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TITLE: The Big Band Period 
AUTHOR: august (appelsini@hotmail.com) 
RATING: PG
CATEGORY: CJ/Toby 
SPOILERS: Set just after Take Out the Trash Day, so everything up to there. 
SUMMARY: CJ/Toby fic. "This is the stupidest thing she has ever done". 
ARCHIVE: With thanks.  
NOTES: A dear friend, a long time ago and in another fandom, once  said: 
"I'm not a 'shipper, I just play one in fanfic". That's my story, and  I'm 
sticking by it.  

This is for another dear friend, my fruit-gum chewing, patty larkin  listening 
wonder Sabine.  

*  

She'd tumbled down hallways before, with men she'd known for hours but it  had 
always been about laughter and alcohol and falling down.  But that was  years, 
and so much more, away from the man who was leaning against the  elevator 
wall, watching her in silence. Her heels echo through the empty  hallway and she 
keeps turning around to make sure he is still there.  

This is the stupidest thing she has ever done, she thinks, but then his hand  
is on the back of her neck as she unlocks her door.  

He had been staring at her shoulders and back all night - longer than that,  
if she let herself think about it. 

As they waited for a taxi, he had drawn  his finger across her collarbone. 

"Spilt a cab?" She had asked, watching his feet. 

"Because we live so close." He said, eyebrows raised. 

"Then come home with me."  

He hadn't answered, but when the taxi had come, he held her wrist, pulling  
her back and getting in first. 

It is the stupidest thing she has ever done, but she lets him close her 
door behind them.  

*  

There were plenty of ways she was used to waking up but none of them  
included Toby trying to tie his tie in her bedroom.  

"Trouble?" She is smiling, although she supposed he had no way of knowing  
that.

"I think I'm still drunk, " he says, the words clearing his throat.

She  laughs and he does, a little, and there are so many ways 
this could have gone.  

"Come here." She sits up, a little. 

"You know, I've done this one or two times before, CJ." He moves 
to her anyway, crouching in front of her. 

He is quiet, silent, as her hands move in  the almost dark around his 
neck.  There is his breath on her forearm.  

"You know, you don't have to go." She smoothes her hand down the front 
of  his shirt. 

"This isn't one of those-" 

"-I know." She tries to pull a sheet around her. 

"Because it's not that... you know." He stands, flattening down his
trousers. 

"Yeah." "I need to get clean clothes. Also, about a million pages 
on Wid-Mest diary farmers." 

"You've got that today?"

"Yep." 

He picks up a blanket off the floor, and lays it on the end of 
her bed.  

"Toby?" She reaches to catch his hand, but misses. 

"Yeah?" 

"We're good." 

"Yeah?" 

She closes her eyes at his question. 

"Yeah. I'll see you in a couple hours."  

After a moment, he crosses the room.  "Can I just say, " he begins, 
turning back, "that this, right now ... your  back is about the 
most perfect thing I've seen." 

"Toby."

"Yeah." He agrees, and she imagines him blinking long, trying to clear 
his vision. She sees him turn and start and turn again. 

"I know." 

Moments after she hears the front door close behind him, she gets 
out of bed and closes her window. Her toes are cold.  

* 

She's standing outside her building, her mind filled with Sinatra 
tunes as she waits for her driver. She hadn't slept much after Toby 
had left, she'd  started to read some briefs but had gotten side 
tracked by a Sinatra CD and  her ceiling, until her wake up call rang. 
Occasionally, in the midst of her mental debates over the merits of 
Sinatra's Gershwin/Berlin period, she realises her thighs ache and 
smiles at  the thought of her night. 

Mostly. 

Mostly, she thinks, as she waves to her driver and gets in the car, 
although unmitigated thoughts of Toby throw her a little; there's 
a lot of anger tied  up in the thought of his hands. She's 
still not sure whether she's done the  stupidest thing of her 
life, but there are messages waiting for her on her phone, and 
she finds herself humming "Night and Day" as she begins to dial. 

He'd been dropping by her office, on his way out of the building. 
It had started around the time of the sex education report, where 
she had watched  him play with the yogurt container on her table 
and pretended not to  understand his question.  Sometimes, he would 
set his briefcase down and go through the next day's  briefing. 
She gets the feeling that he had wants to say more, but he picks  
up his coat and case and leaves without saying good-bye.  

It took her four nights of this for her to realise that he was 
building up  to an apology. It was the Toby she had known for 
years - he'd push, a  little, and retreat. He has the shortest 
temper of anyone she's known, a  contempt for people and once, 
in New York, she'd seen him put his fist  through a car window. 
She forgets, now, why.  But he also defends Julia Child and there
are flecks of kindness in his sometimes cruelty. He had made her 
look like an idiot in front of the press and that was a vision 
crushing thing that wasn't going to go away, but he had also 
brought her a paper bag filled with watermelon candy the day 
the Lydells went home, without ever once stopping to ask how she was.   

"We're here, CJ. Have a good day."

"Thanks Heather." She smiles and steps out of the car. 

She pauses a moment,  at the door, and looks back inside. "Sinatra. 
Gershwin period, or big band?" 

"Big band." Heather says. "Gershwin talks too much."  

*  

"Leo's office, ten minutes." Carol says, handing her a file.  

One day, she is determined to get to her office before her assistant;
she is becoming increasingly steadfast in her belief that someone 
simply throws a blanket over Carol at the end of the day.  She 
nods, and pushes open her office door.  

The thing of it was, she'd started kissing Danny a few weeks back. 
Not for a while now, not since she sent the Lydells home, but she 
had, and they had, and there was no use pretending that that wasn't 
something.  

Last night, when Toby had come to her office, it had been late. 
At about 10:30pm, when she was starting to read papers for a 
conference planned three days away, she realised that she was 
waiting for him. At about 11:00pm, she stood up, feeling like 
an idiot high school kid instead of the White House Press 
Secretary. 

There were so many things wrong with this situation, she 
didn't even want to start listing them.  

Number One. It was Toby.  

"Hey." He looked tired, she thought, and old. 

"Hey." She tried not to look up, to look at him, although that failed 
the minute he set down his coat. 

"You okay?" He stood in front of her desk, head slightly crooked. 

"Yeah, you know, you're interrupting my busy schedule of jamming 
things into my briefcase." She wasn't sure why she was mad, but 
she was doing a pretty good job of jamming. 

"I got held up with this stupid cotton thing, I'm sorry-".  

They both looked up at the same time.  "I have no idea why I'm 
apologising to you." He said, laughing a little, and her hand 
seemed to be caught on the clasp of her case. It was cold, and small, 
and most definitely shut, but better her concentration be on a cold,  
small, inanimate object that what Toby Ziegler was saying to her. 
"I also  have no idea why I'm laughing."  

In a breath of bravery, or something else, there were these words: 
"Let's  get out of here, Toby. Let's go and drink."  

"Yeah." He said, and although she didn't want to notice, 
he was dragging his eyes away from her fish.  

*  

In the bar, with Toby, she'd told him that she had wanted to leak 
the Lydell story. She said it from behind her beer, playing with 
the pretzels on the table and half expecting him to walk out of there. 

He waited until she made eye contact with him. "Why did you do 
that, CJ?"  

She's mad at herself about it, of course. Mad that she let Danny 
draw the  line on her professionalism, mad that she let Toby call
her on it. Mad that she was kissing people who didn't trust her 
to do her job, but oh god, was  that a thought for later.  And mad 
at herself, of course, for even considering not playing the team 
game. All of this had come out as, "forget about it, Toby."  

"Forget that you tried to leak a story to a member of the press?" 

"It wasn't like-" 

"-then what was it like? Exactly?" 

Number Two: CJ was not a masochist.  

He's a hard man to be friends with, and whatever the hell she was 
doing now was going to be about twenty times harder.  "You were right." 
She says, simply.

"Not about that. You were going to use Danny to make yourself feel better.
That's not at all about me being right, CJ. That's about you, and Danny." 

She picks up her drink, he watches her pick up her drink. 
She watches him.  

"What's going on here?" He says, not suddenly.

"I thought..." She stops, shakes her head and then makes herself continue.
"I thought I might ask you the same question."

And there was silence, real silence, that didn't hold any promise of 
an end.  And she thinks that if he can't do this, break this, it 
would be- "I've been thinking about how to say it. And I couldn't. 
So I didn't." 

There is urgency, and tumbling, as she speaks. 

"How long?" 

"How long?" 

"How long have you been thinking about it?" 

"You don't want to know, CJ." 

"You have no idea."  

"What, you two are having CJ and Toby time now?" A chair is pulled 
up to the table, and Josh sits down, enamored by his joke. 

"Yes." Toby says, staring straight at her and she has to look away, 
look at Josh. 

"You're not serious, right? Cos Mandy and Sam are about to walk in." 

"I'm always serious, Josh, especially when it means I have to spend 
time with Mandy outside of the office."  Josh laughs and claps his back.

She can't help but smile, and he sees that, and that something is 
there again. And she sits back and drinks, because these are her 
friends, this is who she is.  And in the early Washington morning,
on a street corner outside a bar, she  invites him home.  

*

"CJ? Leo's office in two minutes." Carol hollered, for the second 
time. She has the sneaking suspicion that Carol has been taking 
voice projection  lessons as a direct way to avoid actual contact 
with her. She discussed the  theory with Josh, who agreed that Donna 
had seemed to be staring at him more  intently of late, lending weight 
to the mind control theory. Sam had once again gloated about 
Cathy-the-magnificent.  She felt jipped.

He didn't look up when she walked into Leo's office, and she smiled 
silently at that. He was, however, taking more than a passing 
interest in her drinking Evian and that was a small thing to 
turn over as she begin taking notes.  

She follows him out of the Oval Office, still writing notes from the
meeting. She almost walks into him several times, and he waits for her 
to finish writing before speaking.  

"Call Helen and make sure she runs with this story, CJ. Bring her 
in for a meeting with the President, if you need to." 

"Yup." 

"Also, be careful with Barry's questions this afternoon. He's on his 
way out and he's gonna want a swan song." 

"Well, let's not give him one." She says, stopping outside her office. 

"Good."  

She's about to turn for her office, when he says, "CJ?" 

She looks up from her file for the first time. "Yeah?" 

"Hi."  It's not quite a smile on his face, but it makes her want to. 

"Hi."  And there's a second there, and she watches him drag a hand 
across his face, and the moment breaks.  

"I've got this milk thing," he begins. 

"Go." 

"Yeah?"

"Go."

*

He had shut her apartment door behind them, and there they were,
two forty-somethings in an under-furnished Washington apartment.

And he had  looked around, and up, and at her.

There had been hands, and pillows, and it had been a while but he
gripped her shoulders and touched her ribs. And this was slow and
all sliding belts off and lifting up shirts. And there was coffee,
and opening windows, and a kiss on the back.

*

"Hey."

"Hey." She puts down her papers and looks at him over her glasses. 
"How'd the milk thing go?"

He shrugs. "I can now add the mid-West to the places I can never
safely  visit."

"Toby." She tried not to smile.

"Yeah." He brushes his hand over his face.

"That's getting to be some list."

"Lucky I don't like to travel."  He falls into a chair, but he does it
smiling as he leans his head back and  closes his eyes.  "Eaten yet?"
He says, after a moment, eyes still closed.

"Yeah, Donna did rounds a couple hours ago."

There is a kind of reply, a grunt maybe, and after a while she picks
up her papers again. It felt like pantomime, she was forty years old
and pretending  to read papers as she sat across the room from a man
who may or may not be asleep.  

The knock at the door didn't interrupt anything. "Toby? Ah, excuse me, Sir?"

He doesn't bother to lift up his head, but sighs loudly.  She laughs at his
dramatics. "Yes, Ginger?"  

The thing with Sinatra, she supposed as she watched Ginger cloud Toby with
papers and questions, was that he wasn't a particularly good singer. He
certainly wouldn't have been a Democrat and although she liked to consider
herself open-minded, she was pretty sure the one thing she couldn't sleep
with was a Republican.  

So there's this careful thing they have, her and Toby. And she watches him
finally open his eyes, like he expects Ginger to disappear, and grimaces
when she doesn't. 

He had kissed the back of her shoulder when she had  stretched to open
a window last night. There was refracted kindness, that could shatter,
but that she would have to trust it, for the moment, not to.