TITLE: Colorado in Autumn
AUTHOR: Amber.
RATING: PG.
SPOILERS: Slight for "Upgrades."
PAIRING: Sam/Jack.
SUMMARY: An autumn night and a trip to O'Malley's. (SamJack romance)
ARCHIVAL: Just ask.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. I profit in no way.
NOTES: Written for the lovely Natasha (Aimee5), the person responsible for my conversion to this 'ship if not to this fandom. For that little unintentional gift, she receives this story and my sincere gratitude.
---
"He stood you up?"
She stares out the window of his truck, air rushing in the window and blowing her short hair back. Her answer is lost to the wind.
"He doesn't deserve you."
She doesn't hear him.
"I want you."
She doesn't hear him now, either, but she chooses that moment to turn and smile, her face flushed. He glances away from the road long enough to grin back.
"You're buying," he tells her.
She's laughing when she turns back to the stars.
---
And now they're in a back booth at O'Malley's, hip to hip, arm to arm, and her skin is warm and soft where it rests against his own. Daniel and Teal'c are lost somewhere between them and the bar, sent on a mission for a second pitcher of beer. The errand was simple enough, except…
"You don't think Daniel passed out, do you?" Jack asked.
Sam laughed, an airy sort of sound in the heavy air. "Teal'c can handle him."
"You didn't answer my question."
She laughs again. "I'm sure he's fine." She turns around, grabbing Jack's sleeve for leverage as she sits backward on the bench. "They're fine. I see them. They're coming back." She twists back down into her seat beside him, and somehow she's closer now than before.
"And so we… fought them," Daniel is saying to Teal'c as they approach the table, and Sam chokes on her drink.
"Ah, Daniel, don't tell that story," Jack scolds. "It makes us look bad."
"No," Daniel corrects, "we made us look bad."
"It was sort of fun," Sam admits. She looks up from the blue paper umbrella twirling between her fingers and quickly explains, "Not the fight. I mean, the pool. The pool was fun."
---
Jack isn't pleased. Daniel's too drunk to notice, and Teal'c won't say anything, but Jack most assuredly is not pleased.
Sam is halfway across the room, walking slowly around a pool table, her fingers trailing on the slick wood of the frame. Jack is watching her almost as intently as she is watching the table, and he imagines that her mind is a mass of trigonometry and physics formulas at that moment, trying to evaluate what her best shot is. He also imagines that the young man playing against her is taking advantage of the opportunity to watch her walk. Maybe this stranger even thinks that Sam is putting on a show for his benefit.
Somewhere behind what he won't call jealousy, Jack is secretly gratified that he knows her well enough to know better.
She finally bends to make her shot, and Jack loses sight of her for a moment. Whatever she chose must have gone well, he sees, because when she straightens up, she's grinning, and the man at her side knits his eyebrows in frustration for a moment before he, too, disappears from view.
Sam is speaking now, and she turns to indicate the three men waiting for her back at their table. Daniel sees and waves, and Jack quickly turns away, feigning fascination with his empty soda glass. The same unrecognized part of Jack that feels jealousy and really wanted to wrap an arm around Sam's waist earlier in the evening hopes that she looks a little disappointed to find that he isn't watching her, but when he finally lifts his eyes, not only is she not looking sadly in his direction, but she's nowhere to be seen.
For a moment, Jack worries. Air Force officer or not, Sam is a woman, and the man with whom she had been playing was, well, a man in a bar. Jack had been a man in a bar on more than one occasion, and he doesn't trust this stranger any more than he deserved to be trusted on those long ago nights.
Before he can rouse the half-sleeping Daniel and rally a search party, Sam appears at his side, breathless but smiling. She hands him a fresh glass of soda and sets to twirling her new paper umbrella. Her body is tight against his again, and if it weren't to the fresh smoke lingering in her hair and the bright orange hue of the umbrella, he may be concerned that he is caught in another time loop. At least this one would be more interesting, he thinks, although he can't imagine dragging Daniel back to the base and having the poor boy manage to translate much of anything in his current condition.
And just when Jack is thinking that maybe he would be okay with that, that maybe this is as good as he can hope for it to ever be, Daniel yawns, and the spell is broken. Sam sits up, her body pulling away from his, and checks her watch. She murmurs something that the others don't catch, something that they quite obviously aren't intended to, then she says, "I have to get home."
Jack takes a moment to catch up, but when he does, he nods. "Let's get you home, then."
---
They're in the truck again, and she's wearing the old jacket he keeps with him because he can remember walking an hour in the snow when he was a teenager and his first car broke down three miles from home. She looks as grateful for it as he would have been that night. He watches in the side mirror as a smile flickers across her face and she turns, snuggling into the wool collar.
"It smells good," she murmurs in response to his bemused glance.
"It smells like old truck," he corrects her.
"Old truck smells like Colonel O'Neill, then," she says with a shrug before going back to staring out the window.
"Thanks a lot," he mutters, and he is rewarded with another half-hidden smile.
---
Too soon, they are parked in Sam's driveway, and the night is dark and heavy around them, Colorado in autumn. She has already given up the jacket, if a little reluctantly, and it sits folded on the seat between them.
"I had fun," she tells him, and before it can turn into some awkward moment reminiscent of his dinner and movie dates of thirty years ago, she smiles and steps easily to the ground. For a moment she stands beside the truck, holding the door open, and an uncertainty glazes her eyes. She quickly recovers, offering the same smile one last time for the evening. "Good night, sir."
"Good night," he says, and she shuts the door and jogs up the walk, turning to wave from the porch. He returns the gesture and waits until she is safely inside, her front door locked behind her and the living room light illuminating the lawn and the side of the truck, then he turns the radio on and pulls out of the driveway, heading toward his own home.
---
It will be only two months before Jack has cause to pull the old jacket out of his truck, only two months before he'll be stranded by the highway on his way to a New Year's Eve party at the general's house. In two months, he will be standing alone in the snow, wrapped in a jacket that smells like truck and smoke and Sam, and he will bury his hands in the worn pockets for a little extra warmth.
In two months, Jack will find a crumpled paper umbrella twisted in the wool lining and, with a smile, he will whisper on the night air a secret resolution.