A Lover in My Bed, and a Gun to My Head: Ch. 2 - Thank God for Indpendence Day
For the we_take_five ficathon: prompt, smear.
Title: A Lover in My Bed, and a Gun to My Head
Chapter: 2 of 4: Thank God for Independence Day
Wordcount: 2840-ish
Fandom & Pairings: Supernatural - Dean/Jo(centric), Sam/Jo
Rating: NC-17, Violence, Language, Sexuality
Genre: Angst/Drama/Action
Warnings: Spoilers up to BUABS
Thanks to: kmousie & purestvixen & everyone who commented on the last chapter. The response to this has really been overwhelming since it’s my first SPN fic. I love you guys! Comments and concrit, as always, are more than welcome!
previous
Ch. 1 - Humans are Animals Too
A Lover in My Bed, and a Gun to My Head
Chapter 2: Thank God for Independence Day
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Four days in Jackson Hole and every lead they get is a dead end. Dozens of unsolved missing persons reports over a twenty-year period, a handful of local spook stories, but nothing concrete, nothing that can lead to anything traceable. This time, Jo has her own room, but Dean finds himself waking up in the middle of the night, the bed next to him empty until the morning when Sam sneaks back in while he pretends to sleep.
“You’re a noisy bastard, you know that?” Dean says one morning after his brother has settled back down into bed, smelling of sex and her and, oddly, cigarettes. Jo doesn’t strike him as the type to spark up after a romp, but then again neither does his brother.
“Oh yeah? Well… you’re a light sleeper!” Sam replies stupidly, pulling the covers back and sitting up straight. “Besides, what’s it to you?”
“Nothing. It’s just… Do I look like a moron to you? ‘Cause, I know you’ve been knocking boots with Jo every night. It’s pretty obvious.” Dean regrets this euphemism, because immediately a flash of Jo’s boots hooked together behind his brother’s back on that bathroom counter back in Reliance comes to mind. He shakes it off, pulling himself out of bed and running his hands through his hair.
“Oh, come on! It’s no secret how much it bugs you that she’s here, Dean.” Sam talks as Dean tugs his jeans on over his boxers. “I didn’t think you’d be exactly thrilled.”
“I’m not your keeper, Sammy.”
“It’s not just that. It’s…” Sam starts.
“What?” Dean asks levelly.
“I know she used to have a thing for you.”
“And?”
“And… it’s only a little awkward.”
“How’s that?”
“Dude, don’t be stupid.”
“Whatever, man. That was a long time ago, water over the bridge or under the dam or wherever the hell it goes.” Dean pulls on a t-shirt and tosses Sam’s bag into his lap and for a minute, even he believes that what he’s telling Sam is true.
“Now get up and go get your girlfriend. I got a call last night about our spook. Looks like we hit pay dirt.”
Beaver Creek, Wyoming
“What’s the word?”
“A sanatorium,” Jo tells Dean as she climbs into the passenger seat of the Impala and Sam gets in behind his brother. They just finished talking with the owner of an old used bookshop in Beaver Creek, a town just west of Jackson Hole.
“Chinook Sanatorium,” Sam elaborates.
“Those are for -” Dean starts.
“Tuberculosis patients, mostly, yeah,” Sam continues.
“How come we haven’t heard about this before now?” Dean asks turning back to face him.
“Most people around here don’t even know about it. According to this guy, it’s a well-kept local secret. The place burned to the ground in 1937 and all the patients died, some of the staff too. Back then, these people were all but abandoned by their families. Hardly anybody even knew about it for years.”
“If the place was toasted, what’s left?” Dean asks. “There’s nothing to left to burn - not the bodies, not the building, nothing.”
“This is the really interesting part,” Jo says eagerly.
“The groundskeeper,” Sam says.
“Right,” Jo continues. “These hauntings didn’t start until about twenty years ago. So it doesn’t make sense that any of the spirits killed in the fire would be responsible.”
“Another dead end?” Dean asks.
“Not necessarily,” Sam says cryptically.
“What then?”
“The groundskeeper,” Jo says. “This place was huge. They housed staff in smaller buildings, away from patient quarters. A groundskeeper named Morris Foster witnessed the entire thing, got burned pretty badly trying to save the patients and anyone inside. They all burned alive. After that, Foster lived as a shut-in, never talked much. Just… cut him self off from the world.”
“So?” Dean asks, skeptical.
“So…” Sam finishes, “Foster died twenty years ago, almost to the day that the hauntings in Jackson Hole started. What’s more, these hauntings happen right around the same time every year - the month surrounding the anniversary of the Chinook burning. Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think we’ve found our spook.”
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
He remembers telling her to stay in the goddamn car. So seeing as she is totally incapable of following his orders, it shouldn’t surprise Dean at all when she comes barreling through the door of the abandoned barn where Morris Foster’s spirit has been giving them a run for their money. He likely would have lopped her head off too, if Dean hadn’t pulled her to the ground beside him before shooting a round of rock salt directly at Foster’s head.
“I told you to stay in the car, Jo!” Dean barks at her.
“Yeah, and I told you to go screw yourself, remember that?” Jo brushes off her jeans as she crouches next to him behind the stall door. “Where’s Sam?”
“The loft.” Dean looks up and shouts, “You handling yourself up there, Sammy?”
“I can’t find the damn book!” Sam shouts back. “Where am I supposed to be looking?”
They have already salted and burned Morris Foster’s remains, but Morris Foster is a persistent bastard. Another chat with the bookshop owner reveals rumor of a journal in which the old groundskeeper documented his account of the night of the Chinook burning and that’s what they are after.
“Try the floorboards!” Jo calls up. The two of them wait a silent beat, then two.
“Got it!” Sam finally yells after a minute.
“Dean, watch out!” Jo pushes him out of the way just as Foster’s heavy axe swings down from behind. Apparently, the mortal Morris Foster used the axe to attempt to free the burning victims. Jo and Dean aim and fire two rounds of rock salt at the same time, but the ghost dodges them and swings again, this time for Jo, who falls back, her gun skidding across the wooden planks and out of reach.
“Sammy! Burn the fucker!” Dean barks, firing two quick rounds at Foster, who dodges them once again. “Now would be good!”
Jo fumbles for her gun and finds nothing but dirt and hay and the stale and musty smell of rotting wood. “Come on, come on!”
“Where the hell did the son of a bitch go?” Dean asks, standing a few yards away from her, his weapon at the ready, searching the room. “Do you see him?”
Jo doesn’t have time to answer because Foster’s ghost lunges for her out of nowhere. “Jesus!” Jo scoots back, away from him; somewhere in the dark on the barn floor, her hand brushes against the cool metal of her pistol. Both she and Dean squeeze off two shots just as the ghost begins to disintegrate in front of them.
Jo lets out a long breath and flashes Dean a look that says, that was close.
Too damn close, he thinks.
Independence Day
It is long past daylight by the time they get back to the motel. Jackson Hole is quiet in the morning; maybe it had been quiet all the time, but they were just too pumped full of adrenaline to notice the calm and endlessness of the blue and green of Grand Teton National Park.
They eat in a diner with a view of the mountains and say little, shoveling forkfuls of eggs, bacon and flapjacks into their hungry mouths, and then they sleep. For the first time since Reliance, Sam stays in the bed next to Dean’s, his breathing even and contented.
This time, it’s Dean’s bed that goes empty.
It is just after dusk when she hears the creaking sound of her motel door being opened. The anger in the footsteps that follow it and the sound of his keys jingling in his pocket are enough to tell her that it isn’t Sam. She lies there for a long time, waiting for him to speak, her back to him.
She remembers how he acted that night in Reliance. After. He returned to speaking in monosyllables, avoiding eye contact - the same game they’d played back in Duluth. It would be easy, and incorrect, to say that Sam was the reason, but the truth is that ever since she’s known Dean Winchester they’ve this kind of push-and-push relationship, one she always hoped he’d grow tired of eventually. But he hasn’t and she’s not really all that surprised about that. But this? Showing up now in her motel room, alone and in secret? She doesn’t know what to think of that.
“Is this normal behavior for you?” Jo breaks the silence first and pulls her pistol from beneath her pillow in one swift motion, aiming it at Dean.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“And that makes it less creepy?” she asks, raising one eyebrow.
“Kind of the idea.”
“Excuse me?” She cocks her head to one side, leaning a little closer to him with the gun and drawing the hammer back.
“Do you wanna put the gun down, Jo?”
“Depends. Are you gonna explain yourself?”
“You won’t like it,” he says simply, a hint of a smirk on his lips.
“Try me.”
“Gun.”
“Explanation.”
“Fine,” Dean says. He reaches around his back, finds his pistol tucked beneath his belt, and points it at Jo. “Have it your way.”
“You’re not gonna shoot me.”
“And you’re not gonna shoot me, either.”
Her eyes meet his for the first time in the dark, a silent surrender between the two of them, and they both put away their weapons. Dean stands as he tucks his gun behind him and looks out the window.
Jo gets off the bed, wearing just a white tank top and a pair of pink boy shorts. She has no interest in being modest when he looks back and if she does, she isn’t going to let him know it. She pulls a pair of blue jeans over her hips and looks up only when she hears Dean choke back a snort.
“What?”
“I just didn’t figure you for a pink kind of girl,” Dean says, rubbing one hand through his hair.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t figure you for the stalker type either. I guess we all make figurings,” she says sarcastically. “You wanna tell me what you want?”
“You.” Jo’s breath catches in her throat for a moment, trying to process what he’s saying, to read his body language. “Gone.”
Her face flushes and she knows that he knows he’s gotten to her. “Is that all?” she asks defiantly, shrouding her embarrassment.
“We can’t have you around, clouding everything up. You’re a distraction,” he says, and he’s only half talking about Sam, “and you don’t follow orders.”
“A distraction? A distraction for who, Dean?”
“Having your girl on the hunt? Never ends well. My brother’s a smart hunter, and I know he’d deny it, but you could make him slip up, Jo. And if something happens to him because of you?” He lets that thought linger in the air a moment before continuing. “I hold you personally responsible.”
“I think I’ll take my chances.”
“Not really a request.”
“You wanna know what I think?” she asks, and this time all the defensiveness in her tone has evaporated.
“No,” Dean answers predictably, “but I’m sure you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I think,” she says as she moves closer, lowers her voice to a whisper and leans up to him, her fingers resting lightly at the hem of his t-shirt. “I think you’re just jealous. Your little brother one-ups you once again, huh?” She says these words, these entirely false words, because she knows it will hurt him and because she knows he’ll only deny it. The thought never occurs to her that they just might be true.
Her breath is hot on his neck and he can smell her hair, like coconut, when she whispers the words into his ear, and Dean tries to fight the urge to punch her in her face, or kiss her, or both. He grabs her shoulders then and pushes her back but doesn’t let go, his fingers searing into her biceps. She should be afraid, but she isn’t. She stares at him, his eyebrows knitted, his wounded gaze fixed on her.
“Dean,” she says, realizing the cruelty of her words. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Shut up,” he says, the words punching out of his mouth. A threat? A warning? She can’t tell, all she knows is that his grip is tightening on her arms and she’s sure she’s going to have bruises tomorrow. Before she knows it, she’s up against the wall, and Dean’s mouth is closing over hers. His hands drop to her waist, fisting at the fabric of her tank, pulling her to him, fingers dancing over her hips as he pushes his tongue through her lips.
She is overcome for a moment at the size of him, the feel of his strong frame pressing against hers, his fingers on her skin, but after a second, her hands begin to roam, raking over his chest, snaking around his neck and into his messy hair. She tips her head, kissing him back, and it’s much clumsier than she would like, teeth and lips and tongues colliding in a desperate need to touch.
He groans into her mouth and she gasps when she feels him hard against her stomach through his jeans, his hips jutting into her, fingers dipping into the top of her jeans just above her ass, playing with the material of those pink boy shorts. She moans when she feels a familiar ache settle in the pit of her stomach and leans into him.
This is what Jo wanted, or at least it used to be. She’d given up on Dean. She waited for over a year. And when that call never came she wrote him off, as any girl with half-a-brain would do, even a stubborn one like her.
But when he kisses her, she remembers what it is like to want this, she remembers that sunny day outside the Roadhouse when his words weren’t enough. But he had tried.
God, he tried.
And that’s the thing she’d given up on until this moment, his hands on the small of her back, his tongue lapping at the roof of her mouth. It is so easy to forget about Sam and about the reasons she’s here. She thought she knew why. She thought it was about the hunt, tired of local jobs on weekends, dead-ends and easy fixes. She thought.
But now? She misses her mom, too stubborn to call after more than a year. Truth is, she just misses having a family, a home. And they have it. They always have each other. And she wants that. God, does she want it. But not this way, not like this, not with Dean in this motel, not with Sam just beyond the wall.
Somewhere outside of themselves, there’s something happening, an explosion. For a minute, she thinks it’s just in her head, but then it comes again, and again. She pushes Dean off of her, their lips parting, panting and slick with saliva. “What the hell was that?”
Once outside the room, they find a crowd of people gathered around a cluster of lawn chairs in the dirt parking lot, all looking towards the now darkened sky, the smell of barbecue, then a loud bang, followed by a red burst of sparkling light. Fireworks.
“What’s this all about?” Jo asks, to no one in particular. She looks at Dean, who only licks his lips and crosses his arms, clearly not okay with what just happened between the two of them and the truth is that Jo isn’t either, not really.
“What do you mean?” The question comes from the aging motel desk clerk, who is handing out sparklers to a group of eager kids. He laughs. “It’s the fourth of the July.”
“Hey guys.”
Jo doesn’t even realize how close she’s standing to Dean until she hears Sam’s voice. She takes a quick step away from him as Sam walks up behind her. “Why didn’t you wake me up? How much did I miss?” He pulls Jo to him from behind, wraps his long arms over her shoulders and kisses the back of her head.
“Well,” Jo lies. “I wanted to, but Dean said you need all the beauty rest you can get.”
“Jerk,” Sam says defensively and punches Dean on the shoulder.
Dean swallows hard, clenching his jaw tightly, and Jo can feel the tension between them rise back up just as quickly as it came down. “You kids have fun. I’ll be in my room.”
“What’s with him?” Sam asks.
“I dunno,” Jo says, guilt-stricken, but not quite sure what to do about it, not quite sure it’s even her fault, forgetting for a moment that she kissed him back, trying not to think about what might have happened if those thirteen colonies had never won their independence. “He’s your brother.”
Ch. 3 - Her Crooked Handiwork
Title: A Lover in My Bed, and a Gun to My Head
Chapter: 2 of 4: Thank God for Independence Day
Wordcount: 2840-ish
Fandom & Pairings: Supernatural - Dean/Jo(centric), Sam/Jo
Rating: NC-17, Violence, Language, Sexuality
Genre: Angst/Drama/Action
Warnings: Spoilers up to BUABS
Thanks to: kmousie & purestvixen & everyone who commented on the last chapter. The response to this has really been overwhelming since it’s my first SPN fic. I love you guys! Comments and concrit, as always, are more than welcome!
previous
Ch. 1 - Humans are Animals Too
A Lover in My Bed, and a Gun to My Head
Chapter 2: Thank God for Independence Day
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Four days in Jackson Hole and every lead they get is a dead end. Dozens of unsolved missing persons reports over a twenty-year period, a handful of local spook stories, but nothing concrete, nothing that can lead to anything traceable. This time, Jo has her own room, but Dean finds himself waking up in the middle of the night, the bed next to him empty until the morning when Sam sneaks back in while he pretends to sleep.
“You’re a noisy bastard, you know that?” Dean says one morning after his brother has settled back down into bed, smelling of sex and her and, oddly, cigarettes. Jo doesn’t strike him as the type to spark up after a romp, but then again neither does his brother.
“Oh yeah? Well… you’re a light sleeper!” Sam replies stupidly, pulling the covers back and sitting up straight. “Besides, what’s it to you?”
“Nothing. It’s just… Do I look like a moron to you? ‘Cause, I know you’ve been knocking boots with Jo every night. It’s pretty obvious.” Dean regrets this euphemism, because immediately a flash of Jo’s boots hooked together behind his brother’s back on that bathroom counter back in Reliance comes to mind. He shakes it off, pulling himself out of bed and running his hands through his hair.
“Oh, come on! It’s no secret how much it bugs you that she’s here, Dean.” Sam talks as Dean tugs his jeans on over his boxers. “I didn’t think you’d be exactly thrilled.”
“I’m not your keeper, Sammy.”
“It’s not just that. It’s…” Sam starts.
“What?” Dean asks levelly.
“I know she used to have a thing for you.”
“And?”
“And… it’s only a little awkward.”
“How’s that?”
“Dude, don’t be stupid.”
“Whatever, man. That was a long time ago, water over the bridge or under the dam or wherever the hell it goes.” Dean pulls on a t-shirt and tosses Sam’s bag into his lap and for a minute, even he believes that what he’s telling Sam is true.
“Now get up and go get your girlfriend. I got a call last night about our spook. Looks like we hit pay dirt.”
Beaver Creek, Wyoming
“What’s the word?”
“A sanatorium,” Jo tells Dean as she climbs into the passenger seat of the Impala and Sam gets in behind his brother. They just finished talking with the owner of an old used bookshop in Beaver Creek, a town just west of Jackson Hole.
“Chinook Sanatorium,” Sam elaborates.
“Those are for -” Dean starts.
“Tuberculosis patients, mostly, yeah,” Sam continues.
“How come we haven’t heard about this before now?” Dean asks turning back to face him.
“Most people around here don’t even know about it. According to this guy, it’s a well-kept local secret. The place burned to the ground in 1937 and all the patients died, some of the staff too. Back then, these people were all but abandoned by their families. Hardly anybody even knew about it for years.”
“If the place was toasted, what’s left?” Dean asks. “There’s nothing to left to burn - not the bodies, not the building, nothing.”
“This is the really interesting part,” Jo says eagerly.
“The groundskeeper,” Sam says.
“Right,” Jo continues. “These hauntings didn’t start until about twenty years ago. So it doesn’t make sense that any of the spirits killed in the fire would be responsible.”
“Another dead end?” Dean asks.
“Not necessarily,” Sam says cryptically.
“What then?”
“The groundskeeper,” Jo says. “This place was huge. They housed staff in smaller buildings, away from patient quarters. A groundskeeper named Morris Foster witnessed the entire thing, got burned pretty badly trying to save the patients and anyone inside. They all burned alive. After that, Foster lived as a shut-in, never talked much. Just… cut him self off from the world.”
“So?” Dean asks, skeptical.
“So…” Sam finishes, “Foster died twenty years ago, almost to the day that the hauntings in Jackson Hole started. What’s more, these hauntings happen right around the same time every year - the month surrounding the anniversary of the Chinook burning. Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think we’ve found our spook.”
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
He remembers telling her to stay in the goddamn car. So seeing as she is totally incapable of following his orders, it shouldn’t surprise Dean at all when she comes barreling through the door of the abandoned barn where Morris Foster’s spirit has been giving them a run for their money. He likely would have lopped her head off too, if Dean hadn’t pulled her to the ground beside him before shooting a round of rock salt directly at Foster’s head.
“I told you to stay in the car, Jo!” Dean barks at her.
“Yeah, and I told you to go screw yourself, remember that?” Jo brushes off her jeans as she crouches next to him behind the stall door. “Where’s Sam?”
“The loft.” Dean looks up and shouts, “You handling yourself up there, Sammy?”
“I can’t find the damn book!” Sam shouts back. “Where am I supposed to be looking?”
They have already salted and burned Morris Foster’s remains, but Morris Foster is a persistent bastard. Another chat with the bookshop owner reveals rumor of a journal in which the old groundskeeper documented his account of the night of the Chinook burning and that’s what they are after.
“Try the floorboards!” Jo calls up. The two of them wait a silent beat, then two.
“Got it!” Sam finally yells after a minute.
“Dean, watch out!” Jo pushes him out of the way just as Foster’s heavy axe swings down from behind. Apparently, the mortal Morris Foster used the axe to attempt to free the burning victims. Jo and Dean aim and fire two rounds of rock salt at the same time, but the ghost dodges them and swings again, this time for Jo, who falls back, her gun skidding across the wooden planks and out of reach.
“Sammy! Burn the fucker!” Dean barks, firing two quick rounds at Foster, who dodges them once again. “Now would be good!”
Jo fumbles for her gun and finds nothing but dirt and hay and the stale and musty smell of rotting wood. “Come on, come on!”
“Where the hell did the son of a bitch go?” Dean asks, standing a few yards away from her, his weapon at the ready, searching the room. “Do you see him?”
Jo doesn’t have time to answer because Foster’s ghost lunges for her out of nowhere. “Jesus!” Jo scoots back, away from him; somewhere in the dark on the barn floor, her hand brushes against the cool metal of her pistol. Both she and Dean squeeze off two shots just as the ghost begins to disintegrate in front of them.
Jo lets out a long breath and flashes Dean a look that says, that was close.
Too damn close, he thinks.
Independence Day
It is long past daylight by the time they get back to the motel. Jackson Hole is quiet in the morning; maybe it had been quiet all the time, but they were just too pumped full of adrenaline to notice the calm and endlessness of the blue and green of Grand Teton National Park.
They eat in a diner with a view of the mountains and say little, shoveling forkfuls of eggs, bacon and flapjacks into their hungry mouths, and then they sleep. For the first time since Reliance, Sam stays in the bed next to Dean’s, his breathing even and contented.
This time, it’s Dean’s bed that goes empty.
It is just after dusk when she hears the creaking sound of her motel door being opened. The anger in the footsteps that follow it and the sound of his keys jingling in his pocket are enough to tell her that it isn’t Sam. She lies there for a long time, waiting for him to speak, her back to him.
She remembers how he acted that night in Reliance. After. He returned to speaking in monosyllables, avoiding eye contact - the same game they’d played back in Duluth. It would be easy, and incorrect, to say that Sam was the reason, but the truth is that ever since she’s known Dean Winchester they’ve this kind of push-and-push relationship, one she always hoped he’d grow tired of eventually. But he hasn’t and she’s not really all that surprised about that. But this? Showing up now in her motel room, alone and in secret? She doesn’t know what to think of that.
“Is this normal behavior for you?” Jo breaks the silence first and pulls her pistol from beneath her pillow in one swift motion, aiming it at Dean.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“And that makes it less creepy?” she asks, raising one eyebrow.
“Kind of the idea.”
“Excuse me?” She cocks her head to one side, leaning a little closer to him with the gun and drawing the hammer back.
“Do you wanna put the gun down, Jo?”
“Depends. Are you gonna explain yourself?”
“You won’t like it,” he says simply, a hint of a smirk on his lips.
“Try me.”
“Gun.”
“Explanation.”
“Fine,” Dean says. He reaches around his back, finds his pistol tucked beneath his belt, and points it at Jo. “Have it your way.”
“You’re not gonna shoot me.”
“And you’re not gonna shoot me, either.”
Her eyes meet his for the first time in the dark, a silent surrender between the two of them, and they both put away their weapons. Dean stands as he tucks his gun behind him and looks out the window.
Jo gets off the bed, wearing just a white tank top and a pair of pink boy shorts. She has no interest in being modest when he looks back and if she does, she isn’t going to let him know it. She pulls a pair of blue jeans over her hips and looks up only when she hears Dean choke back a snort.
“What?”
“I just didn’t figure you for a pink kind of girl,” Dean says, rubbing one hand through his hair.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t figure you for the stalker type either. I guess we all make figurings,” she says sarcastically. “You wanna tell me what you want?”
“You.” Jo’s breath catches in her throat for a moment, trying to process what he’s saying, to read his body language. “Gone.”
Her face flushes and she knows that he knows he’s gotten to her. “Is that all?” she asks defiantly, shrouding her embarrassment.
“We can’t have you around, clouding everything up. You’re a distraction,” he says, and he’s only half talking about Sam, “and you don’t follow orders.”
“A distraction? A distraction for who, Dean?”
“Having your girl on the hunt? Never ends well. My brother’s a smart hunter, and I know he’d deny it, but you could make him slip up, Jo. And if something happens to him because of you?” He lets that thought linger in the air a moment before continuing. “I hold you personally responsible.”
“I think I’ll take my chances.”
“Not really a request.”
“You wanna know what I think?” she asks, and this time all the defensiveness in her tone has evaporated.
“No,” Dean answers predictably, “but I’m sure you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I think,” she says as she moves closer, lowers her voice to a whisper and leans up to him, her fingers resting lightly at the hem of his t-shirt. “I think you’re just jealous. Your little brother one-ups you once again, huh?” She says these words, these entirely false words, because she knows it will hurt him and because she knows he’ll only deny it. The thought never occurs to her that they just might be true.
Her breath is hot on his neck and he can smell her hair, like coconut, when she whispers the words into his ear, and Dean tries to fight the urge to punch her in her face, or kiss her, or both. He grabs her shoulders then and pushes her back but doesn’t let go, his fingers searing into her biceps. She should be afraid, but she isn’t. She stares at him, his eyebrows knitted, his wounded gaze fixed on her.
“Dean,” she says, realizing the cruelty of her words. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Shut up,” he says, the words punching out of his mouth. A threat? A warning? She can’t tell, all she knows is that his grip is tightening on her arms and she’s sure she’s going to have bruises tomorrow. Before she knows it, she’s up against the wall, and Dean’s mouth is closing over hers. His hands drop to her waist, fisting at the fabric of her tank, pulling her to him, fingers dancing over her hips as he pushes his tongue through her lips.
She is overcome for a moment at the size of him, the feel of his strong frame pressing against hers, his fingers on her skin, but after a second, her hands begin to roam, raking over his chest, snaking around his neck and into his messy hair. She tips her head, kissing him back, and it’s much clumsier than she would like, teeth and lips and tongues colliding in a desperate need to touch.
He groans into her mouth and she gasps when she feels him hard against her stomach through his jeans, his hips jutting into her, fingers dipping into the top of her jeans just above her ass, playing with the material of those pink boy shorts. She moans when she feels a familiar ache settle in the pit of her stomach and leans into him.
This is what Jo wanted, or at least it used to be. She’d given up on Dean. She waited for over a year. And when that call never came she wrote him off, as any girl with half-a-brain would do, even a stubborn one like her.
But when he kisses her, she remembers what it is like to want this, she remembers that sunny day outside the Roadhouse when his words weren’t enough. But he had tried.
God, he tried.
And that’s the thing she’d given up on until this moment, his hands on the small of her back, his tongue lapping at the roof of her mouth. It is so easy to forget about Sam and about the reasons she’s here. She thought she knew why. She thought it was about the hunt, tired of local jobs on weekends, dead-ends and easy fixes. She thought.
But now? She misses her mom, too stubborn to call after more than a year. Truth is, she just misses having a family, a home. And they have it. They always have each other. And she wants that. God, does she want it. But not this way, not like this, not with Dean in this motel, not with Sam just beyond the wall.
Somewhere outside of themselves, there’s something happening, an explosion. For a minute, she thinks it’s just in her head, but then it comes again, and again. She pushes Dean off of her, their lips parting, panting and slick with saliva. “What the hell was that?”
Once outside the room, they find a crowd of people gathered around a cluster of lawn chairs in the dirt parking lot, all looking towards the now darkened sky, the smell of barbecue, then a loud bang, followed by a red burst of sparkling light. Fireworks.
“What’s this all about?” Jo asks, to no one in particular. She looks at Dean, who only licks his lips and crosses his arms, clearly not okay with what just happened between the two of them and the truth is that Jo isn’t either, not really.
“What do you mean?” The question comes from the aging motel desk clerk, who is handing out sparklers to a group of eager kids. He laughs. “It’s the fourth of the July.”
“Hey guys.”
Jo doesn’t even realize how close she’s standing to Dean until she hears Sam’s voice. She takes a quick step away from him as Sam walks up behind her. “Why didn’t you wake me up? How much did I miss?” He pulls Jo to him from behind, wraps his long arms over her shoulders and kisses the back of her head.
“Well,” Jo lies. “I wanted to, but Dean said you need all the beauty rest you can get.”
“Jerk,” Sam says defensively and punches Dean on the shoulder.
Dean swallows hard, clenching his jaw tightly, and Jo can feel the tension between them rise back up just as quickly as it came down. “You kids have fun. I’ll be in my room.”
“What’s with him?” Sam asks.
“I dunno,” Jo says, guilt-stricken, but not quite sure what to do about it, not quite sure it’s even her fault, forgetting for a moment that she kissed him back, trying not to think about what might have happened if those thirteen colonies had never won their independence. “He’s your brother.”
Ch. 3 - Her Crooked Handiwork