She stirs first in the room, disentangling her legs from the heaped sheets at the end of the bed. It's just gone dawn, and CJ feels the distinct headache of too much sex and not enough sleep beginning in her head. She struggles to pick out her clothes from the selection on the floor; finally unveiling her skirt from underneath somebody's crisp, white, masculine shirt.
It's easy to recognize it as Sam's, and she turns back affectionately, seeing the men illuminated in soft light. The dark parts of Toby's face are pressed into the pillow, and Sam sprawls languidly; one arm folded underneath him, the other stretched towards Toby as though longing for some un-received touch. Neither of them see her awake; gazing at them from across the room. She decides against wake them, but leaves them alone in her apartment, kissing Sam briefly as she goes. The door is quietly shut behind her; her fingertips stopping it from slamming loudly.
It may not have been the best idea they've ever had; but in the bright, morning light, there's a new way to see things, and there's something about it that feels like it once was love; sweet and clear.
Toby awakes sharply from a dream he doesn't remember, and lifts his head off the pillow to squint blearily into the light. The room feels vacant without her presence, but then he twists slightly to see Sam; a tangle of dark hair and open mouth and pale skin, still sleeping.
He wants to touch him; leans over cautiously, steadily, as though it were the first time he had woken up with Sam (and not the last). But at the last moment, Sam turns away unconsciously.
Toby leans backwards and falls into his side of CJ's bed.
Once, it might have been called love.
CJ sometimes plays let's pretend, in her stranger moments; the three of them, in a wild bohemian lifestyle somewhere in New York, with the rest of the crazy, non-political world. He never sees it like she does. Sam's not made for the life she's describing, and he can't see anything without him.
Toby shuffles, and gradually steps out of the lethargy which has invaded him, and back into the land of the conscious. He gets up to dress, glancing over at Sam periodically, left alone in the bed that suddenly seems too big.
Sam has always been the first to wake in the morning. It's an unchangeable fact of life. He loves the solitude; the thought that he's the only one there, in the warm, radiant mornings, where the world seems rosier and more romantic in the silence.
In this room though, there are two others; the three of them sleep clinging together like drowning swimmers to this raft of a bed. It isn't unusual to wake and find him ensconced in CJ's delicate arms, but Toby is far less tactile, and usually curls into himself to sleep, despite CJ's laughter and coaxing.
On this morning though (the last morning) he doesn't leave; instead, he listens to them sleeping. Their light breaths are the only sound he can hear. When they eventually awaken, independently, they are quieter still, out of reverence for the supposedly sleeping.
When she leaves; CJ drops a kiss to his forehead. Later, Toby will do the same, softer still, after dropping the wedding ring he still carries casually into his back pocket. She whispers something sounding suspiciously like love you or miss you in his ear, tickling him with her breath; Toby will later, unknowingly, echo her words, and Sam will smile easily in his pretend sleep.
Somebody might have called it love, once.