Supernatural FIC: "Mockingbird" 2/10; NC-17, het (Sam/OFC), angst
Title: Mockingbird (Chapter 2/10)
Author: hiyacynth
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, near-future fic, het; AU after "What Is and What Should Never Be"
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam, various OCs. Sam/OFC
Rating and Warnings: Story overall rated NC-17 for sex and thematic reasons. This chapter NC-17 for sex; also, beware of dark themes and cursing. Spoilers: Everything's fair game until the Season 2 finale, which didn't happen in this universe.
Word count (chapter): 8,937
Disclaimer: If nothing else, this story proves to me that I do not own the Winchesters. They own me. Hard. Apparently Kripke and Warner Bros. and the CW own them. I'm making no money here.
This is a ten-part story. Chapters will be posted on Mondays and Thursdays for five weeks.
Notes: The first six of my Winchester offspring go to liptonrm, baylorsr, kimonkey7, iamstealthyone, likethesun2, and cunien for all they've done to help me. This story is being posted first in spn_het_love as a response to their Challenge 8-the OFC-a-thon. The comm's great, so check it out!
Timeline Notes: This story was started in January 2007 and takes place in the summer of 2008. It projects a future (Jossed completely by "All Hell Breaks Loose") wherein the Big Battle with the Yellow-Eyed Demon occurred during (my brain's version of) Season 3.
Summary: Dean frowned and shook his head. Even if he wanted to, how could he start to explain what Sam was these days? He wasn't sure himself. He knew what Sam had been before the war. He had a pretty good idea of what Sam'd been during. And he knew Sam wasn't either of those things anymore.
Previous Chapters: Ch. 1
Mockingbird
Chapter 2: Wanna Do Right, but Not Right Now
"I swear," Arnie muttered from where he leaned in the corner of the bar, one elbow hooked around the Henry's tap, and stared dead-eyed at the Mariner's game on the overhead TV. "Any deader and we're gonna have to throw a wake just to get people in here."
"It's early," Jem said-the same thing she said a half-hour into every one of her Saturday-night shifts. "It'll pick up."
It better, she thought. Another week making more from her hourly minimum wage than in tips, and she was going to have to find something in Lincoln City.
Sure enough, by seven there were three tables and a booth filled with dehydrated jet skiers back from a day on the lake, a couple of lumberjack types and their brassy girlfriends, the sweet hippie family-Tanner?-with their tree-name kids, and toward the back, the two new guys from the motel.
The one who'd done the talking at the motel greeted her jauntily and ordered for both of them, big smile on his face-which was, admittedly, the prettiest face Jem had seen in town in a couple months. His brother, clearly the strong silent type, was intently reading the menu but looked up to listen keenly as she rattled off the list of beers on tap. He frowned when the other one ordered two pints of Workingman's Red, but didn't argue-just went right back to inspecting the menu, making no move to give it up.
"He's a reader," the smiley one said with a note of amused apology in his voice as he handed over his own menu.
Sometime after she'd cleared their burger plates and brought them a second round, Jem stood up from changing the MGD keg and found them leaning against the bar.
"Sorry, you need your check?" she asked, and Mr. Smiley shook his head. Mr. Stoic just watched stoically as his brother smiled some more.
"Nah, we're good." He put his empty glass on the counter, and the taller one did the same. "Just thought I'd save you a trip. Two more would be great. And when you get the chance, a coupla tokens for the pool table." He put two wrinkled dollar bills on the bar.
Jem pulled their beers, dug two tokens out of the lost-and-found box-no idea why Arnie kept them there-and added the beers to their tab. "The dealie jams sometimes," she said, "but if you give it a good whack right under the token slot, it'll release the balls." One day, she vowed, she would work someplace where she didn't have to explain how to get what you wanted out of machines that didn't work the way they were supposed to.
"'Kay," he said, but stayed where he was, sipping slowly at his beer. "Thanks for the tip on this place. Best burger I've had in a long time. Seems like a nice town, too."
Jem nodded, wishing he wouldn't try so hard. "It is. Small, but good people, great environment."
"Cool. I'm Dean," he told her for the third time that day.
"I remember," she said, giving in and flirting back just a little. "Dean and his gentle giant of a brother, Sam, who reads menus. Working for Curtis, staying a week to start, room ten. See? I was paying attention."
The other one, Sam, lifted his glass and watched some more, and Jem thought she might have seen the tiniest glimmer of a smirk at the edges of his angular, blank face.
Dean leaned over the bar, his mouth easing into a curvy smile, top teeth lining up between his lips like a string of pearls. "Very good. And you're Jem."
She nodded, noticing how pouty his green eyes were, how hard the curve of his shoulders was under his ugly plaid cotton shirt, how nicked and calloused his hand was around his glass. God, what was it about guys who worked with their hands?
"Jem," he repeated. "That's outrageous."
She stopped herself rolling her eyes just in time and let him finish the line he obviously thought he was the first to pitch her way.
"Truly, truly, truly outrageous." He waited expectantly, and Jem almost took pity on him. She had rules, though, and not dating guys who quoted the Jem and the Holograms theme song was way up top.
"Good one," she said dryly. "I have four older sisters. My dad was dead set on a boy."
"Your dad named you Jem because he wanted a boy?" Dean asked as his smile twitched in confusion.
Line 'em up, shoot 'em down, Jem thought and replied as she always did in this situation, "Yeah, well, Scout's a funny name for a girl." A tiny humming noise drew her attention away from Dean's perplexed look for a moment, and Jem was slightly startled to realize it had come from the brother.
Poor Dean still didn't realize he was being set up. "But Jem's a perfectly normal name for a boy."
"Coulda been worse, I guess," she said, moving in for the punch line she knew for sure he wasn't going to get. "I coulda been-"
"Dill."
The voice was low and rusty, and older than should have come out of Dean's silent brother, but the tight smile curving the right side of his mouth and the glint in his eye confirmed it was he who'd spoken.
Jem smiled back at him. "I usually go with 'Boo,' but you're right. Dill's even worse."
"'Specially for a girl. Boo's kinda cute."
Dean's beer sloshed when he clumsily set it down on the bar and gawked at his brother as if he'd started speaking in tongues.
Sam's smile widened to include the left corner of his lips and then went hard, taking his eyes with it. "Jesus, Dean," he sneered, "read a fucking book."
Rocking back from the bar, Jem looked uneasily between the brothers, who were suddenly bristling with tension.
"Right," Dean said in a short, tight voice. "I'm gonna go shoot some pool. Whyn't you give Oprah a call, see if she can join your little book club." He swept his beer off the bar with one hand, palmed the tokens in the other, and strode over to the pool table. The token slot jammed, and the thump he gave it carried across the room, followed by the clatter of the balls dropping into the pocket tube. He racked them with practiced grace and broke them violently, sinking three.
"Well," Jem said under the thick silence at the bar. "Gotta say, that whole exchange usually ends a lot less awkwardly."
Sam drew his eyes away from his brother and said matter-of-factly, "I run kinda low on the social graces these days."
"Happens to the best of us," Jem observed.
She looked him over more closely as he took another pull off his beer. He wasn't as classically pretty as his brother, but he'd gotten his fair share of whatever fortunate genes ran in their family. Up close, his shoulders were comic-book broad. He had great bone structure, a strong jaw punctuated by a pointier chin than his brother's but with the same matinee-idol cleft, and remarkable amounts of dark chestnut hair that made her heart tighten a bit. She suddenly wanted to touch it, test and compare its texture. When he raised his eyes and caught her looking, Jem held his stare, feeling heat bloom over her collarbones and up her neck.
"I can't tell what color they are," she said and moved to her left, trying to find an angle with better light.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Your eyes. Are they green, like your brother's, or brown?"
"I don't remember." He set down his pint, still two-thirds full, meandered back to the table where they'd eaten, stretched his legs across the facing chair, and watched his brother clear the last five balls from the pool table.
Dean whacked the balls out of the trap and racked them up again, sinking the second fifteen with clacks so sharp and loud they turned heads. He strode over to Arnie's end of the bar and traded a fiver for another set of tokens, calming considerably for his next game. He picked up a challenger the next time he racked the balls, one of the loggers.
The buzz of her phone in the back pocket of her pants pulled Jem away from the family drama her brush-off had unintentionally inspired, and she was grateful. Unless it was aimed in her specific direction, she had little use for testosterone-filled displays. This exhibit was pretty enough, she thought, casting one last glance at the stretch of Sam's legs and the curve of Dean's ass as he sank the seven and eased around the table to set up his next shot, but saying goodnight to Birdie was more important.
Several hours later, near closing, Jem leaned against the screen door to help the cool, fir-tinged night breeze push the ache out of her head, which was throbbing from the constant crack of the resin balls. Hearing Arnie's raspy cry for last call, she pushed off her heel, turned through the doorway, and ran smack into a wall of shirt. She yelped and bounced back, screen door hitting her on the ass and making her jump again.
"Jesus!" she gasped. "You scared the-" She looked up to find Sam towering over her, and the adrenaline that had startled through her system rushed to her chest. "You scared the crap out of me," she admonished, shaking her hand from her throat, where it had flown instinctively. "What're you…" She took a step back, not because she was afraid, but because she wasn't anymore. "Bathrooms are back toward the kitchen."
Sam rocked back a step but didn't move any farther, his eyes dark and smoky. A chunk of hair flipped out behind his ear, haloed by the light bulb over the men's-room door, so similar to Rob's that Jem couldn't stop herself. She reached up and smoothed the wing down, letting the tips of her fingers comb it flat, and then impulsively pressed her palm against the plane of his cheek. Surprised at herself, she pulled her hand back. Sam followed it, laying one of his hands at the base of her throat. The web of his thumb curved around her larynx and his fingers splayed across her clavicle, almost to her shoulder.
Jem's nerves jangled, and the skittery heat in her chest was sliding down her torso when Sam tipped his head to the side, almost like a curious Lab, and walked back toward the bar, leaving Jem swallowing hard and muttering under her breath about what passed for social graces these days.
**********
Sunday mornings were a bitch, and no doubt about it. Tony's closed at two, and Birdie simply did not care. She woke up at seven no matter how late Jem had been up, and was big enough now to climb out of her crib and toddle into her mother's room when she got bored, which was never later than seven twenty-two.
Jem rolled onto her back and hoisted her daughter onto the bed.
"When're you gonna be big enough to bring Mommy some coffee, baby bird?" she asked sleepily, but Birdie just spread herself over Jem's chest and buried her face in her neck. Jem ran her fingers across her dark curls, still baby-fuzz soft. Birdie mirrored the gesture, opening and closing her fist around a handful of Jem's hair.
There were definitely worse ways to wake up.
The first few weeks Jem had been at Tony's Birdie'd stayed over at Mandy and Curtis's, but Jem hated waking up without Birdie, and the thought of Birdie waking up without her. These days she keyed into the house by ten after two, gathered her daughter's sleeping body into her arms, and carefully picked her way across the gravel drive between the house and the motel and into manager's apartment where she and Birdie had been living for going on two years.
Birdie's hair-clasping turned to pulling, and Jem untangled her small fingers. "Okay, I get it."
"Cheerios," Birdie requested as Jem scooped her up and got out of bed.
At eight, showered and dressed, Jem unlocked and opened the lobby's sliding door, yanking the screen into place. She left both of the office's connecting doors open, giving her a direct path between her living room and the lobby, and did the dishes while Birdie played with her Duplo blocks.
Sundays were lazy, even if she was technically working all day. During the week, Jem and Mandy took shifts on office duty and housekeeping-she always made sure to get Birdie to a play group or out to the beach a couple times a week-but Sundays were the Curtis and Mandy's date day, and Jem stuck within hearing distance of the office's bell from eight till whenever they came home.
Jem was finishing off her second up of coffee at the kitchen table when a movement through the window overlooking the courtyard caught her eye. Across the pool, room ten's door opened. Dean stepped through, wearing the same ugly checked shirt he'd had on last night. He paused in the doorway, mouth moving, and then strode along the length of the pool, past the lobby door. A few seconds later, Jem heard the deep rumble of a car kick to life on the other side of her apartment wall.
Housekeeping on Sundays was always a treat because Mandy wasn't around to watch Birdie. Jem felt bad being grateful that they were having a slow week. Less than half of the motel's twenty rooms were filled, and there were only two check-outs scheduled. From the kitchen window, she could see three "Do Not Disturb" signs, including one on the new guys' room. That meant two full cleans and four touchups-not bad for a weekend.
Birdie was going through a phase where she wanted to help, which last week had ended with a set of hand towels in room seven's toilet. Jem had caught it before they'd gotten flushed, but fishing them out of the bowl had prompted her to find a new way of keeping her daughter busy while she cleaned. They spent the morning folding and taping bits of old boxes and paper towel rolls into a Birdie-sized vacuum cleaner.
Birdie took it for a test drive around the living room and then pulled it over to the office doorway, where she shifted impatiently from foot to foot. "C'mon. We gotta work."
"Keep your pants on, baby," Jem said. "We need shoes." Birdie made a face, but Jem insisted. "I know. I hate 'em, too, but rules are rules. We wear shoes when we clean."
Birdie allowed herself to be shod with less fuss than usual; the lure of her vacuum apparently overpowered her distaste for footwear. It also kept her from trying to wash the linens in the toilets, so Jem counted it as a double win.
When she'd finished in the last room, Jem pushed the housekeeping cart into the utility room and moved all the dirty linens into the bags for the service to swap for cleans on Tuesday. Birdie then earnestly restocked the cart's toilet paper supply while Jem replenished the towels and bedding.
"Good job, Mommy," Birdie said as Jem locked the cart away in the supply closet.
"Thanks, babe. You, too."
Back out in the courtyard, Jem noticed that room ten's door stood open. She gave her daughter's Pull-Up-clad rump a light swat. "You run and vacuum your room, okay? I'll be right there."
She followed Birdie and pulled the office door shut before heading back over to the supply closet and pulling out a couple of sets of towels and a roll of TP.
The DND sign still dangled from the knob of the open door, and the room was dim except for a trapezoidal stripe of light that fell across one of the beds. The tall brother, Sam, was leaning against the headboard with a book in his lap, long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, feet bare.
Jem knocked on the doorjamb.
"Hey," she called when he looked up from his reading. "I know you've got the Do Not Disturb on, but I saw the door and thought maybe you could use a restock."
His torso passed into the patch of sunlight as he sat up straight, the sharp angle of his cheekbone throwing a shadow over the place her hand had rested last night, and Jem felt that same, tight twang of attraction in her chest as he got off the bed and moved silently into the doorway.
"Here," she said, holding the pile of folded linens over the threshold. When he stepped forward to take them his face came fully into the daylight and Jem tipped her head back to get a better look. "Hazel," she concluded.
Sam's eyes narrowed, and a startlingly deep set of dimples popped out around his mouth as his lips stretched and flexed in and out of a brief near-smile of query.
"Your eyes," she said, stepping back from the door. "They're hazel."
He stared at her, and then one of the dimples reappeared, punctuating an actual smile this time. His skin was smooth, newly shaved; last night there'd been a slight prickle to it that had caught against the fine grooves of her palm and fingers. Jem felt the muscle in her lower arm twitch as it started to rise, but she caught herself. She couldn't leave Birdie alone in the apartment.
"I gotta go," she said, waving toward the office. "I'll see you around."
Sam nodded, and when Jem paused in the lobby door, she could see him in the doorway.
Birdie'd gotten her shoes off and was busy running her shoebox vacuum cleaner over the kitchen floor. Jem took a deep breath and blew it out as she scooped the tiny sandals up and tossed them back into the closet, shaking the disconcerting buzz out of her system and getting her head where it needed to be.
"What's for lunch, baby bird?" she called, and Birdie abandoned her cleaning to discuss the question.
Later, after they'd colored the cardboard vacuum with markers, put the laundry away, and read Whose Mouse Are You? three times, Jem wrangled Birdie into her crib for her nap.
As soon as the griping calmed down, Jem went out to the pool, letting the sun blaze down on her shoulders as she skimmed pine needles from the surface of the water. Sam's door was still open, she noticed, and about two minutes into her task she saw him move into the doorway. He sat, leaning against the right side of the door frame with his legs stretched out into the sun and his book spread face-down across his thighs, watching her.
Jem was sweating when she finished up, hot and thirsty and buzzing again. She threw a last look at Sam and went for the bag of quarters in the office, which she used to coax a couple of pops out of the machine in the laundry room. She cracked open her plastic bottle of Diet Coke as she stepped back into the courtyard and took a long, thirsty drink from it, watching the legs unfold from the doorway of ten. She went inside.
Either it'll happen or you're imagining it, she told herself, as she settled onto the overstuffed chair in her living room with her book. Nothing to do but wait to see which.
Her drink was almost gone when Jem saw a shadow fall across the connecting doorway. Sam leaned against the doorframe, barefoot under his green T-shirt and jeans.
"I got you a Coke," she said, laying her book aside. "I thought you might come out of your hidey-hole."
"I'm supposed to stay put. Read my book."
"What're you reading?" she asked as she stood up and walked over to him with his drink.
He held it up: Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True. "Dean got it for me. I don't think he knows what it's about."
"You're not going to cut your hand off, are you? Because that would be awkward."
"I don't know what I'm going to do."
She lifted her chin and held his gaze. "I bet you have a couple ideas."
She looked closely at him, and long. He was an odd one, no question. Intriguing. Obviously above-average IQ. She could feel his intelligence-she'd seen it in the flash that had passed between them last night, when he'd picked up her literary reference and run with it at his brother's expense-but he was off enough to make her wonder if there was something going on in his head other than being socially awkward. Jem's high school best friend's father had been bipolar, and there was something of his mercurial mood shifts in Sam.
The Coke bottle was sweaty with condensation. Jem shifted it to her other hand and pressed her cool, damp palm over the back of her neck.
"Hot today," she observed, holding the bottle out to him. "Doesn't usually get this hot out by the coast till July or August. Even then, just a few afternoons."
Sam stepped in closer, ignoring the Coke, and his hand closed on her wrist, fingers overlapping his thumb. God, he was huge. The push, the want pulsed through her, making her extremities throb and her insides ache. His other hand, his right, pressed against her throat and collar bones-the same gesture as last night, the same hot, heavy presence that cut off all Jem's logic processes.
The Coke slipped from her hand and bounced on the linoleum, and the plastic cracked, carbonated corn syrup hissing and fizzing on the floor. Jem didn't care. Her hand slunk around the back of Sam's neck, and she pulled, drawing him down and in. His breath was ragged against her neck as she stretched onto her toes and said into his ear, "Stay put a second. I gotta take care of a couple of things."
She went through the door to the lobby and put the "Ring bell for service" sign on the counter. Closing the office door behind her, she ducked hastily back into the apartment and made a dash for her bedroom, where she grabbed a strip of condoms out of the bedside table.
Sam hadn't moved when she got back. Jem pulled the office door shut behind them and set the condoms on the table next to the office's couch, closed the ugly brown curtains, and crossed her arms over her stomach, grasping the hem of her tank top and pulling it swiftly over her head.
Sam's eyes flared, wide open for just a split second, and he took a half-step forward. Jem watched his hands swing heavily next to his thighs, as if he were thinking about moving them but wasn't sure where they should go. She narrowed the space between them, caught his thick wrists in her hands, and looked up at him.
"I'm not wrong, right?" Jem asked. "This is what you thought you were gonna do."
Sam's eyes jumped from her face to her chest and back, and his Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and nodded. She lifted his hands to her waist and waited, palms growing sweaty on the backs of his hands, as his thumbs moved in small arcs over her bottom ribs. His fingers curled up and then he was touching her breasts, cupping, weighing, squeezing. Jem put her own hands to good use, lifting the hem of his T-shirt and tugging it up. He disengaged from her long enough to pull his shirt off, and then as quick as they could, their hands were back on each other. Jem's skimmed over the hard, pale expanse of his chest, pausing to trace the edges of the tattoo riding high on his breastbone-a green sun or flower, neatly outlined in black, with a black-lined star filling its center-before continuing down his torso, sliding along the angled muscles of his belly to the waistband of his jeans.
He mirrored her moves, lingering at the top of her shorts, but Jem urged his hands back up to her tits and stretched into them, exhaling appreciatively as his thumbs moved roughly over her nipples, pressing them into the edge of his palms. He released one, dragged his right hand up to her throat, her jaw, into her hair, pulled her head back. His teeth were on her neck, breath hot at the corner of her jaw. Jem shivered against his chest, whipped her arms around his narrow waist, dropped her hands down the back of his jeans, and pulled against his ass. She could feel his erection against her stomach, just as ready to go as she was, and moved her pelvis to rub it, thinking they were going to have to come back to this foreplay stuff another time. She didn't have the patience for it today.
Ducking from under his sharp teeth and grasping hands, Jem backed away from Sam and quickly popped the snap on her shorts, pushing them down her legs and impatiently kicking them and her panties to the side. Another step back and the arm of the cheap couch pressed against her legs, just above the knees. She sat and beckoned Sam.
"C'mere," she coaxed, and he didn't hesitate, though his head was tilting to the side again in that way that reminded her of a curious dog. She moved her knees apart as he approached and slid her hands up the sides of his jeans to pull him in nice and close. The skin on his belly was so pale that she thought it should have felt cool, but she could feel the heat coming off of him as she leaned her forehead against it and worked the buttons of his fly open. She tossed a look up at him before she went any further. He hadn't said a word since the small talk about his book, and she needed to be sure he was still with her.
He was still with her. Sam's eyes were hooded and dark under his long hair and heavy lids, but he was watching everything she did, intent, alert, poised. She could see the slightest tremor in his hands where they hovered at his sides, again, seeming unsure of where they were supposed to be, but badly wanting to be there. His mouth was cracked open, and he breathed shallowly through it.
"Okay?" she asked, just in case. When his bangs flopped as he nodded, she flicked her tongue around his navel and used her hand to free his cock as she pushed his jeans and boxers down. She watched the long muscles in his thighs slide over each other as he stepped free from his pants and pushed them aside, where they joined the small pile of her clothing against the door to her apartment.
The length of solid flesh, full and hot against her cheek, made Jem wish momentarily that she didn't have rules about this kind of thing. She missed the freedom monogamy had granted her, missed the days she could just close her mouth around Rob and work him until he popped. It was weird, she thought as she reached for the condoms on the table to her right, that she could think about Rob with another guy's dick nudging along her jawbone and not feel … What? Guilty? Treasonous? Slutty? But she was what she was. She'd enjoyed sex before Rob, and she hadn't stopped just because he wasn't around to have it with anymore.
The clammy weight of Sam's hands on her shoulders brought Jem out of her head-back to this couch, this guy, this condom slipping out of its foil. She slid her hand up and down the shaft and then eased the rubber over the head, lapping briefly at the soft skin near the base of him before chasing the ring made by her forefinger and thumb down his cock with her mouth. Lots of guys bitched about condoms, but she found that the visual of her mouth engulfing their dicks tended to preempt their complaints. Jem didn't take risks when it came to her casual sex. She had Birdie to think about, not to mention a full twenty times the self respect she'd had at seventeen.
Jem lingered, enjoying the feel of Sam in her mouth, the ragged breath coming out of him, the flex that was starting in his hips, the twitch of his balls under her fingers. On her shoulders, his hands squeezed and clenched, fingertips biting into her skin, digging into the muscle almost painfully. A fist grabbed her hair, and she lifted her head to see the want painted in broad strokes across Sam's face. She slid her arms up his sides and pulled him down as she leaned back, arching her back so that, still on the armrest, her hips tilted and opened to him. She reached back with one hand and grabbed at a pillow, stuffing it under her lower back while the other hand guided him in.
Her breath caught as Sam sank into her, pitching forward to catch his weight on his hands. Something slipped somewhere, and he lurched clumsily against her, deeper in, and it hurt and didn't hurt so much that her eyes stung. He stretched awkwardly on top of her, hunching his back to move, and Jem was just starting to understand the problem-he was a yard or so too tall for the couch-when he growled and slid his arms around her, under her back and ass, and heaved back and up, lifting her as easily as if she were a toy. Quick on the footsteps of the pain-not-pain, fear-not-fear sang through Jem's veins. God, she thought as he simply relocated her to a place of his choosing, he could crack me open like a Pixy Stix if he wanted to.
The thought left her head the moment Sam set her on the desk, carelessly swiping it clear of the mail and ledgers. The iron bands gripping her ribs loosened and his fingers loosely ringed her biceps as she leaned away, her arms sliding smoothly through his hands as she lay back. Sam followed her down, body pressed solidly against her now, hips moving slowly, hands clutching her elbows, sharp chin jabbing into the tendons at the join of her neck and shoulder.
Jem wrenched her arms free of his grasp and twisted her fingers into Sam's hair, pulling his head up so she could kiss him. His mouth was open and pliant against hers, and he sucked in a hard breath when her tongue slid over his, urging it into action. His hands clapped over her ears, tangling roughly in her hair, and he sped up his thrusting, tongue keeping time with his hips. She arched and lifted her ass, hooked one heel on the edge of the desk, and groaned softly into his mouth as they found that rare, happy angle that pumped some part of him-she didn't know or care what, except that it was solid and moving at just the right slant-firmly against her clitoris. Just as she was starting to gasp with it, Sam reared up, changing the approach, and Jem caught herself hoping he and his brother were staying more than a week because goddamn she could get used to the kind of fucking this might be if they learned the road a bit better.
The stimulation moved further out with Sam standing up, but Jem had never been a girl to hold someone else responsible for getting her off. She snaked a hand down her body and worked her clit under the pads of her fingers to keep up with Sam. He was watching her again; the tilt of his head was becoming familiar, the way he cued off her moves and reactions. His brows knit together, and she felt a rush of wet heat as he dropped his hand down to join hers. She backed her hand up and bit her lip as he flattened his palm over her hair and explored with the broad pad of his thumb. His mouth twisted up into that curly half-smile of his when she sucked in a breath, and then he folded his fingers into a loose fist and pushed the wide ridges of his knuckles against her, sliding them experimentally over her clit.
"Oh, yeah," she breathed, "like that. Like that, just … more."
There was more pressure, faster, and there was his body knocking his hand harder against her as he thrust, his finger bones tapping out a slippery, inexpert counter rhythm to the beat of his cock. Sooner than she expected, it undid her; all Jem could do was stare at Sam's hands, the scars across his knuckles, and let everything sweep her over the precipice.
A high, warbling groan spilled out of her mouth, and she hooked her arm over her face, sucking hard on the flesh at the inside of the joint so she wouldn't wake Birdie. Her body bucked and clasped, and Jem hooked her legs around Sam's thighs as she came, holding him fast, grabbing his hand and riding it until the spasms slowed and receded.
Jem let her legs drop and dangle loosely off the edge of the desk and forced oxygen into her lungs. She lifted her arm from her mouth, noting the hickey she'd given herself, and wrapped her hands around Sam's upper arms.
"Go on," she urged, rocking her hips. "You now."
He arched lazily, back curving like a waking cat, and then leaned forward again, his sweaty skin skidding over hers as he stretched his body over her and found the pace he'd set before she knocked them off track. He lifted her enough to get his arms around her and squeezed, holding her body still as he fucked her. Jem lifted her legs to the desk and then hitched them up and around his waist. His breath huffed against her ear, just a hint of voice behind it, and he was new to her, and quiet, and she wasn't sure where he was until it was right on top of them both.
Sam clutched her around the shoulders, one hand folded up and over, long fingers digging into the soft space at the center of her shoulder girdle, and it hurt, but it was so good, he was so strong, and there was so much of him, everywhere-on her and in her and around her. A vibration built in his chest and turned into a low, throaty growl, and Sam's hips pounded out an escalating rhythm that would leave her the very best kind of sore. A sharp pain shot through her as Sam hunched and quaked, his teeth glancing hard off her collarbone as he buried his cock in her cunt and his face in her neck, iron arms clutching and squeezing until her ribs creaked.
"Sam," she gasped, "you're crushing me."
He froze, pressure steady, and then shook his shaggy head as if to clear it and relaxed his grip, still panting into her hair. When they'd caught their breath, he lifted himself onto his elbows, and Jem frowned at the red smear on his chin. She wiped it off and contemplated the dark smudge across her thumb, then winced and gingerly touched her collarbone. Her fingers came away bloody, and she remembered his teeth.
"Sorry," Sam said hoarsely.
"It's okay. Easy to get carried away."
She shifted under him and he backed up further, giving her the space she needed to get her hand between them and hold the bottom of the rubber as he pulled out. He watched as she slipped it off, tied the knot, and tossed it at the wastebasket.
"Missed," he said, and went to correct her aim.
He looked just as nice from behind, she thought, all legs and back, a bit more of a butt than his jeans let on. There was a second tattoo just above the crack of his ass-another flower shape, red this time, with fewer petals, and its center ring was filled with a triangle inside of a square.
Jem sat up and hopped off the desk, the muscles in her legs and inner thighs protesting as she landed but doing their job in the end. Sam turned, wiping a hand over his face, down his neck, and she noticed a bright, ugly scar on his left bicep, red and shiny and new.
"All right?" she asked.
He nodded. "I'm hot. It's hot in here."
"AC's busted. Mandy's always on Curtis to fix it, but he's wearing his ass out at the shop, you know? Maybe now your brother's there, he'll get some time. I don't mind much. The one in my apartment works fine, and there's always the pool if it gets too bad."
She wasn't surprised when Sam cocked his head at her attempt at post-coital chit-chat. Probably another of those social skills he was struggling with.
"Pool sounds good," he said.
"I might grab a shower, myself." She was on her way over to pick her clothes out of the pile when she heard the office door open. "Sam?"
He was gone, and she heard the sliding-glass door creak along its track. Jem pulled a gap in the curtain, standing to the side to avoid flashing any guests, and watched as Sam swung a leg over the knee-high iron fence that ran around the pool and made a shallow racing dive into the water, butt naked. He took the first length and a half under water, surfaced with a gulping breath, and launched into a nice, clean freestyle. Four long strokes brought him back to the near end of the pool, where he somersaulted and headed away again.
"Okay. Why don't you take a swim, then," she said, letting the curtain fall shut.
Jem plucked her shorts, panties, and tank top from under Sam's clothes and went through to her place, where she rinsed off in a quick, cool shower. Then she threw on fresh clothes, grabbed the baby monitor and her book, and scooped up Sam's stuff on her way out to enjoy the late-afternoon sun.
**********
Dean was in love with Bell's Garage. Flat out, tits-deep in love with the setup of the place, the near-compulsive arrangements of tools that let you lay hands on exactly what you wanted the minute you needed it, the smooth, even sound of machinery that Curtis Tate kept clean and running right. He loved everything about it. But most of all, Dean thought as he slid into the Impala's driver's seat and turned the key, he loved his girl. And by the way she was purring at him, his girl loved him right back.
Just like he'd thought, she just needed some attention. He'd spent a solid six hours pampering her-oil change, fluids flushed and refilled, hoses checked, changed, tightened. The works, just like he and Dad used to do every time they swung through Bobby's until the falling out and accompanying shotgun incident. They'd made due after that, but there was nothing like an uninterrupted day in a full-service body shop.
Dean hit the grocery store on the way out of town, dropping forty bucks on the cheapest staples he could find: spaghetti, sauce, bread, peanut butter, jelly, eggs, milk, beer, a thing of ranch, and two heads of some fancy lettuce that was on sale, seeing as how he couldn't remember the last fresh vegetable they'd eaten. Somehow he didn't think the pickles and tomato on the burgers last night counted.
It was nearly four when he got back to the motel, and hot, and Dean was thinking about not a lot more than a cool shower and a cold beer before boiling up a mess of spaghetti for dinner. The cheap plastic grocery bags were stretching over his wrists, threatening to snap, as he headed into the courtyard. He nodded politely to Jem the desk-clerk-slash-bartender, who was lounging near the pool in shorts and a one-piece bathing suit, watching some guy swim comically short laps in the not-quite-rectangular pool. He keyed his way into the room and swung the groceries onto the formica table in the room's tiny kitchenette, calling Sam's name as he pulled the door shut against the late-afternoon heat. No response.
The air conditioner puffed loudly, and the chilly air blowing across the otherwise quiet room made the hair on Dean's neck and arms stand up as he crossed the room, pocketing the keys as he went.
"Sam, you in there?" Dean rapped on the bathroom door then pushed it open, but the room was empty. "Goddamn it," he muttered, running his hand over his head, smoothing over the cold fear plucking at the inside of his ribs. "What part of 'stay the fuck put' do you not get?"
It's not happening again, Dean told himself. It's not. There hadn't been any signs. Except Sam's dream the other day, but that wasn't a sign, it was a dream, Bobby said. Probably nothing. No real signs-no storms or cattle deaths or freaky demonoid birthmarks popping up on Sam's arm. There was just a pair of rumpled beds in an empty motel room in Otis, Oregon.
Just like the pair of beds in an empty motel in Tulsa on the twenty-ninth of February. Fucking leap year.
It's not happening, Dean repeated to himself, pulling his shit together. You're overreacting. Sam's doing laundry, getting himself a Coke, something.
Dean stepped back outside and scanned the pool area again. He tried to look casual as he strolled up the lobby-end of the pool, planting a boot on the lower rail of the fence and leaning in a little to call to Jem.
"Hey again. How's it going?"
"Enjoying the view," she answered. The battered deck chair creaked as she shifted to look up at him, shading her eyes with her hand.
"Yeah, nice day. Hey, you seen my brother around? Tall guy, way too much hair, chock full of witty literary references?"
She scratched idly at a Band-Aid at the bottom of her neck. "Sam."
"Yeah, Sam. Seen him?"
Her tanned face spread into a sly smile, and she tipped her head back toward the pool. "Did I not mention the view?"
Dean followed her gaze to the guy swimming laps, noticing for the first time the freakishly long arms and mass of dark hair. Sam came up on the end of his lap fast and whipped his body into a neat flip turn, and Dean's mouth dropped open, the rush of relief quickly overtaken by horrified disbelief.
"Jesus, Sam!" he yelled. "The hell're you doing? Put some pants on!"
Jem's slow laugh drew his attention away from Sam, whose steady, clean stroke didn't even hitch at Dean's outburst.
"Says he doesn't have a suit. But he really, really felt like a swim. Who'm I to argue with determination like that?"
Dean pulled his eyes away from the pool before they started bleeding and looked back at Jem, who didn't seem bothered at all by the motel's skinny-dipper. Rather, as she'd said, she seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the scenery, which was downright unsettling for more than a few reasons.
A crackling noise interrupted the steady slap and splash of Sam's strokes, and Jem leaned over the arm of her chair to pick up what Dean had thought was a cordless phone but appeared to be some sort of walkie-talkie. It was whining.
"Be right back," she said, standing up and coming over to him. She opened a gate Dean hadn't noticed and meandered into the lobby.
Dean scratched his head, not sure what to do. Sam obviously wasn't going to drown without a lifeguard, but it didn't seem right to leave him out here to traumatize the guests. He stepped through the gate and tried yelling at Sam again as he closed in on the end of his next lap, but Sam either didn't hear or was ignoring him. Finally, Dean dropped into Jem's abandoned deck chair, figuring the least he could do was steer off anyone who came out to swim.
After six more of Sam's out-and-backs, Jem reappeared, trailing a little girl in a sagging pink bathing suit by the hand. Jem stooped to open the gate, led the girl through, and closed it behind them. They headed straight over to the baby pool-a ten-by-ten square of foot-deep water in the corner of the fenced-off area-where Jem caught the kid under the arms and lowered her into the water, then sat on the edge and dropped her feet in.
Dean stared for a minute, mentally rearranging the assumptions he'd made about Jem, considered his options, and then went to join them, figuring it was a better view than Sam's scrawny, naked ass. The kid was earnestly trying to sink a plastic boat with a ball.
"Cute kid. She yours?" he asked idly, casting a reassessing glance over her, thinking she was probably a little older than he'd thought yesterday-twenty-four, twenty-five-the pigtails and cargo shorts made her look younger. He looked enviously at Jem's bare, wet feet, at the little girl splashing in the pool. His feet were starting to cook in his boots.
"Yep," Jem answered. "Say 'hey,' Birdie."
The girl's dark head lifted and she looked back and forth between her mother and Dean and then waved and went back to her toys.
"Birdie, huh?" Dean repeated. "That another book-club secret-handshake name?"
Jem's gray eyes crinkled as she smiled. "Nope. Her dad was a forestry major. Rob."
Dean tipped his head and squinted at her. "You ever just give a straight answer?" he asked, and Jem laughed, making her daughter pause in her attack on SpongeBob's speedboat.
"Once in a while," she conceded. "The doctor told us we were having a boy. We were gonna name him after Rob and his dad. Didn't put any thought into other names, so when she turned out to be a girl, Rob just punted. But, you know. Roberta's gotta be the ugliest name on the planet, and Rob liked birds. So, Birdie."
Dean smiled, nodding. "Got it. Cute name." They watched her sit on the bottom of the pool, completely at ease with the water coming up to her shoulders. "How old is she?"
"Turns three in October."
"Fun age," Dean said, thinking how much more entertaining Sam had become when he'd finally started doing things-playing with toys instead of just gnawing them to death, talking, sucking at hide-and-seek but begging to play anyway. Personality asserting itself, for better or worse. He missed the weird little kid Sam used to be. Missed the way Sam used to chant along with him as he practiced his Latin on the copy of Cattus Petasatus Jefferson had given them for Christmas. Dean didn't think The Cat in the Hat was funny in Latin, but Sam would pitch three kinds of a fit if Dean tried to read it in English. Christ, the kid had translated The Lorax for himself before he was nine. Dean could still see their beat-up copy of the book, lines of Sam's chalkboard-perfect printing stretching across the Truffula Trees.
"Yeah. It's weird," Jem said, drawing Dean's focus back to the kiddie pool. "She still feels like a baby to me, even though she's running around, climbing like a monkey, getting into everything she can."
"Guess it's normal a parent would feel like that. Hell, sometimes I look at Sam there and still see..." He caught himself and steered the conversation back to more solid ground. "What's her dad say?"
"Nothing these days. He's gone," she supplied in a neutral tone Dean recognized as coming from practice discussing touchy topics with strangers.
"Took off, huh? That sucks."
"He didn't leave." Her tone was just as neutral as before, but she shot him a narrow-eyed look. "He died."
Dean grimaced at his flub. "Sorry. That sucks, too." There was something about Jem's straightforward, no-bullshit approach that Dean appreciated, that prompted him to give her something of it back. "I've been there."
She squinted as she looked at him, frowning a little. "Your wife died?"
Dean corrected himself. "No, no wife. Our mom, when we were little. It's rough."
Jem's gaze rested on him for a moment longer, then she turned her head to the bigger pool, where Sam's arms were wind-milling like he'd never run out of steam.
"We do okay," Jem said, scooping up her daughter's ball as it floated into her shin. "Don't we, Birdie?"
Birdie hauled herself back to her feet and slapped her hands on the water, yelling, "Catch!" Jem tossed the ball in a low, easy arc that bounced gently against Birdie's potbelly. The little girl grabbed the ball and chucked it imprecisely. Dean leaned left and caught it before it could roll across the cement. Birdie eyed him and repeated, "Catch," so he threw it into a high curve that dropped the ball directly onto the top of her head. It bounced once and dropped into the water in front of her. She blinked at him twice and then burst out laughing.
The rhythm from the other pool broke, and Dean looked past Jem to see Sam push off the bottom and swing himself onto the deck. Three long strides and he was swinging a leg-and some other stuff Dean squeezed his eyes shut to avoid seeing too much of-over the fence. Jem was watching, too, and when the door to room ten closed she turned back to Dean and cocked an amused eyebrow.
"Last skinny-dipper we had wasn't in nearly as good shape," she observed, and Dean frowned.
"Hey." He made sure to keep his voice light. "That's my kid brother you're gawking at."
"So I recall."
Dean scratched his head. She was a strange one. "You come out to ogle guests often?"
She shaded her eyes and looked up at him with a shrug. "Birdie and I swim every afternoon. I can't help it if your brother felt like putting on a show."
"Well," Dean said. "Guess I better pick him up some trunks, huh?"
"Probably a good idea," she agreed. "I don't mind overly, but the family in eight might not appreciate it as much."
There was a familiar-looking pair of jeans in a tangled pile of clothes at the corner of the pool nearest the office. "Those his?" Dean asked, pushing off his palm to get to his feet.
"Yep."
"Okay." He stood there for another awkward moment, and then stooped to gather up Sam's clothes. "Nice talkin' with you." When he straightened up, Jem was swinging a dripping Birdie onto her hip.
"Bye," Birdie said, waving.
"See ya 'round, kiddo."
He was through the gate and halfway to their room when Jem called after him. He waited while she rounded the pool's corner and caught up with him.
"Sam's book," she said, handing it over the fence. "You going to Tony's tonight?"
He shook his head. "Planned on staying in." They were down to their last thirty bucks cash. "Why? You on?"
"Not till Wednesday. You should come by then. There's a trucker whose route brings him through nearly every week. Larry. Thinks he's hot shit at the pool table, likes to take money from people."
Dean eyed her steadily. "And you're telling me this because…"
She gave him a scornful look. "You think I don't know an off-duty hustler when I see one? Please."
He scratched the back of his neck and waited to see where she was taking this.
"Listen, leave the weekend crowds alone-they're locals. But the truckers? As long as you don't let them catch on, they're great marks."
Dean's mouth curved thoughtfully as he nodded. "Okay. Good to know. Thanks."
"No problem. Just remember to tip your waitress."
He tossed her a little salute of a wave and started toward the room, hoping Sam had put the time to use getting dressed.
"Hey, and Dean?"
He turned around again.
"You might wanna… I'm not being snotty, I promise. But that book. You might wanna check out the first chapter or so."
Dean frowned down at the infants lying face-to-face on the book's cover.
"I think Sam thinks it's… significant, or ironic or something."
His frown deepened. "Sam talked to you about his book?" he asked, raising a suspicious eyebrow at her. This afternoon was getting weirder and weirder.
"Only in passing, but…" Birdie was struggling to get down, and Jem shifted her to her other hip. "Give it a look." The little girl went boneless on her-classic passive-resistance mode-and Jem caught her under the knees as she started to slide down her body. "Hungry, baby?"
"Macencheese, please."
Jem shrugged at Dean. "I gotta go. See you around."
Dean watched them go then opened the book, flipped through a dozen pages of reviews and acknowledgements and crap, and settled on Chapter One, which he read leaning more and more heavily against the doorframe of his and Sam's room, stomach growing cold and hard in his belly, until the crazy twin hacked his own hand off in the public library.
"Nice fucking book club."
**********
Chapter 3: Just an Anchor on My Heart
AN: Yep, I have a "Mockingbird" soundtrack, and yep, my chapter titles come from it. This chapter's title is from Gillian Welch's "Look at Miss Ohio." Full soundtrack will be posted at the end of the story, with links and cover art because I'm a huge dork.
Author: hiyacynth
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, near-future fic, het; AU after "What Is and What Should Never Be"
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam, various OCs. Sam/OFC
Rating and Warnings: Story overall rated NC-17 for sex and thematic reasons. This chapter NC-17 for sex; also, beware of dark themes and cursing. Spoilers: Everything's fair game until the Season 2 finale, which didn't happen in this universe.
Word count (chapter): 8,937
Disclaimer: If nothing else, this story proves to me that I do not own the Winchesters. They own me. Hard. Apparently Kripke and Warner Bros. and the CW own them. I'm making no money here.
This is a ten-part story. Chapters will be posted on Mondays and Thursdays for five weeks.
Notes: The first six of my Winchester offspring go to liptonrm, baylorsr, kimonkey7, iamstealthyone, likethesun2, and cunien for all they've done to help me. This story is being posted first in spn_het_love as a response to their Challenge 8-the OFC-a-thon. The comm's great, so check it out!
Timeline Notes: This story was started in January 2007 and takes place in the summer of 2008. It projects a future (Jossed completely by "All Hell Breaks Loose") wherein the Big Battle with the Yellow-Eyed Demon occurred during (my brain's version of) Season 3.
Summary: Dean frowned and shook his head. Even if he wanted to, how could he start to explain what Sam was these days? He wasn't sure himself. He knew what Sam had been before the war. He had a pretty good idea of what Sam'd been during. And he knew Sam wasn't either of those things anymore.
Previous Chapters: Ch. 1
Mockingbird
Chapter 2: Wanna Do Right, but Not Right Now
"I swear," Arnie muttered from where he leaned in the corner of the bar, one elbow hooked around the Henry's tap, and stared dead-eyed at the Mariner's game on the overhead TV. "Any deader and we're gonna have to throw a wake just to get people in here."
"It's early," Jem said-the same thing she said a half-hour into every one of her Saturday-night shifts. "It'll pick up."
It better, she thought. Another week making more from her hourly minimum wage than in tips, and she was going to have to find something in Lincoln City.
Sure enough, by seven there were three tables and a booth filled with dehydrated jet skiers back from a day on the lake, a couple of lumberjack types and their brassy girlfriends, the sweet hippie family-Tanner?-with their tree-name kids, and toward the back, the two new guys from the motel.
The one who'd done the talking at the motel greeted her jauntily and ordered for both of them, big smile on his face-which was, admittedly, the prettiest face Jem had seen in town in a couple months. His brother, clearly the strong silent type, was intently reading the menu but looked up to listen keenly as she rattled off the list of beers on tap. He frowned when the other one ordered two pints of Workingman's Red, but didn't argue-just went right back to inspecting the menu, making no move to give it up.
"He's a reader," the smiley one said with a note of amused apology in his voice as he handed over his own menu.
Sometime after she'd cleared their burger plates and brought them a second round, Jem stood up from changing the MGD keg and found them leaning against the bar.
"Sorry, you need your check?" she asked, and Mr. Smiley shook his head. Mr. Stoic just watched stoically as his brother smiled some more.
"Nah, we're good." He put his empty glass on the counter, and the taller one did the same. "Just thought I'd save you a trip. Two more would be great. And when you get the chance, a coupla tokens for the pool table." He put two wrinkled dollar bills on the bar.
Jem pulled their beers, dug two tokens out of the lost-and-found box-no idea why Arnie kept them there-and added the beers to their tab. "The dealie jams sometimes," she said, "but if you give it a good whack right under the token slot, it'll release the balls." One day, she vowed, she would work someplace where she didn't have to explain how to get what you wanted out of machines that didn't work the way they were supposed to.
"'Kay," he said, but stayed where he was, sipping slowly at his beer. "Thanks for the tip on this place. Best burger I've had in a long time. Seems like a nice town, too."
Jem nodded, wishing he wouldn't try so hard. "It is. Small, but good people, great environment."
"Cool. I'm Dean," he told her for the third time that day.
"I remember," she said, giving in and flirting back just a little. "Dean and his gentle giant of a brother, Sam, who reads menus. Working for Curtis, staying a week to start, room ten. See? I was paying attention."
The other one, Sam, lifted his glass and watched some more, and Jem thought she might have seen the tiniest glimmer of a smirk at the edges of his angular, blank face.
Dean leaned over the bar, his mouth easing into a curvy smile, top teeth lining up between his lips like a string of pearls. "Very good. And you're Jem."
She nodded, noticing how pouty his green eyes were, how hard the curve of his shoulders was under his ugly plaid cotton shirt, how nicked and calloused his hand was around his glass. God, what was it about guys who worked with their hands?
"Jem," he repeated. "That's outrageous."
She stopped herself rolling her eyes just in time and let him finish the line he obviously thought he was the first to pitch her way.
"Truly, truly, truly outrageous." He waited expectantly, and Jem almost took pity on him. She had rules, though, and not dating guys who quoted the Jem and the Holograms theme song was way up top.
"Good one," she said dryly. "I have four older sisters. My dad was dead set on a boy."
"Your dad named you Jem because he wanted a boy?" Dean asked as his smile twitched in confusion.
Line 'em up, shoot 'em down, Jem thought and replied as she always did in this situation, "Yeah, well, Scout's a funny name for a girl." A tiny humming noise drew her attention away from Dean's perplexed look for a moment, and Jem was slightly startled to realize it had come from the brother.
Poor Dean still didn't realize he was being set up. "But Jem's a perfectly normal name for a boy."
"Coulda been worse, I guess," she said, moving in for the punch line she knew for sure he wasn't going to get. "I coulda been-"
"Dill."
The voice was low and rusty, and older than should have come out of Dean's silent brother, but the tight smile curving the right side of his mouth and the glint in his eye confirmed it was he who'd spoken.
Jem smiled back at him. "I usually go with 'Boo,' but you're right. Dill's even worse."
"'Specially for a girl. Boo's kinda cute."
Dean's beer sloshed when he clumsily set it down on the bar and gawked at his brother as if he'd started speaking in tongues.
Sam's smile widened to include the left corner of his lips and then went hard, taking his eyes with it. "Jesus, Dean," he sneered, "read a fucking book."
Rocking back from the bar, Jem looked uneasily between the brothers, who were suddenly bristling with tension.
"Right," Dean said in a short, tight voice. "I'm gonna go shoot some pool. Whyn't you give Oprah a call, see if she can join your little book club." He swept his beer off the bar with one hand, palmed the tokens in the other, and strode over to the pool table. The token slot jammed, and the thump he gave it carried across the room, followed by the clatter of the balls dropping into the pocket tube. He racked them with practiced grace and broke them violently, sinking three.
"Well," Jem said under the thick silence at the bar. "Gotta say, that whole exchange usually ends a lot less awkwardly."
Sam drew his eyes away from his brother and said matter-of-factly, "I run kinda low on the social graces these days."
"Happens to the best of us," Jem observed.
She looked him over more closely as he took another pull off his beer. He wasn't as classically pretty as his brother, but he'd gotten his fair share of whatever fortunate genes ran in their family. Up close, his shoulders were comic-book broad. He had great bone structure, a strong jaw punctuated by a pointier chin than his brother's but with the same matinee-idol cleft, and remarkable amounts of dark chestnut hair that made her heart tighten a bit. She suddenly wanted to touch it, test and compare its texture. When he raised his eyes and caught her looking, Jem held his stare, feeling heat bloom over her collarbones and up her neck.
"I can't tell what color they are," she said and moved to her left, trying to find an angle with better light.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Your eyes. Are they green, like your brother's, or brown?"
"I don't remember." He set down his pint, still two-thirds full, meandered back to the table where they'd eaten, stretched his legs across the facing chair, and watched his brother clear the last five balls from the pool table.
Dean whacked the balls out of the trap and racked them up again, sinking the second fifteen with clacks so sharp and loud they turned heads. He strode over to Arnie's end of the bar and traded a fiver for another set of tokens, calming considerably for his next game. He picked up a challenger the next time he racked the balls, one of the loggers.
The buzz of her phone in the back pocket of her pants pulled Jem away from the family drama her brush-off had unintentionally inspired, and she was grateful. Unless it was aimed in her specific direction, she had little use for testosterone-filled displays. This exhibit was pretty enough, she thought, casting one last glance at the stretch of Sam's legs and the curve of Dean's ass as he sank the seven and eased around the table to set up his next shot, but saying goodnight to Birdie was more important.
Several hours later, near closing, Jem leaned against the screen door to help the cool, fir-tinged night breeze push the ache out of her head, which was throbbing from the constant crack of the resin balls. Hearing Arnie's raspy cry for last call, she pushed off her heel, turned through the doorway, and ran smack into a wall of shirt. She yelped and bounced back, screen door hitting her on the ass and making her jump again.
"Jesus!" she gasped. "You scared the-" She looked up to find Sam towering over her, and the adrenaline that had startled through her system rushed to her chest. "You scared the crap out of me," she admonished, shaking her hand from her throat, where it had flown instinctively. "What're you…" She took a step back, not because she was afraid, but because she wasn't anymore. "Bathrooms are back toward the kitchen."
Sam rocked back a step but didn't move any farther, his eyes dark and smoky. A chunk of hair flipped out behind his ear, haloed by the light bulb over the men's-room door, so similar to Rob's that Jem couldn't stop herself. She reached up and smoothed the wing down, letting the tips of her fingers comb it flat, and then impulsively pressed her palm against the plane of his cheek. Surprised at herself, she pulled her hand back. Sam followed it, laying one of his hands at the base of her throat. The web of his thumb curved around her larynx and his fingers splayed across her clavicle, almost to her shoulder.
Jem's nerves jangled, and the skittery heat in her chest was sliding down her torso when Sam tipped his head to the side, almost like a curious Lab, and walked back toward the bar, leaving Jem swallowing hard and muttering under her breath about what passed for social graces these days.
**********
Sunday mornings were a bitch, and no doubt about it. Tony's closed at two, and Birdie simply did not care. She woke up at seven no matter how late Jem had been up, and was big enough now to climb out of her crib and toddle into her mother's room when she got bored, which was never later than seven twenty-two.
Jem rolled onto her back and hoisted her daughter onto the bed.
"When're you gonna be big enough to bring Mommy some coffee, baby bird?" she asked sleepily, but Birdie just spread herself over Jem's chest and buried her face in her neck. Jem ran her fingers across her dark curls, still baby-fuzz soft. Birdie mirrored the gesture, opening and closing her fist around a handful of Jem's hair.
There were definitely worse ways to wake up.
The first few weeks Jem had been at Tony's Birdie'd stayed over at Mandy and Curtis's, but Jem hated waking up without Birdie, and the thought of Birdie waking up without her. These days she keyed into the house by ten after two, gathered her daughter's sleeping body into her arms, and carefully picked her way across the gravel drive between the house and the motel and into manager's apartment where she and Birdie had been living for going on two years.
Birdie's hair-clasping turned to pulling, and Jem untangled her small fingers. "Okay, I get it."
"Cheerios," Birdie requested as Jem scooped her up and got out of bed.
At eight, showered and dressed, Jem unlocked and opened the lobby's sliding door, yanking the screen into place. She left both of the office's connecting doors open, giving her a direct path between her living room and the lobby, and did the dishes while Birdie played with her Duplo blocks.
Sundays were lazy, even if she was technically working all day. During the week, Jem and Mandy took shifts on office duty and housekeeping-she always made sure to get Birdie to a play group or out to the beach a couple times a week-but Sundays were the Curtis and Mandy's date day, and Jem stuck within hearing distance of the office's bell from eight till whenever they came home.
Jem was finishing off her second up of coffee at the kitchen table when a movement through the window overlooking the courtyard caught her eye. Across the pool, room ten's door opened. Dean stepped through, wearing the same ugly checked shirt he'd had on last night. He paused in the doorway, mouth moving, and then strode along the length of the pool, past the lobby door. A few seconds later, Jem heard the deep rumble of a car kick to life on the other side of her apartment wall.
Housekeeping on Sundays was always a treat because Mandy wasn't around to watch Birdie. Jem felt bad being grateful that they were having a slow week. Less than half of the motel's twenty rooms were filled, and there were only two check-outs scheduled. From the kitchen window, she could see three "Do Not Disturb" signs, including one on the new guys' room. That meant two full cleans and four touchups-not bad for a weekend.
Birdie was going through a phase where she wanted to help, which last week had ended with a set of hand towels in room seven's toilet. Jem had caught it before they'd gotten flushed, but fishing them out of the bowl had prompted her to find a new way of keeping her daughter busy while she cleaned. They spent the morning folding and taping bits of old boxes and paper towel rolls into a Birdie-sized vacuum cleaner.
Birdie took it for a test drive around the living room and then pulled it over to the office doorway, where she shifted impatiently from foot to foot. "C'mon. We gotta work."
"Keep your pants on, baby," Jem said. "We need shoes." Birdie made a face, but Jem insisted. "I know. I hate 'em, too, but rules are rules. We wear shoes when we clean."
Birdie allowed herself to be shod with less fuss than usual; the lure of her vacuum apparently overpowered her distaste for footwear. It also kept her from trying to wash the linens in the toilets, so Jem counted it as a double win.
When she'd finished in the last room, Jem pushed the housekeeping cart into the utility room and moved all the dirty linens into the bags for the service to swap for cleans on Tuesday. Birdie then earnestly restocked the cart's toilet paper supply while Jem replenished the towels and bedding.
"Good job, Mommy," Birdie said as Jem locked the cart away in the supply closet.
"Thanks, babe. You, too."
Back out in the courtyard, Jem noticed that room ten's door stood open. She gave her daughter's Pull-Up-clad rump a light swat. "You run and vacuum your room, okay? I'll be right there."
She followed Birdie and pulled the office door shut before heading back over to the supply closet and pulling out a couple of sets of towels and a roll of TP.
The DND sign still dangled from the knob of the open door, and the room was dim except for a trapezoidal stripe of light that fell across one of the beds. The tall brother, Sam, was leaning against the headboard with a book in his lap, long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, feet bare.
Jem knocked on the doorjamb.
"Hey," she called when he looked up from his reading. "I know you've got the Do Not Disturb on, but I saw the door and thought maybe you could use a restock."
His torso passed into the patch of sunlight as he sat up straight, the sharp angle of his cheekbone throwing a shadow over the place her hand had rested last night, and Jem felt that same, tight twang of attraction in her chest as he got off the bed and moved silently into the doorway.
"Here," she said, holding the pile of folded linens over the threshold. When he stepped forward to take them his face came fully into the daylight and Jem tipped her head back to get a better look. "Hazel," she concluded.
Sam's eyes narrowed, and a startlingly deep set of dimples popped out around his mouth as his lips stretched and flexed in and out of a brief near-smile of query.
"Your eyes," she said, stepping back from the door. "They're hazel."
He stared at her, and then one of the dimples reappeared, punctuating an actual smile this time. His skin was smooth, newly shaved; last night there'd been a slight prickle to it that had caught against the fine grooves of her palm and fingers. Jem felt the muscle in her lower arm twitch as it started to rise, but she caught herself. She couldn't leave Birdie alone in the apartment.
"I gotta go," she said, waving toward the office. "I'll see you around."
Sam nodded, and when Jem paused in the lobby door, she could see him in the doorway.
Birdie'd gotten her shoes off and was busy running her shoebox vacuum cleaner over the kitchen floor. Jem took a deep breath and blew it out as she scooped the tiny sandals up and tossed them back into the closet, shaking the disconcerting buzz out of her system and getting her head where it needed to be.
"What's for lunch, baby bird?" she called, and Birdie abandoned her cleaning to discuss the question.
Later, after they'd colored the cardboard vacuum with markers, put the laundry away, and read Whose Mouse Are You? three times, Jem wrangled Birdie into her crib for her nap.
As soon as the griping calmed down, Jem went out to the pool, letting the sun blaze down on her shoulders as she skimmed pine needles from the surface of the water. Sam's door was still open, she noticed, and about two minutes into her task she saw him move into the doorway. He sat, leaning against the right side of the door frame with his legs stretched out into the sun and his book spread face-down across his thighs, watching her.
Jem was sweating when she finished up, hot and thirsty and buzzing again. She threw a last look at Sam and went for the bag of quarters in the office, which she used to coax a couple of pops out of the machine in the laundry room. She cracked open her plastic bottle of Diet Coke as she stepped back into the courtyard and took a long, thirsty drink from it, watching the legs unfold from the doorway of ten. She went inside.
Either it'll happen or you're imagining it, she told herself, as she settled onto the overstuffed chair in her living room with her book. Nothing to do but wait to see which.
Her drink was almost gone when Jem saw a shadow fall across the connecting doorway. Sam leaned against the doorframe, barefoot under his green T-shirt and jeans.
"I got you a Coke," she said, laying her book aside. "I thought you might come out of your hidey-hole."
"I'm supposed to stay put. Read my book."
"What're you reading?" she asked as she stood up and walked over to him with his drink.
He held it up: Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True. "Dean got it for me. I don't think he knows what it's about."
"You're not going to cut your hand off, are you? Because that would be awkward."
"I don't know what I'm going to do."
She lifted her chin and held his gaze. "I bet you have a couple ideas."
She looked closely at him, and long. He was an odd one, no question. Intriguing. Obviously above-average IQ. She could feel his intelligence-she'd seen it in the flash that had passed between them last night, when he'd picked up her literary reference and run with it at his brother's expense-but he was off enough to make her wonder if there was something going on in his head other than being socially awkward. Jem's high school best friend's father had been bipolar, and there was something of his mercurial mood shifts in Sam.
The Coke bottle was sweaty with condensation. Jem shifted it to her other hand and pressed her cool, damp palm over the back of her neck.
"Hot today," she observed, holding the bottle out to him. "Doesn't usually get this hot out by the coast till July or August. Even then, just a few afternoons."
Sam stepped in closer, ignoring the Coke, and his hand closed on her wrist, fingers overlapping his thumb. God, he was huge. The push, the want pulsed through her, making her extremities throb and her insides ache. His other hand, his right, pressed against her throat and collar bones-the same gesture as last night, the same hot, heavy presence that cut off all Jem's logic processes.
The Coke slipped from her hand and bounced on the linoleum, and the plastic cracked, carbonated corn syrup hissing and fizzing on the floor. Jem didn't care. Her hand slunk around the back of Sam's neck, and she pulled, drawing him down and in. His breath was ragged against her neck as she stretched onto her toes and said into his ear, "Stay put a second. I gotta take care of a couple of things."
She went through the door to the lobby and put the "Ring bell for service" sign on the counter. Closing the office door behind her, she ducked hastily back into the apartment and made a dash for her bedroom, where she grabbed a strip of condoms out of the bedside table.
Sam hadn't moved when she got back. Jem pulled the office door shut behind them and set the condoms on the table next to the office's couch, closed the ugly brown curtains, and crossed her arms over her stomach, grasping the hem of her tank top and pulling it swiftly over her head.
Sam's eyes flared, wide open for just a split second, and he took a half-step forward. Jem watched his hands swing heavily next to his thighs, as if he were thinking about moving them but wasn't sure where they should go. She narrowed the space between them, caught his thick wrists in her hands, and looked up at him.
"I'm not wrong, right?" Jem asked. "This is what you thought you were gonna do."
Sam's eyes jumped from her face to her chest and back, and his Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and nodded. She lifted his hands to her waist and waited, palms growing sweaty on the backs of his hands, as his thumbs moved in small arcs over her bottom ribs. His fingers curled up and then he was touching her breasts, cupping, weighing, squeezing. Jem put her own hands to good use, lifting the hem of his T-shirt and tugging it up. He disengaged from her long enough to pull his shirt off, and then as quick as they could, their hands were back on each other. Jem's skimmed over the hard, pale expanse of his chest, pausing to trace the edges of the tattoo riding high on his breastbone-a green sun or flower, neatly outlined in black, with a black-lined star filling its center-before continuing down his torso, sliding along the angled muscles of his belly to the waistband of his jeans.
He mirrored her moves, lingering at the top of her shorts, but Jem urged his hands back up to her tits and stretched into them, exhaling appreciatively as his thumbs moved roughly over her nipples, pressing them into the edge of his palms. He released one, dragged his right hand up to her throat, her jaw, into her hair, pulled her head back. His teeth were on her neck, breath hot at the corner of her jaw. Jem shivered against his chest, whipped her arms around his narrow waist, dropped her hands down the back of his jeans, and pulled against his ass. She could feel his erection against her stomach, just as ready to go as she was, and moved her pelvis to rub it, thinking they were going to have to come back to this foreplay stuff another time. She didn't have the patience for it today.
Ducking from under his sharp teeth and grasping hands, Jem backed away from Sam and quickly popped the snap on her shorts, pushing them down her legs and impatiently kicking them and her panties to the side. Another step back and the arm of the cheap couch pressed against her legs, just above the knees. She sat and beckoned Sam.
"C'mere," she coaxed, and he didn't hesitate, though his head was tilting to the side again in that way that reminded her of a curious dog. She moved her knees apart as he approached and slid her hands up the sides of his jeans to pull him in nice and close. The skin on his belly was so pale that she thought it should have felt cool, but she could feel the heat coming off of him as she leaned her forehead against it and worked the buttons of his fly open. She tossed a look up at him before she went any further. He hadn't said a word since the small talk about his book, and she needed to be sure he was still with her.
He was still with her. Sam's eyes were hooded and dark under his long hair and heavy lids, but he was watching everything she did, intent, alert, poised. She could see the slightest tremor in his hands where they hovered at his sides, again, seeming unsure of where they were supposed to be, but badly wanting to be there. His mouth was cracked open, and he breathed shallowly through it.
"Okay?" she asked, just in case. When his bangs flopped as he nodded, she flicked her tongue around his navel and used her hand to free his cock as she pushed his jeans and boxers down. She watched the long muscles in his thighs slide over each other as he stepped free from his pants and pushed them aside, where they joined the small pile of her clothing against the door to her apartment.
The length of solid flesh, full and hot against her cheek, made Jem wish momentarily that she didn't have rules about this kind of thing. She missed the freedom monogamy had granted her, missed the days she could just close her mouth around Rob and work him until he popped. It was weird, she thought as she reached for the condoms on the table to her right, that she could think about Rob with another guy's dick nudging along her jawbone and not feel … What? Guilty? Treasonous? Slutty? But she was what she was. She'd enjoyed sex before Rob, and she hadn't stopped just because he wasn't around to have it with anymore.
The clammy weight of Sam's hands on her shoulders brought Jem out of her head-back to this couch, this guy, this condom slipping out of its foil. She slid her hand up and down the shaft and then eased the rubber over the head, lapping briefly at the soft skin near the base of him before chasing the ring made by her forefinger and thumb down his cock with her mouth. Lots of guys bitched about condoms, but she found that the visual of her mouth engulfing their dicks tended to preempt their complaints. Jem didn't take risks when it came to her casual sex. She had Birdie to think about, not to mention a full twenty times the self respect she'd had at seventeen.
Jem lingered, enjoying the feel of Sam in her mouth, the ragged breath coming out of him, the flex that was starting in his hips, the twitch of his balls under her fingers. On her shoulders, his hands squeezed and clenched, fingertips biting into her skin, digging into the muscle almost painfully. A fist grabbed her hair, and she lifted her head to see the want painted in broad strokes across Sam's face. She slid her arms up his sides and pulled him down as she leaned back, arching her back so that, still on the armrest, her hips tilted and opened to him. She reached back with one hand and grabbed at a pillow, stuffing it under her lower back while the other hand guided him in.
Her breath caught as Sam sank into her, pitching forward to catch his weight on his hands. Something slipped somewhere, and he lurched clumsily against her, deeper in, and it hurt and didn't hurt so much that her eyes stung. He stretched awkwardly on top of her, hunching his back to move, and Jem was just starting to understand the problem-he was a yard or so too tall for the couch-when he growled and slid his arms around her, under her back and ass, and heaved back and up, lifting her as easily as if she were a toy. Quick on the footsteps of the pain-not-pain, fear-not-fear sang through Jem's veins. God, she thought as he simply relocated her to a place of his choosing, he could crack me open like a Pixy Stix if he wanted to.
The thought left her head the moment Sam set her on the desk, carelessly swiping it clear of the mail and ledgers. The iron bands gripping her ribs loosened and his fingers loosely ringed her biceps as she leaned away, her arms sliding smoothly through his hands as she lay back. Sam followed her down, body pressed solidly against her now, hips moving slowly, hands clutching her elbows, sharp chin jabbing into the tendons at the join of her neck and shoulder.
Jem wrenched her arms free of his grasp and twisted her fingers into Sam's hair, pulling his head up so she could kiss him. His mouth was open and pliant against hers, and he sucked in a hard breath when her tongue slid over his, urging it into action. His hands clapped over her ears, tangling roughly in her hair, and he sped up his thrusting, tongue keeping time with his hips. She arched and lifted her ass, hooked one heel on the edge of the desk, and groaned softly into his mouth as they found that rare, happy angle that pumped some part of him-she didn't know or care what, except that it was solid and moving at just the right slant-firmly against her clitoris. Just as she was starting to gasp with it, Sam reared up, changing the approach, and Jem caught herself hoping he and his brother were staying more than a week because goddamn she could get used to the kind of fucking this might be if they learned the road a bit better.
The stimulation moved further out with Sam standing up, but Jem had never been a girl to hold someone else responsible for getting her off. She snaked a hand down her body and worked her clit under the pads of her fingers to keep up with Sam. He was watching her again; the tilt of his head was becoming familiar, the way he cued off her moves and reactions. His brows knit together, and she felt a rush of wet heat as he dropped his hand down to join hers. She backed her hand up and bit her lip as he flattened his palm over her hair and explored with the broad pad of his thumb. His mouth twisted up into that curly half-smile of his when she sucked in a breath, and then he folded his fingers into a loose fist and pushed the wide ridges of his knuckles against her, sliding them experimentally over her clit.
"Oh, yeah," she breathed, "like that. Like that, just … more."
There was more pressure, faster, and there was his body knocking his hand harder against her as he thrust, his finger bones tapping out a slippery, inexpert counter rhythm to the beat of his cock. Sooner than she expected, it undid her; all Jem could do was stare at Sam's hands, the scars across his knuckles, and let everything sweep her over the precipice.
A high, warbling groan spilled out of her mouth, and she hooked her arm over her face, sucking hard on the flesh at the inside of the joint so she wouldn't wake Birdie. Her body bucked and clasped, and Jem hooked her legs around Sam's thighs as she came, holding him fast, grabbing his hand and riding it until the spasms slowed and receded.
Jem let her legs drop and dangle loosely off the edge of the desk and forced oxygen into her lungs. She lifted her arm from her mouth, noting the hickey she'd given herself, and wrapped her hands around Sam's upper arms.
"Go on," she urged, rocking her hips. "You now."
He arched lazily, back curving like a waking cat, and then leaned forward again, his sweaty skin skidding over hers as he stretched his body over her and found the pace he'd set before she knocked them off track. He lifted her enough to get his arms around her and squeezed, holding her body still as he fucked her. Jem lifted her legs to the desk and then hitched them up and around his waist. His breath huffed against her ear, just a hint of voice behind it, and he was new to her, and quiet, and she wasn't sure where he was until it was right on top of them both.
Sam clutched her around the shoulders, one hand folded up and over, long fingers digging into the soft space at the center of her shoulder girdle, and it hurt, but it was so good, he was so strong, and there was so much of him, everywhere-on her and in her and around her. A vibration built in his chest and turned into a low, throaty growl, and Sam's hips pounded out an escalating rhythm that would leave her the very best kind of sore. A sharp pain shot through her as Sam hunched and quaked, his teeth glancing hard off her collarbone as he buried his cock in her cunt and his face in her neck, iron arms clutching and squeezing until her ribs creaked.
"Sam," she gasped, "you're crushing me."
He froze, pressure steady, and then shook his shaggy head as if to clear it and relaxed his grip, still panting into her hair. When they'd caught their breath, he lifted himself onto his elbows, and Jem frowned at the red smear on his chin. She wiped it off and contemplated the dark smudge across her thumb, then winced and gingerly touched her collarbone. Her fingers came away bloody, and she remembered his teeth.
"Sorry," Sam said hoarsely.
"It's okay. Easy to get carried away."
She shifted under him and he backed up further, giving her the space she needed to get her hand between them and hold the bottom of the rubber as he pulled out. He watched as she slipped it off, tied the knot, and tossed it at the wastebasket.
"Missed," he said, and went to correct her aim.
He looked just as nice from behind, she thought, all legs and back, a bit more of a butt than his jeans let on. There was a second tattoo just above the crack of his ass-another flower shape, red this time, with fewer petals, and its center ring was filled with a triangle inside of a square.
Jem sat up and hopped off the desk, the muscles in her legs and inner thighs protesting as she landed but doing their job in the end. Sam turned, wiping a hand over his face, down his neck, and she noticed a bright, ugly scar on his left bicep, red and shiny and new.
"All right?" she asked.
He nodded. "I'm hot. It's hot in here."
"AC's busted. Mandy's always on Curtis to fix it, but he's wearing his ass out at the shop, you know? Maybe now your brother's there, he'll get some time. I don't mind much. The one in my apartment works fine, and there's always the pool if it gets too bad."
She wasn't surprised when Sam cocked his head at her attempt at post-coital chit-chat. Probably another of those social skills he was struggling with.
"Pool sounds good," he said.
"I might grab a shower, myself." She was on her way over to pick her clothes out of the pile when she heard the office door open. "Sam?"
He was gone, and she heard the sliding-glass door creak along its track. Jem pulled a gap in the curtain, standing to the side to avoid flashing any guests, and watched as Sam swung a leg over the knee-high iron fence that ran around the pool and made a shallow racing dive into the water, butt naked. He took the first length and a half under water, surfaced with a gulping breath, and launched into a nice, clean freestyle. Four long strokes brought him back to the near end of the pool, where he somersaulted and headed away again.
"Okay. Why don't you take a swim, then," she said, letting the curtain fall shut.
Jem plucked her shorts, panties, and tank top from under Sam's clothes and went through to her place, where she rinsed off in a quick, cool shower. Then she threw on fresh clothes, grabbed the baby monitor and her book, and scooped up Sam's stuff on her way out to enjoy the late-afternoon sun.
**********
Dean was in love with Bell's Garage. Flat out, tits-deep in love with the setup of the place, the near-compulsive arrangements of tools that let you lay hands on exactly what you wanted the minute you needed it, the smooth, even sound of machinery that Curtis Tate kept clean and running right. He loved everything about it. But most of all, Dean thought as he slid into the Impala's driver's seat and turned the key, he loved his girl. And by the way she was purring at him, his girl loved him right back.
Just like he'd thought, she just needed some attention. He'd spent a solid six hours pampering her-oil change, fluids flushed and refilled, hoses checked, changed, tightened. The works, just like he and Dad used to do every time they swung through Bobby's until the falling out and accompanying shotgun incident. They'd made due after that, but there was nothing like an uninterrupted day in a full-service body shop.
Dean hit the grocery store on the way out of town, dropping forty bucks on the cheapest staples he could find: spaghetti, sauce, bread, peanut butter, jelly, eggs, milk, beer, a thing of ranch, and two heads of some fancy lettuce that was on sale, seeing as how he couldn't remember the last fresh vegetable they'd eaten. Somehow he didn't think the pickles and tomato on the burgers last night counted.
It was nearly four when he got back to the motel, and hot, and Dean was thinking about not a lot more than a cool shower and a cold beer before boiling up a mess of spaghetti for dinner. The cheap plastic grocery bags were stretching over his wrists, threatening to snap, as he headed into the courtyard. He nodded politely to Jem the desk-clerk-slash-bartender, who was lounging near the pool in shorts and a one-piece bathing suit, watching some guy swim comically short laps in the not-quite-rectangular pool. He keyed his way into the room and swung the groceries onto the formica table in the room's tiny kitchenette, calling Sam's name as he pulled the door shut against the late-afternoon heat. No response.
The air conditioner puffed loudly, and the chilly air blowing across the otherwise quiet room made the hair on Dean's neck and arms stand up as he crossed the room, pocketing the keys as he went.
"Sam, you in there?" Dean rapped on the bathroom door then pushed it open, but the room was empty. "Goddamn it," he muttered, running his hand over his head, smoothing over the cold fear plucking at the inside of his ribs. "What part of 'stay the fuck put' do you not get?"
It's not happening again, Dean told himself. It's not. There hadn't been any signs. Except Sam's dream the other day, but that wasn't a sign, it was a dream, Bobby said. Probably nothing. No real signs-no storms or cattle deaths or freaky demonoid birthmarks popping up on Sam's arm. There was just a pair of rumpled beds in an empty motel room in Otis, Oregon.
Just like the pair of beds in an empty motel in Tulsa on the twenty-ninth of February. Fucking leap year.
It's not happening, Dean repeated to himself, pulling his shit together. You're overreacting. Sam's doing laundry, getting himself a Coke, something.
Dean stepped back outside and scanned the pool area again. He tried to look casual as he strolled up the lobby-end of the pool, planting a boot on the lower rail of the fence and leaning in a little to call to Jem.
"Hey again. How's it going?"
"Enjoying the view," she answered. The battered deck chair creaked as she shifted to look up at him, shading her eyes with her hand.
"Yeah, nice day. Hey, you seen my brother around? Tall guy, way too much hair, chock full of witty literary references?"
She scratched idly at a Band-Aid at the bottom of her neck. "Sam."
"Yeah, Sam. Seen him?"
Her tanned face spread into a sly smile, and she tipped her head back toward the pool. "Did I not mention the view?"
Dean followed her gaze to the guy swimming laps, noticing for the first time the freakishly long arms and mass of dark hair. Sam came up on the end of his lap fast and whipped his body into a neat flip turn, and Dean's mouth dropped open, the rush of relief quickly overtaken by horrified disbelief.
"Jesus, Sam!" he yelled. "The hell're you doing? Put some pants on!"
Jem's slow laugh drew his attention away from Sam, whose steady, clean stroke didn't even hitch at Dean's outburst.
"Says he doesn't have a suit. But he really, really felt like a swim. Who'm I to argue with determination like that?"
Dean pulled his eyes away from the pool before they started bleeding and looked back at Jem, who didn't seem bothered at all by the motel's skinny-dipper. Rather, as she'd said, she seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the scenery, which was downright unsettling for more than a few reasons.
A crackling noise interrupted the steady slap and splash of Sam's strokes, and Jem leaned over the arm of her chair to pick up what Dean had thought was a cordless phone but appeared to be some sort of walkie-talkie. It was whining.
"Be right back," she said, standing up and coming over to him. She opened a gate Dean hadn't noticed and meandered into the lobby.
Dean scratched his head, not sure what to do. Sam obviously wasn't going to drown without a lifeguard, but it didn't seem right to leave him out here to traumatize the guests. He stepped through the gate and tried yelling at Sam again as he closed in on the end of his next lap, but Sam either didn't hear or was ignoring him. Finally, Dean dropped into Jem's abandoned deck chair, figuring the least he could do was steer off anyone who came out to swim.
After six more of Sam's out-and-backs, Jem reappeared, trailing a little girl in a sagging pink bathing suit by the hand. Jem stooped to open the gate, led the girl through, and closed it behind them. They headed straight over to the baby pool-a ten-by-ten square of foot-deep water in the corner of the fenced-off area-where Jem caught the kid under the arms and lowered her into the water, then sat on the edge and dropped her feet in.
Dean stared for a minute, mentally rearranging the assumptions he'd made about Jem, considered his options, and then went to join them, figuring it was a better view than Sam's scrawny, naked ass. The kid was earnestly trying to sink a plastic boat with a ball.
"Cute kid. She yours?" he asked idly, casting a reassessing glance over her, thinking she was probably a little older than he'd thought yesterday-twenty-four, twenty-five-the pigtails and cargo shorts made her look younger. He looked enviously at Jem's bare, wet feet, at the little girl splashing in the pool. His feet were starting to cook in his boots.
"Yep," Jem answered. "Say 'hey,' Birdie."
The girl's dark head lifted and she looked back and forth between her mother and Dean and then waved and went back to her toys.
"Birdie, huh?" Dean repeated. "That another book-club secret-handshake name?"
Jem's gray eyes crinkled as she smiled. "Nope. Her dad was a forestry major. Rob."
Dean tipped his head and squinted at her. "You ever just give a straight answer?" he asked, and Jem laughed, making her daughter pause in her attack on SpongeBob's speedboat.
"Once in a while," she conceded. "The doctor told us we were having a boy. We were gonna name him after Rob and his dad. Didn't put any thought into other names, so when she turned out to be a girl, Rob just punted. But, you know. Roberta's gotta be the ugliest name on the planet, and Rob liked birds. So, Birdie."
Dean smiled, nodding. "Got it. Cute name." They watched her sit on the bottom of the pool, completely at ease with the water coming up to her shoulders. "How old is she?"
"Turns three in October."
"Fun age," Dean said, thinking how much more entertaining Sam had become when he'd finally started doing things-playing with toys instead of just gnawing them to death, talking, sucking at hide-and-seek but begging to play anyway. Personality asserting itself, for better or worse. He missed the weird little kid Sam used to be. Missed the way Sam used to chant along with him as he practiced his Latin on the copy of Cattus Petasatus Jefferson had given them for Christmas. Dean didn't think The Cat in the Hat was funny in Latin, but Sam would pitch three kinds of a fit if Dean tried to read it in English. Christ, the kid had translated The Lorax for himself before he was nine. Dean could still see their beat-up copy of the book, lines of Sam's chalkboard-perfect printing stretching across the Truffula Trees.
"Yeah. It's weird," Jem said, drawing Dean's focus back to the kiddie pool. "She still feels like a baby to me, even though she's running around, climbing like a monkey, getting into everything she can."
"Guess it's normal a parent would feel like that. Hell, sometimes I look at Sam there and still see..." He caught himself and steered the conversation back to more solid ground. "What's her dad say?"
"Nothing these days. He's gone," she supplied in a neutral tone Dean recognized as coming from practice discussing touchy topics with strangers.
"Took off, huh? That sucks."
"He didn't leave." Her tone was just as neutral as before, but she shot him a narrow-eyed look. "He died."
Dean grimaced at his flub. "Sorry. That sucks, too." There was something about Jem's straightforward, no-bullshit approach that Dean appreciated, that prompted him to give her something of it back. "I've been there."
She squinted as she looked at him, frowning a little. "Your wife died?"
Dean corrected himself. "No, no wife. Our mom, when we were little. It's rough."
Jem's gaze rested on him for a moment longer, then she turned her head to the bigger pool, where Sam's arms were wind-milling like he'd never run out of steam.
"We do okay," Jem said, scooping up her daughter's ball as it floated into her shin. "Don't we, Birdie?"
Birdie hauled herself back to her feet and slapped her hands on the water, yelling, "Catch!" Jem tossed the ball in a low, easy arc that bounced gently against Birdie's potbelly. The little girl grabbed the ball and chucked it imprecisely. Dean leaned left and caught it before it could roll across the cement. Birdie eyed him and repeated, "Catch," so he threw it into a high curve that dropped the ball directly onto the top of her head. It bounced once and dropped into the water in front of her. She blinked at him twice and then burst out laughing.
The rhythm from the other pool broke, and Dean looked past Jem to see Sam push off the bottom and swing himself onto the deck. Three long strides and he was swinging a leg-and some other stuff Dean squeezed his eyes shut to avoid seeing too much of-over the fence. Jem was watching, too, and when the door to room ten closed she turned back to Dean and cocked an amused eyebrow.
"Last skinny-dipper we had wasn't in nearly as good shape," she observed, and Dean frowned.
"Hey." He made sure to keep his voice light. "That's my kid brother you're gawking at."
"So I recall."
Dean scratched his head. She was a strange one. "You come out to ogle guests often?"
She shaded her eyes and looked up at him with a shrug. "Birdie and I swim every afternoon. I can't help it if your brother felt like putting on a show."
"Well," Dean said. "Guess I better pick him up some trunks, huh?"
"Probably a good idea," she agreed. "I don't mind overly, but the family in eight might not appreciate it as much."
There was a familiar-looking pair of jeans in a tangled pile of clothes at the corner of the pool nearest the office. "Those his?" Dean asked, pushing off his palm to get to his feet.
"Yep."
"Okay." He stood there for another awkward moment, and then stooped to gather up Sam's clothes. "Nice talkin' with you." When he straightened up, Jem was swinging a dripping Birdie onto her hip.
"Bye," Birdie said, waving.
"See ya 'round, kiddo."
He was through the gate and halfway to their room when Jem called after him. He waited while she rounded the pool's corner and caught up with him.
"Sam's book," she said, handing it over the fence. "You going to Tony's tonight?"
He shook his head. "Planned on staying in." They were down to their last thirty bucks cash. "Why? You on?"
"Not till Wednesday. You should come by then. There's a trucker whose route brings him through nearly every week. Larry. Thinks he's hot shit at the pool table, likes to take money from people."
Dean eyed her steadily. "And you're telling me this because…"
She gave him a scornful look. "You think I don't know an off-duty hustler when I see one? Please."
He scratched the back of his neck and waited to see where she was taking this.
"Listen, leave the weekend crowds alone-they're locals. But the truckers? As long as you don't let them catch on, they're great marks."
Dean's mouth curved thoughtfully as he nodded. "Okay. Good to know. Thanks."
"No problem. Just remember to tip your waitress."
He tossed her a little salute of a wave and started toward the room, hoping Sam had put the time to use getting dressed.
"Hey, and Dean?"
He turned around again.
"You might wanna… I'm not being snotty, I promise. But that book. You might wanna check out the first chapter or so."
Dean frowned down at the infants lying face-to-face on the book's cover.
"I think Sam thinks it's… significant, or ironic or something."
His frown deepened. "Sam talked to you about his book?" he asked, raising a suspicious eyebrow at her. This afternoon was getting weirder and weirder.
"Only in passing, but…" Birdie was struggling to get down, and Jem shifted her to her other hip. "Give it a look." The little girl went boneless on her-classic passive-resistance mode-and Jem caught her under the knees as she started to slide down her body. "Hungry, baby?"
"Macencheese, please."
Jem shrugged at Dean. "I gotta go. See you around."
Dean watched them go then opened the book, flipped through a dozen pages of reviews and acknowledgements and crap, and settled on Chapter One, which he read leaning more and more heavily against the doorframe of his and Sam's room, stomach growing cold and hard in his belly, until the crazy twin hacked his own hand off in the public library.
"Nice fucking book club."
**********
Chapter 3: Just an Anchor on My Heart
AN: Yep, I have a "Mockingbird" soundtrack, and yep, my chapter titles come from it. This chapter's title is from Gillian Welch's "Look at Miss Ohio." Full soundtrack will be posted at the end of the story, with links and cover art because I'm a huge dork.