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Chapter Text

When he spots her on the pool deck, her lips are stained as red as her swimsuit.

Not from lipstick. Catelyn Stark wouldn’t allow her daughter to show up at Winterfell Country Club in red lipstick and Sansa would never think to disappoint her mother.

Red like the popsicle she eats. Signed for with her dad’s club number at the pool shack, where they stock chips and popsicles and sodas for kids and rich teenagers with nothing to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

Ned Stark put his name behind Jon too: he put in a good word with the club manager that got him the job. A job that has brought Jon back into this rarefied circle after he spent the last four years avoiding Long Island altogether. He didn’t consider he’d run into Robb's sister when he graciously accepted Mr. Stark’s offer to make tennis Jon’s ticket to summer employment just as it had been his ticket into Columbia.

He’d been caught up in real concerns. His mom is sick, real sick. She needs him at home. A job in the city, where he would have to take the train, eating into more hours of the day, was out of the question.

Jon squints.

It’s definitely her. Red hair, pale skin, long legs. Pretty little Sansa Stark, unmistakably, although she looks different. Which makes sense: he hasn’t seen her in years. Different. Better.

She licks up the side of the wooden stick to catch a drip without thought to the warped teen boys, who sit pimple-backed and greasy, pretending not to stare behind their Ray-Bans. He knows what they’re thinking. He’s thought it too once upon a time and passingly about Sansa Stark.

She’s oblivious, sweetly oblivious, not in the least coy about that cherry popsicle pinched between her thumb and middle finger or how she sucks that same thumb when she switches the melting pop from one hand to the other. She leans over to whisper to the girl next to her, popsicle in front of her mouth like a hand, guarding some secret.

His neck gets hot, red spreading like a burn up into his face, as he puts his back to her. She might have spotted him too, shooting the shit with the pool shack manager. The idea of her seeing him in his tennis whites, one of the staff, bothers him more than it should.

There was a time when he hoped if they ever met again, it would be under distinctly different circumstances than the roles they'd played before. Better. The kind of scenario where he'd made something of himself and could look her square in the face. It's just the kind of drivel Sansa Stark with her Rex Smith records would probably believe in while wearing her taffeta arm-in-arm with Joffrey Baratheon without a thought to the dissonance.

She's sweet like that. Or was. Sweet like her glistening ice pop.

…

It’s as hot as Hell on Earth and still June. He’s in Hell even if his mother’s people don’t subscribe to it as a physical place of fire and brimstone. Between the heat and Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq's attentions, he’s ready to go home by noon. Keep his mother company even if that’s the depressing option.

There’s a pile of Dixie cups in the tennis court trash. Val has to replace the five-gallon orange Igloo water cooler on the courts twice from the first junior clinic until his first private lesson of the day. She drives over from the clubhouse to swap out the mostly empty one for fresh, honey-blond hair swinging as she hops off the golf cart and circles around the back.

“I’ll grab it.”

He has no intention of letting her lift the damn thing, while he stands around.

She works inside. In the hierarchy of Winterfell, his job—tennis pro—ranks higher than hers as a server. They’re distinguished in this difference by his tennis whites and her black skirt and white polo with grey Winterfell crest embroidery at the chest.

Every place in the damn world has an established hierarchy.

Even Columbia. Shouldn't have come as the shock it did. Weber, Marx, Structural Functionalism, they've all got the divisions right there in black and white.

But they’d all gotten in, right? He imagined it would level the playing field. But it wasn't that different from White Harbor Country Day School, where he was enough of a jock to keep people from doing shitty things to his hand-me-down blazer while he was in P.E. class, and having Robb Stark as a best friend didn’t hurt either, but Jon wasn’t ever going to be one of them.

He thought he’d cracked the code with his acceptance letter. He thought one day he could be the guy sitting at the table, not the one serving it.

Val’s not starry-eyed like that and probably never was. Came out of the womb jaded. She’s a little hard in a way that sometimes rubs him the wrong way. She's unquestionably hot though, and she makes pony kegs appear in the golf cart shack like magic on the weekends.

“Such a gentleman,” Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq says from under the shade canopy, as his fingers fit underneath the cooler.

She’s annoyed he’s stepped away during her lesson. It’s there in the sugary warm dip in her voice.

Jon almost feels sorry for her. Her husband is older. He’s one of those types who is nice to your face but doesn’t tip, which is the kind of thing that gets around fast among the staff. She's young enough that Jon thinks she's probably about the same age as him. She’s not an idiot. She’s shockingly beautiful. When she’s not pretending to seduce him, her tennis game is strong. She could be doing something else with her life. Something better than trying to win over the Winterfell Women’s Committee, which is a losing proposition. She’s not from around here. She’s not one of them, and they can smell it on her no matter how deep her husband’s pockets are. Feeling sorry for poor little rich girls wasn’t in his plans for the summer, but he almost does.

Almost.

She’s always asking Jon to call her Dany. It’d get him fired if he did and someone heard. She has to know that.

Val swings the cart key around her finger. The lanyard wraps around her finger until the tip tinges pink. “I swear to God if you—” she says, pausing to poke him with a swing of the dangling key, “her. I will judge you.”

He smiles flatly from behind the cooler, hefting it off the cart. “Jealous?”

And because she’s a classy gal, she’s got a retort at the ready: “Bite me.”

…

Val isn’t jealous of anything he does or doesn’t get up to with anyone. She’s casual. Casual about the cigarettes she bums and the pony kegs she charms from the kitchen staff and casual about having messed around with him. Twice. Probably because she was bored.

He’s not exactly himself around Val. He suspects she knows it. Very little escapes her, including the fact that he pretends not to notice Sansa Stark.

He’s been pretending not to notice her at the pool, pretending not to notice her in the dining room, pretending not to notice when she books the courts for a game of doubles with her friend and two other girls he’s never spoken to in his life despite being raised minutes down the road from each other.

He pretends not to fixate on their sole conversation. She stopped him between the clubhouse and the courts to say, “How’s your mom?” with her hand on his forearm in a tone that conveyed she knows his mom isn’t good and that she’s genuinely sorry about it, and somehow he barely managed to choke out an “okay.” She was being nice, and all he’s done is stare at her and pretend it doesn’t bother him that there’s a divide between them even if there’s no official uniform to delineate it outside the club.

He should stop looking for his damn sanity. But it's like an itch he has to scratch. He’s followed Sansa’s movements in her little blue belted Izod polo dress across the back stone patio from behind his sunglasses on and off all evening while waiting with Val for the dinner buffet to be closed so she can clear it and clock out for the night.

So, he pretends. But all of it’s a little bit of an act, hanging out with Val. She’d laugh at how much he had liked Philosophy 201 or kept taking Cultural Anthropology classes to no end even though he was a Poli Sci major. He found that shit fascinating. He's too earnest for her. He took off her bra one-handed in the front seat of the car, but she’s not his girlfriend and that's fine.

He’s got ample proof of it when she coolly suggests he hit on Sansa Stark. Carefree self-assurance underpins the curl of her lip as she turns to look at him, swiping away a bead of sweat from her tanned jawline with the tip of her thumb.

“You’re friends with her brother.”

He’s not sure how she knows that when Robb’s studying abroad this summer, a year behind after taking a gap year. She’s never seen them together and Jon hasn't brought it up. They don't talk about stuff like that, though he knows her favorite band is T. Rex and she blasts "Cherry Bomb" loud enough to get pulled over in Greywater Watch.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Don’t be stupid. Society princess over there,” she says with a lift of her head toward the white tablecloth-covered tables he helped set up this morning when it was hot enough to sweat through his shirt.

He leans back against one of the porch’s stone pillars, arms crossed over his chest. “They’re all society princesses.”

With another girl, it’d be a test. Val doesn’t bother playing games. She probably hasn’t had to anyway. Heads turn when she walks by, including the heads of members with wives sitting not a foot away.

“If I had to bet, your last girlfriend was a redhead,” she says, clicking her tongue.

“Wrong,” he lies.

“Was she a rich girl at your fancy university?”

“No.”

That much is true. Ygritte was hard too. A hinge of guilt presses the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He looks down to scuff the toe of his sneaker against the slate.

“Just talk to her. You're almost interesting when you try.”

“I’ve spoken to her,” he says, giving up the pretense of not knowing which society princess she means, wandering among a sea of them, looking as though they all coordinated.

Everyone’s dressed in at least one of the flag’s colors today. The 4^th is the club’s biggest holiday of the year. 350 guests registered. But she stands out. To Jon at least. She looks wholesome the way his pseudo-intellectual friends at Columbia would sneer at.

“Talked her ear off, didn’t you?” Val says too solemnly. “Don’t worry,” she says with a jab to his side, “you might not need to be interesting at all. Some girls are bound to go for this thing you have going on.”

He gives her a look, anticipating the slam.

“Mopey. Pouty. Everyone has a type. What’s hers?”

“I don't know.”

He knows the asshole in his class at White Harbor Country Day School who took her to prom. That’s enough to sketch in the rest of the details.

“I’ve served her family’s table a few times. She’s not a total bitch.”

“She’s not a bitch at all,” he says with enough edge to make Val’s head tip back and laugh.

“Poor Jon,” she says, brushing off her skirt. “You actually like these people.”

He could argue that he doesn’t and maintain he hates all of them.

All except for Robb, who’s different than the rest of them because he befriended the scholarship kid at White Harbor. And Mr. Stark’s always been nice and did him a solid getting him this job. Or Mr. Stark and Robb and Robb’s little sister, Arya, who’s really not a bad kid. Bran too. Who could hate Bran? Or even Rickon. He’s funny: pretended to be a wolf for months back in the day, driving Mrs. Stark certifiably insane. Jon likes him too. None of them are bad people, certainly not Sansa. Just rich as all get out, and they wear it with that unawareness that makes it somehow easier to swallow.

“It’s okay. I won’t tell,” she says, pushing off the porch’s rail. “Just say there’ll be beer in the cart shack. There’s your opening.”

…

He’s been ignoring her for a month, working pathetically hard at it, and just like that, he has to be the one to hand her one of the little lit sparklers staff is passing out before the fireworks start. He'll die if he doesn't. This dinky sparkler feels like his only chance at something he'd never admit to. A level of self-deception Trivers could theorize about.

It’s a third of the way burned down when her blue eyes go wide and she takes it from him with a thank you. She's not one to forget to be polite even if he's been rude, pretending not to notice her in a strappy swimsuit, reading from a book with a curling cover on her usual pool lounger almost every day of the week.

“How are you?” he asks, so she won't walk away.

She waves the sparkler before her face and smiles. “Good. Is this us talking?”

“What?” he half-shouts, as one giant firework fills the sky behind her.

“I didn’t think we were going to do that. Talk.”

He swallows hard. “Sorry.”

She swivels to look up into the sky, for one long moment looking like a Rückenfigur against the illuminated sky.

When she pivots back, the sweet smile fixed on her face doesn't match her next statement. “I thought maybe you hated me.” The sparkler spits softly. “I wasn’t always friendly.”

He swallows, feeling pitched back four, five, six years ago when he was even less comfortable in his skin. “I don't, and you were fine.”

If she wasn't friendly, it's fine. He was older, and it was a whole thing, the divide between them. He’s not holding a grudge.

“You graduated. Congratulations.”

He bites back his well of self-pity at where he's landed with a grimace he ought to trade for something more neutral before he opens his mouth again.

He invites Sansa Stark to a cart shack. For beer. Out of a stolen pony keg.

The sparkler snuffs out, and she holds it out to him, a burnt-out metal stick. Their fingertips brush.

“I’m legal you know.”

She’s nineteen, legal to drink in the state of New York. He knows what she means intrinsically, and yet— His mind wants to go somewhere else.

Thank God for the dark.

He rubs the back of his neck. “Happy belated.”

Yeah, she’s legal and she can walk into any bar she wants and there will be three guys lined up to buy her a drink. This beer being free makes zero difference now if it ever would have. Free isn’t a real draw for the likes of the Starks anyway.

Her smile brightens and dims as she steps in close enough to almost rock him on his feet. “Okay, let's go.”

“Now?”

She bites the corner of her lip. “Don't you want me to come with you?”

And there's no denying he does.

…

She has one beer. He has two. One and a half in, he puts his hand in the small of her back, while she laughs at the stories the assistant groundskeeper and two of the Junior Sports directors exchange.

At first, they give him looks like he’s going to get them fired by bringing her here, but the awkwardness drains right out of the room because of how she makes everyone in it feel. Sansa isn't up on her Weber, Marx, or Structural Functionalism at all. She acts like it’s the most normal thing in the world, being here with them, putting everyone at ease with her musical laugh.

She turns a smile on him that prickles his skin in the humid night air.

They get bolder and some of the stories are at members’ expense. She laughs harder and shares a couple of her own.

It's easy all of a sudden. Like he couldn’t conceive it could be when she would sit down at the Stark kitchen table with him and Robb in her school uniform, and he’d immediately become the biggest idiot in Nassau County, hyper-aware of how stupid everything he said sounded as she smiled to herself, pencil tapping in judgment against her notebook.

It’s easy, and that’s more intoxicating than the couple of beers he downs.

He steals a cart and drives her out on the 11^th hole, where the trees along the fairway give way to a really nice slice of sky. Light pollution isn’t as bad here as it is at his house and nothing like the city where the sky was hidden from him. You can see a good amount of stars.

She asks him if this is what he does with all the girls, and he realizes what this must seem like to her.

He just wanted to show her something pretty. Even if it’s at her own club. But she let him bring her out here, thinking he was trying something. That does something to his chest.

He rests his wrist on the bottom of the steering wheel. “I’m not that slick.”

“I know you didn’t use to be. You were nice.”

Nice. She might mean hopeless, which was a fair assessment of him in high school. But he knows some stuff about girls now. He wouldn’t mind showing her some of the things he knows.

The knot in his chest expands.

Robb would kill him, and that’s not even why he’s kept his distance. But the reasons don’t matter. None of it matters when she ducks in and kisses him.

And she tastes like summer.

Chapter Text

Hands behind his head, Jon stares up into the darkness of his childhood room.

There are stickers plastered all over his dresser, Sports Illustrated pages from Arthur Ashe’s competition days taped above his chipboard desk, and a Siouxsie And The Banshees poster tacked to his door. They’re all vestiges of the past he can’t fully make out at this hour.

He’s surrounded by them, trapped by it all since coming back. By his room, his house. By a job that leads nowhere after years of hard work at school. And by his mother’s illness too.

She could die and there’d be nothing he could do about it.

Kierkegaard wouldn’t be surprised how sleeplessness has become something of a habit. But long after the debris from the spent firework shells has been cleaned off the pristine golf course, for once it isn’t dread that keeps him awake.

It’s a girl. The girl. A teenage fantasy he couldn’t ever fully admit to.

And she kissed him.

…

Life felt rosy when he woke up, but his mom’s car is still shit. It’s been shit since she bought it used a decade ago. It’s really shit now.

It doesn’t start, the engine won’t turn, and he has to get to the club. Val’s first shift back after the 4^th isn’t for a couple of hours when service starts. She’ll be asleep. He knows he’s going to wake her up by calling, but he has her number written down on a club napkin and he’s out of time and options.

Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq has a private first thing. He can’t afford to be late.

He set out this summer to do everything by the book. Once he thought if he played by all the rules and excelled at them, they’d let him into their secret clubs. He’d get a seat at the table. He knows that’s bullshit now; he just needs the damn job. He’s poor. His mom is sick.

He’s also not stupid: if he’s fired, his reason to see Sansa every day evaporates faster than the morning dew on his mom’s postage-stamp front lawn in the summer heat. And he’s got this stupid piece of hope that she might want to see him too wedged in his chest.

So he makes the call.

Val comes for him, looking half-asleep. She saves his ass.

He’s grateful for it, really grateful, despite some razzing about his disappearance Monday night. He’s grateful right up until he makes eye contact with Sansa in the clubhouse parking lot as Val pulls around to the back lot reserved for staff.

She doesn’t look happy. For a split second at least before the car turns and she disappears.

Be careful there, honey—His mother’s words of advice over a breakfast where she did her usual act of pushing around the eggs he made her, pretending to eat. She wanted to know if he’d had fun last night. Fun at work. Even if it’s a ridiculous premise, she wants that for him, her only child. Ridiculous though it might be, he did have a good night. A really good one. So, it was an easy thing to throw out, thinking it might make her happy: I talked with Robb’s sister, the older one. She was with her family.

It didn’t though, make her happy. She looked worried, and it was the first blow to that damn smile that keeps wanting to break on his face.

And now he’s made another person pull that female look of fleeting displeasure.

She’s here awfully early for no good reason. The pool isn’t even open yet, and Sansa’s not much for golf. He’s been watching, so he’d know. Unless she wanted an excuse to see him.

His body does a weird confused thing. He feels screwed and buzzed all at once because she’s arrived here early only to see him pulling into the parking lot with another girl.

“Unclench,” Val says, as she shifts into neutral and his hand goes for the door handle. “It’s just a ride. She’ll understand once you explain poverty to her.”

…

That unhappy pinch in her face? It’s gone when he spots her coming down the hill in her tennis whites. She looks painfully pretty in his peripheral vision, as she sets up shop under the shade canopy. Legs crossed at the ankles, she looks innocent. Scrubbed fresh and hair pulled back. There’s no sign of what passed between them. He was careful: didn’t leave a mark. It’s like it never happened.

He wants to kiss her. Wants to put his hands on her narrow waist.

Be careful there.

He didn’t ask for clarification. Something like this may be what he was supposed to avoid.

His heart beats way harder than it needs to feeding Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq balls.

He’s a specimen under the microscope, wriggling atop the slide before the drop of ethanol dries him up.

Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq is determined to make it worse. He’s convinced of it.

She’s tiny. She fits right up under his arm at the end of the lesson as he reaches high for a fresh towel under the canopy to mop his face and neck with one of his awkward flat-mouthed smiles for Sansa. Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq’s hand splays on his sweaty back, and her drowsy-sounding, “See you tomorrow,” is matched by Sansa’s unflinching gaze and finely arched brows.

One way or the other, he’s getting fired today, a point driven home by Sansa not even waiting for Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq to leave the courts before she pushes to her feet to scold him in cutesy sing-song—“Jonathon Snow. You’re awfully busy this morning.”

He tosses the towel down. “That’s just how she is.”

She hums, switching her racket from one shoulder to the next. “Lucky you?”

She’s never had a job. Might never have a job. Just finish school with an engagement ring for her trouble. Have four kids. Chair a few charities like her mother.

Being flirted with at work isn’t fun. But he just needs to explain poverty to her.

Her lips go pale with the press of them. “Am I interrupting?”

“No, I’m glad you’re here.” He grabs his racket. “I was looking for you before I had to run down here.

Her smile flickers over perfectly straight teeth. “Yeah?”

“I wanted to explain.”

The shimmer dies as her eyes dip to the freshly watered clay under their feet. “About the blonde server. I’m sorry, I don’t know her name.”

She remembers everyone’s names. She uses them so they feel seen. Everyone. It’s not far off from the girl he knew before, who always was polite even with her brother’s awkward charity friend.

“It’s Val.”

“Is she your girlfriend? I’ve been on the other end of something like that. I don’t want to do that.”

“No. She’s not.”

He frowns. The unspoken part of that backstory makes his body tense.

He grabs a fresh ball as the shawl that is his poverty drops over his shoulders. “My car wouldn’t start. I called her for a ride.”

She plucks the ball from him without asking and makes three quick downs with her racket. “You two hang out a lot. She’s pretty.”

He thought whatever the staff were up to was below Sansa’s notice. He thought he was below her notice before Monday night. If that’s not true, his internal hierarchy needs shuffling.

“She’s a friend.”

The truth of his half-numb interactions hides in the euphemism.

Until he lay in his bed after the 4^th had turned into the 5^th, feeling everything in 1960s-saturated technicolor, he’d lost track of how little he was feeling this summer.

“You sure?”

The twinge of hope in her voice is going to make him embarrass himself. He’s going to say something way too big. He takes a deep breath. The smell of freshly cut grass balloons his chest.

“Yeah, she’d laugh at that.”

“Then she’s silly.”

“If you say so.”

The stupid smile, the one that hurts his cheeks and probably makes him look like a dufus is right there threatening to ruin the last shred of his dignity when she prods him with the end of her racket, square in his chest.

“Will she spit in my food?”

His throat bobs. “No, she won’t spit in your food.”

“I’d have given you a ride. You know our number.”

That’s as sweetly naïve as anything he’s ever heard.

He just needs to explain poverty to her, and then wait for her to come to her senses.

He looks down at the racket in his hand and spins it. It’d be bad enough to beg her for a ride. But the call itself. Her mother answering—

She bites her lower lip and he can perfectly remember how it felt between his.

Her next nudge isn’t as gentle, and he wants to wrap his arms around her tight. “Do you want to know if I have a boyfriend?”

He knows the answer because he can’t imagine Sansa Stark doing anything so scandalous as kissing one of the staff behind a boyfriend’s back. She’d have to be on a second divorce to attempt anything that out of character.

“Because I don’t. Have a boyfriend.”

“Good.”

She lowers the racket and shakes her head at him, her mouth pulling up in a shy smile that is totally going to get him fired. He’s willing to make all sorts of terrible decisions to earn it. He knows that with terrifying certainty.

A kiss, her smile, her hand sliding under his polo shirt.

“Well, you don’t have to come looking for me. I signed up for a lesson with you. You had an opening.”

He twirls his racket again. “What a waste of your time.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

“I’ve played doubles against you. You don’t need lessons. Not from me.”

She plays with an unusual sort of elegance. He found it interesting in high school, almost hypnotic to watch. Like she was from a different era. She’s not aggressive. Just accurate. There’s no flailing, no rushing. It’s like she anticipates her opponent’s move and is already there to return it.

“I remember that game, and better than you, I guess, because I lost.”

“That wasn’t your fault. Robb is a terrible doubles partner.”

He turns his palm up for the ball. “But if your dad is paying good money for you to destroy me, you should show me what you’ve got.”

She could wreck him a dozen different ways. He’s willing to risk it.

.…

That dull feeling where nothing quite reaches him, good or bad, is gone.

The overhead spray, hitting him in the shower he scrubs with a yellow cleaner that stings his nose because his mom doesn’t have the energy anymore, actually feels amazing. Spine tingling good. With one hand splayed against the slick white tiles, as his head tucks down and the water runs over his face and into his slack mouth, other things feel better too.

He’s ready in the morning without an internal complaint. At their kitchen table before he needs to be. No matter how late he’s been up the night before.

And he is. Up late.

Her little hiccup of a giggle against his ear with his arm slung around her back replays in his mind, as he brings a glass of milk up to his mouth. He picked up the half-gallon at the 76, and it tastes delicious.

The sky’s a different blue when he knocks the screen door open hard enough for it to bang.

The air is sweeter. Full of more oxygen. Hitting his serve, he feels it bubbling through his veins the way some of his classmates buzzed at parties high on coke. More than one member comments on his game.

He is not slick. He doesn’t want to be. He just wants to be good to her. He wants to make things good for her.

It’s long warm days where can’t get enough of her. Of his hand teasing just under the hem of her tennis skirt to follow the smooth curve of her thigh before anyone else shows up for the day. And the taste of a cold Coke from the staff room vending machine made ten times better because she splits it with him. Of working with her on her truly terrible parallel parking skills in her red SAAB using the cones he liberated from the cart shack, while she laughs at every attempt that ends with the thump of a cone going under the car. And the way she sings along with the radio even though he tells her she needs to concentrate.

Longer nights with his hand skimming the band of her bra and her fingers digging into his shoulder.

He doesn’t need sleep.

…

Sansa’s type isn’t nice. Or at least, he’s pretty sure that quality didn’t top her list when she was checking off desirable traits even a few months ago. That’s the vague sense he had based on the guys he knew she’d dated.

But she dated other guys he didn’t know too. They weren’t nice either.

He doesn’t know the extent of it until she runs her hand down his front and toys with his belt like she’s going to do something new but spills her guts instead.

“My last boyfriend wasn’t very understanding. We broke up.”

“What happened?” he asks dumbly, all his blood headed south.

He shouldn’t have asked, because he definitely doesn’t want to know the whys of how it didn’t work out with the rich, stuck-up, asshole she could bring home to her parents or sit in a pew alongside at mass.

“He got bored with waiting,” she says, her narrow shoulder pulling up towards one ear. “He pushed.”

His stomach bottoms out.

Things get noisy. In his head.

“So, I appreciate you, you know,” she says, small and distant, as he wraps his hand around the wrist that flutters above his waist. “How sweet you are. How good you kiss.”

He draws it up his chest over his heart so he can think. “What’s his name?”

Her eyes dart between his. “Why?”

He hasn’t been in a fight since high school. He gave it up after a talk with the headmaster about his future at White Harbor and how he’d trade it away acting like judge and jury for his peers. But he’ll make an exception.

Those jerks at White Harbor all deserved it too.

There’s a sternness in her tone he’s never heard before when she says his name, as she presses her hand hard over his racing heart. “You can’t touch him. Promise me.”

He’s not good at schooling his face. Not the way Sansa is. She has opinions about people at this club, which they’ll never be the wiser about because she keeps her face quiet and her words honeyed sweet.

“Tell me what he did to you first.”

“No, Ramsay Bolton’s dad is too important. They’d press charges.”

Bolton. Jon knows the guy.

She says his name again, and he buries his head in her neck. Her fingers slide through his hair, trailing his scalp. “I don’t want you to get in trouble. Not for me.”

She smells like fresh lemon Love’s Baby Soft. It’s what absolution ought to smell like instead of musty confessionals and incense he can only guess at. “It’d be worth it.”

She hums. “You can’t. Your mom needs you.” She pulls his face back to kiss him. Just a quick press of her lips to his that he leans into, rocking her in close with his hand on the small of her back, so it turns desperate for one endless beat. It started with one beer in the cart shack. Then two. And now she whispers against his lips, “I need you.”

And he needs her too.

So, he keys Ramsay Bolton's vintage black Mustang instead.

Chapter Text

The club put in a Toro hydraulic sprinkler system two years ago paid for with an assessment of the members. Not a big one. Not big enough to get everyone complaining, but the system wasn’t exactly cheap either. The benefits though: greener greens, lusher lawns, perkier flowerbeds. Or getting soaked to the skin on an 85-degree night in August.

It catches them out after the dining room has closed and the last member's car has pulled down the lane. Maybe the old groundskeeper who might be pushing eighty or more saw them kissing and flipped it on.

She shrieks, running through the whip of the sprinkler heads’ pulsing spray, laughing as he pushes her forward with a hand in her lower back, uselessly trying to outrun it. It’s too late. There are too many, a field of crosshatched arcing blasts of water between them and the clubhouse, and they’re soaked, dripping by the time they get to the brick pathway that winds around to the staff entrance.

Their wet shoes squelch loudly to the accompaniment of her breathless amusement and the splay of her wet hand seeking his.

It’s locked. He jiggles the knob, uselessly wiping his hand on his soggy shorts as if it’ll open if he can just get a good grip.

There’s no way for them to get to the locker rooms. No way to change before going home.

But the lightning bugs are out, blinking away like they did in childhood, and none of it matters when she slips between him and the door. She feels even better wet clinging to him than she did under the spread of that oak on the fairway.

It’s the last time he kisses her without counting how many days are left in August.

…

They’re the worst-kept secret. They’ve done a shitty job being discrete around the half of the club who is paid and Sansa forgets to be embarrassed about being with him around the half who are paying to be there.

Case in point, she doesn’t tug her hand free when Val pulls up alongside them in the staff lot. Val is paid. The passenger in the seat next to her is not. Jon tries not to let his attention slide from Val to Theon Greyjoy, as Val cranks her car window down. Theon isn’t a member. His dad belongs somewhere else. But he’s the type of guy who makes friends with enough people who belong to the right places to ensure he’s always got an invite. Supposedly, one day he’ll come into a trust fund;  he’s just spinning his wheels until then.

“What are you losers doing?”

Sansa’s fingers are laced through his, but neither of them wants to say what their plans look like.

A chorus of cicadas fills the silence. These cicadas usher in the dog days of summer with their raucous courtship. He hasn’t seen the blink of a lightning bug all week.

Theon angles his head around Val with a grin. “Maybe we don’t want to know.”

Theon was a couple of years ahead of him at White Harbor. Robb likes him because Robb has the unfortunate nice guy rich kid ability to get along with almost everyone, but Theon’s an ass. Throw him on a couch for a session in the city and he’d probably vomit up deep issues rooted in childhood abandonment.

Jon can sympathize with his situation but he can’t empathize. Theon has a real damn chip on his shoulder about who his dad is, despite Mr. Greyjoy seeming to have forgotten Theon ever existed years ago. Theon walked around their school like he owned it, casually bullying anyone he could get one over on and charming the pretty teachers.

Theon called him a bastard once in the locker room and Jon would have broken every bone in his face if the coach hadn’t come in and threatened him with suspension.

He feels it: inadequacy spreading through his body like a diseased neurosis a classically trained Alderian psychologist would be happy to psychoanalyze. Theon’s lazy antagonism dredges it up.

Theon purses his lips like he’s going to lean in to kiss Val’s neck. She catches his face in her palm and pushes him away, unbothered. “Well, we’re going for burgers. Wanna join?” 

“Munchies,” Theon says, speaking against her hand.

She twists and says something unintelligible to Theon that gets him to shift back enough that his face disappears in the dim light.

Val’s not stupid. She won’t fall for his bullshit. But he has the good weed. That’s worth a little aggravation. For her at least. The stuff makes Jon paranoid, convinced everyone hates him.

Psych 101 at 9 AM on a Wednesday. His primary inferiority stemmed from his childhood experience intensified by comparisons with peers, adults, and even romantic partners—the redhead he swore to Val didn’t exist when she guessed too easily about his type. The secondary inferiority took shape as he failed to reach the dreamed of level of success he believed necessary to overcome those primary feelings of inferiority. Cue loneliness, a decrease in happiness, a sick mom.

It’s textbook. All except his mom’s illness, which can’t be explained away by a shrink. Otherwise, pedantically textbook.

Until Sansa rewrote it all for him.

But the last cicada will cease its noisy call, Sansa will pack up her things for school, and the club will shutter for the season and he’ll be out of this shitty job and—

Sansa’s thumb slides along his index finger down and back. “I’m headed home actually.”

And he Sansa’s ride.

Her friend Margaery picked her up this morning. It’s her excuse for not having her car and inevitably, for coming home late. It’ll be her excuse because she's going to spend the next hour straddling him on the bench seat of his mom’s beat-up car.

When he’s the one to drop her off, he always lets her out a block from her house. She never asked him to; she doesn’t have to. He wouldn’t make her admit to any ungenerosity in her feelings about him when she’s been a life preserver tossed around his neck. But he’s convinced they’re there, those uncharitable reservations she's got to have about him, sweet as she is. It’s the same reason he expected her to let go of him and pretend they weren’t just holding hands on the way to the car when Val threw it in park.

“Your daddy still sticks you with a curfew, Sans?” Theon asks, hand on Val’s dash as he leans back in. “I can talk to him for you both.”

Something tastes like bile right behind Jon’s teeth. Something about Theon’s father.

Arms strung like powerlines with their hands linked together as he steps forward, she doesn’t let go.

Her fingers squeeze his.

His jaw aches, and he swallows it, the petty insult. Saying it wouldn't make him a nice guy. He can be a prick too if he wants—overcompensating—but he doesn’t need Sansa to see that all laid bare. He doesn’t want to be textbook. He wants the summer, his life, to depart from the script somehow.

“I think she’s good. Just has different plans for the night. You good too?” Val asks him with a wink.

He barely gets the lie out and Val instructs her passenger to say goodnight.

…

“I don’t want to say goodnight. I don’t,” she begs, fingers hooked through his belt loops.

He doesn’t either. He’s been grasping to hold on to the last weeks of summer even as they slipped through his fingers like sand through a child’s red plastic sifter at the shore.

He considers with rosy regret the independence of being away at school—Ygritte sleeping over, sharing a shower, sleeping in until noon on a Sunday with her leg slung over his thighs—that he never thought to appreciate before he had to pull over under the street light time and again inside the Kingsroad development to let Sansa out of his car before she’d be missed at home.

Smoothing down her hair, kissing her one more time, he's getting worse at saying goodnight when increasingly, there's something else at the forefront of his brain he wants to say or do. He doesn’t want to let go.

It’s how he ends up with her in his bedroom, chasing the last few minutes of summer, the summer he wants to remember outside of doctor appointments and his ever-dwindling checking account and mounting bills. It's a terrible idea, and he’s managed to go most of the summer without doing something quite this stupid.

“I don’t want to wake your mom,” she whispers close enough to his ear that the meaning doesn’t have the effect her breath and her fingers tucked into his waistband do.

“We won’t.”

“She’ll hate me.”

“No.” They won’t wake her, and his mom couldn’t hate her.

Not too long into this, his mom told him it was nice to see him happy. It made her happy. Don’t get her in trouble.

Knowing his mom, it was a sex talk. The sex they haven’t had, but he tries not to get her in trouble. He tries not to keep her out too late. Not all the time. He tries to keep her shirt down. He tries to make it so they could ostensibly claim they weren’t doing anything if a cop shined a flashlight in the driver’s side window. He doesn’t want her to tell someone one day about the guy from last summer, a friend of her brother’s, who almost got her arrested.

But he likes the way her fingers look wrapped around a racket and he likes the way she looks from the back when she’s walking away from the courts when he’s got a clinic. He likes it when she glances back at him even better. And right now, he likes the way her breathy little laugh sounds when his hands trail down her sides and she tucks her head in close to his neck like she trusts him. He likes how it makes him feel.

Arthur Ashe over his desk needs to look away.

Her hand around him makes him feel like a damn amateur. That should bother him, he should want to impress her, but it doesn’t register. It doesn’t matter, so long as she’s okay and he doesn’t hurt her and she keeps making those soft encouraging sounds.

Her face is close to his and the springs in his bed creak like the crickets outside. She’s warm. The spread of her legs is an invitation.

Her skin is guiltlessly soft. Her hair silky and dark as it slips through his fingers in his lightless bedroom.

There's a word for this, maudlin but all he can think of, as her mouth opens underneath him and her body bows. He shushes her softly. The room is dark but his brain is filled with beads of light, streaks of yellow-green lightning bug flashes.

And he’s careful. He doesn’t want to get her in trouble.

…

His life falls apart. First in a club manager’s office: You didn’t tell us you were Jewish. And then in the staff parking lot, as she hurries after him, her Keds slapping against the blacktop of the staff lot, demanding to know what happened.

She happened.

Someone didn’t like him running around with a member’s daughter.

You and the eldest Stark girl— There was a complaint.

Jon’s got his money on Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq.

Winterfell is a restricted golf club. He knew of course.

Jon lives in an old house, drives his mom’s beat-up car, can’t pay his mom’s medical bills, has no prospective job beyond this summer, and he’s a Jew because these people don’t care about a distinction like practicing or non-practicing.

Sansa Stark is not meant for him. Never has been.

I’d break that off before you ruin your life.

Ned Stark could do that, ruin Jon’s life. He has all the right connections. But it’s probably not necessary. Jon’s done a fine enough job of it without Ned or Sansa having to lift a finger to wreck him.

“They fired me. My mom’s a Jew. Did you forget?”

Her pretty lips part but not because he's about to kiss her. He's shocked her. She didn't know it could be ugly like that.

“I didn’t forget. I didn’t think it mattered.”

Sweet like a toothache. Naïve.

“It does.”

He rubs at his forehead roughly as if he could slough it off, the inadequacy.

Her head shakes like she doesn't quite believe him. “I’m sorry.”

His hand drops dead at his side. “I needed this job.” All his anger is up in his throat, gagging him. It makes him sound wrong.

“I know, I know,” she soothes, stepping into him, despite his anger and it being two in the afternoon on a Tuesday in broad daylight with members coming and going. She keeps forgetting or she doesn’t care if someone sees and the latter possibility has his eyes burning.

She rubs his arm like you would a child who’s ready to cry. “It’ll be okay. At least the summer was almost over anyway. Right?”

He thinks he might be in love with her. It feels like it. Like a raw wound now too, because this is the ending he always knew was coming. The summer is over and two weeks early. They’ll be over. They didn’t even make it to Labor Day.

She’ll go back to school, and last year he could have said he was headed back to Columbia, which would have given the illusion they were on equal footing. But it would have been just that, a convenient delusion. Merely perception. Now all that is stripped away.

He wishes he could, but he doesn’t hate the Starks and he doesn’t hate Long Island. Being home reminded him he never really did. What he hates is that it’s somehow his responsibility to explain poverty to the girl who’s been good enough to gracefully ignore his.

“I can’t ever be rehired, not next year, which I was counting on, and they won’t give me a reference. I’m screwed.”

Her face pinches, as her hand slips behind his neck as though she might pull him down to kiss him. “But you don’t want to be a tennis pro.”

He doesn't grab her waist. He doesn't tip his head to meet her halfway.

“I don’t get to pick what I want to be. I just have to do something to pay the bills. Picking is a luxury I don’t have,” he says, laying out the difference between the pair of them, a difference she would have eventually seen for herself. “You were told you could be whatever you want, but it's not like that for some of us.”

The tendons in his neck strain and she lets go, sinking back down. She looks as if she’s been slapped.

He covers his mouth, muffling his desperate need to escape this sad final bow. “I have to go.”

“Wait. Come hang out with me. You’re off—”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Because he’s not off. He’s been fired, and she won’t be fired from anything in her whole life.

“Actually,” he says, turning to jam his key in the car door, “Regardless of who your dad is, you won’t ever be president just in case you were counting on it. Robb maybe.” He grabs the doorhandle and yanks.

“Let him then. I don’t want to be president.” She says his name softer than he deserves with how he's acting. “Ask me what I want.”

He swings the door wide. “My mom has an appointment.”

There’s no appointment. It’s a lie, and he hasn’t lied to her in weeks. He’s forgotten to bother. Even when it would have saved him some embarrassment over the poverty she doesn’t even understand.

…

His mom told him if he liked Robb’s sister, keeping her a secret wasn’t nice.

That found its mark. It’s why he agreed to bring her home, to have her over for dinner, a dinner he had to make because his mom’s chemo left her feeling too nauseated to stand much less cook.

Sansa offered to bring her famous lemon bars. He didn’t even know she could bake. It was a sweet offer, but he didn’t want Sansa to feel bad if his mom didn’t touch what she brought: she can hardly stomach anything. He told her not to bother. She didn’t listen.

She’ll think I’m a bad girlfriend.

That’s how he found out she was his girlfriend. Once he knew, he stayed up half the night cleaning the house. Exhausted, he slept-walked through his lessons and clinics the next day. Mrs. Hizdahr zo Loraq commented on it. He lost both his doubles matches. But he wasn’t going to let Sansa think his mom didn’t keep a nice house. The Stark’s house is perfect, and his mom might have hated housework but things always looked right before she got sick. He shouldn’t have let it slip.

It’s not as clean now. He didn’t keep it up the way he promised himself it would. Just like he hasn’t tried to fix their broken doorbell, which is why the person on the other side of their door is forced to knock, dragging him out of his somnambulant blankness. A second knock and Jon pushes off the floral print couch where he’s been sunk since he got home from the club, staring at a TV he didn’t bother to turn on. It would only be General Hospital or Guiding Light or Hollywood Squares. Nothing worth watching.

She stares back at him through the peephole, her pretty face distorted by the concave lens. If she’s come to tell him off, he deserves it. He’ll give her the pleasure of breaking up with him face to face. She deserves that.

The possibility should rock him, but he's not quite here. He's somewhere outside his body, as he leans into the doorway. Her eyes slide over him and back up as he explains why he can’t let her in. His mom’s asleep and she doesn’t know he was fired. He’ll have to tell her sometime. Maybe after he’s found some other shitty job.

He can't have her inside the untidy house with a mom sleeping off yesterday's chemo, but he offers to sit with her on the porch swing that needs a fresh coat of paint. For some reason, she agrees, which means the whole neighborhood will see her perched there next to him, her hand palm up on his thigh in invitation.

The anger pounding through his body is gone. The fear too. Everything drained out of him as he sat inert on the couch, leaving behind the dull nothingness he knew before.

Before Sansa.

“I was a jerk,” he says, lowering his hand into hers. His breath catches in his chest. He feels that. It's almost too much. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you were upset, and I didn’t get it really, which I feel bad about.” Her fingers curl up around his. “I told my dad everything. About you being fired. About us.” Her swallow is loud. “He’s not entirely happy with me.”

He curses. “Why’d you tell?”

He didn’t want to get her in trouble. Especially with her parents. And what's the point now?

Her head tilts. “It wasn’t very mature of me keeping it a secret. He may have mentioned that.”

“Still,” he says, staring out at the street. Bumblebees buzz around his mother’s white geraniums in their pots on the narrow strip between the porch steps and the cracking sidewalk. The club has red, but the bees don’t bother them: they can’t see red. “He may not get it but I do.”

There’s bound to be a couple of busybodies who have already noted the Saab parked at the curb as they peeked through their kitchen chintz curtains. It’s too nice a car for the neighborhood.

“You didn’t lie. You brought me home here to your mom.”

“I’m not a saint.”

Her pretty mouth quirks. She rocks into his side, sending the swing swaying. “No, you’re not even Catholic.”

He could get a good job, one that would pay for the initiation fee, the dues, even hefty assessments. Somehow. Someday. But they’d still keep him out.

She bumps their linked hands against his thigh. “My dad says those people are a bunch of bigots.”

“Yeah. They are.”

The bees have the good sense to stay away. Jon's the glutton for punishment.

“I’d join that club if they’d have me though. Pathetic, right?”

Her brows knit. “No, you can want nice things. I want nice things. For us both. Something better than Winterfell Country Club.”

He wants her.

“My parents didn’t know how sick your mom is and I should have told them earlier. About that and us. And I didn’t understand how you needed the job and how I might be getting you in trouble. I thought I did,” she says, looking down, “but I’m as spoiled as you think I am—”

“You’re fine.” Even in her imperfections, she’s more than fine. She might not understand everything, might misstep sometimes because of it, but that’s just because the ugliness of the world hasn’t gotten to her yet. “I’m the embarrassment.”

Her head dips down to his shoulder. “I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want it to get back to Robb. If he threw a fit about it? You’ve been friends a lot longer than we’ve been together.”

His friend. He hasn’t thought about him much in all of this. Not since the beginning and even then it wasn't so much as a bike's handbrake against how much he wanted this.

“Robb can think whatever he likes.”

Her head turns, pressing her brow into his cotton polo sleeve. “You thought I was embarrassed?”

Yes, but they know now. The outcome will be the same whether she kept quiet because of Robb or out of concern about how her parents would react to their differences.

His jaw works. “Did your parents tell you to—”

End it.

He can’t make himself say it. All this summer, it’s been temporary. Except it hasn’t. Not for him. She’s always been the one thing he couldn’t admit to wanting. Even before forever had meaning and life had an expiration, he wanted her. And he always knew it was crazy when he could hardly string together two sentences in her presence.

She might need the room adjoining him in the psychiatric ward. Nothing else explains the offer she holds out to him on the heels of one fat tear and then another hitting the arm he wraps around her: Ned Stark wants him to interview for an open position in the County Executive’s office. Thursday at 9 AM.

“Why?”

She sniffs and he begs her not to cry. It makes him feel desperate. It pushes that maudlin thing he's been biting back right to the forefront of his brain.

“You’re smart and capable. He knows that. He got you the job at the club because he knows that you're great. I know it.” She brings her wrist up under her nose and sniffs again. “A little struggle is good, my dad said. It’s the making of a man or something, but your mom is sick. You need a good job. They didn’t know or he would have recommended you for something other than just a summer thing.”

That’s not the kind of thanks you get for running around a girl’s parents’ backs.

He drags his hand through his hair. “But you’ve been getting in late half the summer and they aren’t stupid. They have to know what’s up.”

The shimmer of the smile he loves fights the bite of her teeth. “Yeah? What’s up?” she teases, tinging pink in places that take him right back.

His stupid eyes dip down to where the placket of her collar splays. The cups of her white bra were edged in white lace. There was a rose at the top of her panties and a constellation of moles above her right hip. The dip in her waist fits the curve of his hand. The arch of her back is just right for the belt of his arm.

She kissed his chin when he came inside of her.

God, she’s sweet like that. Like the sweetest part of summer. Like lemonade and ice pops and the frosting on a cupcake.

“You know what I mean.”

Her lip pulls free and her teeth are white and perfect. “Well, I don’t think my dad thinks me capable of that. So, go for the interview. What else are you going to do with your degree?” she asks, nudging his leg. “Maybe you’ll be president.”

“No, God, I was being stupid.”

Between the two of them, people like her better anyway. She'd have his vote a hundred times over.

“Then don’t be stupid. Say you’ll go for the interview.”

“Thank you.” Ned Stark might think well of him, but this is all because of Sansa, and he can’t afford to say no. He can’t afford to be proud. With his heart hammering in his throat, he can hardly even swallow. “I’m surprised you want to help me at all after today.”

“It was just a fight. Things don’t end just because of a fight.”

He nods like he knows that. Like his dad didn’t duck out for less than that. But really? He’s taking lessons on what this could be like from her, from the girl who used to peer up at him from the Stark’s living room floor, head propped on her hands, listening to records. And it feels like everything is new.

“But you’re going back to school.”

The swing’s chains creak.

“You want to talk about that?”

He huffs. “No, if I’m being honest.”

She snatches his hand back. Her fingers are fine like the rest of her, delicate like she's fragile. But she's a lifeline. Something sturdy in the storm.

“It’s all the rage to have a long-distance boyfriend. A nice boy back home? I’ll be the envy of all my friends.” Her face gives it all away. The thing she hasn’t given voice to either, but she’s been showing him for weeks. He’s not the only one. “Could we work that out, please?”

She's sweetly oblivious, maybe less so now. But when he bends down to kiss her on his mom’s front porch, she tastes like a promise.