fic: the secret's in the telling
It starts like this: they’re fighting.
That’s pretty much a given, considering it’s them, but this is old and new all at once.
She’s screaming at him because he paid off the eleventeen hundred and seventy third (yeah, he’s definitely lost count here) guy she’d been dating, that’s old. And he’s looking at her mouth and pretending to himself he’s not, that’s older.
And then she’s still screaming and he’s still looking and he’s not pretending any more.
That’s new.
-
“You know what I think?” she half turns, her unfastened bra catching the edge of the chair, the rays of the sun darkening her skin to poetry.
“Don’t complete that sentence,” he flips a page, “you and thinking is already an overstatement.”
“I think,” she smiles, the pool water sparkles in her eyes, “we could stay like this forever.”
-
He’s thought about it, because he’s a guy and she has breasts. In the ‘if hell freezes over’, ‘fuck that’s so weird’ sort of way.
And then she takes to wearing his shirts at night and nothing else and he catches glimpses of her through her half open door and suddenly it’s less weird and more his hand on his cock and her name at the back of his throat.
-
Her eighteenth birthday, he’s in New York, getting a hang of the business (mostly wearing suits, pretending he knows what the hell he's doing, whatever).
She calls him at some ungodly hour, drunk; slurring her words, “I hate you, you jackass.”
“I love you too,” he says exaggeratedly, pulls the cord, tries to keep inflections out of his voice.
“Where’s my birthday gift?”
“Didn’t you get it, it was the…”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says off-handedly, “I got that.” stops, “Mel said her gift of choice would be you in wrapping paper. And nothing else.”
He doesn’t remember, “who’s Mel?”
“Melissa Harbor,” she giggles, “green eyes, dark hair, perky tits, ass like whoa.”
He swallows, those words on her lips hotter than the girl they’re describing, “I don’t know her.”
He can almost feel her rolling her eyes, “you’re such a loser. Anyway, I told Melissa she can’t have you.”
“Why?”
“You’re mine, I don’t share.”
-
His twenty-first birthday, she gets married.
He’s pretty sure it’s a huge ‘fuck you, you freak’ from the universe.
-
“Boone, I…”
“I don’t know what…”
“He didn’t turn up, and it’s…”
“We’re somewhere around…”
“I can’t stand the sound of…”
“Please take me home, I just…”
It doesn’t matter how many times she changes the script, his line remains the same.
“Tell me where you are, I’ll come get you.”
-
“You’ve always been in love with me. I’ve always known it.”
He’s counting breaths in heartbeats and he’s pretty sure his heart stopped beating somewhere around her lips and his skin.
-
He’s inside her twenty three fractions of eternity.
-
She sits in a chair across the bed, bitter, sharp, killing him with distance.
“God,” she says, “I just fucked my brother.”
God, he doesn’t say, I just made love to my sister.
(He’s pretty sure that’s their tragedy in two acts).
-
After she’s stopped screaming, she turns to him; wide-eyed, innocent, all of eleven, “we’re lost.”
He looks out to the sea, the debris from the plane cutting into his skin, he always has been.
-
He watches her with Sayid, laughing, playful, in love.
It ends like this: it doesn’t.
-