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I did not need to look over my shoulder to know who was standing behind me. Somehow, it had gotten to the stage where I could recognise Neal Caffrey from his footsteps alone. His tread was loud yet not heavy, the clear-cut sound of expensive soles knocking against a wooden floor, and though he walked slowly, his feet were by no means dragging, the assured saunter of a man with too much confidence for his own good. My back still turned, I schooled my features into an expression of indifference so that when I finally turned around my face betrayed none of the relief I felt upon his return.
Neal did not look like he had just foiled a criminal mastermind. Or rather, he looked like he had just foiled a criminal mastermind and it had cost him no effort at all. Even a week or two ago, when I didn’t know him any better, I would perhaps have taken that for the truth. Now, however, I was beginning to understand that his unflappable exterior was a well-kept façade, and that whichever emotions he chose to let float to the surface were unlikely to betray anything as to how he truly felt. So I ignored his easy smile, relaxed posture and perfectly tousled hair, meeting him in the eye instead, scanning his gaze for any indication of weakness, as if he were across from me, bluffing, at the poker table. At first, the expression in his eyes blandly matched that of the rest of his face; blasé and, in the simplest sense of the word, happy. Yet there was a genuine dynamism to them that there wasn’t in his practised grin; they were twinkling with a mischievous magnanimity, as if he were a kindly old man about to conjure a gold coin from behind a child’s ear. Rather than a gold coin, however, he summoned from behind his back a poorly moulded lump of tin foil, bobbing it towards me as if it were a duck bouncing along waves. He had the good nature to cringe a little as he did so, glancing momentarily away from me with an uncharacteristic shyness. Something like a flush passed over his cheeks and I was alarmed to find mine heating in response.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, taking the duck in my hands and trying desperately not to smirk at the half-hearted attempt at a tin foil beak. For a master forger it was very shoddy work indeed.
“I was starving.” I added, because it was true; I was starving. Usually, I made a point of always remembering to eat- skipping meals made me feel like a godawful stereotype of the hard working, ruthless, ruthlessly slim modern woman- but this evening I had gotten so genuinely caught up in the research, I’d lost track of time. I wondered how Neal had known that would happen. Had he twisted the foil into shape confident in the fact that I would still be here, that I would be so engrossed in his research, I had not even eaten? Or was this another of his infamous gambles? Or was it… Oh. Mozzie. Because the duck had probably never been intended for me at all. Of course. He had shown up at this hour expecting to find his weirdly loyal and weirdly weird partner in crime and had been surprised, pleasantly perhaps, but surprised all the same, to find me, the offish insurance investigator, here instead. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed at having stayed so long. A few days ago, I had told Neal that I wanted to help him out of pure curiosity, with no ulterior motives. This lie may have convinced us both at the time, but now it was becoming painfully transparent that I had no real place here. That the only thing that had kept me rooted here all evening, scanning dusty record after dusty record, was some absurd, teenage girl’s crush.
“Mozzie’s in the other room.” I said quickly, fingers beginning to unwrap what was maybe supposed to be the duck’s wings. “He said he was going to look at some microfiche.”
There. Now if Neal had not come to see me, he had his excuse to leave.
“Hm.” He nodded, though something in his eyes told me that he had not really been listening. With a dull thump, he threw his coat down on the low table between us, before perching, a little awkwardly, on the narrow ledge that ran the length of the towering bookcase opposite me. A shiver ran through me. He had not seized the opportunity to flee and like hell was I going to give him another one.
“How was your night?” I asked, glancing up at him to find him watching me with an easy, interested gaze.
“Ah,” He smiled to himself. “You know, the usual.”
With Neal, the usual could mean anything from burgling the crown jewels to infiltrating a drug cartel to rescuing a kidnapped poodle, but I resisted probing further, instead responding with a nonchalant, “Yeah?”, before ploughing on and asking some nonsense question about the food.
It was easy to develop the false impression, perhaps because of his petulant behaviour whenever he was around Peter, or the way he seemed to interpret life as a great game, that Neal Caffrey was a man of many words, blustering his way into and out of any number of situations. But this was not the case. Neal’s silver-tongued success came down to the fact that his words were always chosen and never aimless. He only spoke when he had something to say and was, for this reason, often rather a lot quieter than you expected him to be. This was true in this moment, where, in response to my question, he merely raised both eyebrows, indicating with his gaze to the half-dissected duck in my hands, as if to say: ‘Why don’t you open her up and find out?’
Sighing, I followed his implicit instructions, grinning and saying with a bite of irony, although it was true, “Oh, great. I love gourmet finger food.”
He chuckled at this, a little exasperated, shrugging his shoulders to tell me: ‘I was at a party, what else was I supposed to get you?’
I was about to reassure him, needlessly, that I really was very thankful and that he shouldn’t have and that actually, I did love gourmet finger food when, with a deflated whirring, the electricity cut out, plunging the two of us into relative darkness.
“Guess the blackout finally caught up with this grid,” He muttered.
Fumbling in the dark, I set the duck back down on the table.
“Mozzie gave me a lantern,” I said, once my eyes had adjusted and I could make out the pale outline of his face again. I gestured loosely to the knot of shadows to his left, where the lantern ought to have been. Yet Neal did not seem to understand and showed no indication of reaching to get it.
“I’ll get it then,” I said, surprised to hear some annoyance in my voice, as I moved round the table to stand by him, Neal stepping respectfully out of my way. There was still a corner of table between me and the lantern, which I clumsily leant over, to keep from knocking my shins against it, wobbling a little as I felt along the ledge- still warm from where Neal had been sitting- for the lantern. As my outstretched hand made contact with the lamp switch, the ghost of a hand passed over my lower back, as if to steady me. I froze, finger hovering above the on button. The hand, sensing this, retreated. In other circumstances, I would have been enraged. The Sara Ellis I believed myself to be would have been enraged. For God’s sake, I’d been walking in heels and attending yoga classes for almost a decade, I most certainly did not need a man’s assistance to balance in a half-way hold. But this was Neal Caffrey. And Neal Caffrey knew me. He knew how I felt about assistance. Which meant… Could it be that his hand had wandered to my back, simply because it had wanted to? Or because he had detected that I wanted it to, just as he had detected my hunger that evening before I myself had realised it?
I turned on the light. Neal muttered something. I stepped back so that he was pinned against the bookcase and I was standing in front of him. There was no table between us now. I let my eyes dart a quick, perfunctory look down at his lips and then stared at him, daring him, overwhelmed by a heady confidence. Neal’s gaze was less decisive, dithering uselessly between my lips and a spot between my eyes, shyly asking my permission with each flickering movement. By instinct, I found myself rising up onto my tiptoes, leaning in towards him, my heart hitching in my chest as if I were peering over the edge of a great cliff. This was all the permission Neal needed, apparently, for a hand suddenly pressed itself into my hair and his lips rushed in to meet mine. He kissed me exactly as I wanted to be kissed; as if, like with the hunger, like with the hand, he had known it before I did. It was aggressively tender, or tenderly aggressive; our lips met violently, but then sighed against one another, moving as one to nip gently with teeth, tongues tentatively meeting. One hand would tug at clothing, the other softly caress hair. Neal groaned, responding delightfully to my touch, as I slipped his tie from around his neck, setting quickly to work at his shirt. Meanwhile, he loosened my blouse from my shoulders, fingers hesitating sweetly around my breasts, hips jerking involuntarily to meet with mine.
With a sound like the distant slamming of a door- a dull, echoing thud- the electricity powered up, causing me to jerk back a moment, blinking rapidly, a little dazzled by the light. Kissing Neal Caffrey in the dark had been one thing. Now, able to make out clearly the delicate features and dilated pupils of the man standing before me, I felt suddenly startled. In the dark we had kissed as if in a dream, without thought, without consequence. If we continued in the light…
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. My eyes, I knew, were panic stricken and my breathing erratic. It was wrong of me to do this, with Neal in his position, with what had happened to Kate, the poor girl, with my job and my relationship with the FBI.
“Don’t be sorry.” Neal murmured back. If I were, in that moment, a tumultuous storm of emotions, each howling for attention, Neal was a cloudless sky of pure bliss. His eyes, pupils blown out so that only the faintest circle of blue was to be found, expressed a lazy, wolfish desire, whilst his smile was, perhaps for the first time since I had known him, genuine. He shook his head gently looking almost awestruck, as if he somehow could not believe his luck at being the one to kiss me. My resolve didn’t stand a chance. I let Neal’s lips press down upon mine again, sweeping away all my anxieties- I’ll deal with them later, I thought- for now, I would follow Neal’s lead, I would give in to the current of my desire, kissing harder and faster, kissing until his chest was bare against mine and one of his hands was cradling the back of my head, fingers gripping firmly into my hair. Kissing until- Until we were interrupted, by the sound of an unwitting Mozzie turning the corner, too quickly for either of us to prevent it.
Neal and I sprung apart instantly, as if the magnets that had previously been attracting us together had been flipped to repel. Before I let my mind return to the world of sane decisions and weird little men and forgotten Nazi archives, I took a moment to drink in the sight of Neal, shrugging on his shirt with a feigned look of embarrassment, although I was sure he’d been in this position many times before, and made a hasty, binding promise with myself: This wasn’t over. Whatever this was, it wasn’t over yet.