A/N: Again, this story not is suitable for younger readers. Thanks to all who are reading and to my reviewers; I appreciate all the responses.

This series is set in the same universe as my "Wedding" series, and follows "I Do" chronologically.

Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY.

Force

Flack slammed the door behind him, threw his keys on the table, and then, picking them up again, hurled them with deadly accuracy at a picture on the wall, smashing the glass.

He strode into the kitchen, flung open the fridge and grabbed a beer from the door. He started to close it, then grabbed a second bottle as well. Twisting off a cap, he took a long swallow, then loosened his tie, pulling it off and throwing it across the room with the jacket that had been stifling him all day. New York had decided an early hot spell would keep things interesting, and as the heat rose, so did the crime rate.

"And it's only May," he thought wearily, finishing off the first bottle and opening the next. He sat down heavily at the small table covered in take out menus and half-eaten food; this was the first night he had been home before midnight in two weeks.

Idly, he pushed through the top layer of menus and take out cartons to look for something which might entice his failing appetite. After today, he may never eat again, he thought, his gorge rising at images from not one, but three crime scenes challenging his notoriously tricky stomach. "A crispy critter in a car, a steamed stiff in a dumpster, and then a three course barbeque in a garage," he thought, his head in his hands. "Vegetarian tonight."

He dug down to menus from months ago, ones for restaurants he could barely remember, and his heart stilled when he turned over one written in Japanese to find Stella's distinctive writing across it. "# 57. #31." He looked at the address: just around the corner. Well, that was what the gods had thrown into his lap. Might as well follow the rolling golden apple, he thought wryly.

As he placed the order over the phone, he stripped off the rest of the clothes that had been sticking to him since the sun rose that morning and finished his second beer before walking into the shower and standing absolutely still until the water cooled to match the chill he had carried inside him for so long he could barely remember a time when memories didn't hurt. Once he had achieved some sort of tenuous balance, he toweled off vigorously, pulling on shorts and a t-shirt that had seen better days before he left high school. Hair still damp and tousled, looking younger than his thirty years, he shoved bare feet into ratty old sneakers and took off down the stairs as if demons could be out-run.

The young woman who had taken his order had told him in heavily accented English that it would be at least forty minutes until his dinner was ready, but he couldn't sit still in his un-air-conditioned apartment. Checking his watch, he decided to walk as far as he could for ten minutes in one direction, and then double back to the restaurant.

Hands thrust into his pockets, he started off at a quick pace, but soon slowed down, meandering a bit as he got closer to the ten minute mark. He had already done his run that morning, and a thirty minute workout at the precinct gym, not that either had helped dispel the funk he was in. Aside from work sucking big time, life in general had been a challenge, he reflected, for months now.

Since Stella had gone undercover. He knew that was the dividing line, the border between okay and screwed up. If he could have just held himself together that day, like he had for weeks before that, months even, things would have stayed on track.

Images of the wedding night filled him for the hundredth time that day, when Stella and he had benefited from the Messers' unused honeymoon suite. Benefited four times, as he recalled, a feat he had not matched since he was a horny 17 year old and had to make up for what he lacked in finesse with recuperative power and enthusiasm. He could feel his cock twitch just thinking about that night. Nothing in his life had prepared him for a Stella Bonasera. It wasn't enough that she was beautiful and smart and strong. She was a lifetime of fantasy women rolled into one.

He hunched over, shoving his hands a little further into his pockets. He tried not to think about that night because inevitably it led to memories of other nights: fuckbuddy hookups at her place, at his place, once in a park, once in a parked car on the way back from a scene. He wasn't proud of it, but he was a guy; he couldn't help being aroused by it. The hunger he had walked out with was swiftly being replaced by a hunger that was not getting much relief these days since he had broken things off with Kandi.

Danny and Lindsay had never given poor Kandi a chance, freezing her out so delicately she had barely felt the incipient hypothermia. Hawkes had been polite, but he had intimidated her just by asking her what she did all day at the precinct. Stella had stopped going out with the team as soon as Kandi had appeared on the scene, and pretty quickly it had been just Kandi and him. He had to admit, although she had a talented tongue and gifted mouth, she was more apt to use them for talking than anything useful.

And she was boring. Flack shuddered as he thought back to night after night of clubbing with Kandi and her friends. Little Kandi with her vast knowledge of pop stars and fashion was undeniably the brightest spark in that box of matches. His hand and a little soap was a better companion than that. There was a fine line between 'uncomplicated' and 'simple'.

He'd never thought he would miss conversations about de-comp and TOD. Never thought topics like that could be foreplay.

So he had let Kandi down easy, handing her off to a rookie cop closer to her age and IQ, and still got a high five and far too much information from young Daniels when they crossed paths. He had taken to avoiding the 15th Precinct at all costs.

Flack checked his watch again and decided to turn back even though he still had three of his ten minutes left. "And stop thinking about Stella," he ordered himself firmly.

Because everything came back to Stella. He had screwed that up big time. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, let his lady have her way, and reap the benefits. And instead of simply saluting her creativity and thanking the gods of combustible sex everywhere, he had had to take a stand. He had to fuck the whole thing up.

He scowled at a young couple sitting in a bus shelter swapping spit and linking tongue piercings. The boy had his hand up the girl's shirt, and she was moaning and giggling. If Flack had brought his badge with him, he'd have rousted them for disturbing the peace.

They were certainly disturbing his peace, anyway.

He turned into the restaurant still a few minutes early, just in time to hear "Order for Bonasera, phone number 555-1234, a number 57 and 31."

He stepped towards the counter to correct the name and take the two paper bags full of tantalizing food when a woman already at the counter picked one up and turned towards him.

"Shit."

Her startled green eyes struck him to the heart, bringing memories flooding back. He looked down at his feet, wincing at the image he must present. He had seen the man she'd been dressing up for the past month: a distinguished diplomatic type with salt and pepper hair and Italian suits who took her to the symphony and the opera. Flack was wearing the same clothes he had worn in high school, literally in the case of the varsity b-ball shirt he was wearing, with St Andrew's emblazoned across the chest.

He stepped past her to the counter as she grabbed the other bag, and said, "Do you have another order? Same phone number - that's my phone number. Name is Flack, number 57, number 31? I called it in," he looked at his watch, "40 minutes ago?"

"Yes, yes, number 57, number 31, for 555-1234. That right? Lady has bags, sir." The young girl behind the counter beamed at him, frowning in dismay when he shook his head.

"No. No. Another order. A different order," he started, but it was obvious from the girl's rapidly disintegrating confidence that she had either got the order wrong, or could not understand him, or both.

"Great. Well, today just got so much better," he muttered under his breath as he turned to leave, nodding brusquely at Stella, who was standing with cash in her hand ready to pay for her dinner. There was a 7-11 down the street; another night of microwaved burritos and nachos with melted cheese crap probably wouldn't kill him.

He was nearly at the door when a hesitant hand touched his arm.

"Don?"

Reluctantly he turned to face her.

"Did I take your dinner?"

"Don't worry about it – not your problem. I'll just grab something else." He smiled briefly and opened the door.

"Oh, this is bloody ridiculous." Her voice was reassuringly irritated. "Do you have beer at your place?"

He stopped dead. "Yes."

"Then if you'll give me a beer, I'll share the sushi with you. The tempura you'll have to fight me for, though."

He didn't move for a minute, just stood in the doorway.

She went on impatiently, "Come on, Flack. We used to be able to do this, you know. Just hang out like friends."

He could feel the words fighting their way up his throat, sitting on the back of his tongue like the bitter pills his father used to make him swallow whole.

Then she laid her hand on his back and said quietly, "Please?"

They walked in silence to his apartment, each carrying one bag of food. When they came through his door, he stopped her with a hand and said gruffly, "Wait here a sec, 'kay?"

Quickly he crunched through the glass spread over the floor, and swept it up, grabbing clothes and tossing them into the bedroom.

He went back to the door to where Stella was standing reasonably patiently. "C'm in." He knew he sounded less than gracious, but damn it all. The world just seemed to be determined to hold him here, right here with a knife at his throat.

Stella walked in as if she owned the place, a trait he had always admired in her, but which he knew actually came from living in foster care homes in her youth. "If you didn't act like it was home from the get-go, they soon got rid of you," she had explained to him once when they had a case involved abuse at a foster home. She ignored the table in the eating nook, going straight to the couch and pulling containers out of the paper bags, setting them out on the coffee table before breaking her chopsticks apart and rubbing the ends together to get rid of any splinters.

She looked up to see Flack leaning on the doorway, watching her with guarded blue eyes. "What?"

He shrugged and said mildly, "I'm wondering why you're here." He wasn't going to be able to stomach any food anyway, he knew, so he might as well get the worst of it over with at once.

"Do you have any beer or not?" She grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, clicking through the channels while he went into the kitchen and grabbed two bottles. If she jumped when he slammed the fridge door, there was no sign of it when he came back in. She had found the baseball game on TSN and had the sound down low, but loud enough for him to follow the action. He handed her a beer.

She twisted off the cap and took a long swallow, and Flack nearly choked on the swig he had just taken when she wrapped her lips around the neck of the bottle. Then she grabbed one of the bento boxes and expertly fished a tuna sashimi out. "Come on. Sit and eat, and tell me about the Porter case."

He sat and glanced into the other bento box, sighing when he saw that there was more tuna than salmon. He could just about stomach the salmon, but raw tuna never sat well. He grabbed an avocado roll, too impatient for chopsticks.

Stella slowly managed to coax some stories out of Flack, and some food into him. Wrapped up in talking about the worst case of the day, or yelling at an umpire's bad call, he didn't even notice when she swapped all his tuna pieces for her salmon.

The food was finished, the empty containers cleaned up, and Flack was beginning to drift off as the game wound down. Stella stood up, and went down the hall, looking around as she went. Other than the dining table, the apartment was painfully clean, as if he was never in long enough to mess it up. There was nothing in the fridge but beer and a jug of water; she had checked when she had taken the empty containers and bottles in. The bathroom was messy, at least.

She stood at the bedroom door, not going in, just silently observing. The bed was unmade, and clothes were lying as they had been thrown, some from the door, she could tell, probably what he had been cleaning up when he made her wait. She had noticed the broken glass in the hall; she wondered if it were coincidence that the destroyed picture was one of Flack receiving his Purple Shield and a commendation from the Commissioner. She knew that in the background, the team was lined up in dress blues, on parade. She had been standing next to Mac.

She had the same photo in her bedroom.

She leaned against the doorframe. The room smelled dusty and stale, and she longed to open the windows to bring some fresh air in, but didn't dare. She'd given up the right not once, but over and over. Even being here now was wrong and unfair.

She walked back to the living room, where Don had fallen asleep on the couch. He was breathing slowly, face relaxed under disheveled hair. He looked young, even younger than his actual age, and she realized with a bit of a shock that he had started to look old at work; the responsibility his job entailed was aging him, hardening him.

She sat in a chair across the room and watched him. Memories came flooding back over the dam she had worked so hard to build: dinners snatched on the run; running jokes that lightened the hard cases and held back the nightmares; too few nights spent holding each other, drowning out the victim's cries and the monsters' excuses. It had all worked; it had all been okay, until that one night after they broke the child-porn ring when she changed everything.

Again.

It was all supposed to be a game, she thought, examining him as if he were under a microscope. A little somethin'-somethin' between friends: no strings, no expectations. She'd done it before, successfully, stayed friends with two guys from college and one of the sergeants from her days in Narcotics. She knew it could work out fine. So why had it all come crashing down with Flack, with a guy she really cared about? Why had it left them here, in this place, with poorly mended hearts and broken glass?

She shivered as her treacherous body went back to that night, a night that coloured her every fantasy. She had liked the control at first, enjoyed the sensation over someone like Flack, a man who wore power slicked over his skin like sweat. She had loved feeling his body tense under hers, struggling to subdue his own needs to her desires.

But she had lost focus when she looked into his eyes, when she saw lust and desire drown in a wave of love. He loved her, and she was using him. She knew it, and so did he, and she knew she had to stop.

After that night, she had stopped answering his phone calls and had him re-assigned to other CSIs on the job. When that became too difficult, she had gone to Miami for a week of sun and sand and uncomplicated sex with any attractive man she could find.

So she hadn't found anyone who turned her on. It happens, she tried to convince herself, even on the beaches of Florida. She had slept with Horatio Caine for old times' sake; he was still in shock over the death of his young wife Marisol.

She shrugged away the memory of a pity fuck gone horribly wrong. At least they had been able to stay friendly.

Flack muttered in his sleep, head turning restlessly. Stella shrank back into the easy chair. She should go.

But somehow she felt powerless to leave. She had screwed this up, and left them both in this weird frozen state: not able to go back, not able to move on. She knew he had broken up with Kandi; Officer Daniels had been voluble in his grateful disbelief. She hadn't been with anyone since that disastrous attempt with Horatio; the man who took her to concerts she couldn't otherwise afford liked a pretty woman on his arm and a young man in his bed.

She slowed her breathing to match his. They were both lost and searching for a way out and she needed to do more than just sit under a tree and wait for the birds to cover her up with leaves.

Flack shifted on the couch, and began to snore.

Loudly.

So loudly he woke himself up with a start, making Stella jump in her shadowed corner.

He sat up, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. "You still here?"

She nodded.

"Why?"

"I wanted to make sure you were okay."

He stood up and stretched restlessly. "The day three beers and raw fish take me down is the day I'm in a box." He began to prowl around the room, picking things up and moving them aimlessly.

"Are you okay?"

"No." The answer was so quiet she nearly missed it, but she couldn't miss the book that flew past her to hit the wall with a stunning force.

"What the hell do you want from me, Stel? Why did you have to show up tonight? Tonight of all fucking nights. Danny and Lindsay all over each other everywhere I look today."

He glared at her with something akin to hatred.

She grimaced. Three hundred and sixty-five days equaled two anniversaries.

Her silence fueled his rage. "Every time I think I'm over this – I think I'm past it all – you crook your finger and I come running. Do you like that? Is that why you do it? You get bored and decide to take GI Don out of his box to play with a little more?" Shaking with fury, the words poured out of him in a steady caustic stream.

Stella shrank further into the chair, hands clenched tight on the arms, but otherwise motionless.

"I guess it isn't all your fault, is it? I could stop. Just walk away and stop sitting there waiting for you to come pick me up. But it doesn't matter what I do. Everything begins and ends with you."

He sat down suddenly, a puppet whose strings had been cut, all long loose limbs and no life.

They sat in a bubble of silence that stretched into eternity.

Finally Don raised his head. "I'm sorry." The words were dull. "I didn't mean to frighten you. Christ, I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "You didn't."

Her hands did not loosen from the arms of the chair though.

"Christ." His voice was filled with self-loathing now, and he was back on his feet and moving fast. She had to turn her head to watch him. "I'm as bad as Mala. Worse, because I know what he did to you. Get out, Stel. Leave now. I can't be responsible for what I may do."

Stella shook her head again, but did not move.

"Why are you here? Do you want to talk? Fine. Talk. Let me down easy this time. Or are you just going to disappear again, cut me out of your life? Leave me sitting in a shit pile not knowing what I did wrong or where I fucked up? Because I know I fucked up. I just don't know how."

She sat, silent, tongue-tied, scraped raw by his agony. In spite of the heat, she was shivering.

"Are you here for a fuck? Is that it? Gentlemen, start your engines? 'Cause you know you got me." He held his arms out wide, his eyes burning and wild. "Stud-on-call. All you have to do is look at me and I'm good to go. I told you, you never needed to tie me down. I'll perform on command like any other dog. You're still holding the leash, lady."

He was on his knees now in front of her, wrung out, torn apart, hands resting on the chair, head bowed.

Stella unclenched her hands slowly. They ached and she struggled to lift them. She buried them in his hair, feeling him warm and vital under her bloodless fingers, bending to rest her forehead on his.

He knelt, passive and drained, until he felt her tears on his face, and he broke, his arms wrapping around her desperately.