Chapter Text
In theory, it sounds like a horrible idea.
“We should, uh — ”
On the other end of the line, Elliot stumbles, hesitates. This is the problem, really, with where they’ve ended up lately. Where they’ve ended up as of late, the phrase her therapist had used last week to ask about him. She’d clocked the missing compass back in May and finally pushed Olivia to put a name and a backstory to the theoretical interesting friend who hands out ten thousand dollar baubles to his buddies.
(That had been -
Something. Telling a new person their story had been something.)
“I feel like we’re at a standstill,” she’d admitted to her therapist when all was said and done. “Like we can’t figure out where to go next.”
All that fucking healing, all that time spent fumbling around in the darkest corners of her mind over the last year, and she’d assumed, stupidly, that when this chance presented itself again, one of them would have a clue on what the fuck to do. That one of them would have an idea, maybe, on how to do this in a way that didn’t involve waiting for some case to fall out of the sky and shove them together.
They didn’t.
She knows she can’t heap all the blame on him, either. It has to be nerve wracking, stepping up to bat after all those swings and misses or swings and clips or swings and foul goddamn balls under the fluorescent lights in an urgent care in Ohio.
It’s not lost on her that she could self insert herself into this ridiculous metaphor in her mind, and step up to bat.
(She blames Fin and Velasco, and last week when she’d caught them crowded around Velasco’s phone in the break room, bemoaning the bets they’d placed on the last Yankees vs Mets).
She could have asked Elliot to take her to coffee.
Lunch, maybe.
Instead, they’d both stayed in the dugout. Or, they’d both refused to swing, hoping the other one would accidentally on purpose keep throwing balls until the other had to slow-jog their way to first base.
She needs to stop thinking in fucking baseball metaphors, but it works, somehow. In her mind, she’s made it into the only sports analogy she really knows anything about, a mix of leftover Cassidy nostalgia and the brief two years her son spent playing and she’d willed herself to learn as much as she could; the not so latent guilt at missing games and practices making itself known in overfunctioning.
It works, though.
They’re both just waiting for that perfect pitch.
And - ‘for what it’s worth,’ - she’d told her therapist, only slightly to mildly defensive:
“It’s not like it was two years ago.”
It really isn’t, this time. Sure, there’d been a slow start when he got back in the winter - more missed phone calls and voicemails than anything else - but now it’s steady, even; a very normal people who maybe (do) want to do something about it amount of contact.
It’s good.
It’s the type of good where they talk sometimes until both their voices are hoarse; the type of good where she grins once in a while at a text message that comes through in the middle of a meeting. The type of good where Elliot is unflinchingly honest about the things that are haunting him (as. of. late. anyway) and she’s done a good job of being honest right back about pretty much everything else.
“So you talk, and you’re in regular contact, but…”
Her therapist really did, it seemed, want to keep digging. She’d scrawled her signature on an iPad back in January giving permission for Heather to seek out her old records from Lindstrom so she has to know some things. She’d half wondered if it was some sort of professional challenge, some sort of goal setting. If Lentz wanted to send off a coded text to her former therapist someday, gleeful in cracking something he couldn’t:
‘solved them’
“We talk, yeah,” Olivia had told her. “We just — ”
She’d shrugged. She’d picked at a fake spot on her pants. She’d fought the urge to glance at her bag like a call was coming though. She’d been open and honest and real with this therapist the whole time but this, somehow, was the hardest layer to peel back.
She’d looked up as she’d finished, fingers shifting to pull at the lapels of her jacket, as she’d shrugged.
“We’re just - stuck.”
Seventh inning stretch, tied improbably at zero, half the stands emptied out into the parking lot to beat the traffic home. Everyone just resigned to the fact that no one was going anywhere, any time soon.
Even Fin doesn’t ask anymore.
They’re stuck. Zero for zero in the series. Or zero for three. Or zero for twenty-six, maybe - she gets a lost little here, in the o-fers.
So, yeah.
Yes, it is a little bit of a surprise when they’re 21 minutes into a Sunday evening not early, not late, right at a reasonable hour phone call and he says it. It is, actually, a little bit of a shock when she throws out the fact that she’d signed up for a 10k in September and he hems and haws for a minute - makes a rogue comment about being out of it and wanting to get back in it. It’s a shock after he talks too long about his bursitis, and she nods along and says, yeah, she took a break too because her hips went a little bit tight. It’s a shock when Elliot clears his throat, and she makes a joke about both of them needing training plans at their ages, with all their injuries.
And his response is to just —
To just say it.
“We, uh — ”
He stumbles, at least. He hesitates. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, and then he exhales, and then three months into neither one of them moving, Elliot Stabler takes a swing at the pitch she didn’t even know she took.
“We should train together,” he says. “I should sign up, too.”
Absolutely not, she thinks after the disbelief settles in. It’s a horrible fucking idea.
“Train for… ”
“Your race,” he answers.
She digs her nails into the arm of her couch. Four little indents, right in a row, into the expensive brown leather. In the kitchen she can hear the clatter of Noah cleaning up his bowl and spoon from dessert. She’d meant to ask him to scoop her out a bowl of ice cream, too; the butter pecan that he’s been ignoring for the double cookie dough chunk.
“A 10k,” Elliot says slowly, finishing up the open-ended question that she hadn’t managed to finish. “In September.”
“Together,” she clarifies. “Together?”
It’s too far from normal, even for them. They could at least try to do it in a way that makes any sense at all, instead of 6 am meet ups to run.
“Together,” he says, and it’s all innocent, like the idea of this isn’t loaded at all.
It’s the fourth time one of them has said the word together in the last ninety seconds. She can picture him standing right there in his kitchen. She can’t figure out if it's a sheepish smile he might have on his face, or something smug and cocky. Maybe leaned over his island, both elbows down, staring down while he says together.
Like they’re partners again, training for some sort of fitness test.
Which - they never did.
In all that time together, never once did they ever suggest working out in any way shape or form together. Not even one, two years in, before things got different, more twisted. They’d never even suggested it to each other.
It was like they both always knew.
It’s crazy.
They should just get lattes, like two normal people.
Swing and a miss, is right there on the tip of her tongue.
Except.
At least someone had done something, finally. At least one of them had finally taken the chance. She could picture them doing this still. One year, two years down the road; stuck in a holding pattern that resets every time he comes home.
“Ok,” Olivia says.
She lets her grip relax on the cushion of her couch. The little indents disappear, the leather smoothing itself right back into place.
If he’s serious, then so be it.
Play ball.
“Six AM tomorrow.”
—
She sleeps like shit, of course.
It’s July, but her place is expensive enough that even with the pre-war architecture - the refurbished floors, the ornate trim everywhere - that the HVAC system is new, state of the art. No little dial to mess around with, no fussing with window units. It’s just a little tablet on the wall that she can adjust the temperature on, and when it’s eleven o’clock and she’s still tossing and turning, that’s exactly what she does. Hoping that it’s the stifling heat creeping in through her windows that’s making her restless, knowing full well that it’s not.
Noah, she knows, will be fine.
Noah has been fast asleep under his comforter for almost three hours at this point, while she’s been tossing and turning. Noah is probably sweating, damp curls on his head from burrowing in and not moving.
Not her, though.
One leg under the duvet, one leg out, both legs uncovered and the duvet and sheet shoved all the way down to her ankles. On her right side, then her left; then flat on her back as she watched the ceiling fan above her circle, as she listened to the hum of her white noise machine.
She looks at her phone no less than seven times.
She’s not sure if she wants it to ring or not; Fin or Velasco or Curry cutting through the silence of her room.
She gets up, and she slides her finger on the temperature gauge all the way down to 67 degrees, and then she stares at her ceiling for at least another hour until her body finally gives.
—
The first thing she sees when she walks up to the bench is him.
Stretching, without a care in the fucking world.
Which - she hadn’t planned on.
She’d left her place at 5:40, a note to Noah to ‘keep the doors locked, only unlock them when I call, I’ll be back by 7:15’ and she’d speed-walked to the bench. The one she’d described in great detail to him last night in a text, and the one she’d expected to get to around 5:47.
5:48, if the elevator was slow.
But Elliot is here, and he is as early as she is. He’s here, and he is pulling a heel to his ass in the middle of the sidewalk, face screwed up in concentration so he doesn’t fall. He doesn’t spot her for a full beat of time, being so careful not to fall over.
“You’re — ”
His head snaps up at the first sound of his voice. His foot falls on the ground, loud on the pavement. He’s already smiling, already walking in her direction. Already shooting her that soft, half smile that’s higher on the right side, and her stomach feels outrageously loopy immediately.
Olivia waits for the sharp pang of panic - the one that’s been as familiar to her as he was, at one time - to come.
When it doesn’t, she keeps moving.
“You’re early,” she tells him as she draws close. It comes out too breathy, too soft, and his smile broadens, grows. He looks so satisfied with himself, so pleased at the sound of her voice, too breathless by far.
“Yeah, well — ”
He’s still moving towards her, even as she brings her wrist up. Like he actually needs the proof, like she needs to show him the time. It makes it so that the second he moves in and wraps his arms around her, her wrist is pinned between them.
A little awkward, a little strange, but she can feel the way his breath sort of stutters like this with her hand on his chest. How it catches, then stops and starts again before he exhales long and slow, almost in relief.
She feels the heat on her cheeks, the unmistakable blush and she pushes her top half forward just enough.
Her pink cheek brushes his ear.
“Yeah, well,” she murmurs, close, pushing in with her cheek.
“I’m early,” he tells her, and it’s all low and warm and that feeling in her stomach - that one that’s nervy and looping and anticipating - intensifies. His chin grazes against her shoulder.
“So are you,” he reminds her.
They must look insane to the other people trying to start their day with a jog; a high intensity walk. Their arms swinging wildly by their sides as they eyeball the two people embracing by this bench. It is insane, she thinks, for maybe the fortieth time since she’s pushed open the door to her apartment. She’s wearing a compression sock on her right ankle. Elliot smells like he’d showered before he got here, fresh soap mixing with the sunscreen he must have applied in his car.
Training for a 10k together, she thinks.
How fucking insane.
They should pack it in right now, and get coffee at the little diner that’s just now dragging tables out of their store, the harsh sound of steel mesh loud on the cement as the staff chatter.
Elliot pulls back, and that grin is still there. Boyish, charming, one hundred and ten percent aware that he’d gotten her, here, at six in the morning to run with him.
He is enragingly charming when he wants to be.
She feels his hand wrap around her wrist. He turns it gently, checking the time with his own eyes, finally. His hand feels huge; like it could wrap around her wrist twice over.
She inhales, then tries not to let her exhale waver at all as she answers.
“Just wanted to make sure you didn’t get a head start.”
—
“You ready, Benson?”
Now, Elliot stands next to her at the bench. He shifts back and forth on his heels, both of them eyeing the people moving around them. It’s already 78 degrees at seven o’clock. The sun is blinding, bright, and she is 97 percent sure she already has to pee.
She starts to answer his question now.
“I’m — ”
She stops, when Elliot lifts his left leg up on the bench in front of them. He leans forward, a huffed out, low grunt escaping as he reaches for his toes through his sneakers. His shorts tighten around his waist, and the back of his shirt rises up. There is a strip of skin between his waist and and his hem that makes her fingers twitch by her side.
She has watched him scratch that strip of skin idly a thousand times, standing in the locker room; one elbow pressed against the metal doors as they talked through a case, and she tried not to look for years.
Olivia lets her eyes linger, now. Her teeth scrape against her bottom lip. This is as much the problem as anything else with this. Normal people go on dates at a cafe, where there’s no opportunity to scope out a graying trail of hair that runs down his front; disappearing right into his waistband. Normal people don’t have to worry about looking at someone’s happy trail at six am, after twenty six years and reminding themselves it’s okay.
She can hear him counting to ten under his breath.
“You need to stretch?” he asks.
When she looks up to answer, he’s watching her eye him, and she is fully caught.
Strike one, she thinks.
His voice is strained, and she realizes he really is stretching. It’s not just him doing some sort of placating thing, some sort of movement to fill time. He’s putting his weight behind it, muscles taut and long.
He’s serious.
“I’m good,” she says.
It comes out too strangled, too Jesus Christ, the fucking hamstrings on this guy, and she looks away, down the long path through the park.
“I stretched before,” she says hastily.
“Ah. ”
Her eyes snap back at the way he says that. The way it catches, rumbles in his throat.
“Got it,” he grunts. “You got a pace goal in mind?”
She watches as he switches sides. Right heel up on the bench this time, the same low ten count on his breath. When he’s done, he rotates, keeping his leg straight, but moving so his body fully faces her.
She looks up as quickly as she can, away from anything even close to below his navel.
Elliot quirks one bushy eyebrow up, waiting.
He has one AirBeat in, the other tucked neatly inside a pocket that zips. He’s got one of those belts with the water bottle that clips right on. She’s got $254 shoes on. Both of them are wearing watches that will track their time, their pace, their heart rates, not their other ones they’ve left at home.
If you looked at her heart rate right now - well.
No one would call it resting.
Normal people get lunch; get dinner. Normal people let a hand find a thigh in the back of a Lyft. Normal people don’t wait 3 years to go on a jog in the park, while their heart beats too fast before they even start.
It’s one strip of his skin.
(It’s his ass in those shorts, and it’s the way his arms had tightened around her; big and strong and familiar and so, so present. It’s his voice, gruff and soft at once. It’s the way she’s excited but also relieved, somehow, heart beating fast but something else inside of her fully relaxing).
She’s wearing an $83 sports bra, now, for fucks sake, and Elliot Stabler is in shorts that swish every time he moves, asking her how fast she wants to go with all this.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“No goal,” she manages to mumbles.
She shakes her head one more time. She looks down at her watch, and sets it for an outdoor run while he watches. Her own Airpods are both in, out of habit, but no music plays.
She starts running with one strike of her heel on the ground, purposefully moving before Elliot can.
He’ll have to chase her, for a few seconds at least.
Maybe she can catch her breath then.
“Let's go.”
—
He catches up to her in less than ten seconds.
The grit of the damp pavement under their heels is loud without music. She can hear every step they both make; hear every loud breath that she takes. She can hear Elliot too, breathing hard and close as he falls into step, and matches his strides to hers.
His elbow brushes hers. The smell of sunscreen is almost overpowering now that he’s sweating. She thinks it’s funny - how he’ll throw himself in front of a bullet ten times a day for a job, but make sure he’s protected from the lazy morning rays of a July sunrise.
She catches him watching her twice, eyes drifting over to her arms, the place where her running tank splits in the front.
When her lips twitch up, he catches that too.
“Fast, then,” he huffs after a moment. “Fast pace.”
They find a rhythm together like it’s nothing.
—
When she runs with Amanda, they barely talk. Before they start, they do - on the slow stroll to a starting point, while they stretch - and after, too, but during the actual run, they’re mostly silent. Both of them focus on breathing, timing; how the length of their strides affect scarred over left hips and too tight postpartum muscles.
Elliot is the opposite.
Elliot immediately started talking - barely winded as he did so - and with three-quarters of the first mile behind them, they’ve covered Noah’s latest obsessions (Fortnite and Dorothy Lamour) and Becky’s latest ultrasound (baby is good, he’s still not sure how to feel) and they settle into an easy, even pace that lets them —
Talk.
A lot, it seems.
Chat, really.
“You see that email? From the — ”
He pauses as they split apart, veering around a woman with a stroller who's moving at half their speed. When he finds her again, his elbow bumps into hers.
She’s one hundred percent it’s on purpose.
“From the commissioner?” he finishes. “The one with the new rules about overtime?”
Olivia considers it, before she answers. She knows exactly what he’s talking about. It’s something they would have talked about on the phone, maybe twenty-two minutes in, the conversation slowly dwindling, if they weren’t here. “I did,” she says finally. “I saw it last night.”
“Such fucking bullshit,” he says. He’s more winded now, his grumble a little breathless. “Making us track it online. Brass thinks they need to be more strict about — ”
“It protects you, actually,” she interrupts. There’s a group of older women speed-walking up ahead of them, and they move to their left together. They both pick up their speed automatically as they pass, seamless; as smooth as can be. “It makes sure bad department heads aren’t screwing over lower ranked officers.”
Then, because she can, and because probably only she can, she adds:
“You know it doesn’t count when you go under, right? Special circumstances,” she says, the last part huffed out quick and low enough that it’d be hard to tell if it was athletic effort or sarcasm.
He peeks over at her, clearly unsure. After a moment, he nods.
“I know. It’s still bullshit,” he huffs. “I just - we can manage.”
He looks down at his wrist.
She feels her own watch vibrate, one mile done. She looks over at him. There’s sweat ringing his collar already, armpits completely damp. He swipes at his brow; wipes the sweat away before it hits his eyes. All of the sudden she has a vivid picture of him. One of those sweatbands pulled tight around his bald head, ridiculous looking as he runs beside her.
She tries not to smile.
“I just think we can manage, you know?” he goes on, breathing harder.
They didn’t slow down after the speed walkers, and she dials it back now, well aware she can’t keep up this pace. He adjusts right with her, clearing his throat harshly before he tells her.
“It’s just another way for them to micro-manage.”
On one hand, she gets it. Twenty years ago she would have been right beside him, railing at the injustices of having to actually track and manage hours worked in a job where those didn’t actually matter.
On the other hand?
“I helped write it,” she says. She lets the smile that’s been threatening out of the cage, a flash of teeth as she grins in his direction, a wild bit of her own disarming gaze aimed right at him on purpose.
Olivia feels a drop of sweat roll down the side of her face, sink into the shoulder of her tank. This is so fucking undignified, and yet, she realizes she doesn’t hate it. Talking to him between short gasps of air, their bodies never actually slowing down. Not being able to figure out if the rapid beat of their hearts is from one thing or the other.
She laughs, clocking the way Elliot’s mouth stays open as he looks back at her. In this light, she can see the faint stubble growth on his face. He must have showered this morning, but shaved last night. It’s short enough in the morning that it would be rough, would leave her face or her body raw.
He still hasn’t said a word. It’s just the steady, even sound of their feet on the ground.
“The policy, I mean. Not the email,” she clarifies.
“No, no - I, uh — ”
She wonders if he’d blush; embarrassed pink from the tips of his ears down to his chest if he wasn’t already red from exertion. He scuffs his sneaker a little, and doesn’t quite stumble, but he slows them down a little more. He waits until they’re running even again, until they’re back in tandem.
“I forget sometimes, now,” he says. “When it’s just you and me.” She thinks he’ll play it off with a joke; try to backpedal a little. It throws her when he doesn’t, when his voice goes sharp and clear, even through the labored breathing.
“I forget - who exactly you are now,” he tells her. “I missed seeing it happen, and I just - forget.”
She glances over, surprised. When he looks over this time, there’s something like pride in his eyes. At one point in time, right in the beginning, all she’d ever wanted was for him to look at her exactly like this. He did eventually, and then that had shifted, too, and then he’d left and she wasn’t sure she’d see anything in his eyes ever again.
“I missed a lot,” he exhales the words, slowly.
“Missed — ”
He blinks, and then they are coming up on two teenage boys, shirts pulled through their belts, half-jogging, half wrestling in too long denim shorts, taking up the whole path, and he looks away.
He finishes, his eyes straight ahead; breathing it out all at once:
“You’re it, now,” he says; somehow earnest even when he’s this out of breath. A minute ago, and she thinks it would have meant the big bad, the ever awful brass, but she understands. She knows exactly what he means. It’s right there, broadcast in his eyes. Face beet red, and both of them dripping with sweat, but the eyes don’t change at all.
All the sudden, she’s overwhelmingly relieved that he’d asked her to meet up like this; where they both can blame the heavy way she draws in air on their run. It seemed ludicrous at the moment, but now?
“Well,” she breathes out. “I guess - I am. It.”
It probably still is more than a little ludicrous.
“You are,” he says, and it’s so quiet she thinks she could have dreamed it right up.
Her arms feel heavy as she keeps moving, keeps pumping them. She can smell his sweat; musk mixed with the sunscreen. She feels his eyes on her again and she looks over. She watches him move, legs pumping. The shape of him, big and broad and on her outside, and here, totally in step with her.
She breathes.
Olivia looks ahead. She can’t quite see the spot where she’ll have them turn around, where they’ll start their loop back. It’s just a big, almost out of place rock, placed right in the corner of a little patch of flowers that blooms in the fall.
She swallows, her mouth horribly dry.
She can blame the run for that, too.
Her watch vibrates against her wrist again. This time it’s not telling her how far she's run; but a gentle nudge at the time goal she’d lied about before. They’ve slowed down too much.
If this was a game, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is just about over, and everyone that’s left is coming back to their seats.
Pick up the pace.
“So I guess — ” she laughs, and starts to pump her legs, her arms faster. Elliot falls behind her for just a second. She drops her voice, mimics an old line they’d both ignored willfully, openly; half the time leaving their old paper time cards blank.
“Account for your overtime, Detectives.”
When he catches up to her, he’s laughing too. In between pants, he’s laughing. They keep moving, onward, up a small incline. She’s breathing hard, fast. She feels like she’s thirty-five again, like if she strained she could hear both of their cheap dress shoes loud on the pavement. Her lungs are on fire. This was the worst best idea he’s had in a long time.
“Too much like Cragen?” she asks when his laugh fades away, when she can hear the sound of his sneakers striking the ground again.
He barks out a laugh; harsh, a little phlegmy from exertion.
Undignified.
When she looks over, he’s shaking his head. They’re running faster than they have all day, but it feels like time stands still as he looks at her eyes, her face; then daringly, down to where her tits barely bounce in that $83 sports bra.
His gaze is appraising, hungrier than she ever remembers him allowing himself to be, and he doesn’t bother disguising it.
If she’s being honest, she’d always wanted him to look at her exactly like this too. Not in the short, small bursts that he’d given to over the years, but like this.
With no real restraint.
“Not quite,” she hears him say.
“Not like Cragen at all.”
—
They run 4.23 miles, in the end.
A little bit more than she would by herself.
They jog all the way up to her block; to the corner closest to her building. She keeps expecting him to slow down, to stop and walk while they negotiate an awkward goodbye, a hesitant when should we do this again, but instead he launches into a story about his mother’s caregiver and Randall, the two of them stuck in the elevator and panicking while Bernie managed just fine.
He trails her right through the front door of her building.
Into her building, right to her elevator, where he stands behind her and pushes the up button, reaching halfway around her to do it. Staying there after, so close that she knows he can smell her, feel the heat coming off her skin.
“What, uh — ”
When it opens up, and the little girl from 4E and her dad pile out, she steps back and right into him. It’s automatic, the drop of her elbow, his left hand reaching to steady her. His phone is in his right hand, opened to something he missed.
“What 10k?” he asks. His voice is still too throaty, still just a little breathless. They’d barely stopped running a moment ago.
“I need to sign up.”
His hand stays, right there until they board. She’s still halfway out of breath too. Olivia blinks, and the doors close, and she has no clue what the fuck, actually, is going on.
“Cops and Joggers,” she answers. When she hears his bark of a laugh, she shakes her head. “Noah thought it was funny. It’s - it’s upstate.”
She looks over at Elliot. He’s smiling, phone still in his hand.
“When?” he asks. “I know, September, but — ”
“The 7th,” she cuts him off. She shouldn’t still be this out of breath. “It’s in Amsterdam.”
The elevator is small, tight, meant for two people who live together, not two people who haven’t fucked in twenty-six years and just jogged four miles and a quarter together as the sun rose. They’re standing so close that their arms are pressed together, and she can feel how sweaty he is. The wiry hair of his arms presses into her own damp skin.
They stink. Or they will, in a minute, when the sweat settles into their clothes.
She finally remembers to press the button to her floor, and the elevator jerks as it moves up, old and finicky, and he reaches out again to brace her, his hand on her waist. This all feels insanely natural, in a way that contradicts everything she chided herself for feeling for a decade and half with Elliot Stabler when he was this close.
“38 bucks,” he murmurs next to her.
He’s grinning as he looks down at his phone. He squeezes his hand at her waist, once, then let's go to start typing his information into his phone. She breathes, and nods.
“Free T-shirt, though,” she says. “It goes to help…”
She can’t think of it. Some sort of animal, some sort of —
“Kittens,” he finishes. “Amsterdam Kitten Adoption.”
His arm is still against hers. She is so, so sweaty; her tank stuck to her back. She’ll be chilled as soon as she walks into her goddamn apartment; she’d never adjusted the air conditioner. It’ll be all goosebumps, damp hair curling, nipples trying to fight their way through the padding of her sports bra.
She doesn’t know what he expects - an invite in for coffee, water, while he types in his credit card info - and before she can figure it out, the elevator doors are opening.
She looks over at him.
He’s typing, diligently.
She realizes suddenly she hasn’t texted Noah at all. Usually she does it right from the lobby, so he’s standing behind the door and waiting for her knock. She walks out, hastily palming her phone from the tight pocket on her leggings.
“I need to - hold on.”
Olivia waves the phone as she starts to step out.
He follows her.
“Noah waits for my text,” she explains, thumbing out a quick here to her son. She walks down the hall, and so does Elliot, sort of behind her, sort of next to her at the same time, and it’s right on the tip of her tongue to offer something.
Water seems like the option, really.
She stands by her door.
Elliot’s voice is quiet, almost a murmur now in her hall as he starts to ask.
“Same time — ”
The door is yanked open and it’s her son - not dressed for camp, hair still a mess - pulling it open and Elliot’s grinning immediately. Doing that thing he does with kids, where they like him as soon as he opens his mouth, because he knows the tone of voice to use and talks right at them instead of around them.
“Hey man,” Elliot says. “Long time no see.”
Noah, at least, has the good sense to like slightly surprised. Maybe even a little suspicious, his brows furrowed as he considers the sight in front of him. His mother, fresh off of a run, and a man he sees once every eighteen months.
She sees the second he decides to not care that much, the slight half shrug as he nods, and steps aside.
“Hi Elliot,” Noah replies.
Then he looks at Olivia, and shakes his head. His curls are still matted down, like he hasn’t gone through his laborious pre-teen hair routine.
“We’re out of orange juice,” he tells her.
Next to her Elliot still has his phone in his hand, the screen lit up with his registration info. When she looks over, he grins again. It’s all strangely anti-climatic, when he shoves it in his pocket and looks over.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asks.
She nods, and she knows he’s clocked her surprise, and she thinks he’s probably a little fucking smug about it.
Asshole, she thinks.
And all she can think to do to maintain any equilibrium at all is to lean in and squeeze her arm around his back as fast as she can. Her son is moving down the inside hall, thankfully not watching the whole strange thing.
“Yeah,” she says. “Bright and early.”
She feels the moment Elliot grins, the moment he shakes his head against hers. The brush of his face is, in theory, disgusting; almost clammy now with sweat. The palm of her hand is against a t-shirt that’s just as bad.
She presses in; squirms a little bit so he knows it’s on purpose. Makes him feel her own too damp back; the way her whole body feels too hot still. Makes him inhale the musk on her, elemental and distinct and just her.
Laughs silently when she feels him tighten his arms and breathe.
She remembers a rule from when Noah played baseball - something about the pitcher making eye contact with the hitter - and she wonders who, exactly, is which, in this part of the fucking analogy she can’t seem to dodge.
Pitcher, she decides. For the moment at least.
“See you then,” he tells her, all husky voice and she can’t help the huff of a laugh when he adds “six o’clock” against her cheek.
Olivia watches him walk down her hallway. She keeps her hand on the door jamb, like she’s actually going to do something. Like she’s actually going to call out and tell him to turn around and come back.
Elliot turns and gives her a half wave while he waits for the elevator.
She doesn’t close her door until the elevator shuts.
—
It’s just that simple again, the next day.
Tuesday morning, they do 3.53 miles. She walks out of her lobby at 5:47 and she’s not surprised to see him outside. She doesn’t bother with a good morning, just waits until he sees her and then tilts her head back just enough, eyes up at the sky.
“Might rain,” she remarks.
It won’t, she knows. The actual storm is going to miss them; is going to slide south and then out to the Atlantic where it will break up.
She’s been up since a little past 4, belly antsy and looping again.
She’d watched the weather report 3 times all the way through.
Elliot shields his eyes, squints up at where the clouds are solid, more grayish than white. Not dark, not looming. The sort of gray that goes on for a day or two without any actual rain before the sun breaks through.
“I say we chance it,” Elliot says.
He’s looking right up at the sky, not bothering with the sunglasses tucked into his collar. They look expensive, nothing he’d have worn in his last life. She has a horribly clear memory of the time he snapped a pair of cheap sunglasses in half in the front seat of a sedan when they’d lost a victim. He’d taped them together for a week before she broke and bought him a new pair at CVS, tired of looking at the duct taped reminder of her own fuck up.
“Ok,” she tells him. “Let’s risk it.”
At the turn around point - a bench today, where they pause so she can re-tie her sneaker - Elliot lifts up the hem of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his brow, muttering about sunscreen and sweat dripping into his eyes from underneath the cotton. He’s not shy, or even hesitant at all. Just uses one hand underneath to raise it, and then it’s his abs on full fucking display for the city. Hard lines of muscle and that trail of hair and she doesn’t tear her eyes away.
She isn’t hesitant or shy about looking, and when he drops it and sees her, he’s smirking.
“Ready?” he asks.
The look on his face is so self-satisfied.
Strike Two, she thinks.
She gathers herself quickly, blinking away as she eyes the street ahead. He probably expects her to stay dazed; still gawking, acting like the two older women who had speed walked by and done exactly that.
Instead she scoffs, shakes her head.
“You put sunscreen there too?” she asks before she starts running again.
They beat the rain back by ten minutes, and he crushes his whole body to her as he hugs her goodbye. He feels like steel that’s been left to harden, burning hot but still solid.
Olivia feels every un-sunscreened inch of him.
She can’t decide if she made it on base or not.
—
That’s how it goes, then.
She comes out to the bench in the morning. After four days, she gives up on trying to beat him, and just accepts that he’ll be there, ready and waiting, stretching and making those little grunt noises he makes as joints pop and muscles pull. She expects it, now, as much as she expects him to actually be there when he says he will.
Which - does, admittedly, alarm her as much as it surprises her. She’d be less alarmed (and maybe less surprised) if she got there to see the bench empty, a text from him coming through saying he’s under again, he’ll be back in a baker’s dozen (months).
That’s what she tells herself, anyway.
They stretch. They run. They eyeball each other a little more openly, let gazes linger too long.
It’s almost simple. Over the next week, they run five out of the seven days. She tells him she takes Fridays off for yoga - the restorative kind, the same place she’s been going to every Friday she’s not on a case for a decade - somewhere around mile 3 on Thursday.
When he raises his eyebrows, when she can see the ‘maybe I should — ’ sitting right there on his lips, she shakes her head before he can say it.
“Too much?” he asks, that half smug, half chagrined smile on his face as they both breathe hard up a hill. Sometimes she falls behind on purpose when they do this, to not so surreptitiously watch his legs work. The man really has spent the last decade and a half in a gym, and it’s something, seeing the space his thighs take up in a pair of old NYPD gym shorts. It’s all muscle, and she doesn’t need to be shy about looking, she tells herself.
Besides, sometimes he does the same.
“Absolutely too much,” she says. She huffs out a laugh, picturing Elliot Stabler, huge and looming in basketball shorts and a T-shirt in a sea of neon lycra; twisting his stiff knee on a too small mat.
“Besides,” she starts, shaking her head. “The people that go…”
The horrible part was maybe the moment she thought about how fun it would be, the two of them in the back, making eye contact every time one of the bored, rich women flirts with the newest Gen Z instructor, holding on to his arm while they ask about his training trips. Thinking about how they’d all try to flirt with Elliot, too, and he’d shrug it off.
Laughing about what normal people do, her head buried in his shoulder on the elevator ride down when they talk about it all.
In ten years, she’s talked to maybe half a dozen women there. She walks past the little gathering spot in the front as fast as she can, every Friday.
“It’s all middle aged women bitching about their kids and their husbands, anyway,” she finishes hastily. She brushes her elbow against him as she catches up, eyes falling away from the firm swell of his ass; the strong, elongated muscles in his thighs.
“You’d hate it.”
He sends her a text at six in the morning on Friday, a ‘have a good yoga.’ She stares at it as she sits in her SUV, waiting to go in.
She has a horrible yoga, distracted by the idea that he’d gotten up to text her just that when he could be sleeping in. ‘I did,’ she lies when she texts him back. ‘So refreshed.’
But mostly, they run.
Saturday, and Monday, and then Tuesday again, they run.
They talk.
They dig a little deeper into shit they really didn’t over the last six weeks, because they’re both slightly abysmal at phone calls, and because it’s not the same at all, his voice on the other end of the line. “Tell me more about the Flynns,” he urges after they make a wrong turn on a park sidewalk, and she makes a crack about needing the compass, maybe, after all. “We didn’t really dig in before.”
She tells him all of it, and she tells him about all the shit that’s happened in the last year. They stretch, they run, they talk, and they fall into something that’s almost too easy.
Almost dependable.
One week.
Five runs.
Not home runs - not her simple turned complicated metaphor, the ridiculous one her brain keeps snapping right back to - of course. No one’s pitched the right ball yet; no ball connecting with the bat, the loud crack deafening everyone around them as the home run finally happens.
She’s 90% sure they’re in their respective dugouts right now, warming up aching knees and icing their shoulders, waiting. Olivia tells herself she’s not used to it - even if she admits she’s enjoying it; even if she can, at least, admit that it’s not such a horrible idea, and it’s probably longer and more frequent than lunches or coffees - as the first week of 10k training ends, and the second begins.
“We on for tomorrow?” he asks after their sixth run Tuesday morning as the elevator doors whoosh shut.
The small space is practically filled with them, sweaty bodies and that damp, earthy smell that comes right after a run, before the sweat settles on skin. She’s grown used to this moment, both of them tugging their phones out of their pockets when the doors close, leaning against each other just a little as they check to see if and what they’d missed.
It’s automatic, now, her bicep pressed against his sleeve, their breathing a little too loud in the silence.
It’s not a habit, though.
“Same time, same place,” she tells him.