AN: Another long, thoroughly amusing (at least to me and anyone else who shares my odd sense of humor) chapter for you. Enjoy!

Chapter Eleven

She forgot entirely about moving in deference to being polite as she smiled back. Apparently once he could see her, she didn't have anything to say.

"Hi." No one had ever seen Jack O'Neill with quite that stupid a look on his face.

"Well, apparently that problem is solved." Daniel fidgeted nervously. He was pretty sure someone was about to tell him to leave, but he didn't think he should go until someone expressly told him to. God forbid someone might call him back and he had to walk in on two of his best friends sucking face ever again. Of course, it didn't seem that his friends exactly noticed or cared that he was there as they sat there, in way too much physical contact for the third wheel's taste, gazing at each other. "Ok, so I'm just going to head out." He set the bottle of whiskey down on the table and disappeared.

Ok, so he didn't actually disappear, but by the time Sam pealed her eyes off Jack's long enough to turn around, it seemed to her that Daniel had disappeared into thin air. She turned back to Jack and grinned. "Miss me?"

He grinned back. "So I guess I'm not getting molested by a demon."

She raised one eyebrow in her best Teal'c impression. "Not unless you're thinking of saying no."

His eyes danced happily as he ran his hands over every bit of her he could reach. "If I'm crazy, I really don't ever want to get better."

She leaned in, unable to resist pecking his lips simply because she could. "You're not crazy. I'm really here."

"How?"

Sam grinned. "How? Aren't you the one who declared that people were not supposed to ask me how anything?"

"Normally, yes, but I'm really curious. I mean-" He looked around, almost as though he was afraid someone would overhear. "I thought you were dead."

"I am."

He shook his head the same way he always whenever she tried to explain the theory of how the gate worked. "Then how are you here?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

His happy expression started to fade. "What do you mean you don't know?"

"I mean I don't know how. I'm here. Souls continue to exist after they're dead and they can come back if they want to. That's all I know."

His smiled disappeared so completely that she wondered if it had ever been there. He jumped to his feet, sending Sam tumbling off his lap, as he tried to put as much distance as he could between them. "You're not Carter!"

Sam stood up, rubbing the elbow which had struck the coffee table again. "No, I'm the ghost of Carter. But since I have a physical body on occasion and can talk, it's probably easier to call me Carter."

Jack took another step back, giving Sam the impression he was trying to fuse with the way with the way he pressed against it. "Get away from me!"

"Jack, it's me."

His eyes narrowed and slid to the left, planning on making a break for the front door at the first opportunity. "Carter didn't call me Jack."

"She tried, but you pretty much had the same reaction then too." Sam flopped on the couch, thoroughly disgusted with the situation. She'd thought getting people to admit she was there at all was difficult. She hadn't expected to have trouble getting them to believe it was her.

"There are no such things as ghosts." Jack's voice was matter-of-fact; however, it lost its authority coming from a man who was cowering in fear of something he claimed he didn't believe in.

"Then what am I?"

Jack abandoned his post at the wall and grabbed for the whiskey Daniel had retrieved. "You-" He opened the bottle and gagged down a swallow of the warm liquid. "Are exactly why I'm never sobering up again."

She approached him and took the bottle from his hand. "Don't do that." She set it down and looked back at him. "Do you want me to leave?"

Jack shrugged, weighing the benefits of seeing Carter, even if she wasn't really Carter, against the idea of spending time with an evil-Carter impersonating demon, even if it wasn't really there. "I think so."

"Fine, I'll leave. But don't give yourself alcohol poisoning. Getting your stomach pumped isn't going to help anything." Her shoulders drooped. Things were not going the way she intended. "I'll be with Daniel if you change your mind."

"Why?" He looked wary, but hurt.

"Because he isn't afraid of me? Because he admits that he sees me? Because he's sober? Take your pick."

"Are you- were you-" He swallowed hard and looked even more unhappy. "With him?"

"A minute ago you thought he was hitting on you."

Jack winced. "You heard that?"

"I was here."

"So does that mean you aren't involved with him?"

"We're friends, Jack."

"I don't really want you to leave." He turned away, trying to mask his emotions. "Not if it really is you."

"I can't prove it to you. Besides assuring you that I remember the complete and utter disaster that weekend at the cabin was, but I'm trying to pretend that didn't happen, so I can't even assure you of that."

Jack smirked. "Yeah, it was pretty awful, wasn't it?" And then his face fell, revealing utter devastation. "God, this is all my fault. I threw you out. I put you on that plane. I'm the reason you're dead." He reached for the whiskey again, but Sam's hand caught his.

"Ok, first of all, it was actually all my case worker's mistake and it wasn't supposed to happen. Nothing you or I did had any effect on it and wouldn't have changed the outcome."

Jack didn't look convinced, but he said nothing and he didn't try for the bottle again.

"And secondly, what difference does it really make?" She stepped forward, leaning against him. It barely took a second for his hands to find their way to her back in what felt like a terribly natural movement to both of them. "I'm still here. As far as I can tell, the only differences are that I don't get noticed by a lot of people I probably don't want to be noticed by anyway and I don't have to pay taxes."

He grinned despite himself. "I guess you don't have to worry about dying either."

Sam smirked when she felt his grip tighten and pull her closer. "And I don't have to worry about those pesky Air Force regulations either. I might need to move in with you right away though since I'm not sure I'm going to qualify for a mortgage considering that I have no income and I'm dead."

He looked completely stupefied by her words. Slowly his hands started to move up her back, caressing her gently.

She winked at him. "I think you're finally catching on, flyboy."

She didn't have a chance to say anything else because his mouth suddenly closed over hers. She let him kiss her, let his plundering tongue do some serious damage to her ability to think straight. But there was something bothering her, something that wouldn't let her truly enjoy the experience, something that she couldn't deny. She pulled away.

"Uh, Jack?"

His pupils were dilated and he looked drugged. He was a typical male - all moral dilemmas paled in the light of having sex. "What's wrong?"

"Go take a shower." It was obviously not the statement he was expecting.

"What?"

"I might be dead, but I can still smell."

He looked down sheepishly. "That bad?"

She nodded. "Brush your teeth too."

Jack hung his head as he walked toward the bathroom. Sam feared that the time alone would undo what she'd just done. She followed him, reveling in the sight of him pulling his shirt over his head. He might have been drunk and half-starved and laying off the workouts for three weeks, but he still looked fantastic. She smiled at his questioning glance when she threw her shirt next to his.

"If you brush your teeth first, I'll join you in the shower." His eyes widened in response and Sam could see the 'it's not her' wheels start turning again. She wasn't about to have that. "Look, Jack, you never knew me when you weren't my CO and now that you're not my CO, everything I do is going to seem out of character." She tried her best to sound as professional and confident as he was used to her sounding, but it was really difficult with the way he was ogling her chest. She reached out and snagged his chin with her finger. "My face is up here."

"Sorry." His cheeks were red. He nodded toward her shirt, crumpled on the floor. "You're going to be able to put that back on, right?" Luckily, he continued before she had a chance to panic that he had changed his mind. "It's not that I mind-" His eyes steadily drifted down to her chest. "Cause I so don't, but you might not want to see Daniel like that."

Sam hadn't actually given any thought to the clothes she was wearing. She'd been in the same thing - the clothes she'd been wearing the day she died - since her first conscious thought in the DMV line. For the most part, Same wore the plan, comfortable, white cotton panties and bras she'd always felt would be the least embarrassing underwear to be caught in by fellow soldiers in the locker room, her teammates in case of other-worldly chemicals which might (and had) cause her to give them a strip tease, the paramedics if she were ever in an accident, or the coroner if the accident was really bad. Besides, she wasn't the seductive type and because of her looks, which she swore wasn't at all conceited, she'd never really had to try skimpy lace to get a man's attention.

But the weekend she'd died was supposed to have been special. She'd been expecting that she'd be having sex with Jack and, although she hated to admit it, he seemed like the sort of guy who would thoroughly enjoy seeing his prim little Major decked out in impossibly thin piece of lace in a variety of garish and embarrassing colors.

She'd made a special trip to the store - the horrid one that advertised with body parts she didn't think belonged on network TV - and bought a bunch of things she didn't ever want anyone to know she owned. She'd even paid for the purchases, which included sheer black lace, shimmering lavender, and a horrid green rubber set the salesgirl had sworn would look spectacular on her that Sam had bought just to stop the girl from mentioning her cleavage one more time - with cash so her bank wouldn't know she'd ever gone there. And, of course, she hadn't packed for the possibility that she and Jack would be fighting and fully clothed the whole time, so she'd spent the trip intensely uncomfortable due to unnatural fabric sticking to her and sharp wires poking her in places unnatural fabrics and sharp wires had no business being, which she realized belatedly might have had something to do with her bitchy mood during the trip.

Sam looked down and wanted to die all over again. No wonder he was staring. She was donning a fire-engine red mesh bra with absolutely no nod to modesty whatsoever. It didn't cover a damn thing. It didn't pretend to. And it wasn't even sorry about it either. Jack was right - Daniel would die too if he saw her in that. She was utterly mortified, which was silly considering she'd bought the bra for Jack in the first place, except he was supposed to enjoy it and by enthralled by it and not mention its utter impracticality. She decided to grab the bull by the horns, tugging the waistband of her jeans down a little to reveal the matching strip of fabric at her hip

"Weren't you supposed to be brushing your teeth?"

When Jack didn't answer, she grinned smugly. "And drooling isn't winning you any points."

Probably due to sheer astonishment, Jack obediently brushed his teeth. When he was finished, he turned back to her. "Um, I just want to clarify, we're going to be able to actually - uh - you know - with - up - the - um-"

She adjusted the temperature controls for the shower and then faced him, still grinning as confident, cocky Jack stuttered around for some way to ask the question. He was bright red when he finally gave up. She found his unease amusing - he was willing to have sex with her, but not talk about it with her. "You mean can we actually have sex?"

"Uh, yeah, that."

"I have no idea. I've never had sex dead." She shrugged. "Of course, I didn't really have that much of it when I was alive and I certainly never with you, so our odds are probably just as good."

Jack looked hesitant while the steam from the shower started to fill the room. "I don't want to start something we're not going to finish."

Sam raised her eyebrows and let her eyes drift down to his pants. "I hate to break it to you, but it's already started." She was referring to his body's reaction to her red mesh approximation of underwear. Without the benefit of his oversized shirt to hide it, his interest in her was obvious and made her wonder if his oversized uniform jacket hadn't hidden the same thing over the years. She congratulated herself for having been right about him liking eye candy, even if she hated that she'd bought it. But she couldn't hate it so much anymore, because she absolutely loved the effect it had on him.

She made quick work of her jeans and sneakers and socks, allowing him a few seconds of staring before she finished undressing and climbed into the shower. She leaned back through the curtain and crooked her finger for him to follow. "You're a little overdressed, Jack."

She didn't have to wait long.