Archive of Our Own ^beta

NCIS Sydney, Saturday afternoon. The team was finally relaxed after a long week — coffee, laughter, music blaring from JD’s speaker, which Blue had tried to silence for the third time.

Evie was sitting at her desk, a cup of iced coffee, when she heard that familiar voice:

“So… Evie Cooper on WaveMatch, huh?”

She bit into her straw and looked up. JD was standing by her chair, an expression that screamed enjoying the moment.

“Excuse me, huh?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Your profile picture showed up in my ‘Suggested Matches’. And by the way — that description, ‘adrenaline junkie with a taste for trouble’? Really original.”

Evie rolled her eyes. “First of all, it was an internal test. Second, you’re obviously the one on the app, so who’s ‘with a taste for trouble’ now?”

“Touché,” JD said, leaning on the edge of her desk. “But, just for the record — if you’d ‘swipe right’ on me, I’d have a great opening line.”

“Let me guess,” Evie said with a cynical grin. “‘Hey, I know where you buried the body’?”

“No. ‘Your ballistics report completely disarmed me,’” JD said.

Michelle, who had just walked by, nearly spilled her coffee on herself. “Please stop. This is a crime—not the one we’re investigating.”

JD smiled and whispered, “Admit it, Cooper, if I were your match, you’d be happy.”

Evie raised an eyebrow. “If you were my match, I’d delete the app.”

But as JD walked toward the lab, Evie opened her phone anyway.

A new notification: “Jim Dempsey has swiped right on you.”

She chuckled to herself. Then—without thinking—she tapped right.

Match!

The screen lit up, and JD’s first message appeared below:

“Let’s start with the crime of the heart. Coffee at 7?”

Evie sighed and said to herself, “This is going to end badly.”

But her fingers typed the answer anyway:

“Only if you pay, Sergeant.”