Archive of Our Own

“There’s just more soup,” Sam informs Joan upon picking up, and then makes a disgruntled face at her cell phone, as if it’s the technology’s fault that her voice sounds like meat going through a wood chipper, instead of her burgeoning laryngitis and the fact that she hasn’t spoken to another human being in the last seventy-two hours.

There’s a pause, and then Joan says, “I’m sorry?”

Sam coughs a little to clear her throat. “I’m at the grocery store,” she tries again, and sounds a little less gravelly this time.

“Oh. Is this a bad time? I can call back later.”

Sam sighs and grabs three of the first can in front of her. It advertises “from can to bowl in three minutes” and may or may not contain chicken. She’s eaten worse. “No, it’s fine, I can talk. Unless— Is that rude? To take a phone call in the grocery store?” She looks around and decides, “It’s fine, the place is pretty empty. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to check in, see how your travels are going. Where have you ended up this week?”

Sam rubs her nose, sniffs. “Wisconsin? Some backwoods farming town. Population 6 or something ridiculous like that.”

“That’s… quite a change from your trips so far. Weren’t you in Monte Carlo last week?”

“Yeah, and trust me, I needed the opposite for a while.” The second her flight landed, she opened an outdated road atlas of middle America and drove to the first town her finger landed on that had a cafe and a gas station. “Got a quaint little townhouse on Airbnb. Firmly exhausted the delivery options in the first three days. Now I’m trying to— Oh. Hang on—”

She holds her phone to her shoulder and ducks into her opposite elbow with a tightly repressed sneeze, trying her hardest to keep it quiet.

“Bless you,” Joan’s voice says distractedly from the phone.

Sam sniffles, pressing a knuckle to her nose until she’s sure she’s not gonna sneeze again, and then brings her phone back to her ear as she pushes her cart into the next aisle. “Thanks, sorry. I’m stocking my kitchen, is what I was trying to say.”

“That’s good,” Joan says, and then, “Are you all right? I thought it was just a bad connection, but you sound… a little rough.”

“Ugh. Yeah. I think I’m getting a cold.”

That’s the real reason she braved the outdoors today, if she’s being honest. Because once this really hits her, she’s not going to want to do much more than lay on the couch for a week straight, and she’s already sick of takeout.

“You have been traveling a lot,” Joan sympathizes. “Stress can take a toll on your immune system, plus airplanes are a cesspool of disease—”

“I’ll be fine,” Sam interrupts before Joan can delve into the science of it. She turns into the produce aisle. “Just gonna drink lots of fluids and—”

She stops short, almost tipping her shopping cart over, and stares at the man restocking oranges at the end of the aisle.

Her body recognizes him before her brain does, her stomach doing a sick little flip the second she lays eyes on him, even as she can almost convince herself it’s someone else. His hair is a little longer, choppy bangs like he cut them himself falling into his eyes. He’s gained some weight, or maybe some muscle—anyway, he’s not so awfully skinny, and there’s healthy color in his cheeks, like he’s gotten some sun. He’s wearing the employee uniform of the grocery store, an orange vest and a matching trucker cap, but there’s no mistaking him.

“Damien,” Sam breathes, too quiet for him to possibly hear, but he looks up anyway and freezes, eyes flashing with not-quite anger.

“Sam?” Joan prompts. “Are you still there? You stopped talking.”

The phone almost fumbles out of her hand. “I gotta go, Joan, sorry, it’s— I’ll call you later.”

She hangs up before her friend can protest, and then stands there in the resultant silence for a minute and wonders if that was the right thing to do. No one knows where she is now. Or that she’s alone. With Damien. 

She could walk away. Abandon her cart, hop into her rental car, and cancel the rest of her Airbnb reservation once she’s made it far enough out of town.

Or she could say hi.

He’s resumed his shelving, taking individual oranges from a shopping cart of crates of them and adding them to a delicate pyramid. He doesn’t stop, or even look at her, when Sam guides her own cart alongside.

“You’re pretty good at that,” she says, nodding at the pile of fruit. “I would’ve knocked the whole thing over by now for sure.”

He spares her the briefest glance, and hands her the next orange. Her stomach flips again, but she takes it and puts it in her cart. Oranges are good for colds, right? Vitamin C and all that.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, trying to sound casual about it, like they’re old acquaintances running into each other, instead of… whatever the hell they are.

“I live here,” Damien drawls. His voice sends a shiver down her spine, straight out of her nightmares. But he’s stiff as he moves his cart to the other side of the display and starts adding to a pile of green apples—like she makes him nervous. “You’re not gonna run me out of this town too, are you?”

“No,” Sam says. Not without reason, anyway. “You work here?”

He fixes her with a truly unimpressed glare. “No, I just have a passion for produce arrangement.” He looks down again, focusing on his work (or maybe he just can’t stand to keep eye contact with her for more than a second). After a beat, he says, “Yes. I work here. And a few other places, I like to keep busy.”

Sam blinks, surprised by his tone: short, matter-of-fact, maybe a little bit shy. “I’m… sure you do.”

It’s been a long time since she’s been around Damien’s ability, and even when she was semi-regularly, it was always more of a gaslighting elephant in the room than something he actively used on her specifically, so she’s not sure she could recognize it now if she tried. If it has come back after all this time, she doesn’t think he’s using it on her. Wouldn’t she want to leave if he was? Or is he what’s making her want to stay?

Sam shifts her weight from foot to foot, sniffling when her nose starts to run down her upper lip. (Gross.) She wipes it on the cuff of her sleeve and, with no other option presenting itself, says, “So… how have you been?”

She winces at how awkward and insincere she sounds. Damien’s dramatic sigh doesn’t help. He piles apples with more fervor.

“No, I don’t have my ability back; no, I haven’t done anything illegal—well, more illegal than using the fake ID you made me—and no, I haven’t been back east since—”

“—since you saw Chloe in that diner?”

His eyes snap up to meet hers. “How the hell do you know about that?”

She gets a sick little thrill at having the upper hand for once. “I was on the phone with her at the time.”

Damien rolls his eyes. “God, of course you were. Goddamn graduate of the Joan Bright School of Privacy Violation.”

She scoffs. “Look who’s talking!”

They glare at each other across the fruit display for a moment, and then Damien seems to remember that glaring counts as looking and tears his gaze away from her. Some of the animosity bleeds out of him, leaving him subdued and self-conscious again as he admits, “No, uh. I was actually. I was in Boston after that. Once. With Rose, I— I had to check on a friend.” He waves a hand. “But that was two, three years ago. Clearly none of your crew found out about it.”

Sam frowns. He’s right, she didn’t know that. Why bother telling her, then?

“Well… good,” she says, flexing her hands around the handle of her shopping cart. “It’s good that you’re staying out of trouble. That was the whole point, right?”

He opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it. Picks up a precariously-placed apple and moves it over to a new spot.

Sam doesn’t know where to go from here. Or why she stopped to talk to Damien in the first place. She needs to finish her shopping, and take some prophylactic cold medicine, and maybe go to sleep.

“All right, then. I guess I’ll just—”

“How is… Boston?” Damien says, stopping her. He’s still fussing with the apples; all that’s left in his cart are bags of grapes, which go on a shelf along the far wall. He’s not looking at her. She knows what he’s really asking.

“Mark is good,” she says. She believes that Damien’s still powerless, that she doesn’t have to tell him anything, and yet... “Bought a house last month. Working in professional photography.” She pauses, then adds, “He’s seeing someone.”

He raises a brow. “Someone?”

“Yes, someone. We... broke up a long time ago.”

A ghost of his familiar smirk starts to curl at Damien’s lip. “Gee, I hope it wasn’t on my account.”

Sam rolls her eyes, wishing her cheeks weren’t hot. “Don’t flatter yourself. It just didn’t work out between us. But he’s happy now. For once.”

Without either of us, she doesn’t say, but it hangs in the air between them anyway.

Damien nods, returning to his fruit. “Good. He deserves to be.”

Before Sam can decide how to feel about that, the store PA system kicks on, and a garbled voice says, “Damien, clean up on Aisle Seven. Damien to Aisle Seven.”

“That’s—” Damien says unnecessarily, pointing at the ceiling. “I should—”

“Yeah.” Sam’s already turning her cart away. “Me too. I’ll… see you around, I guess.”

“Or not,” he says flatly. “Not would be fine too.”

He pushes his cart away, and doesn’t look back.

Of course there’s a line at the coffee shop.

Sam did not sleep well last night. A summer storm pounded jackhammers of rain onto the thin roof of her rented townhouse, making her jump with every crash of thunder. The more she lay there and swallowed, the more her throat transitioned from “something she was more aware of than usual” to “decidedly sore.” And she couldn’t stop thinking about Damien.

Despite her greatest desire to forget she’d ever seen him and move on with her life, she still can’t stop thinking about Damien.

She shivers in three layers as the line slowly inches forward. In her haste to leave the grocery store yesterday without another run-in, she forgot to get tea, and fake chicken soup was just not going to cut it.

She wants nothing more than to wrap herself in a blanket with a hot cup of chamomile and binge-watch Gilmore Girls. But the one coffee shop in this town doesn’t deliver, and hell if she’s going back to the grocery store anytime soon.

She coughs into her sleeve, earning a dirty look from the couple in front of her, and hugs herself, wishing she could sink into the floor.

Stupid Damien, distracting her from getting everything she needed before she felt this bad. Stupid Damien, making her lie awake wondering what he’s been up to the last few years, if he’s been ruining some other poor soul’s life or if he’s actually, finally learned how to be a person. Stupid, stupid Damien—

—is standing behind the counter when the line clears.

“Crap,” he mutters when he sees her, putting down the paper cup he’d been writing on. He’s in another dumb uniform: green apron, black baseball cap. His name tag reads “Robert (he/him)”.

“Of course,” Sam sighs, hugging herself tighter. “You work here too?”

“I told you, I like to keep busy.” He grabs the cup again, finishes whatever he was writing, and passes it to another barista down the line. “Don’t go to the bookstore tomorrow.”

Sam rolls her eyes, but a sudden tickle in her nose saves her from having to come up with a good retort. She turns away, covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve, and crushes four sneezes into as close to silence as she can manage. She blushes at how wet they sound, despite her best effort to rein them in.

When she raises her head again, sniffling, Damien’s staring at her. “You look like shit. Did you look like shit yesterday?”

She glares at him, sure her face is red. “I have a cold. It’s… settling in.”

He considers her for a moment, something she can’t read in his eyes, and then jerks his chin toward the tables in the back of the cafe and grabs a new paper cup. “Go sit down, I’ll be right there.”

She frowns. “What? Why? What are you doing?”

“I’m making you your drink.”

“But I didn’t order anything yet.”

“Will you just—?” He looks at her, exasperated, and visibly bites back the words trust me.

She should laugh.

He huffs, glaring down at the counter for a moment, and then meets her eyes with less fury this time. “Look. You gave me the money and means to start my life over after I just about ruined yours. This—” He gestures around himself at the cafe, the hand-painted menu with “Barista Creation” proudly describing half the specials— “is part of my life now, and I’m good at it. The least I can do is give you a free coffee.”

Sam hesitates. In all her most generous imaginings of what Damien would do with himself after leaving Boston, she never pictured him… thriving. Participating in society. Not being a dick about something.

He glares at her and growls, “I won’t spit in it, I swear.”

“Fine,” she says, if only because her throat hurts and she doesn’t feel like arguing with him. “I’ll be over there.” She starts to head for a table in the corner, then remembers to tell him, “Hot tea, actually, would be great. Nothing fruity.”

“You got it,” Damien says with a roll of his eyes, but he puts her cup on the opposite counter next to a box of tea bags.

At the corner table, she puts her head down on her folded arms and coughs where she can’t see people glaring at her. It eases some of the thickness in her chest but makes her throat burn, and she has to bite back a whimper when the fit finally passes.

She doesn’t know how long it’s been when heat wafts over her arm and Damien’s gravelly voice says, “Sit up. Here.”

She raises her head just enough to peer suspiciously at the cup he put in front of her. “What’s in it?”

“Echinacea and a shit-ton of honey.”

Honey sounds glorious, but she’s still not sure it’s safe to drink something Damien made for her free of charge.

He must know what she’s thinking, because he rolls his eyes again and snaps, “Look, drink it or don’t, but the healthcare’s shit in this town so you’re better off nipping this thing in the bud. Take this home and go to bed. Or throw it out for all I care.”

Sam looks up at him, too tired to confidently parse his expression for any hint of dishonesty. Before she can talk herself out of it, she picks up the cup and takes a sip.

She almost moans. The tea is sweet and earthy, hot enough to open up her airways but not enough to scald her tongue. She grabs a napkin from the dispenser on the table when the steam makes her nose run, but she doesn’t dare blow it with Damien standing there.

“It’s good,” she admits, dabbing at her upper lip. “Thank you.”

He shrugs. “Like I said, I owed you.”

Her nose itches. She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth to try to stave off the tickle, but it doesn’t work. As her eyes flutter closed, she hurries to fold the napkin over her mouth and nose and crumples in on herself with a harsh, wet sneeze.

Damien makes a small noise in the back of his throat, or maybe she imagines it. She stays doubled over, palms steepled over her nose with the now-wet napkin serving as a thin barrier between them. Damien’s gaze is like hot coals on the side of her face, making her shrink in on herself to avoid getting burned, and she still has to sneeze.

Another one barrels out of her. She has to grab a fresh napkin to clean herself up with when the first one practically disintegrates in her hands. She gasps, and sneezes again, helpless and unrestrained and loud, like she usually only lets herself when she’s alone. 

“Fuck,” she bites out, cheeks burning. She doesn’t remember the last time she was this sick. On her first road trip, maybe, looking for Mark (and how ironic, really, that his then-captor has just made her tea). At least then, she was able to hide in her hotel room, order room service, and be disgusting in private like God intended. She doesn’t think she’s ever been sick like this in front of people. Strangers and… again, whatever the hell Damien is. Three years ago, she would’ve been so mortified to be in public like this, she probably would’ve time traveled by now. God, how far she’s come. 

“You sound like shit, too,” Damien says helpfully. “Where are you staying?”

She tries to laugh and ends up coughing, wiping her nose with another napkin. “Like hell I’m telling you that.”

“Right. Whatever.” He reaches into his pocket and drops a blue cardboard package on the table. NyQuil. “We had some in the back. Go home, Sam.”

She stares at the box, and at her tea, and risks a painful swallow so that tears don’t spring to her eyes. “I would love to,” she whispers, and doesn’t even care whether or not he hears her.

“How are you feeling?” Joan asks, and even if they weren’t on FaceTime, Sam’s pretty sure she’d be able to hear the pitying frown in her friend’s voice.

It’s the next afternoon, and Sam is feeling decidedly worse. She’s been camped out on the couch for the better part of the last twenty-four hours, dozing in fits and starts rather than ever attempting to actually go to bed. She’s choked down three bowls of Thicken Noodle Soup more because she knew she should eat than because she was hungry, and between naps, she’s been cycling through her favorite episodes of various comfort shows and drinking a lot of tea.

Because yesterday at the coffee shop, she sat and waited until Damien went on break, and then she slipped an extra $100 to the 18-year-old who took his place at the register so he’d fill six catering cartons with the echinacea blend and carry them out to her car for her. 

It’s not as good as that first cup Damien made her, but it’ll do.

“I’ve felt better,” she admits to Joan, hunching further down into her blanket cape. It’s a purple fuzzy thing she found in the linen closet that she’ll either have to steal, burn, or pay to have power-washed when she leaves this place because it’s soft and warm and she ran out of tissues six hours ago. Her laptop on the coffee table shows Joan in her office, her smart pantsuit and glasses a sharp contrast to Sam’s general state of disarray. She would probably care under different circumstances. Hell, she probably would’ve cared yesterday. But her voice has been coming in and out as it is, nasal and raw with her constants dulled beyond intelligibility, so she wanted to at least give Joan a half-chance at reading her lips.

Somehow, yesterday’s shame at being perceived when she’s like this hasn’t applied to Joan. Maybe because they know each other so well. Or because the cold’s progressed far enough that now she’s too miserable to be self-conscious.

But she would’ve answered the phone anyway. When she first left Boston for this world tour of hers, Joan said, “Should I expect to be ghosted for another month?” They laughed it off as a callback to a sadder, stranger time; she teased Joan for using the word “ghosted” in a mostly-appropriate context. But Sam’s stomach hurt for days afterwards. When Joan calls now, Sam always answers.

On the screen, Joan’s frown deepens clinically, and her hand leaves the frame like she’s reaching for something on her desk. “What are your symptoms?”

“Joan."

“I know, I know, I’m not a medical doctor, but I am your friend, and I’m worried about you.” She sets her notebook in front of her, pen in hand, and raises her eyebrows expectantly. “Humor me.”

Sam sighs, and then coughs, only half-raising her sleeve to cover, and shifts her position on the couch so she can reach the roll of paper towels she brought over in lieu of tissues. “Sore throat,” she reports, evidenced by how raspy she sounds. “Headache, but I think that’s mostly sinus pressure.” She sniffs, or tries to. “Oh, I’ve officially passed the point of being able to breathe through my nose, so that’s fun.” She folds a paper towel into a square and dabs it under her nostrils, wincing at the sting. “I cough pretty much every time I breathe, and I keep sneezing in fits of about a million, both of which are made extra fun by the aforementioned sore throat." 

She drops her hand into her lap, tired just from the act of lifting it. "What's my prognosis, Doc?”

Joan studies her, concern in the curve of her lip. “Did you get your flu shot this year?”

"It's just a cold, Joan. I don't get sick very often, so when I do, it hits me like this—hard and— and fast—” Her breath starts to hitch. She scrubs futilely at her nose, reaching blindly for another paper towel, but she only manages to knock the roll over before she’s forced to wrap her elbow, and by extension the blanket, around her face instead, to catch three wet sneezes in a row. Her face flushes hot with exertion, as well as the renewed mortification at the knowledge that Joan’s just sitting there watching her. She presses her wrist against her nose, trying to quash the itch, but all it does is make the next five sneezes come out pinched and painful through her teeth. 

When the fit finally tapers, she gasps a desperate, necessary breath that sends her coughing, harsh and wet from the chest. By the time she can breathe again, there are tears in her eyes, and her nose and throat and chest all burn. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. If she weren’t more than a little anxious about what a virus might do to her ability, she would go on a trip right now just to stop having a body for a little while.

“My goodness, Sam,” Joan’s voice says from her computer. “Bless you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone sneeze that much, is that normal for you?”

“Sneezing is not normal,” Sam grumbles as she finally gets her hands on a clean paper towel. “I never sneeze.”

She remembers only from the blank look she gets that Joan is just about the worst person to make pop culture references to. She shakes her head, like, Never mind, and mutes her computer mic while she blows her nose.

“You look flushed,” Joan adds when she’s finished. “Do you have a fever?”

“Ugh. Probably.” Sam crumples up her makeshift tissue and presses the back of one hand to her hot cheek. “But Da— uh.” She flushes hotter, redirects. “I already took NyQuil.”

She’s been debating, for going on two days now, exactly what to tell Joan. About Damien. That she’s seen him twice now, in this nowhere town. That he’s been… nice to her. If it’s even worth saying anything at all.

“That has acetaminophen in it,” Joan says, luckily seeming not to have noticed her slip, “you should take some ibuprofen too. And take your temperature when you can, just for a baseline.” She bites her lip. “Maybe I should fly out there.”

“Don’t you dare,” Sam scoffs. “You have patients, and I’m two hundred miles from the nearest airport, I’d be better before you could get here.”

“I suppose… You know, Mark and Oliver are in Chicago this weekend—”

“Oh my God, Joan, you cannot send my ex and his new boyfriend to check on me!” Sam stares her down, mortified. “I am finally on good terms with Mark again, I would like to keep it that way.”

“Fine, fine.” Joan checks her watch with a sigh. “I should go, Jackson will be here any minute.”

Sam pumps her eyebrows. “Ooh, in your office?”

“For a meeting, Samantha,” Joan insists, her cheeks reddening. “We are keeping our relationship very professional, I’ll have you know.”

“I’m sure you are,” Sam says around a smile. Her heart pangs at the thought of being alone again once Joan hangs up. “Well. Good luck. Tell him I say hi.”

“Call me,” Joan makes her promise, “if there’s anything I can do. Or even just if you feel worse and want some sympathy.”

“Will do. Bye, Joan.”

She hangs up, and stares at her depressing reflection in the black screen of her laptop for a moment before she shuts it. She feels newly exhausted, and disgusting beyond belief. She should take a shower. She should make more tea. She should eat something with actual ingredients, and maybe a vegetable. Getting off the couch feels so impossible.

Just as she’s trying to work up the energy to at least slice up the orange Damien gave her, the doorbell rings.

Sam stares down the front hallway, certain she must have imagined it. She’s not expecting a delivery. Not even Jackson could help Joan surprise her two seconds after she got off the phone.

No one else knows she’s here except Mary Linn, the middle-aged woman who owns the Airbnb, and Sam paid extra to make her swear she wouldn’t drop in unannounced.

The doorbell rings again. Sam’s curiosity wins out against her reluctance to move. She wraps her blanket more firmly around her shoulders and shuffles down the hall. There’s no peephole, but she’s a little too tired and sick to be anxious about strangers at her door, so she doesn’t hesitate to throw it open.

Damien’s standing on the front porch. He’s in jeans and a “Shop Small” t-shirt, slouching with his hands in his pockets. At his feet is a pile of shopping bags, each full to bursting.

He looks at Sam, like he’s waiting for her to speak first, like she’s the one out of place here.

So she says, “I thought you were working at the bookstore today.”

He pauses. Makes a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. Says, “Closing shift. Don’t have to be there till three.”

“Okay,” Sam says, because her brain must not be working quite right today. “What… are you doing here?”

He shrugs, crossing his arms over his chest. “You seemed pretty sick yesterday. Thought you might need some supplies.”

“You literally saw me at the grocery store two days ago.”

“Yeah, and you had like three things in your cart before you freaked out and left.”

She glowers at him, but doesn’t argue. She thinks, for once, he might not be trying to start an argument. “How’d you even know where I was?”

Damien rolls his eyes. “This is not exactly a tourist town, Sam. Mary Linn only put this place on Airbnb so the state would get off her back about opening a hotel. While you’re on vacation, she’s crashing on the futon in my living room.”

Sam blinks at him, slow to follow. “You know Mary Linn?”

“Everyone knows Mary Linn. She’s the head of our town council. And she owns the grocery store.”

“Sure,” Sam says, as if this all makes perfect sense.

He keeps staring at her expectantly. Because apparently Sam has sacrificed half her brain capacity and all her common sense to this fucking cold, she says, “Come on in, then. I guess.”

She sits on a barstool at the kitchen island, hugging her stolen blanket around herself as Damien unpacks his wares. Tea and honey. Noodles and a thousand different vegetables and a whole, actual chicken. He hands her a box of lotion-infused tissues, and she tears it open immediately, not even caring that he can hear her blow all the congestion out of her nose. 

He putters around the kitchen like he knows it better than she does, putting a pot on the stove for soup and a kettle for tea. He chops vegetables and shreds chicken and digs a pump-bottle of lavender soap out of the back of the cabinet under the sink to wash his hands. He cleans up after himself as he goes, not saying anything, and Sam just sits there, sniffling, and watches him.

Eventually, Damien plops onto a stool across from her and sets down a steaming mug of tea. Even through her stuffy nose, Sam can smell the warm fragrance of peppermint wafting off of it.

She makes no move to take the mug.

Damien says, “Soup’ll take a while.”

Sam says, “‘S fine. I ate.”

Damien’s eyes flit to the empty fridge and back. He makes a disbelieving sound, gets up from the table, and comes back with a bowl of orange slices.

His nose is still a little crooked from when she, and then Caleb, punched him. She never saw him smoke in the brief time she knew him, and yet his fingers twitch where they rest on the table like he’s jonesing for a cigarette. Reaching for something he can’t quite touch.

She saw him once, in the past, holding a mug to Mark’s lips when he was barely strong enough to sit upright without help, pressing tender fingers to his forehead to check for fever and whispering, There you go, big guy. Let’s get you better.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks, voice a rough whisper.

Damien chews on an orange slice, not quite meeting her eyes. “Doing what?”

“Sitting there. Making me soup. Being… nice to me.”

He rolls his eyes, some of his signature snark returning. “Well, jeez, my bad for trying to be neighborly.”

“We’re not— neighbors!” she reminds him. “We’re… I— punched you in the face and turned you in to an evil organization that kept you chained to a bed for two months. You threatened to make me kill myself so you could kidnap a seventeen-year-old kid and use him as a hostage. I made you a fake ID so my boyfriend could run you out of town, for God’s sake! We’re not friends.”

“We were in love with the same man,” Damien snaps, finally hitting her with a steely glare. Her own words thrown back at her make Sam’s stomach flip. “I think that entitles me to care whether you live or die.”

“I have a cold, Damien, I am in no danger of dying.”

“Then, Jesus Christ, Samantha, maybe I’m just trying to be a better person now! God, were you this much of a bitch when Mark would take care of you?”

His name sits in the silence between them like a bullet suspended in mid-air. Sam wants very much not to be hit by it, but she doesn’t necessarily want to fling it back at him either.

She’s so tired. The NyQuil must be wearing off, or maybe just talking to Damien exhausts her, because she’s starting to feel her sore throat again, her aching muscles, the fever flush to her neck and cheeks.

She sighs, and coughs, turning away and half-heartedly raising her blanket sleeve to cover. Damien slides the mug of tea closer to her, and this time she actually takes a sip.

Of course it’s fucking delicious.

“Thank you,” she says after a moment, fiddling with the teabag string. She means it, and also sort of means, I’m sorry.

He makes a small sound, not quite a hmmph, but doesn’t say anything, just sits there, tapping his forefinger against the table and watching her drink her tea. 

Sam doesn’t know how to break the silence, how to go back to the weird and confusing, but not so damn awkward, dynamic they had between them a second ago. Or why she even wants to. He brought the groceries over. She can finish the soup herself, probably (the idea sounds exhausting, but she could rally if she wanted to). She should thank him again, and then tell him to leave. And then she should really tell Joan she ran into him, just in case. Just so it’s not a secret. 

She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at him, but doesn’t let herself care that he’s looking at her, or that she’s sure she looks disgusting. 

After a minute, the pot on the stove starts to burble, and Damien pushes his chair back and gets up to stir it. Sam finds her gaze following him without her express permission, finds herself taking note of the way his hair curls around his ears, of the tiny hole in the collar of his t-shirt, of the chunky old cell phone sticking out of his back pocket. How natural he looks with a ladle in his hand. How he passes an easy hand through his hair to move it out of his eyes. It’s hard to believe he’s even real, much less the same person to teach her what true hatred felt like.

“Were?” she says a bit later, her sluggish brain finally catching up to his earlier words. Damien hums questioningly without taking his eyes off the stove, so she elaborates, “You said we… were in love with the same man. You’re not… You don’t still have feelings for Mark?”

Damien goes so still she almost regrets asking. His grip tightens on the wooden spoon he’s been stirring with, muscles flexing in the back of his hand. But his voice, when he speaks, is soft with vulnerability. “Fuck, I don’t know… I haven’t seen him in three years. I’ve been trying to— There’s this girl, here—”

“Girl?”

He looks over his shoulder at her, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Yes.”

Sam shrugs. “I… didn’t know you liked girls.”

“People can be bisexual, Sam, I know you know that.”

Her face heats. “I know people can be, I just didn’t think you were.”

“What did you think I—” Damien’s voice rises, but then he cuts himself off, lips pressed tightly closed, and huffs out an affronted breath through his nose. He turns back to the stove and gives the soup a vigorous stir. “No, I’m not still in love with Mark,” he says after a beat, adjusting the stove’s heat a little. “Not… in any way that matters. Because I’m never going to see him again.” He lays the spoon on its rest and turns back to her, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest. “What about you?”

Sam blushes again, even though it’s a reasonable question, and there’s not a hint of judgment or accusation in how he asks it. She sips her tea as an excuse to stall a moment, then says, “I’m not… in love with him either. In any way that matters. I’ll probably see him pretty soon, though, he and my girlfriend have, like, a book club thing going on.”

Damien sputters a laugh. “Girlfriend?”

She glares at him, cheeks burning. “People can be bisexual, Damien.”

He doesn’t take the bait. “You’re here, in this podunk town, with the cold from hell, and you’re telling me you’ve got a girlfriend waiting for you back home?”

“Yes?” Her stomach swoops. That’s not such a ridiculous thought, is it? She spoke to Mags three days ago when her plane landed. She’ll call again when she’s feeling better. Talking to Joan when she feels and looks and sounds like shit is one thing, but Mags doesn’t want to be around her when she’s like this, and they’re not exactly the type of couple who need to be in each other’s pockets all the time. That’s the mistake she made with Mark. “So what?”

“Does she know where you are?”

“I didn’t send her my location, but she knows I’ve been traveling the last few months.”

“Without her.”

“She’s busy. She works for the AM.”

She means that to shut him up, but he doesn’t even blink, like it makes perfect sense for Sam to be dating an employee of the organization that kidnapped her ex. “Does she know you’re sick?”

“Of course she does.” Probably. Sam didn’t exactly tell her in as many words, but she sent a picture of the TV when she was watching Gilmore Girls this morning, and Mags sent back, “<3 poor girl” which means either Joan told her or Mags just knows enough to recognize Sam’s comfort show. 

Damien shakes his head a little, like he doesn’t believe her, an infuriating smirk held between his teeth. He looks at her for a moment, then says, “She know I’m here?”

Sam levels her best death glare at him. “She doesn’t even know who you are, Damien. You’re not exactly my favorite person to talk about.”

His smirk fades, expression closing off in an instant. The lighting shifts, casting shadow across his face, and for a moment, he looks like his old self again: dark circles beneath his eyes, gaunt curves to his cheeks, bottom lip twitching like he can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. 

Sam can’t bear to look at him anymore. She still doesn’t know what he’s doing here. God, who is she kidding? She doesn’t know what she’s doing here. In this town. In this kitchen. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t kicked him out yet. She doesn’t know why she’s able to sit here, drinking tea he made her, and not feel so self-conscious, but the thought of FaceTiming her girlfriend of two and a half years when her nose is running and her face is all flushed makes her want to vomit. 

Music starts playing from Damien’s back pocket, a song Sam vaguely recognizes from a playlist Oliver Ritz made her called “Byron, your friends’ music taste is shit.” She only realizes it’s Damien’s phone ringing when he pulls it out, and then, no, a timer maybe, because he doesn’t answer it, just makes a face and stabs at the screen, cutting the song short.

“Soup ready?” 

He grabs the spoon again. “Uh, no, not yet. Couple minutes.”

“What song was that? Your ringtone?”

Damien glances over his shoulder at her. “Fuck do you care?’

Sam rolls her eyes. “Jesus, Robert, I’m just making conversation.”

He scoffs and turns away again, grumbling something under his breath.

“What was that?”

“It’s Carly Rae Jepsen,” he growls. “Ever heard of her?”

The danger in his voice only serves to make the sentence that much more ridiculous. Sam laughs so hard she snorts, snot bubbling out of her nose. “I’m sorry,” she says through her giggles as she grabs for a tissue. “I didn’t realize you were such a fan of bubblegum pop.”

“It’s— experimental.” Damien turns back to her, wielding his wooden spoon like a weapon. “And you are one to talk about taste, I’ve seen how you decorate.”

“We’re not talking about my furniture, Damien.” She elects not to point out that he bled over half that furniture. “Which song’s your favorite? Call Me Maybe? Or would that one hit a nerve?”

She can’t stop smiling, and somehow, even through his glare, Damien’s biting the inside of his cheek like maybe he’s enjoying himself too. “You are such a bitch sometimes, do you know that? That song was number 1 on the Top 40 for, like, nine weeks straight. And I’m not even talking about that, I’m talking about her new stuff, okay? Emotion? Cut to the Feeling is fucking— revolutionary, and Mark knew all the words to Warm Blood last I checked, so take it up with him next time you wanna shit on an icon.”

He punctuates his speech with a wave of the spoon, flicking droplets of soup onto the counter. Sam just grins at him. She could keep making fun of him. She could tease him about Mark’s new boyfriend sharing his taste in music. She could ruin the mood entirely by snapping at him about how Mark wouldn’t have had a choice in the music they listened to on their road trip from hell.

She doesn’t want to. 

Their easy conversation continues, somehow, as Sam props her elbow on the table to hold her head up and Damien starts getting bowls down from higher cabinets. He asks her what kind of music is her favorite, if she’s gonna be so high and mighty about his, so she tells him about Mags getting her into Bruce Springsteen lately, to which Damien asks how “horny white boy rock” is in any way better than bubblegum pop.

As he’s doling out ladlefuls of chicken noodle soup, his phone goes off again, and he holds it up so Sam can hear better, making intense eye contact with her while he mouths, I wanna dance on the roof. Her giggles seem to spur him on. He abandons the soup in favor of holding the spoon to his mouth like a microphone and dramatically lip synching, and soon enough, Sam’s laughing so hard she breaks into a coughing fit.

Is this how Mark felt, that summer driving from nowhere to nowhere with Damien? Before he knew what was happening, that he’d been lied to, did he have silly dance parties with him in their shitty motels? How much of that was Damien’s ability keeping him pliant and how much was him just being like this? Dorky and easygoing and… fun?

“Hey. Barnes. Go sit on the couch or something before you fall over.”

Sam blinks, only realizing her vision was blurring when it steadies. She must have missed something, because Damien’s not standing by the stove anymore, and the pot’s been moved to a cool burner, and he’s suddenly much closer to her, looming over her chair with a steaming bowl of soup in each hand. She’s slumped over the table, neck aching and spit pooling in the corner of her mouth. The music’s stopped. Damien’s phone is sitting facedown on the counter. There’s something unreadable in his expression that wasn’t there a moment ago.

Shit, did she fall asleep? How long was Damien trying to rouse her? She sorta remembers voices…

Couch might not be a bad idea.

Once she’s settled in the corner of the sectional with her blanket wrapped tightly around her, Damien hands her her bowl. She almost spills it from how quickly he takes his hands away to avoid touching hers. 

She hunches over herself, more surprised by the shard of hurt that lances through her at his revulsion than by the revulsion itself, and murmurs, “Sorry if I get you sick.”

Damien scoffs, like that’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said ever, and pushes some used tissues off the coffee table so he can sprawl across the couch with his own bowl and kick his feet up, shoveling soup into his mouth like he’s never been fed before. “Eat so you can take something,” he says through a mouthful. “I took your temperature while you were drooling all over the table. Mary Linn said if it gets any higher, your brain’ll start melting into mush.”

Sam pauses, spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. “When did you talk to Mary Linn about me?”

His chewing slows, color spreading up his neck, but he doesn’t look at her, just grunts and waves a dismissive hand. He fishes out the remote from between two couch cushions and scrolls through Netflix’s homepage, making disgruntled faces at all Sam’s favorite shows. Which is as clear an indication as any that he will not be answering her question. She rolls her eyes and focuses on eating.

Damien’s soup is just as good as his tea, hot and hearty and just spicy enough for her to taste through her congestion. The steam makes her nose run, threatening to drip into her bowl. She makes a big show of sniffling and wiping her nose on her sleeve just to get a rise out of Damien, but all he does is pass her the tissue box without looking away from the TV.

He puts on a True Crime show that Sam watched last month, set to low volume with the subtitles on, and settles back into the couch cushion to continue devouring his meal. 

Sam tries to focus on spooning soup into her own mouth and not on the way Damien seems unable to look at her again. It’s crazy how three days ago she thought seeing him at all was one time too many, and now… She feels like she missed something. Or did something wrong. Which is so stupid, she reddens just thinking about it.

Once she’s drained the last of her bowl, Sam leans forward to place it on the coffee table next to Damien’s feet. Moving around makes a fresh tickle start up in her nose, and she presses her face into her elbow, reaching blindly behind her for the tissue box. She sneezes twice, feeling a mortifying amount of wetness splatter across her shirtsleeve.

Damien doesn’t bless her—actually, now that she thinks about it, she doesn’t think he ever has, the dozen times she’s sneezed in front of him in the last forty-eight hours—but he presses a wad of tissues into her hand and then gets up from the couch and disappears into the kitchen while she’s cleaning herself up. He comes back a moment later with two bottles of pills.

“Oh, I still have the NyQuil you gave me,” she tells him, voice muffled behind her hands. She blows her nose, but it fails to make her any less sniffly. This fucking cold. “So you can keep that to replace what you had at the coffee shop.”

“I didn’t have any at the coffee shop,” Damien says, putting one bottle on the table and fighting with the child-resistant cap on the other one. 

Sam frowns. “No, the pack of NyQuil you gave me yesterday? You said you had it in the back.”

“Yep. Lied. Sent the new kid to the pharmacy for it.”

She blinks at him, slowly trying to piece his words together, but she’s distracted by the glare of concentration he’s directing at the pill bottle, which seems to be resisting his attempts to open it. 

“Keep twisting, junior,” she tuts, “all you get is clicks.”

Instead of giving her one of the blank looks she’s always getting from Joan, Damien freezes and snaps his gaze up, nose scrunched in disgust. “I. Cannot believe. You just made a Homestuck reference.”

Sam can’t stop the grin that spreads across her face. At least he’s looking her in the eye again. “Ah, but you understood the reference, sooo… Devil’s Sacrament and all that.”

“You’re— delirious,” he scoffs, shaking his head, but he’s smiling again. Sam doesn’t think she’d ever seen him smile before today. Smirk, sure. Evil grin, maybe. But not like this. It looks nice on him. 

He finally gets the cap off and hands her the bottle. “Two of those to start. When’d you last take NyQuil?”

She pops two red pills in her mouth and washes them down with the rest of her tea. “Like six hours ago?”

“Then two of these, too,” he directs, and hands her the blue bottle. “Hang on, I’ll get you some water.”

He disappears again, and in his absence, it hits Sam. The banter between them, the easy method she’s fallen into of doing what he says, taking what he gives her. It makes her stomach twist dangerously. Herself from three years ago would be furious at her for how careless she’s being, for letting her guard down around Damien for a single second, much less… actually trusting him. Mark and Joan would be furious now if they knew. 

She grabs the little trash can she brought in here this morning but quickly gave up on using for its intended purpose, and starts to clear the used tissues off the floor and coffee table, cleaning up her nest at least a little bit. Her heart’s racing, her hands trembling a little. It’s too soon for the medicine to be kicking in, and yet she can’t help feeling like her thoughts are becoming clearer. Like now, only now, three days into whatever mental breakdown she must be having, she’s starting to realize exactly what she’s doing here. Trusting Damien. Laughing with him. Sitting in his presence and feeling something other than hate. 

For a moment, she considers the possibility that his ability came back after all. That he’s making her trust him. But why would he do that? He acted like he wanted nothing to do with her the first two times they ran into each other. She’s not a mind manipulator. So what could have possibly possessed him to come here today? Could he really just have been worried about her? 

When he returns, armed with a fresh cup of tea and her Stanley, Sam curls up in the corner of the sectional, trying to make herself as small as possible, and considers him, as if for the first time.

He’s still Damien—surly and sarcastic, with glares that could cut steel and wisecracks like a forked tongue in his mouth, ready to strike. But he’s also so different, and not just physically. He’s got three jobs. There’s a girl here. Someone trusts him enough to crash in his living room when there’s a stranger renting her house. 

He came back to Boston “to check on a friend” and Sam didn’t even know about it. 

Maybe he’s not tricking her. Maybe she’s not going crazy. Maybe he’s just… changed.

“Can I ask you something?” she says around the straw of her thermos, looking up at him through her lashes.

Damien squints at her, looking uncomfortable. “Okay.”

She puts her water on the table so she can hug her blanket around herself. “How come they call you Robert at the cafe and Damien at the grocery store?”

His expression does something complicated, like a scowl but not quite angry. She almost expects him to ignore the question, but after a moment, he flops down onto the cushion next to her, manspreading with his arms crossed over his chest like a child mid-tantrum. 

His voice, however, comes out soft and flat, like he’s trying hard not to let any emotion bleed into his tone. “I’ve been here, like. Two years now? When I left… Boston, the last time, I didn’t really know…”

He trails off, but she can guess what the rest of his sentence was going to be. What to do. Where to go. How to be a person.

Damien sniffs, and shifts his weight on the couch a little, glare trained toward the TV. “I just drove around for a while, waiting for something to… click, or— make sense again, I guess. And then I ran out of your money, so I tried to settle down somewhere, at least until I could make some cash of my own. And it was… It was hard. Harder than I thought it would be, harder than it was in Boston right after I lost my ability. At least then, I had—” 

He cuts himself off again, huffs out a breath, tries again. “Anyway, the first couple towns didn’t work out. So then, when I got here, and Mary Linn from the town council took one look at me and decided I was a lost puppy who needed, fucking, friendship. Or something…” 

He looks down, shy all of a sudden. It’s such a rare thing to see from him that Sam almost regrets asking. 

“I didn’t wanna mess it up. And she knew me as Damien, at the store, so when I got the second job, I said I went by Robert, just… just in case something went wrong at one place, maybe it wouldn’t burn all my bridges at the other.”

“Sure,” Sam says, more because she feels like she should fill the silence of his pause than because she’s actually following his logic here. But then again, she’s never had to start over somewhere like he did. She almost (almost) feels bad for making him.

He clears his throat a little, shrugs. “Anyway, it didn’t really work in a town this small, everyone knew my face before I’d even lived here five minutes, but, uh. I don’t know. Lotta queer kids around here, so everyone just kinda calls you what you wanna be called?” He shrugs again, cheeks dusted pink. Embarrassed to have told her? To have cared in the first place?

“What do they call you at the bookstore?” she asks. “‘Hey, you’?”

He glares at her, but there’s a drop of amusement behind his expression that's enough for her to believe he’s not actually angry. Then, his gaze softens, and he says, “You sound better, you feeling better?”

Sam draws in a breath. It snags, and she turns to cough into her sleeve, grateful for the excuse to look away from him. She doesn’t feel so achy any more, that’s for sure, and her nose feels like it’s been rubbed raw but at least it hasn’t been giving her as much trouble. 

“Yeah,” she decides, shrinking back into the cushion with her stolen blanket wrapped around her. “Tons better, thank you.”

More than anything, she just feels tired now, her eyelids growing heavier with each blink. Part of her knows there are things she should do before letting herself fall asleep—pack up the rest of Damien’s soup, maybe take a hot shower, move to the actual bed—but none of that seems important when she’s warm and fed and cozy on the couch. Damien will take care of things. He’s been really good at that lately.

He shifts a little closer, turning the volume up on the TV—she thinks he switched to a Rom-Com at some point, unless Hugh Grant witnessed a murder she didn’t know about—and murmurs, “Go ahead, you can go to sleep.”

Sam nods gratefully and shifts position a little bit, trying to get comfortable, and the next time her eyes fall closed, she lets them stay that way.

Some time later, she becomes aware that her head is pillowed on Damien’s shoulder. He hasn’t shoved her off or anything, so she doesn’t make herself move.

She dozes on and off for a while, breathing in the scent of aftershave and letting the mumbled sound of 90s British love stories lull her to sleep. At some point, she surfaces enough to let the words that have been cycling through her brain actually make it out of her mouth.

“Damien.”

“Hmm?”

“Why were you so nice to me today?”

She feels him turn his head, feels him press his soft lips into her hair. The last thing she hears before sleep completely settles over her is, “Because you looked miserable. And I didn’t want you to be alone.”

Sam wakes up horizontal on the couch, a clean blanket, even fluffier than the one she’d wrapped herself in earlier, tucked neatly over her. She blinks away the fog of a midday nap and gingerly pushes herself up to sitting. 

The TV’s off. Her laptop has been placed on the corner of the coffee table, which has been completely cleared of trash. Next to it sits her Stanley and the two pill bottles, a fresh box of tissues, and a note that says Soup in fridge. Tea in kitchen cabinet. Take more meds after 8pm.

It’s almost nine now, according to the clock on the wall. She slept, Jesus, almost seven hours? Best sleep she’s had in days. 

She doesn’t recognize the handwriting, but it’s not hard to guess who left her the note. 

“Damien?” she calls, voice a barely-there rasp. She grabs her water and gulps down a few deliciously cold sips, then tries again, loud enough for her voice to echo through the small townhouse. 

There’s no response, not that she was really expecting one. He’s probably closing down the bookstore as they speak.

She feels empty inside, like she’s missing more than just his presence. Which is stupid. She didn’t want him here in the first place. He’ll probably show up again tomorrow, right when she’s starting to feel glad to be rid of him.

But he doesn’t show up tomorrow. Or the next day. 

Three days after what Sam would think was a dream if she didn’t have Damien’s handwriting stuck to the fridge as a stark reminder of its reality, she’s on the mend and ready to get out of the house again. She puts Gilmore Girls on while she packs her things, then gets bored of the familiar dialogue and switches to Four Weddings and a Funeral while she deep cleans the townhouse.

She books a flight out of O’Hare back to Boston and sends Joan and Mags screenshots of the itinerary. She checks out of the Airbnb straight from the app, and for lack of a better thanks/apology for the purple blanket she takes with her, leaves Mary Linn a $600 tip.

It’s a two-hour drive to the airport. On her way out of town, she stops at the grocery store for road trip snacks and a fresh bag of lozenges for her lingering cough. Then she swings by the coffee shop for a latte—large, for the long drive ahead, but decaf for the anxiety such a drive is sure to give her. 

She has no good excuse for hitting the bookstore, knowing she’ll sleep on the plane, but she didn’t see Damien at either of his first two jobs, and she does feel some strange obligation to say goodbye. And to thank him, she supposes, for taking such good care of her. 

“Hey there, welcome in,” says the bald man in a flower crown standing behind the register when Sam walks through the door. “What can I help you find today?”

Sam glances around, hoping she’ll spot him stocking shelves or something so she can give the bald guy her usual, “Nothing, thanks, I’m just browsing” and avoid further interaction. But it’s a big store, and she knows she’ll look even stupider peering around every corner for him, so with a steadying breath, she goes up to the counter and says, “Hi, yeah, I have sort of a strange question. Could you tell me if Damien’s working today? Or— Or he might go by Robert, here?” Unless he’s got a third name just for the bookstore. God, that would be just like him. “I’m Sam, his— We’re— I mean, he knows me, you can, like, tell him I’m looking for him?”

She winces at her own words, rambly and awkward, but the guy just gives her a slightly stoned-looking smile and says, “Man, I’m so sorry, but he’s actually not in today.”

“Oh.” Shit, did she miss him at one of the other places? Or— No, duh, it’s not like he works three jobs seven days a week, he’s probably off today. She should’ve thought of that.

She doesn’t know where he lives in this town, or what phone number he’s currently using, and it would take too much time and a strong VPN connection for her to figure it out. But she could probably switch her flight and find someplace to crash an extra day or two…

“Do you know when he’ll be working next?” she asks the bald guy, hoping she doesn’t sound like some kind of crazed stalker.

“Yeahh, uh.” He glances around, then leans across the counter toward her. “Actually, between you and me, guy quit the other day.”

Sam blinks in surprise. “Oh?” Maybe she should’ve inquired more at the coffee shop then. 

“Yeah,” the bookseller continues. “Didn’t even put in two weeks or anything, just got his shifts covered for the rest of the schedule and said he was out. Leaving town, apparently.”

Cold dread starts to spread through Sam’s veins, threatening to choke her. “What? He— He said that? That he’s leaving town?”

“That’s the story,” he says with a shrug. “Thought it might be a family emergency or something, but our owner’s known the guy longer, says he’s always kinda had one foot out the door.”

“Right,” Sam says shakily, backing toward the exit. She feels sick to her stomach all of a sudden, and she’s pretty sure it has nothing to do with her getting over a cold.

I didn’t wanna mess it up, Damien had said. Two years in this town. Jobs and friends and maybe a girl, and now he’s just… gone?

Because of her?

An hour later, she’s on the road, gripping the steering wheel tighter than death to keep her thoughts from straying too far into guilt. She checked back at the grocery store and the coffee shop, and both confirmed it: Damien quit his jobs without notice and left two days ago, the morning after she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. She could track him down if she wanted to, just as easily as she could’ve three years ago.

But she didn’t then, because she knew it wouldn’t be good for her or her friends to know what Damien was up to. And she won’t now, because apparently Damien doesn’t think it’d be good for him, for her to know what he’s up to.

Why else would he run?

Joan calls as she’s crossing the border into Illinois, so Sam pulls into a gas station to answer it.

“You’re coming home!” Joan says, a grin in her voice. “Was Wisconsin that much of a dud? I didn’t think we’d see you before Christmas.”

Sam’s glad that Joan can’t see the grimace on her face as her heart gives a pang of regret. This is her chance, to finally admit everything now that there’s no danger of Damien turning on her. She’s on her way home, he’s off in the wind, and she’s fine. She ran into him. It was nothing. She should tell Joan that. 

But she doesn’t know how she would explain it—that it was kind of nice, to banter with him, to say what she was really thinking without caring about the damage it might do. That he makes good soup and better tea. That he was kind to her. 

“Yeah,” she finds herself saying, resigning herself to a secret that can’t possibly hurt worse than her friend’s reaction to the truth. “No, hey, I couldn’t have picked a better place to catch a cold in, not like I missed very much.”

“You sound a lot better, though, are you feeling better?”

She closes her eyes against the words, almost an exact echo of one of the last things Damien said to her. “Yeah, mm-hmm, much better,” she manages.

“Mags said you tend to be the suffer in silence type about that sort of thing,” Joan says, “but I’m sorry there wasn’t anyone there to take care of you. It sucks being alone when you’re sick.”

Sam blows out a breath. She needs to get over whatever complicated feelings are living in her chest about this, and fast, if she’s ever going to hang out with Chloe or Caleb again. For all she knows, her illness-clouded brain conjured up the whole thing, and she just spent three days alone on a stranger’s couch. 

Maybe that’s better than the alternative.

“I’m just happy to be headed back to Boston,” she says, and tries to mean it. “I missed you. All of you.”

“We missed you too, Sam. It’ll be good to have you home.”