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Some nights, when they’ve pulled over at one shitty hotel or another, en route from one tragedy to another, Sam wakes from his nightmares in the unfamiliar darkness reaching for her. He hates those nights. When he doesn’t actually extend his hand, if he doesn’t actually touch the other side of the mattress, he can pretend she’s lying there, that Dean’s snores are hers, that she really is just an arm’s reach away, warm and soft and so alive. He could shake her awake if he wants. He could reach over and feel her warm bare skin, could hear the little hum she made in the back of her throat as she woke, could tell her the horrible dream he’s been having. You’re on the ceiling, Jess. You’re dying. I know, I know, it’s just a dream, but I’m scared. I’m gonna call my dad and my brother. They deal with things like this.
And she would rub the sleep out of her eyes with a lazy smile that told him just how stupid he was being. Well, I always have wanted to meet your family.
As long as he doesn’t actually reach, he can pretend that he’s about to say the words he never did and that’s she’s going to hear them. On the nights where he lies in bed stiff as a corpse, he saves her life.
And then the sun rises and slices through the cheap hotel curtains until the figure on the other side of the bed is just a pile of pillows and sheets. And then Sam rises and they get back to work.
It’s lucky they live such a strange life, he and Dean. Lucky that they never bother with the common markers of everyday life. As Sam pumps rock salt into a spirit’s chest, he never thinks Jess should be here. She never belonged here. As long as he’s hunting, he can’t miss all the places she should be.
That’s the theory at least. But it turns out it’s not so much the places she should be that hurt. They’d known each other two years. They’d dated for a year and a half. There are blood stains in the Impala older than that. He has more grief than they had history. So he mourns their future instead, the future that they were supposed to get. Dean drives them through South Carolina, and Sam realizes that he never got to go on a road trip with her. They set fire to a haunted house, and Sam realizes he will never buy a home with her. They investigate a daycare plagued by a poltergeist, and Sam excuses himself to the bathroom where he washes his face with shaking hands and mourns a little girl with his eyes and her hair that they would have named Mary.
That’s the worst part about those nights when he can’t stop himself from reaching out to the other side. He is never surprised to find it empty. He had never gotten used to Jess.
His grief will last longer than her face. It’s been six months and already holding onto her memory is like holding on to sand. If he could just hear her voice, see her face, touch her skin, he’d remember her so perfectly that he could rebuild her from memory, but she’s slipping further and further and soon she’ll be like Mom, a shapeless blob of love and pain that haunts him worse than any ghost and is a hell of a lot harder to exorcise.
He holds on to what he can remember, the strange details that have branded themselves into him so strongly that he can’t imagine not knowing them. How she read six books at the same time, switching from one to the other when they started to get boring. How she would shave her legs in the kitchen, her lathered up leg propped up on a chair, so she could watch TV, and when Sam complained, she flicked shaving cream at his head. How when she opened the fridge, she’d do a little dance in front of the open door and then she’d sing to whatever food she was about to eat.
He worries that these will be all he remembers, that Jess will become nothing but a string of disconnected quirks, a caricature of his love. But he has nothing else. Dad has managed to cling to Mom’s memory for twenty years. Sam can hold on as long as Dad can.
And he knows why Dad does it. When Sam was little and the only Winchester who’d never known Mom, who couldn’t remember Mom, he didn’t understand his dad’s and his brother’s grief. He genuinely shared it—Sam didn’t need to know her to feel her lack in his life—but he couldn’t match it. On nights when Dad would get drunk enough to talk about the woman that they never stopped thinking about, Sam would sit silently and listen Dean and Dad trade stories. The birthday cake she tried to make, the records she used to play, the nursery rhyme she’d made up. “You remember that, don’t you, Sammy?” Dean would ask when he noticed how long Sam had been quiet. And Sam would nod and say that he sure did and leave out the part where he only remembered it because Dean and Dad had told him about it. On nights like that, Sam didn’t understand why they didn’t let the dead lie. If they could just let Mom go, they could all have a normal life. Of course Sam never said it to Dad, not even during their worst fights. Sam may be stupid sometimes, but he knew where the line was.
But Sam understands now. The memories always hurt. But sometimes they hurt worse than others, and sometimes they’re the only thing in the world worth having. And either way, it’s not like you can stop remembering them.
Like, Jess had three freckles around her right nipple. Of all the amazing things about her body, he remembers that more than anything else, those three small brown freckles that formed a perfect right triangle. He liked to press his fingers against them, not even as a sex thing—though, obviously, sometimes, and that was great too—but just because Sam couldn’t imagine anyone else in the world having that particular layout of freckles, and the most unbelievable thing Sam had ever dealt with was knowing that he could identify the intimate parts of her body with his eyes closed.
Identify them, at least, but he couldn’t name them. Not precisely. Sam had learned the language of sex from Dean who’d learned it from hunters who didn’t know he was listening or magazines he shoplifted along with dinner. And tit and cunt and pussy and twat, they worked well enough, and they got the point across, but they didn’t seem right for Jess. She wasn’t too pure or any bullshit like that, but the vocabulary was still lacking. There should be words you use for the parts of the people you love, for the moment where you started loving the body because it was their body and when you pressed yourself against them, you weren’t just thinking about this time but the time before and before and before and all the times that would follow until you couldn’t anymore and then you’d still try anyway because how could you know this body and not want to know it.
And on the other hand, Jess had no problem wrapping her hand around Sam and calling it his cock.
“Just call it my love grotto,” she said when he explained his problem. “No, wait, my fertile crescent!”
“Never mind,” Sam said.
She held up her hand. “No, no! My pleasure palace! My kitty door! My unpopulated baby canal!”
Sam covered his face with both hands as she laughed. “I get it, I’ll go back to saying pussy.”
“My thunder dome! My love sheathe! My O’Keefe! Ooh, I like that, my art history teacher will be so proud.” She was suggesting more even as Sam made his mouth acquainted with pussy again.
She was almost aggressively against sentiment. One time Sam made the mistake of calling sex making love and she laughed until she fell out of bed. (Sam might have pushed her a bit.) Then she scrambled to the desk and grabbed their small fan. “Ooh, lovah,” she said in some sort of fake English accent as she used the fan as her own personal wind machine. “Wrap me in your big strong man arms and teach me how to feel.”
Laughing almost too hard to see, Sam wrestled the fan out of her hands as she alternating between giggling and moaning, “I’ve been so lonely for so long. Oh, lovah, my darling and beautiful love, won’t you unfreeze my heart.”
“I was just,” Sam said in between pressing kisses against each of her ribs, “trying to be romantic.”
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him down so she could laugh into his mouth. “You need practice,” she said. “Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots—”
Sam kissed her again and held her fast. Jess giggled her way through sex that night. (“Through lovemaking, Sam. I giggled my way through lovemaking.”)
After that, lover became a running joke between them, usually paired with what Jess and Sam considered fancy language and an accent that existed on Earth but sounded like Southern or English if you’d never heard either before.
“Are we out of milk, lover?” Jess would say as Sam made coffee.
“Almost, lover,” Sam would reply as he poured her a cup. “Shall I fetch some more for thee?”
“Mayhaps, my prince. But alas and alack! I fear we are out of gas in our chariot.”
“Forsooth, a tragedy,” Sam said, and they would keep it up until someone laughed or until they started making out. They sounded like idiots. They knew they sounded like idiots. They did it in front of friends and their friends told them, in great detail, how much they sounded like idiots which had the side effect of making them do it all the time because Sam and Jess were both horrible assholes when they felt like it. Last year, at the only New Year’s Eve party they had ever attended together, Sam and Jess had an entire conversation that was just lover repeated back and forth in different inflections. At some point, they looked around and realized that all their friends had left them. “Oh my God,” Jess had said. “We’ve become that couple.”
“What couple?” Sam asked.
“The obnoxiously cute one.” Jess grinned at him. “Lover.”
“Lover,” Sam replied.
They started making out a bit after that. As the room counted down around them, with five seconds to spare, she broke the kiss and pressed her forehead against his. “Happy New Year,” she whispered before she crinkled her nose and added “my lover boy,” and Sam held her head with both his hands and pressed his lips against hers as the crowd roared.
This year, Sam and Dean sit on their own beds in their cheap hotel room and pass back and forth a bottle of wine they’d bought at 7-11. Sam takes another swig. “Did you remember that year where Dad got drunk and told us Dick Clark was an evil spirit who stole youth to extend his life?”
Dean chuckles and reaches for the bottle. “Yeah, man. You believed him for three years.”
Sam shrugs as he passes the wine. “Seemed plausible. Dad never did tell us if he was joking.”
With the bottle halfway to his lips, Dean pauses. “Huh.” He drinks and squints at the TV. They watch in silence for a while. Sam doesn’t think about last year. “He’s probably not,” Dean says at last.
“We’re not killing Dick Clarke, Dean.”
“We probably won’t.”
Sam thinks about throwing a pillow at him. But then Dean would throw one back and then they’d end up wrestling on the floor until they’d both done enough damage to each other to pretend they had unquestioningly won. Sam reaches out for the wine instead. It tastes like grape juice mixed with rubbing alcohol, but it makes him feel pleasantly dumb. “You would have liked Jess,” he says as confetti rains down in New York City. “She was a horrible person too.”
Dick Clarke does look a little shifty. Maybe Sam wasn’t that far off when he was younger.
“Yeah?” Dean asks. It’s not till Sam hears the caution in Dean’s voice, like a foot pressing against the ice to see how thick it is, that Sam realizes what he said.
They’re used to each other’s silences. They spend most of their time trapped in the same car a foot from each other. When you spend that much time together, you learn how to sit and wait until someone’s got something to say. Sam sits and waits and drinks.
“Yeah,” Sam says at last. “You two could have gotten together and talked about how much you hate feelings.”
Dean snorts. “Don’t know how she could put up with you then.”
“I don’t know how I put up with you,” Jess said, her hand on her hip, her hair pulled up into the lazy sort of bun that Sam loved because with one little tug it would all come tumbling down, golden hair around her tan shoulders or fanned out across her pillow or coming down like a curtain around her face as she leaned over Sam, closer and closer; Jess said, wearing Sam’s old shirt that was so big on her she could belt it and wear it as a dress, which she did sometimes and went out like that, Sam walking behind her, making eye contact with anyone who glance their way like, yeah, she’s with me, she chose me, no, I don’t know why either; Jess said, as she tried to cajole Sam into putting on a stupid Halloween costume, to be a sexy doctor to her sexy nurse for one stupid night of stupid fun that Sam was too good for.
“It must be these dashing good looks,” Sam mutters, and there must be something in his voice (maybe that they’re Jess’s words, usually said as she cupped his cheek) because Dean glances over. Sam stares ahead and keeps Dean in the corner of his eyes. He doesn’t know what he’ll find on Dean’s face, and he doesn’t want to see it.
“Hey, Sam—”
“So we’re heading to Maryland tomorrow?” Sam asks, and Sam knows, and Sam helped plan the route. He doesn’t look at Dean. He can feel Dean looking at him.
“Yeah,” Dean says at last. “Should make it to Springfield by three, if the holiday traffic’s not insane.”
“Ten, nine,” the east coast chants.
Jess liked to kiss with her eyes open. “And miss this view?” she had teased when he asked, and then she’d kissed his nose. “Maybe I just like seeing you,” she said and grimaced at herself like even that was admitting too much.
“Eight, seven.”
Once, when they’d first started dating and Sam was still terrified of her, she’d been sitting on the edge of his bed in his dorm room when she’s accidentally burped so loud someone out in the hallway shouted at them. “Well,” she said, trying to look dignified. “You still wanna make out?”
They’d still made out.
“Six, five.”
He keeps a shirt of hers wrapped in a plastic bag in the backseat of the Impala. Dean had waited in the car as Sam rushed from one mutual friend to another, trying to find something of hers. They didn’t even know that she’d died yet. When Melinda, baffled and scared, handed over the blue button down Jess had lent her last week, Sam had her drop it straight into the bag. After all, Sam had come straight from the fire. He didn’t want the shirt to smell like ash.
“Four, three.”
On nights when he wakes reaching for her, Sam sneaks out to the Impala, pulls out the shirt, and buries his face into it. Sometimes he stays out there until morning, when Dean finds him curled up out there and pretends he didn’t.
“Two.”
The shirt doesn’t smell like her anymore. It smells like gunpowder and salt and sweat and leather and plastic. But he still goes out there and he still holds it, except now it does nothing and Sam doesn’t know what to do, except sometimes he looks at that bag and thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he just put it over his head and breathed deeply.
“One!”
She sat in front of Sam in Spanish 101 and Sam didn’t learn anything from that class besides hola and the curve of her back. “Ouch,” was the first thing she ever said to him, that coupled a little grimace as she passed back his test. Sam’s pretty sure he failed, but he can’t be sure. All he remembers is her thumb bumping his as he grabbed the paper, and the apologetic little smile she gave him. “Better luck next time, Sam,” she said. He couldn’t get over how right his name sounded in her mouth.
“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t know your name.”
Months later, the night that they first had sex, when they laid on the bed afterwards and remembered the day they first talked, Jess punched his arm and laughed. “You were so not smooth. You were the opposite of smooth. You were—”
“Rough?” Sam said with a grin.
She snorted as she snuggled closer to him. “You wish. You’re just lucky I’m into awkward geeks.”
“So what you’re saying,” Sam said, working his hand into hers, “is that you loved me from our first conversation.”
“Mmm.” She kissed the back of his hand and nipped at his knuckled. “When I heard you stammering like an idiot, I knew it was meant to be.”
But in class that day, she didn’t say that, of course, she didn’t say any of that. She just dropped her eyes and smiled at the floor, before she tucked her hair behind her ear. “Jessica,” she said. “Call me Jess.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Jess,” Sam whispers as of New York City embraces each other. He doesn’t think Dean heard him. He doesn’t think Dean would say anything if he did.
That night, when he wakes from the nightmare, that same goddamn nightmare that he will have until the day he dies, Sam keeps his hands tucked against him. The nightmare doesn’t matter. It was just a nightmare. Sam can hear her breathing. Jess is just an arm’s reach away. He could reach over and shake her if he wanted, but why would he want to wake her? All that matters is that she’s there. She’s right there. And in the morning, he’ll tell her all about what a strange dream he had, and maybe they should do something about it. He’s going to save her.
Just this once, he’s going to save her.
She’ll be dead again by morning.