Once things were in the oven, Eric and Nell exchanged their presents, and they took a break with the cheese, crackers, and Eric's wine. The rest of the cooking, the meal, and the evening drinks went well. When the dishes were washed and the conversation finally died down, Nell just curled up on the sofa and nuzzled into Eric's side. As the candles were burning lower, though, Eric was feeling both like he didn't want it to end and like he was wondering what bedtime would hold. Soon enough, they were both getting ready to climb into his bed; again sufficiently covered to keep temptation at only a simmer.
Eric awoke with a start to his girlfriend's sobs. Nell was lying facing the other wall, crying away, and as soon as Eric was conscious, he reached over to comfort her.
"Nell,... Nell... What's the matter?"
Eric saw 2:17 on his alarm clock just before Nell pulled him across her tiny frame. "Eric, Eric. Why? Why am I here?"
"What do you mean, Nell? Is there something wrong? We didn't do anything to be embarrassed about."
"We lived, Eric. I just can't get over how we just had a wonderful Christmas day, complete with cheese and crackers, but there's all this tragedy around us. People we know –we know—have ended up dead this year: Agent Hunter watching the Chameleon wire the car to blow her up, Michael Salleh getting tortured in Sudan while radiation poisoning slowly chewed his lungs into pieces, all those other people we tried to help. What was Christmas like for their families?"
Eric breathed a sigh of relief: at least it wasn't him, but it hurt to see Nell hurting like this.
"Nell, we're the ones on the side of good. We're the ones trying to keep them safe."
"But in spite of what we did, sometimes even kinda because of what we did, they ended up dead. How do you keep your happy, sweet personality in spite of it all?"
"You heard that classical playlist of mine. Sometimes it helps to feel like the mad scientist who traded in his pipe organ for a Kia on the 405... And then there's surfing: that calms me down... And then there's you."
Nell's curiosity and shock were enough to pull her out of her sobs. "Me?"
"Sure. For a long time now, whenever I've gotten like that, I would see you working away on it, and your focus, your calm made me get my act together. It's like you're a leopard on the hunt in the savannah of cyberspace: alert, focused, no extra movement."
"You've been watching me?"
"Nell, I hope you're not upset, but yes: for a long time now. I've struggled to focus, wondering what it would be like to date you, to hold you."
"Jeez! How'm I gonna live up to those expectations?"
"You have nothing to worry about! This is better than anything I could have imagined."
In the morning, Eric was surprised to learn that Nell had a change of clothes in her backpack. "Guess she was planning ahead," he thought.
Nell must have been thinking about the same kind of thing, because as she went into the bathroom for her shower, she commanded, "Pack a change of clothes. We're staying at my place tonight." Eric's smile removed the last of the sadness he felt for her.
He spent the rest of the time the water was running thinking: Is now the right time? Could I? Should I? And finally he knew he should. He grabbed a paper bag from the kitchen, sprinted to the bedside table, grabbed the box of condoms, double-wrapped it, and stuffed it in the back corner of his stuff-bag. He thought back to how he had bought them in a fit of optimism a long time ago, in preparation for a date with Carole, a woman he'd met at the grocery store. What a disaster that date had been! It had been soon after Nell had ordered the bouquet for herself, and he was still looking for the way to make Nell jealous. As he had listened to Carole twitter on about her Internet consultancy business, he realized he would rather endure the wrath of Hetty several times over than play with someone else's heart.
As they approached the mission, they decided that even though they were early, it would look less suspicious if they arrived separately, so she offered to get Eric something from the bakery around the corner, and meet him in the bullpen.
"Mind making it a double espresso?" he asked, trying to slip her a five-spot.
"Keep your money. My treat. It's because I'm too fragile for you that you need that espresso."
"That thing in the middle of the night? That was because you're human. Don't apologize for letting your defenses down. Please!"
When Nell carried two coffee cups and two bakery bags into the mission, she was surprised to find the whole team relaxing in the bullpen. Like Eric, she'd expected to make a quiet entrance because they had been running early. "The transport left the carrier at three this morning," explained Deeks.
"Callen texted me when they were 30 minutes out, and got me out of bed…the buzzard!" added Sam.
Surreptitiously, Nell passed Eric his espresso, along with a surprise, a bakery bag containing a cookies-and-cream donut. Unfortunately, surrounded by four detectives, there's no such thing as "surreptitiously," and while Hanna and Callen simply exchanged looks, it was Deeks who said something: "There must be some reason you didn't bring me anything," and he raised his eyebrows.
"It's because you're not my partner." Eric could hear how Nell wanted to punctuate that with a raspberry.
"Hear that, Kensi? It's a partner thing."
"Yup, there are certain benefits to being nice to your partner," Kensi reminded him.
Callen smirked, "So, just how nice was he, Nell?"
And almost simultaneously Deeks was saying, "I'm nice to you! How many times have I invited you to my place for mojitos?"
Sam Hanna put his hand on Deeks' shoulder, both calmingly and paternalistically, "If that counts at all, buddy, it's not in your favor."
Since the agents were teaming up on Deeks, it gave Eric a chance to turn to his makeshift breakfast, thinking he had never tasted a better combination than this particular espresso with this particular donut. While he was contemplating that realization, Hetty materialized in the bullpen: "Our caseload is all caught up now, so unless a surprise comes our way, tomorrow we'll be having a team-building retreat. I've gotten us a cabin at a camp nearby. I've sent the directions to your navigators. We'll start at 8 o'clock…. Sharp!"
"That's awful early, Hetty. Do you need me there?"
"Absolutely, Mr. Deeks."
It turned out Hetty was right about the caseload. Everybody spent most of their day doing paperwork on old cases and personnel issues. Just before lunch, though, an alert came up on Nell's system.
"Here's something, Eric. Somebody from the Nevada Test Site turned up dead in Las Vegas."
"Sounds like we'd better interface with Las Vegas police, and see where things stand."
Nell and Eric ended up on a videoconference with a woman from LVPD forensics and her boss, and the four of them decided that since it looked like a standard issue of gambling debts gone bad, jurisdiction would stay with the police, but there were a few ways NCIS would assist and LVPD would keep them in the loop.
As the videoconference ended, Nell observed, "Good grief. Even the nuclear scientists can go overboard on gambling."
Eric checked the file. "There's nothing nuclear going on there now. Looks like he was just a guard. By the way, didn't that guy look like the bartender, Sam, from Cheers?"
"Yeah! And the woman looked like the girl from the original Karate Kid: Ali with an i."
"I think you're right, Nell-with-an-l."
"It's two l's, Mr. Eric-with-a-c."
"And no s."
"What? Somebody thought you were Erics? Or Seric?"
"No, I have a cousin Jennifer who would go ballistic when jokers would call her 'Jennifer Beals.'"
"You mean from Flashdance? I'd be flattered."
"Still, it got annoying."
"Now I understand, No-S."
"Thanks, Two-L."
A few minutes later, Nell said, "Okay, I'm past the firewall on the loan shark's files. He didn't protect them two-L," and she smirked at Eric.
"Okay, I'm making progress on all the security cams and traffic cams between Las Vegas and the Test Site. I'll just No-S around in these files."
A few more minutes of cyber-detective work sprinkled with their usual banter and they were convinced it was the loan shark. Nell finally broke the concentration, "Two-L with this. Let's go get some lunch. I'll put together an e-mail for LVPD forensics. Where should we eat?"
"I don't know, let's just follow our No-S."
"I'm not sure that'll turn out two-L," and they laughed and exchanged an underhanded high-five. As they turned to the door, they were surprised to see Hetty there, and exchanged guilty glances.
"Mister Beale, Miss Jones: I didn't get a chance to ask. I trust you had a pleasant holiday?"
In their haste toward the door, they merely muttered the usual social pleasantries.
"How long do you thing she was standing there? And what do you think she heard?" Nell finally asked.
"Weird nicknames, but that's nothing new, Rockstar."
"But she also heard us get all embarrassed about them."
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
"You're right, Mr. Nixon."