* MORE OR LESS.

       “you’re assuming i haven’t sat through it already before — twice.”

       “an american chip or a british one?” 

       “… oh. oh, well now my heart’s just broken.” one of her eyebrows arches, a grin actually curling into place along her mouth now. “is that something else he gets from you? i only ask because you mentioned the looks and well… ”

       “— always good to know. is this where you casually, but with a bit of charm, ask me what my intentions are? marriage, of course. i’m thinking straight out of high school. a white picket fence. definitely dogs. two? likely two. i know he’ll want you to have a guest room — ” the look on her face says it all for her. “i pictured you taller. seven feet, at least.” 

     “semantics,” she shrugs. “mm, try elaborate lifetime movie worthy rumors. people talk, it’s not a big deal. nate talking, though … now you know i have to ask, right?” 

      “ — that could’ve been mildly concerning to hear if i didn’t know who you were talking about. you look like him.” 

       “… i’unno,” deanna could pick her way through the viscera of memory. of the thing that wanted her brother. the stench of its breath. more beast than man. its teeth, claws. the blood, the blood that made everything taste like iron for weeks after and she felt like she couldn’t breathe without it bubbling up from her mouth. she could pick her way through it and tell him torn apart doesn’t do justice to what was done to that thing, but she’s leaning in to the grip at her throat, mouth falling open with a curl of her lip. a soundless snarl. “you gonna tell me you were a good boy ‘n still said your ‘ hail marys ’ as she cut you up? ‘cause then … yeh.”  

       her body shifts and it’s deliberate and far from subtle, hips rolling down into his. hands gliding up his chest in the same languid wave of movement. one hand rakes through his hair. the fist she makes is a loose one. loose enough to mimic the hand at her throat. and then she tightens it, coaxes his head back as she does. he smells like smoke. smoke and something else. something that fills her lungs and leaves her swallowing hard.

      “ave maria,” deanna nips at his throat, then his jaw, then his lower lip, “gratia plena,” her free hand grabs his chin, firm, and the brush of their mouths against one another is strategic. not a whole kiss, but a promise of it. of teeth and tongue and drawn blood. when she speaks, it’s as much in to his mouth as it is over it.

     “dominus tecum,” she finishes, smirking. the full extent of her latin laid bare in only a fragment of prayer. the dead should stay dead. wouldn’t john winchester be proud? he wanted her to practice more latin. deanna feathers a kiss, deceivingly tender and lingering, against the bridge of sam’s nose. then their eyes catch and she swears she forgets to breathe.

     “show me what’cha got.” 

     ave maria. pray for us sinners. nothing poetic in chasing friction, in the low hiss of his breath or the knifepoint edge to his smile when she fists his hair. he sees an empty church pew and a faded hymnal, sees his own hands clasped in futile prayer. for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. did he say his hail marys ... ?

     “nah,” hip to thigh, pushing fingers into the meat of it until they bruise, “i called her a crazy bitch ‘n told her she better go before i caught a murder charge.” 

     latin and tenderness are a risky combination, tugging at something visceral in him that’s only diluted because the latter is as dishonest as he is. their eyes catch and he kisses her. rough. no tenderness. nobody is proud. nobody would be proud of them for the way he’s leveraging her weight to flip her onto the couch, bear down on her with that pressing grip around her throat. not the way he shoves between bracketing thighs, grinds against her, getting hard through his jeans. kisses her and bites her lower lip to make good on that promise of blood. 

     her own jeans are hauled down past her hips, underwear along with them. half off when he grips her behind each knee and ducks under the mess of bunched up fabric to lick into her, slow and full, then quicker, fucking her with his tongue, sucking at that bundle of nerves that makes her twitch forward against his mouth. 

       in an instant, she’s pulled from the roads. from the oceans and skies. she’s coaxed into her body again. the persisting desire to be anywhere but here settles into the crevices of her mind and she exists only here. only in boston. in mattapan. in this set up. only with sam drake. he touches her and she’s grounded. try as she might, deanna can’t focus on the swirls of smoke seductive around him or on the dog barking once more in the distance. a warning bark. she focuses on the spread of his hand and then on the pull of muscle beneath skin when he’s showing her his. true to word. 

       “the same ex from the roof? lemme guess,” leaving her pants open and hanging, she boldly moves to straddle his lap. careful to not hit his cigarette, careful to not upend the ashtray. she fits on top of him with ease. sitting next to him is an option, but from here she can touch the scars he displayed. the one at his rib cage. the one from his ex. her fingers drag from one scar to the next. “your own knife. nah, that might be too poetic. even for you.”  

      deanna looks up from his torso, already smirking. 

      “boston, i gotta tell you,” she pulls off her shirt, tossing it beside him on the couch. “i’m beginnin’ to think you got a type. and it kinda makes me wonder what you’re thinkin’ ‘bout me since i’m here ‘n all.” deanna takes his free hand and guides it to her stomach, pressing his fingers against her skin to slide it along the curve of her hip. “anyway, i had to get out of a… uh, sticky situation involving sammy and wasn’t thinking straight, just had to get to him. ran right into a table. it clipped me good.” 

    letting his hand go, she rests her palms against his chest. she doesn’t shy away from the lingering eye contact. the intensity of it. him.

     “split open ‘n everything.” 

     the barking dog is a doberman, an alarm system for the whole block; the family across the way who doesn’t speak a word of english, the couple downstairs who peddles prescription drugs and dirt weed that’s too dry and tastes like chlorophyll. him too, he supposes, since he’s only been out a month and already violated the terms of his probation at least a half - dozen times. it’s a wiry mutt, all sinewy muscle, always leashed to the chain link no matter the weather outside. sam’s considered setting it loose once or twice, just letting it run off somewhere. a couple hours’ freedom before it’s hit by a car or something seems better than a lifetime of barking at the same stretch of sidewalk. barking more than normal. 

     something in the air tonight, maybe. it dulls to static. she straddles him, pants open, guiding his hand and touching his chest and talking about scars like that’s what they came here for. like that’s all this is. war stories. he’s got better stories. 

     he’s got worse stories. 

     “’m thinking,” he sucks down one last pull of smoke, stubs the filter into the ashtray, that same hand roaming fingertips over the mark on her belly before it navigates to her other hip. “that that’s what’cha get for not payin’ attention, but you sure have your priorities lined up right. i mean that. hope whatever fucked with him got tore up worse than you did.” 

     his own hips rock upward. an arcing motion under the transparent guise of shifting to better settle against the couch cushions. 

     the hand whose placement she’d chosen moves again. moves up between her breasts and curls loosely at the base of her throat. then a little less loose, just a little. then to pull her closer, almost mouth to mouth. 

      “day i met him, i thought nate would do great in theatre.” and she means that, too. three pulls of beer in and already comfortable on the couch, her eyebrows lift and amusement hooks her mouth into another lazy grin. she has other scars. scars with better stories. scars that better fit her ability to shoot or even the way she isn’t deterred by any of this. others still from being an idiot, simple scars. left behind pencil lead ‘cause she stabbed herself running with a pencil, gravel stuck in her knee ‘cause she ate shit on ice. most, but not all, are hard to explain when you pluck them singlehandedly from the context of her life. 

      “yeh, all right.” setting her beer just beside sam’s foot, deanna pulls herself up off the couch again. there’s no belt for her to unbuckle, but she undoes the button of her jeans and shuffles to get them down below the curve of her ass. then pulled at one side to show her left thigh. drawing her hair out over one shoulder, preventing it from obscuring her own view, she angles to let him see better. their knees touching. further below the line of her underwear and disappearing down still beyond the expanse of skin she’s showing, two faint discolored lines run. they’re smooth, faded to look paler than anywhere else. unless you’re looking, it’s easy to glance over. true to her word, no freckles touch along the barriers. 

     the cherry of his cigarette is an easy draw for her attention when she glances up.

    “yours are what? ya didn’t finish,” she doubles back to ask, reaching for his beer to drink from instead of her own, instead of fixing her pants just yet. 

   “show me yours, i’ll show you mine, yeh?”

     true to her word. what’s that line nathan’s always pitching at him, half - kidding, half serious as a heart attack ... ? trust, but verify. sam’s mouth hooks again at the corner. he scoots forward to set his beer bottle on the table and leans closer to her, to the scar; lidded eyes and a lingering glance up across the plush of her thigh make it a less innocent gesture when his palm coasts across bare skin, tracing the paler tissue. 

     “yep, there it is — grilled you good, huh? you got way more freckles than i thought.” 

     still at the edge of the couch, he reaches back to ash his cigarette and balance it on the side of the ashtray. 

     “must be some sorta record,” he says idly. teasing. “fastest a girl’s ever pulled her pants down since walkin’ through the front door. well — second fastest. semantics.”

     their eyes catch again for a beat and then he’s tugging off his shirt, ducking his way out of it, reaching for another pull on the cigarette that this time stays between his teeth as he talks.

        once again, she’s struck with the deep-rooted impulse to tell him to not stop. to carry them both away. far away. until they disappear. until everything is a memory left so far behind they could question if it was ever real or not. it gnaws at her, gnaws until the feeling’s a raw one. and lingers. like his kiss. and once again, she thinks of both of their brothers. despite it the thought doesn’t sour the moment, the feel of the wind in her hair or his chest against her back, or the power of the engine between her thighs and beneath her. the ride ends just as quickly as it began and she’s already scoped out the surrounding area before she’s waltzing in through the open door of his place. the air’s electric. dangerous.

       “hey, i live outta hotels,” deanna’s already slipping out of her jacket, turning on heel to take in the inside. “a bed’s a bed in my books.” 

       the first thing she takes note of is the faint haze of smoke that seems to laze about the air, trapped from the last cigarette he lit up however many hours ago. it’s dim, and not just because the night is closing in fast on their heels. small, which is only noticeable because everything else about him feels like too much and not enough all at once. there’s beer in the fridge. she sets her jacket on the counter by the sink and pulls two from the rest, hip bumping the door to close it again. her smile catches when their eyes meet.

      “there was this one joint we stayed in outside’a … where was it, jackson. wyoming? yeh, sounds right,” one bottle cap is knocked off on the edge of the table, she holds the beer out to him. then she does the same with the other. “anyway, had one of those old radiators. hissed and clunked during the winter. it burnt the shit outta my leg. s’what i get for curling up beside it, i know. still got the scars. faded a li’l, but its a patch the freckles won’t touch.” 

     she holds her beer up to clink against his.

     the kitchen light switch is inside the doorway and he flicks it on for her, notes the bleed of phosphorescence into the apartment’s only other room — apart from a tiny bathroom, two steps down what’s barely a hall just off to their left. mattress pushed up lengthwise against one wall, low slung couch along the other. tv stand made out of wood planks and stolen cinderblocks while his bookshelves are stacked milk crates. the shades are drawn, have been all day. they stay drawn in this neighborhood. it’s a second story place, but that doesn’t mean much. 

     he’d had to replace the locks when he first moved in. busted doorjamb, too, from when the cops or whoever had kicked in the door. 

     “this one shithole we lived in for a couple weeks had a radiator like that. nathan got all freaked out by the noise, refused to sleep in his own bed. so dramatic.”

     he slips out of his jacket and slings it over the counter, takes the beer and the proffered toast, a generous swig before he’s fishing for his cigarettes. scuffed silver zippo, tail end of his brother’s birth year engraved into the side. they’re on the couch when he sparks it. one foot kicked up on the coffee table, ashtray balanced next to him on the armrest, he raises the bottle for another, slower drink.

       she almost gasps. almost. the kiss takes her by surprise. and it shouldn’t, it really shouldn’t. he’d been looking at her mouth and she’d been biting her lip and those are all steps to the inevitable, but it still surprises her. maybe because of how it makes her feel during and after. maybe ‘cause she’s got an immediate broad grin and bright eyes as he pulls away and every instinct that tells her she’s in the jaws of a skilled beast of prey falls silent.

      deanna winks. it’s exactly where she wants to be. 

      “thought you might like that.” 

      she thinks of jonah and the whale and getting swallowed whole and climbs up on that bike with him, wiggling against him until she’s settled. whales and birds, oceans and skies. her shoulders roll and she fills her lungs, able to breathe freely. unabashedly. 

    “you just told me you almost died with a hard on. now you wanna get shy?” she snorts, “pg-13 my ass. let’s get outta here. i don’t care where.”

     "i was tryin’ to be a little less crass. went on a date, sat face to face ‘n took her for a ride. how ‘bout we leave it at that?”

     if he knew what she was thinking, he’d tell her that story’s bullshit. god doesn’t have boundless compassion and you can’t survive in the belly of a whale, no matter how much you pray. but she’s not jonah, and sam’s not the whale, and he doesn’t want to swallow anything whole — he wants to eat it raw and pick his teeth clean with its bones. there are metaphors about all that, too. rebirth in destruction, et cetera. rebirth only tastes like blood to him. she shifts in between his thighs and he leans forward again, chest to back. 

     oceans and skies. he’s always careful when he gets near the coast. the atlantic is a dangerous lure; some days it sounds like freedom, some days like drowning. 

     silent again on the drive, road and engine, sky and emerging stars. this is the night. no open fields this time, no bottles in a row, just the walk - up to his apartment complex and a dog barking loud and sharp nearby, cracking like gunshots. mattapan isn’t the safest place to be after dark.

     he locks the bike up, twirls his keys around his index finger. once they’re up the stairs and his door’s unlocked, he stands aside to let her pass by first.