Dinner's Ready, Honey

Part 2
Sam Malone, The Greatest Relief Pitcher Baseball Ever Saw

Okay. This part is Sam's POV on his whole relationship with Diane. I've decided that I Do, Adieu did happen, but as you'll see in one of the chapters containing stories, they still ended up married, that parting was just one last bump in the road. So here's Sam's POV, the actual stories will be coming next chapter. Those may take me awhile, especially once I go back to school (winter break now!) but hopefully they all will come eventually.

The quote about Sam that is the title of this part was from, Manager Coach, I think. And I forgot to mention in the last part, but the quote about Diane that is the title is, of course, from Show Down, Part 2.

Disclaimer: Not mine. :)

Diane Chambers. God, I never would have thought that one name could have elicited so many different emotions in one person's life. Anger, resentment, annoyance, desire, happiness, and those crazy feelings of love.

At first glance she's absolutely 100 unlike me. On paper. If you compare us personality wise, the gap lessens significantly. I guess that's why at first we seemed to repel and dislike each other. We only had a vague idea of what the other was like. Once we started to realize that our personalities were the same in some ways, we started dancing around the subject of a relationship, a dance we did for a long time, in many different ways.

You may laugh when hearing that our personalities are the same. I would have, too, early on. So would she. It took us a long, long time to realize that we were too much alike for our own good. We constantly blamed the failure of our relationship attempts on our differences, when in reality it was our similarities that screwed us up. We were both too stubborn. If only one of us had been stubborn things may have worked out easier. When we got into an argument neither of us would admit we were wrong and let it go, which drug simple arguments out into long fights. How many couples do you know argue over who left who? That's what we did. We both had to come out on top, both of us felt we had to be the one to leave the other. And not only once, at least three times did we argue over who left who, who broke up with who. Once we got into an argument over some stupid fortune she got and we each wanted to be the one to break up with the other. In the end, we stayed together. When we actually did breakup, the topic of who left who became an issue. And years later, when we had been through a million goodbyes and hellos, we argued over why Diane was leaving Cheers-- had she quit, or was she fired?

Of course, that's hours of marriage counseling talking. At one point when we were engaged Diane had begged me to talk to a noted marriage counselor, but I didn't have my heart in it, being that we weren't even married, let alone in trouble yet. Somehow I ended up going along with it, and the whole experience caused more trouble than it was worth as the marriage counselor told us we were a total mismatch. After that, Diane and I agreed to leave things in our own hands, until we needed help.

But after almost losing her again, not because of a fight, but because of me wanting her to go have a chance to achieve her dream, we decided that we wanted to be sure things would work. We acknowledged that we weren't in trouble, that we were just trying to prevent trouble in the future. I guess now we'll never know if it's our state of mind or the counseling that's helped us, but something has.

I'll never be able to explain what drew me to Diane. Maybe because she was so much different from all the other woman that I could go after and easily get, I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that at first she would have nothing to do with me, which was not something I was used to. But it wasn't just physical attraction. At first, it was. Then there was a point in my quest to get Diane that I realized I wanted her for more than one reason. And it killed me, because I didn't know what it was. She could easily irritate me, she knew how to push my buttons, she drove me crazy, and yet, I had to have her. I think what impressed me about Diane first was her courage to stand up against Carla. When Carla takes a dislike to someone, she's merciless, as poor Cliff will probably tell you. Cliff sat in the bar, day after day, sitting there taking Carla's jabs. And he was a man. Diane came in, Carla took hits at her, and Diane sent them right back and held her own with Carla.

I think what drew me to Diane after our relationship started was simply the effect she had on me. I found myself uttering unheard of phrases such as I love you, without thinking, doing things I never would have done to make her happy, going to art exhibits and odd museums, and turning down nights of babe hunting. I had been married once before, but that had been a disaster. The whole marriage was rushed into, a mistake some may say, and ended abruptly not much later. When I think back to that whole relationship with Debra, I don't know what she was thinking, marrying me-- we didn't have anything extremely special. I don't think that I even actually said that I loved her in so many words. It was implied, and I thought I did love her, but I don't think the actual three words ever came out of my mouth in that form. Perhaps that was why it was so hard to say them to Diane-- I had never actually said them, and never actually meant them with the intensity they came with for Diane.

When she left me, and yes, I will admit that she left me for now, the first time I soon found myself drinking again. I had been sober for five years by that point, following a bout with alcoholism. I had had moments, like the time when I had lost the bottle cap off the last beer I drank, where I wanted to drown my sorrows in a drink. But I always managed to hold out. So it speaks volumes that I went back to drinking when Diane left. Though I refused to admit it at the time, my drinking was all because of the failure of our relationship. It had nothing to do with her end of the relationship, really, but mostly me kicking myself for not going after her when she walked out of the bar. I had started to go after her, I really had, before I heard a voice in my head telling me that Sam Malone didn't chase after one specific woman. So I stopped myself. Then the depression set in. Angry that I had caused my own depression by not going after her, and feeling guilty for feeling depressed anyway-- Sam Malone does not need one woman-- I went back to drinking, hoping to drown my sorrows and cover up the fact that I was hurting. At the time I thought it was better to be a drunk than heartbroken. However, I don't think I was fooling anyone. Okay, I know, now, in retrospect, that I wasn't fooling anyone.

She came back when she found out that I was drinking again, and somehow Coach talked me into giving her her job back. I'm pretty sure he played us all and talked Diane into taking the job back and Frasier into being okay with her working with me again, as well, but I guess it worked out in the end. Having her around again was almost like a relief, I could get over her now when I realized how irritating she was. I kept my feelings about Diane hidden pretty well, if I do say so myself. Though she was doing the same thing, I'm sure. Frasier was in the picture now, he was her new love interest, and I didn't intend on breaking that up. Though when the chance arrived, I would screw poor Fras over for Diane. I almost took her from him the night after her Bon Voyage party, and then I went off to Italy to steal her from him at the altar. Although I never found them in Italy, Frasier apparently didn't like the fact that emotionally she was always mine, and came after me with a gun. It's ironic, now, being that we've become great friends. But I never did actually take her from him, she left him on her own. Though emotionally I suppose he saw me responsible for her leaving him, it wasn't really my fault-- she had been mine before he was even in the picture. The decision to fly to Italy to stop their wedding took me by surprise. But it was then that I realized that no matter how hard I tried I could never actually get rid of the feelings I had for Diane.

For another year after I got her to return to Cheers I went on hiding my feelings and screwing things up when they were looking good. There was that time I declared my feelings for her when I thought we were going to die in a plummeting plane. There was the time I admitted the truth to her, that Frasier had organized the whole night at the Opera, not me, somehow costing me the night with her because, as she put it, we were too close to have sex then. Then the next day I screwed that closeness up by going out with someone else. And then there was Janet. I'm still not sure what I was thinking when I started dating her. I had come so close to getting back together with Diane so many times maybe I just thought it would never actually happen, or if it did, it would end like it had before. I liked Janet, I really did, but she paled in comparison to Diane. I was completely oblivious to the resentment and jealousy Diane was feeling when I was with Janet. I had once again talked myself into believing that I had no feelings for Diane, though apparently I didn't have Janet fooled, because she cited my feelings for Diane as one of the reasons she was breaking up with me. It became apparent to me that Diane was slowly going insane when she showed up at Janet's press conference with a squirt gun, asking us questions about our relationship during the conference so that the press would follow her lead and freak me out.

It was when Janet walked out on me and I didn't feel that painstaking desire to return to drinking or to run after her that I knew I had let the right woman, as Carla had put it, get away. Something possessed me to grab the phone and propose to Diane right then. I knew that even though we seemed to butt heads 65 of the time, there would never be another woman who would get to me the way she did. She wanted to be asked more romantically, which I should have figured. So I asked her. Romantically. Then she turned me down.

I honestly couldn't figure that one out for the longest time. She had wanted to be proposed to more romantically, she had said she was planning on saying yes, so why on Earth did she tell me no? I was hurt after that. Sam Malone does not propose to women often. He does not expose that sensitive side of himself. Especially if he's going to get rejected. It was partially my embarrassment and partially the fact that I had wanted to marry her and she said no, the hurt, that made me refuse to propose again. She was constantly after me to propose again, telling me I was hurting myself as well as her, but I didn't care. As long as she finally got to see what it was like on my end. I don't know why I didn't just make things easy on us both and propose again. We both knew I would eventually. Then when I finally blurted out a proposal, she said no, again. It took taking me to court to get us engaged. Something to tell the grand kids, for sure.

I hated that she could always get her way. She could buy a house I didn't want and get me to love it. She could beg me to propose again and I would. She could get me to dress up in a Santa suit in mid May to throw Christmas for the previous owners of our house. She wanted to name our son Emil, she probably would have gotten her way then, too, had she not changed her mind about the name. The one time I got my way was our honeymoon destination-- she wanted Tibet and I wanted Disney World. Somehow I won out. Then we ended up never going on that honeymoon because we had had a parting of the ways again before we finally got married for good. But at the same time, the fact that she had this spell over me was what drew me to her.

I told you I couldn't explain it. She's made my life an insane mess. And for some reason, that's why I love her.

But I do know one thing; I do love her. As hard as I tried to fight it, as many times as I tried to deny it, it's true, I do love her. I've never had such strong feelings for anyone before. Only her. Even if those feelings were of irritation or jealousy or love, they were always strong.

Diane Chambers, ladies and gentlemen. The one person who could, somehow, win her way to Sam Malone's heart.