Sam doesn't remember how it starts. She can't even trace it back to a single point in time, something she can point at and say: here, yes, this is when; this is where. After their exile in the palace of the light, certainly. Perhaps as late as when Teal'c had turned back to Apophis, however briefly. All she knows is that there is a point past which she can no longer deny the fact that her Friday nights aren't solo affairs anymore, and by then, Daniel has twined himself so gradually into her life that she can't remember a point where it began.

Sometimes he settles so softly she barely realizes he's there; they order a pizza and work, side-by-side, into the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes they agree, wordlessly, that they're looking for nothing more than mindless entertainment, and they choose a movie based on what seems the most outrageous and heckle it to pieces. Sometimes they make it a foursome, her and Daniel and Janet and Cassie, and it's Janet's gumbo recipe and a movie and Daniel helps Cassie with her homework while Janet and Sam sit in the kitchen to gossip over cookies and Mai Tais. Sometimes they just sit together, the two of them, quiet and still, and it doesn't matter what they do; it's just nice not to be alone.

Sometimes she finds herself pouring out her heart: long, rambling monologues on whatever floats through her mind, lubricated by whatever wine he's brought over to take up residence in her fridge. He always sits and listens. She's never known anyone who can listen as fiercely as Daniel can; for those moments, it's as though she's the center of his universe, like he's narrowed his whole world down to her words, her gestures, her face. It's a little flattering, and more than a little disconcerting, and it makes her wonder who taught him how to do that or whether it's just something uniquely Daniel.

Sometimes Sam wonders what he did with his Friday nights before he came to spend them in her living room. And more than that, why he isn't doing it anymore. Then she remembers she promised herself she'd stop asking questions about Daniel a while back, after she'd caught the look in his eyes at the tail end of a bad night that said, plain as day: you don't ever want to know.

So instead she sits with him, or he sits with her, and they keep each other company: two half-healed loners. There's something about SG-1, she thought, that leaves them all alone in the end. Alone except for each other, but it isn't like she can go out or stay in drinking with the colonel, and Teal'c -- well, she trusts Teal'c, and she cares about him, and he listens to her too. But not like Daniel does.

Daniel's enough like her to be a comfort, and different enough to have perspective. More perspective than she has, at least. He'll sit and work with her when she's in a mood to dive into her equations and her reading; he'll match her shot-for-shot when she's in the mood to get so drunk she can't think about all the things she doesn't want to think about.

Usually. Not tonight. Tonight, she's about two and a half sheets to the wind, and Daniel keeps pouring her more tequila and doing nothing more than sipping at his own glass of red wine. She keeps sliding further and further towards him on the couch, like he's got his own local gravity, and it's when she finds herself trying to solve for total exerted gravitational force based on his height and mass in relation to her own that she realizes she's way more trashed than she'd intended to get.

"Shh," Daniel says, and refills her shot glass.

"You're getting me drunk," she says. There are a hundred reasons why Daniel could be intending her to overindulge. He does it, sometimes, when he thinks she needs the release of saying something she can't usually say. She knows he thinks she doesn't know. They walk carefully around their secrets, the two of them. They always have. It's one of the reasons why they can be so easy with each other.

Daniel and the colonel know each other's secrets too, she thinks. They just use them as weapons, rather than marking them as off-limits.

And if she's thinking about the colonel (off limits, stupid anyway, he's not attracted to you, or if he is, it's nothing but something shallow like the way you look) she must be even drunker than she thought she was, and that's a recipe for disaster, so she knocks back the last shot and turns her glass over on the table.

Daniel gives her a look from underneath his lashes. "It's good for you. Enough?"

"Too much," she says, and closes her eyes. The world's beginning to spin. Once upon a time, she would have had someone to take her home and tuck her in after a tequila drunk. But all the boys who used to take care of her have disappeared or been taken away or turned out to be lying or losers from the start, and she's already home anyway.

One of Daniel's arms comes to settle around her shoulders, and she turns her face and rests it against his chest. "Do you ever think," she says, hearing in her voice the patient, clear diction of someone who has to stretch to sound reasonably sober, "that the SGC would be far better off if we all just went out and got laid more often?"

The minute she hears herself say it, she remembers that tequila makes her both maudlin and uninhibited. She never remembers why she shouldn't drink tequila until after she's already put away half the bottle.

Daniel laughs, softly, against her hair. "Most people do, you know," he says. "In a sanctioned fashion or not. You could. There are plenty of people on base who'd like to give you a hand."

"Bad idea," she says, vaguely. "Don't forget the curse." She isn't supposed to know that they all talk about the boys she's fallen for, over the years. She isn't supposed to hear. Nobody ever means it roughly, but it cuts anyway.

Daniel snorts. "Curse," he says. His arm tightens against her. "Fuck that."

He's a little drunk too, she realizes, and turns her face so her nose is pressed against his shirt. He smells like soap and a bit like spices. There's something missing from the way he used to smell. That's another one of those things she isn't thinking about.

"B'sides," she says, the faintest hint of a slur starting to creep into her voice, "all of them would jus' be doing it because they want a crack at the Vestal Virgin of the SGC."

Daniel's fingers are stroking idle patterns along her bicep, sneaking up under the hem of her t-shirt and then sweeping back down. From anyone else it would be flirtation; from Daniel, it's simply absentminded affection, a proof that she is close enough to family for him to forget to put up his armor and his defenses. She can't remember, all of a sudden, whose idea the tequila was.

"What do you want, Sam?" Daniel is asking her, and his voice is so soft and low that for a minute he doesn't sound like himself. She turns her head a little too quickly, to look at him, to make sure he's still her Daniel, and the quick motion makes her head start swimming. It's Daniel still. But she's not sure why he looks so strange.

It's funny how with just a single change in stress, what Daniel had said could turn into one of the things Jonas had been fond of saying, once upon a time: what do you want, the unspoken bitch at the end of it something she could only hear after she'd realized he was the kind of person to add that voiceless epithet.

Maybe she should have someone pick her friends and her lovers for her; there's no way anyone's record could be worse than her own.

Daniel asked her a question. He's sitting and waiting for the answer. "If you could have anything," he prompts. "If you could be anything. What would you want?"

"I want to stop being so lonely," she blurts out, before she can stop herself.

Daniel only nods, slowly. Sam remembers the nights before she and Jonas had tried to go from friends to lovers: her and Jonas and David and Cam and Greg and Martin, six people piled into a bar booth meant for four in a sleazy road-side tavern, with her sitting on the lap of whoever had room. She remembers the endless games of pool, and the nights of bad beer and good tequila, and how when she'd been one of the guys it had been all right. She remembers Narim's smile, and Orlin's eyes, and all the boys who'd been so sure they'd known her because they thought they knew the package she came in.

She remembers the colonel confessing to caring about her more than he should, and utterly refusing to ever say another word on the topic ever again, and her bone-deep conviction that if they could only talk about it they'd be able to stop being so fascinated by the lure of the forbidden.

Daniel is watching her, and his eyes are sympathetic. She tips up her face, before she knows what she's doing, and kisses him. She would have expected him to be startled, to take a minute to realize what she's doing, but he meets her soft and sweet. It feels like punctuating a sentence, like putting the equals sign in the right spot to balance an equation. It feels like they've been asymptotically approaching this kiss for the past -- how long? Weeks, at least. Months. The past forever.

Daniel's exploring her mouth with his, a curious combination of aggression and playfulness. They're tug-of-warring for control of the kiss, tongues clashing, advancing, retreating. Daniel tastes like red wine and lingering hints of the chocolate ice cream they'd had for dessert. Daniel had been the one to pour the tequila.

Daniel's the one to pull back and take her face in her hands, brushing his thumbs over her cheekbones. She's bracing herself for the speech, the one about how she's such a sweet girl but really, let's just be friends.

Instead, he takes her mouth again, this time more quickly, a little rougher. She's starting to feel the tug between her legs, the cling and push of desire building in the pit of her stomach. When he pulls back, she doesn't look down to see if he's feeling it too.

"Not while you're this drunk," Daniel says, quietly, and it takes a minute for the sounds to become words in her ears. "Not for the first time."

"I'm not that drunk," she says, and tries to get up. Put away the bottles of tequila and wine, put away the glasses they'd been drinking from, catch Daniel by the hand and lead him to her bed: a simple three-step plan. Except for the part where, when she stands, she suddenly realizes that she really is that drunk, and has been all along. Tequila always sneaks up on her.

She clutches the side of the couch to keep from falling over. "I don't want you to wake up in the morning and hate yourself," Daniel says. "I don't want to take advantage of you."

"I am sick and tired," Sam says, each word as neat and precise as she can make it, "of people thinking they have to protect my virtue."

Both of Daniel's eyebrows go up. She's got the impression she's managed to shock him, or at the very least startle him -- but no, he's smiling, and it's the same smile he gets on his face when he's suddenly solved a problem, and that makes her frown for just a second and try to catch up. Her head's swimming. She can't quite tell if she's turned on or pissed off or just too drunk to track things straight.

Daniel stands up too, and she finds herself leaning against him without telling herself it's all right to lean, but he's warm and he's strong and he smells like fabric softener and fresh air and not at all like (Jack) the colonel or like Jonas or like Martouf or like Narim or any of them at all. He smells like Daniel, and he puts a hand in the small of her back and kisses the curve of her neck as she rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes against the crest and crash of her senses bobbing up and down.

"Ask me again in the morning," Daniel says softly, and it confuses her, because she hadn't asked him anything at all. Except she had, really. She and Daniel have always had that unspoken communication, and besides, there aren't many ways to misinterpret a kiss like that. Neither of them are what the other wants most. He isn't the colonel (but she doesn't want him, doesn't) and she isn't Sha're (but Sha're is dead) and Daniel is never going to be able to give her what she's always wanted, the white picket fence and the house full of children and the dog barking in the backyard.

But Daniel's got his hand on the side of her face, and oh, his hands are so big and strong, and his shoulders are broad, and she always forgets how solid he is until she's touching him; there's a part of her that will always think of him as the reedy bookworm, and she wonders what first impressions of her he carries and can't let go of. She wonders if it's the same as everyone else's. "Come on, Sam," he says, his thumb stroking over her cheekbone. "Let's get you into bed."

She stumbles a few times as she walks down the hallway to her bedroom, but he's right there behind her, ready to catch her if she falls. He's there as she strips off her clothing, not bothering with pajamas. He's there as she falls into bed, fumbling at the covers to get them up and over her, and just as she's expecting her to kiss her good-night on the forehead like a little girl, he pulls off his shirt and pushes off his pants and slides under the covers next to her.

It's been a long time, so long, since there's been anyone else in this bed. She doesn't know where to put her hands. He settles the problem by rolling over to face her and pulling her body up against him, skin to skin, tucking his thigh between hers and draping his arm over her side, and that makes it okay for her to rest her hand on his hip, okay for her to touch. His hand is resting on the small of her back again. It feels warm and comforting, electric without being demanding, and she closes her eyes again, because she is drunk and naked and Daniel is in her bed and she has the sudden sense that she will want to die of shame in the morning.

But he traces invisible patterns on her skin, and kisses her face (eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, lips) with tiny feather-light impressions, and she drifts away somewhere between one and the next.

*

Sam wakes, overheated, when the morning sun stabs through her eyelids and ignites the headache in both temples. Her mouth tastes like something died in it, and she can't remember what she was dreaming, only that it left her tense and nervous and keyed up. For a minute she can't figure out why her head hurts so badly.

The sound in her ears resolves into Daniel's soft snoring, and she realizes the weight on her belly is Daniel's arm and the weight on her chest is Daniel's head. They've both rolled over in the middle of the night, and she's on her back and he's on his stomach, using her for a pillow. She thinks he's been drooling. It's almost sweet.

Then she remembers last night, through the haze of headache and hangover, and she winces and throws an arm over her eyes to block out the sun. At least it's Daniel. Daniel will have the good manners to ignore her desperation; all she will have to do is act like it never happened, and to Daniel, it never would have.

She eases herself out from underneath him. He doesn't stir; Daniel, when asleep and not in the field, can be pushed and shoved and rearranged without waking him. She shuts herself in the bathroom, runs the water in the sink until it gets as cold as it ever does, and fishes out two Advil and a B-complex vitamin. She drinks two glasses of water, brushes her teeth, and takes the pills. The woman who looks back at her in the mirror looks tired and old and alone.

"Stop that," she says to herself, seeing her lips move in reflection. She's trying to learn how to stop the self-deprecation before it even starts. It's harder than she would have thought it would be. She'll call Janet up for girls' night tonight, maybe, and a reminder that she isn't defined by the sum of her relationships. Or lack thereof.

The shower hisses and spits hot water, and she climbs underneath the spray and washes away the sleep and the sweat and the alcohol oozing from her pores, and she's almost ready to get out and face the morning when there's a knock on the bathroom door and it opens all in the same second. Daniel lets himself in, still yawning, and makes a sleepy good-morning noise.

The burst of cool air makes her shiver, even under the hot water of the shower. They've done this before; there's no room for modesty on a team like theirs. Her shower curtain has lacey holes in it; she can see him using the toilet, brushing his teeth, and she knows he can see her in return. The two of them, out of all the potential permutations of the team, have always been the best at matter-of-fact and domestic. It would make her smile, if she weren't suddenly uncertain about what she was going to say to him about last night, if she weren't so suddenly furious at herself for introducing the chance that this is going to be weird now.

But the shower curtain twitches, and Daniel lets himself in with a raised eyebrow of "do you mind?", and she finds that she doesn't, for all that this particular variation on sharing space is new and unfamiliar. He's still sleepy -- she can see it in his eyes, in his half-stifled yawn -- and there's not quite enough room for two, but his body feels good in her space. "Soap?" he asks, which is Daniel-before-coffee shorthand for "hand me the", and she does. Then hugs him, impulsively, because he's here and he's real and she wants to touch him.

He hugs back, and he's still not awake, and the water from the shower gets up her nose. But it's not awkward in the least. It's just Daniel, and everything is suddenly all right.

"I'll go make the coffee," she says, and "coffee," he agrees, and she gets out of his way and dries herself off. She puts on her bathrobe, and doesn't bother doing anything with her hair or her makeup, because it's a Saturday morning and she doesn't have anywhere to be, and besides, it's only Daniel.

She's fussing with the coffeemaker when he comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her waist from behind and nuzzles at her neck, and it's so unlike the Daniel she knows that she catches herself running down the telltale signs of alien possession. He's wearing nothing but a pair of sweats; he's always careful never to leave clothes here, but he brings a bag with him every weekend. "Good morning," he says, more articulate by now, and she hears a smile in his voice. "How bad's the hangover?"

Not weird, then. Or maybe weird, but not weird the way she'd thought.

"Not bad at all," she says. Trying to keep her voice under control. Her eyes slit closed as he hits a spot that makes her shiver. "You?" she manages, breathless, and closes her hands on the edge of the counter to keep herself upright.

"I'm fine," he says. His hands pause at the belt holding her robe closed. "Ask me again in the morning, Sam," he says, and this time, her name is an endearment.

Sam wonders if she's stepped into another universe, some alternate dimension where things like this happen to girls like her. "Daniel," she says, because when she's sober, she doesn't know quite how to say please.

He must know what she means, though, because he unties her robe, and it falls open for him to trace the line from her hips to her breasts with his palms. She lets her head fall back against his shoulder, and he rubs his cheek against her damp hair and brushes his fingers against her nipples. The touch sends her from feeling awkward to feeling like she's going to explode in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

This isn't her. She doesn't do this: sex is something that happens in bed, under the covers, where it's supposed to stay. Not in the kitchen at eight in the morning, in full view of whoever looks in the window. But there's the touch of confidence in Daniel's movements as he turns her around, presses her back against the counter with his body, and the faintest bubble of panic wells up in her throat before she catches his expression.

He's smiling. Faintly, fondly, as though he's inviting her in on the joke, and there's a sort of grave playfulness there that she recognizes from the times when he's teasing Colonel O'Neill or General Hammond and they don't quite get that he's having fun with them. And suddenly she's laughing, because for all of the weirdness, this is Daniel, and his lips quirk up a little more at the sound, and she wraps her arms around his neck and pulls his head down to kiss him. They both taste of her toothpaste, and she's still laughing against his mouth, and he skims his hands down until he has two handfuls of her rear end and pulls her tightly up against him.

His body feels hard and strong and comforting against her, and she opens her mouth to his tongue and wraps one leg around his, tucking her heel into the back of his knee. She can feel his erection pressed between them beneath his sweats, up against her belly, and she can feel the sweet hot anticipation building up between her thighs.

He draws back, nips at her chin, and she laughs again. It feels good -- the touch, yes, but mostly the laughter; she can't remember the last time she laughed when a man had his hands on her. His thumbs skim the underside of her breasts, and she shivers -- it tickles; her skin feels bright and sensitized. This should be awkward, but it's not; the fact that it's not will make her sit and question it later, she knows, but for now she threads her fingers up into his hair, cradles his skull between her palms. She didn't know this was what she wanted until this very minute, but with the sharp focus of Daniel's attention all brought to bear on her, she can't imagine wanting anything else.

He's smiling as he pulls away, and in the early morning sunlight, he looks like some kind of angel as he slides the robe from her shoulders and lets it fall to the floor. He brushes his thumb over her lips, and she lets them part, flicks out her tongue to taste his skin. "Come on," he says, and takes a step back. For a minute she feels disappointed (that he's not going to do her up against the counter? don't be stupid, Samantha, that wouldn't do anything but leave you with bruises against your kidneys from the side of the counter digging into your back) until he catches her hand in his and squeezes.

They walk back to her bedroom together, hand-in-hand, and she opens her mouth to say something when they reach her bedside and Daniel lets her hand drop, but before she can figure out what it is she's going to say, he puts two fingers against each of her shoulders and pokes. It's not nearly enough to unbalance her, but she topples over backwards onto the bed anyway, because it's silly, because it's fun, and props herself up on both elbows and hooks her ankles around his thighs to tug him closer to her.

He holds himself tall and still, looking down on her from the edge of the bed, and for a minute she feels like a cloud passing over the sun, like a wave of cold. She couldn't say why, only that there's something in his face, in the cant of his head and the distance of his eyes, that makes the pit of her stomach crawl. It passes so quickly she can't even be sure it happened, and then he's smiling again, sinking slowly to his knees and pressing his lips to the insides of her thighs.

She lets her head fall back against the bed, draws her heel up along his back and digs it into the top of his shoulder. He rubs his thumbs along the edges of her labia; she can feel herself opening beneath his touch. His mouth is sweet and undemanding as he tongues her, and she hears herself making a noise that's more than half relief. She's got a drawer full of toys that Janet made her buy for herself and none of them feel like this, like the low electric hum through her veins that builds and builds and --

She's coming before she's barely even warmed up, thighs tensing, oh God yes right there and that's something that's never happened before (Jonas, his fingers pinching into her, always acting like he was doing her a favor, like she should feel blessed) but it's like Daniel can read her every tiny twitch and parlay it into pleasure. He doesn't stop even while she's shuddering, just pauses a fraction of a second to breathe and then brings his tongue back up against her, caressing her with little flutters that feel like big broad strokes.

She goes over the edge again, and he's grinning at her, the bastard, backing off and looking up, knowing that she needs a second to catch her breath, and how could she ever have thought Daniel would be anything other than amazing at this? It makes her laugh. He makes her laugh, the way he makes her feel, deep and replete with a giddy pleasure she hasn't felt in too damn long. "Yeah," he says, the answer to a question she hadn't asked, and she watches him slide his first two fingers into his own mouth, getting them slick and wet. He rests his forehead against her inner thigh for a second, watching intently as he teases her open and works his fingers inside of her, and she bears down and bangs a fist against the sheets and whimpers when his mouth returns.

He makes love to her with his fingers, with his mouth, humming tunelessly against her skin, and she closes her eyes and lets go of something she hadn't even been aware she was holding on to.

"God, Daniel," she finally manages, by the time he's got her feeling laid out and worked over and aching for the weight of his body spread out over hers.

He lifts his head again, and this time there's satisfaction lurking behind his smile. "Yeah?" he murmurs, soft and gentle, and all she can think of, looking at him, is desire.

"You," she says. Then realizes it might not be enough for him to piece together what's going through her head. "Please -- I want --"

She can't say it. Can't make herself say it, even now, even when that nagging self-censor in the back of her mind has been knocked blessedly quiet. He tilts his head. "What do you want?" he asks, and if Daniel asks her that enough times, sooner or later she'll stop hearing the echo of other voices in the words.

"I want you to --" she starts, and when she runs out of words, makes herself, forces herself, to keep going. "There are condoms. Bedside table. I want you to --"

Fuck me lingers on her lips, on the tip of her tongue; plain blunt syllables rich with power and promise. She can't say it. But Daniel's face shifts, mercy without a bit of pity lurking behind it, and he's sitting back on his heels on the floor and opening the drawer.

He puts a knee up on the bed next to her, shifts her with one hand against her hip until she's no longer lying sideways on the bed but lying back with her head against her pillows. She watches as he opens the wrapper, as he slides the condom on with both hands and a careful concentration, but just as she's expecting him to fit himself over her body so she can welcome him, he instead stretches out along the length of her side. He presses against her hip; he props his head up on one elbow to let his eyes rake over her skin. His fingers tease at the damp curls between her legs, and she parts her thighs for his touch.

"So beautiful," he says -- softly, so softly; she can barely hear him, even as his breath ghosts over her shoulder. His eyes are hungry, and she feels warm and cherished under his gaze. She turns her head and lifts one hand to press it against his cheek. He turns his face to nuzzle her palm, even as he lifts his eyes back to hers. "I want to do beautiful things to you," he says against her skin.

"Daniel," she says, and then something clicks into place. He's waiting to be asked. She lets her hand trail down his chest, closes it around the length of his dick, feels the weight and the heft of it deliberately for the first time. His eyes go soft and distant as she strokes him experimentally, and he's smiling at her and suddenly she wonders what in the hell was keeping her silent. "Fuck me," she whispers, "Daniel, please, I want you, I want you to fuck me," and he rolls over on top of her with her hand still around him and she parts her knees and plants her heels against the bed and guides him home.

For a minute he holds himself still, and then she hears him sigh out sweetly. He settles his weight on her chest and buries his face against her neck, and she shifts until she's a little more comfortable, rocking her hips up against his, getting used to the way he feels against her, inside her. His lips move against her skin, and she recognizes affection and warmth in his voice even if she can't quite place the words.

Like this, then: no fencing, no sparring, no ulterior motive or lingering doubts. It's not true love, but she'll take this instead: Daniel's body, Daniel's voice, Daniel's hands and Daniel's smile. If it's what he's decided to offer, she'll accept it for the gift that it is.

*

There's a part of her that's still expecting things to be awkward, but Daniel has such a sublime self-confidence that he's able to keep it warm and sweet. He kisses her, after, and he knows enough to know not to thank her. He just sprawls out at her side and they drowse together in the warmth of the early-afternoon sun.

She's just about dozed off when he says, "It's all right, you know."

Sam is dazed and sleepy and a little bit hung over still, her body limp but humming. She can't quite bother with words, or with opening her eyes. "Mmm?"

Daniel's voice says that he's just as loose and limber and relaxed as she is. It's a relief. To know that she could give this gift to him, the way he could to her, and Sam most resolutely does not think of lovers past and future, or how sex has always been used against her as a weapon, or where this might wind up, because she knows this wasn't anything more than a reaching-out. A friend. It's Daniel.

She isn't sure if knowing that makes it better or worse.

He tangles sleepy fingers in her hair. "To be happy," he says. "It's a hard lesson to learn. But it's true. It's all right."

It's warm in here, and the sheets are half-knotted on top of each other, and her thighs are sticky and wet. She's content. He's solid and he's real, and she knows he's not going to ask for more than she could give. He'll just be there for her. It should be enough. It's more than she's had for a long damn time.

"I am happy," she says. It's an automatic reaction, an automatic denial. She's known the rules her entire life. Smile pretty and never let them think you're anything less than perfectly okay.

"Mm," he says, on a half-yawn. "We'll work on it." Something in his voice makes her wonder what he means, but she loses it again; he's kissing her shoulder and saying, "Thai for lunch? Or sushi? I haven't had either for a while."

"Thai," she says. There's a little place downtown that delivers; she's out of their range, but Daniel tips well enough that they'll go out of their way for him. "You call."

"In a minute," he says. "'M comfortable."

It is comfortable, lying here, limbs entwined and skin pressed against skin. Human contact. Sometimes she thinks she's starving for it. She rests the palm of her hand on the plane of his back and thinks: their lives would be easier, if they weren't all looking for someone to love.

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