Save a Horse, Ride a Winchester
Chapter 5
Chapter Wordcount: 2613
Nicole woke up to the sound of Rodney Atkins’ “Cleaning This Gun” muffled by her jeans pocket and the blankets her and Sam were curled up under. Groggily, she fumbled to get to the phone before it woke him up, but essentially failed because she had to unravel herself from his arms to reach her pocket.
“Hello?” she murmured.
The person on the other end of the call seemed to be important because Niki sat up, blinking several times to at least appear awake. A smile appeared on her face not too long after.
“Yeah, my dad’s leaving this afternoon. What time’s the party?” She paused, waiting for a response. “No, that should be good. Can I bring a guest, or two?” Another pause. “Cool, I’ll see you then, Michael.” Smile still intact, she closed the phone and snuggled back under Sam’s arm.
“Who was that?” he mumbled through a yawn.
“My friend Michael, he invited us to a party tonight. Dad’s gonna be gone for the next few days so we’ve got this place to ourselves. You up for it?”
“Sounds good,” he chuckled.
“Is this really necessary?” Dean whined.
Adrianna sighed, “Yes, it’s necessary. You’re hanging with a bunch of cowboys and cowgirls, you’ve gotta look like you fit in.”
“I’ve never been one for fitting in.”
“Well, too bad.” She grinned at him and shoved a hat onto his head. “There. All finished.”
Dean hesitantly went to look in the mirror in the bathroom. Sam was coming out of Niki’s room at the same time; they both looked at each other before busting out laughing.
“I feel so out of place,” Sam chuckled as Niki came up next to him and slipped her arm around his waist.
“You look pretty damn good,” she smirked. “Now I don’t have to feel ashamed of being seen with a nerd.” She stuck out her tongue at him involuntarily.
Adrianna held out the camera to her cousin. “Photo op,” she stated simply and grinned triumphantly at the groan that emitted from Dean.
Niki arranged the boys in front of the wall by her room and, after getting Dean to stay still, she finally managed to snap three pictures, all with various facial expressions. “Can we get one at least semi-serious? I need to have one to hang in the living room,” she giggled. “Please?”
Sam obliged but Dean tipped his hat forward on his head so he was peering out from under the brim.
Nicole could only chuckle as she shook her head and made sure to get at least one good shot of it; she really did want to frame it and hang it on the living room wall above the TV.
Adrianna tapped her fingernails against the wall in annoyance with her cousin’s lack of ability to get ready fast. “Niki, come on!” she called up the stairs.
“I couldn’t find my boots!” Niki answered her as she fumbled to pull on her boots while hopping down the stairs.
Before anyone could respond to her, she disappeared out of view and only several thuds were heard.
Dean immediately burst into fits of laughter from his spot on the couch, choking on the water he was drinking while Sam tried his best not to do the same.
“Niki, are you okay?” Adri piped up, stifling her own giggles when she saw the other girl’s physique post-fall.
“I’m fucking fantastic. There is going to be a bruise on my ass by the time I go to bed tonight,” she stated with a frustrated huff.
Biting his lip, Sam made no effort to reply simply because he was afraid of his laughter deceiving him. Dean, on the other hand, had no problem blatantly and hysterically laughing.
“I give it…nine points,” Dean snickered.
Nicole smacked him upside the head, hard, before he could even attempt to stop her. “Ow!”
Sam couldn’t help but snicker to himself, but Niki’s head snapped in his direction as she said, “Laugh again and see how much sex that gets you.”
His mouth popped closed just as Dean covered his ears and shouted, “TIME TO GO!”
Almost the instant the foursome walked into the crowded barn, Dean was off to find a drink and Adrianna wasn’t far behind which left the other two to do as they pleased. Before Sam could offer her a dance, though, she was approached by a guy with shaggy blonde hair, stunning blue-gray eyes and the necessary cowboy boots.
“Nik!” he exclaimed, comfortably slinging an arm around her shoulders in a half hug. “Man, I haven’t seen you in forever. You look good.”
“Yeah, you too,” she smiled back. “So the friends I was talking about…” Niki glanced around for a moment. “Well, I think Dean and Adri went to get drinks but this is Sam. Sam, this is Michael. We’ve been friends since the sandbox days, I think,” she chuckled.
Michael and Sam shook hands with smiles and that was that. Michael and Niki went on catching up with one another and at some point, Sam found a break in the conversation to ask if either of them wanted a drink simply so he could get one for himself to escape how awkward it was feeling like a third wheel.
“No, I’m good, thanks man,” Michael said politely.
“I’m good, Sammy,” the brunette focused on him for an instant, leaned up to kiss his cheek. “Thanks. Can you go make sure Adri and Dean didn’t fall into a closet, though?”
He smiled at her and nodded before heading off in a different direction. Luckily, both his brother and Adrianna were at the table with the snacks laid out and the drink cooler sitting nearby so it wasn’t much of a search. But he could still see Michael and Niki talking by the entrance to the barn.
“Dude you gotta try this barbeque, freaking awesome!” Dean crowed, rib bone in his hand and sauce on his chin.
Sam just stared half in shock, half in disgust and nodded absentmindedly. Dean took that as a form of acceptance and took off back to the table off to the side with a plate in hand.
Adri just laughed and shoved a beer into his hand.
“I’m waiting to see how long he walks around with sauce on his face before he notices,” she grinned.
Sam couldn’t help but laugh and looked back over at Niki and Michael subconsciously.
Adri followed his line of sight through the crowd to see what had caught his attention.
“Well I’ll be, if it ain’t ‘lil Mikey,” she grinned.
“Mikey?”
“Yeah, Mike, her ex-boyfriend,” she said, tossing her empty beer bottle into a muck-bucket-turned-garbage-can and grabbed another, obviously on her way to becoming pleasantly buzzed, just enough to not notice the sudden wide-eyed terror on Sam’s face, his knuckles white around his own bottle.
“They dated for like forever. From kindergarten I swear…dunno why really they broke up,” she mused, cocking her head and studying the couple across the barn. “Everybody thought they were a sure deal, so sickly sweet it’d give you cavities, ugh,” she shuddered, sipping from her beer.
She finally looked back at Sam and noticed the freaked out look on his face and she dropped her hand.
“Oh my god, I shouldn’t have said…”
“God man! Had to use my fighting skills just to get to the table!” Dean cut in, finally shouldering his way back through the crowd with a paper plate stacked high with the ‘secret family recipe’ barbecue. “Next time you get your own damn food,” he said, holding out the plate for Sam.
Adri was still wide-eyed waiting for the fallout.
Sam just turned sharp and walked off without a word.
“Dude! I risked personal injury for this!” Dean called after him, completely unaware of the real conversation. “Ungrateful bastard,” he mumbled, biting into a rib himself.
Sam was intent on marching up to Niki, but half way there he realized he wasn’t sure what to say. No, they weren’t dating officially, just sharing a room; and a bed, but still. Despite that, he kept moving and stopped about six inches short of her and Michael.
“Niki, can I speak with you?” His voice was edgy, but it came off as more annoyed than anything.
The brunette stared at him for a moment before nodding, “Yeah, sure…”
Without warning, Sam was pulling her out of the barn towards the wooden fence standing just outside, surrounding the grassy pasture, still wet from the rainfall the previous night. Niki perched on the fence, waiting for the lecture she had a bad feeling was coming after the few minutes of silence. She’d caught a glimpse of Sam’s expression on his march over.
“You still love him,” Sam blurted out finally, but the way he’d said it had sounded almost like a question.
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
He looked up at her curiously. “I don’t know. Do you?”
Another beat of silence passed. “There’s no reason to be jealous of Michael, Sam,” Niki finally said quietly.
“I’m not jealous!” he argued.
Niki couldn’t help but give him the most exasperated look, a hint of a smile on her lips.
“You just seemed so excited to see him.”
“He’s been my best friend since pre-school.”
Sam looked up at her with a rather upset expression she immediately knew the cause of.
“We were inseparable, Sam, that doesn’t mean I loved him as anything other than a brother,” she stated.
“Yeah, but you did. C’mon, Nik, your eyes light up when you see him.”
“My eyes light up when I see Dayzee, too. I love Michael, but we just don’t have that…chemical attraction everyone thinks we do,” Niki said. “He means a lot to me, I’m not gonna deny that, but I feel really…attached to you… If you were to pick up and leave tomorrow, I don’t know…” She cut herself off and picked up somewhere else. “Honestly, when we’re together, I can feel the connection with you, even if you’re just looking at me; it gives me goosebumps. It’s not like that with him, it’s just…different,” she finished.
Sam glanced up to catch the sincerity on her face and saw her shiver. “I give you goosebumps?” he chuckled, a smile breaking out on his face.
“You’re doing it now and I know it’s on purpose, so stop, I’m already freezing,” she giggled as he pulled her off the fence and held her close, resting his cheek on the top of her head, his cowboy hat having been tugged off in the midst of his frustrated silence.
“Nik?”
“Hmm?” she hummed against his chest.
“I’ve got goosebumps, too.”
Sam led Niki back into the barn, the party now having calmed down enough to at least play a slow song or two, and scoped out his brother and Adrianna slow dancing in the center of the barn’s hay-covered floor. The song he didn’t know, which didn’t surprise him, but he was more than surprised that Dean was slow dancing to it. Luckily, there was no leftover barbecue sauce on Dean’s face.
Niki slipped away to grab a drink, but before she came back, Adrianna approached Sam with what looked like an expression crossed between worry and relief.
“So, you talked to her?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, we’re okay.”
“You know, even if she and Michael appeared to be perfect for each other, that doesn’t necessarily mean they were. She opened up more to you in the past week than she has to him in the past five years. She trusts you, Sam.”
Sam glanced over to where Niki was standing by the table loaded with food, smile on her face as she chatted with one of the girls nearby, then turned his attention back to her cousin. “I know.”
The next song started and Adrianna’s face suddenly fell.
“What?” Sam stared at her, confused.
“‘Strawberry Wine’,” she said quietly. “It’s her mom’s song.”
No more than ten seconds later, Niki came over, ever-so calmly and smiled half-heartedly at the two of them. “Sam, would you mind?” she asked quietly. “Just one dance?”
Sam took her hand and led her into the other few couples slow dancing, pulling her close so she could bury her face in his shoulder to hide the few inevitable tears filling her eyes.
Adrianna sighed, watching her cousin dance with Sam. On the one hand she wanted to go stab whoever it was acting as DJ with a pitchfork for even playing the song, but on the other she was at least glad that Niki had Sam to lean on now.
She smirked half-heartedly and turned to find Dean again, outright smiling when she remembered his wide-eyed terror when she forced him to slow dance. For all his hemming and hawing he had moved smooth and slow against her once she got him to shut up.
She was headed back towards where she had left him when she heard his loud laugh off to the side. She finally spotted him drinking the homemade Booth’s wine straight from the bottle.
“Shit,” she hissed, pushing her way through the crowd and yanking the bottle out of his hand.
“Hey!”
She was about to rip into him, but he looked so dejected that she took the bottle away from him, and she knew all too well how…pleasantly, Booth’s wine went down that she just grinned and grabbed his hand, dragging him across the sawdust floor.
She pulled him along, all the way over to the back of the barn, where it was quiet and deserted, the farm trucks and tractors parked end to end in order to empty the rest of the area for tonight’s party.
She climbed up on the big green John Deere tractor, glancing behind her just long enough to see Dean grin and follow her.
He plopped down in the seat and she made herself comfortable in his lap, taking a healthy swig of the sweet wine before wrapping her arm around his neck and kissing slow and sticky.
His hands found her skin, soft and warm underneath the hem of her shirt and pulled her tighter against him, moaning into her kiss.
She grinned against him, switching the bottle to her free hand and keeping the other wrapped behind him to take another swig.
He held her eyes while she drank, his gaze trailing down to watch the roll of her throat at she swallowed and leaned forward to lick the bittersweet aftertaste from her lips.
She sighed against him, pushing him further down into the tractor’s seat, breaking the kiss again to tip the bottle to his lips.
Again he held her eyes, drinking the wine down until she pulled the bottle away and put it in the built in drink holder off to the side.
Wrapping both arms around his neck she kissed him again, hot and wet and slow, the alcohol leaving them both feeling relaxed and languid.
Dean groaned deep in his throat, letting his hands trail up her back.
“You gonna let me fuck you on top of a damned tractor?” he grinned against her lips.
She laughed against him.
“Not a chance cowboy,” she grinned, flicking off the ridiculous cowboy hat he had been wearing all night before plopping it down on her own head before leaning in for another kiss.
“Figured we could just make out like horny drunk teenagers,” she smiled, dragging his lower lip through her teeth.
He chuckled, wrapping his arms tight around her waist, the leather of her belt digging into his arms.
“Sounds good,” he grinned, pulling her into another kiss.
***
Niki's truck
and Dean on a tractor ;)
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Chapter Six