JACK

On Friday, Jack bought new trainers. They pinched his toes as he ran, and they were already soaking wet and muddy. Two days later, and you could barely see traces of the original white leather. He soldiered on, breathing a little more laboured than he was comfortable with, sloshing through puddles and cursing at the rain that trickled into his eyes. He found it hard to believe that a week ago he had sat in a sunny park, watching the joggers and thinking he really ought to get back in shape.

Martin Fitzgerald goes jogging on a Sunday, with Samantha Spade in tow and the sun shining gaily.

Jack Malone goes jogging on a Sunday, all alone, and the heavens weep.

Typical.

He ran to forget, but he couldn’t help remembering. A sunny park. Chocolate ice creams. A charming young couple jogging effortlessly on a warm morning.

The next day at work. Sending them on separate assignments, against all logic, because that sort of entanglement could cause distractions. Never mind that he had once told himself that he could do his job no matter who he was sleeping with. Never mind that they’d been carrying on for God knows how long and he hadn’t noticed any problems with their work. He knew now, and that was enough.

But Viv knew too, and she gave him a look when he divided up the assignments that day. Samantha with Danny. Him with Viv. Martin back in the office cross-referencing phone records.

Viv not believing him when he told her, ‘It just worked out that way.’

He dragged himself back to the present, to the pouring rain and the sloshing puddles and his uncomfortable shoes. Frankly, it was more pleasant than the memories, the thoughts and images rolling through his mind. He was sick of feeling guilty, sick of re-living the last week like some dumb teenager with an unrequited crush.

He was fed up with Martin, sitting behind a desk day after day with that untouchable look on his face. Doing his job. Holding his head high and looking everyone straight in the eye. No shame. No guilt.

He was tired of Samantha, all crisp professionalism and brisk efficiency, never questioning anything except by the spark of defiance in her eyes. Unfailingly polite to him, and making no attempt to explain or justify anything she had done.

And then, of course, there was Danny. Watching everything with those calm, observant eyes. You never knew exactly how much Danny knew or what he approved of. Not until he decided to share ­ and so far he hadn’t.

When, Jack wondered, had his life become so damn complicated?

The rain was getting heavier, and he found himself wiping water from his face and looking around for shelter. He was, he realised, near Elgin Street, right near the Hummingbird Café. Maybe it was stupid to go there ­ to the one public place he had felt safe taking Samantha, because it was so far from home and so unlike his normal style ­ but it was close and it would be dry and....Well, somehow, he couldn’t resist.

He turned down Elgin, ignored the little voice in his head telling him what a god-damned stupid idea this was, and pushed the café’s door open. A bell tinkled, a perky young waitress smiled at him brightly, and no-one mentioned the fact that he was dripping water all over the floor. They wouldn’t, not here.

The café’s exterior was drab and faded, but the interior was bright and colourful. Cutesy hummingbird windchimes tinkled outside each window, and the walls were covered with cheap, bright prints of birds and flowers. The waitresses all wore bright yellow t-shirts, and the menu was chalked untidily on the board behind the cash register.

Jack found an empty table and sat down. The radio was trilling away softly in the background, and most of the patrons looked like students: young, carefree, underfunded. He felt old, and wondered what these people had thought of him and Samantha, sitting in the darkest corner and drinking coffee. He’d always, he remembered, carried a file or two with him, just in case Maria should walk in. Not that she ever would, not that she liked cheap and noisy little cafés, but just in case.

He leaned back in his chair and ordered a coffee from the perky waitress. He didn’t want one, but he could hardly stay there, sheltering from the rain, without ordering something. Samantha had always liked this unnaturally colourful place, he remembered, though he had never understood why. She kept telling him not to bring the files, that Maria would never come in, that he needed to make up his mind what the hell he was doing with his life and stick to it .

Maybe he should have listened.

He sat with his back to the door, sipping coffee he didn’t want, and waiting for the rain to stop. He should go home, he thought. Call the girls. Maybe go into the office and catch up with some paperwork. Find something to do other than moping around like a melancholy teenager.

The door tinkled behind him, and he heard a woman’s laugh.

Her laugh.

He had no idea if she saw him or not ­ she must have, in that tiny little café ­ but he didn’t stop to think or talk or wonder. He dumped money on the table for his unfinished coffee and bolted. Out through the door, past a distinctly startled looking Martin, past Samantha’s shocked face, and back out into the rain.

Perfect, he thought. Just perfect.

SAMANTHA

She’d always know he was curious. She figured he couldn’t help it. You didn’t become an FBI agent without a certain amount of inbuilt nosiness, an inherent longing to find the answers and make the world make sense again. Yet Martin never asked her about her time with Jack, never asked her what had possessed her to enter into an affair with a married man who was also her supervisor. He endured Jack’s silent torment at work, and never asked anything.

Maybe that was why she felt obliged to tell him.

Sitting cross-legged on his big bed, she looked out the window at the rain and tried to find the words. Martin leaned back against his pillows and watched her.

‘Something on your mind?’

She turned to face him. ‘You never ask me about Jack.’ Blunt, she decided. That was the best way. ‘About what happened.’

He shrugged and looked away. ‘It’s not really relevant, is it? I mean, that was then. This is now. People...people make mistakes, Sam. We see that every day.’

She smiled. That was so typically Martin. ‘Jack was the biggest mistake of my life. I look back sometimes, and I wonder what possessed me. I knew he was married, I knew it was wrong, but....but somehow it still happened.’

‘Does that still bother you? That he was married?’

She looked away, back out at the rain. It would be hard, she thought, for Martin to understand what she had been thinking back then. Ethics were a matter of black and white for him, right and wrong. If she’d been married, no matter how attracted he was, he wouldn’t have made a move. No way. He might have suffered, he might have dreamed, but he just wouldn’t do it. But he was trying to understand, and for that she had to give him credit. ‘It bothers me now, maybe more than it did then.’

She looked back and found him looking at her again, that familiar puzzled frown crinkling his brow. ‘Martin, I...I told you about Jessie, right?’

He nodded.

‘I stayed away from men for a long time after she died. Years. I’d made such a mess of my life and all I wanted to do was sort it out. She died and I survived, so in a way I needed to live for both of us, you know?’

He reached out and cupped the side of her face in his hand. ‘You were a grieving kid,’ he said softly. ‘I can understand that.’

She smiled, a little tearily, and resisted the urge to nuzzle her face against the palm of his hand. ‘It seemed so unfair that she was the one who died, when she was the innocent one. So I tried ­ I tried so hard to straighten things out. And for a few years I did. Then I met Jack and everything fell apart again.’

‘You were lonely.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘I’d gone to extremes during college and just afterwards. Did nothing but study or work. I never had the social life that most college kids did. There was this café Jack took me to sometimes. I liked it because it always had students there. I could...I guess I could see that carefree atmosphere I missed out on.’

She slid off the bed and walked to the window. ‘Anyway, when I met Jack, the last thing I was thinking of was an affair. But it was the first time in years I was receptive to maybe getting involved with a man and...’ Her voice trailed off. It was impossible to explain the rest to Martin. The loneliness. The inadequacy. The seduction, slow and almost sweet. ‘It was such a stupid thing to do, and a few months later is was over. I vowed I’d never do it again.’

He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. ‘Sleep with a married man?’

She smiled ruefully and turned to face him. ‘Or a co-worker.’ She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and slid her arms around his hips. ‘I guess some rules are meant to be broken.’

‘How - ‘ He stopped himself mid-sentence. ‘No, forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

But it did, she thought, if he was wondering about it. Worrying, maybe. ‘Finish it, Martin. It’s okay.’

‘How did it end?’

She turned back to the window, but didn’t pull away from his arms. ‘That café we went to. We only went there because there was no chance anyone who knew Jack would go there. It was such an unlikely place for Special Agent Jack Malone to be. Even so, we only went there a few times, and he always took some files with him so that we could pretend to be working. It was the only public place we ever went out to.’

She could see his reflection in the window panes, she realised, and she could see that his eyes were sad and serious as he stood behind her. Sympathetic. She reached up and patted his shoulder awkwardly. ‘Anyway, one day we were sitting there in the café and Jack said something about how awful it was, about how he never would normally go there normally.’

‘Was it awful?’

She shook her head and kept watching his reflection. ‘I didn’t think so. It was cheap and cheerful and not really my normal thing, either. But I liked the college kids. And it was the sort of place I might have taken Jessie for milkshakes when she was older, if I was still struggling for money.’ She stopped for a moment, considering. Martin had never in his life known what it was like to struggle for money, truly struggle. Probably he wouldn’t like the Hummingbird Café any better than Jack had. Possibly he wouldn’t even understand what it was about it that had tugged at her, that had reminded her of the path she might have taken if not for Jessie short life and tragic death.

‘There was this place I used to like in college,’ Martin told her. ‘It wasn’t one of the trendy bars or cafés. This old Italian lady ­ Maria ­ ran it, and she used to make this wonderful tomato soup on cold winter days.’ She watched his reflection smile, reminiscing, and felt a tug of warmth when he rested his chin on her shoulder. ‘When I decided I was going to join the FBI, I took my father there. I knew he’d hate it, but I wanted somewhere familiar when I told him I wasn’t going into politics.’

She could picture it so clearly, the young, idealistic man steeling his courage over a bowl of old Maria’s steaming tomato soup. The dictatorial father sitting ill at ease in a working class café. She smiled.

‘I never had a place like that in college. Maybe that’s why I liked the Hummingbird so much. Anyway, when Jack said that, when he said how awful it was, it made me think. He left first, like he always did, and I sat there and thought about it. It was a tacky café, I realised, for a tacky part of his life. He wouldn’t have taken Maria there, or his daughters. And I realised I didn’t want to be a tacky part of any man’s life, not then, not ever.’

Restless, she pulled away from Martin, walked across the room. His bedroom always reminded her of him: neat, comfortable, solid. She ran a hand along the polished headboard of his bed, liking the smooth feel of it under her hand. She liked to come here, because her bed, her apartment still reminded her too much of Jack.

Martin grabbed his shoes and sat on the bed. ‘Get dressed.’

She blinked. ‘What?’

He paused, one shoe dangling from his hand. ‘Let’s go to the Hummingbird Café, Sam. Let’s go pretend to be college kids for a morning.’

She felt a smile spreading across her face, almost before she registered the bubble of happiness in her chest. ‘If they still have the same cook, they make the most delicious blueberry pancakes,’ she said. ‘And hot chocolate you would die for.’ Neither of which she’d tasted while Jack was there. She always ordered the same thing ­ a cappucino, one sugar - when they sat down together. It was only after he left, while she was waiting the requisite half hour before leaving, that she tried other things on the menu. Blueberry pancakes. Hot chocolate. Raspberry ice cream sundaes. Toasted sandwiches.

It didn’t take them long to get ready, and it didn’t take her long to drive downtown to Elgin Street. Funny, that she had never thought of going back there before now. After all, although the Hummingbird Café had seen shameful, clandestine meetings, it had also seen two highlights of her relationship with Jack: the day she decided to end it, and the day, not long after, when she actually did. It was a good place, and it felt good to be taking Martin there. It felt right.

She pulled up to the kerb, and, laughing, they made the dash from the car to the door. The exterior was just how she remembered it: simple, pleasant, a little worn. The door still jingled when she pushed it open, and the interior walls were still a bright, cheerful yellow, which matched the shirts the waitresses wore. Martin crowded behind her, nudging her out of the doorway so that he could get in out of the rain.

Then she froze. Jack. He was sitting at the table that had always been theirs ­ the most isolated, secretive table possible in such a cheery, open place ­ and staring right back at her. He stood quickly, threw a handful of coins on the table, and marched out without a word, shouldering Martin roughly aside.

‘Well,’she said, as the door slammed after him. ‘That’s weird.’ It was all she could think of to say.

‘This is getting ridiculous,’ Martin muttered. ‘What does he do?

Follow us around?’

She reached behind her and took his hand. ‘I doubt it, Martin. He was here first.’ She led him to a table near one of the windows and, when he still looked doubtful, nudged him into a seat. She gestured around ­ at the walls, the pictures, the college kids, the waitresses ­ and forced a smile. ‘What do you think?’

He looked at her, hard, for a moment, then turned to studied the café. When he turned back, he was smiling again. ‘Bonnie would love this,’ he said, quietly. ‘She’d love to bring Ava here and show her the windchimes.’

It always hurt him to think of his aunt, she knew, who was currently enduring pain and suffering he wouldn’t inflict on his worst enemy. She squeezed his hand, and tried to think of something to say.

A waitress appeared, smiling brightly. ‘Hi, my name’s Rachel. Can I get you folks anything?’

‘I’ll have a hot chocolate, please,’ Sam said, relieved at the distaction. ‘And do you still have blueberry pancakes?’

‘We sure do.’

Martin smiled at the girl. ‘We’ll have a large serve to share, please. And you’d better make that two hot chocolates.’

Rachel nodded and scribbled on her notepad. ‘I’ll bring the drinks straight out, and the pancakes should be ready in about ten minutes.’

‘That sounds great,’ Sam said, and watched the waitress leave. She looked at Martin, at his melancholy smile, at the comfortable way he looked around at the hummingbirds on the walls. Actually, she thought, it was perfect. Just perfect.

End.