He would’ve run to the shower, except for the fact that he didn’t think he wanted to run again. Ever. However, the heat of the shower did little more than getting sweat off of his overheated body. The muscles of his back were too tense and his legs too achy for it to do much good. He decided the whole standing thing overrated- he cursed himself for not investing in a bathtub. After a few fruitless moments, he shut the steaming water off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked out into his bedroom. He pulled trusted grey sweats on over Calvin Klein boxers and put on a pair of socks, feeling the draft drifting across his cold wooden floors.
With a sigh, he collapsed unceremoniously on top of his king sized bed and feebly kicked the quilt and Israeli cotton sheets away from him. “I’m never doing that again.” He groaned.
Ziva, fresh but not horribly sweaty, strode in her smooth, graceful way through the bedroom door. She had changed from the athletic warm-ups she wore for the run into pair of dark grey cotton athletic leggings under one of Tony’s massive, well-loved Ohio State t-shirts. Her feet were in black socks, apparently having felt the draft as well. Her olive skin was flushed, and her wild brown curls were pulled back in a ponytail. “Do not be such a baby, Tony,” she chuckled, “It was only eight miles.”
“Only eight?” He said incredulously as she crossed the floor and sat on the bed next to him.
“I specifically recall you saying you ran a half marathon five days a week when you were at Ohio State,” she retorted, chocolate eyes alight with humor.
“Yeah, but that was over twenty years ago and I was playing basketball.” Tony grumbled good-naturedly and lifted up his arm, inviting her in next to him. She complied, snuggling into his side and turning in on him, draping her right leg over his two. Her t-shirt rode up; revealing toned olive flesh over her adorable flat-yet-convex stomach that frustrated her ceaselessly. He put his hand on her hip, lazily stroking it over the smooth, muscled plain of her back and divots that he knew now were those gorgeous dimples…
He smiled a little. He would never have seen himself here last October. That time the previous year, he had no idea where Ziva was- she was on her quest to heal in Israel and god-knows where else. He was hurting, spending countless hours at NCIS, working in order to avoid his apartment and the empty reality that she wasn’t there.
Now, he was at home as much as possible in order to spend more time with Ziva, so he could see the lines around her wide brown eyes crinkled into a true smile, one with teeth, so different from the Mona Lisa one she used to don all the time. So he could feel her body wrapped around his in an affectionate manner she would have been totally averse to before “restarting.” He was in heaven, and grateful. The woman he loved was there, lying- next to him or on top of him? He wasn’t sure how to distinguish which her current position was. Whichever it was, it was pleasant. The woman he loved was lying with him and he was happy. As long as those two facts stayed true, he was the luckiest guy on the planet. He smiled at the curly dark mass of hair that was resting on his shoulder. “Only one habit you’re still keeping up from Mossad, and it has to be running?” He chuckled, not really even supporting his own side of the argument anymore. Somehow, the aches and pains had magically lifted from his muscles with her presence, and if a run led to this- hey, who was he to complain?
“It is good for you, and,” she chuckled, poking a few times at his recently less-pudgy abdomen, “is showing.”
He ego got a nice little boost from that. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.” He craned his neck to place a kiss on top of her brunette curls which had somehow come undone from their ponytail. “Actually, Sweet Cheeks,” he mused, “I think I was wrong. There was one more habit you kept up.”
“Oh?” She said, twisting flexibly to gaze directly at him. Her once-haunted wide brown orbs finally had only light in them, or in this case, laughter. “And what is that?”
He kissed her squarely on the lips. “Me.”
