Page 40 of Welcome to the Friendzone

“But he really makes me happy and the more time we spend together and he asks me for a date, the more my heart aches to say yes to him. I feel like I need to convince myself more and more that we’re just friends. That it wouldn’t be right to be more. Because it wouldn’t, right?”

She looked at the grave, silently waiting for another breeze to come up as a reaction from Frank. Great, now she was going insane because of the weird coincidence of a series of breezes. Marta let out a long breath, unable to hide the slight pain of disappointment in her chest. She really needed her husband for a real conversation.

“Of coursenowyou’re silent. Now, when I really need your help. I don’t even know why I asked for your opinion when it’s crystal clear that I should never date him.”

The strongest breeze so far began to blow, making Marta lose her balance and she had to step back and engage her core so as to not fall to the ground.

“What the hell?! Are you disagreeing with me, or what? Ishoulddate him?” She almost spit at the grave, annoyance taking the best of her.

Within a few seconds a cloud moved past the sun and the sunlight reached her skin making heat slowly seep back into every cell of skin that it illuminated.

“You gotta be freaking kidding me,” Marta chuckled under her breath, not quite able to believe what just happened. The breezes would have been easy to explain, but the sudden appearance of the sun?

“Nobody will ever believe what just happened but let’s be honest, I won’t tell anyone anyway. They’d think I’m fucking crazy.”

Her eyebrows were furrowed, and she looked at Frank’s name on the grave with a scowl on her face.

“So you want me to date him, huh? Okay, but if it turns out to be a bad idea it’s all your fault and I won’t bring you flowers for a whole month.”

Marta walked towards the inscription before kneeling and placing a kiss on every single letter. With a ceaseless smile on her lips she walked to her car to drive back home.Home. The CIA headquarters that had slowly but steadily become her home over the last few years and where Oliver really did his best to make her feel safe and comfortable.

Yes, she might give him a chance for a date. But not right away. He’d need to fight for it and one day, she’d say yes.

Her heart fluttered at the thought of going on a real and official date with him and in that moment, she was thankful that Frank forced her to make this decision.

It felt like the right one.

One Day

NOW

December 23rd, 2023

“Sugar, would you bring me some marshmallows for my hot chocolate?” Oliver grabbed Marta’s wrist as she was about to head towards the kitchen area of the community kitchen.

Today was their internal Christmas party and a lot of colleagues from all the different task forces had gathered around and decorated Christmas cookies. Marta had organized the festivities this year to connect people in the different task forces she was responsible for. They’d never had big corporate-wide events other than a summer barbecue, but that was for the whole CIA, so they didn’t have the chance to converse between the task forces that were under the same Deputy Director. The terrorism task force and the drug trafficking task force had several operations together and for cases like that Marta wanted their teams to know each other.

That’s why she and Oliver had organized this Christmas party together. They drank hot chocolate (with or without alcohol in it), listened to Christmas music, and decorated and ate cookies as well as a huge gingerbread house that Oliver had built with Nate.

To Marta’s surprise the former Grinch had grown into a Christmas-loving guy, willingly baking and decorating a huge gingerbread house the size of a washing machine. Nate had been whistling and humming in the kitchen the whole of the previous day, decorating the walls and roofs with different colored icing as well as a wide variety of gummy stuff. Oliver had bought everything but not even he had thought Nate would have so much fun making the house.

To stick with their own tradition, Oliver and Marta were wearing ugly Christmas sweaters and, although they had a little collection after all these years, today they decided to appear at their Christmas party in the first set they ever got. The ones that Oliver bought for them in 2019.

“No probllama,” Marta answered her boyfriend, referring to her own sweater.

Oliver burst into laughter and the Agents around him did as well. Instead of finally letting her go, Oliver pulled Marta closer again, his eyes looking at her with expectation. She knew exactly what he was up to, so she leaned down and placed a tender kiss on his lips. Oliver smiled into the kiss before he finally let her go, so she could get herself a new hot chocolate and marshmallows.

They had officially announced their relationship around Christmas last year after having multiple conversations with HR and even Director Burns. It wasn’t easy and HR gave them a hard time. The original idea was that Marta wouldn’t be responsible for the terrorism task force anymore but Director Burns vetoed that idea. The team trusted Marta and, after so many failed missions over the past year, he didn’t want to demotivate them even further by changing their boss.

Firing one of them was off the table right away, as was forcing Oliver to change task forces. All of the regular solutions for this issue wouldn’t work for Oliver and Marta and HR were not amused.

The final solution was strict supervision of each and every one of Marta’s decisions regarding the terrorism task force, at least if it involved Oliver. She needed to write way more detailed protocols about the operations and the reasons for her decision so that HR could check if she were favoring Oliver in any way. It was super annoying and additional work, but Marta was willing to do it as long as she was finally able to behave freely around people other than their closest friends. Now they could hold hands or kiss each other whenever they wanted, without checking their backs the entire time. It was more than freeing.

Oliver had talked to Nate a lot about this topic, as he and Lynn had officially come out as a couple a while before. Things between his best friend and Lynn had even improved after they weren’t forced to make a secret out of everything.

Well at least until their relationship had taken a different turn late 2022, but that was another story.

Marta stepped towards the kitchen island where she’d prepared a big pot of hot chocolate with a golden ladle in it to refill the mugs easily. It hadn’t been one of the premade chocolates that only needed to be heated, but one made from scratch. You think it’s only milk and chocolate? Not when you make a hot chocolate using Marta’s special recipe. She used unsweetened cocoa powder, sweetened it with brown sugar and added a chopped chocolate bar into the hot milk. This combination always gave the best chocolatey taste, and she got compliments from everyone who tried a sip. Her secret ingredient was just a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract as the vanilla helped to enhance the special taste of the chocolate milk.

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