Bela awoke with a jolt, and with a sharp pain forming in her upper arm. It didn't take her long to realize that Dean had smacked her—hard—with the back of his hand in order to wake her up. He surely lacked for subtlety.
She glared at him.
"Wakey-wakey, eggs and bake-y, sunshine!" He said, a rather too loudly. He was doing this on purpose. Her head throbbed.
"Would you please shut up," she groaned, closing her eyes once again when the sunlight threatened to liquefy her eyeballs.
"'Please' doesn't pay the bills, Bela."
Bela clenched her jaw. It was going to take all her strength not to reach around and strangle Dean Winchester all to hell.
After a while, Bela finally spoke, her eyes still closed. "Where are we?"
"At a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere," he answered matter-of-factly.
She almost sighed with relief, despite the fact that she had a pounding headache and her back felt like it was broken in two. Even though the term "roadside diner" didn't exactly seem all that…clean, she was relieved to hear that she was finally going to be able to get that coffee that she so desperately needed. And maybe a bowl of fruit, or something that had a less chance of being spoiled when it arrived at their table.
"C'mon, I'm not gonna wait forever," he grumbled, shoving her in the shoulder in the same spot where he had hit her. She winced ever-so-slightly before churning her face into a scowl and carefully climbing out of the car, her back threatening to give out if she moved too fast.
Dean was already waiting for her on her side of the car. He laughed at her position. "You look like a seventy-two year old hag."
"Thanks," Bela sneered. She didn't know if it was just impatience or pity that drove him to assist her, but he let out a short sigh and moved to help her out of the car. He then looked her up and down once she was standing straight up, before scoffing incredulously.
"What?"
"Really?"
"What?"
"You look like the secretary of a business CEO. Or maybe the CEO herself, I haven't decided."
Bela rolled her eyes. "And you look like your name is Buck and you drive a car with flames on the sides. Does that make us even?" she snipped, her British accent making her sound extra businesslike, much to her displeasure.
Dean chuckled but didn't deign her with a reply, instead heading to the diner's main entrance. He practically left her in the dust, although this gave her an opportunity to study the roadside diner for herself.
And she immediately frowned.
The building was square, wood-paneled, and painted a booger green color, which was also chipping. The door was rickety, she could tell as Dean struggled to open it, and there were hardly any windows, or at least big ones, for that matter. To top it all of, or to make it worse, rather, there wasn't exactly an official name for the place, just a giant fifties-styled neon sign that protruded out of the ground and read nothing but the word EAT. Maybe the diner's name had been advertised on the sign at some point, but it was long gone by now.
Bela resisted the urge to shudder and quickly followed Dean inside. He was right. She was entirely overdressed for this place.
She found him in a booth at the far end of the restaurant, which (to her surprise) was relatively full of (not to her surprise) greasy-looking truck-drivers with pit-stained tank tops and raggedy jeans. Quite literally, almost every guest in the diner was wearing a dirty tank top and a pair of jeans.
After Bela wearily sat down, Dean grinned widely and clapped his hands together. "I like it!"
Before Bela could answer with a disgusted response, a young woman with short black hair and a relatively pretty face stepped in front of their table. She was wearing a red polo shirt and had a black apron tied securely around her waist. The image almost made Bela sputter with laughter, but she was too worried about what kind of germs lay in her seat to do anything but.
The waitress placed two menus in front of them before smiling broadly at Dean. Bela rolled her eyes.
"Can I get you two anything to drink?"
Dean opened his mouth to answer, but Bela beat him to it. Her voice was quick and sharp.
"Two coffees, thank you."
The waitress pried her eyes off of Dean's face for one second to glare at Bela. She simply smiled sweetly back up at the woman before watching her leave with satisfaction.
She ignored Dean's glare of annoyance (ha, that's what you get for waking me, she thought) and instead smiled humorously.
"Funny, isn't it?"
He furrowed his eyebrows. "What?"
"And here I thought you weren't all that daft," she said, rolling her eyes. "The waitress. She looks almost exactly how I did when we first met."
"Oh, and you tried to feel up my brother. I remember that," he nodded.
"I wouldn't exactly call it that. I just needed to get that rabbit's foot off of him. Which, I might add, wasn't very hard."
"Yeah, well, he had a right to be at least a little distracted," Dean said before immediately realizing what he had just implied, his neck turning a deep pink. Bela also instantly blushed, although she attempted to hide it by suddenly becoming increasingly interested on an invisible piece of lint on her sleeve.
After a good, five minute-long awkward silence, the waitress soon came back with their coffee, completely ignoring Bela and practically melting Dean with an (almost) pearly-white smile. He smiled back, of course, all-charm that he was, before unashamedly watching her behind as she left.
Bela kicked him under the table, causing him to sit up alarmingly.
"What?"
"Honestly, you are something else, Dean Winchester," she sighed, holding her cup up to her mouth.
"Takes one to know one, right?" he smirked.
And just like that, they were back to their usual conversation.
A half-hour later they were both hovering over their plates, although Bela was watching Dean shovel his food into his mouth with a look of half disbelief, half disdain scrawled all over her face. He had ordered a whole side of hash browns, a plate of bacon, a meat-lover's omelet, and a stack of toast. He was also halfway through his food already, despite having received it only less than ten minutes before. Bela had, in fact, ordered a bowl of fruit, although she also opted for an English muffin and a side of jam, and was now struggling to eat with the sounds that were coming from Dean's side of the table.
He also talked with his mouth full.
"So, a non-stop drive from New York to North Dakota is about twenty-six hours. However, sleeping in the Impala is out of the question. No matter how much I love her, sleeping in that car is a bitch." At this, he snickered at Bela, who rolled her eyes. Her back was still aching. "Anyway, sometime or another we're gonna have to stop and rest. We'll start looking for motels at around six p.m."
"Wait. It was barely sunrise, last time I remember. What time is it now?"
He checked his watch. "It's almost noon. So about six more hours to drive,"
Bela swallowed a piece of cantaloupe and sighed. "You know, if we'd only caught a plane, we could have been in North Dakota already."
"No."
"Why, afraid of airplanes, Dean?"
"No, distrustful of airplanes, Bela." He said her name harshly, almost like it hurt his lips to form the word. His struggle brought a smile to her face.
"Ah, yes," she said. "You. Always so distrustful of everything."
Dean shrugged. "Don't take it personal, sweetheart."
They soon finished their food and Dean called for the check. When the stiff—and oddly covered with old stains—piece of paper arrived at their table, Bela and Dean immediately went to grab for their wallets before leveling one another with a glare.
"Pardon me, I just figured that a diner like this was above your price range," she said, lifting a shoulder in a shrug.
Dean ignored her and slid out a blue credit card, reading the name engraved on the plastic. "It's not out of Theobald Sweeney's price range, I can assure you that." A smirk spread across his face as he pressed the card to the table and slid it towards the check. With a charming smile and a wave of a hand, the waitress was back at an instant.
She immediately picked up the card and read the name. "Theobald Sweeney. That's such an original name," she cooed, one of her eyes fluttering in what Bela presumed to be a wink before leaving with the card.
Bela rolled her eyes. "Theobald Sweeney," she muttered under her breath, staring out the window. "You couldn't have come up with something more realistic-sounding?"
Dean shrugged. "Sammy is Reginald Sweeney. We're the Sweeney brothers."
At the mention of Sam his smile faltered, but he quickly gathered himself together in time to return the waitress' broad beam. Bela watched him the entire time. Usually, when it came to other stuff that Dean was struggling with, and if Bela happened to be around him during those times, Dean was fairly good at keeping his usual façade intact. But she was soon beginning to realize that when it came to Sam or family in particular, things were drastically different.
She wished she could relate.
"Hey," Dean snapped his fingers in front of Bela's face, causing her to blink her thoughts away. "Mary Poppins. You ready to hit the road?"
Bela glared at his name-calling but slid out of the booth and got up nonetheless. Dean took this as her response and got up as well, downing the last of his coffee and checking his pockets to make sure that everything was where it was supposed to be—Sam's bottle included, Bela guessed.
She was just about to turn around and walk out the door when a slim man sitting at the breakfast counter caught her eye. He quickly glanced away from her, rapidly shifting his attention to an approaching waitress. Bela frowned, looking the man up and down. He certainly wasn't a truck driver, not in the kind of clothes that he was wearing—business suit, and a tailored business suit, at that—but before Bela could say or do anything in related to this out-of-place man, Dean stepped into her vision, looking in the same direction that she was.
"Hey, look. It's your business partner." He grinned.
Bela rolled her eyes. "Let's just go, yeah?"
Dean shrugged and walked past her. As she left, she couldn't help but think that the man in the suit watched her all the way until she and Dean got into the Impala and disappeared down the road.