A/N: Hello! I am so glad you folks continue to read this stuff.
This one felt very, very odd from the get go. The humor goes a little to the flamboyant, perhaps? (I should let you decide.) I sent it off to dancesabove and offered to have a second go — a total rewrite. She said not to. So, blame her if you find this too strange :)
Then I punished her by sending it back again with changes! So, I thank her doubly.
Really, I am a pain. And I go unpunished! As a result of her edits, I even got to have a chat about the subjunctive with a man in his underoos. It has been a very, very strange day. Perhaps I am just passing that strangeness on.
Christopher pulled the door open rather vigorously in response to Sam's knock on Sunday afternoon. It was as if he'd been lying there in wait for her.
She looked badly startled.
"What's the matter, Sam?"
"I had rather expected Andrew." Because the door nearly came off the hinges, she left unsaid.
"He's busy inspecting my larder."
Sam laughed, seeming much more like her old self.
She then found it odd that Foyle came outside instead of letting her in. He closed the door and joined her on the front steps, evidently preferring the cold and the chaperoning of the neighborhood to being with her in the company of his son.
He reached to put a hand at her hip just quickly. Signaling so plainly and needfully that he wanted her to kiss him.
But she didn't.
Why were they stuck like this – outside? she was left to wonder.
"Andrew suspects something. Thinks... I don't know," Christopher began, his hand now pressed to his head.
"He thinks you aren't yourself?" she wisecracked.
"I'm not sure that would be a complaint. It might be an improvement – if I weren't who I've been." His honest, wavering smile then was among the most lovely things she'd ever seen.
"I don't have very many complaints," she whispered back. "About the man you've been since you've returned." She waited to see how the laden words would sit with him.
But he dodged her meaning. "You know, obviously… well... how much I enjoy you." This isn't going well, he thought. And one look at Sam told him he was right about that.
"You... enjoy me?"
"That I enjoy being with you."
Then she actually said the words that he had thought out loud.
"Dear God, Christopher. This isn't going well."
"You know that I am..."
"Confused?" she suggested, when his sentence lost its way.
"Yes." Actually, that hadn't been what he was going to say, but it fit. And seemed to satisfy her.
"Because I told you things could be uncomplicated. And then I admitted I was in love with you?"
"I wouldn't have taken advantage of that offer. You know..."
"I know," she assured him quickly.
"If you didn't love me... If it was just that you were getting over things and deciding I was the way to do that, then I could... be a certain way... Keep things... Wait..."
She shook her head, decidedly not understanding what was going on. "But I've told you that I love you. Are you going to let me know where we stand now?" She was far too afraid to be hopeful.
"I don't change course easily. It's not that I'm pessimistic...
"You sound it, just now," she cut in gently.
"I'm cautious. Worried, for you. Not about you. And a bit... plodding, I suppose, when it comes to change. Not that I like that word."
"Steady is better," she supplied, mentally flogging herself for complicating an already-botched conversation.
"You've been the best change, Sam. Since I've been back... But good policemen are... steady like that. Almost unmovable. There has to be the preponderance of evidence. And I..."
The noise from the house shocked them both. The door had popped open and Andrew now stood there, surveying them quizzically.
"And you are a marvelous policeman, truly," Sam concluded to Christopher. She smiled at Andrew and then squeezed by him shamelessly to get into the house without waiting for a proper invitation.
Andrew just whispered, "Dad?" as if a tad worried for the man's sanity. "What was there you needed to do out here?"
Sam leaned back out the door. "On my honor, Andrew," Sam said, sounding a trifle harsh, "we were discussing the best attributes of truly successful policemen."
"No." Doubt seemed to be Andrew's predominant expression of late.
"It's the lack of job," Sam suggested, at a whisper. She caught the younger man by the jumper and tugged to bring him back over the threshold.
Andrew took the hint and followed Sam along the corridor towards the kitchen. "Have you seen the mass of tins dad brought back from America?" he asked, as if there were nothing strange at all about their visit so far.
"No!" Sam said, eager to chase the previous conversation away.
"He must have crammed things in awfully tight to get all that back. It's lovely."
Christopher was red in the face when he appeared at last in the kitchen doorway. It might have been the cold, or the disastrous conversation.
He cleared his throat. And to Sam it was as if a skipping gramophone were being firmly set back on track. "Let's have dinner in," he suggested confidently now. "There are a few potatoes in the bottom cupboard there, Andrew. Sam, why don't you settle on the meat. There's ham and..."
She did not wait to hear any more. It would have spoiled half the fun of scouring the newly stocked shelves Andrew had talked about.
"Ooooh. Right-ho," she said with a grin, as she disappeared into the tiny room off the kitchen.
The pull Christopher felt to follow her was inexplicably strong. And his response – his lack of resistance – was, he knew, shameful, really.
"Get the kettle, would you, Andrew?" And with no further preamble, Christopher walked into the pantry as well.
God help him, he wanted to close the door. Kiss her neck. To feel her arch against him brazenly. To have her confidently push off his braces – as she only had in his fantasies.
But here he was – chaperoned by his son, if not by his insecurities and fears.
Sam watched him watching her. Saw his eyes light on her mouth, her chest, her hips. His eyes travelled back to hers then, and she knew she had quite unconsciously licked her lips at that inopportune moment.
"Oh... Dear," she said. Just that. And his crooked smile told her she was most assuredly blushing.
And that he understood the general gist of what her comment probably meant.
Foyle smiled. You only love me for my larder, he wanted to say. He wanted that comfortable, warm, settled banter.
He was very nearly ready to let himself believe that she loved him, but he still wanted to have her find him clever, witty and flirtatious.
As of today, it might be asking too much that she find him sane.
He stepped a bit closer; then visibly fell apart. Just a little. "You know, don't you?" he whispered.
Her mouth opened to answer him. But it was his son he heard next.
"I vote for the fruit, if anyone is listening," Andrew called out from the kitchen.
/ / /
Andrew volunteered to walk her home, and in a voice that was a tad too eager.
"You have to pack, don't you?" his father wondered, pulling up his sleeve to check his watch. "Catch that train in another hour or so?"
"It's just the one bag. And it's packed, Dad," the suspicious man said. "Besides, the walk will be nice; I'll be just sitting on the train after that."
Christopher knew full well his nod of agreement had a touch of a grimace to it.
"I'll see you tomorrow, then," Sam told her former boss, as Andrew helped her on with her coat.
"Well, if you have the time. You needn't..."
Sam's look was worried, then. Questioning. And he knew he was not about to get a kiss goodnight after that. Even if Andrew had not been standing guard. But then surely she understood that it was Andrew's scrutiny that had made him say what he had.
Foyle knew how the rest of this evening would go – even if nothing could be done but let it play out. Andrew would interrogate Sam during their walk, and then confront Christopher when he got back to the house.
So the detective decided to settle in with a whiskey and let things take whatever course they might.
… . …
His son looked unhappy when he returned. But in surreptitiously studying him while taking another sip, Foyle decided that Andrew was unhappy not about something he had learned, but because he had failed to learn what he had hoped to.
"Did she fail to confess all her sins then, Andrew?"
"What?"
Andrew sat himself on the couch. Christopher swallowed hard as the memory of lying there with Sam surged to the fore, but he managed to keep to the conversation at hand.
"You wanted to get her alone to ask her something. That was my guess. And you look as if you haven't got whatever answer you wanted."
"Well, I will tell you that it would be nice if at least one of you did not feel it necessary to lie to me."
Christopher smiled then, and tried hard not to look as if he were gloating. But he was rather pleased that Sam had managed to put Andrew off. He could imagine there had been a stinging riposte or two, and not a drop of information divulged.
Of course, Christopher thought, he could also tell Andrew the unlikely truth in a voice pitched with pained sarcasm. And he could have that rejected as an unfunny joke:
'I pinned her to the couch, Andrew. Right there, where you are sitting. God, the lovely noise she made as I kissed her throat... I haven't wanted a woman that badly – loved a woman —'
"Are you all right, Dad?"
Christopher sighed. He was not anything close to 'all right.'
Loving Sam was easy. But having things go right was something altogether different, he knew. And there sat his son, his worry and his objections written on his face.
Reality and a well-meaning Andrew were the biggest foes to his burgeoning relationship with Sam, the slightly-less-than-sober man decided. At the moment, it was his son who was taking the most out of him.
"I'm fine. Fine." Foyle cleared his throat. Next he closed his eyes and stretched his neck quickly. "Andrew," he said calmly, his eyes re-focusing on his son.
"What's going on, Dad?"
Tiredly then, the words poured out of the elder man. "What's going on, I think, is that the two of us are wondering at what point any right to privacy would be applicable here. I can't think that I was ever this diligent in hounding you for details about who you were spending time with."
"But Sam—"
"Don't." Don't you think I know this might not work, Andrew? Do you think I'm so blind that I haven't considered the odds? The risks? Every roadblock we'll encounter?
And you would really urge me not to take the chance? God help you when you believe yourself handed your last, best chance at happiness.
There was a wounded silence until Christopher rallied. "Sam is an adult, Andrew. I enjoy being with her. She enjoys being with me."
"What are you really saying, Dad?"
"That there is nothing more that matters, and nothing more to say."
