Intimations
They were made of time; a handful, small pockets of it.
Something like Hope
Hope and Jack don't mix, or so she thought.
She could recognize him from a mile away. She's grown familiar to his swagger; the way his shoulders droop just a bit forward, putting his weight to the front, so as to attempt balance in the ever-shifting sand. She's seen how his arms flail about at the slight exertion, how his legs seem to drag lazily, at the same time, resolutely through the white shore and how the grains of sand trail along his stride. She lets her eyes follow him, all the while wondering how such inane details could be entertaining, even memorable to her. He reaches his destination, the only indication of it being that he stops and stands still. It takes exactly five seconds for curiosity to get the best of her.
"What are you looking out to sea for?" she asks, stepping forward until her shoulders aligned with his.
He doesn't turn to her. And for a second, she thinks that this might've been a mistake. But he smiles and she's made to feel welcome.
"Just admiring the view," he replies. He shelves his hands in his pockets and breathes in deeply as if he was, all this time, holding his breath.
She crosses her arms, purses her lips in disbelief. "Hmm, you trek half a mile to enjoy the view of endless seawater. Yes, that must be it." His response takes a while. It wasn't, she rationalizes, that funny, anyway.
"They've been gone for almost two weeks now." She looks to him as he spoke. He still hasn't given her as much as a glance. His eyes remain locked on to sea as if searching the pristine, blue horizon for a speck of dirt. Something that he could deliberately mistake for a boat, or a part of the boat, or a body…anything.
"I wonder how they've been, how they are," she sympathizes. The burden is too heavy for one person to carry, she understands that much.
"Yeah, me too. I think there's no need to worry, though."
She stifles her doubts and just nods.
"They've got enough water on them to last for a couple of more weeks. They've got Jin for fish. And of course, Sawyer for entertainment."
And for once in this conversation, they share a smile.
"By the time they grow tired of him, they would have reached open water, specifically shipping routes. We should be expecting rescue soon, four weeks tops."
She stares at him, half-surprised and half-worried at his words. She can't decide which feeling pulls more weight. So she tries to coax it out of him. "It's okay Jack. It's just me. You don't need to give me hope."
He manages a small but amiable laugh. "Yeah, I know," he says, finally making eye contact. His eyes are bright, warm and sad. "I wouldn't even try." He looks away too soon.
His face becomes inscrutable. His jaw is set, lips kept tightly together, as if to fend off any more desire to converse. Maybe it's because of the sun or the crystal waves bouncing off the sun's rays but he now has his eyes narrowed into slits, eyebrows burrowing into his forehead. It's too calm to be a frown, she thinks. And too calm to be truly calm. She still can't decide.
She's stumped. And when finally she surrenders, defeated by the impossibility of trying to read him, he slips. "It's just…sometimes, I think, it's me who needs some." He says it with an expression she hasn't seen before. And she ponders the possibility that he might've finally told her something true, that he had finallyshared somethingof himself.
"Careful, Jack. You don't want anyone hearing you say that."
"No, we can't have that, can we?" He grins; the irony is not lost on him.
The man, she thinks, will never run out of surprises. So she sticks around for a while longer, hoping she'll be let in on some more.