Author: Angie
Email: AngieSuth@aol.com
Title: Time Is Up
Characters: Josh/CJ/Toby
Rating: PG
Summary: This is their time now
Disclaimer: Not mine at all.
Spoilers: No.
Feedback: Always appreciated.
A/N: Rhonda as always. And for Kansas and her break.
A resolution of sorts to 'Testing Time'. But maybe not the end of the series – if Rhonda gets her way.
*
Time Is Up
*
Toby stands in the doorway to his office and sees her. She is sprawled on his couch, head only just visible over its arm, and knees bent up to accommodate her length. He says nothing but crosses to her and gestures to her to sit up, and as she does just that, starting to swing her legs to the floor, he grabs them and pulls them across his lap.
"What are you doing here, CJ?" he asks in response to her raised eyebrows.
"Hiding." Her reply squeezes from behind a rueful smile.
"From what or from whom?"
"Josh."
"Ah." Toby looks thoughtful. " May I ask why . . . apart from the usual reasons?"
CJ leans her head back against the arm of the couch and closes her eyes in denial of the dangerous territory she has suddenly found herself edging towards. "Because he keeps hounding me, driving me crazy with his quest for a personal life."
Toby studies her face in repose. She could almost be asleep save for the small muscle twitching near her eyelid. He wishes he could take a camera (or, at a push, a paintbrush) and immortalize her. The thought temporarily immobilizes him.
He finally breaks the silence. "Has he kissed you again?"
The reward to his quiet question is the small lopsided smile that flickers around her mouth and he finds himself smiling too.
"No. Although I believe he was seen chasing Will around his desk, all puckered up and ready for action."
Toby snorts suddenly. No-one else can quite elicit such spontaneous amusement from him. She knows his funny bone and always manages to hit it.
The door opens suddenly, making them both jump.
Josh.
He sees them on the couch and blinks away his acceptance of their intimacy. Of course he's seen them touch before, an arm on a back, a hand at an elbow, even a brief peck on the cheek at times of celebration. And the occasional dance. But this is new. This touching without moving, without purpose. And they don't move away from each other when they see him.
He wants to join them, feel part of their togetherness, so he walks to the couch while demanding, "Move up."
CJ lifts her legs and Toby shifts closer to her, allowing Josh to squeeze onto the end cushion and catch her feet, lowering them to his lap.
Toby can feel the heat of the backs of her thighs on his lap and, finding nowhere obvious or comfortable to put his hands, puts them obviously and comfortably on her knees.
They sit together in the quietness. Not unusual for them in their long years of friendship, but unheard of for Josh.
CJ can see both men in profile and she allows herself the forbidden luxury of studying their faces through her lashes, Josh's hands on her ankles a comfort and Toby's palms on her knees, well. . . she would like to say a comfort, but the heat and the gentle pressure of his ever-moving fingers contain enough erotic charge to turn her mind completely in a direction she has forbidden herself for years.
CJ feels the air in the room change and wonders if Toby and Josh can feel it too. She wonders if Toby has noticed that her arm lying along the back of the couch has inched minutely towards the back of his head and that her thumb is close enough to his neck to feel the softness of the hair curling there.
She can't believe the madness that has induced her to go this far; further than she has allowed herself in the twenty odd years of knowing him and the twenty odd years of wanting him. The twenty odd years of loving him. She can't believe it.
She can't comprehend the insanity of that thumb, now stroking the skin under the black curls, as it risks everything in front of Josh; in spite of Toby's children, in spite of Andi and the hundred proposals of marriage.
She doesn't seem able to grasp the madness of the heat of his legs under hers and the warmth that is spreading up through her center.
All she can hear in her head is the ticking of the clock and with it the knowledge that her time is up.
Toby can feel the pulse in the thumb at the back of his head. He can hear, or at least imagines that he can, her heartbeat in her hand and the pulse of the blood around her body, flowing through the heavy limbs resting under his fingers. The current travels through them and charges the air.
He wonders what Josh must be thinking and decides that he doesn't really care; this feels too right and too dangerous and he couldn't stop it even if he wanted to. And he doesn't want to. He doesn't want it to ever stop. It is the right time.
Briefly, he closes his eyes and imagines his caresses falling on silken skin instead of smooth wool. The sensory picture turns the heat up several notches and his self control takes a further battering under the assault from her hand at his neck.
He hadn't dreamed of this before, but now it will be all he can dream.
Josh breaks the mood.
"I'm just wondering," he pauses, oblivious to the tension in the room, "whether I do need to sort out my personal life after all, I mean people are starting to mock me."
CJ sighs dramatically and increases the pressure of her fingers on Toby's neck. She is surprised at how comfortable she feels at breaking her rules. She decides that she doesn't care if Josh notices or not. The die is cast. "Toby, I told you he's been hounding me. He's like a dog with a bone."
Toby smiles at her verbal gift. He loves the way she does that for him.
Josh tickles her foot in revenge and she shrieks, pulling her legs up and away from him. There is a moment of indecision before she abandons her escape reflex and brings them back down more firmly over Toby and away from Josh.
She is almost in his lap now, her arm wrapped around his neck, fingers at his shirt collar. His arm is around her waist and the other protects her calves from Josh's fingers, his own fingers drawing their particular pattern.
CJ feels safe.
Toby wonders why he never tried this before.
Josh sits up suddenly as the veil lifts from his eyes. "Well look at you two!"
He can't stop the smile that has started to spread from cracking his face in half. To him, Toby looks amazed and CJ, well CJ looks as though her soul has taken off and is hovering above the room someplace. "Kiss her, Toby. Kiss her! You've got to, honestly. Show her how it's really done!"
Toby looks appalled, but his arm tightens around her and he slips his fingers under her blouse to scratch gently at her soft skin. A warning shot is needed.
"Josh . . ." Toby's rebuke is silenced by her lips on his. His tongue unable to form the words as hers sucks softly at it. He is enveloped in a white heat and a sense of such rightness that he cannot break away. He has never kissed like this before and never even attempted a paler version in a public place.
They do not break apart, even at the sound of the door softly closing, or the whispered conversation outside. Or even the muted applause and laughter that leaks in through the cracks.
*
This is their time now. Enough has been wasted. No more walking away.
The End
