He steps out of the narthex onto the stone steps of the old church. With one hand he's shaking out a match and with the other he's holding a cigarette to his mouth. The night is warm and tastes of iron. The blade strapped to his thigh glints garnet in the moonlight. From behind one of the stone pillars he hefts his leather bag, surveys the empty streets of the small town illuminated by the full moon, and strides down the steps and away from the moon.
It's been three days in Central America and several weeks of self-imposed separation from her, but Jack still tastes her tongue in his mouth, can still feel the slick skin of her cheek encountered when he possessed her mouth and it's her mouth that pulls him forward away from one certain hell. Behind him, the church recedes in the background even as he draws closer to worshiping at the altar of her.
He finds himself in Scottsdale waiting for a layover and contemplates renting a car. Twelve hours to clear his head sounds good, but twelve hours in anything but her sleek grey Volvo feels like cheating on her. So instead he rents a room in a motel with no AC despite the desert heat that shimmers off the pavement. He throws the scratchy blankets off the bed and lays his bare skin down against the cool white-ish cotton of the bed-sheets.
From the US he can call her.
But they don't do that anymore. Not since he groaned her name when he stroked himself to completion and changed the rules of the unspoken agreement between them. He thinks about the sound of her sighs - the ones she carefully schooled to sound like the consonants that weren't his name.
He's half hard against his thigh by the time he's plugging his credit card numbers into the phone and then the phone is ringing and he's trying to talk himself out of starting before she picks up the line.
When she answers it's late afternoon and he can hear the sound of her lab around her voice and realizes that he's about to cross every line they've ever drawn between them. To the unfamiliar number she gives her rank and name and he must say something inane because she's breathing his salutation but it sounds like his name wrapped in pleasure tied up with relief.
In his mind, the sound of his groan when he grasps his erection echoes down the hallways of the SGC and he's damned. The shuddery sound of her exhale washes over his exposed skin and he realizes they've been doing this so long that his brain knows her so well his body is convinced it does, too, and he's suddenly completely unsure what they're playing at because dammit but he belongs inside her. So he tells her. The wet sound of her licking her lips caresses that place behind his ear that makes his feet flex.
The heavy sound of her lab door closing is followed too closely by a whimper that makes him imagine her hands on her body - a sight he's never seen but has no problem imagining. His higher brain function no longer participating, he conveniently erases the details of the security cameras that mean his mental picture is more wishful thinking than anything else. But she gives it to him anyway. In the end, they can always reduce themselves to this elemental moment of basal nature. After so many times ignoring it, and after a few times allowing it, he finds that there's absolution in the way she participates. Her litany is his name according Carter with soft, mewling interstitials that threaten to be the thing that tips this whole situation into the realm of actuality.
When he slips and tells her in even words what he's doing, she pauses like she's translating him into the whisper-soft language of consonants she speaks to him. At some point he tells her his theory about how he worships at her hips and she feeds him back an exhale that translates into anticipation and suddenly the protective barriers between them are gone.
He was created in the field during a war and he was born sick but she doesn't care. Apparently she was forged in the same hell fire because she's the one that started this quiet stroke of the genius of shared ecstasy. The harsher his exhalations the more she soothes him and when he comes on a groan of disappointment she makes loose, hungry sounds that coil his gut back into the idea of readiness even if his body can't comply.
When it's over, he lays still in the stuffy room covered in the essence of himself that is the aftermath of her.
Her words begin to include vowels. Things are different now, they both agree. There's no going back to before that first of the last Earth-bound missions and this one was the tipping point, the one when - he hasn't yet told her - he discovered that these missions are going to be part of his future for long enough that he's going to have a good chance to let her ride the knife's edge of the pleasure of his dark side.
Together they are caught in the ninth circle that opens only to fresh hell. They've just forged their path in the iron of a promise neither can keep but that neither will break.