Tony hung up the phone with a sigh. "Single again," he announced, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms out.
Snorting, Ziva didn't even look up from the file she was reading. "You are single more often than not, Tony."
"Still, one always hopes," he said earnestly. He straightened up and leaned down to snag his bag from under his desk. "And now," he stood and shrugged into his jacket, "I must go. I have a date with a beer and a basketball game. Drowning my sorrows, you know."
"If one beer is enough to drown them, you weren't feeling too sorrowful."
"Plenty more fish in the sea, Ziva." Tony said lightly, stepping out from behind his desk and heading for the elevator.
After a couple of minutes had passed Ziva peeked up over the top of her cubicle to make sure Tony had actually disappeared into the elevator. Finding him gone, she dropped back into her seat and turned it so that she was facing McGee across the aisle. "Do you think he does it on purpose?" she asked.
McGee's fingers paused in their flight over his keyboard, the rhythmic clicking silenced. "Does what on purpose?"
"Loses the women."
Frowning, McGee turned away from his computer more completely. "What makes you think that?"
"Haven't you noticed the pattern?" Ziva asked, eyebrows rising.
"No," McGee said dryly. "As far as I can tell, Tony will date anything with breasts."
Ziva waved his observation off. "Not that kind of pattern, McGee. The timing. He never dates them for more than two weeks. Never. Sometimes he breaks up with them literally on the fourteenth day. There's never a fifteenth."
"Are you sure?" McGee asked skeptically. "I could swear he's gone on about some of them for months."
"Oh, sometimes he talks about them for longer, but between the first date and the last? Never more than fourteen days."
McGee shrugged. "Tony's a player, Ziva. I think he'd feel like he was missing something if he let one woman pin him down for too long."
"Still, it seems rather precise," she mused.
"You haven't known Tony for very long," McGee said, turning back to his computer. "Trust me, after a couple more months the parade of women won't seem strange at all. It's just Tony."
*****
Tony shucked his clothes, tossed them into the hamper, and crawled naked between the sheets to join his lover. He settled down onto the cotton, warmed with body heat, with a satisfied sigh and stretched for a moment, just enjoying being there. Then he rolled onto one side, propped up his head with one hand, and found Gibbs watching him with an amused quirk to his lips.
"Settled?" Gibbs asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Not quite." Tony scooted closer and cast his best pleading look at Gibbs.
Gibbs snorted, but obligingly rolled onto his back so that Tony could curl over his side, his head resting on Gibbs's shoulder and his nose tucked into the curve of his neck. "Now I'm settled."
"I swear, Tony, I've known women who're less huggy than you are," Gibbs grumbled.
"Chalk it up to my terribly neglected childhood," Tony said, voice muffled a little.
"Yeah, right," Gibbs said dryly. "Your mother was more the smothering type."
"What makes you think that?"
"You mean aside from the way you complain about how she ran every aspect of your childhood life? Just a gut feeling."
Tony pulled his head back a little, just enough to let Gibbs turn his head so that they were practically nose to nose. "Can we stop talking about my mother now?"
"Sure," Gibbs said easily. "What'd you tell them this time?"
"What, about Andrea?" Tony asked.
"Yeah."
"Thing about frat guys."
"A 'thing' about frat guys?" Gibbs repeated incredulously. "And they bought that?"
"I 'broke up' with a woman because she had a squeaky voice once, Gibbs, and they bought that." Tony laid his head down again and stroked his fingers lightly over Gibbs's chest, not really trying to arouse, just enjoying the glide of skin under his fingertips. "I'm going to start running out of even the dumb reasons pretty soon. For the women and for me."
"I don't think anyone will care if you start reusing them," Gibbs said. "It's not like there isn't more than one woman with a squeaky voice out there."
"Hmmm," Tony let his eyes close, just soaking up the warmth of Gibbs's body. "Let's just hope no one ever wants to actually meet one of these women."
"It takes more than two weeks to get serious enough about someone to start introducing them around," Gibbs assured him. "That's why we picked that number, remember?"
"Hmmm. Sleep now?"
Gibbs chuckled softly. A moment later a warm hand ruffled Tony's hair and slid over his waist, palm settling in the small of his back. "Yeah, Tony. Sleep now."
--End--
Author's Chapter Notes:
Ziva makes an observation. Written for the "Schedule" Challenge at ncis_flashfic.