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Alex arrived just a minute before Olivia, was waiting on the sidewalk outside the building, a suitbag in one hand and a huge tote in the other, her briefcase strap slung cross-body over her torso.
"Sorry you were waiting." Olivia grabbed the tote, immediately feeling bad for keeping Alex out in the cooling evening air.
"It was only a minute," Alex reassured her. "Not worth worrying about."
"I'll have to get you a key," Olivia said, and Alex felt her heart expand like a balloon.
"Only if you want to, Liv," her answer far more circumspect than her visceral response.
"About this morning, Alex," Olivia started, but didn't know how to finish.
"Inside." Alex put a single finger on Olivia's lips. "Let's go in, relax, heat up some soup. We don't have to talk here on the street. There's time to say whatever you need to say."
They had dinner, Olivia toasting some French bread she had into crostinis to go with Alex's tomato basil bisque. They ate on the couch, as they had so many times before, this time with Alex's always-cold feet tucked under Olivia's thigh. She hated to wear socks around the house, but had the coldest feet in the known world. They talked a bit about the case, though not in any great detail, Olivia thinking Alex would find all that out soon enough. Then, a little voice in her head said, Will she? Or will she have jumped ship already? She pushed that voice down.
"This soup is fantastic, honey," Olivia said when she was done. Alex beamed, both proud of her cooking skills and thrilled that Olivia had called her honey. Maybe this wasn't going to be as bad as she'd feared.
"My pleasure. Anything for New York's finest."
After dinner, they cleaned up, and Alex went in to run a bath. "Want to join me?"
"Thanks, but not quite yet."
Alex slipped beneath the water, almost too hot to stand, but it relaxed her, and the steam coming up off the water into the air around her head was comforting. She lay there for a few minutes, so acclimated to the heat that she turned on the hot tap again the moment the water cooled just a few degrees. She heard a light knock on the door, and the knob turned. The door pushed in just a few inches, revealing one outstretched hand with a glass of bourbon.
"Can I come in?"
"After you've teased me with that bourbon, you not only can, you must," Alex answered. Was Olivia going to come to her, to initiate this conversation? She didn't want to hold her breath. Olivia slipped in, closing the door behind her and handed Alex the glass, keeping an identical one for herself.
"You going to get in, babe?"
"No, I don't think so," the brunette replied. "But can I sit with you?" She gestured toward the small stool at the end of the tub.
"Of course you can. I'd love it."
Olivia pulled the stool over, carefully removing Alex's folded towel and her glasses, setting them on the toilet lid. She sat, facing Alex, left elbow propped on the edge of the tub, holding her glass, while her right hand reached out to Alex's arm. "Sweetie, your skin is so red." She dipped her fingers in the water. "Al, honey, this is really hot. Aren't you burning up?"
"No, I'm fine, really," Alex answered. "It feels good." She grabbed Olivia's hand, though, while she had the chance.
Olivia took a sip of her drink, and a deep breath. "Can we talk, Alex? About this morning?"
"Of course we can," the blonde answered. "I'm sorry to have sprung that on you. I just couldn't think of a way to ease into that."
"No, I'm sorry, Alex," Olivia replied. "I overreacted. You told me your news—it's big news, and I should have just been happy for you—but I just saw this miraculous window that we had just opened, and it was closing up right in front of me."
"But it's not," Alex argued. "Nothing is closing up. If I decide to do this..."
"If?"
"Yeah, if. I have to let them know by Tuesday, when the DA gets back from a conference in Chicago." Comprehension dawned, slowly, and Alex turned a bit to face Olivia. "You thought I'd already taken it? That it was a fait accompli?"
"Well, yeah, I did," Olivia admitted. "I mean, I thought it in English, not French, but I thought you were saying it was a done deal. And I just panicked. I saw everything we'd waited for slipping through our fingers."
"Oh, baby, no. No, no, no," Alex said, and she felt beyond bad that she hadn't made that clear earlier. "I know I've made decisions before that kept us from getting close. Now that we...I wouldn't do that again, Liv. The DA met with me on the 7th, asked me to consider the move. I told him I'd need some time, and that worked out fine for him. The spot won't even open up for another six weeks or so, and he was headed out of town for vacation and then a conference. I bought myself some time. Bought us some time."
"Us?"
"Us. I didn't know—I went up to Connecticut the next day, you know, and talked to my uncle about all of it."
"All of it?"
"Yes, actually. I told him about the offer—well, he told me first, since Branch had already gossiped about it to him—and we talked about you, and SVU, and I told him I had no idea what to do. How could I decide if I should take the job or not, when everything I felt for you was just sitting there? I didn't know if I could tell you everything, and I knew that taking the job would change things. But I couldn't know yet if that was bad, or good."
"And then you came home from Connecticut, and..."
"And we talked, and fought, and talked, and..."
"And here we are," Olivia finished. "So, one thing's resolved but the other is up in the air."
"Is it?" Alex asked. "Resolved, I mean?"
Olivia leaned over and kissed the upturned face, damp from the steam in the room; she pulled away, briefly, only to go back for one more kiss. Finally, she spoke. "Yes, one thing is resolved. I wasn't sure this morning, and I know I reacted badly. My favorite sport is jumping to conclusions, and I'm very good at it."
Alex responded to Olivia's cockeyed grin with a small laugh, but didn't speak, didn't want to interrupt this train of thought.
"I thought all sorts of things—you were doing this to put space between us, you'd known this and had misled me these past few days—but while I was out on the call with Fin today when I should have been here with you, I missed you. And I realized I didn't much care."
"I wouldn't do anything to get away from you, Olivia," Alex said, holding the detective's free hand with her own. "Though, when things seemed to be off the rails a bit with us last week, I was even more torn, thinking maybe it would be better not to see you all the time. But now, it's all different."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm not sure yet. What do you think?"
"Well, it would be a step toward your ultimate goals—DA, Governor, maybe even the Senate, right?"
"I..." Alex trailed off, lost in thought.
"What is it, honey?"
It was still sometimes hard for Alex to admit, even to herself, that those goals might have changed. "I'm not sure that's what I want anymore," she finally replied. "I used to want those things, want them desperately, but I think I wanted them for the wrong reasons. I wanted them for who I would be, not for what I could do."
"There's no shame in that, Alex. You have changed, you've seen and done more than most people ever will, and it's affected you. I'm proud of you, all you've come through, all the good you've done, here and in Africa."
"You've never said that before, Liv."
"Haven't I?" Now Olivia was a bit embarrassed. Of course she'd been proud of Alex, always. But had she really never told her? She took the drink from Alex's hand, and set it with her own on the sink. She took Alex's hands, and helped her stand up and step out onto the fluffy rug by the tub, before wrapping her in a huge, dark brown towel.
Finally, she stopped moving about, and rested her hands lightly on Alex's hips, looking straight into her blue eyes. "I'm proud of you, Alex Cabot. I'm proud of who you are, and of everything you do, and how you always think of yourself last and everyone else first. And I'll be proud of whatever you decide to do."
"Whatever I decide to do?" Alex repeated. She was unexpectedly moved by Olivia's little speech, didn't trust herself to say that out loud without tears.
"Well, maybe anything but clown college," Olivia said. "But, yeah, pretty much whatever else you can come up with. Besides, I don't think the shoes for clown college are exactly up your alley, unless Manolo Blahnik has some side business I'm unaware of."
They laughed, and Olivia opened the bathroom door onto the bedroom. She grabbed their drinks while Alex pulled her pajamas from her overnight bag, and lay down on the bed to watch her dress, and towel her hair, and brush it out. Despite all of the emotions they'd cycled through in the past couple of weeks—hell, the past couple of days, even—Olivia felt sure that these mundane moments were the most real, and were what really let her believe that all this was happening.
She'd made love to Alex once, years ago, and countless times both before and since in her dreams. She'd
known and imagined her kisses, and the touch of her hands. But she'd never imagined this: Alex's nightly routine (the face wash was clear with blue flecks, and foamed up, while the toothbrush was a battery-powered deal that looked like it could strip varnish off the floor); the fact that her long hair had tangles, just near the bottom, and that she hated to comb them through; that she always took a glass of ice water to bed, but hardly had more than a sip of it, and wouldn't drink it when it was room temperature.
This was all the stuff of real life, and a real person who was at this moment here in Olivia's bedroom, and not in her imagination. And she was glad she'd never attempted to create this alternate reality in her mind before, not because these details were dull compared to the feel of Alex's skin or the sound of her voice when she came, but because it was these minute details—these very moments—that make up a life together, and if she'd imagined it and couldn't have it, or had it and lost it, it might have broken her into a million pieces.
These were like the details they held back from the media on a case, so that when they got the confession, they knew it was real. A million people could probably spin a tale from whole cloth of a night with Alex Cabot, simply from seeing her, admiring her beauty and fantasizing about her body. But when Olivia's confession came, she'd have the details that would back it up: Colgate toothpaste, right side of the bed, no nightlight, too-bright alarm clock turned toward the wall, no-pulp orange juice, kept on the door of the fridge, never on the shelf. She knew as surely as she knew her own name that those things she could list off were only a start, and that she wouldn't mind spending a lifetime amassing an encyclopedic knowledge of everything Alex.
When Alex returned from the bathroom, hair combed, face washed, she took her drink from Olivia's hand and replace it with her own fingers, and sat down on the bed.
"Hi, babe."
"Hey," Olivia said, lazily. Why did she always feel lately that she was in a waking dream? "So, tell me all about this job offer."
"Well, running Major Case, it's obviously a big deal. I'd have thought any promotion coming my way would have been Bureau Chief at SVU, that maybe Mike would move over to Major."
"You're certainly qualified for it, but that is unusual, right? Leapfrogging Cutter like that?"
"Yes, but I don't know why they're doing it, didn't think to ask and I can't really talk to Mike because I don't know what he knows yet," Alex explained. "But I do think it's political. I mean, everything is, but the Mayor was chiding me during those meetings in the fall about why I hadn't held out for higher-profile slot when I got back from Africa."
"He's a snake," Olivia opined.
"That he is," Alex agreed. "And I'm sure, with him, it's a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Neither my dad nor my uncle were ever huge fans of his and I know he has his own people he'd like to see in the DA's chair, and succeeding him in Gracie Mansion. He probably assumes that I'm still pointed in that direction myself, and in that case it certainly behooves him to keep tabs on me."
"I assumed you were still pointed in that direction, Alex," Olivia confessed. "I guess that's why I put my foot in my mouth that day in your office, telling you I'd keep your secret. I know things are changing, but I'd just thought you would probably keep things behind closed doors to make life easier."
"Well, God knows I wouldn't be the only New York politician making my back-room deals from a walk-in closet. But no, after I came back, and made the mistake of getting involved with Robert, I knew that I was going to live my life. Granted, I'll probably never take out a full-page ad in the Times, but I decided I wouldn't duck any direct questions, either. If there had ever been anyone to answer questions about, of course."
"So, if your uncertainty about taking this job, and by extension, about the future it could represent...if that isn't about your private life, what is it about?"
Alex thought for a moment, not sure how to say it. She'd been trying to articulate it for a while to herself, had wanted to try to explain it to her uncle, but came up short each time. "Africa changed me, Liv. SVU changed me, my time in Witness Protection changed me. I craved power before, but I don't know that I'd have done the right things with it if I had it."
Olivia nodded. "Munch is fond of saying absolute power corrupts absolutely."
"I know. He's said it in my presence on more than one occasion so I'm not entirely sure he isn't trying to tell me something," Alex laughed. "And my dad loved that saying, as well, believed it with all his heart. I think I do too, now."
"It doesn't have to, you know."
"I think you're right. And that's why I've taken so long to come to any decision on this offer—I've been examining my motives inside and out. Taking this would put me on a path that I'd have to work to get off of. There's a trajectory, and saying no to this would be telling the power brokers in this city that I'm saying no to everything that comes after. They don't understand things like I'm not sure, or maybe in a couple of years. "
"You have to take it, then," Olivia said. "You just said it yourself; you can get off that merry-go-round later if you want to, even though it'll be hard, but once it starts and you've turned down a spot, you won't be able to catch up and get back on."
"I just feel like I'd kind of vanquished that ambitious streak. I mean, I always want to do well, to do right by the victims, but getting ahead for the sake of getting ahead didn't appeal to me any longer."
"Until?" Olivia asked.
"Until what?" Alex looked at her.
"That sentence wasn't complete, honey," Olivia explained. "I've listened to you for twelve years—fights, theories, interrogations, plea bargains, summations—and I know the end of a forceful sentence. That one wasn't. There was something left off. So, until what?"
Alex looked at her, and saw someone who was astonishingly smart and even more perceptive. "You think it's hard to pull one over on a lawyer, Liv, you should try to deal with a detective. You're worse than my therapist."
"Well, am I right?"
"Yeah, you are," Alex said. "And you know it kills me to say that, so enjoy it." Olivia's smile said she was enjoying it, very much. Alex was up now, off the bed and pacing. "I just realized that getting on that train doesn't have to end at the DA's chair or the governor's mansion or the Senate or anywhere else, unless I want it to. But what I can do, if I'm willing to play the game and amass a little power, set aside some markers to call in later, is change things. Atlanta has a bureau now that just prosecutes crimes against women. New York has a human trafficking bureau. I could take those things, plus a million other ideas, and really make a dent in things here. I could change things for a lot of women."
"Your passion is showing, Cabot," Olivia said. And Alex stopped and looked at her, not sure quite what that meant, until she saw the huge smile on the detective's face.
"I'm a little fired up, huh?" Alex chuckled.
Olivia jumped up and stood in front of her. "You are. And I love it. I'd vote for you anytime, anywhere, for anything, but if you never decide to run for office you still have a million great things you can do. And you can do them, I have no doubt."
"Won't you miss me at SVU?" Alex asked. She knew this decision was made, but had to make sure Olivia was okay with it.
"Turns out, I miss you when you're just in the kitchen," Olivia said, "so don't let that hold you back." They both laughed, before Olivia continued.
"Yeah, of course I'll miss you, Alex, but we can't ignore the fact that working together might have raised some issues for us down the road, if anything was called into question."
"I know," Alex said. "But I did come back to SVU by choice, and I will miss it, and working with all of you. It's my home, really."
"It's not your only home," Olivia said, quietly.
Alex stepped to her and wrapped her up in a gentle hug. "It isn't," she agreed. "You are my home. And maybe I'm ready now to leave that nest and try to fly a bit."
"So, you've been pondering this decision since the 7th, you said?" Olivia was putting pieces together, and Alex didn't like it. "Since we kissed, and then you blew me off and then we..."
"Yes." That was all Alex said, wanting to avoid the question she knew would come next.
"What would you have done if you and I hadn't..."
"I don't know," Alex said, firmly. "And now, I don't have to know. I was torn—if you'd not felt the same way I felt, I might not want to see you every day, but if I left SVU then, with everything going on between us, you'd have thought I was running away, and we might never have gotten a chance at this. So, in short, I had no idea what in hell I was going to do, probably wouldn't have known until it came out of my mouth in the DA's office on Tuesday afternoon."
Olivia just smiled. "I'm glad I'll never know the answer to that question, then."