Living Forward – Chapter 6/7

By Midnight Caller

Rated: PG-13

See chapter 1 for disclaimers and summary...

*****

I have a tattoo on my left shoulder.  A couple of guys from the 82nd convinced me to get it one night, and we'd had too much alcohol in our systems to tell us any better.  I don't really show it off, and it was kind of impulsive at the time, but I don't regret it. 

Samantha once asked me about it, running her finger lightly over my skin.  Maria always hated my tattoo. 

Most relationships are founded on some form of trust, on love, on an unseen but undeniable connection.  A lifelong friendship, for instance, or the bond between siblings; they're supposed to be governed by those things.  The same goes for a marriage. 

I doubt an affair should be filed under that same category, since the trust is discarded in favor of deceit, but when the love and the undeniable connection vanish from a marriage, sometimes the voids are filled unexpectedly, and this new product then qualifies as a relationship.  An affair is not a replacement for a marriage, just as a mistress is not a substitute for a wife; the feelings aren't replaced so much as recreated in another form, most often with more potency than before and an intensity that defies comprehension. 

But like my tattoo, I have no regrets.  I may have slept with Samantha on impulse that first night, giving in to a need and craving a level of comfort that only she could provide, but something else happened, and kept happening, long after that first night.  I don't know what it was.  A deep, unexplainable adoration, a warmth that seemed to encompass every smile she gave me from her desk, or from inches away as she sleepily laid her head on a pillow.  

Living forward, I merely told myself that she made me happy, she made me feel, she rekindled something deep inside of me that had been asleep for a long while.  Looking backward, however, I think I can pinpoint that as the moment I fell in love with her. 

But a relationship founded on deceit, though it may have the other qualifiers on its side, is fated from the very start.  You just can never see that until it's pretty much over.    

I can't remember the exact moment I started to pull away from her.  It was gradual, probably because I knew if I suddenly deprived myself of her, I would go into some kind of shock from the withdrawal.  It's not like I was getting back together with Maria; I just knew I had to stop.  What we were doing was dangerous for both of us; it could ruin her career, and I didn't want anyone to think she was sleeping with me to climb some Bureau ladder.  But I was also always afraid my feelings would show through if I ever had to choose between her life and following protocol. 

It's strange... when my family was threatened by Katan, all I could think about was procedure – safe houses, FBI protection, interrogating my own wife about her eyewitness account – I was acting on instinct as an Agent and a father.  In Farrell's office, I was acting on instinct as something entirely different.  I was a man driven by adrenaline.  Anger.  Revenge. 

Looking back, I gave myself away running in there like that, and maybe it was the timing with the Spaulding trial, but I just didn't care what he thought of me, only that he knew he wouldn't get away with what he was doing.  It scared me inside, though, that Samantha could still trigger such a reaction in me.  It scared me that after all that had happened with Katan and my family, I was still in love with her.

She was waiting for me outside the courthouse on that day I'll never forget.  It had been a day of ugly but necessary truths, and even as I'd smiled at her, and she'd smiled at me, something in my gut had told me there would be more to come. 

We'd sat on that bench with burdened hearts, and had left with broken ones.  When I'd held her to me, my chest wrenching in pain from the look in her eyes, I'd wondered why the truth had always been against me and why it had chosen that day to overtake everything in my life.  The truth had saved a colleague's trust, but had set a killer free.  It had disguised itself as closure for Samantha, but I could feel in the way she leaned against me that it had brought much more pain that I had ever intended.  The truth hadn't improved my life; it hadn't set me free.  It had made me one hell of a miserable bastard.   

...tbc...