A/N: Thank you all so much for reading and reviewing. I appreciate each and every one of you. This chapter has no canonical scenes in it, and several episodes get reworked and collapsed from here on out to accommodate the new developments in Jane and Maura's relationship.
"You know, I don't think you liked it very much, but the sponge bath did give us a glimpse into our distant future," said Jane, freshly showered and laying on top of Maura's covers in a tank top and her underwear.
"I appreciated your hands on me," Maura sighed, completely naked, laying on her belly, head towards Jane on the pillow. "But I am bitterly jealous that you got to take a shower."
Jane chuckled. "So is the nudity payback, then?"
"Excuse me?"
"You being naked. Is it because I got to shower and you didn't?"
"I'm naked because I always sleep naked, Jane."
"You never sleep naked when I'm around!" Jane exclaimed.
Maura rolled her eyes and then closed them to banish the tension that always came from their banter - banter that left her titillated and full of sparks, but also on edge. "We weren't sleeping together before. Hence the decorum of pajamas when we would share a bed. Now there's no mystery, so I don't have to."
"But we can't… you know," said Jane, trailing off.
"For at least a week," Maura confirmed. She then felt the rabbit-like shaking of Jane's foot at the end of the bed. Wait a minute. "Jane, you haven't slept in almost forty-eight hours. I'm currently at the border between sedated and high."
"I know," Jane groaned, throwing a pillow dramatically over her own face. There was some kind of utterance afterwards, but Maura couldn't make it out for the life of her.
"What?" she asked.
Jane removed the pillow from her mouth but it stayed over her eyes. "I said I know, but we're not fightin' anymore and you almost died and you're laying there naked… Naked. It's hardly fair. I have officially flown past tired and into… aroused."
"Absolutely not," Maura scoffed. "We will absolutely not be having sex right now."
"Maura," Jane whined, knowing she was defeated anyway, "I can be…"
"Gentle? No you can't," Maura said, "not when you look like that. That's a look I have come to know intimately the past week."
"What look?"
"The 'I'm going to tear you in half' look," Maura elaborated and Jane blushed scarlet. Maura laughed and then placed a tentative finger on the bridge of Jane's nose. "We can't. What happens if I pop a stitch? You'd have to spend another night with me in the hospital. So we're not allowed to make passionate, unadulterated love right now," she said with a shrug, "it beats the alternative of the ER."
Jane gulped and turned on her side to find Maura's lips with her own. The kiss began exploratorily, soft in the way Maura allowed it, reciprocated it, matched the decadent rhythm of togetherness and retreat that Jane had set. They kissed wetly for long, long seconds, lips sliding in place and pressing forward, anxious for union - and Jane would fully own up to taking it further if asked, sliding her tongue into Maura's mouth first and laying it heavy against its counterpart. When she curled it to lick Maura's alveolar ridge and the back of her front top teeth, Maura grabbed her chin between two fingers. Hard. "Ow," Jane yelped.
"I said absolutely not," Maura panted. She squeezed the dimple in Jane's chin forward and kissed it. "But we can talk instead."
"I'm not really a talker," Jane sighed, accepting her fate. She decided to revel in the feeling of Maura's hand on her head instead, fingers woven through her almost-dry hair and scratching lightly at her scalp underneath.
"Humor me," Maura asked of her. "Tell me something about you."
"Like what?" said Jane. She rubbed the soft skin of Maura's side with her knuckles, not daring to travel any farther down.
"Tell me why you sound like this with me, in here, and not out there," Maura replied lowly, gravel in her voice as she lifted her head just so off the pillow to plant a kiss on Jane's rapidly smoothing forehead.
"I don't have to tell you how hard it is to get ahead in a male dominated field. You have intimate knowledge. It's just, you grew up sounding like you do, you know? I grew up sounding a little less Boston Brahmin and a little more Marty Walsh."
"You don't de-rhoticize nearly as much as Marty Walsh, Jane," Maura said seriously.
"De-what? I didn't say I was that extreme, but you get the picture. People like me, who talk like me, get passed over for shit all the time," Jane responded. "And I found out real quick that recruits that sounded more like you got more responsibility and more attention. So," Jane breathed in, opened her eyes and squared her shoulders as best she could lying down, "nice to meet you - I'm Detective Rizzoli. The youngest officer to be promoted to detective and the only female in homicide, past or present," she spoke crisply, detachedly, cleanly, and exactly the way that Maura remembered her speaking when they first met and up until, oh, seven days ago.
Maura marveled at the change, sudden and jarring. She realized that she hadn't heard this Jane, not when they were alone, or near her family, since before they had fought. "How do you…?"
"Keep it up? It's not like a total fake accent. We all do it, depending on what situations we find ourselves in. I just kinda… suck the Boston in when I gotta be at work or… impress a pretty rich girl," Jane joked at the end, winking at Maura.
Maura initiated their next kiss. It was short and reverent. "This impresses me more."
"Sounding like a masshole?" Jane chuckled.
"The code switching. The way your mouth works so differently than mine," Maura replied, her breath still mingling with Jane's as she hovered close enough to touch their lips together again. "I'm attracted to you because you enlighten me about many things."
Jane shuddered with the desire to mount Maura then, it barely contained and rattling against the cage of her chest. "You teach me stuff, too."
"Mmm," Maura hummed. "But what I teach you you could find in any textbook. What I learn from you can only be learned from you. Do you know what else I want to learn?"
"What?" Jane pleaded, supposedly in reference to the question, but more about the way she had propositioned Maura some minutes before. Her hand splayed possessively against the small of Maura's back, running over all the tiny, colorless hairs there, before she plunged down to knead the rounded flesh of her ass.
"More… positions in your Boston Kama Sutra," Maura whispered against the clench of Jane's superwhite, fully bared teeth. "As soon as I'm able. Teach me?" she moaned as the hand became more insistent, as it continued to dip toward the center of her hips and cup between her legs.
Jane all but growled. "How am I supposed to last a whole week?"
"Jane," Maura admonished.
"Fine," Jane consented, "just as long as you promise not to teach it to anyone else."
"We're not even together," Maura pulled back from Jane's mouth, both stimulated and shocked. "I can't possibly guarantee that I would never have another-"
"So?" she was interrupted by Jane's word against her ear. "Keep me a secret if that happens, if we crash and burn. All I'm asking is, don't give my love away. The things me and you do? Only me and you are gonna do 'em."
Maura nodded dumbly, too aware of how wet the idea of sharing this only with Jane made her to speak. She let Jane discover how wet it made her, too, and spent the rest of her waking moments being strong for the both of them.
Never had abstinence been so difficult.
Jane stumbled down the last few stairs of Maura's home right around seven-thirty in the morning. She had put on running shorts and a Red Sox hoodie to make her way to the kitchen, the fall morning too chilly for the clothes she had slept in.
Maura smiled when she came into view, having already brewed an entire pot of coffee and anxious for Jane to try it, but then she saw Jane's stiff gait. "Are you alright?" she asked, approaching slowly, knowing that the best remedy for morning ails would not be her touch but the brew she had just stuck in front of Jane at the counter.
Jane sipped and hummed gratefully. "No," she answered honestly. "We were run over by a Dodge Ram the other day and I feel like I got sacked about thirty times. Over and over. With no pads."
"That's a football reference," Maura nodded seriously.
Jane smirked. "Yes, Coach Ditka," she joked, watching the reference fly over Maura's head. "But it's nothing a little ibuprofen and biofreeze won't fix. How about you? You're the one with a nearly amputated leg."
"Much, much better," Maura replied as she looked down at the dressing on her calf. "I can walk! Mostly without a limp."
"Me too," Jane said as she wagged her eyebrows. Maura shook her head in annoyance and attraction. "If Cavanaugh didn't make me take the day off I don't know how I woulda got any work done. Honestly I can't wait to sit on that couch and do nothin'."
"But you won't," Maura replied matter-of-factly, as though she was stating something they both knew.
"What do you mean, I won't?" Jane glared.
"There's a Tuesday morning farmer's market that you're taking me to," she explained, again, as though this were common knowledge.
"No I'm not," Jane said petulantly. She stared too long into Maura's eyes, however, and softened. Just a little. "Why?"
"Because I need vegetables," Maura reasoned. When Jane continued to snarl, she continued to speak. "Because I want to enjoy some sunshine on one of my few days away from my basement lab," she said with a pout, the one she knew made Jane weak, but it still wasn't quite enough. "Because I want to talk to you. About our relationship. Away from your family. And I will need to sit and rest often so we really should kill two birds with one stone."
Jane went white. She panicked. "You're not gonna dump me, are you?" she asked with wide, wild eyes.
Maura laughed. She took Jane in her arms, rubbed wide and comforting circles on her back. "Of course not," she said soothingly into Jane's hair, "we would have to be together for me to dump you." And out came her trademark wickedness. Rare, but when it happened, her teasing could rival Jane's.
"Maura!" Jane whined into Maura's shoulder, grasping her tight at the midsection, bunching fistfuls of satin robe against her palms.
"No," Maura said, no longer joking. "But I want to know exactly what it is we're doing, don't you?"
Jane was quiet for several moments, and then she nodded her head against Maura. After a few moments more, she said, "should you even be walking on that thing?"
"Actually, yes," Maura answered. "The more I can increase circulation to the lower compartment of my leg, the lower the risk for complication in the near future."
"So I won't be carrying you on my back, then?" Jane smirked, now back to her coffee. She took a bracing gulp, and then picked Maura up, bridal style, jogging her toward the staircase.
"Oh Jane, don't! Your lumbar spine!" Maura shrieked, leaving a trail of laughter from the kitchen island to her bedroom.
"The hell is Red Orach, and do people actually eat it?" Jane pushed her sunglasses to rest on the bone of her forehead. She had her hands on her knees as she looked on, like the orach had insulted her personally.
"Of course," Maura said, taking a bunch and handing the man behind the booth a few dollars. "It tastes like spinach, just saltier." She cleaned up well after just having almost lost her leg, in a black top and fashionably printed, flowy boho pants with plenty of room for the dressing on her calf.
"Why can't you just get regular spinach?" Jane asked. She, in turn, looked like a New England Dad in black jeans and a light gray half-zip sweatshirt advertising the state of Maine with a bright red lobster over her left breast.
"We could not look more different," Maura commented as she took Jane in again.
Jane herself nearly got whiplash from the nonsequitur. "Huh?"
"You and I. But somehow we look good together. Take my hand," Maura held hers out, fingers already spread apart and waiting for Jane.
Jane did take her hand, of course, unable to resist the touch, but still had her suspicions. "You got an undiagnosed head injury? We were knocked around pretty good in that car."
"No," Maura laughed, gazing at Jane as though she had hung the moon in the sky. "Walk with me," she asked and Jane obliged. "Do you think we should explore a relationship?"
Jane coughed and stared at their New Balance shoes. Maura's were much more fashionable than Jane's simple black and white, hers a pretty maroon, but they were still sneakers, meant to be supportive rather than complementary to her outfit. "Is it buggin' the shit out of you to be in running shoes?"
"Don't avoid the question," Maura pressed as they stopped in front of a booth selling goat cheese and honey. "Or else we'll have to talk about it at home. And yes." Her mouth twitched in a barely-there smirk.
"I think," Jane paused, searching for the right thing to say, "we should definitely explore a relationship. If that means we're exclusive."
"That is usually what that means," Maura said. She didn't drop Jane's hand when she took a toothpick sample and popped it in her mouth. She pulled the cheese off with her teeth and raised her eyebrows at Jane from behind her oversized shades.
"Then yes. You and me. Good," Jane attempted speech in the face of all things Maura's mouth was doing, and it was a valiant effort, given the circumstances.
Maura still chuckled. "Alright Tarzan, but I have a request."
"Anything," Jane promised before she knew what Maura was going to say.
Maura guarded her heart at the sound of it, trying to hold onto her rationality for this next statement. "Your mother once told me that you're very good at… how did she put it? Grand, sweeping, romantic nonsense. So even though I feel like you meant that, I need to take it slow."
Jane somehow paid for cheese and honey for Maura with just one hand and her wallet all the way in her back pocket. Anything. "What's that mean? I gotta wait longer than a week?"
"Definitely not," Maura vehemently dismissed the prospect. "I don't mean take it slow sexually. I mean take it slow emotionally. We just fixed this yesterday."
"Ok, that I can do," Jane breathed a sigh, "emotional cripple, remember?"
Maura shook her head. "All too well. Please work on that for me?"
Jane stiffened, but she assented. "Anything." she said again.
"And…" Maura began again, taking Jane to a bench just outside the market space.
"And?" Jane prodded her when she took an inordinately long time to continue.
"And… I may be asking for your help with something soon."
Jane crossed one leg over the other, put an elbow on the back of the bench, and clasped her hands together. "Ok… help with what?"
"When Paddy fell, when he… got shot," Maura said tactfully, "he kept telling me something - 'hope,' he said, over and over again."
"And does that mean somethin' to you?" Jane asked, and Maura could tell that she was staring intently, even behind her aviators.
"I think it's my birth mother's name," she said. "And I think I might be ready to try and find her."
Jane raised her eyebrows in a gentle surprise. "That's big. You got anything else? To go off of, I mean. The more details you give me, the more help I can be."
Maura smiled warmly at Jane's eagerness. "Well, I have my birthdate, and her first name, where she went to college. I'm going to think on things a little bit, but if I need you, I want you to be ready."
"I'm always ready," Jane said. She reached in the bag for a few of the fresh grapes they'd purchased as a pretense for giving Maura time to rest. She let the juice coat her tongue, reveled in the sweetness, though she'd never tell Maura that she preferred fresh, organic fruits and vegetables to the stuff in the supermarket. Not long into her snack, her phone vibrated on her hip. "Speakin' of birth mothers," she said as she held up her iphone, "mine's texting." she read Angela's message, and then huffed. "Alright, here's the thing - you can back out now, no harm no foul. By the time we get home, I'll forget we ever said anything about dating. But if you don't, you've got a family meeting waiting for you tonight. No rain checks allowed."
Maura put her hand over Jane's knee and grinned. "Oh Jane," she said, "you know my attendance would be required whether we were dating or not."
Jane chuckled. "Yeah I guess so. Sucks to be you."
Jane knew not to trust the calm that stole over Maura's home in the hour before Angela had promised them a meal and an awkward conversation. She also knew that she should not have taken a nap beforehand, because naps made her irritable and her mother deserved more than irritability when their meeting was more than likely about her father.
She mused, as she pulled her jeans back on, rising gingerly from the left side of Maura's bed, that her father was an asshole. When did he get like this? Was he always like this? Were all the good parts of him that she had believed in a lie? She feared what exactly her mother would say, what more her mother would reveal about him when the rest of the Rizzoli family bounded into the kitchen downstairs.
"Is it time to wake up?" Maura called from behind her groggily, very un-Maura-like.
Jane took a little heart in the crisp rustle of the sheets as Maura lifted her head. "You don't have to wake up at all. This is your house. You wanna skip out, you just say the word and I'll tell them you don't feel up to it," she said, "but I'm gonna get up. If I'm not at the ready with a spatula or a spoon, I'm gonna get an earful."
"I'll join you," Maura replied, but then she hugged her pillow closer, "in a few minutes."
"A'right," Jane accepted. She straightened her t-shirt and ran her fingers through her hair and made her way downstairs.
Angela waited for her at the kitchen island with a wooden spoon outstretched towards her. "Sleep good?" She asked Jane cheekily, turning her back to her to check on the water running in the sink.
"I got hit by a truck the day before yesterday," Jane stated, "all I did I was sleep. You must have some bad news if you're busting out the homemade dough." She pointed to the thawed, rolled out ball of pasta, heavily floured, resting on the counter.
"We'll talk when your brothers get here. Cut the dough," Angela ordered, "I'm making the meat sauce like you like."
Jane, for all her complaints of her mother's smothering, savored these quiet moments between them when neither of them felt the need to perform for anyone else. Today, it allowed her to study the hurt on Angela's face, despite the way she tried to smile for her child's sake. For the first time, Jane thought her mother looked older, older even than the twenty years she had on Jane. "He's a jerk. You deserve better."
Angela shook her head to banish tears away. "Speakin' of deserving," she said quietly, browning crumbled Italian sausage. "You better have had a better conversation with Maura than 'Ok but I'm less sorry.' She deserves that much."
Jane glared. "When I say 'butt out,' what do you hear? Because your ass is definitely still deep in my business, Ma."
"Don't talk to me like that, Jane. I'm your mother," Angela scolded. Mother sounded like mothah and Jane was transported back to her childhood kitchen.
"A'right a'right. I'm sorry. Not that you need to know, but she and I hashed some things out while we were wandering the hinterlands of Western Mass. And then we hashed out some more things while we were out this morning."
"Oh? Anything you'd like to share?" Angela poked, eyes once wet with sadness and now lit up with mischief and hope.
"We'll talk when my brothers get here," Jane mocked. "Hey Ma, basta," she pleaded when Angela squeezed her pink cheek.
Maura descended the stairs and entered the kitchen just in time to see the display. She smiled in sympathy. "I take it things are going well with dinner?" she asked, in her own attempt to save Jane from Angela's attention.
"They are," Angela laughed, taking pity on Jane and moving back to her sauce. "How's your leg?"
"Sore from walking this morning, but looking healthier by the hour. Would you like to see?" Maura had already bent down to pull up her pant leg.
"No, no!" Jane and Angela waved her off at the same time.
"I believe you, honey," Angela said sweetly, too sweetly. "Maybe after we've eaten."
Jane chuckled in the handsome way that showed all her teeth and narrowed her eyes. It was deep and slow. "Yeah, no Frankenstein at the dinner table."
"Says the woman who has made me close a bullet hole at the dinner table," Maura retaliated. She shrugged her shoulders when she walked past Jane to put the pasta into the boiling water.
"La la la - I'm not hearing this!" Angela put her fingers in her ears.
Jane huffed. "Thanks for ratting me out," she said to Maura. Then she pointed at her mother. "It wasn't a big deal, I just got clipped. That's all. This was a couple years ago."
"How many times have you been shot?!" Angela cried out. The door behind them opened when she said, "you know what, I don't wanna know. Don't tell me."
"Four times," Frankie Jr. answered anyway, having just stepped into the house with Tommy in tow. "Janie's been shot four times. At work anyway." He winked at his sister's angry face.
"That sounds like a shit job," Tommy quipped. He picked a piece off of the mozzarella ball waiting on the counter and popped it in his mouth.
"Hey," both Jane and Frankie said. Maura delighted in the Rizzoli family's penchant for simultaneous exclamation.
Angela, an hour later, placed the finished lasagna on the table. "It's Tuesday. There hasn't been a Patriots game for two days, and there is zero football on today. How is it that you all can find a channel that is nothing but Patriots talk?"
"We play Thursday, Ma, that's only two days from now," Tommy called behind his shoulder on the couch where he and his siblings sat, all six eyes still glued to the screen. "Gotta know the game plan."
"No you don't, you're not a player. You sit down, you eat, you watch. That is your role. Now turn that off before I come turn it off for you."
The three Rizzoli siblings got up from the sofa, varying heights, but all tall. Maura, who worked on a report at the writer's desk directly behind them, used her laptop screen to obscure the way she stared. Each brother was six feet, and Jane barely an inch and a half below them - they all commanded the room in different ways because of it. Tommy swaggered into it with the confidence of someone who owned his stature, who moved in it with natural sexuality. Frankie's unassuming attitude belied his height, but the closer you got to him, the more safe, protected you felt by his size. Jane stood with her broad shoulders back and drew all attention to her hips with the way she carried herself, and when you could finally drag your eyes back up to hers, you realized how long of a journey it was. By then she had anyone and everyone hooked. And Maura was hooked by all of them. She slammed her MacBook shut to rattle herself out of her fantasy.
When they had all made it to the table, the meal could truly begin. And to go with all their sexy height, the Rizzolis employed all their sexy manners. They didn't have manners the way Maura was taught them, endless rules and stylized routine, no. They had kindness in the way that Jane cut into the pasta first, but turned to her mother and asked, "you want the corner piece?"
She nodded and held out her plate, and Jane served her. Frankie then wordlessly passed Tommy a piece of bread buttered just the way he liked it and took the spatula from Jane. "I got it, Janie," he said. He cut Jane the biggest piece from the middle and winked at Maura when he gave her one half that size. It was a flurry of siblings serving each other and their mother, a chaotic goodness.
"Oh shit," Tommy cursed, definitely not mannerly in the way Constance and Arthur would have expected a child to speak, but when he brought out the pitcher of water to fill everyone's cups, Maura melted all the same. Then it dawned on her that it was passion like this, passion for love, that had been missing her whole life. Suddenly slow did not seem at all like the right way to go with Jane. She stifled that thought.
"So…" Jane started when they all had taken at least a few bites. "Not that I don't like lookin' at all of you, but why are we here?"
"Yeah, Ma, what's goin' on?" Frankie asked. "Lasagna seems pretty fancy for a Tuesday."
Angela put her fork down on the edge of her plate in the motherly way she always did when she had something important to say. "Your father left Boston this morning," she said.
Maura bit the inside of her cheek when she looked at Tommy. Please don't ask me anything please don't ask me anything, she repeated in her head. She continued to eat as if she weren't hearing the conversation beginning to sizzle around her.
"Where the hell did he go?" Jane asked. She turned to Tommy when Angela didn't answer right away. "Where does he go, Tom?"
"I know he's got an apartment in Florida," Tommy said quietly, "that's where he spends most of his time."
"Where?" Frankie demanded.
"I don't know," said Tommy. "I've never been. But he pays for Lydia to go see him sometimes, or he comes to see her here."
"Wait a minute. Lydia lives here?" Jane interrogated him around a mouthful of food. "How exactly do you know her?"
Maura blushed with the secret she carried. Luckily, Angela saved her. "Uh uh. I don't wanna talk about her. We're not talking about her. What I wanted to tell you is that I told him that I am under no circumstances signing the annulment paperwork. And I need you kids to stand firm with me on this. Your Daddy likes to divide and conquer you. He knows that if he gets one of you alone, it's easier to make you do what he wants." Fair or not, everyone looked at Tommy. He didn't deny it.
"Well we can't help him with the papers, Ma," said Frankie.
"No, but he can get you to try and guilt me into it," Angela responded. "And that's what he's going to do. He's going to try and make you wear me down. Like he always does. But I am asking you three to resist him and let my decision be my decision," she said, her voice finally breaking at the end.
Jane patted her mother's wrist gently. "Course, Ma. Of course we will. You're right, it's your decision." Maura threaded her fingers with Jane's other hand under the table.
Tommy and Frankie shared their own forms of agreement, and then the table settled into a comfortable silence of recovery for a short time.
Maura and Jane stayed as they were, Jane eating with her left hand, Maura with her right, and eventually Tommy noticed. "Hey Janie," he said about fifteen minutes after their discussion about Frank Sr., his smile wicked, "anything you wanna share now that we're all together?"
She looked genuinely confused. "What?"
"I think she shared it on Saturday when she opened the door on us with that big ass thing on her neck," Frankie snickered. He flickered his eyes toward his sister and then immediately down again so that her ire wouldn't melt away his humor.
"You guys are assholes, you know that?" Jane asserted, the realization dawning on her. "Just big, gaping assholes."
"Jane," Angela warned. "Your brothers just want to be happy for you. Let them be happy for you. I wanna be happy for you, too."
Maura pulled her hand away from Jane's so that she could cross her arms in front of her plate on the table. She wanted so badly to needle Tommy and Frankie a little bit, make them a little uncomfortable, but she recognized that Jane needed to take the lead.
"Maura and I are… exploring a relationship, alright? Very tentatively exploring," Jane huffed out, visibly flustered. "So now that you've made me announce it to the world, how about you back off?"
It wasn't to be, of course, not with the Rizzolis. Angela congratulated them in a joyous, booming Italian, and Frankie clapped vigorously - Tommy actually whistled. Maura laughed, indulging in the raucous attention, and Jane slumped her head to the table. But for a moment, for the rest of the night, they forgot all about fathers and their schemes.