Fic: Three Men, An Astrophysicist and A Boyfriend
“So, Shezam-ahan, you’re with the Denver PD, right?”
Her commanding officer’s tone was conversational, but Sam glared at him anyway. First and foremost, she glared because she knew he knew her boyfriend’s name was Shanahan. She also glared because Jack asked the question so damn casually.
With seven years of experience to draw on, Sam could conclude with a high degree of certainty that no good would ever come from Jack doing anything casually.
“Yeah, going on four years now.” Pete, on his best behaviour, let the older man’s mangling of his name pass without comment.
“So you were there for that big corruption shakedown about two years back?” Jack continued his line of questioning, unbothered by the glare his 2IC leveled at him. “The one where they rounded up a dozen or so cops for selling off weapons and drugs seized from bad guys?”
“Sir…”
“What?” Innocence dripped from the question. Not that anyone who knew Jack O’Neill would ever believe he was innocent.
Sam shot him a pointed look that begged him to play nicely. After all this time, she’d perfected the subtle eyebrow quirk and could issue the request without anyone else noticing, save the rest of their team.
“Actually, sir, Pete was involved in that investigation.”
Jack’s interest was piqued. “Oh?”
Sam mentally kicked herself for her poor word choice.
Pete, bless his heart, was either oblivious or determined to get along with the men of SG-1, no matter what. “My partner and I noticed we were starting to round up weapons that were already supposed to be in police custody. We started the investigation.” He said it with pride, but he wasn’t bragging.
Thank god. Jack didn’t like bragging.
Unless he was the one doing it, of course, and even then, only when his audience was an arrogant alien with a god complex, or a marine.
“That is most interesting, Detective Shanahan,” Teal’c said. It was the first time he’d spoken in over an hour. So far he’d been rather obviously trying to intimidate Pete by size alone.
“It is?” Pete asked skeptically. He clearly doubted that a 100 year-old alien could find anything about the life of a mere Earthling all that interesting.
“It is?” Sam echoed warily. She didn’t like the spark of achievement she saw in her teammate’s eyes. She knew the conversation was going somewhere she wouldn’t like, she just didn’t know where ‘somewhere’ was.
Yet.
“Indeed,” Teal’c said placidly. Then, with a steely glare at Pete, he went in for the kill. “Turning in one’s co-conspirators is recognized throughout the galaxy as an effective means of diverting attention from one’s own involvement in a plot.”
Pete blinked speechlessly, Jack smirked gleefully, and Teal’c almost smiled triumphantly.
Sam shot a desperate look at Daniel, begging him to mediate the situation before it got really ugly. Daniel gave her a reassuring nod in return before jumping into the fray.
“What are the firearm proficiency requirements for the police department?” Daniel asked curiously.
Sam’s relief dissipated almost as soon as it washed over her. Daniel didn’t talk about guns because Daniel didn’t care about guns.
He wasn’t orchestrating a rescue, he was leading Pete into an ambush of some sort.
Sam bit back a sigh. This evening’s get together was going marginally better than she’d anticipated, but only because her at-the-door search of Jack and Teal’c hadn’t turned up any hidden zat guns.
“Daniel…”
The warning drawl did nothing to dissuade the archaeologist from continuing his line of questioning. To Pete, he said, “We have bets on which one of you is the better shot: you or Sam.”
Pete risked a sidelong glance at her, silently asking whether or not he should answer. Sam threw her hands up in the air and sighed in exasperation.
Pete took her reaction to mean it was okay to answer.
He shouldn’t have.
It wasn’t.
“On a good day, I can put four out of five slugs between a target’s eyes.”
“So Sam then. Figured as much.” Daniel grinned impishly at her from across the coffee table, as though flattery would get him out of the deep, deep hole he was digging.
Sam took in all three of her teammates with a disapproving look. “There wasn’t really a bet, was there?”
Jack smirked back at her. “Of course there wasn’t. None of us are dumb enough to bet against you.”
She would have been flattered by that, really she would have, if Daniel hadn’t chosen that exact moment to ‘help’ her again.
“I can cluster a full clip in a one inch diameter area on a moving target more than fifty feet away,” he declared matter of factly. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added the piece de resistance. “And I’m the one with the least amount of training!”
“Daniel!”
He shrugged innocently and shot her a ‘butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth’ look of sheer innocence. “What?”
Jack leaned across the coffee table and proudly informed Pete, “I taught him.”
A timer beeped in the kitchen, but Sam wasn’t sure if it was the sound of a well-timed save or a death knell tolling. Even though she was determined not to burn anything tonight - she would put the myth that she couldn’t cook to rest if it was the last thing she ever did - Sam didn’t jump up to see to dinner preparations.
She trusted her teammates with her life, but she wasn’t sure it was wise to do the same thing with Pete’s. Not when they’d made it so clear they didn’t like him.
And definitely not after Cassandra - who must have been eavesdropping the last time Sam had popped in to chat with her mother - had, for some completely unfathomable reason, informed the three men that her adopted aunt was sleeping with Pete.
That news had gone over like a lead balloon.
Now every time Pete went to touch her in front of an audience, Sam blushed, her teammates glowered and Pete, demonstrating a healthy sense of self-preservation, backed off to a minimum safe distance.
Sam was still annoyed about the apparent double standard. Her teammates had all, at one time or another, slept with alien women they’d known for less than a day, and yet she wasn’t allowed to have sex with her own boyfriend?
Sam was also annoyed that despite how angry and embarrassed she’d been after Cassandra’s announcement, she hadn’t been able to resist spoiling the teen rotten on their next shopping expedition.
Like the saying went: forgiven, but not forgotten.
“Sam, do you want me to…” Pete asked, snapping her out of her thoughts. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the kitchen, where the timer was still chirping insistently.
“Please.”
Pete was trying hard not to look like he was running away. Sam had to give him credit for that. But she didn’t miss the relieved slump of his shoulders when he disappeared into the relative safety of the kitchen.
As soon as he was gone, Sam fixed her teammates with a fiery glare.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?” Jack asked, trying his hand at innocence again.
“Ganging up on him,” Sam hissed. She added a belated ‘sir,’ but it sounded perfunctory even to her own ears.
“We’re just having some fun, Sam,” Daniel reassured.
She cocked her head to one side and regarded her bespectacled teammate reprovingly. “I’m sure Pete’s having a blast.”
“Relax, Carter.” Jack reached his arms high over his head and made a show of stretching lazily. “We’ll go easy on him. It’s not like our macho male routine was getting to him anyway.”
“I really like him, guys,” she pleaded quietly. “And tonight, getting to know my friends… This was his idea, so if you could try not to make him regret it…”
Teal’c interrupted, his voice smooth and low. “We will be on our best behaviour for the remainder of the evening, Major Carter.”
She studied the three earnest faces before her, still feeling the slightest zing of trepidation. She knew what they were doing and why, but that didn’t make it any easier to tolerate.
Her teammates didn’t break out the ‘macho male routine’ often. It was a sign of how much they respected her, how much faith they had in her abilities, that they actually let her take care of herself.
When they did pull the ‘macho male routine,’ it was because they saw potential for her to get hurt and were trying to spare her the pain. It was nice to have such a clear reminder of how much they cared about her, but still…
“Do you think you could maybe be on someone else’s best behaviour? Because I’ve seen the three of you on your best behaviour and it really leaves something to be desired.”
“Smart ass,” Jack shot back, but he was smiling.
“Really guys, promise you’ll…”
Daniel interrupted her plea with a reassuring smile. “We promise, Sam.”
Pete picked that moment to call in from the kitchen, “Sam, hon? Are you sure you put the chicken in for long enough?”
“Pretty sure,” she called back. “Why?”
She would not react to the pair of smirks or the lone raised eyebrow now aimed at her. She would not react to the whispered explanation about terms of endearment going on between SG-1’s resident alien and the team’s cultural expert. And she sure as hell would not react to the extremely amused superior officer currently sitting on her couch, mouthing ‘hon?’ at her.
Nope, not reacting.
“It’s just… Um… Well… It’s a little undercooked, babe, that’s all.”
Sam winced at the hated endearment and made a mental note to work harder at breaking Pete’s habit of dropping words like ‘babe’ and ‘hon’ into conversations.
Sneaking a look at her teammates, she noted that Jack looked like he was going to rupture something if he didn’t let out the bark of laughter he was desperately trying to smother. Daniel and Teal’c weren’t faring much better.
They were, Sam decided, enjoying themselves entirely too much.
“The cookbook said it might need a bit of extra time. Put it in for another 10 minutes or so,” Sam replied sweetly, patiently. Then, in a dangerous whisper, she warned her teammates, “Don’t. Say. A. Word.”
“I think it’s going to need a bit longer than that,” Pete called again.
Sam rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So put it in for…”
“The chicken is still completely raw, hon.”
Jack grinned, his amusement growing by the second. “Forget something, Carter?”
No. Nope. Nothing at all. She’d followed the recipe to the letter because this time, damn it, she was going to show her team that she could cook. She’d started dinner preparations well ahead of time, measured every last ingredient with rigorous scientific precision, and then double-checked all of her work…
The problem dawned on her at the same moment Daniel figured it out.
“Uh, Sam,” Daniel began tentatively. “Remember that time we were baking cookies for Cass’ school bake sale?”
“Yes.” Against her will, one hand came up to rub at her forehead. All of the sudden, she felt a gigantic headache coming on.
“And remember how you forgot to preheat the oven because the baking temperature is printed at the top of the page, rather than in the instructions?”
“Daniel…”
He pressed on diplomatically. “Do you think, maybe, there’s a chance that you….”
Sam threw up her hands in exasperation for the second time in less than five minutes. “Yes! I forgot to turn on the oven. Again. Okay?”
Pete reappeared at the living room door. He had the good sense to look chagrined, apologetic, and just a wee bit afraid for his life. “What do you want to do about dinner, babe?”
She sighed, disappointed that despite her best efforts, she’d merely reinforced the notion that she was domestically impaired. Again. “Put it in the fridge. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“And tonight?”
“I’ll call ahead for the pizza,” Daniel jumped to his feet, already fishing in his pocket for his cell phone.
Jack was already halfway to the front door. “T and I will go pick up the beer.”
Pete looked uncertain of what he was supposed to do now. He eyed all four members of SG-1, trying to pick up a cue from one of them. “We could always defrost some steaks or something?”
“No worries, Shezam-ahan.” Jack patted him on the shoulder on his way past. “Date Carter long enough and you’ll get used to the fact that most home-cooked meals mysteriously become pizza at some point.”
“That’s not true!” Sam said, indignantly. Then, after three of the four men in the room raised skeptical eyebrows, she sheepishly added, “I usually order Thai or Indian. You always pick pizza, sir.”
Pete looked back and forth between Sam and Jack, clearly trying to piece something together. “So, this happens a lot?”
“Not a lot,” Daniel said helpfully. “Just when Sam tries to prove she can cook.”
“Fortunately, Major Carter does not feel the need to attempt such a feat very often,” Teal’c added.
Sam folded her arms across her chest and frowned at her teammates. “Get out of my house.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour,” Jack promised, grinning broadly. He took two steps before seeming to think better of it.
He turned on his heel, his eyes narrowing into slits as he stared Pete down. “In the meantime, don’t even think about trying to get in her pants.”
“Colonel!” Sam barked, blushing furiously.
“We’re going,” Daniel assured her. His face was almost as red as Sam’s.
Beating a hasty retreat, Daniel snagged Jack’s arm as he brushed past and ushered Teal’c into the front hall ahead of them.
As the trio headed out into the chilly autumn evening, Sam could make out several hisses that sounded suspiciously like ‘don’t be an ass,’ ‘promised,’ ‘best behaviour,’ ‘damn it, Daniel,’ and ‘don’t like that good for nothing Mr. Potato Head.’
Sam coughed loudly, trying to drown out Jack’s running commentary on all the reasons why he didn’t like Pete.
She let out a slow, deep breath after the front door slammed shut. Pete looked at her hopefully, offering something halfway between a smile and a wince.
“So, that went well, right?”
Sam grimaced, then told him honestly, “It went better than I’d expected.”
“It did?” Pete’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Really?”
Thoughts of bodies being zatted into oblivion whipped through Sam’s brain. “A lot better, actually.” Then, in answer to the still puzzled expression on his face, she added. “You’re still breathing.”
Pete frowned, looking slightly worried now. “Just out of curiosity, that joke you made once about all your boyfriends dying… That was a joke, right?”
Sam tossed him a cheeky grin and dodged the question. “Come into the kitchen and help me make dessert. My Jell-o is to die for.”
“Seriously, Sam,” Pete said, sounding increasingly worried. “You were joking, weren’t you?”
Sam's grin grew even wider.
Let him wonder.
Her commanding officer’s tone was conversational, but Sam glared at him anyway. First and foremost, she glared because she knew he knew her boyfriend’s name was Shanahan. She also glared because Jack asked the question so damn casually.
With seven years of experience to draw on, Sam could conclude with a high degree of certainty that no good would ever come from Jack doing anything casually.
“Yeah, going on four years now.” Pete, on his best behaviour, let the older man’s mangling of his name pass without comment.
“So you were there for that big corruption shakedown about two years back?” Jack continued his line of questioning, unbothered by the glare his 2IC leveled at him. “The one where they rounded up a dozen or so cops for selling off weapons and drugs seized from bad guys?”
“Sir…”
“What?” Innocence dripped from the question. Not that anyone who knew Jack O’Neill would ever believe he was innocent.
Sam shot him a pointed look that begged him to play nicely. After all this time, she’d perfected the subtle eyebrow quirk and could issue the request without anyone else noticing, save the rest of their team.
“Actually, sir, Pete was involved in that investigation.”
Jack’s interest was piqued. “Oh?”
Sam mentally kicked herself for her poor word choice.
Pete, bless his heart, was either oblivious or determined to get along with the men of SG-1, no matter what. “My partner and I noticed we were starting to round up weapons that were already supposed to be in police custody. We started the investigation.” He said it with pride, but he wasn’t bragging.
Thank god. Jack didn’t like bragging.
Unless he was the one doing it, of course, and even then, only when his audience was an arrogant alien with a god complex, or a marine.
“That is most interesting, Detective Shanahan,” Teal’c said. It was the first time he’d spoken in over an hour. So far he’d been rather obviously trying to intimidate Pete by size alone.
“It is?” Pete asked skeptically. He clearly doubted that a 100 year-old alien could find anything about the life of a mere Earthling all that interesting.
“It is?” Sam echoed warily. She didn’t like the spark of achievement she saw in her teammate’s eyes. She knew the conversation was going somewhere she wouldn’t like, she just didn’t know where ‘somewhere’ was.
Yet.
“Indeed,” Teal’c said placidly. Then, with a steely glare at Pete, he went in for the kill. “Turning in one’s co-conspirators is recognized throughout the galaxy as an effective means of diverting attention from one’s own involvement in a plot.”
Pete blinked speechlessly, Jack smirked gleefully, and Teal’c almost smiled triumphantly.
Sam shot a desperate look at Daniel, begging him to mediate the situation before it got really ugly. Daniel gave her a reassuring nod in return before jumping into the fray.
“What are the firearm proficiency requirements for the police department?” Daniel asked curiously.
Sam’s relief dissipated almost as soon as it washed over her. Daniel didn’t talk about guns because Daniel didn’t care about guns.
He wasn’t orchestrating a rescue, he was leading Pete into an ambush of some sort.
Sam bit back a sigh. This evening’s get together was going marginally better than she’d anticipated, but only because her at-the-door search of Jack and Teal’c hadn’t turned up any hidden zat guns.
“Daniel…”
The warning drawl did nothing to dissuade the archaeologist from continuing his line of questioning. To Pete, he said, “We have bets on which one of you is the better shot: you or Sam.”
Pete risked a sidelong glance at her, silently asking whether or not he should answer. Sam threw her hands up in the air and sighed in exasperation.
Pete took her reaction to mean it was okay to answer.
He shouldn’t have.
It wasn’t.
“On a good day, I can put four out of five slugs between a target’s eyes.”
“So Sam then. Figured as much.” Daniel grinned impishly at her from across the coffee table, as though flattery would get him out of the deep, deep hole he was digging.
Sam took in all three of her teammates with a disapproving look. “There wasn’t really a bet, was there?”
Jack smirked back at her. “Of course there wasn’t. None of us are dumb enough to bet against you.”
She would have been flattered by that, really she would have, if Daniel hadn’t chosen that exact moment to ‘help’ her again.
“I can cluster a full clip in a one inch diameter area on a moving target more than fifty feet away,” he declared matter of factly. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added the piece de resistance. “And I’m the one with the least amount of training!”
“Daniel!”
He shrugged innocently and shot her a ‘butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth’ look of sheer innocence. “What?”
Jack leaned across the coffee table and proudly informed Pete, “I taught him.”
A timer beeped in the kitchen, but Sam wasn’t sure if it was the sound of a well-timed save or a death knell tolling. Even though she was determined not to burn anything tonight - she would put the myth that she couldn’t cook to rest if it was the last thing she ever did - Sam didn’t jump up to see to dinner preparations.
She trusted her teammates with her life, but she wasn’t sure it was wise to do the same thing with Pete’s. Not when they’d made it so clear they didn’t like him.
And definitely not after Cassandra - who must have been eavesdropping the last time Sam had popped in to chat with her mother - had, for some completely unfathomable reason, informed the three men that her adopted aunt was sleeping with Pete.
That news had gone over like a lead balloon.
Now every time Pete went to touch her in front of an audience, Sam blushed, her teammates glowered and Pete, demonstrating a healthy sense of self-preservation, backed off to a minimum safe distance.
Sam was still annoyed about the apparent double standard. Her teammates had all, at one time or another, slept with alien women they’d known for less than a day, and yet she wasn’t allowed to have sex with her own boyfriend?
Sam was also annoyed that despite how angry and embarrassed she’d been after Cassandra’s announcement, she hadn’t been able to resist spoiling the teen rotten on their next shopping expedition.
Like the saying went: forgiven, but not forgotten.
“Sam, do you want me to…” Pete asked, snapping her out of her thoughts. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the kitchen, where the timer was still chirping insistently.
“Please.”
Pete was trying hard not to look like he was running away. Sam had to give him credit for that. But she didn’t miss the relieved slump of his shoulders when he disappeared into the relative safety of the kitchen.
As soon as he was gone, Sam fixed her teammates with a fiery glare.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?” Jack asked, trying his hand at innocence again.
“Ganging up on him,” Sam hissed. She added a belated ‘sir,’ but it sounded perfunctory even to her own ears.
“We’re just having some fun, Sam,” Daniel reassured.
She cocked her head to one side and regarded her bespectacled teammate reprovingly. “I’m sure Pete’s having a blast.”
“Relax, Carter.” Jack reached his arms high over his head and made a show of stretching lazily. “We’ll go easy on him. It’s not like our macho male routine was getting to him anyway.”
“I really like him, guys,” she pleaded quietly. “And tonight, getting to know my friends… This was his idea, so if you could try not to make him regret it…”
Teal’c interrupted, his voice smooth and low. “We will be on our best behaviour for the remainder of the evening, Major Carter.”
She studied the three earnest faces before her, still feeling the slightest zing of trepidation. She knew what they were doing and why, but that didn’t make it any easier to tolerate.
Her teammates didn’t break out the ‘macho male routine’ often. It was a sign of how much they respected her, how much faith they had in her abilities, that they actually let her take care of herself.
When they did pull the ‘macho male routine,’ it was because they saw potential for her to get hurt and were trying to spare her the pain. It was nice to have such a clear reminder of how much they cared about her, but still…
“Do you think you could maybe be on someone else’s best behaviour? Because I’ve seen the three of you on your best behaviour and it really leaves something to be desired.”
“Smart ass,” Jack shot back, but he was smiling.
“Really guys, promise you’ll…”
Daniel interrupted her plea with a reassuring smile. “We promise, Sam.”
Pete picked that moment to call in from the kitchen, “Sam, hon? Are you sure you put the chicken in for long enough?”
“Pretty sure,” she called back. “Why?”
She would not react to the pair of smirks or the lone raised eyebrow now aimed at her. She would not react to the whispered explanation about terms of endearment going on between SG-1’s resident alien and the team’s cultural expert. And she sure as hell would not react to the extremely amused superior officer currently sitting on her couch, mouthing ‘hon?’ at her.
Nope, not reacting.
“It’s just… Um… Well… It’s a little undercooked, babe, that’s all.”
Sam winced at the hated endearment and made a mental note to work harder at breaking Pete’s habit of dropping words like ‘babe’ and ‘hon’ into conversations.
Sneaking a look at her teammates, she noted that Jack looked like he was going to rupture something if he didn’t let out the bark of laughter he was desperately trying to smother. Daniel and Teal’c weren’t faring much better.
They were, Sam decided, enjoying themselves entirely too much.
“The cookbook said it might need a bit of extra time. Put it in for another 10 minutes or so,” Sam replied sweetly, patiently. Then, in a dangerous whisper, she warned her teammates, “Don’t. Say. A. Word.”
“I think it’s going to need a bit longer than that,” Pete called again.
Sam rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So put it in for…”
“The chicken is still completely raw, hon.”
Jack grinned, his amusement growing by the second. “Forget something, Carter?”
No. Nope. Nothing at all. She’d followed the recipe to the letter because this time, damn it, she was going to show her team that she could cook. She’d started dinner preparations well ahead of time, measured every last ingredient with rigorous scientific precision, and then double-checked all of her work…
The problem dawned on her at the same moment Daniel figured it out.
“Uh, Sam,” Daniel began tentatively. “Remember that time we were baking cookies for Cass’ school bake sale?”
“Yes.” Against her will, one hand came up to rub at her forehead. All of the sudden, she felt a gigantic headache coming on.
“And remember how you forgot to preheat the oven because the baking temperature is printed at the top of the page, rather than in the instructions?”
“Daniel…”
He pressed on diplomatically. “Do you think, maybe, there’s a chance that you….”
Sam threw up her hands in exasperation for the second time in less than five minutes. “Yes! I forgot to turn on the oven. Again. Okay?”
Pete reappeared at the living room door. He had the good sense to look chagrined, apologetic, and just a wee bit afraid for his life. “What do you want to do about dinner, babe?”
She sighed, disappointed that despite her best efforts, she’d merely reinforced the notion that she was domestically impaired. Again. “Put it in the fridge. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“And tonight?”
“I’ll call ahead for the pizza,” Daniel jumped to his feet, already fishing in his pocket for his cell phone.
Jack was already halfway to the front door. “T and I will go pick up the beer.”
Pete looked uncertain of what he was supposed to do now. He eyed all four members of SG-1, trying to pick up a cue from one of them. “We could always defrost some steaks or something?”
“No worries, Shezam-ahan.” Jack patted him on the shoulder on his way past. “Date Carter long enough and you’ll get used to the fact that most home-cooked meals mysteriously become pizza at some point.”
“That’s not true!” Sam said, indignantly. Then, after three of the four men in the room raised skeptical eyebrows, she sheepishly added, “I usually order Thai or Indian. You always pick pizza, sir.”
Pete looked back and forth between Sam and Jack, clearly trying to piece something together. “So, this happens a lot?”
“Not a lot,” Daniel said helpfully. “Just when Sam tries to prove she can cook.”
“Fortunately, Major Carter does not feel the need to attempt such a feat very often,” Teal’c added.
Sam folded her arms across her chest and frowned at her teammates. “Get out of my house.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour,” Jack promised, grinning broadly. He took two steps before seeming to think better of it.
He turned on his heel, his eyes narrowing into slits as he stared Pete down. “In the meantime, don’t even think about trying to get in her pants.”
“Colonel!” Sam barked, blushing furiously.
“We’re going,” Daniel assured her. His face was almost as red as Sam’s.
Beating a hasty retreat, Daniel snagged Jack’s arm as he brushed past and ushered Teal’c into the front hall ahead of them.
As the trio headed out into the chilly autumn evening, Sam could make out several hisses that sounded suspiciously like ‘don’t be an ass,’ ‘promised,’ ‘best behaviour,’ ‘damn it, Daniel,’ and ‘don’t like that good for nothing Mr. Potato Head.’
Sam coughed loudly, trying to drown out Jack’s running commentary on all the reasons why he didn’t like Pete.
She let out a slow, deep breath after the front door slammed shut. Pete looked at her hopefully, offering something halfway between a smile and a wince.
“So, that went well, right?”
Sam grimaced, then told him honestly, “It went better than I’d expected.”
“It did?” Pete’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Really?”
Thoughts of bodies being zatted into oblivion whipped through Sam’s brain. “A lot better, actually.” Then, in answer to the still puzzled expression on his face, she added. “You’re still breathing.”
Pete frowned, looking slightly worried now. “Just out of curiosity, that joke you made once about all your boyfriends dying… That was a joke, right?”
Sam tossed him a cheeky grin and dodged the question. “Come into the kitchen and help me make dessert. My Jell-o is to die for.”
“Seriously, Sam,” Pete said, sounding increasingly worried. “You were joking, weren’t you?”
Sam's grin grew even wider.
Let him wonder.