The thing was, Jackie was right.
Elliot didn't want to lose his family. Didn't want to lose Kathy after eight more years of trying to make it work, of making it work. Didn't want to break her heart, or tell her she was right to leave him the first time. Didn't want to quit, to walk away from the woman he had sworn to love in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part. Didn't want to admit that she was right, that they never should have come here, that the move to Nebraska was gonna be the straw that broke the camel's back. And he didn't want to lose Eli. Didn't want to go from seeing his son every day to seeing him on weekends, maybe; hell, if shit went sideways with Kathy she'd probably take him back to New York, and then what was Elliot gonna do? Quit the Marshals, leave Liv behind, and try to find a new job somewhere else? Stay in Nebraska with Liv and become a stranger to his son?
He didn't want to lose his family, and he didn't want to hurt Liv more than he already had. When he left the job, when he left her, he'd quit her cold turkey in the hopes that the totality of his absence would set her free. Now he was back, a deadweight around her neck; how was she gonna move on, build a new life here, if he was lurking just over her shoulder, dragging her back to the old one? How could she be Lindsey, if he didn't let Olivia go?
As he drove his belly churned unpleasantly, guilt biting at him from every direction. Wasn't this part of the reason he left Liv behind? With Liv and Kathy both in his life he found himself constantly having to choose; to choose between the job and his family, his partner and his wife. Caught in an eternal struggle where it seemed that no matter what choice he made someone always ended up hurt, he'd walked away to put an end to it. To choose, once and for all. No more NYPD, no more Liv, just Kathy, just the kids, just the solemn oath he'd sworn before God to love and protect his family. What was he thinking, staying here, risking his new job before he'd ever even really got started just to keep Liv close to him? When he first met Liv he'd been thrown headlong into this quagmire with no idea what waited for him; he knew, now. He knew the risks. He knew the cost. How could he justify willingly putting himself, putting his family, putting Liv through all that again?
How could he not? How could he just leave her, lost and alone, in the moment when she most needed a friend? How could he bear to walk away from her a second time? What would become of him if he did?
By the time he parked the car in front of his house he was practically vibrating, furious with himself, terrified of the choices in front of him, so topful of guilt there was hardly room enough in his lungs for him to draw breath. He had to find some way to put it down, to vent this pressure, or else he felt he might burst.
But he couldn't tell Kathy. Couldn't violate Liv's trust or the edicts of his newfound profession in such a devastating way, couldn't put Liv's safety at risk, couldn't face Kathy and the heartbreak he knew this would bring to her if she ever found out that for the last week every night he'd been away from her bed had been spent with him sitting in the car in front of Liv's house. She'd be angry, but it wasn't her anger that worried him. It was her sorrow, and he knew that sorrow would be vast and ruinous.
He walked into the house as quietly as he could, praying she'd be asleep, but God's grace was not with him tonight; Kathy was sitting in the living room with a book on her lap. She'd not been reading it, or if she had she'd stopped when he pulled in the drive; the book was closed, and her expression was weary as she stared up at him from the wan circle of light glowing from the lamp on the table beside her.
"Is there any point in asking where you were?"
It was the resignation in her voice that broke him. Like she had given up trying to get him to love her, to see her, like she had made peace with the rending of their marriage, like she wasn't even angry, anymore.
How could he have done this to her? They'd been married more than thirty years; surely he owed it to her to be a better man, a better husband, than he had been lately.
"Come here," he said, holding out his hand to her.
For a moment she stared at him with unreadable eyes and he began to worry that it was too late already, that she had checked out of their marriage completely and had no intention of trying to salvage it, but only for a moment. She did take his hand, eventually, let him pull her to her feet.
This is your wife, he reminded himself. This is the woman you've chosen to spend your life with.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It won't happen again."
Please, God, he prayed. Don't make a liar out of me.
"You can't promise me that."
"No," he allowed. "But I can try. Come here, baby."
He pulled her in closer, and before she could stop him he sank his mouth over hers. He meant for the kiss to be gentle, tender and slow, a reassurance she sorely needed, but the first familiar brush of her lips lit a fire somewhere deep inside him. All that anger, all that grief, all that fear and all that shame, it sparked a flame that roared into life. This is where you put it down, he thought. There had been plenty of nights, in the old days, when he'd come to Kathy with trembling hands and a belly full of poision and she had sheltered him between her thighs and let him pound out his fury against her until they were both spent, and at peace. It was what happened the night Eli was conceived; a bad case and his heart in shambles, and her holding her arms open for him, that had brought them another child and saved their marriage. If it worked back then, why shouldn't it work now?
His kiss turned frantic, heated, and she gasped, surprised, maybe, but he did not give her the space to run from him, just tangled his fingers in her soft hair and pulled her in closer, ground his hips against her and let her feel his burgeoning arousal, his heartbeat loud as thunder in his ears.
"Elliot, wait," she gasped, tearing herself away from him, but he would not be deterred, just let his hands began to wander over her body, familiar to him as his own. "Eli-"
"Eli's asleep," Elliot rumbled at her. "I want you right here, right now."
If she made him wait, made him walk up the stairs behind her and keep his hands to himself until they were safely inside their bedroom, he worried his desire would leave him entirely. If he allowed himself to think, even for a moment, about where he'd been tonight, and why, about what he wanted and why he was so desperate for Kathy now when he hadn't touched her once since the move, if the silence of the house allowed the ghostly echo of Olivia's voice to permeate his brain, he might not be able to go through with this at all.
"Right here?" she repeated breathlessly, looking up at him with something like hope in her eyes.
"Right now," he growled, and then he kissed her again, and this time she did not fight him.
This time she clung to him, and kissed him back, wrapped her arms around him and let him take her right there on the bare patch of floor in front of the sofa, louder and harder and more desperate than they had been for one another in a decade. In the darkness behind his closed eyelids he saw Olivia, saw her proud face and the flash of her dark eyes, and tried with the full might of his body to pound the memory of her away.
It did not work; it never had, and when Kathy came undone he followed after, sinking his teeth into the delicate curve of her shoulder to keep from crying out the wrong name.
September 24, 2015
It got a little easier, with each passing day. After the debacle on Sunday night Elliot had not come around again; she'd been looking for him, through the window of her new bedroom, searching the night for his car, but she caught no sign of him. He did not call, and she remembered to check the alarm before she stepped out her door, and life settled into something that felt a little more like normal.
It was normal, to her, thinking about him even when he wasn't there. It was normal, to her, being furious with him and wanting to see him both. It was all so goddamn normal, because this, now, felt exactly like four years ago, like sitting at her desk and staring across the empty space where he was meant to be.
On Thursday afternoon she sat herself down on a lawn chair in her new backyard and watched Noah chase a soccer ball across the grass. It was warm, still, but wouldn't be for long; winter in Nebraska would come early, she knew, earlier than in the city, and this would be a winter unlike any she had ever known.
From the other side of the fence that separated her yard from the one next door she heard the sound of a dog barking, a child's laughter following after.
Maybe I should get him a dog, she thought. Olivia Benson had never entertained such a thought in her entire life; she did not spend enough time at home to care for a dog, could never have given a dog the kind of life it deserved, and never really wanted to, anyway, but things were different here. She was different here. A dog could keep Noah company; he'd have someone to play with, someone to love. The house felt strangely empty, no sound of neighbor's feet from above or neighbor's TVs from next door, isolated, even though really no more than twelve feet separated her house from the one where the dog was barking. A little company might do them both some good.
Noah had been trying and failing to land a kick on the ball, and when he finally did he stopped and looked up at her, looked to her for praise, for reassurance, and she gave it to him at once.
"Good job!" she told him, clapping. "Can you do it again?"
Noah nodded seriously, and then raced off after the ball.
"Hey, new neighbor!" a voice called from the other side of the fence. The voice belonged to a man; the fence was six feet tall, and when she looked Olivia could just see the top of his head above it.
"Hey!" she forced herself to answer.
"Ope, hang on a second…"
There came a shuffling sound from the other side of the fence, like he was dragging something heavy, and then the twin thumps of footfalls, and next thing she knew he was suddenly significantly taller than he had been a moment before. He must have found a chair or something to stand on, and now he was smiling down at her, waving in a welcoming, dopey sort of way.
Dopey, maybe, but he wasn't bad to look at. A little over six feet tall, broad through the shoulders, dark hair and warm dark eyes, a nice square jaw. A midwestern dream.
"I'm Paul," he said cheerily.
"Lindsey," she answered.
"Nice to meet you, Lindsey. And who's this?"
Noah stood frozen on the other side of the yard, staring at Paul in open-mouthed confusion.
"That's N - Gabe," she answered, catching herself before she accidentally said Noah.
"Nice to meet you, Gabe!" Paul said, waving again. "My son Riley's only a little bigger than you are, maybe you two can play together sometime."
What the fuck is going on right now? Olivia wondered. Nothing quite this Rockwellian had ever happened to her before.
"That'd be great," she said, because Olivia Benson would've made some excuse and gone inside, but Lindsey Duncan didn't have any reason to be afraid of her blandly handsome neighbor.
"So," Paul said. "Haven't seen much of you! Are you keeping the home fires burning while your husband's at work?"
"Uh."
Now or never, she told herself. She and Noah couldn't stay cooped up in the house forever; she was going to have to get a job, and they were going to have to meet people, and she was going to have to figure out how to be Lindsey Duncan. Might as well start now.
"Gabe's father passed away, actually," she said. "It's just us."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." He did actually sound sorry. "It's just me and Riley, too. Only my wife - my ex-wife - she's not dead, she's just…well."
"Yeah."
They both went quiet for a second, and Olivia cast about in her mind, desperately searching for something to say. Christ, when was the last time she'd made small talk with anyone? What did people normally talk about with their neighbors? In the city they'd mostly just ignored one another.
"Well, I work from home," Paul said. "So, I'm pretty much always around, if you ever need anything."
"Thanks, that's…thanks."
She had no intention of calling Paul to come change a lightbulb or fix a leaky faucet. But he did seem nice, and if his kid was the same age as Noah maybe they could all be friends, eventually. Maybe that'd be ok.
"Say, anyone tell you about the block party yet?"
"Block party?" Olivia repeated. She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
"Oh, yeah, it's the best. We do it all the time. We'll shut the street down -"
"Shut the street down?"
"Oh, just for a bit," he waved her concerns away, smiling. "Just the houses on this cul de sac. There's, oh, boy, I don't know, maybe eight families, we like to get together in the summer. Turn the sprinklers on, let the kids run, grill some burgers. It's BYOB, of course. Be great for you to get a chance to meet everyone! And Gabe could make some new friends."
Was that something real people did, she wondered, sit on the street in lawnchairs and eat burgers with their neighbors? Was it something she could do?
"Sounds great," she said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, which was in fact very little. "When is it?"
"Tomorrow night. We'll get started around six."
"We'll be there."
"Great! I -"
The dog started barking again, and something crashed behind Paul, and he shot her an apologetic look.
"Gotta run," he said. "Nice meeting you, Lindsey! See you tomorrow!"
"See you tomorrow," she answered faintly.