SPN FIC - I'd Do Anything
Sam and Jess, the Stanford Years. A little hanky-panky. But no money. Just me being a voyeur.
She smiled at him, then turned away and went around the corner out of sight. He could hear her opening her suitcase and knew she was going to pick out an outfit for dinner, something that would be right for sitting out on the terrace of a restaurant near the ocean in Carmel. He was going to make sure she sat with the sun behind her, so he could see the sunset and her and maybe the ocean all in one image.
This can’t last, he thought, and hated himself for thinking it. Nothing this good gets to last.
Length: 4,200 words
Pairings: Sam/Jess
Rating: R, mostly for language
Spoilers: just the Pilot
I’d Do Anything
By Carol Davis
Off in the distance, Sam could hear the ocean battering itself against the rocks. Here in the room, because they had turned off the air conditioner in favor of opening the window just a little - as much as the safety bar would allow - all he could hear was the whisper of Jess’s breathing.
She seemed to be asleep. Really asleep, not faking, and even though they’d been spending the night together off and on for weeks, he still marveled at the fact that this girl trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms. Not that she shouldn’t trust him; after all, he wasn’t a serial killer, although he had more experience with crimes of a lesser variety than he wanted to remember. But there was something about falling asleep in the cradle of someone’s arms that spoke volumes about your relationship with that person.
Very lightly, to avoid waking her, Sam brushed the side of his thumb against her cheek.
Thank You for this.
Thank You for letting me be with someone like this.
He’d spent those first couple of weeks after they’d met, after she’d let him know she was interested, as terrified as a seventh-grader. Everything that came out of his mouth had been thought to death. Every piece of clothing he put on had been considered and rejected half a dozen times. Every place he offered to take her had already been vetted with the few people whose opinion he valued. (And bless Professor Hayworth for being willing to look at movie ads twice a week without reminding him that office hours were really intended for school business.)
Then, finally, when he had begun to think that his nerves could take no more of that, when it seemed like breaking up with Jess might be the only way to preserve his sanity, there had been the root beer float incident.
As in, root beer and ice cream all over her skirt. Her new skirt.
He’d waited, counted off the seconds in his head, sure she would freak. Cry. Yell. Tell him he was a clumsy ass. Something.
Instead, she laughed. Big, crazy whoops of laughter.
That night, they made love for the first time. Sweet, giddy, gentle, frantic. And again. And a third time. After the third time, when she started getting drowsy enough for him to be sure there wouldn’t be a fourth time, he slid out from under the covers and looked around on the floor for his pants.
“Where’re you going?” she asked him.
He stopped, with his jeans dangling from one hand. “Home?”
“Why?”
“I…um…”
“Get back in bed, Sam. It’s late.”
She obviously wanted no part of the timetable Dean had taught him - the one that’d come from Mark Twain’s observation about visitors and fish stinking after three days. In Dean’s worldview it was more like an hour and a half, two hours max. “Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am” was a little harsh, because that seemed to imply fifteen or twenty minutes - no foreplay, no cuddling - and Dean had a whole mental manual of foreplay, one he’d cheerfully shared with Sam when he decided Sam was old enough to hear it.
Never mind that Sam was thirteen and was, pretty much, more grossed out than interested. “You do what?” he remembered squeaking. “Why?”
“Because girls like it.”
“They do?”
“Never got any complaints.”
“Maybe they were being polite,” he’d decided, and was annoyed by the way Dean chuckled at him.
Jess didn’t buy the two-hour timetable, but she certainly was a fan of most of the other wisdom Dean had passed on. By the time the sun crawled up over the horizon at the end of that first night, it had crossed Sam’s mind that he would like to die then, because he figured being that happy would - like the near nervous breakdown it had replaced - end up being no good for him in the long run.
He didn’t die. And his nervous system seemed to be surviving. How, he wasn’t sure. But he’d reached the point where, if Jess left him, that would kill him.
She shifted in his arms a little and opened her eyes. Smiled at him lazily. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, yourself.”
“Time is it?”
Sam peered at his watch. “Almost six.”
“Maybe we should think about dinner.”
“Okay. And I’m buying.”
“Nooooo. I told you, this is my treat.”
“You paid for the room.” And you paid too much was implied. He’d told her that when they arrived and he got a good look at the place. They were in Carmel, without a view of the ocean but close enough to hear it, and that meant major expense. Way more than Sam had ever been a part of paying for sleeping accommodations. Crazy more.
But she’d brushed that off. And was still brushing it off. “I told you - I had to spend my birthday money on something.”
“You could have bought…clothes.”
“I’ve got enough clothes. My grandmother said to use it for something special. This is something special. You’re something special.”
“Thank you.”
It was all he could think of to say. And it sounded stupid, like she’d bought him a book or a bag of popcorn. And sure enough, she peered at him curiously. “You act like you don’t believe it. I mean…I don’t think you should go around acting like you’re God’s gift, because if I never have to be in the same room with somebody like that again it’ll be too soon. But…you’re not secretly a huge ball of self-esteem issues, are you?”
“I hope not.”
“Good.” She snuggled in again, and lay there quietly for a while. Then, with a small smile, she spider-walked a hand across his midriff and began to trace circles around his left nipple.
“You did want to get dinner sometime today, right?” Sam asked.
“Sure.”
“Then maybe you should keep your hands to yourself.”
“Awww,” she pouted. “You’re no fun.”
“We’ve already had fun twice. If we get something to eat, we might have enough energy to have fun - I don’t know, thirty or forty more times before Sunday afternoon.”
“Is that all?”
“Does your mama know you like sex this much?” Sam drawled.
“I hope not,” she grinned. With a little bit of a giggle she squirmed around under the covers, got to her knees and straddled his thighs. The covers ended up near Sam’s shins. “Ooh,” she said. “I like the view from up here.”
“It’s not bad from down here, either.”
Jess took hold of his hands and twined her fingers with his. He’d begun to breathe deeply, slowly, trying to make this last. All she did for a minute was look down at him, smiling just a little. Drinking him in. The first time he’d seen that phrase in a book - it had to be years ago - he’d thought it was odd. But it fit now: she was drinking him in. Like she was thirsty, and he was cool, clear water.
God, that was dorky. Apt, but dorky.
Carefully she leaned over and kissed him, first on one cheek, then the other, and finally on the lips. When she drew back his erection twitched in between them.
“Mr. Happy says, ‘me too, me too, Jessie!’” she giggled.
“What?”
The giggles had a firm grip on her. It took her a moment to stop laughing enough to say, “He wants kisses.”
“You’re completely insane.”
“Yes, but it’s a good insane.”
“Do me a favor,” Sam said, fighting the urge to giggle himself, because that would have been just…well, lame. “Don’t name my penis. I don’t believe in personalized license plates, or naming cars, or naming plants, and I really don’t want to name my…”
“Dick?”
“Stop.”
“Aw, Sammy, you’re no fun.”
The name made memories swirl through Sam’s head. Days and places and circumstances all bled together, like a watercolor spoiled by too much water. Days that had gone by, separated from this place, this day, by miles and years and a long dark void of not hearing Dean’s voice, not seeing Dean’s face. Or Dad’s. It made his throat grow tight, made the rightness of being away from Dean, away from Dad, evaporate and drift away like coastal fog in the face of a stiff, dry breeze.
“Did I say something wrong?” Jess asked softly.
“No. What? No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Just - I need a minute. Bathroom.” Before she could question him, he slid out from underneath her and escaped to the marble-tiled bathroom with its wall of mirrors. Not the best place to avoid anything.
“Sam?” Jess said from the bedroom.
“I’m all right.”
She came to stand in the doorway, long and lean and blonde. She looked like California, looked like Carmel. Looked like sunlight. “Please tell me,” she said.
“It’s -“
“No. Something’s wrong. Please tell me.”
He tried not to cave. Tried, then gave up. “My family. They called me Sammy.”
“And you’d rather be someone else here.”
I am someone else here, he thought. It wasn’t true, but he thought it anyway. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t.”
“Maybe we should get dressed and go get some dinner. Callie said there’s a place not far from here that’s really good.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t hold things inside, Sam. Be honest with me. Will you?”
“I will.”
She smiled at him, then turned away and went around the corner out of sight. He could hear her opening her suitcase and knew she was going to pick out an outfit for dinner, something that would be right for sitting out on the terrace of a restaurant near the ocean in Carmel. He was going to make sure she sat with the sun behind her, so he could see the sunset and her and maybe the ocean all in one image.
This can’t last, he thought, and hated himself for thinking it. Nothing this good gets to last.
***
“Seriously?” Sam said.
“Why would I not be serious? I had the female lead in our senior class musical. Playing a prostitute.”
He sat with his fork hanging in midair, hoping no one around them had heard that. If they did, they made no sign of it, these Carmel people. Or…these people from other places, sitting here in Carmel for a little while, like he was.
“Oliver!” Jess said.
“What?”
“God, Sam, you’re such a geek. The musical. Oliver!”
“Uh-huh.”
“From Oliver Twist? Charles Dickens? Please tell me you’ve heard of Charles Dickens.”
“I have.”
“But you don’t know the musical Oliver!”
“I was in Our Town,” Sam offered.
“Which is not a musical.”
“If I had signed up to be in a musical,” Sam sighed, “my brother would have left me by the side of the road somewhere. Assuming I could even sing well enough to be considered for a part in a musical. Which I can’t.”
“Do you sing karaoke?”
“No,” Sam said firmly.
“Bet I can change your mind. With the assistance of a few drinks.”
“There is no way on this earth.”
The expression on her face could be called nothing other than a smirk. “Is there a dare implied in that?”
“No way. Ever. No singing. In public. No singing.”
“But in private there might be singing?”
“No,” Sam said.
Jess crooked a finger and beckoned. He resisted, shaking his head, making a point of taking another mouthful of his dinner. When she did it again he heaved a sigh and leaned forward a little. She met him as close to halfway across the small round table as she could manage and crooned softly:
I’d do anything
For you, dear, anything
For you mean everything
To me…
“Oliver!” Sam guessed.
She nodded. “Oliver!”
“I’m still not singing karaoke. There’s not enough alcohol on the planet to make me stand up in front of a roomful of strangers and sing.”
“I love a challenge,” Jess told him.
***
The only thing that saved him was that he was still under 21, he had come to California without the fistful of fake IDs that had been so much a part of his life on the road with Dad and Dean, and he and Jess were unable to find a bar in Carmel that offered both karaoke and a willingness to ignore their age. After an hour of looking Jess agreed to table the issue “for now.” Campus, she told him, would be a whole different matter. Campus equaled private parties and privately-owned karaoke machines.
They were halfway back to the hotel when Jess jammed on the brakes, jerking her car to a stop abruptly enough to get a whoof out of Sam. With her foot firmly planted on the brake pedal, she fumbled in her purse until she found her cell phone.
“What are you -?” Sam stammered.
“There. Look!”
He did. “What am I looking at?”
“Clint Eastwood. Right there. With those people.”
It was long since dark out, and the cluster of people she was pointing at was outside the range of the closest streetlamp. Still, Sam decided as Jess snapped a picture with her phone, she was right: the man in the dark jacket who had the attention of his companions was indeed Clint Eastwood.
Dean would shit, he thought.
“Wait till I tell my dad,” Jess chuckled. “He’ll love this.”
“Very cool.”
Our Town had required nothing approaching this level of acting - particularly since he had played one of the townspeople, had no lines, and had to spend much of the play sitting silently in a straight-backed chair. Our Town had not required him to keep a smile on his face and his eyes on the little cluster of people surrounding Clint Eastwood when he wanted desperately to grab the phone out of Jessica’s hand and use it to call his brother.
When he wanted desperately for his brother to be here.
His performance merited, at the very least, one of those gold-plated trophies they sold in sporting goods stores. By the time he and Jess got back to the hotel, he had upgraded himself to being worthy of a People’s Choice Award. Or possibly the thing on Nickelodeon that involved getting slimed. He kept a sweet, benign smile on his face as much and as often as seemed appropriate, careful not to overdo it for fear of looking like he was stoned. When they passed a mirror in the lobby he took a fleeting look at himself and decided he looked perfectly normal. And normal was perfect, because it had been a normal evening. He had had a nice dinner with his girl at a nice restaurant with a view of the ocean. The weather was nice, and the sun had cooperatively set right behind Jess, giving him the image he had wanted of her and the water and a broad band of brilliant color.
And now they were going back to their nice, expensive room to have more sex.
Normal.
Normal, normal, normal.
No fake IDs, no stripe of salt across the threshold, no being hyperaware of sounds in the night. No Dean snoring wetly in the other bed, no Dad hunched over his journal at the table in the corner. None of that, not a single bit of that other life.
Except for him, Sammy who was now Sam.
“That was perfect,” Jess announced as he closed the door to their room.
“It was nice.”
She toed her shoes off and curled her toes into the soft carpet. “I am so full. I’m going to sleep like a log.”
“After?”
“After. Or maybe in between.” Looking a little sleepy-eyed, she padded across the carpet to him, stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him lightly. “You’re very tall, you know that?”
“I think I’ve had it pointed out to me once or twice.”
“It’s nice to reach up to a guy. I like that. Most of the guys I’ve gone out with” - she bit her lip and looked a little chagrined - “not that there were all that many, but they weren’t that much taller than me.”
“The whole brigade of them.”
“Sam.”
“Probably equal in number to the vast parade of women I’ve gone out with.”
“Is your family tall?”
“No,” Sam said. “Not - no. Six feet or so. My dad. And my brother. I don’t know about my mom.”
“So it was the food you ate?”
Memories nudged their way in again: Dean insisting that he drink his milk. Dean, rather than his mother or his father, telling him he could have a cookie if he finished his glass of milk. “It makes strong bones and teeth, Sammy.” Dean had been all of, what, eight years old? “I guess,” Sam said softly.
“So…are we going to bed, or do you want to watch a movie? It’s still early.” Without waiting for him to answer, she went on, “Can we shop in the morning? I’d love to look in some of those little stores we passed.”
“If you want.”
“I won’t make you stand there while I spend three hours looking at purses.”
“I appreciate that.”
Her expression turned a little more solemn. Or maybe “solemn” wasn’t right. “I want to buy you something.”
“You do?”
“Just…something. You have the smallest collection of stuff of anybody I’ve ever met, even for a guy.”
So how do you respond to that? he wondered. He shifted his shoulders in a small shrug and figured he could let it go at that. He could explain - tell her how Dad had always wanted to be able to pack up and leave in less than ten minutes if Social Services, or the landlord, or something supernatural and nasty was headed their way. How he and Dean generally had to make do with what would fit inside one duffel bag. How even now, after more than a year away from Dad and Dean, with half of a dorm room to call his own, he found it difficult to buy things.
“That would…” he said softly. “I’d like that.”
Jess tucked her arms around his waist and held him close, resting her head on his shoulder. “You look so sad sometimes, Sam.”
“I do?”
“When you think nobody’s looking.”
“Somebody told me they cancelled Charmed. It has me depressed.”
“You.” She swatted him hard on the butt. “I’m being serious. I mean…if there’s anything you want to talk about, I’ll listen. Callie can tell you - I’m very non-judgmental.”
My father has spent my whole life trying to find the thing that killed my mother, Sam thought. Emphasis on “thing.” He has a collection of weapons in the back of his truck, and my brother has one in the trunk of his car. And I…I have a steel blade sharp enough to take your arm off with one swipe hidden in the bottom of my closet. Think you can be non-judgmental about that?
“Okay,” he said.
***
You’re a liar, he thought. You got away from everything except the lying.
You used to think it was cool, making up names and pretending to be somebody else. Now you use your own name but the rest of it’s all a lie.
The first Stanford student he’d asked out had interrogated him with all the fervor of a veteran FBI agent. They barely got halfway through dinner before the questions started hitting him like hailstones, small and hard and sharp. Where was he from? Okay, that was easy enough: Lawrence, Kansas. Did he have brothers and sisters? One brother. But it got worse from there. She wanted name, age, key personality traits. Ditto for his parents. Didn’t give him a chance to say his mother was dead. Maybe she didn’t care that his mother was dead, as long as she knew Mom’s maiden name, favorite color, and likelihood of being diagnosed with adult attention deficit disorder.
It took him several weeks to shake her. Patty. Patricia Deborah. Born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Key personality trait: does not take rejection well.
After dates with three other girls, he began to think there was no one in Palo Alto who would settle for dinner and a movie without asking for a DNA profile.
He spent Christmas break alone - reading, studying, preparing for his second semester courses and wondering if his whole college career would be like this. Quiet, lonely.
In the middle of February, Dr. Phil turned on the lights.
He had no TV, but the store he’d ventured into to find a cell phone charger to replace the one he’d stepped on had a whole wall of them, all tuned to America’s new favorite pop psychologist. The man’s Texas twang caught Sam’s ear, making him listen as he browsed the rack of phone chargers a couple of aisles over from the TVs.
“What’s the common denominator in these relationships?” Dr. Phil demanded of his guest.
It’s you.
When Sam turned around, Dr. Phil was looking straight into the camera. His piercing gaze startled Sam badly enough that he stood gaping at the TVs like someone who had never seen a TV before.
It’s you.
You’re the common denominator.
You’re the one who doesn’t want anyone to know about you. About that other Sam - the one who had no home. Who had his own gun when he was nine. The one who spent the night of his sixteenth birthday digging up graves in a cemetery in Louisiana.
You’re the one who wants to shut a door between then and now and never open it again.
They’re not doing anything wrong, asking you those questions. You’re the one who wants to be a blank slate. And you’re not.
You’ll never be.
There were two more girls between that day at Radio Shack and the day he met Jess. One of them was Callie, who told him on their fourth date, “You’re looking for somebody else - and I think I know who she is.”
She was Jess.
She was sleeping now, nestled deep into the bed with one hand tucked up under her cheek, while he stood at the window, looking out in the general direction of the ocean and listening to the crash of water against rock.
I want to tell you the truth, he thought. Because it’s what I am, who I am, and you deserve that. You should have that, if you’re going to be a part of my life and I’m gonna be a part of yours. But my dad taught us from the beginning, “We do what we do, and we keep quiet about it.”
So I either tell you the truth, or I do what he taught me.
Do what I’ve done a hundred other times: pretend I’m somebody else. Invent myself. Invent somebody you can bring home to your folks.
Somebody you wouldn’t want to be afraid of.
I have a blade hidden in the bottom of my closet.
I had my own gun when I was nine years old.
When I was fifteen, I killed something that looked human. Looked like a woman. I aimed a gun at her and pulled the trigger and killed her.
It.
Jess wiggled around in her sleep, found a new position and settled in again. He watched her while she did it, saddened by the innocence of it. She was sleeping in a strange place, in the company of someone she’d known for only three months. Someone she didn’t really know at all, and yet trusted enough to become completely vulnerable with him.
She was unafraid, Sam thought.
Not foolhardy, or blind. Just unafraid.
And there was no way he could ruin that for her.
He padded back across the room and slid back under the covers. She seemed to know, even asleep, that he was back. Her lips drifted into a smile and she murmured a small sound of contentment.
“Jess?” Sam whispered.
She murmured again, a little. Then opened her eyes.
“I love you, Jess.”
“Oh,” she said. “Love you too.”
“Jess?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you for this.”
She blinked at him, smiling, eyes at half-mast. “I don’t do this for just anybody,” she told him quietly.
“I wish…”
My brother is a drifter. We haven’t talked in five months - except for that time I hung up on him. My dad is an alcoholic, and he hasn’t had a job since my mother died. He raised us in cheap motels and dirty apartments, and when we’d start to make friends he’d pull us away, take us somewhere else. I’ve attended thirty-one different schools.
I never felt I could trust anybody until I met you.
She was humming. A small string of notes, then a little bit more. The song she’d sung at the restaurant.
“Jess…”
“Sshhh.” She pressed a finger to his lips.
“No karaoke,” Sam said.
“Hmm.”
Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. “I want to tell you -“ he whispered.
“In the morning.”
“I’m not sure I’m who you think I am.”
“I think you’re a big, shy, smart man with no stuff,” Jess said. More sleepily, she changed that to, “Big gorgeous shy smart man with no stuff. Who won’t sing for me.”
“For you I would.”
“I’ll remember that in the morning.”
“Jess?”
“Hmm?”
“I love you.”
“Yeah, Sam,” she smiled. “Me too.”