Chapter Text
Not Telling
“I’m not gonna show it to you,” Juliet said in a teasing yet firm voice as she and Ethan came up behind Magnum as he sat at the bar. La Mariana was back to at least having some customers but sadly for Rick it wasn’t exactly booming.
“Come on! It’s just a story!”
“Not happening,” she said cheekily. Magnum liked it when she used that tone with him. He didn’t like it when she did it with Ethan.
“Oh come on! I’ve taken a bullet out of you and you one out of me. That gotta be enough for you to trust me with your fairy tale!” Ethan insisted, further intriguing Magnum.
“What you guys talking about?” he asked, spinning around on his bar stool.
“Juliet won’t let me read her fairy tale,” Ethan said, nodding to Rick behind the bar.
“Your fairy tale?” Magnum asked, a little confused, because well...this was Juliet Higgins. Fairy tales weren’t really something he associated with his badass no-nonsense partner.
Juliet sighed. “It was just this creative writing class I took last summer. Ethan saw the folder on my tablet when I was showing him some pictures of my old flat in England.”
Magnum felt unreasonably jealous of the fact that she’d shown Ethan pictures of something from her past. Something she’d never showed him.
He also hated the possibility of why she might have done so. Showing how she liked to decorate her home...and how she would like to possibly decorate one with Ethan in the future.
Of course, that wouldn’t happen.
Like he’d told her in the jungle when she’d just started going out with Ethan, the odds were that she and Ethan would last weren’t good. Were they? They had been going out for four months now. He’d even stopped counting the dates (after fourteen, it just seemed silly. Okay, maybe he still was counting...and maybe this one made 19).
“You never showed me any pictures of your apartment!” He was unable not to point out. “And you never told me you took a creative writing class.”
“Why would I have?” she said, in her normal Higgy way. “Besides, it was before we became partners. And I wasn’t very good.”
“Didn’t you say you’d the only class you ever got less than B in was Art?” Ethan said, sitting to Magnum’s left. "You can't have been that bad!"
“I don’t know,” Magnum retorted as Higgy sat on his right, looking a bit annoyed. He smiled into his beer, kind of happy that he was between the two. No annoying touch-feel going down for a bit. “I can’t see it. Higgins writing fiction?”
“Of course you can’t,” she said, pulling a napkin from the dispenser. “Then again, you can hardly be called an avid literature critic now can you?”
“Hey!” he said, a little offended. “I like to read.”
“Books in which you are the main character performing unreasonably heroic deeds? Course you do,” she said, then paused, realizing she’d just outed him as the White Knight to Ethan.
Ethan didn’t seem to have noticed or cared, still on Juliet’s literary endeavors and his exclusion from them. “I can’t see why you wouldn’t let me read it. It’s just a story right? Didn’t you let people in your class read it?”
“That was different,” she said, looking uncomfortable as she smiled at Rick as he put a beer in front of her. “They were strangers.”
“Oh come on!” Ethan said.
She looked at him, frowning. “I don’t see why you’re so curious!”
“Course he’s curious,” Magnum said, feeling quite intrigued himself. “What’s the story about?”
“The assignment was to write her life as if it had been a fairy tale,” Ethan said, while Higgy gave Magnum a look.
Right, he thought, quite understanding why she wouldn’t maybe want Ethan to read it. Only it couldn’t contain too many details about her spy life if she’d let perfect strangers read it for critiques. But it was quite possible Richard - as the love of her life - made an appearance, wasn't it? Possibly it even ended with her getting her happily ever after with him and never coming to Hawaii. That thought made him feel bad, sad, for her. Oddly enough for himself too. He also wanted to try to helper to get Ethan to drop the subject.
“Well that sounds kind of boring - unless you wrote about the missing beer case,” he said, turning to Ethan, ready to provide a distraction from the topic via a long-winded case-retelling. “She tell you about that? It was pretty great. It all started when...”
After, when he parked the Ferrari in the driveway of Robin’s Nest she uncharactisually said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Distracting Ethan,” she got out of the car.
“No problem,” he said, wanting to ask about the fairy tale himself. Wanting to see if he -who knew her better than anyone else in the world- might be permitted to read it. He debated with himself. Would she let him? He wanted to think she would. But if she said no? That might hurt more than he was ready for. So he went for something else. “How about you pay me back by showing me some pictures of your apartment?”
“You want to look at pictures of my old flat?” she sounded kind of baffled. Which maybe made sense. Home decor wasn’t normally one of his biggest interests…
“Course I do.” He began following her towards the main house. “I bet you have hundred-year-old portraits and a bunch of suits of armor. Maybe a ghost? And like a billiard room. And a-”
“It was not a castle, Thomas, it was a flat in central London,” she said, slightly smirking though. “No suits of armor.”