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The dream is always the same (never quite exact).
It’s June and Sam’s at Stanford and Jess is beautiful. This is always true; it will never change and it will never end.
Jess is always smiling at him
(flames)
and Jess is always kissing him.
(screams)
They fall into each other like animals, like virgins, and Sam is too desperate to be gentle and too in love to be anything but. She straddles his hips and says (the same thing every time) something to make him laugh and he thinks that it’s good that she’s here
it’s right that she’s here
because what would he do if she weren’t here? To make him laugh, make him smile and relax and get out of his own head for a while.
(Even in this it is all about Sam, what he wants and what he needs, and even as he throws himself into loving her for her sake it is really for his own. Sam is not too far gone to forget to hate himself for this.)
It’s June, always, at Stanford and they are in their rented house in a park on a beach in the water and her kisses are always (never) quite the same.
He tries to lose himself in the way she tastes, his head between her thighs like he could belong there.
the smell of scorched flesh
It always ends before it’s started because Lucifer does not know peace, does not know who (not what) Jess really was.
It’s easy enough for a dead girl in a white nightgown to be an angel, to be redemption and paradise and endless collegiate Junes.
It is easy enough for this illusory Jess to kiss like cinnamon and smell faintly of soap and detergent, easy enough for her to straddle Sam and make him laugh, because this Jess is not real and nothing Lucifer does will ever make it so.
The Jess that Sam loved (not Sam’s Jess) in the true summer hated the way the heat made her hair frizz. She would drink milk straight from the carton if she was too hurried to get a glass (drove Sam nuts), and she would sweat profusely when the air conditioning broke and her kisses tasted like herself and whatever she had eaten recently (never cinnamon, not like this).
Sam buries himself between her legs and her taste is perfect against his tongue, clit exactly as he remembers it. She tugs his hair with the perfect amount of force, just on the far side of painful, and it hurts
hurts
that Lucifer knows this truth about her, about them.
It hurts even worse that it’s not true (never quite right, no).
It is June on the west coast and Sam is losing himself in Jess, again and again and again
she is dying on the ceiling and it is sam’s fault is not sam’s fault and she’s everything and she’s just one person and she’s everything and sometimes sam is dying on the ceiling with her, always and forever and again and again
It is June on the west coast and this girl, Lucifer’s girl, is not Jess.
Sam will hold onto this truth as long as he can (each time a little harder, a little more lost, and eventually we all know he will give in).
Jess is always (never) smiling
always.