click - Sam Winchester/Reader
read it on ao3.
Pairing: Sam Winchester/Reader (circa season 1)
Tags/Warnings: cabin-in-the-woods moment, fluffy bestie banter, virgin reader, first time sex, vaginal sex, vaginal fingering, multiple orgasms, overstimulation, and of course, Sam is a pussy god, as per usual.
Word Count: ~20k (shhhh don't talk about it i have a problem)
Notes: that's right, i make moodboards now bitches. these photos were collaged by my wonderful commissionee @daffodil-mania, who asked for: ""a reverse (you are a) natural, baby? where sam is the reader’s first time + a smutty cabin in the woods-type situation."
Ask to be added to my taglists for future posts!
“Okay, okay,” you thought out loud, thinking hard, “my turn—if you could have anyone as a dinner guest, alive or dead, who’d you pick?”
A few paces ahead of you, Sam hummed in thought. His puffy winter coat made the outline of him against the swirling snow thicker, and if it was possible, taller, a menacing wall of deep blue between you and the woods. Something hiding out here and spying could even mistake Sam for something scary. Luckily, you weren’t that stupid.
Sam, for the millionth time in the last minute, checked that you were where you were supposed to be. (Two immediate steps behind him. Or he’d die). Looking back at you made the wind mess up his hair every time, and every time Sam tucked the same two strands behind his ears again. Like the shy girls in rom-coms did. Truly, monsters trembled at the sight of him.
He geeked at your question, but managed to play it cool: “Gandhi. Feel like he could teach me something. We’d probably like the same food, too, so it’d make for a good dinner.”
“Oh yeah, he was a vegetarian, right? You two could have a nerdy little salad together.”
Under the soft swell of the wind, you thought you heard Sam laugh, but it picked up in loud gusts at times that swirled skirts of untethered snow around your ankles. Well, your knees. The snow was tall enough here to seep into your boots. You’d given up totally on finding your own footing and started walking in Sam’s tracks, which were wider than yours almost all the way around. You told yourself that this was to confuse anyone tracking your prints in the snow, but really it was just fun to compare your shoe size to Sam’s. This set the walk back to the cabin at a snail’s pace. But with the way this conversation was going, you didn’t exactly mind freezing your ass off.
John had left his boys yet another unfinished hunt to distract them. Sam and Dean, tired of being distracted, changed tactics and split up. Dean was following a lead in Montana that could actually take him to John, and you and Sam were tying up John’s loose ends in upper Washington. The two of you had spent the last three days researching bloody disappearances in the area. An area in the thick of its snowiest, blurriest season, mind you, miles from anything but one of the Winchesters’ off-the-grid apocalypse shelters. This wasn’t how you and your mother had operated when you’d hunted together, but. Things changed. Parents disappeared.
Sam seemed to be shoving himself through John’s absence as best he could. You got smiles out of him here and there, but especially today, playing question games to pass the time mapping the woods and putting down traps.
“Gandhi was a fruitarian,” Sam clarified. He shielded his face from the snow by hiding in his collar, so you may have misheard when he added, “So, yeah. Him or my mom.”
Months ago, a mention of Sam’s mom would’ve shocked you into a full-on coma. He kept her memory even closer to his chest than Dean did, in some ways, and either brother even sneezing in the direction of their storied past had been a once-in-a-lifetime event. Before this hunt, that is. Now you couldn’t get Sam to shut up. Either the isolation had made him lonely or something else had pushed him to trust you, because the last two days had been spent this way—trudging through snow and spilling your guts about everything under the sun together. Sam loved to read and watch documentaries, he was fascinated by astronomy and meteorology and organized crime history and Native American folklore, and, hey, big surprise, reading. You’d never heard him talk about anything with so much passion. You hadn’t heard that passion in your own voice since before you’d lost your mom.
Still. As comfortable as you suddenly felt with Sam, you were sure to tread lightly. You risked a glimpse at his broad, snow-dusted back. “Mary would be nice too. Maybe you’d get to try some family recipe she’d make or something.”
“I think I remember my dad tellin’ me once that she hated cooking, actually, but m’ not sure,” Sam said, a bit of humor in his voice.
You thought of the soup Sam had turned to lava over the wood stove that morning, and grinned, “Yeah, I think you got that from her.”
Keeping casual eyes on your feet, you tried to see how fast you could get your boot through each foothold in the snow. Sam would make deep gouges in the powder with his longer strides. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. You’d clear them three in a row, sometimes four, then stop short a step behind Sam and wait for him to make more tracks. Like hopscotch, almost. Every once in a while a huge gust of wind would force Sam to stop, and without a word he’d form a wall between you and the blast. You’d learned pretty much everything there was to know about Sam these last few days, but out of all his best dorky qualities his chivalry was your favorite.
“S’ not that I hate cookin’, I just suck attit.”
And the accent. The accent was gold, when the pretty drawl of it crept through with Sam’s boredom.
A little further and the spindly, snow-heavy trees parted for the lake you and Sam had been using to navigate. On your first day scouting you’d noticed how the icy surface had frozen like a misshapen heart, and since then Sam followed the point of it back to your cabin every night. Southeast of it was the abandoned mining facility that’d swallowed three people whole, and to its far right was where three more had disappeared. Your guess was a couple of territorial tree nymphs or werewolves, and Sam was betting on a Winter Hunger. The loser would take the first shift driving down to Montana.
Seeing the lake, Sam starts to arc your march around the edge, his sharp eyes on the treeline across the ice. The wind was stronger with room to run over the lake, but you reminded yourself that being a little cold was the gentlest way to die out here and forged ahead. Besides, most of your body had gone stark numb miles back. When you remembered how bad your cheeks were stinging, you’d bring your scarf tighter around your face and watch Sam, his long legs cutting easily through the snow.
The wind cooled down to a whisper. You reminded him, “Your turn.”
You’d reached a point where coming up with good questions had become harder than answering them, so Sam took a bit to stew on something good. There’d been a silent agreement on who was responsible for which kinds of asks. You would probe Sam with the deepest, most personal shit you could come up with, and after he explained what his life’s accomplishment was and what friendship means to him, Sam would go, uhhhh, what’s your favorite color? He was definitely the smartest shovel in the Winchester shed.
“How about this,” Sam cleared his throat. “Would you ever wanna be famous?”
You must’ve made a noise that gave away your surprise at the quality of his question, because he made a snooty sound back that had you seriously considering shoving him in the snow. You put your hands on his shoulders and everything, but where there should’ve been normal guy shoulders there were buff guy shoulders, which wouldn’t budge an inch. Sigh. What a lousy, muscly jackass.
Sam planted his feet, whining your name. “C’mon. Answer.”
“I’m thinking!” You laughed, and pushed with your legs until Sam tilted forward into his next step. It took a moment for you to keep your hands to yourself. “Okay. In this hypothetical world, what am I famous for?”
“Supermodel,” Sam answered right away.
You splashed a little snow at his jeans, deciding to save your funny feelings about his answer for later self-reflection. “Dude. Be realistic.”
At this, Sam snickered, and even with him facing forward you could imagine the dry sloping smile pressing into his dimples. “Okay—across the whole entire world, you’re famous for cooking the perfect soup in a can. Like, in ways no one can even imagine, that’s how good. You make millions of dollars off it and become a household name. Would you want that?”
“God, no,” you wuffed out, immediately sending Sam into a fit of giggles. “Are you kidding me? All those strangers knowing me, not giving me any privacy? And don’t even get me started on all those soup-hounds throwing themselves at me for my soup-money.”
“I guess that’s true. You could never marry for love, 'cause everybody would just want your soup,” Sam mourned. Another great Sam quality: he was excellent at going along with a bit. “You’d just have to live with brief soup-flings for the rest of your life.”
You thought about what a soup-fling could entail for all of one second, then burst out laughing, warm clouds of it spiraling into the air through your breath. The shoulders of Sam’s coat shook with glee. It was funny for a few more beats until it warmed into something that was light and airy, something you hadn’t heard from Sam since you’d met him. He had the sweetest laugh. It made your damn teeth rot.
“Y’know, speaking of flings,” you hollered over the hissing wind, “I have no idea how your brother does that shit.”
Dean was safe and familiar territory; he was the centerpiece of everything you had in common with Sam, so your conversation circled back to him plenty. Every conversation you’d had with Dean orbited around Sam some way, too, so you’d come to expect it. You’d never seen two brothers care about each other as much as they did. Which was hilarious, since the moment one of them got you alone all they did was bitch. Dean’s been driving me up the damn wall. Sam keeps stickin’ his nose in my business. Neither of them had ever had a trusted third set of eyes before, or at least one who understood that their complaints were overshadowed with love. John had been someone to look up to, to emulate and impress, but you were a fresh outlet available for family baggage. The boys were your outlet for bitching too, since it was understood that your bitching also came from the heart.
“A girl in every port sounds fun in theory, but I feel like I’d get sick of it fast,” you confessed.
The snow underfoot began to crunch harder with each step, packed down into a firm sheet. Soon Sam’s prints were so shallow that you could see the tips of your boots again. Taking the chance while you had it, you fought against the snow to walk side-by-side with him, then fought again to match him stride-for-stride. Sam’s poor face had been pounded with so much snow that his bangs were soaking wet, but he still managed a half-frozen smile seeing you next to him.
“And, I dunno. I think I care about hurting people’s feelings too much to just…” you gestured stiffly, “head to the next town after sharing a night with someone.”
“Same here,” Sam sighed, then gave a very subtle cough as a sign to shift gears: “But, uh, I think it’s kinda a stress relief thing for him.”
You probably should’ve guessed that Sam wasn’t the fling type, since you’d been there every time he’d shied away from Dean’s plans to pick up girls, but the idea… sat there. Staring at you. It’d be stupid-easy for Sam to live that lifestyle. Dean had his own notions about what girls were most into (bad boys, leather jackets, you know), but you happened to be certified in what girls were into, and you had it on good authority that Sam was a total dreamboat.
You nudged Sam with your shoulder, coaxing him open with a well-placed smile. This was unearthed territory. “Not your thing, huh?”
The snow had pinkened Sam’s face enough as it was, so what he was capable of on his own was downright impressive. Even his ears went red. “Uhh,” he chuckled, too skittish to look you in the eye. “No, not really. I’m. I, uh, I’d rather get to know her first, y’know. Before we’re intimate. And hopping towns doesn’t exactly give you the time to do that.”
Yup. Total dreamboat.
“Oh, so that’s your plan, asking me all these personal questions.”
Sam controlled his sputtering by pressing his lips into a firm, flat line, which refused to indulge your silly flirting. “You’re a jackass,” he said, and the growing smile in his voice betrayed just how little he thought that was true.
When you were done laughing at your own joke, Sam guessed, “So that’s not your thing, either? One night stands?”
You were having fun—pulling Sam’s leg, for one, but also talking to him in general, so the truth glides right out of your mouth.
“Wouldn’t know. I’ve never had sex.”
Sam had left his filter two states behind on the drive up, so he doesn’t even think to cap his disbelief. He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”
His mortification with himself makes contact two beats later, and while you’re smirking and floating unbothered across the snow, Sam nearly goes belly-up falling over himself to apologize.
You soak up his groveling until Sam’s embarrassment hits a breaking point, then, in your humblest and kindest princess voice, you say, “It’s cool, Sam. No worries. I’m not at all offended you think it’s weird I’m a virgin.”
“I don—I-I don’t think it’s weird,” Sam stressed, going a little wild in the eyes. “It’s great! …I mean, not like, great, I just mean. It’s not a bad thing or anything.”
You meet his awkward silence with a smug, pleased one of your own. Sam’s smart enough to realize he’s stumbled into your trap, but not quick enough to find an escape, so he sputters for a long time and falls back on his third option.
“I’m just wondering,” he winces, knowing his question is stupid, “why are you still a virgin?” You’re about to laugh in his face, but the earnestness in Sam’s voice makes you hesitate. His question is a genuine one. “...That sounds awful, m’ sorry. But, c’mon. You’re smart enough to know how pretty you are. Charmin’ enough to use it, too. I mean, I’d…”
He caught himself. “—Anyone, would, uh…”
Sam didn’t finish his thought. He changed his grip on the shotgun swinging from his hand, self-conscious, and cleared his throat.
Well. That wasn’t obvious at all. No way in hell you were leaving that alone.
“You’d what?”
Sam didn’t say anything. He just tucked his hair behind his ears again, too shy to say what he was thinking but bold enough to let it be spoken in his silence instead. And it was a very, very telling silence.
Your brain scrambled to cram as much as possible into the blank Sam had left. There was so much potential in that one little word. I’d…
I’d understand if someone wanted to have sex with you.
I’d have found someone by now, if I were you.
I’d have sex with you.
I’d take that opportunity, ______, if I could.
Hm. Okay. Okay, huh. There weren’t a lot of people in the world capable of making you question your life decisions so quickly, but of course, this was Sam. His silence persevered. Your train of thought became an internal trainwreck.
A few opportunities had cropped up over the course of your life—third dates with guys that hadn’t totally sucked, a few handsome barflies—but nothing had… clicked. Because there was supposed to be a click, right? Before sex? Some compass in your body, moving you in a certain direction? You hoped to drift toward something that fit better than a stranger, but like Sam had said, that level of commitment wouldn’t be waiting for you out on the road. You could hook up with civilians or hunters as you pleased, but just the thought made your chest ache. Real connection wouldn’t be waiting for you in the back of a truck or a sleazy motel. Hunters lived short lives, sure, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t be a hopeless romantic.
You’d held onto that notion for a long time. Someday, something would click, and it’d be worth the damn wait.
Now, Sam was here, blinking coyly at you through his bangs, keeping you close to him, listening when you spoke. Click, goes your brain. Like a gear notching into place. He has those mossy, sensitive eyes that pry right open just for you and the prettiest rasp to his voice. Click click.
“C’mon,” Sam coughs. “Cabin’s just ahead.”
I’d… Sam had said, and left you to fill in the blanks.
_
The next day, both of you were proven wrong. You found out the hard way that the disappearances weren’t caused by cannibalistic spirits or werewolves. After getting mauled by living hills of snow and almost swallowed by an avalanche, you and Sam got the very subtle and not-at-all-lethal impression that you were dealing with an insane case of cursed ground. (Cur-sed, Sam had said, because he was fancy.) It took some on-the-spot ritual work and a day’s worth of walking to bury hex bags in the right spots, but by dusk you were alive and comfortable back in the cabin.
“I say we stick around for one more night—make sure this place is clean,” Sam suggested, shaking himself out on the welcome mat. When he shucked his coat off, the silky interior and the back of his shirt were dark with melted snow.
You glanced between Sam, who was blue at the edges, and the shifting tides of flakes on the wind outside. If you stared long enough the whole mountainside seemed to come alive in the dark.
“Uh,” you told him, “are you sure? If we got even one of those spells wrong, what’s stopping this thing from burying the whole cabin?”
But Sam had already thought of that, like he’d already thought of everything else. He rose from where he’d been kicking off his boots to give your icy hands a quick, warming squeeze. “I got it covered. Go—get a fire started, and fast.”
Since you were still riding the wave of adrenaline that’d kept you alive against moving, living forces of nature, you were already following Sam’s orders before he’d finished saying them. He didn’t act hardly as hurried. Being soaked and half-frozen was apparently second nature to him, since he navigated uninhibited through the duffle of ingredients you’d unloaded on the cabin’s floor. Your fingers were so numb that it took three tries to scrape some fire out of your matches, and by then Sam was already tying off his millionth hexbag of the day.
You didn’t regain your senses until a few minutes later, which passed as slow as hours did. Somehow in that sliver of time you’d hauled more firewood inside, hurried it into the fireplace, lit it, helped Sam bury the protection spells around the yard, raced back inside, and laid all your wet clothes out in front of the hearth. The second the doors were locked, your high started to tank. Sam was talking.
“—will last us through til’ tomorrow. Then, in the morning, we can use the spell to see if the land is purified. It might even be a good idea to check with the dowsing rods, too. If this ground is as cursed as we think, the hexbags will be just fine, though, so you don’t have to worry. You listenin’?”
Sam was a big, fuzzy-edged shape sitting criss-cross on the ratty rug a few paces from the fire. His silhouette was outlined by it in handsome shades of gold and honey-white, ‘cause of course he was the kind of movie beautiful that suited romantic fire lighting. Like, really romantic. Your brain had been baking in the panicked sludge of fleeing and hunting all day, but even it was capable of looking at that image of Sam and going, Uh, yeah. There’s something going on here.
For the last few days, the two of you had purified the ground of the cabin, too. It was the most telling relic of Sam and Dean’s life with John Winchester: rationed, unglamorous, and harsh. John was usually an out-of-bounds subject for the boys, but Sam had spent the last few days describing him at length. He was paranoid and obsessive—hence the cabin’s military rations, hidden weapons, traps, metric fucktons of salt, and next to nothing else. John hated any music and technology post-1980—hence the cabin’s record player. It was the only source of entertainment on hand, and the same three records only lasted so long. Even as hunter’s hovels went, this one was impressively oppressive.
Sam, plagued by abysmal hunter-kid memories of being stuck out here, had warned you about it ahead of time. You’ll get bored and miserable. He’d said that and you’d thought to yourself how hard it would be to get bored and miserable around Sam, who mystified you just sitting there. Still, you splurged on some big fluffy blankets, the shittiest and cheapest chess set you could find, pillows, and s’mores. Not exactly the John Winchester essentials, but. Just in case.
Stuffing the footwell of Sam’s stolen truck with cozy bullshit had been worth it in the end, purely because you wouldn’t wish the sleeping situation in the cabin on your worst enemy. There was a single, boxspring-less bed crammed in the bedroom’s corner, with a blanket too pitiful to put into words. It only had one pillow. This pillow also happened to be of unknown origin and age, and you were only brave enough to touch it because you’d worn your big girl pants that day. Sam had banked on the two sleeping bags he and Dean had left there as kids, but they were unfortunately still kid-sized. The two of you would’ve been forced to share body heat under one petal-thin blanket. Now, loaded up with massive, fuzzy comforters and heavy quilts, the two of you were happily sharing body heat under enough blankets to drown in.
Sam had insisted on making a bed for himself on the floor the first night. You’d let him, purely because he was pouring on the chivalry by the truckload and you were too grateful to know what to say. Any plans to argue were pinned down by that stern, unguarded stare. S’okay, I’ve been sleepin’ like this since I was little. Just a few minutes sinking into your snug nest made you rot with guilt. Being on the road with the boys put you in a bed with Sam plenty of times, and though the quarters were a bit tighter in the cabin, the cold was sharper too. You confessed your guilt to Sam the next day, and after the usual research marathon that night you felt his weight fill the untouched side of the bed.
Okay, Sam had caved. But—you’re sleeping on the inside, by the wall. I’m a lighter sleeper. That way if somethin’ comes in, I can protect you.
Hearing that, you’d grabbed his wrist and pulled it over your side. You’d kept one hand fisted around the knife under your pillow and the other folded over Sam’s hand, as if to say, I can protect you, too. Sam must’ve understood, because he’d pressed his cheek against your shoulder blade and succumbed to sleep. The rest of the week was spent like that, Sam herding you against one side of the slim bed with his legs and his arms and his sleepy-soft breaths. Though the bed was toasty and the contact was a one-stop sleeping pill, you stayed up with your knife for company. Sam deserved to feel safe while he slept.
You didn’t get that often as a hunter. Especially the touching part. Touching of any kind only really happened when you trusted someone, and trust was earned on the road with all the ease and painlessness of pulling teeth. In Sam’s case, he was an untapped well for little doses of affection. The moment that line was crossed, the second you’d taken a hit in his place for the first time, the second you’d torn your own clothes to wrap his wounds, Sam was open to you. He would never reach for your hand first (not if he was still Sam, who thought he didn’t deserve it), but you could reach for his and he would take it without question. You could pull his arm around you and Sam would wrap it tight, pressing his nose into your back. There was an exchange that occurred. He trusted you to give him something he was too proud to ask for and you trusted him to let you in, the two of you careful not to break the magic.
While he poked at the fire and lit candles, you flitted to the other room to scoop up a blanket to wrap yourself up in. The constant back-and-forth insanity of the day had made you too nauseous to eat, but you knew your stomach needed something. Preferably something sweet to trick you into feeling rewarded. Military rations really weren’t your thing, so you opted for the pomegranate Sam had avoided to keep his research papers clean.
He’d been going through your plan for tomorrow, right. “I’m listening, Sammy.”
When you circled back to join him on the rug, you opened up an arm of your blanket-cape for him. Sam, without comment, ducked under it, and you shuffled around for a minute to give his broader shoulders some fabric to work with. “All we can do for now is wait,” he told you, “so… whaddya wanna do?”
You put a bowl down in front of you and started splitting the pomegranate with your knife. “Chess again?”
Sam’s lip slanted in a frown. All his energy for smart stuff had been spent on the hunt today, so you weren’t all that surprised at his reluctance.
“Cards, then?” You guessed. Beads of rich red fruit started to fill your bowl, which Sam didn’t hesitate to sneak a hand into.
“There’s only so many rounds of Go Fish a guy can handle losing, _____,” Sam teased.
It was true. You’d obliterated him every round so far, the poor bastard.
Sam leaned into your side, filling your peripherals with his know-it-all smirk. “Unless you—”
“We’re done playing poker,” you said, having suffered your fair share playing against him. The emptiness of your wallet must’ve reflected in your voice, since Sam started snickering into his lap—and yeah, maybe the whole cute-shy-guy routine had worked on you, but knowing Sam he’d find a way to sneak the money he’d won out of you back into your bag. He was sweet that way. Evil, but sweet.
“Okay,” Sam wet his lips and wracked his brain. “...I could read my book to you. It’s the one I was telling you about—”
“—with the corrupt cops in L.A,” you filled in. Separating the pomegranate seeds from their core was bloody work with your knife, so when the natural halves of it were happily in the bowl you picked the rest apart with purple-stained fingers.
“Uh-huh. And we’re at a part I think you’d find pretty interesting, all the crazy trial stuff.” Sam shrunk into his shoulders a little bit, then added in a quiet voice, “If you, y’know. If you want.”
Hmm. You swiped the book from Sam’s other hand, the planes of his fingers making brief, electric contact with yours. A sharp flash of heat whipped through your belly, sizzling through your nerves. It took a bit for you to refocus, but the pause made you look like you were some deep scholarly person really inspecting the back cover, which Sam seemed to appreciate. You took care not to get any fruit stains on the pages. When you turned to pass it back to him, Sam was rubbing his bruised knuckles into his sleepier eyes. How he could keep reading after staring at nothing but old newspapers all week, you had no clue.
You reeled the book back toward you. “...How about I read it to you?”
Sam froze, considering this. He considered it so long that you could watch his cheeks color in real-time, the same red they’d been in the snow, until he broke out of his trance and managed a warm, surprised sort of smile.
“Okay,” Sam melted.
“C’mere, lawboy,” you decided on a whim, and pat the top of your thigh. True to form, Sam took his permission and ran with it, twisting shyly to lay on his side and prop his cheek on your leg. “Lemme impress you with all the big words I know how to say.”
Sam chuckled, and it was the kind of laugh that told you just how many weird law words were about to trip you up. It was also the kind of laugh you could feel, rumbly and real through your leg, which was. It was. It was something. He got comfortable, curling a lazy arm around your knee and using you as a proper pillow.
You really should’ve put more thought into having Sam this close. Like, really should’ve, since he’s so big and warm that it has you running on nothing but instinct, and your first impulse having Sam in your lap is to go straight for that gorgeous hair.
You take the lock Sam’s been messing with all day and tuck it behind his ear, just because his head is there and you need a damn place for your hand to rest. Right. A deep and draining sigh airs out of Sam’s nose being touched like that, and you start to wonder if this was something he’d masterminded. He seeps into your lap like he’d been chasing this all day, all week, and something about it makes you feel special in ways no one else could manage.
You open to the page Sam left off on and start to read. Sam doesn’t move an inch, laying statue-still in your lap. He only moves to sneak pinches of pomegranate seeds. Stiff as he is, he’s there, the furnace you’ve relied on for the last few days to keep warm. You get through a few chapters this way, Sam pausing you every ten seconds to explain something or hum or snootily translate some lawyer-speak for you. The whole time you do an excellent job of keeping your hands to yourself. Ever since Sam’s comment from yesterday, the little pieces you’ve gotten of him have made you greedy. Click.
The fire and the candlelight create a perfect bubble of heat on the otherwise icy floor, so it doesn’t take long for Sam to go from resting in your lap to downright oozing across it. From your point of view he’s nothing but a mop of shining hair and a big hand curled around your knee. His presence seeps into you as much as his warmth does, and after so long it’s almost overwhelming to taste someone else’s vulnerability this way. Click click. You’re reminded of how much you care about Sam, and how long it’s been since you’ve been allowed that. There was something about him that would always be worth protecting. Maybe it was how fucking good he smelled.
“Doctor Janen’s contributions to the investigation, especially her knowledge of luminol, were,” you trailed off, “were…”
Sam’s breathing had evened out in your lap. Or, you thought it had, until his posture shifted under the sweater he was wearing. He rolled out of your lap and onto his hands with a reluctant groan. Tired as he was, Sam was always capable of being a smartass. “D’you know what luminol is?”
“Yes, detective,” you scoffed, maybe a teensy bit disappointed that he’d left your lap. The outline of his touch on your thigh burned like a heat beacon. “Should I go back and read the last few paragraphs, or was that you just pretending to sleep?”
Sam rubbed at his face, like it was possible to physically scrub the sleep from it. He sat up next to you, blinking slowly to get his bearings, and for no logical reason your heartbeat built to an ear-ringing throb in your chest. You were completely alone with him. For once, you had Sam all to yourself. Soft shadows kissed his arms and hands and neck. He was made up of nothing but full endless sloping lines, a charcoal sketch come to life.
“I was restin’ my eyes,” he sassed. “We should stay sharp through tonight, though. Stay up. I can take the first shift, since you’ve taken the last three.”
You didn’t miss the little nod to your sleeping habits. Which meant Sam had also laid awake long enough to know you hadn’t fallen asleep until late, which meant he’d laid awake next to you. In bed. Thinking with that big brain of his. It made your own big brain run around in crazy circles, chasing whatever conclusions he might come to.
You stole a glance at the nearest window. The salt lines were laid neatly on its sil, on the off chance boarding up the glass turned out to be useless. “That’s okay. I’m not exactly tired yet.”
Sam popped a few pomegranate seeds into his mouth, humming in thought. “Then it’d probably be smartest to keep each other up.”
“Samuel!” You gasped. He froze mid-chew, confused, and remained confused until you started poking him and laughing. “I’d expect a line like that from your brother, but never from you.”
You were a tease-first-ask-questions-later kind of person, so you understood Sam’s particular brand of banter and how he liked to respond to yours. Typically, you’d annoy him with a playful little taunt and Sam would let you know you were funny by calling you a jackass. You waited for Sam to hear your line and brush you off as an idiot. Instead, he did something much more interesting: he got defensive.
“I meant stay up like, like talking,” he sputtered. “I would never—y’know. I wouldn’t. Do, uh. Do that. Why don’t we keep up our question game from before? It’s, it’s your turn, right?”
“Okay. What was your first time like?”
Well. Shit.
This was the fastest question that either one of you had managed to whip out all week, and that fact hung so obviously in the air that you could feel it between you and Sam on the floor. It dropped so hard in the middle of the conversation that it shut you both up, silencing Sam’s sputtering and veering your train of thought to a shrieking, sparking halt. Sam was smart. His big brain would put together—had probably already put together—that you’d thought about asking him this. He might even be smart enough to intuit why you’d been itching to bring this subject back up, and for the first time in your life you prayed that Sam was the dumbest, most thick-headed man to ever hunt with you.
He did a great impression of someone less clever than himself. “Like. The first time I…?”
You chewed a few pomegranate seeds. “Uh-huh.”
“...Right.” Sam registered. He conveniently decided to fixate on the fire instead of you, which should’ve helped your sanity, if that was even possible anymore. The bulb of his nose and the swell of his lip curved just perfectly in profile, made even prettier by the firelight. God.
You panicked. “If that makes you uncomfortable—”
Sam swallowed. “No, no. You’re okay. Just thinking.”
You bit down on your tongue. Oh, awesome. Thinking! Exactly what I want you to be doing right now!
Sam swiped two sweaty, corded hands down each of his thighs. Tucked his hair behind his ears. Made your belly flutter and twist like a huge gust of wind going through a spring-fresh tree.
“I was seventeen,” Sam cleared his throat. “We were in Utah—well, I was in Utah, Dad and Dean were… Whatever. But I was sort of, um, on this rebellious streak at the time.”
You lazed back on your hands. “So, in hunter-kid terms, counting the days til’ you’re eighteen and packing your rucksack?”
An abrupt laugh barked out of Sam. His gaze loitered on your face with renewed comfort, remembering, again, that you’d both hidden your acceptance letters where no parent could see them. This was another Sam-move you knew the steps to.
“Yeah,” his eyes glittered. “Exactly.”
(The day you met Sam, the one reference you’d made to your associate’s degree had him crossing his legs under the table. He’d asked in a husky, tight voice what you’d gone to school for. Just hearing the words folklore and mythology had the guy close to pitching a tent.)
Sam managed to take his eyes off you. “But, uhm. There was this girl at school my Dad had ordered me not to hang around, so… I hung around. After a school dance. In her car.”
You were a very mature adult who was not at all jealous of a teenage Utahn, and thus sculpted your face into something playful. “Dirty,” you snickered. Sam’s light smile was encouraging, so you said as an afterthought, “Sounds like a squeeze, though. Don’t know if I’d want my first time to be in a car.”
“Especially in a tiny, cramped Nissan,” he agreed, chuckling. The smidgen of regret in his voice shouldn’t have made you feel like you’d earned a point against Random Utah Girl, but it did. You scolded yourself for it (your imaginary point gripped in one fist).
It was now Sam’s turn to ask a question, and he asked it fast. Impressively fast. “Okay, so. No car. Where would you want your first time to happen, then?”
Though you were an absolute animal when it came to Go Fish, your empty wallet was proof enough that you were a lousy poker player—due to an even lousier poker face. Hearing Sam’s question, it did you no favors. Even before you’d formed any thoughts about… everything, your body knew its answer, pointing every delicate nerve in your body toward the open doorway to the cabin’s bedroom.
You flicked a glance at the warm, intimate darkness waiting for you there.
It was only a second. But that one look was enough. Your hand was exposed, and Sam, by comparison, was an excellent poker player.
In a rush, you scrambled to put some distance between yourself and your obviousness. You winced. No way out. “Uhh, anywhere cozy. For the first time, I dunno if I’d wanna be cramped in a closet or something, no matter how sexy it may be. Is it lame to say… a bed?”
Sam hummed. As you’d talked, he’d become more and more relaxed in front of the fire, lounging on a propped-up arm and picking out of the fruit bowl. There was a long silence from him that could’ve been the weighted silence before a judge’s verdict.
…You’d never seen a judge draw his hand up to his mouth, suck pomegranate juice from the pads of his fingers, then pull off them with a noisy pop, but. But maybe they took a different approach at Stanford.
“It’s the standard for a reason, right?” Sam shrugged, amused.
He pushed the bowl across the floor with his wrist instead of his spit-slick fingers. It made a hollow scraping sound that brought your head back to the conversation, thank god, since the last seconds of your life post-fingers-to-mouth action had been spent elsewhere. The specific “elsewhere” that entailed Sam’s thick-knuckled fingers and Sam’s pretty pink mouth. You’d had the occasional intrusive thought about men creep up on you before, but the tricky part was that those thoughts pushed their way in. They jolted into your life then jolted back out.
Single-handed, Sam had hooked you, reeled you in, and pulled you “elsewhere.” Keyword: pulled. Not pushed.
…Then… maybe… pulled you again. And pushed you back. And again. Pulled out, then pushed in. Pulllled out slow, only to ssssink back in, deeper than before. Pulling and pushing with rhythm. Pulling, pushing, faster, deeper. Making you gasp and yelp his name, his fingers—Sam’s fingers—digging into your waist, your belly—
Click. Click click click click click click.
“_____?”
You’re so self-conscious you think you could feel the individual atoms of your body clanging against each other. “...Uh-huh?”
It’s your turn to ask a question next. But Sam breaks the rules and speaks first, since he knows exactly what he wants to ask you. He glides up onto one hand, his whole body a twenty-page study of lanky coyness, and tilts in close to you.
“If you could lay it all out—the timing, the place, the person…” Sam’s face glittered with a poker player’s curiosity. “What would your perfect first time be like?”
Or: Give me the manual, and I’ll follow it.
Your mouth was watering. It was one of a million things making it impossible for you to speak right now, including the sudden, nigh-unbearable heat of the room under your collar, and, oh right, the metric fuckton of slick soaking your underwear. The speed at which your arousal hits you is enough to make you dizzy, and in the haze you swear you start to hear something. Click. Click. Click click click click click click click—
Fuck. Sam is waiting for an answer. Fuck.
“I guess I’ve never thought about it before.”
Which was a blatant lie, since you’d spent the last ten minutes thinking of nothing else. Sam either sensed you weren’t telling the truth or was looking for something more, because he let you linger in your own answer, prying the rest out of you with his hanging silence.
Really, you should’ve been tougher, but the first long breath without anything from him shredded your strength. You caved and filled the quiet.
“I mean,” you toyed with your hands in your lap. “No matter what, I’d want it to be special. Bein’ out on the road, marching around, that’s not really a luxury we’re allowed to have. It’s like you said yesterday. I wanna be with someone I’m connected to, and I don’t think that’s gonna be in the back of a bar or—”
“—in a stranger’s bed,” Sam softened with understanding. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.” You echoed. The fire crackled and popped, loud enough that you could use the sound as an excuse to look elsewhere. “And if I happened to find that person, they’d have to be in the life. We can only trust other hunters, nowadays.”
Sam snorted. “If we’re lucky, maybe.”
It disappointed you how much you had to agree with him. There used to be a sense of mutual understanding among the hunters you’d met, but something had shifted since you were little. The world was a much scarier place, and the hunters that’d survived to see it had darkened to meet it. You’d dodged all shades of skeevy, selfish people before you’d landed in the Impala’s backseat. Even Dean and Sam had colored the list of hunters you’d been warned to avoid. Of course, every inch of it had turned out to be triple-hand gossip. Maybe you were quick to judge or the boys were just good seeds in a shitty crop, either way, ending up with them was the kind of good luck that beat the devil.
You’d never had the chance to tell Sam that before.
“I dunno. Not to go all mushy on you, but I do feel pretty lucky.”
Sam indulged you with an inviting tilt of his head, impressed that either one of you had a sliver of luck between you. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. This last year, before I joined up with you n’ Dean, there wasn’t a single living soul out there I thought was worth putting my faith in,” you said, easing your mushy confession onto him under the guise of fact. Sam couldn’t digest it any other way. “I’m really grateful you changed that for me. It feels—it feels good to trust people. To feel like somebody knows you.”
Sigh. The side of your personal bubble filled with nothing but Sam started to seep with quiet, disbelieving fondness, and you could tell because Sam was giving you the eyes. The eyes. The ones that people brought out their wallets for and sent girls like you into romantic psychosis.
You dared to face them head-on, which was a reckless idea (probably brought on by romantic psychosis). Sure enough, his gaze was big and soulful and heart-rending. Sam was sitting so close now that you could almost soak up his body heat. The biting wind wormed its way through the thin walls and the fire was fading with it, but Sam oozed magnetic warmth by comparison. Stuff-your-face-in-his-neck kind of warmth.
“Do you feel like…” Sam rasped. He brushed the flats of his knuckles down your arm, breaking that final touch barrier. “...like I really know you?”
Your entire nervous system implodes with fluttery feelings. It’s just two fingers, brushing soft down your arm through your sweater, but. It’s confirmation. It’s Sam’s yes, I want this, and it puts into perspective how the two of you have spent the last week: alone together. Curled as one shape in bed. Talking just loud enough for only the other to hear, and never an octave higher. Never more than a few feet apart. If you reached for Sam first you knew he’d accept your hand, your boots in his bootprints, but when he coasts his palm down the swell of your shoulder it’s him reaching out for you.
You reach right back. You curl a hand up to cover his hand with yours, those big doe eyes asking that same question on repeat. Do you think I know you? Do you trust me? Do you want this?
“All I’ve got is me, you, and Dean. And it wasn’t him that I told all my deepest hopes and shittiest moments to,” you laughed. “So…”
Every other time you’ve hit this point, you’d been distracted by the logistics and the math of sex—protection, chemistry, the when and how, and the consequences of both. It’s not gonna hit you until two days after this moment, after Sam has you as many times as you want in the plush cabin bed, that there was no math with him. Just want. Just things sliding into place. Click click click.
“So…” Sam’s face tips even closer. Your head fogs with the heat and smell and presence of him, mesmerized.
He puts it all together for the two of you: “Your perfect first time would be with a hunter, somebody in the life that you trust. Somebody who could make you feel special. Somebody who really knows you.”
You smirk before you can stop yourself. “Do I need to drop any more hints, Sam?”
Damn, could that boy put a fireworks show to shame. He lit up. Sam’s shoulders did this really cute boyish swell and his lips parted, telegraphing with every piece of himself, Oh, you really want this, you really want me!
You’d never seen him wear that kind of happiness before, and it made sense why. Thank god the two of you were off the grid out here, because you didn’t doubt that Sam’s smile could pop every lightbulb in the entire country.
Sam aimed a bubbly laugh at his lap, embarrassed. “I don’t think I’m getting the full picture,” he tried to flirt, “a few more, maybe?”
So, getting less and less subtle as you went on, you explained to Sam the hypothetical author of the night of your life. He’d be sweet. Polite. Smart, too, but not the type to rub it in your face. (This made Sam laugh). He’d be gentle and considerate and frankly fucking awesome, but not so shy that he couldn’t give you a wild time.
When he was blushing so hard you stopped needing the fire for warmth, you sprinkled one last handful of flattery on him. “And, jesus,” you whistled, “this guy I’m picturing? Total dreamboat. So pretty it makes me wanna write dumb songs about him.”
Predictably, Sam got so flustered that he went back to futzing with that same strand of hair by his ear. With the touch barrier between you broken, your mind buzzed with a million different ways to reach out and feel him, to draw him in, and all those ideas coalesced seeing Sam’s hand come up to his cheek. Before you lost your resolve, you stroked the messiest portion of his bangs behind his ear for him. Sam melted. He liked to do that around you.
“Now I’d just sound arrogant if I assumed that it’s me,” Sam snorted.
You pressed the flats of your knuckles down Sam’s warm, smooth cheek. “It’s you. It’s been you for a while, actually.”
The easy, loving contact dazed him. Sam’s eyes fluttered closed, and a short, shaky breath puffed out of him in one bracing go. It was clear that he hadn’t been touched this way in a while. He sat there absorbing your touch for a long time, a cat resting his head in the full scope of your palm. You turned your body to face his and Sam’s gaze, which was layer after layer of hazels no artist could mimic, opened for you.
You thought about saying something cheesy like, wow, ain’t I lucky, having the whole world in the palm of my hand, but Sam was much faster (and much, much cheesier).
A leather-tough hand scooped around the back of your neck. The touch was fucking-christ-big and god, so was he, the line of his thumb to his wristbone as long as the length of your neck. You knew this because that’s exactly where Sam placed it, stroking your chin with his thumb. Prickling chills tickled up your legs. He scrutinized you—and you say scrutinize loosely, since the Sam-equivalent was gazing into your face like a fatal decision was held there. Your mental yes, yes, I want you was so loud that Sam could’ve psychically heard it. If he did, it was enough to make his pupils become huge pools of want.
“C’mere,” Sam grinned.
You laughed. “M’ practically nose to nose with you, Sam, I don’t have any further to—”
The rest of your teasing was lost to a louder yelp. Sam scooped his arms around your middle and. And hauled you. Into his lap.
His—lap.
There was no way to survive this landing. You were plopped right on top of his barrel-wide thighs, your every sense instantly stuffed full to bursting with every wonderful thing that made Sam himself. A steam of woody body wash and aftershave put you under his spell. Two massive hands soothing down your back glued you happily in place. Sam’s warm chuckles seeped through his chest and into your hands, because, oh yeah, you were allowed to touch him. And there was so much of him to touch now, too. The entire front of your body was cozily smushed up against his firm, longer frame, filling your hazy vision with the soft shadows on his throat and collarbones and those fucking dimples. What the fuck.
“Is this okay?” Sam asked you.
The only time you’d been permitted in another person’s space like this was to hug them. Overwhelmed with choice—you could kiss him, touch him, run your fingers through his hair this close—you defaulted to what you knew. Sam hesitated, but with a breath, the coil of his body unwound and the two of you slid together with a satisfying smush. (Or maybe a click).
Oh my god that’s good, your senses wailed, but all you could manage with your face muffled in his neck was, “Warm. Sooo warm, Sammy.”
“Is that a yes?” He hoped.
You pulled your face out of his shirt to sigh. “The biggest yes of your life.”
Sam gleamed. Being so close to the source of all happiness on earth (the toothy grin he was biting back for your benefit) should’ve instantly pulverized you and every other hot-blooded being on this side of the planet. It should’ve. But your soul was still ringing around in your feeble body, and sure enough, your calves were still snug around Sam’s thighs like they’d been before. You’d survived being inches away from Sam’s face while he smiled all shy for you, and succeeded in feeling only a teeny bit like a pile of smoking ash because of it. For a second you tricked yourself into thinking you could survive him.
That is not the case.
With impeccable timing, Sam kisses you. Just a brief, firm peck on the mouth. Testing the waters. The waters that are now a fucking ocean in your underwear, thank you very much. It’s only a two-second kiss, but the instant Sam’s lips pop off of yours an embarrassing happy squeal follows him out. Definitely not the suave reaction you were expecting from yourself. Sam just laughs, which translates as a sexy hum under your free hand.
“That was cute,” he whispers, eyes crinkling.
“Shut up, Sam.”
He hums, still brimming with that big spoiled grin. He takes you by your prickling arms and starts to pull his hands down them, again and again, squeezing the anxiety out of you in huge handsy swaths. You feel a bit better about being such a nervous wreck. His hands are trembling too.
The first kiss was good. Really good. Wetter, warmer than you were expecting, but so fucking—good. His mouth was soft and stained by the pomegranate, but, oh no, you’re already forgetting what it was like to taste him. It’s so tempting… to just… lean in…
He’s just as tempted. Sam meets you in the middle for a second kiss that he finds so satisfying, so right that this deep rumbling moan purrs right out of him. The pink swell of his lips are, of course, pressed hot to yours, filling you head to fucking toe with that single bassy note. You gasp through your nose—because nothing is worth breaking his kiss. Not a desperate breath of air, not an uttered word.
Sam kisses you with his hands as much as he dazzles you with his mouth, laying heavy touches down your back, then your waist, then your legs, inspecting and absorbing. You’re hardly as methodical. He is a wonderful beach and it’s your first time seeing the ocean. You take the biggest fistfuls of him that you can, feeling the silky sand of him slip between your greedy fingers.
Sam is apparently into being your metaphorical beach, since after he’s done melting your brain and your underwear in the most intense make-out session of your life, he pulls away to speak.
Sam rasps. “Can I take care of you?”
It takes you a moment to respond, because. Well. A, that’s the sexiest way someone has asked to have sex with you, no contest, and B, you’ve been waiting this whole time for the moment where you don’t want this anymore. With other men, your body had just never found the spark that should’ve been there. Was this time different? Had things click click clicked into place?
You take a step back to put this in perspective for your future self. As vividly as you’re able, you think about having sex with Sam. You visualize Sam’s sharp eyes, his naked back, the cut of his hips, all of it, as he fucks you straight through the shitty mattress in the cabin’s bedroom. All the sweat-twisted blankets shoved to the floor. Sam’s hips canting your thighs apart. The worn-smooth slope of his—of his fucking paws, essentially, squeezing your tits and your tummy and your waist in achy handfuls. You think about it some more. How Sam would moan, how his lashes would screw shut in ecstasy as he filled you. You keep thinking about it. When your mind starts to deviate toward the filthy, thick sound of him… o-of Sam plunging into you over and over again, smushing you under his weight… uhm. Uh.
Yeah. Yeah, this is everything you fuckin’ want.
It takes conscious effort for you to close your gaping mouth, then pry it open again to blurt: “Please, yes.”
A tiny piece of his posture relaxed in relief. Sam smushed a cute, giddy peck into your cheek, reminding your entire tingling nervous system that there was a really sweet guy underneath the deadly-efficient hunter you knew.
“Okay,” he beamed, and shyly tipped his head toward the bedroom. “Shall we?”
You feel like you should be doing more than being demure and nodding a lot, but Sam doesn’t seem to mind. After you climb out of his lap and find your footing on your jellified legs, he unfolds off the floor like bucks do, knowing on instinct how to conduct the body he has so much of. The fire’s sleepy and weak in the hearth, and with it dead, Sam is the new center of heat in the room. He takes your hand and just touching the middle of his palm spurs shivery warmth down your legs. Now, you’re all too aware of Sam’s proportions—how encompassing his hand feels, how easily his shoulders fill the doorway to the little bedroom. Feeling mature, you fill the next room with bright giggles. You see in real-time how Sam melts at the noise.
Like you have the last few nights, you each scoop up a candle and find a place for it amidst the hunter clutter. It takes a beat to find your way through the dark. The space is just big enough for the slim bed pushed snug into the corner, and already you know from experience how you and Sam fit into the nest of blankets and pillows. (Hint: extremely well).
Sam uses his candle to light a few others on the bedside table, keeping a free hand stretched toward you to reserve his spot as your only hand-holder. You drop your candle on the dresser and consider the only thing next to it while you wait for him. The Winchesters had three vinyls total for their ancient record player, and seeing it unused and wasted in front of you, you have a stroke of romantic genius.
The second you drop the needle on the first jazz record and turn back toward the cozy, honey-lit room, Sam’s there, sliding into your open arms to plant a kiss on you. And another. And another. And another, coaxing little happy sighs from you. They’re such deep kisses that you dip back with each one, until the curve of Sam’s towering body is diagonal over you and you have to clutch his shoulders to stay standing. Both of his rough-sawn hands cup the scoop of your back to support you. All your daydreaming about him had convinced you that he’d be a head-to-toe brick wall, but Sam’s teddy-bear soft instead, the gleaming skin you have access to yielding and plush. His lips most of all, puffy pink and shining.
Sam persists, pressing closer, kissing you deeper, panting under his breath. Whatever it is about the happy sounds you make wake up something dark in him. There’s a tight, delicate rhythm he likes to follow, and the more of Sam you get the less of it you see. That straight-arrow persona is there, and then—poof! Sam’s tongue is laving wet and hot and perfect across your parted lips, ruining your underwear in one fell swoop.
He tilts in to start sucking on your tongue—
“Fuck, Sam,” you choke out.
The situation in your panties graduates to unbearable levels. If you have to makeout with Sam fully clothed for even a second longer, you think your core will enter a full reactor meltdown. You try to get the words across, grabbing helplessly at his sweater and whining, but Sam interprets it as something else.
“Everything okay?” He worries.
Dazed, you nod more than you need to. With your eyes open and his face in full view, you’re hit with a spark of self-consciousness. Sam fills the bedroom with easy conviction, owning his desire in a way you’ve never really been capable of. You don’t exactly have the experience to blow his mind or anything. Why would he want this if there was so little in it for him? Sam wasn’t a selfish guy, but… To you, your eagerness starts to feel more like greediness.
You shift from foot to anxious foot, shrinking in place. “...Could you, um? Walk me through it? How we’re gonna…?” You swallowed the frog in your throat. “Sorry, that must seem stupid.”
Leave it to him to make something stupid into something ridiculously, fatally sexy.
“S’okay, don’t be embarrassed. It’d…” Sam wets his lips, looking for the words. A quiet, dirty-minded smile plays across his face. He decides, “It’d be my pleasure.”
His touch moves away from your back, and you’re about to mourn the loss of it until Sam’s hands start to play with yours, twisting them around in his own like a schoolboy. He closes the space you’ve timidly left open between you by pressing your chests together. It’s a small gesture. But this is Sam, so your face is in smolders on that alone. (…And you’d just been french kissed, to be fair).
“Okay. Uhh,” Sam fumbles. He stops to consider his approach. As in, the approach he’ll take to seducing you, as if you aren’t seduced on a level incomprehensible to humankind.
You can’t help but laugh at how much Sam-math must be happening in his head, and Sam laughs too. Sam keeps laughing, until it warms into a handsome, knowing hum, and suddenly he’s laying your hands on his belt and tickling your ear with the hot fan of his breath. You squeak, sensitive, which tempts him into breaking character.
Sam reigns it back in, then whispers.
“When you’re ready… m’ gonna get you out of these clothes.”
The deliciously big set of hands on your waist sidle up under the open strip of skin below your shirt. Just one of his fingers is brave enough to sneak up to draw circles against your tummy. It’s the slightest taste of what it’ll be like to have those hands all over you, sweat-slick skin-to-naked skin, which is just enough to make your appetite for him boil in your gut.
“And I know you’re gonna be freezin’, we both are, but I promise you’ll get real hot real soon. Cause’...”
The bulb of his nose (and the ghost of his smile) brushed your cheek, then down, and the explosive fluttery feeling already lighting up your belly pitches into a whole fireworks show.
“...The minute I see you lying all pretty on your back for me…”
Sam tips in to lay a kiss on your throat. A slow, open-mouthed kiss, suckling soft on your skin.
“...In our bed…”
Our bed, he says. That choice of words alone implies so much. If the two of you sharing it before didn’t count, then Sam was about to make it your bed.
“I’m not stopping til’ you get every single thing you want,” Sam purrs. His kisses become blatant licks, the whole of his capable tongue drawing wet lines on your throat. “Til’ you’re damn spoiled.”
What. The fuck. The universe could dissolve into mist and you would be too turned on to care, tethered to the last atoms of the earth by your hands on Sam’s belt. You gape up at him. Sam, the evil genius, smirks right back. When you’d said you wished your first time could feel special, you hadn’t exactly been planning for Sam to follow that direction to the damn letter. He makes it sound like he’s going to bend to your every whim, and knowing Sam...
You swipe at your face to check that you’re not drooling. “I’m—I-I—you’re—” while you’re sputtering, he swipes a dab of spit off the other corner of your lip. “—Suh-Sam.”
Screw it. You drop both hands on Sam’s chest and twist your fingers in his shirt, forcing the words out in choppy pieces. “I’m not as experienced as you. But I really, really… want this. To be—to be good for us. Wanna give you everything you want, too.”
Sam makes a flattered, yet sympathetic face. “Oh, baby, don’t think about me—”
“—I can’t stop thinking about you.”
Now, it’s Sam’s turn to forget how to speak. Finally.
You wind your fingers into the tuft at the back of his neck, enunciating, “How… do I make this good for you?”
“You’re already here. That’s all I need,” Sam gushes, falling back on his tender chivalrous boyfriend routine. It’s really sexy. Almost sexy enough to work. He tucks back his signature lock of unruly hair, blushing from his ears to his neck.
Well, stream-of-consciousness hasn’t failed you yet.
“Uh-uh. We’ve been alone together in this teeny cabin for a whole week. There’s no way I’m the virgin, but you’re the one without the dirty fantasies.” You take a long squinting look at him to divulge any loose secrets. Thumbing Sam’s hip through his shirt, you press, “Tell me. C’mon. You want me to blow you? Pull your hair? Or do you, I dunno—wanna bite me? Pin me down?”
You can track the second Sam starts breathing harder, but somewhere between then and now his eyes have glazed over with dangerous desire.
Sam clutched fast at his shrinking sliver of self-control. “Okay,” he squeezed his eyes shut. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. So… if it feels right, and it’s not embarrassing, it would be… I’d, I’d love it if you…”
“Got super noisy?”
After an intensely bashful pause filled with quiet music, Sam nods, hiding behind his bangs. Knew it. He always got so squirrely when you did your oh-I’m-so-cozy moan snuggling into bed at night.
Teasing him any more would definitely be poking the bull. But is it fun to poke that bull? Absolutely. Especially when Sam starts to unbuckle his belt, his whole body crawling with the urge to throw himself at you.
“Alright, I can do that. But how noisy are we talking? Like, normal enjoying myself kind of noisy, or best-sex-of-my-life noisy?”
He gets this nasty, disbelieving smile on his face, and it’s your last warning before—
Snap. Sam’s restraint splits in two. In an instant you’re captured by the underarms and Sam, who’s honest-to-god grinning/snarling about how you need ta’ be taught a lesson on leavin’ well enough alone, flings you onto the end of the bed. You land with a shriek. Then a second, louder squeal, as Sam takes your pantlegs in his fists and whips them clean off.
The next precious moments are filled with all sorts of lessons. For one thing, it takes a lot of force to tear pants off a person. By happenstance, you’re dragged a whole foot further down the bed and right against Sam’s lap. You also learn that pants are connected to underwear, so following that math, it makes sense why your panties are now royally rearranged on your hips. These two factors are too convenient to not be planned on Sam’s part. You’re reminded, again, that Sam is a genius.
You also remember that you’ve never been pantsed before. With and without the sexy context. Keeping that in mind, you, like any other person in your delicate situation, snap your legs closed on instinct. Not because you don’t want Sam there—holy shit, do you want him there—but because he happened to tickle you in the transfer from floor to bed, and you’re not about to let him pounce on you and tickle you to death.
This really works out for you in the long run, since having your legs closed means that it’s inevitable Sam will have to open them.
You’re laughing so hard that your sides have locked up with stitches. Sam pretends he’s not just as amused by kneeling up on the bed as grouchily as possible, ripping his shirt off, and… and, uhm… scooping his huge palms under your knees, and… yeah. He doesn’t have to do any pushing past that. Your legs just fall right open for him, and Sam wiggles in between them where he belongs.
Nothing in this entire world could prepare you to have Sam this close, so the idea that you could even cope with being absolutely towered over by the indecent amount of ab he possesses is fuckin’ laughable. Who the fuck let him have abs? For the health of all people attracted to men on this planet, who taught Sam to work out?
Your giggling trails off into mesmerized, panting silence.
“How noisy?” Sam scoffs, chuckling mean and deep in his chest. “How noisy? I’ll give you a hint how noisy you’re gonna be—”
He falls forward onto his hands, effectively blanketing you in a swath of flushed-smooth, freckly skin. There’s not a thought in your mind about how cold this room is in comparison to the last. Your hands smooth over the planes of his cheeks on instinct, and Sam follows the touch into a soul-shattering, full-body, toe-curling kiss that melts both your bodies into the homey center of the quilts and comforters. His nose squishes into your cheek and a long, satisfied groan bubbles out of him. He barely pulls his lips from yours when he hisses—
“...I’m gonna fuck you til’ you’re hoarse.”
What in the ever-loving fuck.
I cannot put into words how much I want you to do that, you want to say, and it’s true, since you end up making the world’s neediest gasp of glee instead. You’re not pleading up into his face for a full second before Sam gets your message. One can only guess what he’ll do next. (Hint: Sam cannot take in a full breath without kissing you first).
All week you’ve been toiling away to earn tiny pieces of the Sam puzzle. The picture you’ve built so far is, frankly, a touch-starved animal, who will wait at the heels of the first trusted person willing to provide. You kiss Sam once and he’s so damn grateful that he’ll multiply it by five. You get adventurous with your hands, squeezing and appreciating Sam’s flushed-smooth back. Because he’s Sam, returning the favor takes precedence over his beloved activity, and your kiss is forced to break so he can sit up and touch you proper.
Well. If any of this can be considered proper, that is. And if there’s one word to describe what Sam does to you with his hands, it’s improper.
“Still ready, _____?” He asks.
You bite back your inner worries and taunt him, “Been ready.”
He splays his fingers on your belly and is so transfixed by its softness that he stoops to smudge a kiss above your belly button. You do your best to pretend it doesn’t tickle, which is the opposite of what Sam wants. He gives your sides two quick pinches that have you squirming and squeaking under him, too shy to keep your eyes open. You’re embarrassed about the girly sounds he gets out of you until you risk a look at his face—plum red, dizzy, and glazed with fond desire.
Sam wasn’t kidding. He does want you at your noisiest.
This brings your horniness to a whole new level, turning the airy fluttery feeling expanding in your belly into the opposite: an emptiness, a vacuum, and one that desperately needs to be filled. Sam seems to do nothing but fill things. The doorways he stands in, the beds he kneels on, the snuggly center of your embrace. Naturally, this makes you insane. His hands fill up the most—big swaths of your belly, your shirt—your bra.
They push the band of the hunting sportsbra you’re wearing clear over your tits and out of his way. Sam rumbles in approval.
You stop your hands from twitching up around your naked chest, now hyper-aware of how much your breasts rise with your breath. Sam breathes you in. His gaze is soft beyond imagination, which makes the whittled-down shards of fear inside you seem even sillier than before. Either he reads your mind or he’d predicted you’d be mousy (and christ do you hope it’s the latter, since that means he thought about this already), because Sam plucks up your closest hand and presses it flat to his happy trail.
“Don’t be nervous,” he soothes. “Touch me too.”
The thought alone explodes you into steam. But you’re no quitter, so you roll with the invitation, stroking the soft pads of your fingers along the line from Sam’s naval to his ill-fitting jeans. He’s not flexing for you, so you get to feel him as Sam really is: butter-smooth and blanket-soft. Without his belt there’s a precious gap hanging between his hips and his waistband. It’s just big enough for your hand to fit inside.
You’re not brave enough to take that final plunge until Sam twists down to kiss your chest. His mouth burns scorching hot on your breastbone, and as he curls over your body, his hands on your belly slide up to take two needy handfuls of your tits. In the same motion you fit your hand into Sam’s jeans and squeeze and—ohhh fuck, you wind in as one, sharing a perfect bow-taut moment of hissing pleasure.
Sam pressed his face where he was kissing, deflating on top of you with a long, seeping, “Shittt.”
Okay. On top of feeling good, sex could be a fun little puzzle to put together. Sam urging his hips into your hand was one piece, and if you put it in the right place (i.e: touched him like that again), he’d be all yours. You do. You cup him through his boxers and follow what you feel, and what you feel is. Fucking. It’s. I-is it supposed to be that big? And, and holy shit, is he hard.
Sam. Sam’s big, thick dick in your hand. You’re gonna be wet for damn weeks.
Stupified, you blurt out, “Do you always get this hard?”
Sam cracks a wry grin, his eyes lidded. “Mm. It’s definitely you. Bein’ stuck out here with you.”
He drops a kiss on the seam of your ribcage. Then lower. And lower, leaving shiny wet circles along your tummy. “Makin’ me crazy… sticking by me every second, pressing yourself into me in your sleep. Lookin’ at me like—like that.” Just thinking about it made Sam shiver. “You turn me on like nothing else. Just last night, even, right here in this bed—I must’a stopped myself from rolling you over and tasting you a hundred times.”
The urge was so vivid for him that Sam’s mouth must’ve been watering, since he sucks the spit back through his teeth before he starts to kiss your belly in earnest. Just that sound burns with lust. Sam wants it, wants you so bad he’s shaking, his hands trembling under your thighs as he slithers down to lay between them. His kisses grow fiercer, open-mouthed and sucking the closer he gets to your panties. Kitten-soft moans start to sneak into the cycle of your panting.
“Don’t think I’m gonna be able to stop myself this time,” Sam husks.
You let him know just how comfortable you are with that by curling your legs around his back. Then his shoulders. Then Sam’s ears, and at that point he’s singeing spit-damp kisses inside your thighs like the world’s most faithful servant.
Nobody but him had ever touched you there. You choke out his name on short, needy breaths. It’s like you’re filling a meter. With enough please, Sams, you hit his limit, and he stops rubbing his face into your soft under-thighs long enough to hook his fingers around your waistband.
You’re treated to the Sam Winchester specialty. He bats long lashes at you over dark, sensitive eyes, and rasps, “Am I okay to…?”
You’re so horny that you start spurring Sam closer with your heels. “Fucking yes.”
This is the A+ answer. Sam doesn’t even wait to get your underwear all the way down your legs, yanking them out from under you and ducking straight below the bridge they make. Just seeing your pussy makes him swear. You’re so swollen and slick and his mouth is so close, so close, but Sam decides to taunt you, blowing across the spit cooling on your belly instead. Heat oozes in hazy lines from his body. From his hands. By comparison, the night has leeched the warmth from the room and you’re cold enough to get goosebumps.
“Please please please, Sam,” you hiccup, “need it. Need you. Need you t’ warm me up.”
“My poor girl,” Sam coos, brows drawn with playful sympathy. He starts to rub some heat back into your freezing legs, tilting closer, closer. “I know just how to help.”
You let your head flop back as you take his cheesiness in, laughing. That’s not exactly a line you’d expect from him. Before, though, you would’ve never pinned Sam as the kind of guy to clamp your knees against your chest, drop his head between your legs and fit his mouth on you, slurping noisily on your slick like he’s eating the juiciest fruit of his life—
“—f-uuuuckkk Sammy yes yes yes—”
Indescribable pleasure pops and sizzles along your weeping core. It’s so fucking—fucking yes all at once that you clap down both hands to white-knuckle the top quilt and howl. Sam sets to work. He covers your entire pussy with his mouth, swallowing you fucking whole, apparently, since you’re the most delectable thing he’s ever tasted. You have to be, with Sam groaning and cursing all fierce and hot between licks.
“Fuck. That’s it, pretty girl,” Sam coaches. He slurps loud and obscenely on your clit, swallowing down the results with a shiver of ecstasy. “Shit, just like that. You’re so good at this already. So good at taking it, ______. Never should’a made you wait.”
But all that must not count as getting a full taste of you, since Sam deviates, splaying his tongue flat and wide to rake it against you top to bottom. His tongue almost drools with liquid heat. At first you’d been disappointed you couldn’t see him over your legs, and now, you’re grateful for the mercy. Seeing Sam like that…
Sam licks you open until there’s no breath left in him. He goes until his jaw is sore and your slick is rolling off his chin in sticky rivulets, wetting the bedspread. He goes and he keeps going, worshipping your slippery-wet cunt between huffy moans.
You make a pathetic attempt at giving as good as you’re getting, but what should be a sexy zinger actually comes out as, “Sam, I-I—oh, god—Sam—!”
After that, your ability to form words joins your other higher brain functions in the endless sparkling expanse of white in your mind. Sam stirs a single long finger through your sopping folds. The stimulation alone has your hips twisting helplessly up to his face, on top of the rapid flicks of his talented tongue, but it’s the easy pressure of Sam’s thick finger filling you to the knuckle that actually earns a scream.
Not your average horror movie scream—an honest, enthusiastic, belly-deep cry that jerks in your chest like a sob.
You can pinpoint the precise moment that Sam realizes you’re a screamer; he hum-laughs to himself where he thinks you can’t hear.
“Next time,” (oh my fucking god there’s a next time), “‘won’t make you wait a minute, baby. Gonna give you everythin’ you want. I’m real sorry, darlin’, do you forgive me? Forgive me for not fucking you the second we were alone?”
You’re too busy having actual, real tears of desire cake your cheeks to string together a better answer than a moan. Holy shit.
Sam gives your pussy two deep, loving licks, each hot enough to send you into a coma. “Say it,” he utters, teasing, “say you forgive me.”
“I forg’ve you,” you croak.
“Forgive who?” He presses.
“I forgive you, Sammy.”
“That’s my girl,” Sam husks the promise between kisses to your clit, “So good to me. So sweet.”
Somehow, this is just as life-altering for him as it is for you. Long, flowing crests of pleasure seep hot through your system, winding tighter, tighter, tighter, twitching in the muscles of your stomach and almost cramping in your curled toes. The taste of you is so rich that Sam’s back quakes with euphoric shudders, trembling deep under the skin where he’s too far gone to rein back in. Sweaty locks of his bangs flutter as he breathes. It’s the only sign he’s breathing at all, really, what with him eating you out like he’s fuckin’ starved.
Sam gives a few good twists of his finger deep in your pussy (which doesn’t even graze how deep he might be with his cock). When you’re a puddle on the mattress and used to him, Sam withdraws to studiously coach you, “Deep breaths, ______.”
It takes a moment for the words to register. Once they have, you wind down long enough to measure your crazed breathing into even strokes. The ceiling overhead swims with dancing candlelight shadows and floating cartoon stars. Sam lifts his head to see for himself that you’re following his instructions, and after he’s done falling in love with the sight of you, Sam fills you up with two digits instead of one.
“A-ah!”
Just like before, they’re thrust in to the hilt at once. The throbbing, aching, leeching core of your arousal positively explodes, the urge to be filled finally touched. Sam’s responding bassy groan vibrates all the way up your body. The length and thickness of his fingers is put to immediate use, stretching you out with long knuckling gestures. You’re so unimaginably wet that your pussy just pulls him right in.
There’s a pause where you wiggle down onto his hand and brace yourself for the next brain-melting touch, and true to form, Sam sails straight over your grandest expectations. He’s quick to find the silky heart of arousal in your core again. You only know it by reputation, not experience, so when Sam presses into it with two soft fingerpads the pitch of your wailing jumps up ten octaves. Suddenly the pleasure is hot hot hot inside-going-out.
Sam tilts his head to one side and finds the gall to ask you: “How does that feel?”
(He just wants to hear you say it.)
“So good,” you weep. “Please please please gimme more, Sam, please—”
“It’s gonna be okay, _____. I’ll make it all better…”
Only then does Sam’s tongue get back to work, and—and holy fucking shit, he swoops in to steal the gold, demolishing every other name in the pussy-eating game. Sam wins. Sam fucking wins.
If this is just how his fingers feel…
Sam’s grin takes on a confident gleam. By coincidence, it’s around then that you remember that he’s psychic.
Somewhere between licking you into the next dimension and, oh yeah, Sam licking you into the next dimension, he’s pinned your thighs to your chest with a firm hand under your knees. You squeeze that hand for all you’ve got, every feeble atom in your body scrubbed raw with perfect pulsing desire.
To think, you’d spent this whole time getting off with your hand. A fucking hand. A few fingers! Sam crooks his in a way you’d never even hoped for on your own, finding that fluttery, twitchy spot inside you and working it for all it has. You’d asked for more and he gives you more, thrusting two fingers in at a brutal, even pace—again and again and again, til’ you’re thrashing up and off the mattress, wailing, your whole body a fist cramping shut around him. You snap in so tight toward him that you shove your face into your knees and cross your ankles tight behind Sam’s neck, keening, the fire knotted in your body devouring whatever fuel he’ll give.
Sam’s skill with his hands made you feel like an amateur in your own department. But his slick velvet tongue on your slick velvet pussy, taking slow sucks on your clit that turn into big broad licks, licking you up, licking you into his mouth whole, made just the thought of masturbation fucking laughable. I mean, c’mon! What the fuck are you supposed to do after this? Pop into the bathroom to use the showerhead, when Sam and his insatiable appetite for pussy are sitting right in the next room? Why even bother fantasizing about him and dicking around with a vibrator when nothing would ever compare to the real thing, shoving his parched panting mouth between your legs in an addict’s haze?
Still lapping up your dripping core, Sam pries his free hand from your grip. You’re pretty sure you have the right to whine in protest. Without his leverage for support your weak thighs collapse straight open, and for all you know the gates of heaven had parted to reveal god’s most beautiful angel. Sam is the picture of filth. His pretty pink lips are sealed around your cunt, his nose is all cute and smushed into your pubic bone, and you watch in time with every dirty lap as his jaw rolls handsomely under his skin.
The look on his face is unfor-fucking-gettable. In fifty years, sixty years, seventy, you know this memory will still live inside you, since no man has ever looked at you that way before. You weren’t sure it was even possible. Hazy euphoria radiates in unending rays from Sam’s face. He wants you. He trusts you. He is written all over with warm, intent desire, satisfying himself on you.
“Stay still,” Sam asks, politely.
Politely, you slap back against the bed and moan out, “Mhhmm.”
A new kind of mischief flashes across his face. You would’ve never pinned Sam as the type of guy to thrive with an audience, but now that he knows you’re watching, he falls seamlessly into a performance. His act is a three-parter.
While keeping his pace with his fingers, Sam starts by sliding slow off your pussy and spitting on it even slower. Whatever hazel leftover in his eyes has been swallowed totally by glittering, black delight. The muscles is his arm bulge and cramp fucking into you so hard. Pleased with himself, Sam dips down, dark eyes disappearing under his bangs, and makes a show of pointing his tongue to flicker across the raw nerves of your clit.
There’s more after that in the finale of Sam’s act, but the constant, brutal winding toward your release has taken its final toll. You have no fucking clue how you’ve survived this long. The overpowering squeezes of arousal inside you become full-body, wracking pangs. The sweaty trembling scraps of your soul leftover from Sam’s work throb and throb until they’re a blinding star. At the center of it, your core, tight and hot and so loved by Sam’s mouth. The searing pleasure becomes explosive. Apparently, the noisy, pitchy moans waking up the mountainside are coming from you, as you claw to get Sam even a molecule closer—closer, closer, closer—s-so close—!
So…
Close…
And you’re there. In the shimmering, divine realm Sam has made just for you; the realm your meager hands could never bring you to, and the realm you’ll be chasing still for the rest of your life. It becomes blatantly obvious in the next blissful minute that you’ve never cum before. Not for real, at least. This was a real orgasm, flashing through your spirit and flowing hot and beautiful through the numb ends of your body. You wail through it like it’s real, that’s for sure.
Your pussy clamps down around Sam’s fingers in waves of slippery pressure, and he revels in every second of it. You’re fucked through it. Kissed through it. He keeps up his pace and smushes his face in close, and that’s when you realize, oh fuck, Sam is going to drink your glass empty. The soft scooping of his tongue ramps up and up and over, til’ the edges of your vision start to spot and your muscles are too tight to unknot and it’s all too much.
“Sa—Sam—”
Just that word has him off you. You think Sam draws back and away, but that’s just a guess, since the wires between you and the outside world have been fucked stupid. Even the language has been licked and lapped out of you.
“Sam…”
You feel… like soup. Wet all over and hot hot hot. Filling the shape of the bed. You make an honest attempt at communicating this to Sam as your soupy mind’s way of telling him how satisfied you are, but. Your pussy gives a delighted, distracting throb that melts you into the top quilt all over again. Wow.
Just. Wow. You marinate in the aftershocks for what feels like ages, speechless.
Down by your legs (so that’s where he went!), Sam peels his heaving chest off the bedspread. Right. If you couldn’t breathe, he definitely couldn’t either. He gets up on all fours and crawls towards you like a guy in an RnB music video, all sexy moving arms and hips. It really shouldn’t be as appealing as it absolutely is. Starry-eyed, you open lazy arms to him and haul him down the second he’s close enough. He falls on top of you with a happy oomf. He’s long and smooth and wonderful, making you sigh when he snuggles in.
A few sparkling millennia go by laying in bed with him, toying with his hair and giggling dazedly to yourself. Sam hides his blazing face in your neck and murmurs something.
You’re buzzed by the skin-to-skin contact and cum drunk, which puts everything he says into fuzzy empty speech bubbles. The low, shy rasp of his voice tickles your neck. You try again.
“...Uh-huh…?”
“Was, uh, that too intense? Or…?”
The question floats around in your head for a while, bumping into things and spinning in zero gravity. Finally, the lights in your ship start to come on, and you pull what Sam said out from space.
“Look at me a minute.”
Sam does, curious.
“How’d,” you struggled to find your breath, “how the hell’d you learn t’ do that.”
And suddenly, Sam’s high school shyness is on a man’s face, and that man licks your slick off his lip and suppresses an evil grin. “I have, y’know. A thing about it.”
“A thing?” You echo, laughing with him. Maybe if you said it again it wouldn’t blow your mind as much. “A thing. Try an addiction, Sam, holy shit.”
In a few days, you’re gonna have to act normal around him in a room with his brother, while Sam uses the lips he defiled you with to talk, drink, and smile. Fuck. For the rest of your life, you’re gonna have to sit beside him at the dinner table and remember how he told you had a thing for eating pussy. A thing.
Glowing with innocent humility, Sam pawed up onto his hands, rolled onto his side, and positioned himself like a pin-up girl inviting you to bed. When he was done broadcasting with his entire body how much he wanted you, Sam shrugged. “I dunno… I just love to do it.”
(Being stunned silent by Sam tally: one million and three.)
He’s not real. There’s no way he’s real. You grab around for some part of him to pinch, and though Sam’s indignant yelp sounds authentic, you’re unconvinced. They had to have cooked him up in a lab somewhere.
This earns you a deep, fond Sam laugh. He gives your closest hip a playful pinch too, and after a brief tickle-fight that you miserably lose, Sam tilts his lips toward yours and husks, “Roll over that way and c’mere.”
With nothing else to do but submit happily to Sam’s will, you follow his hand and tilt in toward the wall. “You are something else.”
You’re joking, but you can also kind of feel it. Sam slings his arm over your ribs to pull your back flush to his chest, and already you melt into each other, settling back into the hollows you made in the blankets the night before. This close you can feel the magic in him. Sam oozes with cozy bonfire heat, his body laying sure and protective against your body, the last dregs of hunt anxiety in him gone. You feel the worn-soft denim of his open jeans as Sam’s lap wiggles down to scoop under you. A map of what’s ahead.
He teases a hand down your ribcage, thumbing sweetly at your belly. Sam tilts his head forward for a kiss, and unable to resist him, you meet him in the middle for one that turns into two, then three, then a swath of obsessed pecks. He must have a thing about kissing, too.
Sam pulls back to study you. With less confidence than you’d expect, he asks, “You wanna keep going?”
Just the teeniest motion of your head has Sam swooping for the chance to kiss you again, but you stop him short and twist to get a better look at him. In a high, maidenly voice, you play at being confused. Your poker face is still awful, so you have to hide your massive grin behind the invisible handkerchief you’re clutching.
“Keep going? My, a gentleman like you… an unmarried woman like me… what else is there to do, Samuel?”
His week being teased by you at all angles has forced him to evolve. Sam forgets altogether about indulging your bit and upgrades straight to more wonderful, ticklish manhandling, wiggling an arm between your vulnerable side and the bed to practically throw you back where you belong. You squeak and sputter between laughs, pretending your skin doesn’t explode with goosebumps at his touch.
When his massive palm is spread over your breastbone, Sam hoists you back against him, rolls in to threaten squishing you with more plush muscle and manly weight, and snarls in a way that ruins your metaphorical panties all over again.
“Uh-uh. Don’t play. You know exactly what m’ gonna do to you. Do y—?”
Sam stirs up his hips as he talks. All the snooty teasing left in your tank evaporates in one fell swoop, feeling the delicious outline of his dick swelling against you. Okay. You’re woman enough to admit that does it for you, and you really, really don’t want to wait anymore. Sam is an unbearable tease who will drag this out forever. You take matters into your own hands. Or, really, you put them into his.
…You prop open your closest leg for him, bent at the knee.
“Aw,” Sam rumbles, “didn’t even have’ta ask.”
You don’t hide your mean little grin. Sam, of course, kisses you into oblivion just seeing it, sliding a coarse hand under the silky, sensitive flesh behind your knee to keep you open for him. The ashes of your last climax are still simmering with heat, but it’s Sam’s kiss and his touch that reignites you totally.
It’s a bit of a twist to lean back and kiss him, but Sam’s height is made for this: his bulge swells right under your pussy, and he has the room to lean in close to your ear and purr—
“Take it out.”
Sam is asking you to take out his dick. You know that, yet you imagine yourself a month from now, unsure of which weapon the boys are comfortable letting you borrow from the Impala’s trunk. Dean’ll tell you, oh, the machete’s fine. Then Sam, with glittering eyes and full knowledge of how he’s torturing you, will nudge his chin toward the trunk and utter that phrase. Go on. Take it out. Knowing exactly what you’re thinking, and when, and how. And how deep and how hard.
It takes some shuffling and some curling, but you manage to work Sam’s jeans and boxers down his thighs. Just the sound of his zipper makes your mouth water. He hisses soft by your ear at the chill of the room, but in your hand Sam’s dick is body-hot by comparison. And. And so… s-so…
You scoop your palm around the shaft, squeezing him, feeling him. Through your back you feel Sam curl in and shiver, rumbling in approval. Your cheeks feel like they’re cooking by the candlelight just going for it, but your curiosity wins out—or, more accurately, your fucking awe. Because. What the fuck. You’ve never exactly seen a dick in person before, but you’re not naive. Sam is big enough to split you in half, and—and it just kind of pisses you off, because not only is he big, his dick is pretty, too. He has a pretty dick. Just cause’ being smart and empathetic and all that other bullshit didn’t make him sexy enough. God.
You nuzzle your cheek into Sam’s and he drops his lazy temple against yours. The two of you lounge there, heaving like peeping toms, as you both take in how sexy his cock looks leaking against your belly. Laying between your legs. It’s goddamn photo-worthy. Then, the angle your hand is taking slow, experimental pumps of him… accidentally… grinds Sam’s shaft between your abuse-swollen folds. He’s already twisting to moan into your mouth when you start to rock along him in earnest. You take a fistful of Sam’s hair and ride him for all he’s worth, dragging your sopping wet cunt across his dick until he glistens.
For three blissful seconds Sam locks you against his chest and grinds with you, making it instantly clear why people always use the word friction with sex. The push and pull of it has you whimpering loud and high against Sam’s mouth. And, thank god for him, because when your head starts to fog with visions of being filled raw, Sam pulls away from your kiss and recollects his control.
“Condom,” he gasps for breath, “we should. Probably. Yeah.”
“...Right,” you cursed. Your high school sex-ed teachers would not be proud of your lack of forethought, but it’s impossible to have any kind of thought in this situation, period.
For example: Sam tilts away to fish around in his duffle bag beside the bed, and, unfiltered, your mind taps its fingertips together and cheerily hopes, maybe Sam will be so rough the condom breaks.
Woah there, girlfriend, your reason butts in. But it doesn’t have anything else to say, since you start picturing how Sam’s cum would look oozing out of you, and. Um.
“You almost sound disappointed,” Sam jokes, digging for his wallet.
You snuggle down into the blankets and pretend you’re not hiding your face. “A little bit,” you confess, chanting the word responsible over and over in your head for good measure. “How much am I gonna feel you?”
Sam finds the condom and rolls back into your bubble. He turns in to kiss your shoulder, and you can feel his smile when he tells you, “You’re gonna feel every bit of me. Every inch… every stroke… I promise.”
He is so determined to assuage your worries that he holds the condom where you can see it, turning it over (between those long, long fingers) to make sure it’s punctureless and new. The little foil packet has XL printed on one side, which both adds to your sexy thoughts and pulls you out of them. Sam really is that big. He knows it, too, which is probably how he reads your nervousness.
“We’ll take it slow,” Sam promises, voice honey-sweet and quick to reassure you. “S’ big, yeah, but I’m gonna do everything to make you comfortable, kay? And if you wanna stop—”
He cares so much, you realize.
“Sam?”
He looks into your eyes like he loves you, and utters, “Yeah?”
“Thank you for making this good for me,” you say.
Sam melts. He doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, and you let him know it’s okay with a softer, warmer kiss than the others you’ve shared. You take in the shape of his face, the subtle freckles on his cheeks and nose, how the candlelight shadows sweeten Sam’s gaze. It slams on top of you how there’s nobody in the whole world you’d rather be doing this with, and in one puff your anxiety is in the wind.
You wrap your fingers around Sam’s wrist and flirt, “...Can I put it on you?”
Sam nods, eyes lidded. You’ve never exactly had to open a condom before, so you’re careful to pry the foil open with your fingers. For whatever reason you hadn’t figured it’d be lubed, but it makes fitting the ring of it around Sam’s tip and sliding it down his shaft a bit easier. A soft happy groan escapes him. They keep escaping him as you pump his cock in languid twists of your hand.
Sam nuzzles his face between your shoulder blades, whisper-rasping, “Would you like to…? It’ll be less scary that way.”
You really, really would. Before you make your move, Sam adds, “But, uh, before you put it in—want you to look at me.” He wets his lips with his tongue. “Wanna see the look on your face when I fill you up.”
Well, fuck. You tilt your face against Sam’s, nose to nose with him and warmed by his breath, and feel the slow ripples of heat in your belly roll into long, growing waves. Sam slides a hand back to the silky underside of your thigh and props you open for him. When you line Sam up, you start with the tip, not pressing, just stroking, feeling him against you. A satisfied purr drizzles out of your mouth to Sam’s. So far, your chosen pace has been “just go for it,” and since it hasn’t failed you yet—
—you go for it.
Sam’s bulbous cockhead dips between your folds to find your hole. A desperate, keening yes squeals out of you. You’re spit-wet and absolutely caked in slick, so there’s no hitch when you pull Sam in, just a hot, sudden fullness that seems to go endlessly deeper and deeper. The fit is so fucking snug. Snug like he’s made for you. Snug and perfect and stinging, made easier by Sam’s soft huffing coos. Look at you go. Makin’ this look easy. You looked so pretty when I ate you out, baby, but I knew you’d look even prettier taking my dick. So eager, Sam says, and he’s right. Your wetness is just begging to swallow him whole. Just being stuffed with half of Sam’s cock has you sucking down air, so the final surge to bring him to the hilt pries a genuine, hoarse cry from your belly. Sam shoves his face in your hair and groans, the sound catching on the snarl between his teeth.
Together, you orbit around the throbbing core of pleasure between you, suspended in the moment.
Sam is a wind-up toy, springs tightening with every vicious squeeze of your pussy. His mouth has made you soft, slippery, and swollen, so the firmness of his cock is different but stellar. This close, in such an intimate position, you can feel his heartbeat in more ways than one, and it surrounds you and fills you so effortlessly that you can only assume it’s your own. He touches your body like it’s one he just stepped into, feeling you from a new perspective for the first time. Sam fixates on your tummy, too, and you find out why when he presses down under your belly button—feeling the thick swell of him under your skin, deeper than anyone else could ever go. He gives you a turn too, pressing your hand down in the same place. It sends electric blackouts of lust through your system that demand to be fucked brainless.
You start to wiggle in his grasp for more, stirring your hips down onto him and choking out his name. Sam is already responding: your open leg is scooped into the crook of his arm and drawn tight to his chest, spreading you open as wide as you’ll go. His hold cants up your hips in a way that lets his cock hit just that much deeper, and that’s all you need to dash your head against the pillows and mewl for your life. Two rough fingerpads slip back into the sopping wet home of your clit and stir against it at a pace brutal enough to cramp. Between Sam’s fingers and the thick drag of his cock against your soft walls, you’re desperate for something to hold onto. You latch onto Sam’s wrist for dear life. Then starts Sam’s pulling and pushing in brief, filling strokes, rocking, driving you fucking crazy, making you need him to fuck you like you need air. He was deep to a point that you swear you could feel him in the back of your throat.
“You want more?” Sam asks, and if it weren’t for the breathy rattle in his voice he could’ve sounded innocent.
You nod until your head is close to rolling off. “Yes, yes Sammy please.”
Sam grins. You feel it for an instant, then his cheek pulls away from your back and all you have left to read him by is the needy, carnal noises he’s making. All at once he’s drawing out further than he had before. You’re almost empty for a whole sob-worthy breath, which Sam makes up for with every ounce of his being.
For what has to be three glorious hours, Sam leans back to fuck you in powerful, even strokes, filling you to the brim every time, and filling the room with the thick, wet sound of his cock pounding into you. You repay him the only way you can, and—get—noisy.
You moan. You wail. You mewl, pretty much every time Sam’s hips snap up into your ass. You pant hard through it all, begging him in soft whines to f-fuck me, fuck me, p-please, Sam and to go deeper, baby—uhnn, more more more…! From there you’re on autopilot, letting loose even the most primal noises that Sam gets out of you. He is very, very good at his task, so you color the room with every erotic syllable under the sun. A porn studio would hire the two of you without even entering the room. Sam especially, but you might be biased since every time you sigh his name he drives in a little harder.
Indescribable pleasure follows even his tiniest movements. You absorb every pump with nothing but desperate enthusiasm, spreading your legs further, curling your back, and digging your fingers into the cushions for any sort of leverage at all. Just a few minutes pass until your limit is a trembling boulder of knots in your gut, but still Sam’s nowhere near finished yet. Slick coats your thighs and Sam's cock, you cry at every thrust, your body twitches and shudders all over, but he's still not there.
He slows. The brush of his lips against your ear and the wisp of his breath set your nerves on fire. “You’re gonna finish first, but tha’—that’s okay, baby,” Sam reassures, and works your poor swollen clit even harder, choking a string of thready moans from you. “Wanna feel your pretty pussy cum all over my dick.”
“Oh fuck,” you whine.
(Tomorrow, you’re going to wake up and wonder where the hell he got that dirty mouth from. Somebody needs to clean it out with soap.)
It’s as Sam’s laying sloppy kisses on your throat that his prediction comes true. The tissue in your body pulls taut, winding tight, tighter, curling around the epicenter of pleasure, toward him. You expect Sam’s thrusts to take a fierce turn. Instead, you’re treated to the same thorough, determined pace that got you here in the first place—the same pace that is currently jellifying your insides and reducing you to tears on this teeny bed. If the percussive slapping of skin on skin wasn’t enough to wake up the entire planet, then the vicious slam of the bedframe putting a new dent in the wall would certainly do the job. Somehow you hear it all past your pulse thundering in your ears. The arm hooked behind you to rake a hand through Sam’s hair bobs with each thrust, and your leg trapped in Sam’s hold bounces on beat. All you can do is scrape out broken gasps, until the tossing waves of heat and lust and power twisted in your belly have built too high—and all things that go up must inevitably come crashing down.
“That’s my girl,” Sam slurs, squeezing your tits in both hands. He rolls his hips into you and coos, “Just like that… take what you need, baby, it’s okay…”
Like last time, Sam fucks you through it. You’re scooped up in his arms and squeezed tight, tight enough to be drawn into Sam’s body and absorbed. The hot, gorgeous drags of friction against the sensitive walls of your cunt slow, but Sam never draws out, burying himself deep and soaking up every wild clamp of your pussy. There’s something fucking spectacular about having something to clench down on. Sam is that perfect something, vieny and thick and still fucking hard.
You cum on him in long rippling rushes of wet heat that feel downright unrealistic, otherworldly—exaggerated, maybe, by the fact that you fucking—black—out!
It must only be a few beats later that you come out of it, but the fact remains that Sam Winchester made you cum so hard you passed out, and you’re going to have to live with that for the rest of your life. You’re already starting to realize that Sam is the best lay you’re ever going to have, period, and the dull happy throb of your orgasm hasn’t even left your body yet. Sam hasn’t even left your body yet.
Wait, fuck. He’s still hard.
…This could be. This could be very good.
Fueled by hormones, sweat, and adrenaline, you pull off him and roll the rest of the way onto your belly. During all the crazed fucking, you and Sam had migrated halfway down the bed. You crawl to the top as sexily as you’re able, stuff your cheek against the closest pillow, and wiggle your cum-soaked ass in the air just for him, open for his taking. Your face could start the whole bed on fire, but you feel more alluring than embarrassed.
“C’mon, Sammy,” you taunt, and throw him a mean grin, “gimme the big finish.”
Sam sucked in a deep breath from his nose, probably preying for strength. A dirty smile touched his face. “You’re… you’re amazing, _____.”
Feeling like it, you turned your face over onto the other side of the pillow and tempted him with another mesmerizing ass wiggle. Sam was up on his knees in an instant. You should’ve known that Sam, the addict, would instantly take the chance to shove his face between your legs. The only warning you get is his massive hands clamping down on your calves to hold you still, then a hot, silky tongue swipes once through your folds for a taste. You haven’t finished squealing when Sam’s weight saddles up behind you, and the heavy shape of his cock starts to rut between your legs.
“Sorry,” Sam hums, not sorry at all, “Needed a taste of you.”
Stars above, he doesn’t hesitate to get handsy with you, too, taking two broad handfuls of your ass-cheeks. Your ass sits so nicely against his hips that you start to wonder if soulmates are real. Because Sam must be yours, fitting into you like a key and teasing you open like a master lockpicker. Once you’re where Sam wants you, he bobs your ass back until his tip has room to part your folds, and after that you’re both brought home into sparkling, slippery, blinding pleasure. He digs his fingers into your ass and pulls you right on him, filling your pussy to the hilt, like always. Key. Lock. Click click click.
“Yes,” you and Sam hiss together.
“Fuck,” Sam adds. “You should see yourself like this. You look so stuffed, baby, squeezing down on me.”
“Feel so stuffed,” you flirt back, wiggling into him.
This angle is different than the last, exaggerating, as Sam immediately starts in on his pace from before, how thick his cock is. He curls his fingers around your waist and beats in hard, pulling on your still-sparking overstimulated wires from last time. Every joint in your body locks ramrod straight, overwhelmed with brief flashes of too much too much. Your pussy clenches helplessly around him, but Sam brings you over it with a few well-placed stirs of his hips. In no time you’re mewling for him like you were before, emboldened by your first round.
You get your nails into Sam’s sculpted ass and drag him deeper, faster, urging him on the end of a moan, “Fuckin’ take it, Sammy—mhhnn, take what—what you need, Sam, yes, so good—”
This is exactly what Sam needs to hear. You’re scooped up around the middle, just like before, and Sam crushes his face into your back, spooning you close as he brings himself closer and closer to where he needs to be. Your hands can’t get enough of him, smoothing down his vieny arms and squeezing his hand against your belly. The picture the two of you must make is obscene on unimaginable levels. Sam, latched onto you like a parasite and reaming you for his release. You, smushed under him and loving it, digging your ass up into him for more. All the sweat-twisted blankets shoved to the floor. Sam’s hips canting your thighs apart. The worn-smooth slope of his palms, squeezing your tits and your tummy and your waist in achy handfuls.
Finally, Sam’s hoarse choked panting cuts off with a sharp breath. His hips putter into you for the last time, then still. Sam spills into the condom, shuddering against you from head to toe, and slowly… the two of you collapse into each other… panting and panting until your breathing syncs up. Sam’s chest goes up. You suck in a breath. His chest goes out, and you deflate right with him.
He doesn’t get up and you don’t ask him to. As the haze of sex starts to clear from the room (as much as it can, anyway), the chill of the mountainside creeps in behind it, and the hottest thing around for miles is easily the giant, naked Sam Winchester in your bed. Wrapped up in him and as warm as can be, you wonder if he’s as close to passing out (again) as you are.
But no. Suddenly, Sam’s up on his hands, and there’s only two possible reasons why.
“Didn’t get to kiss you as I finished,” he complained.
Smushed into your pillow, you tell him, “I think you have two addictions.”
Regardless, you roll onto your back so Sam can lay one on you. Since your soul is officially back in your body, you’re more aware than ever of the aches and bruises you’ve earned, not to mention a few sets of pomegranate-purple fingerprints. After a few stunning kisses from Sam, you’re still not sure that all of that actually happened. You touch his face and pinch his cheeks plenty of times, but all he does is look at you extra dreamily. Still doesn’t seem real.
Of course, being a gentleman, he decides to prove it to you.
“Speaking of my other addiction…” Sam lays a playful hand on your belly, “I know I wound you up a bit back there. Can I take care of you one more time? Please?”
“Hmm…” You pretend to think, grinning to yourself. “Man. I just can’t say no to you, Sammy…”
_
Two weeks later, you’re crammed in a teeny car instead of a teeny cabin, riding down a back road in rural Texas the Dean way—blowing by road signs at sixty miles an hour, windows down and music up. Sam’s shotgun. You’re content to sit behind him, catching his eye in the side-mirror as he pretends to hunt around newspapers for a new case. His hair flutters in the wind, outlining his face in the most enchanting way.
“I don’t know how the hell the two of you stayed up there the whole week!” Dean hollers over his Lynyrd Skynyrd tape, which he could turn down whenever he wants to. He throws you an unenvious look from the driver’s seat, “You must’a been bored out of your fuckin’ gourds!”
You’re honestly surprised that Dean didn’t automatically assume sexy shenanigans occurred at the cabin. Sam doesn’t move to answer, deeply engrossed in his reading. Where Dean can’t see, you curl your fingers into the hair at the back of Sam’s neck and caress his scalp, which earns you a look that promises that sexy shenanigans can happen anywhere. They can happen in motel rooms. Click. Even Impalas, when Dean’s gone. Click click click.
You shrug at Sam’s brother, shouting over the music with an unsubtle grin. “We entertained ourselves!”
_
Tags: @samssluttybangs @cookiemumster1 @lacilou @cevans-winchester @leigh70 @seraphimluxe @emily-roberts @emme-looou @aloneatpeace @williamstop @ornella0910 @chaoticshepardplaid @dakota-dream @lcvecstiel @goghkiss @spnexploration
READ PART TWO.
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Ok, I think I might be exiting the "are you fucking kidding me?" period and ready to make a real argument, so lets talk about Three Act Structure!
Is OFMD S2 just the "Darkest Hour"?
A very common explanation I've been seeing for some of the... controversial... aspects of S2 is that it's meant to be that way. That the middle act is where the protagonists hit their lowest point. Where we get the big failure point. Where everything looks kind of shit.
S2 is supposedly just that point. It's The Empire Strikes Back. People have been making that comparison since before the first episodes even dropped, telling everyone to expect something that could be disappointing or unsatisfying - it's just a matter of needing to wait for S3 to pull it all together.
It's not a baseless framework to consider the show through - I'm pretty sure David Jenkins has mentioned it in interviews (or at least mentioned he planned for three acts / seasons) so it's certainly worth asking how he's doing at the 2/3rd mark.
So - quick summary of Three Act Structure:
Act 1 introduces our characters and world. It includes the inciting incident of the story and the first plot point, where a) the protagonist loses the ability to return to their normal life, and b) the story raises whatever dramatic question will drive the entire plot. Act 2 is rising action and usually most of the story. The protagonist tries to fix things and fucks them up worse, in the process learning new skills and character developing to overcome their flaws. Act 3 is the protagonist taking one more shot, but this time they are ready. We get the climax of the story, the dramatic question gets an answer, and then the story closes.
If you want examples, the Star Wars Original Trilogy is a very popular template. And, hell, he said it was a pirate story... the main Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy also does a solid job with their three acts.
Let's compare. (Spoiler: I'm not impressed 🤨)
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First thing I need to establish... Wait. Two things. First is that Three Act Structure is flexible, so we can't really analyze success or failure by pulling up a list of necessary plot beats that should have been hit in X order. Second is that if you tell me you are writing a romance with a Three Act Structure - where "the relationship is the story" - the first thing I'm going to do is ask you how you are adapting it. Because while there's not necessarily anything preventing you from applying this to a character driven plot, most people are familiar with it as plot structure for externally driven conflict.
Unless there's a reason the status of the main relationship is intrinsically tied up in the current status of the war against the evil empire, a standard Three Act Structure is going to entail either an antagonistic force that absolutely wants your main couple apart being the main relationship obstacle OR the romance aspect being a subplot to the protagonist's narrative adventure. None of those sound like how the show has been described.
So how is OFMD adapting it?
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Act 1
(Can't figure out how well Act 2 is doing if we don't start at setup.)
Right out the gate, OFMD breaks one of the main "rules" for a story where the Acts are delivered in three parts. Namely the one where the first Act is treated as an acceptable standalone story, with it's own satisfying yet open ended conclusion.
In Star Wars, A New Hope ends with the princess rescued, Luke finding the Force, Han finding his loyalty, and the Death Star destroyed. The Empire isn't defeated, the antagonists still live... the story is not over, but this one movie doesn't feel unfinished.
Similarly, Curse of the Black Pearl gives Jack his ship back, Elizabeth and Will get together, and Norrington has the English Navy let them all off the hook and give Jack and the pirates one day's head start.
OFMD's final beat of S1 being Kraken Arc starting is not that, even if Stede returning to sea is still a pretty hopeful note. Now... I don't necessarily think this was a bad call. At least, not if the story is the relationship. It's easy to close on a happy ending and then fuck it up next movie if the conflict is external and coming for them. Not so much if you're driving the story with your protagonists' flaws, in part because it should be really obvious at the end of setup that your main characters need development and can't run off together right now. I actually like that they were risk-takers and let S1 look at the situation clearly vs doing a fragile happy end, because it takes into account the difference between a character-driven and plot-driven narrative.
I think OFMD's Act 1 actually ends at maybe the Act of Grace? Well, there through the kiss on the beach, counting as our "first plot point" before everything goes wrong, basically.
At that point, they have setup the story and characters. We've been introduced to Edward and Stede's current issues. Signing the Act of Grace does make the intertwined arcs between them real - it's no longer a situation that either one of them could just walk away from like it was in 1x07 - and we narrow in on the (alleged) driving question of the show:
It's not about "Will Stede become a great pirate?" or "Will we develop a better kind of piracy for the crew?" - the show is the relationship and the big question is "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?"
Act 1 ends on their first solution, being together and making each other happy and admitting it's more than just friendship. Act 2 starts, appropriately, by saying both of them are currently too flawed for that to go anywhere but crashing and burning.
Now... looking back, what does Act 1 do well vs poorly?
I think it's really strong on giving us the foundation for BlackBonnet's characters and flaws. We aren't surprised Stede goes home or Edward goes Kraken (or at least... we weren't supposed to be surprised. There are still a lot of holdouts blaming Izzy for interrupting Edward's "healing" despite how at this point in the story it doesn't make sense for Edward to have the skills to heal... but I digress). The relationship question is compelling at the end of S1, the cliffhanger hooks, and the fandom explosion of fics did not come from nowhere - the audience was invested.
I also think Act 1 does a great job of settling us in the universe. We understand the rules it abides by, from how gay pirates are just a fact of life to how there's no important organs on the left side of the body. Stede has a muppety force field. Rowboats have homing devices, and port is always as close as you want it to be. Scurvy is a joke. The overblown violence of pirate life is mostly a joke, but we are going to take the violence of childhood trauma seriously.
Lucius's fake-out death, while technically part of Act 2, works well because Act 1 did a good job of priming everyone to go "obviously this show wouldn't kill a crew member for shock value, and we're 100% supposed to suspend disbelief about how he could have survived getting flung into the sea in the middle of the night." And we do. And we get rewarded for it.
Regarding antagonists - a big focus of any setup - the show is deliberately weak. The one with the most screentime is Izzy, and he's purposefully ineffective at separating our main couple. Every antagonist is keyed to a particular character, and they function mostly to inform us of that character's flaws and development requirements. The Badmintons tell us about Stede's repression and feelings of inadequacy, and Izzy tells us about Edward's directionless discontent and tendency to avoid his problems. Effectively - the show is taking the stance this will be a character driven narrative where Stede and Edward's flaws are the source of problems and development the solution. No person or empire (or social homophobia) is separating them...
...which leads me to something not present - there nothing really about the struggle of piracy against the Empire. Looking at Curse of the Black Pearl... we see piracy is in danger. The Black Pearl itself is described as the last great pirate threat the British Navy needs to conquer. Hangings are omnipresent - Jack is sentenced to die by one almost as soon as he's introduced to the story, when his only act so far had been to wander around and save Elizabeth from drowning. OFMD tries to invoke this kind of struggle in 2x08, but there's no foundation. Our Navy antagonists are Stede's childhood bullies, and so focused on Stede the crew isn't even in danger when they get caught. The Republic of Pirates is getting jokes about being gentrified, not besieged.
Even the capture of Blackbeard by the Navy is treated as a feather in Wellington's cap but not a huge symbolic blow against piracy... because we just do not have that grand struggle woven into Act 1. You only know the "Golden Age of Piracy" is ending if you google it, or have watched a bunch of pirate shows.
Overall, a solid Act 1, well adapted to the kind of story they've said they were looking to tell - a romance in the (silly-fied) age of piracy, instead of a pirate adventure with a romantic subplot.
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Now, Sidebar - Where is the story going?
The thing about the dramatic question - in OFMD's case: "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?" - is that a) there's normally more than one question bundled up in that one + sideplots, and b) while you aren't supposed to have the answer yet, you can usually guess what needs to happen to give you the answer.
Back to our examples... Luke's driving question is "Will the Empire be defeated?" Simple. Straightforward. Also: "Will Luke become a Jedi?" The eventual climax of our story from there is pretty obvious... the story is over when Luke wins the war for the Rebellion in a Jedi way. That's the goal that they are working toward.
Pirates of the Caribbean is a bit more complicated. We're juggling more characters and have a less defined heroic journey, but there are driving questions like "Is Jack Sparrow a good man?" and "Is Will Turner a pirate / what does that mean?" and even "Will the British Navy defeat piracy?" They get basic answers in Curse of the Black Pearl, and far more defined ones in At World's End. Still, this is another plot-driven narrative. They've laid the foundations for the Pirates vs Empire struggle, and when that final battle turns into the trilogy climax then you know what's happening.
OFMD is not doing a plot-driven narrative. To judge how they are doing at their goals, we have to ask what they think a happy ending entails in a character sense.
Clearly it's not the classic romantic sideplot, where the climax is the first kiss / acknowledgement of feelings. They've teased a wedding in Word of God comments a lot, so that's probably our better endpoint. Specifically, though, a wedding where both of our protagonists aren't ready to flee from the altar (big ask) and where they've both grown enough that their flaws / mutual tendencies to run away from life problems won't tank the relationship.
In Stede's case it's still massive feelings of inadequacy and being too repressed to talk about his problems. Also he ran away from his family to chase a lifelong dream of being a pirate - "Is Stede going to find fulfillment in being a pirate captain, or will the real answer be love?" Edward meanwhile expresses a desire to quit piracy and retire Blackbeard, but we also find out he's struggling with massive self-loathing and guilt from killing his father - "Is retiring what Edward wants to do, or is he just running away?"
If they are going to get to a satisfying wedding beat at the climax of their story, what character beats do we need to hit in advance?
Off the top of my head - both characters need to self-realize their flaws (a pretty necessary demand of anyone who runs away from problems). They are set up to balance each other well, but also to miscommunicate easily. They have to tell each other about or verbally acknowledge that self-realization so it can be resolved. Stede has to decide how much being a pirate means to him. Edward has to decide if he's retiring and what he wants to do. They both need to show something to do with getting past their childhood traumas given all the flashbacks. Through all this, they also need to hit the normal romance beats that convince the audience they are romantically attracted to each other and like... want to get married.
Oh, and this is more of a genre-specific sideplot, but once they demonstrate a behavior that hurts the people who work for them, they need to then demonstrate later how it won't happen again. Proof of growth, which is kind of important in a comedy where a lot of the humor is based in them being massively self-centered assholes. Stede doesn't earn his acceptance in the community until he kicks Calico Jack off the ship, making up for causing the situation with Nigel in the first episode. A workplace comedy can get a lot of material from the boss as the worker's antagonist, but if you want the bosses to stay sympathetic you have got to throw them some opportunities to earn it.
All that sounds like a lot, but like - the relationship is the story, right? If we spend so much time on establishing flaws big enough to drive a story, we also have to spend time on fixing them. Which is where the turning point hits.
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Act 2: How it Starts
This is where the full story reality-checks your protagonist. Glad you saved your boyfriend and embraced new love in Act 1, but his repressed guilt means he's about to completely ghost you, and your own abandonment issues and self-loathing are about to make his dick move into everyone else's problem.
Again, it's a non-conventional choice OFMD has this start at the very end of S1 rather than with a sudden dark turn in the S2 premiere, but it's still pretty clearly that point in the Three Act Structure.
In Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back opens with a timeskip to our Rebellion getting absolutely crushed and hiding on a miserable frozen planet. The Empire finds them as the plot is kicking off and they have to desperately flee. They get separated. Han and Leia try to go to an ally for help and end up in Vader's clutches. It's a sharp turn from the victorious note that A New Hope ended on.
Pirates of the Caribbean's Act 2 starts dark. Dead Man's Chest opens with our happy couple Will and Elizabeth getting arrested on their wedding day for the "happy end" escape of the last movie. Jack has not been having success since reclaiming his ship, and we'll soon find out he's being hunted by dark forces. As for the general state of piracy, we get a horrifying prison where pirates are being eaten alive by crows, and a new Lord Beckett making the dying state of piracy even more textual. "Jack Sparrow is a dying breed... The world is shrinking."
The key here is making a point that our heroes aren't ready. This is the struggles part - things they try? Fail. The odds do not look to be in their favor.
Now, OFMD apparently decided to go all-in on flaw exploration, especially with Edward. The first 3 episodes of S2 are brutally efficient in outlining Edward's backslide. In S1 you could see he had issues with guilt and feeling like a bad person. S2 devolves that into a destructive, suicidal spiral where Edward forces his crew into three months of consecutive raids, repeats his shocking act of cruelty with Izzy's toe offscreen (more than once!), escalates it with his leg, and finally they state directly that Edward hates himself for killing his dad so much that he fears he's fundamentally unlovable and better off dead.
Stede's struggles are subtler, but most definitely still there. He's deliberately turning a blind eye to tales of Edward's rampage, half from simply being too self-centered to care about the harms Edward causes others, and half from being unable to face or fathom that he had the ability to hurt Edward that much. Upon reunion he wants to put the whole thing behind them, not addressing why he left in the first place. Very "love magically fixes everything" of him, except Stede is no golden merman.
Interestingly, here, BlackBonnet's relationship dysfunction has very clearly been having a negative impact on the surrounding characters we care about. Make sense, since it's the driving force of the story, but that also adds a lot more relationships we need to make right. Like... Edward is the villain to his crew. The show focuses on their trauma and poisoned relationships with him. And then draws our attention even more to Stede taking his side to overrule their objections to him.
For a story where the conflict and required resolutions are primarily character based, and the setup had already given the main couple a good amount to work with, dedicating a lot of S2 to adding more ground to cover was... a choice. Potentially very compelling on the character end, certainly challenging on the writing end... but not a complete break with the structure.
Bold, but not damning.
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Act 2: How it Ends
Now it is true that Act 2 tends to end on a loss. Luke is defeated by Vader and loses his hand, and Han has been sent away in carbonite. Jack Sparrow for all his efforts cannot escape his fate, and he and the Pearl are dragged to the locker.
But the loss is not the point. The loss is incidental to the point.
Act 2 is about struggles and failure, but it's also about lessons learned. There's a change that occurs, and our cast - defeated but not broken - enters the final act with the essential skills, motivation, knowledge, etc. that they lacked in the beginning.
Luke Skywalker could not have defeated the Empire in Return of the Jedi until he'd learned the truth about his father and resisted the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back. (Ok, confession, I'm using Star Wars as an example because literally everyone is doing so, but frankly it's a better example of formulaic Three Act Structure repeating within each movie because on a trilogy level - relevant to this comparison - it is a super basic hero's journey in a very recognized outfit and as such the Act 2 relevance is also... super basic "the hero tries to fight the antagonist too early" beat where he learns humility. Not really a lot going on. So, for the better example...)
Dead Man's Chest has a downer ending with the closing moment of the survivors regaining hope and a plan against an enemy now on the verge of total victory - a classic Act 2. But in that first loss against Davy Jones we get Will's personal motivation and oath to stab the heart, Jack finally overcoming not knowing what he wanted and returning to save them from the Kraken (being a good man), Elizabeth betraying Jack (being a pirate), Barbossa's return, and Norrington's choice to bargain for his prior life back. The mission to retrieve Jack from the World's End is the final movie's plot, but things are already on track to turn the tables back around as we enter the finale.
Now, relevant sidenote - one major difference between Three Act Structure within a single work vs across three parts is that Act 2 continues into Part 3, and only tips over into Act 3 about midway through. This is because obviously your final movie or season cannot just be the climax. That's why both movie examples start with a rescue mission. They have to still be missing something so they can get the plot of their third part accelerating while they go get whatever that something is.
But if you wait until the 3rd movie / season to get the development going at all - you're fucked.
Jack's decision in the climax of At World's End to make Elizabeth into the Pirate King goes back to the development we saw in the Pearl vs Kraken fight in Dead Man's Chest. So does Elizabeth's leadership arc. Will's whole arc about becoming Captain of the Dutchman gets built upon in the third movie, but it starts in the second. Not just as an idle thought - he's actively pursuing it. Already consciously weighing saving his father vs getting back to Elizabeth as soon as he makes the oath. Everyone is moving forward in Act 2. Their remaining development might stumble for drama, or they might be a bit reluctant, but I know that they know better than to let it stick, because they already faced their true crisis points.
I'm not sure we can say the same about OFMD.
S2 does a good job of adding problems, yeah, but there's not really any movement on fixing them. Our main couple stagnates in some ways, and regresses in others.
Stede opened Act 2 by running away in the middle of the night back to his wife without telling Edward anything. We know he did it because of feeling guilty and his core childhood trauma of his dad calling him a weak and inadequate failure. Now in S1 he actually speedruns a realization of his shitty behavior with Mary, but what about S2? Well...
He continues to not talk to Edward about... pretty much anything. My guy practiced love confessions galore but Edward only finds out about going back to his wife via Anne, and it gets brushed aside with a love confession. He seems to think Edward wants him to be a dashing pirate, or maybe he just thinks he should be a dashing pirate. Idk, it doesn't get examined. Regarding his captaincy, they give him an episode plot about Izzy teaching him to respect the crew's beliefs, but this is sideplot to a larger arc of him completely overruling their traumas and concerns (and shushing their objections) to keep his boyfriend on the ship so. That.
Stede kills a man for reasons related to his issues, shoves that down inside and has sex with Edward instead of acknowledging any bad feelings. At least this time Edward was there and knows it happened? Neither Chauncey's death nor his dad have been mentioned to anyone. He gets a day of piracy fame that goes to his head, gets dumped, and ends on a complete beat down by Zheng where he learns... idk. Being a boor is bad? He's still wildly callous to her in the finale, and spends the whole time seeking validation of his pirate skills. He reunites with Edward, kisses, and quotes Han Solo.
Where S1 ended on a great fuckery, his S2 naval uniform plan after they regroup is ill defined except to call it a suicide mission - and we don't get to see what it would have been because it devolves into a very straightforward fight and flee. And gets Izzy killed. Quick cut funeral (no acknowledgement of his S2 bonding with Izzy), quick cut to wedding (foreshadowing), quick cut to... innkeeper retirement? Unclear when or even if BlackBonnet discussed Stede's whole driving dream to be a pirate and live a life at sea, but I guess that got a big priority downgrade. Despite the fact he was literally looking to Zheng for pirate-based compliments in the post-funeral scene.
I guess he's borderline-delusionally dogged in his pursuit of love now - so unlikely to bolt again - but he's also got at least a decade of experience mentally checking out in a state of repression when he's unhappy. And he's stopped being as supportive and caring toward the crew in that dogged pursuit, while arguably demonstrating a loss in leadership skills, so, um, good thing someone else is in charge?
And if Stede is a mess, Edward's arc is so much worse.
As established, they devote the Kraken to making Edward worse. He literally wants to kill himself and destroy everyone around him in the process because Stede left, and this is fixed by... Stede coming back. That's it. The crew tries to murder him and then exiles him from the ship (and Izzy takes the lead on both, indicating exactly how isolated Edward has become), but it's resolved in half a day by Stede just forcing them to put up with his boyfriend again. Like they think he murdered Buttons and still have to move him back in???
The show consistently depicts Kraken Era as a transgression against the crew, but they also avoid showing Edward acting with genuine contrition. He admits he historically doesn't apologize for anything, and then mostly still doesn't. It's a joke that he's approaching probation as a performance (CEO apology), and then the only person he genuinely talks to is Fang - the one guy cool with him - and the only person who gets a basic "sorry" is Izzy - the guy he really needs to be talking to. Edward's primary trauma is guilt, but apparently he only feels it abstractly after all that? He's only concerned with fixing things with Stede, despite Stede being about the only person around who hurt him instead of the reverse.
Speaking of primary traumas, Edward hating himself doesn't really go anywhere after the beat of self-realization. Apparently Stede still loving him is enough of a bandaid to end the suicide chasing, but he doesn't like. Acknowledge that. Edward is maybe sorta trying to go slow so he doesn't hang all his self-worth on Stede again (you can speculate), but they a) absolutely fail to go slow, and b) he doesn't make any attempt to develop himself or another support structure. Just basically... "let's be friends a bit before hooking back up." And then we get the whiplash that is Blackbeard and/or retirement.
Kraken Era is Blackbeard but way worse, like no one who has known Blackbeard has ever seen him. In the Gravy Basket Edward claims he might like being an innkeeper, before destroying his own fantasy by having the spectre of Hornigold confront him over killing his dad. The BlackBonnet to Anne & Mary parallel says running away to China / retiring makes you want to kill each other - burn it all down and go back to piracy. Stede rightfully points out prior retirement plans were whims. Edward gets sick of the penance sack after a day and puts his leathers back on to go try "poison into positivity". But also claims to be an innkeeper (look - two whole mentions!) when trying not to send children to be pirates after teaching them important knife skills.
Killing Ned Low is a serious, bad thing that prompts ill-advised sex and then going hardcore into retirement mode - leathers overboard, talk about mermaid fantasy, get retirement blessings from Izzy, end up dumping Stede for a fishing job instead of talking about how he's enjoying piracy. The fishing job, however, is also a bad thing and a stupid decision because Edward is a lazy freeloader fantasizing about being a better person. We have an uncomfortable, extended scene of "Pop-Pop" weirdly echoing his abusive dad and then sending Edward to go do what he's good at - disassociate, brutally murder two guys, fish up the leathers, rise as the Kraken from the sea. He continues with comically efficient murder but also he's reading Stede's love letters and seeking to reunite with him so... wait, is this a good thing? Post makeout / mass slaughter he's trading compliments on his kills with Zheng so. Yeah. Looks like it. Murder is fine.
Wait, no, skip ahead and Izzy is dying and Edward suddenly cares a whole lot as Izzy makes his death scene about freeing Edward from Blackbeard. Now being a pirate was "encouraging the darkness" because Izzy - a guy who had little to no influence over Edward's behavior - just couldn't let Blackbeard go. Murder is bad again, and he is freed. Minus the little detail that the murder he explicitly hates himself over was not related to Blackbeard or piracy whatsoever, so presumably haunts "just Ed" still. Anyway he's retiring to run an inn with Stede now, as the "loving family" Izzy comforted him with in his dying moments sails away from the couple that can best be described as the antagonists of their S2 arc. Also Edward implicitly wants to get married. It's been 3 days since making out was "too fast". He's still wearing the leathers.
So most of the way through Act 2 and Edward's barely on speaking terms with anyone but Stede, who he has once again hung his entire life on really fast? Crushing guilt leads to self-hatred leads to mass murder and suicide, but only if he's upset so just avoid that. He's still regularly idealizing Stede as a non-fucked up golden mermaid person (that maybe he personally ruined a bit) because he barely knows the guy. His only progress on his future is "pirate" crossed out / rewritten / crossed out again a few times, "fisherman" crossed out, and "innkeeper ?"
Just.
Where is the forward movement?
It's not just that the inn will undoubtedly fall apart - it's that the inn will fall apart for the near-exact same reasons that China was going to at the beginning of Act 2, and I can't point to anything they've learned in the time since that will help them. I guess Stede realized he loved Edward enough to chase after him, but that was in S1! They should be further than this by now. You can't cram another crisis backslide, all the Act 2 development, and the full Act 3 climax into one season. Certainly not without it feeling like the characters magically fix themselves.
If they just fail and keep blindly stumbling into the same issues because they don't change their behavior, then Act 2 doesn't work. You're just repeating the turning point between Act 1 & Act 2 on a loop.
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Where Did They Fuck Up?
Actually... lets start on what they did right.
The one consistent aspect of S2 that I praised and still think was done well in a vacuum (despite being mostly left out of the finale) was the crew's union-building arc.
With only 8 episodes and more to do in them than S1, side characters were going to get pinched even if the main plot was absolutely flawless. That was unavoidable. With budget cuts / scheduling issues, we regularly have crew members simply vanish offscreen outside of one scene, meaning cohesive arcs for your faves was not likely. Not to say they couldn't have done better - my benefit of the doubt for the TealOranges breakup and Oluwande x Zheng dried up about when I realized he was literally just her Stede stand-in for the parallel - but something like Jim's revenge plot from S1 was realistically not on the table without, like, turning half the crew into seagulls to afford it.
The union building works around this constraint really well. They turn "the crew" into the side arc, and then weave Izzy's beats in so that they aren't just about Izzy. The breakup boat crew working together to comfort each other and protect him turns them into a unit, and Stede's crew taking it upon themselves to address the trauma vibes while the captains aren't in the way solidifies it across all our side characters. The crew goes to war with Stede's cursed coat and wins, they Calypso their boss to throw a party, and they capitalize on a chance to make bank with an efficiency Stede could only dream of.
We don't get specific arcs, but Frenchie, Jim, and Oluwande are defaulted to as leaders in just about every situation, and Roach is constantly shown sharing his inventions with different characters. Individuals can dip in and out without feeling like the sideplots stutter. Any sense of community in S2 is coming from this arc - even if there are cracks at the points where it joins to other storylines (Stede and Edward, Zheng, etc.)
So why does it work? Well, because it's a workplace comedy, and you can tell they are familiar with working on those. They know where the beats are. They know where to find the humor. They know how to build off of S1 because they made sure the bones were already there - an eclectic group of individuals that start as just coworkers, but bond over time in the face of their struggle against an inept boss who they grow to care for and support while maintaining an increasingly friendly antagonism because, you know, inept boss.
OFMD does its best work in S2 when it's being true to its original concept... and its worst work when it seemingly loses confidence in its own premise.
"The show is the relationship," right? It's a romance set in a workplace comedy. The setup of Act 1 was all about creating a character-driven narrative. So given that... where the hell are we getting the dying of piracy and a war against the English Navy?
That's not a character-driven romcom backdrop, it's an action-adventure plot from Pirates of the Caribbean or Black Sails. It's plot-driven, creating an antagonistic force that results in your characters' problems. Once the story is about the fight against the Empire, the dramatic question becomes the same as those adventure stories - "Will the British Navy defeat piracy, and will our protagonists come out the other side of the battle?"
Forget the wedding. The wedding is no longer the climax of the story, its back to the happy ending flash our romantic subplot gets after winning this fight.
Except, of course, trying to pivot your story to a contradictory dramatic question near the end of Act 2 can be nothing short of a disaster, because either you were writing the wrong story until now, or you've completely lost the plot of the real one. I shouldn't even be trying to figure out if they are doing this, because it should be so obvious that they wouldn't.
And yet.
What do the Zheng and Ricky plots add to the story if not this? Neither of these characters have anything emotionally to contribute to Stede and Edward - they truly are plot elements. It's a hard break from the S1 antagonist model, but it also takes up a lot of valuable screentime. This was considered important, but still Zheng's personality and motivation only gets explored so far as it's an Edward-Stede-Izzy parallel with Oluwande and Auntie, and they only need the parallel for Izzy's genre-jumping death scene. Which follows a thematically out-of-left-field speech about how piracy is about belonging to something good (workable) and how Ricky could never destroy their spirits (um...?). And then David Jenkins is pointing to it and saying things about "the symbolic death of piracy" and speculating S3 might be about the crew getting "payback"??? An idea floated by Zheng right before our temporary retirement, btw.
Fuck, the final episode of S2 didn't have time for our main couple to talk to each other because it was so busy dealing with the mass explosion of Zheng's fleet and Ricky's victory gloat. We get lethal violence associated with traumatic flashbacks until they need to cut down enemy mooks like it's nothing, at which point we get jokes with Zheng. The Republic of Pirates is destroyed outright, and it feels like they only did it because they got insecure about their "pirate story" not having the right kind of stakes. Don't even get me started on killing a major character because "Piracy’s a dangerous occupation, and some characters should die," as if suspending disbelief on this aspect makes the story somehow lesser, instead of just being a fairly standard genre convention in comedy. Nobody complains about Kermit the Frog having an improbably good survival record.
Did someone tell them that the heroes have to lose a battle near the end of Act 2, so they scrambled to give them one?
Just... compare the wholly plot-driven struggle in 2x08 to Stede and Edward's character-focused storylines in 1x10 and tell me how 2x08 is providing anything nearly as valuable to the story. Because I can't fucking find it.
At best they wasted a bunch of time on a poorly integrated adventure plot as, like, Zheng's backstory or something, and just fucked it up horribly by trying to "step up" the kind of plot they did for Jim. In which case the whole thing will be awkwardly dropped but damage is done. Otherwise, they actually thought they could just casually add a subplot like this because they've done something wildly stupid like think "pirate" is a genre on the same level as "workplace comedy" and can just trample in-universe coherency while you draw on other media to shore up their unsupported beats.
Bringing us to the most infuriating bit...
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"...end the second season in a kinder spot."
If this was the goal, the entire season was written to work actively against it in way that is baffling and incompetent.
The really ironic thing is that the reason that the Act 2 part typically gets a downer ending is because of the evil empire that OFMD did not have to deal with until they pointlessly added it. A plot-driven story has an antagonistic force - a villain - that the heroes need to defeat. Something external working against them. The story ends when they beat the thing, and it's not much of a climax if they do most of the defeating before you get there. Ergo, they have to be outmatched up to the climax. Ergo, the second part cannot end on them feeling pretty comfortable and confident going into the third.
The same rules do not apply in the same way to a character-driven arc.
We already established Edward and Stede declaring their love is not the end of the story. Nor, necessarily, is both of them confidently entering a relationship. Even once they've developed a bunch they will have to show that development by running into the kinds of problems that would have broken them up before and resolving them better.
David Jenkins keeps talking about this idea that S2 is getting a hopeful open ending and S3 will get into potential problems, and like... I don't see any reason why they couldn't have done that successfully. They didn't, but they could've.
If S2 grew them enough as characters and then had them agree to try again in the last minute of the finale, they absolutely could have had a kind and hopeful ending where you were confident they could do it. And then a potential S3 can show that. It's a bit rockier than they were counting on, but they have learned enough lessons to not break up. And then the overall plot can build to proposal (start of Act 3) and wedding (the romantic climax). It doesn't have to be a blow out fight to be emotionally cathartic.
(Hell, the main rockier bit that they overcome in the S3 Act 2 portions could be marriage baggage. I'm sure they both have some. It would work.)
In the same way focusing on our character's long term flaws and character-driven conflict makes an Act 1 "happy ending" more difficult, I suspect it makes an Act 2 "happy ending" easier.
Instead they wrote an Act 2 that failed to convincingly start development and got confused on its direction, and then presented a rushed finale ending in a copy of the predictable disaster from S1 as though it's a good thing. They yanked the story at least temporarily into an awkward place where a romcom is trying to sell me on a bunch of serious drama / adventure beats that it has not put the work into, and inviting comparisons to better versions of those same beats in other, more suited media that make it look worse. The need to portray everyone as reaching happy closure overrules sitting with a major character death and using it for any narrative significance, while still letting it overshadow those happy endings because a romcom just sloppily killed a major character with a wound they've literally looked into the camera and said was harmless.
If I'm being entirely honest, Dead Man's Chest ends effectively at Jack Sparrow's funeral and then cuts to the British Navy obtaining a weapon of mass destruction, and it still feels kinder and more hopeful just because I leave with more faith the characters are actively capable of and working toward solving their problems.
OFMD S2, in contrast, has half-convinced me our main couple would live in a mutually obsessed, miscommunication-ridden horror story until they die.
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Additional Reading
Normally I link stuff like this in the post, but that requires more excitement than I'm feeling right now. Here's my alternative:
Where I thought they were going with Edward - really outlines the mountain of character development they still have unaddressed
Where I thought they were going with Izzy - touches on a lot of themes that might be dead in the water & also context that's still probably relevant to why Izzy got a lot of focus in S2
My scattershot 2x08 reactions
An ask where I sketched out the bones of this argument, and another where I was mostly venting about the fandom response
This one, this other one, and this last one (read the link in op's post too) about genre shifts and failure to pull them off
The trauma goes in the box but it never opens back up - the whole point of Act 2 is that they needed to start opening shit like that - and also they focus so much on needed character growth and so little on following through
They can't even carry through on character growth that we got last season???
Why Izzy's death feels like Bury Your Gays ran smack into shitty writing
EDIT: Oh and this post is REALLY good for outlining the lack of change in way less words than I did
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