Spencer let out a loud moan as Toby suckled at her neck, surely leaving evidence of their rendezvous in the form of a love bite. She could already feel it forming, but she didn't care because it felt so good.

She ran her hands down from under his shirt and furiously tackled his belt buckle as he lifted her up, holding her against the elevator wall as her legs clung around his waist, her hands still at work between their bodies.

"Just give it to me," she hummed sexily in his ear, desperate for him to fill her void.

"Not yet," he said into her ear as he nibbled at it, kissing down her neck, his growing member poking her inner thigh, mere centimeters from where she wanted it.

"But I need you," she begged breathily, feeling his fingers grab at her backside.

He continued to tease her for several minutes, before finally succumbing to her pleads, nearly throwing her against the wall as he passionately and furiously pounded into her, emitting a scream from the depths of her throat.

"Spencer….Spencer….Oh God, Spencer," he screamed


"Spencer…Spencer," Toby lightly took hold of her shoulder and shook her gently. "It's 1:20, you have to leave for the doctor in fifteen minutes."

Spencer shot up, gasping for air, her hand on her chest. "Toby?!"

"Yeah, it's me," he laughed a little. Her hair was stuck to her face with sweat and she was red as a beet. He put the back of his hand to her face. "Have you taken your temperature? You're burning. Are you sure you're going to be able to drive?"

She shifted uncomfortably on the bed. The dream had felt so real, and she was starting to question if it was her fever or her dirty dream that had caused her to sweat through her sheets. She ultimately decided that the fever had caused the dirty dream version of their reunion, so even if the steamy elevator sex had caused the sweating, it was still because of her fever.

"Spencer?" Her ears perked up and she looked at him. "I'm fine. Where's Aaron?"

"Napping on the couch. Can I drive you?"

"No, no…go home."

"Can you call me later and let me know how he is? I know you're going to say I don't have the right, but… you're sick, and he's sick, and this is a little freaky for me, and even if I can't be in his life I want to know he's okay…"

"Toby — I'm sorry, but the room is half-spinning and my brain is pounding out of my skull so I can't have this conversation with you right now. I will talk to you later, okay?" She pushed herself to stand and he lent a hand as she stabilized in the dark. "Thank you," she tousled his hair as she headed inside and grabbed her keys, gently scooping up Aaron without waking him and leaving the apartment with Toby, locking up behind him.

As she watched him get into the elevator going up, she swore her heart skipped a beat, the dream version of him slamming her against it's walls flashing in her mind. This wasn't going to be as simple as she'd hoped.


Thankfully the doctor's schedule was open and he was able to examine Spencer as well. She was given an antiviral medication to stop the multiplying of the virus, and Aaron was told to just keep on with the Advil and lotion, and it'd clear up in a few days.

Spencer stopped at the pharmacy before heading home to pick up her medicine, and let Aaron pick a package of ice cream, promising him they would watch a movie and eat ice cream and have a "sleepover" since they were both sick.

When she got home, Aaron begged for the iPad and since he was sick, she caved and let him take it in his room. She filled a glass from the tap and took a sip to swallow her medicine, and then some regular cough and cold medicine. She opened up all of the cabinets before she realized she'd forgotten she'd meant to buy soup for them while she was picking up her medicine, but Aaron's ice cream mission had distracted her. Not to mention that she kept having flashes of her dream.

She sighed and called Toby, realizing he was really the only one in the area she could call. She had a second-wind of guilt, realizing only then just how much she really did depend on Caleb and Hanna on a fairly regular basis. She made a mental note to think of something nice to do for the two of them to repay them. Even if they were the ones who offered and loved Aaron like crazy.

Toby answered on the second ring in a hurry.

"Whoa buddy, calm down," she couldn't help but laugh. "He's fine, he just needs rest. Me, too. Butttttttt if you want to be the concerned patron you were earlier, I could really use a favor," she said, chewing on her bottom lip. It was a bad habit she'd had since she was a kid. She'd bite on her lips, and worse, her inner-cheeks. She could still feel the rough patch of skin inside of her mouth where she'd bitten so much, especially when she had braces as a kid which made the injury worse, that it never healed properly.

He felt relieved when she called and asked him for a favor. The more she let him in, the more he could prove that he was different now. And while he may not deserve it, he could do his best to make up for lost time. He'd known his share of familial issues and now that he'd realized that his son was not just an idea thrown at him from a tiny girl who didn't look like she'd be a mother, but he was now a real person he'd talked to and thrown a ball with and laughed with, and how it had aged that same tiny girl into a mature, chipper mother and woman, he knew he had to do his best to ensure they had what they needed. Even if it took a long time for her to trust him to do it as more than favors here and there.

He also knew that Spencer was very smart and knew she could use him for a lot of this stuff. He was earning his keep, and he didn't mind.

"Anything," he said all too eagerly. He meant it, though.

"Can you bring us soup?"

He could almost hear her bottom lip puffing out subconsciously. She had a highly emotive face.

"Consider it done. What do you guys like?"

"I'll eat anything, but Aaron won't touch anything with rice in it."

Toby nodded, as if he could hear her. He made a mental note, cataloguing all of the information he could about his son. If he was going to be a dad, he wanted to be a good one. Good dads listened.

"Toby?"

"Oh, yeah, okay cool. I'll be there soon."


Toby juggled the bag while trying to not burn himself taking her spare key from under the light fixture next to her door. She'd texted him asking him to just come in and she'd put the key outside since Aaron was getting cranky and she was going to lay with him.

When Spencer heard the door, she darted up from under Aaron in his bed, trying not to wake him and shhh-ing Toby.

"He just fell asleep," she whispered. "Thank you," she said unpacking the containers of soup. He went all out and didn't buy the Campbell's cans, but the pre-packaged soups from Whole Foods that are made fresh and don't have a ton of salt and additives in them.

"Like I said, anything…" he lingered, shoving his hands in his pockets.

"What?" she put her hand on her hip, seeing the look in his eyes like there was something he wanted to say, but wasn't.

"It's just that you're miserable and he's miserable and if you're going to keep needing help…"

"You can stay for now," he finally sighed. "But only because Caleb's not able to come and Hanna's sick too."

"You don't have anyone else?" He raised his eyebrow. "Like family or like a friend or a guy…?"

"Subtle," she rolled her eyes. "I do have a boyfriend, if you have to know."

"So why isn't he here taking care of you guys?" He said putting the soups in the fridge.

"Because he's on a business trip and won't be home for another week, and he lives back where we were in Allentown. And I'm not ready for him to meet Aaron…" she rambled. "Not..none of this is your business, you know." She said pretzel-style on the couch. "Are you gonna sit or not?"

He sat on the other end of the couch. "I'm just trying to catch up on the last few years. I wasn't trying to pry. I asked about anyone, not just a guy."

"You know more than almost anyone how much my family and I don't get along," she shifted. "My pregnancy didn't exactly help that situation. Unless you count helping me out of that dreadful town…unless you forgot that, too."

"I remember…" he said defensively. "Look, if you don't want me here, I'll leave. I just thought I was helping."

Her face softened a bit. "I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling well. And I might still be a little mad at you. It's not easy having you here. I don't like it. But I need help. And you want to help. So I guess i'm kind of forced to let you."

"That's valid. I can understand that," His understanding and cool tone almost shocked her. But then again, this seemed like the Toby she remembered from before she informed him he was an expectant father. He was calming. It was what kept her coming back to him after they'd first hooked up, even if just for a few weeks.

He was trying to be understanding because he knew his place in all of this. He was shocked that he was even in the apartment right now. But he had to take chances and push boundaries for anything to change. Even when she was being mean, he smiled. He'd missed her. He'd acted like he'd forgotten about them, but he'd thought about her much more often than he'd prefer to admit.

"You're being too nice," she narrowed her eyes.

"You say that like it's a bad thing." He smirked.

She started to laugh a little at his coyness, but the laughter sent too much movement towards her upset stomach sending her to the bathroom. After emptying what little she had in her stomach, which was mostly water and stomach acid since she hadn't eaten all day, she weakly hobbled into the kitchen, turning on the tea kettle.

"Let me do it," he jumped to his feet. "I guess it's true chicken pox is worse when you're an adult." He laughed as she laid down on the couch. He returned a few moments later with a mug of tea with honey and sat back on the edge of the couch, lifting her feet onto his lap to rub them for her.

"You can't butter me up to get to Aaron," she teased, taking a sip as the steam fogged up her glasses, causing them both to smile a little.

"I'm not trying to." He retorted, to which she made a face. "Okay, maybe a little."

"Don't you have anything else to do but sit around and wait for us to need help?"

"I'm in-between projects right now. I'm working my way up in an architectural firm but right now I'm just freelancing on special projects. I do some grunt work building on the side, but only to keep a more steady income."

She nodded, and was interrupted by Aaron quietly crying in his room. She went to him and tried to tell him he was just having a bad dream, but he was burning up and scratching too much. She picked him up and he nuzzled in her neck like a baby, sucking on his thumb. "I know, baby, I know." She kissed his head. "You're hot. Momma's gonna get you more medicine for your fever and your itchies," she said plopping him down next to Toby and going into the bathroom.

Aaron started sobbing again as soon as Spencer stepped away. "Teddy," he whined, his thumb still in his mouth. "I need Teddy," he looked at Toby, his eyes flooded with tears.

"Uh…alright. I can…do that." He said scanning the apartment for a teddy bear but coming up short, Aaron just throwing anything he gave him.

Spencer returned with Advil, lotion and a pair of gloves. She knelt next to Aaron and put his gloves on. "You have to keep these on so you don't hurt your itchies by scratching too much," she said.

"Mommy I want Teddy," he rubbed his eyes crying.

"I tried but he didn't like the stuffed animals from the toy bin." Toby didn't want her to think he'd ignored the child's cries.

"Teddy's not a doll, it's a blanket," she looked more flushed than before, he thought, and he wasn't sure why. He attributed it to her fever. She felt all the heat in her cheeks and hoped he hadn't.

"If you take your medicine Mommy will go get Teddy," she said holding the little medicine cup up to his mouth. After a few minutes of whining he finally swallowed and crawled across Toby's lap quickly to grab his sippy cup filled with juice.

She lotioned him up and disappeared back into her room and came back with a quilt of dark grays, blacks and whites with a few patterned panels adding a bit of color. Toby watched as his son snuggled up against it and found the corner edge of the quilt, taking it up towards his nose and flicking the corner back and forth against his nose, his eyes seemingly heavier with each passing second.

"Wow…" Toby sighed. "That was…"

"It's his comfort object," She explained. "He loves rubbing the corner on his nose, I'm not sure why. He did it as a baby too. Sometimes he does it with the tags on stuffed animals." She said softly.

"Wait—" Toby had stopped mid-sentence earlier because the center of the quilt had caught his eye. It was a row of colorful Grateful Dead dancing bears.


Spencer kissed his mouth one last time before darting to the other side of the bed, as if she were playing a game. Because she was. She always was. It was one of those quick, teasing kisses as she practically ran away from him, laughter of them both filling the room. He lunged after her, grabbing her by the hips and leaving a mess of kisses on her chest and shoulders, blowing raspberries on her skin between kisses causing them to laugh harder.

They'd never meant for it to become this. At least, he didn't think either one of them had this amount of pre-planning. It started out as a chance. He knew the people of Rosewood were not particularly fond of him and that rumors swirled around and around about him and his past and his convictions. But Spencer was different, she always had been. They'd never been friends, but in Rosewood, you knew everyone's business. He remembered her as being the girl who always marched to her own drum. He always remembered her as the only person in Rosewood to disagree with Alison DiLaurentis. Which meant she was a force to be reckoned with. Part of him wondered if she had anything to do with Alison's disappearance and death. But he knew better than that. But if he was going to reconnect with anyone, it would be her. And it worked. She had her own demons, and she ousted them with sex, drugs and alcohol. She'd dragged him into her backyard for a quickie during a party, which is normally where they'd both have left it. But after an awkward run-in at the post office, he told her he didn't want to avoid each other. And then before he knew it she was bothering him to come out for a drive at 3AM. And then 3AM became 3PM and they weren't night time explorers or fuck buddies, they were real friends driven by a recklessness he couldn't explain but he craved after beginning this with her.

He didn't know how the days had turned them into these people. But he did know he was happy to have her here.

He'd just moved into the loft, where he'd undoubtedly be putting months of work and labor into restoring it, but, he would be living rent-free. She had offered to help him unpack, desperate to do anything to get out of her own house - a struggle he knew all too well.

Of course, emptying boxes only lasted so long before they'd decided christening his new apartment on his new sheets was a better use of the afternoon. She unlatched herself from her position of tangled limbs and reached into her purse, hanging off the bed with her ass in his face, which of course he jokingly grabbed at and slapped before she returned onto the bed.

She yelped. "Be good or I'm not sharing," she said holding up the little baggie of weed she'd pulled from her purse, shaking it in his face, and expertly rolling a joint on her thigh as she sat next to him. He was quiet while he watched her. He thought her concentrated face was sexier than anything else, even if she didn't agree. She put the joint between her lips as she disappeared over the edge again, his hands attaching themselves to her butt playfully once more, and picked up her denim shorts from the floor and pulling a yellow lighter from the pocket. She came back up and squealed. "I said be good!" She laughed and blew a raspberry on his tummy. She lit up the joint and took a few hits, blowing smoke out of her nose and mouth like a dragon.

"How do you blow out your nose?!" He laughed as she giggled, smoke emitting from her face, laughing as she passed him the joint.

"You just blow out your nose, just like it sounds," she laughed, watching him try and fail, coughing as he inhaled too much smoke.

"You're bad at this," she teased, taking the joint from him and this time blowing out "O" rings slowly.

"And you're a fucking tease," he said in her ear in a low, raspy voice, his fingers trailing up and down her bare spine teasingly.

After they'd finished she shot up off of the bed and started to walk across the apartment. He marveled at how free and confident she was walking around his room without any clothes on, not even bothering to pull a sheet around herself or look for her clothes that had been thrown amongst the boxes. Granted, he'd seen her in all of he glory a few times now, and she definitely had nothing to hide, but it was still adorable and amazing and even intimidating that she hadn't a care in the world. When he'd laughed at it once before (in an endearing way of course), she carried on about bodies being just a shell and who cares?

"Hey, hey want are you doing?" He said pulling up his boxers and joining her in front of his closet - the one thing that they had finished unpacking was his clothes.

"I don't want to wear my denim shorts anymore, they were riding up and giving me front wedgie. Guys have no idea how uncomfortable it is to be cute." She teased, pulling a blue, patchy, worn out Grateful Dead t-shirt and pulling it over her head, the fabric falling perfectly to fit her as a dress, coming down to her upper-middle thigh.

"Well you do look good in my shirt," he said, pulling her closer.

"That's why I'm keeping it," she teased back, rising on her tiptoes to put her lips just a few inches from his mouth before returning to her normal stance, leaving his lips un-kissed.

"Oh, you're gonna get it now," he said tickling her until she fell onto the bed, laughing until they were crying.


"Is that my—"

"Don't." She interrupted, knowing what he would say. She got up and brought her mug to the kitchen, and motioned for him to follow so they could let Aaron rest and fall asleep.

"Why did you do that?" He smiled more than he'd mean to expose.

"I wanted him to have a connection. Don't get me wrong, I hated you. But I still thought he should have roots, even if he doesn't know they're there. And when I made it…" she trailed off. Part of me still thought you'd come back for us, she thought. She'd made it while she was still pregnant. "I was just in need of a project. Hanna goes on Pinterest too much and then before I knew it she was giving me a pattern." She recovered.

"I love that," he admitted, still with his crooked smile. "I don't expect you to tell him, by the way. After all I've done…"

"I definitely can't… I can't do that to him. But maybe one day, if you're still around, I mean if you really figure out that you want to be a full-time Dad." Her cold medicine was making her a little softer around the edges.

"You have no idea how much I've realized I want this, but I also know how awful I was to you and to him before he was even born. I'm just asking for a chance to be here. I don't expect to all of a sudden be Dad of the Year. Even if he never knows I'm any more than a friend of yours, an Uncle or something. I just feel this connection…"

"Well…if you remember me, if you remember that shirt," she laughed. "I was not the same person I am now, at all. I was crazy. People change."

"You were sexy as hell that day," he smirked, remembering how much confidence she'd had, but honestly thinking less about her bare body and the sex they'd christened his loft with, and more about how much she'd made him laugh.

"Don't push it," she jokingly pushed him back, blushing as she remembered walking around his loft without any of her clothes after having had sex on almost every surface of the place. What they had was never romantic, but it was certainly passionate and raw and the kind of desperate that was almost good. Almost.

He smiled a little, remembering that that was the day he realized he really cared about her, and that it wasn't the physical stuff either one of them kept coming back for, it was each other.

"I guess you're right, thanks. Well until then, I hope we can be friends. I know I don't deserve that but… we had a good thing. Might be kinda nice to see if we can have that again."

"Don't push it," she repeated, nudging him this time to let him know she was letting him in a little bit.


Toby had ended up staying for dinner with them and helping her take care of herself while taking care of Aaron. After they all ate together, she sent him home.

That night, she dreamed not of the alternate universe elevator ride, but of the afternoon in the loft that they'd reminisced on that afternoon. And once again, she woke up drenched in sweat, stuck to her sheets, with his name ringing in her ears.