Chapter Text
It’s a rainy Saturday and Rafael has a craving for pancakes and nothing even remotely related to a pancake mix ingredient in his apartment. He closes his kitchen cabinets and swears, for about the thirtieth time this year, to cook more at home.
He throws on a jacket, a pair of shoes he doesn’t care about getting wet, grabs an umbrella and makes his way down to the chain grocery store in his neighborhood. He supposes he could’ve gone to the bodega on his block but everyone knows the charm of bodegas is their ability to have cheap prepared food and snacks. If there’s a bag of flour or a box of pancake mix at the bodega Rafael bets it’s covered in a thin layer of dust and costs easily three times what it should.
He quickly gets distracted at the grocery store picking out stuff he doesn’t need but thinks looks nice. He’s being weekend-lazy and his fridge is empty, he figures he’s allowed to take his time, here.
He’s holding up an eggplant that looks good, but he’s not totally sure what he’d do with, when he hears someone clear their throat next to him. Assuming he’s standing in the way and someone just needs to get by, Rafael mutters out an apology and steps back. Then he looks up.
Sonny Carisi is in front of him, hair slightly damp, missing its usual gel finish, strands of it curling against his neck and flopping in front of his wide eyes. He’s all lank in dark jeans and a black henley top. Rafael feels a chill just looking at him. He feels a lot of things.
“Detective,” Rafael says dryly.
“Uh, hey,” Sonny says, offering up an awkward little wave of his hand. He looks like he doesn’t know what to make of Rafael in the middle of this brightly lit store. “Didn’t expect to see you…here.”
“Even former-ADAs need to eat,” Rafael says.
“No, yeah, I know,” Sonny babbles. “I just. I dunno. Grocery shopping seems…too mundane. For you.”
Rafael’s not sure if that’s a compliment or not so he just nods. He watches some water drip down from Sonny’s hair and his throat goes a little dry seeing it. He coughs. “Get caught in the rain?”
“Oh yeah, just a little.” Sonny shakes his head, like he’s a dog, and pushes his hair back out of his eyes. It just flops forward again.
“Do you live around here, now?” Rafael asks as he wonders how either of them will get out of this conversation with their pride intact.
“Yeah, just moved here a month ago,” Sonny says. He looks sheepish and scratches idly at the back of his neck. “I, ah. Forgot. You lived around here.”
Sonny has only been to Rafael’s apartment once. The week before everything that happened…happened. And Rafael left the DA’s office. Rafael didn’t really expect him to remember where Rafael lived. A lot of that night is blurred at the edges thanks to the alcohol they’d both slightly over indulged in at the bar. It hadn’t been enough for either of them to say the night was the direct cause of intoxication. Though Rafael would have to admit the scotch had loosened his tongue, may have helped Rafael move and reach out to Sonny, may have helped Sonny reach back to meet him.
Rafael doesn’t expect Sonny to remember the rushed car ride from the bar to Rafael’s place. But so much of that night is still carved into Rafael’s memory with a weight that will takes years to wash away that he can’t help but also feel a bit stung.
“Yes, same apartment,” Rafael says, a tad pointedly. “Not too far away.”
Sonny clears his throat and his eyes flutter around as if looking for a subject change to take physical form in front of him. “I heard you’re working legal aid, now.”
“Sometimes,” Rafael says, wondering who Sonny ‘heard’ that from. Probably Liv. “I’m also teaching.”
“Fordham?” Sonny asks, smirking.
“Columbia,” Rafael says and he returns the smile in spite of himself. “And I’m working with Bayard, a bit. Just every so often, when he needs help with Project Innocence.”
“Wow, that’s. That’s great,” Sonny says, sounding genuinely pleased for Rafael and impressed. “Bayard Ellis, man. He’s. Something.”
“I’ll ask him to autograph something for you,” Rafael says, then immediately wishes he hadn’t. It comes out more bitter than he’d meant and from the way Sonny’s smile slides off his face, he hears it too. “Sorry, that…” Rafael sighs. “Sorry.”
“No, hey, it’s okay.” Sonny shrugs. “This is. More than a little awkward.”
“Because I’m your former coworker who resigned in disgrace or because we fucked once?” Rafael asks and he watches as Sonny blushes and looks away. Rafael sighs and finally puts down the eggplant he’d been considering. He doesn’t even have it in him to make a joke about that. He looks at Sonny again and wonders if he’ll ever see him again. If this is it, than it’s as good a place as any, he figures. “Are we ever going to talk about it?”
Sonny’s cheeks are still pink but he recovers enough to snark back at Rafael, “Which one you wanna talk about? You resigning in disgrace or how we fucked once?”
Rafael nods as if to say, fair enough. “The second,” he clarifies.
“I don’t know,” Sonny says honestly. “I thought we would. I thought we’d have time.”
“Right,” Rafael says and he lets out a sad, low laugh. They’d both been awkward the day after–days after. They had both maybe needed some space. By the time Rafael had begun to feel ready to talk to Sonny about sleeping together he’d already started down the short path that would expel him from the DA’s office.
“I wanted to wait. After.” Sonny sighs and Rafael’s not sure if Sonny means after they slept together or after Rafael quit. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, in the long run. “And then the longer I waited, the more I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to call.”
“I did,” Rafael says.
“You didn’t even say goodbye,” Sonny says and Rafael can see the lingering anger layered underneath the sadness and the awkwardness on Sonny’s face. “You were just there one day and then gone.”
Rafael admits now that he hard pretty much cut off everyone at SVU once his trial started. Everyone except Liv, who didn’t listen when he told her to stay away, anyway.
“I distanced myself,” Rafael explains to Sonny. “I guess I thought it would make things easier.”
Sonny snorts in disbelief. “Did it?”
“Yes and no,” Rafael concedes.
“Well,” Sonny says, feigning as much cheer as he can muster, and it’s not much. “I should, uh, let you get back too–”
“Pancakes,” Rafael blurts out, apropos of little. “I was. I came here for stuff for. Pancakes.”
“Pancakes,” Sonny repeats, and he’s smiling now, something close to full and real. “Not seeing a whole lot of pancake stuff in your basket, there.”
“What are you the basket police, now?” Rafael rolls his eyes, at Sonny and his own poor retort. “Bisquick was my next stop.”
“Aw, come on,” Sonny whines. He looks a little pained, his hand coming up to clasp at his heart, like he’s suffering some serious slings and arrows. “Real pancake mix is so much better and not that hard to make.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start, there,” Rafael says.
Sonny shrugs and says, “I make great pancakes.”
It sounds like an offer. Rafael swallows and hopes he’s not reading more into that than he should. “You could…if you didn’t have any plans, that is. You could make me pancakes.”
“I could, huh?” Sonny huffs out a laugh. “How generous of me.”
“If you were interested,” Rafael says, making it Sonny’s choice.
Sonny looks genuinely torn, for about a second, and then he reaches out and takes Rafael’s grocery basket from him and looks further inside. “Yeah, okay, but we’re gonna need some more stuff that’s actually pancake-related, here.”
It takes work to appear nonplussed in that moment and Rafael just nods and hopes his hands aren’t shaking as he gestures to the rest of the store. “Lead on, then.”
When Sonny finally makes him pancakes, it’s Sunday morning. Sonny’s in his underwear and a borrowed Harvard Law t-shirt. His hair is a frightful mess–the end result of getting caught in the rain the day before, letting it air dry, and then letting Rafael run his fingers through it all night and all morning. His neck and cheeks are pink, and Rafael isn’t sure where his pleased flush at having cooked breakfast ends and the beard burn Rafael left behind begins.
“Alright,” Sonny says, a vision in rumpled domesticity and seduction that Rafael can’t believe he gets to have. He hands Rafael a fork and positions a large plate of pancakes between them, like he plans for them to share, Lady and the Tramp style. “Try that and tell me it’s not better than Bisquick.”
Rafael is still waking up and his eyes feel dry and puffy. He can’t remember if he cried at one point during last night’s talking-sex-talking-sex marathon and he thinks maybe it’s better than he can’t. And maybe it doesn’t matter, anyway, since Sonny is still here and that’s about all Rafael cares about in this moment.
He cuts himself a neat layered triangle of pancake with his fork and stuffs it into his mouth, doing a neat impression of a chipmunk as Sonny laughs. Rafael chews and swallows and looks at Sonny’s bright blue eyes.
“It’s better,” he says.