A/N: I'm so flattered by all the follows and the couple reviews I've already gotten for this little fic. Thank you all for the encouragement - it's helping me to be kind to myself as I try to get back into the swing of writing again. Here is chapter 4. I hope you enjoy! Reviews are welcome. E/O of course, as I currently can't imagine writing any other pairing for this show.

Spoilers: Fault, Fat, Informed, Clock, Underbelly

Rating: K+ for the first 4 chapters, but my fics will always (ALWAYS) end up at M

Disclaimer: Law & Order: SVU and its characters belong to Dick Wolf. No copyright infringement intended, and no money is being made.

"Elliot!" He could hear her voice on the edge of a giggle again as she said his name, and Elliot's heart pounded. She looked at his face and he hoped she couldn't read how unsteady he felt. "We've been partners almost eight years, and you've never gotten me a Christmas gift. Or any other gift, for that matter," Liv said wryly.

"Yeah, well," El exhaled, "you know - old dogs and all that." He took a long swig of his beer and glanced out at the traffic Liv had been watching.

"What is it?"

El chuckled. "You grow up without wrapping paper, too?"

Olivia rolled her eyes as she passed him, to place her wine glass on the coffee table. He had even wrapped it himself - as sorry of a gift wrapper as he was - foregoing his usual gift bag for a box in dark blue paper, with red dots and a simple silver bow. He watched her eyes, looking at the gift, impatient for her to respond.

When it came to women, Elliot Stabler needed all the praise and road signs he could get. It was no secret that he had charm for days, but it felt like a century had come and gone since he had to flirt, let alone consider romance. Kathy had been a chapter of his life that had come before he even really knew what romance was. Duty was the 3-letter word their marriage had been built on. Until recently.

"So, are you gonna open it, or are we gonna play a guessing game?"

Liv could see that he was fidgeting. At last, she slid her fingers under the fold of the paper and relented against his anxiety. "Oh, El. It's wonderful. It's . . . " Olivia faltered. "What is it?"

Elliot laughed out loud in spite of his nerves. Placing his empty bottle on the kitchen island, he reached to Liv's hand and gently extracted what she was holding. Looking down at it, he grinned. "When Maureen was little, her daycare did this activity where all the kids were s'posed to create an ornament that showed what their parent did for a job . . ."

"This is you?" Liv's eyes widened.

"Great likeness, huh? I was, uh, still in the Marines. And Maur was three."

Liv laughed, more softly, and looked closer at the ornament in her hand. "Is that macaroni?"

"Rotini, I think."

"Right."

"Let's put it on the tree," El rushed, embarrassed.

"This is great, El. Really. But . . . don't you want to put it on your own tree?"

Clearing his throat, El went back to the tree, searching for the best place to hang it. "After Kathy moved out, I got going through some stuff at the house. Just, you know, sorting things for us getting our own places. When I found this, Kathy wanted to get rid of it." He hung it up and turned back to Liv.

"Well, you do have four kids, El," Liv said, "that's a lot of old pasta to hang up."

He wanted to tell her about the late nights in his basement, sifting through cardboard boxes thanks to his insomnia - worsened by his kids' not breathing nearby for him to listen to. He wanted to tell Olivia how he'd felt, looking back over years of memories and marriage. Funny, what could be contained in boxes. Secrets, for example. El had packed a few of those away over 20 years of marriage, too. The most important of which had been folded neatly and tucked into a box in the darkest of places eight years ago, when Olivia had walked into the one-six.

She had come back to the tree, and was touching the ornament gently. "Funny, I never would've pegged Kathy as the parent to easily let go of things," she murmured.

El ignored the layers of meaning in that one. "More wine?"

"Just a little."

Elliot came back to the couch with another beer and Liv's refreshed glass. She was finally relaxing, he saw, curled into her over-stuffed cushions with her legs drawn up. She was also getting tired - blinking slow and languorously. In truth, he had lost interest in the beer, but was grateful to have it in his hand, to help him resist the urge to touch her face, tuck her hair behind her ear. He had already taken huge risks, with the tree, and the snowball fight. Touching her just for lack of restraint would likely bring an abrupt end to what was turning out better than he had anticipated.

Despite all of this being his move, El was feeling more than a little un-anchored. He sometimes felt plainly like an asshole when it came to women: his soon to be ex-wife, his daughters, his mother, and of course, Olivia. Words and gestures that always started with the best of intentions somehow got interpreted as if in a language that only they understood, and try as he might, Elliot couldn't even glean a working knowledge, let alone become fluent.

He was tired, too, in his own way. Tired of being assured he was a good man, while women walked out the door. Tired of going to confession without the words to relieve the strain of having an emotional affair for eight years, and a physical affair in his own head that was becoming harder to escape.

After Gitano, Elliot had opened his mouth and done it again. He never believed that Olivia would leave, despite it being his idea to deal out some fucked-up ultimatum. How could she have stayed? Both of them knew, without having to say it, that it was an impossible promise - to work together and ignore the risks when the heat was pressing in. Even as the words were leaving his lips, he knew the option of having left Liv bleeding on the station floor while he dashed up the escalator had never been viable.

Even worse, he knew why she left without talking to him. He had known, instinctively, that he had pushed her to it, and like a good Catholic, he was ready to suffer. But Blaine had found the button to push that El thought he kept much better hidden.

No wonder your partner dumped you.

It had stung him in a place too private, and his temper had immediately begun to run the show. Nobody ever got close enough to that secret box in the dark place - certainly not some temp partner with something to prove.

You screwed her, and now you're tryin to screw me.

When his fist had connected with Blaine's face, he felt safe again. He knew that made him a grade-A prick, but Liv was gone and he'd never been good at wrangling his own temper the way she was. She didn't dump me! the voice in his head had shouted, I made her leave! It was what he couldn't say to anyone out loud.

The low tone of her voice, and the way she had looked at his chest where the shirt fell open. His inability to breathe had been what saved him from an immediate hard-on - and also possibly leaping the locker room bench to put his arms around her body in one bound. Pride kept him from begging, or taking back anything he had said, but he knew what the job was going to be like without her. It was already exhausting him.

Elliot had to let her leave. What he had seen and heard, in her eyes, in his own voice through the Gitano disaster? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

He wouldn't let himself - or her - work this job long enough for him to have to watch her die.

But he had to let her come back, too.

Kathy had been out of the picture for so long by then, he had picked back up at least half of his old Bachelor ways. Less food and more coffee, wearing wrinkled shirts to work, sleeping in the crib instead of the apartment he was paying for. It had never occurred to him how many of those small things were propped up by Liv when Kathy had given up trying. A part of him wanted Liv back so soon, simply to hear her voice say, You look like shit, El. Which she had - before she left again. If life had a favourite body part to abuse on Elliot, it was, without a doubt, his balls.

He had finally convinced himself to open that box - he saw himself, approaching it every day, shining a light into that secret corner. He was getting ready to spill its contents and trot each one out into the harsh light of day. After hearing the recording telling him that the number he had dialled was no longer in service, he felt more like tearing that secret box apart. He wanted to be done - with the job, with having partners, with everything. But the job reminded him of Liv, despite the pain of loneliness, and that was really what he had left.

When Dani Beck had confronted him in front of the court house, he was still viewing the job as a distraction, and had very little interest in having to school someone on how SVU operates. Then he realized that Dani admired him somehow, and though he was a grade-A prick, he was also a man with a wounded ego. He wanted the attention, and the company, of someone who was wounded in some of the same places he was. So he started to respond to Dani, started trying a little harder to act like she was really in the world with him.

But what was even more in the world with him than Dani Beck was his loneliness. Twenty years of marriage makes a person forget how to be alone. Elliot could never even really remember being alone - from his mother's house, to the Marines, to marriage, then kids, the squad - alone was a foreign country he'd heard of but never visited. He had let himself get drunk, after one of those all-too-familiar cases that made him too aware of having three daughters, a case that had rattled both him and Dani. Dani was still new to him, in ways that Olivia had never been; he didn't know how to comfort her and himself at the same time. The loneliness had been like its own, living, breathing person that night - always behind him in places he couldn't catch.

He was missing Liv that night in a huge, palpable, head-pounding way. Combine that, with drinking just enough to numb himself, and you got what had happened. Dani was a blonde, like Kathy, and it helped him to convince himself it was safer, easier, than the metaphorical box he had stuffed back into its hiding place.

"Did you sleep with her?"

Liv's sleepy but serious voice, and the question he never could have anticipated, startled Elliot out of his own head so hard that he nearly dropped the beer bottle he was holding onto her coffee table, where it would surely have shattered. She obviously didn't mean Kathy - he had four kids to show for that one. He cleared his throat nervously.

"With . . ." he practically whispered the word, stalling desperately.

"With Dani." Liv's voice was a little stronger then, and she lifted her gaze from her wine to Elliot's face, not wanting to miss any of his familiar tells that she knew by heart.

As Elliot forced his endlessly blue eyes to meet Liv's curious, anxious dark ones, he heard that voice in his head again:

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.