Jess had been staring out the window, silent, for two hours. After tracing her profile six, seven, eight times against the evening sky, Sam had stopped looking. Inside, if he was honest with himself, he knew that she would never again look as beautiful as when she had with the low sun caught in her curls, its warmth pushing her toward him. Now the sun was close to setting, red against the toothy hills of the desert.
He could no more draw out that one moment than he could prevent the soft decline of their relationship. Sam couldn't pinpoint the moment that Jess knew it was going to end, but he remembered exactly when he did. It was the day he dropped out of Stanford.
Hell, it might as well have been the day he arrived on campus.
Jessica was from a different world entirely. Her parents were those country-club types, the kinds who owned pastel golf wear and kept a wine cellar. They drove down from their Bayview townhome one weekend a month to shower Jess with decor items for her dorm room, and provide her with a new case of Napa Valley chardonnay or pinot gris. To favor Sam with polite words and stilted smiles that said they were certain he was just another mode of rebellion for their daughter.
Between the two of them, the wine was gone within a week after each visit. Sam always held his liquor well, but Jess would get hammered every night. Ask Sam to fuck her. She refused to call it anything other than "fucking." It made Sam uncomfortable, before the pleasant forgetfulness of the buzz took over. But she was beautiful-so goddamn beautiful-and when Sam said he loved her, she said it back. When the wine dried up, both were uncomfortable for a while, hanging on the hope of the next binge.
He lost interest in engineering long before he would ever lose interest in Jess, though the death of one meant the death of the other, by and by. That dying would be easy.
On the day that he quit, Sam was less afraid of disappointing Jess than he was about giving any retroactive satisfaction to his father.
To say his dad, John, was working class was perhaps to make an understatement of the situation. John Winchester was a small man pinned to small ideals. He hadn't always been that way, but it was getting harder and harder for Sam to remember anything else. From the charred shell of the two-story home where his wife-Sam's mother-died burning along with the faulty space heater that caused the fire, John took his only son to a tiny one-bedroom apartment...and just kept downsizing.
His health faded, dropping onto the convex glass at the bottom of whiskey bottles. He left the apartment on long deer-hunting trips, sometimes leaving everything but his gun in the coat closet. Sam was half-afraid and half-hopeful he'd freeze to death.
John's concern for his son faded, at least until Sam had announced his intention to study engineering at Stanford on scholarship. Then his dad had badgered him, knocked hard at the edifice of what Sam would only come to find out later was an entirely misplaced dream, until Sam packed a bag and drove the beat-up Ford Explorer he'd bought in high school from Lawrence, Kansas to Elko, Nevada. That's where the car finally gave up the ghost. He took a bus the rest of the way into Stanford and snagged a job as a line cook until the semester started.
Just before Thanksgiving that year, he'd met Jess.
Now she sat untouched and unapproachable in the passenger seat of her own Audi RS 5, riding away from a melting sunset toward Reno. Hoping, perhaps as Sam did, to recover what he feared was already sunk like a water-filled buoy off the north shore of Lake Tahoe.
"Are you hungry?"
Jess looked over at him like he was speaking Ancient Etruscan. He felt pathetic for craving that look, anyway.
"It's dark already," Sam said. "I could use something to eat. I say we hole up in Reno for the night and make the trip down tomorrow."
There it was at last. A smile, like a weary blessing. Sam wondered offhand if he got a couple of beers in her whether she'd beg him to take her again, like old times. He was disgusted with himself for thinking it.
"Sure," Jess said. "No matter what, I want one of those drinks tomorrow. The ones with the weird names. Wet Willy." Her laugh was like raindrops.
"Wet Woody," Sam said, cracking a grin.
"That's not any better," said Jess.
In the on-off flicker of the streetlights above I-80 within the city limits showed Jess looking over at him, under the fringe of her lashes like she had at the idiotic fraternity White Party where they'd met. To Sam's credit, and hers, they'd left the blacklit dance floor and spent most of the night talking on a ratty couch on the front porch. The brother in charge of the cheap stereo system had played Steve Miller Band's The Joker seven times. Neither of them had noticed.
Jess just kept looking at him through those long, long lashes-blonde at the tips and almost dancing in the rotating colored lights from the doorway-and at that moment nothing mattered. Here under the stuttering lights on Interstate 80, just past the Reno city limit, it was as if no time had passed at all. He couldn't keep from staring at her.
"Sam-"
The last thing she said was his name.
Her eyes went wide, washed out in the streetlight-no, it wasn't a streetlight. A headlight.
Then the whole world was crumpled and tossed like paper. Jess didn't make a sound beside him, but the curtain airbag deployed just a second sooner than the glove box. The dual impacts turned Jess's chin away from him for the final time. Then Sam felt his nose break as his own airbag fled toward him like a fist. It rasped against his face, burning his lips raw, and sank from view. He heard rather than felt both of his tibias snap.
The whole world was a field of burning stars.
Then nothing, only for a second or two. The smell of rubber laid out, fluids and sheared metal woke him. Jess was slumped in her seat beside him. The dash was a foot nearer to her chest, which was powdered in a corona of white dust. There were stars in her hair, bits of the annihilated windshield.
It took Sam only a moment, even through the red haze crawling up and over his eyes from his shattered face, to realize that Jess's side had taken most of the impact. The Audi lay skewed, accordioned like a blossom of metal facing the opposite shoulder. Jess wouldn't be able to open her door.
Sam shouldered his own door open, and it thumped to the concrete, attached by a single hinge. On the blacktop, his legs swung and wobbled, useless. The pain had not set in yet. He looked into the sudden silence and blackness of the desert night.
Over the gentle grade of the highway, by the guardrail, a dark-haired woman raised her head. After the axle had snapped, her side of the car had dug a deep groove in the pavement and the scar bristled with the afterburn of sparks. The woman opened her eyes, and Sam knew she saw him. Her long, dark hair was teased into an electric cloud around her heart-shaped face.
Sam saw a tremor pass from shoulder to finger as she made to raise her useless hand. Then a stream of blood burst from her nose and leapt off the lapels of her suit jacket to litter the concrete. The drops were the brightest ruby red Sam had ever seen.
A hot wind rolling over the dunes pushed him forward, and Sam saw his own wild-haired shadow on the blacktop. When he looked back toward the car, both it and Jess were in flames.
Sam opened his mouth to scream. The heat pushed the noise back down his throat and closed that throat with a fierce hand. He had ten seconds to watch Jess's motionless form blacken as the halo enclosed her. Then his world went black as well.
A white mountain rose in his view. Sam's entire field of vision was crisscrossed with light, cold and warm beams woven through each other.
The fluorescent panel above was sliced by the rings of a privacy curtain. Slats of late-afternoon sun fanned out across the bedcovers.
The mountain was his nose, bulked by bandages and taped down below his eyes so he could feel every blink. The scraping sea-noise was his breath. Both legs from the knee down were encased in heavy plaster, and the toes that emerged above the padded terminus of each cast had a purplish hue.
It hurt to breathe, and the pain rose sharp in his throat and fell into a spiky tightness around his chest, as though his lungs were filling bit by bit with sparks. Sam saw them spill out above his head with each exhale. He tried to form his lips around Jess's name, but the corner of his mouth split and trickled blood into the day's growth of beard on his chin.
Something over his left shoulder began to click and beep. Salt-heavy, dehydrated tears stung as they fell.
The brusque nurse had asked whether there was anyone she could call. She had a dry-erase slate and marker in her hand. Sam shook his head, waving the slate away. No words necessary for that. Jess was...Jess was gone. And he'd re-break each of his legs in turn rather than have anyone call John Winchester.
The nurse had just nodded and turned away. No follow-up questions, no concerned hands on the forehead. It wasn't like in the movies, and for that Sam was glad. The hospital was a machine, and not one especially disposed to lavish attention on a torn-up stranger with no ID and no insurance.
It was just as well. In the week or so after he regained consciousness, Sam had already cultivated an appreciation for the cool functionality of his surroundings.
He was not really one given to sentiment-not after nearly twenty years of "nut up or shut up" from his father-so the raw grief over Jess blindsided him. During those first days he would weep for solid minutes before even realizing he was crying. He would fill the gauze plugs in his nostrils with bloody snot until it leaked onto his lip. The foul fluid ran down his throat, too. The taste was awful, salt and iron, but swallowing was agony for a throat scrubbed raw by fire, so every two minutes he had to decide between holding the coppery slickness in his mouth a little longer or giving in to torment.
But any of it was better than having his cool, white cocoon of a room invaded. None of the nurses who changed the gauze or the bedpan, brushed powder through his hair or sponged the rank sweat from his skin offered pitying looks or sympathetic words. Still, their organic presence still felt disruptive. Alone amid the whirr of machines, the click and beep, Sam could imagine a symbiosis with the breathing mass of metal, plastic, and glass. If he lay very still, he could feel the tubes that fed him fluids extending tentative roots into his veins and, finding no resistance, wrapping them and filling them. The casts that wrapped his legs hid from sight the minuscule incursion of the titanium pins and screws into his bones, the quiet filling of spaces.
Listening to dirt-daubers kamikaze against the window next to him-the catastrophic crush of exoskeletons reduced to soft, sighing pops-he could picture himself sinking into the mattress, becoming dim and unnoticed. Gone like breath when the sheets were stripped away and ready to embrace the next broken body feeding its blood and tears to the bed.
When he was able to speak again, Sam cried anew for the death of that dream.