The decision actually comes fairly easily. After hearing the choked sound in her voice, it becomes a matter of settling into the idea of a life with her instead of the life he's slowly coming to remember. The information that he loves her is both new and old and because of that is very comforting. There's so much about his life now that has happened post-amnesia that decisions have to be made with both versions of himself in mind.

It's her. It's probably always been her. He likes to think that the only thing that kept them apart was their sense of duty, but he won't know for sure until he decides to put the moves on her. He worries that maybe the feelings between them were amplified by the fact that they couldn't be together. Maybe the forbiddenness made it seem like something they wanted more than they really did. Or her, because he's pretty sure he's always wanted her with the same intensity he feels now.

It becomes about the way she looks at him when they're together. And together is something he's been orchestrating a lot more of. No more disastrous dinner dates. As a matter of fact, things between them go well. Very well.

After three dates he kisses her and he thinks he now understands the concept of spontaneous combustion because he feels like he's on fire when her mouth opens under his. "I remember kissing you like this," he says in the small space between their mouths.

"We've never kissed," she says, confused.

"Yes, we did," he insists. "During the time loop."

She puts her hands on his chest and pushes him back gently. "You kissed me during the time loops?"

"What makes you think I kissed you?" he teases, but he pulls her back to his mouth with a hand on the back of her head. "Are you crazy? Of course I kissed you."

"How?" she asks into his mouth.

He pulls back, "I resigned. Then, I-" he dips her and covers her mouth again with his own. She laughs.

Before things go too far, he's afraid of rushing her, they say goodnight and he leaves her in the entryway of her house looking flushed and tousled. He likes the look on her and he tells her making her blush all the way down into her dress.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

He dates her for a long while. There are dinners, and tickets to all sorts of things, some heated necking in one of their houses or cars - his truck is better for that so they learn to take his - and flowers and, once, some candy that she laughed about. "Did you really send me candy?" she asks him over the phone and he sounds slightly affronted by her laughter.

"Yes. Yes, I did, Carter. Deal with it."

It feels good to hear him say her name in that same old way. She likes "Eyes," she likes "Sam," but she's always loved the way her surname came out of his mouth. It long ago became something more than just what he was supposed to call her.

She continues to take his name for a spin and rarely forgets and calls him "sir," but when she does his eyes darken a way that tells her it won't be long before he takes her to bed and she thinks about rolling out the honorific while tangled in his sheets and likes the way the thought makes her feel.

The first time they come close to sleeping together, he throws the brakes on when they're both out of their shirts. She's confused but he tells her he's not interested in rushing through the good stuff.

She tells him that maybe he's forgotten what the good stuff is and he assures her he hasn't with his mouth doing very distracting things on her belly just above the waistband of her jeans.

It takes two more heavy-petting session but she finally gets her bra off and he looks at her like she's a sculpture. It makes her feel strange so she tells him, "If you even want to look again, you'd better touch."

And he does. He touches with his hands, his fingertips, his tongue, but when she reaches for the button on his jeans he leans back from her, chest heaving, eyes heavy and dark and just shakes his head.

"This is getting old," she tells him. When his face falls she correct, "Not this," waving a hand between them, "but the stopping. I'm a grown woman. I appreciate the slow approach, but Jack, this is getting ridiculous."

So he takes her to bed. It's not the quick, frantic coupling she'd always pictured, but he's slow and sweet and intense right when he needs to be and makes it so, so good that she wonders how she ever did without it.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Once he's taken her bed it's like he can't get enough of her, and that's part of what he was worried about. He knew, once he'd tasted her, that their time together was going to become less getting-to-know-you and more getting-to-have-you. It's not that he doesn't enjoy the sex it's that he'd really enjoyed her. And she's so busy that it's almost like they have to choose. When he tells her, she smiles at him sweetly and tells him the novelty is bound to wear off soon, but maybe he'd like to take her to dinner that night.

So he does and they both make it a point to spend at least half their time dressed - even if she considers dressed one of his t-shirts and his bed sheets. But he can't really say that he minds. She looks great in his sheets. They carry on that way for several months, she works, he makes sure dinner's on the table when she gets home and being with her starts to feel like less of a dream and more like normal was always supposed to have felt.

The guys get used to seeing them together and Daniel stops making jokes about two weeks in. Teal'c seems to think the whole thing is just fan-damn-tastic and finds the stupidest reasons to leave them alone together. But Jack doesn't mind. He likes being alone with her and he doesn't even care of he's the butt of some SG-1 jokes because he's the one that gets to go to bed with Sam every night.

In the end it seems like maybe it was all worth it, the weeks of having no idea who he was, having to relearn then re-remember what it was like to deal with some of the worst pain of his life, losing the SGC... It sounds cliché, even to him, but all roads did, eventually, lead to Sam.

She learns to open up to him, bit by bit. She starts sharing things with him that don't have anything to do with military Sam and have more to do with who she is as a person. He learns about her mother, about the decline of the relationship with her brother, and why things had seemed so strained with her father at first.

He tells her things as he remembers them. The memories of his childhood and his family seem to come last, she thinks it's because he'd done such a stellar job of burying them to begin with and that maybe it had been easier to do the things he'd needed to do over the years if he wasn't someone's son, someone's brother.

He finds a box of photographs in his spare room when she's moving in and inside are piles of pictures of his brother and a few military mementos he thinks maybe his mother should have. When he calls her to tell her he has them she sounds confused. "Yes, son, I know." And he finds out he's not that close to his mother anymore, probably hasn't been in a long time. "I'm sorry, mom," he tells her when it's time to get off the phone and she just hangs up and he wonders, a lot about how that relationship went sour.

After it all, after most of his memories are his again, he ends up with Sam completely and it matters less that the relationship with his mother doesn't seem to fit into any of the slots left in his brain. He wonders if he ever really knew what happened between them. So he focuses on what he can, works with Doctor Fraiser and some hypnotherapist to fill in the blanks and, soon, he's about as complete as he can be.

In the end, he's whole and happy.