We Drank a Thousand Times - Chapter 5
They spend most of the fall in this town with pretensions of being a city somewhere in southern Montana, doing research. Or, well, Dad spends it doing research and Dean spends it going slowly out of his mind with boredom.
Freakin' research geeks. Sam, too. Spends a solid five years bitching every waking moment about the job, and then winds up in college doing the same damn thing. Research.
Dean prefers the hands-on parts, himself. Quiet-time leaves him with too much time to think. He details the Impala, fixes the plumbing of the little shack that they're holed up in (belongs to a friend of Bobby's, although he's not entirely clear on whether the friend actually knows they're staying here), re-builds his EMF meter, and even makes a half-assed effort at reading through the spellbooks for Dad. It's mostly a waste of time. He speaks enough French to get around and his Spanish is almost fluent, but without Sammy there to help him pick through the grammar, the old (freaking handwritten) Latin tomes make him want to break his head on the table.
The one good thing about it is that it keeps Dad occupied until November second has come and gone. Last year--their first year without Sammy--was a bad one. Took him two freaking days to get Dad out of jail that time, and he still hasn't asked about the dents in the grill of the truck. Piles of dusty books are an improvement over that, he guesses.
It's mid-November when he finally runs out of ways to kill time around the house and decides to sample what the town has to offer. Test out a few theories, as it were. If he weren't so fucking bored, this would probably seem like a really bad idea, but he is, so it doesn't.
"Going out," he calls on Friday, already on his way out the door. Dad glances up briefly from the stack of books piled on the kitchen table, liberally salted with notes in his chicken-scratch handwriting.
"That's my coat."
Dean grins, shrugs, settling the old leather on his shoulders. Like armor. He feels like there's a live wire running under his skin, giddy and dangerous for no reason he can think of. "Yes it is, sir."
For a minute he's expecting to get barked at, but Dad just sighs. "Get out of here, Dean. Go blow off some steam."
"Happy to oblige."
"And don't get arrested. I have better things to do with my time than sweet-talk you out of a drunk and disorderly."
Dean slaps his chest, affects an offended look. "I would never."
Dad snorts and opens another book with a pointed thump, and Dean gets out of there.
***
There's a grand total of one gay bar in this town, and it looks pretty much the same as any other place. Jukebox, pool tables, nothing fancy. The dance floor lights up, though, and Dean can't decide if that's incredibly cool or the lamest thing he's ever seen.
It's not like everybody in here's gay, either, but there are guys dancing with guys, slow and grinding to the beat of the music, which is some alternative pseudo-rock emo crap that Sammy would probably love. There are girls dancing too, dancing together like they mean it and not like they're trying to get anybody to watch. It's still pretty hot, though.
Fuck, he's in so far over his head.
Still, he hasn't grown up the way he did without learning how to fit in anyplace he happens to be, how to slide into the crowd like he belongs. It's Jay he's thinking of, even though Jay's a long way from the first guy he's fucked. Jay woudn't fit in here any better than he does, he thinks, although he probably doesn't really know the guy well enough to say for sure.
He thinks about Jay sitting on his barstool at Rocky's with a beer in one hand, one of his toxic cigarettes in the other and a polite fuck-off expression on his face, and yeah. No way in hell would Jay fit in here. That makes him feel better, for some weird reason.
Jesus, this is stupid. He should just leave. There must be eleven bars in walking distance of here; he could go find himself a pool game and a girl. Something easy.
There's a guy a couple of seats away, watching him.
He's about Dean's height but not quite as broad, blond hair, dark eyes. Not bad, if you're into that kind of thing. Which Dean is...maybe. Fuck. He doesn't know.
The bartender plonks another whiskey soda down in front of him.
"I didn't order that," Dean says, but he already knows how this game goes. From the other end of it, usually, but, well. Not always.
The bartender smiles. He's bald on top and his t-shirt is too tight, but he seems like an alright kind of guy. Dean likes bartenders, as a general rule, and not just because they control access to the booze. "Fella over there paid for it," he says, and jabs a thumb at Blond Dude.
"Of course he did," Dean mutters, but the bartender's already working his way down to the other end of the room. Blond Dude is still watching him, and for a second Dean considers setting the glass down and hightailing it out of the bar, dignity be damned.
Instead, he wraps his fingers around the glass, condensation cool on his skin, and meets the guy's eyes with a smile.
***
He gets home early enough to get a raised-eyebrow look from Dad, sweat cooling on his skin, knees sore from the alleyway pavement, still distressingly sober despite the whiskey he tossed back to get the taste out of his mouth.
"Have fun?" Dad asks dryly, and Dean shrugs. It's not like it was bad, or anything. Blond-Dude-whose-name-he-didn't-ask wasn't rough with him, murmured things like god and so good instead of cocksucker and slut. Returned the favor, too, and didn't complain when Dean pulled his hair. Kissed him afterward, said maybe I'll see you around.
It wasn't bad.
He's still not gonna do it again.
***
They swing up through South Dakota to return Bobby's books, and it takes all of twenty minutes for Dad and Bobby's customary sniping to morph into an out and out screaming match. Dean makes three wildly unsuccessful attempts to intervene, then takes a beer and goes out on the front porch to hang out with the most recent of Bobby's junkyard dogs. It's yellow, shaggy, and ugly as sin, but it licks his chin and then flops down with its head in his lap, a friendly weight while he drinks his beer, watches a couple of crows pecking at something out in the yard, and listens to Dad and Bobby call each other names at increasing volume.
When Dad storms out onto the porch with Bobby armed and hot on his heels, Dean gives the dog a scritch behind the ears, dumps out his beer, and follows them out to where the cars are parked.
"...and your damned pigheaded crusade, Winchester, I ain't gonna be a part of it!"
"Fine," Dad snarls. He's shifting his weight like he wants to throw a punch, and Dean really hopes he doesn't try. Bobby probably just has birdshot in that gun, but he still doesn't feel like spending tonight picking it out of Dad's ass.
"Get the hell off my property," Bobby snaps finally.
"Glad to," Dad says, and cuts a glance at Dean. He lifts his hands, telegraphing leave me out of this with all his might.
Bobby glances at him too, craggy face unreadable, then makes a noise like an irritated bear, turns, and stomps back toward the house without another word.
"Let's go," Dad says, and Dean nods and digs out his keys.
***
In late April of '04, there's a band of Spriggans wreaking havoc in Athens, Ohio, and Dean's life gets fucked up yet again.
He meets Cassie in the OU library, looking like a grade-A freak with his clothes inside-out and a heavy iron crucifix dangling from his neck, waiting for the building to close so he and Dad can break into the basement and clean out the nest. She's finishing up a piece for her internship at the Athens News, and he's pretty sure the only reason she doesn't hassle him about his getup is how sleep deprived she is. Smart as hell, though, and fucking gorgeous even wearing Donald Duck pajama pants with two pens tucked behind her ear and three-day circles under her eyes.
They talk for an hour before the library closes, and when it turns out that the damn faeries have spread all over the city, Dean doesn't even complain once. There's at least a dozen nests for them to clean out. That's a couple weeks of work at least.
Dad gives him a suspicious look when he grins at the news, but Dean ignores it. Cassie's--damn. Something else.
Man, that girl gets him to go to a poetry reading. And like it.
He seriously should have fucking seen it coming.
***
It takes them three and a half weeks to clear the infestation, and they manage it without major injury or arrest, which is a minor miracle all on its own. Dean spends most of the time walking around with a stupid grin on his face, and Dad's kind enough to leave off the ribbing, for the most part.
"Got a contact to meet down in Georgia," he says on Thursday of the fourth week, while they watch the last nest of the ugly little monsters burn in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of the city.
Dean sighs. It's not like he hasn't been expecting this, but that doesn't make it suck any less. He has Cassie's cell number, and she has his, but he knows from long experience how this goes. He'll drop in, maybe a year from now, and she'll have her own life and no place in it for him. That's just the way it is.
"Anyway," Dad says, and there's something in his voice that manages to sound simultaneously shrewd, smug, and proud. "She's not too fond of young fellas with smart mouths."
Dean squints over at him. The streetlamps are all broken out here, and the fire's down to embers. It's hard to read Dad's face in the dark. "Sir?"
"Maybe it'd be better if you stuck around here. This could be a real good contact for some hard-to-find weapons. I wouldn't want it to get messed up just because she decides she doesn't like your face."
"Everybody likes my face," Dean says, but it's all he can do not to start bouncing with glee like a twelve-year-old girl at her first school dance.
Dad snorts. "Meet me in Atlanta by Monday," he says, and that's the end of that conversation.
***
It's a temporary reprieve and he knows it, but it gets him thinking. If he can talk to her--if he can make her understand--maybe he can have this. Not all the time; he's not built to spend his life playing house when there's work that needs doing, but maybe--
Hell, half the military has somebody waiting for them at home, why not Dean?
***
They go out with a couple of Cassie's friends that night, get tipsy on girly drinks that Dean would never in a million years drink in front of Dad or Sam. The booth's tiny, and she spends most of the evening sitting on Dean's lap, his arm settled around her slender waist, the smell of her cocoa-butter lotion in his nose.
They fuck in her bed in the small hours of the morning, slow and sweet, and afterward he brings her a glass of water and sits down on the mattress and says, "I have to head out on Monday."
She sets the glass down and puts her head on his thigh, smiles sleepily up at him. "You and your mysterious job," she says. "You ever gonna tell me what that is?"
Dean opens his mouth to say traveling salesman or secret agent or one of a dozen other pre-fabricated lines of bullshit, and then he shuts it again. Smooths his hand through the sex-tangled mess of her hair and thinks, jesus, you pussy, tell the truth for once in your fucking life.
So he does.
***
Ten minutes. That's all it takes. Ten fucking minutes to get from no, seriously, what do you do for a living to Dean, this really isn't funny, to you know what, if you want to leave, just fucking tell me so.
He stops trying to get her to listen to him when she starts throwing his clothes at him and telling him to get out, get the hell out of my apartment you fucking lunatic--
His boot catches him in the face, steel-toe splitting his lip wide open while he's trying to pull on his boxers. She's standing in the doorway of her bedroom, fierce and naked and still so fucking beautiful he almost can't look at her.
He puts a hand to his mouth, and his fingers come away bloody.
For a second, there's something like remorse in her dark eyes, and then she throws his other boot at him--at his feet, not his head--and turns around and slams the door without a word.
Dean spits a mouthful of blood out on her welcome mat and starts gathering up the rest of his stuff. It won't be the first time he's pulled his clothes on in the gray light of dawn on somebody else's front lawn. This isn't any different.
***
He stops for coffee on his way out of town, and he's a good thirty miles down I-77 when he notices that he's headed toward North Carolina, not Georgia. He should get off the next exit, turn around, drive down and meet Dad and--
Fuck it. Dad said be there Monday, he'll fucking be there Monday.
***
He rides into Canfield on the nose of a storm that afternoon, gray thunderheads rolling down the hill after him like his foul mood followed him all the way from Ohio. The whole town seems empty, the wind kicking up garbage in the streets and tearing new leaves off the trees.
Jay's closing up at the garage when Dean pulls the Impala in next to his truck. He climbs out, shakes the road-stiffness out of his muscles and leans up against the warm flank of his car to wait. The lot is empty but for the two of them, and the air smells like rain.
There's no way in hell Jay could have known he was coming, but he does a good job of pulling his reaction. He's probably a good poker player.
"Hi," Dean says, hauling a smile onto his face. "Surprise?"
Fuck if he knows what he's doing here, but the way Jay smiles back makes the hard, cold knot that's been riding in the pit of his stomach all day uncoil just a little.
"That it is," Jay says easily. "Can't say as I was expecting you."
"Yeah." Dean rubs the back of his neck, suddenly self-conscious. "Sorry. I'm just having a freaking craptastic day. I was hoping I could stop and have a drink with somebody who doesn't want to throw anything at my head."
"Got a case in the fridge back at my place, guess I could share. So long as you don't mind the cheap stuff."
His voice is mild, but his gaze flickers over Dean's face, catching on his mouth. Split lip, Dean remembers. Right. He slides his tongue over it, tentatively, winces. "If it's cold and alcoholic, I won't complain."
Jay smiles. "Reckon I can guarantee that much."
He looks half-amused, gray-blue eyes hooded, a thumbprint of grease on his temple like he tried to rub away a headache without washing his hands. His hair's too long and he's about three days overdue for a shave. And--seriously? Fuck it. Dean's not always the most self-aware person on the planet, he knows that, but he's pretty sure he didn't drive a hundred and fifty miles out of his way and risk Dad's wrath to help Jay drink a case of cheap beer.
He crosses the space between them, reels Jay in for a kiss. It's fast and brutal, the taste of coffee and cigarettes and the sharp spark of pain where his lip is split.
When they pull apart, Jay drops his forehead against Dean's, chuckles quietly. His hand's found its way up to the nape of Dean's neck, warm knotted fingers that smell like motor oil. "You remember the way back, I take it."
"Yeah," Dean admits. "I'll follow you."
Seriously, he has no idea what the hell he's doing.
***
It's raining when they get to the house, fat droplets breaking against the gravel driveway. Dean cuts the engine, closes his eyes for a long minute before he climbs out.
Jay meets him in the strip of ground between their two vehicles, hair already going soggy with the rain. It takes two strides for Dean to get him pressed up against the side of his truck, slipping a leg between his thighs, all solid heat bleeding through wet clothing, hands catching on his denim-clad hips. Jay doesn't talk. Doesn't ask what the hell's going on, doesn't suggest getting inside before they catch their death of cold, just drags Dean into another hard kiss while the sky opens up above them.
Dean spares a moment to be grateful that Jay's house is far enough out of town that nobody's likely to happen by, and then his jeans are sliding down his hips and Jay's mouth has moved to the hollow of his throat and he is totally fucking done thinking.
It's a while before they make it inside.
***
The storm hits that night, wind hard enough to crack the tree branches and drive sheets of rain against the side of the house. Dean doesn't mind storms, but it's still kind of nice to have Jay sleeping quietly on the other side of the bed, a warm weight that he can reach out and touch, like an anchor.
He hasn't just slept with all that many people, and never with a guy (unless you count Sammy, back when they were kids, which he doesn't. Little fucker liked to kick). It's okay. Different, but okay.
***
They climb up on the roof the next morning to replace the shingles that got torn off by the wind. It feels good, sitting on the edge of the roof with a beer, feet kicking in the air over the porch and Jay's leg a long warm line against his. They talk about the shop, the new tranny Dean had to put in the Impala last spring, the weather. The hunt. Jay isn't a hunter, won't ever be a hunter--he's got more common sense than that, Dean thinks--but he likes to know what's out there. Just in case. Always be prepared.
"You were a boyscout, weren't you?"
"Got the uniform to prove it," Jay says, smiling so bland that it's impossible to tell whether or not he's screwing around. Dean steals his beer, just in case, and Jay laughs and doesn't try to steal it back.
He also hasn't asked what the hell Dean's doing there, and that's probably one of the main reasons Dean's still here at all. Well, that and the sex. Which is another thing they're not talking about, thank fucking Christ.
Jay's got his head tilted back to look up at the sky boiling gray above them. He's shirtless even though it's not all that warm, and from this angle Dean can see the devil dog tattooed in faded blue ink on his bicep, the old shrapnel scars spanning across the top and back of his right shoulder. His dogtags bounce against his sternum.
The overgrown backyard is stretched out green and tangled below them, and Dean's clothing feels like it's wilting against his skin from the humidity. Jay's thigh is pressed up against the his, carelessly close even though there's plenty of room up here. He can feel heat bleeding through two layers of clothes, smell clean sweat and cigarette smoke.
It totally shouldn't be hot, but it kind of is anyway. And hey, fuck it, not like there's anybody here to see. Dean purses his lips for a moment, considering, then sets his beer down in the gutter trough.
"So," he murmurs, dropping his head against Jay's shoulder, mouth to skin. "Roof's pretty flat."
Maybe Jay knows him better than Dean gives him credit for, because he chuckles and reaches over to squeeze Dean's thigh firmly. Doesn't try to move away, though. "I don't think so."
Jay's shoulder is warm, already showing a reddish farmer's tan around the edges of the scars. Dean kisses one of them, then leans in to suck a slow hicky into the softer skin at the junction of his neck. "Come on."
"Good way to end up with a broken neck," Jay says. He's still not moving away and his voice is suspiciously raspy. Dean grins.
"Only if we fall."
"You got some kind of death wish," Jay mutters, but he doesn't make any effort to stop Dean from undoing his jeans and reaching inside.
"Nah." Dean curls one leg over Jay's thigh to keep him in place, feet still dangling in the no-man's-land above the porch. It feels shivery and dangerous in a really fucking awesome kind of way. "I really don't."
He takes his hand away long enough to lick a wet stripe down the center of his palm, then takes a hold of Jay's cock and starts jerking him long and slow. Jay shudders and stops protesting, head falling back, lean bare torso forming a perfect arc from the points of his elbows digging into the shingles to the flat expanse of his belly to his cock, slick with spit and pre-come, sliding in Dean's hand. He's shifting a little, like he's suppressing the urge to thrust up into it, and Dean bites the slope of his shoulder, less gentle this time, speeds up the pace until Jay's gasping, shaking, coming with a low, explosive, "fuck."
Dean kisses the purpling hickey he just made, then pulls his hand away and wipes it on his jeans. "So."
He means it to sound cocky, but it comes out low and hoarse instead. He can feel Jay's leg flex under his, the warm shudders of a body still coming down from the peak, and then Jay laughs, short and amused. "You are something else."
"Aw, I bet you say that to all the girls."
"Kind of a smart-mouthed little prick, ain't you?"
"Hey, there's nothing little about my--" Jay shuts him up with a kiss, and Dean lets himself be silenced. He's kind of distracted anyway, and he makes a little incoherent noise of protest when Jay pulls back.
"Come on, let's climb down before you get any more smart ideas."
"I have awesome ideas, and it's not like you were complaining. Much. And anyway--"
Jay finishes tucking himself away and shoves Dean's leg off of him. "I'll blow you, but I ain't doing it on the goddamn porch roof."
"Well," Dean says. "When you put it like that."
***
Jay shoves him up against the front door before it's even all the way shut, and Dean would love to be smug about that, but it's a little hard--ha--with Jay's tongue in his mouth, one muscular leg sliding between his thighs. Jay's not exactly a huge guy, but he's plenty strong enough to get Dean pinned to where he can't shake loose without some serious effort, which probably shouldn't turn him on the way it does.
"So, you were saying?" Dean says when they come up for air. He's pleased to hear that his voice only sounds a little uneven.
"Shut the hell up," Jay murmurs good-naturedly, but he's sliding down to his knees, so Dean lets his head fall back and braces his palms against the door and stops talking back, at least for the time being.
***
They make it out of their clothes and into the bedroom eventually. It's slower that time, gentler, and it's not like any of this is really new to Dean but somehow that's what it feels like.
Maybe it is different. A little different. He's fucked more women than he can count, but his experience with guys has been pretty much limited to reeking alleys and the backseats of cars and on one occasion he generally chooses not to remember, the sheriff's office in some backwoods jail.
And this.
The pillowcase is cheap cotton, a little nappy, rough under his cheek. He's holding onto the corner of the mattress so hard his fingers are starting to cramp, shaking like he's terrified and more turned on that he can remember being in a long time. Jay kisses the nape of his neck and smooths a rough hand down his flank, and fuck, he's used that move before, on women.
The snap of a bottle closing, and Jay's fingers are cool with slick and slow, too fucking slow. Dean curses and shoves back against it, too far gone to even care what he looks like right now.
"Stop fucking around and do it already," he hisses, letting go of the mattress to reach blindly behind him and grab for Jay's hip. He holds on tight, fingers pressing deep enough to make the point, and Jay laughs quietly.
"Easy," he murmurs in Dean's ear, fingers twisting to find the spot that makes his back arc and the breath leave his lungs like he's been punched. "Just be easy now."
"I look like a chick to you?" Dean gasps. Jay chuckles again, warm against the top of his shoulder, and then there's the crinkle and tear of a condom wrapper and hands on the inside of his thighs easing his legs apart--fingers still a little sticky, warm, almost familiar by now. This is almost familiar by now.
Jay moves like he knows what he's doing, not rough but sure. He waits for Dean to breathe through the stretch and burn of it, murmuring things Dean can't quite hear over the rush of blood in his ears, and when he does start to move it's slow, a smooth easy roll of the hips.
It feels good. Fuck, it feels really good, and Dean breathes out and lets go.
***
Afterward, he feels giddy and a little high, like a fuse blew somewhere in the depths of his brain.
"I think you broke me," he mumbles, gazing muzzily up at the ceiling. There's a water stain shaped like Montana on the tiles over the bed. Jay snorts. He's sprawled out with his cheek resting on Dean's belly and an arm flung carelessly over his hips. For some reason, this feels more intimate than the sex they just had, but he is way too fucking comfortable to care.
"You alright?" Jay asks quietly after a while, and Dean rolls his eyes at the ceiling.
"Orgasms are a real hardship for me, but I think I'll live." His hand is in Jay's hair, and he's not quite sure how it got there. The sun is sinking low in the sky and there's a window cracked to let in the breeze and the sound of crickets. Jay looks loose and half-asleep, stretched out like a big cat on the faded sheets, tan sliced through here and there with old scars.
He could be a hunter, by his body. He was a soldier. He moves and thinks and breathes in ways that are familiar to Dean, which is maybe why none of this is freaking him out the way he still feels like it should.
Dean dozes on that thought for a while, and the next time he's fully awake there are long shadows striping across the bed and his belly is rumbling with hunger. He feels sore and kind of gross, but food is a priority right now.
"Hey," he mumbles. His hand is resting heavy on the back of Jay's neck, and he gives him a little shake.
Jay grunts and lifts his head. His eyelids are heavy and the red sunset catches in his lashes and the stubble on his cheeks. He licks his lips, blinks. It's maybe the most relaxed Dean's ever seen him. "Yeah?"
"'M hungry."
Jay blinks again. "I got frozen pizza, I think."
"Nah," Dean decides. "Pancakes."
"It's dinnertime."
"So?"
Jay chuckles and pushes himself into a sitting position. "Fine. Pancakes. You're cooking 'em."
Dean grins. "I can do that."
***
Turns out Dean actually can cook, which surprises Jay more than it maybe ought to. He does it naked, too, totally unself-conscious. He don't turn the light on, but the light of the sinking sun is enough to show up a whole bunch of scars laced across his skin. Way too many scars for somebody as young as him. Some of them Jay knows the story to, like the gouge that runs from the top of Dean's right kneecap all the way up to his hip, the result of a pissed-off poltergeist and his little brother's first attempt at sutures. Some of them, he has no clue.
"You're gonna get hot grease someplace you don't want it," he observes from the bedroom doorway, watching Dean flip a pancake onto the waiting stack.
Dean laughs. "Nah, I got skills."
"Yeah?"
"You have no idea."
"I got some idea."
A snort. "Cooking, man."
Jay laughs, pulls his jeans back on and tosses his sticky t-shirt in the direction of the laundry pile. "Smells good," he offers.
Kid could light up a room with that grin.
***
Nellie shows up around noon on Saturday to drop some stuff off for Jay, but she's kind of skittish around Dean and doesn't stay long. Considering that he shot up a ghost in her front yard the last time they ran into each other, Dean can't entirely blame her.
The town's dead on Sunday, but Jay opens the shop all the same. For lack of anything better to do, Dean drives down with him.
George is still working the front office, and he gets this lip-curl on his face when Dean wanders in. Kind of makes Dean want to punch him in the face, which is a feeling he got pretty familiar with the last time he was working here.
Instead, he bats his eyes, cocks his hip, and pouts at the skeevy asshole like he's Scarlett Johanssen instead of a mostly-bald pot-bellied mechanic with an attitude problem and bad teeth. "Hi, George."
George turns purple. Dean grins and follows Jay into the shop.
***
And then it's Monday. He wakes up with a headache that he can only partly attribute to the beers he put away last night and the sinking sensation of reality crashing down on his head. Three days of cars and beer and good sex and nothing to remind him of Cassie still aren't enough to get her out of his head, apparently.
He goes out into the living room to make the phone call, sinks down on the lumpy couch and indulges in a brief fantasy of telling Dad to shove it, that he's gonna stay in Nowheresville, North Carolina, and become a mechanic. Then he punches in the number.
Dad picks up on the second ring. "Dean."
Dean tucks the phone under his ear, stares at the cheapass fake-wood paneling on the wall behind the TV. "Hey, Dad."
That's it, but Dad hasn't had Dean covering his six for as long as he has without learning to read his voice. His tone sharpens immediately. "What happened?"
My life's a crock of shit, that's what happened. You know, the usual. "I'm heading out pretty soon," he says instead. "I'll be Atlanta by this afternoon."
"This afternoon." The tone's neutral, and Dean grimaces. Busted. Dad knows as well as he does that it's a ten hour drive from Cassie's apartment to Atlanta, and that's with a healthy amount of speeding. "Where the hell are you?"
"Canfield."
"You're in North Carolina."
"Yessir."
"What happened with Cassie?"
"She threw me out," Dean says, trying to make his voice even, light. Kind of like it's no big fucking deal, because it isn't. Spilled milk or whatever.
Yeah, he's doing just fine.
Dad doesn't answer for a while, sighs, finally. "Meet me at the Blue Robin Inn. Right off of I-85, room number's 320. I'll expect you there by three."
Dean pinches the bridge of his nose, wonders if he could get Jay to lend him another travel mug of coffee sludge even though he didn't bring back the last one back. "I'll be there."
He's about to hang up when Dad says, "Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry. About Cassie."
Yeah, he definitely needs coffee. Maybe some prescription-strength painkillers. A sledgehammer to knock himself out with. "It's cool, Dad. I'll see you later."
He disconnects the call before Dad can say anything else.
Jay's awake when he comes back into the bedroom, but he doesn't say anything, just watches Dean gather up his clothes and stuff them in his duffel bag.
"I should get going," Dean says.
"I figured."
"I--" he lifts a hand, presses his knuckles into the ache knotting itself into his forehead. "Fuck."
Jay slides out of bed, pulls on a pair of crumpled jeans. "You alright?"
"Peachy."
"Yeah, I can tell."
Dean rubs his forehead again, drops his hands to his sides. Jay's just looking at him. "You never asked me why I came back here. You never ask."
"None of my business."
"I met this girl." He doesn't know he's gonna say it until the words are out of his mouth, but then he can't seem to stop talking. "Cassie. She's--man." How to explain Cassie? Gorgeous, funny Cassie, with the smart mouth and the attitude and the way she never once acted like she was out of his league.
And the fucking fantastic throwing arm. Can't forget that. He barks out a laugh. "So, I told her the truth. About what we do."
"She didn't take it well, I guess."
Dean rubs the healing split in his lower lip. Still stings like a bitch. "You could say that, yeah."
Jay nods. "I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Dean says again. He sort of wishes he had something in his hands to play with, focus on, because he's not entirely blind to the weirdness of discussing his woman troubles with the guy he's been banging for the past three days. Jay doesn't seem bothered by it, but Dean's not sure he'd be able to tell. "This is--I don't know, man."
He wants to apologize, but he's not sure what he has to be sorry for. Something, probably. He's no good at this shit.
"It is what it is," Jay says mildly. "You want me to fix you some coffee for the road?"
"I didn't bring your last cup back."
"I expect I'll survive. Come on."
It's not worth arguing. Dean slings the bag over his shoulder and follows Jay into the kitchen, leans against the sink while Jay fills the pot and turns it on. "Hey, Jay."
"Yeah?"
"You ever have somebody?" Jay goes still, the lean, tanned lines of his back tense. His hands flex on the countertop, and Dean adds, "I mean, it's not my business, but--"
"I did," Jay interrupts quietly. "Long time ago."
"What happened?"
He's got an idea, and the look on Jay's face when he glances up confirms it before the man even opens his mouth. "He met with an accident," Jay says, mellow voice gone precise and bitter. "The kind that involves a tire iron and a lonely stretch of road."
"I'm sorry," Dean murmurs.
Jay lifts a shoulder. "It was a long time ago," he says again. Like that makes any fucking difference. Christ, it's been twenty years since Mom, and Dad still hasn't come anywhere close to getting over it. That's not the kind of hurt that just goes away.
Still, it isn't his business to tell Jay how to handle his shit, so he doesn't push it, just settles himself back against the lip of the sink and watches Jay pour one of those cheap plastic mugs full of coffee. Their fingers brush when he hands the cup over, and Dean sets it down on the counter, leans in and kisses him on the mouth, slow and thorough.
It isn't a sexy kind of kiss. Something else, something Dean can't entirely get a handle on and isn't sure he wants to.
Jay brushes his cheek with his knuckles when they pull apart, an oddly tender gesture. His eyes are unreadable. "Y'all take care of yourself," he says, just like the last time.
Dean kisses him again, then picks up the mug, letting the heat sink in through his fingers. "I'll see you around."
***
"That mechanic friend of yours lives in Canfield," Dad says that evening.
Dean doesn't pause loading the gun, but the shells suddenly feel slippery in his fingers. He doesn't look up. Can't. "Yeah. I was staying with him for a couple of days. To get my head on straight."
So to speak.
Dad's quiet, and for a long moment all Dean can hear is the rasp of his own breathing, loud like thunder. Then Dad's moving, a slow shift and rustle of flannel, and he reaches across the table to squeeze Dean's shoulder. The weight of his hand is so damn comforting that for a second Dean feels like a little kid again, and to his intense embarrassment, his eyes are burning.
"Let's hit the road," Dad says. "We got a lot of ground to cover before morning." Gives him a little shake, then lets go.
They don't talk about it again.
They both get arrested in a small town in South Dakota that Dean hasn't bothered to learn the name of. Bobby's only a couple of hours away, and if Dean called instead of Dad, he might be willing to drive down and bail them out so they don't have to scrap yet another set of ID's. It's just trespassing. No big deal.
Dad's a stubborn bastard, though, and he nurses a grudge like nobody else Dean's ever seen, except maybe Sam. They break out instead, bust the Impala and Dad's truck out of the impound and head back to California to check up on Sam without so much as a sniff in the direction of Sioux Falls.
They spend three days following Sam around and don't talk to him, either. Dean doesn't even bother suggesting it this time. He does pick the lock on Sam's mailbox to leave an envelope stuffed with twenties in there, though. It's even odds that Sam will throw it in the garbage without opening it and Dad gives him this look, but he doesn't care. It's his job to look after Sam, even if the pissy bastard is too pigheaded to accept it.
He gets a phone call from a Stanford number when he's in the shower that night. The message on his voicemail is about five seconds of dead air, and nobody picks up when he calls back. Dean kind of wishes he was surprised.
***
Nellie graduates with her Associates the first week of June, and Jay ends up sitting in the crowd with Missy and Jake, mostly to keep Jake out of trouble. Man can't even stay sober for his own daughter's graduation.
He brings a couple of disposable cameras with him, and when he gets the photos developed later, there's about twenty of Nellie in her blue cap and gown, one of Jake snoring away on Missy's shoulder, two of Jay looking like a damn fool in a suit he ain't worn in years. There's also a couple of pictures of the '73 Mustang he did body work on a while back, and one of Dean sitting on the porch steps with a beer, looking faraway and still too pretty for his own good.
Jay shoves that one in his dresser drawer and drives up to the state pen to hand the rest of them off to Mae. The look on her face when she sees her little girl in that cap and gown puts it right out of his head.
"Two more years," he says, watching her trace the outline of Nellie's face with one slender finger. Her hair's grown out to its original mousy brown and there are more lines than he remembers around her mouth, but when she smiles at him it's just as pretty as it was back in high school.
"Thanks for bringing me these, sweetheart," she says, and reaches across the table to squeeze his hand.
Jay squeezes back. Probably a little too hard, but she don't complain. "Next time, I'll bring the girls with me."
***
It's August when Jake drives his old Silverado through a guardrail and rolls it down a hundred yards of rocky slope. He's dead before the engine quits, and that's about the only mercy in the whole sorry situation.
Nellie cries all the way up to Raleigh and all through the two-hour visit with her mama, but she buttons up on the way back and don't shed a single tear through the funeral.
Missy takes to sleeping in her sister's bed, even though she's almost twelve now and ain't done that in years. Jay stops by to help out around the house, and Nellie takes a job with a hospital over in Asheville. Says she can wait to move out of town, at least until Missy's out of school. It's a good enough job that the state don't give her much hassle about getting custody, so at least Missy don't end up shipped off to some foster family somewhere.
That should be the end of it, except for how three months in, there's cold spots and blown circuits turning up in the trailer. Nellie's car breaks down four times for no reason Jay can figure out, and around November Missy swears up and down that her daddy locked her in her bedroom and wouldn't let her out for three hours.
Time was, Jay would have said she was losing her marbles. He knows better now.
***
"Got a question for you," Jay says, and Dean slumps in his seat, shifts his grip on the phone, and sighs. That's an opening gambit that never goes anywhere good.
"Shoot."
"Salt and burn. That the only way to do for a spook?"
"The only sure-fire way," Dean admits. "Why, you got--"
He's talking to dead air. Even for Jay, that was abrupt.
North Carolina is fifteen hundred miles east of them, and they're on a job now. Black dogs, and there are five people dead already. If Jay's got a ghost problem out there in Canfield, he's gonna have to take care of it himself. He's a smart guy. He can handle a ghost, and he can probably even avoid getting arrested for grave desecration.
Doesn't make Dean feel any better about the whole situation, though. If there's one thing he fucking hates, it's being helpless.
***
It ain't that he ever even liked Jake. Damn bastard was worse than useless, a drunken lump of a man who died with more flair than he ever lived. Just about figures that he wouldn't have the sense to get gone.
Which is why Jay's out in a cemetery at the ass-end of midnight, digging up a fresh grave. Good thing it's fresh enough that the dirt ain't packed to sod, 'cause that's a lot of digging and he ain't as young as he used to be. Ain't got quite the stamina, and maybe he oughta start thinking about cutting back on the smokes or something. He's winded by the time he moves enough dirt to get at the coffin, has to sit there for a minute listening to the night sounds out here in the back of nowhere. Owls in the woods. It's just lucky the graveyard ain't closer to town. He ain't got a clue how he'd explain this to the cops.
"This ain't right."
'Course, he shoulda figured Jake wouldn't just go in peace. He don't look like he's trying to make trouble, just leaning up against his own headstone with droopy hounddog eyes, but that could change.
"You're dead," Jay informs the ghost. "Time to move on."
"Ain't right," Jake repeats, and Jay sighs. 'Course the bastard has even less sense dead than he did alive. He gets the shovel down, pries the lid loose. Even though he's braced for it, the smell makes him recoil. Ain't much smells worse than a fresh corpse, and it's been a long damn time since he's had to deal with one. Specially of someone he knew.
Jake's body is waxy and bloated in his cheap suit, and Jay hold his breath while he douses it with lighter fluid and salt. Next to him, Jake's ghost looks on mournfully.
"I just want to be with my girls," he says while Jay digs a match out of his pocket. "I just want to be there for my little girls."
Jay looks the spook square in the eye while he lights a match. "Shoulda tried that when you were breathing," he says, and drops it in.
The stink of burning flesh clings like war-dust to his clothes even after he fills in the grave, and at home he strips down to his boxers and tosses his jeans and shirt in the trash before calling Dean back.
Dean don't complain about the hour or the way Jay hung up on him earlier, just settles in to tell a story about a couple of strippers and a cross-dressing policeman that probably don't have a shred of truth to it. Jay don't mind. Just the sound of a friendly voice is enough to unwind some of the sickness in his belly.
He don't know what to call this thing between him and Dean. It ain't love, that's for sure. Dean's got no room in his heart for anybody but his family, and any love Jay had in him died in the morgue when he had to identify Keith by the tattoo on his leg because his face was too beat-in to recognize. He's a little piece of comfort for Dean, and maybe that goes both ways. It ain't much, but it's something.
He's smiling when he hangs up.
***
Somehow, it ain't even that much of a surprise when Dean rolls into town during the first frost of the season, a week later. He's waiting outside the shop by his car when Jay finishes locking up, looking sheepish and a little defiant, like he ain't entirely sure of his welcome. Hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans more like he's trying to trap them than like he's bothered by the cold. He squints as Jay approaches. "Hey."
"Hey yourself," Jay says. "What brings you 'round these parts?"
Mike passes them on his way toward his truck, lifts a hand to Dean, and Dean waves back without looking away from Jay. "Just passing through. Thought I'd stop in and see how you were doing."
"Canfield does seem to be on the way to a lot of places."
"Yeah," Dean says, and suddenly there's a grin hiding in the edges of his mouth. "Funny about that."
Smartass. Jay finds himself smiling back reluctantly. "Good to see you, kid."
"You ever think maybe it's a little creepy to call me that, considering the nature of our relationship?" Dean asks, but the grin's all the way onto his face now, and Jay just chuckles.
"Made my peace with it a while back. What say we head over to Rocky's and grab a beer?"
"Sure," Dean says easily. "You're buying."
Jay bumps his shoulder, just friendly, and Dean slings a heavy arm around him and leaves it there. His body is warm and close, and Jay can smell smoke and leather. "My pleasure," he says, and means it.
***
He hangs around for almost two weeks that time. Ain't any kind of discussion; he sleeps in Jay's bed and cleans his way methodically through Jay's gun collection and rebuilds the engine of a '62 Thunderbird in the shop. Nobody hassles him. George lit out to Kentucky a while back, Mike's almost as bad a gossip as Marty but he ain't the confrontational type, and the new kid's too scared of Jay to make any smart remarks.
They drink beer and play darts down at Rocky's, fuck in every room in the house, and don't talk about anything important. Nellie comes around a few times, and after the second visit she even stops flinching every time Dean talks to her.
She's a tough kid. She's doing alright.
Dean's slower this time, calmer without the manic thread of nervous temper running through everything he does. Not happy, Jay thinks, but come to terms with his lot in life. Resigned, in a way Jay knows all too well. Kind of makes him sad, seeing that in the kid, but it ain't anything he knows how to fix.
He leaves on a pale, cold Monday morning with one of Jay's plastic gas-station mugs full of strong coffee, sticks his hand out the window of the Impala to wave when he pulls out onto the road, and that's the last time Jay sees him for almost three years.
***
October, 2005
"New Orleans, I don't know, Dad. They get hurricanes down there." Dean grins. "Could be dangerous."
Dad doesn't even bother smacking him down. "There's a couple of rogue witches trying to summon back Katrina," he says tiredly, and Dean lets out a low whistle.
"That is a special kind of stupid, right there." He pauses. Dad's packing, fast and efficient like he always does, and his notes are already shoved in the back of his truck. "What about you?"
"I'm heading out west. Jericho."
"In California."
"That's right."
Dean looks down at the Desert Eagle spread out on the motel desk. There's sun beating in through the dusty windows and their room smells like lighter fluid, burnt coffee, and gun oil, and it's all so comfortable and normal that the sudden chill in his gut doesn't make any sense at all. "You gonna stop and see Sam?"
See Sam here meaning just exactly that and nothing more. Dad hasn't said a goddamn word to Sam in years, and it doesn't seem likely that that's gonna change anytime soon. It makes Dean's head ache every time he thinks about it, but the two of them are equally pigheaded in their own special ways and there's nothing he can do to force a happy reunion.
Much as he wants to shove them in a room together and make them duke it out like reasonable people.
"Maybe," Dad says. Later, Dean will remember the way Dad looks at him, serious and intense like he's memorizing Dean's face. Later, he'll think that he should have known right then that something was up. "Think I'm gonna stop and see Jim on the way there. Call me up when you get the job finished, and I'll let you know where to meet up."
"Yessir," Dean says. "So. New Orleans, huh?"
"I got you a contact with a local voudou priestess," Dad says. "I expect you to be respectful."
"Am I ever anything but?"
"I mean it, Dean."
"Alright, alright, I'm kidding. I'll behave."
"Good." Dad shoulders his bag, hesitates for a moment, then reaches out to clap Dean's shoulder. "The room's paid up through tonight, but you should hit the road early tomorrow."
Dean nods, and Dad squeezes his shoulder and turns on his heel and walks out of the room.
***
The next day he's heading down to Louisiana, thinking mostly about spicy food and good liquor and whether he should try and swing by Canfield before he heads back west to meet up with Dad.
A month after that, he's in a cheap motel room with three bags of clothing that smell like smoke and Sammy curled up like a toddler in the other bed, making these hurt little noises in his sleep.
He flips his phone open, scrolls through his list of contacts, then flips it closed again without dialing.
***
Mae gets out just in time to see Missy start ninth grade, and they have a party at the trailer. Cake and balloons under a hot blue sky, and Mae squeezes him hard enough to crack his ribs when she gets there. It's a good day.
That night's the first time he coughs hard enough to bring up blood. Jay stares at the red splatter on the bottom of his bathroom sink for a second, then turns the faucet on to wash it down the drain.
His chest feels like someone scooped out his lungs and replaced them with a couple of hot, dry stones, and when he looks up at the mirror, his face looks pasty-pale and resigned. He knows what this is. Should have seen it coming, maybe, after the way his old man went back in '93.
It takes Mae and Marty both nagging him for a good six months before he gives in and goes to the doctor. He forgot how damn pigheaded the two of them can get together.
When he gets the diagnosis, he goes home and sits on the porch, looks out at the dry streambed along the edge of the road, the heat waves rising off the asphalt, the sagging fence that needs fixing up. Anything but the X-ray photo in his lap, with its picture of the death that's growing like a small sun down in his lungs.
He fills out a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers the next day, turns down the doc's notion of chemo, and drives back to his garage to bitch Mike out for a botched transmission job.
And that's that.
***
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
Author's Notes & Acknowledgments
Freakin' research geeks. Sam, too. Spends a solid five years bitching every waking moment about the job, and then winds up in college doing the same damn thing. Research.
Dean prefers the hands-on parts, himself. Quiet-time leaves him with too much time to think. He details the Impala, fixes the plumbing of the little shack that they're holed up in (belongs to a friend of Bobby's, although he's not entirely clear on whether the friend actually knows they're staying here), re-builds his EMF meter, and even makes a half-assed effort at reading through the spellbooks for Dad. It's mostly a waste of time. He speaks enough French to get around and his Spanish is almost fluent, but without Sammy there to help him pick through the grammar, the old (freaking handwritten) Latin tomes make him want to break his head on the table.
The one good thing about it is that it keeps Dad occupied until November second has come and gone. Last year--their first year without Sammy--was a bad one. Took him two freaking days to get Dad out of jail that time, and he still hasn't asked about the dents in the grill of the truck. Piles of dusty books are an improvement over that, he guesses.
It's mid-November when he finally runs out of ways to kill time around the house and decides to sample what the town has to offer. Test out a few theories, as it were. If he weren't so fucking bored, this would probably seem like a really bad idea, but he is, so it doesn't.
"Going out," he calls on Friday, already on his way out the door. Dad glances up briefly from the stack of books piled on the kitchen table, liberally salted with notes in his chicken-scratch handwriting.
"That's my coat."
Dean grins, shrugs, settling the old leather on his shoulders. Like armor. He feels like there's a live wire running under his skin, giddy and dangerous for no reason he can think of. "Yes it is, sir."
For a minute he's expecting to get barked at, but Dad just sighs. "Get out of here, Dean. Go blow off some steam."
"Happy to oblige."
"And don't get arrested. I have better things to do with my time than sweet-talk you out of a drunk and disorderly."
Dean slaps his chest, affects an offended look. "I would never."
Dad snorts and opens another book with a pointed thump, and Dean gets out of there.
***
There's a grand total of one gay bar in this town, and it looks pretty much the same as any other place. Jukebox, pool tables, nothing fancy. The dance floor lights up, though, and Dean can't decide if that's incredibly cool or the lamest thing he's ever seen.
It's not like everybody in here's gay, either, but there are guys dancing with guys, slow and grinding to the beat of the music, which is some alternative pseudo-rock emo crap that Sammy would probably love. There are girls dancing too, dancing together like they mean it and not like they're trying to get anybody to watch. It's still pretty hot, though.
Fuck, he's in so far over his head.
Still, he hasn't grown up the way he did without learning how to fit in anyplace he happens to be, how to slide into the crowd like he belongs. It's Jay he's thinking of, even though Jay's a long way from the first guy he's fucked. Jay woudn't fit in here any better than he does, he thinks, although he probably doesn't really know the guy well enough to say for sure.
He thinks about Jay sitting on his barstool at Rocky's with a beer in one hand, one of his toxic cigarettes in the other and a polite fuck-off expression on his face, and yeah. No way in hell would Jay fit in here. That makes him feel better, for some weird reason.
Jesus, this is stupid. He should just leave. There must be eleven bars in walking distance of here; he could go find himself a pool game and a girl. Something easy.
There's a guy a couple of seats away, watching him.
He's about Dean's height but not quite as broad, blond hair, dark eyes. Not bad, if you're into that kind of thing. Which Dean is...maybe. Fuck. He doesn't know.
The bartender plonks another whiskey soda down in front of him.
"I didn't order that," Dean says, but he already knows how this game goes. From the other end of it, usually, but, well. Not always.
The bartender smiles. He's bald on top and his t-shirt is too tight, but he seems like an alright kind of guy. Dean likes bartenders, as a general rule, and not just because they control access to the booze. "Fella over there paid for it," he says, and jabs a thumb at Blond Dude.
"Of course he did," Dean mutters, but the bartender's already working his way down to the other end of the room. Blond Dude is still watching him, and for a second Dean considers setting the glass down and hightailing it out of the bar, dignity be damned.
Instead, he wraps his fingers around the glass, condensation cool on his skin, and meets the guy's eyes with a smile.
***
He gets home early enough to get a raised-eyebrow look from Dad, sweat cooling on his skin, knees sore from the alleyway pavement, still distressingly sober despite the whiskey he tossed back to get the taste out of his mouth.
"Have fun?" Dad asks dryly, and Dean shrugs. It's not like it was bad, or anything. Blond-Dude-whose-name-he-didn't-ask wasn't rough with him, murmured things like god and so good instead of cocksucker and slut. Returned the favor, too, and didn't complain when Dean pulled his hair. Kissed him afterward, said maybe I'll see you around.
It wasn't bad.
He's still not gonna do it again.
***
They swing up through South Dakota to return Bobby's books, and it takes all of twenty minutes for Dad and Bobby's customary sniping to morph into an out and out screaming match. Dean makes three wildly unsuccessful attempts to intervene, then takes a beer and goes out on the front porch to hang out with the most recent of Bobby's junkyard dogs. It's yellow, shaggy, and ugly as sin, but it licks his chin and then flops down with its head in his lap, a friendly weight while he drinks his beer, watches a couple of crows pecking at something out in the yard, and listens to Dad and Bobby call each other names at increasing volume.
When Dad storms out onto the porch with Bobby armed and hot on his heels, Dean gives the dog a scritch behind the ears, dumps out his beer, and follows them out to where the cars are parked.
"...and your damned pigheaded crusade, Winchester, I ain't gonna be a part of it!"
"Fine," Dad snarls. He's shifting his weight like he wants to throw a punch, and Dean really hopes he doesn't try. Bobby probably just has birdshot in that gun, but he still doesn't feel like spending tonight picking it out of Dad's ass.
"Get the hell off my property," Bobby snaps finally.
"Glad to," Dad says, and cuts a glance at Dean. He lifts his hands, telegraphing leave me out of this with all his might.
Bobby glances at him too, craggy face unreadable, then makes a noise like an irritated bear, turns, and stomps back toward the house without another word.
"Let's go," Dad says, and Dean nods and digs out his keys.
***
In late April of '04, there's a band of Spriggans wreaking havoc in Athens, Ohio, and Dean's life gets fucked up yet again.
He meets Cassie in the OU library, looking like a grade-A freak with his clothes inside-out and a heavy iron crucifix dangling from his neck, waiting for the building to close so he and Dad can break into the basement and clean out the nest. She's finishing up a piece for her internship at the Athens News, and he's pretty sure the only reason she doesn't hassle him about his getup is how sleep deprived she is. Smart as hell, though, and fucking gorgeous even wearing Donald Duck pajama pants with two pens tucked behind her ear and three-day circles under her eyes.
They talk for an hour before the library closes, and when it turns out that the damn faeries have spread all over the city, Dean doesn't even complain once. There's at least a dozen nests for them to clean out. That's a couple weeks of work at least.
Dad gives him a suspicious look when he grins at the news, but Dean ignores it. Cassie's--damn. Something else.
Man, that girl gets him to go to a poetry reading. And like it.
He seriously should have fucking seen it coming.
***
It takes them three and a half weeks to clear the infestation, and they manage it without major injury or arrest, which is a minor miracle all on its own. Dean spends most of the time walking around with a stupid grin on his face, and Dad's kind enough to leave off the ribbing, for the most part.
"Got a contact to meet down in Georgia," he says on Thursday of the fourth week, while they watch the last nest of the ugly little monsters burn in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of the city.
Dean sighs. It's not like he hasn't been expecting this, but that doesn't make it suck any less. He has Cassie's cell number, and she has his, but he knows from long experience how this goes. He'll drop in, maybe a year from now, and she'll have her own life and no place in it for him. That's just the way it is.
"Anyway," Dad says, and there's something in his voice that manages to sound simultaneously shrewd, smug, and proud. "She's not too fond of young fellas with smart mouths."
Dean squints over at him. The streetlamps are all broken out here, and the fire's down to embers. It's hard to read Dad's face in the dark. "Sir?"
"Maybe it'd be better if you stuck around here. This could be a real good contact for some hard-to-find weapons. I wouldn't want it to get messed up just because she decides she doesn't like your face."
"Everybody likes my face," Dean says, but it's all he can do not to start bouncing with glee like a twelve-year-old girl at her first school dance.
Dad snorts. "Meet me in Atlanta by Monday," he says, and that's the end of that conversation.
***
It's a temporary reprieve and he knows it, but it gets him thinking. If he can talk to her--if he can make her understand--maybe he can have this. Not all the time; he's not built to spend his life playing house when there's work that needs doing, but maybe--
Hell, half the military has somebody waiting for them at home, why not Dean?
***
They go out with a couple of Cassie's friends that night, get tipsy on girly drinks that Dean would never in a million years drink in front of Dad or Sam. The booth's tiny, and she spends most of the evening sitting on Dean's lap, his arm settled around her slender waist, the smell of her cocoa-butter lotion in his nose.
They fuck in her bed in the small hours of the morning, slow and sweet, and afterward he brings her a glass of water and sits down on the mattress and says, "I have to head out on Monday."
She sets the glass down and puts her head on his thigh, smiles sleepily up at him. "You and your mysterious job," she says. "You ever gonna tell me what that is?"
Dean opens his mouth to say traveling salesman or secret agent or one of a dozen other pre-fabricated lines of bullshit, and then he shuts it again. Smooths his hand through the sex-tangled mess of her hair and thinks, jesus, you pussy, tell the truth for once in your fucking life.
So he does.
***
Ten minutes. That's all it takes. Ten fucking minutes to get from no, seriously, what do you do for a living to Dean, this really isn't funny, to you know what, if you want to leave, just fucking tell me so.
He stops trying to get her to listen to him when she starts throwing his clothes at him and telling him to get out, get the hell out of my apartment you fucking lunatic--
His boot catches him in the face, steel-toe splitting his lip wide open while he's trying to pull on his boxers. She's standing in the doorway of her bedroom, fierce and naked and still so fucking beautiful he almost can't look at her.
He puts a hand to his mouth, and his fingers come away bloody.
For a second, there's something like remorse in her dark eyes, and then she throws his other boot at him--at his feet, not his head--and turns around and slams the door without a word.
Dean spits a mouthful of blood out on her welcome mat and starts gathering up the rest of his stuff. It won't be the first time he's pulled his clothes on in the gray light of dawn on somebody else's front lawn. This isn't any different.
***
He stops for coffee on his way out of town, and he's a good thirty miles down I-77 when he notices that he's headed toward North Carolina, not Georgia. He should get off the next exit, turn around, drive down and meet Dad and--
Fuck it. Dad said be there Monday, he'll fucking be there Monday.
***
He rides into Canfield on the nose of a storm that afternoon, gray thunderheads rolling down the hill after him like his foul mood followed him all the way from Ohio. The whole town seems empty, the wind kicking up garbage in the streets and tearing new leaves off the trees.
Jay's closing up at the garage when Dean pulls the Impala in next to his truck. He climbs out, shakes the road-stiffness out of his muscles and leans up against the warm flank of his car to wait. The lot is empty but for the two of them, and the air smells like rain.
There's no way in hell Jay could have known he was coming, but he does a good job of pulling his reaction. He's probably a good poker player.
"Hi," Dean says, hauling a smile onto his face. "Surprise?"
Fuck if he knows what he's doing here, but the way Jay smiles back makes the hard, cold knot that's been riding in the pit of his stomach all day uncoil just a little.
"That it is," Jay says easily. "Can't say as I was expecting you."
"Yeah." Dean rubs the back of his neck, suddenly self-conscious. "Sorry. I'm just having a freaking craptastic day. I was hoping I could stop and have a drink with somebody who doesn't want to throw anything at my head."
"Got a case in the fridge back at my place, guess I could share. So long as you don't mind the cheap stuff."
His voice is mild, but his gaze flickers over Dean's face, catching on his mouth. Split lip, Dean remembers. Right. He slides his tongue over it, tentatively, winces. "If it's cold and alcoholic, I won't complain."
Jay smiles. "Reckon I can guarantee that much."
He looks half-amused, gray-blue eyes hooded, a thumbprint of grease on his temple like he tried to rub away a headache without washing his hands. His hair's too long and he's about three days overdue for a shave. And--seriously? Fuck it. Dean's not always the most self-aware person on the planet, he knows that, but he's pretty sure he didn't drive a hundred and fifty miles out of his way and risk Dad's wrath to help Jay drink a case of cheap beer.
He crosses the space between them, reels Jay in for a kiss. It's fast and brutal, the taste of coffee and cigarettes and the sharp spark of pain where his lip is split.
When they pull apart, Jay drops his forehead against Dean's, chuckles quietly. His hand's found its way up to the nape of Dean's neck, warm knotted fingers that smell like motor oil. "You remember the way back, I take it."
"Yeah," Dean admits. "I'll follow you."
Seriously, he has no idea what the hell he's doing.
***
It's raining when they get to the house, fat droplets breaking against the gravel driveway. Dean cuts the engine, closes his eyes for a long minute before he climbs out.
Jay meets him in the strip of ground between their two vehicles, hair already going soggy with the rain. It takes two strides for Dean to get him pressed up against the side of his truck, slipping a leg between his thighs, all solid heat bleeding through wet clothing, hands catching on his denim-clad hips. Jay doesn't talk. Doesn't ask what the hell's going on, doesn't suggest getting inside before they catch their death of cold, just drags Dean into another hard kiss while the sky opens up above them.
Dean spares a moment to be grateful that Jay's house is far enough out of town that nobody's likely to happen by, and then his jeans are sliding down his hips and Jay's mouth has moved to the hollow of his throat and he is totally fucking done thinking.
It's a while before they make it inside.
***
The storm hits that night, wind hard enough to crack the tree branches and drive sheets of rain against the side of the house. Dean doesn't mind storms, but it's still kind of nice to have Jay sleeping quietly on the other side of the bed, a warm weight that he can reach out and touch, like an anchor.
He hasn't just slept with all that many people, and never with a guy (unless you count Sammy, back when they were kids, which he doesn't. Little fucker liked to kick). It's okay. Different, but okay.
***
They climb up on the roof the next morning to replace the shingles that got torn off by the wind. It feels good, sitting on the edge of the roof with a beer, feet kicking in the air over the porch and Jay's leg a long warm line against his. They talk about the shop, the new tranny Dean had to put in the Impala last spring, the weather. The hunt. Jay isn't a hunter, won't ever be a hunter--he's got more common sense than that, Dean thinks--but he likes to know what's out there. Just in case. Always be prepared.
"You were a boyscout, weren't you?"
"Got the uniform to prove it," Jay says, smiling so bland that it's impossible to tell whether or not he's screwing around. Dean steals his beer, just in case, and Jay laughs and doesn't try to steal it back.
He also hasn't asked what the hell Dean's doing there, and that's probably one of the main reasons Dean's still here at all. Well, that and the sex. Which is another thing they're not talking about, thank fucking Christ.
Jay's got his head tilted back to look up at the sky boiling gray above them. He's shirtless even though it's not all that warm, and from this angle Dean can see the devil dog tattooed in faded blue ink on his bicep, the old shrapnel scars spanning across the top and back of his right shoulder. His dogtags bounce against his sternum.
The overgrown backyard is stretched out green and tangled below them, and Dean's clothing feels like it's wilting against his skin from the humidity. Jay's thigh is pressed up against the his, carelessly close even though there's plenty of room up here. He can feel heat bleeding through two layers of clothes, smell clean sweat and cigarette smoke.
It totally shouldn't be hot, but it kind of is anyway. And hey, fuck it, not like there's anybody here to see. Dean purses his lips for a moment, considering, then sets his beer down in the gutter trough.
"So," he murmurs, dropping his head against Jay's shoulder, mouth to skin. "Roof's pretty flat."
Maybe Jay knows him better than Dean gives him credit for, because he chuckles and reaches over to squeeze Dean's thigh firmly. Doesn't try to move away, though. "I don't think so."
Jay's shoulder is warm, already showing a reddish farmer's tan around the edges of the scars. Dean kisses one of them, then leans in to suck a slow hicky into the softer skin at the junction of his neck. "Come on."
"Good way to end up with a broken neck," Jay says. He's still not moving away and his voice is suspiciously raspy. Dean grins.
"Only if we fall."
"You got some kind of death wish," Jay mutters, but he doesn't make any effort to stop Dean from undoing his jeans and reaching inside.
"Nah." Dean curls one leg over Jay's thigh to keep him in place, feet still dangling in the no-man's-land above the porch. It feels shivery and dangerous in a really fucking awesome kind of way. "I really don't."
He takes his hand away long enough to lick a wet stripe down the center of his palm, then takes a hold of Jay's cock and starts jerking him long and slow. Jay shudders and stops protesting, head falling back, lean bare torso forming a perfect arc from the points of his elbows digging into the shingles to the flat expanse of his belly to his cock, slick with spit and pre-come, sliding in Dean's hand. He's shifting a little, like he's suppressing the urge to thrust up into it, and Dean bites the slope of his shoulder, less gentle this time, speeds up the pace until Jay's gasping, shaking, coming with a low, explosive, "fuck."
Dean kisses the purpling hickey he just made, then pulls his hand away and wipes it on his jeans. "So."
He means it to sound cocky, but it comes out low and hoarse instead. He can feel Jay's leg flex under his, the warm shudders of a body still coming down from the peak, and then Jay laughs, short and amused. "You are something else."
"Aw, I bet you say that to all the girls."
"Kind of a smart-mouthed little prick, ain't you?"
"Hey, there's nothing little about my--" Jay shuts him up with a kiss, and Dean lets himself be silenced. He's kind of distracted anyway, and he makes a little incoherent noise of protest when Jay pulls back.
"Come on, let's climb down before you get any more smart ideas."
"I have awesome ideas, and it's not like you were complaining. Much. And anyway--"
Jay finishes tucking himself away and shoves Dean's leg off of him. "I'll blow you, but I ain't doing it on the goddamn porch roof."
"Well," Dean says. "When you put it like that."
***
Jay shoves him up against the front door before it's even all the way shut, and Dean would love to be smug about that, but it's a little hard--ha--with Jay's tongue in his mouth, one muscular leg sliding between his thighs. Jay's not exactly a huge guy, but he's plenty strong enough to get Dean pinned to where he can't shake loose without some serious effort, which probably shouldn't turn him on the way it does.
"So, you were saying?" Dean says when they come up for air. He's pleased to hear that his voice only sounds a little uneven.
"Shut the hell up," Jay murmurs good-naturedly, but he's sliding down to his knees, so Dean lets his head fall back and braces his palms against the door and stops talking back, at least for the time being.
***
They make it out of their clothes and into the bedroom eventually. It's slower that time, gentler, and it's not like any of this is really new to Dean but somehow that's what it feels like.
Maybe it is different. A little different. He's fucked more women than he can count, but his experience with guys has been pretty much limited to reeking alleys and the backseats of cars and on one occasion he generally chooses not to remember, the sheriff's office in some backwoods jail.
And this.
The pillowcase is cheap cotton, a little nappy, rough under his cheek. He's holding onto the corner of the mattress so hard his fingers are starting to cramp, shaking like he's terrified and more turned on that he can remember being in a long time. Jay kisses the nape of his neck and smooths a rough hand down his flank, and fuck, he's used that move before, on women.
The snap of a bottle closing, and Jay's fingers are cool with slick and slow, too fucking slow. Dean curses and shoves back against it, too far gone to even care what he looks like right now.
"Stop fucking around and do it already," he hisses, letting go of the mattress to reach blindly behind him and grab for Jay's hip. He holds on tight, fingers pressing deep enough to make the point, and Jay laughs quietly.
"Easy," he murmurs in Dean's ear, fingers twisting to find the spot that makes his back arc and the breath leave his lungs like he's been punched. "Just be easy now."
"I look like a chick to you?" Dean gasps. Jay chuckles again, warm against the top of his shoulder, and then there's the crinkle and tear of a condom wrapper and hands on the inside of his thighs easing his legs apart--fingers still a little sticky, warm, almost familiar by now. This is almost familiar by now.
Jay moves like he knows what he's doing, not rough but sure. He waits for Dean to breathe through the stretch and burn of it, murmuring things Dean can't quite hear over the rush of blood in his ears, and when he does start to move it's slow, a smooth easy roll of the hips.
It feels good. Fuck, it feels really good, and Dean breathes out and lets go.
***
Afterward, he feels giddy and a little high, like a fuse blew somewhere in the depths of his brain.
"I think you broke me," he mumbles, gazing muzzily up at the ceiling. There's a water stain shaped like Montana on the tiles over the bed. Jay snorts. He's sprawled out with his cheek resting on Dean's belly and an arm flung carelessly over his hips. For some reason, this feels more intimate than the sex they just had, but he is way too fucking comfortable to care.
"You alright?" Jay asks quietly after a while, and Dean rolls his eyes at the ceiling.
"Orgasms are a real hardship for me, but I think I'll live." His hand is in Jay's hair, and he's not quite sure how it got there. The sun is sinking low in the sky and there's a window cracked to let in the breeze and the sound of crickets. Jay looks loose and half-asleep, stretched out like a big cat on the faded sheets, tan sliced through here and there with old scars.
He could be a hunter, by his body. He was a soldier. He moves and thinks and breathes in ways that are familiar to Dean, which is maybe why none of this is freaking him out the way he still feels like it should.
Dean dozes on that thought for a while, and the next time he's fully awake there are long shadows striping across the bed and his belly is rumbling with hunger. He feels sore and kind of gross, but food is a priority right now.
"Hey," he mumbles. His hand is resting heavy on the back of Jay's neck, and he gives him a little shake.
Jay grunts and lifts his head. His eyelids are heavy and the red sunset catches in his lashes and the stubble on his cheeks. He licks his lips, blinks. It's maybe the most relaxed Dean's ever seen him. "Yeah?"
"'M hungry."
Jay blinks again. "I got frozen pizza, I think."
"Nah," Dean decides. "Pancakes."
"It's dinnertime."
"So?"
Jay chuckles and pushes himself into a sitting position. "Fine. Pancakes. You're cooking 'em."
Dean grins. "I can do that."
***
Turns out Dean actually can cook, which surprises Jay more than it maybe ought to. He does it naked, too, totally unself-conscious. He don't turn the light on, but the light of the sinking sun is enough to show up a whole bunch of scars laced across his skin. Way too many scars for somebody as young as him. Some of them Jay knows the story to, like the gouge that runs from the top of Dean's right kneecap all the way up to his hip, the result of a pissed-off poltergeist and his little brother's first attempt at sutures. Some of them, he has no clue.
"You're gonna get hot grease someplace you don't want it," he observes from the bedroom doorway, watching Dean flip a pancake onto the waiting stack.
Dean laughs. "Nah, I got skills."
"Yeah?"
"You have no idea."
"I got some idea."
A snort. "Cooking, man."
Jay laughs, pulls his jeans back on and tosses his sticky t-shirt in the direction of the laundry pile. "Smells good," he offers.
Kid could light up a room with that grin.
***
Nellie shows up around noon on Saturday to drop some stuff off for Jay, but she's kind of skittish around Dean and doesn't stay long. Considering that he shot up a ghost in her front yard the last time they ran into each other, Dean can't entirely blame her.
The town's dead on Sunday, but Jay opens the shop all the same. For lack of anything better to do, Dean drives down with him.
George is still working the front office, and he gets this lip-curl on his face when Dean wanders in. Kind of makes Dean want to punch him in the face, which is a feeling he got pretty familiar with the last time he was working here.
Instead, he bats his eyes, cocks his hip, and pouts at the skeevy asshole like he's Scarlett Johanssen instead of a mostly-bald pot-bellied mechanic with an attitude problem and bad teeth. "Hi, George."
George turns purple. Dean grins and follows Jay into the shop.
***
And then it's Monday. He wakes up with a headache that he can only partly attribute to the beers he put away last night and the sinking sensation of reality crashing down on his head. Three days of cars and beer and good sex and nothing to remind him of Cassie still aren't enough to get her out of his head, apparently.
He goes out into the living room to make the phone call, sinks down on the lumpy couch and indulges in a brief fantasy of telling Dad to shove it, that he's gonna stay in Nowheresville, North Carolina, and become a mechanic. Then he punches in the number.
Dad picks up on the second ring. "Dean."
Dean tucks the phone under his ear, stares at the cheapass fake-wood paneling on the wall behind the TV. "Hey, Dad."
That's it, but Dad hasn't had Dean covering his six for as long as he has without learning to read his voice. His tone sharpens immediately. "What happened?"
My life's a crock of shit, that's what happened. You know, the usual. "I'm heading out pretty soon," he says instead. "I'll be Atlanta by this afternoon."
"This afternoon." The tone's neutral, and Dean grimaces. Busted. Dad knows as well as he does that it's a ten hour drive from Cassie's apartment to Atlanta, and that's with a healthy amount of speeding. "Where the hell are you?"
"Canfield."
"You're in North Carolina."
"Yessir."
"What happened with Cassie?"
"She threw me out," Dean says, trying to make his voice even, light. Kind of like it's no big fucking deal, because it isn't. Spilled milk or whatever.
Yeah, he's doing just fine.
Dad doesn't answer for a while, sighs, finally. "Meet me at the Blue Robin Inn. Right off of I-85, room number's 320. I'll expect you there by three."
Dean pinches the bridge of his nose, wonders if he could get Jay to lend him another travel mug of coffee sludge even though he didn't bring back the last one back. "I'll be there."
He's about to hang up when Dad says, "Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry. About Cassie."
Yeah, he definitely needs coffee. Maybe some prescription-strength painkillers. A sledgehammer to knock himself out with. "It's cool, Dad. I'll see you later."
He disconnects the call before Dad can say anything else.
Jay's awake when he comes back into the bedroom, but he doesn't say anything, just watches Dean gather up his clothes and stuff them in his duffel bag.
"I should get going," Dean says.
"I figured."
"I--" he lifts a hand, presses his knuckles into the ache knotting itself into his forehead. "Fuck."
Jay slides out of bed, pulls on a pair of crumpled jeans. "You alright?"
"Peachy."
"Yeah, I can tell."
Dean rubs his forehead again, drops his hands to his sides. Jay's just looking at him. "You never asked me why I came back here. You never ask."
"None of my business."
"I met this girl." He doesn't know he's gonna say it until the words are out of his mouth, but then he can't seem to stop talking. "Cassie. She's--man." How to explain Cassie? Gorgeous, funny Cassie, with the smart mouth and the attitude and the way she never once acted like she was out of his league.
And the fucking fantastic throwing arm. Can't forget that. He barks out a laugh. "So, I told her the truth. About what we do."
"She didn't take it well, I guess."
Dean rubs the healing split in his lower lip. Still stings like a bitch. "You could say that, yeah."
Jay nods. "I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Dean says again. He sort of wishes he had something in his hands to play with, focus on, because he's not entirely blind to the weirdness of discussing his woman troubles with the guy he's been banging for the past three days. Jay doesn't seem bothered by it, but Dean's not sure he'd be able to tell. "This is--I don't know, man."
He wants to apologize, but he's not sure what he has to be sorry for. Something, probably. He's no good at this shit.
"It is what it is," Jay says mildly. "You want me to fix you some coffee for the road?"
"I didn't bring your last cup back."
"I expect I'll survive. Come on."
It's not worth arguing. Dean slings the bag over his shoulder and follows Jay into the kitchen, leans against the sink while Jay fills the pot and turns it on. "Hey, Jay."
"Yeah?"
"You ever have somebody?" Jay goes still, the lean, tanned lines of his back tense. His hands flex on the countertop, and Dean adds, "I mean, it's not my business, but--"
"I did," Jay interrupts quietly. "Long time ago."
"What happened?"
He's got an idea, and the look on Jay's face when he glances up confirms it before the man even opens his mouth. "He met with an accident," Jay says, mellow voice gone precise and bitter. "The kind that involves a tire iron and a lonely stretch of road."
"I'm sorry," Dean murmurs.
Jay lifts a shoulder. "It was a long time ago," he says again. Like that makes any fucking difference. Christ, it's been twenty years since Mom, and Dad still hasn't come anywhere close to getting over it. That's not the kind of hurt that just goes away.
Still, it isn't his business to tell Jay how to handle his shit, so he doesn't push it, just settles himself back against the lip of the sink and watches Jay pour one of those cheap plastic mugs full of coffee. Their fingers brush when he hands the cup over, and Dean sets it down on the counter, leans in and kisses him on the mouth, slow and thorough.
It isn't a sexy kind of kiss. Something else, something Dean can't entirely get a handle on and isn't sure he wants to.
Jay brushes his cheek with his knuckles when they pull apart, an oddly tender gesture. His eyes are unreadable. "Y'all take care of yourself," he says, just like the last time.
Dean kisses him again, then picks up the mug, letting the heat sink in through his fingers. "I'll see you around."
***
"That mechanic friend of yours lives in Canfield," Dad says that evening.
Dean doesn't pause loading the gun, but the shells suddenly feel slippery in his fingers. He doesn't look up. Can't. "Yeah. I was staying with him for a couple of days. To get my head on straight."
So to speak.
Dad's quiet, and for a long moment all Dean can hear is the rasp of his own breathing, loud like thunder. Then Dad's moving, a slow shift and rustle of flannel, and he reaches across the table to squeeze Dean's shoulder. The weight of his hand is so damn comforting that for a second Dean feels like a little kid again, and to his intense embarrassment, his eyes are burning.
"Let's hit the road," Dad says. "We got a lot of ground to cover before morning." Gives him a little shake, then lets go.
They don't talk about it again.
They both get arrested in a small town in South Dakota that Dean hasn't bothered to learn the name of. Bobby's only a couple of hours away, and if Dean called instead of Dad, he might be willing to drive down and bail them out so they don't have to scrap yet another set of ID's. It's just trespassing. No big deal.
Dad's a stubborn bastard, though, and he nurses a grudge like nobody else Dean's ever seen, except maybe Sam. They break out instead, bust the Impala and Dad's truck out of the impound and head back to California to check up on Sam without so much as a sniff in the direction of Sioux Falls.
They spend three days following Sam around and don't talk to him, either. Dean doesn't even bother suggesting it this time. He does pick the lock on Sam's mailbox to leave an envelope stuffed with twenties in there, though. It's even odds that Sam will throw it in the garbage without opening it and Dad gives him this look, but he doesn't care. It's his job to look after Sam, even if the pissy bastard is too pigheaded to accept it.
He gets a phone call from a Stanford number when he's in the shower that night. The message on his voicemail is about five seconds of dead air, and nobody picks up when he calls back. Dean kind of wishes he was surprised.
***
Nellie graduates with her Associates the first week of June, and Jay ends up sitting in the crowd with Missy and Jake, mostly to keep Jake out of trouble. Man can't even stay sober for his own daughter's graduation.
He brings a couple of disposable cameras with him, and when he gets the photos developed later, there's about twenty of Nellie in her blue cap and gown, one of Jake snoring away on Missy's shoulder, two of Jay looking like a damn fool in a suit he ain't worn in years. There's also a couple of pictures of the '73 Mustang he did body work on a while back, and one of Dean sitting on the porch steps with a beer, looking faraway and still too pretty for his own good.
Jay shoves that one in his dresser drawer and drives up to the state pen to hand the rest of them off to Mae. The look on her face when she sees her little girl in that cap and gown puts it right out of his head.
"Two more years," he says, watching her trace the outline of Nellie's face with one slender finger. Her hair's grown out to its original mousy brown and there are more lines than he remembers around her mouth, but when she smiles at him it's just as pretty as it was back in high school.
"Thanks for bringing me these, sweetheart," she says, and reaches across the table to squeeze his hand.
Jay squeezes back. Probably a little too hard, but she don't complain. "Next time, I'll bring the girls with me."
***
It's August when Jake drives his old Silverado through a guardrail and rolls it down a hundred yards of rocky slope. He's dead before the engine quits, and that's about the only mercy in the whole sorry situation.
Nellie cries all the way up to Raleigh and all through the two-hour visit with her mama, but she buttons up on the way back and don't shed a single tear through the funeral.
Missy takes to sleeping in her sister's bed, even though she's almost twelve now and ain't done that in years. Jay stops by to help out around the house, and Nellie takes a job with a hospital over in Asheville. Says she can wait to move out of town, at least until Missy's out of school. It's a good enough job that the state don't give her much hassle about getting custody, so at least Missy don't end up shipped off to some foster family somewhere.
That should be the end of it, except for how three months in, there's cold spots and blown circuits turning up in the trailer. Nellie's car breaks down four times for no reason Jay can figure out, and around November Missy swears up and down that her daddy locked her in her bedroom and wouldn't let her out for three hours.
Time was, Jay would have said she was losing her marbles. He knows better now.
***
"Got a question for you," Jay says, and Dean slumps in his seat, shifts his grip on the phone, and sighs. That's an opening gambit that never goes anywhere good.
"Shoot."
"Salt and burn. That the only way to do for a spook?"
"The only sure-fire way," Dean admits. "Why, you got--"
He's talking to dead air. Even for Jay, that was abrupt.
North Carolina is fifteen hundred miles east of them, and they're on a job now. Black dogs, and there are five people dead already. If Jay's got a ghost problem out there in Canfield, he's gonna have to take care of it himself. He's a smart guy. He can handle a ghost, and he can probably even avoid getting arrested for grave desecration.
Doesn't make Dean feel any better about the whole situation, though. If there's one thing he fucking hates, it's being helpless.
***
It ain't that he ever even liked Jake. Damn bastard was worse than useless, a drunken lump of a man who died with more flair than he ever lived. Just about figures that he wouldn't have the sense to get gone.
Which is why Jay's out in a cemetery at the ass-end of midnight, digging up a fresh grave. Good thing it's fresh enough that the dirt ain't packed to sod, 'cause that's a lot of digging and he ain't as young as he used to be. Ain't got quite the stamina, and maybe he oughta start thinking about cutting back on the smokes or something. He's winded by the time he moves enough dirt to get at the coffin, has to sit there for a minute listening to the night sounds out here in the back of nowhere. Owls in the woods. It's just lucky the graveyard ain't closer to town. He ain't got a clue how he'd explain this to the cops.
"This ain't right."
'Course, he shoulda figured Jake wouldn't just go in peace. He don't look like he's trying to make trouble, just leaning up against his own headstone with droopy hounddog eyes, but that could change.
"You're dead," Jay informs the ghost. "Time to move on."
"Ain't right," Jake repeats, and Jay sighs. 'Course the bastard has even less sense dead than he did alive. He gets the shovel down, pries the lid loose. Even though he's braced for it, the smell makes him recoil. Ain't much smells worse than a fresh corpse, and it's been a long damn time since he's had to deal with one. Specially of someone he knew.
Jake's body is waxy and bloated in his cheap suit, and Jay hold his breath while he douses it with lighter fluid and salt. Next to him, Jake's ghost looks on mournfully.
"I just want to be with my girls," he says while Jay digs a match out of his pocket. "I just want to be there for my little girls."
Jay looks the spook square in the eye while he lights a match. "Shoulda tried that when you were breathing," he says, and drops it in.
The stink of burning flesh clings like war-dust to his clothes even after he fills in the grave, and at home he strips down to his boxers and tosses his jeans and shirt in the trash before calling Dean back.
Dean don't complain about the hour or the way Jay hung up on him earlier, just settles in to tell a story about a couple of strippers and a cross-dressing policeman that probably don't have a shred of truth to it. Jay don't mind. Just the sound of a friendly voice is enough to unwind some of the sickness in his belly.
He don't know what to call this thing between him and Dean. It ain't love, that's for sure. Dean's got no room in his heart for anybody but his family, and any love Jay had in him died in the morgue when he had to identify Keith by the tattoo on his leg because his face was too beat-in to recognize. He's a little piece of comfort for Dean, and maybe that goes both ways. It ain't much, but it's something.
He's smiling when he hangs up.
***
Somehow, it ain't even that much of a surprise when Dean rolls into town during the first frost of the season, a week later. He's waiting outside the shop by his car when Jay finishes locking up, looking sheepish and a little defiant, like he ain't entirely sure of his welcome. Hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans more like he's trying to trap them than like he's bothered by the cold. He squints as Jay approaches. "Hey."
"Hey yourself," Jay says. "What brings you 'round these parts?"
Mike passes them on his way toward his truck, lifts a hand to Dean, and Dean waves back without looking away from Jay. "Just passing through. Thought I'd stop in and see how you were doing."
"Canfield does seem to be on the way to a lot of places."
"Yeah," Dean says, and suddenly there's a grin hiding in the edges of his mouth. "Funny about that."
Smartass. Jay finds himself smiling back reluctantly. "Good to see you, kid."
"You ever think maybe it's a little creepy to call me that, considering the nature of our relationship?" Dean asks, but the grin's all the way onto his face now, and Jay just chuckles.
"Made my peace with it a while back. What say we head over to Rocky's and grab a beer?"
"Sure," Dean says easily. "You're buying."
Jay bumps his shoulder, just friendly, and Dean slings a heavy arm around him and leaves it there. His body is warm and close, and Jay can smell smoke and leather. "My pleasure," he says, and means it.
***
He hangs around for almost two weeks that time. Ain't any kind of discussion; he sleeps in Jay's bed and cleans his way methodically through Jay's gun collection and rebuilds the engine of a '62 Thunderbird in the shop. Nobody hassles him. George lit out to Kentucky a while back, Mike's almost as bad a gossip as Marty but he ain't the confrontational type, and the new kid's too scared of Jay to make any smart remarks.
They drink beer and play darts down at Rocky's, fuck in every room in the house, and don't talk about anything important. Nellie comes around a few times, and after the second visit she even stops flinching every time Dean talks to her.
She's a tough kid. She's doing alright.
Dean's slower this time, calmer without the manic thread of nervous temper running through everything he does. Not happy, Jay thinks, but come to terms with his lot in life. Resigned, in a way Jay knows all too well. Kind of makes him sad, seeing that in the kid, but it ain't anything he knows how to fix.
He leaves on a pale, cold Monday morning with one of Jay's plastic gas-station mugs full of strong coffee, sticks his hand out the window of the Impala to wave when he pulls out onto the road, and that's the last time Jay sees him for almost three years.
***
October, 2005
"New Orleans, I don't know, Dad. They get hurricanes down there." Dean grins. "Could be dangerous."
Dad doesn't even bother smacking him down. "There's a couple of rogue witches trying to summon back Katrina," he says tiredly, and Dean lets out a low whistle.
"That is a special kind of stupid, right there." He pauses. Dad's packing, fast and efficient like he always does, and his notes are already shoved in the back of his truck. "What about you?"
"I'm heading out west. Jericho."
"In California."
"That's right."
Dean looks down at the Desert Eagle spread out on the motel desk. There's sun beating in through the dusty windows and their room smells like lighter fluid, burnt coffee, and gun oil, and it's all so comfortable and normal that the sudden chill in his gut doesn't make any sense at all. "You gonna stop and see Sam?"
See Sam here meaning just exactly that and nothing more. Dad hasn't said a goddamn word to Sam in years, and it doesn't seem likely that that's gonna change anytime soon. It makes Dean's head ache every time he thinks about it, but the two of them are equally pigheaded in their own special ways and there's nothing he can do to force a happy reunion.
Much as he wants to shove them in a room together and make them duke it out like reasonable people.
"Maybe," Dad says. Later, Dean will remember the way Dad looks at him, serious and intense like he's memorizing Dean's face. Later, he'll think that he should have known right then that something was up. "Think I'm gonna stop and see Jim on the way there. Call me up when you get the job finished, and I'll let you know where to meet up."
"Yessir," Dean says. "So. New Orleans, huh?"
"I got you a contact with a local voudou priestess," Dad says. "I expect you to be respectful."
"Am I ever anything but?"
"I mean it, Dean."
"Alright, alright, I'm kidding. I'll behave."
"Good." Dad shoulders his bag, hesitates for a moment, then reaches out to clap Dean's shoulder. "The room's paid up through tonight, but you should hit the road early tomorrow."
Dean nods, and Dad squeezes his shoulder and turns on his heel and walks out of the room.
***
The next day he's heading down to Louisiana, thinking mostly about spicy food and good liquor and whether he should try and swing by Canfield before he heads back west to meet up with Dad.
A month after that, he's in a cheap motel room with three bags of clothing that smell like smoke and Sammy curled up like a toddler in the other bed, making these hurt little noises in his sleep.
He flips his phone open, scrolls through his list of contacts, then flips it closed again without dialing.
***
Mae gets out just in time to see Missy start ninth grade, and they have a party at the trailer. Cake and balloons under a hot blue sky, and Mae squeezes him hard enough to crack his ribs when she gets there. It's a good day.
That night's the first time he coughs hard enough to bring up blood. Jay stares at the red splatter on the bottom of his bathroom sink for a second, then turns the faucet on to wash it down the drain.
His chest feels like someone scooped out his lungs and replaced them with a couple of hot, dry stones, and when he looks up at the mirror, his face looks pasty-pale and resigned. He knows what this is. Should have seen it coming, maybe, after the way his old man went back in '93.
It takes Mae and Marty both nagging him for a good six months before he gives in and goes to the doctor. He forgot how damn pigheaded the two of them can get together.
When he gets the diagnosis, he goes home and sits on the porch, looks out at the dry streambed along the edge of the road, the heat waves rising off the asphalt, the sagging fence that needs fixing up. Anything but the X-ray photo in his lap, with its picture of the death that's growing like a small sun down in his lungs.
He fills out a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers the next day, turns down the doc's notion of chemo, and drives back to his garage to bitch Mike out for a botched transmission job.
And that's that.
***
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
Author's Notes & Acknowledgments