"Boone?" They were sitting in a couple of lounge chairs in the backyard.
It was a Saturday and Boone had earlier finished detailing the two bikes, with Andrew's help. He could easily have paid someone else to do it for him, but he wouldn't have traded the satisfaction he got from doing it personally for the few extra hours of free time it would have given him. The added bonus being that Andrew always insisted on helping, the two of them male bonding as the boy fetched clean buckets of water and cleaning supplies, eventually settling on his butt on the driveway, meticulously, with his small perfectly suited child sized hands, cleaning each and every individual spoke on all four tires.
Boone had been so hot and tired when they were done, that he'd turned the hose on himself, drenching himself from head to toe, the sleeveless tee and shorts he wore soaked through. Then he'd turned the hose on Andrew, chasing the squealing child around with a spray of water, till they'd both collapsed on the lawn laughing.
"Yeah, bud?" Boone sipped at his iced green tea.
"What's gong to happen with Miss Phillips when Shan comes back?" Andrew asked innocently.
'Awww, fuck!' Boone thought, officially deciding that single parenthood should definitely rank at the top of the worlds' most difficult jobs. Hell, he figured, Komodo dragon wrangling or tornado chaser would be a cake walk in comparison. He idly wondered if there were any immediate openings in either field. Though to be fair to the boy, Jack had asked him almost the identical thing. He hadn't really had an answer for Jack, any more than he had one for Andrew now.
"I love your mom, you know that right?" Boone asked, biting his lip at how close that love had come to killing him several times over.
Andrew nodded quickly, "I can feel it when you when you think about her, and sometimes even when you don't."
Boone laughed at that. "But she's not here right now, and as much as I love you and Tom and Heather, I need someone my own age to talk to, like you do, when we go to the park."
"Kay Boone," he nodded, understanding at the concept. "But what's going to happen with Miss Phillips when Shan comes back?" He repeated his original question.
"I wish I knew bud, I really do," Boone answered, but in reality he knew all too well.
Pamela was at the front of her class in the middle of a history lesson when the other shoe dropped, so to speak. She was outlining a basic timeline of a portion of American history concerning the old west when it clicked. She turned suddenly from the board and swept her eyes over the class, lingering on Andrew longer than on any of the others. Quickly assigning some reading, she crossed to her desk.
Boone had said that the crash was six years ago, plus a bit, and the rescue just over five. She reached for her class roster, scanning quickly down the personal information on each child. She liked to have a list of their birthdays, so she could acknowledge them; it added a personal touch she thought the kids appreciated. She stared at the date she'd been sure she'd remembered correctly and confirmed that there was nothing wrong with her memory. Andrew was just shy of five and a half. He'd been born on this island that Boone had spoken of with a note of homesickness in his voice she was sure he wasn't even aware of.
He'd said he'd been travelling with his sister, Shannon. But he'd also told her that he only had a step-sister, she assumed they were one and the same, and that it was only a matter of Boone being used to leaving the 'step' part out. The last piece of the puzzle she figured was what he'd said about moving here from LA: 'We'd been away for over a year, and needed someplace quieter.' She was sure if she asked the boy his mothers' name, he'd say Shannon. The person Boone had been married to and had a child with could only have been his own step-sister. No wonder he'd kept it hidden from her.
Knowing that school wasn't the proper venue at which to confront him, but pissed off enough anyway, she glared at him a bit when he came to pick Andrew up at four, then went back to her paperwork. The next thing she knew, he was standing beside her desk.
"Pamela?" He was looking down at her uncertainly, appearing exactly like a recalcitrant student she'd chastised.
"You should have told me," she unwitting repeated her words from the very first day they'd met, but this time Boone had no idea, either right or wrong, about what she was referring to.
"Told you what?"
She considered waiting, reminding herself again how wrong it was to talk to him at school about their relationship, "The truth about your step-sister. Shannon, I think you said her name was." She watched the colour drain from his face, except for two bright red spots on his cheeks. She was stunned when he turned on his heel and left the room quickly, collecting a concerned looking Andrew on his way out.
Her cell rang just as she was unlocking the door to her apartment. Checking the call display, she answered, "Boone," her tone flat and unreadable.
"I didn't want to do this at school and I don't want to over the phone either." He started right in, no preamble, no greeting.
She recognized the traditional start of a break up speech and dropped her briefcase on the floor, her hand pressed to her chest, overcome with dread in anticipation of what he'd say next.
"I'll tell you about Shan," he sounded sad and resigned.
His words left Pamela shocked on so many levels. Not only was he not breaking up with her, he was actually going to share more of his background!
"Meet me for coffee at seven? Please?" He pleaded, as if there was a chance she'd refuse.
His motorcycle was already parked at the curb when she got to the same coffee shop they'd gone to on their first date. She looked through the glass insert in the front door. He was sitting at a table, a teapot and cup in front of him, as well as a huge café latte cup opposite him. He had one elbow up on the table top and his head in his hand.
"Boone?" his head snapped up at the sound of his name as she pulled her chair out. He started to rise, but she motioned for him to stay put.
He smiled uncertainly, "Hi, thanks for coming, I wasn't sure you would."
She laughed at that. "I'm not mad at you Boone; I'm just a bit disappointed. Though I guess I can understand why you're so reticent about talking about your past, from what little I've learned so far." She sipped at her coffee.
Christ, he thought bitterly, and she barely knows anything. "Yeah, it's a little…different," he understated.
She waited, watching him, his eyes the same icy blue colour as his shirt. They looked somehow cold and isolated, bringing to mind a picture of a singular iceberg, drifting at the mercy of an ocean current, not having any control over its' own destiny. She didn't realize how apt a metaphor it was to describe the life of the man sitting across from her, about to reveal something about the ocean current that had ruled his existence since has was ten.
Boone took a deep breath and let it out slowly, furrowing his brow and gritting his teeth a bit. "Shannon." He said the name the way a zealot might utter the name of the deity he worshipped. The emotions that played across his face left her breathless. Would anyone ever love her that much? Would he? "It's kind of obvious by now that you've already figured out that she's Andrews' mother, and my wife."
"Yes," Pamela acknowledged, not picking up on the current tense he was using, still secure in her assumption that he was a widower. "I must admit, I find it more than a little odd, and a bit creepy, that you were married to your step-sister."
"Yeah, we used to get that a lot." He went on to outline their years together before he'd fled in desperation to university in New York. Detailing his life with the golden haired princess who'd captured his heart from the second he'd laid eyes on her, the girl who'd wrapped him more securely around her finger than a lock of that same pale yellow hair. "There was nothing I wouldn't have done for her, it was killing me." University and the continent between them had helped a little; that was until her father had been killed and he'd flown back, knowing she'd need his support. He described how badly he felt he'd let her down, putting his own future before hers, when he'd accepted a lucrative job offer, but Pamela knew he'd made the right decision.
He skipped the first two fabricated calls for help, and the theft of his money, entirely, going directly to the call from Sydney and how he'd dropped everything to go to her. He'd become increasingly more emotional as the story progressed and had to bite back a bit of a sob as he shamefully revealed that her abusive boyfriend had actually beaten him up.
She'd tried to hold his hand at one point, but he'd pulled it out of her grasp and had sat worrying at the flesh on the inside of his right wrist, she'd caught a brief flash of silver as he'd slipped his left thumb up under his shirt cuff, his head hung low.
He took a breath and continued. "Andrew was conceived the night before the flight. He knows that. He knows most of what happened. He's more his mothers' son than mine in that regard, so much stronger than I am."
He looked at her and blinked a few time. "I can't lie to you, Pamela. If she comes back, if she ever comes back to me, and I don't know if she ever will, but if she does, she owns me. I can't help myself. I'm sure I won't be able to resist her. You need to know that before we go any further."
The emotion she'd been experiencing at this story was now clouded by confusion. "Comes back? What do you mean comes back? I thought she'd died."
"What? No," he shook his head, "she's not dead. She left me, she left us. Why would you think that she's dead?"
"I just thought…you know…you're so…you're so fantastic. Who could ever leave you?" His wife was still alive? Was she crazy, leaving this precious man? Then the deeper implication hit of what he'd said hit her. Oh fuck, where did that leave her? This wasn't a passing fancy on her part, she'd fallen hard for this guy and was thinking long term.
"Shannon Rutherford, that's who," he answered.
Shannon surveyed the gym floor, 'Stupid Boone, stupid exercise.' Damn but the habits she'd picked up from him annoyed the crap out of her. 'Fucking home gym,' she cursed the building he'd had built for them.
She headed over to a weight station and adjusted the free weights on the bar before lying on the bench beneath it. She set her hands, in their fingerless leather palmed gloves and drew a breath, preparing to lift.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a guy pass, "Spot me?" she called out.
"Sure luv," he answered quickly, taking in the shapely legs and toned figure.
By the time they finished the entire circuit she'd assessed him and found him suitable to be taken into consideration as her next substitute for Boone, though she knew that there really was no substitute for the real thing, especially in his case. At best anything else could only be compared to a flat lifeless two dimensional stand in, like a bookstore might display a life sized cardboard cut out of a popular author flogging his latest best seller just inside their front door, because they failed to engage him for a personal appearance stop on his latest book signing tour.
As they sat in a local pub after the gym, Paul excused himself to visit the bathroom.
Her earlier musings prompted her to take the opportunity of being alone to fish out her wallet and extract the picture she'd taken from Boone the day she'd left him, and had carried with her ever since. It had been the only one he'd had with him, but he'd gladly handed it over to her, along with his picture of Andrew, hoping that the reminders would keep them in her thoughts, maybe one day encouraging her to return to them.
As she looked into the smiling face of her husband, she ran her index finger over his features, lost in the blue of his eyes.
The insistent repetition of her name intruded on her thoughts.
"What is it Boone?" She snapped, startled when she raised her head and her eyes encountered the face across from her that wasn't his.