Damn him.

Damn him for touching her, for holding her, for apologizing. How was she supposed to maintain her belligerence with him while he was invading her personal space?

He'd only ever held her like this twice before. Once on an impulse after she'd saved the life of his wife and newborn son. And once with more desperation and reluctance to let go after the death of a colleague. Both times she had welcomed his embrace.

In reality, now was no different. She wanted nothing more than for him to hold her. She didn't really need him anymore, but she wanted him near, wanted him in her life, just plain wanted him. But the bastard had broken her heart and here he was fighting dirty.

She urged herself to continue her refusal, not to embrace him back. But she didn't push him away either. Finally, and with great trepidation, she wrapped her fingers around his biceps and gently pulled back from him. She looked up at him as she continued to hold onto his arms. Even through his jacket she could feel their strength.

"Well I guess that's a start," she said.

He could feel the tightness in his chest start to dissipate as soon as she accepted his apology. He was far from back in her good graces, but at least he had the tip of one toe in the door.

"But right now we need to talk about this case," she added, shifting back to business.

He reluctantly released her, just as he had in the church basement following the death of Sonya Paxton. He was afraid to let her out of his grasp for fear he'd never hold her again. But when she motioned for him to sit back down, he had to let her go.

She walked back around her desk and sat down. "What are you doing in that school?"

He cleared his throat, drew a long breath and put his game face back on. "I work part-time security there. Make sure the parents follow the dropoff rules, check backpacks, hardcore stuff like that," he quipped. "It keeps me busy."

"What do you know about this boy?"

"Zach Scott? He's pretty straight-laced, never had any trouble with him. He's a quiet kid."

"Do you believe his story?"

"Do you?"

Olivia rolled her eyes slightly at his annoying little habit of tossing her own questions back at her. "I think something happened to him, but I'm not sure what. I was hoping you could shed some light."

"Today is the first I heard of this," he said. "You know I would have reported this had we seen any signs."

"I'm not blaming you, Elliot."

"I never said you were."

The man was infuriating. That hadn't changed. But she refused to take his bait. Instead, she paused a moment and ran her hands through her long brown tresses before starting again.

"Who do you like for it?"

"I've been racking my brain about that all morning," Elliot said. "Honestly, no one sticks out. The school has the normal mix of teachers who tow the line and a few who like to bend the rules. But I doubt it's a classroom teacher. Start with support staff, the speech teacher, people like that."

"You can grease the wheels?"

"You know me, Liv," he smiled. "I'm as charming as ever."

She let the corners of her mouth curl slightly at his comment, but really she was stuck on the fact that he'd called her Liv for the first time in five years. It was a familiarity that she'd missed.

"I do know you, and that's what worries me."

He didn't press for her to elaborate or spend much time pondering the meaning behind her words. He was more concerned with creating some sort of next encounter with her. He'd quit her cold turkey years ago, but now that he'd had a fix, he was hooked all over again.

"How about I call you tomorrow morning and set up a time to talk to a few folks I think are worth looking at?"

"Elliot, you don't work here anymore," she said firmly. "You can't be part of these interviews. In fact, we have to rule you out."

"Seriously, Liv?"

"You know the drill."

"At least let me run point for you."

She sat back in her desk chair and considered him. How easy it might be to fall back into stride with him. But he wasn't her partner anymore. He wasn't even a cop anymore. She had to build boundaries to separate this Elliot from the one she used to know.

"I'd prefer that you just have the principal contact Detective Carisi for followup."

"Carisi?" He said it as if the word tasted terrible coming off of his tongue.

"He's a good cop."

"Liv …"

She raised her palm again to silence him, then spoke firmly. "This is how it's gonna work. End of story."

She rose then from behind her desk and opened her office door. "Carisi, can you please take Mr. Stabler's statement?"

Elliot was stunned. She was dismissing him from her office and, he feared, from her life. As Carisi's lanky form approached, she turned back to Elliot, who stood and approached the doorway as slowly as possible. Anything to prolong being in her presence again.

"I trust you can see yourself out afterwards," she said, avoiding eye contact.

He stopped at her side and slipped his hands into the front pockets of his jeans to help repress the urge to touch her. With seconds running out he had to say something. "Can I call you?"

She was cold, downright cold with her response. "If we need anything else, we'll call you. We have the number."

Then just as Carisi arrived in the doorway, she quickly turned away and walked back to her desk. Elliot dropped his eyes to the floor as he followed the young detective to an interview room. He turned briefly to glance back at her doorway, but she wasn't there. What he didn't know was that she'd turned away from him so he wouldn't see the single tear threatening to run down her cheek and blow her cover.

The end of the day, this day, couldn't come quickly enough for Olivia. She always looked forward to dropping the weight of the day at her doorstep and stealing inside to scoop up Noah. He'd reach out for her with his pudgy little fingers and, if she got home at a decent hour, most of his dinner still stuck to his cheeks.

Tonight she only briefly conversed with Lucy, her babysitter, before lifting Noah out of his high chair and kissing the applesauce off his face. She'd saved him from a life in foster care, but he was saving her a little more each day. She so treasured their evenings together on the living room floor and the light in his eyes as he learned through everything he did. She was addicted to the hearty belly laugh he'd expel each time he knocked over the tower of soft blocks they'd build together. And nothing was more peaceful than snuggling with him to read a bedtime story, his pudgy fingers pawing at each page until sleep consumed him. After today, she was about ready to crawl into the crib with him, but footsteps in the hallway and a subsequent knock on her apartment door meant her night wasn't over.

She quietly closed Noah's bedroom door and padded through the living room to look through the peep hole. The old Olivia would have swung the door open without a care. But this Olivia, the one who'd spent four days in hell and now had a child to protect, was much more cautious. As soon as she saw him through the peephole, she expelled a deep breath and let her forehead fall against the door. She didn't have it in her to fight with him tonight.

"C'mon Liv, I know you're in there," his muffled voice offered from outside the door.

Reluctantly, she grasped the doorknob and, as if the door itself was made of solid concrete, mustered every ounce of strength she had to open it part way and eye him. A thousand memories replayed in her head of him standing there just like this on the doorstep of her old apartment. But that was then and this was now. He'd forfeited his right to automatic admission.

"Funny how I can't seem to get rid of you all of a sudden," she said sarcastically.

He hoped like hell she'd meant it playfully. But he couldn't leave it to chance. If he stood any chance of getting back into her life, he had to get inside her apartment. So he said it. "Did you ever think I stayed away for a reason?"

She'd certainly spent enough time in recent years speculating on his motives, so the very prospect of hearing a reason - any reason - after all this time was enough to make her step aside and allow him enough room to pass by and enter.

He moved tentatively, studying her new surroundings. This place was bigger and brighter and the photos of them together that used to take up space on an end table in her old apartment seemed to have no home here. They'd been replaced with candid shots of the baby boy he'd only just learned she had. The one Fin told him was named Noah when he gave him her new address. He managed so many thoughts in the mere moments it took her to shut the door behind him, slip her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans and watch him take in the pieces of her new life. The one she'd made without him, in spite of him.

"Good looking boy," he said picking up a framed photo of Noah. "He's what ... 14-15 months?"

"Fifteen months next week," she confirmed.

He did the math in his head. Fifteen months plus nine more. Two years. Two years ago she'd let someone into her bed, into her body. If he'd shown up then - at the time that he and Kathy had finally called it quits - it might have been him.

"You raising him alone? His ... uh ... his fath ..."

"I didn't give birth to him, Elliot. He was my foster son. I just adopted him."

Elliot still didn't turn to her. He didn't want her to see the relief on his face. Relief that she hadn't made that kind of commitment with another man.

"I know you've always wanted that, Liv," he said, placing the frame back on the shelf. "You deserve it."

She wasn't interested in his pleasantries or in rehashing conversations they'd shared years ago. She couldn't take it. "Look, I don't want to wake him. It's been a long day, so what do you want?"

You. But he couldn't say that. Yet.

He turned around now and tried to find the words - the right words - to keep the conversation going, to keep her from sending him on his way. He longed for the days when words between them came naturally and didn't need to be carefully plotted out on the war map between them. But he had no right to mourn what he'd so carelessly tossed away.

"You seem just so …," he began. But he couldn't find the word he was looking for.

In a way she was intrigued, so she let him suffer as he searched for the word in his head. "So what, Elliot?"

He knew he was trying her patience. "So ... different … you're stronger."

She scoffed at his words, moving to sit on the sofa and looking down at her bare feet. "I guess what they say is true."

He tilted his head in inquiry, so she stated the obvious for him. "You know ... what doesn't kill you ..."

"Right ... makes you stronger," he finished for her. "I get it."

Silence consumed the room then. He lowered his gaze and studied his own shoes, trying desperately to keep his eyes from wandering across the floor in front of him to her painted toenails.

"About that," he began tentatively. "I wanted to kill him."

Her eyes grew wide at his vague acknowledgement of her ordeal with William Lewis. She wanted to believe he didn't know. It was the only excuse for him not calling, not visiting, not confirming that she still had a pulse. Knowing that he knew hurt like hell. So she tried to hurt him back.

"It wasn't your place," she told him dismissively.

He was quick with his response. "It used to be."

She was looking down at her own feet now, happy for a moment's reprieve from having him in her line of vision. She swayed slightly on her feet then finally looked up to question him. "So you knew? You knew about that?"

He lowered his eyes, ashamed to admit that he'd known but done nothing. "Yeah. I looked in on you ... in my own way."

She desperately wanted to know more about that but refused to give him the satisfsction. Instead she snickered and lowered herself to sit on the sofa. "Nice to know you cared."

"Seriously?" Elliot asked much louder than he had intended. "You honestly believe I don't care what happened ... what happens ... to you?"

If he was ramping up, she would too. "Well I don't know, Elliot. I haven't had many reasons to think so, have I?"

He took a moment to absorb her low blow. He hadn't come here to fight, but it came easily to them somehow. He smothered his urge to lash out and instead chose to redirect. "I don't know where to start, how to explain it to you."

She looked up at him then, but he didn't have it in him to meet her eyes at that moment. At first glance he was still the fit, muscled man who'd watched her back for 12 years. But below that, under his sturdy surface, she could see hints of incredible weakness in him. Compassion was a characteristic that made her good at her job. And now she decided she would show some to this man, the man before her.

"I find with these kinds of things it's best to start at the beginning."

When he heard her encouraging words wrapped in a gentle tone, he expelled the breath he'd been holding. "Can I sit?"

She motioned with her palm to the arm chair across from the couch. She wasn't inviting him to sit next to her but she wasn't kicking him out either. He'd take that deal.

She wasn't sure who she was more angry with. Him for walking away. Or herself for giving a damn. She studied him from across the room. He was leaning forward in the armchair, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands clasped together in front of him. He was looking down at his hands and had yet to speak a word about the beginning, the middle or any part of the story he had to tell her. No matter how long he'd been gone she still knew a few truths about Elliot Stabler. He'd walk through walls for the people he loved, but he had no idea how to talk about his own feelings. He was a man of action, not words.

She would have to break the ice. But she surprised herself with what came out of her own mouth when she opened it.

"I thought about you, you know?" she said without looking at him. "When Lewis had me."

He looked up with wide eyes at her admission and her willingness to make it. He was compelled to move toward her, to touch her so he rose from the arm chair and stepped toward the couch. She raised a palm to fend him off. She didn't want contact, but she kept talking.

"When he had a gun on me, when I was sure he was going to rape me, maybe even kill me ... it was you. It was you I wanted to see," she explained. "And I hate you for that."

He really wanted to touch her, reach out to her, but he knew she wouldn't let him. So he had to speak. "I should have been there."

"You should have been there all along," she fired back.

He was right back to square one, mired in shame and regret. She'd let him take one step forward before launching him three steps back.

He stood and paced the living room, his shoes shuffling along the floorboards and his own hands in his pockets now. "You're right," he told her. "But I wouldn't have been any good to you. I wasn't any good to myself."

He had her attention now, and she wanted to hear more.

"I killed that girl, Olivia."

"You had to shoot her," she said. "As rough as it was, she was going to kill all of us."

Elliot would not be so easily consoled. "I could have shot her in the leg. I didn't have to kill her."

"You know the job," she said, strangely enough now arguing in his defense. "Moments like that you don't get to pick your shot. You don't have time."

"I know all those things. But it didn't change how I felt. Like we'd done all this good, and there were still so many victims. The line was no longer black and white. It was turning more and more gray every day."

"You could have talked to me," she said. Then, with her voice trailing off, added, "I always thought we were friends."

"Best friends," he said, looking her square in the eye so there would be no doubt about his belief in their connection.

"Exactly. So why didn't you ..."

But he cut her off, suddenly brave enough to say it. "Do you know how easy it would have been for me - at my lowest point like that - to fall into your arms?"

Her eyes widened with each word. He'd never - never - so overtly referred to any attraction, dependence, need. Whatever the hell it was that pulsed between them for more than a decade. She was stunned. It's not that she didn't know it was there. It's that she never really knew that he knew.

"Elliot ..."

"I'm sorry," he said, scrubbing a hand over his own face. "I shouldn't have said that."

In a way she didn't want him to take it back. It had taken this many years for anything close to those words to pass between them. There was no way she would let him crawl away from it now.

She rose and took a step toward him, but not close enough to be tempted to touch him. "Is it true? Were you really afraid of that happening between us?"

"Terrified," he said, squaring his shoulders to her. "Every fucking day."

She swallowed hard, suddenly feeling like she was walking through water, struggling for every breath.

"So what did you do?"

"I put in my papers. I drank. I destroyed the final shreds of my marriage."

She'd noticed his bare ring finger earlier in her office but it just pissed her off more that he hadn't told her about another defining moment in his life.

"You're divorced?" she asked, her voice almost cracking.

"Two years."

"Wow," she said, running her hands through her hair and turning away from him again. "I'm so sorry."

He followed her as she stepped away. "Are you, Liv? Really?"

Her whole body snapped around at his accusation. "What the hell does that mean?"

He'd gotten too cocky and moved too quickly with the conversation. He had no right to push for admissions from her. He had no right to push for anything. He needed to backpedal, so he sat down and explained himself softly. "There were times when I was so sure that I saw it. Something in you, a look, a sign that you wouldn't have turned me away."

He'd floated it out there, hoping she'd say something, anything to let him know he wasn't wrong. But she looked down in silence, not wanting to give up the ghost or give him the satisfaction. She couldn't make it that easy for him.

"It's late," she said, her tone colder now. "You should go."

He reluctantly rose again from the chair and grabbed his jacket. She made her way to the door, ready to open it for him and clearly letting him know she was done with this - whatever this was - for tonight anyway.

He walked toward her slowly, stopping just short of touching her. In that moment, when he was clearly at risk of losing her again - he felt compelled to push his luck.

"And now," he said, courageously stepping into her space and reaching his hand up to tuck away hairs that had fallen from her messy bun. "The way you move around that squadroom, I find myself wondering what ... wondering what that ... this new you ... tastes like."

She swallowed hard as her eyes flicked between his and then, as if they had been invited there by his words, fell to his lips. She found herself moving toward him, her eyes slipping shut. He hadn't so much as touched her, but she felt like he was tugging and pulling at her, drawing her closer. She met his lips then, rolling hers firmly over his, lingering momentarily, then pulling away.

She opened her eyes before he did, and waited for him to look at her. "Now you know."

He was grinning ear to ear as he ran his tongue over his own lips, licking at the subtle hints of her that lingered there. He crooked a finger and ran it along her jaw and down the column of her throat. Then he splayed his fingers at the side of her neck, his thumb brushing inside the open collar of her blouse and touching her clavicle. His eyes dragged along the length of her delicate gold necklaces and settled at the dip in her cleavage. She grabbed his wrist immediately. "Stop," she said angrily. "You haven't earned that."

He turned the tables, grabbing both of her wrists and pinning them to the wall beside her head. He leaned into her ear and graveled, "I don't think you hate me, Olivia. I think you want to fuck me."

He thought for sure she'd be pissed. But she smirked at him, her eyes gleaming with impending victory at how quickly the power struggle between them was about to shift. "Maybe I do," she said simply, confidently. He stiffened immediately and swallowed hard as he forced his face not to show the shock rippling through him. "But I'm entirely too pissed at you to do it tonight. So get your hands off me. Now."

He released her wrists and stepped back for his own sake. He lowered his eyes and shook his head subtly but quickly, trying to pull his brain out from under the weight of her words.

"You …," he began. "You're like a weight on my chest. But I'll keep taking the blows. I know I deserve them."

"Just go. Please," she said turning knob and stepping back to let the door open.

He didn't try to kiss her again and he didn't say anything. He simply walked out the door she was holding open for him.

She closed the door behind him and rested her weight against it. She dipped her head and expelled a long, slow breath. It had taken everything in her not to show him what he did to her, what he still made her feel five years into his disappearing act. But she was determined to make him earn his way back into her life.