This is a disclaimer.
AN: Challenge prompt was "a female character, and a change of season".
Was a time when you let me know
The seasons don't really change in California, and that's a good reason for Jess Moore to hate it here. Whenever autumn rolls around, she starts thinking resentfully of the little town in the Midwest where she spent the first twelve years of her life, wishing she were back there to see the leaves change colour, the snow fall.
But life is so busy these days that she doesn't have much time to mope. College is still all scary and new and larger-than-life even after three years here. Sometimes she thinks she'll wake up one morning and find it's all been some crazy dream, that she's still sixteen and in high school and dreaming of being grown-up and independent. Mostly though, she wakes up in her own bed in her own apartment, cheerful and relaxed and snuggled up to one of the most gorgeous men she's ever met.
Sam's fascinating. He's a bundle of contradictions wrapped up in a mystery. He's got the sharpest tongue of anyone she's ever met but he never starts an argument, she knows perfectly well just how good a shape he's in but he's got this lazy couch-potato sprawl going on most of the time, he doesn't talk about his family but he loves hers, he's not a sociable person but he gets along like a house on fire with everyone and anyone, he's kind and polite and funny and smart and interested in the same things she is and doesn't think it's at all weird that she reads Dickens for fun and…
… OK, so she's a little bit obsessed with him. A little. But why that should be a bad thing…
Friday morning, and he's already left, not that she's surprised. He's got a lot on his plate, and Jess knows better than to try and divert him from it in any way. Sam doesn't do distractions. He's much more goal-orientated than she is: see it, want it, get it.
Right now, he wants those exams. And he wants them to be good.
So she putters around and drifts to class, has coffee with Becky and drifts back home again, feeling cheerful and aimless and a bit like Anne at the end of Green Gables: "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world". It's a nice feeling. Jess is determined to hang on to it for a bit.
Sam's home when she gets in, sitting at the kitchen table staring at a spread of books and papers, laptop charging on top of a precarious pile of criminal law books. But he's not studying, not really. The look on his face is distant and far-away, and he's got his cell phone in his left hand, long fingers wrapped around it.
"Hey," Jess says. "All OK?"
Sam jerks, looks up at her sharply, movement abrupt and tense. There are dark shadows under and in his eyes, and she thinks it actually takes him a minute to remember who she is, he was so far away just then. And there's something else there, something about the way he's sitting, the tilt of his head, the set of his shoulders, that's almost scary. Fierce, on edge. The look he had when she spoke…
Her mood plummets like a pebble dropped off the top of a church steeple, gathering force on the way till it could kill a man at the bottom.
"Yeah," Sam says then, forcing a smile. It's a perfect replica of his usual one, and that doesn't help her mood at all.
"Sure? You look a little…"
He laughs. "Nah, I'm just practicing my exam-angst."
"I didn't realize you knew what angst even was."
"I am a little out of practice," he agrees, leaning up to kiss her when she bends over him. "Anyway. We're outta coffee, so I'm gonna go get that before I start having withdrawal symptoms."
"Good idea," Jess agrees, watches him stand up, pocket his wallet, head for the door. There's a strange sharpness to him, a quickness, a tense sort of grace, that she's never seen before, like he's actually using that height of his, like he doesn't give a damn who takes notice of him, but as he reaches the doorway to the kitchen he pauses, and it seems to fall away as he turns back to her.
"Anything else you want?"
"Nah. Just the caffeine."
Sam smiles again. "OK then. Won't be long."
She watches from the kitchen window as he crosses the street, disappears from her sight. Not hunched exactly, just with the old air of feeling kinda awkward with how tall he is. Sam's not shy, he just doesn't like being noticed.
Jess gives herself a shake and turns away from the window. It's just stress. She should know better than to bother him right now. Hell, he practically moved out to give her space while she was doing her exams. She should do the same for him: just let him be for now.
Afterwards, maybe they should take a week and head inland someplace for a holiday, the mountains perhaps. A break would do them good after all this studying, she decides. Besides, it's October, and she wants to see the seasons changing.