"Why is it so important for you to be on that raft?"
"Because there ain't anything on this island worth staying for."
The tone of his voice and the look on his face belied every word that he said, and she knew without a doubt that he would stay if she asked him to. Oh, there would be bluster and swagger galore, preening and strutting to be sure, snappy one liners and a string of none-too-flattering nicknames thrown into the bargain, but come tomorrow, when the raft sailed, he would still be on the island, and they would both know the reason why.
All she had to do was ask.
"Be safe, Sawyer," she said, after too much time had played out between them.
"Yeah." He wanted to turn and walk away, but couldn't bring himself to do it. Couldn't bring himself to take half a step towards her, either, even though he knew that all of the steps after that would be no effort at all. He blinked then, and the spell seemed to break.
Ducking his head, he turned and disappeared into the darkness.
He lay on his back, staring at a billion stars through a tear in the roof.
Fucking hog. He should have killed it when he had it in his sights. Just a boar, my ass, he thought, watching twin meteorites streak across the opening. He could have tried to patch the hole, or moved the tarp to a sidewall, but then he wouldn't be reminded of how the bastard had looked him in the eye and dared him to do something to make it stop harassing him. It was like the thing had a death wish.
Don't we all, Brother Boar. Don't we all.
He closed his eyes, and she was there, laughing up at him over some backwoods crack that he had made. She always laughed at him, refusing to take him as seriously as he tried to take himself. She didn't buy his act, never had, and she chipped away at him day in and day out until she finally breached the wall. She let herself in, and for just a while, the light in Sawyerville had shined a little brighter.
Then Michael had started building that bitch of a raft, and Sawyer had bought the last available seat. She had taken that hard, and he knew why, but it was more important to him that he catch this one-way ride to certain death than give her the opportunity to evade Johnny Law. His betrayal of her trust had driven her back to her own side of the playground, where she had sealed herself off from him without a backward glance.
He was sorry for the ugly turn things had taken, but could not bring himself to say so. That's all she had wanted to hear. A simple I'm sorry from him would have opened the door for some small sort of healing between them, so that their parting would not echo with the emptiness of things left unspoken.
He had almost said it. Damn it, if she knew him at all, she would have seen that he really had said it, just by showing up at her fire earlier tonight. But she had fortified the wall on her side, and no way in hell and half of Georgia could he muster the energy it would take to get through.
Then he thought of the kiss.
It wasn't much of a surprise, really, being blindsided by the memory. It happened more than he liked to admit, and not always under cover of darkness. Sometimes the images came at him in the midst of a blinding jungle squall, other times the feel of it rolled in with the morning tide. Whenever it came, he took care to acknowledge it, because it topped his list of The One Thing I Want To Be Thinking Of When I Finally Bite The Big One. On a scale of one to ten, that kiss had been off the chart.
Not bad for something that began as a joke.
What do you want, Sawyer? He had stopped the axe mid-swing to consider his answer. Now that was the sort of open-ended question that he could get behind.
A kiss. From you, right now. He called up the dimples and turned on the charm.
She didn't take the bait.
Then she'd pissed him off with her I understand your pain bullshit, and he had lost control of the situation, temper pushing him to shove the letter into her hands. No one had ever seen the letter before. No one had touched it. Read it. Yet here were the words coming back at him, not in the voice of a devastated little boy, but in the hesitant timbres of the only person on this God forsaken island who probably could understand.
Son of a bitch.
He rolled onto his side and closed his eyes again, calling up memories of his mama as she sang his favorite lullaby, hoping it would take him to the land of Nod, where sleep would come and the dreams would not.
Hush a bye
Don't you cry
Go to sleep my little baby.
When you wake
You shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Dapple and gray,
Pinto and bay,
All the pretty little…
Nuh uh, buddy. Not gonna happen.
Fuck.
That damn kiss just wasn't going to let a sleeping dog lie.
It was a bartered kiss, when you got right down to it, won through guile and cunning, as his kisses always were. He had nothing to barter with, but she didn't know that, and he wasn't about to let the cat out of the bag. He didn't expect much; nothing more than her loathing-thinned lips pressed to his, but he would still win the game, and wasn't that what it was all about?
To her credit, her touch had been soft and her mouth slightly open when she finally leaned in to pay the piper. Not one to miss an opportunity, he had eased his tongue forward, determined to claim some small spot of her for his own. Hell, just to taste the juice from this morning's mango at the corner of her mouth was worth the price of admission. But the joke was on him and he was met not with the cold detachment that he had imagined, but with the smallest flicker of her tongue against the inside of his upper lip.
Jesus.And then she had pulled back.
Not completely, just a whisker's breadth, and before he could think, he felt her lips again, forcing his mouth to open wider, pressing into him with a hunger so urgent that it drew a low growl from the back of his throat. This time when she broke to breathe, her lips remained against his for the split second that it took to take in air, and then she was at him again.
It was a good thing he was tied to a goddamned tree when she hit him with phase three. It was the kind of kiss that called for fingers sliding through hair and tangling there, yanking back to open a mouth wider and to expose the pulse that pounded just below a jaw line, for hands to slide down the back of a neck, around the collarbone and down to an area sprinkled with a dusting of new freckles, leading like a path of fool's gold to the Promised Land.
Tongues and teeth and deepening angles had threatened to steal his breath away, but the kiss was as honest as he had ever allowed, and he knew it was the same for her. Then she jerked away, her sharp intake of breath signaling the return to a reality that neither of them wanted and both would deny. Their foreheads resting together for an instant signaled the end of a moment that would fade into memory like the mist of a dream.
Good damn thing he'd been tied to that tree.
A rustling at the back wall of his tent had him sitting up and reaching for the Sig, just as she stepped inside. She stood there, the corner of the blue tarp bunched in one hand, the other arm raised inches from her side, fingers splayed, empty palm out. Her jaw had a determined set and her mouth was drawn into a hard line. There was moonlight and the raw glint of challenge reflected in her eyes.
He put the gun down and waited.
An eternity passed. Damned if he was going to make the first move. This was her party, and although he thought he was reading the invitation right, with her you couldn't always be sure. She never took her eyes from his, and she offered nothing more than that penetrating, black-eyed stare. He was just about to tell her that the midway was closed for the evening when she finally moved.
She kicked off her shoes.
TBC