Birds Against Pink Skies (Het, R)
Title: Birds Against Pink Skies
Rating: R
Category: Pre-series AU oneshot
Word Count: 7138
Characters: Sam/Jo, Ellen, mentions of John and Dean
Spoilers: None
Summary: California was going to be a chance at something new. She’s new but not part of his plan.
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: An endless amount of gratitude to vinylroad for the beta and for being so kind and patient when answering my questions. I can’t thank her enough for her thoughts and opinions on this one. Loads of thanks also goes to equinox_blue who is one of the busiest people I know and still found time to beta and kick my butt in all the usual places. As always, any remaining mistakes are mine alone and are not the reflection of anyone else. Cross-posted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
1.
He first notices her in the small café right outside campus. There are a few opened books in front of her, forming a circle around the notebook where she’s scribbling manic notes, and an untouched drink sits off to the side with its whipped topping dissipating into a flat, white puddle. Against her shoulders, her hair lies tousled and blonde on her denim jacket, and her free hand taps a rhythm silently on the tabletop. Other students mill around her, chattering about weekend parties and horrendous tests, and everyone ignores her. She’s separated despite being surrounded.
If all he was to give her was a quick glance and nothing more, he’d dismiss her as any ordinary college kid. Another girl deep in thought.
But when he looks up, away from his own textbooks and highlighter yellow lines, she’s staring at him. Her pencil rests lazily between her teeth, and her gaze cuts through the other people in the building and settles on him.
When they lock eyes, he’s the first to look away.
It happens again and again, a dance of glancing over and away, and then up again only to see that she’s not backing down, he feels uncomfortable. Doesn’t like the worry in his belly that questions if she’s doing more than making eye contact to get in his pants. While he hasn’t touched a shotgun in months, his hunting instincts haven’t faded.
He gathers his belongings and leaves with her eyes on his back.
- - - - -
He avoids the café for a while, and when he returns on the fourth day with a study group-strength in numbers, after all-she isn’t there. Secretly, he finds himself stupidly relieved. Although he’s almost positive she wasn’t a threat, he’s seen a stare like hers before and has learned that trouble instinctively comes at the receiving end of it.
Days go by and he finds foolish comfort in the idea of being able to disappear into the thousands of other stressed and bustling students. Yet nearly a week later, his contentment with anonymity is ruined when he meets her again in the library.
She’s standing in front of the row of books he needs to use, so he swallows his irrational paranoia and walks over.
“S’cuse me,” he says, snaking an arm in front of her to slip his needed paperback off the shelf.
“No big,” she mumbles. Next to him, she’s much shorter than he assumed, and he immediately chides himself for being so ridiculous before. She’s practically a little girl.
He thumbs through the pages, verifying this is the book he’ll need for his report, and she looks up at him.
“Hey,” she says, “you seem familiar. Have we met before?”
He shakes his head, clears his throat. “You were in the café-the one downtown by the laundromat?-a week or so ago. That’s it.”
She nods, remembering this. A piece of loose hair falls from behind her ear, and she tucks it back to blend with the rest of her ponytail, not taking her eyes away from him. She tugs on the strap of her book bag, pulling it tighter on her shoulder.
“What’d you say your name was?” she asks. In her voice, there’s a lilt, a certain twang that he can’t place by location but recognizes from a distant part of his past.
“Didn’t say,” he tells her, “but it’s Sam.”
“Sam,” she repeats, smooth and easy, testing the weight of it on her tongue.
“Yup,” he replies, backing away now that he has his needed book. “Um, I guess I’ll see you later?” he says only to fill the static air. He won’t be the first guy to give a girl false promises, he knows. Besides, it’s not like he owes her anything.
His words fall on deaf ears because she’s already engrossed in her own pages. She scratches her nose and doesn’t look up as he disappears around the shelf into another row of endless books.
- - - - -
Coming from class, taking the stairs two at a time out of the building, his mind is spinning with charts and theories and wondering how he’s going to finish his homework by tomorrow. A report to write and research to start, too much to do and too little time to do it.
Suddenly his thoughts screech to a jarring halt when he sees her perched on the stone ledge right outside the door. She’s swinging her legs, boots beneath holed denim jeans, and looking back and forth. Ducking his head, he tries to work his way into a group of jabbering students, hoping to avoid her as he passes by.
He’s down the sidewalk, thinking she hasn’t seen him, when he hears her calling his name. Her voice comes closer, louder, and he can hear the slapping of her shoes against the cement.
Because he’d have to be deaf or simply an asshole not to acknowledge her now, he turns and says, “Yeah?”
She looks up at him, face flushed. “Hey, remember from the library when I said you looked familiar? I think I figured out where I know you from.”
“Really,” he says distractedly, not caring and instead glancing over his shoulder as a cluster of football players, big guys with thick necks and arms, laugh and slap each other on the shoulders, whooping it up about their big game that night.
“Sam?” she says, trying to get his attention. It isn’t until he looks back at her, makes eye contact, that she continues. “I know your father. Well, knew, I guess. Haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“Yeah?”
“John Winchester?” she asks him, and he stares at her blankly, not wanting to reveal anything, praying that his face doesn’t twitch under the power of her words. He reminds himself that anyone with decent enough computer skills could hack into his school records and figure that one out.
When she sees that he’s not impressed, that he hasn’t given her the reaction she was apparently hoping for, she steps closer to him so he can smell the crisp spearmint gum on her breath when she nails the closing punch.
“I know that he hunts. And I’m not talking about deer and rabbits. Anything supernatural and evil that none of these morons here would believe. He hunts monsters, right?”
This time, he does gape. Words are pulled away from him and the blood falls from his face. His heart leaps and holds fast in his throat before he spits out, “You better start talking.”
- - - - -
He pulls her aside, quick and furious, stumbling behind a cluster of bushes to stand underneath thick, hiding trees next to a sidewalk that no one ever uses. An empty bench waits at the foot of a tree, and he takes her by the shoulder, hopes his hands aren’t shaking when he leads her and sits them down.
“Who are you?” he asks. “How do you know all that? Have you been spying on me?” He can’t seem to get enough air, and his words are strained. The adrenaline is thumping hard and wicked in his blood.
“Geesh,” she says, annoyed, pulling his hand off her. “One question at a time. First, I’m Jo. Jo Harvelle. Second, I know because I called my mom and asked her.” He opens his mouth to say something. Protest, but she shakes her head before he has a chance. “Just a sec here, cowboy, lemme finish, all right? And last, yeah, I have been spying on you, but only after I figured out who you were.”
“Your mom?” he echoes, mind refusing to budge from that fact.
She nods, biting her lower lip thoughtfully. “Mm-hmm,” she answers. “Ellen Harvelle? Ring any bells?”
He shakes his head. She’s speaking a language he once understood fluently and now can’t remember.
“Guess you’ve been out of it longer than we thought. Well, my parents knew John. Your dad used to visit this place my mom owns now-the Roadhouse?-and she told me about you when I called her the other day. So,” she sighs, a heave of her chest beneath an old shirt, “here we are.”
His fear and anger dissipates, and he wipes a hand over his face.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he admits, all his fierce words scattering. It’s too much and it’s been too long. Like ripping open a scab and watching it bleed and forgetting how the wound happened to begin with.
She smiles, maybe sympathetically; he can’t read her well enough to tell. “How ‘bout we go grab something to eat?” she asks. “God, I’m starving. You hungry? C’mon, I’ll pay seeing as how I’m the one that screwed up your day.”
He agrees only because he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight. He has too much to ask her.
- - - - -
The restaurant’s mostly empty when they arrive, and an employee is sweeping underneath a table on the opposite side of the room, a steady, scratchy swish-swish of the broom over the tiled floor. The sound is only a background white noise to the group of girls spouting medical terms at a sleek laptop.
After Jo’s ordered and she’s holding a large chocolate milkshake, she slides into the booth, tucks one of her legs beneath her in a girlish sort of way and says, “Ask away. I can see the questions whirling around up there in that big head of yours.”
“You’re a hunter.” It’s really not a question. He needs confirmation more than an answer.
She has her lips wrapped around her straw, and she swallows before responding. “I’d like to think so, yeah. Everybody says I’m too young or just a girl or bias bullshit like that, but I’ve known how to shoot since I was in pigtails, so yeah, I can handle myself.”
“Why are you in California?”
“A job. Why else do hunters go where they go?” She snickers at her words, a bit of self-amusement in her voice. “And, I needed some research material, and Stanford has a decent enough occult section in their library, so I stopped by.”
He squeezes his hands together, too distracted to have ordered any food, and he fidgets in his seat. He’s uncomfortable next to her, drawn to her, both confused and intrigued.
“How long are you going to be here?” he asks.
Watching the girls in their scrubs and lab coats, it takes a moment before she turns back to him. “Why? Want to get rid of me already?”
“Just curious.”
“Dunno. When I’m ready? How’s that for an answer, hm?” She pops the lid off her milkshake, pushes the straw aside so she can tilt her head back and drink. When she sets her cup down on the table, there’s a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her lips and she wipes it away with her index finger. Smirks at him and says nothing more.
- - - - -
2.
She attends all sorts of classes, large lectures on mythology and speech presentations in Latin, guest speakers from Europe and laboratory studies on human psychology, and he tells her she’s going to get herself caught. That someone’s going to figure out that she’s not enrolled at the school and her whole cover’s going to be blown. He’s afraid that if she’s discovered, he’ll be dragged right down with her.
She finds his warnings funny, thinks he’s being overprotective, and ignores everything he spouts at her about not letting anybody find out about the things they’ve done as hunters. When she doesn’t listen to him, he turns away and leaves her.
But she finds him.
She always finds him.
- - - - -
“So, you’re telling me that nobody here knows who you really are?” she asks over a lunch of greasy fries with a pool of ketchup on the side and extra large fountain Cokes. His secrecy seems to astound her, and his refusal to be honest about his past is a subject of which she never tires.
“They know who I am,” he answers, shifting in his seat so he can hook his feet into the rungs of the barstool. Tucked in the corner of a restaurant, they sit by a window that looks out at a bustling street of new cars glistening in the noonday sun and college kids with their overstuffed backpacks.
It’s been almost a month since she came to campus. It feels so much longer.
“Then your classmates, your roommate, they all know that you were raised to be a hunter?”
“No.”
“So you are lying to everyone,” she says triumphantly. She dips a fry into the cup of ketchup, swirls it around before lifting the fry to her mouth, careful not to drip on her shirt. For a brief moment, she appears tiny and feminine. Delicate.
He leans forward in his seat, long arms nearly knocking over the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table, pushing aside the flyer that advertises the upcoming bookstore sale, and he whispers, “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is my chance at what I’ve always wanted. I’m not going to screw it up. That hunter you’re always talking ‘bout? That’s not me anymore. I’m done with that.”
He lets this settle between them, satisfied with his words until she leans forward, close enough for them to nearly be knocking noses, and she says, “Sam, babe, I hate to burst your pretty little bubble here, but let me tell you that I’ve broken into your dorm room, okay? And anybody who’s done with hunting sure as hell doesn’t keep a knife with a seven inch blade under their pillow.”
- - - - -
He hates everything about her.
She’s childish and stubborn. She chews with her mouth opened when she’s focused elsewhere and laughs loudly over perverted, eighth-grade jokes. She obsesses over anything supernatural, anything to do with hunting, determined to memorize exorcisms even though she’s only seen a possessed man once. She remains stupidly glued to the case that brought her out here, determined not to leave until she’s seen it to the end, and she goes so far as to rent an apartment for herself just to prove her tenacity.
He hates everything about her because she reminds him of home.
- - - - -
3.
“Do you ever go back to see your family?” she asks. It’s Thanksgiving evening, and they’re sitting on the floor in her apartment. The windows are opened to let in milky gray light and cool wind.
Everyone else on campus has gone home for the holiday except him. And she’s stayed behind with him.
He shrugs, takes a bite of the cold turkey sandwich he bought down at the grocery store when she called him earlier in the afternoon to invite him over. She’s smeared her bread with mayonnaise and mustard, layered it with cheese and topped it with pickles that she continues to eat by the forkful straight from the jar.
“Don’t know,” he replies. “Why don’t you?” he asks after swallowing.
“Because,” she answers promptly, a little bit cockily, “my dad’s dead and my mom isn’t real happy with my decision to go hunting.” She takes a long drink of the red wine they’re sharing, lifting the bottle with one hand, her throat bobbing smoothly. “Hell, she’d take me back. In a heartbeat, but y’know? I just wanna see things for myself. That’s all.”
“Yeah, makes sense.”
“Is that why you’re out here? Seeing things?”
“Something like that,” he answers.
“Sam,” she coaxes. “What’s up with your family? Would they take you back? C’mon, spill already. I won’t tell anybody. Just you and me ‘n the birds. Cross my heart.”
He looks down at his sandwich, at the paper plate on the floor in front of him beside his feet wearing faded socks, and says, “It’s a long story. I’d rather not talk about it.”
There’s a moment of silence, and he’s waiting for her to continue her questions, to push him into an answer, but all she says is, “Do you miss them?”
He looks up at her and sees how she’s framed by the pale light coming in through her skinny little window. The light makes her skin glow, and her head is cocked to the side inquisitively. Her eyes are big, open and trustworthy, and he wishes he could bring himself to tell his secrets.
Instead of answering her directly, he just stares and says, “I’m here now. That’s what matters, right?”
She pauses, pickles dangling from her fork, suspended between the jar and her mouth. She stiffens like this isn’t the answer she expected, but then she smiles, sad and sardonic.
“Well,” she agrees, “I guess it is.”
- - - - -
She leaves for a few days. Off to Phoenix after a case about men who murder their children and leave wives as stone statues of horrors.
“You wanna come?” she asks as she loads the trunk of her car. The sun is setting as a bloody smear on the horizon. “I could use an extra set of eyes and somebody’s who good with a gun.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets, wraps his fingers around spare change and his dorm key linked to her lent apartment key, and he shakes his head, denial and refusal to her request.
“I’ve got midterms this week. Don’t want to screw those up.”
“And if you didn’t have ‘em?”
His silence, his blank stare and tightened lips are enough of an answer, and she laughs at nothing funny, rolls her eyes.
“You can’t pretend forever, Sam.” She slams the trunk shut, walks past him, swinging her keys from a curved finger, and climbs into her car. “Don’t wait up for me, all right?”
She starts the engine, music blaring, and leaves him standing alone on the sidewalk.
- - - - -
He studies. Passes every test and he goes out with a few friends to celebrate that weekend. At the bar his cell phone rings and her number glows on his screen. He picks up after the third ring
“Jo? Jo, are you okay? Where are you...Jo?”
There’s no answer.
- - - - -
It’s dark when her car pulls up in front of the apartment, and his hands are shaking something fierce when he climbs down the steps where he’s been waiting what feels like hours. He watches in horror as she slumps forward in the seat, forehead coming to rest on the steering wheel, one hand looped weakly on the top of the wheel while the other curls in her lap.
“Hey,” he calls. “Jo?” He opens the door and flinches instinctively at how broken she is.
The eye he can see moves slowly, just barely, and looks over at him through a fringe of dirty blonde hair. Her lip is torn, and when she smiles faintly, breathes, “Sam,” blood runs onto her teeth.
He goes to work at unbuckling her, at lifting her from the car and carrying her inside. One of her eyes is swollen black and blue shut and there’s dried blood on her shirt, crusted blossoms on the fabric. She inhales sharply when he lays her down on the couch in her living room.
“What happened?” he asks after he’s gotten the first aid kit from her bathroom and has it opened on the coffee table.
It’s like riding a bike, he thinks bitterly. He’ll never forget how to save. He wishes he could forget why. Why so many have bled before him.
“It followed me outta Phoenix,” she whispers. “I didn’t know. Thought I was safe.”
“You called me.”
“Tried to,” she admits. “Could barely focus on driving. Couldn’t drive and talk.” Her attempt at a smile is morbid when her lips part to reveal those slimy red teeth again. “I’m not that talented.”
He cuts open her shirt, helps her out of it and wipes away the dried blood on her back. He touches her skin and refuses to let his thoughts stray when she unhooks her bra so he can stitch the claw marks shut along her spine. Even though he’s sewn flesh together many a time, it’s always been his brother, his father, a person who he’s known all his life. Never a girl so soft-vulnerable-and smooth. He swallows down the heat rising in his throat.
She hisses when the needle pierces her skin, and her fingers curve tight over the cushions of the couch.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”
She pinches her one good eye shut. Remains quiet when a tear, glassy and clean, runs over her cheek.
When he’s finished and she’s floating on drugs, he shuts the kit and starts to say how he should be going back to his place. It’s closing in on five in the morning. He hasn’t slept all night, and he has a class at eight that morning.
But she reaches for him with her bandaged fingers and says, “Please. Don’t leave. I don’t-” Her face flinches, pain perhaps. “I don’t want to be alone.”
He knows. He’s been alone since he shut the door in Dad’s face and refused to answer Dean’s pleas to stay. Since he came here to this land of endless dreams.
He nods and says, “Okay.”
- - - - -
4.
The day before school lets out for winter break, she calls to say she’s going back home for the holidays. He tells her to have a good trip and make sure she drives safe because the roads can be bad this time of the year.
Down his hallway, somebody’s blasting “Jingle Bell Rock,” and he’s not sure what he’s going to do by himself when all his friends go home to families that’ll greet them with hugs and presents.
As if reading his mind, she says that he should come with her. He shrugs, chewing on a pencil, and agrees even though he knows better. He’ll berate himself over his decision during the trip.
At the Roadhouse-Jo’s version of home-there are heaped snowdrifts and windows that have little feet of frost creeping around the edges. Jo drops her bags, stomps her feet, leaving white footprints across the floor, and she calls out to her mother. She tugs off her stocking cap, reveals hair frizzy and static.
A woman, wiping her hands on a towel, comes from a hallway off to the side. She smiles, big and wide as a prairie horizon and pulls Jo in tightly. She kisses the top of her head and says, “Good to have ya home, baby girl.” Combing down Jo’s messy hair with her fingers, she turns to Sam and says, “You must be the Winchester boy, hm?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replies, still holding his lone duffel bag in one hand and keeping his backpack strapped on tight.
“You can call me Ellen. Don’t need anything fancy,” she tells him, no nonsense about it. She pauses, glances from Sam to Jo and then back again to her daughter. “You two hooked up?”
Jo protests, “Mom, honestly,” at the same time Sam quickly answers, “No, ma’am, no.”
Ellen nods, lips pursed before patting Jo on the shoulder. “Jo, honey, why don’t you go put your things away? I’ve been cleaning out a room for Sam. Can you grab an extra set of blankets? It’s gonna be a cold one tonight.”
Jo gives a final look at Sam and scoops up her bags before disappearing down the hallway from where Ellen came. Once Jo’s out of earshot, Ellen walks over to the empty bar and pulls out a bottle, amber liquid sloshing against cut glass.
“You want something to drink?” she asks.
“No, ‘m good, thank you.”
She smirks, seemingly amused by this, and says, “You’re John’s son. The younger one?”
He nods. He feels he has to choose his words carefully with her. Around the strap of his duffel bag, his hand is sweating, and his backpack feels heavy on his shoulders. He still doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Perhaps seeing if there is any of this life left for him.
“You seen him lately?” she questions. “Your dad?”
“No. I’ve been at school the last couple years.” He pauses then dares himself to ask, “Um, is he-How is he?”
“He’s good,” she answers. She smiles, eyes softening tenderly like only a woman’s can, and she knows what he’s really after, what he wants to know more than that. “And Dean? Yeah, he’s good too. Don’t worry there, Sam, don’t you worry at all.”
He smiles, relaxed for the first time since coming here, and lets out a heavy breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
- - - - -
5.
He wants to hate everything about her.
She asks him millions of questions and listens intently when he explains things in a stumbling way because he’s never opened up to someone who isn’t his brother. She finishes her case, finds the answer after all, and keeps living at the apartment for reasons she won’t reveal. She likes to ruffle his hair while he studies or read growing reports over his shoulder as he types on his laptop. She laughs at his jokes when they’ve had too much to drink and never says anything when he tells her that he wishes he could remember his mom better than just a photograph on his nightstand.
He wants to hate everything about her because it’s easier than admitting that he might like her.
- - - - -
She’s made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup at her apartment. Over the stove, Jo says her mom used to make it for her all the time.
“Dean tried to make grilled cheese one time,” he tells Jo as she comes into the tiny TV room with two glasses of milk. On the coffee table in front of them, Sam’s already set down the tray of soup bowls and plates of sandwiches.
This is the first time he’s said Dean’s name aloud to her, and he feels like he’s betraying his family by speaking of them.
“Yeah?” she asks, cups of milk held carefully as she sits down next to him on the couch, not wanting to slosh the milk over the edges. “How’d that go?” She places the cups next to the tray on the small table with the rest of the food.
Sam snorts. “He went outside to get the newspaper and ended up reading the front page on the back porch. By the time he smelled the smoke, the sandwiches were black. Even the cheese.”
She giggles and takes a bite. Cheesy strings dangle in the air between the bread and her lips until she tugs them together and drops the orange bundle into her mouth. “Sorry I decided not to burn these. Next time, mmkay? Just for you.” She licks her fingers childishly.
He grins at her. “Sure.” Picking up the TV remote, he flips through the channels until she lays a hand on his arm and tells him to stop. It’s some type of dramatic romance movie with a sweeping musical score. He rolls his eyes. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding, Sam?” she wants to know with an elbow in his side. “I feed you, let you use my TV and sit on my couch, so I get to pick the flick.”
They eat dinner together and Jo makes comments as the movie plays. When they’re both finished, they leave their dishes on the coffee table, and she lays down on the couch to curl up next to him, her head hard against the soft part of his abdomen where he sits. While the end credits roll on the screen, he looks down at her, peaceful in sleep. He hesitates, uncertain and second-guessing himself before resting his hand on her shoulder to hold her close. Next to the couch, he reaches over to the lamp and turns off the light.
- - - - -
6.
He enrolls in a handful of summer classes so he can still have a place on campus to live. He likes the peacefulness of the half-empty school, how he doesn’t have to fight for space on the sidewalk and how the classes are smaller than an echoing, impersonal lecture hall. Even his dorm building is quieter, and he’s satisfied with this slow sink into silence.
Sometime in July, she asks him to join her on a trip to Mexico. More of a vacation on the beach than a real hunt, and she tells him that he should come along for the ocean and ignore all the rest.
He reminds her that he has an upcoming test at the beginning of this week and a paper due by the end.
She sighs. “Same old Sam.”
He doesn’t answer. After all, he’s not the one who has mixed up priorities.
- - - - -
7.
They’re fighting. They’ve never really fought like this before, and he wonders if it means something that they’re spitting and slinging insults like an old married couple even though they haven’t shared more than lunches and late night conversations. No kisses, no stolen moments, no intimacy of skin to skin.
“You’re a hypocrite!” she yells at him, slapping down the knife she was using to cut carrots into thin slivers. “You go around here, acting all noble, all perfect. Like you’re better than me. Better than them, but you’re just a fucking liar like everyone else too.”
“And why’s that?” he spits at her, gripping the countertop hard enough to squeeze his knuckles white. “Because I don’t want to go on your hunts with you? Go hunting evil again like it’s normal? You think that makes you better than me? Because you don’t hide it? Huh?”
She turns, stands on the opposite side of the counter with eyes burning. Her skin is tanner since she got back from Mexico; she wears the sun beautifully.
“At least it doesn’t make me a liar. I know who I am, Sam,” she snarls, craning her neck to meet his eyes. “You don’t even know who the hell you are.”
“I know who I am!”
“Yeah? Do you? You have a brother and a father somewhere out there. You’ve never even talked about them like they’re some secret you’ve got to protect. A whole ‘nother life and you just keep painting the fucking layers on.”
“I don’t have to listen to this bullshit,” he says, turning away and snatching his coat off the back of the kitchen chair. Even though it’s pouring outside, he doesn’t bother to put the jacket on, and its sleeve catches, drags over a pile of papers he knows she’s been working on. He refuses to stop and pick them up; he lets them flutter to the floor messily.
“Then just walk away,” she tells his back. “It’s what you do every time you don’t get your way, isn’t it?”
He spins around, hand fisted on the doorknob, ready to leave, and she’s standing by the kitchen table, ignoring all her diligently organized papers scattered on the ground.
“Just shut up,” he growls. He hasn’t been this angry with anyone since Dad told him to leave and not come back. “You act like you know me. You don’t know shit about me, all right?” He doesn’t let her get another word in, doesn’t let her toss one more argument on the butcher table between them. After he throws the door open, he slams it behind him hard enough to feel the vibrations in his hand on the knob.
Outside in the rain, he runs all the way back to his dorm, pushing past the few people out with their colorful umbrellas and rubber galoshes. He’s soaked and breathless when he bursts into his building. His hair is dripping in his eyes, water running down his face, and his heart flutters erratically. A curse escapes-hisses-from between his lips.
- - - - -
They go to the ocean together, and everything lies stagnant between them. He wants to apologize for his obscenities and insults, only he can’t make himself speak. There’s a wall around her, and she doesn’t joke or laugh. He’d assume that he’s lost her except she still accepted his invitation. That gives him a flicker of hope.
At the beach where the waves are short and choppy, she walks far ahead of him, long hair billowing, snapping in the wind. He has to run to catch her.
“Jo!” he calls. “Jo, wait.”
When he reaches her, she stops, turns with eyes unreadable against the backdrop of the sea.
“Look,” he says, “we need to talk about what happened last week.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
She walks away, slower this time, enough that he can take one long stride for every two little steps of hers, and he’s questioning, wanting to know why she’s so closed and separated, what he can do to make things better when she stops again, lets her arms fall to her sides, defeated.
“Sam, stop. Please.”
“Jo?”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what?” he asks because he’s male and she’s female and everything she says seems foreign and blurred.
She looks out over the water, away from him. “You want to know? Okay, then,” she says at last only because he won’t stop asking since he doesn’t want things to stay like this anymore. When she speaks, her voice rambles, falls and rises with the hitches in her emotions. Her hair whips across her face, and she rakes it away viciously. “I’m not mad at you. I was, yeah, but…”
When she pauses, words dying on the wind, he stares and says nothing, waiting for her continue. Waiting for her to speak to him again.
“Sam, I…I like you. A lot. I didn’t want to. I really wanted to hate you because of how you treated me because of what I do even though you did the same things too. And I can’t-” She halts, voice shuddering, and she wraps her arms around herself, protective against the ocean wind and his stare. Her eyes are wet, and when she blinks, tears run down her face. She doesn’t try to brush them away. “I can’t keep doing this ‘friend’ thing anymore, okay? I can’t. It’s just too hard.”
She turns, moves down the shoreline until she shrinks into a small pink spot drifting in the wind. He brings a hand to his face, wipes over skin damp from the spray of the water. The lighthouse in the distance blinks, a turn and twist, pirouette of its light, and he closes his eyes.
- - - - -
Three days. Three days of silent phones and empty seats in all their places. The library, the restaurant, café, and classes. Three days of pacing his dorm room and walking past her apartment complex before he swallows his selfish, stupid stubbornness and climbs the stairs to her place.
He knocks, then steps back and waits. The door opens, and she’s barefoot, wearing a green sweater, sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and frayed blue jeans with a black stain above the knee.
“This really isn’t a good time,” she begins.
She doesn’t finish. He bends and kisses her, hard, enough to steal all her air and make her gasp in surprise. He kisses her and whispers, “I’m such an idiot.”
She loops her arms around his neck and laughs into his mouth. Tells him between kisses, “Nah, you’re just a slow learner.”
- - - - -
In her bed, her hands are in his hair, yanking his head down to her neck, and his hands are beneath her layers of shirts, slipping up underneath the soft bra to cup her in his hands. She’s so small in his hold, and he feels like he could break her if he wasn’t thinking.
“C’mon,” she hisses, face flushed pink on the apples of her cheeks. “C’mon, already.”
He looks up, sees her eyes obscured by the ragged curtain of her bangs and how she watches his mouth on her skin. Instead of answering, he surges up to kiss her lips fiercely, teeth clashing, and there are fingers on pants’ zippers and buttons, and he doesn’t know-doesn’t care-whose hands are whose anymore.
They fuck with their shirts on, mostly dressed, jeans shoved down just past her knees and his barely off his hips, and shoes still tied up to their necks. It’s messy and frantic, hurried like he hasn’t had before, but she moves with him, catching his rhythm, meeting his pace and force effortlessly. She cries out when she comes, digging fingers into his shoulder, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. His hips slowing in their mad thrusts, he buries his face in the pillow beside her head and shudders, falling over the edge soundlessly.
- - - - -
8.
On an afternoon when the sun is no brighter and the events of the day are no more extraordinary than before, they’re on the bench beside the rarely used sidewalk where they first sat and talked, and she looks at him and says, “Tell me about your family.”
He lifts his eyes to meet hers. It’s the one secret he’s kept from her all this time. The one thing he’s never told anyone in this wide state and its future promises. The weight of this rests heavy on him, and he wonders for a brief moment what it’ll feel like to lift away this burden of silence. Wonders if he’ll be able to breathe freely again.
Choking down the lump rising thick in his throat and taking a chance on her-them together-he asks, “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me.”
The trees move overhead, splitting and scattering the sunlight with their leaves, and drops of light land on her skin. Her face is quiet and still.
“All right,” he agrees softly, remembering the final horrid fight and how his father laughed, the way that Dean liked his coffee and his painful good-bye. Recalling their faces and voices. Good and bad both combined. “Sometimes,” he says, voice hoarse and broken, “I hate them more than anything…” He brings a hand to his face, pinches the bridge of his nose to push the tears back into his eyes. “God, I miss them more than anything.”
- - - - -
9.
Late at night, well after he should’ve gone to bed but his laptop screen still glows with a paper not yet finished and his roommate hasn’t returned from a party downtown, Jo calls.
“Ever wanted to go to Sacramento?” she asks. She sounds awake and bubbly; he assumes it’s caffeine doing the talking.
He glances at his computer clock and rubs his eyes. His vision burns and swims with exhaustion. “Why? What’s there?”
“Three suicides in the past two days. All three leapt off the roof of the same building, even though they didn’t live there. Police can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Jo, I-”
She sighs, frustrated, a muddled burst of static. “Right. I know. You’ve got homework to do and class tomorrow.”
Swallowing, he thinks of her trip to Phoenix and what a life-even that of a stranger’s-means when compared to an eight o’clock lecture on the history of American law.
He tells her, “I’ve got about two hundred words left on this paper, and I need to edit it up a bit. Pick me up in an hour?”
Her smile is heard all the way through the line when she says, “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
- - - - -
In motel bed, after the hunt where she sliced and he shot and after they came here to make love with the shower water hot on their backs before tumbling into sheets and pillows, he lies behind her. He keeps his face pressed to the bare slope of her neck where her heart beats quietly and her hair rests in soft silken waves. Her knees are tucked up and he fits perfectly behind her.
Two puzzle pieces. One piece just remembering what it means to be part of the picture again.
Around her naked waist, he wraps a protective arm, lets his hand lightly cup her breast, while his thumb strokes her skin peacefully.
“Jo?” he says into her skin.
“Mm?” she murmurs, barely stirring. She’s warm and wonderful in his hold, and he doesn’t want to move away from her.
He presses his lips to her cheek tenderly, a chaste kiss, and he whispers, admitting it at last out loud, “I‘m glad you’re here.”
- - - - -
10.
They go to a birthday party for a friend together. Jo drives, saying things like, “Never been to a kegger before” and “How much does it take to put you under the table anyway?” Her grin is mischievous and excited. They plan to make their rounds and say their hellos and then they’ll be off to northern California for a case. Sam’s already turned in the paper that’ll be due while they’re gone. He told the professor he was going away on “family business” for the next few days.
Inside the boisterous house, they mingle politely with everyone, and Sam holds a red plastic cup and she has a blue one. She keeps reaching over and hooking her fingers through his belt loops, never saying anything.
As they’re getting ready to leave, one of the girls he recognizes vaguely from a long ago group project, catches him by the doorway. She giggles, filled with alcohol, and asks, “Have you met my friend?” Her hand covers her mouth as she hiccups, and she ignores Jo when she says to Sam, “I think you two would you be great together.” She makes a drunken motion to a tall girl standing behind her.
“Hey,” he says the other girl, giving a polite nod, “Sam.”
“I’m Jo,” she tells them.
The tall girl, the one with the lipgloss shined lips and big, careless hair, smiles radiantly, and she shakes Jo’s hand.
“I’m Jessica,” she says to both of them, but her eyes are for Sam alone. He feels heat rise up from his stomach, and for the briefest of a moment, no more than an instant reaction of something subconscious he’ll never understand, he sees only her.
- - - - -
They walk hand in hand out of the house, down the sidewalk to Jo’s car.
“Do you think you could ever date a girl like that?” she asks, breaking the silence between them.
He looks down at her, illuminated by the sharp fluorescent light overhead, and narrows his eyes quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“She’s beautiful,” Jo responds. She looks at him with that same cutting gaze she wore when they found each other in that café so long ago.
“Yeah, well,” he answers, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her tight to him. He thinks of everything they’ve shared so far and what’s still to come, and he tells her, smile on his face, “She’s not you.”
End
"Late Goodbye" by Poets of the Fall and "Rehab" by Rihanna
Rating: R
Category: Pre-series AU oneshot
Word Count: 7138
Characters: Sam/Jo, Ellen, mentions of John and Dean
Spoilers: None
Summary: California was going to be a chance at something new. She’s new but not part of his plan.
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: An endless amount of gratitude to vinylroad for the beta and for being so kind and patient when answering my questions. I can’t thank her enough for her thoughts and opinions on this one. Loads of thanks also goes to equinox_blue who is one of the busiest people I know and still found time to beta and kick my butt in all the usual places. As always, any remaining mistakes are mine alone and are not the reflection of anyone else. Cross-posted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
1.
He first notices her in the small café right outside campus. There are a few opened books in front of her, forming a circle around the notebook where she’s scribbling manic notes, and an untouched drink sits off to the side with its whipped topping dissipating into a flat, white puddle. Against her shoulders, her hair lies tousled and blonde on her denim jacket, and her free hand taps a rhythm silently on the tabletop. Other students mill around her, chattering about weekend parties and horrendous tests, and everyone ignores her. She’s separated despite being surrounded.
If all he was to give her was a quick glance and nothing more, he’d dismiss her as any ordinary college kid. Another girl deep in thought.
But when he looks up, away from his own textbooks and highlighter yellow lines, she’s staring at him. Her pencil rests lazily between her teeth, and her gaze cuts through the other people in the building and settles on him.
When they lock eyes, he’s the first to look away.
It happens again and again, a dance of glancing over and away, and then up again only to see that she’s not backing down, he feels uncomfortable. Doesn’t like the worry in his belly that questions if she’s doing more than making eye contact to get in his pants. While he hasn’t touched a shotgun in months, his hunting instincts haven’t faded.
He gathers his belongings and leaves with her eyes on his back.
- - - - -
He avoids the café for a while, and when he returns on the fourth day with a study group-strength in numbers, after all-she isn’t there. Secretly, he finds himself stupidly relieved. Although he’s almost positive she wasn’t a threat, he’s seen a stare like hers before and has learned that trouble instinctively comes at the receiving end of it.
Days go by and he finds foolish comfort in the idea of being able to disappear into the thousands of other stressed and bustling students. Yet nearly a week later, his contentment with anonymity is ruined when he meets her again in the library.
She’s standing in front of the row of books he needs to use, so he swallows his irrational paranoia and walks over.
“S’cuse me,” he says, snaking an arm in front of her to slip his needed paperback off the shelf.
“No big,” she mumbles. Next to him, she’s much shorter than he assumed, and he immediately chides himself for being so ridiculous before. She’s practically a little girl.
He thumbs through the pages, verifying this is the book he’ll need for his report, and she looks up at him.
“Hey,” she says, “you seem familiar. Have we met before?”
He shakes his head, clears his throat. “You were in the café-the one downtown by the laundromat?-a week or so ago. That’s it.”
She nods, remembering this. A piece of loose hair falls from behind her ear, and she tucks it back to blend with the rest of her ponytail, not taking her eyes away from him. She tugs on the strap of her book bag, pulling it tighter on her shoulder.
“What’d you say your name was?” she asks. In her voice, there’s a lilt, a certain twang that he can’t place by location but recognizes from a distant part of his past.
“Didn’t say,” he tells her, “but it’s Sam.”
“Sam,” she repeats, smooth and easy, testing the weight of it on her tongue.
“Yup,” he replies, backing away now that he has his needed book. “Um, I guess I’ll see you later?” he says only to fill the static air. He won’t be the first guy to give a girl false promises, he knows. Besides, it’s not like he owes her anything.
His words fall on deaf ears because she’s already engrossed in her own pages. She scratches her nose and doesn’t look up as he disappears around the shelf into another row of endless books.
- - - - -
Coming from class, taking the stairs two at a time out of the building, his mind is spinning with charts and theories and wondering how he’s going to finish his homework by tomorrow. A report to write and research to start, too much to do and too little time to do it.
Suddenly his thoughts screech to a jarring halt when he sees her perched on the stone ledge right outside the door. She’s swinging her legs, boots beneath holed denim jeans, and looking back and forth. Ducking his head, he tries to work his way into a group of jabbering students, hoping to avoid her as he passes by.
He’s down the sidewalk, thinking she hasn’t seen him, when he hears her calling his name. Her voice comes closer, louder, and he can hear the slapping of her shoes against the cement.
Because he’d have to be deaf or simply an asshole not to acknowledge her now, he turns and says, “Yeah?”
She looks up at him, face flushed. “Hey, remember from the library when I said you looked familiar? I think I figured out where I know you from.”
“Really,” he says distractedly, not caring and instead glancing over his shoulder as a cluster of football players, big guys with thick necks and arms, laugh and slap each other on the shoulders, whooping it up about their big game that night.
“Sam?” she says, trying to get his attention. It isn’t until he looks back at her, makes eye contact, that she continues. “I know your father. Well, knew, I guess. Haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“Yeah?”
“John Winchester?” she asks him, and he stares at her blankly, not wanting to reveal anything, praying that his face doesn’t twitch under the power of her words. He reminds himself that anyone with decent enough computer skills could hack into his school records and figure that one out.
When she sees that he’s not impressed, that he hasn’t given her the reaction she was apparently hoping for, she steps closer to him so he can smell the crisp spearmint gum on her breath when she nails the closing punch.
“I know that he hunts. And I’m not talking about deer and rabbits. Anything supernatural and evil that none of these morons here would believe. He hunts monsters, right?”
This time, he does gape. Words are pulled away from him and the blood falls from his face. His heart leaps and holds fast in his throat before he spits out, “You better start talking.”
- - - - -
He pulls her aside, quick and furious, stumbling behind a cluster of bushes to stand underneath thick, hiding trees next to a sidewalk that no one ever uses. An empty bench waits at the foot of a tree, and he takes her by the shoulder, hopes his hands aren’t shaking when he leads her and sits them down.
“Who are you?” he asks. “How do you know all that? Have you been spying on me?” He can’t seem to get enough air, and his words are strained. The adrenaline is thumping hard and wicked in his blood.
“Geesh,” she says, annoyed, pulling his hand off her. “One question at a time. First, I’m Jo. Jo Harvelle. Second, I know because I called my mom and asked her.” He opens his mouth to say something. Protest, but she shakes her head before he has a chance. “Just a sec here, cowboy, lemme finish, all right? And last, yeah, I have been spying on you, but only after I figured out who you were.”
“Your mom?” he echoes, mind refusing to budge from that fact.
She nods, biting her lower lip thoughtfully. “Mm-hmm,” she answers. “Ellen Harvelle? Ring any bells?”
He shakes his head. She’s speaking a language he once understood fluently and now can’t remember.
“Guess you’ve been out of it longer than we thought. Well, my parents knew John. Your dad used to visit this place my mom owns now-the Roadhouse?-and she told me about you when I called her the other day. So,” she sighs, a heave of her chest beneath an old shirt, “here we are.”
His fear and anger dissipates, and he wipes a hand over his face.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he admits, all his fierce words scattering. It’s too much and it’s been too long. Like ripping open a scab and watching it bleed and forgetting how the wound happened to begin with.
She smiles, maybe sympathetically; he can’t read her well enough to tell. “How ‘bout we go grab something to eat?” she asks. “God, I’m starving. You hungry? C’mon, I’ll pay seeing as how I’m the one that screwed up your day.”
He agrees only because he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight. He has too much to ask her.
- - - - -
The restaurant’s mostly empty when they arrive, and an employee is sweeping underneath a table on the opposite side of the room, a steady, scratchy swish-swish of the broom over the tiled floor. The sound is only a background white noise to the group of girls spouting medical terms at a sleek laptop.
After Jo’s ordered and she’s holding a large chocolate milkshake, she slides into the booth, tucks one of her legs beneath her in a girlish sort of way and says, “Ask away. I can see the questions whirling around up there in that big head of yours.”
“You’re a hunter.” It’s really not a question. He needs confirmation more than an answer.
She has her lips wrapped around her straw, and she swallows before responding. “I’d like to think so, yeah. Everybody says I’m too young or just a girl or bias bullshit like that, but I’ve known how to shoot since I was in pigtails, so yeah, I can handle myself.”
“Why are you in California?”
“A job. Why else do hunters go where they go?” She snickers at her words, a bit of self-amusement in her voice. “And, I needed some research material, and Stanford has a decent enough occult section in their library, so I stopped by.”
He squeezes his hands together, too distracted to have ordered any food, and he fidgets in his seat. He’s uncomfortable next to her, drawn to her, both confused and intrigued.
“How long are you going to be here?” he asks.
Watching the girls in their scrubs and lab coats, it takes a moment before she turns back to him. “Why? Want to get rid of me already?”
“Just curious.”
“Dunno. When I’m ready? How’s that for an answer, hm?” She pops the lid off her milkshake, pushes the straw aside so she can tilt her head back and drink. When she sets her cup down on the table, there’s a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her lips and she wipes it away with her index finger. Smirks at him and says nothing more.
- - - - -
2.
She attends all sorts of classes, large lectures on mythology and speech presentations in Latin, guest speakers from Europe and laboratory studies on human psychology, and he tells her she’s going to get herself caught. That someone’s going to figure out that she’s not enrolled at the school and her whole cover’s going to be blown. He’s afraid that if she’s discovered, he’ll be dragged right down with her.
She finds his warnings funny, thinks he’s being overprotective, and ignores everything he spouts at her about not letting anybody find out about the things they’ve done as hunters. When she doesn’t listen to him, he turns away and leaves her.
But she finds him.
She always finds him.
- - - - -
“So, you’re telling me that nobody here knows who you really are?” she asks over a lunch of greasy fries with a pool of ketchup on the side and extra large fountain Cokes. His secrecy seems to astound her, and his refusal to be honest about his past is a subject of which she never tires.
“They know who I am,” he answers, shifting in his seat so he can hook his feet into the rungs of the barstool. Tucked in the corner of a restaurant, they sit by a window that looks out at a bustling street of new cars glistening in the noonday sun and college kids with their overstuffed backpacks.
It’s been almost a month since she came to campus. It feels so much longer.
“Then your classmates, your roommate, they all know that you were raised to be a hunter?”
“No.”
“So you are lying to everyone,” she says triumphantly. She dips a fry into the cup of ketchup, swirls it around before lifting the fry to her mouth, careful not to drip on her shirt. For a brief moment, she appears tiny and feminine. Delicate.
He leans forward in his seat, long arms nearly knocking over the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table, pushing aside the flyer that advertises the upcoming bookstore sale, and he whispers, “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is my chance at what I’ve always wanted. I’m not going to screw it up. That hunter you’re always talking ‘bout? That’s not me anymore. I’m done with that.”
He lets this settle between them, satisfied with his words until she leans forward, close enough for them to nearly be knocking noses, and she says, “Sam, babe, I hate to burst your pretty little bubble here, but let me tell you that I’ve broken into your dorm room, okay? And anybody who’s done with hunting sure as hell doesn’t keep a knife with a seven inch blade under their pillow.”
- - - - -
He hates everything about her.
She’s childish and stubborn. She chews with her mouth opened when she’s focused elsewhere and laughs loudly over perverted, eighth-grade jokes. She obsesses over anything supernatural, anything to do with hunting, determined to memorize exorcisms even though she’s only seen a possessed man once. She remains stupidly glued to the case that brought her out here, determined not to leave until she’s seen it to the end, and she goes so far as to rent an apartment for herself just to prove her tenacity.
He hates everything about her because she reminds him of home.
- - - - -
3.
“Do you ever go back to see your family?” she asks. It’s Thanksgiving evening, and they’re sitting on the floor in her apartment. The windows are opened to let in milky gray light and cool wind.
Everyone else on campus has gone home for the holiday except him. And she’s stayed behind with him.
He shrugs, takes a bite of the cold turkey sandwich he bought down at the grocery store when she called him earlier in the afternoon to invite him over. She’s smeared her bread with mayonnaise and mustard, layered it with cheese and topped it with pickles that she continues to eat by the forkful straight from the jar.
“Don’t know,” he replies. “Why don’t you?” he asks after swallowing.
“Because,” she answers promptly, a little bit cockily, “my dad’s dead and my mom isn’t real happy with my decision to go hunting.” She takes a long drink of the red wine they’re sharing, lifting the bottle with one hand, her throat bobbing smoothly. “Hell, she’d take me back. In a heartbeat, but y’know? I just wanna see things for myself. That’s all.”
“Yeah, makes sense.”
“Is that why you’re out here? Seeing things?”
“Something like that,” he answers.
“Sam,” she coaxes. “What’s up with your family? Would they take you back? C’mon, spill already. I won’t tell anybody. Just you and me ‘n the birds. Cross my heart.”
He looks down at his sandwich, at the paper plate on the floor in front of him beside his feet wearing faded socks, and says, “It’s a long story. I’d rather not talk about it.”
There’s a moment of silence, and he’s waiting for her to continue her questions, to push him into an answer, but all she says is, “Do you miss them?”
He looks up at her and sees how she’s framed by the pale light coming in through her skinny little window. The light makes her skin glow, and her head is cocked to the side inquisitively. Her eyes are big, open and trustworthy, and he wishes he could bring himself to tell his secrets.
Instead of answering her directly, he just stares and says, “I’m here now. That’s what matters, right?”
She pauses, pickles dangling from her fork, suspended between the jar and her mouth. She stiffens like this isn’t the answer she expected, but then she smiles, sad and sardonic.
“Well,” she agrees, “I guess it is.”
- - - - -
She leaves for a few days. Off to Phoenix after a case about men who murder their children and leave wives as stone statues of horrors.
“You wanna come?” she asks as she loads the trunk of her car. The sun is setting as a bloody smear on the horizon. “I could use an extra set of eyes and somebody’s who good with a gun.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets, wraps his fingers around spare change and his dorm key linked to her lent apartment key, and he shakes his head, denial and refusal to her request.
“I’ve got midterms this week. Don’t want to screw those up.”
“And if you didn’t have ‘em?”
His silence, his blank stare and tightened lips are enough of an answer, and she laughs at nothing funny, rolls her eyes.
“You can’t pretend forever, Sam.” She slams the trunk shut, walks past him, swinging her keys from a curved finger, and climbs into her car. “Don’t wait up for me, all right?”
She starts the engine, music blaring, and leaves him standing alone on the sidewalk.
- - - - -
He studies. Passes every test and he goes out with a few friends to celebrate that weekend. At the bar his cell phone rings and her number glows on his screen. He picks up after the third ring
“Jo? Jo, are you okay? Where are you...Jo?”
There’s no answer.
- - - - -
It’s dark when her car pulls up in front of the apartment, and his hands are shaking something fierce when he climbs down the steps where he’s been waiting what feels like hours. He watches in horror as she slumps forward in the seat, forehead coming to rest on the steering wheel, one hand looped weakly on the top of the wheel while the other curls in her lap.
“Hey,” he calls. “Jo?” He opens the door and flinches instinctively at how broken she is.
The eye he can see moves slowly, just barely, and looks over at him through a fringe of dirty blonde hair. Her lip is torn, and when she smiles faintly, breathes, “Sam,” blood runs onto her teeth.
He goes to work at unbuckling her, at lifting her from the car and carrying her inside. One of her eyes is swollen black and blue shut and there’s dried blood on her shirt, crusted blossoms on the fabric. She inhales sharply when he lays her down on the couch in her living room.
“What happened?” he asks after he’s gotten the first aid kit from her bathroom and has it opened on the coffee table.
It’s like riding a bike, he thinks bitterly. He’ll never forget how to save. He wishes he could forget why. Why so many have bled before him.
“It followed me outta Phoenix,” she whispers. “I didn’t know. Thought I was safe.”
“You called me.”
“Tried to,” she admits. “Could barely focus on driving. Couldn’t drive and talk.” Her attempt at a smile is morbid when her lips part to reveal those slimy red teeth again. “I’m not that talented.”
He cuts open her shirt, helps her out of it and wipes away the dried blood on her back. He touches her skin and refuses to let his thoughts stray when she unhooks her bra so he can stitch the claw marks shut along her spine. Even though he’s sewn flesh together many a time, it’s always been his brother, his father, a person who he’s known all his life. Never a girl so soft-vulnerable-and smooth. He swallows down the heat rising in his throat.
She hisses when the needle pierces her skin, and her fingers curve tight over the cushions of the couch.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”
She pinches her one good eye shut. Remains quiet when a tear, glassy and clean, runs over her cheek.
When he’s finished and she’s floating on drugs, he shuts the kit and starts to say how he should be going back to his place. It’s closing in on five in the morning. He hasn’t slept all night, and he has a class at eight that morning.
But she reaches for him with her bandaged fingers and says, “Please. Don’t leave. I don’t-” Her face flinches, pain perhaps. “I don’t want to be alone.”
He knows. He’s been alone since he shut the door in Dad’s face and refused to answer Dean’s pleas to stay. Since he came here to this land of endless dreams.
He nods and says, “Okay.”
- - - - -
4.
The day before school lets out for winter break, she calls to say she’s going back home for the holidays. He tells her to have a good trip and make sure she drives safe because the roads can be bad this time of the year.
Down his hallway, somebody’s blasting “Jingle Bell Rock,” and he’s not sure what he’s going to do by himself when all his friends go home to families that’ll greet them with hugs and presents.
As if reading his mind, she says that he should come with her. He shrugs, chewing on a pencil, and agrees even though he knows better. He’ll berate himself over his decision during the trip.
At the Roadhouse-Jo’s version of home-there are heaped snowdrifts and windows that have little feet of frost creeping around the edges. Jo drops her bags, stomps her feet, leaving white footprints across the floor, and she calls out to her mother. She tugs off her stocking cap, reveals hair frizzy and static.
A woman, wiping her hands on a towel, comes from a hallway off to the side. She smiles, big and wide as a prairie horizon and pulls Jo in tightly. She kisses the top of her head and says, “Good to have ya home, baby girl.” Combing down Jo’s messy hair with her fingers, she turns to Sam and says, “You must be the Winchester boy, hm?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replies, still holding his lone duffel bag in one hand and keeping his backpack strapped on tight.
“You can call me Ellen. Don’t need anything fancy,” she tells him, no nonsense about it. She pauses, glances from Sam to Jo and then back again to her daughter. “You two hooked up?”
Jo protests, “Mom, honestly,” at the same time Sam quickly answers, “No, ma’am, no.”
Ellen nods, lips pursed before patting Jo on the shoulder. “Jo, honey, why don’t you go put your things away? I’ve been cleaning out a room for Sam. Can you grab an extra set of blankets? It’s gonna be a cold one tonight.”
Jo gives a final look at Sam and scoops up her bags before disappearing down the hallway from where Ellen came. Once Jo’s out of earshot, Ellen walks over to the empty bar and pulls out a bottle, amber liquid sloshing against cut glass.
“You want something to drink?” she asks.
“No, ‘m good, thank you.”
She smirks, seemingly amused by this, and says, “You’re John’s son. The younger one?”
He nods. He feels he has to choose his words carefully with her. Around the strap of his duffel bag, his hand is sweating, and his backpack feels heavy on his shoulders. He still doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Perhaps seeing if there is any of this life left for him.
“You seen him lately?” she questions. “Your dad?”
“No. I’ve been at school the last couple years.” He pauses then dares himself to ask, “Um, is he-How is he?”
“He’s good,” she answers. She smiles, eyes softening tenderly like only a woman’s can, and she knows what he’s really after, what he wants to know more than that. “And Dean? Yeah, he’s good too. Don’t worry there, Sam, don’t you worry at all.”
He smiles, relaxed for the first time since coming here, and lets out a heavy breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
- - - - -
5.
He wants to hate everything about her.
She asks him millions of questions and listens intently when he explains things in a stumbling way because he’s never opened up to someone who isn’t his brother. She finishes her case, finds the answer after all, and keeps living at the apartment for reasons she won’t reveal. She likes to ruffle his hair while he studies or read growing reports over his shoulder as he types on his laptop. She laughs at his jokes when they’ve had too much to drink and never says anything when he tells her that he wishes he could remember his mom better than just a photograph on his nightstand.
He wants to hate everything about her because it’s easier than admitting that he might like her.
- - - - -
She’s made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup at her apartment. Over the stove, Jo says her mom used to make it for her all the time.
“Dean tried to make grilled cheese one time,” he tells Jo as she comes into the tiny TV room with two glasses of milk. On the coffee table in front of them, Sam’s already set down the tray of soup bowls and plates of sandwiches.
This is the first time he’s said Dean’s name aloud to her, and he feels like he’s betraying his family by speaking of them.
“Yeah?” she asks, cups of milk held carefully as she sits down next to him on the couch, not wanting to slosh the milk over the edges. “How’d that go?” She places the cups next to the tray on the small table with the rest of the food.
Sam snorts. “He went outside to get the newspaper and ended up reading the front page on the back porch. By the time he smelled the smoke, the sandwiches were black. Even the cheese.”
She giggles and takes a bite. Cheesy strings dangle in the air between the bread and her lips until she tugs them together and drops the orange bundle into her mouth. “Sorry I decided not to burn these. Next time, mmkay? Just for you.” She licks her fingers childishly.
He grins at her. “Sure.” Picking up the TV remote, he flips through the channels until she lays a hand on his arm and tells him to stop. It’s some type of dramatic romance movie with a sweeping musical score. He rolls his eyes. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding, Sam?” she wants to know with an elbow in his side. “I feed you, let you use my TV and sit on my couch, so I get to pick the flick.”
They eat dinner together and Jo makes comments as the movie plays. When they’re both finished, they leave their dishes on the coffee table, and she lays down on the couch to curl up next to him, her head hard against the soft part of his abdomen where he sits. While the end credits roll on the screen, he looks down at her, peaceful in sleep. He hesitates, uncertain and second-guessing himself before resting his hand on her shoulder to hold her close. Next to the couch, he reaches over to the lamp and turns off the light.
- - - - -
6.
He enrolls in a handful of summer classes so he can still have a place on campus to live. He likes the peacefulness of the half-empty school, how he doesn’t have to fight for space on the sidewalk and how the classes are smaller than an echoing, impersonal lecture hall. Even his dorm building is quieter, and he’s satisfied with this slow sink into silence.
Sometime in July, she asks him to join her on a trip to Mexico. More of a vacation on the beach than a real hunt, and she tells him that he should come along for the ocean and ignore all the rest.
He reminds her that he has an upcoming test at the beginning of this week and a paper due by the end.
She sighs. “Same old Sam.”
He doesn’t answer. After all, he’s not the one who has mixed up priorities.
- - - - -
7.
They’re fighting. They’ve never really fought like this before, and he wonders if it means something that they’re spitting and slinging insults like an old married couple even though they haven’t shared more than lunches and late night conversations. No kisses, no stolen moments, no intimacy of skin to skin.
“You’re a hypocrite!” she yells at him, slapping down the knife she was using to cut carrots into thin slivers. “You go around here, acting all noble, all perfect. Like you’re better than me. Better than them, but you’re just a fucking liar like everyone else too.”
“And why’s that?” he spits at her, gripping the countertop hard enough to squeeze his knuckles white. “Because I don’t want to go on your hunts with you? Go hunting evil again like it’s normal? You think that makes you better than me? Because you don’t hide it? Huh?”
She turns, stands on the opposite side of the counter with eyes burning. Her skin is tanner since she got back from Mexico; she wears the sun beautifully.
“At least it doesn’t make me a liar. I know who I am, Sam,” she snarls, craning her neck to meet his eyes. “You don’t even know who the hell you are.”
“I know who I am!”
“Yeah? Do you? You have a brother and a father somewhere out there. You’ve never even talked about them like they’re some secret you’ve got to protect. A whole ‘nother life and you just keep painting the fucking layers on.”
“I don’t have to listen to this bullshit,” he says, turning away and snatching his coat off the back of the kitchen chair. Even though it’s pouring outside, he doesn’t bother to put the jacket on, and its sleeve catches, drags over a pile of papers he knows she’s been working on. He refuses to stop and pick them up; he lets them flutter to the floor messily.
“Then just walk away,” she tells his back. “It’s what you do every time you don’t get your way, isn’t it?”
He spins around, hand fisted on the doorknob, ready to leave, and she’s standing by the kitchen table, ignoring all her diligently organized papers scattered on the ground.
“Just shut up,” he growls. He hasn’t been this angry with anyone since Dad told him to leave and not come back. “You act like you know me. You don’t know shit about me, all right?” He doesn’t let her get another word in, doesn’t let her toss one more argument on the butcher table between them. After he throws the door open, he slams it behind him hard enough to feel the vibrations in his hand on the knob.
Outside in the rain, he runs all the way back to his dorm, pushing past the few people out with their colorful umbrellas and rubber galoshes. He’s soaked and breathless when he bursts into his building. His hair is dripping in his eyes, water running down his face, and his heart flutters erratically. A curse escapes-hisses-from between his lips.
- - - - -
They go to the ocean together, and everything lies stagnant between them. He wants to apologize for his obscenities and insults, only he can’t make himself speak. There’s a wall around her, and she doesn’t joke or laugh. He’d assume that he’s lost her except she still accepted his invitation. That gives him a flicker of hope.
At the beach where the waves are short and choppy, she walks far ahead of him, long hair billowing, snapping in the wind. He has to run to catch her.
“Jo!” he calls. “Jo, wait.”
When he reaches her, she stops, turns with eyes unreadable against the backdrop of the sea.
“Look,” he says, “we need to talk about what happened last week.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
She walks away, slower this time, enough that he can take one long stride for every two little steps of hers, and he’s questioning, wanting to know why she’s so closed and separated, what he can do to make things better when she stops again, lets her arms fall to her sides, defeated.
“Sam, stop. Please.”
“Jo?”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what?” he asks because he’s male and she’s female and everything she says seems foreign and blurred.
She looks out over the water, away from him. “You want to know? Okay, then,” she says at last only because he won’t stop asking since he doesn’t want things to stay like this anymore. When she speaks, her voice rambles, falls and rises with the hitches in her emotions. Her hair whips across her face, and she rakes it away viciously. “I’m not mad at you. I was, yeah, but…”
When she pauses, words dying on the wind, he stares and says nothing, waiting for her continue. Waiting for her to speak to him again.
“Sam, I…I like you. A lot. I didn’t want to. I really wanted to hate you because of how you treated me because of what I do even though you did the same things too. And I can’t-” She halts, voice shuddering, and she wraps her arms around herself, protective against the ocean wind and his stare. Her eyes are wet, and when she blinks, tears run down her face. She doesn’t try to brush them away. “I can’t keep doing this ‘friend’ thing anymore, okay? I can’t. It’s just too hard.”
She turns, moves down the shoreline until she shrinks into a small pink spot drifting in the wind. He brings a hand to his face, wipes over skin damp from the spray of the water. The lighthouse in the distance blinks, a turn and twist, pirouette of its light, and he closes his eyes.
- - - - -
Three days. Three days of silent phones and empty seats in all their places. The library, the restaurant, café, and classes. Three days of pacing his dorm room and walking past her apartment complex before he swallows his selfish, stupid stubbornness and climbs the stairs to her place.
He knocks, then steps back and waits. The door opens, and she’s barefoot, wearing a green sweater, sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and frayed blue jeans with a black stain above the knee.
“This really isn’t a good time,” she begins.
She doesn’t finish. He bends and kisses her, hard, enough to steal all her air and make her gasp in surprise. He kisses her and whispers, “I’m such an idiot.”
She loops her arms around his neck and laughs into his mouth. Tells him between kisses, “Nah, you’re just a slow learner.”
- - - - -
In her bed, her hands are in his hair, yanking his head down to her neck, and his hands are beneath her layers of shirts, slipping up underneath the soft bra to cup her in his hands. She’s so small in his hold, and he feels like he could break her if he wasn’t thinking.
“C’mon,” she hisses, face flushed pink on the apples of her cheeks. “C’mon, already.”
He looks up, sees her eyes obscured by the ragged curtain of her bangs and how she watches his mouth on her skin. Instead of answering, he surges up to kiss her lips fiercely, teeth clashing, and there are fingers on pants’ zippers and buttons, and he doesn’t know-doesn’t care-whose hands are whose anymore.
They fuck with their shirts on, mostly dressed, jeans shoved down just past her knees and his barely off his hips, and shoes still tied up to their necks. It’s messy and frantic, hurried like he hasn’t had before, but she moves with him, catching his rhythm, meeting his pace and force effortlessly. She cries out when she comes, digging fingers into his shoulder, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. His hips slowing in their mad thrusts, he buries his face in the pillow beside her head and shudders, falling over the edge soundlessly.
- - - - -
8.
On an afternoon when the sun is no brighter and the events of the day are no more extraordinary than before, they’re on the bench beside the rarely used sidewalk where they first sat and talked, and she looks at him and says, “Tell me about your family.”
He lifts his eyes to meet hers. It’s the one secret he’s kept from her all this time. The one thing he’s never told anyone in this wide state and its future promises. The weight of this rests heavy on him, and he wonders for a brief moment what it’ll feel like to lift away this burden of silence. Wonders if he’ll be able to breathe freely again.
Choking down the lump rising thick in his throat and taking a chance on her-them together-he asks, “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me.”
The trees move overhead, splitting and scattering the sunlight with their leaves, and drops of light land on her skin. Her face is quiet and still.
“All right,” he agrees softly, remembering the final horrid fight and how his father laughed, the way that Dean liked his coffee and his painful good-bye. Recalling their faces and voices. Good and bad both combined. “Sometimes,” he says, voice hoarse and broken, “I hate them more than anything…” He brings a hand to his face, pinches the bridge of his nose to push the tears back into his eyes. “God, I miss them more than anything.”
- - - - -
9.
Late at night, well after he should’ve gone to bed but his laptop screen still glows with a paper not yet finished and his roommate hasn’t returned from a party downtown, Jo calls.
“Ever wanted to go to Sacramento?” she asks. She sounds awake and bubbly; he assumes it’s caffeine doing the talking.
He glances at his computer clock and rubs his eyes. His vision burns and swims with exhaustion. “Why? What’s there?”
“Three suicides in the past two days. All three leapt off the roof of the same building, even though they didn’t live there. Police can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Jo, I-”
She sighs, frustrated, a muddled burst of static. “Right. I know. You’ve got homework to do and class tomorrow.”
Swallowing, he thinks of her trip to Phoenix and what a life-even that of a stranger’s-means when compared to an eight o’clock lecture on the history of American law.
He tells her, “I’ve got about two hundred words left on this paper, and I need to edit it up a bit. Pick me up in an hour?”
Her smile is heard all the way through the line when she says, “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
- - - - -
In motel bed, after the hunt where she sliced and he shot and after they came here to make love with the shower water hot on their backs before tumbling into sheets and pillows, he lies behind her. He keeps his face pressed to the bare slope of her neck where her heart beats quietly and her hair rests in soft silken waves. Her knees are tucked up and he fits perfectly behind her.
Two puzzle pieces. One piece just remembering what it means to be part of the picture again.
Around her naked waist, he wraps a protective arm, lets his hand lightly cup her breast, while his thumb strokes her skin peacefully.
“Jo?” he says into her skin.
“Mm?” she murmurs, barely stirring. She’s warm and wonderful in his hold, and he doesn’t want to move away from her.
He presses his lips to her cheek tenderly, a chaste kiss, and he whispers, admitting it at last out loud, “I‘m glad you’re here.”
- - - - -
10.
They go to a birthday party for a friend together. Jo drives, saying things like, “Never been to a kegger before” and “How much does it take to put you under the table anyway?” Her grin is mischievous and excited. They plan to make their rounds and say their hellos and then they’ll be off to northern California for a case. Sam’s already turned in the paper that’ll be due while they’re gone. He told the professor he was going away on “family business” for the next few days.
Inside the boisterous house, they mingle politely with everyone, and Sam holds a red plastic cup and she has a blue one. She keeps reaching over and hooking her fingers through his belt loops, never saying anything.
As they’re getting ready to leave, one of the girls he recognizes vaguely from a long ago group project, catches him by the doorway. She giggles, filled with alcohol, and asks, “Have you met my friend?” Her hand covers her mouth as she hiccups, and she ignores Jo when she says to Sam, “I think you two would you be great together.” She makes a drunken motion to a tall girl standing behind her.
“Hey,” he says the other girl, giving a polite nod, “Sam.”
“I’m Jo,” she tells them.
The tall girl, the one with the lipgloss shined lips and big, careless hair, smiles radiantly, and she shakes Jo’s hand.
“I’m Jessica,” she says to both of them, but her eyes are for Sam alone. He feels heat rise up from his stomach, and for the briefest of a moment, no more than an instant reaction of something subconscious he’ll never understand, he sees only her.
- - - - -
They walk hand in hand out of the house, down the sidewalk to Jo’s car.
“Do you think you could ever date a girl like that?” she asks, breaking the silence between them.
He looks down at her, illuminated by the sharp fluorescent light overhead, and narrows his eyes quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“She’s beautiful,” Jo responds. She looks at him with that same cutting gaze she wore when they found each other in that café so long ago.
“Yeah, well,” he answers, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her tight to him. He thinks of everything they’ve shared so far and what’s still to come, and he tells her, smile on his face, “She’s not you.”
End
"Late Goodbye" by Poets of the Fall and "Rehab" by Rihanna