A/N: Part Three of the Pilot. I'm not sure every episode will be this detailed, but it was my goal when I started writing this. I could hear this story in my head as I was watching the episodes. I'm really trying to keep it interesting and not tedious. The fun of writing this is amazing, as I notice little things that I hadn't before...like Sarah's hand on her gun on the rooftop. Quite a tell, and I used it here. Thanks for continuing to read and review.

He protested when I asked for his keys, telling me that it was company policy for only him to drive. I deactivated the lock in his car door, jumped in and ordered him inside. The phony act was gone, the flirty blonde trying to pry information out of a lonely guy, not that I had committed fully to that anyway. I was all CIA agent when I sat behind the wheel of the car. While he was still waiting to get in, a black SUV screeched around the corner and blasted into oncoming traffic. I screamed for him to get in, and backed up before he had even shut the door all the way.

What ensued was a high speed chase on a busy city street with me driving in reverse and a government issued NSA vehicle trying to ram me from the front. I could see Casey in the front seat, but he wasn't driving. I made eye contact with him even as I was blinded by the SUV's headlights. Chuck lost it completely, high-pitched squealing that he was going to die. I have to imagine that this moment had been the most frightening of his entire life up to this point, so it was only understandable. The only thing I could do was stay calm…because I was not going to let him die. I swore that to myself at that moment. I asked him to tell me when to turn, mostly to distract him from the danger of the situation.

I swerved the car out of the way of the SUV, but there was no road there. His tiny car bounced down a flight of cement stairs that were part of an office building complex. I could hear metal and plastic grinding underneath us. I didn't know if the car would be drivable when we were done…or even upright. I took my foot off the accelerator, praying that I didn't flip his car over. We could very likely be trapped inside…and they would catch us. The hood came unlatched and the front bumper, already loose, banged hard against the stairs. The pursuing SUV stopped at the top of the stairs. We screeched, spinning out and stopping on level ground at the bottom of the stairs.

Chuck was hyperventilating, close to hysterical. I was a little out of breath myself, but I decided to tell him the truth. I didn't think it would ease his mind, but at the same time, I wanted him to know what was going on. I was out of time. There was no other way I could protect him from the NSA without letting him know the whole story.

I puffed my hair out of my eyes with a tight breath and told him, "Listen to me, Chuck. Those men will hurt you. They're from the NSA and they're after you."

Wide-eyed, he looked at me. "Me? Why, why? Why me? I'm nobody," he rambled in a high-pitched voice. "I'm the supervisor of a Nerd Herd at a Buy More. Maybe one day I'll be assistant store manager and I don't even know if I want that job," he grumbled. "You know, that's not your problem…" he conceded.

Suddenly the interior of the car was brightly lit. I could see the reflection of the headlights of the oncoming car in his eyes that were still wide and terrified. I had almost no time to react, as apparently Casey's driver had his foot to the floor as he started barreling towards us. All I could do was close my eyes and lean away, tucking my arm behind him and my head down towards his shoulder, as the impact was coming straight for the driver's side of the car. The airbags deployed and the car spun around as glass and metal shattered all over the road. The momentum they'd garnered to ram us carried them down the street before the brakes squealed when the SUV stopped.

Our driver's door was almost completely destroyed. I clicked my seatbelt open and his as well. I had to climb over him to get out through the passenger door. He was shaken up, but alright, with no serious injuries. He oofed when I knelt on his lap on my way out, pulling him with me as we started to run. It was awkward, and I was on his left but had a grip on his right wrist, which threw him off balance. Because of that, he stumbled over the broken bumper lying in the street and fell, sprawled on his stomach. At the same time, I saw the headlights of the fast approaching SUV.

My first instinct was to get Chuck out of the way so he wasn't run over. In that split second, I saw the driver swerve to avoid him. They were gunning for me. He didn't even have time to stand up, but he was screaming my name as he saw the car heading straight for me. I did a lightning fast assessment of my surroundings.

There was an emergency barricade in the parking complex where we were. The cement pylons were in the ground, but there was a red button on the wall next to the unmanned security booth. I grabbed a knife and threw it with all my might at that button, and then crouched down. I heard them protract, the mechanical whine soon drowned out by the revving of the engine. I heard the clunking of broken metal and breaking glass as the SUV crashed straight into the security barrier. A shower of sparks surrounded me like a cloud.

I was panting, out of breath, but I was ok. I heard Chuck, out of breath too, though from fear, and probably bewilderment at the entire situation. I needed to get him someplace safe, and fast. I called for support with emergency air-evac. He was on his feet and at my side by the time I hung up the phone. He was surveying the wrecked car, but I grabbed his wrist and started running with him again. Tactical support would send a chopper; we just needed to get onto the roof of a tall enough building.

We ran up ten flights of stairs in less than a minute. I was wearing high-heels and my feet were screaming in pain, but I ignored it. He was winded, wheezing and almost stumbling a few times. I waited until we were out of the stairwell before I asked him what I needed to.

"How well do you know Bryce Larkin?" I asked crisply. He was hanging on the top hand-rail, completely out of breath and struggling to continue. He stumbled forward.

"What? How do you…how do you know Bryce?" he demanded to know. He sounded irritated, of all things.

"We worked together at the CIA," I informed him. I reached back, placing my hand on my firearm, just in case, but I left it there.

"The what?! The CIA?!" he exclaimed, stumbling down to his hands and knees as he fought to keep up with me. "Bryce is a spy?! Bryce Larkin from Connecticut is a spy?!" He was already winded from running, bent at the waist and holding his knees while he tried to catch his breath. He was flabbergasted by what I had just said, no doubt in my mind at all. I took my hand off my weapon.

"A rogue spy," I shouted at him. "Did he try to contact you?"

Chuck was pale, shaking, as he still tried to catch his breath. "I haven't heard from Bryce in…" I was spinning, checking to make sure we were alone. When I spun back to look at him, something seemed to dawn on him. "Wait. No, he…he-he sent, he sent me an email."

"Did you open it?" I asked sharply.

He looked contrite. "Yeah. It was, it was a line from Zork."

"What?" I barked, angry and intense in the moment at something that made no sense.

He was stammering. "Zork," he repeated. "It's a video game that we used to play. It was like a riddle and I solved it and then there was, uh, pictures. Lots and lots of pictures." He made great use of his hands while he was explaining, something I would later learn was just one of many little personality quirks of Chuck's that surface when he's nervous.

"You saw them?" I asked. My intention was to ask in the same neutral tone I had been using as best as I could in the dangerous situation we were in. Something was there in my tone of voice, though, some modicum of the dread I had started to feel spreading inside me like a dark stain. I know because I saw the terror on his face when he looked at me, more terror than he had shown me at all up to this point. He gulped so loudly I could hear it, even though he was about six feet away from me and we were standing on a windy rooftop.

I shook myself. "Uh, your computer, did you back it up?" I asked him, gesturing with my hands when I was speaking. "Is there an external drive?" I needed to know if there was anything left for me to retrieve, which was my initial mission and reason for being sent to L.A.

"It crashed a week ago," he said distractedly, spacing out the words slowly. "Wait, wait, wait. Hold on," he interjected nervously. "Was I not supposed to look at those pictures?" he asked desperately.

Before I could answer him, I heard footsteps clicking against the cement on the roof. Whatever had happened in the SUV downstairs, someone had survived the crash, healthy enough to climb ten flights of stairs, just a few minutes behind us.

Intensely, I told him, "Ok, I may have to aim my gun at you, so just don't freak out." It was a strange thing for me to say, and it flashed across my mind that last time I'd heard that was from my mother, when I called her from Hungary and Molly was crying and I couldn't get her to stop. The thought went through me like lightning. Again, I was all Chuck had in that moment, and I wasn't about to fail. Maybe my orders…but not my mission, the one I had given myself.

"Why?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's late. I'm tired," Casey complained, rubbing his eye as he walked up to us, like he was in total control. Chuck turned his head and shifted his terrified eyes to our companion. "Let's cut the crap and give him to me now," he growled. "He belongs to the NSA."

I drew my gun and pointed it at Chuck, but never took my eyes off Casey. Chuck gasped, despite my request. "The CIA gets him first," I snapped. Casey pulled his gun and aimed it at me. "You come any closer and I shoot," I warned. Chuck was my leverage in that moment, as it seemed Casey was ordered to take him alive.

"Sarah…I'm freaking out," Chuck muttered in a high-pitched voice, through his teeth.

"You shoot him, I shoot you," Casey said evenly, glancing out of the corner of his eye to regard Chuck. "I leave both your bodies here, go out for a late snack. I'm thinking maybe pancakes," he drawled. God, Graham wasn't kidding about him, I thought.

Chuck panicked, and turned and ran. We were ten stories up. Was he going to jump? Was he just so overwrought he didn't know what to do? "Chuck, no!" I screamed, upset that my words hadn't convinced him to be at least a little calmer. Turns out, he flashed again, but his back was turned to us, so I didn't know anything had happened.

He spun around. "They're gonna kill him," Chuck stuttered out.

"Kill who?" Casey asked as he glanced away from me and our gun triangle.

"Stanfield, the general. The General Stanfield. The NATO guy," he blurted.

It made no sense, what he was saying. Casey looked perplexed as well, and we exchanged curious glances.

"Look, something is wrong with me, ok?" Chuck sighed, rolling his eyes and gesturing with his hands again. "I don't know what it is, but something is very, very wrong with me, and I'm remembering things I shouldn't know," he rambled anxiously.

The Intersect, I thought, remembering the initial explanation and suddenly realizing that functionality had been transferred from the computer to Chuck's brain when he saw all of those subliminal messages and coded secrets.

"Ok, Chuck, talk to me. Like what?" I prodded.

"I don't know. I don't know. For example, uh…there was, there was a Serbian demolitions expert at the Large Mart today. That's kind of odd, wouldn't you say? Look, last week the NSA," he said, turning to Casey. "You guys intercepted some blueprints, blueprints of a hotel, that hotel," he said, gesturing frantically back over his shoulder at the way he had been facing when he had flashed with his back to us.

"And then the CIA, you guys found a file of schematics of a bomb in Prague. The bomb is in that hotel!" he shouted, turning back to address me.

Casey was looking at me, his eyes widening ever so slightly. Moving almost faster than my eyes registered, he shifted the gun from pointing at me to pointing at Chuck. It was instinct, me turning my gun on him. Protect Chuck. It was like a voice inside my head.

"He was working with Bryce," Casey concluded.

"No!" I said firmly. "He opened Bryce's email," I explained. It seemed to work, in Chuck's head, exactly as the computer was supposed to function. Gather bits of unrelated intelligence and piece them together to understand more than was just apparent on the surface. "Chuck, those pictures that you saw were encoded with secrets…government secrets. If you saw them, you know them."

"There were thousands of them," he breathed back at me, the frightening magnitude of the situation more apparent.

"Wait a minute. You're telling me all of our secrets are in his head," Casey said stiffly, moving the red targeting laser to Chuck's forehead as he said it. Chuck rolled his eyes up toward the red light.

"Chuck…is the computer," I stressed, making sure Casey knew Chuck was the only remaining location for those files.

Chuck looked terrified again, standing away from us while we held guns on each other. "What did you…what did you say? What does that mean?"

"Chuck, you have to listen to me. You have to tell us where the bomb–" I started to insist.

"What is happening to me?!" he screamed over my instructions. He had reached his end of his ability to cope in the situation.

"You said there was a bomb! Is there time to stop it?" I demanded, more forcefully, trying to focus him as best I could.

"What?! What?! Are you crazy?!" he shrieked, looking between Casey and me.

"No, we're the good guys," Casey said. "We get paid to keep bombs from exploding." Casey's definition of "good guys" was suspect to me, knowing what I knew. I'm sure Chuck was not quite sure of that at this point, either.

"Look, I can't…I can't help you, ok?" he answered, his voice shaking. "I really wish that I could, but I can't. Call Bryce. He's the guy that can save the day," he rambled. I sensed that thinly veiled sarcasm there. He may have known Bryce, but he wasn't a friend of Bryce's. At least not any more, based on the way he had said that.

"Bryce is dead!" I shouted, cutting him off. I heard my words echo in my head, the first time I had said them out loud to another person. Despite that hitch from before, Chuck looked stricken at that knowledge. My eyes burned as my emotions surged up from the frozen pit inside me. "He died sending those secrets to you."

"Bryce is dead?" he gasped in disbelief.

Casey fired his gun into the air, disrupting the tense air between Chuck and me. The sound of the gunshot startled me more than it startled Chuck. I actually staggered on my feet.

"Yeah, and he's gonna have a lot of company unless you start talking. So, pretty please…can we defuse the bomb now?" Casey said patronizingly.

"According to the schedule, the general's already on the stage," Chuck sighed.

"Then we need to move. Now," Casey ordered. He put his gun away first. Once that was away, I tucked my gun back into my waistband. We ran down the stairs and onto the street. No one had a drivable vehicle any longer, so we had to run. There was a chance there that Chuck could have run away from us, even though it would have been foolish. Somewhere between insisting that he couldn't help us and Casey firing his gun, Chuck had completely committed to helping us. Fortunately, the hotel was only two blocks away. Even in my heels, I could run faster than Chuck, but we were both faster than Casey. We waited for Casey, who flashed his credentials to let us through security in the hotel lobby.

I stopped dead, holding out my palm forcefully. "Wait! Casey, wait! We can't take him in. He's too valuable." Chuck ran straight into my hand, and I ended up grabbing two handfuls of his shirt to hold him in place.

Casey knocked him onto the floor. "Ok, Johnny Commodore. You stay here, but you tell us where to go," he barked.

"Uh, the easiest way?" he asked.

"No, fastest, Chuck," I barked back at him.

"The fastest. Got it," he said, pointing at me. He jumped to his feet and started running before either one of us could catch him.

"Chuck, stop!" I shouted, just as he leapt into the lobby fountain and started running across. Casey and I followed him through the water. "Chuck, wait!" I called breathlessly, but he didn't stop. For someone who only just a little while before had been terrified of his situation, he was running full speed into an even more dangerous situation with almost no hesitation.

We ran up to him, listening as he stammered gibberish, pointing to the room where the general was speaking. My feet were already sore, and soaking wet leather boots were aggravating the blisters I was developing.

The room where the general was speaking was packed. It was a logistical nightmare if the bomb was in fact in this room. "Chuck, where is it?" I asked.

He stammered breathlessly for a few seconds, while he scanned the room. His gaze stopped on a stainless steel dinner cart positioned quite close to the stage where the general was standing. Casey pushed him from behind, but Chuck ran through the crowd to where the bomb was.

Casey opened the lid to reveal the explosive device. It was a laptop computer hooked up to enough C4 explosive to blow the entire room and parts of the surrounding rooms and hall sky high. There was only a little less than one minute and 30 seconds left on the timer.

"No time to evacuate. Ideas?" Casey said quickly as I assessed the device.

"Disconnect the laptop," I offered.

"There's no trigger. The cables," he added briskly, dropping down on his knee.

"No, definitely a trap," I told him.

Hotel security finally caught up with us. Casey grabbed a security guard by the front of his shirt and bellowed out his rank, title, and a crisp explanation of what it was exactly that we were doing. The general mumbled behind the microphone as the attendees seemed to sense something was wrong, but also started filing out of the room in an orderly fashion.

"Chuck, is there anything else you remember about the bomb?" I asked him, grabbing his arm as I leaned into him. He was nervous and confused. His cellphone rang, its ringtone a pop song that I didn't recognize. He answered it, and it was his friend Morgan. Casey and I went back to examining the bomb, while the time continued to tick down. I didn't pay attention to what Chuck was saying.

Suddenly, Chuck pushed past me and knelt down in front of the laptop. "Ok, ok, I have an idea," he said confidently.

Casey grabbed both of his hands. "That's not an XBox. And you're not an X men," he quipped.

"I understand that," Chuck conceded. "This is a Prism Express laptop, ok. We sell this at our store. It has a DOS override." He sounded amazingly confident, but I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me. "I think I can do this. I can do this, please." He kept shifting his gaze between Casey and me, ending on me. His eyes went straight through me and I had to swallow hard to focus.

"He's our best shot," I stressed to Casey. He was our only shot. The clock had ticked down to 30 seconds. Either Chuck succeeded, or we all died right here. I wasn't afraid, not like one would expect. I had never been afraid of dying. The way I felt when Chuck looked at me…that scared me, much more than the impending explosion. Casey let him go.

He went to work typing so fast his fingers were a blur on the keyboard. "Mr. Bomb, meet Mr. Internet," he muttered to himself.

"He's searching for porn," Casey grumbled. I just looked at Casey, wondering how he was so sure so quickly. Chuck shushed Casey, which was amazing to see, considering how Casey had treated him up to this point.

He pushed the button, and then clenched his fists tightly and closed his eyes…that thing I would soon learn Chuck would do when he was facing sudden death. I watched as the program he pulled up crashed the computer in real time, while the timer ran down to nothing. I held my breath, but the timer stopped with one second left. The detonator was fried.

He peeked out of one eye, his hands still clenched into fists. At the blank screen, he then turned with both eyes wide open and saw his success. He was speechless, totally gobsmacked.

"You did it," I said to him, doing nothing to hide the awe in my voice.

His mouth was open and his breath was shaking and hitching as the adrenaline rush caught up with him in the moment. "I did it," he gushed with more shaky breath, amazed at himself. Proud. He had every right to feel that way, and I couldn't help but smile. "I did it. I…defused a real bomb. This was a real…" He was laughing, but turned a little green after a few seconds. "What if I was wrong?" he asked out loud to himself. I could almost see the nausea he must have been feeling on his face.

"Don't puke on the C4, huh?" Casey quipped, then left the area to check in with security.

I squeezed Chuck's shoulder and rested my other hand on his back. His muscles were tense, hard enough to feel like he was intentionally flexing, he was so tight. I squeezed just a little, feeling him relax a bit. But I had to pull my hand away, telling myself to do so. Unconsciously, I think I would have left my hand there until he walked away from me.

Casey took care of everything, and made the report to General Stanfield and his people. Getting Chuck involved, letting the general or any of his people see Chuck, was too much of a security risk. Chuck and I went outside and waited on the sidewalk. He ended up sitting on the curb, his head in his hands while his elbows rested on his knees. He was overwhelmed.

I stood behind him processing everything that I'd learned. Chuck, who was now a human Intersect, was an innocent bystander. Bryce had sent him the file without warning. I didn't know what Bryce knew about the Intersect and what he didn't, but there had been a real chance of the Intersect file overwhelming Chuck's brain, driving him insane, or even killing him. That had always been a known side effect when they were proposing Omaha. It was one more crime of Bryce's, putting an innocent person potentially in harm's way for some unknown purpose. I had no idea who Bryce was at all…if he could do something like that…to someone like Chuck. He was a victim. My gut reaction, to protect him, had been the right one.

I wanted to sit beside him, offer him some comfort if I could, but I didn't know how. I had never had to comfort anyone in my life. Regardless, this was even worse, considering I didn't have one bit of solace to offer him. Everything was fluid, dynamic, and none of it could protect him from the lasting effects of what Bryce had done to him. The only thing I could do was stand behind him so he knew he wasn't alone.

The moment Casey emerged, we started arguing. Chuck stayed seated the way he was, but we moved away. Casey insisted his superiors wanted Chuck in D.C. in lockdown. Chuck was a United States citizen with rights…but the NSA and the CIA were sometimes above the law, as disgusting as that sounds. If I hadn't been there, I know that is exactly what would have happened to Chuck. Against his will, Casey would have probably drugged him and taken him on a military plane back to D.C., where they would have kept him in an underground bunker. Probably until the Intersect computer was rebuilt, and then they would have eliminated him. His sister and his friends would have reported him as a missing person…years would have gone by and they would have eventually believed him dead, never having the closure that could have allowed them to heal. Grim…but truthful.

There was more than one way I needed to protect Chuck, I thought to myself. Graham's need to absolve me of Bryce's crimes had been annoying at the time he'd done it, but here I found myself feeling culpable, thinking if I had somehow been able to stop Bryce that he wouldn't have hurt Chuck the way he had. Part of the turmoil that had overturned Chuck's life was my fault. So I argued with Casey like I have never argued for anything in my life. I got Graham involved. I refused to go back to D.C. until he squared it away with the NSA. I was staying here, in L.A., to protect Chuck. I owed him that. The argument I got from the NSA was countered by my concession that Casey was allowed to stay here as well, and we would work as a joint team to protect Chuck. I didn't trust Casey as far as I could throw him, but I had to agree. It was the only way I could win that debate.

In the middle of that argument, Chuck heard me talking to Casey about Chuck's friends and his sister. He was a nervous wreck, pacing on the sidewalk, but he rushed up to us when he heard that.

"What about my sister?" he asked me warily.

"Nothing, we were just–" I started.

"No, no, no, hold on a second," he interjected forcefully. "You have to leave my family and my friends out of this." His face was set like stone, his eyes on fire when he confronted Casey. Nothing matters more to my husband than his family, and his friends (who are always considered family anyway.) I saw that for the first time here, at one in the morning on September 26, 2007, standing outside the hotel where a computer technician from Buy More had stopped a terrorist from killing hundreds of people by using a computer virus.

"We'll see," Casey said brightly, completely underestimating Chuck at that moment.

"Look, Bryce sent that email to me. I'm the one remembering your secrets. Which means you have to listen to me, both of you. And right now…I'm going to go home." I had seen him muster the courage to talk to us that way, panting but letting the anger give him the strength he needed.

Casey grabbed his arm, pinching his shirt in his fingers. "No, you're not. Uh-uh," he griped. Chuck ripped his arm away from Casey with a violent yank.

His eyes were still on fire when he turned to Casey and then me, pointing. "You…you need me." He stormed away, leaving the I don't need you unsaid. It was prophetic, what he said. I did need him…like nothing else I have ever known. I just didn't understand it there.

The rest of that argument happened on the phone, because I followed Chuck, at a safe enough distance that he never knew I was tailing him. I know he called a tow truck about his crashed Herder. Without a vehicle, he walked. He ended up on the beach in San Pedro after about a 45 minute walk. I was in my rented car in the parking lot all night in the dark. I watched him on the shore, sitting and staring out at the ocean. I had the final say from Graham via a phone call that the NSA and the CIA had agreed to the terms I had proposed. Casey was not happy, but General Beckman, the director of the NSA, ordered him to stay. I know Graham was irritated as well, almost as irritated as he'd been when Bryce and I were partnered. I know regardless of his loss of access to me again, it was more important to him that the CIA had a vested interest in the Intersect. He applauded me for staying and working on my own to secure that, never understanding that I had only done so because of Chuck…and how he had so effortlessly affected me the way he had.

The sun had come up while I was on the phone with Graham. Chuck had sat on the shore and watched as the golden glow filled the sky and sparkled on the water. He was completely alone on the beach. I took off my boots and walked down the sand to see him. He never moved, never turned his head to look at me as I approached.

"How long you been here?" he asked, his voice defeated.

"All night," I confessed, crouching to sit beside him. His face looked washed out, like he had been crying, but the breeze from the ocean had dried the tears on his cheeks. That realization went through me like a knife. My life up to now had been full of bravado, heroism without emotional expression. Chuck was sensitive…and not afraid to show it. For me, that would have been a sign of weakness. To him, it was a strength. I learned that over time, but that lesson started here.

"There's nowhere I can run, is there?" he asked, pursing his lips tightly.

"Not from us," I admitted.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, gritting his teeth. I heard him clack his teeth together in aggravation. "Talk to me, Chuck," I said, scanning him with my eyes.

"Yesterday I was making 11 bucks an hour fixing computers. Now I have one in my brain," he told me bitterly. "And I can't figure out why Bryce did this, why he chose me." So Chuck, right there. I only became aware of it later, how much he felt Bryce had ruined his life at this point. He was bitter, but he still phrased it like that…why he chose me. Not why he chose my life to ruin and destroy. As much as he detested Bryce, he couldn't speak ill of him to me.

I heard him swallow. "What are you gonna do with me?" he asked. He was so worried when he looked at me. I could feel it radiating from him. "What happens now?"

I was so thankful that I had fought for what I did, to let him stay in his life. I don't know how I would have been able to crush whatever hope he had left to tell him he would have to leave with us and never see the people he loved again.

"For now, you go back to your own life. We'll protect you and you'll work with us," I told him.

"And my sister, my friends, are they in danger?" he asked. Always them first, himself second.

"You tell them nothing to keep them safe," I instructed him. I could almost feel him tense up next to me. I was asking him to lie to the people who mattered most, but there was no better option.

"I need you to do one more thing for me," I added.

He lifted his eyebrows curiously. "Yeah?" he asked sarcastically, like what was one more thing when we had already asked everything.

"Trust me, Chuck," I implored him. He looked back at me the same way, only his eyes were less worried. One side of his mouth was turned up in a little smirk. He had absolutely no reason to trust me here. All I had done was lie about who I was and why I was here. But I know, without question, that he did, even at this earliest of times.

I leaned into him, bumping his shoulder with mine. That little smirk intensified, just a bit. I found myself wishing he would smile at me, but he was too upset, and, sadly, I felt a pang when I realized those smiles had been for the person he thought I was, not the person I was in truth. That wasn't correct, though. He was just overwrought, and worried about his sister and his friends more than he let on. That smile was always just for me…part of that way he looked at me, always.

We sat in silence for a little while. He told me his sister would be really worried that he'd stayed out all night on a first date. I drove him back to his sister's apartment. He got out of my car and walked through the gate, dragging his feet like he was exhausted. He never turned back to look at me.

I went straight home to my hotel. I had a million things to do. I needed to change the hotel from a short term to long term reservation. I needed to buy a car and not continue renting. I needed a cover job and a way to surveil him. I had to reconnoiter with John Casey. But I had also been up all night and I was sore from fighting and running. Sleep first, problems later. I changed into my pajamas and got ready to climb into bed. The flowers Chuck gave me were still on the bed, wrapped in paper, dying of thirst.

The scent of them was still pungent, disturbing. I flipped through my phone, finding the photos of Bryce and me from Cabo, my happy place now forever destroyed, full of misery and betrayal. I missed him…and I didn't want to. And I couldn't close my eyes when I tried to lay down, for every time I tried I saw Chuck's hazel eyes, full of pain and lost as he'd sat next to me on the beach. The thought of him in pain, in any pain, seemed to ricochet through me as well. When you care for someone more than you care for yourself, that's what happens. I had never felt that way before, and I didn't really comprehend what was happening to me.

I was already hopelessly in love with him, 24 hours after I'd met him, and he assured me later the feeling was mutual, although I didn't know that until the second time we were on that beach, after I had forgotten all of this the first time. I didn't know it. I had no idea what love was, having never felt it before, not understanding that the pain inside my chest was less about missing Bryce than it was about longing for something that I now wanted so badly…and knew I could never have.