It was quiet the next night as Gibbs finished up his report for the director. Leon was a stickler for paperwork, and Tony’s reports left much to be desired. Tonight, so did his. His mind kept wandering to the owner of the business card in his jacket pocket. Finally he gave up, shut off the computer and picked up the phone.
“Hello?” came her soft, sleepy voice. He looked at the clock. Shit, 11:30.
“I’m sorry I woke you, Andie, I didn’t realize how late it was,” he didn’t identify himself. He didn’t need to.
“You’re still at work?” she asked softly, waking fully at his voice.
“Just finishing up,” he replied, and they spoke together: “paperwork.” Then laughed.
The ice broken, he settled back into his chair and she shifted to sit against the wall behind her bed. “Did you catch the bad guy?” she asked.
“Sort of,” he said. “This time there wasn’t really a bad guy.” They both flashed back to a time when there was a bad guy " a very bad guy " and the fallout had spelled the end of their relationship.
“I never meant for it to be fifteen years, J,” she said. Of the two, she had always been the one to charge into emotional territory headfirst.
“Time gets away from you,” he replied. “You get busy. But you’re here now?” He made it a question.
“Some things have happened in my life in the last couple of years,” she sighed. “It made me think - a lot - about where I was, where I had been, and where I wanted to be. I took a job at Georgetown this semester, teaching summer courses. Staying in San Diego just wasn’t an option anymore, and I thought…” she trailed off.
“You thought what Andrea? You’d look me up?” he got to the heart of what had been bothering him. Had she moved from the opposite coast to rekindle their relationship?
“The job at Georgetown is a good move for me, J.” She let him know right away he wasn’t the reason for her move east. Well, not the only reason. “I’m good at what I do and this is a serious step up for me if it works out with them. And I needed a fresh start; I needed to get out of California.” Her voice broke a little, and his gut tightened. There was a story there.
“What happened, Andie?” He used her nickname, letting her know he wasn’t upset, wasn’t defensive anymore.
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone, J,” she responded in kind, the only person who had ever gotten away with abbreviating his name to anything other than “Gibbs.”
“Breakfast tomorrow?” he offered.
She shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see her. “I have a morning class. Dinner?” she reiterated her original offer.
“Tomorrow night " tonight,” he promised, looking at the clock again and realizing it was now morning. “I should let you get some sleep.”
“You should get some sleep, Jethro Gibbs,” she countered with a smile in her voice. “Still surviving on coffee and two hours?”
“Two hours does me just fine,” he said, with the sound of an old argument running through his head.
“Two hours is a nap, J.” She picked up the thread of that argument as though it hadn’t been a lifetime since they had last bantered like this.
“Then I’ll let you get your beauty sleep, madame,” he teased. “Goodnight Andie.”
“Goodnight J,” she smiled into the phone and hung up, already halfway to what she hoped would be really good dreams.
They spoke more than once the next day, setting up dinner plans " his favorite restaurant, her favorite food, his schedule, her schedule, where to meet. All could have been handled with one call, but he was enjoying tormenting the team, watching them squirm with the barely-repressed urge to nose into his personal life. And she was enjoying hearing his voice again, since it had indeed played a key role in her dreams that morning.
By the time she emerged from her last meeting and found him waiting outside her office, she was excited and nervous like a teenager on a first date. She had let her red hair curl and fall down her back in its natural state, and was wearing a dark blue skirt suit she had bought because it almost matched her eyes.
Gibbs saw her before she saw him. It gave him the opportunity to look at his leisure, and he did. Heels, high enough to pull her calf muscles tight, legs that went on forever, encased in hose " pantyhose or stockings, he wondered briefly; she had never worn hose when they were together before. The skirt flared, clinging to her ass but not molded to it the way some skirts did when they came as part of a suit. The jacket was long sleeved, unusual for summer in D.C., he thought, then saw the material on the sleeves was a little bit sheer, allowing just the faintest glimpse of her arms. She was wearing her hair shorter than before; the curls and waves fell to the middle of her back instead of nearly to her waist. She turned, and he knew the moment she saw him. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, then smiled.
“Andie,” he spoke first. “I’m not early.”
“No,” her voice was a little breathy as she unlocked the door and motioned him inside. “Meetings everywhere are the same, it seems. They always run long.” She left the door open as she walked in. “I’m ready to go, just let me dump this stuff.” She dropped a pile of papers in one arm onto her desk and snagged her purse from a desk drawer. When she bent over he saw the skirt had a clever slit that seemed to go all the way up. Wrap around, he thought, that’s what it’s called. She turned, keys still in hand, and walked back to the door. “Unless you’re here to cancel, let’s go, before they catch me with something else to do.”
“Oh, you definitely have something else to do,” he quipped as he passed her out the door.
She blushed.
That set the tone for their dinner. Teasing, light flirtation, in between bites of the best-prepared steak she had eaten in years. As the waiter took their empty plates away, Andrea sat back and regarded the man in front of her.
“You may still not be sleeping, but you’re not surviving on take-out anymore, either,” she commented.
“I didn’t survive on take-out as long as we were together,” he replied. “You were a hell of a cook.”
“I still am,” she said. “Next dinner, I’ll prove it.”
They sat in silence for a moment, contemplating that there would be another dinner. It was the pattern from their first relationship together, when he had rescued her from a trip up the stairs outside her apartment door and carried the bag of groceries she had dropped into her home. She unpacked the groceries, he asked about some of the items " never having seen a starfruit before " and suddenly she was cooking dinner for them both. He lived in the apartment across the hall when he wasn’t deployed halfway around the world with his Special Ops team. When he was in town, she’d cook. He’d do those odd “man jobs:” fixing a leaky pipe, hauling a new television up the stairs. It wasn’t until three months after their first meeting that he noticed her belly.
“You’re pregnant,” he suddenly burst out from his position at the breakfast bar where he was watching her cook.
She lowered her arm from where she had been reaching for a spice above the stove. “Almost eight months,” she replied.
“You’re pregnant!” he nearly shouted. “You’re cooking and carrying things and walking up those stairs " you almost fell up those stairs " and you’re pregnant!”
She turned the stove off and faced him, wondering what had set him off. “Like I said, Jethro,” from the beginning she had refused to call him by his last name, “I have been pregnant for almost eight months now. I’ve been doing fine, the baby is fine; I’m not doing anything my doctor doesn’t know about.” She kept her voice gentle, like she was speaking to a spooked " or wounded - animal. She came around the bar and stood near him. “Why are you upset? What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, staring at her stomach. He reached out a hand, as though to caress the belly, but she stepped back. They weren’t intimate; they were friends, but she didn’t understand the look in his eyes.
When she drew away from him, Gibbs jerked his hand back. He stood and all but ran to the door. “I’m sorry Andie, I am. But I have to go. I’ll be back, but I just…” and he was gone. She heard his own door slam, and then she thought she heard a primal yell. But he was across the hall, and she couldn’t be sure.
Later that evening, Andrea responded to a soft knock at her door. She opened it, sure it would be him. And it was, Gibbs, bearing a small white teddy bear. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she drew him inside. From the look on his face, he was still off-balance, and she led him to the couch. He sat, and she curled into a corner so she could face him.
“Tell me,” she spoke very softly.
And he did. His first wife, his daughter. Their deaths. His second wife, who she knew had recently left him for some young hotshot FBI agent. His fear that her wish to have kids was what had driven them apart. His fear of children now, of relationships and even trying for anything permanent. It was a long time before he stopped speaking, and was certainly the most she had ever seen the Marine open up. At the end, she reached for his hands and gently drew the bear from his fingers. She kept his hand in hers, uncertain what to say.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Gibbs and Andie have dinner and take a trip down memory lane.