In the end, she was glad she'd shaved her legs. Not for him, though. Nice, smooth legs made her feel sexier, even under her jeans. She'd opted out on the slacks after all, decided they were too 'dressy' for the movie theater where they'd essentially be in the dark for the majority of the evening. They'd made no plans to go out to dinner afterwards.
Dinner, clearly, was a step too far.
Sitting in the seat next to him, leaning just a little towards him, Sam's eyes fixed on the screen though she wasn't paying any attention to it whatsoever. If anyone had asked, she wouldn't even know what the movie was about, who the characters were, hell, who the *actors* were - even though she was pretty sure it had that girl in it that the... that he liked.
Dammit.
JackJackJackJackJackJackJackJack.
Why couldn't she say it?
"Did you say something?"
She turned towards him. You know, he was pretty close right now. As in... a couple of centimeters away from her face.
Wow.
"Sorry?" she whispered.
"Did you say something?"
So... close. "Nuh-uh," she whispered again, her eyes on his mouth.
Wow.
"Um. Okay."
Hey! Where was he going! That was the perfect opportunity for a.... Dammit. Looked like he was actually, you know, *watching* the movie instead of staring at the screen and thinking about whether or not they were dating.
She was pretty sure they were dating. They hadn't actually come out and said it yet, of course, but they'd been to each other's houses, watched movies at home, got take-out a couple of times. And tonight they'd gone to the movies together, even though they'd met up at the movie theater and split the cost of the tickets equally.
Shit. Maybe they...
No, they were. They definitely were. She wasn't completely stupid, after all. They had enough chemistry to blow up the SGC, for God's sake and she knew - she was *positive* - that he cared about her.
Plus, he was staying in Colorado for a while longer. Daniel had been under the impression that the Colonel - dammit! *Jack* - would be going straight up north after his retirement. Which hadn't happened. He'd stayed. And someone didn't turn up randomly in a person's house just because they wanted to be friends, did they?
No.
That decided, Sam snuggled down into her seat and watched the movie. Or tried to.
Who the hell was that guy? Okay, that guy she knew. No, wait, this was someone else. Now, this chick was definitely new. Hold on... this wasn't the one he liked was it? If it was, Sam was seriously disappointed in his taste...
"Popcorn?" he whispered in her ear.
Whispered. In. Her. Ear.
Oh. *Wow*. Whole right side of her body? Tingling all over.
Suffice it to say, Sam thought as she stuffed her mouth with salted popcorn, she was feeling a tad frustrated. He'd been retired for nearly a week now and they'd gotten no further than... no further than they'd ever gotten.
Actually, they'd practically gone *backwards* as far as physical affection went.
Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Perhaps this was normal. She hadn't, after all, been out on a proper date for years. Hadn't actually been romantically interested in anyone else who was human for years - which was saying something. Well, it was saying that her life was freaking weird but it was also saying that she was thirty-four years old and she had next to no experience dating anyone as an adult.
Plus, it wasn't as if these were the best conditions to date. She was still working very hard at work - in fact, more so than usual. She'd had to cut back on her lab time to deal with the pressures of leading SG-1, which required far more paperwork than she'd expected, and she was spending a lot of time reading up on old mission reports of the Colonel's just to familiarize herself with his tactics.
She'd never realized quite how hard he worked before. And he'd pulled it off as if he didn't work at all. She couldn't count the number of times he'd turned up in her lab with 'nothing to do'.
*How* he could have had nothing to do was beyond her. Where the hell did he find the time?
Mentally, she sighed. She guessed she was going to have to do some serious parceling of her time. Probably needed to draw up some kind of a schedule, maybe a spreadsheet. With colors. She'd known the time in her lab would be cut short - Hammond had pointed that out to her first thing - but that didn't mean she couldn't miss it.
"Carter?"
She jumped again and swallowed the last of her popcorn, refusing, this time, to look at him because that was a distraction all on its own. "Yeah?"
"Who's the guy on the left?"
She focused on the screen and was embarrassed to recall that she still had no idea. Not a clue. And, usually, she could multitask with the best of them.
Sam toyed with the idea of making something up - obviously he didn't know, or he wouldn't be asking her, but then she figured, why bother? She wanted to at least start this relationship - and it was a relationship, definitely - with some truthfulness. Even if it was about a movie. "I have no idea."
He chuckled and looked at her warmly, a daft grin on his face. "Me either."
They spluttered helplessly.
"Shhhh!" someone hissed behind them.
They both stifled their laughter and slumped in their seats. And, somehow, their hands got tangled up together.
*
The nerves were building. His stomach was a mass of butterflies, all flapping away inside and butting against each other. Plus, his heart seemed to have vacated its normal spot and migrated north, causing his throat to constrict and his heart rate to rocket.
They stopped in front of her car.
You know, when he'd been a teenager and first started dating (earlier than his parents had thought, by the way, because they hadn't taken into account the oak tree outside his window and the feminine wiles of Katherine Reilly and her phenomenal... never mind), he'd figured the whole male/female thing would get easier and the entire 'who makes the first move' issue and the nerves that seemed to be a prerequisite for said issue.
Hell, he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to do more than kiss her. Frankly, the back seat of his truck was looking pretty good right now. As was the asphalt under his feet, the bench over there by the pay phone, that patch of grass, the side of her car, the trunk of her car, the hood of her car...
Damn but her car was looking really sexy all of a sudden.
He really had to get his mind out of the gutter.
Thankfully, Carter was looking pretty skittish too. Her eyes kept darting all over the place and he could feel the fluttering of her pulse under his fingers. She seemed to be intently chewing her bottom lip. Carter was doing all the things she did when she was nervous.
Which was faintly reassuring, he supposed.
It took Jack a moment to work out that they'd stopped in front of her car, were still holding hands, and neither of them had said a thing.
They were just standing there doing nothing.
Jack sighed.
"So this is... pretty awkward," she said, very, very quietly.
"Yeah." He looked down at the ground and then back up at her, grasping what little humor he could find. He smiled at her. "I figure, Daniel and Jonas would be mocking us at this point."
"And Teal'c, too," she put in, smiling back at him. "Only he'd do it silently."
"All the more damning," Jack said, deadpan.
She laughed a little. "Yeah."
The silence crept back again. Carter was, probably unintentionally, doing that whole female looking-through-the-eyelashes thing and he was just standing there, holding her hand.
What? Had they regressed to children, suddenly?
"Look," he said, cutting to the chase, "it's pretty simple. We both want to... " Jack leaned his head forward a little, trying to explain without actually having to say it.
Seriously, he was too old for this shit.
She nodded though. "Oh *yeah*."
Jack's eyebrows raised. Well, that had sounded pretty heartfelt. And he guessed, from the way she was blushing, Carter hadn't quite meant to sound that desperate.
Maybe this wasn't so bad.
He tugged her towards him which must have surprised her somewhat because she stumbled and her hands went up to his chest to protect herself. "Ooof!" she exclaimed softly.
The heels of her boots put her nearly at eye level with him so there was no problem with eye contact.
Plus, by this stage, they were both grinning pretty stupidly at each other.
Not so bad at all, in fact.
Carter rolled her eyes. "Oh for God's sake, Jack..."
He was delighted. "Hey!"
"What?"
"You said it!" And he couldn't begin to describe the rush he'd felt when she did.
She grinned. "I was practicing in the movie theater."
"I didn't hear you."
"No. I mean," she looked over his shoulder and shook her head slightly in embarrassment, "in my head."
Jack opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times before he could find a way to express himself properly. "That's... so completely adorable," he said helplessly.
She made a pained face. "*Adorable?*"
"Yeah. I know. Sorry." He tried to restrain the helpless grin but it was pretty resilient.
"You still call me Carter." She pushed him gently with her hands, a teasing smile on her face.
"Yeah, but that's different," he pointed out, catching hold of her hands with his hand holding them at bay, "I say Carter with affection. At least it's your name."
"So are you always gonna call me Carter?"
"No, I'm pretty sure occasionally... I'll be moved to call you 'Major'."
She shoved him again, a little harder and this time, he pulled her hands around his torso, forcing her to come closer. When he let go of her hands, they stayed around him.
He was so smooth.
Carter snickered. "Bet you think you're really smooth."
Jack rolled his eyes - he should have known she'd tease him for it. "Come on, give me some credit. We're overcoming insurmountable awkwardness here."
She licked her lips. "Jack?"
"Yup?"
"Could you, I don't know, *kiss* me for Christ's sake?" she exclaimed in exasperation.
His eyebrows shot up. He was having way too much fun winding her up. "I can see your leadership qualities just oozing from every pore, Carter."
"Oh, shut *up*." She pulled her hands from his behind his back and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. Giving him a dark look, she pulled him down just that little bit needed for their mouths to be aligned and for her breath to tickle the skin around his mouth. "No more talking," she warned him, turning her head to the side, then tugged him two more millimeters closer for their lips to connect.
As far as public decency went, Jack figured there was a line you had to cross when things got out of hand. Most forms of kissing would be considered okay, particularly when it was dark and they were standing in a vaguely empty parking lot. Then again, there was kissing and then there was *kissing*. The first being more acceptable than the second because the second led to the possibility that things could, at any moment, get out of hand.
Jack was proud that he and Carter entirely skipped Version One Kissing and went straight to Version Two. Which essentially meant that he had her up against the side of her car in about three and a half seconds, had his hands hooked under her thighs and was lifting her up to *just* the position where things could get really interesting.
And things did.
Get interesting.
Just, not in the way he thought.
Carter started buzzing.
They pulled apart, panting.
"Cell phone," she said
Unwilling to move his hips from where they were helping to hold her against the car, he removed his hand from under her shirt (how and when had it got there?) and fished the vibrating creature from her jacket pocket. He glanced at the screen. "SGC," he said, suddenly going cold. He stepped back and she slid to the ground, still breathing heavily.
She took the cell phone from him, their fingers clasping momentarily around the device before she opened the flap and lifted it to her ear. "Carter."
Trying not to listen, Jack fixed his eyes on the roof of her car as she muttered vague comments into the phone, trying to be discreet. The conversation was short and she hung up after less than two minutes.
"I'd better go," she murmured.
He nodded, helpless now for an entirely different reason. "Okay. Sure."
Sam stood up straight and adjusted her shirt, the last four buttons of which he had already undone. Her cheeks were flushed, her mouth red and swollen, the lipstick she'd worn staining her around her lips. Almost as if she knew what he was looking at, she put the back of her hand against her mouth but stopped just short of wiping. "I'm sorry, Jack," she said.
He laughed silently and moved forward, moved by her unnecessary apology. Pressing his mouth to her forehead, he brought his hands to the side of her head lightly. "No need. I have a feeling this is going to happen a lot. Drive carefully, Carter."
"Yes, sir," she whispered. Then laughed awkwardly as she realized her slip. "Oh damn, I was doing so well, too."
"We'll work on it," he promised, stepping back from her and burying his hands into his pockets where they would be hidden, where he could control the urge to grab her and pull her to him. "Be safe, okay?"
She nodded fervently and turned around as her hand searched for the keys in her pocket. "You too, Jack. Um, do you want to... meet up again?"
"Second date?"
Her smile was bright and quick. "Yeah. Second date."
"Dinner, this time?"
"Sure." She unlocked the door and opened it. "I'll call you when I... can. Okay?"
"Okay." Jack started backing up. "Bye, Sam."
"Bye, Jack."
Forcing himself to turn, he walked back to his truck.
Story Notes: Matter of Tact 03: Email: randomleaves@yahoo.co.uk
Archive: SJD please.
Spoilers: Um. Not really. Just the big Season 7 one.
A/N: Sequel to 'Un-used' which was a sequel to 'A Matter of Tact'. Beta-ed by Melly and Emry {{knuffel}}.
Heh. There's no way I'm gonna get these all up by tonight - just no way. There's going to be a week's break between one or two. Yeah. I suck much.
Archive: SJD please.
Spoilers: Um. Not really. Just the big Season 7 one.
A/N: Sequel to 'Un-used' which was a sequel to 'A Matter of Tact'. Beta-ed by Melly and Emry {{knuffel}}.
Heh. There's no way I'm gonna get these all up by tonight - just no way. There's going to be a week's break between one or two. Yeah. I suck much.
End Notes: "Liked? No. Adored, loved, wanted to have its little fic babies - YES!" http://www.randomleaves.com
DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognisable characters, settings, etc, are the property of their respective owners. Any original characters and plots are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended. ... [ read more ]