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Ilsa was so beautiful, always. But nights like these were something else. Hair carelessly tied back, the softened leather of her jacket thrown over the back of the chair, smelling warmly of sweat and oil, of action and amber. The conspiratorial glint in her eye. Alive. God, of course she made a damn good spy . He wanted to spill his guts. She motioned the bartender for another drink.
“I don’t want to turn it into something it wasn’t.” He pauses, drags a hand down his face. He has had too much to drink. “And I don’t want to let being older and knowing better ruin how it is in my mind. That is still a part of me, even if it all seems - I loved - I love Julia. I don’t see many people. Like that I mean.”
Ilsa would understand, she knew more keenly than him the way as soon as your body is a weapon there is only so far you can feel normal about it. To grant yourself the vulnerability as something other than a ploy.
“I was new to the IMF, but I was hardly a kid. I was a nightmare to be honest - a criminal with a wake of destruction. They were kind to take me,”
The guy they sent to collect him was a suit. Something out of a TV procedural with more than a passing taste for conspiracy; all sunglasses and flat top. After it all blew up and he had been quite literally in the dark, some concrete black site, strange kindnesses were given.
“I’m sure you had your reasons.” Ilsa surely had hers.
“Oh I did. Spent hours playing out the moral upshot with myself before we’d go on runs. I was doing it for my family, my aunt and uncle back home, they’d done so much for me when they had so little and I ought to pay them back.” A sour laugh, knocking back the dregs of his rum and coke. “I was such a shit.”
The humiliation was out there already. Wounds of a buried life torn open in front of the people he’d least want to know.
“The job was going to be done anyway and if it were me doing it, I would make the choices where I could for kindness. There’d be bodies at the end of the day, but fewer of them; worse men.”
He was rambling. He could hardly believe it of himself. Ethan Hunt did not talk about himself like this. There was enough going on everywhere else. But he was drunk and his bones ached and he could taste blood at the back of his throat and he was blissfully happy that they were alive. He was old and tired and deserved to indulge.
“But I did want it. Claire was beautiful, but I would not have done it if I weren’t drawn to the two of them.”
His first impression of Claire had been that of a cat. All sharp eyes, wetly cloaked in kohl, and pointed nails. Quiet, with a simmering watchful gaze. Second in command to the agent tasked with training this batch of new recruits, she was not to be crossed. Offering advice in her clipped European hush, she left in her wake a trail of stunned students; it was like having a cinematic femme fatale in their mix.
No one quite knew what to do with her. Thankfully, his initial assignment, be it a glorified lesson with training wheels, left little time for sexually frustrated group bonding. Shortly after his initial meeting with the man in black he came to know as Kitteridge, and his subsequent understanding that it was this, or prison for life, that he was essentially a dead man and that his life as he knew it was no more, he had been funnelled, sack back over his eyes, on to a jet.
It was the dawn of the new year of a new life when he was assigned to Jim’s team. His grasp on time was tenuous, careening from training to mission to mission, living out of his suitcase. The IMF’s festive drinks had signalled that it had been around 8 months since it all went to shit in Spain. It was sort of like the prison he wasn’t in - no one could or would ask what anyone else was in for, what weight of a life before this one they carried.
It didn’t mean he did not speculate. He was rude in that way. Someone like Sarah it was difficult to imagine ever existing in a world outside of fanciful girl’s schools and tipsy race days. Perhaps something with money, a trader’s implicated wife. Jack was easier to square: he was a kind Ethan had already encountered, one born without the sense of self preservation that was so innate in others. Everything, even potential death, was an excuse for a laugh. He was a good man to have nearby. Back then Ethan imagined becoming something like him down the line, the years making his cocksure bravado lapse into something of a fool’s bravery.
He wasn’t sure what the deal was with Claire. Whether or not her origins were as sordid as the rest. She certainly seemed every bit the glamorous mule, the vamp with the poisoned chalice, but there was no trace of that in her camaraderie with her husband. She sat with the team and simpered in turn during briefings.
He was growing old and his memory fumbled beyond the most base. But he remembered meeting Jim, in that grimy bar someone of his status should have been far beyond, rubbing shoulders with the agents as they let loose. Something should be wrong in this picture, he should be out of his element. But Jim had been there before, judging by the hurrahs that erupted as he came in, the lifting of glasses beckoning him over, the way his politician’s geniality seemed oddly comfortable amongst the sticky bar mats and awful music.
“You see - Kitteridge was a company man through and through. A damn machine.” You almost had to admire it. “But Jim was real.” The ice and sugar as he took a sip was blissfully cool against the set-in stickiness of the night. “He let him call him ‘Jim’!”
“The old man could party?”
“Back then it was all so damn bureaucratic. An office job with more secretive bosses.” Shaking his head. “We had Christmas parties.”
“It sounds like they gave you the chance to breathe.” Ethan had not slept in a bed that belonged to him in months and he’s already paranoid that the next waiter to approach them would produce a tape from under a cloche, jammed among the fries.
Jim had done his round of pleasantries, clapping shoulders along the way, before approaching the newest recruit.
“Ethan right?”
“Uh, that would be me.”
“Sorry to have not had the chance to meet you in a more professional context”, eyeing the dubiously orange glasses Ethan had double-fisted.
“Oh that’s not - Oh. Only one of these is for me”, he signalled over his colleague on her way back from the bathroom, handing one over. Turning back to Jim, he offered a mocking three-finger salute. “Promise. I owed her that one.” Jim’s eyes follow his to the left of the bar, where she is now huddled giggling with another woman.
“I see you’re already settling in.”
When Claire cornered him in that bathroom after Honduras he felt so happy he could cry. A year of loss and the dull ache of loneliness gave way to soft thighs and a wet mouth and the lilt of her voice in his ear telling him that it was all going to be ok. Less fun was the ensuing debrief headed up by Jim which was spent waiting for a man in black to knock on the door, invite him into the corridor and shoot him between the eyes.
But nothing happened.
Further trysts followed, in stolen moments in janitorial closets, a respite from always being on. Relations with Jim were polite as ever and missions went off without a hitch. He was the freest hanged man there ever was.
He and Claire even engineered what he understood at the time to be an escape to London, following some low stakes trailing in Dublin. They'd spent the whole weekend in bed, giggling at tourists from the window, wrapped in sheets and drinking champagne. They arrived back in the states with no fanfare.
“I probably should have felt worse than I did.” It was stupid in a refreshingly adolescent way, a sandbox amongst all the scheduled hours. “I reckoned it was something we could at least allow ourselves.”
Ilsa’s gaze remains cooly even. In anyone else it would have been terrifying. Maybe it was with her. But he knew that her still waters didn’t belie some barely contained cruelty, but warmth. He is so fucking drunk.
“And then Jim- Christ,” this is embarrassing. He can’t stop himself, least of all when he feels a warm calloused hand reach out to gently turn his palm upwards and thumb and the thrumming pulse of his wrist.
“I honestly thought he didn’t know. How could he? God, if you’d only seen Claire” an attempt to break the tension, “no offence”. Ilsa rolled her eyes. “Especially next to him. You know how he bitched about his lot in life when it all blew up? His barely 30 year old wife and his salary. He had a salary! Jesus. You’d think they were making him do it.”
It was off the back of a mission in Seoul, one of those barely remembered, having gone out with no hitch to tie memory to. What he did remember is the swooping invincibility they all felt. Even Sarah’s characteristically stiff upper lip was left loose and smiling as they found some local dive for a celebration.
“A toast to the golden boy!” Jack almost took his head clean off his shoulders with the force with which he threw his arm around his neck, saluting with a dubiously blue liquid.
He revelled. He was awash with bodies as his teammates came with hugs to congratulate him for some daring act he’s sure he did, but seems terribly vague, decades on. Claire’s chypre enveloped him as she joined the procession, nails in catching the shorn hairs behind his ears as she hugged him. “Let’s celebrate. You deserve it.”
Looking back, it’s a blur, one of age and vodka.
Jim joined them later on, having had some vague official business to attend to before checking out for the day. They ended up in some karaoke place, Jack belting True Colors.
Ethan was halfway present, tired and sore and yet bubbling under with that nervous energy he knew had gotten everyone; that post-mission buzz that sat under your skin and nobody knew where to put. He was wedged into the corner of the L-shaped sofa between Sarah and Hannah, who were occupied providing backup vocals. Claire and Jim nestled in a chair, the former whooping, the latter combing his fingers through her hair. It’s funny, what you remember.
Somewhere around Hannah’s warbling turn, Claire yawned and Jim announced that they were going to turn in for the night.
“I asked for a ride to the hotel. It was some cocky bullshit.” The rush of proximity.
Bright lights blurred and refracted against the windows of the cab. Claire turned up the collar of her coat and nestled Jim’s neck. Ethan tried to keep an upright posture.
Coming to, to the pulsating heat of Claire’s breasts at his back, head resting on Jim’s outstretched downy forearm was a headfuck.
“Nothing happened. But I flipped. I thought I was going to be taken round the back of some building and shot.”
“Ethan, Ethan, Ethan. So you ran?”
Laughing, “yes, I did.”
It was a couple of weeks until they found him in the highlands. He’d like to think his record has improved.
And it was ok. They were drunk and overtired and to them it wasn’t a big deal, and Jim was no more suspicious. They went on.
And yet the question stayed with him. The proposition cocooned protection, someone on each side to keep him safe. Claire could tell, and she pressed him on it, with her leg crooked over his shoulder and his mouth on her.
“God, Ethan, you’re so perfect like this. All for me.” He hummed, happily singular in his pursuit.
“I think Jim knows.” She said, like it was nothing. He froze, she sighed, pressed a palm to the back of his head and shifted in frustration. “You don’t have to worry, you know. I think he likes you just as much as I do, with all you do for the team.” He went on, reckoned she deserved some level of fantasy, young and beautiful and hitched to her boss, however happy she seemed with the cryptic arrangement. She sighed, “I think he’s jealous.”
He halted, properly this time, sitting back on his ankles, “Is this some weird European thing?”
She knelt to join him, irritably pushing down her dress, huffing a laugh as she bracketed his head in her small hands. “It’s ok,” pulling him to her, lilting voice in his ear. “It's ok to want it.”
Turning away, tucking a strained laugh against his shoulder, “What are you even saying? The old man wants a taste?”
“Ethan!” scolding, “Jim is a wonderful man. He’s very good to me. I think he would be good to you too.” She hugged him, earlier pursuits abandoned. “He talks to me about you, always talking about what an asset you are. How handsome you are. He’s afraid to act because of his position.”
“Didn’t seem to stop him before.” A pointed glare.
She met his glazed glare, “That was different. You have to understand his place. He doesn’t want to risk losing that. But I - I think we can make something work”
Something clicks. “Have you two been plotting this?”
“Sshh. Jim doesn’t know about all this. I mean, he knows about us, I think, but he’s clearly not keen to stop it.”
“Say I did go along with this, what would you do? If he’s so afraid.”
“Don’t worry. Just leave it with me.”
“This makes it sound so terribly sordid. It was hardly my first rodeo, if you know what I mean. Jim wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last. Can’t say I’ve managed such complications since, but. You know.”
“It’s ok, I know what you mean.”
“So have you ever” - he shoots his hands up - “I’m asking in the most respectful way, of course.”
Ilsa snorts, “Of course.”
“But you get it.”
“I get it.”
Interesting. He quirked an eyebrow and filed it away. “So, uh, things progress-”
“You can’t leave it there! I’m hooked!”
“You’re the fucking pervert!” Laughing. God, it was good to speak to someone who got it. He hasn’t in years. “So you want to hear all about my youthful transgressions-”
“You were 30! It’s fair game.”
“Jesus, Ilsa”
“Forgive me for being compelled by a dashing young spy climbing the corporate ladder with his wiles. What was he like?”
Jim. Reflecting, trying to verbalise what he was like, what it was that captivated, was hard. He was old - likely younger than Ethan is now, and God, didn’t that make the blood in his veins feel funny - but he seemed old. While he was technically still ‘in the field’ he sat at a clinical remove. He wore expensive suits, had expensive taste, knew the owners of the good restaurants by their first names. He could be slimy. He sometimes looked like he was made of wax. He carried himself like a man that knew the world intimately. He was rarely unsure of himself. Claire loved him.
He could sometimes be strikingly handsome, too. Never in an obvious way, it always shocked you when you saw it, but with a certain tilt of his head, or the right turn of phrase when the team needed to hear it, he had something. Maybe something just Ethan and Claire could see.
“When I first met Claire, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. She could have had anyone and she had him. Sure, he was powerful, but there were much more powerful men around.”
“Girls like a daddy.”
“Gross. But it wasn’t that - I confess I thought it was - but Claire really loved him. More than he ever loved her, in the end. And there was something, you’d get it if you’d met him. Or maybe not. You have too much good sense.”
“Hardly, but I’ll take it.”
“He was a good man to have on your side. There was something knowing about him, but he wasn’t weirdly clinical like the other men at his level. He sort of straddled the space between us operatives and the guys at the table. And he understood us like none of them cared to.”
“I can’t say I would have noticed it if it wasn’t for Claire’s needling, but once you were up close...”
Claire had arranged their liaison the next weekend at some private room of an unassuming restaurant. Ethan noticed it was disconcertingly similar to some mission drop. He arrived last, finding the couple at the table, wine already opened, askew in the ice bucket. Jim was uncharacteristically quiet, remaining seated and offering a smile as Claire stood to hug Ethan.
“Ethan! How was your day?” And on they went, dancing around the issue until their entrees arrived. Ethan was in the midst of skewering his ravioli when Jim spoke.
“I think we all know why we’re here. And we’re here now, so I don’t see any reason to keep dancing around the issue. Ethan, I know about the time you’ve been spending with my wife; you’re not half so subtle as you think you are. I would be well within my rights to be upset. Luckily for the two of you, I’m not. Rather the opposite in fact. You understand that this is a rather sensitive situation, one that I would like to stay between those at this table.”
Ethan’s mouth dried and refused to remoisten. He managed an affirmative sound as Claire stroked Jim's forearm where it laid on the table.
“Given that, I am sure you will understand what I mean when I point out that given your own indiscretions, I could very well have had you dismissed. Of course, that would be a shame.” Jim let this hang in the air for a beat.
“Now. I would really rather move on from any unpleasantness. I don’t think that’s what any of us want.” He sipped on the wine, something red and heady. Claire continued her petting, reaching out her other hand to draw patterns on Ethan’s hand where it sat on his lap, hidden in the tablecloth.
“There was a contract.” At this Ilsa burst into another round of gin-laded laughter and Ethan buried his head in his hands and groaned.
Jim didn’t want to do things by halves and to his credit went to great care to remind Ethan that he could walk away at any point; earlier veiled threat to insure his own position.
They left together that night, Ethan bracketed in the back of the cab by Jim and Claire. A strange, more sober echo of karaoke those months ago.
Once at the hotel - again to Jim’s credit much more upmarket and less seedy than what he’d imagined married men taking their mistress to, but then again, Ethan supposed, it wasn’t quite the same - the earlier stiltedness seemed to be done away with. They barely spoke on the ride over, for a lack of words or discretion, or both. But as soon as the door was safely closed behind them it was all a go.
To begin with, he and Jim hardly touched, the latter content to direct from the couch - “This is hardly new to you two, show me what I’ve been missing.” Ethan was so fucking nervous to start, undeniably excited but with a still-irking sense that something would all go terribly wrong, that he had been set up.
“Kiss her.”
Claire was a balm, warm wet mouth and full lips against his own, lighting tugging his hair where it was starting to grow longer than regulation as they kissed. She felt the fluttering heartbeat behind his sternum where she had begun to rack his shirt up and almost cooed. “It’s alright, I’m here. I’ve got you.”
He pushed Claire’s blouse over her shoulders, kissing her neck, guiding them towards the foot of the bed where they awkwardly managed to sit while tangled in one another. Fuck it, all in, he thought, maneuvering towards the headboard, until Claire lay below him, hair dark and mussed faming her face against the crisp pillow. Presumably, out of his view, she made some motion towards her husband as he continued to kiss her neck, down her collarbones and towards her chest, the lace of her bra scratchy in contrast to the soft heat of her breast.
He felt a presence behind him, Claire held his head steady against her, kissing his scalp, before gently moving him off to her right. Jim, tie and jacket now off, took his place as he knelt over her, Ethan was surprised to see him lightly kiss the tip of her nose before moving to her mouth.
Ethan watched.
Claire began making those breathy sounds she made, tilting her hips up and hooking Jim’s ankles round her own as he ground down in earnest. From the sidelines, Ethan was hypnotised, turned on without the stress of having to play his part, purely a viewer. He thought he should maybe be doing something but felt his traitorous body immobilised, stuck on the image of the two of them.
Admittedly it was not something he had given much thought to before Claire raised her suggestion, beyond some team-wide gawking at what the hell the two of them must get up to. Claire was pure sex, but at a remove, so much as to be accessible, while Jim was their boss, and naively neutered in the extent of their youthful estimation. But here, now he got it, the way Jim’s solidness enveloped Claire, how Claire’s austere tendencies, even in their previously shared intimacies, melted away into an open face, eyes gleaming with pride and love.
When Jim’s shirt came off, with the hurried insistence of Claire, he had a hint of the gut of a man his age but you could see the field agent he once was and in part remained in the broadness of his chest, the assuredness of his movements. They seemed lost in one another. More than jealousy Ethan found himself filled with a sort of wondered reassurance that this sort of thing existed somewhere out there, beyond his suspicion of a love that could survive marriage and itineraries.
Going into this, he didn’t know what to expect, but if forced to hazard a guess it was to function as some virile prop to support a dubious marriage. But it seemed he wasn’t needed.
“Maybe they were doing that for you.” Ilsa interjected. “Putting on a show.”
“I didn’t think about it like that.”
“But you were there, they wanted you to see something. Everyone has their agenda.”
Eventually, in his daze, he felt a small hand pulling the shoulder he wasn’t leaning on, towards them. Unsure of his part to play, he followed. Claire pulled him in to kiss her, a blissfully familiar task with which to occupy himself while Jim loomed above. Eventually he had to break for air, and when he did Jim went back to Claire, this pattern continued until they were ruddy cheeked and breathless, each other’s spit in their mouths. Always looking to rush in, he resented the silence, not knowing or being told how to proceed.
Claire had fully relaxed, gone loose and unconcerned, shooting knowing looks between the two above her. “Go on then. I can’t do it all for you.”
When Jim didn’t move, Ethan realised it was on him to take action, to grant this fragile permission. Swallowing his own paranoia of what was to come in the next day, the next months, he leaned forward, bringing his hand to cradle Jim’s jaw, connecting their lips hesitantly. It was awkward - stilting, both too self conscious. Too aware of what this was. Jim tasted like spearmint gum and was oddly cold blooded to the touch.
An encouraging noise from someone below, Claire, her hands coming to hold the both of their heads, gently pushing, broke whatever tension had been suffocating them. He was in two places at once - his body trembling in an awkwardly twisted position as he licked into his boss’ mouth, making noises foreign to himself, while another part floated, the observer, caught between laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and being absurdly turned on at the image.
“You look good like that.” They didn’t stop to ask her which she meant.
Eventually: “Come on,” Pulling them toward her.
“It was something that happened. It kept happening, not all the time, we had a job to do. But it was something nice to look forward to.”
“Right to the end?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s shitty.”
Ethan stretched, arms over his head, shoulders clicking from where he had been hunched over some kitschy table in some irrelevant hot city. “Well. I don’t think I can be held responsible for that particular implosion, except as a symptom of some middle aged crisis.” He motioned the waiter for a check, all of a sudden hyper-aware of the weighty exhaustion in his bones, the ache of overstretched muscles.
“It was always going to end the way it did. I can’t say I regret the good parts.”
“Thank you for telling me. It’s nice to hear about the past sometimes.” Always going forwards. Ilsa stood, helping Ethan, slightly unsteady on his feet, to stand. She gave him an uncharacteristic hug and kissed his cheek.
“Alright you old stud. Let’s get you to bed.”