Dark Secrets(61)

"Wow, man. That was... poetic," Max teased, lips twitching. "But I get it. Sometimes it happens that way with a woman. And there ain't shit you can do about it. Swear to fuck, God throws a couple of those unforgettable women in our paths at the wrong fucking time just to screw with us."

Daniel sighed, popping off his beer top and taking half the liquid down in a long swig. He had to agree- it was the wrong place. It was the wrong time. It was the wrong situation. It was just so wholly fucking wrong.

But that didn't shake the small, niggling little voice that whispered maybe, maybe that in spite of all that, it was still incredibly right.

Except now she knew he was a liar and a fed and probably thought he was fucking her to try to get information.

He had gained information on her. He had Max run a whole file. But as soon as things hit the sheets with them, he decided he was done snooping around her life looking for dirt. So when she left in a rush to go to her class, he took his time getting dressed, but he didn't snoop. He didn't even look in her goddamn medicine cabinet. Nothing. He just went home.

Not that it made him some sort of saint to not be a creep, but the fact of the matter was, this was his job he was talking about. He wasn't like normal people. He didn't have a rich family life and lots of close friends and an apartment with plants and pets and a social life to fill out his life. His entire life was the job. He knew nothing else. It wasn't just his bread and butter, it was his fucking everything.

So possibly hindering a job he had worked hard for because he didn't want to dig through her things, yeah, that meant something for a man like him.

And he wasn't lying about her being special. She was like something he had never seen before and he had seen a lot. He had met fellow agents who did dangerous, dirty God-awful undercover gigs. He had met women who specialized in bomb-making and women who ran lawless militaries. He knew special women.

But Faith, for him, was above and beyond. She had obviously grown up somewhat sheltered despite having a criminal dad. So the way she dusted herself off just hours after watching her father and mother being tortured and being badly beaten herself was even more impressive. Then she had, somehow, the part that followed was unclear, but she somehow took care of herself and trained and got tough. And she didn't just use that to take care of herself, to guard herself; she used it to better the lives of other women in her situation or worse.

You would think it would make her cold all the way through. And, on first impression, she did seem that way. She was prickly and abrasive and cool. But if you spent the time with her, you got to see that she used those masks to hide what was underneath. Hell, you just had to look around her ultra-girly apartment to know there was softness there.

He barely got a glimpse under the surface, but he wanted more. He wanted it all.



       
         
       
        

But now he fucked it all up and he would never get any more.

"Yo," Max broke into the endless swirling of his thoughts.

"What?" he asked, getting off the chair and going back to the fridge to get them another round, putting his empty next to the sink because Max, among other things, was a pretty fucking strict recycler. And he needed to rinse the bottles and shit before he chucked them in the bin.

"Seen you after every one of your jobs blew up before, jobs you worked on for years, sacrificed pieces of your goddamn soul for, and you were hardly shook. Not like you're shook now. You just started this job. You didn't have to do a damn thing dirty."

"Max, enough."

"Nah," he said, shaking his head a little tightly. "I wasn't done. You're shook. So I can only conclude that it's because you were in deeper with Faith than you even want to admit to yourself."

"Either way, man, it's done. It's all fucking done."

Max sighed, knowing it was true. While undercover, their lives were pretty much theirs to govern, giving that the government knew that they had to involve themselves with illegal situations, had to do things they couldn't stop, so while they kept in contact with handlers, they did their own things. But when a job tanked- they were given two options right away. One, they opted into getting shipped somewhere else, getting trained on something else, going undercover yet again. Two, they finally stopped uprooting their lives and pretending to be people they weren't. They chose to be stationed somewhere. Maybe, if they had a good career, they could get accepted at a field office in one of the big deal places- California, New York, Florida. Places where the crime was big crime and you wouldn't die of fucking boredom in a week.