Chapter 7 #2
"The detective," Elliot said, "has excellent judgment. I've always thought so, for the record. Since day one."
"Since I refused to pull up a tree?"
"Especially since then. You had no idea what you were starting."
"Neither did you."
"No," he admitted, tightening his arm around her, unhurried and content in a way she'd never once seen him during all those careful weeks of restraint. "I really didn't. Best surprise of my very patient life, though."
She swatted him lightly, and he caught her hand and kissed her knuckles instead, unbothered, delighted, entirely hers, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, Simone Adler felt like the truth had finally, finally paid her back for every cost it had ever asked of her.
They lay there a long while after, watching the last color drain from the sky, stars starting to prick through overhead one by one, and neither of them felt any particular urgency to move, the grove holding them both in the same unhurried patience Elliot brought to everything he loved.
"I could stay here all night," Simone murmured, eyes half closed.
"Ground's harder than it looks after the first hour."
"Ruining the moment, Rourke."
"Just being thorough. It's kind of my whole thing." He shifted, pulling her closer, the warmth of him solid and real against the cooling night air. "Stay as long as you want. I'm not in any hurry to leave either."
They didn't, not for a long while, and when they finally did gather themselves up under a sky gone fully dark, Simone found she wasn't thinking about case files or supervisors or any of the careful architecture she'd built her whole professional life around.
"Can I ask you something," she said, buttoning her shirt slowly, in no real hurry despite the cooling air.
"Always."
"Why the grove? Of all the places in this town, why did you pick this one to be your thinking spot?"
Elliot considered the question the way he considered everything, unhurried, turning it over before answering.
"My father used to bring me out here when I was a kid.
Before things got complicated with him. It was the one place that felt like it belonged to nobody and everybody at the same time.
No club, no badge, no reputation to defend.
Just trees that didn't care who you were. "
"That's the most honest answer to a simple question I think I've ever gotten from anyone."
"I did warn you, early on, that honesty was the only mode I came in."
"You did." She leaned back against him, his arms coming around her easily, naturally, like they'd been doing this for years instead of one long spring.
"I'm glad you brought your complicated father-and-grove trauma out here to intersect with my complicated exile-from-a-corrupt-department trauma. Feels very fitting."
"We're a matched set, Detective."
"God help us both."
He laughed, the sound rumbling warm against her back, and pressed a kiss to her temple, unhurried, the way he did everything.
"For what it's worth," he said, quiet now, "I don't think either of us is broken. I think we're just two people who got very good at protecting the things that mattered because nobody else was going to do it for us. That's not the same as broken."
Simone turned in his arms to look at him properly, something in her chest going soft and unguarded in a way she wasn't yet fully used to.
"When did you get so wise, Rourke?"
"Somewhere around the fourth time you refused to pull up a tree and I had to find increasingly creative ways to keep talking to you anyway."
"You could have just asked me to stay."
"I did ask. Repeatedly. You kept leaving anyway."
"I was establishing professional boundaries."
"You were establishing that you needed twenty extra minutes every single time before you could admit you didn't actually want to leave.
" He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, unhurried, watching her with the kind of attention that made her feel, for the first time in longer than she could remember, entirely and completely seen.
"I didn't mind. I'd have waited considerably longer than twenty minutes a night, if that's what it took. "
"How long, exactly? Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically? I'd have sat in this grove until I was an old man if I thought there was any chance you'd eventually pull up a tree."
"That's either the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me, or a genuinely concerning amount of patience."
"With me, Detective, it's rarely just one or the other."
She kissed him for that, slow and easy, no urgency left in it now, just the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of being allowed to.
She was thinking, only, that she'd spent twelve years certain that honesty and loneliness came as a package deal, and that a patient man in a grove had just spent one long spring quietly, thoroughly proving her wrong.
They walked back to the cars together sometime after midnight, hands loosely linked, the whole valley quiet and dark around them except for the distant hum of cicadas and, somewhere far off, a dog barking at nothing in particular.
"Same time tomorrow?" Elliot asked, at her car door, sounding almost bashful about it, an expression she'd never once seen on him before tonight.
"You're asking me on a second date. After we already—"
"I'm asking you on a first actual date. Tonight doesn't count as a date. Tonight was a long time coming and considerably overdue."
"What would a first date even look like, with you? Chess and ledgers?"
"I was thinking dinner. Someplace that isn't a public grove, out of respect for the detective's earlier professional concerns."
"The detective appreciates the gesture."
"The detective," Elliot said, leaning in to kiss her one more time, unhurried, "has spent an entire spring earning considerably more than one dinner. I intend to make good on the rest eventually."
She drove home that night with the windows down despite the chill, humming something she couldn't name, feeling lighter than she had in over a year, and fell asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow, no case files, no old scandals, no ceiling fan ticking anxiously overhead — just the quiet, settled certainty that for the first time in longer than she could remember, she had absolutely nothing left to armor herself against.