"What was the rest of it then?"
He shrugged, reaching out to hand her back her coffee, likely seeing the storm had blown over. He didn't know her well enough to know that another could be right along behind it in seconds. "I haven't had a life in over a decade. I mean, I've had lives. I've been a skin trader and a drug dealer and a bartender," he said with a small smile, "but I haven't had a life of my own. That's part of the job. I knew that going in. And in the beginning, that was fine. I was young and hungry and addicted to the rush. But I'm not a kid anymore. It's not enough."
Faith felt her shoulders lose some of their tension at that. It was something she had been too mad at or, alternately, upset with him about, to consider- what if his intentions were pure? What if he did care about her? What if she wasn't just a mark? Just a potential file he could snap shut?
It was dangerous to think those things with no evidence to back them up.
But him standing there and telling her just that, well, it made it really hard to cling to her anger and sadness.
"Faith?" he asked when she was silent for a long minute.
"I'm thinking," she told him unnecessarily.
"Maybe you could do some of it out loud so I can know if I need to protect my balls or be ready to get second degree burns from that coffee or what," he said with a wry smile.
She felt her own lips curve up slightly at that, realizing that no one had ever been able to read her quite so well. "What's your plan?" she asked, surprising herself. She hadn't been sure what she was going to say, but that definitely didn't seem to even be something she was thinking.
"My plan," he repeated, watching her. "Good question. Been thinking a lot about that myself. The one nice thing about working undercover for your entire adult life is your money stocks up. So I'm going to actually move in to my place, buy some furniture, paint the fucking walls. Then I am going to see what I want to do about a job."
"I think 'skin trader, drug dealer, and professional liar' will look really good on your resume," she said with a smirk.
"Got a lot of compiled skills over the years. I make a pretty mean bartender too," he added. "Ran fucking circles around you."
"Do it for a decade then come tell me you aren't sick of everyone's shit and sob stories and over-the-top drunken antics."
"Cynic."
"Realist. It's not a job people like us are meant to do."
"People like us, huh?" he asked, reading more into that than she intended.
She ignored him. "This job has an expiration date. Especially for women."
"Sweetheart, you'll be turning heads at sixty," he said, rolling his eyes. "What is your plan then if you don't see yourself doing this much longer?"
"I'm here because my mom gets good care. And good care costs a mint. Even with my salary and tips, I wouldn't be able to pull it off. So Vin does. Some day, I am leaving this hellhole. Get a little house. Have a life that isn't so..."
"Baby, you'd go stir-fucking-crazy in the 'burbs and you know it. PTA meetings and neighborhood watches and people bitching about how tall you let your grass grow and..."
"Alright alright," she said, face horrified. "Fuck. I'll stay in the City. Jesus. They do that shit in the suburbs?"
"You got no fucking idea how insane middle America is," he agreed with a nod.
"Alright, I'll buy a condo in a better area," she compromised. It wasn't until that moment that she saw how unlikely it was that she would ever leave the City. It was what she knew. She grew up there. It had things she had gotten accustomed to- like Chinese at four in the morning after work when she was hungry and lazy and cabs and the subway so you never had to drive yourself anywhere. Hell, she didn't even have a driver's license.
"Solid plan," Daniel said with a nod. "What about work when you leave Lam?"
Faith shrugged. "I always figured I would just keep teaching self-defense. I got plenty of good years left in me for that."
"I could get behind that. I'll invest a stupid amount of money in that business plan if you go into it in the future."
"You want to invest in me," she said, rolling her eyes. "You don't even know me."
Daniel sighed, shaking his head at her like she was being silly. "I know enough to know you're one of the best self-defense teachers I've seen. And I've seen a lot. You know what you're doing and you teach it in a very approachable way. You're tenacious and headstrong and stubborn as all fuck..."