Disclaimer: I do not own the characters in this work of fiction and no profit, monetary or otherwise, is being made from the writing and posting of this.
A/N: Written for the hc_bingo square - broken bone (livejournal). Characters might be considered slightly OOC. This is pre-slash.
Symbiosis
"When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it." - Edgar Watson Howe
The dictionary defines symbiosis as, "A cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between two people or groups." In my line of work, symbiosis is how friendship is defined. If you can't count on someone to have your back when the going gets tough, well, you wind up injured or dead. Neither option puts you on the winning end of a situation.
You also don't want to be questioning your relationship with someone who holds his life in your hands when you're working closely together on a case. Especially not when you're on a boat in the middle of shark-infested waters and a guy's got a gun to your head and your symbiotic 'partner' is negotiating for your life.
Needless to say, you need to know that the people you are working with have a reason to keep you alive 'before' you find yourself at their mercy on the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore the mutual beneficial aspect of the symbiotic relationship is key.
"Look, like I said, my friend and I just came out here to fish. We don't want any trouble," Jesse says, holding his hands out wide and smiling guilelessly.
To the outsider, it would look like Jesse was nervous: the wringing of his hands and wiping of sweaty palms onto his jeans went a long way toward selling that to the men who'd boarded our boat with the intent of robbing us. Pirates. Minus the eye patch and parrot on the shoulder. The swashbucklers, who were waving guns at us and threatening to kill me, were not any less convincing dressed in modern-day clothing: stylish jacket vests and corduroys.
But, to the trained eye, it was plain to see that Jesse was assessing the situation, taking in every little detail – from the contemporary pirates' speedboat (far more powerful than the yacht I had managed to borrow for our little operation) to the artillery they had at their command (two Reider Automatic Rifles a favorite of pirates from Somalia , a grenade launcher and the Smith &Wesson that pirate number one was pressing to my temple) to the way the pirate captain kept shooting sidelong glances at the horizon as though nervous about something.
The pirate not pointing a gun at my head raises an eyebrow and smiles; it isn't a friendly, how-do-you-do kind of smile, it's a, you know I could kill you in your sleep and not bat an eye, kind of smile.
"Where's your tackle and bait?" He jerks a chin in the general direction of the stern, and I watch as Jesse visibly deflates, letting his hands fall to his side and his gaze drop to the deck.
Not good. If you're ever caught in a lie by a pirate on the high seas, it's imperative that you do your best to come up with a more convincing lie, one that has some thread of truth in it. One that you can sell, not only to the pirate who's holding you hostage, but also to yourself. If you don't, you will die.
Pirates are ruthless, calculated individuals. The only thing they care about is making a profit through any means necessary. If you have nothing of monetary value to offer them, your life becomes a bargaining chip. If your life has no financial value, then you are dead.
Jesse sighs, and the look that he gives the pirates is one of desperation mixed with despair. His brown eyes fill with tears and his bottom lip quivers. He looks as though he's lost both his best friend and his puppy in one fell swoop. If the man hadn't made a solid career out of spying, he'd have made a fine actor.
"Look," Jesse says and he sighs again, heavily, and then he blushes, and awkwardly scrubs at the back of his neck with a hand, "I…"
The pirate presses the gun harder into my temple, and I'm silently praying that whatever Jesse's got planned is a hell of a lot better than the fishing lie, because my life is just a click away from ending in something less than a blaze of glory.
"We don't have time for this. Let's just take whatever they've got and get out of here."
"Relax, we've got time, I want to hear pretty boy's story," pirate number one says, and at this point, I want to hear Jesse's story too.
"Jefferson's gang's on its way," the captain, who hasn't even left their pretty little speedboat, says, and he's looking even more anxious now. "We've got to move."
Pirates running from other pirates, not a good sign. Especially not when you're sitting on what amounts to enough explosives to blow up a drug den in Cuba. What we don't need right now is a gunfight. Jesse better have a good enough lie in place that will, not only get them off the hook, but will leave them and their boat intact.
"Please, just, please don't kill us," Jesse says, and I inwardly groan. His voice is a mixture of pleading and whining. "Here, take this." He thrusts a wad of cash into the pirate's hand. "Just don't hurt my boyfriend."
Boyfriend? I can't keep my jaw from dropping, and it takes a couple of seconds for my brain to start working again. Dropping a bombshell like this on your partner when his life is on the line is not considered good manners.
"Boyfriend?" The pirate looks between the both of us and smirks, shaking his head.
The gun digs into my temple and I swallow the retort on my lips. 'Kill me now', I think, but I say, "Yeah, we were just looking for a little privacy. Look, I've got a family, if my wife finds out about this…"
The gun leaves my temple and slams hard into my gut, and then, as I'm gasping for air, I feel the pirate's hands rifling through my pockets.
"People like you make me sick," he says, and he grabs my hair, pulls my head back so that I can see into his cold, blue eyes, "stringing a wife and kids along while you keep a fuck buddy on the side. Man up. If you're going to be a queer, be a fucking queer."
The gun slams into my gut once more and I double over in pain, concentrating on trying to catch my breath. He slips the watch off my wrist, and then, still holding my head up by my hair, he smashes my head down on his knee and I can feel the bones in my nose breaking, blood gushing out.
"Stay right there pretty boy," the pirate who's holding me up, says, and I can see Jesse moving out of the corner of my eye, "I'm going to teach your boyfriend here a little lesson, and then we'll be on our way."
"Pete, we ain't got time for this," one of the pirates says, but either Pete doesn't hear or he just doesn't care, because the gun is suddenly nuzzling me in a very private place, and the man's fingers are digging into my scalp.
My head's swimming and all I can think is that my life is completely in Jesse's hands, and last time I checked, he wasn't exactly all that happy with me after the last case that we worked together.
He got shot. It wasn't my fault, but, when you're in my line of work, fault is grey area at best. Because I had hired Jesse to work on the case, the blame lies on me.
"Please don't do this."
Jesse sounds very convincing, and though I can't see him, I think he must be putting on a real show for the pirates, because while the pirate doesn't loosen his grip on me, the gun does move and I can breathe a little easier.
"If it's money you want, I can get you money."
"Tell you what lover boy; I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to kill this piece of shit boyfriend of yours."
The sharp edge of a knife replaces the cool metal of the gun, and all I can think is, 'Shit,' as the knife is jabbed through the fabric of my jeans and is twisted into the flesh of my inner thigh. I hiss in pain, gulping convulsively as my head is craned back and the knife is pressed against my neck, just enough to draw blood.
"No, please don't kill him. Look, I'll do anything you want, give you whatever you want, just don't, don't kill Marcel."
Jesse sounds convincing, like maybe the man has been harboring some unrequited feelings for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. He needs to sell his act, make the pirates believe that he will do whatever it takes to keep Marcel, his secret boyfriend, alive.
"Come on Pete, either kill the man or don't, but we've got to get going, I can see Jefferson's boat."
I can hear the high-pitched whine of a twin-engine boat in the distance over the sound of blood rushing to my ears and I hope to god that Jesse has something more up his sleeve than the story of two star-crossed gay lovers meeting clandestinely on a yacht. The knife slices into the flesh just above my clavicle and I let out a string of curses. It isn't deep, but once again, Pete, the pirate, twists the knife, making the wound larger, and drawing out the pain.
Pete didn't just want to kill me. He wanted to make me suffer. Which begged the question – who screwed Petey over? If I was a betting man, I'd have wagered that it was his daddy, but I wasn't exactly in a position to make any bets.
"Stop, you're hurting him."
The sound of a scuffle is followed by the feel of Jesse's hands on my back and shoulder. His hands are warm and anchor me. He's really hamming up the part of the distressed boyfriend, worried about his lover, begging for his life to be spared.
I almost laugh, but Pete slams my head against the edge of the yacht and I see darkness, punctuated by bright white dots that blink in and out of existence. Opening my eyes doesn't dispel the dizziness and I focus on the feel of Jesse's hands, now centered on my back.
"How are you doing?"
Jesse's whisper tickles the hair on the back of my neck, and I try not to squirm, not to let my face register that Jesse's spoken to me so that the goon who's hell-bent on killing me doesn't realize that Jesse's talking to me.
In lieu of speaking, I shift my weight, hopefully conveying that I'm fine. Because, I am. Fine. Dizziness and shallow knife wounds aside, I've been in worse situations before.
"Do you trust me?" Jesse asks. His voice is a ghost against my ear, lips touching, just barely.
I nod, because I haven't been stuck with the knife in the past couple of seconds and I can finally see straight. When there's a lull in the violence, you have a fighting chance. You have to take every chance you can get.
What Jesse does next, however, is not something that I've been trained to expect. When out in the field, one of the keys to survival is adaptation. Survival of the fittest is not just a triathlon; it's a scientific paradigm upon which all life is based. Only those who are capable of adapting to the circumstances that life throws their way will live to face the next obstacle. But, when your partner throws a curve ball your way like the one Jesse lobs at me, sometimes you just don't know how to react, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It begins as a subtle pressure against the back of my neck, gentle and chaste. And, at first I'm just confused, blinking at the setting sun, trying to make sense of just what it is that's happening. It's not the kind of pressure that I've come to anticipate in working with Jesse. Fi, yes. She's always been full of surprises, and to her, violence, particularly when it's been enacted upon me, has always served as foreplay.
When Jesse's lips move, his tongue darting out between them to lick the back of my neck, I can't help it, I shudder. Touch, particularly that which is intimate, elicits a natural reaction from the recipient. An innate reaction that you don't necessarily have control over.
Jesse's tongue on the back of my neck – wet and hot – triggers a chain reaction of sorts in my nervous system. One that I had little control over, particularly given my current situation – being held captive by a small band of pirates, bleeding, and still slightly dizzy from a blow to the head. I moan and my fingers grope at nothing, trying to find purchase on something to ground myself.
Harsh laughter that sounds like it's a million miles away doesn't deter Jesse. The man's lips aren't soft and pliant like Fiona's, they're warm and wind-chafed as they scratch their way along the stubble of my jaw. My toes curl, and I can feel his kiss unfurling something heretofore hidden in the pit of my stomach.
Jesse's whispering something in my ear, and I don't quite catch it over the pounding of my heart. When your partner, the man holding your life in his hands, is kissing you, while simultaneously communicating an escape plan, it's a little difficult to stay focused on the here and now. Especially when his kiss seems to have awoken something inside of you that you'd thought had been buried long ago. Back when you were in middle school and David Cooper invited you to his house to 'study', and you weren't really sure about it, but you weren't all that sure about girls either, so you said, yes, and ended up on his bed, panting and blushing, and you left his house with a hickey on your neck that lasted for a week.
"Fuck," I gasp, but it comes out sounding funky, and it feels like my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest through my nose.
Broken noses hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, and they seriously impede your respiratory system, making it difficult to breathe properly. Add kissing to the mix, or rather, being kissed to the mix, and you might as well give up on the concept altogether.
Jesse's hands move from my back, and I fall to my ass, wondering when the pirate loosened his grip on my hair, and what the hell it was that my partner was trying to tell me earlier. Jesse's fingers find their way up underneath my shirt, touching, caressing, and making my skin quiver and my heart race. His thumbs, calloused from working with guns, brush against my nipples and I arch back into him, and then turn so that we're facing each other and I can get my hands up beneath his shirt.
When you're on a borrowed yacht that has been overtaken by pirates, your partner's tongue is in your ear making your skin tingle, and his fingers are stroking the scar tissue from a knife wound that you'd forgotten about years ago, it's a little too much to ask that you be coherent. Add a concussion that you'd initially misdiagnosed into the mix, and you haven't got a hope in hell of getting out of this alive unless your partner carries you through it.
"Michael," the dropping of the alias, Marcel, should worry me, because I can sense the presence of the pirates, even if I can't see them.
But, my mind is wrapped up in trying to understand just when and how Jesse's lips found mine. His teeth are teasing my bottom lip and his eyes are boring into mine. There's a look in them that I know I should recognize. I know he's trying to communicate something to me, but I just don't get it.
Eyes, the windows to the soul, are great communication tools when you are surrounded by bad guys and are not able to speak freely. That is, when all parties are thinking clearly and not impeded by a head injury and emotions that war with logic.
"Are you with me?" Jesse asks, and I nod even though I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about.
When your partner is kissing you like you've never been kissed before and his fingers are pulling at the band of your jeans, playing the edge of the fabric between his thumb and forefinger, lucidity is highly overrated. A boatful of pirates and explosives that could blow you a mile high seems trivial by comparison, and all you want is for his hands to find purchase on your ass, barring the alternative.
"On my count of three," he says, and I follow his lips when he pulls away, capture them in a greedy kiss of my own. Ignoring the painful throbbing of my broken nose, and Jesse's sharp intake of breath, I suck on his lower lip, enjoying the taste of sea salt and bitter aftershave.
"You still doubting those two are lovers?" one of the pirates asks, and I have to admit I'm wondering that right about now too, because when Jesse doesn't pull back from me, but lets me continue to nibble on his lip and then his neck, it feels like we've done this countless times before, and not just as a live-saving ruse.
"Jesse," I murmur.
My mouth is tight against his throat, and I can feel his pulse – strong and steady – drumming beneath my lips. He groans in response, and I lick a trail up his neck, leaving off just beneath his chin.
"One," Jesse breathes, and he kisses me on the forehead.
"Think we should tape this?" one of the pirates asks.
"Two," Jesse's breath hitches, and his pulse quickens beneath the palm of my hand. His teeth graze my neck and I lean into him.
"And what, put it on YouTube?"
"Three," Jesse says, and then I can feel myself being lifted, Jesse's hands moving up beneath my armpits, dislodging my hands from his chest, and he kisses me on the mouth, even as he propels me into the pirate who had his heart set on killing me.
When your partner tosses you into the arms of your enemy after delivering a mind-blowing kiss, you kind of feel like you've lost your center. You're off-balance, and a little stumbling is to be expected. A lot of stumbling, if you've suffered a severe blow to the head as well.
And apparently that had been part of Jesse's plan all along, as the pirate in question, in his attempt to keep me from bowling him over, winds up overcorrecting, and falls with a rather impressive, 'splash,' into the ocean. I lean over the edge of the rail, looking for the fallen pirate, but the sky's growing darker by the second – the sun sets quickly over the Atlantic – and all I can see is the white frothing of disturbed water where the man has disappeared beneath its surface.
"Jesse." I growl the man's name and lurch over the rail as a large wave rolls beneath the yacht causing me to lose my balance. My hands grip the cold metal tightly, but the railing's wet with ocean spray, and it's only a matter of time before I too plunge into the dark, moody waters.
The pop, pop, pop of gunshots, and their echoing retort – sound is amplified on the open water – startle me and I attempt to pull myself up, but I'm slipping. When you find yourself dangling from the side of a yacht over increasingly choppy waters, and bullets are flying at you from various angles, you are officially screwed, unless, of course, your partner takes that moment to pull you up and over the edge.
"You okay?"
Jesse's brow is creased with concern and his hands are all over me, but not in the way they were before. This time he's assessing me for injuries, his hands running over the constricting fabric of my black tee-shirt.
I'm sitting with my back to the rail, Jesse's crouched down in front of me and I can only nod. When your thinking has been compromised due a head injury, the simpler you keep things, the better. Yes or no questions only, and minimize movement.
"Stay here, okay?"
Jesse's hand is warm and stabilizing against my chest, holding me in place, even as I attempt to move. When you have a head injury, you aren't exactly thinking clearly and it's up to your partner to do the complex thinking for you.
"How many are there?" I ask.
"I took one and you took out the other pirate that boarded the yacht. The captain was killed by the Jefferson crew; I counted five, maybe six pirates on the crew total."
"Help me up." I raise a hand and Jesse shakes his head.
"No man, you aren't in any condition to fight of a band of pirates. I got this," Jesse says, and then he pushes my hand aside and leans in and kisses me, quick and with just a little bit of bite. "Trust me?"
When your partner is giving you a look that says: 'If you don't trust me, you'll break my heart,' it's difficult not to nod and trust that he's got everything under control. He presses a gun into my hand, and exchanges a grim smile with me.
When it's just you and your partner in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, against an unknown enemy, and one of you is effectively down for the count, the odds are not stacked in your favor. But, when you're a burned spy, the odds are rarely stacked in your favor, and you learn to cope with that.
Surprise is an excellent tactic to use if you've got it on your side. There's no telling how much the second pirate gang knows about us, or what those who'd held Jesse and I captive for the past half an hour or so might've told them, but chances are that they aren't expecting a yacht armed to the teeth with explosives.
"Go," I say, waving the gun at him.
He raises an eyebrow and then shakes his head and grins.
"Stay," he says, pointing at me, and then, before I can answer, he's turned, disappearing into the darkness.
I double-check my weapon, making sure there're enough bullets in it and that it's secure. No matter who hands you a weapon, you always check it yourself. Too many people have been injured because they've not taken the time to secure their own weapon or because they've blindly trusted the person who handed it to them. It's not a matter of offending your benefactor – whether friend, partner, or acquaintance – it's a matter of personal safety. Always check your weapon.
The sound of gunfire, much too close for comfort, has me gripping my gun tightly, and trained in front of me. I have to trust that Jesse's got things under control on his part, that he's safe. He's a trained spy, just like me, maybe even a little better than me in some respects, but knowing that is one thing, and believing what your eyes can't see is a whole different matter
I try to keep my mind from going down the list of dire possibilities for the sudden silence that follows a spectacular burst of firepower, and the distinct lack of Jesse popping up in front of me declaring that the coast is clear. But given the increasing darkness now that the sun's completely set, and the eerie silence, save for the water lapping at the hull of the boat, it's difficult to do, and I find myself thinking the worst, that Jesse's been killed and the pirates are on their way to kill me too.
A head injury really messes with your mind. You don't think clearly, and it can play tricks on you, make you see and hear things that aren't really there, and in situations like this, when you are in the dark about your partner's plan and what is happening, it can cause you to mistake your partner for the enemy.
Especially when you're faced with two men clad all in black, both of similar height and you can't see either of their faces clearly. It's really bad when they both begin grappling for a gun that skitters just out of reach of the both of them, and your nose is swelling like a watermelon, compromising your vision.
A broken nose not only causes your nasal cavity to grow twice its natural size, but it can also make the skin around your eyes balloon. Breathing through your nose becomes a serious problem, and give up on seeing clearly. Your vision tunnels and you lose peripheral vision. At best, you're a liability in the field. At worst, you wind up getting your partner killed.
Still, when there're too men fighting for control of a weapon, and you aren't certain which one is going to win out, injured or not, you can't just sit there and watch it all unfold. You have to weigh in on the fight to ensure that your man wins out.
Trouble is that I have no idea which one is Jesse and which one is the pirate, and I don't know if another armed goon is going to come around the corner in the time it will take me to determine who is who. You have a couple of options when push comes to shove in situations like this. You can give a shout out to your partner, guaranteeing a fifty-fifty percent chance that the one who turns will actually be him. But, not only will you be giving your location away, you'll also be a distraction to your partner, and that will either get him killed or seriously injured.
Or, you can get off your ass, concussed and aching like hell or not, and sneak around to gain some kind of leverage and a better angle to assess the situation. It's difficult to be stealthy on a yacht at the best of times. Rough waters and a compromised equilibrium just make it that much more difficult.
The sound of a gunshot reaches me before I can manage to get to the duo. The pair doesn't stop fighting, though, and I have no idea which of them to point my weapon at.
"Jesse?" I give up the element of surprise, and pray that the guy who's got the other in what looks like a pretty impressive chokehold is Jesse and that I haven't fucked things up.
"I could really use a hand here."
The man that Jesse's got in a chokehold is fighting back valiantly. He's digging his nails into the flesh of Jesse's forearm, drawing blood. The man thrashes around in an attempt to free himself, bucking up against Jesse's hold. As I near the pair, I can see that Jesse's taken a bullet to the arm. The blood glistens black in the moonlight, and his request for help wasn't just for show.
"Fuck," Jesse lets out a stream of vulgarities.
The butt of my gun crashes down on the pirate's skull before I even realize that I've moved, and Jesse's hands – being this close to the other man makes me realize just how big they are – are lightning quick as he twists the pirate's neck. It's a clean break.
There isn't a discernible 'crack' like it's portrayed on TV or in the movies. Being a hands breath away, I hear nothing, but I know that Jesse hears that almost inaudible 'snap' and feels the man's death tremble before he goes limp in his arms.
Taking another man's life is not easy, no matter how simple it may seem to an onlooker. Even if you are killing one of the 'bad guys', there's still a high price to pay, and I know that the death of this pirate, as well as the other's he's had to kill tonight, will weigh on his conscience. Just because you are doing the right thing, doesn't mean that you don't feel guilty about it afterwards. Death is not an easy card to deal.
The man simply goes boneless in death and Jesse crabwalks his way from underneath the dead man.
I blink down at Jesse who slumps back and just breathes. He presses a hand to his bleeding forearm, and I crawl over to him, because for some reason I'm on my knees, and just when the hell did that happen?
"How's the pirate situation?" the question has to be asked.
When you're facing an enemy that you're unfamiliar with, and both of you are injured, you need to know how many more of that enemy might still be lurking around.
"I got them all," Jesse says.
His eyes are closed, and he's gasping for breath, but he manages to sit up with my help.
"How many in all?"
"Six," Jesse says.
"Look man, I'm…"
"Just…don't," Jesse cuts my apology short, and reaches for my hand with fingers slick with blood. "Just, we've got a job to finish, and I did what I had to do, and you weren't in any condition to help, so just don't."
When your partner sums things up so eloquently, and fuck it all, it isn't about the words, it's the sentiment behind the words that counts, you have no choice but to let things drop, and give the man the mental space that he needs. Especially when you aren't exactly sure what it was that you were going to say in the first place, because sorry just doesn't seem like it's enough.
"Stop it," Jesse says, "we both know what's involved in this kind of work. Just cut out the whole chick flick thinking you've got going on inside of that head of yours and get us to Cuba so we can finish this up and get home."
I shake my head and head off to grab a first aid kit to toss to Jesse, because we're going to need to patch up before we reach Cuba. When Jesse sets my nose, breaking it again because too much time has passed, I can feel the bone click into place and hiss the pain out through my teeth. The knife wounds, which hadn't really bled much, were easy to patch up. The concussion, however, is not such an easy fix.
Concussions will not only leave you disoriented and seeing double, they can also make you irritable and may cause nausea. Add rolling waters to the mix and you can pretty much ensure that there will be some vomiting. Okay, a lot of vomiting, ringing in the ears, slurred speech, and apparently memory and concentration issues if Jesse's repeated questions and, "Man, he really did a number on your head," are anything to go by.
If your head injury is severe enough, a personality change can occur. But, as I'm patching up Jesse's gunshot wound – thankfully it's little more than a flesh wound – I don't think that the way my heart thunders in my chest at our close proximity has anything to do with my head and everything to do with what happened between us earlier.
Kissing a fellow operative while undercover is sometimes a necessary ploy you have to put into play – oftentimes as a last resort – to maintain your cover; it can even save your life. Usually it doesn't leave you feeling so confused or emotionally off-balanced afterwards.
You kiss to maintain a ruse, and it generally ends at that. The ability to distance yourself emotionally from a partner you've had to be intimate with for the sake of a job is a basic professional foundation in the spy business, and it is crucial to maintaining a good working relationship for the future.
If you are unable to be detach yourself emotionally, you will be out of a job. Because, falling in love with your partner is the last thing that you want to do. It gives any enemies you may have leverage to use against you, and it makes you a liability.
Same-sex relationships, while embraced by certain factions of society, are not exactly openly accepted amongst the ranks of spies. A gay spy is not something many people have heard of, not because they don't exist, but because they don't exist officially. Work and your personal life are supposed to be kept distinctly separate. I've never been very good at that. Take Fi and Sam as examples. My mother too.
Hell, even Jesse was someone that I was supposed to keep at arm's length. I was the one who burned him in the first place. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't be working with him, and he shouldn't be working with me. We were meant to be enemies. Sometimes it's funny how things work out the way that they do. But then again, I've never been particularly conventional in my life as a spy, or in my private life.
"What the hell is going on in that head of yours?"
The look on Jesse's face is more fondness than anger and confusion, and that confuses me. Concussions allow for some leeway in thought processes and altered personalities, but Jesse isn't suffering from a concussion, which doesn't in any way explain why he's looking at me like that. Like maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking, that, when we get back to Miami, we should see if what happened between us was more than just well-orchestrated subterfuge.
"Nothing," I say, because it doesn't need to be said.
When you're a spy, you learn how to read people. Body language. Facial expressions. Tone of voice. All of these communicate the truth of what someone is thinking and feeling, and they are a better gauge of what's going on in someone's head than whatever words come out of their mouths. And, right now, the way Jesse is looking at me, his pupils just this side of blown, mouth slightly open, hand resting on m thigh, told me all that I needed to know.
Five days later, I wake up in the hospital feeling like my head had exploded, and without a clear memory of what had happened after anchoring off the coast of Cuba. Everything is a series of foggy, half-there pictures that just don't make sense. Blinking in the dim light, I reach over to the side table for the glass of water that I know's there. The water helps, a little, and I lie back against the pillow and close my eyes.
I expect Fiona or Mom, or maybe even Sam to break the silence with a sarcastic remark, because that's what usually happens in these situations. When I hear nothing, but the sound of the beeps from my heart monitor, I open my eyes wondering where everyone is. But no one is there, and I check to see if there's a handcuff attached to my wrist. Being hospitalized as a prisoner in Cuba while working on a secret op for the CIA is not a good thing.
A flick of my wrist reveals no handcuffs, and the distinct lack of armed guards also reassures me that I'm not being held prisoner. However, it's seeing Jesse, slumped in an uncomfortable plastic chair that looks like it's seen better days, the sound of his gentle snores between the beeps of my heart monitor, and the sight of his arm in a sling that puts me at ease.
"Jess…" I croak, and I need to take another sip of water because just attempting to talk causes a coughing fit that is not in keeping with my last assessment of the injuries I obtained thanks to the would-be pirates. My lungs feel like they're on fire, making me wonder just what the hell happened in Cuba.
"Michael?" Jesse comes to right away, starting and blinking owlishly, almost falling out of the chair in his haste to assess the situation, and make sure that everything is okay, that they haven't fallen into enemy hands.
"How long you been there?" I ask after several more sips of water.
My voice is still hoarse, it feels like I've gargled a glass of rocks, and I know that, if nothing else, I probably didn't make it clear of the building when the first of the explosions went off. Smoke inhalation would explain the tightness of my chest, the sore throat, and the headache.
"Since I got patched up, and the doctor's gave me the go ahead," Jesse confesses, and he's not quite looking at me, like he expects me to chastise him.
"And how long ago was that?" I ask. The lack of memory does not sit well with me.
"Three days ago," Jesse says, and then he looks at me.
His eyes are red, as though he hasn't slept in weeks, and there's stubble on his chin.
"But you've been out of it for the past five days. For a while there, I didn't think you were going to make it."
"What happened?"
"What didn't happen?" Jesse asks, scrubbing a hand over his face, and he props his hip on the side of my bed.
"Thanks for getting me home," I say.
Even though I don't know what happened, I have a vague memory of Jesse carrying me out of a burning building.
"Whatever man, just," Jesse takes a deep breath, and pierces me with a look that, if I hadn't already been short of breath, would have taken my breath away, "just don't ever scare me like that again, okay."
And he trails a finger down my cheek – from scar to chin – leans in close so that his lips are hovering millimeters above my own. He smells of smoke and mildew, and days old aftershave. And then, the heart monitor skips a beep and speeds up until it's hard to tell one beep from the next when Jesse's lips brush against my own.
"So," he says, his lips ghosting over mine as he speaks, "what do you want to do about this?"
"Just kiss me, damn it," I growl, and snake a hand around his neck so that he can't pull away. "Never figured you for a tease Jess."
"You sure about this?"
I nod. When your partner's requesting permission to kiss you after a particularly harrowing op, don't question it. Especially not when it feels as good as this, and if your lungs weren't already compromised, they'd forget how to breathe on their own.
The dictionary defines love in many different ways: "…to feel romantic and sexual desire and longing for somebody; … like doing something very much; …to feel and show kindness and charity to somebody…"
In my line of work, love is considered a disadvantage, something that can be used against you. It is a commodity that most spies spurn, because our work is just too dangerous, and we don't want the onus of someone else's life on our conscious.
At the moment, though, with Jesse's teeth nipping, and tongue plying at my lips, and the hand of his uninjured arm sneaking its way up underneath my hospital gown to twist a nipple, I can't really think of a good enough excuse not to encourage whatever it is that's starting between us.
Fi and I have had an on-and-off relationship for years, and yes, things haven't always gone smoothly, but they've gone. And, I don't know where this will go, if anywhere, but I'm willing to go along with the ride for as long as it lasts.