The Soldier and The Spy: Jay Halstead- Episode 2

Chapter 3

Present Day

The next week was the best of his life.

All the others had been with Tess as well, each powerful, vulnerable, poignant moments that had shaped the core of his character but this one surpassed them all because this was a culmination of all the rest, of everything they had wanted for as long as they had wanted each other. This was the end they'd been fighting for and the beginning of what came next.

And Jay couldn't get enough of it.

He couldn't get enough of her. All he wanted was to be with her, to be around her, to touch her, smell her, kiss her, hold her. Honestly it was starting to get a little ridiculous and he was almost surprised she wasn't sick of him but if anything Tess was feeding his need, always running her hands along him and peppering him with kisses, not to mention that anytime he was even semi-reclined she was in his lap. The emotion between them, the intensity of it... it was all consuming. The only time he had ever felt anything like it had of course been with her, not the first time they'd become intimate, not even the second because time and circumstance hadn't really allowed for it but the time after that. After his discharge. That month had been the first chance they'd really had to explore each other, who they were outside of their jobs and how they worked together.

And though things had been simpler back then it only made where they were now more meaningful because they understood the significance of what they'd been through. What they had overcome. Every day the air around them was becoming lighter as it sank in, as they began to unburden themselves of all they'd carried these last few years.

Tess had more to share and she started by telling him about what had happened with the agency, the nine men who had bought her information and how fiercely she had pursued them, the people she'd angered and the friends she'd made along the way. How it had taken fifteen months until she'd been safe, as safe as she could get, how she'd come back to the city, her voice growing quiet when she explained how she had seen him with Erin and chosen to stay away. That she had liked his former girlfriend. He'd shot her the most incredulous look when she said that she'd been rooting for them but even though he eventually got her to admit how perverse that was she remained adamant that he shouldn't feel guilty. In fact she was so firm in her belief that neither of them should that even while he tried to believe her he couldn't help wondering how much she believed herself. And even though Jay knew she was right and he would never regret being with Erin nothing would ever stop the guilt he felt knowing that Tess had come home twice and found him with another woman. That she had walked away twice believing he was happier without her, believing that a day stillmight come when they could be together.

No, he would carry that for the rest of his life. And he could see that she knew that, that she hated it but also understood it. It was probably why she shared that she had had someone too, though he'd given her another dubious look when she'd explained that the last time she had seen that individual, who she described as a smart mouthed British mercenary named Dean, he'd been abandoning her in a dingy in the middle of the South China Sea. Apparently the broken paddle now adorning the side of her home had come from said excursion, after it had been bitten in half by a particularly temperamental sand shark.

Jay hadn't really known how to react to that beyond anger that someone could treat her so poorly and what he knew was completely hypocritical jealousy but they talked it through until each of them started to feel better, the way they did with every heavy topic that came up.

There were a lot.

Five years worth of experiences, for each of them; there was no way they could cover them all in a week but thankfully neither seemed inclined to try. Instead they talked about things as they came up, their friends and teams, Will and his father, which had been a particular sore spot for her, the stories behind their different scars and her tattoos. There were several of the latter he got to discover, his favourite being the small outline of a moose she had added to the background of the Sequoia tree that ran up her left side, the one she had gotten with him in Tofino. His least favourite was the skeleton blowing bubbles on her left shoulder, not because it was any less beautiful but because of what she told him it represented. Death. It didn't matter when she explained the reasoning behind it, another nod to one of her favourite series he still didn't like it. In his mind death and Tess were two words that didn't belong in the same sentence.