Nodding, Elizabeth turned off the bug killer and replaced it in her bag as she hooked the long leather strap over her shoulder. �I should get going anyway. I�ve got meetings all day tomorrow, but maybe we could have dinner? Talk some more?� she suggested.
�Uh� tomorrow�s no good for me. Overnight shift at the hospital,� Simon said, the lie coming easily to him. He knew he couldn�t very well cancel on Ava with no notice and no excuse�telling her that he was cancelling their plans to have dinner with the woman he�d never technically broken up with was less of an option than telling Elizabeth that there was an Ava�and he had used the �overnight shift� excuse with Elizabeth before with one hundred percent success so he wasn�t worried about her finding anything odd in his statement. The fact that he no longer even worked at a hospital wasn�t necessary to mention, either. �The day after tomorrow?� he countered.
�Sounds good. I�ll call sometime during the afternoon to set up a time,� Elizabeth said as she gathered up her coat and stuffed her feet back into her shoes, not bothering to tie the laces. As much as she had been looking forward to seeing Simon again the fact of the matter was that being in her house when nothing in the house was hers anymore except for Sedge and Simon was cool and aloof and she didn�t know how to act around him anymore was thoroughly uncomfortable and she wanted more than anything to escape as fast as possible. Giving Sedge a lingering scratch behind her ears and wishing she could bring the dog with her back to the SGC�if her outfit had caused raised eyebrows earlier she could just imagine what the reaction would be if she walked in with Sedge beside her�Elizabeth said a quick goodbye to Simon before slipping out through the front door and making a beeline for the SGC car.
It wasn�t until she was halfway back to the SGC that she started to relax again.
Even if Simon hadn�t given her any indication of how he felt about what she was doing or whether or not he intended to seek a position on Atlantis, the simple fact that she had gotten everything out in the open was more liberating than Elizabeth had expected it to be. On Atlantis she rarely had to worry about what was classified and what wasn�t, rarely had to watch what she said lest she betray one of the billion state and global secrets she knew. On earth, however, there were limited places where she could actually let her guard down and talk about her experiences, and even then she never relaxed completely, knowing that some things needed to be played down or given the right amount of spin so that events were seen the way she needed them to be seen.
As she was leaving Colorado Springs proper she realized that she hadn�t told Simon not to mention her return to her mother, should he speak to her before they saw each other again.
Telling Simon as much of the whole truth as possible was one thing.
Seeing her mother and telling her a complete lie was something else entirely.
�Crap,� she said aloud, knowing there was little, if anything, she could do to avoid incurring the wrath of Mama Weir. Being the one to share the news of her return�from where Elizabeth still hadn�t worked out�with her mother was one of the only things that she could think of that would help lessen the impact of the fact that she had been completely incommunicado since the day before her meeting with President Hayes.
Pressing her foot down on the accelerator Elizabeth pushed past the speed limit, not particularly caring whether or not she got a ticket. The only way she would stop torturing herself with thoughts of what Simon was going to do or what her mother would say when she finally found the courage to contact her or any number of other things that were spinning around in her mind on a never ending roller coaster loop would be to take the sleeping pills Carson had prescribed to her, crawl into her SGC-issue �VIP� room bed, and sleep for as many hours as possible before her first meeting the next morning.
Since landing at Nellis and being assigned quarters John had felt many things. Most of them were frustration-related�he�d never been good at sitting around doing nothing, which was basically what he�d done since arrival�but there was one feeling he wasn�t entirely used to, and it took him a little while to figure out what it was. He finally did, though.
He was lonely.
All his life he�d been surrounded by people�his sisters, his mom before she died, his dad before he put as much distance between himself and the older man as possible, Samantha and her family and their friends from the Academy, friends he�d made at school or specific duty stations�but other than Samantha he�d never really had any people in his life who were constant, whether by presence or thought, because he had thought about Samantha all the time (wondering where she was, if she was still with the Air Force, if she had a giant brood of kids, if she had discovered some amazing science thing that he would probably have no hope of ever understanding) during the years where they hadn�t seen each other and had lost touch. Sure, there were usually hundreds of people on any base he was stationed on�he hadn�t had an off-base home since the summers between years at the Academy, when he�d lived with Sam and they�d done the college thing�and even when he was in Afghanistan he�d been stationed on a pretty huge base before being sent out on a series of