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Aaron was finally sleeping with Claire on the couch, tufts of blond hair tickling Claire’s face like it had always tickled Kate. A serene look was painted across Claire’s features, her nose scrunched up and her lips falling open. Kate couldn’t help but smile, a warm feeling spreading in her chest along with an urge to cover the young woman with a blanket, or to carry her and their child to their shared bedroom (for Aaron’s sake), not unfamiliar per se, nor unwelcome, perhaps, but confusing.
It had been a long time since she’d had these thoughts for anyone other than… she swallowed thickly, tearing her gaze away from the mother and son only long enough to swallow a mouthful of beer.
“Adorable, ain’t they?”
Kate watched Sawyer with a wary look, trying to parse the feeling behind his words. He seemed to sense her tension as he raised his hands, one of them still holding his beer, and laughed.
“I ain’t judgin’,” he said with a tilt of his head. Even while taking a swig of his beer, he kept his eyes on her and the attention sent a very familiar thrill through her.
She cleared her throat, tapping her fingers on the bottle of beer mindlessly. “There’s nothing to judge.”
“You’re cosying it up real nice in this here house, ‘s all I’m sayin’.”
“For Aaron,” she said rather harshly. Seeing the twitch in his otherwise relaxed composure, she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Sawyer—I don’t want to talk about this.” About how she held Claire in the night and dreamt of kissing her hair; how she made sure to always include her when Aaron wanted something ordinary, because the young woman had been broken enough to need just something normal; how sometimes she hoped to wake up in a different bed instead. None of this really mattered. “Movie night’s over.”
That’s what it was, what Sawyer had been invited for. Ever since their return from that goddamned island, this was their only source of sanity, and neither of them really knew the other survivors, so here they were: the original trio. Oh, how their group had depleted.
She wasn’t even sure who she invited Sawyer for more these days, however: for herself, for Claire, or perhaps for him. Even now, having actually been given the chance to do right by his daughter, there was a sort of solitude in Sawyer that Kate recognized well. They had always been alike like that: twin souls, perhaps.
“Sorry for takin’ up your time, Freckles.”
She smiled tightly, feeling her heart squeeze in her chest at the sudden coldness in his voice. Why had she reacted like this?
As he stood up, beer still in his hand—always in his hand, even now that he had a daughter (and she couldn’t judge, could she? She drank around her son too)—she followed him up. An apology attempted to pass through her lips, but her throat seized up and she clenched her fists instead, averting her gaze.
“See you next time, Sawyer,” she said softly.
He watched her for a moment, then nodded sharply, like a marionette being snapped out of its thread. “Next time.” A pause. His gaze landed on the sleeping mother and son, and he gulped down the rest of his beer. “I hope…”
Kate could not let him finish the sentence. “Yeah.”
.
“Is she good to you?”
It hurt to be second-best. To be spoken over. Every decision ran through someone else before Sawyer even agreed.
(He wanted to be called Jim now, even though she knew he had always hated his name just a little, even though he always thought of himself as Sawyer—which Kate knew, because she knew him like she knew herself, because sometimes she wished she’d done the same: convinced everyone her name was different, but her mother had called her Katherine and every mention of her name was a twist of the knife.
Often, she was grateful that Sawyer—Jim—called her Freckles, but it wasn’t the same now)
It thus shouldn’t have surprised her that Sawyer only agreed to save Ben for Juliet’s sake, but perhaps she needed to know, needed to poke and prod at that until she understood. What made Juliet so special? It couldn’t be just her good looks, because Kate would have fallen for that just easily if not for the woman’s evil tendencies. The woman had locked them in cages!
But—but she was sweet. Kate could see it in the way she spoke to Sawyer (he would always be Sawyer, dammit), in the way she touched his hair like Kate once had. Her hands looked kind, skilled. Kate wondered what it’d be like to be him; she knew what it was like to be her: she’d known and loved Sawyer—even now she was fairly certain she knew the way his heart beat better than Juliet—but what was it like on his end?
A dimple to trace, soft, light-blonde hair to caress, maybe tuck behind an ear, and gorgeous blue eyes to look into. A dipped head to allow access to perfect pink lips parted for this exact purpose.
Juliet morphed into a different woman before her eyes at the thought, and for a moment Kate let her mind wander, allowing herself to remember her real purpose, her real aim on this god-forsaken island. She had to find Claire. Good, innocent Claire.
Whom she would likely not kiss, if she did meet her again. Nor would she kiss Juliet, or Sawyer, for that matter.
Her mind returned to the present as Sawyer regarded her quizzically. They were on their way back now to the barracks, before anyone spotted them, but she had to know.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment, and Kate knew she had only imagined the hesitation, the little tilt in his voice, the way he looked away. Sawyer was happy now. “You’d like her if you gave her a chance.”
“Sure,” she said bitterly.
Sawyer was right, of course. Juliet was easy to talk to, and she quite liked her morals more than she liked Sawyer’s or Jack’s, but there was something still irritating about it. Something she couldn’t quite place.
Sawyer stopped at a copse. “Did you come back for…”
“No,” she said, and that was that. She changed the subject. “I hope Ben will be alright.”
“Oh yeah,” Sawyer replied, his accent thick with sarcasm, “sure lookin’ forward to seeing more of that bug-eyed kid. Though he was… well, hell, he was a little sweet these past years, you know? Kids… they make you do crazy things.”
Kate chuckles, her thoughts going once again to Claire, and the child they now shared. She cleared her throat, choosing to mirror the playful tone.
“Like saving the lives of genocidal maniacs.” She shook her head. “But he deserved to live. This wasn’t—this wasn’t right. I’m glad she got some sense into you.”
“She does. She always does. She’s good like that.”
Somehow, that twisted the knife even more.
.
“I would kill for a smoke,” Claire said, a hint of a laugh in her voice. It wasn’t lost on Kate that the young woman had joked about something that would have been, just a few weeks ago, a trigger. Progress was slow, but Kate cherished every moment of it.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Big Momma,” Sawyer said, lounging on the backyard chair right next to theirs with only a beer in his hand.
Claire laughed more openly now. “When did you stop smoking?”
The question hung in the air as Sawyer shared a knowing look with Kate. The island was, even over a year after they were free now, not a good topic of conversation, particularly not around the already jittery enough traumatized mother.
“Cassidy made me,” Sawyer said weakly, and Kate easily heard the hint of a lie. It had been someone else, someone less recent, someone less alive. Someone who might’ve been a trigger, because Juliet had cared for pregnant women, and who knew how Claire would react to that reminder? But the explanation was enough for Claire, who nodded along and resigned herself to a cigarette-free life.
“I’m not buying a pack, after all,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Unless you’d share it with me?”
This last question was directed at Kate, and the fluttering of lashes that accompanied it made Kate’s heart stutter in her chest and a deep flush spread upon her cheeks, highlighting her freckles. As though they hadn’t already shared a bed in more ways than one enough times to make them more than familiar with sharing.
As though they weren’t sharing a chair right now, their bodies flush against each other, the younger woman somewhat astride her lap.
“Uh…” she replied smartly.
“It’s a no from Freckles too,” Sawyer supplied for her, nudging her foot with a dumb smirk upon his lips. She averted the oncoming crisis with a swig of her beer, because Sawyer was not on her menu anymore, and hadn’t been for a while, couldn’t be.
They shared another meaningful glance before Claire interrupted it to indicate the stars above them.
“That’s Gemini!”
Kate squinted at the stars. She could about pick up a shape, but her brain was a little too addled by the beer and the present company to see it, so she simply hummed.
“What’s this about?”
“Claire’s a wizard for astrology,” Kate explained quickly and softly, her words thick with affection, before the other woman could offer a different explanation.
“I’m not a wizard!” Claire gasped, her ego soothed only by the soft caressing of Kate’s thumb across the back of her hand and a kiss on her cheek. It didn’t go unnoticed by Sawyer, whose smile briefly twisted into a grimace before growing ever wider.
“What’s my sign?”
Claire grew pensive. It made her look even more adorable than usual, her lips pursed in a rather inviting manner.
“Oh, I know! Sagittarius, right?”
Sawyer shook his head with an incredulous smile. “Damn you. How did you know?”
“She’s a wizard,” Kate suggested, and the younger woman preened. Once again Kate found herself noticing Sawyer’s slight discomfort, and it made her feel just as uncomfortable too—she couldn’t keep treading on eggshells in her own home and yet she couldn’t keep herself from noticing him: his cupid’s bow, his recently shortened hair, his trimmed beard, his laugh.
But it had taken so long for her to keep herself entirely at bay, to only notice and to only act upon her desires in her dreams.
Desires that she now shared for two people, in equal and different measure. It wasn’t easy to compare the two feelings. In fact, Kate hardly wanted to try. It was one thing to feel them, and quite another to think about them.
And Sawyer and Claire were very, very different people. She looked at them like the past and the future, or perhaps the past and the present—or maybe they were nothing at all at this point.
She smiled to herself as first Sawyer, then Claire caught her pensive gaze. She squeezed Claire’s hand and interlaced their fingers.
This was nice, this was good.
.
Mistletoe hung above their heads at the barracks, dangling from Sawyer’s fist inconspicuously, his other arm propped against the doorframe invitingly.
Kate glanced at it with an arched eyebrow, her arms crossed. It wasn’t even Christmas yet—she thought. Time was difficult to understand on the island, but enough time had passed since their crash that maybe, maybe, it really was close to Christmas now.
Maybe Christmas had even come and gone, unnoticed. To be fair, Kate had never celebrated it well enough. When she was little, her step-father had always been drunk, and her father had always been sad at being excluded, the two of them hardly ever sharing the joys together, and her mother, well—her mother had always respected her drunk of a husband more than her.
She did remember one good Christmas, though, before her mother had left her father (or the other way around, it had never been clear enough for Kate) and the three of them had sat by the Christmas tree in their big, empty house. Back then, Kate had wished for siblings, or even for her friend to at least come over.
Cookies had sat on the floor and the presents had been unwrapped, and her mother sang. Not a loud tune, but a soft one. Her mother had dangled mistletoe above their heads, but he had only laughed, too absorbed by something or other in his head.
Wayne, his breath reeking of alcohol so much it left a trail through the house, never refused a kiss.
“Gonna leave me hangin’?”
Sawyer’s sultry voice brought her back to the present, and she blinked back a thought. There was a hint of alcohol in Sawyer’s breath, but it didn’t put her off. It was a familiar scent, and all the more inviting for it.
She touched his chest playfully. “What if I did?”
Her eyes met his in a challenge, her front teeth poking out to bite her lower lip. His gaze followed, lashes fluttering low. It sent an immediate surge through her body—so much for abandoning this life.
One last time couldn’t hurt, could it?
She angled her head to the side, tilting her chin up, and used her hands on his shirt to pull at it. His lips touched hers perhaps a little too fast and too hard, but he swiftly recovered by propping himself against the doorframe behind her head and moving his lips against hers, soothing whatever bruise his landing had caused.
She breathed in his heavy scent with a sigh, her arms wrapping around his neck to pull him in further. How could she give this up?
They would soon need to move out of the way, because this was way too public. Through a narrowly opened eye she could see the other survivors that had followed Locke watching them meekly.
She pushed him away, their lips parting with a smacking sound, only long enough to close the door behind them. Everyone would know what they were up to, but it felt nice to let go sometimes, to feel his stubble against her neck as he moved lower, to arch into his hands.
Nobody would step in between them.
.
It wasn’t clear who had hung the mistletoe in this particular corner of the house, at the entrance to the kitchen, but somehow Kate found herself walking through it simultaneously with Claire right as Sawyer was watching.
“Rules are rules, ladies,” he said mockingly, drawling out his words slowly, flirtatiously.
Kate almost grabbed the spatula out of her salad bowl and threw it at him—because this wasn’t the moment yet, she wasn’t ready. Claire surely wasn’t ready.
Claire touched her forearm gently, her once frightened eyes meeting Kate’s. Unexpectedly, her chin bobbed in agreement.
“It’s the rules,” she said with a smile, and yes, the rules were the rules.
Kate didn’t hesitate any longer before dipping lower to meet Claire’s lips.
A brief featherlight touch of lips—that was all she expected it to be. But Claire pressed against her more insistently, her hand moving from her forearm up her arm, feeling the muscles under her palms and then up to Kate’s neck, pulling her in until they were as flush as the salad bowl allowed.
Kate had not expected this. Claire, who had always seemed so innocent, so uninterested. But she had fallen for Charlie all too quickly, and they had known each other much longer.
The clearing of a throat was the only thing that finally made them part, and the way Claire bit her lip and ducked her head like she had been caught by an older brother made Kate want to kiss her again. Would she be allowed to?
Finally, she met Sawyer’s gaze. Where there had been a playfulness to it, there was now something indecipherable. It sank to her stomach like a stone. Suddenly, the kiss with Claire felt sour. But he had encouraged this, wanted this—couldn’t he be happy for her like she had been for him and Juliet?
Kate bit the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. She hadn’t been accepting of that either, and the growing relationship between him and Cassidy made her uneasy too. Deep down she knew she’d never free herself from this, and neither would he, but she liked Claire, maybe even loved her, and she knew he felt the same for Cassidy.
And yet, they would always be entangled.
What a pair they made.
“That was something,” he said, his accent thick with a feeling she easily identified. If she hadn’t been so uncomfortable, she would have been more rightfully angry at the way he was okay with her kissing Claire only as long as it meant nothing.
But it didn’t mean just nothing. Kate could feel Claire’s presence at her side heavily, warmly. Challengingly, because Sawyer didn’t own her feelings, she turned to Claire and caught her elbow, nodding at her meaningfully.
Could Claire hear her heartbeat right now?
The younger woman kissed her cheek softly, then turned to Sawyer with an apologetic smile.
“I’m sorry.”
They all were.