unbelieving

"I'm a spy," she repeated carefully, looking at me directly. She'd almost finished tending to her wound. Seven bullet fragments and a pair of tweezers lay on a paper towel on the kitchen table. Vaguely, I remembered my dinner was still in the microwave. I didn't feel much like eating. "I work for the CIA. You are in danger, and we need to move as soon as possible."

I stared at her for several seconds. She was putting band-aids - band-aids, on a bullet wound - over each of the little lesions in her skin. Most of the blood had been cleaned off. I was sitting on a chair.

"I don't know how you expect me to believe that," I told her, honestly, for the third time in a row. Her jaw clenched, and her eyes flashed, but I was refusing to believe that I had once dated a spy. Besides, could Cammie actually be a spy? For all I know, she could be a druggie, or something, and she'd gotten shot because...I don't know, don't druggies get shot a lot? "I'm sorry. I'll call an ambulance, and you can go deal with whatever problem you're having -"

I was interrupted by a flying whiskey bottle, which Cammie had, with lightning speed, picked up and thrown in my direction in exasperation. It broke and shatter at my feet, soaking my socks in alcohol, and Cammie put two hands on the kitchen table and leered over me in a surprisingly menacing manner. "Zachary, if you dare compromise my mission because your tiny civilian mind can't wrap itself around the idea that I am a spy, I swear to God, I will shoot you in your fucking mouth and make it look like a suicide."

Glancing at the coat, I concluded that what I thought was a barrel of a gun turned out to be, in fact, the barrel of a gun. I decided to shut up.

"So how long, then?" I asked conversationally.

"What?"

How long have you been a spy?"

Cammie thought about it. Then, hesitantly, she answered, "There's never been a time...when I considered myself to be...normal."

I raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't everybody feel that way?"

"I got a butterfly knife for my sixth birthday," Cammie said. I nodded, understanding. She observed me momentarily, before a knock at the door caused her flinch and look away, suddenly on alert. "Don't move," she whispered quietly, as I stood up. Another knock, three times in a row. Some footsteps outside. Heavy ones. She glanced at me. "Just kidding. You need to move."

"What? Where?"

"The window," she murmured, inching towards the door. More knocks. "Shoes. Wallet. Then window." She looked back. "Now!"

In a flurry, I grabbed my wallet from the kitchen counter and shoes from the floor of the living room, then nervously stood by the window, wondering what the hell I was actually supposed to be doing. The front door was knocked down by three burly-looking guys, and one of them yelled, in a deep, gruff, voice, "That's him!"

"What the hell are you waiting for?" Cammie screamed, as she punched the closest guy in the face; he fell back into the second guy and they fell to the ground, before she kicked the third guy in the nose. There was a sickening crunch as the third guy backed up, howling, but the two guys on the floor were already getting back up, and to my dismay, it looked like they had guns. "Open the fucking window!"

"Why?"

"To jump, you idiot!" Cammie yelled, scampering between the two men advancing, then kicking them both, hard, on the back. With all three men very temporarily immobilized, she ran again towards her coat, pulled out her gun, and shot three times: one for each head.

Up until that point, I'd never seen somebody get shot before, unless you counted action movies. It wasn't very pretty. Actually, it was extremely disgusting. I looked away quickly, but somehow couldn't stop the pride that I'd had sex with someone so cool.

"Somebody definitely heard that," Cammie muttered. "Why is the window still not open?" With obvious adrenaline coursing through her veins, she thrust open the window and pushed the screen out. It fell to the concrete street below with a clatter, and she poked her head out.

"I'm more used to doors," I confessed, peering out the window. The ground was very far away.

"Because we can really leave the building through the front door right now," Cammie said, shrugging on her coat, her tattered, bloody blouse flapping in the wind. "It's forty feet to a Dumpster. You'll live." Without warning, and with way more strength than I was expecting, she pushed me and I tumbled, somersaulting, out the window.

And you wonder why I wasn't sad when she left.

motel

"I smell like shit," I frowned.

"Yeah. You fell in a big pile of it," Cammie, who was currently brushing her teeth, in the bathroom, said.

"I think I'm in shock," I said, feeling my forehead. I couldn't quite remember what had just happened, but my heart was beating extremely fast, my hands were sweating, and I hadn't quite registered the fact that after we'd fallen into the Dumpster, we'd run for eight blocks (Cammie faster than me, somehow, even though there was no way her bullet wound could've healed yet) before finally, like normal people, catching a taxi, and arriving at a seedy motel.

"Probably," Cammie shrugged. She exited the bathroom and went to her backpack, which was sitting on a moldy armchair in the corner of the motel room. "But before you pass out, you might want to read this."

It's a manila file. It reads Zachary Goode.

a/n: okay i'm really undecided right now because in the middle of writing this, i got a plot bunny and wrote the first chapter to another story called 'risky business' and cammie is a spy and goes undercover as zach's secretary and zach is rich and tragic and idk if i should publish it so thoughts?