This fic would not have been possible without all the help from the Hive - thanks guys!

Special thanks go out to Amanda for the title. This one's for you!

The office job was supposed to be simple. She really needed a break after the last mission went to hell in a handbasket - she was still recovering from a bullet wound and on doctor's orders to take it easy, so when she'd asked to go back in the field, Coulson had given her the easiest thing on his docket.

Easiest, however, she thought regretfully, didn't translate to interesting.

Here, on her boring, utterly uninteresting mission, she was Rose Nelson, the most recent addition to the secretary pool at Hellenic Imports of Greater Wisconsin, Inc. As potential HYDRA shell corporations went, this one left a lot to be desired. In her three weeks here, as near as she could tell, she'd discovered that Kalamata olives sold better in the summer, that the second part of the phrase "water cooler" represented more of a hope than reality, and the salesman with the grabby hands got ever so slightly grabbier on Tuesdays. It attested a lot to her state of mind that she'd been debating tailing him on Monday nights to figure out why.

Judging from the red-rimmed, bleary eyes that accompanied his periodic interest in the cut of her blouse, she rather suspected she knew the culprit anyway.

Her inbox refreshed, and she clicked open the new message, hoping for something that would take her mind off the numbing conditions in her cubicle. Apparently, Hellenic Imports was in the market for a new warehouse guy. She thought she remembered something about an accident last week. Something about the circumstances had pinged her interest, though she couldn't say what, and now that they were hiring someone new . . .

Well, she'd call Coulson on her lunch break. That was something to look forward to, at least. Maybe he'd want to talk about his latest trading card acquisition or something.

The two hours before lunch dragged, and she bolted the moment the clock changed to noon, neatly sidestepping the various lunch offers that were sure to spring up. It wasn't that she was particularly attractive or interesting company (she could be, of course, if she wanted to be, but that wasn't why she was here), but she was new and she had a feeling that new didn't happen very often in these parts. Sure, she needed to cultivate those offers of friendship (and she did), but today she had other business to attend to.

She walked briskly across the parking lot to the shopping center on the other side of the busy road, her sensible loafers clacking on the pavement. Grabbing a sandwich and a coffee from the cafe there, she smiled at the sullen-faced clerk. He'd obviously had just as interesting and invigorating morning as she had.

Slipping into a booth at the back, she pulled out her phone.

"Coulson," the voice on the other end said. Her handler's voice was clipped and polite as ever. Some things would never change.

"Hi!" she said too perkily, just in case anyone nearby was listening. "This is Rose! How are you?"

She heard Coulson turn to someone else in the room and say, "It's Romanoff." To her, he said, "Anything to report?"

"Why as a matter of fact, yes! I had the most interesting news today!"

"The warehouse?" he asked. She knew he kept an eye on all his agents whereabouts, and he'd probably gotten the information about a new hire right around the time she did.

"Uh huh." She smiled broadly as she talked, sipping from her styrofoam cup and bouncing her leg, pretending like she was talking to a close friend.

Actually, if she really thought about it, she was. She didn't have a lot of friends, just Coulson and Clint. Well, if you could call them that. The thing with Clint was as complicated as the thing with Coulson was neat. She and her handler had comfortable, well-established boundaries, ones that facilitated their smooth working relationship, but push come to shove, if she really needed someone, he would be there. Clint, of course, would too, but sharing personal information with him always led to feelings, uncomfortable ones that made her lose concentration in the middle of otherwise important affairs.

She didn't have a whole lot of experience to go on, but she wasn't an idiot, and the things that her partner had her feeling, the way he made her stomach spin around and eat itself, the way her palms started to sweat if she thought about him for too long . . . Well, those things weren't really signs that she thought of him as a friend, not exactly. She might not know what to label the strange dance they were making around each other, but she knew better than to think that it was just "friends".

The worst part of it was that the feeling had grown even more intense in past months, to the point where she had a hard time concentrating even on missions. It had been one of the reasons that she'd taken a bullet during her last operation; she had been distracted, worried about him off on his own, and it had affected her work.

"Do you want backup?" Coulson asked, and she paused, taking another sip of her drink. She hated asking for it, but if things went south, it would be a good idea to have someone else around. The local pd was top notch, all things considered, but she didn't want to have to rely on cops if HYDRA really did show up.

"That would be great," she said, already going through the list of possible candidates for the role. There were only so many people suitable for the job, only so many people that Coulson would knowingly send in to work with her. If Clint wasn't on a mission, he'd be first on that very short list.

Coulson confirmed her suspicion with his next breath.

"Taylor, Carter, and Barton are available," he said. "If you have a preference?"

She bit her lip before she answered, not wanting to sound overeager. "I haven't seen Clint in ages!"

If she didn't overthink it, maybe she could convince herself that what she was saying wasn't the truth, that it was just part of her cover.

"We're going to send Barton in," Coulson said, and she thought she heard a chuckle in his voice. "Make sure his application goes to the top of the stack."

"No problemo!" she said brightly, powering through the twisting clench in her stomach. "Ta!"

She snapped her phone shut and slid it back into her pocket. Well, she got what she wanted.

Great.

He rolled into the parking lot with an odd mixture of nervousness and anticipation mixing around with the coffee in his stomach. The anticipation he understood - he always felt like that before a mission, often times throughout the mission, but nervousness? That was new.

He strode into the reception area, hopefully giving off more confidence than he felt. He knew that Natasha was upstairs somewhere, tracking orders or answering phones or whatever it was that she did while she tried to figure out just what this import company was up to. He also knew that she was going to make certain that he was the only real candidate for the warehouse job, so the nervousness wasn't a result of that.

You know what this is, his brain whispered even as he signed in and took a seat on an ancient plastic chair to wait.

Yeah, he knew what this was.

He hadn't seen Natasha in months; they'd been on separate missions before this, and when hers had wrapped up early (she'd been fucking shot and he should have been there with her, he should have had her back, he should have been able to do something, but he'd been in Argentina not Uzbekistan and he hadn't been able to do anything except call Coulson and ask for a status update), she'd been sent here, on a deep cover assignment.

He wasn't ashamed to admit that he'd been worried about her. What concerned him was how much he'd been worried about her, even after Coulson told him that she was recuperating fine and, later, that she was well enough to be sent out in the field again.

No, his worry was very much based on the fact that he was in love with her. It was stupid as shit, he knew that, because that sort of thing left you compromised in a job where you couldn't afford distraction, and here he was, head over heels for her.

Christ, she was going to kill him.

It didn't help that he was ninety percent certain that she felt the same way. He was an observant guy, and there was no way she'd been giving him those looks without it meaning something. Whether or not that something was concern over whether or not her partner was going insane was another matter entirely. Thus, the ninety percent.

That said, it sure hadn't felt like ninety percent when they'd kissed in Brussels on their last mission together. They'd been made and were on the run, trying to get to the extraction point before the drug lord of the month caught up to them, and when Clint had spotted a busy nightclub, it seemed like as good a place as any to lose a tail.

She'd let him lead her down onto the dance floor, grinding with him amongst the writhing masses, and when one of the goons had gotten too close, she'd slipped her arms tighter around his neck and kissed him.

Kissed him. Kissed him.

Fucking hell.

He'd be more inclined to believe that she was just aiming for distraction if she hadn't sucked on his lip, if she hadn't clung to him for a little longer than strictly necessary, digging her fingers into his arms as she held her body flush with his. Natasha didn't do unnecessary things, and he'd resolved to talk to her about it the first chance he got.

But then they'd been off and running again, getting to the helicopter only minutes ahead of their tail, and once they'd gotten back to base, it was time for debriefing. He'd intended to go to her quarters, to see if she was up to talking, but after he'd showered, his bed beckoned, and he was really in no shape for that kind of talking anyway.

When he'd gotten up the next morning, he discovered that she'd already been shipped out for her next assignment. He'd always thought he was the king of avoidance, but it looked like she bested him in that, too.

"Mr. Thompson?" the receptionist asked. He jerked his head up at his cover name. "They're ready for you."

Pushing thoughts of Natasha aside, he stood.

Show time.