Chapter Seven
It took the ministrations of Jack's obscenely gifted mouth approximately half a second to stop Carter's thought process and reduce her vocabulary to various breathy moans. She would have said the idea of kissing Jack would be enough to discourage coherent thought, but actually experiencing it, free of alien viruses, was more remarkable than even she had imagined, which was a little scary for her since she'd imagined it an awful lot in the seven years she'd spent quietly lusting after him.
And simply because she'd placed most of the blame on his mouth, she had to remind herself to breathe at the touch of his equally talented hands, which had made their way under her shirt and were pressing against her back. She was particularly thankful for them because they alleviated the unrelenting pain of the padlock that had been pressing into the small of her back.
Which, unfortunately, was a sobering thought.
As much as she wanted him, and that was a hell of a lot more than she'd ever guessed, she was not about to have their first time up against the lockers in the mens locker room where people were liable to walk in at any moment. And she absolutely knew there was no chance she could resist him if she didn't stop him very, very soon.
Her hands were free, for the moment, so she pressed them against his shoulders. "Wait."
He didn't appear to hear her, which might have been because he'd chosen that same moment to slide one of his legs between hers, aligning their bodies perfectly so she could fell that he apparently wanted her as much as she wanted him, thus driving what little sense she'd regained right out of her head. Her hands abandoned his shoulders, moving up and tangling in his perpetually messy hair. She used her hold to pry his mouth off her neck so she could kiss him. She smiled at his dark eyes, amazed with herself for making such an incredible man want her so much. Her fingers played with his hair as they kissed. When his lips once again journeyed to the hollow of her throat, she leaned against his ear, confessing something she'd always wanted to have the opportunity to tell him.
"I love your hair when it gets long and messy like this." She didn't tell him it was because it made for a good handle, in addition to simply being adorable.
He pulled back slightly and grinned at her. "I know." He leaned in and kissed her lips. "That's why I stopped cutting it."
She giggled at the notion she had the power to control him like that. "How did you know?" She hoped her face hadn't revealed the way her stomach flipped every time she'd ever seen him with his messy mop of hair.
"Because you told me." He moved in to kiss her again.
Carter jerked her head back, wondering how she ever could have gotten so drunk that she'd ever said such a thing and hadn't remembered it. "When?"
He shrugged, his eyes focusing on her neck. "A couple weeks ago? I don't remember."
She didn't resist again as he left a trail of wet kisses along her throat. But even as she leaned back to give him better access, she clearly remembered being disappointed earlier that week when Jack had shown up one morning sporting that horrible cropped cut she hated so much. She was quite a scholar on how fast his hair grew because she'd paid far too much attention to it over the years and she knew there was no way it had grown that fast.
A chill ran through her and she jerked away, tripping over the bench and slamming her knee into the cement floor. Utter confusion reflected on Jack's face as he tried to figure out what she wanted from him. Evidently, space wasn't among the things that occurred to him. He squatted down on the floor next to her, prying her hands away from her throbbing knee.
"Let me see it."
"No." She tried to scoot backwards, but she was still half out of her mind from the power of his kisses. "Don't touch me."
He met her eyes for a moment, before he sighed and slumped back against the lockers. "What did I do this time?"
Carter quickly discovered that her brain's speed was directly proportional to the distance from Jack's mouth to her skin. Therefore, the further away his mouth was, the faster she could think. "Who are you?"
Jack closed his eyes and shook his head. "You're not still mad about the wedding, are you?"
Memories she hadn't known existed were coming back to her and she remembered something from the briefing that morning - while she was gazing, as Daniel had so politely put it, at Jack, she'd had a fleeting thought about actually telling him he looked stupid with his hair damn near shaved like he was in boot camp. There was no chance in hell his hair had grown that fast. There was no chance in hell the man, or thing, in front of her was Jack.
She climbed unsteadily to her feet, willing her knee to stop hurting. "Stay away from me." She turned and sprinted from the room, thinking the suddenness of her departure would give her a decent head start.
She locked herself and two guards in the security office. She wanted to ask General Hammond to order the Jack imposter locked up, but she had no evidence she could use, besides evidence that would incriminate her. Throwing herself in a chair and rubbing her sore knee, she ordered on of the guards to bring up the security tapes from the gate room when they were returning from the mission. Just before their return had been when she'd noticed Jack's behavior change. On another monitor she had them bring up the video of them leaving.
Her heart skipped a beat when she saw him, the colonel she knew, the man she trusted, her Jack, walking up the ramp beside her that morning with that ridiculously short hair cut. She glanced at the footage of them returning, Jack, with his hair at least an inch longer, scowling unhappily at her.
Her voice was weak as she asked someone to hand her the phone. She'd really been hoping that she was wrong. She waited patiently for the general to come, checking to be sure it was really him in a rarely observed, extremely paranoid fashion, before she allowed the guards to open the door.
Even as she reported the story to Hammond, she berated herself. She'd known something was wrong. She'd recognized his mood swing and had ignored it. She'd heard him lie about sleeping with her. She'd seen him forget his iris code. She'd caught him lying to the general about never being out of her sight on the mission. And the one thing she hated about herself the most was that the clearest indicator that he wasn't Jack, the outrageous way he'd flirted with her and touched her that afternoon, was something she'd cherished. She was mortified, even though she hadn't said a word about it. She'd let her personal feelings for him cloud her professional judgment - something she'd sworn she would never do.
Hammond listened to her story, to her vague explanation that the colonel hadn't been acting quite right, and carefully inspected the footage she held up as evidence. He asked her to meet him in the briefing room. When he arrived a few minutes later, Daniel and Teal'c were with him. He questioned them and received the same decidedly vague assurance that Jack's behavior had been odd, although neither of her teammates disclosed any particulars regarding what Jack had said. Carter was exceedingly grateful for it because it was once less thing she'd have to explain. She was praying they could get rid of the fake Jack and get the real one back without anyone being the wiser about just how well she'd been snowed into buying the lie.
A few minutes after that, Jack was brought to the briefing room by a couple of SFs. He looked confused, voicing his distaste with whatever royal screw up had landed him there. Carter looked away when he took in the faces around the table and realized one of them had turned him in.
The SFs blocked the doors, leaving Jack relatively free to move about the room. He inched toward Carter, not knowing she'd been the one to turn him in. Just as he reached her side, she practically leapt halfway across the room to cower on the other side of Daniel.
He looked crushed and Carter had to give him - it - credit for its dead on reproduction of his expressions. "Carter?"
"Stay away from me." Her voice sounded like a hiss. She hated the creature that corrupted her fantasies.
He took a few steps toward her, trying to reach for her in an uncharacteristic display of need for her support. "I'm not going to hurt you, Sam."
She moved further away, stepping to the other side of Teal'c as well, deliberately masking the limp brought on by her swollen knee. She didn't want it to know she had a weakness. "Then don't hurt me from over there."