Disclaimor: I own nothing.
a/n: the font may have changed in this chap. I usually write it on my mac, but I'm at my boyfriend's house, (so I'm also having trouble finding time to update) but he has a PC, and I'm not comfortable with the word-processor. If there are weird things happening with the font and style, it's not me.
Jackson walked out of the club, cursing himself. Why had he done that? It was stupid. He could have given himself away, and compromised his entire mission. What he had done had risked angering his employer. He had never done anything so risky before. It just wasn't who he was. He was a good manager, all of his employers liked him, and his clients respected him. What had come over him?
He passed right by his car and walked furiously towards the beach.
He knew what it was. It was the same thing that had come over him when he had allowed himself to fail in the Keefe job over a year ago. This girl just made him want to fuck up. As soon as he'd seen her at the Matchstick, the smart, professional thing to do would have been to leave immediately, and then request to be taken off the case. Because now that he knew she was here in Hawaii, he would be too distracted to finish the job. He would want to see her again.
Because the truth was, she fascinated him. He prided himself on being able to read people and discover their weaknesses, and know how to use their weaknesses against them. People were no mystery to him. But she was. She had been ever since he had first seen her, in a photograph slipped to him in a manila folder while he was on the plane to Miami. It was a quick photo snapped of her while she was walking to her car, one hand inside the purse slung over her shoulder and the other placed absently on her collarbone. The look on her face was tense and unhappy, but it was her eyes that had captured him. At the moment that the picture had been taken, she had tossed a glance over her shoulder, her eyes meeting the camera lens, unseeing but haunted. In her eyes he could see that there was a ghost haunting her, and that she battled it each and every day.
She was like him. He had ghosts too, and he knew from experience that fighting them could be the scariest thing you ever did. Most people wouldn't be able to deduce all of that just from a photograph, but he was a highly trained professional. In college, he had taken several psychology classes, and they had overall been his favorite courses, because he had been able to put them to practical use immediately, whenever he stepped out of his room, whenever he went to Starbucks, every time he met someone knew. Not only was he a natural at getting inside people's heads, but he knew instinctively how to make people feel however he wanted them to.
The stopped walking finally, finding a secluded spot on the beach, and squatted down, weight on the balls of his feet and head in his hands.
The bottom line was, he had thought that he understood her. When he looked at her, he had seen what looked like a frightened, beaten woman who had been struggling with a past, and was exhausted by it. She looked like she couldn't fight anymore, and that made his job all the easier. She was the perfect person for intimidation.
But unlike anyone he'd ever met before, she had surprised him. More than that, she had shocked him. Not with the distracting recount of her rape. He had expected that it had been something like that. But her reaction to it was something he had never seen before. Instead of letting it destroy her, she had let it harden within her, her pain and fear had been pressed and solidified within her by the fire of her outrage and strength of heart into a sharp diamond of contempt and fierce courage. The contempt had been for him. The courage was for the world, and he was proud of her.
Most of this revelation had happened for him while he was lying on her living room floor after being shot. It had passed within seconds, but felt like years had gone by while he stared at her, and his brilliant mind finally picked up on the stores of strength that had been hiding in her. How had he missed them during his long weeks of surveillance?
And seeing her at the club had brought it all back to him. She had looked whole, healthy, and strong. And when she danced, her eyes had glowed with a wild life that had been repressed for years. That was why all the men had stared, he knew. Not because of her beautiful body, or the way she had moved, although those things never hurt. People had stared because she looked like an animal, a jungle animal, that had recently been set free from it's cage.
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Lisa hugged Taylor goodbye, and stood outside her own apartment, hugging her arms, trying to quiet her body. Her skin was still humming from the contact with the man. She could smell him on her, the sharpness of his aftershave, and soft scent of his skin. It was in her hair. The smell was maddeningly familiar, and the feeling it gave her, (if you notice, all smells give you a feeling, or a hint of a feeling) she wasn't sure what it was, but it disturbed her. It made her feel, on a fundamental level, like she was in danger.
She shook the thoughts, and decided to go for a walk. She directed her feet to the beach. For some reason, her thoughts led her to him. it happened at random times, and she wasn't really that surprised that he was on her mind tonight. Most nights he snuck into her dreams like a bandit, filling up her mind with his face and his strong arms and hands. In her dreams, his hands did things that they had never done in the short time she had known him. Naughty things. Things that Taylor would have been shocked that Lisa even knew about.
She walked out to the edge of the waves and stood there, staring out at the ocean. She felt water break over her shoes, and, cursing quietly, quickly removed her shoes and held them aloft. She gazed up at the stars, and noticed, absently, that they were spinning slightly, and then realized that she was drunk. She laughed, and started to spin herself, faster and faster, until she felt a wave break over her hips and realized that she had gone out too close to the edge. She fell to her hip and felt cold water wash over her, wetting her thoroughly.
This should have been enough to startle her into sobriety, but she was a lightweight, and she stumbled her way back to the shore. Just the movement of her eyes made her dizzy. She didn't feel sick, luckily, just very, very drunk. Her thoughts returned to Jackson. She wished she were still at the club, dancing her mind away, with strangers. It was better than being here, alone with her thoughts. She had not yet made peace with the fact that he was in her blood, and probably always would be.
She knelt, facing the ocean, her wet shirt clinging to her dripping skin, her hair falling forward like a curtain.
Less that twenty feet away, Jackson Rippner crouched, head still in his hands. He had been unable to hear her, simply because his mind was too full of her to hear anything. If either of them had bothered to look in the right direction, this night could have had a drastically different ending, but as it was, Lisa soon turned and tripped her way back to her house, and presently Jackson made his own way home. But for the second time that night, they had been critically near to each other, and this time, both were unaware.
a/n: sorry, there wasn't a whole lot of action in this chapter, but I love getting lost in their minds. More action coming up, I promise! Please review, I love them!
-E