45A/N: Here's the final installment! This story ended up being ten times longer than originally planned, but I suppose that's about par for my course. Thanks to all of you for reading - I really appreciate the positive responses and hope you and yours are healthy and safe.
Part 3:
The first thing Teresa saw when she woke up in the morning was Patrick Jane smiling at her from the other side of the bed, all tousled golden curls and tanned skin with a fine dusting of stubble, and it made a feeling rise in her that was disturbingly close to adoration. She immediately closed her eyes again to try to make it go away. It didn't work as well as she'd hoped.
She had not, she admitted to herself, been adequately prepared for sex with this man. She'd imagined it a lot of different ways - rough and desperate, agonizingly slow, even, these past weeks, tender and romantic. She'd imagined him different ways too - clinically reading and manipulating her reactions, stricken with guilt, drunk and uninhibited. But she'd gotten it all wrong.
Of course, that was hardly surprising. She had not, until last night, actually believed in sex like that. When some woman in a cheesy novel talked about sex as a transcendent experience, or a joining of souls, or that kind of garbage, she'd assumed it was either pure fantasy or a euphemism for "he made me come really hard."
She was forced to concede that she may have been mistaken. Jane had not done anything particularly different from what other partners had done with her in the past, though the level of finesse, attentiveness, and timing he brought to it had elevated the simplest acts to something remarkable. Still, it had not been notably athletic, long-lasting, or exotic. But it had felt like the whole world disappeared and there was only the two of them fused together in a bubble of heat and pleasure and - goddamn it - wonder and joy. It felt like he'd reached all the way into her heart and left indelible finger prints that she'd never be rid of until the day she died.
It hadn't bothered her at the time. She'd been drunk on his body and the magic of his hands on her, and it hadn't occurred to her that anything that felt that good could be wrong. But now it was the morning and she still felt like a layer of skin had been stripped off of her, like if she opened her eyes and saw him again she would melt into a puddle of goo. She was a cop. She'd been taking care of herself since she was twelve years old. She was not gooey. She was not the kind of woman who made nauseating heart-eyes and thought her boyfriend was dreamy.
And despite all that, there was a not-inconsiderable part of her that wanted to roll on top of him and do it all again. Another part thought it might be a better idea to bolt from the room and never come back.
She decided on seeking coffee as a compromise. She made it out of bed and into the bathroom without having to look at him, which seemed like a small victory. The woman in the mirror facing her bore no outward marks of what had happened, but she thought there might be a worrying new softness in her eyes and around the mouth.
She realized she still reeked of them, and decided on a shower. Sense memory was powerful, after all. Maybe when she smelled like her hair products and not sex, she'd feel more like herself.
But once she'd dressed and made it to the kitchen, there he was, fixing her a cup of coffee, and the sight of him made her weak all over again. She accepted her mug from him and sat down at the table, eager for a little distance. He joined her with his tea. She sneaked a glance at him, and then another.
"You look the same," she said accusingly. "Was last night not -" she cut herself off, unable to finish the question in a way that didn't make her want to cringe in shame. But he was the one who'd claimed to be hopelessly in love with her. Shouldn't what they shared have changed something for him too?
He had the gall to laugh at her, though the smile on his face was mostly happy and only partly amused. "Never fear, darling, you rocked my world just as much as I rocked yours."
Her only reply was a suspicious glance.
"It's just - the way I suspect you're feeling now, I've been feeling that for a while already."
"Since when?"
"Since I realized I was in love with you."
She remained skeptical. "Then why didn't I notice it?"
"Well, I was trying to hide it from you because I hadn't decided whether it would be right to pursue you. But you probably did notice some things, you just didn't know what they meant."
She thought back. It was true that when he first started acting differently, she'd thought it was about him coming out of his post-Red John funk, rather than anything to do with her. And since he'd declared his feelings for her, he had given her some awfully mushy looks. But still… "So last night didn't change anything for you?"
"Of course it did. If you recall, I was the one of us who cried."
He'd shed maybe two tears, and it had, oddly enough, seemed like an appropriate reaction at the time.
"But," he continued more hesitantly, fiddling with the string on his ring finger, "I suppose I was more prepared, because I've had that kind of experience before."
They looked away from each other, both awkwardly aware of the question this had immediately prompted for her: whether the sex had been better with his wife. Lisbon knew that it was an unfair question to begin with, even more so because they'd only tried it once - well, twice if you wanted to get technical - while he and Angela had had years to figure out how to please each other. She felt ashamed for comparing herself to a ghost at all, and more ashamed for how fiercely she wanted to come out on top.
She hadn't felt this ridiculously needy yesterday. Something was definitely wrong with her. She felt as wobbly as a peeled egg. She stared resolutely at her mug and sipped her coffee, because if she couldn't stop her thoughts from going haywire, she could at least keep them behind her teeth.
For all the good that did when the other person in the room was Patrick Jane. She could feel his eyes on her, and the tension in the air ratcheted up another notch. She had to fix this. There was nothing he could possibly say that would make her feel better, so she had to stop him from saying anything at all.
"What do you want to do today?" she asked, still not looking at him. Having the day off work was on the one hand a relief because she didn't have to attempt to act professionally or deal with the rest of the team while she felt she had "I Slept with My Consultant" stamped across her forehead. But on the other hand it meant she was stuck with him and all the feelings sloshing around in her without the ability to send him off to interview witnesses when she needed a break. She suspected that if she kicked him out of the apartment it might hurt his feelings. And she had the even worse suspicion that if she did it anyway, as soon as he was gone she'd immediately want him back again.
She was clearly losing her mind.
"It might be nice to get outside," he said. "We could have a picnic in the park." He paused for a moment. "Or we could just spend the day in bed." Another pause. "What do you want?"
She hated it when he asked her that. She wanted to be back in control of herself. She wanted him to put his arms around her and never let go. She wanted to know how she was supposed to survive this, and whether he felt like he'd been turned inside out too, and if this was a permanent condition or if there was some chance that tomorrow or next week she'd wake up feeling like a fully separate, self-contained person again rather than a component of this strange lurching amalgam that was them. She thought of all the people she'd interviewed who referred to their spouses smugly as their "other half." She didn't want Jane to be her other half. She didn't want to be a half at all.
She remembered then that he'd barely been out of doors in the past two weeks, and decided that if she was a lost cause, they may as well do him some good. "The park sounds nice," she said.
"Excellent," he said with false cheer, and got up to start on breakfast while she finished her coffee.
He left her mainly to her own devices for the morning, and she set to work cleaning the apartment, doing laundry and clearing the spoiled food out of the fridge and taking care of the other chores that had gone by the wayside during the two weeks of nonstop work that had gone into catching Nurse Edward.
Jane busied himself with some inscrutable task on the laptop the FBI had issued to him. When she asked him what he was doing, he just told her she'd find out in due time. She decided to let it go.
When she was down to scrubbing out the inside of the microwave, he announced it was time for their outing.
He started by driving them to pick up supplies. In the car, it was impossible to avoid looking at him, and her tension level started rising again. He glanced back at her and smiled when he felt her gaze, and she felt a blush warming her cheeks, which was just unacceptable. She could not possibly have turned into one of those women who salivated every time Jane sent a cheeky grin their way. At this point, being unaffected by his charms had practically become the basis of her whole career. So, fine, she was human, occasionally his good looks and charisma got to her a little, but she'd never let it sway her. But now just seeing his profile as he focused on the road was doing something funny to her chest. It turned out that rather than building up an immunity, all this time she'd just been incubating the worst case of him anyone had ever come down with.
He pulled into the parking lot of the kind of grocery store where everything was organic and cost three times as much as it should, and she decided to wait in the car rather than go in and bicker with him over the price of crackers.
She leaned her seat back and closed her eyes, trying to get a grip. To at least understand what was happening to her. She remembered Jane's voice from the breakfast table: "I've been feeling that for a while already… Since I realized I was in love with you." She'd blocked out the implication at the time, but she had to admit there might be something to it.
Was she in love with him? She tested the concept out gingerly, rolling it around in her mind. It… well, it certainly didn't feel not true. It wasn't a bad thing, she told herself a little desperately. Would it be so awful, being in love with her - her boyfriend? Well, it was kind of awful so far, but also kind of… aside from the terror and confusion and general feeling of having been thrown out of an airplane, it felt good. It had felt very, very good last night, before reality began to set in again. It felt good when she saw his face, or heard his voice, or - well, she hadn't let him touch her yet today, but she already knew how good that was.
She'd suspected that she was capable of loving him. She would never have accepted his advances otherwise - she wouldn't have toyed with him that way. But she hadn't known it would be like this. Like a dam had burst inside her and now these feelings kept tumbling her around and pulling her under, and he was the only person in the world who could keep her from drowning. But what if he chose not to?
Jane returned before she'd resolved anything in her mind. Instead of a grocery bag, he was carrying a wicker hamper large enough to comfortably house a corgi. "Look what I found!" he said happily as he stowed it in the back seat. "Now we'll be set whenever we want to go on a picnic - it even has its own plates and cutlery!"
"I'm sure it was a real bargain."
He clicked his tongue at her lack of enthusiasm and began to discourse on the traditional food-carrying apparatuses of east Asia as he drove them to William Land Park.
Once they'd parked, they decided to go for a walk before eating. They started on a loop around the ponds. After a couple of minutes, he reached out and took her hand, lacing their fingers together. When she failed to pull away, he began to rub his thumb across the back of her hand. It felt unfairly good, like he was conjuring up new nerve endings just by touching her. Then his other fingertips started making little circles too and it was almost overwhelming. This could not possibly be appropriate in public, she thought, glancing around to see if there were children watching.
"Will you tell me what's bothering you?" he asked softly.
"Why do you think something's bothering me?" she asked, playing for time, her voice going high against her will.
"Because I'm not an idiot," he said, "and because you've barely been able to look at me all day."
She pulled her hand away from him and crossed her arms, staring resolutely at the ducks paddling through the murky water. "I just - I don't understand how none of this bothers you," she said a bit petulantly, looking at him at last but unable to hold his gaze. "You're just so - so calm and well-balanced and sure about all this -" she gestured between the two of them, "and it feels like you've strapped me into a roller coaster and you're just waving at me from the sidelines while the bottom drops out from under me."
He laughed at her, then grabbed her hand again and pulled her over to a bench, ignoring her scowl. "So you're telling me," he said, "that you would feel better if I was more of a basket case? And because I'm not, you think I don't feel as strongly as you do?"
It sounded kind of terrible when he put it like that. "…I guess."
He laughed again. "Then have I got some good news for you! I've just been trying to act like I'm holding it together because I thought if you found out what a lunatic I really am about you, you'd run away from me and never look back."
"Really?" she asked hopefully.
"Would you like to know just how unbalanced I actually am?" he asked, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.
She nodded, feeling herself melt beneath his touch.
He took a breath. "When I was undercover, one of the things I decided was that if you die, I'll just kill myself immediately. There's no point going through a whole drawn-out grief-stricken breakdown again. Not when I know I'd never be able to recover a second time. Better to just save myself the suffering and cut right to the chase."
"That's terrible," she said, and took his other hand. On some level she knew that this was an upsetting piece of news that she had deep objections to, but she was stuck on how the man who turned her into mush had just said he couldn't live without her while gazing into her eyes with soulful intensity.
"Yesterday morning, when I noticed the string you tied on me," he continued, "it made me want to get out of the shower, track you down, ravish you immediately, and then go buy a ring to put on your finger."
"It did?"
"It did."
She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, picturing it. Jane in the shower with ravishment on his mind was a very attractive picture indeed. Maybe all his unruffled steadiness had been an act after all. Maybe underneath it, he was still the same obsessive maniac who'd wormed his way into her heart.
"You really are a basket case."
"Teresa," he said seriously, "I don't think you ever need to worry about being the unhinged one in this relationship."
She laughed. "That's a relief."
"Do you feel better now?"
"I do, actually." She straightened up and punched him in the shoulder, but not too hard. "I don't want you to kill yourself."
"I know," he said easily. "And I don't want you to die. So as long as you can avoid that, neither of us has a problem."
She decided to shelve that argument for another day. Or at least until after lunch. "So what did you get us to eat?" she asked.
"Let's go find out," he said, and pulled her up off the bench to go back to the car to retrieve the basket.
As they walked, he wrapped an arm around her waist, and she let him tug her closer. "I promise you're not in any of this alone," he told her, dropping a kiss onto her head. "I'm right here with you."
His grip on her tightened, and when she glanced up at his face, she saw wistful tenderness mingled with something raw and almost wild. "When we made love last night," he said, "I felt like I was reborn, like your hands on me, your body around me were changing every molecule in me and if I could have, I would have stopped time and just stayed right there with you in that moment for a thousand years, with no more sadness or loneliness or murderers to catch. But then I thought that if that happened, I'd be shortchanging us, because you and I are just getting started, and I wouldn't want to miss out on learning everything about you I haven't yet, or on knowing what our five hundredth time together is going to be like, or seeing how you change over the years to come." He took a breath. "For over a decade, my greatest wish was that I could go back and undo my past mistakes. But last night I realized that isn't true anymore. The things I want most are in the future now. And that was when I cried. Because after everything, you've brought me back to life again."
Her throat was too choked to get words out, so she just put her hand over the one he had on her hip and squeezed, probably too hard.
Maybe it wasn't so bad, she thought, jumping out of an airplane, if someone else was there too, falling with you.
x-x-x
After they finished their picnic, Patrick lay his head on Teresa's lap and closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the way she was running through her fingers slowly through his hair, like she was doing it for her own pleasure as much as his. He tried to lull himself into total relaxation, but a kernel of worry would not dislodge itself from his mind. He was still off his game. He'd seen her skittishness in the aftermath of their intimacy and thought he could reassure her with normalcy and self-possession, but it had been the wrong play. And when she explained the problem, he'd thrown himself blindly in the other direction instead without thinking through the consequences. In the short term, while her own emotions were in upheaval and she felt uncertain and over-exposed, confessing how unreasonable he was about her had soothed her, as it had been meant to. But she would still remember his words next week and next month. And when she'd regained her equilibrium, he would still be the same damaged, possessive man he was now, and that might no longer seem so charming.
He saw, then, that he hadn't been keeping his more socially unacceptable impulses from her for her sake so much as to protect himself. Self-obfuscation was a deeply ingrained habit, and though to some extent he meant to shed it, he wasn't sure how comfortable he was baring himself to her completely. And yet every time he did, she surprised him, drawing closer when he anticipated she might back away. She was his weakness and his strength, she maddened him and kept him sane, and he fully expected she would continue to confound him for the rest of his life.
Her fingers left his hair, and he was about to protest when he felt them skim across his cheek. She traced his forehead, the line of his nose, his jaw, his eyebrows, then skated over his eyelids, whisper soft. All thought evaporated from his mind, and he was helpless to do anything but feel her. A single fingertip mapped the outline of his lips and he felt himself begin to harden at the exquisite delicacy of her touch.
Then her hand stilled and he felt her muscles tense beneath his head. He opened his eyes to see what had upset her and followed her gaze to a bicycle police pedaling past them on a patrol of the park.
"Is that -" she asked.
"Officer Lopez? Yes," he said, disgruntled by the rude interruption of the outside world. Lopez had been the first to the scene of a murder they'd investigated two years ago.
"Do you think he recognized us?"
Jane sat up and squinted at her. "No. But would it have been so awful if he had? We aren't doing anything wrong." The anxious dread on her face stabbed at him. "You were never this secretive when you dated in the past," he stated neutrally.
"This is different!"
"Because it's me?"
"Yes."
He recoiled from the look on her face. In his vanity, he'd foolishly imagined that her insistence on keeping their relationship private had an entirely different motivation - he knew she wasn't comfortable airing strong emotions in the office, and had thought it was the intensity of their feelings that made her uncomfortable with the prospect of their coworkers finding out about them. But he'd clearly been very wrong, and that in turn made him panic about what else he might have misinterpreted.
Then her expression changed from embarrassed to remorseful as she saw his response.
"No - not that," she said urgently. "I'm not - I'm not ashamed of being with you. It's just - it's complicated."
"So explain it," he demanded.
She blew out a frustrated breath and plucked at the grass beside their blanket. "Look - you know how much gossip there already is about us. It paints me as - as… unprofessional."
That was, he knew, the least of it, but he didn't see why she should let it control their lives.
"So if it gets around that we're actually together," she continued, "it's only going to get uglier. And then there's the fact that you're you, and half the women in the field office and a decent number of the men wish they were the one sleeping with you, so the news will travel like wildfire, and they'll all have their claws out for the person who got what they wanted. So yes, there are complications with you that there wouldn't be if you weren't on my team, or if you were a bit less flashy."
He wasn't sure he liked being called flashy, but that wasn't actually the most distressing part of what she'd said. "What do you mean, if it gets around? Just how long do you think we can keep this a secret?"
There was that guilty look again. "I just thought… why go through all that until we're sure this is going to work out." She looked down. "I can cope with what they say if we're together. But if we break up - having to hear other people's opinions about it at the water cooler would just make everything that much worse."
She was, he told himself, not being unreasonable. They hadn't been together long yet, and no matter how many times he told her he wouldn't leave her again, there was a part of her that wasn't going to believe it just from hearing the words. But it couldn't hurt to say it again. "In case it wasn't abundantly clear from what I said before lunch, I'm already sure about this. There isn't an if for me." He took a breath. "But I take your point. If I were you, I might wait and see if buyer's remorse set in too." Her frown line appeared and he flashed her a smile before she could interrupt. "So we'll do it your way for now. But I have a condition."
"What's that?"
"Our relationship needs to be public knowledge before you make any career moves. As acting agents, fraternization rules don't apply to us, but if you join up with the Feds for real or go anywhere else, I want us grandfathered into any contract you sign. It'll be much easier to negotiate any necessary exemptions before you're government property again."
"That's… surprisingly reasonable," she admitted.
"I have my moments," he said lightly. "So do we have a deal?"
She held out her hand, and he shook it, then bent over her hand, kissing it and then kissing all the way up her arm until he got to her sleeve. He put a hand behind her head then and leaned her back onto the blanket. "Officer Lopez is long gone," he assured her, and lowered his mouth to hers.
She pushed him off of her a few minutes later, her cheeks pink and lips shiny and swollen. He rolled onto his back, tearing his eyes away from her to get himself back under control. "You know the team's going to figure us out," he told her conversationally.
"You think?" she asked skeptically.
He allowed himself an eyeroll. "The only reason they haven't already is because we spent most of this case separated. They do know us."
"Well." He could practically hear her marshaling herself. "We can trust them."
He didn't like the uncertainty in her voice, but the guilt was even worse. "You don't have to feel badly about wanting to keep this to ourselves," he told her. He didn't want anything about being with him to hurt her, or make her doubt herself. She was already giving him so much more than he'd expected. He just couldn't help being greedy with her - the more of her he had, the more he desired. But even if everything immediately was what his heart clamored for, it wasn't fair to demand it. Patience was the least of what he owed her.
She sat back up and looked down at him, then away, her gaze skittering nervously. "It isn't…" she licked her lips and drew a shallow breath. "It isn't because I don't love you."
Her words were barely loud enough to hear, but he didn't miss them. He scrambled to sit up, dumbfounded. "It isn't?" he asked disbelievingly.
She shook her head, chin tilted down and hair hiding her face. He needed to see her. He put a gentle finger under her chin and lifted it up. Her eyes were glossy, and he read defiance and fear and pain but no doubt in them.
She batted his hand away and looked at the duck pond past his shoulder. "A long time ago," she said, "I told you that I thought you would choose life in the end, and you told me I was wrong. That I couldn't fix you. I kept trying, obviously. I kept hoping. There were moments - but the closer we got to him, the more clear it became. While you were in Vegas… I realized I'd lost. You'd chosen death after all, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't even blame you - you'd been honest with me about your intentions from the start. So I just… mourned you. Then you came back, but it was obviously temporary. I tried to just be glad for whatever time there was before the end. When you left me on the beach on the way to unmask Red John, I knew that it wasn't just because you didn't want me interfering in his death. You didn't want me to interfere with yours, either. But then you - you changed your mind. I didn't believe it. Not when you said it - not even when he was lying there dead and you were still standing next to me. I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think… I think part of me still is. I don't know how to stop."
He wanted to reach out to her, so he did. He pulled her against his chest and rested his forehead on her shoulder. "Oh, darling," he whispered, overcome. It had been easier for him, for years and years, to downplay her feelings for him, and consequently the degree to which he'd hurt her. No wonder she'd bottled it up for so long, and felt so swept away when their physical intimacy had unleashed the flood.
"I'm sorry I put you through so much for so long," he told her. "I'm sorry I trained you to always expect the worst with me." He pressed a kiss to the side of her neck, then pulled back to look her in the eye. "But it wasn't like that, for me. Before Vegas… I was getting desperate exactly because I didn't want death anymore. I don't think I was fully aware of it, but I wanted to really live again, and I didn't want to wait another five or ten years to do it. Escalating the game with Red John was the only way I knew to get to the end. Those six months I was away… I missed you so much. Every day. But I needed to find him, and I needed to keep him away from you. I - I know I wasn't making good decisions for a while there. But it wasn't for the reason you think."
She gave him that happy-sad smile.
"I don't blame you for needing time," he said. "Honestly I'm amazed you're here with me at all."
She shrugged and met his eyes, and what he saw in hers made his heart ring like a bell.
"It was never a choice," she said, a little rueful. "With you, the dice were loaded from the start."
He grinned. "Well, I could hardly leave something as important as you to chance." He kissed her. "I love you far too much for fair play."
Her nose wrinkled. "I can't believe I fell in love with a cheater."
His pulse accelerated outrageously every time she said that word. "You'd be bored by anything else," he murmured, leaning in to brush her cheek with his nose. "Admit it, I've ruined you for honest men."
Her laughter was the best thing he'd ever heard. "And who have I ruined you for?" she asked.
"Everyone," he told her.
She smiled at that, uncomplicated happiness on her face, and he saw that he'd finally gotten something right. He felt a rush of pride, and he thought that if he could make her look that way often enough, he might be worth something again.
x-x-x
Teresa found herself reflecting on those honest men Jane felt he'd stolen her away from. It was late afternoon and she lay half on top of him, both of them naked and drowsing. Her senses were replete with him - the scent of his sweat, the taste of him still bitter in the back of her mouth, the sound of his heart beneath her head, the lulling comfort of the lazy patterns his fingers traced on her side. She thought he was wrong, though. She'd been ruined for honest men long before she met him - it was just now she'd finally admitted it.
Greg had been honest, as had her handful of semi-serious boyfriends since. Those were the men she tried hardest to want, to make things work with. But it never did. And she'd known all along that she was the problem, not them.
She hadn't exactly been good, as a kid, but she hadn't been bad either. She'd had a wild streak - her mother called her a little hoyden, she remembered. She'd bossed her brothers around mercilessly and fought any kid at school who tried to give them trouble. But she'd believed in the basic justice of the universe - that good behavior would be rewarded and bad punished - until after her mother's death. Or until what it did to her father. Then she learned that the bad things happened whether you deserved them or not, and following the rules in an upside-down world only made things worse.
So she stopped doing it. She couldn't count the number of times she forged her father's signature - on checks for the monthly bills, on absence excuses, on report cards. She cheated gullible kids out of their lunch money. On a couple of occasions she'd stolen what she couldn't buy. And she'd lied her head off - to her teachers, her brothers, and most of all to their father. She never liked it, but she said what she had to, and she didn't regret it.
It changed her, though. So when she got to know an honest man, and tried to get close, there was a gulf of misapprehension. And she found herself lying yet again, pretending to be the same kind of person he was, the kind who didn't know just what they'd be willing to do when push came to shove. The kind who thought doing what was right and following the rules were the same thing.
Jane had been a relief, really. He was the only person she knew who acted on the outside how she so often felt on the inside. And, better yet, he got away with it. With quite a bit of help from her, of course, but it was (usually) well worth the bureaucratic headaches to get to watch him say what she couldn't. So they acted out the pantomime where she chastised him for breaking the rules and he made some token amends, and they both pretended not to know she'd enjoyed the whole business as much as he had. Right up until he crossed a line and it was actual people getting hurt, not just some bigwig's self-image, and she found herself furious both at him and at herself for not having stopped him.
His hand drifted from her side down to her hip. "What are you thinking?" he asked.
"Thinking about you," she said, a hint of teasing in her voice.
"What about me?"
"Mmm," she said. "In college I took a course on the psychology of criminal behavior, and the professor had this quotation from some Roman guy he repeated a lot. It went, 'nothing human is alien to me.' He said it meant -"
"That anyone is capable of anything."
"Yeah. He said that under the right circumstances, we might do the same thing as any criminal we encountered, so we shouldn't indulge in us versus them thinking, pretending that perps are different from everyone else."
"And what does this have to do with me?" Jane asked.
She found herself tracing circles on his chest. She still wasn't used to the expanses of his skin - it was impossible to stop touching it. "I've tried to keep that sentiment in mind, but it doesn't always work for me. There are things people do - not just criminals but also other cops, or these honest, decent men you keep saying I might have ended up with if not for you - that try as I might, I just can't wrap my head around. But not you. You've done things I disagreed with - things I hated even - but you've never done anything I felt I couldn't understand."
He hummed an acknowledgment. "For me, I think it's not so much about understanding - it's that you feel more real than other people. A lot of people just strike me as - thin, simple, insubstantial. Whereas you're always vivid, layered… interesting."
"Well, it's nice to know I don't bore you," she said.
"Ha." He gave her a gentle pinch. "It comes down to empathy, doesn't it? We all have more for some people than others. It's funny, when you have too little empathy, you get a sociopath, but when you have too much, you get a different type of psychopathy - like Nurse Edward."
"You think his problem is too much empathy?" she asked skeptically.
"Sure - people do terrible things because of empathy. Because it means that other people's pain hurts us. So in moderation, empathy motivates the best in us - our efforts to help one another. But when it's too strong, and we don't know how to make the other person's pain stop, we lash out to punish them for making us suffer alongside them. Edward couldn't fix his friend's pain, and it made him so furious he killed everyone who reminded him of the guy."
"He didn't seem angry. He claimed he was helping them."
"Meh. No one really thinks murder is helpful. That's just what he tells himself so he can reconcile his violent rage with his belief that he's a good person. But it all stems from how much other people's pain hurts him. Too much empathy."
They lapsed into silence. She shifted and rubbed her foot along the inside of his calf, enjoying the slight rasp of his coarse hair on her sensitive sole.
Then another bit of their earlier conversation returned to her and she pushed herself up on her elbow to look at his face. "What were the other things you decided while you were undercover?"
"Pardon?"
She narrowed her eyes at this show of ignorance. "In the park," she reminded him, "you said one of the things you decided in there was…" her face scrunched in distaste, "what you'd do if I died. What were the other things?"
"Ah." His expression went blank and then thoughtful, which she understood meant he was deciding what to tell her. After a moment he sat up in bed, leaning against the headboard. He glanced at her and then away. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on his knee through the sheet, and she thought he was wishing he had some sort of distraction for both of them - a steering wheel in his hands, a coin to pull from her ear, a cup of tea to hide behind. But there were the just the two of them naked in bed, and she felt a twinge of guilt for asking him to expose himself even further.
Then he turned a bright lie of a smile toward her and began to talk. "Going undercover did bring back memories of my other time on a ward like that. It was… not easy, but it did clarify some things for me. For a long time I tried not to think about that period of my life. Having it come back - it felt both very immediate and very far away. Like looking at the moon through a telescope." He paused for a moment. "In the early days you knew me, I used to tell myself these two contradictory things. First, that I'd been weak to fall apart that way, and if there'd been more to me I would have just picked myself up and gotten to work seeking my vengeance instead of letting the trail go cold while I wallowed in a drugged stupor. The second was that I'd failed my family by surviving them at all."
"What the hallucination of your wife said," she murmured.
His head jerked in a sharp nod. "On some level I knew all along that my desire for revenge was purely for my own benefit - that it wouldn't make any difference to them. So if my only reason for living was selfish, then wasn't that worse than no reason at all? I was caught in this conundrum of simultaneously having contempt for myself for both not being able to live and not being able to die. But - looking back now from a distance - I could see that I was actually just having a - a normal reaction to an untenable situation. It was reasonable - justified even, under those circumstances, to have broken down and tried anything I could to escape what I felt. But at the same time I'm grateful that I got through it, both for my own sake and because my death wouldn't have done anyone any good. So I felt that I could finally forgive myself, both for trying to die and for not succeeding."
"I'm glad," Teresa said, her voice strange and dry in her throat, as if she hadn't used it for weeks. She wanted desperately to touch him, but the foot of space between them seemed to belong to him alone, and she didn't know what he wanted. Her heart felt like it had left her body and wrapped around him like a pair of wings, encompassing everything he was, every twinge of his own pieced-together soul. She wanted to be his home and his shelter, the place where he could lay down his many burdens.
"So those were the things I decided," he continued. "That it was all right that I'd wanted to die back then, but it was good that I hadn't. That I'm glad to be here now, and I don't have to feel guilty for that either. But that if - that if it ever comes down to it, I won't make myself outlive you. I know you don't like hearing that, but it makes me less afraid of loving you."
It was true that she didn't like that last part. But she did understand it. And, with that sensation of plummeting through the sky again, she understood something about herself as well, something she had dimly sensed but refused to see, because the scope of what she felt for him had been terrifying. It still was. But it was also a gift she could offer him, one that might matter at a time when he was working to forgive himself.
So she reached out and cupped his face in her hands, gently turning him so he could see her eyes. Her heart was skittering in her chest like she was about to pull a cord that might either open her parachute or detonate a bomb. She swallowed and forced herself to meet his gaze. "I know you've done things in the past that you're not proud of," she said. "And you know that I don't like some of the things you've done either. But I need you to know that I love you. I love all of you. Not apart from the things you've done or in spite of them, but including them. I love every version of you there's ever been, because they're all part of who you are now. I love Patrick Jane the Boy Wonder, and the fake psychic, and the suicidal mess, and the man who lived for revenge. And I will still love you after you make your next mistake, and the one after that. I don't mean - I can't promise that nothing you might do could come between us. But if it did, it wouldn't be because I stopped loving you. Because I don't think that's possible."
His eyes burned into hers. "Teresa -" his voice broke on her name. Then his mouth was on hers, at once gentle and demanding. Their eyes remained open, locked together as their tongues met, and it felt devastatingly intimate, like he was seeing all the way into her most private heart. Without breaking their kiss he shoved the sheet down and lowered them to the mattress, his body covering hers, though he kept his weight on his arm so as not to crush her. She slid her hands down his back, urging him closer.
His mouth left hers and he was kissing her eyelids, her cheeks, her jaw, her neck. "You're my miracle," he murmured into her skin. "You're -" he made a sound of frustration and nipped her earlobe. "There aren't enough words for how I feel. But you're everything to me. I love you so much I can't breathe sometimes."
She smiled, his fervor soothing her. She buried a hand in his hair as he reached between her legs and caressed her. Desire and tenderness burned together within her, and her breath caught in her throat. They were still hurtling through the sky together, but she thought they might never hit the ground. And maybe the word for that wasn't falling after all. Maybe it was more like flying.
x-x-x
Patrick's body was sore in unfamiliar ways. He wasn't sure his legs would hold him up if he tried to get out of their bed. Fortunately, there was no need to. Teresa had drifted off after their post-shower detour back between the sheets, and he was more than content to remain exactly where he was, watching the orange glow of sunset play across her skin.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life looking at her. He knew he'd been remiss, as a lover, in not telling her how beautiful he found her. He had a thousand ways to compliment a woman, but now the words stuck on his tongue. He never wanted her to think that he'd love her an iota less if she had warts and crooked teeth and all her glorious hair fell out. She had a beautiful face, but he didn't adore it for its aesthetic qualities but because it was hers. He couldn't look at her and see a collection of features to be dispassionately assessed. He could only see her eyes, her nose, their effect blindingly, incomparably powerful because they evoked whole rooms full of memories of her, smiling and frowning, irritated, impatient, tolerantly amused, her looking back at him and seeing him as no one else could.
Besides, he mistrusted beauty. It was a trap, a sham, a shiny fishing lure. Not that he was immune to it - he was a man, after all. A lovely face might draw him in, but he knew better than to forget the hook hiding beneath the surface. After all, he'd cast it out himself more times than he could count - he'd traded on his looks all his life and was well aware of both their power and their essential emptiness. It was a paradox: beauty was inherently dishonest, yet Teresa was both honest and beautiful. And he didn't know how to express that in a way she would understand.
He reached out and gently traced the line of her cheek, careful not to wake her, feeling that something within him was crumbling, and the only thing that could hold him together was her nearness.
How she humbled him. Hours later, he was still awestruck by her words of love. At every turn, without even meaning to, she taught him lessons in courage and strength of heart. Just that morning she'd been terrified of her own feelings, but instead of pushing them - and him - away, she'd not only accepted them, but shared them with him. It was a form of grace he could barely comprehend. He had been raised in a frankly transactional world. No one got something for nothing, and only a fool didn't negotiate the price before making a deal. That outlook had been so deeply ingrained in him that he couldn't escape it even when he tried.
When he'd understood his feelings for Teresa, he yearned to win her love, to earn her affection. As if she was a prize at a fair. As if all he had to do was perfect his sales pitch and upgrade a few of his features to fool her into settling for less than she was worth.
But what she'd said to him today - even he knew there was no way to earn something like that, or deserve it. He could only receive it, gratefully, reverently, and do his utmost not to give her any further reason to regret what she'd bestowed on him. And, of course, love her back, to the best of his grasping and selfish ability.
He had spent so long being ashamed of himself. Of the choices he'd made. But what she'd told him had given him a glimpse of wholeness, of being more than an assemblage of regrets bound together by bloody-mindedness and the light of Teresa Lisbon. He tried, painfully, glancingly, to imagine a version of himself in the future who might be able to live with his past as peaceably as she claimed to.
It occurred to him that the worst things he did were tied to the worst things he believed about himself. He wondered if believing something else instead might result in different outcomes. Then he filed the thought away for future consideration. Today was a good day. He didn't want to waste it on maybes and might-have-beens. He didn't want to be anywhere but right where he was, with this woman, his at last to touch and hold and love until his body and his heart both ached with it.
She let out a huff of breath and he watched her expression change as consciousness returned to her. An eyelid cracked open and then closed again.
"You were watching me sleep, weren't you," she said, blinking at him, her voice thick from sleep. "Do you do that a lot? No, wait, don't answer. I don't think I want to know."
As soon as her eyes were on him, the crumbling feeling came back. He plastered it over with a wolfish smile. "Like you never gaze at me when I'm napping on my couch."
"I do not gaze," she said, rolling over and taking a sip from the glass of water on her nightstand. "I check on you. Because you require nearly constant supervision."
"That and you think I'm pretty."
"I think you're pretty aggravating," she muttered, sitting up.
"Well, I think you're pretty."
She glanced at him suspiciously, her cheeks an enchanting pink.
"I'm not ashamed of how much I like looking at you," he told her, giving her a wink. "Which is an awful lot."
Her blush deepened, spreading from her face all the way down to her chest. He watched its progression with appreciative interest.
"Stop it!" she said.
"Stop what?"
She got up and pulled on a tank top and shorts, then tossed some clothes at him and sat back down at the foot of the bed. "Trying to make me uncomfortable in order to hide from me."
He pulled the shirt over his head. "What exactly do you think I'm hiding?" he demanded.
She scowled at him. "Whatever it is you're actually feeling right now. You have this haunted look in your eyes but you just smile and tease me and think I won't notice. Well, I didn't call you on it when you were just my consultant, but things are different now."
She said it as a challenge, but there was a bit of a question in her voice too. She wanted to find out exactly how different things actually were.
But he didn't know what to tell her. "I don't know what I'm feeling," he said, letting the smile fall off his face.
She crawled over to him and ran a hand through his hair, then cupped his cheek and looked into his eyes. "What is it?"
"What you said earlier," he began, the words spilling out of him from he didn't know where, as if she'd hypnotized him, "I don't - I don't - I don't understand how you can feel that way. About me. You know me. You know me better than anyone ever has. You know what I've done, what I've wanted to do, what I'm capable of. So how can you…" He trailed off, unable to even say it.
"We were just talking about this," she said gently. "You're capable of anything, same as me, same as anyone. But I think you're referring to things you haven't even done. Things you chose not to do."
He shook his head. "Your religion says that intention to commit a sin is a sin itself. And believe me, I had more than intentions. I had plans. I had preparations. I had - I could have done it. I could have done more - more than I think you know."
He looked back at her and found something completely unexpected in her face.
"And you think that makes you different from me?" she asked.
He just blinked at her in confusion. "You never…"
"Planned to murder someone? But I did," she said. "Why do you think I never turned away from you when you told me what you wanted to do?"
Her hand dropped from his face, and he grabbed it. "What happened?" he asked.
She took a deep breath. "My father had a handgun," she said. "He taught me and my brothers to shoot when we were old enough. It was for protection. I never thought twice about it. Until one day… He was drunk, but he'd fallen asleep before things got out of control. But the boys were screwing around, playing hockey on the hardwood floors, and Tommy broke a window. Dad woke up, he saw the glass on the floor, and he just… He went nuts. He was screaming that he'd lost everything else and now we were destroying the house too, we were destroying him - he said a lot of things. And then he got the gun. He pointed it at Tommy. I got between them and I managed to talk him down, I got him to come to the kitchen and have another beer and when he put the gun down I picked it up and stuck it in a drawer out of sight. The safety was off. When he was teaching us - he always said you never, never aimed a gun at anything you weren't prepared to shoot. I don't think he'd really meant to fire but - the state he was in, anything could have happened. That night, I lay in bed trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't let him - Tommy was just a kid. They were all just kids. But Dad was getting worse, and he had a gun. So after a few hours, when everyone else was asleep, I went downstairs and got it from the drawer. I disassembled it and threw the pieces away, far from the house. And then I went home again. He didn't remember what had happened. A few weeks later he went looking for the gun and couldn't find it. I told him that he'd sold it to a friend and he believed me. But he said he was going to buy another. And so I had to think about what to do if he did. And I did think about it. Not just about how to stop him if he was threatening my brothers. About how to stop him from threatening them in the first place. I thought about how to make it look like an accident. If it came to that. It didn't, though. He took care of it for me six months later. Right after he got around to buying that new gun."
She smiled at him, as bitter as he'd ever seen her. "So you so see, I'm no better than you. I never have been. You wanted to kill a murderer who destroyed your family and many others. I obsessed about killing a man who'd never taken a life, someone I'd loved."
By the time she finished talking, she was rigid with tension. He was certain she'd never told that story before. He was honored that she trusted him with it, but he couldn't agree with her conclusion. He put his hand on her arm and rubbed gently up and down, trying to convey that he was there for her in every possible sense. "Darling, I'm so sorry he put you through that. But you were a terrified kid trying to protect your little brothers. That you were willing to do whatever you had to - it just shows how brave and strong you were. That's not - that's not the same as fantasizing about torturing someone to death for your own pleasure. It doesn't make you like me."
She looked at him with unguarded eyes. "You said I know you better than anyone. How could I possibly do that if the same things weren't in both of us? If you won't admit that I'm like you, then maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you're more like me than you think. Neither of us went through with it, after all. I know you could have. You could have ditched us and gotten your revenge at the end there, and I - I don't think I would have stopped you."
He shrugged. "Just arrested me after, right? You always promised that."
She shook her head. "If I'd been there when you killed Timothy Carter, I'd have put the handcuffs on you myself. But by the end? It was too dangerous. Red John could easily have left orders for someone to kill you in custody if you were arrested for his death. The Blake Association was everywhere. I would have done whatever it took to protect you."
He took this in. She was truly a marvel. "I don't deserve you," he said.
"Why not?" she demanded. "What exactly do you think makes you so unlovable? That you have regrets? Who doesn't? That a monster once used your arrogance as a pretext for killing your family? That wasn't your fault. You're just a person. There's good and bad in you, like in me, like in all of us. But you're my person. You're the one who knows me better than anyone. And I'm not giving that up."
"I don't want you to," he said, pulling her into a hug. She was warm and soft and strong and she smelled like his personal heaven. "I never want you give up on me. I couldn't stand it if you did."
She shifted against him and nudged his nose with her own. It was a gesture of such loving familiarity that his chest ached with stunned gratitude. He rested his forehead against hers and breathed through it.
"All right then," she said, her fingers twining through the curls at the back of his neck. "It's a deal. I won't give up on you and you won't run away from me."
He let out a ragged laugh. "At this point I don't think you could pry me off with a crowbar," he told her.
"Well, I'm afraid you're going to have to let go long enough for one of us to make dinner, because I for one have worked up quite an appetite this afternoon."
"Can't do it," he said, pulling her more firmly against him with one arm while he grabbed her phone off her nightstand with the other. "Order a pizza."
"Fine," she said, "but we're not eating in bed."
They ate on the couch. He kept one hand on her leg while he fed himself with the other. She gave him an amused look but tolerated the contact without complaint. He knew he was being ridiculous, but for whatever reason he needed the physical connection, and as long as she was willing to put up with it he saw no reason to deny himself.
She put a boringly predictable medical drama on the TV, which he tuned out almost completely. Once they were done eating, he tucked her under his arm and relaxed, playing with her hair while she was distracted by the show.
It struck him that at some point along the way, he'd set Lisbon up in his head as his personal moral arbiter - the judge and jury who would review the evidence of his existence and sentence him accordingly. In addition to his feelings for her and his need for the CBI's resources, this had also made it imperative that he remain in her good graces: if she'd cast him out, it would have meant there was no hope left for him. Accordingly, it had given him a kind of pleasure and reassurance every time she yelled at him - no matter how angry she was, as long as she was still trying to get through to him, then whatever he'd done, he hadn't crossed the final line.
And he supposed that when he'd set out to win her heart, he'd really been asking, on top of everything else, for her verdict on him: whether he could be forgiven for his failings and deemed fit to participate fully in human society, or if he was irredeemably flawed, condemned to eke out an existence on the periphery of other people's lives. Or perhaps she would assign him some penance by which he could atone for his misdeeds and salvage himself from the junk-heap of loneliness.
But she had returned none of the judgments he'd been prepared for. She had, instead… accepted him, fully, flaws and misdeeds and all. It seemed - well, improbable, inadvisable, and possibly insane. But she had meant it. And he found he didn't quite know how to come to terms with that. The dissonance between her view of him and his view of himself seemed irreconcilable, yet he couldn't dismiss hers as wrong. Not without betraying the respect and admiration and trust that had led him to appoint her as the adjudicator of his fate in the first place.
Her unbounded love ought to be a balm to his soul, but what he felt in that moment was more like… fear.
There had, he remembered, been a few times, in those last, worst days undercover, when he'd really felt like he'd lost her, and on top of the anguish and loneliness and loss, there had also been a little bit of relief.
"Ouch!" Teresa yelped, stiffening beside him.
He realized that he'd wound a strand of her hair so tightly around his finger that he'd hurt her, as well as cutting off his own circulation. "Sorry, sorry, here, let me -" he extricated himself from her, careful to inflict no further pain.
Free, she scooted out of his grasp and tucked her knees up under her, rubbing the tender spot on her scalp. She clicked the TV off and frowned at the look on his face. "What's going on with you?" she asked.
He shrugged uncomfortably and hunched over a bit, hiding from her gaze. "Thinking."
"About what?"
She was worried about him. Again. Of course. And he had nothing to say that would ease her mind. "It, ah, occurred to me that…" he flicked a quick glance at her. "Do you remember when we were in Monterey and I said that thing about how easily you could destroy me?"
"Sure." Now her hand was on his leg.
"Well, I think there's an ugly little part of me that… wanted you to," he admitted slowly, head in his hands. "That wanted you to reject me when I asked you to let me love you. To - to excoriate me and send me away. Because then I wouldn't have to try to finish putting myself back together. I wouldn't have to be afraid of failing, or of anything really, because the worst would have already happened. I've been so terrified for so long of what my next big mistake might cost. And if I had you - if I had what I wanted most, then there would be so much more to lose."
She squeezed his leg. "Are you saying that if I'd turned you down, you would have just… what, curled up in a ball and given up on life?"
He gave her a pained laugh. "Of course not. I would have immediately begun scheming to change your mind and win you over. But that sick piece of me would have felt very vindicated and would keep telling me I should just leave you alone if you were smart enough to finally figure out you'd be better off without me."
"But… you do know I wouldn't be better off without you, right?"
He shrugged again. "I don't know," he admitted. "I think, sometimes, about the life you might have had if you'd never met me. You'd have gone a lot further in your career - maybe not at the CBI, given how corrupt it turned out to be, but no doubt the Feds would have poached you if you hadn't been tainted by your association with me. You might be married, have a family of your own if you wanted it. But I took all that away from you."
She whacked him on the shoulder and he flinched, looking up in surprise. "You're an idiot!" She whacked him again for good measure. "A condescending idiot! First of all, how stupid do you think I am? You think I don't know what choices I'm making? That I lost all agency the day you joined my team? You think I couldn't have gotten rid of you if I'd cared that much about a promotion? You think if I'd decided I wanted to settle down and have babies, you moping around on my couch would have stopped me? Believe me, I have not been weeping into my coffee mug as I counted down my fertile years all this time. It's my life, Jane. I knew perfectly well what I was doing with it. And second, I already know what my life would have been like without you, because that's how I spent the majority of it, before we met. And it wasn't better. It was just lonelier."
He raised his hands in defeat. "I stand corrected," he said, smiling ruefully at her. "I don't think you're incapable of making choices. I didn't mean that. I just - choosing to stick by me all this time seems like such a dubious one that sometimes I feel like I must have tricked you into it."
She hit him again, but gently. "You do realize that my choices aren't the problem here. That voice in your head is."
He nodded. "Yeah."
"So what helps you stop listening to it?"
He swallowed. "Touching you helps," he confessed.
She nodded and stood up from the couch, then grabbed his hand and towed him to their bedroom. She sat him down on the edge of the bed and stood between his legs as she began to unbutton his shirt.
He caught her wrist. "I'm not sure I can…" he said, trying not to blush.
"This isn't about sex," she told him, and got back to work.
She stripped both of them to their underwear and pulled back the covers. He climbed in obediently, and she arranged herself fully on top of him, chest to chest, her face tucked into his neck. He raised his hands to her back and stroked her slowly, letting himself relax into their cocoon of warmth.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, holding him tightly. "You know something?" she whispered to him. "I like who I am best when I'm around you. I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on this version of me."
He blinked, his eyes suddenly damp. "The version of me I am around you is the only one I like at all," he said.
He felt her smile against his skin. "Then it's a good thing you're around me almost all the time, isn't it?"
"Yeah," he said, voice thick. "It's really lucky."
"Do you feel afraid right now?" she asked.
"No." With her so close, it was impossible to feel anything but good. Safe. Loved. God, he didn't think he'd ever felt so loved before in his life.
"Me neither," she said.
"That's good." He stroked her skin and wondered what would happen when she finally realized exactly how much power she held over him. Probably nothing. Probably she wouldn't take any advantage of it unless she was desperate to stop him from doing something really stupid. If she'd been even remotely calculating, she would have figured it out already. It wasn't as if he'd hidden it, lately. But still, he couldn't quite bring himself to spell it out for her.
So instead he said, "You should know that I'm never going to stop loving you. I'm yours for as long as you want me, and I'll still be yours after that too."
She squeezed him. "Well, you should know that I don't regret my choices. In fact," she added slowly, "I'm pretty proud of them. I'm glad I spent my time doing good work that meant something to me instead of playing politics to land a fancy title and an endless supply of bureaucratic nonsense. I'm glad I didn't settle for a mediocre relationship with a boring man who didn't really understand me."
When she explained it that way, it did seem much less like he was a millstone around her neck. And it was true that while she was a lot of things, conventional wasn't one of them. He didn't know why he'd imagined the conventional markers of success would have been what she was really after, or what would make her happy. He supposed it had been less a genuine belief than a convenient stick with which to beat himself. That, he realized, was another bad habit he'd have to try to break. It wasn't fair to make her battle his sense of inadequacy every damn day. Surely he could manage to offer her something better than that.
"If you're willing to save me from dying alone," he said, "I promise to save you from dying of boredom."
"It's a deal," she agreed without hesitation.
"Shake on it?"
"Oh, I think we can do better than that," she said, and levered herself up enough to kiss him properly.
As her tongue pushed into his mouth and her hair tumbled down around his face, blocking out everything but her, he thought that lately he'd made a few good choices too. He was determined to keep the streak going as long as he could. It wouldn't last forever, but given the reliability of her forbearance, maybe it didn't have to. Maybe, if he was lucky and she was game, his best would be good enough. Maybe, finally, he could be enough.
