Second Chances
Her head throbs as the thoughts race through her mind one after the other, unable to be pushed away, no matter how hard she tries.
It's dark outside now and her hands grip the steering wheel and she's angry, but the hurt indignation on his face flashes before her eyes (I wasn't pretending anything), and when she sees the supermarket up ahead, relief courses through her.
She pulls in the parking lot and once the car is at a stop she presses her hand to her forehead, the cool against hot calming and comforting.
She knows she has the medicine at home somewhere but she just can't wait until then, even if home is only a few minutes away.
She manages to gently rouse Aaron out of his slumber and once inside the store she makes a beeline for the medicine aisle.
She looks down at Aaron, at how his small hand moves over his face and his sleepy eyes scrunch up against the bright light and she smiles faintly at him.
"I'm sorry I woke you, baby. We'll be home real soon."
As she rounds a corner, finding the aisle she's looking for, he smiles up at her, the smile that melts her heart every time.
"Okay, mommy," His eyes wander curiously around him. "Where's Sun?"
She clenches her jaw, thinking of what took place at that marina less than half an hour ago. "She's busy right now, sweetpea."
"Oh," Aaron answers, but then his face lights up with glee and he points ahead of her.
"Can I go look at the toys?"
She looks and sees the toy aisle not too far ahead of her, then looks back at Aaron, who's practically bouncing on his feet.
She smiles, giving in. "All right. But stay there where I can see you."
"Okay, mommy!"
And he sprints as fast as his legs will carry him.
The sight of this is so adorable that at any other time she would have laughed, but not tonight, and she turns away, bitter.
Her eyes scan the shelves for aspirin, anything to alleviate this pain, and she touches her forehead again, holding her hand there for a moment.
All of a sudden an inexplicable chill comes over her, and she can't help it, she shudders, and diverts her attention from the shelves to her left, to check that Aaron is all right.
But the toy aisle is empty.
He's not there.
Her stomach clenches with fear and the migraine is the farthest thing from her mind now as she begins to run.
As she checks through more empty aisles tears rise to her eyes, and she can't believe she had even allowed herself to take her eyes off him for one second, after what Ben admitted he had tried to do.
She hurries through one aisle and is about to go into another when she nearly collides with a woman, and as she pulls her eyes up to meet hers the desperate words almost tumble out of her mouth-- please, help me, I've lost my son-- but as she sees who it is she stumbles back, the air leaving her lungs.
Claire stares back at her, solemn, looking the same way she remembers seeing her, and she can't move, the only thing she can do is to stare right back."You have to go back, Kate," Claire declares, her light eyes boring into hers. "But remember what I said before. Don't bring him back with you."
Her mouth opens and she tries to form words but fails, but Claire doesn't wait for an answer, just moves on past her into another aisle like they had never spoken at all, like they were merely strangers.
She just stands there, trying to collect herself, to let the fear subside, and when she finally looks away from where Claire had gone and up ahead of her, she sees him, greedily studying the rows of candy.
She nearly stumbles as she runs to him and as Aaron hears her footfalls approach he looks up at her, smiling, holding out a candy bar. "Mommy, can I have this?"
She crashes to the floor, pulling him tightly to her.
"I told you to stay where I could see you," She chokes out, finally regaining her ability to speak, and her eyes swivel around nervously for Claire, expecting her to reemerge. "You scared me so much."
Aaron pats her back, and it's now that she realizes she's shaking. "I'm sorry, mommy."
She feels like she's going to be sick, but she swallows, holding it back, and releases her hold on Aaron, pulling back to look at him.
"Did anyone talk to you, baby?" She asks, studying his face intently. "Did a woman talk to you?"
Aaron shakes his head at her, his blue eyes wide (just like his mother's, who had been standing merely a few feet from him a moment before) at her distress. "Nuh-uh."
She looks away, letting out a deep breath, towards the direction Claire wandered.
But there's no sign of her now.
She might as well have been a ghost.
Deep down, it doesn't surprise her that she's the only one who saw her.
It is her own personal nightmare, after all.
-
She hands him over and it feels like her heart is actually tearing in two.
The only other time she felt like this was when Jack left her.
She'd never thought she'd feel this way again. She had hoped, desperately, that she never would.
But it's what his mother wants (his real mother) and so she does this.
"He'll be fine, Kate. I'll take care of him."
She looks inside of the house at where Aaron sits cross-legged on the floor next to a girl a few years older than him, her long dirty-blonde hair sliding over her shoulders as she arranges toys across the floor.
The girl looks up at her, as if she sensed her eyes on her, and they hold each other's gaze, her ocean blue eyes (her father's eyes) on her green ones.
Then the girl looks away, chatting with Aaron.
Aaron's back is to her, his conversation with his new friend animated and excited, and I love you crawls up her throat but dies on her lips.
"Just keep him safe," She says instead to the woman who became her friend through odd circumstances, and once she gets back in her car and the front door closes she buries her face in her hands and cries.
She doesn't know how many minutes have gone by as she looks out of the windshield at the night that's now darker than ever, and she fumbles in her purse for a Kleenex but her fingers close around something thin and metallic instead.
-
She is a bit amazed herself that she kept it in her purse all this time, but she never could bring herself to put it away or get rid of it, just like she couldn't with the ring (in her dresser drawer) or the picture (on the desk by the door).
It's been months, months since she's felt something unmistakably like bliss, and yet, even when it's over, she still kept those things close to her like nothing had changed at all.
Because not having those things close by would mean that it really was over.
She just can't face that. Not yet.
She turns the key in the lock and opens the door and she can tell by the darkness inside that he's not back yet, but she doesn't bother turning on a light, just walks purposefully and effortlessly down the long hallway to his bedroom because she remembers and never forgot.
She lies down on his bed and it truly hits her that she's here, in his apartment, that this bed is his, that everything here is his, and she barely notices the tears until the covers are damp against her cheek.
He finds her sometime later and the sound of his voice and the feel of his hand against her arm overwhelms her, saddens her in so many different ways and for so many different reasons.
She looks back at him and he back at her, both of them waiting for something, and the words spill over her lips (don't ever ask me about Aaron again, do you understand, Jack?) when all she really wants to say is the truth, that she gave Aaron away and now he's slipped through her fingers like he did and she just wants things to go back to being good again.
His hands frame the sides of her face tentatively and she expects him to stop her any minute now, she even braces herself for it, but his lips only move over hers with a passion that matches her own and she knows that he needs this as much as she does, that he craves for this comfort too.
They fall onto the bed and she pulls off his suit and he slides his hands under her shirt and he's so gentle with her, like he's afraid he'll break her, like he doesn't know that they're both broken, perhaps beyond repair, now.
Throughout the night he holds her, and she lets him, her arms moving around to his back and she curves against him, and he says nothing, doesn't even shift, as her tears leak from her face onto his skin.
-
The reality sets in as soon as she wakes and her eyes adjust to the light filtering through the window to her right.
She brings her hand over her eyes; even now they feel puffy and sore, and as she looks around her she sees that she must have extricated herself from Jack sometime in the night, for now he's laying splayed out on his back.
His eyes are still closed and his face looks peaceful; a long while ago she would have smiled and kissed him until he woke up grinning, but she doesn't do that now, because things aren't like that now, not anymore.
She holds the covers up to her chest as she attempts to slip out of bed but then his hand brushes against her bare back and even now, after all this time, his touch makes her skin tingle.
She manages a tight smile as she looks over her shoulder at him and he's smiling back at her as well, but she can tell by the way his face is set that he's readying himself for rejection, for an excuse she'll give to leave, for a proclamation from her that this was a mistake and that she regretted it.
Even though he had hurt her, she just can't bring herself to hurt him.
"I'm just going to take a shower," She says, and everything about him seems to relax.
She picks up her clothes that were discarded on the floor and redresses; she can feel his eyes on her as she does this and she knows he wonders why she even bothers.
She used to just take only the sheet, letting it trail behind her as she retreated to take her morning shower.
She remembers how his eyes would follow her as she did this (you have no idea how tempting that is, Kate), how sometimes he'd nearly be late to work simply because they couldn't keep their hands off each other.
Her cheeks burn as she makes her way to the bathroom, reminiscing about this, but that was before, and this is now, and this is what it has come to.
She'd be a liar if she said it didn't hurt.
-
When he looks up at her the smile he wears transforms his face so much that it almost seems like he never was that man, that man with the tequila on his breath and the empty, pained eyes.
The man that both frightened and devastated her at the same time.
His eyes shine with hope and he gestures towards the table, so she agrees to stay, even though she had planned from the moment she woke up on walking out the door.
He remembers how she prefers her coffee and it takes her aback, and as he stares at her, trying hard, so very hard, her heart aches, like it has continued to do for so long.
So she indulges him and smiles for him and he returns it with one of his own, clearly relieved.
What happened the night before with Aaron is still fresh in her mind and as she takes a sip of her coffee as Jack talks about his father in an attempt to get her to think of other things, her stomach tightens.
This is what she has now lost: nights with Jack, sitting together for breakfast as a family (all three of them).
Family is something that she believes is no longer attainable for her.
The phone rings, giving her the chance to exit, and she takes it, because she really doesn't think she could bear staying here any longer anyway.
-
She's aware that she must look terrible, with her eyes so rimmed with red, but she can't find it in herself to care.
She can feel Jack's eyes on the back of her head too many times to count but she sits resolutely in her seat and makes sure not to look back.
But he makes the first move, like he has done so many times.
"We're on the same plane, Jack, it doesn't mean we're together."
The second those words leave her lips she sees the hurt reflected in his eyes, only briefly before he casts it away, and she regrets saying it, she does, and when he gets up to speak to Frank, the shame swells in her chest.
She doesn't look in his direction when he passes her seat a few minutes later.
-
She stares out the window, and for the life of her she can't think what she could possibly say to Sawyer when she sees him again.
She could say what happened to her after she left the island, the decisions she's made and the life she's lived, but there's too much to say, too much to possibly begin to explain, and honestly, she just doesn't feel up to it.
None of it truly matters anyway, because as soon as they reunite there will be that knowledge hovering between them, the awareness that she already made her decision.
That decision is sitting on this plane with her, only a few rows behind her.
With Sawyer, it was never a question of whether she missed him or not, because she did, of course she did.
But she had discovered that as the days off the island passed by, whether in a blur, like the days that were spent scrutinized by the media, or drawn out, like those days of her trial, she never really longed for him.
Not like she longed constantly for someone else.
Three years is a long time, too long a time to pine over a relationship that was over as quickly as it had started.
-
The plane rocks and shakes and she's clutching the armrests so tightly that her knuckles are turning white, so white against the dark blue of the seat.
A high pitched ringing sound fills her ears and a bright flash of light blinds her and the only thought that crosses her mind then isn't Aaron, or Sawyer, but just Jack, and how she wishes he were here beside her now.
Then she wakes up, dizzy and disoriented, to the sight of Jack's face.
-
They just stare at each other, their eyes locking in an unwavering gaze, for it has been three years, three years since he had jumped out of that helicopter and she had made it to civilization.
Jack stands beside her, unmoving and silent, and Sawyer smiles and she moves forward and wraps her arms around his neck.
He holds her warmly, yet it's different than it was before, in a way she can't explain.
"Hi, Sawyer," She says quietly, and his hand moves over her hair.
"Hi, Kate."
And suddenly she can feel it, even though she doesn't see, that Jack has already looked away.
-
She, Jack, Hurley, and Jin, they sit in the house Sawyer and Juliet live in, that they have lived in for years now, and there are many, many explanations.
The things they say to her are things that she would have laughed upon hearing if it weren't for the very serious looks on their faces.
They say that they're posing as part of the Dharma Initiative, because they're stuck in the 1970s, and when she sneaks a glance at Jack sitting across from her, she expects him to retaliate, to express his disbelief, but what she does see surprises her.
His face is thoughtful and calm, and he sits silently, taking in their words.
Sawyer says he can give them jobs and a house to stay in, but while he says this, he won't meet her eyes, and it's just now that she realizes how close he and Juliet sit together on the couch, how they almost subconsciously seem to lean into each other.
-
They stand outside his house, looking out into the night, and the distance between them is as present as ever.
It's not like the distance that exists between her and Jack, for they maintain it but are always so desperate to close it and reach out to each other.
The distance between her and Sawyer now doesn't pain her. It's certainly odd, but she had already known long ago that this distance would come to be between them eventually.
It was inevitable.
"I saw your daughter," She declares, and she can sense him become taut next to her.
A second goes by, then, "Is she okay?"
The porch light shines on his apprehensive face as she turns to look at him, smiling in reassurance. "She's fine. And happy."
"And her mother?"
In his voice she can detect regret, and she knows that he wishes things could have been different with that woman, and his daughter.
"She's fine too." She answers.
She watches as he swallows thickly, but clearly relieved, and he looks at her and smiles. "Thanks, Kate."
They've finally achieved some sense of peace between themselves, she can tell, now that her promise to him has been fulfilled.
They don't owe anything to each other anymore.
After a moment of staring out of the darkness towards the jungle once more, she asks, "How long have you and Juliet been together?"
He starts at this, just like she knew he would, and his discomfort practically radiates off of him.
"About a year or so," He finally responds, then looks at her, his eyes pained. "I'm sorry, Kate--"
She shakes her head, putting on an expression of understanding. "Are you happy, Sawyer?"
He gazes back at her for a few seconds, then says, honest and soft, "Yeah, I am."
She looks away, feeling his eyes continue to be fixed on her, and then he says, quietly, "Are you happy, Kate?"
She looks back at him then, sees the way his eyes crinkle in concern, and she sees evidently that he really has changed.
He's matured, taken on responsibility, and she doesn't think she has heard him make an insensitive quip to anyone ever since she got back.
Perhaps Juliet had a part in making him become the man that he is now.
She nods and smiles. "Yeah, I'm happy."
It's not exactly words of truth, not at the moment, but there's still a chance, and she knows she can be again.
-
There are two bedrooms in the house she and Jack reside in and they each stay in one.
It was a decision that he seemed to have made on his own.
He doesn't set foot in her bedroom, he respects her privacy a bit too much, and he acts so cordial to her, so much more distant than usual, that on most nights she lies awake in bed dwelling on it.
For some reason, she imagines him unable to sleep peacefully either.
It's a tiring game and yet they've always played it, ever since they met: he'll push her away then she'll push him away, but at least he's got a good reason this time for keeping space between them.
She wishes she could just muster up the courage to tell him to his face that she and Sawyer aren't together, that there will never be a time where they will be again, and that she chose him and meant it, even now.
And once or twice she almost did, when they passed each other during the day, or when it was only them in the house, but the words would never come when she needed them to and she'd have no choice but to look away and retreat.
But one night she finally does it.
Her bedroom door is slightly ajar and she hears his light footsteps as he's about to pass her room (some nights he lingers and she can imagine his fist poised, about to knock, before he thinks better of it and walks away), and she sits up in bed, turning the lamp on.
"Jack?"
It's astonishing how easy his name comes to her lips, how she's so used to saying it by now.
His footsteps cease outside her door and after a hesitation he pushes the door open slowly, peering in.
"Yeah?"
She can tell instantly that he's guarded, reluctant, and she makes herself smile, despite her nerves. "You can come in, Jack."
He does, and she sees that he's removed that jumpsuit, now wearing boxers and a white t-shirt.
At one point she saw him dressed like this every night, but she feels the heat rise to her face nonetheless.
He seems to notice this for she's sure the ghost of a smile had begun to form on his face.
But then it's gone.
"Is there something you need, Kate?" He says, fixing his eyes on the wall behind her more than on her, and there's nothing more that she desperately wants than for them to stop being this way.
"I want you to stay," She proclaims, the audacity she needed before finally coming to the surface.
He just stares at her and she stares back, sincere.
"Here," She motions towards the bed. "With me."
His face remains impassive, tight, like he doesn't want to get any hopes up too fast.
She understands.
She hurt him too much.
"What about Sawyer?"
His voice breaks through her reverie and his eyes roam over her face, doubtful.
"It's over," She states, and is determined, more than anything, that this will be the last conversation they have about Sawyer in this manner. "We're not together, and never will be."
Everything about his body manner changes completely; the relief emanates from him.
"Can we just start over?" She pleads, grasping this change in his behavior to be positive, and her heart beats wildly when he smiles, genuinely, and nods.
She smiles back as he approaches her, settling on the bed next to her.
His arms envelop her body and she folds herself against him as his lips graze her neck.
When she got on this island the first time, she viewed it as her way of getting a second chance, and she thinks that maybe, now that they're back, this will turn out to be their own second chance.
She can only hope.
-
He thinks it will be a girl, for all he ever recommends to her are girl names, and she doesn't feel the need to disagree with him about it.
Because more than once she dreams about the girl, the girl with wide dark eyes and waves of brown hair and a big smile.
It kicks and she lets out a small gasp and his hand moves delicately over the swell of her stomach and when he feels the movement he chuckles, and she joins in.
He pulls her closer and she rests her hand over his and can't help but feel that it was supposed to be this way.
---
.end