Thanks for the reviews. Another long chapter to make up for the lack of Jate interaction. I'm thinking this fic will end around chapter 30 and then I'll probably go back to writing on Destiny. ;)
Chapter 25.
"I have to admit, I was surprised when you called," Sam said, shouldering Kate's duffel bag as they left the airport together. "I didn't think I was ever gonna see you again."
She'd written to him from LA a couple of times to let him know that she was okay, but it was the first real contact they'd had since she discovered that he wasn't her biological father. She waited until they were both seated in his car to answer. "I never should've said those things to you," she told him, a pang of remorse gripping her as she remembered how harsh her words had been and how he'd just stood there. "What happened – what she did – wasn't your fault. It wasn't your job to tell me the truth." It was her mother that she should have been hating, but that wasn't easy when she wasn't around to defend herself.
He swallowed hard, nodding and shooting her a watery smile to tell her that he wasn't going to hold any of it against her. "How're things with that guy?" he asked, changing the subject as he gunned the engine. "What's his name? The doctor."
"Jack," she supplied, wishing that he'd chosen something else to talk about. Anything else. Despite what she'd told Jack about needing to get to bed early so that she could make her flight, she hadn't been able to sleep without him.
"Jack," Sam repeated, drawing her out of her thoughts. "How's things with Jack?"
He was going to have to know eventually. "We broke up," she confessed.
"Sorry to hear that," he said, his smile fading; they fell back into an uncomfortable silence until he added, "You wanna talk about it?"
What she wanted was to forget. By doing it now instead of later, she was supposed to be sparing them both a lot pain; she hadn't expected it to hurt so much. Already it was like a physical ache, and the worst part was, she had no one to blame for it but herself. "I wanna move back home," she blurted out. If she could get away from him, then maybe she could get over him. "You were right – I was running away."
He glanced over at her, trying to catch her eye, and she could feel his gaze boring into her. "And what are you doing now?"
Kate had been gone for less than a day and Jack could already feel himself slipping back into his old pattern. When even the scent of her shampoo on the pillow beside his wasn't enough to lull him to sleep, he dressed in the dark and drove over to the hospital to check on his patients.
It was hard to think about his own broken heart while he was surrounded with people who were worse off than he was; then again, he had to live with his pain. As much as he hated to admit it, his mother was right: he'd survived losing Kate, but just barely.
His first consult wasn't until nine, so he managed to take a brief nap in the on call room before his shift officially began. The patient had been admitted through emergency the day before after complaining of severe back pain; Jack went over the report filed by the attending on duty before he went to the patient's room.
Like many of his patients, he was older: a septuagenarian if Jack had to guess. "Mr Jacobi?" he read, taking his chart from the hook. "I'm Dr. Shephard."
"Call me Eli." The old man reached over the rail, stroking something, and as he repositioned himself for a better view, Jack noticed, for the first time, that there was a fully-grown golden retriever curled on the floor by his bed. "And this here is Leo."
Despite his model behaviour, the dog was incongruous with the rest of the room. "I'm sorry, Eli, but didn't anyone tell you that we have a strict no animal policy here at St Sebastian's? I'm sure—" He began, intending to call for one of the nurses, but the old man cut him off with a hearty laugh.
"Leo is a service dog," he explained, scratching between the golden retriever's ears. "He takes care of me."
Jack glanced back down at the chart in his hands, scanning the lines of doctors' scrawl until he found what he was looking for. "You're a diabetic."
"The joys of aging, eh?" the old man agreed, the corners of his eyes crinkling as his lips turned up into a smile.
"It says here you've also been diagnosed with lumbar spinal stenosis?" Jack checked, consulting his chart again. "And that you've tried anti-inflammatory drugs, physiotherapy and cortisone injections, all without success?"
"So what's the prognosis?" Eli asked. "You perform a laminectomy, try to relieve the pressure on the nerve roots? I'd do it myself, but…" He twisted his neck, looking over his shoulder with a sheepish grin to illustrate how difficult it would be for him to reach.
Jack couldn't hide his surprise at how well the old man seemed to understand his condition. Something about his confidence told him that he hadn't just researched treatments online. "You're a surgeon?"
"Was a surgeon," Eli corrected him. "Now I'm just an old man with back problems."
"If you're a doctor, then I don't need to tell you that there's a higher instance of post-operative complications in patients suffering from diabetes," Jack reminded him gently. There were so many things that could go wrong – hyperglycaemia, hypoglycaemia, pneumonia, infection – and at his age, given his poor state of health, even a minor infection could prove fatal.
Eli stopped joking around then, touching his sleeve to get him to look down at him. "I know the risks, but I can't live like this," he agreed. "I want the surgery."
Sam went back to work after dropping Kate off, leaving her to get settled into her old room. Everything was the same, from the threadbare blue comforter, to the New Kids On The Block poster she'd tacked behind her door when she was ten, to the plastic horses lined up on the shelf, but somehow it didn't bring her the comfort it once had. When she lay down on her bed, closing her eyes, all she could see was Jack's crushed expression; she couldn't stop her mind from replaying his anger and the desperate way he'd offered to give her a baby. If she'd believed for a moment that he wanted a family with her as much as she wanted one with him…
"What d'you say I take you to a movie to celebrate your first night back in Iowa?" Sam suggested as they cleared up after dinner that night.
On a normal day, she would have relished the opportunity to spend time with him. She'd always been what her mother called a daddy's girl. Tonight, however, she just wanted to be alone. "Thanks, but I was thinking I might go for a drive, check out some of the old haunts," she told him.
She could see that he was disappointed. That, or he was afraid she still resented him. "Raincheck?"
"Sure," she agreed, flashing him the warmest smile she could manage. She kissed his cheek and took his keys from the hook. "Night, Daddy."
She ended up at the tree house she'd built with Tom in the woods behind her childhood home. It was little more than a rickety wooden platform in the fork of an old oak, but as a child, it had been her escape: a place where she could go to hide from Wayne, or to dream, or just to sit and think.
She could see right into her backyard from there; she watched as Wayne's truck shuddered into the drive and he staggered up to the porch, disappearing from sight, drunk as usual. He didn't know she was there, but all of a sudden, she wanted to be back on the other side of the country in Jack's apartment with him and Claire and Aaron. Somehow, they'd become her family, her home.
A pair of hands came into view over the planks to her left, followed by a familiar dark head. "Tom," she greeted her former fiancé as he hoisted himself onto the platform beside her. She wasn't sure if she was happy to see him.
"I heard you were back," he explained, breathing hard with the exertion of climbing. "Thought I might find you out here." He leant back on his hands, allowing his legs to dangle over the side. "What're you doing?"
"Just thinking," she told him, hoping that he still knew her well enough not to ask her what about. She didn't want to talk to him about Jack.
"You been to see Wayne yet?" he asked when his gaze landed on the house.
She shook her head. "No." That was one part of her past she was determined not to revisit. They might share half of her genes, but that was where the relationship ended.
"Good," Tom agreed. "Let the bastard drink himself to death. It's what he deserves."
He turned his attention back to her with a heavy sigh. "Rachel and I split up," he confessed.
She hadn't seen him in over four years, since he came home for Spring Break with a woman he'd met at Northwestern and announced that he was getting married, so why was he telling her this now? "I'm sorry. What about Connor?"
"Rachel's got him, but she lets me take him out on weekends," he told her. "If she lets me have him for the summer, I'm gonna drive to the beach."
For a fleeting moment, she wondered if he was planning to come out and see her. Then again, she could be reading him wrong. "He must be almost…?"
"Three." He fished a crumpled picture out of his wallet, of a little boy with round cheeks and a mop of chestnut brown hair.
"He looks just like you," she told him, examining it with a smile, but inside, she couldn't help wondering if she was doomed to remain the only one in her circle of friends without a child. It seemed like everyone was having babies except her.
And Jack, of course.
Tom tucked the wallet and picture back into his pocket, his mood changing, becoming grave as he asked, "You ever think about…?"
"Yeah," she agreed. For almost ten years, she'd managed to bury it, but lately, she couldn't seem to stop herself.
"Sometimes, when I look at him – at Connor –, I wonder if that's what our son would've looked like," he confessed.
"Or daughter," she reminded him, brushing away the tears that stung at her eyes. They would never know for sure.
"She would've been beautiful," he said, reaching for her hand to give it a brief, comforting squeeze; it was nice to touch him again after all this time, but he wasn't Jack.
He cleared his throat. "So what about you?" he asked, nervous all of a sudden. "You seeing anyone?"
She could have said no, but after less than a day, she didn't feel single. "It's complicated."
"Tell me about it," he agreed, cracking a smile. "You wanna go grab a beer? You can tell me all about your glamorous life in LA."
It wasn't like it would be cheating. Without Jack, she was free to do whatever she wanted: she could go home with Tom, spend the night; they could get married, have the nine kids he'd teased her about, just like they were always supposed to.
It should be a dream come true, so why did thinking about it now make her want to cry?
"Sounds like fun, but it's been a really long day," she told him, using a branch that hung low overhead to pull herself to her feet. "I think I just wanna go to bed."
Around five o'clock, Claire sent Jack a text to tell him that she was spending the night at Charlie's; he wasn't ready to go home to an empty apartment, so he ate dinner alone in the cafeteria, watching a father cut up food for his toddler while his wife sat in a wheelchair beside them, nursing a baby that couldn't have been more than a day old.
More than anything, he wanted to be that guy, but he couldn't seem to drown out the voice inside his head that told him he deserved being alone.
"What's the matter, son?" Eli asked, picking up on his gloomy expression when he stopped by his room to collect another blood sample. He needed to check the old man's electrolyte count one more time before he felt confident scheduling the procedure. "You look like you lost your best friend."
Leo was still keeping vigil beside his bed. "That's funny," Jack said without looking at Eli as he prepared the syringe. If only he knew how close this was to the truth.
"Then why aren't you laughing?"
He didn't have to answer that. He could just take the blood and escape. "My girlfriend left me," he told him, concentrating on cleaning the area. He was so used to confiding in Kate now that he didn't know who else to talk to.
"Ah, a lover's tiff," Eli teased him with a knowing smile. He flinched as Jack inserted the needle into the inside of his arm. "Well, I'm sure she'll come around."
Jack wished that he could believe him, but it wasn't as simple as begging her forgiveness. If it was, he'd be on his way to Iowa by now. "It wasn't even a fight – she just left me." He sealed up the vial, packing the instruments away in a careful, clinical manner as he struggled to avoid showing any outward sign of emotion.
"So what'd you do?" Eli pressed. Off Jack's silence, he added, "You must have done something."
It wasn't so much about what he'd done as what he hadn't done, or at least, what he wasn't prepared to do. "She wants a baby, and I don't know if I have what it takes to be a good father," he explained.
"You seem like a compassionate young man, so what's the problem?" Eli asked him. "Don't like kids?" He leaned forward, lowering his voice with a furtive look. "You're not sterile, are you?"
"No, I'm not sterile," Jack assured him with an indignant laugh, caught between amusement and embarrassment. "At least I don't think so." It wasn't like he'd ever had a reason to get tested. "And I like kids, I just don't know how they'll feel about me. My first wife divorced me because I was never home. She said I worked too much. I wanna be there for Kate and our family, but what if I mess up again?"
"She already left you, son," the old man pointed out, raising a dubious eyebrow at him. "How much worse can you mess it up? Besides – all that time bent over an operating table? You don't wanna end up like me…"
Next chapter: Kate returns... ;)
It's my birthday tomorrow, so don't forget to review! xD