Fic: "Understanding"
Title: Understanding
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Warning: Angst, angst, and more angst
Summary: AU: Sun deals with losing Jin as Sawyer recuperates.
Note: Out of the blue, I got the inspiration for a possible slow-building Sawyer/Sun pairing, of which this might or might not serve as the beginning. Sadly enough, it means I have to pretend Jin did not survive the raft ordeal. (I’m not about havin’ Sawyer steal Jin’s woman, and Sun’s brokenness might be the only catalyst for Sawyer’s being a decent human being.) Spoilers to present (2.9).
Understanding
Sun stepped gingerly into the hatch, a little unnerved by it, as always. It was unnatural. Some things just don’t make sense, and having a storeroom of food, a shower, and computers on this island-and after a month of roughing it-just seemed wrong somehow.
Her first order of business was to take a shower. If she was going to be inside, she thought she should be clean, not sticky with sweat. She also wanted to be clean because she was helping take care of Sawyer, who was still burning and shivering through an infection. She had carried fresh clothes with her, and she stripped off the old, folding them for no good reason, before climbing into the shower. It was only there that she would let herself cry over Jin.
The worst of it, what she kept coming back to, was that they had shared only a short moment of reconciliation, not saying everything they needed to say, before he set off on a fool’s errand. Or maybe the worst of it was that she still held onto anger like a tight fist in her heart. He didn’t have to go. None of them did, but his going was the only one that mattered to her. Michael and Sawyer seemed to have reasons (though they’d gotten nothing good from their plans), but they didn’t make her angry enough -- and partially at herself for even being angry -- that she stood under the hot water and cried until it ran out.
She was sure Sawyer knew.
For the past three days, she had come in the afternoon for a couple of hours when Kate and Jack could be pried away from his bedside. She wasn’t sure which one of them had been more glad to see Sawyer and more desperate to hide that fact. It would have made her smile, but nothing much could make her smile right now, especially Sawyer. He was in such bad shape, and they couldn’t do anything but wait.
It was hard when he was talking, because sometimes he sounded so weak and hurt and other times it sounded like it was all he could do not to scream. In some ways, she preferred him asleep. He looked like a more reasonable man then. But he was more often than not awake, making small talk just to stay sane. He teased her sometimes, but then unexpectedly his concern for her would almost knock her down, concentrated as it was in just a few words wrung from the mouth of a man unused to concern, a man who was also in pain. For long moments, deep into the afternoon, it was like their pain melded together almost, and he was speaking her sadness and she was looking at him with his fear.
He asked her if she was feeling all right the day before. She said yes. He told her that her eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy; had she been crying? She merely nodded, and he said nothing. She wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t care or didn’t know what to say until he mumbled, sometime later, half out of it, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, Sawyer?” she asked, rising from her chair and bending over him.
She thought he replied, “Cry. Don’t.”
*****
After she got out of the shower, she towel dried her hair and put on her change of clothes, feeling both heavy and hollow, not even noticing the clean, really. Jack was asleep in the chair across from Sawyer’s bed, and Sawyer was fitfully sleeping himself. She had brought a bowl of cool water and a clean cloth, and she set them down on the table by the door.
“Jack,” she said, shaking him gently by the shoulder.
He always startled when he was awakened, but he settled down when he saw her there, when his eyes focused on her face and the look of restfulness was replaced by his worried grimace. “What’s going on?”
“Time for a break.”
Slowly, stretching his limbs and pulling himself into a standing position, he said, “Let me check him.”
This was always the routine, the reminders to check his temperature, his pulse, to not let him touch the wound. She might have resented the repetition if she could resent anything right now, if she weren’t floating above her life, trying not to touch it lest she be sucked in. She had seen Sayid since the funeral, and he looked the same: shell-shocked, too hurt to let anything in anymore, determined not to fall into ungatherable pieces. They hadn’t spoken, except once, and they’d simply told each other they were sorry. That was all that needed to be said. Sun felt a well of anger and sadness push up against her heart for a moment when she thought of Shannon - another person whose life was destroyed by the island. The girl had been beautiful and stubborn, much like Jin, but she was essentially a good person, if she would let herself be. Quickly Sun recovered from that wave of pity, focusing on Jack’s hands moving over Sawyer, watching him duck out the door, finally. She breathed a small sigh of relief. Jack was too earnest.
“Sunshine,” Sawyer said, small and low. She hadn’t thought he was awake or that he knew she was there. His eyes were closed.
She was retrieving her bowl and cloth, steeling herself against his inevitable sympathy and shared pain. She decided to focus on his voice, its musicality so very unlike that of her own language, although she was rather fascinated by it. More than other English accents, this particular American version had a facility for changes in pitch and intonation that could tell a person volumes more than the words themselves said. So she let herself engage him in conversation. “How did you know I was here?”
“Could smell you.”
“That’s silly.”
“Maybe. Besides, it’s always you if it ain’t Freckles.”
“How can you be sure that it’s me and not her?”
“You always bring that bowl of water. Heard you set it down.”
She dunked the cloth in the water, wringing it out. “Do you look forward to me cleaning you like this?”
“Not as much as I would if I were well, Sunshine.” His flirtation, obvious as it was, felt heavy, cranked carefully through a mechanism of fakeness just as it was forced over tired vocal chords.
“Sun is not a…nickname for Sunshine.”
“I know. Do you think that’s gonna stop me?”
She sighed.
“If it bothers you…”
“No. It’s fine.” In some small way, it really was fine.
*****
She always started with his feet. It was the quickest way to cool him. She lifted his left heel and ran the cloth over his arch, scrubbed between his toes.
“I doubt you’ll find any dirt there, Sunshine. You did the feet yesterday.”
“Do you dislike me doing this?”
“No.” After a moment: “Yes. I don’t like anybody having to wait on me hand and…well, foot.”
“I don’t mind.”
“That’s what I don’t like. People taking pity on me.”
“It’s not pity.”
“No?”
“I like doing this. It makes me feel useful.”
“Okay.”
He was silent for a time, not exactly sleeping but definitely lost in his own world as he typically was when she was washing him like this. He didn’t seem to mind having someone’s hands working on him; he even accepted Jack’s touches now without flinching. Since he wasn’t offering her conversation, she focused on his body. She had to admit, if she was attracted to American men-or if she was attracted to self-absorbed assholes-Sawyer would have been at the top of her list. If she could separate personality from body, Korean from desire, he would be quite desirable. He had a lean figure with a golden tan, a few shades off the tone of her own skin. As she moved up from his ankles to his knees to his thighs, right to them hem of his boxer-briefs, she noticed the strength in his legs, even while he was far from strong. However, she liked his stomach the best. It wasn’t as taut as his legs, but it was covered in a light down of hair, and he had the slightest of love handles that peeked over the top of his underwear. She always washed his chest quickly, for fear of getting mired there, as much for aesthetic pleasure as anything sexual. He was just a beautiful specimen. Especially his eyes: that sea-colored blue so unlike anyone’s she was used to, so unlike Jin’s.
She ran cloth over his collarbone, moving toward his bad arm carefully. It was nice to be standing over him and breathing in his smell, trying to anchor herself in him, in his needs, in his so very foreign flesh, trying to banish thoughts of Jin for five minutes, 108 minutes, however long she could. Then his eyes popped open.
“Sun, could you wash my back, you think?”
“Jack said not to move you.”
“Jack worries too much.”
“How would we…?”
Before she could protest, he was rolling toward her, over onto his good side, and she saw that she would have to climb onto the bed and crawl behind him to do what he asked.
“You are a pain in the ass,” she said as she did so.
He chuckled weakly. “Somebody’s been teaching you to say bad things about me.”
“Bad or true?”
He hissed in reply, feeling the cold rag touch his tower back. “Thanks, Sunshine.”
“You’re welcome. How does that feel?”
“Really nice.”
“How do you feel?”
“Still got a bullet hole in me.”
“Do you think you’re getting better?”
“Don’t know. Don’t I sound better?”
“Yesterday you were mumbling a lot. You seem…to understand better today. What’s the word? Coher…?”
“Coherent. Yeah. If ‘coherent’ means my arm hurts like hell, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish everybody would stop telling me how sorry they are, like they put me on the doom ship and shot me full of holes.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stopped her hand at her unconscious repetition, but he just chuckled. “How did I end up with you as my nurse?”
Continuing up his back, she said, “A lot of people care, but they are too scared to come down here.”
“Why?”
“They have enough bad things to deal with. They don’t want to be faced with more.”
“But that’s exactly why you come down here, isn’t it?”
Sun stopped moving, and she was suddenly backing her way down the length of the bed and lowering herself back onto the floor.
He coughed and said, “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“It’s true, though.” She sat down in the chair, her heart suddenly trying to thump out of her chest. She breathed and told herself that she would not start to feel, and she certainly wouldn’t cry.
“How long were you married?”
“Five years.”
“It’s hard to deal with all of them, isn’t it?”
“All of who?”
“Nice people. They don’t know what to say. They wanna help, but they’re fucking clueless.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You do. That’s why you’re here with me. I’m too sick to bother you.”
“But you do.” The words came out before she thought about them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and she saw that he had his eyes open and he was looking intently at her. “I didn’t mean…”
“No. It’s just…”
“My parents died,” he said quietly, after she didn’t finish her words.
“When?”
“I was a kid. People kept telling me how sorry they were. But nobody’s sympathy helps anything. It just brings up pain. Of course, then sometimes you want pain because you want something, anything.”
“Sawyer…”
“You don’t have to say anything, Sun. You can do whatever you want down here, even if you want to make yourself more miserable. I won’t stop you, judge you, or tell anybody.”
Sun couldn’t find the words to respond, and Sawyer didn’t speak. When she looked up again a minute or two later, his eyes were closed again. She started to walk out of the room, to get some air for a minute, but he mumbled, “That’s what he did.”
“What?”
“Jin. That’s why he was…”
“What?”
“Pain. That’s why he left.”
Suddenly, the room felt like it was suffocating her, so she left him there, vowing to return when she next heard the alarm sound, which gave her maybe thirty minutes alone.
*****
Sun stepped into the light, and she found that she had been cold, somehow, until she went back into the jungle. Sitting down on the ground, she ran a hand through her hair and found that it was finally dry. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t particularly want to eat.
“I am falling apart,” she said, and she realized that she was speaking English without thinking. That’s how much her life had changed. Now that Jin was gone, it was almost like she couldn’t remember how to speak Korean, and, anyway, she would now have no reason to. Tears stung at her eyes, and she stood up, making her hands into fists, her face into stone, her soul into something weightless and untouched by the earth.
Reluctantly, or maybe with a morbid eagerness, she went back inside.
*****
Sawyer was awake when she returned.
“I’m sorry,” she said, coming to his side and leaning over him to feel his forehead. A fever raged, and it was worse than before.
“It’s okay. But I think it’s time for my medicine.” His voice came out dry and quiet.
She looked at the watch that sat on the table. Carefully counting out the antibiotics and pain pills, she carried them over to him with a glass of water. “I’m sorry.”
After he swallowed them down, he said, “What you got to be sorry for?”
“I left you.”
“Sunshine, you’ve done been gone.”
“Sawyer?”
He giggled to himself, coughing. Then: “I think your sponge bath gave me a chill.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grabbed her by the arm, and his grip was surprisingly strong. “Stop that. You know it’s not your fault. Don’t you stop coming to take care of me just because I don’t think before I talk.”
“Okay.”
*****
He must have been quite cold, because he was starting to shake and he used all his energy to calm himself, though nothing really worked. Sun piled on two blankets, but the shaking continued.
“Do you want me to get Jack?”
“No. We don’t need that clingy bastard down here.” A shudder went through his body. “It’s just…the pills wearing off. I’ll be okay.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“Neither do you. You look like hell,” he said forcefully.
Not letting his comment register, she said, “We have to get you warm.”
“I’m fine. Just give it ten minutes.”
In the next few minutes, he didn’t speak, and she was sure he was asleep a couple of times until he let a frustrated groan slip out as a shudder wracked his body. She hovered over him, and he was struggling, eyes closed, fighting against it, almost like he were drowning. Without much thought to why she was doing it, because she was hardly thinking anymore about reasons and feelings, she pulled back the covers and climbed up onto the bed. Sawyer’s eyes flew open as she lay down half on top of him, one leg slung over his hips and her stomach pressed to the side of his chest. She hooked her right arm over his other side and settled her head on his chest, determined to stop the shaking in his body. Though he was trembling, he felt almost too warm.
“What the hell…?”
“Does this help?”
He didn’t answer right away, because he was still struggling against her, and she wasn’t sure if it was the fever or some gut reaction to the increase in intimacy. After a minute or two, his tremors slowed, only wracking him sporadically. She was holding him tightly, sinking into the skin that she had been poring over, examining and cleaning, and it was somehow different from looking and touching. It was being near someone in a powerful way, feeling their body fit against yours.
“Are you warmer?” she said.
“Yeah.” His voice was strained; tired, but grateful.
Then she felt him shift, do his best to make her raise up, and she quickly understood why when she felt his erection poke at her thigh. It should have shocked her, but it didn’t, nor did it bother her.
“Shit,” he mumbled.
“It’s okay.”
“Shit.” He was still trying to force her off him and off the bed.
“Stop it.”
“I didn’t mean…”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “You have to stop apologizing for things I already understand.”
“It’s not that-“
“I don’t care. You have to let me help you.”
Sawyer sighed, shifted again, but it was of no avail. To keep her there, he would have to suffer letting her feel his erection pressing into her thigh. Sun was amazed at her own reaction to things, how she was neither disturbed nor disgusted nor turned on. His body’s response was just proof of something, proof maybe that Sawyer was still Sawyer. She felt for a moment embarrassed for having climbed on top of him, having caused it, but she wasn’t sorry and she wasn’t about to move. This was the most good she’d done for days; this was the most she’d touched anybody since Jin left her, long before he left on the raft.
She lay there listening to his heart pounding as though it were trying to break out of his chest, like he was trying and failing to leave his uncooperative body behind. She also realized it was more than possible she felt her own heart beating, too, because she was starting to feel like she was coming back into her own body again. You couldn’t be this close to someone and be that far away from yourself. She lay very still, not moving even her fingers for fear of sinking deeper into his body. Then Sawyer circled his good arm around her waist, and she felt something break inside her. Every smile from the other people on the island told her of the smiles she would never see again, and now this man who was not her husband, who was so far from the kind of man Jin was-this man was holding her and being touched by her and wanting her, in his own unconscious way; and she was touching him and letting him hold her and finding it impossible to forget that she would never feel anything like what she had before. This was a reminder, but it was a shadow. She felt the pain return in a flood, or perhaps it was just a part of her returning, washing into her so fast that it hurt her to breathe.
This time, she let him see her cry, and he must have known that maybe she needed to stay there in his arms, even if it hurt like hell, because something about it made a strange kind of sense. So he smoothed his hand over her back and didn’t say a word.
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Warning: Angst, angst, and more angst
Summary: AU: Sun deals with losing Jin as Sawyer recuperates.
Note: Out of the blue, I got the inspiration for a possible slow-building Sawyer/Sun pairing, of which this might or might not serve as the beginning. Sadly enough, it means I have to pretend Jin did not survive the raft ordeal. (I’m not about havin’ Sawyer steal Jin’s woman, and Sun’s brokenness might be the only catalyst for Sawyer’s being a decent human being.) Spoilers to present (2.9).
Understanding
Sun stepped gingerly into the hatch, a little unnerved by it, as always. It was unnatural. Some things just don’t make sense, and having a storeroom of food, a shower, and computers on this island-and after a month of roughing it-just seemed wrong somehow.
Her first order of business was to take a shower. If she was going to be inside, she thought she should be clean, not sticky with sweat. She also wanted to be clean because she was helping take care of Sawyer, who was still burning and shivering through an infection. She had carried fresh clothes with her, and she stripped off the old, folding them for no good reason, before climbing into the shower. It was only there that she would let herself cry over Jin.
The worst of it, what she kept coming back to, was that they had shared only a short moment of reconciliation, not saying everything they needed to say, before he set off on a fool’s errand. Or maybe the worst of it was that she still held onto anger like a tight fist in her heart. He didn’t have to go. None of them did, but his going was the only one that mattered to her. Michael and Sawyer seemed to have reasons (though they’d gotten nothing good from their plans), but they didn’t make her angry enough -- and partially at herself for even being angry -- that she stood under the hot water and cried until it ran out.
She was sure Sawyer knew.
For the past three days, she had come in the afternoon for a couple of hours when Kate and Jack could be pried away from his bedside. She wasn’t sure which one of them had been more glad to see Sawyer and more desperate to hide that fact. It would have made her smile, but nothing much could make her smile right now, especially Sawyer. He was in such bad shape, and they couldn’t do anything but wait.
It was hard when he was talking, because sometimes he sounded so weak and hurt and other times it sounded like it was all he could do not to scream. In some ways, she preferred him asleep. He looked like a more reasonable man then. But he was more often than not awake, making small talk just to stay sane. He teased her sometimes, but then unexpectedly his concern for her would almost knock her down, concentrated as it was in just a few words wrung from the mouth of a man unused to concern, a man who was also in pain. For long moments, deep into the afternoon, it was like their pain melded together almost, and he was speaking her sadness and she was looking at him with his fear.
He asked her if she was feeling all right the day before. She said yes. He told her that her eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy; had she been crying? She merely nodded, and he said nothing. She wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t care or didn’t know what to say until he mumbled, sometime later, half out of it, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, Sawyer?” she asked, rising from her chair and bending over him.
She thought he replied, “Cry. Don’t.”
*****
After she got out of the shower, she towel dried her hair and put on her change of clothes, feeling both heavy and hollow, not even noticing the clean, really. Jack was asleep in the chair across from Sawyer’s bed, and Sawyer was fitfully sleeping himself. She had brought a bowl of cool water and a clean cloth, and she set them down on the table by the door.
“Jack,” she said, shaking him gently by the shoulder.
He always startled when he was awakened, but he settled down when he saw her there, when his eyes focused on her face and the look of restfulness was replaced by his worried grimace. “What’s going on?”
“Time for a break.”
Slowly, stretching his limbs and pulling himself into a standing position, he said, “Let me check him.”
This was always the routine, the reminders to check his temperature, his pulse, to not let him touch the wound. She might have resented the repetition if she could resent anything right now, if she weren’t floating above her life, trying not to touch it lest she be sucked in. She had seen Sayid since the funeral, and he looked the same: shell-shocked, too hurt to let anything in anymore, determined not to fall into ungatherable pieces. They hadn’t spoken, except once, and they’d simply told each other they were sorry. That was all that needed to be said. Sun felt a well of anger and sadness push up against her heart for a moment when she thought of Shannon - another person whose life was destroyed by the island. The girl had been beautiful and stubborn, much like Jin, but she was essentially a good person, if she would let herself be. Quickly Sun recovered from that wave of pity, focusing on Jack’s hands moving over Sawyer, watching him duck out the door, finally. She breathed a small sigh of relief. Jack was too earnest.
“Sunshine,” Sawyer said, small and low. She hadn’t thought he was awake or that he knew she was there. His eyes were closed.
She was retrieving her bowl and cloth, steeling herself against his inevitable sympathy and shared pain. She decided to focus on his voice, its musicality so very unlike that of her own language, although she was rather fascinated by it. More than other English accents, this particular American version had a facility for changes in pitch and intonation that could tell a person volumes more than the words themselves said. So she let herself engage him in conversation. “How did you know I was here?”
“Could smell you.”
“That’s silly.”
“Maybe. Besides, it’s always you if it ain’t Freckles.”
“How can you be sure that it’s me and not her?”
“You always bring that bowl of water. Heard you set it down.”
She dunked the cloth in the water, wringing it out. “Do you look forward to me cleaning you like this?”
“Not as much as I would if I were well, Sunshine.” His flirtation, obvious as it was, felt heavy, cranked carefully through a mechanism of fakeness just as it was forced over tired vocal chords.
“Sun is not a…nickname for Sunshine.”
“I know. Do you think that’s gonna stop me?”
She sighed.
“If it bothers you…”
“No. It’s fine.” In some small way, it really was fine.
*****
She always started with his feet. It was the quickest way to cool him. She lifted his left heel and ran the cloth over his arch, scrubbed between his toes.
“I doubt you’ll find any dirt there, Sunshine. You did the feet yesterday.”
“Do you dislike me doing this?”
“No.” After a moment: “Yes. I don’t like anybody having to wait on me hand and…well, foot.”
“I don’t mind.”
“That’s what I don’t like. People taking pity on me.”
“It’s not pity.”
“No?”
“I like doing this. It makes me feel useful.”
“Okay.”
He was silent for a time, not exactly sleeping but definitely lost in his own world as he typically was when she was washing him like this. He didn’t seem to mind having someone’s hands working on him; he even accepted Jack’s touches now without flinching. Since he wasn’t offering her conversation, she focused on his body. She had to admit, if she was attracted to American men-or if she was attracted to self-absorbed assholes-Sawyer would have been at the top of her list. If she could separate personality from body, Korean from desire, he would be quite desirable. He had a lean figure with a golden tan, a few shades off the tone of her own skin. As she moved up from his ankles to his knees to his thighs, right to them hem of his boxer-briefs, she noticed the strength in his legs, even while he was far from strong. However, she liked his stomach the best. It wasn’t as taut as his legs, but it was covered in a light down of hair, and he had the slightest of love handles that peeked over the top of his underwear. She always washed his chest quickly, for fear of getting mired there, as much for aesthetic pleasure as anything sexual. He was just a beautiful specimen. Especially his eyes: that sea-colored blue so unlike anyone’s she was used to, so unlike Jin’s.
She ran cloth over his collarbone, moving toward his bad arm carefully. It was nice to be standing over him and breathing in his smell, trying to anchor herself in him, in his needs, in his so very foreign flesh, trying to banish thoughts of Jin for five minutes, 108 minutes, however long she could. Then his eyes popped open.
“Sun, could you wash my back, you think?”
“Jack said not to move you.”
“Jack worries too much.”
“How would we…?”
Before she could protest, he was rolling toward her, over onto his good side, and she saw that she would have to climb onto the bed and crawl behind him to do what he asked.
“You are a pain in the ass,” she said as she did so.
He chuckled weakly. “Somebody’s been teaching you to say bad things about me.”
“Bad or true?”
He hissed in reply, feeling the cold rag touch his tower back. “Thanks, Sunshine.”
“You’re welcome. How does that feel?”
“Really nice.”
“How do you feel?”
“Still got a bullet hole in me.”
“Do you think you’re getting better?”
“Don’t know. Don’t I sound better?”
“Yesterday you were mumbling a lot. You seem…to understand better today. What’s the word? Coher…?”
“Coherent. Yeah. If ‘coherent’ means my arm hurts like hell, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish everybody would stop telling me how sorry they are, like they put me on the doom ship and shot me full of holes.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stopped her hand at her unconscious repetition, but he just chuckled. “How did I end up with you as my nurse?”
Continuing up his back, she said, “A lot of people care, but they are too scared to come down here.”
“Why?”
“They have enough bad things to deal with. They don’t want to be faced with more.”
“But that’s exactly why you come down here, isn’t it?”
Sun stopped moving, and she was suddenly backing her way down the length of the bed and lowering herself back onto the floor.
He coughed and said, “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“It’s true, though.” She sat down in the chair, her heart suddenly trying to thump out of her chest. She breathed and told herself that she would not start to feel, and she certainly wouldn’t cry.
“How long were you married?”
“Five years.”
“It’s hard to deal with all of them, isn’t it?”
“All of who?”
“Nice people. They don’t know what to say. They wanna help, but they’re fucking clueless.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You do. That’s why you’re here with me. I’m too sick to bother you.”
“But you do.” The words came out before she thought about them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and she saw that he had his eyes open and he was looking intently at her. “I didn’t mean…”
“No. It’s just…”
“My parents died,” he said quietly, after she didn’t finish her words.
“When?”
“I was a kid. People kept telling me how sorry they were. But nobody’s sympathy helps anything. It just brings up pain. Of course, then sometimes you want pain because you want something, anything.”
“Sawyer…”
“You don’t have to say anything, Sun. You can do whatever you want down here, even if you want to make yourself more miserable. I won’t stop you, judge you, or tell anybody.”
Sun couldn’t find the words to respond, and Sawyer didn’t speak. When she looked up again a minute or two later, his eyes were closed again. She started to walk out of the room, to get some air for a minute, but he mumbled, “That’s what he did.”
“What?”
“Jin. That’s why he was…”
“What?”
“Pain. That’s why he left.”
Suddenly, the room felt like it was suffocating her, so she left him there, vowing to return when she next heard the alarm sound, which gave her maybe thirty minutes alone.
*****
Sun stepped into the light, and she found that she had been cold, somehow, until she went back into the jungle. Sitting down on the ground, she ran a hand through her hair and found that it was finally dry. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t particularly want to eat.
“I am falling apart,” she said, and she realized that she was speaking English without thinking. That’s how much her life had changed. Now that Jin was gone, it was almost like she couldn’t remember how to speak Korean, and, anyway, she would now have no reason to. Tears stung at her eyes, and she stood up, making her hands into fists, her face into stone, her soul into something weightless and untouched by the earth.
Reluctantly, or maybe with a morbid eagerness, she went back inside.
*****
Sawyer was awake when she returned.
“I’m sorry,” she said, coming to his side and leaning over him to feel his forehead. A fever raged, and it was worse than before.
“It’s okay. But I think it’s time for my medicine.” His voice came out dry and quiet.
She looked at the watch that sat on the table. Carefully counting out the antibiotics and pain pills, she carried them over to him with a glass of water. “I’m sorry.”
After he swallowed them down, he said, “What you got to be sorry for?”
“I left you.”
“Sunshine, you’ve done been gone.”
“Sawyer?”
He giggled to himself, coughing. Then: “I think your sponge bath gave me a chill.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grabbed her by the arm, and his grip was surprisingly strong. “Stop that. You know it’s not your fault. Don’t you stop coming to take care of me just because I don’t think before I talk.”
“Okay.”
*****
He must have been quite cold, because he was starting to shake and he used all his energy to calm himself, though nothing really worked. Sun piled on two blankets, but the shaking continued.
“Do you want me to get Jack?”
“No. We don’t need that clingy bastard down here.” A shudder went through his body. “It’s just…the pills wearing off. I’ll be okay.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“Neither do you. You look like hell,” he said forcefully.
Not letting his comment register, she said, “We have to get you warm.”
“I’m fine. Just give it ten minutes.”
In the next few minutes, he didn’t speak, and she was sure he was asleep a couple of times until he let a frustrated groan slip out as a shudder wracked his body. She hovered over him, and he was struggling, eyes closed, fighting against it, almost like he were drowning. Without much thought to why she was doing it, because she was hardly thinking anymore about reasons and feelings, she pulled back the covers and climbed up onto the bed. Sawyer’s eyes flew open as she lay down half on top of him, one leg slung over his hips and her stomach pressed to the side of his chest. She hooked her right arm over his other side and settled her head on his chest, determined to stop the shaking in his body. Though he was trembling, he felt almost too warm.
“What the hell…?”
“Does this help?”
He didn’t answer right away, because he was still struggling against her, and she wasn’t sure if it was the fever or some gut reaction to the increase in intimacy. After a minute or two, his tremors slowed, only wracking him sporadically. She was holding him tightly, sinking into the skin that she had been poring over, examining and cleaning, and it was somehow different from looking and touching. It was being near someone in a powerful way, feeling their body fit against yours.
“Are you warmer?” she said.
“Yeah.” His voice was strained; tired, but grateful.
Then she felt him shift, do his best to make her raise up, and she quickly understood why when she felt his erection poke at her thigh. It should have shocked her, but it didn’t, nor did it bother her.
“Shit,” he mumbled.
“It’s okay.”
“Shit.” He was still trying to force her off him and off the bed.
“Stop it.”
“I didn’t mean…”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “You have to stop apologizing for things I already understand.”
“It’s not that-“
“I don’t care. You have to let me help you.”
Sawyer sighed, shifted again, but it was of no avail. To keep her there, he would have to suffer letting her feel his erection pressing into her thigh. Sun was amazed at her own reaction to things, how she was neither disturbed nor disgusted nor turned on. His body’s response was just proof of something, proof maybe that Sawyer was still Sawyer. She felt for a moment embarrassed for having climbed on top of him, having caused it, but she wasn’t sorry and she wasn’t about to move. This was the most good she’d done for days; this was the most she’d touched anybody since Jin left her, long before he left on the raft.
She lay there listening to his heart pounding as though it were trying to break out of his chest, like he was trying and failing to leave his uncooperative body behind. She also realized it was more than possible she felt her own heart beating, too, because she was starting to feel like she was coming back into her own body again. You couldn’t be this close to someone and be that far away from yourself. She lay very still, not moving even her fingers for fear of sinking deeper into his body. Then Sawyer circled his good arm around her waist, and she felt something break inside her. Every smile from the other people on the island told her of the smiles she would never see again, and now this man who was not her husband, who was so far from the kind of man Jin was-this man was holding her and being touched by her and wanting her, in his own unconscious way; and she was touching him and letting him hold her and finding it impossible to forget that she would never feel anything like what she had before. This was a reminder, but it was a shadow. She felt the pain return in a flood, or perhaps it was just a part of her returning, washing into her so fast that it hurt her to breathe.
This time, she let him see her cry, and he must have known that maybe she needed to stay there in his arms, even if it hurt like hell, because something about it made a strange kind of sense. So he smoothed his hand over her back and didn’t say a word.