SPN Fic: Stay (1/4, Gen, Pre-Series, R)
This one's been cooking for a long, long, long time. I actually started it shortly after I wrote Ten Going on Thirteen. Like a couple of days shortly after. That's how long it's been cooking. For a long time, I didn't know what it was about. I do now, so I finally finished it. This is a companion piece to Ten Going on Thirteen, not a sequel. It takes place across exactly the same stretch of time as the original story, it just tells a different perspective of the events as they unfold. Because the original story was limited to John's perspective, and because John was slip-sliding in and out of consciousness throughout the tell of it, and because Dean can be a misdirectively little bastard even at ten, what John thinks happened isn't really what happened, for the most part.
From my perspective, there were a couple of things I wanted to do with the original that I couldn't really do, given the way I chose to tell the story. One of them was to tell the reality of ten-year-old Dean under this kind of pressure as compared to John's perception of him. Another was to tell how all three Winchesters are perceived during this life-and-death crisis by the outsiders in the story. A third was to explain a choice I made in the original to kill a set-dressing character in such a focused and unprovoked fashion as to imply there was a story behind the violence I wasn't telling. (There was, and it's in this one.) The last was to make the story a little bit more h/c than the original turned out to be. Because I told the original from John's perspective, and because John was doing everything he could to hold it together for the sake of his sons, I couldn't really let him acknowledge some of the physical realities he was going through. This one allows you to see what John is actually going through rather than perceiving it through the filter of his own perceptions, being the stoic fella he can be, and thus downplaying any kind of pain to a "rub some dirt on it and you'll be fine" degree just to keep from letting it own him.
So those are the reasons I chose to write another story about events I've already detailed, and why this one is more than five times the length of the original. Hopefully, how this changes your perceptions about what really went on during Ten Going on Thirteen makes it worth the telling. As always, I'm very interested in y'alls thoughts.
Title: Stay (1/4)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, pre-series
Rating: R
Word Count: 31,000
Warnings/Spoilers: Violence, language, mature themes
Disclaimers: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: When breakfast on the road takes a deadly turn, Dean is the only one who can save his father's life. He's ten, he's alone, and the only way he makes it is if she stays.
Author's Note: This is a companion piece for Ten Going on Thirteen. While it can stand on it's own, there's significantly more resonance to the story if you read Ten Going on Thirteen first simply because this is an outsider perspective on what happens in that story. Which isn't, as you might expect, what you might think happened.
Stay
Kelly Watson was having a spectacularly crap-ass day when Doll, Sweet Face the man with lady-killer Sex Eyes strolled into the diner like a testosterone parade on wheels. They’d pulled off the highway in a ’67 Impala with a U-Haul hitched to its bumper; she’d noticed because it was written in her genetic code to notice a sweet ride like that, U-Haul or not. By the time they hit the front door from were they’d parked at the far end of the lot, she’d already identified Doll as a royal pain-in-the-ass, Sweet Face as Doll’s willing shadow, and Sex Eyes as one nerve short of being done with the both of them.
She could relate.
She put a fresh pot of coffee on- he looked like he needed it - then went to check on her other customers while the parade worked its way to a table near the back. Even as tired as he was, Sex Eyes had a smooth way of moving she found intriguing. There was an effortlessness to how he avoided the jostle and tumble of his boys as they jockeyed for position, elbowing one another aside to see who could manage to be the most underfoot without actually getting stepped on.
She had to smile when Doll ducked under his dad’s arm to stake a claim on the seat that faced the diner, it’s back to the wall, only to have that claim displaced with a single gesture, a small flick of two fingers that conveyed irritation more effectively than any string of curses she’d ever heard. Doll moved, his posture all belligerence as he sprawled into the other side of the booth, then put his feet up to block his little brother from sitting down beside him.
Sweet Face appealed the territory dispute to a higher authority. Sex Eyes settled it by standing again to let the smaller boy crawl in beside him, take up a place between his elbow and the wall.
Kelly was wiping down the serving counter when Sex Eyes looked up, glanced over to see what the hold up was. She lifted her chin to re-direct his gaze to the coffee machine. A slow, tired smile rose through his expression. He nodded, grateful, and just that was enough to trade her day up from spectacularly crap-ass to more-or-less run-of the-mill, every-day crap-ass.
When the coffee was finished, she took it over and poured him a cup. Because she’d seen too-long-on-the-road in too many faces not to spot a critical jones for intravenous caffeine, she didn’t bother to ask, she just hooked him up.
He tasted it black and hot - something that would have been a hell of a mistake if she’d served him the caffeinated tar that had been bubbling on the burner since 5 am - then gave her a look of raw gratitude that made her day almost not-so-crap-ass after all. The half smile in those sex eyes of his were more appreciation than most of her regulars showed on their best tipping days.
"Thank you," he said almost reverently. The sincerity in his tone restocked her nearly depleted stores of give-a-damn enough to earn him a smile in return.
"Sure."
The warm fuzzy of it didn’t last long. When she started to walk away, Doll demanded, "Hey! What about me?"
He glared at her with the insulted petulance only a ten-year-old can muster when they feel they’ve been slighted for no better reason than being ten years old. She lifted an eyebrow, and he responded by gesturing at the cup he’d turned over as if she was a bit incompetent not to have noticed it on her own. Then, his expression a clear mockery of her own, he lifted his eyebrow back at her in a way that made him look like a much older jackass than the jackass he was.
She might have just turned and walked away if Sex Eyes hadn’t spoken up, saying, "She’s not your damn handmaiden, Dean. Ask her nicely or don’t ask at all."
Doll didn’t actually roll his eyes, but he didn’t not do it by much. "Can I have some coffee, please," he complied truculently.
She could see what a full time job it must be not to strangle the little twit.
Sex Eyes verified as much by the way he sighed. His tone apologetic, he said, "It’s been a long night, and evidently my daughter didn’t get his beauty sleep. But even so -" he gestured vaguely at the boy’s mug, "- if you don’t mind?"
Doll bristled at his dad’s censure. He could have damned near passed for a porcupine, he was that pissed off about being referred to as a daughter. Hell, Sex Eyes could have three cups of coffee and thirty minutes in the storage closet for that.
"Sure," she said again.
"Me, too," Sweet Face piped up as she filled his brother’s cup. Then, without any prompt to do so, he added, "Please."
Kelly glanced at him, had to smile back at the way he was smiling at her. His chin barely cleared the tabletop, but it didn’t seem to bother him any. She suspected not much bothered him: He looked like he pretty much had the world by the tail. Or at least, he thought he did.
His dad’s response was immediate: "No, Sammy."
Sweet Face’s response to his dad’s response was equally immediate: "Why not?"
"Because the sky is blue."
Kelly almost laughed. He must get that question a lot. Or a thousand others, just like it. Then to her, because Doll didn’t bother to, Sex Eyes said, "Thanks."
"Yeah, thanks," Doll muttered like she’d just gotten him in trouble by being a whole lot of bitch.
Ignoring Doll, Kelly winked at Sweet Face. "I could bring him some hot chocolate," she offered.
Sweet Face’s grin nearly split his little face in two. He looked up at his dad expectantly, seconding the motion with an enthusiastic, "I like chocolate."
"What she needs to bring you is a booster seat, Geek Boy," Doll said. The comment was punitive, punishing his little brother for earning a wink when all he got was amusement at his expense.
Sweet Face wasn’t chastised so much as simply indignant. "I’m too big for a booster seat," he announced as much for her benefit as in response to his brother’s dig.
Before Doll could respond, Sex Eyes cut them off with a sharp "Boys" that left no room for argument. But even so, Sweet Face managed to get in a "well I am" before they settled back to silence. Kelly suspected the cease-fire would only last as long as she was actually standing there.
"Sure," Sex Eyes told her after a beat. "Hot chocolate’s fine."
"With marshmallows, please," Sweet Face added.
She winked at him again - it was more politically correct than flipping Doll off - and said, "Of course. Is there any other way?"
Leaving them to bicker over the menu for a couple more minutes, she passed the time by stirring up a mug of Swiss Miss for Sweet Face, then filled it to overflowing with small marshmallows. She did it to make a point to Doll - something along the lines of sugar being the way to catch the girl (or the marshmallows) instead of petulant bullshit - but he proved he wasn’t the kind of kid who learned anything the easy way by starting in on her again almost as soon as she returned to take their order.
Because she committed the mortal sin of calling him Doll - her Aunt Sophie used to call her "Doll" when she was young, so it was her default for pretty much any nameless kid who required some form of address other than "Hey You" or "Dork Weed" to hurry them along - he retaliated by flipping her full-on attitude. Giving her the cold-fish eye as she stood by their table, all her weight shifted to one hip, tapping her pencil impatiently on the order pad; he refused to answer like she gave a flying fuck whether or not he got anything to eat at all. He obviously thought it was just a giggle a minute to keep her hanging, so she called him Doll again, just because she could.
He informed her his name was Dean.
Like she gave a flying fuck about that either.
His dad cared though. His response was immediate, his tone sharp when he told Doll he’d be riding in the trunk if he didn’t learn to keep a civil tongue in his head. He’d already threatened the little twit with prunes for breakfast if he didn’t hurry up and order - something Kelly took as a thank you for the fresh coffee - but the way he took Doll to task for mouthing off to her was something else. It was almost an instinctive response, like Sex Eyes wouldn’t tolerate his boy taking that kind of tone with anyone, not just with someone who had the access to spit in their eggs if she took a mind to do it.
That slow smile of his was hot. Those sex eyes were even hotter. But slapping down his kid like that for showing disrespect? That was smoking.
When Doll clammed up to sullen silence, Sex Eyes filled in the question marks on his half-assed pancake order, then asked for eggs and sausage for Sweet Face and more coffee for himself. She’d noticed the ring on his leave-em-alone finger when he first walked through the door, but she tossed a little Pig Latin coy his direction anyway, justifying it more as a reward of highway friendly than any kind of true come-on.
He smiled distractedly, only half aware she was flirting, so she amped it a bit, calling him "Darlin’" in the honey-slow drawl she could affect just by letting twenty years of Yankee living slip a little cattywompas in her memory. Then, because nothing pisses a boy Doll’s age off more than having his daddy flirted with, she popped her gum at the little twit and smiled.
It worked, on both counts.
When she laid a "big, strapping boy like you?" on Sex Eyes in response to his "just coffee," that worked even better. Doll actually huffed in outrage at the affront, which tipped his daddy to her game, so he started playing along, smiling her up the same way she was smiling at him.
And it worked like gangbusters.
Folding both arms across his chest and shoving himself deeper into the far corner of the booth, Doll glared at Kelly like he was mad enough to eat nails. Which was exactly where she wanted him. Nails seemed like the perfect side for pancakes with syrup - her not being bright enough to intuit the syrup part without his clarification being his general point there. The fact that his daddy’s sex-eyed smile actually put a bit of warm to her burners was pure, unexpected bonus.
The highway wasn’t in the habit of bringing much flirt-worthy through the diner’s front door; and even when it did, she didn’t get a whole lot from playing sex games with total strangers. Playing torque-the-twit, on the other had, was actually quite fun. And as it turned out, kind of a turn-on, too.
Huh. Who’d have thunk it?
When she asked Sex Eyes his name - again, more to irk his kid than because she cared - he said it was John, then glanced at her nametag in a way that was less about her name than it was about where her nametag was pinned. His glance lingered a bit longer than it should have, then returned to her eyes with a small smile that made his show of interest a compliment in a way very few men could make looking at a woman’s chest a compliment.
Kelly almost laughed. He had a sense of timing, this one. Knew the difference between flirting and leering, between pushing a little and pushing enough to put someone on the defensive. And he knew when to keep his mouth shut, too; because not calling her by name after he’d spent that long reading five whole letters sure put the implication to the air that he hadn’t even noticed her nametag at all.
She would have liked to see where that went - see how long he’d hold to it, see what he’d say next if she didn’t say something first, if all she did was raise an eyebrow at him - but Sweet Face interrupted the lingering stretch of the moment by informing her that his name was Sammy. Then he gave her a whole-face happy, just to make it clear he was fine with her flirting up his dad, as pleased about it as the twit was torqued. Kelly smiled back because there really wasn’t any way for someone not to smile at the look on that kid’s face: part happy, part sweet and one hundred percent you-should-love-me-because-I-totally-love-you.
He was what … five? Six? And already a heartbreaker. And a flirt in his own right, even if he didn’t know it yet.
The ring on Sex Eyes’s finger caught her eye again. It was burnished bright like he touched it a lot, like it was something he turned on his finger when he was thinking, something he worried when his mind wandered other places.
Divorced, she decided. Or a widower.
Though either would have fit the evidence, once it occurred to her, widower’s the one that stuck. Men tended to lose the ring when they signed papers; but there were those who kept it after they’d buried someone they weren’t done loving.
Waitressing in a dump diner in the middle of bum fuck nowhere - something she’d been doing a lot longer than she’d been working specifically here - she’d developed a pretty keen sense for separating the attached from the unattached, and she’d learned a long time ago that a ring, or lack thereof, was actually a better indicator of whether or not a man was a liar than whether or not he was married. It was also a good way to tell how he viewed relationships in general, and women in specific: if he was trying to land something or just playing catch and release, if he was a one entrée man or the kind who double dipped in every buffet in town, if he thought women were stupid enough not to notice or just slutty enough not to care, if he could say goodbye when the time came or if you were going to have to take out a restraining order to get his shit out of your garage.
And by her read of it, that shiny ring said a few things about Sex Eyes: not fishing at all, the same restaurant every night, it wasn’t about anyone but whoever put that ring on his finger, and the time was never going to come once he parked his shit in your garage. He might be a harried dad with an sweet-smiled charmer and a twitty tweenager a couple of head-knocks short of courteous in tow, but as much of a dad as he clearly was, he was wearing the bone tired of a man towing the boat alone.
She’d figured that much out from the Imapala. Driving a muscle car wasn’t a married-with-children thing to do. A man drives a car like that for two reasons. One of them is a woman riding shotgun with her hand in his lap. The other is hoping to find a woman to ride shotgun with her hand in his lap.
So driving it around like a family station wagon on a cross-country trek? Foregoing the U-Haul truck with attached car caddy option to bolt a hitch to a sweet ride that was never designed to haul anything but some serious ass?
That’s a man turning a ring on his wedding finger. That’s a man who’s lost a woman who made him feel the way that car did; so he keeps it to remind himself of her, not to lure a replacement in with the smell of sex on wheels.
And it’s true loss, not leaving or being left. Leaving trades him up to a more cherry, hipper version of muscle. Being left puts a crowbar to that baby in rage or pain or both.
But loss? Loss puts him in that car forever, keeping it up like it’s his soul, putting it to the task of family the way she would have wanted to the end of bolting a hitch to the bumper with the same hands that grease themselves to exhaustion after a long day’s work just to make sure the timing hits every mark square-on, the sparks fire unencumbered, the wheels are properly dressed and every scratch and ding the kids put to the paint is treated within twenty-four to protect the chassis from rust and decay and loss.
Yeah, that ride marked Sex Eyes a widower almost as clearly as if he wore her obit tacked to the back of his jacket.
But it wasn’t a fresh wound; it was one he’d suffered for some time now. She could tell as much because he didn’t wear the grave dust of trying to crawl into the ground after a woman. Instead, he wore her memory in his kids, raising them the way a man raises kids - boys in particular - alone: a testosterone parade on wheels.
Hell, the boys themselves were evidence enough of that. It was pretty clear neither one of them saw the civilizing influence of a woman on a regular basis. Not that they were ill-kept. They weren’t. They were just a little rough around the edges in a way a mama would have kept sanded down.
Sweet Face needed a haircut like an English sheepdog needs a haircut, and when he looked at her, it was like he was looking at the Holy Grail - as sure a sign as there was of a child wanting something he didn’t have. And Doll? Doll fairly reeked of testosterone buildup. If that boy had a mother, she would have peeled his shit down every day out of self defense. She would have kept it manageable, kept it from accumulating to such a degree it put Doll on track for fourteen-year-old machismo at the tender young age of ten. Or eleven. Or however the hell old he was under all that smart-ass attitude.
But there was more to it than just rough around the edges. They might bicker like cats and dogs on occasion, but the three of them had a monkey-see, monkey-do dynamic going on that branded them with "us against the world" in big, bold letters. That kind of thing didn’t develop when there were other people around to mitigate the influence Sex Eyes had on Doll, or Doll had on Sweet Face.
Because seriously: Clone Boys much?
Doll in particular. All petulance aside, that boy was going to grow up to be his daddy some day, lady-killer sex eyes and all. He already had the look to him, the classic lines of a muscle car in the making. Give him another eight to ten years and he’d grow into that machismo overload he already had on a hard boil. He’d be the kind of boy who could stand by a curb in the middle of nowhere and still draw girls like flies to honey; the kind who’d make all the other boys look like cheap imports by comparison.
In other words, exactly what his daddy had no doubt been until whoever put that burnished ring on Sex Eyes’s finger turned him from a full-blown muscle car to a sweet ride gone domestic. But not so domestic he could hide the sleek lines of who he was. The classics were like that. You could rust em up, knock em down, even scar the paint or tack a U-Haul to their ass; but under all that dust and abuse, there was still a classic with the power train to take you where you wanted to go.
A woman could always spot that in a man, the same way a man could always spot it in a car. And she could see it in Sex Eyes the same way she saw it in Doll. In the future at least, because right now? Right now, Doll was one hundred percent twit-to-the-bone, a certifiable pain-in-the-ass in boy boxer-briefs.
Which did nothing but verify he was made of the right stuff to grow into his daddy’s shoes, as well as his daddy’s car. Because as much as Sex Eyes had a smack of old-fashioned chivalry to his way of being, she had no doubt he could be every bit as much of a pain-in-the-ass as his son was if he put his mind to it. He had that look about him: the look of a man who could make you want to club him senseless on general principles alone.
She wasn’t sure if it was the way he smiled when he realized she was flirting; or if it was the way he slapped down his mouthy kid in her defense without saying anything that would humiliate the boy so much as just teach him his place; but whatever it was, she could smell it on him. His responses had just enough stand-up-for-the-lady to be gallant while still falling short of ride-your-kid to the end of coming off like he was trying to impress her, or like he cared more what she thought than what his kid did. The balance they struck made her pretty sure Sex Eyes not only knew how to push people’s buttons, he had a good chunk of practice doing it.
Which, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She liked a man who could stand up and drive; one who didn’t have to stop and ask directions every damn time the weather changed, or the road took a turn he wasn’t really expecting.
But there were drivers and there were drivers, and Kelly had an unfortunate predilection for the latter. It was her greatest misery in life to be a full-blown bitch to an addiction she didn’t seem to be able to break if her life depended on it: a weakness for men with a classic power train and the urge to do all the driving no matter who might be behind the wheel at any given point in time. She’d kicked more than one of those drivers to the curb over the years trying to gain some modicum of control over her life, some modicum of autonomy in where she was going and how she wanted to get there; but she was still prone to hitch a ride on the same damn train when the urge to travel put her to the road again.
And Sex Eyes was definitely that kind of man. As much as she’d love to think otherwise, she’d seen it all the way from the parking lot. He was exactly the kind of man who always got her in trouble, who always put her in the backseat - or sweet talked her there with his sex eyes and his easy way of flirting - for the short run rather than inviting her to ride up front with him for the long haul. Maybe even drive on occasion, when he needed a break, or just when she wanted to.
And she’d spent enough time in the back seat for a while. She was done with that game: over and done and doing her damnedest to stick to her own personal twelve-step to keep from falling back into old habits. Sex Eyes had a good way about him, and that slick move he made of glancing at her nametag for just long enough but not a moment too long made her feel something she hadn’t felt for longer than she cared to admit; but even with two kids in tow, the only ticket he was going to punch was the ticket to the back seat, and that simply wasn’t where she wanted to be.
Not even in a sweet ride like him. Or in that car he had parked outside, a U-Haul trailer tacked to the bumper the same way Sex Eyes had his boys locked in step beside him, the whole set of them haunted by the memory of a woman who wasn’t there.
But even knowing it wasn’t going anywhere, there was no reason a little harmless road friendly couldn’t help pass a crap-ass morning into a better state of day. And messing with Doll was just the ticket to that particular ride - a ride both she and Sex Eyes were enjoying enough to make it more than worth the time to take.
Flashing Sex Eyes a quick grin to say "thanks for playing, I appreciate the assist," Kelly turned and walked away. She took far more delight in swinging her hips at Doll than she should have because he was just at the right age to notice something like that and let it bother him. Which it did. She could hear the little twit snarking on her Pig Latin as she left him behind, and it made her smile. If she had more time to torment him, they might actually become friends, once she got done peeling his shit down to a manageable level.
"Pancakes and a scramble plate, Ted," Kelly said, passing the ticket through the order window to the cook behind it.
Instead of taking it, Ted just looked at her, grinning that skeevy grin of his. He had a talent for making even the smallest of smiles come off like a flat-out leer. And not a leer in a good way, but rather a leer in an "I need a pot of boiling water and a bar of good, strong lye soap" way. She waited a couple of seconds longer, then shook the ticket at him impatiently. She could drop it and walk off; but if she did, it might hit the grill and ignite a grease fire in his face, and that wouldn’t be fair to the grease fire.
God, how she hated working the early shift with this freak. Most days, it was dead as hell until around ten, which made it just her and Ted and Ted’s skeevy grin, all alone in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. That, in and of itself, was just about enough to make her think about moving on.
Not that she hadn’t worked out in the middle of bum fuck with skeevy losers before. She had. Hell, most of the time, the biggest loser in the tri-state area was the boss. But Ted was different. Ted put every instinct she had on high alert.
He hadn’t ever done anything specific she could put a finger on - well, other than just being a serious freak - but there was something about him in general that was wrong. Really wrong, as compared to just loser wrong. He came on like a dog in heat and never let up, but it was more than just that. It was more than just the way he looked at her, or the freaky things he suggested they do in the back room, or over the serving counter, or on the fucking grill to see if he could get off before the skin on her ass charred black and cracked open …
The fucking freak.
After about the twentieth time Ted didn’t take "fuck no, rot in hell" for an answer to one of his totally fucked-up freak suggestions, she’d asked Ron to fire him, or at least stop scheduling them together out here when there was no one around to give her a hand if things got ugly. Ron - being Ron - promised her, cross his heart, he would absolutely do one of those two things. Then he followed through on that promise the way he followed through on all his promises, which was to say, not at all.
He was a peach, that Ron. Just about as dependable as the damned cable company. If it was run by a weatherman. Who answered to Microsoft.
So that left it up to Kelly to handle Ted if he ever grew the cojones to act on any of the bullshit he was always talking. She figured she could, if it ever came to that - she’d been handling freaks like him for longer than she’d had anything freaks like him could be legally interested in - but still, she didn’t like her first line of defense also being her last.
She’d survived as long as she had after Sophie passed on, leaving her all alone in the big bad of the big, bad world, by spotting trouble before it showed up and getting the hell out of the way; not by depending on her ability to put freaks to the floor with a swift kick to the kids. True, she had a hell of ball-busting juke that was deadly effective at putting them to defending where she wasn’t kicking; but even so, Ted still worried her.
She’d shut him down so many times you’d think the guy would have grown a shut-off valve by now, but it hadn’t even made a dent in how often he dogged her, in how often he told her he was going to fuck her blind some day, and the harder she fought, the more he was going to like it. But it was more than just his talk that put her on edge. Every once in a while, she’d catch him watching her from the corner of one eye, and the look he got when he thought no one saw him did more than intimidate her, it actually scared her.
Scared her to the bones.
Just looking into his eyes at those times told Kelly he had plans for her. Plans she wasn’t going to like. Plans she’d be damn lucky to survive.
Or maybe not lucky so much as damned.
The fucking freak.
But as much as he occasionally scared her, she wasn’t ever going to let Ted know that. Fuck him, she’d jump off a bridge before she let that freak show know anything he did made her feel anything at all except a sudden urge to puke all over his skeevy-ass grin.
"Soccer Mom over there your type, Sweets?" Ted asked. He jerked his weasel chin to indicate Sex Eyes and his kids. "You like ’em soft and pussified, do ya? Suckling their own bitches at the tit?"
Kelly gritted her teeth. John. Sex Eyes said his name was John. Nice normal name, John.
"Or is it that boy of his you’re after?" Ted pressed when she didn’t answer. "Fresh, young meat for that fine grinder of yours? Bet you could teach him a thing or two. Bet you could make that little boy cry with the kind of things you could teach him."
Okay, beyond everything else, that was exactly why Skeevey Ted was such a skeeve. Just because he would even think something like that, let alone fucking say it.
"Well he sure outranks you, Tad," she said, porking his name the way she always did when he was pissing her off.
Ted smiled his skeevy little freak grin. "Soccer Mom? Or Soccer Mom’s little bitch?"
"Both." She shook the order ticket again to indicate he should take it before she quit worrying about being fair to a grease fire.
She half expected one of his usual responses - something about liking women with spunk because they fought harder when you stuck bottles up their ass - but she didn’t get it. Instead, Skeevy just smiled.
"What are you smiling at?" she demanded. And then regretted the question almost before she’d finished asking it. Some guys you just had to learn to ignore. Skeevy Ted was right at the top of the list. Ignore him like the plague … at the same time as you watched him like a hawk at all times.
"Just picturing that grinder of yours in my mind." Ted’s eyes went ugly, as compared to just skeevy. "Bet it’s nice and tight, ain’t it?" he practically purred. "Bet you’d feel every inch of puppy going in, wiggling around like a little fish. Just imagine what you’d feel wrapped around a big dog like me. Bet I could make you whine when I fucked you, baby. Bet I could make you cry with the kind of things I could teach you-"
"Fuck you," she snapped just to shut him up.
"Hold that thought, Sweets." His grin went from ugly to scary - bad plans scary - as he glanced up at the clock. "About eight minutes, give or take."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"Surprise party," Ted said. "If you’re a good girl, maybe I’ll let Soccer Mom and his little bitch watch. Maybe they can even play. I wouldn’t mind making the boy cry. Fucking him up the ass might make a good appetizer for the main dish."
Kelly rolled her eyes. Ted was always saying crap like that. Personally, she thought he’d dropped some bad acid when he was still in diapers and had been fascinated by the sound of his own shit every since. Regardless of why he was the way he way though, she was done listening. Because he still hadn’t taken the ticket, she flicked it at him before she walked away. She didn’t give a rat’s ass any more if it landed on the grill. Grease fire was on its own.
She felt someone watching her, so she glanced around, found it was true. Sex Eyes had a look on his face that made her feel safer, just seeing it. He was half a diner away, but still paying enough attention to smell Ted’s shit in the wind. There was no way he’d heard their actual exchange - if he had, Ted would be eating his own teeth for what he’d said about Doll - but he must have seen something that told him how it played: maybe the way she was standing or the fact that her skin was trying to crawl off her bones to get away from the thought of Ted’s "big dog" anywhere near her anything.
Or Doll’s.
Sex Eyes’s gaze flicked to Ted. For a moment, she thought he might get up, come over.
Kelly opened a napkin dispenser and let the front drop to the counter with a small, metallic clank. The noise popped his attention back to her, as she intended it to. She shook her head a little, saying everything was fine, she had the whole world under control and didn’t need some overgrown Boy Scout galloping to her defense.
It surprised her when Sex Eyes nodded. It was a small gesture - indistinct almost - but a very clear response, nonetheless. It was a nod of understanding, of acceptance: If she said she didn’t need his help, he’d take her at her word.
Tossing her the keys to the car, so to speak.
If he hadn’t had two kids to feed and she’d had someone to cover her shift, she might have dragged him out to that sweet ride of his and put him to his own back seat right then and there. As it was though, Doll said something that drew his attention back to the table and his own affairs, so Kelly went back to filling the napkin dispensers, wishing she’d taken a little longer to flirt a little harder and wondering if the opportunity to follow up on that change of heart might still exist.
Or if it had ever existed in the first place, that ring of his being burnished to such a shiny color of trapped-in-the-past the way it was.
She was still pondering it nine and a half minutes later when the door jingled open.
When she looked up, there were two guys standing in the doorway; and she recognized them both. They’d met Ted for lunch a little over a week ago. That time, they didn’t bother to leave a tip. This time, they were carrying guns.
Kelly froze. Her heart stopped - it just stopped, right then, right there - not because of the guns as much as because she knew what the guns meant. They meant she was fucked. She was seriously, seriously fucked.
She heard Ted chuckle behind her. "Surprise," he said.
And then one of the guys fired.
The sound of a shotgun going off in such close proximity is a little like the sound of a freight train running through a tin house. Or at least, that’s what Kelly thought a train might sound like in a tin house, not knowing for sure since she’d never actually heard one before. But that’s the way she imagined it might sound: Just like the shotgun sounded when it went off in the diner’s doorway.
A thousand thoughts ran through her head as she braced herself to die. Did she leave enough food out for the cat to last forever? Would Aunt Sophie be glad to see her again, or pissed she’d showed up early? Did it count as good luck or bad luck to kick it before the party? Did workman’s comp cover getting killed on the job? Did Ron’s insurance cover blood damage to linoleum? If it didn’t - or even if it did - would Ron try to pass this all off as an unfortunate blender accident so he could sue Hamilton Beach? And hey, who knew a shotgun fired this close would sound so much like a freight train running through a tin house?
Those were the kind of thoughts that ran through Kelly’s head as the freight train of a shotgun blast thundered past her (instead of through her, as she expected) to cut Skeevy Ted’s laugh off almost as soon as it started.
For the most part, she liked to consider herself pretty blasé when it came to being caught off guard. There simply weren’t all that many things that surprised her any more. She’d learned a long time ago to expect the worst, hope for the best and try to keep the faith that most things in life fell someplace between those two extremes.
But this turn of events surprised her. It surprised her like being born surprises a person.
Surprised to be alive - more surprised she hadn’t wet herself in the living - Kelly felt the warm wet of Skeevy Ted splatter all over her back as he went down. A thousand sparklies in her ears made it hard to hear anything but tinkerbell fairies, but even so, they weren’t loud enough to drown out the sound of Ted’s body hitting the wall with a side-of-beef slap, then sliding to the floor in a wet glop of blood puddle. She didn’t look behind her because, well, she wasn’t stupid.
So much for Ted’s surprise party. Surprise, Ted. Surprise.
The smaller of the two guys in the doorway - and, oddly enough, the one with the smaller gun - stepped forward and shoved that gun right in her face. On closer inspection, Kelly decided it was actually the biggest fucking gun she’d ever seen. Much bigger than the shotgun, even; and twice as scary, being shoved up her in face the way it was.
"Everything you’ve got," Big Gun Guy ordered. "In a bag. Now."
There were a lot of things you could say about Kelly Watson, but needing to be told to do something twice when there was a gun in her face wasn’t one of them. She was very good at taking directions with that kind of incentive. So good, in fact, she could list it on her resume, along with being detail-oriented and punctual to an irritating fault.
Grabbing a take-out bag off the counter, she popped the cash drawer and started emptying the register. There wasn’t much there and that scared the hell out of her, but everything that was there, they got; every fucking cent, even the bills Ron had her put under the drawer so the random fifty that occasioned out of some traveler’s hip pocket didn’t tempt Skeevy Ted into giving himself a five-finger raise.
Worried about his fifties around Ted, but not about someone Ted said he was going to fuck blind some day, and the harder she fought, the better he’d like it. Real peach, that Ron.
Kelly put the last handful of bills in the bag and was in the process of handing it all over when everything went bad.
Or worse might have been a more particularly accurate assessment.
While Big Gun Guy held that big-ass gun of his right up in Kelly’s face to encourage her to speed on the task of getting them their money, his partner kept the diner covered with his shotgun, holding everyone there as still as stone the way only the threat of following someone already put to a gory splatter can. The whole place was suspended in time when Doll strolled out of the bathroom, shoving his sweet faced little brother before him, unaware the shotgun even existed, let alone that it was now swinging his direction and the guy holding it didn’t give a rat’s ass that he and his brother were nothing more than a couple of kids who posed no threat to anyone at all.
"Fart Breath," Doll said, his voice dropping the insult like a benediction in a cathedral of absolute silence.
"Oh, God," Kelly whispered.
Their dad was already moving, already out of the booth and making a desperate effort to get his own body between the shotgun and his sons. There was no way in hell he was going to make it - they were too far away, and the shotgun was already settling into line - but he still tried.
Doll’s dad tried.
"Dean!"
Both Doll and Sweet Face froze at the sound of their father’s voice. Rooted in place as their dad barreled toward them, Doll’s eyes found the danger and went wide. His hand thrust out, slammed into the middle of his brother’s back, knocking the smaller boy down and out of the way as the shotgun went off like a second freight train going through that same little, tin house.
*
If she’d thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have done it.
Not because she wouldn’t have thought she should do it, but rather because there was a huge gun less than four inches from her face, and that gun scared her so much she couldn’t even remember her own name. So if she’d thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have done it; but she didn’t think about it, so she did do it.
She just did it.
Her hip swung, hit the register stand hard. Ron had been promising to fix the damn thing for months now, but his promise on that subject was worth just about as much as all his other promises, so it still weobbled every time a customer leaned on it.
And if you bumped it hard enough, it actually moved.
A little.
All things considered, it wasn’t much of a jostle - not much more than just enough to annoy the piss out of Shotgun Guy as he pulled the trigger on a bone-deep twit of a kid who didn’t want some waitress he didn’t know calling him Doll - but it was all she could do, so she did it. It was only after the train took off again that she realized it was the last stupid choice she was ever going to make.
Big Gun Guy was looking right at her when she swung her hip into the stand. He was still holding the bag she’d passed off to him in one hand and his big-ass gun in the other, the barrel right up in her face where all he had to do was pull the trigger and it was game over. There was no way he missed seeing what she did, no way the flash of anger in his eyes could be read as anything other than "fuck you, you’re dead" because she did it.
Boy Aunt Sophie was gonna be pissed. After all she’d sacrificed to raise Kelly after some drunk fuck took it on himself to kill Sophie’s sister and that borderline dimwit she married (by Sophie’s estimation at least, but then again, by Sophie’s yardstick, all men were a bit dimwitted) to the end of saddling her with a kid she barely even knew after she’d specifically made a pact with the universe that kids were not going to be a part of her future, it was going to torque her no end to find out Kelly just threw it all away over some little twit she didn’t even know beyond his bullshit attitude and his daddy’s sex-eyed smile.
Thinking with your twat, was what Sophie would call it. Which, knowing Sophie, could be either an indictment of letting a sexual attraction to Doll’s dad influence her thinking on whether to live or die or on having a soft heart when it came to the subject of two boys who were absolutely not her fucking responsibility. Sophie liked to use "twat" as an interchangeable pronoun for either vagina or heart, depending on the situation. She was colorful like that, and more than a little crude when it came to calling things the way she saw them.
And she’d see this as pure stupidity.
Odds were better than even she’d crack Kelly upside the head right there in front of God and everybody when they met up at the Pearly Gates. That was Sophie’s way. Hands-on love, she called it; and it worked, more or less.
At the very least, it had done a passing job of putting Kelly’s head back to straight whenever she made a piss-poor choice in Sophie’s estimation; which, in all fairness, was usually a piss-poor choice by anybody’s estimation … except maybe Kelly’s. At the very least, it kept her on the straight-and-narrow when every other damn thing in her life was such that most people had already given up on her before she really had a chance to even get started.
She hadn’t been the easiest kid in the world to raise, and Sophie hadn’t been the most qualified woman in the world to do the raising. But Sophie was always there - Sophie stayed - and that, in and of itself, was what really mattered.
It made all the difference for a kid who didn’t have anyone else; made all the difference for a kid who needed someone more than just herself to stand up against the way the world turned.
Right now, she could have used a little of Sophie’s hands-on love. She could have used Sophie standing there beside her, ready and able and more than willing to dole out a good smack to the head just to remind her to watch out for her own skin instead of doing stupid shit for no good reason, the difference made not being enough to actually make a difference anyway, so it was all going to end up being for naught in the long run.
And wasn’t that just always the way of it anyway? The best of intentions were always the ones that got you fucked up the ass in the end. And this was no different. Kelly could see it coming in Big Gun Guy’s eyes. She could see it in the way those eyes narrowed with fury, the way his finger went white on the trigger of his big-ass gun as she closed her eyes and waited for it all to be over.
Everything went quiet inside her. Still. Frozen. The only sound at all was the sound of her own heartbeat, but that was so loud she wasn’t sure she’d even hear it when it happened. She wasn’t sure she’d hear anything over the sound of thunder tearing through her head, wasn’t sure she’d feel anything through the fire of pure panic that ignited every nerve in her body to one moment of absolute nothingness so profound she wasn’t even sure she existed any more.
So there she stood, waiting for it to happen, but nothing happened.
Nothing.
Happened.
She waited for what seemed like fucking ever before finally opening her eyes again. She was just in time to see the gun barrel in her face swinging away, just in time to see it swinging in the direction of the diner itself without blowing her face out the back of her stupid, stupid head. She followed the focus of the gun because, pretty much, that gun was the sum total of her whole entire universe at the moment.
She only realized Doll’s dad had a gun, too, and he was putting it to damn good use, when Shotgun Guy’s head came off at the shoulders. Or more accurately, came apart. A bullet hit the soulless bastard smack in the forehead, and his skull just came apart right there in front of her eyes.
It was gruesome as hell and twice as scary, but she still found herself almost cheering when it happened, like this wasn’t really happening, like she was sitting front-row center in her own private horror movie as the bad guy got his rather than watching blood and bone and gore go every which way in a real life splatter that was the end of a man she didn’t even know.
Or at least didn’t know beyond his willingness to blow away a ten-year-old twit and his sweet-faced little brother.
Standing there like a spectator to the main event, she gaping in dazed wonder at all the pretty colors as one big-ass kettle of violence exploded all around her. Common sense might have told her to duck-the-fuck-and-cover, but common sense wasn’t in right now. It ran away and crawled into a dark corner at the first sign of trouble.
Smart common sense. Cowardly, but smart.
Her whole body flinched when the gun pulling away from her face went off, snapping out a bullet in a sharp, short bark of sound that wasn’t any freight train in a tin house, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. The echo of his gunshot hadn’t even died when Big Gun Guy did, his left eye coming out behind his left ear in a way that, again, was gruesome as hell yet still made her feel a little bit like cheering.
Or crying. She wasn’t sure which.
As quickly as it started, it was over.
Just over.
The diner became a vacuum of silence. It was such a stark contrast to the pepper of gunfire she thought she’d actually gone deaf for a moment, or gotten trapped in a cosmic hiccup in the very fabric of time. While she pondered which scenario was more likely - a tear in the time-space continuum or having gone stone cold deaf - the universe pulled one of those wonky-ass hat tricks it sometimes does in moments of extreme stress. Everything froze in place, utterly without motion, suspended mid-frame like someone hit the pause button on life.
For just a moment, she was standing outside herself, just watching the whole world pass her by.
A tear in time-space, she decided. Someone blinked her ass into a live-action Tim Burton movie so she could be Ewan MacGreggor, pushing popcorn aside while she moved through the circus of life, death and love-at-first-sight. Only there wasn’t any popcorn. And she didn’t believe in love-at-first-sight. And Ewan MacGreggor made an ass-load more money than she did.
But still, that was what was happening. She’d decided.
Standing stock still, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything at all except just fucking breathe, Kelly tried to make sense of a world that suddenly made no sense. Just the fact that she was still doing even that - just breathing - seemed like something of a major miracle. She should be dead. She should be lying on the floor behind the register stand, her face one big bullet imprint, her soul getting its metaphysical ear chewed off by Sophie on the subject of thinking like a twat while she waited in line for her ticket through the Pearly Gates and a tearful reunion with parents so long gone she didn’t even remember what they looked like any more.
But she wasn’t. For some reason, she was still standing here, still gaping at the world around like a fucking spectator to a blood sport as she expended every ounce of energy she still possessed just to fucking be.
Just to exist.
Just to stay.
The wet, heavy sound of Doll’s dad hitting linoleum and the metal clatter of his gun skittering across the floor shattered the Burton-MacGreggor effect like cheap plastic. Kelly blinked, lost her balance. She grabbed at the register stand, and it weobbled dramatically in her hands.
Doll.
For just a moment, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know why she was here, didn’t know what on God’s green Earth had possessed her to stay instead of falling to the floor like a good little girl and just going the fuck to sleep to dream of a better place where Aunt Sophie waited with a comforting smack to the head just to show her she was loved.
Hand’s-on love. The kind of love a kid needed to keep the world from winning in the war to steal everything just because it could.
Doll. She had to get to Doll.
She wasn’t really thinking yet when she threw herself into motion, half skidding and half crawling as she made her way toward the booth at the back of the diner. It was more like an instinct; more like a drive she couldn’t even articulate that made her frantic to find her way to that twit of a ten-year-old just to make sure he wasn’t a shotgun-gutted shell of busted kid, and that his little brother wasn’t missing his wide, heartbreaker grin under that English sheepdog haircut of his.
The bloody floor was slick as hell, and she fell twice before she even got half way there. She passed one of the other customers on the way, and because he was just standing there, gaping like a fucking idiot, she told him, "Call 9-11. Tell them we need an ambulance."
The guy looked a hole right through her like she wasn’t even there.
By the time she reached the back of the diner, Doll was moving, dragging himself off the little brother he’d thrown himself across as they fell, using his own body like a flesh-and-bone shield by wrapping himself around the smaller boy like he thought he was bulletproof or something. He shoved Sweet Face deep into the shadows under a nearby table and shouted "stay!" at him in a voice that sounded more like a drill sergeant than a ten-year-old, then scuttled across slick linoleum to fall to his hands and knees at his father’s side.
Because Doll was at least moving, Kelly went in after Sweet Face. He was backed into the far corner, staring out from the darkness with huge, terrified eyes. His face was chalk-white with stun; and he flinched when she touched him, made a small sound of fear when she dug her fingers into his shirt and pulled him to her so she could wrap him up in her arms and back out the same way she came in. His whole body was colder than ice in a bucket, and he was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane; but he didn’t struggle as she twisted out from under the table to sit on the floor, didn’t protest while she rocked him in her lap, holding on while she told him over and over, "it’s okay, it’s okay" as he watched his father bleed.
Half a dozen feet away, Sex Eyes was a pile of seriously fucked up. The floor around him was sticky with blood; his body was contorted in on itself like a bad Boy Scout knot as he struggled to breathe in harsh gasps and choking gurgles.
"Dad," Doll whispered. His hands hovered, not sure where to touch, not sure where not to touch. He sounded terrified, sounded broken.
She wasn’t sure if his dad responded to the sound of Doll’s voice or to the terror in that voice, but either way, he responded, his voice hoarse with pain as he reached up, put a hand on Doll’s face and said, "Dean. Good boy, Dean. You did good." Doll tried to grab at his father’s hand, but he missed. Bloody fingers left garish streaks behind on Doll’s skin as they fell away.
Sex Eyes coughed, closed his eyes.
The child wrapped in Kelly’s arms trembled harder. "Daddy," he whispered.
She shifted, tried to block his view with her shoulder, but Sweet Face wasn’t having any of it. He started struggling, his little body going wild in her arms until she gave in and settled back to her original position so he could stare past her to watch his daddy die.
His name was John, Kelly remembered suddenly. Sweet Face and Doll’s dad’s name was John.
"No," Doll moaned. "No, Dad. Don’t. Please, don’t. Dad … don’t."
John wasn’t moving; he wasn’t talking. The harsh wheeze of his breathing sounded like a death rattle in the otherwise quiet diner. Doll leaned closer, talked louder. "Please, Dad. Come on. Please." When John didn’t respond, Doll began to shake him; gently at first, and then harder, more insistently.
"Dad? Can you hear me, Dad?"
She wanted to go to him, but she couldn’t. Sweet Face wasn’t just sitting in her lap any more, he was holding on to her now like she was the only thing that stood between him and the big, blue ocean. His arms were wrapped around her neck, his hands clenched into her shirt, digging into her skin. She couldn’t just peel him off and leave him there, couldn’t just set him aside like he didn’t matter.
The other customers were gathering around like vultures to a road kill. They were three of them - two men and a woman - but there wasn’t enough empathy in the whole set for even one of them to do anything other than just stand there and watch as Doll shook his dad with growing desperation, his voice breaking while he pleaded, "Come on, Dad. Come on. Don’t do this to me. Come on. You have to wake up. Come on, Dad. Wake up. Please wake up."
"Wake up, Daddy," Sweet Face whispered. "Please wake up."
John made a sound deep in his chest. It wasn’t a good sound, and hearing it unraveled Doll from frantic to a full-blown panic.
"Dad! Come on, Dad. Please! Wake up. Come on, wake up." His voice was so afraid it gutted her. "Come on, Dad. Please. Dad. Dad!" Doll leaned closer, shaking John harder as he called into his ear, "Come on, Dad. Come on, come on. Please, Dad. Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me, Dad. Please, Dad, please. Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Dad. Please don’t leave me."
"Don’t leave, Daddy," Sweet Face whispered.
John groaned. He said something completely unintelligible. Doll shook him again. He rattled his dad’s teeth, he shook him so hard. John said it again, the words tearing out of him in a soft, agonized gasp. "Dean … stop. Stop."
Doll froze. He leaned closer to hear what his dad was saying. "Tell me what to do," he pleaded.
"Stop," John breathed again. "For God’s sake, Dean. Stop."
"Okay," Doll agreed. "I stopped." Then again, "Tell me what to do."
John didn’t answer.
"Dad?"
Nothing.
"Dad … please." Doll’s voice cracked. "Please tell me what to do."
But still, John didn’t answer.
Kelly couldn’t take it any longer. She couldn’t take the hopeless desperation in Doll’s voice as he broke apart right there in front of her. She remembered that feeling, remembered how heavy the world had been when she was shaking her mother, trying so hard to wake her up long after waking up was no longer an option.
Cutting loose with a long string of ferociously descriptive profanities she was pretty sure no six-year-old should ever hear, Kelly struggled to her feet with an armful of cold, silent little boy. The man standing two feet to her left was balding and in his sixties; a regular customer and a shitty tipper. She shoved Sweet Face at him, saying, "Here. Take him."
Shitty Tipper just blinked at her. For several seconds, he just stood there, staring at her like he only now realized she was even there.
The fucking idiot. Blind, deaf, dumb, stingy and stupid.
Patient wasn’t on her list today, so she literally snarled at him the second time: "Take him, you stupid, heartless bastard!" And this time, he did.
It surprised her a little when Sweet Face accepted the transfer of custody without a reaction. He just unwrapped his arms from her neck and let her pass him off like a bag of groceries.
"I’ll be right back, baby," she said, squeezing his hand.
He nodded without taking his eyes off his dad. Kelly released him to slip-slide her way to his brother’s side.
Part 2
From my perspective, there were a couple of things I wanted to do with the original that I couldn't really do, given the way I chose to tell the story. One of them was to tell the reality of ten-year-old Dean under this kind of pressure as compared to John's perception of him. Another was to tell how all three Winchesters are perceived during this life-and-death crisis by the outsiders in the story. A third was to explain a choice I made in the original to kill a set-dressing character in such a focused and unprovoked fashion as to imply there was a story behind the violence I wasn't telling. (There was, and it's in this one.) The last was to make the story a little bit more h/c than the original turned out to be. Because I told the original from John's perspective, and because John was doing everything he could to hold it together for the sake of his sons, I couldn't really let him acknowledge some of the physical realities he was going through. This one allows you to see what John is actually going through rather than perceiving it through the filter of his own perceptions, being the stoic fella he can be, and thus downplaying any kind of pain to a "rub some dirt on it and you'll be fine" degree just to keep from letting it own him.
So those are the reasons I chose to write another story about events I've already detailed, and why this one is more than five times the length of the original. Hopefully, how this changes your perceptions about what really went on during Ten Going on Thirteen makes it worth the telling. As always, I'm very interested in y'alls thoughts.
Title: Stay (1/4)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, pre-series
Rating: R
Word Count: 31,000
Warnings/Spoilers: Violence, language, mature themes
Disclaimers: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: When breakfast on the road takes a deadly turn, Dean is the only one who can save his father's life. He's ten, he's alone, and the only way he makes it is if she stays.
Author's Note: This is a companion piece for Ten Going on Thirteen. While it can stand on it's own, there's significantly more resonance to the story if you read Ten Going on Thirteen first simply because this is an outsider perspective on what happens in that story. Which isn't, as you might expect, what you might think happened.
Stay
Kelly Watson was having a spectacularly crap-ass day when Doll, Sweet Face the man with lady-killer Sex Eyes strolled into the diner like a testosterone parade on wheels. They’d pulled off the highway in a ’67 Impala with a U-Haul hitched to its bumper; she’d noticed because it was written in her genetic code to notice a sweet ride like that, U-Haul or not. By the time they hit the front door from were they’d parked at the far end of the lot, she’d already identified Doll as a royal pain-in-the-ass, Sweet Face as Doll’s willing shadow, and Sex Eyes as one nerve short of being done with the both of them.
She could relate.
She put a fresh pot of coffee on- he looked like he needed it - then went to check on her other customers while the parade worked its way to a table near the back. Even as tired as he was, Sex Eyes had a smooth way of moving she found intriguing. There was an effortlessness to how he avoided the jostle and tumble of his boys as they jockeyed for position, elbowing one another aside to see who could manage to be the most underfoot without actually getting stepped on.
She had to smile when Doll ducked under his dad’s arm to stake a claim on the seat that faced the diner, it’s back to the wall, only to have that claim displaced with a single gesture, a small flick of two fingers that conveyed irritation more effectively than any string of curses she’d ever heard. Doll moved, his posture all belligerence as he sprawled into the other side of the booth, then put his feet up to block his little brother from sitting down beside him.
Sweet Face appealed the territory dispute to a higher authority. Sex Eyes settled it by standing again to let the smaller boy crawl in beside him, take up a place between his elbow and the wall.
Kelly was wiping down the serving counter when Sex Eyes looked up, glanced over to see what the hold up was. She lifted her chin to re-direct his gaze to the coffee machine. A slow, tired smile rose through his expression. He nodded, grateful, and just that was enough to trade her day up from spectacularly crap-ass to more-or-less run-of the-mill, every-day crap-ass.
When the coffee was finished, she took it over and poured him a cup. Because she’d seen too-long-on-the-road in too many faces not to spot a critical jones for intravenous caffeine, she didn’t bother to ask, she just hooked him up.
He tasted it black and hot - something that would have been a hell of a mistake if she’d served him the caffeinated tar that had been bubbling on the burner since 5 am - then gave her a look of raw gratitude that made her day almost not-so-crap-ass after all. The half smile in those sex eyes of his were more appreciation than most of her regulars showed on their best tipping days.
"Thank you," he said almost reverently. The sincerity in his tone restocked her nearly depleted stores of give-a-damn enough to earn him a smile in return.
"Sure."
The warm fuzzy of it didn’t last long. When she started to walk away, Doll demanded, "Hey! What about me?"
He glared at her with the insulted petulance only a ten-year-old can muster when they feel they’ve been slighted for no better reason than being ten years old. She lifted an eyebrow, and he responded by gesturing at the cup he’d turned over as if she was a bit incompetent not to have noticed it on her own. Then, his expression a clear mockery of her own, he lifted his eyebrow back at her in a way that made him look like a much older jackass than the jackass he was.
She might have just turned and walked away if Sex Eyes hadn’t spoken up, saying, "She’s not your damn handmaiden, Dean. Ask her nicely or don’t ask at all."
Doll didn’t actually roll his eyes, but he didn’t not do it by much. "Can I have some coffee, please," he complied truculently.
She could see what a full time job it must be not to strangle the little twit.
Sex Eyes verified as much by the way he sighed. His tone apologetic, he said, "It’s been a long night, and evidently my daughter didn’t get his beauty sleep. But even so -" he gestured vaguely at the boy’s mug, "- if you don’t mind?"
Doll bristled at his dad’s censure. He could have damned near passed for a porcupine, he was that pissed off about being referred to as a daughter. Hell, Sex Eyes could have three cups of coffee and thirty minutes in the storage closet for that.
"Sure," she said again.
"Me, too," Sweet Face piped up as she filled his brother’s cup. Then, without any prompt to do so, he added, "Please."
Kelly glanced at him, had to smile back at the way he was smiling at her. His chin barely cleared the tabletop, but it didn’t seem to bother him any. She suspected not much bothered him: He looked like he pretty much had the world by the tail. Or at least, he thought he did.
His dad’s response was immediate: "No, Sammy."
Sweet Face’s response to his dad’s response was equally immediate: "Why not?"
"Because the sky is blue."
Kelly almost laughed. He must get that question a lot. Or a thousand others, just like it. Then to her, because Doll didn’t bother to, Sex Eyes said, "Thanks."
"Yeah, thanks," Doll muttered like she’d just gotten him in trouble by being a whole lot of bitch.
Ignoring Doll, Kelly winked at Sweet Face. "I could bring him some hot chocolate," she offered.
Sweet Face’s grin nearly split his little face in two. He looked up at his dad expectantly, seconding the motion with an enthusiastic, "I like chocolate."
"What she needs to bring you is a booster seat, Geek Boy," Doll said. The comment was punitive, punishing his little brother for earning a wink when all he got was amusement at his expense.
Sweet Face wasn’t chastised so much as simply indignant. "I’m too big for a booster seat," he announced as much for her benefit as in response to his brother’s dig.
Before Doll could respond, Sex Eyes cut them off with a sharp "Boys" that left no room for argument. But even so, Sweet Face managed to get in a "well I am" before they settled back to silence. Kelly suspected the cease-fire would only last as long as she was actually standing there.
"Sure," Sex Eyes told her after a beat. "Hot chocolate’s fine."
"With marshmallows, please," Sweet Face added.
She winked at him again - it was more politically correct than flipping Doll off - and said, "Of course. Is there any other way?"
Leaving them to bicker over the menu for a couple more minutes, she passed the time by stirring up a mug of Swiss Miss for Sweet Face, then filled it to overflowing with small marshmallows. She did it to make a point to Doll - something along the lines of sugar being the way to catch the girl (or the marshmallows) instead of petulant bullshit - but he proved he wasn’t the kind of kid who learned anything the easy way by starting in on her again almost as soon as she returned to take their order.
Because she committed the mortal sin of calling him Doll - her Aunt Sophie used to call her "Doll" when she was young, so it was her default for pretty much any nameless kid who required some form of address other than "Hey You" or "Dork Weed" to hurry them along - he retaliated by flipping her full-on attitude. Giving her the cold-fish eye as she stood by their table, all her weight shifted to one hip, tapping her pencil impatiently on the order pad; he refused to answer like she gave a flying fuck whether or not he got anything to eat at all. He obviously thought it was just a giggle a minute to keep her hanging, so she called him Doll again, just because she could.
He informed her his name was Dean.
Like she gave a flying fuck about that either.
His dad cared though. His response was immediate, his tone sharp when he told Doll he’d be riding in the trunk if he didn’t learn to keep a civil tongue in his head. He’d already threatened the little twit with prunes for breakfast if he didn’t hurry up and order - something Kelly took as a thank you for the fresh coffee - but the way he took Doll to task for mouthing off to her was something else. It was almost an instinctive response, like Sex Eyes wouldn’t tolerate his boy taking that kind of tone with anyone, not just with someone who had the access to spit in their eggs if she took a mind to do it.
That slow smile of his was hot. Those sex eyes were even hotter. But slapping down his kid like that for showing disrespect? That was smoking.
When Doll clammed up to sullen silence, Sex Eyes filled in the question marks on his half-assed pancake order, then asked for eggs and sausage for Sweet Face and more coffee for himself. She’d noticed the ring on his leave-em-alone finger when he first walked through the door, but she tossed a little Pig Latin coy his direction anyway, justifying it more as a reward of highway friendly than any kind of true come-on.
He smiled distractedly, only half aware she was flirting, so she amped it a bit, calling him "Darlin’" in the honey-slow drawl she could affect just by letting twenty years of Yankee living slip a little cattywompas in her memory. Then, because nothing pisses a boy Doll’s age off more than having his daddy flirted with, she popped her gum at the little twit and smiled.
It worked, on both counts.
When she laid a "big, strapping boy like you?" on Sex Eyes in response to his "just coffee," that worked even better. Doll actually huffed in outrage at the affront, which tipped his daddy to her game, so he started playing along, smiling her up the same way she was smiling at him.
And it worked like gangbusters.
Folding both arms across his chest and shoving himself deeper into the far corner of the booth, Doll glared at Kelly like he was mad enough to eat nails. Which was exactly where she wanted him. Nails seemed like the perfect side for pancakes with syrup - her not being bright enough to intuit the syrup part without his clarification being his general point there. The fact that his daddy’s sex-eyed smile actually put a bit of warm to her burners was pure, unexpected bonus.
The highway wasn’t in the habit of bringing much flirt-worthy through the diner’s front door; and even when it did, she didn’t get a whole lot from playing sex games with total strangers. Playing torque-the-twit, on the other had, was actually quite fun. And as it turned out, kind of a turn-on, too.
Huh. Who’d have thunk it?
When she asked Sex Eyes his name - again, more to irk his kid than because she cared - he said it was John, then glanced at her nametag in a way that was less about her name than it was about where her nametag was pinned. His glance lingered a bit longer than it should have, then returned to her eyes with a small smile that made his show of interest a compliment in a way very few men could make looking at a woman’s chest a compliment.
Kelly almost laughed. He had a sense of timing, this one. Knew the difference between flirting and leering, between pushing a little and pushing enough to put someone on the defensive. And he knew when to keep his mouth shut, too; because not calling her by name after he’d spent that long reading five whole letters sure put the implication to the air that he hadn’t even noticed her nametag at all.
She would have liked to see where that went - see how long he’d hold to it, see what he’d say next if she didn’t say something first, if all she did was raise an eyebrow at him - but Sweet Face interrupted the lingering stretch of the moment by informing her that his name was Sammy. Then he gave her a whole-face happy, just to make it clear he was fine with her flirting up his dad, as pleased about it as the twit was torqued. Kelly smiled back because there really wasn’t any way for someone not to smile at the look on that kid’s face: part happy, part sweet and one hundred percent you-should-love-me-because-I-totally-love-you.
He was what … five? Six? And already a heartbreaker. And a flirt in his own right, even if he didn’t know it yet.
The ring on Sex Eyes’s finger caught her eye again. It was burnished bright like he touched it a lot, like it was something he turned on his finger when he was thinking, something he worried when his mind wandered other places.
Divorced, she decided. Or a widower.
Though either would have fit the evidence, once it occurred to her, widower’s the one that stuck. Men tended to lose the ring when they signed papers; but there were those who kept it after they’d buried someone they weren’t done loving.
Waitressing in a dump diner in the middle of bum fuck nowhere - something she’d been doing a lot longer than she’d been working specifically here - she’d developed a pretty keen sense for separating the attached from the unattached, and she’d learned a long time ago that a ring, or lack thereof, was actually a better indicator of whether or not a man was a liar than whether or not he was married. It was also a good way to tell how he viewed relationships in general, and women in specific: if he was trying to land something or just playing catch and release, if he was a one entrée man or the kind who double dipped in every buffet in town, if he thought women were stupid enough not to notice or just slutty enough not to care, if he could say goodbye when the time came or if you were going to have to take out a restraining order to get his shit out of your garage.
And by her read of it, that shiny ring said a few things about Sex Eyes: not fishing at all, the same restaurant every night, it wasn’t about anyone but whoever put that ring on his finger, and the time was never going to come once he parked his shit in your garage. He might be a harried dad with an sweet-smiled charmer and a twitty tweenager a couple of head-knocks short of courteous in tow, but as much of a dad as he clearly was, he was wearing the bone tired of a man towing the boat alone.
She’d figured that much out from the Imapala. Driving a muscle car wasn’t a married-with-children thing to do. A man drives a car like that for two reasons. One of them is a woman riding shotgun with her hand in his lap. The other is hoping to find a woman to ride shotgun with her hand in his lap.
So driving it around like a family station wagon on a cross-country trek? Foregoing the U-Haul truck with attached car caddy option to bolt a hitch to a sweet ride that was never designed to haul anything but some serious ass?
That’s a man turning a ring on his wedding finger. That’s a man who’s lost a woman who made him feel the way that car did; so he keeps it to remind himself of her, not to lure a replacement in with the smell of sex on wheels.
And it’s true loss, not leaving or being left. Leaving trades him up to a more cherry, hipper version of muscle. Being left puts a crowbar to that baby in rage or pain or both.
But loss? Loss puts him in that car forever, keeping it up like it’s his soul, putting it to the task of family the way she would have wanted to the end of bolting a hitch to the bumper with the same hands that grease themselves to exhaustion after a long day’s work just to make sure the timing hits every mark square-on, the sparks fire unencumbered, the wheels are properly dressed and every scratch and ding the kids put to the paint is treated within twenty-four to protect the chassis from rust and decay and loss.
Yeah, that ride marked Sex Eyes a widower almost as clearly as if he wore her obit tacked to the back of his jacket.
But it wasn’t a fresh wound; it was one he’d suffered for some time now. She could tell as much because he didn’t wear the grave dust of trying to crawl into the ground after a woman. Instead, he wore her memory in his kids, raising them the way a man raises kids - boys in particular - alone: a testosterone parade on wheels.
Hell, the boys themselves were evidence enough of that. It was pretty clear neither one of them saw the civilizing influence of a woman on a regular basis. Not that they were ill-kept. They weren’t. They were just a little rough around the edges in a way a mama would have kept sanded down.
Sweet Face needed a haircut like an English sheepdog needs a haircut, and when he looked at her, it was like he was looking at the Holy Grail - as sure a sign as there was of a child wanting something he didn’t have. And Doll? Doll fairly reeked of testosterone buildup. If that boy had a mother, she would have peeled his shit down every day out of self defense. She would have kept it manageable, kept it from accumulating to such a degree it put Doll on track for fourteen-year-old machismo at the tender young age of ten. Or eleven. Or however the hell old he was under all that smart-ass attitude.
But there was more to it than just rough around the edges. They might bicker like cats and dogs on occasion, but the three of them had a monkey-see, monkey-do dynamic going on that branded them with "us against the world" in big, bold letters. That kind of thing didn’t develop when there were other people around to mitigate the influence Sex Eyes had on Doll, or Doll had on Sweet Face.
Because seriously: Clone Boys much?
Doll in particular. All petulance aside, that boy was going to grow up to be his daddy some day, lady-killer sex eyes and all. He already had the look to him, the classic lines of a muscle car in the making. Give him another eight to ten years and he’d grow into that machismo overload he already had on a hard boil. He’d be the kind of boy who could stand by a curb in the middle of nowhere and still draw girls like flies to honey; the kind who’d make all the other boys look like cheap imports by comparison.
In other words, exactly what his daddy had no doubt been until whoever put that burnished ring on Sex Eyes’s finger turned him from a full-blown muscle car to a sweet ride gone domestic. But not so domestic he could hide the sleek lines of who he was. The classics were like that. You could rust em up, knock em down, even scar the paint or tack a U-Haul to their ass; but under all that dust and abuse, there was still a classic with the power train to take you where you wanted to go.
A woman could always spot that in a man, the same way a man could always spot it in a car. And she could see it in Sex Eyes the same way she saw it in Doll. In the future at least, because right now? Right now, Doll was one hundred percent twit-to-the-bone, a certifiable pain-in-the-ass in boy boxer-briefs.
Which did nothing but verify he was made of the right stuff to grow into his daddy’s shoes, as well as his daddy’s car. Because as much as Sex Eyes had a smack of old-fashioned chivalry to his way of being, she had no doubt he could be every bit as much of a pain-in-the-ass as his son was if he put his mind to it. He had that look about him: the look of a man who could make you want to club him senseless on general principles alone.
She wasn’t sure if it was the way he smiled when he realized she was flirting; or if it was the way he slapped down his mouthy kid in her defense without saying anything that would humiliate the boy so much as just teach him his place; but whatever it was, she could smell it on him. His responses had just enough stand-up-for-the-lady to be gallant while still falling short of ride-your-kid to the end of coming off like he was trying to impress her, or like he cared more what she thought than what his kid did. The balance they struck made her pretty sure Sex Eyes not only knew how to push people’s buttons, he had a good chunk of practice doing it.
Which, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She liked a man who could stand up and drive; one who didn’t have to stop and ask directions every damn time the weather changed, or the road took a turn he wasn’t really expecting.
But there were drivers and there were drivers, and Kelly had an unfortunate predilection for the latter. It was her greatest misery in life to be a full-blown bitch to an addiction she didn’t seem to be able to break if her life depended on it: a weakness for men with a classic power train and the urge to do all the driving no matter who might be behind the wheel at any given point in time. She’d kicked more than one of those drivers to the curb over the years trying to gain some modicum of control over her life, some modicum of autonomy in where she was going and how she wanted to get there; but she was still prone to hitch a ride on the same damn train when the urge to travel put her to the road again.
And Sex Eyes was definitely that kind of man. As much as she’d love to think otherwise, she’d seen it all the way from the parking lot. He was exactly the kind of man who always got her in trouble, who always put her in the backseat - or sweet talked her there with his sex eyes and his easy way of flirting - for the short run rather than inviting her to ride up front with him for the long haul. Maybe even drive on occasion, when he needed a break, or just when she wanted to.
And she’d spent enough time in the back seat for a while. She was done with that game: over and done and doing her damnedest to stick to her own personal twelve-step to keep from falling back into old habits. Sex Eyes had a good way about him, and that slick move he made of glancing at her nametag for just long enough but not a moment too long made her feel something she hadn’t felt for longer than she cared to admit; but even with two kids in tow, the only ticket he was going to punch was the ticket to the back seat, and that simply wasn’t where she wanted to be.
Not even in a sweet ride like him. Or in that car he had parked outside, a U-Haul trailer tacked to the bumper the same way Sex Eyes had his boys locked in step beside him, the whole set of them haunted by the memory of a woman who wasn’t there.
But even knowing it wasn’t going anywhere, there was no reason a little harmless road friendly couldn’t help pass a crap-ass morning into a better state of day. And messing with Doll was just the ticket to that particular ride - a ride both she and Sex Eyes were enjoying enough to make it more than worth the time to take.
Flashing Sex Eyes a quick grin to say "thanks for playing, I appreciate the assist," Kelly turned and walked away. She took far more delight in swinging her hips at Doll than she should have because he was just at the right age to notice something like that and let it bother him. Which it did. She could hear the little twit snarking on her Pig Latin as she left him behind, and it made her smile. If she had more time to torment him, they might actually become friends, once she got done peeling his shit down to a manageable level.
"Pancakes and a scramble plate, Ted," Kelly said, passing the ticket through the order window to the cook behind it.
Instead of taking it, Ted just looked at her, grinning that skeevy grin of his. He had a talent for making even the smallest of smiles come off like a flat-out leer. And not a leer in a good way, but rather a leer in an "I need a pot of boiling water and a bar of good, strong lye soap" way. She waited a couple of seconds longer, then shook the ticket at him impatiently. She could drop it and walk off; but if she did, it might hit the grill and ignite a grease fire in his face, and that wouldn’t be fair to the grease fire.
God, how she hated working the early shift with this freak. Most days, it was dead as hell until around ten, which made it just her and Ted and Ted’s skeevy grin, all alone in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. That, in and of itself, was just about enough to make her think about moving on.
Not that she hadn’t worked out in the middle of bum fuck with skeevy losers before. She had. Hell, most of the time, the biggest loser in the tri-state area was the boss. But Ted was different. Ted put every instinct she had on high alert.
He hadn’t ever done anything specific she could put a finger on - well, other than just being a serious freak - but there was something about him in general that was wrong. Really wrong, as compared to just loser wrong. He came on like a dog in heat and never let up, but it was more than just that. It was more than just the way he looked at her, or the freaky things he suggested they do in the back room, or over the serving counter, or on the fucking grill to see if he could get off before the skin on her ass charred black and cracked open …
The fucking freak.
After about the twentieth time Ted didn’t take "fuck no, rot in hell" for an answer to one of his totally fucked-up freak suggestions, she’d asked Ron to fire him, or at least stop scheduling them together out here when there was no one around to give her a hand if things got ugly. Ron - being Ron - promised her, cross his heart, he would absolutely do one of those two things. Then he followed through on that promise the way he followed through on all his promises, which was to say, not at all.
He was a peach, that Ron. Just about as dependable as the damned cable company. If it was run by a weatherman. Who answered to Microsoft.
So that left it up to Kelly to handle Ted if he ever grew the cojones to act on any of the bullshit he was always talking. She figured she could, if it ever came to that - she’d been handling freaks like him for longer than she’d had anything freaks like him could be legally interested in - but still, she didn’t like her first line of defense also being her last.
She’d survived as long as she had after Sophie passed on, leaving her all alone in the big bad of the big, bad world, by spotting trouble before it showed up and getting the hell out of the way; not by depending on her ability to put freaks to the floor with a swift kick to the kids. True, she had a hell of ball-busting juke that was deadly effective at putting them to defending where she wasn’t kicking; but even so, Ted still worried her.
She’d shut him down so many times you’d think the guy would have grown a shut-off valve by now, but it hadn’t even made a dent in how often he dogged her, in how often he told her he was going to fuck her blind some day, and the harder she fought, the more he was going to like it. But it was more than just his talk that put her on edge. Every once in a while, she’d catch him watching her from the corner of one eye, and the look he got when he thought no one saw him did more than intimidate her, it actually scared her.
Scared her to the bones.
Just looking into his eyes at those times told Kelly he had plans for her. Plans she wasn’t going to like. Plans she’d be damn lucky to survive.
Or maybe not lucky so much as damned.
The fucking freak.
But as much as he occasionally scared her, she wasn’t ever going to let Ted know that. Fuck him, she’d jump off a bridge before she let that freak show know anything he did made her feel anything at all except a sudden urge to puke all over his skeevy-ass grin.
"Soccer Mom over there your type, Sweets?" Ted asked. He jerked his weasel chin to indicate Sex Eyes and his kids. "You like ’em soft and pussified, do ya? Suckling their own bitches at the tit?"
Kelly gritted her teeth. John. Sex Eyes said his name was John. Nice normal name, John.
"Or is it that boy of his you’re after?" Ted pressed when she didn’t answer. "Fresh, young meat for that fine grinder of yours? Bet you could teach him a thing or two. Bet you could make that little boy cry with the kind of things you could teach him."
Okay, beyond everything else, that was exactly why Skeevey Ted was such a skeeve. Just because he would even think something like that, let alone fucking say it.
"Well he sure outranks you, Tad," she said, porking his name the way she always did when he was pissing her off.
Ted smiled his skeevy little freak grin. "Soccer Mom? Or Soccer Mom’s little bitch?"
"Both." She shook the order ticket again to indicate he should take it before she quit worrying about being fair to a grease fire.
She half expected one of his usual responses - something about liking women with spunk because they fought harder when you stuck bottles up their ass - but she didn’t get it. Instead, Skeevy just smiled.
"What are you smiling at?" she demanded. And then regretted the question almost before she’d finished asking it. Some guys you just had to learn to ignore. Skeevy Ted was right at the top of the list. Ignore him like the plague … at the same time as you watched him like a hawk at all times.
"Just picturing that grinder of yours in my mind." Ted’s eyes went ugly, as compared to just skeevy. "Bet it’s nice and tight, ain’t it?" he practically purred. "Bet you’d feel every inch of puppy going in, wiggling around like a little fish. Just imagine what you’d feel wrapped around a big dog like me. Bet I could make you whine when I fucked you, baby. Bet I could make you cry with the kind of things I could teach you-"
"Fuck you," she snapped just to shut him up.
"Hold that thought, Sweets." His grin went from ugly to scary - bad plans scary - as he glanced up at the clock. "About eight minutes, give or take."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"Surprise party," Ted said. "If you’re a good girl, maybe I’ll let Soccer Mom and his little bitch watch. Maybe they can even play. I wouldn’t mind making the boy cry. Fucking him up the ass might make a good appetizer for the main dish."
Kelly rolled her eyes. Ted was always saying crap like that. Personally, she thought he’d dropped some bad acid when he was still in diapers and had been fascinated by the sound of his own shit every since. Regardless of why he was the way he way though, she was done listening. Because he still hadn’t taken the ticket, she flicked it at him before she walked away. She didn’t give a rat’s ass any more if it landed on the grill. Grease fire was on its own.
She felt someone watching her, so she glanced around, found it was true. Sex Eyes had a look on his face that made her feel safer, just seeing it. He was half a diner away, but still paying enough attention to smell Ted’s shit in the wind. There was no way he’d heard their actual exchange - if he had, Ted would be eating his own teeth for what he’d said about Doll - but he must have seen something that told him how it played: maybe the way she was standing or the fact that her skin was trying to crawl off her bones to get away from the thought of Ted’s "big dog" anywhere near her anything.
Or Doll’s.
Sex Eyes’s gaze flicked to Ted. For a moment, she thought he might get up, come over.
Kelly opened a napkin dispenser and let the front drop to the counter with a small, metallic clank. The noise popped his attention back to her, as she intended it to. She shook her head a little, saying everything was fine, she had the whole world under control and didn’t need some overgrown Boy Scout galloping to her defense.
It surprised her when Sex Eyes nodded. It was a small gesture - indistinct almost - but a very clear response, nonetheless. It was a nod of understanding, of acceptance: If she said she didn’t need his help, he’d take her at her word.
Tossing her the keys to the car, so to speak.
If he hadn’t had two kids to feed and she’d had someone to cover her shift, she might have dragged him out to that sweet ride of his and put him to his own back seat right then and there. As it was though, Doll said something that drew his attention back to the table and his own affairs, so Kelly went back to filling the napkin dispensers, wishing she’d taken a little longer to flirt a little harder and wondering if the opportunity to follow up on that change of heart might still exist.
Or if it had ever existed in the first place, that ring of his being burnished to such a shiny color of trapped-in-the-past the way it was.
She was still pondering it nine and a half minutes later when the door jingled open.
When she looked up, there were two guys standing in the doorway; and she recognized them both. They’d met Ted for lunch a little over a week ago. That time, they didn’t bother to leave a tip. This time, they were carrying guns.
Kelly froze. Her heart stopped - it just stopped, right then, right there - not because of the guns as much as because she knew what the guns meant. They meant she was fucked. She was seriously, seriously fucked.
She heard Ted chuckle behind her. "Surprise," he said.
And then one of the guys fired.
The sound of a shotgun going off in such close proximity is a little like the sound of a freight train running through a tin house. Or at least, that’s what Kelly thought a train might sound like in a tin house, not knowing for sure since she’d never actually heard one before. But that’s the way she imagined it might sound: Just like the shotgun sounded when it went off in the diner’s doorway.
A thousand thoughts ran through her head as she braced herself to die. Did she leave enough food out for the cat to last forever? Would Aunt Sophie be glad to see her again, or pissed she’d showed up early? Did it count as good luck or bad luck to kick it before the party? Did workman’s comp cover getting killed on the job? Did Ron’s insurance cover blood damage to linoleum? If it didn’t - or even if it did - would Ron try to pass this all off as an unfortunate blender accident so he could sue Hamilton Beach? And hey, who knew a shotgun fired this close would sound so much like a freight train running through a tin house?
Those were the kind of thoughts that ran through Kelly’s head as the freight train of a shotgun blast thundered past her (instead of through her, as she expected) to cut Skeevy Ted’s laugh off almost as soon as it started.
For the most part, she liked to consider herself pretty blasé when it came to being caught off guard. There simply weren’t all that many things that surprised her any more. She’d learned a long time ago to expect the worst, hope for the best and try to keep the faith that most things in life fell someplace between those two extremes.
But this turn of events surprised her. It surprised her like being born surprises a person.
Surprised to be alive - more surprised she hadn’t wet herself in the living - Kelly felt the warm wet of Skeevy Ted splatter all over her back as he went down. A thousand sparklies in her ears made it hard to hear anything but tinkerbell fairies, but even so, they weren’t loud enough to drown out the sound of Ted’s body hitting the wall with a side-of-beef slap, then sliding to the floor in a wet glop of blood puddle. She didn’t look behind her because, well, she wasn’t stupid.
So much for Ted’s surprise party. Surprise, Ted. Surprise.
The smaller of the two guys in the doorway - and, oddly enough, the one with the smaller gun - stepped forward and shoved that gun right in her face. On closer inspection, Kelly decided it was actually the biggest fucking gun she’d ever seen. Much bigger than the shotgun, even; and twice as scary, being shoved up her in face the way it was.
"Everything you’ve got," Big Gun Guy ordered. "In a bag. Now."
There were a lot of things you could say about Kelly Watson, but needing to be told to do something twice when there was a gun in her face wasn’t one of them. She was very good at taking directions with that kind of incentive. So good, in fact, she could list it on her resume, along with being detail-oriented and punctual to an irritating fault.
Grabbing a take-out bag off the counter, she popped the cash drawer and started emptying the register. There wasn’t much there and that scared the hell out of her, but everything that was there, they got; every fucking cent, even the bills Ron had her put under the drawer so the random fifty that occasioned out of some traveler’s hip pocket didn’t tempt Skeevy Ted into giving himself a five-finger raise.
Worried about his fifties around Ted, but not about someone Ted said he was going to fuck blind some day, and the harder she fought, the better he’d like it. Real peach, that Ron.
Kelly put the last handful of bills in the bag and was in the process of handing it all over when everything went bad.
Or worse might have been a more particularly accurate assessment.
While Big Gun Guy held that big-ass gun of his right up in Kelly’s face to encourage her to speed on the task of getting them their money, his partner kept the diner covered with his shotgun, holding everyone there as still as stone the way only the threat of following someone already put to a gory splatter can. The whole place was suspended in time when Doll strolled out of the bathroom, shoving his sweet faced little brother before him, unaware the shotgun even existed, let alone that it was now swinging his direction and the guy holding it didn’t give a rat’s ass that he and his brother were nothing more than a couple of kids who posed no threat to anyone at all.
"Fart Breath," Doll said, his voice dropping the insult like a benediction in a cathedral of absolute silence.
"Oh, God," Kelly whispered.
Their dad was already moving, already out of the booth and making a desperate effort to get his own body between the shotgun and his sons. There was no way in hell he was going to make it - they were too far away, and the shotgun was already settling into line - but he still tried.
Doll’s dad tried.
"Dean!"
Both Doll and Sweet Face froze at the sound of their father’s voice. Rooted in place as their dad barreled toward them, Doll’s eyes found the danger and went wide. His hand thrust out, slammed into the middle of his brother’s back, knocking the smaller boy down and out of the way as the shotgun went off like a second freight train going through that same little, tin house.
*
If she’d thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have done it.
Not because she wouldn’t have thought she should do it, but rather because there was a huge gun less than four inches from her face, and that gun scared her so much she couldn’t even remember her own name. So if she’d thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have done it; but she didn’t think about it, so she did do it.
She just did it.
Her hip swung, hit the register stand hard. Ron had been promising to fix the damn thing for months now, but his promise on that subject was worth just about as much as all his other promises, so it still weobbled every time a customer leaned on it.
And if you bumped it hard enough, it actually moved.
A little.
All things considered, it wasn’t much of a jostle - not much more than just enough to annoy the piss out of Shotgun Guy as he pulled the trigger on a bone-deep twit of a kid who didn’t want some waitress he didn’t know calling him Doll - but it was all she could do, so she did it. It was only after the train took off again that she realized it was the last stupid choice she was ever going to make.
Big Gun Guy was looking right at her when she swung her hip into the stand. He was still holding the bag she’d passed off to him in one hand and his big-ass gun in the other, the barrel right up in her face where all he had to do was pull the trigger and it was game over. There was no way he missed seeing what she did, no way the flash of anger in his eyes could be read as anything other than "fuck you, you’re dead" because she did it.
Boy Aunt Sophie was gonna be pissed. After all she’d sacrificed to raise Kelly after some drunk fuck took it on himself to kill Sophie’s sister and that borderline dimwit she married (by Sophie’s estimation at least, but then again, by Sophie’s yardstick, all men were a bit dimwitted) to the end of saddling her with a kid she barely even knew after she’d specifically made a pact with the universe that kids were not going to be a part of her future, it was going to torque her no end to find out Kelly just threw it all away over some little twit she didn’t even know beyond his bullshit attitude and his daddy’s sex-eyed smile.
Thinking with your twat, was what Sophie would call it. Which, knowing Sophie, could be either an indictment of letting a sexual attraction to Doll’s dad influence her thinking on whether to live or die or on having a soft heart when it came to the subject of two boys who were absolutely not her fucking responsibility. Sophie liked to use "twat" as an interchangeable pronoun for either vagina or heart, depending on the situation. She was colorful like that, and more than a little crude when it came to calling things the way she saw them.
And she’d see this as pure stupidity.
Odds were better than even she’d crack Kelly upside the head right there in front of God and everybody when they met up at the Pearly Gates. That was Sophie’s way. Hands-on love, she called it; and it worked, more or less.
At the very least, it had done a passing job of putting Kelly’s head back to straight whenever she made a piss-poor choice in Sophie’s estimation; which, in all fairness, was usually a piss-poor choice by anybody’s estimation … except maybe Kelly’s. At the very least, it kept her on the straight-and-narrow when every other damn thing in her life was such that most people had already given up on her before she really had a chance to even get started.
She hadn’t been the easiest kid in the world to raise, and Sophie hadn’t been the most qualified woman in the world to do the raising. But Sophie was always there - Sophie stayed - and that, in and of itself, was what really mattered.
It made all the difference for a kid who didn’t have anyone else; made all the difference for a kid who needed someone more than just herself to stand up against the way the world turned.
Right now, she could have used a little of Sophie’s hands-on love. She could have used Sophie standing there beside her, ready and able and more than willing to dole out a good smack to the head just to remind her to watch out for her own skin instead of doing stupid shit for no good reason, the difference made not being enough to actually make a difference anyway, so it was all going to end up being for naught in the long run.
And wasn’t that just always the way of it anyway? The best of intentions were always the ones that got you fucked up the ass in the end. And this was no different. Kelly could see it coming in Big Gun Guy’s eyes. She could see it in the way those eyes narrowed with fury, the way his finger went white on the trigger of his big-ass gun as she closed her eyes and waited for it all to be over.
Everything went quiet inside her. Still. Frozen. The only sound at all was the sound of her own heartbeat, but that was so loud she wasn’t sure she’d even hear it when it happened. She wasn’t sure she’d hear anything over the sound of thunder tearing through her head, wasn’t sure she’d feel anything through the fire of pure panic that ignited every nerve in her body to one moment of absolute nothingness so profound she wasn’t even sure she existed any more.
So there she stood, waiting for it to happen, but nothing happened.
Nothing.
Happened.
She waited for what seemed like fucking ever before finally opening her eyes again. She was just in time to see the gun barrel in her face swinging away, just in time to see it swinging in the direction of the diner itself without blowing her face out the back of her stupid, stupid head. She followed the focus of the gun because, pretty much, that gun was the sum total of her whole entire universe at the moment.
She only realized Doll’s dad had a gun, too, and he was putting it to damn good use, when Shotgun Guy’s head came off at the shoulders. Or more accurately, came apart. A bullet hit the soulless bastard smack in the forehead, and his skull just came apart right there in front of her eyes.
It was gruesome as hell and twice as scary, but she still found herself almost cheering when it happened, like this wasn’t really happening, like she was sitting front-row center in her own private horror movie as the bad guy got his rather than watching blood and bone and gore go every which way in a real life splatter that was the end of a man she didn’t even know.
Or at least didn’t know beyond his willingness to blow away a ten-year-old twit and his sweet-faced little brother.
Standing there like a spectator to the main event, she gaping in dazed wonder at all the pretty colors as one big-ass kettle of violence exploded all around her. Common sense might have told her to duck-the-fuck-and-cover, but common sense wasn’t in right now. It ran away and crawled into a dark corner at the first sign of trouble.
Smart common sense. Cowardly, but smart.
Her whole body flinched when the gun pulling away from her face went off, snapping out a bullet in a sharp, short bark of sound that wasn’t any freight train in a tin house, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. The echo of his gunshot hadn’t even died when Big Gun Guy did, his left eye coming out behind his left ear in a way that, again, was gruesome as hell yet still made her feel a little bit like cheering.
Or crying. She wasn’t sure which.
As quickly as it started, it was over.
Just over.
The diner became a vacuum of silence. It was such a stark contrast to the pepper of gunfire she thought she’d actually gone deaf for a moment, or gotten trapped in a cosmic hiccup in the very fabric of time. While she pondered which scenario was more likely - a tear in the time-space continuum or having gone stone cold deaf - the universe pulled one of those wonky-ass hat tricks it sometimes does in moments of extreme stress. Everything froze in place, utterly without motion, suspended mid-frame like someone hit the pause button on life.
For just a moment, she was standing outside herself, just watching the whole world pass her by.
A tear in time-space, she decided. Someone blinked her ass into a live-action Tim Burton movie so she could be Ewan MacGreggor, pushing popcorn aside while she moved through the circus of life, death and love-at-first-sight. Only there wasn’t any popcorn. And she didn’t believe in love-at-first-sight. And Ewan MacGreggor made an ass-load more money than she did.
But still, that was what was happening. She’d decided.
Standing stock still, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything at all except just fucking breathe, Kelly tried to make sense of a world that suddenly made no sense. Just the fact that she was still doing even that - just breathing - seemed like something of a major miracle. She should be dead. She should be lying on the floor behind the register stand, her face one big bullet imprint, her soul getting its metaphysical ear chewed off by Sophie on the subject of thinking like a twat while she waited in line for her ticket through the Pearly Gates and a tearful reunion with parents so long gone she didn’t even remember what they looked like any more.
But she wasn’t. For some reason, she was still standing here, still gaping at the world around like a fucking spectator to a blood sport as she expended every ounce of energy she still possessed just to fucking be.
Just to exist.
Just to stay.
The wet, heavy sound of Doll’s dad hitting linoleum and the metal clatter of his gun skittering across the floor shattered the Burton-MacGreggor effect like cheap plastic. Kelly blinked, lost her balance. She grabbed at the register stand, and it weobbled dramatically in her hands.
Doll.
For just a moment, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know why she was here, didn’t know what on God’s green Earth had possessed her to stay instead of falling to the floor like a good little girl and just going the fuck to sleep to dream of a better place where Aunt Sophie waited with a comforting smack to the head just to show her she was loved.
Hand’s-on love. The kind of love a kid needed to keep the world from winning in the war to steal everything just because it could.
Doll. She had to get to Doll.
She wasn’t really thinking yet when she threw herself into motion, half skidding and half crawling as she made her way toward the booth at the back of the diner. It was more like an instinct; more like a drive she couldn’t even articulate that made her frantic to find her way to that twit of a ten-year-old just to make sure he wasn’t a shotgun-gutted shell of busted kid, and that his little brother wasn’t missing his wide, heartbreaker grin under that English sheepdog haircut of his.
The bloody floor was slick as hell, and she fell twice before she even got half way there. She passed one of the other customers on the way, and because he was just standing there, gaping like a fucking idiot, she told him, "Call 9-11. Tell them we need an ambulance."
The guy looked a hole right through her like she wasn’t even there.
By the time she reached the back of the diner, Doll was moving, dragging himself off the little brother he’d thrown himself across as they fell, using his own body like a flesh-and-bone shield by wrapping himself around the smaller boy like he thought he was bulletproof or something. He shoved Sweet Face deep into the shadows under a nearby table and shouted "stay!" at him in a voice that sounded more like a drill sergeant than a ten-year-old, then scuttled across slick linoleum to fall to his hands and knees at his father’s side.
Because Doll was at least moving, Kelly went in after Sweet Face. He was backed into the far corner, staring out from the darkness with huge, terrified eyes. His face was chalk-white with stun; and he flinched when she touched him, made a small sound of fear when she dug her fingers into his shirt and pulled him to her so she could wrap him up in her arms and back out the same way she came in. His whole body was colder than ice in a bucket, and he was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane; but he didn’t struggle as she twisted out from under the table to sit on the floor, didn’t protest while she rocked him in her lap, holding on while she told him over and over, "it’s okay, it’s okay" as he watched his father bleed.
Half a dozen feet away, Sex Eyes was a pile of seriously fucked up. The floor around him was sticky with blood; his body was contorted in on itself like a bad Boy Scout knot as he struggled to breathe in harsh gasps and choking gurgles.
"Dad," Doll whispered. His hands hovered, not sure where to touch, not sure where not to touch. He sounded terrified, sounded broken.
She wasn’t sure if his dad responded to the sound of Doll’s voice or to the terror in that voice, but either way, he responded, his voice hoarse with pain as he reached up, put a hand on Doll’s face and said, "Dean. Good boy, Dean. You did good." Doll tried to grab at his father’s hand, but he missed. Bloody fingers left garish streaks behind on Doll’s skin as they fell away.
Sex Eyes coughed, closed his eyes.
The child wrapped in Kelly’s arms trembled harder. "Daddy," he whispered.
She shifted, tried to block his view with her shoulder, but Sweet Face wasn’t having any of it. He started struggling, his little body going wild in her arms until she gave in and settled back to her original position so he could stare past her to watch his daddy die.
His name was John, Kelly remembered suddenly. Sweet Face and Doll’s dad’s name was John.
"No," Doll moaned. "No, Dad. Don’t. Please, don’t. Dad … don’t."
John wasn’t moving; he wasn’t talking. The harsh wheeze of his breathing sounded like a death rattle in the otherwise quiet diner. Doll leaned closer, talked louder. "Please, Dad. Come on. Please." When John didn’t respond, Doll began to shake him; gently at first, and then harder, more insistently.
"Dad? Can you hear me, Dad?"
She wanted to go to him, but she couldn’t. Sweet Face wasn’t just sitting in her lap any more, he was holding on to her now like she was the only thing that stood between him and the big, blue ocean. His arms were wrapped around her neck, his hands clenched into her shirt, digging into her skin. She couldn’t just peel him off and leave him there, couldn’t just set him aside like he didn’t matter.
The other customers were gathering around like vultures to a road kill. They were three of them - two men and a woman - but there wasn’t enough empathy in the whole set for even one of them to do anything other than just stand there and watch as Doll shook his dad with growing desperation, his voice breaking while he pleaded, "Come on, Dad. Come on. Don’t do this to me. Come on. You have to wake up. Come on, Dad. Wake up. Please wake up."
"Wake up, Daddy," Sweet Face whispered. "Please wake up."
John made a sound deep in his chest. It wasn’t a good sound, and hearing it unraveled Doll from frantic to a full-blown panic.
"Dad! Come on, Dad. Please! Wake up. Come on, wake up." His voice was so afraid it gutted her. "Come on, Dad. Please. Dad. Dad!" Doll leaned closer, shaking John harder as he called into his ear, "Come on, Dad. Come on, come on. Please, Dad. Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me, Dad. Please, Dad, please. Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Dad. Please don’t leave me."
"Don’t leave, Daddy," Sweet Face whispered.
John groaned. He said something completely unintelligible. Doll shook him again. He rattled his dad’s teeth, he shook him so hard. John said it again, the words tearing out of him in a soft, agonized gasp. "Dean … stop. Stop."
Doll froze. He leaned closer to hear what his dad was saying. "Tell me what to do," he pleaded.
"Stop," John breathed again. "For God’s sake, Dean. Stop."
"Okay," Doll agreed. "I stopped." Then again, "Tell me what to do."
John didn’t answer.
"Dad?"
Nothing.
"Dad … please." Doll’s voice cracked. "Please tell me what to do."
But still, John didn’t answer.
Kelly couldn’t take it any longer. She couldn’t take the hopeless desperation in Doll’s voice as he broke apart right there in front of her. She remembered that feeling, remembered how heavy the world had been when she was shaking her mother, trying so hard to wake her up long after waking up was no longer an option.
Cutting loose with a long string of ferociously descriptive profanities she was pretty sure no six-year-old should ever hear, Kelly struggled to her feet with an armful of cold, silent little boy. The man standing two feet to her left was balding and in his sixties; a regular customer and a shitty tipper. She shoved Sweet Face at him, saying, "Here. Take him."
Shitty Tipper just blinked at her. For several seconds, he just stood there, staring at her like he only now realized she was even there.
The fucking idiot. Blind, deaf, dumb, stingy and stupid.
Patient wasn’t on her list today, so she literally snarled at him the second time: "Take him, you stupid, heartless bastard!" And this time, he did.
It surprised her a little when Sweet Face accepted the transfer of custody without a reaction. He just unwrapped his arms from her neck and let her pass him off like a bag of groceries.
"I’ll be right back, baby," she said, squeezing his hand.
He nodded without taking his eyes off his dad. Kelly released him to slip-slide her way to his brother’s side.
Part 2