Disclaimer: although I wish I owned them, because if I did Woody wouldn't have been a jerk and I wouldn't have had to write this to stop being upset with him, I don't! Tim Kring, lucky man, does!
A/N: I usually write Law and Order: SVU storied but CJ is my great love and I couldn't let this idea go. Just so yall know, the title, WITCHING HOUR, refers to the time that passes in this story. And midnight is known as the hour of enchantment and of achieving the impossible.
Witching Hour
It was his fault. He had fallen in love before she was ready to accept him, and scared her away. The memory of their first meeting pained him. It wasn't an awful one, it was actually a relatively pleasant memory considering the dead man they were both trying to find justice for, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out where his smooth moves and endless charm had disappeared to.
"You like this tie?" he had asked,
"No," she had replied, and so he had bought a new one and repeated his question until the answer was 'yes'
He should have known from the beginning that she was complicated. Her figure and features were awe-inspiring, her personality was electric, and she was so far out of his league it wasn't even worth considering. And he was an idiot and it was his entire fault.
For two brief moments in his life, he had felt like everything was going to fall into place. Both were in LA, with her. The first involved a desert, a dying car, and a campfire, and what a moment it was. He had told her about his life, sitting in the cooling sand of the Mojave Desert, and looking back, he couldn't remember if she had kissed him or if it was the other way around. That part wasn't his fault, but he should have known she'd run away, or push, as the situation shows. The second involved a hell-bent version of her, trying to free an innocent woman and set things right, no matter how many times Faye kicked her in the teeth. With all the problems that were arising on the Sunny Coast, she just needed someone to hold her closer, and he told her as much. She said she wouldn't run, or push and she didn't but apparently the universe doesn't feel like they deserved any favors and they didn't have any time to see each other for too long. This brings him back to the issue at hand. It's his entire fault!
Then there was the ring fiasco, and how even now, he has a feeling that he should have waited and let her speak. Instead, he took a turn to push and she did seem to recover quickly, even if it was only a blind date set up by Lily, the morgue romanticist. After that was the case with Riggs, the first one with Riggs, which ended in an abandoned warehouse with a bullet piercing through Kevlar into the tough muscle and soft flesh of his stomach. And this time, it was his turn to push, so push he did, as far and as fast as he could. But he didn't mean it and now it was too late.
He was out of the deathtrap hospital and his bloody prints had been found on a dead body, a body pronounced as Riggs', and then there was the small problem that he hadn't called her in two months. For someone who was apparently moving on, she wasn't too happy about his not calling. And he screwed up in the worst way; he played her concern to his advantage and lied. Not everything had been a lie though, the part about not wanting to push her away anymore was the honest-to-God truth but after his follow up performance there was no way that she would believe another word he said. He had told her that he needed time to sort through his feelings and thoughts on them, and he had said that Sidney found nothing at all, that they had hit a dead end.
And then she had caught him with a gun to Riggs' throat and all hell broke loose.
"How big of an idiot do you think I am?" she had screamed at him, allowing the hot tears to course down her pale cheeks.
You're not an idiot, was what he had wanted to yell back, I love you and don't want you anywhere near me when I go down.
But it wasn't that simple, she had called the police and he panicked. She had told him that he was falling apart and needed help; he had replied with a snide comment on how she shouldn't be talking, on how not everything was about her, even though in his world it was.
It was his entire fault, and now all he could do was stand there and watch her sleep. He still had a key from before the series of events that tore them apart, and he had let himself into her apartment after work, after she was asleep.
She lay on her back, shadows dancing across her body in the dark. She was wearing an old, navy shirt that swallowed her whole. He could make out the faded white lettering of Boston PD on the front and for a moment his heart leapt, thinking it was his, until he remembered that her dad had been in the PD too and it was most likely his. She was wearing a small pair of gray, cotton shorts, rolled at the waist to make their length, or lack thereof, practically illegal. A dark comforter was draped over one leg and hip; nestling against the silky skin of the other thigh, her face was tilted towards the wall, away from him. As if she sensed his presence, she turned over. Her right hand slipped under one of her many stacked pillows and he could almost feel the cool cotton under his fingers. Her shirt had ridden up a small amount, to expose an inch or two of porcelain skin that he was dying to run his hands over. She nestled her face into the pillow that cradled her hand, her other arm came to rest along her side, curving along her waist and hips, fingers brushing a toned thigh.
More than anything, he prayed for the night to last forever. He willed the lighted, red digits on her alarm clock to stay reading the same time, 12:00. He was once again reminded of the age old question of whether of not midnight was am or pm. It didn't matter. She had a bead curtain strung across her door frame, and he was certain that whatever color the beads were, they matched her personality perfectly. A desk stood in a small alcove with a window face over a small expanse of grass with a satiated creek ambling through it. Her bed, with her on it, was next to the desk against two walls. It was bedecked in dark grays and white with a splash of what he suspected was sea foam green. Bookshelves were built into the walls by her door and closets and he wasn't even going to consider checking out her collection.
Instead of looking for well-worn romance novels, he moved silently towards her desk to check out her photos. He recognized one, it was the morgue staff photo, Nigel, Bug, Garrett, Sidney, Lily, and her, all standing around a gurney in autopsy room 1. Nigel was wearing the hideous wig that he had resorted to when Slokum had attacked his hair.
He had heard about her comments to the interim chief ME about the way he ran things, and wished that he could have been there. Apparently Sidney practically carried her out of the room and to the damning information that stretched their bonds until they were too pulled out of shape to reconfigure. She had been wearing a suit. She doesn't even wear suits to court.
Another picture is placed face down and he gently tilts it upwards to see himself staring down at a photographic version of her. She's wearing a slinky, little, red dress. Damn, he loves her in red. Actually he loves her in everything and anything.
She sighs gently in her sleep and gives a small moan, her cheeks are tinged a light pink and he can tell that her dream is a good one. Someone is definitely loving her well.
His name gushes from her lips in two mellifluous syllables and for a moment he is seized with the urge to kiss her softly awake.
But the feeling is gone as soon as he remembers that tomorrow she will wake up and hate him once again. Doesn't everyone have hot dreams about people they don't like now and then? Like when he used to, on rare occasions, dream about that Vegas girl Sam.
Her eyes flutter open for a second and she blinks sleepily a couple times and their gazes lock. The whiskey-colored orbs close again and he sneaks silently away, out of the colored bead curtain and out of her apartment with a heart full of regrets.
Her eyes fly open quickly this time, sure that he was standing in front of her a second before, but he's gone now. And she sighs in defeat.
"I love you Jordan," he whispers from his car, where he is pulling away from the curb, his clock says 12:01 am.
"I love you too Woody," she replies, running a trembling finger down the now uprighted photograph of them and sparing a regret and longing filled glance at the swinging curtain of beads.
The End...