Thanks for the reviews. I know, I know: long time, no see! The truth is that my schedule is brutal at the moment. I'm taking a full time course load (four units) and working five or six days a week, which means that I have very little, if any, time left to write, so it has literally taken me this long to finish the chapter. I'll try to get another update out soon, but in the mean time, I'm going to ask you all to be patient with me. ;)
Chapter 9.
"There's something wrong with this picture," Jack announced when Kate let him in the next day, jingling the set of keys dangling from his fingers.
Her eyes went straight to the street behind him, falling on the weathered Ford Bronco parked in her driveway. It felt right to see it sitting there again, like it had every night when they were together. "You passed your driver's test!"
He tried to sound nonchalant but the twinkle in his eyes told her that he was pleased with himself. "It's not really a big deal, Kate."
"Are you kidding? It's a huge deal. I'm so proud of you!" She threw her arms around his neck without stopping to think about how uncomfortable it might make him, withdrawing them quickly when the stiffness in his shoulders reminded her of why he'd had to retake it in the first place, and then she couldn't help feeling wounded that he seemed to be able to remember everything except her.
"What's all this?" she asked to cover her awkwardness, shifting her attention to the paper bag tucked under his free arm.
"I wanted to make sure you were eating okay," he explained simply, carrying it into the kitchen and setting it down on the granite countertop.
"I don't know if I should be touched or insulted," she told him, folding her arms as she watched him unpack enough fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and eggs to feed the whole household. Did he really think that she didn't know how to take care of herself? Especially now that she was pregnant?
"I wasn't implying anything, Kate," he insisted, clearly taken aback by her reaction. Of course he thought that he was doing a good thing. "You said it yourself – that's my baby. I just wanna do what I can to help out." He opened the door of the refrigerator and began putting the groceries away. "How're you feeling today anyway? You should be over your morning sickness by now, but it's not unusual for you to be experiencing abdominal pain or discomfort…"
He was speaking to her like one of his patients. She was just a case to him, something that he could treat. "You don't have to do this."
He glanced up at her, his brows knitting together in confusion. "Do what?"
"This." She wasn't sure how to put it into words, so she gestured around them at the empty kitchen. "Buying me groceries, asking me how I am, taking care of me."
"What're you saying?" he asked, frowning at her, his own temper beginning to emerge from beneath the layers of confusion. "That you want me to pretend what you told me yesterday doesn't change things?"
She wanted to scream that that was exactly why she'd kept the truth from him: she didn't want him to see her as another problem for him to solve. "I'm saying this is not your responsibility. The man I love, the man I made this baby with… That wasn't you. He was just someone who looked like you." For all intents and purposes, her Jack – the real Jack – was dead. She hadn't wanted to accept that at first, but maybe it would be better for both of them if she did.
To her surprise, his eyes darkened with hurt and she realised that she'd succeeded in offending him. "You're right," he agreed. "I do feel responsible for you, Kate, but not just because of the baby. You told me we were in love. That we almost got married. We had something once. I need to make up my own mind about what that was."
She couldn't hide her incredulity as she said, "So you want to date me?" The idea felt foreign to her. They hadn't really dated the first time around.
"It doesn't have to be a date," he corrected her, and she wasn't sure if that made her feel better or worse. "Just let me spend some time with you, get to know you again."
It wasn't the declaration that she'd been hoping for, but if there was any chance that it might help him remember: who she was, who they were, what she'd meant to him... "Okay," she agreed, deciding that anything was worth a shot at this point. If it didn't work, at least she could console herself with the knowledge that she'd tried.
"Okay?" he repeated with a tentative smile.
"Yeah," she reaffirmed with more certainty this time. "What do you wanna do?"
"What did we do… before? Aside from…?" She felt her face heat up as his eyes strayed to her belly and she grasped his meaning.
What did they do? She wished she'd paid more attention. "I don't know. Normal things. Took care of Aaron. Ate dinner together and talked about our days. Sometimes we asked the nanny to stay late and we went out."
"Where did we go?"
"Come with me and I'll show you," she told him, collecting her keys from the hall table.
"Don't you wanna drive?" he asked when instead of taking him to the garage that housed her own car, she unlocked the front door.
She crossed the lawn to the old Bronco, running her fingers lightly over the hood. She'd hated it when they were together, pleading with him to trade it in for something more family-friendly, but now that it was back where it belonged, she realised how much she'd missed it. It was a part of who he was. "No. Let's take the truck.
"Are you sure this is the right place?" he asked, pulling up to the chain link fence that separated them from the airfield.
It was hard to believe that little more than three months had passed since the night that he'd asked her to meet him there. So much had happened since then. "You brought me out here on our second date," she explained as he killed the engine.
He released his seat belt and turned to face her with a wry smile. "Please tell me it didn't have anything to do with that motel back there."
The thought of him luring her to such a seedy establishment, just to have sex, was so absurd that it made her laugh. It was something Sawyer would do. "I'd already let you stay the night by then," she assured him, taking pleasure in the way his eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"You slept with me on the first date?"
"No." She flashed him an impish grin. "I slept with you before our first date. As a matter of fact, you asked me to have dinner with you the next morning."
Kate cracked her eyes open to find Jack's deep brown ones focused on her. "Hey," she greeted him with a sleepy smile, pushing the tussled curls back from her face.
"Hey," he echoed, leaning over to place a tender kiss on her lips.
She shifted onto her side so that her position mirrored his. "How long've you been awake?"
He groped behind him for his watch, holding it up to the early morning sunlight so that he could read it. "A while," he answered as he returned it to the dresser, laying his head back on the pillow, clearly in no hurry to get to the hospital. "You have the cutest snore, you know that?"
She stared at him in horror. "I do not!" She didn't snore… did she? She had no idea. It had been so long since she'd shared a bed with anyone except Aaron.
"Remind me to bring my Dictaphone next time," he teased her and she couldn't tell if he was playing with her or not, but it didn't really matter, because that wasn't the part that caught her attention.
Next time. The thought made her smile. "I can't believe this is happening," she confessed. She'd fantasised about having him in her bed like this, but until last night, she hadn't allowed herself to consider the possibility that those daydreams might become a reality. "I can't believe you're here." She lifted a hand to stroke the back of his neck, as if to make sure. "I've wanted this for so long."
"Me too," he agreed, moving in to kiss her again.
He propped himself up on one elbow when he released her. "Will you go on a date with me?" he asked her with an earnest expression that she found absurdly endearing after the intimacy they'd just shared.
There was no part of her that he hadn't seen, touched or kissed. "Don't you think it's a little late to be asking me that now?" she deadpanned. "I mean you already got some." It was true: there was no need for him to go to all that effort when she was there, ready and willing.
She felt her own face break into a grin when he chuckled. She loved hearing him laugh, knowing that he was as happy as she was. It was a nice change from the weary, burdened Jack that she'd first come to know on the island.
"I'm serious," he insisted. "Let me take you out tonight. Just the two of us."
"What about Aaron?" Until now, her whole life had been about him. She hadn't thought about how she would make room for anyone else.
"We'll ask Veronica to stay with him," he told her and it she realised that he must have planned the whole thing out while she was sleeping, down to the last detail. "Not that I don't love Chuck E. Cheese's as much as the next guy…"
"But you think we could do with a little grown up time?" she finished for him. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been to a real restaurant, with wine lists and linen napkins and tablecloths.
"Is that…?" His earlier self-assuredness waned and she could see that he felt guilty, remembering the conversation they'd had outside the courthouse. "I know you said he was part of the package..."
"And he is, but that doesn't mean we can't spend a night away from him sometimes," she assured him. It might even be good for him.
"So is that a yes?" he checked, pulling her towards him. "You'll have dinner with me?"
She felt almost giddy at the prospect of finally being able to do something as normal as go on a date with him. After everything that they'd been through, she couldn't help feeling that they deserved it. "Yeah. I'll have dinner with you."
"Wow. We didn't waste any time, did we?" he said once Kate had finished.
The smile she gave him was sad. "We wasted too much time."
He hated seeing her so despondent, knowing that it was his fault, because he couldn't be the man that she needed. The man that she'd loved. "So why did I bring you here?" he asked her, hoping that it would keep her talking, and prevent her from dwelling too much on these thoughts.
"You said it was your favourite place when you were a kid. From the time you learnt to drive until you went off to college, you used to come out here to watch the planes land and take off. You wanted to fly one someday, but your father and your father's father were both surgeons and you felt like you owed it to them to carry on the family tradition. That's why you became a doctor. You didn't know how else to make them proud of you."
"I told you that?" His mother had never said anything about him wanting to be a pilot. He wondered if she even knew.
"You used to tell me everything," she agreed with a faraway expression. "When we first got together, we would talk for hours. About our families, our childhoods… If you read all the articles from when we got home, then I'm guessing you know about Wayne?" He nodded. It had been all over the news. "What you don't know is why."
He could see that she expected him to be alarmed by the knowledge that she'd killed another human being, but she didn't seem all that dangerous to him. "I don't care what you did, Kate," he told her. He'd known that she was a murderer at the time and that hadn't stopped him from getting involved with her. There must be a reason for that. "If it didn't matter to me then, why would it matter to me now?" The corners of her lips curled into a smile. "What?"
"Nothing, it's just… That's what you said when you found out the first time," she explained. "You told me we should all be able to start over."
That wasn't bad advice under the circumstances. "Sounds like I was onto something."
"Is that what we're doing here?" she asked softly. "Starting over?"
He didn't even know if it was possible when she still had one foot planted firmly in the past. What if she could never see beyond the man he was before? "Is that what you want?"
"I don't know what I want," she confessed, training her gaze on the windshield, watching a plane taxi along the runway. "All I do know, is that the three months where I thought you were dead were the worst of my life. I never wanna feel anything like that again."
Once again, he was touched by her obvious grief for him, even if he wasn't sure that he understood it. From what she'd told him, they were no longer together at the time of his disappearance, and yet she made it sound as if they were. "Can I ask you something? If we called off our engagement, why didn't you take off your ring?" That was the one part of her story that didn't make sense.
The colour rose in her cheeks and he saw that he'd embarrassed her. "I did. I put it back on after you…"
"Died?" he supplied with an ironic grin.
"Yeah. I should give it back…" She began easing it off her finger but he put his hand over hers to stop her.
"Don't. Keep it. Wear it if you want to." He didn't let go, enjoying the warmth of her skin beneath his. He'd been so isolated since he got back that it felt good to actually touch someone. "I know you're scared, Kate, but you don't have to protect me. What I need right now is for people to be honest with me, no matter how hard the truth is to hear. Do you think you can do that?"
She stared down at their hands, hesitating for only a fraction of a second before nodding. "But you have to do something for me. I'm not broken anymore. I don't need you to fix me. Don't make me into one of your projects. I can survive almost anything, but not that…"
For anyone who's wondering, this chapter was inspired by two scenes from the show: the one where Jack tells Kate that he took a flying lesson and the phone call where he asked her to meet him at the airport. I decided to link them both together.
Next chapter: Jack goes with Kate to her appointment... ;)
