Sitting next to a smoldering off-world fire, Jack watches Sam and Daniel poring over some textbook-sized monstrosity Daniel insisted he couldn't do without. He watches the way she leans back and stretches her legs and thinks about the way she leaned against her car during a road trip that, as it happens, they both remember very differently.
It's not just the details - though some of hers don't quite agree with his; it's the way she remembers it as an exercise in restraint and he remembers it as a few hours of unconditional emancipation.
When he debriefed in Washington he told the brass that the last mission was the last mission. No more Iraq, no more spec ops, no more broken necks under the cover of darkness. He was fucking done. At that point, if they'd been the laughing sorts of people, they'd have laughed in his face when they reminded him that eagles fly under the stars. As it was they'd told him he'd do as ordered and said colonel they way they usually said cadet and he wisely - if uncharacteristically - bit his tongue.
Later, Hammond bought him a drink and gave him a conciliatory clap on the shoulder before telling him he was back on 'gate duty. He drove by Carter's house three times trying to work up the courage to stop but on the fourth pass her lights were out so he drove on home. But he just couldn't resist the lure of her so he called her from his cell phone while parked in his driveway. That's when he found out that their stories didn't quite jive.
And here, on a quiet, uninhabited planet, he watches her feet while she stretches and thinks of her bare toes pressed against her dashboard and wonders what it'll take to open her up. If asked, he would have said he understood her, especially after she showed up at a non-descript military airstrip in the middle of Kansas and bought him a drink somewhere between there and the Welcome to Colorado sign. He thinks about the way she'd stolen his sunglasses like they were teenagers and let him drive her car at triple digit speeds while he told her who he was in the only language he could speak after rubbing a dead man's sweat and jet fuel off his fingers. Then he remembers waking up the next morning to find her gone and feeling both relieved and jilted when he didn't have to face her in the bright light of day.
Across from him, she smirks at something Daniel says and he's propelled back to a dusty bar and the smirk on her face when she wasn't at all self-conscious when he told her he knew that her last phone conversation with him before he left included one more orgasm than their calls usually did. Not that the calls never included orgasms but it's safe to say it's not the sort of thing they make a habit of doing or mentioning. But then she'd said something that hit a little too close to home and he'd lashed out at her because she was the only one there. He attempted to embarrass her, to shame her - never mind that he'd done the same thing when he was alone in a Middle Eastern hovel clutching a map doused in her scent between his teeth. But she hadn't been shamed. She'd smiled at him, with a glint in her eyes that told him she wasn't ashamed of what she'd done and that she wasn't going to let him weaponize her feelings. He's tried to make it a habit not to compare Sam to Sara because it isn't fair to any of them, but he remembers how Sara would turn cold when he attacked and thinks he likes the way Sam just puts him in his place with quiet ease.
On the other side of the fire she stretches her shoulders and sighs a little. It hits him the same way a guy did in a bar in the asshole of the world: hard, in the stomach, in a way that leaves a bruise. The way she moves is inside him now and he doesn't quite know how or why, but it is and he thinks it probably happened somewhere in Kansas between climbing into her car and finding a run down bar. He's an addict. She's the drug.
Eventually Daniel toddles off to his tent, half drunk on fatigue and half on the thrill of whatever it is he discovered between the onion paper pages in the appendix of his book. Carter meets his eyes through the haze of heat over the fire and, while he blinks, repositions herself until they're separated only by the soft-washed filaments of thread on the cheap fabric of their uniforms.
She's too close. Ever since she let him drive her car to dissipate the extra - and more than a little mean, if he's being honest - energy swirling around inside him after his mission, he's found that his usual ability to check his impulses where she's concerned is wholly unreliable. So instead of saying anything, he worries the seam on the outside of her knee with his knuckle.
She doesn't speak but the way she drags her tongue across her lips - slowly, wetly, desperately - says more than enough. All he can think of is the way her eyes held her smirk when he'd brought up the thing they never bring up. But I heard you on the phone that night before I left. I heard it when you came. So maybe you hold on to a little of the guilt yourself, huh?
She hadn't let him get the better of her and he finds that part of her is the part he fell in love with first. Not her looks, not her brains, not the altogether nice woman she really is. No. He fell in love with the part of her that drinks whiskey, rides motorcycles in leather, and speeds in her sportscar. Yes, he fell in love with the part of her that made her capable of jilling herself off while on the phone with her commanding officer - even if she had waited until he'd confirmed how he felt about her. He fell in love with that part of her that flashed in her eyes and smile when he called her on the behavior that pushed fire through his veins. Yes. He first fell in love with the part of that reckless part of her that made him feel a little more human about the reckless part of himself.
In Iraq he'd allowed himself to shed the last vestiges of denial. He'd bitten into the idea of her as surely as his teeth had bitten into a map that smelled like her. He'd sucked in her scent to his toes and remembered the way she curled her tongue around his when they kissed once too long ago as he tightened the fist wrapped around his adrenaline and anger fuelled erection. It was laying down that mantle that opened the floodgates to his addiction.
And now, with her sitting so close, apparently wanting the same things he wants, with her licking her lips in response to his knuckling her trouser seam, he finds himself less focused on the fact that she's his subordinate and more on the fact that he wants to know if the scent she'd left all over that map had anything to do with the coming she did the night before he left. It's taking every bit of his self control to keep his fingers at her knee.
It's strange that it seems to be easier to approach her from the sexual side of this thing they aren't doing than it is to come at the emotions. But for all that he wants to bury his face between her legs and breathe her in, he wants to find some way to bury himself in her. Samantha Carter though, well, she's about as emotionally accessible as a mannequin when it comes to Jack O'Neill. He's knows it's not personal; it's self-preservation. He'd had a taste of something sweet that night they spent driving across Kansas. Something so sweet it made him ache down to the soles of his feet with wanting more of it - the openness, the availability, the vulnerability he hadn't allowed himself to experience with anyone since Sara in the earlier years.
In between the silence and the woodsmoke he relaxes into the space she creates for him. He should draw a line between that road trip and the command structure, but it turns out that lines move and structures aren't always sturdy but the road is always there, always going somewhere. It occurs to him, when she pushes her knee slightly into his fingers, that they play with fire. It also occurs to him that while he was right - that night in the car was complete release - she was, too; everything between them is nothing but the tightly held reins of restraint. The backs of his finger brush wide stripes against her trousers.
They sit together and talk about nothing letting his fingers say everything. It isn't until Teal'c appears for his watch that he realizes they sat through both their watches. He's glad the work is automatic after all his years in service because he remembers perimeter checks and coming back after each to a topped off cup of hot coffee and, once, the crackers and cheese she can't stand from her dinner MRE. He remembers the way she'd eventually sat down on the ground leaning against the log he'd rolled near the fire and the way he could tap her shoulder and finger the ends of her hair.
It's so close to inappropriate, the things they're allowing to happen. And the reasons they're allowing those things to happen? Long since have they passed appropriate and become something that could end their careers. He wants to say that's not part of the thrill of her, but he'd be lying. He likes the whiskey, the motorcycle, the sportscar and the woman who flirts with the spirit of the regs.
She picks her way across the campsite and he thinks again about her toes on her dashboard. He thinks things would be easier if he didn't have such a vivid image of her bare toes in his mind. Or the way she smirks when he says the word come. Or, even, the way she walks towards him. Because between now and whenever, the road trip needs to be an aberration. It's the only way he'll survive the here and now until the here and now becomes whatever's next.
She slips quietly into Daniel's tent and she doesn't even look over her shoulder at him. Across the campsite Teal'c returns from the latrine and a perimeter check. The big man sits down on the log on the other side of the fire. Jack glances over at his tent, then deep into the fire. The wind shifts and the smoke burns his eyes.
The night's turned chilly. He reaches towards his pack and wipes tears out of his eyes.
"Coffee?" he offers and puts water on to boil.