all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing (3, 735 words)
It was cheesy, and I could feel my cheeks heating up with more than just the remnants of a several-thousand-degree fire, but I meant every word. He had given up so much to keep me safe, so much to become such an important part of my life, and although I knew lots of teenage couples said that at eighteen, I was willing to bet I wanted him to be an important part of my life forever.
or
Zach and Cammie share a tender moment at Langley as they await their debriefs after the fire at the Gallagher Academy. Canon-compliant, set during UWS.
I realized I haven't written any Zammie in a while and these two idiots in love deserve some more love from me, so enjoy the first time they said "I love you."
When the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women burned down, I didn’t cry.
I wasn’t sure if it was because of the shock, the lack of acceptance that my home was burning down, or if I had just run out of tears to cry after the events of the last two years. That night, as the blazing embers of Gilly’s mansion burned on and stone walls crumbled onto the muggy April earth, I stood with my mother, my sisters and best friends, and, well, Zach.
There were tears all around us, from frightened seventh graders and weary seniors, all aware of the history and legacy that was burning with our beloved school. I knew I would be sad about it, after the numbness wore off, but I knew my sisters were wrong about one thing. The legacy of our school wasn’t burning with the all-consuming fire, because the legacy was here. Soot-stained faces and bloody knees on green grass, girls still in their pajamas, weapons at their sides, spies even on the darkest of days. The legacy was out in the world, people like my Aunt Abby, who protected the world beyond the walls of my school.
Summer was coming soon, but the night air was cold, even in the humidity and heat of the burning school. It made me shiver, huddled between my friends and Zach as my mother and other staff members made calls in languages I didn’t know yet to people I had never met. It didn’t matter, though. I was alive.
Zach had been quiet most of the night, mostly gazing into the flames as we waited for operatives and approved firefighters to descend on the mansion and take us, well, wherever they were taking us. I could tell he was thinking of the one person we had left inside—the one body that the investigators would find when they combed through the pieces of the mansion.
“You okay?” I asked quietly as the dawn had broken and vanfuls of CIA agents had arrived to take us back to Langley to interrogate (and maybe figure out what to do with) a hundred teenage spies. There were blankets, and water, and sleepy taps on shoulders as Tina Walters woke up a seventh grader who had fallen asleep on her shoulder, and Mick and Courtney carried a slightly burnt Anna Fetterman to one of the vans.
He shrugged, the pale light of the early morning reflected in his eyes as he looked back at the remains that had begun to smolder as the fire crews arrived. “I’ve been better, I guess.”
Then we were quiet as we climbed into a van behind my roommates, and on the two-hour drive to D.C., none of us said a word, all too exhausted from the night’s events. It struck me that at some point, Zach had become a person with whom I could share a long silence with comfortably. It didn’t seem like a great time to bring it up, so I stayed quiet, laying my head on his shoulder as Bex held my hand on my other side. Everyone I loved had lived, but not everyone I loved was doing okay right now.
When we were all unloaded at Langley (by the way, they really did peak with the whole dressing-room-slash-secret-entrance thing, because the main entrance is kind of boring!), we were split into sections as girls went and changed and showered before the forever-and-a-day process of interrogating all of us began.
Putting together the pieces of the Gallagher Academy wasn’t just physical, and the paperwork really did always come back and bite you in the butt. Maybe that was my biggest takeaway from the last few years of my life.
As the two people who had been in the fire the longest, and the two people who had seen the bomb that had blown up the school, my mom explained that Zach and I would probably be interrogated at the end, since ours would take the longest, and other operatives could begin to situate the rest of my sisterhood.
Mom always looked radiant, especially since getting engaged to Mr. Solomon, but at that moment, she looked tired. Her dark brown hair was still shiny and put-together, but there were circles under her eyes, and she smelled like campfire smoke (I didn’t even want to know what I looked or smelled like).
When she turned and left us alone in the small, marble waiting room that looked like the one I’d first been interrogated in my sophomore year, I felt lifetimes away from the girl I’d been when I had met my first boyfriend. But we were alone. It was the first time we had been alone in hours, since we’d run out of the burning passage and into the night sky as his mother blew up my beloved school.
I didn’t really know what to say. It wasn’t the first time a fire had come between us, but a lot had changed in the year since the tombs, and I didn’t want there to be something like that between us. I wanted to talk to him, listen to him, and make sure he knew he wasn’t alone in whatever feelings he was dealing with.
He squeezed my hand, leaning his own head against my shoulder. “Hi.”
I brushed my fingers against his arm, noticing the burns and scrapes that littered it. “You got hurt.”
He moved my fingers away with the hand that had been holding mine, taking them gently in his hand as he sighed a little deeper. He was far too young to look this exhausted. “I’m fine, Gallagher Girl, it really is nothing.”
“You can talk to me about it, Zach,” I said quietly, trying not to keep dancing around the elephant in the room. “She was your mom. It’s okay to…to have mixed feelings about it.”
He inhaled through his nose and used his other hand to run it through his hair, turning to look at me. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it with you, Cammie. It’s that…I don’t want to talk about it with them.” He flicked a thumb at one of the steel doors that kept us in the room, where I had seen more and more members of my sisterhood disappear for their questionings as the morning had gone on. We at least had coffee and muffins (turns out the CIA has an excellent bakery on-site), but the heaviness of the last few hours had really seeped through the walls.
“They’re going to ask me questions and have me tell them things I’ve never told anyone before, and she was a murderous fucking bitch, and I hate everything she’s done to you but,” he took another deep breath, steadying himself, “But she was my mom. For the longest time, she was all I had. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel, and now I have to tell the CIA about it?”
I stayed quiet for a second, seeing if he would continue, not wanting to interrupt him and stop him from getting this off his chest. “And then there’s the Townsend of it all, and I didn’t get to ask her anything about it, or ever get closure on why she did the thing she did—to me, to you, to your dad, to me. What am I supposed to tell them, Gallagher Girl?” His eyes met mine, and although they looked exhausted and cloudy, they looked at me with the same intensity they always did, as if he was trying to communicate something to me over some psychic thread.
“You could talk to me about it first,” I said quietly.
“I mean,” I replied, my voice growing louder, “You can tell me about it first. Then they won’t be the first people you tell that to. You can tell it to me.”
“Gallagher Girl, that’s not fair to you. She—she just spent the last several years trying to kill you. You don’t need to—”
“Zach,” I interrupted, “I’m clearly not good at this whole girlfriend thing, but I’m pretty sure one of the caveats is being able to talk to each other when things are hard.”
“Yeah, one of the caveats is also going on dates, but we still haven’t gotten around to that fully, have we?” His voice was lighter, and I could tell he was trying to tease, but it fizzled out between us into silence.
“Really. You can tell me.”
“Cam, we really don’t have to—”
“I love you, Zach.” Although I blurted the words out, I had never felt more sure of anything in my life. My body was aching and bruised, I had almost certainly burned off quite a bit of arm hair, and I was going to have to start putting my life together the same way my home had to be put together. I was going to have to decide on my college and what dorm I’d be in, and how many hours I’d be working at the CIA while I got my bachelor’s degree. I had to do a lot of things, but thinking about loving Zachary Goode was not one of them.
I had seen all too often how quickly life could end, how marriages and families could be torn apart, and how sisterhoods could be turned against each other. I thought about my own dad, about Amy’s dad, and the deep regret I felt for not having told him I loved him as much as I could before he died. I couldn’t change any of that, but I could change how much I told the people in my life I loved them. Starting with Zach.
He really was an excellent spy, because he only startled a little at my admission, so I took a deep breath and repeated, slower, “I love you. I know we’ve been in this mess for a while, and maybe Langley isn’t the best place to say this, but I do. I want to know everything about you, good and bad. I think you’re an amazing person, and I hate that this is the closure you’re forced to have. I know neither of us asked to be in this situation, or in this life, even, but if we are, I want you by my side. I want to be your partner in every way I can be. I trust you. I love you.”
It was cheesy, and I could feel my cheeks heating up with more than just the remnants of a several-thousand-degree fire, but I meant every word. He had given up so much to keep me safe, so much to become such an important part of my life, and although I knew lots of teenage couples said that at eighteen, I was willing to bet I wanted him to be an important part of my life forever.
The hand that wasn’t holding mine reached up to touch my face, his fingers brushing my hair away from my skin. For a second, I was worried he wouldn’t say anything—that I had said too much, or gone too far, and that maybe he didn’t feel the same way. But then his fingers moved absentmindedly to my lips, tracing over their outline as if memorizing the words I’d just said.
“I love you too, Cammie,” he said at last, and it felt like every emotion I’d ever felt had been bottled up inside of me and was starting to seep out with his reply. “I’ve never really felt…at home with anyone until I met you.” His voice was soft, almost as if he were in awe of it…of me.
When he kissed me, it was softer than almost any kiss I’d ever shared with him. It wasn’t the hard and fast ones of the last six months as we dealt with bullets and rogue terrorists, or the deep and hungry kisses stolen in late-night passageways with wandering hands. It was just…soft.
Then I became acutely aware of the fact that we were at the Central Intelligence Agency’s main headquarters with probably a billion cameras and some of the world’s best agents. Maybe making out with my boyfriend (who loved me!) wasn’t the best course of action as we waited to be interrogated for the horrific events of the previous night.
I pulled away, and his lips followed mine, trying their best not to break the kiss, but I broke away fully, my hands sliding back onto my thighs. I tried to control my breathing, as if I told boyfriends I loved them all the time (which, believe me, I don’t).
The gravitas of the moment was broken a little bit when we both came to and realized where we were and why we were there. “I mean it, Zach,” I said, “You can talk to me.”
Another run of his hand through his hair before he put an arm around my waist, looking up at the ceiling as if he were counting the tiles (276, by the way), before he started, slowly, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do now.”
I waited for him to go on, and it felt like the words were almost painful for him to say — as if he had to chew on them, slowly, to avoid choking on the unknown. “I know this isn’t over, but it feels like it’s over. We graduate in a few weeks, and then you’ll go to college, and if the CIA will still take me, after my murderous, psychopathic mother blew up a school, I guess I’ll go there, but I’m not really sure what happens after that.”
Still, I said nothing, just squeezed his hand as an I’m listening gesture, and he started to pick up speed, as if the words had to come out of him before they swallowed him alive. “These last few years, Cam…they’ve been hard. I know you, of all people, know that, and it feels silly to compare it to everything you’ve been through, but as terrible as she is, my mom was the one person I’ve had most of my life. And now I have a dad I have to talk to, who’s never been there before, and it feels like I’m starting off my life with a black mark against me.”
He looked up at me then, and although he didn’t say it, I saw the fear in his eyes at the confession, as if he had said too much or opened himself up to vulnerability. As much as he made me feel seen, I saw him, too. “You are one of the main people responsible for bringing down a nearly 200-year-old terrorist organization, Zach,” I said gently, “And you were a kid in this whole situation. It’s not your fault that your mom was the way she was. Children aren’t necessarily a reflection of their parents. You’re a good guy, Zach. They can’t hold that against you when you’re so clearly a good guy.” I tried to keep my voice gentle, afraid to scare him off.
“I’ve killed people, Cam. I’m not exactly innocent in all of this.”
“So have I,” I replied. It was true. We had all hurt and killed people, whether inadvertently or on purpose. I had blood on my hands just as much as my mother or best friends did.
He shrugged again. “And to add fuel to the fire—sorry, bad joke—there’s a part of me that…” he trailed off, closed his eyes, “That feels a little sad. She was crazy, and I hate everything she did to you, and I am glad she’s dead, I really am, Gallagher Girl. But she was my mom. For pretty much my whole life, she was all I had.”
I didn’t know what to say. How could I fault him for that? The feeling of losing a parent, no matter how terrible they were, was a pain I knew all too well. We were spies—my dad wasn’t a saint, no matter how much he fought for the good guys. It didn't make me love or miss him any less.
Even if he had lost her long before the events of last night, there was still an air of finality in knowing he’d never get to talk to his mom again. She may have sang him lullabies about murdering government officials, but she had been his mom. I couldn’t blame him for his feelings, no matter how much I hated Catherine Goode. “No one’s going to fault you for that either, Zach,” I said quietly. “And you don’t have to worry about hiding your feelings because of me or what I think. If we’re serious about this whole partner thing, then we need to be able to talk to each other.”
He nodded, and I saw then the traces of the little boy I’d seen in a dilapidated mansion in South Carolina. Maybe that’s what love was—seeing the deepest parts of someone, knowing the hard things or the things that made you uncomfortable, and loving them anyway. Goodness knows my roommates were the best examples of a love like that—they’d been with me through all of it, and loved me anyway.
“It’s just a lot to take in, I think.”
“Tell me about it. This entire night has felt like a fever dream.”
"Well, at least tell me that doesn't include the part where you told me you loved me, Cameron Morgan.” In that moment, hurt and sad and bruised as we both were, it felt a little like the first time I met him, on a D.C. elevator while he flirted with me and teased me.
We were both totally different people than we had been that day on the Mall, and even though it had been (almost literally) hell and back since meeting him, I wasn’t sure I would have changed that day or the decisions that led me to meet Zachary Goode. “No, don’t worry, no amnesia there.” I tapped my head twice before standing up suddenly and starting the pace through the cold, metal holding room we were in.
“This is taking forever,” I groaned. We had arrived at Langley 212 minutes ago (not that I was counting), and we were still waiting to be interrogated, as Gallagher Girl after Gallagher Girl passed through the metal doors to (presumably) a shower after her interrogation.
“Joe has always said the worst part of being a spy is waiting. I guess this is practice for when we start working here.”
“Speaking of,” I said, whirling around to face him again, “What are you doing this summer before we start in August?” It was bizarre to think I hadn’t asked him that already. Another item on the list of things I wanted to know about him.
Another shrug. “Townsend and I had a conversation last week, and he really wants to help me get set up with like…a lease and stuff here in D.C. I told him I wanted to wait until I knew for sure where you were going, because I’d love to be near you if you let me—”
“Come to Nebraska with me,” I blurted. Something about the day, or maybe the person I was with, had things coming out of my mouth a lot quicker and less dignified than I would have normally liked. Fourteen languages, and sometimes it felt like I never knew the perfect thing to say.
“Come to Nebraska,” I repeated, more slowly. “With me. I’d…I’d love for you to meet my grandparents. It’s not much, it really is just a farm in the middle of nowhere, but I don’t want to have to—” God, it was so embarrassing to be romantic— “I don’t want to have to miss you if I don’t have to.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again, thinking through his words, before a small smirk danced onto his lips. “So you do want to be alone with me.”
I smacked his arm. “If you think Gary Morgan is going to let his only granddaughter be alone with a boy he’s never met, you’ve got another storm coming.”
He pointed his thumb at himself. “Spy.”
“You want to be alone with me enough to risk facing the wrath of my grandfather? You really are a brave man, Zachary Goode.”
“I want to be with you all the time, Gallagher Girl.” His voice was softer that time, the playful edge gone from his voice. “And if that means spending time on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, then yeah, I want to come with you.”
“I’ll have to tell my mom. I’m sure she won’t be thrilled, but it’s not like she can say much after everything.”
Yes, Zach and I were less than four weeks away from graduating from spy school after having spent the last several years being tortured, chased, kidnapped, shot at, and on the run from an ancient terrorist organization, but my mother was the best spy in the world. Neither of us could have heard her coming, quiet as a mouse, through one of the steel doors at the opposite end of the room.
Needless to say, I was glad we weren’t touching each other like we had been earlier, because that would’ve been way worse to explain. “Just the summer plans,” I tried to say coolly, fully aware that my cheeks were red again, “I invited Zach to come with me to Nebraska.”
“That sounds like a lovely idea, sweetheart. You two can discuss that more after you finish your interrogation. I’ve been on the phone with the trustees all morning, trying to figure out how to round out the last few weeks of the school year, but for now, Langley has enough rooms to accommodate all of us while we sort something out.”
She gestured for us to follow her, and Zach stood up, catching up to me as I followed my mother, his hand slipping into mine casually. As we walked through the doors, closer to finally being debriefed and a change of clothes, I couldn’t help but feel like everything would be okay.
I had survived spy school—I could take on whatever this next chapter was.
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