Post Untethered. My first LOCI fic. Review, please.
Disclaimer: Not mine, but every night before I go to sleep, I make a wish.
Eames sat in her chair, wondering if she should call Bobby or wait for him to call her. Past experience told her that it was always better if he called first. But it had been about an hour since he had been scolded for his private undercover mission.
The captain had come out of the room. "It doesn't look too good for Detective Goren," he had said solemnly.
"Where is he?" Alex asked desperately. She knew that she had to talk to him, to help him, to fix this somehow.
"He left. I'm not sure where he went. Eames," his face softened a bit, "you can't fix this. Goren screwed up."
She shook her head in defiance. Now, here she was, an hour later and sitting in her living room, growing more nervous with each passing minute.
Her anxiety finally got the best of her. Quickly, she dialed his phone number.
"Hello?"
"Bobby?" He could sense the urgency in her tone. "Where are you?"
"Somewhere in Times Square." He gave her the name of a place.
She sighed. She'd never heard of it. "I'm coming to get you, okay? Just meet me at central park."
His answer was surprisingly calm. "Okay."
----
Bobby waited patiently for Alex's car. Quickly and quietly, he got into the large SUV.
"I don't know where Donny is," he said after a minute of silence.
"Oh, Bobby," she sighed.
"Frank doesn't know either. He's using again, by the way. I'm pretty sure he's blaming all this on me."
Alex stole a glance at him. At work, he always seemed to look so professional. He always had the nicest suits, too. Now, he looked terrible.
She felt a guilt pang. After all, it was her who persuaded Bobby to listen to Frank.
"Bobby, I'm sorry. I should've listened to you when you told me Frank wasn't clean."
"No, it wasn't your fault." His voice was defiant, angry almost. Now it softened. "I believed him too. Don't beat yourself up about it."
She chuckled a little. "What?" he asked.
"Did you ever notice that I usually call you by your first name, but you always call me Eames?"
"No, I didn't." He paused. "I didn't know if you liked to be called Alex."
Alex snickered. It was ironic that they spent most of their days together, but he wasn't sure how she liked to be addressed. "It doesn't matter. I was just making an observation."
He stayed silent for a moment after that. After the car turned on a road he didn't recognize, he spoke. "Where are we going?"
"I'm going to buy you a cup of coffee." She looked at his face. "Or a drink. Whatever you need more."
He smiled. "You're hard to read, you know. I'm supposed to be good at that. Reading people, I mean. But it's different with you."
"That's not done on purpose." She kept her eyes on the road. "I was always like that, hiding my feelings from others. To me, showing vulnerability is showing weakness, which isn't an option for a woman working in the NYPD."
He nodded, understand. They arrived at the little restaurant. Bobby held the door for Alex.
The waitress sat them at a secluded table, mistaking the outing for a date. Or maybe it was a date. God knows the last time either of them had been on one.
"I'll have an Irish coffee," Bobby told the waiter, who was way too eager for a teenager.
"I'll have a grey goose on the rocks with a wedge of lemon." She watched as the young waiter literally bounced away.
"I didn't know you liked vodka, Eames," Goren said conversationally.
She nodded. "As long as it's grey goose."
"You know vodka is made from potatoes, right?"
She nodded again. "I do."
"And you still drink it?"
"Well, after a couple of them, you don't really care what they're made of."
----
"Do you, do you want to come in for a little?" Bobby asked as they stood outside his apartment.
Alex looked at her watch. It was late. Very late. As she looked up to reject his offer, she realized how much she would like to spend more time with him. And before she knew it, she found herself saying yes and walking into his apartment.
"I wanna offer you something to drink," he said, walking into the kitchen, "but I'm all out of grey goose."
Alex smiled. "Coffee's fine."
"Gotcha."
He returned with two cups. Eames took one and they both sat there silently, not sure what to say.
"Look," Alex said, breaking the silence. "I'm sorry about Donny. And Frank."
"I assume the captain already told you what's going to happen?" Bobby asked, sipping from his cup.
"He said it didn't look good," Alex said quietly.
"Yeah, well I'll be okay."
"Bobby," Alex said, moving closer. "I know they say you're hard to work with, what with you smelling crime scenes and such." He smiled. "They think, without me, you'll have no one else to work with." She took a deep breath. "But they've got it wrong. Bobby, I don't know what I'd do without you. When you were at Tates… I thought I'd lost you for sure. Even if you got back in one piece physically, I knew that mentally, you couldn't be the same. Bobby, I was so scared."
He didn't say anything at first. "You're showing vulnerability."
"I am," and she couldn't stop the smile from emerging on her face.
Bobby smiled his crooked half-smile. "Thank you…" he murmured, moving in closer.
Maybe it was the amount of alcohol in the two detectives' systems that drove them to their next action. Perhaps it was because neither of them had been with anyone in quite some time. But the reason was probably due to the fact that all those silences and unspoken words finally caught up with them.
But for whatever reason, Bobby claimed Alex's lips with his own. And she was kissing him back. Thoughts swirled through both of their minds, but, for some reason or another, both of them felt comfortable kissing each other.
What started out as gentle suddenly turned into violent passion. Urgently, they stood, making their way to the bedroom.
Bobby pressed Alex against a wall and moved down to her neck. Wildly, a memory struck in the back of her head of being a crazy, hormonal teenager. Alex welcomed the thought.
"Bobby," she sighed. He worked his way back up, to her jaw line, her cheekbone, her ear. Her arms were twisted around his neck.
"Should we stop?" he whispered, breath ragged. Eames wanted to nod; she did, because sleeping with Bobby probably wouldn't be the smartest of ideas. But she couldn't deny the voice in the back of head, reminding her of the feeling in her heart. And for the second time that night, she found herself doing something she shouldn't: She was shaking her head.
"Good," he whispered, and picked her up. She wrapped her legs around him.
They shed each other's clothes until Alex was left in her underwear and Bobby in his jeans.
He paused above her. "Are you sure?" She nodded and kissed him.
----
They laid in bed, side by side, silently. After a minute, Bobby turned to Alex.
"Are you, uh, mad that this happened?" he asked.
She smiled. Through everything that happened lately, Bobby always knew how to make her smile. "No." She rested her hand on his stomach. "I'm not."
"That's good." He smiled his crooked grin again; the kind that made Eames's heart break, but also made her smile for some reason. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close to him.
"I miss you," she said, knowing it sounded wrong, but he understood.
"Me too, Alex."