Chapter 10: Nine Months

Freshly healed, her stitches out, Elizabeth was placed on light duty. Which meant she scoured the Pearl looking for something to do, while the rest of the crew insisted the Poppet should still rest. When she found Gibbs grumbling about inventory in the hold she offered to help make the counts, and he was all too eager to hand it over to her. She'd proved more than once that she was good with numbers.

The hold was musty, dark and damp, but Elizabeth liked having some time to herself as she tallied crates and barrels. Now that she was out of Jack's cabin privacy was a commodity once again.

Not that any of the men bothered her. Sometimes she felt their eyes upon her, perhaps, but for the most part the crew had accepted her as one of their piratical little family, especially after she had fought and bled for the prize of the Inmaculada. She took it as a great honor, and cherished her place among them more than she could say.

Will, however, hated it here. It was more and more obvious with every passing day, and she knew it was only a matter of time before he put his foot down. Strangely, however, after all these long months it finally seemed to occur to the boy that a sour temper and surly mood did nothing for his cause in keeping Elizabeth close to him.

"I know what you want, Elizabeth," he'd said to her the night previous, joining her at the taffrail late in the evening, daring to place tentative hands upon her shoulders. Surprised, she'd turned to him with wide honey brown eyes. It was the sweetest he'd spoken to her in ages. Though the proclamation was dodgy at best. She didn't even think she knew what she wanted, outside of being free. After she'd woken from her nap the day she let Jack touchher she'd undergone the most horrendous bout of guilt. Worse than looks or intimate conversations or kisses ever made her feel.

It was really the first time she truly absolutely without a doubt felt she'd been unfaithful, and it was a gray nebulous feeling she did not like at all. One moment she felt justified, and the next like she should beg for forgiveness from her clueless fiancé. As though he knew all too well, Jack took her following rebuffs on the chin, and did not press her overly for favors as some men would have.

Maybe he hated the label, but Jack really was a good man.

Or, he was biding his time.

"What do you mean?" she'd asked her fiancé, and he'd lifted a hand to her cheek, studying her face carefully in the shadows. He'd kissed her, and she let him, going through all the motions, the touch of lips giving way to a war of tongues. She'd waited for that spark to flare, the fire kindling inside, the way it did with Jack. Surely it would? Will was her fiancé, she loved him. He was good and sweet and faithful, everything a woman should want in a husband.

Yet who could have fathomed that Jack Sparrow, with his handsome ship and a hold full of gold, could ever seem a more secure prospect? She batted the thought away. Some of that gold was theirs, after all. They could take it to the new world under a new name…open a smithy in the American colonies, perhaps, and live new lives. Perhaps Charlestown, where they could be by the sea…

And she would look on it longingly between her chores at home, remembering a time when she had sailed among the Brethren of the Coast, had been the thing that goes bump in the night for all the good little merchant sailors scudding across the great blue ocean…

She could never tell her children who she was—who she had been. They would think her good and sweet and dutiful and never guess their mother had once raised a sword in battle or drank dark rum with a legend in the making beside her.

Will had continued to kiss her, backing her slowly up against the taffrail. His hands fumbled with her coat, unbuttoning her slowly, until he could slip his hand inside. He was shaking, and somehow…she almost felt as though she was taking advantageof him. "Will…"

"It's alright," he'd said, kissing her cheek, her jaw, her neck. "We don't have to wait. I'm sorry I said no, before. I'm sorry I've been so…cross. It's just that nothing has gone the way it was supposed to."

"I don't think there ever is a set way things are meant to go," she'd admitted before she could stop herself. "Fate seems like such a fickle thing."

She'd thought she and Will fated, once. She'd rescued him as a boy, watched over him. He was her best friend. They were supposed to be together, regardless of class, or even law. Hadn't the gods decreed it, when they gave him to her like a gift from the sea?

Now, she suspected the gods were just laughing. Laughing, laughing, all the time, sod them all.

Will froze against her, his hand pausing upon her sash. She realized that she'd always told him she thought their love was fate. Now she was telling him she didn't believe in fate. Did that mean she didn't believe in their love?

She didn't know. She didn't fucking know. Why were there no easy answers? She didn't want to hurt him. It was the last thing in the world she wanted, to cause this sweet boy pain. She'd sighed and lifted his hands from her, kissing his knuckles. "It's alright, Will. You don't have to do this for me."

Will's eyes narrowed, a question on the tip of his tongue. She'd been so eager before—was someone else doing it for her? Jack Sparrow, perhaps—he wasn't a complete fool. He was all too aware of the way Jack looked at her, and if he was even more honest with himself, the way Elizabeth looked at Jack.

"Let's just…talk," she'd suggested. "It's been so long since we talked."

They'd tried. But every conversational thread met a dead end, and eventually Will had given up, kissing her lightly and going to bed. Elizabeth stood at the back of the ship an hour more, and cried.

What was she going to do?

During their stunted conversation William had brought up one request: help him find the chest containing Davy Jones' heart. She'd told him she would, knowing all the while that even if she were to stumble upon it here in the hold she would not hand it over to him.

Bootstrap Bill had sealed his own fate along with Barbossa and the rest of the mutinous crew; the chest was a power she felt much better having in Jack's hands than anyone else's.

Not that it was likely that the coveted chest was hidden down here. Jack would never be so foolish. It was probably secreted in his cabin, underneath his bed…another place she could have access to again if she wished, though Will would rather die than send her on that mission.

She wondered if she should just let him go.

Could she be so brave? Yet...she didn't think he would go. Not without a fight. Not without the Heart. These posed problems she didn't have a good solution for yet. And there was that other little detail: she loved him, didn't she? The thought of losing her childhood sweetheart made something deep in her soul ache.

She did not like feeling like a failure.

And what of losing Jack?

That too caused a sharp, nigh intolerable pain inside.

All she had were difficult questions, it seemed, and no good answers. Best just to carry on with what she was doing. The day to day tasks, the sailing of the sea. Ah, and prizes. Jack had shown her some of the jewelry taken from the Inmaculada, and some of the things were so fine and heavy and encrusted with jewels that not even she, a governor's daughter, had ever had a hope to possess in her former life.

Lost in her thoughts, she remained rather oblivious to her surroundings, so much so that when a strong pair of arms encircled her waist she started and opened her mouth to scream. This impulse was quashed, however, when a mouth closed upon hers, and the scent of salt and sandalwood engulfed her senses.

Jack.

Her scream melted into a moan, and blindly she set down her lantern so that she could bury her hand in his mass of dark hair, trinkets jangling as she did so.

"What do you think you're doing?" she gasped, surfacing for a desperate gulp of air, her nerves on fire for his touch. Those strong hands traced the ladder of her ribcage, down to the curves of her waist. He was gentler on the side where she'd been cut, and she softened at the knowledge that he still remembered.

"Thought that was fairly obvious," he quipped against the skin of her throat, trailing kisses down her neck as she tilted back her head to better receive them. "I want to touch you again, Lizzy. I want to taste you." As though he knew her knees had gone weak at hearing those words he lifted her to sit upon a crate and went back about the business of pillaging her mouth. She gasped again as his hips nudged her legs apart, so that he could press against her.

She should have slapped him, pushed him away, told him to stop…

She wrapped her long legs around him, pulling him closer, winning a low groan that left her feeling a fierce triumph that was just as intoxicating as his lips on her skin.

She felt dizzy, utterly mad with…with whatever this was that Jack called up in her. Will had kissed her just the night before and she felt practically nothing. Certainly nothing, compared to this mad reeling magic conjured with Jack's lips on hers.

"Jack, Will is asleep in a hammock just over our heads!" she hissed, grasping for some sane reason to put a stop to this.

"Aye, sleeping like a babe. I checked," Jack agreed, and she forgot what point she'd actually meant to make with this information. They stared at each other from a breath away, the tips of their noses nearly touching.

He hadn't really had a chance to be alone with her since she'd had her stitches removed and vacated his cabin, and he'd felt her absence like a growing hole in his heart. Will watched over her like a hawk, and though there was very little about the boy Jack respected, young William's alarmingly sharp sword was on the list.

He caressed her hair with a tenderness that was a startling contrast to his earlier onslaught, and her heart continued to attempt escape from her chest. "I've missed you."

Missed was the understatement of the year. He barely slept, pacing his cabin like a tiger in a cage, scheming upon how next to go about getting her back in his arms again. The feel of her sweet soft flesh upon his fingers, his name ragged upon her lips, needy, pleading, Jack… Knowing she slept just a deck below his feet and yet he could not touch her made him want to climb the walls, or perhaps throw that damnable boy overboard and be done with it.

He knew she'd felt guilty about their little tryst, if one could call it that, in his cabin. By the skin of his teeth he'd managed not to press her for an encore when she'd claimed she was tired, or her side ached, or the sun was out. Somehow he knew if he held on too hard, she would slip right through his fingers, but the waiting was slowly killing him.

But if he could just remind her, just a little, perhaps she would soften to him again…

"I haven't gone anywhere."

"You know what I mean."

Elizabeth bit down on her reply, knowing it could lead nowhere good. Yet in the end she felt her head nodding of its own volition.

He kissed her again, softer this time, and yet somehow it caused her to melt even more beneath him, rendering her clinging, pliant, utterly at his mercy. She arched as she felt his hand find its way beneath her shirt, his fingers splaying upon her side, tracing the new scar that went from her hip all the way up to just under her breast. "Jack…"

Elizabeth didn't know if it was a protest or an encouragement. "Do you want me to stop, Lizzy?" His voice came low, husky with desire, and that she could affect him so made her feel powerful in a way she didn't yet quite understand.

He told himself that he would stop if she really wanted him to. He just didn't think she really wanted him to…

Again, she thought of Will the night before, and their empty kisses. It hadn't always been that way. Was there a way to regain that fire, or once it was gone…was it simply gone?

"I…"

She simply could not think. She had to gain control of this situation somehow, or else she might…

She would give him everything.

"I suppose you would like to collect on your turn," she said evasively, reaching down between them to brush her fingers against the hard bulge in the front of Jack's breeches.

A rather strangled sound escaped Jack, his fingers flexing upon her side, and in that moment she felt strangely powerful, that such small contact could render this man so…undone. "I was thinking more along the lines of an equal exchange," he corrected, taking her mouth again with a kiss that made her melt once more.

This was it Elizabeth realized, her head tilted back at an almost painful angle as Jack kissed her neck, her collarbone, and lower, her body taut as a longbow. Desire sang in her veins once more, taking hold of her body and soul with a merciless totality. She was going to lose her virginity on a crate in the hold of the Black Pearl to Jack Sparrow, and lose it gladly.

"Elizabeth?" Will's voice echoed down through the hold, and immediately Jack blew out the lantern, plunging them into darkness. He pulled her behind the crate upon which they had been snogging, folding her into his body as they crouched, their breathing sounding loud as a trumpet in such close proximity. She felt the rough curve of Jack's whiskered cheek, and knew he was smiling.

That boy had the damndest timing.

They heard Will's footsteps near closer, but the whelp had not brought a lamp or a candle of his own. He paused beside their crate, undoubtedly squinting into the darkness, perhaps smelling the smoke of the extinguished wick. But in the end he turned on his heel and they listened to him clomp back up the companionway.

Elizabeth felt more than heard Jack laughing behind her, and suddenly very annoyed, she drove her elbow into his ribs. What had been a golden rush of exhilaration had curdled into a mass of guilt and uncertainty inside her.

"Oof. What was that for?" he hissed, and she huffed in answer.

"As if you don't know."

"You seemed to be enjoying yourself plenty."

She certainly had been, and that was part of what vexed her.

"This is all just a game to you."

She tried to stand but Jack's arm tightened about her waist like a band of iron. "Life is a game, Lizzy, but I take the stakes of our little wager very seriously."

He kissed her neck, and she felt herself melting all over again. This was insane. That he could approach her like this, and she would thank him for it. She could let him take her in this damp moldery hold without the slightest twinge of regret…until morning, perhaps, when she had to look upon Will's face, and tell him...

Christ, what would she tell him?

The thought made her struggle against Jack again, feeling trapped in the darkness by her doubts of herself and Jack's strong grip.

She needed fresh air.

"You don't play fair, Jack Sparrow."

"No one who wins ever does, love." That was a lesson he'd learned the hard way, one too many times. And he wanted to win this little game they were playing, badly. Yet when she truly made it known she wished to be released he let her go, and somehow restrained himself from giving chase as she fled up the stairs after Will.

He still had some pride left, it seemed, but without her his arms felt unbearably empty once again.

"Bugger."

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