Fic: Caught My Heart in the Middle of a Feeling (SPN, Sam/OC, PG-13)
My lgbtfest fic! Guys, this is so not the last you're gonna see of this OC. F'realz.
Title: Caught My Heart in the Middle of a Feeling
Fandom: SPN
Pairing/Characters: Sam/OC, Dean
Rating: PG-13 for language and some sexual content
Disclaimer: Sam and Dean and their world belong to Eric Kripke et al. I make no profit from this work.
Prompt: 772. Supernatural: Sam Winchester. Sam gets involved in a high school GSA not because he's gay but because it seems like a place that welcomes outcasts like him. What happens when he begins to have real questions about his own sexual identity? And what does he tell Dean?
Summary: Sam goes looking for new friends and finds something he never would have expected.
Notes: This story took me by surprise at least as much as it did Sam, and there's no way it really ends here. Betaed by the fantastic littlewings04 and my awesome mother. Any further mistakes are my own. ~5900 words.
Sam’s the new kid, always, perpetually, forever and ever amen. And having grown six inches in the past six months isn’t doing him any favors either. Now they just call him “that tall kid” instead of “that kid with the floppy hair.” It isn’t really an improvement. So on Monday when Kim from AP European History tells him he should stay after with her for GSA, he does, even if half the reason is curiosity about the meaning of the acronym, and the other half is sheer desperation because after two weeks at a new school, she’s still the only person he’s said more than three sentences to.
Sam thinks he deserves some credit for not bolting as soon as he finds out GSA stands for Gay-Straight Alliance. He could have. There was a convenient moment when he could have said, “Hey, sorry, I forgot to tell my brother I was staying late. He’s waiting outside.” If Dean hadn’t made sense of his stuttered voicemail, it might not even be a lie. He’s a little confused as to why Kim thought he belonged here. But he’s got no friends, so it’s not as though it’s going to be bad for his rep if everyone thinks he’s gay as well as tall. And a pretty Asian girl with her long hair streaked black and red smiles at him as soon as he comes in the door, which is more encouragement than he expected.
There are a couple little clusters of people around the room, maybe ten in all, and a teacher he doesn’t recognize at the desk in the corner. Sam lets Kim lead him and ends up sitting beside a person with wavy dark blonde hair and a black t-shirt that says, “Do me a favor: ignore me.” Sam offers an uncertain smile, hair falling into his eyes in a way he figures implies harmlessness. “Hi,” says the blonde. “I’m Jay.” The hand held out for Sam’s is decorated with electric blue nail polish.
“I’m Sam,” replies Sam politely, shaking hands.
“How tall are you?” asks the girl with the red and black hair suddenly, turning in her seat, as if that’s a totally normal question to ask a total stranger.
“Um,” says Sam. “Six-foot three, maybe.”
“Is everyone in your family tall?”
Jay elbows her. “That’s Josie. You get used to her.”
Josie elbows back. “I was just trying to make conversation, asshole.”
“Sam’s a little shy,” offers Kim, like she’s an expert on Sam’s brain. “His family moves a lot and he never really learned how to interact with normal humans.”
“Well, luckily there are none of those here,” says Jay, winking at him.
He almost misses Josie asking, “Why’d your family move so much?” over the sudden rush in his ears. No one has ever winked at him before, except probably Dean, and that’s totally different. Jay has really nice eyes, a warm, coffee sort of color.
“My dad’s job,” he replies vaguely, darting another glance at Jay, who is smiling at him.
Josie’s probably about to ask what his dad’s job is, but just then a girl with spiky red hair and freckles all over her skinny arms walks in and says, “Are we having a meeting today or what?”
A gothy boy at the front of the room raises his hand. “I vote for ‘or what.’”
“And I vote for ‘shut up, Tony,’” replies the girl.
“Casey,” warns the teacher from the corner. “Weren’t we going to try to have one meeting without petty insults?”
“That wasn’t an insult, Mr. Sklenik: that was a helpful suggestion. As president of this fine organization, I have to keep the members in line.”
Mr. Sklenik just shakes his head and goes back to the papers he’s grading.
In spite of Casey’s “are we having a meeting,” it doesn’t seem very organized to Sam. They move all the desks and play a game where everyone stands in different parts of the room depending on their answers to a set of questions Casey reads off a card. It makes Sam feel oddly vulnerable, telling these strangers something about himself with his body. But they only do it for about ten minutes before their president gets bored, and then they talk about the speaker who’s set to come the next week, a lawyer friend of Tony’s dad’s who’s going to talk to them about what hate crime legislation really means. “He’s really hot, too,” Tony says, when some people look skeptical.
Sam keeps quiet and assesses the situation, this motley group of geeks and punks and girls in polo shirts who all get along and seem to genuinely like each other. At four-thirty, Mr. Sklenik taps his watch in a pointed way. “Anybody need a ride?” asks a plump quiet girl whose name Sam doesn’t know, and he thinks of Dean, waiting out in the parking lot, and has no idea how to explain this, except that he wants to be a part of it.
“You have a way home?” asks Jay, jangling a set of keys, and Sam feels nervous heat low in his belly. There’s a part of him that wants to say no.
“My brother should be here,” he says. “But thanks.”
“Maybe next week.”
“Yeah,” agrees Sam, and he can’t help it that his eyes follow Jay out of the room.
***
“So, what is Jay?” Sam asks the next afternoon, laid out on Kim’s floor with his history book because his family’s apartment is currently full of the noxious smell of hemlock, and they’re letting it air out. He told her they were fumigating.
“You really are socially retarded, aren’t you?” Kim asks.
Sam feels himself blushing. “No, I just…”
“You want to know what pronouns to use,” she says slyly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, then why don’t you ask Jay?”
***
Sam does, awkwardly, rubbing his hands over his knees in the cramped passenger seat of Jay’s Nissan after the next week’s meeting. “I, uh,” Sam says, “so, I don’t know what to call you.”
“I always answer to Jay,” Jay tells him amiably.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know, Sam.” Jay sighs and pushes back a wayward curl of hair. “Do you want a pronoun or an autobiography?”
“I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“For you, I’m a boy.”
Sam isn’t sure what to make of that. “Just for me?”
Jay shrugs tensely. “For everyone, as much as possible.” Sam looks at Jay, and lets his understanding come together, like when dad took him on a hunt and said, “That’s a Black Dog” and Sam knew it was, knew he’d never see another shadowy, grimacing shape like that and not know. Boy, he says to himself, and the angles of Jay’s face, the tapping of Jay’s fingers on the steering wheel, lock into place.
“Okay,” Sam says, to fill the silence.
Jay answers with a fleeting smile. “Right. So, where do I turn?”
Sam makes Jay drop him at the corner store down the street from his building, claiming he wants to get a soda. He’s not exactly ashamed of where he lives, but he likes Jay (that’s how Sam chooses to classify the squirming in his belly) and he doesn’t want Jay to think he’s a freak, no matter that all the kids in GSA claim to be freaks.
***
“How was chess club, Sammy?” Dean asks when Sam comes in. He’s got his feet propped on the rickety coffee table and a beer between his legs. Sam has the urge to point out that the coffee table’s going to break if he keeps doing that, but he knows that would just give Dean more pleasure in ragging on him. “Learn any good moves?”
“Better than yours,” Sam replies, and Dean grins.
Sam sees his brother inspecting the sweat-darkened underarms of his t-shirt. “You didn’t walk from school, did you?”
“I got a ride,” Sam says, as casually as he can. But he can’t stop the sideways dart of his eyes, and Dean pounces.
“Sammy, I think you’ve got yourself a geeky little lady friend. With wheels.” Dean toasts him with his beer. “We might be related after all.”
“Shut up,” says Sam, because it’s not, not like that. He’s not gay, and liking Jay, that would be gay. Except, it’s different, isn’t it? Jay’s like a loophole. And Sam knows he’s got to stop thinking about it.
“I bet she’s one of those chicks who takes off her glasses and her cardigan and bam! Hottie. Have you gotten her out of her cardigan yet, Sammy, you sly dog?”
Sam ignores him and goes into the kitchen for a glass of water. He doesn’t get his brother anymore. After high school, Dean just accepted his part in the family business, as if it was really the only thing to do. He works at the garage part-time, and goes out some nights with the guys he works with, coming into their room at three in the morning smelling like smoke and sweat, sometimes not coming home at all. He jumps when Dad says jump. Sam’s pretty sure there’s got to be more to life than that, but Dean doesn’t seem to mind.
“Hey,” Dean calls into the kitchen. “You up for a hunt this weekend? Dad called about a poltergeist a couple of towns over. Sounds like a nasty son of a bitch.”
“Okay,” says Sam, and Dean claps him on the shoulder on his way to the fridge.
***
Sam goes to school on Monday in long sleeves to hide the spiraling bruise on his arm where he’d been attacked by the cord to a hairdryer. He keeps rubbing it absently in class, and he has to remind himself not to push up his sleeves, even though it’s sticky hot all day. By the time he gets to GSA, he’s fidgety and ready to get home to the hiccupping window air conditioner. But this might be his only chance all week to see Jay, who’s a senior and spends half his days taking community college classes across town. And as pathetic as it is to admit, that’s important to him.
Casey and Alice get into an argument about Ann Heche, and the meeting breaks up early due to lack of interest. Sam’s trying to remember if he left his chem book in his locker when Jay touches his shoulder and says, “Do you want to go for ice cream?”
Sam freezes, feels the press of Jay’s fingers tingle through him, and says with more honesty than he intended, “I don’t have any money.”
Jay shrugs. “My treat,” he says. “Come on.”
***
They sit on a picnic table outside Dairy Queen, and Sam watches a flake of chocolate melt on Jay’s lower lip as he bites into his cone. “So what’s your story, Sam?” Jay asks, and Sam nearly punches his thumb through the side of his cone because he doesn’t want this moment to come so soon. The lying, dissembling, “oh, it’s complicated” moment he’s gone through with every friend he ever had. The moment that usually makes them say, “Oh,” and sit with somebody else at lunch the next day.
“I don’t know,” says Sam, stalling. “Why?” He slurps up some ice cream that’s threatening to dribble over his hand.
“Because you never talk about your parents, and I don’t think that bruise on your wrist came from playing football.”
Sam looks down in alarm to find he’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow without even thinking, and the dark line of the bruise is clearly visible. “I got in a fight with a hairdryer,” Sam tells him, which is the truth, but the sort of truth no one ever believes.
“A-ha,” says Jay skeptically. “Well, if you ever want to talk, let me know.”
“It wasn’t my family. My dad, I mean, he’s a hardass, but he would never hurt me.” There are relatively few things in life that Sam Winchester is sure of, but that’s one of them.
“Okay.” Jay licks a slow circle around his ice cream, and Sam shifts uncomfortably. “So, how long do you think you’ll be here for?”
Sam shrugs, tearing his eyes away. “Sometimes we stay for a while, sometimes not. My dad has these projects he does, for work. So he has to go where the work is, you know.”
“You don’t get a say at all?”
“Nope. My brother, I think he sort of likes it. But…” Sam wrinkles his nose.
“But you don’t.”
“Sometimes we go places I’d like to stay.” He catches Jay’s eyes for a second, and thinks he sees something he recognizes there.
“My family lived in Texas when I was little, but I barely remember it. Here is home.”
Sam can’t even comprehend the weight to that word. Sometimes Dean used to tell him stories about before the fire, stories about Mom, but he still doesn’t get what they meant to Dean, like there’s this gap inside him. “What’s your family like?” he asks.
“They’re great. They don’t really get me, but they’re trying. My mom’s a doctor and my dad sells shoes. And I’ve got two little sisters, Natasha and Emily. They’re ten.”
“Twins?”
“Yeah. They get away with stuff I never would have because there are two of them. Strength in numbers, right?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Siblings are never fair. How old’s your brother?”
“Twenty-one. But he acts like he’s ten a lot of the time.”
“Do you spend a lot of time with him?”
“My dad goes away sometimes, for work, and then it’s just me and Dean. I used to idolize him, you know, but now that he’s out of school, he doesn’t really do much, and I don’t know…” He watches Jay crunch through the last bite of his cone, rubs his own empty, sticky hands on his jeans. Sam finds himself wondering whether Jay’s mouth would be cold to kiss when he hears a low familiar growl cresting the hill, breaking the easy afternoon quiet. That sound has meant safety, and family, coming and going and all the little adventures in between. But right now it just means Sam’s caught, in the middle of something nice and fragile and shiny-new, and he freezes.
“What?” asks Jay, seeing Sam’s panicked expression.
“That’s my brother’s car.”
“Is he really going to mind you being at Dairy Queen?”
Sam takes a deep breath, shakes it off, because whatever else Dean is he’s not psychic. “No, I just… No. Of course he’s not.”
Dean’s cruising along with the windows open, screeching guitar solo blaring out, and he doesn’t even look over as he passes, but Sam’s eyes follow the Impala down the road anyhow, until it slips out of sight over the next rise.
“Cool car,” says Jay.
“Dean loves it.”
“So, why were you afraid of him seeing you here?”
Sam’s breath sticks in his throat, and a frantic part of his brain is clamoring that now is the time for action, that if he lets this chance go he may never get another. “I…” he says faintly, and then, before he loses his nerve, he leans in and brushes his mouth over Jay’s, soft. “I wanted to do that,” Sam whispers, pulling away, looking at Jay through the fall of his own bangs.
Jay’s smile blooms wide. “That’s a good reason,” he says. “But maybe here isn’t the best place.”
Sam licks his lips. “Someplace else?”
Jay smudges a thumb across Sam’s mouth. “Not today.” He hops off the picnic table. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
***
Sam doesn’t even try to hide his grin when he gets home, but no matter how many times Dean asks, he won’t say what’s made him so happy. It must still show on his face the next day, though, because Kim drops a note on his desk in history that says, “The Hundred Years War never made anyone this gleeful. You will tell me.”
That’s as strange and new as anything, having someone want to know why he’s happy, having someone look at him with curiosity instead of suspicion. Things have been changing since he started going to GSA; there are people who say hi to him in the halls now, who sit by him at lunch and make small talk, like he isn’t just some freak.
“I hung out with Jay yesterday,” Sam tells Kim. “It was fun.” He doesn’t have to say anything else, but for once it doesn’t feel like he’s keeping a secret. Kim grins and claps her hands.
***
Mostly, the phone in the apartment (hooked up under the name Ezekiel McGillicutty) never rings unless it’s dad calling to check in or one of Dean’s friends from the shop making plans, so when it rings on Thursday night while Sam’s working on his trig homework, he lets Dean get it. But he glances up sharply when Dean says, “Sammy? Yeah, he’s here. Hang on a minute.”
Dean puts his hand over the receiver and whispers loudly, “I think it’s your girlfriend.”
Sam feels heat rising in his cheeks, and he lunges for the phone, so damn glad he’s tall enough now that games of keep-away don’t work. “Hello,” he says breathlessly, hand suddenly slick with sweat against the phone.
“Sam? It’s Jay. I was just wondering if you want to do something tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Yeah. That’d be fun.” Dean makes kissy noises at him, and Sam punches him in the shoulder.
“Good. I’ve got some errands to run after school, but I can pick you up at five or so. We can grab dinner, go down to the reservoir?”
“Sure, yeah. So I’ll see you at five. Great.” He doesn’t know what else to say, doesn’t want to say more than he has to with Dean standing there leering at him. “Well, Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Sam,” says Jay, and Sam can hear the smile in his voice.
When he hangs up, Dean’s grinning. “You gonna make her buy you dinner before you put out, Sammy?”
“I don’t understand why anyone would ever date you,” Sam replies matter-of-factly, sitting down and trying to get back to his math.
Dean snorts. “I don’t ask them to date me.” He grabs a Coke from the fridge and wanders back into the living room.
Sam can’t concentrate on his homework after that though, too worried about whether or not it is a date, and what the hell he’s supposed to do on a date with a guy, especially a guy like Jay.
***
They eat their burgers sitting on the hood of Jay’s car, sunset turning the water in front of them pink and gold. Swallowing all his pride, Sam had bummed ten bucks from Dean so at least he could buy his own dinner, and they had gone to what Jay said was “the best burger joint in the state.” Licking the grease from his lips, Sam has to agree about that. He grabs one of Jay’s onion rings out of the paper bag between them, and Jay grins at him.
“Great, right?” Jay asks, and Sam nods, his mouth full of crispy batter. “You needed someone to show you the local color.”
“This is pretty great too,” Sam says, gesturing at the reservoir, dancing with little ruffles of wind.
“I like it here.” Jay squints up into the pines around them. “It’s quiet and it smells good.”
They’re silent for a long time, Sam finishing his burger and his drink, chewing thoughtfully on the straw, wondering whether Jay’s really just showing him the sights because he’s a nice guy. “Do you bring a lot of people out here?”
Jay shakes his head. “Not many,” he says casually, and Sam wants that to mean something, but he can’t tell if it does. Jay slides off the hood of the car and tosses their trash into the can marked “Keep Our Parks Clean.” “Come on,” he says over his shoulder, and Sam follows him down to the water, watching the way the light hits Jay’s hair, burning it golden.
They sit in the grass, pine needles crunching under them, and Sam doesn’t know what to do. He picks at a loose thread on the seam of his jeans, and waits for Jay to make the next move.
“Do you think your family’s going to stay here a while?” Jay asks.
Sam’s stomach twists unpleasantly. “I never know. We might though. We lived in Des Moines for a whole year once.” He doesn’t mention that it was because his dad and Pastor Jim were sweeping the whole state of Iowa, looking for signs of the thing that killed Sam’s mom.
“A year doesn’t seem like that long.” Jay shakes his hair out of his eyes and looks thoughtfully at Sam.
Sam looks back. “Yeah, but if we stayed here for a year, by the time we left, you would have graduated and who knows where you’d be?”
“San Francisco,” Jay answers promptly. “I’m going to live out there until I can get residency and go to Berkeley for in-state tuition.” He glances off towards the water again, smiling. “That’s the plan.”
Sam doesn’t know a lot about having plans, and he’s suddenly envious because he’s never gotten to make any, never gotten to choose anything about where he lives or what he does, and he’s afraid maybe he never will. He’s the only kid he knows with college catalogues hidden under his bed instead of porn, the only one who has to say he has detention when he stays after to meet a college counselor. “That sounds like a good plan,” he tells Jay.
“And there are doctors out there, so I might…” he trails off, swallows.
“Are you sick?” Sam asks, and then kicks himself for his stupidity. “Never mind. Sorry.”
Jay smiles and leans into him a little. “It’s okay. I don’t mind if you forget.” He’s close enough that when he turns his head, his breath hits Sam’s cheek in a burst of warmth. Sam bites his lip, ducks his head and then Jay’s kissing him, mouth soft on his, tongue opening him up. Sam gasps into it, wavering for a moment before shutting his eyes and kissing back, one hand sliding around Jay’s neck and pulling him in closer. They fit together just right, Jay’s fingers catching in Sam’s hair, his mouth guiding Sam’s into a slow, slick rhythm.
By the time Sam opens his eyes again, it’s dark, the sun making just the slimmest strip of pink on the horizon. His lips feel swollen, wet, and when he licks them, he can taste Jay there. “Wow,” he says, his hand finding Jay’s where it rests on his knee and twining their fingers together, not ready to lose contact yet.
“Do you need to be home any time soon?” Jay asks, staring out at the water.
“Dean won’t care,” Sam replies, and Jay kisses him again.
***
They sit there until they can barely see each other anymore, kissing, talking about school, Jay telling him about the things he wants to see in San Francisco. Every once in a while, Sam hits a stop, something he knows he’s not supposed to talk about, and Jay squeezes his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, after Jay asks where his dad is right now, and Sam can’t tell him “hunting a wendigo in Minnesota.”
“We’ve all got things we don’t talk about. You’ve just got more of them than a lot of people.”
Which pretty much sums up his life right there.
***
They’re turning onto Sam’s street when Jay says, “I take it you’re not out to your family.”
Sam blinks. “No, I mean, I don’t know if I’m… if there’s anything to come out about.”
Jay raises as his eyebrows and glances down at himself. “Uh, Sam…”
“Yeah, but you’re…”
Jay holds up a hand to stop him. “There’s no non-offensive way that sentence could end.”
You’re a loophole, Sam was planning to say, but playing it back in his head, he can see why Jay might not like that so much. “I’m sorry,” Sam tells him softly. “I didn’t mean to...”
They pull up outside Sam’s building. Jay’s squinting at him in the glow from the rental office window. “Do you look at me and see a girl?” Jay asks, voice hard and eyes soft, like the people Dad talks to on jobs who’ve never had someone believe their stories before.
Sam shakes his head. “Never,” he says honestly. He’s not sure what he does see sometimes, because he doesn’t think of Jay quite like a boy either, or quite like anybody he’s ever known.
Jay leans in and kisses him again, slow, and Sam guesses that was the right answer. “See you on Monday,” Jay says, pulling away.
“Goodnight,” Sam says. “Thanks.” And Jay winks at him just like he did that first day in GSA, and Sam feels the same thrill he did then.
***
“It’s ten o’clock, young man,” Dean says, wagging a finger at him as he comes in the door. “What are you doing home so early?”
Sam’s too happy to even be annoyed. “I don’t have to spend hours getting my dates drunk first,” he says cheerfully, sitting down at the end of the couch and glancing at the slasher movie on the TV.
Dean smiles, open and genuine, nothing mocking in it. He offers Sam a swig of his beer. “Congratulations, baby brother.”
They watch the movie for a while in silence. Sam doesn’t recognize it, but it doesn’t matter much. A man is chasing some girl in a little tank top and no bra through the woods with an axe when Dean says, “So, are you serious about this girl?”
Sam’s eyes narrow. “Why?”
Dean shrugs and doesn’t look at him. “If you are, I’ll talk to dad, try and make sure we can stay awhile longer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Geek like you, gotta make sure you have a fighting chance. Now shut up, this is the best part.” The man on-screen beheads the girl in one stroke, and a close-up of her face shows her eyes whirling crazily while the stump of her neck pumps blood. Dean laughs out loud and slaps his knee. “Now that’s entertainment.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Thanks,” he says anyway, and Dean turns a quick grin on him.
“It’s my duty to make sure you’re not a virgin ‘til you’re thirty, Sammy.”
***
The next Saturday Dean’s taken a shift at the garage and Dad’s in Kentucky, so Sam figures it’s safe to invite Jay over. He said they could do homework together, but since they’re not even in the same grade, let alone the same classes, he’s pretty sure Jay knows what he meant. Still, Jay brings his backpack and they read for a while, turning pages on the couch, before Jay says, “Can I see your room?” and Sam sets down his book and nods.
Dean’s guns are stashed neatly in the closet, his knives in the cabinet between their beds. Jay doesn’t make a comment about Sam still sharing a room with his twenty-one year old brother, and Sam’s pretty damn grateful for that.
“Seems kind of empty,” Jay says. There’s a frayed basketball poster on one wall, a naked girl on a beach on another, two beds, a dresser, the bedside cabinet, and Dean’s grungy socks flung all over the half of the room closer to the window. Sam’s teetering stack of library books haunts a corner.
“We can’t have a lot when we move so much,” says Sam, and he tries to remember the last time he had a friend over to any of the string of shitty apartments and motels they’ve lived in.
Jay peers at a couple of pictures on the dresser, Mom and Dad back before Dean was born, Dean at four years old, peering through the bars of Sam’s crib. “Your family doesn’t take pictures much anymore, huh?” Jay says, and Sam shrugs, feeling like maybe he’s giving something away when Jay already knows too much about him.
“Sometimes Dean buys disposable cameras, but he usually forgets to get the pictures developed.”
Jay smiles. “That’s what my mom does too.” Sam lingers in the doorway, hands in his pockets, until Jay comes over and curls a hand around the back of his neck. “When’s your brother going to get back?” he asks.
“Not until four, at least, and he might stay out…” Sam stops talking as Jay’s mouth covers his, and it seems like a matter of seconds before they’re sprawled on his bed, Jay lying halfway on top of him, kissing him full and deep. Sam’s arms settle around his waist, and Jay feels small in his arms - like anyone would - but solid. Not like Robin Churchill, who he’d made out with a couple of times back in Michigan, a skinny, birdlike girl, whose every movement he’d expected to creak with the effort.
Jay’s tongue winds around his, makes Sam moan deep in his throat as he feels himself getting hard. He shifts restlessly and kisses Jay harder, trying to say with his mouth what’s he’s not ready to say with his body. Jay makes a soft sound when Sam tugs his lower lip with his teeth, and Sam grins and does it again. His hands slide under the hem of Jay’s t-shirt, and Sam rubs his fingertips over smooth, warm skin, the rough edge of another shirt resisting the finger Sam slides up the valley of Jay’s spine.
“What’s that?” he asks hazily, moving off Jay’s mouth to trail kisses down the side of his neck.
“It’s a shirt, to help keep my boobs down,” Jay replies, and doesn’t stop kissing him.
Sam gets a little distracted by the idea of boobs, running his hands farther up Jay’s back, feeling the tight spandex spanning his ribcage, strap running up between his shoulderblades. “Does it make it hard to breathe?”
Jay looks up from mouthing Sam’s collarbone and says, “I don’t think that’s what’s making it hard to breathe.” He bites down on the side of Sam’s neck, and Sam gasps in surprise and unexpected pleasure.
Jay shifts on top of him and his thigh brushes Sam’s hard-on. Sam squirms sideways in embarrassment. “Sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t be. If I had one of my own, it would be doing the same thing.” And Sam doesn’t know why that’s turn-on, but it is, thinking about Jay wanting him, getting off on him with a piece of equipment he doesn’t even have. Jay slides a thigh in between Sam’s, rocking against his dick, and Sam bends his knee up, trying to return the favor.
In hindsight, he guesses it’s not a surprise that they don’t hear the front door, that Sam doesn’t know Dean’s there until he opens his eyes and there he is, standing in the doorway with his mouth hanging open. “Shit,” Sam whispers, and Dean’s gone again by the time Jay looks up.
“Your brother?” he asks, and Sam nods shakily. “Do you want me to stay?”
Sam sits up. “No. Thanks. I think I need to handle this one on my own. But I…”
Jay rubs his thumb across Sam’s cheek. “You can call me if you need to, or if he has questions.”
“Thanks.” Sam realizes his hands are shaking as he walks Jay to the door, and he shoves them into his pockets. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Dean at the kitchen table, stripping the label from a bottle of beer.
“See you Monday?” Jay asks hesitantly, tongue sneaking out across his lower lip.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and leans in to brush his mouth across Jay’s one last time, hopes it won’t be the last time as Jay smiles into his mouth.
***
“Who was that?” Dean asks, in a low voice like he’s channeling dad.
“That was Jay,” Sam says, sitting down across from him.
“And what is Jay?”
“A friend from school.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Sam.”
“He’s” - that pronoun has never seemed so daunting in Sam’s life - “somebody I met at school, and we’ve been hanging out, and I like him. A lot.” He digs his nails into his thighs, but it doesn’t stop the shaking.
“He’s the one you’ve been out with, the one giving you rides?”
“Yeah.”
Dean clears his throat, and Sam can see him struggling for an angle, a place to start. “Sam, is Jay a real boy, if you know what I’m saying?”
“Does it matter, Dean?” he finds his voice rising uncontrollably. “Does it matter if I was kissing somebody who was born that way? He’s still a guy.”
“It matters,” Dean growls, “because you didn’t say a single goddamn word to me about what you were doing. You’ve been having this person over, and…”
Sam interrupts him. “Like you tell me all about every girl you hook up with in back of a bar.”
“Do you want me to? And besides, at least they’re all girls. Are you gay, Sam?”
“The world’s not as simple as gay and straight,” he snaps. If there’s anything GSA’s taught him, it’s that.
“Okay, fine, PC boy. Do you think you’re going to spend a lot more time making out with guys?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says quietly, and Dean’s face softens, reminds him of the days when he really did tell Dean everything. “I don’t know what I am.”
Dean’s quiet for a long time, not quite frowning, his eyes on Sam’s. “Are you going to tell Dad?”
Sam freezes, and he’s pretty sure his heart stops for a second. “No, Dean, I… Please, please don’t tell him. I’ll do anything.”
Dean shifts into a glare. “I’m not going to squeal on you, you little asshole. But you know he’s gonna find out sometime. Dad’s not stupid. And it’ll be a hell of a lot better if you tell him than if he catches you...” Dean waves a hand toward their room.
Sam’s stomach twists. “I know. But not yet. I’m not ready yet.”
Dean takes a swallow of his beer, nods to himself. “Okay.”
“Really? Dean, why are you being so cool about this?”
“You’ve been happier the last few weeks than anytime since your balls dropped. That’s not a bad thing. That’s something you could use some more of.” He tilts his beer bottle towards Sam. “Got one question though: with Jay being… not all man in the pants, are you still getting some pussy out of this?” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
Sam pushes back his chair and stands up, blushing furiously. “You’re an asshole,” he says matter-of-factly, and starts to walk out of the kitchen, torn between anger, embarrassment, and gratitude.
“Come on,” Dean calls after him. “It’s a fair question. I’m trying to be supportive here.”
Sam rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer. But he finds himself grinning as he shuts the door to their room behind him. As soon as Dean’s safely engrossed in his cheesy movie of the night, Sam thinks he’ll call Jay.
~fin~
Feedback is wildly fangirled and thinkily replied to.
Title: Caught My Heart in the Middle of a Feeling
Fandom: SPN
Pairing/Characters: Sam/OC, Dean
Rating: PG-13 for language and some sexual content
Disclaimer: Sam and Dean and their world belong to Eric Kripke et al. I make no profit from this work.
Prompt: 772. Supernatural: Sam Winchester. Sam gets involved in a high school GSA not because he's gay but because it seems like a place that welcomes outcasts like him. What happens when he begins to have real questions about his own sexual identity? And what does he tell Dean?
Summary: Sam goes looking for new friends and finds something he never would have expected.
Notes: This story took me by surprise at least as much as it did Sam, and there's no way it really ends here. Betaed by the fantastic littlewings04 and my awesome mother. Any further mistakes are my own. ~5900 words.
Sam’s the new kid, always, perpetually, forever and ever amen. And having grown six inches in the past six months isn’t doing him any favors either. Now they just call him “that tall kid” instead of “that kid with the floppy hair.” It isn’t really an improvement. So on Monday when Kim from AP European History tells him he should stay after with her for GSA, he does, even if half the reason is curiosity about the meaning of the acronym, and the other half is sheer desperation because after two weeks at a new school, she’s still the only person he’s said more than three sentences to.
Sam thinks he deserves some credit for not bolting as soon as he finds out GSA stands for Gay-Straight Alliance. He could have. There was a convenient moment when he could have said, “Hey, sorry, I forgot to tell my brother I was staying late. He’s waiting outside.” If Dean hadn’t made sense of his stuttered voicemail, it might not even be a lie. He’s a little confused as to why Kim thought he belonged here. But he’s got no friends, so it’s not as though it’s going to be bad for his rep if everyone thinks he’s gay as well as tall. And a pretty Asian girl with her long hair streaked black and red smiles at him as soon as he comes in the door, which is more encouragement than he expected.
There are a couple little clusters of people around the room, maybe ten in all, and a teacher he doesn’t recognize at the desk in the corner. Sam lets Kim lead him and ends up sitting beside a person with wavy dark blonde hair and a black t-shirt that says, “Do me a favor: ignore me.” Sam offers an uncertain smile, hair falling into his eyes in a way he figures implies harmlessness. “Hi,” says the blonde. “I’m Jay.” The hand held out for Sam’s is decorated with electric blue nail polish.
“I’m Sam,” replies Sam politely, shaking hands.
“How tall are you?” asks the girl with the red and black hair suddenly, turning in her seat, as if that’s a totally normal question to ask a total stranger.
“Um,” says Sam. “Six-foot three, maybe.”
“Is everyone in your family tall?”
Jay elbows her. “That’s Josie. You get used to her.”
Josie elbows back. “I was just trying to make conversation, asshole.”
“Sam’s a little shy,” offers Kim, like she’s an expert on Sam’s brain. “His family moves a lot and he never really learned how to interact with normal humans.”
“Well, luckily there are none of those here,” says Jay, winking at him.
He almost misses Josie asking, “Why’d your family move so much?” over the sudden rush in his ears. No one has ever winked at him before, except probably Dean, and that’s totally different. Jay has really nice eyes, a warm, coffee sort of color.
“My dad’s job,” he replies vaguely, darting another glance at Jay, who is smiling at him.
Josie’s probably about to ask what his dad’s job is, but just then a girl with spiky red hair and freckles all over her skinny arms walks in and says, “Are we having a meeting today or what?”
A gothy boy at the front of the room raises his hand. “I vote for ‘or what.’”
“And I vote for ‘shut up, Tony,’” replies the girl.
“Casey,” warns the teacher from the corner. “Weren’t we going to try to have one meeting without petty insults?”
“That wasn’t an insult, Mr. Sklenik: that was a helpful suggestion. As president of this fine organization, I have to keep the members in line.”
Mr. Sklenik just shakes his head and goes back to the papers he’s grading.
In spite of Casey’s “are we having a meeting,” it doesn’t seem very organized to Sam. They move all the desks and play a game where everyone stands in different parts of the room depending on their answers to a set of questions Casey reads off a card. It makes Sam feel oddly vulnerable, telling these strangers something about himself with his body. But they only do it for about ten minutes before their president gets bored, and then they talk about the speaker who’s set to come the next week, a lawyer friend of Tony’s dad’s who’s going to talk to them about what hate crime legislation really means. “He’s really hot, too,” Tony says, when some people look skeptical.
Sam keeps quiet and assesses the situation, this motley group of geeks and punks and girls in polo shirts who all get along and seem to genuinely like each other. At four-thirty, Mr. Sklenik taps his watch in a pointed way. “Anybody need a ride?” asks a plump quiet girl whose name Sam doesn’t know, and he thinks of Dean, waiting out in the parking lot, and has no idea how to explain this, except that he wants to be a part of it.
“You have a way home?” asks Jay, jangling a set of keys, and Sam feels nervous heat low in his belly. There’s a part of him that wants to say no.
“My brother should be here,” he says. “But thanks.”
“Maybe next week.”
“Yeah,” agrees Sam, and he can’t help it that his eyes follow Jay out of the room.
***
“So, what is Jay?” Sam asks the next afternoon, laid out on Kim’s floor with his history book because his family’s apartment is currently full of the noxious smell of hemlock, and they’re letting it air out. He told her they were fumigating.
“You really are socially retarded, aren’t you?” Kim asks.
Sam feels himself blushing. “No, I just…”
“You want to know what pronouns to use,” she says slyly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, then why don’t you ask Jay?”
***
Sam does, awkwardly, rubbing his hands over his knees in the cramped passenger seat of Jay’s Nissan after the next week’s meeting. “I, uh,” Sam says, “so, I don’t know what to call you.”
“I always answer to Jay,” Jay tells him amiably.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know, Sam.” Jay sighs and pushes back a wayward curl of hair. “Do you want a pronoun or an autobiography?”
“I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“For you, I’m a boy.”
Sam isn’t sure what to make of that. “Just for me?”
Jay shrugs tensely. “For everyone, as much as possible.” Sam looks at Jay, and lets his understanding come together, like when dad took him on a hunt and said, “That’s a Black Dog” and Sam knew it was, knew he’d never see another shadowy, grimacing shape like that and not know. Boy, he says to himself, and the angles of Jay’s face, the tapping of Jay’s fingers on the steering wheel, lock into place.
“Okay,” Sam says, to fill the silence.
Jay answers with a fleeting smile. “Right. So, where do I turn?”
Sam makes Jay drop him at the corner store down the street from his building, claiming he wants to get a soda. He’s not exactly ashamed of where he lives, but he likes Jay (that’s how Sam chooses to classify the squirming in his belly) and he doesn’t want Jay to think he’s a freak, no matter that all the kids in GSA claim to be freaks.
***
“How was chess club, Sammy?” Dean asks when Sam comes in. He’s got his feet propped on the rickety coffee table and a beer between his legs. Sam has the urge to point out that the coffee table’s going to break if he keeps doing that, but he knows that would just give Dean more pleasure in ragging on him. “Learn any good moves?”
“Better than yours,” Sam replies, and Dean grins.
Sam sees his brother inspecting the sweat-darkened underarms of his t-shirt. “You didn’t walk from school, did you?”
“I got a ride,” Sam says, as casually as he can. But he can’t stop the sideways dart of his eyes, and Dean pounces.
“Sammy, I think you’ve got yourself a geeky little lady friend. With wheels.” Dean toasts him with his beer. “We might be related after all.”
“Shut up,” says Sam, because it’s not, not like that. He’s not gay, and liking Jay, that would be gay. Except, it’s different, isn’t it? Jay’s like a loophole. And Sam knows he’s got to stop thinking about it.
“I bet she’s one of those chicks who takes off her glasses and her cardigan and bam! Hottie. Have you gotten her out of her cardigan yet, Sammy, you sly dog?”
Sam ignores him and goes into the kitchen for a glass of water. He doesn’t get his brother anymore. After high school, Dean just accepted his part in the family business, as if it was really the only thing to do. He works at the garage part-time, and goes out some nights with the guys he works with, coming into their room at three in the morning smelling like smoke and sweat, sometimes not coming home at all. He jumps when Dad says jump. Sam’s pretty sure there’s got to be more to life than that, but Dean doesn’t seem to mind.
“Hey,” Dean calls into the kitchen. “You up for a hunt this weekend? Dad called about a poltergeist a couple of towns over. Sounds like a nasty son of a bitch.”
“Okay,” says Sam, and Dean claps him on the shoulder on his way to the fridge.
***
Sam goes to school on Monday in long sleeves to hide the spiraling bruise on his arm where he’d been attacked by the cord to a hairdryer. He keeps rubbing it absently in class, and he has to remind himself not to push up his sleeves, even though it’s sticky hot all day. By the time he gets to GSA, he’s fidgety and ready to get home to the hiccupping window air conditioner. But this might be his only chance all week to see Jay, who’s a senior and spends half his days taking community college classes across town. And as pathetic as it is to admit, that’s important to him.
Casey and Alice get into an argument about Ann Heche, and the meeting breaks up early due to lack of interest. Sam’s trying to remember if he left his chem book in his locker when Jay touches his shoulder and says, “Do you want to go for ice cream?”
Sam freezes, feels the press of Jay’s fingers tingle through him, and says with more honesty than he intended, “I don’t have any money.”
Jay shrugs. “My treat,” he says. “Come on.”
***
They sit on a picnic table outside Dairy Queen, and Sam watches a flake of chocolate melt on Jay’s lower lip as he bites into his cone. “So what’s your story, Sam?” Jay asks, and Sam nearly punches his thumb through the side of his cone because he doesn’t want this moment to come so soon. The lying, dissembling, “oh, it’s complicated” moment he’s gone through with every friend he ever had. The moment that usually makes them say, “Oh,” and sit with somebody else at lunch the next day.
“I don’t know,” says Sam, stalling. “Why?” He slurps up some ice cream that’s threatening to dribble over his hand.
“Because you never talk about your parents, and I don’t think that bruise on your wrist came from playing football.”
Sam looks down in alarm to find he’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow without even thinking, and the dark line of the bruise is clearly visible. “I got in a fight with a hairdryer,” Sam tells him, which is the truth, but the sort of truth no one ever believes.
“A-ha,” says Jay skeptically. “Well, if you ever want to talk, let me know.”
“It wasn’t my family. My dad, I mean, he’s a hardass, but he would never hurt me.” There are relatively few things in life that Sam Winchester is sure of, but that’s one of them.
“Okay.” Jay licks a slow circle around his ice cream, and Sam shifts uncomfortably. “So, how long do you think you’ll be here for?”
Sam shrugs, tearing his eyes away. “Sometimes we stay for a while, sometimes not. My dad has these projects he does, for work. So he has to go where the work is, you know.”
“You don’t get a say at all?”
“Nope. My brother, I think he sort of likes it. But…” Sam wrinkles his nose.
“But you don’t.”
“Sometimes we go places I’d like to stay.” He catches Jay’s eyes for a second, and thinks he sees something he recognizes there.
“My family lived in Texas when I was little, but I barely remember it. Here is home.”
Sam can’t even comprehend the weight to that word. Sometimes Dean used to tell him stories about before the fire, stories about Mom, but he still doesn’t get what they meant to Dean, like there’s this gap inside him. “What’s your family like?” he asks.
“They’re great. They don’t really get me, but they’re trying. My mom’s a doctor and my dad sells shoes. And I’ve got two little sisters, Natasha and Emily. They’re ten.”
“Twins?”
“Yeah. They get away with stuff I never would have because there are two of them. Strength in numbers, right?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Siblings are never fair. How old’s your brother?”
“Twenty-one. But he acts like he’s ten a lot of the time.”
“Do you spend a lot of time with him?”
“My dad goes away sometimes, for work, and then it’s just me and Dean. I used to idolize him, you know, but now that he’s out of school, he doesn’t really do much, and I don’t know…” He watches Jay crunch through the last bite of his cone, rubs his own empty, sticky hands on his jeans. Sam finds himself wondering whether Jay’s mouth would be cold to kiss when he hears a low familiar growl cresting the hill, breaking the easy afternoon quiet. That sound has meant safety, and family, coming and going and all the little adventures in between. But right now it just means Sam’s caught, in the middle of something nice and fragile and shiny-new, and he freezes.
“What?” asks Jay, seeing Sam’s panicked expression.
“That’s my brother’s car.”
“Is he really going to mind you being at Dairy Queen?”
Sam takes a deep breath, shakes it off, because whatever else Dean is he’s not psychic. “No, I just… No. Of course he’s not.”
Dean’s cruising along with the windows open, screeching guitar solo blaring out, and he doesn’t even look over as he passes, but Sam’s eyes follow the Impala down the road anyhow, until it slips out of sight over the next rise.
“Cool car,” says Jay.
“Dean loves it.”
“So, why were you afraid of him seeing you here?”
Sam’s breath sticks in his throat, and a frantic part of his brain is clamoring that now is the time for action, that if he lets this chance go he may never get another. “I…” he says faintly, and then, before he loses his nerve, he leans in and brushes his mouth over Jay’s, soft. “I wanted to do that,” Sam whispers, pulling away, looking at Jay through the fall of his own bangs.
Jay’s smile blooms wide. “That’s a good reason,” he says. “But maybe here isn’t the best place.”
Sam licks his lips. “Someplace else?”
Jay smudges a thumb across Sam’s mouth. “Not today.” He hops off the picnic table. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
***
Sam doesn’t even try to hide his grin when he gets home, but no matter how many times Dean asks, he won’t say what’s made him so happy. It must still show on his face the next day, though, because Kim drops a note on his desk in history that says, “The Hundred Years War never made anyone this gleeful. You will tell me.”
That’s as strange and new as anything, having someone want to know why he’s happy, having someone look at him with curiosity instead of suspicion. Things have been changing since he started going to GSA; there are people who say hi to him in the halls now, who sit by him at lunch and make small talk, like he isn’t just some freak.
“I hung out with Jay yesterday,” Sam tells Kim. “It was fun.” He doesn’t have to say anything else, but for once it doesn’t feel like he’s keeping a secret. Kim grins and claps her hands.
***
Mostly, the phone in the apartment (hooked up under the name Ezekiel McGillicutty) never rings unless it’s dad calling to check in or one of Dean’s friends from the shop making plans, so when it rings on Thursday night while Sam’s working on his trig homework, he lets Dean get it. But he glances up sharply when Dean says, “Sammy? Yeah, he’s here. Hang on a minute.”
Dean puts his hand over the receiver and whispers loudly, “I think it’s your girlfriend.”
Sam feels heat rising in his cheeks, and he lunges for the phone, so damn glad he’s tall enough now that games of keep-away don’t work. “Hello,” he says breathlessly, hand suddenly slick with sweat against the phone.
“Sam? It’s Jay. I was just wondering if you want to do something tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Yeah. That’d be fun.” Dean makes kissy noises at him, and Sam punches him in the shoulder.
“Good. I’ve got some errands to run after school, but I can pick you up at five or so. We can grab dinner, go down to the reservoir?”
“Sure, yeah. So I’ll see you at five. Great.” He doesn’t know what else to say, doesn’t want to say more than he has to with Dean standing there leering at him. “Well, Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Sam,” says Jay, and Sam can hear the smile in his voice.
When he hangs up, Dean’s grinning. “You gonna make her buy you dinner before you put out, Sammy?”
“I don’t understand why anyone would ever date you,” Sam replies matter-of-factly, sitting down and trying to get back to his math.
Dean snorts. “I don’t ask them to date me.” He grabs a Coke from the fridge and wanders back into the living room.
Sam can’t concentrate on his homework after that though, too worried about whether or not it is a date, and what the hell he’s supposed to do on a date with a guy, especially a guy like Jay.
***
They eat their burgers sitting on the hood of Jay’s car, sunset turning the water in front of them pink and gold. Swallowing all his pride, Sam had bummed ten bucks from Dean so at least he could buy his own dinner, and they had gone to what Jay said was “the best burger joint in the state.” Licking the grease from his lips, Sam has to agree about that. He grabs one of Jay’s onion rings out of the paper bag between them, and Jay grins at him.
“Great, right?” Jay asks, and Sam nods, his mouth full of crispy batter. “You needed someone to show you the local color.”
“This is pretty great too,” Sam says, gesturing at the reservoir, dancing with little ruffles of wind.
“I like it here.” Jay squints up into the pines around them. “It’s quiet and it smells good.”
They’re silent for a long time, Sam finishing his burger and his drink, chewing thoughtfully on the straw, wondering whether Jay’s really just showing him the sights because he’s a nice guy. “Do you bring a lot of people out here?”
Jay shakes his head. “Not many,” he says casually, and Sam wants that to mean something, but he can’t tell if it does. Jay slides off the hood of the car and tosses their trash into the can marked “Keep Our Parks Clean.” “Come on,” he says over his shoulder, and Sam follows him down to the water, watching the way the light hits Jay’s hair, burning it golden.
They sit in the grass, pine needles crunching under them, and Sam doesn’t know what to do. He picks at a loose thread on the seam of his jeans, and waits for Jay to make the next move.
“Do you think your family’s going to stay here a while?” Jay asks.
Sam’s stomach twists unpleasantly. “I never know. We might though. We lived in Des Moines for a whole year once.” He doesn’t mention that it was because his dad and Pastor Jim were sweeping the whole state of Iowa, looking for signs of the thing that killed Sam’s mom.
“A year doesn’t seem like that long.” Jay shakes his hair out of his eyes and looks thoughtfully at Sam.
Sam looks back. “Yeah, but if we stayed here for a year, by the time we left, you would have graduated and who knows where you’d be?”
“San Francisco,” Jay answers promptly. “I’m going to live out there until I can get residency and go to Berkeley for in-state tuition.” He glances off towards the water again, smiling. “That’s the plan.”
Sam doesn’t know a lot about having plans, and he’s suddenly envious because he’s never gotten to make any, never gotten to choose anything about where he lives or what he does, and he’s afraid maybe he never will. He’s the only kid he knows with college catalogues hidden under his bed instead of porn, the only one who has to say he has detention when he stays after to meet a college counselor. “That sounds like a good plan,” he tells Jay.
“And there are doctors out there, so I might…” he trails off, swallows.
“Are you sick?” Sam asks, and then kicks himself for his stupidity. “Never mind. Sorry.”
Jay smiles and leans into him a little. “It’s okay. I don’t mind if you forget.” He’s close enough that when he turns his head, his breath hits Sam’s cheek in a burst of warmth. Sam bites his lip, ducks his head and then Jay’s kissing him, mouth soft on his, tongue opening him up. Sam gasps into it, wavering for a moment before shutting his eyes and kissing back, one hand sliding around Jay’s neck and pulling him in closer. They fit together just right, Jay’s fingers catching in Sam’s hair, his mouth guiding Sam’s into a slow, slick rhythm.
By the time Sam opens his eyes again, it’s dark, the sun making just the slimmest strip of pink on the horizon. His lips feel swollen, wet, and when he licks them, he can taste Jay there. “Wow,” he says, his hand finding Jay’s where it rests on his knee and twining their fingers together, not ready to lose contact yet.
“Do you need to be home any time soon?” Jay asks, staring out at the water.
“Dean won’t care,” Sam replies, and Jay kisses him again.
***
They sit there until they can barely see each other anymore, kissing, talking about school, Jay telling him about the things he wants to see in San Francisco. Every once in a while, Sam hits a stop, something he knows he’s not supposed to talk about, and Jay squeezes his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, after Jay asks where his dad is right now, and Sam can’t tell him “hunting a wendigo in Minnesota.”
“We’ve all got things we don’t talk about. You’ve just got more of them than a lot of people.”
Which pretty much sums up his life right there.
***
They’re turning onto Sam’s street when Jay says, “I take it you’re not out to your family.”
Sam blinks. “No, I mean, I don’t know if I’m… if there’s anything to come out about.”
Jay raises as his eyebrows and glances down at himself. “Uh, Sam…”
“Yeah, but you’re…”
Jay holds up a hand to stop him. “There’s no non-offensive way that sentence could end.”
You’re a loophole, Sam was planning to say, but playing it back in his head, he can see why Jay might not like that so much. “I’m sorry,” Sam tells him softly. “I didn’t mean to...”
They pull up outside Sam’s building. Jay’s squinting at him in the glow from the rental office window. “Do you look at me and see a girl?” Jay asks, voice hard and eyes soft, like the people Dad talks to on jobs who’ve never had someone believe their stories before.
Sam shakes his head. “Never,” he says honestly. He’s not sure what he does see sometimes, because he doesn’t think of Jay quite like a boy either, or quite like anybody he’s ever known.
Jay leans in and kisses him again, slow, and Sam guesses that was the right answer. “See you on Monday,” Jay says, pulling away.
“Goodnight,” Sam says. “Thanks.” And Jay winks at him just like he did that first day in GSA, and Sam feels the same thrill he did then.
***
“It’s ten o’clock, young man,” Dean says, wagging a finger at him as he comes in the door. “What are you doing home so early?”
Sam’s too happy to even be annoyed. “I don’t have to spend hours getting my dates drunk first,” he says cheerfully, sitting down at the end of the couch and glancing at the slasher movie on the TV.
Dean smiles, open and genuine, nothing mocking in it. He offers Sam a swig of his beer. “Congratulations, baby brother.”
They watch the movie for a while in silence. Sam doesn’t recognize it, but it doesn’t matter much. A man is chasing some girl in a little tank top and no bra through the woods with an axe when Dean says, “So, are you serious about this girl?”
Sam’s eyes narrow. “Why?”
Dean shrugs and doesn’t look at him. “If you are, I’ll talk to dad, try and make sure we can stay awhile longer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Geek like you, gotta make sure you have a fighting chance. Now shut up, this is the best part.” The man on-screen beheads the girl in one stroke, and a close-up of her face shows her eyes whirling crazily while the stump of her neck pumps blood. Dean laughs out loud and slaps his knee. “Now that’s entertainment.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Thanks,” he says anyway, and Dean turns a quick grin on him.
“It’s my duty to make sure you’re not a virgin ‘til you’re thirty, Sammy.”
***
The next Saturday Dean’s taken a shift at the garage and Dad’s in Kentucky, so Sam figures it’s safe to invite Jay over. He said they could do homework together, but since they’re not even in the same grade, let alone the same classes, he’s pretty sure Jay knows what he meant. Still, Jay brings his backpack and they read for a while, turning pages on the couch, before Jay says, “Can I see your room?” and Sam sets down his book and nods.
Dean’s guns are stashed neatly in the closet, his knives in the cabinet between their beds. Jay doesn’t make a comment about Sam still sharing a room with his twenty-one year old brother, and Sam’s pretty damn grateful for that.
“Seems kind of empty,” Jay says. There’s a frayed basketball poster on one wall, a naked girl on a beach on another, two beds, a dresser, the bedside cabinet, and Dean’s grungy socks flung all over the half of the room closer to the window. Sam’s teetering stack of library books haunts a corner.
“We can’t have a lot when we move so much,” says Sam, and he tries to remember the last time he had a friend over to any of the string of shitty apartments and motels they’ve lived in.
Jay peers at a couple of pictures on the dresser, Mom and Dad back before Dean was born, Dean at four years old, peering through the bars of Sam’s crib. “Your family doesn’t take pictures much anymore, huh?” Jay says, and Sam shrugs, feeling like maybe he’s giving something away when Jay already knows too much about him.
“Sometimes Dean buys disposable cameras, but he usually forgets to get the pictures developed.”
Jay smiles. “That’s what my mom does too.” Sam lingers in the doorway, hands in his pockets, until Jay comes over and curls a hand around the back of his neck. “When’s your brother going to get back?” he asks.
“Not until four, at least, and he might stay out…” Sam stops talking as Jay’s mouth covers his, and it seems like a matter of seconds before they’re sprawled on his bed, Jay lying halfway on top of him, kissing him full and deep. Sam’s arms settle around his waist, and Jay feels small in his arms - like anyone would - but solid. Not like Robin Churchill, who he’d made out with a couple of times back in Michigan, a skinny, birdlike girl, whose every movement he’d expected to creak with the effort.
Jay’s tongue winds around his, makes Sam moan deep in his throat as he feels himself getting hard. He shifts restlessly and kisses Jay harder, trying to say with his mouth what’s he’s not ready to say with his body. Jay makes a soft sound when Sam tugs his lower lip with his teeth, and Sam grins and does it again. His hands slide under the hem of Jay’s t-shirt, and Sam rubs his fingertips over smooth, warm skin, the rough edge of another shirt resisting the finger Sam slides up the valley of Jay’s spine.
“What’s that?” he asks hazily, moving off Jay’s mouth to trail kisses down the side of his neck.
“It’s a shirt, to help keep my boobs down,” Jay replies, and doesn’t stop kissing him.
Sam gets a little distracted by the idea of boobs, running his hands farther up Jay’s back, feeling the tight spandex spanning his ribcage, strap running up between his shoulderblades. “Does it make it hard to breathe?”
Jay looks up from mouthing Sam’s collarbone and says, “I don’t think that’s what’s making it hard to breathe.” He bites down on the side of Sam’s neck, and Sam gasps in surprise and unexpected pleasure.
Jay shifts on top of him and his thigh brushes Sam’s hard-on. Sam squirms sideways in embarrassment. “Sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t be. If I had one of my own, it would be doing the same thing.” And Sam doesn’t know why that’s turn-on, but it is, thinking about Jay wanting him, getting off on him with a piece of equipment he doesn’t even have. Jay slides a thigh in between Sam’s, rocking against his dick, and Sam bends his knee up, trying to return the favor.
In hindsight, he guesses it’s not a surprise that they don’t hear the front door, that Sam doesn’t know Dean’s there until he opens his eyes and there he is, standing in the doorway with his mouth hanging open. “Shit,” Sam whispers, and Dean’s gone again by the time Jay looks up.
“Your brother?” he asks, and Sam nods shakily. “Do you want me to stay?”
Sam sits up. “No. Thanks. I think I need to handle this one on my own. But I…”
Jay rubs his thumb across Sam’s cheek. “You can call me if you need to, or if he has questions.”
“Thanks.” Sam realizes his hands are shaking as he walks Jay to the door, and he shoves them into his pockets. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Dean at the kitchen table, stripping the label from a bottle of beer.
“See you Monday?” Jay asks hesitantly, tongue sneaking out across his lower lip.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and leans in to brush his mouth across Jay’s one last time, hopes it won’t be the last time as Jay smiles into his mouth.
***
“Who was that?” Dean asks, in a low voice like he’s channeling dad.
“That was Jay,” Sam says, sitting down across from him.
“And what is Jay?”
“A friend from school.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Sam.”
“He’s” - that pronoun has never seemed so daunting in Sam’s life - “somebody I met at school, and we’ve been hanging out, and I like him. A lot.” He digs his nails into his thighs, but it doesn’t stop the shaking.
“He’s the one you’ve been out with, the one giving you rides?”
“Yeah.”
Dean clears his throat, and Sam can see him struggling for an angle, a place to start. “Sam, is Jay a real boy, if you know what I’m saying?”
“Does it matter, Dean?” he finds his voice rising uncontrollably. “Does it matter if I was kissing somebody who was born that way? He’s still a guy.”
“It matters,” Dean growls, “because you didn’t say a single goddamn word to me about what you were doing. You’ve been having this person over, and…”
Sam interrupts him. “Like you tell me all about every girl you hook up with in back of a bar.”
“Do you want me to? And besides, at least they’re all girls. Are you gay, Sam?”
“The world’s not as simple as gay and straight,” he snaps. If there’s anything GSA’s taught him, it’s that.
“Okay, fine, PC boy. Do you think you’re going to spend a lot more time making out with guys?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says quietly, and Dean’s face softens, reminds him of the days when he really did tell Dean everything. “I don’t know what I am.”
Dean’s quiet for a long time, not quite frowning, his eyes on Sam’s. “Are you going to tell Dad?”
Sam freezes, and he’s pretty sure his heart stops for a second. “No, Dean, I… Please, please don’t tell him. I’ll do anything.”
Dean shifts into a glare. “I’m not going to squeal on you, you little asshole. But you know he’s gonna find out sometime. Dad’s not stupid. And it’ll be a hell of a lot better if you tell him than if he catches you...” Dean waves a hand toward their room.
Sam’s stomach twists. “I know. But not yet. I’m not ready yet.”
Dean takes a swallow of his beer, nods to himself. “Okay.”
“Really? Dean, why are you being so cool about this?”
“You’ve been happier the last few weeks than anytime since your balls dropped. That’s not a bad thing. That’s something you could use some more of.” He tilts his beer bottle towards Sam. “Got one question though: with Jay being… not all man in the pants, are you still getting some pussy out of this?” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
Sam pushes back his chair and stands up, blushing furiously. “You’re an asshole,” he says matter-of-factly, and starts to walk out of the kitchen, torn between anger, embarrassment, and gratitude.
“Come on,” Dean calls after him. “It’s a fair question. I’m trying to be supportive here.”
Sam rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer. But he finds himself grinning as he shuts the door to their room behind him. As soon as Dean’s safely engrossed in his cheesy movie of the night, Sam thinks he’ll call Jay.
~fin~
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