Fic - Finding Your Footing (SWC, WM, RPF) pg, 1/1
Title: Finding Your Footing
Summary: Some things just aren't meant to last forever.
Rating: pg
Author's Notes: 2, 389 words. RPF. This is probably SWC fic more than anything, written and takes place around her 31st birthday. Sarah/Wentworth undertones and a nice big cameo by Dominic. Probably can be noted as taking place in the same universe as The Things We Leave Unsaid and by "universe" I really mean the wacky confines of my brain. I don't own these people. Feedback is a very nice thing.
Went is leaning against her chair and his close proximity is making it hard for her to concentrate on the script she’s reading.
“So you know what I heard?” He asks in a whisper because Dom’s still shooting his scene and the director is just within earshot. Apparently, or so she’s been told, when they’re together they act like something similar to the cool kids in the back of the class, giggling and talking when they’re not suppose to - it gets them in trouble quite a lot.
“That we’re having lots and lots of hot, steamy sex when no one is looking?”
Went raises an eyebrow. “Since when do you check up on Perez?”
She laughs and pushes her hair out of her face. “I think it’s amusing that you think we’re famous enough for Perez.”
“We’re not?”
“You wish we were.”
“I thought we were.”
“We’re too boring.”
Went laughs as he slides into the seat next to her. He leans in close, like he always does, like he belongs there, and bounces his knee out of habit. Their hands are just inches apart and it’s too distracting. There’s a pause in production, some commotion and both of them look up and out onto the set.
Dom is taking off his shirt and Marshall is covering his eyes as he shoves his shoulder saying, “Old man, cover that up. Nobody wants to see that, jesus.” They start to shove each other back and forth playfully, like a real life father-son duo and it all ends moments later with a manly, gratuitous slap on the back.
They laugh and there’s a moment between them where they look at each other a little longer than necessary. Went smiles. Sarah looks away. They do this a lot.
“So, uh, you were saying?”
“What? Oh.” Another laugh, another sheepish smile. Her chest tightens a little. “I forgot.”
Sarah chuckles. “You’re an idiot.”
+
LA is an adjustment.
It’s jagged edges and harsh lights and it takes a lot of getting used to. There are cameras everywhere, people everywhere and she has honestly never thought her life was this interesting. It makes her long for the anonymity that hid behind the Texas heat, the normalcy.
Here there are looks of constant judgment and comparison and Sarah spends entirely way too much time looking in the mirror. In Texas it was nothing. It was all Lance and Eva and Tony twenty-four-seven, and nobody really cared who they were ninety percent of the time. It was nice. She misses it.
A few weeks in and she’s still living in a hotel, alone (she’s too lazy to house hunt and it just doesn’t seem right to do it without Josh) and she feels tired, different.
“Well, it changes people,” Dom says one night over coffee and pie and he seems tired, too. Older. It resonates within her in that moment just how much has changed since she’s been gone and she feels sorry for reasons she can’t explain. “You can’t help it. You just can’t let it either.”
She wakes up before dawn most days, misses her kid more than is humanly possible. Doesn’t sleep. She guesses it’s kind of like falling back into old patterns since she’s been back and everyone is relatively excited about her being there, but it’s not the same.
Sarah feels like the new kid all over again, struggling to find her footing in a world she knows like the back of her hand. It’s an odd feeling.
+
“I don’t know if I can make it for the first, Sarah,” Josh says over the phone one night and she bites her nails and tries not to sigh. She’s been expecting this. “Keala has a fever -“
“She’s sick and you didn’t call?”
“You didn’t call, Sarah -“
“I called yesterday and talked to the Nanny. You weren’t home yet. I tried calling last night, too, you didn’t answer.”
Josh sighs something heavy and she can feel it over the line. “It started last night. She was up crying, I probably didn’t hear,” there’s a pause and she counts his breaths out of habit. “I’m sorry,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.
“It’s okay,” Sarah pauses and waits a beat. Tries to remember the last time a conversation between the two of them didn’t turn into an argument. She fails miserably. “Can I talk to her now?”
“I just got her down.”
“Oh… Okay.”
“Look, Sarah,” Josh pauses and starts again. “It’s late,” he says, and deep down she knows that isn’t what he was originally going to say. “I’m going to go. We’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah,” another sigh, more distance between them. “Give her a kiss for me? Oh, and give her the purple bear. She always likes the purple bear -“
There’s a patient sigh on the line and it seems like all they have between them these days is distance and sighs and pauses. Stop and go, hurry up and wait. She longs for the consistency they used to have.
“She has the purple bear, Sarah.”
Something catches in her throat and she feels like crying, but doesn’t. She misses her daughter. “Oh. Tomorrow, then?”
“Yeah.”
Josh hangs up the phone before she can say anything else and occurs to her, an hour later when she’s sipping wine and watching Leno (funny, she used to be a Letterman girl before she moved out here) that they didn’t even say I love you.
+
Went brings her coffee in the mornings.
“You want to talk about it?” He asks because he always just knows. They walk together, right foot, left foot, always in synch and the stability of it all makes her feel lighter. He bumps her shoulder as they walk, holds her coffee without asking as she zips up her jacket. It’s their routine; she revels in it.
Sarah smiles up at him. “Nothing really to talk about.”
He gives her a look like he doesn’t believe her, but otherwise lets it go. “So, my Mom wants to know if you want to have dinner with us next week, but I didn’t know if Josh and Keala were coming, so…”
“Sure,” she replies from behind her coffee cup.
“Good,” he smiles like she’s made his day and it’s infectious; she smiles back. “I’m excited about seeing Kaela -“
“They’re not coming, actually,” she pauses to take a sip of her coffee, to wash down the lump in her throat. When she swallows, she continues, “so it’ll just be me,” with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
She can feel him falling out of synch with her before he actually stops and she continues walking a few steps before stopping. She turns to look at him.
“What do you mean they’re not coming?”
“It’s just not a good time.”
The sun is starting to come up and she pushes the sunglasses on top of her head down onto her nose; she’s found it’s easier to lie to him when she’s not looking directly at him.
“Sarah -“
“It’s not a big deal, okay?”
Because he knows her so well, recognizes the tone in her voice, he nods and says, “Alright,” and continues walking. Lets it go.
They drink their coffee in silence. She’s thankful.
+
“Hey, I got you something.”
Sarah looks up to see Dom standing next to her, gift bag in hand. “You didn’t have to.”
He shoves it towards her. “Just shut up and take it.”
She does, pulling back the tissue paper and reaching inside to pull out a blue baseball cap. “You really shouldn’t have.”
“It’s so you can go incognito, avoid the paparazzi,” he laughs and she laughs too and for the first time all day she feels happy. He sobers for a moment and says seriously, “I know it’s an adjustment.”
“Thanks, Dom,” she says, genuinely touched by his thoughtfulness and Dom looks awfully proud of himself as she runs her fingers over the blue fabric. Peers at it a little closer. “Hey, is this…”
Dom grins from ear to ear and slides into the seat next to hers. Places an arm on the back of her chair. “Alright, so I technically didn’t buy it -“
“No,” she laughs, “you stole it.”
“It’s not like wardrobe is going to miss it.”
They laugh about it for a long moment and it’s nice, to sit here with someone and laugh and just be. She’s missed her friends and she guesses she still isn’t use to having them right there with her instead of only phone calls away. It is one adjustment she doesn’t mind getting used to.
“So how are you, really?”
“Okay, I guess.”
Dom nods. “Yeah.”
Sarah fingers the phone clutched in her left hand. The day is halfway over and still no phone call from Josh. She’s left two messages, nearly a dozen texts. It’s been over twelve hours since she’s talked to Kaela, counted her breaths over the line. She’s starting to get antsy.
“Is it ever not hard?” She asks out of nowhere and knows he knows without asking.
Everyone always thinks it’s been her and Went since day one and it’s true, she supposes, because he is, more or less, her best friend, but in the beginning, the very beginning it was her and Dom. Bonding over coffee and pie in the middle night, about being away from their better halves, their families.
“No.”
Sarah slides the cap over her head. Settles back into her chair. “I didn’t think so.”
+
Sometimes, during her darkest hours, Sarah thinks that Kaela was just as much a saving grace as she was a godsend.
It’s horrible of her, she knows, and she wouldn’t trade her daughter for anything, but it’s not a secret that things between her and Josh weren’t exactly anything to write home about for a long, long while. But she hadn’t really thought anything of it, because marriage is hard, right? And everyone has their rough patches, they just happen to have a few more than others. Quite a few more. Then she got pregnant, and nine months later Kaela was born, and then, finally, they made the collective decision for her to leave the show and things got better. Things were good and she was happy. She really was.
But acting has always been her first love and now matter how long and hard she tried, she just couldn’t make herself fall out of love with it.
When Sarah can’t sleep at night, she remembers the day she’d told Josh she was going back. The look on his face, his patient, if that’s what you want. The disappointment, like she’d failed him somehow.
Sarah figures that’s where the problem has always laid. Josh never did understand that if she didn’t do it, if she didn’t say yes, she somehow would have been failing herself.
+
“You do realize that there are fifty people on set waiting for you to show your face so they can yell surprise, don’t you?”
Sarah looks up as Went slides onto the bench next to her. Josh does call, but she’s filming and by the time she checks her voicemail it’s too late to call back. Her phone is still in her hand, though, hopeful. Deep down she knows it’s a fruitless cause.
“Yeah,” she sighs. She feels so tired, a month in and she’s still not used to the long days again.
Thirty-one, her mind reels. She guesses she feels a little old, too.
“What’s going on, Sarah?” he asks, looking all earnest and caring and her heart breaks a little because she’s never kept things from him, and it feels weird to do it now. It’s not intentional, really, just self preservation. Saying it meant admitting the truth, admitting what had been lurking in the shadows for months, years, really, if she thought about it. She doesn’t think she’s ready.
There is a moment where she wonders, briefly, if this is what failure feels like. With her here and Josh and Kaela there, so many states and miles away; spending birthdays alone and longing for things (people) that haven’t been hers for a long, long time.
(“It’ll be the end of us, Sarah, you do realize that, don’t you?” Josh had said when she’d told him she was going back, and she’d laughed and kissed him, and promised him it wouldn’t, but deep down she knew he was right.
It’s why she wasn’t shocked when he told her he wasn’t going to come out to LA right away. It’s why she’s not fazed that he’s not here now, a month later. She thinks she probably should have brought Kaela with her, shouldn’t have let him win that particular fight, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, right?)
“I think my marriage is over,” she says quietly, out of nowhere, and Went looks at her for longest time.
And despite it all, she doesn’t regret coming back, not really, and maybe that’s her biggest fault. They loved each other, sure, but they were so young, together for so long, and looking back marriage was really more a matter of it being the next step, rather than the right thing. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe she should regret that, too, but she doesn’t. Things were good for a long time, and she loves Kaela, loves her daughter more than life itself, her and Josh just weren’t meant to last forever.
What really is?
“I’m sorry,” he says and she’s shocked that she doesn’t feel more like crying, just relieved that it’s finally out there, like she can finally breathe after two long years of holding her breath.
“It’s okay.” Went goes to say something else, but she stops him. “I don’t want - I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” she says, “can we just sit here for a minute? Just sit?”
“Yeah.”
Sarah reaches out for his hand to find his already there waiting, and she grabs it, interlaces her fingers with his, holds on. Went moves closer, wraps his free arm around her shoulder and she lets him, revels in his warmth, the insurmountable amount of comfort he offers by just being. His lips press into her hair and she breathes.
Neither say a thing.