A/N Saturday Morning in Okeechobee. What could be sweeter? Thanks, folks, for your kind attention. Drop me a line-a review or a PM.
Thanks to michaelfmx for his kind attention to my scribble scrabbles.
Don't own Chuck.
Miss Trust?
Saturday Morning Sept. 2, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)
Okeechobee, Florida
The Blushing Pelican Motel
CHAPTER 6 Second Sight, Second Thoughts?
Chuck woke up early. He had wound himself into a knot of limbs and blankets by the time his eyes opened. He had gotten up not long before dawn and taken off his clothes in an attempt to get comfortable, sleeping in nothing but his boxers. He was going to have to get some clothes today. The ones he had would ripen quickly in the heat after a long day's wear yesterday.
He took another shower to invigorate his lumbering mind. He had dreamt of Janet and Sally and Sarah, all talking to him, all telling him things, each arguing with the other, none agreeing, except they each accused the other two of lying. He had no way of knowing what to believe or who to believe or why. There were just words and words and words, but none of them seemed to have any weight, to mean anything in particular.
He put his head under the shower, turning the water slowly toward cold as he did. His mind began to get limber, the booming, buzzing, confusing words of his dream slowly sloughing off, spinning down the drain.
He got out of the shower and dried himself off. Putting the towel around his waist, he walked back into his room. Sarah was standing with her back to him, peering out of the window, sunlight cutting the darkness that had collected in the room overnight. Whatever she saw or didn't see seemed to satisfy her and she dropped the curtain's edge. She turned to him and her eyes swept down the length of him, and then immediately back to lock with his eyes.
"I heard that you were awake. I was too." She gave him a bright smile, maybe the brightest he had seen her wear. "Did you get any sleep? It took me a minute…but once I went to sleep, I slept like a dead woman. I don't remember sleeping like that since…well, I don't remember."
Chuck tried to read her. Her features were relaxed and open. She did look rested. But this was the woman who confessed her intense yen for him late in the night. Maybe her late-night confession had helped her somehow? It hadn't helped him. In fact, it had tightened the knot of limbs and blankets.
She continued to smile at him and walked over to him. Her eyes dropped to his shoulder; a rivulet of water was running down onto his chest. She reached out stopped it with her thumb, wiping it away. It was extraordinarily intimate, breathtaking, yet such a small gesture. But she seemed almost oblivious to it. She stepped past him and sat down on the bed. She looked up at him, the bright smile still on her face. Was this the hot/cold thing again—but the weekend version, a version that evidently started hot, whereas the weekday version started cold?
Chuck's dream came back to him. He shook his head. Still wearing only his towel, he sat down next to Sarah on the bed.
"Sarah, I had bad dreams all night."
Concern covered her face. "Why? Are you worried about the people who are after you?"
"Well, yes, but I didn't dream about them."
"Who'd you dream about?"
"Um, well…"
She smirked at him good-naturedly, jokingly: "Did you dream about me?" She was flirting with him—and expecting him to realize that.
"Yes. I mean—well, yes."
She leaned close to him, batting her eyelashes deliberately, holding on to the joking tone of a moment before. "What was I wearing?' She asked this in a breathy voice.
"Nothing." Sarah's eyes grew large. "I mean—that I don't know. I didn't dream your clothes." Her eyes were still large. Chuck tried again.
"In my dream, you were really just talking. I could see only your face."
"That's a very chaste dream, Chuck. What was I saying?"
"I don't know. I couldn't really understand much of it."
"So, what was I doing, then?"
"Lying." Sarah's bright smile went dark. Her face, so open a moment before, closed.
She put her hands together in her lap and stared at the floor. Chuck couldn't think of any way of making it better without her help, so he got up, grabbed his clothes and went into the bathroom. When he came out dressed a few minutes later, Sarah was still sitting on the bed, still staring at the floor. She lifted her head and pointed her chin at him.
"Chuck, I know why you had that dream. Between Casey and me, you don't know what to believe. I told you that your engagement was an illusion. Casey told you, I'm guessing, that you need to be careful about me, careful of me. And I know a lot…disturbingly so…about what Janet did. You must wonder how I know that.
"I decided last night that I want to tell you how I know that…but you need to understand something: I had planned not to revisit that story, or at least never to speak about it. But last night, I realized that there is something I want more than I want not to tell that story…"
Chuck studied her. She seemed completely sincere. Sincere, and a tinge desperate to be believed. Her hands reached out toward him and then she pulled them back.
"What do you want more than that?" He sat down beside her.
"You."
Silence filled the room. Neither spoke. That word, 'you', was like a stone dropped into a deep well. After a long silence, they both heard it finally strike water; they both heard the splash.
After another moment, Sarah elaborated. "I came in here last night and I talked to you while you slept." She paused, blushing slightly at her own admission. "I told you how much I wanted…to be in your bed. I also told you I couldn't be there because I had made promises to myself. But I felt the need to confess how I felt—even if 'confess' may be the wrong word, given that you were asleep." She flashed him a brief, awkward smile. She paused, marshaling her forces.
"I went back to bed. I continued to ache for you just as bad, maybe worse—but telling you that broke something loose in me. I cried for the first time in…well, I cried. I don't do that." Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. "It's like I am…alive again. I've come back to the light—and I know I sort of had to be dragged here kicking and screaming, and that I haven't made it easy on you in any way—but I'm not going back into the numbing gray I've been in for so long, back to that achromatic world. You are color, Chuck, and light, and warmth, and I want all three. I want you." Sarah said the words and then seemed almost shocked at herself. She put her hand over her mouth for a moment, as if to stop herself from speaking. But then she took her hand from her mouth. She looked at Chuck in a way that declared that she would live with her declaration. "I'm tired of it always being six minutes till three in my life, Chuck. I don't want to be a figure in a Chirico painting. I am ready for time to start again."
It was Chuck's turn to blush deeply. Sarah added quickly, "I don't just want you, Chuck, although I do want you. I want you." She reached out to him. He took her hands in his and he raised one to his face. He kissed it. She gently freed her hands from his and wrapped them around his neck. She pulled him to her for a sequel to the epic kiss of yesterday. She pressed her lips to his and then opened them slightly. They both deepened the kiss. It was that rarest of things—a sequel that eclipsed the original.
Chuck thought of Casey's warning about climbing into bed with Sarah for a split second. He decided he'd risk it, risk that she wasn't trying to create an asset, but rather to express her genuine feelings for him. He would risk trusting her because he wanted to know her, to know her, not just to know about her.
Sarah pushed him down on the bed as she deepened the kiss even more. Eventually, they both needed a moment. She pulled back slowly from his lips, gazing into his eyes. He had never seen their blue this close, nor when so filled with unedited emotion.
"You know, two people never lie down together without at least one getting up with feelings…"
She smiled at him, the smile small and shy at first but growing with resolve and…peace. "In this case, Chuck, one of us will lie down with feelings already."
"No."
"No?" Sarah's face started to crumble slightly, her resolved, peaceful smile threatened.
"No, two of us will lie down with feelings already." He pulled her down to him and then, keeping the kiss intact, he rolled her over gently, so that he was on top of her. She gazed up at him, delighted. A freedom and playfulness were in her response that hadn't been there before.
"Chuck?"
He was nuzzling her neck, overwhelmed by her scent and the unbelievable softness of her skin. "What?"
"Make me feel things, Chuck, lots and lots of things, make me feel them until I go crazy with feelings."
He rested his hand on her knee and slid it slowly upwards. "How's this?" His question was at once teasing and solicitous.
"This is a very promising start…"
}o{
Chuck knew it had been a long time for him, and he could tell it had been a long time for her. They were new to each other and they were both so excited: so consumed by each other: so thrilled to discover each other: they lost the entire morning. Chuck counted it a morning well lost.
}o{
They finally got up and found their way to a diner down the street. They were both starving and ate huge breakfasts, laughing and talking. Their waiter got caught up in their high spirits. He teased them, and they teased him back. As they got up to leave, he told them that there were few things he liked better than serving a couple so obviously in love. They both colored and stammered; neither denied it, although neither could quite make eye contact with the other for a few minutes.
They left holding hands. They stopped in a department store and bought some clothes. Chuck got some plain, solid-colored t-shirts and jeans. Sarah bought a couple of pastel sundresses, blue and green, and some sandals. They each got a pair of large, dark sunglasses and broad-brimmed straw hats. It would be enough to make them harder to spot at the airport. They went back to the motel and changed. They gathered their things and headed back to Boca Raton—to Sally and the airport.
}o{
As the Land Rover merged with Interstate traffic, Sarah set the cruise control. She glanced over at Chuck, took a deep breath and, without further preamble, began to talk.
"My dad was a confidence man. My mom, too—well, not a confidence man, a confidence woman…Anyway, they were both cons…Give me a minute, Chuck, please, this isn't easy for me….They met on a con. My dad was to be the face of the con, in one sense, the person who talked to the mark, buttered him up, played him. My mom was the…distraction and the bait. Well, in the midst of everything, Mom distracted Dad and Dad buttered up Mom and by the time that con ended, they were a couple. They got married a few months later, maybe the only non-con thing either of them ever really managed.
"You see, they did, in their way, genuinely love each other. But somehow their professional pride got wrapped around their emotions, and Dad worried that Mom didn't love him or didn't love him as much as he loved her, and Mom got worried about the same, and so they started this strange dance—they're still in it—in which neither would come out and admit how he or she felt about the other.
"It was a bizarre life for a little girl. A home on the road, different towns, different cons, different names. Left alone for hours on end. Mixing with other cons, many of whom were dangerous or…worse. I mean, no one bothered me, but it was a strange group of people to grow up around. Carnies with brains and guns, Mom used to say.
"But the worst part of it was my parents and the way they treated each other, their refusal to ever admit how they felt, even though they managed somehow to stay a couple in all that grifting and lying and cheating.
"When I was around 12, they hooked a big fish—so big that the score could have set us up for life. The problem was that they had no time to assemble a team. The big fish just sort of leaped into view and they had to go into action. It required what I was telling you about with Janet, a long con, a long-term seduction. Dad could manage the other parts of the con—but Mom would have to be the seductress."
Sarah's face showed her pain and shame at the memory and the sharing of it. She went on.
"She didn't want to do it. Dad didn't want her to do it. (I understood all this fully only later, at the time all I could make out was their roiling misery.) But Mom wouldn't say that she didn't want to do it. She wanted Dad to tell her he didn't want her to do it. Dad wouldn't tell her he didn't want her to do it, he wanted Mom to tell him that she didn't want to do it. They went around and around like that, planning a con neither wanted because neither would tell the other what he or she did want.
"The closest they got to admitting it to each other was in the planning of the con. They worked hard to set it up so that Mom would work—by flirting, by promises, by getting nearer and then pulling back—to make the mark fall for her. But the plan was for the situations to always be controlled, for her to have an exit strategy, not only for the end of the con but for each meet with the mark. It was never supposed to involve Mom sleeping with the mark. Dad and Mom would never say why to each other, but it was clear that was not supposed to happen.
"Mom was…beautiful and smart and good at what she did. Dad was very good too. They hooked the mark and began to set up the big score. A few weeks went by, then a couple of months. Mom and Dad eventually sank all their money into the con, setting up fake businesses, buying Mom the right clothes to attract and keep attracting a spoiled, wealthy man…
"Finally, about four months in, it was almost time to spring the con, time for the payday. But the mark picked the day before everything was to happen to surprise Mom. He had been…waiting for her for a long time. He was supposed to take her to dinner—but when she got in the car, he headed out of town to a bed and breakfast: he had planned a surprise romantic getaway for the night. Mom was trapped. She did all she could—I believe this, although my dad still struggles with it—to keep anything from happening. She finally told the mark she was sick. The problem was that she had played that card a couple of times already and the mark began to get suspicious. She felt she was stuck—the mark was demanding, ready to leave, and the con would fall apart, or she could…do what he wanted. She decided to go through with it…and she did.
"I don't know what say about that, other than to say it makes my stomach ache still, but it was the choice she made. She slept with the mark for the sake of the con. The next day, Dad sprang the con and we walked away with a lot of money. Enough money to change our lives, to let us leave our carny existence. Buy a house. Become a normal family.
"But we never did. Neither Dad nor Mom could forget what happened to get that money. It became much more a curse than a blessing. Maybe the money would have been a curse no matter what, given that it was, in effect, stolen. But the features of the con seemed to make the money doubly cursed. Mom was despondent. Dad thought that what Mom had done proved that her heart wasn't really in the marriage, that she cared about the money more than us. Mom thought that she had made an awful sacrifice for the sake of her husband and her daughter. He couldn't forgive her and she couldn't forgive him. And neither of them could forgive themselves. I was drowning in their whirlpool of recrimination and self-recrimination.
"Mom started drinking. Everything fell apart at home. After a while, Dad left, and I left with him.
"They're still married, although I have no idea when they last saw each other. Mom still has the house and the money. She stopped drinking. I've started visiting her again. I've forgiven her, even if she won't forgive herself. I see my dad occasionally when his 'business' brings him nearby. He still refuses to talk about any of it.
"They've never gotten over what happened. I guess I haven't fully either. They can't let go of each other and they can't be together. They've lived that painful contradiction for over twenty years: not divorced, not married, miserably in love with each other but unable to do anything to alleviate the misery."
Silence. Broken only by the sound of passing cars.
Chuck started to speak but didn't realize how much the story had affected him. When he spoke, his voice sounded raspy, constricted.
"God, Sarah, I'm sorry. I can't…I can't even imagine that without it breaking my heart. I have no idea what it would be like to live it." He blinked several times.
She smiled sadly at him and reached over to rest her hand on his leg for a moment.
"So, that's how I know about the kind of thing that was done to you. I never participated in such a con—but I know all about them, and I still live in the ruins of one. Once I got older, my parents independently rehearsed its details to me over and over—how it was supposed to work, how it went wrong. Because of all that, I would never have been part of such a thing for the CIA if they had ever asked—and they didn't. They don't. I have also been taught a great deal about deep cover by the CIA and learned a lot about it doing it over the years. That's what I meant by 'experience'.
"I wanted to tell you this…I haven't told anyone. Ever. I needed to tell you because I wanted you to know how I knew what Janet was doing, what she did." Sarah sighed through all of this.
"I also needed to tell you because…because, after I told you how much I wanted you last night and went back to my bed…I realized that I had us in a whirlpool that was too much like the one I was in as a child. I…felt things for you that I didn't want to admit, and I was trying to keep you from admitting what you felt for me. And you were trying to understand if your trust in me was mistaken, and I was half-convinced that maybe it was, because that made it easier for me to keep from admitting what I felt…and so on…a whirlpool, circles within circles. I am sick to death of circles within circles.
"After I cried, I decided I had had enough of this. I'm still skittish as a colt, and I will need you to be patient with me, but I am going to trust you…I'm going to take you at face value, and try to let you do the same with me.
"The sad truth is, Chuck, I was raised by parents who instilled in me that doubt was more fundamental than trust. I guess it's easy enough to see how two cons would instill that in their daughter. And…things have happened to me since to make that seem unquestionable. My career in the CIA, things that happened during that career. Until you, Chuck. You see the world upside-down, given what I was raised to believe, but I've begun to wonder if you don't see it right-side up. I've begun to wonder if I've spent my life standing years on my head…
"I mean, there's a paradox in what I believed, what my parents instilled in me. Basically, I trusted doubt. I'm not saying that trusting doubt can't make sense in specific circumstances, but as a general attitude to life, doubt has started to seem…incoherent to me. Trust has to come before doubt. And if I'm going to trust, I'm going to trust someone—not trust doubt. I'm going to trust you, Chuck. But I'm going to have to unlearn habits—and that takes time, just like acquiring them does. So, I'm going to relax my earlier demands. I'd like you to Do, Listen, and Trust because I want to get you out of this unharmed. But I'm asking now, not demanding, not daring. Please trust me, Chuck, trust me above all to trust you."
}o{
They pulled into the airport about an hour before Sally's flight was due to arrive. They went inside and checked to make sure it was on time. It was. They were wearing the clothes they had bought in Okeechobee. Chuck was gratified when Sarah reached out and took his hand to walk with him. They went through the main area in which travelers were arriving and meeting their friends and family or hustling on to ground transportation. Sarah still seemed relaxed as she had most of the day, except during the tale about her parents. They stopped in a coffee shop and got some coffee. He noticed that Sarah was careful to take a seat that gave her a commanding view of the arrival area. Chuck sipped his coffee and studied her as she sifted through the people standing or walking nearby.
What she had told him about her parents sank his spirits considerably. It had been an up and down sort of weekend. He was very, very happy about what had happened between them at the Blushing Pelican. In fact, he blushed himself just thinking about it. And he had been happy to know why Sarah had told him about her parents. But the story itself made his stomach hurt.
How could people tie themselves and the ones they loved into such torturous knots? Could Sarah straighten herself out after having been wound up in her parent's Cat's Cradle? He knew that he wanted to fall in love with her; he knew he might already have fallen in love with her. Could she, would she, love him back? The question nagged him, not because of what Casey had said, but because of what she had told him about herself. She was not playing him—but how much did she have to give? How much survived her childhood, and her time as an agent? But she seemed to have held onto herself somehow, some essential core of herself, through it all. Sarah was in there—under all the editing, the discipline, the self-denial, the pain, and the fear. He was convinced he had seen her today and was still seeing her.
She was stirring her coffee insistently and looking at him as he studied her. She submitted to his gaze without closing herself off, although he could see her inner struggle against years of living behind the frosted glass her eyes could so easily become.
Her eyes. Bluer than blue. Blue. It struck Chuck that blue was the chromatic color of which there were arguably the most shades, since it ran from a blue so pale it was almost white to a blue so dark it was almost black. Her eyes could run the whole gamut of shades, although the dominant shades were a pale ice blue—thankfully not in evidence so far today, although she had treated him to it enough already—and a rich electric blue—very much in evidence in the motel this morning. One could freeze you to death; the other could raise the dead. Her eyes.
Chuck made himself look away. She was affecting his breathing and instigating his imagination. Sally was due to arrive soon. He needed to be ready to see her.
This was a bizarre situation, he knew. Set aside the espionage stuff, the Vortex and all that. He was with a woman he had just made love to and with whom he had real hopes of…more, despite the obvious hurdles they faced. He was sure that they had more to talk about still, that there were further things they needed to know about each other. And, in this new and precarious position, they were about to meet Sally Hinto, his first love. She had wanted to try again, but Chuck would not. She wanted to try again now. How would she react to him? How would Sarah feel about Sally?
He sipped on his coffee and closed his eyes as he swallowed it. Sarah was studying him now. Was she thinking about Sally or about something else? He could tell that the tale of her parents' fateful con was not the only event to have discolored Sarah's view of romance, disastrous though it was.
Sarah stiffened. Chuck looked up. There, in the arrival area, stood Sally Hinto. She was unmistakable, a well-used backpack on her shoulder and a tote bag in her hand, and she was wearing her trademark: a beaten black Stetson.
}o{
Sarah watched Chuck sip again on his coffee. She could see thoughts were racing in his brown eyes. She knew they were thoughts of her—of their morning together, the lovemaking at the motel and the talking in the car.
She was jittery about meeting Sally, and the coffee wasn't helping with that, not even with all the stirring she had done trying to calm herself. Chuck was obviously still fond of Sally. Did Sally reciprocate those feelings? Sarah could tell they were friends, but she wondered if there had not been a strong hint of something more in Sally's concern and her willingness to drop everything to bring the Vortex to Chuck, to come and see Chuck.
Sarah swept her eyes back through the arrival area and stopped. Standing there, with a black hat on, was a woman who had to be Sally Hinto.
}o{
She was simply stunning, absurdly attractive. Her hair was inky black, blacker than the well-worn hat on her head—her hair made the hat seem grey. Her skin was beautiful, smooth and darkly luminous. She had eyes that somehow seemed blacker than her hair. They were so black that, at this distance, there was no way of telling that she had pupils.
Sally spotted Chuck when he waved at her. She flashed a wide smile, her teeth white and her lips very red. Sarah was not vain, but she was used to being the most attractive woman in the room. She was not the most attractive woman in the arrivals area. Sally was. She seemed to be so beautiful that she bent the light, as if the raven-nevermore blackness of her hair and her eyes commandeered and redirected the light around her.
She started toward them. She was neither tall nor short, but she was statuesque, and she was very light on her feet—or rather in her cowboy boots. She inspected Sarah as she approached. She seemed as struck by Sarah as Sarah was by her.
"Well, if it isn't Chuck Bartowski. Long time, no see, huh, barn boy?" Sally swooped in and gave Chuck a slightly more than friendly kiss on the lips. He looked surprised and uncomfortable. She looked like she would like more. Sarah waited to see what would happen.
"Hey, Sally. You look great. I mean, it's great to see you. Have a good flight?"
"Flights, plural. These weren't the easiest two places to connect by plane."
"Ah, Sally, this is Sarah. Sarah is my…" Sarah could tell that Chuck had no word he felt confident of in finishing that sentence, so it sort of fizzled. 'Friend' was too weak, 'lover' too new and much too revelatory. What should he say?
Sarah reached across the table and took his hand. It was done naturally and was not aimed at Sally, although Sally certainly took stock of it.
"…girlfriend. I'm Chuck's girlfriend." She smiled at Chuck and he smiled back, for a moment completely caught up in her gift of that word.
"Yeah, this is Sarah Walker, my girlfriend. She teaches at Commonwealth too."
Sally's smile waned but she showed no hostility or anger. There might have been a trace of disappointment, but it swept across her face for the briefest of instants and was gone.
"It's good to meet you, Sarah. I've been hoping Chuck would finally find…someone…again. He's too good a guy to be moldering away alone."
"Thanks, Sally, that's kind of you. I'm really glad to meet you." Sarah had to admit that she was. Sally had a presence about her—she was fully real, fully present where she stood. She had a commitment to the space she occupied, wherever that happened to be. She seemed to carry her territory with her.
"So how long will you be here?" Chuck asked.
Sarah saw Sally subtly recalibrating. "Not long. I'm really just a courier service today." She put the tote bag down and slid it across the floor to Chuck. "My return flight is in two hours. There's the Vortex. I worried one of the guards was going to take it from me when I passed through security back home, but I told him it was my barn door opener, and that I was taking it to get it repaired at a shop here, so he didn't bother with it. After all, it's just a bunch of electronics—the x-ray showed that. Not as threatening as a laptop."
"Thanks, Sally. This was way beyond the call of duty." Chuck stood and gave her a hug.
Sally's eyes revealed the degree to which she reveled in that hug. Sarah felt a strong twinge of jealousy. Sally wanted Chuck. There was no doubt about that. But Sally had shown no real sign of jealousy toward Sarah.
"Did you have any trouble getting away?" Chuck was concerned. "Will there be trouble when you get back?"
Sally looked thoughtful, puzzled. "No, no trouble coming. I tried to watch, to see if I was being followed, or if anyone took special notice of me. But no one seemed to. I don't have any reason to worry about things when I get back. Dad's fine; he says no one has been looking for him or you after the initial visit."
This struck Sarah as odd. Why would the team out west have made such a half-hearted effort to find the Vortex? Admittedly, it wasn't the same as getting the project itself, or getting Chuck, but it was obviously second-best. Maybe they really didn't understand what the Vortex was. Maybe they had no access to anyone who could figure that out. Maybe they were just…fishing. Sarah scanned the arrival area again. Still, no one, nothing grabbed her attention. The whole situation was beginning to seem bizarre.
"Do you two have time to grab something to eat with me here? There's not enough time for me to leave the airport, I don't think." Sally asked the question initially of Chuck, but turned to make it obvious that she was asking them both.
Chuck turned to Sarah, a question in his eyes. She smiled.
"Sure, Sally, we'd be glad to."
They found a place near the coffee shop and the hostess seated them. Sarah and Sally sat down, but Chuck didn't. "I'm going to go to the bathroom. Too much coffee."
Sarah saw that the bathroom was just across the wide hallway. She watched him as he walked to it and until he vanished from sight. The morning came back, came back to her, over her, the new possibilities of her future. Sally watched Sarah watch Chuck.
"He's extraordinary, you know," Sally mused, "genuinely, not-blowing-smoke-in-any-way extraordinary. He makes me think of Charles Lamb—and not just because they share a first name."
Once Sarah had seen Chuck reach the restroom safely, she had zoned out for a moment. Sally's words finally pierced the warm pink haze into which Sarah's mind had wandered. "Charles Lamb? Oh, the essayist? 'Dream-Children: A Reverie', right?"
"You know Lamb?" Sally asked.
"Not really. Just that one essay. I found it one day on the Internet and I've read it many times. It's beautiful, disturbing and comforting—all at once."
"Yes, it is." Sally paused a moment, thinking of the essay. "A beautiful testament to the peculiar regret that attends things we want but don't choose, or haven't yet chosen to have, like children," Sally stared speculatively at Sarah as Sarah drifted into back into reverie.
After a long moment of indulging Sarah, Sally went on. "I wasn't thinking of that essay, though; I was thinking of 'The Sanity of True Genius'. Chuck always makes me think of that essay—because he's brilliant but also the sanest man I know. His understanding of computers and of what they are and can do is on a different plane: he seems to see in 3D and in Technicolor what exists only in the form of black and white programs and equations for virtually everyone else, if it exists for them at all.
"But he knows so much else besides—a STEM guy who genuinely reveres the humanities and who spends a lot of his time reading and thinking about literature and history and poetry and philosophy. He's what Archilochus called a hedgehog-not a fox. 'The hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox knows many small ones.' And on top of all that, he is thoroughly decent, humble."
Sarah knew enough about Chuck now not to think this idle praise, but she was surprised at the depth and intensity of Sally's respect for Chuck.
"So, you're a big fan of Chuck's?"
"The biggest, present company possibly excluded, of course. I never wanted to give him up… but we just couldn't get our lives to mesh. I'll be frank, I still want to make that…mesh…happen. But seeing you, and seeing Chuck look at you, tells me that my chance has passed me by again." Sally said all this in a measured and disappointed, but still not hostile, way.
"Why do you say that?" Sarah was pleased by Sally's confession, but also slightly puzzled.
"Because of the way he looked at you when you said, 'girlfriend'. That was a complete surrender of the Chuck Bartowski variety. I've now seen it twice, but the white flag never waved for me. It waved for Janet, may the Devil take her, and it's waving now for you. I don't know that it fully unfurled for her, but it is whipping in the breeze for you. You've got him, Sarah, forever, if you really want him."
Sally had said almost all of this while looking at the entrance to the restroom, waiting for Chuck to reappear. But she turned as she ended it and pushed her cowboy hat up her forehead. Doing so somehow brought the full force of her midnight eyes to bear on Sarah. Sarah met Sally's questioning gaze uneasily.
A waiter came and took their drink orders. Sarah ordered Chuck some water but asked the waiter to come back and check again when Chuck rejoined them.
"Are you implying that I don't really want him?" Sarah sounded a bit more defensive than she felt, probably because she still couldn't hold Sally's eyes. Sally pulled her lips inward, thinking.
"No, Sarah. And I don't mean to offend you. But I take it that 'girlfriend' and 'boyfriend' are new words for you two in this context. Am I right?" Sarah nodded.
"I don't know you, Sarah, but I'm good at people. Say it's a Sioux thing, mystical," Sally laughed, shaking her head and rolling her dark eyes, "or just say it comes from having spent a long time studying history, or just say I'm observant, whatever…But I can tell you're a woman who's been stumbling under burdens for a long time.
"I want you to ask yourself whether wanting Chuck is wanting another burden, or wanting to free yourself from some, maybe all, of your burdens." Sally's black eyes flashed as she finished, half convincing Sarah that Sally did have second sight, some mystical power.
"I'm not sure I understand that, Sally...What do you mean?" At that moment, Chuck came out of the restroom and looked sheepish when he noticed that both women were staring at him.
Sally turned back to Sarah. "I don't mean to be hard to understand. You're just not at the right time and place yet to understand me. You will be soon, I believe."
Chuck rejoined them, and the waiter came back. They ordered food and the conversation relocated to stories of Chuck and Sally at Stanford and in South Dakota. Sarah marveled at the genuine friendship between the two, especially given that they were once romantically involved and that one of them wanted to be again.
Sarah had to give Sally credit: she was a woman who knew herself, and a woman who knew how to stay in her own lane. Sarah was sure she wouldn't do as well if the situation were reversed.
By the time they finished eating, it was time for Sally to head to her departure gate. She left the tote bag with them. As she left, she gave Chuck a long hug and her goodbye was misty. Blinking tears back, she turned to Sarah and hugged her too.
"He's a keeper. He wants someone who wants a keeper, someone who wants a partner."
Sally whispered this quietly into Sarah's ear. The last word made Sarah go steely all over. Sally felt it and pulled back from the hug, her dark eyes again intently searching Sarah's face. For the first time, Sarah felt a wave of worry and even a hint of animosity from Sally. Sally took Sarah's hand and pulled her away from Chuck by a few yards.
"You said 'girlfriend'—did you mean it?"
Sarah was panting slightly, an abrupt panic gripped her. She stammered: "Y…yes, yes, I meant it."
Sally's look was not exactly skeptical, but it certainly wasn't convinced either. "Ok, let's say you meant it, but what'd you mean by it? Do you even know?"
With that, Sally walked back to Chuck, whispered something in his ear, and got into the line for the security check. Once in line, she sought out Sarah and gazed into her eyes before turning to show her ID and to go through security.
Sarah wondered what Sally whispered to Chuck. Sarah's panic rose. She wasn't going to ruin the morning before she even got through the day, was she?