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chapter fifteen

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and now the state line
felt like the berlin wall
-Death Cab for Cutie, "Crooked Teeth"

xx

April 24, 2003
8:05 am

Samantha smiled to herself as she boarded the elevator and pressed the '12' button until it lit up. While the fact that she was running a few minutes late would normally make her nervous and tense, this morning she rode the elevator in an easy silence. Martin was coming into town that afternoon for an early dinner meeting with the mayor, and he would be staying until Sunday morning. He was meeting up with a few old friends that evening, but they had plans to spend the rest of the weekend together.

She exited the elevator and walked briskly down the hallway, running into Naomi and Jack along the way.

"Morning, Sam," Naomi called as they headed in opposite directions. "So nice of you to join us."

"I got held up on the way here," she shrugged casually. Carefully omitting that the hold up had actually been Martin's early morning phone call and not traffic. Between their busy schedules, coordinating phone calls had not come easily.

Naomi and Jack disappeared down the other end of the hallway, and she sat down at her desk and began to clear her messages, waiting for the next move in the case they were working on. Danny and Vivian were out interviewing coworkers while she was going back over the paper trail. From the looks of it, they would be down two agents for the morning while Jack and Naomi were going over testimony with the DA's office about the Spaulding trial.

As she began to go over pages and pages of credit card records with nothing standing out as out of the ordinary, her mind began to wander back to almost two weeks ago, to the morning after the Four Seasons dinner.

She yawned and stretched her arms as she awoke that Sunday morning. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep, but she could feel Martin's heart beating below her as her head rested on his chest. She had fallen asleep against his side when they had finally succumbed to exhaustion late in the night.

Martin's arm was wrapped around her lower back, and she felt it pull her closer in to him. He knew she was awake.

"Mmm, morning." He mumbled against her hair as he spoke.

She smiled and opened her eyes. "Hey. How long have you been up?"

"Not too long, I don't think." He replied. "I usually wake up early on the weekends to go for a run, but I don't think I really need the exercise today."

His eyes sparkled as they met hers, and she felt the last vestiges of sleep fade away. She laughed against him. "Yeah, I haven't had a workout like that since I was at Quantico..."

"You know," he tilted her chin with his free hand. "I was seriously considering joining the FBI for awhile."

"Really?" She asked, and he nodded his head. "White Collar would have loved you with your background in financial consulting."

He groaned and rolled his eyes. "Ugh, don't remind me about all the time I wasted at the Dalton Corporation. It's funny to think, though. We could have met anyway."

She smiled at his hopeless optimism. "Yeah, but then we probably wouldn't be right here, right now... They don't exactly encourage agents to get involved. And they're right, it isn't really such a great idea."

She paused, wondering if she'd said too much.

"You sound like you're speaking from personal experience," he said. His tone wasn't accusatory, and she figured her secret was safe for now. She knew she had to tell him. It would be far worse for him to find out through the grapevine - or worse, from his father. But now, only two days after they had officially decided to see where things went, it didn't feel like the right time.

She swallowed before offering her retort. "Maybe I am." She craned her neck so that she could kiss him, "But I'm here with you now, am I not?"

She moved to lie on top of him, running her hands through the tangled locks of his messy bed head before bringing his face forward to kiss him deeper.

He broke the kiss long enough to murmur. "Yes, you are."

And then he pulled her back down to capture her lips once more.

xx

Washington, DC
10:40 am

"Martin?" Colin Adair leaned forward from his seat to place the in-flight entertainment brochure back in its proper position.

Martin turned his head to signal that he was paying attention.

"How long are you staying in the city?" Colin inquired, taking out his palm pilot to sort through his schedule.

"I was planning on flying back Sunday morning."

Colin looked pensive for a moment before commenting. "That's a long stay for a dinner meeting. I thought your sister and her kids were out of town this weekend."

"Uh, yeah," Martin answered, choosing his words carefully. "Caro, Tim and the kids are up at the Cape this weekend. They thought the beach might do the girls some good." Martin paused, wanting to change the subject as soon as possible. He had a feeling that if they continued in their current conversation, he would soon let something slip. He didn't like keeping his relationship with Samantha a secret, but he knew that, at the same time, it was wise to protect her privacy for as long as possible. It was a necessary evil for the time being.

"Has your son decided on a grad school program yet?"

Colin began rambling incessantly on the merits of the various engineering programs that were courting his youngest son. Martin sat back in his seat and carefully tuned out his older colleagues idle chatter, instead choosing to remember his early morning phone call with Sam, and the last Sunday morning that they had spent together...

His heart was still beating rapidly in his chest as his breathing slowly evened out again. Sam had collapsed on top of him after their early morning lovemaking, her sweaty form nestled against his chest and her head buried in the crook of his neck.

It felt comfortable and real, and he didn't want the feeling to end.

Sam was everything that the debutantes and socialites in Washington were not. She was strong-willed and independent, more than capable of making up her own mind and taking care of herself. She was complex, and he knew there were many layers of Samantha Spade that he had yet to uncover. But as he hugged her naked form closer to him and her body relaxed further against his, he knew that it was worth the risks just to discover what those layers are.

The thought sent a chill down his spine.

"Mmm," she murmured against him. "What are you thinking?"

He wanted to keep the mood light and comfortable between them, so he veered away from the serious musings of just moments before and turned back to their previous conversation on how he had considered joining the Bureau. "Oh, nothing much. Just fate, destiny, the stars aligning to bring us here together..."

She shook her head. "You've been watching too many Meg Ryan movies."

"What's wrong? You don't like a good chick flick Agent Spade?"

She pulled the covers up around her, shivering as she spoke. "Nah, I prefer to watch movies that don't belong on Lifetime."

They lay together in comfortable silence for several minutes, neither one wanting to move. He, in particular, was dreading the thought that he would have to return to Washington late that evening.

"So, then," he finally said. "What were you doing in the woods that day at Delia Rivers' Memorial Service?"

He felt her body go tense against his, and he worried he had pushed too much. He held his breath while he waited for her reply.

"I was thinking about my sister," she whispered, her voice tinged with regret. "My father left us about three weeks before my grandmother died. Mom was so distracted with my grandmother being sick that she never really explained things to me..."

Martin felt her slowly begin to relax again as she recounted her childhood tale. He knew Sam didn't like to talk about her past, but was grateful that she felt comfortable enough to share this with him. He rubbed her back to sooth her as she told him of her five year old self's conceptual mix-up, feeling an intense sadness that she had endured so much loss at such a young age. He thought of his own nieces and wondered what could have possessed Sam's father to leave his own children behind.

"... You know, the funny thing is that Lindsey never asked me why I was looking for him there." She said as she finished her story. "I guess she must have known, though. It reminded me of where he used to take us camping."

His eyebrows creased inquisitively; he was learning new things about her by the second. "You used to go camping?"

"Yeah," she said. "We, uh, never really had the money to go away on vacation. But once a year, Dad used to get out this ratty old tent that he had and take Linds and I away for the weekend. I don't remember much about it, but we used to have a blast."

He smiled at her. "I used to go camping all the time."

"Don't tell me: Boy Scouts," she whacked him playfully on the shoulder.

He rolled her off of him and onto her side, yanking the covers with him and leaving her nude form for him to admire.

"Hey!" She yelped and grabbed at the bedspread. "What was that for?"

He propped his head on his elbow and held the covers protectively against him.

"Always be prepared," he admonished.

She laughed.

xx

New York City
10:00 pm

"So, how are things really going in Washington?"

Martin looked up from his drink long enough to wave a hand at Ralph. After dinner with Senator Adair and Mayor Bloomberg, he had met up with a couple of his old college friends at one of their apartments. He, Peter, Ralph, and Christopher had all been roommates in college, and they had managed to remain friends in spite of the fact that they were all at different points in their lives. Ralph had a wife at home with their young toddler, Peter usually worked fifteen hour days on Wall Street, and Christopher liked to change jobs every eight months or so just to add variety to his life.

"Things in Washington are fine," he said simply, not really wanting to delve into the inner workings of Capitol Hill in his present slightly inebriated state.

"Oh, come on!" Christopher exclaimed. "You've probably got a different chick each night of the week. You should at least tell us about some of them."

Martin rolled his eyes; Christopher was never going to grow up.

"Marty's not like that and you know it." From the tone of voice, he guessed Peter was half defending him and half mocking him. "Seriously, though," Peter turned to face him, "Aren't you getting pressure from all sides to settle down? Isn't it basically a requirement?"

He shrugged. "There are plenty of women in DC, but none of them are very interesting."

There's a pretty interesting one who lives just downtown, though, he mused.

He sat back in his seat, grateful that Peter interjected a story about the crazed late night happenings of his Wall Street office: proof that overworked businessmen ought to be on limited caffeine allocations.

The four friends continued to play catch-up on each others' lives until Ralph finally rose from his chair. "I should get home to Angela and Brendan," he explained. "It's been too long, though. We need to do this again soon."

The other three nodded in agreement.

"I should probably get going myself," Martin said, moving towards the door and pulling on his light jacket.

He said his goodbyes and boarded the elevator with Ralph. On ground level, Ralph hailed a cab while Martin waited for his driver to pull around the corner.

"You take care of yourself, Senator," Ralph teased, stepping forward to open the door of the cab that was waiting for him. "And don't think too much about what dumb and dumber said. If I were a betting man, I'd say you'll find someone years before they do."

Martin shrugged his shoulders as Ralph's cab pulled away, moving quickly towards his own car that was just pulling up.

"Home, sir?" his driver inquired as he climbed into the backseat.

Martin considered for a moment before disagreeing and giving him Samantha's address instead.

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