i
There was nothing they could do to salvage the date, especially not the lie of 'I had a good night' that tumbled from her lips almost automatically as they sat in her car, 30 minutes before she had a call from the head of InGen scheduled (he was working in Australia, she couldn't help that).
He just raised his eyebrows and shook his head, not bothering to call her out on it because all that would achieve was another argument, and he had really had enough of those for at least a few months.
"I'll get a cab," Owen announced, swinging open the car door and stepping out into the rain, "Call me when you shred your itinerary and learn how to have fun.", before he walked away as Mr Grady and left Claire with her head resting on the steering wheel, livid.
ii
The week after the incident was spent in flooded hotels and embassies, trying to get a replacement for the passports they had left behind so they could travel - where? - home?
They only asked for one room, after all, over twenty thousand people were in need, and it was cheaper - it was a miracle she managed to get one working credit card - Owen was still out of luck on that front.
Neither of them talked about the night he moved from his bed to hers because she woke up screaming, and they certainly didn't acknowledge the morning where they woke up naked, tangled in each other's comforting embrace.
iii
He was only meant to stay on her sofa for a few nights, a week (or two) at most, until he could find a replacement bungalow, a replacement that was affordable but not tiny, one that was consoling but not claustrophobic, where he (they) could be content -
(Claire; he wanted to be with Claire)
It wasn't planned (her life was quickly becoming unstructured and she wasn't sure if she liked it or not yet), but one day his toothbrush appeared next to hers, space was made in her wardrobe for his clothes, and his shampoo that she secretly loved manifested itself in her groceries - he hadn't used her sofa for weeks anyways.
iv
Somewhere between the hotels of Costa Rica and teleporting toothbrushes were lawsuits, board meetings, and court hearings, not to mention the journalists tailing them night and day, offers of interviews raining down on them from all sides, and the internet going crazy for the woman in a grainy video clip running from a T Rex armed with only a flare and the man who trained raptors for a living.
They always danced around the subject of what Claire was going to do once the clusterfuck that was the incident was sorted out, because they were too exhausted from gory nightmares to even think about having a talk about the island in the light of day past the professional matters; the only time they talked about it personally was when one of the two woke (screaming in Claire's case, in a cold sweat in Owen's) in the twilight hours while the other rocked them amongst whispers of it's ok, you're safe i'm safe, i'm right here.
Owen had a stint as a builder, but quit when one of his colleagues believed the side of the media that cast Claire as the real reason a couple of hundred of people died instead of focusing on the fact that she saved the rest and ignored the major factors responsible for the park going to hell - he ended up in a zoo with a job that allowed him to care for the larger animals instead (and he loved it).
v
After a few months of panic attacks, flashbacks, sleepless nights and denial, Owen managed to drag Claire along to his therapist from his Navy days.
(He didn't drag her so much as thrust the doctor's card in her face every day until she relented after a particularly harrowing flashback during a mandatory press conference.)
A few months after that, both of them slept through the entire night.