A Gray Llove

Don't You Have a Job?

Lloyd didn't feel at all stereotypical as he sprawled across the backboard of a king-sized bed in a hotel room in Paris. Pinning a cigarette between two fingers, he stared out at the waters of the Seine, the grey paving stones, and the misty morning below. Taking a deep drag on the cigarette, he tipped back his head and blew lazily at the crystal chandelier dangling smack over the center of the bed, shaking his head with a faint smile. Five and a half months in working as a CIA operative, and he still couldn't say whether he liked it. Sometimes it all felt...boring. Fly here, meet this person, kill this person. Sure, working for Denny sounded a hell of a lot better than working for his predecessor, Old Donald Fitzroy. His friend from Harvard had pulled some strings with his new power and so far had served up missions to Lloyd in exotic parts of the globe, each relatively cushy – even Lloyd could admit that – and not even that hard.

But this wasn't the first time Lloyd had been to Paris. His family had been globetrotting on cruises and the like since he was a toddler, the perks of being born into one of the East Coast's old money dynasties. For some agents, it might be the thrill of their lives to jet into Beijing, escape across a few borders to India, then debrief somewhere on an island in Indonesia. For Lloyd, it was already getting routine. And forget the people who said he was too brutal to be in this line of work. Wasn't brutal exactly what one was supposed to be when one was sent to kill people the CIA wanted dead? Wasn't Lloyd allowed to make his job just a little more interesting while extracting information he had been sent to extract anyway?

He suspected it had been his former operations partner who had ratted him out for...experimenting with a little torture on the side during his last mission. The two of them hadn't been partners for more than a couple weeks before that one had tattled to Denny like the dickless low-brow he was. Denny had given him to the HR department in short order and set Lloyd up with a new arrival, someone he described to Lloyd with a smirk as, "Just your type."

Lloyd's eyes drifted back from the scene beyond the open balcony doors, creeping back inside and roving over the long, bare back of a woman sleeping pressed up to his side. Her face was to the wall, so all Lloyd could see of Sasha Lewellyn, CIA operative, was the gentle ridged line of her lean vertebrae under dewey freckled skin beneath a shag of coiled brown curls. Even in sleep, the powerful muscles of her arms and back were apparent; Lloyd's eyes lingered on an ugly five-inch scab striping the area just above her left kidney, a remnant of their previous mission. Sasha wasn't shy about taking the hits to get their mission done. She was vicious, whip-smart – had the low-burning patience to wait for a mark to lean just the right way around a corner so that when her bullet hit them, they would fall without a sound. She had what Lloyd could only call an uncanny sense that told her exactly when on a mission to swing her arm across Lloyd's chest and halt his trigger finger before he blew their cover. Reporting back to Denny after their trial outing together, Lloyd had joked to Denny that Sasha didn't pull her weight on the mission. It was a compliment. Standing back-to-back, Lloyd's partner rose only to about his fourth rib. She had used every inch of her wiry, wily self to finish the mission, leaping across building tops, hefting bits of rubble, scrabbling into small spaces before emerging to spring into a firing pose and hit her target with perfect aim. Lloyd had done what he had had to do for the mission, but Sasha had definitely pulled far more than her weight. Because he and Denny had been friends since the cradle, Lloyd could then admit with only a small amount of pride lost that Denny had been right about Sasha. He had been right even more than he had probably meant to be right.

Lloyd didn't guess it was typical for operative partners to fall into bed as a matter of course – just look at the beer bellies and ugly mugs amongst the old-timers. He had felt Sasha working on him just as much as he had been working on her to get the two of them into bed, though, and that was unique. Lloyd usually didn't have to do more than wink at a woman to get what he wanted, and what he wanted wasn't the woman herself. But he found himself wanting Sasha. Constantly. The shape of her beneath their tactical gear, the smell of her hair as they waited in a dark corner for a target to appear, the sound of her voice over comms describing something with a bit of that godawful sexy accent – Sasha made missions interesting.