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Sansa isn’t sure why it’s Jon that comes to mind when she’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Margaery Tyrell’s lush apartment, the pulse of music on the other side of the door at odds with the brightly-lit little room spinning like a tilt-a-whirl with her at the center. She knows she can’t drive home like this, and that there’s no one at the party in any condition to do this favor for her. Her fingers fly through her contact list, looking for someone to call for help. Someone who isn’t at this party, or a thousand miles away because she wanted to get out of boring old Minnesota.
Tonight wasn’t supposed to be like this. After the ugly break-up with Joffrey, Margaery had cheerfully insisted that a party was just the thing to help her forget. Sansa’s had a few too many hand-mixed drinks, vodka clumsily spilled into the hot pink concoction passed to her, and hadn’t stopped to think how many through the thrum of music in her blood. It wasn’t until the song switched that she realized how dizzy she felt, how the floor seemed to sweep up toward her. And at first she thought the broad, handsome jock who grabbed her shoulder was going to steady her on four-inch stilettos and get her some water, the nice sort of thing a boy back home would have done. Instead, he pulled her too close, bent toward her face and said -- well, whatever he was going to say was blocked out by the pulse of the music and Sansa shoving him off with sharp elbows and a cry that she thought she might throw up.
And now she’s in the bathroom, and Sansa just wants to go home. Home to Minnesota, where her mother would bundle her up with a knitted throw and a steaming cup of tea. But she’ll settle for her apartment here in Los Angeles, where there’s a soft, yellow blanket folded on the edge of her bed that sounds like the most heavenly thing she can imagine at a moment like this. As soon as she gets home, she’ll kick off her heels and drink some water, and then spend all of Sunday in her pajamas.
Assuming she can get home. Sansa keeps scrolling.
Jon Snow.
Sansa’s fingers flick past the name, but she quickly presses her thumb to the screen and scrolls upward again. Jon. Robb’s childhood best friend. He’s all the way out in Pasadena, where he’s a graduate student in engineering. Robb told her that she should call him when she got to LA, just so she wasn’t completely alone in California, but that was almost two years ago, and of course Sansa never did. If Jon knew to expect a visit, he never let on the few times she’s seen him since she started college, mostly at Christmas and summer barbecues at the lake.
But Jon’s not a stranger, at least, and he’s not what feels like a million miles away from her spinning little bathroom, and Sansa clumsily pecks at her screen until a blank text opens.
Are you awake?
She holds her breath, wonders if she should call instead. It’s nearly 1 am, and Jon can hardly be expected to be awake to field her text messages. Sansa takes in a deep breath and started to look for someone else to text. Her mother has an old friend from back east who lives in LA, and though Sansa doesn’t know if she likes him, at least she thinks he might come if she called for a ride.
The sudden chime of a text notification drives her from that fruitless line of thought. It’s from Jon. Sansa’s fingers shake when she swipes down and selects it.
Is something wrong? Jon doesn’t ask who she is, so maybe Robb gave him her phone number, too. Just in case. Sansa is stupidly glad for it.
She also has cause to be glad for auto-correct when her fingers slip and slide across the screen, tapping out her response: I’m at a party and I’m too drunk to drive home. She pauses, then adds, in a separate message, Robb said I should call if I needed anything. Sorry if I woke you up.
The last message has barely finished sending when the green bubble of Jon’s reply pops up on her screen. I’m on my way. What’s the address?
Sansa closes her eyes and tries to force her sluggish, spinning head to recall Margaery’s address. But she can’t remember, so she just punches in: I don’t know. Too far to walk back to campus.
There’s a long time she doesn’t hear anything, but Sansa just slumps over to rest her forehead on the cool tile of the bathtub. When her eyes are open, the halo of the light is painfully bright, but she stares at it anyway. If she closes her eyes, the room begins to spin uncomfortably again. Maybe she should try to throw up before Jon comes, so she doesn’t get sick later. Maybe she should tell Jon to stay home. But then she doesn’t know how she’s going to get home if he doesn’t come.
Something heavy slams into the bathroom door, jerking Sansa back to her sluggish senses, and she yelps quietly. It’s probably someone trying to get in, because the door handle shudders a few times, but then there’s another thump and she realizes that there are two bodies. Not just someone, but probably a couple trying to slip into the bathroom for some privacy. Lacking that, they appear to have settled for noisily fumbling against the bathroom door, because Sansa hears a loud moan muffled by the music and their awkward brushing against the door. She blushes and looks down at her phone, which has two texts from Jon, and a missed call.
Just stay there, I’ll find you. Her heart thuds loudly in her chest, and the next message reads: Got it from the Facebook event. I’ll be there soon. The last message is from almost fifteen minutes before, though Sansa doesn’t remember being in the bathroom so long. Her phone buzzes insistently in her hand and she realizes sluggishly that it’s ringing.
“Hello?” she says, trying to sound as normal as she can, though she can hear the way her vowels elongate a little too much. Outside the bathroom door, a loud thump alerts her that the couple on the other side have escalated their ardour.
“Sansa? Where are you?” The static on the other end is loud, but then Sansa realizes that it’s the fuzzy noise of loud music and a crowd of people, and recognizes the voice near shouting on the other end of the line as Jon. “I’m outside in the courtyard.”
“I’m in the bathroom,” she admits quietly, clearing her throat and staggering up to her feet. “I’ll--there are people outside the door. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Stay there.” Jon’s voice is firm, like he’s angry with her. And maybe he’s got every right to be, Sansa calling him up in the middle of the night to rescue her from a situation she was dumb enough to get herself into.
Sansa swallows back the urge to cry and quickly pats cold water on her cheeks, staring up at her reflection. In the stark, unflattering bathroom light, she looks a little too pale and she can see her mascara has begun to run on one side. She quickly blots it up with a bit of tissue -- Margaery’s bathroom is rather well stocked with makeup remover -- and swabs on a bit of lipstick so that Jon won’t think Robb’s baby sister is a complete disaster.
There’s a shuffling noise and an indignant shout from outside the door, and then a gentle knock at the door. “Sansa?”
She fumbles with the lock on the door three times before she can get it undone, but when she swings it open, she’s rewarded with the sight of Jon Snow leaning against the doorframe, blinking at the sudden light from the bathroom against the relative darkness of the rest of the apartment. Wearing a pair of loose sweatpants and a Minnesota hockey t-shirt, his long, black curls tied back, at least two days of scruff on his face, and a pair of wire glasses perched on his nose, he couldn’t look more out of place at this party.
Overcome with relief and forgetting that she doesn’t want Jon to think she’s a hot mess, Sansa throws her arms around his neck. “Oh, thank you. I can’t believe you came.”
Jon clears his throat awkwardly, gently extracting himself from her. “It’s late, Sansa. Let’s get you home.”
The ride in Jon’s car is awkward. Sansa picks at a peeling corner on her manicure and stares out at the the haloes forming around streetlights, trying to think what to say. She knows better than to think that Jon won’t tell Robb about this, but she wonders whether to call Robb herself to keep him from saying something to their father the next time he stops by with Jeyne and little Ned.
It takes almost no time at all before she realizes that they’re near her apartment, just outside campus. She’s about to ask how he knows where she lives when she sees his phone balanced on his leg, silently navigating him to her apartment building. His face is mostly shadowed, but he’s jittering his other knee up and down and he yawns widely at every stoplight. The digital clock tells her that it’s already past two in the morning. Sansa looks away, shame building like a hard lump in the back of her throat, and she wants to cry again.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles weakly, wiping fog from his window in time to see her apartment building swing into view. “You can let me out here.”
“Not likely,” Jon answers lightly, pulling into one of the visitor parking spaces and shifting into park. Sansa peeks over at him, but Jon rubs his eyes under his glasses before looking over at her with a dry smile. “Robb’d kill me if you fell in the pool or something.”
She’s not entirely sure that he’s not being bitterly sarcastic, but Sansa can take her lumps in stride. So, she carefully lets herself out of the car, planning to walk across the parking lot with as much dignity as her current state will allow, but Jon is there, carefully guiding her around a deep pothole with an arm around her waist. Sansa stares at him openly, stumbling on her too-high heels, which she can barely believe she’s still in at this point.
“Which one is your apartment?” Jon looks over at her, his eyes nearly black in the darkness, and Sansa thinks she seems something other than irritation. Worry? Relief? Or something else?
“2C,” she recites, tottering toward the stairs. Outside the door, she fumbles with her keys until Jon takes them from her and searches for the right one to slip into the door, and Sansa allows herself lean into him. His t-shirt is soft from years of wear, but the layer of muscle under it is anything but soft, and he smells warm and piney. Jon isn’t the sort of guy who wears some manufactured cologne. The idea of him picking one out at the perfume counter makes her smile to herself. No, it’s just that this is how Jon smells. She hadn’t noticed it in Minnesota, and now that he’s here, she wonders why it’s been two years and she’s never called him. Probably she was so hung up on life in California that she didn’t want to think about boring old Minnesota. Except…
The door swings open to her empty apartment and Jon hesitates in the doorway, even as Sansa steps down from her heels and tumbles inside, holding onto his forearms for balance.
“My roommate’s out for the weekend,” she explains, tugging him inside and fumbling for the light switch. She’s a little better than she was when she first texted Jon, but she’s still uncomfortably drunk and she’s going to regret every last one of her drinks in the morning. But she leaves her shoes by the door and heads to her bedroom, leaving Jon standing in the living room. Sansa means to tell him he can sit down, or head on home, but when she staggers into her pajama pants and a tank-top from her sorority bid day and peeks back out of her bedroom, Jon is halfway down the hall with a tall glass of water and a granola bar.
“You should drink this,” he says as seriously as ever, but he doesn’t give her either until Sansa is sitting on the edge of her bed. Then Jon shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants and watches her, turning his head away only once to yawn.
“I’m sorry,” Sansa says quietly between sips of water, because it’s her fault that he’s at least half an hour from getting back to bed. “You can stay on the couch. You should stay. You wouldn’t be awake if it weren’t for me.”
Jon rubs his hand along the back of his neck, but he takes the water glass from Sansa when she starts on the granola bar. “Actually, I was already awake.”
Because he’s a graduate student. Of course, she thinks, flushing a little more. And dutiful, studying on a Saturday night instead of getting wasted and making bad decisions at a party.
Sansa tries to be polite, because Jon has been extremely kind to her, and the water and granola bar are helping to settle her stomach. She asks, “Studying?”
A faint smile quirks in the corner of his mouth. “Grading, actually.” He hands back the water glass and throws the wrapper away in her little wicker wastebasket by her desk. “I needed the break, or I’d have started drinking, myself.”
Sansa looks down into the glass and frowns a little. He’s trying to make her feel better. She murmurs a quiet thank you, but can’t shake the sense that her parents would be disappointed.
“Robb told me to call you when I first got out here, and I just… I can’t imagine what you think of me now.” She gives a bitter laugh and shrugs a little. As sorry as she’s feeling for herself right now -- with the alcohol and the break-up with Joffrey and the stupid chances she took -- she’ll feel even worse with her hangover in the morning. And if that’s the worst she has to deal with, then she’ll count herself the luckiest girl in LA.
But Jon pulls her yellow throw blanket over her shoulders, crouches down in front of her, and peels a stray lock of her hair back from her face. His eyes flick between hers a few times, and Sansa tries for a smile, even though she knows it looks weak.
“I’m glad you called, Sansa.” At his words, a warm flicker coils up in her chest, and Sansa’s eyes fly up to his. Jon looks painfully earnest. His gray eyes look kind and more than a little weary in the dim lamplight in her girlish room, and Sansa suddenly can’t remember why she ever let herself forget that Jon was close by. Close enough to remind her of home, even in a place like this.
“You should stay,” she repeats, biting her lip a little, looking at his lips. A little fleeting thought, that she would probably like kissing lips like Jon’s, is gone as quick as it’s come, but it’s there now. “It’s a long drive back to Pasadena.”
Jon doesn’t argue with her this time. Instead, he refills her glass and finds a couple of aspirin in her cabinet and lingers in the doorway for an instant, framed by the hall light.
“I’ll be right here anytime you need,” he says as Sansa dips toward the relief of sleep, pulling the door behind him and leaving it cracked.