Thank you to everyone who reviewed my last fic, this is something that came to me while a friend and I were talking about our exes. What if you got to sit down with an ex and clear the air? Here's what happened when Sam and Stuart did just that.
DI Samantha Nixon shifted uncomfortably in her seat and looked at her watch, "just one more hour," she told herself, "just one more hour then you're free for a whole weekend". Not that she had any plans for the weekend beyond doing her laundry and cleaning her car, but after spending most of the week cooped up in the obbo van collecting evidence against a suspected drug dealer she was looking forward to having her own space. Sam rubbed her blue eyes, trying to force herself to stay awake, then glanced at her watch again, the hands hadn't moved. Sighing to herself, Sam watched DS Stuart Turner walking back to the van from the café across the road. A moment later the passenger door opened and Stuart handed her a polystyrene cup filled with coffee, before sitting down next to her.
"Did I miss anything?" Stuart nodded towards the house as he prised the lid off of his own coffee and dropped in two sweeteners. Sam resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
"Nope, looks like our man's decided not to show today." Sam shifted in her seat again in an attempt to regain the feeling in her left leg.
"I bet you thought you were finished with all the donkey work when you got promoted." Stuart sipped his coffee and glanced at Sam.
"I can think of things I'd rather be doing." Sam pushed her soft blonde hair away from her face and stared out of the window, checking the faces of a couple of passers by against the mug-shots on her lap. "You know how it is though, half of CID is off with flu and we were understaffed any way with Phil still being at Specialist Crimes."
"Have you heard from him?" Stuart tried to sound disinterested, but he was dying to know how things were between Sam and Phil.
"Yeah he's been emailing me to tell me what a great time he's having, I've had a couple of texts too." Sam blushed slightly as she thought of the content of some of these text messages. She'd thought she was over Phil Hunter but somehow flirting with him via text message seemed harmless, she was trying not to think about how things would be when he got back to Sunhill. Would he expect something of her? Would he pretend it had all been perfectly innocent? Shaking her head slightly to clear thoughts of Phil from her mind, Sam looked across at Stuart who seemed to be fascinated by his coffee cup.
"Why do you ask?"
"Oh you know I just wondered. It can be weird, you know working with exes, I was curious that's all." Stuart tried not to look at Sam instead he focused his dark brown eyes on a pair of pigeons fighting over the remains of a sandwich.
"It's not weird between us though is it?" Even as she said it Sam was aware of a change in atmosphere inside the van, the easy conversation had suddenly become something more intense and she wasn't sure where it was going. Her history with Stuart was complicated and they'd never really talked about it, they just split up and moved on without taking time out to recover.
"Yeah, we're okay." Sam picked up on the distracted note in Stuart's voice and waited for whatever was coming next.
"I need to ask you something." Stuart's words came out in a rush, like he'd been building up to it and had to say it before he bottled out.
"Go on," Sam was apprehensive, she wasn't sure she wanted to hear what he had to say and even less sure that she'd want to answer.
"You and me, it wasn't all bad was it? We did have some good times?" Stuart sounded uncertain, like he was trying to convince himself.
"Yeah, I guess we had fun." Truthfully Sam couldn't remember when they'd ever had fun, they'd moved so quickly from flirting to living together that she couldn't remember it ever being fun, but she had the feeling that saying this would be a bad move.
"Could we have made it work? If the circumstances had been different." Stuart was looking right into Sam's eyes, as if he was trying to see whether or not she was lying to him. Sam didn't like it, Stuart's intense gaze was making her feel uncomfortable, but she couldn't look away without it looking like she wasn't being honest.
"I don't know, we both wanted different things. It was never meant to be anything heavy and we were in too deep before either of us knew what we wanted."
"You mean you getting pregnant?" In a single sentence Stuart had made it sound like their break up had all been her fault.
"We were having problems before then. But yeah, it did make me see things a lot more clearly." Sam could feel herself getting annoyed and focused on the pigeons to stop her from having to look at Stuart. She knew that as soon as she looked at him she would loose all sense of what was calm and reasonable.
"Well I don't think any problems we were having were my fault Samantha." Stuart was defensive, all he wanted her to do was admit that the car crash that was their relationship was all down to her then he'd be able to move on.
"So who's fault was it then Stuart?" Sam dropped all pretence of being calm and turned to look him, as her blue eyes met his brown ones she was pleased to see he was taken aback at the anger on her face.
"Phil's." Stuart spoke softly his eyes flickered away from Sam's face as if he was ashamed of what he'd said.
"Phil's?" Sam was now confused as well as annoyed and it wasn't a good combination.
"He was always there, every where we went I could feel him, in restaurants, in the taxi on the way home, in our bed when we were making love!" Stuart was shouting now and he had to admit the release felt good.
"It was all in your head." Sam was astounded, she knew Stuart had a problem with Phil but she'd had no idea it went this far.
"No it wasn't but he was in yours, that was the problem. Admit it Sam, I was always a poor substitute for what you really wanted. Someone safe to be with while you fantasised about Phil."
"You had better explain yourself right now." Sam's voice was cold and dangerous but Stuart was on too much of a roll to notice the warning tone.
"Who did you go to when you found out you were pregnant? Phil. Then who did you confide in when you miscarried our baby? Phil. We were never going to work while you kept running to him." Spit was flying from Stuart's mouth as the words came tumbling out.
"If I wanted Phil so much why wasn't I with him?" A little voice in the back of Sam's head was telling her that their shouting could probably be heard outside the van, and they'd almost certainly blown the obbo, but she was too riled to care.
"Because he'd break your heart and you're scared of letting anyone close enough to do that. I could have loved you Samantha and you pushed me away because my love was something you couldn't control."
"What makes you think he'd have broken my heart?" Sam knew Stuart was dangerously close to the truth, she had been terrified of getting hurt by Phil, but she'd been equally scared that she could hurt him.
"Because he's Phil Hunter, it's what he does. He treats women like dirt and gets away with it." Stuart couldn't believe Sam didn't see Phil for what he was.
"He wasn't like that with me. He told me he loved me, then I dumped him, so I guess I broke his heart in the end." Sam had spent most of the last six months thinking about whether she did the right thing when she dumped Phil.
"Don't flatter yourself Samantha, he was probably screwing some tart in an alleyway the night you dumped him, whereas I haven't been with anyone since you. Its like you've got under my skin and nothing else will do until I know why I wasn't good enough for you."
'Ah', thought Sam so this isn't really about me, 'it's about Stuart's ego he just needs me to say that he did nothing wrong and that it was all my fault. Not likely'. "You couldn't guarantee that you were with me for the long term, you proved that when you were so relieved that I lost the baby. I'm too old to play games Stuart."
"I'd have stood by you if you'd had the baby." Stuart spoke quietly, it sounded as though he was worn out by the whole conversation.
"You'd have been doing it out of some old fashioned sense of duty, not out of love." Sam stared out of the windscreen, her eyes automatically scanning the street for their suspect.
"I'd have tried to make it work." Stuart knew that Sam was right but there was no way he was going to admit it. "Why didn't you sleep with Phil?" In the back of Stuart's mind a voice was screaming at him, 'What are you doing? What on earth do you want to know that for?' Stuart ignored the voice and studied Sam's profile he saw the delicate line of her jaw tense and braced himself for her reply.
"I did sleep with Phil, more than once, I just didn't run around the station shouting about it."
"That bad was it?" Stuart's mouth seemed to be on some sort of suicide mission, the words were falling out before he had time to process them.
"No for your information, not that it's any of your business, it was great. He was the best I've ever had. Happy now? Do you feel better for knowing that?" Sam was beyond furious, how dare Stuart presume he had the right to ask her about Phil. It was none of his business.
"What makes him so special Samantha? What hold does Phil Hunter have over you?" Stuart spoke through gritted teeth, like he was trying to stop the words getting out.
"He hasn't got any hold over me. I just trust him, I know I can always trust him to always be there and not to hurt me in any way." As she spoke about him Sam realised how much she was missing Phil, they'd gone so easily from being friends to lovers and back again that she'd never realised how much she took his presence for granted. She was so used to seeing him wandering around the station that she'd never had to consider how she'd feel if he suddenly wasn't there.
"And you can't trust me? What's he got that I haven't Sam?"
"No, to be honest I can't trust you, not to stick around when it counts. When I lost the baby you were so annoyed about the fact that you had to find out from Phil that you didn't even ask me if I was okay. Let's be honest Stuart you're just not ready for a serious relationship and I'm not prepared to wait for you to be ready. I'd rather be on my own than with someone who isn't in it for the right reasons."
"And you think Phil's the right someone do you?"
"In case you haven't noticed I'm not with him anymore either." It was only just dawning on Sam that dumping Phil had probably been the biggest mistake she'd ever made.
"And why is that?" Stuart couldn't keep the triumphant tone out of his voice.
"Because I was scared that I'd disappoint him." Sam was back to staring at the pigeons, she didn't want Stuart to see her furiously blinking away the tears as she thought about what she'd given up.
"Why would you disappoint him?" Stuart couldn't help but ask, he'd spent so long comparing Phil's faults to his own that it had never occurred to him that Sam had dumped Phil to protect him.
"Phil and I have spent so long being on the brink of something special that I was terrified that he had built up this ideal version of me that I can never be, I'm too flawed to live up to his expectations. When he told me he loved me it felt amazing for a moment, then I started freaking out and had to end it before I got in too deep. Before he realised that the woman he imagined wasn't the woman he was with. If I'd let it get that far then I would have been the one with a broken heart."
Stuart was too stunned to speak, his brain was trying to process all this new information and figure out what it all meant. Unfortunately his mouth was quicker on the uptake. "So you were worried that you weren't good enough for Phil Hunter? Does that mean I wasn't good enough for you?!" As soon as the words were out of his mouth Stuart regretted them.
Sam shook her head in disbelief. How was it that Stuart managed to turn around everything she said so that it was about him? "I didn't say that. What I meant was that Phil had all these preconceptions about me and we have this enormous shared history, no one could possibly live up to that. I called time on the relationship before we both realised it and we lost our friendship. You and me were something completely different." Sam surveyed Stuart's face and let her mind drift over their brief relationship. What struck her was that they still didn't really know anything about each other, they'd lived together and spent nearly every working day together for the whole five months of their relationship and she still didn't know him. He knew how she took her coffee and she knew that he coordinated his socks and underpants but they didn't know about each other's hopes and dreams or each other's histories. Maybe that was the giveaway, the signal that their relationship had been driven by lust rather than love and when that burnt out they just weren't suited to each other.
"You and me don't have any of that Stuart. We were never friends, we went straight from being colleagues to being lovers. We moved too fast that's what went wrong for us Stuart, we never actually sat down and worked out what we wanted from the relationship." Sam was exhausted, her heart was racing and her head was spinning from the mix of emotions fighting for dominance.
"So it was nothing I did?" Stuart sounded hopeful.
"I didn't say that." Sam wasn't about to let him off that easily. "You weren't mature enough to handle it when things got heavy, you kept you're distance when I needed you most."
"I always said I didn't want anything serious." Stuart tried to justify his actions.
"I didn't think I did but when I got pregnant it made me realise that I had another chance to be a parent and to get it right this time. My priorities changed and yours didn't, you just hoped it would all go away." Sam couldn't believe they were back on this, raking over their history. "Look Stuart, bottom line we wanted different things, it was nothing to do with Phil or anybody else. You didn't want a serious relationship, I did. If that's what you need to hear to get closure then there it is, it's just something that happened."
Stuart opened his mouth to say something then thought better of it, he watched Sam as she rested her head against the glass of the window, she looked so tiny and vulnerable that he felt ashamed of himself for dragging up their relationship and reopening old wounds. "I'm sorry Samantha." He said quietly.
"For what?" Sam turned to look at him.
"For the baby. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me and I'm sorry you went through that on your own." The words almost choked him but he had to get them out, once he said them he'd be able to move on, to get Samantha Nixon out of his system without feeling like he owed her anything.
"I wasn't on my own." Sam spoke quietly and looked at her watch. "Look it's knocking off time and we've had a very long day, lets head back to the station." She turned the key in the van ignition and checked her mirrors before pulling out and turning the van towards the station.
Epilogue
Sam handed the keys to the obbo van in at the front desk and walked out of the police station into the sunshine, squinting against the light she spotted a familiar figure leaning against a black Audi. She felt her heart leap as she walked towards him.
Phil Hunter smiled as Sam approached him. "Hello stranger." He said once she was in hearing distance.
"What are you doing here?" Sam looked up at his handsome face, his time at Specialist Crimes had done him good, he was tanned and relaxed.
"I finished early today and since you've been bitching all week about being stuck in the obbo van with Stuart I thought I'd see if you fancied a drink." Phil looked her up and down appreciatively.
"How did you know I've been thinking about you all day?" Sam smiled and got into Phil's car.
"Well let's be honest spending the whole day with Stuart how could you resist thinking of me?" Phil's green eyes twinkled mischievously as he slid into the drivers seat and started the engine.
Stuart stood in the shadows of the station's front entrance and watched them drive away, he felt lighter, like he could move on. And by the looks of things Sam had finally realised where she belonged. Maybe they would all get a happy ever after thought Stuart as he stepped into the sunshine and spotted a pretty brunette standing across the road.
The End