Conversations About Kate (Sawyer/Juliet fic)
Title: Conversations About Kate
Author: domfangirl
Starring: Sawyer and Juliet
Category: One-shot (~4500 words)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is how Juliet learns everything about James, and why he falls in love with her.
Author’s Notes: Dialogue in the first section is from episode 5x04 The Little Prince. Everything else is mine. From the same universe as Unbroken.
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place
but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
~Dorothy Nevill
Resting against the outrigger, Juliet pants heavily while her mind twists around the small confidence James had given her earlier. It piqued her curiosity and something burned within her, a similar feeling, perhaps, to what she’d read in his face when he’d announced that he’d seen Kate in the jungle.
“We didn't get a chance to finish our conversation,” she says now, her lungs relaxing as she sits on the wet sand next to him.
His head turns towards her and he asks, “What conversation was that?”
Ah, so that’s how it would be. “The one before they started shooting at us. Where you were about to tell me how it felt to see Kate again.” She doesn’t say it as a question, or a prompting. She says it as fact, because that’s the only way to get anywhere with James Ford. When confronted with undeniable truth, he generally admits to it-or at least he doesn’t try to deny it.
He mutters lowly, “I wasn't about to tell you anything,” which they both know is a lie.
Juliet goes on as though he hadn’t denied it. “Why don't you tell me now?”
He pauses, and she wonders what it was that he saw exactly. What was Kate doing? Had she been with Jack? Imagining seeing Jack again herself-separating out the anger and hurt that has burned in the pit of her stomach since the last time she saw him, as he walked into the jungle with blood seeping from his incision-she realizes she doesn’t care. Jack’s focus had never been her, it had always been outside of her, just beyond her, and seeing him again wouldn’t change that. Her feelings for him were just that: hers, and hers alone.
“I was close enough to touch her. If I wanted to I could've stepped right up and talked to her.” The evident longing in his voice is touching, and Juliet can’t help but wonder if it is his, and his alone, as well.
“Why didn't you?” she asks aloud, because she knows why she wouldn’t have made the effort. Not with Jack anyway. If out of nowhere Rachel and Julian were to appear, now that would be a different story altogether.
“What's done is done,” James says, the finality in his voice two-fold. Juliet thinks better of taking him at his word-what one says and what one feels are two different things entirely, but she does agree on a certain level. It is done for her. She’s done. Done with all of this, and the minute she can get off this island, she will. She isn’t going to give Jack Shephard another thought.
*
"She's the only girl I've ever loved," he admits late one night. It had become a tradition-late in the evenings-they quietly read in the living room before retiring to their respective bedrooms.
Juliet enjoyed reading, but more often they ended up talking, and she found that she enjoyed that far more than reading.
James is odd, because he always just starts the conversation as though they are already engaged in it, and she has learned to react as though that is the case, because when she didn't he often lost his nerve and shut down his emotions as quickly as they arose. It had only taken a couple of such attempts on his part before she adapted to his style.
"How is that possible?" she asks, because she knows he is her same age, and she'd been in love several times throughout her life.
"I think it was the Island," he says, and obviously that's what he's been thinking about lately. How the Island had changed him. "I think before I came here I couldn't. It wasn't in me. There was this one girl-Cassidy. I liked her a whole hell of a lot. And she loved me, so I think part of me wanted to love her, because well, then I might've been worth somethin'..." He shakes his head as he trails off and that thought is abandoned. "But Kate seemed to see me for who I was right from the beginning. She saw who I was, and who I shoulda been, and she called me on it." He pauses. "I think I loved her for that. For not believing the bullshit."
Juliet smiles, and looks away from him to set her book open-faced on the coffee table. "That's an admirable quality, to be sure," she muses. She sees Jack in her mind's eye and she wonders if Kate ever called him on his bullshit too. Would have done him a world of good.
“She was the first person to care enough to see through it, I guess,” he says, his eyes shifting back to his book before looking off out the window into the darkness of Town Dharma. “It had to be the Island,” he says, and Juliet can tell the conversation has gone as far it will.
She stands up and stretches her arms over her head. “She won’t be the last one who cares, James,” she says. Turning she walks up the hall toward her bedroom. “Good night,” she calls softly.
“’Night, Juliet,” he responds.
*
“It was serious for me when I knew I would die for her. I woulda done anything to get her out of there, not to say I wasn’t trying to save my own skin too, you know. But some of the shit Ben pulled taught me just what I felt for her. Showed me that it was more.”
Juliet sips her Dharma beer and rolls her head to the left to look at him. They’re sitting on the living room sofa, their feet up on the coffee table, beers in their hands. It’s been a long, hot day, and this is their relaxation before they decide what to make for dinner. Things have changed enough between them now that she feels comfortable sharing too. “Ben’s tricks were generally some way to better himself, but every once in a while he did do something that helped other people.”
James tips his head towards her and gestures with his can. “What’d he ever do that helped you?”
“He foisted me on Jack because he thought I looked like Jack’s ex-wife.”
“No shit?” James asks, a small laugh escaping his lips. He ponders for a moment the implications of her statement, but then quickly moves on. “How’d that help you?”
“Jack reminded me that sacrifice can bring blessings. Seeing what he did for you and Kate-“
“He only did it for Kate,” James corrects softly.
“-Well, seeing what he did roused something deep down inside me, something that had died with the patients I lost, and Goodwin, and with the desperation of being trapped here. I would have done anything at that point to get off this godforsaken island, but that was the turning point. That was when things started to shift. I stopped thinking about myself only.”
As they gaze at each other, Juliet feels something else rouse within her-only this feeling is in the pit of her stomach, and it’s been coming with more frequency now that she and James have been growing closer over the course of months passing them by with no return trip from John Locke. James is the first to break the moment, his eyes shifting away as he lifts his beer to his lips. Swallowing loudly he nods his head. “Yep, that’s how it starts, all right. You stop thinking about yourself, and before you know it you jump off a helicopter, or you don’t get on a lifeboat, and bam! You’re stuck in the ‘70s and there ain’t any drugs to be found.”
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” Juliet says, and they both start to laugh.
They stop laughing when James says quietly, “It ain’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
*
“It was almost like she wanted to have a baby-which was fucking crazy, let me just say-and when I told her that, she got mad. I guess that was the beginning of the end and I just didn’t know it. When she left, I figured she’d be back, because I didn’t really think we’d get rescued.” He sighs as the memory lingers in the air between them. He looks at her suddenly and asks, “Why’d you let Jack loose in the jungle when he was all but bleeding to death?”
Juliet arches an eyebrow at him as she shakes out a bed sheet. “You think I had any say in what Jack did or didn’t do?”
He shrugs before reaching for another towel to fold. “I guess not, but he sure took to you in a way that scared the rest of us. You might remember me and Sayid trying to head you off at the pass that one time.”
Juliet held one end of the sheet with her lips as her fingers brought the other corners together; then she crossed her arms over her belly to drop the freshly laundered bedding down for the final fold. “Jack ‘took to me’ because Kate had taken to you. And he wanted to keep his thumb on me because he didn’t trust me entirely. Jack’s a little archaic, you know. He thought Kate was committed to you since she’d slept with you.”
James chuckles mirthlessly. “Kate couldn’t commit to nothing. That’s why she was on that side of the island, and then on this side of the island like a freaking ping-pong ball.”
“Oh, so the commitment issues were all Kate’s then?” Juliet asks slyly, dropping her eyes back to the laundry basket that they are drawing items from. When she looks up at him, his expression is slightly chagrined, but very thoughtful.
“I don’t guess so,” he says, leaving it at that.
*
The day Juliet comes home and finds him very drunk, she’s stayed much later at the motor pool than normal because one of the Dharma vans had caught on fire. It had taken quite a bit of effort to keep the whole vehicle from going up in flames, and her fear that that the fire in the engine would reach the gas tank had caused her to react with a combination of panic and calm that had somehow prevented a bigger accident. Her plans to animatedly re-enact the whole situation for James as they ate a late dinner went by the wayside when she finds him reclining on the bed in her bedroom with several empty beer cans around him.
“What’s up?” she asks him, wiping her greasy hands on her jeans.
He doesn’t seem all that surprised to see her; it’s as if he was waiting for her to come and ask him that very thing. “You know what today is, Jules?” he inquires with a slur.
“No, James, I don’t.” She’s unsure about the feelings rioting within her at finding him in her bedroom, even if he’s in less than good condition. It’s been there between them lately, the electric tug getting stronger every day, but she’s positive that pursuing it is a bad idea.
No matter how much she wants to.
“It’s been a year,” he says morosely. “Locke’s been gone a whole year.”
This news stuns Juliet; it doesn’t seem possible that that much time could have passed. As they’ve settled in with the D.I., as she’s grown more and more fond of James, as she’s finally come to enjoy her time on this Island, after such a long time of hating it, it seems unlikely that it could have been that long. If it had been a year, it made the three years before this one had seemed more like 100 years and this one a two-week vacation. “No,” she says, softly, rejecting the idea.
James swings his legs off the bed, sitting up so quickly he nearly topples right off on to the floor. “It’s true,” he says loudly, his arms scrambling to balance his imbibed body on its perch. Juliet can’t help but rush to his side in an effort to keep him upright. “It’s been a year, and you were right, John did what he said-he saved us-but he couldn’t bring her back.”
His voice cracks at the end of that and then his head is against her chest and her arms are around him somehow. He cries, tears actually seep through her work shirt and touch her skin. She pats his back with one hand while the other caresses his hair softly. “Shhhh,” she croons, putting her lips against the top of his head. “You’ll be all right, James,” she says.
A few minutes later, his body grows heavier and she realizes the alcohol has taken over completely. Knowing he must be seconds away from passing out, she pushes him back and helps him lie down again. She could probably wrestle him into his own room, and into his own bed, but maybe he shouldn’t sleep alone, at least not tonight.
Then she goes and showers the grime of the motor pool off of her before putting on a t-shirt and shorts-her normal sleeping attire since her roommate is a man she is not romantically involved with-and climbs into the double bed beside him. He snores lightly into the pillow next to her and she watches him for a few minutes before reaching up to switch off the bedside lamp. He’s still in his Dharma jumpsuit himself, his feet bare, but she knows he’ll be fine sleeping on top of the bedding. He generally slept with only a sheet because of the warm weather, something she had been acutely aware of as he didn’t tend to be as modest just because he cohabitated with a female roommate. He usually slept with his bedroom door open, and she’d just picked up certain things.
That’s how she knew it had been a year, because of how well she knew him now, because of all the details she had stored away about him. This was the first time she’d seen him drunk, ever. He enjoyed a nightly beer or two, but he’d never indulged himself this far before. In the darkness she reached over and placed her hand against his forehead, smoothing her palm up and into his soft hair.
She’d long imagined he regarded her the same way he would if he lived with Miles or Jin, except that every once in a while he got a look in his eyes that told her he knew she was neither Miles nor Jin. For the king of cons that he seemed to be, sometimes the naked emotion in his eyes was too much to take and Juliet had been running from it more frequently lately.
Of course it had been a year; but it would take at least that much longer for James to be anywhere near ready for what she now wanted, and that was being generous with the passage of time. Perhaps he’d never get over Kate, and perhaps he’d never act on the fledgling chemistry between them; but Juliet found that for all the times in her life when inaction had been her way, and the thing she hated most about herself, this time the waiting and the biding her time was the only way to handle the situation-yet she felt so impatient as the desire to do more than hold him against her as cried for his lost love flared within her.
She removes her hand from his head and turns her back to him. She lays that way for a few moments before giving up the fight. Rolling back on to her other side, she scoots closer, laying her head against his shoulder and placing her hand over his heart.
*
James Ford remembers the last time he awoke in a bed with a beautiful woman lying next to him, and the throbbing in his temples seems to bring it to his remembrance even more ferociously.
Sonofabitch! Had he slept with Juliet, and he didn’t even remember it? He really had changed.
She snuggled into his side, her breathing even and rhythmic, and with mild disappointment he reaches down with the arm she isn’t lying against and feels that his jumpsuit is still on his body.
So they might actually have slept together, but they really only slept. He’s glad there hadn’t been any sex.
Really, he is. If he can’t remember it, it isn’t worth it.
But, man, if they’d somehow breached that barrier without him actually having to do anything that would have been a relief. Sometimes when he looked at Juliet, he thought she was just going to pounce on him, and trust him, the idea was mighty appealing. She had something about her that set him at ease and fired him up all at once and he’d pondered that a bit while also imagining her naked.
He stretches, jostling her somewhat, and she makes a soft noise and slides off his shoulder, burrowing her face into the pillow. She doesn’t appear to wake up, however, leaving him alone a little while longer.
His mouth feels like a hay barn and his head is killing him, so he sits up slowly, and that’s when he sees all the beer cans. It starts coming back to him then, how crappy the day before had been, how he seemed to be only person other than Jin who realized how much time had gone by-though for Jin every day was one more day he was certain his wife and child were okay and alive somewhere in the future, somewhere far away from the Island.
“James?”
He looks back over his shoulder to see that her eyes are blinking sleepily as she gazes up at him. She sure is a beautiful woman, he thinks not for the first time, and even with no make-up and her hair kinda crazy, it’s all he can do not to just grab her.
Lucky for him he stinks to high heaven and he’s totally aware of it. How she slept next to him is beyond him. “Hey,” he responds, finding a casual smile to toss at her. “Thanks for the slumber party,” he says, getting to his feet slowly.
“You feel all right?” she asks, sitting up. He tries, unsuccessfully, to not let his eyes drift down to her braless breasts as the blankets pool at her hips.
He rubs a hand across his face to distract his gaze and then shrugs. “I’ve been better, but I’ve been worse,” he quips without his usual snark.
“Drink some water, that’ll help,” she says, stretching just like he had a minute ago. This time it’s not her breasts that draw his eyes, it’s the flash of skin as her belly is exposed and then abruptly covered again. “Do you have to work today?” she asks.
He shakes his head no as she shifts in the bed. At first he thinks she’s going to get up, but instead she fluffs the pillows, readjusting them at the head of the bed and then she pulls the covers up to her armpits and settles back in. “Me, either, so I’m going to sleep in a little. I’ll get up in a bit and we can make a big breakfast. I’m hungry-missed dinner last night.”
Nodding, James turns and heads for the doorway. He still thinks of himself as Sawyer sometimes, and he knows what Sawyer would do right now. Sawyer would crawl right back in bed with that woman and break down all the barriers that James has been unable to scale. It seems like all he can do is talk to Juliet-and by talk, he means spill his ever-living guts about every little damn thing.
He misses Kate-longs for her even sometimes, but more than anything he feels like every time he tells Juliet something about her, she fades more and more away on the horizon. John Locke isn’t coming back, but he somehow can’t stop looking for him. And he wants Juliet, but he can’t manage to make that happen, either.
Sawyer is disgusted with James, truth be told. “I’ll grab a shower,” he says.
Maybe over breakfast he can find some other inane thing to tell her about Kate so she can pluck some other enormous truth about him from it and gently shove it in his face. “Catch ya on the flipside,” she murmurs her face already steeped in down feathers.
*
He climbs out of the shower about ten minutes later, even angrier with himself than when he climbed into it. It’s been building for a while, something inside him he hadn’t yet acknowledged, only because there was so much other crap to work through, and worry about.
It was waking up in bed with her that tipped him over, though. He wasn’t ready, and he’d probably feel guilty if he fucked her, but god!, did he want to fuck her. He wanted Juliet, not as a replacement for Kate, but because Juliet got to him in ways that unsettled him to the core, and he thought the only way he’d ever be able to rattle her cage in an equal manner was if he had her naked and pinned beneath him.
And he was so sick and tired of thinking about Kate, and talking about Kate, and looking for Kate to turn up. She’d left him long before she left the Island, so he didn’t even know why he put so much emphasis on it.
Okay, so that was a lie. He knew. But he also knew he wanted to get over it, move past it, and the here and the now involved Juliet. The hard-on he has right now is because of her, for her. Only he’s just standing in the bathroom alone thinking about Kate again.
If he waited for the desire to recede, he’d only end up giving Juliet some lame reason why he’d gotten drunk the night before, something that would be half true, because somewhere along the way it had stopped being about who left, and it had become about who stayed.
Juliet stayed.
After he brushes his teeth, he stares at himself in the mirror, his forehead creased with irritation and frustration, and he gives himself a moment to imagine the feeling of total release. Losing it all inside Juliet physically instead of just mentally.
He wraps a towel around his waist and opens the bathroom door, staring across the hallway to her still-open bedroom door. He’d been the one who left it open, but she could always have gotten up and closed it.
He took it as a much needed, though completely ludicrous, sign.
“Jules?” he says softly, because he figures she’s drifted back to sleep, just like she said she wanted.
“Hmmm?” she murmurs, her head lifting up from the pillow. Her eyes widen slightly when she sees his naked torso and the towel that’s only closed because he’s got one hand fisted at his right hip.
He had planned to say something more, but all the smooth lines Sawyer would have uttered dissipates with the incredibly insecure moment James is experiencing. He steps across the threshold and comes to a stop by the bed, just staring down at her in the hopes that she won’t actually make him say the words.
Her eyes seem to get bigger the longer they look at each other, and he sees the ocean and the sky and forever in no particular order as he searches their depths. God, he wants her, and it feels like he’s wanted her for a very long time, and he just can’t wait anymore. He pulls the blankets back so that she’s exposed, the purple shorts and white t-shirt as sexy as any crotchless nightie ever has been as far as he’s concerned. He puts one knee on the mattress and leans toward her, waiting.
At any moment now, she’s going to ask him what the hell he’s doing and he’s going to tell her he doesn’t know because he’s still drunk. That’s the only plausible explanation.
But when her hand reaches out and drags the towel away, he praises God in a way he’s never done before.
*
He’s had sex in some pretty interesting places-just on this Island, if you wanted a place to start-but making love in Juliet’s bed beats them all, and not just because it’s clean and warm and smells like her, but because she’s hot and greedy and she doesn’t let him pin her down, at least not the first time.
The first time, he’s under her, and when he comes, he feels like every blood vessel in his body has exploded. His entire being is limp in the aftermath, even his brain. For the first time in who knows how long he can’t even think.
It’s glorious.
But the sadness that invades him in the quiet moments following that is something he can’t avoid, and Juliet, in all her wisdom and kindness seems to understand. Her fingers move over his chest in a light caress, but then she gets out of bed and finds a bathrobe to put on. When she returns to the bed, she sits next to him in an almost clinically detached way, and he appreciates the doctor part of her that allows this.
He thinks maybe he’s falling in love with this woman, and he remembers an adage from when he was much younger: the best way to get over someone is to fall for someone else.
Maybe that’s what’s been happening all along. She reaches over and takes his hand in hers, softly petting his skin while not saying anything. He’s not sure what she’s expecting, but knowing Jules, it’s nothing taxing. If he knows anything about her, it’s that she makes his life easier, not harder.
He sighs, and lets his fingers caress hers in return. “I’m not ready,” he finally says.
“I know,” she replies, her fingers tightening briefly.
“I’m almost there,” he adds, because he knows now that he’s had her, he’s not going to want to go for too long without her.
He turns his head so their eyes can meet. She tilts her head, the understanding in her face painfully tender. “You know what Kate would think about this?” she asks.
James hesitates; this isn’t something he anticipated thinking about, so at first he really doesn’t know. When Juliet says, “She’d want you to be happy,” he feels an answering tremble in his chest. Yes, because that’s what he wants too-he thought that right before he jumped from the helicopter. If it would’ve guaranteed her happiness, he would’ve jumped a thousand times.
Reaching up, he cups his hand around the back of Juliet’s head so that he can bring her face to his. Kissing her softly-it’s still a novelty, so it goes on a little longer than he originally plans-he puts as much tenderness in the brush of his lips and tongue as she’d had in her expression. “I want you to be happy, too,” he murmurs as he draws back.
“I’m happy to wait a little longer,” she says. He knows she doesn’t mean forever, but he also knows he won't need that much time.
Author: domfangirl
Starring: Sawyer and Juliet
Category: One-shot (~4500 words)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is how Juliet learns everything about James, and why he falls in love with her.
Author’s Notes: Dialogue in the first section is from episode 5x04 The Little Prince. Everything else is mine. From the same universe as Unbroken.
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place
but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
~Dorothy Nevill
Resting against the outrigger, Juliet pants heavily while her mind twists around the small confidence James had given her earlier. It piqued her curiosity and something burned within her, a similar feeling, perhaps, to what she’d read in his face when he’d announced that he’d seen Kate in the jungle.
“We didn't get a chance to finish our conversation,” she says now, her lungs relaxing as she sits on the wet sand next to him.
His head turns towards her and he asks, “What conversation was that?”
Ah, so that’s how it would be. “The one before they started shooting at us. Where you were about to tell me how it felt to see Kate again.” She doesn’t say it as a question, or a prompting. She says it as fact, because that’s the only way to get anywhere with James Ford. When confronted with undeniable truth, he generally admits to it-or at least he doesn’t try to deny it.
He mutters lowly, “I wasn't about to tell you anything,” which they both know is a lie.
Juliet goes on as though he hadn’t denied it. “Why don't you tell me now?”
He pauses, and she wonders what it was that he saw exactly. What was Kate doing? Had she been with Jack? Imagining seeing Jack again herself-separating out the anger and hurt that has burned in the pit of her stomach since the last time she saw him, as he walked into the jungle with blood seeping from his incision-she realizes she doesn’t care. Jack’s focus had never been her, it had always been outside of her, just beyond her, and seeing him again wouldn’t change that. Her feelings for him were just that: hers, and hers alone.
“I was close enough to touch her. If I wanted to I could've stepped right up and talked to her.” The evident longing in his voice is touching, and Juliet can’t help but wonder if it is his, and his alone, as well.
“Why didn't you?” she asks aloud, because she knows why she wouldn’t have made the effort. Not with Jack anyway. If out of nowhere Rachel and Julian were to appear, now that would be a different story altogether.
“What's done is done,” James says, the finality in his voice two-fold. Juliet thinks better of taking him at his word-what one says and what one feels are two different things entirely, but she does agree on a certain level. It is done for her. She’s done. Done with all of this, and the minute she can get off this island, she will. She isn’t going to give Jack Shephard another thought.
*
"She's the only girl I've ever loved," he admits late one night. It had become a tradition-late in the evenings-they quietly read in the living room before retiring to their respective bedrooms.
Juliet enjoyed reading, but more often they ended up talking, and she found that she enjoyed that far more than reading.
James is odd, because he always just starts the conversation as though they are already engaged in it, and she has learned to react as though that is the case, because when she didn't he often lost his nerve and shut down his emotions as quickly as they arose. It had only taken a couple of such attempts on his part before she adapted to his style.
"How is that possible?" she asks, because she knows he is her same age, and she'd been in love several times throughout her life.
"I think it was the Island," he says, and obviously that's what he's been thinking about lately. How the Island had changed him. "I think before I came here I couldn't. It wasn't in me. There was this one girl-Cassidy. I liked her a whole hell of a lot. And she loved me, so I think part of me wanted to love her, because well, then I might've been worth somethin'..." He shakes his head as he trails off and that thought is abandoned. "But Kate seemed to see me for who I was right from the beginning. She saw who I was, and who I shoulda been, and she called me on it." He pauses. "I think I loved her for that. For not believing the bullshit."
Juliet smiles, and looks away from him to set her book open-faced on the coffee table. "That's an admirable quality, to be sure," she muses. She sees Jack in her mind's eye and she wonders if Kate ever called him on his bullshit too. Would have done him a world of good.
“She was the first person to care enough to see through it, I guess,” he says, his eyes shifting back to his book before looking off out the window into the darkness of Town Dharma. “It had to be the Island,” he says, and Juliet can tell the conversation has gone as far it will.
She stands up and stretches her arms over her head. “She won’t be the last one who cares, James,” she says. Turning she walks up the hall toward her bedroom. “Good night,” she calls softly.
“’Night, Juliet,” he responds.
*
“It was serious for me when I knew I would die for her. I woulda done anything to get her out of there, not to say I wasn’t trying to save my own skin too, you know. But some of the shit Ben pulled taught me just what I felt for her. Showed me that it was more.”
Juliet sips her Dharma beer and rolls her head to the left to look at him. They’re sitting on the living room sofa, their feet up on the coffee table, beers in their hands. It’s been a long, hot day, and this is their relaxation before they decide what to make for dinner. Things have changed enough between them now that she feels comfortable sharing too. “Ben’s tricks were generally some way to better himself, but every once in a while he did do something that helped other people.”
James tips his head towards her and gestures with his can. “What’d he ever do that helped you?”
“He foisted me on Jack because he thought I looked like Jack’s ex-wife.”
“No shit?” James asks, a small laugh escaping his lips. He ponders for a moment the implications of her statement, but then quickly moves on. “How’d that help you?”
“Jack reminded me that sacrifice can bring blessings. Seeing what he did for you and Kate-“
“He only did it for Kate,” James corrects softly.
“-Well, seeing what he did roused something deep down inside me, something that had died with the patients I lost, and Goodwin, and with the desperation of being trapped here. I would have done anything at that point to get off this godforsaken island, but that was the turning point. That was when things started to shift. I stopped thinking about myself only.”
As they gaze at each other, Juliet feels something else rouse within her-only this feeling is in the pit of her stomach, and it’s been coming with more frequency now that she and James have been growing closer over the course of months passing them by with no return trip from John Locke. James is the first to break the moment, his eyes shifting away as he lifts his beer to his lips. Swallowing loudly he nods his head. “Yep, that’s how it starts, all right. You stop thinking about yourself, and before you know it you jump off a helicopter, or you don’t get on a lifeboat, and bam! You’re stuck in the ‘70s and there ain’t any drugs to be found.”
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” Juliet says, and they both start to laugh.
They stop laughing when James says quietly, “It ain’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
*
“It was almost like she wanted to have a baby-which was fucking crazy, let me just say-and when I told her that, she got mad. I guess that was the beginning of the end and I just didn’t know it. When she left, I figured she’d be back, because I didn’t really think we’d get rescued.” He sighs as the memory lingers in the air between them. He looks at her suddenly and asks, “Why’d you let Jack loose in the jungle when he was all but bleeding to death?”
Juliet arches an eyebrow at him as she shakes out a bed sheet. “You think I had any say in what Jack did or didn’t do?”
He shrugs before reaching for another towel to fold. “I guess not, but he sure took to you in a way that scared the rest of us. You might remember me and Sayid trying to head you off at the pass that one time.”
Juliet held one end of the sheet with her lips as her fingers brought the other corners together; then she crossed her arms over her belly to drop the freshly laundered bedding down for the final fold. “Jack ‘took to me’ because Kate had taken to you. And he wanted to keep his thumb on me because he didn’t trust me entirely. Jack’s a little archaic, you know. He thought Kate was committed to you since she’d slept with you.”
James chuckles mirthlessly. “Kate couldn’t commit to nothing. That’s why she was on that side of the island, and then on this side of the island like a freaking ping-pong ball.”
“Oh, so the commitment issues were all Kate’s then?” Juliet asks slyly, dropping her eyes back to the laundry basket that they are drawing items from. When she looks up at him, his expression is slightly chagrined, but very thoughtful.
“I don’t guess so,” he says, leaving it at that.
*
The day Juliet comes home and finds him very drunk, she’s stayed much later at the motor pool than normal because one of the Dharma vans had caught on fire. It had taken quite a bit of effort to keep the whole vehicle from going up in flames, and her fear that that the fire in the engine would reach the gas tank had caused her to react with a combination of panic and calm that had somehow prevented a bigger accident. Her plans to animatedly re-enact the whole situation for James as they ate a late dinner went by the wayside when she finds him reclining on the bed in her bedroom with several empty beer cans around him.
“What’s up?” she asks him, wiping her greasy hands on her jeans.
He doesn’t seem all that surprised to see her; it’s as if he was waiting for her to come and ask him that very thing. “You know what today is, Jules?” he inquires with a slur.
“No, James, I don’t.” She’s unsure about the feelings rioting within her at finding him in her bedroom, even if he’s in less than good condition. It’s been there between them lately, the electric tug getting stronger every day, but she’s positive that pursuing it is a bad idea.
No matter how much she wants to.
“It’s been a year,” he says morosely. “Locke’s been gone a whole year.”
This news stuns Juliet; it doesn’t seem possible that that much time could have passed. As they’ve settled in with the D.I., as she’s grown more and more fond of James, as she’s finally come to enjoy her time on this Island, after such a long time of hating it, it seems unlikely that it could have been that long. If it had been a year, it made the three years before this one had seemed more like 100 years and this one a two-week vacation. “No,” she says, softly, rejecting the idea.
James swings his legs off the bed, sitting up so quickly he nearly topples right off on to the floor. “It’s true,” he says loudly, his arms scrambling to balance his imbibed body on its perch. Juliet can’t help but rush to his side in an effort to keep him upright. “It’s been a year, and you were right, John did what he said-he saved us-but he couldn’t bring her back.”
His voice cracks at the end of that and then his head is against her chest and her arms are around him somehow. He cries, tears actually seep through her work shirt and touch her skin. She pats his back with one hand while the other caresses his hair softly. “Shhhh,” she croons, putting her lips against the top of his head. “You’ll be all right, James,” she says.
A few minutes later, his body grows heavier and she realizes the alcohol has taken over completely. Knowing he must be seconds away from passing out, she pushes him back and helps him lie down again. She could probably wrestle him into his own room, and into his own bed, but maybe he shouldn’t sleep alone, at least not tonight.
Then she goes and showers the grime of the motor pool off of her before putting on a t-shirt and shorts-her normal sleeping attire since her roommate is a man she is not romantically involved with-and climbs into the double bed beside him. He snores lightly into the pillow next to her and she watches him for a few minutes before reaching up to switch off the bedside lamp. He’s still in his Dharma jumpsuit himself, his feet bare, but she knows he’ll be fine sleeping on top of the bedding. He generally slept with only a sheet because of the warm weather, something she had been acutely aware of as he didn’t tend to be as modest just because he cohabitated with a female roommate. He usually slept with his bedroom door open, and she’d just picked up certain things.
That’s how she knew it had been a year, because of how well she knew him now, because of all the details she had stored away about him. This was the first time she’d seen him drunk, ever. He enjoyed a nightly beer or two, but he’d never indulged himself this far before. In the darkness she reached over and placed her hand against his forehead, smoothing her palm up and into his soft hair.
She’d long imagined he regarded her the same way he would if he lived with Miles or Jin, except that every once in a while he got a look in his eyes that told her he knew she was neither Miles nor Jin. For the king of cons that he seemed to be, sometimes the naked emotion in his eyes was too much to take and Juliet had been running from it more frequently lately.
Of course it had been a year; but it would take at least that much longer for James to be anywhere near ready for what she now wanted, and that was being generous with the passage of time. Perhaps he’d never get over Kate, and perhaps he’d never act on the fledgling chemistry between them; but Juliet found that for all the times in her life when inaction had been her way, and the thing she hated most about herself, this time the waiting and the biding her time was the only way to handle the situation-yet she felt so impatient as the desire to do more than hold him against her as cried for his lost love flared within her.
She removes her hand from his head and turns her back to him. She lays that way for a few moments before giving up the fight. Rolling back on to her other side, she scoots closer, laying her head against his shoulder and placing her hand over his heart.
*
James Ford remembers the last time he awoke in a bed with a beautiful woman lying next to him, and the throbbing in his temples seems to bring it to his remembrance even more ferociously.
Sonofabitch! Had he slept with Juliet, and he didn’t even remember it? He really had changed.
She snuggled into his side, her breathing even and rhythmic, and with mild disappointment he reaches down with the arm she isn’t lying against and feels that his jumpsuit is still on his body.
So they might actually have slept together, but they really only slept. He’s glad there hadn’t been any sex.
Really, he is. If he can’t remember it, it isn’t worth it.
But, man, if they’d somehow breached that barrier without him actually having to do anything that would have been a relief. Sometimes when he looked at Juliet, he thought she was just going to pounce on him, and trust him, the idea was mighty appealing. She had something about her that set him at ease and fired him up all at once and he’d pondered that a bit while also imagining her naked.
He stretches, jostling her somewhat, and she makes a soft noise and slides off his shoulder, burrowing her face into the pillow. She doesn’t appear to wake up, however, leaving him alone a little while longer.
His mouth feels like a hay barn and his head is killing him, so he sits up slowly, and that’s when he sees all the beer cans. It starts coming back to him then, how crappy the day before had been, how he seemed to be only person other than Jin who realized how much time had gone by-though for Jin every day was one more day he was certain his wife and child were okay and alive somewhere in the future, somewhere far away from the Island.
“James?”
He looks back over his shoulder to see that her eyes are blinking sleepily as she gazes up at him. She sure is a beautiful woman, he thinks not for the first time, and even with no make-up and her hair kinda crazy, it’s all he can do not to just grab her.
Lucky for him he stinks to high heaven and he’s totally aware of it. How she slept next to him is beyond him. “Hey,” he responds, finding a casual smile to toss at her. “Thanks for the slumber party,” he says, getting to his feet slowly.
“You feel all right?” she asks, sitting up. He tries, unsuccessfully, to not let his eyes drift down to her braless breasts as the blankets pool at her hips.
He rubs a hand across his face to distract his gaze and then shrugs. “I’ve been better, but I’ve been worse,” he quips without his usual snark.
“Drink some water, that’ll help,” she says, stretching just like he had a minute ago. This time it’s not her breasts that draw his eyes, it’s the flash of skin as her belly is exposed and then abruptly covered again. “Do you have to work today?” she asks.
He shakes his head no as she shifts in the bed. At first he thinks she’s going to get up, but instead she fluffs the pillows, readjusting them at the head of the bed and then she pulls the covers up to her armpits and settles back in. “Me, either, so I’m going to sleep in a little. I’ll get up in a bit and we can make a big breakfast. I’m hungry-missed dinner last night.”
Nodding, James turns and heads for the doorway. He still thinks of himself as Sawyer sometimes, and he knows what Sawyer would do right now. Sawyer would crawl right back in bed with that woman and break down all the barriers that James has been unable to scale. It seems like all he can do is talk to Juliet-and by talk, he means spill his ever-living guts about every little damn thing.
He misses Kate-longs for her even sometimes, but more than anything he feels like every time he tells Juliet something about her, she fades more and more away on the horizon. John Locke isn’t coming back, but he somehow can’t stop looking for him. And he wants Juliet, but he can’t manage to make that happen, either.
Sawyer is disgusted with James, truth be told. “I’ll grab a shower,” he says.
Maybe over breakfast he can find some other inane thing to tell her about Kate so she can pluck some other enormous truth about him from it and gently shove it in his face. “Catch ya on the flipside,” she murmurs her face already steeped in down feathers.
*
He climbs out of the shower about ten minutes later, even angrier with himself than when he climbed into it. It’s been building for a while, something inside him he hadn’t yet acknowledged, only because there was so much other crap to work through, and worry about.
It was waking up in bed with her that tipped him over, though. He wasn’t ready, and he’d probably feel guilty if he fucked her, but god!, did he want to fuck her. He wanted Juliet, not as a replacement for Kate, but because Juliet got to him in ways that unsettled him to the core, and he thought the only way he’d ever be able to rattle her cage in an equal manner was if he had her naked and pinned beneath him.
And he was so sick and tired of thinking about Kate, and talking about Kate, and looking for Kate to turn up. She’d left him long before she left the Island, so he didn’t even know why he put so much emphasis on it.
Okay, so that was a lie. He knew. But he also knew he wanted to get over it, move past it, and the here and the now involved Juliet. The hard-on he has right now is because of her, for her. Only he’s just standing in the bathroom alone thinking about Kate again.
If he waited for the desire to recede, he’d only end up giving Juliet some lame reason why he’d gotten drunk the night before, something that would be half true, because somewhere along the way it had stopped being about who left, and it had become about who stayed.
Juliet stayed.
After he brushes his teeth, he stares at himself in the mirror, his forehead creased with irritation and frustration, and he gives himself a moment to imagine the feeling of total release. Losing it all inside Juliet physically instead of just mentally.
He wraps a towel around his waist and opens the bathroom door, staring across the hallway to her still-open bedroom door. He’d been the one who left it open, but she could always have gotten up and closed it.
He took it as a much needed, though completely ludicrous, sign.
“Jules?” he says softly, because he figures she’s drifted back to sleep, just like she said she wanted.
“Hmmm?” she murmurs, her head lifting up from the pillow. Her eyes widen slightly when she sees his naked torso and the towel that’s only closed because he’s got one hand fisted at his right hip.
He had planned to say something more, but all the smooth lines Sawyer would have uttered dissipates with the incredibly insecure moment James is experiencing. He steps across the threshold and comes to a stop by the bed, just staring down at her in the hopes that she won’t actually make him say the words.
Her eyes seem to get bigger the longer they look at each other, and he sees the ocean and the sky and forever in no particular order as he searches their depths. God, he wants her, and it feels like he’s wanted her for a very long time, and he just can’t wait anymore. He pulls the blankets back so that she’s exposed, the purple shorts and white t-shirt as sexy as any crotchless nightie ever has been as far as he’s concerned. He puts one knee on the mattress and leans toward her, waiting.
At any moment now, she’s going to ask him what the hell he’s doing and he’s going to tell her he doesn’t know because he’s still drunk. That’s the only plausible explanation.
But when her hand reaches out and drags the towel away, he praises God in a way he’s never done before.
*
He’s had sex in some pretty interesting places-just on this Island, if you wanted a place to start-but making love in Juliet’s bed beats them all, and not just because it’s clean and warm and smells like her, but because she’s hot and greedy and she doesn’t let him pin her down, at least not the first time.
The first time, he’s under her, and when he comes, he feels like every blood vessel in his body has exploded. His entire being is limp in the aftermath, even his brain. For the first time in who knows how long he can’t even think.
It’s glorious.
But the sadness that invades him in the quiet moments following that is something he can’t avoid, and Juliet, in all her wisdom and kindness seems to understand. Her fingers move over his chest in a light caress, but then she gets out of bed and finds a bathrobe to put on. When she returns to the bed, she sits next to him in an almost clinically detached way, and he appreciates the doctor part of her that allows this.
He thinks maybe he’s falling in love with this woman, and he remembers an adage from when he was much younger: the best way to get over someone is to fall for someone else.
Maybe that’s what’s been happening all along. She reaches over and takes his hand in hers, softly petting his skin while not saying anything. He’s not sure what she’s expecting, but knowing Jules, it’s nothing taxing. If he knows anything about her, it’s that she makes his life easier, not harder.
He sighs, and lets his fingers caress hers in return. “I’m not ready,” he finally says.
“I know,” she replies, her fingers tightening briefly.
“I’m almost there,” he adds, because he knows now that he’s had her, he’s not going to want to go for too long without her.
He turns his head so their eyes can meet. She tilts her head, the understanding in her face painfully tender. “You know what Kate would think about this?” she asks.
James hesitates; this isn’t something he anticipated thinking about, so at first he really doesn’t know. When Juliet says, “She’d want you to be happy,” he feels an answering tremble in his chest. Yes, because that’s what he wants too-he thought that right before he jumped from the helicopter. If it would’ve guaranteed her happiness, he would’ve jumped a thousand times.
Reaching up, he cups his hand around the back of Juliet’s head so that he can bring her face to his. Kissing her softly-it’s still a novelty, so it goes on a little longer than he originally plans-he puts as much tenderness in the brush of his lips and tongue as she’d had in her expression. “I want you to be happy, too,” he murmurs as he draws back.
“I’m happy to wait a little longer,” she says. He knows she doesn’t mean forever, but he also knows he won't need that much time.