Up and Down, On and Off

“Am I married this time?” she teased, draped across the motel’s dingy couch that was barely wide enough to cushion her long, gangly legs.

She tossed a yellow stress ball into the air in an endless loop. From his desk a few paces away from the couch, he watched as the ball arced up and came back down, up and down, up and down, up —

“Kieran.”

“Hmm?” he mumbled, barely realizing she’d addressed him earlier. The static buzz of the TV was a constant droning in the background. Jules said the sound made her skin itch, but Kieran was insistent on leaving it on the vacant channel. The white noise soothed the murmur of activity in the hollow at the back of his mind.

“The cover story for the upcoming case. Am I married this time?”

The words finally registered. He flushed from ear to ear, dropping his face into his hands and groaning. “How many times are you going to make me apologize for that, Jules?”

“Until you stop getting so flustered about it,” she said, eyes shining emerald green with unshed mirthful tears. She had always been embarrassed about her tendency to cry when she laughed, but Kieran found it terribly endearing. He found most things about her terribly endearing.

He shook the thought from his head. “Yeah, well,” he scoffed, crumpling up one of the thousands of discarded papers on his desk and tossing it across the room. She had the audacity to level an offended lift of her eyebrows at him when the wad of paper cuffed the side of her head. “I didn’t see you jumping to say anything last night when that ambassador asked how we knew each other.”

“Not my fault you got lazy with memorizing our cover stories,” she replied with a sly wink that assured him she wasn’t genuinely upset; she just liked to press his buttons like no one else could. “Can’t believe you made yourself my ball and chain. You don’t know the restraint it took for me to not flirt with anyone for the rest of the event. That’s the kind of willpower it takes not to steal those decorative soaps from high-scale venue restrooms. Which I also totally didn’t do last night.”

“I’m sure,” he said, although he was no such thing.

It had been a moment of weakness. He and Jules had spent that whole morning before the event picking out designer clothes from boutiques that were normally way above their paygrade, and it was a blast. She had pretended to fan her face in mock attraction each time he came out of the dressing room in a new tux, and he had given her an exaggeratedly sultry once-over each time she strutted out in a new dress. The entire experience had been rife with laughter and the familiar dips and curves of a friendship that had been etched out over a decade.

It had nearly been ruined by a comment made by the retail worker helping them choose their outfits. “You two make such a good couple,” she had said as she took a dress from Jules’ hands. “I remember my parents were like that when I was growing up.”

Kieran had frozen, ice running cold in his blood. It was an unwritten rule between him and Jules that they weren’t allowed to address the massive crush he had on her (crush, he called it, because he knew labeling his feelings for Jules to their true extent would drive him insane) after the first time Jules had kindly but firmly shut him down.

He had opened his mouth to correct the worker, but Jules had beat him to the punch, saying with a smile, “Thank you, sweetheart. Could I have the next dress, please?”

It was stupid. It was so stupid. But love— crushes, crushes! he corrected his thought with a rush of panic that nearly unseated him. His eyes darted over to Jules on the couch as if to check she hadn’t heard the hiccup in his internal monologue. Judging by the uninterrupted up and down, up and down of the yellow stress ball, she hadn’t; he breathed a stealthy sigh of relief and settled back down.

It was stupid, but crushes were stupid. Kieran knew it was impossible that Jules’ feelings for him (or lack thereof) had changed, but the fact that she hadn’t corrected the retail worker had given him reckless, baseless hope. They had continued their trying on of various different outfits, but now with the charade of a couple instead of two best friends. It had made him hopelessly giddy.

But that was the one of the dangerous parts about their line of work. You couldn’t let yourself get lost in the fantasy; you had to learn how to slip selves on and off, on and off, on and off like gloves.

It had been a moment of weakness. The gloves wouldn’t come off; they had shrunken to fit his hands perfectly.

“Kieran Doherty, your fame precedes you,” the ambassador had said, mustache twitching as he spoke of Kieran’s entirely falsified resumé and last name. ‘Fame,’ Jules had mouthed to him, eyes shining with amusement. He rolled his eyes at her and thanked the ambassador, who then asked, “And who is this lovely young lady with you?”

“My wife, Julia,” he had said automatically, naturally as anything. Her eyes had widened almost imperceptibly; that wasn’t the story they had planned out together. Glass shattered in Kieran’s head. “I, um — that is to say —”

“Yes, we’ve been married for — oh, five years now? I lose track,” Jules had said, sweeping in before the ambassador could become suspicious. Her smile was slightly tight, eyes not quite right. The shattered glass cut at something deep within him, the wound deepening as he spread his mouth into an equally as forced smile.

“I believe it’s actually been six, my dear,” he had replied softly. The ambassador congratulated them on their union before he disappeared into a crowd of other high-ranking officials. Once Kieran was certain he’d gone, he turned to Jules to apologize — but she’d already slipped away without a word.

Back in the present, he sighed. He tracked his hands through his hair, disturbing the strands and causing them to spring up like weeds. He was supposed to be planning out the cover stories for their upcoming case, but instead here he was. Pondering impossibilities. What a fool he’d made of his own heart.

“Hey,” Jules said, voice soft. He looked up from the document in front of him. She held the yellow ball in her hands and smiled at him. “You and me, yeah? S’all we need.”

He looked away, lump forming in his throat. Those words, they were both everything he ever wanted to hear, and not enough. Never enough. She would never mean those words the way he wanted her to mean them.

But he’d rather have her as a friend, a partner-in-crime, than as nothing at all.

He cleared his throat. The static from the TV invaded the hollow at the back of his mind.

“Of course,” he replied, mirroring her soft tone. “Of course, always.”