TITLE: Night Calls
AUTHOR: Clairisant
CLASSIFICATION: AJ/Other
FEEDBACK: Would love to hear both good and bad feedback but please try to be kind and constructive. Clairisant
CREDITS: A special thank you to my beta readers Qupeydoll and Emsta.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story picks up during the episode A Girl's Best Friend and will explain why AJ retired so quickly and without warning. Also the meanings for the flowers that I use in the story come from a wonderful site that I use quite often, .
Chapter 1
Thursday, January 9, 2003
2230 EST
AJ's home
McLean, Virginia
AJ Chegwidden was a creature of habit. Part of that could have been because of his life of military training, or it could have been because of his age, but no matter the reason, he had his routine and kept to it. He had dinner within an hour of getting home in the evenings, or if he was going to be later than usual getting out of the office, he would stop for dinner somewhere or pick up take out. Then he would read the paper front to back after letting Dammit out. If there was a sports game on that he was interested in, he would turn on the television and sit in his recliner with a beer. At 2200 hours he would turn on the local news, then go to bed. He used to stay up and watch the monolog segment of The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson had still been the host, but he didn't like Jay Leno, so he no longer did that. Normally he was asleep by 2245 EST.
Meredith Cavanaugh, his fiancé, had often teased him about his 'stodgy ways' and said it made him seem old. So, in an effort to show her that he could be as spontaneous as she could, if not as zany, he decided to surprise her when he got off work that night. He had dropped by to see her. But tonight the surprise had been on him! He'd walked in and found her in bed asleep. He was just about to call her name to wake her, when a movement in her bathroom doorway took his eyes from his sleeping fiancée to a tall dark male stranger coming out of the room buttoning his shirt. Their eyes had met and then the stranger, whom AJ assumed was her Professor friend, called Meredith's name. She woke to the sound of Selvaggio's voice with a smile and then followed his gaze to where AJ stood in the doorway.
As he lay down to sleep that night, it was the look on her face that he saw when he closed his eyes. She hadn't looked guilty, or sorry that she'd done what she had, it was more a look of being sorry she'd been caught. That was the look that had made him turn and walk out without saying a word. It was also the look that wouldn't let him sleep now.
How could he have trusted her with his heart? They had been planning a wedding! A life together! And she had betrayed all that!
Granted he had been working a lot of hours lately, but he thought she'd understood his job and what it meant. But none of that justified what she'd done.
After tossing and turning for over an hour, AJ sighed in frustration and turned on his bedside radio in the hopes that the music would sooth him enough so he could finally sleep. His favorite jazz station came on and he listened until midnight when the announcer said it was time for the nightly call in show. A Dr. Luna Huggins would take calls, answer questions, and give advice for the next four hours. AJ gave a snort of disgust and reached out to turn the radio off when his hand stopped at the last second.
The most compelling voice he'd ever heard in his life came into his bedroom and seemed to wrap him in an aura of warmth and caring. Her voice was husky for a woman, but there was something about it that just drew you in. It made you feel like she was talking to just you. It sounded like warm honey. His hand slowly fell away from the radio, almost without conscious thought. AJ never listened to this kind of free 'psychobabble' as he called it. He scorned shows like Dr. Phil and countless others that popularized psycho-analazation on public television.
AJ knew that counselors and physiatrists were necessary and even beneficial. He had talked to a few in his lifetime and had to send the people under his command to see them too, most recently when Colonel Mackenzie had killed Sadik and wasn't handling it well afterwards. But that was in the work world.
To be continued…