SPN FIC - Just a Saturday Afternoon
blucasbabe ! Guess what? Sam and Connie, at the movies. (The sequel to Improperly Socialized, May 1999.)
It wasn't like he'd never been on a date before. He had, a bunch of times. And it wasn't like Connie wasn't nervous, because she was, he could see that, had been seeing it since he'd picked her up at her house and she'd dropped her purse on the way to the car. When she'd crouched down to retrieve it, she'd fumbled it, and almost lost her balance trying to stand up again.
Characters: Sam (age 16) and OFC
Genre: Het
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2875 words
JUST A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
By Carol Davis
"It was nice of him," Connie said. "To let you use the car."
Yeah, it was nice - feeling the weight of the keys to the Impala resting in his jeans pocket. If you ignored the rest of it. The whole rest of it. The fact that Dean had badgered Sam for…what, three days, before he surrendered the keys. Because at the ripe old age of twenty Dean thought he knew all, saw all, understood all.
He'd turned over the keys along with a matched set of condoms, which Sam had backed away from like they were…
Condoms.
"The hell, man," he'd wheezed.
"Dude," Dean said firmly.
"You're the one who told me not to -" Sam sputtered. "I'm not - I - we're going to the mall."
Dean took a swig of his Mountain Dew and raised an eyebrow that spoke volumes. At least, Dean seemed to think it did. "I'm just saying. No matter what your intentions are - even if you think nothing's gonna happen. Sometimes it does. You gotta be prepared for any eventuality, Sammy. Seriously."
"I'm going to the mall."
"Fitting room at Sears," Dean countered.
Sam left the keys and the condoms lying on the table and sat down on the couch. It was a little more of a collapse than he'd planned.
"I'm just saying," Dean shrugged as he walked away.
Nice of him. Yeah, you could say that.
Connie didn't know about the Trojans. And if Sam had anything to say about it, she wasn't going to know. Ever. Not in this lifetime or any other.
Which wasn't to say she wasn't cute. And she smelled good (hand lotion, she'd told him). They were both sixteen, which you could say was old enough - after all, at least a dozen people in their class claimed they were doing it regularly, and even if you figured half of them were lying, that still left a few that Sam was pretty sure were telling the truth, judging by the way they groped each other in the corridor in between classes.
And Dean? Not that you could really use Dean as a basis for deciding whether something was normal or not, but he'd crossed the border on his fifteenth birthday, a whole year and three weeks younger than Sam was now.
"Did you want some popcorn?" Sam asked, and cringed at the old-screen-door squeak in his voice.
Connie smiled at him, and God, yes, she was cute.
Sam took the smile as a "yes" and scuttled toward the concession stand, realizing after he'd entrenched himself in the line of customers that (a) he'd pretty much abandoned her, and (b) he hadn't asked her if she wanted butter or not, or a soda, or if she thought she'd made an enormous mistake by coming here. With him. When yes, he was every bit of the clueless geek Dean said he was. But stepping back out of the line seemed like even more of a tactical error.
Maybe he looked like he was simply taking some initiative.
He gave himself to the count of five, then glanced in Connie's direction. No (thank you, God), she didn't look upset. She was waiting, looking around at the movie posters. So maybe the other guys she'd been out with did this same thing. Took initiative. Got the popcorn and the soda (Sprite, he thought; she liked Sprite) without asking for a lot of specifics.
Candy. Did she want candy?
She looked over at him and smiled again. Okay, he could handle this. Trying for the relaxed air of the guy in front of him in line, he pointed to the candy case and looked inquisitively at Connie.
She shook her head.
He went for Twizzlers anyway, when it was his turn, since he wanted them and she might change her mind later on. He ordered a Sprite and a Coke and…shit, did she want her own popcorn? If he got just one, a large one, maybe she wouldn't like that whole sharing thing, the saliva in the popcorn. This was their first date, after all, so maybe they didn't know each other well enough to share - either popcorn or saliva. But if he got her her own popcorn, maybe she'd think he didn't want to share with her.
Dean would be laughing his ass off if he could see this.
Dean…?
Sam shot a look around, feeling sweat dribble down into his shirt collar, because it would be just like Dean to borrow Dad's truck and come over here, to pretend he had a real serious need to be at the mall right now, this afternoon, and spend the whole afternoon tailing Sam. Because Sam was a clueless asshole who had no idea how to take a girl to the stupid mall and see a stupid movie and get some stupid dinner in the food court.
And get home before dark, of course.
Like he was Cinderella.
He knew how to drive. Dad had taught him when he was ten, when he got tall enough to reach the pedals. He'd known, by then, what was really going on with Dad - where Dad was going when he took off by himself, and what he was doing. He knew what was out there in the dark. So when Dad had come to him and said, "Gonna give this a try," and urged Sam into the driver's seat, it wasn't so much that Dad was letting Sam do something cool, it was that he was teaching Sam how to get himself out of trouble if driving a motor vehicle was the only available way to do that.
He'd gotten a license at fourteen, also courtesy of Dad. Phonier than a three-dollar bill, but he looked sixteen because of his height, and it was only for emergencies.
His sixteenth birthday gift? Permission to drive. For real.
Which wasn't to say that Dean didn't still harass him about being careful. The way he yapped about the Impala, you'd think it was a hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari.
And the way he yapped about Sam…
"Sir," snapped the kid behind the concession stand. It was ridiculous, the "sir," because okay, the kid might have been a little older than Sam but he looked younger, and he was way shorter. Had a nightmare of zits peppered in amongst his beard stubble, so Jesus, trying to shave had to be awful, and for a second Sam felt a gut-deep pang of sympathy for him. Then the kid barked at him again and shoved his order across the glass top of the candy case. You're holding up the goddamn line was written all over his pimple-splotched face.
"Sorry," Sam muttered.
Now this was a trick, juggling the sodas and the candy and the popcorn. The cardboard tray they were in was no way sturdy enough to hold the weight. Sam had to keep a hand under each cup of soda to keep them from dumping, which left him exactly no hands with which to do anything else. Connie had to open the door to Cine 4, then stand aside so he could pass through. Finding a seat and lowering himself into it, carefully balancing the crappy cardboard tray, seemed to take longer than the entire drive over here from Connie's house, and man, that had taken six kinds of forever because of the traffic and the fact that all Dean's carping had erased Sam's ability to drive over twenty miles an hour.
"I got you Sprite," he told Connie.
"Oh, good," she beamed.
His hands were shaking as he passed her the soda. No…his whole body was shaking.
Dean wasn't here; Sam had checked, both out in the lobby and in here, as he and Connie made their way to their seats. But it felt like Dean was here.
And Dad.
And pretty much everybody he'd ever met in his life.
"We could see something different," Connie offered, completely misinterpreting his…well, him. He'd let her pick the movie, figuring with The Matrix, The Mummy, and The Phantom Menace to choose from, the odds were that she'd pick something interesting, but no, she'd pointed to the poster for She's All That with a tiny smile and a murmured, "Everybody says it's good."
Two hours of Freddie Prinze, Jr.
But that was what dating was, according to Dean: you gave in to some of what the girl wanted, so you could earn yourself some negotiating points.
Yeah. So she'd have sex with you in the fitting room at Sears.
Sam shuddered, endangering his cup of Coke.
"Are you okay?" Connie asked.
"Sure," Sam blurted, fumbling to steady his soda in a way that made it even more likely to up-end itself all over his jeans. "No, I'm, I'm good. I just got this…you know. Cramp. In my leg. I'm fine. The movie's okay. There's no…no problem."
It wasn't like he'd never been on a date before. He had, a bunch of times. And it wasn't like Connie wasn't nervous, because she was, he could see that, had been seeing it since he'd picked her up at her house and she'd dropped her purse on the way to the car. When she'd crouched down to retrieve it, she'd fumbled it, and almost lost her balance trying to stand up again.
He'd settled on one popcorn, a big one.
For some reason, he didn't remember actually deciding on that, but there it was on his lap, a single big container of popcorn.
All he needed right now, he thought, was two hours of watching Freddie Prinze, Jr. be cool and in control. The difference between him and Freddie would stand out like…
Fuck.
Seriously, fuck.
Except…no, no, not that, not in the fitting room at Sears or anyplace else. He shouldn't be here at all, he thought, they shouldn't, because it was…well, it wasn't fair to her. Taking her out, being on a date with her, when Dad had already implied that the day school let out for the summer, they'd be hitting the road for somewhere. Dad already had a job, or jobs, lined up, and maybe he'd talked about them with Dean or maybe not; either way, he'd said nothing to Sam, like Sam didn't need to know. All Sam needed to know was…
Nothing.
He looked over at Connie and moved his face into something that tried to be a smile. "We," he said. "Um…"
"What?"
"We have to…move. Again. My family."
"Oh," Connie said.
"My dad said."
"When?"
"After school's out."
Connie stared into her soda for a minute, then offered Sam a smile that was no more genuine than his own. "Oh," she said again.
"I figured I should say. You know. Tell you."
"Okay," she murmured, and stared at her Sprite.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you coming back?"
"I don't think so."
"In September?"
Sam stared into his own cup. Into the popcorn. You could have waited, you dick, he thought. Until after the movie.
If she started crying…
"It must be interesting," she said slowly. "Living in a lot of different places. I've only ever lived in Scranton. But we went to Disney World once. And Cape Cod. We went there twice. And I saw, you know, Hyannis? Where the Kennedys live? My mom and I, we saw one of them at the post office. It's nice there. The Cape."
"Yeah," Sam murmured.
"Do you want to go home?"
"What? No."
"We can if you want."
The last place he wanted to go was home. To the house Dad had rented, none of which was theirs in the way Connie's house was hers. Sam had seen a little of the inside of the Dulays' home the day of Connie's birthday party: the kitchen, the family room, the bathroom. He'd seen the collection of stuff fastened with magnets to the front of the fridge, the basket of magazines and crossword puzzle books in the family room, the pet food bowls on the kitchen floor near the sink. The little things that said the house was theirs, had been for a long time, and would be for a long time to come.
He and Dad and Dean had lived in the rented house on Brownell Street for a couple of months. In less than a month they'd be gone.
"No," Sam said. "I don't want to go home."
Carefully balancing the cardboard tray on his leg, he offered the container of popcorn to Connie.
"Thank you," she said.
"Sure."
The mysterious "they" were right: the movie wasn't half bad. Not too girly, and there were some funny parts. The Mummy would have been better, but she'd picked this one, and after that disaster of a birthday party she'd had last week, he figured she had it coming to her to say what she wanted. No strings attached.
The popcorn was only half gone when he set the container down on the floor and reached over to take Connie's hand. It was a lot smaller than his own, and very warm, like his own. They were both a little sweaty, even though the AC in Cine 4 was cranked up pretty high.
"You okay?" he asked her quietly.
"Yeah," she said.
Neither of them said anything more until after the movie was over. They left the theater hand in hand. It was nice, he thought, holding hands with somebody in a way that said I'm here, no strings attached, no need to go looking for fitting rooms or storerooms or any other kind of rooms. What the other kids at school thought of her didn't matter; she was cute and her hair was really shiny as they walked underneath the long skylights in the middle of the mall. Most of the girls they passed were wearing t-shirts or some other scruffy kind of thing, but Connie had picked out a pink shirt with flowers on it.
"You look nice," he told her.
He half expected her to do a double-take, like nobody had ever complimented her before, like she'd never deserved a compliment before, because he couldn't help but listen to the kids at school, the ones who'd decided she wasn't worthy of their friendship, mostly because her mother was a teacher, one of their teachers. But, instead, she looked up at him like she was standing in a warm breeze, like everything was good and rock-steady and was going to stay that way.
"Thanks," she said. "You do too."
"Do you want to eat now? Or we could wait. Whatever."
They were standing in front of Music World. Connie tipped her head in that direction and suggested, "We could look in there. I'm not really hungry right now."
"That's…okay. Sure."
"Unless you're hungry."
He was, kind of - he was basically always hungry. "No, I'm good," he said.
Then he leaned down and took her head between his hands, gently, like applying even a little more pressure would hurt her, and kissed her, slowly, carefully, trying to avoid getting poked in the eye by her glasses.
He had two condoms in his wallet, and he'd listened to Dean rattle on enough times to understand something about himself and about the rest of the world: that if he nudged things in a certain direction, if he pretended to be someone he was not, if he took advantage of the way Connie had been treated by a bunch of ass-brained kids who'd decided they were worthy and she was not, he could make use of Dean's "be prepared" speech and his condoms, could use some room in the mall for a purpose for which it hadn't really been intended, or he could use the back seat of Dean's precious car, or some other place.
He could, and part of him said hell yes, because he was tired of flying solo, waiting for the house to be empty or making do in the shower. He wasn't dumb enough to think Dean was wrong about everything; really, Dean was dead on about a lot of things, and the fact that sex with a girl was on a whole other continuum than ten minutes alone in the bathroom was probably one of them.
He could feel Connie's warm palm against his chest, not pushing him away, just resting there.
The condoms in his wallet? Could stay there.
For now.
He drew back a little, enough to see Connie's face. The other kids were wrong about her, he thought. She didn't look desperate, or needy, or clingy, or any of that stuff. She just looked…happy. Like maybe this was the best Saturday afternoon she'd spent in a long time. She seemed to be paying no attention to the people who were skirting around them, a lot of them grinning or nodding or saying silently, Hey, man, go for it.
All she seemed to see was him.
That was pretty much good enough.
"Thanks," he told her quietly.
Her expression asked him silently what he meant by that, what exactly he meant.
Instead of answering her, he leaned in and kissed her again. Then he slid an arm around her waist and walked with her into Music World.
~~~~~~~~~~~~