A kiss is just a kiss

“So you kissed her,” Guerrero said, before taking a sip of the scotch that Chance had passed to him the second he stepped out of the elevator.

“No, Ilsa initiated it,” Chance corrected, “she kissed me and I didn’t… not kiss her back.”

Guerrero chuckled. “Dude, you know that’s just a really clumsy way of saying you kissed her.”

Chance frowned and the look amused his old friend. “I wasn't planning to. Maybe it was just reflex. The default reaction if someone kisses you is to kiss back, right?"

Guerrero shook his head. “It can’t have been that unexpected dude. You two have been dancing around the possibility for months.”

“Yeah,” Chance conceded, “but it was never really serious. She‘s an attractive woman and attractive women are used to being flirted with. It was familiar ground for her in an unfamiliar situation. Besides, Ilsa isn’t over her husband’s death yet and I’m so not up for a three-way with his ghost looking on.”

“But if she was over Marshall…?”

Chance took a generous sip of his own scotch before answering. “I don’t know. It would make working for her, with her, complicated.”

“Don’t over think it dude. You kissed her. You must have wanted to. How was it?”

Chance shrugged. “It was over pretty quickly. We were kissing, then we weren’t. I wasn’t exactly thinking about it. I wouldn’t have kissed her if she hadn’t kissed me first. She’s not ready to be kissing anyone right now.”

Guerrero fixed him with a look that Chance couldn’t quite decipher and that made him uneasy. He’d known Guerrero long enough to be able to read him without even thinking about it, and yet here was a totally new expression on his face.

“What?” Chance asked, shifting uncomfortably beneath Guerrero’s gaze. What was that? he wondered. Is he pissed? Is he disappointed? Is he jealous? Chance couldn’t get a clear read on him.

“I’m having a little trouble with getting my head around the fact that your default reaction to being kissed unexpectedly is to kiss back. Someone invades my space like that? They’d get a painful reminder to respect my personal boundaries, dude, not my tongue in their mouth. ”

“Yeah, well you have the soul of a psychopath, Guerrero. Most people actually enjoy being kissed. And anyway, there were no tongues involved.” Chance said, unsure why he felt he needed to make that clear to Guerrero.

He shrugged, indicating that it didn’t really matter if there were tongues involved or not. “You let her kiss you because you wanted to. It’s as simple as that.”

Chance frowned.

“Oh for fuck sake,” Guerrero grumbled as he took the three steps across the office it took him to stand toe to toe with Chance. “Your subconscious knows what you want even if you don’t. You kissed back because you wanted to kiss her. If it was someone kissing you who you had no interest in kissing back, you just wouldn’t. For example…” Guerrero grabbed a handful of the front of Chance’s shirt and pulled him forward, planting what was intended to be a chaste, closed mouth kiss on the taller man’s lips but somehow the moment seemed to extend longer than was strictly necessary to prove his point. Chance didn’t kiss back but he didn’t pull away either and Guerrero felt inexplicably reluctant to break the contact between them. Chance’s familiar scent was dizzying at such close proximately and, as intoxicating as it was, it did eventually force him to remember that this was Chance he was kissing. But when he did manage to pull away Chance let out a needy little grunt of protest. The noise hit Guerrero like a lightning bolt and knocked the breath from his body as he realised the magnitude of what he’d just done.

Stupid stupid stupid…. Where the fuck had that come from? And what the fuck was that noise about?

Guerrero stepped back out of Chance’s space and took a slug of his scotch.

“See dude, it’s not automatic. You only kiss someone when you want to.” He winced as he realised that by that logic, he’d clearly wanted to kiss Chance. “I mean you only kiss someone back if you want to kiss them in the first place.”

Chance was just staring at him, wide-eyed and confused. Guerrero wished he’d just fucking say something. He’d only been trying to prove a point, but then he found that he was enjoying the kiss and when he stopped Chance had made that noise. Now he was trying very hard not to think about what that noise could mean and what he could do to hear it again.

“Guerrero…” Chance started to say something but it seemed to slip away before he could get the words out and instead he cautiously ran his tongue over his top lip. Guerrero felt his insides twitch as his eyes involuntarily followed the movement.

This is so not happening. I did not just kiss Chance and I am so not getting off on it…

His body clearly had ideas of its own though, as the unmistakable rush of blood to his dick was about to make painfully obvious. He downed the rest of his drink and ditched the glass on the nearest flat surface.

“Well, I made my point,” he said, deliberately avoiding eye-contact with Chance as he bolted to the elevator.

Chance just stood there watching him leave, thinking: What the hell just happened?

If Chance had wanted to talk about his feelings, he would have called Winston, not Guerrero, he thought that went without saying, but apparently not. He’d hoped to drink his way through the bottle of scotch with Guerrero with their usual minimum of conversation about anything remotely to do with their emotions. All he’d been looking for was Guerrero’s terse agreement that women in general were crazy, before they settled in to doing some serious drinking. For reasons that totally escaped Chance, Guerrero had instead tried to convince him that he had kissed Ilsa because he wanted to and everything just spiralled out of control from there, until Guerrero grabbed him and kissed him and suddenly Ilsa was forgotten and the whole world receded until all that was left was the feeling of his best friend’s lips pressed against his own.

Responding to that kiss would have been every shade of wrong and Chance was relieved that shock had temporarily paralysed him, preventing him from taking Guerrero’s face in his hands and kissing him back. Had the kiss lasted any longer Chance would have been unable to suppress the rush of longing that accompanied the re-ignition of a twenty-something year old attraction to his friend and mentor. It was an attraction he’d buried a lifetime ago for the sake of self preservation, and because the need for respect and comradeship out-weighed his need for physical affection. As Junior, he’d managed to dampen down that white hot desire for Guerrero to a more tolerable slow burning friendship that had managed to endure the barren emotional wasteland of working for the old man. In his new life as Christopher Chance he thought he’d managed to close the door on his troubling feelings for Guerrero, but that one kiss re-opened what wasn’t so much of a door as a floodgate.

In the early days of their working relationship Junior had tried to dismiss his feelings for Guerrero as a crush, as hero-worship taken a step too far, but time and familiarity had only served to deepen the attraction. Junior realised that he wasn’t just in awe of Guerrero’s skills, he was drawn to the man himself and he longed to be the focus of Guerrero’s laser like focus. His fantasies had been dominated by speculation as to what it would feel like to have those strong, skilful hands running over his naked flesh and what it would do to him to hear Guerrero growling his name into his ear as came…

Being able to compartmentalise his feelings had been part of his job as an assassin and he had forced himself to lock those feelings for Guerrero away. Life had moved on and his friendship with Guerrero had become something too precious to Chance to be threatened by the remnants of adolescent lust.

But then Guerrero kissed him. Just a simple press of one pair of lips against another’s, totally lacking in the heat and passion of the intense tongue-fucking of Junior’s fantasies, and yet it was enough to drag those carefully, long suppressed feelings back to the surface and draw a whimper of disappointment from Chance as Guerrero pulled away. A whimper that Guerrero must have heard.

Chance took the bottle of scotch upstairs to his living quarters and flopped down on the couch and Carmine soon joined him, laying his head down on his lap and giving his master a look of soulful sympathy. Chance absentmindedly scratched at Carmine’s ears as he flicked through the channels on the TV, pausing every so often to take another sip of whiskey.

How had everything gotten so out of control in such a short space of time? How was he going to deal with Ilsa? How could he make things right with Guerrero?

Questions chased each other around his head until the scotch managed to dull his thinking to the point at which he at last fell in to a shallow, troubled sleep on the sofa.


When Ilsa announced her return to London, Chance felt a guilty pang of relief. He was very fond of Ilsa and, in some not insignificant ways, was very attracted to her, but he recognised that the potential disaster if they acted on their feelings could easily make his relationship with Maria look tame in comparison. Chance knew he’d never be able to fill a dead man’s shoes and Ilsa would never be able to cope with the stress of loving a man who sought out violence and danger not just for a living, but as a way of life. The kindest thing for him to do was to let her go.

The extravagant breakfast spread that Ilsa had laid out for them was the first time he had seen Ilsa since their kiss in her office, and the situation was made more stressful by Guerrero’s presence. Chance had to remind himself that Guerrero would rather disembowel himself with a teaspoon than confess to another living soul that he’d kissed him, and that as far as everyone else was concerned the only topic of interest was why Ilsa was leaving, and why Chance hadn’t asked her to stay. Ames and Winston shared meaningful looks and Guerrero just plain ignored him as Ilsa raised a toast to the team and made a hasty exit.

“Is that it?” Guerrero asked. “No hugs? She just ups and leaves? Kinda cold if you ask me.”

Guerrero slunk out of the room without a backwards glance, and although that was fairly typical behaviour, Chance felt as though he’d been snubbed and that his team mates were bound to notice that the two former assassins had avoided making eye-contact.

Winston wasted no time in telling Chance that Ilsa had wanted him to ask her to stay, and when Chance had pointed out that she had legitimate business in London, Winston responded with a cynical grunt.

“Something you’re not saying?” Chance asked.

“No, but there’s something you’re not saying,” Winston replied

Winston’s words turned Chance’s blood to ice for a second, as he considered the terrible possibility that Winston knew, that he’d picked up on the tension between him and Guerrero. A split second later he realised that Winston was still talking about Ilsa but he knew his face must be a picture of guilt.

“You do realise that just because we’re men it doesn’t mean we can’t talk about our feelings?” Winston continued.

“Yes, it does,” Chance replied, trying not to think about what talking about his feelings with Guerrero had led to.

Just when it looked like at least one complication was leaving his life Guerrero had found Marshall’s mistress, and naturally the responsibility of racing to the airport to tell Ilsa fell to Chance. The look on Ilsa’s face as she stepped off her private jet hit Chance harder than he’d anticipated. She obviously assumed that Chance was there to beg her to stay, to finish what that rum-fuelled kiss had started and there was no easy way to disillusion her.

“Mr Chance, what are you doing here?”

“We found her.”

“Found who?”

“Marshall’s mistress.”

The fact that Ilsa turned away when she heard those words spoke to the depths of her disappointment. Chance felt like a total bastard because, in that moment, Ilsa was more concerned with his motivation to stop her from leaving than she was with her husband‘s death. He had to actually spell it out to Ilsa that the woman Guerrero had found could reveal the truth about Marshall’s killer. He tried to tell her gently but somehow it still felt like he was accusing her of dishonouring Marshall’s memory by turning away to get back on the plane.

Chance was grateful that Ilsa declined his offer to drive her back to the office, insisting that she’d prefer her driver to take her. Chance finally had the opportunity to be alone with his thoughts, without Winston’s well meaning attempts at matchmaking or Ames vocalising her every thought. The situation with Ilsa was awkward enough to begin with, but now all the old feelings for Guerrero had flooded back with a vengeance, the office was the last place he wanted to be. For a moment he let himself seriously consider running. He could just disappear and leave the whole mess behind him… As tempting as the idea was, he knew that there was no way to run from Guerrero, literally or emotionally. At some point the was going to have to face him.

They’d been played. Julia was good, CIA good, but the warning signs had been there - I’ve been on the run. Moving every ten days. Changing names… Guerrero knew that an aid worker would have to be insanely lucky to survive for a year on the run from anyone powerful enough to kill a man like Marshall Pucci and get away with it. Chance’s judgment was always clouded when Ilsa was involved, but Guerrero should have known. He’d let the team down, he’d let Chance down, and it was because he was still preoccupied with that stupid kiss.

He’d argued with Chance often enough over the years, so why had needed to prove to Chance that he wanted to kiss Ilsa back so badly that he’d offered himself up for comparison? How could he have thought that kissing Chance, under any circumstances, would not affect their friendship? Guerrero’s mind kept winding back to what he’d said to Chance - Your subconscious knows what you want even if you don’t… You only kiss someone when you want to…

Guerrero told himself that the reason why he’d kissed Chance didn’t even matter any more, because if they didn’t find a way to deal with this whole CIA mess soon it would mean the end of all of them. It was difficult because every time he looked at Chance he heard that plaintive little noise that his friend had made when Guerrero had broken off the kiss. However much Guerrero tried to push the memory of that kiss from his mind, he was haunted by that sound and its implications, and so when they fled the office, Guerrero fled from Chance too.

Ames had followed him to the Eldo and for a moment he was even a little grateful for the company. As long as she was running her mouth off, he wasn’t alone with his thoughts. Unfortunately it soon became apparent that being alone with Ames’ thoughts was not going to be plain sailing either. He managed about five minutes in the car with her every thought falling from her mouth like a constantly dripping faucet before he made the decision to turn back to the office.

As he sat in the Eldo listening to the CIA agent instruct his men to seek out the team’s weaknesses, he heard something that finally drove the kiss from his thoughts.

- Wow, we’re doing society a favour by putting this freak out of his misery. It says here he has a kid. See? That’s what I mean by pressure point.

His son. They were going after his son.

Guerrero had no memory of how he got back into the building or how he’d taken out four of the CIA men. He was acting out of an instinct so pure that he was almost incapable of rational thought. When the foot soldiers had been eliminated leaving only the CIA agent in charge, something deeper kicked in. His loyalty to Chance was the only thing with the power to stay his hand when his instincts screamed at him to destroy anyone and anything that could ever put his son at risk. The life-long imperative to watch his friend’s back was too deeply ingrained to ignore, and instead of annihilating the agent on the spot, he put a gun to his head and secured Chance’s safety. Only when Chance was safe he could deal with the agent more permanently.

There was something profoundly satisfying about cuffing the CIA agent to the Eldo. He knew the man had seen enough of his file to realise that Guerrero could have been a lot more inventive in his method of dealing with him, and he knew the agent would turn the ignition and detonate the explosives with something approaching gratitude that he’d escaped a gruesome execution. Guerrero could have made his death a prolonged, excruciating experience, so the use of explosives was bordering on merciful. Guerrero’s satisfaction came from the knowledge that the agent himself would unwittingly detonate the bomb and the last thing he would do on this earth was remember Guerrero and his son.

“He’s my world. You understand? That’s my kid.”

As he walked away from the flaming debris of the Eldo, Guerrero felt relieved. As a father, he should have shot the son-of-a-bitch back at the office, but in order to help Chance he’d given the agent a few more precious hours of life, and that troubled him. Although the agent was secure in his custody the whole time, he had still delayed neutralising the risk to his son in order to help Chance. Everything always came back to Chance.


Chance knew the odds that the mission to retrieve the photos from the Lamont Hotel would go according to plan were roughly equal to the odds that Guerrero wouldn’t eat Winston’s lunch if he left it in the refrigerator. Ilsa didn’t exactly crack under pressure, but she did tend to stray from the plan whenever faced with something unexpected. The second that Winston announced over the comms link that Julia was in the building, Chance knew Ilsa would ignore the instruction to get the hell out of the building in favour of confronting her husband’s killer.

Climbing the side of the building to reach the rooftop where Ilsa was holding Julia at gunpoint was actually one of the easier challenges Chance had faced over the last few days. It was risky and strenuous, but it was still easier than the conversation he’d had back at the motel room when he’d forced Ilsa to relive her last interactions with Marshall over and over, until he found the clue he needed to lead him to the location of the photographs. Ironically, given his position hanging by his fingertips and precarious toe holds on the side of the hotel, hundreds of feet above street level, the physicality of the task at hand made him feel as though he was finally on solid ground. The situation was as familiar as it was simple: get the client and get the hell out. It didn’t matter that the client in question was Ilsa and it didn’t matter that there was still intense, unresolved tension between them. Chance was now doing his job, saving the client, and everything else could wait.

Chance knew that Ilsa didn’t have it in her to pull the trigger and murder her husband’s killer. If they had been in this situation a year earlier, when her grief was still agonisingly raw, it might have been a different matter. In that year Ilsa had grieved for Marshall, and although she still felt his loss as a physical ache every single day, the pain had faded enough that she could move forward with her life. It had faded enough for her to see Chance as much more than an employee or business partner.

It didn’t take much to disarm Ilsa, just a few words and Chance’s reassuring presence beside her, but disarming Ilsa was never going to be the difficult part. The inevitable arrival of Julia’s back-up left Chance with only one option, and, at that moment, he was grateful that it was Ilsa who was his protectee. Only Ilsa would have taken his hand and made the blind leap of faith off that rooftop, putting her life completely in Chance’s hands.

Chance had faced the possibility of his own death far too many times to still experience the old cliché of his life flashing before his eyes, but as he hung from the gargoyle on the edge of the hotel roof with Ilsa dangling bellow him, his mind did turn to the things he held most dear. He thought of Katherine and her burnt cookies, and of the simple pleasure of lying sprawled on the couch in his loft with Carmine’s head in his lap. He pictured Winston with the disapproving look on his face that warmed Chance with the knowledge that he worried about his wellbeing. But mostly he thought of Guerrero. There was no way he was going anywhere until he made things right with Guerrero…