#law & order SVU Agent Dean Porter

[justanoasisimagines]

List of Fandoms/Characters I write for...

House of the Dragon ❀Criston Cole ❀Aemond Targaryen ❀Aegon II Targaryen ❀Harwin Strong ❀Cregan Stark

Game of Thrones ❀Sandor Clegane ❀ Tormund Giantsbane ❀Podrick Payne ❀Jon Snow ❀Robb Stark ❀Theon Grejoy ❀Jorah Mormont ❀Samwell Tarly ❀Gendry Waters ❀Tyrion Lannister ❀Jaime Lannister ❀Oberyn Martell ❀Ramsay Bolton ❀Viserys Targaryen ❀Khal Drago ❀Daario Naharis ❀Dickon Tarly ❀Koner ❀Ser Davos Seaworth

The Walking Dead ❀Rick Grimes ❀Shane Walsh ❀Merle Dixon ❀Daryl Dixon ❀Glenn Rhee ❀Jerry ❀Negan ❀Milton Mamet ❀Ceasar Martinez ❀Siddiq ❀Abraham Ford ❀Eugene Porter ❀Noah ❀Theodore "T-Dog" Douglas ❀Beta ❀Alden ❀Simon ❀Benjamin ❀Phillip "The Governor' Blake ❀Dante

Fear the Walking Dead ❀Troy Otto ❀Jake Otto ❀John Dorie ❀Nick Clark

Mayans MC ❀Ezekiel Reyes ❀Angel Reyes ❀Neron "Creeper" Vargas ❀Johnny "Coco" Cruz ❀Nestor Oceteva ❀Hank Loza ❀Gilberto "Gilly" Lopez ❀Bishop Losa ❀Che "Taza" Romero

Sons of Anarchy ❀Jax Teller ❀Harry "Opie" Winston ❀Juan "Juice" Ortiz ❀Alexander "Tig" Tragger ❀David Hale ❀Chibs Telford ❀Bobby Muson ❀Happy Lowman ❀Herman Kozik

Marvel ❀Steve Rogers ❀Bucky Barnes ❀Sam Wilson ❀Joaquin Torres ❀Baron Helmut Zemo ❀Tony Stark ❀Bruce Banner ❀Clint Barton ❀Thor ❀Loki ❀Pietro Maximoff ❀James "Rhodey" Rhodes ❀John Walker ❀Eddie Brock ❀Erik Killmonger ❀Charlies Xavier ❀Druig ❀Ikaris ❀Hank Mccoy ❀Frank Castle ❀Billy Russo ❀Danny Rand ❀Matthew Murdock ❀Kraven the Hunter ❀Dane Whitman ❀Wade Wilson ❀Pior "Colussus" Rasputin

DC ❀Adrian Chase ❀Clark Kent ❀Arthur Curry ❀Hank Hall ❀Leonard Snart ❀The Joker (Heath Ledgeer) ❀Victor Zsasz (Gotham) ❀Oswald Cobblepot (Gotham) ❀Edward Nygma (Gotham) ❀Harvey Bullock ❀Christopher "Peacemaker" Smith ❀Jerome Valeska ❀Mick Rory ❀George "Digger"Harkness ❀Ciso Ramon ❀Ray Palmer ❀Bruce Wayne ❀Chato Santanna ❀Rick Flag ❀Alfred Pennyworth

Stranger things ❀Eddie Munson ❀Steve Harrington ❀Jim Hopper ❀Dr Alexie

Vikings ❀Ivar the boneless ❀Rollo ❀Ragnar Lothbrok ❀Ubbe ❀Sigurd ❀Bjorn Ironside ❀Halfdan the black ❀Harald Finehair ❀Aethelred ❀Aethelstan ❀Alfred

Bridgerton ❀Prince Fredrich ❀Anthony Bridgerton ❀Benedict Bridgerton ❀Colin Bridgerton

The Witcher ❀Jaskier ❀Eskel ❀Geralt of Rivia ❀Lambert

Top Gun ❀Robert "Bob" Floyd ❀Jake "Hangman" Seresin ❀Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw

Shadow Hunters ❀Raphael Santiago ❀Simon Lewis

Fast and Furious ❀Deckard Shaw ❀Han Lue ❀Jakob Toretto ❀Dante Reyes ❀Aimes ❀Owen Shaw

Zoo ❀Mitch Morgan ❀Jackon Oz

Twilight ❀Carlise Cullen ❀Charlie Swan ❀Sam Uley ❀Garrett

Ewan Mitchell Characters ❀Tom Bennett ❀Micheal Gavey ❀Billy Washington

Joseph Quinn Characters ❀Tom Grant ❀Billy Knight

Henry Cavil Characters ❀Napleon Solo ❀Captain Syverson ❀Charles Brandon ❀Walter Marshall ❀Gus March Phillips ❀Sherlock Holmes

Chris Evans Characters ❀Ari Levinson ❀Hugh Ransom Drysdale ❀Loyd Hansen ❀Andy Barber

Primeval ❀Connor Temple

Law and Order - SVU ❀Rafael Barba

Criminal Minds ❀Spencer Reid ❀Derek Morgan ❀Luke Alverez

9-1-1 ❀Evan "Buck" Buckley ❀Eddie Diaz ❀Albert Han ❀Howard "Chimney" Han

Station 19 ❀Dean Miller ❀Jack Gibson

Chicago PD ❀Kevin Atwater

Call of Duty ❀Simon "Ghost" Riley ❀Captain John Price ❀Alex Keller ❀John "Soap" McTavish ❀Koing ❀Phillip Graves ❀Nikolai ❀Kyle "Gaz Garrick ❀Alejandro Vargas ❀Rudolfo "Rudy" Parra ❀Vladimir Makarov

Grimm ❀Nick Burkhadt ❀Monroe ❀Captain Sean Renard

Beauty and the Beast ❀The Beast ❀Gaston

Shameless ❀Lip Gallagher ❀Kevin Ball

Black Sails ❀Long John Silver ❀Charles Vane ❀Jack Rackham ❀Captain James flint

The Night Agent ❀Peter Sutherland

Harry Potter; ❀Remus Lupin ❀Sirius Black ❀James Potter ❀Oliver Wood ❀Percy Weasley ❀Charlie Weasley ❀Fred Weasley ❀George Weasley ❀Bill Weasley ❀Viktor Krum ❀Neville Longbottom ❀Cedric Diggory ❀Severus Snape ❀Cormac Mclaggen

Fantastic Beasts and where to find them ❀Thesus Scamander ❀Newt Scamander

Vampire Diaries ❀Damon Salvatore ❀Stefan Salvatore ❀Enzo St John

The Originals ❀Niklaus Mikealson ❀Elijah Mikealson ❀Kol Mikealson

Maze Runner ❀Gally

Greys Anatomy ❀George O'Malley

The Mummy ❀Rick O'Connell ❀Ardeth Bay

Once Upon a time ❀Killian Jones ❀David Nolan ❀August Wayne Booth ❀Neal "Bealfire" Cassidy ❀Rumplestiltskin ❀Sheriff Graham Humbert ❀Jefferson

The Musketeers (BBC) ❀Porthos ❀Aramis ❀Athos ❀D'Artagnan

The Last Of Us ❀ Tommy Miller ❀Joel Miller

Fargo ❀Gator Tillman

Sebastian Stan Characters ❀Nick Fowler ❀Lee Bodecker ❀Mickey

Lewis Pullman Characters ❀Rhett Abbott

American Gods ❀Mad Sweeney

Scream ❀Dewey Riley ❀Billy Loomis ❀Stu Matcher

Shadow and Bone ❀Matthias Helvar ❀Kaz Brekker ❀Jesper Fahey ❀Nikolai Lantsov

Reacher ❀Jack Reacher

Bullet Train ❀Tangerine

Percy Jackson ❀Poseidon ❀Hepheastus ❀Aries ❀Hades

The Last Kingdom ❀Osferth ❀Finnan ❀Sihtric ❀Ulthred

AEW ❀Maxwell Jacob Friendman ❀Wardlow ❀Eddie Kingston ❀Orange Cassidy ❀Chuck Taylor ❀Trent Berretta ❀Cash Wheeler ❀Luchasarus ❀Hook ❀Kenny Omega ❀Daniel Garcia ❀Will Osprey

WWE ❀Damien Priest ❀Grayson Waller ❀Sheamus ❀Otis

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                           Entire Story

Chapter 1:  Don’t Get Me Started

Chapter 2:  The Rest Of The Story

Chapter 3:  Protection

Chapter 4:  What If…

Chapter 5:  A Bloody Mess

Chapter 6:  A Little Too Easy

Chapter 7:  Playing By The Rules

Chapter 8:  Reorientation

Chapter 9:  Aggravated Crimes

Chapter 10:  Wooing

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                       Chapter 6:  A Little Too Easy

Source: @kendaspntwd

Chapters 1-5        Story on AO3

Amanda Rollins noticed Rafe Rojas the second he walked into the squad room.  Only a man who lived in jeans could make them fit like that.  And the squint lines around his dark eyes did something to her down low.  He was the lean, cowboy type – well, he was a literal cowboy – she absolutely could not resist.  His hat was well-worn and didn’t disguise the shagginess of his thick, dark hair.  She didn’t mean to come on to him.  She liked Frankie, and Frankie was in deep shit. But her older brother was basically sex in cowboy boots.  So Amanda got real Southern, real fast, the minute she stepped up to Rafe to introduce herself.  Sure, Porter was standing next to him and could have made the introductions.  But Amanda’s ovaries were in charge.  Or some part of her female anatomy, anyway.  

“We’re on our way out to Riker’s,” Porter explained.  “We just stopped by to give you guys a chance to ask any questions you may have thought of.”

“Nikki OK with that?”

“Nikki might not be aware of it,” Porter muttered.  “And your lives might be easier if you didn’t mention this visit to Stone, either. Unless something good comes out of it.  But I trust you guys.  I know you’re on Frankie’s side.  ”  

Dodds introduced himself to Rafe, who was a few inches shorter and a few shades darker.  Rafe’s voice was deep and Amanda thought she detected just the slightest twang, like a delicate spice that gave a tasty dish just the right, subtle kick.  

For several minutes, the group discussed anything in Frankie’s past that might be either helpful or hurtful, but there was nothing.  She was who she was.  She had no skeletons, no previous arrests (knife-related or otherwise), and no history of any kind of violence, unless having a hair-trigger temper and a sharp tongue counted. Rafe couldn’t help the case, except to reassure them that there were no surprises in his sister’s past waiting to trip her up.  

Porter and Rafe left shortly thereafter.  Amanda could feel her thighs quiver when Rafe touched his hat to her and said, “Miss,” as he left.  Amanda was positive he gave her a subtle wink along with his nod.  She stood just a little too long watching the hallway after they’d turned the corner toward the elevators.  

 *********************

Porter ran interference with the guard at Riker’s who tried to keep Rafe from hugging his little sister. He felt responsible for his friend being in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, and he wasn’t about to deny her the small comfort of a hug from her brother.  

“You all right, Snot-rocket?”  Rafe asked, sitting down next to Frankie.  

“Y-yeah,” Frankie stuttered, trying desperately not to cry.  

Rafe pulled her head to his shoulder, and Porter signaled to the guard to let them be.  

“Everybody sends their love. They’re pissed at you for tellin’ ‘em not to come, but they get it.”

“I can’t-“

“They know.  They treatin’ you OK in here?”

“Yeah.  It’s fine.  My lawyer knows some of the guards, and she has some clients in here, so…”

“Can’t say I’m too impressed with a lawyer whose clients are in prison.”

Frankie gave the tiniest laugh, then sniffled.  “She’s good. She’ll get me out of here.”

“Yeah, she will.  And if she don’t, me n’ the guys’ll stage a jailbreak.  Always wanted to do that.”  

“Don’t even joke about that in here,” Frankie told him.

“Ain’t jokin’.  So listen, Porter only got us five minutes, so I don’t wanna waste it.  Just… you need anything?  You need me to do anything?”

“No, there’s nothing. Dean gave you the keys to my apartment?”

“Yeah.  I’ll take care of it for you until you get home.  You just hang in, all right?  Porter’s gonna find that kid.  I met your team at SVU, and they seem like they got their shit together.  We got you, OK?”

“OK.”

“By the way, I’m gonna marry that Amanda.”

“She’s way too good for a snot-rocket like you.  But you go ahead and try.”    

 ********************

Things started to get strange about eight O’Clock the next morning.  Peter Stone got a call in his office.  Based on an anonymous tip, Detectives Carisi and Tutuola had picked up Juwon Jefferson and had him in custody.  And he was talking.  

He was a different kid than Stone had seen on the tapes of his first interrogation.  For one thing, he was a mass of bruises and cuts.  For another, he was giving them real information. The attitude was still on full display, and he was definitely not happy to be there.  But at least they had him, and for whatever reason, he was ready to tell them everything he knew about Alan Canady.  In part, Stone believed his story that Canady had been a truly evil son of a bitch, and now that he was dead, Juwon could safely say so.  But there was no way that was the whole story.  

“Yeah, man, I tol’ the Doc to go see the motherfucker, gave her the message he was gonna barbecue her boyfriend if she didn’t show up.  Ain’t nothin’ illegal ‘bout that.  I just delivered a message.”

“Did he pay you?”  Stone asked.

“Yeah, man, you think I play messenger boy for my health?”  

“Why did he want to see Dr. Rojas?”

“He said he was gonna fuck her up.  Said he was gonna do hisself, make it look like she done it.  Guess that’s pretty much what he done, ain’t it?  That’s bad-ass, man.  Stabbin’ yo’self.  That’s cold.”

Stone rolled his eyes. This was all way too convenient. Out of the blue, they get an anonymous tip and this kid who hadn’t cooperated at all is suddenly telling them the exact same wildly implausible story the suspect told?  And he just happened to be covered with injuries?  No.  Somebody got to this kid, and he was either getting something huge out of this, or they had something big over him.  Either way, Stone wasn’t about to let Rojas walk on the word of this little tweaker alone.

“Why should I believe you?” Stone asked, looking hard at the kid.

“I don’t give a shit if you believe me.  It’s that rich bitch doctor sittin’ in Rikers, not me.”

The kid had talked quite a bit about Alan Canady’s rapes of the three women.  That, at least, they could prove.  The kid’s evidence gave them probable cause to test Canady’s DNA against the rape kits, which was being done right that moment.  Stone thought blackly that it wasn’t like it was hard to collect Canady’s DNA - it was pooled all over the floor in that cheap motel room. But that still didn’t prove who had killed Canady, and it didn’t answer why this kid was suddenly in custody and talking.  Stone was suspicious of anything this neat and easy.

 ****************

Later that day, Stone stopped by Barba’s office.  Barba was sitting at his desk, tapping a pen and staring off into space.  

“Thinking deep legal thoughts?”  Stone grinned.

“Shallow ones, anyway. What can I do for you?”

“I wanna talk about this Rojas case.”

Barba frowned.  “You can’t talk to me about that case.”

“Not about the case itself, just…  Hypothetically, what would you say if you had a case with a very hard to find, reluctant, unreliable witness, who suddenly gets found by an ‘anonymous source’ and starts singing like a canary?”  Stone made himself comfortable in one of the chairs in front of Barba’s desk.

“I’d smell a rat. Especially if this suddenly cooperative witness is a junkie.”

“He is. Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically. Look, I’m in an impossible spot here. You know that.  I know Francisca Rojas didn’t kill Alan Canady.”

“You don’t know that, and neither does anyone else except Canady.  And he’s not talking.”

“I have instincts, same as you.  And I know this woman.”

“You’ve known this woman for a whole month.  And you’re fucking her.  Tends to mess with the instincts, Barba.”

Rafael shot Stone an irritated look and gave a snort of annoyance.  “What, exactly, do you want from me here?  There’s no way she did it.  I know that.  But if you’re asking me whether you can believe this tweaker’s sudden conversion to the light, I’d say no.  So you get all the information you can out of him, and you check it all out, and you prove she didn’t do it with that evidence.”

“What the hell’s happened to everyone around here?  Since when are we in the business of proving someone didn’t do a crime?”  Stone snapped.

“Since always.  We prove the truth, not just what we want to be true.  That’s why I’m saying don’t buy the tweaker’s story.  I’d like Franci-  Dr. Rojas out of Riker’s today.  But you have a job to do, and that means you need to be right.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Stone smirked, getting up.  

“That’s what I’m here for. Get her out.  Soon.  But do it the right way.”

Rafael was troubled.  The tweaker was back and now he was talking? What had she done?  Or what had been done on her behalf?  

 **********

The DNA matched.  Alan Canady was the Pattern 20 rapist. Unfortunately, that didn’t prove who had killed him.  Nothing did. The autopsy was consistent with either Canady stabbing himself or someone else stabbing him; it was inconclusive either way.  And both his fingerprints and Frankie Rojas’s were on the knife.  True, Canady had no defensive wounds, but she could simply have gotten a lucky shot before he realized what was happening.  Because Barba’s building had no security cameras, there was no way to prove that Canady or Jefferson had somehow gotten in and stolen the knife.  From an evidence standpoint, that meant it was equally likely that either Frankie had killed Canady, or he had done it himself.  

In the end, the Manhattan DA’s office had no choice but to drop the charges against Frankie Rojas.  With the tweaker kid’s testimony, there was simply too much reasonable doubt for Nikki Staines to work with.  Nikki had actually been in the office the day the decision was made, raising holy hell and making Peter Stone’s life miserable.  Stone wasn’t happy about any of it – he felt like they had been played by someone who had gotten to the tweaker kid, but he couldn’t prove it, and he had other cases he could prove.  So they dropped the charges and Nikki blew up the phones at Riker’s as she drove out to collect her client, making sure they would have her processed out and ready when Nikki arrived.  

She called Dean Porter from her car.  “You heard?”

“Yeah.  Can I go pick her up?”

“I’m on my way now. But listen.  I’m never gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, but Stone thinks he got played, and I can’t blame him.  Is there anything I should know about that Jefferson kid?  It does seem like he had a pretty sudden, and violent, change of heart.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you don’t. I just want to know I’m not gonna get any surprises, and my client isn’t either.”

“You won’t.  I swear to you, Nikki, it’s all above board.  The kid was telling the truth.”

“Yeah, but why was he telling the truth?”

“You know what?  Take the win.  It’s all good.”

“It better be.  You got a lot to lose these days.”

“Yeah, life is good. And I wouldn’t jeopardize that. We didn’t do anything to the tweaker kid that’s gonna hurt us.  Or you. Or Frankie.”

“You didn’t, huh? Then who’s ‘we’?”

“Did I say ‘we’?  I meant ‘I’.  Hey, Nikki, my other line is ringing.  I gotta answer that.  Nice working with you.”

***************

Frankie was pretty sure she was being set up.  She didn’t really like it, given what she’d just been through, but it was hard to find a basis to complain.  Her brother and Amanda had become very… close, and were both claiming that, since he was planning to fly back to Austin in the morning, it was their last opportunity to spend time together.  So, as badly as they felt about it – yeah, sure, she thought – they wondered whether Frankie would mind spending one more night at Barba’s.  Besides which, all her things were at Barba’s.  And they claimed already to have set it up with him.  

Frankie dimly felt that it was bizarre for people who loved her to be worrying about romance, their own or hers, after she had just been in prison for murder.  But she was exhausted.  She’d barely eaten or slept in the five days since her arrest, and she’d been in an emotional spin-cycle the entire time.  The truth was, she wanted two things.  She wanted to take a shower for about a week, followed by a soak in a bathtub for a month.  And she wanted Barba.  

She hadn’t spoken to him since her arrest.  He’d retained Nikki for her, and she’d had messages from him through Porter, but that had been all he could do.  Now that she was about to see him again, she was in a turmoil of different emotions.  She felt physically hideous and soiled, and she felt emotionally battered and horribly ashamed.  She thought she was far too needy to be going to stay with a man she knew as little as she knew Barba.  But, apparently, she was the only one who felt that way, because he was waiting for her when Nikki pulled up at the curb in front of his building.

He looked absolutely delectable to her.  Gorgeous and kind and caring and opening his arms to her before she was all the way out of the car, even though all she had to wear home was the terrible sweats they’d given her at the M.E.’s office when they’d taken her bloody clothes.  Nikki smiled broadly at Rafael as he moved to push the car door closed, cradling Frankie in his arms.  

“Thank you,” he mouthed.

“My pleasure,” she replied, waving.  She liked the idea of Barba owing her one.

Rafael gently guided Frankie through the door to the lobby, and held her while they waited for the elevator.  

“Thank you for letting me stay with you,” she mumbled into his shirt.  She hadn’t looked at him, really, as she’d climbed out of Nikki’s car, just put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.  

“I would have come to your place, if you hadn’t come here.  Even with your brother there.  I want to help.  I’ve felt so fucking useless these past days…”

She squeezed him, hard. “You called Nikki.  You shouldn’t even have done that.  That was everything.”

“I know you didn’t kill him, Francisca.”

“No, you don’t.  No one does, except me and him.  But I didn’t.  I swear it.”

“Still arguing with me…” he said with a grin, as he led her into the elevator, still with her arms clasped to him and her face buried. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was wonderful to have her in his arms again, to be able to comfort her as he’d been aching to for days.  But the way she was clinging to him spoke of a depth of fear and anguish that he’d only guessed at.  He was intensely grateful she had come to him so that he could help her through it.  He was honored that his fresa, usually so dauntless and fiery, and now so crushed and wounded, would allow herself to be this vulnerable with him.  He vaguely realized that he would do anything for this woman in his arms, but he paid little attention to the thought, as he thought about what he could do to help her begin to recover from her ordeal.

She released him from her arms when he closed the door behind them, but stayed right next to him.

“I’m guessing you’d like the longest, hottest shower in the history of the world,” he suggested.  

“I’d give my left arm for that,” she sighed softly.

“No charge for guests. You go get in the shower, and I’ll bring you a drink.”

“Do you happen to have any scotch?”

Rafael couldn’t help but laugh at that.  Everyone knew about Rafael Barba and scotch.  He was a little amused by this evidence that they really hadn’t known each other that long.  “I have scotch.”

When he had poured a scotch for each of them, he hesitated outside the door to his bathroom for a moment. He could hear the water running, and see billows of steam floating lazily into the bedroom.  But he was suddenly unsure what she was expecting. Did she want privacy?  Should he wait for her to come out?  Well, he’d told her he was going to bring her a drink.  Besides, he realized, the steam was escaping into the bedroom because she had left the door ajar.  He knocked tentatively and pushed the door open a little.

“Francisca?  I brought your drink.”  

She didn’t respond. He noticed the sweatshirt and pants she’d been wearing wadded up on the floor.

“What do you want me to do with these sweats?”

It took her a second to answer.  “Bonfire,” she finally said in a choked voice.  

He was sure he heard a sob. He didn’t hesitate, but stepped into the room, set his drink on the counter, and pulled the shower curtain back just enough to see her.  Her hands were splayed on the tile wall and she was leaning on both arms, head hanging, crying hard and trying to be silent about it.

“Oh, mi fresa,” he said, pulling the curtain back and stepping, fully clothed, into the shower to take her into his arms.  She instantly let out a groan of agony, turning into him and clinging to him as she sobbed into his shoulder.  He held her drink just outside the spray of the shower.  

For long minutes, he just held her and let her cry, while the hot water cascaded down and soothed her. He didn’t realize he had begun to hum softly to her until she turned her face into his neck, muttering, “That’s nice.”

When she seemed to be done crying, he moved them a bit to the side and held the glass to her.  “Here, drink this,” he said softly, not letting go of her.  She downed its contents in one gulp and handed it back to him.  He smiled.  

When he felt her arms loosen around him, he reached behind her and set the glass down on the shower’s built-in tile shelf.  He took a bottle of shampoo and poured a little into his hand.  Moving her just a bit backward out of the spray, he began to shampoo her hair.  She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, the slightest smile touching her lips. When he was done, he moved her under the spray to rinse her hair and began to soap her body.  He tried not to make it sexual, given the situation and the fact that he was still wearing all of his now-soaked clothes.  But it wasn’t easy.  He wasn’t sure, but it seemed like she moved into his hands from time to time. He conditioned her hair when he’d finished washing her, and moved her once again under the spray to rinse out the conditioner.  

“MMmmmmmm,” she said. “This feels so nice.”

“That’s the point,” he said, leaning down without thinking and kissing her.  

He was just preparing to be concerned about pushing her when she reached to put a hand behind his head and wind her fingers in his wet hair, pulling his mouth harder on hers.  After thoroughly kissing him, she looked into his eyes for the first time since she’d arrived.  

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.  And I mean that in a number of different ways. I like having you here, and I’m here for you.”

“I know,” she said.  “Can we take a bath?”

“Of course we can.”

“And… will you please take your clothes off?  I don’t care what you do when you’re alone, but I refuse to take a bath with a clothed man.”

Rafael put his forehead to Frankie’s.  “No, I won’t take them off.  But you’re welcome to, if you want.”

“Oh, you’re a pain in the ass, Barba.”  She kissed him again and began undressing him.  

When she had his clothes off, he quickly washed his hair and turned the dial that turned off the shower and began to fill the tub.  Pulling back the curtain, he picked up the pile of wet clothes and wrung them out as best he could, then tossed them across the bathroom into the sink to be dealt with later.  

“You get comfortable.” He said.  “I’ll be right back.”

Rafael quickly padded out to his kitchen and retrieved the bottle of scotch, bringing it to the bathroom and setting it down next to the tub where Frankie was pouring some shampoo under the water to make bubbles.  He took his glass from the counter, lifted hers from the shelf in the shower, and put them on the edge of the bathtub, then stepped into the water. She moved to let him get seated behind her, then scooted between his legs and relaxed against his chest. 

He poured some scotch into her glass and handed it to her, then picked up his own.  He wrapped one arm around her and she held his arm with hers. They sat in the rapidly-filling tub and sipped in silence.  

When the tub was full, Frankie used her foot to turn off the water and turned herself so that she was lying on her side, her cheek on his chest, and could put both arms around him.

“I love you,” she murmured, eyes closed and smiling.  

Rafael kissed the top of her head, wondering whether she could possibly have meant what she’d just said. She lay quietly, seemingly perfectly satisfied with no response other than a kiss.  She’d had two drinks – he had only poured a couple of fingers each time, but he had no idea when the last time she’d slept or eaten was, and for all he knew, she was asleep right this second.  Maybe she didn’t even know she’d said it.  He decided that’s what it was.  His chest felt warm anyway, and it wasn’t just because of the scotch.  

He thought he dozed a little, lying there holding her in the hot, bubbly water.  He was gently nudged back into consciousness when she shifted between his legs and mumbled, “It’s getting cold.”

“You want to put in some more hot water?”

“Mmmmmm, I want to be in bed.  I don’t want to get out of this tub and move to the bed.  I just want to be in bed without that part.”

“I’d like to do that for you, mi fresa, but I don’t think I possess that particular skill.”

She inhaled deeply and slowly exhaled.  “OK, we’ll do it the hard way.”

They helped each other to stand and climb out of the tub, and Rafael wrapped Frankie in a deliciously large, fluffy towel.  She was too sleepy to comment, but she made a mental note to compliment him on his taste in towels – and scotch – in the morning.  Neither bothered much with their hair – Rafael just toweled his off and Frankie twisted hers into a quick bun on top of her head.  They quickly brushed their teeth, leaning on one another, and were cuddled together in bed very soon thereafter, arms around one another and her head cradled on his shoulder.  

In the soft light coming through the window, Frankie looked up at Rafael.  She lifted her lips to kiss his jaw and he turned his head to take her lips between his.  He was a bit surprised when she subtly shifted her body and opened her mouth to his, sliding her hand down his side to his hip and thigh, angling her caress until she was softly cupping him in her hand.  

“Barba?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Will you please make love to me?”

“Anything for you.”

He followed her lead, going slowly and touching her softly, never taking his mouth from hers, even when whispering endearments and praise.  Her soft moan as she came with him inside her was pure enchantment, and he was almost positive it contained a whispered, “I love you.”

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                        Chapter 8:  Reorientation

Source:  @yunafire

Chapters 1-5  Chapter 6  Chapter 7   Read on AO3

It was late when Mike Dodds showed up at Forlini’s.  By then, Fin and Carisi had already left and Amanda was getting ready to head home herself, but she stayed to have a last drink, not wanting to leave just as Dodds arrived.  He worked too hard, and he had a thing about not getting too social with the detectives, trying to maintain an appropriate distance since he was their Sergeant.  Amanda thought that was crap; Olivia socialized with them, after all, so she bought him a shot of tequila to go with his beer.

The conversation was typical Friday night, several-drinks-in fare, and it was exactly what Dodds needed to clear work from his head. Especially with these women, who flirted tipsily with him and were primed to laugh at his jokes.  Amanda did excuse herself after she finished her last drink, though, leaving Frankie and Mike at the table.

“You want another one?”

“I don’t know, Mike, I’m kinda lit already.”  Frankie made a face.  

“C’mon.  I just got here.”

“Oh, what the hell.  I’ll just switch to beer.  I’m buying.”

When she returned with their drinks, she looked just a bit too long out the window.  Dodds was not only a trained detective, he was also naturally intuitive.  The look on her face didn’t escape him.

“What was that?”  He asked, clinking his beer glass with hers.

“What was what?”

“That look.  You see someone out on the street?”

“Mike.  Clock out already.  You are done Sergeant-ing for the day.”

Dodds laughed.  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrogate you. But I actually have been meaning to check in with you.  About Canady, and everything that happened.  How you doin’ with all that?”

Frankie’s eyes took on a speculative look.  “I think I’m OK.  My life is back to normal, and I haven’t had a prison dream in a while. And I didn’t realize until he was dead how often I was worrying about Alan finding me.  So, you know… I think I’m good.”

“Glad to hear it.  Sorry I had to be the one to arrest you.”

“Stop apologizing for that.  It was your job, and you couldn’t have been nicer about it.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure there are women who dream about you handcuffing them, Sergeant.”  

Dodds’ face twisted into a wry grin of sorts.  “Well, I’m afraid they’re gonna have to go on dreaming.”

Frankie tried to keep her face impassive.  “Oh?  Rather handcuff men, would you?”

“Not into handcuffing at all, to tell you the truth, but yeah. If there’s handcuffing to be done, I’d prefer it be male.”

Frankie smiled and clinked her glass with his.  “Gotcha.”

“You surprised?”

She shrugged.  “I hadn’t thought about it.  OK, that’s a lie, I noticed you’re pretty, um…”  she waved her hand up and down to indicate him.  “What’s the professional way to say ‘sexy’?  So I might be just a little disappointed.  But I can’t say I blame you.  I like dick, too.”

Dodds almost spit out his beer at that.

“Oh, shit.  I must be drunker than I thought.  Sorry about that, Mike.  Sometimes my mouth tries to kill me.”

He swallowed and laughed.  “No, don’t be sorry, that may be the best response I’ve ever gotten after coming out to a woman.”  

“So, obvious next question.  Are you dating anyone?”

“Not currently, no.  Which explains why I’m sitting here with you at ten O’clock on a Friday night.”

“Wow.  That hurt.”

“No – that came out wrong.  I just meant-“

Frankie laughed and put a hand on Mike’s arm.  “I’m just giving you shit.  I’m the wrong flavor.  I get it.”

“But you are Barba’s flavor, and I gotta ask about that.  I thought the two of you had a thing going.”

“For a grand total of one minute.”

“Bullshit.  I see the way you look at eachother.  And don’t even try to tell me all that yelling isn’t foreplay.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Sergeant.  I mean, yeah, he’s attractive enough, but we have a fundamental… difference of… opinion…”

Frankie’s voice trailed off and she gazed, eyes unfocused, at the tablecloth.  

“About?”

Her mind had suddenly been pulled back to Rafe’s hand injury.  She wasn’t going to share her suspicion with Dodds, but she was just drunk enough to take the opportunity to unburden herself a bit.  “Well, it’s…” She looked up at him and leaned in. “Can I talk to you about something sort of personal?  Confidentially?”

“The doctor is in.  Did you want to lie down on the couch, or…?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…  Everybody’s a comedian.  So the thing is, Barba thinks I did something to get Juwon Jefferson – you remember, the tweaker kid?  Barba thinks I got him to say Alan was the Pattern 20 rapist and that he killed himself.”

“What, Barba thinks you killed Canady?”

“No, he says he believes me about that, but he thinks it’s awfully convenient that Jefferson suddenly started cooperating.”

“And?”

“What do you mean, ‘And”?  Barba thinks I tampered with a witness.”

“He thinks Jefferson lied?”

“I don’t know, exactly.  But he thinks whatever he said, I put him up to it.”

“Did you?”

“No!”

“Then who gives a fuck what Barba thinks?”

“I do.  That’s the problem.  I… Mike, I could really care for him. In fact, in vino veritas, I do really care for him.   But I can’t have him thinking I did something like that.”

“Something like what?  Frankie, seriously, let’s say you did – I don’t know – bribe Jefferson, or threaten him with something if he didn’t come clean.  Hell, let’s even say you got him to lie.  As long as you didn’t kill Canady – and you didn’t - so what?”

“Are you fucking serious right now?”  

“Dead serious.”

“It would be OK with you if I bribed a witness to lie for me.”

“In this case?  Yes.”

Frankie gaped at him, incredulous.

“Oh, grow the hell up, Doc.  I might not even be all that upset if you were the one who offed the guy. You’re from Texas, right?  What is it they say, ‘He needed killin’?”  

“You are honestly telling me…”

“Look, I don’t know, all right?  I’m feeling that tequila, maybe in the cold light of day I would have a problem with you actually killing the guy.  It would depend on the circumstances.  But as it stands, he did himself to frame you, and if Jefferson hadn’t backed you, it would’ve worked.  That, I definitely would have a problem with.”

“Shit, Dodds.  That’s basically what Barba said.”

“Then Barba’s right.”

“Listen, you gotta keep this between us, OK?  Don’t say anything about… how I feel about Barba.”

“I won’t.”

“In fact, you gotta give me some collateral.  Tell me something you don’t want anyone in the squad to know so I can blackmail you.”

“What was that phrase from the Cold War?  ‘Mutually assured destruction?’”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think I’ve had that much to drink.”

“Then let me tell you something about you that you don’t want anyone in the squad to know.  I’ve been sitting here multitasking, assimilating the idea of you being gay.  Suddenly your reluctance to socialize with us makes a little more sense.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s Carisi, isn’t it?”

“Fuck, Frankie, you could destroy me with that.”

“Of course I couldn’t.  Number one, I’m assuming you’ve never said or done anything about it.”

“Of course not!  He’s my subordinate and he’s straight as an arrow.”

“And number two, I’d never say a word.  Unless…”  She gave him a wildly overdone evil leer with a mustache twirl.

“You’re diabolical.”

“I’m not, actually, but please don’t say anything to Barba.”

“I won’t, but you should.  He’s into you.”

“A lot you know.  Right this minute, he’s ‘into’ the Chinese restaurant across the street with a blonde.”

“I knew you were looking at something out there!”

“Yeah, bully for me.  Next, I’ll be driving by his house at night, just hoping to get a glimpse of him, like a bad country song.”

“You could do that.  Or just fucking talk to the man.  I’m telling you, Frankie, you are the one making problems for the two of you.   You need to lighten up and see the world for what it is.”

“Shit, you’re practically quoting him.”

“Then maybe you should listen.  Because I know he’s waiting for you to make a move.”

“He’s waiting with a blonde, Mike.”

“So?  You’re here with me.”

“I think the blonde shares our preferences.”

“Again, so?”

“So I’m assuming he will be sharing leftovers with her in the morning.”

“Jeez, Frankie, how old are you?  So he fucks her.  So what?”  

“So I’m the jealous type.  That would be a problem for me.”

“Oh, come on.  Say I take you back to my place and fuck you stupid.  All weekend, even.  Is that going to change the way you feel about Barba?”

“Depends.  Are there handcuffs?”

Mike laughed loudly.  “I think in your profession, they call that ‘deflecting.’  Which means I win.  It’s the twenty-first century and we’re grown-ass adults, Frankie.  Let the blonde handcuff Barba all she wants. That isn’t gonna change the way he feels about you, and you shouldn’t let it change the way you feel about him.”

Frankie leaned back and shook her head.  “I’ll think about it,” she said, frowning.

“Do that.”

She brought her eyes back to Dodds and leaned in again.  “And you think about Carisi being straight. You may find he’s straight as a rainbow.”

“Shut up.”

“Yep.  I’ve seen some things.  And I can even find out for you, if you want.”

“He’d still be my subordinate.”

“I don’t want to know the details, Dodds,” Frankie winked.

“I meant that I’m his Sergeant.”

“I know what you meant,” she laughed.  “And I’m going to find out how he rolls.  Carefully, discreetly, and without even a hint of your name.  I’ll let you know.”

 *******************

“Hey, Snot-rocket!”

“You’re the snot-rocket, Snot-rocket.  How’s it going?”

“It’s good.  Got a bit of a squall comin’ through right now, which is messin’ with my plans for today, but life on a ranch, right?”

“Right.  So… how’s the hand?”  Frankie waited to see what Rafe would do with that question.  

As expected, his response was, “What hand?”

“I heard you had a couple of broken fingers, or sprained, or something.  Twisted them working on a fence?”  

“Oh, that.  That was a while ago, and it was nothin’.  They’re fine.”

“What happened, exactly?”

“Like you said, I twisted ‘em.  Workin’ on a fence.”  

“We have different definitions of the word, ‘exactly,’ Rafe.”

“What are you, interrogatin’ me?  Am I under arrest?”

“Hmmmm.  Defensive reaction.”

“Frankie, what are you gettin’ at?  I hurt my fingers.  BFD.”

“Well, it is a big fucking deal if you’re lying to me because you hurt them beating up Juwon Jefferson to get him to talk to the cops.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.  

“Amanda tell you that?”

“No, you just did.  What the fuck, Rafe?  That’s witness tampering.  It’s illegal.  Stone could use it to re-file the charges!”

“He ain’t gonna do nothin’ if you don’t tell him.  Drop it, Frankie.  I mean it.  It’s over. You coulda been convicted of murder, and I wasn’t gonna let that sumbitch do you like that.  That’s all I got to say about that.”

“Rafe…”

“That’s all I got to say.  How’s Amanda doin’?”  

Nothing Frankie could say would get any more information out of her stubborn brother.

 ****************

Olivia was very surprised to see Frankie at her apartment door on a Saturday afternoon, but Porter wasn’t.  They’d been texting, and he hadn’t been able to put Frankie off. The most she would agree to was to wait until Noah’s naptime before coming over.  She was clearly upset.

“Do you want some coffee?”

“Thanks, Liv, I’d love some.”

Porter sat down on a chair across from the couch where Frankie sat. “All right, so what’s the emergency?”

“You avoided me after I got out of Riker’s.  I thought it was weird that I couldn’t get you to agree to a time to get together and talk about what happened with Alan, after all we’d been through.”

“And the fact that I was busy means I was avoiding you?”

“You were waiting for the bruises to heal.”  

Olivia handed Frankie a mug of coffee and sat next to her, an expectant look on her face as she looked at Porter.  

“You knew.”  

Olivia sighed.  “I knew Dean was in a fight the night Jefferson was brought in, and that he asked me not to mention it to anyone at NYPD.  But that’s all I knew.”

“Because you purposely didn’t ask any questions.”

“Best I could do.  And, if you want my advice, I’d recommend you don’t ask any questions, either.”

“So it’s true.  You-“

“Don’t say anything else, Frankie.”  Porter advised, leaning forward toward her.  “Just drop it, have some coffee.   We can talk all you want about Canady.  Let’s just not worry about Jefferson.”

Frankie drank deeply and thoughtfully.  Barba’s coffee was infinitely better than Liv’s.

“Am I that much of a child?”  She asked.

Liv took that one.  “Frankie, you know me.  You know how I do things.  Would you call me a child?”

“Of course not.”

“Then neither are you.  Now.  Would you call me… oh, I don’t know.  Crooked? A rogue cop?”

“Of course not.  You’re one of the most righteous cops I know.”

“Then listen to me.  I was one of the arresting officers in your case.  It was bad.  It was very bad.  Based on everything I’ve seen, I was scared for you.  So when I got the call about Jefferson, and he started to talk, I was relieved as hell.  And when Dean showed up with bruises that night, I didn’t ask any questions.  He’s an FBI agent.  He gets beat up.  I have no idea what happened to him, and neither do you.”

“What if Stone finds out?”

“Finds out what?  Finds out Dean’s an FBI agent who sometimes gets in fights on the job?  He already knows.”

“You know what I mean, Liv.”

“I know you’re drawing conclusions.  I know you have no idea what did or didn’t happen while you were in Riker’s.  And I know you should be grateful as all hell you’re not there now, and you should never think about it again.  That’s what I know.”

Frankie sighed and took another long drink of dreadful coffee.

“You want to talk about something else?”  Porter asked.  “Because we have some news.”

Benson and Porter’s engagement was the only topic of conversation for the rest of Frankie’s visit.  

 *********************

“Hey, Sonny, I need to ask your opinion on something.”

“Shoot, Doc.”

Sonny was sitting at his desk, searching online for a site on the dark web that had just turned up in a case.  Frankie sat on the edge of the desk nearby.  No one else happened to be in the squad room at the moment.  

“I have this cop friend.  He’s gay and he’s thinking about coming out to his team.  He wants to know what I think, and I haven’t been part of the NYPD for long enough to have a good sense of how that would go.  You’ve been around NYPD for a while, worked in some different houses, what would you tell him?”

“Depends on his unit.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.  Like, if he works Gangs, he should move to the back of the closet and hide behind the winter coats.  But some units are friendlier than that.  Where’s he work?”

“Until he comes out, I’d prefer not to say.  I trust you, I just don’t have his permission, you know?”

“Got it.  Well, since you’re that discreet, let me tell you somethin’.”  Sonny looked around to ensure their privacy.  “SVU’s about the most LGBTQ-friendly unit there is in the NYPD, right?  And even here, I publicly only date girls.”

“So you’re saying you’re bi, but you wouldn’t come out, even here.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Well, thanks for the insight.  And the confidence.  It’s not misplaced.”

“I know.  And I’m out to Amanda, too, just so you know.”

“OK.”  Frankie said, then pretended to be struck by a thought.  “So listen, that being the case…  I heard something.  I need to thread the needle a little bit here, but…  Someone, a guy, told me that they’re interested in you, and he wanted to know if you were straight.  But he’s not out here, either.”

“Someone in SVU?  A guy? Is interested in me?”  

“I didn’t say he was in SVU,” Frankie said, noticing that Carisi’s eyes instantly went to Dodds’ desk.  “But he’s… around, and you know him.  I told him I didn’t know where you stood, but I’d find out.  I don’t know how to do this…  I wouldn’t out you to him, even with your permission.  It’s a rule I have.  But could I tell him he could trust you not to shoot him if he made his interest known?  Would that be OK?”

Sonny’s brow furrowed. “Can I think about it?”

“Of course.  And if you never mention it again, neither will I.”

“Cool.  Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Sonny worked for a while longer.  “Hey, this guy…  What’s he like?”

“Tens across the board.”

“Really?”

“Definitely.”

“OK.  You can tell him I won’t shoot him.  The rest is up to him.”

“Consider it done.”

 *********************

Frankie needed advice.  Well, that wasn’t exactly accurate.  She’d received quite a bit of advice on how to view what Porter and Rafe had done, all of it decidedly uniform.  But she was having a tough time accepting it.  She needed to talk to someone about it, and she didn’t know who to turn to. She respected and trusted the opinions she’d heard; it wasn’t that.  The problem was, she needed to talk to someone whom she knew had unimpeachable principles of right and wrong.  Actually, she would have loved to hear Peter Stone’s thoughts, but she would always be scared shitless of him.  Also, she preferred to stay out of prison.  Nikki?  No, she knew Nikki would say what everyone else said.  

And then she thought of George Huang.  

“Frankie!  What a nice surprise!  Or is it? You’re not calling to curse me for letting you get involved with SVU, are you?”

Frankie laughed.  She loved George.  Even the relaxing sound of his voice made her feel better.  “I’m not, but you could’ve warned me about Barba.”

“Ooh.  Sorry about that.  I guess I should’ve seen a little potential conflict there.  You remind me of each other.  Then again, maybe he’s good for you.  He’s the only person I can think of who could say ‘no’ to you and make it stick. I’m guessing you find that as attractive as you do annoying.”

“Get out of my head, Professor.  I’m not your student anymore.”  

“Listen, I was very sorry to hear about what you went through. With Canady.”

”Thanks, George.  And thanks for your emails.  I appreciate it.”

“How are you doing now?”

“Surprisingly well, actually.  It will probably turn out to be good for me, professionally, to have had that experience.  You know, maybe in ten, twenty years.”

Huang laughed softly.  “I’m glad to hear you’re OK.  I was worried.”

“Well, when I say I’m OK, that’s a bit relative.  There is something I need to work through.”

“That’s what you said in your text.  Your fifty minutes starts now.  I’m expensive, make them count.”

 *************

Carmen had been here before.  Janice Edwards was not the first woman who “just happened to stop by hoping to catch Mr. Barba” when he was in court, and ended up pumping Carmen for information about him.  She was, however, the first one who came bearing expensive coffee not for Mr. Barba, but for Carmen.  Carmen hoped Ms. Edwards was a bit less obvious with judges.  Ms. Edwards was perfectly aware that Mr. Barba had a hearing this afternoon; Carmen had heard him tell her about it not two hours before. Consummate professional that she was, Carmen sipped her coffee and smiled, despite the fact that she really wished Ms. Edwards was sitting in the chair next to her desk, rather than on her desk, leaning in as though they were the closest of friends.  

“I happened to see he had lunch with Bess Quinn yesterday.  Do they have a case together?”

“Not currently, no.”

“Oh?  What was the lunch about, then?”

This was not Carmen’s debut performance on this particular stage. “I’m not sure.  This suit is just beautiful.”

“Really?  When did she call to schedule it?”

“I’m not sure who scheduled it.  He just asked me to put it on his calendar.  Is this Alexander McQueen?”

Carmen thought she’d successfully answered all Ms. Edwards questions without actually saying anything when she started to talk about her suit.  Five minutes later, however, she found herself fielding more questions, this time about what Mr. Barba had done this past weekend. That was interesting, given that Carmen had made reservations for him and Ms. Edwards at Xiāngliào on Friday night.  But since Carmen knew nothing about what Mr. Barba had done over the weekend, she simply said so.  

“You know, between us girls, I think he’s seeing someone.  Is he seeing someone?”

“Not that I’m aware, Ms. Edwards.”

“Oh, you know you can call me Janice.  And you can tell me.  He’s not back with Bess Quinn, is he?”

“I couldn’t say.”  She also wouldn’t say that Mr. Barba – well, Carmen on Mr. Barba’s behalf - had sent Ms. Quinn flowers after their lunch, or that he had tickets to see an opera in French with Adrien St. George the next night. Carmen could understand Ms. Edwards’ curiosity.  Even for Mr. Barba, that was a lot of… socializing.

Carmen had to keep doing her job, even with Joyce Edwards in residence on her desk.  Excusing herself, she answered Mr. Barba’s private line and was annoyed – but undetectably so – to see Ms. Edwards leaning in to try to hear.

“I’ll give him the message,” Carmen said, purposely not using the caller’s name or writing anything down for Ms. Edwards to read. She wouldn’t forget to tell Mr. Barba that Dr. Rojas wanted to speak to him.  In fact, she’d been watching the two of them, and Carmen had some theories of her own about Mr. Barba’s social schedule.

 ***************

Frankie and Mike Dodds found themselves on the courthouse elevator together the following day.  

“Hey, Mike, that thing we talked about last Friday?”

“What thing?”

“I said I was going to get some information for you about that detective we talked about.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah.  I made a discreet inquiry.”

“And?”

“I am authorized to tell you that they will not shoot you if you make yourself known to them.”

“I have no idea what the hell that means.”

“It means you should pursue that line of investigation.”

“No shit.”

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                     Chapter 3:  Protection

Source:  @barbaoutfits

Chapter 1  Chapter 2  

Rafael was impressed with the way Dr. Rojas presented as an expert witness.  She had plenty of experience testifying, of course, and anyone would listen to her once they heard her credentials, even if she hadn’t been as articulate and poised as she was.   Plenty of expert witnesses were either incapable of speaking at a level understandable by a jury, which was off-putting, or sounded as though they were intentionally dumbing down their words, which was insulting.  Rojas didn’t.  She had an ability to explain complex matters and introduce technical terms in a way that was understandable and relatable without being condescending.  It didn’t hurt that she wore her shiny, black hair in a French twist that would have been severe except for the gently curling strands that escaped it to soften her look, and a simple but elegant suit in a subtle green that flattered her warm, coppery skin tone.  She was accomplished and beautiful but, because of her open, friendly manner, the jury found her attractive rather than threatening.  

Frankie had needed almost no preparation, which was fortunate for both her and Rafael because, after their argument a few days before, they were almost unable to speak to one another normally.  For Rafael, it was difficult to disguise the deep feelings she aroused in him.  He wanted her, there was no question about that.  And, after the way she had responded to him in the interrogation room, he was certain that she wanted him, too.  He would have been very excited by that, except that he also despised what she stood for and found her personally irritating in the extreme.  Even hearing her name generated a physical and emotional heat he had to work around in everything having to do with her.  It was not an ideal situation for a Prosecutor questioning an expert witness in a felony trial. 

It was no easier for Frankie.  In fact, after spending the past two days watching him own this courtroom, dealing with Barba had only become more difficult.  She was always attracted to talent and intelligence, and had a special predilection for men who were clever with language.  Barba was like a rock star on stage as he subtly, expertly maneuvered the trial in exactly the way he intended.  It was exquisite torture to watch him in his perfectly-tailored suits that allowed her to imagine exactly what she would discover if she took them off, until she caught herself being lulled into those thoughts and roughly yanked herself back to the present.  She only wished she could see his facial expressions which, over the last few days, had become entirely fascinating and electrifying to her.  Just watching him lift an eyebrow or twitch his lips could be disturbingly erotic.  She still didn’t like him, but she probably owed Amanda a dozen cupcakes, because she’d skipped right over thinking Barba was hot to desperately wanting to jump him.  Worse, after their argument in the interrogation room, she was fully aware that he knew how she felt. 

Rafael saw the moment Rojas spotted Alan Canady in the courtroom.  It was as though someone had thrown a switch that drained all color from her face and caused tiny beads of sweat to pop out on her forehead.  The fear that instantly clouded her features scared him a little, too.  Fortunately, it was very near the end of her testimony and he was questioning her on redirect, which gave him options.  He sauntered, seemingly casually, toward the witness stand and stood next to her, between her and the jury box. 

“¿Estas bien?”[1] 

“No.  Alan esta aqui.  Cuarta fila.  Mi derecha.”[2]   

“OK.  Escucha, ¿puedes esperar un poco?  Él no puede hacer nada mientras estás en el estrado.”[3] 

“No se-“[4] 

The defense attorney objected to the whispered conversation, which objection the judge sustained. 

“Apologies, your honor, I was just asking the doctor whether she needed a break.” 

“Dr. Rojas?”  The judge lifted an eyebrow.

“I’m fine,” Frankie responded, willing her voice not to shake. 

Rafael purposely asked her several questions he knew defense counsel would want to follow up, specifically to keep Frankie safely on the stand after he was done questioning her.  Once he had completed his redirect and had retaken his seat, that allowed him to whisper to Fin Tutuola, sitting next to Sonny Carisi directly behind Barba in the gallery.  While Frankie answered the defense’s follow-up questions, Fin whispered to Carisi, who then left the courtroom, pulling his phone from his pocket as he went.  Fin quietly moved to where Alan Canady was seated in the courtroom and sat down a little too close to him, whispering something that caused Canady to scowl.  But he didn’t get up from his seat.

When the judge excused Frankie from the witness stand, her first instinct was to flee from the courtroom.  Instead, since Carisi had returned, she went to sit next to him.  She had seen what Barba had done, so she knew that Alan was under control for the moment.  But she was still comforted by the fact that she was touching shoulders with an armed police detective who knew the situation.  She wondered who he had called when he briefly left the courtroom.  As court was adjourned for the day, she turned to him to ask, but was surprised when Carisi took her upper arm, saying, “Come with me.”

He led her through the railing to the prosecution table, where Barba was hastily shoving a few things into his briefcase and instructing the junior A.D.A. who was sitting second chair regarding the rest of the materials on the table.   Frankie looked behind her to see that Fin was standing next to Alan, whom he had apparently instructed not to leave his seat.  Alan was glaring daggers at her, with an evil leer that shot a surge of fearful nausea through her.  Barba nodded to Carisi and they led her past the judge’s bench to the door on the other side, Barba before and Carisi behind her.  That level of protection both reassured her and ratcheted up her terror. 

Barba opened up the door to a small room with a scarred wooden table surrounded by a disorganized set of battered, mismatched chairs, with additional chairs along two of the walls. 

 “We’ll be fine in here,” he told Carisi.  “No one can get through that door without getting past the bailiffs, and Canady can’t get into the courthouse armed.”

“Right.  I’mma go back Fin up.  I’ll get the bailiffs to put someone outside this door, and I’ll come get you when Porter gets here.” 

When he left, Frankie began to pace the small room.  Rafael set his briefcase on the table and pulled out a chair.

“Do you want some coffee?”  He asked before sitting. 

She looked alarmed at the question and reached out a hand to him.  “No!  Please, don’t-”   Realizing how that must have sounded, Frankie quickly said, in a softer, more controlled voice, “I’m sorry.  I just meant…”

“I know.  I’m not going anywhere.  I’ll just ask someone to bring us some.  OK?”

“OK.  Yes.  Please.”

She decided to try to sit down while Barba muttered to someone passing in the hall.  It was no good; almost as soon as she’d felt the chair under her, she’d become too agitated to sit still and stood again.  Barba closed the door and turned back to her.  Now that they were alone, they instinctively lapsed into Spanish.

“I saw what you did,” Frankie told him.  “Thank you.” 

“My pleasure.  I’m killing out there, so I don’t want anything to happen that might cause a mistrial.” 

Rather than making her mad, the joke had the intended effect of comforting her.  “Cocky asshole,” she said, shaking her head, her lips twisting into a slight, involuntary grin. 

“Not gonna deny it.”  He took his seat and looked at her.  “You OK?”  

“Yeah.  Thanks to you.  You’re pretty quick on your feet.”  

“You talking about the trial, or – “  he indicated the room.  

“Both.  It’s nice to see that your ego isn’t entirely unwarranted.” 

“Careful, Doctor.  That was dangerously close to a compliment.  Remember who you’re dealing with here.” 

“Oh, I remember, don’t you worry.   But I have to admit, you are sort of killing this trial, and you did just get me out of a jam, so…  I’d say don’t let it go to your head, but why waste my breath?”

Barba’s smile, and the resulting rush of heat, finally got Frankie to sit down.  She wondered how she could possibly be horny at this particular moment, but in this tiny room with this stupidly handsome man who had done nothing all day but impress her, she couldn’t help it. 

They sat, not speaking, Rafael reviewing his notes and Frankie, having jumped up again to pace the room as soon as the surge of hormones cleared her system, making him nervous with her restlessness.  After ten minutes of that, Rafael handed her a report written by the defense’s expert psychiatrist.

“Make yourself useful,” he grunted.  “See if you can think of anything else I can attack this on.” 

She took the report from him, preparing to review it standing up.  “What are we waiting for, exactly?  Fin and Carisi have Alan, why can’t I just leave?”

“Quit complaining and read your report.”

“Well, what’s taking so long?” 

“Doctor, when a team of professionals from three different agencies are working to protect your shapely ass, a little gratitude is generally expected.” 

“You think my ass is shapely?” 

“That’s what you got out of that?  I was calling you ungrateful.”

“And shapely.”

Barba sighed and went back to his notes.  

It was half an hour later when Carisi knocked softly and entered the room.  “Porter’s taken Canady to Federal Plaza,” he told them.  “So Doc, you don’t want to go back to your office right now.  And until we know whether the feds are gonna be able to arrest him, I’m afraid it’s not a good idea to go home, either.”

“It’s a very secure building,” Frankie began. 

“It’s the precinct or Barba’s office.  You pick, and I’ll get you there safely.”  

“But he’s in custody!” 

“He’s not.  He’s being questioned, but he can leave any time unless Porter finds a way to arrest him.  So we need to move now.  Where’d you like to go?” 

“I have a ton of work to do,” she sighed, sounding whiny and ungrateful even to herself.

“My office,” Barba said to Carisi as he re-packed his briefcase.  “I’ll be there prepping all night, anyway, and it’s quieter, so la fresa[5] will at least be able to work in peace.” 

“Barba, you-“  She decided not to finish that thought in front of Sonny. 

Carisi grinned and opened the door, sweeping a hand toward the hallway.  Rafael took the report from Frankie’s hand as he preceded her into the hallway. 

“What’d you call her?”  Carisi asked Barba, speaking across Frankie as though they didn’t flank her protectively as they walked down the hallway. 

“She knows,” Barba smirked. 

   The evening was quiet and actually fairly comfortable as Rafael worked at his desk and Frankie worked on her laptop on the table in his office.  She envied this beautiful space; the plush quietness was much nicer than the industrial government-issue feel of her own office in Federal Plaza.  She’d instantly liked his assistant, Carmen, perhaps because she felt such sympathy for her, having to work for a bully like Barba.  Carmen’s last act before leaving for the day had been to order them Szechuan food from the place Mr. Barba liked so that they could have dinner while they worked. 

Carmen was intrigued.  Francisca Rojas was nothing like Mr. Barba had described her, and his interaction with her was decidedly unlike his interaction with people he disliked as much as he claimed to dislike her.  Besides which, Carmen didn’t need to be as intuitive as she was to see the sizzle between her boss and Dr. Rojas.  As much as Carmen liked Mr. Barba – and she liked him better than any of the attorneys she’d worked for in the past – she found him inexplicable when it came to women.  He relied upon Carmen to do much of the work surrounding his dating life – plan dates and make reservations, get tickets, send flowers, choose gifts – so she knew his tastes.  He claimed to be too busy to do it himself, and that Carmen was much better at that stuff than he was, but she suspected that it was closer to the truth to say that he really couldn’t be bothered.  Mr. Barba dated a lot of beautiful, accomplished women who seemed to like him as much as Carmen did.  But she could never figure out why a man as nice as he was – and he was nice, despite what he wanted the world to think – never seemed to get very emotionally involved. 

When his phone chimed to let him know their food had arrived, Rafael told Frankie he was going down to the front lobby to retrieve it.  The look on her face was only slightly less fearful than it had been at the courthouse when he’d offered to get coffee.

“It’s OK, Doctor.  You couldn’t be safer.  Not only can’t he know you’re here, he couldn’t get in even if he did.  Sit tight, I’ll only be a minute.”  His voice was meant to be reassuring, but she found it distinctly sexy, instead.  She had thought from the beginning that his voice was sexy when he used a certain tone, and now that she thought pretty much everything he did was sexy, she was almost relieved to have him leave the room for a moment.

She took the opportunity to look around.  The first thing she noticed was that his framed diploma showed he had graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law.  She wasn’t surprised, but she was deeply impressed.  Frankie had only graduated Cum Laude from law school, and she had to imagine that Harvard’s law program was tougher than A&M’s.  She wondered whether Barba had chosen the art on the walls in his office.  She liked it.  She appreciated not only the historical subject matter, but the way the pictures themselves complemented the overall gravitas projected by the office.  Her mouth quirked as she wondered whether Barba had intended that, to lend himself more gravitas.   Not that he needed it, anyone who spent more than five minutes with him would have a healthy respect for his ability, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

He returned sooner than she expected, noting that she was standing in front of a bookshelf studying the titles.  

“Preparing a critique of my reading choices?”

“Hmmmm,” she responded noncommittally.  “I can’t help but notice you have a copy of ‘Twenty-Five Acts’, which is in questionable taste…” 

“Would you believe that was for a case?” 

“Yes, but only because I already knew that.  And that doesn’t explain why you still have it.”  Her mocking half-grin unsettled Rafael. 

She sat back down at the table in front of her laptop as he stood nearby, taking cartons of food from the bag he’d placed there.  They smelled delicious.  

“Don’t work through dinner.  That’s a terrible habit.  Come sit on the couch and talk to me.” 

“I don’t want to talk about ‘Twenty-Five Acts.’” 

“You don’t even want to know how I got Cain convicted?”

“I know how you got Cain convicted.  And bragging, while perhaps a little bit deserved in that case, is rude.”

“You already think I’m rude.”

“I know you’re rude.  So why should I come over there and talk to you?” 

“Because you’re a doctor, and you should know that polite conversation is better for the digestion than reading about depraved criminals.  And before you say anything: yes, I am capable of polite conversation.” 

“This I gotta see.”

Frankie chose a carton and a fork and sat on the opposite end of the couch from Rafael, leaving her shoes on the floor and tucking her legs under her, which meant she had to pull her fitted skirt a little up her thighs.  Rafael stifled a groan.  Rather than say what he was thinking about her legs, he asked, “Fork?  Really?” 

“Sue me.  I’m from Texas.” 

“That’s no excuse not to know how to use chopsticks.”  

“Mmm-hmmm.  ‘I know how to make polite conversation’ he says.  I knew you couldn’t do it.” 

Forget hot.  He was gorgeous when he laughed.  “OK, that one I deserved.  Sorry.”

“Maybe we could just eat in blessed silence.”

“No.  I want to hear about growing up in Texas.  Please keep it to culture.  I don’t want to hear about any mansions or butlers.  I’m eating.” 

Rafael was very fortunate not to be eating at the moment she threw her head back and laughed.  The way her long, graceful neck arched, the flash of white teeth, the music of her laughter, or any one of those could have caused him to choke.  As a doctor, she probably knew the Heimlich Maneuver, and he did want her to put her arms around him, but still. 

“Is that what you think?  Oh, Barba, you clearly did not do a very good job on your research.  I did not grow up in a mansion.  I have, in fact, met real butlers, but it was at other people’s houses, and they freak me out.  I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to say to them, and I refuse to pretend they’re not there.”

Rafael was stunned, and not only because the flush of amusement that animated her face made him want to laugh with her almost as much as he wanted to kiss her.  He had clearly missed something.

“You’re BioRed Pharmaceuticals.  You have more money than God.”

“BioRed Pharmaceuticals is a corporation, and my father has more money than God.  You did take Corporations at Harvard, right?  Trusts and Estates?  You understand how property works?”

“Let’s stick to your story.  You’ve got me interested now.  So, no mansions or butlers?”

“None.  I grew up on a working ranch, where my family still lives.  I ride workhorses and I’m pretty good at roping steer, which is a skill I’ve considered using on you a time or two, and I’m holding in reserve, just in case.  Never played polo, never even seen polo.  All my ridin’ and ropin’ was done in the course of long, hard workdays, because that’s how we were raised.  I will admit that my father paid my way through school, so I don’t have any student loans.  But I’ve had to earn my own money since the day I started getting an allowance.”

“But… your clothes.”

“I like clothes.  I spend too much on them.  What’s your excuse?”

“Same.  But I don’t have a billionaire father.” 

“I guarantee you I get less money from my father than you do from yours.”

“My father is dead.” 

“OK, then I get exactly as much money from mine as you do from yours.  Which is to say, none.  He believes in working for a living.” 

“And who’s ‘we’?  You said ‘that’s not how we were raised.’” 

“I’m one of six kids.” 

“Really?  Oldest, no doubt.” 

“Wrong again.  I have three older brothers and two younger ones.” 

“Wait… you have five brothers?  I should probably have found that out before I started talking to you the way I do.  And they’re from Texas… can they shoot?”

“Can they shoot?  You have heard of Texas, right?  You know what happens on a ranch?”

“Can you shoot?”

“I can shoot the eye out of an iguana at a hundred paces.”

“Shit.”  

“Does this mean you’re going to be nicer to me from now on?”

“Of course not.  But it does mean I’m going to ask Liv for a bulletproof vest.” 

“Don’t bother.”

“Is that a threat, Annie Oakley?”

“No, it means I don’t have a gun.  I hate ‘em.  Although, with Alan around again, maybe I oughtta re-think that.”

“You could always lasso him.”

“Shootin’s more fun.  At least, in Alan’s case.”

“Also more illegal.”

“Spoilsport.  But I don’t want to talk about Alan.  Tell me about you.  Where’d you grow up?”

“Right here.  The Bronx. With my eight siblings.”

“You have no siblings.”

“I have eight.”

“No.  There are practically entire textbooks about how your personality says you’re an only child. Beloved and the pride of your family, but an only child.”

“You’re stubborn, you know that?”

“Everyone who has ever met me knows that.  The real question is, why are you avoiding telling me about your childhood?”

“I’m not avoiding it.”

“You’re so avoiding it.”

“No, I’m – Ok, fine.  I was small and nerdy and I sucked at sports.  I had two best friends who did all the same things I did and I was always the one who got caught.  Which was fine, because I could always talk my way out of trouble.”

Frankie was smiling at him while she listened.  He was so damn cute.  If anyone had told her before this moment that she would have thought that, she’d have laughed or maybe assessed their mental competence.  But it was true.  

“I loved my abuelita.  She was my favorite person in the world.  No matter what happened in my life, she thought I was the smartest, and the best, and that I could do anything.  She used to call me el juez.[6]  Even before I got into law school.”

“I think I’m in love with your abuelita.”

“Me, too.  I miss her. We lost her last year.”

“I’m sorry.“

Half an hour of sweet stories about Rafael’s childhood later, Barba’s desk phone rang.  They both turned to look at it.  “You know what this is going to be,” he said.

She slid her shoes back on and followed him to the desk, standing on the other side while he listened to Dean Porter.  Rafael’s side of the conversation was almost nothing except an occasional “uh-huh.”

Frankie was almost frantic by the time he hung up.  “Well?”  

Rafael looked her in the eye as he told her that they had gotten nothing out of Canady, and hadn’t had any reason to arrest him.

“So he’s just out there somewhere.”

“I’m sorry.  Porter says you shouldn’t go home.  Canady was pretty pissed when he left.”

“Fuck that.  He is not driving me out of my home.  Not again.”

Frankie stomped over to the table and rummaged in her purse for her phone, plucking it out and beginning to touch the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for an all-night gun store.”

Rafael took the phone from her.  “I can think of at least five reasons that’s not a good idea, but the only one you’re going to listen to is that there’s a three-day waiting period. You might as well relax and get used to the idea that you’re not going home.”

She grabbed the phone roughly from his hand and threw it back into her purse, then slammed her laptop closed and began shoving things into her carryall.  “That is so easy for you to say.  You’re safe. You can go home.  You don’t have some deranged asshole following you around the country trying to kill you.  Well, fuck him.  If he wants to kill me so bad, let him try.  So maybe I can’t get a gun tonight, but I got plenty of knives in my kitchen and I might as well be comfortable while I wait.”

“Francisca, stop it.  You’re not thinking clearly.”

“Damn straight I’m not!  I’m pissed off!”  She stormed toward the door, with him right behind her.  “I’ll show myself out.”

“You can’t-”

She turned to him.  “I assure you, I’m perfectly capable of opening a door.”

“And similarly capable of making a very bad, very dangerous decision in a fit of temper.  Which I am not going to allow you to do.”

He took the last few steps toward her and they both reached for the doorknob.  Standing chest to chest, her hand on the doorknob and his hand on hers, they faced one another, both angry.

“You’re not walking out of here alone.  And you’re not going home.”

“You really think you can stop me?”

“You really gonna make me?”

Their faces got closer with each word.  “You are so…”

“Yes?”  He asked, putting his arm around her and leaning so that his lips were almost touching hers.

“Annoying and frustrating,” she closed the distance. “And arrogant, and…”  Their lips met in a molten kiss.

“Well, you’re conceited and short-tempered and you drive me up a wall,” he gasped, pushing her against the door with his body.  Taking his hand from the doorknob, he encircled her with both arms as he captured her mouth with his.

“Do you ever fucking shut up?”  She panted into the kiss.

“Not when I have something to say.”

“Why am I not surprised?”  She asked, burying her hands in his hair the way she’d been wanting to for days as she responded to his probing tongue.

“You’re not exactly silent yourself,” he muttered.

She gave herself completely over to the sensations he was creating in her.  He used his mouth on hers in ways that had her beginning to moan after only a few minutes, as she moved her body to fit it more closely to his.

“Nothing to say?”  He gasped, moving to kiss down her neck.

“I have plenty to say.”  She whispered between breaths.  “I’m prioritizing.”

“You’re coming home with me.”

“Damn right I am, but not because you said so.  Because I want to.”

“Whatever gets you there,” he growled.

 Rafael and Frankie scandalized the cab driver who took them from Rafael’s office to his apartment.  Rafael had pulled the silky shell she wore out of her waistband and unhooked her bra by the time they reached his apartment building, hands all over her breasts as he ravished her mouth.  He had no idea how much the fare was, or how much cash he tossed into the front seat as he followed Frankie out of the cab.  

By the time the elevator reached his floor, Frankie had Rafael’s tie off and his shirt undone, and a fairly significant purple mark on the front of her neck.  As soon as they closed his door behind them, she’d removed his jacket, pushed his suspenders off his shoulders and practically torn off his shirt.  She threw them to the floor and reached to pull his undershirt up, but he pushed her jacket from her shoulders, causing her to have to stop her progress in undressing him to allow him to remove it.  She reached for him again, but he moved her hands out of the way.

“You’re so fucking pushy,” she complained as they broke their nearly continual kisses so that he could pull her shell up and over her head.  She paid no attention to what he did with it, and neither did she, because their lips were again enmeshed and he flicked her bra off and began working on her skirt.  She remembered to be grateful she’d worn nice lingerie today.  

“And you’re way too fucking spoiled,” he muttered, allowing her to take off his undershirt before slipping her skirt down her hips to fall onto the floor.  She pulled at the fly of his trousers as he again began to fondle her breasts.  It took her little time to get his pants unfastened and run her palm down his abdomen, under the waistband of his boxers, and take hold of his stiff member.  He groaned as she’d hoped he would.

With very little effort, he pulled his trousers and boxers down and stepped out of them.  She was too engrossed in his penis to pay attention to how he got his shoes and socks off, but noticed when he took one of her hands and led her toward what she assumed was his bedroom.  She stepped out of her shoes on the way.  They didn’t bother with lights; there was plenty of light coming in through the window from the city beyond.  When they reached the bed, he turned and took her into his arms again, falling with her onto the mattress.  Somehow they wriggled and rolled their way to lying side by side, lips and hungry mouths never parting.  

When he ran a hand up her thigh to the moist crotch of her panties, she let out a moan that could have made him come right then, but he kept a hold on his desire long enough to quickly pull the skimpy boy shorts off her body.  

“Shit,” he gasped.  “We need to talk about… consent, and protection…”  He was breathing almost too hard to speak.

“I’m clean and I’m on the pill and if you don’t fuck me in the next five seconds, that’s when we’re gonna have a problem,” she growled.

“Impolite, and disrespectful,” he murmured, moving into position and gently nudging her thighs apart.  “Impatient, and… oh, fuck!”

He kissed her, hard and messy and frenzied, as he began to thrust into her.  

“Yeah, well, you’re… uhn…  uncivil and surly… oh… and bossy…”

“Tell me how to make you come,” he grunted.

“See?  Bossy… oh, shit…  fuck, Barba…  I’m… Just like that!  Just… like…”  

Frankie could not remember the last time she had come just from being fucked. Well, at that moment, she couldn’t remember her own name.  But she somehow found a small part of her brain with which to be astounded at how good Barba felt inside her and the ease with which he had brought her to this shouting, incoherent climax.

He followed just as she began to come down.  Did he actually call her fresa in the midst of his orgasm? Oh, this man was absolutely impossible. Entirely, completely impossible.    

[1] Are you all right?

[2] Alan is here.  Fourth row.  My right.

[3] OK.  Listen, can you hang on for a little while?  He can’t do anything while you’re on the stand.

[4] I don’t know.

[5] See definition in Chapter 2

[6] The judge

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                       Chapter 5:  A Bloody Mess

Source:  @fortheloveofbarba

Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Read it on AO3

Frankie knelt where she was, next to the blood-soaked man with her hands up, thick drops of blood making trails of gore down her forearms.  

“Please… he had a pulse.” Her eyes were wild and her voice was a shriek of desperation.  “It was weak, but I’ve lost it now.  I need to continue CPR-“

“Step away from him, Doctor. Do it now.”  Dodds was using his commanding, authoritative voice, and Frankie was too dazed not to obey, even as she gasped with panic and resistance. She took two steps to the side of the body, not wanting to get any closer to Dodds or Benson, with their weapons drawn and aimed directly at her.  

When Rojas had cleared the body, Benson stepped to it, leaned down and felt for a carotid pulse. Nothing.  But the guy was still warm.  

“Please, Olivia!  Let me at least try!”  Rojas was starting to lose it.  Fat tears were trailing down her cheeks from eyes huge with terror.  

“He’s gone,” Benson said. “He’s lost too much blood.”

At that moment, a team of paramedics burst into the room and pushed the cops and Rojas aside to work on the victim.  Dodds took Frankie by the forearm and led her to the side of the room, giving them space to work.  

“Who is that guy?” Dodds asked, glaring down at Frankie in full cop mode as he holstered his weapon.  

“That’s…  That’s Alan Canady.”

Dodds and Benson shared a look.  If anything, this was worse than it had at first appeared.  In that moment, it got even worse.  The paramedics pronounced the man dead and covered him with a sheet.

“No!  He had a pulse!  I did CPR!  Try! Please, you can’t just give up!” Dodds had to hold Frankie by the shoulders as she tried to lunge over to the victim.

“Lady, that knife’s in his heart.  I’d bet my house on it.  He’s dead,” one of the paramedics said with no attempt at kindness even though he had no idea who the man had been to this woman.  

Frankie issued a wordless wail of despair.  

Olivia put herself between Frankie and the body.  “Tell us what happened.”

“I didn’t do this!” She shouted.  

“Talk to me.  Tell me what happened,” Olivia said sternly, leaning into Frankie’s face.  

“They… They… They let me go back to my office today.  The tweaker kid – his name is Juwon – he was waiting for me there when I went outside at lunch.  I wasn’t even going to go anywhere, I just wanted to be outside for a minute!  There was an FBI agent right there in the lobby, I don’t know why he didn’t see…”

“What happened?” Dodds asked, gently but firmly pulling her back to the facts.

“He stepped up to me and he said, ‘Alan knows about Barba.  If you don’t want what happened to your car to happen to Barba, meet him at this hotel.’  And he gave me this room number.”

“So you just came over here? There was an FBI agent a few feet away and you didn’t ask for help?”

“He said Alan would kill Barba if I told the FBI or the cops!”

“All right, all right,” Liv said.  “Then what happened?”

“I came here.  I didn’t even go back up to my office.  I had my wallet because I was going to get some coffee from the cart in the lobby, so I just hopped a bus and came here.  And when I got here, Alan was standing there, holding a knife.  He did this.  He stabbed himself!  Now I know what he was doing with his fingers…”  She looked away, as if remembering.

“What are you talking about?”  Dodds asked.

“He did this weird thing with his fingers.  At the time, I thought it looked like he was counting his ribs.  That must’ve been exactly what he was doing!  He meant to kill himself.  He meant to stab himself in the heart!”  Frankie turned back to the body and began to cry in earnest.  “Oh, my God!  That’s what he meant!  He’s …”

“OK, look at me,” Olivia said, putting a hand on Frankie’s shoulder and turning her to face Olivia. “So you get to this room, and then what? You knock?  What?”

“No.  The door was open.  He was just… standing there.  Right where he is now.  And he did that thing with his fingers, and he said ‘I get it now.  But if I can’t have you, I’m taking you with me.’  And then he…  just…” she mimed setting a knife against her chest, taking a deep breath, and pushing it in.

“He stabbed himself,” Olivia asked, looking into her eyes.

“Yes!  He put the knife right where he wanted it to go, and he just… pushed it in.  Hard.” Frankie put her bloody hands to her face as she continued to cry.  

Neither Dodds nor Benson had any idea what to make of this.  Could a person actually do that?

“OK, Frankie… let’s keep going.  What happened next?  What did you do?”

“He… he fell over, just like you see him.  I ran to him, I was screaming, I don’t know.  I grabbed the knife, but I knew if I pulled it out, he’d bleed worse than if I left it in.  So I felt for a pulse, and it was weak.  I didn’t have my phone, I’d left it at the office, so I just screamed for help. Then I lost his pulse, and I moved to do CPR, but the knife moved, so I had to hold it while I did compressions with one hand…  And then you came in.  Oh, God! I didn’t do this!  Please…”

Benson and Dodds eventually took Frankie to another room in the hotel while the CSU team began to process the scene.  They asked her again and again what had happened, but got no more details.  A CSU tech took an endless series of photographs of Frankie while Dodds and Benson questioned her.

An hour into the investigation, as Frankie sat on a small, uncomfortable chair, still encrusted with drying blood and still near-hysterical, a tall, severe-looking man in a suit entered the room.  Dodds and Benson shared a look, and Dodds went to talk to the man.  

“Who is that?  What’s happening?”  Frankie panted.

“That’s ADA Stone.”

“No.  Oh, please, no.  Olivia, I didn’t do this!  Alan did it! I tried to help him!”  

“I know, Frankie.  I hear you.  Stone’s good, but he’s fair.  Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

“Shit, Liv.  I can’t… If the ADA is here, I need to stop talking to you.”

Olivia nodded, looking into Frankie’s eyes.  “Yeah, Doc. You probably do.”  

Frankie dissolved completely into tears.  

“Listen,” Olivia whispered to her, looking over her shoulder at Stone to make sure he was engrossed in his conversation with Dodds.  “I’m gonna call Barba.  I’ll ask him to get you the best possible lawyer.  OK?”

Frankie could only nod as she choked on her sobs.  

It took very little time for ADA Stone to instruct Dodds to arrest Frankie.  Colleagues or not, Dodds couldn’t argue with the man’s reasoning. He tried to be as kind as he could as he cuffed her and explained her rights.  She continued to cry and look terrified, but she was beginning to get the glassy-eyed look suspects got when it began to sink in that this was all really happening. The only good thing was that she was smart enough not to say anything more about what had happened beyond repeating, “I didn’t do this.”  Those were the only four words she said to Peter Stone as she was led past him to the squad car.  

 **************

Frankie was finally allowed to change clothes and shower once they got her to the M.E.’s office and examined.  Not particularly out of kindness, but because her blood-soaked clothes were now evidence. She couldn’t have cared less what she looked like, which was good, because she looked pretty much the way she felt, but at least she was no longer covered in Alan Canady’s blood.  The awful, cheap grey OCME sweats were thin and baggy, and the stains on the yellowed T-shirt they gave her to wear underneath were something Frankie was simply not going to acknowledge.  Things were bad enough.  The only thing she allowed herself to think about the rough, white cotton socks and plastic shower shoes was that they were exactly like the ones she’d seen on ‘Orange Is The New Black’.  

From there, Dodds took her to the station house, where she was finally uncuffed and made to sit in the wrong chair in one of SVU’s interrogation rooms.  She was met there by a strikingly good-looking woman with beautifully-streaked hair and a suit so lovely Frankie noticed it even in her current circumstances.

“Dr. Rojas?  I’m Nikki Staines.  I’m your attorney.”   She put her hand protectively on Frankie’s shoulder and turned to Dodds and Benson. “Out.  Both of you.  And turn off the camera and the speakers.”

Dodds and Benson did as she asked.  

Frankie looked up at her attorney with huge eyes brimming with tears.  “I didn’t kill him.  He killed himself.”

“That’s what I hear,” Staines said, laying her briefcase on the table and sitting across from Frankie. “We’ll get to all of that.  Right now, I want to know how you are.  Are you hurt?  Do you need anything?”

Frankie shook her head. “I’m OK.  I’m… Is Barba…”  

“He knows where you are. But you’re not going to be able to see him for a while.  He shouldn’t even have gotten involved enough to call me.  I want coffee.  You want some?”

“Yes, please,” Frankie answered in a small voice.  

Staines didn’t allow the SVU detectives or the ADA into the interrogation room for the next two hours. She took her time, learning all she could about her new client and what had happened.  She gave no indication of this, of course, but she hoped the cops would find some helpful evidence.  Dr. Rojas’s story was pretty flimsy.  

And yet, Nikki believed her completely.  First and foremost, Nikki made it a point to believe all of her clients.  But she had also been attacked herself recently, and had learned firsthand the twisted, fucked-up shit men could do to women in order to control them.  Not only was she convinced that her client was telling the truth, and that Alan Canady got exactly what he deserved, but she was also pissed.  That was good.  Nikki Staines was more than a match for Peter Stone.  Pissed off Nikki Staines was his worst nightmare.

“All right, Frankie, let me tell you what’s gonna happen.”

“In a minute, I’m going to let those bozos in here, and we’re going to tell them you’re not talking. You’re already under arrest, so I’m afraid that means you’re going to have to be arraigned, and that’s not going to happen until tomorrow.”

“I have to stay in jail? Overnight?  In the Tombs?”

“I’m sorry.  There’s nothing we can do about that.  But you’ll be fine, I promise.  I’ll ask some guard friends of mine to look out for you.  And tomorrow, we’ll ask for bail.”

“I’ll get bail, won’t I? I won’t have to stay in jail?”

“If I have anything to say about it, yes.  You’ll get bail.  It’ll probably be high, and you’ll have to surrender your passport-“

“I don’t care.  Anything.  Just get me out of jail!”

“OK, OK.  I’ll do everything I can.  And I’ll talk to Stone, see if I can get him to agree to something.”

“Will he?”

“I don’t know.  He can be a hardass.  But I’ll be my most charming.”  

Frankie appreciated Nikki’s warmth and whatever she was doing to try to convey confidence. Frankie was not confident.  She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.  At the moment Alan had pushed the knife into his chest, all she could think of was saving the life of an injured man.  She’d gone instantly into doctor mode.  She realized now that was exactly what Alan had been counting on, and she’d fallen, so easily, so willingly, directly into his trap.  She’d touched the knife.  Hell, she’d grabbed the knife.  And she’d been found by the police, kneeling over his body, his blood dripping from her hands and soaked through all her clothes into her underwear.  She could think of no single shred of physical evidence that supported her story or called into question the idea that she’d killed him.

She hadn’t killed Alan, but it looked very much as though he had killed her.  New York didn’t have the death penalty, but if Alan had put her in prison for first-degree murder, he’d have taken her life just the same.  It would just be a longer, more painful wait to die.

Frankie didn’t say a word as ADA Stone strode into the interrogation room, followed by Lieutenant Benson and Sergeant Dodds.  Nikki explained that Frankie had said all she was going to, and wouldn’t be answering any questions.  Stone looked unsurprised and grim.

“We’re charging her with Murder One.  If we’re done here, we’ll get her booked into the Tombs and I’ll see you in Arraignment Court tomorrow,” he said without expression.

“Listen, Peter, she’s a colleague.  She’s an FBI Agent, and she’s an NYPD Consultant.  Not to mention that she works closely with your office.  She didn’t kill your vic.  He killed himself.  How about we talk about bail?”

Stone scoffed slightly. “Ms. Staines, I hear you, but this woman is the definition of a flight risk.  I can’t agree to bail.”

“You can.  C’mon, Peter, at least think about it.  Ask for all the bail you want.  A million.  Two million. She’ll surrender her passport-“

“That’s my point, exactly. She has access to unlimited funds, she’s bilingual and has all kinds of contacts in Mexico.  No bail.  I’m sorry, Nikki.”

Stone turned around and left the room.  Frankie thought he might be the coldest, most terrifying man she’d ever seen.  She was more afraid of him than she’d been of Alan. Alan, at least, had had emotions.

 ************

It took everything Rafael Barba had not to attend Francisca Rojas’s arraignment the next morning.  He wanted more than anything to be able to support her with a look, a small smile, anything.  But he couldn’t.  First of all, he had already contacted defense counsel on her behalf which, if his office learned he’d done it, would get him a reprimand, at the very least. Second, he was a material witness. As much as he hated the idea, he was the only one who knew certain things about this case.  He was already in a terrible position with Stone, who hadn’t been happy to learn that a fellow Senior ADA was sleeping with an expert witness who was now Stone’s murder suspect.  Barba didn’t give a fuck about Stone, but he did care about his law license.  In order not to jeopardize that, he had to be unstintingly, scrupulously honest with Stone about everything he knew about Francisca Rojas.  And he had been.  

Stone now knew about the conversation Frankie and Rafael had where she’d asked him what the FBI and SVU would need to get a subpoena for Canady’s DNA.  It was entirely possible that she’d gone to Canady’s hotel room to get the additional evidence Rafael had told her they would need.  It had begun to look more probable with the discovery that the knife that had killed Alan Canady had come from the kitchen of Barba’s apartment. Where Rojas was staying.

Nikki Staines was eloquent, reasonable, and eminently logical as she argued that Frankie’s entire career had been spent in law enforcement, and that she had never had so much as a parking ticket.  Frankie stood, shaking in the dress Nikki had chosen for her to wear to her arraignment, praying fervently never to have to set foot back in jail.  It took Peter Stone about two minutes to crush that hope and get Frankie remanded to Riker’s Island to await trial.  All Frankie could do was stand, mutely shaking, too stunned and terrified even to cry.  

Nikki comforted Frankie as best she could, but wasn’t entirely surprised by the judge’s decision.

 *******************

Nikki could instruct Frankie not to answer questions, but she couldn’t stop Stone or the SVU detectives from asking them.  She sat next to Frankie, who looked pale and sick and heartbreakingly scared, around a dented metal table bolted to the floor in one of the interrogation rooms at Riker’s.  Frankie’s orange jumpsuit was about two sizes too big, which contributed to her look of lost confusion.  

“Dr. Rojas, the FBI agent in the lobby of Federal Plaza didn’t see you there on the day of the murder.  Did you see him?  Acknowledge him?”  Stone asked.

Nikki nodded permission to answer.  “I saw him,” Frankie said.  “I didn’t acknowledge him.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think I was supposed to.  He was supposed to be inconspicuous, so if Alan or the tweaker kid –“

“The tweaker kid – Juwon Jefferson?”

“Yeah.  If they showed up, he’d see them but they wouldn’t see him.”

“Anybody else see you in the lobby?  Did you speak to anyone?”

“No.”  

“You said you took the bus to the hotel in Chelsea.  Did you use a MetroCard?”

“No, I just paid cash.”

“Talk to anyone on the bus?”

“No.  It was a short ride.”

Nikki interrupted.  “Where’s the bus video?  Why don’t we have that yet?”

Stone sighed.  “Camera on the bus was inoperative.  Did you talk to anyone at the hotel?”

“No.  I knew the room number, I just went up.  I didn’t want Alan to hurt Barba, and I hoped I could talk to him.”

“About what?”

“About… everything!  I hoped I could talk him into, I don’t know… leaving me alone.  Leaving Barba alone…”

“What made you think you’d be successful this time, after…”

“Peter, that’s enough. You want facts that’ll lead to evidence showing my client didn’t kill the guy, fine.  But we’re not interested in your opinion of her choices.”  Nikki gave Stone a mildly reproving look.

“Did anyone see you after you went through the hotel lobby?  Anyone see you on the stairs, or in the hallway, or in Canady’s room?”

“No.  No one but Alan.  And it happened exactly like I said.”  

Peter Stone had had a lot of pretty women look at him with those pleading eyes.  He was immune to it.  Besides which, he didn’t believe a word out of this one’s mouth.  

“And you have absolutely no proof of that, is that right?  Nothing to show that the victim stabbed himself which, I have to tell you, is a pretty fantastic allegation.”

“OK,” Nikki said, scooting her chair out.  “We’re done.”

“Frankie, please,” Dodds said, putting a hand on her arm.  “We need your help.  If there is anything, anything you can think of…”

“Find the tweaker kid,” she said, putting her hand on top of his.  “Please, Mike.  I know you don’t believe me, but I’m telling the truth.  Find the tweaker kid and make him tell you what he did.  Maybe Alan told him what he was planning-“

“Sergeant, that’s enough,” Stone said icily, pushing his chair back under the metal table and signaling to the guard to unlock the bars.  “We do not work for the suspect.”

Dodds shot him a look, but squeezed Frankie’s arm.  “We’ll keep looking,” he said kindly.

 As soon as Stone and the SVU detectives had gone, Frankie looked up at the guard, expecting to be led back to her cell.  “Porter’s here, too,” Nikki said.  “He wanted to see you alone.  He’s on our side.”

A tear slid from Frankie’s eye.  She sniffed, trying not to begin crying again.  She felt so wrung out as it was, she didn’t think she had another crying jag in her. Her head pounded and she felt weak and rubbery.  She had neither eaten nor slept since her arrest.  

Porter looked like a White Knight as he came down the barred wall of the interrogation room and into the room itself.  He went to Frankie and hugged her until the guard cleared his throat and shook his head. “You know the rules, Agent Porter.”

Porter sat down across from Frankie and took her hands.  “I’m so sorry, Frankie.  This is all my fault.  I should have been able to get Canady.”

“It’s not your fault, Dean. It’s Alan.  This is all Alan.  He planned this…  I did exactly what he wanted me to do.  He said he was taking me with him, and he has.”

“No.  No.  I do not accept that.  And neither do you.  Now, listen to me, Doctor.  I am going to find the tweaker kid and I’m going to make this right.  I will not rest until I do that.  Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.  Thanks, Dean.  I don’t know if it’ll do any good, even if you do find him.”

“Keep the faith, you understand?”

“He’s right, Frankie,” Nikki said, putting a hand on her shoulder in a way Frankie really needed.

“I’ll try,” she said, in a small voice.  Porter wanted to stab Canady himself for reducing his confident friend to this.  

Porter grinned lopsidedly. “Barba says hello.”

Frankie didn’t smile. Instead, she put her face in her hands. “Oh, I’ve screwed his life up so bad. Is he in trouble?  Is he OK?”

Nikki raised an eyebrow. She knew Barba’s reputation, and hadn’t been surprised when Frankie told her she was another of his conquests.  She couldn’t really blame Frankie.  Nikki had been tempted herself; Barba was hot AF, but she made it a rule not to date opposing counsel.  Still, there was something that sounded like real emotion in Frankie’s voice.  Poor kid. She had enough trouble.  Nikki hoped Barba wouldn’t break her heart on top of everything else.

“He’s fine, Frankie.” Porter answered.  “He’s cooperating with Stone, but he’s been clear he knows you’re innocent.  He’s just worried about you.”

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Let’s just worry about you, OK?  Barba’s fine. And you have nothing to be sorry for.”

“OK,” she sighed.

“There’s one more thing. What’s this I hear about you refusing to let your family come?”

“NO.”  Frankie said, more firmly than she’d said anything thus far. “I don’t want them to see me like this. I mean it.  Please.”

“Frankie, you deserve their love and support.”

“Look, I don’t think I’m doing this to punish myself.  I just… I can’t stand the idea of my family seeing me in this-“ she pulled at the baggy orange jumpsuit.  “Here,” she weakly waved a hand at their surroundings.

“I had a feeling you’d stick to that,” he said.  “But they’re persistent.  I see where you get your stubbornness.”  

Frankie’s mouth twitched.

“So I made a deal.”

She scowled at him.

“Rafe is coming.  Only Rafe.  He’s on a plane right now.  That was the best deal I could make for both sides, and it’s happening, so deal with it.”

Frankie slumped in her chair and nodded in defeat.  It would be good to see her oldest brother. She thought she could handle the humiliation of Rafe seeing her in prison, accused of murder, as long as her father didn’t.  She was grateful her mother wasn’t alive to see this.

 ***************

Barba laid in bed, hands behind his head, staring at the windows in the building across the street.  He was sick to his stomach over what had happened to Francisca.  He would never call a woman with a name that beautiful “Frankie.”  He wasn’t sure it was accurate to say that he missed her, after three nights together, but that’s what it felt like.  He could smell her on his pillows.  He could hear her voice laughing at him.  What the hell had happened to his life?  One minute, he was getting a new colleague he couldn’t stand, the next he was basically dragging her into his home, and into his bed.  It had taken him no time at all to become thoroughly preoccupied with her.  It wasn’t love.  Of course it wasn’t.  But it was… a sensation he hadn’t had in a very long time.  

And now this.  This woman he had met a month before, and barely knew, was in prison for stabbing her ex-boyfriend in the heart with a knife.  His knife.  He wished with all his heart he’d never met her.  Well, that was a lie.  He wished with about half his heart he’d never met her.  With the other half, he wished she was here with him now, safe and warm in his arms.  He knew that was nothing but hormones, of course.  Wasn’t it?  Then why couldn’t he get her voice out of his head, and why did it bother him so damn much that right this moment, she was probably terrified and crying, and lonelier than he was?

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                             Chapter 7:  Playing By The Rules

Source: @all-things-raul-esparza

Chapters 1-5  Chapter 6   Story on AO3

Rafael Barba made the best huevos rancheros in the world.  The solar system, even.  He was fully aware of that and unafraid to acknowledge it to anyone who would listen. Frankie mocked his conceit about it, but her biting sarcasm was belied by the fact that she was on her third helping.

Beneath the playful ribbing, Rafael’s eyes kept sliding to the stack of luggage next to his door.  She had packed her things as he’d made breakfast, despite his repeated assurances that he was just as happy for her to stay.  He didn’t say he wanted her to stay, preferred her to stay, although they both knew that was what he’d meant.  

But Frankie needed to go home to her apartment.  Rafe’s plane had left at an ungodly hour that morning, and Amanda had taken him to Kennedy, so she didn’t need to rush in order to see her brother off, but she needed as much normalcy as she could find.  Alan was dead, and that was a good thing, however it had happened, and she could now resume her normal life without fear.  But it wasn’t that easy and, as a psychiatrist, she knew that.  

And then there was Barba.  Frankie needed a lot of things right now, and space was at the top of the list.  She was in love with Barba.  She’d told him that.  Twice. And she knew it was true.  But she also knew that she was a mess.  Having just come through a traumatic experience that had threatened every aspect of her life, and been welcomed into the arms of a man who was everything she had ever wanted, she knew as a psychiatrist that what she felt could very easily have been deep gratitude and a need for security being mistaken for love.  She needed to do the adult thing and reclaim her life.  When she had her feet back under her, solid and balanced, that would be the time to see how things stood with Barba.

The other benefit of that strategy was that it would give Barba space and time, too.  Frankie had fallen for him completely.  And he was being as supportive as she could ever hope for at this moment.  But that didn’t mean he felt anything for her.  It could easily just mean he was a good man who liked women.  She remembered what Amanda had said.  He dated, but he didn’t get involved.  If she wanted him to feel what she felt – and holy shit did she want that - she needed to give him time to get there.

“I ordered a lot of groceries when I knew you were coming here, but maybe I should have ordered more.”

“I do not apologize for my appetite.  Besides, I haven’t really eaten in days.”

“I can make more toast.”

“No, thank you.  More coffee would be good, though.”  

Rafael stood touching her as much as possible as he filled her mug with his excellent coffee.  When he was done pouring, he kissed her cheek before stepping away to replace the pot in the machine.  

“Francisca…”

“You can call me Frankie, you know. You’ve seen me naked.”

“Your name is beautiful.  I’m not about to desecrate it with that preposterous nickname.”

As she looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup, her eyes sparkled with the smile he couldn’t see.  It actually gave her a little thrill every time he said her name.  Not only did he pronounce it beautifully, but the slight roll on the “r” made her think about his tongue.  Every time. She even liked it when he called her “fresa”, although she would take that secret to her grave.  

“When are you planning to return to work?”  He asked, returning to the subject he’d been about to raise.

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow.  I want my life back.”

“I can understand that.  We’ll be glad to have you back.  This whole thing…  I don’t care what you had to do, I’m just glad it’s over.”

“What does that mean, ‘what I had to do’?”

He blinked.  Why had he said that to her?  It didn’t matter.  That was the decision he’d made; he would never let it matter.

“I don’t mean anything.  Just that I’m glad it’s over.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Barba. What did you mean by that?”  

“I misspoke, that’s all.  Let it go.”

Frankie set down her coffee cup on his kitchen table.  “Barba, this is important.  You’re… We’re…  If you have questions, or misgivings, you need to ask.  Or maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

Frankie ran a hand through her hair, looking around the room as if for help.  “Look, I mean…  We started out badly, and then things got intense fast, and…  I know you see a lot of women, and why wouldn’t you, you’re…”

“Rico?”  His mocking expression was a little forced.

“And if that’s what this is… was… then fine.  But I feel, um…  Well, that’s just it.  I feel. For you.  And I don’t need you to return that, I’m a grown-up, but if you wanted us to see each other, then you should know that.  And I would need to know that you didn’t think I’m a murderer or… whatever it was you were just suggesting.”

Rafael didn’t respond for a moment. Which of those things was he supposed to deal with first?  He turned and refilled his own coffee cup to give himself some time to gather his thoughts. “You really know how to pack a lot into a few nearly incoherent sentences.”

She stood and began to clear the dishes from the table.  “You don’t have to respond.  I need to get going, anyway.  Sorry if I dumped a lot on you.  I think too much about things.  Occupational hazard.”

“Stop it.  Don’t do that.”  He turned to her, leaning against his counter.  “I assume you were speaking your mind.  Now let me speak mine.”

She turned from the sink and unconsciously mirrored his position, leaning against the counter a few feet from him.

“You said I date a lot of women.  I don’t know what ‘a lot’ means, but I don’t suppose it matters.  That’s apparently something someone thought you should know, and there’s not much I can say about it.  It is what it is.  But I really don’t like you making yourself a notch on my bedpost.  That’s not what happened.”

“I apologize.”

“So do I, if that’s how I made you feel.”

“It isn’t.  Of course it isn’t.”

“Then there’s this whole idea that I think you killed Canady.  I don’t know how many ways to tell you that is not what I think.”

“But you think I did something to get the charges dropped.”

“I think…”  He frowned.  “We’re being honest with each other here.  I don’t know what I think.  It happened pretty fast, Francisca.  Out of nowhere, there’s this ‘anonymous tip’ about a guy who wouldn’t give us the time of day before, and suddenly he’s spinning the exact same story you are…”

“Spinning?  Story?”  

“Here we go…”

“Words are critically important, Barba.  You say a lot simply with your word choices.”

“Don’t try this at home, folks, she is a psychiatrist…”  He muttered unhappily into his mug.

“You say you don’t think I’m a murderer.  But I’m ‘spinning a story’ about what really happened, and apparently I somehow got to Jefferson from Riker’s so he would ‘spin’ the same ‘story’.”

“Francisca, I don’t care.  That’s my point.  You can parse my language any way you want, but you can’t tell me what I believe.  I know you didn’t kill Canady.  And I don’t give a flying fuck why some tweaker backed you up when there was no evidence we could use to help you…”

“FUCK!  You think I did it!”

“For the ten billionth time, I do not think you did it.”

“You think I got to Jefferson.”

“I think… something happened. And Francisca, I do.not.care.”

“I care!  Don’t you get that?  I care!  He told the truth!  What he said, that’s exactly what happened.  And if you don’t believe that, if you think he ‘spun a story’ to help me, then you think I’m no better than he is.”

“I really need you to stop telling me what I think.”  

They stood, side by side leaning against Barba’s kitchen counter, heads turned so that they were scowling at one another.  

“And I need to live with myself. I did not do what you think I did. Whatever that is.”  She kept a tight rein on herself as she spoke quietly and pushed up from the counter.  “I’m just gonna hail a cab outside.”

“Francisca, don’t leave like this. You’ve been through enough.”

She didn’t respond as she pulled on a short, fitted leather jacket over her soft grey tank top.  When she’d collected her luggage, she turned to him as she stood just inside the open door.  

“Thanks, Barba.  I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, more than I can say.”

“I’m not a monster.”

“Neither am I.”

“I know that.  That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“And that’s the problem.  I’m one of the good guys, Barba.  I can’t feel the way I feel about you and have you doubt that.  Even if you don’t care.”

“What does that even mean?!” He shouted.

“It means I hear you.  You know I didn’t kill Alan but you think I did something to get the charges dropped, and you don’t care about that because all’s well that ends well.”

“Yes.  Exactly.”

“For you, that doesn’t make me a monster.  For me, it does.”

“You’re young, Francisca.”

“OK, that’s my cue.  When your argument starts being my age, we’ve said everything there is to say.”

For the rest of the afternoon, both Barba and Frankie muttered to themselves all the things they wished they’d said.

 *****************

“Amanda, stop!  I cannot hear that stuff.”

“I wasn’t telling you sex stuff!  I couldn’t, could I, when I’ve been back from Austin for a month?  It’s just that Rafe’s amazing, and we had the best time together, and why didn’t you tell me he was such a studmuffin?”

“Ugh.  Stop.”

“Well, he likes you.”

“I like him, too.  We’re close.  Just…  tell someone else.  Tell Carisi.”

“Carisi doesn’t want to hear about how hot your brother is.”

“Carisi is right.”

“OK, well, Barba’s here, so you get a reprieve for now.  But seriously, Frankie, he is just…”

“Briefing time.”

Around the table, the team provided the information they had about their latest case, making sure everyone had all the data they would need during the questioning to come.  Frankie’s role would be a passive one; she didn’t need to take part in the interview unless something unexpected happened.  What they needed was her read on the suspect.  

It was awkward standing next to Barba in his sublime suit, even though the past two months had been surprisingly normal.  Rafael and Frankie had even found their way into several arguments.  It was awkward because he’d hung his jacket over the back of his chair at the conference table and rolled up his sleeves.  His hands and forearms were beautiful and kept drawing Frankie’s attention.  Not only that, he kept making astute observations and asking piercing questions that were helping Frankie to zero in on this suspect’s psyche.  They were a good team.  

During the past months, blessedly full of routine and ordinariness, Frankie had recovered her sense of herself. It had been healing to be in her own apartment, waking up and going to work in her own office, in charge and control of her life.  She didn’t see any reason to replace her burned-out car; she liked the freedom of not having to deal with it.  Her colleagues at the FBI and in SVU had been wonderfully supportive.  She hadn’t had the opportunity to see Porter since she’d been released from prison, which was a little odd given what they’d been through with Canady, but he’d called.  Olivia assured her she’d see him soon.  

The problem was that, the more she recovered and settled permanently into her New York life, the more head space she had for Barba.  Her feelings for him were not lessening with time.  Worse, they had both been terribly adult about the whole thing, which told her that she was going to need to get over it.  She was the only one who had been foolish enough to fall in love in such an irrationally short time.  She didn’t blame herself – trauma could do that to a person, she’d seen it a million times on the job.  She just needed to shake it off.  But it made her very sad, and the more she grew into her role at SVU, the worse it got. Barba was so very attractive, so brilliant, so damn great at his job, she would really have liked to build something with him.  It was not going to happen.  He was a serial dater, and she’d just been the latest woman on his agenda.  He’d made her feel attractive and special, and had been exactly what she’d needed when she needed him.  But that was apparently just the reason he was so attractive to so many women.  He didn’t feel what she did.

“How old is this guy?”  She asked Barba as they stood, a discreet distance apart, watching the interrogation.

“Sixty-eight.”

“Yeah.  That fits.”

“What are you thinking?”

“He’s not faking this.”

“You’re saying the entire building and everything in it really has been replaced by exact duplicates?”

Rafael’s heart skipped a beat when she gave him the familiar scornful side-eye he sometimes said things specifically to elicit.  Like now.

“I’m saying that idea is a real symptom of a real problem.  It’s called ‘reduplicative amnesia’ and there’s an easy way to find out.” She knocked quietly on the door and walked into the box.  

“Mr. Wilson, I’m Dr. Rojas.  I apologize for the interruption, but I wonder if I might ask a couple of questions. It will only take a moment.”  

Rafael watched as she asked a number of questions about where the suspect believed himself to be, and was surprised when he informed her that this building was in Detroit. It was an exact replica of an actual police station in New York, but this wasn’t the original.  It was a fake copy, designed to trick him.  He could see “Aha!” written all over her.  

Barba appreciated the chance to simply watch her for a while.  He was fascinated by the way she made her simple shirtdress seem so elegant, and the way the different sections of her braid shone with slightly varied colors in the overhead lights.  He found her dazzling.  And watching her use her talent and insight was fascinating no matter how many times he saw it.  He even enjoyed the hell out of their verbal sparring.  But he was at an absolute loss as to what to do with his feelings for her, and it was starting to be a problem.

Rafael didn’t understand what had happened.  He’d thought that Frankie had asked him to be honest about what he thought of the information Juwon Jefferson had given them.  He had been, but apparently that wasn’t what she really wanted.  What she wanted Barba to do was tell her that he believed everything Juwon Jefferson had said.  She wanted him to lie.

Rafael might have been right about her in the first place.  Francisca Rojas might be a woman who required the people in her life to believe she was perfect, or at least to tell her that she was.  He couldn’t do that.  He’d told her what he believed.  He’d even told her that he didn’t care if she or someone else had done something that might not be entirely admirable, since it had kept her from going to prison for a crime she didn’t commit.  That was the best he could do.  But, apparently, that wasn’t good enough.  And, worse, what passed for “love” in her mind was far short of what he was looking for.  She’d said she loved him the night she came home from Riker’s, and although she hadn’t repeated it the next morning, she had at least confirmed that she had feelings for him.  Yet since the moment he’d blundered into suggesting that someone might have influenced Juwon Jefferson to give a statement corroborating hers, it was as though she’d turned it off.  Rafael needed a woman whose love was indestructible.  Francisca Rojas’s was apparently about as durable as smoke.  

“He needs a CT, and probably an MRI, as well,” Frankie was saying to Olivia, who had been in the interrogation but was now leaving with her and Fin, apparently having abandoned it.  “There are several things that can cause this: tumors, dementia, brain injury, other psychiatric disorders...  He needs a workup.  Because we need to know his mental state before we can go one step further.”

“Wait, wait, wait…” Barba cried, stopping them as they passed him on their way to Olivia’s office.  “What’s going on?”

“Wilson may not be competent to stand trial,” Frankie said.

“Bullshit. So he thinks he’s in Detroit.  He still knows rape is wrong, and he still tried to avoid being arrested.  Voila! Competent.”

“Oh, brother. Get over yourself, Barba.  Nobody’s that good.  Any expert psychiatrist as sane as Wilson is could make hay out of this.  We need a workup.”

“Not today, we don’t.  I’m charging him.  If it gets to the point where there’s a need for a workup-“

“Ni siquiera te importa si él es [1]–“

“Esto no se trata de [2]-“

“Ding! Ding!”  Olivia called.  “Fighters to your corners.  There’s no one in your room right now.  Let me know who wins.”

Rafael and Frankie expressed their displeasure, but both trudged into the least-used interrogation room at SVU, which had begun to be affectionately known as “their room”, because it had become routine for them to have heated disagreements that apparently could only be solved through half an hour of high-volume Spanish discourse.  

“Explain to me why you don’t want to know the truth here?”

“Explain to me why I need to explain anything to you?”

“I’m not here to be decorative, Barba.  This guy’s got a pathology going on, and it could mean he’s not legally responsible for what he did.  How is it that doesn’t matter to you?”

“Because even he thinks he’s legally responsible.  He ran away, remember?”

“Even you don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back to you telling me what I believe.”

Frankie was taken aback for a second.  Was he still talking about the case?  “I don’t think you really want to just stick your head in the sand on this.  Do you?”

“You call it sticking my head in the sand.  I call it looking at the world the way it really is.  You oughtta try it sometime.  It’s very refreshing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”  He was talking about them.  She was sure of it now.

Rafael sighed. “Nothing.  It means…  Francisca, not everything is black and white.  This job, you gotta get a little more comfortable with gray.”

“Well, thank you for the career advice, but in this particular situation, there’s a fairly simple way to determine whether this man has organic brain damage that might-“

“So what if he does?  He still raped a woman and beat her bloody.  He still deserves the punishment for that.  I really don’t give fuck one if ‘the tumor made him do it’.  He’s still guilty, and he should still pay the price.”

“Even if that means breaking a whole shitload of rules.”

“Sometimes, to make things come out right, you have to break the rules.  You can do that and still be one of the good guys.  And that, mi fresa, is a lesson you have yet to learn.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“Then stop acting like one.  The world is an imperfect place.  The sooner you get comfortable with that, the better off we’ll all be.  I’m instructing Liv to charge him.”  Rafael turned his back on Frankie and strode from the room. Although he’d won this argument, he’d lost what mattered.  

Olivia Benson constantly accused Barba of having too much respect for the rules, of being too bound by them.  In that moment, he realized that he had lost Francisca, a woman he could have loved, because she didn’t think he respected rules enough. It was the ugliest kind of irony.  And it was enough.  Time for Barba to stop living like a monk waiting for a woman who was never coming back.

 **************

One of Frankie’s favorite things to do had become Friday night drinks with Sonny, Amanda, and Fin.  They were so much fun, had so many great stories, and she really enjoyed the chemistry between them.  On rare occasions, they were joined by Olivia and Porter, but when the two of them had a night off together, they were much more likely to want to spend it alone together, or just the two of them with Noah.  Tonight was an “alone together” night while Noah stayed with a friend, which received its fair share of jokes in questionable taste around the table at Folini’s.  

Amanda and Sonny were now trying to get Fin to reveal details about the date he had planned for the next night.  Fin was enjoying their attempts, but was giving nothing away.  Apparently, Amanda and Sonny shared Frankie’s opinion that it was kind of cute how excited he was about the date, because they would not let it go.  They were well into their second drink before the subject finally changed.

“I don’t know why you won’t tell us about her,” Amanda said to Fin.  “We tell you everything.”

“Did it ever occur to you that might be why I don’t tell you anything?  You overshare.  Both of you.”

Sonny’s offended look was hilarious.  “I do not overshare,” he insisted.

“You so overshare,” Amanda laughed.  

“Oh, Partner, you do not get to go there with me.  I should not know how many condoms you went through when you visited Frankie’s brother in Austin.”

“Ewwwww! Stop right there!  I do not want to be in therapy for the rest of my life,” Frankie shouted.  

“Hey, look, we were celebrating!  He’d just got the splint off his hand so we were finally able to-“

“Wait, what? What splint?”  

“Hmmmm?” Amanda asked, with a false confusion Frankie saw through instantly.  

“What happened to Rafe’s hand?”  

Amanda looked around the table, each of the other faces as blank as she was trying to make hers.

“Oh, you must have heard about it.  He got… hurt on the ranch.”

“How?  What happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t remember the details.  I just know he was doing something with a steer, and his fingers got caught in a rope somehow.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“They probably thought they’d be accused of oversharing!”  Amanda laughed and began to tease Sonny about his own lack of discretion.

Something about the exchange bothered Frankie.  Amanda was clearly lying, and Amanda had done enough undercover work to be a very good actress when called upon.  But that was when she was prepared.  She had clearly said something she shouldn’t have.  There was something about Rafe’s hand injury Amanda, or Rafe, didn’t want Frankie to know.  But that made no sense.  What could be secret about a hand injury?

She was temporarily distracted from her thoughts when something across the street caught her eye; a familiar profile in a well-made suit walking in front of a Chinese restaurant the team never went to because it was far too expensive.  Rafael was holding the door open for a striking blonde woman in a pantsuit Frankie had been drooling over the previous week at Barney’s.  As she walked past him into the restaurant, the woman gave Rafael an unmistakable pat on the butt, which made him laugh in a way that made it clear the touch was quite welcome.  

[1] You don’t even care if he’s-

[2] This is not about -

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                              Chapter 4:  What If...

Source: @sherrykinss

Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  

Why yes of course you can also read this on AO3

Frankie really, really did not want to untangle herself from Rafael to answer her phone, but she’d put it on the bedside table in case the NYPD or FBI needed to get in touch with her, and the screen told her it was Dean Porter.  As she rolled back toward Rafael, she put the phone on speaker so that he could hear the call. 

“I have some news,” Porter said without preamble.

“Shit.  What did he do?”

“He set your car on fire.  Well, he didn’t, he had the tweaker kid do it.  But your car is destroyed.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“No, the parking garage near the courthouse has a good sprinkler system.  Only damage was to your car.  It’s all on video.  Pretty brazen.”

“Did you catch the tweaker kid?”

“I’m sorry.  Not yet.  But he hasn’t come near your apartment, so there’s that.”

“I haven’t made it to the DMV yet, so the registration on my car still has my Virginia address.”

“Then there’s a chance he doesn’t know where you live yet.  But it’s the twenty-first century, lots of ways he can find that out.  We can’t take that for granted.  Don’t tell me where you are on a cell phone, but are you in a safe place?”

“Yes.”

“Then wherever you are, you should stay there.”

Frankie looked up at Rafael, leaning over her in his bed with a concerned expression and a serious case of bed head. 

“I will.”

“We’ll keep you informed.”

“Thanks, Dean.  I appreciate everything you all are doing.”  She hit the “end” button on the phone, tossed it aside on the bed, and threw her arm around Barba’s neck, pulling him down into a searing kiss.

“See?  Gratitude’s not that difficult,” he muttered, tickling her lips with his laugh.

“Cállate.[1]  He torched my car.”

“That’s why there’s insurance.”

“Thanks for the sympathy.”  They were getting very good at talking and kissing – even serious kissing – at the same time.

“I’ll be sympathetic later.  Right now, I’m- what did you call it?  Prioritizing.”

“You’re doing a good job,” she breathed, arching her body toward him.

“Another polite comment.  You’re much nicer when you’re getting laid.”

“You’re not.”

*******************

A lazy, sensual, and very satisfying half hour later, Rafael had to get up to go to work.  He wouldn’t let Frankie join him in the shower. 

“You’ve done enough damage,” he said sternly.  “I’ve had no sleep, and I did about a third of the trial prep I had intended last night.  You’re just lucky I’m so good at what I do.  Otherwise I’d drag you in front of the judge and make you explain yourself.”

“No problem.  She’s a woman.  She can see how rico[2] you are.  She’ll understand completely.”

He smiled as he leaned over and kissed her.  “You’re shameless.”

Frankie just giggled.  When he got up and went into the bathroom to shower, she stretched luxuriously and rolled over, asleep before he even got under the spray. 

****************** 

He was fully dressed as he leaned over the bed and kissed her awake.  She groaned.   

“Don’t answer the door.  I’ll call and check on you as often as I can.”

“Kick that defense attorney’s ass,” she muttered.

“Already in process,” he grinned, giving her another quick kiss before standing up and moving toward the door.

“Barba,” Frankie called.  He turned back toward her, hovering in the doorway.  She was a gorgeous mess – hair comb long since fallen out, leaving her long, black tresses to spread across his pillows, sleepy eyes sparkling but half-open, lying tangled in a sea of hopelessly disordered bedding – and he felt a physical pang of desire to dive back in with her.

“Thank you.  For letting me stay here,” she said softly.

“You’re welcome.”

He hesitated.  They both wanted to say more, to discuss what had happened between them, but neither knew yet what they wanted to say.  They settled for smiling at one another before he turned and left for court. 

 ********************

Barba had been right.  Even the defense attorney had to admit that Barba had the trial won.  During the first recess of the day, after Barba had annihilated the defense’s expert psychiatric witness using the questions Dr. Rojas had helped him prepare, the defendant had accepted a very satisfactory plea deal.  Which meant that, only a few hours later, Rafael was able to call it a day.  He had more work to do than he could possibly handle, and could have made a good dent using the extra time the plea deal had provided, but he uncharacteristically allowed his second-chair to wrap up the paperwork on the trial and called Carmen to say he wouldn’t be coming back to the office.  Alone at her desk, Carmen indulged in a facial expression that clearly showed her intrigue at this news. 

*****************

“It’s just me, Señorita Fresa,[3]” he called as he let himself into his apartment.

Since he had texted to warn her he was coming home, Frankie wasn’t frightened by Rafael’s entrance.  He was taken aback, however, to see her, sitting in a reading chair with the sun streaming in the window making her look like she was aglow.   Her hair was down around her shoulders, ruler-straight and gleaming, and her face was radiantly beautiful without a touch of makeup.  His royal blue zip-up sweatshirt was huge on her, as were his jogging pants, which she’d had to roll up to be able to walk in them.  She was about a third of the way through ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, one of Rafael’s favorites. 

“What did you call me?”  She tilted her head with a fake frown.

“Sorry.  Doctor Fresa,” he corrected.

She shook her head, laying it back against the soft cushion of the deep, fluffy armchair she sat in.  “You realize that’s an insult,” she said, grinning.

Rafael walked over to her, sitting on the ottoman where she rested her bare feet and leaning toward her, putting a hand on the chair back above her and the other around her waist and pulling her to him.  He kissed her for a long time. 

“I don’t know why you’d think so,” he said matter-of-factly.  “Strawberries are beautiful.”  He kissed her again.  “They’re shapely.”  This kiss lasted longer, and involved some tongue.  “And they’re delicious.”

His hands were all over underneath the sweatshirt she wore, and she moved her body to make sure he had plenty of room to touch her anywhere he chose.  When she could speak, she asked breathlessly, “What am I going to do with you?”

“I’ve thought of nothing else all morning,” he responded, and she put down her book and followed as he led her to his bedroom.

**********************

For the rest of the day, neither SVU nor FBI made any progress with the Pattern 20 rapist or finding either the tweaker kid or Alan Canady.  In the evening, Rafael emerged, yawning, from taking a few hours’ nap while Frankie continued reading her book.  Wearing nothing but sleep pants, his hair adorably askew, he padded to his kitchen.  He was delighted to find hot, fresh coffee waiting for him, without having had to make it himself.  

Frankie grinned at him as he stumbled into his living room, coffee in hand, to flop down on his couch.

“How’s the book?”  He asked.

“It’s yours, and it’s dog-eared. I’m assuming you’ve read it.”

“I was asking how you like it.”

“Actually, I’ve read it before, too.  At the risk of the inevitable mocking I’ll receive from you, I still don’t get it, even on the third reading.”

“I’d like to mock you about that, and I would…”

“Of course you would.”

“Except I find it a little difficult, too.”

“No kidding.  That’s quite an admission, coming from you.”

“Mmmmmm.  I’m sleep-deprived, undercaffeinated, and hungry.  Only explanation for such a moment of vulnerability.”

“Well, today is your lucky day.”

“How so?”

“I’m hungry, too, and you happen to have the makings for Tacos al Pastor.  I’m curious as to why, exactly, you have a pineapple, but you do, and I’m a great cook.”

“Can I help?”

“You can hang out and talk to me. Or just sit there looking like that. That works for me, too.”

“I’m told I’m rico.”

All Frankie could do was shake her head at that on her way into the kitchen.

****************************

“How hard is it to get a sample of someone’s DNA if you think they’ve committed a crime?”  Frankie asked, seemingly at random, while slicing the pineapple half an hour later.

Rafael, sitting at his kitchen table sipping his second cup of coffee, watched her thoughtfully.  “Depends on why you think they’ve committed a crime.”

“Well, that’s the thing.  It’s just a theory.  But it makes sense, if you know the suspect.”

“Not gonna happen.  You need more than ‘it could be this person’.  You need to ‘proffer a good faith factual predicate sufficient for a court to draw an inference that specifically identified materials are reasonably likely to contain information that has the potential to be both relevant and inculpatory.’"

Frankie stopped cutting and looked at Rafael.  “Shit, Barba. That was hot.”

“Really?  That works for you?  Because I can recite the standard for a 440 motion for ineffective assistance of counsel, too.”

“Before you do that, you’re gonna need sustenance.  Because I can’t be responsible for my reaction.”  

“Do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“Uh… sex.  That was innuendo.”

“Smartass.  You know what I mean.”

“OK, so I’ve been trying to figure out where the tweaker kid comes in.  Who is he?  How does he know Alan?  And what does fencing items stolen from rape victims have to do with Alan?”

“And your theory is?”  

“Well, brace yourself, because it’s going to sound a little far-fetched. But not if you know Alan.  So, Alan knows what I do for a living, and he knows I work with sexual assault victims. Somehow he finds out I’m in New York, and he looks at FBI recruitments online, which anyone can do.  What if Alan raped those women, in hopes it would lead him to me?”

“Francisca, mi fresa, you’re right.  That’s far-fetched.  Very far-fetched.  New York is huge.  The FBI and NYPD are huge.”

“Yes, but the intersection between the two, with respect to sex crimes, isn’t.”

“And how does that connect Alan and the tweaker kid?”

“So if my theory is correct, then someone has to commit a sex crime.  Alan’s on board to hurt and humiliate any number of women, but he’s not going down for a felony.  So what he does is, he commits the sex crime, steals valuables from his victims, and hires the tweaker kid to get caught trying to fence them.”

“Why’s the tweaker kid going to do that?”

“Seriously?  You need to hang out with more addicts, Barba.  They’ll do anything for drug money.  The kid gets arrested, looks to see if he can find any trace of me at SVU, gets paid either way but more if he finds me.”

“But he goes to jail.”

“For a day.  He gets bail, which Alan pays, then he skips, never to be heard from again.”

“Until Alan needs him to torch your car.”

“Which he’s perfectly happy to do for more drug money.  Doesn’t even have to go to jail this time.”

“I don’t know…”

“OK, I’m not asking you to accept my theory.  What I’m asking is, would it be enough for a judge to let us DNA-test Alan against the rape victims?”

“Not even close.  Sorry.”  

Frankie scowled as she went back to cutting the pineapple.  “What would you need?”

“Something tying the suspect to the crimes.  A confession. A fingerprint.  A piece of physical evidence.  Defensive wounds consistent with the victim’s story.”  

“Shit.  We have none of that.”

“No, we don’t.  We can at least share your theory with Porter and SVU.  But I have to tell you, it sounds pretty wacky to me.”

“Not to me.  And not to Porter.”  

********************************** 

Amanda Rollins took Frankie to her apartment the following afternoon to get some clothes and other necessities.  It felt really strange to Frankie to be wearing a bulletproof vest, and increased her sense of being in danger.  Even though Amanda was there to ensure her safety, she hurried to pack as quickly as she could, and was relieved when they were back in the squad car, pulling away from Frankie’s building.

“Can we make a stop on the way to where we’re going?”  Frankie asked, as casually as she could.

“Sure.  Where?”

“Patsy’s cupcakes.”

“Oh?” 

“Yeah.  Because you’re about to find out that I’m staying at Barba’s apartment.”

Amanda’s eyes went wide.  “OH.” 

“Yeah.  Oh.”

“Well, um…  Huh.”

“What?  You’re the one who said he’s not the guy he seems like at first, and that he’s hot.”

“All of which is true.  I stand by it.  But listen, Frankie, I…  I like you.  I think we’re gonna be friends.  So I’m gonna tell you something, with the full understanding that I like Barba, and he’s my friend, too.  OK?”

“OK.”

“He’s kinda got a… reputation.”

“What kind of reputation?”

“He goes out with a lot of women.”

Frankie laughed.  “OK, so he’s a slut.  Consider me warned.  What makes you think I’m not an even bigger slut?”

“Maybe you are.  I just thought, being new in town, you might want to know not to get too attached.  Because he doesn’t.”

“Well, thanks, Amanda.  I appreciate the heads up.  I’ll guard my heart, although I don’t think it’s in too much danger.”

Amanda frowned through the windshield.  “Did I cross the line?  I apologize if I offended you.”

“Not at all!  I like you, too, and I’d like us to be friends.  I think we are already.  If the situation was reversed, I’d make sure you knew what you were getting into, too.  Speaking of which, now that we’ve established that we’re friends and I’m a slut, tell me about your love life.”

Frankie was more bothered by what Amanda had said than she let on.  Not that she had feelings for Barba.  Of course she didn’t.  Her concern was that, in the hormone-drunk frenzy she’d been in since meeting him, she’d completely ignored everything she knew about recreational sex.  She knew never, ever to have unprotected sex.  Ever.  Sure, Barba had been reckless enough to take her hurried word for the fact that she didn’t have any diseases and was on the pill, but that was Barba’s problem.  She hadn’t even asked him.  That bothered her for a host of reasons, especially now, being told that he slept around.  Well, she needed a doctor in New York anyway.  She made a mental note to get one and get tested as soon as possible.  And if she and Barba were going to be having more sex – and there was no doubt that she and Barba were going to be having more sex – they were definitely using condoms from now on.  She frowned.  Maybe it was a mistake staying with him.  But she told herself that it was safer than staying at a public hotel. 

*******************************

Amanda had also taken Frankie by the grocery, so that when Rafael returned to his apartment that evening, he was met with rich cooking smells that drew him into his kitchen.  Frankie, in faded jeans and a ribbed turtleneck with one of his aprons covering most of her, was stirring some kind of rice dish that looked complicated.  

“That smells wonderful,” Rafael smiled.  “What’s in it?”

“I could tell you,” she answered, “But then I’d have to turn you over to the Federales.  Mexican state secret.”

“You’re American.”

“Yes, but my mother wasn’t.  A Mexican citizen can legally pass this recipe down to her children, but that’s as far as it goes.  I’m terribly sorry, but it’s in Chapter 18 of the Mexican Civil Code.”

“It is not.”

“What an ego.  You don’t know what is or isn’t in Chapter 18 of the Mexican Civil Code.”

“Pretty sure your mother’s recipe for arroz con pollo[4] isn’t in there.”

“I didn’t say it was.  I said-“

That was as far as she got before their lips met and she didn’t say anything more for a long while.  When they broke the long string of kisses to catch their breath, he was pressing her against the counter and they were moving together.

“I could definitely get used to coming home to you,” Rafael said without thinking.  He could feel Frankie react to that, but she simply laughed.

“It’s not usually like this, believe me.  It’s just that, I tried to work today but I’m more distracted than I thought.  So I decided to cook, instead.  It’s relaxing.  Usually, with me you get leftover takeout.”

“That’s a food group around here.”

After a dinner of savory, spicy arroz, Rafael excused himself to take a shower while Frankie did the dishes.  It wasn’t long, however, before she joined him under the steamy water, playful and audacious.  Rafael found himself holding onto the shower head and the handle of the built-in soap dish to keep upright as she drove him to distraction with her mouth.  He wasn’t entirely sure how she was managing to breathe down there with the water running, but he trusted her to complain if that was a problem.  

Later, as she lay sprawled across his bed with him half covering her legs while he rested from reciprocating her favor, she asked him whether he’d spoken to SVU or Agent Porter about her theory that Alan might be the rapist.

“I met with them today.”

“And?”

“This is what you want to talk about right this minute?”

She snorted a short laugh.  “I suppose my timing is somewhat poor.  But it’s on my mind.”

Rafael crawled back up the bed and laid down next to her, putting an arm around her as she curled up against him. “It would be.  Sorry.  They… think it’s an interesting theory.  They’re going to let me know as soon as they come up with anything they think I can use to get a warrant, but I don’t think you should hold your breath.”

Frankie sighed.  “It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed these last few days being your kept woman, but I’m about ten minutes from stir crazy.  I can’t just sit here and wait for Alan to come for me.”

“No one’s asking you to. They’re working on it.  Anyway, I’m not complaining.”

“You’re not, are you?  I hardly recognize you.”

“And here I thought we’d turned a corner, you and me.  Turns out you’re still obnoxious.”

Her body moved delightfully against his as she chuckled.  “Maybe. But you like me.”

“I do not.  I tolerate you because it turns out you’re a hell of a cook.  It’s you who likes me.”

“No, I don’t.  I will admit, I am pleasantly surprised to find that you are… not entirely without your charms.  And if I must hide, here with you is preferable to a Turkish prison. But I still think you’re arrogant and… have other undesirable qualities that escape my mind right now because you’re distracting me with your fingers.”

“You find this distracting, do you?”

“Very.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“Oh, hell, no.”

***********************

The following day, Mike Dodds got a call about a sexual assault in progress in Chelsea.  The witness who reported it had asked for “Sergeant Dodds from SVU” in particular, which was very strange, but he and Olivia Benson were rolling anyway.  They figured that the uniforms would get there before they could, but SVU would be among the fist on the scene, so hopefully they wouldn’t muck up the evidence too much before they got there.  In one of those rare, strange New York City coincidences, SVU and the uniformed patrol officers arrived on scene at the same time.

Tearing up the stairs to the fourth floor of the cheap motel, Dodds in the lead, the SVU detectives pulled their weapons and told the uniforms to stay back.  That was why Mike Dodds and Olivia Benson were the first two people through the door, and the ones who saw Dr. Francisca Rojas, covered in blood, kneeling over a man’s body with her hand on the handle of a knife plunged into his chest. She looked up as they approached the open door, horror-stricken expressions on all of their faces.

“I didn’t do this,” she said, holding up both hands, from which blood was dripping freely.

[1] Shut up

[2] Literally means “delicious”, Cuban slang for a hot guy

[3] See definition in Chapter 2

[4] Rice with chicken

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                           Chapter 2:  The Rest Of The Story

Source:  @fortheloveofbarba

Read Chapter 1

The man in the box was a good candidate.  He’d been arrested trying to fence items stolen from not one, but two of the victims.  Not only that, but he was angry and uncooperative, and his interaction with Lieutenant Benson and Sergeant Dodds thus far in the interrogation was certainly nasty enough to be consistent with the guy Dr. Rojas had said they were looking for.  However, he wouldn’t give them DNA, and he had alibis for the times of the rapes.  Fin and Rollins were out at that moment checking them out.

Barba and Rojas stood on opposite sides of the one-way glass in Benson’s office, as far apart as they could, as they watched the interrogation, hoping for a break.  Over the three weeks they’d been working together, things had not improved between them.

“Y’all trippin’,” sneered the skinny, tweaked-out kid. “You wastin’ your time.  I told you where I was when them rapes went down. Just check it out.”

“We’re doing that,” Dodds said.  “In the meantime, maybe you can tell us where you got the stuff you were trying to sell.  Because it’s pretty suspicious that it belongs to two of the women who were raped.”

“I done told you that.  Some dude gave it to me.”

Dodds sighed and moved closer to the suspect, whom Dodds dwarfed.  “Describe the dude,” he said, slowly and distinctly.

“I don’t feel like it.”  

Barba was scowling thoughtfully.  “This kid knows a lot about this case that he’s not saying,” he muttered to himself.

Frankie cut her eyes to him.  She’d just been thinking the same thing.  “But he’s not our guy.”

“No. And we’re asking the wrong questions.”  

“Have you noticed his weird affect?  I can’t pin it down, but there’s something…” 

As she looked at Barba while he stared thoughtfully into the interrogation room, Frankie noticed for the first time how well-cut his hair was.  She knew an expensive haircut when she saw one.   She wondered whether that was what Amanda had been talking about when she’d called him hot. He did have a nice profile, she supposed.  To be fair, he wasn’t ugly by any stretch.  And since Amanda had mentioned his green eyes, she had noticed those, too. But hot?  Barba?  Not with that personality.  

Suddenly, it struck her what the witness’s behavior reminded her of.  “You ever see a little kid try to keep a secret?  How they’re just busting with it, dying to tell?”

Barba looked over at her, nodding.  “Yes.”  He looked back through the glass, still nodding.  “Yes.”

As he watched the suspect, he had to admit that was a good description of his behavior.  After just that brief look at Dr. Rojas, he also had to admit that she was wearing a very nice suit today, which fit her extremely well.  He’d noticed that all her accessories, from the necklace that - though subtle - probably cost as much as his suit, to the chic shoes that elongated and accentuated her legs without drawing attention to themselves, showed excellent taste.  Barba usually liked well-dressed women, but on her, the effect was ruined.  Rather than appreciating her outfit, Barba found that it left a sour taste in his mouth.  He knew that he would probably have admired her if he hadn’t known who Francisca Rojas was. But he did.  He knew that she was one of them. She might be Latina, but she wasn’t one of his people.

Rafael Barba was insightful enough, at least, to recognize that he had a particular chip on his shoulder when it came to Dr. Rojas and the rest of her privileged class, to whom everything came entirely too easily. People who expected that, and believed it to be no more than their due, and who had very little regard for people like him and his family, who had to earn their achievements.  Any display of unearned wealth disturbed him on a deep level wherever he saw it, and he was looking at it right now.  Her father might be self-made, but she was not.

He had met far too many of her type in his life. His parents had sacrificed to send him to Catholic school so that he would get the best possible education, which meant all his friends from Jerome Avenue were together at public school while he was incarcerated with all the posh kids from the surrounding area.  With the fierce cruelty of children to anyone who stands out, his classmates had made sure he understood his inferiority, mocking everything about him that set him apart, even the fact that he was smarter than any of them.  It didn’t get better in college, it was just more well-concealed.  And at Harvard…  Well, Rafael had actually preferred Catholic school.   At Harvard, the culture of overt prejudice against “scholarship kids” was not only blatant but encouraged, and highlighted by an irremediable difference of wealth and social class that no amount of achievement could touch.  It was there that Rafael’s dislike of the trappings of wealth and social distinction was honed to a razor-sharp hatred.

Getting nothing further from the suspect, Benson and Dodds eventually had to end the questioning and arrest the suspect for nothing more than receiving stolen goods.  None of them thought he was the rapist, and none of them thought he was going to give them anything that might lead them to the rapist.  When Fin and Rollins returned, having confirmed his alibis for the times of the rapes, no one was surprised.

As the suspect was being led out of the box to be booked, Olivia signaled.  “Rafa, Dr. Rojas, can we talk in my office?”

Hearing that, the suspect involuntarily flinched and turned to look at Frankie, lighting up with interest.  Trouble was written plainly in his sudden wide smile as he gave her an insolent once-over.  “You’re Frankie Rojas?  I know someone who is looking for you.”

“Oh?”  She asked, too surprised to hide her reaction.

“Yeah.  Alan sends his best,” the skinny punk laughed as he was led from the squad room.  

Frankie blanched and appeared to falter as she put a hand out to steady herself on the nearest desk.  Barba and Olivia shared a look.  What was that?  

They headed into Olivia’s office and took positions around the small room, Olivia behind her desk, and Barba and Rojas on opposite sides of the couch.  Mike Dodds started to close the door but was stopped by a tall, very good-looking man with dark hair whom no one had noticed enter the squad room.

“Hey, Porter,” Dodds said, holding the door open looking expectantly over at Lieutenant Benson.

She smiled regretfully.  “Ten minutes, Dean.  I’m sorry, we just need to have a short debrief.”

Frankie surprised everyone by standing up from the couch and saying, “No, I think he should come in.  And I think he should stay.”

All eyes turned to her as she looked at Olivia’s live-in boyfriend, FBI Agent Dean Porter, who had come to take Olivia to lunch. Normally, that would have been cause for a fair amount of suggestive joking, since the relationship was fairly new and rumored to be very physical, but not today.

“He’s here,” Frankie said to Porter, the fear in her voice unmistakable.  “Porter, Alan is here.”

“Fuck,” Porter said, and closed the door.

Olivia briefly scanned the faces in the room, paying extra attention to Rojas and Porter.  She looked from one to the other, saying, “Is someone going to explain what’s going on?”

Porter held out a hand to Frankie, inviting her to speak.  He and Dodds remained standing while she collapsed back into her seat.  She took a deep breath and exhaled it forcefully before beginning.

“Everything you know about me is true.  Porter and I did meet at Quantico and we did… work together. When you hear ‘we worked together’, that sounds like we were partners or on the same team or something, and we let that impression stand.  We were both working Major Crimes, but that’s not… that’s not how we knew each other. We knew each other because I was a victim in one of his cases.”  She sighed again.  “There was a man – is a man named Alan Canady.  Long story short, he wants to kill me.”

After dropping that grenade, Frankie simply waited for questions.  None came. She looked around for help, but everyone in the room was too skilled an interrogator to think of interrupting.  

So she continued.  “We met in San Antonio, when I first started with the Bureau.  He and I dated for about six months.  It’s the textbook story we’ve all heard a million times.  At first, he seemed entirely normal.  But then, over time, he got progressively more possessive.  It happened so slowly I didn’t realize it at first.  Have I missed any of the clichés yet?”

Olivia muttered, “Stop it, Doc.  We’re familiar with the pattern, yes.  But we don’t judge our victims here.  Just tell us what happened.”

Frankie smiled thinly in gratitude.  It was one thing to be the one who got to say those things.  It was another to believe them when they were said to you.

“One day, something happened.  It was so small, just one of those little, stupid things that happen every day.  I had to work late, and then my car wouldn’t start.  By then, Alan had all these rules. I was supposed to call him any time I wasn’t going to be where I’d said I would, but we didn’t even have a date that night, and we didn’t live together or anything… And then when my car wouldn’t start, one of my coworkers was right there, and he gave me a ride home.  I didn’t even think about it until we got to my house, and Alan was there.  He was seething.  He accused me of… well, this isn’t a very original story.  You know the rest.  It was the first time he hit me.  And then it escalated, like it always does, until I ended up in the hospital.  So I broke up with him.  He went nuts, stalked me for a while, and was such a general pain in my ass that I decided to take a position in Virginia to get away from him. I thought that was the end of it, until he showed up there.”

“He followed you to Virginia?”  Barba asked.

Frankie was having a hard enough time working around the shame of having to reveal this to her new colleagues.  She simply couldn’t respond to Barba, of all people.  She could only imagine what he would be like to work with now.

“He followed her and torched her house,” Porter answered for her.  “With her asleep inside.”

“Shit,” Dodds hissed.

“I don’t think he was trying to kill me at that point.  It was easy enough to get out once I woke up.  He was just trying to scare me into taking him back.”  Frankie pointedly did not look at anyone but Porter, who knew the whole story.  “Anyway, that’s when I met Porter.  Alan was always one step ahead of us.  It doesn’t look like he moved to Virginia, which is part of why he was so hard to trace. He just visited enough to make my life miserable and keep me scared.  But he escalated.  That’s when Porter started to recommend that I leave town.  In retrospect, I should have, but I fought it for a long time.  I was so pissed!  I didn’t want to have to start over in a new city, again.”

“So what happened?”  Dodds asked.  

“Porter came to New York to be with Olivia and the Bureau assigned a new Special Agent to the case.  When she came on, she took one look and said I had to get out of Virginia. Alan was trying to kill me for real, and he was going to succeed one of these times.  She said that Porter and I were like those frogs in the pot of water. You know that saying?  You turn up the heat gradually enough and they’ll just get used to it until they’re boiled alive, not realizing how hot it is?  She said it was too hot for me to stay at Quantico, and she went over my head to get me reassigned.  She called Porter, who knew about this job because of Olivia, and here I am.  You can read the file if you want.  You probably should.  Because now Alan’s here.  Already.”

The room digested the new information.

“How do you know?”  Porter asked.  “How do you know he’s here?”  

“We were questioning a suspect just now,” Dodds answered.  “When he heard Liv call her ‘Dr. Rojas’, he recognized her name.  He called her by her first name and he told her ‘Alan sends his best.’”  

Porter looked concerned.  “What was the suspect’s crime?”  

“We’re charging him with receiving stolen goods, but we were questioning him because the stolen goods belonged to two victims of the rapist we’re calling Pattern 20,” Rafael answered.  He was watching Dr. Rojas carefully.  From the complex look on her face, she wasn’t thinking anything good.

“Is he good for the rapes?”  Porter asked.

“We don’t think so,” Rafael responded.  He thought Rojas was suddenly very quiet for someone who enjoyed sharing her opinions as freely as she did.    

“How’s this tweaker kid know who Frankie is? How’s he make the connection between her and Alan Canady?”  Porter mused, looking at Olivia but not particularly asking the question of her. Frankie looked at her, too, hoping she’d have an idea, because that was the question bothering Frankie, too.

“That’s what we’re going to ask him,” Olivia answered. “Let’s get lunch while he’s being booked.”

The group filed out of the office, with Dodds holding the door.  Due to her position in the room, Frankie was the last one to reach the door.  

“Doc, a word?”  Dodds asked.

“Sure,” she said, hanging back while he re-closed the door.

“I’m sure the Lieu won’t mind if we borrow her office,” Dodds said, indicating the couch.  They both sat.  

“What’s on your mind?”  She asked.

“That’s my question to you, actually.  Guy tries to kill you multiple times, runs you out of two cities and chases you to a third…  I’m guessing you have some thoughts about that.”

“You trying to shrink the shrink?”  Frankie’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.

Mike simply replied, “Yes.”

Frankie stood, hugging her arms to her waist and looking out the window into the squad room.  “I appreciate it, Sergeant.  I do. And you’re right.  I question what it was about me that this prick thought he could treat me the way he did.  I feel like a damn imbecile, choosing him to date when I’m supposed to be an expert on this kind of stuff.  But most of all, now I’m fucking scared again.  And that pisses me off.”

She turned around to look at him again.  “That about what you expected to hear?”

He shrugged.  “Just about.  You’re the psychiatrist, and you have more experience in this field than I do, but all that sounds pretty damn normal to me.”

“It is.  But that doesn’t make me hate it any less.”  

Dodds nodded but didn’t say anything, just giving her an opportunity to talk if she needed to.

“I appreciate the shoulder, Sergeant.  But I’d appreciate an arrest more.”

“Understood.  And one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve said ‘fucking’ in front of me now.  That means you get to call me Mike.”

Frankie insisted upon being in the room when they questioned the tweaker kid again.  When Barba refused to allow it, she initially tried to talk him around, but he refused even to consider it.  The harder she pushed, the angrier he became, until the argument became so heated, Olivia insisted they go into one of the other interrogation rooms to work it out. She then had to stop Carisi and Rollins from using the speaker to eavesdrop.  Even without the speaker, it was easy enough to hear Barba and Rojas shouting at one another in Spanish.  Olivia knew just enough to recognize that some of the words they were using were not polite.

“This is my life, Barba!  I am going to be there.”

“’This is my life?’  Really?  Isn’t that what teenagers say when their parents won’t let them drop out of school to become beat poets?”

“Don’t you fucking patronize me!  I have as much right to be in that room as you do, and you cannot keep me out.”

“In fact, you don’t, and I can.  And I am.”

“This man has tried to kill me multiple times. He’s here to try again.  I’m not playing games here.”

“Neither am I, Doctor.  I’m doing my job.  I’m making sure that your little tantrum doesn’t destroy three separate criminal cases. One of which, I might add, is yours.”

“My little tantrum…?”  

“I realize you aren’t all that familiar with the word ‘no’, but I also realize you have a law degree and, although you’ve never practiced law, you should at least recognize the concept that having the victim do the interrogation is a bit of a conflict of interest.”

Frankie was too angry to form a coherent sentence. “You egotistical son of a…  strutting around like a tin-pot dictator in your little fiefdom…”

“Calling names is not particularly refined discourse, Doctor.  But if we were calling names, I’d call you a fresa[1] and suggest you go have your nails done and let the rest of us get to work.”

”A… A… ��you did not just call me a fresa to my face.”

“Nothing wrong with your grasp of the obvious.  I’m going to…”  He started moving toward the door, but she stepped in front of him, stopping with their faces very close together as they shouted.

“I am a fully-qualified Forensic Psychiatrist with all the credentials.  I’m perfectly qualified to take part in questioning this suspect.  I happen to be very good at interrogations, which you would know if you ever took your eyes off the mirror.  I also know this case.  That is why I should be in that room!  Anything else you might think is utter bullshit.”

“Really.  I can’t help but notice you’re quite unhappy about being one of the lowly victims we work so hard to protect.  It’s lovely to play the lady bountiful in your pristine Elie Saab, but it must be terrible for you to have to rub elbows with the great unwashed…”

“Stop talking.” She growled.  

“With pleasure.  Get out of my way.  I have an interrogation to attend.”

For a very, very long moment, they stood there, glaring at one another, their breath heaving in their anger.  Rafael was furious and completely frustrated by her irrational, petulant refusal to see reason.  He was also painfully hard.  Before he lost control of his urge to bend her over the table in the middle of the room, he stepped around Frankie to the door and left without another word.  Frankie knew she wanted to throw him to the ground at that moment.  What she didn’t know was which she wanted to do first, fuck him or punch his lights out.

 [1] Literally means “strawberry”, but is Mexican and Latin American slang meaning stuck up, fake, snob, one who thinks they’re better than everyone else because they were born rich, and are well-educated.