Chapter Text
For a long time—years—twenty and change of them, in fact—Olivia would never have admitted that she’d fantasized about sex with Elliot. She might have admitted—maybe—in a very matter-of-fact way—that the thought of what Elliot might be like in bed had crossed her mind. But only in passing, only in the way that occasionally inappropriate thoughts skate unbidden across one’s mind.
She would never have admitted to dwelling on them. Would never have admitted to just how many times she’d lain in her own bed, eyes shut tight and heart pounding, imagining the hand tucked between her thighs was Elliot’s rather than hers. Imagining the heft of the vibrator she was working in and out of herself at a steady pace was his cock moving inside her.
She would never have admitted it because Elliot was married, because Elliot was her partner, because Elliot was her friend. And then, eventually, because Elliot was gone, and who fantasizes about someone who dropped out of their life like they meant nothing?
But Elliot was also, well… Elliot. He was handsome, and kind, and strong, and protective. For a long time, she’d told herself that the fantasies were harmless. That her mind wandered to Elliot not because she actually wanted him, but because he was safe. There’s an adjustment period to SVU, a stretch of time where even the prospect of good sex brings to mind all the horrors that are filling your days, and the idea of going out to pick up some stranger in a bar seems needlessly risky. The fantasies had started then—early—and she’d told herself that it was fine, that it was necessary. That what Elliot didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and that if she’d told him why—that to her, he was the embodiment of a Good Man, one she couldn’t imagine ever doing any woman harm, and she needed that for just a little while—he would have understood.
She’d told herself it would only be a few times, just for a little while.
“It passes,” Elliot had told her when she’d said something about how SVU was harder than she’d anticipated, how the work was more rewarding than anything she’d ever done but it made her feel a little like swearing off sex forever. “It’s like that for a little while, but eventually you get better at compartmentalizing when you leave at the end of the day,” he’d said, and so she’d told herself that as soon as she could stomach the idea of sex with anybody else, she’d let Fantasy Elliot go.
Only she hadn’t.
She’d thought of him less, maybe, for a while, but she’d never let him go entirely. Not even after he’d let go of her entirely, when he was who-knew-where, and the thought of him made her eyes water and her throat tight, hitching tears lingering after her orgasm more than once.
So yes, she thought about him, about them, together, about what it would be like. In fact, it’s safe to say she’s thought a lot about it, cumulatively, over the last quarter of a century. She’s imagined dozens of different scenarios, dozens of different ways they could end up in bed. Things he’d do to her, things she’d do to him. Things they’d do together.
When it finally happens—on a Saturday afternoon when she’s accepted his invitation to spend the day eating take out and watching movies on his couch in an attempt to distract herself from the fact that Noah is spending the weekend in the Stepford paradise that is the McCann’s house—it’s nothing like she’d imagined.
First of all, she’d never imagined it would start with any amount of heavy petting during the movie Clue, and she’d never imagined he’d taste like Mongolian beef and beer. She’d never imagined she’d be wearing one of his white t-shirts because she’d dropped broccoli on hers half an hour ago and had to scrub the streak of garlic sauce off the fabric before it set into a stain.
Most of all, though, she’d simply never imagined she’d be so fucking nervous.
They’ve been on a few dates now—lowkey ones—a dinner here, a coffee there, a Sunday brunch with Noah. Nothing too fancy, nothing with too much pressure. They’ve admitted that they’re doing this, that there are feelings here, that they both want something more than friendship and that they both have for longer than it was ever polite or proper to do so. But they also have baggage. A ten-year gap of time yawning between them, the devastation of his abandonment, not to mention the fraught feelings of the thirteen years that came before.
And then there’s the pressure—the paralyzing weight of expectation, the fear that if they fuck it up they’ll lose everything all over again.
So they’ve been taking things slow.
Not rushing in.
Wading. Slowly. Glacially, to be honest.
They’ve been working on communication, have promised honesty even when it’s hard, even when it’s vulnerable and terrifying. They talk every day—even if it’s just a pair of texts to say good morning and good night. (He’d suggested it after she’d admitted in a timid whisper that since he’s been back, every time the days of silence have stretched into weeks, a tiny part of her had feared he was gone again, for good.)
And they’ve kissed. God, how they’ve kissed. In the hallway outside her door for long minutes when he walked her upstairs after an evening of Italian food and wine. On his sofa, for over an hour after their second date, Olivia’s hands shaky with want when she’d turned the key in her ignition and headed for home. (It had been too soon, she’d insisted, and he hadn’t argued despite the raging hard-on he’d been grinding against her until they were both panting and painfully horny.) Even once in the precinct parking lot, necking in the back seat of her car for fifteen minutes during her lunch break.
But they’ve never been naked together, and they’ve never been one together, and so when he pushes her (his) t-shirt up her torso and murmurs, “Can I take this off?” her heart starts jackhammering even as she nods her permission.
Her hands go clammy when she reaches for his belt, and the first time she feels his mouth against her nipples, his big hands cupping her breasts as he gives the pebbled peaks slow sucks, it triggers a burst of anxious adrenaline in her belly that almost makes her feel sick.
She needs to get her shit together.
So she coughs. Pretends she’s swallowed her own damn spit wrong, and coughs until he pulls back, until they’re sitting back up, until he’s stumbling toward the kitchen with his pants still undone and another impressive erection tenting the denim. She presses her palms to her thighs and swallows heavily, takes a deep, slow breath and then several gulps of water when he returns with a full glass for her.
Elliot sits next to her on the sofa and waits, watching her face with concern. Mostly her face, anyway—he keeps glancing down at her bare breasts and then dragging his gaze back up to her face. He’s trying not to ogle while she’s on the verge of choking to death, and it makes her very aware that she’s just sitting here on his sofa with her tits out.
Olivia looks away, swallows another mouthful of water.
This is going absolutely splendidly, isn’t it?
It’s not until he clears his throat and she catches sight of his own palms rubbing up and down his denim-clad thighs, notices one of his knees bouncing, that she realizes he’s nervous too.
“Do you, ah, do you wanna stop?”
Olivia’s gaze slaps back to his. “Do you?”
He smiles, one of those boyish half-smiles that always made her heart flutter (still do), and tells her, “No. I don’t.”
She can tell he’s trying very hard again not to look at her breasts.
“But this feels a little…” He grimaces, trying to find the right word to finish the sentence.
“Like virgins on prom night?” Olivia suggests and Elliot snorts, nodding.
“I’ve never been so excited to touch a boob or so nervous I was gonna finish before we even got started, so yeah, that sounds about right.”
It makes her laugh, which makes him laugh, and soon they’re both sitting there in stitches, one of her arms crossed over her chest to keep her boobs from jiggling too much.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous about sex,” she admits once the giggles have petered out. “It’s ridiculous.”
Elliot nods, agreeing, and telling her, “Well, it’s not every day you get to sleep with someone you’ve been thinking about for 20 years.”
His admission makes her smile, close-lipped and sly. “You too, huh?”
“Oh, yeah,” he nods. “Used to feel guilty about it—for the obvious reasons. Still do sometimes, to be honest. Like you wouldn’t like it.”
“I don’t mind,” she whispers. “Turnabout being fair play and all that.”
“You thought about it?” he asks, and she nods slowly.
“I felt guilty, too,” she admits. “Same reasons—everything, and… I guess it seemed kind of invasive. Thinking about you, when I was…”
He perks up a little at that, interested and amused, as he teases, “Oh, when you were…”
He gives her a pointed look, and she feels her cheeks flush hot, crossing her arms more tightly over her chest as she realizes that he’d admitted to thinking about sleeping with her, not to masturbating about it.
“Oh, come on,” she scoffs, mortified. “You’re telling me you thought about it, but never thought about it?”
Dear God, please let him have thought about it. She’s never in her life wished harder that a man had jerked off to the idea of her. (She’s pretty sure she’s never in her life wished that at all, until now.)
He puts her out of her misery with a naughty-but-nervous smirk, and a, “Yeah, yeah, I thought about it.”
She chuckles, muttering, “Jerk,” under her breath; she’s really starting to wish she had a shirt on.
But then Elliot scoots closer, until he’s right up against her side. He’s naked from the waist up, too, so it’s all warm naked skin and firm muscles, one of his arms sliding around her shoulders as the other hand cups her chin and draws her in for a kiss that’s surprisingly chaste and sweet.
“I think we need to take the pressure off,” he murmurs against her lips. “Forget about… all of it… and just… go with the flow.”
She likes that, going with the flow. Maybe slowing down, just a little, and letting them acclimate to the reality of sex with each other.
But she’s going to insist on one thing: “Can we move to the bedroom? The couch is…tight.”
He smiles at her again, and it’s dazzling this close, makes her heart knock harder in her chest.
“Yeah, we can do that,” he murmurs.
And so they do—they leave their empty takeout containers and half their clothes and a little bit of their dignity in his living room, and they make their way to his bedroom. To his comfortable bed (he flings the quilt down to the foot of it when they walk in) and his soft pillows (he scoops one up from where it had fallen to the floor this morning and plops it back at the head of the bed).
They make out some more, no less eager than before but a little but slower, a little bit more intentional. Soft whispers of That’s nice and Can I just touch you? and Jesus, you look good naked.
They shed jeans, and socks, and underwear, and end up tangled in his sheets, Elliot sprawled out alongside Olivia, leaning over her, thoroughly undoing her with relentless, endless, tongue-filled kisses. He’s propped up on one elbow, but his other hand is touching her. Just touching her now, wandering over her belly, her side, up the slope of her breast and tracing a circle around her nipple, then skating back down, grazing along her hip. She has goosebumps; she’s gasping into his mouth. One of his thighs is tucked between both of hers, and they’re grinding slowly, coaxing little moans and sighs from each other.
It’s good, as good as any of the fantasies ever were. Better, because it’s actually happening. Finally.
And then he stops kissing her, bumps the tip of his nose against the bridge of hers and asks in this low voice that makes her toes curl, “What do you like? Tell me what you want me to do.”
She doesn’t have to think twice, the request spilling from her lips in embarrassingly short order: “Go down on me. Please.”
Because it’s been years, at this point. The last man to eat her out was Ed Tucker, back when she was still a Lieutenant, back when Noah was still in preschool. It has been half a decade since a man has had his mouth on her, so if Elliot is taking requests…
He groans in response, presses his mouth hard against hers, a quick, steamy kiss before he mutters, “Gladly,” and starts to kiss his way down her body.
Olivia’s breath hitches with anticipation, her face flushing as Elliot murmurs that he’s always wanted to, always wanted to know what she’d taste like, and, Jesus, the idea that they might have been sitting in the sedan on some Thursday afternoon, talking about this or that while Elliot wondered what her pussy tastes like has her wanting to climb the walls.
It was wrong—how much they wanted each other, back then—but at least they’d kept it to themselves, she thinks. Things had been complicated, and there’d been insecurity, and jealousy, but at least they’d been able to keep their respective horniness under wraps. At least, there had been that.
Now, though, now there’s no reason to hide it. No reason not to confess to each other what they’ve always wanted. Later, she thinks, she might tell him how she’d secretly dreamed of swinging a thigh over him on the weight bench and riding him until they both worked up a sweat.
Let’s see what he thinks of that.
But for now, she’s going to focus on the here and now. Namely, here where Elliot is getting situated between her spread thighs, and now when he’s dipping his tongue into her bellybutton, then sliding it down, down. Her mouth feels dry as she digs her fingers into the pillow under her head, her gaze steady on the sight of Elliot’s mouth as it makes its way between her thighs. She feels the heat of his breath against her first, and then the wet, silky swipe of his tongue over her clit.
They both moan—his hungry, hers desperately relieved.
She breathes, “Oh God…” and spreads her thighs a little wider, tips her hips up just a bit in invitation. Elliot drags his tongue all the way down to the source, dips it inside of her for the briefest second and then laves it back up. He’s tasting her, and his tongue is wide and wonderful, and she lets out this whine of she-doesn’t-even-know-what. Her mind is racing and stuttering, and then he covers her clit and starts to work his tongue against it, and she’s moaning and twisting her fingers in the pillowcase.
It’s good, so good, so fucking good. She’s been alone for a long time, she is used to being alone, and she has made several high-end purchases to help her weather the long, loveless nights. She doesn’t want for orgasms, and she never has. But God, she’s missed this. The heat of it and the spit and the way his tongue moves and dips around her clit, the way it skates down her inner lips and back up.
She flares hot, fast, feels shaky already with the bliss of it, feels restless in her skin, dragging her heel up and down his ribs and babbling her pleasure. Gasping and moaning and gushing half-formed encouragement.
She doesn’t usually make this much noise during sex. She’s not quiet, usually, but she’s generally not this whimpery, not blurting all these high-pitched “Oh my God”s and “Oh fuck”s, and “Please”s. She is not a woman who begs, but as his tongue swipes over her clit again and again, she grasps restlessly at his wrist and whines, “Please, oh—mm—ah! Please, please, please…”
It’s embarrassing, the way she’s begging for it, for him, for more. The way she can’t drag in a steady breath, each inhale and exhale shaky and shuddering. It’s just oral sex, for God’s sake.
But it’s not just oral sex, it’s Elliot, and Elliot is good with his tongue, and there’s no amount of battery operated bliss that can emulate the soft, wet strokes of it against her sensitive flesh. It feels so fucking good, and it’s been so fucking long, and if she’s not careful she might just cry about it.
And then—oh, God—he slides his tongue down and dips it inside of her again, committing this time, fucking her with it. Olivia bucks up against his face, her feet planted on the mattress and her ass lifting clear off of it as she grinds up into Elliot’s chin with an eager moan.
“Fuck, God, El…” she gasps, and he stops, pulls back.
Presses kisses to the tops of her inner thighs and murmurs, “I’ve got you, baby, just relax.”
She laughs at that—a delirious, heady snicker—and says, “I can’t fucking relax, El, I’m—this is—” She lifts her hands, covers her face with them and mutters, “This is embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?” he questions; she peeks through her fingers to find his brows halfway to his nonexistent hairline. “Why?”
“I’m—” She swallows, rakes her hands up into her hair and stares at the ceiling as she confesses, “I’m not usually like this.”
Elliot dips his head down, circles her clit gently with his tongue, once, and asks, “Like what?”
Her hips jerk slightly at the stimulation, her breath catching. When she answers, “Like that,” it comes out strangled and tight. She swallows again, draws in an intentional breath and tells him, “I’m not usually so…responsive.”
“Maybe you’ve just never had anyone eat you out properly,” he suggests, and she’s about to say that she has, she absolutely has, but then his mouth is on her again, over her clit, again, giving her these firm sucking rubs that have her ability to speak devolving into a sound that comes out as a throaty Haaa–aahhh… and her ability to think shorting out entirely for a minute.
He stops, just long enough to tell her, “I wanna hear every sound you make.” Kissing her clit and adding, “Wanna hear everything I do to you, you got it?”
He sucks at her again, and Olivia squeezes her eyes shut and manages a high, “Mmhmm!”
There’s not a lot of talking after that—nothing coherent, anyway. There’s a lot more cursing, and quite a bit more pleading, and his name, over and over. And there’s the sound of him, slurping sucks, and encouraging moans, and another “I’ve got you,” when she starts to squirm and writhe. He’s had his hands gripped where her hips meet her thighs, his thumbs stroking her heated skin, long fingers digging into lean muscles, but he shifts, then, slides one hand up and in, one hand in and down, until he has a palm pressed to her sternum, his arm a steadying, welcome weight on her belly. The pressure settles her, like an anchor to her rocking writhing, her heart hammering under his hand as her torso goes still.
He uses the other hand to part her lips, to bare her clit even more; she feels his breath wash against her, warm and tickling, and then his tongue is pressed against her, working her exposed clit with firm, unhurried flicks. She shouts, a startled, ecstatic, “OH! Mmm!” her head snapping back as her hips jerk up—or try to, anyway, but that hand low on her belly presses down as she pushes up, and the pressure on her sternum grows heavier, and she is pinned there, under the onslaught of him. He flicks and flicks and her thighs spread wide, wider, her hands grasping at the sheets, his shoulders, his pillows, her hair.
“OhGodI’mgonna—!” she gasps, and then she does, coming hard, crying out, and his mouth, fuck, his mouth, God, his mouth latches on to her clit and sucks and sucks and sucks, and she is making noises. Uncouth, undignified noises, wordless and loud, pleasure ricocheting between her spread thighs, pinballing between her hip bones, knocking around her ribs.
And Elliot, fuck, Elliot doesn’t stop. Not even when she starts wriggling against him, not even when her pornographic noises die down into a steady repetition of breathless “oh...oh…oh…”s, a new one tumbling forth with every suck to her throbbing clit. Her mind goes blank—utterly, completely blank—and her lungs seize, and her muscles tense, and then he flattens his tongue against her clit and turns his head back and forth, the intense pleasure sputtering into a heady simmer.
She’s so fucking sensitive now, gasping shakily at the silky-soft feel of his tongue over her clit. For a minute there, she just floats, pleasure fizzing merrily in her veins, her muscles feeling jittery and heavy all at once. And then the sensation starts to narrow, focusing in as his tongue goes from broad and flat to narrow and pointed. He’s still teasing her, drawing his tongue in scribbled lines that are light and languid. But she’s so fucking sensitive, and he’s dragged his thumb over the hood of her clit to draw it back a bit so he’s teasing just the exposed tip and the sensation is so much it makes her eyes water.
She can’t bring herself to stop him, can only mutter, “El,” and “Elliot,” and “oh,” “oh fuck,” and “oh it—I’m—” and “Please, please, please…”
She drops her gaze down and finds him gazing up at her, his eyes so blue and so intense, focused, wanting. She has to squeeze her own shut to block out the sight of it—of him with his tongue against her clit and so much fucking feeling in his eyes; it’s too much.
Her thighs are twitching and her ass is clenching and she keeps squirming closer to him and then away again, desperate for more but overstimulated, goosebumps spreading over her skin, drawing her nipples into tight, needy peaks, making her hair stand on end.
She feels like one singular vibrating nerve, a plucked harp string just humming away, and then it starts to build again. Everywhere his tongue touches feels hot, tendrils of bliss radiating out and out, and she realizes that she is wet, so wet she’s dripping, so wet that when she writhes her hips and clenches her ass cheeks again it feels slippery.
She hasn’t been this wet in ages, and somehow it turns her on even more, knowing how ready her body is for him, knowing how easily he’ll slide into her, fill her up. God, she wants him, needs him. Now.
“El—please—fuck me.”
He makes a noise at that, a sort of dissatisfied grunt and then his lips close around her clit again, sucking it in quick, shallow bursts. Olivia eyes roll back, and that heat catches like the tip of a sparkler, whooshing into light and then crackling its way down, except it doesn’t fizzle out at the end. Instead, it pops, another orgasm sparking and flashing under her skin. She cries, “Ahh!” and slams her thighs shut–as much as she can with his broad shoulders wedged between her legs—jolting and juddering and shouting her pleasure to his lofted ceiling.
And then he starts sucking deeper, harder, and her orgasm seems to fold in on itself, doubling, blooming, and she’s not sure if she comes again or just comes harder, but all the breath leaves her lungs and her nails scratch at his shoulders, her leg jerking, her heel knocking against his ribs.
When he finally eases off, she collapses into the mattress, her legs noodley and buzzing, her lungs panting and burning.
Jesus Christ.
He kisses his way up her body, planting wet, messy kisses below her navel, beside it, beneath her left rib, at the base of her breastbone. And then he veers sideways and covers her nipple with his mouth again, giving it slow, deep sucks that make her gasp and moan. The pleasure is less fraught, a sweet ache rather than a sizzling burn, and she basks in it while she tries to get her limbs to work again and her brain to produce more than static.
He has her cupped in both palms, his elbows planted next to her ribs, her breasts piled in his grip. He kisses one nipple then the other, switches back and forth, back and forth, taking his time and worrying each one with swirling licks and soft kisses and sucking pulls.
They make her belly tense; they make her clench. And when she does, she remembers how empty she is, how achey she is for the heft of him inside of her, finally. After two decades and change of imagining, she wants the real thing, and it’s here, now, poking against her thigh, smearing pre-cum there. She reaches down (hey, look at that–her limbs are working again) and cups him beneath the chin, drawing his mouth from her nipple (he holds the suction until she pops from his lips) and dragging him up to her mouth.
When they kiss, it’s sloppy, and it tastes like sex. Like her. Olivia groans into his mouth, draws her thighs up a little higher and reaches between them, Elliot’s breath huffing out as her fingers find his cock and nudge him down toward her entrance. The kiss breaks as he presses against her, the head of his cock parting her lips, still just outside of her, poised and ready.
Their eyes lock, heated brown on eager blue, and then he presses forward, down.
Olivia winces at the intrusion, the pinch of it, the way he does not just sink right into her the way she’d expected.
“You okay?” he asks, easing off a little, brow furrowing. “Am I hurting you?”
“No, I—yes,” she amends, grimacing apologetically. “Sorry—it’s me—I'm a little… tight, I think. Tense.”
Elliot’s brows shoot up. “After that?”
She snickers, burying her face in his neck and nodding, muttering against his skin, “Yes, after that. It was intense; I need another minute to unclench.” He chuckles at that, his breath fanning warm against her sweaty neck. Olivia draws her head back, her cheek skimming along his until their lips almost touch, and then she whispers, “Kiss me.”
He makes a soft sound in his throat, a warm little hum of approval and then his lips are on hers. His tongue sweeps into her mouth almost immediately, their kisses intimate and deep. She can feel him all around her, the hard, heavy weight of his body pressing hers into the mattress, his elbows caging her in. His cock is still pressed against her, the whole length of it now, firm and velvety against her sex, his hips rocking against hers in tiny motions that create a subtle friction against her clit.
He has one hand buried in the hair at the nape of her neck, his thumb pressed just below her ear as they kiss and kiss, and the sensation of his fingers cupping her there sends her hurtling back through time, her mind flickering through a slideshow of dozens of times he’d settled his hand just there over the years of their partnership. It had been an innocuous, innocent place he could touch her, the squeezing pressure of it standing in for every hug they’d ever resisted sinking into; the feel of it now, like this, in his bed, makes her head swim.
His other hand slides from her shoulder down to her breast, cupping and squeezing as his mouth veers away from hers, peppers soft kisses along her jaw, down her neck.
She’s trying to give back as good as she’s getting—coasting her palms up and down his back, turning her head to press kisses along his bicep—but her thighs are still quaking and her hands are still trembling and she’s never been eaten out like that in her life, my God.
She needs a few moments without any stimulation, needs just a minute to settle back into her skin, so she sneaks her hand in between them and wraps her fingers around his hard length, shifting slightly beneath him to create an inch of space. He gasps at the contact, then exhales a heavy breath, the sound of it loud just below her ear.
He’s close enough that she can hear the quiet unh that drops from him as her fist strokes up to his tip, then down to the root, back again. She’s keeping it slow, learning the feel of him, licking her lips when she notices the underside of his cock is damp from being pressed against her.
It’s only a few seconds, though, before he sucks in a breath and murmurs, “Gotta stop that, baby—” And when did that start? Baby? They’ll have to talk about that later, after, when she’s more willing to bicker. “Wanna last when I’m inside you.”
She wants that, too—God, does she ever want that—so she nods and stills her hand, but she leaves it there at the base of him, feeling him twitch slightly as their mouths meet again. Her thumb is pressed against a vein and she can feel it pulse faintly, can feel the tempo of his racing heart. Everything seems to slow, then—slow breaths and slow kisses, the slow stroking of his thumbs against her breast, her neck.
It’s the reprieve she needs. Her galloping heart finally decelerates, her shaky fingers finally steady. The tension in her thighs finally relaxes.
Olivia drops her chin, dipping out of the kiss, and then she tightens her grip around him and uses it to guide him home again. This time, he slides in easily, sinking an inch before their eyes meet again, so close it makes her a little cross-eyed. Her breath catches, or maybe it’s his; she knows it’s him who lets out a quiet, desperate moan of contentment. Olivia slips her hand from between them, presses it to the base of his spine and holds her breath as he pushes deeper.
When he finally sinks into her fully, it feels right, feels like completion, like home. Neither of them closes their eyes until he’s buried in her to the hilt, and then hers drop shut, her hands running up along his arms until she can wrap her fingers around his. Elliot squeezes tight, dips his head until their mouths meet again and begins to move inside her.
It’s better than any of the fantasies.