"Swear, Ned."
"I'm twenty-seven years old, Bess. I don't swear. Unless whatever I'm swearing might result in my getting laid."
He could almost hear her pouting. "Fine. Nancy and Frank had a big argument after you left yesterday morning. What happened?"
Ned's eyes widened. "Nothing," he mumbled. "Nothing happened."
"She's had that-- look on her face."
"She gets a look?"
Bess made a noise Ned couldn't quite interpret. "We've been friends with her since we were five. Yes, she gets a look. Several looks."
"And, of her several looks, what was this one?"
"You know the-- oh, you don't. Nancy gets a look whenever she's on a new case."
"She told me that was ages ago," Ned replied. "A lifetime ago. She's still a detective?"
"Well, it was the look she used to get. Man, if you'd seen her. Nothing, not the most romantic thing Frank could ever do for her, not even the Mustang her father bought her right after she turned eighteen, nothing else gave her that look."
"That sounds good," Ned said. "Right? Unless... what, I'm a mystery?"
"Oh, trust me," Bess said, laughing. "If you're a mystery, that will definitely work for you."
After Bess hung up, Ned sat back with his fingers laced behind his head. Not even the most romantic thing Frank could do for her, huh, Ned thought, and smiled.
Even though he liked hearing Bess's encouragement, she wasn't the one he wanted to hear from. Nancy's conversation with him had been far too brief, and he thought that maybe he had pressed too hard. Especially with her boyfriend still in town... well, her boyfriend for now.
He still wished he'd found the nerve to do it. Boyfriend be damned. She'd almost been daring him to do it, not blinking, not moving away, and her foot brushing his, and the plane of her abs as her hips dipped in toward his, as he bought her one last drink and watched her brush her hair back from her glistening cheeks and shoot him a wicked, secretive grin. He knew exactly what she would taste like. He wanted to find out if he was right.
But Frank was around.
Ned sighed and grabbed his keys. A good long run would clear his head, and distract him from doing what he wanted to do. He wanted to go over to their apartment and find her, lean in and stare into her eyes, until she had to choose. He'd never seen himself as the kind of person who would break up a relationship; he was already angry enough when he found out that his girlfriends had strayed. But for her, God, she made him crazy. He wasn't even dating her, but he was spending every weekend since they'd met waiting for a message from Bess about what they would be doing, everything else be damned. Everyone else be damned.
"I have to stop this," he gasped under his breath as he finished the first mile. "She's a girl, she's just a girl..."
She was. And his parents had been bugging him to get married and start giving them grandchildren since he'd graduated college. Belinda had been a lot of fun, when she'd wanted to be, but he couldn't imagine her as a wife, much less a mother. But it wasn't just Belinda, and their basic incompatibility; he just hadn't been able to keep a girlfriend for much longer than six months. He became bored, the girl found someone else to be with, or it just didn't work out, and the thought of being a bachelor the rest of his life wasn't so bad. If his parents really wanted grandchildren that badly, they could adopt a seventeen-year-old and try again.
Until her. He'd never met anyone like Nancy. Like everyone else around Chicago he'd read about her growing up, skeptical that an eighteen year old girl could manage to outwit nearly all the criminals who came through her town, even if she was the privileged only child of the most respected and feared criminal defense attorney in Chicago. And God, she was beautiful. After Belinda, finding someone who didn't talk about herself all the time was a welcome change.
"Stop it," he told himself, rounding another corner. "Stop it. She's taken."
But how taken can she be, if she could look at me like that...
Ned shook his head and redoubled his efforts, until his shirt was soaked with sweat and his lungs were burning. She could be fascinating, and brilliant, and gorgeous, and he could wish that things had worked out differently, but she wasn't his. She already had a successful boyfriend.
who doesn't make her smile the way you do, the voice came back, purred.
He didn't feel any better when he made it back from his run and stood just in the doorway with his palms resting just above his knees, waiting for his breath to slow. In the shower he found himself searching his memory, trying to figure out if he'd ever seen the expression on her face that Bess had told him about, and stopped himself.
The answering machine light was blinking when he headed back into the living room with a bottle of water. He stopped next to it. It hadn't been blinking before he'd left...
"Hi, Ned... sorry, you must be out," he heard Nancy's recorded voice, loud in his silent apartment, and only then did he swear.