Gigi Sinclair

As the plane taxied up to the terminal, I reached for the microphone and put on my "pilot voice," the one Carter says sounds like Barry White with a head cold.

"I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for flying with us. On behalf of your entire flight crew, we hope you have a pleasant stay here in Atlanta, or an enjoyable continuing journey. The local time is 10:37, the temperature is a balmy 78 degrees and the steak sandwich in the airport TGI Fridays is excellent." Carter smiled beside me. "Please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened until the aircraft has come to a complete stop." I didn't have to worry about that. The cabin crew included Murray, aka a linebacker in a flight attendant's blazer. There was never any trouble with the passengers when Murray was on board.

"You feel like one of those sandwiches for lunch?" Sam Carter, my co-pilot, asked as I clicked off the intercom.

I yawned. Man was not built to fly the Tokyo-Atlanta red eye. "I can't. I'm deadheading up to New York on the 11:30."

Carter's eyebrows disappeared into her hat. "Really. Would that have anything to do with the mysterious Dr. Jackson?"

It did, but I wasn't about to admit it to her. So I changed the subject. "You know, Carter, ever since you and Siler got engaged, you've been a real pain in the ass."

Carter grinned and pulled on her coat, flashing her engagement ring, which she'd probably bought herself given Siler's airline mechanic's salary. "It doesn't matter, Jack. Paul's on the New York run this week. I'll just ask him if there are any big lit-up red hearts on the side of the Empire State Building like in 'An Affair to Remember.'" She laughed and left the cockpit as I gathered my things. Last I heard, she was asking Murray if he wanted to go for a steak. ***

I was going to New York to see Daniel. I had a souvenir from Tokyo to give him, a sushi set that cost about as much as my first car and could fit in my top pocket, but even as I boarded the plane, I didn't know if this was a good idea. We'd only been dating for two months, but when he told me he was giving a lecture series at NYU and would be away for a week, my first thought was to go and surprise him. I just hoped he'd be happy to see me.

Like so many great relationships, it started out with stalking. I went into the same Denver coffee shop for weeks after I first saw him there, hoping to run into him again. I did, a few times, but he was always busy with stacks of books and papers and stuff and I couldn't think of anything to say, anyway. Finally, just as I was about to give up and attempt to get a life, I found an excuse to talk to him. I asked if I could borrow his newspaper. I made some stupid comment about the Chicago Bears, he told me he was more of a theatre guy than a sports guy and I, smooth as always, made him spill coffee on his crotch and nearly turned him soprano trying to clean him up. Then, astoundingly after that debacle, Daniel asked me out.

He offered me a lot of first date options. We quickly decided that neither of us really wanted to go bowling, although I would have tried it for him, so we settled on dinner at a quiet little Italian place he knew. I went home to drop off my bags and wash the Heathrow-Denver grime off my body. Three hours later, Daniel and I met at the restaurant.

I suck at dating, and Daniel was pretty obviously not a pro, either. I guess the awkward pauses and bland conversation should have comforted me, since it proved he wasn't in the habit of picking up strangers any more than I was, but at the time, it was painful.

"Why are you here?" Daniel finally asked.

I blinked. "Well, I think you're an interesting guy, and…"

Daniel shook his head, smiled, then frowned. "I, um, I meant, why Denver? If you're a pilot, couldn't you live pretty much anywhere with an airport?"

I shifted, embarrassed all over again. "My ex-wife lives in Colorado Springs." A look I knew all too well, the "oh shit, have I misinterpreted everything?" look, passed over Daniel's face. So I clarified: "I'm ex-military." I hoped he understood what that meant. It wasn't completely accurate. Sara was never just a convenient cover; she was the mother of my child and still one of my best friends. But feelings about ex-spouses are more of a third date conversation topic. "Anyway," I said, "Now that my son's all grown up, I guess I could move somewhere." I'd thought about going back to Chicago, or maybe somewhere else. I'd once considered Los Angeles, but I like having four seasons instead of just two: tourist and more tourists.

"You have a son?"

"Where do you think the grey hairs came from?"

"Do you have a picture?" Daniel asked, and I knew there was a reason I'd downed gallons of mediocre coffee to meet this guy.

I pulled out my wallet and showed him the photo of Charlie in his uniform, taken just before he left. "That's Charlie."

Daniel examined the picture minutely. "How old is he?"

"Twenty." Although I still saw him as a two-year-old, sitting in his highchair with chocolate cake all over his face, or sometimes a snotty fifteen-year-old embarrassed to know me, or an excited six-year-old thrilled about his first day at school. Call it parental time relativity.

"Air Force," Daniel commented, glancing up at me. "I guess that was your branch, too."

"How'd you know?"

Daniel gave the picture back, and I put it safe in my wallet. Daniel was still looking at me, so I fiddled with my cutlery and wondered what was taking them so long. "Think they're out shooting the cannelloni?"

"Is Charlie overseas?" Daniel asked, like I hadn't spoken.

"Iraq." So far, he'd been gone a hundred and sixteen days. But who was counting? "He's OK, though. His mom got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago." Of course, it had been dated a month earlier, but Sara and I still took it as a good sign. You couldn't send any letters if you were in trouble. Sara and I knew that very well.

Daniel reached across the red chequered tablecloth and touched my hand. It was a casual thing, and it only lasted a second, but it sent a jolt through my body like I'd grabbed hold of an electric fence. I took a swig from my wineglass, then Daniel started talking about his family, his father and stepmother and their archaeological dig in Luxor, which I'd always thought was a hotel on the Vegas strip. When we left the restaurant, Daniel asked if I wanted to come back to his place for coffee. I had an early flight the next day, so we exchanged numbers in the parking lot. I didn't know whether to kiss him or shake his hand or what, so I settled for a half-hug that failed when Daniel moved at the wrong moment. I went home alone.

***

Paul was on the flight to New York, but some kind of problem with the VCR kept him hopping and he didn't have time to talk to me, except for a quick: "Hi, Jack. Want a drink?" I did, but I didn't think it would help any. I shook my head and picked up a magazine.

It had taken some serious research to find out Dr. Daniel Jackson was lecturing on "Monotheistic Cults in the Nile Valley" at four o'clock. It was a private lecture, but a little donation to the anthropology department at NYU got me in.

The lecture hall was full of kids Charlie's age and I wished, yet again, that he'd taken after his mother and gone the college route instead of the Air Force route. I would still have worried, although more about him destroying his liver or knocking up some communications major with green hair and an eyebrow ring.

I found a seat on an aisle, so I could stretch out my bad knee. Looking around, I was glad I'd changed out of uniform in Atlanta. Chinos and a button-down shirt still didn't fit in with the sea of jeans and "Free Tibet" T-shirts, but it was better than it could have been.

It was a very long time since I'd been to a lecture, and even then they were Air Force academy lectures, and you always knew what to expect. Namely, a lot of information presented in very little time, which you were supposed to understand immediately. I didn't know how Daniel was going to start, whether he was going to tell some joke the pierced audience would get and I wouldn't or what. He didn't do anything like that. He came to the podium at the front of the room in a sport coat and slacks. The girl next to me pulled a notebook out of a huge canvas backpack and pushed down the tiny writing table between our seats. I shifted to my left and watched as Daniel's doctoral student, an exotic-looking woman he'd told me was called Sha're Ferretti, set up a laptop computer. Daniel said, "Thank you for coming," and that was the last thing I understood for some time.

***

Daniel and I had three more dates after the Italian restaurant thing. The best was when we met for coffee at that same coffee shop in Denver. We sat at a table in the corner and shared a chocolate cappuccino brownie. We talked about opera, the performance of "Don Giovanni" that was coming in a few months and a PBS version of "Carmen" he'd watched and I'd taped. When Daniel licked brownie crumbs off his lip, it took all my restraint to keep from kissing him right there in front of the yuppies. Instead, I pressed my foot against his under the table, and I got a brilliant smile in return. The kissing, and more, came later. The other dates were less successful. We went to the movies. Since I didn't want to see "Death and Dismay" in the original Czech and Daniel didn't want to see anything with Adam Sandler, we ended up as the only men not snoring beside a female date in the audience of some big budged weep-fest about the Civil War that neither of us enjoyed.

The biggest problem, though, came when I took Daniel to a Bears versus Broncos game at Invesco Field. I thought it would be cool, seeing as how the Bears and their crappy playing had brought Daniel and I together. I knew Daniel wasn't a sports guy, but he was a guy, and every red-blooded American male could get to like football if he had it properly explained to him. Or so I thought. Then again, Daniel had been born in Egypt.

It started when we went to the concession stand and he said: "Six dollars for a beer? That's criminal."

"It's all part of the experience." I told him, although I choked a little as the twelve-year-old behind the counter told me our total. I gave Daniel the extra-large nachos and the beers as I dug in my wallet for the money. When I turned back, a second and a twenty-dollar bill later, the beer was on Daniel's khakis and Daniel was arguing with a man large enough to be part of the stadium infrastructure.

I got over there in time to hear the man ask Daniel: "What the fuck do you mean, I owe you two beers?"

"Well," Daniel replied, precisely and snottily, "I was standing here, and you ran into me. A reasonable person would consider that as being responsible for the incident."

The man scowled, and I could tell he'd understood at least some of the many layers of Daniel's scorn.

"It's OK," I said, to Daniel and to his new friend, "Accidents happen, right?"

"Fuck you, faggot," the man spat. At Daniel, not at me, but that didn't make me feel any better. Well, OK, maybe just a little.

Daniel blinked. "Excuse me? 'Faggot'? I really don't think hurling prejudiced epithets at each other will improve the situation, but if you insist…"

With visions of spending the night in jail, or in the hospital, and missing my 10:15 to Singapore, I tried again. "Look, guys, this is all a simple misunderstanding…"

"Captain O'Neill. Is something amiss?" I'd never been so happy to hear that deep voice, the one I usually heard explaining that in the event of cabin depressurization, oxygen masks would drop from the ceiling.

I turned and smiled at Murray, who was standing with a jumbo-sized Coke in hand, his wife Dreya, Jonas Quinn the airline customer service manager, and Paul Davis by his side. "No problem, Murray."

Murray looked coldly at the other guy, who puffed up his chest a little. "I would suggest, sir," Murray said, in the same tone he used on people who tried to bring oversized hand luggage onboard. "That you return to your seat at once. The game is about to begin, and it would be unfortunate if you were to miss the kick-off." When the man looked about to argue, Murray repeated: "Most unfortunate."

With a sneer and one last mumbled "Faggot" in Daniel's direction, the man moved on and Murray stuck out his hand to Daniel. "I am Murray, a co-worker of Captain O'Neill's."

"Daniel Jackson," Daniel said, still glancing after the man irritably, like he was going to follow him and demand his beers back. I put a hand on Daniel's arm, just to restrain him. Murray looked at Dreya, and I knew the gossip would be all over the airport by tomorrow morning. Our seats were about twenty rows behind Murray and company's, and off to the right, so I could see them fairly clearly. I watched, interested, as Jonas helped himself to Paul's popcorn, and then to his Pepsi. Jonas was a great customer service manager because he could take all kinds of abuse with a smile and an "I'm sorry you're not satisfied, what can I do to make it better?" while any normal person would have screamed profanities and quit. At least, I would have. I had serious respect for Jonas, even if he did eat like Charlie during that growth spurt that depleted my fridge from the day he started the sixth grade to the day he joined the Air Force.

Paul didn't seem to mind that Jonas was going through his food like a gorging teenager. He even laughed and swatted in Jonas's direction, and I wondered if I was shamefully behind in my gossip. Last I'd heard, Jonas was dating a woman he'd helped with her lost luggage, but things change fast.

Witness Daniel. "How many periods are there?" He asked, gazing intently at the field.

"They're quarters." I replied, as Paul and Jonas laughed at something Murray had said.

"How many of those, then?"

I looked at him. "Daniel."

He stared blankly for a moment. "Oh. Right." He was quiet for a while, and I tried to concentrate on the game. Eventually, Daniel said: "I'm just going to the washroom." When I went to look for him, forty minutes later, I found him happily reading a newspaper and drinking a coffee on a bench near the souvenir stands.

***

Sitting in the lecture hall at NYU, I could understand how Daniel had felt at Invesco Field. I had to trap my finger in the hinge of my writing table to keep from falling asleep. Everyone else seemed into it, though. The girl beside me scribbled non-stop in her notebook. Occasionally, the audience would gasp or murmur, and Daniel would smile like a kid on Christmas morning. Those times, I was glad I'd come.

A group of people went up to Daniel at the end of his lecture. I hung around at the back of the crowd as Daniel talked to all of them, looking like a movie star or a star quarterback with his admirers. I'd always known Daniel was smart, he'd told me about his two Ph.D.s, but I'd had no idea it was like this. I felt a surge of pride I hadn't felt since Charlie gave the valedictory address at his high school graduation.

The pride only got stronger when Daniel saw me. For a second, his face was blank. Nervous, I gave him a little wave, and the Christmas morning smile turned into a Christmas-morning-trip-to-Disneyland-birthday-party-at-Chuck-E-Cheese grin, and I knew I'd done the right thing.

When the last student had gone, Daniel broke away from the old, professor-type guy beside him and came up to me.

"Jack. What are you doing here?" Daniel put a hand on my shoulder and patted a little, still smiling.

I shrugged. "Oh, you know. I was in the neighbourhood."

"How long can you stay?" "Can you stay", I noticed, not "are you staying."

"Tonight and tomorrow."

"That's all?" He sounded disappointed. I restrained myself from cheering.

"The planes don't fly themselves." Yet, anyway. I looked past Daniel at Ms. Ferretti and the professor, who were staring.

Daniel said: "Jack, this is my doctoral student, Sha're Ferretti, and Dr. Ernest Littlefield from here at NYU. This is my friend Jack." The hand slid from my shoulder to the small of my back. From the knowing look Sha're gave me, she knew exactly what Daniel meant by "friend." Ernest Littlefield, on the other hand, blinked and said:

"What's your field, sir?"

"Astronomy." Kind of. Although I hadn't used it for much beyond impressing my dates by pointing out constellations. I hadn't tried that on Daniel yet. I was too nervous he'd be able to correct me. "But I'm a pilot."

"Ernest and his wife invited us out for dinner," Daniel said.

Right away, Ernest put in: "We would love for you to join us. Catherine is interested in astronomy herself."

Great. I put on a fake smile, but it wasn't enough to fool Daniel. "Maybe some other time, Ernest," he said, and right away, I felt like shit. After all, Daniel had watched a football game for me. A couple of periods, anyway.

"I'd like to go." I could endure it, anyway, as long as it paid decent dividends. And from the surprised look on Daniel's face, it would.

Catherine Littlefield turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, anyway. She'd known Daniel when he was a little kid running bare-assed around Egypt, and she was the first person I'd heard talk about Daniel's mother.

"A brilliant woman," Catherine told us, while we were waiting for our appetizers in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. "I would have had you over to the house," Catherine had told us, "But my cooking is abysmal and it's Mrs. Patterson's day off." My kind of woman. "She quite adored your father."

"I know. She saved his life instead of her own." Daniel sounded a little annoyed about it.

"She loved you, as well, very much," Catherine went on. "She used to call you her greatest accomplishment."

Sha're smiled. "How sweet." She, we'd determined, had no kids and was married to an accountant in Denver.

"It can't have been for them. I was a hellion," Daniel replied. That, I could picture.

Catherine shook her head. "It doesn't matter, Daniel. You love your children, no matter what they put you through." Amen to that. There was an awkward pause, which was finally broken when the appetizers arrived. At least, that's what I thought they were. They looked more like unsuccessful craft projects.

They tasted OK, though, so I spent the rest of the meal eating and listening to archaeology talk as Daniel ran his foot up and down my leg.

I'd left my suitcase at the front desk of Daniel's hotel, hoping I wouldn't have to spring for my own room. I didn't. As soon as we got there, Sha're disappeared upstairs and Danie looked at me. "Give me five minutes."

"What for?"

He raised his eyebrows and pushed the elevator call button. "Wait and see."

Knowing Daniel, I thought as I went to pick up my bag, he probably needed to gather the laundry off his hotel room floor.

There was a long pause when I knocked on the door, and I wondered if Daniel had fallen asleep. Then the door opened and my mouth went dry at the sight of Daniel in a hotel terry cloth bathrobe. Unbelted.

For only our third time together—if you counted the awkward, annoyed but still satisfying groping after the football game—Daniel and I had a pretty good grasp of what we liked. He worked on unbuttoning my shirt while I slid my hands under the bathrobe, feeling the hard muscles that had surprised me. He said he didn't work out, but I couldn't imagine that kind of body coming from lifting a few textbooks and pottery shards. Still, I wasn't complaining. I was, in fact, slobbering like a Saint Bernard when Daniel got my pants off, but he didn't seem to care. He kept on kissing me, his tongue pressing hard against mine as he backed us towards the bed.

He grunted a little as we went down on the mattress, which wasn't as soft as it could have been. Obviously, visiting professors' designated hotels aren't as nice as airline staffs'.

Daniel stiffened suddenly, his arms around me and his erection tucked in beside mine. I stopped squirming and panting long enough to say: "You OK?"

"Yes." But he seemed distracted.

"Daniel." I nudged him, my cock sliding over his hip. "What's up?" Apart from the obvious, of course.

He sat up a little, running a hand through my hair. "Thank you for coming to see me."

"Hey, no problem." I shifted again, hoping Daniel would take that as a cue to get back with the program.

He didn't. "I haven't been completely honest with you, Jack."

"Oh?" I tried to sound casually interested, even as a boulder settled in my stomach. "About what?"

"My job." He sat up and moved his hands to his lap and stared at the gauzy curtains over the beige vertical blinds. "I'm not a professor. Well, I am, but my main job is with the government. I'm working on a top secret project that's trying to build alliances with alien races."

I laughed, but it died when Daniel looked back at me, completely serious. "It's true. We're based out of Cheyenne Mountain. Why do you think I'm at the University of Colorado instead of Harvard or Yale?"

"You're a closet skier?" Daniel shook his head impatiently. I felt like an idiot, but I said it anyway. "Are you serious?"

"Ask Sha're if you don't believe me. She's not really from Egypt. She's an alien who came back with us when her planet was destroyed."

I swallowed, not sure what to think. This was extreme, but at the same time, it was still Daniel, and I knew him enough to know he was far from crazy. "No shit, huh?" It explained a lot about Sha're, anyway. "Aliens."

"It's the truth, Jack. I'm a space explorer." He gripped my hand, looking earnestly into my eyes. "And right now, I'm very interested in Uranus."

I stared at him for what had to be nearly a minute. Then the corner of Daniel's mouth turned up.

"You bastard." But I had to smile. Eventually.

Daniel threw himself on top of me, laughing until I kissed him and shut him up.

Afterwards, we were lying comfortably together, his head on my chest and my arm around his shoulders, Daniel still snickering occasionally and muttering: "Uranus" smugly, when I remembered the gift. "The sushi set."

Daniel raised his head. "I didn't expect you to say that."

"I brought you a present." I pushed him off me and went over to my bag, rummaging until I found the sushi set, complete with plastic chopsticks with little red tassels and a nice looking shiny black plate. I came back to the bed and presented it to Daniel, who blinked at it like I was offering him a pre-chewed sandwich or my spleen. "I know it's not much, but we didn't have a lot of turnaround time, and it was that or a Hello Kitty lunchbox…"

"It's great, Jack." Daniel grinned, like the present had changed into a pot of gold. "I love sushi."

"I remembered." He kept saying we should go to this place in Denver, but I wasn't quite ready to try it. I'm more of a KFC kind of guy.

"I got you something, too. Well, it's not really for you." He put the sushi set on the bedside table, next to the room service menu and the garish pink fake-marble lamp, and went to his suitcase. I lay back against the pillows, fighting against a sudden wave of exhaustion. I opened my eyes when I felt the bed dip beside me, and Daniel thrust a baseball in a clear plastic cube into my hand. The ball was covered in black squiggles, and according to the little plate at the bottom of the box, it had been autographed by all of the 2003 New York Yankees.

"Sha're's husband's a big Yankees fan, so we went shopping earlier. I remembered you saying Charlie likes baseball, so I thought you could give him that when he gets home." I looked at Daniel, who reddened a little and looked away.

"This is great."

Charlie was going to love it, and for once, it would put me ahead of Sara and her cop husband Pete in the "parent with the best partner" stakes, but even I could see that wasn't what this was really about. Like everyone else, Daniel was telling me Charlie was going to be OK. Unlike with everyone else, I actually came close to believing him.

I set the baseball next to the sushi set and kissed Daniel, twisting my fingers with his and putting my leg over his thighs. I was done for, but I could feel Little—or not-so-little, depending on how you looked at it—Daniel getting interested again when Daniel said: "I know what happened to you. In Iraq."

Way to kill a mood, Daniel. I pulled away a little. "How do you know that?"

"I looked it up."

"My records are classified." Although I didn't think for a minute that would stop Daniel, or even slow him down much.

"Well, I don't have details," Obviously. "But there was an article in the paper when the army rescued you from the prison. All it took was a whole lot of scrolling through microfiche."

"Sounds like fun."

"That's what grad students are for. Just kidding," he added, when I looked at him. He put a hand up to my shoulder, squeezing a little. "I can't imagine what it must have been like."

I rolled onto my back, staring at the white stuccoed ceiling and the small brown stain I didn't want to speculate about. "That's good." I never wanted anyone to go through what I'd gone through in Iraq. And now there were hundreds of kids going through it every day, kids just like Charlie, and hundreds of families just like Sara and I were suffering again. "It sucks that nothing changes, you know?" I said, without actually expecting Daniel to understand. "What the hell did I do it for if it was just going to happen all over again?"

"I can't answer that," Daniel said, which was better than the usual: "It's noble to sacrifice yourself for your country" shit I got from people. Maybe it is, but I didn't sacrifice myself. I sacrificed my health, my dignity, my marriage and my air force career, and now I was sacrificing my only son.

"It's Sara I feel really bad for." It's harder to be the one at home, something I'd never really got until Charlie left. "She's done it twice."

"She has to be a strong woman," Daniel said. "She was married to you."

When I first saw Daniel in that coffee shop in Denver, frowning peevishly and trying to brush brownie crumbs out of his textbook, I thought he looked like a guy I'd like to meet. I never thought he'd be The Guy, with capitals. But right now, in a lumpy bed in a mid-level hotel room with weird ceiling stains, a baseball and a pair of chopsticks on the bedside table, he was looking pretty capital-worthy.

"Tell you what," I said, finally, as Daniel looked at me. "When Charlie gets home, you can give him the baseball yourself." Maybe Daniel could even talk Charlie into enrolling at the University of Colorado. I wouldn't care if Charlie majored in communications. And he could date all the eyebrow-pierced women, or men, he wanted if it kept him here at home.

"I'd like that, Jack," Daniel said, simply. Then he smiled again, kissed me once, and turned out the light.

As I settled down to sleep, I felt Daniel's arms come around me, his head resting on my shoulder. Within minutes, his breathing slowed and he was snoring slightly, his breath puffing over my bare skin.

And I'd never been so glad I'd asked to borrow a guy's newspaper.