A/N: Another short AU. I got woken up in the middle of the night by the plow and couldn't fall back to sleep. Stuck at home in the snow and I really worked this idea. Probably about nine chapters max. I was avoiding watching the Shaw episodes, in the hopes of writing a little more happy Charah to tide me over. The other story is still on track, considering I wrote multiple chapters of this at once. Would love to know what you think, even though FF site is clunking again.
I met Chuck Bartowski when I was 16 years old. Chuck and I were high school classmates all of junior year and a few months of senior year. We were friends all of that time. We were more than friends for one day, or more aptly, one night.
All I can say about that is we were young and impulsive, grappling with feelings neither one of us understood.
Sadly, I took for granted that I had time. I was lulled into a false sense of security, a false sense of permanence that unprecedented stretch of time in Burbank had caused. It never occurred to me that after 16 months of finally staying still, my father and I would have to run again. But we did.
When I was new to the school, Chuck made it a point to help me adjust. He befriended me that very first day, when I was lost and confused. I was used to moving, but the first day in a new place was always challenging. He made it easy, stressless for me.
Chuck had a small circle of friends. They were the nerds—his title, not mine. His best friend, Morgan, and he liked Star Wars and playing video games. There were others—Mark, Skip, and Lester.
In the beginning, I was the only girl. In between junior and senior year, a girl named Anna joined their group. I didn't really fit with his friends, but Chuck always smoothed over the rough patches. He made sure no matter what, I felt like I fit.
He was easygoing, friendly and genuinely kind. A magnificently wonderful person, even when he was only 16. He was the makeshift leader of their group. Mark was nervous, Skip was a clutz. Lester was…odd, I guess the best word would be. Anna was odd, but in a different way—like free-spirited. Morgan was immature, but otherwise just as nice as Chuck.
With the exception of Morgan, they all excelled in school. They tutored other students, including the group of girls I eventually ended up hanging around with.
They were the cheerleaders, the popular girls, although I wasn't a cheerleader and relatively speaking, I wasn't popular. I was too introverted, too aloof to effectively mingle with those girls. Nevertheless, I assimilated into their group because they thought I was from a wealthy family. I hated them all, but associating with them offered me protection I wouldn't have otherwise had.
One of the things I learned from my father–never dismiss an opportunity to exploit a situation.
No one knew the truth. I had expensive clothes and an expensive car because my father was a thief, a conman. I could get away with saying just enough without giving anything of myself away. The group of girls I hung around with had a leader—her name was Heather Chandler. She was the actual antithesis of Chuck. She was a terrible person, mean and belittling to almost everyone. I don't think she really had actual friends—more like loyal subjects who fawned over her, terrified of crossing her lest they be ostracized.
I was no fawner and I wasn't a cheerleader but despite that, she tolerated me. I didn't question it, just took what protection it offered.
But I always stayed friends with Chuck. I walked a fine line—not offending the nerds, not irritating the cheerleaders. As long as my interactions were separate, everything was okay.
As long as all the attention was focused on Heather, she didn't care about who I talked to when I wasn't with her. Chuck was too decent a person to let anyone tell him who he could or couldn't be friends with.
Chuck was mature enough in high school to not let teenage angst bog him down. He acted as a buffer between his awkward friends and those who picked on them. Nothing in school ever fazed him.
His home life was so bad, for a different reason than mine was, but still, so awful, that what Heather Chandler thought about him was the least of his worries. He put up a comical front to both sides—but he always told me the truth. He trusted me with his truth.
Late in our junior year, Heather was failing trigonometry and needed a tutor. One of Chuck's friends, Mark Ratner, was asked by his teacher if he would help her. Mark was sweet and shy, a really nice kid. All Chuck's friends were, even if they were awkward sometimes. Maybe with the exception of Lester. But, still…
Heather's idea of getting help from Mark was getting him to do her homework and help her cheat on her tests. I'm sure he balked at first, being the rule follower he was, but she used his awkward innocence against him and manipulated him. She pretended to like him, like a girlfriend would. Amy, one of the other girls, told me Heather was giving him blow jobs in the boys' locker room to make him think she was interested in dating him.
I'm sure she wasn't. Stringing him along was the easiest way to get what she wanted. She was a real slut, too. She had sex with every guy she ever went out with. No self respect, to the point of basically prostituting herself to pass trigonometry without doing any work. Of course Mark thought it meant more than it did, falling head over heels for her.
He was so awkward he never questioned why she never let him touch her, why they never went on dates parking or even had sex like some couples. I think it was Chuck who eventually told Mark he was being used. Mark never got over it…and Heather didn't care.
Despite the horrible people I associated with, Chuck always talked to me like I was a person. He knew I was different from the rest. At the same time, he was different from his friends too.
He wasn't just smart, he was brilliant. Understanding computers and how they worked came second nature to him. Everyone knew he was going to be the valedictorian. He was a swimmer, the only one of his friends who did anything athletic. He played guitar in the school jazz band.
He was the only person in the school who I wanted to be around. I found opportunities to stay around him. Being around him made me feel better than I had ever felt in my life before. He made me feel special, like I mattered.
He was the most important thing in my life, only I couldn't see it until it was too late.
"Where's Morgan?" I asked as I stood before Chuck as he sat alone at a table in the high school cafeteria.
He looked up and smiled a crooked smile at me. "He cut school. Math test he did not want to take."
"I thought you helped him study?" I asked.
"I did. For hours. Days. But he just…freaked out." Chuck shrugged, but I could tell he was disappointed in his friend.
I put my tray down across from him and sat. He was slouching, but he sat up straighter, suddenly uncomfortable. "Oh, Sarah, you don't—"
"Shut up, Chuck," I teased. "I'm sitting here."
I saw him look nervously over my shoulder. The table full of my so-called friends were all staring at us, Heather leading the pack and leering. I was risking making her look bad, sitting with the nerd, but I didn't care. Not when Chuck needed me.
I didn't want Chuck to be alone. I would risk being put down, maybe ostracized for a while, to do so. Heather would always come back around, when she wanted something. That was how it worked.
"Why do you hang around with those girls?" he asked me, sotto voce.
He often asked me that. I never knew what to say. "They're just cheerleaders." Wasn't an answer and he knew it.
"Every single one of them is a horrible person. You're nothing like them," he insisted.
He was the only one who knew me enough to say that. To most, I was cool and aloof. Unfriendly. I hung out with him outside of school frequently, so he saw a side of me no one else could.
But he didn't know about my father, what he did for a living. No one did. And they certainly didn't know that on occasion I was still helping him.
I didn't want to do it, but I didn't have a choice. Any action on my part to do the right thing would put my father in jail and me in foster care. I lived with him and only him. I couldn't just refuse him—I'd tried. He would sweet talk me, tell me this was the last and then he would stop. I always believed him, but I was never surprised when I knew he couldn't keep his promise.
At this time, the fall of my senior year, he was knee-deep in a pyramid scheme. One of the largest cons he had ever attempted. I was flying under the radar because as of yet, he hadn't pulled in the parents of any of the people I knew at school. Once he did, my clock would start ticking to when we would uproot and move again.
We had moved nine times in the 12 years I had been in school. The only friends I had ever made were friends like Heather. Convenient. There was no closeness there, no real bond.
That is, until Chuck. He changed everything.
Not long after I was recruited to be part of Heather's group, she made it her mission to make me over, since I was awkward and still reeling from puberty's effects. She fixed my hair, my makeup and my clothes. Going shopping with her with my wads of cash popped her eyes, assuring that because of my supposed stature I was worth her time. If only she knew everything I had was stolen, she would have changed her mind.
I'll never forget what Chuck said after I returned to school sexed up the way I was. "You look…amazing. But you looked amazing before. How can you improve upon perfection?" I blushed like I had never blushed before and he apologized for embarrassing me.
He was the sweetest person I had ever met.
He had just proved it to me again, and I told him so. He turned beet red and looked away.
"Hey, Sarah." That was Bryce Larkin, my ex-boyfriend. We had dated for six months at the end of last year and through the summer, but I broke up with him right before school started.
He was pressuring me to have sex, and I didn't want to. I was still a virgin and the idea of being intimate with someone scared me.
No one knew that was why, of course. None of those girls knew I was a virgin. And Bryce never clarified, lest he be teased by the other jocks that he couldn't get me to submit to having sex with him.
He was most certainly not a virgin. I'd accidentally caught him under the bleachers at a football game screwing my friend Amy. Why he waited six months for me and then lied about it, I have no idea.
It never occurred to me that he just liked me. Not love, certainly not at the age of 17, but…something other than just physical attraction. It made sense to him.
I just wanted something more special. Not love. I wasn't naïve enough to believe I was waiting for Prince Charming. But I also didn't want to lose my virginity with my skirt bunched around my waist on the cold dirt under the bleachers. Not romance, but something in between.
That topic was the one thing I could never talk to Chuck about–me with other guys, or him with other girls. Even though Chuck was a nerd, he was charming and handsome. I knew the way the girls looked at him when he didn't know they were.
"What do you want, Bryce?" I asked coolly.
"Come sit with me?" he asked hopefully, rudely ignoring Chuck.
"I'm sitting with Chuck."
"With the dork? Really?" Bryce was pretty, the prettiest male I think I've ever seen, but he was ugly when he sneered.
Chuck's already-red face got even hotter.
"Take your rude ass and sit somewhere else," I hissed.
"Wow," he mocked with an insincere smile. "Protecting the dorks today. They certainly need it." He strolled away like a king. What an asshole.
"I'm sorry, Chuck," I said honestly. "He's such an ass."
Chuck's blush slowly faded. "That he is. But you went out with him." He winked at me.
"Don't remind me," I grumbled, but then giggled at the face Chuck made. He could always make me laugh.
We finished our lunch, chatting comfortably, until the end of the period. Right before the bell rang, Heather approached me. Chuck was standing right behind me.
"Hey, Sarah, Rob wants to take me out on Friday but his cousin is in town. Any chance we could double date?"
I was horrified. Double dates with Heather meant finding a place where there were no parents and having sex. Rob was her boyfriend, but she thought nothing of pairing me with someone I didn't know who would expect something similar if we were together, alone in someone's house. Too many times in parallel situations with her and her boyfriend, I had been with Bryce, barely fending him off, going further each time, to the edge of my boundaries.
The night we broke up, he was ready to have sex. He felt like he'd been patient, covering for me with both groups of friends for long enough. I was just too frightened. We were so close, undressed and lying on the bed. I just couldn't do it. He offered me oral sex and I refused. He asked me to perform oral sex on him. I did what he asked, telling myself while it was happening that it would never happen again. That's how I got through it.
I'm sure I was terrible. It took forever, almost a full half hour, mostly because I was so unsure of myself. I was so afraid he was going to come in my mouth, I hesitated, starting and stopping and interrupting his arousal. He warned me in time, but he still came all over me. I ran into the bathroom to wash it off.
Because I had refused his offer, that was the end. Not that him touching me was all that pleasurable. I'm sure if I'd relaxed I could have enjoyed it. I was always so tense, so self conscious. I had only a small, scattered number of weak, fluttery orgasms that lasted only a few seconds. I thought that was normal, with nothing else for comparison.
His probing fingers and dull clitoral massages did really only one thing for me. He stretched me open, gradually and steadily, the entire time we were together.
So my first time, when it happened, was only mildly painful. And I didn't bleed. I was expecting an awful experience, but as weird as it seems, Bryce made it easier. Although, I wasn't the least bit prepared when it finally did happen.
"I can't, Heather. I already have a date with Chuck." It was my usual dodge, used much more now that I no longer had a boyfriend.
"Really?" she quipped, one eyebrow raised. "Since when?"
Chuck and I frequently used each other for cover to get out of so many situations we wanted no part of. It was our private little pact.
I didn't invoke it with Heather that often, mostly to protect Chuck from her. But she called me on it and I had to say something. I knew Chuck would understand.
Heather rolled her eyes. "Well, have fun. Only you would choose watching some dorky movie over partying with us."
"What exactly are we doing on Friday?" Chuck whispered once Heather walked away, leaning down next to my ear, grinning at his wicked teasing.
"Not now, Chuck," I mumbled, bumping his shoulder. I heard him chuckle.
We left the cafeteria and walked out into the hallway. He took my books without even thinking about it. We walked in companionable silence up the stairs to our next class.
"Sarah, what would you say if I really asked you out for Friday?" He was smiling, but I could tell he was nervous.
"Like a real date?" I asked in disbelief.
"Am I that repulsive?" he teased.
I swatted his arm. "You know you're not. It's just…well, we're friends. Wouldn't it be weird?"
"Why would it be weird? We know each other. No nerves, no anxiety, nothing to stress about. It would be fun."
I didn't know why he was trying to sell me on the idea. We had spent many Friday nights hanging out, hiding from other things. But there was no romance involved, ever. Strictly platonic.
"Why the sudden change of heart?" I challenged.
That upset him. I didn't really understand why. He jumbled his words on the way out. "It's not—not…not a, not a change. I just thought, you know, it might be fun. If you don't, you know, don't—"
"Ok," I said softly.
His eyes opened wide. "Ok?" he parroted, confused.
"Yes, ok." I smiled.
I agreed to go because he asked. There was no one else I would rather be with. I convinced myself it would be fine. A real date, but it was Chuck. What I thought it meant was us doing more date-like things than friend-like things. Trading locales, wearing different clothes, but nothing more.
I had no idea how he really felt.
I had no idea how I really felt.
Until that night.