When I touch my tongue to her lower lip, slowly sliding it from one side to the other, she pushes the lip against my tongue for just a moment before her jaw slackens, her lips fall apart and the tip of her tongue searches for and finds mine. They make contact only briefly before she withdraws – her tongue, not her lips, which remain pressed openly on mine. Still, when she did that, something akin to a whimper escaped her throat and I was done. Stick a fork in me, it's over, I'm done, the hard-on can become official and I'm about to kiss the living hell out of Olivia Benson.

My right hand slips beneath her jaw and my left reaches around to thread into her hair. I shift toward her again, bringing her somehow even closer to me, tilting her head and slanting my mouth over hers. The kiss isn't exactly the picture of forceful passion – yeah, it surprises me, too. It's more of a dare, really. A gamble. It's about placing our bets, seeing just how much each of us is ready to risk, willing to give. It's about raising the stakes, testing our resolve. It's about calling bluffs, seeing who's actually willing to take an offer and who would fold.

Jesus. I'm kissing Olivia and channeling Kenny Rogers at the same time. How fucked up is that?

We kiss like this for what feels like several minutes (time isn't registering properly in my head right now) before she shrugs my hoodie off her shoulders. I hadn't even noticed her unzipping the thing. Underneath, she's wearing a simple white tank top and I think it's been far too long since I've seen her in one of those. She goes for the hem and I know she's gong to have to break the kiss entirely to take it off.

Okay, I'll see her the coat and shirt. My coat hits the floor and I'm working on unbuttoning the shirt she'd earlier watched me put on as she drags her tank top over her head. She stands there observing me, her hands resting lightly on the low-slung waistband of her jeans. When I reach the final few buttons and am about ready to pull the panels of the shirt open, her hands disappear behind her back and the elastic band of the simple satin bra that covers her contracts suddenly as she releases the hooks in the back. She lets the straps fall from her shoulders and drops the bra itself to the floor just as I let my shirt drift off my arms to the floor behind me.

There. Now we're even. Bare chest to bare chest.

At least I thought so. But the skeptical gaze she's eyeing me with gives me pause. I hold her eyes with my own long enough to let her know I'm wondering. The instant she knows she has my attention is clearly visible in her multi-dimensional brown eyes. It's followed closely by her silent "follow me" stare. I know that one like the back of my hand. It always results in my doing as she asks, but with a heightened physical and emotional protectiveness of her that goes far beyond any mere macho or partnerly obligation. Either that or it results in my immediately charging ahead of her to make her be the one to follow me because I'd rather face the unknown than cover her as she does.

She doesn't move anything except her eyes, so I assume I'm meant to follow their path. As her gaze lowers, so does mine until I find myself staring at my own two feet. My own two sock-and-shoe-clad feet. I stare at the remarkably shiny leather surface of my shoes, trying to connect the dots. I can feel her eyes now boring into the top of my head, waiting expectantly. I raise my eyes slightly, confronted by those glossy toenails of hers. Bordeaux, I'd call them. I pull my lower lip into my mouth slightly. No, not bordeaux. I'd say more of a chianti. Or a cabernet. Yeah, a cabernet.

She sighs a little. To anyone else, it would sound like she'd just taken a slightly longer breath. But I know that she's trying to tell me I'm taking too long with something. It's her "Any day now, Elliot" sigh. I smile, not taking my eyes off her toenails as I wriggle my way out of my shoes and then socks, kicking them away from me. Only then do I look up at her. I don't even have the time to offer up my sly grin before she's thrown herself onto me. Her lips suction tightly to mine, her tongue invading every space in my mouth it can possibly reach. She grabs both of my hands, directing them up to her head.

I take the hint, tangling and twisting my fingers tightly in her hair and she immediately drops her hands from where they'd been pulling at the back of my neck. I feel her hands squeeze between our bodies and she must be working on the button and zipper of her jeans, because her knuckles keep bumping and prodding against my cock as they move. When she gets the button undone, she's a bit overzealous about yanking the fly open and the backs of her fingers hit me with a little more force. The immediate answering thrust of my hips into her hands makes her laugh into my mouth, and I savor the vibrating sensation against my lips. It becomes increasingly difficult to hold her head still beneath mine as every part of her below her shoulders starts wiggling around to try to divest herself of her jeans. She kicks herself free just as her hands return to me, roaming among my face, neck, head and shoulders and I take that to mean the bet had come to me and it was my turn to make a play or fold.

I wrestle my hands down between us, finding it a bit tighter of a squeeze than it had been for her smaller hands. Either that or she's just moved even closer to me. Or I moved closer to her. Or I just want to think it's because my hands are bigger to explain why my groin is so impossibly close to that of my partner because if I let myself think about the fact that we've made them this close I really am going to lose it.

But then I start working on my belt and feel the smooth bare skin of her abdomen rubbing against the backs of my hands. I feel the strong muscles beneath it contract and almost tremble. It takes every ounce of concentration that she hasn't already sucked out of my awareness through my mouth to not just yank my zipper down with little to no caution as to the danger that could pose to my very insistent cock. I've got underwear on, so that would offer some minor protection, but still. The zipper pull reaches the bottom of its track and…

Fuck me. I've got underwear on, but app-ar -ently she doesn't. My knuckles brush against the strip of closely trimmed hair on the lowest part of her abdomen that leads to…

Fuck. Me. I have got to move my fingers now, otherwise they're going to wind up buried inside her.

I shove my slacks and boxer-briefs down with one push, not caring that I have to tear my mouth from hers to do it because I know that, very shortly, I'll have them fused back together. The last remaining articles of clothing on my body gone, I straighten up and move to immediately fist my hands in her hair, but she's quicker than I am, taking her right hand and trailing her fingers swiftly from my right shoulder to hand, grasping the hand, turning and ducking underneath our joined arms until she's holding my arm over her shoulder, back turned to me. I rest my left hand on the curve of her waist, following closely behind her as she walks silently toward her bedroom.

It occurs to me that for all our kissing and de-robing, neither one of us has really taken the opportunity to just look at the other. I want so badly so just spin her back around and scan over every fucking inch of that naturally tanned skin. Well, I want to do that among other things. Things which my dick are reminding my of each time the head of my member bounces against her flesh as she moves in front of me.

But that's me. And this is her show. She's the one holding my hand, she's the one leading me. It's her move to make now. Her bet. Stay the same or raise the stakes. Of course, in our current state of undress, the stakes can't go much higher. At this point, I think it's all in or nothing. All in. How appropriate. The extent of my present strategy is to pray that if she lays it all out there she's not bluffing because you'd better believe I'm gonna call that bet in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, measuring time by a heartbeat requires one's heart to be beating. I'm pretty sure mine just stopped. Jesus. Yeah, it stopped as soon as she did, at the foot of her bed, back still to me. Her grip on my hand is semi-ferocious, her voice is quiet and unsure. Olivia can fool any number of perps in an interrogation room with the tone of her voice. But the perps aren't playing this game with her. I am. And for me, her voice is always something I can read, analyze. It's a tell. In this case, I'm fairly certain that quiet and unsure translates into "she's nervous." A bit of an obvious conclusion, sure, but the experienced Olivia-reader like myself understands that she's only nervous because she's very committed to whatever decision it is she's made about us and that if I fuck it up, she's liable to never forgive me. It's that knowledge that stops my heart when she speaks.

"El, if you're not sure about this…if you don't want…you need to tell me…please…because…"

I'm not sure at what point during her little speech I started kissing her neck, but that's what I'm doing. My tongue licks the long, thin line of the scar Gitano gave the left side of her neck, my lips sliding easily over the saliva-slickened skin. My heart is just starting to beat again it seems, slowly and evenly – whatever shreds of apprehension it had been previously hammering through my arteries are gone, replaced by an eerie calm and determination that could only come from the realization that she wanted me to call her out. She was ready to show her cards if I was willing to ask her to. Honestly, I don't know if there was a time before this during our seven years of partnership that I'd have been ready to do such a thing. For the first time in all my years of dealing with Olivia Benson, I feel like I'm playing with a full deck, so to speak.

I lift my legs one by one, pushing the backs of her thighs with the fronts of mine, inching her forward toward the bed just ahead of her. "I swear to God, Liv," I mumble against her neck, her own pulse rapid on my lips, "if you're bluffing me right now…"

"Bluffing you? Jesus Christ, Elliot, this isn't a poker game." She chastises me, but her hand squeezes mine just the tiniest bit tighter.

I do the first thing that comes to mind then. I move my lips to rest next to her ear and rumble in my best Kenny-from-Brooklyn impression, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em," and that's as far as I get before she doubles over laughing, her knees collapsing onto the bed, her hand releasing mine to join her other in catching herself on the mattress to avoid face-planting into it.

And now, Olivia is, for all intents and purposes, on her hands and knees on her bed in front of me.

Holy Mother of all things very much un-holy.

I'm really quite lucky I didn't just lose it for the umpteenth time this afternoon because she's pink – like this ridiculously flushed rose color – and she's wet and she's right there. Jesus, she's right there. The way she landed caused the lips of flesh that surround…her…to pull apart slightly. I can see the sheen of moisture on them and I'll be damned if this isn't the most porn-inspired vision I've ever been confronted with during the whole of my adult sex life. Not that that says a whole lot. Kathy was never exactly inclined to do anything porn-inspired.

But this isn't Kathy and I'm not married and for all the hell I know this could be a porno and you know what they say about when you're in Rome…

Her fits of laughter have begun to subside, existing now only as silent shakes of her shoulders. I've been entranced watching, among other things, the waves of giggles ripple the muscles of her strong but sleek back. It's not until she begins to push herself upright that I'm startled into motion. My body tells me to act on every basic instinct that this woman has ever awoken in me and suddenly a series of things begin to happen in rapid succession.

My arms are around her before even I realize it and she gasps as I haul her upper body the rest of the way up and against me as I step forward to meet her body. She's kneeling in front of me on the edge of the bed, her calves on either side of my legs. My left arm slithers around her torso, my forearm braced low on her hips, my hand holding tight to her right side. My right arm, apparently a bit more daring than its counterpart, wraps around a little higher, allowing my hand to cover her left breast. She moans. My lips and tongue are back on her neck – kissing, licking, sucking.

I nip her when I push myself up inside her. Both her hands immediately grasp my left forearm and she braces against it, pressing down on it as she stretches up and arches her back sharply. I tighten my hold on her with both arms, causing the one hand to inadvertently squeeze her breast and she squirms harder in my grasp. I'm barely inside her at all, but that doesn't discourage me from thrusting nonetheless. My strokes are slow and shallow, the head of my dick sliding in and out from underneath the ridge just inside her entrance. I keep my mouth occupied with the exquisite column of her neck because if they weren't planted there, God only knows what I'd find myself saying.

She hasn't stopped moving, her thighs tight with the effort of trying in vain to slide her knees closer on the mattress. She keeps stretching herself taller against me, pulling her body up and almost off of my cock, resisting, but not really. Her thighs give out temporarily, causing her to drop down onto me before she straightens and arches again, straining against my forearm. It had made me slide a little deeper into her than before, into a spot where her muscles haven't yet been confronted with the idea of accommodating my intrusion. Just as she jerked back upright, pressing her thighs toward one another again, an errant "Oh, God" escaped on a hiss of her breath. Her pulse is racing beneath my mouth now, the flooding of blood in her arteries pounding against her skin much like I'm aching to pound into her right now.

But she's tight, and I know I'm not a small man, and she's writhing and struggling against me. She's gasping and if I strain to hear, there are whispered pleas of encouragement that betray her body's attempts to escape. My mouth is torn from her neck suddenly when she lurches her upper body back into me particularly forcefully, her nails digging into my arm. This may or may not have had something to with my having let my right hand leave her breast and swipe quickly once over her clit.

Jesus.

I barely even touched her and the severity of her reaction has me thinking we've been doing this foreplay thing far longer than just the past several minutes.

And then I want to kick myself because damn it all to hell, we've been doing this foreplay thing for seven fucking years.

If I didn't already know it, I sure as hell do now. She's definitely not trying to get away. She's just so crazily turned on right now that I may not be the only one who had been worrying about this ending too soon. She starts to fall forward again and I catch her by raising the grip of my left arm around her, leaving my right hand in its new position at the juncture of her thighs. Her right hand releases my arm, leaving the crescent-shaped indentations of her fingernails in its wake, and she wraps her arm up and around the back of my head, pulling my chin down to rest on her shoulder. The muscles in that arm are alternately tightening and releasing as she tries to move herself up and down on my dick. She's still clamped down so hard around me that I haven't much succeeded in getting but a couple of inches into her, so I work at loosening her up the only way I can think of.

I've got the pads of two fingers working at her now, rubbing and pressing all around and on top of the hood of flesh that covers the place I know she can't handle me touching right now. Her nails are scratching into the skin on the back of my neck, her voice rasping as it whispers and moans broken strings of urges and appeals. I press a bit harder with my fingers on her, rubbing back and forth with short rapid strokes, the pace of my fingers matching the pace and depth of my thrusts into her…short and rapid. It takes seconds before she sucks in a deep breath, in sharp contrast to the shallow, ragged breaths she'd been taking up until this point. She holds it, her voice and exhale stuck in her throat as her fingers on my arm dig into my skin almost painfully and she flings her right arm a bit farther behind herself, nearly hooking my neck in the crook of her elbow. Her right hand is a fist now and the muscles of her stomach and abdomen contract and quiver under my arm.

Her head is thrown back and I sneak a glance at her. Her face changes constantly in the few seconds I see her. Her teeth bite into her lower lip and her eyes squeeze shut before her mouth falls open and her eyes widen, the brown staring up toward the sky. She could be praying, saying grace or just giving thanks, but then her ass presses back toward me, her pelvis instinctively trying to evade the assault of my hand in a gesture of preservation before she self-destructs entirely, which she does, and I don't care what she was saying to the heavens.

The breath she'd been holding rushes out of her. Her spine starts moving in a rhythmical but powerful wave against me and she's trying to hold herself up with the leverage from the arm thrown around me, her forearm pressing like a bar on the back of my neck with an iron force that makes me thankful that this woman has never put me in a headlock despite having cause to do so on numerous occasions. Her voice is trembling almost as intensely as the rest of her body as she lets my name tear from her throat.

"Elliot…" then a few heaved breaths, "fuck!"

Her whole body is crashing into and around mine, her muscles clamping around my cock, finally, mercifully, pulling me all the way into the hot center of her. I keep moving within her, using deep, slow pushes now, riding out the tidal wave with her.

I'm silently thankful as hell that she didn't last terribly long because I know I'm not going to. I realize as her body starts to go limp that we were never really opponents in this game at all. We were always playing with the same cards. Identical hands. There was never a need for all the antes, the bets, the dares. All we ever had to do was just lay our cards on the table and we'd both come out on top. Well, that's not entirely accurate. In this case, I'm about to come while on top and then we'll be a perfect pair. Of orgasms. Best case scenario, she has another ace hidden up the sleeve of that hoodie and we'll go for three of a kind.

She starts to fall forward, her vice-like grip on my left forearm releasing and her right arm dropping from behind my head, and I allow her to, wrapping my right arm back around her, inching my knees up onto the bed on either side of hers, helping her lower herself to the mattress with the support of my arms. I let my hands slip from beneath her just as her body sinks into the comforter on her bed. I'm still inside her and I plan to stay that way. Her legs are bent slightly, ass tipped toward me, legs spread just wide enough to allow me to stay in her. My own legs rest just outside hers and the spread of my torso covers her body completely. When I start to thrust into her, her arms snake out from underneath her chest, where she'd come to rest on them, and her fingers grip the comforter on either side of her head. I instinctively move my hands to cover hers, threading our fingers together.

She picks her head up and sets it back down on her left cheek, turning her face to one side. She twists her neck around to get her lips on mine when I lean my face down close to hers. The kiss is done with mouths wide open, tongues battling until our already stretched demand for oxygen becomes too much. Her head drops back to the bed with a sigh and I rest my forehead against her cheek, kissing her shoulder as I continue to push harder and deeper into her. I figured it was probably in my favor that her clit was now essentially off-limits in this new position, assuming that if I'd touched her there again, she'd have gotten her second before I'd had my first and she'd be too wiped out for me to be a part of this trio of orgasms.

First and foremost, I'm a man. Never let it be said that at the heart of our sexual prowess we're entirely unselfish, because that's bullshit. Besides, this particular arrangement of bodies gives her the secondary benefit of that elusive G-spot thing as my dick drags against the front walls of the muscles that surround me every time I push into her. Apparently that's enough for Olivia, because I can feel the ripples of a second orgasm quickly building within her. Or perhaps it's good, but not enough because now she's moving her hips underneath mine, rubbing herself against the mattress every time she does.

My thrusting is almost frantic now, the movement of my hips hard and fast, and I'm having to constantly readjust my knees on the bed, practically crawling up to stay inside her. Her hands clench beneath mine and I clasp my own around hers as I feel her begin to break. She bites back a scream, turning her face into the mattress and her body bucks so hard underneath me I have to make sure to keep my head over her shoulder to avoid getting a blow to the face. I haven't managed anything as civilized as words since she first fell onto the bed and when my orgasm rips through me, I certainly can't form words now. I come inside her in a series of deep, grunt-accented thrusts, protection only an afterthought as I hope she would have said something if it were a necessity.

She's still contracting around me when I collapse fully on top of her, trying to keep enough of my weight on my legs so as to avoid crushing her. She's turned her face back to the side and I rest my own cheek on hers after placing a soft kiss to her temple. She rotates her hands palm-up to fully intertwine our fingers. The direction our gaze is headed has us looking into the open door of her bathroom. On the floor of her bathroom is a small pile of clothes. On top of the pile is a shirt. A greenish-gray shirt. A greenish-gray men's dress shirt. My dress shirt. I maneuver her right hand so the back of her hand again rests in my palm, and I move our fingers so that both of us are pointing to the pile of clothes. Lifting my head, I mumble in her ear, "What's that?"

She smiles. "Nothing. Just some dirty laundry."

I grin against her ear. "That's not just dirty laundry, Liv. That's my dirty laundry."

She doesn't answer right away.

"Where'd you get that, anyway?"

She pulls our hands toward her mouth and smothers a smile against the back of my hand. "I went upstairs to get my stuff to go home and when I got back down to our floor I saw you at your desk and thought I'd sneak up to the crib and get that out of your locker. I was gonna replace the buttons and give it back to you."

I smile to myself at her usage of the phrase "our floor." I lift myself up and off of her only enough to turn her over underneath me. It causes me to slip out of her and I remedy that as soon as I'm resting between her legs. I look down at her skeptically. "Were you really gonna give it back?"

She laughs, but nods. "Looks better on you than it would on me."

I furrow my brows, appearing to be in deep thought. "I don't know about that. Maybe you'll just have to try it on sometime."

"Maybe."

I smile.

"After I wash it."

"Oh, come on. You won't even just try it on for me?"

She makes a face. "I don't wanna wear your dirty laundry."

"Hoodie, Liv," I remind her before dropping a kiss on her nose. "You love my dirty laundry."

"Not when some prick's ruined one of my favorite shirts."

It doesn't escape my notice that she used the same term I'd used for him earlier this afternoon. "You don't have to wash that hoodie anytime soon, you know. I kinda like that it smells like both of us."

Her eyes are starting to glaze over with impending sleep. She stifles a yawn. "I'm going to have to wash it at some point, Elliot." She squirms, burrowing herself underneath the warmth of my body. "Guess we'll just have to share it."

"Yeah, I guess so," I mumble, placing a kiss on her forehead as I watch her eyes close. I reach to the side and grab a fistful of the comforter so that when I roll our bodies, it comes, too, wrapping around our exhausted bodies.

Well, if there's anybody in the world beside myself who should be allowed to wear my dirty laundry, it's her. She's worn mine now and the next time I put my arms through the sleeve of that hoodie, I guess I'll have worn hers, too. The fact that we're comfortable enough with each other's dirty laundry speaks volumes to me.

Fuck. And now I have another song in my head.

That's what I get for trying to wax philosophical instead of drifting off to sleep as Liv did. Gone is The Gambler. Arrived is The Eagle.

"We can do the innuendo, we can dance and sing…when it's said and done we haven't told you a thing…we all know that crap is king…give us dirty laundry…"

I don't realize I'd been singing out loud until I feel Liv's smile on the skin of my chest. She shifts her body, eyes still closed, tucking her head underneath my chin. "Jesus, Stabler," she mutters. "You don't sing in the shower, too, do you? 'Cause I'm gonna be needing one of those as soon as I wake up."

I grin and wrap my arms securely around her.

Gotta love that dirty laundry.