“Tell me what you want.” Mike asks you as the two of you sit side by side at a bar that no one knows in the darkest depths of the Bronx. This is his hidey hole, the place he goes when he wants to be alone and somehow he’s allowed you to infiltrate it, the same way you seem to be disrupting everything else in his life. “Because we can’t keep going on like this.”
You pause, your gaze lowering to the glass of bourbon clasped between your fingertips, watching the liquid swirl around and around and around.
“It feels like I’m the Captain but you’re the one calling all the shots.” He informs you, inclining his head towards you. “You decide where and when we see each other, if we see each other. You’re the one that calls me when you want to blow off steam. I can’t do this anymore, you know how I feel.”
“Mike…” You trail off because you know what you want, you’ve known from the moment he’d kissed you outside of Lambert’s the problem was you didn’t want to become a cliché.
Every morning after you sent him packing you told yourself it was the last time and you thought it was.
Then you thought of that soft look in his eyes when he made love to you, the way he chased your pleasure and not his own. The way his fingers ran through your hair in the aftermath, holding you close.
It wasn’t sex you craved when it came to Mike Duarte, it was intimacy. It was the knowledge that someone out there loved you, cherished you.
He stood up and pulled out his wallet, tossing a note on the bar.
“I’m calling time on this.” He told you, pulling on his jacket. “If you call me it needs to be professional. You can’t just use me to get off when you feel the pressure.”
You wanted to open your mouth and say something, to tell him you feel the same way, you’re just scared, terrified because he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman in the NYPD. He doesn’t understand how hard you’ve fought for a place at the table.
Instead you watch him leave, your eyes on his back as he closes the door quietly behind him.
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