Past Tales and a Staycation

A one-shot, an evening

Do not own *Chuck*. Not a penny made.

Sarah Walker powered down her laptop and the face of Langston Graham disappeared.

Mercifully. She exhaled, grateful. The end of a long day.

Never one to keep up with special days, even holidays, Sarah had been surprised when it occurred to her as she woke up that it was the anniversary of her employment with the CIA. Fifteen years. A long, brutal fifteen years. Fifteen years.

Noticing her reflection, she examined it in the darkened laptop screen.

Her hair was cropped short. Her features, still attractive, were marred by a scar on her cheek, beginning not far below her eye and ending an inch and a half lower. She had been on a mission, gotten cut - the bad guy had mercifully missed her eye, his target - but he had cut her face and gotten away. She had not been able to capture him and finish the mission in time for the CIA doctors to completely erase the scar. It was light, thin, not noticeable from a distance, and she could hide it effectively with makeup if necessary, but it was there: a reminder of who she was and what she did: two things she mostly kept out of her mind - the first was easier since she had no idea who she was. The second was harder but it could be managed, oddly enough by forcing herself to stay wholly engaged in the details, the tactics, strategies and adjustments, required by her mission: she used her mission to blind her to her mission, much as standing too close to something could hide from you what you were seeing.

But her mission was done. Graham, greying and increasingly menacing, had grudgingly accepted the result of her just-finished mission and he had informed her that a new policy, one he could not circumvent, required him to give her a week off between cover assignments.

A week off. The very thought terrified Sarah. She did not do time off. On. She needed to be on, on all the time. To go off, take time off, would mean her time was hers, unstructured. Hers. Time to burn.

To burn. Years and years, mission after mission, all inflammable.

All at once, the ticking of the mechanical clock in her overstuffed, ridiculous B&B room began sounding like a gong. Looking around, she realized she was sinking among engorged pillows, pastel, and well-placed doilies, cream.

The B&B was tucked away in a small town in Illinois. Rock Island. Why a CIA mission had taken her there was a long story, too long for her to want to tell it even to herself. The mission was done; regardless of Graham's reaction, she had gotten it done. She always did.

The pastel pillows seemed to be expanding. The doilies appeared suspiciously like spiders' webs. She felt trapped.

Standing, she looked at the gonging clock. It was dinner time at the B&B. Sarah was not sure she was hungry, but she needed to get out of the room. Not that the dining room was anything other than a variation on the themes of her room, but it was larger, and there would be other people there. The woman who ran the place had chirped to her at breakfast that there was going to be another lodger. Mrs. Lirriper - that's what Sarah had taken to calling the woman, although her name was Mrs. Fitzsimmons.

Roast beef and potatoes. That's what Mrs. Lirriper had promised for dinner. It actually sounded good. Sarah had not had a decent, home-cooked meal in a long time. Her earlier days in the B&B had been so mission-clogged that she hadn't had time to do anything other than grab fast food. She hated it but it was a necessity. Necessity ruled her life.

She walked from her room down the short hallway to the stairs. As she went down, she smelled the roast beef, it wafted up and she descended. She stopped and breathed in. She stood there for a moment, wreathed in roast beef scent, and wondered about her past. Time off. How many times had she had a home-cooked meal since she was a very small girl? She did not know the number but she knew it was depressingly small.

Home - as in 'home-cooked' or 'home-anything' - was a foreign concept to her. Maybe that was why the B&B was encroaching on her, crowding her. It was too homey and so too foreign. But her mouth was watering, and she couldn't keep her feet from starting down the stairs again.

Mrs. Lirriper crossed the foot of the stairs just before Sarah got there. "Ah, Miss Jevons, glad to see you. I thought the promise of roast beef might finally lure you to my table. After all, not many B&B's provide all three meals. And you've eaten none. Go in and sit down. I just put the food on the table. I was getting my phone for Mr. Bartowski."

Mrs. Lirriper waved her ancient cell phone as she went by, smiling her plump, good-natured smile. "Mr. Bartowski?" Sarah asked as she lighted on the curious green pastel rug at the foot of the stairs, just behind the passing Lirriper.

"Yes," Lirriper sang, "Mr. Bartowski. He's here to do some kind of computer work at Augustana College. He's nice."

Sarah had an image of a heavy, sweating man with a too-small shirt and too-large glasses, smacking his lips on the roast beef. A computer guy. She knew them from Langley, had spent her early CIA years rebuffing clumsy advances. Later, she had watched them scurry in fear whenever she entered a room, unable to meet her eyes, to bear the knowledge that she was the one who...finished the missions they designed or the missions they assisted. They would have been frightened of a male agent who did what she did too, but not in the same way. There was a subtle double-standard, some conviction that a male Enforcer - Enforcer, that's what Graham called her - was bearable as a female one was not. The truth was, Sarah frightened them on levels they did not understand and could not articulate. She was not just a killer, she was a female killer, a potential mother who was a killer. Sarah huffed to herself. She was not a potential mother, not any longer, except in the technical sense. She had left whatever thoughts of that sort that had bubbled up inside her - a desire for a home of her own, maybe for an eventual family - long behind after that particularly brutal year.

The Intersect year. The year of Graham's insane attempts to install a computer program into agents. The year Fulcrum was trying to do the same thing to its agents with their own version of the program. The year Bryce Larkin, her full-time partner and part-time lover, disappeared, and then died. A long, bloody year, agents falling left and right. Bryce was just the first. The CIA's version of the Intersect proved deadly, killing each agent implanted with it or causing the agent to kill himself. Or herself. Amy, Sarah's former teammate on a group of clandestine female agents, the CATs, was one of the ones who killed herself. Or at least that is how her death was reported. Graham had sent Sarah on mission after mission; she could not remember how many. All she remembered were bodies, and blood, bodies, and blood, and Graham sending her on the next mission before the bodies cooled or the blood dried.

When that year ended, that hidden place inside herself that Sarah had clawed for years to keep inviolate, sacred - a place of hopes unnamed, dreams postponed - that place was gone, unlocatable. Nothing of her, of what she had hoped was the real her even if the real her was a stranger, - nothing was left. She was false bottom after false bottom, endless covers, in shifting layers, silty and soft and unfathomable. Twenty-thousand leagues under the sea and still no Sarah. Or...whoever. She hadn't thought of that Jules Verne novel since junior high when she had read it for an English class assignment.

She stepped into the dining room but did not find Mr. Bartowski.

Not the Mr. Bartowski she expected. In his place was a tall man, lanky even, with curly hair just beginning to gray at the temples, perhaps a bit premature but...nice...a nice grey. It seemed to make his brown eyes, lifted to her as she came in, browner. He was eating. He put down his fork, picked up his napkin, and put it to his mouth. He put the napkin down and stood up.

"Hi, I'm Chuck," he offered, nodding. He put out his hand and she took it. His grip was firm, not too soft, not too hard.

"Sarah, Sarah Jevons. You're Chuck Bartowski?"

"Yes," he said, waiting to sit down until she had done so in the chair across from his. "That's me." He struck Sarah as warm - or maybe it was that he made her warm. Or both. Or something. Not exactly warm with desire, although not exactly not warm with desire. It was a...complicated warmth, starting in her chest and radiating outward.

For some reason, she instantly felt at ease among Mrs. Lirriper's knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, shadow boxes and porcelain clowns. At ease. None of it seemed foreign. Sarah had room to breathe.

Chuck picked up a plate covered with thick slices of roast beef and extended it toward her. Sarah speared two pieces and put them on her plate. Chuck then handed her the large bowl of mashed potatoes and Sarah ladled out a mound, rounding it on her plate as she did. She saw Chuck smirk, but she felt too at ease to worry about it. She lifted one brow, the one above her scarred cheek, just to let him know his smirk had been seen. That caused his smirk to grow. She had not expected that. Even though he had not looked like the computer guys at Langley, she had expected him to act a bit like them, and her catching them in a smirk would have resulted in the smirk's instant vanishment, replaced by a forced smile below vague, apologetic eyes. Chuck, however, seemed pleased to be caught, even to be baiting her into a comment.

"Chuck, huh? Not the happiest of monikers."

He looked wounded - and then she realized it was a put-on. Placing his hand on his heart, he half-whined. "You wound me, Mrs. Jevons, you wound me. To make fun of my name, and to use 'moniker' to do it. I thought that word had been forgotten long ago."

Sarah smiled without intending to. "Well, it seems of a vintage about the same as 'Chuck', doesn't it. And it is Miss Jevons. There's no Mr. Jevons - except my father."

Something inside Sarah twisted. Not just at the lying cover name, but at the way her response mixed truth and lie. She was not Mrs. Jevons. She was not a Mrs. Jevons. But she was not a Miss Jevons either. For that matter, she was not a Sarah or a Walker, although that was the name on the bank account to which her CIA checks were directly deposited. She thought of herself as Sarah Walker, so it did seem like her name - but that did not change the fact that it was not the name given to her at birth. That name seemed so far removed from her that it struck her when she thought about it - Samantha - as simply her first alias, not her real name.

Chuck blushed slightly at her correction but Sarah was not sure if it was embarrassment or pleasure. Maybe it was both. She saw him glance at her scar - she had come to dinner without makeup, and he was close enough to her to see it. Interestingly, instead of the usual curiosity or hesitation the scar caused those who noticed it, Chuck's eyes softened. For a split second, Sarah remembered a look on her mother's face many years ago, just before her mother had kissed away a boo-boo, a bruise Sarah had gotten in a tricycle crash of not-epic proportions. Sarah almost shook her head visibly. The memory was so sudden and complete, so real, so...warm.

"So that makes us a pair of singles since there is no Mrs. Bartowski…" Chuck's blush deepened, and he glanced at her again to see her reaction to his comment. She smirked at him, but then the smirk became an honest smile.

"I'm surprised, Chuck," she said with a laugh, "after all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single computer guy in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife. I would have thought you'd have satisfied that want long ago." Sarah had only meant to misquote Austen, but the follow-up had sounded...flirty. She didn't do flirty. Not in ages if ever. Except on missions - but, God, how she hated doing it then. This...flirty...was not deliberate but she did not regret it; she realized that as her own words re-sounded in her head.

She dropped her eyes to her plate, spooning out some green beans from a smaller bowl near her and adding them to her roast beef and mashed potatoes. "This looks good."

Chuck did not respond. He seemed to be hearing her words again in his head. "Miss Jevons, you misquoted Austen."

She bowed her head slightly, "Yes, sir, I believe I have done." She glanced up as she cut into one of the thick slices of roast beef, fork in one hand, knife in the other. He was grinning openly at her.

"I haven't read that in years. Pride and Prejudice, right?"

Sarah nodded, waving her knife absently. "I should be honest, though, that misquotation pretty much taps out my fund of learned references." She noticed her waving knife and spoke as she did. "Unless you are interested in knives."

Sarah had to fight down a gasp at her own words. What the hell am I saying? She glanced at Chuck quickly and then back at her plate. He had looked directly at her, then at her scar. "You know a lot about knives?" His intonation was nearly flat, hard to read. So much for dinner.

He continued. "That's really...cool." His tone spiked, excited. "I was at a traveling circus in Louisiana a few years ago and saw this amazing act, a black-haired woman, beautiful - she looked a little like you, actually…" Chuck stopped and Sarah, now looking directly at him, saw him gulp at what he had said, "and this clown. She threw knives at him. They had this whole miming act. It was great."

Sarah felt a touch of his excitement somehow. "That sounds great. But, um, yeah, my dad was interested in knives and taught me about them when I was a girl...I guess that's not really conversation, though, is it?"

"Don't know why not. My dad was interested in computers and taught me about them when I was a boy. And here I am today, having just finished a presentation to Augustana College, hoping they will choose my company to overhaul their outdated administrative computer system...And if that's conversation, then so are knives, Miss Jevons."

Sarah grinned. "Call me Sarah, please. And the knives thing: it's true, but I'm not sure why I mentioned it; it's not a hobby, really." That's true but misleading.

"Still," Chuck said, after chewing a bite of roast beef, "I don't often meet women...like you...who are interested in knives."

"Like me, Chuck?" Sarah smiled inwardly at his sudden fidget.

He looked panicked. He gulped again as he had a moment earlier. "Yeah, um, but it's not really the knives, it's the girls."

Sarah was suddenly lost. "What?"

"I mean I don't often meet women like you, period, so, a fortiori, I don't meet women like you who are interested in knives."

"'A fortiori'? Latin, Chuck? Is that a programming language now?" She was getting a perverse enjoyment out of his gulpy backpedaling. "And, like me?" She kept the pressure on him.

Mrs. Lirriper came into the dining room and interrupted. "Good to see you young folks getting along," she said with a glance at Chuck, who had started to study his plate. "Can I bring anything else?" She put a tray of homemade rolls on the table, steam rising from them. "Sorry to be slow getting these on the table. I got my preparations a little out of order when I went to get my phone."

Chuck seized on that. "Thanks, the rolls smell wonderful. Why don't you bring me your phone, ma'am, and I will take a look?"

"No, Mr. Bartowski, I will not interrupt your dinner with the lovely Miss Jevons. Maybe I will bring it in when I bring in coffee, later?"

"Okay, sure," Chuck nodded. He took a roll from the tray. "Sarah?"

"I shouldn't, but, yes, absolutely." Chuck handed her a roll. His hand brushing hers stirred her; the warmth she felt increased. She kicked her shoes off under the table, then wondered at herself. Before she could come to a conclusion about her own surprising action, Chuck held the butter out to her. She took it, cut a piece and put it on the roll. It began to melt immediately. Sarah watched it, feeling a peculiar sense of identity with it as it softened, warmed, and melted into the roll. When she looked up, Mrs. Lirriper was gone and Chuck was watching her with a soft smile.

"What?" She asked, suddenly self-conscious, aware of her bare feet and - for her - the unguarded moment.

"Nothing, I just...well, I'll say it. I just like to look at you. You asked me what I meant - 'like you'. I meant someone...lovely," he let the word out like a caress, and it lingered in the air, "...but lovely not just because...well, lovely…" the word again, a repeated caress, "lovely because she's lit up from inside, aglow…An obviously good person."

Chuck finished, looking directly at her as if he had X-ray vision. Sarah blushed furiously, completely, warm to hot. She wondered for a crazy second if her bare feet had reddened beneath the table.

"That's...sweet, Chuck, but you don't...know me." She felt herself cool, the old familiar cool that had earned her the title of Ice Queen in the intelligence community. She did not like the feeling, familiar though it was.

"No," Chuck responded, thinking, "but sometimes you just know, you know?" He grinned at the thought and at her at the same time.

"No," she replied, "I've found that few...things are as they appear."

Chuck refocused on her. "Really, I think almost everything is what it appears to be. No reason to throw yourself out of the Garden of the world we live in. To stay, all you have to do is...trust."

"Trust?"

"Yeah, trust. Take the appearances of things as their faces, not their masks."

Sarah felt her blush return, if not quite so furiously, but the blush somehow made her more aware of the scar on her cheek, almost as if the old injury had not quite healed. "That's pretty deep for conversation, Chuck."

Chuck roused himself from reflection. "I suppose so." He gave her a self-conscious grin. "Too much time in the car, too many books on tape."

"Do you drive instead of fly?"

"Not always but often enough. I sell computing systems all over, mainly to academic institutions, colleges. The company - it's small, mind you - the company is mine but I like to do the sales stuff myself when I can. Let folks meet...the face of the company. I drive so I can see the country. I spent most of my life in California - grew up in Burbank - and didn't leave until a few years ago." He paused. "I actually left on my birthday. My sister threw a party and I...I couldn't stand it." He paused again. "You see," his tone shifted, "I went through a bad breakup in college, Stanford. My girlfriend, Jill, dumped me for the President of my frat, a guy named Bruce, Bruce Hopdin."

He stopped altogether for a moment, suddenly aware of what he was saying, and looked around the room as if searching for a shadow to hide in. Sarah followed his gaze. He stared for a moment at the shadow boxes on the wall, like he was trying to will himself to shrink, Alice-like, and take up an enshadowed position in one of the boxes. Failing, he turned to her with a defeated grin.

"Sorry, that was way too much information." He looked down.

Sarah shook her head. "No, Chuck, that's fine. Stanford. Great school. I knew a guy who went there - he must have been there when you were. Bryce Larkin?"

Chuck's head snapped up. "Larkin? Yes, I knew him. Accounting/Comp Sci double-major. Super handsome, super popular. Athlete. From Connecticut, right?"

Sarah nodded, again without thinking.

Chuck volunteered more. "You know, a few years ago - five maybe - he sent me an email. We were in some of the same classes at Stanford. Worked on a couple of game designs together for an advanced programming class. Never best buds - we moved in different circles - but a good guy, I guess."

Sarah's heart was thumping. "You got an email from Bryce, five years ago? What was it?"

Chuck shrugged. "No idea. See, um, Bryce and Bruce were buddies, and so after Jill, you know, dumped me, we never really interacted anymore. He was friendly but we weren't friends after that if you know what I mean."

Sarah nodded. "So you never looked at the email?"

Chuck seemed puzzled by her sticking to that topic. "Noooo. In fact, my sister, Ellie, told me my computer got stolen later that night. She claimed that a woman in a black ninja outfit took it, but, well, Ellie was drinking a bit at the party…"

Amy. That was when she first entered the Intersect Sweepstakes. Sarah knew the story; Amy told it to her. The CIA had never figured out why Bryce emailed the Intersect to a guy in Burbank. The guy - the man seated across from her, strangely - had been investigated and checked out, not a spy, an innocent bystander and, so far as Sarah knew, he never had any idea that he had unknowingly entered and exited the spy world on more or less the same night.

Chuck's puzzled look remained. "So, are you an accountant too? That's what Bryce went on to do, right?"

Sarah looked at him. She didn't want to lie to this man. She took a bite of her roll, then moved some green beans around on her plate. "Well," she said after the silence began to thicken, "Bryce and I did work together - but he...we weren't accountants. We worked...in...let's just say we worked in law enforcement, mostly international…"

"Like...Interpol?"

She nodded. "Yes, something like that." She ate a green bean and saw him looking again at her scar.

"Oh. Knives. Um, right."

Now, computer guy, it's time to be frightened, like the guys at Langley.

Chuck straightened in his chair. "That's really interesting. I actually want to say 'hot', but that seems...um, forward, and wrong. This is a B&B, not a club. Not that I go to clubs much, actually, or at all, really. Or that I tell women at clubs they are hot. How could I since I really, actually never go? And I don't think I've ever told a woman I thought she was hot. Except in my head - and even then, I apologized." He dropped his face in his hands. "Sorry, sorry, just shoot me."

She had enjoyed the spiral, and the fact that he hadn't recoiled from her - he had done just the opposite. "I'm not going to shoot you, Chuck."

He lifted his head. "Don't stab me?"

She laughed, really laughed, at that. "Not that either, I promise."

The conversation dwindled then, but the silence was not thick or uncomfortable, They ate together, glancing at each other and smiling. Mrs. Lirriper came into the dining room a couple of times more, once to clear away the plates, and then to serve coffee.

"Why don't you two let me bring you some dessert, too? I just made apple cobbler," she said as she poured the coffee.

Sarah looked at Chuck and they nodded together. Mrs. Lirriper smiled with pleasure, looking back and forth between them. When Chuck looked away for a second, Mrs. Lirriper winked at Sarah. Sarah smiled back at her as she left.

"So you worked with Bryce?" Chuck asked the question as he picked up his coffee mug and looked at her over the rim. There was more than one question he was asking.

"Yes, and we...I don't know if 'dated' is the right word...but we were a couple for a time." She found that the memory of Bryce came to her now with neither pang of loss - that had passed a long time ago - nor with any flash of anger. She was more interested in her present company than her past. "It ended, um, six years ago or so. And, Bryce is, well, he's dead. Sorry to be blunt, but it happened five years ago. I doubt word of it would ever have reached you."

Chuck's face showed a moment of sadness but then it passed. "That's too bad. And I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was a long time ago and I had...gotten over him before he died. Of course, I was sad, but not like I might have been if we'd still been involved."

He looked at her for a moment, his lips compressed. "Strange, meeting you here. A woman who…knew Bryce Larkin. Worked with him. At an Interpol-ish job." He grinned. "There's an Interpolish joke there somewhere…"

It took Sarah a second, then she grinned back. "How about we let it stay there?"

Chuck laughed. His laugh reminded Sarah of how warm she felt, how relaxed. The coffee, black and strong, was wonderful. Chuck's eyes, brown and soft, were more wonderful. She stretched her long legs under the table and her bare foot brushed up against his leg. He glanced down under the table and she knew he caught a glimpse of her foot. She did not pull it back. She left it in contact with his leg, her eyes now in contact with his. She tried to allow her eyes to be as open as his. She felt a slight pressure as he pushed his leg against her foot.

"Here's the cobbler, hot and thick and covered in melting vanilla ice cream," Mrs. Lirriper announced, coming into the dining room. Sarah had to look away from Chuck's eyes. Her warmth was now definitely the warmth of desire. It was still complicated, deep, but now urgent.

Mrs. Lirriper - Fitzsimmons - put the bowls of cobbler on the table and Sarah inhaled. Apples, cinnamon, vanilla. Heavenly. The scent of home.

Home. She knew then. She had felt at home ever since she met Chuck. At home. She felt at home - and she felt sexy.

Sexy. It had been ages since she felt that way. She never felt it on missions even when she knew that marks found her sexy and she used that fact to her advantage. And she so rarely had time between missions that she never felt it then. In Langley, the fearful reactions never made her feel sexy. - Had she felt sexy with Bryce?

Not really. They had sex. But she had figured out even before he left that although she excited him, what excited him was what of her he could see, touch. Her thoughts, her feelings, those had only existed for Bryce as part of a calculus, aimed at keeping her satisfied and willing, at keeping her in his bed. He had never sympathetically entered into her thoughts and feelings or allowed her entry into his. He reported them as she sometimes reported hers, but it was all mission data somehow, not a sharing of themselves. Even with the veils she had kept in place during her dinner conversation with Chuck, she realized that in one evening she had shared with him - in what she said, in her reactions and actions - more than she had shared with Bryce in months.

The sexiness she felt sitting there, her foot against Chuck's leg, licking her dessert spoon, was not a sexiness driven by her capacity to cause Chuck to react, it was about her own reactions, about the fact that she - Sarah, Samantha - was there, in that chair, in that dining room, in that B&B, with this man, and that he saw her there. Her. The woman in that secret, inviolate, sacred place.

It was not gone. She had just misplaced it. Chuck, with his soft, brown, X-ray eyes, had seen into her and into it. He had not violated or profaned it. She had taken off her shoes, literally, but it was as if he had taken his off, metaphorically. He was there, barefoot, in her sacred place and she knew he wanted the woman he found there, that he thought she was beautiful.

The bowls were empty, scraped clean. The coffee cups were almost empty too.

Sarah's foot was still against Chuck's leg and they were lingering over coffee. Her warmth, urgent, was still there, but she was willing to let the urgency linger too. Chuck had been telling her about his childhood, about his parents leaving. She had responded by talking about hers. Her parents' split, her eventual decision to go with her dad. She even let on about what she and her dad had done, the confidence games. Chuck never stopped looking at her, seeing her. She had never told anyone all of that.

Mrs. Lirriper came in quietly. "Well, if you two are finished, I am going to go to sleep." She looked at Chuck. "I decided not to trouble you with my phone, Mr. Bartowski." She turned toward Sarah. "Can I get you anything else?" Mrs. Lirriper had a funny look on her face and seemed to be trying to catch Sarah's eye.

Sarah shook her head and Mrs. Lirriper smiled. "Okay, well my room is downstairs, you know, downstairs, on the other end of the house from your rooms. Quite far, actually. Just so you know. You know, in case you need me." She winked at Sarah but Chuck saw it. "Goodnight, you two. I'm glad you enjoyed dinner."

She left the room. The silence now was uncomfortable, thick. Sarah pulled her foot away from Chuck's leg. He looked disappointed for a second but then composed himself. Sarah felt disappointed.

"She's not subtle, is she?" Chuck asked after a minute.

Sarah smiled. "No, not subtle."

"May I walk you to your room? I think we're both heading in the same direction."

Sarah's smile grew at that. Her disappointment lifted. Chuck stood and walked to her side of the table and pulled her chair out for her. She stood, then squatted down to reclaim her shoes. She kept them in her hand and turned to him, standing barefoot. She had not realized how tall he was. She was tall but he was still taller.

He reached out and took her empty hand. "This was the best dinner I have ever had. I mean the food was good, but that's not what made it so great…"

Sarah could not speak but she nodded in agreement.

He put his hand up, reaching out hesitantly toward her face, a question in his eyes. She leaned forward, bringing her cheek into contact with his hand as her answer. She felt him trace the scar on her cheek. Somehow, his touch seemed to erase it. His touch seemed to erase years. She turned a little so that she could kiss his caressing hand.

He looked deeply into her, into her eyes. "I'm going to kiss you now if that's okay."

She did not say anything but she closed her eyes. He kissed her: she tasted him and he was good. The kiss stirred her completely, bringing to life parts of her she thought dead and gone. When it was over, she gave him a small smile and, taking her hand from his, she brushed her fingers through the greying curls at his temples.

"Thank you, Chuck." He nodded. "Are you still going to be on the road for a few more days?" He nodded again. "Well," Sarah continued, "I happen to have some time off and I think I'd enjoy a road trip. Seeing some of the country I fly over. Listening to books on tape." She paused and looked deeply into him, his eyes. "Talking."

"I have a passenger seat that's empty," he offered, his eyes dancing.

"Good," she said. "You can sit in it. I'll drive. See you in the morning, Chuck."

"Breakfast? Same place?" He gestured to the table.

"Yes, definitely. Then we start our road trip. Where to next?"

"Iowa City, University of Iowa."

"Is there a B&B there?"

Chuck nodded. "Yes, I only stay at B&B's. I hate corporate hotels. Factory sleeping."

"Do you think we can find one in which Mrs. Lirriper's room is at a distance from ours?"

Chuck took a minute, then he smiled at her. "I'm sure we can."

"Good. See you in the morning."

"See you in the morning, Sarah."

They kissed again standing on the curious green pastel rug at the foot of the stairs, then they ascended the stairs together, parting company after one more kiss at Sarah's door.

She closed her door and sat down on the bed, reaching over to grab one of the overstuffed pillows in the room. She hugged it to her, then reached out and straightened the doily under the lamp on her nightstand. She set an alarm on her phone. She relaxed back onto the bed. She was warm all over, and the urgency was still there. But it would be there in the morning, she knew, and it would make everything so much better when the time was right. After more talk.

I'm taking some time off. A staycation - with Chuck.

She was composing her resignation letter in her head as she drifted into sleep.