In the end they don't go to a cop bar, because she's driving and she wants to find a place where they will be mistaken for something else. He's good at being other people, especially when he looks like this, when he hasn't shaved for a few days and his hair is crazy, and she can barely get a word out of him. She's only slightly reassured by the fact that no one else can, either.

"Two? Smoking, or non?"

Alex glances over at Bobby, who has picked up one of the spare sets of rolled silverware and is slowly unravelling it, his fingers plucking at loose threads, debating. "Smoking."

He knows their waitress and this has stopped surprising Alex. He orders the house red for Alex and a straight scotch for himself, and when the waitress brings it he plucks out a pink and yellow umbrella with his fingers and tosses it onto the table between them. New bartender. Probably someone perky and sporting pink hair.

"Do I want to know what happened in there?"

He shakes his head slowly, twice, and with anyone else that level of deliberation would be an unmistakable sign of inebriation, but with him it only means that his brain is running about five times faster than his stumbling tongue can express. His eyes linger anywhere but her face.

"Maybe I can give you my last two shrink appointments."

He doesn't even smirk and the house red tastes like bile. "That little girl," he murmurs, and shakes his head again.

"What can I get you two?" the waitress asks, and she's perky and Eames looks up but her eyes are on Goren when she asks, and somewhere in the restaurant a knife scrapes against a fork and Alex's shoulder blades tense, hard.

"What's on special?" His grin comes thirty seconds late and he's staring at the waitress's left ear. Once she's finished, even after the theatrical press of the pen into her full lower lip while she pretends to remember what the house soup could possibly be, he orders from the menu without a single glance, for her again, but at least this time it sounds like something she could possibly like.

"And a water," Alex smiles when she hands her menu back.

"You don't like the wine." Bobby has shredded something paper between his large hands, once the waitress has moved away and Alex has already registered how many couples around them ordered steak, simply by the scrape of metal against metal.

"Someone's going to have to drive you home."

Bobby signals for another. "I can take a cab," he mutters.

"You're on my way."

"To where, your brother's house?"

She's beginning to feel like a suspect in the interrogation room, and she takes a sip of her wine. "What is it, the scent of his tobacco on my clothes or the mileage on my car?"

He smiles down into his scotch. "Your car isn't even out of impound yet."

She waves her hand. "They can keep it. I don't really want to drive a crime scene."

His smile is gone as though it never was, and he swallows the rest with a grimace. "All we do is drive crime scenes," he mutters, running his hand through his hair.