Lie a Little Better

by Writings of Stardust

Soulmate AU. Special Agent McKenna Anderson is a strong fixture in the White Collar Crime Division. She ends up in a strange relationship with someone she'd normally be trying to catch when Neal Caffrey becomes her consultant. Upon finding her soulmate, things get infinitely harder. She never thought she'd have to choose between being a cop and being a criminal... until she did.

21. Don't You Know I Want You With Me

Chapter Twenty-One – Don't You Know I Want You With Me

Saturday morning, I intended to go in to work a little later and spend the morning at home with my sister. Katie and I both slept a little bit later, took longer showers, and then chose to be comfortable while our hair dried out in the air. Katie was wearing a tank top and shorts with a fleece blanket wrapped around her in the chilly kitchen, slippers protecting her feet from the linoleum, while I had pulled on some undergarments and then a robe, tying it around me tightly to keep it appropriate.

I yawned while I carried my plate of waffles to the table. Kate was already eating her L'Eggos, freshly-popped from the toaster. The butter was melting into the grain and the syrup warming up, too, smelling delicious under my nose. I set the plate down, grabbed a fork, and then traipsed back over. My robe was a scarlet red with a black belt tie, a size too big so that while the fleece would keep me warm, it wouldn't be too tight or hot to wear in the summer. The end didn't reach much further than my knees.

Kate and I weren't morning people before we had coffee. Katie was already halfway through her cup. I was just starting in on my first and I carried that, the pot, and a large bottle of creamer to my waffles before I sat down, kicked one leg up over the other, and made myself comfortable in my chair to dig in.

Right as I started using my fork to slice through the waffle, the door opened from the front porch. No knocking, no doorbell, no introduction – it just opened, then closed loudly, with the same shameless and unhindered entry of Kate or I coming home. I looked across the table again. Yep, Kate was there. I set my fork down and stood up to confront the invader…

… And then sank right back down into my chair, exasperated, as Neal came sauntering in, fully dressed, hair combed back and tie straightened down over the buttons of his shirt, tightly pressed between his top and his grey vest. He waved at Katie and smiled cheekily at me.

"I hope you don't mind, I let myself in."

"I should mind." I looked suspiciously at Neal, who bent over the table between us, leaning heavily onto his hands. The legs of his trousers pulled up just enough to see the lower half of the anklet cuff on his left leg. Strangely, while I was insulted that Neal had just walked right in without permission, it didn't feel abnormal to have him in the kitchen with us, even though I wasn't dressed. "This is something I should mind," I said to Katie, annoyed at myself. Why couldn't I just respond the right way to something?

Katie shrugged, looked from Neal's hands up his arms and to his face, and then prodded his cheek once with her pointer finger. He frowned at her. Katie hummed and then went back to her waffles, reading on her phone.

Well, that's one way to say hello. Neal sucked in his cheeks, making a silly face at her.

"You girls having breakfast?" He asked, sinking down lower to his elbows, rocking his hips side to side lazily while he looked at both of our plates.

"Yes," I said, smiling at him thinly. "Yes, we are trying to, at least. Most important meal of the day and all that." Contradictorily, I stabbed my waffle with the fork aggressively. The syrup coated my tongue, but instead of tasting enjoyably sweet, it seemed irritatingly thick in my mouth.

Neal raised his eyebrows at my aggravated eating and cocked his head. "If it's so important, why do you substitute it with coffee so often?" He smartly retorted.

"Those aren't breakfasts," I explained in a way that made perfect sense to me. "Those are work days." Which were totally different from leisure days where I had the time and energy to go to the extra effort of making another meal. "Breakfasts are times in the morning when I sit down to eat…" I motioned to my table in general. "With my lovely sister…" I pointed out Katie, who smiled, flattered. "In our house…" Gestured to the ceiling. "With no uninvited guests."

Neal grinned at me when I added the last part and looked very meaningfully at him. Pushing himself off of the table, he spun around and strolled comfortably right over to the fridge, where he pulled down a box of name-brand cereal from the top. He popped open the top of the box, looked with intrigue at the advertisements on the back, and turned the cereal almost on its side to try to peer into the shadows.

I continued, unhindered by his apparent fascination with my cereal. "Do you know the meaning of uninvited guests?" Probably not. Or, more likely, he knew very well what it meant and just chose to ignore it whenever it suited him.

Ignoring me, Neal tapped on a star-shaped design on the back of the box. "This says it has a free sheriff's badge," he told us both. "Have you found it yet?" Kate shook her head no. Neal shrugged one shoulder and then stuck his hand into the box, rooting around the cereal for the kids' toy. "Come on, it should be in here." He pouted and worked harder.

"Katie?" I asked, unsure how to proceed now that Neal was seeking out toys in our cereal boxes on one of the few mornings I got to have off. It was like having a child in the house, except Neal was big enough not to need to stand on a kitchen chair to reach the top of the fridge.

She hummed, swallowed her waffle, and twisted around to look at the conman over the back of her chair. "You're welcome to get a bowl and join us," she invited, doing the exact opposite of what I had beseeched her to do, indicating needlessly with her silverware where the bowls were. Neal had eaten over with us enough times to know the kitchen almost as well as his own.

With one hand still in the box of cereal, Neal held the other to his heart and spread his fingers inside the box so it didn't fall while he melodramatically pretended to be emotionally touched. "Thank you, I will." Haughtily sniffing and reaching simultaneously to open the cupboard, Neal fixed me with a disapproving stare and scolded, "Manners!"

"Says the guy digging through my cereal!" I protested. Since when did I have to defend myself in my own kitchen?! Katie got on me when I ate ice cream out of the quart, but she was cool with Neal rummaging through our breakfast food? There was some favoritism going on there that I was not a big fan of.

Since arresting Michelle Clark, not a lot had changed on the outside. Neal's tracking anklet still showed that he spent an inordinate amount of time at my residence, which I explained away with Kate's happy corroboration: Katie was his friend. He was free to hang out with friends within his enclosure, and since Kate was a friend and my house was in his permitted travel routes… Katie still worked full-time at the daycare, I still worked full-time as an agent, and Neal was still a full-time consultant with a part-time gig as my lover on the side. The largest change to anyone looking in would be Katie and Derek. Katie spent more time out of the house and on dates and excursions with my brother, and Derek came over more than he used to. Which I was cool with. I was never against having him as a house guest. His attention was just… reserved more specifically for Katie lately.

Which, I wouldn't lie, had made me feel a little bit jealous. We'd had plans to go see a horror movie that Kate wanted to pass on, but that premiere was on the same night that Kate had parent meetings and he'd taken her to a very late dinner afterwards to unwind. He asked me first if it was okay, of course, and I gave him the green light, but it was still a little bit hurtful that that happened on top of the distraction and general attention that seemed to be targeted specifically to Kate. I was more of his boss than his friend in the last few weeks. I just hoped that once the honeymoon phase of the relationship was over, we'd go back to being as close as we'd been.

The outsider's perspective left a lot of things out. When I critically looked around and evaluated the people within my life, I could see that the balance was still shaken, no matter how well it was hidden.

In regards to Kate, she was much more conscientious of the people around her, and a bit more suspicious, too. She'd stopped taking rideshares entirely, sticking only to taxis, public transit, and rides from friends. I was no longer the one locking our house up before I went to sleep, because Kate had already done them all up… twice. I'd come home about a week after Fowler left to find her talking to a man from a security firm, getting a set of panic buttons installed – one in the kitchen, another in the living room, one upstairs in her bathroom, and one each in my bathroom and my home office (I wasn't consulted on this). It wasn't just that Fowler had broken her trust; he had violated her privacy to do so, and she was determined not to let herself be caught in a similar situation ever again.

For Derek, Fowler's attack on Katie had made things more personal. Of course he'd been pissed when Fowler had gone after one of our own. Neal was part of the team. Not everyone accepted that, but Diana and Derek did. Neal just wasn't Derek's number one priority, not like Kate had become, and he was itching for blood. The minute Fowler came back for a third round, Derek was going to be on him with unsheathed claws. I had found him asking around about the OPR agent. At that point, I had taken him aside and calmly explained that I was already taking care of it. I was also already in Fowler's line of fire, and had done a little playing of the guilt card to convince him to back off. If Fowler came after me again, then at least Kate could feel safe that Derek was secure. He listened, although he wasn't happy about it, and avoided me for a couple of days.

My siblings' behavior was concerning, but at least it was to be expected. Especially where Kate was concerned, I was relieved to see a change. It meant that, if nothing else, she was accepting what had been done and was adapting, learning to move past it, and her refusal to ice out Derek meant that she was set on giving her soulmate ideals another shot. It was Neal who worried me the most.

He had become more reluctant than ever to let me talk to anyone about anything case-related on my own. He found some reason or another to be in the field with me at all times, and if I was clocking out, then he liked to persuade me into getting dinner with him or going to one of our homes. His motivations weren't the obvious, because the majority of the time, after an hour, he'd be totally fine with us separating. I had suspected it might be that he was afraid I'd go home to another scene like the ones that had sent me running to him previously and wanted to help me avoid that. Or maybe he didn't really believe that I was putting down the case files for the night.

That was what I told myself until I noticed the touching and the security-conscious behavior. More than just paranoia about Moreau's kidnapper being an agent, Neal had started acting more careful about safety. He locked the door to the penthouse suite, even when we were both there, which he didn't used to do. June had a key so he had told me it was pointless, and we both knew that Mozzie would pick the lock if he really wanted in, but something had changed his mind on that. He'd also started to draw the curtains over the sliding door to the roof at night, blocking out the view if he wasn't going to be right there.

Touching. There wasn't much to say about that. Neal was a touchy person with me. He hadn't always been, but he'd gotten into the habit quickly, and I couldn't say I had ever discouraged it. I probably started it, in fact, with the impulsively-guiding hands and little taps for attention. Now his touching was just centered on a different location… where previously he liked to play with my hair or hands while we watched TV, he had taken up a new favored position where he somehow pulled me against his side or his chest and covered my stomach with one or both hands. He also curled up behind me more often when we slept together, possessively protecting my back, which hadn't been unusual, per se, but it also hadn't been quite as frequent.

Kate and Derek were easy to interpret. Neal took me longer because he was more subtle. If I was being honest, part of me hadn't wanted to think it had really made an impact, but he had definitely gotten more protective since I'd told him exactly how I got those scars on my body. He touched to make sure I wasn't bleeding or hurt, he locked the doors and drew the windows in case Køhler came looking for me, he was dissatisfied to let me leave work alone in case someone vicious was waiting to attack. The return of my torturer was a nightmare I had unwillingly entertained several times, but to have Neal concerned about the same thing made it more concrete.

This all left me in a precarious situation. Neal wanting to protect me… that was sweet, it was, and it made me feel all sorts of kissy and fluffy things, but it also made me feel insecure. What did it mean when my pacifistic lover started acting like he intended to physically protect me from something other than a bad fall? Did it mean he didn't think I could take care of myself? Did it mean he thought that it was his responsibility? God, that would've been worse. No one had the responsibility to protect me but myself. I was obligated to protect Neal via his work-release, but it didn't go vice versa. I wanted as little of our relationship to be mandated as possible.

So, since he wasn't technically hurting anyone but me by reminding me even more frequently that I had been a subject of involuntary surgery, I had let the things slide. I'd let him lock the doors – jeez, I'd have to be stupid to try to convince him not to lock his doors, no matter what the context was – and see me out of work safely and get in positions where he felt like I was safer, and if that meant plastering himself up against my back, well, it wasn't a bad thing, was it? It meant he had easy access to playing with my hair. If he wanted me to lay between his legs so he could hold my front, then it was easy for me to fall asleep like that. I felt safer with his precautionary steps, regardless of that I knew that the person we were afraid of wasn't going to be deterred by closed windows or a locked door or a particularly snarky artist.

No – the problem was that Neal was afraid for my sake and acting like it, too. Køhler was my burden to bear, not his. The problem was that Neal was more focused on a part of my past that even I tried not to think too hard on, and it made it hard to be completely open around him when I was being reminded of the time when I had been forcibly opened way, way too much in a much more literal sense. Not that I was really open around him… since there was the whole soulmate thing going on… but I did know that he cared about me, and I wanted to reward the trust and loyalty with some of my own.

Neal rattled cereal from the box and into the bowl. I sighed, sawing off another piece of waffle with my fork. "Milk is in the fridge," I dully informed. He replaced the box at the same time as he got the milk and carried both the gallon and his bowl to the table, a silver plastic piece on top of the cereal.

"I found the badge," Neal said proudly, grinning between Kate and I.

Kate gave him a patient, warm smile. "That was hard work, sweetie, I'm proud of you." I snickered. That was the tone that she used on the four-year-olds. Neal's smile faltered, but his excitement over finding the sheriff's badge would not be destroyed. He stuck his tongue out at her, moved the toy onto the table, and then started pouring milk into his cereal.

"You know, you could call before coming by," I suggested in vain. Calling ahead of time was a rare occurrence, even when it was entirely plausible that I would kick his ass for entering my house uninvited. "I could've put on actual clothes." Not that I was particularly awkward in my state of undress – not around Neal or my same-sex, closely-bonded sister – but, you know, there was a principle.

Neal 'eh'-ed. "Nothing I haven't seen before," he pointed out carelessly, stirring his cereal with a spoon.

Kate choked and slammed her fist on the table. "Oh, God! I'm trying to eat here, guys!"

We both ignored her. Did she think I wanted to imagine what she and Derek got up to? I'm not a sexually repressed person, but neither is Katie by a longshot, and I know Derek isn't, either. If I had to worry about my baby sister being sexually active, she could stand to hear a vague statement about me getting it on.

"I'm just trying to say, you don't live here," I pointed out, though trying to teach Neal etiquette about other peoples' personal space might have been futile. "I call you before I show up at yours."

"I did call," Neal said defensively, scooping up more cereal and nodding over at Kate. "Katie answered."

"She did, did she?" Kate avoided my eyes, looking down at her waffles and starting to eat faster. I leaned down until I was catching her eyes. "Did this slip your mind?" I asked her very kindly.

She started out shaking her head slowly, then tried to cover up the sheepish, meek apologies from her eyes with a winning and persuasive expression. "No, it did not," she decided to promise me. "I very definitely made a point of remembering." I nodded along. Of course she had. Then, quickly, she looked down again and stared at her plate. "I just… chose not to tell you in advance."

"Why?" I asked, calmly continuing to eat my breakfast.

"I thought you might try to lock the door," she said reasonably.

"Heh." Neal giggled and looked down at his bowl of cereal, more amused by Kate's logic than anything else. "As if that would be effective…"

I sighed. So they were both going to be frustrating today. Good to know. "What do you want, Neal?"

He put up his hands in front of him harmlessly while he finished chewing and then defended himself. "Hey, I'm not here for my own nefarious purposes," he said, snickering as he said it, which really made me wonder how legitimate that claim actually was. "I come in peace on behalf of June."

Perking up a little, I said, "June owns the penthouse he lives in," to Katie, who had never met the generous landlady.

"I know," she nodded, pushing an emptied plate to the area of the table no one was using. "I don't think you realize how much you tell me when you vent." Wiggling in her chair to face Neal, she balanced her chin on her fist and her elbow on the table, engaging him in his story.

Neal proudly held himself taller for his audience of two. "Her granddaughter needs a kidney, but she was bumped from the transplant list last week."

"Why?" I asked aloud, already interrupting. I wanted to know both why she needed a new kidney and why she was moved off of the hospital's list. Maybe it was something that I could help straighten out. June was always so sweet, and I owed her for giving Neal a safe and comfortable place to stay. She was extremely tolerant of the odd hours of Neal's visitors coming and going, myself included, and if she knew about the nights that I stayed over… she never said anything.

Neal paused, realized he didn't have an answer to either of the ways my one-word question could have been answered, and hastily shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know." Moving on quickly, he continued. "But, a few days ago, a woman approached June and said that her organization could help them find a kidney for her granddaughter."

Katie smiled slightly at what sounded like a happy ending. "That's nice of them," she said admiringly. Always with the soft spot for children. "And it's kind of the purpose of some charities," she added, stating politely why she was somewhat unimpressed with Neal's story.

"Yeah, but this woman asked for a donation," he said solemnly, insistent that this was not an ordinary organization. I started to roll my eyes. Just because someone else got their money without swindling and hustling didn't mean that it was completely weird to ask for it. Charities had to have some way of funding their projects. "Of a hundred thousand dollars."

I almost spat out my coffee.

Katie, on the other hand, took it in stride, just frowning and noting, "That doesn't seem normal."

"No, it doesn't," I agreed fervently.

"And," Katie thoughtfully pursed her lips and put more thought into it. "It also occurs to me that they can't go around asking civilians for hundred-thousand-dollar donations, so they must have gone to June knowing she's loaded." Neal and I both looked at each other and then back to my sister, impressed with the amount of consideration she was putting into the matter. "Either the donation size is specifically targeting the wealthy, or it varies according to financial status." Sipping at her coffee, Kate didn't even seem to realize the magnitude of the accusation. "Seems unethical no matter how you look at it."

I leaned back from the table and looked at both Kate and Neal, sniffing and rubbing my cheek. "Aw, look at you two," I cooed. "All grown up and working on your own new case." Releasing them as partners into the field may not be the best for my stress levels, but I bet they'd get results.

Kate sent me a disgruntled glare. Neal, however, was delighted by the positive reaction. Taking up the silver sheriff's badge from the table, he pulled out the front of his vest and clipped the belt fastener onto the front breast pocket, smiling with boyish enthusiasm at the shiny new accessory.

"Well," he drawled in a twang, "That's what us lawmen do."

I tried not to laugh. "Talk to June if you can," I encouraged, reaching out under the table and rubbing up his calf with my bare foot. Neal's legs jumped into action, chasing after me to play footsie. "Get some specifics. I'll join you once I'm showered and no longer mourning the loss of my privacy to professional lock picking."

Suddenly, a smaller foot, with fuzzy slippers on instead of shoes, slammed into my ankle. I yelped and shot backwards in my chair, looking across the table at Katie, who scowled at me. "No footsie at the breakfast table," she scolded. Neal was biting his lip and reaching under the tablecloth to rub his own wounds, too.

He forced on a grin that looked sincere but was tempered with pain. "So you mean I can run with it?" Neal asked me hopefully.

"Run?" I scoffed. Neal and the word 'run' did not belong together, because for Neal to run, then he was either getting ahead of himself, getting ahead of the law, or just plain running, which I worked very hard not to consider ever happening. "No. Oh, no, no, no." His face fell a little. "What you can do is hold it very, very carefully in both hands," I cupped my hands together as if I were holding a baby chick. "And take baby steps in the vague direction of forwards."

He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. "Got you." Finishing his cereal with a few more bites, he took his bowl over to the sink and washed out his dishes. After setting them in the dishwasher for the next load to run, he came back over, pushed his chair in, and leaned down over my shoulder. "Have a good shower?" He asked lowly, dragging his fingers over my wet, stringy hair.

"Ugh, you guys," Katie groaned, covering her eyes. "I eat in this room. Stop making me watch this."

Neal and I both laughed. That had probably been the entire goal of asking about my shower. Kate picked up her phone while glowering at both of us equally and accusing us nonverbally of being troublemakers. Giving my back a solid pet through my robe, Neal stood up straight and took off, leaving just as quickly as he'd come.

There was a metaphor I could have made to his presence in my life.

"Remember, that badge is fake, Neal," I yelled as I heard the door opening. He hadn't unpinned the sheriff's star from his vest. "Not even a little bit real!"

In the hallway, Neal scoffed disbelievingly and started to laugh upon hearing a joke. The door closed a minute later. Kate looked back at my cynically, frowning in the direction of the front of the house.

"That's a little unsettling," I mumbled, going back to drinking my coffee.

---

I took a few breaths outside of Neal's door, looking down at myself and swiping down my shirt. It was one of our few days off, and Neal and I usually took our space from each other at the same time that we took our breaks from work. Fittingly, I had dressed in civilian clothes, and I'd even left my gun in my car since I knew that Neal didn't like them. I thought I'd surprise him by helping out, and if I ran into June, then that would be nice, too, to make sure she was alright.

I knocked on the door soundly and took a step back, forcing myself not to fix my hair the way I wanted to. I was being ridiculous. It was just Neal. I'd come to his penthouse a hundred times before. The only difference was the context. I wasn't on duty as an agent or his handler, and I was trying to be nice, and he had asked me on a date last month and I'd avoided talking about it.

Yeah. Nice, normal day.

The door opened, but it wasn't Neal behind it. Mozzie stood there instead, looking puzzled to see me. I returned the skeptical and suspicious frown. Mozzie was dressed up. Brown slacks, tweed jacket; like he'd dressed when playing Neal's lawyer from the University of Phoenix online program. I peeked over his shoulder. June as well as another woman were seated at the table, June able to just turn her head to see me but the other woman having to turn around in her chair, her back to the door.

I looked back down at Mozzie. Neal was nowhere in sight. Kind of a weird place for June to have a meeting, unless she had asked for a lawyer. Lawyer, stranger, hospital, charity. Things fit together. My suspicion relaxed, but I still stared at Mozzie, unimpressed. He made a meeting and stuck his friend in.

Mozzie lit up after a second, around the same time I came to my conclusion, as he seemed to realize that there was a benefit to having me here. "Oh! What a coincidence!" He laughed and opened the door further, indicating that I should come in. I walked inside, unsure what I was about to be going along with. "Miss Calloway, this is Dr. Reichs. I mentioned her, didn't I?"

Reichs… like the anthropologist? Mozzie had seen one of my books lying around and that was when Katie had told him happily that I had an obsession with forensic science novels.

"Should I come back later?" I asked June directly, pointing to the door.

The other woman stood up quickly, spinning around to face me. She was not someone I knew. Her hair was a sort of red, gingery color, light cinnamon, and she had hazel eyes and light olive skin. Gorgeous. She wore a pleated pencil skirt and a low V-neck blouse with the top three buttons undone, collar turned down, and a red blazer was draped over the back of the chair she'd been in. Shining black pumps raised her an inch off the ground. The woman couldn't have been older than me.

"Oh, hi!" She came walking forward from the dining area and to the front of the suite, reaching out to shake my hand. I gave Mozzie a little blind faith and let it happen. "Are you Samantha's mother?"

Now that I couldn't even begin to argue. Either the girl was dumb or she'd never seen a photograph of Samantha, because the African-American girl looked nothing like me, and not just because of my skin color. "No," I said quickly, shaking my head vigorously. I was no one's parent, and Mozzie was not going to convince me to pretend to be June's granddaughter's mom.

"Oh, no," June disagreed at the same time, laughing a little bit at the misunderstanding.

"No way," I reaffirmed.

"She's just a family friend is all, Miss Calloway." Calloway. Didn't ring any bells. June held a hand out to me as the redhead held my hand firm and started to pull me towards the table, having me join their little meeting. Well. "This is A-"

She started to introduce me by my title, but I thought ahead. If Mozzie was giving me a fake name, then obviously he didn't want Calloway to know who I was. I interrupted with a sweet smile to the woman. "A very energetic, curious, and nosy woman who saw a strange car out front and decided to check it out. How are you?"

She smiled broadly. "I'm doing well, thank you." She sat down without letting go of my hand. I took my own hand back and walked behind the chair Mozzie had abandoned, going to the unoccupied side of the table to sit. Calloway just kept engaging me. "It's been a while since I've come to New York. The city's just like I remembered." I nodded slightly. There were things about it that always appeared the same, though the people came and went. "Melissa Calloway. I'm here with an appointment with June and Mr. Honeycutt regarding Samantha. I work with the Hearts Wide Open foundation."

I don't even know where to begin. For one, that was an absolutely terrible alias. Had Moz been hungry when he'd come up with that one? Because all I could think about was Christmas ham.

I chose to go with the second point, seeing as how he was in the middle of lying about his identity, so broaching that topic probably wasn't the most fantastic idea. "Oh. That's a… that's a very…" I struggled to find something nice to say. "That's a very interesting choice of name." Melissa tipped her head back, giggling and smiling. "Sorry, I'm being really rude. I don't know where my head goes off to sometimes. I'm McKenna, McKenna Reichs." Nothing wrong with using my first name as long as I don't contradict Mozzie.

I wasn't breaking any rules by giving her an alias. I was just lying. Which, while impolite, is not a felony.

"It's not nearly as gory as it sounds," she promised humorously. "We connect people in need of new organs with willing donors outside of the bureaucratic limitations that govern hospitals." Mozzie came back and sat down while Melissa and I made friends. "Red tape frequently gets in the way of human compassion, so Hearts Wide Open aims to rectify the situations as we see them."

"That's really nice!" I beamed, pretending to be emotionally touched. It was a nice sentiment, really, it was just that this was the organization Neal brought to my attention, and this was probably the representative that had upfront asked June for a small fortune. A charity doing strange things might not be all that straightforward what it seems, and anyone that preys on the sick just needs to be pushed out a window. "Yeah, I hate when that happens. Some things just shouldn't have the place to interfere with health and medicine, right?"

"I couldn't agree more," she vehemently concurred, nodding her head, her hair falling in loose curls over her shoulders.

Mozzie scooted his chair back in. He and his tweed and glasses looked really uncomfortable. June was looking like something had started to be resolved, too. I took another look at the way Melissa's chair was angled so she could get up quickly and concluded that things had probably been going pretty poorly. Well, Mozzie was a great actor, but he wasn't all too hot with forced empathy. Despite having a lot of what he called "moral relativity," he had a pretty powerful moral compass when things got serious, and I doubted Melissa was one of the people he would be able to feign compassion for.

Still, this was not the situation I really wanted to be in when I drove over, and I couldn't help but wonder what Neal was getting up to that meant Mozzie was left to handle this alone. "If this is your meeting, I should probably go-" I started to say, shifting to get up again.

"It's not a closed meeting," Melissa quickly interrupted, looking up at me with a smile that she tried to repress by pursing her lips.

I paused, mouth slightly open, and saw her eyes dart to my lips. The first thing I did was look to Mozzie, who looked fidgety and a little hopeful, and bite my lower lip. Mozzie had done crazier things for me in the past. At least this didn't necessitate some vehicular assault. "June?" I asked carefully. It was still her granddaughter's health in jeopardy.

"By all means, stay if you like." June wasn't trying to be subtly persuasive like Mozzie. I sat back down slowly. If everyone wanted me here, then I didn't have a good enough reason to leave. June smiled at me reassuringly as if she could tell that I wasn't fully comfortable with prancing in and doing spontaneous reconnaissance improvisation. "You have a sort of insight into these things."

That Mozzie doesn't? I wondered privately. Sometimes it occurred to me that he may have actually gone to law school. He liked to put on his "lawyer jacket" and he did a damn good job of defending Neal against evidence that had seemed damning when Fowler was trying to stifle them with warrants and tampered proof. I doubted he would tell me if he had, and unless he ever told me his real name, it would be almost impossible for me to verify it either way.

I leaned into the back of the chair and picked up my left leg to cross over my right, symbolically getting comfortable for whatever terror was coming.

My presence settled, Mozzie swallowed when he saw I was waiting for a lead to follow and turned back to Melissa. "You said you make connections outside of the bureaucracy," he recalled. "Going around the national registry – isn't that illegal?"

"Only if the money exchanges hands," Melissa said, and skimmed over that close technicality. "We find our donors willing to contribute through the Good Samaritan law. I am sure there is someone out there who will find Samantha's case as compelling as we do." Giving June a warm and friendly grin, Melissa stretched out across the table to take the homeowner's hand.

Mozzie waited a bit too long before he said something. I glanced at him, wondering why he was letting it slide, only to find him looking at his lap and playing with something. He kept looking up afterwards. I followed his eyes to his open laptop on the island counter by the kitchenette and my eyes widened. It was a real-time video of the street outside the manor. Neal was small and his face unfocused on the video, but given the pattern my life followed, there was really no chance that it wasn't him trying to push something thin into the mechanism of a compact, dark blue car.

You fucker… I stared meanly at the video for a second and then covered up my ire as I distracted Melissa with some smooth improvisation. I wasn't comfortable, but my talents hadn't flown out the window with Neal's common sense. It's broad daylight and you're breaking into a car!

"As I understand," I said, and got a grateful look from June, who was increasingly stressed by Mozzie's attempts at multitasking. "You asked Miss Ellington for a pretty hefty sum in exchange for further consideration."

"Oh, not in exchange for," Melissa disagreed, rapidly shaking her head. "Merely along with. We would never discourage anyone from helping us to continue our work."

"Oh, boy," Mozzie squeaked. I looked over Melissa's shoulder. A police uniform was showing up on the screen, and Neal was turning around to face the officer, pushing his back to the car.

As Melissa looked over her shoulder to see what I was looking at, Mozzie shut the laptop video off just in time, leaving the screen blank. The close call left me wondering what the hell was going on outside and why Neal felt the urge to carjack, but my loyalty to the two idiot conmen made me just sigh and continue to play.

"How much is a typical donation?" I inquired politely.

Melissa glanced at June to include her and be personable. "It varies," she answered me.

Mozzie set his padded elbows on the table, laughing a little in spite of that the situation didn't call for amusement. "But ballpark it for me," he asked, rubbing his hands together unsurely.

It was clearer that Melissa didn't actually want to answer, but as the matter was pressed on, it would have just looked sketchy if she didn't. "Anywhere from a hundred thousand to half a million," the coordinator disclosed.

Wow. I didn't realize I'd said it out loud until Melissa winced and nodded reluctant agreement.

"How much time do we have to consider?" Mozzie asked.

"Not much," Melissa warned, fixing her handbag in her lap before it tipped over. She kept her hands on it securely, though I bet it was so she had something to do with her arms. "Unfortunately, there are only so many willing donors, and there are many more people in difficult situations."

Her explanation didn't seem entirely congruent with what she'd told me about money being appreciated, but not required. The entire discussion seemed to be revolved around the financial aspect, and if we didn't have time to consider money, then it felt to me as though they would move on to another person who would more enthusiastically pay whatever price the so-called charity set. A decent charity wouldn't pick and choose who it helped depending on how much profit it could make off of the people it chose to aid.

Distracted by Neal's plight, Mozzie didn't have an immediate reply. He struggled to find something to say and had to settle with a lame, "Truer words!" exclamation, raising an empty fist up like a toast.

No wonder he was glad to see me; this is crashing and burning.

---

No matter what pretense Mozzie had set up, letting him lead the discussion had been a tremendous mistake that equated to almost physical pain and a severe case of secondhand embarrassment.

"Well, I hope I've answered all of your questions." Melissa gathered her purse in her arms and pulled the loose strap up over her slim shoulder, holding it against her side. She pushed her chair out and stood up while Mozzie reached after her as she moved away. In return, she rewarded him with a tense and uncomfortable smile. "And then some."

"But-" Mozzie stuttered, lacking the conversational fluidity to come up with a quick and engaging reply and the charisma to stall until he had one. Instead, he stammered. "But-"

June sent me a pained look, asking me with her eyes to do something, anything to stop Mozzie.

I rose gracefully from my chair, stretching my arms and standing up on my toes. While I luxuriously stretched, I tipped my head back, baring my throat while my hair fell back, conveniently also pushing my chest out by arching my spine. Melissa's rattling keychain, attached with a carabiner to her purse, stopped just a few feet away.

"Feel free to call if you have more." More questions, she implied to the conversation, but I got the feeling that wasn't exactly what she meant when Melissa offered me a business card from her leather bag, bangles on her wrist clinking, large on her slim wrist but too small to fall right off of her hand. "Or just happen to think of me." She gave me a slight and pretty smile.

I returned it with one of my own, a little laugh, and ducked my head, playing it as embarrassment at being the center of attention. Mozzie totally owes me for taking over. I could distract Melissa for at least a few minutes, easy. "I'll remember that," I said, loud enough for Mozzie to hear I had it under control, reaching up to rub the back of my neck and looking at her through my eyelashes. "Thank you, Miss Calloway."

I used her last name intentionally to see just how interested she was. If I was right, she would correct me to use her first name, tearing down the professional wall that separated us. It was no shock to me that that was exactly what she did. "Melissa, please," she corrected kindly.

While I stalled, buying more time by taking a few seconds to respond, Mozzie panicked and tried to interrupt. "Wait, uh, you haven't given me the chance to-" He stood up so quickly that he knocked the chair over. June and I both flinched back at the noise. Melissa turned to look at him over her shoulder, startled, and made a face that could only be compared to the grim resignation of someone about to take a broom to the spider in the corner of the ceiling. Mozzie fumbled with his hands after he almost tripped over the chair legs. "To ask you to dinner!" He exclaimed, having what he thought was a stroke of genius.

The silence that followed clued him in. His hand, which was held out, quickly fell back to his side, and I swear he started to blush.

Melissa took one swing with the verbal broom. "You're crazy," she decided, her attention drawn entirely from me in the face of being hit on by someone who couldn't take a hint.

The spider clung on while Melissa turned on her heel and started to not just walk, but stalk back to the exit, eager to leave. Cursing internally, I started forming a plan to follow her and stall some more. June hid her face, humiliated by Mozzie's poorly-executed good intentions.

"Crazy for you!" Mozzie called after Melissa desperately.

It was truly pathetic. I stepped in between Mozzie and Melissa as she swung open the door with more force than was strictly required, swift to leave as soon as she could. "Um, okay, that's enough," I promised him, torn between laughing and crying at the horrific natural disaster that I had just been a witness to. Next time Neal wanted to snoop, he had to get someone else to do the talking.

"Thank you, Mr. Honeycutt, that's all," June emphatically agreed, sending me another apologetic glance while she rose quickly, gathering up her coat and the long fur sleeves, leaving after Melissa to smooth things over. I didn't know if she knew what we were doing to protect Neal, but she certainly didn't want the charity representative to leave with so many crooked feathers.

After the door closed behind June, I kept rubbing the back of my neck. The awkwardness of that affair had lasted long enough for an entire lifetime. I looked back at Mozzie, unsure I even wanted the accompanying explanation, but curiosity killed the cat.

"That was… whoa." I shook my head and swallowed. Interesting was too nice; heartbreaking sounded mean; odd didn't even begin to cover it. "I don't even have words." Mozzie was pressing buttons on a flip phone, a burner cell he'd trash in about a week or less. "What was that?"

"I was buying time," Mozzie snapped, taking insult to my tone while he held the phone up. Shooting me a look that was more embarrassed than mean, he put the call on speakerphone. Glaring up at me over the rim of his glasses, he looked kind of like an angry gnome.

The phone clicked. "Moz, don't worry, the cops are gone." Neal soothed calmly.

"That's great," Mozzie said with distress, taking his glasses off of his face and rubbing the lenses on the shoulder pad of his jacket. "I hope you're done."

"Not yet."

"Well, then get done. You told me to do what you'd do, so I asked her to dinner." He rushed through it, realizing now that that was not the right approach to take.

I burst out in a fit of giggles and covered my mouth with my fist, biting down into the side of my hand to try to stay quiet. I didn't want to be mean or hurt his feelings, it was just… that explained a lot of the last twenty minutes. Mozzie had his own charms, I was sure, somewhere among the eccentricities and paranoia, but he wasn't the personable, easily-lovable Neal Caffrey. He lacked the social grace, among other things.

Neal actually paused for a moment, a little bit curious. It was nice of him not to automatically assume it went terribly. "What happened?"

"She left," Mozzie reported, his face turning red all over again as he pushed his glasses back on with one hand.

"Running!" I added while cackling, bending over the table with a stitch in my side.

"Kenna!" Instantly distracted from Melissa and the disaster flirting, Neal sounded like he would've gone bolt upright, nervous that I was aware of what he was doing – which was, for the record, not walking very slowly with the lead. "I can explain!"

Really, I would love to see you try.

"Just get out of trouble," I told him over the phone, looking at Mozzie again and whistling, valiantly avoiding another fit. Spinning around, I went to the fridge to go get a drink, and hopefully both of us would have gotten over it enough to not spur each other's reactions on.

I could do the mature thing when I really had to.

---

"I sent a text to Diana while we were talking with Melissa to look into Hearts Wide Open." I stopped, holding my phone against my hand, and looked up at Neal from the couch. Mozzie had left, a little embarrassed, several moments ago, leaving the two of us in the penthouse. The roles had reversed, and I was the one dressed while Neal was stripping off his top to change. "Horrific name for a charity, by the way. I don't know what they were smoking."

"Moz agrees," Neal told me with a grimace. "He thinks it's a better name for a horror movie." The buttons undone on his shirt, he rolled his shoulders back, sliding the sleeves down his arm, the front opening over his torso. I eyed his abs hungrily but stayed put on the sofa before him.

"He's not wrong," I pointed out. Mozzie was, for once, one hundred percent correct. A charity that handles organ donations shouldn't be called anything "wide open," let alone a vital organ such as a heart. "Anyway, she works for the founder, a Dr. Wayne Powell. He runs medical clinics all across the east coast officially, but each clinic has their own administrative supervisors, leaving him free to travel and broaden his reputation."

Shirtless Neal was one of my favorite versions. Much happier and more amicable than Jumpsuit Neal and much more pleasant to be around than Sulky Neal, I appreciated his presence. Picking up a couple of shirts on hangers that had been draped over the empty coffee table with care, he held them both up in front of his body to show me.

"I got some names. Which do you think?"

My first impulse was the blue shirt, but the color wasn't the best for his eyes, and the vertical stripes would look… weird. Neal in stripes was unusual, but he had a dark blue shirt with vertical white lines across it that looked amazing on him, especially without a business casual tie, and now anything else with stripes seemed odd.

"Grey," I decided, pointing to the one on the left, then went on with the conversation. "How did you get them?"

Neal paused, eyes sticking to the grey shirt like they'd been glued, and he tossed the royal blue with red stripes at me. "Her briefcase wasn't locked," he admitted, and quickly moved on to change the subject. "I thought you liked blue on me."

"Inadmissible," I sighed flatly. One day, he was going to get evidence in a way that meant I could press charges without jumping through hoops to get more evidence. "I do, but this one isn't as nice as the blue and white. Look, it doesn't matter. Tell them to me anyway and I'll do a Google search."

But it does matter. The cigarette filters had been the start of not just a convenient in to keep himself out of prison – they'd been the beginning of a long chain of events in which he'd had to avoid meeting my eyes while he told me something that he had done. I had told him to proceed very slowly and carefully like he was holding an egg in a spoon, and he had just fucking catapulted the egg, sprinted forward, and somehow miraculously caught it before it hit the ground. In this case, the smashing egg would've been the police outside arresting him. Those odds weren't going to hold out for forever.

Neal, oblivious to the growing uncertainty on my face, shrugged the chosen shirt up his arms and flipped down the collar around the back of his neck. "Leonard Parker was one," he said. I typed it into my phone's search bar. Neal had a knack for remembering names. "Also, Edgar Tanenbaum-"

"I want you to start being more careful, Neal," I blurted, mouth running without my permission, and as a result, I snapped my mouth shut.

We both blinked at each other. Neal seemed as surprised by my sudden outburst as I was. Then, forgetting about the rest of the shirt buttons, he sat down on the couch next to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

"I talked to the police," he reassured, retelling the story from his perspective, filling in what I didn't know, and probably hoping that proving he'd had it under control would convince me he was all good. "Told them I was a prosecutor, and-"

"You broke into someone's car and lied to the police!" I pointed to the door to the rooftop. He'd been just yards away from us and down a couple of stories and could've been arrested for suspicious activity. He was lucky he had talked himself out of trouble. Lucky. And if I knew anything about luck, it was that it would inevitably run out right when he needed it the most. "I'm not saying it's not for a reason, but you're not armed and you don't have the protection of being a government agent." I twisted, pulling one leg up so my knee was on the couch, and started to pull the sides of his shirt together across his chest, working on the buttons for him so I had something to do with my hands before I started to anxiously pop my knuckles. "Consultants are very useful, but when they start going off on their own, they get too caught up, they start to drown, and they get hurt. Worse, they get killed."

I couldn't let anything happen to him. It was endearing that he wanted to protect me, but if that was what it came to, I'd rather face my demons alone than have Neal where he could be harmed by them. I would rather take his fights onto myself than stand by and watch him struggle. He just kept putting himself in danger. When he had been moved to prison again, I'd sobbed in my bedroom, reduced to useless anxiety and terror until Katie had come to snap me out of it.

Swallowing, I pressed the final button in and rubbed my thumb over the space just above it as the collar opened up, showing a section of tanned skin that was warm and smooth to the touch, heated with his blood and pulse. Neal raised his hand when I wasn't paying attention and he caught my wrist. I stopped the gentle touching of his chest and looked down to his lap, embarrassed by my worrying. I wasn't supposed to care. I wasn't supposed to need him to promise me he'd be safe.

"I'm careful," he said to me gently, holding my hand lower and closer to his heart. "It took years for Peter to catch me because I'm careful."

I shut my eyes. Neal could say that he was careful all that he wanted, but that didn't change the fact that he wasn't careful enough. As long as he was going to keep doing dumb things like breaking into cars in broad daylight, I was not going to be able to stop fretting. I had come perilously close to losing him to a lifelong prison sentence once already, thanks to Fowler. I wasn't going to let him do something stupid that made it hard for us to so much as hold hands without getting a whistle blown at us and someone snapping that physical contact wasn't allowed.

Mozzie and I teased Neal about being Peter Pan and Robin Hood for a reason. Like those childhood heroes, he had an underdeveloped sense of consequences and an inflated idea of his own invulnerability. One day he was going to get caught and neither Mozzie nor I would be able to do much of anything to help. We could warn him as much as we liked, but Neal didn't get how close he pushed it. It was either that he just didn't think it through or he genuinely didn't care how much he toed the line, and I wasn't sure which was worse.

He was watching me carefully, judging if he needed to say anything else. I took my hand away and scooted a few inches down the sofa, taking his arm off of my shoulders. Clearing my throat, I steered the subject back to safer waters. "All of the names are part of DGI – that's Doctoral Global Initiative."

"I know what DGI is," Neal nodded and let the translucent redirect slide. "If Powell's charity is supplying organs to those in need, maybe this is how he gets hold of them to start with."

"Using the third world as your own personal organ bank…" I shivered. "It's either clever or extremely skeevy, depending on how you look at it." Hopping up from the couch, I shoved my phone into my pants and grabbed my jacket from the back of the furniture. "Alright, I will ask to see where he's currently at and we can talk to him pretty soon. Does that work?"

Please say it works. Please do this with me so I can protect you.

"No need." Leaning back into the sofa, Neal stretched his arms along the back, crossed his legs, and grinned at me proudly. "I know exactly where we can find him."

"The briefcase?" I surmised, pinching the bridge of my nose. That was one change of topic that didn't last very long.

"The briefcase," he confirmed, bobbing his head. "Are you a tennis fan?"

---

A tennis club. I hadn't really seen myself ever returning to one of those, but I hadn't forgotten how to look the part. I took out a chiffon dress with stylishly short shorts, the fabric white with swirling blue and yellow as if the white was water and the colors were dissolving tablets. I'd paired the dress with black heeled boots, been sent back into my closet by Neal, and repeated the process a couple of times before he said that I absolutely could not wear combat boots and raided my shoe supply himself, setting me up with tall golden gladiator sandals.

I didn't have an alias prepared to get in, but I was confident that I could just show my badge to the man monitoring the visitors and get let inside with no hassle. If not, maybe I could drop a few important names. Neal took my arm, wearing a casual business suit without the blazer, and led us inside the gallant entryway.

The interior of the main building was rich. This was clearly a retreat of the one percent. A chandelier hung from the ceiling and cast sparkling reflections on the floor and walls, the tiled floor had been polished to shining within an inch of its life, and lacy curtains trailed down over broad windows, filtering out the sunlight while leaving the room bright and clear. Spiral staircases gradually arched to the second level on both sides of the lobby, wide corridors extending under them both to the left and the right to the two wings of the building, and a greeter stood behind a front desk.

I kept looking around curiously, not seeing anyone else but strangely feeling at home in the library-esque quiet. It was rude to make too much noise indoors, especially in a club like this one. I didn't like how welcomingly familiar it felt. I had left that sort of setting a long time ago and I missed the luxuries, but I was content with my choice. After all, opting out of the extravagance had gotten me Katie, Derek, Diana, and, later on, Neal.

Neal oozed comfort, but I knew it was for other reasons. His broadcasted confidence wasn't just a front – it was from experience in these kinds of settings, and he knew how to play it like he belonged to the right class. After linking arms with me like a gentleman, he matched my slightly shorter stride while subtly leading the path up to the desk.

The man looked up from the ledger, glasses perched on his nose, thick, luscious hair pulled back with a sweeping motion like the dip of a wave. "This is by invite only, sir and ma'am," he told Neal, following it up with a polite nod at me.

I dropped my arm as Neal patted his pockets, first in front, then in back. "Oh," he said, laughing embarrassedly. "I left mine at home."

Unmoved, the greeter raised his eyebrows. "Then you're just going to have to go home and get it, aren't you?"

I pursed my lips and tried not to look too pleased as Neal was shut down before he even really got started. Neal smiled friendlily at the greeter anyway, nodded his agreement, and turned around. "Okay," he said. I looked after him, confused, but he kept walking back towards the front entryway.

Well, that's unusually… compliant… of him.

I started to follow, walking faster to catch back up. I reached for his arm and touched his elbow. "That was the extent of your plan?" I asked incredulously, mindful of my volume. Neal shrugged and looked down at his shoes. "That was sad," I informed. I expected at least a little bit more effort from such a brazen conman.

Before we left the lobby, I heard another person's footsteps and impulsively looked to my left, down the right wing of the building. Melissa Calloway was walking out of the corridor, passing underneath the staircase, head down and one hand rifling through her red-orange purse. Ginger hair bounced, curled and sprayed neatly with loose ringlets around her face. Her dress was similar to mine, but had a longer skirt instead of shorts, and was purely white. Two-inch white heels were making the clicking footsteps.

I pulled on Neal's arm to slow him down. "Wait, there she is, it's Melissa." Mozzie had not endeared himself to the woman in any way, but she had liked me pretty well. Well enough for me to expect a warm welcome. I could be friendly and probably talk my way into some information, possibly even convince her to set up a meeting with Powell if I played it right, and if I was really good, I could make her think it was her idea.

Neal paused and looked at her. He hadn't really gotten to observe her for very long before, keeping his head down and unnoticeable so she wouldn't pay attention to the man walking away from the direction of her car. "As good of an approach as any," he murmured thoughtfully, reaching up to his head and swiping back his hair vainly. It hadn't needed to be fixed. I rolled my eyes as he pulled away from me and went up to Melissa, throwing her a handsome, bewitching smile. "Excuse me, hi. I seem to have forgotten my invitation."

That is not the approach I was trying to initiate, I sighed. Clearly, we needed to have a talk about who called the shots on who does what.

Melissa looked up from her bag but kept her hand inside, not willing to open up and have a long discussion with the man who just came up to her, looking down to her earnestly with a flirtatious grin. "And… you are?" She asked expectantly.

Neal held out a hand. "Dr. Parker, from Doctoral Global Initiative," he lied. I could have smacked my forehead into the nearest wall, but the greeter would have gotten suspicious. As it was, he was glaring over at Neal, insulted that he was trying to get in without an invitation after being turned away. What if Melissa had already met Parker and knew Neal was lying? "But you can call me Leonard. And you are?"

"Miss Calloway," Melissa returned sharply, not having any of the first name business. I winced sympathetically. Neal was not used to being turned down so quickly, and that was twice in a row. Thankfully, she didn't seem to catch on to that Neal wasn't who he said. "Remember your invitation next time, Doctor. I hope you have a good afternoon."

Faltering, Neal just said, "You, too," and stepped aside so that she could pass.

Giggling behind my hand, I walked up to Neal's side. "I don't think that went the way you expected it to," I snickered, leaning against his shoulder. He frowned at me. Someone was not having a great day.

When she heard my voice, however, Melissa stopped and turned back around, recognizing the tone from June's house. Brightening up significantly, she walked back towards us with a more enthusiastic spring, her hair bouncing. Letting her bag slide comfortably back over her shoulder and forgetting about whatever she'd been looking for, she approached – but had eyes only for me.

"Miss Reichs!" She held her hand out. Neal leaned back, rocking on his heels, stunned by the role reversal. I smiled warmly, forced a small blush to my face, and looked down to hide the redness. I'd learned a long time ago that when people were interested in me, that usually charmed them a little more, so I shook her hand while thinking about the time I'd stumbled face-first into a closed door and been laughed at by the interns. "Oh, I never asked. It is Miss, isn't it?"

Holding up my left hand to show her the lack of jewelry, I smiled encouragingly, blushing yet appreciative of her interest. "I'm not married," I confirmed, biting the inside of my cheek shyly.

If anything, my apparent timidity to her attention spurred her on. "What are you doing here?" She asked, moving forward slowly and taking my elbow. I let her guide me with my arm back into the open lobby, slowly steering towards the greeter's desk.

Only the knowledge that looking back and smirking at Neal would give up the game kept me from doing exactly that, because for once, he was the one left standing, disgruntled and disapproving, forced to follow along like a puppy.

I went over the medical information I knew and chose the safest way to go. "I'm an orthopedic specialist in DGI," I fibbed, glancing over at her like I couldn't keep my eyes away. "If I'd known you worked with Dr. Powell, well, I'd have never let you leave without a longer conversation." My face reddened a little bit more, but I wanted to validate her attraction so she didn't lose focus. It could have been considered mean, but if she was feeling anything for me, it was little more than lust. Exploiting love and tenderness were cruel, but sexual attraction… well, I was playing with her libido, not her heart.

"We may have a few slots still available, now that I think about it," Melissa warmly said, as if she wasn't just going to make some new slots appear if there weren't. I knew this game. It had just been a while since I'd played it. After all, who goes for the professional, coffee-consuming, and irritable federal agent when there's a suave, smooth, and beautiful blue-eyed man next to her? "Doctor, would you care to accompany me to the lawn? We've hired caterers and there's a minibar outside."

Ooh, a minibar. She had me at 'caterers.' "Sounds absolutely fantastic," I agreed, biting my lip as I smiled at her. Neal was probably going to want a drink.

"Come on, then," she invited, letting go of my arm when we were close to the desk. Looking over my shoulder, she surveyed Neal for just a moment. "I'm sure I can fit in your associate, as well," she added as an afterthought, being nice to my friend to be nice to me. I nodded gratefully and Melissa turned to walk up to the greeter and have a few words.

Neal slunk forwards. "Wow," he said, his tone the opposite of what 'wow' usually entailed. He sounded flat and unsupportive. "That did not go at all like I thought it would."

Melissa motioned to us over her shoulder. The greeter looked right at Neal and scowled, irked. "Don't take it personally," I told him, referring to Melissa more than the annoyed man at the desk. "I think she just bats for my team." I made a little swinging motion and winked. Turned out that it was a good thing I'd ditched the intimidating fed suit.

Neal's face darkened. "She wasn't even a little interested in me," he muttered, stingy. "You're not on the same team."

I shrugged. Yeah, I was definitely attracted to Neal, but what did it really matter that Melissa wasn't? Other than that it apparently hurt his ego. And personally, if he was that offended when someone didn't take an immediate shining to his pretty face, he probably needed his ego knocked down a few pegs, anyway.

"She likes women, I like anyone that can give informed consent. There's an overlap."

Neal huffed. "You do realize you now have to flirt with her for the rest of the day, right?" I wiggled my eyebrows. Did he think I was incapable of flirting? I'd been a teenager at one point. I could do it. "This should be a fun story to tell your lovely sister over breakfast tomorrow," he continued sarcastically.

Something clicked. The date we'd never gone on, the restaurants he kept trying to take me to, known for their romance and reputation as a couples' destination, that I narrowly avoided by complaining about the price or the cuisine. He wasn't pushy or rude but he also wasn't subtle, either.

"Are you-" My head reeled. It seemed ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical – how did he think I felt when I watched him ply women into falling all over him? "Are you jealous?" I hissed incredulously.

Neal scoffed, but he looked away, and he honored his longstanding promise not to lie to me by saying nothing to refute.

---

When we left the back of the large facility, we came onto the club grounds. A huge green field expanded for at least an acre in each direction, tennis courts covering the land to the left. White tents had been pitched on the right, and on the green directly behind the building were setups for minibars, tables, picnics, and a large grill being attended to by several staff members.

Melissa excused herself to go check in with her boss and left down the slight slope to the minibar, which had been set up with the alcohols in view of any direction. A breeze came up and ruffled the pants of my shorts, also catching Melissa's dress and sending the back flying up to her thighs. Since I knew Neal was watching me, I fixed my eyes on her legs and licked my lips.

He shoved his hands in his pockets. I thought it was good for him to understand how I felt every time I watched him flirt the pants off of (metaphorically) anyone else, or how it felt when he had shamelessly ogled the models at Le Joyau.

Melissa caught someone's attention, a male person at the minibar who was hunched over the top with his back to us. "Over there," I said at a normal volume. Melissa was too far away to overhear and no one else was hovering – they were enjoying themselves, getting food or wandering over to the tennis courts to play a match. "That looks like Powell." She had said she was going to go see her superior, and Powell was the overseer she corresponded with. "Since I'll be entertaining Melissa," I grinned, "See if you can get Powell to entertain you. Get close to him, and get whatever information you can."

Neal snorted. "You'll have to pry your girlfriend off of his arm first," he pointed out. Melissa was pulling on Powell's hand, tugging him to face her, while he clearly just wanted to drown himself in drinks. Someone was having a bad day.

"Cheer up," I elbowed him. "There's nothing really to be jealous of, is there?" I added, and I let it hang pointedly for a few seconds. Neal couldn't be upset with me for flirting when he did it all the time, and he also couldn't be upset with me for flirting because we weren't an item. Hadn't I made that clear? Gods, I wanted to be, but I couldn't. It wouldn't work. "Either way, the only person's bed I'll end up in in the near future is yours." Melissa was gorgeous, but she was no Neal, and currently the only person I really had eyes for was him. "It's kind of cute that you're worried, though," I teased.

"I'm not worried," Neal defended, very transparently lying as he shifted his weight to one leg, watching Melissa as she said something to Powell and turned around to come back up the hill to us. It wasn't a long trek, so we'd need to wrap this personal conversation up soon. "I'm just thinking about potential ramifications."

"You? Considering consequences?" I covered my mouth and snickered. Neal, thinking about ramifications. "That's a first!" Scowling gravely, it was Neal's turn to elbow me. I took it with grace, still giggling until Melissa came close enough. Then, to rub it into his face, I forced another heavy blush into my cheeks and flirted some more. "Hey, Melissa…" I moved a few small steps closer to her and nodded back towards Neal. "My friend here says he doesn't think I can get the sexiest woman here on my arm with two sentences. Care to prove him wrong?"

Although she blushed, too, flattered, she laughed, her voice like gentle chimes. "I would love to prove you right by doing the exact same," she winked, holding out her elbow to link our arms. I slid my hand into the crook of her elbow, her arm warm and smooth and deceptively strong. "I still need to show you your spot, don't I?" She asked as if just remembering, beginning to lead our walk to the right, heading towards the tents instead of the courts.

"I'd love to see my spot," I replied in a conspiratorial hush, glancing back over my shoulder to smirk and throw a wink at Neal before laying it on extra thick and leaning into Melissa, lowering my head onto her shoulder.

---

My 'spot' was apparently one of the white tents furthest away from the group. They were almost ten feet high and as many feet long, but a few feet shorter where width was concerned. A sort of hospital bed had been set up to the side of the tent with its wheels locked and blocked with cinderblocks, and a set of drawers with a tray on top had been rolled in for first aid. A cooler was on the ground over a pretty orange and yellow towel.

Once inside, Melissa zipped the tent closed from the upper middle of the flaps, isolating us alone and out of sight. The white fabric was thick and opaque. "You work very closely with Dr. Powell, I take it?" I asked lightheartedly, making conversation while I took in the limited scenery.

It did occur to me as she was closing us in that this was as close to a secure place as any to hook up, and it was a lot classier than a janitor's closet in the building. There was also less risk of someone interrupting. All we'd have to do was be quiet and no one would know that we were here; no one would think to look…

Melissa hummed noncommittally. "He does keep a small circle," she stated without explaining anything. I pretended not to notice how guarded an answer that was. "Your… friend… back there seems to have captured his attention." Neal had gone right to Powell and before entering the tent, we'd seen the two of them talking, acting like commiserating lonely pals at a bar.

"Well, he's definitely a charmer. He will flirt the pants off of anything that breathes," I chuckled. I wouldn't have been surprised if Neal was coming onto the doctor down at the minibar as an in.

Melissa frowned slightly and turned her back to me. I thought for a second I'd said the wrong thing until she bent down to open the cooler. She kept her knees straight so her dress pulled up. My eyes widened. "He's got a nice body," she commented, seeking out… some sort of answer from me, while her dress slid up her thighs, over the curve of her ass, showing a hint of lacy white underwear.

I swallowed. "He's gorgeous," I agreed passively. Any onlooker with eyes would say Neal looked pretty. It didn't necessarily mean I was into him, which was what I needed to remind Melissa of or she might shut down. Although she seemed like she was going a little fast to hit the brakes. "But a little too flippant and a lot too facetious…" I looked down to the ground, leaning back on the hospital bed, which was about the right level to just hop up and sit on. "I prefer someone a little more trustworthy, responsible, dependable."

Neal was all of these things, I knew that. The flaws and the ideal characteristics – he had them all. The problem was that he was only trustworthy, responsible, and dependable to certain people. Moz would trust him. I didn't think he'd ever hurt Moz, and they might be best friends, but they weren't so tightly entangled that Neal could break his heart, I didn't think, unlike me, who was expecting to be hurt at any time. It hurt every time he did something like asking me on a date or trying to do something indicative of the like, because I had to say no. What if I couldn't trust him? What if it was a scheme or a ruse? The downfall would hurt twenty times more than just declining to begin with.

Melissa slowly stood up straight, the skirt taking its time to pull back over her creamy, pale thighs. The cooler lid slipped shut and left her carrying an iced bottle of champagne. "We've arranged this setup in tents in case any of our athletes are injured. The club has a doctor on call, of course, but would you mind acting as backup?"

The coordinator pulled the cork out of the top of the bottle. It had been opened before, probably by someone in the staff that put it together. Normally I'd refuse to drink from it without knowing who else had had access, but Melissa seductively wrapped her lips around the rim and tilted it back, pouring a sip down her throat, swallowing slowly.

"That's my job," I laughed a little nervously, both as a shier character and as someone who wasn't sure how far this would have to go. "As long as they don't hit their head, I'm pretty useful…" The redhead licked her lips, sucking in on her plush bottom lip. I swallowed hard and dove in. "… In whatever way you need me."

The woman stepped closer. I'd have backed up, but the bed prevented me from moving. She raised the bottle to my mouth, giving me little choice but to drink, and when I parted my lips, she tilted a thin stream of sparkling champagne, making my mouth glisten wetly and the wine flood my senses. It wasn't a strong liquor, but it was heady, with a powerful scent and a strong, all-encompassing taste that took over my tongue. Melissa had good taste in drinks.

I let her continue to pour the wine right into my mouth, darting my tongue out to lick a bead that collected on the rim. A thin hand tangled in through my hair, pulling at the curls in my ponytail and tugging my head back further. Blindly, I reached behind me to balance myself with my hands on the bed, the sheets crisp and heated from the sun.

"I think I'll be your first patient," she purred, her breath catching, her head coming closer and eventually touching home on my bared throat. She bumped her nose against the side of my neck, nuzzled down to the sensitive spot between my collarbone and my throat, and just missed hitting that zone as she moved an inch back up and pressed a kiss from wet lips. "And, if all goes well, your last."

I could have interpreted that as a death threat, but I was having a hard time concentrating on much. It wasn't so much that I was so aroused I couldn't think straight. No, Melissa wasn't familiar with my body. She didn't know the words to use or the way to touch, let alone the places that set me on fire with want or just made me weak in the knees from sensual goodness. But there was the wine being slowly sipped and her face so close to my neck, her mouth so wet and warm and I could feel her breath curling over my throat and collar, down the front of my dress, her hair tickling my shoulder and her perfume filling my nose where the champagne didn't. Anyone could have come in. Anyone. Just because we were out of the way, didn't mean we were invisible. If I let this continue, if I found myself on the bed with my legs spread, anyone could walk right in and see, and I hadn't ever really considered myself an exhibitionist but the idea of Neal coming to check…

I shuddered. Melissa took it as a sort of cue, scraped her teeth over my jugular in a playful promise of more to come, and took the bottle away. She took another slow, sexy, tempting swig and shrugged her shoulders, rolling them back… She put down the bottle on top of the cooler and trusted its hazardous perch, sliding elegant fingers underneath the left strap of her dress, pushing it down her shoulder, bending her elbow and pulling her arm out.

Melissa twisted her dress around with the sleeve off enough to pull down the zipper in the back, and held the dress up to the front of her body with a hand just under her chest. The dress didn't have the pressure to keep it up around her and left little to the imagination, which I was fairly certain was her intention. She backed up to me while she turned around, gathering her hair out of the way over her right shoulder.

"I have this… knot… in my back." She said, her tone frowning. "It's been ages since I've had a nice release…" Part of me took it as a challenge. My hormones were rising to the occasion before she even added innocently, "Of stress."

I can give you a nice release, I thought provocatively, laying my fingers over the back of her spine. The dress unzipped almost all the way to her ass. Her back dipped, was narrow like an hourglass. I liked giving as much as I liked getting; I was good at giving. It'd been a while since I'd been with a woman intimately but it wasn't the kind of thing I thought anyone would forget, per se. I was more than content with my male lover, but there was something enticing about a female that men just didn't have.

Of course, if Neal was female and Melissa male, then I'd have been thinking the same thing, just with the sexes swapped. I considered myself pansexual and without a particular biological or anatomical preference, but it was like having ice cream and cake. Most people love them both and happily enjoy one, but that doesn't mean they don't remember liking the other. Melissa was an offer, a temptation, a reminder of a lot of self-exploration and… well, just exploration in general, and a sense of coming to peace with myself.

"Here?" I asked, a little throatier than I meant to, pressing my fingernails a little harder against her lower spine.

The redhead made a very happy sound and nodded her head, keeping her chin down and her hair out of the way. I pushed my fingers in deeper to her lower back and spread out my hands, splaying them across her skin while I massaged my thumbs into the left and right of her thoracolumbar fascia. Dipping my head down, I pressed my nose to the base of her neck and breathed in deep. Her perfume smelt like petrichor, that fresh, earthy scent after a rainfall, and I shut my eyes and pretended I was in the country in the spring instead of New York.

I darted my tongue out to taste without thinking, taking a small lick of her skin. Melissa jumped and made a quiet gasp. She didn't taste like petrichor, but she had the clean smell of some sort of passive soap and a little bit of sweat from being in the sunlight that made her taste like a real person.

Thankful for my (albeit limited) medical education, I continued my massage and worked away from the fascia, extending up to the trapezius. Melissa leaned back into my hands with a soft, repressed whine, her eyes falling shut, resting back against me. I tucked my face between her shoulder and her throat and started to kiss and trail my tongue in earnest, searching out a spot where the nerves would sing and she'd make louder versions of the pretty, enticing noises. I liked noisy lovers. It was somewhat reaffirming. Lovemaking was sweet, but it required an emotional connection that I didn't get to make… and, in my current relationship, didn't want to let myself make. So hearing verbal confirmation that yes, it felt good, please, I want you… it was validating that I had a place, even though it was far from permanent.

I had a fantasy for quiet sex, but it wasn't something I was going to share with Melissa, and oddly enough, it had only started to reoccur after the first few times with Neal – both getting naked and vulnerable, having him lean on the headboard, straddling his lap, kissing him and murmuring his name while I rode him, feeling his hips thrust up shallowly and hearing the mumbled, broken groans. Lights low, doors locked, soft music playing from speakers, maybe the smell of candles in my nose. I could trail my hands down his chest or grip his deltoids, feeling the hidden muscles in his arms, or he would take me by the hand, raise my wrist to his mouth, and kiss adoringly over every centimeter of the soulmark that we shared. Fuck, I'd love that. It wasn't fucking, it was making love. If I closed my mouth, brushed my lips over the skin, I didn't have the feminine taste in my mouth and could pretend I was nibbling at Neal's throat. Large and yet artfully clever hands cupping my thighs, helping me bounce. Him exploring my throat like I was doing to Melissa-

Melissa. As the redhead intruded on my fantasy, I was ripped out of it, only barely aware that I'd been starting to breathe heavier myself, eyes shut tightly while I laved at her neck the same way I treated Neal, and Melissa leaned her head back onto my shoulder, reaching up with the hand not holding her dress to my hair, pulling me by my ponytail down further on her neck and to the front. Her knees were bent, she was sagging against me, but it was a weight I could easily support, even if the position was a little awkward.

But Melissa wasn't Neal. She wanted a different treatment, she wanted to get pushed along faster, while Neal enjoyed having his throat teased and tasted, kissed and sucked and nibbled at playfully, and he was beyond happy to let me take my time with foreplay. Melissa was warm like Neal, but she was too small, too little and lithe, not built and strong and firm. Her noises were whines and whimpers and gasps, but they weren't right. They weren't meeting my ears through Neal's lovely tenor voice, lowered and roughened with arousal.

She reacted in the wrong ways and she wasn't my lover and as much as I had thought I'd missed women, my skin crawled at even the thought of going further with anyone but Neal, whom I was so intimately comfortable with, even though we lacked the essential key element to my fantasy: love.

Damn it, I fumed miserably, trying to think of a way to weasel out of a heated situation I had encouraged. Fuck, fuck, fuck. While I kept trying to feign interest, I could feel my body cooling down, the fever lessening. Melissa was sexy, soft and supple and warm and very, very beautiful, but she just wasn't Neal. I felt like I was cheating. Somehow I knew that she might feel exquisite, but she wouldn't do anything for me emotionally, because I didn't feel anything for her… nothing like the way I felt for Neal.

How can I be cheating when there's not a relationship to cheat on?! Despite my best efforts to protect myself and shield us both from a fallout, it was seeming more and more like we'd become a couple without me even noticing.

I almost told her to stop whining when she was supposed to be groaning, because that touch always made Neal groan so obviously she was doing it wrong, but even I knew that I was being dumb and obtuse and that was just a stupid thing to say – there was no wrong reaction to a stimuli, and it was beyond rude to say something like that in a sexual situation, of all times, but I was so irritated with myself that it almost slipped out regardless.

Melissa felt my vigor decreasing, most of my kissing becoming closed-mouthed, and she took in a deep breath. "Maybe we're working on the wrong side," she suggested breathlessly, no doubt intending to renew the heat and get my mouth down on her breasts. Which, five minutes ago, I'd have not objected to.

"Um…" My stomach flipped when she took one of my wrists and guided my hand up to her chest. Her breast was firm and just barely too large to fit in my hand, a distantly familiar weight that made me just want to shrink back. Everything was wrong. Instead of letting her push it onwards, I panicked. It felt like I was one come-on away from running out and taking a cold shower. "Talk work to me," I mumbled against her throat.

I cringed. Terrible approach. The coordinator, however, was so startled by the change in subject from sex to work that she started to laugh. She let her hair fall and slipped her arm back through the sleeve of her dress, turning back around to face me with sparkling eyes and a reddened yet delighted face.

"Ah… Dr. Powell and I put a lot of time into running the Howser clinic in Manhattan," she offered, doing exactly what I had asked and talking about her work. She looked down at her heels and giggled, pulling her dress's neckline back up.

I motioned with my hand for her to turn around. She did, so her back was to me again, but this time instead of feeling along her spine, I pulled her dress closed for her and re-zipped her. "The more I hear, the more I want," I said as my head cleared, letting me think again. The perfume still stayed in my nose, but as much as I liked petrichor, I'd much rather taste it in the air naturally than breathe it in from someone who wasn't my lover, a lesson I'd just learned the hard way. "The Howser's supposedly the best clinic in the state, I've been meaning to go see but don't seem to have the opportunity."

She turned around, playing with her hair to get it to lay the way she wanted again. I stayed against the hospital bed, sinking most of my weight backwards while trying to still look composed. Though it didn't go the way she had planned, it could certainly be said that Melissa was very gracious about having the brakes slammed, even though they'd been triggered by someone else without a stated reason.

"You should come see it for yourself sometime," she invited, so while she was polite and considerate, she was not going to give up. She bent over again. This time it wasn't to show off her body, just merely to pick up her purse from the towel under the cooler. She took a cardstock piece out of the front pocket and handed it to me with a smile, a wave of auburn hair bouncing out in front of one of her eyes like mine did before it was straightened. "This is my personal phone number. Feel free to give me a call and we can see each other again… whenever you're ready." Her card was plain white with black lettering spelling her name, phone number, email, and the address of her office at the Howser (six-two-six William Street).

She raked her eyes up my body quickly and then gave me another charming smile. Blushing heavily, I forced myself to nod. I knew very well that I was not going to be ready in the way that she hoped. I was way too into my illicit and illegal affair with my soulmate. What a drag. My soulmate got in the way of my hookup and he wasn't even there.

Katie would have laughed her fucking ass off and called it karma for keeping my soulmark secret.

---

I wasn't back at work for long before a knock was on my door. Without waiting for assent, Neal propped it open and leaned inside, peering around the edge. "Hey, Dr. Anderson," he called mockingly, "I have a question for you: Does 'FBI' stand for Female Body Inspector?"

Surely he meant to piss me off, or at least embarrass me, but he had no idea how far I had or hadn't gone with Melissa and I intended to keep it that way, not giving out any information. That disastrous attempt had gone awry, which I had almost expected – the potential to be caught making out or getting it on was hotter than I had thought it would be, but I didn't seriously think I'd have let anything get to that point in a public place, much less during an investigation. The means by which it had gone awry, though… those threw me sideways and made me mad at my own head, my own sense of loyalty and feelings of cheating, like I was being disloyal to Neal.

Well, if nothing else, at least I knew that I still had a strong character.

I grinned and put up a front that showed no sign of distress. "Ha!" I laughed loudly and leaned back from my computer, waving him on inside. "If it does, then you're certainly out of luck, aren't you?" I joked. It was one of the few times the context permitted me to say something about Neal's and my private relationship without actually being strange. It was the same kind of joke Diana, Derek, and I would throw around.

Neal, still smirking with pride at his own joke, came inside and sat down in the chair that had practically become his. I turned the monitor of my computer around so it was between us. He could see as well as I could.

"I pulled up his travel records, thanks to our lovely government information-retrievers. He travels all over the globe, especially the third world, and he focuses a lot of his time in India. Any idea why?" I propped up my chin on my hand.

I knew before he said anything that Neal was going to have an answer; from the second I'd said 'India,' his eyes had been alight. "He told me he had a friend who needed a zero-mismatch kidney and that the biological pool in an Indian village was looking pretty promising for him," he explained, pleased to have been able to answer.

I hummed. Zero-mismatch, huh? The last twenty-four hours were making me pretty grateful for the biology and physiology classes I'd taken in college. Zero-mismatch kidneys were hard to find. Everyone's DNA was different, but it was possible that enough proteins matched up between kidneys… it had to be rare…

"Did he give you the friend's name or was he vague?" I asked, hoping that maybe whoever the mysterious friend was would either be a lead to the organization or might even be unaware of what Powell was doing, and thus be willing to help stop him.

Neal shook his head. "He was very careful to be ambiguous." I nodded and flicked my wrist like it was not a big deal. Neal was excellent at getting information, but it was unrealistic to expect him to get everything we needed, especially before we even realized that we needed it. "What about connecting the people he uses to scout out the donor organs?"

My turn to shake my head negatively. "Nope." I popped the consonant. "Hearts Wide Open – ugh, still an awful name," I reminded for the record. "Officially does volunteer work. All funds and donations are passed through the books as charity. Powell looks like the new saint and there's no way to get anyone on anything suspicious through this angle. Oh, and given his own condition," I snorted. Kind of ironic, really. "He gets to look like even more of an A-plus person. Makes even you look like – I don't know, Ted Kaczynski in comparison."

Neal stared at me, but paused before he took offense to being compared to a notorious killer. "His own condition?" He asked instead, still giving me an unappreciative frown as if to make sure I knew that he objected.

I leaned back. I'd already gotten the full down-low on Wayne Powell, but there wasn't anything dirty on him. Scholarship through pre-med at Harvard, top of his class in Johns Hopkins, parents both dead but with a niece whom he had doted on until she and her dad moved to Canada, and now he didn't see her as much – through no fault of his own, of course, because he was busy changing the world through his charity. The only shade wasn't even from his own shadow, it was from the creeping threat of genetics and misfortune.

"Powell was diagnosed with renal agenesis before he was even walking." I looked at Neal's face, didn't see immediate understanding, and elaborated. I watched so much TV and educated myself on medicine to the point where I wasn't sure what was common knowledge and what wasn't anymore. It's not like I could really consider myself a doctor. "That's when a child is born with only one kidney," I explained. Neal 'oh'-ed and motioned me on. "Now, he was fine, completely healthy, even, until a couple of years before he founded this organization. His PRA levels started to climb, meaning he's becoming more and more susceptible to kidney failure."

"Of course he was cryptic," Neal's eyes widened. "He's the one that needs the zero-mismatch." I nodded slowly and rolled my eyes. The man had done a damn good job of covering his own tracks. One detail kept away from the stranger who went to talk to him and we wouldn't know anything. "He's got the perfect cover story here. If he weren't so dirty, I'd almost respect him."

Almost? Aside from the ethical appeal, I was having a hard time thinking of many criminals I'd met who had smarter plans. Just because we had cottoned on didn't mean we had anything that we could use to go after him with. He did an excellent job. He was reprehensible, of course, but his intelligence – if not his morals – deserved some recognition.

"It's just frustrating that, for all the financial flips and funneling, the charity is actually still saving lives." I shrugged, a little sad that I was deliberately going to try to take down such an organization. People not unlike Samantha were depending on Hearts Wide Open for one reason or another. Was it worth risking their health – their lives, even – to stop one skeevy bastard? Legally I didn't have a choice, and the number of people actually being helped had to be low if they were demanding a hundred grand for a transplant, but the question still stood. June could have afforded it. She and many other people in the one percent. "A lot of people have recovered from otherwise terminal prognoses thanks to him and Melissa. I hate the grey areas; they make it so difficult to be sure of anything."

Yet another point to blue-collar crime. It was hard to be morally or emotionally confused when the results of not doing anything would only be more bodies, more fear, more grieving families and dark funerals.

"Pretty much life in a nutshell," Neal sighed.

I gave myself a shake to get back into the game. Life was going to be grey, but that didn't mean that Powell got to get away with extortion. He's no saint. It's not just self-preservation; it's greed and cruelty and disrespect for other human beings. How many people had died that he could have saved, just because they couldn't produce a hundred thousand dollars for him or some similar amount at the drop of a hat?

"There is going to be proof of it somewhere," I said determinedly, trying not to think too long about the kids like Samantha. June's granddaughter needed a kidney… theoretically, Powell could get her one… but my job was to prevent creeps like him from taking over the world with dirty money. If worse came to worst, I could always call a few friends and see if I could get consultations on her condition. I had a few with medical degrees around the country, and a really good one in Switzerland. "He has to keep a log of the information. My guess is that it's all in the Howser."

"The Howser clinic?" Neal checked. I confirmed. "You think he'd keep his patient records all in there?"

"Someone has to," I reasoned. The building existed. It would just be weird if they were lacking in patient files. Surely that would draw more attention than a bunch of names and logs that most staff wouldn't even care to comb through unless ordered. "It's one of the most secure places where patient records wouldn't actually be questioned. Totally normal for a practitioner and administrator to have those."

Looking prepared to go along with it, Neal stood up and stretched his arms behind him. "What are we waiting for?" He popped his back and bit his tongue, grinning at me. "Let's go take a look."

I stayed sitting. "Nope." I shot it down. Neal's smile faltered and he fell back into his chair, looking disappointed. "We need another angle first," I explained, resisting the urge to smile wanly at him for his enthusiasm. "Doctor-patient confidentiality is shielding him now. Without client permission, we don't have enough cause to requisition those records. I trust you see the problem here?"

"Without those records, we have no way of knowing who those clients are," he supplemented, shoulders sagging.

"Bingo."

---

I dropped Neal off at his house a couple of hours before dinner and he invited me in. Though it made me feel bad, I was hopeful that I wouldn't have to face June before I could tell her much of anything about the charity. It wasn't like we'd made a lot of practical progress. Luckily, my guilty wishes were answered and the woman wasn't home when Neal led me up to the penthouse, the long set of stairs making my calves burn by the time we got up to the top floor.

June wasn't home, but Neal had an unexpected guest at the dining table with a chess board in front of him. I spared a brief look over in that direction as I took off my jacket, embracing the warmer air from the outside chill. "Well, you look lonely," I remarked, combing my hair back into order and tossing my jacket over the back of the couch.

Mozzie didn't even look up from his chessboard. It probably said something about how many times I tried to get under his skin. "You are your own worst enemy, and I am my own best opponent," he quipped at me, probably quoting some philosopher from the nineteenth century.

I turned to Neal with my hands on my hips and complained about his friend. "Alright, now I want fortune cookies," I loudly declared, while sending Mozzie an unappreciative look.

Neal loosened the cuffs of his sleeves and rolled his eyes. He was never going to get Mozzie and me to stop bothering each other. The arguing was how we got along best. Neither of us were totally okay with the other's career of choice, and it was better than we aired our complaints when we got the opportunities than waiting until the grievances were too stressful.

The artist leaned over the table opposite Mozzie and looked over the chessboard. It looked like just a normal chessboard. The conspiracy theorist was playing himself on a rotatable table. "Byrne versus Bobby Fischer, nineteen fifty-six," Neal said from memory after analyzing the pieces.

"Very good," Mozzie praised, Neal's reward being his undivided attention as he finally tore his attention away from the pieces. "Who won?" He quizzed.

"Fischer," Neal answered without pause. "He sacrificed his queen on move seventeen."

I was about as talented at chess as I was at tennis, and let's just say that it was a good thing Melissa hadn't actually expected me to play tennis at the club. "Why do you just know that?" I wondered, joining them by the table and sitting down in the chair at the end, kicking one leg up over the other and sighing.

Both of them sent me disapproving looks for my bewilderment. Apparently it was normal to have the exact positions of chess pieces memorized for certain games of chess throughout history. Weirdos. Clearly Neal had missed the lesson in high school where the chess nerds are the ones that can't get dates.

"Name all episodes of NCIS that featured Troian Bellisario." Neal demanded wryly.

I just stopped myself from starting to answer "Red Cell." A little chagrined, I realized that Troian Bellisario and NCIS weren't the only actors and shows I could do that for. I had a weird thing about memorizing the titles of episodes and their guest stars. I guessed I was supposed to take this as a sign that I was being hypocritical in telling them that they were the strange ones.

Biting the inside of my cheek and staring at them, I crossed my arms. "Okay, point proven," I grudgingly admitted. "Carry on."

Mozzie stared forlornly at the chessboard yet seemed to be looking right through it. After he didn't do anything, Neal went to move one of the white pieces to its next spot according to the game Mozzie was recreating. The shorter one didn't even react to his friend interrupting his gaming process.

His lack of engagement made me a little worried. I could be snippy, but Mozzie was never that easy to knock off of his feet. "Are you okay?" I reluctantly showed some concern. "I feel like we've stepped into the Doom and Gloom Room."

Mozzie slowly drew his hand up and nudged the base of a black piece, pushing it a few squares over. He took a deep breath before he slowly said with obvious frustration, "The charity rescinded its offer to June's granddaughter."

All of us reacted. June and Neal were friends, Mozzie had taken a liking to June from the first time they met, and I was of the personal opinion that June was the reason Neal wasn't spending half of his time in the hospital from that hellish motel the bureau had wanted to book him in. God knew what kind of diseases and bacteria there were. Forget pajamas – he'd have needed a hazmat suit.

"What?" Neal asked, forgetting the chessboard and looking as though he'd been hit.

"Yep," Mozzie confirmed sadly.

"God." I stopped and uncrossed my legs, leaning over the table. Pushing my head into my hands didn't really help until I pinched my nose tightly the way I did to ward off headaches. The pressure helped me feel a little more centered. "Damn it," I groaned.

Powell needed to be taken down and Melissa obviously had to pay for her part in it, too, but Samantha needed a kidney. Not immediately, not within a set time frame, but she would need it sooner rather than later. For every day she went without, her odds increased of going into renal failure. I didn't know the full story, but I did know that no one can survive without functional kidneys, and Samantha stood even less of a chance than Powell – Powell was a grown man and she was a little girl, half my height and weight and still growing.

"Did they say why?" Neal asked after a moment while I tried to wrack my brain and think of some way to fix it. Maybe not through Hearts Wide Open, granted, but there had to be some alternative.

"They say they found a 'more urgent recipient,'" Mozzie recited dryly, his tone giving away that he didn't buy it for a second. I couldn't blame him. The so-called "charity" didn't care about patients, it cared about money. Which June had plenty of. They wouldn't have backed out unless things looked suspicious around June, and they hadn't. Melissa wouldn't have been so overly friendly to me if she recognized me as a connection to a risky target.

"And you-"

"I scouted out the clinic," Mozzie dully interrupted before it could be asked. He sounded so upset and sullen, lacking the lively energy even to be his normal sarcastic, cynical, and annoying self. "Something's got them spooked. Employees have been throwing files into the garbage all day."

I let go of my nose and lifted my head. "I'll see if there were security cameras," I volunteered lamely, feeling like there was something more I should have been doing instead of just checking out some videos. "If we prove they were destroying evidence…" It was tenuous, but it might be enough to convince Hughes.

Neal pulled out a chair next to Mozzie and sat down in between us. "Could you see what they were?" He asked quietly, not quite able to be that optimistic.

Mozzie huffed. "I couldn't tell. It's a big, pretty upscale place, in case you didn't notice. Private security is at every corner." Right. The Howser was the clinic they were working out of, probably what they were using as a front, and it was a private clinic. You didn't get walk-in appointments. They hired from a private security firm and were a quiet, secluded faculty. "Any idea what has them rattled?"

If it hadn't been something Neal or I had done, which I was reasonably sure it hadn't, then they'd found out from another source that someone was onto them. The only person I could think of would have been anyone with the bureau. I hadn't kept the Howser investigation a secret, and with my luck, someone had thought they'd be helpful and try to collect more information. Sometimes I wished my colleagues would take a little less initiative.

I had left some stuff out on my desk. There were only two people who would take something right off my desk without being asked, and Diana was more likely to ask me what the case was about before she started working on it. "Derek probably asked for some of their records," I mumbled, feeling like it was partially my fault for not keeping everything away from others' questioning hands until we were at that stage.

Mozzie made a cynical and rude hum. Well, at least his spirit isn't completely destroyed. Looking up at me with a glare, it was evident that I wasn't the only one who assigned some of the blame in my direction. "Have you noticed yet that your brother has a really bad habit of putting the worst things through the wrong channels at the most disadvantageous times?" He questioned testily.

As if I had forgotten how the innocent inquiry about Neal's secret signatures on the forged bonds had snowballed into Fowler planting evidence of Neal's initials on the pink diamond. That hadn't been Derek's fault, though. Hadn't really been anyone's but Fowler's for being low enough to use that trick to begin with; it was just an unfortunate consequence of Kate overhearing and then sharing with her best friend, which wouldn't have mattered if he wasn't a curious agent.

"It's not like he does it on purpose," I defended Derek and myself at the same time. He'd been trying to help; I had just assumed that my office was a private space and had forgotten that it was actually in a public domain. "Damn it! Again. It's worth saying twice."

"I'd be doctoring my books right now, too," Moz snidely wouldn't let me have the last word.

I took out my phone and decided to give up the fight. It wasn't one worth starting. I wasn't at fault for it and it wasn't an intentional harm, so Mozzie would get over it once the anger at the charity wasn't as fresh. He had a right to his emotions and I didn't want to invalidate those, no matter how much he got on my nerves.

"Well, if he's already butting in on the requisitioning of potential evidence, I'm going to tell Derek to look at security cameras in the area," I shrugged, opening up my texts and finding my recent contacts. Katie and Derek were my most frequently texted, followed by Neal and then Diana. "It's a longshot, but maybe they saw something suspicious we can use as probable cause."

A really, really long one… but it's possible, and this isn't a game, it's not a fun chase, not when a victim is my friend and her family members…

I felt eyes on me and looked up. Neal was staring at his hands, delving deep into thought in the quiet that followed my statement, but Mozzie was just staring at me over the chessboard with narrowed eyes.

"I," I amended with a roll of my eyes, then adopted a scolding voice. "I can use as probable cause." Jeez, he knew what I meant, were the semantics really that important? I sent my text and stood up. Mozzie and I obviously weren't going to get along right then, and not only did I want to reassure myself that Katie wasn't in danger of internal organ failure, but Neal didn't need to be in the middle of his friends fighting. "I promised Kate I'd pick up dinner. I'll call you if I find anything. Stay out of-"

"Stay out of trouble," Neal looked up. His face was tired. I hadn't noticed his eyes darkening, but they seemed a dimmer and darker hue than I'd seen since he'd been shoved back into prison. "Yeah, Kenna, I've only heard you say it to me the first three dozen times." To show that he wasn't also being irritable like Mozzie, he cracked a grin at me.

"Well, if you would listen any of those times, I wouldn't have to keep saying it," I wisely retorted, reaching over the table to him. Neal lowered his head amiably and let me mess up his hair, scratching my fingers through the thick locks and taking them out of place.

Mozzie looked away like he couldn't stand to watch the indignity.

Neal looked up with a boyish and keen smile, brighter than he'd been before, and he didn't immediately fix it. He looked atypical with one side of his hair sticking up funnily. I smirked. "I don't actively go trying to get into trouble," he said to his credit. "I just go looking for ways to help with our cases, and trouble sort of finds me. It's like I'm wearing some sort of tracker or something."

I stuck my tongue out at him for the poor attempt at a joke and left feeling a small bit better.

---

Mozzie had a role to play in the selection of my dinner that night. Katie had been prepared to make chicken sandwiches, but when I told her I wanted fortune cookies, she gave me the name of her favorite Chinese takeout place and turned off the oven. My craving had evidently passed to her through the mere medium of text messaging. Although I was obviously upset about the charity and the frustrating position June's granddaughter was in – bumped off of the waiting list without consideration, and now without Hearts Wide Open doing anything about it – I was trying not to think about it very much. My life got very complicated the day Neal Caffrey was released from prison, and ever since Fowler had decided to screw around with my sister's feelings, I've been trying to set aside time each week to be with her, not thinking about work, or Neal, or the "work" that, on the record, I definitely wasn't doing.

And, yes, once I actually tried to stop myself every time my mind wandered to topics that didn't have to do with pre-kindergarten children and the TV show being adapted to a board game that Kate wanted once it was sold in stores, I realized that Neal was the sole focus of many of those tangents, which was irritating and exasperating. So much for having a new CI not changing my life as I knew it – now I can't even go a day without speaking to him, much less thinking about him.

I pulled my feet up onto the couch, leaning into the corner between the back cushions and the arm of the sofa. Cookie crumbs were sticking to loose fibers on my shirt, and my tongue still tasted like fortune cookie. The slips of paper that had been wrapped up in the fortune cookies were all sitting in a pile between us on the couch for us to play the phrase game that we'd been doing since the first time we had Chinese together. I'd never have played it with my parents, but Kate's were the people who introduced her to it to begin with.

"Your high-minded principles spell success," I read aloud, darting my eyes up over the edge of the red words on white paper, winking at my sister. "… In bed."

Kate was holding one between her hands, the paper forced smooth with tension. "A dream you have will come true… in bed."

We both giggled. This never failed to make us laugh. It turned out that when you took the words on the fortune cookie quotes and added the words "in bed" to the end, they were almost always interpretable as something hilarious. While my shoulders shook, Kate tossed hers over into an open container that used to hold rice and dumplings. She reached between her raised knees and the back of the couch to grab another from the small pile.

"Again!" She cheered, sliding the ribbon out straight over her thigh and reading, "There is no greater pleasure than seeing your loved ones prosper… in bed." She wiggled her eyebrows overly suggestively and looked up at me at the end.

There was definitely a joke there that I wanted to make about pleasure and beds, and another one about she and Derek. The thought of almost anyone else in bed with my sister would annoy me, if not set me off, but I'd long since been forced to learn the thing about how I'm not allowed to choose who she dates, and if she wants to have someone in her bedroom then that's her decision, and I'm just glad that the person to make his way there will be someone I already trust not to hurt her. I chose to count that one as a lucky win. Before I could open my mouth and smoothly add that joke, my head gave me images of someone completely different from Derek, and I shut my mouth, feeling my face getting hot. Evidently my memories were objecting to associating that particular phrase with Kate and Derek.

I picked up another with slightly less enthusiasm, praying that she wasn't noticing the blush on my cheeks. "You can make your own happiness… in bed." On that one, I threw my head back laughing.

Kate hooted and kicked her leg across the couch to shove at my feet. "I think yours is trying to tell you something!"

In the dining room, something started making noise – a very loud noise, like the sound of a printer working to warm itself up and ink something out after a long time of being asleep. Kate looked over in that direction quickly, dropping the fortune she'd held onto. One of my feet was too near the edge, and when my body jerked, my leg went sliding off of the couch. I sat up and looked over towards it. The old fax machine that we'd had when we'd moved to our first New York residence bleated pathetically and sucked up a piece of paper from the dock.

"I didn't know that thing still works," she remarked, turning back to me. She sat up, pushing her legs back over the front of the furniture to sit normally.

I couldn't resist. "In bed," I cheekily finished for her.

In return, I was delivered an elbow to the ribs that made my jaw drop and a quiet squeak leave my throat. "Were you expecting anything?" She asked as I doubled over, half off of the couch and hurting like I'd been smacked with a really heavy book. Kate completely ignored that she was the reason I was bent over in pain. This time I knew better than to add 'in bed' to her sentence.

"Of course not," I almost wheezed. Okay, maybe I was overdoing it a little bit. It didn't feel like it though. For those few seconds in which her elbow had been connected to my ribcage, it felt like something had shattered inside me. Physically, not emotionally, although there was a minor sense of betrayal beginning to manifest, now that I thought about it. I opened myself up to her and she physically abused me. Hm. "I never use it anymore." Kate stood up while I pressed my hand hard against my side where she hit me, and she almost skipped across the foyer into the next room, bouncing in front of the fax machine as it sadly tried to print out more. "I don't think I ever have, really… why do we have it?"

Kate looked so honestly confused that it was probably never her idea to keep it to begin with, then reached for the paper. She didn't pull at it, since it was still printing out, but she held it straight out so that she could see what it was. "I don't know what the first part is," she said slowly. "It looks like a legal document or something. "It says…" her eyebrows drew together and she squinted at it like it was an illusion, then slowly read aloud, "Something's written in pen, and it says "drowning."" My head snapped back to my warning to Neal and I sat bolt upright in the hospital, fading pain in my ribs forgotten in light of a burst of adrenaline. "What the hell?" She canted her head and stared at it sideways like there was a secret meaning.

"Neal," I stated simply, scrambling to find my telephone on the coffee table behind boxes of takeout and fortune cookie wrappers.

---

"Electronic Monitoring Compliance Units," the second person to answer the phone, and the last person who would put me on hold if I had anything to say about it, answered with a feminine voice, inappropriately perky for dealing with aggravated FBI agents. Because that whole four-word spiel was so much faster than just saying what they were – tracking anklets.

I had no patience for them and couldn't have cared less about being polite. Neal wouldn't have tried to reach me unless he needed me. He needed me and I wasn't there to help him because I didn't know where he was. I needed to call on that insurance policy of the anklet now, not after I've listened to the hold music for another fifteen minutes. What if he was hurt, needed serious medical attention? What if he was being arrested because he'd been caught right then? What if he was literally drowning oh God-

"This is McKenna Anderson, FBI special agent, I need the location of detention tracking anklet nine-three-oh-five alpha, subject Neal Caffrey." Reciting the numbers breathlessly was easy. I knew the designation number better than I knew Neal's phone number. His phone number let me talk to him if he allowed it; his anklet permitted me to find him regardless of whether or not he was mad at me.

"One moment, please." A keyboard typed even as I was asked to wait and I growled meanly and loudly but shoved the microphone of my phone up against my throat so they didn't have to hear me as clearly.

"I'm going to kill him," I swore vehemently, locking eyes with Kate, who drew her knees up onto the couch with her nervously, watching with apprehension. She was frightened, too. It was her friend that I was scared for and she didn't know any more than I did about what was going on – less, even, because I hadn't explained every single detail about Melissa or Powell or the Howser clinic, which I was about eighty-four percent sure was where his coordinates would be. "I'm going to absolutely murder him!"

Except I wasn't, I wasn't going to hurt him no matter how mad I was, I would never hurt him, I'd probably just hug him really, really tight, maybe smack the back of his head or squeeze him in such a tight hug that he'd have to wheeze and push me away. I couldn't settle down until I was back to his side.

Kate straightened up a little, her arms around her knees, holding her knees tight to her chest. "In bed?" She asked, forcing a small little smile that trembled on her lips.

I snickered anxiously. It sounded hysterical, even to my own ears. "Fortune cookie game's over, Katie," I said misleadingly even while I laughed about it, giggling with anxiety as I imagined 'murdering' Neal in bed. Either I was going to give him such a good time it blacked him out or things were gonna get all American Horror Story in our bed.

The mumbling of a voice came back to my ear and I yanked it back up, though the edge of the phone caught on my earring and jolted the wire. I barely cared. I was too hyped up to feel the pain as acutely as I later would.

"Agent Anderson, we've located Neal Caffrey at six-two-six William Street."

Six-two-six William Street. Damn it! That eighty-four percent won. That was the address on the card Melissa gave me; that was the Howser Clinic. He had done exactly what I'd told him not to, infuriating me all over again. He was such a pain in my ass. Disobedient, unruly, impulsive – reckless enough to get in trouble and expectant enough to believe I would come running.

And I was so hopelessly drawn in by his beauty that the thorns were in too deep to pull out.

"Thanks," I lied, not feeling grateful in the least, but it wasn't the other woman's fault. I hung up and chucked my phone at the couch. Katie watched it bounce and looked ready to object to my rough treatment, but I was already going off at a man that wasn't even there while I aggressively shoved my feet into my shoes. I had no idea what I was going to do to help him, but I wasn't going to let myself just sit around and do nothing, so I was pretty screwed either way.

"I told him not to go to the clinic alone," I ranted. Why did I like him so much? Why was he so deep in my heart when I couldn't even be surprised that he'd done the wrong thing and gone bungee jumping into danger? – Practically back into prison? What was it about him that supposedly made him so perfect to my soul when he was constantly agony to my brain and my heart? "God, what's he gotten into, I don't think he was invited!" He knew it was private property. "He could be arrested and convicted again!" He could be thrown back into prison, his worst nightmare, and he…

I paled, blood flushing down out of my face. "Oh, Jesus, no," I mumbled. I couldn't let him go back to prison; I couldn't lose him back to those tiny little cages and the violent, mean killers that were in the near cells. I couldn't let my darling back in that hell. I couldn't, I just couldn't, I couldn't. "I need a way in that actually is legal…" Or else it wouldn't matter, they would say 'she's in here illegally, he's in here too, he broke the law just like her' and I'd get in trouble but they'd have their confirmation bias and I wouldn't get a say.

"Um," Katie concernedly piped up, raising her hand shyly half in the air, fingers barely above her head. "I'm pretty sure you already have one."

I'd have been polite in my corrections, I really would have, but there wasn't time. I needed to make a plan. An illegal plan to get in after Neal, and that was Neal's thing, not mine. So instead I went past her entirely. "Getting a warrant will take too long," I muttered, not to mention that I didn't even have enough cause. "Who knows what's happening! Maybe he was caught by security." Security carried tasers… maybe guns. "Oh, God, he could be hurt."

"You're no use to anyone if you're panicking," Kate said, raising her voice so it was harder to just completely ignore her and continue with my poor problem-solving. I snapped my head to her, about to just tell her that if she had an idea then she had better just tell me instead of making me guess. "Call your lady friend," she suggested, her voice mild and calm even though she was still frowning, playing with her hands uncertainly. "If she invites you in, shows you around the clinic, then that's okay, right?"

Melissa. Melissa would let me in. Melissa thought that she could woo me by offering me a tour of a clinic my character would adore the chance to work in. And she definitely wanted in my pants. The sooner she won me over before she had to leave on some foreign, exotic trip to their third-world organ bank, the better.

There was nothing wrong with being invited inside. That wasn't forcing an entry; that was walking in the doors to no resistance.

I inhaled sharply and leaned down to her, taking her face in both hands and cupping her cheeks. I pressed my forehead to hers. She blinked, a little earnestly puzzled. "Oh, Katie…" I breathed, looking into her shining eyes with the flecks of green. "If it wouldn't be totally awkward, I would kiss you so hard you forgot your own name."

Kate grinned and giggled, not completely relieved but a little bit relaxed by my unorthodox praise.

"You know, I just realized," she said thoughtfully, her breath puffing over my lips. I gave her a solid kiss on her forehead before letting go of her face and standing up straight, clapping my hands hard together, rubbing my palms. "You guys can't go anywhere unless you're invited in. You're kind of like vampires."

I stopped frozen. … FBI agents… Vampires…?

FBI agents are not vampires.

"Right as I start hailing you as a genius, you say something like that," I said sadly, patting the top of her head. "Come on, I put the card down in the kitchen. I need the phone number."

"You need my help to make a phone call?"

"I need your help to keep me from saying something dumb!"

---

Kate controlled the cell phone, laying it on the table and lighting up the screen so she could press the tab for the speakerphone. That button glowed white to prove that it was turned on while the dial tone rang. My sister sent me a thumbs-up. I nervously rocked on my heels, taking long, deep breaths and guiding my breathing with my hands. I was anxious, but I could do this. It was just like any other undercover lying thing, and I loved those.

The phone clicked right as Kate sat down behind the phone, hands out to change the settings at a second's notice of things not going according to plan. "This is Melissa," came the prompt, professional greeting.

This is it, Katie mouthed at me. I swung my arms and spoke loudly to be heard with confidence and clarity both. "Hey, Melissa. This is Dr. Reichs from the tennis club. How are you?"

It took her a second. Did she actually expect me to call, or had it just been a line? Was giving me her number just one of those things people did when they thought someone would be a good hook-up? Just as I got worried all over again, Melissa assuaged my concerns by sounding pleasantly surprised, but honest. "Actually, I'm going into the office for Dr. Powell."

"That's great!" I exclaimed delightedly, rocking. Kate did a small victory fist-pump with me. So far, so good! "Wow, perfect timing!" I milked it for all I could. "You said I could swing by at any time, and, well, I'm in the neighborhood."

The next split-second pause was less positive. "Oh… I'm sorry, but today is not looking good." At least she genuinely sounded apologetic.

On the ball, Katie tapped the screen, glanced down at the icons, and hit the one that looked like a dashed "X" mark over the speaker depiction. That one lit up as well as the speakerphone. "Don't give up," she commanded insistently. "Be flirty."

Conscientious of the time it would take before Melissa realized we'd muted her, I spluttered. "What – what do I say?"

Kate looked disappointed and rolled her eyes. "You used to be good at this," she reminded me cynically.

I threw my arms out. "I hear her voice and all I can think about is giving her a massage!" It wasn't my fault that every time I heard her voice I thought of when I felt like I'd been one base away from cheating on Neal, and if I kept on that vein then my mind strayed to the lovemaking fantasy that just kept coming back.

"Wait, what?" Kate was missing a very large part of the picture, but she vigorously shuddered, realizing that she didn't want the full picture to begin with. "No, you know what? Just remember you need to sweet talk her so you can get to Neal," she said firmly, pressing down on the mute button again to turn the volume back on.

"-tor, are you still there?" Melissa was asking in concern.

For Neal. I licked my lips. My life had relied on my acting before, but my lying had never seemed like such a hard thing to master until I was forced here to lie about my true feelings.

"Yeah, I am." I went quiet again. We could hear her breathing. Kate's expression changed to one of gentle encouragement.

I had to do it just right. If I didn't, it wouldn't be believable enough. How? I wasn't the one that watched the dumb dramedies, and I wasn't a big Harry Met Sally fan, either. I didn't commit the romantic monologues to memory, I didn't even pay enough attention to the advertisements about soulmates to paint my feelings for Melissa like they were that irrevocable – not that I could stomach doing that anyway, because it would seem like I was trying to undermine Neal's place in my life, which no one would ever be able to do. I couldn't just throw out purple prose because then it would be obvious that it wasn't realistic-

Realistic. The operative part being real. I wasn't normal, but no one could say that my feelings weren't authentic. I could do realistic as long as I just omitted out the parts that were super specific, the parts that were only reserved for me and Neal, that no one else was allowed to see, ever, because they belonged to us and it was a personal bond.

"I… I need to see you."

Truthful enough, just misleading. I cut out Neal's name at the end and if I squeezed my eyes shut, leaned over the table and forgot that I was putting myself under any pressure at all, from myself or from Katie's audience, I could envision him talking into his phone on a street in Manhattan. I started out with him at the payphone, but it was too painful – that memory was laced with Kate Moreau, so I threw it out, replaced it with his voice telling me that I was hearing No One as I called him in to search for the Bible stolen from the church.

"I just can't get you out of my head."

I couldn't go a day without thinking about him. Neal pervaded every aspect of my life. My professional life, my social life, my private life, my sex life – he was everywhere because it felt like it wasn't too offensive, then because it was practical, then because it started to feel like it made logical sense, then because it was okay and now because he belonged there.

Slowly, Melissa responded. "Is that right?" She asked, voice changing. Not sultry, per se, but definitely sensual, and flattered.

No, I bit my tongue. No, it's not, I don't like you. You're seductive and sexy and you have a nice voice and you're clever but I don't like you, I can barely stand you, because you're in on a terrible scheme and you're using your intelligence to genuinely hit people while they hurt and you're not the person I have stuck in my head every day for the past nine months and I wish I could stop thinking about him but I can't, he's my new addiction.

"I've never met anyone like you before," I rambled, venting at both of them at once. The more I talked, the longer she stayed on the phone, the closer I got to being invited to the Howser. I was getting in that clinic whether or not I was extended an engraved card, damn it, but it would be so much easier if I was. I just… couldn't talk about Melissa because she would know I was lying. I was too frustrated to pull off a convincing lie, so I just told the truth instead. "I'm intrigued and curious and amazed. And it feels a little dangerous, too, because I can't control my feelings and that's terrifying."

I stopped, took a long, slow breath, and remembered the first time we met, the first time I'd felt proud of him, first time I'd called him by his first name, the first time he saved me, the first time I saved him, the first time we kissed, the first time he held me while I fell asleep feeling warmer and safer than I had in months, the first time he broke a promise to me, the first time he betrayed me for Interpol (hopefully also the last), the first time I lied to the bureau for him, the first time he broke my heart, the first time he really trusted me, the first time I called him my soulmate, even just to myself, the first time he was my everything when I needed just anything. Everything felt so real and powerful and it was really no surprise I couldn't get over him.

My breath shuddered. I leaned onto the table and shut my eyes. "I can't stop thinking about the kisses we shared," I admitted, swallowing past the long-standing resistance to anything romantic. I wasn't doing a good job lying to myself anymore. It was time to be honest with someone, even if it wasn't the person who should have been hearing it. "Your hair was so soft and smelled like the tropics and your lips tasted like Chapstick." Purely coincidence that Melissa used fruity shampoo; Neal had run out of his and used some of mine, and I guess he'd liked it, because he kept the bottle. "It's only been days but you don't know how hard it's been not to call you and hear your voice again."

Movie night. Game night. Night with Mozzie and June – whatever. I just missed Neal and it was dumb because I'd just seen him a few hours ago but having him in danger amplified the need to have him close, where I could personally ensure his wellbeing.

Kate's mouth was open in shock, her eyes bright and wide, leaning forward in her seat as if paying the utmost attention to her romance drama, but this was real life – it was my life – and it was high time I started to own up to it.

Melissa's breath caught. It wasn't every day that someone directed a romantic speech at you over the phone, sounding breathless and full of the "L" word and like they wanted to take you off your feet and place them in a private corner of the universe.

"… Wow," she said, taken aback, touched, thrilled. "I… I'm really honored, Doctor."

"McKenna," I corrected her, just like she'd corrected me to call her Melissa. I could pretend I was talking to Neal, but Melissa didn't get to call me Kenna. Kenna was Neal's nickname for me, designated for his use only. "Please call me McKenna." Remind me that you're not him.

The woman on the other side of the phone sighed softly, her tone longing. I drummed my fingernails hard into the table. Just say yes. Let me come get my mate. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss those magic hands… McKenna. You knew just where to touch." Kate frowned, mouthed it over again to confirm it was what she'd heard, and then stared up at me demandingly. I waved it away. Not the time! "McKenna?" Melissa asked of the silence, trepidative.

I cleared my throat. "Yes, Melissa?"

"I've got to run, but if you're really interested in seeing the clinic later today, I can get you a visitor's pass." My knees went weak. I held tighter to the table and dropped my head. Yes. That was the green light. All I had to do was get in and she had already invited me, she wouldn't press charges if I just played it up like that again. "You can come by later, and maybe we can grab a drink somewhere else."

"Perfect," I agreed before she could change her mind. "That sounds perfect."

Kate hit the button to hang up without Melissa's or my consent. I hoped Melissa wasn't offended. My sister looked up at me wish thoughtful fish-eyes. I looked down at her in turn, breathing heavily like I'd run a marathon, or as good as. I had just talked about my feelings. I'd admitted what I felt to myself. I'd said it out loud, even, in a way.

"That was a little too inspired to be a script," she said knowingly, lowering her chin and staring at me expectantly through her eyelashes.

I coughed. "Shut up." My heart was racing and I hadn't done anything.

She put her hands up innocently. "I'm just trying to point out to you that maybe if you're that into him, you should let him know that." Didn't she know that I wished I could?!

---

I did not go into the Howser clinic with the cool composure that I prided myself on. In fact, I felt like I was only half put together. And I was pretty sure that my watch was on upside down.

The Howser was a chilly building, air conditioning running full blast over the entry. The lobby was using a color scheme of dull blue and silver, and the front desk was large and curled around, sweeping in an arc around the inwardly curved wall behind it. The shape of the desk complimented the similarly curling stairways on both sides, those curbing outwards from the lobby as they ascended to the second level. To the right behind the stairs was a sign for the bathrooms and the elevators. A plaque with the names of doctors and their room numbers was behind the front desk.

I went up to the receptionist. The first thing I wanted to say was give me back my consultant, but I knew that that may not be the best way to address the issue for many reasons. What if they didn't know who he was or the leverage they could use him for? What if it was only a select few holding him hostage, and the receptionist wasn't one of them? The fewer people who knew about it, the better.

"Can I help you?" The woman, her blonde hair tied in a low ponytail, looked at me as if I were kind of dumb for just standing there for a few seconds, working out how to approach.

Yes, you can get me my consultant! I overrode the impulse by looking around for something other than the receptionist and spotted my mark – the ginger-haired administrator coming down the stairs, saying something low and quiet to a security guard at the top of the flight.

"I was going to say yes, but my invite is right over there." Like that negated the need for the front desk and any attempt of signing in, I waved goodbye to the woman, who looked irked, and whirled back around to the stairs on the right. "Melissa!"

Melissa looked startled to see me regardless of our phone call, and for a second, I swore she looked a little bit hassled and nervous. You should be, if you have anything to do with what's wrong with Neal. I raced up the stairs, bounding them with enthusiasm, and met her halfway.

"McKenna!" She said, reaching to touch my shoulder to affirm I was really there. There was a short landing halfway up the staircase that she stopped walking when she reached, probably for a safe place to pause rather than on the ledge of the steps. "You're, ah, you're early."

Her eyes wandered down to the lower-cut neckline of my shirt. I almost sneered. I bet you're not complaining.

Instead, I breathlessly flattered her. "I just couldn't wait to see you any longer," I said imploringly, begging her not to turn me away. Internally I felt sick. This wasn't romantic. It was a movie ploy, sure, but following her around Manhattan and being so obsessed I couldn't wait and make an appointment was just sad. I was being pathetically, creepily desperate. I could only hope that she was turned on by the stalking Edward Cullen/Christian Grey type.

Melissa looked over her shoulder at the guard. The security guard had something sticking out of a holster on his belt, but didn't look enough like a gun for me to be alarmed. At worst, it was a taser. He didn't look down to her, instead holding a position steadfastly.

"Ah…" Turning back to me, she smiled, a little bit antsy and not doing a good job at hiding it. Melissa was definitely spooked. "Truthfully, I'm flattered, but this really isn't a good time for me." Why, because you've just caught a trespasser? "If you wouldn't mind waiting until this evening…?"

"I'm sorry," I said relentlessly, injecting fueled adoration and lovesickness into my voice. "It just couldn't wait."

She smiled uncomfortably. It is not the best feeling when someone you barely know starts acting like your one true love you had been separated from five years prior. I was being kind of unsettling; if I were Melissa, I'd have taken my pushiness as a red flag and had security escort me to another room, if not out of the building, uncomfortably.

And who knows, maybe she was contemplating doing exactly that, but her phone rang and her smile melted into something a little more worried. "Excuse me," she said, thinly concealing that something was really, really bothering her. She turned her back to me and leaned on the banister looking down to the ground floor while answering her phone. "Yes?"

I wanted to be nosy, but honestly, I couldn't care less about Melissa's problems for as long as Neal was in jeopardy. It was easy to slip past. Melissa got so caught up in her concerns with whoever was talking to her on the phone that she didn't even notice me moving behind her or creeping up the stairs, careful not to let my footsteps make a lot of noise. Ditching her was rude, but then, so was extortion, so I figured we were even.

At the top of the stairs, I said hello the security guard and then introduced myself as an associate of Dr. Powell, saying that I was sorry for making that scene, it was just that I'd been head over heels since Powell had introduced me to Melissa. The guard looked very uncomfortable hearing my story about my whirlwind romance, which was the intention, and he just waved me on through so that I would stop trying to tell him about the redhead's virtues. Once my back was to him and I had thanked him profusely, I smirked and went to exploring. The second floor seemed as good a place to start as any.

Past the security guard, I looked back over my shoulder at the first turn. He wasn't paying attention, so I made a quick left that led down a hallway. One of the doors was ajar. I pushed it open wide enough to see no one was inside and then moved it back to its half-open state before scurrying away and sneaking further into the clinic.

The corridors were long and dark, and I expected to be stopped by someone demanding to know what I was doing at any moment. The second floor was oddly empty, strangely quiet. I would've expected a medical clinic to have patients and staff running around, busy and well-lit. Had I come up the stairs into the wrong wing of the Howser? Were they so spooked that they were clearing out their patients, now, too? And where the hell was Neal? He was still here, wasn't he? Surely he would've called to tell me he was alright if he'd gotten free and left.

"Neal?" I ventured forward, raising my voice a little bit, just to be heard through closed doors. I swallowed and moved forward at a normal walk. I was in a hallway. No matter how quickly I could freeze, I wouldn't turn invisible. Might as well cover more ground. "Caffrey?"

"… two lovers kissed and the world stood stiiiiill…" I perked up. That sounded like it was coming from nearby, somewhere along this hallway. "Still…" And raising in volume, too, but not because I was getting closer. I picked up my pace. It sounded like Neal's voice, albeit the pitch sounded weird. His singing was usually more even. "Stiiiill!"

"What the hell is going on?" I asked myself. Was he trying to free himself from trouble by intentionally being a headache or something? I knew for a fact that he could sing like an angel, not… whatever screeching that was supposed to sound like.

"Stiiiiiiill!" That one lyric seemed to have fascinated him, because he kept repeating it, falling flat on the high note and making me wince every time. I went past a door that was completely shut. "Stiiiiiill!" The direction had changed. I backed up and looked at the door. It was just like the dozens of others I'd gone past.

I pressed my ear to the door.

"Stiiiiiiiill! Two lovers- stiiiiiill!"

I sighed. The sooner he stopped that, the better. I pushed on the handle slowly, expecting it to be locked, so it was surprising when it opened right up with no resistance. I only pushed it open an inch at first while I held the handle with my left hand and took out my gun with my right from under my jacket. I was not prepared for a fight, though I hoped no one was going to challenge an FBI agent with a gun. I didn't want the hassle and Neal certainly didn't need to witness that.

No one was inside. Nothing came flying at me and no voices were raised except for Neal's, which was a lot clearer when I entered the room. "Stiiiiiiiill!" He belted off-key, head rolling to the side. I stared in shock for a second. The room was an empty office with a hospital bed rolled in, Neal strapped down and restrained.

My blood boiled. Leather straps were pulled tight over his upper chest and shoulders, his waistline and forearms, and his thighs. A stout and unremarkable pillow was shoved under his head carelessly. His hair was still looking rough, not just from being laid on but from what looked like hands being in it. No one touched his hair but me. That was his rule; he didn't like people messing with his hair, I was the exception because we were sleeping together. I assumed he'd been manhandled, going by the restraints. Shining silver handcuffs were on both of his wrists, but instead of keeping his arms shackled together, the other cuffs were around the wide beams running lengthwise on the gurney.

It was a good thing we were alone in the room, because when I pushed the door shut with my heel, I might have actually gone Uma Thurman on anyone else who had dared to have some hand in trussing him up like that. His pants were wrinkled and he was wearing… oh. He was wearing the shirt I'd mentioned, the blue with the vertical white stripes, the top button opened and collar turned up towards the front. Both of his sleeves were rolled up to his triceps, which normally made me want to touch, but right then I just wanted to fix his clothes and hair and take off the restraints and punch the perpetrator in the face with a chair.

I took a deep breath but it didn't do much to seethe the fury I was feeling. No one got to treat Neal like that.

Neal himself distracted me. "Stiiiiiiiiiill! Nature's wiii-"

"This doesn't look good," I said, forcing some calm into my voice to make a joke by understating it. Hopefully Neal would stop making that noise.

Instead of lifting his head to look over his chest, Neal sighed at my voice, took another long inhale, and started to sing again. "Hiiiiiiiiiigh on a-"

"Sh!" I snapped, hurrying over to tell him to shut up and to undo the buckled leather straps. "Sh." Neal fell silent obediently and looked up at me. He just watched me with sort of dulled curiosity while I yanked on the buckles, tightening them just long enough to get the latches out and loosen them, throwing both ends to either side of Neal's legs. I went up to his waist and broke him out of that one before getting the one on his shoulders last. I smiled at him, trying not to appear ready to break someone. "Hey."

He blinked up at me with wide, glassy eyes. I frowned and felt his forehead. He was sweaty and warm, face flushed. I'd thought it was just from expending all his oxygen on shrieking out the lyrics to Frank Sinatra, one of his favorite composers. His fringe was soaked, too, the sweat washing out the product that kept his hair the way he liked it.

"Hey, sweetheart," I said cautiously, hesitant to lean over him but doing it anyway. I touched his throat softly with my left hand while I kept my right on his forehead, feeling his pulse. A little rapid. His eyes seemed unfocused and dazed, feverish, even, and he seemed to have a hard time concentrating on anything other than Love is a Many Splendored Thing.

They drugged him. Forget Neal seeing anything and me getting in trouble. Without any information on his identity or his potential allergies, they had given him a drug that obviously had had to be forcibly injected, otherwise they wouldn't have had to restrain him. I'd have shot live rounds, no questions asked. My sweetheart had been manhandled and strapped down. I knew what it was like to be drugged and I could count on one hand the number of things scarier than being shot up with a syringe that could have had anything in it.

Shaking, I leaned over and kissed his forehead. His temperature burned my lips and sweat clung to my mouth. I stroked his hair back and kept my kiss there for a second, just petting his hair and shielding him from the rest of the room. I trembled. He must've been so scared and I hadn't been there to stop it or save him.

"I'm so sorry, darling," I mumbled against his skin. Part of me knew I couldn't be held responsible, but the larger part couldn't stop seeing what might have happened, the pain and anxiety he must've felt while he was assaulted and forced down, the terror as he was given a shot of who-knew-what, the distant and detached panic as it got harder and harder to stay lucid. It didn't look like he'd been crying recently, which was a shock, since I was tempted to just sit down and bawl and I wasn't even the victim.

Around that time, he seemed to catch some hint of what was going on. I carded my fingers through his hair and stood over him, touching my hand to his arm supportively, considering how to get him out of the handcuffs. I could always pick them, but I didn't want to rely on a skill that I didn't think I could say that I'd mastered, and I hated the thought of leaving him unattended even long enough to walk to the office desk five feet away to get a paperclip.

"Hey!" He wriggled and then was promptly shocked into stillness when he realized that he could move most of his body. Neal threw his head back on the pillow with a giggle at his newfound mobility. It would have been adorable if he wasn't on some chemically-induced high. "Kenna!" I smiled at him and curled my fingers into a half-fist in his hair, tightening my grip so he'd feel without pulling. "Baby!"

He seemed delighted to see me. My toes curled in my shoes at the pet name. "Hi, Neal," I murmured back.

"Hi!" Neal enthusiastically responded, which just seemed to remind him that he was supposed to be putting on a Best of Sinatra concert. "Hiiiiiiigh on a windy hill!"

Now that he knew who he was singing for, he put more effort into the tonal quality. Still annoying, but I would've been happy to let him sing until his throat was raw if it didn't pose the threat of drawing attention. Singing kept him happy, I wanted him happy and calm and okay until he could think clearly. Better that than distressed.

"Sh, sh, sh," I hushed him again, taking my hand out of his thick hair and covering his mouth with two fingers over his lips. Neal looked completely enraptured with my face from the second he looked up at me again. "We don't want to be heard," I reminded him carefully, trying to be empathetic to that he might not even remember my last name. "How did you get in here?"

"Mozzie was Bruce Lee," Neal chuckled, rolling his head to the side. I frowned and opened my mouth to press on that one, but stopped and just shook it out of my head. There were more important matters. And if Neal thought that Mozzie was actually a movie star, then I should probably wait and get a more coherent answer after he sobered up.

Neal turned his arm over, movement still limited but able to catch my hand, just barely, with his. I moved my hand into easier reach and he excitedly intertwined our fingers. "Does the world stand still to you when we kiss, Kenna?" He asked languidly, looking up lazily at me with a slight smile, like I was his entire world in that moment – the look of afterglow infused with – with something strangely like love and longing. My breath caught in my throat. It's just because of the lyrics, I reminded myself, heart pounding. "Because I feel like it does. Feels like home… ah…" Neal rambled and squeezed my hand, palm clammy. "I really really like to kiss you McKenna," he said, sounding earnest and turning his head to the side, pushing against my other hand like a cat looking for attention.

Nervously, I just laughed. What else could I have said? No, Neal, the world doesn't stand still because when we kiss, you are my world, and you're never still. "You are completely high," I said, avoiding the question.

I realized my mistake after Neal started on the music again. "Hiiiiiigh on-"

"No, no," I reminded, tapping my finger over his lips. "No more singing. Sh…"

"Have I told you how pretty you are?" He started talking again, my finger no more of a deterrent than my shushing. Now that he was fully aware of who I was, he did not want to shut up. The obedience had been nice while it lasted. "I should tell you," he mused to himself, then cleared his throat and said loudly, "Kenna, you're pretty." I rolled my eyes. "You're soooo pretty…"

"I need to get these off," I muttered, feeling the cuffs. How did they even get them? At least they had a lining on the inside. I slipped two fingers in between the cuff and Neal's wrist, feeling the inside. He likely wouldn't have bruises or marks from them. The fleece made them hot, but didn't let them chafe.

"Whoa! You mean these?" Neal proudly showed off, flipping his arms up on his elbows. The cuffs on both wrists just sort of fell off, dangling uselessly by the other ends hooked to the bed. "What?" He laughed. I sighed at his obnoxiousness. "Never met a lock I couldn't pick."

But how did you pick the locks on your wrists when your hands were – I give up.

"Alright, Houdini-"

"Except my anklet," Neal interrupted morosely, lifting his head up to look down his front. He picked up his left leg and the cuff of his pants fell upwards; he looked at the blinking light on his tracker, the flashing green managing to cut through the haze long enough to keep staring at it.

Oh, you are not going to make me feel bad about the anklet. If it weren't for the anklet, I wouldn't have found him. I'd never been more grateful for it. Who knew what would've happened if I didn't show up? They could've drugged him some more, maybe poisoned or overdosed him; they might have turned him over to police, and having broken in would get him back in orange. Once he was clearheaded again, he'd realize that the anklet was a good thing.

"Okay. That's it, sit up." I pushed a hand underneath his shoulder to prompt him to move.

"My anklet's mean. It – it makes my ankle all trapped and hot." Neal whined, arm reaching for my body, grappling around my waist, and pulling me over the edge of the bed, holding my back down. He turned his head so he was facing my stomach and sighed, using me to block the light from getting to his eyes. "But you can always find me wherever I am and I think that part's nice. I know you'll keep me safe."

I clearly didn't do a very good job this time, I thought guiltily before reminding myself that Neal had gotten himself into this one. "What did they give you?" I asked on the off chance that maybe they had told him, or he'd seen the name on the needle or jar or something.

I started wrestling with Neal to get him upright. It was like trying to get cooked pasta to stand on its own. His entire body was loose and uncontrolled. I pushed him until he was sitting up and one of his legs fell off the side of the bed, but he rolled his head to his shoulder, not seeming to notice that he was supposed to be helping.

"Can I kiss you?" He asked tiredly. "While we're vertical? Well, you seem vertical, I dunno what I am, but it's more…" Waving a hand out in front of his face, he searched for a word. "… Moving. Nothing's straight. It's all blurry. Something's wrong with my eyes." He covered his face with that hand and groaned. "But I feel great so I dunno…"

I did not envy him his trip. "Kiss me later," I said dryly, taking his other arm around my neck and pulling his forearm down my front. "Come on, keep your arm over my shoulders."

"I like kissing you later, I just never get to kiss you with our clothes on," he rambled. I nearly fell down. Jesus Christ! I could not let him talk to anyone else before his brain-mouth filter came back online. "It's nice to kiss without clothes but it's also probably really nice just to kiss for fun, you know? Because you're so special and stuff." I ignored the voice that told me to just kiss him then and mentally counted to three. "We should try that, we should-" On three, I hefted him up and pulled him forward off of the table. Neal fell onto jellylike legs and his knees bent instantly, dragging him down. "Whoa," he mumbled, impressed, as I kept him from falling. "You're strong."

I bent my knees to get to his level, wrapped my right arm around his back, and pulled him back up. He was still slumped over but at least he wasn't falling down. "Yeah, I know," I grunted with effort.

"I got it, I got it," Neal claimed intently, legs wobbling as he tried to take a step.

"I don't think you've got it," I disagreed when one of his feet went across the other. Was he even entirely autonomous yet?

"I got it, love, I got it," Neal insisted, trying to pull away from me just to prove how much he had it.

I wasn't about to try to break him out of the clinic while he was trying to get away from me, so I decided to just go with it and let him prove to himself that he was not currently suited to walking. I let him go. Neal stood unsteadily for a second, tried to take a step, and the second he lifted his foot, he crashed to the floor.

"You don't got it," I reminded him, looking down at him while he laid on the carpet. Awkwardly, the conman writhed, trying to get up but lacking the strength. He got his hands over his head and his knees under him, but couldn't raise himself any higher than to get his ass in the air. When he tried to push himself up with his arms, he teetered. I moved to the side so that he leaned against my legs instead of falling over. "Neal, do you know why you're on the floor?" I asked patiently.

He pitifully mumbled, "I don't got it."

"You don't got it," I agreed.

---

Protecting people is the best feeling in the world.

It depends on the people, but when I protect people that deserve to have someone looking out for them? It feels amazing. There they are, maybe scared, maybe confused, maybe hurt, and I get to take care of them. I get to make sure that they stay okay, stay safe. I get to make them feel secure and comfortable. Maybe I like it because of the trust thing. I get so little trust and responsibilities from my parents that I just love it when I'm trusted with something as important as a person's wellbeing. It gives me some power and control, but it also makes me feel incredible because I knew I had an opportunity to be bad, but instead, I was good. I was nice and kind and helpful and a good person.

Looking after a sick friend, or walking someone home because they're scared to be alone, is one of my favorite things to do. And I'm a good protector. I excel in martial arts. No one's going to hurt someone under my watch unless they get through me, which is harder to do than one might think.

I'm looking forward to proving myself as a good protector for my friends, my significant others, and my soulmate one day, but I don't want them to be the only people I provide that service for. There's a huge number of people who need someone to have their backs, and the number of people who I will personally know is very small in comparison.

That's why I'm starting to think about law enforcement. It never really occurred to me before, but that's something I could do. I could help and protect civilians. I could help and protect so many people that even though my parents can't stand me, my friends, my significant others, and my soulmate could all be proud of me.

Love (and protect),

Zarra L

---

A/N: Chapter title from Lucy Hale's "Kiss Me."

Next chapter: Neal and McKenna plot to take down the charity's founder, reluctantly addressing some personal issues along the way.

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