"Hank," I heard myself echo her without meaning to. "Wh-what did he want? Are you going to go out with him again?" Why else wouldn't she want me to know? I dropped my hand from hers unintentionally and took a few steps back to lean against a conveniently located mailbox for support. It couldn't really be over this quickly, could it?

"No," she replied quickly, striding towards me and chucking aside what little was left of her ice-cream. "Definitely not. Nick, I'm with you." She wrapped herself firmly around one of my arms and leaned her head on my shoulder. I looked down at her form snuggled warmly against mine and suddenly felt foolish. I angled my head to plant a kiss on her hair.

"I'm sorry," I murmured softly. "I just-- I-- well, worst case scenarios are the easiest to spring to mind." I tugged my arm from her grasp and enveloped her in a real hug, our assortment of shopping bags briefly forgotten on the sidewalk at our feet. "So why didn't you want to tell me?"

"Well, he was…" she paused and took a deep breath as she tried to figure out the correct word, "…persistent. I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want you to get upset or macho and try to intimidate him."

"Persistent?" I repeated for clarification.

"Well, he phoned a few times." Sara replied hesitantly.

"He did?" I felt the monster of jealousy rearing its ugly head once more. "What did you tell him?" She caught my tone and took a step out of my embrace to study me.

"This is why I didn't want to tell you." She reached up to touch my face in a reassuring gesture. "You don't need to be upset or worried about this, okay? I'm handling it. Hank doesn't matter anymore; he never really did. I just needed him to make you get your act together."

I nodded and Sara picked up the bags I had dropped. She wrapped her free arm around my waist and continued walking, guiding me through the people on the street. I tried really hard to drop the subject but I couldn't. I don't think I lasted two minutes before asking: "How many times did he call?" Sara let out an expected sigh.

"I can't be sure because I took it off the hook to avoid them," she had gone into defensive mode. I wasn't going to be deterred.

"Fair enough… but how many times did he call that you know of? Surely it had to be a number of times to make you knock off the phone." I came up with that justification on the spot. It's a good one, eh?

Her response was stern: "It doesn't matter--"

"Humour me." I cut her off, which didn't appear to help my cause.

She untangled her arm from my body but we continued at pace. "I'm trying to, Nick, but you're being impossible. It's not really any of your business who called me, how many times, or why! This whole jealousy thing was cute at first, but it's getting old awfully quick!" I think she may have growled near the end; it was kind of sexy. Okay Nick, focus!

"Whoa! Why did he phone you so much?" I didn't even notice she had avoided that answer earlier. Okay, it was definitely a growl that time.

"So much? You don't even know how many times he phoned!" she sounded exasperated.

"Well, whose fault is that?" I shot back. She turned her head towards me to fix me with a withering glare but she couldn't hold it and quickly turned away again to hide her smile. She shook her head and replaced her arm around me.

"It's really bothering you, isn't it?" She leaned into me gently as I draped my arm around her shoulders.

"There's something about that guy…" Suspicion laced my words. "What kind of a name is Hank anyway?" I scoffed as I repeated the same childish line from my conversation with Warrick earlier that month.

"Fine. I'll tell you but then you have to drop it so we can return to the pleasant evening we'd been having up until ten minutes ago. Deal?" Sara looked up at me out of the corner of her eye, waiting for confirmation.

"Deal." I replied grudgingly. Worse comes to worse I can hassle her for more information after work tomorrow morning.

"Okay. Yes, he called an unnecessary number of times." I was about to interrupt to request something more quantitative but she held up the hand carrying our stuff to stop me before I started. I forgot she was carrying them. It wasn't very chivalrous of me, so I took our bags without interrupting. "How many? I'm not sure I wasn't counting, but you're right, enough to make me disconnect the phone.

"Now then, what he wanted? Simply put, he was looking for another date. At first when I politely told him that I wasn't interested anymore he was a little surprised and quickly got off the phone. I guess after a moment to digest the information he was curious and he called back for an explanation. I didn't want to tell him about you," again she held up a hand to stop the comment she knew I was about to make, "not because I'm hiding us or ashamed of you or anything silly like that but just because getting blown off is hard enough without knowing you've been so easily replaced… Anyway he accepted whatever excuse I gave him and hangs up. Then he phoned back. He wanted to double check the reason."

"What is this guy, some kind of masochist? How many times did he want to hear you say 'no'?" I started counting calls in my head. That was three.

"He seemed to think that I had been talking to someone and was trying to convince me not to listen to whatever they had said." Sara made a valiant attempt to defend him.

"See, you're lucky that I got in the way of you two because it looks like I was right," I said smugly. "There's something fishy there; that call sounds like a guilty conscience. Someone so worried about rumours, must have done something to deserve them…"

"Is that so, lady killer? Well Greg told me this great one about you the other week. Let's test your theory, shall we? He says that--" She looked gleeful.

"Okay. Okay. Point taken." I grumbled. "Just for the record, Warrick's a more reliable source ab--"

"Oh, I know," she interrupted. "So anyway, Hank hung up after I told him that no one else influenced my decision."

"Except me," I added proudly, puffing out my chest.

"I'll get there," she promised with a bemused smile. "Then he called back again, asking whether it was because of what happened at the diner. He apologized for that even though it wasn't his fault and he said he was sorry for waiting so long that I had to phone up to ask him out. Incidentally, he was out of town, which was why he didn't call. Anyway, that was when I admitted that I had met someone else; I had hoped that he would take that as proof it wasn't because of anything he had done and accept it."

"I take it he didn't?" That was four so far. "Man, he is persistent." And pathetic.

"Yeah, the rest of the calls that I, or my machine, took were trying to persuade me to give him a second shot and that there was something special about me and that he thought we could really go the distance…"

I laughed and had to ask, "His words or yours?"

"His." She finally laughed a little at his expense. "Anyway, then I knocked the receiver off the hook and went to bed."

Now that I had heard the story I felt a lot more at ease. He was much too needy for Sara, and since she now knew that he wouldn't be competition. Still, it annoyed me that he had called so many times. "So that was, what? Seven, eight calls?"

"About. Now stop that," she referred to the grimace which crossed my face, "I told you what happened and now we're done with it. And I don't want you to do anything about it, okay? Nothing. Under no circumstances are you to speak to anyone else about this; especially Hank. Got it?" She wagged her finger sternly in my face.

"Got it." I considered it for a moment, "However, if the phone calls don't stop…"

"You'll be the first to know and you can do something stupid and macho to scare him off," she gave me a dazzling smile and I leaned down to seal the promise with a kiss.