Ficlet:Kissin' In The Back Row Of The Movies
Title: Kissin' In The Back Row Of The Movies
Author: Pepper
Rating: PG
Featured Character(s): Jack, Sam
Pairing(s): Sam/Jack
Summary: You need more summary than that title?
A/N: For splash_the_cat: "S9/S10. Fighting over the popcorn at a movie."
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She was doing it on purpose.
Jack frowned at the screen, not seeing the film at all (and really, he loved these pirate movies, but he hadn't seen her in weeks and they'd still only managed to finagle one weekend off together, so going out this evening had been a really bad idea, but they'd just wanted to pretend, for a while, that they were a normal couple, with a normal life, able to spend whole days actually not bothering to have hot, frantic sex because they had plenty of time for that later. And, yeah, he was beginning to seriously question the reasoning there).
Sam had definitely just moved her popcorn away from him.
He moved closer, pretending to be snuggling, but really just after one thing... and she smacked his hand. "Jack! That's my popcorn!"
He shot her an outraged look. "You're really not going to share it with me?"
"You had your own."
This was true. He'd bought popcorn for them both, knowing that Sam could be remarkably anal about apportioning food. He glanced down at the floor, and squished one of the little white puffs with his toe. "Yeah, well, if you'd warned me you were gonna put your hand on my leg..."
Sam huffed disparagingly. "Some Black Ops guy you are."
He opened his mouth to tell her that, when it came to her, all his training went completely out the window and he considered himself lucky if he could remember his own damn name when she was this close - but then remembered he was pissed about her selfish popcorn habits. "But I'm hungry!" he whined, instead. "I can't concentrate if I'm hungry - you know that."
"You can't concentrate, full stop," she said, unimpressed. "And we've just had dinner. You can't possibly be hungry."
Well, no. He actually wasn't. But he... he just wanted some popcorn, dammit. They were at the movies, watching a big Hollywood blockbuster, with explosions and swordfights, and derring-do; ergo his tastebuds were demanding popcorn. It was the natural order of things. "You've just had dinner and you're eating popcorn," he argued. "You can't possibly want all of it." Yes. The one thing that could always sway Sam: reason.
"It's mine." Or not.
"Carter, don't be so-"
"Don't you dare 'Carter' me about this!"
"I'm not-"
"Will you please be quiet?"
The irritable request came from the seat in front of them, and they both immediately fell silent, and ducked a little lower in their seats. They exchanged a guilty, conspiratorial look. Sam's mouth twitched, and Jack gave her a grin. "Oops," he mouthed.
Sam rolled her eyes - whether at herself or at him, he wasn't going to ask - and silently held out her popcorn. Jack took a satisfactorily big handful (there were times when having big hands really paid off), and Sam tucked the box between them, but on her side of the seat arm (to make it clear that it was her popcorn, which she'd very generously decided to share with him). Then she snuggled closer, and Jack put his arm around her, and popped pieces of corn into his mouth, and stared at the screen, trying to remember what had been happening, last time he looked.
He still couldn't concentrate.
He was beginning to find the seat arm between them really very irksome. Maybe they should stayed home and watched movies and eaten popcorn on his couch - or, then again, they could have not bothered with the popcorn or the movie. Or dinner. Or getting out of bed at all.
"Stop it," she whispered. He glanced down at her, slightly startled that she was reading his mind.
"Stop what?"
"Just watch the film. I can tell you're thinking of... of making spitballs, or something."
"I so was not!" he replied, indignantly. How old did she think he was, exactly? He glanced at the drink in the cup-rest beside him. Anyway, they made the straw packets out of cellophane, now, so they didn't make very good... and this was beside the point. "That would be childish," he said, instead, with great dignity, and her shoulders shook slightly with laughter, as he'd intended. He tugged her a bit closer, and leaned to whisper in her ear. "I was thinking about doing something else, though, that might get us thrown out of here." Her eyes snapped to his, quickly, and he grinned at the startled look in her eyes. "Dirty mind much? I just meant..." Demonstration being a much more satisfying way of explaining it, he craned forward slightly and brushed her lips with his, very gently.
He leaned back again, just a few millimetres, because he loved the look in her eyes at this moment. It was a look he'd never get tired of seeing. He'd travelled quite a bit in his time, to places that few other people on Earth even knew existed. He'd seen things stranger than even his imagination could invent. He'd had experiences all across the emotional scale. But the peculiar anonymity and intimacy of the back seat of the movies, the smell of popcorn in the air, the screen-light confusing more than it illuminated - it held a very special, very personal magic that felt every bit as sparkling and vivid and inexplicable as it had, all those years ago, when he'd been about to kiss a girl for the very first time.
And when he kissed her at last, she tasted of popcorn and cola, and there was a cold, sweet patch in the centre of her tongue where her drinking straw had rested, and Jack O'Neill aged fifty-something and with more miles on the clock than he cared to count, making out with a woman who had blown up suns and saved the Earth and offered up her life to save the universe on more than one occasion, spared a thought for Jack O'Neill aged fourteen-and-a-half, finding out that braces weren't the end of the world after all, and had to agree that life did not get any better than this.
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END.