Chapter 1: One Plus One

Willow wasn’t sure why she was surprised at his instant reaction to her appearance. All she knew was that he kept glancing around the room like he was afraid someone he knew would walk in at any moment. Which was probably the smart thing to do, considering how embarrassing any answers he might have about her would be.

She watched him glance around one more time.

“Can you take me home?” she asked, blushing as his head whipped up and he gave her a questioning look.

“No! No, I mean, my place is in a pretty sketchy neighborhood and I’m a little too tired to pay enough attention to not get attacked or something.”

Toby gave her a fleeting grin.

“Sure.”

********

“So, how did you happen to wander into one of my, well, not favorite, but...”

“Um, I saw you,” Willow said as she and Toby took a seat on the cold stone steps of the apartment building she was staying in until her money ran out.

“Why were you in Washington?” he asked as he took off his overcoat and put it around her shoulders, practically swallowing her small frame.

It had been months since he had last seen her, but it felt like hours. As she looked at him with her huge frightened eyes, Toby felt a tight ball begin to form in the pit of his stomach. He tried to ignore it for the time being, more interested in how she had ended up here, in this rundown apartment building in the same city where he had been trying in vain to move his life forward.

“Um,” she said, sheepishly, moving her eyes from his and studying her hands a little too intensely.

Toby waited for her to finish, a thousand thoughts swarming through his head, the main one being how, even though he’d only known her for one night, he felt like she was one of his best friends. Which was odd, considering how few people he even considered friends.

Willow glanced up at him. “I actually saw you on tv. I was in kind of a bad place, and I was hiding in my hotel room from, well, the world I guess, and I turned on CNN and then ‘boom’, there you were, in some shot of the president boarding a plane to fly somewhere, and I just had this feeling that you were sort of the answer to that moment.” Willow took a deep breath, shaking her head a little. “Um, no pressure though.”

A small smile graced Toby’s face for a split second before he processed everything that the troubled redhead in front of him had said. “What kind of bad place?” he asked, instantly regretting it as her expression turned from hopeful fear to pain and then to almost no emotion.

“My girlfriend, um...” Willow began, shaking her head and taking a deep breath. “She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

Willow laughed, as Toby watched her, not sure how he was supposed to condole her.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh,” Willow said, sheepishly, “It’s just that, well, that’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.”

Toby nodded, waiting for her to continue.

“My friends are worried about me. They think I might do something crazy.”

“Like pack up all your belongings and move to Washington?”

Willow laughed, this time out of amusement, getting a little smile out of Toby in the process.

“I think we talked about this,” Willow replied, breathing an internal sigh of relief when she managed to slip in a reference to the time they had spent together and the man next to her didn’t flinch. “My, um, Tara, was shot and killed a few years ago and I sort of went off the deep end. People ended up getting hurt and the man that shot her was killed, and I sort of lost myself for a while. They’re just worried that it’ll happen again, I guess.”

Toby nodded. “It’s good to have friends who care about you.”

Smiling, Willow found herself nodding her agreement. “Yeah. They’re amazing people. It was almost as bad as losing Tara when I felt like I had lost them. But they took me back. And as much as I don’t want to lose them again, I feel like if they find me, well...”

“Come stay with me,” Toby said, his eyes growing wide right along with Willow’s as the words slipped out before he could stop them.

As a silence built between them, Toby found that he didn’t really regret asking.

Willow looked around at the graffiti covered buildings around her, before finally giving him a shy smile.

“Okay.”