After that, after Shannon, I guess it became a pattern with him.
Blowing into a town, finding the rough-around-the-edges group of people. The ones who probably weren't bad, not really, but were stuck in bad places. Hanging out with them, getting to know all the seedy ins and outs of dusty American towns.
But he didn't talk about it. Not to me, anyways. Whatever it was he was doing. Didn't bring his friends over. Didn't try another acting class.
Didn't talk about girls, any of them. Not like he had Shannon.
Even after I started becoming aware of the fact that there were girls. And a lot of them.
Sure, he talked about their parts, their physical attributes, or whatever, in the crudest possible terms.
When puberty started pushing me around a little, not long after, I started to see how he flirted with cashiers and desk clerks, with random pretty girls on the street. Hell, even my algebra teacher, when he bumped into her picking me up from class one day.
He started coming home late at night all the time, smudged with the scent of smoke and beer and the floral note of a lady's shampoo or perfume.
But there were no more cheap necklaces or formal dances or even the suggestion of anything so conventional as a date.
Just Dean learning how to make use of his charm and his looks. The same way he learned the weight of a new weapon in his hands.
It was just something else to add to his arsenal.
And that's what it was, to Dean, it seemed like: a tool. For release or pleasure or help with a case or whatever. Nothing that really created intimacy or cultivated love or anything like that. Things that Dean scoffed at, distanced himself from as loudly as he could.
Until Cassie, apparently.
But I wasn't around to see that, of course. I just caught the highlight reel.
What's funny, though, is that Cassie sort of proved Dad's point. About how keeping your heart under wraps was pretty much the only way to go for people like us. I mean, if somebody like her couldn't take it straight—somebody that smart and funny and willing to put up with Dean's crap, but only to a point—then, fuck. Who would? Who could? Maybe, I thought, as we left Mississippi well and good behind, we should just stop expecting the world to understand us, what we did, people like us, and accept the rules for what they were. The rules that Dad had laid down so long ago.
You don't get to keep them, people you love. So what point is there in trying?
But all that was in the abstract, for me. I understood it, sort of, sure, as a way of living that make sense to Dean, but I wasn't like that. I didn't treat women that way, as disposable fuck toys or something, especially after Jess. No, my heart was always in the game, with any girl that I liked, even if we were only in town for a while.
But not Dean. Years of not letting anyone in past the gates of the Winchester smirk, of leather gun charm and guile; hell, I think, he forgot how to work the damn lock. And when he finally got it jimmied, damn if Cassie didn't slam those gates on his fingers, make him rue the day he ever wanted them open.
But me? Come on. I was an open book. Wasn't that what Dean told me every five minutes, it seemed like? My heart was always in play.
Dean might have padlocked his, after Cassie, but mine had always been open.
So I thought, anyway.
It was late, a few weeks after we'd left Mississippi, in that part of the night that's so close to day it almost seemed like a waste to lay down. But we were anyway, stretched out akimbo on a crappy queen, only one decent pillow between us, and I let my curiosity get the best of me. The words snuck out before I could stop them.
"How did you know?"
The bed creaked as he twisted towards me. "Know what?"
"With, uh. With Cassie. How'd you know that you were, um, in love with her?"
A couple of semis went by outside before he answered.
"Eh," he said, wistful. "I woke up one day, you know, beside her. Looked over and realized I couldn't really see myself doing that again—waking up, I mean—unless she was gonna be the first thing I saw."
I waited for him to finish, to kick himself with some stupid aside, but he didn't.
"Oh," I said, finally. "Yeah."
He sighed and shifted again. Stretched out on his back, his bare knee knocking mine.
"So how did you know? With Jess?"
I bit my lip. "I didn't, for a long time. She said something first, and I kind of didn't believe her."
He chuckled. "Really."
"Yeah."
We'd never talked about Jess, not about her and me, I mean. Not really. What our lives were like together or whatever, and I wasn't sure what he wanted me to say. If he was seriously asking, or if he was just trying to level the playing field. Poke me back since I'd bugged him first, or something.
But I hadn't realized how much I missed hearing her name, missed thinking about her when she was alive, about her living, so I grabbed that chance and kept talking.
"Jess, she—it was on our second date, and she—she said it, you know, that she loved me, and I—"
He shook his head, and I could hear the grin in his voice. "You left her hanging, Sammy? Aw, come on. I taught you better than that."
I didn't tell him that she'd said it when she was right on the edge, when my tongue was on her clit and my chin smeared with her sweet wet. Didn't tell him how her hand went tight in my hair and her thighs shook against my ears when she came, that little hoarse I love you still hovering over her lips.
My silence said enough, I guess, because he laughed and smacked my arm. "And on your second date, huh? You dog."
"We'd been friends for a long time before that!" I said, which was true, but it sounded like a dodge even to me. I didn't blame him when he laughed again.
"Oh, I bet you were," he leered. "Yeah. Friends my ass."
I let it lie. Turned over and tugged the pillow towards me. Buried my eyes in the cotton and let myself see her face for once without flinching. Sometimes it was easy to forget how happy we'd been, how happy she'd made me, how good it was when we were together, and now that I'd started remembering, I didn't want to stop. So I tried to block out where I was, who was with me, and just stared at her in my head, all the Jesses she'd been while I'd known her: my friend, my lover, the girl I was going to marry.
She put a smile on my face, every time, even when she was furious with me, and fuck did that piss her off.
For the first time in a long time, I let her do that again. Make me smile.
Dean let it go for a while, let me, but then he got impatient.
"So," he said. "She knew first, ok. So when did you?"
When I saw her burning, my head said, unbidden, and then the rest of me caught up, shouting Oh fuck oh no that wasn't true I know that isn't—
"Sam?"
Dean pitched up. I could feel him leaning over me, annoyed, but the flames in my head were still roaring and I had to keep my eyes closed, had to, or else I was sure they'd escape and we'd both go up in smoke.
"Dude. You asleep?"
I bit my lip again. Didn't answer.
"Fine," he huffed. "Don't tell me, bitch. Last time I get all touchy-feely with you."
I waited until he was asleep, caught dead in the snores he'd always deny. That's when I let myself cry. But all those damn tears couldn't put out the fire behind my eyes, couldn't stop some part of me from taunting: It's easy to love 'em when you know they're already gone.
Except. Except.
Dean.
He was the one thing I could love and have it not be a mistake. One person I could be close to and know that he was never gonna leave, never fly up to the ceiling and burn.
I'd left him, damn it, for years, and then he came to get me and it was like no time had gone by.
Except Jess, that traitorous part of my head whispered.
Yeah, I shot back. And how'd that turn out?
So I got it, right then, at four in the morning at the Super 8. It hit me in the sternum full force: Dad's rules for hunters 101.
"When you find someone you connect with," he'd said. "You don't get to keep them. They're not family."
That was the moment I tried to fill my heart fill with concrete. I laid there listening to Dean wheeze and bound the fucking thing in barbed wire. Tossed it over the side, watched it sink to the bottom of my gut where nobody, no girl, could get at it. Where I couldn't yank it free if I tried.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
Love? Wasn't something I could have, not as long as I was a hunter, with Dean. He was the only one I could love safely, without putting him in danger. It wasn't the kind of love I'd had for Jess, the kind I might've had for the next girl down the road, but it was love, I was sure, all the same. A love that didn't act like gasoline that left me holding the match.
So I did my best to sink it, my heart, as far deep as I could, and fell asleep somehow, gone cold.
In the morning, I didn't look different. My eyes in the mirror were the same bleary with steam and sleep they always were first thing. That night, I didn't pick up the first blonde girl that I saw, didn't fuck her in the backseat and forget her name once I came.
I didn't act like Dean, I mean.
But I felt different, a little more distant from the world. A little safer, too.
I had Dean at my elbow and a fucked-up purpose in life and that, for then, was enough.
