CHAPTER THREE

Sunday night found Jess and Gibbs standing in front of a restaurant scoping out the menu. Neither one of them could come up with a "favorite place" they wanted to go, so it was decided that they'd meet early and wander around Georgetown, reading menus until they found a place they both liked.

They'd finally decided on Ristorante Piccolo, which promised "regional Italian cuisine at moderate prices." The place was warm and cozy and had three working fireplaces that added nicely to the ambiance. Gibbs and Jess ordered wine and dinner and made slightly uncomfortable small talk while they waited for food to arrive. Gibbs wasn't really a "small talk" kind of guy. Jess had been warned about this, but he was doing his best. There were a lot of long pauses as they each looked around the room, sipped their wine, looked at each other and smiled, and tried to think of things to talk about.

Jess had already told a couple of stories about her travels, hoping that one of the locations she'd mentioned would spark a similar story from Gibbs. But either Gibbs hadn't been anywhere – ever – or he didn't have any stories he cared to share. He seemed interested in her travels, and asked a lot of questions, but what she'd really been hoping for was to get a little more insight into this Leroy Jethro Gibbs guy.

Gibbs, for his part, felt badly that Jess ended up taking on the lion's share of the conversation. But his stories of traveling from base to base with Shannon and Kelly didn't seem to be nearly as interesting as her stories of street festivals in Berlin or camel rides in Australia. Besides, Gibbs wasn't a storyteller and Jess obviously was. So … he let her talk.

By the time the appetizers had come and gone, Jess felt as though she'd been giving a presentation for the Travel Channel. She felt like she was monopolizing the conversation. Every joke Tony had ever made about Jess being a 'motor mouth' or how she could talk a politician under the table came back to her, and it started to make her self-conscious. She smiled at Gibbs. "I'm sorry," she said, a bit sheepishly. "I get started telling stories sometimes, and it's hard to stop."

Gibbs smiled. Jess raised her eyebrows and looked at him quizzically. "Your turn?" she said, trying to lead him into conversation.

Gibbs chuckled and began to blush a bit. "I'm a little shy on topics, it seems …" he said.

"OK," Jess said, "I'll get you started." She thought for a second, and then smiled a slightly evil little smile. "What were you and Tony talking about yesterday when I came in the room?"

Gibbs smiled. "He was telling me about your 'junior spy' days and some movie about summer vacations."

"Oh my gosh," she said, with a smile. "'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' – I'd almost forgotten that. Yeah … that was a fun summer."

"You and Tony," Gibbs began, doing his best to push the conversation along. "You guys have a lot of history." She smiled and nodded. "Care to share any information?"

Jess looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "Please tell me that you're not this obvious when you're in interrogation."

He laughed. "Come on," Gibbs coaxed. "It doesn't have to be embarrassing or blackmailable. He spent all day yesterday telling stories about you. The only thing I know about him from that timeframe is that you guys were junior spies and that you have this weird scar competition." She laughed.

There was a pause. Gibbs was about to change tactics when Jess spoke.

"I don't know …" she began. "He's not that hard to understand. He's just … Tony." She smiled. "He likes playing basketball, but he doesn't like watching basketball. He likes his steaks rare, but his hamburgers well done. He can play concert-level piano but he can barely type. He's a great kisser…" she began, and then stopped suddenly and blushed.

"Finally," Gibbs said, a smirk on his face. "Something we have in common." He stared at her, and she returned his gaze and his smirk. They stayed locked in that stare as their dinners arrived. The waiter put down the plates silently and left.

Jess picked up her fork and smiled sweetly at Gibbs. "Yeah," she said, a playful glint in her eye. "I've seen you type."

Gibbs laughed out loud and picked up his fork. "THAT one, you're gonna pay for," he said, as he took his first bite of pasta.

"I certainly hope so," Jess responded under her breath, smiling to herself and thinking how much fun Tony would be having if he were monitoring their conversation. Then, she suddenly froze and surveyed every single item on the table. With Gibbs' confused expression following her movements, she picked up the small decorative cube that had held the list of specials, and dropped it in her water glass. You could never be too careful when it came to Tony.

The rest of the dinner went a bit better than the beginning. Once they started eating and drinking, the conversation flowed a little more smoothly. There were still chunks of silence, but it wasn't the kind of silence that you wallow in. After the dessert plates were gone and last of the coffee consumed, it was back to Jess' place for a nightcap. Gibbs wasn't entirely sure where the evening was supposed to go at this point. He was pretty rusty at the dating thing and wasn't sure what the modern protocols were. He decided to just "go with the flow," a phrase he didn't particularly like, but it seemed to fit the situation.

As Jess made coffee, Gibbs looked around the living room, searching for discussion topics. Jess appeared with coffee and liqueur and some kind of strange tea cookies that Gibbs had never seen before and they both settled on the couch. Gibbs' eyes fell upon the ugly stuffed cat Tony had brought her in the hospital a few months earlier.

"That's the cat that Tony bought you at the hospital, isn't it?" he asked, indicating the furry lump.

Jess laughed. "It is. It's ugly … I know."

"At the time," Gibbs remembered, "you said it looked just like 'Dino Kitty'." He smiled at her and asked, "What's that all about?"

Jess looked at Gibbs and blew out a breath. "OK," she said with a smile. "You wanted a DiNozzo story … here's a DiNozzo story." Gibbs folded his hands and put on his best 'attentive listener' face.

"I was, like, ten years old or something and it was just after Thanksgiving," Jess began. "Tony and I were window shopping in the big stores in Boston while his dad was having drinks at a fancy hotel bar."

She stood and walked to the mantle, taking the stuffed cat and bringing it back to the couch. "We saw this ugly stuffed cat in a toy store window, and I made some kind of comment like, 'No one will ever buy that cat – it's too ugly. Poor little kitty.' Tony laughed at me at the time, and kept kidding me about 'the poor little kitty'. I got mad at him and told him that everything deserved to be loved, even little ugly stuffed cats." She rolled her eyes. "It sounds really sappy now," she laughed. "But it was incredibly important to me at the time."

"I'm sure it was," Gibbs smiled, as he recalled his daughter Kelly and her attachment to various broken toys and stray animals.

"Tony's parents were the kind of parents who gave him very specific amounts of money and very specific instructions on how to spend it. Christmas presents for teachers, grandparents, important people, children of important people – those were all appropriate uses of his allowance. I, however, wasn't on Tony's parents' approved Christmas list – I was just the ever-present kid next door who got him hurt and taught him things they didn't think he needed to know."

Gibbs looked shocked. Jess laughed and continued. "Tony started shoveling sidewalks and delivering Christmas baskets, walking dogs, assembling toys – anything he could do to earn money. It was driving me nuts at the time, because he never had time to play. I couldn't understand why money was so important to him all of a sudden, and he wouldn't explain it to me." Jess started playing with the cat and tossing it in the air. "On Christmas morning, he knocked on my door and handed me this huge box, perfectly wrapped. The smile on his face as he handed it over was … I can't even describe it."

She looked at Gibbs. "You know his 'patented DiNozzo smile'?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah," Gibbs said, with a laugh and a nod.

"Well, this one was a hundred watts brighter." She smiled. "I opened the box, and inside was a ton of tissue paper and this one ugly stuffed cat. The card said, 'I'm a poor little kitty. Please love me'. Tony had earned enough money to buy it and then had talked his tutor into taking him back to Boston to pick it up. It was, I think, the very first thing he'd ever bought with money he earned himself. He was so proud of that."

"But … 'Dino Kitty'?" Gibbs asked.

"I used to call Tony Dino – short for 'DiNozzo', and don't you EVER tell him I told you that – and since it was a gift from him, I called it 'Dino Kitty'. He loved that."

"What happened to Dino Kitty number one?" Gibbs continued.

"I went through a purging phase in college, after Tony graduated and I was there on my own," Jess said with an apologetic look at the cat. "Got rid of a lot of stuff that now I wish I had kept. Dino Kitty was pretty much on his last legs by that time – he'd been re-sewn and re-stuffed so many times, I don't know that any part of him was actually original any more. So … it was out with the old." Jess smiled and hugged the cat.

"And now," Gibbs said, taking the cat from her and looking at it full in the face, "it's in with the new."

"And I thought I was sappy!" Jess said, with a burst of laughter. Gibbs grinned, unceremoniously hit her over the head with the stuffed cat, and pulled her into a kiss.