Ande stared at the clock sitting on the wall in the diner. She had three minutes until Oliver would allow her to go on her fifteen minute lunch break. The whole morning had been dead, with only about five customers total coming in. Lauren and Ande would simply go back and forth, completely ignoring who was in their section. Usually Friday mornings weren't this bad, but apparently no one wanted to come get a fresh brewed coffee or a plate of Oli's famous Texan Flapjacks. It was lunch time now, obviously, but no one had walked through the doors in the last hour and Ande was getting a little worried.

Thirty seconds left, and Ande counted them softly under her breath. Her lunch break sounded amazing, since it would break the monotone dead feeling of an incredibly slow morning.

She only had ten seconds, ten measly seconds, before she was free and the diner was under Lauren's control, but the bell rung just as she counted out number nine, and it was her turn to get their table. Ande sighs, stops counting just before eight, and turns away from the clock to look at the customer that came in. She starts to put on a smile to greet them with, but it quickly transform into one of surprise.

"Tony?" Ande asks, surprised. The man smiles once he's fully in the door. After almost a month of coming in everyday fifteen minutes too late, he finally arrives just as Ande is getting off to eat her lunch.

"Will you eat lunch with me, today?" he asks, and Ande is still in too much shock to realize that he actually came earlier than his usual time. It takes her a few minutes to pick up her jaw from the floor and attach it back, before she nods and turns to go into the kitchen. Oliver has her tomato soup and patty melt waiting for her.

"Tony's usual," she says quietly, staring at her plate, not yet picking it up. Oliver notices.

"Something wrong, Ande?" Oliver asks, going to the fridge to pull out the bowl of chicken salad he had made just a little earlier.

"Tony he... he's here. He came early to eat lunch with me."

Oliver just grins and quickly fixes the meal he could make in his sleep. When he's done, Ande grabs Tony's plate and her own, taking it out of the kitchen. Tony is sitting in his usual seat at the counter, his fingers fiddling with a left over paper-straw wrapper. It's rolled into a little ball between his inked fingers. He stares at them, obviously lost in his thoughts until Ande sets down their plates. He looks up and gives her a wide smile.

Ande returns the smile, pushes some of her brunette hair behind her ear, and turns to fill up two glasses of the fresh lemonade Lauren had mixed that morning. Turning back around, Ande watches Tony as he fiddles with the paper ball a little more waiting for her to sit down. She places their glasses on the counter and walks around, taking off her apron, to sit beside him.

They don't speak, but to Ande, Tony's actions have spoken enough to her.

-----------

Ande fidgets as she stares at the clock. It's been three days since Tony has contacted her and Ande isn't quite sure of what to do with herself now. He always calls her, if not during her lunch break, then after three when she's off work. The last time Ande spoke to him, was at lunch the day he left for his job and it was just to tell her that they were leaving the office then and he loved her, again.

The words still give Ande goosebumps, but the nice kind. It makes her shiver and smile big and constantly think of how happy she's been these last seven months, but right now she was just worried.

Oliver had officially put her on kitchen duty while Lauren got the few tables there were. Ande couldn't make herself eat anything for her lunch that day, and instead stared into her soup and sipped at her lemonade. She had her cellphone on the highest volume no more than a foot away from her. Tony could call her at anytime and she was going to pick up no matter what.

However, during her whole shift on that third day of hearing nothing, Ande received no such call and was a mess driving back to her little apartment. At every red light she would look for Tony's shiny black truck, but she would only find white ones or bright yellow cabs or a scarce police car or a person on a bike that was trying to cross the street. Ande was ready at any moment to answer the phone and scold Tony for not calling her for three days before asking if everything was alright and telling him how worried she had been.

And that he owed her one of his delicious spaghetti dinners that he had made for her on her birthday two months ago.

The ride seemed longer than usual, and she was constantly looking for the large black truck with the little sticker in the corner of the back window of a turtle holding a lightsaber. It had been one of the most adorable things Ande had ever seen, and she loved it. The first time Ande had seen it was when Tony had taken them on their third date, an afternoon at the beach complete with fruit salad and a bottle of whip cream vodka. It had been a quiet Sunday since it was the middle of March and not too many people really go to the beach in the spring until it was Spring Break.

Just thinking about their little dates and cute hang outs made Ande even more worried. What if something had happened to him? What if that short little goodbye in the middle of her living room was the last time she would see him? Ande gripped the steering wheel tighter and felt sick to her stomach. They had only been dating for seven months, but Ande felt like maybe she found the eternal happiness she had been searching for, and that happiness was Tony.

Tony Perry, the geeky little guitar player that wanted to play in a band more than anything but his shyness kept him from walking out on a stage, and he simply put up with being a security guard for a money truck and drove around in his big black truck with Thrice and Thursday blasting out the open windows late Monday nights while he holds his snapback on with one hand and drives with the other with the biggest grin anyone has ever seen on his sweet face.

That was where Ande found happiness and she was too selfish to let it possibly slip through her fingers.

When Ande pulls into the drive way of the apartment complex, her heart stops beating when she finds Tony's black truck sitting in front of her apartment, numbered B4. Ande barely gives her car time to fully stop before she pulls the key from the ignition and throws her body from the vehicle. Her fingers fumble with her keys until she finds the one that opens her apartment. She had told Tony after their six month anniversary where her extra key was - stashed under the hat of the little garden gnome sitting on the edge of her tiny front step.

She bursts into the apartment, ready to see her boyfriend in order to scold him and hug him all at once. Ande does not get very far though.

Just from the front door, Ande can watch Tony as he bites onto one of her leather belts and digs a pair of pliers into a wide, bloody hole in his left arm. She can't tell what is blood and what is red ink of his tattoos. Tony hears her, and just as he tugs the pliers away, grasping what he was looking for, he looks up with tired, teary eyes. There's a black hoodie and bandana laying out on her kitchen table leaving his chest bare and a bit of it bloody.

There's a rifle and a large dufflebag sitting at his feet. The foreign object Tony had pulled from his body was dropped to the floor with a loud metallic clatter along with the belt he had clenched between his teeth.

"Ande," he said with a struggled voice, obviously in pain. "Let me explain."

Ande doesn't move, she just stands there. Tony groans as he bends over to reach into the dufflebag and pulls out a big bottle of amber colored whiskey. He unscrews the top with his good hand, flinching when he moves his left arm in a bad way, and then goes on to pour some of the alcohol over the wound. It sizzles like a snell, and causes Tony to bite his bottom lip to hold back a not-so-manly cry.

She only watches him do this, almost as if she's watching some television show.

"Please close the door," he tells her, but she barely hears it since it is a whisper. Ande steps two steps and lets the door firmly close behind her. She doesn't move, scared that something will jump out of the walls and attack her. Ande doesn't know what to think anymore.

Tony takes a large gulp of the whiskey to help burn away the pulsing pain in his arm.

"Ande," he calls out to her. She's simply a machine, a selfish, all-I-want-is-love machine that steps forward until she's suddenly in the kitchen three feet away from Tony. He sets the bottle on the top of the table beside the hoodie and the bandana. She watches him with calculating brown eyes, not missing a single movement of his body. Tony stands, and takes the few steps it is to wrap his good arm around her body and bury his nose into her hair.

It's been a long three days for the both of them.

"I've missed you so much, Ande," he tells her, sighing before inhaling her scent of flowery shampoo and coconut body wash. "I'm sorry I didn't call. Things didn't go as planned, but I'm okay, baby, I'm okay and I'm here with you again and everything is going to be okay." He tries to reassure her, to reassure himself, to make sure she won't have a panic attack or go into shock or simply leave him like he's been left so many times before.

Ande stared over Tony's shoulder. She stared out the little window into the world of San Diego and listened to his breath and his heart beat and all the sirens that began to sing in the city. There was the police, and the fire department, and the ambulances, and the little cars that weren't worth the price tag with the annoying alarms that screamed the person driving it wanted attention because of their wallet size and not how much heart they possessed.

"What are you not telling me?" Ande asked, her voice one steady tone. Tony's whole body tensed up before relaxing.

"The guys, Vic and Mike and Jaime, and I, we... we rob banks."

It's the first confession Ande gets and it is enough to make the brunette push away from him and begin her screaming.

"You're a criminal?! You rob banks?! Why are you just now telling me this, Tony? Why didn't you tell me this before you decided to start loving me? Why didn't you tell me this on our first date? Something like this you can't hide from a person, especially one you supposedly love!"

"I was trying to protect you!" he yelled for the first time at her, and it shocked her into silence. He quickly calmed down, however, and grabbed the package of gauze he had in the dufflebag and wrapped it around his left bicep. "I didn't tell you because this was supposed to be our last job before we had enough to leave us all well endowed for the rest of our lives. Something fell through, though. Casey didn't get the right info and when we went in, the cops were waiting for us. I got shot because I ran first. I couldn't deal with you finding out who I really was from a broadcast on the six o'clock news."

Ande continues to stare, her brown eyes slightly glassy. She would have been so mad at him if that had really happened.

"What about the others?" she asked with a scratchy throat.

"Pissed at me, but they're safe. Mike got a dislocated shoulder and Jaime twisted his ankle, but we're okay. Well, I did get shot but that's taken care of."

She looks down at the bloody bullet he pulled from his arm. It sits in a little puddle a few feet away. Ande then looks at Tony and observes his features. He's tired and sore and so happy to see her again all at the same time. She feels the same, truthfully. She's so glad to see him that her heart feels like it's going to burst any second.

The banging on her apartment door scares them both. Ande gasps, clenching a fist over her heart. Tony immediately reacts, using both of his arms, no matter how much it hurts, to push Ande behind him and grab the rifle he has sitting on the floor. The banging stops, but starts right back up again.

"Tone! Ande! Open up!" Vic yells from the other side.

Tony sighs, relaxes his body and puts the gun on the table. He massages the muscle above the wound, feeling the sting of more alcohol start to clean the skin. Ande stays in the kitchen, away from the bloody clothes and gun and empty dufflebag. Tony, shirtless and bloody and sweaty, opens the apartment door. Vic, Mike, and Jaime all stand, still dressed in black.

"What's up?" Tony asks. The look on Mike's face makes his blood run cold.

"Casey has been compromised. They have his laptop, they know where we live."

Tony always keeps a bag in the back of his truck, ready to run if he has to, but everything has changed this time around.

"They know about Ande."

Notes

Thank you to those that commented! Another chapter coming soon. :)