If It Ain't the Years, It's The Mileage [James]

[Sabra]

It had been a week since two rogue wolves in an abandoned warehouse had tried to kill her. One with his teeth, the other with a handgun. Of course, both of them had failed and although a good amount of her own blood had ended up freezing on the cold cement floor of the building, Sabra had been the one to go home at the end of the day. Which is what counted in the scheme of things, or so she thought.

James had the patience of a saint. He was a single father working a blue-collar job with a girlfriend who redefined the word secretive. But even a saint's patience wore thin eventually. The jig was up the night Silas brought her to his apartment, cradled in his arms and half dead from the chill and the absence of a few vital pints of blood. Jesus, if she could ever get that look on his face out of her mind, terrified, angry, but most of all, helpless, it would be a miracle. The guilt she had been carrying around for the past week hurt nearly as much as her abused body, and that was saying something.

He'd made a mistake in letting her inside his home on that snowy Boston night. What good ever came of a stray? Usually, there was a good reason for them being ownerless in the first place. She had made a mistake in calling the number he'd scribbled onto the palm of her hand. But for all the grief she'd caused him, Sabra couldn't make herself regret it.

No more than a starving man regretted his feast. Everything came to an end eventually and she had learned to take her fill while she was able.

Bacon sizzles in the cast iron skillet to her side and Sabra hobbles over, spatula in hand. The stitches pull tight in her skin and she tries her best not to wince with each step. James didn't approve of course, but he couldn't keep her cooped up forever, short of tying her to the bed. Cooking was her silent way of apology and it kept her from having to talk more than necessary. Izzy smacks her palms against her high chair, babbling in baby talk and breaking the heavy silence that seemed to hang over the house like a storm cloud that just refused to make way for the sun. She still wasn't use to sharing her father and being hungry didn't sweeten her temperament in the least.

"Breakfast'll be ready in a sec, hun." Sabra manages, casting a look over her shoulder. And just like that the quiet's back. James is watching the news in the living room and sharpened senses allow her to hear the entire report. Murders, suicides, kidnappings, the usual kit and caboodle of depression. It's a domestic scene on whole, a Saturday morning with eggs and grits cooking away on the stove top, a chubby baby waiting for her meal, a pretty, if not tired looking woman in the kitchen, and the man, freed temporarily from his job, relaxing on the sofa.

If only things were that simple. She grits her teeth and tries to tune out the nasal sound of the reporter's voice. The clock ticks overhead and she gathers plates, doles out breakfast as quickly as a bum shoulder and a bum leg would allow. The minutes seem to drag by and finally, something snaps. The wolf twists reflexively, gnawing at her chains, gnawing through the last of her own thinned nerves.

The spatula clatters to the counter top and she clears her throat, hands balled up into fists at her sides. She has had enough of the quiet game, of pussyfooting around the giant elephant in the room and beating around the bush.

"If you've got somethin' to say, spit it out, James."

[James Morgan]

It had been a crazy night—the night that Sabra had come home, bloodied with new scars, carried in the arms of a man that James had never met. It had been too much for one night, too much for one man, and James had cracked in a moment of high stress. But once Sabra had been proving to get better, largely thanks to her quick healing, that James had fallen into a tense silence accompanied by gritted teeth and drumming fingers when attempting to pay attention to just about anything but Sabra herself. Izzy had been a wonderful distraction for a certain amount of hours, but now it’s the news. Even watching a reporter talk about two brutal stabbing deaths feels like a better, more lighthearted idea than getting into an argument with Sabra over the shit that she had been pulling, so he tries. He tries, for her, and for himself, to keep his mouth glued shut as it always is, and let things roll off of his back, as they always do.

But Sabra is determined not to let this happen, and perhaps it’s due to just how much of a stark difference there is in James now that the happy-go-lucky man has fallen steely-eyed and quiet. At first he considers not responding at such a bitchy remark, but instead he sighs, and turns the tv off, rising to his feet to level Sabra what is becoming a quickly aggravated look. “Spit it out?” he echoes, brow furrowing in the tension that has quickly risen in the room. Even Izzy seems to be able to sense it, pausing and looking at Sabra curiously. “You really gonna tell me to spit it out?” It’s months of irritation, of worry, of panic, fear, anger, and disappointment welling in his chest now.

Because Sabra knows what’s happening, just as well as he does, and she’s already doing whatever she can to avoid the blame on her own shoulders.

“I’ve got a hell of a lot to say, Sabs.” And he knows that she will not appreciate a single word of it. “What have you been doing this whole time? All of these ‘accidents’, the hiding, the secrets—do you take me for a damn idiot?” He had kept his mouth shut, for days, weeks, months how. He hadn’t questioned her when she gave him stupid excuses, like falling down the stairs, or tripping and landing badly. He had never pried into her business, her life or the happenings of the pack. It had been a respect that he had lended to her, and a respect that had not been given to him back at all.

A man of patience, a man of respect earned and respect given, a man of equal treatment, and a man of tolerance—but his patience has never been endless, and where Sabra is concerned, he finds that she has the remarkable ability to wear it thin extraordinarily fast.

And maybe it’s because he simply cares too much, maybe it’s because of the fact that he’s a lovestricken man desperately trying to grasp and hold at whatever strands of her he can before she’s out the door again—leaving to go somewhere, do something that is beyond his knowledge, with no indication of when he may see her again. And he can only take the fear and the panic, the unending anxiety that something terribly bad will happen to her, so many times. For as long as he had known, it had never been healthy or normal to watch his woman walk out the door and worry that she may not come back again.

It’s partially his fault, that he had let her effectively shove him into the dark of the shadows, away from any knowledge and information on what was happening to her, or what she was doing to herself. A game of the hero, played by a woman who is convinced that her burden is one that she should carry alone. And as one month had turned to two, and two to three, James’s tolerance for the lies, the dancing around the truth, the constant hiding, had finally created a split in the dam.

“I’ve never appreciated a liar.”

It’s a challenge, if there ever was one. Tell me that you’re not lying—or tell me that you have. It’s a threat and it’s an insult, it’s a warning and a plea, all at the same time, and James can’t choose which message he wants to convey the strongest… Though he has a good idea of which one she will read.

Not all good things have to come to an end, but something will always have to give and James can only hope now that it won’t go out with too loud of a bang.

[Sabra]

With that handful of words she's finally unleashed the flood waters. Any gentleness in him is a memory now. It's all been a long time coming, if not said by her, the wound between them would only continue to fester, become worse with each passing day until it poisoned their blood and whatever trust they had left in one another. "You've been stewin' for the past week, since the minute I came through that door." She accuses sharply, slamming her open palm against the counter top. The crack echoes through the apartment like gunshot and her eyes are not quite so human as they stare into his.

Her frustration boils over and Izzy sits up in her highchair, eyes wide. Yet again, Sabra finds herself thankful that she is so young and her memory so short.

As soon as James had been reassured she wouldn't go gently into the good night, he had lapsed into this. Withdrawn and silent, all the things that she herself was. She hated it. She hated the helplessness Boston had wrought on her and the far reaches of its poison. This was supposed to be home, protected and safe from the evils that lurked outside, but despite all her efforts, Sabra had brought that ugliness with her and exposed a good man and his child to it.

James wasn't going to stop until he had those explanations. He had the look in his eyes, starved for understanding, waylaid by events out of his control. Placed in strange territory the beast craved control above all else and although the moon held no sway over her lover, Sabra knew that fact was no less true for James. "No." Her voice softens and she looks away from him, raising a hand to rub faintly at the sore muscles of her shoulder. "I don't think that." There were plenty who might assume him to be nothing more than brainless muscle, but Sabra knew better. Patience did not mean stupidity, a kind heart did not mean he was unaware to all the things that went unsaid.

"I've been doin' my job." Boston is a long and complicated story not all her own, and it is missing vital pieces. How can she even begin to explain? Their breakfast is cooling on the counter top and Sabra turns her back to him pointedly, reaching to turn off the stove. Meeting someone's eyes was rarely a problem for her, in fact, there had been more than a few occasions where she took great satisfaction in staring irritating subordinates down. It wasn't quite so easy to look James in the eye, the man she shared a bed with.

Talking is not her forte. She knows how to take apart an engine, how to dismantle a .223, clean and reassemble it in less than fifteen minutes, but this is beyond her area of expertise, and Sabra doesn't have the faintest idea how to fix something so broken, and by her own hand at that.

But no one can make the house rattle with gunshot like James. She takes the blow with a quiet expel of air and rolls her shoulders. If he thought she'd take the bait that easily, he was mistaken. "I am gonna talk and you're gonna listen. When I'm finished talkin', if ya want to call me a liar again, then have at it." She knows where the door is and so does he.

"Sit down."

Sabra gestures to the kitchen table, but keeps her place, leaning against the counter top to take the pressure off her bad leg. "I am an enforcer. I've been one in one fashion or another for a while. Wolves? They don't get second chances. I'm the one who makes sure the first fuck up is the last." To hell with sugarcoating it. If James couldn't take this, then she'd kindly take herself back to her own apartment.

A small hand circles the line of stitches that runs up her inner thigh, the latest demonstration to an accident prone career. Cool eyes rise to meet his, her mouth set in a firm line. "And sometimes they don't take too kindly to that."

[James Morgan]

She accuses him of having been stewing all week, and he supposes that she is correct in that statement. Sabra stands up to the challenge of what is almost an argument immediately. The kids and her stupid underlings in the pack may tuck tail, but he does not. His arms fold and he exhales a sigh of aggravation—“Yeah? And what damn job is that?” For as long as he and Sabra had been together, her ability to get up and leave whenever the pack needed her to, and even bigger, her ability to come home bloodied and scarred and still lie to him about what had happened, had become a sore spot as time had worn on. It had become harder and harder for James to just avert his eyes and nod to her. It had turned into gritting teeth and furrowed brows, hands wringing in stress and hours of sleep lost to a secretive woman.

Coming back home to him, carried in another man’s arms, soaked in her own blood, had been the last straw. James now, is only happy that he hadn’t been the one to initiate the discussion—the argument, the whatever-this-was-turning-into.

He doesn’t sit when she tells him to, however he does come closer into the room, choosing to instead lean against the wall, waiting. He should be inclined to believe her false again, to toss off whatever words she wants to offer now as more lies, but her tone of voice is enough to hold him there—and when she finally speaks, it’s enough to lift a significant weight off of his shoulders. His head drops and he sighs, shaking his head. Because saying that, even that little bit, the tiny chunk of information she had given him, should not have been so hard. But it makes it all of the more clear just the type of woman that he willingly deals with—and it becomes clear now that this goes beyond her just playing the hero. It’s more than that.

“Well, fuckin’ hell, Sabs,”

What else is there to say?

He deflates with a long sigh, running stressed fingers through his hair. “What’d ya think I was gonna do this whole time?” Already, almost as soon as the anger had come, it begins to ebb away. James has never been a man to stay angry, and he has never particularly liked the feeling to start with. There are couples across the world that have relationships that are just that—arguing, animosity, constant fights, unending hardship—and James cannot say that he wants that to be his. “Chain ya down? Lock ya up? Barge in on your pack business, and run my mouth?” They are the only logical things that he can come up with. “Sabra, I don’t wanna do any of that. I know you’ve got a job to do and I know you’ll do it damn well.” Because she, like him, is a hard worker.

It’s one of the many traits about her that he loves. She’s no modest housewife, and he would never ask her to be. “All I’m askin’ for is some honesty here, ya know? No lyin’ ‘bout what’s happenin’ to ya—I’d never ask you to stop what you’re doin’. I just don’t want to be kept hidden in the dark.”

It’s a request that James does not think would be asking too much of her—the last thing he would want to do is change the woman.

He moves away from the wall, taking a few steps towards her with his hands out as an offering. “So what, you keep the dogs in line, huh?” He gives her a lopsided grin in a halfhearted attempt to bring some light to the dark tone that had swept over their conversation, to lighten the cool burn of her eyes. “I honestly wouldn’t expect anything less of ya, darlin’.”

[Sabra]

She watches him with wary eyes and tension ripples from the tips of her fingers to the broad muscles of her shoulder and thighs, a readiness to fight, to run. Calling them wolves meant she didn't have to call them by what they were really were; men and women, daughters and sons and more. It meant that she was a hunter and not a murderer. It was a small detail, but it concealed a great deal of the truth.

James was good. He was heart-breakingly good in a way Sabra admired and knew she would never be. It was his nature, just like it was the way of the creek to flow and the trees to grow.

The tension in the room seems to drop a few notches with that sigh, but the enforcer keeps her place near the kitchen counter. Once bitten, twice shy and all too expecting of rejection. It was no small thing to place on someone's shoulders and by God she knew James' shoulders carried enough weight as it was. "Didn't know what to expect, honestly." She raps her fingers on the counter once and pulls away slightly, rocking on the back of her heels, before sucking in a quick breath of hurt and sinking back down. Damned stitches. "Never had anyone...never had things turned 'round like this. Most the people I been with, they were the ones sendin' me out on m'jobs."

Where the admission comes from, she doesn't know, and she clams up after it, feeling some shame bubble up at memories best forgotten and best not mentioned in the company of present day lovers.

They weren't a thing like him, after all, but it was her only point of reference.

"Someone's got to." She mumbles softly, trying to hide the smile that James brings with his praise. Some stubborn part of her wanted to hang onto that anger, but he made it easy to smile and forgive, and when he offers up his hand, Sabra breaches the gap between them. She slips her small hand into his big one, and feels their callouses rub against each other, the results of hard work and lived in bodies. Their fingers fit well together, despite the size difference. They embrace and Sabra inhales his scent, the peace it all makes and the hurt it chases out.

It's a while before she pulls away, only when she knows the wolf is satisfied and her heart is too, as well as his. "Do ya wanna know what happened?" Sabra doesn't know what else to offer him in the way of apologies except this; the knowledge that she had kept from him for so long. A glimpse into her world, into moments where she was vulnerable and holding onto thoughts of them, happy and in love, to pull her through the cold and pain.

Already knowing his answer, Sabra does her best to tell the story, leaving it as unedited as possible, but still not so detailed as to scare him unnecessarily. She draws him down to the table and dishes out their breakfast, letting Izzy pick through her scrambled eggs and gurgle happily. "I got ambushed, sorta." It's hard to admit that even the canniest of hunters could get one pulled over on them. "The one I was after, he was in human form, with a pistol, had a friend with him, hidin' in the shadows as a wolf. Missed being shot, but his lil' pal did me a good turn before I was able to get away." She takes a healthy swig of coffee and rubs the back of her neck sheepishly, feeling suddenly embarrassed for the weeks of tensions when here they're talking about it so easily over Saturday morning breakfast.

"I love you." There's a long pause, and Sabra looks away with flaming cheeks, something fluttering around in her gut, and she sure as hell knows it isn't her cooking that's at fault. "I-I know I leave an awful lot, but," She clears her throat and stands up, passing Izzy in her high chair. "I'll always come home to you." Sabra plucks the piece of bacon out of his hands and kisses him, slow and sweet and tasting maple syrup and pancakes on his tongue. It makes her all very grateful to be alive and after she pulls away, Sabra grins and pops the bacon in her mouth, looking up with one brow cocked. "Darlin'."