Gail

Adrian finally calls on the Friday.

"He wants to meet Monday," Dan sighs, putting the phone down and leaning on the kitchen bench. "I think he wants to move on this, thank God."

"Good," Gail says, wandering over to the fridge.

"It's nearly freaking Christmas and I need this to be over," Dan sighs, running a hand through his hair. He has just been out running and he is a sweaty, stinking mess. "I knew it was pushing it, taking a job at this time of the year, but I stupidly did it anyway." He shakes his head, dripping sweat onto the bench.

Gail wrinkles her nose. She's sympathetic to his frustration, though. She definitely wants this done by Christmas, too. But she also knows that it will be worse for Dan, whose wife and kids are expecting him back for the holiday.

"It will be over soon," she assures him as she opens the fridge. She doesn't even know why she is bothering. She knows there will be nothing much in there. But still she swings the door back, inspecting the contents. She's right: there's nothing but half an apple, beer and some cheese. She closes it again and turns back to face him. He looks stressed, his skinny little face stuck in a frown.

"Hey, it'll be okay," she tells him. "We'll be done by Christmas, for sure."

"Yeah," he says, clearly working to muster a smile. "I just miss the little bastards, that's all." He shrugs and then rubs a hand across his face. "And Lisa. God I miss Lisa."

"Well, she wouldn't miss you if she knew what you smelled like right now," Gail tells him, trying to lighten his mood. "Go shower."

"Oh you are charming, Peck," he says, turning and heading for the bathroom.

"Remember that," she tells his retreating back.

She goes into her room and flops down on the bed, tucking her hands under her head and resting her legs up on the wall. She sighs.

They are cutting it dangerously fine, time-wise. It had been nearly a week since the dinner and they have been getting gotten more and more worried, having not heard a word. Of course, you can never really predict how these things will go, but based on the informants they'd flipped, they had been expecting a relatively quick process if you came 'recommended'.

The last week has again largely involved the marathon task of finding things to do— for both of them. Dan has doubled the length of his daily run and Gail has even been out walking sometimes, just to get out of the apartment. There is no way in hell she will take up jogging. Gail will never be bored enough for that. The only time she runs is at work, for pay, and that's often enough. But the cabin fever is getting out of hand now, and she has been finding more and more of an urge just to get out of the house. She'd never tell anyone, but she kind of likes it. It's meditative. She doesn't go anywhere, really, just wanders the streets near the apartment, Toronto territory that is actually unfamiliar to her. She finds it strangely comforting watching other people do normal stuff like go to work and come home, argue with their kids while they do the shopping, walking their dogs, while she keeps up this weird, lonesome pretence of being someone else entirely, someone who's friends and family are mere stories.

It is such a weird limbo to exist in. She remembers Sam telling her about the long stints of undercover work he has done, about the way if you do it long enough, how with the absence of everything and everyone you know, what you know starts to disappear and you start to lose your sense of self a little. Gail hadn't really got what he was saying at the time. But now, she sees how it could happen if you did this for long enough, and if you were alone. But right now, she is still feeling the absence of everyone too acutely for them to disappear.

Gail stares up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of Dan padding around his room and wishing she could just call Holly and tell her about this job, or just to hear her voice. It's hard to believe now that it was not that long ago she didn't even know Holly. Or that it was not that long ago that that Holly was just this person who may or may not be a new friend. Or that it was not that long ago that Holly was not one of the most precious, inviolably good things in Gail's life.

How do these things happen so quickly?

But at the same time, she is not sure now how she didn't recognise when she first met her that Holly was to be so fundamental, a game-changer? In hindsight, the first time Gail could have— or should have— recognised that she was harbouring some sort of feelings for Holly was after the wedding. Even though at the time she knew that the kiss Holly had planted on her at the wedding—before she had just upped and dumped her for a dance floor—was more teasing than anything, she realises now that something had altered for her with that kiss anyway, whether she liked it or not.

Sometime that next week Holly had invited her for a quick dinner after work. Gail, all about trying new things that week, went with it, even though she had to admit she was feeling ever so slightly awkward about that kiss. Or, more to the point, awkward about the potential of having to have any kind of conversation or post-analysis of it. And she had no idea how drunk Holly was that night. She was swigging champagne from the bottle, but that seemed to be more about swag than drunkenness. . She had no idea what kind of shape or importance it might have taken for Holly since the wedding.

So Gail went to the dinner feeling ever so slightly timorous about what she would say if Holly did say anything, about how she would go about playing it down and maintain her cool. She should have known that the fact that she was giving it that much thought meant something in itself. It's not like Gail isn't used tobrushing off advances. Why did this one bother her so much?

But when she got there, Holly was just Holly, the laidback, funny, slightly-out-of-left-field Holly she had delightfully been every single time they had hung out.

Holly didn't mention the kiss. But she did talk about the wedding, and she did talk about her night on the dance floor at a friend's birthday drinks afterward and she did make a joke about Gail's stupid questions in the cloakroom. So Gail knew she wasn't avoiding it, either. She was just making it normal.

That surprised Gail on so many levels. What was most surprising, though, was the way that Gail found herself taking her cues from Holly, recalibrating her reaction based on how Holly dictated it. That was not usually how Gail lets things play out. She was used to commanding these kinds of emotional negotiations with people, deciding how things would go forward. She found herself suddenly stripped of such power with Holly.

But what Gail recognises now, too, what she wouldn't allow herself to before, is that pang she felt when she realised Holly was dismissing that kiss as anything beyond drunken flirtation through her silence, was not relief at avoiding any kind of 'feelings' talk, as she decided it was at the time. At the heart of it was some as yet un-recognised disappointment. But she also knows she wasn't ready to feel that yet because she was still too busy just acclimatising to the presence of someone like Holly in her life.

Of all the myriad things that have been thrown at Gail in the last year or two, Holly will remain the most surprising. Until they met, Gail had gotten to the point where she was almost certain she was always going to be, at some level— relationship or not— something of a lone wolf. She knew that she'd find people in her life that would get her enough, or at least find her eccentricities and tics beguiling enough to try and forge a connection with her. But she had pretty much given up hope until Holly that there was someone out there that could not just comfortably and happily operate on her plane of weird, but who existed on it anyway, with or without her.

And now she has her, now she has been granted just enough, painful, distance, to fully realise the extent of her feelings for her, she misses her like hell.

Gail presses her lips together, frowning. She had always thought that the moment when she felt it, when she became utterly aware of the magnitude of her feelings for someone, it would be like an explosion or a flash. But what she realises now, with Holly, is that it isn't like that at all. Rather, it is like a slow rolling wave that had made it's way from wherever it is that waves start their journeys finally hitting the sand. It comes as a certainty— an arrival at what was simply, in the end, an inevitable and natural destination. But what Gail would have labelled, if told it would happen this way, as boring— as without thrill, is not at all. Because it is simply her consciousness catching up with something she already knows. Gail realises she has never been more certain in her life of her feelings for someone. She sighs and opens her eyes to the stark white ceiling above her head.

The crappy thing is she can't even tell her.

Gail

"What?"

"He's bringing her over."

"What?" Gail says again into the phone. "When? Now?" She looks nervously around the darkened apartment. Her notes are all over the coffee table and last night's take out containers are still sitting in a pile. She hasn't even raised the blinds today.

"No. Tonight, after work."

"Oh, good," she breathes again. She has time. "So this is it?"

"I don't know," he tells her. "Can you tidy up?"

"Of course," she answers, tersely, automatically. She knows what he really means is to make it look like they are living there as a couple. But as if she wouldn't remember to do that, anyway. She blinks, still trying to make sense of the fact that Adrian will be here with a girl they are supposedly going to keep here in a few hours. It also means the operation is successful and that maybe it will all happen tonight.

"I'll see you in a couple of hours, babe." He tells her, playing husband. "Bye."

"Yeah, see you," Gail tells him, flinching at the word babe. That's Holly's name for her. Holly, she thinks, feeling a small bubbling of excitement in her gut. If he brings the girl tonight, it means it could all be over in a few hours and she will be able to see Holly.

She allows herself a smile and a small air punch of happiness before she forces herself to switch her mind to what she has to get done before he arrives. Now she has to move her things into the master bedroom with Dan and clear out all traces of her existence in the spare room. She needs to change the sheets, and buy some food and maybe flowers and magazines or something. She needs to make the house look lived in. She wanders down the hall and takes in the mess that is their kitchen. She'll have to clean that too. She sighs. Now she really does feel like the housewife.

She rushes through the tasks, her mind already fixed on going home. Maybe, just maybe, if they stall debriefing until tomorrow, she will be able to get to Holly's before she goes to sleep. Even if she doesn't, she will wake her up. And she knows exactly how she will wake her up, she thinks as she grabs her keys and heads out of the apartment.