Work Text:
Jada could sneak over to the Winchesters’ apartment to spend time with Sam after her aunt had fallen asleep, but they couldn’t have their date without a sitter.
When Dean offered himself, Jada laughed, assuming he was joking, but he ate lunch and dinner with Dottie Johnson nearly every day for a week. He did puzzles with her and listened to her play piano. He even slow danced with her to Etta James.
“Don’t tell my girlfriend about this,” he grinned as they swayed around the living room. “I told her I can’t dance.”
“You can’t,” said the old woman, “but at least you have that face going for ya.”
By midweek, Jada practically cried tears of joy. When date night rolled around, she gave Dean a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“I see why Sam loves you so much,” she whispered in his ear before leaving with his brother.
Once they’d gone, Dottie gazed at him with a wry smile. “How do you feel about horror movies, handsome?”
Before they even walked in, Sam was second guessing his restaurant choice, a seafood place near the wharf. Jada was from San Francisco; seafood wasn’t exactly special. Other than a grey-haired man perched at the bar, the place was nearly empty when they arrived. He didn’t take it as a good sign.
“This is cozy,” Jada said, as she sat in the chair Sam held for her. “The service should be quick.”
He liked this about her, her positive thinking. She was exceedingly polite, a near shocking trait in his world – including his less-bloody job as the high school librarian. It was as if she believed the world could be bent to her will via gentleness.
She wore a fitted black dress with a wide neckline, secured at her shoulders with little black bows. Her hair was up in one of those magical, effortless twists all women seemed to be able to create, and decorated by a large pink flower. She looked like she’d just stepped off of a film set circa 1963.
“This is so odd,” she said, smoothing her napkin over her lap. “I know this is our first date, but it feels like our third or fifth.”
He grinned, his dimples on full power. “Good! It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten how to do awkward first dates.”
She leaned on her hand and gazed at him with her soft black eyes. “Handsome fellow like yourself, I find it hard to believe it’s been awhile since you’ve been on a date.”
“Well, you know, work. Setting up a life takes up some time.”
“The librarian and the bookkeeper. We sound remarkably dull.”
He looked around the room at the bartender, waiter, and the one patron. “I don’t know. We may be the most exciting people in this room.”
They ordered a bottle of wine to go with their swordfish steak and crab cakes. After a glass and a salad, Jada left for the restroom, and Sam flagged down the waiter.
“If everything all right, sir?”
“Yeah, yeah everything’s great, but I was wondering if you could answer a question for me?”
“I will do my best.”
“Is this place Sunnydale’s best-kept secret? What’s with the low Saturday night turnout?”
The waiter’s posture changed from stiff-shouldered and fake-smiled to shifty-eyed and conspiratorial. “Look, buddy, the boss’d kill me for telling you, but seeing as it was in the paper this morning…Boss came in to open up yesterday and found a body in the parking lot.”
“A body? Like, a dead body?”
“Deader than a doornail.”
Sam leaned in closer, his voice low. “Were there any marks? Like, on the neck?”
“What are we whispering about?” Jada asked brightly as she sat down.
Before Sam could stop him, the waiter who was in full juicy gossip mode blurted, “The body in the parking lot, miss.”
Jada gave Sam a worried look. “Currently in the parking lot?”
“No, miss, yesterday morning. He had two punctures on his neck, and he’d been exsanguinated. That means all his blood was drained.”
“Thank you for that information. Would you mind getting me a coffee?” Jada asked, flashing her thousand-watt smile. Eager to please, the waiter happily scurried away. Her eyes wide with shock, Jada turned to Sam. “How utterly morbid.”
Treading lightly, Sam asked, “What? You’ve never read the news?”
She poured herself another glass of wine. “I try to stay away from such things.”
He leaned back in his chair, considering the smart and gentle woman before him, and decided to press. She had to realize eventually. “You aren’t the slightest bit curious? I hear Sunnydale has a weirdly high murder rate for being basically a wide spot in the road.”
“That’s what Auntie Dot says.”
“She knows a lot of Sunnydale history.”
“Sam, I appreciate how kind you are to her, how much you listen to her, but she’s not well.”
“I know that, but she seems to have a fifty-fifty chance of lucidity.”
“You don’t know her.” Jada’s voice was low, accusatory. “My brother and I spent all of our childhood summers with her. She taught us to swim, to build campfires and make s’mores. She took us to museums and read us biographies of great men and women. Despite being a coffin-maker, she didn’t dwell on death.”
The waiter returned with a coffee and their entrees. Jada, deflated, watched the waiter’s quick hands with detached interest. Sam wasn’t sure if he’d made her upset or if she’d just dropped the happy mask.
“Dottie is getting older,” Sam said. “It’s natural for someone her age to think about dying.”
Jada poked her crab cakes with a fork and shook her head. “She’s not dwelling on her death. She’s reading all those horrible fantasies at the library and perusing the newspaper for stories of dead bodies found and murders unsolved. Halloween night I caught her trying to sneak out. She kept telling me ‘The streets must be full of demons!’ Death is like an adventure to her, and I can’t deal with that right now, not after…”
Sam slid his hand across the table and gently held hers as she stared at her plate, tiredness and shame on her face.
After a long pause, she said, “You know, I have a level of decorum I try to maintain with people. I don’t make my problems theirs. I don’t interfere. I don’t ask for help. Then there’s you, Sam. I just say ugly things when you’re around–”
“Ugly?” He raised an eyebrow. “You mean honest? It’s okay to feel bad, Jada.”
She took a deep breath followed by a long sip of her coffee. “Why does death interest you?”
“I was curious as to why no one was here.”
“It goes beyond that,” she said, her dark eyes challenging him. “Your apartment is full of true crime books, and I’ve seen the pile of obituaries you cut from the paper. Are you making some sort of grisly murder scrapbook?”
She noticed more than she let on, so why wasn’t she asking questions about the source?
“You know I lost my parents when I was pretty young. I didn’t tell you – and I apologize because this isn’t a great date conversation – my college girlfriend was murdered. Arsonist.”
Jada covered her mouth, her eyes horror-struck. “Sam, I’m so sorry!”
“Thanks, but that’s not why I brought it up. Look, I’ve lost so many people, it interests me, comforts me, to see how other people mourn. It’s never the same person to person. Some weep publicly; some cry silently behind closed doors. Some laugh inappropriately. We’re all members of the same shitty club trying to find our way.”
She took a bite of her dinner, and pointed at it with her fork. “This. This is what comforts me. Flavor. Spice. Music. Dancing. Reveling in the things a lost loved one can’t enjoy anymore. Living for them when they can’t.”
She busied herself eating, not looking at him. The distance between them calm but growing.
“Who did you lose?” he asked quietly.
Jada looked around, her eyes settling on the restaurant’s one other patron. “Let’s talk about anything else, okay? How’s your swordfish?”
The conversation moved back into lighter territory. Favorite foods, childhood summers, tacky tourist traps. But the ghosts remained.
As she looked over the dessert menu, she could hear her father clucking his tongue. “Too chocolate heavy. Where’s the key lime pie? Pineapple upside-down cake? Have they never learned to pair foods?”
As she took a bite of cheesecake, she could hear her mother. “You’re skinny now, so eat all you want, but when you hit your thirties…” At this point, her mom would shake her plump hips. “Keep eating all you want because food is delightful.”
Distracted by her ghosts, Jada barely heard Sam. Though she did enjoy watching him, the way the candle on the table highlighted his high cheekbones, his sharp nose and strong jaw. He talked with his hands, fully engaged in his story about some house museum in Wisconsin. When he smiled, flashing his boyish dimples, she laughed. It was their first date, after all. He didn’t need to deal with the roiling pain sitting in her chest.
Her brother, Michael, barely two years younger than her, would have made kissing sounds and sung, “Jada likes a boy! Jada likes a boy!” as if his life didn’t entail a wake of love-struck girls.
Her mother would have looked Sam from head to toe before turning to her and saying, “Tall, shaggy-haired white boy. You certainly have a type. He’s the handsomest of the bunch; I’ll give you that.”
Her father, who loved to wax poetic about love in general, only ever had one question about any boyfriend. “Does he bring you joy in your soul? Not a smile to your lips, but an unshakable buoyancy even when things are bad?”
Did Sam Winchester make her soul buoyant? Not yet, but she didn’t feel the need to keep her distance either.
After dinner, she rushed through the parking lot, the ghoulish chill of recent death nipping at her heels. Sam grinned at her, but kept his comments to himself.
The car radio was off, but she could hear her father’s – and her own – favorite song: That’s the time you must keep on trying / Smile, what’s the use of crying / You’ll find that life is still worthwhile / If you just / Smile.
She didn’t want to “just smile” at Sam. She didn’t want to keep on trying. For once, Jada wanted to be okay feeling bad.
Having put the last tray of loaves in the oven, her father washed his hands before starting a wedding cake. “How are the danishes coming, Momma?”
“They’d be done if I had a little help?” she replied, pointedly glaring at her daughter, who was taking a quick inventory of the kitchen.
Jada smiled at her mother. “Do you want to do the math?”
“Carry on, child.”
Her father seized the opportunity of clean hands to switch the record from a heartbroken Billie Holiday to Nat King Cole. With the change, he started to sing. Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile, even though it’s breaking / When there are clouds in the sky.
The song was on his lips when he clutched his arm and crashed to the floor, sending the bowl of batter flying.
Nat kept singing, You’ll get by if you smile, while they called 911.
Her father’s lips turned ashen. He never made it to the ambulance.
Jada had been quiet for most of the meal, content to listen to his partially made up stories, flashing her brilliant smile almost on cue. Her smile – the sort of wide, bright smile you only see on movie stars – was one of her most stunning features, but Sam liked it when she didn’t smile. She wielded it like a shield, and he felt for a brief moment at dinner like he’d almost gotten a peek behind the armor.
Her arm linked with his, they walked up the stairs to their apartments, her eyes a thousand miles away.
She leaned against the railing at the top of the stairs and smiled at him. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Sam.”
He didn’t think he’d given her a lovely evening at all. He moved in closer to her, close enough to smell her light floral perfume, and slipped his hand into hers. “What have you been thinking about all night?”
Her smile faded. “It’s nothing you can fix.”
Sam nodded solemnly. “I won’t even try.”
Eyes downcast, smile gone, Jada said, “My father had a heart attack last fall. He was…” She shook her head. “Sorry, but I think I need to stick to the vaguest of details.”
“That’s fine! I’m sorry about your dad. Were you close?”
She nodded her head. “He was the heart of the family. When he passed away, my mother spiraled into depression. She closed up the bakery, which felt like shuttering my childhood. Trouble is, she won’t get help because she doesn’t believe depression is real. I’d like to be with her now, but Auntie needs me more.”
“Can’t your brother help?”
“No, he’s deployed in Japan. We used to be so close, but he’s not the best at keeping in touch.”
She gazed up at Sam with her big dark eyes. “I feel like I’ve lost everyone I care about. Daddy would have told me to keep smiling and eventually it will get better, but it won’t. I can smile from now until eternity, and it won’t bring him back.”
Sam wrapped her in his big arms, her head resting on his shoulder, his nose buried in her hair. “You’ll get better,” he promised, “but you won’t be the same. Don’t wear yourself out trying to be strong, okay? Cry. Get mad. Scream at the sky.”
She shook a little in his arms. He thought she was crying until she pulled away with a chuckle. “‘Scream at the sky?’”
He shrugged. “Find what works for you.”
She rifled through her clutch for her keys. “You work for me.”
It was Sam’s turn to smile, but as he leaned in to kiss her full lips, a scream rang out from Jada’s apartment. They pushed open the door and rushed inside the darkened living room to find Dean and Dottie with a bowl of popcorn between them, watching a horror movie.
“You’re just in time for the good stuff!” said Dottie.