Chapter Seven
Confidant
We only part to meet again.
-John Gay
"You know, I really enjoy these movie nights," Olivia said as Elliot helped her clean up the soda cans and popcorn bowls.
"Even though we always take over your apartment and trash it?" he asked.
She looked at him and sighed. "You always stay to help clean up, so it's not such a bad deal. Besides, this is a central location. Can you see all of us trooping out to the Bronx or Brooklyn to hang out at Fin's place or the captain's house?"
"Or crowding into Munch's studio apartment?" Elliot added.
"Of course, you have plenty of room," she told him, sliding her hands into the suds in the sink. She washed and he rinsed. It had become their routine.
"And a wife and four kids," he replied, rolling up his sleeves to keep them dry.
"We had kid-friendly movies tonight."
"But it wasn't a wife-friendly mess," he told her with a laugh.
She took the flippant comment at face value but asked, "How are things going between you and Kathy?"
"Some days it's more of a minefield than a cake walk," he admitted, "but we're doing all right."
Olivia continued washing dishes, leaving the silence for Elliot to fill or ignore, whichever he saw fit.
"It seems like the one thing she wants most is the thing that's hardest for me to give her."
"And what's that?" Olivia asked, knowing he was waiting for the question to see if she really was interested.
"She wants me to talk about my feelings."
Again Olivia was silent, knowing he would continue if he needed to. It took a few moments, but eventually he told her. "It seems like . . . like I just don't have the vocabulary to do that, or maybe I just don't understand what the words mean. Really, what in the hell's the difference between pissed off and angry or furious and enraged? It's like the words I know just never fit."
"So, what do you do when that happens?" Olivia asked.
"Most of the time I tell them what I want to do about what I feel."
"Them?"
"Kathy and our marriage counselor, Father McKay. Like last week, there was this jerk in the stands at Lizzie's soccer game and he was just heckling her brutally because she missed a couple of plays. He made my kid cry."
He set a bowl on the counter with a thump and Olivia winced. "I know that pissed you off, but easy with the dishes, Elliot."
"Oh, sorry."
"No harm, no foul. So what did you do?"
"I complained to the ref, and the ref ejected him. When he refused to go, the security guard removed him. As he was leaving, I told him if he ever did that to another child I would have him banned from the games and he would be arrested for trespassing if he showed up again."
"Sounds like you handled it all right," Olivia observed.
"I thought so, too, and Kathy was there, so she knew what I did, but she brings it up in counseling, and Father McKay wants to know how I felt about it."
"And?"
"Pissed off! Angry! Furious! Enraged!" He threw his hands helplessly in the air and said, "Nothing fits! So, at Father McKay's suggestion, I tell them what I wanted to do."
As she drained the sink and rinsed the suds away, he leaned against the counter and dried the dishes with a towel.
"What did you want to do?"
"I wanted to pull him out of the stands, drag him behind the field house, and stomp his head in with my cleats. Kathy and Father McKay looked at me like I was a cannibal and they had just caught me in the act of eating human flesh."
"Oh, Elliot," Olivia made a face.
He dried the last bowl and set it on the stack and then stood there holding the towel while she dried her hands on it.
"Sorry, but that's just the way they looked at me. It's like they can't distinguish between the impulse and the action," he explained, "but I'm the one with the problem."
She took the towel and stood there gazing into his eyes. The way he chewed his lower lip told her this was really bothering him. "Has either one of them ever seen you really lose your temper?" she asked, twisting the fabric in her hands.
He dropped his gaze, and shook his head. "No." Looking up at her again he asked, "Why?"
"Well, 'stomp his head in with my cleats' is a pretty vivid image, El. They don't see the kind of stuff you do . . . did."
He looked at her in confusion. "What does that have to do with it?"
She lay the towel out on the couter to dry and laced her fingers through his. Leading him to the living room, she sat on the couch and pulled him down beside her.
"How many times have we seen something that we never would have been able to imagine, Elliot?"
He scratched his beard and said, "I don't know about you, but to me, it seemed like every week there was something horrible I'd never dreamed of before."
"So, do you think it's possible that you've just developed a higher tolerance for brutality than Kathy and your priest?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I suppose so."
She gave him a look that said, there's your problem.
He made that wide-eyed, clueless face that he often used when he couldn't follow her reasoning and asked, "So, what do I do about it?"
"Maybe you need to help them understand where you're coming from," she told him. "Ask them if they have ever felt like punching someone. Almost everyone has at some point."
"And then what? They want to hit someone, and I want to crush his skull. How does that help?"
"Well, what do you think is probably the most horrible thing Kathy has ever seen? In person, I mean."
He shrugged. "A few years ago, she saw a kid get hit by a car when she was picking the twins up from school. That really upset her."
"And how does that compare to the things you have witnessed?"
He sat quietly.
"Pretty tame, I'll bet," she said when he never answered.
He nodded.
"You need to get her to understand that," Olivia said, putting a hand on his shoulder and shaking him gently.
He looked at her, and she saw the pain in his eyes. "I never really told her all that much about my work, just a case every now and then that I couldn't let go." he said. "She knows what's out there, but I didn't ever want to bring it home with me."
She covered his hand with hers, and said, "At the time, you were probably right to keep the job separate from your family, but now . . ."
Now what, she wondered. He was waiting patiently for her words, and she was afraid to say them. She didn't want to anger or upset him, but it was a dark secret all of them shared that needed to be brought into the light.
"It has scarred you, Elliot. The job scars all of us; we're all damaged by it," she told him. "It's hard to admit that. It hurts, and that's why none of us ever let anybody get too close. The things you saw and did in the SVU will always be a part of you. You can't run from them, you can't hide, because they're inside of you."
She was beginning to tear up because she realized that what she was saying was true about herself, as well.
"There is a part of you that has been changed forever, Elliot. There's a corner of your soul that will always be dark, and as long as you keep that part of you a secret from your wife, it will always come between you. You have to tell her about the job and how it has affected you all these years. It's the only way she'll be able to understand and accept you for who you are now."
"But what if she doesn't understand, Liv?"
She gave him a smile. "She will, Elliot," she assured him, "because she loves you." She stood up and pulled him to his feet and said, "Come on, help me move the furniture back."
A dining chair went back into the kitchen and a folding one was put in the closet. The other furniture was shifted around a bit, and as they were putting the pillows back on the couch, Olivia asked, "So, have you made love yet?"
It wasn't as forward a question as it might have seemed to an outsider. A few weeks ago, he had confided in her that they'd been back together for three months and while they cuddled a lot, neither of them seemed to feel any sexual desire for the other.
He hesitated but then admitted, "Yeah, a couple of times over the past month or so."
When he left her hanging, she had to ask, "And?"
He grinned. "So you want to be titillated, do you?"
She swatted him with a pillow and said, "No, I want to know how you and Kathy are doing!"
He blushed slightly and ducked his head. "It was good."
She picked up a forgotten soda can from the coffee table. "And the nightmares?"
He sighed. "They come and go, but I've always had them, even before I worked in SVU. At least I'm sleeping."
Olivia held his gaze, and he knew she wasn't going to let him off the hook with a non-answer like that. "She's learned not to ask too many questions. I can't tell her that . . . She and the kids . . ."
He chewed his bottom lip for a moment, then took a deep breath and asked, "Do you remember Humphrey Becker?"
"Yeah, of course."
There was no way Olivia would ever forget the RDK serial killer copycat. A sexually insecure newspaper archivist and frustrated novelist who had been abused and neglected by his mother, Humphrey had sought out his fifteen minutes of fame by reenacting the crimes of a convicted killer and sending the detectives on a wild goose chase through the city with his baffling clues. Time and again, they had arrived too late to save the victim.
Becker was afraid of the dark because he had spent a good deal of his childhood locked in a dark closet while his mother was off watching her movies, and he was so claustrophobic that he had taken all the doors down inside his apartment. When they finally got him into interrogation, he had taunted them with the knowledge that there was one more victim out there slowly suffocating. In a fit of rage, Elliot had dragged him out of the room and down the hall to a storage closet. Throwing all procedure out the window, Olivia had held the door for him while he threw Becker inside, and one of them had busted the single light bulb that illuminated the tiny room. Cragen had produced the key that had kept him confined until he told them where the final victim was. She had been found alive, but just barely.
"My last nightmare was about him," Elliot said, "but instead of his actual victims, we kept finding my kids or Kathy, and it happened over and over again, more times than it did in the real case. I woke her with my tossing and turning, and then she woke me. I couldn't tell her what it was about. How could I tell her I was having flashbacks but the victims all had hers and the kids faces? So, I told her that I had dreamed about a rough case and left it at that."
"Then what?"
"I just rolled over on my stomach, and she rubbed my back, and eventually, we went back to sleep."
"See, Elliot, that's exactly what I meant when I said the job has scarred you," Olivia told him gently. "You have to tell her just a little bit about it so she knows why it haunts you the way it does. Maybe you should find a quiet time when the kids aren't around and tell her about that dream. Or share it with her and your priest next time you go to counseling."
Olivia usually gave him good advice, but it wasn't always easy to follow, so instead of committing to the idea, he nodded slightly and said, "I'll consider it."
She gave him a sympathetic smile and found a forgotten glass on the end table hidden behind a large candle. He picked up a couple of pieces of popcorn that had been dropped on the floor, took the soda can and the bowl off her hands and went into the kitchen to put them where they belonged.
"We're gonna be all right, Liv," he called as he walked away from her. Coming back into the room, he added, "It's taking some time because we hurt each other in so many ways, but we're working things out."
She crossed the room to him, gave him a sweet smile, and a kiss on the cheek. "I'm glad."
He slipped on his coat and hat, and she walked him down to the main entrance to her building.
"You know, I think we've seen each other socially more often in the five months since you quit than we ever did when we were working together," she told him as they stood looking out the glass door at the autumn leaves playing tag in the street.
He nodded. "You're right, and we talk more than we did then, too."
He looked into her chocolate brown eyes for a long moment.
"What?" she asked with a confused little smile.
He shrugged and shook his head. "I don't know, just, thanks, I guess."
They stepped out onto the stoop together, Olivia shivering in the autumn chill. He gave her a quick peck on the cheek and said, "See you next Monday."
She watched as he crossed the street and sprinted through the falling leaves to his car. He waved to her before he climbed in. She waved back and called, "Goodbye!"
After he drove off, she headed back upstairs chuckling to herself. He had forgotten that Kathy had invited her to their Halloween party. She was going as a gypsy fortune teller, though she hadn't mentioned it to him. She wondered what he would say about her costume. It was a little sexy, but tame enough that it was appropriate to wear around his kids.
She laughed aloud. He'd only just left her, and already she was excited about seeing her best friend again. That was the good thing about saying goodbye.
The End
Author's Note: