Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty

He held his hand out to me and I had to take it.  He was, after all, my date.  My cover.  “I’ll have you know that I am perfectly comfortable in skinny black dresses,” I told him, not mentioning the slit that ran up my leg—have I mentioned the slit?  There was a slit in the side of my dress that was designed to show off things that I had not been prepared to show off.  I mean, if I had known that I would be sneaking off to Romania to show the world my legs, then maybe I would’ve shaved above the knee.

But Collins just smiled, not even bothering to look down at me as we wove our way through the crowds, sweeping and swaying all the way to a door marked Ieșire de Urgență in bright red letters.  Emergency exit.

In one, fluid motion, Collins backed me into a wall, his shadow falling over me as he turned his back to the party, leaning in close with one hand over my head and another along my waist, sending fire snapping all the way up my side.  “What are you—?”

“I can see right through you, Goode.”  He whispered, too close.  Too present.  Without pulling away, he reached into the pocket of his jacket, taking out a wallet far too slim to belong to anyone at that particular party.  “Don’t lie to me.”

If Collins possessed the ability to hear things like I could, he might’ve heard my gulp right then.  He might have heard my heart skip a beat as I remembered the slit running along my leg or he might have heard me take in a breath as I remembered just how little support my dress had.  Collins might’ve heard that I was lying and that he was right and that I would never wear something like this outside of a Romanian ballroom.

Collins couldn’t hear these things, I was sure, but somehow he still knew about them.  He still knew about the slit and the bra and all of the insecurities that came with a little black dress and I realized that if I could hear the truths of the world, then Collins could see them.

He flipped open the wallet, pulling out a thin card with no writing.  No stripe.  Just a plain black rectangle with a chalky grey sheen to it.  A magnet, I realized.

He leaned in even closer, both of his arms around me now, one holding himself up and the other reaching for the emergency door, jimmying the magnet in between the latch and the alarm.  Suddenly, I knew what this was.  I was cover—a girl in the arms of a lovesick teenage boy, the two of them sneaking off into the shadows with nothing but giggles and a sense of adventure.  We were anything but two spies trying to unlock the back door.

“Besides,” he began again, his careful hand still going at the latch.  “You don’t need to worry about any of them remembering your face.”

“Oh?” I said, watching over his shoulder.  Acting as lookout for a boy who didn’t know the first thing about looking back.  “And why’s that?”

His eyes flashed to me, that crooked, knowing smile on his lips one more time, but then he looked back to the job at hand, careful not to set off any alarms or else risk blowing the mission.  “Because none of them were looking at your face.”

I thought back to the onlookers.  To the women with their sneers and the men with their jaws gaped.  I couldn’t recall a single glance that had made it higher than my shoulders.  But no.  That couldn’t be right.  “A third of these guests are women,” I argued.

But Collins just smiled like it was a fact he knew all too well.  “And if that’s not a testament to how good you look tonight, I don’t know what is.”

I heard the door click and my breath caught, waiting for the blaring sirens and flashing lights.  When they didn’t come, both of us let out a sigh.  “That was almost a compliment,” I noticed.