Chapter 5
I'm sorry about this, y'all. :(
Chapter 5
If anyone knows the feeling of sweet relief that comes from dodging a proverbial bullet, it’s Sawyer. But not even surviving a plane crash felt as good as knowing that Margo Shephard hadn’t recognized him. She’ll be a problem, of that he’s sure, but the kind of problem she’ll be is something he can deal with. It could’ve been so much worse.
Right now he has a bigger problem, and that’s keeping a roof over their heads. Literally. It’s been nearly twenty years since he last worked in construction, and though he has a general idea of how to go about renovating his mess of a house, sometimes he gets bogged down in the details. He seems to have no problem taking things apart, but he’s apparently a lot less skilled at putting them back together. The only solution for that is just to dive in and do it, though, so he props a ladder against the house and begins to climb.
If he hadn’t forgotten the nails he would’ve missed the phone call. But he does forget the nails, and he does climb down, swearing, and he hears the phone in the kitchen ringing. He thinks it’s Jack, and that’s why his answering, “Yeah,” is unguarded and cheerful. He should’ve remembered that a man like him should never let his guard down.
“Good morning, Sawyer,” says the cool, smooth female voice. “This is Margo Shephard. I enjoyed our dinner date, didn’t you? I trust you slept well last night? With my son?“
Jesus. Sawyer. So she knows. She recognized him. He wants to slam the phone down, but another thing Sawyer knows is how to tell when there’s nowhere to run. “Mornin’, sunshine,” he says, resignedly shrugging on his old armor of indifference. “If you’re lookin’ for Jack, you might wanna try his cell. He left for work half an hour ago.”
“We both know I didn’t call to talk to Jack. I spoke to him a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact. That’s how I knew you’d be home alone, so we can talk privately.”
“So.” Sawyer closes his eyes and sighs heavily. “Talk.”
There’s a long silence, and Sawyer figures she’s trying to make him sweat. That she’s enjoying it. If that’s what she wants to accomplish, it’s working. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. Finally she says, “You’ve changed a lot in seventeen years. The Sawyer I remember was a clean-cut college boy. Well-spoken. Preppy.”
“Good memory, sweetheart,” Sawyer says, knowing he’s so screwed that there’s no point in trying to hide his sarcasm.
“Not really,” Margo says drily. “I remember a real charmer. A ladies’ man in the making.”
“Yeah? That how you remember it?”
“Yeah,” she says pointedly. “Straight.”
“When I needed to be.”
She laughs, a soft bitter sound. “No, you were definitely straight. A woman can tell something like that about a man when she’s been in…certain situations with him.”
“Or she might just be gullible. I’m real good at what I do.” What I used to do, he adds silently.
“Anyway,” she snaps, clearly getting impatient with his attitude, “I know two things about you. One, you like women. Two, you’re a con man. So what kind of a con are you pulling on my son?”
Sawyer closes his eyes and counts to five. His temper is ready to blow, but telling this woman off will only make things worse for him. For Jack. “Margo, look. I know it seems like a great big ol’ coincidence that the kid who conned you seventeen years ago is the same man your son is livin’ with today. But--”
“It doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all,” she interrupts. “You picked him for a reason, didn’t you? Maybe because he’s my son. Maybe you think gullibility runs in families.”
Sawyer doesn’t respond, just opens his eyes and stares blankly at the ceiling.
“You were following him, weren’t you? That’s why you were on the same plane that he was.”
“Nice theory,” he scoffs, “but it ain’t even close to the truth.”
Margo’s voice is cold as ice. “And why should I believe you about anything? No, this is how I see it. You targeted Jack as a mark sometime before he went to Australia to find his father. Maybe you knew he was under stress, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and you thought you could exploit his vulnerability. You followed him to Australia, for whatever reason, but before you could make your move he found his father, dead, and you chose to wait. For Jack to get his inheritance, maybe? You got on the same return flight that Jack did, and we both know what happened next. You spent six weeks in the kind of circumstances that would break anybody, especially a man who was already emotionally on the edge. Jack was a perfect victim, wasn’t he?”
Fuck, Sawyer thinks. She has it all worked out in a nice neat little package that explains away coincidence (fate, he mentally corrects himself) and has rationalized why her “straight” golden boy had walked away from his golden life and away from her. It makes perfect sense; a lot more sense than the truth does. And he has a feeling that Margo is just as stubborn as her son is, so it doesn’t seem likely that he can convince her she’s wrong. He decides to play along just to see where it leads. “Okay, you got me,” he says resignedly. “What do you want, Margo?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I want to protect my son. I want you out of his life. Forever.”
It seems like the right time to call her bluff. “Well, that’s mighty friendly of you, ma’am. But I know, and Jack knows, that the little scenario you concocted ain’t true. So you go right ahead and tell him your fairytale, it won’t make any difference.”
“If you say so,” she says, unconvinced. “But Jack doesn’t know the part of it that you and I both know is true. You conned me. Seventeen years ago you charmed me and you seduced me and you walked away with several thousand dollars that didn’t belong to you. Does Jack know about your life of crime?”
“No,” he says, defensiveness creeping into his tone. “I gave that up a long time ago. Don’t have anything to do with my life with Jack.”
“Oh, but it does. It has plenty to do with Jack’s life. Do you know what happened after you conned me, Sawyer? I had to tell my husband. I had to explain to him where the money went and how you were able to get it from me. And do you know what happened next?”
“No, but I’m guessin’ it wasn’t pretty.”
“Christian…used to drink a lot. And when he got drunk, he got mean. He wasn’t usually physically abusive, but he could hit harder with his words than he ever could with his fists. Jack usually bore the brunt of it. This went on through most of his childhood, and then something happened to Christian. When Jack started to get old enough to stand up for himself, when he was around, oh, eleven or twelve, Christian suddenly woke up and realized that he’d been driving his son away. He realized that he had to change, for Jack’s sake. He got sober. He stayed that way for ten years.”
Sawyer thinks he can see where this is going, and he fights back a dark feeling of dread. “Yeah?”
“When he found out that I’d been unfaithful, he didn’t leave me. Eventually he even claimed he’d forgiven me. But I don’t think he ever really did. It drove him back to the bottle. He fell back into the hole he’d finally managed to climb out of, and he never really got back out again. He eventually drank himself to death, as I’m sure you know. I blame myself for that. But mostly I blame you.”
Sawyer sags against the kitchen counter and lets his eyes travel around the room. He sees the breakfast dishes, lined up neatly in the dish drainer where Jack had put them before leaving for work. He smells the bacon and coffee that Sawyer had made at dawn. They have a pact that if one of them gets up early and cooks breakfast, the other one will do the dishes. They have little domestic arrangements like that about a lot of the household chores. The routine feels good, comforting. They have a nice life here. One that’s about to come crashing down around them. “Just say it,” he snaps.
“All right then, I’ll spell it out.” Margo’s tone is clipped, businesslike. “You break up with Jack. Get him out of your life forever, any way you have to, and Jack will never know what you did to his father. He’ll never know what you did to his family. And if you don’t, I’ll tell him. If you drive him away, he’ll be hurt, but he’ll get over it eventually and he’ll move on. But if I tell him the truth, he’ll never get over it. And he’ll never forgive you.”
He’ll never forgive you, either, Sawyer thinks, but he knows that is irrelevant. All this woman wants is for Jack to go back to being the nice, normal, status-providing perfect son. She doesn’t care whether or not she has his love. “You’re a bitch, you know that, Margo? You know the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. You can’t get your revenge on me that way so you’re using Jack instead. I’ll pay you back, with interest, as much as you want, if you’ll just back off and let Jack be happy.”
“Happy?” Margo laughs bitterly. “Do you really think I believe that Jack is happy? Jack has obviously had a nervous breakdown, otherwise he’d still have his prestigious job in the city he loves, and he’d be looking for a good wife to start a family with. He’d be living the life he was meant to live. I’m only thinking of Jack’s well-being, Sawyer. If you cared about him as much as you pretend to, so would you.”
It takes a master manipulator to know one, and Sawyer can tell from Margo’s tone that she knows she has the upper hand; she won’t back down. She’s cold and she’s tough; Sawyer knows that just from the way she conned him into believing that she hadn’t recognized him. Jack is going to get hurt, one way or another, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
If anyone has to hurt him, then better Sawyer than Margo. Better to lose a boyfriend than a mother. People need their mothers. “Okay.” He sighs heavily. “You win. Happy now?”
“I’m never happy to cause my child pain.” The satisfaction in her tone belies her words, and Sawyer seethes silently. “But some things just have to be done for his own good. I think this is the right thing for Jack. Thank you for being reasonable. You’ve got til this time tomorrow.”
********
He spends the day packing. It’s not a chore that should have taken all day - Jack hasn’t accumulated much in the way of belongings in the short month he’s been here. But Sawyer has to keep stopping. Sometimes he stops to hit things. Sometimes he stops to press his face into a favorite article of Jack’s clothing, to take in Jack’s scent before he puts the shirt or the jacket or the faded pair of jeans into the suitcase and out of his life forever. But mostly he keeps stopping to think.
If only he’d done that seventeen years ago. If only he’d just stopped to think. But he owed people money, dangerous people, and instead of thinking, he’d reacted blindly. He’d reacted out of fear, yeah, but as his papaw had told him all those years ago, being scared is no excuse. You have to face your demons, not hide from them. James had hidden behind his looks and his charm and he had invited demons into his very soul.
Fate. He’d sealed his a long time ago, and everything that has happened since then has been leading to this. To this time when he’s finally learned what it feels like to have a soul. That’s the gift that Jack has given him; the gift he can’t accept. He’d sold his soul for six thousand dollars, and there’s no way to repay Jack for the things he’d stolen from him.
He knows he can take it. Sawyer can take everything that fate throws at him; hasn’t he proven it again and again? He’ll hate himself forever for what he’s about to do to Jack, but hating himself isn’t new. He’s lived with self-loathing since he was seven years old. No, it isn’t the thought of his own pain that’s making him rail at fate. It’s the fact that fate used Jack to punish him. Jack, who didn’t deserve to be used, didn’t deserve to be hurt, didn’t deserve to be punished at all.
“My own fault,” he tells himself, and for the first time he thinks he has a glimmer of an understanding of what his father felt when he sat on a bed and put a gun in his mouth. When he knew that he’d destroyed the life of the person he loved most in the world. Sawyer thinks of what he’s done to Jack’s life, and what he’s about to do, and he craves the sweet relief of death. It seems so much easier than living with the knowledge of what he’s done. But his life has never been about “easy.” Easy isn’t something Sawyer deserves.
He folds the last of Jack’s shirts, closes the case, and locks it. Then he picks up a smaller bag and heads for the bathroom. Somehow packing up Jack’s toiletries is the hardest part of the job. He thinks of Jack in California, packing his razor, his shampoo, his toothbrush. He thinks of the level of trust it must’ve taken to make such a leap of faith, to pack up his things and leave his home to come here, to Sawyer’s. Then his thoughts stray and he wonders what Jack’s doing now, at this very minute. Is he thinking of Sawyer? Soon he’ll be getting in his car and beginning the drive home. He’ll be wondering what’s for dinner. He’ll be wondering what Sawyer’s wearing, and what they’ll do later on in bed. He’ll be looking forward to coming home. To a home he hates but looks forward to coming back to anyway, because Sawyer is there.
Sawyer remembers the look on his face last night when he’d told Jack he was proud of him. He’d looked so touched, so full of hope. Sawyer picks up his grandmother’s heavy porcelain soap dish and hurls it into the mirror above the sink. He watches his reflection shatter into a million pieces. Why had he ever thought he deserved anyone’s trust, how had he ever dared to give anyone hope? Bottles and shards of glass rain onto the floor as he drops the bag, sinks to his knees, and buries his head in his hands.
link to Chapter 6
Chapter 5
If anyone knows the feeling of sweet relief that comes from dodging a proverbial bullet, it’s Sawyer. But not even surviving a plane crash felt as good as knowing that Margo Shephard hadn’t recognized him. She’ll be a problem, of that he’s sure, but the kind of problem she’ll be is something he can deal with. It could’ve been so much worse.
Right now he has a bigger problem, and that’s keeping a roof over their heads. Literally. It’s been nearly twenty years since he last worked in construction, and though he has a general idea of how to go about renovating his mess of a house, sometimes he gets bogged down in the details. He seems to have no problem taking things apart, but he’s apparently a lot less skilled at putting them back together. The only solution for that is just to dive in and do it, though, so he props a ladder against the house and begins to climb.
If he hadn’t forgotten the nails he would’ve missed the phone call. But he does forget the nails, and he does climb down, swearing, and he hears the phone in the kitchen ringing. He thinks it’s Jack, and that’s why his answering, “Yeah,” is unguarded and cheerful. He should’ve remembered that a man like him should never let his guard down.
“Good morning, Sawyer,” says the cool, smooth female voice. “This is Margo Shephard. I enjoyed our dinner date, didn’t you? I trust you slept well last night? With my son?“
Jesus. Sawyer. So she knows. She recognized him. He wants to slam the phone down, but another thing Sawyer knows is how to tell when there’s nowhere to run. “Mornin’, sunshine,” he says, resignedly shrugging on his old armor of indifference. “If you’re lookin’ for Jack, you might wanna try his cell. He left for work half an hour ago.”
“We both know I didn’t call to talk to Jack. I spoke to him a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact. That’s how I knew you’d be home alone, so we can talk privately.”
“So.” Sawyer closes his eyes and sighs heavily. “Talk.”
There’s a long silence, and Sawyer figures she’s trying to make him sweat. That she’s enjoying it. If that’s what she wants to accomplish, it’s working. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. Finally she says, “You’ve changed a lot in seventeen years. The Sawyer I remember was a clean-cut college boy. Well-spoken. Preppy.”
“Good memory, sweetheart,” Sawyer says, knowing he’s so screwed that there’s no point in trying to hide his sarcasm.
“Not really,” Margo says drily. “I remember a real charmer. A ladies’ man in the making.”
“Yeah? That how you remember it?”
“Yeah,” she says pointedly. “Straight.”
“When I needed to be.”
She laughs, a soft bitter sound. “No, you were definitely straight. A woman can tell something like that about a man when she’s been in…certain situations with him.”
“Or she might just be gullible. I’m real good at what I do.” What I used to do, he adds silently.
“Anyway,” she snaps, clearly getting impatient with his attitude, “I know two things about you. One, you like women. Two, you’re a con man. So what kind of a con are you pulling on my son?”
Sawyer closes his eyes and counts to five. His temper is ready to blow, but telling this woman off will only make things worse for him. For Jack. “Margo, look. I know it seems like a great big ol’ coincidence that the kid who conned you seventeen years ago is the same man your son is livin’ with today. But--”
“It doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all,” she interrupts. “You picked him for a reason, didn’t you? Maybe because he’s my son. Maybe you think gullibility runs in families.”
Sawyer doesn’t respond, just opens his eyes and stares blankly at the ceiling.
“You were following him, weren’t you? That’s why you were on the same plane that he was.”
“Nice theory,” he scoffs, “but it ain’t even close to the truth.”
Margo’s voice is cold as ice. “And why should I believe you about anything? No, this is how I see it. You targeted Jack as a mark sometime before he went to Australia to find his father. Maybe you knew he was under stress, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and you thought you could exploit his vulnerability. You followed him to Australia, for whatever reason, but before you could make your move he found his father, dead, and you chose to wait. For Jack to get his inheritance, maybe? You got on the same return flight that Jack did, and we both know what happened next. You spent six weeks in the kind of circumstances that would break anybody, especially a man who was already emotionally on the edge. Jack was a perfect victim, wasn’t he?”
Fuck, Sawyer thinks. She has it all worked out in a nice neat little package that explains away coincidence (fate, he mentally corrects himself) and has rationalized why her “straight” golden boy had walked away from his golden life and away from her. It makes perfect sense; a lot more sense than the truth does. And he has a feeling that Margo is just as stubborn as her son is, so it doesn’t seem likely that he can convince her she’s wrong. He decides to play along just to see where it leads. “Okay, you got me,” he says resignedly. “What do you want, Margo?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I want to protect my son. I want you out of his life. Forever.”
It seems like the right time to call her bluff. “Well, that’s mighty friendly of you, ma’am. But I know, and Jack knows, that the little scenario you concocted ain’t true. So you go right ahead and tell him your fairytale, it won’t make any difference.”
“If you say so,” she says, unconvinced. “But Jack doesn’t know the part of it that you and I both know is true. You conned me. Seventeen years ago you charmed me and you seduced me and you walked away with several thousand dollars that didn’t belong to you. Does Jack know about your life of crime?”
“No,” he says, defensiveness creeping into his tone. “I gave that up a long time ago. Don’t have anything to do with my life with Jack.”
“Oh, but it does. It has plenty to do with Jack’s life. Do you know what happened after you conned me, Sawyer? I had to tell my husband. I had to explain to him where the money went and how you were able to get it from me. And do you know what happened next?”
“No, but I’m guessin’ it wasn’t pretty.”
“Christian…used to drink a lot. And when he got drunk, he got mean. He wasn’t usually physically abusive, but he could hit harder with his words than he ever could with his fists. Jack usually bore the brunt of it. This went on through most of his childhood, and then something happened to Christian. When Jack started to get old enough to stand up for himself, when he was around, oh, eleven or twelve, Christian suddenly woke up and realized that he’d been driving his son away. He realized that he had to change, for Jack’s sake. He got sober. He stayed that way for ten years.”
Sawyer thinks he can see where this is going, and he fights back a dark feeling of dread. “Yeah?”
“When he found out that I’d been unfaithful, he didn’t leave me. Eventually he even claimed he’d forgiven me. But I don’t think he ever really did. It drove him back to the bottle. He fell back into the hole he’d finally managed to climb out of, and he never really got back out again. He eventually drank himself to death, as I’m sure you know. I blame myself for that. But mostly I blame you.”
Sawyer sags against the kitchen counter and lets his eyes travel around the room. He sees the breakfast dishes, lined up neatly in the dish drainer where Jack had put them before leaving for work. He smells the bacon and coffee that Sawyer had made at dawn. They have a pact that if one of them gets up early and cooks breakfast, the other one will do the dishes. They have little domestic arrangements like that about a lot of the household chores. The routine feels good, comforting. They have a nice life here. One that’s about to come crashing down around them. “Just say it,” he snaps.
“All right then, I’ll spell it out.” Margo’s tone is clipped, businesslike. “You break up with Jack. Get him out of your life forever, any way you have to, and Jack will never know what you did to his father. He’ll never know what you did to his family. And if you don’t, I’ll tell him. If you drive him away, he’ll be hurt, but he’ll get over it eventually and he’ll move on. But if I tell him the truth, he’ll never get over it. And he’ll never forgive you.”
He’ll never forgive you, either, Sawyer thinks, but he knows that is irrelevant. All this woman wants is for Jack to go back to being the nice, normal, status-providing perfect son. She doesn’t care whether or not she has his love. “You’re a bitch, you know that, Margo? You know the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. You can’t get your revenge on me that way so you’re using Jack instead. I’ll pay you back, with interest, as much as you want, if you’ll just back off and let Jack be happy.”
“Happy?” Margo laughs bitterly. “Do you really think I believe that Jack is happy? Jack has obviously had a nervous breakdown, otherwise he’d still have his prestigious job in the city he loves, and he’d be looking for a good wife to start a family with. He’d be living the life he was meant to live. I’m only thinking of Jack’s well-being, Sawyer. If you cared about him as much as you pretend to, so would you.”
It takes a master manipulator to know one, and Sawyer can tell from Margo’s tone that she knows she has the upper hand; she won’t back down. She’s cold and she’s tough; Sawyer knows that just from the way she conned him into believing that she hadn’t recognized him. Jack is going to get hurt, one way or another, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
If anyone has to hurt him, then better Sawyer than Margo. Better to lose a boyfriend than a mother. People need their mothers. “Okay.” He sighs heavily. “You win. Happy now?”
“I’m never happy to cause my child pain.” The satisfaction in her tone belies her words, and Sawyer seethes silently. “But some things just have to be done for his own good. I think this is the right thing for Jack. Thank you for being reasonable. You’ve got til this time tomorrow.”
********
He spends the day packing. It’s not a chore that should have taken all day - Jack hasn’t accumulated much in the way of belongings in the short month he’s been here. But Sawyer has to keep stopping. Sometimes he stops to hit things. Sometimes he stops to press his face into a favorite article of Jack’s clothing, to take in Jack’s scent before he puts the shirt or the jacket or the faded pair of jeans into the suitcase and out of his life forever. But mostly he keeps stopping to think.
If only he’d done that seventeen years ago. If only he’d just stopped to think. But he owed people money, dangerous people, and instead of thinking, he’d reacted blindly. He’d reacted out of fear, yeah, but as his papaw had told him all those years ago, being scared is no excuse. You have to face your demons, not hide from them. James had hidden behind his looks and his charm and he had invited demons into his very soul.
Fate. He’d sealed his a long time ago, and everything that has happened since then has been leading to this. To this time when he’s finally learned what it feels like to have a soul. That’s the gift that Jack has given him; the gift he can’t accept. He’d sold his soul for six thousand dollars, and there’s no way to repay Jack for the things he’d stolen from him.
He knows he can take it. Sawyer can take everything that fate throws at him; hasn’t he proven it again and again? He’ll hate himself forever for what he’s about to do to Jack, but hating himself isn’t new. He’s lived with self-loathing since he was seven years old. No, it isn’t the thought of his own pain that’s making him rail at fate. It’s the fact that fate used Jack to punish him. Jack, who didn’t deserve to be used, didn’t deserve to be hurt, didn’t deserve to be punished at all.
“My own fault,” he tells himself, and for the first time he thinks he has a glimmer of an understanding of what his father felt when he sat on a bed and put a gun in his mouth. When he knew that he’d destroyed the life of the person he loved most in the world. Sawyer thinks of what he’s done to Jack’s life, and what he’s about to do, and he craves the sweet relief of death. It seems so much easier than living with the knowledge of what he’s done. But his life has never been about “easy.” Easy isn’t something Sawyer deserves.
He folds the last of Jack’s shirts, closes the case, and locks it. Then he picks up a smaller bag and heads for the bathroom. Somehow packing up Jack’s toiletries is the hardest part of the job. He thinks of Jack in California, packing his razor, his shampoo, his toothbrush. He thinks of the level of trust it must’ve taken to make such a leap of faith, to pack up his things and leave his home to come here, to Sawyer’s. Then his thoughts stray and he wonders what Jack’s doing now, at this very minute. Is he thinking of Sawyer? Soon he’ll be getting in his car and beginning the drive home. He’ll be wondering what’s for dinner. He’ll be wondering what Sawyer’s wearing, and what they’ll do later on in bed. He’ll be looking forward to coming home. To a home he hates but looks forward to coming back to anyway, because Sawyer is there.
Sawyer remembers the look on his face last night when he’d told Jack he was proud of him. He’d looked so touched, so full of hope. Sawyer picks up his grandmother’s heavy porcelain soap dish and hurls it into the mirror above the sink. He watches his reflection shatter into a million pieces. Why had he ever thought he deserved anyone’s trust, how had he ever dared to give anyone hope? Bottles and shards of glass rain onto the floor as he drops the bag, sinks to his knees, and buries his head in his hands.
link to Chapter 6