Fic: high tide/low tide (Sark/Sydney)
high tide/low tide
(PG Sark/Sydney)
a/n: I wanted to write the sort of fic I like to read, one with more questions than answers, one where the emotions are there, but not easy to see. I think I've accomplished that. I'd love to hear what you think about it, too.
Enormous love to Dawnie and Joel, who both helped me so much with this story. As always, this is for and_only.
high tide/low tide
The end of the day filters through the windows, arcing across the floor and up over the small wooden table that’s pushed against the wall in the pursuit of space. She could knock the wall down and make the dining room and kitchen into one big open space, but there’s something about the almost cramped room that she doesn’t want to disturb. Something sacred held within its tight angles that whispers of security in the twilight.
The coffee in her cup in going cold as she circles the want ads; waitress, shop assistant, secretary. She pauses for a moment, pen frozen in mid air, then scribbles out the last in black ink. Nothing with computers. Bussing tables probably wouldn’t be suitable for her now so she crosses that out too. It’s slim pickings, but she’s not too worried. She has enough saved up to go without work for a while yet and anyway, there’s so much to do here.
Paint swatches are taped haphazardly over the wall, simple colours with decadent names like winter garden, tiara and Gobi Desert overlap each other, a garish mosaic that is slowly making the white disappear. She gets a new colour chart every time she finds herself in town, mostly because the small hardware store smells of sawdust and turpentine and the old man behind the cash register calls her Missy.
She’d found the house on the second day of looking, a rare moment of good fortune. No one told her just how cold January could be in Cape Cod, her jacket zipped up tightly to her chin and her lips stung red by the wind as she made her way across the beach. It had been early, not long after sun rise when everything was bleached of its colors, indistinct, a faded memory.
Her hands pushed tightly into her pockets, she’d turned to head back when she saw it, run down and only just on the salvageable side of decrepit, edged with a bank of long grass that shivered in the wind.
The deck needed repairing, the windows needed new shutters, the roof new shingles.
She had the keys in her hand the next day.
Francie, she starts, handwriting careful, practised.
It’s starting to get warmer now, thank God, I’m not sure I could have taken much more of the wind here.
I drove to Brewster today and there were daffodils lining the road,
She rubs her index finger across her bottom lip then takes a sip of her coffee. Her hand is shaking again and before she can get hold of it, it jerks and spills coffee onto the postcard she bought earlier that day. She blows a breath out between her lips and puts the cup down, letting the postcard stain.
Picks up the pen, writes -
I miss the sound of your voice
and
I’m sorry
and
The trees are starting to blossom
and a million other thoughts her glorious dead will never read.
She’s eating eggs and waffles when she sees him. The eggs are scrambled and copious, the waffles light and as close to heaven as she’ll probably ever get. She has orange juice, coffee and a taste for a side of bacon. The diner is busy, bustling with locals and the occasional tourist buying chunky handled mugs with Betsy’s painted across them.
She’s smiling at the waitress, Lynn, thanking her for her refill and listening to the rounded vowels of her Boston accent when she sees him out of the corner of her eye. He’s crossing the street, jogging to beat the traffic, blond hair longer than she remembers.
Jaywalking, she thinks absently as her fork clatters loudly against her plate.
“You OK, sweetheart?”
She looks at Lynn, blinks, looks back out the window. He’s gone.
“Yeah,” she clears her throat, “just saw a ghost.”
She packs a suitcase when she gets home, locks it in the trunk of her car then goes back inside and runs a bath. She wakes up the next morning, hung over and shivering in the cold water, and decides he was a hallucination.
***
She sets her alarm for 6am every night and always wakes up before it goes off. It’s part of a routine she can’t seem to shake. She brushes her teeth, showers, opens the shutters that still need to be repaired and then sits at her kitchen table to eat a slice of toast and drink two cups of black coffee in quick succession. Sometimes she runs on the beach, sometimes she doesn’t. She was never a fan of yoga and still isn’t - it’s too slow, gives her too much time to think.
Sometimes she goes to the market and buys too many vegetables for one person, because she likes the weight of the bag in her arms when she walks home.
Sometimes she wakes before the sun and watches it rise from the beach, pinks and oranges bleeding together in between the clouds, all of creation a watercolour smear across the horizon. She counts the waves that beat against the shore and gives each a name, each a life of their own. She doesn’t tell the ocean her secrets. She wouldn’t know where to start.
The second time she sees him she’s eating an apple, touching the tips of her fingers to a brightly coloured quilt hanging outside a store that has a blue awning and sells everything imaginable. Reds, yellows and oranges swirl together on the neatly stitched material, circles of colour that are almost hypnotic. It's the most colourful thing she's seen in months, maybe years.
He's talking on his cell phone, wearing a T-shirt and old jeans that are so completely him and not him at the same time it hurts. He looks young, but that's because he is. With everything he's done, sometimes it's difficult to remember that fact.
She goes still, tries to fade into the background and become invisible but she's never been able to hide from him.
His eyes widen slightly when he sees her but she turns on her heel and walks away swiftly, refusing to acknowledge the sound of her name being called behind her because it doesn't exist anymore.
***
Francie, she writes.
There are still too many boxes to unpack. I’m starting to think they multiply when I’m asleep.
She scratches the back of her neck where the sun had caught her yesterday, skin pink and uncomfortable.
I think I’m losing my mind.
She puts the postcard with the others that will go unsent.
***
A week passes, then two, and she’s sandpapering the floorboards in the hallway when the need to get lost in a crowd rushes through her. The house is too quiet and she can’t seem to catch her breath. She changes out of her paint splattered pants and drives up to Boston. It’s the last week of May and tourist season is already in full swing.
She sits in the Common on a stone bench and watches the swan boats circle the lake for an hour, her hands clasped firmly together in her lap to stop the right one from shaking. It doesn’t help, she can feel the nerves twitching anyway.
When she gets home it’s late and the house is choked with dust from earlier. The night is warm so she opens all the windows and takes a beer out with her to the back porch, beads of condensation wetting her fingers.
The bottle smashes and foam splashes against her legs when she sees the quilt, neatly stitched swirls of colour still visible in the dim light, laid carefully across the wooden railing that spans the back of her house.
The third time she sees him, he sees her first. She’s sitting in a comfortable booth near the back, facing the door just like she was taught. She’s been in town long enough to pass as a local in the Irish Pub and that suits her fine, no one bothers her, the music is good and there’s a refreshing lack of kids with fake IDs propping up the bar. The TV is showing tonight’s game, it’s the bottom of the ninth and the Red Sox are winning. She’s been there for an hour, nursing the same gradually-warming beer when he sits down opposite her. She hadn’t even seen him come in.
The corner of his mouth lifts with something resembling amusement. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”
She swallows the mouthful of beer, carefully puts the bottle back on the table and wipes her damp hands on her jeans. “I would’ve left with Laszlo.”
“Hmm," he nods slowly, thoughtfully, before picking up her beer and taking a sip, "but you would have dreamed of Rick for the rest of your life.”
There's too much truth in that sentence and it makes her defensive. “She didn’t love him." Sydney snatches back her drink even though her taste for it had vanished as soon as he'd sat down. "Not really.”
He frowns for a second but it's gone as quickly as it appeared, making her wonder if she imagined it. “If you say so.”
She clears her throat, annoyed but unwilling to argue that which would be best forgotten “How did you find me?”
“Honestly?" He shrugs, picks up the damp coaster and taps it once, twice, three times against the table. "I wasn’t even looking.”
Unsettled, she switches her attention back and forth between the TV and the door until the waitress, Andie, comes to the booth. Sark smiles politely, orders a whiskey, no ice and doesn‘t watch the waitress walk away.
“Thank you,” she says suddenly because everything about him is so familiar. She still remembers how he drinks his whiskey, likes his tea, eats his steaks medium rare and can’t sleep without the window left open during the night even though doing such a thing is tantamount to suicide in his profession. Still remembers how he looks first thing in the morning and last thing at night. How he can say the sweetest things with blood on his hands. She feels flustered and knows he can tell. “For the quilt, I mean,” she finishes in a rush before standing up and dropping a bundle of dollar bills on the table, unable to look at him.
She needs to leave. Get out. The suitcase is still in the trunk of her car.
Sark catches her wrist and she freezes. It’s been forever but she has the cartography of his fingerprints memorized, every swirl and groove, knows every line and scar as his thumb presses against her hollowed tendons. Her arm twitches and she isn’t sure if it’s because of him or just the way she is now.
“Have dinner with me.”
She shakes her head and says, “I can't,” because it’s the truth.
She leaves, the heavy door clicking shut behind her.
***
Her passport says Lucy Sanderson. She chose the name herself, liked its bland anonymity. Her birth certificate lists her mom as deceased, complications during labor. When asked about her family she smiles politely, says she’s an only child. If pressed, she says her dad‘s an accountant in Ohio, then quietly changes the subject by asking you’re doing for the holiday weekend.
Her hair is brown, no highlights, lowlights, or shades of red. It reaches down past her shoulders and most days she wears it up in a messy ponytail. Her closet is full of jeans and sneakers, she owns one pair of high heels but has only worn them once in the last few months.
She doesn’t really date, although there were a couple weeks in February when she did. He said his name was James but he'd hesitated too long before saying it. His accent whispered of Tennessee and when she asked what brought him north of the Mason-Dixon, he laughed and said the wind, sweetheart, the wind. She slept with him because she wanted to, because he had blue eyes and blonde hair and didn’t so much smile as smirk. Because she knew he’d be gone in the morning.
She dreams in shades of grey, her colours have become muted, blurred at the edges. She sees the sun setting beyond the boardwalk, a bath stained with blood and birthday cards written in Russian, all saturated in patinas of slate.
When she wakes, her legs are tangled in her bed sheets and she can taste copper in her mouth.
***
The roof will need to be reshingled before winter rolls around but it’s only June and there’s plenty of time before the winds pick up again. She’d like to do it herself, but knows her right arm isn’t strong enough anymore. She hates that her body lets her down over even the simplest things now.
She’s unpacking after her trip to the store, arranging the lemons lazily in the wide blue bowl that sits on the centre of the kitchen table because fresh cut flowers remind her too much of hospitals, when there’s a knock at the back door. Almost two years out of the CIA and she still reaches for a gun she no longer carries.
It’s him. Of course it’s him. He never listened to her before so she isn’t surprised to see him through the mesh. She's been expecting him and thought he'd have turned up at her back door sooner. She tells herself it’s only morbid curiosity that has kept her here waiting for him these last two weeks.
“Sark,” she says and stops, swallows the word because if feels so familiar on her tongue. For everything she can’t forget, she can’t remember the last time she allowed herself to say his name. Sark. Never Julian. She doubts there’s enough of the Lazarey boy left inside him to warrant its use anyway.
He presses the palm of his hand against the mesh and tilts his head to the side. “You didn’t really expect me to stay away, did you?”
“You said you weren’t looking for me.”
He opens the screen door and the edge of the table digs into her thighs when she takes a step back. He looks down, scratches the back of his neck, looks up again, smiles and it’s almost bashful. He looks so innocent, too young for the atrocities he’s shaped with his own careless disregard; blood, destruction and lies hidden behind this boy‘s smile. “I found you anyway.”
She’s not scared of him, never has been, even when he had a gun to her head she wasn’t scared of him. He irritates her, infuriates her, makes her bones judder with fury, but he doesn’t scare her. No. It’s the distance between them she‘s terrified of. Whether it’s too much or too little, the space between their hands is deadly.
He refuses to leave. She doesn‘t scream, rage, threaten or plead. Knows from too much experience that it wouldn‘t do any good. It doesn’t touch him, doesn’t make a dent in his carefully crafted veneer, never has and never will. He takes a seat at her kitchen table, the one that has been empty since she moved in, and Sydney can do nothing but rub her forehead and finish unpacking the groceries.
She remembers to put the milk in the refrigerator this time, too often she’s left it out on the side to spoil. Pasta in the jar, peanut butter in the cupboard, garbage bags beneath the sink. If she concentrates on what she’s doing, maybe she can pretend he’s not there, maybe he‘ll allow her that small victory.
“There was a time when you didn‘t suffer through my company,” he says. There’s something in his voice that she can’t pin down, something like amusement but more like bitterness.
She turns her head slightly to look at him out of the corner of her eye. The left side of his face is washed with sunlight, turning his blonde hair almost golden. There’s a cut on his bottom lip and an angry bruise spreading across his cheekbone. He must be in town on business.
“I’ve always suffered you, Sark.”
Beer and tomatoes in the refrigerator, coffee filters in the drawer, chicken in the freezer.
She hears his chair scrape back across the floor but doesn‘t turn around. Won‘t. Can‘t.
He says, “Not always,” and the screen door closes opens and closes with a creak.
An hour later she’s in her car, the a/c turned up because summer is creeping across the Cape. A glare is bouncing harshly off the road and she has to squint to see past it. Her hands tightly grip the steering wheel and she’s not thinking, she’s not, she’s not, she‘s not.
She gets as far as Mashpee before she pulls the car over to the side of the road and takes one, two, three deep breaths. She drives to the nearest gas station and buys a bottle of water and downs three Advil. Her eyes feel gritty, like she hasn’t slept properly in months.
When she gets back, it’s dark and, apart from the quilt that’s laid over the end of her couch, there’s no sign that Sark was ever in her home today.
She spends the next four days slowly painting the back porch, listening to the gulls as they glide and dive, but mostly she’s waiting. Waiting and watching the minutes tick by on the clock in the kitchen, pretending she’s not holding her breath during the seconds in between.
On the fifth day she drives up to Provincetown early in the morning before the traffic is too heavy. She spends an hour or two strolling up and down Commercial Street, lingering in galleries filled with vivid canvases that leave colourful fingerprints behind her eyelids when she blinks.
She buys a ticket for the Portuguese Princess Excursion and lets her fellow whale watchers jostle for the best viewing spot as the boat heads north. She listens with vague interest as their guide talks about the feeding behaviour of humpback whales and digital cameras snick and whirr around her.
She falls asleep on the sofa when she gets home, too tired to take the long walk to her bedroom. When she wakes up at 3 a.m., uncomfortable and with the remnants of a dream scraping down her spine, Sark is asleep in the threadbare armchair opposite her. She can barely see him, the dim glow of the moon casting him a darker shadow than the rest of the room. She squints and sees that his feet are crossed at the ankle, propped up on the coffee table between them.
She pulls the quilt over her and closes her eyes.
***
The next morning, her favourite cup is laying in broken pieces on the kitchen floor, its contents burning her fingers. She rubs the back of her neck and shrugs Sark away when he tries to help.
“I can do it,” she mutters, kneeling down carefully to pick up the jagged pieces of ceramic. She drops them into the garbage and mops up the spill with a wad of paper towels. “It’s not usually this bad.”
“I know,” Sark nods and yes, she remembers, he does know. He was there for the after as well as the before.
“Sometimes it just. Gets away from me,” she says instead of why are you here, what do you want, please don’t do this to me again, I miss you so much, I hate that I miss you so much, you ruined me.
“You don’t have to make excuses to me, Sydney.”
“I’m not,” she frowns. She hates the understanding in his voice. Hates even more that it isn’t pity or contrived. Hates that he said her name because she’d almost stopped missing the sound of it.
Sark sits down in what has become, in the space of two unwanted visits, his chair, looks so comfortable there that she can‘t help but answer when he asks, “Who’s your neurologist here?”
“Baker. He’s good. Doesn’t bullshit me.”
The corner of Sark’s mouth lifts with a knowing smile. “You always did have a low bullshit tolerance.”
“Not everything changes,” she murmurs, picks up a kitchen towel, the one with a lighthouse printed on it, folds it then throws it back where she found it. “What do you want, Sark?”
There. The question’s been asked.
“A cup of tea in this godforsaken country that doesn’t taste like toilet water, the general public to stop voting Citizen Kane as the best film of all time, a better reception on my cell phone,” he says casually around the lip of his unbroken cup. He captures her gaze and refuses to give it back. “The fire back in your eyes.”
She looks away, ignores how much that stings. “You can’t just turn up here in the middle of the night. I may not be in the CIA anymore, but I’m pretty sure breaking and entering is still against the law.”
“I’ll add it to my list of sins then, shall I?” he says dryly.
She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Do what you want. I have things to do. Please don’t be here when I get back.”
She doesn’t know if she’s relieved or disappointed when she returns home later that day to discover that, for the first time in two and a half years, he’s done as she asked.
***
It’s raining, sharp needles of water that leave divots in the sand but does little to relieve the suffocating humidity. It’ll storm later, she’s sure of it, having grown use to the fickle weather on the Cape.
She’s rocking back and forth slowly on the porch swing, watching the rain hit the waves. The saoucepan filling slowly with water in her bedroom is tinny and rhythmic, so she makes another mental note to get an estimate for the roof soon. She should write it down so she doesn’t keep forgetting, but she forgets to do that too. Sometimes it makes her laugh to think about the codes, facts and lies she could once recall without hesitation. Now she’s happy if she can manage to remember to take the garbage out.
She eats peaches out of a can for lunch, the syrup makes her fingers sticky but she likes the way the fruit‘s flesh feels in her mouth when she rolls it around with her tongue.
When the sky begins to crowd with resentful-looking clouds, she pulls her legs up to her chest on the swing and rests her chin on her knees. She turns her face into the breeze and thinks the wind, sweetheart, the wind.
The swing rocks when Sark sits down beside her, she knows it’s him without turning her head, can smell the leather of his jacket, faint traces of familiar a cologne that he only wears once business is concluded, had heard his footsteps over the storm.
“Why are you here, Sydney?” he asks.
Sydney rubs her jaw against her knee, her jeans are soft ,well worn, don‘t chafe her skin. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
“Does Jack know where you are? I imagine he‘s worried -”
She whips her head round to face him, eyes narrowed, words hissed out between her teeth. “Don’t talk about him like the two of you are buddies, Sark. Because you‘re not. I‘m pretty sure he despises you.”
He raises his eyebrows and she hates that he can still get a reaction out of her, that he knows he can.
The sky flashes with light and she counts the distance before the first rumble.
On seven Sark asks, “Are you happy here?”
On ten she answers, “Yes.”
It thunders on fifteen.
“You’re lying.”
She shrugs. “Why break a habit of a lifetime?”
“You never lied to me,” he says quietly, tucking a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. “We never lied to each other.”
“That is such bullshit,” she scoffs and lurches off the swing because she can‘t bare it. She grasps the wooden railing, the wood smooth with new paint under her palms. “All we did was lie to each other.”
“Not about the important things.”
She leans against the railing and shakes her head, letting it drop forward loosely so she can feel the rain on the back of her neck. “What do you want? Why can’t you just leave me alone?“
The swing creaks and groans as Sark stands up. She starts when he touches her arm but he doesn’t let her shake him off, instead he trails his fingers over her elbow, her shoulder, her neck, until he’s holding the side of her face in his hand, his fingers tangled in her hair. She has no choice but to look at him. The bruise on his cheekbone is fading, what had been angry purple is now a guilty yellow and it makes her sick to think of how he got it, who was on the receiving end of his gun this time, so she tells herself not to. The wind chimes clink together in the breeze as he leans his forehead against hers and she can feel her hand shaking even though she’s gripping the railing tightly.
He says her name quietly, her true name, not Lucy, not sweetheart, not Missy and it‘s too much, it‘s just too much.
“I miss you. I do,” she admits, her voice barely heard over the rushing of the wind and the waves. She pulls away and feels momentarily lost at sea. “But you and me? Us?” She gestures in the space between them. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”
Sark frowns like he doesn‘t understand, and she wonders if he really doesn’t. “I don’t know why you feel the need to punish yourself for being happy with me-”
“Because it’s you.”
Sark sighs as he looks up at the wooden slats above them. He runs a hand through his hair and she realizes it’s wet with rain, sticking up and ruffled, like when he’d first come out of the shower in the morning.
“Christ almighty,” he says under his breath. He sounds as weary and she feels. “Yes, it’s me. You knew that perfectly well when you started this,” he gestures between them, just as Sydney did. Neither of them have ever tried to define what they were, are, with words. It would be useless. “And don’t even attempt to deny that you were the one who started it.”
“You’re right, I did start it. But I ended it, too.”
“You ran away. That isn’t an end.”
Sydney tilts her head back and laughs. The sound is broken by the wind, cracked down the middle and she can feel each and every one of the splinters. “You wear me down, Sark. God, I hate you.”
The flashes of lightening and thunder begin to get closer and closer until there isn‘t enough time to blink between them. She jumps when a particularly loud crash sounds overhead but doesn‘t move to go inside. Eventually the storm begins to move off, leaving a silence in its wake.
Unsure whether he‘ll still be there, she turns around. He‘s rocking back and forth on the swing again, his right arm stretched out across the back of it like he owns it and everything else around him. “You need new shutters,” he says, watching her closely.
She rubs a hand over her face, resigned. “And a new roof.”
***
Francie, she writes.
I didn’t leave because of who he is. I didn’t pack up my bags and travel the width of the country because of the things he does, the people he hurts, the lengths he’s willing to go to get what he wants.
I left because I didn’t care about any of that anymore.
He’s not a good man, I know that. I know that better than anyone. I do, I promise I do. But somewhere along the line, with all the lies they fed me after -
She clenches and unclenches her fist.
-after what happened, I stopped caring about the past. About what he did to you, to Will, to Vaughn.
God, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry, Francie.
I stopped caring and what should have just been a mistake, a lapse in judgement, was threatening to become something. Something really good.
Please forgive me. Please.
The storm tide has swept a line of pebbles and shells on to the lip of the beach. She picks up a craggy piece of drift wood and swings it by her hip as she walks, her bare feet sinking thickly in the wet sand with every step. The air is clear and fresh, but she knows that won’t last for long. No one told her how hot summer could be on the Cape, it’s not the same kind of oppressive heat as LA, though. The nights are cool and she can breathe here.
If she looks over her shoulder she knows he’ll still be there, whether she can see him or not, barefoot in her kitchen, making coffee because she doesn’t have the tea he likes. She told herself last night as he painted a path of kisses across her shoulders, her belly, her wrists, that she’d be gone in the morning. That she’d leave another place called home and find somewhere else with a swing that creaks in the breeze before the sun made it‘s lazy way over the horizon.
But when she woke from dreams shrouded in grey, the sun was seeping through the shutters and his hand was warm on her hip.
Tomorrow, she tells herself as she makes her way back to the house.
Tomorrow.
end
Characters contained within belong to JJ Abrams and Bad Robot, I make no profit from borrowing them. Pictures all found on Google. I make no profit from them, either.
(PG Sark/Sydney)
a/n: I wanted to write the sort of fic I like to read, one with more questions than answers, one where the emotions are there, but not easy to see. I think I've accomplished that. I'd love to hear what you think about it, too.
Enormous love to Dawnie and Joel, who both helped me so much with this story. As always, this is for and_only.
high tide/low tide
The end of the day filters through the windows, arcing across the floor and up over the small wooden table that’s pushed against the wall in the pursuit of space. She could knock the wall down and make the dining room and kitchen into one big open space, but there’s something about the almost cramped room that she doesn’t want to disturb. Something sacred held within its tight angles that whispers of security in the twilight.
The coffee in her cup in going cold as she circles the want ads; waitress, shop assistant, secretary. She pauses for a moment, pen frozen in mid air, then scribbles out the last in black ink. Nothing with computers. Bussing tables probably wouldn’t be suitable for her now so she crosses that out too. It’s slim pickings, but she’s not too worried. She has enough saved up to go without work for a while yet and anyway, there’s so much to do here.
Paint swatches are taped haphazardly over the wall, simple colours with decadent names like winter garden, tiara and Gobi Desert overlap each other, a garish mosaic that is slowly making the white disappear. She gets a new colour chart every time she finds herself in town, mostly because the small hardware store smells of sawdust and turpentine and the old man behind the cash register calls her Missy.
She’d found the house on the second day of looking, a rare moment of good fortune. No one told her just how cold January could be in Cape Cod, her jacket zipped up tightly to her chin and her lips stung red by the wind as she made her way across the beach. It had been early, not long after sun rise when everything was bleached of its colors, indistinct, a faded memory.
Her hands pushed tightly into her pockets, she’d turned to head back when she saw it, run down and only just on the salvageable side of decrepit, edged with a bank of long grass that shivered in the wind.
The deck needed repairing, the windows needed new shutters, the roof new shingles.
She had the keys in her hand the next day.
Francie, she starts, handwriting careful, practised.
It’s starting to get warmer now, thank God, I’m not sure I could have taken much more of the wind here.
I drove to Brewster today and there were daffodils lining the road,
She rubs her index finger across her bottom lip then takes a sip of her coffee. Her hand is shaking again and before she can get hold of it, it jerks and spills coffee onto the postcard she bought earlier that day. She blows a breath out between her lips and puts the cup down, letting the postcard stain.
Picks up the pen, writes -
I miss the sound of your voice
and
I’m sorry
and
The trees are starting to blossom
and a million other thoughts her glorious dead will never read.
She’s eating eggs and waffles when she sees him. The eggs are scrambled and copious, the waffles light and as close to heaven as she’ll probably ever get. She has orange juice, coffee and a taste for a side of bacon. The diner is busy, bustling with locals and the occasional tourist buying chunky handled mugs with Betsy’s painted across them.
She’s smiling at the waitress, Lynn, thanking her for her refill and listening to the rounded vowels of her Boston accent when she sees him out of the corner of her eye. He’s crossing the street, jogging to beat the traffic, blond hair longer than she remembers.
Jaywalking, she thinks absently as her fork clatters loudly against her plate.
“You OK, sweetheart?”
She looks at Lynn, blinks, looks back out the window. He’s gone.
“Yeah,” she clears her throat, “just saw a ghost.”
She packs a suitcase when she gets home, locks it in the trunk of her car then goes back inside and runs a bath. She wakes up the next morning, hung over and shivering in the cold water, and decides he was a hallucination.
***
She sets her alarm for 6am every night and always wakes up before it goes off. It’s part of a routine she can’t seem to shake. She brushes her teeth, showers, opens the shutters that still need to be repaired and then sits at her kitchen table to eat a slice of toast and drink two cups of black coffee in quick succession. Sometimes she runs on the beach, sometimes she doesn’t. She was never a fan of yoga and still isn’t - it’s too slow, gives her too much time to think.
Sometimes she goes to the market and buys too many vegetables for one person, because she likes the weight of the bag in her arms when she walks home.
Sometimes she wakes before the sun and watches it rise from the beach, pinks and oranges bleeding together in between the clouds, all of creation a watercolour smear across the horizon. She counts the waves that beat against the shore and gives each a name, each a life of their own. She doesn’t tell the ocean her secrets. She wouldn’t know where to start.
The second time she sees him she’s eating an apple, touching the tips of her fingers to a brightly coloured quilt hanging outside a store that has a blue awning and sells everything imaginable. Reds, yellows and oranges swirl together on the neatly stitched material, circles of colour that are almost hypnotic. It's the most colourful thing she's seen in months, maybe years.
He's talking on his cell phone, wearing a T-shirt and old jeans that are so completely him and not him at the same time it hurts. He looks young, but that's because he is. With everything he's done, sometimes it's difficult to remember that fact.
She goes still, tries to fade into the background and become invisible but she's never been able to hide from him.
His eyes widen slightly when he sees her but she turns on her heel and walks away swiftly, refusing to acknowledge the sound of her name being called behind her because it doesn't exist anymore.
***
Francie, she writes.
There are still too many boxes to unpack. I’m starting to think they multiply when I’m asleep.
She scratches the back of her neck where the sun had caught her yesterday, skin pink and uncomfortable.
I think I’m losing my mind.
She puts the postcard with the others that will go unsent.
***
A week passes, then two, and she’s sandpapering the floorboards in the hallway when the need to get lost in a crowd rushes through her. The house is too quiet and she can’t seem to catch her breath. She changes out of her paint splattered pants and drives up to Boston. It’s the last week of May and tourist season is already in full swing.
She sits in the Common on a stone bench and watches the swan boats circle the lake for an hour, her hands clasped firmly together in her lap to stop the right one from shaking. It doesn’t help, she can feel the nerves twitching anyway.
When she gets home it’s late and the house is choked with dust from earlier. The night is warm so she opens all the windows and takes a beer out with her to the back porch, beads of condensation wetting her fingers.
The bottle smashes and foam splashes against her legs when she sees the quilt, neatly stitched swirls of colour still visible in the dim light, laid carefully across the wooden railing that spans the back of her house.
The third time she sees him, he sees her first. She’s sitting in a comfortable booth near the back, facing the door just like she was taught. She’s been in town long enough to pass as a local in the Irish Pub and that suits her fine, no one bothers her, the music is good and there’s a refreshing lack of kids with fake IDs propping up the bar. The TV is showing tonight’s game, it’s the bottom of the ninth and the Red Sox are winning. She’s been there for an hour, nursing the same gradually-warming beer when he sits down opposite her. She hadn’t even seen him come in.
The corner of his mouth lifts with something resembling amusement. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”
She swallows the mouthful of beer, carefully puts the bottle back on the table and wipes her damp hands on her jeans. “I would’ve left with Laszlo.”
“Hmm," he nods slowly, thoughtfully, before picking up her beer and taking a sip, "but you would have dreamed of Rick for the rest of your life.”
There's too much truth in that sentence and it makes her defensive. “She didn’t love him." Sydney snatches back her drink even though her taste for it had vanished as soon as he'd sat down. "Not really.”
He frowns for a second but it's gone as quickly as it appeared, making her wonder if she imagined it. “If you say so.”
She clears her throat, annoyed but unwilling to argue that which would be best forgotten “How did you find me?”
“Honestly?" He shrugs, picks up the damp coaster and taps it once, twice, three times against the table. "I wasn’t even looking.”
Unsettled, she switches her attention back and forth between the TV and the door until the waitress, Andie, comes to the booth. Sark smiles politely, orders a whiskey, no ice and doesn‘t watch the waitress walk away.
“Thank you,” she says suddenly because everything about him is so familiar. She still remembers how he drinks his whiskey, likes his tea, eats his steaks medium rare and can’t sleep without the window left open during the night even though doing such a thing is tantamount to suicide in his profession. Still remembers how he looks first thing in the morning and last thing at night. How he can say the sweetest things with blood on his hands. She feels flustered and knows he can tell. “For the quilt, I mean,” she finishes in a rush before standing up and dropping a bundle of dollar bills on the table, unable to look at him.
She needs to leave. Get out. The suitcase is still in the trunk of her car.
Sark catches her wrist and she freezes. It’s been forever but she has the cartography of his fingerprints memorized, every swirl and groove, knows every line and scar as his thumb presses against her hollowed tendons. Her arm twitches and she isn’t sure if it’s because of him or just the way she is now.
“Have dinner with me.”
She shakes her head and says, “I can't,” because it’s the truth.
She leaves, the heavy door clicking shut behind her.
***
Her passport says Lucy Sanderson. She chose the name herself, liked its bland anonymity. Her birth certificate lists her mom as deceased, complications during labor. When asked about her family she smiles politely, says she’s an only child. If pressed, she says her dad‘s an accountant in Ohio, then quietly changes the subject by asking you’re doing for the holiday weekend.
Her hair is brown, no highlights, lowlights, or shades of red. It reaches down past her shoulders and most days she wears it up in a messy ponytail. Her closet is full of jeans and sneakers, she owns one pair of high heels but has only worn them once in the last few months.
She doesn’t really date, although there were a couple weeks in February when she did. He said his name was James but he'd hesitated too long before saying it. His accent whispered of Tennessee and when she asked what brought him north of the Mason-Dixon, he laughed and said the wind, sweetheart, the wind. She slept with him because she wanted to, because he had blue eyes and blonde hair and didn’t so much smile as smirk. Because she knew he’d be gone in the morning.
She dreams in shades of grey, her colours have become muted, blurred at the edges. She sees the sun setting beyond the boardwalk, a bath stained with blood and birthday cards written in Russian, all saturated in patinas of slate.
When she wakes, her legs are tangled in her bed sheets and she can taste copper in her mouth.
***
The roof will need to be reshingled before winter rolls around but it’s only June and there’s plenty of time before the winds pick up again. She’d like to do it herself, but knows her right arm isn’t strong enough anymore. She hates that her body lets her down over even the simplest things now.
She’s unpacking after her trip to the store, arranging the lemons lazily in the wide blue bowl that sits on the centre of the kitchen table because fresh cut flowers remind her too much of hospitals, when there’s a knock at the back door. Almost two years out of the CIA and she still reaches for a gun she no longer carries.
It’s him. Of course it’s him. He never listened to her before so she isn’t surprised to see him through the mesh. She's been expecting him and thought he'd have turned up at her back door sooner. She tells herself it’s only morbid curiosity that has kept her here waiting for him these last two weeks.
“Sark,” she says and stops, swallows the word because if feels so familiar on her tongue. For everything she can’t forget, she can’t remember the last time she allowed herself to say his name. Sark. Never Julian. She doubts there’s enough of the Lazarey boy left inside him to warrant its use anyway.
He presses the palm of his hand against the mesh and tilts his head to the side. “You didn’t really expect me to stay away, did you?”
“You said you weren’t looking for me.”
He opens the screen door and the edge of the table digs into her thighs when she takes a step back. He looks down, scratches the back of his neck, looks up again, smiles and it’s almost bashful. He looks so innocent, too young for the atrocities he’s shaped with his own careless disregard; blood, destruction and lies hidden behind this boy‘s smile. “I found you anyway.”
She’s not scared of him, never has been, even when he had a gun to her head she wasn’t scared of him. He irritates her, infuriates her, makes her bones judder with fury, but he doesn’t scare her. No. It’s the distance between them she‘s terrified of. Whether it’s too much or too little, the space between their hands is deadly.
He refuses to leave. She doesn‘t scream, rage, threaten or plead. Knows from too much experience that it wouldn‘t do any good. It doesn’t touch him, doesn’t make a dent in his carefully crafted veneer, never has and never will. He takes a seat at her kitchen table, the one that has been empty since she moved in, and Sydney can do nothing but rub her forehead and finish unpacking the groceries.
She remembers to put the milk in the refrigerator this time, too often she’s left it out on the side to spoil. Pasta in the jar, peanut butter in the cupboard, garbage bags beneath the sink. If she concentrates on what she’s doing, maybe she can pretend he’s not there, maybe he‘ll allow her that small victory.
“There was a time when you didn‘t suffer through my company,” he says. There’s something in his voice that she can’t pin down, something like amusement but more like bitterness.
She turns her head slightly to look at him out of the corner of her eye. The left side of his face is washed with sunlight, turning his blonde hair almost golden. There’s a cut on his bottom lip and an angry bruise spreading across his cheekbone. He must be in town on business.
“I’ve always suffered you, Sark.”
Beer and tomatoes in the refrigerator, coffee filters in the drawer, chicken in the freezer.
She hears his chair scrape back across the floor but doesn‘t turn around. Won‘t. Can‘t.
He says, “Not always,” and the screen door closes opens and closes with a creak.
An hour later she’s in her car, the a/c turned up because summer is creeping across the Cape. A glare is bouncing harshly off the road and she has to squint to see past it. Her hands tightly grip the steering wheel and she’s not thinking, she’s not, she’s not, she‘s not.
She gets as far as Mashpee before she pulls the car over to the side of the road and takes one, two, three deep breaths. She drives to the nearest gas station and buys a bottle of water and downs three Advil. Her eyes feel gritty, like she hasn’t slept properly in months.
When she gets back, it’s dark and, apart from the quilt that’s laid over the end of her couch, there’s no sign that Sark was ever in her home today.
She spends the next four days slowly painting the back porch, listening to the gulls as they glide and dive, but mostly she’s waiting. Waiting and watching the minutes tick by on the clock in the kitchen, pretending she’s not holding her breath during the seconds in between.
On the fifth day she drives up to Provincetown early in the morning before the traffic is too heavy. She spends an hour or two strolling up and down Commercial Street, lingering in galleries filled with vivid canvases that leave colourful fingerprints behind her eyelids when she blinks.
She buys a ticket for the Portuguese Princess Excursion and lets her fellow whale watchers jostle for the best viewing spot as the boat heads north. She listens with vague interest as their guide talks about the feeding behaviour of humpback whales and digital cameras snick and whirr around her.
She falls asleep on the sofa when she gets home, too tired to take the long walk to her bedroom. When she wakes up at 3 a.m., uncomfortable and with the remnants of a dream scraping down her spine, Sark is asleep in the threadbare armchair opposite her. She can barely see him, the dim glow of the moon casting him a darker shadow than the rest of the room. She squints and sees that his feet are crossed at the ankle, propped up on the coffee table between them.
She pulls the quilt over her and closes her eyes.
***
The next morning, her favourite cup is laying in broken pieces on the kitchen floor, its contents burning her fingers. She rubs the back of her neck and shrugs Sark away when he tries to help.
“I can do it,” she mutters, kneeling down carefully to pick up the jagged pieces of ceramic. She drops them into the garbage and mops up the spill with a wad of paper towels. “It’s not usually this bad.”
“I know,” Sark nods and yes, she remembers, he does know. He was there for the after as well as the before.
“Sometimes it just. Gets away from me,” she says instead of why are you here, what do you want, please don’t do this to me again, I miss you so much, I hate that I miss you so much, you ruined me.
“You don’t have to make excuses to me, Sydney.”
“I’m not,” she frowns. She hates the understanding in his voice. Hates even more that it isn’t pity or contrived. Hates that he said her name because she’d almost stopped missing the sound of it.
Sark sits down in what has become, in the space of two unwanted visits, his chair, looks so comfortable there that she can‘t help but answer when he asks, “Who’s your neurologist here?”
“Baker. He’s good. Doesn’t bullshit me.”
The corner of Sark’s mouth lifts with a knowing smile. “You always did have a low bullshit tolerance.”
“Not everything changes,” she murmurs, picks up a kitchen towel, the one with a lighthouse printed on it, folds it then throws it back where she found it. “What do you want, Sark?”
There. The question’s been asked.
“A cup of tea in this godforsaken country that doesn’t taste like toilet water, the general public to stop voting Citizen Kane as the best film of all time, a better reception on my cell phone,” he says casually around the lip of his unbroken cup. He captures her gaze and refuses to give it back. “The fire back in your eyes.”
She looks away, ignores how much that stings. “You can’t just turn up here in the middle of the night. I may not be in the CIA anymore, but I’m pretty sure breaking and entering is still against the law.”
“I’ll add it to my list of sins then, shall I?” he says dryly.
She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Do what you want. I have things to do. Please don’t be here when I get back.”
She doesn’t know if she’s relieved or disappointed when she returns home later that day to discover that, for the first time in two and a half years, he’s done as she asked.
***
It’s raining, sharp needles of water that leave divots in the sand but does little to relieve the suffocating humidity. It’ll storm later, she’s sure of it, having grown use to the fickle weather on the Cape.
She’s rocking back and forth slowly on the porch swing, watching the rain hit the waves. The saoucepan filling slowly with water in her bedroom is tinny and rhythmic, so she makes another mental note to get an estimate for the roof soon. She should write it down so she doesn’t keep forgetting, but she forgets to do that too. Sometimes it makes her laugh to think about the codes, facts and lies she could once recall without hesitation. Now she’s happy if she can manage to remember to take the garbage out.
She eats peaches out of a can for lunch, the syrup makes her fingers sticky but she likes the way the fruit‘s flesh feels in her mouth when she rolls it around with her tongue.
When the sky begins to crowd with resentful-looking clouds, she pulls her legs up to her chest on the swing and rests her chin on her knees. She turns her face into the breeze and thinks the wind, sweetheart, the wind.
The swing rocks when Sark sits down beside her, she knows it’s him without turning her head, can smell the leather of his jacket, faint traces of familiar a cologne that he only wears once business is concluded, had heard his footsteps over the storm.
“Why are you here, Sydney?” he asks.
Sydney rubs her jaw against her knee, her jeans are soft ,well worn, don‘t chafe her skin. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
“Does Jack know where you are? I imagine he‘s worried -”
She whips her head round to face him, eyes narrowed, words hissed out between her teeth. “Don’t talk about him like the two of you are buddies, Sark. Because you‘re not. I‘m pretty sure he despises you.”
He raises his eyebrows and she hates that he can still get a reaction out of her, that he knows he can.
The sky flashes with light and she counts the distance before the first rumble.
On seven Sark asks, “Are you happy here?”
On ten she answers, “Yes.”
It thunders on fifteen.
“You’re lying.”
She shrugs. “Why break a habit of a lifetime?”
“You never lied to me,” he says quietly, tucking a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. “We never lied to each other.”
“That is such bullshit,” she scoffs and lurches off the swing because she can‘t bare it. She grasps the wooden railing, the wood smooth with new paint under her palms. “All we did was lie to each other.”
“Not about the important things.”
She leans against the railing and shakes her head, letting it drop forward loosely so she can feel the rain on the back of her neck. “What do you want? Why can’t you just leave me alone?“
The swing creaks and groans as Sark stands up. She starts when he touches her arm but he doesn’t let her shake him off, instead he trails his fingers over her elbow, her shoulder, her neck, until he’s holding the side of her face in his hand, his fingers tangled in her hair. She has no choice but to look at him. The bruise on his cheekbone is fading, what had been angry purple is now a guilty yellow and it makes her sick to think of how he got it, who was on the receiving end of his gun this time, so she tells herself not to. The wind chimes clink together in the breeze as he leans his forehead against hers and she can feel her hand shaking even though she’s gripping the railing tightly.
He says her name quietly, her true name, not Lucy, not sweetheart, not Missy and it‘s too much, it‘s just too much.
“I miss you. I do,” she admits, her voice barely heard over the rushing of the wind and the waves. She pulls away and feels momentarily lost at sea. “But you and me? Us?” She gestures in the space between them. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”
Sark frowns like he doesn‘t understand, and she wonders if he really doesn’t. “I don’t know why you feel the need to punish yourself for being happy with me-”
“Because it’s you.”
Sark sighs as he looks up at the wooden slats above them. He runs a hand through his hair and she realizes it’s wet with rain, sticking up and ruffled, like when he’d first come out of the shower in the morning.
“Christ almighty,” he says under his breath. He sounds as weary and she feels. “Yes, it’s me. You knew that perfectly well when you started this,” he gestures between them, just as Sydney did. Neither of them have ever tried to define what they were, are, with words. It would be useless. “And don’t even attempt to deny that you were the one who started it.”
“You’re right, I did start it. But I ended it, too.”
“You ran away. That isn’t an end.”
Sydney tilts her head back and laughs. The sound is broken by the wind, cracked down the middle and she can feel each and every one of the splinters. “You wear me down, Sark. God, I hate you.”
The flashes of lightening and thunder begin to get closer and closer until there isn‘t enough time to blink between them. She jumps when a particularly loud crash sounds overhead but doesn‘t move to go inside. Eventually the storm begins to move off, leaving a silence in its wake.
Unsure whether he‘ll still be there, she turns around. He‘s rocking back and forth on the swing again, his right arm stretched out across the back of it like he owns it and everything else around him. “You need new shutters,” he says, watching her closely.
She rubs a hand over her face, resigned. “And a new roof.”
***
Francie, she writes.
I didn’t leave because of who he is. I didn’t pack up my bags and travel the width of the country because of the things he does, the people he hurts, the lengths he’s willing to go to get what he wants.
I left because I didn’t care about any of that anymore.
He’s not a good man, I know that. I know that better than anyone. I do, I promise I do. But somewhere along the line, with all the lies they fed me after -
She clenches and unclenches her fist.
-after what happened, I stopped caring about the past. About what he did to you, to Will, to Vaughn.
God, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry, Francie.
I stopped caring and what should have just been a mistake, a lapse in judgement, was threatening to become something. Something really good.
Please forgive me. Please.
The storm tide has swept a line of pebbles and shells on to the lip of the beach. She picks up a craggy piece of drift wood and swings it by her hip as she walks, her bare feet sinking thickly in the wet sand with every step. The air is clear and fresh, but she knows that won’t last for long. No one told her how hot summer could be on the Cape, it’s not the same kind of oppressive heat as LA, though. The nights are cool and she can breathe here.
If she looks over her shoulder she knows he’ll still be there, whether she can see him or not, barefoot in her kitchen, making coffee because she doesn’t have the tea he likes. She told herself last night as he painted a path of kisses across her shoulders, her belly, her wrists, that she’d be gone in the morning. That she’d leave another place called home and find somewhere else with a swing that creaks in the breeze before the sun made it‘s lazy way over the horizon.
But when she woke from dreams shrouded in grey, the sun was seeping through the shutters and his hand was warm on her hip.
Tomorrow, she tells herself as she makes her way back to the house.
Tomorrow.
end
Characters contained within belong to JJ Abrams and Bad Robot, I make no profit from borrowing them. Pictures all found on Google. I make no profit from them, either.