fic: Sometimes you wanna go [Sam/Diane] 3/3

[i am sab]

Sometimes you wanna go
by Sab
3/3

She leaves in the morning with long, languorous kisses that make Sam squirm and a promise to meet him at the temple at four thirty. He takes Duke for a walk and somehow the biting cold doesn't bother his joints so much, and though his muscles ache like hell from last night's workout he'd swear he hasn't felt this good in thirty years.

He spends an hour dressing and setting his hair, and Duke watches with his head cocked, but in the end, both Duke and Sam are pleased with the reflection in the mirror. "Got some years on me, but I'm still arm candy," Sam says. He takes a cab to the temple, gets there a half hour early and sits at the stone picnic tables with Rita while the caterers file a steady procession through the back doors into the reception hall.

At four thirty the doors open, and Sam hasn't seen Sarah yet.

"She's with her sister," Rita says, by which she means her daughter from her second marriage, Lauren, whom Sam hasn't met. He frowns. "She's getting ready for the most important day of her life, Sam!" Rita says.

"I know," says Sam, and the truth is he wants to see Sarah before the wedding because he knows it'll soften the blow, like he knows that seeing her in that white dress walking down the aisle will give him a heart attack. He sighs.

At five o'clock the wedding starts, and Diane hasn't come. Sam waits outside until the usher tells him they're shutting the doors, and then, hands frozen from the dusk chill, he shuffles to his seat just as the rabbi begins.

Sarah is a vision, and though she doesn't kill him his heart swells in his chest so big he imagines he can feel it stretching out his ribs to the breaking point.

After the wedding, she runs to him and hugs him before he can run to her and do the same, and when she pulls away he's got tears in his eyes.

He scans the crowd for Diane, as if somehow she might have come in unannounced, but of course she's nowhere, and eventually dinner's served, and everyone drinks champagne but Sam. Sarah's father-in-law takes her out on the dance floor, and Sammy fades into obscurity and goes home before midnight, with a peck on the cheek to Rita and an entreaty for Sarah to call him after her honeymoon.

No messages from Diane on his home machine or his cell. He undresses carelessly, tossing his suit on the chair beside his bed and then slumping down, dejected, in his boxers.

The doorbell rings, and he pulls on a pair of pajama pants and stumbles to the answer it.




"I don't do weddings," she says, at his kitchen table. He pours her some coffee. Sam hasn't said a word since Diane came in, and she hasn't stopped talking.

"-- of course, I'm humiliated, I've humiliated myself, I've humiliated you in front of your family --"

"No one expected you to come," Sam says, taking a sip of coffee.

She takes a drink of her own. "It's weddings," she says. "Something about them, the impermeability, the...bondage!"

"Bondage could be hot," Sam puts in.

"Not when the bonds are those of holy matrimony, Sam," Diane sneers. "As I recall you prefer a leather belt, is that correct?"

He resists the urge to slap her.

She goes on. "Anyway, they frighten me. Weddings frighten me. They frightened me back when I was engaged to marry Sumner, and they have frightened me every day since, including ours, Sam."

"Yes, our wedding was terrifying," Sam agrees.

"I don't do weddings," she shrugs.

He sits down and sips his coffee. It's midnight the night of his daughter's wedding and here he is, taking care of a spooked chick. Spooked Diane Chambers chick, of course, and that almost makes it weirder. The ghosts of his past, very literally, coordinating to torment him.

"So what about your wedding with Luc? You went through with that one, didn't you?"

Diane stirs her coffee, smoothly with a practiced spoon. Then she stops and checks her watch. "Yeah. Yesterday afternoon, France time. I, erh, wasn't there. Out of town, you see."

"Out of town," Sam raises an eyebrow.

"Quite a ways out of town."

"You walked out on your own --" Sam's getting it now. "You walked out on another of your own -- on the third of your own weddings? Diane, you need professional help, and I mean seriously, and I mean fast."

Diane is smiling, and she puts up a hand. "I don't do weddings," she says, "and the truth is, neither do you. Domestic bliss was never our destiny."

Sam can't disagree.

"I don't do weddings," she repeats, leaning up toward him. "But I do do Sam Malone. In fact, Sam Malone seems to be the only thing I do well, and the only thing I'd like to spend the rest of my life doing. What say you, Sam Malone?"

Sam is quite literally floored, and he sinks fast into a chair at the kitchen table to catch up on all those words and all those times she said his name in that serious voice. It ends, he thinks, with a proposition, and he decides he needs more information. "Um," he says. "Whattaya mean, 'do'? I mean, I know what I mean when I say, 'do Sam Malone,' and usually it starts with 'that hottie over there really wants to -' But damned if I'm gonna presume to know what you meant. Yours probably has meditation."

Instead of launching into a speech on "oneness," Diane opens her purse and pulls out two airline envelopes, which she hands to him. First class seats to Italy, Rome then Venice. "I'm doing a unit there in the winter, next month, actually." Diane says. "I thought you might want to come join me. You'd love Venice. And after that it's back to Germany for the four-year fellowship, and after that -- wherever we want to go!"

Sam leaves the kitchen and goes and finds Duke in his bed in the corner of the livingroom. He lays himself down heavily beside the old dog and pats him on the shoulder. "Crazy broad wants me to go to Italy," he says. Duke whimpers. Sam stands up again.

"That's a heavy proposal," he says, going back into the kitchen. "I need time to think about it, how's that?"

Now Diane pulls herself up from her chair, with all the grace of a dancer, and cranes her neck up so he can kiss her. "Can we have sex while you think?" she asks, playfully, and Sam swoops her into his arms, damn the ache in his back, and carries her off to the bedroom.




Sarah and her husband take Duke when Rita calls. He's happy in the suburbs. Rebecca's firm buys out the bar, with Norm and Carla as major shareholders now. If he lives to be a hundred, Norm will own Cheers. Until then, Sam and Diane will be in Venice, where Diane will teach Sam the language, and where Sam will learn to love people who love food, and will even learn to cook. Later, in Germany, Sam will restore a vintage motorcycle, which will take him touring all through the mountains that surround the university town. He'll take a header which breaks his hip and his clavicle, and his motoring days will be over. Diane's heart murmur will worsen, but the doctors will say that it doesn't necessarily indicate problems. They will spend 2010 in Fiji, among the first to greet the new year. Their fighting will be heard even over the fireworks.




The End

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