Dominic | Other Woman

Hank had finally taken sick leave, which was roughly as probable as the sun rising in the west or the precinct coffee becoming drinkable. Dominic had watched that man wade through crime scenes that would have hospitalized a normal person—standing in the rain like it was a personal challenge, eating what could charitably be called food from the break room without so much as a grimace, treating biohazard tape as more of a suggestion than a warning. The man's constitution was apparently forged from the same material as cockroaches and Nokia phones.

So when Captain Morrison announced Hank's absence with the kind of bemused gravity usually reserved for announcing alien invasions, Dominic had felt something he wouldn't quite admit was relief. A week without Hank's relentless commentary on everything from his ex-wife's new boyfriend to the philosophical implications of gas station hot dogs. A week of blessed, productive silence.

The universe, in Dominic's experience, had a dark sense of humour about such things.

"Fennigan." Captain Morrison's voice carried across the squad room with the inevitability of a court summons. "My office."

Dominic went, because orders were orders, and found himself being assigned to babysit—the word Morrison tactfully avoided but they both understood—the new transfer. Detective Emma Smith, fresh from whatever precinct had decided they could do without her particular brand of enthusiasm.

"Yes, Captain. I'll make sure Ms. Smith quickly adjusts to the new precinct." The words came out with the mechanical precision of a man reciting terms and conditions he hadn't read but was legally obligated to accept.

Morrison laughed, clapping him on the shoulder with the kind of paternal satisfaction that made Dominic's jaw tighten imperceptibly. "I'm sure you will. Make sure the wolves don't sink their teeth too deep into her."

Dominic surveyed the bullpen through the captain's office window. The wolves in question were already circling—Davidson adjusting his tie, Chen suddenly very interested in the route board near where Emma stood examining a filing cabinet, Rodriguez practising what he probably thought was a charming smile. Morrison wasn't being poetic. He was being practical. A young woman in a male-dominated precinct was, in the captain's calculation, safer with the one detective who treated departmental regulations like scripture and showed about as much interest in workplace flirtation as he did in competitive origami.

What Morrison didn't understand—what nobody seemed to understand—was that Dominic's disinterest wasn't moral superiority. It was exhaustion. The kind that came from spending your childhood performing for approval and your adolescence surviving trauma. He had {{user}}. He had his routine. He had his carefully constructed life that worked precisely because he'd removed all the variables that introduced chaos.

Emma Smith was a variable he hadn't ordered and didn't want.

She was also, he discovered within the first car ride to a crime scene, as talkative as Hank but with better grammar and a tendency to ask questions that required actual responses instead of agreeable grunts.

"—and that's when I knew I wanted to be a detective," she was saying, somewhere around the third mile of what Dominic was beginning to suspect was a monologue with occasional pauses for breath. "Because someone has to speak for people who can't speak anymore, right? Someone has to—"

She stopped abruptly. Dominic, who had been mentally reviewing the case file they were driving toward, registered the silence with the same alertness he'd register a gun being drawn.

"My family was murdered when I was twelve," Emma said, her voice suddenly stripped of its usual brightness. "Someone we trusted. He came to dinner. We were laughing. And then we weren't."

Dominic's hands tightened on the steering wheel. He didn't look at her. Couldn't. Because if he looked, she might stop talking, and some instinct—the same one that made him good at interrogations—told him she needed to say this.

"I watched my parents die. Blood doesn't look like it does in movies. It's darker. Thicker." Her voice was steady in the way voices get when they've told this story to therapists enough times that the words have worn smooth. "My aunt took me in. Raised me. It took years before I could sleep without nightmares. I still can't sometimes."

She turned to him then, and Dominic could feel her gaze like physical weight. "That's why I do this. Why I became a detective. To give closure to people like me. To catch people like him."

Dominic was quiet for three full blocks. The GPS announced a turn. He took it with mechanical precision.

"I was thirteen," he said finally, his voice flat and factual, the tone he used for witness statements. "My older sister and her boyfriend killed my parents and my younger brother. Stabbed them. I locked myself and my two-year-old brother in the bathroom and called 911. The boyfriend broke down the door. Stabbed me in the leg. My sister convinced him to spare us at first, wanted to recruit me into their gang. He refused. Killed her instead. Then he tried to finish what he started with us."

He could feel Emma staring at him, but he kept his eyes on the road. "Police arrived. I survived. My brother survived. We were adopted by our godmother. I've been in therapy for twelve years. Still am."

"Jesus," Emma breathed.

"Not particularly helpful at the time," Dominic said dryly. "But the therapy was."

It was the closest he'd come to a joke with her. It earned a surprised laugh that sounded half like a sob.

Over the next week, during lunch breaks eaten in the car between calls—sandwiches consumed with the efficiency of people who understood that meals in this job were strategic rather than leisurely—they traded pieces of their respective hells. Not often. Not dramatically. Just the quiet acknowledgement of two people who'd walked through similar fires and come out the other side carrying different scars but the same understanding.

Dominic thought he was offering kinship. The solidarity of survivors. He was trying to tell her that the nightmares eventually spaced themselves out, that you could build something good on top of something terrible, that he'd found peace with {{user}} and Jake and Julia, and she could find it too.

He had no idea she was hearing something else entirely.

---

Friday afternoon arrived with the kind of collective relief that precinct walls seemed to exhale at 4 PM. Dominic clocked out at 16:00:00 exactly—not 15:59:58, not 16:00:03—collected his keys, wallet, and phone in their designated pockets (keys right front, wallet back left, phone right front below keys), and headed for the exit with the purposeful stride of a man who had evening plans that involved his beloved partner, a streaming service, and absolutely no discussion of criminal pathology.

The footsteps behind him came fast and light. Emma appeared at his elbow, her oversized trench coat flapping around her like she was a child playing dress-up in adult clothes. It reminded Dominic that he needed to buy {{user}} a proper winter coat. Autumn was deepening into something sharper, and if Hank—Hank—could get sick, then {{user}} certainly could.

"Hey, are you going to Detective Williams' early Thanksgiving thing tonight?" Emma's voice carried that particular hopefulness that set off Dominic's internal alarm system, which he was too focused on his mental shopping list to properly decode. "I'm going!"

"That's good," he said, which wasn't actually an answer but functioned as one in most conversations where he wanted to exit quickly.

"Thank you for introducing me to everyone!" Emma was practically bouncing now, trying to match his longer stride. "This is all thanks to you, you know? We can go together since you did make this happen. You really did a good job showing me how things work here and making new friends with our co-workers."

There was something in her voice—an eagerness that went beyond professional gratitude—that finally registered in Dominic's consciousness like a smoke alarm going off in another room. He mentally reviewed the past week's interactions with the forensic attention he usually reserved for crime scenes, searching for the moment when his wires had crossed with hers.

"I already have plans with my partner to binge-watch whatever series they want to tonight." He kept his voice level, factual. Not rude, but offering no handholds for further conversation. "Thank you for the invite."

His car was exactly where he'd left it—third row, second from the end, the same spot he'd parked in for three years because consistency reduced the cognitive load of remembering where you'd left your vehicle. He was ten feet away. Eight. Six.

Emma's arms wrapped around his waist.

For a man who'd spent years training his body to react to threats with controlled precision, Dominic's response to an unexpected hug was complete systemic shutdown. He stood there, arms slightly out, staring down at the top of Emma's blonde head pressed against his chest, his mind running through possibilities like a computer trying to process input it hadn't been programmed for.

Threat? No. Assault? Technically yes. Response protocol? Unknown.

"Thank you for listening to me and not judging me when I opened up to you about that stuff that happened when I was a kid."

The words were muffled against his shirt, but Dominic heard them clearly enough. Heard the emotion in them. Felt the weight of what she was trying to communicate through this physical contact that he absolutely had not consented to and had no idea how to extract himself from without causing a scene in the precinct parking lot, where three of the aforementioned wolves were currently loading equipment and definitely watching.

He gave her the benefit of the doubt. She was thanking him. This was gratitude. Possibly the kind of gratitude that came from someone who hadn't had many people listen to her trauma without judgment. He could understand that. He'd had Julia, had his therapist, had {{user}}. Maybe Emma didn't have those things.

His hand came up and patted the top of her head in what was possibly the most awkward gesture of comfort ever executed by a grown man. It felt like patting Bullet, except Bullet didn't read complex emotional subtext into head pats and Bullet definitely didn't hug him in parking lots.

"You're welcome."

He stepped back—gently, because even in his discomfort, he was aware of not wanting to hurt her feelings—and put a solid two feet of space between them. "I have to go home. {{user}} will worry."

He said {{user}}'s name deliberately. A reminder. A boundary marker. I have a partner. I go home to them. This is where this ends.

Emma's face did something complicated, but Dominic was already opening his car door, already mentally three miles down the road.

---

The apartment smelled like the salsa he'd made earlier—lime and cilantro and jalapeños, the kind of fresh sharp scent that cut through the day's accumulation of stress. {{user}} had been curled into the corner of the couch, and Dominic had settled beside them with the bowl of Doritos he'd portioned out (reasonable snacking: one ounce of chips, four ounces of salsa, consumed over the course of three episodes) and given them the remote.

"Your choice," he'd said, which was his version of a romantic gesture.

The series had been one of those ensemble dramedies about people in their twenties making questionable life choices and discussing them at length. Dominic had watched without complaint, because this was marriage—bearing witness to your partner's interests even when those interests involved fictional people having conversations about feelings that could have been resolved with a single honest sentence.

He'd given {{user}} the first and last chip. Always did.

At 2:00 AM, he'd gone through his nighttime routine with the kind of ritual precision that would have made monks nod in approval. Five-step skincare: cleanse (gentle circular motions, one minute), tone (pat, don't rub), serum (three drops, pressed into skin), moisturise (massage technique his dermatologist had demonstrated), eye cream (ring finger, gentle tapping motion). Brush teeth: two minutes, electric toothbrush with pressure sensor. Lip oil: one small drop. Hand moisturiser: worked into cuticles, between fingers, up to wrists.

He wiped down the sink until the chrome gleamed, hung the hand towel with its edges perfectly aligned, and felt that small, quiet satisfaction that came from maintaining order in a fundamentally chaotic world.

When he emerged from the bathroom, {{user}} was holding his phone.

The shift in atmospheric pressure was immediate and total. {{user}}'s face held an expression Dominic had seen before—on witnesses who'd just identified their attacker, on victims realising the extent of what had been taken from them. Hurt and anger, and betrayal, all fighting for dominance.

They had asked him who Emma was and if he was cheating on them.

The word 'cheating' hit Dominic like a physical blow. His eyes—usually so carefully neutralised, so professionally blank—flared with something that was part hurt and part outrage. Not the hot anger that led to raised voices and thrown objects, but the cold fury of someone who'd built their entire life on loyalty and was being accused of the one betrayal they'd never commit.

"Where is this all coming from?" His voice remained level through sheer force of will, but there was a brittleness underneath it, ice forming over deeper water. Each word was measured, controlled, but carrying an undercurrent of genuine pain. "Let me see what's causing you to act like this."

He took the phone gently—always gently with {{user}}, even now, even when he wanted to throw it across the room, not out of anger but out of sheer frustration at the unfairness of being misunderstood—and read the message glowing accusingly in the darkness.

Emma [Read 02:15]: Thank you again for being there for me this week. The hug earlier was what I needed. You felt so warm and cosy, and despite it being only for a week, I can't help but feel like I've known you all my life. I'm sorry to message you so late I just can't sleep and I couldn't help but remember how nice your head pats felt.

Dominic's eyes widened—actually widened, his eyebrows rising in an expression of genuine bewilderment that he couldn't have faked if he'd tried. For a man who prided himself on maintaining control, on anticipating scenarios, on running through contingencies, this was so far outside his operational parameters that his face simply gave up and showed what he was feeling.

Head pats. She's texting me about head pats at two in the morning.

"This is nothing." He looked directly at {{user}}, the phone held between them like evidence exhibit A. His dark eyes were steady but carrying a plea underneath the steadiness: Please see the truth. Please know me better than this. "She's a new detective who got transferred to the precinct. Captain Morrison assigned me to show her the ropes. Our relationship is coworkers. Only goes as far as being friends, and apparently, I was being too generous with that assessment. She's clearly overreading our interactions. She shared the pain she went through in her childhood, and I shared mine as well. There was nothing more and there will be nothing more."

But even as he said it, Dominic felt the inadequacy of the words. How did you explain the human connection that got misinterpreted? How did you convey that you meant compassion, and someone else had heard romance?

He set the phone down on the bedside table—in its exact spot, because even now his hands needed something to do with their precision—and stood there in his grey sleep shirt and black cotton pants, stripped of his uniform and his usual armour.

"Just tell me what you need," he said. "And I'll do it."

The bedroom was quiet. The city hummed on outside, indifferent to the small human dramas playing out in its countless rooms. And in this particular bedroom, two people stood on opposite sides of a chasm that had opened suddenly and without warning—one trying to explain, one trying to decide whether to believe.