Fic: I Know That Ghosts Have Wandered Here on Earth (Lost, Sawyer/Juliet)
Title: I Know That Ghosts Have Wandered Here on Earth
Fandom/Pairing: Lost, Sawyer/Juliet, mention of Sawyer/Kate
Word Count: 2587
Rating: M
Summary: It's funny, almost, the whole thing, but Juliet's looking at him serious as smoke in the goddamn jungle and Sawyer knows if he laughs he's gonna lose her for good. And maybe he can't say what he wants, exactly, but he's pretty sure that that ain't it.
Author's Note: Thanks to leigh57 and adrenalin211 for help with hyphenation. And, you know, all the other stuff too.
Gettin' horizontal with Juliet is just about the stupidest-ass thing Sawyer could possibly do at this point so of course he does it, on a sunny spring morning in the living room when she turns around and calls him James. He can't say what changes, exactly--why after all these months of playin' at marriage he's suddenly compelled to consummate the damn thing--but she arches her back and bites down on his shoulder when he pushes two fingers inside her, so he guesses whatever he's got is catching.
She's softer than he expects, for what it's worth: a little more give in the muscles, like here all's a person who's not always waiting for the bang of the starting gun. She smells clean, like the soap they all use here, and the skin near her navel's smooth under his tongue.
Goddamn.
It's an amateur move, sleeping with her. Sawyer knows his share about dangerous women, which is why he's been keepin' his distance from this one: she might be the closest thing he's got to a buddy in the Dharma Family Jugband, but he ain't forgotten that pistol to Kate's curly temple, electricity shrieking down his spine. If he's learned one lesson since he washed up on this miserable forsaken rock, it's that a little goddamn circumspection never hurt nobody.
That's all shot to hell now, he thinks, even as he's resting his damp, sweaty forehead in the crook near her collarbone, her pulse ticking slowly under his. Watch her spook and hop on the sub and next thing you know he's alone on Treasure Island drinkin' the Kool-Aid with all the other acolytes. Watch her go all Hostile on his ass and he wakes up in bed with a goddamn Dharma-issue steak knife to his throat. Worst of all watch her get it in her head to try and fix him, like he's some sadsack charity case with a wasted heart for mending. Who the hell knows. Problem with Juliet is, Sawyer can't figure her. He ain't never quite sure what she'll do.
"I gotta get to work," he says, and it comes out rougher than he means for it to. He eases himself out of her as gently as he can.
Juliet nods. "Me too." The side of her face is raw from where his beard rubbed against it. She looks him over in that damn unnerving way she has, like she can see the tissue under his skin. "I'm not Belle Starr," she says softly.
Fuck if he knows what that means (or if he particularly wants to guess), so Sawyer just shakes his head, reaching for his jumpsuit. "I ain't Jesse James."
"Well," she says, and almost smiles. "See you later."
"See you."
Outside the sky is endless, like it stretches clear through time. The screen door slams behind him. Sawyer closes his eyes.
*
He gets back to the house that night and he's got it all planned out, what he's gonna say to her. "About this mornin'," he begins, and she looks at him expectantly. She's standing at the counter slicing bell peppers into neat, symmetrical strips. There's a quarter-sized bruise at the base of her neck that he thinks he may have put there, and already he feels awkward, which he hates. "I've been thinkin' we should probably keep it just business between us." Sawyer shoves his hands in his pockets. "We're a good team, and all. Be a shame to screw it up."
Juliet nods. "All right," she says agreeably, like he just suggested they play a little gin after dinner. She's got this look that's one half indifferent and one half coolly amused, and Sawyer one whole wants to wipe it right off her face. Her hair is long and smooth, the yellow-white of sun on sand.
God help him, he keeps right on talking. "I just think it's batshit enough around here without makin' it more complicated on purpose," he says. "You know. What's real or fake or...what all."
"That's probably a good idea." She's still chopping, methodical, damn near serene; she motions for him to pass her the salad bowl, and he does.
"So. That's it, then."
She nods again, pleasant as a store clerk. "That can be it."
Oh, the hell with that. It's like she's humoring him, like he's some little kid she needs to be patient with. Like she's got a gun and some rocks that need breaking. And suddenly Sawyer just wants so bad to get a rise out of her--wants her to admit to anything, to being pissed off or afraid, to the sounds she made when she came underneath him (Jesus Christ, those fucking sounds). He closes the space between them and kisses her. Hard.
He expects her to push him away--to hit him, even, which he thinks might be satisfying enough--but instead she goes all in, her mouth open and eager. She tastes like the cheap Dharma wine they both drink. Sawyer groans. Back when he used to con (used to? asks Jim LaFleur), every now and then there'd come a moment where he'd realize he'd underestimated his mark. "Strictly business, right?" Juliet mutters, and he slips his knee between her thighs.
"Real cute, Blondie."
"Hm." She kisses him again, all tongues and teeth and loneliness, both of them bluffing like some screwed-up game of chicken. She scratches his back through his jumpsuit. He rubs her through the fabric of her jeans. He's hard and restless and God, fuck, he wants like hell to do this, and still he couldn't tell you why. The sky is blue. He makes bad decisions. Being inside her felt somethin' like calm.
Juliet reaches up and pushes his hair back, scrapes her blunt nails whisper light over his scalp. Sawyer breathes in hard. It feels like a stun gun, shrapnel singing through his nerves, and the force of it rattles him a little so he lifts her up on the kitchen table and grinds himself against her 'til he he hears it: sharper than breathing, but not quite a whine. Sawyer smiles. He likes making her do that. He likes knowing that he can.
He gets his hands up into her t-shirt, runs his knuckles down the rising of her ribs. "Hey," she says softly, when he goes for the hooks on her lacy bra. This morning he found out she wears matching underwear, and he'd be a damn liar if he said he hasn't thought about it all day. "Slow down."
Sawyer tenses a little, his shoulders and chest. "Sweetheart, if you ain't interested--"
"I'm interested," she says. Sometimes her voice makes him think of water over a fire, the steam rushing up like that. Her eyes are very, very blue. "Slow down."
"And why's that?" he asks, getting real close to her, lips at her ear and voice low like a threat. "You wanna be romanced, Blondie?"
He's being a sonofabitch on purpose, pushing her buttons just to see if he can, but Juliet doesn't flinch. "What if I do?"
Sawyer almost laughs then, not because it's stupid but because at this point he doesn't think he could even if he wanted to, that he even remembers how to be with a woman when the world's not exploding around him. How it feels when it's just normal, when love and fear and dumbass wishing's not all wrapped up into one miserable freckled package, and every time he kissed her he was tryin' to convince her of something he couldn't even name.
Been awhile, is all.
Anyhow, it's funny, almost, the whole thing, but Juliet's looking at him serious as smoke in the goddamn jungle and Sawyer knows if he laughs he's gonna lose her for good. And maybe he can't say what he wants, exactly, but he's pretty sure that that ain't it.
"Well." He takes a deep breath, thinks what the hell. He nods a little, and his hair falls back into his face. "Okay then."
*
That's as much as they discuss it, but soon it's something like routine: he comes home and eats dinner and goes to bed with his wife, her mouth on his belly, his hands on her hips. At night she smells like lemons and motor oil. He concentrates on going slow.
Time passes. Sawyer keeps watch. He tells himself they're just gettin' it out of their systems, whatever fucked-up power-struggle who's-on-top bullshit there is between them, and if being with Juliet makes him feel less like his chest is on fire all the goddamn time, less like he's ruined, well, he tries not to think about that. Anyway, he figures it's only a matter of time before some brainy Dharma physicist catches her eye and he's back to sleeping in the living room. Sawyer knows about flings, about sex with no future: that much, at least, is nothin' new.
Afterwards they lie there and talk awhile, stupid stuff, meandering. He likes to hear about her college, the kinds of books she read. She's into the Brontës. "Emily was a sick fuck," she tells him one evening, a smile in her voice in the silvery dark. She swears a lot more than he first thought she did. "You like Stephen King, you'll like Emily Brontë."
"That so?" he asks, propping himself up on one elbow and running his thumb over the slope of her breast, half-hoping for a repeat performance. "Coupla' tortured ghosts stuck with each other, strollin' the moors 'til the end of the world?"
Juliet goes expressionless, and only then does it occur to him that maybe that was a jackass thing to say. "Yeah," she replies softly. "That's pretty much how it ends."
They're quiet for awhile. He doesn't know what to tell her. Eventually she falls asleep and he goes back to the couch where he slept when they first got here, scratchy and seventies-plaid. He dreams he's chasing Kate through the jungle, and when he wakes up the damn sheets are soaked through.
*
It takes a long time for him to notice the livid scar at the small of her back--strange, considering how much time they spend naked, though if anybody could manage to stay hidden with all her clothes off it's probably Juliet. "The hell is that?" he asks her, when he finally sees it, and it comes out more upset than he'd like. He ain't squeamish, but Jesus.
Juliet just shrugs. "Beauty mark," she deadpans, and he doesn't ask again. That night he wakes up and she's straddling his hips already, her body rocking restless in the moonlight. He comes and thinks of cages, of locks without a key.
*
Phil's been busting his balls over at the security office, so he's already a little cranky when he gets back to the house and hears that Juliet's got Patsy Cline on the record player, lonesomeness and steel guitars. Sawyer gets real still. He didn't think that kind of dumbass thing could still get to him after all this time, but there you have it. It makes him hate himself some.
"Hi," she says, smiling when she sees him. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch reading some Updike he thought she might like (and which, she informed him over breakfast this morning, she does not). "You're home early."
"Yeah," he manages. It feels like there's beach sand caught in his throat. "You might wanna turn that off."
Juliet doesn't move for a moment, and her voice is as placid as the surface of a pond. "You can say that you loved her, you know. Or that you still do." She shakes her head a little. They never use anyone's name. "It doesn't make you....anything."
Sawyer's still eyeing the turntable. "Patsy Cline died in a plane crash," he tells her. "Ain't that the damndest thing?"
"James."
"That wasn't love," he says immediately, and since her quiet tone of voice makes him feel sort of mean he keeps going. "And whatever you think you felt for the Doc, way back when? That wasn't love either."
"Oh no?" Juliet lays her book down, cocks her head to the side. She looks like she don't believe him worth a damn, which is fine since he don't much believe himself, either. "What was it?"
"Adrenaline."
"Ah." She nods slowly, taking on that calm, vaguely amused air he hates so much, like he's swimming in the ocean and she's the tide itself. "And what's this, James?"
Yeah, well, that's the question, ain't it? Sawyer looks at her. About half the time he thinks if he knew a damn thing about love he wouldn't still be here, would have stayed up in that helicopter even if it more or less meant suicide. The other half of the time he knows that's probably bull. "I don't know, Blondie," he says, and for a second he feels like he's bracing for a flash. "You tell me."
*
Well, lesson learned, he supposes. Don't get a hard-on for your artificial wife.
Neither one of them knows how to end a fake marriage and in any case they'd be damn fools to call the attention to themselves, so for now they act like everything is normal. They work. They make breakfast. They hold hands when people can see. After dinner they stand side by side to do the dishes, a pair of blond reflections in the window above the sink. "So," Sawyer says, when the plates are all drying. He finds himself wishing there were more pots to scrub. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight," she says softly, and after a moment the bedroom door clicks shut. Sawyer lies on the couch and listens.
At night sometimes she'd curl herself around him in her sleep and for awhile there he was thinking maybe that was the real her, her sleeping-self. He guesses it don't really matter, in the end.
*
Sawyer's edgy. He dreams bloody dreams. He misses the sex but mostly he misses the company, someone to talk out his day to, someone who knows who he is. It's strange, all this silence. It doesn't suit him. He starts thinking about what it might be like to leave the island, to give the real world seventies a try. The sub comes and goes, a shark beneath the water. Sawyer waits.
On Saturday morning he's running some papers over to Horace at the office when he sees her at the yoga class Amy's teaching on the green, her yellow hair grazing the grass as she bends her body like a triangle, the letter A. Sawyer thinks of beginnings, and just like that he's standin' by her side. "Hey," he says, right there in front of everybody, a dozen Dharma ladies tied up into knots.
"Hey yourself," Juliet says, palms flat on the common. Still it's like she's not surprised at all. "I'm kind of in the middle, here, James."
"Yeah, I see that." Sawyer swallows. He don't really get nervous as a general rule, but if he did now would be a good time. "I been thinking about Heathcliff."
"Heathcliff." That gets her attention; she stands upright and stares at him, her cheeks a rosy red. He gets why she made a good researcher. One look and it's like she knows everything she needs. "You want to talk to me about books?"
"It would seem," he says slowly, "that I want to talk to you about a lot of things."
Juliet smiles, just for a second. "All right," she says, natural as water, and they cross the grass and go inside.
Fandom/Pairing: Lost, Sawyer/Juliet, mention of Sawyer/Kate
Word Count: 2587
Rating: M
Summary: It's funny, almost, the whole thing, but Juliet's looking at him serious as smoke in the goddamn jungle and Sawyer knows if he laughs he's gonna lose her for good. And maybe he can't say what he wants, exactly, but he's pretty sure that that ain't it.
Author's Note: Thanks to leigh57 and adrenalin211 for help with hyphenation. And, you know, all the other stuff too.
Gettin' horizontal with Juliet is just about the stupidest-ass thing Sawyer could possibly do at this point so of course he does it, on a sunny spring morning in the living room when she turns around and calls him James. He can't say what changes, exactly--why after all these months of playin' at marriage he's suddenly compelled to consummate the damn thing--but she arches her back and bites down on his shoulder when he pushes two fingers inside her, so he guesses whatever he's got is catching.
She's softer than he expects, for what it's worth: a little more give in the muscles, like here all's a person who's not always waiting for the bang of the starting gun. She smells clean, like the soap they all use here, and the skin near her navel's smooth under his tongue.
Goddamn.
It's an amateur move, sleeping with her. Sawyer knows his share about dangerous women, which is why he's been keepin' his distance from this one: she might be the closest thing he's got to a buddy in the Dharma Family Jugband, but he ain't forgotten that pistol to Kate's curly temple, electricity shrieking down his spine. If he's learned one lesson since he washed up on this miserable forsaken rock, it's that a little goddamn circumspection never hurt nobody.
That's all shot to hell now, he thinks, even as he's resting his damp, sweaty forehead in the crook near her collarbone, her pulse ticking slowly under his. Watch her spook and hop on the sub and next thing you know he's alone on Treasure Island drinkin' the Kool-Aid with all the other acolytes. Watch her go all Hostile on his ass and he wakes up in bed with a goddamn Dharma-issue steak knife to his throat. Worst of all watch her get it in her head to try and fix him, like he's some sadsack charity case with a wasted heart for mending. Who the hell knows. Problem with Juliet is, Sawyer can't figure her. He ain't never quite sure what she'll do.
"I gotta get to work," he says, and it comes out rougher than he means for it to. He eases himself out of her as gently as he can.
Juliet nods. "Me too." The side of her face is raw from where his beard rubbed against it. She looks him over in that damn unnerving way she has, like she can see the tissue under his skin. "I'm not Belle Starr," she says softly.
Fuck if he knows what that means (or if he particularly wants to guess), so Sawyer just shakes his head, reaching for his jumpsuit. "I ain't Jesse James."
"Well," she says, and almost smiles. "See you later."
"See you."
Outside the sky is endless, like it stretches clear through time. The screen door slams behind him. Sawyer closes his eyes.
*
He gets back to the house that night and he's got it all planned out, what he's gonna say to her. "About this mornin'," he begins, and she looks at him expectantly. She's standing at the counter slicing bell peppers into neat, symmetrical strips. There's a quarter-sized bruise at the base of her neck that he thinks he may have put there, and already he feels awkward, which he hates. "I've been thinkin' we should probably keep it just business between us." Sawyer shoves his hands in his pockets. "We're a good team, and all. Be a shame to screw it up."
Juliet nods. "All right," she says agreeably, like he just suggested they play a little gin after dinner. She's got this look that's one half indifferent and one half coolly amused, and Sawyer one whole wants to wipe it right off her face. Her hair is long and smooth, the yellow-white of sun on sand.
God help him, he keeps right on talking. "I just think it's batshit enough around here without makin' it more complicated on purpose," he says. "You know. What's real or fake or...what all."
"That's probably a good idea." She's still chopping, methodical, damn near serene; she motions for him to pass her the salad bowl, and he does.
"So. That's it, then."
She nods again, pleasant as a store clerk. "That can be it."
Oh, the hell with that. It's like she's humoring him, like he's some little kid she needs to be patient with. Like she's got a gun and some rocks that need breaking. And suddenly Sawyer just wants so bad to get a rise out of her--wants her to admit to anything, to being pissed off or afraid, to the sounds she made when she came underneath him (Jesus Christ, those fucking sounds). He closes the space between them and kisses her. Hard.
He expects her to push him away--to hit him, even, which he thinks might be satisfying enough--but instead she goes all in, her mouth open and eager. She tastes like the cheap Dharma wine they both drink. Sawyer groans. Back when he used to con (used to? asks Jim LaFleur), every now and then there'd come a moment where he'd realize he'd underestimated his mark. "Strictly business, right?" Juliet mutters, and he slips his knee between her thighs.
"Real cute, Blondie."
"Hm." She kisses him again, all tongues and teeth and loneliness, both of them bluffing like some screwed-up game of chicken. She scratches his back through his jumpsuit. He rubs her through the fabric of her jeans. He's hard and restless and God, fuck, he wants like hell to do this, and still he couldn't tell you why. The sky is blue. He makes bad decisions. Being inside her felt somethin' like calm.
Juliet reaches up and pushes his hair back, scrapes her blunt nails whisper light over his scalp. Sawyer breathes in hard. It feels like a stun gun, shrapnel singing through his nerves, and the force of it rattles him a little so he lifts her up on the kitchen table and grinds himself against her 'til he he hears it: sharper than breathing, but not quite a whine. Sawyer smiles. He likes making her do that. He likes knowing that he can.
He gets his hands up into her t-shirt, runs his knuckles down the rising of her ribs. "Hey," she says softly, when he goes for the hooks on her lacy bra. This morning he found out she wears matching underwear, and he'd be a damn liar if he said he hasn't thought about it all day. "Slow down."
Sawyer tenses a little, his shoulders and chest. "Sweetheart, if you ain't interested--"
"I'm interested," she says. Sometimes her voice makes him think of water over a fire, the steam rushing up like that. Her eyes are very, very blue. "Slow down."
"And why's that?" he asks, getting real close to her, lips at her ear and voice low like a threat. "You wanna be romanced, Blondie?"
He's being a sonofabitch on purpose, pushing her buttons just to see if he can, but Juliet doesn't flinch. "What if I do?"
Sawyer almost laughs then, not because it's stupid but because at this point he doesn't think he could even if he wanted to, that he even remembers how to be with a woman when the world's not exploding around him. How it feels when it's just normal, when love and fear and dumbass wishing's not all wrapped up into one miserable freckled package, and every time he kissed her he was tryin' to convince her of something he couldn't even name.
Been awhile, is all.
Anyhow, it's funny, almost, the whole thing, but Juliet's looking at him serious as smoke in the goddamn jungle and Sawyer knows if he laughs he's gonna lose her for good. And maybe he can't say what he wants, exactly, but he's pretty sure that that ain't it.
"Well." He takes a deep breath, thinks what the hell. He nods a little, and his hair falls back into his face. "Okay then."
*
That's as much as they discuss it, but soon it's something like routine: he comes home and eats dinner and goes to bed with his wife, her mouth on his belly, his hands on her hips. At night she smells like lemons and motor oil. He concentrates on going slow.
Time passes. Sawyer keeps watch. He tells himself they're just gettin' it out of their systems, whatever fucked-up power-struggle who's-on-top bullshit there is between them, and if being with Juliet makes him feel less like his chest is on fire all the goddamn time, less like he's ruined, well, he tries not to think about that. Anyway, he figures it's only a matter of time before some brainy Dharma physicist catches her eye and he's back to sleeping in the living room. Sawyer knows about flings, about sex with no future: that much, at least, is nothin' new.
Afterwards they lie there and talk awhile, stupid stuff, meandering. He likes to hear about her college, the kinds of books she read. She's into the Brontës. "Emily was a sick fuck," she tells him one evening, a smile in her voice in the silvery dark. She swears a lot more than he first thought she did. "You like Stephen King, you'll like Emily Brontë."
"That so?" he asks, propping himself up on one elbow and running his thumb over the slope of her breast, half-hoping for a repeat performance. "Coupla' tortured ghosts stuck with each other, strollin' the moors 'til the end of the world?"
Juliet goes expressionless, and only then does it occur to him that maybe that was a jackass thing to say. "Yeah," she replies softly. "That's pretty much how it ends."
They're quiet for awhile. He doesn't know what to tell her. Eventually she falls asleep and he goes back to the couch where he slept when they first got here, scratchy and seventies-plaid. He dreams he's chasing Kate through the jungle, and when he wakes up the damn sheets are soaked through.
*
It takes a long time for him to notice the livid scar at the small of her back--strange, considering how much time they spend naked, though if anybody could manage to stay hidden with all her clothes off it's probably Juliet. "The hell is that?" he asks her, when he finally sees it, and it comes out more upset than he'd like. He ain't squeamish, but Jesus.
Juliet just shrugs. "Beauty mark," she deadpans, and he doesn't ask again. That night he wakes up and she's straddling his hips already, her body rocking restless in the moonlight. He comes and thinks of cages, of locks without a key.
*
Phil's been busting his balls over at the security office, so he's already a little cranky when he gets back to the house and hears that Juliet's got Patsy Cline on the record player, lonesomeness and steel guitars. Sawyer gets real still. He didn't think that kind of dumbass thing could still get to him after all this time, but there you have it. It makes him hate himself some.
"Hi," she says, smiling when she sees him. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch reading some Updike he thought she might like (and which, she informed him over breakfast this morning, she does not). "You're home early."
"Yeah," he manages. It feels like there's beach sand caught in his throat. "You might wanna turn that off."
Juliet doesn't move for a moment, and her voice is as placid as the surface of a pond. "You can say that you loved her, you know. Or that you still do." She shakes her head a little. They never use anyone's name. "It doesn't make you....anything."
Sawyer's still eyeing the turntable. "Patsy Cline died in a plane crash," he tells her. "Ain't that the damndest thing?"
"James."
"That wasn't love," he says immediately, and since her quiet tone of voice makes him feel sort of mean he keeps going. "And whatever you think you felt for the Doc, way back when? That wasn't love either."
"Oh no?" Juliet lays her book down, cocks her head to the side. She looks like she don't believe him worth a damn, which is fine since he don't much believe himself, either. "What was it?"
"Adrenaline."
"Ah." She nods slowly, taking on that calm, vaguely amused air he hates so much, like he's swimming in the ocean and she's the tide itself. "And what's this, James?"
Yeah, well, that's the question, ain't it? Sawyer looks at her. About half the time he thinks if he knew a damn thing about love he wouldn't still be here, would have stayed up in that helicopter even if it more or less meant suicide. The other half of the time he knows that's probably bull. "I don't know, Blondie," he says, and for a second he feels like he's bracing for a flash. "You tell me."
*
Well, lesson learned, he supposes. Don't get a hard-on for your artificial wife.
Neither one of them knows how to end a fake marriage and in any case they'd be damn fools to call the attention to themselves, so for now they act like everything is normal. They work. They make breakfast. They hold hands when people can see. After dinner they stand side by side to do the dishes, a pair of blond reflections in the window above the sink. "So," Sawyer says, when the plates are all drying. He finds himself wishing there were more pots to scrub. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight," she says softly, and after a moment the bedroom door clicks shut. Sawyer lies on the couch and listens.
At night sometimes she'd curl herself around him in her sleep and for awhile there he was thinking maybe that was the real her, her sleeping-self. He guesses it don't really matter, in the end.
*
Sawyer's edgy. He dreams bloody dreams. He misses the sex but mostly he misses the company, someone to talk out his day to, someone who knows who he is. It's strange, all this silence. It doesn't suit him. He starts thinking about what it might be like to leave the island, to give the real world seventies a try. The sub comes and goes, a shark beneath the water. Sawyer waits.
On Saturday morning he's running some papers over to Horace at the office when he sees her at the yoga class Amy's teaching on the green, her yellow hair grazing the grass as she bends her body like a triangle, the letter A. Sawyer thinks of beginnings, and just like that he's standin' by her side. "Hey," he says, right there in front of everybody, a dozen Dharma ladies tied up into knots.
"Hey yourself," Juliet says, palms flat on the common. Still it's like she's not surprised at all. "I'm kind of in the middle, here, James."
"Yeah, I see that." Sawyer swallows. He don't really get nervous as a general rule, but if he did now would be a good time. "I been thinking about Heathcliff."
"Heathcliff." That gets her attention; she stands upright and stares at him, her cheeks a rosy red. He gets why she made a good researcher. One look and it's like she knows everything she needs. "You want to talk to me about books?"
"It would seem," he says slowly, "that I want to talk to you about a lot of things."
Juliet smiles, just for a second. "All right," she says, natural as water, and they cross the grass and go inside.