He took a step back after that.
From their relationship.
At least that's how it felt to Alex.
Bobby was calling less frequently and she hadn't seen him in 72 hours. She was going back to work soon. She had been off for 2 full weeks. She had added an extra couple of days so she could return to 1PP on a bright early Monday morning. She still felt awfully sore, but if she had to spend one more unproductive weekday alone in this apartment she'd snap.
With cabin fever top of mind, she found herself on a Friday afternoon digging through her dresser drawer of forgotten activewear. She pulled out that sleek yoga ensemble that she (and Jane) had paid so much for. Still on autopilot she slipped into the black and pink gear, laced up her Nikes and went down to street level. Alex jogged down the avenue trying to honour any discomfort she felt in her body. Life had to go on, baby or no baby, rib pain or no rib pain, concussion or no concussion. She had to find herself again and do the things she loved.
The city embraced her with a warm smoggy hug. She breathed deeply, the air was so fresh. She was kidding herself, it smelled of car fumes and a little like a sewer overflow, but after the stale enviroment of her apartment she took it all in. She shaped her nimble body to the spaces on the sidewalk. Going around the man and his border collie, nipping between a magazine stand and a guy on a smoke break, jumping lightly at each curb. Straight up the broad entry into Flushing Meadows Corona park. She'd run her half marathon here and now came back often to recreate portions of that race with it's loops of Meadow Lake and one out-and-back leg to the north end of the Citi Field parking lot, sometimes she even did a circle around the Unisphere.
She'd felt frail over the last two weeks. She'd felt violated and she'd been cloistering, imagining danger around every corner. She could count on one hand the amount of times she had left the house. Now with the wind in her hair, she was filled with a sense of well being, a positive feeling that everything was all right and the world was okay. And that feeling was like a aphrodisiac, it was stimulating , like a shot of arousal - her dirty, sexy relationship with mother nature. She felt so good.
And when she got back, almost 2 hours later, he was there.
She stepped off the elevator and stopped, staring at him over the 20 or 30 foot length of the hallway, with it's neutral beige patterned wallpaper and crazy paisley carpeting. She moved slowly toward her door and him.
"Long time no see."
"You're running again."
"I'm feeling good." His eyes darted all over her, looking so fit and flushed. He felt a stirring in his pants.
"I'm happy to hear that." he offered blandly, no hint of what was coursing through him.
"What can I do for you?" she asked casually.
"Oh I don't know…" he let it hang and this time she did see it, that look in his eyes. He used a couple of fingers to catch her hand raising her arm fully extended like dance partners in days of old. Then he took her wrist, then her elbow then her shoulders, drawing her closer like she was the prize at the end of a rope. When she was very very close, he let his hands slide flat and open down to the damp small of her back. His mouth clamped over hers. Oh God it was good. She clung to his broad back kissing him violently right there in the hallway, a common area, where anyone could see. She felt alive, pulsing with life.
Then her back was to the wall and he was unzipping her black nylon/lycra hoodie. "Bobby we're in the hallway." she panted between his ferocious kisses.
"Just want to see…" Underneath he encountered the form fitting, low-cut, vivid pink tank top. Her skin was all dewy and her waist so small. He growled cupping the weight of her breasts "Take this off."
"You need to let us go inside," there was a catch in the words.
"Okay." He conceded, freeing her. As she unlocked the door he grabbed her hips and pulled her rear into him, lowering a little to press into her softness. She she felt the lewd rubbing of what could have been a steel pipe for all of it's subtlety.
"God Bobby. You are so… horny today." There was no other word.
"I've been waiting for this for almost 3 weeks."
The door swung open. "Well make that 3 weeks and 15 minutes. I need a shower."
"No. No shower." his voice low his lips on her neck.
"I stink! I just ran 7miles."
He responded by pulling her tight to him and kneading her bottom. He was all hands, like tentacles round every part of her.
"I have a fantasy." he muttered.
"Oh you do?"
He backed her up and she felt the couch behind her knees her broad, deep, slightly saggy couch.
"Here?" She asked because her couch was not sexy, but she had to admit that his single-mindedness was. He dipped her low with great flourish like they were on a ballroom dance floor and then plopped her lightly into the comfortable cushions. She supposed foreplay was over because he immediately pulled at the stretchy waistband of her pants ignoring her shocked cry, working them down over her reluctant hips and legs with purpose.
"What are you doing?" she demanded breathily. "You've lost your mind!"
He didn't answer he dropped to his knees and plunged his face deep between her naked thighs.
"I haven't - I haven't showered…" her voice stumbled. Because the soft pull of his lips and teeth made everything but arching impossible.
He took a deep breath of her downy dark blonde fur and made an affirmative noise, a pleased noise, "mmmmmm." he said dropping wet kisses all over her. "Better this way." he murmured "Real, earthy."
She blushed. Was he really describing her vagina like a sommelier would a fine wine? She looked at his salt and pepper crown as he moved his mouth on her until it (the room, the planet) lost all sense and meaning. His soft tongue spread her, corkscrewing around her most sensitive parts. And then his magic lips tugged in impressive 4/4 time.
"Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Bobby."
Fade to black.
She opened her eyes.
She hadn't really passed out, just floated away on what was now the most amazing orgasm of her life. If it got better every time she would just combust one day. Or maybe she'd become a meteor shower superheating until all of her hot bright bits rained down on him.
She was lying there limp and naked from the waist down, under his curious (kind of detached) gaze. He was, after all, fully clothed right down to his shiny expensive shoes and he was standing up, so from down here he looked like Everest. She wanted to jump up or grab at one of the loose back cushions and let it flop over her private bits, but she didn't. She didn't want shame or anxiety to have a place with them. She was a 45 year old woman. She'd had a baby and she had another baking. She wanted him to eye her like a Botticelli, curvy and flawed and real. Maybe he'd put her up on his wall.
"Right you probably like those sweaty naked people in the next room"
"Lucian Freud. As a matter of fact I do."
'You can't put that stuff in your home you can't live with it'
"Well I'm not interested in living with it, I'm interested in thinking about it."
Clearly she'd changed. Bobby was the same as ever.
He kicked off his shoes and started to slowly disrobe. She watched unblinking as he revealed more and more of his body. He'd been working out. He'd told her he was feeling his age. Of course there was a little more of him settling round the middle. But she found herself liking his humanity his greying and his softening. He was remarkably gorgeous all the changes of age aside, included even. He was still tall, muscular through arms and chest and thigh. Everything about Bobby was huge, like he'd sprung from a race of giants that had sent him to live with the mortals. Best of all he was completely unselfconscious in that masculine way.
When he was bare, he took her hand and pulled her up. He removed the last of her clothing barriers. She stepped up onto his feet and he walked them awkwardly stiff legged toward the bedroom.
"How are you?" he asked, really late in their game.
"Well enough for this." she answered straining for him. Then she was tiptoed. Then she curved a leg around one of his thighs. Then he helped her abandon her legs altogether and wrap herself around him. Clinging to him.
"I missed you." He stopped for a moment just to feel the weight and curve of her.
"I missed you too." she said between light exploratory kisses, she pulled his earlobe into her mouth.
"We end up this way a lot." he said.
"Tall man" she murmured between kisses "gotta level the field."
"You're like a feather." he told her and she right-back-atcha-ed him
"It's like wrapping myself around a Redwood." she locked her bare feet behind his back.
"Oh yeah?" he said against her neck."You're so..."
"Limber?"
"Hot." he said and slapped her bottom.
"You are a total neanderthal." she said into his mouth.
"I'm going to drag you to my cave now." he growled playing along.
"My cave." she countered finding the sweet spot under his ear feeling him move fitfully under her mouth. She grabbed the flesh of his back with both hands. He didn't move. "Come on." she urged kicking his thigh a little with the heel of her foot.
"So impatient." he murmured sliding his lips down her neck.
"Aren't you." because she could feel something else knocking restlessly against her backside. Her hips moved and her legs tightened vice-like.
"What a woman." he muttered barely audible.
"Yours." she said back just as quietly, her face warming and colouring at the honesty but unable to be less then that. She had wanted this for so long, the banter, the softness, the emotional intimacy, the physicality, the whole package.
"Mine." His eyes held hers. "Why did I wait so long?" he said mostly to himself, turning her thought into a lament.
"This is perfect, right now." she smoothed his short curly locks and she meant it, his mind was clearer now. He was unburdened. He was just better. She dropped small soft open mouthed kisses all over his face and neck. "Make love to me." she whispered in his ear. She said it that way on purpose, because she wanted love, she wanted to give him what was in her heart.
He carried her to the bedroom and lay down with her just like that, beneath him on the broad expanse of lavender sheeting. He braced himself on his forearms and pressed her pelvis deep into the mattress and she didn't let go. She encouraged his weight she craved his weight. It kept her here, with him, in this moment, discomfort be damned. And they just lay like that wrapped around each other. And he covered them for warmth with her old quilt. And then he slowed. He almost stopped completely. He brushed the hair off her face and stared into her whiskey eyes.
"You're here." he muttered once. And she didn't get it. And then she did.
"I'm here." And beneath him she spread even more. She moved her hips shifted, nudged, encouraged him and he entered her slowly. She cried out at that, a noise that sounded like a bliss. She cradled him with her body and he soothed her. Each slow smooth entry healed both of them.
And then at some point she was crying. Real sloppy, messy, snotty tears. She looked away embarrassed because she wasn't sure why, maybe it joy that he had come to her, maybe relief that this was happening again for them or maybe thinking about what she had almost lost. He froze deep inside her.
"What's wrong? Am I hurting you?" he asked low and breathless, made to move away.
"No!" she snatched at him sinking her fingers into his hips. "No. Not even a little." she gave a watery smile. He took one broad thumb and swiped it across her cheek clearing a path through her tears. Then he pressed that thumb into her wet stung lips massaging dipping it between them. Replacing it with his mouth. She quivered beneath him, angling herself flush against him and he pushed again and again into her tight wet warmth.
"Bobby" she gasped at one point. "I love you." The gravity of the moment sweeping away petty doubts and fears. "I love you." She whispered again as he moved her body and soul.
He apologized an hour later. He needed her again. Then again 4 hours later as the sun came up.
"Again?" her voice low, sleepy and wanton. She knew already knew what he needed from the intensity of his tone and from the unconscious grind of hips against her buttocks.
"Sorry baby." he said not for the first time. But it was the first time he had used an endearment.
"Don't be." she returned with a sexy tone that shot blood straight to where he needed it. She raised her bottom aligning herself with him. Gazing languidly over her shoulder as he pressed in from behind.
Bobby was surprised, he hadn't been this way (so able) for years. He loved how she surrendered to him - acquiesced - because she never did in their other life. But here she instinctively accommodated him. She bent this way or that. She took him closer. She parted her thighs a little and then a little more still. She cupped him and cooed to him. She was his. Her softness here in bed was intoxicating. He loved everything about her. And he took. He tried to give too, but he knew he took. So some things really were the same.
Alex had seen him exactly this way in her minds eye, apologizing for his appetites and compulsions. She had guiltily speculated over the years about just how rough (because of their size difference) and how tender (because of his sensitive soul) he might be. She had a lot of real life information to pull from. Information about how Bobby Goren operated in the world and how that might translate to having him in her bed. How he pursued suspects and craved justice, used methods that confused and confounded. His unfailing dedication to people and cases. She'd seen him lust after information, devour stacks of books and reports flipping page after page. He really couldn't stop. He was driven to know, feel, possess, understand, help. She had waited for this. She had yearned for his undivided attention. But she hadn't really known it would be like this.
His hands everywhere. Always touching, always. Encouraging her over him. Encouraging her down and around him. His mouth tracking lower and lower. She arched, she sweat, she screamed and it was almost too much. Almost but not quite.
She never thought she could lose her inhibitions so, but he invited it. He asked her to tell him everything. God the things she had whispered, moaned and groaned, about his size, her pleasure, the places she wanted him and how deeply he was inside her. They were the pure unadulterated expressions of desire. And the way she had rode him, her hips rolling over his. The way she had tossed her head back as she moved. She had touched and teased herself just to watch him watch her. Then the way she pinned him and kissed her way down his chest then licked and nipped at his abdomen. She'd taken him deeply into her mouth, felt every vein, felt every ridge, explored him, tasted him, made him beg.
The boundaries were obliterated.
"Eames?" she'd heard him whisper that same night, in the dark after they were both spent and on the brink of sleep.
She gave a half smile into his shoulder "Alex." she said gently urged him.
"Alex?" he repeated his voice was a low rumble.
"Yes."
"Can you..." he hesitated "Can you say that thing again."
She wracked her mind because she had said a lot of things. Things that would set fire to building out of context (the context of him buried inside her). But he clarified "That thing you said about how you f-feel, about..." His voice sounding endearingly unsure.
She got up on an elbow and pressed a finger to his lips. "You mean how much I love you?" she looked into his eyes as well she could in the darkness. "I love you. Bobby, I can't remember a time when I didn't love you." she felt him twitch a little. He had asked for it, but nonetheless he was tensed to spring away and avoid the honesty.
She threw a leg over him across his thighs. And ignoring the twinge, she lay forward mashing their moist naked bodies, her ear over his heart. The rhythmic thump, thump, thump her lullaby. "Who has loved you?" She asked quietly "Who has said it?" She softly played a hunch.
"You."
Sadly she wasn't surprised.
"My mother loved us in her own way." he added "but she wasn't... demonstrative." she felt him hiding behind his vocabulary, distancing himself from the emotion in the conversation.
"She did love you." Alex said with certainty because in life Frances Goren had leaned so hard on her youngest, asked for so much. The paradox of love. You take the most from those you hold dearest. "Even without saying the words."
"I had a girlfriend once." he let it hang.
"She loved you?"
"She said it."
This was like extracting teeth. "She didn't mean it?'"
"She was messed up." he thought for a little while "I think she had been abused. She didn't love herself. There was no room for me."
Silence.
The revving of a car engine.
Laughter wafted up from the street below.
Then slowly she said. "I'm fully formed." she raised her head and curved a hand around his cheek and jaw. "I'm a little … hard" she admitted "With all the usual insecurities, some sadness in my past, and a draining bitch of a job." She smiled "But all that makes me really normal, I think." She smoothed his hair. "I know you. I know every part of you. And I love you." her voice quietly emphatic. "I love you." she said again, feeling heat in her face and eyes and willing herself not to cry because of the emotion and the sadness of all this. She kissed his lips softly.
As they kissed she imagined him being starved for those words. A little boy flinching when his mother raised her hand or voice. No love for tiny Bobby, just Frances and her diseased mind. Then she imagined him looking to his father and finding a half man smelling of booze and strange women. Then she imagined him deep in his books growing further and further from Frank. Dammit Frank you should have been an ally. Then she imagined his days in the CID, structure, rules, a crime fighting soldier in far flung locales, tailing Declan (that bizarre, workaholic, excuse for a father figure) no space or time for emotion. Then she imagined the transition to NYPD and their reluctant appreciation for his skills, using him to close case after case while mocking is methods and theories. Never quite understanding or appreciating his genius.
Then she imagined a string of partners, simple-minded-partners, wanting to stay under the radar and get home for supper, not equipped to deal with him, a whirling dervish of ideas and plans. Then she imagined him at home alone after solving another brutal, soul sucking case, fixating on how he got the job done, wondering if he was just an unnecessary complication. Then sickly she imagined the streams of willing women that must have been entranced by him, because everybody was, absolutely everyone (even those with no use for him couldn't look away). She imagined them trying and failing to give him what he needed.
Imagine.
Making it this far into life, accomplishing so much, and yet never really being loved, with all the dedication and selflessness he deserved, loved for who he was: beautiful, brilliant, flawed. Her heart ached to give him that.
And he pushed her back pressing her deep into the bed. She tried not to react in pain, because it was fleeting.
"I don't deserve you." he said so sober. For a moment she couldn't believe it.
"You deserve everything good. And if you want me. You can have me." she bared her neck in supplication as she said the words. Giving him the gift of herself. Asking him to take. And he lowered his lips. Then he bit in gently, then harder drawing her skin tight against his lips.
"I can't let you go." he looked tortured. He grabbed her thigh pulling it up along his hip then higher. He admitted something she hadn't known. "I've tried for years to let you go."
"What?!"
"I'm no good for you."
"WHA..." he pressed a finger to her lips stopping her before she got started.
"I need you too much. I hurt you too much. I have too many problems. I'm your biggest liability."
"No honey. No." she murmured.
Alex wasn't wearing blinders. Her career at the NYPD was... speckled. He had gotten them into some really uncomfortable spots over the years, but she was a major case detective. She was half of a partnership with the highest solve rate in the 5 boroughs. She had been offered the most prestigious captain's position in the most prestigious department. And although it had been tainted by Moran - that bastard - and his personal vendettas, the offer had been real.
And then 9 months after leaving, the NYPD had come calling. They'd asked them to come back. Moran was out, and after a string of pro tems MCS was rudderless. They had re-offered her captain. She had never told Bobby, because after that year, after all that time apart, after all the uncertainty, all she'd wanted was him. Not like this of course, she ran her nails up his spine as he buried his face in her neck. She hadn't imagined this in her wildest visions. It was their old perfect pairing, that was what she'd wanted. So she'd played hard to get with them and they'd sweetened the pot, a salary bump, greater autonomy. Of course therapy for Bobby, but that, they'd assured her, was about the optics.
Alex had secretly thought it was a good thing. She loved him, but if anyone's life was worthy of a little probing… Bobby had been less enthusiastic about therapy. He'd wanted to get back on the job too, but he couldn't suppress his shit disturbing tendencies. Before they'd signed the papers, or received their badges and guns he'd managed to piss off a room full brass by taking them on an embarrassing trip down memory lane, then by intimating that the NYPD was run by morons. But all the anxiety, lawyers and legalese had been worth it, it had made them two freshly minted detectives (again).
As far as Alex was concerned they had reached the pinnacle together. If this was bad, then bring it on.
"I want to do the right thing for you."
"You are the right thing for me." she shot back.
He addressed the elephant in the room. "This," he let his fingers dig into her thigh "risks your career. Is this the right thing for you? And the baby. Was not protecting you the right thing too? I am a selfish man."
"Hey." she held his face to stop him, to stop the self-flagellation "If it's either you or the job, I choose you Bobby. I will always choose you."
He looked into her eyes and she felt that sensation of falling that only he could evoke. "I choose you too Alex."
And there was a long silence because it all felt so important. Like they had just been married, like they'd pledged something deep and abiding and unaffected by the winds of change, whatever they be.
"And o-our baby?"
Ohhhh Bobby. Her heart hurt. Why did you have to go and say 'our'?
"We both … lost our heads."
"What are we...er.. you going to do?" He took himself out of the equation. He didn't want to be presumptuous.
"Can you just fuck me? Can we save all this..." she wanted to shock him and dislodge all thoughts of the real world with her bluntness. It only partially worked as she felt him swell and knock restlessly against her thigh.
"Eames we have to talk about it. It's not going away. It's..."
"Okay, okay. Soon but not now." she reached down and wrapped her fingers around him giving a gentle tug.
"Soon?" his voice wavered.
"Soon." Then she whispered the dirtiest, sweetest thing she could think of in his ear. And he came into her like a battering ram. And then gratefully there was no more talk of babies.