Blame It On The Boogie
She could blame it on the boogie, she could blame it on the rain. But when it came right down to it, Claire blamed it on exhaustion.
She was so tired that month that driving home at night she had to crank down the window to let the February wind blast her, had to slap herself across the face to keep awake. McCoy was tired too, so she couldn't resent him, but god! she resented the workload. Some mornings when the alarm went off she started to cry with the sheer misery of it.
That night – the night it was raining, the night Colleen was humming Marvin Gaye in the elevator when Claire went down to Complaints – she was so tired that she zoned out in the elevator on the way back up to 10th, stared at the open doors until they closed again and the lift started back down.
When she finally got back to McCoy's office after riding the elevator for a while, he was asleep on the couch, one arm flung over his eyes, papers scattered across his chest. Part of Claire thought she should let him sleep. Part of her wanted to drop a couple of law reports from a great height onto his desk and watch him jump.
She settled for touching his shoulder gently. "Got those affidavits," she said.
He opened his eyes, looked at her for a moment, still deep in sleep and guileless, and smiled sweetly.
"Thanks." He sat up, patted the couch beside him. "I'll just be a minute."
Claire sat down to wait for him to decide what he needed her to do next, and tired as she was, she went – just completely out. Awake one moment, the next minute coming out of a deep dark well of sleep.
Warm She was leaning on something warm, something that moved slightly, regularly, lifting and falling. Like an annoying passenger on an airplane, she had slumped over sideways while she slept, onto Jack McCoy. Fucking wonderful, she thought, mortified, trying to ascertain if she'd drooled down her chin in her sleep without alerting him to the fact that she'd woken up.
Then she realised the weight across her shoulders was his arm. Her head rested on his chest, his hand was gently stroking her hair. She could hear his heart beating. She could hear his heart beating very fast
She yawned, sat up, accidentally-on-purpose put her hand on his thigh as she did so, had the satisfaction of seeing him jerk like her touch had electrocuted him.
"Done yet?" she asked.
"Hmm," said McCoy non-committal, with a lap full of papers and clearly no intention of handing them over just at the moment. Claire hid a smirk. Then McCoy put his hand over hers, brushed the back of her fingers ever so gently, not even really a caress, nothing you couldn't do in a case conference or a courtroom.
Claire's mouth went dry and her vision dimmed. She looked at McCoy and he was looking straight back at her, and it wasn't any longer about who was going to win that round. She reached out and touched his cheek, ran her fingers down his jaw and across his lips and McCoy opened his mouth a little, caught the tip of her forefinger between his teeth.
"Jack…" Claire whispered, and saw his eyes dilate black at the sound of her voice.
McCoy released her. He closed his eyes and turned his face away. "We have work to do," he said huskily.
"Yeah," Claire said.
Despite the boogie and the rain, that was it. They were both too tired, too busy, to take it further. But later, Claire would look back at that moment as the tipping point. She went home that night in a cab, too tired to drive, and for the first time in months she no longer wondered if she'd sleep with Jack McCoy.
When.