Chapter 3
Hmmm...this is a stage-setting chapter. PG-13. Oh, and Jen? The pancake fetish lives on. ;)
Chapter word count: 2,416
Chapter 3
They need an axe, Sawyer decides. Funny he’s never thought to buy one, after all the time he’d spent chopping wood on the island. Or maybe that’s exactly why he didn’t think of it, he was blocking the island out. There’s so much he wants to forget, only Jack’s here now and there’s so much he wants to remember, too. He thinks of Jack’s arms swinging the axe, muscles bunched, tattoos flexing, and suddenly he rethinks the idea of having Jack pick up a load of firewood. He glances at his watch and sees that Jack will still be in the car, driving to work, and he punches the numbers into his cell phone.
“Yo, Doc. When’s your next day off?”
Jack doesn’t answer right away, probably because he’s so preoccupied with work that he can’t remember what day today is. Sawyer tries again. “Okay, if today is Wednesday, and your last day off was Sunday-before-last, how long til the next one?”
“Uh…two. Friday’s my day off. Why?”
“We got a tree leanin’ too far over the house, I think. A heavy snow or a storm could bring it down. I thought we should take it down ourselves before that happens. Wanna pick up a chain saw and an axe on your way home?”
“Uh huh.” Jack is obviously distracted. “Chain saw, axe, heater, WD-40…what was the other thing?”
“Firewood, but we don’t need a lot. You talk to your mother?”
Jack hesitates. “Yeah, briefly. We’re having lunch later. I don’t know what’s going on there, she sounded friendly.”
“Yeah, I got a schmoozy vibe from her too. Didn’t trust it. She’s gonna try to lure you back to the ‘burbs, huh.”
“Probably.”
“You gonna let her?”
“You gonna get naked for me tonight?”
Sawyer grins. “I’ll be naked when you get home.”
Jack’s answering smile comes across the airwaves loud and clear. “Then the answer’s definitely no. And I’ll be home early.”
Sawyer pushes the off button, still grinning. Mothers are no match for naked boyfriends, and tonight he’ll pull out all the stops. In the meantime he’s got a roof to fix.
********
“She wants to meet you. She wants the three of us to go out to dinner Friday night.” Jack’s voice is muffled by Sawyer’s neck, where Jack has buried his face in post-coital bliss. “She says that if I care about you, then she knows that she will, too.”
Sawyer is enjoying the heavy feel of sated Jack far too much to want to kill the mood, but that one is just too bizarre to ignore. “You sure she’s your mother? Not some, y’know, shape-shifter or something?”
Jack giggles, that goofy sound that Sawyer can only get out of him after a really good round of sex. “We’re not on the island anymore. Toto.”
“Well, yeah, Dorothy. I just meant, from what you’ve told me about your mama, that don’t sound like her at all. So what’s the deal?”
Jack rolls over onto his back, and in the moonlight Sawyer can see his brow furrow. “I have no idea. She kept going on and on about family, about how Lainey and Steve and I are all she has left. Sentimental.”
“Lainey?”
“Elaine, her sister. And Steve’s my cousin, same age as me. Bet you’ve heard of him. He played quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.”
“No way.” Sawyer raises up on his elbows and stares at Jack. “Steve Bryce is your cousin? You’re shittin’ me.”
“Nope. Got his start right here in Tennessee, I think.”
“No, really. You’re shittin’ me.”
Something in his tone must have alerted Jack, and he sits up. “Why would I lie about that, Sawyer? To impress you? I know better ways to impress you than that.”
Sawyer closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. Fate. He and Jack have always been about goddamn fucking fate. “What’s your mama’s name?”
“Her first name?”
“Well, her last’s Shephard, duh. Yeah, her first name.” Sawyer tenses, waiting for the answer he knows he’ll hear.
“Margo. Why?”
Sawyer sinks back down onto his pillow, defeated. He thought he’d broken the pattern, beat the system. But fate’s screwed him over yet again. “No reason,” he says tiredly. “Go to sleep, Doc, you’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
********
Thursday
“I ain’t goin’.” Sawyer burrows lower on the couch and stares at the tv as if mesmerized. “She’s your mother, you deal with her. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.”
Jack looms over him, angry and agitated. “I had a rough day, it’s late and I’m tired. I don’t want to fight with you about this. She’s making an effort, Sawyer. For the first time in her life, she’s trying to see things from another perspective besides her own. It’s only one dinner; if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me.” When Sawyer only scowls and doesn’t respond, Jack resorts to a word Sawyer knows he hates. “Please?”
Sawyer takes another fitful drag on his cigarette. “I asked you to move here because I wanted to be with you. Meetin’ your family wasn’t part of the deal. Families are too messy, and I don’t want to get involved.”
Jack draws in a breath, obviously trying to rein in his irritation and find a reasonable way to convince Sawyer. “Look,” he says, sinking down onto the couch beside him. “I know I told you that my mom and I are estranged, and I led you to believe that she wouldn’t be part of our lives. When I said it I thought it was the truth, and I thought I’d made peace with it. But I think she’s changed, Sawyer. She’s trying, anyway. And she’s right, she really is alone, and it’s not fair of me to do that to her. You and I are a package deal now, and if I let her into my life, I’m letting her into our life. I think I’m ready to let her back in. Sawyer, I miss having a mother.”
Sawyer flinches. Jack’s good, he’s really good. He knows the exact right buttons to push to make Sawyer give in. Abruptly he stubs out his cigarette, pushes himself up off the couch and strides out the front door, slamming it behind him in a clear signal that their conversation is over. He stands on the porch, letting the chill seep into his bones. Shaking from more than just the cold, he stares out into the darkness.
This porch had been his refuge when he was a kid, the place he came to when the spooks under the bed got to be too much for him to handle. He’d creep out here in the middle of the night and listen to the rustlings of the nocturnal animals in the forest, imagining them as a different kind of spooks. The ones under the bed walked on two legs and were covered in blood. They had names. One of them was named Daddy, and he was the ghost who haunted James in his dreams. The other one was named Mr. Sawyer. He haunted James’ every waking moment. James could never escape them, except when he came out here and listened to the creatures of the night.
Now Sawyer has another ghost in his life - the ghost of his former self. Not the boy who hid from his demons inside a makeshift tent, a boy who secretly believed that no one loved him, and that he deserved to die. No, that boy was gone forever, laid to rest when Jack let him into his life. Now he has a new ghost, the ghost of the man he’d been. A man who lied and cheated and killed…and it had all started with a woman named Margo Shephard.
He should’ve made the connection with the names when he learned Jack’s, but it was so long ago and so many cons in the past - so much water under the bridge, as they said in these parts - that the coincidence hadn’t even registered. He’d put the woman right out of his mind the minute he’d gotten what he wanted - needed - from her. But she wouldn’t have put him out of her mind. She’d remember the young man named Sawyer who wooed her and manipulated her and waltzed out of her life with both a suitcase full of stolen money and a sizable chunk of stolen trust. Six thousand dollars probably didn’t mean enough to her for her to want to hunt him down and take justice into her own hands, as he’d wanted to do with the real Mr. Sawyer. But she’d remember him. And she’d sure as hell hold a grudge.
Jack’s mama. Well, didn’t that just beat all. Sawyer had stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago; the island had done that to him. His connection to Jack’s father, yes, that could be chalked up to coincidence, if the connection had been to anyone other than Jack. But it was Jack. Sawyer had gotten onto a plane in Australia with the man he now believes is his soulmate. Sawyer doesn’t think that was a coincidence, but destiny. Fate. And he knows that though fate can bring miracles, it can also turn around and bite you on the ass. “Some people are just supposed to suffer,” the ghost of Christian Shephard whispers in the night.
Sawyer gives a bitter chuckle and mutters, “That’s why the Red Sox will never win the damn series.”
But they had. Nine days before Sawyer got off the island for good, the Sox had gotten their miracle. Proving that maybe the impossible really is possible.
There’s no way around it. Jack misses his mother. He needs her. And Sawyer needs Jack. He can’t deny Jack his mother; he knows too well what it feels like to long for that connection in your life. Like Jack said, he and Sawyer are a package deal now. He’ll have to face her sometime. He sighs, and his shoulders slump in resignation. It might as well be now.
Maybe she won’t remember him. He just needs a miracle.
********
Friday
Jack wakes up in the cold morning light to find Sawyer’s side of the bed empty. Usually they both sleep in on Jack’s day off, letting themselves rise to the surface of consciousness slowly, their bodies tangled around one another, wrapped in comfort and warmth. Jack loves to be kissed awake, to find himself hard and aching before he even knows it’s a new day. Lazy morning sex is the closest thing he’s ever felt to heaven.
But evidently today, it’s not to be. Jack can’t even smell the usual tantalizing aroma of coffee and frying bacon, Sawyer’s normal contribution to these rare mornings of relaxation and peace. Instead he hears the ring of metal against wood, punctuated by a litany of guttural curses. It doesn’t sound as if peace is on the agenda today.
He pulls on jeans and a sweatshirt and makes his way to the back door, opening it to bright morning sunshine and the sight of Sawyer in a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, back muscles taut and bunching under the heavy fabric, swinging their new axe violently at a pile of freshly-cut logs. “Hey!” he calls and Sawyer stops his attack on the wood, but doesn’t turn around. “When did you cut down that tree?”
“Did it yesterday while you were at work.” He raises his arms to take another swing.
Jack steps gingerly down the rickety steps and into the backyard. Beneath his bare feet the ground is damp and achingly cold. “You took it down by yourself? What’re you trying to do, kill yourself?"
Sawyer mutters something that sounds like, “Better me than you.”
Jack advances cautiously, afraid to get too close for fear of getting decapitated by a wild swing. “Hey. Stop that for a minute. What the hell’s wrong with you today?”
Sawyer’s movements still and he turns, letting the blade of the axe fall to the ground and leaning on the handle with studied indifference. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong, Jack, I’ve got a job to do and I’m doin’ it. You got a problem with that?”
Jack sighs. “You’re still mad about tonight, aren’t you? I told you, Sawyer -“
“I ain’t mad about tonight. But you didn’t think I’d be all hearts and ponies about this little dinner date of ours, did you? I ain’t lookin’ forward to it, that’s for sure.”
Jack just looks at him, feeling helpless. He knows there’s no way he can convince Sawyer that his mother - his wealthy, judgmental, snob of a mother - might actually be able to accept a man who grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee. A man who, though presumably wealthy now himself, prefers for reasons of his own to cling to that lifestyle and to pull Jack into it as well. Jack isn’t at all convinced by his mother’s newfound charity, himself. He offers Sawyer what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “At least come inside and have some breakfast, okay? I’ll cook, if you want me to.”
Sawyer’s chin drops to his chest, and his fingers tighten on the axe. “Your feet are turnin’ blue, get your ass back inside. I’m just gonna finish off this woodpile, if it’s all right with you.”
Jack’s been rejected, he knows, and he shrugs regretfully. “Suit yourself, then. But if you get hungry, there’ll be pancakes.”
He sets about the preparation of the only breakfast food he knows how to cook, warming up the griddle, mixing the batter, adding just a pinch of cinnamon as the instructions he’d found in Sawyer’s grandmother’s recipe box had told him to do. He wonders what his mother would think if she could see him like this, barefoot in a kitchen smaller than her closet at home, cooking a meal he’d learned to make himself to please the man who’d grown up here. His mother isn’t the type to be touched by such a thing, she’s far more likely to be horrified. But maybe losing her husband, losing Jack and then miraculously getting him back, and then losing him again in a whole different way - maybe all of that has changed her. Maybe it has made her appreciate the things that are really important in life - relationships and loyalty - more than status and money. Maybe miracles really do happen. All Jack can do is hope.
link to Chapter 4
Chapter word count: 2,416
Chapter 3
They need an axe, Sawyer decides. Funny he’s never thought to buy one, after all the time he’d spent chopping wood on the island. Or maybe that’s exactly why he didn’t think of it, he was blocking the island out. There’s so much he wants to forget, only Jack’s here now and there’s so much he wants to remember, too. He thinks of Jack’s arms swinging the axe, muscles bunched, tattoos flexing, and suddenly he rethinks the idea of having Jack pick up a load of firewood. He glances at his watch and sees that Jack will still be in the car, driving to work, and he punches the numbers into his cell phone.
“Yo, Doc. When’s your next day off?”
Jack doesn’t answer right away, probably because he’s so preoccupied with work that he can’t remember what day today is. Sawyer tries again. “Okay, if today is Wednesday, and your last day off was Sunday-before-last, how long til the next one?”
“Uh…two. Friday’s my day off. Why?”
“We got a tree leanin’ too far over the house, I think. A heavy snow or a storm could bring it down. I thought we should take it down ourselves before that happens. Wanna pick up a chain saw and an axe on your way home?”
“Uh huh.” Jack is obviously distracted. “Chain saw, axe, heater, WD-40…what was the other thing?”
“Firewood, but we don’t need a lot. You talk to your mother?”
Jack hesitates. “Yeah, briefly. We’re having lunch later. I don’t know what’s going on there, she sounded friendly.”
“Yeah, I got a schmoozy vibe from her too. Didn’t trust it. She’s gonna try to lure you back to the ‘burbs, huh.”
“Probably.”
“You gonna let her?”
“You gonna get naked for me tonight?”
Sawyer grins. “I’ll be naked when you get home.”
Jack’s answering smile comes across the airwaves loud and clear. “Then the answer’s definitely no. And I’ll be home early.”
Sawyer pushes the off button, still grinning. Mothers are no match for naked boyfriends, and tonight he’ll pull out all the stops. In the meantime he’s got a roof to fix.
********
“She wants to meet you. She wants the three of us to go out to dinner Friday night.” Jack’s voice is muffled by Sawyer’s neck, where Jack has buried his face in post-coital bliss. “She says that if I care about you, then she knows that she will, too.”
Sawyer is enjoying the heavy feel of sated Jack far too much to want to kill the mood, but that one is just too bizarre to ignore. “You sure she’s your mother? Not some, y’know, shape-shifter or something?”
Jack giggles, that goofy sound that Sawyer can only get out of him after a really good round of sex. “We’re not on the island anymore. Toto.”
“Well, yeah, Dorothy. I just meant, from what you’ve told me about your mama, that don’t sound like her at all. So what’s the deal?”
Jack rolls over onto his back, and in the moonlight Sawyer can see his brow furrow. “I have no idea. She kept going on and on about family, about how Lainey and Steve and I are all she has left. Sentimental.”
“Lainey?”
“Elaine, her sister. And Steve’s my cousin, same age as me. Bet you’ve heard of him. He played quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.”
“No way.” Sawyer raises up on his elbows and stares at Jack. “Steve Bryce is your cousin? You’re shittin’ me.”
“Nope. Got his start right here in Tennessee, I think.”
“No, really. You’re shittin’ me.”
Something in his tone must have alerted Jack, and he sits up. “Why would I lie about that, Sawyer? To impress you? I know better ways to impress you than that.”
Sawyer closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. Fate. He and Jack have always been about goddamn fucking fate. “What’s your mama’s name?”
“Her first name?”
“Well, her last’s Shephard, duh. Yeah, her first name.” Sawyer tenses, waiting for the answer he knows he’ll hear.
“Margo. Why?”
Sawyer sinks back down onto his pillow, defeated. He thought he’d broken the pattern, beat the system. But fate’s screwed him over yet again. “No reason,” he says tiredly. “Go to sleep, Doc, you’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
********
Thursday
“I ain’t goin’.” Sawyer burrows lower on the couch and stares at the tv as if mesmerized. “She’s your mother, you deal with her. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.”
Jack looms over him, angry and agitated. “I had a rough day, it’s late and I’m tired. I don’t want to fight with you about this. She’s making an effort, Sawyer. For the first time in her life, she’s trying to see things from another perspective besides her own. It’s only one dinner; if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me.” When Sawyer only scowls and doesn’t respond, Jack resorts to a word Sawyer knows he hates. “Please?”
Sawyer takes another fitful drag on his cigarette. “I asked you to move here because I wanted to be with you. Meetin’ your family wasn’t part of the deal. Families are too messy, and I don’t want to get involved.”
Jack draws in a breath, obviously trying to rein in his irritation and find a reasonable way to convince Sawyer. “Look,” he says, sinking down onto the couch beside him. “I know I told you that my mom and I are estranged, and I led you to believe that she wouldn’t be part of our lives. When I said it I thought it was the truth, and I thought I’d made peace with it. But I think she’s changed, Sawyer. She’s trying, anyway. And she’s right, she really is alone, and it’s not fair of me to do that to her. You and I are a package deal now, and if I let her into my life, I’m letting her into our life. I think I’m ready to let her back in. Sawyer, I miss having a mother.”
Sawyer flinches. Jack’s good, he’s really good. He knows the exact right buttons to push to make Sawyer give in. Abruptly he stubs out his cigarette, pushes himself up off the couch and strides out the front door, slamming it behind him in a clear signal that their conversation is over. He stands on the porch, letting the chill seep into his bones. Shaking from more than just the cold, he stares out into the darkness.
This porch had been his refuge when he was a kid, the place he came to when the spooks under the bed got to be too much for him to handle. He’d creep out here in the middle of the night and listen to the rustlings of the nocturnal animals in the forest, imagining them as a different kind of spooks. The ones under the bed walked on two legs and were covered in blood. They had names. One of them was named Daddy, and he was the ghost who haunted James in his dreams. The other one was named Mr. Sawyer. He haunted James’ every waking moment. James could never escape them, except when he came out here and listened to the creatures of the night.
Now Sawyer has another ghost in his life - the ghost of his former self. Not the boy who hid from his demons inside a makeshift tent, a boy who secretly believed that no one loved him, and that he deserved to die. No, that boy was gone forever, laid to rest when Jack let him into his life. Now he has a new ghost, the ghost of the man he’d been. A man who lied and cheated and killed…and it had all started with a woman named Margo Shephard.
He should’ve made the connection with the names when he learned Jack’s, but it was so long ago and so many cons in the past - so much water under the bridge, as they said in these parts - that the coincidence hadn’t even registered. He’d put the woman right out of his mind the minute he’d gotten what he wanted - needed - from her. But she wouldn’t have put him out of her mind. She’d remember the young man named Sawyer who wooed her and manipulated her and waltzed out of her life with both a suitcase full of stolen money and a sizable chunk of stolen trust. Six thousand dollars probably didn’t mean enough to her for her to want to hunt him down and take justice into her own hands, as he’d wanted to do with the real Mr. Sawyer. But she’d remember him. And she’d sure as hell hold a grudge.
Jack’s mama. Well, didn’t that just beat all. Sawyer had stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago; the island had done that to him. His connection to Jack’s father, yes, that could be chalked up to coincidence, if the connection had been to anyone other than Jack. But it was Jack. Sawyer had gotten onto a plane in Australia with the man he now believes is his soulmate. Sawyer doesn’t think that was a coincidence, but destiny. Fate. And he knows that though fate can bring miracles, it can also turn around and bite you on the ass. “Some people are just supposed to suffer,” the ghost of Christian Shephard whispers in the night.
Sawyer gives a bitter chuckle and mutters, “That’s why the Red Sox will never win the damn series.”
But they had. Nine days before Sawyer got off the island for good, the Sox had gotten their miracle. Proving that maybe the impossible really is possible.
There’s no way around it. Jack misses his mother. He needs her. And Sawyer needs Jack. He can’t deny Jack his mother; he knows too well what it feels like to long for that connection in your life. Like Jack said, he and Sawyer are a package deal now. He’ll have to face her sometime. He sighs, and his shoulders slump in resignation. It might as well be now.
Maybe she won’t remember him. He just needs a miracle.
********
Friday
Jack wakes up in the cold morning light to find Sawyer’s side of the bed empty. Usually they both sleep in on Jack’s day off, letting themselves rise to the surface of consciousness slowly, their bodies tangled around one another, wrapped in comfort and warmth. Jack loves to be kissed awake, to find himself hard and aching before he even knows it’s a new day. Lazy morning sex is the closest thing he’s ever felt to heaven.
But evidently today, it’s not to be. Jack can’t even smell the usual tantalizing aroma of coffee and frying bacon, Sawyer’s normal contribution to these rare mornings of relaxation and peace. Instead he hears the ring of metal against wood, punctuated by a litany of guttural curses. It doesn’t sound as if peace is on the agenda today.
He pulls on jeans and a sweatshirt and makes his way to the back door, opening it to bright morning sunshine and the sight of Sawyer in a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, back muscles taut and bunching under the heavy fabric, swinging their new axe violently at a pile of freshly-cut logs. “Hey!” he calls and Sawyer stops his attack on the wood, but doesn’t turn around. “When did you cut down that tree?”
“Did it yesterday while you were at work.” He raises his arms to take another swing.
Jack steps gingerly down the rickety steps and into the backyard. Beneath his bare feet the ground is damp and achingly cold. “You took it down by yourself? What’re you trying to do, kill yourself?"
Sawyer mutters something that sounds like, “Better me than you.”
Jack advances cautiously, afraid to get too close for fear of getting decapitated by a wild swing. “Hey. Stop that for a minute. What the hell’s wrong with you today?”
Sawyer’s movements still and he turns, letting the blade of the axe fall to the ground and leaning on the handle with studied indifference. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong, Jack, I’ve got a job to do and I’m doin’ it. You got a problem with that?”
Jack sighs. “You’re still mad about tonight, aren’t you? I told you, Sawyer -“
“I ain’t mad about tonight. But you didn’t think I’d be all hearts and ponies about this little dinner date of ours, did you? I ain’t lookin’ forward to it, that’s for sure.”
Jack just looks at him, feeling helpless. He knows there’s no way he can convince Sawyer that his mother - his wealthy, judgmental, snob of a mother - might actually be able to accept a man who grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee. A man who, though presumably wealthy now himself, prefers for reasons of his own to cling to that lifestyle and to pull Jack into it as well. Jack isn’t at all convinced by his mother’s newfound charity, himself. He offers Sawyer what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “At least come inside and have some breakfast, okay? I’ll cook, if you want me to.”
Sawyer’s chin drops to his chest, and his fingers tighten on the axe. “Your feet are turnin’ blue, get your ass back inside. I’m just gonna finish off this woodpile, if it’s all right with you.”
Jack’s been rejected, he knows, and he shrugs regretfully. “Suit yourself, then. But if you get hungry, there’ll be pancakes.”
He sets about the preparation of the only breakfast food he knows how to cook, warming up the griddle, mixing the batter, adding just a pinch of cinnamon as the instructions he’d found in Sawyer’s grandmother’s recipe box had told him to do. He wonders what his mother would think if she could see him like this, barefoot in a kitchen smaller than her closet at home, cooking a meal he’d learned to make himself to please the man who’d grown up here. His mother isn’t the type to be touched by such a thing, she’s far more likely to be horrified. But maybe losing her husband, losing Jack and then miraculously getting him back, and then losing him again in a whole different way - maybe all of that has changed her. Maybe it has made her appreciate the things that are really important in life - relationships and loyalty - more than status and money. Maybe miracles really do happen. All Jack can do is hope.
link to Chapter 4