Fic: To know what's under the floor (SPN, Charlie/Jo, PG)
Title: To know what's under the floor
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Charlie/Jo
Rating: PG
Summary: No one here is like me, Jo thinks, and she knows it’s what every eighteen year old on the planet thinks. And she also knows in her case it’s completely justified. But then she meets Charlie.
Notes: Written for cordelia_gray as part of the spn_j2_xmas exchange, for her prompt, Charlie/Jo, hunter AU. I got really excited about the pairing and figuring out the set-up for a hunter AU, although this has very little actual hunting in it. cordelia_gray, I really hope you'll like it anyway, and that you're having a wonderful holiday season! Title from Beth Orton. ~3760 words.
Jo spends a lot of time in the student center, staring at the fliers for events and student organizations and thinking just how much she doesn’t fit in here. There’s a 4H fair coming up that almost makes her homesick for the county fair back home, the baby animals on their wobbly legs and the ribbon for the biggest pumpkin. It’s stupid because basically everything that happens here already mirrors everything she ran away from to come here, except the biggest thing, of course, the thing at looms over her all the time, and sometimes she wants to run as far and as fast as she can, and sometimes she wants to get away from all these people who will never ever understand and find something to hunt. No one here is like me, she thinks, and she knows it’s what every eighteen year old on the planet thinks. And she also knows in her case it’s completely justified.
But then she meets Charlie.
Charlie is stapling up fliers in the student center the first time Jo sees her. “Queer Student Union,” the fliers say, and Jo feels a moment of surprise that they’d have something like that here, nestled among the charity fashion shows and the Christian youth book club.
Charlie's got headphones on and an old cassette Walkman sticking out of her jacket pocket, so Jo just watches out of the corner of her eye with her book for English 102 open and her highlighter dangling loosely from her fingers. And then Charlie turns just as though she knows she’s being watched, and their eyes meet, although Jo looks away again in embarrassment. She doesn’t normally get caught looking at people like that. She wonders if maybe Charlie will say something to her, invite her to a meeting of this thing the flier’s about, and Jo realizes she wants that, wants this stranger to come talk with her about a group she doesn’t even really belong in.
But Charlie just winks at her and walks away, head bobbing in time to her Walkman. And that means Jo’s got to go up and look at the flier herself, let everyone else in the atrium watch her note down the time and place of the first meeting. She still isn’t quite sure how much college is like high school, whether her new classmates will want to know if she’s a dyke as much as her old ones did. Especially since she isn’t sure of the answer to that question herself.
Jo shows up to the first Queer Student Union meeting with her chin held high and all the things she’s scared of tied down tight in her psyche. It’s in a little lounge on the top floor of the student center, with high narrow windows and a circle of folding chairs and sagging couches. Charlie’s the only person in the room, her feet propped up on the back of a sofa and a book in her hand. She looks up at Jo, smiles. “I know you,” she says, and Jo’s afraid this is going to be some philosophical nonsense about the deep interconnectedness of all things. But she continues, “You were watching me put up fliers. I wasn’t sure if it was homophobia or genuine interest. I’m Charlie.” She kicks her legs down and stands, grinning at Jo and holding out her hand.
“Jo,” Jo says, taking it and squeezing firmly like her daddy taught her. “Isn’t there a pretty big difference between homophobia and genuine interest?”
“Not at first glance,” Charlie replies. “In a place like this they both look kind of mystified.” She gapes her mouth into an O, and Jo laughs.
“I sort of thought this would be a bigger group,” Jo says, looking around the empty room.
“I’m gonna give them another twenty minutes. It’s only five after.” She seems so cheerfully unconcerned that she basically threw a party and no one came. “Sit down. I’ve got an extra book if you need one.”
Jo’s only got her school books with her, and she doesn’t really want to do sociology reading right now. “Sure,” she says, and Charlie hands her a dog-eared paperback by Terry Pratchett.
“Have you read him?” asks Charlie, and she’s really pretty with her eyes lit up like that.
Jo shakes her head, looking over the back cover.
“Oh, he’s awesome. Fantasy, but super funny. Really clever, you know?”
Jo folds her legs up on the couch beside Charlie and starts to read. There are footnotes two pages in, and she can’t help smiling. It’s way better than sociology. Charlie nudges her with her knee after a while.
“It’s been half an hour,” she says, and Jo checks her watch, frowning. “So, I was thinking maybe I’d go. Do you want to keep the book?”
Jo realizes there are no chapters, so she had no idea she was fifty pages in. “How would I get it back to you?”
“You’re in the atrium a lot. I think I can find you.”
Jo takes in that Charlie has noticed her enough to know about her study habits. She looks at the book between her hands. “Sure. Thanks.”
Charlie shrugs on her backpack, starts to untangle her headphone cord, then pauses. “Actually, what the hell? It’s early. Do you want to go to the diner and get chili fries? You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“No,” says Jo. “I mean, no, I’m not a vegetarian, but yeah, I’d like to get chili fries.”
Over chili fries and milkshakes, Jo admits, “I’m not actually a lesbian. I mean, I don’t know exactly, if I… but I like boys.”
Charlie waves that off. “Nothing wrong with liking boys. Plenty of perfectly nice people do. I appreciate you showing up anyway.”
“I’m just still trying to find my place, you know. It’s a lot different from high school.”
“You’re, what, eighteen? And a freshman? You’ve got plenty of time to figure yourself out. But I’m about to start running a game of Vampire: The Masquerade if you’d be into that. Nerds are very forgiving, socially.”
Jo cringes inwardly, trying to imagine playing a game about vampires with a bunch of kids who have no idea vampires are real, and Charlie must see some of that in her face. “It’s no big deal if RPGs aren’t your thing,” she says, “but it’s a pretty fun world if you ever want to try it out.”
“It’s not that,” Jo replies, although it would be way easier to let Charlie think she just didn’t want to do nerd stuff than tell her any part of the truth. “I just, I’m not a big fan of vampires.”
“Did you have a bad Anne Rice experience? That could put anyone off.” She leans close across the table and puts a hand beside her mouth to whisper, “I never really saw the appeal, personally.”
Jo laughs. “Yeah. I never got into those sort of books either.”
Charlie folds her arms on the table and wags her eyebrows in a way that makes Jo shift and duck her head. “So what are you into?”
“I don’t know. I guess nothing in particular.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
But she can’t tell Charlie about her knife collection or the dusty bestiary under her bed, so she just smiles and shakes her head.
They hang out more and more over the next few weeks, studying together in the library, watching movies at the second-run theater, sitting around in the diner in the middle of the night. Sometimes Jo goes to Charlie’s game nights, sits at her shoulder while she spins out a story for the other players. If she just ignores the fact that they’re all giving vampires way more credit than they’re due, it’s pretty fun to watch and listen to the players squabble. Jo knows she smiles more just thinking about Charlie, and even her mom comments that it’s nice to hear Jo talking less about dropping out or transferring. It’s still not off the table-it would take a lot more than one friend to make Jo feel really settled here-but she’s feeling a lot more comfortable than she ever would have expected when she got to school.
And then there’s the other thing, the way she sometimes looks at Charlie and sees Charlie looking back at her, and she feels like she might not be entirely straight after all. Like maybe they could be something better than friends if she made a move. It’s hard to get at the root of that, when Charlie’s her only real friend and the only lesbian she knows, but as October goes on, it gets harder and harder to pretend it’s nothing. But also harder to confront because it feels as though the moment to say anything has passed.
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Jo asks Charlie at the end of October while they’re eating pizza off the coffee table in Charlie’s cluttered studio apartment.
“What is this ‘home’ you speak of?” says Charlie, making finger quotes around the slice of pizza in her hand.
They don’t really talk about family, and Jo knows why she doesn’t, but she’s never questioned Charlie’s motives. She looks around Charlie’s apartment with new eyes, considering it as something besides temporary student housing. “So you’re staying here?”
Charlie nudges her with an elbow. “Don’t look so forlorn about it,” she says. “I’m going to sleep in and eat Chinese and rewatch all of Star Wars. It’s gonna be great.”
“I just figured you’d have somewhere to go.”
“You’re going to your mom’s?”
“Yeah. Eating turkey at the bar with my mom and all the saddest drunks in the state of Nebraska.”
“The more you talk about it, the more stoked I am about moo shu and Princess Leia.”
Jo laughs. “Maybe I would be better off staying here with you.”
“You know you’re welcome here anytime.” Charlie pats her knee, leaves her hand there for a second too long. “I’d be happy to have you.”
Jo takes a shaky breath and presses a kiss to Charlie’s cheek. “Thanks.” She goes back to her pizza like it’s completely fascinating. After a moment she realizes Charlie’s still looking at her.
“Jo, let me know if I’m totally off-track,” Charlie says, “but it seems like maybe there’s something going on here that we aren’t really talking about. And I’m thinking maybe we should.”
It’s enough to make Jo put down her pizza and wipe her greasy fingers on her jeans. “I guess so.”
And then, instead of saying anything else, Charlie kisses her, full on the mouth but gently, a hand cupped around Jo’s chin. Her lips part, shaping against Jo’s, her breath hot. And Jo kisses her back, feels Charlie smile into her mouth.
Charlie lays her back on the couch, kissing her again and again but not trying to take it any farther, and Jo flexes her fingers on Charlie’s shoulders, holding her close.
It’s the start of something lovely, something that has Jo smiling even while everyone else at school is driving her more and more insane. Just before winter break, she works up the nerve to show Charlie the big old bestiary Caleb had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She doesn’t say that everything in it is real, that all the pictures of werewolves and vampires and yetis were drawn from life, but Charlie is fascinated, paging through it wide eyed and grinning. “This is freaking awesome,” she says. “I had no idea books like this even existed.”
“You just have to know the right people,” Jo replies.
“You’ve got a lot of layers, Joanna Harvelle.”
“No more than you, Charlotte Moran.”
They email over winter break, and Jo wants to see Charlie again with every fiber of her being. But the thought of pretty much everything else about school just drags her down whenever she thinks of it. The more passing hunters tell her stories about their latest kills, the more she’s sure this is where she needs to be, what she needs to be doing. But her mom won’t even discuss it. “Joanna Beth, this life got your dad killed. It’s gotten a lot of good people killed. I’ll be damned if you’re going to be one of them.”
It’s the same argument they’ve had a hundred times, and Ash’s eyes ping-pong back and forth between them at the bar. “Maybe I wouldn’t get myself killed. Maybe I’d be careful and keep people safe when no one else can.”
“You think your dad wasn’t careful? Do you? He did everything he could, and guess what, Jo, he’s still gone. Eventually, every hunter meets something that’s too much for them. No one in this life dies of old age. And forgive me for wanting my only child to outlive me.”
“Okay,” Jo says, throwing her hands up. “Okay. But I could help. I could research and make hex bags and all of those things. I could be in the life without being in the life. Like Ash.”
Ash blinks like he’s surprised anyone’s talking about him. “Well, but…” he starts, obviously trying to take Ellen’s side, but Jo’s gratified when he can’t come up with an argument.
“Go to school,” Ellen says. “Finish your education. And then we’ll talk about what you can do with your life. Maybe you’ll have a little more perspective by then.”
Jo doesn’t argue because school is where Charlie is, and that’s a big argument in its favor, but when Jo gets back, even seeing Charlie again can’t ease all of her restlessness. It doesn’t help that Charlie seems distracted and antsy, and she’s hardly ever on campus. “I’m moving into a new place,” Charlie says, one of the few times they run into each other in the student center. “So I’m in the crazy packing headspace right now. Like, tunnel vision on cardboard boxes.”
“Can I help?” Jo asks, but Charlie just shakes her head.
“I’m kind of anal about my stuff,” she says. “I really need to just get it done, you know?”
“Right,” says Jo. “Sure.”
Charlie kisses her on the cheek. “My new lease starts February 1st, and then I will be around more, I swear.”
Jo counts the days to February, but every idiotic group project, every lecture where other students clump together while Jo has a whole row of seats to herself, just makes her feel more and more trapped and desperate. She scans the local newspaper for possible cases, even if she isn’t sure how she’d handle it if she found one. She can’t imagine making it through another whole semester of this. When Charlie finally calls her, she warns that her new apartment is still mostly a wall of boxes. “But the bed’s unpacked, if you want to try that out.”
Jo does. They haven’t done much more than kiss so far, but Jo’s ready to try something new. She puts on a pair of lacy pink panties and walks through a light snowfall to Charlie’s new place just off-campus. The old brick house looms over the sidewalk, four stories broken up into apartments, windows lit up against the early darkness. Jo hits the buzzer for the fourth floor, and Charlie comes barreling down the stairs to meet her. “It’s a little bit of a workout,” she says apologetically. “But there’s no upstairs neighbor.”
The stairs wind up steeply through the center of the house, and Jo follows Charlie up. The light on the second landing flickers, throwing new shadows and making Jo blink and refocus on the steps in front of her. They don’t talk on the way up, and by the time they reach the top landing, Jo can feel the stretch in her legs. “Why did you move from the place with a hundred fewer stairs?” Jo asks, leaning one shoulder against the wall as Charlie opens the door.
“Sometimes you just want a change. And the house has got way more atmosphere than my old building.”
Jo has to agree about that. Inside Charlie’s apartment, the ceiling dips and peaks to match the roofline outside, and wallpaper is covered in faded cabbage roses. It’s true that there are boxes everywhere, but Charlie has acquired a heavy, wooden dining room set, and on it are a cluster of Chinese takeout containers just waiting for them.
Jo’s nervous, fidgety, all through the meal, trying to hide it by looking around the room, taking in the crown molding, the hardwood floor, the small chandelier above the table. All she can think about is what will happen after. Charlie watches her, smiling, making small talk about school which Jo can barely even meet her on. “I’m not sure how I’m going to do this semester,” she admits. “My heart’s just not in it.”
“Yeah?” says Charlie. “So where is your heart?”
Jo shakes her head. “I don’t know.” But she does. Her heart is back with the hunters in the roadhouse. At least all of it that isn’t sitting in her throat right now.
“So,” Charlie says, leaning towards her across the table, “we can either do dishes or go to bed. What do you think?”
Jo crosses and uncrosses her legs. “I guess I don’t really like dishes all that much.”
“That’s my girl,” says Charlie, and Jo blushes and ducks behind her hair. She can’t explain why that sends a little shiver of heat down her spine.
Charlie’s bedroom ceiling slants down sharply to a whole line of windows nearly at floor level, and moonlight paints the floorboards silver before Charlie flicks on the lamp. “You kind of look like you’re going to pass out,” Charlie says, coming up close and putting her hands on Jo’s waist. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want.” She rubs her hands up Jo’s back, soothing. “We could just cuddle. I’m a big fan of cuddling.”
Jo takes a shuddery little breath. “No, I… I want you. I want whatever you want. I just haven’t done this before.”
“I know.”
“With anyone,” Jo adds.
“Oh.” Charlie kisses her, gently and then deeper, pulling Jo back to the bed and tumbling her down. She narrates as they undress, asks questions Jo can’t answer. She doesn’t have preferences yet, doesn’t know what she wants. “Then I’m happy to help you learn,” says Charlie, one hand pressed in tight between Jo’s legs, over her jeans.
Jo arches up into her hand. “Teach me everything you know.”
Afterwards, curled up in Charlie’s bed with the covers pulled up to their chins, Jo feels less jittery than she has in weeks, satisfied and at ease with the world. Until a floorboard creaks and settles, and Charlie says, “They told me this house might be haunted when I moved in.”
“Yeah?” Jo says, trying to sound casual. Ninety percent of the places people claim are haunted are just old and noisy, so Jo knows that kind of rumor doesn’t mean anything.
“They say the original owner died falling down the stairs and his restless spirit wanders the house now.”
“Have you ever run into any cold spots?” Jo asks. “Or seen the lights flickering?” She thinks of the lamp on the landing and then dismisses it. Old wiring is way more likely than a ghost.
“Is that how you tell?” Charlie replies. “Cold spots and flickering lights?”
“Well, somebody pushing you down the stairs when nobody’s there would be a sign too. But if you’re worried about it, you can put down some rock salt across the windows and doors.” She doesn’t know what possesses her to even start on it; none of this is stuff she’s supposed to talk about with civilians.
And then Charlie is looking at her too closely, seeing something Jo probably doesn’t want her to. “Rock salt, huh? Good to know.”
“I’m not crazy,” says Jo. “I promise.”
“You just know an awful lot about how to handle a haunting. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“Family business,” admits Jo. And somehow it all comes spilling out of her then, ghosts and vampires and wendigos and the people who hunt them. Maybe it’s because she feels so vulnerable with Charlie right now, or maybe because Charlie just nods at everything she says, urges her on wide-eyed and ready to believe.
“So that bestiary isn’t just a fantasy thing, is it?”
“No. It’s all real. All those creatures. Everything you ever thought might live in your closet.”
“That’s kind of awful,” Charlie says matter-of-factly, when Jo falls silent.
She can’t help the laugh that startles out of her. “Yeah, it is. And all I want to do is help. But I can’t. Not while I’m here.”
“Not to minimize my own appeal, but in that case, why are you here?”
“Because my mom thinks it’s better for me to be in college than out saving lives.”
Charlie touches Jo’s hair, slides a hand down her cheek. “I knew you had some secrets, but somehow I didn’t expect them to be about ghosts.”
“And why would you?” replies Jo. “No one in their right mind expects ghosts.” She feels light now, almost dizzy. Even when she had friends in middle school, a handful of girls who would invite her to go to the movies or out for pizza, she didn’t tell them anything about her family or the hunters at the roadhouse. And now she’s spilled it all out to someone she’s only known for a few months. It’s a little like ripping off all of her skin, revealing everything that makes her different.
Charlie holds her close, tucking Jo’s head under her chin. “I ran away from home,” Charlie says quietly, after a long time. “That’s my secret. I can’t go home for the holidays because I changed my name and covered my tracks to make sure my stepfather would never get near me again. No one in their right minds expects that either.”
Jo nods. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Well, obviously, it’s not okay. But. It is what it is.”
“You changed your name?”
“Yep.” Charlie pops the P like she’s savoring it.
“Can you tell me what you changed it from?”
The floor gives another loud creak as the house settles. “Maybe if you teach me how to get rid of a ghost.”
Jo smiles. “We’d have to find a ghost first.”
Charlie shrugs. “If you do, let me know. I’d like to see it. Nothing in my closet was ever as scary as my stepdad.”
“Deal,” agrees Jo.
-end-
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Charlie/Jo
Rating: PG
Summary: No one here is like me, Jo thinks, and she knows it’s what every eighteen year old on the planet thinks. And she also knows in her case it’s completely justified. But then she meets Charlie.
Notes: Written for cordelia_gray as part of the spn_j2_xmas exchange, for her prompt, Charlie/Jo, hunter AU. I got really excited about the pairing and figuring out the set-up for a hunter AU, although this has very little actual hunting in it. cordelia_gray, I really hope you'll like it anyway, and that you're having a wonderful holiday season! Title from Beth Orton. ~3760 words.
Jo spends a lot of time in the student center, staring at the fliers for events and student organizations and thinking just how much she doesn’t fit in here. There’s a 4H fair coming up that almost makes her homesick for the county fair back home, the baby animals on their wobbly legs and the ribbon for the biggest pumpkin. It’s stupid because basically everything that happens here already mirrors everything she ran away from to come here, except the biggest thing, of course, the thing at looms over her all the time, and sometimes she wants to run as far and as fast as she can, and sometimes she wants to get away from all these people who will never ever understand and find something to hunt. No one here is like me, she thinks, and she knows it’s what every eighteen year old on the planet thinks. And she also knows in her case it’s completely justified.
But then she meets Charlie.
Charlie is stapling up fliers in the student center the first time Jo sees her. “Queer Student Union,” the fliers say, and Jo feels a moment of surprise that they’d have something like that here, nestled among the charity fashion shows and the Christian youth book club.
Charlie's got headphones on and an old cassette Walkman sticking out of her jacket pocket, so Jo just watches out of the corner of her eye with her book for English 102 open and her highlighter dangling loosely from her fingers. And then Charlie turns just as though she knows she’s being watched, and their eyes meet, although Jo looks away again in embarrassment. She doesn’t normally get caught looking at people like that. She wonders if maybe Charlie will say something to her, invite her to a meeting of this thing the flier’s about, and Jo realizes she wants that, wants this stranger to come talk with her about a group she doesn’t even really belong in.
But Charlie just winks at her and walks away, head bobbing in time to her Walkman. And that means Jo’s got to go up and look at the flier herself, let everyone else in the atrium watch her note down the time and place of the first meeting. She still isn’t quite sure how much college is like high school, whether her new classmates will want to know if she’s a dyke as much as her old ones did. Especially since she isn’t sure of the answer to that question herself.
Jo shows up to the first Queer Student Union meeting with her chin held high and all the things she’s scared of tied down tight in her psyche. It’s in a little lounge on the top floor of the student center, with high narrow windows and a circle of folding chairs and sagging couches. Charlie’s the only person in the room, her feet propped up on the back of a sofa and a book in her hand. She looks up at Jo, smiles. “I know you,” she says, and Jo’s afraid this is going to be some philosophical nonsense about the deep interconnectedness of all things. But she continues, “You were watching me put up fliers. I wasn’t sure if it was homophobia or genuine interest. I’m Charlie.” She kicks her legs down and stands, grinning at Jo and holding out her hand.
“Jo,” Jo says, taking it and squeezing firmly like her daddy taught her. “Isn’t there a pretty big difference between homophobia and genuine interest?”
“Not at first glance,” Charlie replies. “In a place like this they both look kind of mystified.” She gapes her mouth into an O, and Jo laughs.
“I sort of thought this would be a bigger group,” Jo says, looking around the empty room.
“I’m gonna give them another twenty minutes. It’s only five after.” She seems so cheerfully unconcerned that she basically threw a party and no one came. “Sit down. I’ve got an extra book if you need one.”
Jo’s only got her school books with her, and she doesn’t really want to do sociology reading right now. “Sure,” she says, and Charlie hands her a dog-eared paperback by Terry Pratchett.
“Have you read him?” asks Charlie, and she’s really pretty with her eyes lit up like that.
Jo shakes her head, looking over the back cover.
“Oh, he’s awesome. Fantasy, but super funny. Really clever, you know?”
Jo folds her legs up on the couch beside Charlie and starts to read. There are footnotes two pages in, and she can’t help smiling. It’s way better than sociology. Charlie nudges her with her knee after a while.
“It’s been half an hour,” she says, and Jo checks her watch, frowning. “So, I was thinking maybe I’d go. Do you want to keep the book?”
Jo realizes there are no chapters, so she had no idea she was fifty pages in. “How would I get it back to you?”
“You’re in the atrium a lot. I think I can find you.”
Jo takes in that Charlie has noticed her enough to know about her study habits. She looks at the book between her hands. “Sure. Thanks.”
Charlie shrugs on her backpack, starts to untangle her headphone cord, then pauses. “Actually, what the hell? It’s early. Do you want to go to the diner and get chili fries? You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“No,” says Jo. “I mean, no, I’m not a vegetarian, but yeah, I’d like to get chili fries.”
Over chili fries and milkshakes, Jo admits, “I’m not actually a lesbian. I mean, I don’t know exactly, if I… but I like boys.”
Charlie waves that off. “Nothing wrong with liking boys. Plenty of perfectly nice people do. I appreciate you showing up anyway.”
“I’m just still trying to find my place, you know. It’s a lot different from high school.”
“You’re, what, eighteen? And a freshman? You’ve got plenty of time to figure yourself out. But I’m about to start running a game of Vampire: The Masquerade if you’d be into that. Nerds are very forgiving, socially.”
Jo cringes inwardly, trying to imagine playing a game about vampires with a bunch of kids who have no idea vampires are real, and Charlie must see some of that in her face. “It’s no big deal if RPGs aren’t your thing,” she says, “but it’s a pretty fun world if you ever want to try it out.”
“It’s not that,” Jo replies, although it would be way easier to let Charlie think she just didn’t want to do nerd stuff than tell her any part of the truth. “I just, I’m not a big fan of vampires.”
“Did you have a bad Anne Rice experience? That could put anyone off.” She leans close across the table and puts a hand beside her mouth to whisper, “I never really saw the appeal, personally.”
Jo laughs. “Yeah. I never got into those sort of books either.”
Charlie folds her arms on the table and wags her eyebrows in a way that makes Jo shift and duck her head. “So what are you into?”
“I don’t know. I guess nothing in particular.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
But she can’t tell Charlie about her knife collection or the dusty bestiary under her bed, so she just smiles and shakes her head.
They hang out more and more over the next few weeks, studying together in the library, watching movies at the second-run theater, sitting around in the diner in the middle of the night. Sometimes Jo goes to Charlie’s game nights, sits at her shoulder while she spins out a story for the other players. If she just ignores the fact that they’re all giving vampires way more credit than they’re due, it’s pretty fun to watch and listen to the players squabble. Jo knows she smiles more just thinking about Charlie, and even her mom comments that it’s nice to hear Jo talking less about dropping out or transferring. It’s still not off the table-it would take a lot more than one friend to make Jo feel really settled here-but she’s feeling a lot more comfortable than she ever would have expected when she got to school.
And then there’s the other thing, the way she sometimes looks at Charlie and sees Charlie looking back at her, and she feels like she might not be entirely straight after all. Like maybe they could be something better than friends if she made a move. It’s hard to get at the root of that, when Charlie’s her only real friend and the only lesbian she knows, but as October goes on, it gets harder and harder to pretend it’s nothing. But also harder to confront because it feels as though the moment to say anything has passed.
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Jo asks Charlie at the end of October while they’re eating pizza off the coffee table in Charlie’s cluttered studio apartment.
“What is this ‘home’ you speak of?” says Charlie, making finger quotes around the slice of pizza in her hand.
They don’t really talk about family, and Jo knows why she doesn’t, but she’s never questioned Charlie’s motives. She looks around Charlie’s apartment with new eyes, considering it as something besides temporary student housing. “So you’re staying here?”
Charlie nudges her with an elbow. “Don’t look so forlorn about it,” she says. “I’m going to sleep in and eat Chinese and rewatch all of Star Wars. It’s gonna be great.”
“I just figured you’d have somewhere to go.”
“You’re going to your mom’s?”
“Yeah. Eating turkey at the bar with my mom and all the saddest drunks in the state of Nebraska.”
“The more you talk about it, the more stoked I am about moo shu and Princess Leia.”
Jo laughs. “Maybe I would be better off staying here with you.”
“You know you’re welcome here anytime.” Charlie pats her knee, leaves her hand there for a second too long. “I’d be happy to have you.”
Jo takes a shaky breath and presses a kiss to Charlie’s cheek. “Thanks.” She goes back to her pizza like it’s completely fascinating. After a moment she realizes Charlie’s still looking at her.
“Jo, let me know if I’m totally off-track,” Charlie says, “but it seems like maybe there’s something going on here that we aren’t really talking about. And I’m thinking maybe we should.”
It’s enough to make Jo put down her pizza and wipe her greasy fingers on her jeans. “I guess so.”
And then, instead of saying anything else, Charlie kisses her, full on the mouth but gently, a hand cupped around Jo’s chin. Her lips part, shaping against Jo’s, her breath hot. And Jo kisses her back, feels Charlie smile into her mouth.
Charlie lays her back on the couch, kissing her again and again but not trying to take it any farther, and Jo flexes her fingers on Charlie’s shoulders, holding her close.
It’s the start of something lovely, something that has Jo smiling even while everyone else at school is driving her more and more insane. Just before winter break, she works up the nerve to show Charlie the big old bestiary Caleb had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She doesn’t say that everything in it is real, that all the pictures of werewolves and vampires and yetis were drawn from life, but Charlie is fascinated, paging through it wide eyed and grinning. “This is freaking awesome,” she says. “I had no idea books like this even existed.”
“You just have to know the right people,” Jo replies.
“You’ve got a lot of layers, Joanna Harvelle.”
“No more than you, Charlotte Moran.”
They email over winter break, and Jo wants to see Charlie again with every fiber of her being. But the thought of pretty much everything else about school just drags her down whenever she thinks of it. The more passing hunters tell her stories about their latest kills, the more she’s sure this is where she needs to be, what she needs to be doing. But her mom won’t even discuss it. “Joanna Beth, this life got your dad killed. It’s gotten a lot of good people killed. I’ll be damned if you’re going to be one of them.”
It’s the same argument they’ve had a hundred times, and Ash’s eyes ping-pong back and forth between them at the bar. “Maybe I wouldn’t get myself killed. Maybe I’d be careful and keep people safe when no one else can.”
“You think your dad wasn’t careful? Do you? He did everything he could, and guess what, Jo, he’s still gone. Eventually, every hunter meets something that’s too much for them. No one in this life dies of old age. And forgive me for wanting my only child to outlive me.”
“Okay,” Jo says, throwing her hands up. “Okay. But I could help. I could research and make hex bags and all of those things. I could be in the life without being in the life. Like Ash.”
Ash blinks like he’s surprised anyone’s talking about him. “Well, but…” he starts, obviously trying to take Ellen’s side, but Jo’s gratified when he can’t come up with an argument.
“Go to school,” Ellen says. “Finish your education. And then we’ll talk about what you can do with your life. Maybe you’ll have a little more perspective by then.”
Jo doesn’t argue because school is where Charlie is, and that’s a big argument in its favor, but when Jo gets back, even seeing Charlie again can’t ease all of her restlessness. It doesn’t help that Charlie seems distracted and antsy, and she’s hardly ever on campus. “I’m moving into a new place,” Charlie says, one of the few times they run into each other in the student center. “So I’m in the crazy packing headspace right now. Like, tunnel vision on cardboard boxes.”
“Can I help?” Jo asks, but Charlie just shakes her head.
“I’m kind of anal about my stuff,” she says. “I really need to just get it done, you know?”
“Right,” says Jo. “Sure.”
Charlie kisses her on the cheek. “My new lease starts February 1st, and then I will be around more, I swear.”
Jo counts the days to February, but every idiotic group project, every lecture where other students clump together while Jo has a whole row of seats to herself, just makes her feel more and more trapped and desperate. She scans the local newspaper for possible cases, even if she isn’t sure how she’d handle it if she found one. She can’t imagine making it through another whole semester of this. When Charlie finally calls her, she warns that her new apartment is still mostly a wall of boxes. “But the bed’s unpacked, if you want to try that out.”
Jo does. They haven’t done much more than kiss so far, but Jo’s ready to try something new. She puts on a pair of lacy pink panties and walks through a light snowfall to Charlie’s new place just off-campus. The old brick house looms over the sidewalk, four stories broken up into apartments, windows lit up against the early darkness. Jo hits the buzzer for the fourth floor, and Charlie comes barreling down the stairs to meet her. “It’s a little bit of a workout,” she says apologetically. “But there’s no upstairs neighbor.”
The stairs wind up steeply through the center of the house, and Jo follows Charlie up. The light on the second landing flickers, throwing new shadows and making Jo blink and refocus on the steps in front of her. They don’t talk on the way up, and by the time they reach the top landing, Jo can feel the stretch in her legs. “Why did you move from the place with a hundred fewer stairs?” Jo asks, leaning one shoulder against the wall as Charlie opens the door.
“Sometimes you just want a change. And the house has got way more atmosphere than my old building.”
Jo has to agree about that. Inside Charlie’s apartment, the ceiling dips and peaks to match the roofline outside, and wallpaper is covered in faded cabbage roses. It’s true that there are boxes everywhere, but Charlie has acquired a heavy, wooden dining room set, and on it are a cluster of Chinese takeout containers just waiting for them.
Jo’s nervous, fidgety, all through the meal, trying to hide it by looking around the room, taking in the crown molding, the hardwood floor, the small chandelier above the table. All she can think about is what will happen after. Charlie watches her, smiling, making small talk about school which Jo can barely even meet her on. “I’m not sure how I’m going to do this semester,” she admits. “My heart’s just not in it.”
“Yeah?” says Charlie. “So where is your heart?”
Jo shakes her head. “I don’t know.” But she does. Her heart is back with the hunters in the roadhouse. At least all of it that isn’t sitting in her throat right now.
“So,” Charlie says, leaning towards her across the table, “we can either do dishes or go to bed. What do you think?”
Jo crosses and uncrosses her legs. “I guess I don’t really like dishes all that much.”
“That’s my girl,” says Charlie, and Jo blushes and ducks behind her hair. She can’t explain why that sends a little shiver of heat down her spine.
Charlie’s bedroom ceiling slants down sharply to a whole line of windows nearly at floor level, and moonlight paints the floorboards silver before Charlie flicks on the lamp. “You kind of look like you’re going to pass out,” Charlie says, coming up close and putting her hands on Jo’s waist. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want.” She rubs her hands up Jo’s back, soothing. “We could just cuddle. I’m a big fan of cuddling.”
Jo takes a shuddery little breath. “No, I… I want you. I want whatever you want. I just haven’t done this before.”
“I know.”
“With anyone,” Jo adds.
“Oh.” Charlie kisses her, gently and then deeper, pulling Jo back to the bed and tumbling her down. She narrates as they undress, asks questions Jo can’t answer. She doesn’t have preferences yet, doesn’t know what she wants. “Then I’m happy to help you learn,” says Charlie, one hand pressed in tight between Jo’s legs, over her jeans.
Jo arches up into her hand. “Teach me everything you know.”
Afterwards, curled up in Charlie’s bed with the covers pulled up to their chins, Jo feels less jittery than she has in weeks, satisfied and at ease with the world. Until a floorboard creaks and settles, and Charlie says, “They told me this house might be haunted when I moved in.”
“Yeah?” Jo says, trying to sound casual. Ninety percent of the places people claim are haunted are just old and noisy, so Jo knows that kind of rumor doesn’t mean anything.
“They say the original owner died falling down the stairs and his restless spirit wanders the house now.”
“Have you ever run into any cold spots?” Jo asks. “Or seen the lights flickering?” She thinks of the lamp on the landing and then dismisses it. Old wiring is way more likely than a ghost.
“Is that how you tell?” Charlie replies. “Cold spots and flickering lights?”
“Well, somebody pushing you down the stairs when nobody’s there would be a sign too. But if you’re worried about it, you can put down some rock salt across the windows and doors.” She doesn’t know what possesses her to even start on it; none of this is stuff she’s supposed to talk about with civilians.
And then Charlie is looking at her too closely, seeing something Jo probably doesn’t want her to. “Rock salt, huh? Good to know.”
“I’m not crazy,” says Jo. “I promise.”
“You just know an awful lot about how to handle a haunting. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“Family business,” admits Jo. And somehow it all comes spilling out of her then, ghosts and vampires and wendigos and the people who hunt them. Maybe it’s because she feels so vulnerable with Charlie right now, or maybe because Charlie just nods at everything she says, urges her on wide-eyed and ready to believe.
“So that bestiary isn’t just a fantasy thing, is it?”
“No. It’s all real. All those creatures. Everything you ever thought might live in your closet.”
“That’s kind of awful,” Charlie says matter-of-factly, when Jo falls silent.
She can’t help the laugh that startles out of her. “Yeah, it is. And all I want to do is help. But I can’t. Not while I’m here.”
“Not to minimize my own appeal, but in that case, why are you here?”
“Because my mom thinks it’s better for me to be in college than out saving lives.”
Charlie touches Jo’s hair, slides a hand down her cheek. “I knew you had some secrets, but somehow I didn’t expect them to be about ghosts.”
“And why would you?” replies Jo. “No one in their right mind expects ghosts.” She feels light now, almost dizzy. Even when she had friends in middle school, a handful of girls who would invite her to go to the movies or out for pizza, she didn’t tell them anything about her family or the hunters at the roadhouse. And now she’s spilled it all out to someone she’s only known for a few months. It’s a little like ripping off all of her skin, revealing everything that makes her different.
Charlie holds her close, tucking Jo’s head under her chin. “I ran away from home,” Charlie says quietly, after a long time. “That’s my secret. I can’t go home for the holidays because I changed my name and covered my tracks to make sure my stepfather would never get near me again. No one in their right minds expects that either.”
Jo nods. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Well, obviously, it’s not okay. But. It is what it is.”
“You changed your name?”
“Yep.” Charlie pops the P like she’s savoring it.
“Can you tell me what you changed it from?”
The floor gives another loud creak as the house settles. “Maybe if you teach me how to get rid of a ghost.”
Jo smiles. “We’d have to find a ghost first.”
Charlie shrugs. “If you do, let me know. I’d like to see it. Nothing in my closet was ever as scary as my stepdad.”
“Deal,” agrees Jo.
-end-