Fic: isn't that the point (SPN, Dean/Lisa, NC-17)
Title: isn’t that the point
Author: Regala Electra
Pairing: Dean/Lisa
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 2,595
Spoilers: Season 6
Warnings: Sexual Content (consensual D/s), Language
Summary: How the pieces of Dean Winchester that remain after Sam's gone do and don't come together. A tale of restoration, destruction, and goodbyes told out of turn, after a fashion.
Author’s Notes: Written for salt_burn_porn for the prompt Why am I so bad at being good?! by memphis86. I probably ruined her prompt by getting all serious but that's how I roll. A major, major part of my inspiration was counteragent's amazing video Coin Operated Boy. I can't even describe it. Instead I wrote fic.
*
It’s different when everything’s splayed out in reverse. He’s got to keep his fingers above his mouth as he pushes a second finger inside her, his tongue working a desperate rhythm on her clit. She’s on top of him, her mouth sucking him off, she pulls back so she’s only wrapped around the head now, waiting for him to come.
She’s gotten too good at knowing how to set him off. Dean has to press his mouth against her thigh as he comes, hips twitching helpless and he breathes hard against her skin. At least he has the presence of mind to keep fingering her that but it takes him a moment to realize Lisa’s gently pulling his hand down.
“What?”
“Be good,” she says. She moves off of him and lies down next to him, absentmindedly stroking his stomach. “Let’s wait.”
“I’m not twenty anymore. It might take a while.”
“Oh, well. I don’t want to wait that long, then.”
He laughs, moving on top of her, taking the slow route down south. She kicks her heel at his back, impatiently.
“Dean!” Then it turns into a moan as he gets to the point.
This is one of the few good times. It took too long to get here. And it’s gonna be long gone in a few moments.
*
The first night he crashed on the couch but by the third, she offers him open arms and he takes the left side of the bed.
“It’s facing the window,” he explains, turning over and watching the world through near-translucent drapes.
Her hand briefly touches the side of his exposed face when she thinks he’s fallen asleep. He tells himself, he can do this.
*
But sometimes, he runs away. Or so he lets himself believe that.
*
When he’s mistaken as a regular at a bar or liquor store, he finds new places, drives on and on until the Impala almost protests at the unnecessary abuse, letting her run down to the fumes like the both deserve it.
He never drives her while pounding down the whiskey. He never drinks beer while near her. Too many memories.
He wakes up sometimes and has no idea how the fuck he got there.
But he always makes his way back. Eventually.
Lisa walks into the room and sometimes she’ll hold him. When he lets her. She has a life though, places to be, and she isn’t there for long. “I have to wake up Ben,” she’ll say or, “I have to meet my friends.” Unspoken, gentle: there’s a life out there, if you want it.
He kisses her, once, hard and desperate and she pulls back.
“Not like this, Dean.” Then. “Please, tell me about it. About what happened.”
The words die in his throat. He shakes his head.
*
He joins her in the shower.
“Dean, what-” She doesn’t say much more when he kisses her, water streaming between their mouths.
Knees hitting the tile, he’s buried between her legs with faster movement than would belie someone detoxing from a hell of a bender.
*
He breaks apart the pieces of Sam that he mistrusted over the years, shatters his anger at Sam’s betrayals and only focuses on that terrifying moment when all was lost. He is left with only that, the knowledge that Sam did overcome Lucifer, long enough for it to count, and that Sam was right and Sam is gone forever.
What he says to Lisa is, “It’s hard without Sammy around.”
She holds his hand at the kitchen table, like they’re having a weird post-dinner prayer. There’s no lie offered, no claim that she understands, because she doesn’t.
*
When he first fucks Lisa after the abyss of alcohol has done nothing more than make him feel even more wasteful-Sam wouldn’t want this-he waits until she’s fast asleep before he tries to leave the house.
He’s not running away, even he isn’t that low, and he’s plenty low, but he needs to get his head clear and he tightens his fingers around his keys. Just a drive, nothing more, he promises. To who, he has no idea, but he promises nevertheless.
(He knows who he’s talking to, in his messed up head, it’s always Sam.)
“Where’re you going?”
The voice is heavy with sleep and Dean turns sharply, stunned that he’s been caught completely unaware.
“Heading out. Gotta pick up some things.” The lie comes easy but he doesn’t dare look Ben in the face.
“You’re leaving,” he says, flat and unaffected. He hadn’t been all that thrilled on Dean’s arrival, savior or not, Dean had left, and he’s no mysterious dad-figure, just some messed up asshole that needs something from his mom.
“Maybe.”
Ben doesn’t say anything then. He walks over and has the balls to take Dean’s keys from his hand. “You said you were going to teach me when I was old enough.”
Had he said that? The days have gone hazy in Dean’s mind, he remembers the efforts he’d made to get Ben talking, to get Ben on his side, like he needed desperately for someone to see something in him that wasn’t utterly broken. But he doesn’t think he did.
“No I didn’t.”
“You didn’t,” Ben agrees, suddenly a young kid all over again, shy and hesitant, fingers running over the edges of the key. “I thought maybe. One day.”
“Come on,” he says, suddenly, like it’s easy. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“Where?”
“Midnight ice cream?” Dean vaguely remembers an all-night diner an hour away that makes insane homemade sundaes. “It won’t spoil your breakfast. And it’s Friday, you don’t have school in the morning.”
He thinks it’s Friday, at least.
When they get back from their midnight madness, Lisa’s pacing the living room, eyes frantic, ignoring Ben as he tries to convince her he’s fine but oh, she tears into him once Ben’s sent to his room.
“You can’t do that, Dean!”
“What? Try to bond with him, a little?”
“You can’t treat him like a kid brother. He’s a child. He’s my son. He’s-he can’t think you’re his cool friend. Not in my house. I’m his mother, he’s my responsibility, but you have to be an adult, too.”
“So that’s how it is.”
She laughs a little, bitterly. “I don’t know what’s happened and I’m not going to make you tell me. A few of my friends think I’m crazy for letting you stay here.”
“Just a few?”
“Maybe all of them.” Her hands are cold when she holds his, but her fingers are strong, blunt nails digging in a little, making him snap his attention to her warm gaze. “I’d kick you to the curb the moment you step out of line.”
“You promise?”
“I packed your bags moment I realized you took off with Ben,” she confesses.
“Not a lot to pack.”
“Hmm. There’s other kind of baggage. You know, being here, it doesn’t mean you failed.”
He wants to tell her. That he hasn’t had a real night of sleep out of fear of what’ll happen if he sleeps too deep, what dream will twist its way into full out terror before he’d be able to wake up. That it’s getting harder to get drunk on the same amount of booze as the week before. That he can feel Sam everywhere but there’s nothing but a ragged space just a step out of his field of vision and he still believes he could’ve fixed all of this, somehow, because his one true faith will always be in his free will despite the ragged ruin of what’s left.
When he kisses Lisa, it’s a way of forgetting and she’s good enough that she pulls back and doesn’t let him escape that way.
They don’t have sex for a while after that.
*
“Are you sure?” she asks and then she says, voice stronger, “We can stop any time.”
He closes his eyes and leans his head forward a little, lets her bind the stockings around his head until he’s blind. She doesn’t tie him down but she does pin him, her legs strong on his biceps, knees bearing down but she’s balanced herself so he’s not feeling the full weight. The pain is good.
This is what he hasn’t been able to ask for: the whispered comfort of the sharp hurts in the dark. The safety he feels when she whispers in his ear that he's ruining everything, how he’s been so bad, twisting it back to pleasure as she jerks him off.
He can only beg her not to stop. Not ever.
She’s grown out her nails and the scratches are welcome. The blood rises against his skin, chest then thighs, and when she sets him free, the slap across his face is just the rush he needed. He deserves this and says as much.
The actual comfort afterwards will be the worst part and it’s for her benefit as she soothes and hushes him. She has to convince herself: No we weren't too loud, it was fine, hey you're still with me right? He wants her to dig her nails into his face because he understands that.
“Dean,” she tells him at the start, “shut up, not one word. Not a noise. Understand?”
He does and takes the punishment when he finally breaks the silence, saying that he loves her.
*
The day he starts rebuilding himself is inconsequential in the long run: Lisa was teaching him the trick to a perfect omelet.
It was a Sunday. Or a Saturday. Not a weekday, because Ben was out in the yard. The kid has some sick love of the early morning that Dean could not understand, though it seemed mostly driven by a need to be out in the yard investigating bugs, which Lisa expressly forbids Ben bring into the house.
“Not even an ant farm?”
“No way. It’s like if Ben got a dog. I’d be the one taking care of it. And there is no way I’m going to be the proud owner of ants.”
It’s an easier day. Dean’s barely thought about-well everything-and Lisa stands next to him as he goes through his first pass at Lisa’s guaranteed technique.
She might be a hell of a yoga instructor but after three failed attempts at the Lisa Braeden Perfect Omelet Flip, she gives up on Dean as a student.
“You’re hopeless,” she says, offering him a consolation prize, a kind smile, as she takes over duties. She knows well enough by now to overload Dean’s omelet with diced ham.
“No,” he says, suddenly, smiling for the first time in a long time. “I’m not.”
She stares at him steadily and easily performs the flip, not even glancing to see how it’s perfect in the pan. It is, of course.
“That’s just showing off,” he says.
“I know. Can you get Ben inside? And get him to wash his hands. I don’t want to know what he’s been doing, but I’d like to pretend he’s not been digging around the garden.”
*
It’s going to work.
He tells her about how he’s thinking about working construction, good honest work, hard but he knows he can get it done. “I’ve spent more time crawling around houses, I should have an idea of how to keep them from falling over my head at least.”
She laughs. They’ve been drinking spiked lemonade in the backyard. The summer day is hazy with humidity and her shorts stick to her thighs.
He runs his hand over her legs, admiring.
She laughs. “You were such a sucker for my legs. Remember when we first met?”
He pretends to consider it. “You might have made an impression.”
Lisa ends the slight distance between them, her lips sweet, tangy and tongue spiked with the whiskey. “I did, huh?”
When he laughs, he means it, and that’s a hell of a thing.
*
He hadn’t even had to aggressively hit on her when he’d seen her at the bar. She’d been the one to come up to him, eyes bright and she’d been laughing with a couple of girls, all them about aching to get into trouble.
At one point, he’s sure, he asked her what she did, and she told him she was a yoga instructor. So he’d made a joke about the downward facing dog.
“That’s a good one,” Lisa told him, and he’d taken the lie as good as the shots they’d been doing for the past hour. “Y’know, and this isn’t actually a joke, I know a guy who’s so flexible, he can…”
She had trailed off for effect, a pointed look at his crotch and well it didn’t take much convincing to get her to head out with him.
He found out she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her dress by the time they were both in the car.
“Disappointed?” She’d asked that somewhere between kisses, breath hot on his neck. “Wanted to add something to your panty collection?”
He’d responded not with words though he wanted to, but she’d been smiling so wickedly that he thought getting off just with his fingers might do her a damn bit of good.
“Lisa,” he said, when she’d finally started to come down, after she’d swatted his hand away, unwilling to ride through any more aftershocks, “You got any plans this weekend?”
*
They’re still in the backyard. Ben’s over at a sleepover, but Dean’s not stupid, and what will the neighbors think actually holds water now.
“You told all your friends about us, right?”
“Fishing for compliments?” She presses her face against his neck and she can feel his smile. “You were somewhat memorable.”
“Shame we were stupid.” He thinks of a different life, one not spent chasing monsters on the road, and it’s starting to feel alien to him, like this is a better place to be.
“No we weren’t.”
*
It was the perfect one night stand. Sure, it took over forty-eight hours and short of leaving the hotel room for necessary provisions (food mostly, he’d gotten the condoms and lube part covered), he’d basically spent hours of near-dating if non-stop fucking counts as dating (and it sure as fuck does).
He’ll never see her again and she hadn’t minded sending him off his way, once he’d dropped her off at her kind of sketchy neighborhood.
“You live here?”
“Rent’s cheap and I know a few bikers around here,” she told him, shrugging. “I’ll save my money for the future.”
“The future,” he’d said, dubiously. “You think about it?”
Another shrug. “Why not? I’m not gonna be a yoga teacher forever.”
“You should be.”
She’d kissed him for that. Then crawled in his lap. Eventually they parted ways.
“Bye, Dean.”
Hell of a girl. It wasn’t until a particularly adventurous threesome a few months down the line that he was ever able to stop comparing other girls to that one weekend with Lisa, who he’d now taken to calling Gumby Girl.
He’d never see her again, though, so it was unfair to compare what he couldn’t have with what was right in front of him.
*
Sam is alive.
She hugs him tight, one goodbye, among many. Her hair brushes against his cheek. He tries to memorize this. But it’s something else for him to lose, like so many things.
He tells her he’ll be back, whenever he can and she looks at him in just the right way to make them both pretend he’s telling the truth.
end
Author: Regala Electra
Pairing: Dean/Lisa
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 2,595
Spoilers: Season 6
Warnings: Sexual Content (consensual D/s), Language
Summary: How the pieces of Dean Winchester that remain after Sam's gone do and don't come together. A tale of restoration, destruction, and goodbyes told out of turn, after a fashion.
Author’s Notes: Written for salt_burn_porn for the prompt Why am I so bad at being good?! by memphis86. I probably ruined her prompt by getting all serious but that's how I roll. A major, major part of my inspiration was counteragent's amazing video Coin Operated Boy. I can't even describe it. Instead I wrote fic.
*
It’s different when everything’s splayed out in reverse. He’s got to keep his fingers above his mouth as he pushes a second finger inside her, his tongue working a desperate rhythm on her clit. She’s on top of him, her mouth sucking him off, she pulls back so she’s only wrapped around the head now, waiting for him to come.
She’s gotten too good at knowing how to set him off. Dean has to press his mouth against her thigh as he comes, hips twitching helpless and he breathes hard against her skin. At least he has the presence of mind to keep fingering her that but it takes him a moment to realize Lisa’s gently pulling his hand down.
“What?”
“Be good,” she says. She moves off of him and lies down next to him, absentmindedly stroking his stomach. “Let’s wait.”
“I’m not twenty anymore. It might take a while.”
“Oh, well. I don’t want to wait that long, then.”
He laughs, moving on top of her, taking the slow route down south. She kicks her heel at his back, impatiently.
“Dean!” Then it turns into a moan as he gets to the point.
This is one of the few good times. It took too long to get here. And it’s gonna be long gone in a few moments.
*
The first night he crashed on the couch but by the third, she offers him open arms and he takes the left side of the bed.
“It’s facing the window,” he explains, turning over and watching the world through near-translucent drapes.
Her hand briefly touches the side of his exposed face when she thinks he’s fallen asleep. He tells himself, he can do this.
*
But sometimes, he runs away. Or so he lets himself believe that.
*
When he’s mistaken as a regular at a bar or liquor store, he finds new places, drives on and on until the Impala almost protests at the unnecessary abuse, letting her run down to the fumes like the both deserve it.
He never drives her while pounding down the whiskey. He never drinks beer while near her. Too many memories.
He wakes up sometimes and has no idea how the fuck he got there.
But he always makes his way back. Eventually.
Lisa walks into the room and sometimes she’ll hold him. When he lets her. She has a life though, places to be, and she isn’t there for long. “I have to wake up Ben,” she’ll say or, “I have to meet my friends.” Unspoken, gentle: there’s a life out there, if you want it.
He kisses her, once, hard and desperate and she pulls back.
“Not like this, Dean.” Then. “Please, tell me about it. About what happened.”
The words die in his throat. He shakes his head.
*
He joins her in the shower.
“Dean, what-” She doesn’t say much more when he kisses her, water streaming between their mouths.
Knees hitting the tile, he’s buried between her legs with faster movement than would belie someone detoxing from a hell of a bender.
*
He breaks apart the pieces of Sam that he mistrusted over the years, shatters his anger at Sam’s betrayals and only focuses on that terrifying moment when all was lost. He is left with only that, the knowledge that Sam did overcome Lucifer, long enough for it to count, and that Sam was right and Sam is gone forever.
What he says to Lisa is, “It’s hard without Sammy around.”
She holds his hand at the kitchen table, like they’re having a weird post-dinner prayer. There’s no lie offered, no claim that she understands, because she doesn’t.
*
When he first fucks Lisa after the abyss of alcohol has done nothing more than make him feel even more wasteful-Sam wouldn’t want this-he waits until she’s fast asleep before he tries to leave the house.
He’s not running away, even he isn’t that low, and he’s plenty low, but he needs to get his head clear and he tightens his fingers around his keys. Just a drive, nothing more, he promises. To who, he has no idea, but he promises nevertheless.
(He knows who he’s talking to, in his messed up head, it’s always Sam.)
“Where’re you going?”
The voice is heavy with sleep and Dean turns sharply, stunned that he’s been caught completely unaware.
“Heading out. Gotta pick up some things.” The lie comes easy but he doesn’t dare look Ben in the face.
“You’re leaving,” he says, flat and unaffected. He hadn’t been all that thrilled on Dean’s arrival, savior or not, Dean had left, and he’s no mysterious dad-figure, just some messed up asshole that needs something from his mom.
“Maybe.”
Ben doesn’t say anything then. He walks over and has the balls to take Dean’s keys from his hand. “You said you were going to teach me when I was old enough.”
Had he said that? The days have gone hazy in Dean’s mind, he remembers the efforts he’d made to get Ben talking, to get Ben on his side, like he needed desperately for someone to see something in him that wasn’t utterly broken. But he doesn’t think he did.
“No I didn’t.”
“You didn’t,” Ben agrees, suddenly a young kid all over again, shy and hesitant, fingers running over the edges of the key. “I thought maybe. One day.”
“Come on,” he says, suddenly, like it’s easy. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“Where?”
“Midnight ice cream?” Dean vaguely remembers an all-night diner an hour away that makes insane homemade sundaes. “It won’t spoil your breakfast. And it’s Friday, you don’t have school in the morning.”
He thinks it’s Friday, at least.
When they get back from their midnight madness, Lisa’s pacing the living room, eyes frantic, ignoring Ben as he tries to convince her he’s fine but oh, she tears into him once Ben’s sent to his room.
“You can’t do that, Dean!”
“What? Try to bond with him, a little?”
“You can’t treat him like a kid brother. He’s a child. He’s my son. He’s-he can’t think you’re his cool friend. Not in my house. I’m his mother, he’s my responsibility, but you have to be an adult, too.”
“So that’s how it is.”
She laughs a little, bitterly. “I don’t know what’s happened and I’m not going to make you tell me. A few of my friends think I’m crazy for letting you stay here.”
“Just a few?”
“Maybe all of them.” Her hands are cold when she holds his, but her fingers are strong, blunt nails digging in a little, making him snap his attention to her warm gaze. “I’d kick you to the curb the moment you step out of line.”
“You promise?”
“I packed your bags moment I realized you took off with Ben,” she confesses.
“Not a lot to pack.”
“Hmm. There’s other kind of baggage. You know, being here, it doesn’t mean you failed.”
He wants to tell her. That he hasn’t had a real night of sleep out of fear of what’ll happen if he sleeps too deep, what dream will twist its way into full out terror before he’d be able to wake up. That it’s getting harder to get drunk on the same amount of booze as the week before. That he can feel Sam everywhere but there’s nothing but a ragged space just a step out of his field of vision and he still believes he could’ve fixed all of this, somehow, because his one true faith will always be in his free will despite the ragged ruin of what’s left.
When he kisses Lisa, it’s a way of forgetting and she’s good enough that she pulls back and doesn’t let him escape that way.
They don’t have sex for a while after that.
*
“Are you sure?” she asks and then she says, voice stronger, “We can stop any time.”
He closes his eyes and leans his head forward a little, lets her bind the stockings around his head until he’s blind. She doesn’t tie him down but she does pin him, her legs strong on his biceps, knees bearing down but she’s balanced herself so he’s not feeling the full weight. The pain is good.
This is what he hasn’t been able to ask for: the whispered comfort of the sharp hurts in the dark. The safety he feels when she whispers in his ear that he's ruining everything, how he’s been so bad, twisting it back to pleasure as she jerks him off.
He can only beg her not to stop. Not ever.
She’s grown out her nails and the scratches are welcome. The blood rises against his skin, chest then thighs, and when she sets him free, the slap across his face is just the rush he needed. He deserves this and says as much.
The actual comfort afterwards will be the worst part and it’s for her benefit as she soothes and hushes him. She has to convince herself: No we weren't too loud, it was fine, hey you're still with me right? He wants her to dig her nails into his face because he understands that.
“Dean,” she tells him at the start, “shut up, not one word. Not a noise. Understand?”
He does and takes the punishment when he finally breaks the silence, saying that he loves her.
*
The day he starts rebuilding himself is inconsequential in the long run: Lisa was teaching him the trick to a perfect omelet.
It was a Sunday. Or a Saturday. Not a weekday, because Ben was out in the yard. The kid has some sick love of the early morning that Dean could not understand, though it seemed mostly driven by a need to be out in the yard investigating bugs, which Lisa expressly forbids Ben bring into the house.
“Not even an ant farm?”
“No way. It’s like if Ben got a dog. I’d be the one taking care of it. And there is no way I’m going to be the proud owner of ants.”
It’s an easier day. Dean’s barely thought about-well everything-and Lisa stands next to him as he goes through his first pass at Lisa’s guaranteed technique.
She might be a hell of a yoga instructor but after three failed attempts at the Lisa Braeden Perfect Omelet Flip, she gives up on Dean as a student.
“You’re hopeless,” she says, offering him a consolation prize, a kind smile, as she takes over duties. She knows well enough by now to overload Dean’s omelet with diced ham.
“No,” he says, suddenly, smiling for the first time in a long time. “I’m not.”
She stares at him steadily and easily performs the flip, not even glancing to see how it’s perfect in the pan. It is, of course.
“That’s just showing off,” he says.
“I know. Can you get Ben inside? And get him to wash his hands. I don’t want to know what he’s been doing, but I’d like to pretend he’s not been digging around the garden.”
*
It’s going to work.
He tells her about how he’s thinking about working construction, good honest work, hard but he knows he can get it done. “I’ve spent more time crawling around houses, I should have an idea of how to keep them from falling over my head at least.”
She laughs. They’ve been drinking spiked lemonade in the backyard. The summer day is hazy with humidity and her shorts stick to her thighs.
He runs his hand over her legs, admiring.
She laughs. “You were such a sucker for my legs. Remember when we first met?”
He pretends to consider it. “You might have made an impression.”
Lisa ends the slight distance between them, her lips sweet, tangy and tongue spiked with the whiskey. “I did, huh?”
When he laughs, he means it, and that’s a hell of a thing.
*
He hadn’t even had to aggressively hit on her when he’d seen her at the bar. She’d been the one to come up to him, eyes bright and she’d been laughing with a couple of girls, all them about aching to get into trouble.
At one point, he’s sure, he asked her what she did, and she told him she was a yoga instructor. So he’d made a joke about the downward facing dog.
“That’s a good one,” Lisa told him, and he’d taken the lie as good as the shots they’d been doing for the past hour. “Y’know, and this isn’t actually a joke, I know a guy who’s so flexible, he can…”
She had trailed off for effect, a pointed look at his crotch and well it didn’t take much convincing to get her to head out with him.
He found out she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her dress by the time they were both in the car.
“Disappointed?” She’d asked that somewhere between kisses, breath hot on his neck. “Wanted to add something to your panty collection?”
He’d responded not with words though he wanted to, but she’d been smiling so wickedly that he thought getting off just with his fingers might do her a damn bit of good.
“Lisa,” he said, when she’d finally started to come down, after she’d swatted his hand away, unwilling to ride through any more aftershocks, “You got any plans this weekend?”
*
They’re still in the backyard. Ben’s over at a sleepover, but Dean’s not stupid, and what will the neighbors think actually holds water now.
“You told all your friends about us, right?”
“Fishing for compliments?” She presses her face against his neck and she can feel his smile. “You were somewhat memorable.”
“Shame we were stupid.” He thinks of a different life, one not spent chasing monsters on the road, and it’s starting to feel alien to him, like this is a better place to be.
“No we weren’t.”
*
It was the perfect one night stand. Sure, it took over forty-eight hours and short of leaving the hotel room for necessary provisions (food mostly, he’d gotten the condoms and lube part covered), he’d basically spent hours of near-dating if non-stop fucking counts as dating (and it sure as fuck does).
He’ll never see her again and she hadn’t minded sending him off his way, once he’d dropped her off at her kind of sketchy neighborhood.
“You live here?”
“Rent’s cheap and I know a few bikers around here,” she told him, shrugging. “I’ll save my money for the future.”
“The future,” he’d said, dubiously. “You think about it?”
Another shrug. “Why not? I’m not gonna be a yoga teacher forever.”
“You should be.”
She’d kissed him for that. Then crawled in his lap. Eventually they parted ways.
“Bye, Dean.”
Hell of a girl. It wasn’t until a particularly adventurous threesome a few months down the line that he was ever able to stop comparing other girls to that one weekend with Lisa, who he’d now taken to calling Gumby Girl.
He’d never see her again, though, so it was unfair to compare what he couldn’t have with what was right in front of him.
*
Sam is alive.
She hugs him tight, one goodbye, among many. Her hair brushes against his cheek. He tries to memorize this. But it’s something else for him to lose, like so many things.
He tells her he’ll be back, whenever he can and she looks at him in just the right way to make them both pretend he’s telling the truth.
end