FANFIC POST: "The Persistence of Gravity" part 1/4 (Twilight)
Title: The Persistence of Gravity
Author: Sara (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Sam/Leah, some Sam/Emily
Rating: R
Summary: His father was a complete screw-up who hurt and abandoned everyone who needed him, but he tries very hard to be a good kid, a good student, a good friend and son. And he swears to himself as he watches Leah sleeping now that he'll always be good to her.
Notes: HOLY CRAP, I wrote something that's not Jacob/Bella! LOL.
Because I'm really interested in Sam and Leah as characters and their relationship we don't know much about, I wanted to write a fic trying to show their story in a very personal way that would make the heartbreak it caused Leah (and also the guilt Sam has over it) very real and understandable. Of course, this is also influenced a lot by my strong feelings that imprinting is basically everything love shouldn't be in a good love story (or, you know, life). And I was unprepared for how invested in this I actually got and how much it ran away with me and got much longer than expected, so I'm really crossing my fingers that there will be readers interested enough in these supporting characters to enjoy this fic in a bittersweet way like I enjoyed writing it.
As a nitpicky note, I know Seth's age in this is way off. At the time I started writing this I somehow had the idea that he's only about three years younger than Leah. But it's a kind of integral detail in one part that would have been hard to fix, so try to ignore it, LOL.
the persistence of gravity.
Sam has known Leah's whole family since he was a kid, but it isn't until one day at school near the end of his Junior year that he really notices her.
He is seventeen, tall and broadening, and she is nearly sixteen. Everyone has been let out of class to go to an assembly with the Seniors doing the traditional end-of-year skits, and after he finds a seat in the gym and is sitting by himself bent over his math homework she appears coming down his row looking for an empty seat.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees just a tall and slender but soft figure, filled out at the hips and everywhere else that it's nice to see some shape, all inside a snugly fitting sweater and slim faded jeans and framed darkly with very long and smooth draping hair. As she stops by him to take the empty seat on his right, he's pretty sure at first glance that she isn't anybody he knows, because if he'd seen her a lot he would know. So when he looks up just long enough to tell who it is, he's so taken aback that he has to stop himself from gaping at her a moment and letting her notice him staring.
And then immediately feels like some ridiculous pervert, and puts his attention back on his homework as she sits down beside him.
Not a minute later someone sitting behind them throws a wadded-up candy wrapper at her head. After it lands in his lap, Sam looks behind him at the same time that she turns around in her seat with an annoyed look, glancing just long enough to see a freshman guy grinning diabolically at her before he looks back down and pretends to mind his own business. He's pretty sure the freshman is the son of Isaac Parks, a guy he used to know as his father's boss, named Ray or Rob or something.
"Oh God," Leah says in a heavy, exasperated sigh after seeing who is behind her.
"Hey babe," Sam hears him saying, in an intentionally irritating kind of way. "I had to sit here just so I could look at your pretty head."
"I told you, Ray," she says dangerously, not at all playing along with his teasing. "I don't want you talking to me. I don't want you near me. We're not friends."
"Oh, gimme me a break," he says. "You're no fun anymore."
"I'm not fucking kidding. I told you to stay the hell away from my brother. Can't you just leave him alone?"
"Why are you being such a bitch? I haven't done anything."
"I know there's only one thing you and your buddies do anymore. Seth doesn't need to be hanging around with a bunch of scumbags like you."
Ray just lets out a laugh and says nastily, "Wow, I can't believe what a hypocrite you are, Leah."
She leans in a little closer to him, speaking more softly but in a way that somehow sounds twice as serious and threatening as before. "He's thirteen years old. I swear if I ever find out you gave him anything-"
"You'll what?" he asks tauntingly, still laughing at her. "Tell on me? You care too much about what everybody thinks of you to do that."
"Oh, you think there's somebody in this school besides your only two real friends you've got in the universe who will give a crap if I rat you out? That's just pathetic. Most people don't like you as much as they pretend to, you know. That's kind of sad if it really comes as much of a surprise that I don't."
Sam can't see Ray's reaction, but in the following beat of tense silence he can picture his face finally looking not so at ease.
"You can screw yourself," he then mutters to her darkly, finally seeming to have had enough as he gets up and goes off to find somewhere else to sit.
Leah turns back around with a loud and frustrated exhale of breath as Sam watches her out of the corner of his eye. Then he steals a closer look as she crosses her arms and just starts to sit very still, tightened up uncomfortably all over as if with the effort to contain her frustration. She acted so cool and unaffected in the way she said those things, but she's a bit rattled now. He gets the faint impression that some of the things Ray Parks said actually got to her just a little. He wonders if they used to be pretty good friends once.
He wonders why he's so interested.
That's when she turns her head just a little and catches his eye. And the look on her face of sudden recognition is unmistakable; she hasn't realized until just now that it's someone she knows sitting next to her. Apparently she's not the only one who has grown enough to not be obviously recognizable.
He looks down right away, trying to look casual about it as if his eyes were just drifting aimlessly toward her, but the damage is done. She turns her face away as well as if she's also a little embarrassed after having that conversation next to him. It seems to leave nothing else but for him to not bother hiding that he heard everything.
"You okay?" he asks tentatively, looking back over at her.
She sighs, meeting his eyes and smiling half-heartedly. "Yeah. It's nothing."
"That sounded pretty brutal."
That makes her smile a little more fully and she says, "Yeah, I can get that way."
Then Sam's smile is slightly amused, made impossible for her to miss by how much he tries to hide it by looking down away from her.
"What?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.
He shakes his head dismissingly, his answer coming out quiet. "I...didn't really mean you."
Leah giggles softly, the sound almost nervous but not quite, and then she takes a deep breath and seems to completely collect herself. "I don't know why it gets me so worked up," she admits. "Seth's a good kid. I'm sure he's not going to get into anything he shouldn't be doing."
Sam shrugs. "I don't know, I'm sure if he were my brother I'd be just as pissed. And you never know. Living in a place as boring as this, people can end up doing things that they know probably isn't the best idea just because they've got nothing better to do."
She laughs lightly. "Yeah, that's exactly what my cousin Emily always says. She's got four brothers who are amazingly dumb for not really being dumb." Then she smiles straight at him, seeming to look for something in his face, and adds in a way that sounds just slightly teasing, "But you sound like you're talking from experience."
He just avoids her eyes again with a tight smirk.
"Hm?" she presses.
Looking back at her, he just asks, "What about you? Sounds like you know that Parks kid pretty well."
She starts to look vaguely embarrassed again, and then sighs a little and shakes her head. "Wow, I can just imagine what you must think of me," she says with a short laugh. "I bet you only even remember me as some skinny little kid you used to see at church."
"I'm sure you haven't done anything I didn't try at your age," he says with a shrug, feeling a little odd about how much she seems to care what he thinks, even if her tone isn't that serious. "But actually, yeah-When you first came over I barely recognized you."
She gives a nod. "Yeah...I remember I always liked your mom. She was nice, and she...once she gave me some Life Savers she had in her purse to help shut me up during the service." She laughs at the memory while he raises his brow, a little surprised she would remember something like that. "How's she doing?"
He just nods and says, "Fine."
She grins like she's amused by his short answer, looking closely at him again. "You're not really big on talking, are you?" she asks.
He meets her eyes with a look that mirrors her own playfully scrutinizing one, a slightly tinted reflection of it. "You're kind of pushy, aren't you?"
Her smile turns a little warmer somehow and then she turns and looks forward, crossing her legs. "Well...that's okay."
The assembly is finally starting, all the students now seated in the gym. He and Leah don't speak or look at each other again the rest of the time, but as the Seniors perform their skits making fun of the teachers and staff they both occasionally break into low laughter along with everyone else. Her laughter is a little deep and throaty, not light and giggly, and after a while Sam's hearing seems to single out the sound among everything else around him so that as the lights are down he never stops being very aware of her presence beside him.
His father left when he was twelve and was hardly ever around even before that. He never taught Sam how to do anything like fish, fix a car, or carve things out of wood. And then suddenly he was gone. He will never forget how silent everything was for a couple weeks in anticipation of some sign that he wasn’t just gone for good, and then finally he came home from school one day to find his mother crying on the kitchen floor. He was the one who comforted her as she kept saying, "What am I going to do?"
Everyone who knows Sam knows all about this. It is a very small community in La Push. Sometimes it can feel like living with the dark shadow of his father’s reputation following him is as tough as having a great man of an ancestor to live up to and constantly be compared to. Now that the old man is long gone, his home is quiet at night without the heated rising voices and the cupboards in the kitchen are always dry, and it seems like he and his mother have even more of nothing than they used to, if it is possible. They save extra money in a jar on top of the fridge and Sam works shifts at a gas station after school and helps make sure the bills always get paid.
When almost nothing is expected from you, it can make it just as hard to motivate yourself to be anyone as when a lot is expected from you. But he doesn’t let it all discourage him. That shadow in his mother’s eyes when she looks at him that is Lee Uley is something he consciously keeps in check. He is never going to be that way. He works hard at his job. He gets all A’s and B’s in school. He is already thinking about applying for college scholarships even though it’s hard to just get a free ride with everything covered. He doesn’t know. He’ll work out something. He will not just be nothing like he was.
He would have made a horrible protector. But Sam does not know about all of that yet beyond just the superstitions. He doesn’t know what else he has to be scared his father passed onto him.
Sam has always been a little quiet and enigmatic, in a way that might make it easy for some to assume that he just doesn’t like many people. It isn’t that he’s shy at all. He is just a reserved kind of person who won’t talk just to fill up silences or smile easily unless he really means it. He has a certain removed and centered presence that keeps people at somewhat of a distance; if students he knows happen to see him somewhere outside of school, they usually aren’t going to bother smiling at him or saying hi.
But after their brief first conversation, there are a couple times Leah sees him around school, suddenly unavoidably noticeable to him now that he knows what’s there, and as she is standing or walking in the halls with a whole pack of friends she catches his eye briefly and smiles. Expecting nothing back and waiting for nothing before she then turns her attention right back to her friends, she just flashes him this fearless and sly smile that seems to say, Yeah, right. You don’t fool me. And he isn’t sure what she means by it.
Then when the Black twins celebrate their birthday with a big bonfire at the beach, she is there. Sam’s best friend Steve gets invited and brings him along as well as his cousin Paul. It looks like every student in the Senior class and then some are there, and he doesn’t even notice Leah among them until a bunch of people start making some noise freaking out about a huge spider crawling along the table where all the food is. She quickly moves to kill it with an easy smile, making a fist and smashing it with the side of her hand, and then everyone around her erupts into cheers and laughter.
Later in the night, Sam passes by a spot where a lot of girls have set up a net and are playing volleyball, and he notices the ball soaring right toward his head before he sees her quickly backing up to try to hit it. He catches the ball at the same time that her body is suddenly colliding against him, knocked off balance for a second so that she briefly grabs onto him as she turns to the side to keep from falling over. Then she looks up and sees who it is behind her and laughs as her face quickly cracks into a natural smile.
“Oh. Hi,” she says as she turns all the way around to face him.
He stays silent, returning the smile all with his eyes as he just hands her the ball.
“Thanks,” she says, and then before turning around her eyes drop away from his face a little and then stop halfway down his upper form as she notices something. “Hey, you’ve got something...”
She reaches up to his chest where a small remnant of a potato chip is clinging to his shirt where it spilled and brushes it off. The light and simple touch feels like it lasts longer than it really does. And then she looks back up at his face once again with that smile, the elusive teasing tantalizing one she gives him when she sees him at school but doesn’t talk to him which it sometimes seems like he could just be imagining, before turning back to the game.
After the party, he and his friends laugh together walking back.
“Hey, who’s that girl who kept picking all the lousy music?” Paul asks at one point. “I know I’ve seen her around with Maggie Allen a lot.”
“Oh, Leah Clearwater,” Steve says. “She’s a freshman.”
“God she’s cute.”
Steve laughs, the sound echoing pleasantly in the open, breezy night. “I know.”
Usually Sam might say something to agree or disagree, or he’d at least mention that he’s known her family a long time. But for some reason he just remains silent next to them then, as if he has stopped paying much attention.
When he gets home, he finds that his mom has fallen asleep on the couch watching television, curled up under a blanket with an unfinished cup of tea sitting by her. She wakes up after he turns off the TV and starts to take her mug away into the kitchen, muttering, “Sam?”
He turns back to her and says, “Hey” as he kneels on the floor to be level with her face. “Is your cold still real bad?”
She nods dismally. “I’m hanging in there...What time is it?”
“Pretty late. Almost eleven.”
“Oh, wow...Oh Sam, did you get a chance to change that tire today?” she asks, remembering it suddenly.
“No, mama, I said I’d take care of that tomorrow,” he says. “I had plans tonight, remember?”
“Oh, right. The...Rachel and Rebecca’s party.”
“Yeah. I’ll get the spare on tomorrow, and if you’re still not feeling well I’ll go take it in to get it fixed so you can get to work on Monday. I promise.”
“Okay,” she says, easily assured and smiling up at him, “I know you will...So did you have a good time?”
He nods and answers shortly, “Yep.”
“Good.” Still smiling, she reaches out and brushes her hand down his face, some deep warmth coming into her eyes behind the glassy tiredness. “You’re a good boy.”
Sam smirks before he stands back up, leaves the room muttering, "Goodnight, ma."
Nearly a couple weeks later, Sam’s mom comes home and tells him she ran into Kathy Morganroth and Sue Clearwater shopping together at the fabric store. A long conversation between the three of them lead to Kathy inviting both of them for dinner the coming weekend so that while they're over she can show them her very ambitious sewing project. Sam is invited as well, of course, and he feels ridiculous for the way his mind slips away out of the moment for a few seconds after he hears that all of the Clearwaters will be there.
He is used to seeing Leah looking very polished and made-up, hair shining smoothly and often styled, wearing long earrings picked to look good with her blouse and heeled boots. But on Saturday night she shows up with her hair tied back in a loose, slightly sloppy long braid and wearing just a faded red tank top, very old-looking sneakers, and jeans that have some off-white stains on them. She apologizes for coming like this, explaining to Kathy as she helps take a casserole out to the small and packed table, "I've been helping a friend paint her bedroom all day and didn't get time to change. I really hope the paint stains won't come off on your chairs or anything." But besides that, she seems completely comfortable with her less than immaculate appearance, as self-possessed and unconscious of herself as ever.
She and Sam never speak directly to each other through dinner. She drops into conversations and cracks jokes as often as any of the adults there, while Seth and the Morganroths’ oldest kid Collin get into their own separate conversations sitting next to each other. Leah keeps shifting position in her chair a lot, at one point leaning back to stretch her arms over her head and then reaching behind her and rubbing her upper back as if it feels sore. Sitting at the other end of the table on the opposite side, Sam takes notice of all this like he can’t help it.
Finally after dinner, the parents all start washing dishes or gathering in front of the TV together, and Sam and Leah both follow all the younger kids out to the garage and stand by watching as Seth and Collin play darts. They both laugh lightly whenever one of them misses the target board very badly, while Collin's little sister Sandra just complains that they won't let her play, and then after a while Leah starts blinking and gently rubbing at one of her eyes.
When she touches Sam's shoulder briefly, it is almost like he knew he was about to feel it. “You want to show me where the bathroom is?” she asks, evidently remembering that he went to use it earlier. “I need to fix my contact.”
He knows this game, he thinks. It is not a big house and she could easily just be told where anything is. But of course he shows her anyway, and they don’t say anything as they move through the dark parts of the house together. She never seems to expect him to.
Instead of going back outside while she is in there, he stands in the hall right outside of it and looks at some small framed art on the wall. Then when she comes out, pouring light from the doorway before she flips the switch, she goes to stand right next to him and follows his gaze to peer at one of the pictures, almost touching him shoulder-to-shoulder. Then he looks down and meets eyes with her, fixing her with a piercing stare to show quite clearly that he isn’t the least bit interested in this picture.
In silence, Leah just smiles a little, devastatingly in the dim light that gives a certain extra softness to her skin. Then she starts to turn, as if she is about to walk away and go right back to the others in the garage, but he reaches up and holds her jaw in his fingers a little firmly, turning her face to look right at him again.
“Are you playing hard to get?” he murmurs.
She smiles again, more gently, the tiniest trace of what might be shyness showing. “I think I’m a little young for you to be playing hard to get," she admits.
“You think so?” he asks, his mouth turning up into a half-smile-because as a matter of fact, it is exactly the reason he has been trying to wait for her, looking for her clear allowance if not for her to move first.
He keeps looking closely at her for a still moment, reading her face, wondering not for the very first time how used to this kind of thing she is. Then he glides his hand down to the smooth bare skin of her shoulder, deciding not to bother with any preamble after stepping delicately around the question long enough.
“I’m going to kiss you, okay?” he says quietly.
The words hold her in place for just one more silent second, and then she just laughs a little. “Not here,” she whispers. “Let’s go for a walk. Seth and Collin will be busy out there forever..."
So they quietly sneak out through the front door, going off without passing the garage so that nobody sees them and everyone can assume they're still with the other group. The Morganroths live closer to the beach than anyone Sam knows, and they automatically head away from the house in that direction in the quiet, peaceful night.
"Does your back hurt?" he asks when he notices her reaching back and rubbing it again.
"A little," she says. "I feel stiff all over after working all day..." As she drops her arm down again, she reaches over with it and takes his hand.
She asks him simple questions to get him to say a few words, gently prying open his shell even though it feels like she could already have all his pearls in her hands; none of the answers he gives her, about general things like what he does and doesn’t like about school or why she stopped seeing him at their church years ago, seem to come as a surprise to her.
When they reach the circle of logs for sitting around fires she does not tell him to sit down, just lightly pushes him backwards over to one of the logs until he drops down and sits on the ground against it. She settles herself down in the sand right between his bent legs, but instead of leaning all the way back against him she sits forward a little and then pulls her braid over one shoulder so it isn’t hanging over her back anymore.
“What are you doing?” he asks in a lightly bemused tone as she seems to be waiting for something.
“My back hurts,” she reminds him simply.
“...Oh.” He smirks, reaching up to her shoulders and starting to massage her with his large hands.
She makes soft, contented sighs in her throat in response to his touch, and he can feel her loosely relaxing all over. After a while he leans forward and starts putting slow, lingering kisses on her neck. Eventually she leans back against him and he can see the small, delicate smile on her face that she seems to be showing unconsciously as her eyes are closed. This is how she wants it done, he guesses, gradually building up to the point with a slow burn. In a way this feels so different than with any other girls he's been with before, and he's in no hurry himself. And he can't help but still feel a little unsure and hesitant about every little advance. She is fifteen, unbelievably beautiful but not this beautiful and perfectly ripened for touch since very long, and he doesn't know what is and what isn't new to her. But when she is finally resting all the way back against him and his hands move down exploring new places, brushing his fingers over her skin down her arms and clutching around her waist, the tiny smile on her face is relaxed and pleased.
She keeps her eyes closed as he tilts her face up to lean down and kiss her, and she responds so eagerly that everything seems to suddenly gain an unrestrained acceleration. She feels small and soft in his arms but as she turns in his lap to hold onto him around his shoulders her grip is so strong and tight. She kisses him with a kind of hunger and endlessly burning energy like she wants to consume him, not just be touched and caressed in a more soft and gentle way. He can tell from the way she feels in his arms, if he couldn't before, that this girl is not the kind who is going to gasp and bury her face into his chest getting scared while watching horror movies. This woman. He has seen her around since they were both very young, but where did she come from?
"I think you should suggest to your parents that they invite me and my mom over for dinner soon," he tells her later when they're about to creep back into the house. "Let them get to know me a little more before your dad gets to wish he could come after me with a shotgun."
She giggles low and quiet, smiling more vibrantly than he's ever seen her smile before. Before turning to slip inside, she kisses his throat, sending tickling electricity coursing through his body that lasts even after she is four feet away from him. What is it about her that makes him feel like he's never done all this before?
He will not wonder for a long time what makes him so sure right from the start that this is different. The first one that changes everything.
During the whole summer a day hardly ever goes by that they don't see each other.
Leah takes him along to her familiar hangouts with her large group of friends, going to movies in the day and various unsupervised shindigs at night. She always knows somehow if there is a party happening somewhere out in the woods or at the house of somebody she may not even know in Forks. Any view he has of her as innocent due to her being younger becomes more and more dissolved as he gets to know her. She can hold four beers almost as well as some guys his own age he knows, and he is always teasing her about how she's obviously just trying to prove to him how tough she is so he won't think of her as some pure and uncorrupted little sophomore.
Sam hardly ever drinks much himself. Sometimes all he can see inside the green and brown bottles is the blood of his father. She never asks why, seeming to easily understand on some level and know that it has nothing to do with disapproval of it, or of her. It's something she likes a lot less than disapproval but won't fault him for all the same.
More often, though, they spend time with Sam's friends, and he observes that Leah seems somehow more natural and comfortable that way, like a slightly different and more down-to-earth person. After spending enough time with her he has caught on pretty easily to how Seth is practically her best friend in some ways, probably one of the only people she'll completely let her guard down with; it seems like having only a brother, as well as a mother who is more of the tough love variety than maternally coddling, has made her almost more fit for male companionship. She is just as happy to hang out in Port Angeles shooting pool at a sports bar or watch hilarious blaxploitation movies with Sam and the boys as she is to go shopping with her girlfriends.
Then one day he, Steve, and Paul go cliff-diving and she wants to come.
Paul and Steve go first, shouting enthusiastically on the way down. Leah watches them descend and then stays peering down at the waves far below, her toes just inches from the edge of the cliff. Sam stands right behind her, holding her waist and looking down at the sea over her shoulder.
"You scared?" he asks.
She shakes her head and replies in an easy tone, "No."
"You got to be at least a little scared. That's what makes it fun."
Looking back at him a second, she grins a little smugly. "Well, I'm really not-"
Her words turn to a short, shrill sceam of shock when he jerks her forward suddenly as if starting to push her over the edge, but he immediately pulls her right back against him and starts laughing at her. She turns right around, also laughing loudly, and grabs him tight around his middle with her breath suddenly a little frantic, muttering, "You jerk."
He keeps laughing, more quietly, in deep vibrations against her face as he leans over and kisses her temple.
"You're not going to tell your parents you did this with me, are you?" he asks.
She just snorts with laughter. "You're always so worried about them not liking you. As if you could be a bad influence on me..."
"Come on, girls!" Paul's faint voice calls from far down in the water, and they both laugh a little again.
Leah grins a little mischievously, standing up tall to kiss him before he stops leaning into her. Then they just stand looking at each other for a preparing moment. Here they go.
When they jump, the frightening and heart-gripping thrill overtaking them with gravity's fierce pull for what seems like such a long moment before they hit the waves, he feels like they are more powerful than anything together right now, like they could survive any kind of fall. She goes first, and then he hits the water right after her. They find each other while still under the ocean, grasping hands as they kick themselves back up, and then reach the surface already locked together in another kiss. Steve reacts to the extensive public display by splashing both their faces with water. Leah lifts a hand up to show him the finger as she and Sam just keep kissing carelessly with their eyes closed, making both the others crack up laughing.
Time seems to fly by very fast. After they have been seeing each other for almost nine months, Leah owes Seth a lot of cokes because she promises to buy him a drink every time he doesn’t tell their parents she’s had Sam over at the house while they weren’t home, and she and Mary Uley have bonded over a TV show they both love and get along so well they sometimes monopolize all the conversation when she's over at Sam's house and end up joking about making him feel left out. With how little he has in the world compared to other people, she is already starting to feel like family to him. His whole life feels bigger than ever before. It seems more like it's going somewhere now.
One day at school as he walks to his next class with Steve she sees them in the hall, walking at the other end with some of her friends. As soon as they meet eyes, she says a quick last word to her friends and then breaks away from them to rush forward toward him. Sam automatically picks her up off the floor when she flies into his arms with a giddy grin on her face, lifting her up and then saying in a low voice, "Hey, Lee-lee" before starting a trail of light kisses up her neck as her arms wrap around his shoulders.
"Why don't you two just get married already, goddamn," Steve teases with a laugh before leaving them on their own.
Sam sets her back down when a teacher standing nearby starts giving them a warning look, and then he takes both her hands in his. "That sounds a lot better than going to Richardson's class," he sighs. "What do you say? Want to ditch school today? Run off and get hitched?"
She laughs and says, "Sounds like someone has a pretty early case of Senioritis. All ready to be an adult as soon as possible?"
The idea makes him look more exasperated. "Not far from the truth," he admits. "Never thought I'd be so tired of this place. If you didn't go to this school..."
"Hey now, you can't be losing motivation yet. Aren't you applying for those scholarships soon?"
"Yeah," he says, looking a little unhappy to be reminded of them.
"Come on, stop feeling so intimidated by it," she says, letting go of one of his hands to hit his shoulder lightly. "I keep telling you, you work so hard it's ridiculous and that's bound to show."
"Okay," he says relentingly, seeming to find her efforts of convincing him to be unnecessary as if he wasn't completely aware of his own expression before. "If you say so."
The halls are beginning to clear out; there is only about a minute left before the next class period. As she stands up on her toes with her hands at his chest, he has to bend down far to meet her for a final kiss. Something makes her lips tighten in a held-back smile as they're still against his, and then after they pull apart she looks a little amused.
"God, you're getting tall," she remarks before sliding her hand out of his as she walks away.
Some days after school Leah comes to meet him at the gas station when he gets off work so they can go back to his house together. Mary is always home by this time, so often she eats with them and then she and Sam spend the rest of the night doing their homework together.
One day while she's over she is so tired after not sleeping well the night before that she keeps yawning and seeming just slightly inattentive whenever they talk. After Sam leaves her working on Spanish to get a quick shower, he comes back to find her curled up on the couch napping and smiles down at the sight.
He sits on the edge of the couch by her feet, staring at her a while. In all the time they have spent together, he has never seen her sleeping before. It fills him with an unbridled and perceptibly expanding kind of softness to watch her this way. She is lying in the same place and in almost exactly the same way his mom was when he came home and found her asleep here the night of the Blacks' birthday party last spring.
The really horrible thing about the way his father was able to just leave her behind without looking back is that Sam knows she still completely believed he loved her up until that day he found her hopelessly collapsed on the floor in the kitchen. She believed there was something that would always hold them together, no matter how bad things were and no matter how much worse they got. And what is so messed up, which he thinks about sometimes, is maybe he really did love her and it just wasn't enough anymore, not enough to make him a good and strong person.
Everyone knows how his father was a complete screw-up who hurt and abandoned everyone who needed him, but he tries very hard to be a good kid, a good student, a good friend and son. And he swears to himself as he watches Leah sleeping now that he'll always be good to her. He knows the words would only sound ridiculous and unnecessary to her said out loud, so he just has to make the promise silently.
Sometimes he used to wonder if he is supposed to feel like he could be happy spending every single waking hour with her and nobody else if he really loves her. If it's okay that they have days when they're tired or distracted and they don't talk as much or kiss and touch with the usual enthusiasm. He used to wonder if this is it, what so many songs and flowery novels are written about. He wondered when and how he's supposed to be sure Leah is the one, like they say, when the world is so big and he's still young and has lived just a simple life in one little town so far.
But now these thoughts don't even occur to him anymore. If there is anything out there better than this, any undiscovered possibility beyond his imagining, he doesn't feel any desire to know or find it. He no longer wonders, and he supposes that must be true contentment, the greatest happiness anyone can ever hope to find. There must always be alternate roads, so all that really matters is being happy enough with the one he is on to never look back.
He knows now. He realizes he has already known for a while, as the conviction gradually settled into him and made itself at home deep inside of him, irremovable. He wants her and only her. He wants to make love to her. He wants to marry her. For the rest of their lives he wants to keep getting into stupid little fights with her on days that they're both in a bad mood and taking it out on each other and then getting over it twenty minutes later every time. He wants to be able to see her sleeping like this when he wakes up on any given morning. Sometimes all he can think when he's with her is I want, as if he doesn't already have all of it in his reach even if not taken already, as if it's an endless changing pursuit to be with her.
That striking knife-smile of hers that is just for him and seems to exist half in his imagination, it is a crescent moon's reflection glimmering and quivering on the surface of moving water, there and real in a sense but not something that can be touched or possessed. Sometimes he grabs her with a sudden, quiet intensity in his face, silencing her laughs with his lips on hers, trying to claim it anyway. The way she always responds leaves no question that she is his, and still he just wants and wants her, so badly.
Continued here...
Author: Sara (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Sam/Leah, some Sam/Emily
Rating: R
Summary: His father was a complete screw-up who hurt and abandoned everyone who needed him, but he tries very hard to be a good kid, a good student, a good friend and son. And he swears to himself as he watches Leah sleeping now that he'll always be good to her.
Notes: HOLY CRAP, I wrote something that's not Jacob/Bella! LOL.
Because I'm really interested in Sam and Leah as characters and their relationship we don't know much about, I wanted to write a fic trying to show their story in a very personal way that would make the heartbreak it caused Leah (and also the guilt Sam has over it) very real and understandable. Of course, this is also influenced a lot by my strong feelings that imprinting is basically everything love shouldn't be in a good love story (or, you know, life). And I was unprepared for how invested in this I actually got and how much it ran away with me and got much longer than expected, so I'm really crossing my fingers that there will be readers interested enough in these supporting characters to enjoy this fic in a bittersweet way like I enjoyed writing it.
As a nitpicky note, I know Seth's age in this is way off. At the time I started writing this I somehow had the idea that he's only about three years younger than Leah. But it's a kind of integral detail in one part that would have been hard to fix, so try to ignore it, LOL.
the persistence of gravity.
Sam has known Leah's whole family since he was a kid, but it isn't until one day at school near the end of his Junior year that he really notices her.
He is seventeen, tall and broadening, and she is nearly sixteen. Everyone has been let out of class to go to an assembly with the Seniors doing the traditional end-of-year skits, and after he finds a seat in the gym and is sitting by himself bent over his math homework she appears coming down his row looking for an empty seat.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees just a tall and slender but soft figure, filled out at the hips and everywhere else that it's nice to see some shape, all inside a snugly fitting sweater and slim faded jeans and framed darkly with very long and smooth draping hair. As she stops by him to take the empty seat on his right, he's pretty sure at first glance that she isn't anybody he knows, because if he'd seen her a lot he would know. So when he looks up just long enough to tell who it is, he's so taken aback that he has to stop himself from gaping at her a moment and letting her notice him staring.
And then immediately feels like some ridiculous pervert, and puts his attention back on his homework as she sits down beside him.
Not a minute later someone sitting behind them throws a wadded-up candy wrapper at her head. After it lands in his lap, Sam looks behind him at the same time that she turns around in her seat with an annoyed look, glancing just long enough to see a freshman guy grinning diabolically at her before he looks back down and pretends to mind his own business. He's pretty sure the freshman is the son of Isaac Parks, a guy he used to know as his father's boss, named Ray or Rob or something.
"Oh God," Leah says in a heavy, exasperated sigh after seeing who is behind her.
"Hey babe," Sam hears him saying, in an intentionally irritating kind of way. "I had to sit here just so I could look at your pretty head."
"I told you, Ray," she says dangerously, not at all playing along with his teasing. "I don't want you talking to me. I don't want you near me. We're not friends."
"Oh, gimme me a break," he says. "You're no fun anymore."
"I'm not fucking kidding. I told you to stay the hell away from my brother. Can't you just leave him alone?"
"Why are you being such a bitch? I haven't done anything."
"I know there's only one thing you and your buddies do anymore. Seth doesn't need to be hanging around with a bunch of scumbags like you."
Ray just lets out a laugh and says nastily, "Wow, I can't believe what a hypocrite you are, Leah."
She leans in a little closer to him, speaking more softly but in a way that somehow sounds twice as serious and threatening as before. "He's thirteen years old. I swear if I ever find out you gave him anything-"
"You'll what?" he asks tauntingly, still laughing at her. "Tell on me? You care too much about what everybody thinks of you to do that."
"Oh, you think there's somebody in this school besides your only two real friends you've got in the universe who will give a crap if I rat you out? That's just pathetic. Most people don't like you as much as they pretend to, you know. That's kind of sad if it really comes as much of a surprise that I don't."
Sam can't see Ray's reaction, but in the following beat of tense silence he can picture his face finally looking not so at ease.
"You can screw yourself," he then mutters to her darkly, finally seeming to have had enough as he gets up and goes off to find somewhere else to sit.
Leah turns back around with a loud and frustrated exhale of breath as Sam watches her out of the corner of his eye. Then he steals a closer look as she crosses her arms and just starts to sit very still, tightened up uncomfortably all over as if with the effort to contain her frustration. She acted so cool and unaffected in the way she said those things, but she's a bit rattled now. He gets the faint impression that some of the things Ray Parks said actually got to her just a little. He wonders if they used to be pretty good friends once.
He wonders why he's so interested.
That's when she turns her head just a little and catches his eye. And the look on her face of sudden recognition is unmistakable; she hasn't realized until just now that it's someone she knows sitting next to her. Apparently she's not the only one who has grown enough to not be obviously recognizable.
He looks down right away, trying to look casual about it as if his eyes were just drifting aimlessly toward her, but the damage is done. She turns her face away as well as if she's also a little embarrassed after having that conversation next to him. It seems to leave nothing else but for him to not bother hiding that he heard everything.
"You okay?" he asks tentatively, looking back over at her.
She sighs, meeting his eyes and smiling half-heartedly. "Yeah. It's nothing."
"That sounded pretty brutal."
That makes her smile a little more fully and she says, "Yeah, I can get that way."
Then Sam's smile is slightly amused, made impossible for her to miss by how much he tries to hide it by looking down away from her.
"What?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.
He shakes his head dismissingly, his answer coming out quiet. "I...didn't really mean you."
Leah giggles softly, the sound almost nervous but not quite, and then she takes a deep breath and seems to completely collect herself. "I don't know why it gets me so worked up," she admits. "Seth's a good kid. I'm sure he's not going to get into anything he shouldn't be doing."
Sam shrugs. "I don't know, I'm sure if he were my brother I'd be just as pissed. And you never know. Living in a place as boring as this, people can end up doing things that they know probably isn't the best idea just because they've got nothing better to do."
She laughs lightly. "Yeah, that's exactly what my cousin Emily always says. She's got four brothers who are amazingly dumb for not really being dumb." Then she smiles straight at him, seeming to look for something in his face, and adds in a way that sounds just slightly teasing, "But you sound like you're talking from experience."
He just avoids her eyes again with a tight smirk.
"Hm?" she presses.
Looking back at her, he just asks, "What about you? Sounds like you know that Parks kid pretty well."
She starts to look vaguely embarrassed again, and then sighs a little and shakes her head. "Wow, I can just imagine what you must think of me," she says with a short laugh. "I bet you only even remember me as some skinny little kid you used to see at church."
"I'm sure you haven't done anything I didn't try at your age," he says with a shrug, feeling a little odd about how much she seems to care what he thinks, even if her tone isn't that serious. "But actually, yeah-When you first came over I barely recognized you."
She gives a nod. "Yeah...I remember I always liked your mom. She was nice, and she...once she gave me some Life Savers she had in her purse to help shut me up during the service." She laughs at the memory while he raises his brow, a little surprised she would remember something like that. "How's she doing?"
He just nods and says, "Fine."
She grins like she's amused by his short answer, looking closely at him again. "You're not really big on talking, are you?" she asks.
He meets her eyes with a look that mirrors her own playfully scrutinizing one, a slightly tinted reflection of it. "You're kind of pushy, aren't you?"
Her smile turns a little warmer somehow and then she turns and looks forward, crossing her legs. "Well...that's okay."
The assembly is finally starting, all the students now seated in the gym. He and Leah don't speak or look at each other again the rest of the time, but as the Seniors perform their skits making fun of the teachers and staff they both occasionally break into low laughter along with everyone else. Her laughter is a little deep and throaty, not light and giggly, and after a while Sam's hearing seems to single out the sound among everything else around him so that as the lights are down he never stops being very aware of her presence beside him.
His father left when he was twelve and was hardly ever around even before that. He never taught Sam how to do anything like fish, fix a car, or carve things out of wood. And then suddenly he was gone. He will never forget how silent everything was for a couple weeks in anticipation of some sign that he wasn’t just gone for good, and then finally he came home from school one day to find his mother crying on the kitchen floor. He was the one who comforted her as she kept saying, "What am I going to do?"
Everyone who knows Sam knows all about this. It is a very small community in La Push. Sometimes it can feel like living with the dark shadow of his father’s reputation following him is as tough as having a great man of an ancestor to live up to and constantly be compared to. Now that the old man is long gone, his home is quiet at night without the heated rising voices and the cupboards in the kitchen are always dry, and it seems like he and his mother have even more of nothing than they used to, if it is possible. They save extra money in a jar on top of the fridge and Sam works shifts at a gas station after school and helps make sure the bills always get paid.
When almost nothing is expected from you, it can make it just as hard to motivate yourself to be anyone as when a lot is expected from you. But he doesn’t let it all discourage him. That shadow in his mother’s eyes when she looks at him that is Lee Uley is something he consciously keeps in check. He is never going to be that way. He works hard at his job. He gets all A’s and B’s in school. He is already thinking about applying for college scholarships even though it’s hard to just get a free ride with everything covered. He doesn’t know. He’ll work out something. He will not just be nothing like he was.
He would have made a horrible protector. But Sam does not know about all of that yet beyond just the superstitions. He doesn’t know what else he has to be scared his father passed onto him.
Sam has always been a little quiet and enigmatic, in a way that might make it easy for some to assume that he just doesn’t like many people. It isn’t that he’s shy at all. He is just a reserved kind of person who won’t talk just to fill up silences or smile easily unless he really means it. He has a certain removed and centered presence that keeps people at somewhat of a distance; if students he knows happen to see him somewhere outside of school, they usually aren’t going to bother smiling at him or saying hi.
But after their brief first conversation, there are a couple times Leah sees him around school, suddenly unavoidably noticeable to him now that he knows what’s there, and as she is standing or walking in the halls with a whole pack of friends she catches his eye briefly and smiles. Expecting nothing back and waiting for nothing before she then turns her attention right back to her friends, she just flashes him this fearless and sly smile that seems to say, Yeah, right. You don’t fool me. And he isn’t sure what she means by it.
Then when the Black twins celebrate their birthday with a big bonfire at the beach, she is there. Sam’s best friend Steve gets invited and brings him along as well as his cousin Paul. It looks like every student in the Senior class and then some are there, and he doesn’t even notice Leah among them until a bunch of people start making some noise freaking out about a huge spider crawling along the table where all the food is. She quickly moves to kill it with an easy smile, making a fist and smashing it with the side of her hand, and then everyone around her erupts into cheers and laughter.
Later in the night, Sam passes by a spot where a lot of girls have set up a net and are playing volleyball, and he notices the ball soaring right toward his head before he sees her quickly backing up to try to hit it. He catches the ball at the same time that her body is suddenly colliding against him, knocked off balance for a second so that she briefly grabs onto him as she turns to the side to keep from falling over. Then she looks up and sees who it is behind her and laughs as her face quickly cracks into a natural smile.
“Oh. Hi,” she says as she turns all the way around to face him.
He stays silent, returning the smile all with his eyes as he just hands her the ball.
“Thanks,” she says, and then before turning around her eyes drop away from his face a little and then stop halfway down his upper form as she notices something. “Hey, you’ve got something...”
She reaches up to his chest where a small remnant of a potato chip is clinging to his shirt where it spilled and brushes it off. The light and simple touch feels like it lasts longer than it really does. And then she looks back up at his face once again with that smile, the elusive teasing tantalizing one she gives him when she sees him at school but doesn’t talk to him which it sometimes seems like he could just be imagining, before turning back to the game.
After the party, he and his friends laugh together walking back.
“Hey, who’s that girl who kept picking all the lousy music?” Paul asks at one point. “I know I’ve seen her around with Maggie Allen a lot.”
“Oh, Leah Clearwater,” Steve says. “She’s a freshman.”
“God she’s cute.”
Steve laughs, the sound echoing pleasantly in the open, breezy night. “I know.”
Usually Sam might say something to agree or disagree, or he’d at least mention that he’s known her family a long time. But for some reason he just remains silent next to them then, as if he has stopped paying much attention.
When he gets home, he finds that his mom has fallen asleep on the couch watching television, curled up under a blanket with an unfinished cup of tea sitting by her. She wakes up after he turns off the TV and starts to take her mug away into the kitchen, muttering, “Sam?”
He turns back to her and says, “Hey” as he kneels on the floor to be level with her face. “Is your cold still real bad?”
She nods dismally. “I’m hanging in there...What time is it?”
“Pretty late. Almost eleven.”
“Oh, wow...Oh Sam, did you get a chance to change that tire today?” she asks, remembering it suddenly.
“No, mama, I said I’d take care of that tomorrow,” he says. “I had plans tonight, remember?”
“Oh, right. The...Rachel and Rebecca’s party.”
“Yeah. I’ll get the spare on tomorrow, and if you’re still not feeling well I’ll go take it in to get it fixed so you can get to work on Monday. I promise.”
“Okay,” she says, easily assured and smiling up at him, “I know you will...So did you have a good time?”
He nods and answers shortly, “Yep.”
“Good.” Still smiling, she reaches out and brushes her hand down his face, some deep warmth coming into her eyes behind the glassy tiredness. “You’re a good boy.”
Sam smirks before he stands back up, leaves the room muttering, "Goodnight, ma."
Nearly a couple weeks later, Sam’s mom comes home and tells him she ran into Kathy Morganroth and Sue Clearwater shopping together at the fabric store. A long conversation between the three of them lead to Kathy inviting both of them for dinner the coming weekend so that while they're over she can show them her very ambitious sewing project. Sam is invited as well, of course, and he feels ridiculous for the way his mind slips away out of the moment for a few seconds after he hears that all of the Clearwaters will be there.
He is used to seeing Leah looking very polished and made-up, hair shining smoothly and often styled, wearing long earrings picked to look good with her blouse and heeled boots. But on Saturday night she shows up with her hair tied back in a loose, slightly sloppy long braid and wearing just a faded red tank top, very old-looking sneakers, and jeans that have some off-white stains on them. She apologizes for coming like this, explaining to Kathy as she helps take a casserole out to the small and packed table, "I've been helping a friend paint her bedroom all day and didn't get time to change. I really hope the paint stains won't come off on your chairs or anything." But besides that, she seems completely comfortable with her less than immaculate appearance, as self-possessed and unconscious of herself as ever.
She and Sam never speak directly to each other through dinner. She drops into conversations and cracks jokes as often as any of the adults there, while Seth and the Morganroths’ oldest kid Collin get into their own separate conversations sitting next to each other. Leah keeps shifting position in her chair a lot, at one point leaning back to stretch her arms over her head and then reaching behind her and rubbing her upper back as if it feels sore. Sitting at the other end of the table on the opposite side, Sam takes notice of all this like he can’t help it.
Finally after dinner, the parents all start washing dishes or gathering in front of the TV together, and Sam and Leah both follow all the younger kids out to the garage and stand by watching as Seth and Collin play darts. They both laugh lightly whenever one of them misses the target board very badly, while Collin's little sister Sandra just complains that they won't let her play, and then after a while Leah starts blinking and gently rubbing at one of her eyes.
When she touches Sam's shoulder briefly, it is almost like he knew he was about to feel it. “You want to show me where the bathroom is?” she asks, evidently remembering that he went to use it earlier. “I need to fix my contact.”
He knows this game, he thinks. It is not a big house and she could easily just be told where anything is. But of course he shows her anyway, and they don’t say anything as they move through the dark parts of the house together. She never seems to expect him to.
Instead of going back outside while she is in there, he stands in the hall right outside of it and looks at some small framed art on the wall. Then when she comes out, pouring light from the doorway before she flips the switch, she goes to stand right next to him and follows his gaze to peer at one of the pictures, almost touching him shoulder-to-shoulder. Then he looks down and meets eyes with her, fixing her with a piercing stare to show quite clearly that he isn’t the least bit interested in this picture.
In silence, Leah just smiles a little, devastatingly in the dim light that gives a certain extra softness to her skin. Then she starts to turn, as if she is about to walk away and go right back to the others in the garage, but he reaches up and holds her jaw in his fingers a little firmly, turning her face to look right at him again.
“Are you playing hard to get?” he murmurs.
She smiles again, more gently, the tiniest trace of what might be shyness showing. “I think I’m a little young for you to be playing hard to get," she admits.
“You think so?” he asks, his mouth turning up into a half-smile-because as a matter of fact, it is exactly the reason he has been trying to wait for her, looking for her clear allowance if not for her to move first.
He keeps looking closely at her for a still moment, reading her face, wondering not for the very first time how used to this kind of thing she is. Then he glides his hand down to the smooth bare skin of her shoulder, deciding not to bother with any preamble after stepping delicately around the question long enough.
“I’m going to kiss you, okay?” he says quietly.
The words hold her in place for just one more silent second, and then she just laughs a little. “Not here,” she whispers. “Let’s go for a walk. Seth and Collin will be busy out there forever..."
So they quietly sneak out through the front door, going off without passing the garage so that nobody sees them and everyone can assume they're still with the other group. The Morganroths live closer to the beach than anyone Sam knows, and they automatically head away from the house in that direction in the quiet, peaceful night.
"Does your back hurt?" he asks when he notices her reaching back and rubbing it again.
"A little," she says. "I feel stiff all over after working all day..." As she drops her arm down again, she reaches over with it and takes his hand.
She asks him simple questions to get him to say a few words, gently prying open his shell even though it feels like she could already have all his pearls in her hands; none of the answers he gives her, about general things like what he does and doesn’t like about school or why she stopped seeing him at their church years ago, seem to come as a surprise to her.
When they reach the circle of logs for sitting around fires she does not tell him to sit down, just lightly pushes him backwards over to one of the logs until he drops down and sits on the ground against it. She settles herself down in the sand right between his bent legs, but instead of leaning all the way back against him she sits forward a little and then pulls her braid over one shoulder so it isn’t hanging over her back anymore.
“What are you doing?” he asks in a lightly bemused tone as she seems to be waiting for something.
“My back hurts,” she reminds him simply.
“...Oh.” He smirks, reaching up to her shoulders and starting to massage her with his large hands.
She makes soft, contented sighs in her throat in response to his touch, and he can feel her loosely relaxing all over. After a while he leans forward and starts putting slow, lingering kisses on her neck. Eventually she leans back against him and he can see the small, delicate smile on her face that she seems to be showing unconsciously as her eyes are closed. This is how she wants it done, he guesses, gradually building up to the point with a slow burn. In a way this feels so different than with any other girls he's been with before, and he's in no hurry himself. And he can't help but still feel a little unsure and hesitant about every little advance. She is fifteen, unbelievably beautiful but not this beautiful and perfectly ripened for touch since very long, and he doesn't know what is and what isn't new to her. But when she is finally resting all the way back against him and his hands move down exploring new places, brushing his fingers over her skin down her arms and clutching around her waist, the tiny smile on her face is relaxed and pleased.
She keeps her eyes closed as he tilts her face up to lean down and kiss her, and she responds so eagerly that everything seems to suddenly gain an unrestrained acceleration. She feels small and soft in his arms but as she turns in his lap to hold onto him around his shoulders her grip is so strong and tight. She kisses him with a kind of hunger and endlessly burning energy like she wants to consume him, not just be touched and caressed in a more soft and gentle way. He can tell from the way she feels in his arms, if he couldn't before, that this girl is not the kind who is going to gasp and bury her face into his chest getting scared while watching horror movies. This woman. He has seen her around since they were both very young, but where did she come from?
"I think you should suggest to your parents that they invite me and my mom over for dinner soon," he tells her later when they're about to creep back into the house. "Let them get to know me a little more before your dad gets to wish he could come after me with a shotgun."
She giggles low and quiet, smiling more vibrantly than he's ever seen her smile before. Before turning to slip inside, she kisses his throat, sending tickling electricity coursing through his body that lasts even after she is four feet away from him. What is it about her that makes him feel like he's never done all this before?
He will not wonder for a long time what makes him so sure right from the start that this is different. The first one that changes everything.
During the whole summer a day hardly ever goes by that they don't see each other.
Leah takes him along to her familiar hangouts with her large group of friends, going to movies in the day and various unsupervised shindigs at night. She always knows somehow if there is a party happening somewhere out in the woods or at the house of somebody she may not even know in Forks. Any view he has of her as innocent due to her being younger becomes more and more dissolved as he gets to know her. She can hold four beers almost as well as some guys his own age he knows, and he is always teasing her about how she's obviously just trying to prove to him how tough she is so he won't think of her as some pure and uncorrupted little sophomore.
Sam hardly ever drinks much himself. Sometimes all he can see inside the green and brown bottles is the blood of his father. She never asks why, seeming to easily understand on some level and know that it has nothing to do with disapproval of it, or of her. It's something she likes a lot less than disapproval but won't fault him for all the same.
More often, though, they spend time with Sam's friends, and he observes that Leah seems somehow more natural and comfortable that way, like a slightly different and more down-to-earth person. After spending enough time with her he has caught on pretty easily to how Seth is practically her best friend in some ways, probably one of the only people she'll completely let her guard down with; it seems like having only a brother, as well as a mother who is more of the tough love variety than maternally coddling, has made her almost more fit for male companionship. She is just as happy to hang out in Port Angeles shooting pool at a sports bar or watch hilarious blaxploitation movies with Sam and the boys as she is to go shopping with her girlfriends.
Then one day he, Steve, and Paul go cliff-diving and she wants to come.
Paul and Steve go first, shouting enthusiastically on the way down. Leah watches them descend and then stays peering down at the waves far below, her toes just inches from the edge of the cliff. Sam stands right behind her, holding her waist and looking down at the sea over her shoulder.
"You scared?" he asks.
She shakes her head and replies in an easy tone, "No."
"You got to be at least a little scared. That's what makes it fun."
Looking back at him a second, she grins a little smugly. "Well, I'm really not-"
Her words turn to a short, shrill sceam of shock when he jerks her forward suddenly as if starting to push her over the edge, but he immediately pulls her right back against him and starts laughing at her. She turns right around, also laughing loudly, and grabs him tight around his middle with her breath suddenly a little frantic, muttering, "You jerk."
He keeps laughing, more quietly, in deep vibrations against her face as he leans over and kisses her temple.
"You're not going to tell your parents you did this with me, are you?" he asks.
She just snorts with laughter. "You're always so worried about them not liking you. As if you could be a bad influence on me..."
"Come on, girls!" Paul's faint voice calls from far down in the water, and they both laugh a little again.
Leah grins a little mischievously, standing up tall to kiss him before he stops leaning into her. Then they just stand looking at each other for a preparing moment. Here they go.
When they jump, the frightening and heart-gripping thrill overtaking them with gravity's fierce pull for what seems like such a long moment before they hit the waves, he feels like they are more powerful than anything together right now, like they could survive any kind of fall. She goes first, and then he hits the water right after her. They find each other while still under the ocean, grasping hands as they kick themselves back up, and then reach the surface already locked together in another kiss. Steve reacts to the extensive public display by splashing both their faces with water. Leah lifts a hand up to show him the finger as she and Sam just keep kissing carelessly with their eyes closed, making both the others crack up laughing.
Time seems to fly by very fast. After they have been seeing each other for almost nine months, Leah owes Seth a lot of cokes because she promises to buy him a drink every time he doesn’t tell their parents she’s had Sam over at the house while they weren’t home, and she and Mary Uley have bonded over a TV show they both love and get along so well they sometimes monopolize all the conversation when she's over at Sam's house and end up joking about making him feel left out. With how little he has in the world compared to other people, she is already starting to feel like family to him. His whole life feels bigger than ever before. It seems more like it's going somewhere now.
One day at school as he walks to his next class with Steve she sees them in the hall, walking at the other end with some of her friends. As soon as they meet eyes, she says a quick last word to her friends and then breaks away from them to rush forward toward him. Sam automatically picks her up off the floor when she flies into his arms with a giddy grin on her face, lifting her up and then saying in a low voice, "Hey, Lee-lee" before starting a trail of light kisses up her neck as her arms wrap around his shoulders.
"Why don't you two just get married already, goddamn," Steve teases with a laugh before leaving them on their own.
Sam sets her back down when a teacher standing nearby starts giving them a warning look, and then he takes both her hands in his. "That sounds a lot better than going to Richardson's class," he sighs. "What do you say? Want to ditch school today? Run off and get hitched?"
She laughs and says, "Sounds like someone has a pretty early case of Senioritis. All ready to be an adult as soon as possible?"
The idea makes him look more exasperated. "Not far from the truth," he admits. "Never thought I'd be so tired of this place. If you didn't go to this school..."
"Hey now, you can't be losing motivation yet. Aren't you applying for those scholarships soon?"
"Yeah," he says, looking a little unhappy to be reminded of them.
"Come on, stop feeling so intimidated by it," she says, letting go of one of his hands to hit his shoulder lightly. "I keep telling you, you work so hard it's ridiculous and that's bound to show."
"Okay," he says relentingly, seeming to find her efforts of convincing him to be unnecessary as if he wasn't completely aware of his own expression before. "If you say so."
The halls are beginning to clear out; there is only about a minute left before the next class period. As she stands up on her toes with her hands at his chest, he has to bend down far to meet her for a final kiss. Something makes her lips tighten in a held-back smile as they're still against his, and then after they pull apart she looks a little amused.
"God, you're getting tall," she remarks before sliding her hand out of his as she walks away.
Some days after school Leah comes to meet him at the gas station when he gets off work so they can go back to his house together. Mary is always home by this time, so often she eats with them and then she and Sam spend the rest of the night doing their homework together.
One day while she's over she is so tired after not sleeping well the night before that she keeps yawning and seeming just slightly inattentive whenever they talk. After Sam leaves her working on Spanish to get a quick shower, he comes back to find her curled up on the couch napping and smiles down at the sight.
He sits on the edge of the couch by her feet, staring at her a while. In all the time they have spent together, he has never seen her sleeping before. It fills him with an unbridled and perceptibly expanding kind of softness to watch her this way. She is lying in the same place and in almost exactly the same way his mom was when he came home and found her asleep here the night of the Blacks' birthday party last spring.
The really horrible thing about the way his father was able to just leave her behind without looking back is that Sam knows she still completely believed he loved her up until that day he found her hopelessly collapsed on the floor in the kitchen. She believed there was something that would always hold them together, no matter how bad things were and no matter how much worse they got. And what is so messed up, which he thinks about sometimes, is maybe he really did love her and it just wasn't enough anymore, not enough to make him a good and strong person.
Everyone knows how his father was a complete screw-up who hurt and abandoned everyone who needed him, but he tries very hard to be a good kid, a good student, a good friend and son. And he swears to himself as he watches Leah sleeping now that he'll always be good to her. He knows the words would only sound ridiculous and unnecessary to her said out loud, so he just has to make the promise silently.
Sometimes he used to wonder if he is supposed to feel like he could be happy spending every single waking hour with her and nobody else if he really loves her. If it's okay that they have days when they're tired or distracted and they don't talk as much or kiss and touch with the usual enthusiasm. He used to wonder if this is it, what so many songs and flowery novels are written about. He wondered when and how he's supposed to be sure Leah is the one, like they say, when the world is so big and he's still young and has lived just a simple life in one little town so far.
But now these thoughts don't even occur to him anymore. If there is anything out there better than this, any undiscovered possibility beyond his imagining, he doesn't feel any desire to know or find it. He no longer wonders, and he supposes that must be true contentment, the greatest happiness anyone can ever hope to find. There must always be alternate roads, so all that really matters is being happy enough with the one he is on to never look back.
He knows now. He realizes he has already known for a while, as the conviction gradually settled into him and made itself at home deep inside of him, irremovable. He wants her and only her. He wants to make love to her. He wants to marry her. For the rest of their lives he wants to keep getting into stupid little fights with her on days that they're both in a bad mood and taking it out on each other and then getting over it twenty minutes later every time. He wants to be able to see her sleeping like this when he wakes up on any given morning. Sometimes all he can think when he's with her is I want, as if he doesn't already have all of it in his reach even if not taken already, as if it's an endless changing pursuit to be with her.
That striking knife-smile of hers that is just for him and seems to exist half in his imagination, it is a crescent moon's reflection glimmering and quivering on the surface of moving water, there and real in a sense but not something that can be touched or possessed. Sometimes he grabs her with a sudden, quiet intensity in his face, silencing her laughs with his lips on hers, trying to claim it anyway. The way she always responds leaves no question that she is his, and still he just wants and wants her, so badly.
Continued here...