AN: Thank you for the reviews! When you review from a FFN account I do my best to respond, but if you review as a guest (whether you add a user name to the top of that or not) I can't actually respond, though I do read and appreciate the reviews! I am not and never will be one to require reviews in order to post, or will post faster with more reviews. I write because I love to write and I share my writing in the hopes that someone else will like the stories I've come up with. But this (like several of my fandoms) is such a small, niche fandom and it delights my heart to know there are some in it who are reading and apparently enjoying the writing that I share with the hopes of exactly that.
Special thanks to rachel. for regular and ongoing support, and for staying in touch with me even when I go through long stretches of being REALLY bad at replying!
Hope you enjoy today's installment - continuing the evening on which, simultaneously, Tara and Bobby have attended the benefit with the Mojo Gogo concert, and Jack and Sue have their first night in their "married" household! It took a lot more editing than usual. For anyone who might be curious, I'll add a second note to the end to let you know why, but if you don't care, feel free to skip the note - I promise I won't be offended. ;)
Tara took a deep breath of the cool night air as they stepped outside. "Wow. Mojo Gogo should do a concert CD. They are unbelievable live." Noticing the uniformed man approaching she added, "Ope, here's our valet guy. You have the ticket?"
Tara took a deep breath of the cool night air as they stepped outside. "Wow. Mojo Gogo should do a concert CD. They are unbelievable live." Noticing the uniformed man approaching she added, "Ope, here's our valet guy. You have the ticket?"
Bobby seemed to shake out of some sort of stupor enough to ask, "What?"
She raised her eyebrows as she smiled slightly as his distraction. "The valet ticket."
"Oh. Yeah, here," he said, handing the man the ticket. The man headed off for their car, while Tara peered up at Bobby with concern.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Of course," he said, trying to look and sound pleasant.
Tara wasn't fooled as she asked disbelievingly, "Nothing's bothering you?"
"No. Why?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just thinking that maybe you're thinking . . . it should have been Darcy here with you tonight."
Bobby was silent for a moment, before turning fully toward her, apparently ready to talk. "Can I ask you a question? And I want your honest opinion."
"Of course."
"Is there something wrong with me? You know, that I—I can't seem to actually stay in love?"
"Well, maybe it's not that you're not able to, maybe you just haven't found the person you're supposed to stay in love with yet. And," she added, returning to his original question, "there's nothing wrong with you. You're smart, you're funny . . . ." She hesitated a moment before adding, ". . . handsome . . . kind. You have that adorable accent." Feeling her face turning red, she gave a slightly embarrassed smile as she quickly turned from the specific compliments back to her point. "You're a great guy, and any woman would be lucky to have you."
Bobby gave her a somehow simultaneously huge and yet soft smile. "And seeing how you're a, uh, great judge of character, as well as clever, sensitive, and I might add, very beautiful, any man would consider himself lucky to be with you."
They stood there a moment, eyes locked, and something between them felt a little different than ever before. Not that neither of them had ever had these moments—moments where they were suddenly struck by how smart or funny or charming or attractive the other was—but this might be the first time they both appeared to have such a moment at the same time. Or were aware that the other might feel it too.
Unfortunately, it was broken by the sound of his car as the valet pulled up in front of them. "I think your car's here," Tara said, breaking her gaze from him.
Bobby hummed his agreement, then held his arm out to escort her the short distance to the car and drive her home.
"Sorry, buddy," Jack said to Levi, who was nosing around as Jack put the dishes in the dishwasher. "You already got every errant scrap of food in the place."
He and Sue had enjoyed their dinner very much—possibly too much, but he finally had a chance to do so many things he'd wanted for so long to do with Sue and, inasmuch as he could without compromising their friendship, their mission, or their jobs, he was going to take advantage of the situation and treat her the way she deserved to be treated. Especially when he could use the mission to disguise his true motives.
Sue had tried to clean up, saying since he'd provided dinner she should take care of that, but he insisted that tonight was his treat entirely. Since he wouldn't let her help, she went to look out the window again toward the Vanderwylen home, in case of any changes there yet.
Just after Jack closed and started the dishwasher, Sue entered the kitchen, reporting that while Joseph had finally gotten home, there didn't seem to be a lot happening next door right now.
Glancing around at the clean kitchen, she said, "Hey, if this FBI thing doesn't work out, I'd say you have a future in housekeeping."
He laughed. "Well, I can't take all the credit. The canine vacuum cleaner helped."
"He's a dog of many talents," she agreed, her own chuckles joining his.
After a moment, Sue looked down at her hands, playing with her bureau-issue wedding ring, then looked back up to Jack, the laughter giving way to sincerity. "Thank you for supporting me in this."
"Well, it was a good idea. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have." Another moment passed before Jack brought himself to say, "I'm going to go up and unpack. Which do you prefer, the master or the guest room?"
Sue shrugged, shaking her head a little. "I don't care, which do you want?"
"I can sleep anywhere, so why don't you take the master?" Jack suggested.
"Okay. Unless you want it?"
"No, I'm fine with the guest room."
"Okay, then."
In truth, he had two reasons he was offering her the master. For one, he was raised to be a gentleman and even though he was a grown man and 900 miles away from her, his mother would still have his hide if she heard that he'd chosen to take the nicer room for himself and leave a lady with the lesser room. Second, and possibly weighing more on him at the moment, was because it was hard enough pretending to be married to Sue yet still not being able to hold her the way he wanted to. He certainly didn't want to compound that by sleeping in a bed that was "their bed," even if it would never really be their bed. He would never be able to sleep if he did that, for spending the night thinking of what it would be like if she were really next to him. He could sleep anywhere but not necessarily under any and all conditions.
Jack headed off before he did something stupid, like grab her and kiss her, or tell her he wished they were sleeping in the same room. He'd only gotten a few steps, though, before she said, "Jack, wait!" He turned back half-nervously and half-expectantly. Whatever he thought, hoped, or feared she might say, what she actually said was nothing like any of it.
"I was thinking maybe one of us should leave the lights off in our room. If the neighbors notice the lights are on in two different bedrooms every night, it could make them suspicious. Not too many newlyweds sleep in separate rooms."
Jack took a deep breath, trying to steady himself and take his mind (for the thousandth time just that evening) off the idea of sleeping in the same room with her, in the same bed with her, holding her, snuggled up against her, leaning forward to kiss her neck and . . . .
Sue apparently mistook his expression for disagreement. "Or, am I overthinking this?" she asked self-consciously.
"No!" he assured her quickly. "No, it's a good point. I'll keep my light off."
"Or I could leave mine off," she offered.
"You already can't hear. It only seems fair I should be the one who can't see. Tell Levi if he hears a loud thud in the middle of the night, not to worry."
They stood there a moment, looking at each other—something that was either becoming one of their favorite pastimes, or a terrible habit, or maybe both—before he rubbed his hands together, took a deep breath, and then signed, Good night.
"Good night," she replied with a soft smile. He turned and walked out of the room as fast as he could, still trying to run from doing something he or she might regret (or worse, might not when they should). So fast, in fact, that he didn't see her smiling besottedly at his retreating form.
The drive back to Tara's house started out quiet, not quite uncomfortable but slightly awkward as they both knew what they had been feeling only moments before the valet arrived with the car, but neither were any longer entirely certain they had read those same feelings in the other correctly. Finally, tentatively, Tara decided to return to the previous topic, seeming to think that asking further about Bobby's uncertainty would somehow clear up some of her own. "When you asked back there about—about not being able to stay in love. What did you mean? I mean, you're a very loving person, as far as being loving to your friends and your family and all. Why would you think you couldn't love consistently . . . in a romantic way? Which I guess is what you meant?"
He shrugged a little, keeping his eyes studiously on the road without even a glance toward her, as though talking to the windshield would make the conversation a little easier. "I dunno, I guess I just . . . I mean, I'm not exactly Mr. Steady, you know? Before Darce I went through so many girlfriends and . . . well, I might've called it love thousands of times, but it never lasted, sometimes never lasted to the next day, you know? Yeah, I'm not sure I really knew what love was at the time."
"Well, what teens do? Or even most college-age adults, for that matter."
"Well, I may be a later bloomer than that in figuring it out. I mean, we're not exactly still in college, and we weren't when Darcy and I got together."
"Bobby, we've worked together, what, 4 years now? I've heard you and Jack joke about your Don Juan days a lot, but I've only seen you actually go out on a handful of dates."
"Yeah, I guess working wi—uh, for the FBI's been good for me." Tara frowned slightly, sure that wasn't what he was starting to say originally, but he plowed ahead and she decided it was probably best not to pry into whatever he had previously intended. "I thought I was starting to figure it out before I met her, too, but . . . well, Darcy's great, and I really did fall in love with her, but then we just sort of . . . ."
"Fell out of love?"
"Not even anything as dramatic as that!" He turned his head her direction for the first time, only as part of glancing both ways at the stop sign he'd just pulled up to, but from what she could see in the glow of the street lamps he really looked like he was thinking hard about exactly what to say, and she couldn't shake the feeling that he was deliberately holding something back. Still, he turned the corner and continued speaking with equal ease, no hint in his voice of the consternation she was almost sure she'd seen on his face. "We didn't really fall out of anything, I guess, but more like fell into comfort and like and regard without really being in love anymore. So subtly that neither of us really noticed it for a while, and when we did it was easy to pretend it was fine because we still got along alright so, in a lot of ways, it was fine, it just wasn't love anymore. No spark or anything, just two friends as ready to do stuff together as with any other friends, and comfortable in the security that if we needed a date for someone we had a built-in date on standby."
Tara shrugged. "I don't know if that's really a bad thing anyway. Well, not the last part, but the part about being comfortable and being friends? Maybe in this case it is, but only because your lives seem headed different directions. I don't think the long-lasting kind of love is always the in-love, big-sparks kind. That's just a phase of a relationship and then you need something more. My grandparents have been together for over 50 years and they're so comfortable with each other, and still so in love but it's different from the way that movies show falling in love."
"I know, but there should be at least some of that spark still too, right?"
"I guess, but . . . that doesn't mean that will be there for every person you date. Just for when you find the right person. Meemaw and Popop always say that their comfortable friendship is the best, but that keeping the deeper part of their relationship alive takes work." She shrugged. "Maybe you and Darcy fell into the comfortable part too soon to have the depth or foundation necessary to be worth making the choice to keep the spark alive. That doesn't mean it would have been impossible if she were staying and you both wanted that."
"But she's not," he said simply. "And I'm okay with that, I really am, I'm not wishing for things to be different with Darce, just for things to be different with—"
After a moment, Tara asked softly, "With who?"
He shrugged again and again seemed, to her practiced eye and ear after four years of being coworkers and friends with Bobby, to be prevaricating a bit as he said, "Not who, exactly, except maybe with myself. Just wishing that I knew how I'm supposed to approach relationships differently, I guess." Then, quirky a patented Bobby Manning Thinks He's Hilarious smile, he teased, "Because I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with having hamsters inside ventricles."
Tara recognized his intentional diversion but decided to go with it, at least for now, and gave a half-laughing faux-offended gasp as she gave a teasing light backhand to his upper arm. "Bobby Manning! Are you making fun of such an amazing band as Mojo Gogo?"
"I'm making fun of lyrics that make no sense!" And as he turned onto her street their heavy conversation gave way to lighter laughing and joking.
AN2: I struggled for a while with Bobby and Tara's post-concert conversation. The alterations from the original - specifically that he's asking about inability to stay in love rather than inability to commit - are for the same reason that I had Bobby and Darcy break up in the same conversation where she told him about her new job, instead stringing it out like they do in the episode. Two reasons, actually.
1. Though I'm combining "Newlywed Game"/"Breaking Up is Hard to Do" with "Troy Story," I'm placing it where the "Newlywed Game"/"Breaking Up" episodes originally take place within the series. That is, cannonically, about a year and a half earlier than "Troy Story," which means only about a year (less than a year, actually) into Darcy and Bobby's relationship. Long enough for them to have determined they were truly in love but not long enough, in my opinion, for Bobby to be fully beating himself up about inability to commit to actually moving entirely across country.
(Note: There are arguments to be made for why he might be, particularly that with his experiences with his absentee con artist father he might have an inclination to think that he's somehow genetically predisposed to have these issues, and since he's also hard on himself about things he wouldn't be hard on other people about, he could totally think it's his fault anyway. But that read, while valid, didn't feel right for this story.)
2. Because of how I had them break up - Darcy saying she realized she was more comfortable with him than actually in love with him, and Bobby acknowledging the same - it wasn't really about committment for them at this point anyway. So I wanted to acknowledge that too.
BUT what I struggled with was getting Tara to say everything in there that she wanted to say about love without taking longer than was reasonable. And ultimately, my original version left out a lot of what I wanted her to say about the difference of working at love versus having the exciting "spark" all the time, and even WITHOUT that, it was too long for while they were waiting for the valet!
I went back and forth, wrote and rewrote it, compared it to the original after I'd been over it so many times that I forgot how short the original conversation even is, realized that it had gone from "much longer" to "WAY WAY too long unless the valet parked their car in Pennsylvania . . . anyway, I finally realized that this conversation couldn't happen then. And I tried to think of another time in the story that they might have the conversation and I FINALLY realized . . . they have the entire car ride home still.
All of which is to say, sometimes writing just flows out of me like it has a desparate need to be in the world, other times I have to pull it out like I'm trying to extract strands of cooked spaghetti from a garbage disposal intact, and then there are times like this, where the words are all there but my own brain gets in the way of the MOST OBVIOUS SOLUTION! lol At any rate, I got there in the end and hope you enjoyed the result!