Author's Note: Thank you so much for the reviews-some of them were so amazing lol. I felt like I needed to post something for you guys since it's been awhile. I'm a little hesitant to though, because I don't know when I'll be able to publish the next chapter and I don't think you guys are going to be particularly happy with the ending of this one...but stick with me, there's a reason for all of this. Trust me, none of this has been easy for me to write.

Chapter 10

Jane couldn't get her mind off last night no matter how much she tried to submerge herself in the facts and tasks of cracking the case she was working. Frost and Korsak had definitely noticed she was even more distracted than she had been the last couple of weeks. At first they had teased her, but then there was a sudden halt to this. It had stopped around the time that Jane told Frost to run down to the morgue and see if Maura had anything. Now, they just left her alone or acted concerned, and Jane much rather preferred the teasing. She paced around the station, unable to sit still at her desk, unable to sit with the memories of last night, especially the feelings that painted them.

She hadn't seen Maura all morning and she'd like to keep it that way. God, what was she going to do tonight though? She'd have to face her at some point. True, she didn't have to sleep at Maura's place, but she'd still have to get her things. Jane practically lived over there now. And Jane found that despite all her embarrassment about what had happened last night, she still longed to share a bed with Maura tonight. She knew what awaited her in a bed she'd have to sleep in alone: night terrors and cold sweats.

So she guessed she'd have to talk to Maura today eventually. But for now, Jane just couldn't face her. She was still thinking it all over, and truthfully the more she thought about it and her head cleared from her hangover, the worse it got. Her realization of her attraction to Maura kept jumping up and hitting her on the side of the head. But the blow that stunned her even more was the idea that Maura most likely did not feel the same way. What was she going to do? She was probably just going to have to live with her feelings about Maura, bury them deep somewhere. She couldn't risk losing her best friend, the person who kept her as sane as Jane could possibly be.

Jane groaned, falling back into her desk chair, her hand over her eyes. Goddamn it! She sighed and turned to the growing stack of papers on her desk, and strained to focus on the case, to act professional.

"So, Jane, we've been doing a sweep around the guy's neighborhood since yesterday afternoon," Frost said, coming up to Jane's desk. "Think we must have scared most of his gang away. We caught a few members, but they wouldn't give us any info. They just seemed pissed we were there trying to figure their brother's murder out."

"Figures," Jane muttered. "That's what I was afraid of."

Frost nodded.

"God, you'd think they'd at least cooperate with us at least a little bit! One of their guys is dead."

"Well, they always hate the police. They don't want our help, they want to take—"

"Take care of it themselves, I know. Shit, in some ways these cases are the most difficult. Dealing with the most hard headed bastards—"

She stopped short when she saw Maura coming through the doorway, a deer in headlights. Well, there was no place to hide, that was for sure. Maura headed straight for Jane's desk—well, of course. Jane turned away and tried to make herself look busy, but she felt Maura's presence when she stood next to her bearing over her, so hard to ignore.

"Hi, Jane. Would you like to get some lunch?"

Jane kept her head down so she wouldn't have to look at Maura's face. She didn't want to see what was written there. But she was asking her for lunch, so maybe things weren't awkward? Or maybe Maura wanted to talk to her about what happened last night, and Jane couldn't face that just yet. She kept staring at the files at her desk, avoiding Maura's gaze.

"Uh, I can't Maura. Stuck on this case," she shrugged. "You know how it is."

"Oh, okay, well, I'm….I'll just go then. I haven't found any new evidence either."

Jane nodded, still not making eye contact. "Okay," she said. God, what kind of a response was that? And was it in her head or did Maura sound a little upset? Jane couldn't bear to think she had caused that. Even in her stubbornness not to look at Maura, she lifted her head up to make sure she was okay.

Maura was making her way through the door, at an unusually fast pace. Yeah, running away from her. Jane sighed for the fiftieth time that morning.

Maura practically ran away from Jane's desk. After being dismissed and ignored by her best friend, she just couldn't help it. She felt like she was in high school again, asking Jim who she thought quite handsome out to the prom, but he had turned her down, barely looking at her. All of the people around her either looked at her with pity, or laughed. And she ran into the girl's bathroom so nobody could see her tears.

Yes, she was 17 all over again, as she ran into the lady's room. She quickly locked the stall door, and leaned against the side. Maura knew she was overreacting, but she also knew undoubtedly now that Jane was most certainly avoiding her, and this didn't seem like it was going to end anytime soon. First of all, Jane had sent Frost down to the morgue this morning. She thought at the time that maybe Jane had had to run out on some new information last minute, but she knew that Jane would still have made it there first before she left. Or she'd let Maura know what was going on, where she was going. Well, typically. Apparently not after last night. Jane couldn't even look at Maura. Maura was starting to suspect that this wasn't just Jane being embarrassed over being drunk. No, this was way too strong of a reaction. She theorized that someone would only avoid their best friend to this extent if they were angry with them, or so confused about their friend's actions, they didn't want to, or know how to be with them. Either option was awful. Jane probably was putting all of Maura's actions together from last night, realizing Maura's attraction to her, maybe even more quickly than Maura had. And clearly it made her uncomfortable, which would lead to the conclusion that Jane didn't feel the same way. Maura bit her lip as silent tears fell. Then angry at herself, she swiped them away, slamming open the bathroom stall and walking to the mirror to put her face back together.

After seeing Maura, Jane needed to get out of this precinct and get some action. That was probably the only way she'd be able to clear her head a little. She decided to rile up her dead guy's gang a bit more, see if she could get them to spout out some information she could use. That was the only way she was going to get anything on this kid and how he'd died.

She drove through the run-down neighborhood, keeping her eye out for the gang's colors and a too confident walk. She pulled over at the sight of a man who fit this description, multiple tattoos running up and down his arm, a switchblade visible in his pocket. Who else knew what he was packing?

She felt a rush as she parked the car a block ahead of the guy. She watched him, hopped out when he was close, and started walking casually towards him. He was less than a foot from her when she yelled, "Police!"

He turned to run, but she stuck out her foot tripping him. She stuck her boot on top of his chest. He tried to scramble up, but she had pinned him. His dark eyes were wide for a second, than flashed with anger.

"What you want?"

"Where you running to? I just want to talk."

She pulled him up off the ground with all of the rage and built up frustration she had today, pinning his face against the wall, his arms behind his back. She searched his pockets, surprisingly only coming up with the knife that she had already seen.

"I'm a homicide detective investigating the murder of one of your members, and this seems to be the only way I can talk to anyone about what happened to him."

"Man, I ain't in no gang—"

"Save it. I said 'member', there was no mention of a gang in my word choice. You just gave yourself away there."

She fished for the photo of her dead guy, lying on a slab in the morgue, and threw it in the guy's face. "He look familiar to you?"

The guy's eyes lit up a bit. Jane could tell by his face he was going to lie though, so she pushed the side of his face into the brick with force and he shaped up.

"Yes, okay, yea! I know him."

"Name?"

"Little Bear."

Jane heaved a sigh. "Real name?"

"Eduardo…Mendez I think."

"Okay, good," Jane said with a patronizing tone. "Now, what I want to know, is why he was shot and killed?"

"Listen, man, I don't know nothing."

"Yes, you do," Jane growled in his ear, automatically pushing him up harder against the wall.

"Some guys have told me he was in their territory."

"The other asshole gang you're always fighting with—their turf?"

The guy furrowed his eyebrows, gritted his teeth. "Yeah. Don't know why he was there, may have been just testing them. We think they saw him, followed him, and picked him off. Pretty easy to figure out, detective."

"Yeah, I pretty much inferred all that, asshole. But I need evidence. Any witnesses to this?"

"Man, I don't—"

She threw her weight into him, pushing him harder against the wall, only letting go a bit, when the words came again.

"Okay! Yeah, a couple of our guys saw it happen. They drove by in a black sedan, shot out the window. Little Bear got hit. Through the car window they could make out their colors. Knew it was those assholes, but they didn't see any faces or nothing."

"I'll need names of the people who saw this," Jane demanded with a small smile, glad she was making at least some kind of headway in one part of her life.

Maura was pacing back and forth in her office. She had stopped even trying to do work hours ago. Now it was six, almost time to go home. She had made up her mind that she really just needed to talk to Jane. No matter how scared she was, this was a necessity. She needed things to be back to normal and talking was the only way they were going to achieve this. All of this was making her so anxious that she was fidgeting. She felt terrible, her stomach tying up in knots, not knowing what Jane was thinking. Maura thought the uncertainty was the worst of it. She had to know what Jane thought of her, the feelings she had about last night. Maybe it wasn't as bad as she thought it was. These more positive thoughts gave her enough steam to make it up to the precinct.

She walked quickly into the room before she lost her nerve. The detectives were making up a board, talking among each other and busy running around. It seemed to Maura that they were finally making progress. She spotted Jane almost immediately. She looked amped up, the look she got after interrogating a suspect or chasing perps on the street. Jane looked up at the sound of Maura's heels and for just a second, Jane's fiery eyes met Maura's and Maura was able to get lost in them, feel the chills up and down her spine she got whenever Jane looked that way. For some reason, this amped-up Jane always gave her a rush, and she realized now that it had probably always been a feeling of attraction she had just ignored.

Those eyes of Jane's changed quickly though. After taking in the sight of Maura, the fire snuffed out. She was suddenly grabbing her cell and jacket. Maura thought for just a second that maybe Jane had read Maura's mind, knew as well as she did how much they needed to talk. But Jane walked right past Maura on her way towards the elevators.

She barely gave Maura a nod, and her voice was even lower than usual when she said, "Hey, Maura."

Maura just stood there shocked for a second at the way Jane had passed her by, barely greeted her, like she was someone she barely spoke to. She felt sadness rising up again, pain, but she pushed that down and let the anger at being basically ignored build for a second. With this new found energy, she flew into the elevator with Jane just as the doors shut.

"Jane, we need to talk," she said, as forcefully as possible.

"Not now, Maura. I just—I can't," Jane said wearily, not even chancing a glance at her.

Maura noticed how Jane was drawing circles around the scars on her palms, something she only did when something was really bothering her.

Maura sighed. She tried to be calmer, gentle. "Look I know last night was quite strange, and a lot happened, and, I just—Jane I think we'd both feel much better if we talked."

Jane began to turn towards Maura, and Maura thought she might say something, but then the doors opened and Jane flew out, like a trapped bird, finally free to fly away.

But Maura just couldn't let Jane go. "Jane!" she called, running as fast as she could after her in heels, but Jane ignored her, kept walking forward. "Jane!" she called louder, hearing the deep emotion in her own voice, the desperation. She briefly noticed how everyone seemed to be turning to look at her now.

Even Jane slowed as she made it out the precinct doors, turning around a little. Maura took advantage of this, and ran quickly out of them to meet her. Maura couldn't really read Jane's face though—she just looked torn.

"Jane, listen to me please." She touched Jane's arm, as she said this. Huge mistake. Jane flew off again at her touch, moving so fast down the steps and onto the sidewalk.

Maura halted for a second on the stairs. She felt a sudden dreaded feeling form in the pit of her stomach, a feeling of loss. Like she was going to lose Jane if she didn't follow after her. This sent her hurrying down the steps after Jane.

She was beginning to catch up with her. "Jane, please, I need to know what you're thinking. I can't stand not knowing." Something was building up inside her, all of these feelings she reasoned, and she needed to let them all out. Before she even thought about the words, they were pouring from her lips. "I'm scared, Jane. I just feel so much."

Jane started slowing her pace. She turned towards Maura as the last words fell, her eyes wide with surprise, but Maura knew that if she tried to read anymore of Jane's expression she might lose the nerve and the time to say what she needed to.

"I feel," she began, but the sound of a roaring car engine caught her attention, made her turn. She saw a car speeding out of a parking space. She didn't know why, but that feeling of loss was getting wider, spreading everywhere now. Understanding hit her like a punch in the stomach as she watched that same car begin to slow as they drove past the precinct, a gun hanging out of its window, pointing…pointing over here…at Jane.

Maura's body reacted before her mind did, with an instinct she could only describe as needing to protect, to save Jane. She didn't calculate herself into the equation.

The air around her was moving so fast, she was crossing the distance between her and Jane, slamming into Jane's body with such force, her hands desperately pushing Jane towards the asphalt, safe from harm.