The apartment was dark and he couldn't hear any sounds coming from the other side of the door that separated him from her. He had seen the light under the door go out half an hour ago, and now, still wide awake, Bobby lay on his back on the couch, hands behind his head, and tried to convince himself to fall asleep.

Canis, who had had the bad luck of being outside the bedroom when Alex shut herself in, lay on the floor next to the couch, occasionally half-sitting up to nose Bobby's elbow, as if to remind him that he wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep. The dog, it seemed, had been almost as disturbed by the argument as the man had, and although Bobby's elbow was beginning to feel rather slimy, he found himself glad for the company. Being startled every now and then was keeping him from sinking completely into the internal debate that was raging in his head.

He'd been nearly shaking with the force of his anger when he'd first laid down, and while the trembling had subsided now, the bitterness was still alive and well. How dare she jump to the conclusion that he was going to disappear again, when he'd done everything but kiss her feet this week in an attempt to make up for leaving the first time? Their rift hadn't even been completely his fault in the first place, not with the deliberate way she'd cut off all communication with him, but had he said anything about her part in it? Of course not.

He'd tried to atone for the way he'd left her. He'd been willing to shoulder all the blame for the sake of peace between them, and he'd thought that she had accepted that. It would be selfish on her part, maybe, but he could have dealt with that.

What he couldn't deal with was the way she'd almost eagerly assumed the worst about him tonight, refusing to even allow him to explain before flinging accusations at him. It wouldn't have mattered whether he'd been about to tell her that he was leaving tomorrow or that he'd told Riley to go find a new partner and leave him alone; either way, she'd had him tried and convicted before he even opened his mouth.

And yet . . . the woman's mother was dead. Her emotional resilience at the moment was almost nil, and this week had been a violent upheaval for her in more than one way. He'd known almost from the start that he would have to allow her substantial leeway in her behavior, to compensate for the grief she was feeling.

He'd also known that she was still trying to decide whether to allow him fully back into her life. When he'd finally deciphered the occasional pained looks that appeared on her face when she spoke to him, he'd realized with a shock that they corresponded to the moments in their conversation that might have reminded her that he would eventually have to return to his other life.

Completely independent of whether she'd forgiven him or not, he'd come to understand, she was, quite simply, terrified of being left alone again - and Alex didn't like being afraid. If he had just pulled himself out of the all-sins-forgiven fantasy he'd been letting himself wallow in and stopped to think about it, he could have foreseen that she would lash out at him rather than acknowledge her fear, to him or to herself, and not allowed himself to be infuriated when she did it.

And yet, fear or not, theirs had once been a relationship dependent on trust, and always in the past, no matter how upset she'd been, she'd been willing to listen to him. Disagreed with him or overruled him afterward, maybe, but always listened. Her refusal to do so tonight felt almost malicious, and he wasn't entirely sure that that had been unintended. The lack of trust, the assignment of blame . . . even if she'd been shaken to the core by her mother's death, she still had to know that those things were counterproductive, and she'd ambushed him with them anyway.

A wet nose touched his arm and Bobby blinked, pulling himself out of his thoughts and leaning over to scratch the dog's ears. "What am I gonna do, huh?" he asked Canis softly. "I can't even tell if she wants me to stay here; how am I supposed to decide whether I should or not?"

Silence from the dog, and with a groan, Bobby swung his legs around and sat up. There was no way he was going to get any sleep tonight, not with all the debates and decisions circling his head.

The simple point Deakins had made at the funeral home had refused to be driven from Bobby's head ever since he'd heard it: he was the only one keeping himself in California. If he wanted so much to return to New York . . . why didn't he?

And he'd realized, sometime as he watched her drift into an exhausted sleep on the way home tonight, that if he was the one holding himself back, he was the one who would have to give himself his freedom. He wanted his life back; he wanted his partner back; he wanted his old haunts and old friends back.

What he didn't want was to hurt Alex, or to torture himself. Everything would rest on her, he'd decided. He had to find out whether she wanted him back, in all ways, as much as he wanted her. If she did, he'd return to LA only long enough to settle his affairs before coming back to New York. And if she didn't . . . well, his life in California was tolerable. He'd intended to, somehow or other, ask her tonight how she felt about his returning.

Instead, they'd ended up in a raging argument, and what worried him now was one simple possibility:

What if that had been her answer?

Sighing, he flopped back down on the couch and threw an arm over his eyes.

A few minutes later, he'd fallen asleep in spite of himself.

It was useless. She just wasn't going to be able to get more than a few minutes sleep at a time in her current state of mind. For the fourth time since she'd climbed into bed that night, Alex opened her eyes and sat up, staring into the darkness. No sounds were coming from the other side of the door, where she'd left Bobby. She supposed he was probably sleeping easy, glad that he didn't have to deal with her.

Why had she exploded at him? She'd been the one to ask him the question, after all. It was perverse to penalize him for answering it honestly.

Fuck that. She'd be as perverse as she wanted; she wasn't the one who was planning on hopping a plane and moving out to the other side of the country again. She wasn't the one who'd come back just long enough to blast a gaping hole in her ex-lover's defenses, and then not bothered to even try to deny that she was leaving.

Be fair, Alex, broke in her conscience. He was so indignant about my reaction, so upset that I assumed he "wouldn't look back" . . . really, he didn't seem very pleased about having to say that he was going to leave.

Ok, so he had known she would react badly and he'd been reluctant to deal with it. That didn't change the fact that he was leaving.

". . . keep telling yourself I was just going to leave and not look back," she heard him say again in her head. Why did that sentence bother her so much?

It probably had something to do with the fact that it implied that he didn't intend to leave her, she realized with a start after a second. But then why had he said he was going to leave?

With a groan, she flopped back against the pillows. Damn her and her uncontrolled reaction, and damn him and his self-righteous anger. This was getting her nowhere.

He's right on the other side of the door, Alex. You're the one who shut it; all you have to do is open it again.

What if he didn't want to see her? She'd rarely seen him as angry as he had been tonight. He was probably wishing her to hell.

But what the hell had he been trying to tell her before he lost patience and gave up?

Unable to resist the combination of curiosity and guilt that was now flowing through her, she slid out of bed and pulled on a t-shirt. If he was still willing to talk, she'd listen.

Bobby wasn't sure what woke him up. It might have been a sound, or it might have just been his cop sense warning him that he wasn't alone, but whatever it was, he was on his feet almost before he opened his eyes.

Alex, who had been trying to approach his sleeping form as quietly as she could, recoiled in shock at the sudden movement and stumbled over her own feet.

Moving quickly, Bobby grabbed her arm to keep her from falling, pulling her closer to him. "What are you doing out here?"

"I . . ." Trying to regain her composure, she stared up at him through the semi-darkness. "I thought maybe we could talk."

He swiftly dropped her arm and turned away. "You've got to be kidding me."

"No, I'm not." Reminding herself that it was she who had fucked up their first attempt at this conversation, she followed him as he moved away. "Look, I freaked out on you before. I'm sorry. It's just . . . this hasn't been a good night. I didn't want to hear any more bad news."

"I wasn't planning on giving you any more bad news." He hesitated, then sighed. "At least, I wasn't then."

The implication in that statement was clear, and Alex forced herself to take a deep breath and let it out before she spoke. "I take you that you are now, then?"

"I don't know!" Dragging an agitated hand through his hair, he turned back toward her, but kept his eyes away from hers. "I don't know, Alex. All you seem willing to believe is bad news. I'm starting to wonder if maybe that is what you want to hear."

"No." Moving before she could talk herself out of it, she closed the distance between them and took his chin in her hand, forcing him to look down at her. "What I want to hear now is what you were trying to tell me before. Whatever it was."

Closing his eyes, he pushed her hand away from his face. "I'm not doing this again unless I know you're going to hear me out this time."

"I am, ok?" Seeing that he still looked skeptical, she dropped down onto the couch and crossed her arms, giving him a stubborn look. "Try me."

He continued to search her face for a few more seconds before sighing and sitting down next to her almost reluctantly. "Riley called to tell me that our lieutenant is getting impatient. He's not happy about me keeping my time here open-ended, and he's leaning on Riley to get to me. What I was saying before . . . I have to go back. I have to get things hashed out at work."

"Bobby -"

Holding up a hand, he shook his head. "Let me finish."

Alex was uneasy about what else was going to come out of his mouth, but she'd promised to listen. She reluctantly nodded her understanding.

"There's also no way I could just not go back and leave my mom out there. Her doctors are used to dealing with me. There are things that have to be . . . worked out."

None of this sounded any different from what he'd said before. Had she been right after all? Swallowing, Alex forced herself to do nothing other than give him a politely questioning smile.

"I have to go back," he said again, looking down at his hands. "But what I was trying to tell you . . . I don't have to stay back."

"What?" she managed after a second, sure he could hear in her voice how shaken she was by that simple statement.

He glanced up at her, shrugged, then quickly looked away again. "There's something my mother has been telling me since she found out about you and me . . ."

Alex blinked. His mother? What would she have said with regard to Bobby's move?

"She said she's old news," Bobby went on, hardly noticing her confusion. "That whether I live near her or not, she knows I love her, and therefore I should . . . I should be less concerned about staying near her than staying near you. When you called . . . about your mom . . . she looked at me and told me that she didn't need me anymore, but you did."

"Oh." She stared at him for a second, then realized that she wasn't quite sure whether he had just made an important point or not. "Meaning . . . what?"

With a self-conscious chuckle, he looked up at her and smiled weakly. "Meaning that she took away my excuse for staying in LA. Also meaning that I think she'd kill me if I tried."

"Oh," she managed again.

He waited for her to say something else, growing more and more nervous when she didn't. "Deakins . . . kind of said the same thing when I talked to him tonight," he stumbled on after an uncomfortable minute. "He said if I really wanted to be back here, I'd have gotten things straightened out and come back."

"He said that to you?" she couldn't stop herself from asking. "Tonight?"

"Yeah, And I realized that he was right and if I wanted move back here, there was nothing to stop me, except me . . . and you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I mean . . ." He shrugged. "I think it's fair to say that at this point, both of us are involved in this. And I didn't want to decide without finding out first whether you were, you know . . . whether you would rather have me stay or go."

"That's what you were going to say before I got mad?"

"Well, yeah. I was going to ask what you wanted. But then you were so quick to assume the worst, I thought maybe . . . that was my answer."

"Bobby, no," she breathed, reaching impulsively for his hands. "I was just so upset . . . after hearing you on the phone, and then my mom . . ."

"Don't," he broke in, tugging gently on her hands to get her to move closer. "I know you were. But Alex . . . I do need to know. I have to go back to work, if only for Riley's sake, and I have to know what to tell him and my lieutenant."

Alex was silent for a long moment. "Are you asking me if I want you to move back here?"

He hesitated for a moment and then said, "Yeah."

"And if I say yes . . . you will? You'll leave your mother out there alone?"

"Yeah," he repeated with a tense smile. "Like I said, I think she'd be mad if I didn't. And . . . and she made a point of telling me that she's not alone anymore. She's got friends at the hospital."

She looked at him closely, searching for the pain she would have expected his mother's assertion of independence to cause and finding none. "You're doing this for me?"

He shook his head, urging her toward him until he could put his arm around her. "Because of you, yes. But 'for' . . . I think I'm doing it for me. My life is here, not in California."

"Ok . . ." she said, still not entirely sure she believed what he was saying. Well, the best way to find out was to call his bluff, she decided. "Then . . . 'yes'."

Bobby blinked. " 'Yes?' Just like that?"

That was as genuinely believable a reaction as she could have hoped for. She gave him a knowing smile. "Yeah, just like that. It's not a hard choice for me, Bobby. Is it for you?"

"I . . . no. No, it's not," he said slowly as the realization dawned on him that it really wasn't. Sometime between the morning he left California and the wake tonight, he had stopped being worried about his mother's ability to survive without him. He'd stopped caring about whatever allegiance he owed to the LAPD. Admittedly, he didn't feel very good about leaving a good cop like Riley without a partner, but Riley of all people seemed to be the most enthusiastically on board with his move.

"You're serious about this?" Alex asked, more from excitement now than doubt, as she wiggled out from under his arm and moved to straddle his legs, putting her face on level with his.

He brought up both hands to frame her face, pulling her in for a kiss. "Dead serious. I love you, Alex. I'm sick of trying to fight it."

She slid her arms around his neck, leaning her forehead against his, and said teasingly, "Yeah, well, I'm sick of you trying to fight it, too, buddy."

Bobby let out a muffled laugh and wrapped both arms tightly around her as he stood up. "Come on. If you're going to beat all the fight out of me, we might as well do it on something bigger than a couch."

"Mmm," she murmured, wrapping her legs around his waist and kissing his jaw as he carried her into the bedroom. "Close the door before the dog follows us in."

A/N: Wow. Once again, the end of one of my stories snuck up on me. But if it makes anyone feel any better, although this is basically the end of the story, there will be an epilogue coming to sum things up