DISCLAIMER: Yeah, the SG-1 guys are all property of MGM, World
Gekko Corp and Double Secret productions. This is all in fun, no
infringement on copyrights or trademarks was intended. All other
characters, ideas, etc., herein are copyrighted to the author.
TITLE: PLANETARY SHIFTS 4: TOUCHING
AUTHOR: Rowan Darkstar
EMAIL: rowan_d1@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://www.beautyinshadows.net
RATING: (PG)
ARCHIVE: All archives fine as long as you let me know.
CATEGORIES: Angst, romance, Sam/Jack
SPOILERS: Through 'Threads'
SUMMARY: "Her hair was golden in the streaks of sunlight and her
nails were polished and she was still calling him 'sir', but she
had been crying on his neck two days ago, and this Carter scared
the bejesus out of him."

AUTHOR'S NOTE: A reminder to those following the series (since
I've been so darned slow getting this part posted), that this
universe essentially turns AU some time after "Gemini", and
although certain plot points were borrowed from "Threads" (before
it even aired), other plot developments in "Threads" and
thereafter did NOT happen in this universe.



Endless thanks to my betas, most of whom jumped in on quite short
notice and performed brilliantly.:) -- Teddy E, SheaClaire,
Jennghis Khan, and Foxcat





"Planetary Shifts 4: Touching"
by
Rowan Darkstar (rowan_1@yahoo.com)
Copyright (c) 2005



Fate was playing cruel games with him. That was nothing new.
But this time, it had him thinking about Bruce Willis and the
late 90s and how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?

He really had meant to avoid the traffic. Really. He had formed
the habit a long time ago; cutting through Carter's neighborhood
on his drive from the grocery store back to his house. The route
had become habit. It hadn't started as a way to drive by
Carter's house every Saturday afternoon and see if she was around
in case she didn't show up at work on Monday morning and no one
had seen her for 48 hours. It had been all about avoiding the
traffic. Right. The traffic. In any case, the route had become
habit, so he was knee deep in his current situation before he
knew he was wading in.

Jack O'Neill sat behind the wheel of his truck, parked at the
curb, signal flashing for others to pass. He wished his truck
were equipped with a cloaking device, so he could stop
concentrating on becoming one with the shrubbery.

Carter stood in her front yard. Two houses down and to his
right. Too clearly in his line of sight, but out of range to
hear.

He sat there, witness to something he was never meant to see,
because he couldn't move forward or back without drawing her
attention. She would know his truck in a heartbeat.

Their movements were like a dance. He had never really thought
about how graceful Carter could be. But not everyone could look
so beautiful with a gun in her hand.

No guns today.

Every movement spoke all he needed to hear.

She was letting Pete go.

She was breaking his heart, and maybe a little of her own.

Carter looked at her lover in the silence between their words,
brow tensed in lines Jack knew far too well. She glanced away;
he knew there were tears in her eyes.

He shouldn't have watched.

He couldn't look away.

Carter lowered her eyes, clasped her hands at her waist. It took
Jack a moment to realize she was taking off the ring. With
tenderness he was rarely privileged to see, she reached out and
lifted Pete's hand from his side, placed the ring in his open
palm. Pete shook his head, pushed her away. Jack saw the pain
flash across Carter's face, but she moved in closer to Pete,
grasped his hand and pressed the ring into it, closed his fingers
around the tiny piece of her life and held them closed with her
own strong hand.

She stood so close to him, her eyes cast down, Pete looking away,
but Jack had stood that close to Carter and he knew how blinding
it could be.

Pete was still fighting. A struggle was being waged, an
inevitable truth wrestled against hope. But there was nothing
left to say. He saw certainty in every line of Carter's body.

Jack watched as they moved apart. He watched Carter bite her lip
and tilt her head, as though if she could fix this the way she
fixed DHDs she would stay awake on coffee for weeks and make
certain they never failed again. He watched Carter reach out a
hand and smooth her palm down the length of Pete's arm, then turn
away. He watched as she swung back and threw her body up against
Pete's, crushing him to her in a fierce embrace that made Jack's
stomach burn. He watched as Pete's arms caught her on instinct,
cradling her close as he must have done so many times before.

Pete cupped a hand to the back of Carter's head and she turned
into his neck for the briefest breath. Then she pulled back.
She stepped away and stared at the concrete walk.

Pete waited only a moment, then he turned and walked through the
gate.

Pete drove his car in the opposite direction, never glancing down
the street at the F350 parked by the side of the road.

Carter remained on the walkway, eyes on the concrete path.

Jack closed his eyes; opened them enough to watch his fingers
clenched at the bottom of his steering wheel. Watching Carter
alone was a deeper intrusion than watching Carter with Pete.

When he looked up, she had turned and taken a step toward her
house. She was tall and quiet and beautiful in jeans and a
fitted sweater with hair that caught the sun. She raked a hand
through her hair. Then, she pulled off her shoe and hurled it
toward the side of her house, narrowly missing a window. Her
hand moved to shade her eyes, and he knew she was crying. Sam
was crying. Not the kind of quiet tears that bled through the
unfathomable stress in the grey fluorescence of the SGC. But
tears of a beautiful, caring woman, who had just suffered the
dissolution of something she loved.

She walked up the path to the porch, not bothering to retrieve
her shoe. He didn't see it coming, when her fist punched into
the wall beside the door, when she kicked at the fresh paint on
the grey siding. She was breathless and flushed when she finally
turned where he could see her face, and she fell back against the
wall, sliding to the hard floor of her front porch. Her knees
tucked tight beneath her chin and she hugged her legs close.

When he closed his eyes again, she had covered her face and
dropped her head to her knees.

Jack O'Neill sat in his truck as the afternoon wore on. He
waited until Samantha Carter felt like moving. Waited for her to
retrieve her shoe, open her door, and disappear inside her house
without a backward glance. He waited to be certain she wouldn't
be outside again.

Then he shifted into gear, turned around, and drove away.


*****


She sat in her living room for well over an hour, pretending to
work on her laptop, pretending to watch TV, pretending she wasn't
waiting for the sound of a truck in the street or the creak of
her garden gate. Pretending she didn't half expect the phone to
ring and Pete's voice to warm her ear, pretending part of her
didn't need that.

She pretended she wanted this time alone and that she hadn't
skipped a few meals in the last twenty-four hours and merely
flirted with sleep. For a while she caught a train of thought
for the latest chapter of her ongoing project on wormhole
physics. She lost herself in the familiarity and typed with
rapid agility, glancing up at the Sunday afternoon feature on the
classic movie channel and scribbling calculations on her scratch
pad. Then the thought patterns fell into a lull, and her senses
keyed up again.

When the gate did creak, and the footsteps clunked up the walk,
she shouldn't have been shaking, the numbers on her notepad
shouldn't have been no longer clear. This was the General. She
saw him every day. Slept next to him on alien planets and let
him shoot past her head with complete trust and confidence. This
was Jack.

Sam kept her hand on the doorknob, staring at the tiles of the
foyer while he knocked a second time. She hoped he didn't know
she was on the other side.

At the sound of the third knock, she opened the door.

Jack O'Neill stood on her doorstep, khaki slacks and grey t-shirt
and his favorite (her favorite) bomber jacket. The one she'd
worn home on New Year's Eve and slept in while she tried to be
numb.

Her pillow had smelled like Jack and leather for days.

"Carter," he said now, mouth curling into the half-smile that
never failed to spread to her own lips at the most inappropriate
times. She knew he used it just to goad her. To see if he could
make her laugh when the General was watching or they were deep in
vital alien negotiations. But only her. Not the rest of the
team. They'd all always known this.

Today she could barely manage a cursory smile. Terror did that
to a girl. Give her a fucking Goa'uld and she could ribbon him
across the room without a flinch, but ask her CO over to her
house, and she lost the power of speech. "Sir," she said softly,
"come on in." She stepped back, opening the door wide.

His skin was tan and warm in the sunshine, and she remembered the
man she first met, golden brown hair shining under alien sun and
hazel eyes holding a thousand scars and some kind of joy she
hadn't suffered enough to know.

She had a feeling she had caught up a bit in the intervening
years.

He crossed the threshold, and she closed the door behind him.
Jack kept his hands in his pockets and bounced a bit on his heels
as he took in his surroundings. "You've moved some stuff
around," he said, and he waved toward her hallway wall.

Sam caught her breath, pushing her brain to engage in the
present. "Have I? Ummm...yeah, I guess, a couple months ago,
after... Well, actually...after bad things happen...I like to
rearrange things a bit. Just...make it kind of new. Fresh
start, you know?"

He nodded, brow furrowing for a moment, realizing he'd hit on
something serious in the light chit-chat and she regretted
letting that slip. She could have said something surface. But
it was Jack. And two days ago they had stopped lying, and she
didn't want to start again. Even if it was only about the phone
table and a portrait of Cassie and hours of being tortured by a
human form replicator.

"Can I get you something to drink?"

He grinned again. "Got a beer?"

This time she returned the smile. And the moment felt
like...them. "Your favorite brand."

"Sweet."

She headed to the kitchen and sensed him trailing behind, like
they were moving through an alien wood. The beer from the fridge
hardly felt cold to her half-numb fingers, and she passed the
bottle off to him, rubbed her fingers dry on the thigh of her
jeans.

He swung the base of his bottle her direction. "You don't want
one?"

She shook her head. "I shouldn't. I'm still on some pain
killers from the Zat blast that knocked me off the ramp the other
day."

He frowned, and her stomach warmed. There was something about
Jack's concern for her that melted her defenses and made her want
to stand near him for a while. She had spent eight years denying
that fact.

The warmth twisted into something like nausea and she swallowed
hard.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Jack said. His tone was the quiet one that felt
like he was speaking only to her in a gateroom full of soldiers.
"I didn't realize you got slammed that bad."

She shrugged. "It's not bad. Just annoyed an old sore spot, I
think."

He nodded, absorbed the information for a moment, then fell back
into an easy smile as he lifted his beer. "Well, we've all got
plenty of those, eh?"

She smiled and almost laughed. "Yeah, that's for sure, sir.
Ummm...," she turned and gestured toward the living room, "come
on in. Sit down."


*****


Her hair was golden in the streaks of sunlight and her nails were
polished and she was still calling him 'sir', but she had been
crying on his neck two days ago, and this Carter scared the
bejesus out of him. Carter in uniform had always scared him
enough, but he knew how to handle her, how to stay in charge or
at least convince himself he had. But this Carter--this woman in
snug black jeans and a soft sky-blue blouse and dark lipstick and
pearl earrings--this Carter who had been engaged twice, made love
to men, laughed, cried, loved, lost, sought, triumphed; this
woman he knew little about, and had no idea how to handle.

He only knew he wanted to know her.

He followed her into the living room, and sat beside her on the
couch, careful to keep a cushion's distance away. He couldn't
pin down the last time he'd been here. It seemed to him it used
to happen more often.

Her posture was a little stiff. Hard angles against the soft
afghans. She was beautiful. But wired. And he wondered if
maybe she had more to tell him than he had even guessed. He
wondered if he was ready.

"So, Carter...how ya doin'?" he said easily, attempting to soften
her, thinly disguising the mocking in his tone. Gentle joking
was his most comfortable approach. He fell back on what he knew.

Carter nodded, worked her jaw a bit. "I'm good. How about you,
sir?"

"Good. Nice weather we're having."

She closed her eyes, hearing the underlying sarcasm and
ridiculousness. "I'm sorry," she breathed, "I probably shouldn't
have even asked you here." There was a huskiness in her voice
that made him think about how tall she was and the line of her
ribcage.

He played with the label of his beer bottle in the silence, then
said finally, "Carter, you know, you don't have to--"

But she stepped over his words, shifting to face him. "No, I do.
It's just, I've had a thousand things to say to you.
For...years. And I've been over and over them in my head. And
now, you're sitting here..." She looked down at her knees,
chewed on the inside of her cheek, and he thought maybe someday
he'd be allowed to touch her face and tell her to stop when she
did that. "To be honest, sir, I have had one hell of a weekend.
And not in a good way. And...," she shook her head, looking off
toward somewhere he could not follow, "I just don't know what to
say."

Jack stretched his arm along the back of the couch, never
touching her, but reaching out all the same. "Maybe you don't
need to try so hard."

She turned and pinned him with that incandescent gaze that
alternately made him back-up a step and say yes to things he
deemed insane. "How?" she said simply. The question didn't
really follow his statement, but he got the meaning.

"There's an Avs game on OLN." He smiled, kindly.

She caught her breath, but not his smile. "Okay," she said. But
she lowered her gaze again, and she sounded too close to
defeated. He had seen that pale grey countenance too many times
this year.

He brushed the backs of his knuckles against the outside of her
shoulder. She responded to his touch and met his eyes before she
thought. He knew it was 2IC radar. Or maybe some other kind.
"Hey," he said, gently. "Just 'til you're ready."

She nodded, tensed. Whispered, "Okay."


*****


He almost dropped the remote when she turned sharply and said, "I
know what I want to say."

The game had been on for a good half an hour and she had popped
some microwave popcorn and they had shared the snack and the
occasional light-hearted comment on the events on screen. She had
seemed almost like the usual weekend Carter, one shoe propped on
the edge of her coffee table and a smile at the corner of her
mouth whenever he grinned at her.

He cleared his throat and tried to wipe the alarm from his face,
lest she mistake the source. "Okay," he managed evenly. He
dropped his handful of popcorn back into the near-empty bowl.

She swallowed visibly and gripped her knees. "Sir, do you
remember when we were on P3X-829? After the memory stamps? When
we thought we were Jonah and Thera?"

"Yeah, of course, I remember. Lots of steam. And Homer
Simpson."

Carter shifted again, facing him more fully as the intensity of
her thoughts carried her motion. "Well...sir, that night, when
we were sitting together. And you told me you
remembered...feeling something for me. Back home. And I leaned
my head against your shoulder. And I knew that no matter how
uncertain everything was, and whether or not our lives were about
to be turned upside down, whatever life we landed in...we would
still be us. Together. And I wasn't scared, anymore. And I
just sat there with you, and everything just felt...okay." Her
eyes had misted with tears as she spoke and her voice was
slipping into the textured breathlessness he had never heard in
her younger years. She was continuing to speak with her usual
stoic manner and determination, but the pure raw openness made
him feel his guts had been neatly ripped apart. The popcorn bowl
sat balanced on his knee and the hockey game was forgotten. The
remote slipped to the floor, but neither of them moved to
retrieve it. "Sir, it was like...like everything that usually
makes me...just...tight. Or...makes that place behind your eyes
sort of clench, like when you know a headache's coming, but it's
not quite there yet? Well, it all just...let go. And I'd never
felt so much like I was exactly where I belonged, as I did that
night. That moment. And then it all vanished. And we went
home. And I tried to believe none of that really applied to my
own life."

She was flirting heavily with tears, now, and he felt like the
world was shaking under his feet, and he needed something to hold
on to besides the remote control, which he had already dropped.

She was wrapped up in her own tumbling admissions and didn't seem
to catch the effect she was having on him. "But, sir, no matter
how hard I tried, no matter how many ways I tried to rationalize
and explain things and move on...I still knew what it was like to
feel that way. And nothing else...," she paused, then she
whispered, "no one else...gave me that." She looked away, up at
the curtains, the window, the mantel. Self-conscious, now.
Determination faltering. Her fingers dug into her knees, and the
late afternoon sun cut across from the back windows and played in
her hair. "And I want to believe I can have everything I want in
life and still be...single. I want to believe I don't need..."

"Carter," he said at last. She looked at him when he spoke,
grasping at the reprieve like a lifeline. He hoped he could live
up to the glimmer of hope in her eyes. Hell, he hoped that every
day. "Carter, nobody has everything they want when they're
alone. Some people are supposed to be married and do the house
in the burbs and the three kids thing, and some are meant to
spend their lives cruising the galaxy and shooting aliens and
blowing things up. But none of them are meant to be alone while
they do it. Nobody is okay alone all the time. It kind of comes
with the being human thing, Carter."

She watched him with wide eyes and wrinkled brow, but didn't
speak.

"And..." he continued. The almost transparent distance in her
eyes made him think she carried the weight of the world and
expected to carry it alone to her dying day. The thought made
his knees hurt. "I like you on my shoulder. A lot, Carter."

She swallowed, her throat muscles pulsing in silhouette against
the window light. She took in his words with a kind of nod and a
softening, but there was still a prevailing sadness about her
that was starting to make him more aggressive. He'd wanted to
scrub away the grey from her aura for so many years.

"Okay, let's try this again, Carter."

"What? I'm sorry, try what again?"

"How ya doin', Carter?"

He'd lost her. "Sir?"

"How about we actually answer that question for once in our
lives? Ya think? I'll start." She rubbed her hands down her
thighs, pushed up to sit straighter, still confused, but he
forged ahead. She was Carter. She would catch up.
"Professionally, we've been kicking some major butt this year,
right? So, that's cool. But otherwise, I've had a basically
crappy year."

She blinked at him. "Really?"

"Yeah."

Carter narrowed her eyes and he saw the seed of something that
for the first time left him feeling truly vulnerable. "Tell me,"
she said.

The shift came in that moment. A realignment of planetary
bodies. Carter gave him an order. She didn't use the word
'sir'. She didn't ask him to comply. She looked at him like the
experienced and battle-scarred and passionate woman he knew she
was, and she asked him to open up to her.

And maybe he needed that. More than he was willing to admit.
Hell, they weren't so different in the end.

"Well...," he began, "I'm in a job I always said I hated. My
team is going out without me where there's very little I can do
for them when they're in trouble. And I'm not out there on
grimy, sandy planets around the campfire, falling asleep in
Daniel's stories and pretending Teal'c's stories are profound or
funny while I take his share of the mac'n'cheese."

Sam grinned. Despite herself, no doubt. And the room felt
brighter.

Yeah. That was why he missed missions. Carter was doing all
that smiling around campfires and on long treks from the gate to
primitive villages, and she was smiling at Daniel and Teal'c and
he was missing it. Crap.

Time to take his own advice. "And the woman I...," he held her
gaze for a long moment before he said softly, "...care
about...has been engaged. To somebody else. I started a
relationship with a really great woman that ended just as it was
getting going. Mainly, because...well, because the woman
I...care about...was engaged to somebody else. And I figured
out, with my usual perceptiveness and acuity, that that was
actually...a big problem for me."

Carter took a long moment to let that soak in, and Jack couldn't
remember the last time he'd felt this raw. He hoped he still
appeared casual and cool on the outside, but the truth was he
hadn't let this kind of thing happen in...well in far too long.
He'd gotten used to his own comfortable little defenses. The
ones he didn't often realize were there.

The genuine empathetic ache in Carter's eyes warmed him more than
he wanted to admit. "I'm sorry," she said at last. "I mean...I
didn't...I didn't really know how hard things have been for you."

"I know," he said with a small, forgiving smile.

"I should have. I get too lost in myself sometimes, and I--"

"It's cool, Carter. It's okay."

"I'm sorry," she said again, and he just smiled at her with his
eyes and she nodded, letting her gaze fall away.

Then after a moment, "So...it, um...it ended?" she asked, manner
nothing like the casual she was obviously attempting.

He let the corner of his mouth quirk into a grin. Made her wait
a beat, then said simply, "It did."

She almost smiled back, looked away at the last second. "I'm
sorry," she said. She wasn't. And he didn't mind.

"It's okay. Your turn, Carter. How have you been?"

She flinched, drew a hissing breath through clenched teeth.
Apparently, she'd forgotten her part in this experiment. She
took a moment to consider, then drew a breath to speak, and he
raised a warning finger.

"AANH! Real answer."

She stopped. Like he'd warned her off a piece of alien
technology. She cleared her throat, slipped her tongue over the
edge of her lip. "Okay. Um...Well...leading the team has
been...a little scary. And it's made me think a lot about what
my strengths are and what I really want to do in my life; where I
belong."

"Yeah?" he asked softly. There was more here than she was
saying, and though he didn't want to push her now, he wanted to
come back to this and hear the long version. She hadn't even
scratched the surface of this when she had spoken to him as her
CO. And then he realized he was thinking ahead. Like something
was...beginning.

"Yeah," she said. "And personally...I've, uh...well...I've
been crying myself to sleep a lot, I guess."

Okay, she could have just punched him in the gut and made it
quick and clean. He was silent and motionless a long moment,
fingers laced around the neck of his beer bottle. "Yeah?" he
said again, voice deep and low.

Carter half-shrugged, hesitant and twelve years old with the life
experience of a warrior.

He kept watching the last of the amber liquid reflecting the
sunlight between his knees. "It's just that...I mean, I
thought...I guess I thought things were pretty okay with you and
Pete."

She nodded. "They were. He's a great guy. It's just..." She
was bordering on tears again, which scared the hell out of him,
and he realized as much as it seemed a new century had begun
somewhere here, it had really only been hours since the scene he
had witnessed on her front lawn, and another woman would have
still been in her pajamas with ice cream or wine or chocolate and
crying her eyes out, and Carter was slick and polished, but the
wounds had to be open and raw and stinging somewhere beneath her
soldier's demeanor. "There wasn't anything bad, sir, it was
just...well, you know."

He shook his head, gaze tight and intense upon her. "No. But I
want to."

Carter caught her breath. There was something so intimate in the
sound it echoed and flared and warmed deep in his gut.

She held his gaze for a long time, then finally said, "I'll
explain some time."

"Good."


*****


The game ended. He turned off the TV. The sun had sunk a bit,
shadows were stretching across her back lawn, and Carter looked
tired, but softer.

"Did you want to stay for dinner, sir?" she asked. "I don't have
much in the house, I haven't had the chance to go shopping since
the quarantine lifted, but we could order something in--"

He nodded. "Pizza's good."

"Okay."

"Carter?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Tell me something else, real. Something right now."

"Like what?"

"Anything. Something in you, right now."

She was quiet a long stretch, then, "My back hurts. My
Replicator duplicate hurt my back. And I had it checked,
and...it's okay, I guess, but whenever something happens, and
sometimes when it doesn't...it just hurts. A lot of the time."

"It does?"

"Yeah."

"It hurts right now?"

She nodded. "A little, yeah."

He reached out and rubbed gentle circles on her spine, heard the
change in her breathing.

"Does that hurt or does it help?" he asked, wanting complete
honesty, mildly distracted by the individual discs of her spine
beneath his fingers.

"Helps," she whispered. Then, "Your turn, sir." He kept his
hand on her back. "Tell me something."

"Okay." And this was a moment. He knew this was where he had to
make something happen, push them over the precipice onto the
grass below, before they wandered back onto the beaten path. He
took a few breaths to gather his words. And his nerve. Carter
didn't have a corner on this panicking thing. "Carter. Ever
since I met you...you have this way of making me remember why I
used to really like the world. Like really like it. Right
there while it was happening. And I had forgotten that. When my
son died. I had decided that life was worth living, thanks to
Daniel and the gang on Abydos, even though I hadn't thought so
for a while, but at that point I was gonna see it through. But
I didn't expect that part where I really loved just...being here
on Earth...to ever come back. I thought that was gone. And then
you came along... And when you find a doohickey or you blow up a
sun or...figure out how to vaporize stuff without messin' up the
stuff around it... then I remember. Even when I don't really
want to. So...I kind of want you around all the time. Ya
know...for that. Amongst...other stuff."

She looked at him for what seemed like forever, eyes wide and
soft and lipstick gone with the popcorn. His hand was on the
small of her back, and he felt the ripples of sensation beneath
her skin. The sun was dipping behind the houses and the room was
dim and quiet and sheltered. He lifted his free hand to cradle
her cheek, brushed at the tight skin beneath her eye with the pad
of his thumb, even though the tears had dried. Her lips parted
ever so slightly as she drew a breath.

He didn't know who leaned in first, but they moved in perfect
synchronicity, as they had in every field maneuver from the day
they met, until his lips were pressed against hers and her breath
was caressing his skin.

Her kiss was so gentle and tender and thick with emotion. Her
long fingers moved into his cropped grey hair, and her palm
cupped his ear. She leaned in as a single kiss turned to more,
and her lips were sweet and warm and salty from popcorn as much
as her tears. She tasted like Carter should and he thought maybe
he had been here a thousand times. But this was the first real
kiss he'd had in too many years to remember. This kiss was from
someone he loved. Someone he had loved for a long time.

When they broke away, she kept her forehead an inch from his.
She bit at her lip, but she showed no open signs of regret. He
could feel her trembling. "Wow," she breathed. "That
felt...really nice."

He gave a breathless laugh. Yeah, this was his Carter. "Well,
yeah," he said, because they should have done this five years
ago.

She actually smiled, and he found out Carter-smiles an inch from
his nose were even more intoxicating than the ones across the
briefing room.

Then her smile faded with a flicker of darker thoughts. "You're
still my CO, sir."

He nodded. "I know. But I've been thinking about some things we
can do about that. I'm thinkin' I'll get on that tomorrow
morning."

She frowned. "Sir, I would never ask you to--"

"Give up the job I didn't want?"

She closed her eyes and sighed.

"We'll figure it out, Carter. I promise."

She nodded. "Okay."

He wanted to kiss her again. She was mere inches from him, and
he could feel her breath and he was caught in her scent and the
feel of her skin against his palm skin. But he didn't want to
press her. She was bouncing back from a crash and there were a
million layers of thoughts and reasoning for her overactive mind
to sift through. She needed time.

He could give her that little bit more.

Just a little bit.


*****


He didn't stay for pizza. She didn't want him to go, but she
knew he was right. They had waited eight years. They could do
this a little longer. They could do this right. And she was
still shaking and she was exhausted and she needed some simple
quiet to let everything soak into her skin. She was tempted to
ask him to stay a few hours, just so she could rest her head on
his shoulder and watch TV until she fell into a real sleep. But
she wasn't ready to ask for that. And she knew it wouldn't stop
there. Not with the memory of his lips still hot on her flesh.

She walked him to the door.

The sun had set. The days were stretching longer, but winter
still held its reign. She wrapped her arms around her midriff to
ward off the chill as she stood beneath the amber porch light.

"Hey," he said softly, moving a step closer.

"Hey," she breathed.

"Don't look so worried," he said gently, and her chest ached.
Because she needed that tenderness. And she didn't know how to
accept it anymore. "We'll work it all out. Okay? All of it."
He understood how much she was wrestling. This wasn't just about
regulations, anymore. Not after all this time. And he got that.
And she felt it.

"Okay." She managed to smile.

She was far too vulnerable tonight. Some part of her wanted
desperately to take the few steps forward and fall into his arms
and bury her face in his neck and cry. And the fact that he
would accept that and just hold her scared her almost more than
the impulse.

"See you at 0800, Colonel," he teased.

"Yes, sir." A pause, then, "Oh, and, sir?"

"Yeah?"

She shook her head. "I can't...vaporize stuff...without messing
up the stuff around it."

His eyes twinkled in the mix of lamplight and moonbeams. "You'll
figure it out."

Their gazes lingered. And the heat was palpable. But there
could be nothing more. Not here in plain sight in the spotlight
of her porch lamp. Not while they were CO and subordinate.

In the end, he drew a light finger down her upper arm that echoed
in shivers down her spine, then he turned down the path.

She had almost reached her door, when he rushed back up the steps
behind her.

"S-Sir?" she stammered as she turned.

He pinned her with his gaze and grasped her upper arms tight,
forcing her to look at him head on.

"What is it, sir?"

"There's just one thing I have to say before I leave here
tonight."

"Yes, sir?"

"Carter...You are the hottest astrophysicist I have ever seen.
Hell, you may be the hottest woman I have ever seen. Eight
years of trying to work next to you and pretend I didn't notice
this... I swear Carter, half these grey hairs are your fault.
And for more reasons than the ones you already know about."

She was speechless. Several seconds later, and she let go
something like an incredulous laugh, and Jack gave a single
decisive nod, as though satisfied he'd gotten his point across.
Then he turned and whisked away to his truck without a backward
glance.

Sam stood on her porch a good five minutes after his F350
vanished into the darkness.

The wind was cold, but she didn't care.

She closed her eyes and listened to the night.

She remembered the taste of his breath.

She remembered the heat of the boilers, the steam off the valves.

The rough texture of the cloth of Jonah's shirt as it rubbed
against her cheek with the rise and fall of his chest.

She remembered the quiet.

She remembered the peace.


*****

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