Unfinished fic: The Stars in the Heavens
So a while back I started this fic that I never finished. It's about 2700 words as-is, and that's probably the reason I didn't finish it--already it was too long, and there was a lot more to write. Anyway, as I don't know if I'll ever finish it (and probably won't) I thought I'd stick it here.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: AU
The Stars in the Heavens and the Moon in the Gutter
The engine is quiet. The whole car is quiet, padded and lush on the inside, compact and unobtrusive on the outside.
He sits in the idling vehicle and waits with his hands in his lap. He’s alone for the moment, and it isn’t necessary to sit so still. Some distant thought flits through his head: he could listen to the radio. The knob is there. He glances at it, then away. Back to the windshield. Through it. Lets his eyes lose focus, the long street smearing into a wash of colors, motion, and distant noise. Why would he listen to the radio?
Why would anyone?
When the administrator finally shows up he’s managed not to fall asleep only because it isn’t allowed. Because he doesn’t do that sort of thing. He doesn’t tell the administrator, Glad you could make it, or, Thanks for taking the time, but the words drift across his consciousness on thin threads and the wry tone collects in his throat. He swallows it away.
A thick envelope lands in his lap. He doesn’t need to open it. He already knows what’s inside.
The administrator, an older balding man, tells him, “It’s time.”
He picks up the envelope. Closes his fingers around it.
“Okay,” he says.
He wants to feel excited, but he can’t remember how.
--
The TV murmurs, white noise and dull light filling the apartment, washing the walls in faint tones of blue and grey. Sam sits, elbows on his knees and face in his hands, and tries to get his breathing under control.
He’s not getting any more sleep tonight. As badly as he needs it, as much as his body craves it, he won’t be able to shut his eyes long enough to be soothed by the empty noise of a dead station. The edges of the dream still hang around him, clawed and sharp and waiting. Closing his eyes would be a mistake. He can’t see his brother’s face again. Not like that.
God, not like that.
He staggers into the living room and sits down heavily on the sofa, staring blearily at the far wall. His eyes too wide, too dry. He can’t remember them feeling any other way. He opens and closes his hands on his thighs, simply for something to do.
A year now. A year and he’s no closer to finding Dean. Not one lead, not a hint of his brother’s presence, anywhere in the world. A strand of hair, a flake of skin, a footprint left behind-nothing.
For the first time he thinks, Not even a body. And claps his hand to the side of his head, digging his nails in until they bite the skin under his hair.
The night crawls up the walls. Shadows and light. The noise of some ocean, somewhere. Empty as the desert. My brother is gone, he thinks. And when he shuts his eyes, just to blink, a fruitless attempt to dampen them, he sees Dean’s fingers, the skin of his neck, the back of his head. On the ground, in the leaves, under the earth. Scattered in pieces.
“He’s not dead,” Sam whispers, pushing the palm of his hand against the corner of his mouth. “He’s not.”
He sits until the sun comes up. Wipes at his face, the cold sweat and nausea, as the sun’s rays stab through the window and cut apart the light of the television. It can’t silence the static, though, and when Sam goes in the kitchen to make coffee, he can still hear it.
When it suddenly falls silent, his eyes snap up and he stares across the little counter into the living room, where Jess is standing.
“You couldn’t knock?” he demands, and she narrowed her eyes at him.
“How long have you been awake?” she retorts, hands on hips, and Sam blanches and looks down.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she goes on, in that biting tone she saves just for him, “And it’s not okay, Sam.” She crosses the room and plants both hands on the counter. He stares at her glossy nails. “Hey.” Her voice softens. “I know this is hard on you-”
He sucks in a sharp breath and jerks his head up. Whatever she sees on his face is enough to cause her to step back.
“You don’t understand,” he says, voice shaking with the effort of control. “Don’t pretend like-don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.” Cold sweat swarms over his skin and he lurches away from her, into the bathroom, buckles over the toilet and vomits saliva in long sticky strings. Tears erupt, briefly, and scorch tracks on his cheeks, until he squeezes his eyes shut.
Jess doesn’t come in the bathroom, which Sam appreciates. She doesn’t leave, either, which he appreciates less, but he doesn’t dare tell her.
She’s the last one. After everything, she’s last. The ones he’d believed in, that he’d thought he could trust, the ones who told him to blow the whistle, tell the truth-they’re all gone. But Jess, who fights with him more than anyone he’s ever met (with the grand exception of maybe two people), Jess for some reason, has stayed. Never said, “Sam, think about your career,” or, “Sam, you can’t fight these people,” or, “David and Goliath is just a story and in real life the little people get stomped on.” He knows she’s probably thought it. More than once over the past year he’s seen her open her mouth, cut her eyes at him, then look away.
When he goes back in the kitchen, she wordlessly hands him a cup of coffee, without meeting his eyes.
“You need a shower,” she says flatly, “You stink. Christ, Sam.”
“Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes and holds the coffee to his mouth, but doesn’t drink it. “Yeah, I know.”
--
The file says Sam Winchester, as if he wouldn’t know the target’s name. As if it’s all some kind of incredible secret, a great game for the administrators to play. Human lives as puzzle pieces. He guesses that’s how they look at the world, figures it can’t be any worse than any other way. It’s not his place to judge anyway.
He spreads the pictures out on the motel’s coffee table. Sam’s a tall sonuvabitch, skinny but broad-shouldered. Given the chance to grow into them, he’d be a massive bruiser, someone to be reckoned with. At the moment, he looks like less of a threat than the tall blonde woman appearing alongside him in over half the pictures in the packet.
Sam is the principal target. He’s the reason. For everything.
The reason for Michael.
Once Sam is dead, it’ll be over.
All of it, over.
Michael picks up the nearest photo and stares at it. He thinks maybe he’s seen this Sam kid somewhere before. He can’t grasp the thread, though, and by this point knows better than to try. Just lets it slip through mental fingers, faint and flashing and gone.
He puts the photo down, and starts re-reading the file.
--
“No,” he hisses, and Jess backs off, hands raised. Sam rakes a hand through his hair (too long, he can’t remember the last time he cut it) and leaps to his feet. Paces the length of the room in long, fierce strides.
“You know they took him,” he bites out, stopping a foot from the wall, head bowed, hair in his face. He can’t turn and face her, can’t have this argument again. “I don’t-how can you say that, after all this time? After they tried to buy me off, and, and…” he presses his lips together and spins around to stare at her. Knows he hasn’t kept the betrayal off his face.
“It’s destroying you, Sam,” she says, “Every day, this is what I see. More of-of this!” She waves a hand, encompassing the apartment, the spider-webs and takeout boxes and unchanged sheets and old clothes and newspapers and unpaid bills. “You can’t make this your whole life! This waiting and, and hoping for, for-Goddammit, Sam, would look at me?”
His hands are in fists at his sides. His whole body is trembling.
“They took my brother.” His voice is low. “They took him, he didn’t just leave one day. I was just trying to do the right thing. Everybody told me it was the right thing!” His voice climbs and Jess flinches back.
“I was wrong, Jess, I shouldn’t have done it. If I hadn’t done it, if I…then D-”he breaks off, licks his lips. He can’t even say his name. He feels the urge to vomit again and puts his hand over his mouth.
“Dammit, Sam.” Jess deflates a little. They’ve been having some version of this fight for a long while now. “Is revenge really the only thing…is it all you’re living for anymore?” By the end of the question, her voice is small.
Sam closes his eyes. His perpetual headache is ratcheting up again, moving from a dull grating behind his eyes to something like a distant siren’s wail.
“Jess, please,” he says softly.
He can’t see her, but he feels her deflate, even from across the room.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asks quietly.
He can’t bring himself to look at her as he nods.
He sinks down on the floor, back to the wall, eyes still shut. Puts his head down on his knees and lets his hair fall across his face, and waits. Jess shuffles through the mess on the floor in the direction of the door, and Sam hears the moment she pauses, on hand on the doorknob, and turns to look back.
“Sam, I-” she begins, and breaks off, opens and shuts the door and is gone, as if she’d never been, and still he can hear the echo of her unspoken words hanging in the air. She’s said them before. Said them months ago, when things were better than they are now.
Sam, I don’t know how to help you.
--
He remembers the song. ‘I shall not’
I shall not be moved
Like a tree. Sanctified and holy. Oh preacher.
He can’t feel his hands. Hasn’t been able to for a while. There’s blood, he thinks, scabbed over and peeled and scabbed again. He twists his arms a little and can feel the stumps, the strange thickness of bone and muscle and skin that goes nowhere, that dead-ends. He’s been here too long. He can’t remember how many fingers he has. He’s tired and he can’t remember.
His lips move, without his say-so. They just spill shapes out into the air, noiselessly. He watches them dissolve on the floor, words that aren’t words. He can’t remember any words. Not anymore.
They’ll be back soon. They’ll say, “You need re-education,” and they’ll say, “This is for the best,” and they’ll say, “Trust us, and it will get better.”
He wants it to get better.
He bites his lip to keep his mouth from moving.
They’ll say, “You don’t have a brother.”
He remembers someone screaming, but doesn’t know who it was.
There’s a whisper at the door. The softest sound. The doors are so quiet, like the brush of feathers on dry, thirsty earth.
Footsteps pace across the floor, but he doesn’t recognize them. These are soft. Light. Not like the re-educators. Not like the administrators. Not even like the nurses, who are pretty and light and terrible.
Fingers brush his shoulder, barely, and he flinches away. A hand latches on the side of his head and a noise springs from his mouth, thin as something worn away. As nothing.
“No,” hisses a voice, and it’s new. He doesn’t recognize it. Flinches away because that’s a healthy response. A normal response.
“Hush! Stop! Listen to me.”
He shudders, but does as he’s told. The hand on his head doesn’t move. If anything, it tightens.
“Listen to me.”
--
Michael sorts the photos again. Not sure why he does so. Moves them into different configurations on the table. Stares at the various permutations of the same face. Noses, eyes, ears. All the same features, from different angles, in different lighting, different places. Flashes like images flickering on a screen, here then gone.
They won’t fix in his head.
He rests fingers on the nearest printout, splayed so the tips bracket three of the four sides. The face of ‘Sam Winchester.’ Michael would know it, if he saw him on the street. He’d recognize the boy. The slope of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the shape of his eyes. But the pieces don’t fit together the way they should. He closes his eyes and breathes and all he can see are bits and pieces of a face. They won’t come together into anything coherent.
It’s a familiar experience. It’s the reason he covered the mirror in the bathroom with a t-shirt.
He opens his eyes. He moves his mouth, but isn’t sure what he wants to say. No sound comes out anyway.
listen
His hand jerks, spilling a few photos onto the floor.
like a tree planted by the water
I shall
Faces and pieces of-
He presses the heels of both hands to his forehead, gasping.
Listen! You have to-
Pushes away from the table, the sofa, until he hits the wall. There’s a noise, there’s static swelling in a wave, inside and outside, filling the walls, pouring into his ears. Voices (they’ll say) murmur.
He squeezes his eyes until he sees lights. Pushes against his head until the noise stops.
And it stops.
And he hears a voice-just one voice.
A mouth says, “Listen.”
--
It’s noisy and crowded, and Sam hunches his shoulders and stares down at his hands, fingertips resting lightly on the paper cup, just above the little paper sleeve. He’s distantly aware of the scalding heat burning against his skin, until Jess reaches down and plucks it away. She sets it down gently a few inches away as she slides into the seat across from him, and he lifts his eyes briefly to look at her, before his gaze flickers away again.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” she says, in an attempt at cheer. Sam presses his lips together but can’t bring himself to meet her eyes again.
“…sorry,” he says quietly.
Just as quietly, Jess says, “Stop apologizing.”
The day is bright, sky blue. The café is only half full but it feels crowded to Sam. Ugly. Full of noise. He reaches for his coffee again, picks it up carefully. Jess sips at her own cup and raises both eyebrows at him. It feels as though his hands are shaking, though he glances at them and they’re steady as they’ve ever been.
He shuts his eyes against a sudden wave of nausea. He doesn’t want to be here. He only came because Jess…because she…
He doesn’t know why he came, actually.
“You know I have a spare room,” she says, from across the table, apropos of nothing. Her voice echoes, thin and hollow, as if it’s travelled down a long tunnel.
He looks up sharply.
“…what?”
“Spare room. I have one.” She points her index finger directly at herself. Sam thinks she’s trying to be cute, maybe. It doesn’t suit her. “You should come and visit.”
His lips pull back, without his say-so. Just peel right back from his teeth, and he sees Jess lean back, eyes widening. Startled, and maybe a little afraid.
That…it’s not what he meant to do.
He forces his face to smooth out.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: AU
The Stars in the Heavens and the Moon in the Gutter
The engine is quiet. The whole car is quiet, padded and lush on the inside, compact and unobtrusive on the outside.
He sits in the idling vehicle and waits with his hands in his lap. He’s alone for the moment, and it isn’t necessary to sit so still. Some distant thought flits through his head: he could listen to the radio. The knob is there. He glances at it, then away. Back to the windshield. Through it. Lets his eyes lose focus, the long street smearing into a wash of colors, motion, and distant noise. Why would he listen to the radio?
Why would anyone?
When the administrator finally shows up he’s managed not to fall asleep only because it isn’t allowed. Because he doesn’t do that sort of thing. He doesn’t tell the administrator, Glad you could make it, or, Thanks for taking the time, but the words drift across his consciousness on thin threads and the wry tone collects in his throat. He swallows it away.
A thick envelope lands in his lap. He doesn’t need to open it. He already knows what’s inside.
The administrator, an older balding man, tells him, “It’s time.”
He picks up the envelope. Closes his fingers around it.
“Okay,” he says.
He wants to feel excited, but he can’t remember how.
--
The TV murmurs, white noise and dull light filling the apartment, washing the walls in faint tones of blue and grey. Sam sits, elbows on his knees and face in his hands, and tries to get his breathing under control.
He’s not getting any more sleep tonight. As badly as he needs it, as much as his body craves it, he won’t be able to shut his eyes long enough to be soothed by the empty noise of a dead station. The edges of the dream still hang around him, clawed and sharp and waiting. Closing his eyes would be a mistake. He can’t see his brother’s face again. Not like that.
God, not like that.
He staggers into the living room and sits down heavily on the sofa, staring blearily at the far wall. His eyes too wide, too dry. He can’t remember them feeling any other way. He opens and closes his hands on his thighs, simply for something to do.
A year now. A year and he’s no closer to finding Dean. Not one lead, not a hint of his brother’s presence, anywhere in the world. A strand of hair, a flake of skin, a footprint left behind-nothing.
For the first time he thinks, Not even a body. And claps his hand to the side of his head, digging his nails in until they bite the skin under his hair.
The night crawls up the walls. Shadows and light. The noise of some ocean, somewhere. Empty as the desert. My brother is gone, he thinks. And when he shuts his eyes, just to blink, a fruitless attempt to dampen them, he sees Dean’s fingers, the skin of his neck, the back of his head. On the ground, in the leaves, under the earth. Scattered in pieces.
“He’s not dead,” Sam whispers, pushing the palm of his hand against the corner of his mouth. “He’s not.”
He sits until the sun comes up. Wipes at his face, the cold sweat and nausea, as the sun’s rays stab through the window and cut apart the light of the television. It can’t silence the static, though, and when Sam goes in the kitchen to make coffee, he can still hear it.
When it suddenly falls silent, his eyes snap up and he stares across the little counter into the living room, where Jess is standing.
“You couldn’t knock?” he demands, and she narrowed her eyes at him.
“How long have you been awake?” she retorts, hands on hips, and Sam blanches and looks down.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she goes on, in that biting tone she saves just for him, “And it’s not okay, Sam.” She crosses the room and plants both hands on the counter. He stares at her glossy nails. “Hey.” Her voice softens. “I know this is hard on you-”
He sucks in a sharp breath and jerks his head up. Whatever she sees on his face is enough to cause her to step back.
“You don’t understand,” he says, voice shaking with the effort of control. “Don’t pretend like-don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.” Cold sweat swarms over his skin and he lurches away from her, into the bathroom, buckles over the toilet and vomits saliva in long sticky strings. Tears erupt, briefly, and scorch tracks on his cheeks, until he squeezes his eyes shut.
Jess doesn’t come in the bathroom, which Sam appreciates. She doesn’t leave, either, which he appreciates less, but he doesn’t dare tell her.
She’s the last one. After everything, she’s last. The ones he’d believed in, that he’d thought he could trust, the ones who told him to blow the whistle, tell the truth-they’re all gone. But Jess, who fights with him more than anyone he’s ever met (with the grand exception of maybe two people), Jess for some reason, has stayed. Never said, “Sam, think about your career,” or, “Sam, you can’t fight these people,” or, “David and Goliath is just a story and in real life the little people get stomped on.” He knows she’s probably thought it. More than once over the past year he’s seen her open her mouth, cut her eyes at him, then look away.
When he goes back in the kitchen, she wordlessly hands him a cup of coffee, without meeting his eyes.
“You need a shower,” she says flatly, “You stink. Christ, Sam.”
“Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes and holds the coffee to his mouth, but doesn’t drink it. “Yeah, I know.”
--
The file says Sam Winchester, as if he wouldn’t know the target’s name. As if it’s all some kind of incredible secret, a great game for the administrators to play. Human lives as puzzle pieces. He guesses that’s how they look at the world, figures it can’t be any worse than any other way. It’s not his place to judge anyway.
He spreads the pictures out on the motel’s coffee table. Sam’s a tall sonuvabitch, skinny but broad-shouldered. Given the chance to grow into them, he’d be a massive bruiser, someone to be reckoned with. At the moment, he looks like less of a threat than the tall blonde woman appearing alongside him in over half the pictures in the packet.
Sam is the principal target. He’s the reason. For everything.
The reason for Michael.
Once Sam is dead, it’ll be over.
All of it, over.
Michael picks up the nearest photo and stares at it. He thinks maybe he’s seen this Sam kid somewhere before. He can’t grasp the thread, though, and by this point knows better than to try. Just lets it slip through mental fingers, faint and flashing and gone.
He puts the photo down, and starts re-reading the file.
--
“No,” he hisses, and Jess backs off, hands raised. Sam rakes a hand through his hair (too long, he can’t remember the last time he cut it) and leaps to his feet. Paces the length of the room in long, fierce strides.
“You know they took him,” he bites out, stopping a foot from the wall, head bowed, hair in his face. He can’t turn and face her, can’t have this argument again. “I don’t-how can you say that, after all this time? After they tried to buy me off, and, and…” he presses his lips together and spins around to stare at her. Knows he hasn’t kept the betrayal off his face.
“It’s destroying you, Sam,” she says, “Every day, this is what I see. More of-of this!” She waves a hand, encompassing the apartment, the spider-webs and takeout boxes and unchanged sheets and old clothes and newspapers and unpaid bills. “You can’t make this your whole life! This waiting and, and hoping for, for-Goddammit, Sam, would look at me?”
His hands are in fists at his sides. His whole body is trembling.
“They took my brother.” His voice is low. “They took him, he didn’t just leave one day. I was just trying to do the right thing. Everybody told me it was the right thing!” His voice climbs and Jess flinches back.
“I was wrong, Jess, I shouldn’t have done it. If I hadn’t done it, if I…then D-”he breaks off, licks his lips. He can’t even say his name. He feels the urge to vomit again and puts his hand over his mouth.
“Dammit, Sam.” Jess deflates a little. They’ve been having some version of this fight for a long while now. “Is revenge really the only thing…is it all you’re living for anymore?” By the end of the question, her voice is small.
Sam closes his eyes. His perpetual headache is ratcheting up again, moving from a dull grating behind his eyes to something like a distant siren’s wail.
“Jess, please,” he says softly.
He can’t see her, but he feels her deflate, even from across the room.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asks quietly.
He can’t bring himself to look at her as he nods.
He sinks down on the floor, back to the wall, eyes still shut. Puts his head down on his knees and lets his hair fall across his face, and waits. Jess shuffles through the mess on the floor in the direction of the door, and Sam hears the moment she pauses, on hand on the doorknob, and turns to look back.
“Sam, I-” she begins, and breaks off, opens and shuts the door and is gone, as if she’d never been, and still he can hear the echo of her unspoken words hanging in the air. She’s said them before. Said them months ago, when things were better than they are now.
Sam, I don’t know how to help you.
--
He remembers the song. ‘I shall not’
I shall not be moved
Like a tree. Sanctified and holy. Oh preacher.
He can’t feel his hands. Hasn’t been able to for a while. There’s blood, he thinks, scabbed over and peeled and scabbed again. He twists his arms a little and can feel the stumps, the strange thickness of bone and muscle and skin that goes nowhere, that dead-ends. He’s been here too long. He can’t remember how many fingers he has. He’s tired and he can’t remember.
His lips move, without his say-so. They just spill shapes out into the air, noiselessly. He watches them dissolve on the floor, words that aren’t words. He can’t remember any words. Not anymore.
They’ll be back soon. They’ll say, “You need re-education,” and they’ll say, “This is for the best,” and they’ll say, “Trust us, and it will get better.”
He wants it to get better.
He bites his lip to keep his mouth from moving.
They’ll say, “You don’t have a brother.”
He remembers someone screaming, but doesn’t know who it was.
There’s a whisper at the door. The softest sound. The doors are so quiet, like the brush of feathers on dry, thirsty earth.
Footsteps pace across the floor, but he doesn’t recognize them. These are soft. Light. Not like the re-educators. Not like the administrators. Not even like the nurses, who are pretty and light and terrible.
Fingers brush his shoulder, barely, and he flinches away. A hand latches on the side of his head and a noise springs from his mouth, thin as something worn away. As nothing.
“No,” hisses a voice, and it’s new. He doesn’t recognize it. Flinches away because that’s a healthy response. A normal response.
“Hush! Stop! Listen to me.”
He shudders, but does as he’s told. The hand on his head doesn’t move. If anything, it tightens.
“Listen to me.”
--
Michael sorts the photos again. Not sure why he does so. Moves them into different configurations on the table. Stares at the various permutations of the same face. Noses, eyes, ears. All the same features, from different angles, in different lighting, different places. Flashes like images flickering on a screen, here then gone.
They won’t fix in his head.
He rests fingers on the nearest printout, splayed so the tips bracket three of the four sides. The face of ‘Sam Winchester.’ Michael would know it, if he saw him on the street. He’d recognize the boy. The slope of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the shape of his eyes. But the pieces don’t fit together the way they should. He closes his eyes and breathes and all he can see are bits and pieces of a face. They won’t come together into anything coherent.
It’s a familiar experience. It’s the reason he covered the mirror in the bathroom with a t-shirt.
He opens his eyes. He moves his mouth, but isn’t sure what he wants to say. No sound comes out anyway.
listen
His hand jerks, spilling a few photos onto the floor.
like a tree planted by the water
I shall
Faces and pieces of-
He presses the heels of both hands to his forehead, gasping.
Listen! You have to-
Pushes away from the table, the sofa, until he hits the wall. There’s a noise, there’s static swelling in a wave, inside and outside, filling the walls, pouring into his ears. Voices (they’ll say) murmur.
He squeezes his eyes until he sees lights. Pushes against his head until the noise stops.
And it stops.
And he hears a voice-just one voice.
A mouth says, “Listen.”
--
It’s noisy and crowded, and Sam hunches his shoulders and stares down at his hands, fingertips resting lightly on the paper cup, just above the little paper sleeve. He’s distantly aware of the scalding heat burning against his skin, until Jess reaches down and plucks it away. She sets it down gently a few inches away as she slides into the seat across from him, and he lifts his eyes briefly to look at her, before his gaze flickers away again.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” she says, in an attempt at cheer. Sam presses his lips together but can’t bring himself to meet her eyes again.
“…sorry,” he says quietly.
Just as quietly, Jess says, “Stop apologizing.”
The day is bright, sky blue. The café is only half full but it feels crowded to Sam. Ugly. Full of noise. He reaches for his coffee again, picks it up carefully. Jess sips at her own cup and raises both eyebrows at him. It feels as though his hands are shaking, though he glances at them and they’re steady as they’ve ever been.
He shuts his eyes against a sudden wave of nausea. He doesn’t want to be here. He only came because Jess…because she…
He doesn’t know why he came, actually.
“You know I have a spare room,” she says, from across the table, apropos of nothing. Her voice echoes, thin and hollow, as if it’s travelled down a long tunnel.
He looks up sharply.
“…what?”
“Spare room. I have one.” She points her index finger directly at herself. Sam thinks she’s trying to be cute, maybe. It doesn’t suit her. “You should come and visit.”
His lips pull back, without his say-so. Just peel right back from his teeth, and he sees Jess lean back, eyes widening. Startled, and maybe a little afraid.
That…it’s not what he meant to do.
He forces his face to smooth out.