I don't even know who I am anymore.
She'd said those words to him in the small hours of a morning over a bad cell connection. He'd placated her with things she already knew but in the end it just came down to knowing that while they hadn't necessarily broken the regs outright, they sure as hell had shredded the spirit of them.
The truth was, when he'd say things like how he would - if he could - lick the crease where her leg met her body, the flat part right there where his nose could touch her hipbone, he killed, just a little, the woman she knew herself to be.
He hadn't touched her. Not even after a conversation that changed the nature of their relationship completely; a conversation that, if they'd had it face to face, would have ended naked, horizontal, sweaty and satiated. No, he hadn't touched her, but he'd described in great detail every fantasy he'd had about the things he would do to her when he could. But could turned out to be a reality not subsidized by proximity.
He orbited around her in a haze of lust tempered only by yet another of the sort of save-the-world situations at which they found themselves so adept.
She sure as hell touched him, though. It's as if his confession had granted her permission. Her palms were warm and she rubbed them against him like she had an itch to scratch. Every breath between them seemed both tainted by the moments they knew about and heightened by the ones they knew they held in reserve. When their fingers brushed, his tongue would tingle since it knew the taste of her and his cock would lengthen like he knew the feel of her but it was all abstract. Those finger brushes... just a metaphor.
One night he told her about the missions - Iraq and Belize, already done, and the six more to follow in locations he couldn't yet reveal. They sat on the hood of his truck, leaned up against the windshield like teenagers and she'd bit her lip until he'd tugged it free of her teeth with jealous fingers. She didn't want this for him and she didn't need to say so out loud for him to know it. But running the missions, they were like riding the knife's edge of danger and they both fed off it. It heightened the tension between them and they were both helpless but to give it release.
Real release, though, would have been a relief. Because since one fateful phone call, made from Arizona, he'd been walking around in a constant state of arousal that could be rivaled only by those years between puberty and the loss of virginity multiplied by a lifetime's worth of erotic images even if he did subtract the ones that didn't feature her.
Instead, he tortured himself by leaving one final boundary untested. In that, he stole from her the conviction of knowing exactly who she was. While he held the final barrier between them she hung in a limbo in which she was ambiguously defined, a chimera. Major Samantha Carter but also something else that was skin and sweat and nerves and pleasure. She rippled with the potential energy of it.
So no, he hadn't touched her. As soon as he did, she'd explode. She'd be the only thing all around him and he couldn't live there. Not yet. When it was time he'd drown in her, let her wash over him but until then, he had to stay focused.
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I don't even know who I am anymore.
As soon as she'd said the words she'd wanted to swallow them back down, a sickness she should have been able to control. They were mere degrees, if not minutes, away from a place they couldn't be - couldn't, even, admit to knowing about. So he compensated by describing, in excruciating detail, the things he wanted to do to her body, to the places he'd put his fingers first, and then his tongue. To the way she'd taste and smell, and eventually, how her body would move and succumb to him. And it was almost as good as the real thing, the anticipation of him.
In retaliation she allowed herself the luxury of touch - a luxury he hadn't given himself. The words she knew weren't the kind she could use to tempt him. She couldn't tell him in as many ways how she'd lave attention over his skin - scarred or smooth - so she stroked the itching centers of her palms over the allowable planes of his body, let her fingers brush against his, normally, innocently, and she hoped he really could read her as well as he seemed to.
Still, he called her in the late, late hours when the sound of flesh on flesh filtered through the phone unfettered. Unhindered. Allowed, under the cover of darkness, to bounce around the walls of her bedroom and to settle next to her on the mattress. He was a smith of words but none spoke as loudly as the ones that didn't come from a dictionary, that were the ones she taught him, the ones that were all consonants and deep, throaty vowels. In the end it was always the wet sound of movement that forced her own hand. She'd wait, on the cusp for the sound of his apogee before she'd tilt, tip, then glide into the gale of her own pleasure.
But each time, in the wake of the dial tone, she'd swipe creases out of the blankets while looking for the pieces of herself she used to recognize. She'd put hard limits on the number of times she'd give them both what they craved because she knew, at a point, there wouldn't be anything left of the officer she'd built up. He chipped away at her until she was nothing more than a woman - only part of what she wanted to be to him. And so, she confessed how her reflection looked like an illusion and they'd managed thirteen days before the next phone call. After that it was a record they tried to beat but never could. It was always something. Always one last straw that drove them to the warm velvet of the other's voice and the flood of hormones that blocked out all but the painful pleasure.
And it was only a matter of time before the phone calls wouldn't be enough.
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God, if you don't touch me, I'll…
But he'd stopped her. They'd crossed a line they shouldn't have already. Not just the phone calls but a slip, one night, off-world, amongst boulders highlighted by moonshine. She'd licked her lips and then, he didn't know how, she was in his arms. His fingers pressed into her ribs and he was panting against her ear and he was so hard he might have well have been a part of the rock formation she had sagged against.
She begged him, pleaded with soft words and insistent movement until she'd very nearly asked him to do the one thing he couldn't - the one thing that would upset the balance he was barely maintaining.
Those words, they greased the way for his transgressions for many nights afterward. The way she'd gasped please against his chest as she shuddered, writhed for control. It was torture to keep both of them right there on the edge. But it was also the same emancipated feeling he got while speeding across the desert with her in the car beside him, his sunglasses riding low on her nose in deference to the night and her feet high up on the dash. It was a high he'd never felt with anyone but her, a hollow knot in his gut he'd forever associate with the moments that came just before.
So he ate on the almost-feel of her breast in his hand and drank of the once-bitten taste of her tongue and resigned himself to knowing he was the one tasked with holding them right there, just outside of the ring of fire that would surely burn them down.