Chapter 3: The Saucy Standoff
The coconut oil incident stuck to them both like a faint, persistent smell. For Jake, it was the phantom taste on his tongue every time he looked at a case file and saw Amy’s neat handwriting in the margins. For Amy, it was the memory of that blindfolded, suspended moment—the world reduced to the wet heat of his mouth on her wrist—that would flash behind her eyes during budget meetings, making her pen slip.
The precinct hummed along on autopilot. Paperwork. A minor larceny. Stakeout coffee. But the air in the bullpen felt charged, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gina let them simmer for four days.
The text came through during a profoundly boring briefing on evidence cataloguing procedures.
Linetti (10:17 AM):
Round 3. Noon. Break room. Prep the main ingredients.
Jake felt his stomach do a slow, cold roll. Main ingredients. He glanced across the conference table. Amy was staring rigidly at her own phone screen, the color draining from her face. She swallowed, a hard click he could almost hear.
At 11:58, the break room was a monument to institutional grimness. The fluorescent light glared off the sticky Formica table. The vending machine in the corner emitted a low, judgmental hum. Charles was frantically wiping the whiteboard clean, sending clouds of old marker dust into the air. Rosa stood by the sink, arms crossed, a digital kitchen timer in one hand.
Gina was already seated at the head of the table, inspecting her nails. On the table in front of her were five squeezable bottles, lined up with military precision. Sriracha. Maple syrup. Soy sauce. A plastic cup of melted chocolate. A tube of wasabi paste.
“Interpretation,” Gina said, without looking up. “The human body is a vessel. For truth. For lies. For flavor. Santiago’s palate failed her last time—distracted by the canvas, wasn’t it? This is a recalibration. A test of focus under… tactile conditions.”
Jake’s mouth went dry. “Tactile conditions?”
“You’re the serving platter, Peralta,” Gina said, finally meeting his eyes. Her smile was all teeth. “Five sauces. One… delivery system. She identifies each by taste, blindfolded. Ten seconds per sauce. You…” She paused, savoring it. “You just stand there and take it.”
A stunned silence crashed over the room. Charles dropped the eraser. It hit the floor with a soft whump.
Amy made a small, choked sound. “That is… that is wildly inappropriate and unsanitary and—”
“—and the reigning champion approved the parameters,” Rosa cut in, her voice flat. “The challenge tests pain tolerance, concentration, and sensory discrimination under duress. Logically sound.”
“I didn’t agree to be the… the platter!” Jake sputtered, but even as he said it, he felt a dangerous, itching thrill kick in his chest. The competition. The absurdity of it. Amy’s mouth.
“You agreed to the games,” Gina shrugged. “The games are what I say they are. Or forfeit. Which, FYI, involves you wearing a sandwich board that says ‘I Lick Paintings’ in Times Square for an hour.”
Amy’s eyes were wide, locked on the bottle of sriracha. Jake saw her jaw tighten, that familiar, competitive fire cutting through the panic. She hated losing. He saw the calculation in her eyes: the mortification of the task versus the humiliation of forfeit. The binder-loving part of her brain was already categorizing this as an extreme oral identification exercise.
“Fine,” she said, the word clipped and tight.
“Fine,” Jake echoed, trying to sound cavalier. His heart was trying to beat its way out of his throat.
Gina gestured. “Platter, assume the position. Against the table. Santiago, blindfold. Boyle, you’re on sauce application and whiteboard scoring. Diaz, you’re time.”
Mechanically, Jake moved to the head of the table. He leaned back against it, gripping the rough edge. The cold Formica bit into his palms. He undid his belt with fingers that felt thick and stupid, pushed his jeans and boxers down just enough. The air in the room was cool, a stark contrast to the heat flooding his face and neck.
Charles approached, bottle of sriracha in hand, looking like a priest performing an obscure sacrament. “I’ll, uh, be gentle. A thin, even layer. For consistency.”
“Just do it, Charles,” Jake muttered, staring at the ceiling tiles. He couldn’t look at Amy.
Amy was tying her own blindfold—a black bandana from the gym lost-and-found. She secured it with efficient, trembling fingers. She sat in a chair directly in front of him, her posture rigid, knees pressed tightly together. Her hands were clenched in her lap.
The first squeeze of sriracha was a shock—cold, then immediately a prickling, fiery contrast. Charles made a nervous, squeaking sound as he applied it. Jake sucked in a sharp breath through his nose. The sharp, garlicky scent of chili and vinegar filled the space between him and Amy.
“Begin,” Rosa said, and hit the timer.
A high, electronic beeping filled the silence.
Amy hesitated for two full beeps. Jake could see the conflict playing out on the lower half of her face—the pursed lips, the slight tremble. Then she leaned forward, a slow, blind advance.
Her breath hit him first, warm and quick. Then the tentative, flat pressure of her tongue.
Jake’s head thumped back against the table edge. His knuckles were white where he gripped it. The sensation was a brutal, confused overload: the sting of the sauce, the soft, probing wetness of her mouth, the sheer, mind-bending reality of it. She licked, once, then twice, a clinical swipe.
“Sriracha,” she said, pulling back. Her voice was strained but clear. “Garlic, chili, vinegar.”
“Correct,” Rosa stated. “Time: seven seconds.”
Charles cheered weakly and wrote ‘1. SRIRACHA – 7s’ on the whiteboard with a squeaky marker.
There was no respite. Charles wiped the residue away with a damp paper towel that was somehow both rough and inefficient, then applied the maple syrup. This was thick, cloyingly sweet, a slow drizzle that felt obscene. The timer beeped.
Amy moved faster this time, as if eager to get it over with. Her approach was less tentative. Her mouth opened wider. The syrup was sticky, and her tongue worked differently—broad, lapping strokes to gather it. The sweetness was a jarring contrast to the previous heat. Jake made a sound, a low groan he hadn’t meant to release, from deep in his throat.
Amy froze for a half-second, her lips still against him. Then she retreated.
“Maple syrup,” she said, breathless. “Grade A. Amber.”
“Correct. Nine seconds.”
The soy sauce was salty, dark, and slick. It made everything gleam under the harsh lights. Amy’s technique was becoming practiced, efficient. She was treating him like a bizarre ice cream cone. Identify, categorize, move on. Jake was unraveling. His composure was a shirt coming apart at the seams. He was hard, painfully so, a fact that was hideously obvious and the central, unacknowledged elephant in the room. He focused on the pressure of the table edge against his spine, the squeak of Charles’s marker, anything but the warm, searching pressure between his legs.
The melted chocolate was the worst. It was still warm from the microwave. It coated him in a rich, smooth layer that smelled of cheap candy. Amy leaned in. This time, her nose brushed against him as she sought the flavor. A small, inadvertent sound escaped her—a muffled hum of concentration that vibrated through him.
Her tongue swept slowly, thoroughly. It was no longer just identification. She was tasting. Savoring the sample. The chocolate mixed with the residual salt and sweet. Jake’s hips twitched forward, a tiny, involuntary pulse.
Amy pulled back, her lips and chin smudged with chocolate. She looked wrecked. “Semi-sweet chocolate. With a… a vanilla note.”
“Correct. Eight seconds.”
Charles was sweating. “Final sauce. Wasabi.” He squeezed a generous, pale green dollop onto the head. This cold was different—a sharp, chemical alert.
The timer beeped.
Amy moved in. The second her tongue made contact, she jolted back as if electrocuted, a sharp gasp ripping from her throat. The wasabi’s pungent, sinus-clearing fire was immediate and aggressive. Tears welled instantly under her blindfold, tracing dark lines down her powdered cheeks.
“T-ten seconds,” Rosa reminded, her voice cutting through Amy’s choked coughing.
Panicked, blind, reacting to the searing pain in her mouth, Amy dove back in, trying to get a clean taste. But she was disoriented. Her movements were frantic. Jake, lost to the building, agonizing tension of the last few minutes, instinctually bucked forward at the sudden, messy contact.
He thrust into her mouth.
It was less than an inch. A fraction of a second. But it was unmistakable. A purposeful movement. Not an accident.
Amy made a wet, startled sound around him. Her hands flew up from her lap, hovering in the air, unsure where to land.
Jake froze, mortification washing over him like icy water.
The timer let out one final, long beep. Time was up.
For five seconds, there was absolute silence, broken only by the hum of the fridge and Amy’s ragged, tearful breathing. The wasabi dripped, neglected.
Charles stood, marker poised, his mouth hanging open.
Rosa’s eyebrow was arched nearly to her hairline.
Gina leaned forward, resting her chin on her steepled fingers. Her gaze was predatory, fascinated. “Well,” she drawled. “A definitive failure to identify. But I’d call that a… conclusive auxiliary data point.”
The word hung in the air. Conclusive.
Amy’s hands finally rose to her face. With shaky, furious fingers, she ripped the blindfold off. Her eyes were red-rimmed, streaming, but the look she fixed on Jake wasn’t one of pain from the wasabi.
It was pure, undiluted, terrifying clarity.
She didn’t say a word. She shoved her chair back, the legs screeching against the linoleum. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, stared at the chocolate and wasabi smeared there, then turned and walked out of the break room, slamming the door so hard the bottles on the table rattled.
Jake stood there, exposed and freezing, the evidence of everything running in sticky, cold trails down his thighs. The ghost of her mouth, angry and final, seemed to brand him.
Gina finally broke the silence. “Score it as a failure, Boyle. But make a big, starry note next to it.” She stood, smoothing her dress. “Game theory isn’t about the answers you get. It’s about the reactions you provoke.” She gave Jake a long, appraising look. “You just provoked a seismic event, Peralta. Clean yourself up. You’ve got paperwork to do.”
She left. Rosa followed, pausing only to give a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Not of approval. Of acknowledgment. A mission parameter had been met.
Charles was still staring at the whiteboard. “Jake… buddy…” he whispered, his voice full of awe and horror. “That was… that was a statement.”
Jake finally moved, pulling his clothes up with clumsy hands. The sauces were a cold, sticky mess. He felt hollowed out, scraped raw. He hadn’t just lost the round.
He’d crossed a line. And the look in Amy’s eyes—that wasn’t the look of someone who was going to let him pretend it hadn’t happened. The game, he realized with a sinking, thrilling dread, was now completely, terrifyingly real.
The game, he realized with a sinking, thrilling dread, was now completely, terrifyingly real. He stood alone in the break room, the aftertaste of cheap chocolate and searing wasabi clinging to the back of his throat, a pathetic counterpart to the cooling mess on his skin. The silence was a physical thing, broken only by the vending machine’s monotonous hum.
He moved stiffly to the sink, running the tap until the water steamed.Paper towels were insufficient. He scrubbed at himself with rough, disposable brutality, the brown and green streaks dissolving down the drain. His reflection in the stainless steel backsplash was fragmented, warped—a man who’d crossed a line and didn’t know how to get back.
The door clicked open.He froze, a sopping wad of paper towels in his hand. Amy stood in the doorway, her face washed clean but her eyes still puffy. She’d taken off her blazer.Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her.“Hey,” she said. Her voice was soft, drained of its earlier fury.“Santiago. Look, I’m—” he started, the apology automatic.“Stop.” She held up a hand, cutting him off. She took a deep breath, her gaze dropping to the floor for a second before meeting his again. “I’m sorry I stormed out.It was… unprofessional.”
Jake blinked. This was not the script.“You’re sorry? Amy, I basically—”
“It was a game,” she said, the words deliberate, as if she were convincing herself. “A stupid, juvenile, Gina-created game.The parameters were absurd. We both… participated.” She took a step into the room, her posture still rigid.“And now you’re covered in… everything. And I… contributed to that.”
She gestured vaguely toward him, her cheeks flushing. “It’s a biohazard.Practically. And it’s… it’s already been in my mouth, so…” The logic was pure Amy, a wild, flimsy structure built to justify the unavoidable. “What’s the harm in cleaning it off properly? With actual soap.”
She moved past him to the cabinet under the sink, pulling out a bottle of industrial-grade liquid hand soap and a clean roll of paper towels.Her movements were efficient, clinical. She wet a bundle of towels under the hot water, applied a dollop of soap, and turned to him.
“This is just… post-event sanitation,” she stated, not looking at his face.Her first touch was a shock. The paper towel was hot, rough.Her hand, guiding it, was firm and sure. She worked with a detached focus, cleaning the sticky syrup from his abdomen, the darkened soy sauce from his thighs. The room smelled sharply of lemony cleaner, cutting through the sweet and spicy ghosts of the sauces.
Jake stood utterly still, his breath held.This was worse, in a way. The frantic energy of the game was gone, replaced by this quiet, devastating practicality.Her knuckles brushed his skin. He flinched.“Sorry,” she murmured, not stopping.
She rinsed the towel, re-soaped it.Her focus dipped lower. Her other hand came up, not to touch him, but to steady herself against his hip.The contact was electric.Jake’s stomach clenched.
“This is weird,” he whispered, the words escaping him.
“It’s necessary,” she replied, her voice a tight wire. She cleaned him with swift, thorough strokes, her eyes fixed on the task. The intimacy was monstrous, worse than the game because it was voluntary and carried the weight of her apology.When she finished, she turned and threw the used towels in the trash with finality.
“There,” she said, washing her own hands at the sink, scrubbing vigorously. “Sanitized.”
She turned off the water and faced him, drying her hands on her slacks. The air between them crackled, heavy with everything unsaid—the taste of coconut oil, the blindfold, the accidental, unmistakable thrust.Her eyes were dark and impossible to read.
“We have the Feldman larceny reports to finish,” she said, her voice returning to its normal, workaday tone. “Captain Holt expects them by end of day.”
“Captain Holt expects them by end of day,” she repeated, but neither of them moved.The hum of the vending machine seemed louder now. Jake could feel the hot water tightening his skin, a clean contrast to the sticky memory of her tongue.
He was painfully, undeniably hard. The clinical cleaning hadn’t helped; her firm, efficient hands had only anchored the feeling, grounding the wild abstraction of the game in a stark, physical reality. It tented his boxers against the damp fabric of his jeans.
Amy’s eyes dipped, then snapped back to his face. A flicker of something—not annoyance, not victory—passed behind them. She bit her lower lip, a nervous habit he’d seen a hundred times during interrogations.“Right.The reports.” She didn’t look at the door.
“Yeah,” Jake managed, his voice rough.She took a step closer, her gaze unwavering. “Jake.” His name, in that tone, was a switchblade clicking open. “I can see that.” She gestured with a slight tilt of her chin.“It’s… a biological response. To the stimuli.”
“A very persistent biological response,” he admitted, the joke falling flat in the thick air between them.Amy nodded, as if confirming a scientific hypothesis. “It’s going to be a distraction.” She paused, her own breathing a quiet counter-rhythm to the machine’s drone. “An impediment to workflow.”
“Probably.”
She looked at the closed door, then back at him.Her decision seemed to calcify in real time. “If it’s just a mechanical issue,” she said, her voice dropping to a pragmatic murmur, “then it has a mechanical solution.” She met his eyes, and the flustered competitive was gone, replaced by a terrifying, focused calm.“We have work to do. So if you’re quick about it.”
The offer hung there, stripped of pretense.It wasn’t seduction. It was expediency.A wild, Amy Santiago-esque loophole. Jake’s mind blanked, all clever retorts erased by the sheer, audacious logistics of her proposal. “Quick,” he echoed, the word a dry leaf in his mouth.“Yes. Efficient.” She knelt, the movement decisive, and the brittle classroom tile clicked under her knees.There was no fanfare, no sly grin. Her hands went to his belt buckle with the same practical determination she used to clear a jam in her service weapon.The rasp of the zipper was deafening.He braced a hand against the sink edge. Her breath, warm and even, ghosted over him a second before her mouth did. There was no hesitant exploration this time.Her approach was direct, purposeful, a means to an end. The wet heat of her was an immediate, shocking contrast to the cool, lemony air of the break room.
She worked with a steady, rhythmic pace that was utterly, devastatingly effective. Her hands cupped him, providing pressure and angle.It was clinical and breathtakingly intimate all at once. Jake stared at the water-stained ceiling tile above the sink, a tiny crack mapping a continent he couldn’t name.His knuckles were white on the porcelain.
The sensations from the game—the sweet, the salty, the burn—were overwritten, compressed into this single, focused point of contact. He could hear the soft, wet sounds, could feel the slight scratch of her ponytail against his thigh.He bit down on the inside of his cheek, hard, to keep from making a sound.
It didn’t take long. The buildup had been ongoing for days, through coconut oil and blindfolds and searing wasabi.Tension coiled, snapped. He came with a shudder he felt in his teeth, his free hand coming down to rest, clumsy and gentle, on the crown of her head.Amy pulled back smoothly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She stood up in one fluid motion, her knees popping softly. She didn’t look at him, but turned to the sink again, ran the water, and rinsed her mouth once, twice. She spat neatly into the drain.“Okay,” she said, turning off the tap. She wiped her hands on a fresh paper towel, her movements crisp. “Now we can focus.” She glanced at him, her professional mask perfectly back in place, though her lips were slightly swollen. “The Feldman files are on my desk. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”
She walked out of the break room, the door swinging shut behind her with a soft sigh.
Jake leaned heavily against the sink, his body humming with a strange, empty exhaustion.The “mechanical issue” was resolved. The air smelled of lemon soap and nothing else. He zipped his jeans, fastened his belt, the motions automatic. His reflection in the steel looked vaguely stunned, like a man who’d just survived a very precise, very bewildering natural disaster.He had five minutes. He took a deep, ragged breath.The game, he understood now, was never really in the break room. It was in the calm, impossible aftermath. It was in walking to her desk and pretending his world hadn’t just tilted permanently on its axis. He pushed off from the sink, his legs feeling both shaky and solid.
The walk to the bullpen was the longest of his life.