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Afterward, when they finally get a car that actually moves forward, the following kind of conversation keeps on happening.

Sam says: Did you ever make out in the back seat of a car?
Toby says: This is a big fantasy for you? This has been praying on your mind?
C.J. says: Shut up, Toby, it's a fair question. He's just interested. Very interested.
Josh says: I think what you're seeing here is Toby stalling while he thinks up a lie, actually.
Toby says: I'm actually fine with the truth on this one, Josh.
C.J. says: Watch now. He's gonna tell a 'I was the Casanova of Brighton Beach' story. This is gonna be great, guys.
Josh says: I've heard that one, and it kinda turns my stomach.
Toby says: Jealousy is so ugly. And so laughable.
Sam says: So, did you?

*

It is a truth universally (if silently) acknowledged in the corridors of the West Wing that Sam Seaborn is in love with his boss and is always looking for opportunities to spend more time with him. Not that such opportunities are exactly infrequent. Ginger, for instance, would estimate, if you asked her, that they spend about eighty-five per cent of their working lives (which means eighty-five per cent of their regular lives as well since it's not like they ever stop working) either locked in the same room together, walking to the same room together, or talking to each other from adjacent rooms, states, or, occasionally, continents.

And yet Sam still finds that his time is still insufficiently saturated with Toby's presence. Which is why a road trip seemed like a good idea in the first place. And the aforementioned tricky situation with a big crush on a co-worker why it seemed like inviting C.J. and Josh along as well might also be a good idea. That it isn't going to work out as neat and tidy as that is hardly Sam's fault.

*

Contrary to popular belief and the horror stories put around by senior staffers in order to inculcate some respect in their juniors, there is such a thing as vacation, and occasionally even the opportunity to take some. Snags arise, of course, as they will with alarming regularity when you work for the leader of the free world. These snags usually form around a combination of obsessive work ethics and mobile telecommunications technology. Which is why Toby refused to own a cell phone for as long as it was possible to do so. Not that he goes on vacation anyway.

But now here's Sam, looking like he's just been steamrollered by a meat truck. There are dark circles under his eyes which Toby has only just noticed and suspects of having been drawn on with grease paint in the men's room five minutes ago, but which are doing a good job of making Sam look forlorn and in need of some down time.

Toby sighs.

"A vacation?"

"A road trip. You know, a great American adventure?"

"You gonna pitch it to Leo and the President as, what? Research and development for a job you've already had for three years?"

"We are allowed to leave the office, Toby. I know how you don't like to, but -- "

"I'm not going sailing with you."

"I didn't say anything about sailing! And, frankly, Toby, I'd be reluctant to lock myself on a boat with you with the only ready exit the prow of the thing."

"I probably wouldn't throw you in."

"You'd definitely try to throw me in. Of course you wouldn't be able to manage it because of my superior -- "

"Sam."

"I'm wandering off the point?"

"A little."

"Not sailing. A road trip. You know -- see the wonders of America for less than ten dollars a day."

"You've been saving up, have you?"

"C.J. thinks it's a good idea."

"C.J."

"Yes."

"She's coming along?"

"Senior staffers field trip. Of course she's coming along."

"We can't, yanno, go to a hotel and not leave except to go to restaurants and ball games?"

"No, Toby. The President told me I had to make you appreciate the outdoors."

"He did, huh."

"Well, no. But I'm sure he would have said something along those lines if I'd asked him."

"Okay."

"C'mon, Toby. It'll be fun, you know. You remember 'fun'?"

"Dimly."

"You, me, C.J., and Josh. A classic American car and the open highway."

"What," Toby says, hand on his hip, "Could possibly go wrong?"

*

So it comes down to this, Toby thinks. Locked in a car with three people who I'd cross the street to avoid in New York. Well, two people. Depending what C.J. was wearing at the time.

Sam has drawn up a travel plan, of course. He's marked all the major exits and highways. He'll be checking the map twice to make sure we all suffer while we're trying to be nice. The necessity of being less than a four day drive away from the White House should a major catastrophe occur has curtailed Sam's peregrinatory exuberance a little: he's confined them to the sights, sounds, and traveler's indignities of the Northeastern states, with a concentration on New England. By the President's special request. Or requirement, depending how you parsed the inflection of his answer at the time that Sam asked him if this godforsaken jaunt was something he might approve. Apparently there was a friendly 'request' that they all write the President a two page paper on the beauty of New Hampshire. Sam said that he honestly wasn't sure whether the President was joking or not. Josh has been demanding that C.J. remind him that he should buy maple syrup by the can every time they see a rest stop or a gift shop. C.J. has been hitting him a lot and given him the first in what Toby suspects will be an ongoing series of lectures on the emancipation of women and what that means for guys like Josh Lyman. Sam has been driving the hideous SUV he apparently thought was the best equivalent to the classic American sports car he wasn't able to get hold of until they get well out of any metropolitan area (i.e. New Hampshire, and points beyond), windows wound right down until everyone else in the car is coming down with hypothermia, babbling about freedom, the open road, and all that sub-Kerouac bullshit while C.J. and Josh play Never Have I Ever in the back seat using Cheetos as forfeits.

Toby has just been rolling his eyes a lot and trying to sleep with his head jammed up against the passenger side window. It hasn't been working.

He's just learning the twenty-second thing he never wanted to know about Josh Lyman's sexual history when the car makes an almighty groaning sound and smoke starts pouring out of the hood.

Josh and C.J., clearly high on imitation cheese, start laughing straight away. Josh hammers his fist against the back of Sam's seat and shouts things that aren't meant to be at all encouraging. C.J. tries to stop him for about half a second, then just collapses with laughter.

Sam looks at the steering wheel like it's been guilty of some kind of personal betrayal against him which, Toby supposes, it has. The road is a lot less romantic and a lot harder to get romantic about when you have to walk it. In New Hampshire. In the middle of what is turning out to be what passes for a good summer in New England. I.e. kinda cold and a little wet.

Toby is sure that the car -- a 2001 Chevrolet SUV with hardly a clunk anywhere in its make-up and no dust around the stick or even a half-empty bag of chips stuck in the glove box -- breaks down for one reason only: that it is being driven by Sam Seaborn.

What surprises him is what Sam does next: with an almighty shout (Toby thinks it started out as fuck and finished as goddamnit because, despite being a grown man, Sam is still squeamish about really putting some feeling behind his cursing; or he is in front of Toby anyway) Sam brings both of his fists down on the wheel, thereby setting off not only a blast from the horn, but also the car's incredibly irritating alarm and the little chime that sounds whenever someone opens any of the doors. Then Sam hits the dash instead, but only once. He sighs, and begins doing what he needs to do in order to turn the alarm and the chime off.

Toby turns to him and raises his eyebrows. He isn't surprised that Sam doesn't actually need to see him doing this in order to realize that it's happening.

"Oh shut up, Toby," he says.

Toby best understands what kind of day this is going to turn out to be when he stares at Sam, then draws his thumb and forefinger, pressed together, across his lips. In case you hadn't noticed, Mister Seaborn, my contribution is already non-verbal. Sam looks up, having fixed the alarm if not the chiming, and catches the tail end of this action. That all Sam does in response to this is to sigh again and nudge the driver side door open with a combination of his elbow and his heel, then close it again with a bang, thereby putting an end to the noise that is, Toby supposes, meant to indicate to those not burdened with higher reasoning skills that they might be letting the rain in, just proves that he lucked out in the Deputy lottery.

The other thing he is surprised by is the way that thought, instead of evaporating as it would have done if they'd been in the office and he'd just accidentally thrown a Spaldeen at Sam's head, nestles in his brain like an incipient migraine headache.

"So," Josh says, "We're walking, I guess?"

"I was heading for a gas station anyway," Sam says. Toby notes, silently, that he already has his game face back on. He's smiling at Josh, shrugging: it's gonna be just fine. "We can call the rental place. See if there's anywhere we can stay that's close."

"What?" Toby says, starting to wish that he'd just shut up like Sam asked but apparently unable to, "No sight-seeing?"

"Maybe next time we can go to Disneyland, Toby," Josh says. "If you're a really good boy."

"Oh, could we?"

"Sam?" C.J. starts, "Don't you have your cell?"

Sam looks down at his jacket, thrown over the dashboard in the middle of The Sam Seaborn Fury Experiment 2002, then back up. His eyes catch Toby's. Toby does nothing. Sam still looks vaguely destroyed by their collective opprobrium.

"Ah, yeah. I do."

Josh reaches through to the front seats, squeezes Sam's shoulder. Toby catches himself thinking: see? it is not a universal imperative that we should all three try to systematically wear down Sam's self-esteem because of his insufferable ability to be positive. Toby rubs the heel of his hand over his forehead. He really is getting a headache.

"We can still walk to the gas station, buddy," Josh says. "Get some supplies? Directions. Or something."

Sam has pulled the cellphone out of his jacket pocket and is giving it that look that Toby gives his laptop at least twice a day: the look of sublime human horror at malfunctioning technology.

"It won't turn on," Sam says.

"Oh for crying out loud," Toby says, under his breath.

"Give it to me," C.J. says. "I have magic fingers."

All three of them turn to stare at her. C.J. stares right back, eyebrows raised.

"Good god, you three need to get laid. As a matter of extreme urgency."

Toby opens his mouth to say something that hasn't quite formed in his head, then thinks better of it. C.J. smiles at him.

"Good choice, there, Toby. Now, let's see whether we can save the cell."

She does. Sorta. After fifteen minutes' tender care under C.J.'s tender fingers the cell phone is agreeing to switch on, even though its display is slightly cracked and some of the numbers go a little swimmy if held at less than an exact 45 degree angle, but the thing has no reception. None at all. Not a bar.

"On the plus side," Sam says, "At least it's not my fault."

"How is that a plus side?" Toby asks.

"It's a plus for me."

"Shall we just walk to the gas station anyway?" Josh says. "Check the thing every mile and try not to get lost. Or eaten by, yanno, prairie dogs or whatever?"

"Prairie dogs?" C.J. says.

"Or whatever."

"Dairy cows?"

"I hear they're vicious, as a matter of fact."

They pile out of the car. Sam looks at it forlornly, and also like he's worried about his deposit. C.J. bumps his shoulder.

"They'll find it. It'll have one of those tracking things."

Sam looks at her. "Huh?"

"Beacon things. You know. So the guys can find it if it is purloined."

"Beacon things?" Josh says.

"Purloined?" Toby says.

"I just want to state for the record that this isn't my fault," Sam says, looking like he thinks the exact opposite is the case. "And I won't be able to afford my own bail so don't lose your wallets, okay?"

"Can we just walk to the damn gas station?" Toby asks.

"Yeah," Josh says, not bothering to hide how excited he isn't by this plan of action. "To the gas station!" He starts walking, then stops. "Which way is it?"

Sam smiles. By Toby's informal count (and when exactly did this count begin, Mister Ziegler?) it is his real first smile for around four hours.

Sam points in the opposite direction to that of Josh's three step excursion.

"That way," he says.

*

Toby thinks about God because it is easier than thinking about this and because he hates walking. His feet already hurt and he could care less about shoes normally but is nevertheless wishing that he'd picked the shoes for this trip with more care. If he does not think about his shoes or about God he starts thinking about the back of Josh's neck and wondering whether the precise combination of tastes he found there last night add up to a taste that could be described as sweet or salt. Right now, with Josh walking up ahead of him and the line of his collar demarcating the lightly sunburned skin from the plain pink; the line visible every couple of meters as Josh's gaze turns back to his feet. Every couple of meters Toby's desire to rub his thumbs first over the burned skin and then over the pink resurges; he wants to see if the one is hotter than the other, if it will burn. So he thinks about God instead. About negative space and how to conceive a hole in the universe of what you think you know. How to think about something that is unknowable. How to think about the reflections he sees in Josh, the late-comers, the ones he saw in Sam in the first hour and in C.J. the first night, how things that come late are the ones which seem more worthwhile. How the reflections show him the ugly angles of his own face. How there is nothing godly there. How much he just wants the press of skin on skin, and no more fucking thinking.

Toby looks up after a mile or so, expecting to see himself back at the start again. But, despite the fact that they seem to have abandoned the idea of actually getting to the fabled gas station, they are still moving forward, somehow.

He doesn't notice C.J. until she's already grabbed hold of his hand.

"Thinking dark thoughts there, Mister Grim?"

Toby clears his throat and pushes his hand down the front of his shirt. His tie is in a ball in his pocket. The lump it makes on his hip is irritating him.

"No more than usual," he says. "And you need some new epithets."

She nods, unexpectedly. "I know. All this fresh air is not having the effect I was told it would."

"It's beautiful!" Sam calls, looking over his shoulder at them, looking pretty pissed, actually. He is walking with Josh. They aren't talking because whenever Josh says anything Sam gives him that look like he's personally responsible for the decline of American morals and appreciation of the Henry Thoreau model of the universe. Which, Toby thinks, is what we get for putting someone who really could put the word 'outdoorsman' on his resume without being laughed out of court, in charge of this little jaunt.

"Yeah," Toby says, to C.J., "It's not doing wonders for your complexion, either."

He is gratified by the split second in which, as a stricken expression comes over her face, she raises her hand to her cheek as though it might have melted away in the four hours since she last paid it any attention. That she spends the following second hitting him around the head is only what he expected.

"Thank you for that, Toby. When I shave off your beard tonight you can just put it down to due payback."

He looks at her, doesn't smile even though he quite wants to. "You don't like me without my beard."

"I don't like you most of the time."

He does smile. "That's not what you said last night," he says, and speeds up to join Sam and Josh.

"Huh?" Josh says, as Toby draws level.

"What?" Sam says. "What?" he says again, like repeating it will somehow ground the question in a context that he understands.

"Don't scare the boys, Toby!" what C.J. calls from behind them. "I've told you before, they're delicate!"

Toby just chuckles. Josh stares at him. Sam sighs, and starts picking leaves off the trees they're walking past and then ripping them into pieces.

"Toby?" Josh says, cautiously, "Is there an interesting story going on here?"

Toby looks at him. "Yes."

"Can we hear about it?"

Toby smiles. "No."

"How come?"

"Like C.J. says, you're not ready yet. Too delicate."

"There's an initiation procedure," C.J. says from over Toby's shoulder. She's caught up with them; Sam has gone a little way ahead.

"The kind that involve shaving foam and no eyebrows or the other kind?"

"What d'you think, Josh?" C.J. asks.

"You know, if either of you had gone to a decent school -- "

"Yale!" C.J. says. "Harvard!"

"Princeton," Sam says, not quite loud enough for anyone except Toby, who only has one ear tuned to the argument that is about to ensue -- it's not like he hasn't heard it a couple thousand times before -- to hear.

"Yes," Josh says. "Yes. Where hazing is taken seriously."

"So how many times have you had to grow your eyebrows back, Joshua?" C.J. asks.

"I'm just saying that there's a tradition to these things. A protocol. A way to do them properly and a way to, you know -- "

"Not?" Toby asks.

"Yes!"

They all hear Sam's sigh, even from five meters up ahead. Toby figures this probably isn't what he had in mind for the perfect vacation. Again, Toby is surprised by his surprise. He is actually feeling remorseful in response to Sam's obvious disappointment. Toby puts this down to the fact that he has now been walking in the open air for almost an hour. Side-effect of too much clean oxygen. Still, surprising. He looks up at Sam; can't help but note that his shoulders seem less steel-straight than usual. Toby makes a little huh noise under his breath. Neither Josh nor C.J. notice this (on account of still getting off on their bickering match) but they both look up at Sam in a way that suggests that, all appearances to the contrary, they might also feel slightly guilty. Sam's shoulders, bright white even in the gathering dusk, fill up the horizon. Toby experiences a certain amount of desire to touch the space between Sam's shoulder blades, where his shirt billows slightly in the wind. Wondering whether that space would be warm or cool, whether he would be able to feel the rise of Sam's vertebrae. Whether, under his tongue, Sam would shiver.

Toby makes the huh noise again. He shakes his head, as though, contrary to the evidence amassed by every person in the history of the developed world, this action will help to clear it of the junk currently in residence there. He wonders exactly when he started thinking about sex all the time. Decides that it's probably Andrea's fault.

"Toby?"

C.J. is staring at him as well as a person can while trying to walk at a reasonable pace.

"You made a little noise there. Did it signify anything?"

"Nothing that would surprise you."

She sighs theatrically. "Hookers again. Toby. I thought we'd gotten you off that."

He smiles. "I've been busy."

"Thinking about hookers."

"Thinking about the President actually, but thanks for putting those two things together in my mind."

"You're the sex-obsessed weirdo, Toby, I was just trying to help."

He sighs. Suddenly it isn't funny anymore. "Yeah."

Eventually, someone remembers that it is possible to phone out for assistance using a cell phone when the reception comes back up. To Toby's disgust, it isn't him.

"The guy says would we prefer a Cadillac or something that won't actually fall to pieces on account of being made entirely of rust?" Josh asks.

"What color is it?" C.J. wants to know.

"Convertible," Sam says, "If they have it."

"Can you drive stick?" Josh asks Sam.

Toby takes the phone out of Josh's hand while Sam is still explaining that he probably can with the subtext that if they'd like to not be stuck at the side of this highway for the rest of their natural lives an automatic would be a better bet.

"Whatever you have, as quickly as you can get it here. Thank you." And he hangs up the phone.

"Toby!" Josh says, fumbling the pass of the cell phone Toby just threw him.

"I wanted a Mustang in blue, Toby," C.J. says.

"You always do, C.J." Toby says.

"What should we do while we're waiting?" Sam says, in the voice of a person trying to quash an incipient argument between three people he cares about but is getting increasingly tired of being around.

"Think of all new ways to kill ourselves?" Toby suggests.

"All new ways to kill each other?" C.J. says.

"Is there any game I could suggest that wouldn't result in me getting murdered and buried by the highway?" Sam says, clearly already knowing the answer.

"Truth or Dare?" C.J. says, with a glint in her eyes which even Toby does not find entirely pleasant.

"I was thinking more I Spy, but okay."

"I'm not sure," Toby says, really meaning it, "That I can deal with any more truths about Josh right now."

"Oh c'mon, Toby, isn't that what vacations are about?" C.J. says. "Getting to know people a little better?"

Toby stares at her. "What the hell kind of vacations have you been on, C.J.?"

"Our intoxicants," Josh says, waving a half-empty bag of the foodstuff in question, "Which I think is more what Toby had in mind, stand at about fifteen Cheetos."

"I could block up your airways with them," Toby muses, at no one in particular.

"Just play nicely, boys," C.J. says. "Is that possible?"

Sam sits down by the side of the road. He hugs his arms around his knees. C.J. sits beside him. Josh sits beside her. Toby bounces on his heels, thinking about dust, dirt, the hassle of dry cleaning, and whether he would rather sit beside Josh, or Sam.

"Toby," Sam says, without looking up. "Truth or Dare?"

Hesitation just makes you look more of an idiot, Toby thinks, and since you're gonna look like an idiot in about twenty seconds why not just cut to the chase?

"Truth," he says.

Sam looks up at him, surprised. His eyes, Toby notices, possibly for the first time, are the same color as the edges of the clouds; blue, and the wetness in them reflecting the light. What Toby ends up thinking, during the twenty seconds before he becomes an idiot, is how easy it would be to lose your way there, up in the troposphere, where the air in thin and the sky is a perfect blue.

*

Sam figures he should probably have given this some thought before he asked the question. All the things that come into his mind ("Have you ever kissed a man?" "Why did your marriage really break up?" "Do you love her as much as it's obvious you do?" "If I left would you miss me even a little bit?") all seem rather on the excessively personal side. The alternatives ("What's your favorite color?" "Your favorite writer?" "Would you kiss me if I asked you, if I made it part of a game?") ... Anyway. It's kinda hard to think.

"Sam?" Toby says, in that voice that always seems to have Sam thinking about reconsidering his position on a higher power; the kind of higher power who would put Toby Ziegler in his path just to create moments like this. Kind of a shitty higher power, actually, which is why Sam is an atheist but --

"Sam."

"Sorry. I'm thinking. It's surprisingly hard, actually."

Further pause.

"A question, Sam."

"Give me a minute, okay!"

"You've had about six."

"Can we rule a few subjects out?" Josh says.

"Shut up, Josh," C.J. says.

"Writing," Sam says, quietly.

"What about it?" Josh asks.

"Shut up, Josh."

"What made you a writer?" Sam says, looking up into Toby's face. "How in the hell did you get so good?"

"You want to know?" Toby says.

"Or I wouldn't have asked," Sam says.

"My mother," Toby says, like he's daring any one of them to make an issue out of it. "Next question."

"Hang on, hang on," C.J. says, raising her hand with her index finger pointing. "I don't know this story."

"Ah, the plot thickens!" Josh says.

"I think I'm entitled to, you know, some kind of elaboration, Toby," Sam says, willing himself to grow a backbone where his boss is concerned even though, when they're out of the White House surely Toby is just some guy he works with and has no actual jurisdiction over him and therefore asking him personal questions can't possibly be grounds for dismissal --

"Sam?" Toby says, bending over and waving one hand in front of Sam's face in what he probably thinks is an ironic way. "You zoned out again there."

"I was waiting for you, actually," Sam says. "So don't even think about trying to put me off."

Toby rolls his eyes.

"Your mom," Sam says.

"My mom."

"Who was she," Josh says, "Leo Tolstoy?"

"You think I write like Tolstoy?" Toby says, like he doesn't particularly think this is a compliment.

"Please don't set him off, Josh," Sam says.

"My mother," Toby says, finally sitting with them by the side of the highway, beside Sam, their arms not pressed together but with only an atom's stretch of space between them, "Was a worker of minor miracles."

"Obviously," Josh says, under his breath. Then, "Ow," as C.J. hits him around the head. Sam grins down at his shoes.

"Anyway," Toby says, "She had strong views on the education of young men -- "

"Ah, just a moment -- " C.J. says.

Toby interrupts. "My Yiddish-speaking European-born mother who wasn't educated in the ways of feminism, C.J., I'm sorry, but that's the way it was. Not that it ended up troubling my sister the New York lawyer or my other sister the NATO translator. But there it is."

"Or your brother the NASA science specialist," C.J. retorts.

"Yeah," Toby says, "Over-achievement runs in my family. Or at least this generation of it. You got a problem with that?"

"You know," Josh says, ponderingly, "I think that makes you the least well-credentialed of your family, Toby."

"Yeah. Sixty-three feet from the Oval Office and I'm the poorly credentialed one."

"Or did I mean the poorest?" Josh says, grinning at Toby from around Sam and C.J.

"That neither I nor the three dollars sixty cents in my pockets can disagree with."

"Can we get back to the story of your mother the feminist?" C.J. says.

"No story," Toby says. "Her father was a poet. In Prague, actually. She was keen on the idea that one of her sons should be one as well. I came first, so I got the composition assignments and poetry appreciation classes while David was fooling around with tadpoles."

"She set you assignments?" C.J. says, smiling as if Toby, or possibly his mother, is the most adorable thing ever.

"Yeah. I got a Norton Anthology for my eighth birthday. First edition."

"And a really big dictionary," Josh says, smirking.

"Is that funny, Josh?" Toby says.

Sam watches Josh takes one look at Toby's expression and decide he doesn't want to have this fight.

"No. Not funny. Just figured, you know -- dictionary. Useful."

"But you're not a poet," C.J. points out, making the point that Sam didn't quite dare to.

"No, well. It wasn't an infallible system. On the other hand, I do write speeches for the President of the United States so for my tax dollars, she did a number on me."

"You'd rather have been an astronaut?" C.J. says, still grinning.

"No. I'd rather have made my mother proud of me," Toby says, quietly. His voice bounces off the concrete. When the sound reaches Sam's ears he is aware of them begin to ache a little.

"Toby," C.J. says, looking at him; looking at him in that way Sam wishes he felt free to.

He shrugs. "I said 'Truth'. There you go."

"You don't think she's proud of you?" Sam says, after he's cleared his throat. It feels like he hasn't spoken for hours.

"She died nine years ago. So my, ah, success was still a ways off."

"Success isn't just when they vote your guy in, Toby," Sam says.

Toby looks at him. For a moment Sam thinks he's going to smile, but he doesn't.

"Maybe not. Helps though." Toby sighs. "It would have ... helped her to see the point of what I did. What I do."

Sam has squeezed his shoulder before he's consciously aware of the decision to do so.

"She did, man."

Toby makes a little noise Sam can't interpret at the back of his throat. But he doesn't tense under Sam's hand.

"Yeah," he says. Coughs. "Anyway. I guess it's my turn now?"

*

Lights come out of the fog looking, C.J. thinks, quite like the last scene of a British movie from the time when they still understood how to make them. The fog descended about half an hour ago, just as the light was starting to fail. She's been trying not to notice exactly how long she's been sitting at the side of the highway freezing her ass off but, if asked to estimate, she would say about two hours. They tried calling out a few times, but Sam's cell phone had reverted to its previous state of complete uselessness.

So they sat. They played stupid games. They even played I Spy, eventually, until Toby begged them to stop and then threatened that if they didn't he would set fire to them and bury them in the nearest ditch without bothering to notify their families. They prayed, silently, that they wouldn't get eaten by wolves, raccoons, prairie dogs or any other example of the fine fauna on offer in southern New Hampshire.

Sam kept offering to walk to the gas station, the location of which they had by that point absolutely no chance of working out. They forbade him on the grounds that getting himself lost and murdered or run down by a truck on account of his guilt re. ruining their lives was just stupid. Eventually, Toby ordered him to sit the hell down, which seemed to work.

And then the fog arrived, and Sam said no more about it. And after the fog, the red Dodge pick-up truck whose headlights are half-blinding her at this moment.

The guy driving the pick-up which has, as far as C.J. can see, no second car attached to it at any point, leans out the window and calls, "You folks waiting on a car?"

Josh leaps up with his arms in the air and starts shouting, "Yes! Here! Us!"

"You could talk to him in complete sentences, even," Toby says, "Just in case he decides we're dangerous lunatics."

"I think I'm turning into a dangerous lunatic, Toby," Josh says from between his teeth, "So shut up."

Toby shrugs. "I couldn't tell the difference."

Josh ignores him and walks up to the car. C.J. feels like the over-familiarity with which he leans on the window of the pick-up's cab probably means he's riding for a fall but she doesn't particularly feel, even though she's sitting in freezing fog miles away from anything that isn't a rabbit warren, like saving Josh from his inevitable faux-pas.

"Hey, man. You from the rental company?"

The guy nods. "'Fraid to say, we can't really help you with your situation as regards a new car."

"Huh?" Toby says, looking up.

Sam groans at the exact same moment.

C.J. hides her smile.

"So, uh. Are we sleeping here tonight?" Josh asks the guy.

"Not at all. Pile in the back here and I'll drop you off at one of our fine hotels."

Sam and Toby look at each other. She can see them begin to parse the potential meanings of the word 'fine' and the word 'hotel'. She smothers her laugh with a cough. They both stare at her.

"Fog irritates my throat," she says, and immediately wishes she hadn't.

"Uh huh," Toby says.

"Anyway," Sam says.

"Yeah, ah, about the other car -- " Josh starts.

The guy waves his hand around. "I'll find it tomorrow morning. Figure we'll probably be needing to charge you a little for recovery but it won't be too much. You fellas can get some sleep tonight and start out again in the morning. If that suits?"

Josh nods, looking relieved. "That'll be great, thank you."

Toby gets up, dusts himself off and then offers a hand to C.J. Sam pulls himself up to his feet and immediately starts looking guilty again. He walks up to the pick-up.

"Look, it was my fault, about the breakdown. When you get round to charging someone, charge me, okay?"

The guy just looks Sam up and down, like he could care less who paycheck the recovery comes out of.

"Ignore him," Toby says, from over Sam's shoulder. "He's distressed from all the fresh air." He turns to Sam. "Get in the damn car, Sam."

C.J. watches the guy decide that these are the two jokers of the party, but he doesn't seem averse to the idea of them hitching a ride in the back of his truck. He watches Josh get in the back, after Josh has apologized for the other two. C.J.'s own turn now.

She leans in towards the cab window, "Sorry about them. I promise to keep them under control."

She is slightly irritated that, instead of being dazzled by her demeanor and impeccable manners -- impaired though they are, she has to admit, by the three hours of roadside rest, Cheetos and worry -- the truck driver just looks at her like he wishes they'd all just shut up. She gets in the damn car.

In the back, the boys are suspiciously silent. Josh is staring at his nails; Toby is staring into the fog; Sam is staring at Toby, or, more accurately, at the very base of his neck, where his shirt is open and his tie missing.

This does, at least, give her something to think about on the drive.

*

The secret to Toby is being able to read the invisible, inaudible verbs, the ones that hang off the ellipses he leaves in ordinary speech. C.J. knows this: learned it the first day and took the advanced course the same night, in the ten awkward minutes that passed between the first kiss and the bursting of the buttons of her blouse under his fingers. She doesn't always get it right, which is understandable, since invisible language is often hard to parse, even for a graduate of the University of Berkeley, but she's top ten percentile, for sure.

She thinks Sam is a natural in the language of Toby Ziegler as written in lemon juice and lightly grilled to reveal its secrets. It amuses her to think of Sam, dressed up in spy gear and looking too handsome for her to admit in a fedora and overcoat, poring over scraps of paper, deciphering codes. But this is what a full immersion course will get you -- this fluency of interpretation which carries with it an ability to trust in the validity of that interpretation. That trusts even when it is being pelted with Spaldeens. She envies that; she envies him his instinctive love, and the power he does not know this gives him over that love's object, because Toby is not nearly as heartless as Sam's heart still, paradoxically, seems to believe. She wants to help -- to meet him on a park bench at seven A.M. one morning, wrapped up in an overcoat of her own, to give him the tip-off -- but she enjoys watching the game too much.

A long time ago, when she was hardly even born yet, C.J. Cregg believed she was in love with Toby Ziegler. He was the sort of boy who was never a boy; who was always a man in embryo, just waiting for time to see his point. He had a beard when he was twenty-one, and a drinking habit, and a quality of silence unlike any that she had experienced before. Unlike her father's studious silence, or the coerced, sullen quietude of her brothers, Toby's was a gathering silence. Like a black hole he pulled absence of sound into himself, and she found her own voice disappearing, until she felt she had forgotten how to speak and he smiled and let her know that words weren't necessary anyway.

They fucked the way you're meant to when you're in college, or at least that's what she thought later. At the time she just got continually drunk on his body, and he got drunk on whiskey, and when they fought she knew it was because he was in the wrong and she told her girlfriends about how fucking awful men are and they agreed, and waited for her to go back to him, knowing that once she did they wouldn't see her again for a month or so.

It wasn't love until later, until after they'd stopped seeing each other. Until he started writing her postcards.

In that respect she understands Sam's instant infatuation. She understands the intoxicating effect that Toby's words obviously have on his Deputy. She knows she has walked around with the same dazed look on her face that Sam has all the time these days. She knows the taste of the air up there in terra infatuata. Sometimes, when the wind blows right, she tastes that air again; she breathes it in as deep as she can. She fills her lungs with it. It's as good as it ever was. And it's nice to share it with someone.

*

Later, they congregate. The hotel, though charming (as far as that goes), is hardly the Hilton. Josh and Sam get rooms next door to each other that remind C.J. of the walk-in closet she had in her L.A. apartment. Toby gets something a little bigger with a pot plant on the sill of the window that has definitely seen better times, but the room itself is over the other side of the hotel and Toby suggests, by the way that he sprawls on the couch in C.J.'s room that he's not eager to make the journey back there any time soon.

So her own room, the biggest, the only one with a TV, and containing two queen-sized beds rather than just the one, is where they end up.

"You know, after a taxing day experiencing the wonders of America," Toby says, "I was really thinking that drinking heavily and passing out was a more appropriate way to end the evening."

"Shut up, Toby. Just because you're socially dysfunctional there's no need to inflict it on the rest of us."

"Games, C.J.? What are we, in grade school now?"

"All part of our secret mission to get you to enjoy life, Toby."

"Yeah," Josh says. "All going smoothly so far."

"What kind of games?" Sam asks.

"Well, funny you should ask, actually, Sam."

"And if you're thinking you don't like the sound of that," Josh says, reaching for a beer, "I think you're pretty much on the money."

"Shut up, Josh."

"You understand that I still have some shreds of dignity that I'd quite like to hold on to, yes?"

"Shut up, Toby."

"What kind of games?" Sam asks again.

C.J. grins. "Games. You'll like them."

"Does he get his money back later?"

"You're not helping, Joshua."

"Well what do you want me to do, C.J.?"

"I kinda thought I'd already made that clear, Josh."

Josh throws his hands up. "Okay! Just don't expect me to sort it all out when the house of cards falls down, C.J."

"I'll be sure not to do that."

"What kind of games?" Toby asks.

"The fun kind," C.J. says. "Just wait and see, okay?"

On reflection, C.J. thinks, Spin the Bottle was maybe not the best of ideas. Or not between three terminal neurotics and a normal person who really couldn't be expected to do all the kissing every single time. Three terminal neurotics who all have stupidly 'complicated', stupidly 'male' feelings towards each other and, in Sam's case, the most open, fragile, shatterable face in the Northeastern United States. Plus, she's never been part of a game of Spin the Bottle that didn't end with someone running off in tears. Just not usually one of the boys.

Okay, he wasn't actually crying. More like fuming. She could probably have toasted an English muffin on his cheeks, if she'd had the presence of mind to bring any English muffins along on this jaunt. Which, again, probably wouldn't have helped.

Still, it's hardly her fault that Toby Ziegler, all appearances to the contrary, is apparently the little black dress of the West Wing. Nor could it be said to be her fault that Toby himself not only does not realize this, not only would he be completely baffled, embarrassed and generally Toby about the whole thing if he did know about it, but also manages to completely mangle and destroy any personal relationship he is lucky enough to have. That is not her fault. And, you know, sometimes matchmaking plans don't come off.

It's just that she happened to be incredibly tired of watching Sam moon around the office. The game was getting pretty old. She just wanted to give him a little nudge in the right direction.

Toby probably weighted the bottle, since there's no way the laws of probability ought to have allowed him to kiss her three times (twice on his turn, once on hers) in a row. He is definitely not that lucky. That said, neither is Josh and he got his twice, and when he kissed Toby he didn't seem to be exactly suffering either. Sam he kissed like a brother, or like a guy who knows what he's getting into. All of which she found pretty interesting.

But then, of course, it was Sam's turn and, of course, the bottle span straight to Toby, pointed right at the center of his crotch, and they all got really tense.

They were sitting opposite each other. Sam crossed legged and Toby with his knees up near his ears and his arms wrapped around them. Not at all defensive, Mister Ziegler. It was that they both had their shoes off that got to C.J. -- boys in socks, Sam's expensive and patterned and Toby's cheap and plain, but both of them going out at the heels and pulled loose at the toes, and their sharp ankles just exposed under the cuffs of their pants. They both looked scared; both of them trying to hide it as Sam got up on his knees and leaned across the circle; both of them looking young and stupid and fuller of beer than they actually were, Sam's breathing getting short and anxious, Toby blowing out a long peal of smoke.

C.J. thinks that if Sam hadn't touched him -- stroked his cheek -- Toby would have been fine with it. Though she wouldn't expect him to admit it, she knows from her own empirical research that kissing a man is exactly the same as kissing a woman once you get right down to it. Lips, skin, warm breath, trying not to break each other's teeth. Admittedly, most women don't have beards but if that should have freaked anyone out it should have been Sam, not Toby. But, no. Express emotion, and he's out of there. Sam stroked his cheek, just with the tips of his fingers along the line of his beard. Then Sam closed his eyes. Then Sam kissed him.

To her -- and to Josh, who flashed her a look as it happened -- it looked like a nice kiss. A sweet kiss. She could see Sam start to smile around it, just at the side of his mouth as he broke for breath. At which point Toby pushed him away. Gently, it's true. His hand in the center of Sam's chest. But away; that's enough, Sam; C.J. expecting him to form a sentence that had the word 'inappropriate' nestling in the center of it like a land mine; Josh wincing, his eyes locked on the label of the bottle of beer he was holding; Sam's mouth still open, red lips, half-lost and still searching; Toby's eyes slipping all over the room in an effort to get away, and he opens his mouth, and he clears his throat, and he says, right into Sam's face, in that low voice that they all know means business, or else the end of the world:

"Just a game, Sam."

And, C.J. thinks, anyone who attended even one day of high school could have told you what would happen next.

She finds him down in the bar with his sleeves rolled up and his stockinged feet perched delicately on the crossbar of the stool on which he is sitting, tossing peanuts into a shot glass. Judging by the pile-up of nuts along the bar he's been at it a while, and the empty glasses that she suspects once held double measures of Jack Daniel's explain the accuracy, or lack thereof, of his aim.

She pulls up a stool. He keeps throwing peanuts.

"So, how you doing, Sparky?"

"You know that day in high school, just before the prom, the day you'd been working up to for weeks and then it finally comes and you tell yourself to man up and just damn well ask the person you think is incredible if they'll go to the prom with you, even though you're kind of a geek and you're still getting beat up in your senior year but it's not like you're a bad guy and it doesn't have to be a big romantic thing, and then they rip out your heart and spit on it and grind it into paste right in front of your locker so you can never forget this moment?"

"So you did lie about being able to get girls to go out with you in high school?"

"No. Didn't lie about the girls."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"So not so great, huh?"

"I'm thinking about reasons I can give the President for my resignation Monday morning."

"Sam."

"C.J.? You ever been comprehensively humiliated, because I really don't recommend it."

"Sam, c'mon, it wasn't all that bad."

"I'm the kid who practices their first name with their crush's last name in the back of their math book, C.J. I am that twelve year old girl."

She smiles. "Yeah, but you're a really cute one."

"Oh shut up."

"It was just a game, Sam. And, yanno -- Toby, and games and how those two things don't exactly mix?"

"He kissed you."

"Yes."

"And Josh."

"Yes."

"So why the hell is it so different when ... " He stops, sighs. "Nevermind."

"Would it help if I insulted him a little? I can do that, if you'd like."

Sam smiles, but without much conviction. "They're singing songs of love. But not for me."

"You don't suit maudlin, Sam."

"Oh, you don't think so? I always thought I was pretty good at it."

"No, I don't think so. Come back out and play. Or sit in the corner and sulk, I don't care. But don't sit in here with your head up your ass because of him."

"Have we got more liquor?"

"Sure."

"Okay."

The look Toby shoots him for a quarter second, as he walks back into the room with C.J.'s hand digging into the small of his back just in case he decides that cowardice is the better part of his valor right now, might be described as an apology. It is certainly shifty enough. Sam looks at him for about a quarter of a second. C.J., her hand still pressed lightly into his back, can hear Sam's breathing, and feel it against her palm. Her own chest starts to hurt in sympathy. She rubs her knuckles across his shoulder blades. It's gonna be okay.

Sam dives for a beer from the cooler; Toby turns his attention back to the cards he was shuffling before they came in. C.J. is impressed that the pack isn't spread all over the floor. She can see Toby's hands shaking from across the room. Josh just looks incredibly uncomfortable. She thinks all this tension, all this breaking up of the family, is about as much fun as a disillusionment enema for him. She suspects that his hands are itching to bang Sam and Toby's heads together and tell them to kiss and damn well make up. Or at any rate learn to lie to each other a little better. She sits down beside him and silently promises him that she'll see what she can do. Magic fingers, Joshua.

They play cards for a while. Toby has the grace to bow out early whenever Sam is winning, or really whenever he's part of the game at all. Next to Toby Sam is terrible at poker but now doesn't seem like the best time to underline the fact. Luckily for Toby, Sam is getting increasingly drunk and the instincts which would usually ensure a burst of hypersensitivity and verbal righteousness on the topic of how sick Sam is of getting patronized by everyone he works with like he didn't earn his job title by virtue of raw talent, hard work, and dedication, are getting dulled by Bud and the bottle of whiskey Toby has been quietly leaving alone all night. There comes a point when Sam is too drunk to sit up straight and stop falling asleep over his cards, at which Josh takes Sam's hand in one of his own, grabs Sam's shoulder with the other and suggests, with the correct measure of gentle but irresistible force, that it's time for bed.

C.J. watches Toby watching Sam out of the room. She considers the fact that Toby isn't trying to hide the fact that this is what he is doing a positive.

"You could be a little easier on him," she says.

He looks at her with exactly the expression she would have expected. Sighs.

"Exactly what am I supposed to do, C.J.?"

"Well, for starters, sometime tomorrow I'd make a point of apologizing to him. Although I guess after that it's really up to you, Toby."

"Says the woman who had the idea that playing the kind of games usually reserved for profoundly horny adolescents would be a good move."

"Yeah, okay. But, what? You'd have preferred a little crochet?"

Toby points at the TV in corner. "The football game. Beer. Eventually passing out." He shrugs. "Call me old-fashioned."

"On vacation, Toby?"

"Yes! On damn vacation, C.J.! I'd have been happy with a week getting reacquainted with my bed but for the Boy Wonder and his great ideas."

"Cut him a break, Toby."

He gives her that look that means What? Jeez! which he uses when his level of irritation is great enough that he can't deal with opening his mouth.

"I'm not kidding, mi amore."

"Is there a lecture on team unity and good leadership coming up now?"

"No. But there is a appetizer of light bodily harm available if sir would be interested." She sighs. "Come on, Toby."

He sighs. "Yeah, okay."

"Promise?"

She'd like to twist his ear, or else some other part of him that would hurt exponentially more, but decides on leniency for the time being.

"Yeah."

"Toby?"

"I promise!"

"What d'you promise?" Josh asks, coming back in with no visible traces of blood or vomit on his clothing. C.J. assumes this means that Sam is safely tucked up in bed.

"He's promised to be a better human being. Or I'll remove some part of his anatomy that he would not like to be without."

"You said the bodily harm was optional," Toby says, not sounding anywhere near scared enough.

"Did I? Sorry. It's not."

"Anyway," Josh says, "More poker? I need the cash."

Toby shakes his head. He looks exhausted, she thinks, all in a moment, like the sky just crashed on him.

"I'm going to bed," he says.

"Sweet dreams, Toby," C.J. says. "Remember that I'm next door with a hunting knife."

"In case the boogeyman is in his closet?" Josh asks.

"In case he decides he knows better about human relationships than those of us who have an emotional IQ of more than two and a half."

"I'm really going," Toby says.

"Goodnight, Tobias," C.J. says.

"See ya in the morning, man," Josh says.

Josh watches Toby out of the room. She is struck by the similarity of this gaze; she's seen it already tonight.

*

Josh thinks of the whole thing like a play, usually a two-hander, usually him and Toby. The last two in the ring. Not enemies but not friends, different than brothers. This is harder than having a brother, or just as hard as not having a sister anymore.

Josh likes kissing him. He feels guilty every time he does, even though it's like trying to stand up in a gale -- trying to withstand one of Toby's kisses. Impossible to do anything but fall over, under him. But Josh knows he isn't the only one who can't help but brace himself against the inevitable storm and who loves the feeling of the rain on his skin. He knows Sam knows and that is the worst thing; Sam's eyes watching everything and saying nothing, imagining a whole story which Josh would not be able to tell him, if he decided he wanted to ask. Nothing much has happened: a shattering nothing which has left Josh's understanding of his own priorities in life prismed on the floor, little fragments of comprehension like broken pieces of a stained glass window. He knows that Toby would hate the simile, would think it insufficiently Jewish. You can't even construct a decent bit of Torah imagery? he would say. Why the hell do I bother with you? Josh wonders the same thing.

He fills up Josh's head with dark clouds, thick as cigar smoke. He draws Josh's eyes back to center. He takes away all the light in a room and haloes it around himself, but when you look there's nothing there, not even the thinnest of coronas.

It's not like he's in love with Toby. It's more important than that, and less. Less ravishing and less crippling than love. Like brothers, but different. Like skin and blood and wanting to reach right into his flesh, grab him by the ribcage and shake him and say: What the hell is this?! And the next day pass him a cup of takeout coffee like nothing's happened, and watch him rub what little sleep he's had from his eyes.

Sam, now. Sam is like sunlight on his skin after the rain, instead of the rain. Like watching the rain from a warm bed with damp hair and cold skin. Or peppermint on his tongue, or bubbles from a Coke. Sam's reproach and Sam's hurt and Sam's quiet acceptance, his complete refusal to run into any walls at full speed ahead to get what he wants, to wrest what he wants away from Josh, is like pinpricks in his skin.

When Toby kisses him it is like pinpricks in his skin.

Which is why he spends a lot of time with C.J. lately, drinking beers and talking. Because it's nice to have a sister again, even if she's too tall and her hair's the wrong color. She smells the same, or at least he thinks she does, just right at the edges; that smell he can't quite catch and could never describe, like his sister late at night.

C.J. says: Let them have some time together. Sam needs to work out a thing.
Josh says: What he needs to work out is, yanno, that Toby isn't some kind of --
C.J. says: Josh, come on. He can't help it. That's just Sam the Man.
Josh says: I've seen him do this before, C.J.. And it wasn't pretty.
C.J. just nods. She takes a swig of beer. She says: Yeah, I know. But you have to let him screw up in his own way. Both of them. All of us.
Josh says: What d'you mean?
And C.J. sighs and says: Oh, nothing.

Her mouth tastes like Budweiser, which is hardly surprising. Her hair is soft, clean. The scent of her shampoo is sharp and makes him feel hungry, and panicked, suddenly, like he might be about to be sent to bed with a scolding. She never stops: a pull here, a push there, her elbow in his ribs, her foot kicking his calf; she never stops working him over; she never gives him an inch. But when he slips into her she gasps, just a little, and turns her head to the side, eyes closed. There's a blush on her neck, under her jaw. He kisses it, then kisses her collar bones, her sternum, her breasts, her nipples. Tries not to think of his sister, or to wonder if the reason he wants to curl up into a breath and blow across C.J.'s body is her. The kernel of memory at the back of his head, nestling under his hippocampus, throbs, glows red. Her arms cross over his back; her thighs lock around his hips. Memory starts playing Schubert behind the ash and scorch of a house fire. She kisses the space between his eyebrows. He comes, and shortly thereafter, the house falls down.

Later. She just strokes his hair for a while. She seems to know that is what he needs, wants, misses. Whatever. He isn't in the mood to argue, since she's right anyway.

She says, "When it happened before, with Sam."

He says, "Mmm?"

"Was it you?"

"Yeah."

"So I guess you're feeling pretty bad right now."

"Yeah."

"Is there any time when you're not eaten up with guilt, Josh?" She kisses the crown of his head. "You're an idiot. Adorable. But an idiot."

"It's kinda hard to watch it all over again, C.J.!"

"Particularly now with you and Toby."

He looks up at her and tries to think of something to say. Tries to think of a lie first and then when that won't come for the best way to put the truth. Then realizes he doesn't know what the truth is.

She smiles, kisses him. "Yes. Of course I knew. Idiot."

"It's just ... I don't know. But I don't think it means anything." Josh swallows, then sits up. He rubs his hand over his hair, then over his face. Takes a deep breath and lets it out. "Not the way it would to Sam."

"Yeah," C.J. says, reaching out for his hand, holding it. Her hand is warm and dry and calms him, even if only by an iota. "Sam hasn't really got the hang of things that don't mean anything, has he?"

"Not really."

"Did you break him up very badly?"

Josh nods. "Yeah."

"Seems like he's over it now."

"Yeah. Toby Ziegler. Safe pair of hands for Sam's stupid heart if you ask me. Jesus."

C.J. just smiles.

"C.J.?"

"You're under-estimating him. Or over-estimating. You ain't got it right, anyway, mister."

"You think ... Toby -- "

"Did I say Toby?"

Josh just looks at her. Then gives up. "Huh?"

"You know those people who believe in UFOs? Nothing can dissuade them. No amount of logic, no reason, not even ridicule. Not even stripping them bare ass naked and writing Mr Chump Wants To Be Beamed Up! on their chests in magic marker. Sam's like those guys."

"Why?"

"He believes. Toby's one of the things he believes in. And I happen to think he's onto something. And that they'll work it out, somehow."

Josh stares at her. His eyebrows do little dances of disbelief.

"Toby looks after him. In his own way."

"With minor acts of assault and major acts of sarcasm?"

"That's his way of caring." She throws up her hands when Josh continues to give her the double-barreled you're talking bullshit now and you know it face. "Well, okay. Or not. That's pretty much just Toby. But Sam takes it and he knows it doesn't mean anything except Toby and that means something."

"C.J., seriously, start a new sentence."

"You think a lot of people have gotten a hold of Toby Ziegler in his misbegotten life? You think that doesn't count for anything?"

"I'd have thought it would count for one ticket straight the hell out of that relationship made out to Toby Ziegler and damn the cost," Josh says. "Actually."

"Well your metaphors are improving anyway. Or whatever. Metaphors? I didn't go to Tightass Grammar School."

"C.J.!"

"Anyway. It counts for something. Sam gets under your skin. As I imagine you would know, Joshua."

"And you think he's gotten under Toby's?"

"I do, yes."

Josh shakes his head. "You ever think of becoming one of those behavioral psychologists who get paid to scare the hell out of innocent people?"

She smiles. "I'd be good at that, right?"

"Terrifyingly."

"Better believe it." She kisses him again. Her lips are cool and her eyes are shining. She looks happy, and that makes him feel better than he has in a long time. She says, "Just don't worry, okay? I realize it's impossible for you, but try anyway. Sam's gonna be okay."

"Should I worry about Toby instead?"

She laughs, throwing back her head. He decides he wants to kiss her neck very badly.

"It might," she says, "Be an idea."

*

It is as shifty and uncomfortable as Sam has ever seen him when, early next morning (or early for a Ziegler on vacation, or, just possibly, late enough for Sam to have slept off his hangover) Toby knocks on his door, opens it before he's been asked to, and stands in the doorway with his hands jiggling the change in his pockets, and asks, "You want to go get lost in the woods?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Would you like to go for a walk in the woods?"

He mumbles it, this formal sentence, this proposal. Sam figures this is as near to recompense as he's going to get: the way Toby is mashing the carpet with the toe of his shoe, the way he clears his throat as a period on the end of the sentence, eliding his discomfort with the formality, with the sheer politeness of what he's just said. Sam narrows his eyes, looks first at his laptop screen and the blank document he had open when Toby came in, then up at Toby himself, and wonders if he can think of a good way to fuck with him in the three or four seconds available to him before the pause between an asked question and a withheld answer becomes too long and Toby just drops the whole thing and they never speak to each other about anything other than work ever again.

"Are you trying to get me eaten by bears?" is what he comes up with.

Toby smiles; Sam has to do a double-take before he believes what he's just seen.

"There are much easier ways to commit justifiable homicide than training a bear to rip you to pieces, Sam. Where do you imagine I'd find the time for that kind of thing?"

"Are there bears in New Hampshire?"

He shrugs. "You think I know?"

"Maybe an escapee from a circus."

"Maybe."

"Yeah."

"Anyway," he says, bouncing a little on his heels, the perfect Nervous Toby Ziegler perpetual motion machine, "You wanna go?"

"I'm leaving my number with C.J.," Sam says, grinning in spite of himself.

Toby rolls his eyes. "Yeah, sure."

"Though I'm guessing you've bought her off somehow."

Toby picks Sam's coat up off the bed and throws it to him. "Come on."

"Or! You've tied her up in her room so she can't rescue me."

"Yeah, I've done that," Toby says, holding the door open as Sam gets his coat on and heads out, "The woman you'll see in the bar as we go out is just her uncanny doppelganger."

"Sure, you say that."

Toby locks the door behind them both. "I do say that and so does everyone else in this building, and indeed in the whole state, who is sane."

"You know, if this is your way of apologizing it leaves a lot to be desired."

"So exactly like a crazy person," he mutters.

"First guy to get the other one certified insane wins?"

"Just come on, will you? And watch out for the bears."

And, as if only for emphasis on urgency, Toby grabs hold of Sam's hand and pulls him down the corridor. Sam can't stop himself noting that Toby's hands are warm, dry, and gentle. Bigger than Sam's own. In that moment it seems like a pretty good metaphor.

*

The woods in question are about a mile out from the hotel. They same ones the pick-up guy drove them through last night and which filled up the horizon with a brooding sort of darkness that Sam had stared into, half-wanting to get lost there. In the daylight it has become an expanse of color, stretching up and across the sky. Sam blinks away reds, golds, fragments of Frost and Whitman, and memories of his father coming back from one of his rare expressions of pure American masculinity -- a hunting trip -- covered in sweat, smelling like the underside of leaves, of soil and, probably, though Sam, just a kid then, didn't realize or want to realize it, of blood.

Sense memories being what they are, Sam finds that he is walking under the trees in a daze, hardly even aware of Toby walking beside him.

It's fall in New England and therefore legally required to be astonishingly beautiful, but Sam, who spent more than a couple of summer vacations at Martha's Vineyard and should therefore have acquired some measure of immunity to this kind of thing, is still completely enthralled. He walks through the tree light. He holds his palms out in front of him and watches the pattern of light change as he walks. His skin in fall colors, and at the edges the last of the green leaves.

He thinks about the President, and all the conversations about leaf peeping they'll be able to have once back at work. Sam smiles to himself.

They are deep in the woods by the time Toby makes his real apology.

He is looking uncomfortable: shaking his foot to get the fallen leaves out of his turn-ups, flinching every time a branch brushes against his shoulders, and throwing long glances up at the sky as if to check that it's still there, that they haven't been swallowed up by nature.

"You like all this, huh?" Toby says, after they've been walking in silence for a while.

"And you'd like to see it concreted over," Sam says, smiling.

"I wouldn't go that far."

"Just put in a little bar, a decent steak house, maybe a municipal transport system and a major sports franchise?"

"Not everywhere can be New York."

"Only New York, I guess."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"I don't have a bottle on me."

"Huh?"

"I don't," Toby says, leaning in close, looping his fingers around Sam's belt and pulling him gently forward, "Have a bottle."

"I guess we'll have one later," Sam says, swallowing.

"I guess."

"Look, Toby -- "

"Or I can cut to the chase."

"Toby -- "

"I'm sorry," he says, before he presses his mouth against Sam's, before he slips his fingers down across the front of Sam's jeans. He breathes sorry between Sam's lips, then presses on his hips, on his cock, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, resuscitate.

"Turnabout is fair play," Toby murmurs. He strokes Sam's cheek. Sam is having trouble thinking about anything except his erection and the warmth of Toby's hands. "Or other clichés."

"I'm not sure this counts," Sam manages.

"Uh huh?"

"You're still fucking with me."

Toby smiles. "Yeah, but, isn't that part of the fun?"

"I thought you didn't believe in fun."

"That's a cruel slander, Sam."

"Yeah, fun when you're fucking with me."

"You keep saying that like you're really surprised at my behavior."

Sam smiles. "Not so much, actually."

Toby shrugs, more with his mouth than his shoulders. He smiles again, leans in to kiss Sam. Sam pulls his head aside, pushes Toby's shoulder with his right hand.

Toby smiles again. "I'm a reprobate, what can I say?"

Sam sighs. "Yeah. I'm beginning to think you need a hobby."

"I've got one, Sam."

"I'm not your project, Toby."

Toby looks at him: again a shift, the shadow of something that Sam would say was guilt, if it were anyone else. But since it's Toby the best he can come up with is something like regret. A different tint to his sadness. Something a little bluer than usual.

"No," he says, sighs. "I guess not." He takes his hands off Sam's hips, then steps away. He tugs once on the sleeve of Sam's sweater. He turns away and sets off down the path in the direction of the hotel. "Let's go," he says, without bothering to turn his head.

They walk back in silence. Sam has more time than he would like to think about more ways he can say 'I really don't think working here is a good idea anymore' to the President and to Leo, and more time to think about all the ways they would let him know he was an ass. One guy with a perfect marriage, and one guy with a broken one, and he and Toby in limbo, somewhere in between.

It's not like he doesn't know that it's just a game (Sam). Toby's way of avoiding saying no outright. Toby's way of asking him what the hell he thinks is so special about Mister Toby Zachary Ziegler, White House Director of Communications and Special Adviser to the President of the United States. Simple expression of sexuality is easy, even for someone as awkward in regular life as Toby Ziegler is, but Toby knows as well as everyone else that Sam is in love with him, and it's this that he finds baffling; it's this which is throwing him off balance; it's this which makes Josh a much less unsettling mark at the other end of a spinning bottle.

And Sam suspects Toby of being afraid that something will come of this, even if the something in question is just Sam running off into the night to do something better than collating Toby's every word in the book he keeps in his head but which everyone can read with one glance at his eyes.

In a way Sam agrees with him. It would be easier to just forget the whole fucking thing.

But that is what makes them different men, he guesses.

As they get to the lobby of the hotel, Sam peels off towards the stairs. There's a blank document waiting for him. Toby heads for the bar. Sam is halfway up the stairs before he hears Toby say:

"Sam?"

"What?"

"See you later."

Sam could swear that he is really asking the question, even though there is no audible question mark at the end of the sentence; as if he's really scared that Sam won't be there later; that he'll have missed his chance. For what? Sam decides, halfway up the stairs, that he doesn't care right now. Just for tonight.

"Yeah. See you later," he says, and finishes the stairs. It surprises him to note that not only is humming 'Do I Worry', but that he is doing so ironically. He suspects that Toby's ignorance of early 40s popular music will probably save him from any difficult conversations pertaining to his choices, however. He closes the door of his room behind him quietly and realizes that he is smiling. He sits down at his computer and begins something that has nothing at all to do with work.

*

Morning light, high and cold, wakes Sam up.

One, two, three, four, four faces in the mirror across the room. Sam wonders, as he always wonders when he's in any kind of hotel, exactly why there is always a mirror directly opposite the bed -- so you can wake up and instantly confront the reality of three hours sleep and the great things it does for your face? And at no extra charge, sir! Sam looks at himself and just sees himself -- his face, his hair a mess, nothing special. He is the first one to wake.

Two queen-sized beds. They played poker to work out -- according to some arcane rules only Toby knew and wouldn't explain -- who shared with who. Somehow it either didn't occur to them, or none of them wanted to admit that they would rather not, split up and go to their own rooms. If anyone had bothered to ask Sam he would have said maybe the most logical combinations would have been himself and Josh, and Toby and C.J., but his good luck had it in for him, and he got Toby all to himself. The immediate consequence of which was spending the first hour after they turned the lights out trying not to get an erection. After that first hour had gone Toby elbowed him and told him to quit twitching, which was kinda hard to take from Toby, particularly considering how much he'd been tossing and turning and stealing the covers. But, as ever, he had done as he was told and held his breath and lain still and after a while he was listening to Toby's deep breathing, the occasional snore, then breathing in the smell of his skin like chloroform and after that dreaming heavy dreams in which he could not breathe for the weight of another body on top of his own. He woke up with the end of a dream still clinging to him, and he was happy, because he was sure that Toby had kissed him, again, not as a game this time, and that whole thing was something he didn't have to worry about anymore.

He woke and remembered; woke and resumed from where he'd left off. He'd sighed as quietly as he could manage, turned in the bed, and got caught in the mirror.

Toby looks exactly the same on any amount of sleep; beards hide a lot, Sam supposes. Josh looks the same, too, or slightly worse. But for Sam, who has seen Josh on the morning after the disastrous occasion where he celebrated John Hoynes' election to the Senate with a truly unconscionable amount of alcohol, 'worse' is a relative term. C.J. just looks like C.J., but Sam assumes that this is a magic trick performed by way of advanced cosmetics, and asks no more. They are all still sleeping.

Sam sighs, and turns his head.

Sam has only heard Toby sing once and they were both pretty drunk at the time, so it takes him a while to work out where the sound is coming from, even though it is vibrating through his back and must, logically, therefore be coming from the bed he is currently lying it. It is humming around his ribcage and exciting with a half-sad, half-comic friction the organs therein. But Sam's logic isn't at its best on three hours sleep, despite all the practice he gets. He props himself up on one elbow to look out the motel window to check if there's a trucker with a loud radio outside, but as he does so, someone begins to stroke his shoulder blade. Since he's pretty sure they didn't send out for hookers last night and he can see C.J. and Josh in the other bed, Sam's logic insists that it must be Toby.

He's just got to Though you treat me just like dirt / You think I give a snap? when Sam turns around. Toby's hand turns palm outward, and he rubs the backs of his fingers over Sam's upper arm. And keeps singing. How he can contrive to do both those things and be grinning at the same time defies, at that moment, Sam's sense of the possible.

"What the hell?" he says, a little hoarsely.

"My dad was a music buff. Cole Porter, mostly, but he got around. Musically speaking. What? You think I don't know the Ink Spots?"

"Yeah?" Sam ventures.

"You're out of luck, Sam."

"And now you're serenading me?"

"That verb isn't completely unjustified."

"Normally that part comes before sharing a bed, I guess."

Toby shrugs. "We defy convention. What can I say? Plus it's a long way down to the street and I'm comfortable here."

He is still stroking Sam's arm. Sam catches the tail end of a thought that insists it shouldn't be possible for one man to pack so much erotic charge into the ends of three fingertips before most of his thought processes are shut off by the press of Toby's lips over his own.

"You really," Sam says, once Toby has broken the kiss and is lying back on the bed looking incredibly pleased with himself, "Really have to stop doing that."

"Well, I probably won't be doing it in the office. Much."

"I think that would upset Leo, yeah."

"And he calls himself a liberal."

"Toby -- "

"I really am sorry, Sam."

"Yeah."

"I fixed the thing with the beds. So I could do this."

Sam smiles. "Yeah. I figured."

"I just needed to get some sleep before putting my master plan into action."

"Yes."

"He worked it all out in the half hour you spent in the bathroom last night," C.J. says from the other bed, sitting up and wrapping the sheet around herself, thereby leaving Josh with no sheet at all. "To his credit, he was very thorough."

"You know, one day it's be great if there was a plan that I was in on from the start. Just once."

"Don't sulk, Sam," she says. "Also, I don't think it would have worked on this occasion."

"Maybe."

"Toby thought it would be less humiliating for you this way."

"See how I'm always thinking of you," Toby says. Sam looks at him, and then at C.J. and genuinely has no idea who is fucking with who anymore.

"And now you'll think twice about taking us all on vacation," C.J. says, smirking.

"Yeah. I thought I had friends, but apparently you're all just demented matchmakers and schemers," Sam says, trying to tell his face not to give in to the smile he doesn't think his righteous indignation can support just yet.

"For the record," Josh says, yawning, stretching, and pulling at the sheet wrapped around C.J. until she batters at his arm to make him stop, "I thought it was a bad idea and I said so."

"Yes, well, you're too lazy and self-involved to be a schemer, Josh," C.J. says.

"I dispute lazy!"

"Josh takes 'know thyself' very seriously as a dictum," Toby says, then kisses Sam's shoulder.

"Hey!"

"Jealous, Mister Lyman?" C.J. asks, still smirking.

"Look," Sam says, "If this is going to turn into an orgy can I have some advance notice?"

"How am I meant to accomplish that, Sam?" Toby says.

"Sam puts the 'S' in spontaneous, Toby, you should know that," Josh says, grinning. Sam takes a moment to notice that Josh's hair is flattened down on one side and sticking up on the other, making him look like a third rate piece of topiary. Sam smiles anyway.

"It's just that it was a long time since I was in college -- " Sam starts.

"You took part in orgies in college?" C.J. says, not bothering to keep the sheer incredulity out of her voice.

"No, but -- "

"But you were asked a few times?" Toby says.

"No, just -- "

"You think the rules might have changed since the Eighties?" Josh says.

"Just give me a break, okay!" Sam all but shouts. "Two days ago I was a maudlin drunk in a bar in New Hampshire, this is just a little bit of a culture shock!"

C.J. smiles, gets up and comes and sits on Sam's side of the other bed. She strokes his hair. She has that indulgent look on her face, like Sam is her new puppy.

"You're awfully cute, you know. Any twelve year old girl would say so."

"You're not really helping, C.J."

"She does that," Toby says. His fingers have moved to the line of Sam's back. The middle knuckle of his index finger is doing a minor tour of Sam's vertebrae. "You get used to it."

C.J. slaps Toby around the head with the back of her hand. "You don't get a free pass here, Ziegler."

"Oh yeah. I forgot I was playing the evil seducer off Broadway this season. C'mon, C.J."

"Well, ask Sam. He probably finds it less funny than other people!"

"I apologized for crying out loud!"

Josh catches Sam's eye. "Cute couple, right?"

Sam grins. "Grudge Match 2002."

"We should sell tickets."

"I'm actually standing up for you here, Sam," C.J. says, reaching over to pinch his arm.

"And I appreciate that, C.J., but could you tone down the physical assault?"

"Yes," Toby says, "The physical assault is my remit here."

"Really?" Josh asks, sounding genuinely interested.

"Yeah. Wait a second, I'll get the leather and whips out."

"I'd like," Sam says quickly, "Advance notice of that, as well."

Toby does that thing where he doesn't actually smile but just fools Sam's brain into thinking he has. His eyes appear to become darker, his pupils swelling, as Sam looks at him.

"I promise not to hurt you. Too much."

"Yeah," Josh says. "I'm thinking orgy. I think this is the only way we can go now."

"We really are Democrats," C.J. says, smirking again.

"Stop saying that like it means a damn thing, C.J.," Toby says, allowing the hand that is pulling all the tiny hairs on Sam's left upper thigh to halt for a moment. "Political affiliation and tragic, monumental horniness do not correlate as neatly as you seem to want them to."

C.J. throws her head back and laughs. Then she leans over Sam's body to kiss Toby's cheek.

"I really love you, you know," she says. "And I say that stone cold sober and with my finest bed hair so you know I'm being nothing but scrupulously honest."

Sam looks at Toby. Josh looks at Toby. C.J. smirks at Toby. Toby blushes. The blush starts at his ear lobes. Sam feels a ripple of non linear time, a message from the self that stands outside his body, pass through the mysterious geography and emotional resonance equipment of his stomach. He leans in and opens his mouth around the strange flesh of Toby's ear. He sucks the heat out of the lobe. When he looks up and opens his eyes, C.J. and Josh are smiling at him like he's just solved one of the logic puzzles of their universe.

"Anyone have a bottle?" Josh says.

*

Kissing Josh Lyman, being naked with and vaguely embarrassed and incredibly turned on by Josh Lyman, is not a new experience for Sam. Everyone seems to think, despite knowing perfectly well that they went to different schools, that they were boyfriends in college. They weren't. Though technically, Sam supposes, that is just because only one of them was at college by they time they hooked up. Josh is four years older. Josh already had a frighteningly successful career when Sam was still obsessing about his finals. Josh bought special suits for days of the week when Sam still mostly wore his Princeton sweater and old jeans.

Josh came to visit in his best suit, one Tuesday, when all great acts of Lyman-esque seduction must take place. But he hadn't come to see Sam.

Sam's roommate was Josh's friend and by some quirk of circumstantial physics mostly governed by the amount of time Sam used to spend in the library or else singing Gilbert and Sullivan to a disinterested audience of undergraduates, he and his roommate's best friend had never met. Sam had heard all about him, of course. In fact he'd heard enough that he was already pretty sick of Josh Lyman by the time he actually met him and if anyone should be suspected of an abiding infatuation with him it should have been Sam's old roommate and not Sam himself.

Naturally, being Sam Seaborn, it didn't turn out like that for him.

Josh remembers it a little like a crazy amalgam of all the right romantic clichés: like a thunderbolt, like a lightning strike, like someone removing all the air from his lungs and replacing the oxygen with an unformed ache that spread down, in quiet, warm rivulets, through his stomach, down to his dick. Sam Seaborn, who doesn't know that he is beautiful and is therefore completely baffling to anyone who has ever looked at him and seen that, since he is well-shaved and properly dressed and even wearing a decently tied necktie, he must have looked in a mirror at some point. Sam Seaborn in ratty jeans and a white shirt. Sam Seaborn's eyes that ask you to redefine the reference points you hold in your head for the word 'blue'.

Josh fell for him immediately, in one night, waiting for the roommate to come back from a date he never did seem to come back from. By the time the roommate stumbled in the next morning the boundaries of Josh's existence had redrawn themselves. He has a good sense for these things: a by-product of the same exaggerated sense that everyone he loves is going to die, maybe later but also maybe sooner so just stand a little way back from the curb, okay? He has a sense that Sam is going to be important. That something they do together is going to be important, maybe the most important thing they ever do.

It is easy to believe in things like The Most Important Thing I Will Ever Do in Sam's presence. It's all in his smile and the way he believes in things so hard that looking at him hurts your eyes sometimes. A one man idealism engine, running on nothing but steamed hope and the Coals of Change. Because Sam is a A Good Person. One of the few that Josh knows, but oh so much easier to spot these days, when he works in Washington and spends his days feeling forty-five per cent dirty and forty-five per cent useless and ten per cent hanging on to hope by his fingernails, hanging on to phone calls from his dad, hanging on to silent, unspeakable things that he sometimes thinks everyone else has forgotten, or never knew.

Sam knows them. Instinctively and encompassingly. Josh is pretty sure he's not going to last as a corporate lawyer.

"So you got together?" Toby says, quietly, with that inflection that is barely there. That Sam interprets as three parts impatience, two parts anger, and one part jealousy. That Josh is just fucking scared of.

" ... Yeah?" Sam ventures.

"Aww," C.J. says in her best fake Valley girl voice, ruffling first Josh's hair and then Sam's, "You boys are so cute, oh my god!"

"So why don't you tell us the Toby and C.J. story?" Josh says, trying to sound dangerous and just sounding prurient. "Because we're pretty sure there is one."

"Are you trying to draw a Venn diagram in your head, Josh?" Toby says.

"Just interested."

"Uh huh."

"It's basically the same story you just told us," C.J. says. "Except that I am, naturally, better looking than either of you."

"But Toby's uglier, so it evens out," Josh says, grinning.

"Thank you, Josh," Toby says, like he expected that jibe ten minutes ago.

Sam kisses his bare shoulder and whispers, "I think you're handsome."

Toby looks at Sam like he's just suggested they call down for raccoon burgers and salad with spicy arsenic dressing.

Sam blushes, shrugs. "Sorry. But I do."

"He appreciates it, Sam. It will just take him the next twenty five years to admit it," C.J. says.

"Deathbed confession," Toby says. "The only solution."

"Well be sure and keep a list of everything you want to say," Josh says, "Because I'm thinking it's gonna be a pretty long one."

*

They sit on the floor in a hotel room in New Hampshire, killing the last evening before the car rental firm promised to call Josh on his cell, half-naked or half-dressed, in nothing more appropriate or any warmer than pajamas (or the big t-shirt with 'CCNY' printed on the front that C.J. uses as pajamas) and they play Spin the Bottle. Again.

Sam has Toby on one side and C.J. on the other. One of them is stroking the inside of his wrist. He has decided to block his innate sense of direction to the extent that he doesn't have to learn which of them it is. Josh keeps spinning the bottle in calculated half-twists that mean Sam has to kiss him again and again. As recompense they have all decided that every time Josh cheats he should have to remove an article of clothing. Since he wasn't wearing much to begin with and insists on getting his own way by fair means or foul, Sam is already finding it difficult not to look anywhere below the level of his nipples. The smell of Josh's thighs is doing what memory triggers always do and Sam figures he knows where this is going to end.

They last time they kiss as a result of a spin of the bottle, Josh's hands slip underneath Sam's sweater. Being already pretty loaded, Josh is clumsy, sloppy, adolescent. His fingers pinch at Sam's left nipple and the sensation is more painful than pleasurable, but when his hands push at Sam's chest, push him down to the floor, Sam sinks. Sense memory again. Josh's mouth tastes sweet, still like his mouth did when Sam was twenty years old. Someone is still stroking his wrist. Probably not the same someone who has started to stroke his hair, the someone into whose lap he sank. He doesn't want to open his eyes and check. Skin on skin. Disappearing under the weight of three bodies, under their warmth. No more thinking. Just flashes, odd moments that Sam tries to promise himself he will not remember, though he knows it is a promise he won't be able to keep.

Josh pulling his jeans over his hips. Kissing the bones, kissing the soft parts of his belly as the head of his cock rubs against the muscle of Josh's chest.

His mouth and C.J.'s, upside and wrong way round and her hair tickling his face. She can't stop laughing. She touches his face like it's something she she shouldn't be doing.

Toby. He can hear Toby's breathing. He knows the difference between Toby's hands and Josh's, and C.J.'s. Or he thinks he does. His body thinks it does. Warmer hands, gentle because they want to be. When Toby's hands touch his belly his cock twitches, and when they touch his cock Sam comes before he realizes what's happening.

*

Even later.

"I love you, too, you know. Sparky. Spanky. Sally. Whatever we're calling you tonight."

"C.J., you have to quit with the mini bar," Sam says, smiling.

"I'm not that drunk," she says, in the kind of voice that proves that is exactly what she is. "I do love you."

Sam nods. "Yes. I know."

"I do, Sam!"

"Okay!"

"I don't love Josh."

"Hey!" Josh says.

"Okay, I probably do. On balance. On aggregate."

"Thanks a bunch, C.J. I'm so glad I refined my already rather masterful sexual technique for you."

Toby starts laughing in that uncontrollable, unbelievable way that he has, all spit and red tongue. Sam grins at him. And says, because he can't help himself and because, hell, this is the topic of conversation at hand and because he's just as drunk as C.J., if not on alcohol, "I love you."

Toby looks at him. He's smoking a cigar. The third one of the night, despite their protests. He looks, to Sam, incredibly good; like Sam's most secret, most clichéd, most masculine fantasy. His eyes are momentarily obscured by smoke. But he is smiling. Sort of.

"And when I finally have you sent to the house where all the staff wear white coats, Sam, I'm putting that piece of information at the top of the admit sheet."

"Sentences like that are why I love you, if you were curious," Sam says.

"Yeah," is Toby's reply. Because sometimes, Sam figures, you don't need to get out the big rhetorical guns. He looks ... touched. Possibly. With Toby it's always a cocktail, always a matter of degrees and approximations and making do with what he'll give you. Sam will settle for this.

"It's your turn, Joshua," C.J. says. "We've all done our embarrassing confession."

"Oh, so Sam only loves Toby? That's a little hard to take," Josh says, looking genuinely hurt in that way only Josh can.

"I do love you as well. I kinda figured you knew that but if you're gonna be an idiot."

"Thanks, Sam. I feel really loved now."

"I don't need your validation, Sam," C.J. says, "But it's nice to hear all the same."

Sam smiles. "Yes. I love you too."

"Yes!" Toby says, throwing up his arms, talking out of the side of his mouth that isn't holding on to a cigar, "We all love each other! Can we please, for the love of everything both holy and not, quit this particular line of conversation?"

"We're drunk, Toby," Josh says. "This is what's meant to happen!"

"I've been drunk a lot, Josh, and I've never done this!"

"Well you were doing it wrong!"

"You know how Toby feels about traditions, Josh," C.J. says.

"And emotions," Sam says.

"And declarations of emotions in traditional circumstances," C.J. says.

Toby sighs, takes a long last drag on his cigar, then stubs it out. "Yes. I'm deeply dysfunctional. For the record I can't stand any of you. I'm only here because it's marginally more interesting than drinking alone in my apartment in D.C."

"And because it's easier to get laid," C.J. says.

"Yes."

"And because our boss told us to and he can get the 82nd Airborne to do whatever he wants including tracking down and destroying his staff?" Josh says.

"Yes. And I'm sure this is exactly what he had in mind for our vacation in the woods. You realize you're all going to have to come up with stories about what we did? Trivia about National Parks?"

"And you aren't going to have to do that?" Sam asks.

"If asked I shall tell the truth. Which means you'd better think of some good trivia."

"Blackmailing the three people who most love you, Toby," C.J. says, "So low!"

"I could care less?" Toby says.

"You say that," Sam says, "But I don't think you mean it."

"Oh yes I do."

Sam smiles and leans over to kiss him. "Okay."

Toby stares at him. "You gave that one up easier than I thought you would."

Sam shrugs. "Honestly, it'd be kinda weird if you said anything else."

Toby smiles, just at the corner of his mouth. He touches Sam's face, gently, like he's deliberately trying to get Sam to abandon everything he thought he knew about their relationship, like he's quietly fascinated by someone like Sam Seaborn.

He says, "Why you love me."

Sam nods. "Yes."

Toby nods back. "Okay."

*

Sam has a dream about the four of them on a dirt road, nothing around, no one about. It is the end of the world and the four of them are still wearing suits. Toby has pushed his sleeves up; this is his concession to the apocalypse. The hair on his arms is dark and thick and looks, to Sam, healthy and rich, absurd against the no-dawn of this blasted landscape. Absurd. The four of them in suits. Josh is brushing the dust off his jacket, over and over. C.J. is wondering allowed whether she should take off her high heels. Sam's own shirt is spotless white; white as a cliché. The cotton the brightest thing for miles. He is a beacon, he realizes, and suddenly feels insecure, on show, like the crows will know to come for him. Sam reaches out for Toby's hand on one side, Josh's on the other. Neither pull away. Josh's fingers squeeze his, tight. Toby's thumb strokes his knuckles. Toby's other hand takes C.J.'s. When the hear a caw splitting the air above them, none of them look up.

Waking up he looks for them like looking for the walls of the room; Josh's soft anxious breathing like the west wall, C.J.'s purse spilled over the credenza like the east, Toby's scent to the north of him: cigars, whiskey and hair oil, the smell thick enough to touch. Sam reaches out. Touches nothing but the air. His own hand his last wall.

He curls his hand in, under the escarpment Toby's ribcage makes. It's warm there. Sam watches him breathing, watches the rock face expand, contract, expand. Makes constellations from the pattern of freckles and shadows. Learns his geology and his astronomy at the same time. Reminds himself how ridiculous it feels to love someone so much. Like he ever loved anyone any other way.

They pushed the beds together. Sam doesn't remember exactly how. It seemed more complicated than it really should have done for four highly educated members of the United States government. He remembers Josh collapsing with giggles and how the dull motel lights picked up the highlights in his hair, the almost-reds and bright blonds. They all collapsed onto the beds, knees and elbows and all the other joints hammering into all their backs and bellies, and their laughter vibrating through the skin. Sam put his cheek against Josh's arm, waiting for the sound, riding it out. Josh hugged him, hard, like he was afraid either Sam or himself would fall off the bed and, in falling off the bed, would fall out of the other one's life. Sam held on to him, fingernails in skin, hard hard. C.J. laughed into Sam's ear like a siren. Toby blew smoke over them, rolling that scent out over their bodies. Sam thought about the molecules of the smoke catching in their hair, flowing into their mouths, sticking on their skin. He spread his arms out, arched his back. Toby blew more smoke. Sam was aware of his cock getting heavy again, of C.J. lifting his head into her lap, of Josh letting go of his arm and starting to stroke his thigh instead. That Toby bent his head down between Sam's legs, the cigar between his teeth and his hands in the crease of Sam's knees, and his breath full of smoke and hot and thick, heavy, coiling around Sam's dick, tightening, before Toby's mouth even got there.

Somehow they didn't set the beds on fire. Sam still isn't sure how that was accomplished. Right now, though, he doesn't care so much. He watches Toby's ribs move in and out. He pushes his fingers under Toby's ribs, just up to the first joint. He needs the tethering. He needs to know that he isn't just going to dissolve into the air. His fingers are the only part of his body he is still aware of, the only part with weight or mass. He tucks them under Toby's body. He closes his eyes again. He isn't going to fly away.