Yowzah Oneshot Collection (1)

83(M)Mattex

Alex had taken far, far too well to the idea of being his secret girlfriend, Matt decided. Particularly to the secret part and to the part where he’d joked about it being similar to being a secret agent. And to whatever damn thing he’d said about codes.

After their frantic rain-soaked activities in her trailer, Alex had napped against him for an hour or so before he’d woken her up and they’d dressed and left her trailer, grabbing something quick to eat before heading back to their respective flats for the night. The second day had been fine. Well, rather wonderful really, they’d flirted just like they usually did on set, only Alex had started to loosen up ever-so-slightly, semi-begrudgingly letting him look out for her in little ways. Then they’d eaten dinner together at his flat and the lovemaking that had followed had been unhurried and full of whispered sweet-nothings as they both relaxed into how they felt about each other. With her once again lying against his chest that night, Matt had joked with her, asking if she’d ever been anyone’s secret girlfriend before, because she was doing a really - if you’ll pardon the expression - bang up job. She’d punched his arm playfully as he expected, but then as she’d closed her eyes, she’d whispered against his chest so that he could just barely hear her, “Just you wait, Matt, just you wait.” It took ten minutes for him to calm down enough to fall asleep along with her after what just those whispered words did to him.

She’d stayed the night in his bed and snuck out in the morning to get ready for the second day of filming. And that was when it he’d found it. He’d thrown on his jacket to go to work himself that morning, only to find a peculiar gift from Alex hidden in his pocket. It had to be from Alex, he thought as he turned it over in his palm, because it was a pocket-sized German-English dictionary, and she was his only friend ( girlfriend! his mind interjected and he smiled), who spoke German. Planting things in his pockets, he thought, maybe he shouldn’t have said anything about secret agents....

He started sliding the dictionary back into his pocket but changed his mind, pulling it out again and starting to flip through it, stopping abruptly when he spotted a bright pink sticky note tucked into the front cover. He pulled the sticky note out, and read it, or rather, tried to read it. It was a bunch of letter and number codes, and the only bit he could make out was the signature.

Deine,

K

Oh yes, he thought as he closed his door to start his walk to work, staring down at the note instead of looking where he was going, he definitely shouldn’t have said anything about codes. Pondering how to crack what had to be Alex’s code ( Yours , K just served to confirm that it had to be her, he always called her Kingston and she wouldn’t want to sign it Alex or even A in case anyone else ever found it), he nearly walked right into traffic, so he wisely tucked the note back into the dictionary, settling for mulling it over in his mind as he walked.

The writing was clearly divided into sets, each one consisting of a two letters followed by two sets of numbers. The note contained only four such sets, and as far as he could tell the first letter was always either D or E, though the second letter ranged more widely. A thought dawned on him, and he paused on a street corner to pull out the note and check his hunch. He looked at the first entry, ED 8 10 it started with an E, so he tried the English-Deutsch section of the dictionary, turning to the D’s as indicated by the second letter, then the eighth page of D’s and the tenth entry. He read the English and German and, excited by possible progress, dug around hurriedly in his pockets for a pencil. He pulled it out and pencilled in the first word, if he was decoding it right, then started looking up the second word, this one started with D, so he flipped back to the Deutsch-English section. Soon he had decoded the second and third words and was confident that he had cracked the code, given the message that resulted. The verbs were unconjugated of course, but it was easy to see what she’d meant.