A/N: Hi guys! Long time no chapter! I know, I know… I'm a bad author… I'm trying to be better. And I shall start… NOW! Okay so here's the real chapter 19, which will be put in the chapter 20 spot because I'm not taking down my apology letter, which I really do feel bad about abandoning y'all for a year (yes, I know I used 'y'all' and no, I'm not from the south. I'm from Boston…) and I'm going to spend these next few months trying to make up for it.

I don't have a foreseeable end to this fic, so, for the time being, it will just be continuing. I hate endings. And change.

Disclaimer: No, sadly I do not own NCIS or Tony and Ziva would have been together YEARS AGO. COME ON WRITERS, YOU HAVE ONE JOB! But I will just sit here and pretend otherwise. Enjoy guys!

O.o.O

When I woke up in the morning, I heard music coming from the living room. I looked at the clock, which told me that it was only eight. That meant I had only gotten seven and a half hours of sleep last night, as I had stayed up late texting Sam. She messaged me the second she got home and demanded details. I didn't have a lot to tell her, as she had been there the whole time and I had been with her for most of it, but I indulged her anyway.

Nate had been really sweet last night, getting us drinks and dancing and smiling the whole time. Between our first kiss after his favorite song and the last kiss at my door, we'd only kissed three other times, none of which Sam knew about before I told her at midnight. I knew she was happy for me.

When I left my room, I found Ziva in the living room, cleaning up dishes and other things from last night.

"Laila Tov. Did I wake you?" she asked. I knew that 'laila tov' meant 'good morning' in Hebrew as she had said it before.

"No," I told her, not wanting to make her feel bad. "Tony's still not home?"

"No, but he should be sooner or later. He is going to ask about last night," she said.

"Yeah… I know," I said.

"What are you going to tell him?" she asked.

"That I had a great time," I said.

"I meant about Nate," she said.

"Yeah… I was just planning to leave Nate out of it," I said.

"He is going to ask about him and you and I both know it," Ziva said.

"What do I say? Oh, and by the way, Nate kissed me. What's for lunch?" I asked.

She laughed. "Did he ask you out?" she asked, curious.

"Would you tell Tony if he had?" I asked.

"No, I would let you tell him," she said. "Did he?"

"No," I said.

"Are you disappointed?"

"I really don't know," I told her.

"Is there someone else?" she asked like she had read my mind.

"Maybe?" I said, tipping up at the end without meaning to.

"Does he go to your school?" she asked, trying to pry it out of me because I wasn't offering up any information.

"He used to," I said.

"Is he in Italy?" she guessed.

"Damn, you're good," I sighed. "His name is Nicolo and we've been friends since we were little," I explained.

"And you are not sure how you feel about him because you have not seen him in so long," she said, nodding, understanding.

"Yes! And now I don't know what to do about Nate. If he asks me out, and I go to Italy, what if I like Nico? What if he doesn't ask me out and Nicolo does? What do I do, Ziva?" I asked.

"I think you should just go with the tide. If Nate asks you out, then that's great. If he doesn't, that's alright too. If Nicolo does, then if it's meant to be, you can work it out. As the saying goes in Spanish, que será será. Whatever will be, will be," she told me.

O.o.O

A little while later, I got a text from Nate. Wanna go out to lunch? The text asked.

Okay. I texted back.

"Hey, Ziva?" I asked. She and I were watching TV on the couch.

"Yes?" she asked, not looking at me.

"Can I go out to lunch with Nate?" I asked her. That made her head turn.

"He asked you out to lunch?" she asked, a smile growing on her face.

I blushed. "Yes," I said.

"Of course you can go. I will cover for you with Tony. He should be home soon," she told me.

"Ziva, you are the best!" I said and hugged her.

"No problem. Where is he taking you?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask," I said and then texted him When and where?

The reply came in a few seconds: Just let me in.

I was confused, but went to open the door anyway. And there he was standing there and smiling.

"What if I had said no?" I asked, smiling and letting him in.

"Well that would have sucked," he answered.

"Okay then. I just need to change and then we can go. I'll be ready in a few minutes," I told him.

"Sounds good," he said.

I walked back into the living room with Nate behind me. "Ziva, look who's here," I said to her.

She didn't bat an eye. "Hello, Nate," she said.

"Hi," he said back. "I'm sorry; I don't remember your name."

"Ziva. I'm Alyx's brother's girlfriend," she explained.

"I'm going to go get dressed. I'll be back in a few minutes," I told them both and then went down the hall to my room.

Once I closed the door, I ripped through my drawers in the dresser trying to find something to wear. I settled on jeans, a semi-nice purple button-up top, and a blue windbreaker because it wasn't warm enough to go without. I brushed my hair and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I figured I look alright, grabbed my wallet, keys, and phone, and went back out to the living room.

We said goodbye to Ziva and then went out to Nate's car. It was small and silver, but it suited him. he gallantly opened the passenger door for me before walking around the front of the car and getting in the driver's side.

"I like your car," I told him, admiring the cross hanging from the rear view mirror between us.

"It's my brother's, actually," he said as we pulled out into traffic.

"It's nice of him to let you borrow it. Tony almost never lets me use his car," I said.

"Well, he doesn't have much use for it on a ship in the Indian Ocean," he said, looking over at me quickly and smiling.

"He is in the Navy?" I asked. I didn't know much about Nate's family as he didn't really talk about them.

"Yep, enlisted at eighteen. He's almost twenty now, his birthday is in two months," he told me.

"Wow, you must miss him," I said.

"Yeah, he's a great brother. He taught me everything that my father didn't, like cars and basketball."

"When will he be home?" I asked, hoping it was going to be soon.

"That's kind of why I asked you to come to lunch with me," he said. At my confused look, he continued. "He got home late last night, like at three am. Do you want to meet my family?" he asked.

"I think I am a little underdressed," I told him as we pulled up to a house and parked behind a blue pickup truck.

He got out of the car and walked around to my side to open the door. "You look perfect," he promised. He took my hand and led me into the house. "Hey, everyone. This is Alyx," he said.

Four pairs of eyes looked me up and down as we walked in. Nate's father was young-looking and fit, even though he was in his mid-forties at least. Nate resembled him more than he did his mother who was very thin with blonde hair and was maybe a few inches over five feet tall. Had his younger sister been born a few years earlier, she and Nate would have been twins. His brother resembled his mother more, but while the features on her made her look more feminine, they made his brother look more masculine. Had I not known he was in the military, I would have guessed that he was. He had that look about him.

Nate's mother came up to me first, a large smile on her pretty face. "Hi, my name's Andrea. Nate's told us a bit about you. Welcome," she said, shaking my free right hand while Nate still held onto my left. I smiled back and said hello.

His father was next. "Nice to meet you. I'm James Burton." His handshake was strong and firm like Gibbs' was.

Nate's brother stayed seated as he said hello because there was a younger girl on his lap, maybe eleven or twelve and who was not moving. "I'm Gabe and this is Danielle, our little sister," he said from the couch. Danielle was slight, but tall for her age. I figured it must be hard on her to have her oldest brother gone so much; I knew I wouldn't like it very much.

A sound came from the kitchen that sounded like the oven timer. "Lunch is ready," Nate's mom announced as she moved towards the next room. "Everybody sit down at the table." Nate's father turned off the TV and everyone moved into the dining room.

We all walked into the dining room and everyone migrated to their seats like they always sat there. Nate pulled me along with him and held out a chair and motioned for me to sit in it. His sister plopped down on my left, Nate's father on the other side of Nate at one end of the table, Gabe across from Nate and Nate's mom on the other side of Danielle at the other end of the table. Just as everyone started serving themselves from the massive plates of food Nate's mom had cooked, there was a rustling at the door and a female voice called out, "Hello?"

"We're in the dining room, Mia," Andrea called to the voice.

A girl tall girl with blonde hair walked around the corner from the living room and screamed when she saw Gabe, who had stood up and walked around the table to where he was just out of sight from the living room. She ran over to him and buried her face in his neck, hugging him tightly. He was hugging her back just as hard. I figured that Mia was Gabe's girlfriend. When Mia stopped crying a few minutes later, the two of them sat down next to each other across the table from me.

Mia briefly took her eyes off Gabe and, when she noticed me, she looked away and then did a double take. "Hi, sorry, I don't know who you are. I'm Mia, Gabe's girlfriend," she said and extended her arm over the table to shake my hand.

"I'm Alyx, Nate's friend from school," I said, shaking over the mashed potatoes.

"Nice to meet you," she told me.

All through lunch everyone was talking. Gabe told a lot of stories from his time at sea and his family filled him in on things he'd missed while he was gone. I mostly stayed quiet because this was a family thing, but it was nice to just listen and watch. It wasn't awkward to sit there with them and, even though I didn't do much talking, it was nice to just be around people who obviously loved each other so much. It was like being at NCIS with the team, who all got along like a mismatched family. Ducky acted as the grandfather, Gibbs as the father, and Tony, Ziva, Tim, and Abby as the children. Tony obviously saw himself as the eldest child and, when Gibbs wasn't around, would make himself seem important and would look down on the others. Not in a bad way, unless you were Tim, who was always the butt of Tony's jokes.

This family was the same as my NCIS family. Mia fit in with everybody as flawlessly as if she'd been born into the Burton family. Occasionally they would ask me a question, to keep me a part of the exchange, but I knew this was Gabe's day, so I made my answers short and tried to direct the conversation back to him. I didn't mind this and I genuinely wanted to know more about him and everyone at this table. I laughed at Gabe's stories and smiled when Nate would glance at me ever so often and smile.

O.o.O

When lunch was over, Nate took me on a tour of their house. It was a modest four bedroom and all of the Burton children decorated their rooms quite differently. Danielle had books stacked up everywhere, bookshelves overrun and piling up on the floor. She had a few posters on her light purple walls. Besides the books everywhere, her room was very neat. Nate explained that their parents loved keeping a clean house. Gabe's room was the obvious place to go if you wanted music. He had more stacks of CDs than Danielle had books. His tastes ran from rock to pop and, surprisingly, I saw a few country albums in the midst. He had posters of concerts that Nate told me that Gabe had gone to and there were even some signed band t-shirts framed and hung on the walls.

Nate's room was very much a mix of his sibling's rooms. He had a small bookshelf full of books with a CD shelf next to it. The main things in Nate's room were sports trophies, sports memorabilia, and movies. I laughed a little bit, recognizing right away some movies that he and Tony had in common. With an avid movie freak for a brother, in the year and a half that I'd been living with him, he'd introduced me to some of his favorites. It was something we easily bonded over, though his love of movies far outweighed my own.

As I looked around the room, Nate sat on his neatly made bed and watched me take it in. "What do you think?" he asked.

"I think, once my brother gets over the fact that I'm friends with you, you two will have a lot in common. He loves movies," I said.

"Why would he care if we're friends?" he asked, looking confused.

"He's a bit… Over-protective," I told him.

Nate smiled. "I think we can work past that."

"I don't know, I don't think you have enough faith in him. He's been known to hold grudges," I teased. He made a face at me and I made one back at him as I sat down in his desk chair which was at the foot of his bed. "I'm really glad I got to meet your family. I like them," I told him.

"Yeah, I'm a bit partial to them myself. It'll be nice to have Gabe back for a little while. My mom loves it when we have the whole family together. He said he might be home until mid-July or August."

"It's a shame I'll be missing that. I leave in a couple of weeks. Right after school gets out," I said.

"And you'll be gone all summer?" he asked, looking a little put-down by this news.

"Yeah, I get back a week before school starts again," I answered. "But we'll keep in touch."

"Will you have internet when you're over there? We can email and keep in touch if you do."

I laughed. "I don't know what my friends brothers would do if they didn't have internet access. All they do is play video games," I told him. "I will be online. Trust me."

Nate stood up. "Well, we should get back out there. I'm glad that you like them. I know they like you too," he assured me.

I smiled and he led me down the hall back to the living room where we could hear talking and laughing.

O.o.O

A/N: Okay, please don't hate me! I know I said that I would have this up in January, but then it got crazy and then, the next thing I knew, it was February. So sorry, guys. But I tried to make up for it with a long chapter. Please tell me what you think. I do have another chapter in the works; I just need to find the notebook that it's in…

Please keep an eye out for the next chapter, which I'm hoping I can get out soon. Most likely this month. Thanks for reading and sticking with me through all of this! I'm trying to be a better author.