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Despite it all, the first emotion that floods her at his tiny visage in the peephole is warm, familiar, hopeful.
His voice echoes in her head - “Stabler coming back has made things more complicated” - and she feels the truth of it she’s been trying to deny. The unreturned phone calls, the dinner date she never cashed in, the Christmas present to uncle Rafa still on the kitchen counter months after Noah had torn into the neatly wrapped packages that arrived without ceremony on her doorstep come Christmas morning.
It’s there in the determined set of his hips when she swings open the door to him. “I’m not here for penance.”
“Barba.” His name is part warning part weary groan on her tongue and she watches the flitter of emotion that chases across his features, watches the way he deflates before her, eyes softening, posture drooping. Still he doesn’t ask to come inside and she doesn’t offer, both holding their checkmate at a respectable distance.
His voice is like a good drop of red - warming, comforting, soft around the edges. “Liv, just know that if you ever need-“ his mouth moves to form the word me before shifting around someone and ultimately swallowing both, leaving a tangible gap. “I’m here, always. I’m-“
It would be so easy to fall into him. To let him take care of her the way he has always wanted to, stop staving off his honesty and let him run another shaky hand down her hair, let him hold her together.
Instead she turns to the ire. “Sure, you’re here. When you’re not defending the man who threatened to kill me. Or disappearing to Iowa with a deafening goodbye. Or turning me in to 1PP.”
Barba’s posture stiffens, his walls thrown back up and jaw tight against retaliations. He looks at her, betrayed, for a beat before his shoulders shift back, chin rising, voice cold and clipped on “I should go.”, taking a step away from her.
Without thinking, her arm swings out to hold him in place, fingers lacing together easily. And he stares at them, the palms pressed together. Even in his shock - their shared shock - his fingers curl naturally around hers, his thumb rubbing a ghosts pattern across her knuckles.
They linger there, content. As if they could inhabit this moment forever. Small things have always felt like this with him; felt more, felt infinite.
He’s not asking for anything of her, not pressing to cross any threshold. And maybe thats why she moves, his name a murmur on her lips, her hand brushing over the peppered bristles of his jaw. Because she can’t imagine anyone else showing up for her the way he does, coming through even at their worst.
“Rafa.”
She knows the shape of this precipice as her face inches towards his. They’ve been here before, at this boundary - her hand too high on his thigh after a rough case one night, his lips pressing a warm kiss into her temple one winters morning.
Now he turns into her, following her movements as he has always done, and she shivers at his scent - coffee, sugar, the spice of his cologne. He’s so close that when he sucks in a sharp loaded breath, she feels the shape of it across her face.
His voice is a soft confession in the incremental space between them, eyes at once downcast and searching. “I’m not that man, Liv. Not Stabler, not… I just wanted to protect you.” It’s beseeching and so painfully sincere that Olivia feels her heart twist in her chest. She nods, lost in the haunted green she spent years charting.
Her fingers smooth along the line of his collar as she offers a bit of herself in return, the second side to an aborted conversation. “You know when Elliott came back, things got… grey. Different hues, different shades - but grey, murky.” Olivia swallows hard on this divulgence, but Rafael tugs her gaze back to his, his voice rough with fear, with hope.
“And now?”
“You’re the only man I know who wears colours so brightly.”
She kisses him, and fireworks burst bright and vibrant into her lungs.