Title: Gravitation
Rating: PG
Summary: He was the kind of man that would give her anything she asked for, and everything that she didn’t. He would take her places, show her the world, holding her hand all the way.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: For Lost Riffs at lostsquee, prompt: elevator, Paris, hungry. I'm also using it for my psych_30 claim, prompt #20: learned helplessness.



Jae wanted to give her the world. He said it often, even though she would sigh and look away and tell him that it wasn’t a good idea. She hated hurting him, pushing him away, but she couldn’t help it. She thought that she should feel herself falling in love with him. He was everything that she should want. He was kind and loving and affectionate. He was the kind of man that would laugh with her, smile with her. He was the kind of man that would give her anything she asked for, and everything that she didn’t. He would take her places, show her the world, holding her hand all the way.

But she didn’t love him. She felt no desire to stay in his bed, to travel with him, to remain in his life for more than the few hours a week that they spent together. It seemed callous at first, and she had wondered when she had become that kind of woman. But she just did not love Jae. She didn’t think she would ever love Jae. And yet she always came back to him, went to him when her home suffocated her with silence, when her husband shrugged her off and left her behind, like a coat being tossed onto the back of a chair and quickly forgotten. She may not have loved Jae, but she needed the way he made her feel, to a depth that frightened her.

She supposed that is why, when he had told her that he was going to Paris and would like for her to come with him, she had agreed. She had said that she could only stay for two or three days, that if she was absent for too long, Jin would suspect something, but the truth was that Jin paid so little attention to her these days that she could leave for over a month and he wouldn’t likely notice. The truth was that her guilt weighed on her more and more heavily every time she looked at Jae, every time he kissed her, every time they had sex. Being around him was only a reminder of what she was doing, who he wasn’t, and who she had become.

She knew that she was a grown woman, that she should be able to keep her desires from controlling her actions, but she couldn’t. She hated that she was standing in that elevator, that she was watching the floor numbers pass go by, getting higher and higher, before finally coming to a stop. Floor 23. The penthouse suite. The doors slid open and she took a reluctant step out.

Her mind screamed at her like it always did. It told her that she should not be here, that she should turn around, go home, that it was better to feel alone with Jin than to live with this constant guilt, day in and day out. But her body wouldn’t obey. Her body longed, hungered, for Jae, for the way that he looked at her, the way that Jin had once looked at her. She craved the way that me made her feel, the love that she got from him despite the fact that she was unable to give it in return.

She pulled the keycard that Jae had given her from her purse, pausing before she slid the card in and turned the door handle. She felt like she was being pulled inside, like her body was moving along without her permission, her desire swallowing her logic whole.

This will be the last time, she told herself, even though she had said it before, meant it before, even though she knew that the same force that brought her here would push her away from the man that she loved and pull her back to the man that loved her.