5
Window Reflections
If Thoughts Could Kill
Amanda had left the Agency that afternoon, stopped by the dry cleaner to get her Bedside Bluebell uniform pressed and then came home to make dinner. Dean had come over; she had spent time with him and with the boys, she checked their homework and got them to bed. She then had a cup of tea with her mother while watching some television. Now even her mother had gone upstairs to bed and the house was finally quiet. Amanda carried the tea cups to the sink and washed them. Placing them in the drying rack she leaned her hip against the counter, looked out the window and took a deep breath. It had been quite a day.
It was hard to keep all the pieces of her life going smoothly. Her mother had pointed out how much she had let drop the other morning. It was a juggling act to work, have a family and a relationship with Dean. Somehow she would learn how to manage it. As this last case was continuing to prove, working with Lee Stetson was not always easy. He was a terrible patient. Who would have thought that a top agent would be such a little boy when faced with needles and doctors? It made her laugh. But the smile quickly left her face as she thought about the rest of what Lee had gone through. How terrible to be used in medical experiments like that. To have one's conscious will violated and controlled so that you could be brainwashed into killing your boss! How awful! She shuddered at that thought.
What if she hadn't been there? What if she hadn't noticed all his strange behavior? No one else had seemed to notice anything strange about Lee or those dreams he had been having. Walt had his wife, Janet, but even she didn't catch things in time and now Walt was dead. Amanda tried to shake those thoughts off. In order to survive in this business a person needed friends, people who knew you well. It seemed to her that the spies that she had met like Lee and Francine didn't have many close friends. It was worth enduring the grumpiness from Lee to know that at least she was there to watch out for him, at least she had been there to notice the change in his behavior and hear about those weird dreams.
She had said that the dreams sounded sexual, why did she say that!? She smacked her forehead at that thought. Why did she bring up sexual with Lee? Ooh boy! And while she was allowing herself to ask these sorts of questions she might as well ask herself why she got more excited about working with Lee as a Bedside Bluebell even though he behaved like a grumpy little boy, than she did about having Dean over for dinner? Lee was not her type, he was a playboy and he lived in a world of "danger, excitement and intrigue." Why did she want to keep doing this stuff? Dean was safe. Maybe he was too safe? Now she was treading in dangerous waters with thoughts like that. She needed to get herself into bed, she had a long day tomorrow as Lee's Bedside Bluebell. She smiled at that thought, she couldn't help it.