The first warning sign for Mac that Hannah’s grand strategy for her ten-year reunion was doomed from the start was Hannah handing him a freshly pressed and starched black button-down shirt. The second?
Hannah gestured at Mac’s hand. “Mac, gimme your ring. Tonight, we are strictly coworkers.”
Mac smirked as he coughed it up.
Dad’s words echoed in Mac’s head: “Sometimes you have to go with your partner’s plans, even if they make no damn sense. Why? Because that’s just how it works.”
Slipping his T-shirt off, he caught Hannah shamelessly checking him out for a hot nanosecond as he changed into the black button-down.
“Coworkers, huh? We’re back to that? Passing this off as a marriage of convenience would be more plausibly deniable,” Mac teased.
Hannah bargained back as she sprayed AXE Kilo in a big, choking X across her body. “Mac. I’d never hear the end of it from my old classmates if they found out that I ended up marrying THE Heart Attack Mac, even out of convenience. Your kick set football back a hundred years. And I was the CHEER CAPTAIN for the other team. Please cooperate, just for tonight? If you do, I’ll grant you a ‘Yes’ day.”
Oh God… The SMELL. I nearly forgot how she smelled when she used AXE. This is really her plan, huh? Good thing I’m milking it.
Mac’s voice warmed to match his smile. “Cheer Captain… you don’t hafta bribe me. You know I’ll be there for you. But I’m SO cashing in on that.”
“Urk!”
“Almost said the same thing about you switching back to AXE, Cheryl.”
Hannah’s Truthseers flipped from their usual bright gray to a dark maroon. “You—! Just you wait ‘till we get back home…” She clenched her jaw, wrestling with the yoke of her ego to keep the corners of her mouth straight and level. “You’re gonna be French toast, Heart Attack.”
Mac cheesed, flashing his trademark dimples at Hannah. “Wow, a twofer. Aren’t I a lucky bastard? But please shower and switch back to flowers before that.”
Snapping on her other earring, Hannah stormed out of their walk-in closet giggling. “UGH. MEN.”
“No, it’s just me, Darlin’.”
Hannah just snickered some more.
---
Visible vapors of her AXE Kilo wafted through the cracks of the double doors of her old high school gym as Hannah busted them open with one hand, her other hand grasping Mac’s wrist tighter than a handcuff after a rough arrest.
“Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday…” Mac memed.
He snuck a peek around her side, refreshing his visual information: punchbowl, people riffing, gaudy decorations.
Without looking back, Hannah responded in kind, tacking on the punchline with her off-key rendition of Jess Glynne’s classic, “Hold My Hand.” “Darling hold my hand…”
“And roight now, yew can save fifty pounds per person…” Mac added on, attempting—and failing—to make Eureka’s bogan dialect all fancylike.
Little did they know, Hannah was marching them—blindfolded and singing that awful cadence—right into an ambush between the buffet table and the dance floor.
A plucky, bothersome, birdlike voice cut through the mix of terrible background music and rich-people niceties, bonking them from behind. “Hannah? And Heart Attack Mac?! Oh. My. Gosh!”
If I remember correctly from Hannah’s brief, this woman’s name is… Julia. She fits the description. Short, slim, black hair. Hannah’s junior and vice-captain. Married a guy in Hannah’s year.
Julia continued mag dumping her words at them. “Whyyyy are you here together? Are you…?”
Hannah choked his wrist even more, her hand turning red and heating up. “COWORKERS. WE’RE. JUST. COWORKERS.”
Stealing a glance at Hannah’s gorgeous face, Mac forgot the mission. “Coworkers? But we’re literally hol—”
“MAC.”
“Oh, right—right. Coworkers. Strictly professional. Super normal. Small world, huh? Just a guy and a girl from completely opposite uhh… everything—who just happened to end up working at the same agency. Coworkers? Coworkers.” Mac gished on, gesticulating coherent-sentence-jutsu with his free hand. “We’re just holding hands for… safety. Company policy. Hannah says she lifted that from old Swissair. Coworkers. Yup.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Julia blinked, her earwax now quivering from Mac’s bullshit.
Smack! Hannah caved her forehead in and groaned.
Nailed it. Kinda. No, not really. I got more important things to worry about, okay?! Like how Hannah sure knows how to wear that little black dress…
Probably one of my favorite looks on her next to that silver party dress she wore at the Quantum Promenade—DUDE. STOP. WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? THE MISSION. PEOPLE WILL DIE IF THE BRUNCH ILLUMINATI NUKE THE BAY. THIS CAN WAIT UNTIL WE GET HOME.
Scratching the back of his head, Mac accidentally deployed his newfound rizz on Julia, laughing away a beaming counter-volley. “Eheh!”
It didn’t last long.
Hannah’s heel tapped once on the dusty hardcourt, the warning shot. Sensing a glare from Hannah, he finagled his lips into a zip, as if Hannah had pinched them shut with her claws.
In the middle of her 21-step patrol around Mac, Hannah broke formation and stepped out of line. “It is requested that people maintain an atmosphere of NOT FLIRTING with my… uhh… Esteemed coworker. Thank you.”
Mac choked back a giggle at Hannah’s horrible shot at a smile. It bounced like a quarter off Julia’s best impression of a skull emoji.
And then without warning, Julia revealed that she had a tactical nuke in her pocket the entire time. She grabbed Hannah’s shoulder and yanked her down to eye level, sighing. “Girl. Listen. You are not the sentimental type. You wouldn’t be caught dead here. I also know that that man is HUSBAND. I’ve been knew. How? I’m caught up on Eureka and Tar’s saucy stories about y’all on the Internet, Hannah. It’s 2050. 99.999999% of the world is wired into the matrix. You really think you’re slick?”
“Ugh. Fine. We’re married. Out of convenience,” Hannah conceded.
“Married because we’re stuck together, for better or worse!” Mac chimed in.
Julia screeched. “OH. MY. GOD. You both said the line! Say it again.”
She now had both of her hands on Hannah’s shoulders, vibrating with excitement.
Hannah blushed, her smoky eyes wandering to a surveillance camera in the corner of the gymnasium.
Is that new mascara, eyeliner, and eye shadow? She’s really pretty… Eh, our cover is blown anyway. I’m just gonna shut up and enjoy the view.
“Juuuulia, stooooop,” she whispered, like the security guard behind the camera would file a report.
Cute!
The camera jiggled, as if the guard hit the joystick from laughing too hard.
“So, what do ya need help with, sis? You clearly came to see me,” Julia asked, side-eyeing the jostled camera.
Hannah’s voice dropped to a husky, conspiratorial whisper. “Promise you’ll keep this a secret, Julia? They’ll literally kill us if you don’t.”
Mac just nodded along, knowing that his part of this conversation was done.
“Spill.”
“We need some help infiltrating—”
A third party piled on to Julia’s attempted social murder turned pact from the blind side. “No way. Is that THE Heart Attack Mac?! What’s he doing with Hannah Sinclair? Why are they holding hands? Wait…”
Pause. The only two working brain cells in the room finally rubbed together.
“They ended up TOGETHER?!”
Mac and Hannah snapped their heads around, echolocating the source somewhere by the spiked punchbowl.
Hannah sighed. “Crap.”
Julia clapped her hands once like she was starting a drill. “Follow me. I still have the keys to the cheer clubhouse.”
So the trio ran.
“It’s a business partnership, dammit! An…” Mac chirped back as Hannah hustled him through the double doors. Pausing his mouth, he racked his brain for a fitting word.
Quick. What was the word again? Marriage involves paperwork… For the long term. Something financial. And in the future? AH. I’VE GOT IT!
“Annuity!” Mac finished the thought, confident that he had protected Hannah’s dignity.
Ka-chunk! The metal crash bar hit his butt on the way out.
---
“Mac. You don’t even know what that word means. And stop staring! Normally I’d be flattered, but Julia’s here, for fuck’s sake. Have some self-control,” Hannah hissed as she wrapped Mac’s rolled ankle with a bandage on the old medical bench.
Mac whimpered weakly like a dying Victorian child as he clung to her arm. “Yes, I do—Oww, oww, owwHannahpleasebegentleoww.”
Sat in the corner on a folding chair, Julia wheezed. “How the hell did you trip on a galvanized diamond-pattern steel floor plate?”
“No, that was just my final resting place. What had happened was…”
Mac flashed back to the disaster: the hallways wider than anything at Salt Ponds High, the floors made of actual hardwood, and the pile of spare metal pipes leaned against the wall in a Home Depot fever dream. “Hannah knocked some metal pipes down in front of me and I tried doing that lumberjack thing? Where they run on a rolling log? Except it was a metal pipe. And I uhh… balanced too well. Got too much momentum. Slammed straight into the janitor’s closet door.”
“That’s curious. I wonder how you made it past twenty-five. My best guess is that God let you skate by on your good looks,” Julia followed up.
Kssssht! Shakeshakeshake!
“Me too. If Hannah hadn’t shown up in my life I’d be—”
HISS!
“COLDCOLDCOLDCOLDCOLDCOLDHannahthatshitisNOTsillystringwhyareyouusingsogoshdarnmuchitburnsitburnsitburns—”
Mac’s ankle slumped over like a slug on the sidewalk in Seattle during a searing, sweltering summer as Hannah shot it with a stupendous blast of magic freeze—the kind trainers conjured when soccer players were trying to milk the clock for a win or a draw.
Hannah smirked. “You were saying, Babyboy?”
“Thank you for saving my life again and again… And that I love you this much, professionally,” Mac replied, stretching his arms out and offering Hannah a hug.
“MAC.”
“What?”
“Julia.”
Mac stuck the landing, playing footsies with the line but almost tripping over it again. “Let her think what she wants to think. I said ‘professionally,’ didn’t I? You know you love me… AS A WORK HUSBAND. I MEANT WORK HUSBAND.”
Hannah snorted. “You’re adorable. Okay.” She found herself in Mac’s arms anyway.
“Will this help you heal faster?” she mumbled into his chest.
“Yes. And AXE smells good on you as well. You could be covered in horseshit and I’d still think you smell like a baby angel’s tears.”
Hannah muffled her chuckles into Mac’s previously perfect shirt, taking a mammoth hit of his scent in turn.
She’s surprisingly low-rent when it comes to fragrances. Old Spice and blueberry shampoo just works on her every time.
Out the corner of his eye, Mac caught Julia’s eyes widening, the realization dawning on her that it was all real, not just Eureka and Tar’s steamy fanfictional account about their coworkers. He winked, silently asking her to keep a secret; if she didn’t, the thread of fate would slip out of their hands. With a knifehand to her brow, she saluted back in silence.
