Although SG-1 had added another team member, they hadn't replaced Daniel. That was impossible and everyone, including the new guy, knew it. Occasionally Daniel would join a SG-1 meeting where his particular expertise was useful. Seeing him in those meetings or in the cafeteria was heaven and hell for Sam once they had declared their mutual love. While it was good to just be able to look at him, Sam had to fight to keep her face schooled in appropriate lines. She could not allow the desire that now flooded her at the sight of him show in her eyes nor sit with her gaze focused on his mouth while she thought of all the things he could do with it, if only she could give him the right. They didn't dare actually be alone together in a private setting where all those thoughts could turn into actions of which they would be ashamed.
General Landry was a shrewd man, but she didn't think he had any idea that there was a reason for suspicion. He and Jack had been friends since their days at the Academy and, in his mind, she belonged to Jack. Cam was the one she worried about. He was really good with people and he noticed things. She feared he would have very mixed emotions about her interest in Daniel. She caught him more than once looking at her speculatively and she wondered if Daniel would confide in him sooner or later. The two men were so close now, Cam's bond with Dan having transferred itself to Daniel. Cam spent a lion's share of his free time with Daniel and his kids and, she thought, his first reaction would be to protect Daniel against being hurt. She doubted that this would translate into supporting Daniel's involvement with her since to any impartial observer, she would look like a train wreck waiting to happen.
Jack had taken to calling her every night but the calls were short. Jack was a man of few words and talking on the phone was not his idea of fun. She personally thought it was his way of marking territory, of reminding her daily that there was a leash and it was a short one.
The self control and focus on discretion she and Daniel shared meant that phone calls were the only recourse left to her. After Jack called, she would call Daniel. This way there was no danger that Jack would be unable to get through and get worried or suspicious. It made her feel rotten to be deceiving Jack in such a calculated manner, but she kept telling herself that she wasn't actually doing anything and that the alternative was to break it off with Jack completely which would have been much harder on him. The phone calls with Daniel had progressed to include some mild but explicit remarks. This actually made things even harder when they saw each other in person. The intimate things they had said tended to surface and dominate their thoughts. Still, they couldn't make themselves give up the conversations. The guilt for these verbal infidelities was eating her alive. Sam knew, from things that Daniel had said, that he was not liking himself very well either. She gained a new respect for drug addicts. If this was what it was like, she could begin to understand that it could be very difficult to "just say no."
Jack had had to cancel the weekend after they got engaged, but he was coming the following weekend. Sam was desperate about how she was going to hold him off sexually. She dreaded shopping for an engagement ring that she intended to return as soon as possible. She called Daniel Thursday night, needing his comfort more than ever.
"You sound really tense," Daniel said.
"This is going to be so hard. I think I know how to handle the no sex thing. I-"
Daniel interrupted, "Which involves NO sex, right? It makes me crazy thinking about his hands on you."
Sam couldn't help but feel just a little gratified by Daniel's possessiveness and jealousy, but it wasn't helping. "I couldn't. You do trust me, don't you?"
"I'm sorry, Sam. I'm just jealous and impatient for having you to myself."
Sam picked up her earlier thread. "I also have an idea of something that might help lead Jack to the realization that this isn't going to work."
"Really? Tell me because I've been coming up empty."
"I'm going to be with the kids eventually right? If I'm with them, I'll be their foster mother if nothing else."
"Right, and?"
"Well, I should start spending significant time with them now. If I drag Jack along, he won't like it. If he begins to understand that I'm not going to give the kids up for him, it might make a difference." Daniel started to object and she said, "Give me a minute more. Dan asked me to search my heart and not fight the feelings I found. I love those kids, Daniel. I'm tired of letting Jack's jealousy interfere with the promptings in my heart. Now, I'm finished. What do you think?"
"Sam, you know I love you and I trust you. I'm just… I… It's that those kids are in my care. If you do this, there can't be any backing down. You can't bow out of their lives, even if you stay with Jack."
It hurt her to hear his words and know that there were still reservations there. She knew, however, that they came from his deep sense of responsibility to a dead man and it was hard to fault him.
"I promise you, Daniel. I will end it with Jack and I will never deny what I know in my heart is intended for me and those children."
"I wish I could be with you and kiss you as tenderly as I want to for those words," Daniel said. His voice was husky and rough.
"I wish you were too," she said, dreamily. "I keep thinking about how much I want to run my fingers through your hair. You know it looks so silky to me now that you've let it grow out again, but I've never really touched it."
He gave a low moan. "Sam, we've got to hang up. It makes me feel like a heel when I talk to you like this. I keep thinking how Jack would feel if he heard us."
She felt like crying, but she knew he was right. "Good night my darling. I love you."
He said, "I love you too," and then there was the click of the hangup and the start of the dial tone. Her room felt as cold and lonely as the Artic.
When Sam went into work the next morning, she found a manila envelope under her door. An intricately detailed piece of artwork was inside, almost every inch of the paper covered with carefully applied crayon. It showed a birthday cake with nine candles surrounded by what appeared to be two small children and four adults. The woman next to the little boy had short blonde hair and blue eyes and was wearing something that was probably a BDU. A huge smile had been plastered on the face of the little boy. Printed unevenly across the bottom were the words, "Please come, love Mitch."
She fished in the envelope for something else that might explain the picture. She found a note from Daniel saying, "Mitch's birthday is Monday. I think I told you we are planning a party for him tomorrow, a kids' thing. He surprised me with this first thing this morning before he went to school and begged me to ask you to come too. Things start up at 1:00. Please do come if you can and bring Jack. Daniel."
The note was almost impersonal. She reasoned Daniel was afraid that Jack might see it. She started to tear up looking at Mitch's artwork which was amazingly good for a child who was about to be 9. The child's interest in her made her feel ten feet tall. Sam thought about the beautifully wrapped present that was already at home in a closet. She hadn't thought she'd be giving it to him in person. Suddenly she was nervous about whether it was the right thing. The task of being a mother yawned before her, like a huge pit full of snakes. She told herself that if you loved them, surely you couldn't go too wrong. A little voice in the back of her head said, "Yeah. Right. You just keep telling yourself that."
Sam put the picture on the wall opposite her desk with great care. She admonished her inner voice, "Like it or lump it. It's happening so get with the program."
Jack arrived in Colorado Springs around 9:00 PM. Friday. He had a message on his cell from Sam saying that their mission that day had gotten complicated, they had gotten back later than expected, and Landry wanted them to debrief immediately. It all added up to a late night. Jack thought fleetingly about how Sara hadn't had a career as much as a job and had never been the one to work late or be unavailable. Some sort of cosmic justice seemed to be at work, payback for all the times Sara had been alone while he served all over the globe.
He decided to go to a sports bar, have a Guinness, and watch a game. He could do that at Sam's or at the condo he had recently acquired in Colorado Springs, but he found that, lately, he didn't want to be alone. He didn't want to interact with strangers, but he wanted people—life--around him. He found a likely spot and, beer in hand, wandered over to the pool tables at the back. A young man was methodically running the table, an amazing achievement because he also appeared to be drunk. When he had utterly vanquished his opponent, he got in the man's face and said, "I guess I'm pretty damn good at this for a snotty nosed kid." His words were belligerent, if slurred. Jack immediately realized that there must have been some hot words exchanged earlier.
The boy's opponent, a beefy man who either took steroids or had an unfortunate genetic propensity to grotesque musculature, growled, "Or maybe you just got lucky." Their bodies were tense and Jack knew they were minutes away from exchanging blows. He didn't think the teenager would be likely to get seriously beaten up in the middle of the prosperous looking crowd, but, he noticed, now that he got a good look at him, that the boy appeared familiar. He couldn't place him, but thought there was a good chance that he would turn out to be the son of someone he knew or maybe even a young soldier stationed at the Mountain. Jack stepped forward and said heartily, "There you are. Sorry I'm late." He clapped the boy on the shoulder and pulled him away from the other man.
"You know this kid?" the guy asked, "I suggest you take him back to his playpen before he gets his diaper crammed down his throat." He blocked their path. "You look like you might need some Depends yourself, old man," he tacked on looking at Jack.
Jack hadn't been in a bar fight for a long time, but he was in a bad mood and feeling very sensitive about his age at that precise moment. He set his beer on a nearby table with exaggerated care and turned to the man who looked at him with a dumb ass expression, clearly clueless as to with whom he was dealing. In a series of quick moves, Jack two-fingered the fellow in a critical nerve cluster, got him in an unbreakable grip, and hissed in his ear, "I've killed a lot of guys in the service of my country. I would regard getting rid of an asshole like you as part of the standing orders I operate under to protect and defend. You want to go a round with me?"
It was all done so quickly and economically that hardly anyone around them even noticed that something was going on. The man went quite still. Jack could smell his fear. "Let's just forget it," the man said hastily.
"If you apologize about all the diaper related remarks and immediately find yourself another place to be," Jack said in a voice laden with cold menace.
"I'm sorry, okay?" he said. He was quite sincere, but Jack imagined he was mainly sorry things had gone south so fast.
"Glad to hear it," Jack said and escorted him to the door.
When he returned, the young man was propped up against the wall next to the pool table, drinking Jack's beer. Jack sighed. This kid didn't need to be running loose. "How about we get you home?" he asked. He decided not to try to reclaim his beer. Jack wasn't fastidious, but he wasn't into sharing his glass with people he didn't know.
"Can't go home, Jack," the fellow said. "My new dad would have a cow because he would probably think I'm not completely sober."
"I wonder why?" Jack asked rhetorically. He took a hold of his arm, doubly glad that he had acted since it was clear the kid knew him, and steered him toward a vacant booth toward the back. "How about you have a sit then."
The boy had finished Jack's Guinness by the time they sat down. When the waitress appeared, he tried to order another but Jack substituted coffee. "Why is it that everyone in sight thinks they're my keeper?" he groused.
"You are drinking with bad id, am I right?"
The boy flushed. "Laws here are stoopid. Back home, while I still had one, people didn't make laws about everything."
"Where's that?"
The boy laughed without any real amusement behind it. "You know, Jack. In a galaxy far, far away. Only we can't get back there. They're all gone." He closed his eyes and Jack thought he was entering the maudlin phase of drunkenness as he repeated very sadly, "All gone. My girl and my planet. All gone."
The pieces fell into place. Jack said, "Your Daniel's kid, Jake, aren't you?"
Jake's head snapped up. "I live with Daniel Jackson. I'm Dan's kid."
"If you think you're old enough to drink in public, then you need to be enough of a grown up to keep your mouth shut in public when it needs to be shut," Jack said in a low voice. "What do you think Dan would say about your behavior in the past few minutes?"
Jake looked defiant, but he nodded reluctantly. The waitress appeared right then with the coffee. Jack said, "Could you go ahead and bring a second cup or maybe just leave the pot?" He pushed the cup closer to Jake after she set it down and said, "You're about to drink a lot of coffee and then I'm going to drive you home."
Sam finally showed up at her place shortly before midnight. Jack was sitting pensively in front of the TV, not really watching what was on, and thinking about the challenge Daniel had in Jake. All the grief and confusion weighing on Jake's mind had jolted Jack a little out of his self-imposed emotional solitary confinement and he was reminded that he wasn't the only one in the universe with problems. The kid was obviously very bright, but he was a whole different kind of person than Daniel, one who was very physical and sports oriented and lacked even a trace of the pacifist. Talking to him, Jack thought that Jake and Daniel hadn't really connected yet, although Jake had a reluctant respect for the way Daniel was attempting to father his siblings. Jake had talked for a solid hour, mostly about the girl he had loved on Abydos, Sha're's daughter. The fact that Jake was still loyally honoring his love for her reminded Jack of Daniel's commitment to Sha're even after he had lost her. At least in that respect, the two were alike.
Sam leaned over and kissed him on the check and then sat down next to him. "I'm so sorry Jack for being late. Did you find something to do?"
Jack just said, "Sure." Jake's drunken episode was his secret with the boy. He reached for her then, but she slipped out of his grasp and stood up. She was worrying her lip and Jack groaned to himself, thinking, please no more emotion right now. He had really hoped that giving in on the marriage would buy him some peace and quiet for awhile.
"There's something we need to talk about," Sam said.
Jack thought, I knew it. "How about we just have some quality time together and talk about it tomorrow?" He made another move in her direction but she eased away from him again.
"That's just it," she said. "There's no easy way to say this, but, I think, we should quit with the quality time for awhile."
"WHAT?"
"The thing is Jack, our relationship, ever since we got together, has been mostly sex. It's so ever present that we don't know what else we have. It isn't enough to build a marriage on. I think we should quit making love long enough to find out if we are really compatible."
"You're serious," he said. He didn't pose it as a question because he knew damn well that she was.
"I am. My parents should never have gotten married. They cared about each other, but all they had really was physical attraction and my brother and I who resulted from it. When all the strains of a military marriage began to tear at them, they didn't have anything but sex as a counterweight. It wasn't enough. I mean I was a kid and I didn't understand all of it at the time, but Dad talked about it later."
"Sam, do you seriously believe that we are that ill-suited?" he asked with a sinking feeling.
"I hope not Jack, but I need to know." She looked so tense and unhappy. For just a moment he thought, this relationship hasn't done her any favors. When was the last time she looked really happy since we got together?
He did love her. He could be a pissant about this--his first instinct was to pitch a fit and try to intimidate her into changing her mind--but he knew Sam didn't really do being intimidated. Something about his encounter with Jake had made him reluctant to go that route. He simply said, "Okay, Sam, but I think I'll go to my condo. Staying here under your roof, but unable to touch you might make me a little crazy."
She looked very contrite but there was also relief there. Maybe she'd been afraid of an ugly scene. He had real plans to break something once he got out of her sight, but he hated to see her distress and really wanted to get ugly all alone.
"Something else I should mention to you. I hope you're not too upset about this, but tomorrow is Mitch Jackson's birthday party. The kid asked me personally if I could come and I didn't see how I could say no. We're both invited, of course. There'll be time to go look at rings after."
It just kept getting better and better. "What time are we supposed to show up for that?"
"At 1:00. Why don't you come by in the morning and we can have some brunch and go over there together. I've got a gift from both of us."
Jack stood and stretched. He was thinking he needed to go run about five miles although doing that in a dark and cold Colorado night didn't seem wise. Maybe he would go to the Mountain and use the facilities there. He didn't want to think any more and he didn't want to lie in bed, not tired enough to go to sleep, while his mind spun over all the unpleasant surprises of the day.
"I'm going to go then," he said, walking to her and pulling her close. He looked down into her face and saw that she still looked unhappy. "I'm okay, Sam. I'm not happy about this, but something tells me that fighting you about it wouldn't get me anywhere."
She smiled, still troubled, but relaxing a little. "There's nothing in the rules against kissing is there?" he asked, unable to believe she would go that far.
"Of course not," she said and she closed her eyes and kissed him. It was a nice kiss, but it felt different to him somehow. Maybe he was paranoid.
"Dream about me," he said lightly and left without any more discussion. As he pounded around the indoor track at Cheyenne Mountain, he felt like he was in a race he didn't understand and hadn't signed up for. He just hoped he could stay the course.