Disclaimer: See Chapter One.
Author's Note: Thanks to your overwhelming feedback, here is the second chapter! I tried to send a private message to all who reviewed my story to personally thank you. I hope you all received it, and I'll try to keep that up as long as I can.
As an aside, I have to give a special shout-out to my muse, James Blunt, whose music kept me writing. Seriously people, if you haven't heard any of his songs, get your hands on some immediately. "Cry" is a personal favourite, same with "Goodbye My Lover". His whole CD pretty much rocks. Anyway, enjoy!
A week went by without incident.
This time, Lisa knew better than to let her guard down, though. As a result, she barely slept, forcing her eyes to stay open and her hands to remain clenched around her weapon of choice—the ever-present, shockingly overused field hockey stick—even as her body screamed for rest. She had an anxious feeling in her stomach that never went away and so she hardly ate, her weight beginning to drop once more. Her attitude at work became listless at best, ill-tempered at worst. She was beginning to get used to the perpetual looks of worry that her father and co-workers bestowed upon her. She was sick and tired of those looks. Sick and tired of not eating, not sleeping. Sick and tired of always being on edge, always looking around corners expecting a monster to jump out at every turn.
Truth be told, she was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
This was her current contemplation at three a.m. as she watching an infomercial about a tiny blender that was making the nastiest-looking green sauce she had ever seen, and then spreading it on top of white pasta. Man, she really wanted scrambled eggs.
"That's disgusting."
Lisa whipped her head around so fast, her haphazard ponytail knocked her on the other side of her face. She choked on her gasp as she turned, her eyes locking on Jackson leaning against the wall inside her main hallway. However, his gaze was over her head on the television screen, his full upper lip curled in distaste.
Keeping her eyes on him, she slowly reached under the blanket on her lap for the hockey stick. His eyes lazily flicked from the television set to her and contemplated her for a beat before flicking right back to the TV.
"Looking for this?" he wondered, casually producing her tool of self-defence from behind his back, twirling it through his fingers like a baton and then holding it upright, the blunted curve almost hitting the ceiling. His eyes never left the screen.
Lisa regarded him disbelievingly for a moment, her hand frantically scrambling under the cover. "How did you—?"
"You dozed off at about quarter to two. Really, you make it too easy." He looked away from the infomercial again to flash her a brief smirk.
She closed her eyes and breathed in heavily through her nose, trying to calm her shattered nerves. He may not have succeeded in killing her after the red-eye, but she swore he was killing her now. "What do you want?" she bit out, clenching her hands together so that he wouldn't notice how they shook.
"I just wanted to talk," he responded simply, noticing how her hands shook. He sauntered over to the other side of the couch, swinging the hockey stick like a cane. "May I sit?"
She looked at him incredulously, all bloodshot eyes and dark circles. She couldn't believe he was asking her that. She couldn't believe he was there.
"Thank you," he said as graciously as if she'd responded in the affirmative, moving her blanket to sit on an unoccupied spot of her black leather couch. He sank deeply into the cushions and let out a heartfelt sigh. "Comfortable."
She continued to glare at him venomously. "I'm going to scream."
"No, you won't." He brushed off her comment like a pesky fly.
Enraged, she raised an eyebrow at him as she sucked in a deep breath and got about a squeak out before his one hand clamped around her mouth and his other around the back of her head, dragging her face down to meet his.
"Seriously? Seriously. Shut up." He had to make it a point to glare at her so that he wouldn't allow himself to smile at her impertinence. The girl lived to spite him, and damn him, but he enjoyed it.
She shoved him, hard enough to make him let go of her. "God damn you, you know that?" she hissed. "Don't you have anyone else to victimise?"
He scoffed at her. "You made yourself the victim, Lise. It didn't have to be that way."
"Uh, no, Jack. I made you a victim, remember? How's the trachea? The leg? Does the shoulder still sting? Did I get a couple ribs, too?" She couldn't help the triumphantly malicious grin that spread over her face. This quickly faded when she saw the irate look on his. She unconsciously swallowed hard but refused to look away, despite the way those bitterly cold orbs caused chills to track up her spine. Then, as quickly as it appeared it was gone and he chuckled.
"I sincerely admire your spirit," he told her. "I do."
She rolled her eyes. "Thanks."
He nodded, then turned away from her to look at the TV. "Are you going to scream again?" he asked her after a minute in silence spent watching the magical blender infomercial.
Lisa, whose eyes were also focussed on but not seeing the TV set, just shook her head.
"That's my girl."
She whipped her head around to look at him. "I'm not your girl." She meant for it to come out forcefully, but when it pushed past her lips it sounded like nothing more than a whisper.
He gave her a sidelong glance. "Aren't you?"
If he had insisted, if he had made some sort of snide or vulgar remark, it would have been easier to refute, easier to get furious, to snatch that hockey stick away from him and crack him over the head with it, then call the police and hit him a few more times while she waited for them to come. As it was, she wasn't sure why she hadn't already done that. She told herself that he could easily overpower her, and had in fact done so on numerous occasions. She knew she was weaker now, physically, from malnutrition and lack of sleep. Even at her best, she could only attack him from a distance. Once he had his hands on her…
"So, I suppose we're at an impasse," he remarked after a few more minutes of silence. "You're not going to scream, I'm not going to leave. Seems we're stuck with each other," he ended with a cheeky grin.
"Don't you have anything better to do with your time?" she wondered sharply, frustration evident.
"Not really," he replied honestly. "I'm between assignments, I guess you could say."
"Mmm. So all terrorists harass former victims in their spare time?"
"I told you," he said, with the weariness of one whose had to explain the same thing numerous times, "I'm not a terrorist. I'm a manager."
"Ohh…" She nodded understandingly. "So you manage the terrorists?"
He gave her an insincere smile. "You're goading me, Lise."
"You're quick, Jack."
He opened his mouth to retort, then snapped it shut and leaned back once more. "You're good to notice," was all he said.
She made a non-committal noise and turned her attention back to the television.
"You look tired." His comment made her turn to him in surprise.
"Thanks," she said dryly.
He met her gaze. "I'm being serious. You're not sleeping, you're not eating. You overwork yourself, and then you do nothing to compensate."
Her mouth dropped open in an incredulous expression. "It's your fault!"
"My fault? Come now, Lisa. You can't blame everything on me."
"Why not?" she exploded. "You—"
"I know, I know. I terrorised you, I victimised you, I made your life hell. Boo hoo. Get over it. I made you start living again, and you know it."
"This is living?" she demanded to know, gesturing wildly at herself, at the television, at him. "This? Being up at three-thirty in the morning with my would-be murderer, watching infomercials?"
He shrugged. "You had it in you, you had the potential to move on. And you did. You were, anyway, for those three months I wasn't around."
"Isn't that telling you something, Jackson? The three months you weren't around," she hissed.
He shrugged again, but she couldn't miss the tension in his jaw. "Tell me you didn't think about me," he demanded, and she gasped at the intensity in his ice-blue eyes when he turned on her. "Tell me that not a day went by where I was in your mind."
"You know that I can't do that," she replied, wearily. "But I can tell you this, Jackson. I thought about you the same way I thought about him."
The fire in his eyes dulled to a cool lethalness. He was silent.
She regretted her words. For as much as he hurt her, as much as he had terrified her, and made her say and do things she hadn't wanted to do, there wasn't the blunt, repulsive hatred towards him that she felt towards her other attacker. There was a passionate loathing, but she didn't fear him. She wasn't disgusted by him, like she was with the other one, as much as she knew she should be. She was sick with herself for the way she was reacting to him, but even at that moment, looking at him sitting on her couch, watching her TV, she felt a tug at her heart. She accounted it to sleep-deprivation, but it was there nonetheless. And it frightened her more than Jackson Rippner ever could.
She bit her tongue to not take back her cruel words, remembering all his cruel words to her, and simply waited for him to respond.
"Who?" His tone was blandly interested. He knew who.
Her mouth worked silently for a moment. "What do you mean who? You know who."
"I don't know who, I want you to tell me who. Why don't you tell me, Lise?" He turned to her with an open expression. She could call it friendly if it were on anyone else's face, if the subject matter were any different.
"Stop it," she told him, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"No." His voice escalated in volume as hers decreased, the friendly expression gone and replaced with something much more sinister. "I want you to tell me. Who? Who did you think about the same way you thought about me? Who had the same effect on your life that I did?"
The ever-present tears were tracking down her cheek, but Jackson was relentless.
"Hmm? Tell me, Lisa Reisert, please. I'm dying to know. Who's this 'him' you speak of? Who is he? And what makes us the same?"
"You both—you both—" She pressed her lips together tightly and shook her head.
"What? What?" He had gripped her arms and shook her, once.
"You both took away my life."
The room was dead silent. Even the people on television were between ads.
He released her arms with a shove and let out a disgusted breath. "Nobody can take away the life of someone who wants to keep it."
Lisa looked up and her eyes cleared. "Oh, what is that? Psychobabble bullshit. People are murdered everyday—fathers, mothers, people that love life and have things worth living for. You're telling me that these people didn't want to keep their lives when they were shot in a drive-by or stabbed for their purse? That's lame even for you, Jack."
He looked at her condescendingly. "We aren't talking about random acts of violence here, Lisa. I don't mean life in the sense of your living being. I mean life in the way you live it. I'm telling you that you aren't alive. Does that mean that you're not breathing? Of course not. But look at yourself—up at God-knows what time, watching crappy TV, putting five hundred calories in your body a day, most of which comes from a shitty cup of hotel coffee, and you're telling me that you're living up to your potential? That you're making each day count?"
"It's your fault!" She cried out so loudly that the room sang. "You made fun of me for blaming you before, but it's true, you fucking asshole." She grabbed his shirt collar and yanked him up, then shoved him back once he was on his feet. "I was getting my life back together and you fucked it all up for me again." With each emphasis she smacked him hard on the chest. "You didn't make me live, you made me want to die, because you made me think about you and I didn't want to." She was openly sobbing now, hysterical and inconsolable, continuously pulling and shoving at him and not noticing that he didn't respond in kind. "You made me feel again and I didn't want to. I hate you, I hate what you've done and I hope you die." Her final words were punctuated by a knock-out punch directly to his left chiselled cheek bone. He let her have it, but as soon as she reared back to do it again, he grabbed her by the thick straps of her tank top and slammed her roughly into the wall behind and to the right of the couch, where he had been casually leaning not even an hour before. She let out a hoarse, moaning wail and slumped to the ground, crying piteously. He went right down with her and, without a second thought, gathered her into his arms. She resisted at first, but he refused to loosen his grip and soon she was grabbing fistfuls of his shirt and bawling in huge, gulping sobs. Every now and then she would lament how much she hated him, throwing in a curse word for good measure. He murmured to her gently, nonsense words and noises, rubbing her back in soothing circles.
He knew what he had done to her, tearing down the defences she had so carefully created after her rape. He also knew that she had become too dependent on those defences, and forgotten who she had been before. He hadn't even known her before the attack, hadn't even know about the attack until she'd told him, but he did know that the person she had been presenting on a daily basis was not the Lisa Reisert of three years ago. There were shadows of that past Lisa, but it wasn't enough. He had come back to finish what the red-eye started. It had been an assignment. Now, it was a mission.
He didn't know why he so badly wanted to unearth this old Lisa, to see the woman she had been after getting to know the woman she'd become. Sometimes though, Jackson knew not to ask such questions of himself. The kind of questions he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to. He had already accepted and admitted the fact that he was intrigued by her; a more zealous person would call it "obsessed". The weeks he'd spent recovering after the various and sundry injuries he had collected subsequent to meeting Miss Reisert allowed him to do a lot of thinking. Again, some may find "obsessing" more appropriate. At first, the rage had had yet to subside. It consumed him, drove him to heal if only to inflict further pain on her. Soon, that pain turned to a grudging respect. Respect that turned into admiration. Admiration that turned into a week-long stint of following her every move once more, simply to ensure that she was alive and kicking, still a workaholic, still a daddy's girl.
But it wasn't enough.
And so he found himself in her home for the second time, comforting her as she cried. She was such a little thing, too. Average height for a woman, but so frail in stature. A helpless exterior that belied a steel-tough interior. Even that, however, he could feel slipping away with each day that passed. And despite what he said, not because of ego or what have you, Jackson believed that it was he who could save her.
He always did have a bit of a "knight in shining armour" complex.
In all honesty, though, he knew that her quick thinking and the circumstances surrounding Flight 1019 gave her a renewed sense of validation and worth. Gave her a glimmer of the life she had left vacant for so long. She could stop going through the motions, finally, and move on. There was only one thing missing.
Him.
Her cries had subsided to sniffling whimpers. She seemed to regain her surroundings and made a motion to distance herself from him. Before he let go, he couldn't help but drop his mouth onto her fragrant hair and hold it there for a moment. Not kissing, just touching. She let him do it for longer than she should have, then shoved him away.
They regarded each other, him casual and her wary. She wiped her face, scrubbing at it with her hands, then looked at the wall, the ceiling, her hands, anywhere but him.
"You should sleep," he spoke finally. She nodded acquiescence. "Here." He held out his hand as he stood, ever the gentleman. She ignored it as she pulled herself up by leaning against the wall.
"Is this the end now?" she wondered quietly, her face still turned away from his. "Are you finally leaving for good?"
"I think you know the answer to that, Lise," he responded gently, then told her anyway, "I'm not going anywhere."
She closed her eyes and nodded. "Yeah."
He looked at her searchingly. "How do you feel about that?"
She met his gaze. "I don't know," she replied honestly. "I just don't know anymore."
"Would you rather we set up a specific day or days? Specific times?"
She let her shoulders droop with fatigue. "This is insane," she scoffed, hysterical laughter in her voice, tears in her eyes. "I can't believe I'm scheduling meeting times with Jackson Rippner. My father would have a conniption fit. I should be having a conniption fit."
"Why aren't you?" he wondered calmly.
This time she did laugh. "I just don't know. I think—" She cut herself off and merely shook her head.
"Just say it," he urged, his quicksilver eyes cutting through her.
She forced herself to meet his gaze and say what she had been thinking for too long. "I'm tired of being alone," she began simply. "Nobody has been able to fill the void within me that has been there for too long. I don't like you, nor should I, but you don't scare me anymore, either. So, if you are what I—need," she choked on the word, "to feel complete again…so be it. I will schedule a goddamn meeting time. But so help me God, if there is even a hint of a threat, or danger to my well-being or my family's—"
"You'll release the hounds, I know." He waved off her concern. "So, what'll it be? Once a week, twice?"
"Once," she said quickly. "Just once."
"Day?" He pretended to examine his fingernails, feigning indifference.
She had to think about it. "What about Sundays?"
He put on a wounded face. "Lisa, I'm hurt. You keeping Friday and Saturday open for hot dates?"
She shrugged. "Maybe. I don't want to rule anything out."
He chuckled. "Fair enough. But I can only come after ten."
"At night?" she said, incredulous.
"Did you really want me to come in broad daylight?"
"What are you doing during the day that you can only come after ten?" She responded to his question with one of her own.
His lips turned up at one side in a half-smile. "That's my business."
She scoffed. "I love how you know everything about me and I know nothing about you."
"I don't divulge what I'm unwilling to tell." He shrugged.
"I wasn't willing! You found it out by force."
"Oh, please, Lisa you're an open book. The most incompetent puppy with a crush could have found out whatever he wanted about you."
She scowled. "Listen, do you want to do this or not?"
"You'll be tired for work Monday," he informed her, and it took a second for her brain to acknowledge the change in subject.
"Mondays I don't start until three p.m., Jack. I thought you knew that, hot-shot stalker-boy," she taunted.
He smirked back, refusing to be fazed. "I stand by my statement."
She glared at him, a new thought occurring to her. "I hope you don't think that this is going to escalate to anything beyond what it already is, Jackson. I don't know what you intend—"
"Please, Lisa. Your virtue will remain intact," he teased. "Scout's honour."
She flushed. "That's not what I—"
"Yes, it was."
She looked at him disbelievingly. "Arrogant prick," she commented, amazed.
He smiled charmingly. "What can I say? So, starting this Sunday, after ten…do we have a date?"
She glowered. "We have a meeting time, to purge ourselves of this…insistence for a relationship. I can't see it lasting much longer than a month, to be honest."
He chuckled. "That's for us to decide now, isn't it?" The "us" he referred to clearly implied "him".
"We'll see, Jack." She crossed her arms over her chest and raised a brow. "It's four a.m. on Thursday, however. I have to get up for work in three hours. As you've already so kindly commented on, I look tired. And that is because I am tired. I'll see you on Sunday." She had to physically force herself to not choke on those words as a shudder almost seized her. She had truly gone insane.
He looked at her, a barely suppressed smile touching his lips, his eyes shining. "I look forward to it. May I walk you to your room?"
"And if I say no?" she wondered, knowing the answer.
"I'll pretend I didn't hear you," he responded cheerfully, crooking his elbow in invitation.
She refused it by simply walking to her bedroom by herself. He followed her.
"Turn off the TV," she told him over her shoulder as she pulled down her covers. Surprisingly, she heard him leave the room and obey. Even heard him shaking out the blanket and tossing the pillows back on the couch. Amazed, she got into bed, and after a few moments, he came back in.
"Don't you ever sleep?" she asked, amazed that he didn't even seem tired.
He shrugged. "I never get much sleep in my line of work, so I learn to take advantage of the time I have. I sleep sporadically, never just at night. Rarely at night, actually."
She yawned, the comfort of her bed pulling her further into her sleepiness. "That's too bad. Night's the best time to sleep."
"Not like you would know," he chided gently, a soft smile on his face.
She marvelled at how it seemed almost…tender. She chalked it up to her drooping eyelids and descent into sleep.
She could feel herself fading further and further away and she knew she should stay awake, if only to watch him and ensure he left, but she wasn't sure she could. "Leave now," she murmured, drawing the covers tighter and yawning again.
"What," he joked, "no goodnight kiss?"
But she was already asleep.
He let the smile slowly drop from his face, savouring it, as he knew it was one of his very few genuine ones. He watched her for a few minutes as she slept, watched the rise and fall of her chest under the covers, the gentle parting of her lips, and the way her limp curls caressed her cheek, taunting him.
His mind told him to leave as his feet took him closer to her. Told him to step away as he crouched down in front of her. He brushed his archnemesis the curl away. With a feather-light touch that only an assassin could possess, he cupped her cheek feeling the smoothness of her creamy skin. His thumb gently traced the hollows under her eyes, trying to erase the dark circles. Her breath came out in a little sigh.
And he took his goodnight kiss.