Elliot dreams about her skin. Her touch, her scent, her softness. The steel tension that lies underneath in knots produced by rape and death and pain.
If he dared to tell anyone about it, he knows what they would say. That he desires her, wants to consume her and possess her and fulfil himself with something as worthless as a one night stand. It sickens him, to think that it could be reduced to something so base and sordid as testosterone and lust.
It's not that though. All he wants to do is run his fingers across her, feel the warmth emanating gently from her, not hidden or blocked by clothes and walls. His skin craves hers. He can imagine it well, all the different areas he could let his touch whisper across. The secret softness of her neck just behind her ear, secluded beneath her falling hair, except when she scrapes it back as she's working out and he catches a glimpse. A faint sheen of sweat coats it and he wants to wipe it off her, letting it dissolve into himself.
Sometimes the urge is almost unbearable. To press his lips against her forehead as you would a child, offering comfort and understanding, a kiss to make the hurt vanish without a trace, the same way a licked thumb can wipe chocolate from the edges of a mouth.
He wasn't always like this. He didn't suddenly become this desperate the moment he lay eyes on her, but if you asked him when she seeped her way into him, he couldn't tell you. Somewhere within the hours and days and years that she has stood beside him, she has become his whole.
He can think of other things that join them. Alcohol deep at night in a bar when they try to forget the world exists. Coffee on a fresh morning that they joke will fix the day but instead will only make it bearable. Only just. Mornings in their lives are broken before they've even started. The sight of their breath mixing in the car before the heater has banished the chill of the air sets him on fire with love for her. His partner. But none of them he needs as much as her touch.
It is the one time he will ever love the snow. The day she walks out of the precinct and the first sighs of snowflakes fall around her. She lifts her face to the midnight sky and tiny crystals flutter, settling with a silent hush on her eyelids and lips, melting into her pores. He wants to be one of them. To be allowed that privilege, that access to her. A smile lights the corner of his mouth in response to hers and their eyes glitter in innocence for a second before reality hits them, and they go their separate ways home.
Like he said, it's not about lust or sex. It's about them being a part of one another. Intrinsically. Immeasurably. Some days he doesn't know where he ends and she begins. The blood that fuels him is hers as well, it comes from the same place, and it builds them both from the inside. To touch her is to make that real, to feel the puzzle pieces fit for a split second, as electricity sparks. He knows that she feels it too, but either she's stronger or weaker than him because he can rarely catch a glimpse of it. Weaker that she will not allow herself to revel in that feeling of utter wholeness. Stronger that she will not fall into the trap.
Perhaps it could be defined as stalking. Does it count when you are thrown together through work, but that it is the only time you feel alive? That although you make the requisite groans and comments of sleep and home and life outside the job, it isn't really what you want. The days he does not see her become hazy in his mind. They don't exist, except in a half life where he cannot be real.
It could be an addiction. He wonders if there is any kind of meeting he should go to. But how can it be defined? He doesn't follow her home, or sit outside her apartment, or leave threatening messages. And he doesn't have sex with her, so he can't be addicted to that.
Not that he hasn't dreamt of it. He's not that good a catholic boy. The tip of his tongue tastes every inch of her, licking every freckle and scar, every blemish, every line. Coating her with him. He wakes up with such a hard-on he could almost cry. It's not that that causes the ache inside though.
He longs to be a victim. They get her embrace, they are allowed to bury their heads in her neck and stain it with sobs, to squeeze palms so tightly together he thinks bones might break. Her skin is taut against her knuckles as she holds onto a girl during her rape kit, keeping her sane, making it something that can be survived, but he never gets that. He will never feel her fingers brush streaks of tears from his cheeks, and he won't do the same to her. He is not allowed to see her cry.
Gone are the days where they touched at will. Leaning into one another as they stare at the same computer screen, a hand on a shoulder in passing or sympathy. Now their contact comes only in the unimaginable, the hell, the grief and the fear. It makes him sad, that within the deepest depths of his heart, he longs for disaster. Her hand stings his face in rage as they fight to stay alive. His blood seeps through her fingers as she murmurs his name in desperation. He can hold her when she's sick, and seize her in his arms when she falls. He knows she can hear his heartbeat, terrified as though caged within his chest, and he can feel the tremor capture her whole body. Fin gets shot and he can have her as his own for a second, her shock destroying the barriers. When the world falls apart, he can touch her, but only then.
When it stops falling, his freezes until the next time.