He was good at his job. Intelligent, dedicated, experienced. He had been through the best investigative training that the FBI had to offer. And now he had gotten one of the top assignments he could have hoped for. Agent Booth had an outstanding reputation in the Agency. Efficient but conscientious, ruthless in pursuit of justice but compassionate with victims, strong and capable but receptive to help, Booth was exactly the kind of supervising agent that Charlie had hoped to work for.
It was just this partnership with Dr. Brennan. No doubt, the woman was amazing. Brilliant beyond anyone Charlie had ever known. As a team, these two were virtually unbeatable. But the woman was distracting. Even in jeans and blazer, she forced every man in the room to concentrate on his own breathing while she walked down the corridor and past the open workplace area to Booth's office.
Charlie would walk in to tell Booth something and she would be there, relaxed in a chair, reading a file or flipping through a handful of papers. Charlie's mouth would still be moving, but his voice would have stopped working. Booth seemed completely unperturbed by his proximity to this gorgeous woman. He would lean over her to point something out in a file, seemingly unaware that he was mere inches from her face, her neck, her hair. She would reach across the desk to hand him a paper and it was like he didn't notice how flexible she was or the grace with which she moved. Charlie couldn't understand it.
It wasn't that he wanted Brennan for himself – he was happily involved with a nice woman named Sarah over at the Department of Agriculture. It's just that Charlie worried how long this partnership between Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth could last. They were both highly attractive people. From the gossip around the office, they just had never managed to meet up romantically because one or the other was always involved with someone else. But since Sully had left the Agency last year, Charlie hadn't heard any rumors about Brennan being attached – and he was fairly certain that there was no one "special" in Booth's life. He was afraid of the consequences of what he saw as an inevitable pairing of the two.
Booth had never said anything to Charlie about this – in fact, any time Charlie (or any other male in the office) even mentioned Brennan, you could almost see Booth's hackles go up, like he was on the defensive. Since she wasn't FBI, the guys didn't pry too much, feeling that they were somewhat out of their depths dealing with a woman who barely tolerated anyone else in the agency. But Charlie knew that when it came right down to it, every last one of them wondered when Booth and Brennan were going to cross that line – though many thought that they secretly already had. Remembering a water-cooler discussion a few weeks ago, Charlie realized that there was probably more money riding on that topic than there had been on this year's intra-agency softball playoffs.
Charlie knew that their relationship was more complex than that, what with Booth's involvement in her father's murder trial and the very familial bond that the two seemed to share, but he couldn't help but speculate that these two people were facing what Booth might call stacked odds. But if they never crossed the line, every time Charlie walked into the room with the two of them, he would feel that almost-electric buzz that made his mouth go dry and his conscience feel like he had walked in on something private. If it continued much longer, he was going to need Sarah to get more weekends free just to maintain his sanity.
He felt rather guilty, reducing what he was sure was a complicated and strained issue down to what eventual effect he foresaw it having on his own life, but these were the realities of working in this kind of environment. If he had his way, Booth and Brennan would take the plunge and come out the other side happier and more relaxed, with the added bonus of there finally being clarification as to whether Brennan was on or off the agency market, as it were. For right now, Charlie supposed he might as well get back to the task assigned to him, and stop thinking about what direction he thought best for the "partnership." But he really wished Brennan would take to wearing big, shapeless potato sacks just so that he could go through a day without stuttering when she came by.