Disclaimer: I own nothing but my inspiration.
AN: I'm pretending that after Sam and Jason were really over, Sam stuck around Port Charles but didn't do a whole lot. There was never Lucky/Sam or any of that. Thanks to Dani and Ash for their help with this.
This has been, by far, the hardest thing for me to write.
Sam sits on the edge of her chair with her right arm propped on the arm rest. She fiddles with the ring on her right hand – the one that used to be on her left but isn't anymore.
She stares out the window and takes a deep breath.
"We were good, once. Me and Jason; we were better than good. Once."
Startled, the woman opposite her looks up from her notebook, but remains quiet.
Sam says it aloud but she's not speaking to the other woman in the room. The words on her lips make them real. They reassure her she didn't dream it all up. Yet, that reassurance is not the band-aid she wants it to be.
She reminds herself that they weren't just good. Once upon a time they were madly in love. They were. They were each other's whole world. He was her everything, she reminds herself. Whatever is now, she knows what they were. She wonders what hurts worse – wishing they had never been, or wishing that they still were.
She fingers the ring again.
Before speaking again, she quiets for a while. Lost in her thoughts, she tries to process things buried from what feels like another lifetime ago.
"Her birthday was last month."
But there wasn't a party; a baby can't turn three if it never takes its first breath.
Sam wakes up to the sound of rain on the rooftop. Outside her door she finds a single white rose. She doesn't have to look at the card. She just throws it away.
She drives to the graveyard, but she can't get out of the car. The weight on her chest is too much to carry. She goes home instead and drinks red wine until she throws up. Her throat burns and she relishes the pain. Anything to remind her she is still alive even though she is dead.
The next week she packs up what little she has left. This is far from the life she had planned, she reminds herself. What she doesn't remind herself is that it is even farther from the life she had wanted.
The life she had wanted was with Jason and the baby girl they laid to rest that cold November day.
She tells herself it's better this way. She never would have been enough, anyway.
She fiddles with the ring on her right hand – the one that used to be on her left but isn't anymore.
As she stares out the window, the waves are crashing on the California coast, but Sam's mind and heart are thousands of miles away - on a cold pier bench with the man she longs to forget and hopes she never will.
fin.