The ex-cop and ex-assassin.

They didn’t talk about it. In fact, they were careful to avoid it, not just the specifics, but the general shape of what they had, what they did, or what it might mean. Weeks slunk past, then months, in a low-grade fever of clandestine sex. It began as that one-time event, tequila, neither of them wanting to be alone that night, not really and a warmth between them that wasn’t the tequila’s but could be attributed to it, if they ever needed to assign blame. Afterward, she dressed in silence and left easily with a kiss to his lips and a slip out the door. But the next time he showed up at her apartment, six days later, and the time after, and the time after, it lost the shock and started to feel inevitable. She kept telling herself it was nothing. No, not nothing. Something, but not something that needed to be named or examined. Something that could exist in parallel to her other life, her other needs. Sometimes they had dinner together, sometimes they just drank and went to her bed, or, more than once, on the living room floor, or with the television murmuring in the background and the city’s sirens washing the windows with blue and red. She liked the way he would make her laugh, on those rare evenings when laughter felt possible and she liked the way he smelled, clean, always, the sharpness of cologne. She especially liked the way he listened, a rare quality in men, rarer in ones like Tony. But sex was sex. And glorious sex it was. She could keep it there. She was sure of it, right up until the day she couldn’t.

The day broke open not with sunlight but with the pale, hysterical blue of an April morning in Maryland, all too eager to expose last night’s bruising. Tony found his awareness surfacing in layers, first the birds, raucous and rude, like a gang of coked-up McGees; then the damp ache that started in his thigh and radiated up past his ribcage, which felt far too tender. Ziva was already yards ahead, her stride brutal, almost predatory. Each time her foot struck the dew-wet grass it sounded like a dare, an assertion of will, impossible not to notice. Tony, trailing, was struck suddenly by the shape she made against the horizon. The curve of her shoulders, the perfect economy of movement, the way she seemed to percept the terrain so effortlessly, as if her body contained a topography that mapped itself onto the world wherever she went. He struggled to keep up and the ache in his thigh reminded him not just of his own wound, but of something deeper, a kind of spiritual limp he’d never quite outrun. She’d always been the one who set the pace, he realized, not just this morning or after the last case went sideways, but always. Ziva led, through gravestones and alleys and the labyrinthine corridors of the Navy Yard, she was the one who got them through, even when the mission was nothing but chaos and screaming and the clarity of a single gunshot. He’d worn the title of Senior Field Agent like a shield, a little ironic, a little ostentatious, but in the end it was her who people followed, her that McGee waited for cues from, her that even Gibbs, in his maddening, silent way, respected. It was her name they’d call in a firefight, her voice that cut through when everything else was static.

The city was a brick oven, holding the heat even after the sun had dipped below the skyline, the concrete radiating back at you in waves. Tony’s shirt clung to his back, sweat beading at his hairline as he strode through the humid dusk, but if he was being honest, the heat had nothing on what had gotten under his skin tonight. He navigated the familiar block, half on autopilot, half thinking about the way her hand had lingered on his arm earlier, the way her lips had brushed his ear when she’d whispered “See you later.” He could still smell her perfume, the faint citrus and jasmine and every step was a beat in the drumline building up to what would come next. He was a man driven by appetite. That had always been the joke, or maybe the truth and he’d learned early to make no apologies for it. But his history of appetites was full of fleeting things, snacks, cars, movies, women whose names he sometimes forgot before breakfast. Ziva was different. Ziva was the kind of hunger that gnawed at him long after the meal, the kind that left him haunted and hollow until he filled himself with more. They’d fallen into a rhythm lately. End of shift, change into civilian clothes, sometimes not even doing that, and he’d be knocking at her door. At first it had been drinks, then drinks and pizza, then drinks and pizza and her, sitting with her knees tucked under her chin on the sofa, her eyes holding his like she was daring him to do something about it, just like the first night he had. He was helpless in the face of her dare. He was helpless, period.