Author's Note: Because I enjoy it, we're getting a healthy dose of angst along with our fluff this time around. We're closing in on the end of all of this and I feel like too fluffy isn't realistic for me, this story, or these characters. Life is good; love is wonderful. But it's also all a little messy and painful – and part of what makes the highs so freaking awesome is that they frequently follow lows.
"Why don't we ever talk about the ice planet?"
He flips the top half of the paper down in front of him. "Antarctica?" he asks over the top of his glasses and around a mouthful of toast.
"No," she says, exasperated, and shoves her suddenly unappetizing cereal away from her, sloshing milk onto the table. "Jonah and Thera."
His eyes widen and he swallows the toast that appears to have gone dry in his mouth. He sips his coffee and collects his thoughts. "Why don't we ever talk about the force-shield or Za'tarc tests? Why don't we talk about dozens of moments we weren't supposed to be having?"
"I'm serious, Jack."
He sits back in his chair and abandons his newspaper. "Because I used to kick myself every day for not taking the opportunity to touch you when I had it."
"Used to?" She covers up the way her insides quiver from the force of his revelation with false bravado.
"Now we're here. And I'm thankful that we don't have to live with some ill begotten gain between us."
"What if that was our only chance?"
"I don't think it will be."
"I'm not optimistic."
He reaches out and cups her face, smiles when she leans into his hand. "I am."
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She's stretched out in the sun on the back deck. He has a hard time focusing on the grill and not her long, bare legs and silver painted toenails.
"It's days like this that it would be nice to have a pool," she sighs contentedly.
"We've got room for one," he says as he flips a steak. He realizes, out of the corner of his eye, that she's frozen with her beer halfway to her mouth with a wide, shocked look on her face. Then he realizes what he implied and he grins.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
"I am so fucking tired of being broken." She drops her laptop bag on the floor in the kitchen and he's suddenly face to face with a pissed off Samantha Carter that makes him wish there wasn't a pot of boiling water on the stove.
He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't when she's in these moods and he never quite knows which tack is going to make her try to take off his head with the sharp edge of her tongue – not to mention she's quite a bit stronger these days and he wouldn't put it past her to try one of those fancy new Judo flips she's been working on with Teal'c. He finally settles for, "What happened?"
She looks at him like he's sprouted a second head. "We had a lockdown at the mountain today. Wow, when you say you're taking a day off you really mean it, don't you? You mean they didn't even call?"
He's momentarily happy to find that her ire is directed at someone on the base rather than him since she can usually turn around whatever bad moment she's having as something that's happening between the two of them. You always hurt the one you love and all of that, he supposes.
Still, and despite how this situation has the potential for her to blame him written all over it, he can't quite figure how she got from a lockdown to pissed about her mental status. "Since when does a lockdown get your ass on your shoulders?"
"Since I got trapped in the brig, for six fucking hours, Jack."
He actually feels the blood drain from his face. "Oh my god. Were you alone?"
"No, thank goodness. Daniel was with me."
"Why the hell didn't they call me?" He's furious. How is it even possible that something that massive would have happened on the base and he wasn't called? Okay, so no – the second for the base doesn't get called every time some team comes back with an alien sand flea, the usual sort of culprit for a lockdown.
All at once his cellphone and the house line spring to life. He stares at Sam and lets them ring. There's nothing more important than her right now. But she rolls her eyes and picks up the handset off the counter and issues a brusque, "Hello?"
So he pulls his cell out of his pocket and answers it similarly. "O'Neill."
"Colonel," Janet rushes forward, "is Sam home yet?"
"She's standing right in front of me," he says tersely. "So if this is a sit-rep, it's past due."
"It just came to my attention that no one called you."
Across from him, Sam is breathing heavily and looking angry with the phone still pressed to her ear. "Who is it?" he mouths at her.
"Daniel," she says, thrusts the phone at him, and flees. Not a fan of phone conversations to begin with, he's certainly not going to double fist this one.
He simply hangs up on Daniel and tunes back into the doc. "…and by the time I realized, she'd already gone."
He finds he doesn't give a single solitary fuck what Janet had just said. "Yeah, well she's home now. Tell Daniel she'll call him later." He presses end and desperately misses the days when you could slam a phone down for effect.
He trails her outside and finds her stalking in circles around the trees that hold up the hammock. He steps in front of her on one of her circuits and she stops, chest heaving, eyes wild. Then she crashes into him. Her mouth is open against his neck – something he's found she does when her emotions are running high – and her harsh breath moistens his skin. She's clutching him tightly. A sob wracks her body and then she's transferring her tension to him as she closes her teeth just one notch past gently against the corded tendons under her mouth.
He hisses – but not with discomfort – and winds his fingers into her hair. Her tongue laves his skin and he fights the groan that threatens to break free of his throat. He wraps his other arm – the one that doesn't still have a hand buried in her hair – around her waist and hauls her up against him. She's hot and trembling, but while she might have her mouth on him, there's no way to mistake the energy pouring off of her for anything remotely resembling the sexual kind. So he stands there, stalwart, and hopes he's giving her even half of what she needs.
Later finds them lying in the cool grass underneath the hammock looking at dusk creep across the sky through the crisscross cotton webbing she's reaching up to twist her fingers in.
Her head is in the hollow of his shoulder and she's pressed all the way up against him. They've been lying this way so long his arm long since went to sleep but he's not asking her to move. Might not ever ask her.
"It was like being back on that planet even though I knew…"
"I know."
She smoothes a hand across his chest. "I fell apart."
"At least Daniel was there," he remembers they owe the man a phone call that's hours past due now.
"Yeah. But it means I made the right decision."
"What decision?"
"About going off world. I can't ever do another prison, Jack. Not being an asset instead of a liability. If we were out there, I'd have gotten all of you killed today."
"You can't think like that."
"I can't not think like that."
"What happened today was gonna happen the first time you found yourself stuck somewhere. I'm just glad you didn't have to do it alone. And I'm sorry I wasn't there."
"Me too," she says and sighs against him.
Inside the house an obnoxious beeping starts. Their eyes meet. Just as he realizes it's the smoke detector she says, "Hey…weren't you cooking something when I got home?"
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
"You're never going to live that down, you know?" Daniel hands the salt shaker over to Jack when he's done with it.
"Yeah, yeah," Jack grouses. "I had other things on my mind."
"How's she doing?"
"She's doing fine," Sam pipes up from her side of the table. "Her hearing is fine, too."
"Sorry," Daniel says sheepishly. "I didn't think you two were paying attention to us."
"It's a restaurant, Daniel, not a cone of silence," Janet laughs.
Sam reaches across the table and covers Daniel's hand with her own. "But thank you. Thanks for caring and thanks for being with me today."
He blushes and ducks his head. "Well, yeah."
"And thank you, Colonel O'Neill, for burning up a pot of boiling water and inviting us out to dinner so I didn't have to cook tonight," Janet breaks the tension with a smile.
Jack smiles and shoves a bite of steak into his mouth to dispel laughter but Janet can tell there's a joke being had at her expense. "What?" she asks with exasperation when she sees Sam and Daniel struggling to contain their mirth.
Jack makes a "come on" gesture with his hands and both Sam and Daniel pull folded twenties out of their pockets and slide them across the table to him.
"What?" Janet asks again this time with ire in her voice.
"You do realize, don't you," Daniel leans over and brushes her hair behind her ear with affection, "that you're the only one at this table who still calls him that, right?"
"Oh for crying out loud," she says with a laborious exhale but can't help the grin when her tablemates dissolve into laughter.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
"I'm going to my house to clean up the glass."
Jack looks up from his book. "Yeah? Want me to come?"
She shakes her head. "No. This is something I need to do. I'll be okay."
"You'll call me if you change your mind."
She nods. "I'll be home in a few hours." He watches as she slips on her tennis shoes and collects her purse. Just as she's about to walk out the door he stops her. "Sam?"
"Yeah?" She turns with her hand on the knob.
"Is this…" He's at a loss for words. He's both afraid and elated by what this newfound strength might mean.
"What is it, Jack?"
He clears his throat and surges ahead. "Are you ready to go back?"
"Why?" she asks, apparently truly perplexed. "Are you?"
"I'm okay wherever," he says slowly and after a couple deep breaths.
"Well, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather stay here."
Tension he hadn't fully realized seeps out of his shoulders. "Yeah," he says breathily. "Here's fine."
"Okay," she says with a small, confused smile. "Just a few hours," she reiterates. "I'll bring pizza back for lunch."
"Sounds good," he says but he waits for her to leave before he releases a shuddery exhale and waits for the adrenaline in his system to level out.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She cleans up the glass in her entry and the spare bathroom and is two-thirds of the way down the hallway before it hits her that Jack thought she was doing this so she could leave him.
She drops the trash bag on the floor and grabs her cell phone off the kitchen counter. He answers after only a couple of rings with, "You okay?"
"Jack," she says in a rush, "I sorry. I didn't realize what you must have thought."
"He chuckles. Well, you did take a couple years off my life."
"I thought we talked about this," she says leadingly. "I'm not going through the gate anymore and you're coming home to me."
He's quiet for a few moments and she's fully prepared to leave her project undone and go straight back to him. "I guess I wasn't sure that conversation meant the same thing to you as it did to me."
She sighs with exasperation. "Jack, half the time these days I can't tell you what I'm feeling. I can't even tell you that everything is going to be okay between us. I'm working on it. But I'm never going to be good explaining how I'm feeling – that's just not me. I don't like talking about it. So if you're worried about something, you've just got to ask me, okay?"
"Why do I feel like those were supposed to be my lines?"
"Of the two of us, right now I get to be more screwed up. We can switch later."
"I dunno, after this I'm thinking maybe you're not so screwed up."
"Well, maybe you're not so screwed up, either."
"Why Samantha Carter, I think that's the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."
"Please tell me you're not going to be a high maintenance boyfriend." She can practically hear the way he grimaces at term.
"Tell me you're not gonna call me that in public."
"What, now that I know how much you love it?"
"Are you about ready to come home?"
"Like an hour?" she hedges.
"Don't stop for pizza. I'll have it delivered."
She grins as they hang up. She finds she rather likes his sense of urgency.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
They're sitting on the couch watching a string of shows about how different things are made. He's got an arm slung around her shoulders and she's tipped towards him, her knees resting in his lap. After a while he can feel her eyes burning holes in the side of his face. "What?" he says and jostles her a little without taking his eyes off the screen and the – he'll never admit – fascinating segment on fiberglass boats.
"Kiss me," she says and completely unspools his brain.
He turns to look at her and finds a determined look on her face. "I'm sorry?"
"I want you to kiss me. We've been doing this for how long now? And you're not going to make a move on me and I can't make one on you and I just…well, I think you should just kiss me and we'll get it over with."
He raises an eyebrow at her. "Get it over with?"
She huffs. "You know what I mean."
"So you're saying you want me to…"
"Yeah. I mean, you don't have to get out of hand about it or anythi—"
He cuts her off by covering her mouth with his. He figures she's right – he wasn't going to make a move on her until she'd made it clear she was ready, and besides, kissing is probably as good a place to start as any, for both the obvious reason as well as the fact that her torturers likely didn't come close to approximating such an intimacy.
She gasps against his mouth and he groans when she nips his top lip encouraging him to open his mouth for her. And then he's lost because the only things he's aware of are the feel of her tongue sliding against his, the rhythmic pressure of her breasts against his chest with every deep breath she takes, and the little pleased sounds she's making.
The fog starts to clear when her nails scrape against his scalp and her fingers try to tangle in his short hair. He feels her wiggle against him and realizes, despite her earlier justification, things are going to get out of control in just a few seconds.
He wrenches his mouth from hers and is pleased to watch the way she has to pry her eyes open, the way she pants a little through her open mouth, and the wondrous little smile that precedes a breathy, "Wow." She wipes the corner of his mouth with the pad of her thumb and he doesn't check the impulse to press a kiss against her flesh just before she pulls away. "Who've thought that's what we had waiting on us?"
"Oh, I knew," he says as smugly as he can manage while he's still trying to catch his breath.
"C'mon," she argues good naturedly, "of course we'd want to think that, but there's no way to know."
"Unless, say, there had been a previous opportunity or two to have tested the theory."
"I think I'd remember kissing you. Especially if we're kissing like that."
"What if you didn't remember anything else about the time during which we kissed?"
He watches as her eyes narrow in thought. "Wait a minute," she says slowly, "are you saying we kissed during the time loop?"
"What?" he asks defensively. "Are you saying you would have let that opportunity pass you by?"
He watches a cocksure grin slide into place and he finds the confidence sexy. "Hell, Jack, I'm not sure I'd have stopped with a kiss."
He groans. "You're trying to kill me. You really are."
But her musical laugh is worth all personal body checking he's doing at the images her words provoked. "We should go back to the kissing. The kissing was nice."
"One more," she says saucily, "and then ice cream."
Sounds like a deal to him.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It's nice, she thinks. She'd forgotten about the pleasant hum that would fill her with the casual kisses and touches in a relationship. She's surprised, when she remembers how that hum makes her feel a little high, that she waited so long to force the issue with Jack. Regardless, she sure is enjoying the freedom to kiss him when she walks by him.
He enjoys the freedom, too. She hadn't realized how often over the last few months he must have checked the impulse. He used to put his hand on her shoulder and lean down and touch their temples together. She's thought it odd and sweet. But now, when he ducks down, he presses his lips to her – usually to her lips but sometimes to other parts.
She likes the feel of his stubble against her cheek and neck; she likes what it says about them, about how they are together – especially when she spent so many years looking at him cleanly shaven in a uniform. Scruffy Jack, in old jeans and t-shirts, makes her almost irrationally happy. It bodes well for the future, she thinks, that every little layer they add makes her feel more secure, makes her feel more ready for what might come next.
She's not sure yet. She still fights little frissons of fear when she thinks of sex. She likes the idea, generically. But the thought of being pressed between a body and any other surface makes her breath start to come quicker – and not in the pleasurable way.
So for now she kisses him. And he kisses her. And sometimes, just sometimes, she'll slide her hands over his body just to remember what planes of hard muscle feel like against her palms. And for now, it's enough.