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Sam lies in the bed with the sheets twisted between his thighs. Sunlight from the uncurtained window is hot as a palm on his back. As soon as he wakes, as soon as he opens his eyes, he forgets the dream he was having but remains disorientated, uncertain of his moorings in what is still a strange, uncertain bed. He is afraid to breathe too heavily, or clear his throat, though he can still feel -- the ache re-appearing with the slow rising of the sun -- the places that were laid open last night; the tooth marks in the meat of his thighs and the small but painful split in his bottom lip; the places where Toby made a few new scratches against the universe, and his own place in it. Sam lies on his back staring at the ceiling wondering why it is his body that Toby has to claw through in order to find that there is no peace on the other side; Sam wonders why he offered it at all.
He found out that he didn't miss California. Or rather, that whatever tender feelings he had towards his home state left him about the same time that the vote was called against him and he looked around the room and saw no one in it he gave half a damn about and went back to his hotel room and sat on the side of the bed and thought about calling ... home, and he checked his watch and realised that it was four o'clock in the morning in D.C. and thought about the way the west wing used to echo with its varying silences in the early morning; thought about C.J.'s office draped in red silks and Toby's couch and the little depressions in its cushions which have formed to fit the shape of Sam's thighs and hips and elbows and how Toby never minded, or told him to take his feet off the furniture.
And so he dialled the number for that office beside the one which isn't his anymore and now never will be, because among the many things he cannot do is go back there, cap in hand. Not like this, not on the melting wings of this particular dream.
He dialled the number. He listened to the phone ring.
He was in the middle of imagining the Amnesty poster that he can't imagine Toby will have moved from its place on the left-side wall, next to the photograph of the President and the Queen of England, above Toby's diploma, which sometimes Sam would wake up and realise he was staring at, his eyes hooked like a piece of bait on the sharp points of the 'Z' in his boss's name, when his ex-boss answered the phone.
"Toby Ziegler."
Sam exhaled slowly into the phone's mouthpiece, then inhaled rather more quickly.
"Hello?"
Sam opened his mouth, then closed it again abruptly. He did not even know how to do this right now, how to open his mouth and deny that he was in more pain than he could remember having been in for years, that he couldn't stand the way it never really got dark there, that pressing hands and kissing babies had gifted him with as great a sense of profound failure as he has ever experienced. He doesn't know how to tell anyone those things; he wouldn't know how to tell his mother those things, but his grip on the phone was tight enough to hurt by that point.
The voice on the other end of the line said, "Sam?", very softly, skimming over the question mark as if it hardly needed to be pronounced.
Sam closed his eyes, tightly; breathed out again. "Hey."
"How you doin'?"
"How did you know?"
"I'm sorry?"
"How did you know it was me?"
"I have magic powers, Sam."
"Toby."
"I ... just knew."
"Okay," Sam said, not believing it and not bothering to keep his lack of belief from his voice.
"So. What's happening?"
"Ah, I don't know. Nothing? Nothing much. Nothing impor -- "
"Sam?"
"Yeah?"
"Tell me what's wrong," Toby said, in his softest, most sinuous, steel-strong voice, that Sam has never, from the very first day they met, been able to refuse or resist, or lie to. It didn't help when Toby added, even softer, "Please."
"I ... I don't know where to start," Sam said.
"Start at the beginning."
"I don't even know where the beginning is, Toby."
"Are you okay?" he asked, whispered, and Sam had closed his eyes so tight.
"No," Sam said.
"You wanna tell me about it?"
"I don't know how, Toby. I don't know what the hell happened with this, how I managed to fuck this up so badly, how I let ... " Sam sighed. "How I let you all down."
He had said, "Sam,", just Sam, in that way which doesn't mean anything at all except that it created a spot of warmth behind Sam's sternum that hurt, beating there, glowing.
"Yeah. I know."
"You made a choice."
"And now I have to lie in it?"
"I would have gone with 'live with it' but, mixed metaphors aside, that wasn't what I was going to say."
"What were you going to say?"
"Just that ... that you made a choice. Perhaps it was a bad one, but you made it and there's nothing to apologise for."
"Why are you being comforting?"
There is a pause at the end of the line before Toby said, "I don't know."
Sam never heard anything about Toby's big plan, the big day, the big crash. He only saw the same news reports that everyone else did, and the footage of Zoey Bartlet playing cars and swings and parties with her daddy and the drone of the news anchor's voice on top of it all, making the unthinkable seem inevitable. Sam waited, and waited. And five days after she was found, he picked up the phone.
"Toby?"
His voice when he said "Hey, Sam," was weak and unsettling, sinking straight to the bottom of Sam's stomach and belling out waves of apprehension like ripples in the surface of what had been plainwater.
"What's going on?"
There was a pause in which Sam had imagined his ex-boss looking around the room trying to find a point of interest, and failing.
"Ah. A few things."
"Clean-up?"
"Yeah."
"So ... You okay?"
"Sure."
"Toby?"
"Did ... did anyone tell you? I - I didn't know if Josh would have called you, or -- "
"About what?"
"I forgot to tell you ... "
"Toby, what?"
"The twins. M-my kids."
This news, or the implication of news Toby was not strong enough to elaborate on, clawed its way through Sam's belly, slowly, hanging off a rib by the time Toby's breath was crackling in the receiver.
"Yeah. You didn't tell me."
"There was a lot going on."
"Yeah," Sam said. "They arrived, huh?" He was trying to smile, trying so hard. His jaw started aching while his head filled up with things he cannot conceive of telling Toby, on that night or any other.
"Yeah."
"Did you name them or just give them numbers for now?"
"Funny," Toby said. "The girl is Molly. The boy's Huck."
He had smiled then, listening to the tremble of the 'y' in Toby's voice and the little gulp of air that threatened to swallow his son's whole name in one. Sam thought he might even have tried for a hug, if they hadn't had a continent between them. "I like those," was all he said.
"Yeah. Andy's paying for the therapy."
Sam laughed, or tried to. "I'm sure she thinks it's character-building."
"Or something. Yeah."
"How is she? Did you set a date yet?"
The silence became wider, deeper; a snow-blanket of anti-sound. Toby broke it after perhaps a minute, with a long sigh. "I really forgot to call."
He watches, silently.
Toby is dressing, hair and beard still damp from his shower, still naked from the waist up. Sam can smell the scent of his hair, the smell that catches it Sam's throat nights, which appears sometimes at the base of Toby's neck where the cords pull strong and the sweat glistens. This too unsettles Sam: too close, intimate. To know these things sometimes feels almost sickening and the knowledge swells and changes in his heart, becoming credos and promises. Then shrivels into self-consciousness, hopelessness.
Toby tugs on an undershirt and Sam mourns the loss of the line of his back. He can do all this with his back turned; he hasn't yet turned around to check if Sam is still sleeping. Sam shifts in the bed, curls himself around the empty space to his left. He thinks about shutting his eyes and pretending, but in the end desire will out, he thinks.
Toby is buttoning up a shirt now. A light grey one that shimmers in the after-dawn light, dazzling Sam. He blinks and Toby comes back into focus: broad back, his arms shadowing as he tucks the shirt into his pants - that dark line drawn between the flesh of the arm and the bone, the black hair there that draws Sam's eye, that produces a strange sting of longing in the pit of his stomach. Toby has worn this shirt already this week; the sleeves are already rolled up. Sam frowns.
The tie is last, and it is thrown over the chair near to the bed. Toby turns around, and meets Sam's eyes.
"Good morning."
Sam feels like saying: is it? But nods instead. "Hey."
Toby reaches for the tie; breaks eye contact. Sam sees the glint of the gold chain at his collar, still undone. Then sees it disappear under the working of deft hands and a black tie. He looks up at his friend, zooms out. Toby seems to be drawn all in black and white, funereal, sober. Like Brooklyn, Sam thinks, on a rainy morning. Only his eyes have colour, and his mouth. A glimmer of sweet brown and a gash of dark red. Sam remembers them both in a different setting and feels the sting in his belly take another jab. Toby takes the three steps to the bed, and leans over, and kisses Sam - not sweet, though mostly tasting of toothpaste, but still Toby, which is to say obfuscated and wry. Promises, but all of them in code. Sam kisses him back, and reaches up to touch his collar, running the starchy cotton through thumb and fingertip. He is still fascinated, and his fact-gathering still raises more questions than it answers.
Toby runs the centre of his hand - neither palm nor fingertips but the between parts - over Sam's hair. And for a second looks ... vulnerable.
After that they had talked more. Always after dark, always alone. Sam imagined Toby at the centre of a vignette of light, slowly growing narrower, holding the phone to his ear, sometimes with his eyes closed. Sam would wait until the day, the pointless day, was over and go home and turn off all his own lights and take the cordless phone into the darkest of his rooms and remove his tie and undo his top two shirt buttons and dial. He would sit in the growing dusk for hours with the fingers of his left hand pressed against his throat, not yet able to really understand why Toby's voice is the only feature of each portion of time he passes in this house, in this state, that feels like home. Nothing on Toby's side of the conversations they have indicate that he knows that, or feels the same way, or that he was doing anything beside reaching out into the distance to push his failures across the other side of America to live with the only one of his friends he knows will never care what he says or fails to say, or fails to do, or provide. But Sam listened every time for the lengthened syllable of his name in Toby's mouth, and how it felt warm and safe, and as though it could be ever-lasting.
There was no invitation; no come see me; no lie about Josh having missed him or C.J. wanting to take him out, get him drunk and put him to bed; nothing about Will Bailey wanting to swop notes on how to survive his time in the Deputy's office with as few casualties as possible. Just one night and Toby's voice on the line, pressure in Sam's chest pushing on him to say it, just say it (i miss you) and on his back the weight of Toby's cadences, and the things his sighs were still trying to hide.
Toby had said, "Call me when you get in." And Sam had, from the airport, shivering because he'd forgotten how the temperature dropped back east even though it was almost summer, if only in name. Toby's car was the same, and stuttered out of the car park on its second try. Sam didn't understand why he expected something different and for twenty minutes or so, while they drove to the house in silence, he felt almost okay, taking long breaths of air that smelt of distant cigars and scotch and the scent of the curls gathered at the back of Toby's neck that Sam has smelt twice in his whole life and never forgotten.
Then they get to the house and the key turned in the lock and Sam felt all the air go out of Toby's lungs in one go, in the second before he stepped over the threshold, like he's working up to a promise or a proposition or a penance. Sam wasn't sure which it was then.
"Do you have to go?"
"It's Saturday, Sam."
"Yeah. Sorry. I forgot."
Toby sits on the end of the bed. His thigh presses against Sam's ribs -- warm, trembling a little. After a second Toby starts bouncing his knee up and down and Sam smiles, if a little sadly.
"Go. You should go."
"Ah -are you ... okay?"
"What, you mean these bruises?" Toby's eyes fall away from his and a blush starts to rise on his cheeks. "Relax, Toby. I'm fine. I've had people bruise me before."
"Really?"
"No," he says truthfully, "Not really."
"I'm sorry," he says, his inflection almost making it a question: do you need me to apologise? do you want me to stop?
"Call it a souvenir," Sam says. He reaches out for Toby's knee, still bobbing in his peripheral vision. He puts his palm down over Toby's thigh, where it thins to the joint.
"I have to go pick the kids up today," he says, after a while that has passed around one point of warmth -- where Sam's fingers stroke concentric circles on Toby's leg. "I told you, right?"
"Yeah, you did."
"In a little bit."
"Okay."
More silence. Sam thinks Toby's breathing has slowed; calmed he would like to think. His own is shallow, nervous.
"There's a plane out of Dulles in a few hours. I'll get a cab."
Toby stares at a point in the distance, an apex; where Sam's black sweater, Toby's old jeans and Sam's new blue tie make a pyramid on the floor. He'd laughed when Sam unzipped the fly of those jeans and put his hands inside and pressed his fingers around flesh not yet hard but so warm and right, actually laughed. Sam had needed to stop himself doing a double-take. Laughed, then shivered, and thrust his hips desperately into Sam's hands.
"You d-don't need to do that."
"Toby -- "
"Stay. I-I'd like you to stay."
Sam realises that his hand has stopped moving on Toby's thigh. He can't seem to make it start again.
"All right."
That first night he spent on the sofa, in the sparsely furnished living room conspicuous with unpacked boxes and a television that wasn't plugged in. He'd listened to the wind curling around the house and gotten up in the night to stand in the kitchen, feet freezing and his arms wrapped around himself for warmth because all he had on was a tee shirt and old sweatpants, standing on old stone flagstones looking out through the doors that opened into the overgrown garden and thinking how little of Toby he could see in that house; how he felt more like the gale rattling the doors, blowing through rooms that still wanted to be empty, looking for a way out. He'd stood there a long time, half-expecting -- or hoping -- with the last vestiges of his romantic sensibilities, that he would turn round and find Toby standing behind him, watching too. But an hour had passed and Sam realised he could hardly feel his toes anymore, so he went back to the sofa and fell asleep for something to do.
In the morning he'd found Toby in the kitchen, nursing a mug of black coffee, staring out into the garden. He'd wanted to say what happened here? and ask why everything in the house was so cold, so lost and impersonal; nothing like the chaos of Toby's old place, with papers and briefing books and the contents of weeks' of the content of his briefcase exploded throughout the apartment, like little cherry bombs of personality; not like that but sterile, deliberately empty. A house waiting for a family where no family could come.
He had sat down at the other end of the kitchen table and returned the smile Toby had attempted, and accepted the coffee he pushed across the table. They watched the sun fall on the green plants and white flowers in silence, until Toby drained his coffee and walked out of the room, his shoulder and the rustle of his clothes brushing across Sam's bare arm as he passed.
Sam thought he realised what they were doing a poor, anhedonic impression of sooner than Toby, but he was never sure. Not until later.
"My rabbi has come to expect this kind of thing from me," Toby says, up to the ceiling.
"He's Reform though, right? So anything goes."
"You're really clued-up on your Judaism, Sam."
"I try," Sam says, his mouth buried in the thick, dark hair that gathers like the lines on a topographical map around Toby's navel. He licks the pelt upwards, just to see the hair stand up on end, then smoothes it down with a forefinger.
"Yeah, you really try," Toby says. His hands are resting on Sam's shoulders and they are light, almost forgettable. Every now and then one hand curls about the side of Sam's neck, fingertips stroke the short hair behind his ear. Sam is trying to give the shivers this engenders back in kind but Toby is still, unmoved.
Sam likes this bed, prefers it greatly to the sofa and the draught from the kitchen doors and the unnatural tinkling the incongruous chandelier makes in the night, waking him with a start from whatever half-formed night thoughts he was having. The bed is warm, soft, built for two. That he isn't the second the lease was originally intended to provide for is something he is trying to put out of his mind. He licks Toby's belly, up, then down, down, under the elastic of his shorts.
"Sam."
"Please. I'll be quick."
"You sound like a bad porno, Sam."
Sam looks up, props himself up on his elbows. "You don't want a blowjob? Fine."
"I-I didn't say that."
Sam smiles, at the stutter, at the blush, at the twitch of blood-rush on blowjob his hand just smothered.
"I won't let you be late. Don't worry."
"I do worry!"
"I have a very good sense of time, Toby. Don't worry."
"You have a very good sense of time?"
"I do!"
"I'd just rather not go off the road, you know?"
"Go off the road?"
"Because I can't keep my eyes open!"
"You really haven't gotten any lately, huh?"
"Sam!"
Sam laughs, then presses a kiss down on the flesh of Toby's left thigh. "It really won't cause you to lapse unbidden into unconsciousness, Toby. Trust me. I know I'm good but, even so."
"Sam, could you, please -- "
"Just shut up."
"Sam -- "
"And close your eyes."
No-one knew he was back; they told no-one. Toby didn't ask whether he ever wanted that to change and Sam found that he couldn't bring the topic up himself. It was too painful to begin again to try to understand the textures and extent of his failures in order that he might explain them to other people. They lived in the house, and the house fed them its silences.
Last night Toby had brought paperwork back from the office: a briefcase full of the west wing and the smell of the hallways billowing off his coat as he blustered through the front door. Sam had gulped up air in the kitchen, bare feet on the flagstones once more, his arms straining to keep him upright, quivering with the sugar crash of memory and the pictures he could feel flickering across his back and chest like home movies of a self who went missing months ago. He had barely registered the pressure of Toby's hand between his shoulder blades, the gentle stroke of Toby's thumb around a vertebral knob; even less Toby's calm breathing, over the noise his own had been making, over the rage of unordered feelings piling up thoughts and doubts and recriminations in his own mind, too loud and self-obsessed to worry over even the most opaque of motives, even Toby's. He had been well on his way to a full-scale panic attack by the time Toby's hand was firm on his shoulder and his voice was telling Sam to drink, holding the glass of water up to his lips, stroking the short hair at the back of his neck, and Sam in sensory overload, unable to tell by that point whether Toby had two hands or ten or why his skin felt as though it was on fire wherever it was touched, febrile, almost choking on the water, sucking in breaths that tasted of stone and the scent of Toby's hair.
Some darkness fell. Sam must have slept.
He had opened his eyes on the hated couch which could never be the equal of its cousin in the office and heard Toby say, "Hey."
"Hey."
"You looked like you needed to sleep," he said. "Sorry about the couch."
Sam hadn't said anything. He hadn't asked or made any motions toward. He had been determined not to -- it didn't seem fair, not with the twins and this house and all the discarded things inside it which he had obviously bought for Andy, like the house itself and its half-written story. But Toby had kissed him anyway, kneeling beside the couch with the kind of surety in his eyes that Sam remembered in a way that made those old days seem for a brief time like they weren't just a dream he had been having in his bed, far away.
They didn't talk; Sam hadn't learnt how yet, and Toby never would. The couch kept them for an evening, and then the bed. And after they had fucked each other, with the taste of Toby's body in his mouth, Sam had half-thought, and half-dreamt, about running -- running fast towards the only arms he had been sure would take him in, since they had been the only ones which hadn't wanted to lose him.
He waits in the kitchen because it seems like the right place. It smells of failures and fear and the anticipation of pain, which makes it the perfect waiting room. And when he hears the key click in the front door lock his whole body jolts; a concentrated shiver of terror. He gets up because it's what he thinks he ought to do -- his mom's voice in his head is instructing him on how to be a good guest, hard-wiring, stronger than the most profound fear. So he walks into the hall.
"Hey guys ... hey, Huck? Wake up, honey. Say hi to Sam."
Neither baby is crying, neither looks really awake. The one Sam assumes is Huck (blue hat) is nestled against Toby's chest, perfectly still but for one hand bobbing in the air, fingers curling and uncurling in Toby's beard. Molly (red hat) has her eyes open, looking down the hall with the amazed one-in-a-lifetime expression of curious babies everywhere. He tries a little wave for her.
"Hey guys," he echoes.
"They're still sleepy," Toby says, whispers, in a voice Sam has only heard him use once before, ringing like the last peal of the last bell in Sam's head.
He never stops talking to them: a running commentary on everything minor and not, as they progress through the stages of settling into the house, including the faulty wiring in the chandelier; voting patterns in Oregon; why Columbian coffee is better than Kenyan and how they can use that knowledge in the future to prove that Sam is an idiot; a few rounds of the alphabet in which neither Toby nor Sam can think of anything but 'xylophone' when 'x' comes by; and songs from black sheep to Bob Dylan to Bei Mir Bist Du Schein. Sam just listens, because he does not trust his own voice.
He wanders in the house that night, while Toby is bathing the kids, gathering in what he knows in this strange, fractured house: how it has quietened the squall in Toby's chest that Sam thought could never be settled; how Sam knows that Toby is hiding now, from the bright blinding pain that is all over this place, written on the walls and hidden in the cupboards, twisting out of shape all the memories he never got the chance to make right; how Toby never looks at this house, never seems to take a lot of notice of whether it is clean or dirty beyond the plates in the sink and the cots upstairs, that he hasn't put up pictures or written anything on the blackboard by the refrigerator and everything that Sam thinks of as Toby's own was brought in through the front door in a briefcase or a pocket, or Toby's arms; how Sam thinks that so much of this place only exists in Toby's head now, mourned like a disappeared lover, that you forget for a moment in the first blink of the morning is really gone.
But around the twins there is a small, thousand-atom halo of warmth; a coloured frame or two in the middle of a black and white movie. Sam saw the tears in Toby's eyes before he turned away quickly, without saying anything; not yet, not tonight.
Sam lies with his face close to Toby's throat, calmed inside, restful. His hands have gathered in the hollow their combined weight has made in the middle of the bed, his fingers warmed by the curve of Toby's belly. Sam smiles when a kiss lands on his forehead, without opening his eyes.
"One of them's awake anyway," Toby whispers. "I'll be back."
Sam falls back into sleep waiting, listening to the sounds of a child crying mingle into those of a man singing and a house reconciling. High winds rattle the windows, but they are firmly locked out.