A/N1 Very glad, and pleasantly surprised, that so many are sticking with my talky little story. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for your responses—reviews and PMs.

Continued thanks to michaelfmx for his patient beta work.

Don't own Chuck. No money made.

Miss Trust?

Very late Friday Night Sept. 1, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Okeechobee, Florida

The Blushing Pelican Motel

CHAPTER 5 Crisscross Double-cross

Sarah listened to Chuck's report about Sally with mixed and mixed-up emotions. It meant that the two of them were not going to have to make a road trip to South Dakota, a long, hard trip. That was what she had expected as the next step. Good. But it also meant that the two of them were not going to have to make a road trip to South Dakota, alone together on a long, hard trip. Bad. Damn. She uncrossed her legs.

Chuck seemed surprised, concerned and unsure. He snuck a glance up at her while he finished reading the email. She knew he was making note of the flight number and arrival time—and that he was trying to judge her reaction to the news of Sally's arrival.

What was her reaction? She could no longer be coy with herself. She was deeply affected by Chuck. She had thought all that love at first sight stuff was rom-com drivel. Lust at first sight: she knew that was possible. In fact, lust was typically a first-sight phenomenon. She had been the object of it countless times, and the subject of it a few. But could you fall in love at first sight? Maybe. Maybe...maybe you could foresee at first sight that you would fall in love.

Romeo, Romeo?

What did the abstract issue matter? Though there was an urgent desire in her response to Chuck, it was by no means the dominant note in her response. The desire was one note—insistent and hard to ignore, to be sure—but Chuck caused a complicated chord in her to be struck, a combination of high notes and low, of respect and admiration and fun (when she let herself thaw, let herself breathe) and of desire and of…slightly wicked…longings. She marshaled her thoughts and sent them in another direction.

"Ok. Well, then I guess our next moves are clear. We hide, and we wait for Sally. Where was Janet Sanders, last you knew?"

"Seattle, maybe. But I meant it when I said I haven't kept up with her. That's where she said she was going right after the break-up. I've never heard from her or tried to contact her."

"So, you and Janet were together for how long?" Sarah's tone was not as detached as she hoped.

"A while. A little over two years all told. We were just a few days out from the wedding when things ended."

"How did things begin? How exactly did you meet?"

Chuck told her. She listened carefully, but with spiking jealousy in her chest. Why? He wasn't hers—was he? What had she said to Casey? What had Casey said to her? She said she asked for him.

"…So, that's how we met." Sarah was struck by the story. Not so much by the way that they met or by what he said about Janet. Sarah had seen the one picture of her online and read a blurb, and already knew Janet was beautiful and smart. She was struck rather by the way Chuck told it.

His deep empathy and his imaginative engagement with people: that was the thing about him that struck her about his gaze too. When he looked at her at the faculty party, he was looking at her and looking inside her all at once: he wanted to know and was actively trying to imagine, what it was like to be her. That same imaginative engagement was everywhere in the story. He didn't tell the story slanting it against Janet.

It was no wonder that Janet had been able to play him for so long. Chuck cared too much about other people to play the game of universal suspicion that most people played part-time, and spies played-full time. His empathy had blinded him to Janet's gamesmanship. Chuck was so uninterested in manipulating others that he could scarcely attribute such a motive to others. In fact, he would have thought to attribute such a motive to Janet a failure to empathize imaginatively, since Chuck's empathy was built on the presupposition that others were, at bottom, trying to do good—perhaps clumsily, perhaps confusedly, but still trying. Chuck's charity toward Janet kept him from seeing her cheat him.

Sarah had to admit that, in the past, she would have thought Chuck benighted. A sap. She would have thought he chose to shut his eyes to doubts, to the certainty of evil in human hearts. Sarah had been the opposite of Chuck: her suspicion was built on the presupposition that others were, at bottom, evil. Sarah had eventually come to understand that building on that presupposition meant that she had to fall under her own suspicion. Why would she alone be exempted from that evil? Sarah was too honest to exempt herself. A universal generalization was a universal generalization, after all.

Coming to understand this played a role in her quitting. She didn't want to be an object of her own suspicion. But that meant recognizing that she could no longer live out that suspicion. She would have to take people as they came, individually. Doing that had turned out to be far harder than she expected.

Even though she was still struggling to rein in her suspicions, she did not think Chuck's attitude sappy or purposefully ignorant. Although she knew it was not Chuck's motive for having the attitude he did, the attitude allowed him to be kind to himself, forgive himself, make peace with himself. That, she guessed, was itself hard, but her attitude of universal suspicion made it impossible, and even her current attitude still got in her way, made it easier to be unkind to herself than to be kind to herself.

It was a bitter thought, but she sometimes worried that she would eventually exempt everyone else from her suspicion but herself. She would remain suspicious of Sarah—but of no one else. Maybe all her choices and promises…Chuck interrupted her thoughts.

"Sarah, you seem awfully sure Janet was playing me—a seduction, I think. Why are you so sure?"

"I'll explain that in a minute. But tell me about your breakup first."

Chuck's face fell, crumbled. He looked ill, stricken. "Are you sure this is relevant? You won't like me much once you've heard it. I don't like me much when I remember it."

}o{

Sarah just nodded. So, Chuck started, started remembering aloud:

We were getting close the wedding. I was happy, really happy, about it all. Janet had started to seem stretched and stressed. I thought it was due to wedding jitters and because she had no family, really, to attend the wedding. Her mother had died during childbirth and her father died while she was in high school. She had a grandmother who had been very involved in raising her, but she had died before her father. She wanted a small, private ceremony. I didn't want a large one, but I wanted one that was larger, that would allow all the people I cared about to take part in it.

The one person who was going to be in the wedding for Janet was her best friend—her maid of honor—Tamara. I had never met Tamara. We'd tried to get together with her a couple of different times, but she was a photojournalist and always on the road; it never worked out. She showed up about three weeks ahead of the wedding. She'd taken some time off finally and decided to spend it in California with us.

It was great. Janet seemed far less stressed, happier. She and Tamara spent a lot of time together, hanging out, shopping, clubbing. I didn't see much of Janet for a while, but I thought that was good. She had a friend in town, someone to spend time with. I had classes to teach and research to do, so I was busy anyway.

Chuck paused. He could begin to see the pattern.

At a certain point, Tamara started hanging out with me a little bit each day, usually when Janet was in class. We got along well, and she was easy to talk to. Then one day, Janet accused me of being interested in Tamara. I told her that wasn't true. I liked Tamara, she was attractive, but I loved her. Janet calmed down, but she seemed to be watching me whenever Tamara was around. She had been telling me since Tamara and I met that Tamara thought I was cute.

Janet and I had planned to have dinner, finally to spend a little time alone together. I had invited her to my house and I had cooked. I wanted her all to myself. But Janet didn't show up. Tamara did. Something had come up on campus and Janet was going to be late, so she'd sent Tamara to explain. Janet was late, really late. Finally, Tamara and I ate the meal I made. I kept trying to get in touch with Janet, but she never picked up. Tamara was sweet about it, but I could tell she was uncomfortable with the situation too. So, I got out the wine I had been saving and we drank it together.

The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed. I was…naked. Tamara was too, and on top of me. Janet was standing in the doorway, screaming at us. We weren't…right then…um, doing anything, but Tamara was naked…I guess I said that… and prone on top of me. Janet ran from my apartment and we never really talked again after that, not face to face. I got the engagement ring back the next day. It had been left on my office desk at Stanford.

Chuck stopped and gathered himself. Sarah could tell how utterly ashamed he was, and how hard it was to tell this story.

I had never cheated on a woman I was dating. Never. How could I have cheated on my fiancée? I just didn't, and I still don't understand it. I guess I drank more than I should have, that we both did. Maybe Janet was right, maybe I was attracted to Tamara, shit, I don't know anything about any of that. It was a complete mess. Janet wouldn't talk to me. Tamara left town. Janet's friends ostracized me. Hell, my friends, the few I had, avoided me. My sister was ashamed of me. I fell apart. My life went dark. It took me a long time to find any light again at all.

}o{

"…That's how it ended, Sarah. I did it. It was my fault. My mess. My mortification. I don't understand it and I'm as…ashamed of it now as I was then. But you asked, and you seem to think it matters, so that's the story, the whole, awful truth. Or as near as I can come to it."

Chuck wouldn't make eye contact with her. He stared at his own hands. They were shaking.

"You think she was playing me. Maybe. I get it. But I don't know, Sarah; I did what I did. Whatever was true of Janet and what she was up to, I believed what I believed. I was going to marry her, and I cheated on her with her best friend."

}o{

Sarah's heart ached for him. He'd been carrying this burden around for a long time. She hadn't seen it as clearly as she should have because she'd been so caught up in her own reactions to Chuck.

Chuck's attitude toward others may have allowed him to be kind to himself, to forgive himself, but he hadn't managed it to do it where this one thing was concerned. The fresh, live guilt and pain were on his face. He kept rubbing his hands together, as if he were washing them, trying to rub the shaking away.

Sarah knew she had reached a crossroads. It was not the first one she had reached with Chuck and surely not the last, but an important one. What she needed to tell him, explain to him, would probably be as unpleasant as what he had just told her, although the nature of the unpleasantness would be different.

She was positive she was right about Janet. The story of the breakup convinced her even more. Chuck was worried about what she thought of him after hearing that story. She was worried about what Chuck would think of her after she explained what she needed to explain. She was hoping she could keep their talk focused in the right way. She bit her lip.

"Chuck," she plunged in, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you were the victim of a long con. Janet was playing you; it was a con game. Tamara was Janet's exit strategy. When you first started telling me about Janet, I felt like she was playing you. But I thought that she was a spy working for a foreign government. I no longer think that. I think she was a spy, of sorts, maybe—but the espionage was corporate, not governmental. Someone out there with a lot of money wanted to keep tabs on you and on what you were doing. Janet was the way that person accomplished it. I'm sorry."

"How can you be sure, Sarah? You weren't there. I was."

"True. But let's just say that I know some things about cons, about the people who run them, about how they work, the patterns they exhibit. The con run on you is rare, mainly because there are very few people who can pull it off. To pretend as Janet pretended is almost impossible. Casey was right. Eventually, you give yourself away, you slip up, or you stop pretending, and what was a con becomes your actual life. Take it from me, Chuck, pretending has its limits. It cannot be perfect, or it stops being a pretense. A pretense is either imperfect or it is a reality.

"I did deep cover work for the CIA, Chuck, I know something about…covers. When you're in deep cover, you do your best to adopt your cover identity completely. But you can't, or it stops being your cover identity—it just becomes the new you. So, you have to find a way to step out of the cover, to be who you really are. That means you find time away from everyone you're trying to deceive. Green Berets sent to spy on terrorist groups, if they are there for a long time, sharing meals and conversations and so on, often just stay, they switch sides. What they spend all their time pretending just becomes what they're really doing."

Sarah looked lost in her own thoughts for a moment and her eyes clouded.

"During the time you and Janet dated, did you spend all of your time together or were you often apart?"

"We were apart a lot. She had her research, I had mine. She had her classes to take, I had mine to teach."

"Right. And did you have any friends on the Comp Lit faculty?"

"No."

"Was that building anywhere near yours?"

"No."

"So, you rarely, if ever just bumped into Janet on campus? Really, maybe, just the first couple of times?"

Chuck was beginning to see the pattern in her questions and his answers. "That's true, I guess…Was she not really in that program?"

"Oh, I'm sure she was in it. How she got in might be an interesting question to pursue. But let's not for now. Assume she was. Her cover would work best if she was. It's even possible she was in the program before she was recruited for the con, although that's less likely.

"So, you two spent time together on dates—and, I assume, after dates?"

Sarah tried to sound dispassionate, uninvested. She didn't really manage it.

Chuck balked for a moment, then nodded.

"She was never willing to live together, right?"

A nod.

"She would spend the night, but leave early the next day, except perhaps on special occasions?"

Another nod, followed by a sigh.

"I'm guessing that the dates were normally pretty intense, pretty breathless?"

Chuck made a face but nodded.

"You see, don't you, Chuck, what she was doing? She was keeping a fairly strict limit on the amount of time she was exposed to you. Controlling the amount of time to control her liability to a mistake. The longer she was with you, the more likely it was that she would give herself away.

"She made sure that her story meant that there were no family members to meet, and the one best friend was always unavailable. When you were together she kept you…preoccupied with her. Given that you didn't see her a lot, that was easy. She knew you would be eager, focused only on her. So, the con mostly boiled down to whether you found her attractive enough to be pulled in...and whether she found you attractive enough to sleep with you regularly."

She worked hard to keep her tone from becoming professional at the end. While she didn't want to sound jealous, even if she was, although it was all history, she also did not want to sound professional; she knew what a slap that would be to him, to treat something so intimate that way.

Chuck put his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands. "So, you're saying she only pretended to have sex with me?"

"Um, no, Chuck. She did not pretend to have sex with you. You were there: Janet had sex with you. Tamara pretended to have had sex with you—note the past tense. I'll get back to Tamara in a minute.

"Janet was going to have to have sex with you. Not just once but repeatedly...a lot. Given that it was a long con, part of her goal would be to move the relationship along, to get you to fall in love with her and to convince you that she had fallen, or at least that she was falling, in love with you. But that meant that the sex had to be convincing in a specific way. She had to allow you to make love to her and she had to convince you that she was making love to you. Now there are certain bodily changes, Chuck, that really can't be faked, not in the moment. She needed to find you attractive enough for those…changes to occur. She didn't pretend to have sex, she pretended to make love, or, if you want, she had sex with a man she pretended to love. Anyway, she had to find you attractive.

"She obviously did. My guess...is that you're an…attentive lover," Sarah blushed, and she slid her chair a little farther under the table. Chuck found the pattern on the motel window curtains completely absorbing for several seconds. They finally looked at each other and Sarah went on.

"That would be a…good thing for Janet…and a bad one. If she found you attractive, and you were attentive, it would make having sex with you easier, because she could enjoy it. But it would also make having sex with you dangerous because she could end up really feeling…um, you know, emotionally…what she was supposed to only pretend to feel. An old friend of my dad's used to say: if two people lie down together, one or both will get up with feelings. That's an exaggeration, but it captures something that's typically true. What we do with our bodies affects our souls—let me put it that way, even if it sounds…too…I don't know…metaphysical. Remember, I teach Italian medieval literature. Someone for whom that is not true is…deeply confused or troubled…or something. As Dante likes to put it, the human soul and body are knotted together: they really can't be completely separated without each losing its nature.

"Anyway, Janet had to have spent all those nights with you responding to your…attentions in a way that you would believe. She had to respond in some ways she could not fake. And you had to believe she was…making love to you, not just having sex with you."

Sarah stopped for a minute. The whole conversation was embarrassing and unpleasant for them both. She could see the disillusionment on Chuck's face, and the outrage. How much better was it, really, to go from cad to dupe—and that was how he must see himself in what she was telling him, see himself as moving from one category, villain, to another, fool. But, for Sarah, explaining all this meant acknowledging, and at least vaguely imagining, Chuck's time with Janet. Acknowledging and imagining it made her feel slightly and weirdly voyeuristic and…jealous. And pissed. She would like to have a few minutes of…conversation with Janet. That was one level. At still another level, explaining it made her sad and forced her to remember things she wanted to just…not think about, completely forget. Family stuff.

Chuck was quiet. After a minute, he asked, without looking at her. "So, the point you're making is that Janet had to find a way to stay in between—she had to…genuinely respond to me or risk discovery—but the genuine responses could lead to still more genuine responses, and so on, until she was not pretending? If that happened, she would no longer be conning me. She had to respond enough to be believable but not so much that she herself believed, became what she was supposed to merely pretend to be?"

"Yes, Chuck. And that's why what she was doing is hard to do for as long as it normally takes. You either get caught or you 'go native', if you'll pardon the phrase. There may be a few really hardened cons out there who could actually fall in love with someone and still successfully con them, but not many."

"Could Janet have been coerced, Sarah? Maybe the person she was working for blackmailed her?"

"That's possible, Chuck. But I doubt it. What she was doing, even if carefully controlled in the ways she controlled it, would be incredibly demanding, exhausting. If she were being coerced, that would make it all worse. Too much worse. You would have discovered her, she would have slipped. Given how well she did what she did, I'm guessing she chose it. Nothing chosen is unbearable. I don't mean that she didn't want, even need, the money she made, or whatever, just that she wasn't being coerced by threats against herself or someone she cared about.

"The bottom line is that it was a real woman who did this, one who had to live a real life to the extent that she could, alongside or mixed in with the massive deception she was perpetrating. We think we can imagine some perfect con who could somehow do nothing but what her con required and do nothing her con didn't require, but that is to imagine a god running a con, not a human being—in this case, a human woman."

Chuck hesitated. "You seem to know a lot about this…CIA experience, covers and so on?"

Sarah knew Chuck wasn't deflecting, he was just thinking about what she had told him, the authority with which she spoke. She wasn't willing to go far in this direction—not far at all. But she owed him something. He'd taken all she had dished out stoutheartedly.

"Yes, partly, we learn a lot about seductions at the Farm and…on the job." She knew her tone bristled slightly, but she didn't want to have this conversation with him.

}o{

Chuck noticed her 'No Trespass' sign and turned in another direction, back into himself.

"So, if I'm getting all of this, then Tamara was the final part of the con, so to speak. Her role was to give Janet a way out of the wedding, right?"

"Right. They planned it all along. Exit strategy. Janet made remarks about Tamara being attracted to you to plant two different seeds: one, since Tamara was attractive, if you were tempted to be unfaithful, being told that Tamara found you attractive might cause you to yield to temptation, try something, and in so doing give Janet her exit. Knowing you, I figure she didn't expect that to be how things would play out. Or, two, being told that Tamara found you attractive would make the scripted scenario she planned make sense to you, seem believable.

"She could do what she did, give Tamara an opportunity to drug you, get you and her undressed, and give Janet time to get to your place. Then, they probably gave you something to wake you slowly, and they played out the little melodrama: Janet has a reason to leave you, you're ashamed and guilty and not in a hurry to talk about what happened; she makes her exit, neat."

Chuck's face had gone blank. His eyes were unfocused. He was caught up in a past that was and was not his past—not real in the way he thought, real in a way he had not thought. A shame he had carried was a fake shame fashioned for him to carry. Sarah reached out to him. He gave a slight jerk as he re-inhabited the present. She smiled at him kindly.

"I'm really sorry to say all this, and really sorry it happened to you. I really am sorry." Sarah then looked around the room and gestured at it as a way of gesturing at their current circumstances. "And I am sorry about all of this."

She stopped talking and waited…and waited…for Chuck to start. He did, at last.

"Well, thanks, and I thank you for being sorry about the fiasco with Janet." He made a bitter sound. "But you should temper your sorrow with the recognition that I've been proven to be a gullible fool of the first rank."

Sarah leaned into the table and extended her arm, her hand, to him. He stared for a second and then his gaze traveled up her arm to her face. He took her hand. She felt the same now-familiar reaction, a trill that ran from her fingertips to her heart. He gazed into her eyes and she met his gaze.

"You're not a gullible fool. This was a carefully plotted and remarkably professional con, run by an intelligent and committed con artist. Was it detectable? Sure, but it was set up to be difficult for you to detect it. All your best emotions and instincts were used against you. But that doesn't mean those are not your best emotions and instincts. I would…I'd give a lot to be like you, Chuck. To see people the way you do. Charitably…expecting the best. You just need to extend yourself that same charity. You were fooled. But getting fooled doesn't make you a fool, no more than taking one drink makes you a drinker. You're no fool, Chuck Bartowski."

Sarah's sudden vehemence surprised them both a little.

Chuck laughed in wry self-amusement. "I admit I didn't feel like a fool until that new faculty party when I saw a woman who reoriented my world. Turns out that seems to be her habit."

Sarah squeezed his hand and he squeezed it back. She was suddenly aware of her bare legs, and of the proximity of Chuck, and of the bed in her room. She wanted to put her bare foot on his, but she was certain she wouldn't be able to stop once they were in contact hand and foot: she would want full body contact. Her need would demand it. It was already getting insistent—a rapidly increasing thrum of desire.

}o{

Chuck wanted to take Sarah's hand and pull her up into an embrace. He wanted to cup her face and kiss her. He wanted to touch her long, bare legs, to run his hands along them.

Then he had a second thought—or maybe it was a third or fourth or fifth. The woman he wanted to…the woman he wanted so much was a former CIA agent whose motives were still unclear to him, even if he trusted her.

Even more, she was a former CIA agent who had detailed, authoritative knowledge of confidence games, of the people who played them and of the difficulties of playing them—knowledge. How had she gotten it? Whether it had been a cover or a con, Sarah knew the insides of the play too well.

Casey's warning rang again in Chuck's head. The hot/cold thing. Hadn't she done that to him all along? What if she was conning him right now? What would be more effective than a con built on the exposure of another con—a meta-con? Was that t-shirt that hugged her so amazingly really an accident? Those shorts—he couldn't look at them without getting a little dizzy, even thinking about them was causing the room to slow-spin—were they planned? She could hardly have planned better: the t-shirt and the shorts were about to kill him.

Kill him.

He had to pull back from the precipice. He did. He yanked his hand from hers so quickly that it caused surprise followed by pain in her eyes. At least, it looked like it did. Chuck realized that he was too…agitated to think about Sarah, and if he held her hand any longer, the agitation would worsen. On top of that agitation was the new confusion about his past. If Sarah was right about Janet—and Chuck had a cold-fingered certainty clutching at his heart that she was right—then the last few years of his life had been structured by falsehoods, not by his own misbehavior.

That surely was good news, bad news. Maybe his morals were not as easily compromised as he had thought, but his ability to know and understand the world around him now fell into question. It was hard to know if that really counted as a net gain or a net loss. He supposed it was a net gain, but still…

"Sarah, I'm sorry." He tried to make up for yanking his hand away by his conciliatory tone. "This has all," he imitated her gesture to the room, to the whole situation, "been a little too much for me."

He stood and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, knowing that it must have made him appear a petulant boy. Sarah's face showed disappointment—and a hint of relief. Chuck didn't know how to parse the two, so he turned and walked back to his room, closing the adjoining door.

}o{

He was by himself again, as he had been since that awful morning with Janet and Tamara. He hadn't dated since then, not seriously.

He had gone out to coffee a couple of times with a couple of women. He had taken female friends to parties where he was expected to live up to a plus one invitation. But he had not been willing to trust himself again. He had not really had too. Whether it was because Janet had poisoned everything or whether he had not met anyone who moved him since Janet, he had not met a woman who caused him to consider trusting himself again, to consider reconsidering his own past actions, and trying to forgive himself.

He knew he had never felt like he cheated on Janet, not even drunkenly. He had never been attracted to Tamara in that way, not at all. He was not a heavy drinker. The whole situation had felt wrong to him, but he had attributed the feeling to what he took to be his own, undeniable wrongness, or to some sad impulse toward self-justification. But now that he could begin to discriminate among his own reactions, he recognized his sense that it had felt wrong, isolated among all the feelings of guilt and recrimination. It didn't help much to know this now—but at least he had not been completely flummoxed, even if stronger, incorrect feelings had swamped his weaker but correct one.

Seeing Sarah changed everything, began everything anew: light shone on the face of his deep: suddenly, there was light. A woman moved him again, more than any woman, including Janet, had ever done; it was like he'd never before been moved by a woman. She drew him to her, drew him to talk to her—not at all his style. He had approached her again after she had rebuffed him. He had gone looking for her after she ran from him. He kept trying to warm her up every time she froze him out. Why? Because in her eyes he'd seen her—gotten a glimpse of who she really was—and although he could not articulate what he saw in that glimpse, he'd never seen anything like it, never been attracted equally by anything, by anyone. Something in her eyes caused him to forget to mistrust himself. Seeing her was his re-creation.

Now, though, he was unsure. He was not unsure of how much she moved him, but of the wisdom of letting it affect him, of letting it carry him away. He had not fought it, not really, not hard, anyway, until now. If he was fighting it now. It wasn't obvious that he was. Casey had warned him. Maybe she had too when she admitted she knew about what Janet had done by training and…experience. What did that mean? Did he want to think about what that meant? He didn't want to think about what that meant.

He pulled back the comforter on the bed and got on top of the covers, his clothes still on. Staring at the ceiling, he thought about Janet again, about how it had been to be with her. He had only slept with two women in his life. Janet—and Sally. Since Tamara didn't count, it turned out.

Sleeping with Sally, being with Sally generally, had been good. Things between the two of them, her father's interference aside, had always been good until they both realized they were rooted in different places: Chuck at Stanford—it was already known they planned to make him a tenure-track job offer; and Sally in Bozeman—she had accepted a teaching job there, and had her community work. They had mutually decided to part, although the decision had been very painful—difficult and sad for them both. But over time their friendship proved stronger than the difficulty, and they got back in touch and stayed in touch. Janet never seemed to mind his friendship with Sally while they were together.

For a little while after the fiasco with Janet, Sally had seemed interested in revisiting their decision to part, especially once Chuck was no longer at Stanford and could possibly move, but Chuck was unwilling, despite being interested himself. He was still unable to trust himself, and he feared the possibility that he might put Sally through a second run of the same difficulty as before, since she was unlikely to move and the chances of him getting a faculty position near her were remote.

He had not seen Sally in person in a long time. He would see her tomorrow.

}o{

Chuck was supine on the bed with his eyes closed for a long time when he heard the adjoining door open, although no light shone through. He could feel Sarah looking at him, although she was still standing, he believed, in her room. He didn't move.

She finally crossed the threshold into his room. She padded noiselessly to the side of his bed—he could feel, not hear, her footfalls. She seemed to be standing over him in indecision. Whatever had put her in motion, it had gotten her to the side of his bed, and then its propulsive force had waned. She seemed to think he was asleep. He thought about doing something to make it clear that he was not, but by now he seemed committed to the ruse. He'd have to pretend to wake up at this point. That seemed worse than just keeping with the pretense of being asleep.

He heard her voice, barely more audible than a thought, tremulous with an emotion that he had not heard from her before. "Chuck Bartowski, you're making me crazy. How did I both find you and find myself back in this life again? I'm aching to be in that bed with you. But…I just can't. I promised myself... There are days I don't want to revisit. But I ache for you. I thought that maybe coming in here and telling you, saying the words at least, sharing it, might make the ache less unbearable."

Her breath caught. He could hear her trembling as she sighed. And then she was gone. He was aching too.

Or had she known he was awake all along? He didn't believe so, didn't reckon she did, but that cheery thought sang him to sleep, off-key.

A/N2 How does Sarah know so much about Janet's sort of play? No, not like that. Answers in the next chapter. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 are the pivots of the story.