Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.


Need to Know

He looked around at the piles of things he had hauled out of the boxes stashed in his closet. Some things, like the shirt he had worn the day he had made full-time agent, may not fit anymore but still held a fond place in his mind and memory. The jacket he'd worn in Paris in '82, when they broke the Russian spy ring and he'd escaped death by a millimeter. The supple leather of his favorite coat as a rookie agent, now battered, stained, and bullet-ridden.

Other things were easier to part with. Satin robes and lipstick-stained shirts. Torn stockings and a stray earring. Crumpled slips of paper with long-forgotten phone numbers, left behind in the morning by countless women who had never set foot in his many apartments ever again. Four years ago, he would have considered these things trophies or badges of honor — the evidence of the exploits that made up an impressive reputation. Now, as he looked at them in distaste, he saw only scars.

The worst of it was that Amanda let herself in unexpectedly, while he was knee-deep in the muck and mire of his past, and insisted on staying to help clear it out. And Amanda had questions — questions with almost entirely embarrassing answers. She also had a disconcerting knack for finding the bags of things he'd already decided to discard.

He didn't know if he was relieved or not when the phone rang and Charlie Benson asked him to meet at Nedlinger's. He might have been, if Amanda hadn't been industriously going through pockets of pants and finding yet another phone number. From Cindi, with an "i".

Her curiosity irritated him. Surely she realized that some doors were better left locked and some bridges were better left burned. Some of the distasteful tidbits of his long and misspent past were better left classified, unseen by her and willfully forgotten by him.

As she closed the door behind him (not neglecting to give him his goodbye kiss), he fervently wished he had done all this before he'd told her he loved her and definitely before he gave her his apartment key.