Part 10: It's never easy, breaking this old addiction.

Law and Order: SVU is the intellectual property of Dick Wolf. The use of the characters, settings, and plotlines is not malicious. This is a work of fiction.

"What the hell was that?" Elliot shouted, following Olivia into the squad room. "You pulled strings with one of your ex-boyfriends to keep us on this case, keep me on it with you, then you shut me the fuck out of it! I want a fucking explanation!"

She turned, her nostrils flaring, her chest heaving. "I don't owe you an explanation, Stabler," she hissed at him. "In fact, I don't owe you a damned thing." She turned away from him, walking fast, and slapped a blue folder onto Detective Lindsay's desk. "Finish that up, for me, will ya? You get the glory on this one, maybe then you'll stop looking at us like we killed your puppy." She stomped off in the other direction and deliberately pushed Elliot out of the way as she stormed out of the room.

Elliot closed his eyes. He knew what was getting to her. He knew why. He scratched at the stubble on his chin and bitterly chuckled. It was the second night in a row that something they'd been waiting for, hoping for, for over a decade had been seconds away from happening, only to be interrupted by work. They were both upset, frustrated, and a little bit terrified, but he thought they were handling it well, until now.

"You gonna go after her, or what?" Dawson asked, garnering Elliot's attention.

Elliot shrugged. "Wouldn't know where to go. Back in New York we always...when one of needed space we went to the cribs, but we don't have those here, I don't know if..."

Voight shot him a look, and said, "Upstairs, the whole floor. Private rooms. Assigned numbers. No one told you this?"

Elliot shook his head and turned toward Dawson. "What's her..."

"Fourteen," Dawson said, making a face. "It's yours, too. Partners stay together."

"Thanks," Elliot said with a nod before running out of the room. He turned the corner and looked around, noticing both elevators had mobs of people waiting for them. He bit his lip and sighed, but then, spotting the stairs at the end of the corridor, he took off running again.

He took bounding steps, leaping over two at a time and pulling himself up with the banister, cursing his body for not going any faster. Finally arriving at the landing, panting, he pushed the door open with his shoulder and made his way down the hall. He slowed to a jog as door fourteen came into view. He waited, taking a few slow, deep breaths, and he grabbed the knob. He turned, but it was locked. "Liv?" he called softly. "Liv, please?"

He heard a click and felt the knob turn, and he let out a breath he'd been unaware he'd even been holding. "Liv..." he stopped, his relief only momentary as he looked at her. "What...what..."

She sat on one of the beds in the room, not looking at him. She felt the mattress give, felt the heat radiating off of his body onto hers. "Are we...do I look like...God, I'm an idiot." She choked out a harsh laugh and wiped the wetness from under her eyes. "I knew, ya know? Part of me knew."

"Knew what?" he said, pulling her hands away from her face and holding them tightly. "Talk to me."

She dropped her head and shook it slowly, a sad smile forming on her face. "Kathy called me." She took a short breath. "There's something...and I swear to God, Elliot, I need you to tell me it was just a mistake..."

"What the hell are you talking about," he asked a bit harshly. He pulled on her hands, forcing her to turn toward him. "Look at me, please, Liv, and just...tell me."

Her tired, red eyes slowly rolled up to meet his. "Your divorce papers," she said softly. "There's a missing signature, or initial, or...or something."

"And you think I intentionally..." he scoffed instead of finishing the thought. "Why?"

Olivia shrugged. "You didn't know what was gonna happen, El," she began, trailing her fingertips along his skin, tracing the paths of the lines etched into his palms. "If I was gonna love you, let you...love me, say yes when you asked me to give this...us...a shot." She looked at him again. "I know you, Stabler, you always have a plan B, and..."

"Plan B, baby, would not be flying back to New York and rebooting the life I had back there, with Kathy." He dropped his forehead to hers, brushing their noses together, and he let go of her hands to wrap his arms around her. "My life...is wherever you are. New York, here, San Francisco..."

"I told you I..." she cut in, but stopped herself. She let her eyes close and she sunk further into his embrace. "I was only holding onto that ticket, because...I wanted you to know."

"Know what?" he asked her, kissing the end of her nose.

"How it feels," she whispered. She pulled back from him slightly and looked him in the eyes. "How it feels to know that...if I wanted to go, I could. I have a way out of this, I..." she shrugged. "Because I've been so afraid that if something happened and you changed your mind...you could always just...go back to Kathy."

He pressed his lips to hers, stopping her from speaking. He ran his hands up and down her back and deepened the kiss when she gave him the access to do it. He moaned her name softly as he eased off of her. "You know the thought of you leaving me again...scares the fuck out of me." He kissed her again. "I'm not changing my mind about you, not now, not ever, and I'm gonna call Kathy and...wait..." he backed up. "Why would she call you and not me? She doesn't even know I found you."

"Oh, I..." Olivia's eyes widened. "I guess she does now. Unless...can I see your phone?"

He furrowed his brow as he reached into his pocket. He pulled out the device and handed it to her, and she swiped to unlock it, tapping in the digits of her badge number. "This isn't yours," she said, sighing. She leaned over and grabbed the phone she'd had with her all day, entered Elliot's password, and the screen lit up. "I had your phone."

"And I had..." he gave her a small laugh. "I guess...this morning when we got the call..."

"We were grabbing things pretty fast," she said with a shrug. "I...I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "Don't." He kissed her forehead. "I know you're scared. I am, too. We...we've waited a long time for this. And this...means everything."

She nodded. "You know...that bus ticket..."

"I know," he said, dropping small kisses to her cheek. "You'd never use it, not unless I got one, too." He kissed her on the lips. "We can't...this is it, and we're gonna make it, no matter how scared we get." He watched her smile and nod, and he kissed her one more time. "I'm gonna make a few calls, get those papers in order, and I swear, Liv, I was in a hurry and probably just missed a page. You know how desperate I was to get out here. Be with you."

"Fuck," she ground out, dropping her head to his shoulder. "You were always my one vice," she admitted. "The one thing I couldn't get enough of. The hours at work, overnights, it was never enough, and now...it still isn't." She laughed and said, "You know, back in New York, I used to sleep with my phone right by my side, hoping and praying that a call would come in, and send me back to you."

"Oh, you have no idea," he told her, giving her a wide-eyed grin. "Me, too, baby." He kissed her again. "Now, when the phone rings in the middle of the night I want to kill whoever dialed," he said, chuckling.

Olivia rolled her eyes. "Before they were interrupting lonely, sleepless nights and now..." she scraped her teeth along her bottom lip and turned her eyes up at him. "Now they have no fucking idea what they're interrupting."

"If they did, we'd be in trouble," he kidded, wagging his eyebrows. He moved to kiss her, but this time she had other intentions. He grunted when she met him halfway, crashing against him roughly. He felt her nails digging into his skin and scraping down his neck, and he cursed as he kissed her.

She moved her hands, fingers dragging down his back, up and over his shoulders, trying to cling to him as the kiss grew more intense. She fell with him as he dropped backward, flat, on the mattress and shivered as his fingers slipped under her shirt and skimmed over the bare skin of her back.

The simultaneous rings of their phones broke them apart, and they froze in place staring at each other for a brief moment. They moved, then, scrambling to find their phones, this time making sure they answered their own. A parallel spitting of last names as they answered earned small smiles from both of them.

"Yeah, Kathy," Elliot said as he ran a hand down his face. "Have them sent out here, I'll sign what I need to...yeah, yeah, that was...that was Olivia." He looked at her as he said her name, her eyes focused on his.

Olivia, on her own call, said, "No, we, we worked it out. You want to what? Yeah...uh...five minutes? No problem."

They ended their calls as simultaneously as they began, and they gave each other one, final, soft kiss before getting back to work and reality. "Who was that?" he asked, standing up.

She rose after him, grabbing her gun and badge off of the table near the bed. "Erin," she said. "She wants to meet me for coffee. Says she wants to talk to me about something."

He looked at her for a moment as he straightened out his shirt. "Do you want me to come with..."

"No," she interrupted as she opened the door. "No, you...you have a case to close."

"Yeah?" he asked with a smug smile.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah," she said, shaking her head. She led him back toward the stairs and that's where they parted. He went downstairs and she headed for the elevator. She stepped into a miraculously empty one and slapped the button for the ground floor. As the elevator moved, she tried to corral her thoughts, hoping the echoes of his words and actions would quell her fears and doubts. When the doors opened, she took a deep breath and weaved in and out of lanes of people milling about the lobby.

She met Erin at the cart outside, gratefully taking the cup of hot coffee from her. There was a moment of silence before she spoke. "About what I said upstairs, I want..."

Lindsay held up a hand. "I deserved it," she said. "I've been...difficult. But I think you deserve to know why."

Olivia sipped her coffee and said, "I'm listening," as she eyed the younger but somehow more jaded detective.

Erin cleared her throat and jutted a thumb toward a street bench. "When you transferred in," she began as she sat, "It left an opening in Manhattan. One that I immediately volunteered for. I know Special Victims is a lot different from what we do here, but it's a pay hike, a better title, a new...a new start that may have led to me earning a higher rank."

"You didn't get the job?" Olivia assumed. "You're mad at me over my old job?"

"No, no, just...please..." Erin paused and took a sip of coffee. "They said they'd call me as soon as their HR calendar cleared. With you transferring out, they had their hands full with temp replacements and trying to work around paying everyone else overtime." She sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. "When they finally called me, I was so freakin' excited, Olivia, I wanted to cry." Her eyes fell. "But they told me...they told me someone else was transferring out, and the strings that had to be pulled to get him where he wanted to go meant the spot I wanted had to be filled by someone else, someone with the same qualifications as..."

"Elliot," Olivia gasped, realizing.

Lindsay nodded. "They told me it would be a while before they would be ready to fill that second spot, since they lost both of their best detectives, and it could take months. Maybe a year." She met Olivia's eyes. "So, ya see, I was angry. I was bitter. And I hated him, because he came here for reasons...I probably shouldn't understand...and everything I wanted and worked for had to be put on hold."

Olivia exhaled, and then quietly finished her coffee. "I didn't know he was...it was a surprise to me," she declared with a small shrug of her shoulders. "I'm sorry things didn't work out for you, but I'm not sorry he's here. I wouldn't...I'm just...he belongs here, with me."

"I see that," Erin told her. "I think we all do see that, but as happy as I am trying to be for the two of you, there's always going to be part of me that blames him for ruining what could have been my only chance to get into that unit."

Olivia watched Erin take the last gulp of her coffee, and then she stood up, pulling Lindsay with her. "Is it really what you want?"

Erin nodded. "Yeah," she said with a small, sad sigh.

Olivia smiled at her as she guided her back into the building. "Okay, then," she said.

"Why are you...are you laughing at me?" Erin asked, turning sharply, offended.

Olivia shook her head. "No, of course not, i just..." she coughed. "I thought this was something more than..what it was. And I..." she looked the younger woman in the eyes. "I can make a phone call. If it's...if it's what you really have your heart set on, I'll do it."

Erin's eyes brightened. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Olivia said. Her eyes glimmered with a wicked gleam as her mouth curled slightly. "But...I need you to do something for me."

Reviews are always welcome.

Peace and love.

Jo

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