Chapter Text
Crave
Watch you come from above, I'm so needy for love
I'm desperate, greedy in slavery
I sneak around from behind, I got a one track mind
We got a skin on skin thing, baby
The second the cabin door opened, she was assaulted by a wall of dry, California heat, nothing like the damp English summer Sam had left behind.
The air smelt like hot tarmac, recycled air conditioning and someone's stale coffee a few rows back. Once the aisle had cleared a little, Sam pulled herself out of her seat and stifled a groan when she stretched her back, feeling more than hearing the click of her spine readjusting to a standing position when she'd been sat for more than ten hours straight.
They cleared the jet bridge in clusters of jet lagged excitement as San Jose International opened up around them. Announcements burst from cracking intercoms in two languages. The sound of suitcase wheels clattering over tile and the distant burst of laughter from a group up front joining the cacophony of background sound as Sam's ear adjusted to ground level.
Baggage claim was its own kind of chaos. Sam joined the sweaty crowd around carousel four, trying not to stare at the couple having a rather loud domestic a few feet away fuelled by jet lag, complimentary liquor on a long-haul flight and heat.
Vicky was already fanning herself with her passport while Amy had found a strip of shade against a pillar and claimed it without offering to share.
"Right, so…" Kim said, her phone in hand, scrolling. "I've booked us an Uber. I've requested a minibus to fit all the cases."
Sam looked up from watching for her suitcase. "I thought we were getting the coach? We talked about it before we left, it's like a third of the price and it drops us right in town—"
"God, Sam, it's really not that deep." Kim didn't even look up. "Just stick it on your dad's card. It's not like he's going to notice."
The slight landed the way it always did —quick and almost friendly in delivery, which meant objecting to it would make her the one being difficult.
Amy huffed something that might have been a laugh.
Sam's suitcase came round the carousel and she reached out, grabbing the handle harder than she needed to and said nothing as the first small crack of thought about why she kept letting this happen she wouldn't let herself look at directly, bloomed at the back of her mind.
The minibus pulled out of the airport lot and onto the highway. For a while there was nothing but desert on either side, all scrubby brush, sunburnt hills and visible waves of heat rising off the asphalt.
Sam pressed her temple against the window, watching the emptiness blur past, until without warning the land dropped away to reveal the pacific ocean, glittering like spilled diamonds on azure silk beneath the afternoon sun, close enough that the highway seemed to be running right along its edge. Scatterings of palm trees began to emerge along the side of the road, the scattering blooming into uniform ranks, smearing past the window in long strokes of emerald green.
The driver cracked the vents, and the ocean air came filtered into the minibus, salt-heavy and clean, tangling with the tropical air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror.
Amy had already commandeered the aux cord, subjecting everyone to Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa on loop.
"Where are you ladies visiting from?" the driver asked, glancing at Vicky in the mirror a beat too long.
"England," Kim said, leaning forward between the seats before anyone else could answer. "We're Northern, but some of us are more civilised than others.”
"Northern,” the driver repeated, testing the word. "That why you don't sound like those posh kids from Harry Potter?"
"We don't try to pretend we're something we're not —well Sam likes to think she's posh. She'd chance herself as a Lady Malfoy,” Vicky said, pointing back at Sam.
Sam pretended she didn't hear and continued to stare out of the window.
"So what brings you to Santa Carla? It's not exactly Disneyland out here."
"We heard it's got a reputation," Amy said, arching a brow, and the driver laughed, a real one this time.
"That it does. You girls staying near the boardwalk?"
"Santa Carla Sands," Kim said. "You know it?"
"Everyone knows it. Good pool." He glanced back again. "You want a tip? Don't go wandering the boardwalk alone after dark. Town's got a weird energy some nights."
"Ooh, spooky," Vicky said, delighted.
An old Beyoncé track was queued up next, loudly blaring from the speakers, the bass turned up higher than the minibuses modest speakers were really built for. Vicky whooped and Amy sang along off-key, on purpose while the driver grinned and said something flirty that made all three of them shriek.
Sam watched the ocean instead, half-listening, the conversation washing past her the way it always did now... close enough to hear and too far to be part of.
The hotel lobby smelled of chlorine and the artificial sweetness of sunscreen, all white marble floors speckled with gold and a waterfall water feature nobody was paying much attention to.
The girls clustered at the front desk, passports fanned out on the counter, while Sam hung back with the bags because someone always ended up doing that, and it had stopped being a question of who a long time ago.
The receptionist, a girl who couldn't have been older than nineteen called Destiny, frowned at her screen. "So I've got a twin room booked under this name," she said, "two double beds… but that's the only reservation showing. I'm not seeing a second room anywhere in the system. I'm really sorry."
"What do you mean, only one?" Kim leaned over the desk like proximity might fix it. "We booked two. Do you have like, any alternatives?"
Destiny typed and winced. "We've got one single left but that's genuinely it for tonight, everything else is booked solid."
There was a pause and Sam felt it happen before anyone even spoke. She felt the shape of the decision arrive in the air a full second before the words did, the same way you feel a wave gathering before it breaks.
"Well, that actually works out fine," Amy said, already turning it into something reasonable before anyone could argue. "The three of us take the twin, obviously and Sam has the single," she said, like she was doing Sam a favour. "You like your own space anyway, don't you? And you never like getting changed in front of anyone, this will save you a trip to the bathroom."
Sam did mind. It wasn't about the room itself, she didn't care about that, rather it was the ease of it. How quickly the three of them had folded into a unit and left her standing outside it, dressing it up as a kindness so that objecting to it would make her look ungrateful instead of hurt the way she actually was.
The comment about never liking to get changed in front of anyone landed somewhere quieter. It had grown to be a small, familiar sting, the kind she'd stopped flinching at outright but never quite stopped feeling. Technically it was true, it just wasn't the whole truth, and Amy knew that, the way she always seemed to know exactly which true thing would do the most damage said out loud in front of the most people.
"It's fine… it makes sense," she said, because it was easier than the alternative, and because some tired part of her didn't want to be the reason anyone had a shit first night.
Kim looked like she might say something for all of a second before Amy started a conversation about the pool bar, and whatever she might have said was overridden by the promise of cocktails.
Destiny handed Sam a keycard, apologetic. "Room 106, it's actually one of our nicer ones —ocean-facing, if that helps."
"It helps," Sam said, and meant it more than she expected to.
Room 106 was actually quite big for a single. Clean. She stood in the doorway for a second, taking it in —the crisp white bedspread, the private balcony with two wicker loungers and a matching table. The ocean beyond it turning the colour of a healing bruise as the sun lowered below the horizon.
There was nobody else's suitcase already unzipped and exploding across the bed. There was nobody asking if she'd brought a hairdryer, or borrowing her charger without asking. Nobody filling the silence with a running commentary she had to have opinions ready for.
It was just… quiet.
She sat on the edge of the bed and let herself feel the flicker of loneliness. She thought, sadly not for the first time, that there ought to be a word for missing people while they were still in the same building as you.
She absently scrolled her phone, her heart sinking just a little when her eyes landed on a photo Vicky had already posted of the three of them posing in front of the lobby's water feature —Finally made it 🌴☀️ #Girlsontour. #Californiavibes.
Sam hadn't been asked to be in it.
She put the phone face-down on the nightstand and walked out onto the balcony, breathing in the ocean air. In the distance the boardwalk was starting to light up properly now, its strobing neon bleeding into the fading light.
She showered and changed, telling herself as she stared at herself in the mirror longer than she meant to, that two weeks was plenty of time to stop being the person who got left at the front desk.