Dealing With It - Part 4
Nina opened the door of her house with ease, despite the fact that she was balancing six bags of groceries in her arms. Walking over to the kitchen, she deposited the bags on the counter top and immediately started putting things away, working quickly and with an economy of movement.
Anyone that happened to come to Nina's place would have almost found it surprising that a person lived there at all. Oh, the house wasn't bare – all the proper furniture was present, neatly arranged, and the place was nicely decorated with pictures on the walls and curtains that coordinated with the furnishings. It was just – impersonal. There was no stamp of individuality on the décor. And it was too neat. There was not a thing out of place, no magazines littering the surfaces, no unwashed cups in the sink. It was like an apartment that real estate agents used as a show house to sell real homes to people. Everything looked like it had been ordered straight from a catalogue and installed at the same time to avoid trouble – which was exactly what had happened.
Nina finished putting her shopping away, picked up her mail from the doormat and walked over to the second bedroom, which she used as an office. Again, there was none of the usual clutter of files and paperwork that you would normally associate with an office, files lined the walls in neat rows, loose papers were carefully stacked in an in-tray. She sat at her desk and began to open an assortment of the usual sort of correspondence – mainly bills and junk mail. Being the type of person that took care of chores immediately, she methodically went through the letters, replying to what needed replying to, writing checks for credit card bills and car insurance.
Her mind wandered as she performed these mundane tasks – and as was most often the case nowadays, she noted that her thoughts immediately turned towards Jack. She sighed, stopped what she was doing and leant back in her chair, resting her arms comfortably on the padded sides.
What was it with that man? She couldn't seem to stop thinking about him. Even when she was at work, when her mind was supposed to be at its most focussed, she found herself idly wondering what it would feel like to kiss him, whether the passion he brought to his job would translate itself to his bedroom.
And yet....there was more to it than that. It wasn't simply that she found him attractive, she could have dealt with simple lust. No it was...Nina swore under her breath and tried to stop thinking about it. She'd fought this and fought this, time and again – but there was something about spending another beautiful Saturday on her own that seemed to make her unable to stop wondering....what would it be like to just....be with him. Not just sleep with him – but...spend time together. Go to movies. Walk on the beach and have dinner at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. Even go away together? Maybe it would nice to be able to share a closeness. There was something about Jack that when he turned his attention to her, she really felt like he listened. Respected her opinion. There was no denying that they were close as colleagues, Tony had even gone so far as to comment on it, enquiring caustically as to whether they were joined at the hip. She'd shot him down of course, she couldn't have him overstepping the mark like that, but still....
Of course, Jack could be an a$$hole sometimes. He had the most fiery temper she'd ever come across and could be fairly insufferable when someone made an unnecessary mistake. His standards were very high and he demanded that everyone reached the bar that he set himself, worked with the same level of commitment he did – and that was difficult for a lot of people to handle. Because when it came to the job, there was no one quite like Jack. Nina felt glad that she could match him technically, if not out in the field – well, not that he knew about anyway – because it meant their working relationship had got that much closer.
Anyway, even when he was being an a$$hole he intrigued her. There was something about that commitment, that patriotism, that belief in the system that he carried around with him - which she found incredibly sexy. Maybe it was because she couldn't understand how he felt that way. Where he'd got this passion from. Because she certainly didn't have it. It was almost as though being close to someone like him made her feel....better. As though his righteous belief might rub off on her somehow. And sometimes....sometimes she really wanted it to.
Because of course, there was the other thing. The thing that was so deep in Nina's make up that she rarely even thought about it anymore. Which was, naturally, what being a deep cover mole was all about. She wasn't someone trained to act like Nina Myers, trained to live her life – it WAS her life. Getting a college degree and working for a government agency wasn't something she'd had faked into her background, it was something she'd done, something she'd lived. She was everything her CTU files said she was – there were just one or two things left out.
Nina had been telling herself for over a year now that she needed to get close to Jack for information. It wasn't true. In fact, in her secret life, Jack didn't really come into the equation at all. She didn't really need him for details of the inside workings of CTU. If she wanted to know what he knew, there were ways in which she could find out, and anyway, she was second-in-command. Her security clearance was pretty high on its own. No...all she had to do with Jack was get him to trust her – and she'd done that a long time ago. Her continued surveillance of him and his habits was now, simply, because she liked doing it. Of course she would exploit any opportunities she came across, like the 'glitch' that had wiped those files a few days ago – but when it came to Jack......Nina sighed again. She just didn't know. He seemed to like her, seemed to rely on her judgement more than anyone else's. And she'd seen him looking at her sometimes in a way that wasn't strictly professional.
But he was married, and very married at that. She'd heard other women talking about him on the occasions she'd been out socially with her female colleagues, and they all reached the same conclusion. It was a travesty that such a man was off the market – but he was, and nothing would change that. None of them ever thought there was a chance of him becoming available. Nina wasn't so completely sure about that but she kept her thoughts to herself. After seeing him last year when he'd come back from some mission overseas, he'd met her in a bar and....what? Nothing had happened. But she'd got the feeling he'd wanted it to, and he'd certainly been acting very differently to how he did before he went away.
Nina mentally shook herself out of her reverie. This wasn't getting anything done. Maybe there was a slight chink in the armour of Jack, a chance of.....something.....but she'd have to be patient. There was no rush. Anyway, she had a date tonight. Some guy from IT. He was boring and not very attractive – but he knew about the new computer protocols that were being brought in next month and she thought there might be a chance to slip something in the backdoor while the changes were being put in place. Something that she hoped she'd never need to use....but it never hurt to be careful. You could never have too many escape routes.
She laughed out loud as she cleared her desk. Jack would have said the same thing. Only not about this....
