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Last night, they were in Beirut. The next morning – or afternoon if they still count time zones, they’re moving halfway across the world in a private jet, Scott bleeding somewhere in the arm and Tessa sporting a very noticeable set of handprints around her neck.
Their pilot doesn’t talk much but she said, “thirty minutes” and Tessa took that as ETA with a slight shrug from her partner as approval.
Green stains Scott’s supposedly pristine white dress shirt as a streak of red runs down the arm, complementary colors evidence of him rolling on the grassy grounds of an estate fronting an underground arms development facility. Their informant was sure about the hole in the security firewall, sure about the shifting of guards, sure about the window – what Tessa was sure about was the bullet in Dramon’s head and the downfall of his arms empire. The other things – they had to improvise just to get into Dramon’s compound.
It surely cost them five stitches, huge bruises, and a ruined dress shirt.
Scott is now sitting across from her in his undershirt, thin sheen of sweat along his hairline as he tries not to shake whilst stitching himself up. They’ve encountered worse, Tessa silently muses, watching at first. But Scott has always been squeamish about his own blood.
Somewhere between their first mission in Scotland and wherever they are now 41,000 feet in the air, she’s made the blood joke about a hundred times. All those hundred times, he’s made the same face and said the same thing.
“Your resignation letter will just say ‘tired of the blood and gore’,” she says, watching as he opens a gauze pad. He looks up at her and sees her smirk, so he gives her his own and shakes his head.
“Never quitting, T,” he replies. “Until they drain all my blood.”
“Wouldn’t you love that.”
“Yeah,” he replies distractedly, and okay. Over the years, they’ve strayed from their usual script of grim humor after every mission, but this time, she detects the underlying fear in his voice.
Fear has no place in their world – they’re spies. His phobia of blood has never hindered their jobs. Never. Ten years and she has never seen him flinch even with a rifle pressed to his temple. So if not blood, then it’s something else.
This fear – it’s something they should talk about, if they were normal people. There’s a futon and a mild-mannered doctor in a simple four-walled room back in home base to take care of that – but, and Scott has always said this, if they had to use that room and fix their shit, they would never come out of it ever again.
“Are you okay?” she asks, eyes still trained on the admittedly ugly patchwork he’s done to his arm. Tessa belatedly realizes that it’s his dominant arm with the bullet hole so she takes pity – rips off the tape and snips the stitches, ignoring his loud indignant yelp.
She sits closer and raises her brows at his protests. “I’m going to go easy on you because you took a bullet for me, even if it’s in the arm, but that’s honestly just. Shit work.”
“Thanks, Tess,” he murmurs, rolls his eyes, but she hears the sincerity in his words nevertheless.
She picks the needle up and goes through the process of sterilization with absent-minded ease before bringing it up to his skin. For a second, she flashes back to the Dramon mission and shudders as she hears the whish of the bullet through the air and into her partner’s flesh. There’s no exit wound, but Scott’s already fished the bullet out and it lies there on the table in its own pool of blood. No one’s ever said this job was always clean in any way.
He’s not looking at her, instead tracing the condensation on the window with his eyes, distracted and afraid of something that he thinks he’s hiding well.
“You know, I’m not fond of going through this horrible pain again,” he says instead, injecting as much humor as he could.
Tessa quietly chuckles. “If you’d done a passable job with it, I wouldn’t be here.”
Something must have hit something because he turns his head to pin her with a look. If they count centimeters, their faces are a good distance from each other for Tessa to notice his lashes or note the grime across his forehead. His breath touches her cheeks like the breeze in Paris as they froze their asses atop a rooftop, waiting for a mark.
He looks like he wants to say something.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he breathes, quiet.
Something else.
But he’s a spy, just like she is, and he’s got a good poker face in front of everyone. Those eyes, no matter how expressive they might be as he sees it fit a situation, they never give away the truth. Or the version of the truth that matters.
And Tessa, one could not tell her she’s not doing a lot of introspection herself. There’s a whole universe of things unsaid behind his eyes that she’s still not ready to uncover, so she accepts this manipulation of truth right in front of her face and gives him a smile.
And then he asks, “do you ever think about Bali?”
Hot sun, beaches, a cold beer for Scott and a paperback novel for her as waves crash along the shoreline by their feet – they were undercover in a high-class event and they got to enjoy a bit of the elite life for a minute. Tessa would say it was one of the best non-vacations they’ve ever had. Plus, the sex was nice, too.
So yes, she has thought about Bali a lot.
“It was a success,” she chooses to say instead.
He nods and breathes in deep. “Yeah, it was. I also had to get shot in the leg so you had to be the one to retrieve the hard drive in a booby-trapped room instead, when it should have been me.”
Tessa doesn’t know where he’s going with this. “That was three years ago. And it was a success.”
“I should have been more careful,” he whispers, lays his forehead against hers, and closes his eyes. He could be trembling, or it could be the plane, but she holds the gauze against his wound tight as if it could help. “Like I should have been today.”
Now she gets it… or some part of it. It’s amazing what one can do with the truth once they’re given the knowledge on how to bend it.
“We’re okay, Scott,” she tells him and then feels his hand on her hip. He chuckles at an unsaid joke and she smiles a bit.
They’re okay now, that’s all there is to it. He’s not dead when he’s supposed to be, jumping in front of a bullet for her like that – and she’s not dead, too, when she’s supposed to be, almost asphyxiated to death by the very man they were after.
And then, the script comes back. “I hope that’s not the only thing you remember from Bali,” she says, lips dangerously close to his ear. This time, a shiver rides down his body like a current. Tessa presses her smile to the skin of his neck and breathes him in – gunpowder and kerosene and the stupid gel he insists on using.
“Absolutely not,” he replies, low and rough and brimming with desire. “Do we… do we have time?” he’s breathing hard now as she skims down his throat and grazes her teeth lightly along his jugular. She’s always liked that particular spot.
“No,” she replies, stopping at his pulse point. When she lifts her head, she sees his eyes, dark hazel and heavy, and she hasn’t done anything yet besides kiss a couple inches of skin. She bites her lip and his eyes drop down to her mouth.
She has to kiss him.
“Maybe later, when we land,” she murmurs against his lips.
When they report this to the director, Tessa says it’s a success.