Keryl Raist's Blog, page 33
May 10, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
Chapter 85: Molly Palmer
Tim got in a little early on Valentine’s Day. Just enough so that he was the first one in the Bullpen, which was getting to be a fairly common occurrence this month.
Apparently, due to spending time with Susan, Gibbs had a tendency to show up, well, not late, but on time, which is a lot later than he usually is.
Tim’s not sure if this is serious or not. It’s only been going on for four months, but she did show for the Christmas party, so that was a good sign. And once again there is something of a spring in the bossman’s step these days. And he’s a bit mellower than usual. But that could just mean he’s getting laid on a regular basis. Or it could be budding love.
He flicked on his computer, watching Gibbs head in, first coffee of the day in his hand, looking, yep, pretty mellow, well for Gibbs.
“DiNozzo and Ziva?”
“Not here yet.”
It’s 8:02, so it’s not like they’re really late or anything.
“Good Valentine’s Day?” he asked Gibbs, who just smiled a little.
“You?”
Tim’s turn to smile. “Hasn’t gotten started yet.”
Gibbs nodded, and with that they hear the bong of the elevator, letting them know that someone else is up.
And someone else was Tony and Ziva. They’re talking about something, sounding happy, Tim didn’t pay much attention as he started going through his emails. Then he noticed Gibbs stand up, head over to Ziva’s desk, and look approvingly at something.
That got his attention. So he looked over. Ziva was showing Gibbs her new toy.
Tim’s not a knife guy. For him they’re tools. Useful tools to be sure, but tools.
But Gibbs is a knife guy, and so is Ziva, and they’re both sort of petting the gleaming expanse of razor sharp steel in her hand. And even Tim can appreciate that knife is beautiful.
He looked over at Tony and smiled. Tony leaned back in his chair, looking very smug and satisfied.
Which lasted all of four seconds because that was when Gibbs’ phone began to ring, and his phone ringing usually means one thing: Call out.
They geared up. Ziva slipping the knife into a sheath on her right ankle, and headed to a new crime scene.
Tyson’s Corner isn’t the other end of the earth or anything, but still, it’d be nice if they occasionally got something less than an hour away.
On the way Tony asked him, “Think Palmer ended up giving her a nicely wrapped IV of Pitocin?”
“I hope not. He told me that if she hasn’t gone into labor by tomorrow, they’ll induce.”
“Good.”
Then they were there, and it was time to swing into action. He got the camera, and got to work cataloguing everything.
He’d been at it for about half an hour, getting the crime scene from all angles, when the ME’s van pulled up. Tim made sure that the area the gurney would go through had been thoroughly photographed, and then began to gather the evidence to clear a path.
A moment later, as Ducky and Dornie wheeled the gurney in, it occurred to him that Dornie wheeling in the gurney was awfully out of place.
Which meant Palmer wasn’t here. And a wide, wide grin spread across his face.
“Where’s Palmer?” Tony asked, also grinning as he noticed Ducky and Dorneget with the gurney. They all basically knew the answer, but confirmation is a good thing.
“He called me at three this morning, when Breena went into labor. When I left them, they were still at home, but planning on heading to the hospital within the hour. Which is where I will be as soon as my part in this case has been taken care of, awaiting Molly’s arrival.”
And if it’s inappropriate to be walking around a crime scene with a huge grin, there was nothing anyone on Team Gibbs could do about it. Though they did all manage to rein it in when dealing with the witnesses and next-of-kin.
Even Gibbs seemed a little distracted from the case. Though not so distracted that he was incapable of handing out the headslaps when Tim and Ziva (Yes, Ziva got a headslap.) kept checking their phones for updates instead of digging through potential leads.
It was a little after eight when Tim and Tony delivered Brim, the suspect, to Gibbs. As they shut the door to interrogation, Tim’s phone began to buzz. He picked it up, looked at it, grinned very widely. Gibbs saw the look, and nodded. Nothing much they could do for right now. He and Ziva were on break the suspect duty, so Tim and Tony could head off.
“Back in two hours,” Gibbs said to them as Tim was pulling Tony away.
“Come on, Tony.”
“Molly’s here?”
“Yep. Let’s go.”
While Tony drove, Tim flashed a text to Abby. Got one back saying she’d be on the road in a few minutes. Had to wrap up some tests.
They didn’t precisely race up to the maternity ward, but they certainly weren’t walking slowly, either. Ducky was sitting, looking very pleased, somewhat rumpled, no jacket, no tie, and his sleeves rolled up, and a bit tired, along with Breena’s parents and one of her sisters in the waiting room.
“We got here as soon as we could. Ziva and Gibbs are still interrogating Brim, and Abby’s on her way,” Tim says breathlessly to Ducky.
“Calm down, Timothy, no one is going anywhere. In fact, they were all sleeping about twenty minutes ago when I came out here. So, settle down, relax, you’ll get to see her soon enough.”
“Breena and Molly are fine?” Tony asks.
“Splendid. Tired, but they came through just fine.”
“Jimmy?” Tim asked.
“Flying colors.”
“Details?” Tim asks.
“Twenty-two inches, eight pounds, seven ounces, curly brown hair, blue eyes. All fingers and toes are accounted for. And Mrs. Slater tells me she is, except for the hair, the image of Breena as a baby.”
Oh, yeah, there are other people here. He and Tony make some congratulatory small talk with the Slaters. A few minutes after that, Abby joins them. And she’s so excited she’s bouncing around, rambling about how cool the seeing the new baby is, and he’s got an arm around her, more or less anchoring her, though he kind of wants to bounce around, too.
After an hour, Jimmy came out, and he looks ecstatically happy, and completely beat. Tim didn’t even know that combination was possible, but apparently it is.
They crowd around Jimmy offering hugs and congratulations, and he leads them back to their room.
Breena’s nursing Molly, and while she doesn’t seem to think it’s odd to sit there and chat with her breast out, both Tim and Tony are looking her very intently in the eyes as they talk. And he gets why this is happening, if you want to see a brand new baby when she’s awake, pretty much the only time that happens is when she’s eating. So, he gets it. But he’s also carefully not looking.
Abby sits next to Breena on the bed, arm around her shoulders, petting Molly, getting the story of how Molly ended up on the outside, but mostly just looking at her.
Eventually Molly finishes eating, and Breena offers her to Abby, who looks a little nervous at the idea, but takes her in her arms and just stares at her.
“She’s beautiful,” Abby says quietly, her index finger lightly stroking Molly’s cheek, then leans down to kiss Breena, followed by getting up to kiss Jimmy, who is standing next to the bed, watching his wife and daughter, a very satisfied expression on his face.
Tim’s watching Abby hold her, wondering if she’s feeling the same really intense I-want-a-baby-right-now sort of thing he is.
He wraps his arms around her, chin resting on her shoulder, looking down at Molly in her arms, murky blue eyes staring up at them, and kisses her ear. “I love you,” he whispers. She smiles, turns, kisses him gently, and goes back to looking at Molly.
After a minute she says, “You want to hold her?”
“Sure.” He takes Molly in his arms. He hasn’t held a newborn in pretty much forever. Since his sister was brand new, and his grandfather handed her to him. But his body remembers how this works, and the soft, warm weight of a person so small she fits entirely in the space from his collarbone to his stomach.
“Hi,” he says as he snuggles her against his shoulder, feeling a little silly at it, but well, nothing else sprang to mind. He pats her back gently, and rests his lips on the top of her head, eyes closed. Abby kisses him again. Tony saying something about them having to get back soon starts to filter through. And how Gibbs and Ziva would be in to visit when they got back.
He opens his eyes and turns to Tony. “You wanna hold her?”
Tony looks startled. “Ummm...”
“Yeah, it’s not hard. You won’t break her.” Tim hands Molly over to Tony, and he gingerly takes her.He’s staring at her like he’s never seen a new baby before, and it occurs to Tim that maybe he hasn’t. “She’s really tiny.”
Tim smiles. “Yeah. Just pat her back a little.”
“You know, this isn’t so bad.”
Tim grinned at him and saw that Tony was right, they’d have to drive like maniacs to get back in the allotted two hours. He kisses Breena and hugs Palmer, getting ready to head off. Tony hands Molly back to Breena looking, well, honestly, pretty relieved, and they started to hurry back to the Navy Yard.
Abby walks out with them, intending to go back to Breena’s side as soon as they head off. She doesn’t have to be back anytime soon. Major Mass Spec won’t be done for at least another two hours.
“You got more trace after this batch?” Tim asks.
“Nope, that was the last of it.”
“Stay here then. I can read the print outs just fine. I’ll call you if I need extra help.”
She nods at that.
They’re in Tony’s car, heading back when he says, “So much for your quiet night in.”
Tim shrugs. Part of the reasoning behind quiet night in was because ending up on a case for Valentine’s was a real possibility. “Good thing about quiet night in, it’s not time sensitive. It’ll be just as quiet and just as night in tomorrow or the next day, or whenever. So much for Ducky’s Luprical.”
Tony nods at that. “You’re coming back here after?”
“Assuming Abby’s still here, yeah.”
Tony shakes his head a little. “You should have seen the way you were watching Abby hold Molly. You’re going to get her pregnant as soon as you possibly can, aren’t you?”
Tim smiles dryly. “She wants to be married before the baby shows up. And even if that wasn’t true, we’ve got everything booked now, and I really doubt she wants to be nine months pregnant for our wedding.”
“Good point. Breena did not look at all happy that last month.”
“Yeah. But I’m willing to bet any time after October first is fair game.”
Tony laughs.
“How about you? You didn’t look like you were about to run away screaming when you were holding her.”
“No. No panic at all. That was actually a little surprising, really. Last time I had a kid hug me I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin to get away.”
“Good. You not freaking out about babies will make Ziva happy.”
“Yeah, it will.” Tony smiles, softly, at that idea. “They say it’s different when it’s your kid.”
“Might be. I like kids, so I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re going to be a great dad.”
“I really hope so.”
“You will. You know what my dad, and your dad, and, hell, Gibbs even, never did?”
“Lots of things.”
“Put the job second. I saw you holding Abby and Molly, and I get it now. I don’t want you to go to Cybercrime, but I get it.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
It was well after one when he got back to the hospital. By that point Breena’s sister, Amy, was the only member of her family still there. Abby was keeping her company in the waiting room. He headed over and sat down next to her.
“Case wrapped?” she asked as he leaned his head against her shoulder.
“Just got to fill out the paperwork.”
“Major Mass Spec give you any troubles?”
“Nah, he’s been being nicer to me since we got engaged.”
“That’s because we had a long chat and I told him you were his new Dad and he had to behave.”
Tim looks a little bemused at that, and just says, “Okay. How’s everyone doing?”
“Sleeping right now,” Amy answered.
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Tim replied, ready to sack out next to Abby on the sofa.
“Not at all,” Amy agreed.
His eye were staring to close when Abby said, “Wait a second, I’ve got something you’ve got to see.” She fished her phone out of her purse and opened it to a photo. It’s Gibbs holding Molly, grinning in a way Tim had never seen.
“He looks really happy.”
“Yeah, he was.” Then she flicked to the next photo, Ziva with Molly. Ziva wasn’t grinning, she was staring, a look of deeply content peace on her face.
Tim smiled at that, kissed Abby, and settled down to snooze.
He was three quarters asleep when she said to him, “You know, it’s nice to go to a hospital and be happy about it.”
“Yeah.”
It was a little after six when he woke up, in need of a restroom. Both of the girls were still asleep. He got up carefully, not wanting to wake up Abby, and went looking for one.
A few minutes later, he paused at the door to the Palmers’ room and heard voices, so he knocked quietly, and then poked his head in. Normally he’d wait for an answer, but he doesn’t want either of them to get up when they don’t have to. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Breena’s voice. She’s on the bed, sitting back between Jimmy’s legs, resting against his chest, nursing Molly.
He pulls up a chair, sitting near the side of the bed, once again keeping up strict eye contact.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore, but better than I was this time yesterday and way better than this time the day before. Tired. Really happy.” She smiles at him, seeing the way he’s maintaining eye contact. “It’s okay if you look. She’s got to eat, and I’m not going to be insulted if you watch.”
His eyes flit from Breena’s to Jimmy’s, who also nods.
So he watches, smile spreading across his face. “Jimmy, don’t take this the wrong way, but, God, that’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, it is,” Jimmy says, kissing Breena’s temple.
He watches them for a while, just enjoying the quiet and being with them for this. Abby comes in a few minutes later, and sits on his lap.
“You’d think a room in the maternity ward would have more chairs,” she says, noticing that there’s a fairly short sofa, and the chair she and Tim are in, and that’s it.
“I think they’re trying to make sure we don’t get overwhelmed with visitors,” Jimmy answers. “It was a little much having all of your family all show up at once.”
Breena shrugs. “First grandbaby/niece, everyone wanted to be here all as soon as possible.”
“The only reason you didn’t get an NCIS stampede was we were on a case and Gibbs would only let us go in shifts.”
“Case wrapped up?” Jimmy asks.
“Yeah. You should have seen Dornie. He got roped into the body moving part of your job. Looked like he was going to pass out.”
Jimmy laughs at that. “Poor Dornie. Teach him to be a Probie.”
“He sends his congratulations.”
Jimmy nods.
“Is there anything we can get for you?” Abby asks after another long quiet moment of just sitting with each other.
Breena shakes her head. “Not right now. Real food might be good in a bit, though. We were talking about it before you came in, and I know neither of you are Episcopalians, but, would you be Molly’s godparents?”That took Tim by surprise, he’s not sure his agnostic/atheist self is prime godfather material. But Abby was saying yes before he had the chance to even think about it.
“Are you sure they’ll let us?” Tim asked.
“Yeah, they will. Not like being Catholic is all that different,” Breena answered.
Then Jimmy took a quiet breath, staring at Tim and Abby, then looked down at Molly, petting her face. “And, we’ve got a more serious question, too. If something happens to us, will you be Molly’s, and any other children we may have, guardians?”
And that one Tim didn’t need to think about. “Yes. If need be, your children will always have a home with us.” Abby squeezed his hand, nodding along.
Breena smiled, “Good.”
Abby caught Tim’s eye, and he knows what she’s thinking, so he nodded. “Back in August, we got our things in order, and back then we’d decided that when we have kids, we’d like you two to be their guardians, as well,” Abby said.
“We were planning on waiting to ask until we actually had some kids, but…”
“Now seems like the perfect time?” Breena finished, reaching out to squeeze Abby’s hand.
“Yeah,” Tim answers.
Jimmy smiled at the two of them, “If they ever need it, your children will always have a home with us.”
Abby took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Wow.”
Breena nodded, and Tim noticed the tears in her eyes about the same time Jimmy did.
“Hey, you all right?” Jimmy asked.
“Fine.” She sniffled a little while Jimmy wiped away her tear. “Just, love you all, so much.”
Abby stood up, kissed Breena, and then Jimmy, “Love you, too.” Then she bent down a little to kiss the top of Molly’s head. “Love you, too, little girl.”
Tim sat back in the chair, huge grin on his face, awash in the amazing contentment and joy of this moment, watching Abby snuggle with Jimmy, Breena, and Molly. He catches Jimmy’s eye, who is also looking deeply pleased to be here right now, and reaches out to squeeze his hand.
Chapter 85: Molly Palmer
Tim got in a little early on Valentine’s Day. Just enough so that he was the first one in the Bullpen, which was getting to be a fairly common occurrence this month.
Apparently, due to spending time with Susan, Gibbs had a tendency to show up, well, not late, but on time, which is a lot later than he usually is.
Tim’s not sure if this is serious or not. It’s only been going on for four months, but she did show for the Christmas party, so that was a good sign. And once again there is something of a spring in the bossman’s step these days. And he’s a bit mellower than usual. But that could just mean he’s getting laid on a regular basis. Or it could be budding love.
He flicked on his computer, watching Gibbs head in, first coffee of the day in his hand, looking, yep, pretty mellow, well for Gibbs.
“DiNozzo and Ziva?”
“Not here yet.”
It’s 8:02, so it’s not like they’re really late or anything.
“Good Valentine’s Day?” he asked Gibbs, who just smiled a little.
“You?”
Tim’s turn to smile. “Hasn’t gotten started yet.”
Gibbs nodded, and with that they hear the bong of the elevator, letting them know that someone else is up.
And someone else was Tony and Ziva. They’re talking about something, sounding happy, Tim didn’t pay much attention as he started going through his emails. Then he noticed Gibbs stand up, head over to Ziva’s desk, and look approvingly at something.
That got his attention. So he looked over. Ziva was showing Gibbs her new toy.
Tim’s not a knife guy. For him they’re tools. Useful tools to be sure, but tools.
But Gibbs is a knife guy, and so is Ziva, and they’re both sort of petting the gleaming expanse of razor sharp steel in her hand. And even Tim can appreciate that knife is beautiful.
He looked over at Tony and smiled. Tony leaned back in his chair, looking very smug and satisfied.
Which lasted all of four seconds because that was when Gibbs’ phone began to ring, and his phone ringing usually means one thing: Call out.
They geared up. Ziva slipping the knife into a sheath on her right ankle, and headed to a new crime scene.
Tyson’s Corner isn’t the other end of the earth or anything, but still, it’d be nice if they occasionally got something less than an hour away.
On the way Tony asked him, “Think Palmer ended up giving her a nicely wrapped IV of Pitocin?”
“I hope not. He told me that if she hasn’t gone into labor by tomorrow, they’ll induce.”
“Good.”
Then they were there, and it was time to swing into action. He got the camera, and got to work cataloguing everything.
He’d been at it for about half an hour, getting the crime scene from all angles, when the ME’s van pulled up. Tim made sure that the area the gurney would go through had been thoroughly photographed, and then began to gather the evidence to clear a path.
A moment later, as Ducky and Dornie wheeled the gurney in, it occurred to him that Dornie wheeling in the gurney was awfully out of place.
Which meant Palmer wasn’t here. And a wide, wide grin spread across his face.
“Where’s Palmer?” Tony asked, also grinning as he noticed Ducky and Dorneget with the gurney. They all basically knew the answer, but confirmation is a good thing.
“He called me at three this morning, when Breena went into labor. When I left them, they were still at home, but planning on heading to the hospital within the hour. Which is where I will be as soon as my part in this case has been taken care of, awaiting Molly’s arrival.”
And if it’s inappropriate to be walking around a crime scene with a huge grin, there was nothing anyone on Team Gibbs could do about it. Though they did all manage to rein it in when dealing with the witnesses and next-of-kin.
Even Gibbs seemed a little distracted from the case. Though not so distracted that he was incapable of handing out the headslaps when Tim and Ziva (Yes, Ziva got a headslap.) kept checking their phones for updates instead of digging through potential leads.
It was a little after eight when Tim and Tony delivered Brim, the suspect, to Gibbs. As they shut the door to interrogation, Tim’s phone began to buzz. He picked it up, looked at it, grinned very widely. Gibbs saw the look, and nodded. Nothing much they could do for right now. He and Ziva were on break the suspect duty, so Tim and Tony could head off.
“Back in two hours,” Gibbs said to them as Tim was pulling Tony away.
“Come on, Tony.”
“Molly’s here?”
“Yep. Let’s go.”
While Tony drove, Tim flashed a text to Abby. Got one back saying she’d be on the road in a few minutes. Had to wrap up some tests.
They didn’t precisely race up to the maternity ward, but they certainly weren’t walking slowly, either. Ducky was sitting, looking very pleased, somewhat rumpled, no jacket, no tie, and his sleeves rolled up, and a bit tired, along with Breena’s parents and one of her sisters in the waiting room.
“We got here as soon as we could. Ziva and Gibbs are still interrogating Brim, and Abby’s on her way,” Tim says breathlessly to Ducky.
“Calm down, Timothy, no one is going anywhere. In fact, they were all sleeping about twenty minutes ago when I came out here. So, settle down, relax, you’ll get to see her soon enough.”
“Breena and Molly are fine?” Tony asks.
“Splendid. Tired, but they came through just fine.”
“Jimmy?” Tim asked.
“Flying colors.”
“Details?” Tim asks.
“Twenty-two inches, eight pounds, seven ounces, curly brown hair, blue eyes. All fingers and toes are accounted for. And Mrs. Slater tells me she is, except for the hair, the image of Breena as a baby.”
Oh, yeah, there are other people here. He and Tony make some congratulatory small talk with the Slaters. A few minutes after that, Abby joins them. And she’s so excited she’s bouncing around, rambling about how cool the seeing the new baby is, and he’s got an arm around her, more or less anchoring her, though he kind of wants to bounce around, too.
After an hour, Jimmy came out, and he looks ecstatically happy, and completely beat. Tim didn’t even know that combination was possible, but apparently it is.
They crowd around Jimmy offering hugs and congratulations, and he leads them back to their room.
Breena’s nursing Molly, and while she doesn’t seem to think it’s odd to sit there and chat with her breast out, both Tim and Tony are looking her very intently in the eyes as they talk. And he gets why this is happening, if you want to see a brand new baby when she’s awake, pretty much the only time that happens is when she’s eating. So, he gets it. But he’s also carefully not looking.
Abby sits next to Breena on the bed, arm around her shoulders, petting Molly, getting the story of how Molly ended up on the outside, but mostly just looking at her.
Eventually Molly finishes eating, and Breena offers her to Abby, who looks a little nervous at the idea, but takes her in her arms and just stares at her.
“She’s beautiful,” Abby says quietly, her index finger lightly stroking Molly’s cheek, then leans down to kiss Breena, followed by getting up to kiss Jimmy, who is standing next to the bed, watching his wife and daughter, a very satisfied expression on his face.
Tim’s watching Abby hold her, wondering if she’s feeling the same really intense I-want-a-baby-right-now sort of thing he is.
He wraps his arms around her, chin resting on her shoulder, looking down at Molly in her arms, murky blue eyes staring up at them, and kisses her ear. “I love you,” he whispers. She smiles, turns, kisses him gently, and goes back to looking at Molly.
After a minute she says, “You want to hold her?”
“Sure.” He takes Molly in his arms. He hasn’t held a newborn in pretty much forever. Since his sister was brand new, and his grandfather handed her to him. But his body remembers how this works, and the soft, warm weight of a person so small she fits entirely in the space from his collarbone to his stomach.
“Hi,” he says as he snuggles her against his shoulder, feeling a little silly at it, but well, nothing else sprang to mind. He pats her back gently, and rests his lips on the top of her head, eyes closed. Abby kisses him again. Tony saying something about them having to get back soon starts to filter through. And how Gibbs and Ziva would be in to visit when they got back.
He opens his eyes and turns to Tony. “You wanna hold her?”
Tony looks startled. “Ummm...”
“Yeah, it’s not hard. You won’t break her.” Tim hands Molly over to Tony, and he gingerly takes her.He’s staring at her like he’s never seen a new baby before, and it occurs to Tim that maybe he hasn’t. “She’s really tiny.”
Tim smiles. “Yeah. Just pat her back a little.”
“You know, this isn’t so bad.”
Tim grinned at him and saw that Tony was right, they’d have to drive like maniacs to get back in the allotted two hours. He kisses Breena and hugs Palmer, getting ready to head off. Tony hands Molly back to Breena looking, well, honestly, pretty relieved, and they started to hurry back to the Navy Yard.
Abby walks out with them, intending to go back to Breena’s side as soon as they head off. She doesn’t have to be back anytime soon. Major Mass Spec won’t be done for at least another two hours.
“You got more trace after this batch?” Tim asks.
“Nope, that was the last of it.”
“Stay here then. I can read the print outs just fine. I’ll call you if I need extra help.”
She nods at that.
They’re in Tony’s car, heading back when he says, “So much for your quiet night in.”
Tim shrugs. Part of the reasoning behind quiet night in was because ending up on a case for Valentine’s was a real possibility. “Good thing about quiet night in, it’s not time sensitive. It’ll be just as quiet and just as night in tomorrow or the next day, or whenever. So much for Ducky’s Luprical.”
Tony nods at that. “You’re coming back here after?”
“Assuming Abby’s still here, yeah.”
Tony shakes his head a little. “You should have seen the way you were watching Abby hold Molly. You’re going to get her pregnant as soon as you possibly can, aren’t you?”
Tim smiles dryly. “She wants to be married before the baby shows up. And even if that wasn’t true, we’ve got everything booked now, and I really doubt she wants to be nine months pregnant for our wedding.”
“Good point. Breena did not look at all happy that last month.”
“Yeah. But I’m willing to bet any time after October first is fair game.”
Tony laughs.
“How about you? You didn’t look like you were about to run away screaming when you were holding her.”
“No. No panic at all. That was actually a little surprising, really. Last time I had a kid hug me I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin to get away.”
“Good. You not freaking out about babies will make Ziva happy.”
“Yeah, it will.” Tony smiles, softly, at that idea. “They say it’s different when it’s your kid.”
“Might be. I like kids, so I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re going to be a great dad.”
“I really hope so.”
“You will. You know what my dad, and your dad, and, hell, Gibbs even, never did?”
“Lots of things.”
“Put the job second. I saw you holding Abby and Molly, and I get it now. I don’t want you to go to Cybercrime, but I get it.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
It was well after one when he got back to the hospital. By that point Breena’s sister, Amy, was the only member of her family still there. Abby was keeping her company in the waiting room. He headed over and sat down next to her.
“Case wrapped?” she asked as he leaned his head against her shoulder.
“Just got to fill out the paperwork.”
“Major Mass Spec give you any troubles?”
“Nah, he’s been being nicer to me since we got engaged.”
“That’s because we had a long chat and I told him you were his new Dad and he had to behave.”
Tim looks a little bemused at that, and just says, “Okay. How’s everyone doing?”
“Sleeping right now,” Amy answered.
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Tim replied, ready to sack out next to Abby on the sofa.
“Not at all,” Amy agreed.
His eye were staring to close when Abby said, “Wait a second, I’ve got something you’ve got to see.” She fished her phone out of her purse and opened it to a photo. It’s Gibbs holding Molly, grinning in a way Tim had never seen.
“He looks really happy.”
“Yeah, he was.” Then she flicked to the next photo, Ziva with Molly. Ziva wasn’t grinning, she was staring, a look of deeply content peace on her face.
Tim smiled at that, kissed Abby, and settled down to snooze.
He was three quarters asleep when she said to him, “You know, it’s nice to go to a hospital and be happy about it.”
“Yeah.”
It was a little after six when he woke up, in need of a restroom. Both of the girls were still asleep. He got up carefully, not wanting to wake up Abby, and went looking for one.
A few minutes later, he paused at the door to the Palmers’ room and heard voices, so he knocked quietly, and then poked his head in. Normally he’d wait for an answer, but he doesn’t want either of them to get up when they don’t have to. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Breena’s voice. She’s on the bed, sitting back between Jimmy’s legs, resting against his chest, nursing Molly.
He pulls up a chair, sitting near the side of the bed, once again keeping up strict eye contact.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore, but better than I was this time yesterday and way better than this time the day before. Tired. Really happy.” She smiles at him, seeing the way he’s maintaining eye contact. “It’s okay if you look. She’s got to eat, and I’m not going to be insulted if you watch.”
His eyes flit from Breena’s to Jimmy’s, who also nods.
So he watches, smile spreading across his face. “Jimmy, don’t take this the wrong way, but, God, that’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, it is,” Jimmy says, kissing Breena’s temple.
He watches them for a while, just enjoying the quiet and being with them for this. Abby comes in a few minutes later, and sits on his lap.
“You’d think a room in the maternity ward would have more chairs,” she says, noticing that there’s a fairly short sofa, and the chair she and Tim are in, and that’s it.
“I think they’re trying to make sure we don’t get overwhelmed with visitors,” Jimmy answers. “It was a little much having all of your family all show up at once.”
Breena shrugs. “First grandbaby/niece, everyone wanted to be here all as soon as possible.”
“The only reason you didn’t get an NCIS stampede was we were on a case and Gibbs would only let us go in shifts.”
“Case wrapped up?” Jimmy asks.
“Yeah. You should have seen Dornie. He got roped into the body moving part of your job. Looked like he was going to pass out.”
Jimmy laughs at that. “Poor Dornie. Teach him to be a Probie.”
“He sends his congratulations.”
Jimmy nods.
“Is there anything we can get for you?” Abby asks after another long quiet moment of just sitting with each other.
Breena shakes her head. “Not right now. Real food might be good in a bit, though. We were talking about it before you came in, and I know neither of you are Episcopalians, but, would you be Molly’s godparents?”That took Tim by surprise, he’s not sure his agnostic/atheist self is prime godfather material. But Abby was saying yes before he had the chance to even think about it.
“Are you sure they’ll let us?” Tim asked.
“Yeah, they will. Not like being Catholic is all that different,” Breena answered.
Then Jimmy took a quiet breath, staring at Tim and Abby, then looked down at Molly, petting her face. “And, we’ve got a more serious question, too. If something happens to us, will you be Molly’s, and any other children we may have, guardians?”
And that one Tim didn’t need to think about. “Yes. If need be, your children will always have a home with us.” Abby squeezed his hand, nodding along.
Breena smiled, “Good.”
Abby caught Tim’s eye, and he knows what she’s thinking, so he nodded. “Back in August, we got our things in order, and back then we’d decided that when we have kids, we’d like you two to be their guardians, as well,” Abby said.
“We were planning on waiting to ask until we actually had some kids, but…”
“Now seems like the perfect time?” Breena finished, reaching out to squeeze Abby’s hand.
“Yeah,” Tim answers.
Jimmy smiled at the two of them, “If they ever need it, your children will always have a home with us.”
Abby took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Wow.”
Breena nodded, and Tim noticed the tears in her eyes about the same time Jimmy did.
“Hey, you all right?” Jimmy asked.
“Fine.” She sniffled a little while Jimmy wiped away her tear. “Just, love you all, so much.”
Abby stood up, kissed Breena, and then Jimmy, “Love you, too.” Then she bent down a little to kiss the top of Molly’s head. “Love you, too, little girl.”
Tim sat back in the chair, huge grin on his face, awash in the amazing contentment and joy of this moment, watching Abby snuggle with Jimmy, Breena, and Molly. He catches Jimmy’s eye, who is also looking deeply pleased to be here right now, and reaches out to squeeze his hand.
May 9, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
84: A Conversation Among Men
“Have you figured it out, yet?” Palmer asked Tony as he sat down with his lunch.
Tony looked at Jimmy and then at Tim. “Okay, you two have to quit starting the conversation without me and then expecting me to know what you’re talking about.”
“Hey, I don’t know what he’s talking about, either,” Tim said, biting into a cucumber stick. The five of them were grabbing a quick, guys only, lunch. They do that about once a month, and found they liked it.
Gibbs showed up a second later. “Valentine’s day. What are you getting Ziva? Right, Palmer?”
“Exactly.” Jimmy shot Tony the he knew what was going on, and he wasn’t even here for the first question look.
“It’s just flat out creepy when you do that, Boss,” Tony said.
“What is ‘creepy’, Anthony?” Ducky added as he sat down with his lunch.
“The way he just shows up and immediately knows what is going on.”
Tim thought about that for a moment, and then something clicks. Gibbs knows sign language. “You read lips!”
Gibbs smiled a little. “Ya think, McGee?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Tony shook his head. “Details, McGee. You’ve been at this more than ten years now, and you’re still missing things. He came up behind Palmer.”
“Window behind you, Tony, the way the sun’s hitting it is making it reflective.”
Gibbs smiled, wider this time, looking deeply satisfied, while Tony turned around to check.
“So, have you figured it out?” Tim asked Tony.
“No. Did I mention I hate Valentine’s Day?”
“By my count, seventy-four million times since Christmas,” Jimmy replied.
“Well, it keeps getting closer, and I still don’t know what to get her. Christmas was hard enough, and now I’ve got come up with something romantic and meaningful, and I’ve got to do it in the shadow of this dork who went and designed his own tattoo for his first Valentine’s Day with Abby.”
“Ziva doesn’t like tattoos,” Tim added.
“No but Abby does, and I’ll have to design my own custom throwing knives… Oh.”
“And DiNozzo’s out of the dog house,” Gibbs said. “What’re you doing Palmer?”
“Hopefully walking around with a new baby instead of a very crabby, insanely pregnant wife. If Molly’s still not out, I have no idea what I’m going to do because by that point she’ll be begging me for Pitocin, and nothing short of that is going to make her happy. What did you do when Shannon was insanely pregnant?”Gibbs shrugged. “Wasn’t Valentine’s Day when she was at term.”
“Thank you, that was remarkably useful. How about you, Tim?”
He winked. “Quiet night in.”
Jimmy just stared at him. “Sex. You’re giving her sex? You give her sex all the time.” Then he seemed to notice the other three are there. “Which we will talk about later.”
Tim nodded, and then saw the other three are staring at him, looking curious. “Not just sex. And we can leave it at that. Gibbs, what are you doing?”
“Working.”
“It’s ten days away, how can you possibly know that?” Tony asked.
Gibbs just stared at him.
Tony thought about it some more. “Are you ‘working’ or is this like your own personal Halloween?”
Gibbs just smiled. Then he said, “Duck?”
“Vivian and I have tickets to Roman-style Luprical festival at the Smithsonian.”
Tim actually knew about that one and said, “Really? Leather whips, running through the crowds naked, orgies, ripping apart goats with your bare hands to eat the raw flesh while drunk?”
“Well, you certainly wouldn’t want to do that sober, now would you? However, Timothy, you are thinking of a Bacchanal, and that will only happen if things go especially well.” And with that Ducky grinned, and then went into a dissertation on the Festival of Luprical, how it was the forerunner of the modern Valentine’s Day, and that yes, there were whips, but they were made of flowers, and the idea was to lightly tap the ladies with them as a blessing of fertility.
“And will you be properly togaed for this?” Palmer asked.
“Of course, Mr. Palmer, one does not attend Luprical in a suit.”
“Quiet night in?” Palmer asks as they head back toward work, the others well ahead.
“Pitocin?” Tim counters with.
“Fine. Mix tape. I recorded some covers of her favorite songs.”
Tim scrunches his eyebrows together. “What are you, seventeen?”
“No, I don’t mean I went on Amazon and bought some of her favorite songs, I mean I recorded them, myself.”
“Oh, that’s right, you sing.”
“Yeah, and I’m damn good at it, too.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
“Thanks. So, what does quiet night in translate into.”
“Japanese calligraphy brush, dark chocolate, and a poem I’ve been working on for three weeks now.”
“You’re going to write it on her?”
“That’s the idea. Tell it to her. Lick it off her. It’ll be good.”
Palmer nods, approving.
“So, how is Breena doing?”
“She hurts all over, has to pee every ten minutes, is so swollen you can leave finger prints in her calves, and can’t sleep. She’s miserable.”
“Maybe it is time to write that script.”
“I’m so tempted. Believe me, but her doc says this is normal, and if she does go past the 15th they’ll induce.”
“Think she’d like some extra company? We’re not busy tonight.”
“I’ll ask when I get home. Sometimes she’s going stir crazy and wants to see people. Sometimes she just wants to rest.”
“Let us know.”
“I will, back to the paperwork,” Jimmy says as he hits the down elevator button.
“Yep,” Tim agrees, hitting the up one.
84: A Conversation Among Men
“Have you figured it out, yet?” Palmer asked Tony as he sat down with his lunch.
Tony looked at Jimmy and then at Tim. “Okay, you two have to quit starting the conversation without me and then expecting me to know what you’re talking about.”
“Hey, I don’t know what he’s talking about, either,” Tim said, biting into a cucumber stick. The five of them were grabbing a quick, guys only, lunch. They do that about once a month, and found they liked it.
Gibbs showed up a second later. “Valentine’s day. What are you getting Ziva? Right, Palmer?”
“Exactly.” Jimmy shot Tony the he knew what was going on, and he wasn’t even here for the first question look.
“It’s just flat out creepy when you do that, Boss,” Tony said.
“What is ‘creepy’, Anthony?” Ducky added as he sat down with his lunch.
“The way he just shows up and immediately knows what is going on.”
Tim thought about that for a moment, and then something clicks. Gibbs knows sign language. “You read lips!”
Gibbs smiled a little. “Ya think, McGee?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Tony shook his head. “Details, McGee. You’ve been at this more than ten years now, and you’re still missing things. He came up behind Palmer.”
“Window behind you, Tony, the way the sun’s hitting it is making it reflective.”
Gibbs smiled, wider this time, looking deeply satisfied, while Tony turned around to check.
“So, have you figured it out?” Tim asked Tony.
“No. Did I mention I hate Valentine’s Day?”
“By my count, seventy-four million times since Christmas,” Jimmy replied.
“Well, it keeps getting closer, and I still don’t know what to get her. Christmas was hard enough, and now I’ve got come up with something romantic and meaningful, and I’ve got to do it in the shadow of this dork who went and designed his own tattoo for his first Valentine’s Day with Abby.”
“Ziva doesn’t like tattoos,” Tim added.
“No but Abby does, and I’ll have to design my own custom throwing knives… Oh.”
“And DiNozzo’s out of the dog house,” Gibbs said. “What’re you doing Palmer?”
“Hopefully walking around with a new baby instead of a very crabby, insanely pregnant wife. If Molly’s still not out, I have no idea what I’m going to do because by that point she’ll be begging me for Pitocin, and nothing short of that is going to make her happy. What did you do when Shannon was insanely pregnant?”Gibbs shrugged. “Wasn’t Valentine’s Day when she was at term.”
“Thank you, that was remarkably useful. How about you, Tim?”
He winked. “Quiet night in.”
Jimmy just stared at him. “Sex. You’re giving her sex? You give her sex all the time.” Then he seemed to notice the other three are there. “Which we will talk about later.”
Tim nodded, and then saw the other three are staring at him, looking curious. “Not just sex. And we can leave it at that. Gibbs, what are you doing?”
“Working.”
“It’s ten days away, how can you possibly know that?” Tony asked.
Gibbs just stared at him.
Tony thought about it some more. “Are you ‘working’ or is this like your own personal Halloween?”
Gibbs just smiled. Then he said, “Duck?”
“Vivian and I have tickets to Roman-style Luprical festival at the Smithsonian.”
Tim actually knew about that one and said, “Really? Leather whips, running through the crowds naked, orgies, ripping apart goats with your bare hands to eat the raw flesh while drunk?”
“Well, you certainly wouldn’t want to do that sober, now would you? However, Timothy, you are thinking of a Bacchanal, and that will only happen if things go especially well.” And with that Ducky grinned, and then went into a dissertation on the Festival of Luprical, how it was the forerunner of the modern Valentine’s Day, and that yes, there were whips, but they were made of flowers, and the idea was to lightly tap the ladies with them as a blessing of fertility.
“And will you be properly togaed for this?” Palmer asked.
“Of course, Mr. Palmer, one does not attend Luprical in a suit.”
“Quiet night in?” Palmer asks as they head back toward work, the others well ahead.
“Pitocin?” Tim counters with.
“Fine. Mix tape. I recorded some covers of her favorite songs.”
Tim scrunches his eyebrows together. “What are you, seventeen?”
“No, I don’t mean I went on Amazon and bought some of her favorite songs, I mean I recorded them, myself.”
“Oh, that’s right, you sing.”
“Yeah, and I’m damn good at it, too.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
“Thanks. So, what does quiet night in translate into.”
“Japanese calligraphy brush, dark chocolate, and a poem I’ve been working on for three weeks now.”
“You’re going to write it on her?”
“That’s the idea. Tell it to her. Lick it off her. It’ll be good.”
Palmer nods, approving.
“So, how is Breena doing?”
“She hurts all over, has to pee every ten minutes, is so swollen you can leave finger prints in her calves, and can’t sleep. She’s miserable.”
“Maybe it is time to write that script.”
“I’m so tempted. Believe me, but her doc says this is normal, and if she does go past the 15th they’ll induce.”
“Think she’d like some extra company? We’re not busy tonight.”
“I’ll ask when I get home. Sometimes she’s going stir crazy and wants to see people. Sometimes she just wants to rest.”
“Let us know.”
“I will, back to the paperwork,” Jimmy says as he hits the down elevator button.
“Yep,” Tim agrees, hitting the up one.
May 8, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
Chapter 83. The Difference A Year Makes
It’s amazing the difference a year makes.
Some things have stayed the same. Andes mint chip cookies and jambalaya, check. Though this year they decided to make something together, something to start their own traditions with.
And while it’s true that McGee loves sugar, he’s been doing a very good job of staying away from it, so they decided something to munch on that’s vaguely good for them might be a plan. He’d gotten down to 190 and was thinking 185 to 180 was probably where he wanted to be. So, one plate of cookies was enough, time for something healthy to go with it.
So this year, next to the plate of cookies and the casserole dish of jambalaya was a bowl of roasted root veggies with curry spices. It was tasty, took almost no skill to make, and meant that for once Gibbs didn’t make every single vegetable dish. (Not to disparage Gibbs’ cooking skills, but while the man is handy with a fire and a steak, or an oven and turkey, he has a tendency to cook veggies well done.)
And like last year the house was bursting at the seams with happy people. Even more this year than last, Vance and his kids, and Gibbs’ “friend” Susan have joined the party. As Tim learned, if you referred to Susan as anything other than a “friend” you get the Gibbs stare of death, and depending on what other than friend you referred to her as, a headslap, too.
She’s the sort of “friend” who makes Gibbs smile. (When he thinks no one is looking.)
And once again, DiNozzo Sr. has decked the place out with every sprig of mistletoe in the greater DC area.
This year, as Tim’s leaned against the door jam between the foyer and living room, and Abby walked by, and his hand snaked out to grab hers, the kiss was soft and wet and open. He enjoyed not having to pretend it’s just friendly.
And this year, he wasn’t the only one to steal a kiss (or five) under the mistletoe. Tony and Ziva certainly took advantage of the license offered by the dangling evergreen. And so did Gibbs. When Susan was standing next to the mantle, talking with LJ and Jackson about something, under a sprig of mistletoe, he handed her a cup of eggnog and leaned in and kissed her full on the lips, soft and sweet. Much to the joy of both his father and father’s best friend.
And, of course, this year Fornell is glaring at Tim, again, but, and this was nowhere on the list of things he’d ever thought could piss the man off, it’s because he and Abby are engaged.
Well, sort of, it’s not the engagement so much as Emily reacting to Tim and Abby.
Tim was sitting on the sofa, Abby between his legs, leaning against his chest, (It’s not so much about being physically affectionate, because that was a bit more snuggly than they usually are with outsiders present, as it was the lack of seats and by sharing a space they both get to sit, without hogging too much of the sofa.) talking wedding plans with Emily, Kayla, and Amira. And between the ring, and the idea of a costume wedding, all three of them were staring at him like he’s pretty awesome.
He noticed a somewhat similar look of wary fear on Vance’s face, too, though he isn’t outright glaring at Tim. And if Mike Franks was still around, he’d probably be offering a similar look on Amira’s behalf.
See, the thing about being the father of a young teenage girl, is that, when said young teenage girls are at a party hanging out with an engaged woman and her fiancée talking about weddings, is that it gives teenage girls ideas.
The sorts of ideas that their fathers really wish they weren’t having.
And it only gets worse when Jimmy and Breena head over, and start talking weddings and babies. And if there’s anyone in this house doting over his significant other more than Tim was doting on Abby, it’s Jimmy with Breena.
So, it’s not anything specific to Tim or Palmer. Tony’d be getting that same why the hell would you do this to me glare from Fornell if Ziva was pregnant or talking wedding plans.
But she wasn’t. And Abby and Breena were.
And Emily was a pretty hardcore steampunk fan, so she’s really, really into the whole wedding planning idea and hanging on Abby’s every word, and they were sketching out a costume for Fornell, talking about him as an aeronaut, with Breena sitting right nearby adding extra help with the detailing. Finally as they were getting his hat and gloves designed, Fornell decided it was time to put a stop to this, because glaring at McGee, who just kept grinning at him, was not having the desired effect, so he headed over and said, “I’m sure Abby and McGee—“
Which is as far as he got in that sentence before Abby looked up at him, grinning and said, “Would be completely thrilled to have someone so into steampunk at our wedding. You’re on the invite list anyway, so bringing along Emily isn’t a problem.”
Fornell looked really puzzled. Gibbs mentioned something about it being a family only wedding, so he did not in any way expect to be attending this thing.
“I’m on the invite list?”
“Sure, Tobias. You and Emily, and maybe that boyfriend of hers—“ Emily blushed scarlet and shoved Abby gently. “—who apparently I’m not supposed to mention. And any date you might want to bring, too. You’ll come, right? You’re not going to leave Gibbs all on his own, are you?”
And faced with Abby and Emily, both beaming at him with intense come to the wedding vibes, Fornell found himself nodding.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled Gibbs to the side and said, “What the hell is steampunk, and why do I have to get dressed up for it?”
Gibbs shrugged. “Some sort of old west-fantasy thing. And you have to get dressed up because I have to get dressed up, and we’re both doing it because girls we love want us to.”
“I should have shot that little punk last year.”
Gibbs just looked at Fornell. That’s my son-in-law comes through loud and clear.
“Fine. This better not be stupid.”
The looked morphed to Of course it’ll be stupid, but we’ll do it anyway because we love them.
Fornell shook his head.
Gibbs looked over, Breena and Jimmy, Abby and Tim, Amira, Kayla, and Emily all sitting on the sofa or coffee table, talking. “They’re talking babies now.”
“Oh God. I’m telling you Jethro, this is going to kill me.”
“I hear it only gets worse from here.”
“Thank you so very much.”
“Go glare at Palmer, might make you feel better.”
“I suppose I could use this as an object lesson on how it’s supposed to be done: school, job, married, then kids.”
“Might work for that. They’re good men, Tobias. Probably not a bad idea to have her see how good men treat women they love, let alone what a functional marriage looks like.”
Good points. She doesn’t get to see that his home, or, since the reason he’s got her two Christmasses in a row is the impending divorce of Diane and Sterling, her mom’s house, either. “I know. It was just easier when she was into Raspberry Rumtart, My Little Ponies, and kittens.”
Gibbs smiled a little, and Fornell realized how much his friend would have liked to have gotten to the boyfriends and fashion part of this. Tobias squeezed Gibbs shoulder quickly, and said, “They’ve already got a costume sketched out for me for this thing.”
“At least it’s Steampunk. The first idea Abby and Palmer—“
Fornell looked away from Emily to stare at Gibbs in horror. “Abby and Palmer?”
“He’s her... man of honor.”
Fornell sighed. Even with a pregnant wife on his lap, the look on his face was sincerely questioning Jimmy’s heterosexuality.
Gibbs nodded. His look answered with a sort of wistfulness for when men knew how to act like men. It’s not that he doesn’t think Jimmy’s straight (or cares one way or the other). After Lee, everyone at NCIS knows that about Jimmy, it’s just… Somehow Jimmy got to be thirty-six without anyone ever mentioning to him that there were certain things men don’t do, and being the maid of honor is one of those things. But Jimmy didn’t get that memo, and he and Abby are having a blast with wedding planning, so it’s Gibbs’ job not to roll his eyes too much.
“Their first idea was renfaire.”
“What’s that?” Fornell asked.
“The sort of thing we’d have to wear tights for.”
Fornell shuddered.
They stayed late to help Gibbs tidy up. Well, that was the official reason anyway. Both Abby and Tim were curious to get to know Susan better, and sticking around after the rest of the crowd left gave them a shot to do so.
They’re in the kitchen. Gibbs loading his dishwasher. Tim’s got drying duty. Susan’s washing up, and Abby, who really knows her way around Gibbs kitchen, is putting the dried pots and pans away.
Tim’s not really talking, just watching. Gibbs at home with a girlfriend is worth watching. Gibbs gets finished with the dishwasher, closes it up, takes two steps to the left, and gently strokes the back of his fingers down Susan’s neck, and smiles at her.
She smiles back, handing Tim another pot, turning her face into a waiting kiss.
As Tim rubs the towel over the sauce pot, he realizes one more change between this year and the last. Last year, this wouldn’t have happened. Well, maybe in front of Abby, this could have happened, but not in front of him.
Last year, he was somewhere in that liminal stage between friend/family/underling. And both he and Gibbs felt those walls, knew where they were, and made sure they stayed in place.
This year, watching the almost goofy smile on Gibbs’s face as Susan teases him a little, he knows those walls are gone. He’s home, with his wife, and the dad he’s always wanted, at ease, and happy.
He hugs Susan as they head out, which felt pretty natural. And he hugged Gibbs too, who looked a little surprised at it, but seemed to get what he meant by it, giving him a little squeeze before they headed into the cold to go to their own home.
And tomorrow there’ll be work, and Gibbs’ll be the boss and they’ll catch bad guys, and those walls will be back, because when they’re working they’re useful. But this space outside of NCIS is real now, and forever, and it feels awfully good.
Chapter 83. The Difference A Year Makes
It’s amazing the difference a year makes.
Some things have stayed the same. Andes mint chip cookies and jambalaya, check. Though this year they decided to make something together, something to start their own traditions with.
And while it’s true that McGee loves sugar, he’s been doing a very good job of staying away from it, so they decided something to munch on that’s vaguely good for them might be a plan. He’d gotten down to 190 and was thinking 185 to 180 was probably where he wanted to be. So, one plate of cookies was enough, time for something healthy to go with it.
So this year, next to the plate of cookies and the casserole dish of jambalaya was a bowl of roasted root veggies with curry spices. It was tasty, took almost no skill to make, and meant that for once Gibbs didn’t make every single vegetable dish. (Not to disparage Gibbs’ cooking skills, but while the man is handy with a fire and a steak, or an oven and turkey, he has a tendency to cook veggies well done.)
And like last year the house was bursting at the seams with happy people. Even more this year than last, Vance and his kids, and Gibbs’ “friend” Susan have joined the party. As Tim learned, if you referred to Susan as anything other than a “friend” you get the Gibbs stare of death, and depending on what other than friend you referred to her as, a headslap, too.
She’s the sort of “friend” who makes Gibbs smile. (When he thinks no one is looking.)
And once again, DiNozzo Sr. has decked the place out with every sprig of mistletoe in the greater DC area.
This year, as Tim’s leaned against the door jam between the foyer and living room, and Abby walked by, and his hand snaked out to grab hers, the kiss was soft and wet and open. He enjoyed not having to pretend it’s just friendly.
And this year, he wasn’t the only one to steal a kiss (or five) under the mistletoe. Tony and Ziva certainly took advantage of the license offered by the dangling evergreen. And so did Gibbs. When Susan was standing next to the mantle, talking with LJ and Jackson about something, under a sprig of mistletoe, he handed her a cup of eggnog and leaned in and kissed her full on the lips, soft and sweet. Much to the joy of both his father and father’s best friend.
And, of course, this year Fornell is glaring at Tim, again, but, and this was nowhere on the list of things he’d ever thought could piss the man off, it’s because he and Abby are engaged.
Well, sort of, it’s not the engagement so much as Emily reacting to Tim and Abby.
Tim was sitting on the sofa, Abby between his legs, leaning against his chest, (It’s not so much about being physically affectionate, because that was a bit more snuggly than they usually are with outsiders present, as it was the lack of seats and by sharing a space they both get to sit, without hogging too much of the sofa.) talking wedding plans with Emily, Kayla, and Amira. And between the ring, and the idea of a costume wedding, all three of them were staring at him like he’s pretty awesome.
He noticed a somewhat similar look of wary fear on Vance’s face, too, though he isn’t outright glaring at Tim. And if Mike Franks was still around, he’d probably be offering a similar look on Amira’s behalf.
See, the thing about being the father of a young teenage girl, is that, when said young teenage girls are at a party hanging out with an engaged woman and her fiancée talking about weddings, is that it gives teenage girls ideas.
The sorts of ideas that their fathers really wish they weren’t having.
And it only gets worse when Jimmy and Breena head over, and start talking weddings and babies. And if there’s anyone in this house doting over his significant other more than Tim was doting on Abby, it’s Jimmy with Breena.
So, it’s not anything specific to Tim or Palmer. Tony’d be getting that same why the hell would you do this to me glare from Fornell if Ziva was pregnant or talking wedding plans.
But she wasn’t. And Abby and Breena were.
And Emily was a pretty hardcore steampunk fan, so she’s really, really into the whole wedding planning idea and hanging on Abby’s every word, and they were sketching out a costume for Fornell, talking about him as an aeronaut, with Breena sitting right nearby adding extra help with the detailing. Finally as they were getting his hat and gloves designed, Fornell decided it was time to put a stop to this, because glaring at McGee, who just kept grinning at him, was not having the desired effect, so he headed over and said, “I’m sure Abby and McGee—“
Which is as far as he got in that sentence before Abby looked up at him, grinning and said, “Would be completely thrilled to have someone so into steampunk at our wedding. You’re on the invite list anyway, so bringing along Emily isn’t a problem.”
Fornell looked really puzzled. Gibbs mentioned something about it being a family only wedding, so he did not in any way expect to be attending this thing.
“I’m on the invite list?”
“Sure, Tobias. You and Emily, and maybe that boyfriend of hers—“ Emily blushed scarlet and shoved Abby gently. “—who apparently I’m not supposed to mention. And any date you might want to bring, too. You’ll come, right? You’re not going to leave Gibbs all on his own, are you?”
And faced with Abby and Emily, both beaming at him with intense come to the wedding vibes, Fornell found himself nodding.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled Gibbs to the side and said, “What the hell is steampunk, and why do I have to get dressed up for it?”
Gibbs shrugged. “Some sort of old west-fantasy thing. And you have to get dressed up because I have to get dressed up, and we’re both doing it because girls we love want us to.”
“I should have shot that little punk last year.”
Gibbs just looked at Fornell. That’s my son-in-law comes through loud and clear.
“Fine. This better not be stupid.”
The looked morphed to Of course it’ll be stupid, but we’ll do it anyway because we love them.
Fornell shook his head.
Gibbs looked over, Breena and Jimmy, Abby and Tim, Amira, Kayla, and Emily all sitting on the sofa or coffee table, talking. “They’re talking babies now.”
“Oh God. I’m telling you Jethro, this is going to kill me.”
“I hear it only gets worse from here.”
“Thank you so very much.”
“Go glare at Palmer, might make you feel better.”
“I suppose I could use this as an object lesson on how it’s supposed to be done: school, job, married, then kids.”
“Might work for that. They’re good men, Tobias. Probably not a bad idea to have her see how good men treat women they love, let alone what a functional marriage looks like.”
Good points. She doesn’t get to see that his home, or, since the reason he’s got her two Christmasses in a row is the impending divorce of Diane and Sterling, her mom’s house, either. “I know. It was just easier when she was into Raspberry Rumtart, My Little Ponies, and kittens.”
Gibbs smiled a little, and Fornell realized how much his friend would have liked to have gotten to the boyfriends and fashion part of this. Tobias squeezed Gibbs shoulder quickly, and said, “They’ve already got a costume sketched out for me for this thing.”
“At least it’s Steampunk. The first idea Abby and Palmer—“
Fornell looked away from Emily to stare at Gibbs in horror. “Abby and Palmer?”
“He’s her... man of honor.”
Fornell sighed. Even with a pregnant wife on his lap, the look on his face was sincerely questioning Jimmy’s heterosexuality.
Gibbs nodded. His look answered with a sort of wistfulness for when men knew how to act like men. It’s not that he doesn’t think Jimmy’s straight (or cares one way or the other). After Lee, everyone at NCIS knows that about Jimmy, it’s just… Somehow Jimmy got to be thirty-six without anyone ever mentioning to him that there were certain things men don’t do, and being the maid of honor is one of those things. But Jimmy didn’t get that memo, and he and Abby are having a blast with wedding planning, so it’s Gibbs’ job not to roll his eyes too much.
“Their first idea was renfaire.”
“What’s that?” Fornell asked.
“The sort of thing we’d have to wear tights for.”
Fornell shuddered.
They stayed late to help Gibbs tidy up. Well, that was the official reason anyway. Both Abby and Tim were curious to get to know Susan better, and sticking around after the rest of the crowd left gave them a shot to do so.
They’re in the kitchen. Gibbs loading his dishwasher. Tim’s got drying duty. Susan’s washing up, and Abby, who really knows her way around Gibbs kitchen, is putting the dried pots and pans away.
Tim’s not really talking, just watching. Gibbs at home with a girlfriend is worth watching. Gibbs gets finished with the dishwasher, closes it up, takes two steps to the left, and gently strokes the back of his fingers down Susan’s neck, and smiles at her.
She smiles back, handing Tim another pot, turning her face into a waiting kiss.
As Tim rubs the towel over the sauce pot, he realizes one more change between this year and the last. Last year, this wouldn’t have happened. Well, maybe in front of Abby, this could have happened, but not in front of him.
Last year, he was somewhere in that liminal stage between friend/family/underling. And both he and Gibbs felt those walls, knew where they were, and made sure they stayed in place.
This year, watching the almost goofy smile on Gibbs’s face as Susan teases him a little, he knows those walls are gone. He’s home, with his wife, and the dad he’s always wanted, at ease, and happy.
He hugs Susan as they head out, which felt pretty natural. And he hugged Gibbs too, who looked a little surprised at it, but seemed to get what he meant by it, giving him a little squeeze before they headed into the cold to go to their own home.
And tomorrow there’ll be work, and Gibbs’ll be the boss and they’ll catch bad guys, and those walls will be back, because when they’re working they’re useful. But this space outside of NCIS is real now, and forever, and it feels awfully good.
May 7, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
Chapter 80: Shabbos
December 2013 started a new Team Gibbs family tradition. Shabbos at Ziva’s.
“Once I had a home filled with the sound of laughing children.” Ziva remembers her father saying that, or something close to it. Once…
She’s the last of the Davids now.
And she has not done this, not in a home filled with ease and love, since she was a child. Since her Safta lit the candles, and her father laid his hands on each of them blessed them before the meal, and she and Tavi and Ari were young enough to laugh and play between prayers.
And it is true, there are no laughing children in this home, not yet. Though there is ease and love here. And soon, ‘round about Valentine’s Day, Molly Palmer will join the festivities. And if a little McGee is more than two years off, she’d be stunned. In the years to come, there will be children here.
She looks at Tony as she blesses the bread, breaking the loaf, and prays that one day there’ll be a small DiNozzo to pass these traditions onto. A little boy or girl to make Challah with, to teach the prayers, and to bless.
Ducky asks her about each prayer, and what they mean.
And Gibbs smiles at her as she answers.
McGee and Abby watch. Abby seeming to appreciate the faith of this, and Tim getting into the celebration, asking about the day of rest bit, intrigued by the idea of a faith that celebrates its holiest day by praying, visiting with friend and family, studying, and naps.
Tony makes a joke about naps and sex being part of the celebration, and that gets a smile out of everyone.
Jimmy’s all in favor of the singing part, though the rest of the crew seems wary. And sure, he’s bad at Hebrew, but he and Ziva produce a decent sounding two part harmony. After a few verses, Ducky joins in, and if there’s anything that sounds odder than Scottish accented Hebrew, Ziva’s never heard it, but she certainly appreciates the effort. Breena adds her voice after that, a soft soprano to go with Ziva’s alto, and yes, it’s not the Sabbath of her childhood, but it’s awfully sweet, and it’s a good first step into a new life that remembers and honors the old, but moves forward into the future without fear.
As they were driving home, Tim said to Abby, “I really liked that.”
“Yeah, it was fun.”
Tim came away from Sabbath dinner thinking that the Jews really knew how to celebrate their faith. Dinner, really good dinner, at home, with all of your best friends and family followed by a day of napping, studying, and sex struck him as a really civilized way to tell God thanks for being alive.
Or at least, he certainly preferred it to Mass. Maybe it was because the rituals were new and different. Maybe it was because it was at home, and done with family and friends as opposed to a collection of near strangers. Maybe because the specter of his father was in no way attached to this. Maybe it was because he never quite hooked into any church the way he was supposed to. Or it could have been the wine and really good food.
Whatever it was, he was hoping that Tony and Ziva hosted Shabbos again.
And if he attends Mass because it’s important to Abby, he’ll go to Sabbath at Ziva’s because he likes it.
He thinks about that as Abby drives. “Is that what Mass is like for you?”
Her eyes dart away from traffic to look at him for a second. “What do you mean?”
“That was…” He’s having a hard time coming up with a good word. “Like being home. The way home is supposed to be. Warm and welcoming and just, really comforting and satisfying.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Huh.” He intellectually knew that she felt different about Mass than he did, but until today he didn’t really have a good understanding of how it made her feel.
She’s smiling, and if she wasn’t watching oncoming traffic, he’s sure that smile would be aimed at him.
Chapter 80: Shabbos
December 2013 started a new Team Gibbs family tradition. Shabbos at Ziva’s.
“Once I had a home filled with the sound of laughing children.” Ziva remembers her father saying that, or something close to it. Once…
She’s the last of the Davids now.
And she has not done this, not in a home filled with ease and love, since she was a child. Since her Safta lit the candles, and her father laid his hands on each of them blessed them before the meal, and she and Tavi and Ari were young enough to laugh and play between prayers.
And it is true, there are no laughing children in this home, not yet. Though there is ease and love here. And soon, ‘round about Valentine’s Day, Molly Palmer will join the festivities. And if a little McGee is more than two years off, she’d be stunned. In the years to come, there will be children here.
She looks at Tony as she blesses the bread, breaking the loaf, and prays that one day there’ll be a small DiNozzo to pass these traditions onto. A little boy or girl to make Challah with, to teach the prayers, and to bless.
Ducky asks her about each prayer, and what they mean.
And Gibbs smiles at her as she answers.
McGee and Abby watch. Abby seeming to appreciate the faith of this, and Tim getting into the celebration, asking about the day of rest bit, intrigued by the idea of a faith that celebrates its holiest day by praying, visiting with friend and family, studying, and naps.
Tony makes a joke about naps and sex being part of the celebration, and that gets a smile out of everyone.
Jimmy’s all in favor of the singing part, though the rest of the crew seems wary. And sure, he’s bad at Hebrew, but he and Ziva produce a decent sounding two part harmony. After a few verses, Ducky joins in, and if there’s anything that sounds odder than Scottish accented Hebrew, Ziva’s never heard it, but she certainly appreciates the effort. Breena adds her voice after that, a soft soprano to go with Ziva’s alto, and yes, it’s not the Sabbath of her childhood, but it’s awfully sweet, and it’s a good first step into a new life that remembers and honors the old, but moves forward into the future without fear.
As they were driving home, Tim said to Abby, “I really liked that.”
“Yeah, it was fun.”
Tim came away from Sabbath dinner thinking that the Jews really knew how to celebrate their faith. Dinner, really good dinner, at home, with all of your best friends and family followed by a day of napping, studying, and sex struck him as a really civilized way to tell God thanks for being alive.
Or at least, he certainly preferred it to Mass. Maybe it was because the rituals were new and different. Maybe it was because it was at home, and done with family and friends as opposed to a collection of near strangers. Maybe because the specter of his father was in no way attached to this. Maybe it was because he never quite hooked into any church the way he was supposed to. Or it could have been the wine and really good food.
Whatever it was, he was hoping that Tony and Ziva hosted Shabbos again.
And if he attends Mass because it’s important to Abby, he’ll go to Sabbath at Ziva’s because he likes it.
He thinks about that as Abby drives. “Is that what Mass is like for you?”
Her eyes dart away from traffic to look at him for a second. “What do you mean?”
“That was…” He’s having a hard time coming up with a good word. “Like being home. The way home is supposed to be. Warm and welcoming and just, really comforting and satisfying.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Huh.” He intellectually knew that she felt different about Mass than he did, but until today he didn’t really have a good understanding of how it made her feel.
She’s smiling, and if she wasn’t watching oncoming traffic, he’s sure that smile would be aimed at him.
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
79. December
“What’s on your schedule for tonight?” Tony asked him as they were heading toward the elevator at the end of work on a Tuesday a few weeks before Christmas.
“Quick dinner, pre-marital counseling.”
“Yuck.”
Tim shrugs. Tony knows that it’s not his favorite pastime. He’d much rather be spending those hours doing, well, almost anything else. “It’s not terrible. It’s just... I don’t know, designed for people who haven’t been together for more than a decade? Last week was about setting goals and plans for the future, and sure, I bet that’s useful if you’re twenty-two and don’t really have a life, but we’ve pretty much got the next thirty years figured out.”
Tony nods. “You mean questions about what your career goals are aren’t terribly enlightening?”
“Yeah, what’s the big surprise going to be? I’ll keep investigating until Gibbs retires or we have kids and then move to Cybercrime? Oh my. Everyone knows that.”
Tony stares at him and switches off the elevator. “I didn’t know that.”
That brings Tim up short. “How did you not know that?”
“We can start with you didn’t actually say anything about it to me.”
Tim nods. “Oh. I thought—“
“My psychic vibes would somehow suck that information straight out of your head, and you didn’t have to actually tell me? You’re my partner. You tell me things like this!”
Tim sighs. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it. After the freezer… Abby was really pissed about the almost dying thing. When I was talking to Gibbs about it, he said you and Ziva both knew I’d be going eventually.”
“Well, yeah, eventually. A long, long time from now. Not—“
“Not the sort of thing that has an actual end date attached to it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, no set date yet. But, I won’t be staying any longer than he does, and depending on how things with kids go, maybe sooner. I’m not going to leave her a widow with a baby. Not if there’s anything I can do to avoid it, and there is something, so I’ll do it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. She spent over two hours sitting in a van, not knowing if we were alive or dead, waiting, and then watched them carry us out. None of us moving, all of us blue, and she didn’t know if they ran you to the ambulance because you were in the worst shape, or if you were the only one still alive. And for right now, she still thinks what I do is worth that, but that won’t be true forever. So, I don’t know when it’ll be time, but the answer is sooner rather than later.”
Tony nods at that, too. Tim can see there’s sorrow in his eyes, but he makes a joke anyway, “You’re going to leave me with two Probies to break in at once?”
“Yes, that’s my plan. Make sure you’ve got two of them so each one takes half of the crap. I figure that’s the easiest way to make sure that your next Probie doesn’t kill you.”
“Like Dornaget would even try.”
“Uh huh. How’d you like that audit?”
“That was him?”
“Yeah, Tony, that was him. Don’t mess with Dornie. He might look like a creampuff, but he’s got some edges in there.”
Tony smirks. “And you’d know all about creampuffs hiding razor blades.”
“Just possibly.” And with that Tim flicked the elevator back on.
“So, you got career goals out of the way. What’s this week?” Tony asks.
“Today and next week are conflict resolution, which should be amusing.” He rolls his eyes a little. “I’m getting to know Father John better, that’s sort of nice.”
Tony nods a little at that, too.
“How about you?” Tim asks.
“Schul.”
Tony had started taking instruction for converting to Judaism a few weeks ago. “How’s it going?”
“I hate Hebrew. These lips were not designed to make those sounds.”
“You’ll get it,” Tim says as the elevator opens and they head toward their cars.
“Sure, sooner or later. I can memorize bits and pieces pretty well. But it doesn’t help that Ziva can learn a new language in like, nine minutes, and I’m stumbling around with basic grammar and utterly destroying the pronunciation of anything I’ve got to actually think about.”
“At least she’s not getting revenge on you for all those years of corrected idioms.”
“Yet. One of these days we’re going to Israel, and I’ve got the feeling I’ll be doing whatever the Hebrew equivalent of Porcuswine is.”
Tim grins. “Karma’s a bitch.”
“Yeah, thanks. Anyway, Friday night, before sunset, her place. Shabbos dinner.”
Tim looks a little surprised at that but says, “Okay. Want us to bring anything?”
“Nah, we got it.”
“We’ll be there.” And with that they headed to their own cars, and from there, home.
They’re sitting in Father John’s office. It’s a pleasant book filled space. Probably has good light during the day, but they only manage to make it at night, so Tim’s never seen it in sunlight.
They’re on a little sofa; it’s not terribly comfortable, and Tim isn’t sure if that’s on purpose or not. Like, is it just a bit too hard because it increases the stress level of the people sitting on it, just a little, so that the sessions can work a little deeper on breaking through the I’m-so-in-love-can’t-think-straight sort of headspace a lot of the other couples who sit on it are probably in? Or is it just not a terribly comfortable sofa?
There’s a coffee table in front of them. Tim has a cup of coffee. Abby and John have tea.
John’s sitting in what appears to be a very comfortable arm chair, talking a little with both of them about the last week. But he finally gets around to conflict resolution.
“So, tell me about how you handled the last time you both wanted to do something with each other, but neither of you wanted to do the same thing?”
They both look at each other for a minute, digging through the memory banks.
Finally Abby says, “It’s silly.”
And Tim knows what she’s thinking, and yeah, it is. “Just, for background, it had been an awful week. Things like this don’t usually set us off.”
“Four days of this terrible case. Kidnappings are always the hardest. And this one—“ Abby’s shaking her head remembering it.
Tim fills in details. “Father died protecting his daughter, she got taken, her best friend got killed, turns out the mom and her boyfriend were behind it, it was just a bad, bad four days.”
“And any case with hurt little girls is worse, because Gibbs goes bonkers, and there is absolutely no downtime. Kidnapped little girls means you work until you collapse, and then he pokes you until you get up, and you work some more,” Abby adds.
“So, end of day four, we’ve got it wrapped, bad guys are in jail, and we get to go home.”
“And after a case like that, we both need down time.”
“Yeah. Case like that, you’re mentally and physically exhausted. All we want to do is just get home and veg. Put as much space between us and the job as possible. So, dinner, flop on the sofa, and then there’s TV. Easy, mindless entertainment.”
Abby’s nodding, agreeing with that. “We like a lot of the same shows so it’s not usually a problem.”
Tim says, “I hadn’t seen the latest Burn Notice, yet. And we’ve also got the last Game of Throne on the DVR.”
Abby picks up the story. “And well, anyway, about five minutes of arguing over which one we were going to see took place.”
“I like Game of Thrones, but it’s not cool down watching for me.”
“And I’d already seen the last Burn Notice, and a story I’ve already seen isn’t going to pull me away the way I need.”
“And after about five minutes, where I’m getting sharp and sarcastic—“
“Making some really snide comments about how watching evil people get horrifically murdered isn’t relaxing—“
“And she’s getting manic and whiny.”
“I was not being whiny!”
He raises one eyebrow at her, and she shakes her head a little as if to say, Fine, I was little whiny. He continues on, “I realized something. I have a computer. She’s got a computer. So I pulled a quarter out of my pocket, flipped it, she called it, and then she watched Game of Thrones on the TV. I headed into my office and watched Burn Notice on my computer. Ta da, conflict resolution.”
Abby smiles at John. “See, silly. If we’d been a little less fried, or a little more willing to get off the sofa, the arguing portion would have lasted about thirty seconds and gone something like this: ‘I want to see Game of Thrones.’ ‘Okay. I’ll go watch Burn Notice in my office.’ ‘Good.’”
“And how did the rest of the night go? Were either of you hurt or bothered by that?”
Tim looks at Abby and she smiles. Then she says, “His show is shorter than mine, so he came in laid his head in my lap, and sat with me for the last twenty minutes of mine, not paying attention—“
“Not really awake.”
“Just hanging out. Then we had sex and went to bed.”
Tim strokes her neck. “No hurt feelings. We’re generally pretty good at this sort of thing.”
“It’s not like we just met each other. We’ve got how to deal with each other down pretty well.”
“And that’s pretty much how you deal with each other. Together when you like, apart when that works better?” John asks.
“Yes,” Abby says.
“We’re both pretty good with alone space.”
“And we’re also pretty good at being alone together, same physical space, maybe sharing a word or two here and there, but doing our own thing. We got that from years of working right next to each other on separate but related projects.”
Tim smiles. “Yeah when we’re home, I can write, she can read, we both listen to our own music, and maybe pet each other on occasion. But she understands that sometimes I really do need to be alone. And I get that she needs that, too. ”
Father John just looks at them. They’ve been at this four weeks, and he’s feeling like he’s wasting their time. Most of the skills he traditionally helps couples with, they’ve got. “So, is there anything you would like to work on. What can we do that’s actually useful for you two?”
Tim and Abby stare at each other. Intimacy isn’t an issue. They’re really good at sex. They’re on the same page when it comes to kids. Sure she’s a believer and he’s not, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, and if she’s angsting over his soul, she’s never mentioned it. They’ve got similar politics. Money’s not an issue. Abby may act like a puppy, but she’s got the same cat-like need for alone time that he has.
Tim finally says, “My job. Maybe. Figuring out when it’s time to go.”
Abby’s staring at him. “I thought we were good on that.”
He smiles a little. “We are. Just thinking more about the timing of it. When you’re pregnant? When the baby’s born? Now?”
“Not now.”
He shakes his head. “Not now. I mentioned leaving to Tony today. Hadn’t realized I hadn’t actually said it to him.”
“Bad?” Abby asks.
“He shrugged it off, but yeah, I could see he wasn’t happy about it.” He turns to Father John. “Want a relationship you can help with? Let me bring Tony in. Abby and I, we’re good. Me and Tony… Not quite so good.”
“Was he unhappy about you leaving, or not telling him?” John asks.
“Both, but different flavors of not happy. I tend not to talk to guys about…” he pauses to think about how to explain the wall he’s got with Tony in specific and other guys in general.
Abby cuts in, “Everything.”
“No, not everything. I talk to Tony about lots of things.”
“Yeah, but you talk more about his half of whatever it is.”
“His half is easier. His half doesn’t get me teased mercilessly.”
“He’s a lot better about that these days.”
“Yeah, he is. Which is why we talk more these days, too. But, anyway, all of the guys I interact with regularly are part of a pecking order.”
“Except Jimmy.”
“Except Jimmy, who is someone I talk to about my half of this sort of stuff. But the other guys are somewhere on the pecking order, and since I’m usually at the bottom of that order, I keep myself to myself. And especially with Tony, not giving him any ammo is a habit. So, I tend not to tell him things, which bothers him because that’s left over from like five years ago, and neither of us are the same guys we were then. But, anyway, he tends to find things out last, and that hurts him.” Tim pauses, drinks some more of his coffee. “So, to get back to your question, he’s annoyed I didn’t tell him, and sad that our team really is going to break apart at some point.”
“How about you, does the end of the team make you sad?”
“Sure. I love who we are and what we do.” Tim looks at Abby, and she smiles and squeezes his knee. “But I’m getting something I love better out of this. We’re building a new team, and this is part of making sure I’m there to put that first.”
“What about Abby’s work? When you’ve moved over to Cybercrime, are you going to be annoyed that she’s still on the front line and working ninety hour weeks?”
Tim shrugs. “I don’t think so. I won’t know for sure until it happens.”
“Norfolk’s lab is shutting down January 2015. I won’t be working ninety hour weeks at that point. Or at least, not usually. And it’s not like he’ll be moving off the front lines, just fighting on a different front. Cybercrime doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but they do important stuff down there.”
Tim smiles a little. “And by a different front, she means way in the back.”
“No. Just a whole different war.”
“That’s a good way to look at it. Whole different skill set, too. If Vance is serious, I’ll be the guy in charge down there, and that’ll be new.”
“Are you looking forward to that?” John asks.
“Actually, yes. I’ve been the low guy on the totem pole for a decade now. It’d be nice to be the guy in charge. Of course, as soon as that happens, Tony’ll start calling me Probie again.”
“In front of your team.”
Tim smiles dryly. “Exactly.”
John looks to Abby, “We know Tim’s willing to rearrange his life for your family, what about you? If Norfolk wasn’t shutting down, what would happen?”
She thinks about that. And Tim does, too. That’s something they haven’t talked about.
“I don’t know. It would depend on what Leon’s willing to do. I’m not interested in being an absentee mom. My own parents were amazing, and I want to do as good a job at this as they did.
“I can’t see leaving NCIS. But if I had to, I would. I get headhunted every year. Labs all over want me, so if Leon’s not willing to get me help, if he can’t figure out how to make sure I’m home on a fairly regular basis, then I will find somewhere else that is.
“But I don’t think that’ll be an issue. Leon’s a single dad. He runs the whole agency and still manages to get home most nights to see his kids. I think, even if we weren’t consolidating with Norfolk, that he’d find a way to work with me.”
“So, who will be taking care of the kids? You’re rearranging things, but you still have a lot of time both of you won’t be home.”
“Nanny?” Tim asks Abby.
She nods. “I can see taking a while off, maybe even six months or so, but I’m fairly sure all baby all the time would drive me insane.”
“I’m not categorically opposed to stay-at-home-dadding. But my guess is that I need to be doing something bigger than that, as well. Just novels and little people won’t fill the need to shut the bad guys down.”
“And you do need that?” John wants to know.
“I think so. We’ll find out for sure when the team breaks up. Either I’m in it for the people and the justice or just the people. It certainly isn’t for the money. If it’s just for the people, then maybe I will move onto being a stay-at-home-dad, because I can’t think of people who will matter more to me. But I think I need the justice, too.”
John glances at the clock. It’s five ‘til eight, which is their usual end point. He smiles at them and asks, “So, what that a bit more useful than conflict resolution?”
Tim nods. “A bit.”
Abby adds, “So next week is the last session?”
“Yep.”
“We’ll see you then,” she finishes as they head out.
They’re in the car when she says, “Stay at home dad?”
He shrugs. “It’s not impossible. Does that bother you?”
“No. Just never thought about it.”
“Until ten minutes ago I hadn’t either. But someone has to be with them all the time when they’re little. I can work from home, so it could be me.”
She’s nodding. “It could be. Does it bug you that it won’t be me?”
“No. Not like it’s a surprise. At no point have I ever imagined you being a full time stay at home mom.”
“Me either.”
“My guess is we’ll have the first one, and you’ll take some time off, and so will I, and we’ll see how it goes. We’ll hire a nanny, and see how that goes. And if we don’t like it, we’ll figure it out. One good thing, we’ve got options and we’ve got money, so it really is just a matter of what seems to work best.”
She smiles. “Yeah, it is.”
“Leave NCIS?”
She sighs. “Probably not. I really hope not, at least. I’m sure Leon will work with me on it. But if he doesn’t or can’t… I’m not going to be your dad, Tim. We have kids, and I will be there for them. Like you said, if you do this with someone, that someone, and those children, should be the most important thing in your life. And you/they are/will be.”
“I’d kiss you right now if I wasn’t merging into another lane of traffic.”
She smiles. “I know.”
Next
79. December
“What’s on your schedule for tonight?” Tony asked him as they were heading toward the elevator at the end of work on a Tuesday a few weeks before Christmas.
“Quick dinner, pre-marital counseling.”
“Yuck.”
Tim shrugs. Tony knows that it’s not his favorite pastime. He’d much rather be spending those hours doing, well, almost anything else. “It’s not terrible. It’s just... I don’t know, designed for people who haven’t been together for more than a decade? Last week was about setting goals and plans for the future, and sure, I bet that’s useful if you’re twenty-two and don’t really have a life, but we’ve pretty much got the next thirty years figured out.”
Tony nods. “You mean questions about what your career goals are aren’t terribly enlightening?”
“Yeah, what’s the big surprise going to be? I’ll keep investigating until Gibbs retires or we have kids and then move to Cybercrime? Oh my. Everyone knows that.”
Tony stares at him and switches off the elevator. “I didn’t know that.”
That brings Tim up short. “How did you not know that?”
“We can start with you didn’t actually say anything about it to me.”
Tim nods. “Oh. I thought—“
“My psychic vibes would somehow suck that information straight out of your head, and you didn’t have to actually tell me? You’re my partner. You tell me things like this!”
Tim sighs. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it. After the freezer… Abby was really pissed about the almost dying thing. When I was talking to Gibbs about it, he said you and Ziva both knew I’d be going eventually.”
“Well, yeah, eventually. A long, long time from now. Not—“
“Not the sort of thing that has an actual end date attached to it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, no set date yet. But, I won’t be staying any longer than he does, and depending on how things with kids go, maybe sooner. I’m not going to leave her a widow with a baby. Not if there’s anything I can do to avoid it, and there is something, so I’ll do it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. She spent over two hours sitting in a van, not knowing if we were alive or dead, waiting, and then watched them carry us out. None of us moving, all of us blue, and she didn’t know if they ran you to the ambulance because you were in the worst shape, or if you were the only one still alive. And for right now, she still thinks what I do is worth that, but that won’t be true forever. So, I don’t know when it’ll be time, but the answer is sooner rather than later.”
Tony nods at that, too. Tim can see there’s sorrow in his eyes, but he makes a joke anyway, “You’re going to leave me with two Probies to break in at once?”
“Yes, that’s my plan. Make sure you’ve got two of them so each one takes half of the crap. I figure that’s the easiest way to make sure that your next Probie doesn’t kill you.”
“Like Dornaget would even try.”
“Uh huh. How’d you like that audit?”
“That was him?”
“Yeah, Tony, that was him. Don’t mess with Dornie. He might look like a creampuff, but he’s got some edges in there.”
Tony smirks. “And you’d know all about creampuffs hiding razor blades.”
“Just possibly.” And with that Tim flicked the elevator back on.
“So, you got career goals out of the way. What’s this week?” Tony asks.
“Today and next week are conflict resolution, which should be amusing.” He rolls his eyes a little. “I’m getting to know Father John better, that’s sort of nice.”
Tony nods a little at that, too.
“How about you?” Tim asks.
“Schul.”
Tony had started taking instruction for converting to Judaism a few weeks ago. “How’s it going?”
“I hate Hebrew. These lips were not designed to make those sounds.”
“You’ll get it,” Tim says as the elevator opens and they head toward their cars.
“Sure, sooner or later. I can memorize bits and pieces pretty well. But it doesn’t help that Ziva can learn a new language in like, nine minutes, and I’m stumbling around with basic grammar and utterly destroying the pronunciation of anything I’ve got to actually think about.”
“At least she’s not getting revenge on you for all those years of corrected idioms.”
“Yet. One of these days we’re going to Israel, and I’ve got the feeling I’ll be doing whatever the Hebrew equivalent of Porcuswine is.”
Tim grins. “Karma’s a bitch.”
“Yeah, thanks. Anyway, Friday night, before sunset, her place. Shabbos dinner.”
Tim looks a little surprised at that but says, “Okay. Want us to bring anything?”
“Nah, we got it.”
“We’ll be there.” And with that they headed to their own cars, and from there, home.
They’re sitting in Father John’s office. It’s a pleasant book filled space. Probably has good light during the day, but they only manage to make it at night, so Tim’s never seen it in sunlight.
They’re on a little sofa; it’s not terribly comfortable, and Tim isn’t sure if that’s on purpose or not. Like, is it just a bit too hard because it increases the stress level of the people sitting on it, just a little, so that the sessions can work a little deeper on breaking through the I’m-so-in-love-can’t-think-straight sort of headspace a lot of the other couples who sit on it are probably in? Or is it just not a terribly comfortable sofa?
There’s a coffee table in front of them. Tim has a cup of coffee. Abby and John have tea.
John’s sitting in what appears to be a very comfortable arm chair, talking a little with both of them about the last week. But he finally gets around to conflict resolution.
“So, tell me about how you handled the last time you both wanted to do something with each other, but neither of you wanted to do the same thing?”
They both look at each other for a minute, digging through the memory banks.
Finally Abby says, “It’s silly.”
And Tim knows what she’s thinking, and yeah, it is. “Just, for background, it had been an awful week. Things like this don’t usually set us off.”
“Four days of this terrible case. Kidnappings are always the hardest. And this one—“ Abby’s shaking her head remembering it.
Tim fills in details. “Father died protecting his daughter, she got taken, her best friend got killed, turns out the mom and her boyfriend were behind it, it was just a bad, bad four days.”
“And any case with hurt little girls is worse, because Gibbs goes bonkers, and there is absolutely no downtime. Kidnapped little girls means you work until you collapse, and then he pokes you until you get up, and you work some more,” Abby adds.
“So, end of day four, we’ve got it wrapped, bad guys are in jail, and we get to go home.”
“And after a case like that, we both need down time.”
“Yeah. Case like that, you’re mentally and physically exhausted. All we want to do is just get home and veg. Put as much space between us and the job as possible. So, dinner, flop on the sofa, and then there’s TV. Easy, mindless entertainment.”
Abby’s nodding, agreeing with that. “We like a lot of the same shows so it’s not usually a problem.”
Tim says, “I hadn’t seen the latest Burn Notice, yet. And we’ve also got the last Game of Throne on the DVR.”
Abby picks up the story. “And well, anyway, about five minutes of arguing over which one we were going to see took place.”
“I like Game of Thrones, but it’s not cool down watching for me.”
“And I’d already seen the last Burn Notice, and a story I’ve already seen isn’t going to pull me away the way I need.”
“And after about five minutes, where I’m getting sharp and sarcastic—“
“Making some really snide comments about how watching evil people get horrifically murdered isn’t relaxing—“
“And she’s getting manic and whiny.”
“I was not being whiny!”
He raises one eyebrow at her, and she shakes her head a little as if to say, Fine, I was little whiny. He continues on, “I realized something. I have a computer. She’s got a computer. So I pulled a quarter out of my pocket, flipped it, she called it, and then she watched Game of Thrones on the TV. I headed into my office and watched Burn Notice on my computer. Ta da, conflict resolution.”
Abby smiles at John. “See, silly. If we’d been a little less fried, or a little more willing to get off the sofa, the arguing portion would have lasted about thirty seconds and gone something like this: ‘I want to see Game of Thrones.’ ‘Okay. I’ll go watch Burn Notice in my office.’ ‘Good.’”
“And how did the rest of the night go? Were either of you hurt or bothered by that?”
Tim looks at Abby and she smiles. Then she says, “His show is shorter than mine, so he came in laid his head in my lap, and sat with me for the last twenty minutes of mine, not paying attention—“
“Not really awake.”
“Just hanging out. Then we had sex and went to bed.”
Tim strokes her neck. “No hurt feelings. We’re generally pretty good at this sort of thing.”
“It’s not like we just met each other. We’ve got how to deal with each other down pretty well.”
“And that’s pretty much how you deal with each other. Together when you like, apart when that works better?” John asks.
“Yes,” Abby says.
“We’re both pretty good with alone space.”
“And we’re also pretty good at being alone together, same physical space, maybe sharing a word or two here and there, but doing our own thing. We got that from years of working right next to each other on separate but related projects.”
Tim smiles. “Yeah when we’re home, I can write, she can read, we both listen to our own music, and maybe pet each other on occasion. But she understands that sometimes I really do need to be alone. And I get that she needs that, too. ”
Father John just looks at them. They’ve been at this four weeks, and he’s feeling like he’s wasting their time. Most of the skills he traditionally helps couples with, they’ve got. “So, is there anything you would like to work on. What can we do that’s actually useful for you two?”
Tim and Abby stare at each other. Intimacy isn’t an issue. They’re really good at sex. They’re on the same page when it comes to kids. Sure she’s a believer and he’s not, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, and if she’s angsting over his soul, she’s never mentioned it. They’ve got similar politics. Money’s not an issue. Abby may act like a puppy, but she’s got the same cat-like need for alone time that he has.
Tim finally says, “My job. Maybe. Figuring out when it’s time to go.”
Abby’s staring at him. “I thought we were good on that.”
He smiles a little. “We are. Just thinking more about the timing of it. When you’re pregnant? When the baby’s born? Now?”
“Not now.”
He shakes his head. “Not now. I mentioned leaving to Tony today. Hadn’t realized I hadn’t actually said it to him.”
“Bad?” Abby asks.
“He shrugged it off, but yeah, I could see he wasn’t happy about it.” He turns to Father John. “Want a relationship you can help with? Let me bring Tony in. Abby and I, we’re good. Me and Tony… Not quite so good.”
“Was he unhappy about you leaving, or not telling him?” John asks.
“Both, but different flavors of not happy. I tend not to talk to guys about…” he pauses to think about how to explain the wall he’s got with Tony in specific and other guys in general.
Abby cuts in, “Everything.”
“No, not everything. I talk to Tony about lots of things.”
“Yeah, but you talk more about his half of whatever it is.”
“His half is easier. His half doesn’t get me teased mercilessly.”
“He’s a lot better about that these days.”
“Yeah, he is. Which is why we talk more these days, too. But, anyway, all of the guys I interact with regularly are part of a pecking order.”
“Except Jimmy.”
“Except Jimmy, who is someone I talk to about my half of this sort of stuff. But the other guys are somewhere on the pecking order, and since I’m usually at the bottom of that order, I keep myself to myself. And especially with Tony, not giving him any ammo is a habit. So, I tend not to tell him things, which bothers him because that’s left over from like five years ago, and neither of us are the same guys we were then. But, anyway, he tends to find things out last, and that hurts him.” Tim pauses, drinks some more of his coffee. “So, to get back to your question, he’s annoyed I didn’t tell him, and sad that our team really is going to break apart at some point.”
“How about you, does the end of the team make you sad?”
“Sure. I love who we are and what we do.” Tim looks at Abby, and she smiles and squeezes his knee. “But I’m getting something I love better out of this. We’re building a new team, and this is part of making sure I’m there to put that first.”
“What about Abby’s work? When you’ve moved over to Cybercrime, are you going to be annoyed that she’s still on the front line and working ninety hour weeks?”
Tim shrugs. “I don’t think so. I won’t know for sure until it happens.”
“Norfolk’s lab is shutting down January 2015. I won’t be working ninety hour weeks at that point. Or at least, not usually. And it’s not like he’ll be moving off the front lines, just fighting on a different front. Cybercrime doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but they do important stuff down there.”
Tim smiles a little. “And by a different front, she means way in the back.”
“No. Just a whole different war.”
“That’s a good way to look at it. Whole different skill set, too. If Vance is serious, I’ll be the guy in charge down there, and that’ll be new.”
“Are you looking forward to that?” John asks.
“Actually, yes. I’ve been the low guy on the totem pole for a decade now. It’d be nice to be the guy in charge. Of course, as soon as that happens, Tony’ll start calling me Probie again.”
“In front of your team.”
Tim smiles dryly. “Exactly.”
John looks to Abby, “We know Tim’s willing to rearrange his life for your family, what about you? If Norfolk wasn’t shutting down, what would happen?”
She thinks about that. And Tim does, too. That’s something they haven’t talked about.
“I don’t know. It would depend on what Leon’s willing to do. I’m not interested in being an absentee mom. My own parents were amazing, and I want to do as good a job at this as they did.
“I can’t see leaving NCIS. But if I had to, I would. I get headhunted every year. Labs all over want me, so if Leon’s not willing to get me help, if he can’t figure out how to make sure I’m home on a fairly regular basis, then I will find somewhere else that is.
“But I don’t think that’ll be an issue. Leon’s a single dad. He runs the whole agency and still manages to get home most nights to see his kids. I think, even if we weren’t consolidating with Norfolk, that he’d find a way to work with me.”
“So, who will be taking care of the kids? You’re rearranging things, but you still have a lot of time both of you won’t be home.”
“Nanny?” Tim asks Abby.
She nods. “I can see taking a while off, maybe even six months or so, but I’m fairly sure all baby all the time would drive me insane.”
“I’m not categorically opposed to stay-at-home-dadding. But my guess is that I need to be doing something bigger than that, as well. Just novels and little people won’t fill the need to shut the bad guys down.”
“And you do need that?” John wants to know.
“I think so. We’ll find out for sure when the team breaks up. Either I’m in it for the people and the justice or just the people. It certainly isn’t for the money. If it’s just for the people, then maybe I will move onto being a stay-at-home-dad, because I can’t think of people who will matter more to me. But I think I need the justice, too.”
John glances at the clock. It’s five ‘til eight, which is their usual end point. He smiles at them and asks, “So, what that a bit more useful than conflict resolution?”
Tim nods. “A bit.”
Abby adds, “So next week is the last session?”
“Yep.”
“We’ll see you then,” she finishes as they head out.
They’re in the car when she says, “Stay at home dad?”
He shrugs. “It’s not impossible. Does that bother you?”
“No. Just never thought about it.”
“Until ten minutes ago I hadn’t either. But someone has to be with them all the time when they’re little. I can work from home, so it could be me.”
She’s nodding. “It could be. Does it bug you that it won’t be me?”
“No. Not like it’s a surprise. At no point have I ever imagined you being a full time stay at home mom.”
“Me either.”
“My guess is we’ll have the first one, and you’ll take some time off, and so will I, and we’ll see how it goes. We’ll hire a nanny, and see how that goes. And if we don’t like it, we’ll figure it out. One good thing, we’ve got options and we’ve got money, so it really is just a matter of what seems to work best.”
She smiles. “Yeah, it is.”
“Leave NCIS?”
She sighs. “Probably not. I really hope not, at least. I’m sure Leon will work with me on it. But if he doesn’t or can’t… I’m not going to be your dad, Tim. We have kids, and I will be there for them. Like you said, if you do this with someone, that someone, and those children, should be the most important thing in your life. And you/they are/will be.”
“I’d kiss you right now if I wasn’t merging into another lane of traffic.”
She smiles. “I know.”
Next
May 5, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
80. Laundry
Some things get more complicated when you live with someone. Grocery shopping, that gets tougher. Less expensive on a per person basis, but more complicated because suddenly you’ve got two sets of taste buds and nutritional/diet needs to deal with.
Laundry, on the other hand, got a lot easier.
Well, sort of.
For Tim it got a bit more complicated. Having lived on his own for quite a while he had a pretty streamlined system for dealing with laundry. Namely, his washer and dryer were in the bathroom, behind his shower, so every night he’d strip off, dump the clothing into the washer, brush his teeth, put his pjs on, and head to bed.
When it got full, he’d add soap, turn it on, and fall asleep to the swishing sound.
Next morning, toss it in the dryer before hopping in the shower.
And that night, he’d toss in sheets and towels, and iron while watching TV or talking to his mom or sister on the phone.
Add in the occasional dry cleaning run for his jackets and suits when he wore one, and that was his laundry system.
Abby has a significantly more complicated system. For example, in addition to a dry cleaning pile, she has three hampers (whites, colors, delicates) and several different soaps. And she actually uses the temperature settings on her washer. (According to Tim, his washer had one setting, and that setting was “on.”)
So it wasn’t long into the two of them living together that a new system of laundry labor division came into being.
Yes, he could learn how to handle her laundry. No it wouldn’t have taken much effort. However, it was a lot easier to just play to their individual strengths. Namely, he memorized which bits of his clothing went into which hampers (not too hard, he doesn’t own any delicates and hardly any whites), she handles the actual washing, sorting, and putting away, and he irons.
He’s very good at it. Since he wears something that requires ironing every day he’s at work, he gets a lot more practice at it than she does. So adding her skirts and the occasional blouse to his ironing pile isn’t a challenge. And since his non-ironed clothing fits into one of four categories (socks, boxers, pants, t-shirt), sorting it out isn’t much additional work for her.
Sure, he did this every six or so days when he was on his own, and they do it closer to every four now, but it still works out to a bit less work.
And he’s got mad skills when it comes to ironing pleats now.
So, it was two weeks later, while he was ironing, and she was putting the dry cleaning away that she noticed the Marilyn dress and remembered something. “I never did get to hear what happened Halloween night 2006, after you got home from work.”
He looks up from shirt he’s ironing. “Huh?”
She turns so he can see the white dress in the plastic bag, and he realizes where her mind must have gone.
“I still can’t believe you did that on purpose.”
“You spent four days telling me about how hot and blonde your Ice Queen was.”
“So you decided to out hot and blonde her?”
“Yep.” She grins at him. “The original plan was just to wear it to the party and make every guy there fall in love with me. Getting to wear it to work in front of you was just icing on the cake.”
He snorts a little and shakes his head, pressing the cuff on his shirt.
“Don’t snort at me, you loved that.”
“Yeah, I did, but talk about frustrated!”
“That was the point. I hope it was a lot like hearing about how hot and blonde and did I mention fifteen years younger and cheerleader your date was. You going to tell me you weren’t doing that on purpose?” She sits on the bed and starts to fold t-shirts.
“Maybe a little. You’re cute when you’re jealous.”
“And sometimes sexy.”
“Very sexy. And with as many Valentine’s Days as I walked down there and found fifty million flowers all from guys who weren’t me, or as many boyfriends I heard about, and the number of times you wandered around in a tiny little skirt, hugged me, kissed my cheek, pressed up nice and close, and then pulled back to head off and go sleep with someone else, I am not at all bothered by making you jealous when I had a chance.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Good.” He flashes her a satisfied smile.
“They really were mostly friends.”
He’s not looking very convinced by that. “I’ve got female friends. You wanna guess how often I send them Valentine’s Day flowers let alone sleep over at their homes?”
“You always got me a Valentine’s Day present.”
“You think we were friends?”
“Not exactly.”
He nods.
“A lot of them really were friends.”
“Sure.” He’s not buying that at all. If they were friends, they were the same sort of friend he was. “Guys don’t send flowers to women they don’t want to sleep with.”
“Straight guys don’t send flowers to women they don’t want to sleep with.”
Okay, that’s probably a distinction worth paying attention to. So he shrugs a little. “True.”
“And a lot of my guy friends are gay.”
“Okay.”
“Did it really bother you?” She asks, finishing folding up all of his t-shirts, putting them in his drawer.
“Yeah!” He goes and hangs up the shirt he was ironing, and grabs a new one.
She shrugs a little. “I’m not exactly sorry, because I kind of really like how it feels that things like that bothered you, but... it wasn’t kind either, and I am sorry for that.”
He flashes her a perplexed look. “Um… thanks… I think.”
“It just feels really good. All those years, you wanted me.”
“Yeah, I did. Of course, I did.” He thinks about it for a moment. “And yeah, it always felt good when you were jealous of one of my girlfriends. ‘Course would have felt better if you had just dragged me back into your office and made out with me.”
“Okay, the teasing thing might not have been kind, but knowing what you wanted, and knowing what I could give, and still sleeping with you, no matter how cute you were, and how often you looked at me like I was ice cream and you wanted to eat me one lick at a time, and no matter how good you are at that, and how fantastic it would have felt, would have been just downright cruel.”
He thinks about that and nods. “Yeah, it would have been. As much fun as it might have been,” because he can think of at least half a dozen times where they very easily could have tumbled into bed over the years, and a few dozen more where he was giving her that ice cream look, and would have very happily eaten her one lick at a time, “I couldn’t have stood to be your friend-with-benefits.”
“I knew that.” She sits on the bed and starts matching up socks. “So, Halloween 2006. We got to do what I was thinking about that night. What did you do when you got home?”
“You want to do this now?”
“You want to watch Dr. Who and come back to this later?” They often watch TV while handling the laundry.
He checks the clock. And the pile of things to be ironed. And if they want to get to bed in time to actually get some solid sleep in… “Dr. Who will still be there tomorrow.”
She grins at him.
“If I burn myself, it’s your fault.”
“Come on, I know you’re a better multi-tasker than that.”
“Never tried talking dirty and ironing before.”
She laughs. “You know, about ten years ago I got a birthday card, and it was a picture of this really hot, mostly-naked guy ironing. The outside said, ‘You know what’s wrong with this picture?’”
Tim raises an eyebrow.
“The inside said, ‘Nothing.’” And she smiles at him brightly.
“So you’re saying sex and domestic chores together is something of a turn on?”
She laughs. “It’s certainly not a turn off.”
Chuckling a little, looking wryly amused, he pulls off his shirt, tossing it in the colors hamper, along with his socks, slowly pulls his belt from his pants, carefully draping it over the crossbar on the ironing board, and then, holding her gaze, popped the button on his jeans. Then he gave her a long, steady, gonna-make-you-come-so-hard-the-neighbors-complain-about-the-noise look, and said, “You like this, right?”
She grins. “Yeah, I really do.” She got up from the bed, stepped around the ironing board, and gave him a long kiss. “Yes.”
“Ironing might become my favorite chore.”
She stepped back, traced her finger from his lip, down his throat and chest, settling it just above the zipper on his jeans. Her thumb pressed into the fabric just to the left of the zipper, gently stroking him, as she pulled it up to meet her index finger and tug the zipper down.
“Perfect,” she said, eyes tracing over him. “Love you like this.” Then she turned, walked back to the bed, and returned to sorting the socks.
He laughed a little, took a deep breath, grabbed the iron, turned it back on, (it turns off if you don’t move it for a few minutes) and waited for it to heat up.
“So, Halloween 2006. Do you remember the last thing you did that I saw?”
She thinks about it for a moment. “Trick or Treating at your desk?”
“Yeah. Remember what you did?”
She grins.
“I’ll take that as a yes. So, I get home, and all I can see is the way you got the treat from me. Everyone else you asked nicely and waited for them to give it to her. But me, noooo… You step right next to me, lean over me, and reach across my body to the drawer I keep my snacks in, rummage around it, for, what was that, ten minutes? Before raiding my cookie stash. You weren’t wearing a bra, and with the way you were leaning, your breasts were hanging soft and loose right in front of my eyes, and your nipples weren’t exactly hard, but that dress is pretty much translucent, so I could see the shadow of them against the white fabric, and then your ass is about a foot away, and once again, translucent dress, so I can see the white outline of your panties, and you’re leaning over me, which meant I could smell you as well as see you, and your legs in those shoes… Look, I love the boots you usually wear, but they call them fuck me heels for a reason. You have no idea how much control it took not to grab you right there and fuck you on my desk in front of everyone. And honestly, I don’t think any of the guys would have blamed me if I had done it.”
She stares at him in disbelief. “I’m getting trick-or-treats for the five-year-old-girl standing two feet away and you were thinking that?”
“Baby, by the time you were reaching into that drawer, your body was three inches away from my lap. The bullpen could have been on fire, and I wouldn’t have noticed, let alone a little girl a few feet away. No, the main thing I was doing was praying to every and any deity or greater power that you’d pull back without brushing against me, otherwise you would have felt exactly how hard I was.”
“How hard were you?”
“Could have pole vaulted with it.”
“Impressive.”
“So were you in that outfit, leaning across me.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. So I get home and the one thing I know isn’t going to happen is me falling asleep nice and easy. I was way, way too keyed up and horny for that. Between you and the case, no way in hell I’ll just go to bed and snooze.
“And I also know that I don’t want to just rub one out fast. I want this to take a while, way too many good images in my head for a quick jerk off.”
She smiles at that, stands up, puts the socks away, and then returns to the bed and the pile of undies.
If asked, Tim would admit this is his favorite part of watching her sort and fold laundry. Her fingers slipping over little cotton bikini cut panties, let alone wisps of silk and lace, and yeah, he enjoys that. And she’s playing it up. Very carefully tucking her panties into tidy little squares, laying those squares on each matching bra. Teddies smoothed out and folded into quarters.
“Tim?”
“Huh?”
“Do you like that shirt?”
“Damn it.” He jerks the iron back. Okay, good, shirt isn’t burned. It’s just really well pressed in one spot. “So much for my multi-tasking skills.”
“Well, how about you get back to distracting me from what I’m doing?”
“I like watching what you’re doing.”
“And something equally hot to listen to to go with it would be nice.”
He grins and shifts the shirt a little. “So, I’m home. And at that point I didn’t know exactly where I wanted the fantasy to go, so instead of picking out anything in specific, beside the lube, I just put my toybox on the bed next to me, figuring I’d grab stuff as I went.
“I got naked, settled back on bed, and started touching myself.”
“How?”
He shoots her his I can’t believe you just asked that look. “I was rubbing my knee. How do you think?”
“Left hand, right hand, both, start off with the lube, add it later?” She holds her fingers in a loose circle and jerks it a few times. “Like that?”
“Why would I use my right hand?”
“I don’t know. Not everyone uses their dominant hand for everything.”
“Left hand, no lube, yet, as for how…” He spends a minute thinking about how to describe that. Then he looks in the closet. He’s got a shirt for tomorrow. “Would you rather just see it?”
“Really?” She’s grinning brilliantly.
He nods. “Yeah.”
“Oh yeah!” She scoops up the folded undies and rushes to her drawer, putting them away fast. He turns off the iron, and then takes the top sheet on the bed, and flaps it, sending unfolded laundry flying to the floor.
“Eager?”
“Not interested in waiting to get this done.”
She’s kneeling on the bed, and he’s standing next to the opposite side of it.
He’s never actually given her a show before. Sure she’s seen him stroke himself on occasion, if he’s going down on her, rubbing himself, hand wet from her, really adds to it. But he’s never done it like this. Not for her to get off on watching.
He traces his fingers lightly over his hip, just above the waistband of his jeans, then slipped it under his boxers, and pulled gently, really enjoying the way her eyes were glued to what he was doing.
“Feel like getting me some supplies?”
“What do you want?”
“Are we still doing Halloween 2006?”
“Yeah.”
“Lube, cock ring, and put some red lipstick on.”
“Red lipstick? I thought I was watching.”
He grins. “This might be interactive.”
She smiles at him, and heads to her dresser. She opens the top drawer and searches through her lipsticks for the right one. A minute later she has it, and is smoothing it over her lips. He’s watching her face in the mirror as she finishes and kisses her lips together.
“You know, every time you wear that, every single guy in the room is thinking about your lips wrapped around his dick.”
“Every guy?”
Tim nods. “Every straight guy. They should call that color Blow Job Red, because that’s exactly what we all think when you wear it.”
She laughs.
“I’m not kidding, at all.”
“I know you aren’t. There’s only one reason a woman wears red lipstick, and it’s to make people look at her lips. It’s still funny,” she said as she opened the lid to their toybox. It lives on his dresser, and at a casual glance just looks like a nice, wooden box, maybe the sort of thing you might keep ties, belts, or handkerchiefs in, if you happened to have a whole lot of them. “Leather or silicon?”
“Silicon, no bullet.” They have three cock rings but the one he wants is the plainest of the bunch. Just a snug ring of silicon, no frills on that one. Beyond keeping him really hard, he doesn’t need it to do anything else.
“Anything else?”
He thinks about that for a moment. Sheets are clean, and it’d be nice if they stayed that way a little longer. “Towel?”
She grins and returns from the bathroom a moment later, lays the things he’s requested on the bed in front of him, and settles into a comfortable position, leaning, back against the foot of the bed, waiting for him.
“Want me to get naked?”
She’s got on one of his button downs and a pair of panties.
“Not yet.”
“Sooo…”
“So, it’s Halloween 2006, and you’ve been teasing me mercilessly all night. And I’m finally home and can do this.” He shucks off his pants and boxers, leaving them on the floor next to the bed, and sits at the head of the bed, pillows piled behind his back, legs spread wide in front of him, cock half hard, hands on his thighs.His thumbs are making wide circles along the inside of his thighs. And no, this isn’t precisely what he did when he got home that night, he’s trying to make this interesting for her as well, and just jumping on the bed and beating off might be a little more direct than she’d like.
She arches an eyebrow at him. “You did that?”
Or maybe she knows him pretty well by now. His hand snaked up his thigh and wrapped around his dick, gently pulling.
“That I believe. What were you thinking about.”
“Your lips. So red, and so pretty, and so wrapped around me.”
She licks them. Pink tongue slipping over them, soft and wet.
“That, too. And there was a really vivid image of your lip print on my dick. Perfect red ring just below the head.”
“Like this?” And she leaned forward, pushing his hand down, carefully wrapping her mouth around him, leaving a red lip print just below the head, then pulling them softly up and over, finishing with a few licks to the tip.
He didn’t realize he held his breath while she did it until it slipped back out when she sat back on her feet.
“Yeah, just like that.” He begins to stroke again, looking at the perfect ring of Blow Job Red, seeing it smear a little on the down stroke.
Tim almost never thinks about what his dick looks like. Not to say he doesn’t love to watch himself fuck Abby, or her sucking him, or, hell, watch anything she might want to do with his dick. If she’s playing with it, he wants to see her do it. Watching is always a very good thing. But when that happens he’s watching her on him. Him by himself, not particularly interesting to him, at least visually.
But she’s watching his hand, his cock, like this is the sexiest thing she’s ever seen, and suddenly he’s watching himself as well.
He’s seen more than enough porn to know his dick’s not setting any records. But he also knows, that like the fact that he’s a bit taller and broader than average, he’s also a bit longer and wider than average. And by average he means in the mathematical sense, and by a bit he means that if anyone were to ever call him Python as a nickname, it’d be because of his coding skills and not what lives in his pants.
It’s straight, no curve in any direction, and the tip tends more towards pink than purple, flushing red the closer he gets to coming.
He slips his hand down, fairly slow, mostly moving the skin of his dick over the shaft, which is usually how this works before lube is part of the equation.
“You like watching this?”
Abby licks her lips again, leans forward, her arms together, pushing her breasts up and forward, and undoes the top three buttons of the shirt, enticing him with a glimpse of cleavage.
“Oh yes, I like watching this. All sorts of good squirminess from watching this.”
“Good.” He settled back a little further and closed his eyes, focusing on the fantasy, because if he doesn’t, he’ll get too wrapped up in her in front of him, and just beat off to that. “In the fantasy it’s your real hair. You’re on your knees in front of me, and I’m back against the desk in your office, holding onto the edge with one hand, the other stroking your hair and face as you pull back and just lick. Lots of wet visible tongue and your red, red lips slowly slipping up and down the tip, just a little suction.”
He’s holding himself with his left hand, and gently tracing the tip of his right index finger over the tip. He felt her move, and then her breath against his glans, and finally her tongue slipping against him licking his dick and his finger.
“Oh.” He bites his lip and takes a deep breath. “This is going to go a lot faster than it did in real life if you keep helping me.”
“I want to help. You look too good not to taste.”
“Okay. In the fantasy, you teased me for a while, soft and wet and just focusing on the tip. Keeping me really hard and squirming, but not letting me get close to coming. Getting me really wet, and then blowing me dry. Or squeezing firm, pushing all the blood into the tip, and then bobbing your lips over it really fast, and pulling back and stopping, just letting me rest on the tip of your tongue, and very gently scraping your teeth over the tip.”
She followed the things he was saying, while he kept up a slow steady stroke over the shaft.
He opens his eyes to watch, and of course her hair is black, and it’s not curly, but her lips are still red, and it feels brilliant. “Fuck, that’s so good, baby.”
She pulls back and smiles at him. “What next?”
“Lube.”
She hands him the bottle, and he pours a little in his palm, smoothing it over his whole penis. He sighs as he does that. Dry is good, slick is better.
“And this would be the part where I stopped teasing you?”
“Yeah. Mouth and hand and all the way up and all the way down and—“ He’s stroking steadily, a faster pace, hand tighter.
“Slow down, let me see what you’re doing.”
He exhales long and slow, and narrates the action. “Moderately tight fist. Keeping my fingers snug enough so I can feel each one as I slip through. I roll my thumb over the tip as it passes through.”
“That is so hot.”
“Good.” He speeds the pace of his hand, hips rocking into the stroke. “As you suck, you hand gets wet and slick.” His right hand, the one he poured the lube into, gets into the action, rolling his balls a little, pulling them gently, and then slipping behind them, pressing against his perineum. “So you switch to just mouth and use your hand on the rest of me.” He shifts position so he’s half kneeling, butt resting against his feet, knees wide apart.
“I’m watching you suck me. Holding me deep in your mouth, hot, wet suction,” he grabs the cock ring and slips it over himself, sighing a little as he gets it set.
“How does it feel?”
“Huh?”
“I know it makes it more difficult to get off, and I know it keeps you hard, but how does it feel when you’re wearing it?”
“Really full, really big. The closer you are to coming the bigger and harder it gets, so it feels like being on edge. The skin can’t move over the shaft, so you get more sensation out of the friction. Balls can’t creep up, so you can enjoy it longer.”
“Okay. Why put it on now?”
“Because in the fantasy your fingers are about to get into the action, and I want this part to last a while.”
“And what are my fingers doing?”
“Slipping around, pressing into my perineum, and one of them is very gently easing into me.” His left hand goes back to a long, slow stroke, all the way up and down, as his right slips further back between his legs, starting to slip in. He lets out a slow breath and speeds his hand a little, distracting himself, better lube means this a lot more comfortable than it used to be, but it’s still not his favorite thing.
He feels her move again and hears the sound of rustling clothing. He opens his eyes and sees her stripping out of her clothing, facing him, matching the speed of his hands to her own fingers moving over her flesh.She looks at him and smiles. “Way too hot, can’t not touch myself.”
He closes his eyes again, hearing the sound of her fingers slipping against her flesh. “This is not helping me relax, at all.”
“Poor baby.” He feels her fingers on his lips, smells her on them, tastes them, and fuck it, this isn’t masturbation any more. He opens his eyes, sucks her fingers into his mouth, and pushes her onto her back.
“Tim!” She’s a bit surprised by that.
“Screw the fantasy!” he said a second before dipping into a long, hot kiss, and grinding himself against her stomach.
They kept at that, writhing against each other for a good minute before he pulled back. “Up, on your hands and knees.” His hands stroked over her shoulders and back, cupping her ass, as he kissed down her spine. “Just like that. Most perfect ass, ever.”
He knelt behind her, thrusting in hard and fast. “Oh God! Fuck! Abby!”
The good thing about the cock ring is that it does provide a certain level of artificially enforced control. Yes, he can climax wearing the ring, but it’s a lot more difficult than usual. But feeling like you’re on edge, even if you aren’t, means that he’s got a lot less control of the rest of his body. Primary, his fine motor control is shot.
He’s kissing her shoulders and neck, hands stroking her breasts. “Touch yourself, baby. Want to feel you get off.”
She does, he can feel her fingers brush his balls when he trusts forward, and her body growing even tighter on him, and it feels so amazing, hot, wet, tight, and slick, on over-sensitized skin, and his body wants to come, and the ring drags that sensation out. She’s rippling on him, twitching and moaning and that’s even better, a whole level of better, and he forces himself to stop, let her ride it out, relax for a minute.He pulls out, going to take the ring off, and slip back in and come so hard he sees stars.
She turns to face him. “Stop.”
“Stop? What are you thinking?”
“It takes a lot of extra stimulation for you to get off wearing that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m feeling awfully relaxed right now. Kneel down, butt on your feet.”
His eyes went wide, fairly sure where this is going. “Really?”
“Yeah. Hold it together long enough for me to get settled, and then you can go full out.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. We’ve done this often enough you know you aren’t going to hurt me.”
He swallowed hard, and sat back, determined to stay very, very still. She got the lube, added more of it to him, and a lot more to her, and then back to his chest, very slowly eased down.
His hands curled into fists, and his feet into whatever the equivalent of a fist is. So hot, so tight, and so, so, so slow. He’s focusing on her back, tracing the tattoos with his eyes, making himself not move, not thrust, not bury himself again and again into her. And since she didn’t stretch ahead of time this takes three quarters of forever and it’s the longest, slowest, tightest, hottest, best-feeling forever of his life.
He knows he’s talking, hot, dirty, sexy words, probably cursing, too, feels too good not to let it out, but he’s got no idea what he’s saying. The feeling of it, the flex of her back as she eases down, the curve of her hips and ass, but mostly the way it feels, is keeping his mind busy.
She settled against him, just still for a good long minute, breathing quietly. Then she leaned forward, arms stretched out in front of her, head resting on the right one, ass high, and said, “Fuck me.”
It was like an explosion in his brain. Any part of him that wasn’t entirely devoted to thrusting and pleasure just vanished at those words. The whole world shrunk down to the feeling of her body tight and slick and sliding along his.
And when his orgasm started, he felt it whole body, through his arms and legs and chest and heart, pouring, pulsing through balls and cock and if fucking fantastic means anything, it means this feeling rushing through him.
They’re on their sides, him still deep in her, when he comes back to himself. He snuggles in closer, sighing happily, kissing her neck, enjoying her next to him.
They drift like that for a little while, just enjoying the endorphins and breathing together. Finally Abby said, “Can you reach the towel?”
He feels around a little and hands it to her. She slips off of him, and he hisses a little at that. Cock ring means he’s very sensitive post-climax. He takes it off carefully, trying to not touch himself too much.
Eventually they’re both cleaned up and in bed, both sleepy. He’s wrapped around her, and it’s probably the endorphins, but maybe it’s just her, and her being near, but he loves her so much right now. It feels too big to hold onto, too big to keep in just one body, one heart.
He usually sleeps spooned behind her, with his arm around her waist, hand curled loosely around her breast, but he slides it over a little, feeling her heartbeat, and the soft rise and fall of her chest under his hand.
And he feels how precious this life is, how fragile, and how much he wants, needs, cherishes it. And there aren’t words, nothing existing solely of breath of man is big enough for this, deep enough for it, so he doesn’t try to speak it.
He kisses her neck, and her shoulder, pressing his face to her back, smelling her skin and hair, and holds her tightly, trying to get the feeling across with touch, not sure if that’s even possible, but it’s--
“I love you, too, Tim.”
He kisses her one more time, wishing he was a great artist, so he could make something as beautiful as this is, and give it to her.
80. Laundry
Some things get more complicated when you live with someone. Grocery shopping, that gets tougher. Less expensive on a per person basis, but more complicated because suddenly you’ve got two sets of taste buds and nutritional/diet needs to deal with.
Laundry, on the other hand, got a lot easier.
Well, sort of.
For Tim it got a bit more complicated. Having lived on his own for quite a while he had a pretty streamlined system for dealing with laundry. Namely, his washer and dryer were in the bathroom, behind his shower, so every night he’d strip off, dump the clothing into the washer, brush his teeth, put his pjs on, and head to bed.
When it got full, he’d add soap, turn it on, and fall asleep to the swishing sound.
Next morning, toss it in the dryer before hopping in the shower.
And that night, he’d toss in sheets and towels, and iron while watching TV or talking to his mom or sister on the phone.
Add in the occasional dry cleaning run for his jackets and suits when he wore one, and that was his laundry system.
Abby has a significantly more complicated system. For example, in addition to a dry cleaning pile, she has three hampers (whites, colors, delicates) and several different soaps. And she actually uses the temperature settings on her washer. (According to Tim, his washer had one setting, and that setting was “on.”)
So it wasn’t long into the two of them living together that a new system of laundry labor division came into being.
Yes, he could learn how to handle her laundry. No it wouldn’t have taken much effort. However, it was a lot easier to just play to their individual strengths. Namely, he memorized which bits of his clothing went into which hampers (not too hard, he doesn’t own any delicates and hardly any whites), she handles the actual washing, sorting, and putting away, and he irons.
He’s very good at it. Since he wears something that requires ironing every day he’s at work, he gets a lot more practice at it than she does. So adding her skirts and the occasional blouse to his ironing pile isn’t a challenge. And since his non-ironed clothing fits into one of four categories (socks, boxers, pants, t-shirt), sorting it out isn’t much additional work for her.
Sure, he did this every six or so days when he was on his own, and they do it closer to every four now, but it still works out to a bit less work.
And he’s got mad skills when it comes to ironing pleats now.
So, it was two weeks later, while he was ironing, and she was putting the dry cleaning away that she noticed the Marilyn dress and remembered something. “I never did get to hear what happened Halloween night 2006, after you got home from work.”
He looks up from shirt he’s ironing. “Huh?”
She turns so he can see the white dress in the plastic bag, and he realizes where her mind must have gone.
“I still can’t believe you did that on purpose.”
“You spent four days telling me about how hot and blonde your Ice Queen was.”
“So you decided to out hot and blonde her?”
“Yep.” She grins at him. “The original plan was just to wear it to the party and make every guy there fall in love with me. Getting to wear it to work in front of you was just icing on the cake.”
He snorts a little and shakes his head, pressing the cuff on his shirt.
“Don’t snort at me, you loved that.”
“Yeah, I did, but talk about frustrated!”
“That was the point. I hope it was a lot like hearing about how hot and blonde and did I mention fifteen years younger and cheerleader your date was. You going to tell me you weren’t doing that on purpose?” She sits on the bed and starts to fold t-shirts.
“Maybe a little. You’re cute when you’re jealous.”
“And sometimes sexy.”
“Very sexy. And with as many Valentine’s Days as I walked down there and found fifty million flowers all from guys who weren’t me, or as many boyfriends I heard about, and the number of times you wandered around in a tiny little skirt, hugged me, kissed my cheek, pressed up nice and close, and then pulled back to head off and go sleep with someone else, I am not at all bothered by making you jealous when I had a chance.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Good.” He flashes her a satisfied smile.
“They really were mostly friends.”
He’s not looking very convinced by that. “I’ve got female friends. You wanna guess how often I send them Valentine’s Day flowers let alone sleep over at their homes?”
“You always got me a Valentine’s Day present.”
“You think we were friends?”
“Not exactly.”
He nods.
“A lot of them really were friends.”
“Sure.” He’s not buying that at all. If they were friends, they were the same sort of friend he was. “Guys don’t send flowers to women they don’t want to sleep with.”
“Straight guys don’t send flowers to women they don’t want to sleep with.”
Okay, that’s probably a distinction worth paying attention to. So he shrugs a little. “True.”
“And a lot of my guy friends are gay.”
“Okay.”
“Did it really bother you?” She asks, finishing folding up all of his t-shirts, putting them in his drawer.
“Yeah!” He goes and hangs up the shirt he was ironing, and grabs a new one.
She shrugs a little. “I’m not exactly sorry, because I kind of really like how it feels that things like that bothered you, but... it wasn’t kind either, and I am sorry for that.”
He flashes her a perplexed look. “Um… thanks… I think.”
“It just feels really good. All those years, you wanted me.”
“Yeah, I did. Of course, I did.” He thinks about it for a moment. “And yeah, it always felt good when you were jealous of one of my girlfriends. ‘Course would have felt better if you had just dragged me back into your office and made out with me.”
“Okay, the teasing thing might not have been kind, but knowing what you wanted, and knowing what I could give, and still sleeping with you, no matter how cute you were, and how often you looked at me like I was ice cream and you wanted to eat me one lick at a time, and no matter how good you are at that, and how fantastic it would have felt, would have been just downright cruel.”
He thinks about that and nods. “Yeah, it would have been. As much fun as it might have been,” because he can think of at least half a dozen times where they very easily could have tumbled into bed over the years, and a few dozen more where he was giving her that ice cream look, and would have very happily eaten her one lick at a time, “I couldn’t have stood to be your friend-with-benefits.”
“I knew that.” She sits on the bed and starts matching up socks. “So, Halloween 2006. We got to do what I was thinking about that night. What did you do when you got home?”
“You want to do this now?”
“You want to watch Dr. Who and come back to this later?” They often watch TV while handling the laundry.
He checks the clock. And the pile of things to be ironed. And if they want to get to bed in time to actually get some solid sleep in… “Dr. Who will still be there tomorrow.”
She grins at him.
“If I burn myself, it’s your fault.”
“Come on, I know you’re a better multi-tasker than that.”
“Never tried talking dirty and ironing before.”
She laughs. “You know, about ten years ago I got a birthday card, and it was a picture of this really hot, mostly-naked guy ironing. The outside said, ‘You know what’s wrong with this picture?’”
Tim raises an eyebrow.
“The inside said, ‘Nothing.’” And she smiles at him brightly.
“So you’re saying sex and domestic chores together is something of a turn on?”
She laughs. “It’s certainly not a turn off.”
Chuckling a little, looking wryly amused, he pulls off his shirt, tossing it in the colors hamper, along with his socks, slowly pulls his belt from his pants, carefully draping it over the crossbar on the ironing board, and then, holding her gaze, popped the button on his jeans. Then he gave her a long, steady, gonna-make-you-come-so-hard-the-neighbors-complain-about-the-noise look, and said, “You like this, right?”
She grins. “Yeah, I really do.” She got up from the bed, stepped around the ironing board, and gave him a long kiss. “Yes.”
“Ironing might become my favorite chore.”
She stepped back, traced her finger from his lip, down his throat and chest, settling it just above the zipper on his jeans. Her thumb pressed into the fabric just to the left of the zipper, gently stroking him, as she pulled it up to meet her index finger and tug the zipper down.
“Perfect,” she said, eyes tracing over him. “Love you like this.” Then she turned, walked back to the bed, and returned to sorting the socks.
He laughed a little, took a deep breath, grabbed the iron, turned it back on, (it turns off if you don’t move it for a few minutes) and waited for it to heat up.
“So, Halloween 2006. Do you remember the last thing you did that I saw?”
She thinks about it for a moment. “Trick or Treating at your desk?”
“Yeah. Remember what you did?”
She grins.
“I’ll take that as a yes. So, I get home, and all I can see is the way you got the treat from me. Everyone else you asked nicely and waited for them to give it to her. But me, noooo… You step right next to me, lean over me, and reach across my body to the drawer I keep my snacks in, rummage around it, for, what was that, ten minutes? Before raiding my cookie stash. You weren’t wearing a bra, and with the way you were leaning, your breasts were hanging soft and loose right in front of my eyes, and your nipples weren’t exactly hard, but that dress is pretty much translucent, so I could see the shadow of them against the white fabric, and then your ass is about a foot away, and once again, translucent dress, so I can see the white outline of your panties, and you’re leaning over me, which meant I could smell you as well as see you, and your legs in those shoes… Look, I love the boots you usually wear, but they call them fuck me heels for a reason. You have no idea how much control it took not to grab you right there and fuck you on my desk in front of everyone. And honestly, I don’t think any of the guys would have blamed me if I had done it.”
She stares at him in disbelief. “I’m getting trick-or-treats for the five-year-old-girl standing two feet away and you were thinking that?”
“Baby, by the time you were reaching into that drawer, your body was three inches away from my lap. The bullpen could have been on fire, and I wouldn’t have noticed, let alone a little girl a few feet away. No, the main thing I was doing was praying to every and any deity or greater power that you’d pull back without brushing against me, otherwise you would have felt exactly how hard I was.”
“How hard were you?”
“Could have pole vaulted with it.”
“Impressive.”
“So were you in that outfit, leaning across me.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. So I get home and the one thing I know isn’t going to happen is me falling asleep nice and easy. I was way, way too keyed up and horny for that. Between you and the case, no way in hell I’ll just go to bed and snooze.
“And I also know that I don’t want to just rub one out fast. I want this to take a while, way too many good images in my head for a quick jerk off.”
She smiles at that, stands up, puts the socks away, and then returns to the bed and the pile of undies.
If asked, Tim would admit this is his favorite part of watching her sort and fold laundry. Her fingers slipping over little cotton bikini cut panties, let alone wisps of silk and lace, and yeah, he enjoys that. And she’s playing it up. Very carefully tucking her panties into tidy little squares, laying those squares on each matching bra. Teddies smoothed out and folded into quarters.
“Tim?”
“Huh?”
“Do you like that shirt?”
“Damn it.” He jerks the iron back. Okay, good, shirt isn’t burned. It’s just really well pressed in one spot. “So much for my multi-tasking skills.”
“Well, how about you get back to distracting me from what I’m doing?”
“I like watching what you’re doing.”
“And something equally hot to listen to to go with it would be nice.”
He grins and shifts the shirt a little. “So, I’m home. And at that point I didn’t know exactly where I wanted the fantasy to go, so instead of picking out anything in specific, beside the lube, I just put my toybox on the bed next to me, figuring I’d grab stuff as I went.
“I got naked, settled back on bed, and started touching myself.”
“How?”
He shoots her his I can’t believe you just asked that look. “I was rubbing my knee. How do you think?”
“Left hand, right hand, both, start off with the lube, add it later?” She holds her fingers in a loose circle and jerks it a few times. “Like that?”
“Why would I use my right hand?”
“I don’t know. Not everyone uses their dominant hand for everything.”
“Left hand, no lube, yet, as for how…” He spends a minute thinking about how to describe that. Then he looks in the closet. He’s got a shirt for tomorrow. “Would you rather just see it?”
“Really?” She’s grinning brilliantly.
He nods. “Yeah.”
“Oh yeah!” She scoops up the folded undies and rushes to her drawer, putting them away fast. He turns off the iron, and then takes the top sheet on the bed, and flaps it, sending unfolded laundry flying to the floor.
“Eager?”
“Not interested in waiting to get this done.”
She’s kneeling on the bed, and he’s standing next to the opposite side of it.
He’s never actually given her a show before. Sure she’s seen him stroke himself on occasion, if he’s going down on her, rubbing himself, hand wet from her, really adds to it. But he’s never done it like this. Not for her to get off on watching.
He traces his fingers lightly over his hip, just above the waistband of his jeans, then slipped it under his boxers, and pulled gently, really enjoying the way her eyes were glued to what he was doing.
“Feel like getting me some supplies?”
“What do you want?”
“Are we still doing Halloween 2006?”
“Yeah.”
“Lube, cock ring, and put some red lipstick on.”
“Red lipstick? I thought I was watching.”
He grins. “This might be interactive.”
She smiles at him, and heads to her dresser. She opens the top drawer and searches through her lipsticks for the right one. A minute later she has it, and is smoothing it over her lips. He’s watching her face in the mirror as she finishes and kisses her lips together.
“You know, every time you wear that, every single guy in the room is thinking about your lips wrapped around his dick.”
“Every guy?”
Tim nods. “Every straight guy. They should call that color Blow Job Red, because that’s exactly what we all think when you wear it.”
She laughs.
“I’m not kidding, at all.”
“I know you aren’t. There’s only one reason a woman wears red lipstick, and it’s to make people look at her lips. It’s still funny,” she said as she opened the lid to their toybox. It lives on his dresser, and at a casual glance just looks like a nice, wooden box, maybe the sort of thing you might keep ties, belts, or handkerchiefs in, if you happened to have a whole lot of them. “Leather or silicon?”
“Silicon, no bullet.” They have three cock rings but the one he wants is the plainest of the bunch. Just a snug ring of silicon, no frills on that one. Beyond keeping him really hard, he doesn’t need it to do anything else.
“Anything else?”
He thinks about that for a moment. Sheets are clean, and it’d be nice if they stayed that way a little longer. “Towel?”
She grins and returns from the bathroom a moment later, lays the things he’s requested on the bed in front of him, and settles into a comfortable position, leaning, back against the foot of the bed, waiting for him.
“Want me to get naked?”
She’s got on one of his button downs and a pair of panties.
“Not yet.”
“Sooo…”
“So, it’s Halloween 2006, and you’ve been teasing me mercilessly all night. And I’m finally home and can do this.” He shucks off his pants and boxers, leaving them on the floor next to the bed, and sits at the head of the bed, pillows piled behind his back, legs spread wide in front of him, cock half hard, hands on his thighs.His thumbs are making wide circles along the inside of his thighs. And no, this isn’t precisely what he did when he got home that night, he’s trying to make this interesting for her as well, and just jumping on the bed and beating off might be a little more direct than she’d like.
She arches an eyebrow at him. “You did that?”
Or maybe she knows him pretty well by now. His hand snaked up his thigh and wrapped around his dick, gently pulling.
“That I believe. What were you thinking about.”
“Your lips. So red, and so pretty, and so wrapped around me.”
She licks them. Pink tongue slipping over them, soft and wet.
“That, too. And there was a really vivid image of your lip print on my dick. Perfect red ring just below the head.”
“Like this?” And she leaned forward, pushing his hand down, carefully wrapping her mouth around him, leaving a red lip print just below the head, then pulling them softly up and over, finishing with a few licks to the tip.
He didn’t realize he held his breath while she did it until it slipped back out when she sat back on her feet.
“Yeah, just like that.” He begins to stroke again, looking at the perfect ring of Blow Job Red, seeing it smear a little on the down stroke.
Tim almost never thinks about what his dick looks like. Not to say he doesn’t love to watch himself fuck Abby, or her sucking him, or, hell, watch anything she might want to do with his dick. If she’s playing with it, he wants to see her do it. Watching is always a very good thing. But when that happens he’s watching her on him. Him by himself, not particularly interesting to him, at least visually.
But she’s watching his hand, his cock, like this is the sexiest thing she’s ever seen, and suddenly he’s watching himself as well.
He’s seen more than enough porn to know his dick’s not setting any records. But he also knows, that like the fact that he’s a bit taller and broader than average, he’s also a bit longer and wider than average. And by average he means in the mathematical sense, and by a bit he means that if anyone were to ever call him Python as a nickname, it’d be because of his coding skills and not what lives in his pants.
It’s straight, no curve in any direction, and the tip tends more towards pink than purple, flushing red the closer he gets to coming.
He slips his hand down, fairly slow, mostly moving the skin of his dick over the shaft, which is usually how this works before lube is part of the equation.
“You like watching this?”
Abby licks her lips again, leans forward, her arms together, pushing her breasts up and forward, and undoes the top three buttons of the shirt, enticing him with a glimpse of cleavage.
“Oh yes, I like watching this. All sorts of good squirminess from watching this.”
“Good.” He settled back a little further and closed his eyes, focusing on the fantasy, because if he doesn’t, he’ll get too wrapped up in her in front of him, and just beat off to that. “In the fantasy it’s your real hair. You’re on your knees in front of me, and I’m back against the desk in your office, holding onto the edge with one hand, the other stroking your hair and face as you pull back and just lick. Lots of wet visible tongue and your red, red lips slowly slipping up and down the tip, just a little suction.”
He’s holding himself with his left hand, and gently tracing the tip of his right index finger over the tip. He felt her move, and then her breath against his glans, and finally her tongue slipping against him licking his dick and his finger.
“Oh.” He bites his lip and takes a deep breath. “This is going to go a lot faster than it did in real life if you keep helping me.”
“I want to help. You look too good not to taste.”
“Okay. In the fantasy, you teased me for a while, soft and wet and just focusing on the tip. Keeping me really hard and squirming, but not letting me get close to coming. Getting me really wet, and then blowing me dry. Or squeezing firm, pushing all the blood into the tip, and then bobbing your lips over it really fast, and pulling back and stopping, just letting me rest on the tip of your tongue, and very gently scraping your teeth over the tip.”
She followed the things he was saying, while he kept up a slow steady stroke over the shaft.
He opens his eyes to watch, and of course her hair is black, and it’s not curly, but her lips are still red, and it feels brilliant. “Fuck, that’s so good, baby.”
She pulls back and smiles at him. “What next?”
“Lube.”
She hands him the bottle, and he pours a little in his palm, smoothing it over his whole penis. He sighs as he does that. Dry is good, slick is better.
“And this would be the part where I stopped teasing you?”
“Yeah. Mouth and hand and all the way up and all the way down and—“ He’s stroking steadily, a faster pace, hand tighter.
“Slow down, let me see what you’re doing.”
He exhales long and slow, and narrates the action. “Moderately tight fist. Keeping my fingers snug enough so I can feel each one as I slip through. I roll my thumb over the tip as it passes through.”
“That is so hot.”
“Good.” He speeds the pace of his hand, hips rocking into the stroke. “As you suck, you hand gets wet and slick.” His right hand, the one he poured the lube into, gets into the action, rolling his balls a little, pulling them gently, and then slipping behind them, pressing against his perineum. “So you switch to just mouth and use your hand on the rest of me.” He shifts position so he’s half kneeling, butt resting against his feet, knees wide apart.
“I’m watching you suck me. Holding me deep in your mouth, hot, wet suction,” he grabs the cock ring and slips it over himself, sighing a little as he gets it set.
“How does it feel?”
“Huh?”
“I know it makes it more difficult to get off, and I know it keeps you hard, but how does it feel when you’re wearing it?”
“Really full, really big. The closer you are to coming the bigger and harder it gets, so it feels like being on edge. The skin can’t move over the shaft, so you get more sensation out of the friction. Balls can’t creep up, so you can enjoy it longer.”
“Okay. Why put it on now?”
“Because in the fantasy your fingers are about to get into the action, and I want this part to last a while.”
“And what are my fingers doing?”
“Slipping around, pressing into my perineum, and one of them is very gently easing into me.” His left hand goes back to a long, slow stroke, all the way up and down, as his right slips further back between his legs, starting to slip in. He lets out a slow breath and speeds his hand a little, distracting himself, better lube means this a lot more comfortable than it used to be, but it’s still not his favorite thing.
He feels her move again and hears the sound of rustling clothing. He opens his eyes and sees her stripping out of her clothing, facing him, matching the speed of his hands to her own fingers moving over her flesh.She looks at him and smiles. “Way too hot, can’t not touch myself.”
He closes his eyes again, hearing the sound of her fingers slipping against her flesh. “This is not helping me relax, at all.”
“Poor baby.” He feels her fingers on his lips, smells her on them, tastes them, and fuck it, this isn’t masturbation any more. He opens his eyes, sucks her fingers into his mouth, and pushes her onto her back.
“Tim!” She’s a bit surprised by that.
“Screw the fantasy!” he said a second before dipping into a long, hot kiss, and grinding himself against her stomach.
They kept at that, writhing against each other for a good minute before he pulled back. “Up, on your hands and knees.” His hands stroked over her shoulders and back, cupping her ass, as he kissed down her spine. “Just like that. Most perfect ass, ever.”
He knelt behind her, thrusting in hard and fast. “Oh God! Fuck! Abby!”
The good thing about the cock ring is that it does provide a certain level of artificially enforced control. Yes, he can climax wearing the ring, but it’s a lot more difficult than usual. But feeling like you’re on edge, even if you aren’t, means that he’s got a lot less control of the rest of his body. Primary, his fine motor control is shot.
He’s kissing her shoulders and neck, hands stroking her breasts. “Touch yourself, baby. Want to feel you get off.”
She does, he can feel her fingers brush his balls when he trusts forward, and her body growing even tighter on him, and it feels so amazing, hot, wet, tight, and slick, on over-sensitized skin, and his body wants to come, and the ring drags that sensation out. She’s rippling on him, twitching and moaning and that’s even better, a whole level of better, and he forces himself to stop, let her ride it out, relax for a minute.He pulls out, going to take the ring off, and slip back in and come so hard he sees stars.
She turns to face him. “Stop.”
“Stop? What are you thinking?”
“It takes a lot of extra stimulation for you to get off wearing that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m feeling awfully relaxed right now. Kneel down, butt on your feet.”
His eyes went wide, fairly sure where this is going. “Really?”
“Yeah. Hold it together long enough for me to get settled, and then you can go full out.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. We’ve done this often enough you know you aren’t going to hurt me.”
He swallowed hard, and sat back, determined to stay very, very still. She got the lube, added more of it to him, and a lot more to her, and then back to his chest, very slowly eased down.
His hands curled into fists, and his feet into whatever the equivalent of a fist is. So hot, so tight, and so, so, so slow. He’s focusing on her back, tracing the tattoos with his eyes, making himself not move, not thrust, not bury himself again and again into her. And since she didn’t stretch ahead of time this takes three quarters of forever and it’s the longest, slowest, tightest, hottest, best-feeling forever of his life.
He knows he’s talking, hot, dirty, sexy words, probably cursing, too, feels too good not to let it out, but he’s got no idea what he’s saying. The feeling of it, the flex of her back as she eases down, the curve of her hips and ass, but mostly the way it feels, is keeping his mind busy.
She settled against him, just still for a good long minute, breathing quietly. Then she leaned forward, arms stretched out in front of her, head resting on the right one, ass high, and said, “Fuck me.”
It was like an explosion in his brain. Any part of him that wasn’t entirely devoted to thrusting and pleasure just vanished at those words. The whole world shrunk down to the feeling of her body tight and slick and sliding along his.
And when his orgasm started, he felt it whole body, through his arms and legs and chest and heart, pouring, pulsing through balls and cock and if fucking fantastic means anything, it means this feeling rushing through him.
They’re on their sides, him still deep in her, when he comes back to himself. He snuggles in closer, sighing happily, kissing her neck, enjoying her next to him.
They drift like that for a little while, just enjoying the endorphins and breathing together. Finally Abby said, “Can you reach the towel?”
He feels around a little and hands it to her. She slips off of him, and he hisses a little at that. Cock ring means he’s very sensitive post-climax. He takes it off carefully, trying to not touch himself too much.
Eventually they’re both cleaned up and in bed, both sleepy. He’s wrapped around her, and it’s probably the endorphins, but maybe it’s just her, and her being near, but he loves her so much right now. It feels too big to hold onto, too big to keep in just one body, one heart.
He usually sleeps spooned behind her, with his arm around her waist, hand curled loosely around her breast, but he slides it over a little, feeling her heartbeat, and the soft rise and fall of her chest under his hand.
And he feels how precious this life is, how fragile, and how much he wants, needs, cherishes it. And there aren’t words, nothing existing solely of breath of man is big enough for this, deep enough for it, so he doesn’t try to speak it.
He kisses her neck, and her shoulder, pressing his face to her back, smelling her skin and hair, and holds her tightly, trying to get the feeling across with touch, not sure if that’s even possible, but it’s--
“I love you, too, Tim.”
He kisses her one more time, wishing he was a great artist, so he could make something as beautiful as this is, and give it to her.
May 4, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
Chapter 79. Wedding Planning
Some things about planning the Sciuto-McGee wedding were pretty easy. The date for example. That took all of nine seconds, eight of which were spent looking at a calendar.
Of course it’s a Halloween wedding, when else would the Elf Lord marry his Gothic Wildflower? (Okay, technically it’s an All Saint’s wedding, because Halloween 2014 is a Friday night and a Saturday wedding is easier for everyone.)
And of course, if it’s a Halloween wedding, then it has to be in costume. Ideas, themes, plans were considered and scuttled. Renfaire wedding: both of them thought that was awfully cool, especially given the costumes, but, then they looked at their friends, and decided that torturing all of them wasn’t the goal of their wedding.
Basically, they had been talking about it, explaining the idea, and then Gibbs visibly winced. And that killed Renfaire.
Which lead to a question that got asked at each new idea before anyone outside of the immediate wedding planning team (Abby, Palmer, Breena, and Tim) got in on it. “Can you see Gibbs in...” killed a lot of the themes. Punk? No. Goth? No.
“A kilt?” Abby asked as they looked at Highland themed ideas.
“You’re kidding, right?” Tim replied.
“He’d look great in a kilt!” Breena added.
“Gibbs, not Ducky,” Tim said.
Breena just stared at him.
Tim shook his head. “Not saying he wouldn’t, just that you’d have to get him drunk and probably roofie him before you’d be able to get him into one.”
Jimmy and Abby looked at each other, shrugged, and onto the next idea they went.
It was Palmer, who had leapt with surprising ease into the role of Abby’s... man of honor? best man? whatever, the guy who holds the flowers during the vows, who said, “How about Steampunk? With like, a Western flare?”
They stopped and thought about that. Gibbs: black stove pipe trousers, black claw hammer jacket, white shirt, navy brocade vest, string tie, boots, Stetson... That worked. That really worked.
“There’s a new Sheriff in town, and his name is L.J. Gibbs. I can see that,” Tim said nodding.
http://romanticthreads.com/neromaango.html“I’m thinking east coast dandy for me,” Jimmy said. He stared at Tim for a long moment. “You too, probably. And Ducky, oh my God, he’ll be all over this in a heartbeat. Heck, he might even break out his kilt for it.”
They realized Abby hadn’t said anything. “What do you think Abby?” Jimmy asked.
She turned the computer toward them. On it was a silver and black brocade dress, skin tight bodice with a low square cut neck, full skirts flared over a bustle, all of it embellished with ruffles and black piping. A froth of lace spilled out at the wrists. The model’s hair was piled up in high curls, and she even looked a little bit like Abby.
“What would you think of this in white?”
Tim’s jaw went slack. He stared at it, then stared at Abby. It took a second, but he was finally able to say, “It’s perfect.”
“A what wedding?” Tony asks Tim three days later.
“Steampunk.”
“What the hell is steampunk?”
Tim almost says, “You’ll like it.” But really, Tony probably won’t. At best, he’ll humor him. “Sort of like the 1880s Old West, but with steam powered things instead of the internal combustion engines we ended up with.”
“So, you’re doing your wedding based on one of the worst movies ever?”
“Huh?”
“Wild, Wild West? Will Smith? Kevin Klein?”
“No idea what you’re talking about. I ran into it the first time with Deadlands.”
“What’s Deadlands?”
“RPG that was popular for about seventeen minutes during the nineties,” Tim says absently while googling Wild Wild West. He check out some of the stills and says, “Actually, yes, this looks right.”
“Worst movie of ’99.”
“How bad could something with Will Smith and Kenneth Branagh be?”
“You’d be amazed.” Tony looks over at Gibbs who has been following this conversation without saying anything. “You going to go along with this?”
Gibbs shrugs. “I like Westerns. And it’s certainly better than… What was that thing Abby and Palmer were going on about last week?”
“Renfaire?” Tim asks.
“Yeah.” Gibbs shakes his head and says one more word on that subject, “Tights.”
“No tights for this. Vests, cravats, hats maybe. No tights.”
Tony looks at the pictures on Tim’s phone. Yeah, it’s not his usual style, by like, ten miles, but he can pull that sort of outfit off, and look excellent doing it.
“Steampunk. Hmmm… Well, you’ve certainly had worse ideas.”
“Thanks Tony, that ringing endorsement was all I was waiting for.”
Chapter 79. Wedding Planning
Some things about planning the Sciuto-McGee wedding were pretty easy. The date for example. That took all of nine seconds, eight of which were spent looking at a calendar.
Of course it’s a Halloween wedding, when else would the Elf Lord marry his Gothic Wildflower? (Okay, technically it’s an All Saint’s wedding, because Halloween 2014 is a Friday night and a Saturday wedding is easier for everyone.)
And of course, if it’s a Halloween wedding, then it has to be in costume. Ideas, themes, plans were considered and scuttled. Renfaire wedding: both of them thought that was awfully cool, especially given the costumes, but, then they looked at their friends, and decided that torturing all of them wasn’t the goal of their wedding.
Basically, they had been talking about it, explaining the idea, and then Gibbs visibly winced. And that killed Renfaire.
Which lead to a question that got asked at each new idea before anyone outside of the immediate wedding planning team (Abby, Palmer, Breena, and Tim) got in on it. “Can you see Gibbs in...” killed a lot of the themes. Punk? No. Goth? No.
“A kilt?” Abby asked as they looked at Highland themed ideas.
“You’re kidding, right?” Tim replied.
“He’d look great in a kilt!” Breena added.
“Gibbs, not Ducky,” Tim said.
Breena just stared at him.
Tim shook his head. “Not saying he wouldn’t, just that you’d have to get him drunk and probably roofie him before you’d be able to get him into one.”
Jimmy and Abby looked at each other, shrugged, and onto the next idea they went.
It was Palmer, who had leapt with surprising ease into the role of Abby’s... man of honor? best man? whatever, the guy who holds the flowers during the vows, who said, “How about Steampunk? With like, a Western flare?”
They stopped and thought about that. Gibbs: black stove pipe trousers, black claw hammer jacket, white shirt, navy brocade vest, string tie, boots, Stetson... That worked. That really worked.
“There’s a new Sheriff in town, and his name is L.J. Gibbs. I can see that,” Tim said nodding.
http://romanticthreads.com/neromaango.html“I’m thinking east coast dandy for me,” Jimmy said. He stared at Tim for a long moment. “You too, probably. And Ducky, oh my God, he’ll be all over this in a heartbeat. Heck, he might even break out his kilt for it.”They realized Abby hadn’t said anything. “What do you think Abby?” Jimmy asked.
She turned the computer toward them. On it was a silver and black brocade dress, skin tight bodice with a low square cut neck, full skirts flared over a bustle, all of it embellished with ruffles and black piping. A froth of lace spilled out at the wrists. The model’s hair was piled up in high curls, and she even looked a little bit like Abby.
“What would you think of this in white?”
Tim’s jaw went slack. He stared at it, then stared at Abby. It took a second, but he was finally able to say, “It’s perfect.”
“A what wedding?” Tony asks Tim three days later.
“Steampunk.”
“What the hell is steampunk?”
Tim almost says, “You’ll like it.” But really, Tony probably won’t. At best, he’ll humor him. “Sort of like the 1880s Old West, but with steam powered things instead of the internal combustion engines we ended up with.”
“So, you’re doing your wedding based on one of the worst movies ever?”
“Huh?”
“Wild, Wild West? Will Smith? Kevin Klein?”
“No idea what you’re talking about. I ran into it the first time with Deadlands.”
“What’s Deadlands?”
“RPG that was popular for about seventeen minutes during the nineties,” Tim says absently while googling Wild Wild West. He check out some of the stills and says, “Actually, yes, this looks right.”
“Worst movie of ’99.”
“How bad could something with Will Smith and Kenneth Branagh be?”
“You’d be amazed.” Tony looks over at Gibbs who has been following this conversation without saying anything. “You going to go along with this?”
Gibbs shrugs. “I like Westerns. And it’s certainly better than… What was that thing Abby and Palmer were going on about last week?”
“Renfaire?” Tim asks.
“Yeah.” Gibbs shakes his head and says one more word on that subject, “Tights.”
“No tights for this. Vests, cravats, hats maybe. No tights.”
Tony looks at the pictures on Tim’s phone. Yeah, it’s not his usual style, by like, ten miles, but he can pull that sort of outfit off, and look excellent doing it.
“Steampunk. Hmmm… Well, you’ve certainly had worse ideas.”
“Thanks Tony, that ringing endorsement was all I was waiting for.”
May 3, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
It turns out that an Arthur Miller costume isn’t all that hard to assemble. The glasses were a little tricky; almost no one sells that style of horn rimmed glasses, let alone without any sort of corrective lens, but Tim has legendary levels of Google-Fu so he found a pair. But a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, corduroy pants, and the pipe were easy to find.
And so he was ready to go not too long after they got home from work on Halloween.
And after getting ready, Abby exiled him from their bedroom, and got to work on Marilyn.
There aren’t a lot of trick-or-treaters in their building, but he fielded the knocks on their door. Most of the kids didn’t even seem to notice he was in any sort of costume. Some of the adults who went with them did, and looked at him a little curiously.
Between knocks, he looks over the edits he’d gotten back on Deep Six Four, now tentatively titled The Traitor Within. Nothing too drastic so far, but he’s also only fifty pages in.
He’s really thinking about one comment in the margin when he realizes she’s standing in the doorway to his office.
He looks up at her: platinum hair, red lips, and that white dress, swallows hard, and says, “We might not make it to that party.”
“You really like this?” she asks, stepping in, twirling a little. He immediately notices something else, this time, she isn’t wearing panties.
“God Abby, yeah, I like that. You know what I did when I got home on Halloween 2006?”
She smiles. “Cried about your missing Ice Queen?”
“Who? Trust me, by the end of that night, she was gone... Wait a minute...” He squints a little, remembering something. “You did that on purpose. We were still at work when we got the call. So were you. You went home to change!”
She smiles and looks innocent. “And if I did?”
“That’s just mean. You knew my date was over and then you dressed like that and told me I couldn’t touch.”
“Please, you teased me all the time, too.”
“When have I ever teased you like that?”
“Really? This from the man who promised to tie me up and didn’t.”
It takes him a minute to figure that out, but once he knew what she was talking about he had a comeback ready. “You’re right, I still owe you one for that. And Marilyn, you’re so gonna get tied—”
His phone rings, followed a second later by hers. And if both of their phones are ringing that means he has to get it. He picks it up, sees Gibbs on the caller ID. “I hate Halloween.” He answers the phone. “Who’s dead?”
“Sailor out of Allendale. Texting you the address.”
“Great. Be there soon.”
He looks at her, and she smiles, nodding as she listens to her half of the call out. Then she hung up her phone.
“The first time I wore this, you kept undressing me with your eyes, and I kept fantasizing about you and me in my office. I kept imaging you sitting on my desk chair, me in your lap, and the way you’d look at me as I slid onto you.” She grins at him. “Looks like we’ll get a chance at that tonight.”
He’s giving her his you’re evil look. “Don’t say things like that to me now. I’m already going to have a hard enough time focusing on the case.”
“Hard being the operative word.” She gives him a slow kiss while squeezing him gently through his pants.
“See you later.” And with those words, and a little skirt flaring twirl, she heads toward her car.
Tony sees him first as he gets to the scene. “I know you’re a writer, but this is walking cliché territory.”
“It’s Halloween, Tony,” he says as he begins pulling on the little blue booties that protect the crime scene from his shoes and vice versa.
“You’re going out as a writer for Halloween? The idea is to be someone you aren’t.”
“I don’t usually look like this, do I? You’ll figure it out when you see Abby. We were getting ready to go out.”
“What could Abby possibly be wearing to make that make sense?”
Gibbs looks him over and says one word, “Marilyn.”
Tim nods.
Tony looks him up and down. “You’re Miller?”
“No. I’m DiMaggio,” Tim shot back, perfect deadpan.
Tony laughs and then looks at Tim, genuinely bummed for them missing out on their Halloween plans. “And once again Halloween strikes.”
“Yeah.”
Gibbs hands him the camera. “Get on it, Miller. Unlike the Ice Queen, Marilyn’ll still be there when we’re done.”
And unlike the Ice Queen, Marilyn was waiting for him when he got back to the lab. And yeah, technically he didn’t have anything to do down here right now. But the computers in her lab work just as well as the ones up at his desk.
And as long as he’s doing something at least vaguely related to the case, he’s still working.
Okay, so watching her sip Caff-Pow, perfect red lips wrapped around the straw, sucking gently, might not be precisely the definition of doing something vaguely related to the case, but… Fuck it, he’s goofing off, there’s no good excuse for it, but he’s remarkably unlikely to stop anytime soon.
And just as he settles in to watch, as she’s grinning at him, lightly licking the tip of the straw, and stroking it between her fingers, he feels the hand connect with the back of his head.
“Less screwing in the lab, more catching killers.”
Abby puts her drink down, grins, and says, “Gibbs, I’ll have you know, that as a forensic scientist of the highest caliber, I can do both at once!”
Tim just stands there and tries not to blush too hard.
“Fine, Abbs, but what about Miller over there?”
“He’s helping me do both at once,” she says with a pretty smile. Which was when Major Mass Spec beeped. “Observe, Gibbs, Major Mass Spec is about to reveal to us…” She reads the print out, looks at it like it was wrong, and read it again. “Weird. The makeup Lt. Hennen was wearing was dosed with Rohypnol.”
“Just straight Rohypnol?” Tim asks.
She hands him the print out. “If there’s anything else in there, I’m not seeing it.”
He shakes his head. It’s a combo of gray face paint and Rohypnol, a lot of Rohypnol. Halloween. “Well, that’s not gonna work, at all. You have to ingest it. Might explain why his head was bashed with the skillet, Boss. Whoever did this didn’t intend to kill him at all, or at least didn’t plan to kill him there. But the plan to sedate him didn’t work and they had to grab for whatever was at hand.”
Gibbs is already on his phone. “Ziva, search the whole house, I want you to find the makeup the Lt. was wearing.” He hangs up. “With me, McGee, you can moon over her later. You—“ He shifts focus to Abby.
“I’m already getting samples of everything else he had in his house. Maybe this was supposed to be part of some sort of chemical cocktail. McGee?”
“Chemical cocktail designed by someone who doesn’t know anything about biology.” Then he notices that’s not the sort of comment Abby was looking for. “Yeah?”
“What was the costume supposed to be?”
“Zombie.”
She looks over the samples in front of her. “Get me the latex prosthetics, the glue for it, the fake blood, and any other makeup colors he had, and fake teeth if there were any.”
Tim’s nodding. He knows where she’s going with this. “He wasn’t finished getting dressed when we found him. I’m guessing something slowed him down, and instead of finding him passed out in costume, they found him putting his makeup on.”
Tim’s taking a step closer to Abby, further away from the door and Gibbs when a hand snakes out, grabs him by the back of the collar, and yanks him out of the lab. “Catching bad guys, McGee.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Find out what slowed him down and who would have known when he should have gotten home.”
“On it, Boss.”
He got down for five minutes two hours later. Though this time it was business, delivering the samples Ziva had collected.
At least, he had intended to be businesslike about it. But she was standing at her computer, long legs on display, curved beautifully from those ridiculously cute high heels, the skirt just skimming along the backs of her knees, and this time, no white outline of ‘50s style panties.
He placed the samples on her work table, and didn’t exactly sneak up behind her, but he didn’t need to be very quiet, her music was on loud and she was into her work.
She jerked a little when his lips landed on her neck as he pressed up behind her, and then relaxed and smiled.
“The last time you wore this, I could see your panties through the dress. This time you aren’t wearing any. Are you teasing me more this time or last time?”
Her hand slid from the mouse to his thigh, stroking gently. “Depends, which did you like better?”
“Not sure. I’m liking both options quite a bit. There’s something really fine about you in those conservative, white, 1950s panties. And there’s something” he inched her skirt up until he could feel skin under his fingers, then his hand slid up her leg, stroking over her hip to caress her pussy gently, “scorching hot about this.”
She leaned against his chest and sighed as he touched her. After a few seconds, when she moaned quietly, he pulled his hand away, kissed her shoulder, and stepped back. She turned to face him, once again flaring the skirt, but not holding her hands to her sides, so he got a quick glimpse of thigh. He took the two fingers he had been touching her with, and holding her gaze, licked them clean, biting the top of his index finger lightly.
Then he nodded to the table and smiled. “The samples you asked for.”
“You’re evil.”
“Thank you.” He winked began to head for the Bullpen.
“Are you close?”
He thought that was an odd question. With the exception of him doing himself, she’s seen every way he gets off, so she should know what close looks like. But maybe she’s setting something up with this, so he grins and says, “Nah, just hard.”
She didn’t roll her eyes, but he has the sense she wants to. “The case.”
“Oh. Yeah…” It takes a second for him to switch gears. “Think so, Gibbs and Tony have a guy in interrogation. And in a minute, I’ll be back up there looking through every electronic record he’s got.”
“Well, hurry up.”
“On it, Boss!”
He was sitting behind the glass, watching Gibbs and Tony interrogating the guy. His phone buzzed. Text from Abby.
Who’s in interrogation?
Gibbs and Tony.
No, who are they talking to?
Jim Sloan, he’s called like ten times this week, and was keeping an eye on the vic.
Wrong guy.
???
Unless he’s also the guy who sold our vic the makeup, he’s the wrong guy.
Nope, didn’t do that.
Good. Send Gibbs down soon.
I will.
And while it’s true that you don’t interrupt Gibbs in interrogation, flashing a text to Tony is completely acceptable.
He sees Tony read it and nod. Then he hands the phone to Gibbs who looks at it, glares at the suspect, and then both of them silently leave the room, leaving Sloan just sitting there, wondering what the hell was going on.
Meanwhile, he heads for his computer, time to tell it to find out where the vic got that makeup.
Three minutes later, Gibbs and Tony are in the lab, and Abby is doing show and tell.
“So, you know, whenever we have a chance at a tampered with product, the first step is to figure out how the tampering happened…” she explains how she took the samples, checked the tubes for any trace of tampering, and noticed the red, the unopened tube, had a tamper proof seal over the lid, which made her think the others would have too.
That got her interest, because makeup tubes like this rarely have those seals on them.
Some googling found that there is no Kyllyn Tyme Monster Makeup.
Then she began carefully taking the tubes apart and found that yes, there is some makeup in all of them, and also powdered drugs.
Major Mass Spec was doing its thing, figuring out what was in each of those tubes, but whatever it is, it probably wasn’t intended to be sold to Hennen.
Tim got there just as she was saying that, he added. “Credit card purchase this morning. Spirit-Halloween in Allendale. He got the makeup, hair spray, and a few other things. I’m guessing he got a hold of the wrong makeup.”
Gibbs nods at him, and says to Abby, “Good work Abbs.”
She smiles, accepting the kiss on her cheek as Gibbs turns to head off. “DiNozzo, take Ziva...”
“On it, Boss.”
“McGee, by the time they get there, I want them to know about everyone who works there and who is likely smuggling drugs through the place.”
Tim nods and heads for Abby’s computer.
“Upstairs, McGee.”
“Upstairs main computer is already digging into Rohypnol dealers in the DC area. Upstairs secondary computer is looking into Rohypnol producers, matching formulas to what Abby’s found. Don’t worry, Boss, by the time they get there, they’ll have what they need.”
Gibbs just stared at him for a second, the no fucking around look. And Tim nodded, turning towards Abby’s computer.
It was a half-hour drive with Ziva at the wheel, and by minute twenty-seven he had sent Tony the names of three guys who worked there, all of whom had sealed juvie records for drug issues. The idea that they had moved onto bigger and better things wasn’t impossible.
He’d also sent the name of the guy who ran the shop, because some fast checking showed that he was in debt up to his eyeballs, and fast, easy money might be very tempting for a sixty-year-old on the verge of losing everything and having to start over again.
And then he turned to Abby, who was behind him, working with the makeup and the rest of the evidence, Marilyn costume covered in a lab coat, gloves on her hands, kissed her lightly on the nape of her neck, and whispered, “Now I’m close,” before heading upstairs.
The image of her grinning at him, eyes bright through lab glasses, stayed in his mind as he rode the elevator up to the bullpen, heading to his own computers to see if they could link this into a bigger drug case.
It was a little after one when she got the text from McGee. Done. Down in 10.
Which means… fifteen maybe twenty minutes--twenty-five if he really wants to tease her, but she’s hoping he’s more interested in quick today, because she’s feeling awfully ready--that seven-year-old fantasy of sitting him at her desk and watching his face as she slides onto him can come true.
Watching Tim experience pleasure is one of her great joys.
When something gets to him, it really gets to him, and he doesn’t try to hide it. At least, not from her. Like, the first time he bit into a deep-fat fried pickle. He was staring at it warily, not crazy about the idea, because he thought it sounded gross and the fried okra didn’t do anything for him. But she nudged his hand, fairly sure he’d like it, and he put it in his mouth, still looking like this whole ideas was insane, and bit down.
And she got to see it on his face, the way hot, crispy, salty, sour, sweet, and juicy all hit at once. That almost pained expression of How on earth have I gone my entire life not knowing something this good exists? and got to hear the soft, almost moan of a sound that came out of him as he started to chew.
She doesn’t know if he knows that she does this, but sometimes she’ll just stand in the doorway to his office, and watch him listen to music.
He never closes the door to his office, so she doesn’t feel like she’s intruding or sneaking, but sometimes she comes home and she’ll hear his music, so she’ll go over and watch. And most of the time he sees her and waves her in and they talk for a bit.
But sometimes the music just sounds right. And she’d be hard pressed to explain what right is, but she knows it when she hears it, and she knows when she peeks in she’ll see him lounging in his chair, eyes closed, head back, just letting it all wrap around him, and those days, when he just lets himself go, lets the pleasure of it take him over, he doesn’t notice her, and she can just stand there and watch to her heart’s content.
He hums along sometimes, which she assumes means that it’s a piece he’s heard before. And others he’s just silent, index and middle finger of his left hand sort of moving with whatever melody or beat especially has him in its spell.
And she’ll stand there and watch, loving that he can get so into the things he loves. And, of course, watching is a treat, but knowing you’re causing that sort of pleasure is even better.
There are perks to running your own department. For example, Abby has the keys to the lab. When she locks up, it’s locked.
Since it’s high security, the janitorial staff isn’t allowed in there. Sure, she has to keep the lab tidy herself, but right now that works especially well for her.
Because right now, she’s pulling McGee into her office, and she knows the doors are locked and no one is going to come in.
Technically, it’s not Halloween any more. Halloween ended an hour ago. But they haven’t slept yet, and she still believes in the idea that it’s not tomorrow until you sleep. And it’s still Halloween five hundred miles west of here, so that counts, right?
And he’s kissing her like he’s been waiting all night for this, well he has, and so has she for that matter, and the only thing not perfect about it is he can’t fist his hand in her hair, which she really likes, but his hand on her neck and the other cupping her tush, keeping her firmly pressed hips to hips against him is awfully nice, too.
He pulls back to just look at her, eyes sliding up and down her body, and she smiles at him, loving that. She’s always loved the ways he looks at her, and how it’s changed over the years. The goofy grin he gave her back in ’06, which she just about melted at, is gone. Today his eyes are hungry, confident, and if the term eye fucking means anything, it’s how he’s looking at her right now.
He tilts her head back, thumb on her jaw, and lays a line of open-mouthed, wet kisses along her throat down the v-neck of her dress while she’s pushing them back into her office.
She’s unbuttoning his shirt. Not bothering to take it off, too much effort to take it off, but she wants his skin, wants the feel of his heartbeat against hers and the smell of his skin. And he’s stripping out of his pants, or at least pushing them down to his knees. She’s not paying enough attention to that to know for sure.
What she does know is he lands on her desk chair, and a second later she’s straddled him, realizing this chair really needs to be a few inches wider to do this properly, but for now, they’ll make do. Her one leg snugs in next to his, and the other ends up over the arm of the chair, and a second after that, she’s holding him steady, and sliding down, watching him as she does it.
He doesn’t close his eyes. He almost never does. But they’re three quarters shut right now, and he’s got that look, that this is so good my eyes want to roll back in my head but I can’t not watch it look. And that always kills her. The way it feels so good but he won’t shut her out of it. How he never, not when they’re having sex, slips entirely into himself.
His head is back, the line of his throat long and laid bare for her, and she wants to lick it, but she can’t see him if she does that, and that look, those almost closed eyes, lips wet and red, just barely open, teeth gritted. It’s too good to not watch.
The sound he’s making is not a moan. Not loud enough for that. A very long, deep exhale? Probably. Followed by a sharp, fast inhale.
And she can’t lick, not without breaking eye contact, so she strokes her fingers down his throat, down his chest.
His eyes slowly open all the way back up. His pupils are blown, wide and black, a fine rim of olive green around them. She’s read about eye color darkening with excitement, but that’s fiction. Though he is excited, and his eyes are darker than normal, it’s the lighting in here that’s doing it. Indoor lighting often makes his eyes look olive drab. Outside, or in good indoor light, his eyes are a sort of slightly warm-toned jade color. Jade of the stone, not the intense blue-green color often called jade. But that light, milky green, a color that makes her think of Asian-style dragons.
“My dragon.” She didn’t mean to say it out loud, and he looks a little confused at it, but she just smiles, and he lets it go.
His hips start a long slow roll, more grinding his pelvis against hers than trying to thrust, and that makes her want to close her eyes and throw her head back. And she does, feeling his fingers trace down her throat, along her chest, feathering over her breasts, and settling on her hips, encouraging her to move.
Sitting in this tiny little chair, she’s in charge of any sort of vertical motion. She adds a grind of her own, which is mostly for her, and a good firm squeeze, which is for him, and this time there’s no mistaking the sound coming out of him, definitely a moan.
A very pleased moan.
He cants his hips up, that gets a little more friction going, and she starts to ride him properly, as he gets his thumb into the action, finding her clit and stroking in fast, small circles.
This isn’t going to take long. Hours of teasing, anticipating, and wanting tends to make for fast orgasms once the actual sex starts.
And there is nothing, nothing at all, like watching Tim McGee come.
He’s so amazingly beautiful as he gets off. So intensely present. When he’s coming, there’s absolutely nothing else going on with him, he’s entirely in that moment, with her, and she treasures getting to be there for it. And it blows her mind that she gets to see this. Gets him, laid completely open in front of her, every feeling, every ounce of pleasure naked to her.
She watches him come down, basking in her own post-orgasmic glow, as well. Now his eyes are closed, and a blissed out expression, and a little smile, on his face.
She thinks about the first time she saw this, and how different it is now.
Ten years ago, he was a sweet kid: a nervous, adorable, occasionally-pouty, but mostly just a ridiculously sweet kid. And sex with that Tim McGee was a treat. A very different treat. That was the joy of showing a man he’s desirable. And especially in guys who don’t get treated like that a lot, seeing them feel it, seeing them know it, giving them the gift of wanting them, that’s amazing.
And Tim… she doesn’t know if anyone ever took the time to want him properly before she got a hold of him. She knows he had a steady girl at MIT, but the way he responded to her, the flower seeing the sun for the first time look she got out of him, that made her think no one ever did.
But he’s not that kid anymore. A lot of that sweetness has burned off over the years. Sometimes she misses that. He’s still playful, and there’s still a very deep gentleness to him, but he’s not adorably sweet anymore. He’s harder now, sharper than he probably ever could have dreamed of ten years ago.
He’s confident now. He’s the man who can open himself like this, lay himself in front of her and let her in. He couldn’t have done that ten years ago. And ten years ago, even if he could have, she wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
But now he’s a man who trusts not just his own worth, but her ability to recognize and value it.
She kisses him, pulls back, watching his face as he relaxes. “I love you, Tim. So much.”
He smiles slowly, stroking his fingers, those long, nimble fingers over her cheek and jaw. “Love you, too.”
She twines her fingers with his, looking at the ring he had made for her bracketed by two of his fingers. He sees her looking at it.
“Getting used to having it there?”
“Starting to. It’ll catch the light in my peripheral vision, and I’ll wonder what that red flash is, and then look and feel all tingly.”
He smiles at that, too, looking very pleased. Then he sighs and lets his head drop back. “Going to fall asleep right here if we don’t move soon. You want to crash here or head home?”
She’s feeling awfully satisfied and lazy right now, not really wanting to go anywhere. But she does want to sleep tonight, and that means unpinning her hair.
“Home. Don’t really want to move, but I can’t sleep with my hair pinned up like this.”
He’s nodding, reaching over for the tissues. They clean up, fast, and in a few minutes are heading toward his car. And while it’s true the Porsche is still his, and the roadster is still hers, usually whichever one of them happens to get to the driver’s side door first ends up driving. They both carry both keys now.
“How about I drive, and you can take your hair down while we head home. That way we can be asleep five minutes after getting in the door.”
“That sounds really good.”
Half an hour later they were home, snuggled into bed, him spooned behind her in their usual sleeping position, and she was just about asleep, when he asks, “What were you saying about dragons?”
She thinks for a second. “Oh. Your eyes are jade-colored. They make me think of those carved Asian style dragons. The Chinese ones with no wings.”
“Okay.” A long, quiet minute passes, while they both breathe softly and edge closer to sleep.
She felt it when he put two and two together. “I’m your dragon?”
“Yeah.”
He bit her very gently on the shoulder. “Grrrrr.”
A/N: Okay, so, it's not the greatest shot of McGee ever, but it's the best shot of his eyes I could find. http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/sean-murray/images/8929433/title/sean-murray-ncis-photo
It turns out that an Arthur Miller costume isn’t all that hard to assemble. The glasses were a little tricky; almost no one sells that style of horn rimmed glasses, let alone without any sort of corrective lens, but Tim has legendary levels of Google-Fu so he found a pair. But a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, corduroy pants, and the pipe were easy to find.
And so he was ready to go not too long after they got home from work on Halloween.
And after getting ready, Abby exiled him from their bedroom, and got to work on Marilyn.
There aren’t a lot of trick-or-treaters in their building, but he fielded the knocks on their door. Most of the kids didn’t even seem to notice he was in any sort of costume. Some of the adults who went with them did, and looked at him a little curiously.
Between knocks, he looks over the edits he’d gotten back on Deep Six Four, now tentatively titled The Traitor Within. Nothing too drastic so far, but he’s also only fifty pages in.
He’s really thinking about one comment in the margin when he realizes she’s standing in the doorway to his office.
He looks up at her: platinum hair, red lips, and that white dress, swallows hard, and says, “We might not make it to that party.”
“You really like this?” she asks, stepping in, twirling a little. He immediately notices something else, this time, she isn’t wearing panties.
“God Abby, yeah, I like that. You know what I did when I got home on Halloween 2006?”
She smiles. “Cried about your missing Ice Queen?”
“Who? Trust me, by the end of that night, she was gone... Wait a minute...” He squints a little, remembering something. “You did that on purpose. We were still at work when we got the call. So were you. You went home to change!”
She smiles and looks innocent. “And if I did?”
“That’s just mean. You knew my date was over and then you dressed like that and told me I couldn’t touch.”
“Please, you teased me all the time, too.”
“When have I ever teased you like that?”
“Really? This from the man who promised to tie me up and didn’t.”
It takes him a minute to figure that out, but once he knew what she was talking about he had a comeback ready. “You’re right, I still owe you one for that. And Marilyn, you’re so gonna get tied—”
His phone rings, followed a second later by hers. And if both of their phones are ringing that means he has to get it. He picks it up, sees Gibbs on the caller ID. “I hate Halloween.” He answers the phone. “Who’s dead?”
“Sailor out of Allendale. Texting you the address.”
“Great. Be there soon.”
He looks at her, and she smiles, nodding as she listens to her half of the call out. Then she hung up her phone.
“The first time I wore this, you kept undressing me with your eyes, and I kept fantasizing about you and me in my office. I kept imaging you sitting on my desk chair, me in your lap, and the way you’d look at me as I slid onto you.” She grins at him. “Looks like we’ll get a chance at that tonight.”
He’s giving her his you’re evil look. “Don’t say things like that to me now. I’m already going to have a hard enough time focusing on the case.”
“Hard being the operative word.” She gives him a slow kiss while squeezing him gently through his pants.
“See you later.” And with those words, and a little skirt flaring twirl, she heads toward her car.
Tony sees him first as he gets to the scene. “I know you’re a writer, but this is walking cliché territory.”
“It’s Halloween, Tony,” he says as he begins pulling on the little blue booties that protect the crime scene from his shoes and vice versa.
“You’re going out as a writer for Halloween? The idea is to be someone you aren’t.”
“I don’t usually look like this, do I? You’ll figure it out when you see Abby. We were getting ready to go out.”
“What could Abby possibly be wearing to make that make sense?”
Gibbs looks him over and says one word, “Marilyn.”
Tim nods.
Tony looks him up and down. “You’re Miller?”
“No. I’m DiMaggio,” Tim shot back, perfect deadpan.
Tony laughs and then looks at Tim, genuinely bummed for them missing out on their Halloween plans. “And once again Halloween strikes.”
“Yeah.”
Gibbs hands him the camera. “Get on it, Miller. Unlike the Ice Queen, Marilyn’ll still be there when we’re done.”
And unlike the Ice Queen, Marilyn was waiting for him when he got back to the lab. And yeah, technically he didn’t have anything to do down here right now. But the computers in her lab work just as well as the ones up at his desk.
And as long as he’s doing something at least vaguely related to the case, he’s still working.
Okay, so watching her sip Caff-Pow, perfect red lips wrapped around the straw, sucking gently, might not be precisely the definition of doing something vaguely related to the case, but… Fuck it, he’s goofing off, there’s no good excuse for it, but he’s remarkably unlikely to stop anytime soon.
And just as he settles in to watch, as she’s grinning at him, lightly licking the tip of the straw, and stroking it between her fingers, he feels the hand connect with the back of his head.
“Less screwing in the lab, more catching killers.”
Abby puts her drink down, grins, and says, “Gibbs, I’ll have you know, that as a forensic scientist of the highest caliber, I can do both at once!”
Tim just stands there and tries not to blush too hard.
“Fine, Abbs, but what about Miller over there?”
“He’s helping me do both at once,” she says with a pretty smile. Which was when Major Mass Spec beeped. “Observe, Gibbs, Major Mass Spec is about to reveal to us…” She reads the print out, looks at it like it was wrong, and read it again. “Weird. The makeup Lt. Hennen was wearing was dosed with Rohypnol.”
“Just straight Rohypnol?” Tim asks.
She hands him the print out. “If there’s anything else in there, I’m not seeing it.”
He shakes his head. It’s a combo of gray face paint and Rohypnol, a lot of Rohypnol. Halloween. “Well, that’s not gonna work, at all. You have to ingest it. Might explain why his head was bashed with the skillet, Boss. Whoever did this didn’t intend to kill him at all, or at least didn’t plan to kill him there. But the plan to sedate him didn’t work and they had to grab for whatever was at hand.”
Gibbs is already on his phone. “Ziva, search the whole house, I want you to find the makeup the Lt. was wearing.” He hangs up. “With me, McGee, you can moon over her later. You—“ He shifts focus to Abby.
“I’m already getting samples of everything else he had in his house. Maybe this was supposed to be part of some sort of chemical cocktail. McGee?”
“Chemical cocktail designed by someone who doesn’t know anything about biology.” Then he notices that’s not the sort of comment Abby was looking for. “Yeah?”
“What was the costume supposed to be?”
“Zombie.”
She looks over the samples in front of her. “Get me the latex prosthetics, the glue for it, the fake blood, and any other makeup colors he had, and fake teeth if there were any.”
Tim’s nodding. He knows where she’s going with this. “He wasn’t finished getting dressed when we found him. I’m guessing something slowed him down, and instead of finding him passed out in costume, they found him putting his makeup on.”
Tim’s taking a step closer to Abby, further away from the door and Gibbs when a hand snakes out, grabs him by the back of the collar, and yanks him out of the lab. “Catching bad guys, McGee.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Find out what slowed him down and who would have known when he should have gotten home.”
“On it, Boss.”
He got down for five minutes two hours later. Though this time it was business, delivering the samples Ziva had collected.
At least, he had intended to be businesslike about it. But she was standing at her computer, long legs on display, curved beautifully from those ridiculously cute high heels, the skirt just skimming along the backs of her knees, and this time, no white outline of ‘50s style panties.
He placed the samples on her work table, and didn’t exactly sneak up behind her, but he didn’t need to be very quiet, her music was on loud and she was into her work.
She jerked a little when his lips landed on her neck as he pressed up behind her, and then relaxed and smiled.
“The last time you wore this, I could see your panties through the dress. This time you aren’t wearing any. Are you teasing me more this time or last time?”
Her hand slid from the mouse to his thigh, stroking gently. “Depends, which did you like better?”
“Not sure. I’m liking both options quite a bit. There’s something really fine about you in those conservative, white, 1950s panties. And there’s something” he inched her skirt up until he could feel skin under his fingers, then his hand slid up her leg, stroking over her hip to caress her pussy gently, “scorching hot about this.”
She leaned against his chest and sighed as he touched her. After a few seconds, when she moaned quietly, he pulled his hand away, kissed her shoulder, and stepped back. She turned to face him, once again flaring the skirt, but not holding her hands to her sides, so he got a quick glimpse of thigh. He took the two fingers he had been touching her with, and holding her gaze, licked them clean, biting the top of his index finger lightly.
Then he nodded to the table and smiled. “The samples you asked for.”
“You’re evil.”
“Thank you.” He winked began to head for the Bullpen.
“Are you close?”
He thought that was an odd question. With the exception of him doing himself, she’s seen every way he gets off, so she should know what close looks like. But maybe she’s setting something up with this, so he grins and says, “Nah, just hard.”
She didn’t roll her eyes, but he has the sense she wants to. “The case.”
“Oh. Yeah…” It takes a second for him to switch gears. “Think so, Gibbs and Tony have a guy in interrogation. And in a minute, I’ll be back up there looking through every electronic record he’s got.”
“Well, hurry up.”
“On it, Boss!”
He was sitting behind the glass, watching Gibbs and Tony interrogating the guy. His phone buzzed. Text from Abby.
Who’s in interrogation?
Gibbs and Tony.
No, who are they talking to?
Jim Sloan, he’s called like ten times this week, and was keeping an eye on the vic.
Wrong guy.
???
Unless he’s also the guy who sold our vic the makeup, he’s the wrong guy.
Nope, didn’t do that.
Good. Send Gibbs down soon.
I will.
And while it’s true that you don’t interrupt Gibbs in interrogation, flashing a text to Tony is completely acceptable.
He sees Tony read it and nod. Then he hands the phone to Gibbs who looks at it, glares at the suspect, and then both of them silently leave the room, leaving Sloan just sitting there, wondering what the hell was going on.
Meanwhile, he heads for his computer, time to tell it to find out where the vic got that makeup.
Three minutes later, Gibbs and Tony are in the lab, and Abby is doing show and tell.
“So, you know, whenever we have a chance at a tampered with product, the first step is to figure out how the tampering happened…” she explains how she took the samples, checked the tubes for any trace of tampering, and noticed the red, the unopened tube, had a tamper proof seal over the lid, which made her think the others would have too.
That got her interest, because makeup tubes like this rarely have those seals on them.
Some googling found that there is no Kyllyn Tyme Monster Makeup.
Then she began carefully taking the tubes apart and found that yes, there is some makeup in all of them, and also powdered drugs.
Major Mass Spec was doing its thing, figuring out what was in each of those tubes, but whatever it is, it probably wasn’t intended to be sold to Hennen.
Tim got there just as she was saying that, he added. “Credit card purchase this morning. Spirit-Halloween in Allendale. He got the makeup, hair spray, and a few other things. I’m guessing he got a hold of the wrong makeup.”
Gibbs nods at him, and says to Abby, “Good work Abbs.”
She smiles, accepting the kiss on her cheek as Gibbs turns to head off. “DiNozzo, take Ziva...”
“On it, Boss.”
“McGee, by the time they get there, I want them to know about everyone who works there and who is likely smuggling drugs through the place.”
Tim nods and heads for Abby’s computer.
“Upstairs, McGee.”
“Upstairs main computer is already digging into Rohypnol dealers in the DC area. Upstairs secondary computer is looking into Rohypnol producers, matching formulas to what Abby’s found. Don’t worry, Boss, by the time they get there, they’ll have what they need.”
Gibbs just stared at him for a second, the no fucking around look. And Tim nodded, turning towards Abby’s computer.
It was a half-hour drive with Ziva at the wheel, and by minute twenty-seven he had sent Tony the names of three guys who worked there, all of whom had sealed juvie records for drug issues. The idea that they had moved onto bigger and better things wasn’t impossible.
He’d also sent the name of the guy who ran the shop, because some fast checking showed that he was in debt up to his eyeballs, and fast, easy money might be very tempting for a sixty-year-old on the verge of losing everything and having to start over again.
And then he turned to Abby, who was behind him, working with the makeup and the rest of the evidence, Marilyn costume covered in a lab coat, gloves on her hands, kissed her lightly on the nape of her neck, and whispered, “Now I’m close,” before heading upstairs.
The image of her grinning at him, eyes bright through lab glasses, stayed in his mind as he rode the elevator up to the bullpen, heading to his own computers to see if they could link this into a bigger drug case.
It was a little after one when she got the text from McGee. Done. Down in 10.
Which means… fifteen maybe twenty minutes--twenty-five if he really wants to tease her, but she’s hoping he’s more interested in quick today, because she’s feeling awfully ready--that seven-year-old fantasy of sitting him at her desk and watching his face as she slides onto him can come true.
Watching Tim experience pleasure is one of her great joys.
When something gets to him, it really gets to him, and he doesn’t try to hide it. At least, not from her. Like, the first time he bit into a deep-fat fried pickle. He was staring at it warily, not crazy about the idea, because he thought it sounded gross and the fried okra didn’t do anything for him. But she nudged his hand, fairly sure he’d like it, and he put it in his mouth, still looking like this whole ideas was insane, and bit down.
And she got to see it on his face, the way hot, crispy, salty, sour, sweet, and juicy all hit at once. That almost pained expression of How on earth have I gone my entire life not knowing something this good exists? and got to hear the soft, almost moan of a sound that came out of him as he started to chew.
She doesn’t know if he knows that she does this, but sometimes she’ll just stand in the doorway to his office, and watch him listen to music.
He never closes the door to his office, so she doesn’t feel like she’s intruding or sneaking, but sometimes she comes home and she’ll hear his music, so she’ll go over and watch. And most of the time he sees her and waves her in and they talk for a bit.
But sometimes the music just sounds right. And she’d be hard pressed to explain what right is, but she knows it when she hears it, and she knows when she peeks in she’ll see him lounging in his chair, eyes closed, head back, just letting it all wrap around him, and those days, when he just lets himself go, lets the pleasure of it take him over, he doesn’t notice her, and she can just stand there and watch to her heart’s content.
He hums along sometimes, which she assumes means that it’s a piece he’s heard before. And others he’s just silent, index and middle finger of his left hand sort of moving with whatever melody or beat especially has him in its spell.
And she’ll stand there and watch, loving that he can get so into the things he loves. And, of course, watching is a treat, but knowing you’re causing that sort of pleasure is even better.
There are perks to running your own department. For example, Abby has the keys to the lab. When she locks up, it’s locked.
Since it’s high security, the janitorial staff isn’t allowed in there. Sure, she has to keep the lab tidy herself, but right now that works especially well for her.
Because right now, she’s pulling McGee into her office, and she knows the doors are locked and no one is going to come in.
Technically, it’s not Halloween any more. Halloween ended an hour ago. But they haven’t slept yet, and she still believes in the idea that it’s not tomorrow until you sleep. And it’s still Halloween five hundred miles west of here, so that counts, right?
And he’s kissing her like he’s been waiting all night for this, well he has, and so has she for that matter, and the only thing not perfect about it is he can’t fist his hand in her hair, which she really likes, but his hand on her neck and the other cupping her tush, keeping her firmly pressed hips to hips against him is awfully nice, too.
He pulls back to just look at her, eyes sliding up and down her body, and she smiles at him, loving that. She’s always loved the ways he looks at her, and how it’s changed over the years. The goofy grin he gave her back in ’06, which she just about melted at, is gone. Today his eyes are hungry, confident, and if the term eye fucking means anything, it’s how he’s looking at her right now.
He tilts her head back, thumb on her jaw, and lays a line of open-mouthed, wet kisses along her throat down the v-neck of her dress while she’s pushing them back into her office.
She’s unbuttoning his shirt. Not bothering to take it off, too much effort to take it off, but she wants his skin, wants the feel of his heartbeat against hers and the smell of his skin. And he’s stripping out of his pants, or at least pushing them down to his knees. She’s not paying enough attention to that to know for sure.
What she does know is he lands on her desk chair, and a second later she’s straddled him, realizing this chair really needs to be a few inches wider to do this properly, but for now, they’ll make do. Her one leg snugs in next to his, and the other ends up over the arm of the chair, and a second after that, she’s holding him steady, and sliding down, watching him as she does it.
He doesn’t close his eyes. He almost never does. But they’re three quarters shut right now, and he’s got that look, that this is so good my eyes want to roll back in my head but I can’t not watch it look. And that always kills her. The way it feels so good but he won’t shut her out of it. How he never, not when they’re having sex, slips entirely into himself.
His head is back, the line of his throat long and laid bare for her, and she wants to lick it, but she can’t see him if she does that, and that look, those almost closed eyes, lips wet and red, just barely open, teeth gritted. It’s too good to not watch.
The sound he’s making is not a moan. Not loud enough for that. A very long, deep exhale? Probably. Followed by a sharp, fast inhale.
And she can’t lick, not without breaking eye contact, so she strokes her fingers down his throat, down his chest.
His eyes slowly open all the way back up. His pupils are blown, wide and black, a fine rim of olive green around them. She’s read about eye color darkening with excitement, but that’s fiction. Though he is excited, and his eyes are darker than normal, it’s the lighting in here that’s doing it. Indoor lighting often makes his eyes look olive drab. Outside, or in good indoor light, his eyes are a sort of slightly warm-toned jade color. Jade of the stone, not the intense blue-green color often called jade. But that light, milky green, a color that makes her think of Asian-style dragons.
“My dragon.” She didn’t mean to say it out loud, and he looks a little confused at it, but she just smiles, and he lets it go.
His hips start a long slow roll, more grinding his pelvis against hers than trying to thrust, and that makes her want to close her eyes and throw her head back. And she does, feeling his fingers trace down her throat, along her chest, feathering over her breasts, and settling on her hips, encouraging her to move.
Sitting in this tiny little chair, she’s in charge of any sort of vertical motion. She adds a grind of her own, which is mostly for her, and a good firm squeeze, which is for him, and this time there’s no mistaking the sound coming out of him, definitely a moan.
A very pleased moan.
He cants his hips up, that gets a little more friction going, and she starts to ride him properly, as he gets his thumb into the action, finding her clit and stroking in fast, small circles.
This isn’t going to take long. Hours of teasing, anticipating, and wanting tends to make for fast orgasms once the actual sex starts.
And there is nothing, nothing at all, like watching Tim McGee come.
He’s so amazingly beautiful as he gets off. So intensely present. When he’s coming, there’s absolutely nothing else going on with him, he’s entirely in that moment, with her, and she treasures getting to be there for it. And it blows her mind that she gets to see this. Gets him, laid completely open in front of her, every feeling, every ounce of pleasure naked to her.
She watches him come down, basking in her own post-orgasmic glow, as well. Now his eyes are closed, and a blissed out expression, and a little smile, on his face.
She thinks about the first time she saw this, and how different it is now.
Ten years ago, he was a sweet kid: a nervous, adorable, occasionally-pouty, but mostly just a ridiculously sweet kid. And sex with that Tim McGee was a treat. A very different treat. That was the joy of showing a man he’s desirable. And especially in guys who don’t get treated like that a lot, seeing them feel it, seeing them know it, giving them the gift of wanting them, that’s amazing.
And Tim… she doesn’t know if anyone ever took the time to want him properly before she got a hold of him. She knows he had a steady girl at MIT, but the way he responded to her, the flower seeing the sun for the first time look she got out of him, that made her think no one ever did.
But he’s not that kid anymore. A lot of that sweetness has burned off over the years. Sometimes she misses that. He’s still playful, and there’s still a very deep gentleness to him, but he’s not adorably sweet anymore. He’s harder now, sharper than he probably ever could have dreamed of ten years ago.
He’s confident now. He’s the man who can open himself like this, lay himself in front of her and let her in. He couldn’t have done that ten years ago. And ten years ago, even if he could have, she wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
But now he’s a man who trusts not just his own worth, but her ability to recognize and value it.
She kisses him, pulls back, watching his face as he relaxes. “I love you, Tim. So much.”
He smiles slowly, stroking his fingers, those long, nimble fingers over her cheek and jaw. “Love you, too.”
She twines her fingers with his, looking at the ring he had made for her bracketed by two of his fingers. He sees her looking at it.
“Getting used to having it there?”
“Starting to. It’ll catch the light in my peripheral vision, and I’ll wonder what that red flash is, and then look and feel all tingly.”
He smiles at that, too, looking very pleased. Then he sighs and lets his head drop back. “Going to fall asleep right here if we don’t move soon. You want to crash here or head home?”
She’s feeling awfully satisfied and lazy right now, not really wanting to go anywhere. But she does want to sleep tonight, and that means unpinning her hair.
“Home. Don’t really want to move, but I can’t sleep with my hair pinned up like this.”
He’s nodding, reaching over for the tissues. They clean up, fast, and in a few minutes are heading toward his car. And while it’s true the Porsche is still his, and the roadster is still hers, usually whichever one of them happens to get to the driver’s side door first ends up driving. They both carry both keys now.
“How about I drive, and you can take your hair down while we head home. That way we can be asleep five minutes after getting in the door.”
“That sounds really good.”
Half an hour later they were home, snuggled into bed, him spooned behind her in their usual sleeping position, and she was just about asleep, when he asks, “What were you saying about dragons?”
She thinks for a second. “Oh. Your eyes are jade-colored. They make me think of those carved Asian style dragons. The Chinese ones with no wings.”
“Okay.” A long, quiet minute passes, while they both breathe softly and edge closer to sleep.
She felt it when he put two and two together. “I’m your dragon?”
“Yeah.”
He bit her very gently on the shoulder. “Grrrrr.”
A/N: Okay, so, it's not the greatest shot of McGee ever, but it's the best shot of his eyes I could find. http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/sean-murray/images/8929433/title/sean-murray-ncis-photo
May 2, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
Chapter 77: An Announcement
They made a quick detour on the way into work the next morning.
“Gibbs, Gibbs, Gibbs, Gibbs...” She’s skipping into his house. Gibbs looks up from his cereal, meets Tim’s eyes, and Tim nods quickly as Abby bounds into his arms, all but singing, “We’re getting married! You’ll be there right? You’ll go to the church with us and walk me down the aisle and give me away when we get MARRIED?”
He pulls her a little tighter, because she’s been bouncing up and down this whole time, and it’s hard to hug someone who’s bouncing, and kisses her forehead. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Abbs.”
She looks up at him, and he can see hints of fear that there’ll be a repeat of Jimmy’s wedding. “No matter what, Abby, I’ll be there.”
She grins again.
The next detour in the usual get to work routine led them to Autopsy.
If there was ever a good clue that Abby was happy as happy could be, it was the fact that she walked (okay, skipped) straight into Autopsy without even pausing as the doors slid open.
Tim was a few steps behind, so he heard, “Abigail, what brings—“ Then Ducky saw him behind, took into account the wide, happy smile on Abby’s face and gathered her into a warm hug. “I assume, congratulations are in order?”
“Yeah, they are, Ducky,” Tim answered.
“Wonderful!” he said, and then pulled out of the hug, motioning Tim closer, and hugged him as well. Then he stepped back and said, “Come now, let me see,” motioning for Abby’s hand.
Palmer headed in as Ducky was saying that. He made a bee-line for Abby. “Finally. I’ve been waiting since February for this!”
“February?” Abby asked, looking at Tim. He smiled and shrugged a little.
Jimmy took her hand, looked at the ring on her finger, and kissed her cheek. Then he looked at Tim and nodded. “Good job.”
“Thanks.”
“Now, what?” Jimmy said to Abby.
“We get talking details. For example, are you my best man or man of honor?”
Tim doesn’t think he’s ever seen Jimmy look so pleased. After a few seconds, he answers, “As long as I don’t have to wear chiffon, any title you like works.”
“No chiffon. I can handled that. How about taffeta?”
For a second Jimmy looks really startled, because it’s entirely possible Abby isn’t joking, but she is, so he laughs, and finally says, “Only if it’s red, and there better be some killer heels to go with it.”
She kisses him, and he pulls her and Tim into a hug.
Jimmy kisses her one more time before letting both of them go. “Do you want me to tell Breena?”
“We’ve already got a lunch date set. Assuming no case pops up, you’re invited, too.” Then she remembered Ducky was standing there. “I mean, if you don’t need him for anything.”
“As long as we are not called upon to render our assistance for a case, I assure you, Jimmy will be free for wedding planning duties.”
The last stop on the tell everyone tour took them up to the Bullpen. Gibbs had already gotten there, and was sitting at his desk, but Tony and Ziva were nowhere to be seen.
Tim’s look asked Gibbs if he knew where they were, and Gibbs just shrugged. Tony and Ziva weren’t living together, but they certainly came into work together about four out of five days. And they didn’t yet seem to have the how to do that and show up precisely on time thing down pat yet.
Tim certainly understood that. It takes a while to work the kinks out of more or less living in two apartments.
So he sat down and turned on his computers. Abby settled on the edge of his desk, watching what he was doing.
Three minutes later, when they came in, Tony grumbling about his dry cleaning being on one side of town and Ziva’s place an hour away on the other, he had a pretty good idea of what was up.
“No clean shirts?” he asks as Tony heads for his desk.
Tony glared and said, “Yeah.”
“They make these things called irons, and if you apply it to a clean shirt, you don’t need to have it dry cleaned.”
“Sure.” During all of this, Ziva’s been leaning against her desk, staring at Abby, and grinning. Abby’s grinning back at her, left hand conspicuously visible. Which was when Tony really noticed that she was sitting there, on the edge of Tim’s desk, where she usually isn’t.
Ziva sees him finally get it and then closes on Abby, both of them hugging. He half hears Abby telling Ziva something about team bride meeting for lunch as the two of them look at the ring.
Tony breaks into a wide smile and gently punches Tim on the shoulder. “You finally did it!”
“Yeah.”
“Good! Stand up.” Tim did and got hugged again. Which, of course, was still happening when Vance came in.
“Anything I should know?”
“Wedding soon,” Gibbs answered.
And thus, Abby got her tenth or so kiss of the day, and Tim’s hand was shaken, and one more layer of congratulations were offered. Which was followed by a fairly gentle back to work from Gibbs.
Chapter 77: An Announcement
They made a quick detour on the way into work the next morning.
“Gibbs, Gibbs, Gibbs, Gibbs...” She’s skipping into his house. Gibbs looks up from his cereal, meets Tim’s eyes, and Tim nods quickly as Abby bounds into his arms, all but singing, “We’re getting married! You’ll be there right? You’ll go to the church with us and walk me down the aisle and give me away when we get MARRIED?”
He pulls her a little tighter, because she’s been bouncing up and down this whole time, and it’s hard to hug someone who’s bouncing, and kisses her forehead. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Abbs.”
She looks up at him, and he can see hints of fear that there’ll be a repeat of Jimmy’s wedding. “No matter what, Abby, I’ll be there.”
She grins again.
The next detour in the usual get to work routine led them to Autopsy.
If there was ever a good clue that Abby was happy as happy could be, it was the fact that she walked (okay, skipped) straight into Autopsy without even pausing as the doors slid open.
Tim was a few steps behind, so he heard, “Abigail, what brings—“ Then Ducky saw him behind, took into account the wide, happy smile on Abby’s face and gathered her into a warm hug. “I assume, congratulations are in order?”
“Yeah, they are, Ducky,” Tim answered.
“Wonderful!” he said, and then pulled out of the hug, motioning Tim closer, and hugged him as well. Then he stepped back and said, “Come now, let me see,” motioning for Abby’s hand.
Palmer headed in as Ducky was saying that. He made a bee-line for Abby. “Finally. I’ve been waiting since February for this!”
“February?” Abby asked, looking at Tim. He smiled and shrugged a little.
Jimmy took her hand, looked at the ring on her finger, and kissed her cheek. Then he looked at Tim and nodded. “Good job.”
“Thanks.”
“Now, what?” Jimmy said to Abby.
“We get talking details. For example, are you my best man or man of honor?”
Tim doesn’t think he’s ever seen Jimmy look so pleased. After a few seconds, he answers, “As long as I don’t have to wear chiffon, any title you like works.”
“No chiffon. I can handled that. How about taffeta?”
For a second Jimmy looks really startled, because it’s entirely possible Abby isn’t joking, but she is, so he laughs, and finally says, “Only if it’s red, and there better be some killer heels to go with it.”
She kisses him, and he pulls her and Tim into a hug.
Jimmy kisses her one more time before letting both of them go. “Do you want me to tell Breena?”
“We’ve already got a lunch date set. Assuming no case pops up, you’re invited, too.” Then she remembered Ducky was standing there. “I mean, if you don’t need him for anything.”
“As long as we are not called upon to render our assistance for a case, I assure you, Jimmy will be free for wedding planning duties.”
The last stop on the tell everyone tour took them up to the Bullpen. Gibbs had already gotten there, and was sitting at his desk, but Tony and Ziva were nowhere to be seen.
Tim’s look asked Gibbs if he knew where they were, and Gibbs just shrugged. Tony and Ziva weren’t living together, but they certainly came into work together about four out of five days. And they didn’t yet seem to have the how to do that and show up precisely on time thing down pat yet.
Tim certainly understood that. It takes a while to work the kinks out of more or less living in two apartments.
So he sat down and turned on his computers. Abby settled on the edge of his desk, watching what he was doing.
Three minutes later, when they came in, Tony grumbling about his dry cleaning being on one side of town and Ziva’s place an hour away on the other, he had a pretty good idea of what was up.
“No clean shirts?” he asks as Tony heads for his desk.
Tony glared and said, “Yeah.”
“They make these things called irons, and if you apply it to a clean shirt, you don’t need to have it dry cleaned.”
“Sure.” During all of this, Ziva’s been leaning against her desk, staring at Abby, and grinning. Abby’s grinning back at her, left hand conspicuously visible. Which was when Tony really noticed that she was sitting there, on the edge of Tim’s desk, where she usually isn’t.
Ziva sees him finally get it and then closes on Abby, both of them hugging. He half hears Abby telling Ziva something about team bride meeting for lunch as the two of them look at the ring.
Tony breaks into a wide smile and gently punches Tim on the shoulder. “You finally did it!”
“Yeah.”
“Good! Stand up.” Tim did and got hugged again. Which, of course, was still happening when Vance came in.
“Anything I should know?”
“Wedding soon,” Gibbs answered.
And thus, Abby got her tenth or so kiss of the day, and Tim’s hand was shaken, and one more layer of congratulations were offered. Which was followed by a fairly gentle back to work from Gibbs.
May 1, 2013
Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction
McGee centric character study/romance. Another Mature Audiences Tag, so keep away if you don't enjoy explicit sex. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.
76: An Immodest Proposal
He’d gone through at least fifty proposal ideas while he waited for the ring to get made. Dinner out? Romantic walk on the beach/mountains/wine country/art museum? (If the ring had gotten done sooner, something along those lines would have been part of his vacation plans.) In bed? Before, during, or after sex? Dinner in? Did food really have to be involved in this? On their anniversary? When the hell was their anniversary? First date ten years ago? God, when was that? Fall? Probably Fall. He could go find the case and look up when that was and from there figure it out. Second first date with The Generics? Would have been great if it wasn’t last week. (He checked the ticket stubs, yes he kept them, and yes, Abby was right, it was the 23rd.) First time he met her? In the lab, same place he asked her out the first time? Long declaration of love? Marry me? Say it out loud? Write it down? Sonnet? Blank verse? Text? So many options, and none of them felt really right.
As they were driving across the country, he noticed a lot of Jack o’ Lanterns out, and as they kept passing pumpkins an idea started to form, and as he pondered it, he decided he liked it.
“Do you still have your Marilyn Monroe dress?” Tim asked as they were getting ready for bed that night. He’s leaning against the sink, toothbrush in hand, shirtless, but, at least for the time being, his jeans aren’t going anywhere, because he needs a pocket. Well, he needs what’s in his pocket.
“Yes. Why?” Abby’s still dressed. White t-shirt, black and red plaid skirt, and knee socks. She’s washed off her makeup and is in the process of taking down her hair.
“Halloween is coming up, and I was thinking we might go out together.”
She nods. That’d be fun. “With me as Marilyn?” she turns to face him as she brushes out her hair.
“Yep.” Her expression says she knows something is up besides Halloween plans. Tim realizes he’s probably beaming at her as they talk, and he’s usually naked by this point in their bedtime routine, so the pants are a giveaway that he’s got something planned.
“And who would you be?” That was exactly the question he wanted her to ask.
“Arthur Miller.”
Abby thinks about that for a moment, and he can feel himself grinning, willing her to figure out what her next line was.
“Weren’t they married?”
Perfect! “Yes.” He looks at her expectantly for a moment. Her eyes widen as she realizes what he’s saying, and her mouth falls open as he kneels before her. He’s glad he practiced it, because he’s able to kneel, get the box out of his pocket, open, and in front of her while simultaneously saying, “Abby, will you marry me?”
She stared at the ring, her fingers hovering over the garnet, eyes bright and wide. “Tim?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s so beautiful.”
He’s smiling so widely at that he feels like his face might crack.
“Stand up.”
He does and she jumps into his arms, wrapping her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck. He wasn’t braced properly for it, and they both fall to the floor, which he only half notices because she’s covering him in kisses and making a very happy noise, that could possibly be the word “Yes” repeated over and over very fast in a high-pitched, excited voice.
After a minute, she pulls back, sitting on his thighs, grinning an impossibly wide and happy grin. He sits up, and kisses her again, deeply this time, lips slipping over hers in soft caresses. He notices the ring is still in the box, still in his hand, so he takes it out, and by feel alone, slides it onto her finger.
She breaks the kiss to look at it on her hand. “It’s perfect.”
He grins at her. “You’re perfect. I just had to find the ring that went with that.”
“You did.” She takes it off to really look at it. “What is it?”
“Garnet, black diamonds, black titanium.”
“It’s so beautiful.” She handed it back to him, and held out her hand, and once more he slipped it onto her finger. “It’s like the thing my hand always needed but didn’t know it was missing.”
He brushes his fingers through her hair as she says that, staring into her eyes.
“It’s the thing, well, one of them, I’ve always wanted to give you.”
“One of them?”
He brushes his hand, his fingers trailing along her arm, across the tattoo they have in common. “There’s one.” He kisses her again, softly this time, hints of suggestions of touch. His fingers drift back to hers. “And one of these days, I’ll give you a wedding ring.” He lifts her hand to his mouth, kissing the tips of each finger, then the base of her palm, lipping gently over her wrist, and then tracing his fingers lightly up her arm as she shivered and squirmed at his touch.
His gaze held hers as he said, “I’d like to give you my name.”
She’s smiling so brightly now, the kind of smile that always lights him up, and she kisses him, then says, “Abby McGee.”
He can’t hold in how good that feels and just smiling, or grinning can’t get it out, so warm, happy laughter bursts out of him. When he stops he kisses her again, and then guides her hand behind her, and holds her wrist lightly behind her back. With his free hand he traces from her shoulder to her belly, lingering along the side of her breast, before drifting to the hem of her shirt. Lifting her shirt, he rubs his knuckles gently against her stomach. Tim breaks the kiss, holds her gaze and quietly says, “And not too long after that, I’ll give you a baby.”
“Yes!” Her eyes are gleaming, and she scoots forward a bit, breasts pressed against his chest, body warm and encouraging. He’s holding her left hand in his, but her right is free, so she caresses his face with it. Fingers skittering from eyelid to cheek to lips, he closes his eyes and leans into the touch. She kisses his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and then settles on his lips.
A minute later, he breaks the kiss and says, “I want to give you a home.”
She kisses him long and deep, then pulls back, radiant smile on her face and a look of deeply content tenderness in her eyes. “I already have one, Tim. Anywhere you are is my home.”
He smiles, or really, keeps smiling, he’s been smiling this whole time, because he can’t not smile, and lets go of her wrist, spanning the small of her back with his hands, and pulling her tighter to him while lifting her shirt off.
His fingers trace over her shoulders, down her arms, raising goosebumps on her skin, as he kisses her jaw and neck.
“I love you, Abby.”
She kisses him again, clinging to him, lips sweet and warm. “I love you, too.”
She begins a slow rolling motion, and he groans softly, then takes her hips in his hands and holds her still. “Okay, if we’re going to keep doing this, we’ve got to move, because these pants are going to cut me in half if I don’t adjust myself.”
She begins to laugh: loud, bright, and happy. Then stands and offers him her hand.
“Then let’s get you adjusted. It’d be a tragedy if you were cut in half.”
He stands up, and as he does so, she reaches for the top button on his jeans. A second later, he’s naked in front of her.
“Better?”
“Almost.” He unhooks her bra, and kneels in front of her, pulling off her panties, leaving on the plaid skirt and knee socks. He smiles widely at her. “Now, I’m a whole lot better.”
“You and your Catholic school girl kink.”
“Me and my you kink. What do I want a Catholic school girl for when I’ve got you?”
“Good answer.”
He stands up, stepping in close, his body next to hers, close enough to feel the heat, and for his penis to rub against the skirt, but the rest of him not touching, and then looks her up and down.
She licks her lips, and he leans down to lick her, stroke her tongue with his.
She sighs as he does that, and moves a fraction of an inch closer, still not touching anywhere other than tongues and penis.
“What do you want tonight?” he whispers to her.
“Take me.”
“Oh yes.” He pulls her flush against him, reveling in the feel of her skin on his and her body tight and quivering in his arms.
He kisses her, taking the lead, his lips and tongue calling the dance while she squirms against him, rocking her hips against his. This time, when his hands settle on her hips, it’s to encourage the motion, to pull her harder against him.
Without breaking the kiss, he picks her up. She gets the idea and helps, wrapping her legs around his hips as he carries her to their bed. He sets her on the edge of the bed, and stands between her legs. She looks up at him, eyes wide, lips wet.
“You are so beautiful.”
She smiles at that and lies back on the bed, her hips flush with the edge, legs dangling to either side of him.There were a few careful measurements Tim took when they got their bed made. One of which was how high off the floor the top of the mattress would be. Specifically, it’s exactly the right height for him to kneel and go down on her, or stand and fuck her.
And with her laid out on the bed in front of him, he finds himself eagerly contemplating both happy options.His fingers trace up the inside of her legs, light teasing brushes of skin on skin. He gets to her hips and flips up the skirt so it covers her stomach and bares her sex.
“I love you. Love looking at you like this. Naked and open for me. Love this so much.”
She sits up, and kisses his erection, licking the tip. “Love you. Love seeing you like this, standing over me, hot and hard.”
He groaned at those words, feeling them like a flush of heat through his dick.
He leaned forward to kiss her, stroking her tongue with his, feeling her hand wrap around him and pull. He went with it, enjoyed it for a moment and then broke the kiss and took her hand away.
She pouted a little at that. “You can do me tomorrow. Remember, you asked me to take you?”
She nods.
“Lay down.”
And she does, a grin on her lips.
He kneels between her legs, kissing his way up her thigh, stroking her calves lightly. He pauses at the top of her thigh, and spends another moment just looking at her. “So, so beautiful,” he murmurs before flicking his tongue lightly over her.
She jerked a little at the touch and then sighed. He settled into it, slow and lazy, not rushing this. His hands continuing to ghost along her thighs while his tongue drew small firm circles over her clit.
She moaned, and he pulled back enough to say, “Like that?”
“God, yes, don’t stop.”
“Not until you’re arching against my mouth and quivering on my tongue.”
“Ohhh...” She rolled her hips against him, and he went back to licking. He sped up slowly, keeping her at a slower pace than she would have liked, but he wants this to take a while. Wants her begging him before he gets her off.
He started with one finger, not in her, just softly teasing. Feather light touches over her lips, barely grazing against her vagina. She growled a little at him, frustration at the teasing lack of penetration.
He continued to just lightly pet, and stopped licking just long enough to say, “Tell me what you want.”
She moaned again as his tongue slowed down, but increased in pressure. He’s just rolling it over her clit, long slow strokes designed to make her squirm.
“Fuck, Tim, get me off!”
His tongue started to move just slightly faster, and he added a second finger, two of them slipping over her lips, stroking her, not entering.
“Little more specific?” He’d grin if his lips weren’t busy, but he’s enjoying teasing her like this.
“Stop fooling around with those fingers and fuck me with them!”
And so he did. He pulled back just long enough to suck on both of them, make sure they were good and wet, and then thrust them in, fast and hard, while his tongue went back to licking, this time fast and light.
He couldn’t see her do it, but he could imagine it, and he was fairly sure she threw her head back, arched her back and neck, and clenched her hands in the sheets. He knew for a fact that she started a long stream of “Fuck baby, yeah, just like that, fuck, oh...” sweet profanity that made him feel like a sex god.
Then words stopped, they morphed into a high-pitched, almost panting moan, and her legs wrapped tight around his neck and shoulders as her body jerked against his.
He let her come down for a moment, just long enough to stop twitching, then stood, pinned her hands to the bed above her head, and slipped into her.
He hissed at it: hot, wet, slick, and snug all perfect and all at once.
He’s taking his time at this, enjoying the feel of her on him. She’s arching against him, her legs around his hips, feet crossed over the small of his back.
He can feel it building, feel himself start to move faster, start to give into the pleasure and the desire to thrust. She’s looking at him, kissing him, licking his neck. He feels her teeth on his ear, and her body squeezing tight around him. And that does it, sets him off, small fireworks burst along his spine and balls, and he thrusts hard and deep.
A minute or two later she smiles at him, and kisses him gently. Eventually they untangle, and clean up, and then they’re in bed together, relaxing and inching toward sleep. He’s lying on his back, and she’s snuggled into his side, her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. He’s stroking his fingers absently up and down hers, feeling the ring there.
“What does an Arthur Miller costume even look like?” Abby asks.
“It doesn’t matter. No one notices the guy standing next to Marilyn Monroe.”
“Marilyn does.” Abby smiles.
Tim thinks about it. “It might involve a pipe. And I think glasses.”
76: An Immodest Proposal
He’d gone through at least fifty proposal ideas while he waited for the ring to get made. Dinner out? Romantic walk on the beach/mountains/wine country/art museum? (If the ring had gotten done sooner, something along those lines would have been part of his vacation plans.) In bed? Before, during, or after sex? Dinner in? Did food really have to be involved in this? On their anniversary? When the hell was their anniversary? First date ten years ago? God, when was that? Fall? Probably Fall. He could go find the case and look up when that was and from there figure it out. Second first date with The Generics? Would have been great if it wasn’t last week. (He checked the ticket stubs, yes he kept them, and yes, Abby was right, it was the 23rd.) First time he met her? In the lab, same place he asked her out the first time? Long declaration of love? Marry me? Say it out loud? Write it down? Sonnet? Blank verse? Text? So many options, and none of them felt really right.
As they were driving across the country, he noticed a lot of Jack o’ Lanterns out, and as they kept passing pumpkins an idea started to form, and as he pondered it, he decided he liked it.
“Do you still have your Marilyn Monroe dress?” Tim asked as they were getting ready for bed that night. He’s leaning against the sink, toothbrush in hand, shirtless, but, at least for the time being, his jeans aren’t going anywhere, because he needs a pocket. Well, he needs what’s in his pocket.
“Yes. Why?” Abby’s still dressed. White t-shirt, black and red plaid skirt, and knee socks. She’s washed off her makeup and is in the process of taking down her hair.
“Halloween is coming up, and I was thinking we might go out together.”
She nods. That’d be fun. “With me as Marilyn?” she turns to face him as she brushes out her hair.
“Yep.” Her expression says she knows something is up besides Halloween plans. Tim realizes he’s probably beaming at her as they talk, and he’s usually naked by this point in their bedtime routine, so the pants are a giveaway that he’s got something planned.
“And who would you be?” That was exactly the question he wanted her to ask.
“Arthur Miller.”
Abby thinks about that for a moment, and he can feel himself grinning, willing her to figure out what her next line was.
“Weren’t they married?”
Perfect! “Yes.” He looks at her expectantly for a moment. Her eyes widen as she realizes what he’s saying, and her mouth falls open as he kneels before her. He’s glad he practiced it, because he’s able to kneel, get the box out of his pocket, open, and in front of her while simultaneously saying, “Abby, will you marry me?”
She stared at the ring, her fingers hovering over the garnet, eyes bright and wide. “Tim?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s so beautiful.”
He’s smiling so widely at that he feels like his face might crack.
“Stand up.”
He does and she jumps into his arms, wrapping her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck. He wasn’t braced properly for it, and they both fall to the floor, which he only half notices because she’s covering him in kisses and making a very happy noise, that could possibly be the word “Yes” repeated over and over very fast in a high-pitched, excited voice.
After a minute, she pulls back, sitting on his thighs, grinning an impossibly wide and happy grin. He sits up, and kisses her again, deeply this time, lips slipping over hers in soft caresses. He notices the ring is still in the box, still in his hand, so he takes it out, and by feel alone, slides it onto her finger.
She breaks the kiss to look at it on her hand. “It’s perfect.”
He grins at her. “You’re perfect. I just had to find the ring that went with that.”
“You did.” She takes it off to really look at it. “What is it?”
“Garnet, black diamonds, black titanium.”
“It’s so beautiful.” She handed it back to him, and held out her hand, and once more he slipped it onto her finger. “It’s like the thing my hand always needed but didn’t know it was missing.”
He brushes his fingers through her hair as she says that, staring into her eyes.
“It’s the thing, well, one of them, I’ve always wanted to give you.”
“One of them?”
He brushes his hand, his fingers trailing along her arm, across the tattoo they have in common. “There’s one.” He kisses her again, softly this time, hints of suggestions of touch. His fingers drift back to hers. “And one of these days, I’ll give you a wedding ring.” He lifts her hand to his mouth, kissing the tips of each finger, then the base of her palm, lipping gently over her wrist, and then tracing his fingers lightly up her arm as she shivered and squirmed at his touch.
His gaze held hers as he said, “I’d like to give you my name.”
She’s smiling so brightly now, the kind of smile that always lights him up, and she kisses him, then says, “Abby McGee.”
He can’t hold in how good that feels and just smiling, or grinning can’t get it out, so warm, happy laughter bursts out of him. When he stops he kisses her again, and then guides her hand behind her, and holds her wrist lightly behind her back. With his free hand he traces from her shoulder to her belly, lingering along the side of her breast, before drifting to the hem of her shirt. Lifting her shirt, he rubs his knuckles gently against her stomach. Tim breaks the kiss, holds her gaze and quietly says, “And not too long after that, I’ll give you a baby.”
“Yes!” Her eyes are gleaming, and she scoots forward a bit, breasts pressed against his chest, body warm and encouraging. He’s holding her left hand in his, but her right is free, so she caresses his face with it. Fingers skittering from eyelid to cheek to lips, he closes his eyes and leans into the touch. She kisses his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and then settles on his lips.
A minute later, he breaks the kiss and says, “I want to give you a home.”
She kisses him long and deep, then pulls back, radiant smile on her face and a look of deeply content tenderness in her eyes. “I already have one, Tim. Anywhere you are is my home.”
He smiles, or really, keeps smiling, he’s been smiling this whole time, because he can’t not smile, and lets go of her wrist, spanning the small of her back with his hands, and pulling her tighter to him while lifting her shirt off.
His fingers trace over her shoulders, down her arms, raising goosebumps on her skin, as he kisses her jaw and neck.
“I love you, Abby.”
She kisses him again, clinging to him, lips sweet and warm. “I love you, too.”
She begins a slow rolling motion, and he groans softly, then takes her hips in his hands and holds her still. “Okay, if we’re going to keep doing this, we’ve got to move, because these pants are going to cut me in half if I don’t adjust myself.”
She begins to laugh: loud, bright, and happy. Then stands and offers him her hand.
“Then let’s get you adjusted. It’d be a tragedy if you were cut in half.”
He stands up, and as he does so, she reaches for the top button on his jeans. A second later, he’s naked in front of her.
“Better?”
“Almost.” He unhooks her bra, and kneels in front of her, pulling off her panties, leaving on the plaid skirt and knee socks. He smiles widely at her. “Now, I’m a whole lot better.”
“You and your Catholic school girl kink.”
“Me and my you kink. What do I want a Catholic school girl for when I’ve got you?”
“Good answer.”
He stands up, stepping in close, his body next to hers, close enough to feel the heat, and for his penis to rub against the skirt, but the rest of him not touching, and then looks her up and down.
She licks her lips, and he leans down to lick her, stroke her tongue with his.
She sighs as he does that, and moves a fraction of an inch closer, still not touching anywhere other than tongues and penis.
“What do you want tonight?” he whispers to her.
“Take me.”
“Oh yes.” He pulls her flush against him, reveling in the feel of her skin on his and her body tight and quivering in his arms.
He kisses her, taking the lead, his lips and tongue calling the dance while she squirms against him, rocking her hips against his. This time, when his hands settle on her hips, it’s to encourage the motion, to pull her harder against him.
Without breaking the kiss, he picks her up. She gets the idea and helps, wrapping her legs around his hips as he carries her to their bed. He sets her on the edge of the bed, and stands between her legs. She looks up at him, eyes wide, lips wet.
“You are so beautiful.”
She smiles at that and lies back on the bed, her hips flush with the edge, legs dangling to either side of him.There were a few careful measurements Tim took when they got their bed made. One of which was how high off the floor the top of the mattress would be. Specifically, it’s exactly the right height for him to kneel and go down on her, or stand and fuck her.
And with her laid out on the bed in front of him, he finds himself eagerly contemplating both happy options.His fingers trace up the inside of her legs, light teasing brushes of skin on skin. He gets to her hips and flips up the skirt so it covers her stomach and bares her sex.
“I love you. Love looking at you like this. Naked and open for me. Love this so much.”
She sits up, and kisses his erection, licking the tip. “Love you. Love seeing you like this, standing over me, hot and hard.”
He groaned at those words, feeling them like a flush of heat through his dick.
He leaned forward to kiss her, stroking her tongue with his, feeling her hand wrap around him and pull. He went with it, enjoyed it for a moment and then broke the kiss and took her hand away.
She pouted a little at that. “You can do me tomorrow. Remember, you asked me to take you?”
She nods.
“Lay down.”
And she does, a grin on her lips.
He kneels between her legs, kissing his way up her thigh, stroking her calves lightly. He pauses at the top of her thigh, and spends another moment just looking at her. “So, so beautiful,” he murmurs before flicking his tongue lightly over her.
She jerked a little at the touch and then sighed. He settled into it, slow and lazy, not rushing this. His hands continuing to ghost along her thighs while his tongue drew small firm circles over her clit.
She moaned, and he pulled back enough to say, “Like that?”
“God, yes, don’t stop.”
“Not until you’re arching against my mouth and quivering on my tongue.”
“Ohhh...” She rolled her hips against him, and he went back to licking. He sped up slowly, keeping her at a slower pace than she would have liked, but he wants this to take a while. Wants her begging him before he gets her off.
He started with one finger, not in her, just softly teasing. Feather light touches over her lips, barely grazing against her vagina. She growled a little at him, frustration at the teasing lack of penetration.
He continued to just lightly pet, and stopped licking just long enough to say, “Tell me what you want.”
She moaned again as his tongue slowed down, but increased in pressure. He’s just rolling it over her clit, long slow strokes designed to make her squirm.
“Fuck, Tim, get me off!”
His tongue started to move just slightly faster, and he added a second finger, two of them slipping over her lips, stroking her, not entering.
“Little more specific?” He’d grin if his lips weren’t busy, but he’s enjoying teasing her like this.
“Stop fooling around with those fingers and fuck me with them!”
And so he did. He pulled back just long enough to suck on both of them, make sure they were good and wet, and then thrust them in, fast and hard, while his tongue went back to licking, this time fast and light.
He couldn’t see her do it, but he could imagine it, and he was fairly sure she threw her head back, arched her back and neck, and clenched her hands in the sheets. He knew for a fact that she started a long stream of “Fuck baby, yeah, just like that, fuck, oh...” sweet profanity that made him feel like a sex god.
Then words stopped, they morphed into a high-pitched, almost panting moan, and her legs wrapped tight around his neck and shoulders as her body jerked against his.
He let her come down for a moment, just long enough to stop twitching, then stood, pinned her hands to the bed above her head, and slipped into her.
He hissed at it: hot, wet, slick, and snug all perfect and all at once.
He’s taking his time at this, enjoying the feel of her on him. She’s arching against him, her legs around his hips, feet crossed over the small of his back.
He can feel it building, feel himself start to move faster, start to give into the pleasure and the desire to thrust. She’s looking at him, kissing him, licking his neck. He feels her teeth on his ear, and her body squeezing tight around him. And that does it, sets him off, small fireworks burst along his spine and balls, and he thrusts hard and deep.
A minute or two later she smiles at him, and kisses him gently. Eventually they untangle, and clean up, and then they’re in bed together, relaxing and inching toward sleep. He’s lying on his back, and she’s snuggled into his side, her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. He’s stroking his fingers absently up and down hers, feeling the ring there.
“What does an Arthur Miller costume even look like?” Abby asks.
“It doesn’t matter. No one notices the guy standing next to Marilyn Monroe.”
“Marilyn does.” Abby smiles.
Tim thinks about it. “It might involve a pipe. And I think glasses.”
