"Um, Carter?"
She looked up from her laptop. She'd been typing busily since dinner, even though it wasn't her watch and Jonas and Teal'c had long since disappeared into the tents. "Sir?"
He couldn't hold her gaze. He stared instead at the patterns he'd been drawing in the dirt with his big stick. "Uh ... can I, uh, ask you something?"
"Um ... yes? Yes. Of course. Sir."
"How old were you, you know, the first time you, uh ... you know?" Well, that had come out better than he'd expected.
Her wide blue eyes got wider and bluer. "When I ..." she sputtered. But being Carter, she recovered quickly. "Why do you ask, Sir?"
"Oh, no reason. It's just ..." The sky, he noticed, had stayed kinda purple even after the sun had gone. "It's just ... I kinda ... um ... never have."
Even wider and even bluer. Then she coughed. "This is the strangest conversation I ever ... Uh ... you had a son. That usually requires ..."
"Yeah. That. Listen, he wasn't mine. I mean he was, as far as I'm concerned, but biologically ... I just, you know, Sara was a friend, and she was in trouble and the guy had run off." He shrugged, feeling like an even bigger loser than usual. "I did the honorable thing."
She hit a couple keys and then closed the laptop, obviously deciding this conversation was going to take a while. "Ooookay ... but you were married for, what, twelve years?"
"Yeah, well."
"Right. Okay. Um, Sir? Why are we talking about this?"
His doodling in the sand had become extremely complex. "Oh. It's just, I thought ... well, I'm kinda tired of wondering. And I thought maybe you might want to, you know ..." After all, she was really hot. And he was pretty sure she thought he was hot right back.
For some reason, though, instead of jumping up and saying, "Sir! I thought you'd never ask!" Carter scrunched her eyes shut and pressed against her forehead with the heel of her hand. He thought he heard her mumble something about how she'd been accepted to Annapolis. "Does it say 'defiler of men' on my uniform or what?"
Wait, that -- made no sense. At all. "Huh?"
"Have you been talking to Jonas?"
"Huh? I talk to Jonas every day."
"Just because I took pity on him up in Steveston doesn't mean I intend to make a habit of this kind of thing."
This was not going well. "This kind of -- Jonas? You took pity on Jonas?"
"And I'm trying to forget about the first Jonas' first time, thank you very much. So kind of you to remind me."
"The ... first Jonas?"
"You know, the dead one? And that's not even counting all the ..."
Jack was beginning to think he'd had a stroke and woken up in a parallel universe. Also, it was dawning on him that this conversation might have been a bad idea, and that there was probably a reason why he'd never asked her before. Even though she was still really hot. "So you, uh, you don't want to, then," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I thought I did."
"You thought you -- huh?"
"Never mind," she said. Was she blushing? It was hard to tell, what with the sky being kinda purple and all. "I think I'll go to bed now."
She stood up, the laptop under her arm, and took a couple steps towards the tents before turning around.
"You know, it's been years since we've seen Anise. Why don't you go visit Anise? Then we can ... talk about this some more."
"Huh? You don't like Anise. I don't like Anise."
"Oh, for crying out ... Never mind."
Maybe it would have been better if he'd had that stroke.
After 3.575 minutes of prompting, Michelle V. wrote Not a Sequel. Yay!
Thanks for reading!