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I thought that was going to be my final memory of her, rushing away from me.
Fitting, really.
But she turned back suddenly, holding the door open, mouth opening and closing a few times before she steadied herself with a deep breath.
"I love you," she declared in a fast, squeaky voice before throwing herself inside, away from me.
Meanwhile, I felt like she had just ripped the ground out from underneath me.
That word.
Society had raised me up to fear it from women, to always think it was too soon, too cheesy, too crazy.
To be fair, there was fear.
Not because I was worried she would start stalking me, start demanding a ring, babies, a house with a picket fence and a vegetable garden.
No.
It was because she wouldn't ask me for any of those things.
She couldn't.
She would never get those chances with the first guy she had thought she was in love with.
In love with.
It shouldn't have surprised me.
But maybe I had blocked the very idea from my mind, hadn't wanted to invite the possibility of her confessing that to me, trying to figure out how to handle it. What to say.
Well, her confess-and-run method made it possible not to have to quick-think a response that wouldn't send me straight to hell.
But even as I stood there staring at a closed door, knowing she was rushing back to her desk somewhere deep inside, I knew that while it would have been wrong to tell her, that it wouldn't have been a lie.
I loved her.
It was such a foreign concept, such an unexpected realization.
Love had been a platonic thing in my life.
I loved my parents before they died.
But with them went what I thought was my capacity for love.
I had no other family.
I had no strong friendships.
Which was what made getting into government work that would send me all over the world not a big deal.
There was nothing to miss, nothing to lose.
And once I got in that lifestyle, well, there was no time to build those kinds of foundations, to build up those feelings.
Which was why it hadn't even been on my radar.
I'd been aware that I was more emotionally involved than I should have been on an op, but not to that extent.
It hadn't occurred to me that the way I was intent to memorize everything about her, to file away every tiny, inconsequential detail was not normal.
I would never need to know that she had a stuffed panda named Cheese that she had since she was four, currently stashed away in a corner of her closet.
Or that she had very firm opinions on TV shows way before her time - everything from Adam 12 to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
None of that was useful to me.
Yet I was happy to have it, to know all those little parts of her.
When she was gone, my dominant thoughts were of her. Wondering how her workday was going, if she had finally managed to make any friends there, or if they were still shunning her because they thought she was getting special treatment because of her connection to the owner. I thought about where to bring her, what stories I could tell her without completely risking a warrant and jail cell for sharing intelligence secrets.
She was an obsession.
And, for the first time, not for professional reasons.
The idea of leaving her made it feel like a hole was being punched through my gut.
And I was pretty fucking sure that was what love felt like.
"Fuck," I hissed, reaching up, running a hand through my hair, trying to ignore the burning sensation in my chest as my hand tightened around the file as I made my way to the hotel, scanning the file, downloading it onto an external drive, mailing each individually back to the states, then getting back to my room, slowly, methodically going through the motions of packing up my room.
It was time.
To make the call.
Even to my own ears, my tone was dead, defeated.
"That was not the assignment," Allen told me. If I were in the right mindset, it would have bothered me that he wasn't pissed, chewing my ass out over a major fuck-up at best, at worst a blatant disregard for direct orders. Allen was, as a whole, someone who was quick to condescend, to snap at you, to make sure you remembered where your place was - directly below him.
But I was too consumed with my own grief at having to leave, my guilt, with the name I had just put to the feelings that had been coursing through me almost since I met Mackenzie Minasian.
"I realize that. But we have what we need to bring Armen down. Possibly even his wife's brother," I told him, pinching the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache of the hammering sort forming behind my eyes.
"The job was to try to turn her, so we had more access. More access had the potential to bring down the entire enterprise. Instead, you got one small file. Even if we got Armen extradited, we pretty much can bet on his brother-in-law, and everyone else connected, getting wind of it, and getting somewhere that we can't find them. You failed, Roan," he told me, words that would have normally filled me with dread.
