“Does Nick ever call you her name?” Jess asks. She’s wearing a t-shirt too large to be her own but too small to be Sam’s, (she never wears nightgowns) and Sarah’s spent the last half hour coaxing her closer. She doesn’t know Jess well enough, but she wants to, and now she’s tipsy and warm where her body presses against Sarah’s. She has a feeling Jess would still have been bold enough to ask her question without the alcohol, though.
“Sometimes,” Sarah answers. She’s tracing the pads of her fingers gently over Jess’s cheek. She is burned across most of her body, and though the scars are well-treated, they remain. Sarah’s heard down the grapevine, from Nick who learned from Lucifer who learned from Sam, that Jess likes when they’re touched. Sarah understands. She’s let Nick kiss the broken cracks of flesh that decorate her rebuilt body for hours. She needs that as much as he does, and Jess needs it, too.
“I can’t believe that’s something I can ask,” Jess says. “‘Does your husband ever think you’re the devil?’ That’s…” Her voice is light, but when she trails off, she shivers.
“Do you ever call her Sam?” Sarah asks. Her wine is just within reach if she can bring herself to stop stroking Jess’s face. Her burns are rougher than the rest of her body. They leap erratic across her skin. What Sarah really wants to ask is if she remembers that part, the moment right before they woke up in memories, and long before an archangel came to give them back their lives, unjustly stolen. Sarah remembers. Instead, when Jess hasn’t answered, she says, “Do you ever think Sam is her?”
“Sometimes,” Jess confesses.
“Me, too,” Sarah says, and knows without saying it that Jess will understand she isn’t talking about Sam.
“Thank God,” Jess laughs, though it’s weak, “I thought I was alone.”
Jess is young. It crosses Sarah’s mind often. She’s the youngest by far, not even taking the century-wide, eon-wide age gaps that exist here. She died a college student, twenty-two and bright as a sun. She’s twenty-three now, and more than a decade has passed. She’s a woman out of time, who is learning how to love a version of Sam she never got to see him grow into, who is the only one that can find the part of him only she knew and bring it to the surface.
Nick used to be younger than Sarah by two years. He should be older by eight now, but even he’s not sure how long he’s been alive, how long he’s been dead, and if the time in-between where Lucifer was inside him counts towards either.
“Careful who you’re thanking,” Sarah says, and finally reaches for her glass and lets the taste roll over her tongue. Her fingers cool with condensation before she sets it down, and when she touches Jess’s cheek again, she trails minute water droplets along the burn.
“I’m trying not to think about that. It’s- Everything else about… Everything is already insane enough as it is. I’m not touching the God question.” Sarah snort-laughs. She remembers trying not to do that before. The sound of her laughter really isn’t something she worries about anymore, only whether she still has something to laugh about.
“My mother was Catholic. How do you think I feel?”
“Were you?” Jess asks, the past tense presumed. Sarah sighs.
“We disagreed about a lot of things.” The world kept turning after she died. Sarah didn’t get to go to her mother’s funeral. She doesn’t even know if she would have gone, if there was a reconciliation hidden in the decade she was dead that neither of them got to see.
“I haven’t talked to my mom,” Jess says. “I don’t think I should. It would be unfair to her. She’s doing okay. Lucifer- We went to check on her. She’s doing okay.” There’s the quiet choke-up of threatening tears. Sarah touches Jess’s shoulder, brings her closer. Sarah’s always been a clingy drunk, and the grips of that are just starting to take root.
She’s not sure what the right thing to do is, urge Jess to contact her mother anyway or praise her for stepping back. Sarah doesn’t have all the answers. Hell, she rarely has any of them. Especially now.
So, she does what she is good at.
She runs her nails through Jess’s hair, and she shifts to be more comfortable to lay against. Jess inhales deeply. She relaxes.
“My husband loves the devil who loves your boyfriend,” Sarah says, “and that isn’t even the weirdest part of our lives.”
“The devil loves us,” Jess counters, “and that isn’t even the weirdest part of our lives.” She looks over at her own empty glass. She finished hers first. Quickly. She looks at Sarah. Without a word, Sarah shakes her head but reaches for her glass again. She passes it over to Jess to drink from. Jess’s lips press to where Sarah’s were. She drinks, and swallows, and hands the glass back. Their hands meet, and though one of Sarah’s travels to return the glass to the safety of its coaster, the other stays and tangles up with Jess’s fingers.
Jess’s face has not always been her own, and neither has Sarah’s. Sarah mistakes her own husband for the devil sometimes. She has never once mistaken Jess for her.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Sarah says. Jess smiles at her, one corner of her mouth pulled higher than the other can because of the burn.
“It’s worth it,” Jess says, and then, “right?” Not like she wants Sarah to know, ultimately, if it is. Like she just wants to know how Sarah feels.
“It is.” Sarah squeezes Jess’s hand, and Jess squeezes back.