Disclaimer: I do not own "Lie to Me." I make no profit. I do hope to make someone smile.
A/N: I'm in the mood for something light-hearted and fun.
Another lull between cases, and Ria once more found herself hemmed in the conference room by the latest stack of books pointedly doled out from Foster's apparently inexhaustible shelves. Eli lounged a few seats down, staring at the ceiling as the screensaver cycled on the laptop before him.
Group study had never been her thing, but she had to admit that having the researcher nearby did save a great deal of time looking up unfamiliar terms or wandering the halls in search of simple explanations. They even seemed to be becoming friends, lately, as his incessant Honesty was displaying rather fewer instances of the irritatingly Radical.
And also as she picked up more of the 'Science' Cal was always after her about. Though she still often found herself confused by the sheer amount of material they expected her to learn. Like now, as she idly tapped her ear with a highlighter."...mimicking tardive dyskinesia in an attempt to mislead the investigators..." Garbled words? No, that was aphasia. "Tell me something..." Broca or Wernicke though? She could never keep them strai-
"Okay. I love you."
Her head whipped around and she could feel the microexpression manifest in leaping brow and slackening jaw. "Wha-" It should have been over in 1/15th of a second, but the second stretched on in what must be a comical parody of stop motion animation as her mind skipped through responses, forced to discard each as contextually unsuited to the man in question. No you d-... Are you on someth-... You realize that's not-... What?"
"I said: I love you." He was grinning, for all the world as if he had just told her she'd tapped ink onto her face.
Had she? No. Lid's still on. "You-" Her voice was unintentionally faint. She didn't do faint.
"-I what?"
"You've been misinformed."
At that, Eli displayed his own split second frame of open mouth and wide eyes. No muscle relaxant then, this time.
As soon as the unconscious response fled, he was back to his grinning, responding in the familiar, teasing, 'what, you don't know this already?' tone. "Gee Ria, it's not like I told you I'm IN love with you."
Oh. "You're... not?"
"Nope." Finally it seemed he'd found something productive to do, sitting up to hover over his keyboard. But before lowering his hands he cut innocent eyes at her with a canary-digesting smirk. "Not yet."