Thanks to all who left me feedback on the last part - very much appreciated! Concrit is also welcome. I don't own the characters, the italicised lyrics belong to Dashboard Confessional, and this part contains somewhat but not really smutty J/S.

This Brilliant Dance

(So you buried all your lover's clothes
and burned the letters lover wrote,
but it doesn't make it any better.
Does it make it any better?
And the plaster dented from your fist
in the hall where you had your first kiss
reminds you that the memories will fade.)

The next day at work is surprisingly normal. They're looking for a woman, name of Sarah Hawes, who went missing late Sunday night. Prime suspect's her stalker ex-boyfriend, but she has some very suspicious emails and instant-messenger logs saved on her computer. From the start Sam thinks, this is not going to work out, and when they discover her body in the trunk of an abandoned car, trussed up in thick silver tape with a red ribbon tied around her mouth, she has to stop herself from shouting I told you so!

Jack steps back from the car, sighing in his normal disgruntled-bear way. "This job, I'll tell you," he mutters, half to himself. "It's goddamn infuriating."

"I know." Sam takes a step closer to him, places a hand gently on his shoulder. She doesn't know why she's doing it, only remembers that she's leaving late Friday and that she's going to miss him very much. "I know."

He doesn't look at her, only raises his own hand to place it on hers. His fingers are warm and dry and while the touch only lasts for a matter of seconds, she feels a jet of electricity run through her body.

They walk back to the car, and she waits for him to call Danny back at the office to tell him that they found a body, her head tilted back against the seat rest as she cranes her neck to watch him. Talking fast, an air of authority about him as if he knows exactly what to say and do.

She watches him drive back and thinks, God, I could have really loved this guy.

Back at the office, Danny corners her by the water-cooler, his eyes narrowed. He's a lot taller than her and could be pretty intimidating-looking, if she didn't know that he'd never hurt her in a million years.

"Samantha, I—" he begins, and then exhales frustratedly. "Jesus, I don't even know what to say." He's staring right down into her face in that invading-of-personal-space thing he's always got going on, his dark eyes conflicted and wide.

She steps quickly out of his shadow. "Martin called me last night."

And he seems to suddenly melt, metaphorical water trickling down his sides and pooling around his ankles. "He did? How is he?"

"He's good." She nods. "Says he's happy."

"Happy?" Sam thinks that maybe she's imagining the flicker of disappointment in Danny's eyes, but maybe she isn't. "He said he's happy," he repeats. "I guess that's good." He hovers for another moment, obviously desperate to ask more questions but driven by pride to remain silent.

Guys, Sam thinks, can be so stupid sometimes. She decides to put him out of his misery. "He asked about you. Asked how you were."

"What'd you say?" Danny leaps on this like a starving dog being thrown a bone.

Sam smirks. "I said you were single—"

"Bitch," Danny curses.

"—and that you missed him," she continues, truthfully.

Danny looks as if he at once wants to smother her in kisses and rip her limb from limb. He settles for a safe middle, and says, "Why did you say that?" in a pained voice.

"'Cause you do." Sam beams blandly up at him.

Danny makes a spluttering noise. "I do not! Since when did I ever say that, I — what'd he say?"

"That he misses you too," Sam tells him gently. Then she smiles and walks back to her desk.

Danny looks slightly stricken.

Later that day, Sam gets paired with Rob to meet the parents at the morgue to get a positive ID on the body. He lets her drive – always a mistake – and to spite him she nearly crashes a total of five times. By the time they reach the morgue he's white and trembling.

She smiles a little when she sees his legs shaking as they walk towards the morgue entrance.

It's not that he's not good-looking, because he is. He's tall and he has shaggy blonde hair and bronzed skin and looks nothing like an FBI agent. In fact he looks as if he just strolled in from a long day's surfing and tried on his dad's suit for kicks.

Not funny, she wants to tell him. Not funny at all.

Because there's something honest about the way Martin and Danny and Jack look after a long, hard case – pale and haggard and battered, like ghouls. There's a kind of unity in the way the team all stagger to get coffee together when a case is over and they haven't slept in three days and their hair's greasy and they have huge, dark shadows around their eyes.

The people at the coffee shop call them the zombie crew.

It's amusing, sort of. At least it used to amuse Sam when they were crammed around a too-small table, all smelling slightly and talking about anything other than the case, like Viv's son and Jack's daughters and how Martin's apartment smelt of dry rot and he was getting kind of worried and how exactly Danny managed to get laid so often. And Sam can't remember what she told everyone else, but it seemed to make them smile, at the time.

She has to stop thinking of Martin as part of the team. It probably isn't healthy.

Then again, in three days she won't be part of the team, either. That's even less healthy.

She shakes all those thoughts from her mind and follows Rob into the building.

It's a quick, positive ID. Well, not positive – how IDing your daughter's body could be positive, Sam doesn't know – but it's her, the missing woman, the one they've been looking for. And now, she figures, it's case closed.

She gets back to the car and Rob climbs in the driver's side, saying hurriedly, "My turn to drive on the way back."

My turn to drive, like they're bickering kids trying to decide who gets to drive home from the beach or something. Get the hell back to the beach and out of my sight, she wants to holler at him, but somehow restrains herself.

They drive back to the office in total silence; if Rob tries to make a comment, Sam either gives him a one-word answer or glares at him as if he's completely insane. Finally Rob draws to a halt outside the office and says plaintively, "I don't know if I've done something wrong…"

Sam leans right into his face and says, "If you don't shut the goddamn hell up, I swear I'm going to kill you."

He freezes for a second and then relaxes, laughing uncomfortably. "Sam, baby, you drive me wild. How about a drink tonight?"

Sam breathes very deeply and, with great self-control, does not shoot him.

She does, however, slap him. Then she leans in as he's touching his cheek very tentatively and looking surprised, and hisses, "Next time I'll kill you. If you ever call me Sam again I swear to God I'll kill you. No one goddamn calls me Sam."

"Jack calls you Sam," Rob protests, and Sam thinks, to hell with it.

"I let him call me Sam because," she says haughtily, "I love him. I do not love you. I don't even like you. In fact, I hate you. In fact, if you were a worm I'd grind you into the sidewalk with my heel. In fact, I wish I could do that anyway."

She slams out of the car and walks into the building. It's not until she gets into the elevator that she thinks with some belated shock, Shit, I just threatened to kill a colleague. And then I hit him. And then I told him that I love Jack.

Wait.

I love Jack?

She debates banging her head against the elevator door, but decides against it.

When Rob enters a few minutes later, there's a large red handprint emblazoned across his cheek. This comes as a surprise to all but Sam, who calmly continues to type. He makes his way into Jack's office, where they have a loud conversation that no one else can hear because of clever soundproofing, but Rob doesn't seem to realise that the walls are made of glass. He points and gestures at Sam a lot. Once she waves back, but he doesn't appear to notice.

Jack sits there, his hands steepled on his desk, nodding in a mature way while Rob dances with fury.

(God, Sam hates him.)

Finally the conversation draws to a close. Jack shows Rob out, and he flounces across to what used to be Martin's desk, and sits down at the desk chair. Jack returns to his office without a glance at Sam. Ten minutes later he comes out again and places a small slip of paper silently onto her desk. It reads:

Sam,

Rob told me what happened. He wanted me to give you an official warning. I figure, you could pretend this is it. You're not getting a real one. That guy's a lech – props for hitting him. Wish I could've done it myself. That's a great shiner.

You should talk to me later. We have to catch up before you leave.

Love,

Jack

Sam thinks, maybe she'll keep the note with her love letters from high school.

Sam figures that maybe she's gone a little crazy since she got her transfer. Because when Jack asks her to go out with him after work, she accepts.

He looks sort of surprised, but beams widely at her. Sam doesn't think she's seen him smile like that in a pretty long time.

So she meets him after work, just by the elevator, and they leave together. And maybe it could be a coincidence, they could plead their cases pretty well, but she's totally happy that it isn't. They go to a small restaurant a block away that they always used to go to way back when, and when they step inside, Sam says dryly, "Boy, this brings back old memories."

Jack cocks an eyebrow at her coolly. "Good or bad thing?"

"Both," she decides, allowing her lips to flicker in a brief smile. "They're good memories, though. I guess."

She doesn't expect Jack to say, "Yeah. They are," and grab her hand, but he does anyway, and leads her to a table. She loves holding his hand, feels treasured and safe, her small fingers inside his big man's hand. The skin on his palms smooth with calluses and his fingerprints probably disappeared because he likes to work with his hands, working wood into new and unimaginable shapes. Sam loves that.

When the time comes to order, they've been too busy talking and looking at each other to have decided on food; but Jack takes charge, saying, "I'll have the ravioli, and Sam, you always used to like the carbonara. That okay?"

And of course she nods, because Jack's the only person she ever took orders from, anyway, and she feels safe under his command. When the waiter's gone, she muses, "It feels like old times."

Jack pauses before agreeing, a slow nod as he flattens out his napkin.

Gently, she runs her fingers over the back of his hand, unknotting his fist and smoothing his fingers out. "Except, no wedding band," she says absently, trailing her fingernail down the length of his ring finger.

"No," he agrees, sounding as if his breath's catching in his throat, and she smirks. He catches her eyes, narrows his own, and takes a sip of his red wine.

She follows his cue, lifts her glass to her lips. It's a fairly decent dry white, not that she's a wine expert exactly but she drank a whole load of cheap shitty wine in high school when all she and her friends wanted to do was get drunk as quickly as possible. And this wine's definitely better than that four-dollar-a-bottle crap. Takes the glass away from her mouth, returns it to the little crescent it made in the tablecloth. Wipes away a smear of lipstick around the rim.

Sam can feel Jack watching her lips, her eyes, the way her hair curls softly around her shoulders, looking at the triangle of bare skin at her neck, the dark shadow that hints at her breasts, and she smiles.

It's not that Jack's bad in bed, because he's not. Definitely not, Sam thinks when she bites back a gasp of near-ecstasy as Jack does something unintelligibly wonderful with his tongue and she digs her fingernails into the bed sheets. And it's not that he's worse than Martin, because he's not. Martin was strangely useless in bed, a weird combination of total desperation to please and utter inability to actually do so.

(She thinks that probably he was more used to having sex with guys, but she never asked him. She's always been tactful like that. Of course, that isn't a matter of tact so much as 'eww, too much information', because while she doesn't care if Martin chooses to have sex with women, men or mountain gorillas, she doesn't particularly want to know about it.)

(Although while he was still in New York she considered maybe sneaking into his apartment and videotaping him and Danny because they were both not just hot but hot, and—okay, it was a mistake to even think it. She admits that now.)

Anyway, he isn't bad in bed. Not at all. But at the same time there's always this weird sense of urgency, as if he has to get it over with quickly, and it always is over quickly, for both of them. It's fast and red-hot and passionate, and Sam always ends up with certain parts of her body bruised to hell, and sometimes it's even a little painful to walk afterwards. But it's a good pain, almost as good as the purplish mark on her neck that she'll have to cover with turtlenecks for a few days.

Jack totally just—

And then all thoughts are dragged forcibly from her mind because, oh Jesus, he's inside her and – fuck, fuck, fuck­ – and she's got no time to bite back her cries this time, and when she comes it's not meek and mild and reticent like it was with Martin but it's a tidal wave, washing over her until she forgets how to breathe and speak and live, and if she dies and goes to heaven right now she probably won't notice.

All too soon it's over and Jack's rolling off her. She stares at the ceiling and tries to get her breath back as he rustles around the room – his room, now, not hers like it always was, she hasn't been here before – and then she hears a hissed, "Shit," from the corner of the room.

"What?" She sits up, holding the sheets protectively around her.

"It goddamn broke, that's what." Jack waves the offending rubber at her, and then slams it into a bin.

All of a sudden she's too tired to process the information. "What—what do you mean?"

"I mean that the last time this happened to me it resulted in my daughter Hanna," Jack snaps out acidly. He sits down heavily on the corner of his bed and Sam is reminded all over again that right, he's got a daughter and she's, what, nearly eleven now, and he's a lot older than her, and shit, what just happened?

She carefully doesn't tell him what happened to her the last time the rubber broke and says, instead, "It'll be okay."

He moans quietly into his hands and says, "Goddamnit, you're leaving on Monday."

"Friday night," she points out very quietly.

"Friday night, of course," he spits out through gritted teeth. "What if – what if something happens and you're all the way over in goddamn Florida?"

"Do you have any STDs?" Sam asks in a very matter-of-fact voice.

Jack looks as if he's about to explode.

"Okay, bad question," she says hastily. "Just… this stuff happens every day. Don't worry about it. I'll get the morning-after pill, it's all cool."

She can feel a sickening lurch of dread in her stomach despite her words. Suddenly she's catapulted back into a cold December night at the age of eighteen and she has to take a deep breath to calm herself down. "It'll be okay," she tells Jack again, feebly.

He nods. "Yeah. Yeah, okay." Then he lets out a snort of laughter. "Dammit, I'm forty-two. This shouldn't be happening anymore."

"That's what you get for messing around with younger women," she suggests lightly.

Jack shakes his head ruefully, and glances up at her. Then he shifts further towards her, reaching out to take her hand. "Hey, Sam."

"Yeah?"

"We could've been good."

"I know," she agrees, telling herself very strictly not to say anything she might regret at some other point. She makes herself smile. "We still have three days to make it good," she tells him.

"Three days," he agrees. "We can be great in three days."

Then he kisses her again.

TBC.