It's a nice fit.
Nice. Pleasant. Agreeable. Practically average. Nice is like answering fine when someone asks you how you're doing. You may be so angry about one thing or another, but you answer "fine" because you don't want to get into it. You don't need that other person to know that you could fall apart right there if you're pushed the wrong way. And so describing something as "nice" to a question like that, things may be terrible, but is that really something to get into at work?
Olivia was tired of nice and pleasant. She wanted heat. Passion. She wanted things that had always been right within in her reach for 12 years until they weren't anymore. She wanted him. But perhaps what she wanted most of all, was an explanation. She knew that day had been rough, and that whole year had been eating away at him. But he'd had worse years. Like the year she almost got both of them fired for that mess with her brother which was also the year she had left him and Kathy was trying to divorce him and he was accused of killing that suspect. But he had stuck it out then; stayed around for four more years.
And then she walked in one morning and he was gone. Vanished without any sort of explanation. No calls, no messages, nothing. Just Cragen telling her that Elliot had turned in his papers and her having a mental breakdown in an interrogation room. And then a few weeks later she walked in to find his Semper Fi medal sitting on her desk with a post-it note stuck to it.
Liv. I'm sorry.
After 12 years, didn't she deserve more than this? After everything didn't she at least deserve a proper goodbye? She didn't even know where he was these days. Sure, she could contact him and find out, but she was being a 12-year-old about it. If he wouldn't talk to her, she wouldn't talk to him. She knew she was being immature about the whole thing, but she decided that she just needed to move on from him, from them, from all of it.
In those 12 years, she'd had only a handful of dates and no real relationships because she'd been stupidly pining after her married partner. Maybe if he hadn't looked at her the way he did, or driven out of his way from time to time to pick her up for work for no real reason, or they hadn't silently established joint custody of that stupid grey hoodie, she could have found someone else to make her happy. And now that he was out of her life, she was trying, she really was. But try as she might, she was also failing.
Brian Cassidy was supposed to be a one night stand, nothing more. She was not supposed be sitting here 13 years later with his mother eating pizza. He had just come into her life when she had been lonely and really needed someone. And he was familiar. He'd been there back when Elliot had been there; back during her first year on the squad.
So she was settling. She was settling because she'd come to accept the fact that she would never have Elliot. She was settling because she was getting old and she knew she deserved the right to try and be happy. So she sat there with Brian and his mother, trying her hardest not to think about the time she had met Elliot's mother. She sat there making small talk and laughing politely, with her "nice fit." Her nice fit that was really like trying to put two puzzle pieces together that didn't quite match.
Brian didn't know about her mother or her father. She never planned to tell him. She never planned to let him in the way she had let in Elliot. And maybe if she had, those puzzle pieces would fit a little bit tighter, a little bit better. But she couldn't do that. Not when that stupid flicker of hope continued to well inside of her. She had tried to put it out, but it just wouldn't go away. Maybe it was because, tucked deep into the back of her closet, was that stupid grey hoodie. And she couldn't help but wonder if he'd come asking for it back one day, since he was the one to buy it and all. The sensible side of her knew that he knew that she had it and was letting her keep it as a memory. But that thought was almost too painful. So she kept holding out hope and settling with her nice fit.
Maybe one day she'd finally be over her partner with the anger management problem. Unfortunately for Olivia, that one day was pretty damn far away.