"CARLY!!!"
Sam sat up fast and experienced instant disorientation. Her head pounded, her vision was blurred and everything was dark. She threw her arms around her knees and hugged them to her chin, feeling emotions batter the insides of her chest, her heart beating hard, her breathing ragged and short. She felt dizzy. She felt sick. She felt cold.
She shivered in the dark. She realized that her legs were bare and she felt naked. Looking down at herself, Sam realized that she was still wearing her bikini. It was pink with white polka-hearts. Okay, so it was Carly's bikini, but Sam was currently the occupier. And, as she regained composure, steadied her breathing and had a look around, she found herself on the roof of the Bushwell Towers. And, she discovered that everything was dark because she was wearing sunshades.
She removed the sunshades. Nope. That was only part of it. The sun had gone down, sucking the light with it, on the western horizon. Without the big ball of sky fire, the air had grown colder. Sam shivered again and felt like a meatless cheeseburger...all wrong.
Mmmm...cheeseburger... Sam decided she was hungry.
As she made her way back down to Carly's apartment, she tried to remember the dream. Yeah, just a dream. She wasn't the brightest light on the Christmas tree, but she had her moments. Although, it felt more like a nightmare. Imagine. Life without Carly. As if Sam would ever abandon the love of her life. As if Carly would ever leave her.
Sam paused at the door to the Shay household and glanced down at the tattoo emblazoned on her left breast. It was still there. Bright and new. The bruising had faded away and the soreness was gone. She caressed her cupcake and smiled warm thoughts.
They had gone to the beach two days after Sam had gotten the tattoo. She had worn a more modest one piece bathing suit under skater shorts. There was no way she was gonna have Fredweiner ogling her perfect body. That was exclusively the right of Carly. But she made sure that the swimsuit was low enough in the front to expose her tattoo for public display. Carly had said that she didn't have to show it to people, but Sam was proud of it. If there was any doubt left, Sam was kicking its butt and chasing it away.
Sure, they had gotten some odd looks from people who recognized them either from school or iCarly. People who knew instantly that the Carly on the tattoo was the Carly on Sam's arm. There were a couple of incidents when some girls made trouble for themselves by making moves of Carly while Sam was occupied with eating. Not that Sam was jealous. Nope. Never. Carly was her cupcake. But, Carly had gotten upset when they made an issue of Sam having been marked as Carly's, yet Carly bore no markings of ownership. They concluded that Carly must be keeping herself available for something better.
Sam had seen the hurt in Carly's face. She knew the brunette beauty would have loved nothing better than to get her own tattoo. Spencer would not have loved it quite as much. He was already a bit iffy with their closer than close relationship. That might have tipped him toward becoming more parental and slapping them with even more rules. Ugh. Rules. Why do adults have so many rules?
They had left the beach and went home. Carly wasn't much in the mood to swim or hang out. She was taking it way too much to heart that her heart was unmarked. No matter how much Sam had tried to convince her cupcake that she had no need to mark her body in order for Sam to know Carly's heart belong to no one but Sam, Carly still dwelled on what had been said. All the way to the car, on the trip home, and for the week after, Carly was preoccupied with a belief that she needed to do something to demonstrate that she belonged to Sam. As if she had to prove something to those future fishwives.
Sam grinned when she recalled excusing herself when they had reached the car to go pee before the trip home. She never told Carly that she had gone back and kicked their butts. All five of them. The look of pride on Carly's face when she got back to the car, though, told Sam that she would never have to tell Carly anything. Her cupcake just knew. Carly was the bright star on the top of the Christmas tree.
Nobody messed with Sam's cupcake.
She opened the door and entered the apartment. It was empty down here. Sam recalled Carly having an errand to run and left Sam to go back to snoozing in what passed for sunlight in Seattle. Whatever it was must have taken quite a while since she never came back to wake her up.
Sam decided to go up to the bedroom and get changed into something less revealing before the nub caught sight of her and stroked out.
The bedroom was empty and Sam was beginning to have this need to see Carly. That nightmare really threw her for more of a loop than she realized. She felt an emptiness, like a part of her had been hacked away.
The bathroom door opened and Carly wandered out, looking like blazing sun when it suddenly appears from behind a gray cloud. Sam's face immediately reflected the light with a big grin. "Hey, Cupcake! Hungry?" Hungry?
Carly stopped with a shocked look on her face. She relaxed once her brain recognized her Sam was standing in her bedroom in the cutest two piece pink bikini and smiled back at her. "Oh! Hi, Sam. I was just going up to wake you. I only got back a few minutes ago. Had to...um...change first," she trailed off.
Sam curled her eyebrows, but decided to ignore it. She met Carly halfway across the floor and seized her in the tightest hug she could manage without breaking the brunette in half or crushing any necessary organs. "Never leave you. Ever," Sam whispered in complete sincerity.
"Um...o-kayyy," Carly chuckled as she returned the hug magnitudes less forceful. "Where did that come from?" She felt Sam pattern her neck with kisses, warm lips pressing against her pulse points. A moan escaped her mouth. "Ahhh...tell me later..."
They had almost made it from the middle of the bedroom floor to the bed. Sam, being a rather impatient girl, could restrain herself for only a handful of steps. Well, three and a half, to be exact. Then, she had decided to make base camp here on the carpet and try for the bed in the morning, pulling a willing Carly to the floor and proceeding to cover her body in tiny bites and kisses, frustrated by the shield of clothing protecting Carly's body.
"Do you mind?" Sam shouted at Carly's long pants, as she struggled with the zipper and began working them off of Carly's long slender legs.
Carly laughed playfully, "I thought you were hungry?"
Sam glanced up at Carly's flushed face, grinning and waggling her eyebrows. "I am..."
"Ohh..." Carly's eyes went wide and her expression turned to one of nervous anticipation when she realized just what the blond demon goddess was intending to perform. "Sam..." her voice barely a whisper, but so full of need.
The pants put up a good fight, but in the end, Sam's determination won the day and they went flying somewhere across the floor. There was only one barrier between her and her prize. It was flimsy, and pink and lacy. How can anything that looked like that stand up to the tigress? She narrowed her eyes at the obstruction, as if her very gaze, the Puckett Stare, would intimidate those intimates right off Carly's body, never to return. Sam moved in for the kill.
Sam was on her knees between Carly's parted legs, focusing her attention on the fragile panties covering the womanhood of the beauty laying beneath her on the floor. Her fingers dug into the waist of the panties and prepared to remove them with great speed. But, the flash of something caught the ever watchful paranoid at the back of her mind. The one that unconsciously saw everything going on around her and picked the worst times to make an observation.
She abandoned the panties and crawled forward so that she was now leaning above and over Carly, propped on her outstretched arms and staring at her face to face, a suspicious look painting Sam's features as she eyed her girlfriend. Sam may not be the brightest light, but she was as sharp as the point of a kabob when it came to seeing something out of place. Like a certain brunette who was favoring her left shoulder.
"Explain," Sam said slowly, coolly, evenly.
Carly just lightly shook her head, as if she had no idea what was being asked, and tried to give Sam a weak smile, but it came off with more guilt than anything else. After a half moment under Sam's intense scrutiny, Carly caved. She was no good at this secret thing, anyway. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came to mind to say.
Carly reached up to her collar and gave a firm tug to expose her left breast and the bandage that was there. She saw Sam's eyes slowly scan down to the gauze and then back up to Carly's eyes. When their eyes locked again, she searched Sam for the disapproval she had hoped would not be there. What she saw confused her.
Sam looked back down at the gauze. She gently lifted it at the corner with her right fingers and pulled it carefully away to look at what was underneath. It was beginning to bruise and would look ugly and sore tomorrow. Sam just stared at it. The emptiness ebbed. A warmth seemed to take its place.
Carly had been doodling ever since that day at the beach. Probably before then. She never showed it to Sam, telling her that she would show it when it was perfect and the time was right. As Sam looked at it, she realized just how perfect it was. Sam simple. Sam basic.
A cooked ham. Below it: "Sam's Meat".
Her eyes found Carly's again. She slowly shook her head and grinned. She put the bandage back into place. She gave her a tender kiss on Carly's lips. She edged her way back down Carly's body to get back to what she had been doing before the interruption. Those panties have been given enough of a respite. Time to evict them.
After all, that ham reminded Sam that she was still hungry. And withing moments, the only thing that was heard in Carly's bedroom was a single cry...
"SAM!"