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sam pulls himself up with zach’s help. “i gotta finish the hedges out front then I’m outta here.” he buttons his jeans checks his pockets to make sure his wallet and phone are still in place. “i’m hopin’ i can take off before she realizes i’m here. only thing anyone wants to talk to me about lately is coach.”

He finally felt like he was able to catch his breath again, though that quickly faded when he started to chuckle. This was the best use of what he considered a multi functional pool house. Work and pleasure mixed together was a recipe for helping Zach show up to work when he was needed. "'M sure those poor floaties were just hoping to get flattened by your ass today," Zach teased, holding a helping hand out for Sam. He was thankful that he at least could wear shorts, especially in this Texas heat. He'd make sure to Windex them or whatever poor anyone used them anyways. "Are you here for the rest of the day or is the grass short now?" Who knew, there could be a round two. Having a fuck buddy at work had it's benefits. "I got at least another hour or two 'round here. Unless Miss Viv decides to talk my ear off, then it'll be at least another four."

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Harris Dickinson

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sam shakes his head. "he watched out for me in high school. i just thought it was like, just 'cause my dad, you know?" the same reason everyone in town took pity on him. why the local cops took him home and instead of to lock up when he was so drunk he forgot which way was home. why, sometimes, he noticed his customer's leaving out food for him while he worked like doing a good deed for the stray dog.

"guess it was 'cause... whatever." he shurgs. "i saw him around town and stuff but i never woulda guessed, though. i've never seen him on any of the apps."

with the threat of frizzy hair gone, savannah lets her hands drop out of their surrender but not before waving off the offer of a cigarette. not that she's above them but they really only appeal to her after a couple of drinks, when her head is fuzzy with a good buzz.

honestly, she hadn't been planning on gossiping with sam about coach but now that the opportunity has presented itself... maybe he knows more than she does. is it wrong to think most of the gay guys in town know each other? she's not entirely sure where the ethics on that yet. "yeah, i did. s'real sad, honestly." that is genuine. "he was a good guy. my dad an' him were close. you seen much of him since you graduated?"

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"karma? either you've done some evil shit or karma's working overtime. can't imagine you doing anything to deserve that." as long as sam has spent blaming her, he can't imagine her doing anything that would stack the deck that high against her.

sam flops back down on the couch next to her, tilting his head back too, mimicking her posture. he takes a drag on his cigarette and nudges the carton against her hand. if she won't eat a donut maybe bennett will take a smoke. "what's there to catch up on?" sam laughs, "not shit has changed here until this morning. you bring a man with a coke habit back to town with you?"

she honestly couldn’t have said it better herself. honestly, watching sam move around to get his cigarettes, she couldn’t help but imagine if she had said that to andrew’s face. instead of sobbing and calling him all the creative names her mom taught her when she was screaming at her father, bennett should’ve just blinked at him and said well, shit. maybe it would’ve knocked the wind out of andrew’s sails a bit. picking at her fingernails as sam apologized, the brunette lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

“i guess we can call it karma,” she said, tilting her head back until she was staring up at the ceiling. wondering if maybe gravity could take the stifling pain out of her head. “y’gunna tell me about what i missed around here while i was gone?”

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if sam had to guess, he’d say austin’s car is worth more than the trailer he pays $500 a month to live in. it looks out immediately of place in their neighborhood. like kobe beef for sale at the dollar general. not that sam has ever minded crawling into the passenger seat.

he’s annoyed, sam can tell as soon as he sits down. he twists around to shove his backpack (containing the weekend essentials, his toothbrush, a change of clothes, and some treats to indulge in for later) in the back seat before pulling his seatbelt across his chest. sam is wearing the nicest shirt he owns, one that austin bought him on one of their first little trips together.

“yeah?” he says plugging his nearly dead phone into the car charger and tosses his phone in the cup holder. “you know i don’t know shit about wine. we got a white zen box in the fridge.” he looks over to austin, trying to gage how willing he is to put up with his trailer trash bullshit tonight. when he decides he better not push it, he adds: “it’s hot when you humble brag about your connections.”

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with another look at his watch, austin starts getting slightly annoyed that he has to wait. doesn't even matter that sam's only late five minutes so far, after the day at work he's had, a little thing like this is enough to push him over the edge. and with everything going on, he's allowed to be a little tense, right?

but maybe blowing up on sam the second the car door opens is a horrible idea—what a shit start to their weekend this would be. thank god he's got enough self-awareness left today to realize that. "hey, you," he says instead of something like took you long enough, pairs it up with a million dollar smile, waits for sam to get settled and starts driving. "got us a really good table at this new place. a client recommended it, apparently the city view is gorgeous. and they got good wine."

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it's not like sam has never noticed that his neighbor is hot. hell, he's seen ricky walk out to get the mail in various states of undress on a hot summer day a dozen times. it's just that he's never seen him this close. and this is close. if sam leaned in just a little he could nearly kiss him. and for a second he does consider it. "so you think i'm hot?" he smirks when he notices the far away look ricky gets thinking he's said something out of pocket. if he's stuck here he might as well shoot his shot and see where it gets him.

sam shakes his head, then immediately stills to let ricky bandage him up. "i was dizzy at first. like right after it happened. i fell off the standing mower and hit the back of my head. but i'm fine down. hey, you got a phone charger laying around? promise i'll be less cranky if i can rot my brain with subway surfer."

"sorry," sam's voice is low, downcast, when he realizes the person who has come to his rescue is one of his neighbors. he looks up at ricky, sitting up a little straighter. "for going a little karen. i didn't mean to be a dick."

he'd watched a couple nurses (including the one who had started to bandage him up, but ended up leaving him with a handful of gauze and telling him to apply his own pressure) dash off in the direction of the commotion. he let's ricky take over, dropping his hand to his lap. under the gauze is a gash above his eye, halfway between his eyebrow and his hairline. "lawnmower threw a rock at me. or a chunk of cement. dunno. the first nurse said something about stitches." without the protection of the gauze, blood starts to well up in the wound. "how bad's that gonna fuck up my face?"

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where / the ford residence (pool house) when / late afternoon with / zach @saddleoiled

"fuck." whatever sam grabbed hold of to pull himself up off the floor had given way under his weight, sending him face first into a pile of half inflated pool floats and foam noodles. sam rolls over to his back. his jeans are twisted around his ankles and the concrete floor is somehow ice cold on his bare ass despite the overwhelming heat outside and the sweat dripping down his forehead.

"swear to god if you you fuckin' laugh at me right now i'm never doing this again. help me up." he holds his hand up in the air, waiting for zach's help. this is what he gets for fucking on the job. not that it's the first time. and even if zach does laugh at him, he's sure it won't be the last.

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his thumb scrolls through what feels like an endless string of texts and speculations, from names he hasn’t thought of in years. all confirming news that had passed him by while he slept. he seems his name pop up more than once, asking the same question shannon had woken him up with. from her, it feels likes cruel than from these people who barely spoke to him ten years ago.

“there’s no fuckin’ way,” he says to himself. “if coach was gay, i woulda known. in a place like this? he woulda popped up on an app or somethin’! he woulda done numbers on scruff.”

but then again, he’d taken an interest in sam, hadn’t he? nudged him and aaron together without any particular reason why, just that he thought they’d get along. sam rubs the heel of his hand into his eye and passes shannon’s phone back. he’s seen enough. “kinda sad, ain’t it? wonder if his wife knew about it.”

“read.” shannon tosses her phone in sam’s direction with no further explanation, open to her texts with the whole story infused with side comments that say ‘oh my fucking god’ and ‘damn who knew coach liked a lil nose candy??’ — all of which, of course, were followed up by the obligatory ‘may he rip.’ shannon hasn’t had the chance to chime in yet considering she’d been rendered unconscious until about two minutes prior, but her old friends have pretty much summed up all of her sentiments.

well, all except one tiny speculation that she doesn’t quite share about her roommate, even though she just barged into his room to debunk their suspicions.

“if you fucked him to death, you can tell me. i won’t tell the cops, obviously — not that it’d matter, ‘cause you know, he had a fuckin’ heart attack. i don’t think anyone’s ever been convicted of that or there’d be a bunch of 20 something women in prison right now just because they wanted a sugar daddy and got unlucky.” and now that she thinks about it, she’s always thought that might be her someday too — and it’d be absolutely fucked if sam beat her to the punch. “i always did think his wife was, like, way too fucking hot for him to be totally straight.”

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“well. shit,” he says. because what else is there to say to that aside from maybe another combination of expletives. “everything fucking sucks,” sam says again like it’s the hook to the world’s shittiest pop song.

a beat of silence passes between them before sam pulls himself off the couch to grab his cigarettes from the counter. “i’m sorry that happen to you,” he says around the filter poking out of the corner of his mouth as he lights it. “really. that sucks.”

what’s even here for you? “oh.” she didn’t mean the exhaled syllable to sound so broken, but sam really did know where to hit her where it hurt. he somehow managed to — whether on purpose or by happenstance — hit the nail on the head with her whole situation. she ran away from sweetwater because there was nothing for her here, but she came running back when things didn’t work in austin. why? bennett didn’t really know. she just felt lost in austin and wanted familiarity. but she was starting to feel lost here too. like she didn’t belong. 

maybe she didn’t belong anywhere.

shifting to sit up straighter, bennett was suddenly interested in the nail polish on her fingers. sam deserved an answer, even if she didn’t know how to answer the question. blatant honesty seemed to be the best bet. “my fiance left me.” she said. “i couldn’t breathe in austin. so i came back here, but it’s somehow harder to breathe here.”

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sam lowers his weapon. “looks good. promise i won’t fuck it up.” he turns. the knob to cut the water and lets the hose fall to the ground with a thud. he finds the pack in his back pocket and offers her one of the last three cigarettes nestled inside.

“you hear about coach? kinda fucked up huh?”

with the hose nozzle pointed directly in her face, savannah's hands raise immediately. "fuck, sam, i just got a blow out. watch where you're pointin' that thing." the texas heat isn't getting to sav yet the way it is sam, but she figures that probably has something to do with him spending the afternoon out in the sun, working on their lawn while she had been sat in one of her co-workers chairs getting said blow out at the salon.

"i was just comin' to say hi. ask how you've been." their paths don't cross much anymore, given sam and carson's falling out but there had been a time when they saw each other reguarly. when carson had gone off to college, sam had become her go to when she needed someone to buy her booze until she found a believable fake id. "and your secret's safe with me."

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there’s a not-so-small part of him that just wants to forgive her. what an easier world this would be if he could pack up the hurt and resentment and fold it neatly into a box and tuck it under his bed. but the jacket he’s wrapped himself in is a pathetic testament to how easily those boxes can be opened again. sam takes a deep breath, lets his eyes close. how had so much time passed, stretching them so far apart that they may as well be standing on opposite sides of the grand canyon? he misses those times when he wasn’t angry at her, when his heart felt whole.

“why did you come back?” he asks, rolling his head to the side to look at bennett straight on. “this place is hell and you got out. what’s even here for you now?”

well that simply was incorrect. bennett thought about sam almost as much as she thought about aaron. a lot of her memories of her brother from high school included sam. the two of them were inseparable. so the idea that she didn’t even think about him was laughable. and she actually ended up snorting as she picked at her cuticles. “that’s bullshit and you know it,” she said. “what were you to me? you were one of my closest friends. but jesus christ sam i could barely breathe here. i needed a break…and i’m sorry i did and i’m sorry i disappeared but i thought it was the right thing to do. it was absolutely the wrong decision.” 

head tilting back, bennett stared at the ceiling and exhaled sharply. “everything fucking sucks,” she agreed, glancing at sam out of the corner of her eye.

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HARRIS DICKINSON as samuel in babygirl (2024)

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sam tosses the donut back in the box and mutters a solemn "suit yourself."

he probs his feet up on the table and sinks into the worn sofa, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket. "i don't think you did it to spite me," he says, eyes forward to focus on a crack in the wall rather than look at bennett who looks more like her brother than he'd remembered. "i don't think you thought about me at all. and i guess that's fair or whatever. what was i to you? just the guy your brother fucked. we wouldn't even know each other if it weren't for him, would we?"

he shrugs, even though he knows the answer. bennett didn't owe him a damn thing, and yet her absence had hit him the hardest. "this sucks." all of it. "it just fucking sucks."

“that’s not fair.” but wasn’t it? all sam was doing was just reminding her of what she had done. running away from sweetwater was one of the many times in her life she just up and left when things got hard. but who could blame her? the stagnant grief in the air around her whenever she was in sweetwater was stifling, choking her with reminders of what she didn’t have anymore. “i didn’t do it to spite you.”

she shook her head at the offered donut. honestly if she ate anything right now she thinks she’d throw it up. “yeah well i didn’t think you wanted to see me,” bennett pointed out. to be fair, she didn’t think she was welcome here right now, but she had committed, and now she was being stubborn. she wasn’t going to let sam see just how badly his words have been affecting her. but she came here for a reason and there was no way she was leaving now. “i came to see how you were holding up. how i could help.”

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replies 📌 sam @ bennett 📌 sam @ shannon 📌 sam @ dixie

starters 📌 sam @ zach 📌 sam @ ricky 📌 sam @ memphis 📌 sam @ savannah

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where / sweetwater clinic when / late night with / ricky @eastcfeden

it's been a long night and at this point, sam is ready to grab a needle and do his own stitches. how long has he been waiting, holding a wad of gauze to his forehead? long enough to watch the sun set and wear his phone down to 2%. he'd turned it off an hour ago so he could call Shannon for a ride home when all this was said and done.

sam wishes he'd thought to google workers comp, but when he'd had his phone to distract him he hadn't thought about it. of course.

the curtain around his bed swings open. "about fuckin' time. how short staffed are ya'll around here?"

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where / the ford home when / late-afternoon with / savannah @miidnightsrain

How the hell is it so hot already in February. And barely a month after a snow that brought the whole damn town grinding to a stop. Sam's shirt is thrown over a bush as he hunches over to dowse his hair in the frigid hose water. He's down to two cigarettes left in the pack shoved in his pockets. As much as he hates cutting grass for the family of his rich high-school friend, at least he'll go home with enough to buy another carton.

With his back to the yard, he doesn't see Savannah walk towards him until he hears her right behind him. Startled, he spins around with the garden hose positioned like a gun pointed right at her. "Shit Sav," he laughs, breathless. "Hands up. Promise you won't rat me out for smoking on the job and I won't have to use this."