Lost Fic: We Can't Go Back (Sawyer/Juliet)
Title: We Can’t Go Back
Pairing: Sawyer/Juliet
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 856
Warnings: Spoilers through “Recon”.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Title adapted from the song "Falling Slowly".
Summary: What we had was just for a little while; maybe we were never supposed to be together.
A/N: Written for a_lost_art's St. Patrick’s Day challenge. My prompt was the movie Once.
Once, once
I knew how to look for you
Once, once
But that was before
Once, once
I would have laid down and died for you
Once, once
But not anymore.
---“Once”, Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova
They met by accident. That’s how these things usually go. She was on her way to pick up her son; he was on his way to meet Miles at the station.
It was a minor incident. Barely worth the write up, but he was in the squad car so he figured he had to go by the book. Their cars collided at the stoplight, his smashing into the back end of hers when she stopped too fast. She got out of the car, knees shaking, smiling nervously. There was a small cut on her forehead dripping blood down her brow.
That was the first time he saw her.
He doesn’t think of himself as a romantic guy. He sure as hell isn’t sentimental, but if he was the sort he’d of said time stopped. The world slowed down and for a minute it was just him and this woman. A woman he didn’t even know. And it was just about the sweetest thing that ever happened in his whole damn life.
“Oh God, are you alright?” she asked.
He shrugged, rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He was more concerned about her than himself.
“I’m fine. Did you hit your head?”
He reached out without thinking and pushed a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes so he could examine the cut. She shook her head, insisted it wasn’t that bad.
“It was my fault, I was in a hurry. My son’s waiting for me at school,” she said.
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet to find his insurance card.
“Tell you what Blondie. This one’s on me. I shoulda been paying closer attention. I’m the cop after all.”
She tilted her head and smiled, soft and mysterious. He could have sworn he’d seen that smile before, knew he wanted to see it again.
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Don’t make me arrest you, ma’am.”
She laughed, thanked him at least a dozen times and got back into her car. He stood there for a moment in the middle of the street, glass from her tail light crunching under his shoes just waiting…for what? He wasn’t sure. For her to turn around, to get in his car, to tell him she was feeling this thing too, this weight. He just wanted there to be something more. Some promise that she wouldn’t just drive off into the sunset.
She did turn around. At the last minute, she stuck her head out the window and called, “Let’s have coffee some time. We can go dutch.”
“You got it, Blondie,” he called back. “Just name the place.”
“There’s a little shop on third street by the bookstore they have great bagels.”
“Well if they’ve got good bagels we’ve got to go.”
She laughed again and shouted, “Tomorrow morning around 8:00, maybe?”
He nodded and got back into his car grinning from ear to ear. There was a song on the radio, something slow and sad. Some poor sap singing about missed chances and moving on, he changed the channel, maybe plugged in a CD he can’t really remember anymore.
He wasn’t in the mood to hear about heartache, not that day.
***
She never showed up.
He waited for an hour, watched the door holding his breath at every flash of blonde hair. She called him on his cell ten minutes after he left.
He was in the wrong damn shop. She was two blocks away waiting on him in some other place drinking coffee and eating a damn fine bagel (at least that’s what she said.)
They laughed it off, promised to reschedule.
They never did.
There were two more phone calls, two more promises that they would have that coffee. He wanted to. God did he want to, but there was always something else to do, somewhere else to be.
***
Long after his car was fixed, after he spent a morning sitting in the wrong coffee shop, after that last phone call---he still thinks about her and feels something heavy in his chest. It’s like a loss. But that doesn’t make any kind of sense.
He didn’t know her. All he got was a name and a couple of phone calls and the memory of a smile that tugged at him somewhere way down deep.
It was just once really.
One day, one conversation about nothing at all and somehow it left him with a feeling of regret, like he had missed some golden opportunity.
He moved on of course, didn’t dwell on it. He went back to eating tv dinners and watching reruns of shows long gone off the air and fucking women he met in bars all the time hoping he might meet one he wanted to fuck twice.
He made himself forget about a woman he crashed into. He wasn’t the kind of man that believed in fate. The universe wasn’t trying to tell him anything. She was just a fantasy. Wasn’t nothing between them. Never was, never would be. Probably for the best, he told himself.
It just wasn’t meant to be that’s all. That’s how these things usually go.