GRACE SEQUENCE
Once Was Lost - Toils and Snares - How Sweet the Sound - Safe Thus Far - Lead Me Home
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TOILS AND SNARES
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It was easier, going back, than Sydney had expected.
Her father met her at the airport in L.A., held her until the agents assigned to bring her in arrived and took her quietly into custody. She didn't give them any trouble, didn't make a fuss. She answered their questions: where she'd been, what she'd been doing. They kept her over night, ran the usual battery of tests before declaring her free and clear in the late afternoon. She'd been awake for over thirty-six hours, but that was alright. She'd been asleep for months.
Her father had left in the middle of the night for Korea. There was a message on her newly-issued government cell: he wanted to take her to lunch when he returned the next day. It made her smile, his cautious courtesy, the tenative way he phrased the invitation. She'd wanted to speak to him, but it could wait.
In the hallway she exchanged smiles with her interrogator; they were on the same side now. He offered her coffee; she declined. Instead she asked for Weiss.
"Syd, you look--" he said when he was delivered, and trailed off.
She smiled, dimples deepening, and hugged him. "You too," she said.
Out at the bar they'd frequented after Michael's death, and years before that, once and a while, after she'd come back from the dead-- she'd missed this place, she'd missed the familiar flavor, aged, of her grief-- she drank while Weiss grilled her.
"C'mon Syd," he said, "you disappeared. Not even Jack could find you."
She shrugged, and smiled, and took another drink. The Guiness slid down her throat: cool, smooth, familiar. This night like dozens of other nights. Her life.
"I needed some time," she said.
"I get that," he said, "I do. But-- six months?"
"Five and a half," she corrected.
He shook his head. "You didn't even bring me anything."
-
"You left me asleep on the floor," Sark informed her after she had said goodnight to Weiss and stumbled, a little drunk, up her own blessed stairs. His back was to her; he was sitting on her couch.
"I sent clothes back," she pointed out, setting down her new purse, the one she'd picked up at the airport in Milan. Everything in the apartment was exactly as she'd left it. Except for him, of course. And an open bottle of wine.
Setting his glass on the table, he moved towards her. "Kind of you," he commented.
"I thought so." She folded her arms and tried to feel impassive when all she wanted was to taste the red wine on his tongue. He'd come after her. She hadn't expected that.
He smirked, and when she sucked in her cheeks, narrowed her eyes in masterful imitation of herself, he laughed. He caught her wrist, opened her hand and bared her palm. His thumb brushed across it.
She swallowed. "Are you . . . mad?"
"Dear Sydney," he said, shaking his head, still laughing, "I cannot even begin to say."
-
The next morning she slept in until almost one.
Julian Sark slept later.
She turned over in her bed to find him there, laid out on his back, naked but for the bit of blanket across his hip she hadn't managed to pull from him in sleep, hair irreparably ruffled and one arm thrown over his head.
Quietly, propped up on one elbow, she took him in-- him, here, in her bed, in her bedroom, in L.A., his face in the light coming in through her window. There were fine lines-- age-- around his eyes, playing about his mouth. One too many smirks, she imagined, then thought of her own mouth. There were lines there too.
His eyes opened, taking her in in return.
"Good morning," he murmurred.
She trailed her fingers along the jut of his collarbone, the hollow at his throat, then leaned down to kiss his chest. "What are you doing here?" she asked him. She moved lower.
He sighed deeply, threaded a hand through her hair, loose from sleep and his fingers the night before. "Teaching you some manners."
"Did I forget to say thank you?"
She nipped at him: brief tension, then another soft exhalation. His breath teased against her cheek as he tugged her head up until he could see her face.
"You forgot to stay," he said severely.
She blinked at him. "You knew where to find me."
"That's not the point," he began, but she lowered her mouth to him to take him in, and she had ceased to hear him anyway.
She left him in her bed while she took a shower. She had shampooed, and rinsed, conditioned, and rinsed, before he appeared, still nude, on the other side of the frosted glass door.
"You're avoiding me."
She turned her back on him.
"I had thought we'd moved beyond this," he said.
She turned off the water. "I have to go to work."
"It's the middle of the afternoon."
"I promised I'd stop by."
-
"I'm sleeping with Sark," she told her father over a late lunch, moving her straw listlessly around in her glass. Sleeping. Present tense. As if it was a thing she was planning on continuing.
Jack looked unimpressed. "Are you?"
She gave him an even look.
"What is he doing in Los Angeles?"
Fucking me blind, mostly. "Nothing." She poked the remaining ice almost viciously, then pushed the glass aside. "As far as I can tell, he isn't up to anything."
"That's . . . difficult to believe."
"He says he cares about me," she said. "I think . . . I think he wants something from me."
She watched her father's face closely for reaction: nothing. She wished he'd register some sort of emotion: disapproval maybe. Or compassion. She wasn't the first in their family to sleep with the enemy.
"You can't give it to him," Jack said, as if it were obvious. As if he were slightly insulted to have to say it aloud.
She looked down at her pasta primavera. She said, "I know."
"Sweetheart," Jack said as they left. "Whatever you were doing out there-- You seem better. Than you were before."
"Thanks Dad." She smiled for him.
-
Sark was on her couch again when she got home, laid out reading one of her books. Or she assumed it was hers; he was barefoot and shirtless, and it didn't look as if he'd left the apartment.
The aparment she'd shared, for almost a year, with Michael Vaughn.
"Oh good," he said, glancing up and sliding a marker into place, setting the book on the side table, "you're home."
She raised her eyebrows.
"I was thinking a simple vegetable grill saute with rice for dinner, but you haven't any actual vegetables. And we're out of wine."
"We?"
His mouth curved tolerantly. "I. I am out of wine. You have a bottle of cabernet I can only imagine you purchased at a corner store of the Kwik Stop Beer and Wine variety."
It was bizarre, almost domestic. It unnerved her. He unnerved her. Following her, only half-clothed, in to the kitchen, wrapping his arms around her from behind, nuzzling her neck. Like a puppy. No-- like some breed of large cat. A predator, not a house pet. This, him, tame-- it didn't make sense.
You can't give it to him, Jack had said.
She shrugged him off, and tried to pretend it didn't bother her when he frowned.
"Something's troubling you," he observed.
"Yes," she said. She mimicked his inflection: "Something's troubling me."
He looked annoyed, and that at least was reassuring. "There's no need to get snippy."
She placed her palms on the counter, leaned into them, closed her eyes against the tears. "I don't understand any of this, Sark. I don't understand what you're doing standing in my kitchen. I don't understand why you're being nice to me."
"You're upset with me because I'm being nice to you."
She whirled on him. "Yes. Try to understand: my life-- it is ruined. My work . . . ." She laughed, a short, bitter sound. "Vaughn's dead. Do you get that? We were building a life together."
"When-- Danny, yes? When Danny was killed, you went on. I know you were . . . fond . . . of Mr. Vaughn. But you made a new life for yourself once. You can do so again."
She shook her head. "Maybe. But I don't want to. Not anymore. Not again."
He grabbed her by her arms, and she backed into the countertop, trying to get away, more afraid of him now than she'd ever been before. "That's not true. It was, but it isn't anymore." He appraised her, speculating glint in his brightly blue eyes. "It if was, you wouldn't have returned here."
"I'm not like you," she said, tears beginning to choke her. "I feel things. I still-- I still feel him. I still love him."
She couldn't miss the way his eyes went cold. His grip on her arms tightened.
"Maybe I'm ready to start trying again. But this?" She looked at him helplessly, shook her head. "I can't . . . I just can't."
"You don't love him."
She stared at him. His voice, inexorable, still rang in her ears; his face was set and hard. "What?"
"You don't love him," he insisted. His fingers tightened further. She'd have bruises.
She struggled against his hold on her. "Stop it!"
"Say it."
She sobbed, she tried to turn her head away, she pressed her lips together, but the words were coming anyway, the words she didn't want to know, the hoarse, horrible whisper: "I don't love him."
Triumph was hot in his eyes. "Who do you love?"
He was a threat, he was dangerous, and she'd let him into her house to demand things from her she didn't want to give. He hurt her and even now she wanted him, the proximity of his body a stimulant, a drug, an addiction she'd only just begun to feed.
"Tell me!"
He shook her, and she cried out. She bowed her head, face crumpling under the onslaught, and she gave it to him, the answer he wanted. She said, "No one."
He nodded grimly, in satisfaction, and released her. "Not for long," he said.
He left her crying in the kitchen.
-
When she finally made her way to bed, he was still awake, reading, waiting for her. He looked up when she entered, soft about the eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He put the book down, turned out the light, and she slid in next to him, allowed him to put his arms around her, to hold her like a lover.
"I shouldn't have lost my temper," he said, and she answered, "You're right."
The bedroom was still. She could hear the cars as they rushed past, headed home late to wives or husbands, children, family, work the next morning.
She asked, "What are you getting out of this?"
"Dear Sydney," he murmured, body pressed close to hers, the beat of his heart reassuringly steady against her back, "I cannot even begin to say."