Tim Bradford, Lucy Chen: S4 Moments

Moment 9: That Scene

Pre-note: I'm watching ep. 7 Chenford clips as research for this moment. Laughing, swooning, and dying of second-hand embarrassment at the same time. Poor Tim. Ohmygosh...(you can guess for which scene...) Oh and poor Grey... I think he's actually more aware of how they feel for each other than they do themselves.

The atmosphere was alive and electric between them. Lasting all of two seconds, they forgot everything. They forgot the bet, they forgot the banter, they even forgot the job. 

"Mic me up," he'd said. Lifting his shirt, he'd gotten to show off his bronzed, muscular torso. Lucy had tried not to swallow. It wasn't like she hadn't seen it before. But in that scenario he had been lying supine on a gurney, his life hanging in the balance. At the time, her attention had been required elsewhere. So, pretty much on anything but the muscularity of chest. Now, there was less to distract her, and it was having the worst effect. Her fingers, usually so steady and capable, fumbled and slipped on the equipment. 

Tim tried to focus on anything but the strangely arousing way her fingertips scraped gently across his chest.  He had always thought that her eyes were dark brown. In the lighting of the van, it almost looked like she had no pupils. But up this close, and he had not often been this close, there was so much more to them. Not having an overly extensive vocabulary when it came to color, he didn't know how he would've explained it. They were dark brown. But... what was that one wood stain they reminded him of? 

Mahogany. That's what it was. They were dark, but light. There was a barely imperceptible tinge of red. And they were bright and intensely focused. At least they were right now. He had seen them, her eyes, when they were firing haughtiness and triumph as she pushed to break their "tie." He had seen them dancing with humor and mockery when he had caught her in the men's locker room after his first day as a sergeant. He had seen them broken and cold and sad and lost and nearly hopeless as he had held her for that brief moment in his living room. He had made a sort of promise to himself back then, that he never wanted her eyes to look like that again. It was foolish. He knew better, understood better, than most that pain would come despite what anyone did to stave it off. Despite knowing that though, it was something he held onto. For the second time in his life, he held a foolish hope next to his heart. He had a feeling this one would never go away. 

Her eyes had darted back and forth, not quite knowing if it was appropriate for her to maintain a fixed gaze, even under the pretense of doing her job. In those darted glances, her eyes met his. They barely lasted even tenths of a second. But they both could feel it.

It wasn't discomfort, it wasn't bashfulness, it wasn't awkwardness. It was something different. It shifted the mood for those measly two seconds. It was thick and meaningful. It weighed on them both. They both knew that the other felt it. It was written plainly across their expressions. They both knew what it was. It was a tension. An attraction. It was so strong, yet neither would put the right name to it, even though they both knew what it was. 

The unsteadiness of her fingers had caused her to place the equipment too high. "It's... a little too high," he said, calling out her mistake. It was his way of destroying the moment. It all came flooding back. The bet. The banter. The job (of course). She played along, happy to oblige. Also pissed off that she let the warmth and exposure of his upper body play on her so much. "I know what I'm doing," she shot back confidently before roughly tearing the equipment off, immensely satisfied with the way he groaned. 

The mic check cleared. 

Turning back, she wasn't quite sure what to make of him rolling up his sleeves, popping the collar of the jacket he claimed made him look like an idiot. 

Yeah... but a hot one, was the unbidden thought that popped into her head. She tried to scrub it out, but it remained in the background. She let a brief expression of "well, okay then," pass across her face. But then she did a double-take before he shut the van door. There was something that unsettled her. He wasn't uncertain about anything of course. There was an air of confidence in his every action. But she could pick up on a tinge of aggressiveness, an air of resignation, and the hint of a grudge. He was angry because he was taking part in the part of police work that he shunned. He held a grudge because of what it did to him. What it did to his marriage. But he was resigned to the fact that this was the job. It had to be done despite what his personal feelings about this element of the job were. 

Her psychoanalysis had to end there. Aston's car was rolling in. It was showtime.

Post-note: There was so much in this episode to play off of but this was definitely the best part. Every day it's the same cry of We Need Chenford! The writers can't seriously give us that masterpiece of a scene and then continue to tell us that it's "not gonna happen."They will metaphorically dig their own graves if that turns out to be the case. 

Also, 3 weeks free of The Rookie? Thanksgiving Break? I'm going to have way too much time on my hands...😉😍🤩

Prepare yourself for some extreme usage of creative licensing!

Last note: For any of you who liked Free Guy as much as I did, I also have a series in progress for that as well. It's under the title: IRL: Free Guy: Keys and Mills.