A/N: Spoilers/references for Untethered, Purgatory, Lady's Man and Alpha Dog, and pretty much every trauma up to that point. Please note that while one sunny day, I might very well write the seminal "Bobby and Alex live happily ever after" fic, today is not that day. And does anyone else think Nestor Serrano (he played Bardum, Alex's ex-partner in Alpha Dog) is smokin' hot? Sigh…..
With enough bourbon, she can admit it: Some days she hates him.
No, Alex Eames corrects herself automatically; she hates the dance they have to do. She has to do, really, since Kentucky's finest has turned her into a stickler for accuracy – tap-dancing all by herself while Bobby Goren twitches and mutters and glowers and stews – to keep this partnership going.
She loves him, loves every twitch and mutter and brilliant insight, and has loved him for much of their partnership. But the ever-deepening tenderness she feels for Bobby hasn't stopped a certain bitterness from seeping in around the edges.
Eames was still in uniform, still a bright-eyed Officer Friendly learning to navigate the minefields of the NYPD when she learned to compartmentalize, to construct a wall between The Job and Everything Else. All these years later, the room in her soul allocated for The Job is overflowing with grief and anger and physical and emotional scars, the room labeled Everything Else echoes with memories of her dead husband Joe, and Bobby…
Well, Bobby refuses to be contained within any walls she can erect. He just walks right through them, she thinks, powered by some lumbering, stumbling, half-psychotic wizardry.
Some days, three-quarters psychotic. Maybe closer to 90 percent, if she can manage another Maker's Mark.
He certainly has every right to his semi-lunacy, and Eames believes that his wobbly balance between sanity and insanity is what makes him so good at his job.
But it doesn't make his particular madness any easier to live with.
He's left singe marks all over her reputation while reducing his own to a smoking ruin. Worse, he's wounded her soul, and he breaks her heart on a routine basis. And for the most part, she lets him.
Till this afternoon when she had to physically separate her partner and their boss, who were ready to come to blows in Interrogation Room 3 after Ross suggested Bobby might be off his meds and Bobby suggested Ross was just too stupid to understand that drug dealers were dropping dead all over Harlem and the Bronx because their killer wanted their turf, not because they were dealing with a vigilante out for bloody justice.
When the smoke cleared, Bobby was looking at a five-day rip, and Ross was making it very clear to Eames that if she didn't get her partner in line, she'd be looking at painful consequences of her own.
"Fix this, Bobby. Find a way to fix this, or I swear, I will," she'd told Bobby, who'd been too busy fuming to go home.
And he'd just looked at her with those big moist, wounded eyes like he couldn't believe how badly she'd betrayed him.
Which was when she'd left, suddenly too blind with fury to look at him for one more second.
And now she's parked at O'Malley's, almost through her second bourbon, with Stash Bardum's hand halfway up her thigh.
Eames has always found her professional detachment helpful in situations like this. One part of her consciousness is just grateful for the bourbon's calming (numbing?) effect. One part is thrilled that she might just get lucky tonight, finally, and really, she's always thought Stash was kind of hot, though she'd been with Joe for most of the years they'd worked together. Another part is really kind of impressed that her ex-partner actually had the stones to show up in a cop bar, since he'd barely dodged prison and had hung on to his NYPD pension by the skin of his teeth after (unwittingly, she thinks, which really just makes him a sap) helping a millionaire engineer a murder.
And then there's Eames' common sense, which is shrieking out that Stash had pimped out his own girlfriend, for Christ's sake, which had gotten her killed. And then he ratted out the millionaire to keep his own sleazy ass out of prison.
Which is where the bourbon comes in, again, to drown out the common sense and smooth out her stop-and-start logic as she signals the bartender for another round. He raises an eyebrow, but doesn't say anything as he refills her glass.
The bourbon reminds Eames of Kevin Mulrooney, speaking of psychotic and sleazy and homicidal, who again reminds her of Bobby and his ability to wreck almost everything in her life while simultaneously being ferociously protective of her.
When others attack, at least. He'd slept on her couch for a week after they'd figured out Mulrooney had broken into her home, but he never seems able to stop himself from lashing out at her.
But while Bobby has approached both psychotic (maybe surpassed it once or twice; Eames is still a little confused about that whole thing with his nephew at the mental hospital, and Bobby refuses to discuss it) and homicidal, he's never been sleazy. Clueless, occasionally, mostly about himself and certainly about her feelings for him, but not sleazy.
Really, how can Bobby not know she's in love with him? She's just almost-drunk enough to be outraged at her partner's willful idiocy, but when Stash leans in to kiss her, she kisses him back, catching the faintest whiff of vodka on his breath. She wonders if he can smell the bourbon on hers. Stash's hand slides to her waist, then to the small of her back as he pulls her in closer for a second kiss, then a third. Hs mouth is hot, his lips soft and skilled and he tastes sort of spicy. He's not wearing cologne, as far as she can tell, which Eames likes. Most men use too much, and it's a total turn-off for her.
They carry on for a few more minutes before he suggests they leave.
"My hotel's not far from here," he murmurs, giving her ass a surprisingly discreet squeeze.
"Sure, but we'll need to get a cab," Eames says. "I can't drive, and you shouldn't either."
It's a nice hotel, which surprises her, and she wonders who's picking up the tab, but only until he unfastens her bra and takes her nipple into his mouth. The sensations his tongue and teeth send through her chase away any rational thought and soon they're both naked in the big luxurious bed, exploring each other with an urgency she hasn't felt in a long time.
The sex is good, and his skillful attentiveness surprises her. She'd just assumed he'd be a wham-bam kind of guy, but he takes the time to stroke and tease and touch until she's moaning and writhing and remembering why, exactly, people are willing to kill for this.
It's not until afterwards, when Stash is asleep next to her, that Bobby creeps back into her thoughts. Would the sex be any good with him?
If they ever get together, will it be because he loves her, or because he knows she's the only woman willing to put up with his crap? The question makes her sad because she honestly doesn't know the answer, and she blinks back tears and curls a little closer to Stash. She won't stay the night, but she needs the warmth of his skin next to hers, the illusion of intimacy they've shared. She closes her eyes and breathes and tries not to think about Bobby, but he's always there, comfortable in the darkest corners of her thoughts.
Later, in the cab back to her street where she left her car, she checks her phone and sees she's missed three calls from him, and the little message symbol is blinking in the corner of the screen. Two mumbled apologies, she guesses, and an angry demand to know where she is.
She's not sure she can answer that question either, and she slips her phone back into the little pocket in her purse.
Maybe when he comes back to work, she'll have an answer, she thinks.
Or maybe not.