As he worked on repairing the beach house enough to survive storm season, Gibbs' mind tried to sort through the thoughts swirling around his head. He struggled to put things back in a logical chronology. The vivid grief that surrounded his memories of Shannon and Kelly overshadowed just about everything else. Slowly but surely he rebuilt his life since losing them. There were still significant holes in his memory, and there was a nagging, gut-churning feeling that he was missing something, no, someone important. But the more he struggled to remember, the further from his grasp it slipped.
His dreams were troubled. He dreamt often of Shannon, and of making love with her, he could so clearly recall the feel of her hands on him, of the way her body fit with his. But what would make him wake in cold sweat was that Shannon kept morphing into someone else in the dark, someone who's hands he knew just as well, whose body also fit his like a glove. But he could never remember her face when he woke, no matter how hard he tried.
He had seen the drawer full of women's clothes in his bedroom when he had packed his rucksack, but it hadn't brought out any memories. Gibbs called and asked Ducky if he had been seeing anyone, figuring Ducky would know, but his response that Gibbs hadn't been to his knowledge just left Gibbs with more questions than answers. If had been seeing someone, it had been in secret. And the only woman that he could envision that he would possibly have had an illicit affair with was the Director. But that thought was unsettling, and just didn't seem right, and he shrugged it off.
He knew there was a woman he left behind, he just didn't know who it was, and that thought made him a little sad, because he hoped that she knew why he left, and that she understood why he couldn't stay.
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When all hell had broken loose, and Ziva needed a safe place to hide, she went to the one place that she had ever felt truly safe. And as she entered his house lost in a flood of memories, she knew she needed him. Needed him to save her this time.
To say that Ziva's phone call threw him was an understatement, and the catch in her voice when she asked him to save her pulled at something deep in his gut and he didn't know why. And it was that pull that propelled him to the airport and onto the next available flight back... home.
She had thought she was prepared to see him, prepared to be near him and not touch, prepared to pretend like what they had never existed, but she was wrong. He made plenty of noise as he entered the house and stomped down the stairs, as not to startle her, knowing she was already on edge. And when her eyes met his for the first time in months she found herself fighting the urge to literally fling herself at him and into the arms she so desperately ached to have around her again.
The pull that he had felt over the phone was nothing compared to what he felt standing there next to her in person, and he couldn't explain it. He shrugged it off, chalking it up as just a reminder that she was a very beautiful woman, and, at least to his memory, he hadn't been with anyone for a long time, even before the explosion.
His body had other opinions on the matter though, and as she was sharing things with him on the laptop, he found himself so far into her personal space that they were touching, and though it should have felt wrong, it didn't. It felt comfortable and familiar and he had to stop himself from reaching up and toying with her hair.
His nearness was having a twofold effect on Ziva, the close proximity of his body made her catch her breath and flustered her a little, and it also almost made her panic, because she wanted, no, needed him to be that near to her but yet he still had no memory of their past relationship and she almost didn't trust herself to be within reach of him, all she would have had to do was turn her head for their lips to meet. Stepping away from him was on of the hardest things she had ever done, and yet she did it.
If there was one thing that Gibbs was good at, it was reading a woman's body language. And Ziva's had him perplexed. He didn't recall her being so jittery around him before, but instead of really analyzing it, he just brushed it aside as part of the stress from the whole situation.
As they hunted for the man that set Ziva up he found that the enigmatic pull was getting stronger. His hand resting on the back of her seat in the truck practically itched to find its way down to rub her neck or play with her hair, and the thing that bothered him most was that it felt so damn familiar. He wondered if maybe Ziva reminded him of the mystery woman that he had been seeing before the explosion, that had to explain it. He also noticed that she was sitting as far away from him in the truck as she could get without riding in the bed. And he wondered if he was unconsciously making her uncomfortable or something and he got irritated with his swiss cheese memory but was able to hide it in his angry comment about another dead FBI agent.
They managed to escape the bomb left for them, and the adrenaline rush they were both riding made them a little high. And as they got in the truck to leave he had a momentary vision of pinning her up against the side of the truck and claiming her mouth, and he almost did, but common sense reigned him in before he could follow through on it. Little did Gibbs know that Ziva was thinking the same thing.
Gibbs had dropped her back off at his house while he delivered the evidence to NCIS. She wandered around the basement, the place so identifiably Gibbs. She ran her hands over the smooth spines of the boat, knowing he had worked each and every one of them with his own hands, shaping and molding them, bending and pushing until he had gotten them exactly as he wanted them. She had never let herself think about a future with him, both of them knowing it was an unlikely scenario, but she never expected it to end like it had. And as she ran her hands over the lovingly crafted wood she suddenly realized that she wanted to see what the boat was going to look like when it was completed, and she wanted him to take her sailing, and wanted to make love to him on its deck out somewhere in the middle of the sea. But as quickly as those thoughts came, she as quickly threw them off, they had no place here in this present, nor in the future that would come about from this present.
When it was all said and done, they found those responsible and Ziva was cleared. And the smirk he gave her in the terrorist's hotel room was so familiar she didn't know what to think.
Over the next few days Gibbs put his home on the market and started cleaning out a lifetime's accumulation of stuff. When he had returned home he had noticed that the drawer of women's clothing had been cleared out. He also noticed his bed had been slept in and his pillow bunched up with several long dark hairs gracing it. But without a DNA test he still had now way of knowing whose hair it was.
He was cleaning out the dresser drawers, deciding what to take with him back to Mexico when something under the edge of the dresser caught his eye as he bent down to empty a bottom drawer. He reached for it and was surprised to pull out a simple bow made of pink curling ribbon. He looked at the knot and realized that he had tied it. He sat on the bed with it in his hands trying to remember why this simple bow was so important, and his gut was telling him that it was.
When the flood of memories hit him, he was grateful he was sitting down. As if a dam had burst all of his memories of Ziva returned.
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The knock on her door at midnight startled Ziva fully awake, she had been dozing on her couch watching some boring documentary. She glanced out the peephole, gun in hand to see Gibbs. She opened the door and stood there waiting for him to say something as to why he was there. But all he could do was stare, because how could he have forgotten her and what they were? When he didn't say anything she left the door open and turned to go back in the living room, putting her gun on the coffee table as she did. She heard him close the door and a moment later, felt him behind her. Somehow she knew, knew that he had finally remembered. At the sound of her name coming hoarsely from him, she turned around to see him holding the pink bow. When she raised her eyes to meet his, the recognition was there as was the desire and the need. And without a word said, he pulled her in and held her so tightly she almost couldn't breathe, but she didn't care, she was home.
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tbc...
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