Here's a little more from Sam's cranium. Sorry this has taken me a while to post … I wanted to let it sit and simmer for a few days. Your comments (and encouragement for more, if you like it enough!) most appreciated.

Disclaimer: I'm a Toronto girl, but I don't own RB. I do get amused at the mix of real streets and fictional ones, though! Ain't never been no "Route 9"….

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The day Andy announced she was engaged, it was almost a relief.

Totally off the market. Done deal. So he could stop … well, frankly, obsessing … right?

Kind of like that trip to Sudbury, which he'd dreaded because it was just way too much uninterrupted quality time in a car with McNally, and he was at a point where he was starting not to trust himself. He'd been short with her - he'd always been able to turn on the charm, but the flip side of that wasn't all that pretty. She'd called him out on his seriousness, not getting, of course, that his self-control was pretty much hanging by a thread, and that various scenarios in which he, she, and the hood of the cruiser were the major players, were on some tormenting random repeat in his head.

When that jagoff of a prisoner transfer had knocked her flat on her ass and sprinted off into the woods, it had sparked not just exasperation, but actual rage, in him. And it was a relief. He'd been walking the knife-edge for a while and it actually felt fantastic to let something else, something primal, flood his system and take over. It obliterated all the other stuff, and he didn't want to let it go.

He managed to continue being royally pissed off for a good hour as they stomped through the wilderness in pursuit of their escapee, but of course he couldn't sustain it while she was looking like a kicked puppy. Three seconds after they'd apprehended the bastard Sam's brain was again entertaining the thought of chaining him to some distant tree while he pressed Andy back down into the leaf litter and peeled off that damned vest …

This, though. This was way more permanent. This should banish all this stupidity from his head. Time to stop doing this idiotic push-her-away, get-sucked-back-in dance he'd been doing, time to stop trying to interpret her every word and gesture for signs that she might actually be into him, time to just stop. She just wasn't an option.

He thought he'd made a pretty good show of sincerity as he wrung her hand and congratulated her, but scarcely 30 minutes later he found himself incapable of not being an asshole, when he asked her if she was pregnant.

So, okay, a rock on her finger wasn't instantly changing the way he reacted to her.

And he was still getting sucked in, through the whole mess when Callaghan got shot and then, scant weeks later, when he heard, like everyone else in the squad, that the relationship had imploded thanks to Callaghan's little trip down memory lane with his ex.

For all McNally claimed she liked to live by the rules, being around her was getting decidedly messy.

The rage towards Callaghan became contempt as Sam watched her struggle to process the end of her little self-scripted fairytale. He half-expected her to cave and take him back anyway, and he braced himself for the big squad-car rationalization speech about working it out. Instead she surprised him with her strength, by moving out and moving on. His admiration for her went up another notch, even as he squelched an irrational urge to be the rebound guy.

That wasn't what he wanted to be for her. Which scared the hell out of him.

When he let his guard enough down to feel it, he couldn't deny that she just plain made him feel good. Something about that Pollyanna streak of hers endeared her to him, as much as, or maybe because, it contrasted with his own cynicism. She believed the best of everyone. She was the kind who passed around birthday cards for everyone to sign, fed other people's cats, looked after her drunk of a dad even he was at his lowest. Sam knew enough about Tommy McNally to know that Andy had been through some stuff when she was a kid. How she came out of that an idealist, he couldn't imagine, but it was kind of amazing.

They had moments when everything was easy, comfortable. Yeah, she was still green, but she was becoming one helluva cop. When they were working together, it was seamless. He was starting to trust her instincts, and she was starting to finish his sentences. It was … well, like working with Ollie, only with flirting. Which he couldn't help, and she didn't seem to mind. She might even have been flirting back. In an alternate universe, it would have been an easy segue to something more. But it wasn't so simple, and something – lots of things – kept him from stepping off the cliff. Not the least of which was that he hated the possibility that she'd end up looking like she slept her way up the ranks. Or maybe that was just a colossal rationalization of his own?

The overall effect was that he felt like he'd been chewed up and spit back out again, and he wasn't sure how much longer he could do it. There'd been that night when he'd left her to deal with an accident victim while he went off in search of a missing kid, and came back to a whole swarm of fire trucks and EMTs, and smoke rising from a burnt-out wreck. No sign of McNally. His heart had stuttered to a standstill as he hollered her name.

And then she was in front of him and miraculously intact, and he'd gotten lost in those lethal Bambi eyes of hers and almost, almost forgotten that half of the rest of 15 Division were potential witnesses on that dark, wet street. She was smiling softly at him and making her own contribution towards closing the distance between them, and he knew before he got there exactly how she would taste, of coffee and smoke and just Andy. His whole body was humming with the proximity and the possibilities of her. All he had to do was lean forward just another half an inch and erase all the uncertainty from her mind. And he'd chickened out, he'd chickened out at the last second, and that smile had turned just a little sad as she pivoted away from him, holding eye contact long enough for him to mentally kick his own ass the entire way home.

With any other woman, he wouldn't have doubted by now that the feelings were mutual. But this was McNally, so he was walking on eggshells. He wasn't sure which scared him more: whether they'd start something only find out that it was too soon, she wasn't ready, and he really was just Rebound Guy. Or whether they'd start something and she'd find out way too quickly that he wasn't serious boyfriend material. Which he was pretty sure he wasn't. Previous attempts had not exactly been spectacularly successful.

Either way, it was bound to go down in flames, wasn't it? And she didn't deserve that. Especially not after Luke.

A change of scenery sounded healthy. Time and space. Guns and Gangs was still stalling, so when another undercover op got dangled in front of him, Sam did the mature thing.

He bolted.