Chapter Two:

"Why?" I say before I can stop myself, although it's not the question I meant to ask. There are so many others racing through my mind, jostling for space, shouting in my brain before they're swallowed by a slow, creeping fog of dread. But my throat is stopped up, and I can't force anything out except for that one, stupid word. Why?

"Why?" Alex folds her legs beneath her skirt, causing the hem to ride up along a sleek thigh, but I barely notice. Somehow, I'm numb to her. She stares at me over the tops of her glasses, and I can see the tiredness in her eyes as she reaches up to adjust the frames. "I don't know the answer to that, Olivia. I just like them." She pauses. "I wish I didn't."

"And the graphs?" I ask. "All those charts?"

Alex pulls her lower lip between her teeth, an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. It is not like her at all. Finally, she sighs. "A little literary analysis. I wanted to prove to myself that Poletti and I were different. That the fantasies in our heads were different."

"And?"

"And they were different," Alex says. She hesitates again. "But not different enough to make me feel better."

"Different how?" Part of me feels bad for pushing her, but not bad enough to stop. There is a feverish sort of heat inside of me, a confused sear of worry and pain and betrayal that is slowly burning me from the inside out.

"I can't get aroused if there are men involved," she says. "Or when someone gets killed or mutilated. I really did almost throw up when I had to read Poletti's stories in court."

I am not sure why, but this only makes me angrier. I don't want to know any more details, but it's obvious that Alex has thought this through. She probably analyzed it in her own brain long before she ever analyzed it on paper. And she didn't tell me. Not once. She kept it a secret.

But maybe I should have known. There were signs. Have I been deliberately blocking them out? Ignoring them? Suddenly, I remember all the times I've gone down on her, and pieces click together. The way she asks for my fingers right at the start, then loses herself in her own head instead of looking at me. I've gazed up along the beautiful, flat expanse of her stomach so many times, watching her breasts rise and fall, waiting for her eyes to open. But they hardly ever do. When we first started dating, she could barely come that way at all, but she humored me. I thought she had eventually learned to enjoy it. I thought that maybe she had just been self-conscious. She was the only woman I had ever been with who could take or leave oral sex.

I often wondered what she was thinking in those moments. Now, I know.

"Is everything we've done some kind of lie?" I blurt out. I regret the words the second after I say them, but I'm too angry to hold them back. She should have told me. This isn't the kind of secret you keep from someone you love. Someone you trust. Someone you whisper to at midnight. "You just… what, pretended I was raping you every time we made love?" Suddenly, my anger devolves into fear. Maybe something about me made it easy for her to pretend. She knows about my past. Knows who my biological father was and what he did. Maybe -

"Of course not." Alex recoils, obviously hurt, and presses herself against the arm of the couch. I can tell she desperately wants to look away, to break our eye contact again. But she won't let herself. "Of course not," she repeats. A little softer, a little sadder. She stares at me with wide, open eyes, and they are swimming with tears, willing me to believe her. "I love making love with you." When I don't respond, she stands up, taking my hands. I let her, but my fingers stay limp, refusing to curl around hers. "Olivia, please…"

"Did I do something to make you this way?" I ask, not sure whether to be angry at her or afraid of myself. "Did I…" I can't finish. My focus is being torn in two directions, and I feel like I'm being torn along with it.

Alex shakes her head and lets my hands fall. "No. I've had these thoughts since I was twelve."

That shocks me into silence for several moments. Twelve? Twelve years old? I knew what rape was when I was twelve, but only because my mother let it slip years earlier. I knew it was terrible and shameful, and that it was where I had come from. And that it was the reason my mother drank. At least, I knew that it was why she drank on my good days. On my bad days, I was convinced that she drank because of me.

"When I was growing up, normal twelve year olds cared about which stickers their friends put on their trapper keepers, Alex," I say, my voice hinging on desperate.

"I wasn't a normal twelve year old," Alex says. "And neither were you." The rest of the sentence is implied: and neither are the countless young victims we try to help every day. I want to believe children that age are innocent, but so many aren't, whether because they've been abused, or because puberty hit early and with a vengeance. Thanks to my mother, I had certainly lost my innocence by then.

"You should have told me," I insist. "This is important, Alex-"

"And when was I supposed to tell you, Olivia? After you've interviewed a ten year old girl who was raped by her stepfather? Before Warner calls you in to look at another dead victim so you can match it to the serial rapist you've been tracking? Or on one of the nights when you cry for what happened to your mother?"

"That isn't fair," I snap, pulling away from her as quickly as I can. "I would have listened." But, deep down, I wonder if that's really true. I want to believe that I would have listened. That I would have tried to understand. But after a hard day like the ones Alex described, I'm not sure. And right now, I just feel sick.

"I know you would have listened," Alex whispers. She continues carefully, hesitantly, and I realize that she's ashamed. I have seen Alex Cabot angry, disappointed, and even devastated, but I have never seen her ashamed before. "But I love you too much to ask."

To ask? Ask what? Ask me to listen, or ask me to rape her? I'm not sure I want to know.

I begin to circle the coffee table, unwilling to sit down on the couch near Alex and unable to hold still. There is a pounding, insistent throb at the front of my head, thudding harder and harder even when I bring my hand up to put pressure on my forehead and temples. "You work the same job that I do. You see what the victims go through. And you still want to be raped?"

"Of course I don't want to be raped." I'm almost relieved to hear an edge of annoyance return to Alex's voice. It's an improvement on the apologetic whispering. "I have fantasies about it, but those are completely different. In a fantasy, I have complete control. And I didn't tell you about them because you didn't need to know."

That makes me whirl back on her before I can turn the corner of the table again. "I didn't need to know?" I bite out, curling my fingers into fists. They shake with tension as I hold them at my sides. "Alex, I had every right to know!"

"Why?" She narrows her eyes at me, lips pressed together. "Do you bring all of your porn to me for approval before you get yourself off? Do you tell me every single thing that goes on in your head?"

"That isn't the same, Alex."

"It's exactly the same. This was a fantasy I had no intention of ever asking you to realize with me, and I knew that telling you would cause a lot of pain for both of us. I didn't want to hurt you, so I kept it to myself."

My shoulders slump. My hands unclench. My breathing slows down. I want to deny it, but I can see the truth written on Alex's face. She had kept her fantasies a secret to avoid hurting me, not to protect herself. I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse, but the pain in my chest makes me wonder if my heart is about to crack in half.

"I wish you'd told me," I tell her, even though I'm not sure if it's the truth. Part of me already wishes that I didn't know.

"No - no, you wish I wasn't like this." Finally, Alex tears her eyes away from mine and stares down into her lap instead, where her hands are folded carefully over her thighs. "It's all right," she says. "Most of the time, I wish I wasn't like this, too."

My anger twists into guilt instead. She's right, I realize. I do wish she wasn't like this. However much I hate knowing that she fantasizes about something as horrible as rape, however much I hate the secret-keeping and the deception, however much I resent her for springing this on me even though I asked… she has to hate it even more.

As the first wave of hurt begins to fade, other feelings rise to the surface. I love Alex. I want to comfort her. I lower myself onto the couch beside her, and when she doesn't look up right away, I reach out and put one of my hands over hers.

"You really weren't going to tell me, were you?"

Alex shoves her glasses further up on her nose again before she raises her chin, but I catch her swiping her fingers beneath them, probably brushing away a few stray teardrops. When she looks up at me, though, I can't tell that she has been crying. "No. I wasn't. You're the kindest, gentlest, most honorable person I've ever met, Olivia Benson. I couldn't ask you to be something you're not, even if it's only pretend."

I take Alex's hand, letting her fingers lace with mine, letting our palms press together. Even after all this, it feels incredibly right just to hold her hand. "So, where do we go from here?" I ask, my voice breaking a little with uncertainty. I'm calm for the moment, but I can still feel hurt coiling in my chest, threatening to tighten its hold and choke me again. "What do you want me to do?"

"I don't want you to do anything," Alex says. "I just want things to stay the way they are." She swallows, breathes slowly, leans a little closer. "I want you to stay."

"I never said anything about leaving," I say, stroking my thumb over the soft blue vein that runs across the back of her pale hand. But for one, guilty second, when Alex confessed that the other stories were hers, I had thought about it. Thought about running from the apartment, and going… where, exactly? Not back to my place, where the loneliness would creep in and leave me nothing to think about but Alex. And not to Elliot's, where I might be walking in on a family dinner. Back to the bull pen at One Hogan Place, maybe.

But I haven't left. I am still here. That, at least, is one thing I have done right tonight.

Alex's relief is visible. The line of her shoulders drops, and she sighs as she tucks her cheek against my shoulder. I wrap an arm around her. "Olivia," she mumbles into the sleeve of my sweater, nuzzling closer to my neck, "let's just forget about this. You know now, but nothing has to change."

"Okay," I whisper, grazing my lips against her silky hair, inhaling the scent of her shampoo. "Okay. Nothing has to change."

But even as I say it, I know it is a lie. Things have already changed, and there's no taking it back.