This time Jo took the lead on being pissed off and not speaking to Dean, even when he put on a Blue Oyster Cult tape and treated her to a little off-key singing. She held onto her irritation all the way up until his stomach growled so loudly that she heard it over the music. Then she begrudgingly admitted that she was hungry too and would be glad to stop and grab a bite to eat.

Dean pulled off in what seemed to be the cutest little Mayberry town he had ever seen. It was one of those towns where you parked and then walked down the cobblestoned Main Street without any cars. As soon as he saw it, he thought about turning around and leaving, but Jo had looked delighted, so he had parked. They found a diner - charmingly named "Diner" if the sign was right - and got a table for two. The waitress gave him that flirtatious smile he usually liked until Jo called him "honey" and ordered for both of them. If she had been anyone else, he would have kicked her under the table. Instead, he heard himself chuckle.

"Put your claws away, Blondie. I'm not looking to get laid." He regretted his choice of words as soon as he said them. She met his gaze, and he felt the uncomfortable itch of knowing what they both were thinking. He played off a quick subject change, even as she rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly.

"I'm sorry I threw a fit about my car. It's not reliable, but it is mine."

"I understand. I'm just not having you die on my watch."

Apologies out of the way, they enjoyed dinner together. Dean couldn't remember the last time he had such a nice meal with someone. They laughed, passed the ketchup back and forth without arguing, and did not mention a single thing that went bump in the night. A couple times, their hands or knees brushed, and Dean did not miss the way she caught his eye each time, looking to him to see if he had noticed or if she was the only one electrified by physical contact. Over the last few hours, he had repeated a thousand excuses for himself: you're just lonely, you are just so grateful she's alive, you're just a guy, you are turned on by her having a crush on you. But no matter what excuse he tried, when he looked at her, he felt that stupid flip-flopping feeling in his stomach.

"So I've been thinking." She took a bite of her slice of cherry pie, turned the fork over, and slid it back into her mouth to get the rest of the filling off. He swallowed hard. "We should go see a movie."

"We need to get to Bobby's."

"You love movies, it's too late to do anything major by the time we get to Bobby's anyway, we walked past one on the way from the car to this diner, you owe me after making me leave my car behind… Do I need to keep going with my reasons?"

Dean tried to remember the last time he went to a movie. As a kid, whenever they'd had extra money, he had taken Sam to catch a flick, their pockets bulging with convenience store candy. Movies had kept Sam occupied for an hour, but Dean had been mesmerized. For two hours, a movie held the whole world at bay and took him somewhere else. Theaters had been a special treat, but after Sammy went to bed, Dean had spent a lot of nights binge-watching before binge-watching was a thing. Even middle school Dean had usually run on 4 or so hours of sleep, preferring to use his nighttime to cruise for fantasy or porn, whichever one he was lucky enough to find.

And of course, in later years, movies were the perfect place to make out with a girl without having your kid brother in the room.

"Is that silence a yes?" Jo slurped down the last sip of her Coke, a gesture so much less sexual than her pie eating that Dean said silent thanks for it.

Then he actually answered her question. "Sure. Why not? I haven't been to a movie in years."

"There's one called Inglourious Basterds that just came out. World War II. Want to see that one?"

Dean tossed a couple of bills on the table and stood up. He had seen Inglourious Basterds on FX one night with Sam and Bobby; Bobby had been particularly amused by the film, even though he had spent the first thirty minutes complaining about doing something as stupid and unproductive as watching a movie.

"Yeah. I've heard it's funny."

They walked side by side out of the diner and down the cobbled sidewalk, street lamps glowing above them. The air had surprising nip to it, and Jo tugged at her jacket, pulling it tighter around her body. They paid at the ticket booth, passed by the empty concessions stand, and entered an empty movie theater. The lights were still on, but not a soul was in there.

Something occurred to Dean. "What day is it?"

Jo grinned at him and then concentrated, tallying on her fingers. "Guess it's Tuesday."

Dean supposed he shouldn't be surprised to see that a movie theater at 9 p.m. on a September Tuesday in rural South Dakota would be empty. He let her pick the seats, a pair right near the middle, and when they sat down, his skin prickled with anticipation. Movie theaters and women… his response was practically Pavlovian. Rhonda Hurley, Jamie, Mary, Stacy Lowe, that random redhead he met at a hardware store… he had some rather happy, sometimes kinky memories in movie theaters. Rather than pretend the concept didn't exist, he tried acknowledging it casually.

"Man, this is a teenage dream. Empty movie theater, pretty girl. I've made out in some movie theaters in my day but was never lucky enough to have them empty."

Jo looked over at him, and he watched a blush creep its way across her cheeks. "I didn't suggest a movie to make out with you."

Dean hadn't actually thought she had, but he couldn't resist needling that pretty red flush.

"I'm sure you didn't. I mean, you've probably had your fill of this cliche. You told me the first time I met you how tired you were of the barroom fling cliche."

Rather than recognize his teasing, she answered him seriously. "Actually, I've never kissed anybody in a movie theater."

Dean turned his whole body in the seat to look at her even as the lights faded out and the commercials started.

"Never? What did you do in high school?"

"I worked behind the bar, got ignored at school, lost my virginity to Travis so it wouldn't be awkward…" She said it all in a rush, a little half-smile glowing in the light of the screen. That downright explained Dean's earlier feeling that he wanted to kick Travis's ass. She continued, "But really, I never got to have a lot of those experiences. I've gotten to have sex when I want it, but it hasn't exactly been the conventional dinner-and-a-movie route."

"I see." His voice sounded strangled to his ears, and he tried to push down the irritation he felt at the thought of her having sex with that bonehead park ranger.

"You're not going to make fun of me?"

"Nope." He said but immediately turned his words into a lie, "I'm just going to put my arm around you, so you can pretend you're on a date."

"Asshole." She didn't shrug his arm off though.

The commercials played through, the movie started, and Dean could not pay a bit of attention. His mind tumbled over her words. She had played it casually, sure, but he remembered high school for him and for Sam. He had been quick to let everything roll off his back, focused on hunting and his own cocky persona, but Sam had taken every moment to heart. He had wanted to be normal. Dean couldn't tell if he had heard that same wistfulness in Jo's voice or not, but he knew one thing: everyone should make out in a movie theater at some point.

He spared a glance over at her. Her eyes were intent upon the screen, but her hands rested on her thighs and her shoulders held just a little tension under his arm. He rubbed his thumb in a lazy circle on her shoulder, and her breath hitched just enough for him to know if he went in for the kiss, he wouldn't be rejected.

But he remembered the taste of her lips from another time and place. Her mouth had been cold the first time he kissed her, and the faint flavor of iron and sweat had lingered there. The haunting memory hung in the air around him.

Then she laughed at something on the screen. He didn't even look up to see what had made her laugh. Instead he watched the crinkle of her nose and the twinkle of her eyes in the light of the screen, and he felt the suddenness of just how she alive she was like a lightning bolt.

"You know," he said, leaning over to whisper in her ear, "on a date, the guy would start putting the moves on you right now."

She tilted her head towards him, and a smile crept onto her lips.

"What would the moves of a high school guy look like?"

Dean couldn't resist. "The moves of a high school guy or the moves I would have used in high school?"

"Is there a difference?" She zinged back, and he nodded.

"Definitely. See, if you weren't still in diapers when I was in high school…"

"You've got to be kidding me," she grumbled.

"And if I had taken you out for a movie," he continued, ignoring her, "I'd wait until just about now, and then I'd lean over and whisper something to you…"

He leaned over, putting his mouth beside her ear, and dropped his voice even lower. The moment hovered in balance between a joke and a move, and his pulse ratcheted up as he heard her breath quicken. He closed his fingers in the fabric of her jacket on the opposite shoulder, pulling her still closer to him.

"You have no idea how beautiful you look tonight," he whispered in her ear, and for all that he was being deliberately cheesy, he also knew it was true.

"Did that line work for you in high school?" She played coy, above it all, but he saw goosebumps rising across the little bit of visible skin near her collarbone.

Those little bumps of flesh, promising him that he electrified her, made him drop the joke. He took his arm out from around her and instead turned her body in the chair, cupping her face in his hands. Her molasses eyes asked him a question, and he nodded to them.

"This is probably stupid, but I want to kiss you," he said. As soon as he said it, she smiled, and he melted. She brought that smile to his mouth, and he realized she was kissing him first. The novelty of someone else's smile on his lips sent his insides skittering, and he pulled her closer.

First kisses have their own magic - and Dean had more of them notched on his bedpost than most men - but the sweetness of Jo's mouth, the insistence of her hands finding their way to the front of his jacket and tugging, and the heat of her skin under his fingers made him a teenager again. When she slid her tongue against his lips, he parted for her, and when he reached down to cop a feel, hand pressing into the softness, he felt the thrilling arousal as if he never had before. She arched into his hand and made the softest sound, a mew that went straight to his groin.

They kissed and groped and fumbled together for hot, beautiful minutes that made him entirely forget the joke upon which this had begun. If the armrest between them hadn't been digging into him, he would be stripping her down, pulling out any number of his patented panty-dropper moves.

She finally broke the kiss, just as she had started it, and she looked at him with swollen, wet lips, panting. The sight made him want to bury himself against her all over again, and he reached for her hand instead, gripping it just a little too tight. He could do the right thing, bring the joke back up, put that wall back up between them, but her proximity clouded all thought. Instead, he pulled her towards him.

"Come here."

She climbed onto his lap, and they put teenagers to shame with their pawing, groping desperation. He trailed his mouth down her neck, wrestled her jacket off of her, and even drew kisses along her shoulder. The tang of her deodorant and sweat in his nose, he nosed away the strap of her tank top and nipped at her bra strap. He tugged it with his teeth. She moaned and ground against him, and he saw stars. She pressed her fingers against his chest and drew her nails down as she sunk out of his lap to the floor below. He played the aggressor, the leader, in all of his sexual encounters, and the flipped script made his mouth dry. His skin now rippled in goosebumps.

On her knees, she reached for his belt, and his already-tight jeans suddenly needed release. He swallowed hard as he watched her blonde waves bobble as she loosened his pants. The shocking thought that his line had been accurate, that she was beautiful in a way he had never let himself notice, slipped through his mind, escaping his emotional lockdown before he could grab it and drifting out into the universe. The thought flew free and away from him until he lost any grip on it at all and it just became fact: he thought she was beautiful.

Jo tilted her head up to meet his eyes as she unzipped his fly, and her eyes on his as she took charge lit him up.

He had no patented moves at his disposal now, just the ability to watch her as the anticipation hammered in his veins. He drew in a ragged breath as she leaned forward to brush her lips along the waistband of his underwear, just grazing the skin, just barely touching him and yet sending his heart galloping in his chest. She dallied like she had all the time in the world, a thousand lifetimes to tease and toy with him, and if he had been able to regain control of his limbs, he would have scooped her back up and crushed her against him, kissed her senseless, taken back the situation.

Just when Jo had him so over a barrel he thought he was going to explode, a slice of light cut into the darkness from the back of the movie theater, and a creaky voice rang out over the movie itself.

"I'm old and don't much care what you do in my theater, but you should know teenagers run the reels and can see you. They're about to start taking bets on what's going to happen next."

Dean had never seen someone go from floor to chair so fast in his life. She buried her face in her hands, and he could practically hear the sizzle of red racing into her cheeks. He felt a rush of affection for anyone who could be about to blow him in a public place but could still get this embarrassed by it.

Then he realized he had been about to let Jo Harvelle blow him in a movie theater.

The brakes in his head slammed so hard they squealed.

Jo didn't speak through the rest of the movie, and Dean didn't push her. By the time the end credits rolled, though, he reached over to touch her hand.

"You had the full teen movie date experience, right down to the usher catching you and telling you to knock it off."

"Guess I did." Her voice was tight. She put her jacket back on.

The chilly air when they entered the theater earlier had become a full-blown cold snap, and Dean rubbed his hands together as they walked down the street back to where the Impala was parked. The silence between he and Jo felt awkward now, and he had no way of remedying it. They shouldn't have been making out like that in a movie theater. It was a stupid decision on every single level. He needed a sharp mind and clear head for what they had ahead of them, and he needed her to understand that he was supposed to protect her. Compromising that for a few sweaty minutes, no matter how much they had rattled something inside of him, was senseless. Yet telling her that what had just happened was senseless and shouldn't happen again… that thought made him want to jump off a bridge. She would take it the wrong way, like she meant nothing, when really the problem was that she meant too much.

He closed his eyes as he unlocked the passenger side door for her, remembering the smell of chemicals and burning flesh the day she had died. Lucifer's eyes glowing through his vessel as he absorbed the Colt's shot flashed in his mind. Dean had a job to do.

They started driving again, this time into long open road under velvety night sky. He loved nights like this with nothing but road and space ahead of him. Ghosts, demons, angels, vampires, and all the other creatures out there felt very far away when the Impala purred under him and no other headlights broke the landscape. This magic of the open road, very old and very beloved, could distract him from anything.

Jo must not have felt the same way, for after a while, she spoke up. He heard her intake of breath before she began speaking and braced himself for answering questions about what that meant and feelings and crap he didn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole.

"That was a mistake, Dean."

He tightened his hands on the wheel. "Excuse me?"

"It was just high-adrenaline situation stuff. The Apocalypse and all. It's just a version of the 'it's our last night on Earth' speech, only we didn't do a lot of talking…" Her voice bobbled before regaining its surety. He spared a glance over at her. "You know as well as I do how people act when they think they're going to die. They don't mean what they do. They just… act."

Dean squeezed his hands so tightly on the wheel that he felt his ring dig into his flesh. For some reason, he thought of his dad, standing there beside the hospital bed and telling him he was proud of him. The same man who never thanked his eldest for making sure everyone had clean socks or for scrambling eggs in the morning had suddenly acknowledged that failure.

He thought of himself singing "Dead or Alive" at the top of his lungs in the car, listening to Sam howl with abandon for the first time since he was a teenager. He thought of how even though he was about to go to Hell, he wanted nothing more than to see his little brother smile.

He thought of Sam when he went to say yes to Lucifer. His brother's resolute jaw had trembled as he said his goodbyes, but he had glistened with a strange pride as well, an unexpected hubris that allowed Sam to reach for greatness and ultimately, to trap Satan in a box in Hell.

He thought of Castiel, the brave, stupid angel who did not know whether to be human or God, trying to stuff souls back in Purgatory and hold back Leviathans, trying to save the world even though he knew he was doomed, the angel who had spent his last breaths trying to tell his friends that he would make it up to them.

He thought of Jo bravely telling them to go on without her, watching them build a bomb to blow her up, and he thought of kissing her goodbye because he could not imagine never seeing her again without having kissed her. Ellen had known she would die when she sat down beside her little girl and sent the Winchesters to kill the devil.

Dean thought maybe he knew a lot more about how people act when they think they're going to die than Jo did right now.

"I'm not worried we're going to die. I'm going to kick this Apocalypse's ass," Dean replied tersely, not sure how he could still breathe with so many memories of so much pain swirling in the car around him.

"Dean, be serious."

"I am being serious. I'm going to win. We're - humanity and all that - we're going to stop this thing."

"Okay," Jo readjusted in her seat and fiddled with the lapbelt. "That doesn't change what I'm talking about here. We made a mistake, gave into adrenaline, but we've got bigger fish to fry. If I don't treat myself with a little self-respect, how the hell am I going to convince you that you can't stop me from helping with this thing?"

"We'll talk about you helping when we get to Bobby's. That's an argument for another day." Dean pushed down on the accelerator and revved her up a little louder, the growl of his engine grounding him. He knew he should be agreeing with her about the steam between them being a mistake; that was the simplest, cleanest way out of this mess he was making of their friendship. But it stuck in his craw thinking that she saw it that way. He had not been reacting to adrenaline back there; he had wanted to kiss her, and he had. It was probably just simple attraction tacked onto friendship, it was definitely a bad idea to pursue it, but whatever else it was, it was real.

"As for tonight, we didn't make a mistake. We're two adults." He pulled a cocky grin that he didn't quite mean. "Two damn good-looking adults. Making out at least once is pretty much a requirement in a situation like ours. I'm not going to apologize for it. Doesn't mean I'm going to repeat it either. But I'm not sorry."

Jo seemed to like the sound of that. He glanced her way and saw her nibbling that bottom lip, trying not to smile.

"C'mon, Jo. Don't try to justify it with a bunch of psychology mumbo-jumbo. You know you're not sorry either."

The smile appeared now, and he felt it squeeze in his chest.

"Fine. I guess I'm not sorry. But it ain't happening again either. I'm a hunter, not some girl for you to run out on."

"Like you'd ever let me forget you think you're a hunter," he said slyly.

"Think I'm a hunter? Oh ho, listen here, buddy…"

As she wound up to give him a good tongue-lashing, Dean felt strange tendrils of happiness growing up through the tangle of anxiety, doubt, dread, and hope that battled in him daily.

He decided to take his own advice and not try to justify it with a bunch of psychology mumbo-jumbo.

They were only a few hours from Bobby's, and there, the work to save everyone he cared about truly began.