"You look like you've swallowed a coat hanger."

Jarod coughed out a surprised laugh. "What?"

"All the smiling. You're grinning like an idiot," said Parker.

The Project QS-9300 team had just been dismissed from their latest field assignment briefing and were pouring out of conference room C. The next major field assignment was to be, as Brigitte termed it, a "long haul". That meant a lot of time away from Centre headquarters. That meant some comfortable respite from the hovering eyes of the Triumvirate. That meant a merciful break from some of the most unpleasant people under the sun. Jarod wasn't the only one in a good mood.

The Centre had ramped up counteragent production, both in preparation for having to arm Miss Parker with a bigger stockpile, and because Jarod now needed a dose every four and half days, instead of every six.

"You would begrudge Jarod a moment of happiness?" chided Sydney. He clapped Jarod on the back. "I can't blame you, Jarod. I'm looking forward to this assignment as well. It's certainly a little easier to get excited about than the last."

"Did we—" Broots dropped his voice to a too-audible whisper. "Did we ever hear from the guy from the last one? Fred, right?"

"Fred's fine," said Jarod, grinning still more. "A little grumpy about having to vanish on all his friends, but settling into life in Norfolk well. The twins are due soon."

"Talking of births," said Sydney slyly. Parker's head swung to fix him with a warning glare.

"Syd, I swear to God, if you—"

But it was too late. "Isn't today your birthday, Miss Parker?"

She closed her eyes, cursing Sydney. This time of year was far too crowded. First Christmas — itself so soon after Thanksgiving — followed by New Year's, then her birthday. What she wouldn't give for a summer birthday, just to spread things out.

"Thanks so very much, Sydney," she said caustically.

It wasn't that she disliked her birthday, per se. She just didn't like the attention and the acute demands on her time. On birthdays, everyone seemed to take on some unsolicited duty to pull her in one direction or another, such that she ended up drawn and quartered by birthday engagements.

"It's your birthday?" said Broots, on cue. "Why didn't you say? Debbie could have made some cupcakes for the occasion. Debbie's very excited about cupcakes right now."

"I've reached my cupcake quota for the month, thanks," said Parker.

"After work, we could—"

"I'm having dinner with Daddy after work." Parker's face twisted up in distaste. "And Brigitte. No time."

"Oh." Broots deflated. "This weekend, maybe?"

"You bring me something I'd rather do than swallow jet fuel and I'll think about it."

Broots wandered off to arrange accommodation for the early stages of the next assignment, brainstorming under his breath. Sydney wished Miss Parker many happy returns, smiled in the face of her returned scowl, and flagged down a passing Brigitte for further questions about mission logistics. This left Parker and Jarod alone.

"Come over after clock-out today," she murmured.

Jarod looked in the direction Broots had disappeared.

"What about dinner with dear ol' Dad?" he said. "If you think I'm having dinner with Mr. Parker…"

"Oh, God, no. No, I just have some time before dinner. Time enough for a birthday gift."

"Oh." Jarod pressed his lips together to contain a smile. "Okay. Should I bring anything?"

"Just you."

She watched him leave, already daydreaming of his visit. Normally, she wouldn't think to invite him to her place. She wasn't aware of any surveillance trained on her house, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Besides, inviting someone over for sex usually meant either explicitly booting them out after the fact, or having them spend the night. The former was unpleasant, and the latter was automatically more intimate than any of the post-Thomas dalliances she'd taken up in the last year-and-change. In this case, however, she had a ready-made exit plan in the form of her father's dinner visit, so she would allow herself this one indulgence on her birthday: sex in her own bed.

(Her most recent disposable dalliance had been only a couple days after New Year's. She'd swung by The Slippery Fork, picked out someone she didn't recognize as a regular. Even now, she couldn't recall anything about the guy's face. He'd been a control group of one, a baseline with which to compare this nonsense with Jarod. She liked sex, so she was enjoying sex with Jarod — it stood to reason. It was nothing to fester over. She pulled the barfly into bed with a vow to prove that everything was business as usual, that good sex was good sex. The man had been gorgeous, witty, smooth, a firecracker in bed. Nevertheless, the lack of Jarod hit her like a brick to the temple, and she found herself mortified and cold as a fish. She faked her way out from under the warm body and left him red of face and blue of balls.)

It was risky, having Jarod over right before her father's visit — hell, all of this was risky. That was part of the appeal. And yet, on a logical level, she knew how monumentally stupid it was. It showed a shockingly poor sense of self-preservation to sleep around with a man whose day-to-day life was so closely monitored and controlled by her employer that even looking at him too long was likely to cause comment. And she was, by the way, looking too long. In the hallways, across the sim lab, in meetings, she replayed their encounters on the silver screen of her mind's eye, lingering shamelessly over her favourite parts. It was enough that she had to cross her legs just to relieve the hot, squirming ache at her centre. She was sure Sydney had noticed the long looks, though with any luck he hadn't guessed at the whole of her reasons.

Getting caught was all but inevitable, but the rush in the meantime was better than nicotine.


Parker swung her leg in an arc and rolled sideways onto the pillows to keep from collapsing against Jarod's mouth, her thighs trembling and shivering mercilessly.

Jarod wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and propped himself up on his elbow. "Happy birthday," he said, and there it was again —

"So smug," she groaned, laughing.

The smugness was warranted. Even now, the pattern pressed into her by his tongue and clever lips vibrated through her like she was a tuning fork struck against a handy kneecap. A wonderful birthday gift, in short. She'd gone into it dreading the inevitable protests of her leg but ready to grit her teeth and bear it. In the end, no teeth bearing was required. Without being asked, Jarod had wrapped his right arm around her damaged leg and propped it up like a crutch as he worked. If requiring help in the first place shrivelled her appetites, witnessing Jarod use his body to keep her comfortable and stable brought them roaring back for seconds.

The only detractor was the lack of control. She liked riding a mouth in part for the sense of control it gave her, and with Jarod wrapped around her, she'd sacrificed some of that control. She had compromised by holding his left wrist down against the bed as she rolled her hips, pinning him down in half measures.

Back in the present, she wondered.

"Hm," she hummed. She slid her heel against the mattress, riding out the last of the thrumming convulsions. "Thoughts on handcuffs?"

Jarod snorted. "No."

She looked over at him, eyebrow raised.

"Quick answer."

"Easy answer," Jarod corrected. "You have handcuffed me before under very different circumstances. I haven't forgotten all that." Parker had said nothing about the handcuffs being for him; she hadn't needed to. She considered contradicting him, claiming that she wanted to be the one to wear them, but she knew it'd be a lie. Jarod went on. "For lots of people, I'm sure handcuffs are very exciting. To me…"

"They're just a reminder." She was a little disappointed, more than she expected to be. Maybe she had some long-buried feelings attached to the idea of Jarod in handcuffs. In her flimsy defence, Jarod-in-handcuffs was something she'd worked towards for a long time. You don't shake that completely after a few months of (ostensibly) being on the same side. "Do you miss it? Not the freedom, I know you miss that. Being a fugitive."

Jarod considered. "Sometimes. Having to stay on the move was frustrating, but at least I was moving where I wanted to go, and not just where I was sent. It was a fun challenge, stringing you along enough to keep you motivated, but not giving so much away that you'd catch up to me. "

Parker snorted.

"Fun for you, maybe. God. That damn ogre… what on Earth made you think of sending me an animatronic ogre, of all things?"

Jarod shrugged. "I had an animatronic ogre. I had to do something with it. The funniest thing I could think of was to put it in your house and have it waiting for you when you got home. I put it right here." He patted the mattress. "Plus ça change."

Parker was silent for a long moment. Then: "When's your birthday?"

"I don't know," said Jarod with a shrug. "It wasn't in that file Sydney faxed over, the one with Emily's photo. Just a birth year. Maybe in the fall? I have an early memory of handing another child a little bag of toys and candy… a goodie bag. And in the memory, it feels like it's fall."

"Well, guess what, this year it's in January," said Parker. She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her bedside table and handed it to Jarod between two pinched fingers. "For you."

He read the line of text written on the sheet.

"What is… that's a Rhode Island number."

Parker nodded. "She didn't run very far. Could be your sister's a homebody."

The mattress twitched beneath her as Jarod jerked his head to look at her. She could feel the force of his grin without even glimpsing it, and couldn't help but return it with one of her own.

"She's still there?"

"Only one way to find out."

Jarod's voice dropped to a whisper. "Thank you."

She nodded again, abruptly robbed of any fitting words.

The doorbell rang. Parker reacted as if touched by a live wire, scrambling out of bed so fast she forgot her leg and stumbled against the clothes dresser. She swore loudly.

"He's here. They're here. I was supposed to have another hour, dammit. You came here on foot, right?"

"You know I did," said Jarod, his tone distracted. He pulled on his jeans. In all but body, he was back at his house, doing a reverse look-up on a Rhode Island phone number. From the direction of the front entrance came the sound of the front door opening, admitting two sets of shoes onto Parker's not-so-welcoming welcome mat.

"Angel? Are you home?" called Mr. Parker.

There was the sound of creaking mattress coils behind Miss Parker. She turned around and Jarod was gone. The window was open.

"I'll be right out," she called back, eyes still on the window. How had they ever caught him?

With all the speed available to her, she pulled her underwear, bra and sweater back on and zipped herself into her pencil skirt. After ducking into the bathroom to freshen up, she faced the music and joined what remained of her family in the living room. Brigitte and Mr. Parker sat on the couch, making themselves at home.

"There you are!" cried Mr. Parker. "Happy birthday, Angel."

He surrounded her in a hug. Miss Parker dissolved into it; however taxing birthdays could be, she was grateful for the excuse to monopolize her father's time. He smelled like licorice allsorts and aftershave, and he smelled like love.

Brigitte also demanded a hug. Unsurprisingly, she did not smell like love.

"So, what are we having?" said Mr. Parker, then burst out laughing. "A joke, a joke. No cooking for you on your birthday. We brought Greek. Do you still like Greek food?"

He and Brigitte watched in comfortable complacency as she bustled around the dining room, putting together the place settings she'd neglected while enjoying her time in the bedroom with Jarod.

"I don't know why we couldn't just go out to eat," said Mr. Parker loudly, watching his daughter scramble. "Less for you to do."

"Restaurants are too stimulating for you right now, sweetheart," Brigitte reminded him with a tender pat on the arm.

Mr. Parker shot her a sharp look. "So you say. I think I know my own mind better than you do."

This was not true, and both women knew it. Mr. Parker seemed not to notice the difficulties he'd been having since the attack on the Tower, and insisted at every given opportunity that he was very lucky to have escaped a knock to the head with no lasting effects.

Brigitte uncovered the dishes they'd brought while Mr. Parker uncorked the wine, and they all dug in. Brigitte passed on the wine.

"I want to thank both of you for the superb work done in Baltimore," said Mr. Parker. He raised his glass. Miss Parker raised her own in acknowledgement.

"Thank you, Daddy."

"All the thanks go to you and Jarod. And Mr. Broots, I understand," said Brigitte. "Though it was regrettable that the fellow wasn't caught."

"That's absolutely fine," said Mr. Parker. "Catching him was not part of the contract, in any case. We have him running scared and no longer interfering with our operations, that's the main thing."

Miss Parker pushed a mouthful of stuffed eggplant onto her fork. "How are—"

"By the way," her father cut in, appearing not to notice his daughter's aborted sentence. "I haven't heard much about Jarod since that whole fiasco at the storage unit. How are things going — you're keeping him in line, I hope, Angel? Because if—"

"Yes," said Miss Parker, raising her voice to get a word in edge-wise. "It's going fine. Let's not talk about Jarod, though, I get enough of him at work. How about Raines and the Tower investigation? Last I heard, we were searching—"

"No, I will talk about what I like," said Mr. Parker. His voice swung up in volume and his eyes bulged with alarming suddenness. The head injury again? "I won't be told not to talk about this or that. Don't interrupt me. Ah—! Oh, for the love of God."

His eggplant was all over his lap.

Brigitte hurried him into the bathroom to clean up, Mr. Parker groaning and bemoaning all the while. Miss Parker stayed at the table, staring into the middle distance with a bit of stuffed eggplant forgotten on the end of her fork.

She wanted to be compassionate about this. Daddy deserved compassion, of course he did. Any dutiful daughter would lavish him with love and support in his time of weakness. She'd be in the bathroom now, helping to towel the tomato off his slacks. She'd stand up, this instant, and go help. Miss Parker did not stand up. Instead, she chewed her papoutsakia and chased it with a sip of Merlot.

Brigitte returned to the dining room alone. She sat down at the table like nothing had happened.

"He's resting on your bed," she explained. "Migraine again."

Miss Parker hummed her understanding. Inside, her mind raced, searching her recollection for anything she might have left out of place in the bedroom, anything that might give away her recent visitor. Nothing sprang to mind.

"There's no reason we can't continue to enjoy your birthday dinner without him," said Brigitte. "Who knows, we could even have fun."

"Fun," Parker repeated. "With you? I can't see it."

"Why not?"

Parker set her fork down. "Where should I start? I could start at the beginning, when you tried to steal my job out from under me. I could move on to the attack on my father's helicopter. Hey, for flavour, I could sprinkle in the time you dragged me in for a T-board, or the time you terrorized and stalked Broots. How's that sounding?"

Brigitte shook her head with a small, sad smile. "You're carrying too many grudges, dear Miss Parker. It's not good for you."

"You may call them grudges, I call them grounds to keep my guard up."

"The same doesn't apply to Jarod, I've noticed. You gravitated to each other like magnets at the New Year's Eve party. Attached at the hip."

Parker considered a rebuttal, then pushed herself back from the table. "I'm not getting drawn into this."

Brigitte put a hand over Parker's to stop her; Parker yanked her hand away, but she didn't get up and leave.

"I'm not your enemy, Miss Parker," she said quietly. She paused. "If it's the deciding factor, I'm not Jarod's enemy, either. I… appreciate that it might seem that way from a distance, but I'm on your side."

"Right. We're all one big, happy, quicksilver-addled family." So saying, she grabbed for her cane where it stood leaning against a table leg.

"Come on, Miss Parker. Sit and talk for a bit. I want to hear about you."

What was this? Brigitte had never shown any interest, falsified or genuine, in Miss Parker as a person. She had encouraged her step-daughter to keep up the appearance of participating in the Parker family legacy, but pretending interest in the day-to-day reality of being Miss Parker? That had never been part of their relationship.

"You already hear all you need to. That's what debriefings are for."

"Not work things. I want to hear about your life. For example," she lowered her voice and leaned in across the table. "Are you getting any use out of the gift I gave you?"

Parker helped herself to more salad, if grudgingly.

"I returned it," she said. This was true. If she was being honest, it had been a nice set, and (as Jarod noted) it had brought out the colour of her eyes. Lingerie simply didn't suit her current purposes.

"Refund or exchange?"

"What?"

"I'm betting on exchange."

Parker reached her limit. "Brigitte, either get to the point or see yourself out the door."

Brigitte's smile turned playful.

"I'm just saying, it's clear you're getting some action regularly, whether or not you're making use of lingerie. Why hide it?"

Parker couldn't help it, she stiffened.

"Instead of, what, talking about my sex life to anyone who asks? Bellowing it from the rooftops? In my experience, being discreet about what one does or does not do in the bedroom is the professional expectation."

This was just like when she'd first met Thomas. Brigitte had taken an unusual amount of interest in Parker spending time with someone who had no Centre ties. Suddenly, concerns had come to light. Brigitte had been the first to stumble across the two of them at the gas station, the first to object to the idea of Parker moving across the country to be with him. Now here she was again, poking her nose where it didn't belong. Parker had a mind to chop it off.

"You misunderstand me," said Brigitte. "I don't want to interfere. You deserve to have your fun, or to mourn… or whatever this is. I was just curious. Pretend I don't already know — who's the lucky fella?"

"If you don't want to interfere, stop asking questions," Parker snapped. "And to be clear, I haven't admitted to anything."

A light, sparkling laugh from Brigitte. "Oh, I didn't need an admission. It's obvious." She leaned back, taking in the entirety of her step-daughter. "Cox told me your patterns of birth control prescription requests have shifted recently — he's much more concerned than I am."

"I hope you told him to take a flying leap."

"I did. Not in so many words, but that was the idea. Then there's your room. I wasn't born yesterday, I know what a room smells like immediately after love-making, even if a gentleman leaves the window open. Finally, your sweater." She nodded at the clothing article in question. "It's inside out, dear. It wasn't, earlier today."

Parker looked down. The seams of her sweater stuck out down her sides and around her armpits. Glaring venom at Brigitte all the while, she yanked the offending garment off, flipped it right side in, and pulled it over her head once more, leaving her hair bitterly tousled and her mood irrevocably soured.

"Have you told my father any of this?" she muttered.

"No," said Brigitte. Her cheerful expression evaporated. "Your father and I don't speak very often these days. Well," she amended. "He speaks quite a bit, it's me who never gets a word in. The doctor said it's common."

Parker had noticed that, too. It was difficult to be angry with her father for a medical symptom. It was also surprisingly easy. Too easy.

Brigitte continued. "We haven't slept in the same bed since…" She thought about it. "Hm. Wow. Not in months. Not since the project started, certainly."

"I don't remember asking," said Parker coldly.

"No, you didn't," said Brigitte, her smile returning. She reached across to her husband's place setting and took a long sip from his neglected glass. "But now you know something about me. I'm going to bundle my husband into the car now, I think. If his migraine hasn't left him alone by now, it isn't likely to let up 'til morning."

Brigitte got up and disappeared into the bedroom, leaving Miss Parker alone once more at the table, staring blankly at her father's glass.

Mr. Parker came tottering out a few minutes later, leaning against his wife.

"Angel!" he said, too loud for the space. "So sorry I conked out in the middle of your special day. You'll forgive me, won't you?"

"Of course, Daddy." She kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

"You haven't opened all your presents — why not?"

"Presents?" she said, lost.

"You had a gift on your nightstand. I knew I shouldn't open it, but I didn't seem to be able to stop myself. Funny thing. Anyway, not much of a gift, just some key. Say—" He frowned, abruptly suspicious. "It's not a house key, is it? You're not moving in with someone, are you? This house needs you, Angel."

"I… No, I'm not moving out. I don't know about any key. You opened a gift on the nightstand? Why?" It must have been from Jarod. It was the sort of thing he would do. If that was the most damning evidence her father had found in there of Jarod's presence, it could have been a lot worse.

Mr. Parker blustered. "Like I said, I didn't seem to be able to stop myself. I got the idea and then… hm. Is there any dinner left?"

"We'll box it up for home, sweetheart," said Brigitte, her tone oddly maternal. "Miss Parker has an early morning tomorrow."

Once they had said their goodbyes and left, Miss Parker found the open gift. The wrapping must have been beautiful before her father got at it. Now it was ripped to pieces, little scraps of pale green wrapping paper littering her duvet. The eviscerated wrapping job surrounded a small cardboard box, and sure enough, inside was a key.

Funny that Daddy hadn't recognized it. He had one just like it.