Guys like him didn't get pretty ladies like Ms. Fey. He remembered that as he stood on the witness stand, cheeks blazing hot, the whole court staring. Dick tried to regret it and couldn't -- all he knew how to be was honest.
Maybe that was why he missed her after the first time they met, and why he watched trials and hoped for the defense to win. Maybe that was why Ms. Fey walked into the station for the first time, haloed with afternoon sun, eyes searching and landing on him, and Dick ached for her all over again.
And he lost count of how many pieces of evidence slipped away, of how many times the Prosecutor's Office glowered down at him. He tried to regret it, but maybe he knew how to be dumb as well as honest because he told Ms. Fey she could have his heart, too, if she wanted it.
She smiled -- at him, for him.
No one had told Mia Fey that guys like Dick didn't get pretty ladies like her. She let him pay. She took his hand. She talked, and she listened, and lent him keys to water the cordyline stricta the odd weekend, and she ran worried-gentle fingers over the scab from his Unfortunate Shaving Incident, and she laughed like spring rain and laid arms around his neck and Mia smiled at him, she always smiled.
And he never stopped aching for her, as she walked by his side, commandeered his lap, sighed contented in his arms and kissed like she had all day and moulded soft and wonderful to him, and guided his hands. He would have given anything to fall asleep beside her -- it would all turn out to be a dream if he did that, it would just fade away, he knew it. So Dick watched her, laid still on the tiny-or-maybe-he-was-just-big bed and watched Mia's even breathing, her curving form in the shadows until morning turned her warm-coloured, and Dick pulled the sheets higher over her because he shouldn't have been looking.
Maybe it was a dream after all, watching Mia wake like a flower blooming, watching her eyelashes stir and her gaze focus. Dick was the luckiest man in the world, and he told her so. Her smile had never been prettier.
And it still didn't feel real, so she wriggled close and settled, soft and warm with her breath tickling his chest and her hair's smell to drown in. She knew things; that, Dick supposed, was the bright side of being honest.