A/N: Okay, Penn, here you go. Yes, the most difficult part of your challenge was keeping Bobby out of it. I don't do so well without my boy. But I hope you like it just the same.
It was a nice day and Mike Logan was bored, so he decided to take a walk in Central Park. If nothing else, he always enjoyed watching women jogging by and kids playing on the playgrounds or the ballfields. He tried not to dwell on the fact that, at fifty-two years of age, he had neither a woman nor any children of his own. He still debated whether or not he even wanted any. He wasn't great with babies, but he liked older kids. Once they were old enough to play ball, they had a common interest with him, and that made them much less intimidating. He could communicate with older kids. Babies unsettled him.
Maybe it was all for the best that he had no family. He saw what the job did to families. It wasn't pretty. So he ultimately decided he would be happy chasing skirts and catching them once in awhile. It added spice to his life, and his life sure could use some spicing up.
As he sat on a bench near the playground, musing over the successes and failings of his most recent string of relationships, he became aware that he was being watched. Searching the surroundings, his gaze fell on a little girl, six or seven years old, who was standing across the way, just staring at him. He returned her scrutiny. When she finally moved, he expected her to run off, back to her playmates, but she surprised him. Instead of running away from him, she came closer. She didn't say a word; she just held out her hand, fist closed.
Puzzled, he held out his own hand, open, palm up. She brought her fist over his hand and opened it. He felt something fall into his palm, and then she turned and jogged back toward the playground, vanishing into a crowd of busy kids near the merry-go-round.
Logan looked down into his hand. A small plastic egg, like one you would get from a gumball machine, sat in the center of his open palm. Curious, he opened it. Nestled into the bottom half of the egg was a ring with a purple stone. He studied the prize, then looked back toward the playground. The little girl was standing on the far side of the play area, holding the hand of a tall man. She smiled at him, then walked away down the path, holding on to her father's hand.
He rose from the bench and walked off in the opposite direction, studying the ring. She didn't get it from a gumball machine, but it wasn't an expensive ring either. It looked like one of those cute little rings you could find at a corner drugstore for a couple of bucks. He wondered why she had given it to him, but that was a question that would never be answered.
As he walked along, a thought occurred to him, and he knew just what he could do with it. He had been searching and searching for a way to get back at his partner for embarrassing him a couple of weeks ago by making an off-hand comment about his prowess in bed. That gave a lot of the guys the wrong idea about his relationship with her, and no amount of protest could convince them otherwise. He was lucky he'd managed to convince Deakins she was just kidding.
But the captain was on vacation this week, and he grinned as he slid the ring back into its little nest. Tossing it up in the air, he caught it and slipped it into his pocket. Just wait, Barek, he thought to himself. What goes around, comes around.
After a morning of chasing dead end leads, Logan and Barek returned to the squad room with their lunch. Setting his sandwich on the desk, Logan went to the soda machine by the elevators and grabbed a coke. Barek was on her own with that disgusting flavored mineral water she liked. He'd take sugar and caramel coloring over flavored fizzy water any day of the week.
As he returned to his desk, he called out. "Hey, Barek."
She looked up as he tossed the little egg across the desks. She caught it and looked at it with a frown. "Frequenting gumball machines again, Logan?"
"Not even. I figured since you're so eager to let the world in on private matters, maybe we should get hitched and show 'em all."
He waited for her to overreact and throw something at him, calling him a pig and recanting everything she'd said to mislead the others who shared their working space.
She popped open the egg and looked at the ring with interest. Smiling sweetly at him, she slid it onto her left ring finger. "That's exactly the sort of proposal I expected from you, Logan, and I accept. I know just the dress I want and I can put together a guest list in no time. Do you have any preferences for location?"
He stared at her, a look of horror on his face as she waited for his answer. He couldn't manage more of a response than an unintelligible stammer. Barek let a few uncomfortable moments pass before she slid the ring off her finger and returned it to the egg. She was laughing, a full laugh of genuine amusement. She tossed the plastic container back at him. "You are priceless, Logan. You can calm down. I couldn't marry you, partner. I would kill you before the honeymoon ever ended."
Logan let out a sigh of deep relief. She was right. They worked very well together as partners, but she had little patience for his antics. "You're a cruel woman, Barek."
"Maybe so, but I gotcha again."
He watched her cross the squad room toward the snack machine adjacent to the soda machine. Flavored water and a Snickers bar. He wondered if he would ever understand women. He turned his head as someone approached from the other side of the room. Eames was grinning at him. "You should know not to go into battle unarmed, Logan. Never try to match wits with a woman."
"Very funny, Eames. Go eat your lunch."
She walked away laughing. Unarmed, my ass, he thought. Unprepared was a term he liked better. No matter how well prepared he thought he was, it was never enough. She outwitted him every time.
Logan passed the rest of the day suffering through the ribbing of his peers. He went home at the end of the day and had cold pizza and a beer for dinner. He wondered how his refrigerator managed to get the pizza colder than the beer. As he sat on the couch and grabbed the remote from the coffee table, someone knocked on the door. Expecting his elderly neighbor, bored after a day alone at home with her cats, he set down the remote and called out. "It's open, Mrs. Ruben."
The door opened and Barek came in, carrying a white box. "Do I look like a seventy-four-year-old Jewish lady?"
"Sorry. I forgot to use my x-ray vision."
"Aw, don't be such a grouch. I brought a peace offering."
He looked at the white box with suspicion. "What? A box that will cover me with whipped cream when I open it?"
She laughed and set it on the coffee table, taking off the string and opening the box. "No, but thanks for the idea. These are jelly donuts, freshly made and ready to drive you ten paces closer to a heart attack."
His eyes lit up and he smiled. "Anything that's bad for me has to taste great."
"Your rule of thumb, I know. Did you eat dinner?"
"Yup," he replied, grabbing a donut from the box and biting into it. "Cold pizza and warm beer. Dinner of champions."
"It's a wonder you're still walking."
"Isn't it?"
She sat on the couch beside him and said, "Look, Mike, I wanted to apologize. I'm not going to go so far as to say you didn't deserve it, because you did, but the guys are going to give you hell for it, and I didn't really plan on that."
He held his arms open, dropping jelly onto the cushion between them. "What the hell did you think was going to happen? Oops. Shit..."
She got up before he could and went into the kitchen for a wet paper towel. She eyed the dishes stacked in the sink and the open loaf of bread on the counter. Closing the top of the bread, she folded it in on itself to keep it from getting any more stale. Back in the living room, she cleaned up the jelly and took a better look around as she took the paper towel back to the kitchen to put in the trash. His suit jacket was draped over a chair as was his tie, and a pair of jeans lay crumpled in the corner under a t-shirt. There was a stack of magazines on the floor by the couch, and she decided she did not want to know what they were, even though she wondered how many of George Merritt's Honeys graced their pages. She dropped the paper towel into an overfilled trash can. He lived like a bachelor, that was for certain.
Returning to the couch, she sat down as he finished his donut. "So, why the peace offering? Afraid I'm going to get you after all?"
"As if," she snorted. "Fun is fun, Mike, but I don't want any bad blood between us. I was just joking, all in good fun, but you seemed to take the ribbing kind of hard. I'll square it away with the guys tomorrow."
He frowned. "Think I can't take it, Barek?"
"Can you?"
He humpfed but didn't answer her question directly. "Of course, there is another way we could deal with it."
"What's that?"
"The rumor mill is an insatiable beast, and are they/aren't they is the favorite topic. So let's keep 'em guessing. But there is one thing I want to get straight with you."
She made an open gesture. "Go right ahead."
He leaned closer and grinned at her. "I want to make it abundantly clear that you were very wrong about one thing."
She did not back away from him. "Was I? And what was I wrong about?"
He closed the remaining distance between them and captured her mouth with his. Too stunned to react, Barek found herself caught up in the moment and she melted into him. Initially intent on proving to her just how wrong she was about his bedside manner, he lost sight of his goal as she responded to him. They were both caught up in the overpowering passion of locked lips and, a short time later, intermingling bodies. Neither had the power or the desire to stop the floodgates once he had opened them.
Neither was sure how much time had passed once they were both spent and sated. Neither chose to dwell on the repercussions of what had just happened. Relaxed in a tangle of sheets and each other, they each found the right area to caress that led the other toward sleep. "Mike," she murmured sleepily.
"Hmm?" he answered, unable to muster the energy to say more.
"I admit it," she whispered. "I was wrong."
fin.