"Hey," Boone said behind him. Jack didn't bother to reply. "You feeling better today?"
"I'm fine," Jack replied, not turning around.
"You sure?" Boone asked. "Cos last night you seemed kinda..."
"I'm fine," Jack cut in.
"Okay," Boone replied. Jack heard him sit down at the table. "It was kind of a change actually. Me not being the crazy vulnerable one for once."
Vulnerable. Jack hated that word. "Boone, I am sick of putting you back together all the time," he stated calmly. "I'm trying to stop myself from falling apart over here so maybe you could put yourself back together."
Boone was probably looking pretty wounded right now. And Jack conceded that he probably had a right to be. But he was also quite glad that he'd said that, Boone could have a tendency to lean on him a little more than was necessary.
"That's not even what I said," Boone stated. He sounded a little more confused that hurt.
No, it wasn't really, Jack admitted. It needed to be said all the same though. Well, Jack didn't know, maybe it didn't. He turned around to face Boone, who was actually looking more mature than Jack expected. Which put him off for a second.
"Look, this is just something I need to sort out, okay? It's my business," Jack explained to him.
"No, Jack, there's no such thing as your business. We're a couple, it's our business," Boone pointed out. "Jeez, have you ever been in a relationship before?" he asked sarcastically.
Jack laughed a little. "You want to talk about relationships?" Jack asked him. "Let's take a look at your track record, shall we? You're hung up on your high school sweetheart who broke up with you and you barely even noticed. And then you had an incestuous relationship with your sister."
Boone looked annoyed. "It's not incest, she's not even my real sister," he replied.
"And she was drunk," Jack continued. "So you took advantage too."
Boone looked up at him, clearly trying not to lose his temper. Jack thought it might be better if he actually did.
"Why are you doing this?" Boone asked him.
"You brought it up," Jack replied simply. "Face it, Boone, you left yourself open."
"Can you just talk to me, please?" Boone requested.
"What do you think I'm doing now?" Jack asked.
"I think you're trying to hurt me," Boone replied levelly. "And I'm not quite sure why but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of transference thing. So you want to tell me what's really going on?"
When did Boone get so damn perceptive? "I have to go to work," Jack stated.
"Shut up, you don't have to be in yet," Boone pointed out.
"Well I'm sure they won't mind me starting early," Jack said.
"Yeah, and then maybe you can paralyse someone cos you're all distracted and angsty," Boone suggested.
Jack looked at him, considering his options. He then shook his head. "I'll talk to you tonight," he said, heading out to the hall.
"Don't go, Jack," he heard Boone call after him.
He got to the hall and slipped on his shoes. Then he took them off again. He put his hands out in front of him and braced himself against the wall. He took a deep breath and rested his forehead against the cool plaster. He should talk to Boone. He knew he should. But now really wasn't a good time. He really did have to go to work. Not at this very second admittedly but there really wasn't enough time to get into all this right now and he didn't want to leave halfway through. But he didn't want to leave Boone stewing all day either. In fact, if he left things like this, Boone might not even be there when he came back. But of course Boone would because Boone was a sucker and he never felt cheated with the short end of the stick.
He went back to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, looking at Boone who was sat at the table, unaware of Jack's presence. He looked kind of lost, Jack noted. And he hated the fact that he had the power to do that to Boone, because Boone should know better than to take everything so to heart. But then, that's what Jack loved about him.
"Do you think we rushed into things?" Jack asked him.
Boone looked up, a little surprised that Jack came back. "Rushed into things?" he asked.
"The relationship, the house, the baby," Jack elaborated.
"No," Boone replied. "We've been together three years, I don't think we're rushing anything."
"But don't you see, we've been rushing it the whole time. Since the day we met we were rushing things," Jack went on.
Boone looked confused. "What do you mean?" he asked.
Jack went to sit next to him at the table. "We couldn't leave," he explained. "We couldn't get away from each other. We were stuck on an island, we had no choice but to spend everyday together."
"We choice a choice, Jack," Boone replied. "There were a whole bunch of other people on that island too, it's not like we were forced into anything, it's not like there was no other company to be had."
"Okay, sure, we liked each other, I'm not saying we didn't chose to be friends or whatever. We had fun hanging out together and we had an attraction and we wanted to be with each other. But it was never a real relationship, it was never like it would have been, like it maybe should have been," Jack rationalised.
"How do you mean?" Boone asked.
"You have a date with someone and then you drive them home and then you back to your place and then you maybe see them in a couple of days," Jack said. "But it wasn't like that. I couldn't take you home. I couldn't see you in a few days. Things moved really fast because we had no other choice. It was all or nothing. And I'm not saying I regret that I took it all but I think it needs to be addressed that we didn't start out the way we should have done and I think we took everything else for granted." He took a breath. "We never found out if we could live without each other."
Boone looked at him. "You're scared you could live without me?"
Jack just looked at him. There was no answer to that one really. He was fairly sure that whatever he said he wouldn't come off well.
"Does that mean you wanna find out?" Boone asked. "Cos if you were gonna do this you could really have picked a better time. We have a baby on the way, we can't go contemplating trial separations."
"Maybe Tayla'll take it," Jack suggested.
"The baby? Jack, are you serious?" Boone seemed to be waiting for a reply but Jack didn't have the energy. "Okay, not only is there the legal matter of the prenatal agreement we signed with Tayla, there's the fact that you just can't do that to someone. You can't just put a baby inside her and say 'Oh, sorry, I changed my mind'. And that's our baby, Jack, it's ours."
Jack looked at him. All very, very true. And Jack didn't want to give the baby up anyway, Jack was rather looking forward to the baby. And it really was getting to the time he should be leaving.
"This is everything you want and suddenly you don't even want it anymore?" Boone asked.
"I had it," Jack stated, a little louder than was necessary. "I had it and I lost it and I don't want to do that again."
"So this is about Sarah and Kimberley?" Boone asked.
It sounded strange hearing Kimberley's name from somebody else. She must be real if somebody else is talking about her, he thought. But he didn't know what to say to Boone, he barely seemed to know what all the fuss was about himself.
"I'm not going anywhere," Boone stated.
"I'm fairly sure Sarah believed the same thing," Jack pointed out quietly. "She still left."
"Jack, come on, have a little faith in me here," Boone pleaded.
"Two and a half years," Jack said, looking up at Boone. "We were together for two and a half years and you didn't believe that I loved you. Why should I believe that you're not gonna break my heart?"
Boone looked him in the eye and seemed to take the question very seriously. "Okay," he said finally. "Maybe I will break your heart. So, what, are you just gonna shut me out? You think that'll make it easier when it happens? It won't, Jack, it'll make it harder. Because if you keep me at arm's length and then this all falls apart you're always going to be wondering if that was the reason why."
Boone could actually be really smart when he wanted to be. And he was right, Jack's plan to not get hurt by not fully buying in was pretty stupid. He didn't want to do that anyway, he wanted to share everything with Boone, every little detail. But he really did have to go to work. His head was such a mess right now he barely knew which way was up let alone how to handle all this stupid stuff that was spinning around.
"I don't know what I'm doing," Jack admitted. "With any of it. The relationship, the baby..."
"Neither do I," Boone offered.
"We didn't think about this," Jack said, shaking his head a little. "I didn't think about it. I just saw some snapshot in a family album and thought 'Hey, I want that'. But now it's just... Maybe I don't want this baby, maybe I want that baby. Maybe I was just so desperate to get her back that I fooled myself into thinking I was ready." He looked at Boone. "I don't know if I'm ready."
Boone didn't say anything. Jack was hoping for some kind of encouragement but he guessed this was something only he could work out. Boone was the one that said he didn't have to do it alone though.
"I went to see her yesterday," Jack said, not looking at Boone.
"Kimberley?" Boone asked, proving once again that she existed.
Jack nodded. "I don't know what she'd think," he continued. "I don't know if she'd be offended. I don't want her to be offended. I don't want to upset her."
"Jack..." Boone began, but didn't get very far.
"But then I think about the fact that she doesn't think anything because she's not even real and I just..." he trailed off. He'd been through this a million times in his head and he could never get to the conclusion.
"She's real," Boone stated, with a conviction that made Jack look up. "Don't ever think that she's not. Don't just write her off because she didn't get a shot at life like the rest of us."
"I don't know how I'm supposed to balance my feelings for her with my feelings for the new baby," Jack explained. "Whatever I do I feel like I'm cheating one of them."
"You gotta stop worrying about everyone else so much," Boone said, looking ever so slightly amused. "And you have got to stop with this over analysing. I don't really get emotional stuff all that much either, but I learnt pretty early on that the feelings that come out of nowhere, the ones that punch you in the gut and just take you completely by surprise, they're the ones you can trust. Because they're not diluted and they haven't been dissected to hell and maybe you don't even understand them but that's all good. You need to take a step back and just let yourself feel this stuff, whatever it is, good or bad, because the more you block it out and the more you try and take it all to bits and study everything on it's own merits the more lost you're gonna get."
Okay, Boone was being really, really smart. Where the hell did all this come from? Boone turned into an emotional puddle over nothing and constantly questioned everything and everyone around him. But maybe that's because he let the feelings come and dealt with them accordingly. He had to admit that, yes, Boone was swimming with insecurities but maybe that was Boone's natural state and maybe the fact that Boone didn't fight it and didn't try to hide it was actually a good thing. And maybe Jack shouldn't have cut him up over it earlier. He looked at the clock. He was running late.
"I really do have to go to work now," Jack stated.
"Call in sick," Boone suggested, which was just the most un-Boone thing ever. You didn't take a sick day unless you were dead in Boone Carlyle's book.
"I can't, I'm not sick," Jack pointed out.
"That's debatable," Boone said with a smile. "Come on, you know they cut you a load of slack cos of the whole island thing and we really never took advantage of that. And besides, I wasn't kidding about you paralysing someone, your mind's really not gonna be on the job today, is it? You wanna add putting the prom queen in a wheelchair to your list of things to feel bad about?"
"No, not really," Jack admitted.
"Go back to bed," Boone told him. "I'll phone up the hospital and tell them you're not well. And then I'm going to spoil you all day. Unless you wanna be on your own in which case I've got a load of stuff I can sort out in the house."
Jack smiled a little. "I'll take the first one, thanks."
Boone smiled back. "Okay, deal. Now go to bed," he ordered. "I'll be up in a minute."
"Okay," Jack agreed, standing up. There was no way he was pushing Boone away again so he was just going to have to deal with the want that he felt whenever he looked at him. Which wasn't such a bad idea. In fact he kind of wished he'd gone along with that from the beginning.