Something had been off with Rick all morning, Kate's last as his and Jordan's shadow, and though she hadn't known what it was, she'd sensed it right away. He'd shown up late, without a shave, without a smile or a wisecrack, his words few and sharp, and without having had the opportunity to get him alone before the call about the body had come in, the only things she'd been able to do about it were wonder and worry.

"Some going-away present," Jordan dropped in Kate's ear from the doorway, their crime scene inside a snapshot of utter savagery. "Don't go in. You don't need to see the rest."

Kate acknowledged the admonition, appreciated the implicit concern, but whatever else was in that bedroom didn't matter, because Rick was the only thing she could see. Not even its white walls, splattered floor to ceiling with the crimson of murder, could pull her away. Against probability, beyond understanding, yet without doubt, he had become a polestar, a place from which her mind and body had come to draw unbounded comfort and pleasure, yet in thirty-one hours, she would be on an airplane home, alone.

An ache lived inside of her now, one born of the inescapable acceptance of the little time that remained, and never before had she felt anything like it, nor did she imagine, if asked, she would be able to convey its sensation, but as she stood there watching him, its throb was sturdy and unyielding, much like his focus.

"Maybe if it talks to him, he'll snap out of his pissy mood," Jordan commented further, exiting the room after a confab with Lanie about the victim. "Hey, Cooper," she hollered into the small crowd behind them, "where's Simms?"

Rick finally straightened from his crouch and came walking over, gave Jordan a flat look, Kate not much more. "Simms and Cole are knocking on doors," he told her. "I'm going downstairs." He left without another word.

"So much for the mood," Jordan noted as she dialed Simms. "When you're done with the sweep," she said when he answered, "call me. We're going back to the house." Lanie, busy giving her team instructions over the body, got only a hand to signal their departure, and offered the same. "Let's go, before he decides to take the car and leave us here."

xxxx

Montgomery pulled Kate into his office for their final tête-à-tête shortly after they'd all returned to the precinct, the partners left to gather whatever preliminary information they could on their victim, Rick's virtual silence still lingering following the ride back.

"There's a prior for possession and a DUI from '09," Jordan announced around her computer screen, but the share elicited no response. "If I'm doing this alone, fine, but could you at least let me know so I don't waste my goddamned time talking to a wall."

Rick's eyes found Kate through the office glass across the bullpen but didn't settle. They wanted to, but he wouldn't let them. "What else is it you'd like me to do, Jordan? I'm here. I'm working. I heard you." There was a weight bearing down on him, that of Kate's looming departure, one grueling in its haul, and he'd woken with it strapped to his back and to his heart. "Can I maybe have one day without this shit from you?"

"Grow up, Rick," she snapped. "You're the one dragging your personal crap in here. Is this how it's going to be when she's gone, too?"

He pushed angrily from his desk, went off for the break room. She always saw, always fucking knew, and she always threw it in his face that she did. Standing there in front of the coffee machine, he could see Kate in her last meeting before the end, and he wanted to scream until all the glass in the place shattered into a million pieces from the force of his heartache.

How did you let it happen? a voice inside rebuked him. How, when you knew you couldn't keep her? But he already knew. He was looking right at the answer-right at every answer. There was no how. There was no avoidance. The simple arrival of her in his world had ensured it, and now there was no going back.

"I just heard today's Kate's last day." Ellison had come into the room after him, though without being noticed. "It's been pretty fun having her around, huh?" he said with a note of melancholy. Rick glanced over his shoulder, acknowledged the man's presence, but had no reply he cared to offer. "At least we'll have the show to watch, I guess."

Rick had tasted her lips, touched her naked skin, fallen asleep in her arms. As if a fucking TV show could ever be adequate consolation for the loss of any of it.

"Yeah," he said finally, just so Ellison would take his idiotic puppy-dog crush and go.

xxxx

Kate's text message buzzed his phone just after 6PM, after Rick's head had been pounding for the better part of three hours, his entire day gone by without a morsel of food save for the pack of gum he'd opened that morning and nearly polished off. She'd left the 12th hours before for a final session with her trainer at the studio, the plan to meet at Rick's apartment sometime afterward for a meal he'd, the day before, insisted upon preparing.

He was already on his way home, having ditched Jordan early, but with the intention of putting in some weekend hours to make up for it-not that she'd come out and condemned his exit, or that she had to with the scowl she'd given him. "Whenever, I'm at the store," he typed back coolly from the check-out line, because the truth was, as much as he longed for the time alone with her, he dreaded the night ahead and the finality it would bring.

An hour later she'd arrived, having not showered before she'd come, wanting just to get there, to be there with him, so he'd offered his, left out his now famous Zeppelin t-shirt for her to slide into when she was done, which she'd quietly found more than a little bit sexy.

Her skin warm and wrapped in a piece of him, she emerged from the bedroom to find him at the stove, the modest table against the wall set for two. "Thank you for this," she said of the cotton hanging seductively off of one of her shoulders with its size. "It smells like you. That's my favorite part."

Rick remained stoic, fixed on his task, his back all he gave, but his legs grew unsteady beneath him with his imagined picture of her. "I bought red and white. They're on the table, if you want." He picked up a spoon and pushed the vegetables around the pan as if they mattered, as if any of it mattered, and that's when he felt her close in.

"I want you to tell me what's wrong, Rick. I want to know why you've barely said two words to me today-to anyone-and why you won't even look at me. Did I do something?"

She had done something. She'd come in and blown up his life, yet it'd been no more deliberate an act than the air moving in and out of his lungs as he stood there in the middle of her fire, and he knew that but it still burned. "You should sit," he said in avoidance. "It's fresh pasta. It'll only take a couple of minutes."

"I don't care about the pasta, Rick. Is that what you think? That I came here to eat?"

He finally turned, found her closer than he expected. "Then why are you here? To tell me how nice it would be if we could be friends and keep in touch?" Tugging the dish towel from his shoulder, he threw it down onto the counter. "I don't want to be your fucking friend, Kate."

"Well, thank you for that," she replied acerbically and moved away before a swift return. "You know, you're not the only one who feels something here, Rick. I'm drowning in this, too, and I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do about it. Do you think it's any easier being the one who's leaving?"

He looked into her emerald eyes wet with the sheen of tears they still clung to, and he closed his own. "How does anyone ever let you go?" he whispered to everyone and no one at all. "I've only had you for a few days and I already can't imagine any possible answer to that question."

Kate stepped into him, bunched the fabric hanging at his hips in her fists. "You've had me since the minute I first saw you, even with that ridiculous doughnut cream caked on your lip," she confessed before a pause. "And you think that because you haven't seen any of the bad stuff, any of the stuff that would make you want to."

"Bad stuff like being a complete asshole to someone you care about on the last day you have with her and then throwing a tantrum over something you can't control instead of telling her how incredible she looks wearing your shirt and then taking her to bed?" He stopped for a breath, glanced back at the stove. "And like burning dinner?"

She smiled softly, reached up and traced the line of his jaw with her finger. "Turn it off." When she backed away he complied, followed her into the bedroom. "Sit." He crossed to the foot of the bed, pushed aside the work clothes he'd tossed there, watched as the wet hair she freed from its binding tumbled down over her shoulders.

"Nothing could ever make me want to let you go," Rick pledged, welcoming her body between his thighs, contracting his muscles to keep hold while his fingers climbed her bare legs. "I want to see everything, Kate, all of you-good, bad, I don't care what." He inched the hem of the tee above her hips when he met it, seeking access to the nectar he craved, and he found no impediment.

"I told you. I didn't come here for food." He dipped into her, pressed his lips against her skin, and when his tongue found her, her pleasure flowed out in her words and he felt himself instantly harden. "I…I came here…for you," she professed breathless, and lowered herself onto his lap, worked the obstacles of his jeans in an effort to free him. "Can we be here instead of in tomorrow, Rick? Please?"

He responded with a searing kiss, one that consumed them both, one that carried them on to morning.

xxxx

Kate lifted her head, pressed her lips to his chest in the early-morning light. "You look exhausted," she observed with an air of amusement, "and beautiful. Tell me what you're going to do today besides take a very well-earned nap."

He spoke as his thumb drew a lazy path along the exposed skin of her back. "The pleasure was mostly mine," he beamed. "And besides think about you, I need to get some work done. Shaw was still there when I left last night, and she wasn't too happy about it."

"Jordan thinks the world of you, Rick. She's proud to call you her partner. I hope you realize that."

Rick guffawed but quickly quieted. "I don't know, maybe. Can we talk about me thinking about you, instead? Wait, what time do you have to go?" Worried, he tried to angle for the clock, but couldn't get a look at it from his position.

"Relax, not for a little while. I'm not done with you, yet," she said, wrapping a leg around his.

He kissed the crown of her head, idled in the fragrance of her hair. "Don't ever be done with me," he murmured, intending not to be heard and failing at it. "Hey, since I ruined dinner, do you want me to make you some breakfast? You haven't eaten a thing. You're probably starving."

"I think I'm falling in love with you."

They were the most perfect words that'd ever been said to him, even with their admitted uncertainty, and he'd never lived a moment he wished more to commit to memory exactly as it was.

"You only think?" he teased, not that what she'd said had earned the whimsy, but he knew had he not taken that route, the chance he could've frightened her with his own admission was a terribly real one.

Kate tilted up again, set her chin on his ribs, waited until she'd had a moment to take him in before revealing herself. "No. I know. I've known, and I don't want this to be over, Rick. I want you."

He cupped her cheek in his hand. "I have never wanted anything more in my life than I want you, and if I have to fly to Los Angeles or Vancouver or Timbuktu every damn weekend, I'll do it, and I'll do it with the biggest, most grateful smile on my face." Something in her eyes then told him there was more. "What is it?"

"You were just in a relationship where you hardly saw each other. Look how that ended."

Rick rolled up onto his elbow and she fell back to the pillow. "No, Kate, I was in a relationship where we hardly made time to see each other, and that was just the tip of the iceberg of why it ended. You don't think I understand what your work means to you, the kind of pride you take in it? You moved here just to work with the NYPD, to make the experience more authentic. You didn't have to do that. Last I heard L.A. had a few guys in uniform hanging around."

"I know what your work means to you, too. I see how much you love it, how much you were meant to do it, and you and Jordan have so many amazing things left to accomplish together."

He rolled his eyes. "What, that slacker? Please." With his kiss, he felt the tickle of her giggle. "I don't want this to be over, Kate. I want you," he echoed, "and I don't have a fucking clue how or what or…how again, but I need to try. Try with me."

She reached up and curled her hand at the back of his neck. "If we do this, I hope you don't think it means I'm going to start eating doughnuts." As she encouraged him over her, he found home between her legs, stole a peek at the clock.

"How long do I have? I bet I can convince you."

"Oh, you know size doesn't matter, Chuckles," she said with a smirk.

"Suddenly everybody's a comedian," he groaned and pressed his mouth to hers.

XXX

To those who celebrate, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for each and every one of you.

x

KB