AN: Did anyone else really want this pairing to happen? I really wanted this pairing to happen.
Title taken from the song Permanent by the Milk Carton Kids.
o.o.o
Liz blames it all on the crappy bar.
It's not their usual haunt; that one fell victim to some kind of plumbing mishap and now the floor is apparently an inch under water, so they moved down the block to this obnoxious place. Well, Liz amends, she supposes that when she was in college she would have loved a place like this—thriving and boisterous and full of people having the time of their lives. But it's been eight years since she left college and all this place does is give her a headache and make her miss the relative peace of their usual cop bar.
Nikki clearly agrees. "I already got a migraine coming on from that perp trying to take my head off earlier," she says as she turns around and walks back to her car. "I can't deal with that bass. You guys go on without me."
And if Colby had agreed with Nikki, Liz would happily have called it a night, but Agent Granger is not the sort to let much get in the way of a drink, once he's decided he wants a drink. So they go in, just the two of them, together and alone and off-duty for the first time in weeks, and Nikki's absence is the first thing she blames the crappy bar for.
The second thing is that the place is so crowded, and the music so loud, that she has to lean in close to talk to him, far closer than is professional. Of course she's known Colby for years, and neither of them cares much about what's professional. But this doesn't stop her from noticing that this is closer to him than she's been in a long time, and it doesn't stop her from noticing that he's radiating warmth and a certain smell that she can't place but that she instantly recognizes as belonging uniquely to him, and it doesn't stop her from eyeing his broad and defined shoulders and wondering, not for the first time, how in the world he manages to just look like that.
And the third thing she blames the crappy bar for is for being full of strangers. Their usual bar is frequented by other agents, and maybe that knowledge would have penetrated the alcoholic haze surrounding her mind and convinced her not to do anything crazy because she'd have an audience of coworkers. But here they're anonymous and she feels no need to worry about appearances, so when a surprising thought occurs to her, she doesn't fight it nearly as much as she probably should.
He breaks off in mid-sentence as he sees her staring at him, taking in his stupidly good-looking face (seriously, she wonders, how does he look like that?), and maybe he's had a little too much to drink too because he just stares right back. And maybe she's a little too drunk to tell if that's the good kind of staring or the baffled kind of staring, but then his gaze flickers down to her mouth and she thinks Good enough for me and kisses him.
He doesn't respond at first, caught in some kind of stunned silence, and then suddenly he's kissing her back, his hand brushing her jaw, and she's wondering why on earth she never thought about kissing him before because wow, she is enjoying this a lot.
Then just as quickly as it started, it ends. Colby pulls away, looking at her a bit regretfully. "We've both had a few," he says. "I don't think either of us is thinking straight."
Both of his assertions are true, so she nods and turns back to her drink, her heart pounding, her breathing quick. They leave a few minutes later, after carefully not talking about that (fantastic, ground-shaking) kiss. But if he thinks that's the last of this discussion, he is sadly mistaken.
o.o.o
The next morning sees the start of a kidnapping case and they hit the ground running, and the quick pace leaves them no time to be awkward around each other about the kiss. But it doesn't stop Liz from thinking about it. She's a professional, of course, and she gives her all to finding the victim, but in the cracks between thoughts, in the quiet moments as they drive from the crime scene to the office and the office to the victim's school, she lets herself think about it. Luckily Nikki is riding with Don so she can't notice Liz watching Colby.
She's never really watched Colby before, not like that. Of course she knows him as an agent better than she knows herself, the same way she knows Nikki and the way she knew David; when you're putting your life into someone's hands on a daily basis, you learn pretty quickly what their tells are when they're lying and how they react when gunshots start and how quick they are to follow your lead when you have a plan. All of this, she's known about Colby for ages (his voice gets a little lower, he's usually the first to return fire, and he generally catches on and follows changes in a plan immediately).
And she's known him as a friend for long enough to know that he prefers crappy take-out Chinese to the actual authentic kind and that he's fiercely loyal when he thinks someone deserves it and that David is the closest friend he's ever had and him leaving earlier this year still weighs heavily on his mind.
But now for the first time she's looking at him as a man and realizing that there has been a really great guy right in front of her face for years now. She really sees, instead of only noticing in passing, the entertaining contrast between his linebacker build and his sweet little-boy grin. She sees the way he always opens the door for women they pass—but not always for her and Nikki; maybe he doesn't want them to feel patronized by a co-worker? She sees the way he gets flustered when Nikki teases him about his hobby of collecting military action figures and figurines, but never makes excuses for it because "I enjoy it; I'm not going to apologize for that", and Liz finds that strangely adorable. She sees that for all he acts like a tough guy all the time, every now and then he instinctively turns toward David's old desk to say something, and when he sees it empty, sorrow flashes across his face. And all of this, put together, means that by the time they've recovered the kidnapping victim, Liz has decided that kissing Colby was not in fact a drunken mistake but rather the best idea she's had in some time.
So when the case is closed and Nikki has left for a date and Don is up to his elbows in paperwork, Liz smiles at Colby. "Give me a ride home?" she asks, secretly pleased that her car's been in the shop for a few days.
Colby smiles back agreeably and they head out to his new truck, and she teases him gently about driving a pickup truck in LA—"You're not in Idaho anymore, country boy"—and he laughingly tells her she'll be glad to have a friend with a truck the next time she needs to move. All the way to her house they talk, as is the team's unspoken policy, about anything but the most recent case, and the conversation flows so easily, about Bruce Willis movies and Lebanese food and people who think the moon landing was faked, that before long Liz is thinking far beyond just kissing him again and is instead imagining them walking hand-in-hand through a weekend flea market and cooking dinner together at her place. It's been a long time since she's had that with anyone. It's been a long time since she's wanted that with anyone.
When they pull up to her little rented house, Colby is still telling a story about crazy old Mrs. Simmons from his hometown, so Liz unbuckles but doesn't get out of the car, more than content to just sit by his side and listen to his voice floating through the darkness. And sit they do for a further fifteen minutes, swapping stories and laughing, and she feels in her very bones that this needs to happen. They need to happen. So when a lull falls across the conversation she sits quietly a moment, deciding how best to work up to a kiss again, and then she turns to him. It turns out he's been watching her in the dim light from the streetlamps, and when she looks at him he turns away embarrassedly. Good enough for me, she decides, and looks at him silently until he finally turns back to her. And then she kisses him.
As with last time, it takes a moment for him to respond, but when he does he does it eagerly. She should have asked him to walk her to her door before kissing him, she decides, because this is a slightly awkward angle, but at least she can scoot closer to him on the bench seat and make it a little more comfortable. This also makes it easier to deepen the kiss, and lets her grab his collar with the hand she's not using for balance, and in response he threads his hand into her hair and kisses her back harder—but apparently this just reminds him of exactly where he is and what he's doing because almost immediately he breaks the kiss and pulls away. "Liz," he says lowly, "don't."
Liz is flummoxed. She doesn't get rejected by guys very often, and anyway Colby keeps kissing her back which is kind of confusing, and how has she read this situation so completely wrong? Some of this must appear in her expression, because Colby quickly jumps in to explain. "It's not that I don't want to," he says. "It's really not. It's that . . . it's complicated. You know, if it ends badly, it could affect how we work together, and with what we do that could get us or someone else killed. And I know it's been over between you and Don for years, but he's still really protective of you—you should have seen the look on his face when you told us about that time you had to pepper spray the guy who took you to the LA Galaxy game. I really don't need that look coming at me from my boss."
So it's not a rejection of her, really, and it amazes her what a weight that is off her chest. "So we make sure it doesn't end badly," she suggests, but Colby shakes his head.
"Do you know how to do that? To make sure of that?"
The truth is, no, she doesn't, and he must see that in her face because he gives her a rueful smile and then turns away, looking out over the top of the steering wheel. "I know this sounds like a bad line from a movie," he says, "but this job really is all I have. I don't have the military anymore, I don't have any family for a thousand miles, and my best friend is on the other side of the country. I can't risk that by jumping into something crazy like this—" and here he looks over at her with a half smile— "no matter how tempting it is."
She can't argue with that, she supposes; she can't ask him to risk the most important thing in his life. So she nods slowly and gets wordlessly out of the car. He backs the car up and waves at her as he drives away, and the light is poor and she only sees his face for a second but she's certain she still sees regret there. And that's when she decides that she's not giving up.
o.o.o
Work is weird the next day. They can't pass off what happened as a drunken impulse—after all, that's why she chose not to ask him to go out for drinks last night, so that he couldn't try to explain it away as an alcohol-fueled bad decision—and it's a slow day for their team, mostly just paperwork, so they have no distraction from what's happened between them. Colby deals with it by avoiding her, which is not very mature but she can't blame him, and by mid-afternoon Nikki has noticed the tension between them.
"What's going on with you two?" she asks when Colby has gotten up to use the bathroom.
Liz lies. "We had a disagreement last night." Well, actually in a way that's true.
"Anything I can do to help?" Nikki asks. "I don't really want to get involved, but if it'll make you two stop acting weird . . ."
And Liz, staring out over the sea of desks in the direction of the restroom, considers this. She's been considering things all day, really, going over and over Colby's words in her head, trying to put her finger on the logical error she knows is in there somewhere. Because she knows, with perfect certainty, that she and Colby together is a good idea, and the fact that he doesn't see that means that one of them isn't seeing things clearly. And then something in her mind clicks into place and she realizes exactly what she needs to say to Colby to fix this.
"Yeah, actually," she tells Nikki. "I need a favor."
When five o'clock rolls around, Nikki stands up and stretches. "I am starving," she tells Liz and Colby. "You guys want to grab some dinner?"
"Sure," says Liz. "What are you thinking?"
"You tried that new Italian place on Westwood and Pico?"
"I've been meaning to," Colby says, perking up. "Yeah, I'm in."
"You still okay with taking me to the auto shop first?" Liz asks Nikki.
"No prob," Nikki says. "I'll be glad when you have your car back and I don't have to drive you to work anymore." She looks over at Colby. "See you at the restaurant in half an hour?"
He nods, and the two women leave together.
But when Colby arrives at the restaurant, only Liz is there, sitting at a table clearly only meant for two, and he looks around in confusion before hesitantly joining her at the table. "What happened to Nikki?"
Liz gives him a chagrined smile. "Yeah, we might have lied to you a little," she says. "Nikki was never planning on coming. She thinks we had a fight and that this is helping us talk to each other and sort it out."
He shakes his head. "Liz—"
"No, hear me out," she says. "I'm not trying to force you into anything or trick you, but you got to say your piece last night and now I need a turn. And I couldn't do it at work with all those people watching, and anyway you wouldn't even look at me today."
"Sorry," he says, ducking his head. "I was just trying to make it . . . less awkward. I don't think it worked."
"I know." She smiles a little at the top of his bowed head. "But just hear me out, and then I'll leave you alone, I promise."
He nods, cautiously, as a waitress comes by to fill their water glasses—but no more than that; Liz got here early enough to ask the waitress not to take their orders until she'd had a chance to give her speech.
"I've been thinking all night and all day about what you said, and I've been trying to see things from your point of view, and I get it. The FBI is the only permanent thing you have in your life right now, and you can't jeopardize that for a . . . fling. And of course that's what you'd expect you and me to have, because that's all you've ever seen me have, right? I haven't had a serious, long-term boyfriend since I got to LA. I mean, the closest I got was with Don and that was really mostly just sex."
Colby gives her a small shrug of agreement.
"But here's the thing, Colby: I like you. Not just, I'm attracted to you, or, You're a really great kisser. I like you. I like being around you. I like talking to you."
There's a funny expression on his face, something like surprise and confusion. Apparently he really did think that she just wanted to hop into bed with him.
She leans forward. "And you were right; it would be a bad idea to just jump into something. Because I don't want this to just be a fling. I want this to work. I want something real, something a little more . . . permanent. I don't know if you want the same thing, but I do think that if you and me are going to work, this is the way it has to be. Our working relationship is too important to risk for anything less."
Colby is staring at her, clearly still conflicted and confused. She wishes she could read more into that expression; she wishes he was giving her even the smallest amount of positive feedback. But she's come this far; she might as well finish the little speech she planned.
"So that's why we're here," she says, motioning at the table between them, the burning tea light (her specific request) throwing romantic candlelight across their faces. "I don't want to rush this; I want to take it slow. So this is me, asking you on a first date to eat some Italian food and just get to know each other. If you'd rather leave, that's fine, but this is where I want to be."
Colby still looks undecided, but at least he hasn't gotten up and left yet. And that's what gives her the courage to stick her hand out over the table, offering it for a handshake.
"So, hi, nice to meet you. I'm Liz. I'm an FBI agent here in LA. I've got two brothers and I love watching soccer games and Audrey Hepburn movies."
He stares at her hand a long few moments, and then up at her face, and finally, finally, he cracks a smile—that sweet little-boy smile that makes her melt.
"Hi Liz," he says, reaching out to shake her hand. "I'm Colby."
o.o.o
fin