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If you lose your one and only
There's always room here for the lonely
To watch your broken dreams
Dance in and out of the beams
Of a neon moon
-Neon Moon, Brooks & Dunn
There’s enough liquor in his bloodstream that for a second, he questions if Samantha Carter is really standing beside him in the back corner of this dusty, run-down bar in the middle of the night in the middle of no where.
But then she’s sliding the tumbler of amber liquid out of his hand, her fingers brushing over his, and the reality of her sinks in. He tilts his head, considers her in the flickering neon light of the bar decor. She’s beautiful.
“Who called you?”
He doesn’t think he’s drunk enough to need a ride home, but he feels dizzy looking at her. He’s not entirely sure that’s the whiskey’s fault, though. That’s just a baseline response to looking at her.
She shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” He eyes the glass of liquor in her hand. “You gonna give that back?”
It’s sharper than his normal tone of voice with her and she picks up on it. She cradles the glass in her hand, staring down into the liquid. “That depends,” she counters slowly, considering. “You gonna tell me why you’re drinking like this?”
He scrubs a hand over his face, pressing his palms into his eyes. This is the last conversation he wants to have right now. This way lies madness, he thinks. But he remembers why he’s here in the first place and thinks maybe, just maybe, he’s mad already.
“You’re going to think I’m a sap, if I tell you,” he sighs.
“I think you’re a bit of a sap already, sir,” she teases, flashing him that smile of hers that makes him want to run his thumb over her bottom lip, the kind where she bites down to stop herself from smiling fully. He wants to see her unreserved and smiling, no more hiding.
The jukebox in the corner of the bar plays something low and slow and twangy. Sir and half-hidden smiles and all the reasons that they can’t and shouldn’t press in against him and he just wants to do something that’s just them. Not Colonel and Major, no sir; just Jack and Sam. He pushes himself to his feet and sways ever so slightly, reaching his hand out to her.
“Dance with me, Carter.”
Her hands still on the glass tumbler as she considers him and his outstretched hand. She frowns, confused. “You’re drinking because you want to dance with me?”
He huffs impatiently. “No, I’m drinking because I want to kiss you. I’m asking you to dance because I can’t. So, what do you say? Dance with me?”
He’s just a shade beyond tipsy and he’s so damned tired of fighting the way he wants to be with her. He wants her leaning against his side drinking from his beer bottle and kissing his cheek and going home with him at the end of the night.
He doesn’t want this: drinking until he loves her a little less, going home to an empty bed, and treating her like she isn’t everything to him.
But at his request she looks pained—whether because his words hurt her or because she’s about to hurt him.
“Sir, we can’t—“
“We can.” He stands and crowds against her, fingers wrapping around her wrist and bringing their joined hands against his chest. “No one knows us here, Sam.”
It’s cheating, he knows, to use her given name. But he’s not feeling particularly charitable. He wants her and a couple of lines in a military code of conduct book tells him he can’t.
Her fingers briefly curl into the soft fabric of his black tee, her foot shuffles in-between his and for the briefest of moments, she is pressed against him, leaning on him like he’s dreamed of.
And then she’s stepping back, cheeks pink, mouth turned down in a frown. “You’re making this harder.”
It’s easy to blame the alcohol, but the truth is, he wants to touch her so he does. His fingers reach for the curve of her jaw, slide past her cheek and into her hair, cradling her head in his palm. She leans into his touch, her hand coming up to grasp at his wrist—to keep him there or push him away, he’s not sure.
“It only feels harder because this—“ He brushes his thumb over her temple, tugs gently at her hair until she’s stumbling against him. “This feels so damn easy.”
The music plays softly in the background and the whiskey is burning in his blood and everywhere he’s touching her is alive and zinging. But he’s waiting. If she pushes him away, if she draws the line more firmly between them, he’ll pull away and call for a cab and send her home.
But if she doesn’t leave, if she doesn’t pull away—
He brushes his thumb back and forth over her temple, cataloging the softness of her skin and the downy fuzz of hair along her hairline; memorizes the way her eyes flutter close and she leans into him.
“Tell me why you’re drinking like this tonight,” she asks again, eyes opening and searching his. The answer clearly matters and if owning up to his feelings means she may be more inclined to step into his arms and sway to the music, he’s willing to be a little pathetic for her.
He knows why she’s asking, too. They weren’t facing a life or death situation, no close calls, no clock running down and time running out. It was so, so simple.
He sighs in resignation.
“You brought me coffee,” he says simply, shoulders shrugging slightly.
“What?”
“This morning, before the briefing with Hammond about PCX-807, you brought me coffee exactly the way I like it, like you didn’t think anything of it, and you just…sat down next to me and pulled your chair closer to mine.”
She blinks up at him, a crease between her brows. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he confirms with a half-raise of his shoulders. Liquor has loosened his tongue and holding Carter has made him weak. He knows she fits perfectly against him, now. “It was just so easy to think about us sitting at home and starting our mornings like that and…” He trailed off, self-conscious. “I told ya. Sap.”
“You think about things like that?”
“Yes.” And then, more softly, “All the time.”
Something crosses her face, a revelation or realization maybe. She leans more heavily against him and he takes on her weight happily. “I didn’t know—I thought it was just—that this was just a physical thing. Attraction at most.”
He’s almost offended, but for all the communication that they do with their eyes, with just a look and a flick of their fingers, they’ve never talked—really talked—about what this thing between them is. It’s his fault, he supposes, for letting her assume. It’s his fault for not telling her the depth and extent of his feelings. Maybe Carter isn’t such a brainiac in all situations. He’d assumed she just knew, but—
“It was, at first,” he admits. “And then it was more. A lot more.” And then he figures, in for a penny, in for a pound. Fuck, he hates clichés. “Sam, this thing we’re doing—or not doing, as the case may be—I am in. I am all in. I lo—“
But her fingers are pressing against his lips, stopping the words. “Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t say it when I can’t do anything about it.”
He drops his forehead to hers, swaying slightly against her, drifting his hands down her shoulders and arms to settle at her waist. “But you know, now,” he murmurs. “And when you’re ready to do something about it, I’m here.”
She’s not the sort to hold back a muffled sob, not the type to let emotion overwhelm her. But she presses back against him, her forehead against his, like if she wills it hard enough they can become one person. “I’m not ready to walk through the gate without you,” she confesses, voice thick with emotion.
He pulls away slightly, looks into her eyes—wide and glassy and so open, vulnerable. “I know,” he says in agreement. “But I want to walk through my front door with you. That’s what’s waiting for us, Sam. If you want it.”
“I’m not ready,” she confesses, face contorting in pain and regret. “I’m not ready to give that part of you and us up.”
“Okay,” he says simply. He meant it when he said he’d wait. He just wants to make sure she knows what’s waiting for her.
“Okay?”
“Yeah, Carter,” he says, smiling softly at her. “Okay.”
Her eyes drop to the center of his chest where her hands have found purchase. “Just so you know, it’s more than physical for me, too. I’m—I’m in.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and it reminds him of the first time she stepped through the Stargate: nerves and excitement and the unknown vibrating within her.
“I lov—“
“Ah, ah!” This time, he’s the the one to cover her mouth with his fingertips, the pads of his fingers presses to her lips. He echoes her words back to her with a sardonic, teasing grin: “Don’t say it when I can’t do anything about it.”
She laughs, a little watery, a little shaky. He tightens his grip on her hips. The jukebox plays another song, something melancholy and slow. “Now what?” She asks.
“How about that dance? We can have that, can’t we?”
“Yeah,” she murmurs, shifting impossibly closer. “We can have this.”
He’s still a little unsteady on his feet thanks to the liquor in his blood stream and she seems reluctant to step outside the darkened, shadowed corner of the bar that had become their own little private space. Their dance is less of a waltz or a two-step and more a gentle, in-place sway.
It’s better this way, though, he thinks.
With her arms wrapped around his neck and his around her waist, pressed together chest to thigh to toe, it’s easy to lose himself in her. He can pull her closer and nuzzle his lips along her hairline and feel her shudder against him in real time. He can sigh out her name and wrap himself around her, head falling to her shoulder and tucking his face against her neck where she’s warm and he can feel her pulse pounding against his cheek.
She seems preoccupied with touching as much of him as she can in the three minutes they have while this song plays. Her palms smooth over his back and shoulders, nails scraping slightly against his t-shirt, before settling against his stomach. She’s not a petite woman, but pulled against his chest, his head buried against her neck and shoulder, it’s easy to feel small and curled up, her head tucked tightly against his jaw.
Together, they simply sway together in place, arms entangled, bodies pressed against one another. He hums against her skin in tune with the song, murmurs nonsense lyrics he half-remembers. It’s the best three minutes of his life, he thinks, just holding her like this. The air is clear between them. She knows and he knows and that’s enough for now, really enough. An endpoint, a day when he can tug her into his lap and kiss the coffee taste from her mouth, is all but assured.
The song fades and for a moment, he thinks if he just stays like this, another song will come on and they can do this again. And again. And again. He knows the feel of her in his arms now, he doesn’t want to let her go.
Harder and easier, he thinks with a huff.
Before he pulls away, her fingers slide into the short hairs at the nape of his neck and he feels her lips press against his cheek, his temple. He holds her a little tighter, returns the favor and presses a soft kiss to her neck.
For now, it has to be enough.
He pulls himself away before he can’t let her go. For her part, she looks just as rattled, just as unhinged as he feels. They hadn’t even done anything, nothing that wouldn’t fly for a middle school dance, anyway, and yet he felt wired with the feel of her, the possibilities of a future.
“I think,” he says ruefully, softly, “that I should call a cab.”
She frowns at him. “Why? I came here to drive you home.”
“Sam, there’s limits to what I can stand and being alone with you with no one looking is a step beyond what I can handle tonight, okay?”
(It’s too easy to imagine her walking him to the very front door he’s wanted her to walk through with him; too easy to crowd her against the entryway wall and slot his leg between her thighs and cover her mouth with his and—)
She blushes at this words, the implications, but nods. “Okay.” A moment of hesitancy, uncertainty, as she disentangles herself from him—her arm gone from his waist, fingers out of his hair, two steps back and a gaping chasm between them. He feels cold without the feel of her.
“We’re going to be okay, right?”
Her voice sounds so small, so unlike the woman he’s come to know. A part of him feels excitement at the prospect of meeting the many facets of this miraculously complex woman in front of him. One day…
He nods, squeezes her hand, and steps back too. Just in case. “Yeah, Carter. We’re gonna be okay. I promise.”
Another song starts up on the jukebox and she looks for all the world like she wants to step back into his arms. He wants to let her.
Instead, he steps back. Tempting fate. “Go home, Sam.”
He watches her go, watches her look back over her shoulder, and turns his back on her, reaching for the tumbler of whiskey on the tabletop and downing the last few fingers. Then, before he can give in to his lesser demons (and his greater demons, for that matter), he drags himself to the bar and flags down the bartender.
“Cab, please.”
(In two years’ time, in a cabin up in Minnesota set beside a lake without fish, he will hold the door open for her and she will walk in beside him in the way he’s dreamed of. In the morning, after she stretches out beside him like a leisurely cat in the sunbeams of the bed, she will join him on the porch and hand him a steaming mug of coffee and his eyes will darken and he will tug her down onto his lap, coffee sloshing over the side of the mug. But he won’t care, because she will be in his arms, her hands in his hair and trailing over his face, his tongue stroking softly over hers in a deep kiss that tastes like Sam and sugar and coffee, and he will not have to worry that they can’t have this.)