Lawyered Up

by Hth

Law & Order/ The Practice crossover

Who: This series alternates between Mike Logan/Jack McCoy and Mike Logan/Bobby Donnell. In Chapter 1, expect M/B.

What: Mike Logan doesn’t like lawyers, and he definitely doesn’t date them. And if he did date lawyers, he still wouldn’t date slick Boston attorneys who defend a murderer that Mike arrested.

Why: Because I don’t own these characters, but they bring me such joy. They are owned by Dick Wolf (Logan, McCoy, Schiff, Briscoe, Kincaid) and David Kelley (Donnell, Frutt).

Where: Permission to forward or archive anywhere, particularly at the Witness Archive.

When: I realize that Logan and McCoy only appeared together for one season, but as far as I’m concerned, that just won’t do. I’ve given them a few years of professional history before the opening of this story, and further distorted time by moving their action into the present so as to happen contemporaneously with current events on The Practice.

Why: The usual reasons. Among those who truly understand is my partner Barbara, to whom I dedicate this story in gratitude for the night she stayed up with me plotting this series. This just wouldn’t be the same without the influence of the suave and sly Mike Logan she played to my Jack and Bobby — or, come to think of it, if she’d never made me start watching Law & Order in the first place.

Lawyered Up

by Hth

"Let’s go, Logan." Lennie spun Mike’s desk chair as he walked past, making a mess out of Mike’s signature.

"What’s wrong with you? Jerking a guy around like that."

"Time to get to work, Mikey. Our friend Ballard is lawyered up and ready to go."

That was the best news Mike Logan had heard all day. "About fucking time," he said with genuine feeling, grabbing for the file on the Ballard case. "Remind me to tell you later how I feel about this little shit holding out on us for three goddamn hours."

"Not on your life. I need another lecture from you about the unjust privileges of the rich like I need another ex-wife."

"You telling me that we’d have waited this long for Richard Ballard’s lawyer if his address were in the Bronx? You telling me that we’d be dancing on a string like this for a plumber or a cabbie who pushed some prof out of a ninth-storey window?"

"Logan, I wouldn’t try to tell you anything. You got all the answers."

But just thinking about it had already punched all Mike Logan’s buttons, and he was ready to come down with both feet on somebody. *Pull it in, Logan,* he told himself. *Lay it on the murderer, not your partner.* Richard Alexander Ballard, trust-fund baby and patron of the arts; the Ballard family hadn’t done an honest day’s work since the Civil War, and every time a Ballard choked on a chicken bone it made the society page. Well, as long as that Ballard wasn’t Richard Alexander; Logan had a feeling that the Donald Cumberland murder wasn’t the first thing Ballard had done that didn’t get talked about in polite society. And, while he was on the subject, fuck Briscoe if he thought Mike should have the slightest bit of sympathy for this guy just because he was a flaming queer. So it was hard to be a fag when you grow up under the scrutiny of the Park Avenue crowd; it was no picnic when you were from a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood either, and you didn’t even have money to make the stress easier to take. Money made everything easier, not harder. Apparently when you killed someone, money made it easier to get the lawyer you wanted, too, even if you had to have him shipped down from Boston while the arresting officers sat quietly on their asses and waited.

The door to the interrogation room slammed against the wall when Mike threw it open. Behind him, he heard Lennie’s low whistle. "Detective Logan," Van Buren said calmly, "would you please take your seat and refrain from chewing the scenery."

"Good afternoon, Detectives." The lawyer seated beside Ballard stood up, and handed his card to Lennie. Mike glanced over his partner’s shoulder as Lennie pulled up a chair — Robert Donnell, from Boston. "I’m sorry you had to wait on me, but I think we’re ready to start now."

"Lieutenant, it still seems to me like he should have a New York lawyer. The murder was committed in the State of New York."

Robert Donnell stepped in smoothly — too smoothly. He had a mellow, calming tone that made Logan feel patronized, and it rankled. "I agree completely."

"What?" Ballard squeaked. "Bobby, what are you talking about?"

He held up a hand, palm toward his client, but didn’t look down at him. "I’m going to ask a friend from New York to co-chair this case with me, just to help me navigate New York criminal code. But the fact is that Rick Ballard has been a friend of mine for a number of years, and both he and I would feel most comfortable if I were in charge of his defense."

"Wonderful." Mike could hardly stand it; that wispy, frightened little rich boy who hadn’t been able to say one single cogent word as he was being arrested, just able to cry and repeat "It wasn’t my fault," endlessly — now he was subdued, but serene, staring at Logan with the confidence of a religious fanatic. Apparently the man at his shoulder, the strong-jawed, blue-eyed, well-dressed lawyer with the deep voice and perfect enunciation of a Shakespearean actor, was a strengthening influence. Goddamn lawyers. "Let’s hear it, Mr. Ballard. You didn’t push Donald Cumberland off the balcony; who did?"

"I did," Ballard said softly. "But I didn’t kill him."

"Mr. Ballard, he fell nine storeys to the ground! He’s dead! This is your idea of a coincidence?"

"We’re going to plead self-defense," said Donnell.

"Self... You’ve got to be kidding me."

Donnell had the audacity to smile, although it was a grave, this-is-all-entirely-relevant smile. "Detective, I’m not going to waste any more of your time than necessary, I promise. We’re pleading self-defense, because Donald Cumberland was threatening Rick with a .44 caliber pistol at the time he was pushed."

Lennie leaned back in his chair. "Holy shit."

"Wait just a minute! There was no weapon anywhere near his body!"

"I took it." Ballard’s voice was so subdued that Logan had to lean forward to hear him. "I went down — after he fell — and I took the gun, and I threw it in the river."

"You were in his hotel room."

"Yes."

"You were following him."

"N-no. I mean–"

"You weren’t following him."

"No, I–"

"His girlfriend called the police three times in the last month to tell us that a guy named Richard Ballard was stalking him."

"No. I never did."

"She said you were making phone calls."

"No!"

"She said you threatened to kill him."

"No!"

"What are you telling us, Ballard? Cumberland and his girlfriend were trying to frame you for the death of a guy who was alive at the time?"

"No. I don’t know."

"Okay. So you come to his hotel room, but you weren’t stalking him. Then he lets you in of his own free will."

"Yes. He invited me."

"He *invited* you."

"Yes."

"And then he threatens you with a gun."

"Yes. We argued. He pulled a gun."

"Cumberland brought a gun to the NYU conference?"

"No. It was – my gun."

"*Your* gun? You went to see Cumberland carrying a gun? Was this gun registered to you?"

"Yes. I mean, no! Yes, the gun is mine. No, I didn’t bring it with me. He had it already. He took it from me before."

"Did you report this gun as stolen?" This story just got better and better. It was all Mike could do not to grin.

"No. I didn’t know it was stolen. I don’t go looking every day at my gun."

"He took the gun."

"Yes. Out of a drawer at my house."

"He broke into your house?"

"No. I let him in."

"He came to see you."

"Yes."

"While he was there, he took your gun."

"Yes."

"Which you didn’t realize until later."

"Until he pulled it on me."

"At the hotel."

"Yes."

"Where you were at his request."

"Yes."

"And you argued."

"Yes."

"And he drew the gun and aimed it at you."

"Yes."

"And you...rushed him?"

"I – reached for the gun. I tried to get it back."

"From a man who had probably five inches and fifty pounds on you."

"Yes."

"You grappled with him for the gun."

"That’s right."

"You weren’t afraid he would shoot you?"

"Of course he was," Donnell said mildly. "Reasonable fear for his life is what makes it self-defense."

"You wanna not answer the questions for him, please? I’m asking Mr. Ballard how he felt at the time. You were in Boston at the time. You wanna let him answer?"

"I’m sorry. Go ahead, Ricky."

Hesitantly, Ballard looked to Donnell, and then to Van Buren, and finally back to Mike. "I didn’t know. I thought he might. I didn’t know."

"But you jumped at him anyway, and fought him for the gun."

"I didn’t know what else to do."

"So you threw him off the balcony."

"I pushed him. I was scared. He had the gun against my cheek, and I was scared, and I shoved him, and he...fell."

"Fell."

"Yes."

"Over the railing."

"He was against the railing already."

"And you just...pushed him over."

"Yes. I was scared."

"Right. Hence the self-defense."

"Yes."

"So after he fell, you ran down the stairs–"

"Elevator."

"After he fell, you took the elevator down to the ground floor to see his body."

"Yes."

"You didn’t call the police."

"No."

"You went down and took your gun back."

"Yes."

"And you threw it in the river."

"Yes."

"And you didn’t call the police."

"No."

"You wanna fill us in on that a little, Mr. Ballard?"

"He was dead. I killed him. My gun was there. I was scared, okay? I didn’t know what else to do. I went home and called in sick to work."

"And you didn’t leave the house until Detective Briscoe and I arrived to arrest you."

"No."

"Did you call anyone? See anyone? Your mom, your priest, Dr. Laura, *anyone*?"

"No! Not until I got here. Then I called Bobby, and that’s all. That’s all."

Mike rubbed his eyes. "Okay, Mr. Ballard. Here’s what I don’t understand."

"This is the one thing, huh?" Lennie asked under his breath.

"Donald Cumberland was a Syracuse University professor of American history who writes books about how every downturn this country has ever taken had something to do with sexual immorality. You’re an activist who owns three gay bars and a magazine. When did you two get so friendly that you were shuttling back and forth between each other’s places, stealing guns and fighting on balconies?"

"Donald was my lover."

"This is for real? This is actually your story?"

Donnell held up his hand again to prevent Ballard from responding. "It’s not so surprising, is it? Cumberland was obviously weirdly obsessed with sexual purity."

"So he was gay."

"It’s not inconsistent with a psychological analysis of Cumberland’s personality."

"Mr. Donnell, I hope you’re not going to the jury with this."

He smiled calmly. "As a matter of fact, Detective – Logan, is it? – yes, I am. Rick Ballard killed Donald Cumberland in self-defense, and he’s going to be acquitted on all charges."

Crazy bastards – both of them. Mike shook his head. "Whatever you say, Donnell. We’ll see you in court."

****

The judge rapped smartly with his gavel. "Thirty minute recess."

"Put me in, coach, put me in."

Bobby Donnell turned gratefully toward the sound of that wry, familiar voice. "Gladly. Pull up a chair, Ellenor. This is Rickie Ballard, our defendant. Rickie, this is Ellenor, one of my partners."

She did grab a chair, retying her hair in its simple ponytail as she scanned Bobby’s scribbled notes on the table. "How’s the judge?"

"All right. Overruled every objection any of us have made since the trial started."

"Us, us? Or all the lawyers?"

"All of them – any of them. That’s EADA Jack McCoy over there; he seems to be chairing this pretty much alone. There’s an assistant, a woman, but she doesn’t say much. McCoy’s pretty much a showboat. How are things in Boston?"

"Gone to hell, are you kidding me? Eugene’s been disbarred, Lucy locked herself in the bathroom and hasn’t come out for three days, Lindsay is snorting coke in the lobby, and Jimmy’s been arrested for fondling the horses, you know, on those Ye Olde Boston carriages that tourists ride in. We can’t handle ourselves without you, Bobby."

There was a little truth under the sarcasm; Bobby could see beyond the wicked glitter in her eyes, and he knew that for Ellenor, as much as for him, the firm was family. Nobody should be gone, not this long. But on the other hand...Rickie. What else could he have done?

After Rickie beat this, Bobby was going to hug him, and take him someplace discreet, and yell at him until Bobby’s throat bled. What was he thinking? Donald *Cumberland,* for Christ’s sake. Of all the people to get tangled up with a Nazi asshole like Cumberland, he would never have expected Rickie. Ten years ago, even Bobby hadn’t been Queer Pride enough for Rickie – too normal, too interested in chasing respectability and the American Dream, too eager for the approval of his father, his professors, the Bar Association – and now Rickie had screwed up his whole life because he thought he was in love with one of America’s loudest, albeit most handsome, homophobes. Not to make light of an old friend going up on charges of murder one, but Donald Cumberland’s nine-storey exit from Rickie’s life had to be the best thing that could possibly happen to him – at least, once the trial was over.

At the back of his mind, there was an uncharitable thought: Bet Rickie was glad *now* that Bobby had been more serious about his career in college than he was about the Cause. Ten years after the fact, Rickie needed a lawyer, not a kindred spirit.

But none of that meant anything now. Only the trial mattered, the ebb and flow of the energy between him and the jury, the anger that simmered in him over the *wrongness* of Rickie in jail for fighting against a man Bobby didn’t doubt for a second would have shot him with his own gun, the crystalline clarity that dropped down like a visor the moment he approached the witness stand, words dancing among each other with perfect geometry of tone and definition. The trial was everything, until it was over. Then it would be him again, Bobby Donnell, and an old friend whose money and brilliance hadn’t saved him from losing everything to his passions. Not like Bobby. No, Bobby had gentler passions, by and large, not the type that Rickie Ballard would recognize as passions at all. All his fire was for the courtroom, and when he walked out of the courtroom, there was just a man who bought his Christmas gifts six months early and took out his own office trash to save work for the custodian. Serious entrepreneur, benevolent patriarch, quiet romantic, a man who saved everything for the jury.

That wasn’t how Bobby had expected to turn out, when he was younger. He’d always figured that later, when he was established, when he had some success and some financial security, he’d be a happier, more freewheeling, less inhibited person. Of course, at this stage in his life, he was beginning to see what a foolish idea that was. Passion was a thing you had to cultivate, just like patience or reputation, and Bobby was pitifully rusty in that department. For all he knew, the damage was irreversible.

But he was a hell of a lawyer. And right now, that was what Rickie needed, just like friends had turned to Bobby in need of a lawyer before, and no doubt would again. That made it better. That made things a lot better.

"What’s on for this afternoon?" Ellenor was asking him, knocking on the table in front of him to get Bobby’s wandering attention.

"Oh. I think prosecution is calling the arresting officer."

"Trouble?"

"Not really. He’s going to explain why they arrested Rickie, but all he can prove is that Rickie was in the room, which we already know. McCoy will make a production out of how the police didn’t find a gun on the body, and when I cross him, Logan will admit that he has no way of knowing whether or not Cumberland was holding a gun when he fell. His whole testimony is basically a non-event."

As a matter of fact, although this was neither the time nor the place to go into it, Bobby was secretly hoping that Detective Logan would come out to their advantage more than the reverse. If juries hated lawyers – and they mainly did, in Bobby’s experience – they hated cops almost as much; Shambala had assured him that, if anything, that was even more true in New York than it was in Boston. And Mike Logan was the poster boy for unlikeable police – stubborn, prickly, too intensely confident of Rickie’s guilt to come across as coolly professional. Bobby’s work was cut out for him: he needed to make Logan look like a typical arrogant flatfoot, too busy to actually investigate a murder and too brash ever to consider that his initial suspicions of guilt might be flawed. He was just the kind of cop – or could be, would be if Bobby Donnell said he was – that New Yorkers were most afraid of these days.

He wondered, idly, if Mike Logan really *was* that kind of cop. Hard to tell, really. Despite what juries believed, it was damned hard to tell much about a man’s character by seeing him on the witness stand, hard to know much in under a year or two, in Bobby’s opinion. There certainly wasn’t much he could say he really knew about the detective, except that he was strong-willed, and had handsome dark eyes under those heavy eyebrows, and he was thoroughly convinced of Rickie’s guilt. That made him the villain for the afternoon, in the snow-globe world of the trial.

Bobby was Rickie’s attorney, and his only chance of not going to jail for 25 to life. Only the trial mattered, and the promise he’d made Rickie that he would take care of everything.

***

"So, are we celebrating or drowning our sorrows?"

"What do you care? I’m buying."

"True enough," Lennie said amiably, taking another mozzarella stick off the plate before returning his attention to the pool game. "I still want to know how your testimony went."

"Do I look like a lawyer to you?"

Lennie snorted. "Fair enough."

Mike was telling his partner the complete truth, in the sense that he really didn’t have a clue how the jury took his testimony, or what it would all mean in the long run. He knew how he felt, though, and he didn’t feel great about it.

It was that damn Boston lawyer. Sussing out juries wasn’t Mike’s line, but it seemed to him that if Donnell was beginning to get to him, it was definitely time to start worrying. There was something almost hypnotic about Donnell, something that just defied you, when he turned that smooth voice and that disarming confidence on you, to disagree with him. Which was bullshit, nothing but sleazy lawyer tricks; Rick Ballard had stalked Cumberland for a month, and finally killed him by pushing him nine floors to his death, and not one detail of his wild story was verifiable by any forensic evidence whatsoever. Wasn’t it funny how they never had anything to say about self-defense until after they’d had a chance to talk to their lawyers? Donnell was paid by rich boys like Ballard to concoct these stories, and to deliver them to the jury with eloquence and charisma and perfect, affable sincerity in his pretty blue eyes.

There were seven women on the jury. How the hell could Donnell not score points there, with those eyes in that face? Jesus Christ, he had the hair on the back of Mike’s neck standing up when he stared at him with those vivid, strangely intimate eyes, and Mike disliked lawyers more than anyone he knew.

"Hey, Mikey. Don’t look now."

Of course he did, as Lennie had intended him to, and he swore under his breath. Donnell had changed into warmer weekend clothes, but the other lawyer on his team, the one Mike didn’t know, was still dressed for the courtroom. They were talking together, and Mike got the feeling it wasn’t about the case; they had a brother-sister dynamic between them, both protective and dismissive. "Keep your head down, Lennie. This is the last thing I want to deal with tonight."

But it was too late, and Donnell was already headed in their direction.

"Nice to see you here, Detectives," he said.

"Really. I can’t think why."

Donnell gave him that vague, pleasant smile, something less than devastating and more than merely interesting. "It’s always nice to know you’ve picked a bar where the locals like to drink."

"Drinks here suck."

"Stick to the appetizers," Lennie advised.

"Ah."

It killed Mike that he was so...aware of the lawyer’s presence. As much as he tried to focus on his attention on his doomed pool game, it was like he’d suddenly sprouted 360-degree vision. Donnell had taken a shower after court; his hair was still damp. His sweatshirt’s logo was from a high school team – mustangs, it looked like. He ordered potato skins, and some yuppie beer with a colorful label. He moved with spare, controlled grace. There was a hint of dark stubble appearing along his chiseled jaw.

*Fuck you, Logan. He’s got nothing you can’t get elsewhere, so mind your own damn business.* And anyway, it was juvenile to think that there had been anything real in those looks that had passed between them during Mike’s cross. First of all, lawyers, if they were any good at all, revealed nothing in front of a jury, and even if they did, it wasn’t likely to be homosexual desire that they revealed. It was a pose, too meaningful, cutting too close to the bone to be real. Second, even if Donnell did want something from Mike, he wasn’t getting it. Contrary to popular belief around the office, Mike Logan did have standards.

Whatever Donnell’s intentions, it was the woman lawyer who eventually approached them as Lennie was lining up his shot. "You’re never going to make that," she said calmly.

Lennie and Mike exchanged smirks. "Just don’t crowd me, honey."

He missed the shot.

"Way to uphold the honor of the force, Briscoe," Mike grumbled.

"Shut up. Look, lady–"

"Ellenor."

"Look, Ellenor, here in New York, we play, not talk about playing."

She shrugged; if possible, Ellenor had more raw self-confidence packed into an outwardly calm demeanor than her co-counselor did. "I came here to play."

It didn’t take Lennie a deep breath to decide that Ellenor was bigger fish than Mike. He didn’t even let Mike finish the game, just started going for the balls and racking them. Figured. Well, Mike couldn’t blame him; Mike loved Lennie like a big brother, but he wouldn’t play baseball with him, and he guessed Lennie probably felt the same way about Mike and pool. Mike backed off gracefully.

Backed so close to Robert Donnell that their shoulders brushed. Mike pulled away ostentatiously, and then wasn’t sure that was the best idea. Donnell was watching him, amused, and too late Mike remembered that real straight guys bowled over each other all the time and barely even noticed it, except maybe to shove each other aside. "Sorry, Donnell," he said gruffly.

"My name is Bobby."

"Sure thing, Counselor."

So there they were, shoulder to shoulder, ignoring each other like good New Yorkers trapped in an elevator together. Except that Donnell – Bobby, Christ, what grown professional went by Bobby? - had a hell of a nice shoulder, for a desk jockey, and Mike resented the hell out of him for the way the jury lapped him up, for the way he was going to get a stone-cold murderer that Mike had moved his ass to bust back out on the streets, for the way he still looked like a preppy lawyer in faded jeans and an ancient maroon sweatshirt, for the way he smelled like Pert Plus and damp fleece and the way it was so ridiculously sexy on him that it made Mike want to sink Bobby fucking Donnell and every over-educated, broad-shouldered, self-righteous defense lawyer east of the Mississippi in the ocean and hope they washed up somewhere in Greenland.

"Ouch," Bobby said sympathetically as Ellenor whiffed her break. "Well, nowhere to go but up, right?" He smiled at Mike, the charm flowing a little thicker and richer, like whipping cream, like chocolate over strawberries.

"Forget it. Lennie never loses."

"Oh, I don’t know. Ellenor is a pretty good pool player. She always beats me."

Mike snorted. "Well, that’s you. That," he said, pointing, "is Lennie."

"Ah." Bobby took another sip of his microbrewery beer, the kind Lennie always called queer beer. "And Lennie never loses."

"You catch on fast, Counselor."

"If he did lose...."

It took Mike a beat to catch the implication. "We’ve got laws against gambling in this state."

"No cash."

"What are you putting up, M&Ms?"

"Dinner." Bobby paused, and then looked up sideways at Mike, flashing him just a glimpse of that grandstanding-attorney aura, the look Mike had seen just that afternoon and almost – for the first half-second or so – almost fallen for. It was bait, pure and simple, and Mike wasn’t biting. After a minute of Mike’s pointed silence, Bobby tried again. "If your friend wins, the dinner of your choice is on me. You can show me the best restaurant in New York."

Anger twisted and stuck between his ribs. Like Mike Logan had ever been to the best restaurant in New York, or ever would on his own. Shit, Bobby Donnell probably made a habit of dropping sixty bucks a plate to be insulted by the maitre d’ for his French pronunciation. He didn’t need to do Mike any favors.

But for once in his life, the voice of reason – *yeahhh, reason, Mikey, is that what they’re calling it these days?* – was ringing inside his skull. Good food, good wine, and someone else – *someone pretty damn fine, Mike, don’t act like you don’t know that* – footing the bill. Besides, he couldn’t very well back out without looking like he was intimidated by the way Donnell was breathing down his neck. "Yeah, you’re on," he said, sounding exactly as bored as he planned.

"What if Ellenor wins?"

"I don’t know. Whatever." He paused, trying to weigh the effects of his next words – and then gave up. He was in this already, so who cared anymore?

"I’ll buy."

Bobby smiled in sleek satisfaction, but nodded and turned the heat of his gaze away from Mike back to the pool game as he downed his beer.

As soon as he could manage it without appearing to retreat, Mike circled around behind Lennie, who was frowning at the table in pure concentration. "I’ve got money on this game," Mike told him under his breath. "Come through for me."

"Don’t I always? How much money, anyway?"

For a five-star dinner that wouldn’t humiliate him in front of Boston Bobby Donnell? It gave Mike a headache just thinking about it. "Enough. Don’t fuck me, Lennie."

"Oh, hose down. Your money’s safe with me."

*******

Keeping box scores on Mike Logan’s sex life was a popular hobby in New York’s criminal justice system. Though Jack always felt the game was beneath him – Logan’s conquests were as reliable and as intellectually devoid as the TV Guide crossword puzzle – he could hardly work in the DA’s office and not be kept current on the state of the unions, as it were.

Cretins. They stalked Mike like an endangered species, entering his every flirtation, his every sated first-thing-in-the-morning grin in their little metaphorical log books, because they felt that Mike Logan’s real world, his real life, was too colorful and fast-paced to include ordinary paralegals and secretaries and beat cops. They were soulless, empty of passion, imagination, or ambition.

That was why none of them would ever have Mike. Because they didn’t believe.

Jack McCoy believed. And that was why he would.

Oh, not just in his bed – that was the kind of thing anyone could aspire to, barring eye stalks or some other bizarre deformity born of excessive inbreeding, and consequently not the kind of prize that appealed to Jack. No, he hadn’t waited for three years just to nail Logan; Jack was waiting to *have* him. Not for long, probably. It didn’t have to be for long. It was the kill that Jack loved, and from the very beginning, the roughly handsome detective with his sensual mouth in its cynical smirk had been exactly the kind of new meat Jack lived to discover.

He’d been biding his time for three long years, knowing he’d recognize his moment when it arrived. But for once in his life, Jack McCoy had to admit that he’d misjudged. There was a new piece on the board – one there was no way he could have anticipated, but that was no excuse.

Three years invested. This had been Mike’s game from the beginning; he’d created the rules when he’d first been alone with Jack, accepting Jack’s intrusion into his personal space with a lazy smile and half-lidded eyes that measured Jack up and down, leaning against the wall and whispering his answer so closely that Jack could feel his breath against his upper lip. It was a rebuff, and a dare, and a seduction all at once, so perfectly impersonal, so excruciatingly severe that it still haunted Jack’s every idle Mike fantasy: "I don’t date lawyers." God, the man was good at this; Jack was more than happy to play this game out to its conclusion, when the rules were so clear and the reward so tempting. No, it wasn’t the three years that Jack begrudged, and a *no* like that was so damn pretty that it hadn’t even stung at all.

But no hotshot pretty boy with a reputation half church choir and half card shark was going to walk into Jack McCoy’s city and scoop him with Mike Logan.

Claire never asked Jack what was on his mind anymore; she knew damn well that when he didn’t want her to know she never would, and when he did, she couldn’t get him to shut up. She just perched on the side of his desk and picked up the legal pad scrawled with his notes from court that day, and a grid of perfectly even boxes, alternating between empty and darkened. "Squares," she said, sounding neither surprised nor puzzled. "Funny, Jack, I always figured you for a triangle man."

He jerked it out of her hands; he was out of his mind these days, only half aware of anything that didn’t address him directly. It was Mike, and the Ballard case, and – fine, it was Mike and the Ballard case. And beautiful Bobby Donnell, whose weirdly sleazy purity the jury was eating up with a spoon, who had somehow managed in under a month to bring Logan to heel.

"It’s a chessboard. Don’t tell me you weren’t on the chess team in high school, Claire."

"Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t. I did not know that you played chess, however."

"I don’t. I had a life in high school. Tell me the truth: how do you think the trial is going?"

She waited a moment, chewing her lip as she thought it over. "He’s got me convinced that Cumberland was Ballard’s lover."

"Fine! What does that matter? That gives Ballard all the more reason to kill him." Claire arched her eyebrows eloquently, and Jack relented enough to flash her a smile. "I’m sorry. Am I making you nervous?"

"You’d like that. What do you really want to know, Jack? If the jury is warming up to him? If Mike Logan is warming up to him?"

Jack’s head shot up in surprise. Jesus, it was easy to forget how quick she was, how wickedly perceptive. For the first time in a week, all the intractable men in Jack’s life – Bobby Donnell, Richard Ballard, Judge Hirsch, Mike Logan – dwindled in importance in his mind. It was all Claire Kincaid and always had been.

Which didn’t keep Jack from being honest – the foundation, of course, of any good relationship. "All of the above."

"The jury likes him. Do they like him enough to acquit Ballard? Not yet, no. But then, he’s ready to call his witnesses now, so it’s a new ballgame on Monday. And, no, I don’t think Mike likes him enough to date a lawyer. Not yet."

"They are dating."

"Jack, they had dinner. Once, after Mike won a bet on a pool game. If Lennie didn’t think anything of it, I doubt there’s anything to think."

Maybe. But as well as Lennie knew Mike on many levels, Jack understood Detective Logan through some primitive connection that he didn’t think Lennie had the slightest access to. He could scent the changes on Mike, read his emotions off of that blank, bored face, because he and Mike shared something that neither Claire nor Lennie would ever recognize. Jack and Mike were hunters. And Mike wasn’t haunting the courtroom for his health these days; he was watching his prey, starting to understand its habits and its weaknesses.

Jack had been doing the same thing for three years now. He smiled at Claire again to put her mind at ease, and perversely he found that the act was having a certain effect on him, too. For now, it was the jury’s opinion that mattered. Mike moved instantly when he was interested at all in making his move quickly; the fact that he had waited this long meant that he was only likely to wait longer. There was still time.

And he might be older than Bobby Donnell, and not the same grade of fine-boned beauty, and familiar instead of new and exotic, but he still had a few things going for him. He knew Logan better, for one thing. He certainly knew Logan well enough to know that beneath his hard shell, Mike was a true believer in the dream of perfect justice, and he drew a hard line between defenders of the right like himself and Jack and corruptive influences like every defense lawyer who ever drew breath.

Most importantly, though, Jack had faith on his side. He had three years of *knowing* that Mike was marked out for him, bagged and tagged from the first time Jack laid eyes on him.

And that was why, in the end. That was why.

********

The pay phone in the courthouse was beeping at him; it wanted more quarters. "I have to go, Eugene. I’m out of quarters, and I’m meeting someone."

"Someone?"

Bobby smiled; someone who was standing across the atrium, watching the traffic come and go in front of the courthouse. "Some guy."

"There’s always some guy, isn’t there, Bobby?"

"No, it’s not like that. Look, I have to go."

"Fine. Hi to Ellenor."

Bobby hung up and took a moment to lean against the bank of telephones. He wondered if Detective Logan would have an excuse this time for spending half the afternoon sitting in court, looking bored out of his mind, but missing nothing. Usually he did, but last time he’d just shrugged when Bobby asked. That was progress, right? That was practically admitting that he’d come to see Bobby.

Detective Logan. What made otherwise smart guys like Bobby Donnell lose it over the one that would always get away, the one who wanted you just enough to strike a match deep inside you, and hated you much too much to give an inch? *Otherwise smart guys like Bobby Donnell and Rickie Ballard,* he amended wryly, gathering up his briefcase and starting across the atrium toward the man who was pretending to chat with the security guards.

His own personal Donald Cumberland? No. Mike was no homophobe, Bobby didn’t think; in fact, there was a bit of a flirt to him that he couldn’t quite shake, however hard he tried. And he wasn’t the hair-triggered cop that Bobby had first taken him for; intolerant and argumentative, maybe, but not a thug and not a liar. Not Cumberland at all.

"Hi, there, Detective," he said casually as he stepped around the metal detector that was meant to slow down incoming, not outgoing visitors. "You’re just the man I need."

Mike Logan’s eyebrows raised. "That so?"

"Flag me down a cab, will you? I still can’t do it like a native."

"Need a lift somewhere?"

Now it was Bobby who looked surprised, and genuinely was so. "Are you offering?"

He apparently was, or at least he didn’t object when Bobby followed him to the parking garage. Bobby was trying not to think too hard these days about what was going on inside Mike Logan’s head; it only gave Bobby insomnia. Their one dinner date had been...strange, with Mike taking every chance to needle him about the case and call him a gibbering idiot for believing Rickie’s fairy tale — and at the same time, grinning at Bobby’s jokes, swapping Catholic school horror stories, and giving Bobby a distinctly speculative look over his wineglass.

But as soon as they’d finished dessert, he locked up tight, becoming the witness on the stand again, blank and distant. Bobby had thanked him for coming, they’d each taken their separate cabs home, and that was that. Except that now Mike was in the courtroom every other day to watch pieces of the trial, and there was something in the way he met Bobby’s eyes when they passed each other during a recess or on the way home.

"Who’s up tomorrow?" Mike asked as they descended the stairs in the garage.

"Neighbor of Rickie’s. Shed some light on how Cumberland dealt with him."

"Victim’s not on trial, Bobby."

"To make self-defense, I have to prove that Rickie had reasonable belief that his life was in danger. That’s going to turn on whether or not Cumberland was the kind of man who would have fired a gun on his own lover."

"Would have is one thing. Would have isn’t did."

"I never said he did. If Rickie believed he would have, it’s self-defense. You know that as well as I do, Mike."

He gave Bobby a sharp look. "Is it Mike now?"

"Well, that’s your name, isn’t it?"

"You just seemed pretty wedded to Detective Logan."

Was he complaining? And about which name? Jesus, but this man was the proverbial brick wall when it came to communication. "You don’t like me very much, do you?"

Mike unlocked the passenger-side door before answering. "I’m trying not to."

Progress, indeed. As Mike tried to step away, Bobby reached out and froze him by touching his chest lightly. "Don’t try so hard."

"I don’t date lawyers."

"I don’t date occupations in general. But I’d like to see you again, Mike."

He put his elbow on the hood of the car and leaned there heavily, scratching the back of his neck. "Do you really think it works that way? We just do what we do while we’re on duty, and then suddenly we can see each other as people and never think about it?"

"Think about...?"

"About the fact that I arrested Ballard for murder, and you’re trying to walk him!"

"I’m not *trying,* Mike. I am going to walk him. Because he didn’t do anything illegal."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because I know him."

"Did you fuck him?"

"What?"

"Is that why you think he’s such an angel? Because he was your lover, and you want to believe--"

Bobby’s hand made a startlingly loud noise as he brought his palm down on the hood of the car. "Now, wait, Mike. Wait. You asked why I believe him, and I gave you the only answer I have: because I know he’s not the kind of man who could kill someone. That’s all. Anything else is not only irrelevant, but none of your business."

"And I guess they’re all old friends. All the people you defend. And they’re all innocent, because they’re such gentle people, totally incapable--"

"My clients are all innocent until proven guilty. That’s not a character flaw of mine, Mike; that’s the law."

"So guys like me get themselves gunned down trying to meet our burden of proof, your *clients* walk out of the courtroom and get a hamburger, and you go home a few grand richer. You’re good-looking, Bobby, but not that good-looking."

"Not good-looking enough to atone for the sin of providing the legal representation to which all American citizens accused of crimes are entitled? My work may not always be heroic by your standards, but it has to be done. I’m an honest man, Mike, and I take my oath seriously. I don’t know about you, but I was not raised to be ashamed of doing legal and honest work well enough to make a living."

"Heroic by my standards? Heroic by my standards means taking criminals off the street, not tucking them into bed at night so they can go right back out the next day."

That was pretty clearly what Mike saw when he looked at life. Civilians were criminals, and you were either in the business of stopping them or abetting them. Bobby sighed. "So what are you getting at, Mike? I’m an unethical vulture. I’m one half-step up from a felon. Are you trying to tell me, in your very delicate way, to get out of your life?"

Mike frowned intensely. "I’m telling you, in my very most fucking delicate way, to get in the car."

"No, Mike. Not until you tell me why."

"Because I like you, all right? Not a lot, but some."

"What, am I getting better-looking?" Bobby shot back.

To his surprise, that elicited a slight smile from Mike. "Not that I’ve noticed. Sorry."

"Let me buy you a drink. What have you got to lose, really? You already want to, so there goes your ethical purity."

It could have pissed Mike off, but it didn’t seem to, particularly. "Call it clinging to the last threads of my ethical purity. You’re an attorney, and I’m a witness in your case. Don’t you think it looks even a little inappropriate?."

"You testified to pretty much nothing over two weeks ago. You won’t be called back to the stand."

"It seems wrong."

"When the case is over, then."

"You’ll be going back to Boston."

That line of thought startled Bobby. He felt a little guilty for not having thought of that, but — he hadn’t pegged Mike Logan for the kind of guy who’d turn up his nose at a one-night stand. "I...not right away. Necessarily." There was no one nearby, and so Bobby threw caution to the wind; he leaned forward and brushed Mike’s lips with his own. The detective permitted it, but he did not reach out for him, whether out of a sense of propriety in a public place or out of some more personal reservation.

Mike had a strange half-smile on his face when Bobby pulled away. "Richard Ballard is innocent."

Gently, Bobby neatened up the knot on Mike’s tie. "Without a doubt."

His smile widened, taking on a slightly sadistic cast that rather intrigued Bobby. "If you win this case, ask me again."

Bobby had to smile back. Was there a secret decoder ring somewhere that

would make sense out of Mike Logan’s thought processes, or was this all as utterly weird and random as it seemed? And why on earth should Bobby like that so much about him? "If I win the case, I get to *ask* you?"

"I’ll even promise to say yes."

"You have kind of a gambling problem, don’t you?" Mike just shrugged. "I’m going to hold you to this, you know."

"They’re going to put him away, Bobby. I mean, I’m not trying to taunt you, here. I just really think you should start getting used to the idea that your friend is going to prison."

"I think he’ll make reasonable doubt. I think you should start getting used to the idea that you’re dating a lawyer."

"Get in the car."

*****

"Deal him."

"No! Adam, you’re killing me. He killed Cumberland and you know it."

Adam waved his hand vaguely. "First rule of getting a conviction, Jack: the jury has to like the victim more than they like the defendant."

"The defendant?" Jack spoke under his breath, not entirely sure whether he wanted Adam to hear or not. "Or his attorney?"

"His attorney isn’t a Nazi sympathizer with a history of violence and sadistic relationships. They think Ballard is the victim here, Jack. They think he fell for the wrong man, and Cumberland was setting him up for a fall from the beginning."

Jack paced to the door and leaned against it, crossing his arms defensively across his chest. "They haven’t proven anything. They can’t. I think that once the jury gets their instructions, they’ll see that all the evidence is on our side, and all that Donnell has--"

"Is a damn credible story that seems to make a lot more sense given what everybody knew about Ballard and Cumberland than our version does. They’re going to call that reasonable doubt, Jack."

"If--"

"If, if. Deal him down and we get a conviction of some kind. Involuntary manslaughter."

"I’m not going to do it, Adam. I can win this."

His eyes went to Claire as he sipped his coffee. "Claire, why don’t you give us just a minute."

"Come on, Adam. If you’re going to dress me down, you can do it in front of Claire. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen."

"I don’t want to offend you, Claire."

"You won’t," Claire promised. "Just continue with the beatings and pretend I’m not here."

His eyes were unusually stern, enough to make Jack a bit uncomfortable under that knowing gaze. "Jack, I let you prosecute almost anything you want, because you’ve got good instincts, and I usually can rest easy at night knowing that what you’re prosecuting is important to you. This time I’m not going to let you run wild. I won’t let you get personal with this."

A chink appeared in Jack’s defensiveness. "What do you — mean, personal?"

"You and I know the same people in Boston, it seems. I know you’ve been digging up dirt on this lawyer."

"I found it, too." Jack was shifting into full courtroom mode, each sentence accented by an arc of surprise in his voice, eyebrows raised in mock disbelief. "His firm was sued for slander recently. One of his partners was arrested for cocaine possession. Our young Bobby Donnell--"

"Is feared and loathed by God-fearing folk from one end of Massachusetts to the other, I’m sure. But this case is being tried in New York, and my job is to protect the integrity of the New York District Attorney’s office. I’ve advised you on cases before, but this time I’m telling you, Jack. Cut him a deal on involuntary manslaughter."

He looked to Claire for support, but Claire seemed to be enforcing her imaginary nonexistence by not looking at either Jack or Adam. "Is this because of the Ballard name and fortune, Adam?"

"No, it’s about you — excuse me for this, Claire — prosecuting with your dick instead of your brain." It was as much that the words came from patient, soft-spoken Adam Schiff as anything else that caused Jack to do a double-take. "I know what’s going on here, Jack. Not the details, which I don’t want to know, but in general."

"Oh, you think so?"

"Yes, I do. Donnell is younger and richer and faster on his feet than you are--"

"*Faster--*" Jack began, appalled.

Adam didn’t acknowledge the interruption. "--and whether it’s a male territorial issue, the two of you duking it out over the jury’s affections, or whether it has something to do with the fact that everywhere Mr. Donnell is these days, Logan seems to follow along behind I don’t know, and I’m not interested in knowing. No one on that jury wants to put a well-liked, well-spoken young man like Ballard behind bars for the rest of his life over the death of a blight on the human race like Cumberland; if you push for murder two, they will acquit. Whatever your rivalry with Bobby Donnell, whatever your insecurities in the courtroom, whatever the nature of your relationship with Logan — I don’t care. I want to convict someone of something. Involuntary manslaughter." Adam punctuated each syllable of the charge with a tap of his fingertip on the desk.

"I think you’re...way off-base here, Adam."

"Involuntary manslaughter. It’s not an option this time. I’m sorry, Jack."

"Yeah. I’m sorry, too."

Claire spoiled the drama of Jack’s exit by following along behind him, catching hold of his elbow in the hall. "Jack--"

"Some help you were back there."

"What do you want from me, Jack? You know he’s right."

"No. No, I don’t know he’s right."

"You don’t care one way or the other about the defendant; it’s all been about the lawyer for you."

Jack stopped, turning to face her, but as his mouth opened, he lost whatever words he had. It was beginning to sink in on him that he had just been thoroughly humiliated in front of Claire. Claire, who would never rub salt in his wounds about losing an argument, or a case, but who was still the one person whose respect he feared losing. "Is that really what you think? I’m prosecuting this case with my dick?"

"You’re...taking it awfully personally. That’s all I think."

"I do *not* think he’s younger and — and faster on his feet, for God’s sake, than I am."

"He is younger."

He gave his assistant a dark glance. "Thanks, Claire."

"I mean, that’s all he has. Youth. What is it they say? Age and treachery will overcome youth and beauty every time?"

"Oh, now you think he’s beautiful, too."

"Yes. And I think you’re treacherous. And I’m okay with that. If there are people in this world who aren’t, then...then they’re not smart enough for you, Jack."

"Don’t patronize me, Claire."

She rolled her eyes. "You know what, Jack? I’m sick to death of the beautiful Bobby Donnell. If nothing else, the sooner we make this deal, the sooner he packs up and goes back to Boston."

That was the first good thing Jack had heard about this deal all day.

*****

Mike was in the courtroom when Rick Ballard pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and obstruction of justice. As per Jack McCoy’s recommendation, he was sentenced to six years in a medium-security prison. It was, without a doubt, the sweetest deal Mike had ever seen McCoy cut a murder defendant.

And he knew even before Bobby turned around so that Mike could see his face from his seat in the gallery that Bobby Donnell would never see it that way.

He slipped out of the courthouse without crossing Bobby’s path and drove for a while — to give Bobby time, to buy himself time, just to get his head together. It was ironic, actually. Bobby had neither won the case nor lost it, not in any clearly defined sense, and so Mike didn’t even have the bet to fall back on like he did last time. This time the decision was all on him.

There was certainly no doubt what he wanted to do. When had Bobby gotten to him like this? Lodged in his mind like a spike, keeping him from focusing completely on anything else. There hadn’t been a night in the last two weeks that Mike hadn’t gone to bed — uncharacteristically alone — thinking of *exactly* what he wanted to do with the blue-eyed, silver-tongued, insanely charming man who turned off and on like a strobe light on him, one second warmly suggestive, the next maddeningly proper and pristine. God, that smooth, tasteful shell made Mike want to crack him open — lick him until he broke apart and screamed and stopped being so damned...perfect.

Maybe that was the thing that was — almost — stopping him. Bobby was either a pathological liar or a really nice guy; in the first case, Mike really didn’t want to be any closer than this to him, and in the second case, he deserved better than someone like Mike Logan plotting against his purity. If he was half the nice guy he seemed, he should probably be saving his energy for some future Significant Other back in Boston. Mike’s motives were entirely animal, and he didn’t think that was Bobby Donnell’s kink. He kind of hoped it wasn’t, actually.

He hoped a lot of things. It left him, in the end, driving as aimlessly and circularly around Manhattan as if he didn’t hope anything at all.

His lack of goals or plans brought him, eventually, to the Embassy Suites where Bobby was staying. So it might have looked, to an outside observer, as though Mike had in fact had a plan all along. He thought of the old Steve Martin routine and quirked a smile at the parking garage attendant. *It is better to look good than to feel good, dahling.*

"How long have you been sitting here waiting for me?" he murmured near Bobby’s ear as he sat down beside him at the hotel’s bar.

Any male on the planet would have hotly disputed that assumption — except Bobby, apparently, who just looked at him and smiled tiredly. "I’m not sure; what time is it?"

"Eight-fifteen."

"About an hour and a half, then."

"Were you really that sure that I’d be here? You didn’t exactly win your case, you know."

The forced friendliness disappeared for a brief moment, and Bobby seemed stripped down to the wiring, his face abandoned by its usual intensity. He looked much older than Mike, though Mike was all but positive that he was the same age or younger. "No. I know."

"I’m...sorry about that."

"Are you?"

"Well...he’s your friend. I’m sorry for what you’re going through."

Bobby watched him a minute, and then nodded. "Okay. I can see that. Actually, though, I didn’t think you’d come because of the bet."

"Why, then?"

"I don’t know. I guess I thought you wanted to."

It was so piercingly simple; why should simple, bone-deep honesty make Mike feel so under this man’s spell? Probably just because he hadn’t expected it from a lawyer. "I did. I do. But...maybe this isn’t the best time. You had a hell of a day, and I don’t--"

"Please. Please don’t give me some ‘doing this for all the wrong reasons’ speech. You know as well as I do that I’ve wanted this almost since I first got to New York; my reasons haven’t changed, and they’re not going to. I’m not going to break down on you, and I neither want nor plan to have a crisis tonight over sending Rickie to prison. Maybe some other time. In short,

Mike, we are probably doing this for all the wrong reasons, but that’s not news, and I want you. I’ve just lost almost three months of my life trying to save a friend that I couldn’t save, and before I go home and try to forget all about this, I want to have something really pleasant happen to me in New York. Do you think that’s sleazy?"

"No. Well — maybe. If I say ‘yes, extremely sleazy’ and then follow it up with ‘but I don’t care,’ would you change your mind about me?"

Bobby stood up and put his hand on Mike’s wrist. It made Mike jump — not the touch itself, but the unexpectedness of someone taking his hand to lead him. Tourists.

He let Bobby lead him, following along into an elevator. As soon as the doors closed, Bobby jumped him. Mike found himself pressed up hard against the elevator wall by Bobby’s weight, the lawyer’s tongue pushing against his lips, looking for a way in. Mike parted his lips to allow it, and suddenly the kiss was even more desperate than before, Bobby’s hands holding his head steady as Bobby probed his mouth.

The elevator door dinged as it opened, and Mike could feel the jump of Bobby’s muscles against him as he prepared to pull away. Mike wasn’t having any of that; he kept his grip on Bobby’s sides, his fingers kneading gently into the layers of muscle there. Their lips were still skimming against each other, but not so tightly joined that Bobby couldn’t make himself understood. "My floor." The faint feeling of his moving lips, moistened with Mike’s saliva, was sending chills down Mike’s spine; he knew damn well that he couldn’t let go of Bobby now if his life depended on it.

He took a step, and Bobby stepped back as well, tangled against him, waltzing with him as they gravitated blindly toward the door. Mike was so distracted by the taste of Bobby that he almost didn’t notice the door closing on them; he managed to get an arm up and block it before it blindsided the still-oblivious Bobby. He expected his forearm to be pretty well bruised tomorrow. Maybe he’d have Bobby kiss it and make it better.

Outside the elevator, Mike swung sharply to the side, flattening Bobby to the wall this time. "God," Bobby murmured before Mike sealed off his mouth completely with a breath-stealing kiss, and then there was nothing for the famously eloquent Bobby Donnell to do but speak to Mike noiselessly, his fingers in the short hairs on the back of Mike’s neck, his shoulders flexing under the weight of Mike’s arms draped over them.

A door opened somewhere, not far from them, and then closed again hurriedly. Bobby shook with quiet laughter. "I think we’re scaring the horses in the street," he said breathlessly as Mike’s open mouth strayed across his face. "Don’t you think we should take this home?"

"Mmm." Mike pressed his fingers into the base of Bobby’s spine, and the lawyer arched instinctively into him. "Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke." Bobby’s neck was already damp, just barely, with sweat, which Mike was more than happy to lap slowly away. Bobby made a minimalist noise that might have been protest or pleasure, weaving his fingers together behind Mike’s head.

However much he tried to ignore it, though, Bobby’s point had been made. Mike was pretty shameless, but he wasn’t far enough gone to give in to the impulse to screw Bobby against the wall in the hallway of a hotel. He freed Bobby, who moved away reluctantly, one hand loosening his tie as he searched through jacket pockets with the other to find his key card. 587 was just around the corner, but still far enough away that Mike’s body was already desperately missing the feel of Bobby’s by the time they got there. He put his hands on Bobby’s shoulders as he unlocked the door, stroking gently down his back and giving him a little push when the door swung open.

Not that Bobby needed any pushing. He kicked the door closed as soon as Mike was inside, and both tie and key card hit the floor so that he could reach out to Mike, grabbing handfuls of Mike’s clothing to pull him closer. Mike obliged him with another kiss, and maybe it was the reality of finally being in Bobby’s hotel suite, but this time it seemed overwhelming mentally as much as physically. Just as physical risk could quickly inflame Mike’s physical needs, the sense of unease that was beginning to tickle him around the edges now was fanning his awareness higher than before. He was running his hands over the backs of Bobby’s thighs, sucking on Bobby’s lower lip, and he was so hyper-alert that it felt like he could see them standing there, even with his eyes closed. The idea rolled back and forth inside his head: he was here with Bobby Donnell, an unpretentious, down-to-earth guy, intelligent and well-mannered, someone he felt inexpressibly close to, someone who was crazy about him. The fear that underscored the thoughts did nothing but heighten Mike’s excitement.

His clothing came apart so easily that for a second Mike thought Bobby had torn them instead of unfastened them by the conventional method. No, his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging off him, his jacket no longer even on his shoulders, his belt unbuckled. It hit Mike with a certain sick feeling in his stomach, a sensation no more or less real than the rising of his cock: how could it be so easy, so undetectable, to be clothed one minute and disordered the next, exposed to Bobby’s hands and eyes? He was out of control here, a slave to appetites he’d been stupid enough to put off and put off with promises of eventual attention; they were all awake now, and ready for him to pay up. Mike felt like he was falling.

He was. The concentric waves of lust and anxiety that were stirring him and kicking his pulse into overdrive were affecting his perceptions, making everything seem intense but disjointed, as though seen through the delirium of illness or drugs, but there was no mistaking the vivid reality of the floor under his back, or Bobby’s legs tucked between his, or his thumbs following the shape of Mike’s hardened nipples.

"Mike, Mike, Mike." Bobby’s hypnotic voice shivered through him as Bobby spoke against Mike’s stomach, echoing through his internal organs like ripples through murky water, darting in and out between his ribs. His fingers trailed through Bobby’s soft hair, and he moistened his lips, hoping that something sexy, if not intelligible, would come out. Nothing did, and Mike closed his eyes. "Raise your arms," he ordered, and Mike did, crooking his elbows so that his hands overlapped each other, resting just above his head.

Blind, he had to grit his teeth to remain quiet under the onslaught of Bobby’s lips probing his navel and Bobby’s fingers lowering the zipper on Mike’s pants. "Tense, Mike?" Bobby asked sympathetically, closing a warm hand on his side.

"Just ready to go." He covered Bobby’s hand with his own, guiding it up the outer line of his body. "Come on, Bobby."

But the motion of his hand reversed, and Bobby was sliding down, his broad shoulders nudging Mike’s thighs further apart; Mike took his cue beautifully, drawing his knees up and opening them as far as he could with his pants still partially on. He was fully erect now, but not with the sudden, painful hardness that usually kicked off Mike’s sexual encounters. He only felt full, warm with pleasure and pride, sucking greedily for air as Bobby’s lips sucked lower and lower, soaking the fine, dark hairs running up from Mike’s genitals to the lower part of his belly. "Yeah," Mike groaned, scratching his fingers roughly through his own hair. "Come on, Bobby. You know what I want."

Apparently he did, because Bobby sank Mike’s cock deeply into his mouth. His hands were petting aimlessly up and down the muscles that wrapped around the sides of Mike’s abdomen. His mouth was cooler than Mike had expected – probably related to the faint flavor of margaritas that Mike had tasted earlier in Bobby’s mouth – which provided a light, stinging jolt through Mike that relaxed him at the same time. "Jesus, that’s good," he said, his voice breaking. "Yeah, Bobby."

Bobby gave head the way he argued a case, pacing himself without appearing to exert any effort at all, moments of heartfelt enthusiasm punctuating his ordinary composure. It was much too good to last for long, especially given how long it had been since Mike had gotten laid – almost since Bobby Donnell came to town. That soothing, wet pressure on his cock was driving him so deeply into bliss that his only thoughts came and went through his head like the flashing of a strobe light instead of like headlights on the road that approached and receded in an orderly fashion. *Hot, hot, God, he’s good at this* flashed and died, and *I don’t date lawyers* and *have to make this last* came with a pang just on the heels of *nice to lie back, nothing to do, just come in this fox’s mouth.*

It built so quickly that Mike was almost afraid to let himself go, to rise with the sensations and meet his orgasm at the top. He was stretched taut, his awareness tingling in the top of his head and weighting down his engorged dick at the same time, and behind his eyeballs there was the first hint of a headache at one isolated point where all his doubts were packed tight. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be enjoying this, shouldn’t be thinking of Bobby as a pretty Bostonian lawyer named Bobby – if he had to think, he should be thinking of him as a tight, slippery mouth and maybe a bottle of wine later tonight. He shouldn’t, shouldn’t, normally didn’t, couldn’t think why he wanted to – that was the bitch of it, what sat like a stone behind his eyes, the fact that he didn’t know when and why he had started to want this. Well before he’d discovered that Bobby could blow him like this.

His orgasm hit him in three different places, releasing a purely animal need in his dick, an unconscious tension in his solar plexus that might have been loneliness, and that knot inside his skull that was almost definitely fear. When the haze cleared and he was blinking at the ceiling, he felt his afterglow anchored in all three places, and the familiar sated, post-coital laziness radiated everywhere out of those three centers. "Shit," he mumbled, more to hear his own voice than for any kind of meaning. He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. "Aw, shit."

"Worth breaking your rule for?" Bobby was kneeling up to help Mike get out of his pants at last; Mike could see traces of his semen glittering wetly on Bobby’s chin.

Mike chuckled. "What are we going to do about you, huh?"

Bobby’s hands pushed down against him as they ran up Mike’s torso, stomach and chest. "Do you know how good you look?"

"I expect. You must be horny as hell."

"Getting there." But despite his agreement, Bobby still didn’t seem in much of a hurry. He stroked Mike’s shoulders and upper arms warmly, softly kissing Mike’s chin and the lower part of his cheek. It occurred to Mike, now that his brain was not completely snowed under by lust, that Bobby was probably here for comfort as much as anything else, whatever he said. Mike closed his arms around Bobby; he wasn’t a cuddler, as a rule, but Bobby was so low-key about his neediness that he made it easy to think of the gesture as simple pleasure in the broad, solid feeling of Bobby in his arms. He kissed Bobby almost shyly, their closed lips pressing together and vibrating with the motion of their still-heavy breathing. It was an unbearably sweet kiss, especially for Mike, who wasn’t at all accustomed to sweetness.

They rolled over together, until Bobby was lying under Mike. Mike pressed up on his elbows and dipped his head once to touch his mouth to Bobby’s lip, the second time to kiss his cheek. Still in the grip of his lassitude, it was easy to draw the process of stripping Bobby into a long production number. His fingers were heavy, forcing him to unfasten each button with care, and it was hard to focus long enough to have any goal at all, other than kissing each new sliver of Bobby’s skin that his hard work exposed to his touch.

"Mike. I want you."

"I can tell," he said mildly, bringing his hand down to cup Bobby’s hardness through the fabric of his pants. "Can you be any more specific than that?"

"Wow, Mike. When I picked you up, I didn’t peg you for the sort of guy I’d need to be instructing." He was really starting to like that glitter in Bobby’s blue eyes; what Mike had originally pegged for sleazy-lawyer smugness he was now realizing was simply Bobby’s sense of humor.

Mike licked with the flat of his tongue all the way up Bobby’s neck. "If I were in your position, I’d be careful who you make fun of."

"I know you’ll treat me right, Mike."

Once he had Bobby completely naked, Mike ran his hands down Bobby’s hips and thighs in a gesture whose proprietary overtones surprised even Mike. He rested one elbow by Bobby’s side, and his head on that hand, lying sideways between Bobby’s legs. His hand as it first wrapped around Bobby’s shaft was gentle, and he slowly closed it tighter and tighter as he began to stroke, his hand sliding easily up and down, lubricated by Bobby’s pre-come. Bobby’s hand sought Mike’s still bicep, squeezing with distracted affection.

Soon Bobby’s hips were moving, in a rhythm that didn’t quite match Mike’s. "Baby. Baby, you look good like that."

"Thank you." He didn’t even say it with any trace of irony. Bobby Donnell, polite under even the most extreme circumstances.

When he saw Bobby’s cock and balls twitch at the edge of orgasm, Mike released his grip. Poised on his elbows and knees over Bobby, he took the bulk of Bobby’s expelled semen against his stomach, and when he lowered down to kiss Bobby deeply, their bellies slipped against each other, greased by Bobby’s come.

His hands stroked up the curve of Mike’s spine, then down, fanning out to track Mike’s sheen of sweat across his back. "Do you want to stay overnight? I mean, if you’re half as tired as I am–"

"You don’t need to give me an excuse, Bobby. I’m fine to stay."

"Good. Do that, then."

Mike nuzzled Bobby’s ear lightly. Staying the night. Dating a lawyer. Getting involved, let alone with a long-distance guy who wouldn’t even be around on a day-to-day basis, was not like Detective Mike Logan. None of this was, except maybe that black-haired, blue-eyed Irish men had always been Mike’s type. But if the strangeness of the whole thing made Mike nervous on an uncharted, biochemical level, he didn’t know enough about the situation to be sure that was a bad thing. It could lead to bad things, of course: commitment, heartbreak, a house that was never completely safe from lawyers -- even love, in the most extreme cases.

What could he say, though? No? Even if he were tempted, he couldn’t do it tonight, with Bobby so light and lost and passionate in the circle of his arms. Dammit, he liked the man. He wanted to believe they could carry this on at least through the end of the weekend. What difference that ultimately made in Mike Logan’s life he didn’t know, except that it had been over two months since his last date, and he was ready to let something – almost anything – convince him that the next night or two was going to carry him on through until the next time, God knew when, the next time he met someone who did to Mike what Bobby could do with a look.

He could say yes tonight, and hopefully yes a time or two tomorrow morning, and maybe even through the weekend, although that was too far in advance for Mike to really have his life planned out. He had the power to break his own rules, and he had the need still in him to hold on to Bobby. "I will," he said quietly. "I’ll do that."

Lawyered Up
Chapter 2

Mike Logan was used to walking around his own apartment naked. He had never quite understood people — like Bobby — who wore clothing of some kind almost twenty-four hours a day. Usually it was pure comfort, a sense of being *home,* owning his own terrain and to hell with anything he didn’t personally care about; there was nothing erotic, in Mike’s opinion, about nudity per se.

Usually. Tonight his body was glowing diffusely, and his genitals felt warm and heavy as they brushed against his thighs. He felt air moving invisibly over his skin, over the short, dark hairs on his limbs, his chest, his crotch, cooling the water that still speckled his skin. It was 7:48 on a Saturday morning, and Mike was exhausted, with a bone-deep tiredness that exerted a constant, not entirely unpleasant, pressure on him to lay the fuck down and give his overextended body a break. And here at the same time, his nerve endings were moaning softly, breathily, fresh lust pricking his skin like the bristles of a coarse wire brush.

Dammit, how could Bobby look so insultingly peaceful, asleep in Mike’s bed?

Mike let the towel drop in the floor when he finished drying his hair. When he turned out the light in the bathroom, he could see nothing distinctly. In the grey morning light coming thinly through his west-facing window, Mike could see that there was a man in his bed, but it was memory and not eyesight that fondly filled in the details.

The details of Bobby Donnell. Muscular, but with a fine-boned grace that made him seem thinner and more delicate than he was. Creamy skin marked with fine, soft black hairs, a handsome contrast that Mike had never seen except on a pure-blooded Irishman. That matinee-idol jawline, square but not stubborn, its severity tempered by its juxtaposition with lips that were silky and expressive. Right now, this morning, he knew Bobby with perfect intimacy. Fuck it; every *right now* with Bobby was letter-perfect. Funny how a streak of right nows didn’t exactly add up to a perfect life.

*No. Christ. Don’t go there, Logan, you masochistic bastard. It’s the weekend. It’s all good.*

He was just now getting over the tension headache brought on by the hassle of talking Bobby into coming back to New York – which you wouldn’t think would be one of the twelve fucking labors of Hercules, but Bobby had a way of twisting reality. For almost two months, his dark, tranquil voice had filled Mike’s nights, Mr. Bell’s marvelous invention bringing him tantalizingly, excruciatingly near in sound, though so far away in the flesh. For two months they had shared between them the El Dorado of vacation time, the question hanging unspoken as a backdrop to every reluctant goodbye: *When can you come back again?* They had fallen into the habit of blithely promising each other the moon, all conditional on that answer. *When I can get away — when I come to New York — when I see you again --*

But that was Bobby’s influence on the relationship. Bobby was the romantic, the one who tilted against windmills, the one who waited for the perfect moment. Mike finally had to take a stand, just flat-out say, "Come this weekend." He couldn’t, he couldn’t, of course it was impossible, obviously he was insanely busy, soon, next month sometime, a whole week, two days wasn’t enough anyway. But Mike held his ground. It had been too long already, their words reaching for each other, Mike living his nights in this fantasia of intimacy, sending confidences he hadn’t even known he was keeping out across the empty spaces that lay between the two of them, and waking in the morning tired and cold and lonely. He needed Bobby, and more than the sound of his voice, more even than the certain knowledge he had of what kind of a man Bobby was. This weekend. I can’t leave town; I’m on call. You have to come here, Bobby. This weekend. You have to.

He had arrived almost twelve hours ago, and it had been like the first time they’d touched, like being forged together by their own heat. Seven weeks of separation had created a need that they had no choice but to find the stamina to meet, and other than a late-night trip to the grocery store to fortify themselves with a weekend’s worth of food, they had not allowed distance to have even the slightest power over them. When they were too worn out to fuck anymore, there were other ways of maintaining the contact — Bobby’s perfectly-manicured hands roaming Mike’s back, Mike’s teeth gently worrying at Bobby’s earlobe. They breathed in tandem, their hands slipped on each other’s slickened skin, they sucked so hard on each other’s tongues that it was almost painful, sometimes when they were overwhelmed by it all they found themselves laughing breathlessly to blow it off again. It was great sex, and already Mike could tell that it was more.

Ever since their first date, which had really been nothing more than five days in Bobby’s hotel suite, periodically dragging his ass out of bed to go to work, there had been something solid about the two of them, something almost tangible. More than Bobby’s utterly unjust natural beauty. More than the way he could keep Mike up all night, lighting up the city all the way from Boston with the white heat of his intellect. Maybe it was the way he got more polite when he dug in his heels and got stubborn, or the way he objected in court — "ob-*jec*-*tion*" — three separate words, as if Jack’s every iffy statement was the most appallingly offensive thing he’d heard in all his years on the job. It could be the way he couldn’t help breaking into laughter when they tried to have phone sex, or the security cameras he bought for the parking lot of his church, or how he laced his fingers behind Mike’s neck when they kissed.

Man, the way Bobby Donnell kissed. He took over Mike’s body, the slow motions of his lips and tongue controlling everything, from the tingling in the top of Mike’s head to the curling of his toes. He reduced Mike to begging, starting with the inside and working out. Sometimes it even broke the surface, and Mike heard his own voice from twenty storeys overhead, saying quiet, inane things like *aww, Bobby* and *so good, the best* and *c’mere, Bobby, don’t go.* Bobby had this way of letting him talk, freeing Mike’s lips to shape his name over and over, without letting Mike remember that he ever once broke the kiss.

Fuck this. Bobby was not sleeping until noon, not on the clock.

Although Mike weighed significantly more than Bobby, he was careful and precise, even graceful in his athletic way. He moved slowly onto the bed, disturbing the mattress a little, but not enough to wake his sleeping lover. Stretched out on his bed with his toes to the headboard, Mike rested on his elbow, enjoying the view. Bobby, dove-white against even whiter sheets. He brushed the tips of his fingernails back and forth over Bobby’s thigh, then kissed the path his fingers had traced.

Mike’s fingertips found their way across the top of Bobby’s leg, tracing the shape of the muscle, finding the pulse high on the inside of his thigh and pressing a finger gently against it. He lowered his head, feeling faintly drunk on the scents of cum and sweat caught in Bobby’s impossibly soft, black pubic hair. Bobby Donnell. So fucking gorgeous he could break a Promise Keeper’s heart. Even Lennie noticed; what was it he had said the morning Mike swaggered into work after his first night with Bobby? "Bagged your pretty Boston lawyer, didja?" Pretty Bobby Donnell, Lennie still called him. Everyone did, everyone who knew about Mike’s affair-turned-relationship.

Pretty, hell. He was devastating, leagues beyond any other lover Mike had ever had, and Mike could afford to chase a better class of person than most. Mike pushed his head lower, feeling his ears ring in rhythm to the blood his fingers could feel thudding through Bobby’s body, just under that delicate skin. The hair was like silk, not harsh at all against Mike’s moistened lips, and he opened his mouth to moan helplessly against Bobby’s groin. Bobby stirred, then stilled, his breathing deeper than ever. To hell with that.

Mike opened his mouth wider and drew it, wet and slow, along the length of Bobby’s soft dick. He eased Bobby’s legs farther apart and shifted his own body so that his shoulders were squarely over Bobby, his elbows on either side of Bobby’s hips. Gently, he scooped his fingers under Bobby’s dick and lifted it, taking it slowly into his mouth as it twitched and began to enlarge. Only slightly erect, it was easy to close his mouth around it, and Mike’s heart thudded wildly in his chest at the sensation of holding Bobby’s penis completely inside the well of his mouth as it hardened.

Bobby squirmed against the sheets, just as he was becoming hard enough that Mike had to ease off, leaving the rising shaft of his dick glistening with Mike’s saliva and concentrating his energies on the head. He couldn’t tell if Bobby was awake or asleep, only that his legs were quivering a little, his breath coming harsher and deeper. Mike wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the base of the shaft, his tongue pressing in, firmly and quickly circling the rim of the head.

Suddenly, Bobby’s back arched, and Mike set his free hand against Bobby’s stomach, pushing him back down. He ignored the weak groan and even the gentle palm that glided across the back of Mike’s head, maintaining his steady exchange of tongue for kiss, kiss for tongue. "Jesus, Mike," Bobby’s voice said, after clearing his throat twice, "do you know what time it is?"

Deeply unromantic point of view, especially from Bobby. Thankfully, his actions were much less draconian than his speech, as Bobby turned his head, rubbing his stubble-textured cheek against Mike’s leg. "Mickey, lover, you’re too good to me. You get the gold star for the day."

He smiled around Bobby’s dick. Mikey, a bunch of the guys from the precinct called him, and Claire, along with a handful of ex-girlfriends, had been known to pull a Michael now and then. Mickey, never. For the rest of his life, he knew that name would put him in mind of the taste of sex on Mike’s lips and the feeling of his own erection pressed flat against the smooth, hard muscles of Bobby’s chest as they both squirmed and scraped against each other, fighting down uncivilized noises of pleasure.

As his lips rose up Bobby’s dick and dropped back down toward the base again, Mike could feel his own erection roaring for attention. Slowly, lazily, he rotated his hips, nudging it harder against Bobby’s chest and shoulder. With a little chuckle, Bobby let the backs of his fingers glide up Mike’s ass, his knuckles coming to rest snugly in the small of Mike’s back. The last thing Mike was expecting was to come this quickly, but somehow just as Bobby was shuddering and breathing the chain of *yes, yes, yes* that always came just before Bobby did, Mike felt the orgasm knife through him without warning, leaving an unbearable sense of relief behind, replacing a tension he’d hardly noticed.

Mike swallowed a few mouthfuls of Bobby’s semen, letting the rest run down Bobby’s softening dick; at his own leisure, he sucked it slowly out of the curls between Bobby’s legs, licked it with long strokes of his tongue out of the cleft of Bobby’s ass. He pillowed his head on Bobby’s thigh, savoring the pungent, humid air that hooded him. For all that he’d practically been out of the house when he’d come, Mike was enjoying the hell out of the aftermath, the sensation of his satisfied groin gummed hotly against Bobby’s body.

"Good morning, starshine," Bobby murmured, his voice a thick purr.

"The earth says hello," Mike responded. His head was empty of rational or meaningful thought, but he could remember the lyrics to two million songs he never liked to begin with. Mike could get lucky with the entire membership of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and he’d still be able to get through the Gilligan’s Island theme in under thirty seconds; memory could be funny like that.

"This doesn’t mean I have to get out of bed, does it?"

"Only if you’re hungry." Mike paused, then added, "Or sticky."

"Eventually, these things will come to bother me. Then we’ll talk lunch and a shower. Right now what I am is sleepy — and very happy."

"Sneezy, Dopey, and Doc."

"Mike...shut up."

Smiling comfortably into Bobby’s hipbone, Mike wrapped his arms securely around Bobby’s thighs. "Go to sleep, Donnell."

"Like it when you’re butch, Mickey." He was already half asleep. On Mike’s time, in the middle of their weekend. Which was okay, actually.

He bit down a flicker of jealousy at the thought of releasing Bobby back into the wilds of Boston on Sunday afternoon. Christ, Mike’s first semi-interesting relationship in – since – *Christ.*

*Pull it in, Logan. Keep it together.*

First semi-interesting relationship in the last two or three years, and he was already scratching at it like a scab, trying to make it bleed again.

First person in that long to kick-start Mike’s engine like this, and here he was trying to fuck it up in his own head with this too-little-too-late routine. No way was he going to blow this by getting edgy, jumping the gun, turning into some freaked out relationship junkie on a long-distance fly-by-night.

*Yeah, say it like that. Tell yourself that. Whatever gets you through the night, Mike.*

Mike’s hand caressed the soft skin of Bobby’s stomach. Pretty Bobby Donnell, and no fucking way was Mike going to ruin this, even for his own good. It was okay, the way things were *right now,* the way they had to be until something changed, if and when anything ever changed.

Bobby’s half-snore, Bobby’s steamy breath on his skin, Bobby lying peaceful and unguarded in the circle of Mike’s arms. Not okay, but...okay.

******

"What happened to my...." Jack was processing a little slowly today, and while he was thumbing through a law book to find the page to which the index had directed him, the word he needed was fading from his mind. Jesus, it was late. If Claire were here, she’d know automatically what he was talking about.

"Earth to McCoy. What happened to your...briefcase, hole punch, trial notes, career?"

He grinned. So Logan wasn’t as easy to work with as Claire. He did still liven up a night at the office. Actually, he was a lot like Claire — witty, easy on the eyes, helpful without getting under Jack’s feet. It was no wonder Mike and Claire got along so well. "My wontons."

"You said you wanted the eggrolls."

"Not to the exclusion of wontons. You ate them all, didn’t you, Detective?"

"Sorry, man. Thought you wanted the eggrolls." He didn’t sound very sorry. Jack might have been disappointed in him if he did. Jack had always liked a man who didn’t apologize.

Jack reached for his eggroll, trying not to keep his eyes on Mike Logan. He was laying low these days, trying not to crowd him. Jack McCoy was famous for never giving up on something once he had it between his teeth, but local legend tended to overstate the tendency. He did know when he was beaten, and he did know how to back down when it happened.

Surreptitiously, he glanced up at Logan, sitting behind Jack’s own desk. Damn shame, though. That it was. Jack had instincts when it came to sex, like cops did when it came to crime, and he knew that he and Logan would have everything in common in bed; Mike Logan didn’t have a clue what he was missing out on. A man like that, with his strong, substantial body and his expressive face, handsome and not-handsome at the same time, like an actor from the ‘40s, would always rate just the right treatment from Jack McCoy, but there was more with Mike. It was the way he dared Jack to try something, the way he sparkled when he led Jack on and then rebuffed him. It didn’t irritate Jack the way it would some men, because he understood. Like Claire, Mike wanted to be convinced. He wanted to see Jack break a sweat bringing him down.

Jack chuckled to himself as he found the case he was looking for and highlighted it. Well, the game had been fun while it lasted, and it was Mike’s loss that he’d put a stop to it. Mike would have enjoyed losing.

But fate was a funny thing. Now Mike Logan was pretty deep into this relationship with Bobby the Beautiful and sinking fast, while Jack — well, Jack had his own life. Things were more serious with Claire than they had been even a month ago; on the surface, nothing had changed, but Jack knew better. She was Jack’s future; he was sure of that, and he thought Claire was, too. They hadn’t actually said the words "exclusive relationship" to each other, but when they did, Jack thought he’d be ready.

So losing Mike Logan — well, it went against the grain, but Jack was capable of letting it go. He had a good thing, Mike seemed to think he did, too, and the detective was decent company over Chinese food and paperwork on nights when Claire had a wedding to be at.

"That’s it. I can’t find it." Impatiently, Mike shoved the folder across the top of the desk.

Jack raised his head off the arm of the couch. "Well, keep looking."

"This is ridiculous, Jack. If you’re so sure his manifesto mentions Wright, then you tell me where."

"Logan, if I knew where, I wouldn’t need you here. Just don’t panic, all right? Go downstairs, get yourself a cup of coffee, and check again."

"Why do lawyers always believe that coffee is the universal panacea?"

Jack quirked his eyebrows at Mike. "How do you manage to know us so well while avoiding us so thoroughly, Detective?"

At first Mike looked annoyed, and then he smiled in something like satisfaction, pushed away from the desk, and propped his feet up on it. "I’ve tangled with my share."

"Especially lately, I hear."

For a moment, the smile was completely gone from Mike’s eyes. "Yeah. Whatever." With visible effort, Mike smoothed out his expression, but Jack was not going to be persuaded to forget that easily. Trouble in paradise? "Lawyers, you know, they’re like roaches. You can swear off them all you like, but you forget to wash the dishes a couple of days, and boom. They’re back."

"Ah, a battle-scarred veteran."

"I’ve had my...day in court." He was smiling again, a lazy, not-quite-wicked smile that really turned Jack’s crank.

"You have me intrigued, Detective."

Mike shook his head slowly. "You want me to drag this manifesto for information that contradicts his testimony, or you want to gossip?"

It was about time for Jack’s ten o’clock coffee break anyway. He laid the book face-down across his chest and fixed his laser-like gaze on Detective Mike Logan. "Gossip, of course."

"Oh, for Christ’s sake, McCoy," he snapped, but the flash in his eyes, so unexpected, was a quick and cornered fear, not anger to match his voice. "If you’re trying to get at something, why don’t you just ask me?"

"If I were, I would," Jack assured him.

But Mike was barreling ahead, apparently oblivious, and picking up steam as he went. "You want to know if I was fucking Paul Robinette? Well, I was. Yeah, and Stone, too. What else, Jack? You want to know about the lawyer I’m doing these days? That turns you on, doesn’t it, hearing about me and Bobby? You want him, Jack? You can have him!"

"Logan. You’re frothing all over my desk."

Mike stood up so quickly that he sent Jack’s wheeled desk chair bouncing off the wall behind him. Angry Irishmen, very hard on paint jobs. No one knew that better than Jack. "I don’t have to do this, you know. This isn’t my fucking job. Let Claire work over the weekend; she likes you."

Stifling a sigh, Jack stood up to intercept his temp help. What was it with cops, anyway? Did being temperamental and moody make you want to go out and get a gun, or did it happen after? Put a whiskey sour or six in Mike Logan, and you’d get Sergeant John McCoy.

Well, there were two kinds of fire-breathing Irish cops: some were drunk, naturally mean, or both, like Jack’s father, and they were the kind you avoided at all costs. Most were more like Logan, and relied on the amount of noise they could make to see to it that nobody interfered with their moods. Those you just did whatever you felt like with; they normally were so thrown off by the fact that you weren’t afraid of them that they didn’t know what to do next.

Jack grabbed the collar of Mike’s leather coat as he tried to shoulder belligerently past. "Mike, sit down. Don’t make me prosecute you for driving while an asshole."

"If that’s illegal in New York, we need a whole new division on the force." No wonder Mike expected his sense of humor to be capable of defusing every situation; it seemed to work just fine on himself. Jack could feel Mike relaxing already – not much, but enough that Jack felt comfortable letting go of his coat.

"Some fireworks show, Mike. What’s the occasion?"

Mike collapsed on the couch, spreading his arms across the back and stretching his legs out in front of him so that he took up all the space his already-substantial body could take up. "Not my day. I’m having this...thing with Bobby. This fight, I guess. I don’t know."

"You don’t know. A thing, a fight, you guess."

He winced a little, hearing his own imprecise language quoted back at him in Jack’s dry, sardonic tones. "It’s too weird, Jack. We can’t fight because we can’t date because we never see each other. I’m on call here six days a week, and Bobby puts in eighty hours making sure his goddamn serial killers don’t get convicted of burglary."

Jack quirked an eyebrow. Colorful crimes were kind of a hobby of Jack’s; even when his cases were boring as hell, there was sure to be something with dramatic value happening somewhere in this great nation. "Serial killers? Let me think, in Boston right now you’ve got – nothing but the Harbor Stranglers, and there aren’t any suspects."

"Don’t get me started. You goddamn lawyers and your goddamn lawyer ethics. Why can’t you have the same basic ethics that make sense to normal human beings?"

"Why can’t we have the same basic ethical dilemmas as normal human beings? Should I go through the express lane with thirteen items, give that homeless guy a buck, leave my insurance info on the windshield after I back into a Buick?"

"So when the stakes get higher, what’s the first thing to go, Jack? Honesty? Respect for human life?"

"Are you asking me for my notes from Ethics 101? Go to law school and pay eighty bucks for a textbook that will explain it all to you."

Mike rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Double-talk me. What happens to you guys if you ever just answer a question straight out? They stop letting you go to the Christmas parties?"

"Who told you?"

"Told me what?"

"About the secret lawyer Christmas parties. I suppose you know about the annual worldwide meetings, too, where we pour unrefined oil over Canadian waterfowl and give blowjobs to the Devil."

Logan didn’t even try to hide his grin. Maybe Mike was just so accustomed to going through life pawing at the ground like a bull in front of the red cape that he couldn’t afford to let it blind him to life’s small charms. "The Devil should get so lucky."

He faked a shocked look at Mike. "Detective Logan. I’m willing to agree that you have a certain degree of expert knowledge on the topic of blowjobs from lawyers, but do you really think it’s appropriate talk for the office?"

"Aw, fuck you, Jack."

"Yeah, yeah. You don’t date lawyers."

"I’m quitting."

"Everybody’s quitting, and nobody ever quits. We’re worse than cigarettes."

"In so many ways." Mike brought up one hand to prop up his head, letting his eyes roam lazily up and down Jack’s body. You had to give Mike Logan the prize for chutzpah, ripping into Jack on the inhale and coming on to him with the exhale. Well, well, well. Jack had obviously been much too hasty in kicking Mike loose.

It was no time to shoot himself in the foot by leaping on this sign of interest like a starving dog, however. Jack limited himself to giving Mike a calm, satisfied look that did nothing to reveal the sudden excitement he was feeling at having the concepts of Mike and blowjobs so tidily juxtaposed. "Back to work, Detective. The beatings don’t stop until you find me something I can use in court."

Mike put in another twenty-five minutes going over the manifesto before he spoke another word to Jack, but when Mike’s sulk did break, it broke but good. "I’m not staying with Bobby. It’s just...we’re too different."

"The lawyer thing?" Jack said noncommittally, keeping his eyes on his own paperwork.

"Nah. Whatever."

Jack nodded. So much went without saying, between two of the same breed. They were neither one romantics, neither one speechwriters — just mostly honest micks with mostly decent jobs who lived alone and worked too hard and got laid now and then, guys with very little to look back on at the end of the day except for the undeniable fact that, bottom line, all the blood and sweat ended in a few less killers on the street. Good men, mostly. Regular guys, definitely.

And then there was Bobby Donnell. Jack understood completely about *too different.* At least his silky, sweet-eyed, rich Irish Rose was a prosecutor like himself; you couldn’t give Jack a good enough reason to deal with all of that socioeconomic class shit on top of a relationship that, at its best, would still be a relationship with a defense attorney. Hell, even if he hadn’t had a personal stake in the matter, Jack would have been against Mike dating a defense attorney. He wouldn’t wish that kind of trouble on a regular guy like Mike Logan.

"If you ever want to talk."

Mike grunted. "Here’s what you can do, Jack: you can break up with Bobby for me. The two of you can talk and talk and talk about it."

Jack echoed his grunt, with slightly more amusement than Mike had shown. "Toughen up, Mikey. You want to date up on the food chain, you have to learn which fork is which and how to conduct a dumping in a civilized manner."

"Long-distance relationships. All of the bullshit, none of the sex."

"Welcome to the global society."

And welcome back into the game, Mikey.

*******

Bobby recognized the New York area code on his caller ID right away, of course, but a part of his brain just below the conscious had known from the instant that the phone woke him from a half-nap on his couch — *Mike.*

Ridiculous. His phone rang the same way, no matter who was calling him. It was just that he’d had Mike on his mind all night, waiting up — more or less up — for just this call. "Hi," he managed, his voice croaking a little.

"Hi."

Bobby swung to his feet; it was darker in his apartment even than it had been when he fell asleep at ten minutes til ten, and he found himself creeping into the kitchen as though he might wake someone up in the darkness. What a strange mental lapse, considering how long it had been since there had been anyone but him sleeping at Bobby’s place. "What time is it?"

"Almost one. Sorry for--"

"No. It’s okay. You had to work."

You had to say that, of course. Had to be polite and say you didn’t mind when every time you tried to talk — forget about seeing him, that was just a pipe dream, but *talk* to your alleged lover, one or both of you got called in to work some emergency. Had to be politically correct, respect his personhood, his natural male tendency to confuse his job with his self-worth, and not just say *I was bored, I was lonely, I missed you, where the hell were you?* Because that would be insensitive. God knows, couldn’t be insensitive. Just because you were tired and you hurt inside and you were falling in love, holy Christ, falling hopelessly in love with this bristly, stubborn Manhattan cop.

"Bobby. We should talk."

There were three different types of juice in Bobby’s refrigerator, and he couldn’t make a damned decision. Robert Donnell, one of the most prestigious criminal defense attorneys in Boston, who held the lives of the rich and famous in his hands every day of his life without so much as flinching, could not narrow down his juice options. Bobby leaned his cheek on the cool surface of the freezer door, pressing his eyes closed. It was so easy to believe that if Mike were here, behind him in the darkness, slipping his solid arms around Bobby’s chest and pushing his chin into Bobby’s hair, that it would change. That Harvest Pear would suddenly sound either a lot better or a lot worse than Cranapple, that his life would be simple and sane in the way that Mike’s always seemed to be. "I’m not really at my best right now, Mick. Can we do this later?"

"Right now I don’t know about later. Is there going to be a later?"

Some part of Bobby, down around his bones, had been expecting this for days. "I don’t know, Mike. You tell me."

"Turn the evidence over to the police, Bobby. Please. You don’t know that it will incriminate your client — it might turn out to be good for him. Let the police make that decision; they know the case."

"Mike, stop. Just stop it. First of all, he’s Rebecca’s client, not mine--"

"Oh, fuck that. It’s your firm, and you know damn good and well that they all go where you tell them to go. You can--"

"I *can’t.* Mike, I can’t." He would never understand. Sometimes it seemed like he didn’t want to. Maybe that was the drawback to having a simple, sane life: how far you had to go to keep it that way, to defend it against ambiguity and this hellish confusion of ethics and decency that Bobby had been living with for so long.

"You can withhold evidence, but you can’t--"

Bobby tried to push down his annoyance, knowing he was more irritated because he’d had to explain all this to Rebecca than because Mike wanted an explanation. It was reasonable, an outsider being confused. The law could be...counterintuitive. "What we have isn’t evidence, Mike. I mean — yes, it might advance the police investigation, but it’s purely circumstantial, and it would be a complete betrayal of the client...." Dammit. It sounded worse than counterintuitive; it sounded sleazy. But those were the rules, the way the profession worked. It didn’t matter what made sense, what the sporting thing to do would be. It mattered what would ruin his career, get him disbarred, probably end up causing a mistrial anyway. That wasn’t selfish; it couldn’t be. He was living up to an oath, to the law. The goddamned law. "If we knew he was one of the stranglers, that would be a different situation completely. As it is, Rebecca has to act as his lawyer, not as a police officer."

"And police officers are the only ones who are supposed to care about getting serial killers off the streets?"

At this point, Bobby was profoundly sorry he’d ever told Mike about this damn case. Wonderful, another fatal flaw in the relationship; he couldn’t talk to his own lover about his work. "Of course I care, Mike. Obviously we all do. But my part in the process is different. I protect--"

"The criminals."

"The rights of citizens. Constitutional rights, basic, inalienable rights, and okay, sometimes it gets all — screwed up and nothing seems to make sense, but the last thing I need right now — and by the way, it’s been a long day, thanks for asking — is you advising me on how to run my firm, because Mike, you are not a lawyer. Okay? I went to law school, I passed the bar, I’ve been practicing for ten years, I know how to do my job. You don’t. You know how to be a cop. Great, so you do that, and I will handle my clients, and everything will be fine." Now they were yelling — Bobby was yelling. Wonderful. He chose Cranapple, but he wasn’t happy with it.

He was standing in the kitchen, in the dark, hungry but too tired to cook, wishing he were anything but an attorney but too proud to say so to Mike Logan, heartsick at the thought of losing this man but too — too courteous to say *Motherfucker, don’t you leave me, don’t you dare, not because of the Harbor fucking Stranglers and not now that I love you.*

"Everything won’t be fine. It isn’t fucking fine."

"Don’t say that."

"It’s not about the Constitution, Bobby. You’re not an angel and you’re not a saint. You are very rich, and you got that way by winning a lot of cases, not by devoting your life to feeding the orphans in Calcutta, so don’t even pull the philosophy shit on me."

In a fit of sudden frustration, Bobby slammed his fist into the refrigerator door and was immediately sorry. It hurt a lot and it didn’t feel like him; hitting things was more Mike Logan’s style. So absurd, so surreal and illogical — so much for the American Dream. All his life, scrimping by on next to nothing, studying and working and taking all the right risks, starting his own firm instead of working for the legal factories that tried to woo him so that his career, his choices would be his own. All those years of careful deliberation, seeking the spotlight while cultivating the right reputation, investing his time, his money, his every hope for the future in this one chance to have it all. And now here he stood, rich and respected, with a career that any lawyer might envy, friends who believed he could do no wrong, and every choice in the world open to him — except that he lived alone, was alone, couldn’t hold on to any relationship because he was a workaholic, a perfectionist, too serious, too old for his age, and now — almost beyond belief — *too rich.*

"What do you want, Mike? Just tell me what you want."

"I want you to be on my side." There were layers to the statement, things that Bobby didn’t know how to unravel.

"Mickey, I am. I am on your side. I love you. And you’re right that I’m not a saint, and maybe I’m not a philosopher either, but I do believe I’m doing what I should be doing. I’m a good lawyer. I believe in my job, I enjoy my job, and I like that I’m successful. If any of those facts bother you beyond all repair, then — then I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I love you, but you have to be able to put up with me, or this is never going to work." The speech didn’t come out right; it sounded too harsh, too much the faceless ultimatum. It expressed none of what Bobby felt for his lover, none of the warmth that came up to engulf him when Mike hit him out of left field with some deranged joke, or the way that Bobby felt genuinely humble, aware of his small place in the large world, when he touched his palm to Mike’s cheek and saw those snapping, dark eyes close softly in response, or the almost frightening way he was coming to rely on Mike’s utter inevitability, his habits, his unchangeableness. Nothing that meant *Mike* to him was anywhere to be found in "or this is never going to work." It did work; it already had. It was real, happening to him, working in and upon him, and now Mike wanted to take it away, and Bobby was too demoralized and too new to this world of need and trust to fight him. He didn’t even know *how* to fight for a relationship. What kind of evidence was admissible? Was anything privileged, and where did you get a warrant, and did motive count for anything?

His instincts told him that motive counted for everything. For whatever Bobby Donnell’s relationship instincts were worth.

"You...love me?"

Oh. Hello. Rule number one: the defendant has a right to face his accuser, or in this specific case, Mike needed to know what he was up against. "I do. Is that good or bad?"

"That’s...aw, Jesus. Good. I think. It’s been awhile, that’s all. Since I got serious."

And even longer, probably, since Bobby had been anything *but* serious about anything. Did that make them the two most incompatible people on the face of the earth, or born for each other? "Let me ask you one favor, Mickey."

"What?"

"See me in person before you dump me. It’s never going to seem real to me if I can’t look at you while you do it."

There was a long pause, and then Mike’s gruff, whuffing laugh. "So you can fall in love with someone over the phone, but that’s as far as it goes, huh?"

"That’s as far as it goes," he agreed placidly.

"Deal."

Bobby closed his eyes, relief warring with dread; this wasn’t a decision, exactly, but it was a chance, and Mike wasn’t here, exactly, but he wasn’t gone, either. They’d won time, nothing more — time for Mike and Bobby to figure out how to come through for each other.

******

At four-thirty in the morning, the food at Aunt Greta’s Pancake Emporium was actually not too bad. Most civil servants had been forced to eat at Aunt Greta’s at one time or another in their career, greasy and overpriced as the breakfasts were, simply because it was open early and located right by One Hogan Place; Mike wondered if this ultra-pre-dawn loophole was some kind of deep, guarded secret, or if he was the only cop out of the loop.

Or maybe they’d just cracked out the edible food for him because he looked so fucking pathetic. He’d been in his car in the courthouse parking garage for almost five hours, trying to figure out whether to panic or pick up the cell phone, call Bobby back, and propose to him.

Neither one the most rational response to a simple "I love you." It was hard to be rational after the first couple of hours in your car.

"Detective."

Mike’s head snapped up at the sound of the raspy voice, and he stuck his elbow in the tabasco sauce soaking his scrambled eggs. He grumbled the foulest curses he could think up under his breath as he wiped his sleeve clean. "What did you do, sleep in your office?"

Jack sat down across from him with a plate of Belgian waffles. "What did you do, sleep in my lobby? I’m usually at the office by five or five-thirty."

"I...never made it home." Maybe it was the pre-dawn light, a soft-focus effect that made Jack look less hawkish and mocking than usual, or maybe it was just the night’s general emotional chaos, but Mike was feeling talkative. "I called Bobby and we talked a little bit."

"Ah. End of Bobby Donnell?"

"You wish."

Jack just smiled, and something pierced the ambient fog that had blanketed Mike’s brain all night long. Bobby made it impossible to know up from down for sure; he changed reality with the intricacies of lawyer thought and the even greater mysteries of what’s-this-love-thing-anyway. But Jack McCoy was simple. Jack was sexy — that look in his eyes, that smile that managed to be smug and self-effacing at the same time, that lethal focus.

What was it with him and lawyers? Fucking in love with Pretty Bobby Donnell, that he told himself it would never be serious with, and he was still stuck with this hard-on for Jack, who had a kind of rough trade, fuck-you sexiness that would have been much better suited to a pouty, thick-lashed twenty-one-year-old on a Harley than a weathered, insanely smart old guy on a substance-over-style riceburner who, apparently, was put on this earth to strike fear into the hearts of Belgian waffles everywhere — Jesus Christ, how fast could that man *eat*?

"Sorry I flipped on you last— no, earlier tonight."

Glancing up, Jack quirked an eyebrow in that eloquent way. "You’re stressed. It happens."

"Been a while since I was in that place after-hours." What was he doing? What in the hell was this about?

"What’s a while?" Jack sounded curious, but not too attached. If he’d been any more bored, or any more eager to pry around in Mike’s personal life, it would have seemed weird, but the way things were — what could it hurt to have someone to say it to, just get it off his chest? Claire trusted McCoy, so he must be reasonably sensitive; Claire might like a little cave in her men once in a while, but she’d never stick with anyone who didn’t communicate like a pro. Which Jack was, he guessed.

And it needed to be said. It needed to be said to someone, and not Bobby, yet. "Two years since Paul left. Almost three."

"Ah." *Ah* again. This must be Jack McCoy code for "Well, that explains everything."

If Jack had all the answers, Mike would like to hear one or two of them. Why his four years with Paul Robinette had seemed so easy at the time, why it was so easy to get used to his gentle tranquility, his thoughtful, wry way of giving Mike a different perspective on life, and why things hadn’t ever gone back to normal after he left.

Lawyers. Selfish bastards, all of them. Bobby and his fucking Constitutional decency, Paul and his — his need for *space,* his crush on Stone, his continual identity crisis, sure that he wasn’t black enough because his lover was a white guy, or wasn’t gay enough because he wore a suit to work. And yet there was something so compelling about their glibness, their mental flexibility, the way they seemed able to make things true just by talking long enough about them. He’d believed Paul when he said that Mike would be with him every step of the way, and everything in him wanted to believe Bobby when he said they would make it work. Christ, that was the nature of the job. You talk, and if you’re any good, ignorant saps like Mike Logan agree with anything you say.

Jack McCoy, thank God, was not talking. He was just sopping the last of his strawberry syrup off the plate with a piece of Texas toast. Sometimes it was good to sit there across the table from someone who got it, who didn’t push at Mike and pull him in at the same time, who just wanted him, in the frankest, most honest way possible.

When Jack’s eyes flicked up, Mike found himself smiling, and not in a good-working-relationship sort of way. Jack returned his smile, placid and knowing, and this had just been going on too fucking long for Mike to keep on denying that something was between them, and getting bigger, not going away at all.

Reluctantly, Mike set his fork down. "I’ve got to get some sleep before my shift, Jack."

"Call you?"

Shit. Mike closed his eyes briefly. Thought of Pretty Bobby Donnell, the rasp of weariness in his voice tonight, the perfect blue of his eyes, the way things were finally — different for Mike, the pain of losing Paul hardly pain at all anymore. "I wouldn’t, if I were you."

"If you were me?"

"Sorry, Jack," he said, knowing he sounded belligerent, but unable to bully himself into obedience without sounding like he was trying to bully the rest of the world, too. "Can’t do it."

"Ah," Jack said, making Mike wonder what he thought he understood *this* time.

Maybe just the simple truth. Maybe just love.

END PART 2