Work Text:
The Manchester wind follows two lonely souls into a hotel elevator.
Jet lag. Too much to drink.
She dances to a song they’d heard at the bar. He catches her.
Toby’s thumbs graze the ticklish part of CJ’s cheeks, her ears, the chain around her neck. Holds her like a lifeline, close enough to drown her senses in the soap he uses to wash his clothes.
“We work together,” she says.
“Technically, you start tomorrow,” he says.
Their lips touch. He gives her the briefest of pauses, a final way out. But she wants to go where the highway ends, on a road traveled before but never this far.
When Toby kisses CJ, it makes perfect sense. And no sense at all.
CJ can only think of Andy—how he probably kissed her like this; how she’s kissed her countless times before he ever did.
Come morning, she won’t remember his wiry beard rubbing against her face, cigar breath ghosting over her mouth; he’s clumsy, muttering his wife’s name, and she’s running her fingers through his hair and pressing herself flush against his waist,
like a body double,
driving
down
that
heartbroken
highway,
to see what Andy sees in him.