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She sees him for the first time in Intro to Anthropology. She’s just taking it to fill a gen ed requirement in her sophomore year and she’s scanning the room, already bored, when she sees him. He’s sitting a few rows down in front of her, his shaggy head bowed over a notebook. He sits like he’s really tall and he’s trying to be inconspicuous. He has big hands, one of them wrapped around a travel mug that’s probably filled with coffee. He’s not one of those jocks, the squat, muscular kids that sit like they know they’re hot, leaning back in their seats and looking around them room. He’s not dressed like the rich kids, the ones who have more money than they know what to do with, who wear polo shirts with their collars popped. His coat has a hole in one elbow and his sneakers have definitely seen better days.
Jess watches him, only half-listening to the TA until class is over and the kid gets out of his seat. He is tall, taller than most of the guys in the room. She likes that.
Liz nudges her. “Cute, huh?”
Jess jolts out of her reverie. “Hm? Oh.” She flushes. “Yeah.”
“I think his name’s Sam. I can’t remember his last name.” Liz picks up her books and shoves them in her bag. “Want to get some food?”
“Sure.” Jess looks back at Sam as he heads out the door. Liz laughs and leads the way out of the auditorium.
##
It’s another couple weeks before she speaks to him. She watches him all the time in class, sketching his face into her notebook when she should be taking notes, but it’s not until Homecoming weekend that she gets closer to him than six rows away. With the weekend there are parties just about everywhere and Jess allows Liz to drag her to one.
“Homework can wait,” Liz says, picking out an outfit for her to wear. She tosses a dress onto the bed. “It’s the weekend. Besides, I’m sure Sam will be there.”
And then they are at the party and wouldn’t you know it, Sam is there. Even Liz looks surprised, which tells Jess that she’d only said it to make Jess come along. But with half a beer warming her stomach and wearing the short dress that Jess knows makes her look like sex on heels, she sidles up to Sam at the keg.
“Hey,” she says.
He glances at her, smiles and blushes. “Uh, hi.” Foam spills over his knuckles and he looks down in alarm, holding the overfilled cup away from his body. Jess steps back and laughs as he tries to slurp up the foam before it can splatter to the beer-soaked carpet.
“You’re Sam, right?” Jess presses when Sam appears to be done slurping up the foam.
“Yeah, uh, Sam Winchester.” He transfers his cup to his left hand, winces at his wet palm, wipes it on his jeans and then holds it out to shake. She shakes it, grinning.
“Jess Moore,” she says. “You’re in my Intro to Anthro class.”
He bobs his head. “Yeah, yeah, you sit six rows behind me.” An awkward pause, and then that creeping blush again. Jess bursts out laughing.
“Exactly,” she says.
Their first date is a couple days later, to the local movie theater. Sam wanted to pay for her ticket and soda and she let him, but she insisted on paying for the ice cream afterwards. They walk, not quite touching but so close that she can feel the heat of his body next to her, through the cool October air.
They first make love after a month of dating. It’s slow in college time but it would be indecently quick if her mother knew. To Jess, it’s just right. Sam is strong and gentle and maybe more than a little weird—even though he’s planning to be a lawyer, he knows more arcane superstitions that she’s ever heard of—but in general he’s nice and intelligent. And, she tells her mother over the phone, he’s going to be a lawyer. Lots of money in his future.
“Just be careful,” her mother says.
“I always am,” Jess replies.
##
Her mother demands that Jess bring Sam home for Christmas, once she learns that Sam is planning on staying in a hotel near the campus until break is over. Sam enthusiastically agrees, and on December fourteenth, after her last final, Jess and Sam catch a plane to Connecticut. Her dad is at the airport waiting to pick them up and he gives Sam the third degree the whole way home. When they arrive, her mother is waiting at the front door with cups of mulled cider and when she gives Sam a big hug, Jess relaxes.
Jess is curious about his family. In everything they’ve spoken about in the late night conversations, phone calls, lazy weekends, they’ve somehow never touched on Sam’s family beyond the basics—no mom, strict father, one older brother. She doesn’t even know his brother’s name. She doesn’t want to press because she can see the dark look in his eyes whenever the subject comes up and more than anything she doesn’t want to make him unhappy.
At dinner that night, Jess’s mother shoots Jess a glance and then leans in to the table. “Sam, darling, your family must be missing you terribly over the holidays.”
Jess levels a glare at her mom, because she’s already warned her off this topic—twice!—but her mom just waves the glare away. Sam looks uncomfortable.
“We’re not big on the holidays,” Sam says after a pause. “My dad goes on a lot of trips, so usually it was just my brother and me.”
“Is your brother away at school too?” Jess’s mother presses.
Sam smiles darkly down at his plate. “No, he’s not really the college type.”
After a few more attempts at conversation, Jess’s mother finally gives up and the conversation shifts onto other things. Still, Jess is kind of impressed. That’s more detail than Jess has been able to get from Sam in the two months they’ve been together.
Later that night after her parents have gone to bed, Jess and Sam say in the den watching a movie. When the credits roll, Jess buries her face in Sam’s chest.
“What’s your brother’s name?” Jess asks him, her voice muffled by his shirt.
Sam’s hand, stroking her hair, stills. “What?”
She lets the silence hang, and after a pause he says, “Dean.”
She lifts her head. “And your dad, what kind of trips does he go on?”
Sam’s face tightens. “Business trips.”
“What does he do?”
“Jess…” Sam looks away. “I’d rather not talk about my family.”
“But why not?” She levers herself up to stare him in the eye. She knows she’s pushing too far but she really wants to know.
His eyes are cold, as cold as she’s ever seen them. “Because they’re both psychotic. Like really psychotic. I don’t get along with them, and if I never see them again, it’ll be too soon.”
Jess feels a rush of embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have pushed.”
His gaze softens. “It’s okay,” he says.
##
They get an apartment together in the summer after their sophomore year. It’s small but it’s very close to campus and within their price range. Sam spends a couple days repainting the place. Jess is delighted with the soft yellow walls of the bedroom but she’s kind of confused by the row of gritty paint on the windowsill, like Sam painted over a line of sand. She runs her fingers over it, feeling the bumps. Definitely sand. And not just this window, but all of them. Weird.
He’s also nervous about her staying out late at night. She doesn’t really party too much, but once in a while she goes out with friends and gets three or four phone calls a night from Sam checking up on her. This moves from being “kind of adorable” to “weird” to “really fucking irritating” pretty quickly. And it leads to their first big fight. Jess says some things that she’s been saving up for a while, things like “you’re overprotective” and “you don’t really trust me, do you?” And wow, she didn’t really mean to say that second one because she knows that the phone calls are more that he’s worried for her safety rather than making sure she’s not screwing around. Red-faced, she says something about him not even trusting her enough to tell her about his past, and they’ve been together almost a year now. Sam sighs, looking tired, and says they need to talk.
##
“When I was six months old, my mother died in a fire in my nursery,” Sam says. “The fire was set by…by a demon.”
Jess pauses, her mouth opening. At first she wants to laugh. Then she feels a rush of anger, that Sam isn’t taking her seriously. But he looks serious, as serious as she’s ever seen him.
“My dad made it his life’s work to hunt down the demon and get revenge. And on the way, he’s been hunting other things—not just demons, but vampires. Werewolves. A lot of crazy stuff.”
Sam pauses again, looking down at her hands. He suddenly looks like a stranger. This is the man she’s been living with for so long? She feels a sudden absurd urge to scream at him to take it all back, don’t be crazy, don’t take the Sam I know away from me. She fights the urge down.
He raises his eyes and looks at her and flushes a little at the look on her face. “I know it’s not true. I know that, Jess. It’s just…” He sighed. “My father is really…intense. I wouldn’t call it charisma, but when he raised us, it was like… He valued strength and skill over everything else. Grades meant nothing so long as you didn’t attract the attention of the school for doing too badly. Honor roll was great, but if you could hit a moving target from fifty feet, well that was actually worth something.” Sam laughs bitterly. “How could you not believe in these monsters when believing in them and working to fight them meant that Dad was going to respect you?”
Jess reaches out and takes a hold of his hand, squeezing it. She doesn’t want to say anything that will make him stop talking. She did ask for this, after all.
“My brother worships my dad, and he would do anything to become just like him. He was four when my mother died, and I think that helped in getting him into the delusion. They didn’t tell me about this whole thing until I was ten, and it was Dean who slipped and told me. It wasn’t as strong for me as it was for him, though. I never knew my mom, and since I didn’t get introduced to it until I was ten, I couldn’t believe as strongly. I mean…” He lowers his voice a little, looking away as if he’s ashamed of what he has to say next. “I did believe them. For a long time. I mean, what else could I do? But my dad refused to let me go on hunts until I was eighteen, so I never saw anything, and by then I didn’t care. I wanted out.”
“Hunts?”
He glances at her briefly. “Uh, like hunting monsters, beheading vampires, stuff like that.”
“Did they actually think that they were hunting real things?”
He chews on his lower lip. “Yeah.” His eyes are distant, like he’s thinking about it. “I never thought about what they might have…” His face goes a little gray.
She squeezes his hand again. “So your brother still believes all this too?”
He comes back to himself. “Yeah. Well like I said, it’s hard not to believe it when it’s been your whole life since birth. And there are others, other hunters I mean. I’ve met a couple. People who think they also hunt demons. It’s this network of people.” He shrugs.
“Like the people who believe that lizard people have taken over the government,” Jess offers. He raises his head and smiles.
“Yeah. I read somewhere— folie à deux. It’s when two people share a delusion. I think that’s kind of what happens with my dad and my brother. My dad believes it, and my brother worships him so much that he can’t help but to believe it.”
“You’re worried for your brother,” Jess says softly. He nods, his head sagging.
“I’m worried for myself,” he said so quietly that she has to strain to hear him. “I’m afraid that if I meet up with them again, I’ll start to think…”
“You won’t,” she said reassuringly. “I know you, Sam. You’re logical. You won’t get sucked into that. I won’t let you.”
##
On their first anniversary, Sam takes her to a fancy restaurant. He’s been saving up for months. He works the help desk in the campus library and makes minimum wage. Jess feels a little guilty sometimes when it comes time for rent, because she has plenty of money to pay her half of the rent and Sam has to empty out his savings to pay his. But he always pays, and when their anniversary comes around, he takes her to one of the fanciest restaurants in town.
After dinner, back in their apartment, Sam peels Jess’s dress off her with big, gentle hands. She takes his head into her hands and brings him in for a long, slow kiss.
“I love you,” she tells him, and he smiles against her mouth.
“I love you too,” he replies.
##
The time passes quickly, like it tends to do in college. She takes Sam home for Christmas again and her mother takes her aside in the kitchen to ask how serious it is between them. Jess can’t stop smiling when she tells her mother it’s serious.
The spring semester goes even more quickly. Sam spends all of his time studying hard. He made it into Stanford on a full scholarship and he’s fully intending on making it into law school on another one. Jess doesn’t doubt that he’ll do it. When he sets his mind to something, he does it. In the summer, he interns with a law firm while she works at a clothing store in town. In the small space of their apartment, they move around each other like they’re two halves of a whole.
Two weeks after their second anniversary, after a Halloween party with some friends, Jess wakes up to find the bed empty. Sam is talking in the other room.
She shuffles to the doorway and flicks on the light. Sam is standing with another man.
“Sam?” she says sleepily.
He turns to her. “Jess, hey. Dean, this is my girlfriend Jessica.”
That wakes her up. “Wait, your brother Dean?” She’s surprised. She had thought that his older brother would be even taller than him, if that were possible, or at least big. Instead, Dean is medium height, with a pretty face and a tough guy swagger.
He leers at her, his eyes skimming her chest and the faded cartoon t-shirt that she wears to bed. “I love the Smurfs. You know, I gotta tell you, you are completely out of my brother’s league.”
Jess looks down at her shirt, blushing. “Just let me put something on.”
Dean immediately objects. “No, no, no, I wouldn’t dream of it… Seriously. Anyway, I gotta borrow your boyfriend here, talk about some private family business, but, uh, nice meeting you.”
Jess glances at Sam and he understands her look. He shakes his head firmly at Dean.
“No. No. Whatever you wanna say you can say it in front of her.”
Dean looks taken aback. “Okay. Um…dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”
There is derision in Sam’s voice. “So he’s working over-time on a Miller Time shift; he’ll stumble back in sooner or later.”
Dean sends him an intense look. “Dad’s on a hunting trip and he hasn’t been home in a few days.”
A hunt. Jess remembers that word. Sam’s face stills and he doesn’t look at Jess. “Jess, excuse us. We have to go outside.”
She can’t object as she watches them step out of the apartment. She wants to stop him. Didn’t he tell her how afraid he was of catching the crazy from his family? But if his father is really missing…
He’s back in fifteen minutes, and he goes straight to the closet to take out his duffle bag. Jess feels as if she has suddenly woken up into a different world, one where she never had that conversation with Sam.
“Wait, you’re taking off? Is this about your dad? Is he all right?” She tries desperately to find something to hold onto, to drag him back to reality.
He keeps his head bowed and tosses clothes into the duffle. “Yeah, you know, just a little family drama.”
“But your brother said he was on some kind of a hunting trip.” Remember? She wants to ask him. Remember when you were so afraid at the thought of what they were hunting?
Sam zips up his bag. “Ah yeah, he’s just deer hunting up at the cabin and he’s probably got Jim, Jack, and José along with him. We’re just gonna go bring him back.”
“What about the interview?”
“I’ll make the interview. This is only for a couple of days.” He starts walking out the door, duffle over his shoulder.
Jess steps after him. “Sam, I mean, please, just stop for a second. You sure you’re okay?”
He pauses, not looking at her. “I’m fine.”
##
He’s gone for three days. Jess spends Saturday finishing up some homework and tidying up the house. Sunday goes even slower. She bakes some cookies, eats them in front of the television. It’s almost pathetic how much her life has gotten to revolve around Sam. She doesn’t know what she would do without him.
Sunday night she puts the cookies on the table for him with a note and then lies in bed for a while with a book. She lights a couple tea candles on the bedside table and tries to relax. She is so worried for Sam. She’s told him that he wouldn’t fall for their delusions again and a part of her believes that, but that doesn’t mean that his family isn’t dangerous. If they know that he doesn’t believe them, then maybe they’ll try to make him believe. Maybe they’ll get angry.
Too tense to read, she decides to take a shower. The hot water will calm her down. She washes her long hair, then stands under the hot spray and lets it beat down on her shoulders until she’s feeling calmer.
There’s a sound from inside the apartment, like a door shutting. Jess turns off the water and wraps herself in a dressing gown, quickly rubbing her hair dry with a towel. She opens the door to the bathroom and steps into the bedroom.
Sam is lying on his back on the bed, munching on a cookie. She feels her face crease into a smile. She steps forward, letting the dressing grown drop from her shoulders, and climbs onto the bed.
The gown, in dropping, knocks two of the tea lights off the bedside table. The lace hem goes up in a flash. Jess is leaning over Sam for a kiss, and water drips from her hair into his face as she turns towards the flames. His eyes shoot open.
“No!” Sam’s shout is shockingly loud as he scrambles up onto his elbows. Jess slides off the bed, grabs for the blanket at the end of the bed.
“Get some water!” she says in a panic, throwing the blanket over the blazing dressing gown. The sheets of the bed have caught now, and that cheap polyester carpet is melting.
“Jess!” Sam shouts. There is a look of absolute horror on his face. She jerks up her head to look at him and he’s still backing away. His eyes are fixed somewhere in the distance, not really seeing her at all. The bed has burst into flames between them, impossibly fast. Jess backs away from the heat, thinking blindly about getting water from the bathroom to put out the blaze.
The door bursts open and Dean is in the room. “Sam!” he hollers.
“Jess!” The fire recedes from Jess’s attention because for the first time she registers the look on his face. This is not Sam. This isn’t the Sam that she’s known for more than two years. Dean is charging at Sam, grabbing him tightly, starting to drag him away.
“No!” Jess screams at them, half in fear, half in fury. “Let go of him!”
Dean pulls Sam toward the door. “We gotta get outta here!”
“Jess! No!” Sam is calling her name but she knows that to him, she is already gone. Dean manhandles Sam out the door, and Sam’s face has collapsed into despair. Jess can see it with startling clarity: her own death on his face. She is dead to him. Somehow, over the course of those three days, they have drawn him in.
Sirens rise in the distance. Jess grabs the damp towel from the bathroom to wrap around herself and makes her way out of the house, but by the time she gets outside, Sam is already gone.