MayDecember8


What the hell does 'defining the problem finds the answer' mean? Ellie's as bad as her father with those cryptic comments.

She was not a person who worked 'problems' without rendering the concept into the concrete. In other words, she wrote things down. She found a legal pad among Ellie's school things and began 'defining the problem'.

He thinks he's too old for me.

He thinks I'm out of his league – a super model.

He's confused by apparent mixed signals.

He thinks it's all for the job – his daughter certainly thinks so.

She read what she'd written and wondered if she'd really defined the problem simply enough. It appeared that even she saw multiple problems but they could be grouped into subsets. She made notes.

He thinks he's too old for me and that he can't attract someone who looks like me. He's only 12 years older than I am. He acts just as old as I do and he's so 'young at heart'. He must have a poor self image if…two questions raised: why are there no pictures of Jill in the house and how do I compare with the dead wife?

I give mixed signals. So does he. He called me to pick him up when Casey could have had someone take him home. He opened his arms to greet me and I froze. I walked in to the Admin and hugged him. When he sat in my car, I practically attacked him and cried all over him. After dinner he did the water strip tease thing and almost lost it. I asked him if I could sleep with him and he agreed. Then I saw how moody he was and I backed off. I didn't think it through. He was probably rehashing the blown mission. Two dead. Yeah, he'd feel responsible. I left him alone to deal with it.

Stupid. I was so stupid! The last thing he should be is alone right now. He's right. Mixed signals. He's sending me 'I need you but I'm afraid for a lot of reasons' and I'm sending 'Yes, no, maybe…I don't know. Maybe you should be afraid.'

She finished her wine and set the legal pad aside. There was one place to find at least some of the answers she'd posed – his office. Ellie had told her that she'd never been in the locked room – ever. It was the only room she was forbidden to enter and she never had. Ellie remembered that Carol had picked the lock once and her father had violently escorted her out of the house.

There was a fancy NSA lock on the door. She remembered seeing it and wondering about it several times while she'd been staying with Ellie. It would be child's play for her to defeat.

She hurried to her room and took out a small gadget with two wires attached and her cell phone and went to the secured door. She plugged her cell into one of the leads and plugged the other into the lock's data port bypassing the keypad. She selected an app from her phone screen and pushed 'dial'. Thirty seconds. It had only taken thirty seconds to defeat the lock.

She opened the door and flipped on the light. An old fashioned partners' desk dominated the room. It was easy to tell which was Chuck's and which had been his wife's by the age of the computers sitting on the desktop. Since he bought the house after his wife's death, anything in place would have been put there by him and not left by his wife. This complicated things.

The desktop was covered by a pane of glass to protect the finish. Under the glass on Chuck's side were notes, lists, phone directories and photos of Ellie as she grew up.

Under the glass on his wife's side were one photograph of Chuck and Jill and the front page of a legal document and a copy of a medical form authorizing a blood transfusion for Ellie when she was 9 years old. She gasped and sat down heavily in Jill's desk chair.

The legal document was a Petition of Dissolution of Marriage showing the plaintiff as Charles Bartowski and the reason. 'Notorious and Open Adultery and Infidelity'. The date on the Petition was immediately prior to his second deployment to Iraq. He'd gone to war married and expected to return divorced – or did he expect to return at all?

She started to cry quietly, wracking sobs held deep within her. Blood doesn't lie. Blood is an irrefutable truth. Wiping her tears away with her t-shirt, Sarah returned to her room, replaced her gadgets in her bag and then walked down the hallway to his room.

She toed off her sandals and threw her t-shirt on the floor and released her ponytail. Sarah slipped into his bed and spooned against his naked back. So many questions about this complicated man had been answered and more posed. She wrapped him in her arms and fell into a comfortable sleep. Home.


His dream woke him to another dream. He was in his bed and somehow Sarah was with him. He was holding her and she was naked, curled against him, one arm draped across him and her head resting on his chest. Her leg was thrown over his thigh and she was drooling and smirking in her sleep.

His subconscious was cutting him a break, balancing the nightmare of their mission with a substitute for reality. He preferred the dream to the reality. His dream girl even drooled in her sleep. Breathing in the scent of her shampoo and smiling broadly for the first time in weeks, he fell back to sleep, relaxed and at peace.

She woke to an empty bed. The absence of his warmth started a process that took only a second or two to the trained spy. She kept her eyes closed and listened, developing an awareness of her surroundings before she could allow any sign that she was awake. It was a survival skill honed over the past 10 years.

Chuck walked out of his bathroom and pulled on his boxers and a t-shirt and pulled the covers up over his sleeping dream girl. Still smiling, he chuckled and left her asleep, going down to make coffee and breakfast. He felt…better. Maybe it was sleep or maybe it was the company but he felt better than he had in a long time.

I can't believe he just covered me up and left! What did he think when he awoke to find me naked in his arms? Was he pleased? Confused? Angry?

She started to get up but heard him coming back down the hall whistling. Whistling? Was that a good sign or a bad sign? Deciding to feign sleep until she had a handle on his mood and intentions, she lay there waiting.

Chuck could see just the top of her blonde hair under the coverlet. He set the tray down on the small table and went to wake his sleepy dream girl.

"Hey, Sarah? Wake up. Coffee, eggs, bacon, toast. Your breakfast awaits." He grinned as she opened one eye and stared at him.

"You left this warm bed to make me breakfast?"

"Make 'us' breakfast. I was hungry, too. I brought your robe from your room. Move your fanny before it gets cold. The food I mean. Uh, well, it's always cool in the mornings here until the sun heats things up around 8 or so."

"What time is it?" She liked this Chuck. Considerate and still fumbling with their relationship. Maybe…? "It's a little after 7am."

"Chuck, you didn't have to do that. But thank you. You said coffee?" She sat up allowing the sheets to slip and reveal her bare breasts and then turned towards him and hugged him. He felt warm and smelled incredible. If she didn't stop, they'd never get breakfast out of the way.

"Uh, Sarah? Your robe?" He was blushing and looking anywhere but at her.

"Not cold. Let's eat." She decided then and there that she knew exactly what she was going to be having for dessert.

"Sarah Walker, put on your robe. There's no way I can sit here and eat with those, I mean with you naked and…and how can you expect me to eat food when all I really want…ah, shit. Walker, at least put on a t-shirt."

"Prude. I'm in love wi…" She stopped and stared at him. Words. They were just words, weren't they?

He looked down at his food, any hint of playfulness gone when he looked up and held her eyes with his. "Sarah, don't. Don't say what you can't possibly mean. It's not fair and it's not…"

"It's not what, Chuck?"

"It's not true. I'm your assignment. I'm your job. I've been here before, Sarah." In a whispered voice, full of bitter despair, "I know exactly how far some agents will go to accomplish their mission."

She got mad. Angry. Enraged. This is what he feared. This is what he'd had done to him before. This is what his wife had done to him. But not her, not Sarah Walker, soon to be ex-CIA Agent Sarah Walker.

"Now you listen to me, Charles Bartowski. I'm done being an agent. My contract will not be renewed and this assignment, an assignment that I love by the way, is my transitional assignment back into civilian life. YOU ARE NOT MY MARK!" The last was almost a scream.

He sat there, dumbfounded, totally awash in remorse for what he'd done to her. The last words had slammed home with the force of her anguish. He stood up and knelt down beside her chair, taking her shaking hands in his.

"I want to believe you more than anything in the world, Sarah. Really, I do. You don't know…"

"Yes, Chuck, I do know. I know that Jill was an agent. I know that she carried on behind your back. I know that you were her assignment. I know that Ellie's your daughter in your heart and soul but not biologically. And I love you because it didn't make a difference who her father was because you were her Daddy and that's what counts in the final analysis, who loves you."

He was stunned. Speechless. How could she know?

"Blood types don't lie, Chuck, people do. You're O Negative and she's A Positive. But it doesn't matter to you one bit, does it? It never mattered. You've raised a fine young woman with values and morals and compassion that her fucking whore of a mother never had or else she wouldn't have done what she did to you for the fucking job."

He tried to say something, anything, to stop her tirade of truth but she wasn't having it.

"I would never, could never, do something that foul to someone I loved. I could never do it to you. I love you, you big, wonderful idiot. Age doesn't matter to me. Looks don't matter to me. What matters to me is what's in here" thumping him on the chest. "That's where I look for love and that's where I found it. So don't you dare tell me you're just my assignment. Don't you dare tell me I can't love you. Don't you dare…"

She fell apart. She couldn't breathe and all she wanted to do was crawl back into their bed and pull the covers over her head and stay forever in the last place she'd been happy.

Chuck picked her up from the chair and placed her back in their bed and crawled in next to her. He wanted and needed to believe her. No one, not even a CIA agent, could display such emotions unless they were real. No one.

She tried to roll away from him, to escape her humiliation but he held her and pulled her against him. He kissed her tears away, wiped her runny nose off on his t-shirt. She fumbled with the hem of the shirt and finally, frustrated, just ripped it off him in her haste.

"I liked that t-shirt, Sarah."

"Tough. It was in the way."

She reached for his boxers and he shied away. "NO! No. Let me. You're entirely too violent about clothing all of a sudden. I'm getting naked, just give me a minute."

"Good boy." She was thoroughly enjoying this playful side of Chuck. An hour ago this was unknown territory on the map of "Chuck" with the warning ornately inscribed with 'There be dragons here'. Indeed.

"Chuck, we'll go slow. I'm sorry if I'm rushing you. I just…it's OK."

"No, we both want this. Somehow I can't imagine you wanting me but I'm OK with it. It'll just take some getting used to, like Beauty and the Beast."

"Well, we'll have to see about the beastly part but I'm flattered you think I'm beautiful. You've seen the scars and you know my history. If anyone should be having second thoughts it's you. You know what horrible things I've…"

He silenced her with a chaste kiss. "Yes, and I told you before, it doesn't matter. That was then, this is now. We'll take it slow; build a good, solid foundation so that no matter what happens, nothing will shake us loose from each other. You know my secrets and I know yours. The rest is just a period of adjustment."

"Good. A strong foundation and no more lies between us, ever. Now, this is our first time together and I don't expect miracles or fireworks or the earth to tremble. It's been a long time for you. I won't be disappointed, no matter what."


He woke up and smiled. Sarah was in the shower, singing. Well, she called it singing. Good thing she had her university job because she'd starve if she had to sing for a living.

He threw on clothes and took the uneaten breakfast tray back down to the kitchen and cleaned up. He hadn't been disappointed and if the sore spots on his back where she'd dug in her nails were indicative, neither had she.

Ellie showed up about 10 with a bad case of bed head. "Dad, you and Sarah working it out?"

"Yep."

"That's it? 'Yep?'"

"Uh huh."

"Can she stay with us, Dad? Like Carol? It's nice having another woman in the house."

"She's nothing like Carol. It's up to her."

"You going to ask her?"

"Nope."

"Dad! You have to ask her."

"Nope."

"Well then, I'll ask her. I live here, too. I like her, Dad, and I know you like her, too. You two have something going, even if you're too dumb to see it."

"Eleanor, watch your mouth. I'm your father and I don't like being called 'dumb' nor do I appreciate you fiddling with my love life. Dr. Walker will make up her own mind in her own time. You should have faith in things, Ellie. What should be generally is."

"Yeah, provided the blind help the deaf." Honestly, he's so stubborn. It's a wonder I'm not like that.

"That's enough. If you don't trust my judgment, maybe I was wrong about allowing you and the geezer to keep dating?"

"GEEZER! He's only 21, Dad. It's not like he's 10 or 12 years older…I mean, uh." She saw the stricken look on his face and hurried to make amends.

"Daddy, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Forgive me?"

"I'll take it under advisement."

Sarah had paused on the steps not wanting to interrupt what seemed like a 'behavioral' discussion and had to smile when Chuck put his parental foot down. Ellie's next comment froze her in place. Age. She just had to bring up the difference in their ages. Taking a deep breath and putting a smile on her face, she walked the rest of the way down stairs into the kitchen.

"Morning, everyone. Ellie, I took your advice." She saw the look on Ellie's face and moved to change the subject.

"So, I need to get back to town. Chuck, are we still on for Casey's party tonight? With everything you've been through, maybe you should just go solo and leave when you can. I don't want you being pestered with questions about me and us."

"I'll pick you up at 6:30, Dr. Walker. Please don't keep me waiting. Us old guys have a hard time staying awake after dark." He shot his daughter another glare and turned back to putting the dishes in the dishwasher.

"I said I was sorry, Dad. Jeez, cut me a break. Sarah, how about a little help here? We women have to present a united front."

"You're on your own, kiddo. Chuck, I'll be ready. I'll check the lot for your Suburban just in case you doze off." Her laughter as she left to drive back to her apartment made him smile. She'd turned a potentially nasty situation into a joke.


A/N: That's it for now. Us old guys need our sleep and the sun's setting.

APR