9. Panic Button

My persistent stomach allows me only a few minutes of peace before commanding, once and for all, that I get up and feed it. Bastard. I don't want to move. I really don't. The heat rising from Elliot's body beneath mine is warming the length of me better than any electric blanket I've ever owned. My muscles are pleasantly exhausted, though I'm not sure they'll remain pleasant once I attempt to reuse them. The post-orgasmic haze has filtered through my head, but even in my newfound clarity I don't know if I'd be capable of processing any thoughts deeper than those of basic needs.

Food, hydration – both in the plans. Shelter – got that taken care of. Reproduction – shit.

Yes, my brain is definitely able (and willing, I might add) to process all thoughts of sex. More specifically, it's rather enjoying processing the fact that I've just had it twice and the prospect that it could happen again.

Again. Good Lord. If that ends up happening (I'm fighting right now to not begin squirming at the idea) it'd be the first time in my life I'd ever had sex three times in a day. I lift my head from where it has been tucked safely against Elliot's neck and stretch to see the clock beyond him on the nightstand. I confirm that yep, there are still plenty of hours left in the day. So, if three happens this early on, and I'm still around, God only knows what kind of ridiculous stats we could wind up posting by tonight. I press my lips together to contain a whimper and quickly hide my face in the side of his neck again. He places his chin just above my forehead. The whimper I'd been trying to smother at the enticing thought of Round Three…or would that be the third period? Well, but there are only three periods in a hockey game. Meaning it would essentially be game over after three.

Screw that. I'm ready for a double-header.

Double-header.

Christ, even that sounds dirty now.

Anyway, that whimper I'd been trying to smother at the thought of…whatever it would be called…has turned into a stifled giggle because "double-header" is funny and I think I only just realized that the sex I've just had and the sex I've been thinking about having again has been with Elliot. Elliot. El-li-ot. It's funny and slightly traumatizing all at once. But before I have a chance to start churning over all the quite possibly life-altering details, he slides his chin from my hair down over my forehead until his cheek rests there.

I can feel his jaw working against my brow as he asks me quietly what was so funny.

I delve my face further into him and mumble "Nothing" against his skin.

"Nothing, huh?" he mumbles back.

I shake my head.

He takes a finger from each of his hands, arms still wrapped around me, and presses them into my sides, wriggles them just beneath my ribs. My upper body lurches at the tickle, but his grip holds me tightly to him.

"Alright, asshole," I scold him. I disengage my arms from his and my hands are now firmly planted on the mattress, propping me up and off his chest. His arms slide lower around me, parting until his hands are left resting on my hips, allowing me my slight evasion.

"So, what was so funny?" he repeats.

I look at him over my shoulder. "Elliot, we just had sex." When he stays silent for a few seconds, I add "Twice!"

He grins lopsidedly at me and his fingertips playfully press into my hips. "Really? Hadn't noticed."

I glare at him.

"Okay, okay. We had sex. How is that funny?"

My jaws works silently for a moment as I try and fail to find words to explain myself. "Because, El, it's you. And me. It's us. We had sex. With each other." He's just watching me and that sets my mind to reeling and just as quickly as the thoughts pop into my head, they're coming out of my mouth. "I mean, do you not realize how crazy that is? How ridiculous? You're my partner – we're partners!" I pause for only a second as something else occurs to me. I put my feet down on the mattress on either side of him, scooting them closer to me as I raise my upper body to sit up straighter. I feel the muscles of his lower abdomen tighten under my – Christ – my very naked ass to support my weight in its newly concentrated form. I tilt my legs in until my knees touch and bury my face in my hands, my voice muffled in my palms as I continue. "Oh God, we're partners." My hands slide up my face until I can rake my fingers through the tousled strands of my hair. "Of course, we won't be much longer as soon as someone finds out about this." When my fingertips meet at the back of my scalp, I let them stay there and drop my forehead to my knees.

With that, one of his hands is immediately on my back, his torso curling up as he props himself up on his other elbow. The toughened but smooth skin of his hand slides slowly up my back to my right shoulder as he speaks, his touch feather light. "Liv, no one needs to know until we want them to." He gives my shoulder a slight squeeze, purportedly for reassurance. Which would have been fine had I ever been assured in the first place. Hard to be reassured without having been assured to begin with.

Besides, does he really think I'm going to buy into this bull? Surely, he knows me better than that. Surely, he's thought this through. My partner's a logical man. But maybe this isn't my partner talking to me. Maybe this is the man I've just slept with talking to me. Maybe this duality of his character is something I'm going to have to get used to.

Get used to? God, I'm thinking like this is a done deal, that we're going to keep doing this, that we're going to be together and try to stay that way. Christ, who am I kidding? It pretty much is a done deal, as far as I'm concerned. But who are we kidding? There's no way in hell we can keep this a secret. No way in hell that we can be together and be partners. Elliot has to know this. He has to. Maybe this is just locker room talk. The good ol' "We can do it" talk, when guards have been let down and helmets have come off. Maybe Elliot leaves his game face at work and this is how he is when he doesn't have to convey with his eyes to every person he crosses paths with that fucking with him would be a very bad idea.

No, we always wear our game faces. Especially when dealing with each other. We always have. That's just how we are. All that stuff we rambled on about in the kitchen was just a momentary lapse. Right? I can't be the only one starting to think that not only is fucking with him a bad idea, but that perhaps simply fucking him may have been a bad idea in its own right, can I?

I whip my head around to glare at him. "Elliot, you can't possibly believe that – we're detectives. We work with other detectives."

He shrugs a casual shoulder. "Which is why we're perfectly equipped to be able to handle this. We know how they think. Besides," he cracks a smile with one side of his mouth, "they probably all think we've been doing this for years…so how much stronger could their suspicion really get?"

I groan, once more smothering my face into my hands. "You're not helping."

"Sorry," he offers.

I speak, my breath moistening the skin of my palms. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," I chant, starting to rock back and forth. "I can't believe I just did this. How could I let this happen?" I keep muttering into my hands, hardly noticing that Elliot has suddenly sat up, causing me to land on the mattress, never losing my posture of embarrassment and slight humiliation. I don't know what he's doing behind me, but I feel him tugging and yanking at the sheets and as soon as the words "I can't believe I had sex with my partner" escape my mouth, I find myself being lifted slightly and deposited onto the lap of Elliot's Indian-crossed legs.

I raise my head to see that the cream-colored flat sheet has been pulled from being tucked under the mattress. I'm not sure at what point he became aware of my growing sense of insecurity, but it's apparent that he has. Part of the sheet is in his lap, acting as a barrier between my ass and his…lap. The rest of the ample material is bunched up behind my back, and he lifts it with both hands, wrapping the sheet up under my arms, only releasing it when I've brought a trembling hand to hold it in place just above the center of my breasts. I immediately miss the warmth of his skin and work the sheet with my hands until my front is covered just the same but it drapes down low on my back, resting below my hips.

Elliot's arms circle around me, holding my sheathed waist securely, his chest pressed to my back. "To be fair," he begins, briefly releasing his left arm to use his fingertips to brush my hair back behind my shoulder before propping his chin there, "I had sex with my partner, too."

Touche.

"I mean, what's with all this 'I' business, Liv? I can't believe I just did this. I can't believe I let this happen."

Okay, now he's mocking me. And I don't sound like that. Not that…whiny.

"For the record, you didn't do anything. You didn't let anything happen. We did this, we let it happen." His voice is quiet at my ear, the vibrations in his throat drumming against the back side of my shoulder. He turns his face toward my cheek and bumps his nose there lightly. "And we will handle this together."

I snort. "In case you forgot, Einstein, I'm not particularly skilled at hiding that sort of thing. Come on, it took you all of…what? Five seconds to figure out I'd slept with Cassidy? And that was back when sex wasn't such a rare commodity. So now…now…one of the only times I've slept with anybody in God knows how long, it's with you and you think I'll be able to hide that?"

He presses his lips to the top of my shoulder, muffling a laugh there.

"Oh, this is so not funny," I groan.

I feel his top teeth scrape lightly against the skin his lips had occupied a second earlier. Just as quickly as they sink in, they're gone. "You're the one who laughed first," he reminds me before kissing the flesh marred by his teeth.

"Yeah, well, I'm not laughing now!" I don't yell, but the pitch of my voice rises almost uncomfortably.

"Olivia, you're panicking."

Thank you for that insight, oh Amazing Seer of the Obvious. "Of course I'm panicking! Why in the hell aren't you panicking?" I start to struggle a bit in his grasp, trying to push myself forward and off his lap, not really thinking that my ass is kind of in a compromising position to be wriggling around.

His arms instantly close tighter around me, keeping me securely against him. He hooks his chin over the shoulder he's been attending to, keeping our cheeks pressed together and my upper body anchored to him. He flexes the muscles of his arms, every part of them from shoulder to wrist squeezing around me. Not tightly – just enough to make we well aware that, for right now, he has me and he doesn't want me to move quite yet. His chin lifts slightly for him to mutter in my ear, "Liv, if you're panicking about us having sex, you probably shouldn't keep squirming your ass around in my lap."

I resign to stop moving and he hooks his chin again. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't really trying very hard to get away. But, of course, he knows that. I blow a heavy sigh upward through my lips, fluttering my bangs from my forehead momentarily.

His arms relax and I mumble an apology. He takes a deep breath, his chest inflating against my back. "The only thing that could make me panic right now, Olivia, would be you running away."

Goddamn him. Just…just…goddamn him. This is not as simple as he's making it out to be. Making it out. Making out. Christ. This is not as simple as he's making it sound, dammit. It's not. It's not.

He must have the sense that I'm on the verge of scampering from his lap like a cat whose been held hostage by a three-year-old, because he doesn't give me the opportunity to say anything in response. He runs his hands from my bare shoulders down to my elbows and gives each of them a squeeze. "Look, why don't you go take a shower? I'll go make something for breakfast. Even though it is…" he pauses and lifts his chin from my shoulder to turn and look at the bedside clock, "well, even though it's basically lunchtime."

I laugh lightly despite myself. "A shower? You saying I'm dirty? Do I smell bad?" I bite my lip and try not to laugh louder because I'm imagining the look on his face right now and wish I could see it. He's probably terrified that I might be being serious. But, once again, he surprises me. He doesn't worry or apologize. He plays along.

He pushes his nose into the hair behind my ear. I hear his gentle inhalation and feel the hum he makes against my scalp. "Mmm, no, I think you smell fantastic. And," his lips are next to my ear now, "I kinda like it when you're dirty."

"You've never seen me dirty, Stabler." I want to blame the fact that the words come out of my mouth before I can rationally stop them on his teeth having grazed the crest of my ear immediately after he said the word "dirty." But I can't. I want to pass off the definitively lower octave of my voice as an attempt to stay in tune with his. But I can't. I just said it. And I just said it like that.

He makes a humming sound. "A promise of things to come, I hope." There is a pause that gives me enough time to crack a grin. "And, by things, I, of course, mean you and me."

"Oh God," I groan, with a roll of my eyes.

Elliot presses a quick kiss to my temple and manages to negotiate his way out from underneath me. He stands, walking to the foot of the bed where he can swipe his previously discarded boxers from the floor. I take the chance to admire the firm roundness of his ass because, panic or no, I mean, he's standing right there. Often times, I am nothing if not an opportunist. Being a cop will do that to a person, too. All those endless hours trapped in a car on stakeouts…when the moment presents itself to grab a bathroom break, trust me, we'll take it. I'm sure the Rangers understand opportunism….the five-hole is open and so, dammit, that's where you're gonna stick it.

Great.

Holes. Sticking it.

I really do need a shower. A cold one now.

My fist clenches a bit tighter around the sheet it has bundled against my chest as I watch Elliot and his newly-clad lower half disappear out the bedroom door and down the hall. My eyes remain on the open doorway long seconds after he has gone. Long seconds after I hear his voice hollering back at me to call him if I need anything. As they fall away, I allow my eyes to slowly track around the room I now find myself alone in.

Elliot's bedroom. Alone. In Elliot Stabler's bedroom. I shudder gently to clear my head of the anything but unpleasant visual.

The walls are painted a muted sage green – the color is saturated, but not the least overpowering. It creates a perfectly natural backdrop for his furniture. All hard oak – solid, I'm sure – thick, sturdy, and therefore entirely well-suited to my partner.

Christ, now I'm comparing him to his furniture.

I scoot over to the left until I'm closer to the bed's edge and swivel around so that my legs dangle off the mattress and I'm again looking into his bathroom. Funny, it's starting to appeal to me as somewhat of a haven right now. There's a shower in there. Showers are good. Showers are places to relax. Places to not think so much. Places to not freak out.

Just like that, my toes touch the soft fibers of the carpet and I hop down, taking the sheet with me, though not feeling modest enough to care that the low drape down my back is probably exposing my bare ass. He's not in the room to stare.

But, he could be. Jesus, he could be walking back down the hall this very second. He. Him. Elliot. My partner. The one I just had sex with.

Inspired by Fred Flintstone at the Bedrock bowling alley, I hightail it into the bathroom on my tiptoes, closing the door behind me.