XIV:

It was definitely quicker work to make the bed with two people; Olivia was grateful for Rafael's help because she was tired from the double she'd pulled so Amaro could spend some time with Zara. Of course, that meant putting up with his smug comments about the inferiority of her corners and how they just weren't up to snuff –

"Rafa, do be a love and shut the fuck up," Liv complained as she shook out the queen-sized fleece blanket and caught him in the face with it.

"Ow! Liv!"

"You big baby," she protested.

"See if I help you make the bed again," he pouted.

She giggled even as he moved to help her drag the heavy blanket and then her comforter around into place. "Hey, not that I'm not happy to see you, but a visit in the middle of the week is unusual…"

"Yeah, I need to get my key back from you," he said.

She paused, her heart constricting in her chest. "Raf?"

"I'm moving – my lease is up and I'm just tired of being so far from you," he said with a sad, shy smile. "But I've got to give my landlord all the keys back."

"Are you going to tell me where you're moving to?" she asked anxiously.

"And spoil the fun?" he shot back.

"Rafael Barba –"

"All right, all right," he caved upon hearing the sharpness in her tone. "I'm renting a two-bedroom in Chelsea. It's only $4800, so it's a steal, honestly."

"That's excellent," she said in surprise, "since I'm shelling out that much for a one-bedroom shithole."

"Yeah, but I'm renting privately through a friend of a friend and they cut me a deal, and you're going through a brokerage, I assume?" he said. "And you're right here by the station, too."

"But Chelsea is a fantastic area to move into, Rafa," she said with a small smile. "I don't know: my contract is up next year, so maybe we could negotiate that whole moving in together thing then?"

"We could find a way to break your contract if you really wanted to," he insisted softly. "Are you ready to make that jump?"

"Are you?" she challenged. She watched his expression for any of his many tells.

"Liv… I'm ready for everything with you." His face was tired and sad, but earnest with his affection.

"You keep saying that, but we never quite get there, do we?" she asked softly.

"We have time," he promised. "Till we're 85, remember? And hopefully longer, since I'm younger than you." Rafael grinned winningly at her and pressed a kiss to her lips. "Hey… do you mind if I stay the night or do you want me to go?"

She hesitated a moment, her fingers tangled in a pillow as she cased it. It was the first time since they'd lost Eva that he'd even come over – normally, she went to him if she needed anything. "No, stay," Liv said.

"Okay," he agreed readily. "So… do you want to order in or should I make something?"

"I don't really have anything but some boxed pasta," Liv said, casing the other pillow and frowning. "Let's just order in or –"

"We could do that or we could go down and I could show you my new place," he suggested gently. "Since you'll have to get used to it sooner rather than later."

"How soon is sooner?"

"I'm moving next week."

"That soon?" She blinked in shock.

"Yeah – don't worry about your stuff at my place," he said. "I've boxed it up very carefully and you can unpack it and put it where you want when you come over next."

"While I appreciate you being so considerate, it's also your home, so you shouldn't be worrying about my things, Rafael," she said.

He looked at her with worried alarm on his face. "Olivia… they're your things and I want to take care of them because I love you and I don't want you to be upset."

"It's fine, Rafa, really: they're just things," Liv said. "So… I guess let's go see this place of yours and go eat."

They walked down 7th Avenue holding hands and talking about work in the vaguest generalities. She couldn't really go into her cases, and neither could he, but they could talk about their co-workers and Liv found herself rolling her eyes and getting frustrated as they turned onto 15th Street.

"I mean, I'm so over Rollins and her attitude," she sniped.

"This is it," Rafael said, pulling her to a stop in front of a brownstone. "And Rollins sounds like she's just trying to find her way. I'm sure you were the same way when you came to SVU: green and trying to prove yourself. Besides, she has to live up to your standards, doesn't she?"

"Rafa, you're living here?" Liv said, impressed, watching him unlock the front door.

"Going to be," he said with a rueful smile. "I've got the third floor apartment and storage in the attic."

They held hands as they walked upstairs and he let them into the third floor apartment. He hung back by the entryway, letting her explore the massive open living-kitchen-dining area, a small smile on his lips when she nodded her approval. "You'll have plenty of room for your espresso machine," Liv said, "since it's the only thing you actually care about in the kitchen."

"I care about other things," Rafael chuckled. "Like chopsticks and steak knives…"

"Goofball," she accused.

"Hey," he said softly, heaving himself off the wall and hesitantly taking a step closer. "You know I thought about this being a place that would be comfortable for both of us, right? When your contract ends on your place, I mean."

She paused in the corridor that led back to the bedrooms. "You still want me to move in?" Olivia asked softly.

"You know I do, Liv."

She smiled, just a little, and left him to explore. What she'd assumed to be the back of the apartment was really the portion that overlooked the front of the building, and the smaller bedroom's farthest wall was comprised entirely of panes of glass and a pair of French doors that opened onto the upper balcony. One of the other walls had built in bookshelves and a recessed closet. She definitely could see Rafael's leather futon and computer desk in the room, along with an expensive rug and his vinyl record collection.

But the master bedroom…

The only personal touch in the entire apartment was the painting that hung on the wall where she knew Rafael meant to place his bed. It had been something he had bought her on a whim on a day they'd been quietly spending time together, desperately in love and drunk on each other, and she'd wondered wherever it had gotten to because she hadn't seen it since he'd dropped the money.

"I'm tired of waiting for our lives to start, Liv," Rafael said softly from behind her.

"Me, too," she whispered.

Trying to find anyone to make a decent case in the DA's office at the moment was like reaching into a stream and praying that a fish might just swim along into your hands: completely unlikely and, as such, Liv wasn't surprised that Harris was hesitant about taking Jocelyn Paley's case to trial. It would take far more balls to stick it to Adam Cain than anyone they really knew in McCoy's office currently had.

"Tough day?" Rafael asked, offering her a glass of wine as she toed off her shoes.

"I don't want to talk about work."

"O-o-o-ka-aaaay," he replied. "Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes – I need to turn in an update to my retirement thing tomorrow. You want your name on the package, too, not just as beneficiary, mi amor?"

She shrugged and sipped her wine. "I added you to my pension ages ago," Liv reminded him.

He blushed a little. "Yeah, I know… this is just – it's a big deal."

"An NYPD pension isn't?" she challenged.

"I'm not saying that – I'm just saying… no, nevermind. I should've done this a long time ago."

"Damn right," she muttered. "Also, I'm 100% over Harris and if Cragen doesn't come back soon, I'm transferring to Brooklyn because I can't deal with the asshole – and at least I'd be able to see your charming face once in a while."

He swore under his breath and lifted his finger to his lips, sucking at the nick he'd managed to inflict while chopping veg for the salad. "Liv, mi amor, you'd murder everyone at Brooklyn SVU," he pointed out.

"Yeah, and I'm about to murder him," she shot back. "You ready to cash out that fancy retirement, Mr. Big Shot EADA, and bail out your hot angry wife?"

"Much as I'd like to talk about what a turn-on it is for you to be that pissed," Rafael commented dryly, "you wanna set the table, hot stuff?"

"What do we need?" Liv asked, heading for the dish cupboard.

"Pasta bowls and salad bowls – and dessert plates. Abuelita sent over a cake yesterday," he said with a fond smile. "She misses us. I told her we'd try to come on Sunday, but I know you're on call with the department being short-handed…"

"Fin will understand if I call off for the afternoon to see your mom and granny," Liv said softly, laying out the dishes and silverware, watching her husband quickly plate up their dinner. "Hey –"

"Hmm?"

"Just because I haven't moved all my stuff over doesn't mean I don't love you, you know."

"No, I know," Rafael said, putting the rest of the hot pasta back on the counter by the stove. He took off his hot mitts and apron, tossing them across one of the other clean countertops and joined her at the table. "You still need a space that's yours. It's a big change. I get it."

"But you're so comfortable with everything –"

He shrugged and smirked just a little. "Might have something to do with being so damn in love with my wife that I can't think straight most of the time," he admitted. "And I can't wait to spend the rest of my life squabbling with you over dirty dishes and who's going to clean the toilet."

She chuckled and said, "Obviously that duty falls on me since you cook all the time –"

"Yeah, but you never leave the gel on long enough for it to actually work before you start scrubbing –"

"Rafael, how many times do I have to tell you, the instructions say to wait five minutes and then scrub," she said with a frustrated huff. "Not let it sit for half an hour and then when your eyes are watering from the bleach fumes, only then scrub the fuck out of the toilet bowl. It's a wonder you're not blind, honey."

"You have to give the stuff time to work –"

"Only if you've been dropping nuclear waste in your shitter, and seeing as how you go through a bottle of cleaner every couple of weeks, that isn't happening," she pointed out. "I adore you, but you need to step off the clean freak gas once in a while, Rafa. This sauce is amazing –"

"It's just fresh vegetables Carmen picked up for me on lunch today at the farmer's market, and some fresh sausage from the butcher in the Chelsea Market," he said dismissively. "Are you really complaining about having a clean apartment? Rats and roaches –"

She stopped for a second and shuddered; there had been a case not too long ago where a victim had been discovered in a ground-floor abandoned apartment full of garbage, a real hoarder's paradise, and her body had been covered in rodent bites and roaches when she had been found. She was still in a coma, unlikely to recover, and her rapist's DNA didn't match any in the system, so they were at an impasse. But Olivia and Amaro had had to sort through literal tons of bags of garbage, looking for a needle in a haystack of needles, and she had wound up with a couple of rat bites herself out of it.

"No, you're right," Liv agreed. "But… five minutes is sufficient, Rafa, with as clean as you keep it. Okay, baby?" She reached across the table for his hand, grasping for it, smiling sadly when he gripped her hand tightly. "I'm sorry – I didn't mean to upset you."

He looked at her blankly. "You didn't," he said, too quickly. "Besides, it's just petty squabbling – we'll be doing that forever, eh, mi amor?"

She knew he got defensive about the cleaning; it was a traumatic throwback to when he was a child and if everything wasn't 100% shipshape, his father would beat him within an inch of his life. It was the little things that gave him away, and he had finally told her one night in the protective comfort of her arms and their bed, told her about the hell of his childhood. How he and Lucia had endured hell on earth at the hands of a drunk abuser until he had broken free with his scholarship and his determination to succeed at no matter the cost. She had told him, likewise, about learning what wine tasted like before she was old enough to know that it was bad for her; knowing that love wasn't meant for her, that happiness was just an illusion…

Until him.

Mutually assured destruction. They were both broken, flawed, harsh edges and prickly, easy to anger, but there was a gentleness that they brought out in each other that could not be denied and she never wanted to give up.

"Hey?" Rafael said, redirecting her attention. "Mi amor?"

"Sorry… I'm just tired," she said. "This thing at work."

"The Paley-Cain thing?"

"You aren't supposed to –"

He shrugged. "It's not hard to guess what your unit is working on," he said with a little smirk. "Not that I'm being nosy or anything."

"Yeah, well…" Liv took a deep breath, then said, "I don't want to talk about work tonight."

"Me, either," he agreed.

"Or cleaning the toilet."

"Okay."

"I do want to wake up in your bed in the morning, preferably well-fucked, and I want some of that fancy-ass coffee," she instructed.

"No tall orders then?" Rafael teased, his eyes twinkling as he continued eating. Liv knew better than to come between him and his dinner: cranky Rafa was not a sexy Rafa, and she wanted to forget how dirty Adam Cain had made her feel earlier in the day. "Just a normal Tuesday?"

Her heart bubbled over with affection for him; he was unguarded, completely at ease with her in their space, this little bubble that was theirs alone, and she loved him so much that it choked her from the inside out. "Yeah, just… normal Tuesday," she assured him.

He pushed his glasses up his nose with his middle finger and said, "Liv, it's okay – you don't have to explain why you want what you want. I love you, remember? And it's already been a hell of a week. So… let's just have a nice dinner and go from there."

She didn't want to admit to him that she'd had to read 25 Acts because of other cases where offenders had blamed their proclivities on the book's explicit content. A few things in it had vaguely turned her on – very vaguely, just enough to irritate her more than anything – but mostly, she had seen it as fodder for other people's unimaginative sexual imaginations. After all, she had a perfectly willing and able partner who indulged her every whim nearly as soon as she had it. She didn't want him to think that she needed someone else's fantasies to fuel her own. She didn't.

Or maybe it just came down to the fact that wild child Olivia Benson had settled down. She was a one-man woman in a stable, committed marriage filled with a kind of intimacy and love she had been looking for since she had been old enough to know what love really meant.

And the thought of losing Rafael for any reason terrified her.

There was something about the hardness of Rafael in court that nearly brought Olivia to her knees; it was so different from the way they were together at home that it sizzled like fire through her veins, a kind of arousal that she couldn't shake. She caught Rollins eyeing him appreciatively and almost blurted out a warning to keep her eyes and hands inside the ride and to her own damn self, thank you very much, but then her higher brain kicked in and she had a moment of realization that he shouldn't be there at all: he should be in Brooklyn. But before she could open her mouth to voice the words, he was turning and greeting Harris with a sardonic, "Bring your daughters to work day?"

She could have slapped him. The fucker knew every inch of the contempt she held for the superior officer and he was turning it right against her like –

Like she was anyone else he had to work with.

Fuck.

There were lines now. Lines they couldn't cross.

She didn't answer his calls or texts; let him suffer. He hadn't told her, so the least he could do was deal without her for one fucking night while she processed the fact that, suddenly, their worlds were on an actual collision course.

But then he tried to let himself into her apartment – she'd latched the door – and he got frustrated. "Olivia Barba, fucking open this door so we can talk," Rafael insisted through the slit. "Your neighbors are going to call the –"

"I am the police, you moron," she snapped, coming out of the kitchen with a half empty wine bottle in one hand and a half-eaten chocolate bar in the other. "How could you?"

"You're going to have to be more specific, mi amor –"

"Oh, don't you 'mi amor' me, you fucker," she spat. "When the fuck were you going to get around to telling your wife that you transferred boroughs and got fucking demoted – demoted, Rafael, my god – just to work on the Island? Seriously? What the fuck? How could you?" She finally felt her anger deflating a little bit as he peered through the crack between the door and the jamb, and she finally shoved the door shut roughly and unlatched the emergency lock before letting him in. "Damn you."

He shut the door resolutely behind him with a click and loosened his tie. "Are you really pissed because I did it without consulting you or are you pissed because I did it without thinking of the consequences?" His voice lowered to a soft growl. "I'm sorry – what you think are the consequences."

"Oh, I'm pissed because we agreed not to make unilateral decisions where this family was concerned," she snapped, rounding on him. "Just because we don't – can't – have kids, Rafa, doesn't mean that you're just absolved of that agreement."

"Jesus, Olivia – are you – are you even fucking kidding me right now?" Rafael laughed, the sound hysterical and mirthless. "I did it for you – for us! Because I was in fucking Brooklyn when you almost died and our… and Eva did die. Because I couldn't get to you in time to help. Because I fucking failed to be the father our daughter needed me to be for the few moments she had on earth – that's why I fucking did it! Because I can't stand still forever waiting for my life to come to me when it's racing past me faster and faster and I can't fucking lose you because I'm too scared to reach out and hold on, goddamn it, Olivia. I don't fucking care about Brooklyn – fuck Brooklyn. It's small potatoes. Being demoted and working Manhattan, then running for McCoy's seat when he retires? That's the big time, Liv. That's the end game – that and a judicial appointment, but I'll take the realistic one." He ran both hands through his hair and groaned. "Jesus. Fuck. I'll – I'll just go."

She hesitated. "Raf –"

"I should've told you, but I knew you'd be pissed." He turned the knob and muttered, "I'm sorry, for what it's worth."

"No, you aren't: you aren't sorry because you're right," she sighed. "Rafa, c'mere –"

"Liv, I need to go home. Get some rest," Rafael said very quietly. "I'll see you tomorrow."

She sat in silence for a long time after he left, until she noticed that her phone was buzzing. "Benson," she mumbled.

"Hey."

She hesitated, somewhere between raw and numb. "Rafa –"

"I'm sorry, Liv." He drew in a shaky breath. "I didn't mean to say that shit about the baby – are you okay?"

She licked her lips. "I… yeah. I'm… I'm fine." She was always fine, even when she wasn't. "I didn't know you felt so trapped in Kings County. Are you okay with moving to –"

"I've tried a murder and two grand larceny cases since I crossed, and made numerous plea deals," he said. "I think I've already proven my worth in gold to Jack McCoy. But he's been itching to turn me loose on a good SVU case; I think he has this idea that I'll work well with my wife, but we still have to keep it on the down low. No special favors and no funny business. Everything is 100% by the book, especially after the debacle Delia Wilson put the DA's office through."

"I almost bitchslapped Rollins earlier," Liv admitted.

"Why?"

"Did you not notice her drooling over you?"

He snorted a laugh. "I was too busy showing off for my startlingly exquisite lover. Now… you need to put that wine away and get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day – and we're going to need all of your considerable brain power put to good use, Detective, in working out just how to make Adam Cain pay for his misdeeds."

"You're very sexy when you talk dirty," she purred.

"Did you put the latch back on, Olivia?"

She huffed and muttered, "No."

"Good." There was the sound of a key scraping in multiple locks, and then he was back inside her apartment. He closed the door and threw all of the locks and lastly, the latch. "I was almost home when I realized I was a fucking asshole and I don't deserve you at all," Rafael said.

She stood up shakily and threw her arms around his neck, holding him close. "Shut the fuck up, Barba, before that mouth of yours gets you in more trouble," Olivia whispered. "You're an asshole, but I guess you're my asshole."

"You guess?"

"Fine," Liv sighed, pulling him toward the bedroom, "you're the pain in my asshole: better?"

"I'll live with it," Rafael said with a grin. "Te amo."

"Shut the fuck up, Rafael."

TBC...