CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When Sam next awoke, and slowly blinked her eyes open, the first thing she realized was that she was sore. She was stiff and sluggish and needed to get moving. As she stretched out across the bed in a attempt to loosen her muscles, a second realization made her heart skip a beat. She was alone. Jack O'Neill was no longer in her bed.

Sam listened hard and couldn't hear anything that would give her a clue that he was still in the house. No running water, no television, nothing. Her hand balled into a fist and lashed out at a pillow. She didn't know whether to be relieved or pissed. Her biggest fear had come true. This had freaked Jack out so badly that he had bolted. Again. Whether his flight was due to the fact that this had been only sex for him and he didn't want to deal with the baggage that accompanied that or because it had meant too much to him and he panicked at his own emotions didn't matter. Jack had bolted. He was gone. Sam knew that when Jack didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be, and she feared she had lost her friend forever.

Sam sighed in frustration. A thousand new questions sprang up in her mind. Didn't Jack understand that this didn't have to mean anything if they didn't want it to? That they could still be friends? Why did men always have to put so much value on things like this? Sure, she hadn't decided yet what this day meant to her, but if she and Jack had decided it meant nothing, she would've been ok with that. She could've accepted it as a wonderful experience between great 'friends with benefits', so to speak. She could have 'kept it in the room'. It's not like it would have been the first time that they had suppressed things. Sure, this event added another degree of difficulty to that task, but it could still be done. On the other hand, if they had decided there were still some emotions underneath it all that they were interested in exploring, that would have been fine, too. Sam just would've liked to have been given the opportunity to make that choice for herself, or at least have some input. She cursed Jack O'Neill and his emotional instability inwardly in every possible way.

However, Carter did see a bright spot to Jack's actions. They did spare her the conversations and awkwardness and emotional nakedness required to make the hard decisions in any relationship, so in a way she thought maybe this was for the best. She just prayed that Jack wouldn't stay gone for good. His friendship was too important to her, and to Daniel and Teal'c, too. Jack had been missed, even in just these last two weeks, and Sam hoped that one sexual experience wouldn't get in the way of him knowing where he needed to be. He belonged with his surrogate family, no matter what. It didn't matter that Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter had made love one sunny afternoon. That didn't change the strong bonds of friendship forged between four people through years of shared experiences, and it didn't change the fact that Jack belonged close to those four people, no matter what.

XXX

After a short shower (Sam had been too long in the military to languish in the hot water, no matter how good it felt), Carter headed into the kitchen for a drink. She was rummaging around in the fridge when she heard something that made her freeze.

A key had turned in her lock.

Only two people had a key to her house besides herself. Daniel and Jack. She was pretty sure Daniel would've knocked before letting himself in, so that left one Jonathan O'Neill as the primary suspect for who was sneaking in the front door.

Sam closed the fridge door, leaned on the counter, and waited.

The door slowly opened and Jack's head appeared around the doorframe, looking around. When he spotted Sam looking back at him, his eyes went wide and then looked to the floor. He seemed surprised and then a little embarrassed.

"Forget something, sir?" The title came out intentionally, and it was laced with venom.

O'Neill began to babble. Nervously, he tried to explain his actions. "Carter, look, it's not what you think…you weren't supposed to…"

Sam interrupted him then. She didn't yell. She didn't scream. She simply very coldly interrogated Jack as she would a stranger. Jack would have preferred yelling or screaming. "No? You weren't running away? You weren't trying to sneak back in here like a thief to collect some forgotten evidence of your presence here? I wasn't supposed to catch you so you could disappear again, like you always do when something gets too close for comfort? When you start to care more than you should? Or is it that you don't care at all?"

Jack stood in the doorway, with his head hung low and his eyes studying the floor, and just let Sam talk, unsure what to do or say. Carter's words were cutting him right to his core. She probably had no idea how right she was. How the same things she was saying had flitted across Jack's mind only minutes earlier as he sat in her driveway in his truck, trying to come back into the house. How he was in utter turmoil about what to do now and how he had no idea how he felt about everything that had happened between he and Sam, not just today, but in the last two years. It would have been so easy to run away, to deal with it by not dealing with it, as was his habit, but Jack O'Neill was tired of running.

He'd tried to escape this, but it hadn't worked. Jack had driven around town for a long time, thinking about a lot of things and looking hard at his life while Carter had slept the afternoon away. No matter which way he looked at things, Jack's mind kept coming to only one inevitable conclusion.

He couldn't run forever. He was old. He was tired. And he wanted to stop.

Finally, Jack's eyes left the floor and he looked into Sam's face. He didn't have any more answers than he'd had a few hours ago, but he knew he had to try this. He had to talk about this. One simple word interrupted Sam's interrogation.

"Carter."

"What?"

"I'm not running away."

"What?"

"I'm not running away. I'm tired of dodging this. I'm tired of running."

Sam was stunned by this admission from the General. Jack was historically so uncomfortable dealing with emotions that Sam fully expected him to try to shut her out, even after the afternoon they had shared and everything else they had been through together, but it sounded like he actually wanted to try to talk. To try to figure out where they stood and where they were going to go from there. Carter wasn't sure if she was ready to do that, or if she even wanted to do it at all, but it looked like there wasn't a choice. It was now or never, and the first option was dramatically better than the second. Never was not something she wanted to think about. So, now it was. Sam began to feel the tiniest tendrils of guilt about her assumptions concerning Jack and his actions.

"So, where did you go then?"

Tentatively, as if he expected Sam to bite his head off at any time, Jack reached back out the door to the steps and retrieved two large white paper bags. "Got dinner. Hope Chinese is ok?"

If Carter thought she felt bad before, she felt worse now. Jack had tried to do something thoughtful, and here she was lambasting him for it.

Blushing and looking up at Jack with an abashed look, there was only one answer she could give.

"Chinese sounds great. I'll get some drinks and napkins."