[fic] where the heart is
Title: where the heart is
Pairing: Sam/Jess
Word count: 3,132
Warnings: One very brief smutty scene and everything else is pure fluffy self-indulgence.
Summary: It's barely the end of junior year, but Jess already has an idea for how they can spend their post-grad summer.
Read below, or on ao3.
The second day after they moved in together, Jess brought home a sprawling map of the United States. “I’ll be working in D.C. five years from now, if not sooner,” she explained cheerfully as Sam rifled through half-unpacked boxes for his notebooks. “Before that happens, I want to visit all 50 states.”
He gave a neutral sort of nod, kicking himself mentally for not setting aside his notes somewhere he could easily locate in time to prep for finals, and didn’t think anything of it.
A few days later he came home from class to find her sitting cross-legged on their bed, tapping the end of a Sharpie against her teeth and squinting at the map unfolded across her lap.
“It’s just a map of the U.S., Jess. It’s not gonna tell you where to find the Ark of the Covenant if you glare at it for long enough.”
Jess ignored him. “What’s a good route from Palo Alto to D.C., do you think? I mean, if I get into Georgetown for grad school then we’ve all of next summer to get from here to there. We’ve both been saving up, we can afford to take a few months off, just this once. What do you say, Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “Just take the I-80,” he said. “Couple days’ drive, you’ll be there in no time.”
Jess dropped her Sharpie and stared at him like he just told her he’d decided to wear nothing but pink satin panties to all of his classes for the rest of the year. “What?” he asked.
“It’s a road trip, Sam,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “I’m talking about a road trip. You know, the thing that all wholesome, bored American kids daydream about? Two-lane asphalt and shitty diner food, breezing through quaint little one-horse towns with cheesy roadside attractions, packing up all your things and living out of seedy motel rooms just because you can?”
He blinked.
“Come on, Sam, it’ll be our last summer before we’re fully responsible adults with boring day jobs and boring lives. Let’s live a little.” And she tugged on his wrist until he grinned ruefully and settled down on the bed with his chest pressed against her back, his arms wrapped loosely around hers and his cheek pressed to her curls.
His eyes inadvertently sought out Lawrence, Kansas on the map like they did every time, and he imagined a little black car chugging along the thin red and blue lines, criss-crossing the country three times over in just five years - but always, always just happening to miss the one place in the entire country he’d ever ached to see.
“Maybe,” he said. “Seems, I dunno, like a lot of effort, though. Driving around all the time, never really stopping anywhere for very long. Why don’t we just spend the whole summer in D.C.?”
“Jesus, Sam, it’s a freaking road trip. It’s just as much about the driving around and getting lost and arguing about dumb things as it is about getting to the places themselves. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Sam shrugged. Adventure is overrated, he wanted to say. When you’ve lived your life from motel to motel for nineteen years, those kinds of things tend to lose their idyllic Americana luster.
“Guess I’m just too comfortable right here, is all,” he murmured instead, pressing his lips ever so lightly to the side of her neck. Jess laughed and gasped in pleasure, then twisted around to catch his lips with hers.
“Sam Winchester, this conversation is not over,” she said as she sank back onto the bed, pulling him down with her.
“Of course not, Jessica Moore,” he breathed, and worked his hands under the elastic of her shorts. Then he trailed his lips along her belly and down between her legs, and he kissed her there, again and again, working his fingers and his tongue until she was gasping and cursing and moaning his name, and then neither of them thought about road maps or car trips for a very long time.
---
“My dad drives trucks,” he said later as Jess traced the veins in his hands lightly with her fingers. She stiffened and turned to face him. It was the first time she’d ever heard anything about his family other than their names, though she’d asked after them several times before. “Big eighteen-wheelers, shipping deliveries and goods all across the lower 48. I guess he’s been doing it since before Dean was born, but after my mom passed he started bringing us with him everywhere. We don’t have a lot of relatives, so we all had to stick together. I pretty much grew up on the road.”
It was a story that Stanford Admissions had readily bought, and Sam figured it was true enough. The constant moving, transferring schools in every new town they’d hit up, each completely different from the others and yet somehow exactly the same in their unfamiliarity. The ceaseless lullaby of rock cassettes and the steady pounding of tires on asphalt that had lulled him to sleep for the better part of nineteen years.
His longing for stability now, his desperate need to stay in one place, free from the nagging fear of finding himself uprooted once again and tossed headfirst into the raging chaos of the hunt. A real life, a real home, with late afternoon sunlight spilling lazily across the crumpled blankets at his feet. Shadows that stayed where they were cast, and wouldn’t murder him in the middle of the night.
He’d just… sanitized the story a bit. Dusted away the dark corners until he could convince himself that they couldn’t touch him anymore. Not here, not now. And no one would be any the wiser.
The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
“It’s not - it gets old pretty quickly,” he finished lamely.
Jess was still watching him, face open and sympathetic, and he felt a sudden rush of affection for her even as the now-familiar guilt coiled traitorously in his gut. She listened well, made you feel as if you were the center of her universe when you were talking to her; it was one of the reasons he’d fallen for her so quickly. She’d make a hell of a diplomat one day.
“That’s no way to raise a kid,” she murmured. Sam shrugged and rolled onto his back, unable to meet her eyes any longer. Flash ‘em your puppy eyes, Sammy, he heard Dean say in his head. You’ll play ‘em like a fiddle.
He shoved that memory away with the others.
“Sure makes for a good college essay, though, doesn’t it?” he deflected. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jess raise an eyebrow. He raised one back.
“You’re serious,” she said, after a beat.
“How do you think I got my full ride?”
Jess snorted. “I’d always assumed it was your dazzling personality.” She grinned, then poked him in the cheek with a finger. “That, and your stupidly cute dimples.”
Sam chuckled and swatted her hand away. “Yeah, I think that was just you,” he said.
“Pretty dumb move on my part, huh?” She shifted forward to plant a kiss on his collarbone.
“The dumbest,” he whispered.
Jess huffed softly and nestled her head against his shoulder. “You know I love you, right?”
Sam said nothing, just watched the dance of light and shadows across the walls and ceiling as a soft breeze rustled the tree outside their window. He let his gaze drift down to the floor. The map lay face-up where it had fallen on the ragged throw rug, half-folded and forgotten. Presently, Jess’ breathing evened out into long, soft sighs. He focused on matching his breaths with hers, but it wasn’t until the distant rumble of rush-hour traffic started up that he found himself drifting off to sleep.
---
When Sam woke again the room was dark and Jess was nowhere to be seen, although she had pulled the comforter over him before she left. It was a sprawling monster of a blanket, too heavy for the early summer months in their little AC-less apartment, but it smelled like the fancy lavender detergent that she always splurged on and Sam burrowed deeper in. He could practically hear Dean calling him a princess.
The roar of jet engines drifted in from their little TV setup in the living room, the twang of an acoustic guitar, a brief smattering of gunfire, voices bantering in a not-quite Old West lilt. Firefly again, then. Sam grinned. Sometimes Jess was all too predictable.
He showered quickly and ambled out to where she sat cross-legged at the coffee table, laptop open on that Foreign Policy paper she’d been putting off for days, eyes glued to the TV. “Working hard, or hardly working?” he smirked, rummaging through the fridge.
“Bite me, Winchester,” Jess replied without turning around.
“Mm. Maybe later.”
On screen, River was telling Jayne that she could kill him with her brain. Sam dumped last night’s takeout into a bowl in the microwave, set the timer, and went to throw out the styrofoam carton. He paused, appraising the lone occupant of the freshly-changed trash bag.
“Hey, Jess?” he called.
“What’s up?”
“Why’d you throw this out?”
Jess turned around this time, saw what he’d pulled out of the bin. “Thought about it some more while you were napping,” she said with a shrug. “It’s still too early to know for sure what we’re doing after graduation, so road tripping really isn’t a priority right now. The map’s just wasting space.”
Sam frowned and ran his hands over the map, smoothing it out flat on the kitchen counter. There was a small stain where the grease from his takeout container had dripped all over New England, but otherwise it was still clean.
“So-” He let it linger in the air until Jess hit pause and turned around to face him. “It’s got nothing at all to do with me. With what I told you earlier.”
Jess sighed. “Sam-”
“Jess.” Sam shook his head. “Look, I know you really want to go on this trip, and if you’re going straight to grad school after senior year then you don’t really have a better time to go than next summer, before all the real-world craziness starts. Please, don’t just throw out all your plans because of me.”
The microwave beeped and Sam pulled out his now-steaming bowl of fried rice and whatever vegetables Jess had picked out of her serving and slipped into his carton the night before. Jess went to pour herself another glass of water and stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the stove. She sipped from her glass, and Sam knew she was trying to pick out the right words to say.
“Okay, first of all,” she said slowly, “You have got to quit it with the puppy eyes. That’s just totally unfair.”
Sam laughed, scratching at the back of his head. Jess continued, “Second, just listen to what I have to say, okay? Please. Before you say anything?” She looked him in the eye and waited for him to nod. He nodded.
“You’re right. Next summer would be the best time to go on a long trip, and this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. But I know I always tend to drag you around to whatever I’m doing, and for some reason you don’t seem to mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Sam affirmed. “At all. Jess, I like when we go-” He broke off when she held up a hand.
“I’m not finished,” she said. “I - sorry. Just. You’re always so okay with whatever I want to do, and sometimes I feel awful about it. I mean, with your dad dragging you all over the country for his stupid job - um, no offense,” she added hastily before continuing, “I have no idea what that was like, but I’m sure it was far from easy, and I’m not going to force you to relive it just because I’ve got some dumb daydream playing out in my head.”
She sounded like she’d rehearsed some of what she was saying, and Sam realized that she probably had, awake with the weight of his fake backstory while he’d eased himself into sleep in order to avoid his conscience.
“And I know it’s still far too early to discuss in detail, but if both of our post-grad plans work out the way we want, I’ll be in D.C. while you’re staying here. At least for a few years. Which means that regardless of what happens after graduation with, um, the two of us, next summer is all we have. You know, before all the real-world craziness starts. So I want to spend that time with you.
“So if that means no road trip, then no road trip. We still have months to figure it all out. But I love you, Sam, so fucking much I don’t even know what to do with myself sometimes, and I want you to be as completely, stupidly happy with me, doing whatever we’re doing next summer, as I am with you all the time.”
Jess finished and took another long draw from her glass. Sam nodded slowly, his rapidly-cooling dinner all but forgotten in the bowl in his hand. She placed her free hand on his arm for a moment. “I know you’re probably already trying to find a way to argue with me, lawyer-boy,” she smiled softly and gave his arm a squeeze. “But just - think about it, okay? Don’t be so quick to blame yourself.”
He murmured in assent and pressed a kiss to the top of her head as she slipped back into the living room, laptop keys clacking away for all of two minutes before he heard a muttered “oh, fuck it,” and the lingering chords of The Ballad of Serenity struck up once more.
Sam ate his dinner standing in the kitchen, examining the map once again. Little blue and red lines wove intricately across North America like blood vessels, and he could trace his entire life on them. Nineteen weary years living out someone else’s vengeance, someone else’s memories, the ashes of a home he’d never known trailing in his wake.
But somewhere along the line, at some point these past three years, his notion of “home” had shifted. Home was no longer an enigmatic dot on a road atlas, questions he’d quickly learned to never ask, the sickly-sweet odor of upchucked whiskey that manifested itself right on schedule every November. Home was a cramped little apartment with creaky floors and no AC. Home was long hours spent cramming for finals in the library, and tailgate barbecues and beer-drenched spirit rallies to kick off football season, and late-night Joss Whedon marathons with chocolate chip cookies and microwave popcorn. Home was clean bedsheets that always smelled like lavender detergent.
Home was Jess.
Beautiful, confident Jess who shotgunned beers like it was nothing and didn’t give a rat’s ass that Sam couldn’t dance worth a shit, because she did it well enough for the both of them. Sweet, loving Jess who liked to tuck brightly-colored sticky notes into his textbooks and wallet with little messages of encouragement - or, on one memorable occasion, a graphic description of all the different ways she was going to ride his dick after he finished his big group presentation. Cranky morning Jess, whom Sam suspected might actually murder someone if they got between her and her first cup of coffee. Passionate Jess, who still drove down to San Jose once a month to help her old high school with something called Model U.N., and ambitious Jess, who had had her whole career path outlined by sophomore year, when Sam and almost everyone else he knew was still scrambling to declare a major.
He finished eating and stacked his bowl in the dishwasher, then eyed Jess’ map again. He rubbed at the grease stain with his thumb.
Somehow, out of the literal thousands of other guys at Stanford, he’d been the one to catch Jess’ attention. Somehow, she liked what she saw and somehow, by some strange fluke of luck, even after a year together she still wanted him in her life.
The least Sam could do was make an effort to fit into it.
He folded the map up and tucked it into the desk drawer in their bedroom, just in case.
---
Hours later, Sam woke to a sudden flare of light, the dip of the mattress as Jess finally crawled into bed. “Time’s’it?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the sudden light.
“It’s like four. Maybe. Last I checked,” Jess said softly. She switched off her bedside lamp and wriggled closer to him. “Go back to sleep, babe.”
“Finish your paper?” He thought it came out more as a slurry of syllables than an actual question, but Jess laughed and said yes, she did.
“Could’ve finished it a lot faster if you didn’t watch so much TV,” he grumbled sleepily.
“So sue me, lawyer-boy.”
Sam chuckled and pressed a small, chaste kiss to her lips. “Love you, Jess,” he murmured. Then, “Wanna go on a road trip with you. Summer after graduation."
Jess sighed. “It’s ass o’clock in the morning, babe, we’re not talking about this now.”
“Not gonna change my mind later.” He kissed her again, cupping her jaw with one hand and stroking her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “’M serious. Adventure for you, and closure for me. Uh, maybe.” He laughed a little. “We’ll see. I can at least show you all the dumb roadside attractions and stuff."
Jess reached over, pushed his bangs back and held his gaze, searching. “You’re a hundred percent okay with this?” she asked softly. “I want you to be okay with this, Sam.”
“I’m okay with this.”
“Promise?"
“I promise.”
Jess considered him for a moment, then raised her hand up, curled into a fist. “Pinky swear,” she said, wiggling her little finger under his nose.
Sam laughed and looped his finger around hers. Then he pulled her close and kissed her again, deeper this time, and when they broke apart her cheeks were pink and her eyes shone brilliant in the moonlight. He smiled and pulled the comforter tighter around the both of them. It would be too hot in about an hour, he knew, and in the morning they would probably wake up to find that they’d kicked it onto the floor again - but for now he wanted to envelop himself in its warmth, and breathe in the scent of lavender, of Jess. Of home.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said.
Pairing: Sam/Jess
Word count: 3,132
Warnings: One very brief smutty scene and everything else is pure fluffy self-indulgence.
Summary: It's barely the end of junior year, but Jess already has an idea for how they can spend their post-grad summer.
Read below, or on ao3.
The second day after they moved in together, Jess brought home a sprawling map of the United States. “I’ll be working in D.C. five years from now, if not sooner,” she explained cheerfully as Sam rifled through half-unpacked boxes for his notebooks. “Before that happens, I want to visit all 50 states.”
He gave a neutral sort of nod, kicking himself mentally for not setting aside his notes somewhere he could easily locate in time to prep for finals, and didn’t think anything of it.
A few days later he came home from class to find her sitting cross-legged on their bed, tapping the end of a Sharpie against her teeth and squinting at the map unfolded across her lap.
“It’s just a map of the U.S., Jess. It’s not gonna tell you where to find the Ark of the Covenant if you glare at it for long enough.”
Jess ignored him. “What’s a good route from Palo Alto to D.C., do you think? I mean, if I get into Georgetown for grad school then we’ve all of next summer to get from here to there. We’ve both been saving up, we can afford to take a few months off, just this once. What do you say, Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “Just take the I-80,” he said. “Couple days’ drive, you’ll be there in no time.”
Jess dropped her Sharpie and stared at him like he just told her he’d decided to wear nothing but pink satin panties to all of his classes for the rest of the year. “What?” he asked.
“It’s a road trip, Sam,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “I’m talking about a road trip. You know, the thing that all wholesome, bored American kids daydream about? Two-lane asphalt and shitty diner food, breezing through quaint little one-horse towns with cheesy roadside attractions, packing up all your things and living out of seedy motel rooms just because you can?”
He blinked.
“Come on, Sam, it’ll be our last summer before we’re fully responsible adults with boring day jobs and boring lives. Let’s live a little.” And she tugged on his wrist until he grinned ruefully and settled down on the bed with his chest pressed against her back, his arms wrapped loosely around hers and his cheek pressed to her curls.
His eyes inadvertently sought out Lawrence, Kansas on the map like they did every time, and he imagined a little black car chugging along the thin red and blue lines, criss-crossing the country three times over in just five years - but always, always just happening to miss the one place in the entire country he’d ever ached to see.
“Maybe,” he said. “Seems, I dunno, like a lot of effort, though. Driving around all the time, never really stopping anywhere for very long. Why don’t we just spend the whole summer in D.C.?”
“Jesus, Sam, it’s a freaking road trip. It’s just as much about the driving around and getting lost and arguing about dumb things as it is about getting to the places themselves. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Sam shrugged. Adventure is overrated, he wanted to say. When you’ve lived your life from motel to motel for nineteen years, those kinds of things tend to lose their idyllic Americana luster.
“Guess I’m just too comfortable right here, is all,” he murmured instead, pressing his lips ever so lightly to the side of her neck. Jess laughed and gasped in pleasure, then twisted around to catch his lips with hers.
“Sam Winchester, this conversation is not over,” she said as she sank back onto the bed, pulling him down with her.
“Of course not, Jessica Moore,” he breathed, and worked his hands under the elastic of her shorts. Then he trailed his lips along her belly and down between her legs, and he kissed her there, again and again, working his fingers and his tongue until she was gasping and cursing and moaning his name, and then neither of them thought about road maps or car trips for a very long time.
---
“My dad drives trucks,” he said later as Jess traced the veins in his hands lightly with her fingers. She stiffened and turned to face him. It was the first time she’d ever heard anything about his family other than their names, though she’d asked after them several times before. “Big eighteen-wheelers, shipping deliveries and goods all across the lower 48. I guess he’s been doing it since before Dean was born, but after my mom passed he started bringing us with him everywhere. We don’t have a lot of relatives, so we all had to stick together. I pretty much grew up on the road.”
It was a story that Stanford Admissions had readily bought, and Sam figured it was true enough. The constant moving, transferring schools in every new town they’d hit up, each completely different from the others and yet somehow exactly the same in their unfamiliarity. The ceaseless lullaby of rock cassettes and the steady pounding of tires on asphalt that had lulled him to sleep for the better part of nineteen years.
His longing for stability now, his desperate need to stay in one place, free from the nagging fear of finding himself uprooted once again and tossed headfirst into the raging chaos of the hunt. A real life, a real home, with late afternoon sunlight spilling lazily across the crumpled blankets at his feet. Shadows that stayed where they were cast, and wouldn’t murder him in the middle of the night.
He’d just… sanitized the story a bit. Dusted away the dark corners until he could convince himself that they couldn’t touch him anymore. Not here, not now. And no one would be any the wiser.
The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
“It’s not - it gets old pretty quickly,” he finished lamely.
Jess was still watching him, face open and sympathetic, and he felt a sudden rush of affection for her even as the now-familiar guilt coiled traitorously in his gut. She listened well, made you feel as if you were the center of her universe when you were talking to her; it was one of the reasons he’d fallen for her so quickly. She’d make a hell of a diplomat one day.
“That’s no way to raise a kid,” she murmured. Sam shrugged and rolled onto his back, unable to meet her eyes any longer. Flash ‘em your puppy eyes, Sammy, he heard Dean say in his head. You’ll play ‘em like a fiddle.
He shoved that memory away with the others.
“Sure makes for a good college essay, though, doesn’t it?” he deflected. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jess raise an eyebrow. He raised one back.
“You’re serious,” she said, after a beat.
“How do you think I got my full ride?”
Jess snorted. “I’d always assumed it was your dazzling personality.” She grinned, then poked him in the cheek with a finger. “That, and your stupidly cute dimples.”
Sam chuckled and swatted her hand away. “Yeah, I think that was just you,” he said.
“Pretty dumb move on my part, huh?” She shifted forward to plant a kiss on his collarbone.
“The dumbest,” he whispered.
Jess huffed softly and nestled her head against his shoulder. “You know I love you, right?”
Sam said nothing, just watched the dance of light and shadows across the walls and ceiling as a soft breeze rustled the tree outside their window. He let his gaze drift down to the floor. The map lay face-up where it had fallen on the ragged throw rug, half-folded and forgotten. Presently, Jess’ breathing evened out into long, soft sighs. He focused on matching his breaths with hers, but it wasn’t until the distant rumble of rush-hour traffic started up that he found himself drifting off to sleep.
---
When Sam woke again the room was dark and Jess was nowhere to be seen, although she had pulled the comforter over him before she left. It was a sprawling monster of a blanket, too heavy for the early summer months in their little AC-less apartment, but it smelled like the fancy lavender detergent that she always splurged on and Sam burrowed deeper in. He could practically hear Dean calling him a princess.
The roar of jet engines drifted in from their little TV setup in the living room, the twang of an acoustic guitar, a brief smattering of gunfire, voices bantering in a not-quite Old West lilt. Firefly again, then. Sam grinned. Sometimes Jess was all too predictable.
He showered quickly and ambled out to where she sat cross-legged at the coffee table, laptop open on that Foreign Policy paper she’d been putting off for days, eyes glued to the TV. “Working hard, or hardly working?” he smirked, rummaging through the fridge.
“Bite me, Winchester,” Jess replied without turning around.
“Mm. Maybe later.”
On screen, River was telling Jayne that she could kill him with her brain. Sam dumped last night’s takeout into a bowl in the microwave, set the timer, and went to throw out the styrofoam carton. He paused, appraising the lone occupant of the freshly-changed trash bag.
“Hey, Jess?” he called.
“What’s up?”
“Why’d you throw this out?”
Jess turned around this time, saw what he’d pulled out of the bin. “Thought about it some more while you were napping,” she said with a shrug. “It’s still too early to know for sure what we’re doing after graduation, so road tripping really isn’t a priority right now. The map’s just wasting space.”
Sam frowned and ran his hands over the map, smoothing it out flat on the kitchen counter. There was a small stain where the grease from his takeout container had dripped all over New England, but otherwise it was still clean.
“So-” He let it linger in the air until Jess hit pause and turned around to face him. “It’s got nothing at all to do with me. With what I told you earlier.”
Jess sighed. “Sam-”
“Jess.” Sam shook his head. “Look, I know you really want to go on this trip, and if you’re going straight to grad school after senior year then you don’t really have a better time to go than next summer, before all the real-world craziness starts. Please, don’t just throw out all your plans because of me.”
The microwave beeped and Sam pulled out his now-steaming bowl of fried rice and whatever vegetables Jess had picked out of her serving and slipped into his carton the night before. Jess went to pour herself another glass of water and stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the stove. She sipped from her glass, and Sam knew she was trying to pick out the right words to say.
“Okay, first of all,” she said slowly, “You have got to quit it with the puppy eyes. That’s just totally unfair.”
Sam laughed, scratching at the back of his head. Jess continued, “Second, just listen to what I have to say, okay? Please. Before you say anything?” She looked him in the eye and waited for him to nod. He nodded.
“You’re right. Next summer would be the best time to go on a long trip, and this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. But I know I always tend to drag you around to whatever I’m doing, and for some reason you don’t seem to mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Sam affirmed. “At all. Jess, I like when we go-” He broke off when she held up a hand.
“I’m not finished,” she said. “I - sorry. Just. You’re always so okay with whatever I want to do, and sometimes I feel awful about it. I mean, with your dad dragging you all over the country for his stupid job - um, no offense,” she added hastily before continuing, “I have no idea what that was like, but I’m sure it was far from easy, and I’m not going to force you to relive it just because I’ve got some dumb daydream playing out in my head.”
She sounded like she’d rehearsed some of what she was saying, and Sam realized that she probably had, awake with the weight of his fake backstory while he’d eased himself into sleep in order to avoid his conscience.
“And I know it’s still far too early to discuss in detail, but if both of our post-grad plans work out the way we want, I’ll be in D.C. while you’re staying here. At least for a few years. Which means that regardless of what happens after graduation with, um, the two of us, next summer is all we have. You know, before all the real-world craziness starts. So I want to spend that time with you.
“So if that means no road trip, then no road trip. We still have months to figure it all out. But I love you, Sam, so fucking much I don’t even know what to do with myself sometimes, and I want you to be as completely, stupidly happy with me, doing whatever we’re doing next summer, as I am with you all the time.”
Jess finished and took another long draw from her glass. Sam nodded slowly, his rapidly-cooling dinner all but forgotten in the bowl in his hand. She placed her free hand on his arm for a moment. “I know you’re probably already trying to find a way to argue with me, lawyer-boy,” she smiled softly and gave his arm a squeeze. “But just - think about it, okay? Don’t be so quick to blame yourself.”
He murmured in assent and pressed a kiss to the top of her head as she slipped back into the living room, laptop keys clacking away for all of two minutes before he heard a muttered “oh, fuck it,” and the lingering chords of The Ballad of Serenity struck up once more.
Sam ate his dinner standing in the kitchen, examining the map once again. Little blue and red lines wove intricately across North America like blood vessels, and he could trace his entire life on them. Nineteen weary years living out someone else’s vengeance, someone else’s memories, the ashes of a home he’d never known trailing in his wake.
But somewhere along the line, at some point these past three years, his notion of “home” had shifted. Home was no longer an enigmatic dot on a road atlas, questions he’d quickly learned to never ask, the sickly-sweet odor of upchucked whiskey that manifested itself right on schedule every November. Home was a cramped little apartment with creaky floors and no AC. Home was long hours spent cramming for finals in the library, and tailgate barbecues and beer-drenched spirit rallies to kick off football season, and late-night Joss Whedon marathons with chocolate chip cookies and microwave popcorn. Home was clean bedsheets that always smelled like lavender detergent.
Home was Jess.
Beautiful, confident Jess who shotgunned beers like it was nothing and didn’t give a rat’s ass that Sam couldn’t dance worth a shit, because she did it well enough for the both of them. Sweet, loving Jess who liked to tuck brightly-colored sticky notes into his textbooks and wallet with little messages of encouragement - or, on one memorable occasion, a graphic description of all the different ways she was going to ride his dick after he finished his big group presentation. Cranky morning Jess, whom Sam suspected might actually murder someone if they got between her and her first cup of coffee. Passionate Jess, who still drove down to San Jose once a month to help her old high school with something called Model U.N., and ambitious Jess, who had had her whole career path outlined by sophomore year, when Sam and almost everyone else he knew was still scrambling to declare a major.
He finished eating and stacked his bowl in the dishwasher, then eyed Jess’ map again. He rubbed at the grease stain with his thumb.
Somehow, out of the literal thousands of other guys at Stanford, he’d been the one to catch Jess’ attention. Somehow, she liked what she saw and somehow, by some strange fluke of luck, even after a year together she still wanted him in her life.
The least Sam could do was make an effort to fit into it.
He folded the map up and tucked it into the desk drawer in their bedroom, just in case.
---
Hours later, Sam woke to a sudden flare of light, the dip of the mattress as Jess finally crawled into bed. “Time’s’it?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the sudden light.
“It’s like four. Maybe. Last I checked,” Jess said softly. She switched off her bedside lamp and wriggled closer to him. “Go back to sleep, babe.”
“Finish your paper?” He thought it came out more as a slurry of syllables than an actual question, but Jess laughed and said yes, she did.
“Could’ve finished it a lot faster if you didn’t watch so much TV,” he grumbled sleepily.
“So sue me, lawyer-boy.”
Sam chuckled and pressed a small, chaste kiss to her lips. “Love you, Jess,” he murmured. Then, “Wanna go on a road trip with you. Summer after graduation."
Jess sighed. “It’s ass o’clock in the morning, babe, we’re not talking about this now.”
“Not gonna change my mind later.” He kissed her again, cupping her jaw with one hand and stroking her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “’M serious. Adventure for you, and closure for me. Uh, maybe.” He laughed a little. “We’ll see. I can at least show you all the dumb roadside attractions and stuff."
Jess reached over, pushed his bangs back and held his gaze, searching. “You’re a hundred percent okay with this?” she asked softly. “I want you to be okay with this, Sam.”
“I’m okay with this.”
“Promise?"
“I promise.”
Jess considered him for a moment, then raised her hand up, curled into a fist. “Pinky swear,” she said, wiggling her little finger under his nose.
Sam laughed and looped his finger around hers. Then he pulled her close and kissed her again, deeper this time, and when they broke apart her cheeks were pink and her eyes shone brilliant in the moonlight. He smiled and pulled the comforter tighter around the both of them. It would be too hot in about an hour, he knew, and in the morning they would probably wake up to find that they’d kicked it onto the floor again - but for now he wanted to envelop himself in its warmth, and breathe in the scent of lavender, of Jess. Of home.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said.