Notes: ffn doesn't have tags sooo ... in my head they all graduated before igoodbye, so they're 19 at this point. i have not seen the rest of sam and cat and i do not want to. two weeks after killer tuna jump is my best guess. implied but not shown nsfw.

title is from boardwalk angel by john cafferty and i highly recommend listening at some point in ur life.

When Sam had said they should have some fun after dinner, this wasn't exactly what she had meant. It's not exactly new for them- fun going a different direction, ending with someone getting stuck in Canada, or on a Japanese roadside, or on a boat, throwing their phones at fishermen.

This part is new- waking up in her ex-boyfriend's hotel room at 3:00 AM, his arms wrapped around her and his even breaths hitting the back of her neck. She almost starts laughing right there- if only her from six hours, six days, six months, six years ago could see her now! Cuddling with Fredward Benson after a night on Venice Beach- Sam of the past would hit a person with a butter sock if they told her about any of this.

Sam of the past didn't start this night thinking she would end up in bed with her ex, or kissing him- she didn't even think they would make it through dinner. One of them should have said something wrong and ruined the night halfway through Sam's second helping of entrees, third at the latest- but it was peaceful until her fourth, when Freddie asked that dreaded question.

"When you called me, the day Carly left…"

"Yeah?"

"And I asked if you wanted to get back together…"

Sam nearly chokes on her burger, covering her mouth with her hand and spitting it onto her plate. Freddie winces at her bad table manners, and she ignores him as her voice lowers into icy calm. "What about it?"

"I think I need to be honest with you about that day. And tell you that Carly kissed me." His eyes glance off her nervously, but she sits quietly for a minute, processing. Carly knew better than Cat what Freddie means to Sam. Carly knew that Sam, despite her bravado and her teasing and the wedgies she gave him, never got over Freddie. Carly knew how hard the breakup hit her.

And yet. "Huh," Sam says after a minute, fiddling with a fork. "Why?"

"Why did she kiss me?"

"Yeah."

"Honestly? I don't know," Freddie says, looking back at her. "I was cleaning up some stuff in the studio and she just… leaned over and kissed me." She tenses, and he hastily adds, "It was just a goodbye kiss between friends. That's all it was for me." His tone turns reassuring, his hand reaching across the table, and for some reason, Sam lets him take hold of hers. "That's probably all it was for Carly, too."

"Huh," Sam says again, taking a bite from her burger. "Weird that she didn't kiss me as a friend. I've known her longer," she says with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.

Freddie laughs, and the mood is restored, the nights not ruined, he's letting go of her hand and going back to his fries. "Probably a good thing. Would be pretty awkward if all three of us had kissed at some point."

Freddie's nose brushes her neck as he shifts slightly. That's something that never changed- his nose still feels like an ice cube against her skin, even as his hands are warm on her stomach and his chest feels like she's cuddling a space heater. When she had asked him about it in the past, he had said it was poor circulation. "Really?" she had said teasingly. "Did Crazy tell you that?" and he had smiled and pressed his nose into where her neck turned into her shoulder and said "She is a nurse, Sam. She knows some stuff."

His nose presses there now, his face dipping down as he kisses her shoulder. "You awake?" he whispers, his voice softened by sleep.

"Yeah," Sam mumbles back. "Your cold nose woke me up." She can feel him smile against her, and she moves slightly, rolling over to face him. "Happy 3 am, Frednub."

He laughs slightly. "You're losing your touch, Sam, that's the second time you've called me that in the last 12 hours."

She stifles a yawn. "Forgive me for not being able to come up with a new nickname at butt o'clock in the morning." He smiles again, moves away from her, and stretches, sitting up to look around the hotel room before scooping his shirt off the floor where he tossed it earlier and heading to the bathroom. She sits up too, holding the covers up to her chest as she spots her own shirt by the end of the bed. She scrambles to grab it, pull it over her head, and figure out where the rest of her clothes are before Freddie comes back. She pulls up her jeans and starts hunting for her socks and shoes. She's not staying- why would she?

"That thing is a death trap. Do you know it's a deathtrap?" He says, his hands shaking as he tries to take off the helmet. "I can't believe you drive this thing around."

"Oh, relax, Fredwad," Sam replies. She swats his hands away and undoes the clip on his helmet. She brushes against his skin as she pulls the helmet off, the race of his pulse thumping against her fingertips, and it's strangely intimate, something she wouldn't do with a friend, definitely not with her ex. She pulls away hastily, looping his helmet next to hers on the helmet hook and locking it. "You sound like your mother." He looks stricken, and Sam can't help but laugh.

This feels normal. Teasing him, making fun of his mom, the casual, meaningless arguing between the two of them. It's easy. It's simple.

It's something she hasn't had in a long time.

"You're leaving?" Freddie says suddenly, startlingly, as she struggles to pull on her boots.

"I, uh…" she pauses, grasping for a good reason. "Cat'll be worried, you know. It's late, I don't want to keep her up like this…." He raises an eyebrow; he could always see right through her bullshit. "I mean, come on, Freddie, this isn't right. It doesn't make sense for us to do this, not when we haven't been together in two years."

"Why does it have to make sense?" he challenges. "When was the last time you did anything that made sense?"

"When was the last time you did anything that didn't?"

They stare at each other for a moment, and seconds later, she's standing up, he's leaning in, and she's reaching for the hem of her shirt. "I can't believe you're making me take this all off again."

"I don't know how," Freddie says angrily, "but this is rigged." He raises the mallet again and swings with all his might. The puck rises steadily to just past 70- and comes straight back down.

Sam can't help but laugh- she's held it back the first two times he tried, but this is just comical. "Alright, hand it over, Benson." He gives her the mallet, and she rolls her wrists, warming up.

The carny running the stand, a greasy balding man, scoffs. "You think you can hit it, girlie?"

She smiles, takes a few practice swings. "Just watch Momma win." She lines up and swings as hard as she can towards the middle of the pad. The puck flies up, past 10, past 50, past 70- the bell rings, and she smiles smugly at the carny as Freddie cheers.

Later, as they wander the pier, Freddie with the purple elephant Sam won and Sam with a pretzel Freddie bought her in thanks, Freddie reaches for her and intertwines their fingers. It's absentminded, the way he's touching her without looking at her, and it's instinctual, the way she squeezes his hand as she pulls him towards a rollercoaster.

"I go back to Seattle in a few hours," Freddie says, looking over to Sam. "I don't want you to leave without saying goodbye."

She stares at the ceiling. "I would have said goodbye… I think."

"You think?"

"I don't-" she starts to sit up, ready to yell at him, the way she did when they were in middle school. But she stops herself, takes a breath, flops back down beside him. She's 19, far too old to get mad at everything Freddie says to her, especially when half the time she still gets butterflies in her stomach when he looks at her. "It's just… it's easier not to. No one ever said it to me. That way there were no tears or anything."

It's quiet for a moment until he says, so quiet she can barely hear, "Is that why you didn't tell me you were leaving Seattle?"

"I guess."

"You didn't tell Spencer either."

"Yeah…"

Quiet again. She can tell Freddie's trying to keep himself from starting a fight, picking his words carefully. "You didn't return any of my texts, or calls, or emails… I ended up going to your house. Your mom had to tell me where you were."

She looks at him- at some point, he had turned his gaze back to the ceiling. "You went to my house?" He nods. "You hate my house. You said it smelled like possums."

"I was worried about you." He looks back to her, their eyes meeting. "Sam… I lost both my best friends that day. And I missed you."

That breaks her heart, just a little bit. She hadn't thought of it like that- when she left, she had just been thinking about her, about Carly, about how there was nothing left in Seattle, it wasn't like she was going to college-

She hadn't thought that Freddie would miss her. Not the way he missed Carly.

Sam laughs as Freddie yelps and races back up onto the sand, his jeans rolled up to near his knees and his shoes sitting next to on the sand beneath the pier. The sun hangs just above the horizon, and the light is red and gold and blue. "I'm never doing that again."

"Not my fault you came to the beach at night in March and thought it would be warm," she teases. He plops down next to her on a cheap towel she bought at a souvenir stand, and she leans into him, just slightly. The way she used to do when they dated, when it was easy for them to be next to each other and not rip each other's heads off. He puts his arm around her shoulders tentatively, a silent question of is this okay? And she reaches up, interlacing their fingers with a silent answer of more than okay and I missed this and I missed you, and they sit like that for a while, quiet and content and warm. Not quite how it used to be, but something close, something familiar enough she can nearly trick herself into thinking it is.

"When's your flight?"

"Three, I have to be at the airport by… 1:30?" Freddie checks his watch. "So I still have three hours till I have to leave." He zips his suitcase and rolls it by the door, setting his bag- the same blue one-shoulder backpack he used all through school- next to it. He glances to Sam, who's still curled up under the covers. "Why?"'

She shrugs, realizes he can't see her shrug under the cocoon of blankets, and says, "I thought… I don't know, maybe we could go somewhere. Out to breakfast, and there's a pretty cool Pear store I thought you might like. Or whatever."

Freddie smiles. "Yeah, that sounds fun."

"Cool." She stretches before standing to pull on her clothes. "I'll run home and see if I can borrow Cat's car."

Freddie laughs and sits next to her as she pulls her boots on. "A car with you isn't much better than a motorcycle."

"Can't exactly carry a suitcase on a motorcycle." She grabs her purse from the dresser and swings her keys around her finger.

It's dark now, and Sam stands in the water, her jeans rolled up to her knees and her toes digging into the sand as the tide pulls it away. There's something grounding about it, the freezing water and the grains of sand and the random pieces of seaweed tickling her ankles, holding her in this moment. Otherwise, it would be too good to be true.

Freddie stands next to her, his clothes wet from the waist down after running into the surf on a dare, holding her hand and staring at the stars. They aren't easy to make out in the smog of the city, and Sam makes a mental note to drag Freddie out to the desert, show him real stars, better than he could see here, better than Seattle. Freddie squeezes her hand and pulls them out of the water, leading her up to the spot they stashed their towel, shoes, and phones, right under the pier. As Sam puts her socks on, hoping the water won't mess up the inside of her boots, Freddie, towel wrapped around his waist, suddenly says, "The day Carly left, and you called and said you had to talk to me about something really important and I asked if you wanted to get back together?"

"Yeah?" she says cautiously after a moment.

"We never really talked about it."

"There wasn't really time." She doesn't mean to sound cold, because God, she gets it. She would've said yes, if it wasn't Carly's dance, if there was a moment she could pull him aside and said she had been thinking about it too.

"And by the time Carly left, you were gone too." His voice is bitter, but he reaches out again, his hand sliding down her arm to her wrist, to her fingertips, before dropping again, the bitterness dropping with it. "If it had been any day but that one, if Gibby's head hadn't been stuck and we weren't racing to take Carly to the dance- I would have been honest. I would have said that I wanted to be with you." He looks her right in the eyes, and her breath catches in her throat. "And, honestly… I still do. I miss you."

Her face heats up, but in the dark, there's no way he could see her flush. Thank God. "I miss you too, Freddie."

He smiles, steps closer to her, and intertwines their fingers. "Yeah?"

She nods, smiles back, takes a step backward so she's leaning against the wood column. "Yeah. I missed you a lot."

The smile doesn't drop as he leans in, his hands settling on her waist in their familiar spots.

She leans against the side of the car as he pulls his suitcase out of the trunk, laughing when it slips out of his hands and slams to the ground, harder when he glares at her. The laughter dies a moment later though, as he stands in front of her and she realizes- this is it. He's leaving. She tries no to let the sudden dread show in her face, no matter how hard her stomach turns. She clears her throat. "So…"

"So…" he says back, smiling slightly.

"This is it."

He nods. "This is it."

"What happens now?" she says quietly. "I don't know what we do after this."

"I mean…" he shrugs, and sighs. "We could try long distance, but with college and work… is that realistic?"

"Probably not."

She stares at the ground as it sinks in: they aren't back together, no matter what words were said last night, or what beds were shared. "God, this somehow feels worse than when we actually broke up," she says after a moment, smiling sadly. She looks up and catches his eye. "But if I ever come back to Seattle…"

He's smiling too, reaching out to tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Or if I ever decide to move to LA…"

"It's just always the wrong time for us, isn't it?" Sam bites the inside of her cheek, trying to startle away the tears. "First it was because we were better as friends. Now it's this."

"Then I guess we just have to wait for the right time."

"Well," she says, "I'll see you at the right time."

He smiles, steps closer to her. "I'll see you then." He pauses, drops his voice slightly. "Bye, Sammy." It's something he hasn't called her since they dated, and her heart swells.

"Bye, baby," she says quietly, and she wraps her arms around him as they kiss for the last time for who knows how long.

She walks back to the driver's side as quickly as possible, holding back tears, but lets herself look back at him one last time as he walks through the airport doors.

He has both fists in the air, pumping them in victory.

End Notes:

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