Title: Strawberries
Rating: PG-13
Summary: From the very beginning, Sawyer has enjoyed testing Sun’s limitations. When he reaches one, she is always quick to push him back, with an angry look in her eye or a sharp word. But sometimes, some blessed times, when he crosses one, she pulls him even further – never with her words, always with her eyes. Like she is now.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: A little while ago, fosfomifira told me, I really wish you'd write more Sawyer/Sun. And I agreed. I haven't written them for a while, and I've wanted to, but I seemed to have a block. So I asked her for a prompt and told her that I'd do the best I could. She gave me this: ice cream, stars, not a cloud in the sky. Well, this is it. :) It takes place before two of my other stories, Reputation and Lie to Me. I'm also using it for my psych_30 prompt #16: fetish.



The thick, pink liquid slides down her soft skin painfully slowly. She blinks almost as slowly, opening and closing her eyes in a manner that Sawyer finds impossibly sensual. How that’s possible, he has no idea, but when he’s around Sun, most times nearly anything the woman does seems to turn him on. But now, as she lays back, unmoving against the blanket, a thick line of strawberry ice cream making it’s way down her abdomen, she doesn’t even have to try.

It must be cold. It has to be. But her face doesn’t show it, not the second it hits her skin or any of the seconds after. She doesn’t appear uncomfortable at all. In fact, the only sign he has that she is with him at all is the darkness in her eyes, the invitation. They pull him in now as they always do.

The corner of her mouth quirks upward, turning into a smirk that, the precious few times it’s on her face, she looks like she was born to wear. “You missed,” she says, calmly, though without a hint of reproach. From the very beginning, Sawyer has enjoyed testing Sun’s limitations. When he reaches one, she is always quick to push him back, with an angry look in her eye or a sharp word. But sometimes, some blessed times, when he crosses one, she pulls him even further – never with her words, always with her eyes. Like she is now.

“Sure I did,” he replies, tossing the spoon back into the tub to join the rest of the half melted strawberry ice cream. She stares up at him, resting back on her elbows as he leans over her, staring back. She always wins this contest, he knows, but it never stops him from starting it.

He moves slowly, calculatingly, lowering his body down over hers but never letting them touch. His chest, his stomach, hover over hers. She doesn’t blink as their faces come to within centimeters of each other. Her eyes lower, though only slightly, when his lips descend over hers, a fraction of an inch away, brushing back and forth, but never landing, never really connecting. She watches them move, left, right, clearly doing her best to keep her own lips still, to remain as stiff as a board beneath his body.

It’s yet another battle of wills that she always, always manages to win. Time after time, he’s the one that moves, that bends to her will even if she never voices it aloud. He goes where she pushes, not the other way around. It’s never been this way before and he has trouble pretending it doesn’t bother him. His old tricks don’t work on Sun, and his old tricks are all he has. He hates how unsure of himself he feels with her, and yet he returns to her, never asks her to leave when she comes to him. She releases something weak in him, he knows, but he can’t keep away from her, or force her away from him.

His lips leave hers, moving painstakingly slowly from her neck, to the hollow of her throat, down to her stomach, where his lips and his tongue discover the strawberry ice cream his hands had very deliberately drizzled there. The taste is so familiar, so comforting, and that mixed with the tang of Sun’s sweaty skin is possibly the biggest turn on of them all. Her skin tastes of her and of strawberry, two tastes so familiar to him, so powerful in their own separate ways. He doesn’t know why he had never thought of this, why nothing like this has ever occurred to him until he had found her in his tent a half an hour earlier, the tub of ice cream in her lap, a spoon in her hand, and smug sort of smile on her face.

He had found that ice cream himself, in the hatch’s freezer. He’d had every intention of eating the whole damn thing himself, and had only stepped out for a minute. Yet Sun had somehow managed to find her way into his tent, and his stash, before he made it back.

His anger died a quick death, however, when he realized just what he had in front of him: a woman who’s mind and body he worshiped despite his better judgment and a tub full of sticky strawberry ice cream. For once, he decided sharing was the better of the two options.

“Strawberry was always my favorite when I was a kid,” he had confessed, though he wasn’t sure why. That was par of the course with Sun, though. He always found himself telling her things he would tell no one else, trusting her to keep them to herself though she never promised him anything. She nodded, lifting the spoon to her lips. He knew she was doing it on purpose, trying to get him to watch her closely. And damn it, it was working.

The silence swallowed him whole, made him endlessly uncomfortable, as it always did. Sun let silence speak for her more often then not, and it always managed to put him on edge. It always made him want to fill it. He went on, “Everyone always goes for chocolate of vanilla.” He sat in front of her carefully, crossing his legs as hers were crossed, and facing her head on. “Strawberry’s very underrated.”

She nodded again, looking up from the meal she was making of his carefully plundered ice cream, and meeting his eyes, holding them for several moments. Emboldened by the attention, he reached out, taking the spoon from her hand and scooping out a generous helping from the tub. She watched him, her eyes traveling down his arm, to the hand that held the spoon, now more than full of bright pink ice cream.

It became obvious to her, after a few moments that it wasn’t going anywhere, that instead of taking the ice cream for himself, Sawyer was offering it to her. She could practically feel him toeing the line, trying to see how far he could push her, and she decided that she could indulge him, that this was one line that she has no problem letting him cross.

Her lips inched closer and closer to the spoon before her tongue wraps around it and she pulls the liquid into her mouth. The chill was a pleasant contrast the heat and humidity of Sawyer’s tent, and of the jungle that surrounded them outside. And it tasted better than anything she could remember.

“Indeed,” she agreed, savoring the flavor that still lingered on her tongue.

The next spoonful was the one that missed, the one that slid from the spoon an inch too early and spilled down the front of her shirt. Through some miracle, it managed to only hit her skin. She never flinched. Sawyer noticed because it was what he was looking for, the reaction that he was studying her face, her eyes, for, the one that never came.

She, however, knew just how to push his buttons, even if it wasn’t her outright intention. She had sighed a soft sort of sigh – that was her only reaction – and unbuttoned her shirt, looking down at the pink line making it’s way down her stomach. Sawyer’s face, his body, had been frozen, rendered dumb and immobile by what was, to Sun, simply a practical action.

And now, here they were. Sun, laying on her back, one hand tangled in his long, blonde hair while the other grasps a fist full of sand. He can see none of this, misses the reaction he has finally succeeded in causing, because he is otherwise occupied, removing from her skin every last bit of the ice cream he had placed there, even long after every visible trace is gone.

Their hands are the only parts of their bodies that move, that change positions. His grasp at her sides, then her hips, until he’s sliding her pants down her slender legs, without looking, knowing her body well enough by now to navigate it blind.

Her hands tighten in his hair, in the sand. It is the only surrender that she offers him.

*

From that moment on, Sun always tastes like strawberry. It doesn’t matter if there’s sand and sweat and dirt on her skin because underneath it, there is always strawberry. It’s faint sometimes, almost as if it isn’t there at all. But he knows it is, and he won’t leave her alone until he finds it, until he tastes it on her skin. She doesn’t seem to mind.

“Sawyer, I have to go,” she tells him, when he’s nowhere close to being ready to let her do so. It infuriates, even insults him a little, that her voice is still so even when she says it.

If she was any other woman, she would writhing beneath his hands and his moth, she would be grasping the edges of the blanket and biting her bottom lip. But she wasn’t. She was laying back, calm as ever, with a dreamlike expression across her otherwise blank features. She might as well be outside, stargazing.

If she was any other woman, this would all be going very differently. But, he also knew, if she was any other woman, he wouldn’t be here.

If Sun were any other woman, she would be the one seeking him out, she would be the one begging him, with subtle actions and emotional glances, to stay just a few minutes longer. If Sun were any other woman, she would have half the brains and no spine to speak of and he wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t be drawn to her the way that he was. If she were any other woman, she wouldn’t matter.

“Five more minutes,” he mutters against her belly button before his lips attach to the skin just above it once more, going back and forth, up and down, over and over. His stubble scrapes against her soft skin and the sensation makes her breath hitch for half a second, but nothing else.

“I have to go,” she repeats, stronger, more forceful. If she thinks that tone is going to deter him, she’s got another thing coming. His lips continue their journey up her bare skin until he reaches her collarbone, then her neck. Her hand leaves its resting place in the sand then, landing on his lower back before traveling, at a maddeningly slow pace, up and up until it’s in his hair.

Her small hand closes into a fist around long strands of blonde hair, but he barely notices until she pulls, hard, lifting his head up. He grunts in pain as his lips are forced from her skin, as she pulls until he’s looking her in the eyes.

“I have to go. Jin is waiting.”

Her words hit him right in the gut, the pain shocking, like nothing he would have ever expected.

It wasn’t that Sun was married, he’d been with plenty of married women before. It wasn’t even that she was married to someone who considered him a friend. Betrayal wasn’t something Sawyer was unfamiliar with either. In that moment, he finally sees just how deep under his skin Sun is. This time, he cares. He cares that she’s leaving his tent to spend the night in the arms of someone else. He cares that she’s all too willing to leave him now and go back to Jin, that he obviously hasn’t made it under her skin the way she has his.

He doesn’t know when this happened, can’t pin-point the exact moment, but he can’t deny that it has. He feels the dread spreading slowly through his body, like a poison. He knows he should let her go, hopefully taking the feeling she brought in out with her, but he can’t. He doesn’t want her to go. And for once, that feeling does not cause him to tell her to leave.

“Five more minutes,” he whispers to her desperately. He lets her see his face when he says it, the emotions plain – and, for once, real. Her eyes betray no emotion as she scans his face, and her expression barely changes as she lets him go, as she lays back in the sand and waits.

He knows her well enough to know it isn’t surrender. But it’s enough.