GRACE SEQUENCE
Once Was Lost - Toils and Snares - How Sweet the Sound - Safe Thus Far - Lead Me Home
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HOW SWEET THE SOUND (AN INTERLUDE)
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Sydney doesn't recognize herself when she's with him.
She likes it that way.
-
The CIA must know he's there, but they haven't been disturbed.
His hand traces up along her slender ankle absently as he reads, propped up against the headboard, naked but for the blanket draped across his hips. She's wearing a camisole and bikini underwear, in cotton, supporting herself with her elbow, temple resting against the heel of her hand, at the foot of the bed as she reads opposite him. Or pretends to. Really, she's watching him: the play of light across his body, the cut of muscle, the occasional crease of skin. She loves the dusting of hair on his arms and chest; she loves the occasional furrow in his brow; she loves him. It's still amazing to her, that he's here. It's still amazing to her, that she can feel this way.
-
He pauses everytime he passes by her mother's picture, framed by her father's on the side table by the sofa. He lifted it once, early on, other hand hovering over Irina's face. He put it back down quickly, suddenly aware of Sydney's curious gaze, closer to Jack's than before: two angled portraits forever separated by glass.
The new arrangment warmed her, and so she left them that way.
-
She whispers it at night: into his chest, against his hair, from the other side of the bed as he sleeps deeply beside her. I love you. She tries it out, tests it in her mouth. I love you.
Once, mid-confession, he woke, eyes luminous with sleep, all of him soft and yeilding in a way that banished who he used to be to her, banished who she had been as well. "Sydney?" he murmured. "Can't you sleep?"
She'd settled back in then, sliding further beneath the covers, slipping into the warmth he radiated at night. She put her hand on his cheek, and kissed him.
The taste of him was thick and nighttime sour, but as he opened to her his saliva mixed with the mint of hers and nothing mattered but the lush feel of his mouth and his hands as they slid along her hips, shifting her nighshirt to bare her thighs, already opening for him in return.
"It means a lot to me," he said quietly after, her cheek pressed against the sweat of his skin and legs tangled with his.
"What does?" she asked sleepily, inhaling the scent of him.
"This."
She almost told him then.
-
He is what she comes home to every night. Rome; Bejing; Atlanta; Bombay: she always returns to him.
She hadn't realized how much she'd missed that.
-
He leans against the door frame, hands stuffed casually into his pockets, as she takes the phone call.
"No, of course not," she says. "Yes, I understand." She snaps the phone closed, brings it underneath her chin to think.
"Everything all right?" she asks.
"Yes," she says, then, "No." She gives him a wry smile, which he returns. "They need me."
"So," he points out, putting his arms around her and resting his chin on her shoulder, "do I."
She can feel his arousal jutting against the fabric of his pants, pressing into her lower back.
"Unfortunately, you're not paying me."
"I could," he suggests, low, against the shell of her ear, and she shivers.
"I really have to go," she says.
He kisses her neck. "Will you return tonight?"
"Tomorrow morning." She turns in his embrace to accept his kiss, taste his longing for her. "You could do something while I'm gone. Like leave the house."
He just laughs.
-
She enjoys missions more now, knowing he's waiting for her at home. They feel like a vacation again from who she is instead of an escape.
She calls him sometimes, like she used to call Francie.
"Did you remember to pick up eggs?" she asks, pulling a spandex halter over her bra-clad breasts. From the other side of the van, her backup just shakes his head and laughs.
"To whom do you think you're speaking, darling?" he chastises, and she can't help but smile. He drops his voice to a husky tease: "Sydney. Your mission this evening: which wig?"
"The red one," she says, and hangs up, still smiling, on his low groan.
Once in a while, like tonight, when she calls he doesn't answer.
She doesn't know what she'd do if she had to go back.
-
"I love you," she says finally.
They are at the breakfast table, and he looks up from him section of the morning paper, a moment passing in which the sound of her words are translated into meaning. Then his mouth settles into that particular self-satisfied smirk she would recognize anywhere, the one that, facing him out in the field, usually signaled a change in her fortune-- and not for the better. It makes her cautious as he stands, folds the paper meticulously and places it on the bar before pulling her wordlessly out of her chair.
He makes love to her on the kitchen table. "Love, oh Sydney," he breathes against her lips, driving into her over and over again, and when he chokes out her name, the sound is the sweetest thing she's ever heard.
As she picks up, one by one, the objects they banished from the table to the floor in their haste, she listens to the water from the shower, picturing the elegant curve of his neck as he ducks to rinse the lather from his hair, the tilt of his hips under the spray. As she adjusts the placement of the salt and pepper, she catches a glimpse of herself, flushed and pleased, in the glass of the breakfront, full of her mother's old china.
It takes her a moment before she can believe it is her own face looking back.
-
Sydney does not recognize herself because for the first time in a very long time, she is happy.