"And my realtor has the key now?"
"Yes, Mr. Hudson, everything is in order," the selling realtor replied. "I must say, this was one of the fastest and easiest sales I've ever managed! I wish all my buyers were like you! You all seemed to have everything in perfect order—I've seen lawyers and finance brokers struggle more! I'm very impressed."
"Ah—yes, well, thank you. I, uh, make a point of doing as much preliminary work as I can before jumping into something so the actual process can move smoothly." Of course, having the entire resources of the Hoover building at his disposal certainly helped.
"Well, you did a great job. Congratulations again! I know you and your wife will love the neighborhood."
Wife. Right. Yes. That was the gambit. "Yes, I'm sure we will. Thank you so much."
"Thank you! Have a great day."
"You have a great day too," Jack replied. "It's been a pleasure working with you, Mrs. Reynolds."
"And you, Mr. Hudson!"
As he hung up the phone, he turned toward Sue, who was standing by his desk. "It's all set, we got the place."
"When do we move in?"
"Anytime we want."
And with those few words, the air between them suddenly turned heavy and slightly awkward once again, as they both allowed the implications to sink in. Anytime we want. We.
Sue and Jack would be living together. As a married couple. It all seemed so . . . easy and normal and natural. So perfect.
So terrifying.
Perhaps it should have been significant that they were more afraid of living with each other than living next door to a possible terrorist (or at least people who had been working with The Terrorist, and whether those people intended acts of terrorism themselves or not, the result was the same) but at the moment they were both too busy trying to wrap their brains around this relationship—fake relationship, they each repeatedly reminded themselves—to even consider that.
And before they had nearly enough time to let any part of this sink in, their teammates came bursting in to disrupt the moment, as was their wont. Tara and Lucy led the procession, carrying between them a bin of shredded paperwork they were reaching their other hands into, Bobby and D trailing behind them.
"And here are the newlyweds now!" Lucy announced, and they both started throwing the shredding—that is, the "confetti"—at them.
"Ah, to be young and in love," Tara added.
"I'm always amazed at how quick word travels in this building," Jack muttered.
"It's the FBI," Dimitrius countered. "The walls have ears."
"Speaking of ears," added Bobby, "hear that clanging, Sparky? That's the sound of your ball and chain." He winked at Sue as he said that.
D jumped in again with, "Hey, Sue, the boys are going out for a beer after work. Can Jack come?" He tilted his head with a faux pleading expression, like a 7 year old begging to keep a puppy that followed him home.
"As long as he's home in time to mow the lawn," Sue teased back, signing mow as she spoke. Jack raised his eyebrows at her. He didn't say it, he didn't sign it, but his entire expression asked, Et tu? She smiled and shrugged as though to respond, When in Rome.
They might have remained looking at one another for a moment longer, each in their own way considering how their easy silent communication in a language all their own could also lend itself to a successful marriage—uh, to the impression of a successful marriage—but Myles happened to enter just then and look around at the mess in confusion.
"What happened?"
"You missed it," Tara responded happily. "Jack and Sue got married."
Jack made a face at her while Myles looked even more confused. "I went out for a tuna sandwich, how long was I gone?!"
If anybody noted that Myles did not seem to question the reality of this, only the rapidity, nobody commented on it. Nor did anybody bother to explain to him right at that moment—he was a smart guy (just ask him) and he'd figure it out pretty quickly. Instead, Jack decided to take a cue from his "wife" and join in with the jokes they clearly wouldn't be able to avoid. Standing, he put his arm around Sue and said, "Thank you all for coming, we're both very happy."
"And," Sue added cheekily, "thank you for all the wonderful gifts I'm sure you'll all be getting us!" She finished off with a comically huge grin at their friends.
"What I want to know," Lucy shot back, "is where are you going on your honeymoon?"
"And can we all go along?" Bobby added.
"No," Jack said a little too quickly, but before anyone could comment on how eager he seemed to be to get his "new wife" to himself, he recovered with, "but you can help us move into our new place."
Those seemed to be the magic words they'd been searching for to get the team to stop pestering them, as they suddenly all scattered as though urgent business called them away right that moment, Myles muttering something about his injury preventing him from doing anything.
Of course, the attempts to get out of it meant little, since at least the guys were required to go undercover as the movers. Meanwhile, Jack and Sue worked with the Chief of Disguise and requisitions officers to select the furniture and decor that seemed to best fit the kind of suburban lifestyle they would be able to pull off.
"I'm surprised we get this kind of choice," Sue confided to Jack when they had a quiet moment. "I figured someone would just load up a truck and we'd have to make do with whatever was sent."
"Remember when I told you that the key to a good lie is to keep as much truth in it as possible? That goes for undercover work too."
"Which," Sue added, "is really just a big, ongoing lie."
"Basically. I mean, if the neighbors came over to meet us and someone asked casually, say, 'Oh, this dining set is so unusual, what drew you to it?' we could try to come up with something on the spot, but if it's one that we actually picked ourselves then we actually already have an answer."
"To save improvisation and keep tracking lies down to a minimum," Sue finished for him.
"Precisely."
Sue considered for a moment, then quirked an impish smirk at Jack as she asked, "Don't you think the heaviest furniture would go best in that house? You know, for those lovely movers who were so eager to help us out?"
The CoD and RO returned from their present search only to be drastically confused by the hysterical laughter that had two of the FBI's finest doubled over a sectional sofa.
Next came wedding photos. Lucy and Tara helped Sue dress, and though they were lightly teasing her the whole time about how they'd always dreamed of helping her get married to Jack, there was once again an untenable sense of reality to it all. So much that both Tara and Lucy found they had a tear in their eyes when straightening out Sue's veil and dress and sending her in for the pictures.
"Stop it," Sue said nervously. "It's not like we're actually getting married y—." She stopped herself just before saying, "yet," but the way Lucy and Tara glanced at one another, it didn't seem to have gone unnoticed.
Nor did the expression on Jack's face when Sue walked into the photography room. Even the photographer himself seemed moved as he said, "Okay, let's get the happy couple in a few different classic wedding photo positions. First, standing side by side, hands clasped. That's right."
They moved from that into standing with her back to him, his arms wrapped around her abdomen as she leaned back into him; one focused in on their overlapped left hands, each bearing a ring that was part of their undercover attire; and then with his arm around her shoulder and her head leaning against him.
"Alright, now one of the happy couple's first married kiss!"
Sue and Jack looked at the photographer in alarm. "S-surely we don't need th-this, uh, this many pictures," Jack protested.
"Right!" Sue agreed. "I mean, we'll only be displaying one or two, right?"
The photographer rolled his eyes. "You agents are always so fastidious. It's an assignment, not a lifelong commitment! If you're going undercover as a married couple, it's entirely possible someone may wish to see your wedding album, you know."
"W-well, how recently married are we?" Sue asked, turning her stricken expression toward Jack. "Would we have all our photographs back from the photographer yet?"
"Right!" he agreed, latching onto her excuse. "That can take months sometimes, right?"
"Right! I think my cousin had to wait, um, almost a year actually."
"Exactly! So if, uh, if we got married, um . . . let's say May? 6 months ago?"
"May is nice! Yeah, we've been married for 6 months and we're . . . um, a little frustrated with the photographer that we're still waiting for the bulk of our pictures, but to compensate we got a few photos sent to us that are ready so that we could hang something up! I think I have a friend who actually did that."
Sue had no idea if any of her friends had ever experienced any such thing, but she could not kiss Jack. If only for fear that she wouldn't be able to stop kissing Jack. They would be alone in a house for . . . a currently unspecified length of time. They couldn't breach that invisible barrier between them immediately before doing so.
The photographer sighed. "Oh, fine, can we at least get one of you holding her?"
"H-holding her? Um . . . I, I can do that."
Sue widened her eyes at Jack, but decided that allowing him to lift her into his arms would be preferable over kissing him, so she nodded her acquiescence. Several awkward moments later—had there been anything but awkward moments since she came up with her brilliant idea of going undercover?—she had managed to allow him to lift her into his arms, and he had managed to do so without touching any areas that were too intimate. They smiled at the camera.
"No no no! Do not be looking at me! You are in love with each other! Look into one another's eyes!"
"If I look at him," Sue protested, "I won't be able to know what you're saying."
"He can tell you, now look to him, look, look!" He brushed his hand toward them as though to physically push their heads together from across the room. So they turned their heads and looked.
And stopped breathing.
Her arms around his neck, his arms beneath her legs and back, him looking down at her as she looked up at him. He studied the fringe of her hair around her face, the slope of her nose, the swell of her lips. She studied his face likewise, and after deeming his eyes unsafe to dwell on, focused on the curve of his expressive eyebrows, the smooth planes of his cheeks, the slight smile on his lips . . . .
And then he was lowering her feet to the floor, apparently in response to a direction from the photographer of which she was unaware, but they did not break their gazes. Instead, he kept one arm behind her back, reaching his newly freed hand up to brush the tendrils of her layered bangs back from her face. She reached her hand up likewise and brushed her hand over his cheek.
"You shaved again," she whispered, noting that the slight roughness he usually sported in the afternoon wasn't present. Not . . . that she had any reason to know it was usually present. She just . . . was observant. She lived her life based on visual cues, and now she worked for the FBI. She had to be observant. That's all.
He cleared his throat slightly. "It's all in the details. I'd hardly go to our wedding with scruff on my face."
"Our wedding." She barely even whispered that, but breathed out the concept.
Suddenly, he started and looked back to the photographer, drawing Sue's attention there likewise. She suspected the tenacious man had not stopped snapping photos while they had this little conversation, and from the fresh delight on the previously long-suffering artist's face, she also suspected he was rather fond of how those pictures came out. For her own part, she was wrestling down panic that some higher-up would see the photos, know in an instant how she felt about Jack, and transfer one or both of them—or worse, fire them.
It's all for the cover, she reminded herself. The delightedly exchanged glances between Lucy and Tara, who had stood behind the photographer silently but not without expression throughout the proceedings, did not help her feel more at ease. Not at all.