**********

They were nodding acquaintances for six years. Of course she knew who he was; everyone knew the dour, brilliant political operative who could never quite get his act together enough to win an election. And he had learned her name and who she worked for, so that when she raised a glass to him across crowds at pointless fundraisers for embarrassingly underqualified candidates, and Andi got that little crease between her eyebrows, he could say, easily, "CJ Cregg. She wants money."

And then Patrick Wyatt got himself blown into a million tiny pieces, and it seemed pointless -- insulting, even -- to perpetuate that facade.

A college buddy called to tell her Pat Wyatt's lab had blown up, with Pat inside. She left on the first plane from Los Angeles, but the first plane from Los Angeles was a long time coming, and by the time she arrived at the shattered hull of the building, most of the gawkers were gone, and only firefighters and family members remained. She recognized him instantly but couldn't wrap her mind around why he could conceivably be there, but it was cold in New York and cold in her soul where this building had been, so she walked up behind him and touched his shoulder. "Toby? Toby Ziegler?"

He turned, blinked a few times as he tried to bring her and her presence here into focus. "CJ?"

"What are you--" she swallowed dryly and looked at the smoking ruins. "Jesus."

He nodded and stuffed his hands even deeper into his pockets. "Patrick Wyatt," he said.

"Yeah." Then she stopped, looked down at the bald spot slowly taking over his head. "Oh, you mean...you knew Pat Wyatt?"

Toby nodded again, fished a cigar out of his coat pocket and rolled it meditatively between his fingers, but did not light it. "He was...I'm sort of seeing his sister." He didn't know why he'd said it like that; he and Andi were practically engaged. CJ didn't respond in any way, and he looked over at her, and he could see her process this information as though it were something that made any kind of difference. "You?" She shrugged unconvincingly and looked away, and something distinctly reptilian took a look at Toby's heart and decided to move in. His mouth dried out. "You two weren't, ah, weren't involved, were you?"

She shook her head too quickly and felt a little dizzy. "No way."

And then another thought struck him, a thought so unpleasant and disappointing it took thirty seconds of sharp breaths and half-coughs to bring it to his tongue, and when he did, when he finally said it, it sounded so judgmental and sanctimonious he thought she would spit in his face and walk away. He hoped she would. "You were...uh, were you a client?"

She laughed as though it were an alien process for her. "'A client,'" she repeated thoughtfully, rolling the word around her tongue. Her hands were California-soft and starting to chap in the New York late-February wind. "I like that. You make it sound almost dignified."

And from the tilt of her head as she said that and didn't look at him, he knew it was true, knew that once upon a time CJ Cregg had been another set of empty eye sockets banging on Andi's door in the middle of the night begging for Patrick Wyatt, pleading for one more fix. He wondered how it would feel if he were to punch her, if her bones would crack under his knuckles and if he would be able to see her eyes roll up in her head as her neck snapped back. He forced himself to stare at the rubble.

She sensed his tension, though, because she hastened to add, "That was, you know, a long time ago. Right after college." And she has no idea why she needed to tell him this, and even less why she also felt compelled to ask, "Is there...is there anything I can do?"

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, because there was suddenly nothing out of the ordinary about this former junkie, current political fundraiser and relative stranger asking if she could do anything to help the grieving sister of her abruptly dead former drug dealer. "You could, I think, talk to Andi. She, uh, she's been on the phone with her mother all day, trying to keep her from, like, self-destructing, and somebody needs, needs to do the same for her."

She blinked at him, stood up straighter, tried to look like the kind of woman who could be entrusted with an assignment of this magnitude. "Yeah. Sure. I can do that."

And so she did, and she thought she did a pretty good job of it. Andi didn't jump off a ledge or break anything important or anything. And Toby didn't surprise CJ in the least when he turned up at her hotel room that night gripping a bottle of fairly expensive scotch, which she didn't usually drink, but this was Toby, and Pat Wyatt was in a million tiny pieces, and just now getting drunk was the best idea in the world. Still, she had to make one thing very clear before he poured a drop.

"I am not having sex with you tonight, Toby."

He nodded calmly and opened the bottle. "That's fine."

"Why are you here?" She was feeling unsure of herself.

He shrugged and handed her a glass. "To thank you. Andi was unexpectedly, you know, calm and lucid when I got home tonight, and, I, I figured I had you to thank for that."

"Okay," she said carefully and swirled her glass. "But, your girlfriend's brother was killed today, gruesomely, and you're here with me."

He grimaced as slow poison burned a track down his throat. "She was, uh, unexpectedly calm and lucid?"

"So you sa -- ah."

"Yeah." Toby ran the tip of his middle finger around the rim of his glass. "Things are, uh, things are not great."

CJ sat on the end of the bed and made sure there was no room for him to sit next to her, and she understood that he only told her these things because she didn't know him, not really. "Are you going to break up with her?"

"Nah. I think...I think I'll probably propose to her." He poured another drink.

She spluttered on a mouthful of scotch. "Well that's certainly one way around your problems."

Toby leaned against the dresser and rubbed his forehead with the back of his thumb, and CJ watched the back of his head in the mirror and watched herself watching him. "I really think I love her."

"But?" There was a "but" there. CJ felt it as distinctly as she felt the stiff, scratchy hotel bedspread beneath her legs.

"I just have to hope she doesn't notice the, you know, my very obvious character flaws."

"Which are what?"

He shrugged one shoulder and set his glass on the dresser. "Mostly, the one where I'm slowly destroying her."

She lifted her glass. "And thus begin all the great marriages in human history."

And then he was standing over her, hands on her shoulders, breath warm and slightly boozy on her face. "Toby," she warned.

"No sex," he said. "I know. I just, I wanted to, I think, kiss you, is all."

She stood, and then wished she hadn't, because she was too much taller to be doing this, and somehow it had been okay when he was looming over her but not when she was the one doing the looming.

The kiss, when she bent down to meet his mouth, was awkward and a little too wet until she brought her hands down to rest on his upper arms and he brought his up to rest on her hips. And they found their bearings, and their rhythm, and CJ's breath caught, and Toby moaned a little, and she felt so certain she was doing a right thing that it was really rather a shock to remember Andrea Wyatt and Darren Richfield, who had almost assuredly fallen asleep poolside awaiting the call she had never placed.

She pulled away and waited for the room to stop spinning before she said, in a deceptively steady voice, "You should go."

He dropped his arms. "Yes."

"You should take your scotch."

"Yes." He stepped away and picked up the bottle.

"You should...you should call me. Sometimes."

He nodded and opened the door. "Yes."

The news the next morning screamed, "Local drug kingpin killed in laboratory explosion." CJ turned off the television and threw the complimentary newspaper into the wastebasket and washed her hands over and over, long after the cheap newsprint had been chased down the drain. She hoped that Toby would call her sometimes, and that Andi would not.

*********

Five years later she fell into the pool. She fell into the pool and told him to avert his eyes, which he did, but it seemed almost more lewd to have him standing there knowing her dress was wet and clingy and not looking, so she made him turn around again.

And after he'd pointed out which way her house was, after she'd agreed to a mind-boggling pay cut to work for a man who didn't stand a chance at the Presidency, she said, too casually, "So, you married Andrea Wyatt."

He nodded. "You did not marry what's-his-name."

"Darren." He shrugged. "No, Toby; I'm telling you his name was Darren Richfield, and, no, I did not marry him, but you already knew that."

"And you already knew I'd married Andi, and you knew that the same way I knew you had not married Darren Richfield, which is that we have talked on the phone almost weekly since--"

This was the closest they had ever come to mentioning Patrick Wyatt.

She leaned against the counter and stirred cream into a mug of coffee. She hadn't offered any to Toby. "It wasn't a question so much as a...I don't know. I seem to recall you only proposed to her to avoid breaking up with her, so I thought..."

"Thought you'd ask how it was working out."

"Something like that." She took a sip of coffee. It was scalding hot and too strong.

"You gonna offer me any of that?"

And if they'd tried, later, to have the "who made the first move" conversation, everything would have hinged on the definition of "first move," because Toby was the one who started kissing her, coffee unpoured on the counter behind them, because Toby was the one who started removing clothing, but CJ had brought up Andi, and his marriage had disintegrated so far that the mere mention of his wife made Toby desperate for sex with any woman who wasn't her.

The next morning she offered him coffee in a travel mug and laughed as she kicked him out of the house with a light, easy kiss and said she'd see him in Manchester.

**********

Sometimes during the campaign, after the divorce, they had sex, and sometimes they did not. It was not a predictable thing; it was not stable or dependable, but sometimes they found each other, and they found their way to a hotel room, or an elevator, or an empty lecture hall, and sometimes they undressed each other, and sometimes they simply shoved aside whatever was in their way.

And sometimes she thought of Patrick Wyatt and what it would feel like to be blown into a million tiny pieces.

*********

Back in California, after he came back from his father's funeral, Josh got incredibly drunk and pugilistic in a bar one night, and Toby punched him. And eventually, Toby lost the fight, because Josh was younger, and more fit, and fueled by alcohol, and adrenaline, and grief. And Toby came to CJ's hotel room that night for comfort of various kinds, and she would not let him in.

"CJ? Come on, I know you're in there, 'cause, uh, Donna told me you'd gone to bed." She leaned against the sliding door to the balcony and glared. "Let me in, CJ," he wheedled. "I'm getting, you know, dirty looks from the other guests out here."

"Go away," she hissed, furious that she had to say that much.

"C'mon, CJ. I just lost a, a, a frankly humiliating fight to, you know, Josh, and I am in some pain here, and I could use, maybe, a little sympathy." She knew he had his forehead pressed to the door and that if she could open it quickly enough he would fall over, maybe smash his face on the carpet, but then she remembered that he would fall into the room, so she crossed her arms protectively across her chest and would not move. "Are you...why are you mad at me?"

She closed her eyes, because it was entirely possible he didn't know why. "Patrick Wyatt," she said flatly.

Toby paused for quite some time. "Fuck," he said finally. "Please, CJ, can we please -- people are looking at me."

"Good." But she crossed and stood by the door anyway. "You punched Josh."

"I did, yes, get one hit in before he, you know, pulverized me. It takes a big man, I think, to, uh, to admit to being beaten by Josh Lyman."

"And punching a woman? How big a man does that take?"

A puzzled pause was followed by a puzzled assertion: "I've never punched a woman."

She whipped the deadbolt up and yanked the door open, and he staggered but did not fall. "In New York, the day Pat Wyatt died, you...I recognized the look in your eyes tonight, right before you punched Josh. I'd seen it before. When I said I used to buy drugs from Pat Wyatt -- you wanted to punch me."

Toby closed the door softly. "I did."

"You thought less of me because of what I'd told you. Because of my past."

"I did."

She closed her eyes, and he put a hand on her arm to catch her as she swayed back, and she shook it away. "Do you...do you still?" And hated herself for caring.

"No."

She opened one eye. "Why not?"

He shrugged. "We are more than our ghosts."

"Are we?" CJ opened her other eye. "Am I?" She passed a hand between them. "Is this?"

He really did look like hell. Whatever Josh did to him, he had done a thorough job; at least one of his eyes would not open tomorrow morning, and he would ache, ache, ache. "I think you would feel better if you punched me."

She snorted with shocked laughter. "You...what?"

"For the, you know, for when I almost hit you. You would feel better if, you hit me."

"I'm not -- I'm not a guy, Toby!" But her hands clenched into fists. "Guys do the thing, where they slug each other once and everything's cool. I'm not...I'm not going to punch you."

He pointed to his chin and closed his eyes, and it really looked comical. "Come on. Right here."

"You're only offering because you think I wouldn't be able to hurt you, because I'm a woman."

He pulled in his chin, but his eyes remained closed. "I am well aware that you study, uh, some martial art whose name I can never remember, and that if you, you know, really threw your weight into it, you could, in fact, do a great deal of damage to certain parts of my face that I am, uh, rather fond of."

She almost did it. For the longest of held breaths she almost drew back the fist that was ready at her side and let this be payment for every wrong he'd ever inflicted on her. Then, "Which parts?"

His eyes popped open. "Which -- what?"

CJ waved her hands. "You said parts of your face you're fond of. Which parts, exactly, are you so fond of?"

He shoved his hands in his pockets and winced. "There's, uh, well, there's my face."

And she started laughing. Great gasping waves of laughter, and she pressed those fists into her aching ribs and sank to the floor and leaned against the bed, because this was Toby's way of apologizing. When she was able again, she looked up at him and said, "I'm afraid of New Year's Eve."

He sat down beside her, because this was her way of apologizing, too. "New Year's Eve?"

"You know." She made a vague tossing motion with her hand. "Confetti."

And sometimes he got that little crease between his eyebrows, too. "A million tiny pieces," he murmured.

"Yes. Wall Street, as well. Ticker tape."

"Been down on the trading floor of the Dow recently, have you, CJ?"

"Fuck you, Toby."

He took her hands and squeezed gently and didn't care so much about the intense pain that caused him. "You have forgotten two very important things."

She closed her eyes, and her head lay heavily against the mattress. "What?"

"Number one," and she knew he was holding one finger up, even though he knew she wasn't looking at him, "you are in exactly one piece." He frowned. "Physically speaking, at least."

She snorted.

"Number two: I didn't punch you. And you didn't punch me."

And those were two very good points, and she had forgotten both of them. And they had this thing, whatever it was, and tonight all she wanted was to remember what it felt like to be in exactly one piece.