SPN FIC - Fear and Comfort in Milan, Ohio (Part 2)
FEAR AND COMFORT IN MILAN, OHIO
By Carol Davis
Part One is here
Part Two
“Winona.”
Dean frowns.
“Winona, Arizona.” He remembers that, of course, because…
“Like Winona Ryder?”
“Yeah.”
“They name it after her?”
“I doubt it,” Sam says.
* * *
"I’m going to get off,” Melissa says, and Sam notices then that she’s packed up her belongings, all the stuff that came out of the clown purse. She says it again, a little firmer, sounding like she’s convinced herself of something against her better judgment. “In Winona. I need to get off this bus.”
They all need to get off this bus.
Somebody ought to send this bus off a cliff, so they can all watch it drop two or three hundred feet and explode like napalm when it hits the bottom.
“What are you -“ Sam begins.
“I’ll walk.”
“Helpless” isn’t a word he’d apply to her, and for all he knows she’s got a sawed-off in that purse along with the tampons and the Lysol. But it’s hot out, and she doesn’t live here, and he feels like he ought to at least keep her company until she can call somebody to come and pick her up, because she can’t freaking walk to Flagstaff.
Really? He just wants to get off this bus.
She doesn’t ask him what he wants to do, or what he intends to do, but when the bus chugs to a halt outside a drugstore in Winona and Sam follows her out, she doesn’t look surprised. Eleven other people get off too. That leaves half a dozen still on the bus. Maybe they’re too weak from vomiting to stand up.
It’s not as hot out as he thought. There’s a breeze blowing.
They walk, side by side, the two of them. She’s got her purse slung over one shoulder and she walks as though it weighs nothing. Sam’s duffel weighs considerably more, but after they’ve gone a couple of miles, he stops noticing that he’s carrying it.
* * *
“So you followed her home?” Dean asks. “Like fuckin’ Benji or something?”
“Pretty much,” Sam says.
* * *
He expected an apartment, but no, she stops in front of a tiny house. They’ve walked all afternoon, something like sixteen miles, nothing he hasn’t done before, but that’s still a long haul - but he feels like they’ve covered no more than a couple of blocks. Walked home from school.
He looks down at her - standing up, he’s a good foot taller than she is - and now he notices that she’s wiped out.
Wants to go into her house and crash. Sleep for like two days.
He has no idea where in Flagstaff the bus station might be. Even thinking about a bus makes his stomach do a slow roll, but he’s got a ticket in his pocket, and the driver told him yes, he could get on another bus and finish the ride to Palo Alto. He needs only to explain that he was on bus number 1451 and the company will honor his ticket.
He needs to keep going.
“You okay?” Melissa asks.
No. He’s pretty much not.
Standing in front of what looks like a Barbie Dream House in Flagstaff, Arizona, he realizes he has no idea what to do next. Up to this point, he’s been running away: running on pure adrenaline, needing to get away from Dad, away from the job, away from his life. He’s not all that different from other college freshmen, he supposes. This is the time when you stretch your wings. Set yourself up to play by your own rules. But the thing is, he’s never been anywhere without Dad or Dean, or both of them.
Never.
Which isn’t to say that he’s a wuss. He can do this, he tells himself. He’s been telling himself that for months. It’s not like he’s going to Jupiter. The dorms are set up for people who’ve stumbled out of the nest for the first time, and he’ll have easy access to food, a washing machine, movies, snacks, whatever he needs.
But he’ll be by himself.
Alone in a crowd.
He’s tired now, bone-tired, because he hasn’t slept well, jammed into a seat that’s meant for someone a lot smaller than he is, and he’s spent the whole afternoon walking. Part of him wants to lie down right here, on the walkway in front of Melissa’s little Barbie-sized house, to rest his head on his duffel and sleep. He wants to just stop moving, stop running. For the first time in almost three days he misses his family.
* * *
Dean doesn’t reply to that.
* * *
He asks Melissa if there’s a motel nearby, something that’s not expensive, even though he can’t spare the money even for something cheap, something that’s got peeling wallpaper and roaches and smells that would make the bus seem like a rolling rose garden.
“I’ve got a couch,” she says.
He hasn’t been able to sleep comfortably on a couch since he was twelve. They’re too short, and if he sleeps with his knees drawn up to his chest, it takes most of the morning for him to get the kinks out of his back and legs. But he can make do, he thinks. He’ll sleep on the floor.
* * *
“Good Christ, you’re lame,” Dean says.
“I’m not you,” Sam replies.
“Yeah, well, I figured that out a long time ago. If she lets you in the door, dude, then you don’t aim for the freakin’ floor.”
“Not everybody intends to -“
“Dude,” Dean says, and now he sounds indignant.
And he’s got a point. As flummoxed as Sam might be with women who make the first move, he’s not stupid.
He thinks of Madison, dumping a basketful of underpants onto the table in front of him.
He’s not stupid.
* * *
Melissa lets him shower first. It feels like the waterfall of the gods, and he stands under the spray longer than he should, given that she’s waiting for her turn and given that he might well be using up all the hot water. But her bathroom is clean and tidy and there’s a bowl of potpourri on a shelf over the toilet that makes it smell vaguely spicy.
His clean clothes, when he digs them out of the duffel, are wrinkled beyond all repair, and no, they’re not really clean. His t-shirt has a couple of mysterious, permanently set-in stains down toward the bottom, and the only way she’s not going to notice is if he tucks his shirt in. Which will make him look like a geek.
He’s in a woman’s house, he thinks.
In Flagstaff, Arizona.
A porn-movie fantasy passes through his mind, of opening the bathroom door to find her standing there in Victoria’s Secret underwear, her hair loosened from its long braid, the bed behind her, waiting for him to literally sweep her off her feet. He opens the door nervously, the hand that turns the knob trembling a little, and when he looks into the bedroom there’s no one there. She’s close by, though; he can hear her moving around.
“You hungry, Sam?” she asks from wherever she is.
He is. But he’s not. The aftermath of the nausea has left his stomach feeling sort of hollow, like “hungry” isn’t a concept it understands.
She comes around the corner into the bedroom and smiles at him. She’s unfastened the bib of her overalls and they’re hanging loosely around her hips, revealing small patches of bare skin below the hem of her t-shirt when she moves. She’s taken off her sneakers and socks and is padding around barefoot, which seems like normal for her, something she prefers.
“I should -“ he stammers.
“When are you supposed to be at school?” she asks. “When does orientation start?”
He’s lost track of what day it is. Doing the math takes so long that she must think he’s a moron. “I was gonna get there early,” he says.
He bailed, is what he means. Left home a week early, just to get out.
“A week from tomorrow,” he admits.
“That’s good, then. I’ve got some friends - they’re going up for a concert. They can take you, if you want a ride.”
“The bus…”
“Turn the ticket in. They’ll give you a refund.”
“They will?”
“They’re leaving day after tomorrow. My friends. Chase and Lucy.”
What am I supposed to do until then? he wonders.
* * *
“You see that chair over there?” Dean asks.
Sam frowns at him.
“If you tell me you spent any part of that two days playing board games, I’m gonna beat you to death with it. If you think I’m not serious, raise your hand.”
* * *
She orders a pizza for dinner.
It’s not much past seven o’clock when they finish eating, but her eyelids are getting droopy. She dumps their paper plates and napkins into the trash, lays the pizza box on top of the wastebasket, and locks the front door.
Then she sits back down beside him on the couch.
Her pottery wheel is out in the garage, she told him, so he can’t sit here and watch her spin something, can’t watch her hands move lightly and gently across smooth, wet clay, shaping it into something beautiful.
This time, when he thinks of Demi Moore’s hands, when he looks at Melissa’s hands, small and square and sturdy, when he thinks of her touching him, she definitely notices what happens, and it makes her grin crookedly.
“You can’t sleep here,” she says, meaning the couch.
She switches off the lamp and walks into her bedroom, and he follows her. Like Benji.
It’s like jumping into deep, cold water: he has to hold his breath and do it. Has to keep moving, because if he stops to think about what’s happening, he’ll freeze. He’s absolutely, one hundred percent certain that he’ll freeze, that he won’t be able to… Well, do anything. She must think he’s done it before, because he told her how old he is, that he’s going to college, so she must be pretty sure he’s had sex. That this whole thing won’t be a collection of fumbling and groping and that it won’t end eight seconds after it starts.
She puts her hand on his chest, over his heart, and he’s sure she can feel it pounding, like a bird hammering its wings against the bars of a cage. For sure she can see that he’s not…well, that he’s not Dean.
“Ssshh,” she whispers, and sits him down on the bed.
It’s not over in eight seconds.
* * *
“Two days?” Dean muses.
“Two and a half.”
“So…”
They’re sitting side by side on Dean’s bed, pillows heaped up behind them. Sam made a move toward getting up, and the way that made Dean frown made Sam settle for fetching his pillows rather than returning to his own bed.
Dean wants him there. Close.
“Seven,” Sam says.
“You are so full of shit.”
Sam shakes his head, a smooth pivot back and forth.
“Dude,” Dean says.
“You had sex with this chick seven times in two days -“
“Two and a half.”
“Don’t interrupt me. Seven times in two and a half days, and you got in somebody’s car and went to fucking Stanford? Dude. Why are you not living in Arizona? Could’ve got yourself a job someplace. I would’ve -“
“No,” Sam says. “You wouldn’t.”
* * *
He gets up on the morning of the third day, the day Chase and Lucy will start driving him from Flagstaff to Palo Alto, feeling like the ground has shifted under his feet.
Melissa’s little house has started to feel comfortable to him. He knows where things are - the salt and pepper, the extra toilet paper - and he can move around on autopilot, the way he does at Pastor Jim’s, at Uncle Bobby’s. Melissa has started to act like he belongs there, like seeing him isn’t a surprise, isn’t something that hasn’t been going on for months, or years, or always. Melissa herself has started to feel comfortable to him, and he supposes that that’s remarkable, because he’s never had a girlfriend, not really, and certainly not one who lived with him.
He pours himself a bowl of cereal and wonders if he should offer to keep in touch.
He wonders if she’ll offer.
He wonders if she wants to keep in touch.
Maybe this is just something she does once in a while. She has a box of condoms in the drawer of her night table, so she must have sex at least once in a while. Maybe she goes out to clubs or bars or art shows or whatever and meets people. Maybe they come back here with her and they sleep together and then they go home.
She’s an adult. She can do that.
He pours milk onto his bowl of corn flakes, listening with one ear to the sound of the shower. They got up early so they could spend a little time together before Chase and Lucy come over to pick him up. He met them yesterday, and they’re cool, and funny, and he’s sure he won’t mind being in the car with them all the way to northern California. It might be a little awkward, though - being in the back seat for all that time, being an unexpected addition to their road trip, when they’re a couple and they might have planned to…well, whatever. But they seem cool with it, and with him. They’re impressed that he’s going to Stanford, that he got the full ride.
He’s eating his corn flakes when Melissa comes out of the bedroom. She’s wearing a white t-shirt and panties, that’s all. It makes her legs look really long.
She smiles at him and kisses the back of his neck. Rests her hands on his shoulders.
He wants to stay.
He wants to stay here, with this girl who doesn’t know anything about salt or holy water or silver bullets except as something in a story, or a movie. He wants to stay with this girl and her friends and go to the bookstore in the evening, after dinner, and sit in one of the big chairs near the fireplace to read until his eyelids start to droop. He wants to stay here until his mind stops racing, until he feels like he can be Sam here, until he feels like he can call Dean and tell him how nice the mountains are, how the air feels fresh up here, how he wakes up in the morning and feels like everything’s new and interesting, like the day is jammed right to the gills with possibilities.
But Melissa hasn’t asked him to stay.
There’s another choice. He realized that yesterday, while he was standing outside with the sun warming his neck and his shoulders.
He could go home.
It would be a surrender in more than one way. It would be caving in to Dad and his very military set of rules: my way or the highway, but when Sam picked the highway, it turned out that Dad’s way was really the only option. Do what I say and that’s that; that’s Dad’s worldview. That’s fine for Dean, yeah, sure, because he’s Dad’s goddamn lap dog, won’t speak up for himself, won’t disagree.
Come with me, Sam said to Dean. Said it three times, on three different days.
I can’t, Dean said.
He misses Dean, misses him like he’d miss breathing. They’ve spent Sam’s whole life within arm’s reach of each other, and being without Dean is like being without half of himself. He wants Dean to see what he sees, he realizes, to do what he does. To share all of it, whatever “it” is. But Dean made his choice. Dean said no.
Dean said no.
“It’s weird, the first couple weeks,” Melissa says. “Till you start to get settled in. But it’ll be great. You’ll love it.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, to no one in particular.
“You’re not that far from San Fran.”
“I guess not.”
“They’ve got some great stuff. Museums. Art galleries.”
Sam frowns at that. When he turns to look at her, he realizes that she’s tweaking him. “Ball games,” she says. “The Wharf. Alcatraz.”
He won’t ever see her again, he realizes. Not after today.
He feels like he belongs exactly nowhere.
With no one.
There’s a clatter at the door. Chase and Lucy are there. Take your time, they tell him, and they both flop down on the couch, chattering with Melissa.
He’s not a part of this. Their lives.
This place.
* * *
“Fuck, Sam,” Dean says. “You’re makin’ me tear up.”
“Shut up,” Sam tells him.
“You ever see her again?”
* * *
He’s hand-in-hand with Jess, walking across the quad, when a girl with dark hair stops abruptly in their path and chirps, “Sam!”
It takes him a moment. “Oh,” he says.
“How are you?”
Jess looks from him to the girl and back again. Curious. Not jealous, because it’s not in Jess to be jealous, not of some random girl they’ve bumped into in the quad. And really, she has no need to be jealous, because for a moment, Sam can’t even remember the girl’s name. “Melissa Church,” he tells Jess. “We met on the bus. When I came here. Freshman year.”
He says Jess’s name, and Melissa and Jess greet each other.
Size each other up, a little.
They talk for a couple of minutes, the three of them, and then Melissa checks her watch. “I gotta go,” she says.
“Nice to meet you,” Jess tells her.
He watches Melissa walk away, for a few seconds.
“Old girlfriend?” Jess asks.
“No,” he says.
Melissa did him a favor, he thinks, by letting him go.
* * *
“Dude,” Dean says, like it’s funny. “You could’ve ended up some pottery-makin’ hippie freak in fuckin’ Flagstaff, Arizona.”
“I’m related to you.”
“Which means?”
“I came, I fucked, I left.”
Dean snorts softly. “More like, you fucked, you came, you left. I hope.”
“You spent two days with Lisa Braeden. You didn’t take up yoga.”
“Thought about it.”
“The hell you did.”
“Yeah,” Dean admits. “Jesus.” Then he reaches over to the night table, seizes the paper bag, wads it into a tight ball, and fires it across the room into the wastebasket Sam pulled it out of. “Whole freakin’ room smells like French fries,” he complains. Without much of a pause, he stares Sam in the face and asks pointedly, “So what was the big secret? Seriously? You couldn’t tell me this, like, years ago? It’s not like you lost your girlhood to farm animals.”
Sam scowls at him. “I wanted -“
“When they make the movie? Abigail Breslin can play you.”
“Bite me,” Sam says.
He gets up off the bed and goes into the bathroom. Shuts the door - not quite all the way - to give himself a minute.
He was never alone, not until the Trickster took Dean away from him. There was always someone: Dean, Dad, his roommate Luis, then Jess. Pastor Jim. His friends at Stanford. There’s always been someone.
But Jess and Dad and Pastor Jim are dead. His friends from Stanford believe he’s dead; and he can’t go to them, tell them it’s not true, for fear of mixing them up in all this. Azazel murdered all of Mom’s friends, and nothing says that Lilith, or one of the other demons, won’t decide to strike the same blow against the people he knows.
Knew.
All he’s got, really, is Dean.
For thirty days.
Just thirty more days.
That’s all, because in his heart, he knows there’s no way out. He can spend the next thirty days searching, can give up only a few hours at a time to sleep so that he can wring every bit of possibility out of those thirty days - and he will do that, he will, he will not admit defeat until defeat grabs him by the neck and flings him out of the way so it can get at Dean.
I should have gone home, he thinks.
She told him. Melissa. The second evening, while they were sitting on her couch eating apples and watching something on TV that he can no longer remember. He shook his head; told her, “He said not to come back,” but she reached out to daub apple juice off his chin with her thumb and replied, “They all say that, Sam. It’s sort of a ‘fuck you’ thing. Get out, and don’t come back, you ungrateful shit.’”
* * *
“There’s more to it than that,” Sam insists.
“There was for me too. There’s always more to it than that.”
“I can’t go back there.”
“Then don’t.”
Sam considers his apple for a moment, then says, “You kind of suck at giving advice.”
She laughs, long and hard, until she starts to cough. He has to thump her on the back to stop the coughing.
“It’s your life, Sam,” she says. “You just kind of have to…hope you don’t crap it up completely.”
* * *
If he had gone home, he thinks, he would have had those three years with his family. Whether he would have been able to iron things out with Dad, he doesn’t know. Probably not, given that when he and Dad finally did come together again, they fell right back into arguing. Went on arguing until Dad asked that they stop.
Until Dad said he didn’t know why they’d always argued in the first place.
He could have had those three years, Sam thinks. He would never have met Jess, and that would be a loss.
But how do you weigh one loss against another?
He pulls the bathroom door open and looks at Dean, who’s sitting with his back propped against his pillows, fussing with the TV remote.
“Hey, Dean?” he says quietly.
Dean looks at him. Smiles crookedly.
There’s only one thing he can think of to say. One thing that might help. “Dad got out,” he offers.
Dad was down there for nine months. Like he gestated down there.
“He looked okay,” Sam says. “Remember? He looked good. He got out, and he was okay.”
It’s not forever, he means to say. Nothing is forever.
They’ve got thirty days.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~