Author's Note: This is the first oneshot in response to the Weekly Oneshot Challenge over at GW. Each week (fingers crossed) I'll post my response as a new chapter here. All the stories will be unrelated. This one started with the image of Sam sitting in a bar and the rest just sort of happened.

Word/Phrase Challenge: Home

Rated: General to Mature (for Language & Sexual Themes)

She doesn't like holding up a bar on a Tuesday night, but she does it anyway now that it's all gotten to be a little too much. She's not crazy about the burn of whiskey as it cauterizes her heart more than her throat, but she drinks it anyway. It doesn't help when men think she's an easy target, surer to say yes with each shot she takes, but she lets them think it anyway because the lie hurts in that good way that things don't hurt since she found a way to bring the colonel home.

It's been eight weeks and an undercover mission that wasn't hers and yet still nearly broke her and she's no closer to telling him to go to hell than she is to fucking him through the drywall in her hallway but she's sure it's got to be one or the other. Both things could end her career but fucking him isn't an option.

It doesn't help that several weeks ago he came in to the bar and tried to apologize. She just wouldn't have it. Couldn't have it because she believed him but she doesn't trust him and she doesn't know what to do in a world where she doesn't trust Jack O'Neill. And now for the third week in a row he's sitting down at the other end of the bar watching while men hit on her and she turns them down nicely with a smile that used to be reserved for him even though he didn't know that until he watched her use it on someone else.

Instead she does obscene things to the mouth of the beer bottle she fingers between shots, ties knots in cherry stems with her tongue and tries not to meet his eyes. Sometimes she doesn't do so well and she likes that dark, heavy look in his eyes and likes to imagine she's seeing things even though she knows she isn't. She's got him. At least on Tuesday nights. On Tuesday nights he wants her.

But it's too little too late because she was there when he turned away from her after she did the impossible to bring him home and she's not sure how she's ever supposed to forgive him for moving on while she was figuring out she was in love with him.

Once she's hit the fifty dollar limit she sets for herself she tabs out and grabs her motorcycle helmet off the barstool next to her. This is the part of the night that makes it all feel worth it. She's slightly wobbly on her feet and her leather pants stick to her uncomfortably and not only because she's a little sweaty but because he looks at her the way he does. She likes how he follows her out and then follows her home just in case she really is drunk enough to take the corners too fast. It feels like he's repenting and she's willing to let him try.

She's never let a man make her reckless before but she flirts with the idea that maybe there was something more to life at one point but it's passed her by or it's not possible anymore or maybe she doesn't even really want it anyway.

She likes the way he sits in her driveway while she moves through her house first turning the lights on then turning them off as she makes her way through to bed. She likes listening to the sound of his engine idling outside and wondering what he might do while he's out there.

On Wednesday mornings now he's always churlish with her and she's not sure if it's because of the drinking, the driving, the ignoring him or the lustful undercurrent that punctuates their Tuesday evenings. She just 'yes sir's' him within an inch of his life and takes a little pleasure in watching as his eyes continue to narrow during the day.

Then one Tuesday he touches her by accident in the elevator and she realizes that wrong or right she's either got to tell him to go to hell already or she'll yank him into her house that night and try out the whole fucking-him-through-the-drywall scenario she's been picturing through her first several drinks at the bar.

She realizes, as she contemplates that in the brief heartbeat when she can feel the heat of his fingers through the fabric of her blouse, that she misses the easy flirtation they'd had before she'd discovered she was serious and before he'd proved he could fall in love with an alien woman because while she thinks very seriously about doing harm to her drywall she doesn't really want that with him. Because when she's not drinking scotch with a beer back she doesn't think about him quite like that.

When she's on base and they're both in uniform, when they're swilling coffee and having mission briefings, when it's not Tuesday night and not Wednesday morning, she thinks about bringing him home. She thinks about relief.