old Lost fic repost #2: The Last Lover (Sawyer/half of craphole island, NC-17)
[Repost: Originally published at lostfic.com on Sept. 25, 2005. What follows here is untouched, C&Ped as is (except the LJ cut).]
Note: Been sittin’ on this one a little too long. I don’t know why I’ve been nervous to post it, but I have, so at the risk of begging…I’d love to know if you like it, if it works.
This sharply diverges from the show sometime after “Confidence Man.”
The Last Lover
The order in which Sawyer Ford took lovers on the island surprised him. If you had been beside him on the plane and pointed out to him who he’d fuck first-indeed, who he’d fuck at all-he would have laughed at you, or maybe made a threat. For Sawyer, sex had become a way to get money or power, but nearly all of his conquests on the island were not really conquests in any sense. There was no financial gain, nor did he have a solid grip on power with any of them. Oh, he might have seemed to be in charge, but he needed them all much worse than they needed him, or at least just as badly.
Boone was exactly not his type. Sawyer’s bisexuality was generally directed at extremes: strong, physically imposing men or slender, delicate women. He’d bedded enough tough, sexy women to have a taste for them, too, but they always had a way about them-maybe it was long hair, or a soft voice, something distinctly feminine. But he normally went for the clearly, old-fashionedly gendered. Boone was, of course, not the masculine ideal. At least not unless you were in ancient Greece.
The first time he unbuttoned Boone’s pants, his hands had been shaking a little. He was half afraid that boy was lulling him into a false sense of security only to beat him. Or even to simply run and tell everyone what an unadulterated faggot Sawyer was. Not that he greatly minded that. But he didn’t particularly need everyone to know that though his first lover on the island smelled like a man, sounded like a man when he came, and had an unbelievable cock, he also had skin softer than just about anybody’s he’d ever touched and a face that was androgynous enough to be spooky, especially when he was turned on.
So he’d unbuttoned Boone’s pants, his fingers lightly brushing a hard, flat stomach, and he attempted to give him a blow job to rival all others. He doubted his skill a little, since it had been so long since he’d had time to indulge himself with a man, but he was nonetheless happy to devour Boone and grasp at his hips and listen to his stifled groans. He supposed part of what made him successful at all was the shock Boone hadn’t gotten over, even when he ran his hands through Sawyer’s hair as Sawyer lay his head on his thigh.
There had been an apology. Took nearly everything Sawyer had to do that, but he reasoned that you couldn’t very well let a person fuck you if they’d beaten you without remorse. Sawyer hardly knew why he had done it anyway, or at least he didn’t until Boone approached him one day and clocked him cold on his chin. Then he hit him again, harder, this time blackening his right eye. Sawyer let himself hit the sand, willfully absorbing Boone’s kicks. This was punishment, but there was something powerfully sexual about it. Sawyer reckoned that part of why he’d hit Boone was that he didn’t want to be attracted to him; maybe Boone needed to hit him too, to prove that what he felt was rage and not lust. Not that he didn’t have rage; not that it wasn’t deserved.
So Sawyer went to him out at the shore line the next night, joining him as he walked. He told him he was sorry for what he’d done, asked him if he wanted to hit him again. Boone said no. Sawyer put a hand on the boy’s arm to hold him there for a moment, and Boone jerked it away, not in fear but in something else. His eyes said, you are too dangerous. You have to make me hate you.
But Sawyer didn’t want to do that. He was in Boone’s space when Boone got back, and the younger man’s eyes flashed with a bright, clear anger. What is it? he’d asked. Did you come to take it all back? Sawyer just pulled him into a kiss that wasn’t exactly gentle, though the feel of Boone’s small waist and hips made him want to be a little softer, even when Boone rubbed his body desperately against Sawyer’s. Sawyer felt like every reckless grab from his hands would bruise him. He was tired of bruising Boone. With as seductive a voice as Sawyer could muster-deep and even-he told him he wanted to pay him back, would love nothing more than to suck him off in such a way that Boone would maybe forget whose mouth it was on his cock.
Trouble was, Boone didn’t want to forget. He also didn’t want to hit Sawyer anymore. But as Sawyer came to him, night after night, it was worse than being hit. Sawyer needed him, and Boone saw that. No, it wasn’t vindictive. Boone was just quite in thrall with having the power to make Sawyer beg because it made him feel strong for once. Sawyer was okay with that for a while, but then he wasn’t. So he stopped coming to see Boone, and Boone never once made a move to get him back.
Sticks had been unpremeditated. For a long time, he thought she really hated him, but she must have realized that the inhaler episode was not about wanting her to quit breathing or really about her at all. Whatever the case, she didn’t hate him too much or fear him at all. She was the one girl that rivaled him for open sexuality, and he found her calculated charm dangerous. She had obviously warped Boone into something wounded and pitiful, and he knew just how she did it. He’d done it all his life, although his targets never knew how low he had them until it was too late. But he would not be so easily deceived, and she didn’t seem to be out for that anyway. When she came to his tent one night, he recognized sex in her eyes immediately, and instantly saw that this was not even lust for some intangible Sawyer-ness. This was simply a girl recognizing her sexual equal and deciding that maybe they should tangle, if only to see who would come out on top.
She did, most of the time. He liked it that way-with her small breasts bouncing there, her hair hitting his chest-because she would look in his eyes, and she would make noise to wake the dead, even with his hand over her mouth. It was nice to find someone as uninhibited as he was, who he could fuck and not feel anything for, who gave no feelings in return. Theirs was a short fling. After they’d learned each other’s tricks, they got together less frequently. But he would still sometimes jerk off thinking about her, the way she’d let him come up behind her in the jungle and slide his hand down the front of her pants, how her ass would push back into him when he brought her to climax, how she would sometimes refuse to return the favor, her eyes telling him to come to her later. And he always knew she’d do something to make the wait worth it.
But after Boone died, she’d retreated into herself. He couldn’t have fucked her without thinking about Boone, without thinking about why she’d come to him, having heard and probably seen him with her brother. Her step-brother-lover. Besides, at that point, she was Sayid’s, really. She’d developed a conscience about sex.
Sayid, however, had not. His noble soul told him to wait for this beautiful girl who was less of a stuck-up bitch every day. But after Boone’s death, when she’d lashed out, he was at a loss. Perhaps he was a little angry and frustrated, and that’s why it happened. Sawyer knew well what lengths people would go to in order to find a reason to hate themselves. Sawyer hated himself a little after he pursued Sayid, not because he had a conscience but because this was the man who had tortured him and left an ugly scar on his arm. If that wasn’t sick, he didn’t know what was. They never spoke about it; there didn’t seem to be any reason to, as if that had happened to other more alive people.
Theirs was no courtship. Sawyer felt Sayid’s eyes on him day after day, even though Sayid found ways to avoid him. So Sawyer tested his theories-both the one that Sayid wanted him and the one that he wanted Sayid-by deliberately letting Sayid catch him bathing. Sawyer’s hands fluttered across his abdomen as he looked at the other man, and quickly he was hard. He invited him into the water with him, but Sayid declined. However, Sawyer saw the bulge in his khakis before he turned and walked away. The next day Sawyer was more bold, following him into the ocean, grabbing him from behind and saying such things in a rough whisper that he almost earned himself an ass-kicking. But when he went to the pool to bathe the next day, Sayid did the pursuing. He swiftly got naked, cleaning himself in earnest while Sawyer watched, finally approaching him and standing there, a couple of feet away, with a look on his face that said, Well, are you still as brave as you were?
They always kept careful track of who had been the dominator last, as if they were only willing to screw each other if they could imagine that they each were the strongest and the most in control. Sayid liked to tease, to make Sawyer sweat and moan and do all but insist on relief; Sawyer got his way by fucking Sayid too hard sometimes, to make him come without touching him, concentrating on his own thrusts into him. But it was a mutually beneficial arrangement that only came to an end when Sayid told him he was really mostly heterosexual, and he needed to be with Shannon. Honestly, he didn’t fault Sayid for that, which scared him a little.
Maybe it was because they’d developed a strange trust in each other, made from mutual dependence and reciprocity. It originated the first time they had touched each other, there in that pool, roughly jerking each other off under the water. They didn’t look each other in the face, and neither one of them made a sound, nor did they want to admit defeat and come first. So when Sawyer felt himself start to go, he’d called out Sayid’s name, sending him over the edge too. Once their breath slowed, Sawyer realized that the reaction he’d gotten was as much due to his use of Sayid’s real name as it was anything else. He hadn’t called him Mohammed or Ali or Omar since that day.
They only kissed after they fucked, as if it took an Olympic-caliber contest to get them to let their guard down enough to do that. But Sawyer could never look the man in the eyes. That would be too much, a little too personal. And things were never personal with them. Even Sayid’s ending of the thing was emotionless. But Sawyer had understood. They had lost the need to punish themselves and each other.
Kate had come to him. All the flirting he’d done, all the innuendo, and she’d come to him on her own terms. He liked to think it was his charm, but it scared him to realize it wasn’t, exactly. She always looked at him like she could see through the bullshit. Maybe she could. She came at first without a plan, he was sure. She just wanted to bitch about Jack and her sorry life. He probably wouldn’t have let things get to the physical level except he hadn’t known where things were going; she was sneaky. She made him feel like his body was almost secondary to his attitude and past and sympathy and scorn. She moved slowly toward her goal by talking to him, telling him things he had no right to know. Then she started sleeping over, and one morning he awoke with her head on his chest. He only had a few days before he knew she could make him do whatever she wanted him to do. Because he’d fall. It had happened before. He would crumble at her feet, and that’s why he had always leered at her so much. He had hoped she wouldn’t realize how deep he was capable of going.
This terror he felt at her touch made him know he turned to men so much more often because they weren’t as scary. Though she had manipulated him, maybe just a little, she was so vulnerable to him that it was frightening. Vulnerability, now that he was used to-women that trusted him for no reason, opening their lives as easily as their legs. But Kate trusted him for reasons he didn’t quite understand and she opened herself to him because she needed to.
They did not say ‘I love you,’ though it might have been true, though not on the soul-mate level of life-long commitment. They simply needed and trusted each other too much to be blasé about it. But it was painful. He would go to her, only wanting to touch her and taste her, to see her let go, but she would beg him not to go down on her, but to be inside her, deeper and deeper and totally consume her body, take control of her. She ceased to be the strong woman she had always been when they fucked; and he was weak too, coming too soon, needing his hands on her, needing to know she would not go into the jungle without him. He honestly didn’t want her to die without him.
But it was not a love affair. It was need and it was terrible. Eventually, they began to fight. She’d reassert herself by hitting him and yelling at him; he’d ignore her and turn cold for days. Some people, she finally said, cannot fuck without falling apart. Needless to say, the decided not to fuck anymore. Except once, when the rain came, and she needed shelter out at the beach, and they were both lonely, she asked him to touch her and he started with his mouth at her throat and ended sliding inside her as he kept two fingers on her clit, and it was slow and fast at the same time, and blinding. He lulled her to sleep with his fingers across her stomach and breasts until she said it was too hot for them to touch. Then he lay awake and marveled as he always had that her nipples were so perfectly round and dark.
He and Kate were in the fighting phase of their relationship the first time Jack gave him a hand job. It had been a joke of sorts. He really couldn’t stand the bastard, wanted to hit him actually, but he knew it was more than likely because he couldn’t look at him without wondering if he swung both ways too. Jack sometimes fought Kate’s battles with Sawyer for her, and Sawyer had to find increasingly creative ways to make Jack unwilling to interfere. He tried sheer meanness, but Jack never rose to the bait. He tried sexual suggestions, which were met with scorn and coldness. He had all but given up one day when he managed to push Jack into getting physical with him. It was different than when Jack had punched him because of the inhalers. This time, it was a more personal frustration, and Jack grabbed him and shook him, looking into his eyes. Sawyer couldn’t help it, confronted with that much power from Jack, his smell, the chest hair that peeked out from the top of his t-shirt. So Sawyer nudged his body into Jack’s and made a suggestion. He was shocked as hell to have it followed, and at the way Jack could kiss so slow and deep while he tugged quickly and clumsily at Sawyer’s cock. But there was something about his calloused hands and the groans he made that Sawyer couldn’t fight or ignore.
They spent ten whole days tiptoeing around each other and wondering what in the hell was wrong with them before Sawyer finally tackled him in the jungle and initiated a repeat performance, to their mutual satisfaction.
Jack was passionate but not always skilled, although he never talked about it or promised to get better. He simply improved with time. He did, however, concede that he had never had anal sex, so Sawyer had the pleasure of introducing him to it. Sawyer bit his lips the first time Jack’s short, thick cock entered him, surprised by the pain of it and the fact that he didn’t even mind how sore he’d be later. Only after that first time he’d let himself be fucked by the person he always thought he hated the most on the island did he realize that this was not just sex. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t emotionless. You couldn’t be emotionless with Jack’s warm brown eyes looking at you like that. You couldn’t stop emotion when you compared the reserved, righteous doctor with the man who kissed his way up and down your body in appreciation of nothing more than your flat stomach and the way you said his name. Jack never pressed the issue of being on top, but Sawyer often asked him for it, begged him in fact. That should have been his first clue.
His second clue was how badly he wanted to hide their relationship, such as it was. That was before they’d been brave enough for definitions, still assuming it was a momentary lapse in judgment. Jack thought Sawyer was ashamed of him. Sawyer told him, emphatically, that it wasn’t true and muffled Jack’s protesting mouth with kisses and what passed in Sawyer’s emotionally stunted vocabulary for affirmations. He never had to say that he was worried that the others would lower their estimation of Jack until Jack would realize what a colossal mistake it all was. This was a man who had never really been with men before. Maybe he was simply a desperate heterosexual, and like many before him, he would wake up one day cured of this need. But Jack knew him, understood his fears. One day, he flirted with Sawyer in front of everybody, brushing his arms lightly with his fingers, licking parched lips, gazing at his crotch. This was simply the first evidence of what everyone already suspected. He deftly pulled Sawyer into a causal embrace, counting on Sawyer to play up his persona and make a move. So he did, kissing Jack in front of half the island it seemed. Except Kate. But she already knew, and she still hadn’t forgiven him-for betraying her or corrupting Jack, he wasn’t sure. Strangely, she was never angry with Jack.
Jack was all the things a person could possibly be for Sawyer, including accepting-in a real way, without pity for his low self-esteem or tolerance for it either. He didn’t know what he was to Jack. What could someone like Jack even need? He was never sure, but he thought maybe it was that Jack was allowed to be nasty to Sawyer without repercussions, or he could simply sit forlorn and have Sawyer scratch his head and rub his back and coax him, finally and not so subtly, into accepting a blow job and going peacefully to sleep. For Jack always slept soundly after an orgasm.
They were the way they’d always been when they were around others, combative and mean. But it was more honestly an act than they’d admitted before. Alone, Jack was a warm, hairy body pressed into his back as they lay quietly together; he was not his enemy. At first they could only hold to each other like that if they maintained that it was not what either of them wanted. But they did want, and need. It was maybe like love. It moved slowly and inevitably, the way all their fights before had moved toward physical contact.
Sawyer said ‘I love you’ first, in a way, a couple of months after their relationship became common knowledge. He left his spoils at the beach and moved to the caves one day, without explanation.
Jack said the words first, a couple of months after that, on the day they were rescued. He said he just wanted him to know. He wanted him to see that he’d held him together for a long time and made him remember he was alive. Sawyer thought it was the end, because now they could be alive in the real world and Jack could forget survival driving him to desperation and go back to tits, to nice women who always saw eye to eye with him, or at least deferred to him-something Sawyer had never done. So Sawyer didn’t speak, and Jack misinterpreted. He said something flippant about remembering him when he went back to being the angry, defensive person he wanted to be. But Sawyer kissed him and said that he had a hard time being that man any more. Then he asked if he could come live with Jack. Jack was genuinely shocked. As well as he knew Sawyer, he had always felt like their relationship would never last beyond the island, that Sawyer would ever want him in the real world. Sawyer was equally surprised to find out that he did, because he hadn’t realized it until they were back on the airplane taking them home and he couldn’t let go of Jack’s hand.
When they faced the real world, they didn’t touch each other, instead disclosing a tenuous bond of grudging respect, held together with snarkiness and competition, which they had to admit was still somewhat true. The secrets of the island would only be exposed in the book that Claire and Charlie were going to write that they would all share the profits from. The other castaways painted a picture of them as bitter rivals who eventually worked out a truce. Maybe it was a miracle for sociologists to study, but no one would say why it happened.
However, just a few weeks later, the tabloids would speculate, publishing pictures of the two on Jack’s front porch, Jack resting his heavy head on Sawyer’s shoulder as he told him about his day. He had gone into emergency medicine, now that he had developed a taste for it, and there had been a man in the E.R. with a knife wound that was just like the one Sayid had given Sawyer. He was feeling guilty again for something Sawyer had never been really angry with him for in the first place. The second picture they took-of Jack’s miserable face as he traced his finger over Sawyer’s bicep-they used to prove the relationship existed and declaim its breakup at the same time.
What they didn’t see was the two going into a house that looked like a nice New England farmhouse on the outside but whose inside looked like it suited both men, somehow, after only a few weeks-warm and masculine, neat because Jack was neat and filled with island knickknacks because Sawyer was a pack rat, and he had learned to attach significance to everything anyone gave him. That night, Sawyer drank two shots of Jack Daniels from a bottle in the cabinet-as many as Jack would abide without his eyes flashing to disappointment-while Jack flopped on the brown leather second-hand couch.
After Sawyer had puttered around cleaning the kitchen, giving Jack some space for a few minutes, Jack announced that he would like to visit heaven for a while, and they raced each other upstairs, stripping off their clothes. Sawyer was done first, having no tie or belt to contend with, and he watched Jack’s perfectly clean and tailored dark blue pants slide off. Jack left his briefs for last, even after he’d removed his socks, because he was actually something of a tease…that is until they stepped into the shower. Nothing made Jack happier than a shower unless Sawyer was in it. And nothing made Sawyer happier than the sheen of sweat on Jack’s stomach after sex, when the musky smell he’d come to know so well on the island would return. Then he could sleep among the cotton and goose down and not worry, not about the quiet or the dryness of the air or his own personal demons, not even about when Jack would get tired of keeping an unemployed fuck-up around. Those thoughts always disappeared with the morning anyway. They were absurd. Maybe he would find a real job. Hell, he thought one morning, maybe there were other pressing things.
“Jack.”
He rolled over, not opening his eyes against the morning sun. He only grunted a response. Jack was not a morning person, exactly.
Sawyer asked him, “Why did you stop asking me my real name?”
“What time is it?”
“7:15. Why did you stop wanting to know my real name?”
“I didn’t. I just gave up asking. You woke me up to fight?”
“No fight. Just curious.”
When Sawyer was quiet, Jack slowly opened his eyes. “So…”
“It’s James.”
“Ford?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “For now.”
“For now?”
“How does James Sheppard sound to you?”
Jack was awake enough to give him a confused face, but he quickly covered it with a laugh, snuggling deeper into the covers. “Like you’re a pod person or else you’ve forgotten we came back to a place that has laws about that sort of thing.”
“I never have cared much for laws.”
Jack just giggled again, softer this time, pulling the covers over his head.
He never did believe Sawyer was serious about anything until it was done. So Sawyer got up and dressed, trying to decide the most likely government agency he’d have to put up with. He did respect law, when it would let him do what he wanted, and there was nothing illegal about changing your name. He was prepared to do that, prepared let go of Sawyer Ford and the long, difficult past he’d had. It would be nice to go back to being James, and, he thought with a chuckle, it will be nice to shock the hell out of James Sheppard’s first and last lover.
-end-
Superfluous end notes: 1) I don’t hate Sayid, so don’t flame me if you think I fucked him over (so to speak). 2) The fact that Sawyer and Boone’s attraction is rooted in sado-masochism is hardly a new concept fanfiction world; I’m just playing off other stories and character depictions there. My thanks to you if I’m echoing your work. 3) I’m sorry if I made anyone gag with the mushiness at the end.
~
Note: Been sittin’ on this one a little too long. I don’t know why I’ve been nervous to post it, but I have, so at the risk of begging…I’d love to know if you like it, if it works.
This sharply diverges from the show sometime after “Confidence Man.”
The Last Lover
The order in which Sawyer Ford took lovers on the island surprised him. If you had been beside him on the plane and pointed out to him who he’d fuck first-indeed, who he’d fuck at all-he would have laughed at you, or maybe made a threat. For Sawyer, sex had become a way to get money or power, but nearly all of his conquests on the island were not really conquests in any sense. There was no financial gain, nor did he have a solid grip on power with any of them. Oh, he might have seemed to be in charge, but he needed them all much worse than they needed him, or at least just as badly.
Boone was exactly not his type. Sawyer’s bisexuality was generally directed at extremes: strong, physically imposing men or slender, delicate women. He’d bedded enough tough, sexy women to have a taste for them, too, but they always had a way about them-maybe it was long hair, or a soft voice, something distinctly feminine. But he normally went for the clearly, old-fashionedly gendered. Boone was, of course, not the masculine ideal. At least not unless you were in ancient Greece.
The first time he unbuttoned Boone’s pants, his hands had been shaking a little. He was half afraid that boy was lulling him into a false sense of security only to beat him. Or even to simply run and tell everyone what an unadulterated faggot Sawyer was. Not that he greatly minded that. But he didn’t particularly need everyone to know that though his first lover on the island smelled like a man, sounded like a man when he came, and had an unbelievable cock, he also had skin softer than just about anybody’s he’d ever touched and a face that was androgynous enough to be spooky, especially when he was turned on.
So he’d unbuttoned Boone’s pants, his fingers lightly brushing a hard, flat stomach, and he attempted to give him a blow job to rival all others. He doubted his skill a little, since it had been so long since he’d had time to indulge himself with a man, but he was nonetheless happy to devour Boone and grasp at his hips and listen to his stifled groans. He supposed part of what made him successful at all was the shock Boone hadn’t gotten over, even when he ran his hands through Sawyer’s hair as Sawyer lay his head on his thigh.
There had been an apology. Took nearly everything Sawyer had to do that, but he reasoned that you couldn’t very well let a person fuck you if they’d beaten you without remorse. Sawyer hardly knew why he had done it anyway, or at least he didn’t until Boone approached him one day and clocked him cold on his chin. Then he hit him again, harder, this time blackening his right eye. Sawyer let himself hit the sand, willfully absorbing Boone’s kicks. This was punishment, but there was something powerfully sexual about it. Sawyer reckoned that part of why he’d hit Boone was that he didn’t want to be attracted to him; maybe Boone needed to hit him too, to prove that what he felt was rage and not lust. Not that he didn’t have rage; not that it wasn’t deserved.
So Sawyer went to him out at the shore line the next night, joining him as he walked. He told him he was sorry for what he’d done, asked him if he wanted to hit him again. Boone said no. Sawyer put a hand on the boy’s arm to hold him there for a moment, and Boone jerked it away, not in fear but in something else. His eyes said, you are too dangerous. You have to make me hate you.
But Sawyer didn’t want to do that. He was in Boone’s space when Boone got back, and the younger man’s eyes flashed with a bright, clear anger. What is it? he’d asked. Did you come to take it all back? Sawyer just pulled him into a kiss that wasn’t exactly gentle, though the feel of Boone’s small waist and hips made him want to be a little softer, even when Boone rubbed his body desperately against Sawyer’s. Sawyer felt like every reckless grab from his hands would bruise him. He was tired of bruising Boone. With as seductive a voice as Sawyer could muster-deep and even-he told him he wanted to pay him back, would love nothing more than to suck him off in such a way that Boone would maybe forget whose mouth it was on his cock.
Trouble was, Boone didn’t want to forget. He also didn’t want to hit Sawyer anymore. But as Sawyer came to him, night after night, it was worse than being hit. Sawyer needed him, and Boone saw that. No, it wasn’t vindictive. Boone was just quite in thrall with having the power to make Sawyer beg because it made him feel strong for once. Sawyer was okay with that for a while, but then he wasn’t. So he stopped coming to see Boone, and Boone never once made a move to get him back.
Sticks had been unpremeditated. For a long time, he thought she really hated him, but she must have realized that the inhaler episode was not about wanting her to quit breathing or really about her at all. Whatever the case, she didn’t hate him too much or fear him at all. She was the one girl that rivaled him for open sexuality, and he found her calculated charm dangerous. She had obviously warped Boone into something wounded and pitiful, and he knew just how she did it. He’d done it all his life, although his targets never knew how low he had them until it was too late. But he would not be so easily deceived, and she didn’t seem to be out for that anyway. When she came to his tent one night, he recognized sex in her eyes immediately, and instantly saw that this was not even lust for some intangible Sawyer-ness. This was simply a girl recognizing her sexual equal and deciding that maybe they should tangle, if only to see who would come out on top.
She did, most of the time. He liked it that way-with her small breasts bouncing there, her hair hitting his chest-because she would look in his eyes, and she would make noise to wake the dead, even with his hand over her mouth. It was nice to find someone as uninhibited as he was, who he could fuck and not feel anything for, who gave no feelings in return. Theirs was a short fling. After they’d learned each other’s tricks, they got together less frequently. But he would still sometimes jerk off thinking about her, the way she’d let him come up behind her in the jungle and slide his hand down the front of her pants, how her ass would push back into him when he brought her to climax, how she would sometimes refuse to return the favor, her eyes telling him to come to her later. And he always knew she’d do something to make the wait worth it.
But after Boone died, she’d retreated into herself. He couldn’t have fucked her without thinking about Boone, without thinking about why she’d come to him, having heard and probably seen him with her brother. Her step-brother-lover. Besides, at that point, she was Sayid’s, really. She’d developed a conscience about sex.
Sayid, however, had not. His noble soul told him to wait for this beautiful girl who was less of a stuck-up bitch every day. But after Boone’s death, when she’d lashed out, he was at a loss. Perhaps he was a little angry and frustrated, and that’s why it happened. Sawyer knew well what lengths people would go to in order to find a reason to hate themselves. Sawyer hated himself a little after he pursued Sayid, not because he had a conscience but because this was the man who had tortured him and left an ugly scar on his arm. If that wasn’t sick, he didn’t know what was. They never spoke about it; there didn’t seem to be any reason to, as if that had happened to other more alive people.
Theirs was no courtship. Sawyer felt Sayid’s eyes on him day after day, even though Sayid found ways to avoid him. So Sawyer tested his theories-both the one that Sayid wanted him and the one that he wanted Sayid-by deliberately letting Sayid catch him bathing. Sawyer’s hands fluttered across his abdomen as he looked at the other man, and quickly he was hard. He invited him into the water with him, but Sayid declined. However, Sawyer saw the bulge in his khakis before he turned and walked away. The next day Sawyer was more bold, following him into the ocean, grabbing him from behind and saying such things in a rough whisper that he almost earned himself an ass-kicking. But when he went to the pool to bathe the next day, Sayid did the pursuing. He swiftly got naked, cleaning himself in earnest while Sawyer watched, finally approaching him and standing there, a couple of feet away, with a look on his face that said, Well, are you still as brave as you were?
They always kept careful track of who had been the dominator last, as if they were only willing to screw each other if they could imagine that they each were the strongest and the most in control. Sayid liked to tease, to make Sawyer sweat and moan and do all but insist on relief; Sawyer got his way by fucking Sayid too hard sometimes, to make him come without touching him, concentrating on his own thrusts into him. But it was a mutually beneficial arrangement that only came to an end when Sayid told him he was really mostly heterosexual, and he needed to be with Shannon. Honestly, he didn’t fault Sayid for that, which scared him a little.
Maybe it was because they’d developed a strange trust in each other, made from mutual dependence and reciprocity. It originated the first time they had touched each other, there in that pool, roughly jerking each other off under the water. They didn’t look each other in the face, and neither one of them made a sound, nor did they want to admit defeat and come first. So when Sawyer felt himself start to go, he’d called out Sayid’s name, sending him over the edge too. Once their breath slowed, Sawyer realized that the reaction he’d gotten was as much due to his use of Sayid’s real name as it was anything else. He hadn’t called him Mohammed or Ali or Omar since that day.
They only kissed after they fucked, as if it took an Olympic-caliber contest to get them to let their guard down enough to do that. But Sawyer could never look the man in the eyes. That would be too much, a little too personal. And things were never personal with them. Even Sayid’s ending of the thing was emotionless. But Sawyer had understood. They had lost the need to punish themselves and each other.
Kate had come to him. All the flirting he’d done, all the innuendo, and she’d come to him on her own terms. He liked to think it was his charm, but it scared him to realize it wasn’t, exactly. She always looked at him like she could see through the bullshit. Maybe she could. She came at first without a plan, he was sure. She just wanted to bitch about Jack and her sorry life. He probably wouldn’t have let things get to the physical level except he hadn’t known where things were going; she was sneaky. She made him feel like his body was almost secondary to his attitude and past and sympathy and scorn. She moved slowly toward her goal by talking to him, telling him things he had no right to know. Then she started sleeping over, and one morning he awoke with her head on his chest. He only had a few days before he knew she could make him do whatever she wanted him to do. Because he’d fall. It had happened before. He would crumble at her feet, and that’s why he had always leered at her so much. He had hoped she wouldn’t realize how deep he was capable of going.
This terror he felt at her touch made him know he turned to men so much more often because they weren’t as scary. Though she had manipulated him, maybe just a little, she was so vulnerable to him that it was frightening. Vulnerability, now that he was used to-women that trusted him for no reason, opening their lives as easily as their legs. But Kate trusted him for reasons he didn’t quite understand and she opened herself to him because she needed to.
They did not say ‘I love you,’ though it might have been true, though not on the soul-mate level of life-long commitment. They simply needed and trusted each other too much to be blasé about it. But it was painful. He would go to her, only wanting to touch her and taste her, to see her let go, but she would beg him not to go down on her, but to be inside her, deeper and deeper and totally consume her body, take control of her. She ceased to be the strong woman she had always been when they fucked; and he was weak too, coming too soon, needing his hands on her, needing to know she would not go into the jungle without him. He honestly didn’t want her to die without him.
But it was not a love affair. It was need and it was terrible. Eventually, they began to fight. She’d reassert herself by hitting him and yelling at him; he’d ignore her and turn cold for days. Some people, she finally said, cannot fuck without falling apart. Needless to say, the decided not to fuck anymore. Except once, when the rain came, and she needed shelter out at the beach, and they were both lonely, she asked him to touch her and he started with his mouth at her throat and ended sliding inside her as he kept two fingers on her clit, and it was slow and fast at the same time, and blinding. He lulled her to sleep with his fingers across her stomach and breasts until she said it was too hot for them to touch. Then he lay awake and marveled as he always had that her nipples were so perfectly round and dark.
He and Kate were in the fighting phase of their relationship the first time Jack gave him a hand job. It had been a joke of sorts. He really couldn’t stand the bastard, wanted to hit him actually, but he knew it was more than likely because he couldn’t look at him without wondering if he swung both ways too. Jack sometimes fought Kate’s battles with Sawyer for her, and Sawyer had to find increasingly creative ways to make Jack unwilling to interfere. He tried sheer meanness, but Jack never rose to the bait. He tried sexual suggestions, which were met with scorn and coldness. He had all but given up one day when he managed to push Jack into getting physical with him. It was different than when Jack had punched him because of the inhalers. This time, it was a more personal frustration, and Jack grabbed him and shook him, looking into his eyes. Sawyer couldn’t help it, confronted with that much power from Jack, his smell, the chest hair that peeked out from the top of his t-shirt. So Sawyer nudged his body into Jack’s and made a suggestion. He was shocked as hell to have it followed, and at the way Jack could kiss so slow and deep while he tugged quickly and clumsily at Sawyer’s cock. But there was something about his calloused hands and the groans he made that Sawyer couldn’t fight or ignore.
They spent ten whole days tiptoeing around each other and wondering what in the hell was wrong with them before Sawyer finally tackled him in the jungle and initiated a repeat performance, to their mutual satisfaction.
Jack was passionate but not always skilled, although he never talked about it or promised to get better. He simply improved with time. He did, however, concede that he had never had anal sex, so Sawyer had the pleasure of introducing him to it. Sawyer bit his lips the first time Jack’s short, thick cock entered him, surprised by the pain of it and the fact that he didn’t even mind how sore he’d be later. Only after that first time he’d let himself be fucked by the person he always thought he hated the most on the island did he realize that this was not just sex. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t emotionless. You couldn’t be emotionless with Jack’s warm brown eyes looking at you like that. You couldn’t stop emotion when you compared the reserved, righteous doctor with the man who kissed his way up and down your body in appreciation of nothing more than your flat stomach and the way you said his name. Jack never pressed the issue of being on top, but Sawyer often asked him for it, begged him in fact. That should have been his first clue.
His second clue was how badly he wanted to hide their relationship, such as it was. That was before they’d been brave enough for definitions, still assuming it was a momentary lapse in judgment. Jack thought Sawyer was ashamed of him. Sawyer told him, emphatically, that it wasn’t true and muffled Jack’s protesting mouth with kisses and what passed in Sawyer’s emotionally stunted vocabulary for affirmations. He never had to say that he was worried that the others would lower their estimation of Jack until Jack would realize what a colossal mistake it all was. This was a man who had never really been with men before. Maybe he was simply a desperate heterosexual, and like many before him, he would wake up one day cured of this need. But Jack knew him, understood his fears. One day, he flirted with Sawyer in front of everybody, brushing his arms lightly with his fingers, licking parched lips, gazing at his crotch. This was simply the first evidence of what everyone already suspected. He deftly pulled Sawyer into a causal embrace, counting on Sawyer to play up his persona and make a move. So he did, kissing Jack in front of half the island it seemed. Except Kate. But she already knew, and she still hadn’t forgiven him-for betraying her or corrupting Jack, he wasn’t sure. Strangely, she was never angry with Jack.
Jack was all the things a person could possibly be for Sawyer, including accepting-in a real way, without pity for his low self-esteem or tolerance for it either. He didn’t know what he was to Jack. What could someone like Jack even need? He was never sure, but he thought maybe it was that Jack was allowed to be nasty to Sawyer without repercussions, or he could simply sit forlorn and have Sawyer scratch his head and rub his back and coax him, finally and not so subtly, into accepting a blow job and going peacefully to sleep. For Jack always slept soundly after an orgasm.
They were the way they’d always been when they were around others, combative and mean. But it was more honestly an act than they’d admitted before. Alone, Jack was a warm, hairy body pressed into his back as they lay quietly together; he was not his enemy. At first they could only hold to each other like that if they maintained that it was not what either of them wanted. But they did want, and need. It was maybe like love. It moved slowly and inevitably, the way all their fights before had moved toward physical contact.
Sawyer said ‘I love you’ first, in a way, a couple of months after their relationship became common knowledge. He left his spoils at the beach and moved to the caves one day, without explanation.
Jack said the words first, a couple of months after that, on the day they were rescued. He said he just wanted him to know. He wanted him to see that he’d held him together for a long time and made him remember he was alive. Sawyer thought it was the end, because now they could be alive in the real world and Jack could forget survival driving him to desperation and go back to tits, to nice women who always saw eye to eye with him, or at least deferred to him-something Sawyer had never done. So Sawyer didn’t speak, and Jack misinterpreted. He said something flippant about remembering him when he went back to being the angry, defensive person he wanted to be. But Sawyer kissed him and said that he had a hard time being that man any more. Then he asked if he could come live with Jack. Jack was genuinely shocked. As well as he knew Sawyer, he had always felt like their relationship would never last beyond the island, that Sawyer would ever want him in the real world. Sawyer was equally surprised to find out that he did, because he hadn’t realized it until they were back on the airplane taking them home and he couldn’t let go of Jack’s hand.
When they faced the real world, they didn’t touch each other, instead disclosing a tenuous bond of grudging respect, held together with snarkiness and competition, which they had to admit was still somewhat true. The secrets of the island would only be exposed in the book that Claire and Charlie were going to write that they would all share the profits from. The other castaways painted a picture of them as bitter rivals who eventually worked out a truce. Maybe it was a miracle for sociologists to study, but no one would say why it happened.
However, just a few weeks later, the tabloids would speculate, publishing pictures of the two on Jack’s front porch, Jack resting his heavy head on Sawyer’s shoulder as he told him about his day. He had gone into emergency medicine, now that he had developed a taste for it, and there had been a man in the E.R. with a knife wound that was just like the one Sayid had given Sawyer. He was feeling guilty again for something Sawyer had never been really angry with him for in the first place. The second picture they took-of Jack’s miserable face as he traced his finger over Sawyer’s bicep-they used to prove the relationship existed and declaim its breakup at the same time.
What they didn’t see was the two going into a house that looked like a nice New England farmhouse on the outside but whose inside looked like it suited both men, somehow, after only a few weeks-warm and masculine, neat because Jack was neat and filled with island knickknacks because Sawyer was a pack rat, and he had learned to attach significance to everything anyone gave him. That night, Sawyer drank two shots of Jack Daniels from a bottle in the cabinet-as many as Jack would abide without his eyes flashing to disappointment-while Jack flopped on the brown leather second-hand couch.
After Sawyer had puttered around cleaning the kitchen, giving Jack some space for a few minutes, Jack announced that he would like to visit heaven for a while, and they raced each other upstairs, stripping off their clothes. Sawyer was done first, having no tie or belt to contend with, and he watched Jack’s perfectly clean and tailored dark blue pants slide off. Jack left his briefs for last, even after he’d removed his socks, because he was actually something of a tease…that is until they stepped into the shower. Nothing made Jack happier than a shower unless Sawyer was in it. And nothing made Sawyer happier than the sheen of sweat on Jack’s stomach after sex, when the musky smell he’d come to know so well on the island would return. Then he could sleep among the cotton and goose down and not worry, not about the quiet or the dryness of the air or his own personal demons, not even about when Jack would get tired of keeping an unemployed fuck-up around. Those thoughts always disappeared with the morning anyway. They were absurd. Maybe he would find a real job. Hell, he thought one morning, maybe there were other pressing things.
“Jack.”
He rolled over, not opening his eyes against the morning sun. He only grunted a response. Jack was not a morning person, exactly.
Sawyer asked him, “Why did you stop asking me my real name?”
“What time is it?”
“7:15. Why did you stop wanting to know my real name?”
“I didn’t. I just gave up asking. You woke me up to fight?”
“No fight. Just curious.”
When Sawyer was quiet, Jack slowly opened his eyes. “So…”
“It’s James.”
“Ford?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “For now.”
“For now?”
“How does James Sheppard sound to you?”
Jack was awake enough to give him a confused face, but he quickly covered it with a laugh, snuggling deeper into the covers. “Like you’re a pod person or else you’ve forgotten we came back to a place that has laws about that sort of thing.”
“I never have cared much for laws.”
Jack just giggled again, softer this time, pulling the covers over his head.
He never did believe Sawyer was serious about anything until it was done. So Sawyer got up and dressed, trying to decide the most likely government agency he’d have to put up with. He did respect law, when it would let him do what he wanted, and there was nothing illegal about changing your name. He was prepared to do that, prepared let go of Sawyer Ford and the long, difficult past he’d had. It would be nice to go back to being James, and, he thought with a chuckle, it will be nice to shock the hell out of James Sheppard’s first and last lover.
-end-
Superfluous end notes: 1) I don’t hate Sayid, so don’t flame me if you think I fucked him over (so to speak). 2) The fact that Sawyer and Boone’s attraction is rooted in sado-masochism is hardly a new concept fanfiction world; I’m just playing off other stories and character depictions there. My thanks to you if I’m echoing your work. 3) I’m sorry if I made anyone gag with the mushiness at the end.
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