Fic: Truckstop - Jensen/Kane, NC-17 (AU)
Title: Truckstop
Author: qthelights
Pairing: Jensen Ackles/Christian Kane
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 10,000
Summary: Jensen is slightly past 18 and just out of school. Chris is a long-haul trucker. One picks up the other. Tensions rise.
Warnings: RPS, AU, offscreen mild violence
Disclaimer: Never happened, no offense intended.
Notes: This came about from a conversation with kadiel_krieger, as most things do. Despite not ‘doing AU’ and not liking to diverge too far from my OTP roots, this one wouldn’t let me go. And here it is. Beta thanks go to cupiscent :) Apologies to truck enthusiasts, ‘cause yeah, never been in one, never paid attention to ‘em. Wikipedia can only tell one so much ;)
Truckstop
The truck is the only one in the lot of the backwater diner that doesn’t have devil's horns or flames painted on it. It’s an eighteen-wheeler and the cab is plain black, covered in dust from lonely hauls across desert interstates. Jensen knows he should be wary, given the rig is in back of the parking lot, set apart from the rest of the sleeping husks of metal. Seclusion is dangerous, but privacy is rare. He takes the chance.
The guy standing against a wheel well, legs crossed and shoulders slumped, is shorter than him but stockier. He looks young. A lot younger than the leathery old guys Jensen has hitched rides with so far, sun-beaten into tanned, pruney skin. This guy’s maybe mid-thirties, ponytail pulling greasy-looking hair off his face; paisley red bandanna crowning his head.
The guy watches Jensen intently as he approaches, cigarette tip flaring lava-orange in the dusk falling around them. His stare doesn’t waver. The guy isn’t afraid and that means something. Not that Jensen poses much of an intimidating picture, barely worn jeans and equally well kept long-sleeve shirt, tall but lanky, clearly not quite out of his teens. Still. When someone could be packing, it pays dividends to be wary, and this guy isn’t. Or at least he doesn’t show it. Jensen files it away.
“Can I help you, son?” the guy drawls, his accent slow and twanging. He blows out a stream of smoke, inhales another drag. Watches.
Jensen is still deciding, but he doesn’t want to fuck it up before he can reach a conclusion. It’s getting late and he doesn’t want to spend another night walking the highway. That the guy is good looking and the accent shoots straight down his spine should not be reasons to trust the guy. And yet.
“Not your son, but I, uh,” he tries not to stutter, tries to be cool and confident. He coughs to cover his nerves. “I need a ride, if you’re open to it.”
The guy snorts a laugh. “That so. And where you heading, Yankee?”
Jensen shrugs, tries to act nonchalant. “Doesn’t matter. Wherever you’re headed.”
The guy looks him up and down, eyes slowly raking Jensen’s body in a way that makes his skin crawl, just a bit. It could be bluff. It could be foreplay. “You running away from home?”
He bristles, tries not to show it ‘cause he knows he looks young, even if he’s past 18, months ago now. “Not home, no.”
“Girl troubles?” The guy grins around his cigarette.
“Just needed some air,” Jensen answers, not willing to give his life away to someone he hasn’t even sized up yet.
The guy considers him, takes one last puff and flicks the butt of the cigarette to the pavement in a skitter of red ashes. “Well okay then.” He holds out his hand to Jensen. “Chris Kane. Going south.”
Jensen shakes his hand, it’s warm and soft, the grip firm. “Jensen,” he says, doesn’t give a surname but pauses then adds, “South is fine. Better than fine, actually.”
Chris nods and opens the door to the cab. “I don’t take breaks and I pick the music. If we stop somewhere, I go when I go, you’re either in the truck or you ain’t. Got it?”
Jensen nods, but Chris has already turned away, levering himself up with ease into the truck’s cab. He hurries around the front of the truck and pulls himself up into the passenger side. He’s a lot less graceful at it than Chris was.
Chris waits until Jensen’s buckled in before he slides on a pair of mirrored RayBan's, protection against the last stabs of sun spearing over the horizon, and grins as he checks the mirrors. “Yeehaw,” he drawls out sarcastically and revs the truck to life underneath them.
* * *
Sometime during the night Jensen falls asleep, head propped against the cool glass of the truck window. It’s probably stupid of him. Just because he feels safe enough to get in the truck with the guy doesn’t mean it’s safe to be unconscious near him.
He doesn’t even know him better than when he hopped in. As they’d pulled onto the highway Chris had pushed a tape into the deck with nail-chewed finger and something country and hard had blasted from the sound system, filled the cab with a giant fuck-off to conversation.
Jensen had been okay with that. It was nice, not having to make shitty small talk, weave white lies and stories around what he wanted to say and what he didn’t. Eventually he’d rested his head against the pane beside him, watched the double lines appear in the headlights and disappear into the gaping yaw of the truck’s chassis.
When he wakes, dawn has come and gone and mid-morning light bathes the desert in long shadows and golden dust. Chris hasn’t killed him in his sleep, or done anything else that Jensen can tell. It says a lot about the guy, or maybe just enough; either way Jensen relaxes, just a bit.
The man himself is singing softly to the music coming from the speakers. His voice is rough but sweet, filled with twangy vowels and resonant r’s that Jensen can feel skitter up his legs. The driver’s window is rolled down and Chris rests a tanned arm along the ledge. Even though the sun isn’t at its zenith, the warmth in the oddly cool breeze promises fierce summer later on.
Jensen blinks, drags the back of his hand across his mouth to check for drool.
“Morning,” he mumbles, stretching his legs out as best he can under the dash and shifting in his seat to wake up the numbness in his ass and thighs.
Chris glances at him, the same sly grin firmly in place. Jensen doesn’t find it worrying anymore, though he wonders if he should. “Morning, Sunshine. Thought I'd have to listen to you snoring till we hit the Mississippi.”
Jensen feels his cheeks colour and turns to look out the window at the miles of rusty brown flatness and sparse grasses clinging for life to its expanse. “Shoulda woken me.”
Chris huffs a laugh, amused, and Jensen can’t help but sneak a quick glance over at him. The smile he finds seems easy and light as Chris keeps his eyes firmly trained on the horizon, one fingerless-gloved hand resting loose on the bottom of the wheel. “You seemed like you could use the sleep. Running away from home takes it out of a kid.”
Jensen rolls his eyes, tries to stretch out his arms without hitting the roof of the cab. “Told you. I ain’t no kid and I’m not running away from home.”
Again Chris laughs but this time there’s a touch of something bitter to it. “Son, we’re all running away from home, you sure as pig shit ain’t the only one.”
Jensen watches a rabbit dash across the road a hundred yards or so ahead of them. “What are you running from then?”
“Mostly, the leather strap of my pop’s favourite belt,” Chris chuckles darkly. Then, quietly, “Many things, kid, too many and too sad to name.”
It sounds like a stock answer, a line from a song. It sounds kinda corny, actually, Jensen thinks. Chris reaches out and twists the knob of the radio, jerking the station into static and random bursts of chatter and disharmony. He stops it on a hair metal song and cranks up the volume. Conversation over.
Jensen just shrugs and settles back into his seat, pulls a novel out of his backpack. The blinding sun edges higher in the sky.
* * *
He’s dozing again when the stuck shudders to a stop, the tick tick tick of the engine trying vainly to cool down under the piercing mid-afternoon sun.
“Grub’s up,” Chris intones, cracking his knuckles in a series of loud pops. “The lovely local Choke and Puke. Get it or go hungry.”
Jensen blinks blearily at their surroundings; they’re at another truck-stop diner, identical to the one they started in save for the weather-beaten sign peeling atop the squat brick building that proclaims “Molly’s” instead of “Bill’s”.
Chris is out of the cab and headed for the building before Jensen gets his head out of the sleepy muddle it’s cocooned itself in. He sighs tiredly and fumbles for the door, levers himself down; narrowly misses falling the four feet to the ground and faceplanting into concrete.
When he pays attention, he realises that he’s hungry; really hungry, if the growling from his stomach is anything to go by. And he desperately needs to take a piss. Food wins out and he heads into the diner. Chris is already sitting down with a tray full of heart attack waiting to happen, grease and salt piled high. The slim-hipped waitress leans over way too far to fill up his iced tea and Jensen can see down her top from the door. He imagines Chris' view is probably even better from an inch in front of his nose.
The leer on his face as he winks and drawls a thank you at her pretty much confirms it.
Jensen picks out one of the sandwiches wilting under the counter, hopes to god he doesn’t end up with food poisoning from the browning lettuce and oily cheese. He grabs a can of lukewarm coke. The pimply kid at the counter, most definitely not ‘Molly’, can’t keep his lust-filled gaze off of Chris and the waitress as he rings up Jensen’s total. When he gives Jensen back a bill with Hamilton staring bemusedly out at him instead of Lincoln’s indifferent stare, Jensen says nothing.
He takes a seat by the window, chews moodily through the stale sandwich. It was true, what he’d said to Chris the night before. South was good. He didn’t actually have any real destination in mind. Just wanted away from the expectations. The disappointed sighs of his mother and father.
So he’d told them he was gonna go away. Spend some time getting to know the world first. It hadn’t gone down well, but there wasn’t much they could do to stop him. He’d packed a backpack and headed out.
South was as good as any other direction.
Though he hadn’t been expecting so much damn nothingness, he thinks as he stares out at the sun-glared landscape.
When he washes down the last of his coke and glances back up from his thoughts Chris is gone, tray half empty on the table. He panics for a second, head whipping around to the parking lot out front, but the truck is still there.
Thank fuck. This is not where he wants to end his journey and so far Chris has been a good travel companion; quiet and not an insane pervert, or at least, not overtly.
He pushes his tray back and gets up, groaning at the way his muscles pull and complain at the movement. He hadn’t thought sitting on your ass all day would hurt so damn much.
Jensen goes back to the counter and asks where the restrooms are. The pimply kid languidly waves him in a direction that Jensen takes to mean ‘out back’.
The heat outside is scorching and sweat breaks out immediately at the back of his neck, his t-shirt sticking to his skin as if it knows he’ll be sweating enough any second to glue it there for real. The door to the bathroom is ajar, lock broken as if kicked out a long time ago. He pushes it open and finds Chris.
Or more specifically, he finds Chris and the missing waitress.
She’s perched up on the sink, head against the dirty mirror and legs spread, panties dangling around one sneakered ankle, Chris is on his knees and has her starched cotton dress rucked up around her waist. His mouth is buried in the mound of hair between her legs and Jensen can see his tongue darting in and curling on the upswing.
The waitress makes a startled gasp in the midst of a moan as her eyes light upon Jensen where he’s frozen in the doorway in shock.
Chris turns sharply and Jensen can see the way he visibly relaxes when he realises it’s only him and not some red-necked yokel, or worse, the girl’s father. His mouth is wet and shiny and he wipes the girl’s juices off his chin with the back of his hand.
“You joining in, Jenny, or you gonna stand there being as useful as tits on a bull?” Chris says in a measured drawl, eyebrow arched in question.
Jensen starts, whether at the nickname or the reality of the situation he isn’t sure. “No I.. I’m...” He doesn’t bother finishing, just backs out of the room trying not to trip on his feet. He hears Chris laugh from inside the restroom, closely followed by a moan from the waitress.
He feels like an idiot, his face has flamed red; he can feel it despite the heat of the sun. The worst part is he knows he shouldn’t. It’s not like he knew they’d be in there, doing...that. He’d just needed a piss, anyone would have felt the same shock at being confronted with unexpected cunnilingus. But not everyone would have stuttered and run away like a girl.
Angry at himself he walks off around to the truck. They’re the only truck in the lot, the lunch hour rush long gone.
He still needs to empty his bladder, even though he’s now also half-hard, images of Chris on his knees, fingers splayed against white thighs, flashing through his head on a loop. Fucking natural response to seeing that, he reasons, and kicks angrily at a stone.
Slipping around to his side of the truck he glances up and down the long line of road. There isn’t anyone coming for miles. He unzips and urinates on the ground behind the cover of one of the tyres. It sits on top of the dusty, parched ground like oil on water.
When he’s done he hops back up into the truck - apparently Chris is either stupidly trusting or just doesn’t give enough of a shit to lock the damn thing - and pretends to be asleep.
Chris comes back sometime later; it feels like ages but is probably only minutes. Jensen feels the truck rock as Chris hefts himself up into the cab and snorts at Jensen’s faux-sleep. Colour rushes to Jensen’s cheeks and it takes all his willpower not to scrunch up his eyes and confirm Chris' suspicion.
The truck grumbles back into life, a cool trickle of air-con seeping through the vents and hitting the sweat-damp skin of Jensen’s arms.
* * *
“So where are you from anyway, Jenny?” Chris asks hours later when Jensen has actually gone to sleep and really woken up again. “I assume you didn’t grow up in the shithole I picked you up in. And you don’t seem like a lot lizard, pretty as you are.”
“Stop calling me Jenny,” Jensen answers, ignores what he thinks is an insinuation of prostitution. “And why do you care?”
Chris snorts. “It’s called making conversation, Jenny. Sometimes people do it to pass the time.”
Begrudgingly, Jensen can admit that Chris has a point. Unless he plans on sleeping, or pretending to sleep, for the next few days, it’s going to be a long fucking trip if they spend it in silence.
“Wisconsin,” he offers. “Milwaukee.”
Chris hums in something like affirmation. “Beertown, eh? Running away ‘cause you’re bored out of your skull then?”
Despite himself, Jensen huffs a laugh. “No, it’s my home I like it. I mean...well, it’s home, that’s all.”
Chris glances at him for a moment before turning back to the road. “Then how come you ain’t badger bound right now?”
Jensen shrugs. “Like I said, I'm not running,” he chews his lip a moment, “I just needed some space from stuff.”
“Like?”
Jensen stares at Chris' fingers wrapped loosely around the gearshift, the tanned curve of his knuckles. “Expectations, mostly,” he admits. “My parents have my whole future bought and paid for. College picked, majors streamed, career chosen. They’ve even paid for the whole thing.”
Chris whistles low “And that’s a bad thing?”
“Sometimes,” Jensen mutters, aware that he’s probably sounding spoilt and young.
They’re quiet for a moment, watching the long wind of the road, the glint of cars hitting patches of sun up ahead like jewelled beetles in the sand.
“Seems like they’re trying to do what they think is right,” Chris says eventually. “Lord knows my pop never cared to do what was right by me.”
“They’re trying to do what they think is right for me,” Jensen says bitterly, “but don’t you think at some stage they ought to ask what I think is right for me?”
“So what of it? Go to college, do what they want. Worst that’ll happen you’ll end up with a degree from some Ivy League school, no debt and the world to choose from when you’re done and mom and pop don’t have no say anymore.”
“You make it sound like it’s easy,” he mutters.
“You make it sound like like life ain’t hard,” Chris answers. “News flash, kid. It’s fucking rough out here. Take the handouts you’re given. It may be all you get.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jensen says, sullenly, not sure he really believes that.
Chris changes tack as he changes gear, slips into fourth. “So what, you on a rich kids vision quest or sumthin’?”
Now Jensen snorts, picks at the tattered cotton threads that have come loose at the left knee of his jeans. “You think I’ll find my true meaning in the cab of big rig?”
“There are worse things, you know,” Chris snaps peevishly and Jensen belatedly realises he’s probably just offended the guy.
“Sorry,” he says, palms up in apology, “I just meant, this isn’t my rebellion, the act of running...I need to find something, an experience, a sign, whatever. This is the means to that.”
Chris snorts and it’s grating. “Kid, I reckon’ you just need to get laid.”
* * *
They don’t stop again until the early hours of the next morning, Chris tugging the fuel line over and wrenching it into place with gloved hands.
It’s barely past 4am and dawn is nothing but a hazy promise of white on the horizon. Jensen quickly makes use of the restrooms (thankfully empty) to get refreshed. He fashions a wet cloth out of the hand towels for a pat down and pulls his toothbrush out of his bag. A change of shirt and underwear and he’s still not particularly peachy, but at least he doesn’t reek enough to put himself off.
Clean, he raids the shop for provisions. Chris isn’t keen on stopping often, like most of the truckers he’s travelled with so far, and clearly he’s going to have to take matters into his own hands if he expects to keep fed. Twinkies, chocolate and barbecue chips, 6 pack of Red Bull. It’s got calories at least. He could swear that the kid behind the checkout is the same one from their last stop, though this one is wearing an orange t-shirt with crucifixes on it. Yeah, he ain’t in Wisconsin now.
When he gets back outside Chris is talking with a high-cheek-boned boy, all perfect blond hair and glinting teeth. Presumably the owner of the eggshell Blue Chevy sitting abandoned by the store’s entrance.
By the way Chris’ body is angled in towards the guy, he’s interested. By the way the boy pretends to be interested in the mechanics of a big rig, Chris is in luck.
Jensen rolls his eyes, because really? Again? He may have gotten out of being molested by this particular trucker, but apparently that’s only because this one is getting his kicks elsewhere plenty enough. Instead of fleeing embarrassed this time, he charges on, heart pounding. Rounds the truck past the two horny men and climbs on back into the cab.
He tries not to watch in the side mirror as Chris and the boy disappear around the back of the truck. He certainly doesn’t hold his breath to listen. Nor does he palm his cock through his jeans to rub gently at the pressure.
When Chris comes back this time, grin firmly in place and smelling like sex and gasoline, Jensen doesn’t bother pretending to sleep, he simply raises an eyebrow and munches loudly on a mouthful of barbecue chips.
Chris laughs, deep and throaty and recently sated. He makes a grabby motion towards the food.
“Uh uh,” Jensen says, wrinkling his nose. “I know exactly where your hands have been.”
* * *
Jensen is backed against the door of a toilet stall, his cock is hard and throbbing beneath his jeans but the pressure won’t go away.
Nail-bitten fingers press against the fly and he groans as his head smacks back into the door.
“More,” he gasps out, “god, please.”
The answering chuckle is dark and full of promise. Teeth bite down on his jaw and the pressure at his groin increases, throbbing, throbbingthrobbing.
Then his jeans are open and a rough hand is inside, enveloping his cock and pulling in time with the beating rush of blood that pulses through it.
He can’t get there, he needs to get there. The hand increases, tightens its grip and stubble brushes scratchingly against his jaw. Just a little... god. Just a tiny bit more... he feels it reaching within him, but he can’t quite catch it, the wave keeps dumping him before he can get on top of it.
The hand keeps pulling, pushing. Again, again, again...
Jensen gasps as he’s jolted back into reality; his head is at an odd angle, neck throbbing with pain at the awkward position. It matches counterpoint to the pulsing between his legs where he’s ridiculously hard. He reaches a hand down to do something about it before the rest of reality rushes in and he freezes, hand mid way up his thigh.
“Nice dream?” Chris sniggers from beside him.
The cab is deathly quiet save for Jensen’s quickened breathing, harsh and obvious. Of all the times for Chris not to be playing music. Jensen just grunts, unwilling to give away anything to make the situation more embarrassing than it is. He certainly isn’t about to acknowledge who the person in his dream might be; to himself or to anyone else.
“Aww, c’mon, Baby,” Chris singsongs, gaze travelling slowly down Jensen’s body like molten lava, “Don’t be like that. Been too long since Jensen got laid?”
“Fuck off,” Jensen snaps, shifts his legs and tries to adjust the pressure on his trapped dick.
“Christ, I hope you’re not a virgin,” Chris smirks and thankfully, averts his eyes back to the road. “It’s not healthy you know, depriving yourself. You oughta get something more than snacks next stop we take.”
Jensen sighs, keeps his eyes studiously on the road. “Maybe I’m not so casual in my preference of snack food.”
Chris shrugs, opening his fingers out in a hands-off gesture, only his palms kissing the wheel. “Sex is sex, Jenny. Anyone’ll do if the need is getting any.”
Jensen snarls, embarrassed, “I don’t see you offering to make it any better.”
Chris' laugh is loud and grating in its obvious superiority. “Now now, jailbait. I got me some goods to deliver, can’t be ending up in prison on a technicality.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jensen says. He’s annoyed at being dismissed so easily, especially for something that isn’t true. But he’s not angry enough to fail to realise that he shouldn’t be wanting to win the conversation in the first place. And yet that doesn’t stop him huffing under his breath, “We both know I'd be the best you’d ever had.”
Chris just hums and adjusts the visor as the sun breaks up over the edge of the Earth. Jensen doesn’t know him well enough to know what it means.
* * *
The day passes in a spattering of small talk and a mixture of radio stations. At some point they pass from desert to farmland and Jensen thinks they must have angled south-east somewhere in the journey. He was probably asleep to miss it.
Corn and something Jensen can’t identify but that might be a grain of some sort obscure the landscape for miles and for a while he’s grateful for the change of scenery. Then the pale green-yellow sway becomes just as boring as the red rock had been.
Jensen finds himself watching Chris instead. The way his leg extends out under the dash, strong denim-clad thigh resting all its weight on the heel of a cowboy boot, toe tapped down on the gas pedal. Or the way his arms are tanned and brown when he rolls up the flannel of his shirt above his elbows. He wonders if Chris has a trucker tan, white and pasty above the line of his shirt sleeve. He wonders why he wants to know that so badly.
It’s not like he’s never been attracted to a guy before, he has. He’s fooled around with mates of mates, friends of his sister that he doesn’t have to see again the next day at school. Sure, it’s never gone much further than a clumsy blowjob and only slightly less clumsy handjobs, but it’s enough to let him know that he likes both men and women.
Still. He has no idea why Chris is the one invading his subconscious. Or rather, he’s got some idea - in fact he’s pretty sure it’s because he’s now seen him in two compromising situations and the human brain naturally objectifies that kind of thing. Makes Chris into that kind of person. The kind Jensen’s person wants to get to know.
Around six Chris pulls the truck over into a rest stop and nods in the direction of some squat wooden buildings up ahead. “That there’s the BlueDog motel. I’m gonna hit the hay for a while before I start checking the back of my eyelids for pinholes. You’re welcome to sleep here or get your own room or hell, I don’t really care as long as you’re back in eight hours.”
Jensen peers into the lengthening gloom. “I was starting to wonder if you ever slept. It’s kinda disturbing.”
Chris smiles, and it seems genuine for once, not laden with innuendo or pomposity. “One you thing you learn quick smart in this racket, don’t be gettin’ used to sleep if you want your pay in full on the other end.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
Chris pauses, hand on the door handle. Jensen thinks he’s gonna get a smart ass response and an empty truck, but Chris actually considers him in the darkening light for a moment before he answers. “Long enough to know that the little white pills lead to a world of trouble even if they do keep you awake. Not long enough to realise that lack of sleep is trouble enough by itself. ‘Bout five years, maybe six. On and off.”
Jensen whistles low through his teeth. “Don’t you get bored?”
Chris laughs, nothing more than a soft gravel flutter in his throat. “The money fixes that pretty quick.”
Jensen nods, he guesses it would. Maybe that’s what he needs. To find a job somewhere and just live a little, save up some money of his very own, be independent for a bit.
“Besides, it’s not forever.”
“No?” Jensen asks, knowing he’s stalling, wanting irrationally to keep Chris in the truck.
“No. Now, are we done with twenty questions, Sport? I’m gonna go find me a bed to curl up in.” The smirk is back, full-force.
It’s out before he can stop it: “Want some company?”
Chris grins and the headlights from a passing car illuminate the enamel in a flash of white. “I think we’ve had this conversation, kid. Go find yourself a pretty piece of tail. Just be back in eight hours.”
Chris winks and then he’s gone.
Jensen sits in the cab for a good long time, unsure if he’s embarrassed, hurt or angry at being rejected. Granted, Chris probably didn’t know it was a real offer. Maybe. It stings all the same.
By the time he makes his way out, locking the cab behind him, he’s settled on a mixture of anger and horniness. Fuck Chris. If he won’t fuck him it doesn’t mean that Jensen can’t find someone else to do the job.
* * *
Despite the heat of the day, the night is cool, and Jensen represses a shiver as he trudges in the direction of the dive bar across the road from the motel. The neon sign outside the door is sparking in a red to nothing flicker. The door doesn’t close properly, just bangs against its wooden housing each time a burly trucker or skankily dressed woman comes bustling out with other things on their mind.
Like vomiting or fucking.
Jensen doesn’t like his chances, at least on the fucking front, but he’s too damn stubborn to go back to the truck in eight hours and have Chris give him his irritating damn smirk and make a patronising comment about coming up empty handed. Or coming from an empty hand...lone hand…whatever.
Even his thoughts aren’t on board with sense-making tonight.
Despite being in the middle of fucking nowhere, the bar is packed.
At least half of the clientele belong to the other big rigs parked along the shoulder outside, hardened and overweight, trucker’s caps, trucker’s tans. There’s a lot of flannel. The other half appears to be local, living it up to cheap booze and Stevie Ray. Jensen suspects they have names like Raylene and Missy-Jo.
He muscles towards the bar, slides in between the masses of sweaty flesh and lurid neon ruffle skirts. A girl steps on his toes in her stilettos without so much as an apology and Jensen thanks his lucky stars he’s wearing industrial leather boots and not flip-flops. When he makes it to the bar, the counter is sticky and the beer mats sodden. They don’t ask for ID and he orders the least offensive beer on tap from the not unattractive bartender. Briefly, he wonders if he should centre his attentions on him; he’s tall and lanky, a shock of black hair and all teeth when he smiles. Given the way he’s flirting with the women lined all the way down the bar like vultures at a kill site though, he’s pretty sure the guy isn’t going to be interested in the fact that he has a dick.
Turning, with only a minimum of elbowing needed, Jensen leans back against the wood and surveys the room. It’s slim pickings, but there are a couple of possibles. One in particular, short and stocky in a way that reminds him of Chris but with darker features, is watching him carefully from where’s standing in the shadows cast by the overhead spotlight on the pool table. He seems more interested in Jensen than the game. It bodes well.
Jensen makes sure to stay in his spot for longer, not rushing over and scaring the guy off in his eagerness to get back at Chris, to get laid. He finishes his beer, keeping his gaze firmly on the man. Watches him watch him back.
Blood ratchets up in his veins and he can feel the pull of tightening nerves begin low in his stomach, dipping further downwards with each moment the anticipation builds. He slaps the foam-laced glass down on the counter and signals to the bartender for another. The bartender barely looks at him as he fills the order and takes Jensen’s money; when he turns back around again, the man at the pool table is still watching.
Seems like he made the right choice there.
His second beer sending rivulets of condensation down his wrist, Jensen makes his way casually over to the guy. He pretends, probably badly, to be interested in the game playing out on the felt in front of him. Not that he has any idea what colour just went into the top corner pocket.
When the guy sidles around the table and stands next to him the hairs on the back of his arm stand on end and he fights to keep from swaying into the guy’s gravitational pull.
“Interested in pool?” the man asks in a hushed voice, nods in the direction of the table. Up close Jensen can see his eyes are a shallow brown.
Jensen takes a swallow of beer, keeps his eyes on the table. He figures there’s little reason to take it slow, it’s only sex he’s looking for after all. “Interested in other things more.”
The guy nods, looks him up and down. “Want some fresh air?”
Jensen nods and finds himself turning and following the man out through the throng of people. He sets his half-empty glass on a high table already stacked with empties as he passes.
The night is even colder in comparison to the stuffy air of the bar. It hits him in the face as he steps out in his quarry’s wake.
“’Round here,” the man nods at him over his shoulder, indicates that they should follow the side of the building to an out of the way corner.
Jensen follows. He’s already hard in his jeans and the knowledge that he’s about to get delivery on his desire floods through him in a heated wave.
He almost doesn’t register the fact that when he turns the corner there are suddenly five guys instead of one. Or that there’s a fist coming out of the darkness towards his face.
***
The first thing Jensen is aware of, when he becomes aware of things again, is that it’s warmer. And softer, though he doesn’t understand why.
A second later the pain swoops in, the groan that escapes physically hurting as it claws its way out of his chest. There’s sharp stabbing sensations in his chest and his face fucking hurts, throbbing, tight and too hot. He can taste blood on his tongue and in the back of his throat. His head aches so loudly and flares so dark behind his eyelids that it’s all he can do but hang onto consciousness.
A hand comes to rest gently on his shoulder, firm and holding him down. He knows he should struggle, fight and run, he just can’t seem to do it, can’t seem to make his legs and arms work the way he wants them to.
Then there’s a cold cloth against his forehead and the sound of a voice murmuring words. They don’t sound threatening.
He lets himself slip away again.
***
What feels like only a second later he comes back to awareness again, though judging by the reduced throbbing in his head it must be substantially later. He’s clearly inside - there’s no noise and it’s not as cold as he was before.
Slowly he tries to open his eyes, but one of them doesn’t seem to want to work properly. It’s bright and he quickly closes the eyelid as objects swim alarmingly and make him feel like he’s going to fall over. Alarming because he’s pretty sure he’s lying down.
His fingers clench in what he recognizes as bed sheets and he tries to make them pull him up. All he gets for his troubles is a sliver of molten torture up his wrist and arm.
“Hey, hold your horses, kid,” comes a voice from somewhere close by. It takes a moment but he thinks it’s someone he knows. “Moving isn’t a genius idea right now.”
“Wha…?” He manages to make his throat work, but the whole word doesn’t get out right.
The bed dips under him as whoever it is sits down next to him. The warm cloth on his forehead is replaced with a cold one.
“Hush now, Jen,” comes the voice, and the knowledge that it belongs to Chris filters into consciousness. “You need to keep still, ‘kay?”
It seems like fairly good advice, some part of his brain seems to think, but he’s confused and unsure what’s going on. He feels Chris’ fingertips on his cheekbones, ghosting carefully along the bone.
“Can you open your eyes for me again, Jensen? I just need to make sure you’re okay, yeah?”
He really doesn’t want to, scared of the spinning vertigo that overcame him last time, but he recognizes the tone of caring in Chris’ voice and it seems important to at least try to do what he’s being asked. He swallows and attempts to open his eyes again, this time more successfully. The room tilts but only for a second. Chris looms over him, blocking out the light from the ceiling, his hair is out of its ponytail and it sheathes down in a waterfall around him, brushing against Jensen’s jaw.
Chris’ fingertips dance upwards, pulling gently at the skin above his eyes to keep his eyelids open. He looks from one iris to the other, Jensen struggling not to go cross-eyed, pretty sure doing so won’t help the pounding in his head.
Chris nods, apparently happy with what he sees. “You were beaten harder than a rented mule, Jensen. What the hell were you thinking?” His words ghost warm across Jensen’s cheek.
Jensen thinks the question might be rhetorical, and as the images of what actually did happen rush through his mind at the prompt, he’s pretty sure he can’t answer it anyway. His thoughts are reduced to a stream of knuckles hitting his face, his chest, his stomach. Blood dripping down his chin from the split of his lip, splashing against the dusty ground, almost black in the dark. He knows he got some punches back, but against five others there was no way he was going to get out on top. Someone had kicked out and hooked his ankle from under him; he’d plummeted down to the ground, wrist taking the brunt of his weight and curled in on himself, but not quickly enough to stop the vicious kick to his stomach.
There had been hands in his clothes, searching and greedy and then the sound of feet hurrying away. The dull bass from the wall at his back had sounded him into blackness.
His eyes prickle hot and salt stings at the cut in the corner of his left eye. Chris places his palm over his eyes, Jensen’s eyelids shutting involuntarily.
“Go back to sleep Jensen, I’ll wake you again soon.”
Jensen sleeps.
***
He’s vaguely aware of being roused annoyingly often throughout the night, but then, blessedly, Chris leaves him alone. When he next truly wakes there is muted sun shining in through the blinds, dust motes dancing in the errant beams.
He feels significantly better, though everything aches. The thumping in his head is nothing more than a persistent headache. In the stark light of day the knowledge of what occurred the night previously should almost be more shocking but it’s dulled in its reality by the passage of time, the fact that the sun is up, that he’s in a warm bed.
Which lasts all of two minutes before he tries to move and pain lances up him like a cattle prod to his side.
Groaning, Jensen decides only to move his head, carefully looking around at his surroundings. He’s in a motel room that looks like it was decorated in the ‘70s, chocolate brown and cream covering everything. Chris isn’t anywhere to be seen, and Jensen wonders with a flutter of fear if he’s left him here. It’s well past the eight hours Chris had allotted. His heart seems to sink within his chest cavity as he reconciles himself to the situation.
He’s alone, injured and abandoned. He hates it, but suddenly he almost wishes his mom was there, or that he hadn’t been dumb enough to leave home in the first place. Then he hears his father’s voice in his head, telling him he told him so, and it just makes his eyes hurt more with the effort not to do something so ridiculous as cry.
He distracts himself by trying to catalogue his injuries. From the heat and gumminess of his left eye he’s sure he has a hell of a shiner. When he opens his mouth his jaw is sore, but it isn’t broken. Probably bruised. His lip is definitely split.
It takes a moment longer to realize that his hands are bandaged, rusted spots where blood has seeped through at his knuckles. Jensen flexes his fingers. Nothing broken then, though his right wrist aches dully.
Lifting the sheet that’s tucked up to his chin he peers down at his chest. There’s a huge black bruise spreading across his stomach and up over his ribs. It joins with the mottled yellow bruise that begins at his collarbone. Nice.
But all in all? He’s fucking lucky.
He knows his wallet is gone, it isn’t even a question. He thanks god that all they wanted was his cash.
Staring up at the stucco ceiling he wonders what he’s going to do. He might be lucky, but he sure as hell can’t move anywhere on his own right now. Even if someone was willing to give a lift to someone who was black and blue and screaming probable trouble. He’s not up to driving, even if he could beg money from his parents and find a hire car.
The feeling of helplessness starts to well up in his chest.
A slide of metal and an electronic beep alert him to someone at the door. A cowboy boot pushes the door open and that someone is revealed to be Chris, door pass held between his teeth, two paper cups in a tray in one hand and brown paper bags stained with oil at the bottom in the other.
Jensen is flooded with relief at the sight of him. He tries to smile though he suspects it comes out lopsided due to the swelling.
Chris spits the room key out onto the nearby chair and the corner of his mouth twitches wryly in return. “You’ve returned to the land of the living then?”
“You stayed.” He tries not to sound like a little girl, simperingly overly grateful, even though he is.
Chris rolls his eyes, places the cups and bags on the sideboard and liberates one of the beverages. “Of course I’m here. I’m not a complete asshole.”
Jensen recognizes it for what it is and allows Chris to brush it off like it’s nothing, even though it’s not. If it makes him feel better, Chris can keep the tough guy act. It’s the least Jensen can do for him.
Chris brings the coffee to him, but sets it on the nightstand next to a glass of water. “Wasn’t sure if you’d be up to that, got it anyway. Drink some water first maybe.”
Jensen inclines his head. “Thanks.”
“There’s food too,” Chris nods back at the bags.
They lapse into silence. It’s not quite awkward, but it’s not quite normal either, given the situation.
Chris sips at his own coffee, leans back against the sideboard and watches Jensen watching him. Eventually he breaks the silence.
“How are you feeling? Made sure you didn’t slip into a coma from concussion or bleed out on me, but that’s about the extent of my nursing skills.”
“Sore,” Jensen replies honestly, “but I think I’ll live. Uh, thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
Chris shrugs. “Heard some guys talking about a pretty boy about to get fleeced, figured your parents’d kill me if I let you get your head smashed in on your first trip away from home.”
“Funny,” Jensen says, sarcasm dripping, but he appreciates it nonetheless.
“I’m a funny guy,” Chris says, deadpan.
Another silence, this time easier.
“Besides,” Chris says, turning to face the TV and pulling some baked goods out of one of the bags, “I did tell you to go get laid, so I guessed I was kinda responsible.”
The thought hadn’t even occurred to Jensen and he dismisses it almost as soon as he hears it. “Wasn’t your fault, man. I was the one heading out all cock-block spurned. I was angry; it made me reckless.”
Chris stares at him intently, ankles crossed and weight against the furniture behind him. He looks thoughtful. “That so?”
Jensen can’t really believe that the guy is that dense that it’s only just now occurring to him that Jensen finds him attractive enough to screw. And yet the way Chris is looking at him, like he’s actually seeing him instead of a runaway kid… Jensen feels the blush rise up his cheeks, mingling with the heat of the cuts and bruises. He does the only thing he can: changes the subject.
“So uh, shouldn’t you be on the road now? It’s past eight hours.”
Chris arches an eyebrow, but thankfully doesn’t comment on the subject change. “We made good time yesterday, we can stay a little longer.”
Jensen doubts that. He notices the plural ‘we’ though.
Glancing down at his hands he realises he’s missing the rings on his hand, his bracelet he wears on his right hand. “They stole my jewellery?” he asks incredulously, mostly to himself.
“Oh, no man,” Chris says, kicks up off the sideboard and shoves his hand into one of his jeans pockets. He pulls out Jensen’s rings and bracelet. “I have ‘em. I thought your wrist might swell up more than it has, thought I should get ‘em off before you couldn’t.”
“Are you sure you’ve never done this before, Florence?” Jensen asks.
“I did some riding in my teenage years. You learn some shit I guess.”
Jensen wonders if Chris means horses or bikes. He tries to sit up again, but the pain causes him to grimace and inhale sharply. Chris is by him in a second, helping him with a firm hand on his elbow. When Jensen is propped up on the pillows, Chris hands him the glass of water first.
“Drink up, have something to eat and have a nap. We can leave later tonight.”
Jensen nods, confused as to why he’s suddenly warranting such sympathy from a near stranger. But he’s tired, and after he munches down carefully on one of the pastries Chris brings him, he feels his eyelids starting to droop, the tenderness in his muscles and skin flaring up. Chris helps him to lie back down again and Jensen closes his eyes.
They’re on the road by nightfall, Jensen doped up on painkillers and propped against the window. Getting him into the truck had been an ordeal. A painful one.
Chris is humming along softly to the radio as he navigates them back onto the interstate.
* * *
“So why do you do this?” Jensen asks the next day.
They’re heading into the deeper South now, the hills are flattening out and Turkey Vultures are gliding on the upstreams above them. The humidity ratchets up a notch and Chris has the air con on full, paper streamers tied to the vents dancing out in waves.
“Rescue fair maidens from being beat to shit?” Chris quips, eyes flashing humour before returning to the road in front of them.
Jensen ignores him. “Drive trucks.”
“I told you,” Chris snorts, “the money is good.”
Jensen studies Chris’ profile. He doesn’t believe him. “But if you’re still driving them then you must be saving the money for something, right?”
Chris is quiet a moment, then he sighs. “If you must be a nosy bitch, I'm going to buy my own ranch. Raise some livestock.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Jensen asks, genuinely intrigued.
Chris looks at him, eyes narrowed and sarcasm drips from his pores. “Of course I fucking know how to do that.”
“Wow. Cool.”
Chris rolls his eyes. “It’s not ‘cool’. It’s just something I can do. That’s all.”
“Yeah but, that’s what I mean, man,” Jensen starts. “You know what you want, what you’re good at... I’m still trying to figure that shit out.”
“You have time, kid. Well. If you don’t get yourself killed at biker bars.”
“Again,” Jensen monotones, “Not a kid, and totally your fault.”
Chris’ gaze snaps to him, dark and unreadable before darting away again. “So you say.”
“So I say,” Jensen parrots, attempting confidence.
Chris snorts, but he doesn’t quite pull off the air of indifference Jensen thinks he’s aiming for.
Something has changed. There’s tension in the truck’s cab. And yet it’s a weird sleepy kind of tension, filled with the knowledge of Jensen’s injuries, and the way Chris had nursed him as if he’d cared. Jensen wonders, if things were repeated would Chris send him off to get laid? Or would he invite him in. He isn’t sure he knows the answer, or even that Chris knows.
It gives him hope, reckless as it may be.
* * *
Jensen dreams again and wakes up hard as nails, blinking in the afternoon sun.
“I guess you really are feeling better then,” Chris says, amused.
Jensen supposes he must have been making noises. Great. Either that or Chris noticed because he’s had his eyes trained on his groin, which seems...doubtful.
“Where are we?” Jensen asks, ignoring the pulsing between his thighs.
“Just went past Pensacola,” Chris replies, voice still amused. “Nearly as far south as I go, bucko.”
Jensen frowns as a little flutter of something beats against his ribcage like a trapped bird. Disappointment? Regret? Fear? He isn’t sure.
“I could come back with you again, on the return trip,” Jensen says, pushing down the hopeful tinge that wants to creep into his voice.
Chris laughs. “No can do, Kiddo. I’m not a chauffeur, you wanted south and I got you south. Can’t say I didn’t deliver.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Jensen mutters darkly.
“Leave it alone, Jensen. I ain’t your surrogate parent. I’m not driving you to soccer practice and I’m not gonna fuck you because you’re having a rebellious streak.”
Anger surges through Jensen’s veins. All this time, all these days and nights and conversation and Chris still thinks he’s some stupid little child running from mommy and daddy. His cock pulses with the blood of anger as well as arousal.
“Fuck you,” Jensen spits and the venom makes Chris glance over in surprise. “I’m not a fucking child and if you think I want to fuck you because I want to screw over my parents in some Freudian nightmare then you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Jen-” Chris starts.
Placating or fighting further Jensen doesn’t know, nor does he care. He isn’t a kid and he knows what he goddamn wants, even if it’s currently making him seethe from where it’s seated next to him.
“No!” Jensen snaps. “You think this is a joke? Here. Look at it. See how funny it is!”
Before he even knows what he’s doing Jensen is tugging open the button of his jeans and yanking the zip down. His cock strains obscenely from behind his underwear, pushing up out of the confines of denim to the freedom exposed by the open zip. The gasp that Chris takes in is satisfyingly shocked.
“Jesus christ, Jensen! What the fuck are you doing?” Chris growls, part anger and part surprise.
“What does it look like?” Jensen answers angrily, as he tugs the band of his underwear down over his erection and fists his cock. The moan that involuntarily hurtles out of his throat is more stunned than he’d like, but he’ll take it. He stares at Chris, at the shocked expression on his face, the way he keeps darting his eyes back to the road before lingering longer on Jensen’s hand as it slides up and down his length. It’s almost too much and Jensen closes his eyes tight, focuses instead on the feel of his hand on his hot sensitive skin.
“Fuck. Do you want to kill us?” Chris snaps, but Jensen can hear the tremor. Chris isn’t immune to the sight. He wants him. Jensen is sure of it.
Emboldened, Jensen spreads his thighs, shoes hitting the door and centre console of his side of the cab. He slides his thumb over the seeping pre-come at the tip of his cock and moans, deep and loud.
Chris swears under his breath, a litany of curses and phrases that would make the Devil blush.
The angle is wrong and his wrist hasn’t recovered from the fall, and when Jensen viciously pulls at his cock on the upstroke pain lances up it. He hisses at the feeling, his whimpering groan arousal and ache, but he refuses to stop. Does it again with stuttering breath.
“Christ, Jensen! Stop! You’re hurting yourself, you idiot.” Chris seems to snap out of the stunned trance Jensen’s hand on his cock had brought on and he’s slamming on the engine breaks, the compression forcing out loud chattering thunder from the exhaust as the truck comes to a slow but hard halt along the side of the road.
“Fuck, Jen,” Chris stammers and Jensen’s eyes fly open because Chris sounds wrecked.
And he looks it too, his eyes have blown wide and dark, and Jensen can see the want plain as day. He’d be smug, but his wrist twists and he stutters out a gasp of pain and then Chris is surging across the cab, pushing his hand away with surprising gentleness.
“Don’t, Jensen...” he murmurs gruffly, “Let me.”
Jensen knows his eyes must be as wide as saucers as Chris’ hand wraps tight around his cock. Pure need shoots through him, hips jerking him up in to Chris’ grip. His uninjured hand snaps to Chris’ head, tangles in the hair even though it’s trapped back in its hair-tie. Chris’ fingers are calloused from driving and the rough skin pulls along his sensitive cock in a way Jensen has never felt before.
“That’s it, Jen,” Chris mutters and then he’s crossing the seats further.
Chris looks at him for a tense split-second and then his mouth is on Jensen’s, hard and desperate. Jensen opens to him immediately, whimpering as Chris’ tongue fills his mouth, curling and sliding; owning. It’s hot and messy and decidedly uncomfortable, twisted as they are in a truck not made for fucking. Jensen’s split lip rends slightly and the sharp tang of blood invades the kiss. Chris tongues at the split and Jensen moans in the sweet pain of it. He loves every fucking second. Jensen takes and bites, sucks on Chris’ tongue and fucks into his mouth. Shows him that he isn’t a fucking kid and makes Chris acknowledge it in groans and abortive thrusts against his thigh.
They’re in the middle of Florida, on the side of the interstate and in broad daylight. State troopers could pass at any second, looking for drug runners from Miami or just a truck having troubles on the side of the road. And neither of them give a shit.
Jensen’s moaning, breath hitching as Chris hand pulls and slides mercilessly on his cock, his muscles are tightening, singing with every squeeze, every swipe of thumb. Chris slides the back of his thumbnail up the vein on the underside of Jensen’s cock and Jensen yelps into his mouth, hips thrusting and pressure pushing between his legs in an obscene escalation into delirium until he’s coming without warning, spurting come into Chris’ hand and moaning like a whore into his mouth.
“God,” Chris whispers, pressing lips to Jensen’s cheekbones. “That’s the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says and his own erection ruts against Jensen’s thigh.
Jensen can’t manage to answer, high on adrenaline and endorphins, breath stuttering into his lungs in embarrassing gasps. “S’sorry about your hand,” he mutters, not really sorry at all.
Chris laughs, and it’s the first time Jensen has heard it contain joy and not sarcasm. “This hand?” Chris asks, pulling back from Jensen’s mouth and lifting his hand, wet and shiny with Jensen’s come. Lifting his hand and licking it in a long stripe of tongue from wrist to finger tip.
”Oh, fuck,” Jensen gasps and his hips tremor with one last pulse of almost painful arousal.
“Yeah,” Chris says. He sucks a finger into his mouth and groans as his hips shove hard against Jensen’s hip, once, twice and then freezing stock still as he comes, fully clothed, against Jensen’s leg.
Chris collapses against him, knocking the breath out of Jensen as he presses against the ache of bruises across his chest. Chris’ breath is hot in the crook of Jensen’s neck.
* * *
They make it to Miami a few hours later, clean only for a gas station restroom and wet paper towels. Jensen checks into a hotel and Chris makes his delivery.
Jensen isn’t sure that Chris will come back, and the relief that floods through him when he sees the truck, minus its trailer of goods, pull into the motel lot is almost embarrassing.
Chris stops calling him a kid and starts moaning his name; Jensen thinks it’s pretty good trade off. They fuck in a mess of humidity, come and sweat. And then they do it again.
And again.
Chris orders them pizza and they eat it, greasy and with their hands, tangled in the scratchy sheets of the motel bed. Jensen gets drunk on a six-pack of beer and Chris laughs at him when he can’t stop hiccuping. Jensen tries to shut him up but Chris just laughs louder and pushes him away, tells him there’s no way he’s getting anywhere near his dick when he’s liable to hiccup and bite the thing off.
Jensen tells him about his life back home. His mom and her auxiliaries and his dad and his golf buddies. Chris rolls his eyes a lot and grumbles about money being wasted on the rich. In turn Chris tells Jensen about growing up in Oklahoma, the farm that his pappy had to sell after his momma spent a little too much on online gambling. How he went to community college and got a degree in farm management and wants to own his own place.
Chris teaches him how to give a good blow job and Jensen practices with enthusiasm. Jensen has sex with a man for the very first time, his fingers scrabbling in the slip of sweat against Chris’ lower back. He comes embarrassingly fast and Chris doesn’t care at all, simply grabs Jensen’s hand and wraps his fingers around his cock, using him to masturbate himself over the edge.
They fall asleep to late night talk show hosts being smarmy on the television.
Three days later, Chris tells him that he still has to go back. Jensen nods and swallows against the lump in his throat. The sex is softer then, a careful tangle of thighs and muscle. Jensen knows it’s goodbye, even though he doesn’t understand it.
He left home to find something, and he found Chris. It makes no sense that he can’t keep him, and it isn’t fair. He wishes he were still a kid so that he could stomp his foot and cry.
But he isn’t, and so he doesn’t. Has a shower instead of watching as Chris drives away. Another haul, another shipment. Heading north.
* * *
Three months later
Jensen gets a job at a local construction company and lives his life. He discovers he doesn’t like a lot of things he thought he might. Freedom isn’t quite as freeing as he’d imagined.
Life, it turns out, is harder than he thought. The meagre bunch of acquaintances he makes are hard-working and definitely not rich. He doesn’t envy their lives, even as he respects their determination to survive.
While part of him wants to prove his parents wrong, he wants to go back to school. Maybe get an MBA, though he isn’t a hundred percent sure. As it happens, he doesn’t actually need to deal in absolutes. His parents had never given the impression there was anything else.
He phones his mom and his dad every few weeks. They still don’t understand but they don’t turn him away, don’t hang up the phone in his ear. He loves them despite their faults, which surprises him even though it shouldn’t.
When he calls to tell them he’s coming back, going to college after all, he tries not to let their elated joy poison his decision. Because it is - his.
He packs up his belongings in his ratty backpack and sets it by the door of the motel.
And he waits.
A week and a half later he wakes up and looks out into the parking lot. His heart jack-knifes in his chest and he pulls on his jeans and his abandoned shirt off the floor. He stuffs his dirty clothes into his bag and is out the door.
The truck is the only one in the lot of the motel that doesn’t have devil's horns or flames painted on it.
Heart thundering in his chest he approaches from the side, hauls himself up on the step and pulls open the door.
“Hey! What the fu-” Chris stares at him, mouth open in mid-sentence. Jensen grins and hoists himself into the passenger seat.
“Jensen,” Chris says, sounding stunned. Sounding something not dissimilar to pleased.
Jensen smirks, because maybe he can keep some of what he found, if he works at it.
He raises an eyebrow, quirks his mouth into a grin. “Going north?”
* * *
End.
Author: qthelights
Pairing: Jensen Ackles/Christian Kane
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 10,000
Summary: Jensen is slightly past 18 and just out of school. Chris is a long-haul trucker. One picks up the other. Tensions rise.
Warnings: RPS, AU, offscreen mild violence
Disclaimer: Never happened, no offense intended.
Notes: This came about from a conversation with kadiel_krieger, as most things do. Despite not ‘doing AU’ and not liking to diverge too far from my OTP roots, this one wouldn’t let me go. And here it is. Beta thanks go to cupiscent :) Apologies to truck enthusiasts, ‘cause yeah, never been in one, never paid attention to ‘em. Wikipedia can only tell one so much ;)
Truckstop
The truck is the only one in the lot of the backwater diner that doesn’t have devil's horns or flames painted on it. It’s an eighteen-wheeler and the cab is plain black, covered in dust from lonely hauls across desert interstates. Jensen knows he should be wary, given the rig is in back of the parking lot, set apart from the rest of the sleeping husks of metal. Seclusion is dangerous, but privacy is rare. He takes the chance.
The guy standing against a wheel well, legs crossed and shoulders slumped, is shorter than him but stockier. He looks young. A lot younger than the leathery old guys Jensen has hitched rides with so far, sun-beaten into tanned, pruney skin. This guy’s maybe mid-thirties, ponytail pulling greasy-looking hair off his face; paisley red bandanna crowning his head.
The guy watches Jensen intently as he approaches, cigarette tip flaring lava-orange in the dusk falling around them. His stare doesn’t waver. The guy isn’t afraid and that means something. Not that Jensen poses much of an intimidating picture, barely worn jeans and equally well kept long-sleeve shirt, tall but lanky, clearly not quite out of his teens. Still. When someone could be packing, it pays dividends to be wary, and this guy isn’t. Or at least he doesn’t show it. Jensen files it away.
“Can I help you, son?” the guy drawls, his accent slow and twanging. He blows out a stream of smoke, inhales another drag. Watches.
Jensen is still deciding, but he doesn’t want to fuck it up before he can reach a conclusion. It’s getting late and he doesn’t want to spend another night walking the highway. That the guy is good looking and the accent shoots straight down his spine should not be reasons to trust the guy. And yet.
“Not your son, but I, uh,” he tries not to stutter, tries to be cool and confident. He coughs to cover his nerves. “I need a ride, if you’re open to it.”
The guy snorts a laugh. “That so. And where you heading, Yankee?”
Jensen shrugs, tries to act nonchalant. “Doesn’t matter. Wherever you’re headed.”
The guy looks him up and down, eyes slowly raking Jensen’s body in a way that makes his skin crawl, just a bit. It could be bluff. It could be foreplay. “You running away from home?”
He bristles, tries not to show it ‘cause he knows he looks young, even if he’s past 18, months ago now. “Not home, no.”
“Girl troubles?” The guy grins around his cigarette.
“Just needed some air,” Jensen answers, not willing to give his life away to someone he hasn’t even sized up yet.
The guy considers him, takes one last puff and flicks the butt of the cigarette to the pavement in a skitter of red ashes. “Well okay then.” He holds out his hand to Jensen. “Chris Kane. Going south.”
Jensen shakes his hand, it’s warm and soft, the grip firm. “Jensen,” he says, doesn’t give a surname but pauses then adds, “South is fine. Better than fine, actually.”
Chris nods and opens the door to the cab. “I don’t take breaks and I pick the music. If we stop somewhere, I go when I go, you’re either in the truck or you ain’t. Got it?”
Jensen nods, but Chris has already turned away, levering himself up with ease into the truck’s cab. He hurries around the front of the truck and pulls himself up into the passenger side. He’s a lot less graceful at it than Chris was.
Chris waits until Jensen’s buckled in before he slides on a pair of mirrored RayBan's, protection against the last stabs of sun spearing over the horizon, and grins as he checks the mirrors. “Yeehaw,” he drawls out sarcastically and revs the truck to life underneath them.
* * *
Sometime during the night Jensen falls asleep, head propped against the cool glass of the truck window. It’s probably stupid of him. Just because he feels safe enough to get in the truck with the guy doesn’t mean it’s safe to be unconscious near him.
He doesn’t even know him better than when he hopped in. As they’d pulled onto the highway Chris had pushed a tape into the deck with nail-chewed finger and something country and hard had blasted from the sound system, filled the cab with a giant fuck-off to conversation.
Jensen had been okay with that. It was nice, not having to make shitty small talk, weave white lies and stories around what he wanted to say and what he didn’t. Eventually he’d rested his head against the pane beside him, watched the double lines appear in the headlights and disappear into the gaping yaw of the truck’s chassis.
When he wakes, dawn has come and gone and mid-morning light bathes the desert in long shadows and golden dust. Chris hasn’t killed him in his sleep, or done anything else that Jensen can tell. It says a lot about the guy, or maybe just enough; either way Jensen relaxes, just a bit.
The man himself is singing softly to the music coming from the speakers. His voice is rough but sweet, filled with twangy vowels and resonant r’s that Jensen can feel skitter up his legs. The driver’s window is rolled down and Chris rests a tanned arm along the ledge. Even though the sun isn’t at its zenith, the warmth in the oddly cool breeze promises fierce summer later on.
Jensen blinks, drags the back of his hand across his mouth to check for drool.
“Morning,” he mumbles, stretching his legs out as best he can under the dash and shifting in his seat to wake up the numbness in his ass and thighs.
Chris glances at him, the same sly grin firmly in place. Jensen doesn’t find it worrying anymore, though he wonders if he should. “Morning, Sunshine. Thought I'd have to listen to you snoring till we hit the Mississippi.”
Jensen feels his cheeks colour and turns to look out the window at the miles of rusty brown flatness and sparse grasses clinging for life to its expanse. “Shoulda woken me.”
Chris huffs a laugh, amused, and Jensen can’t help but sneak a quick glance over at him. The smile he finds seems easy and light as Chris keeps his eyes firmly trained on the horizon, one fingerless-gloved hand resting loose on the bottom of the wheel. “You seemed like you could use the sleep. Running away from home takes it out of a kid.”
Jensen rolls his eyes, tries to stretch out his arms without hitting the roof of the cab. “Told you. I ain’t no kid and I’m not running away from home.”
Again Chris laughs but this time there’s a touch of something bitter to it. “Son, we’re all running away from home, you sure as pig shit ain’t the only one.”
Jensen watches a rabbit dash across the road a hundred yards or so ahead of them. “What are you running from then?”
“Mostly, the leather strap of my pop’s favourite belt,” Chris chuckles darkly. Then, quietly, “Many things, kid, too many and too sad to name.”
It sounds like a stock answer, a line from a song. It sounds kinda corny, actually, Jensen thinks. Chris reaches out and twists the knob of the radio, jerking the station into static and random bursts of chatter and disharmony. He stops it on a hair metal song and cranks up the volume. Conversation over.
Jensen just shrugs and settles back into his seat, pulls a novel out of his backpack. The blinding sun edges higher in the sky.
* * *
He’s dozing again when the stuck shudders to a stop, the tick tick tick of the engine trying vainly to cool down under the piercing mid-afternoon sun.
“Grub’s up,” Chris intones, cracking his knuckles in a series of loud pops. “The lovely local Choke and Puke. Get it or go hungry.”
Jensen blinks blearily at their surroundings; they’re at another truck-stop diner, identical to the one they started in save for the weather-beaten sign peeling atop the squat brick building that proclaims “Molly’s” instead of “Bill’s”.
Chris is out of the cab and headed for the building before Jensen gets his head out of the sleepy muddle it’s cocooned itself in. He sighs tiredly and fumbles for the door, levers himself down; narrowly misses falling the four feet to the ground and faceplanting into concrete.
When he pays attention, he realises that he’s hungry; really hungry, if the growling from his stomach is anything to go by. And he desperately needs to take a piss. Food wins out and he heads into the diner. Chris is already sitting down with a tray full of heart attack waiting to happen, grease and salt piled high. The slim-hipped waitress leans over way too far to fill up his iced tea and Jensen can see down her top from the door. He imagines Chris' view is probably even better from an inch in front of his nose.
The leer on his face as he winks and drawls a thank you at her pretty much confirms it.
Jensen picks out one of the sandwiches wilting under the counter, hopes to god he doesn’t end up with food poisoning from the browning lettuce and oily cheese. He grabs a can of lukewarm coke. The pimply kid at the counter, most definitely not ‘Molly’, can’t keep his lust-filled gaze off of Chris and the waitress as he rings up Jensen’s total. When he gives Jensen back a bill with Hamilton staring bemusedly out at him instead of Lincoln’s indifferent stare, Jensen says nothing.
He takes a seat by the window, chews moodily through the stale sandwich. It was true, what he’d said to Chris the night before. South was good. He didn’t actually have any real destination in mind. Just wanted away from the expectations. The disappointed sighs of his mother and father.
So he’d told them he was gonna go away. Spend some time getting to know the world first. It hadn’t gone down well, but there wasn’t much they could do to stop him. He’d packed a backpack and headed out.
South was as good as any other direction.
Though he hadn’t been expecting so much damn nothingness, he thinks as he stares out at the sun-glared landscape.
When he washes down the last of his coke and glances back up from his thoughts Chris is gone, tray half empty on the table. He panics for a second, head whipping around to the parking lot out front, but the truck is still there.
Thank fuck. This is not where he wants to end his journey and so far Chris has been a good travel companion; quiet and not an insane pervert, or at least, not overtly.
He pushes his tray back and gets up, groaning at the way his muscles pull and complain at the movement. He hadn’t thought sitting on your ass all day would hurt so damn much.
Jensen goes back to the counter and asks where the restrooms are. The pimply kid languidly waves him in a direction that Jensen takes to mean ‘out back’.
The heat outside is scorching and sweat breaks out immediately at the back of his neck, his t-shirt sticking to his skin as if it knows he’ll be sweating enough any second to glue it there for real. The door to the bathroom is ajar, lock broken as if kicked out a long time ago. He pushes it open and finds Chris.
Or more specifically, he finds Chris and the missing waitress.
She’s perched up on the sink, head against the dirty mirror and legs spread, panties dangling around one sneakered ankle, Chris is on his knees and has her starched cotton dress rucked up around her waist. His mouth is buried in the mound of hair between her legs and Jensen can see his tongue darting in and curling on the upswing.
The waitress makes a startled gasp in the midst of a moan as her eyes light upon Jensen where he’s frozen in the doorway in shock.
Chris turns sharply and Jensen can see the way he visibly relaxes when he realises it’s only him and not some red-necked yokel, or worse, the girl’s father. His mouth is wet and shiny and he wipes the girl’s juices off his chin with the back of his hand.
“You joining in, Jenny, or you gonna stand there being as useful as tits on a bull?” Chris says in a measured drawl, eyebrow arched in question.
Jensen starts, whether at the nickname or the reality of the situation he isn’t sure. “No I.. I’m...” He doesn’t bother finishing, just backs out of the room trying not to trip on his feet. He hears Chris laugh from inside the restroom, closely followed by a moan from the waitress.
He feels like an idiot, his face has flamed red; he can feel it despite the heat of the sun. The worst part is he knows he shouldn’t. It’s not like he knew they’d be in there, doing...that. He’d just needed a piss, anyone would have felt the same shock at being confronted with unexpected cunnilingus. But not everyone would have stuttered and run away like a girl.
Angry at himself he walks off around to the truck. They’re the only truck in the lot, the lunch hour rush long gone.
He still needs to empty his bladder, even though he’s now also half-hard, images of Chris on his knees, fingers splayed against white thighs, flashing through his head on a loop. Fucking natural response to seeing that, he reasons, and kicks angrily at a stone.
Slipping around to his side of the truck he glances up and down the long line of road. There isn’t anyone coming for miles. He unzips and urinates on the ground behind the cover of one of the tyres. It sits on top of the dusty, parched ground like oil on water.
When he’s done he hops back up into the truck - apparently Chris is either stupidly trusting or just doesn’t give enough of a shit to lock the damn thing - and pretends to be asleep.
Chris comes back sometime later; it feels like ages but is probably only minutes. Jensen feels the truck rock as Chris hefts himself up into the cab and snorts at Jensen’s faux-sleep. Colour rushes to Jensen’s cheeks and it takes all his willpower not to scrunch up his eyes and confirm Chris' suspicion.
The truck grumbles back into life, a cool trickle of air-con seeping through the vents and hitting the sweat-damp skin of Jensen’s arms.
* * *
“So where are you from anyway, Jenny?” Chris asks hours later when Jensen has actually gone to sleep and really woken up again. “I assume you didn’t grow up in the shithole I picked you up in. And you don’t seem like a lot lizard, pretty as you are.”
“Stop calling me Jenny,” Jensen answers, ignores what he thinks is an insinuation of prostitution. “And why do you care?”
Chris snorts. “It’s called making conversation, Jenny. Sometimes people do it to pass the time.”
Begrudgingly, Jensen can admit that Chris has a point. Unless he plans on sleeping, or pretending to sleep, for the next few days, it’s going to be a long fucking trip if they spend it in silence.
“Wisconsin,” he offers. “Milwaukee.”
Chris hums in something like affirmation. “Beertown, eh? Running away ‘cause you’re bored out of your skull then?”
Despite himself, Jensen huffs a laugh. “No, it’s my home I like it. I mean...well, it’s home, that’s all.”
Chris glances at him for a moment before turning back to the road. “Then how come you ain’t badger bound right now?”
Jensen shrugs. “Like I said, I'm not running,” he chews his lip a moment, “I just needed some space from stuff.”
“Like?”
Jensen stares at Chris' fingers wrapped loosely around the gearshift, the tanned curve of his knuckles. “Expectations, mostly,” he admits. “My parents have my whole future bought and paid for. College picked, majors streamed, career chosen. They’ve even paid for the whole thing.”
Chris whistles low “And that’s a bad thing?”
“Sometimes,” Jensen mutters, aware that he’s probably sounding spoilt and young.
They’re quiet for a moment, watching the long wind of the road, the glint of cars hitting patches of sun up ahead like jewelled beetles in the sand.
“Seems like they’re trying to do what they think is right,” Chris says eventually. “Lord knows my pop never cared to do what was right by me.”
“They’re trying to do what they think is right for me,” Jensen says bitterly, “but don’t you think at some stage they ought to ask what I think is right for me?”
“So what of it? Go to college, do what they want. Worst that’ll happen you’ll end up with a degree from some Ivy League school, no debt and the world to choose from when you’re done and mom and pop don’t have no say anymore.”
“You make it sound like it’s easy,” he mutters.
“You make it sound like like life ain’t hard,” Chris answers. “News flash, kid. It’s fucking rough out here. Take the handouts you’re given. It may be all you get.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jensen says, sullenly, not sure he really believes that.
Chris changes tack as he changes gear, slips into fourth. “So what, you on a rich kids vision quest or sumthin’?”
Now Jensen snorts, picks at the tattered cotton threads that have come loose at the left knee of his jeans. “You think I’ll find my true meaning in the cab of big rig?”
“There are worse things, you know,” Chris snaps peevishly and Jensen belatedly realises he’s probably just offended the guy.
“Sorry,” he says, palms up in apology, “I just meant, this isn’t my rebellion, the act of running...I need to find something, an experience, a sign, whatever. This is the means to that.”
Chris snorts and it’s grating. “Kid, I reckon’ you just need to get laid.”
* * *
They don’t stop again until the early hours of the next morning, Chris tugging the fuel line over and wrenching it into place with gloved hands.
It’s barely past 4am and dawn is nothing but a hazy promise of white on the horizon. Jensen quickly makes use of the restrooms (thankfully empty) to get refreshed. He fashions a wet cloth out of the hand towels for a pat down and pulls his toothbrush out of his bag. A change of shirt and underwear and he’s still not particularly peachy, but at least he doesn’t reek enough to put himself off.
Clean, he raids the shop for provisions. Chris isn’t keen on stopping often, like most of the truckers he’s travelled with so far, and clearly he’s going to have to take matters into his own hands if he expects to keep fed. Twinkies, chocolate and barbecue chips, 6 pack of Red Bull. It’s got calories at least. He could swear that the kid behind the checkout is the same one from their last stop, though this one is wearing an orange t-shirt with crucifixes on it. Yeah, he ain’t in Wisconsin now.
When he gets back outside Chris is talking with a high-cheek-boned boy, all perfect blond hair and glinting teeth. Presumably the owner of the eggshell Blue Chevy sitting abandoned by the store’s entrance.
By the way Chris’ body is angled in towards the guy, he’s interested. By the way the boy pretends to be interested in the mechanics of a big rig, Chris is in luck.
Jensen rolls his eyes, because really? Again? He may have gotten out of being molested by this particular trucker, but apparently that’s only because this one is getting his kicks elsewhere plenty enough. Instead of fleeing embarrassed this time, he charges on, heart pounding. Rounds the truck past the two horny men and climbs on back into the cab.
He tries not to watch in the side mirror as Chris and the boy disappear around the back of the truck. He certainly doesn’t hold his breath to listen. Nor does he palm his cock through his jeans to rub gently at the pressure.
When Chris comes back this time, grin firmly in place and smelling like sex and gasoline, Jensen doesn’t bother pretending to sleep, he simply raises an eyebrow and munches loudly on a mouthful of barbecue chips.
Chris laughs, deep and throaty and recently sated. He makes a grabby motion towards the food.
“Uh uh,” Jensen says, wrinkling his nose. “I know exactly where your hands have been.”
* * *
Jensen is backed against the door of a toilet stall, his cock is hard and throbbing beneath his jeans but the pressure won’t go away.
Nail-bitten fingers press against the fly and he groans as his head smacks back into the door.
“More,” he gasps out, “god, please.”
The answering chuckle is dark and full of promise. Teeth bite down on his jaw and the pressure at his groin increases, throbbing, throbbingthrobbing.
Then his jeans are open and a rough hand is inside, enveloping his cock and pulling in time with the beating rush of blood that pulses through it.
He can’t get there, he needs to get there. The hand increases, tightens its grip and stubble brushes scratchingly against his jaw. Just a little... god. Just a tiny bit more... he feels it reaching within him, but he can’t quite catch it, the wave keeps dumping him before he can get on top of it.
The hand keeps pulling, pushing. Again, again, again...
Jensen gasps as he’s jolted back into reality; his head is at an odd angle, neck throbbing with pain at the awkward position. It matches counterpoint to the pulsing between his legs where he’s ridiculously hard. He reaches a hand down to do something about it before the rest of reality rushes in and he freezes, hand mid way up his thigh.
“Nice dream?” Chris sniggers from beside him.
The cab is deathly quiet save for Jensen’s quickened breathing, harsh and obvious. Of all the times for Chris not to be playing music. Jensen just grunts, unwilling to give away anything to make the situation more embarrassing than it is. He certainly isn’t about to acknowledge who the person in his dream might be; to himself or to anyone else.
“Aww, c’mon, Baby,” Chris singsongs, gaze travelling slowly down Jensen’s body like molten lava, “Don’t be like that. Been too long since Jensen got laid?”
“Fuck off,” Jensen snaps, shifts his legs and tries to adjust the pressure on his trapped dick.
“Christ, I hope you’re not a virgin,” Chris smirks and thankfully, averts his eyes back to the road. “It’s not healthy you know, depriving yourself. You oughta get something more than snacks next stop we take.”
Jensen sighs, keeps his eyes studiously on the road. “Maybe I’m not so casual in my preference of snack food.”
Chris shrugs, opening his fingers out in a hands-off gesture, only his palms kissing the wheel. “Sex is sex, Jenny. Anyone’ll do if the need is getting any.”
Jensen snarls, embarrassed, “I don’t see you offering to make it any better.”
Chris' laugh is loud and grating in its obvious superiority. “Now now, jailbait. I got me some goods to deliver, can’t be ending up in prison on a technicality.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jensen says. He’s annoyed at being dismissed so easily, especially for something that isn’t true. But he’s not angry enough to fail to realise that he shouldn’t be wanting to win the conversation in the first place. And yet that doesn’t stop him huffing under his breath, “We both know I'd be the best you’d ever had.”
Chris just hums and adjusts the visor as the sun breaks up over the edge of the Earth. Jensen doesn’t know him well enough to know what it means.
* * *
The day passes in a spattering of small talk and a mixture of radio stations. At some point they pass from desert to farmland and Jensen thinks they must have angled south-east somewhere in the journey. He was probably asleep to miss it.
Corn and something Jensen can’t identify but that might be a grain of some sort obscure the landscape for miles and for a while he’s grateful for the change of scenery. Then the pale green-yellow sway becomes just as boring as the red rock had been.
Jensen finds himself watching Chris instead. The way his leg extends out under the dash, strong denim-clad thigh resting all its weight on the heel of a cowboy boot, toe tapped down on the gas pedal. Or the way his arms are tanned and brown when he rolls up the flannel of his shirt above his elbows. He wonders if Chris has a trucker tan, white and pasty above the line of his shirt sleeve. He wonders why he wants to know that so badly.
It’s not like he’s never been attracted to a guy before, he has. He’s fooled around with mates of mates, friends of his sister that he doesn’t have to see again the next day at school. Sure, it’s never gone much further than a clumsy blowjob and only slightly less clumsy handjobs, but it’s enough to let him know that he likes both men and women.
Still. He has no idea why Chris is the one invading his subconscious. Or rather, he’s got some idea - in fact he’s pretty sure it’s because he’s now seen him in two compromising situations and the human brain naturally objectifies that kind of thing. Makes Chris into that kind of person. The kind Jensen’s person wants to get to know.
Around six Chris pulls the truck over into a rest stop and nods in the direction of some squat wooden buildings up ahead. “That there’s the BlueDog motel. I’m gonna hit the hay for a while before I start checking the back of my eyelids for pinholes. You’re welcome to sleep here or get your own room or hell, I don’t really care as long as you’re back in eight hours.”
Jensen peers into the lengthening gloom. “I was starting to wonder if you ever slept. It’s kinda disturbing.”
Chris smiles, and it seems genuine for once, not laden with innuendo or pomposity. “One you thing you learn quick smart in this racket, don’t be gettin’ used to sleep if you want your pay in full on the other end.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
Chris pauses, hand on the door handle. Jensen thinks he’s gonna get a smart ass response and an empty truck, but Chris actually considers him in the darkening light for a moment before he answers. “Long enough to know that the little white pills lead to a world of trouble even if they do keep you awake. Not long enough to realise that lack of sleep is trouble enough by itself. ‘Bout five years, maybe six. On and off.”
Jensen whistles low through his teeth. “Don’t you get bored?”
Chris laughs, nothing more than a soft gravel flutter in his throat. “The money fixes that pretty quick.”
Jensen nods, he guesses it would. Maybe that’s what he needs. To find a job somewhere and just live a little, save up some money of his very own, be independent for a bit.
“Besides, it’s not forever.”
“No?” Jensen asks, knowing he’s stalling, wanting irrationally to keep Chris in the truck.
“No. Now, are we done with twenty questions, Sport? I’m gonna go find me a bed to curl up in.” The smirk is back, full-force.
It’s out before he can stop it: “Want some company?”
Chris grins and the headlights from a passing car illuminate the enamel in a flash of white. “I think we’ve had this conversation, kid. Go find yourself a pretty piece of tail. Just be back in eight hours.”
Chris winks and then he’s gone.
Jensen sits in the cab for a good long time, unsure if he’s embarrassed, hurt or angry at being rejected. Granted, Chris probably didn’t know it was a real offer. Maybe. It stings all the same.
By the time he makes his way out, locking the cab behind him, he’s settled on a mixture of anger and horniness. Fuck Chris. If he won’t fuck him it doesn’t mean that Jensen can’t find someone else to do the job.
* * *
Despite the heat of the day, the night is cool, and Jensen represses a shiver as he trudges in the direction of the dive bar across the road from the motel. The neon sign outside the door is sparking in a red to nothing flicker. The door doesn’t close properly, just bangs against its wooden housing each time a burly trucker or skankily dressed woman comes bustling out with other things on their mind.
Like vomiting or fucking.
Jensen doesn’t like his chances, at least on the fucking front, but he’s too damn stubborn to go back to the truck in eight hours and have Chris give him his irritating damn smirk and make a patronising comment about coming up empty handed. Or coming from an empty hand...lone hand…whatever.
Even his thoughts aren’t on board with sense-making tonight.
Despite being in the middle of fucking nowhere, the bar is packed.
At least half of the clientele belong to the other big rigs parked along the shoulder outside, hardened and overweight, trucker’s caps, trucker’s tans. There’s a lot of flannel. The other half appears to be local, living it up to cheap booze and Stevie Ray. Jensen suspects they have names like Raylene and Missy-Jo.
He muscles towards the bar, slides in between the masses of sweaty flesh and lurid neon ruffle skirts. A girl steps on his toes in her stilettos without so much as an apology and Jensen thanks his lucky stars he’s wearing industrial leather boots and not flip-flops. When he makes it to the bar, the counter is sticky and the beer mats sodden. They don’t ask for ID and he orders the least offensive beer on tap from the not unattractive bartender. Briefly, he wonders if he should centre his attentions on him; he’s tall and lanky, a shock of black hair and all teeth when he smiles. Given the way he’s flirting with the women lined all the way down the bar like vultures at a kill site though, he’s pretty sure the guy isn’t going to be interested in the fact that he has a dick.
Turning, with only a minimum of elbowing needed, Jensen leans back against the wood and surveys the room. It’s slim pickings, but there are a couple of possibles. One in particular, short and stocky in a way that reminds him of Chris but with darker features, is watching him carefully from where’s standing in the shadows cast by the overhead spotlight on the pool table. He seems more interested in Jensen than the game. It bodes well.
Jensen makes sure to stay in his spot for longer, not rushing over and scaring the guy off in his eagerness to get back at Chris, to get laid. He finishes his beer, keeping his gaze firmly on the man. Watches him watch him back.
Blood ratchets up in his veins and he can feel the pull of tightening nerves begin low in his stomach, dipping further downwards with each moment the anticipation builds. He slaps the foam-laced glass down on the counter and signals to the bartender for another. The bartender barely looks at him as he fills the order and takes Jensen’s money; when he turns back around again, the man at the pool table is still watching.
Seems like he made the right choice there.
His second beer sending rivulets of condensation down his wrist, Jensen makes his way casually over to the guy. He pretends, probably badly, to be interested in the game playing out on the felt in front of him. Not that he has any idea what colour just went into the top corner pocket.
When the guy sidles around the table and stands next to him the hairs on the back of his arm stand on end and he fights to keep from swaying into the guy’s gravitational pull.
“Interested in pool?” the man asks in a hushed voice, nods in the direction of the table. Up close Jensen can see his eyes are a shallow brown.
Jensen takes a swallow of beer, keeps his eyes on the table. He figures there’s little reason to take it slow, it’s only sex he’s looking for after all. “Interested in other things more.”
The guy nods, looks him up and down. “Want some fresh air?”
Jensen nods and finds himself turning and following the man out through the throng of people. He sets his half-empty glass on a high table already stacked with empties as he passes.
The night is even colder in comparison to the stuffy air of the bar. It hits him in the face as he steps out in his quarry’s wake.
“’Round here,” the man nods at him over his shoulder, indicates that they should follow the side of the building to an out of the way corner.
Jensen follows. He’s already hard in his jeans and the knowledge that he’s about to get delivery on his desire floods through him in a heated wave.
He almost doesn’t register the fact that when he turns the corner there are suddenly five guys instead of one. Or that there’s a fist coming out of the darkness towards his face.
***
The first thing Jensen is aware of, when he becomes aware of things again, is that it’s warmer. And softer, though he doesn’t understand why.
A second later the pain swoops in, the groan that escapes physically hurting as it claws its way out of his chest. There’s sharp stabbing sensations in his chest and his face fucking hurts, throbbing, tight and too hot. He can taste blood on his tongue and in the back of his throat. His head aches so loudly and flares so dark behind his eyelids that it’s all he can do but hang onto consciousness.
A hand comes to rest gently on his shoulder, firm and holding him down. He knows he should struggle, fight and run, he just can’t seem to do it, can’t seem to make his legs and arms work the way he wants them to.
Then there’s a cold cloth against his forehead and the sound of a voice murmuring words. They don’t sound threatening.
He lets himself slip away again.
***
What feels like only a second later he comes back to awareness again, though judging by the reduced throbbing in his head it must be substantially later. He’s clearly inside - there’s no noise and it’s not as cold as he was before.
Slowly he tries to open his eyes, but one of them doesn’t seem to want to work properly. It’s bright and he quickly closes the eyelid as objects swim alarmingly and make him feel like he’s going to fall over. Alarming because he’s pretty sure he’s lying down.
His fingers clench in what he recognizes as bed sheets and he tries to make them pull him up. All he gets for his troubles is a sliver of molten torture up his wrist and arm.
“Hey, hold your horses, kid,” comes a voice from somewhere close by. It takes a moment but he thinks it’s someone he knows. “Moving isn’t a genius idea right now.”
“Wha…?” He manages to make his throat work, but the whole word doesn’t get out right.
The bed dips under him as whoever it is sits down next to him. The warm cloth on his forehead is replaced with a cold one.
“Hush now, Jen,” comes the voice, and the knowledge that it belongs to Chris filters into consciousness. “You need to keep still, ‘kay?”
It seems like fairly good advice, some part of his brain seems to think, but he’s confused and unsure what’s going on. He feels Chris’ fingertips on his cheekbones, ghosting carefully along the bone.
“Can you open your eyes for me again, Jensen? I just need to make sure you’re okay, yeah?”
He really doesn’t want to, scared of the spinning vertigo that overcame him last time, but he recognizes the tone of caring in Chris’ voice and it seems important to at least try to do what he’s being asked. He swallows and attempts to open his eyes again, this time more successfully. The room tilts but only for a second. Chris looms over him, blocking out the light from the ceiling, his hair is out of its ponytail and it sheathes down in a waterfall around him, brushing against Jensen’s jaw.
Chris’ fingertips dance upwards, pulling gently at the skin above his eyes to keep his eyelids open. He looks from one iris to the other, Jensen struggling not to go cross-eyed, pretty sure doing so won’t help the pounding in his head.
Chris nods, apparently happy with what he sees. “You were beaten harder than a rented mule, Jensen. What the hell were you thinking?” His words ghost warm across Jensen’s cheek.
Jensen thinks the question might be rhetorical, and as the images of what actually did happen rush through his mind at the prompt, he’s pretty sure he can’t answer it anyway. His thoughts are reduced to a stream of knuckles hitting his face, his chest, his stomach. Blood dripping down his chin from the split of his lip, splashing against the dusty ground, almost black in the dark. He knows he got some punches back, but against five others there was no way he was going to get out on top. Someone had kicked out and hooked his ankle from under him; he’d plummeted down to the ground, wrist taking the brunt of his weight and curled in on himself, but not quickly enough to stop the vicious kick to his stomach.
There had been hands in his clothes, searching and greedy and then the sound of feet hurrying away. The dull bass from the wall at his back had sounded him into blackness.
His eyes prickle hot and salt stings at the cut in the corner of his left eye. Chris places his palm over his eyes, Jensen’s eyelids shutting involuntarily.
“Go back to sleep Jensen, I’ll wake you again soon.”
Jensen sleeps.
***
He’s vaguely aware of being roused annoyingly often throughout the night, but then, blessedly, Chris leaves him alone. When he next truly wakes there is muted sun shining in through the blinds, dust motes dancing in the errant beams.
He feels significantly better, though everything aches. The thumping in his head is nothing more than a persistent headache. In the stark light of day the knowledge of what occurred the night previously should almost be more shocking but it’s dulled in its reality by the passage of time, the fact that the sun is up, that he’s in a warm bed.
Which lasts all of two minutes before he tries to move and pain lances up him like a cattle prod to his side.
Groaning, Jensen decides only to move his head, carefully looking around at his surroundings. He’s in a motel room that looks like it was decorated in the ‘70s, chocolate brown and cream covering everything. Chris isn’t anywhere to be seen, and Jensen wonders with a flutter of fear if he’s left him here. It’s well past the eight hours Chris had allotted. His heart seems to sink within his chest cavity as he reconciles himself to the situation.
He’s alone, injured and abandoned. He hates it, but suddenly he almost wishes his mom was there, or that he hadn’t been dumb enough to leave home in the first place. Then he hears his father’s voice in his head, telling him he told him so, and it just makes his eyes hurt more with the effort not to do something so ridiculous as cry.
He distracts himself by trying to catalogue his injuries. From the heat and gumminess of his left eye he’s sure he has a hell of a shiner. When he opens his mouth his jaw is sore, but it isn’t broken. Probably bruised. His lip is definitely split.
It takes a moment longer to realize that his hands are bandaged, rusted spots where blood has seeped through at his knuckles. Jensen flexes his fingers. Nothing broken then, though his right wrist aches dully.
Lifting the sheet that’s tucked up to his chin he peers down at his chest. There’s a huge black bruise spreading across his stomach and up over his ribs. It joins with the mottled yellow bruise that begins at his collarbone. Nice.
But all in all? He’s fucking lucky.
He knows his wallet is gone, it isn’t even a question. He thanks god that all they wanted was his cash.
Staring up at the stucco ceiling he wonders what he’s going to do. He might be lucky, but he sure as hell can’t move anywhere on his own right now. Even if someone was willing to give a lift to someone who was black and blue and screaming probable trouble. He’s not up to driving, even if he could beg money from his parents and find a hire car.
The feeling of helplessness starts to well up in his chest.
A slide of metal and an electronic beep alert him to someone at the door. A cowboy boot pushes the door open and that someone is revealed to be Chris, door pass held between his teeth, two paper cups in a tray in one hand and brown paper bags stained with oil at the bottom in the other.
Jensen is flooded with relief at the sight of him. He tries to smile though he suspects it comes out lopsided due to the swelling.
Chris spits the room key out onto the nearby chair and the corner of his mouth twitches wryly in return. “You’ve returned to the land of the living then?”
“You stayed.” He tries not to sound like a little girl, simperingly overly grateful, even though he is.
Chris rolls his eyes, places the cups and bags on the sideboard and liberates one of the beverages. “Of course I’m here. I’m not a complete asshole.”
Jensen recognizes it for what it is and allows Chris to brush it off like it’s nothing, even though it’s not. If it makes him feel better, Chris can keep the tough guy act. It’s the least Jensen can do for him.
Chris brings the coffee to him, but sets it on the nightstand next to a glass of water. “Wasn’t sure if you’d be up to that, got it anyway. Drink some water first maybe.”
Jensen inclines his head. “Thanks.”
“There’s food too,” Chris nods back at the bags.
They lapse into silence. It’s not quite awkward, but it’s not quite normal either, given the situation.
Chris sips at his own coffee, leans back against the sideboard and watches Jensen watching him. Eventually he breaks the silence.
“How are you feeling? Made sure you didn’t slip into a coma from concussion or bleed out on me, but that’s about the extent of my nursing skills.”
“Sore,” Jensen replies honestly, “but I think I’ll live. Uh, thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
Chris shrugs. “Heard some guys talking about a pretty boy about to get fleeced, figured your parents’d kill me if I let you get your head smashed in on your first trip away from home.”
“Funny,” Jensen says, sarcasm dripping, but he appreciates it nonetheless.
“I’m a funny guy,” Chris says, deadpan.
Another silence, this time easier.
“Besides,” Chris says, turning to face the TV and pulling some baked goods out of one of the bags, “I did tell you to go get laid, so I guessed I was kinda responsible.”
The thought hadn’t even occurred to Jensen and he dismisses it almost as soon as he hears it. “Wasn’t your fault, man. I was the one heading out all cock-block spurned. I was angry; it made me reckless.”
Chris stares at him intently, ankles crossed and weight against the furniture behind him. He looks thoughtful. “That so?”
Jensen can’t really believe that the guy is that dense that it’s only just now occurring to him that Jensen finds him attractive enough to screw. And yet the way Chris is looking at him, like he’s actually seeing him instead of a runaway kid… Jensen feels the blush rise up his cheeks, mingling with the heat of the cuts and bruises. He does the only thing he can: changes the subject.
“So uh, shouldn’t you be on the road now? It’s past eight hours.”
Chris arches an eyebrow, but thankfully doesn’t comment on the subject change. “We made good time yesterday, we can stay a little longer.”
Jensen doubts that. He notices the plural ‘we’ though.
Glancing down at his hands he realises he’s missing the rings on his hand, his bracelet he wears on his right hand. “They stole my jewellery?” he asks incredulously, mostly to himself.
“Oh, no man,” Chris says, kicks up off the sideboard and shoves his hand into one of his jeans pockets. He pulls out Jensen’s rings and bracelet. “I have ‘em. I thought your wrist might swell up more than it has, thought I should get ‘em off before you couldn’t.”
“Are you sure you’ve never done this before, Florence?” Jensen asks.
“I did some riding in my teenage years. You learn some shit I guess.”
Jensen wonders if Chris means horses or bikes. He tries to sit up again, but the pain causes him to grimace and inhale sharply. Chris is by him in a second, helping him with a firm hand on his elbow. When Jensen is propped up on the pillows, Chris hands him the glass of water first.
“Drink up, have something to eat and have a nap. We can leave later tonight.”
Jensen nods, confused as to why he’s suddenly warranting such sympathy from a near stranger. But he’s tired, and after he munches down carefully on one of the pastries Chris brings him, he feels his eyelids starting to droop, the tenderness in his muscles and skin flaring up. Chris helps him to lie back down again and Jensen closes his eyes.
They’re on the road by nightfall, Jensen doped up on painkillers and propped against the window. Getting him into the truck had been an ordeal. A painful one.
Chris is humming along softly to the radio as he navigates them back onto the interstate.
* * *
“So why do you do this?” Jensen asks the next day.
They’re heading into the deeper South now, the hills are flattening out and Turkey Vultures are gliding on the upstreams above them. The humidity ratchets up a notch and Chris has the air con on full, paper streamers tied to the vents dancing out in waves.
“Rescue fair maidens from being beat to shit?” Chris quips, eyes flashing humour before returning to the road in front of them.
Jensen ignores him. “Drive trucks.”
“I told you,” Chris snorts, “the money is good.”
Jensen studies Chris’ profile. He doesn’t believe him. “But if you’re still driving them then you must be saving the money for something, right?”
Chris is quiet a moment, then he sighs. “If you must be a nosy bitch, I'm going to buy my own ranch. Raise some livestock.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Jensen asks, genuinely intrigued.
Chris looks at him, eyes narrowed and sarcasm drips from his pores. “Of course I fucking know how to do that.”
“Wow. Cool.”
Chris rolls his eyes. “It’s not ‘cool’. It’s just something I can do. That’s all.”
“Yeah but, that’s what I mean, man,” Jensen starts. “You know what you want, what you’re good at... I’m still trying to figure that shit out.”
“You have time, kid. Well. If you don’t get yourself killed at biker bars.”
“Again,” Jensen monotones, “Not a kid, and totally your fault.”
Chris’ gaze snaps to him, dark and unreadable before darting away again. “So you say.”
“So I say,” Jensen parrots, attempting confidence.
Chris snorts, but he doesn’t quite pull off the air of indifference Jensen thinks he’s aiming for.
Something has changed. There’s tension in the truck’s cab. And yet it’s a weird sleepy kind of tension, filled with the knowledge of Jensen’s injuries, and the way Chris had nursed him as if he’d cared. Jensen wonders, if things were repeated would Chris send him off to get laid? Or would he invite him in. He isn’t sure he knows the answer, or even that Chris knows.
It gives him hope, reckless as it may be.
* * *
Jensen dreams again and wakes up hard as nails, blinking in the afternoon sun.
“I guess you really are feeling better then,” Chris says, amused.
Jensen supposes he must have been making noises. Great. Either that or Chris noticed because he’s had his eyes trained on his groin, which seems...doubtful.
“Where are we?” Jensen asks, ignoring the pulsing between his thighs.
“Just went past Pensacola,” Chris replies, voice still amused. “Nearly as far south as I go, bucko.”
Jensen frowns as a little flutter of something beats against his ribcage like a trapped bird. Disappointment? Regret? Fear? He isn’t sure.
“I could come back with you again, on the return trip,” Jensen says, pushing down the hopeful tinge that wants to creep into his voice.
Chris laughs. “No can do, Kiddo. I’m not a chauffeur, you wanted south and I got you south. Can’t say I didn’t deliver.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Jensen mutters darkly.
“Leave it alone, Jensen. I ain’t your surrogate parent. I’m not driving you to soccer practice and I’m not gonna fuck you because you’re having a rebellious streak.”
Anger surges through Jensen’s veins. All this time, all these days and nights and conversation and Chris still thinks he’s some stupid little child running from mommy and daddy. His cock pulses with the blood of anger as well as arousal.
“Fuck you,” Jensen spits and the venom makes Chris glance over in surprise. “I’m not a fucking child and if you think I want to fuck you because I want to screw over my parents in some Freudian nightmare then you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Jen-” Chris starts.
Placating or fighting further Jensen doesn’t know, nor does he care. He isn’t a kid and he knows what he goddamn wants, even if it’s currently making him seethe from where it’s seated next to him.
“No!” Jensen snaps. “You think this is a joke? Here. Look at it. See how funny it is!”
Before he even knows what he’s doing Jensen is tugging open the button of his jeans and yanking the zip down. His cock strains obscenely from behind his underwear, pushing up out of the confines of denim to the freedom exposed by the open zip. The gasp that Chris takes in is satisfyingly shocked.
“Jesus christ, Jensen! What the fuck are you doing?” Chris growls, part anger and part surprise.
“What does it look like?” Jensen answers angrily, as he tugs the band of his underwear down over his erection and fists his cock. The moan that involuntarily hurtles out of his throat is more stunned than he’d like, but he’ll take it. He stares at Chris, at the shocked expression on his face, the way he keeps darting his eyes back to the road before lingering longer on Jensen’s hand as it slides up and down his length. It’s almost too much and Jensen closes his eyes tight, focuses instead on the feel of his hand on his hot sensitive skin.
“Fuck. Do you want to kill us?” Chris snaps, but Jensen can hear the tremor. Chris isn’t immune to the sight. He wants him. Jensen is sure of it.
Emboldened, Jensen spreads his thighs, shoes hitting the door and centre console of his side of the cab. He slides his thumb over the seeping pre-come at the tip of his cock and moans, deep and loud.
Chris swears under his breath, a litany of curses and phrases that would make the Devil blush.
The angle is wrong and his wrist hasn’t recovered from the fall, and when Jensen viciously pulls at his cock on the upstroke pain lances up it. He hisses at the feeling, his whimpering groan arousal and ache, but he refuses to stop. Does it again with stuttering breath.
“Christ, Jensen! Stop! You’re hurting yourself, you idiot.” Chris seems to snap out of the stunned trance Jensen’s hand on his cock had brought on and he’s slamming on the engine breaks, the compression forcing out loud chattering thunder from the exhaust as the truck comes to a slow but hard halt along the side of the road.
“Fuck, Jen,” Chris stammers and Jensen’s eyes fly open because Chris sounds wrecked.
And he looks it too, his eyes have blown wide and dark, and Jensen can see the want plain as day. He’d be smug, but his wrist twists and he stutters out a gasp of pain and then Chris is surging across the cab, pushing his hand away with surprising gentleness.
“Don’t, Jensen...” he murmurs gruffly, “Let me.”
Jensen knows his eyes must be as wide as saucers as Chris’ hand wraps tight around his cock. Pure need shoots through him, hips jerking him up in to Chris’ grip. His uninjured hand snaps to Chris’ head, tangles in the hair even though it’s trapped back in its hair-tie. Chris’ fingers are calloused from driving and the rough skin pulls along his sensitive cock in a way Jensen has never felt before.
“That’s it, Jen,” Chris mutters and then he’s crossing the seats further.
Chris looks at him for a tense split-second and then his mouth is on Jensen’s, hard and desperate. Jensen opens to him immediately, whimpering as Chris’ tongue fills his mouth, curling and sliding; owning. It’s hot and messy and decidedly uncomfortable, twisted as they are in a truck not made for fucking. Jensen’s split lip rends slightly and the sharp tang of blood invades the kiss. Chris tongues at the split and Jensen moans in the sweet pain of it. He loves every fucking second. Jensen takes and bites, sucks on Chris’ tongue and fucks into his mouth. Shows him that he isn’t a fucking kid and makes Chris acknowledge it in groans and abortive thrusts against his thigh.
They’re in the middle of Florida, on the side of the interstate and in broad daylight. State troopers could pass at any second, looking for drug runners from Miami or just a truck having troubles on the side of the road. And neither of them give a shit.
Jensen’s moaning, breath hitching as Chris hand pulls and slides mercilessly on his cock, his muscles are tightening, singing with every squeeze, every swipe of thumb. Chris slides the back of his thumbnail up the vein on the underside of Jensen’s cock and Jensen yelps into his mouth, hips thrusting and pressure pushing between his legs in an obscene escalation into delirium until he’s coming without warning, spurting come into Chris’ hand and moaning like a whore into his mouth.
“God,” Chris whispers, pressing lips to Jensen’s cheekbones. “That’s the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says and his own erection ruts against Jensen’s thigh.
Jensen can’t manage to answer, high on adrenaline and endorphins, breath stuttering into his lungs in embarrassing gasps. “S’sorry about your hand,” he mutters, not really sorry at all.
Chris laughs, and it’s the first time Jensen has heard it contain joy and not sarcasm. “This hand?” Chris asks, pulling back from Jensen’s mouth and lifting his hand, wet and shiny with Jensen’s come. Lifting his hand and licking it in a long stripe of tongue from wrist to finger tip.
”Oh, fuck,” Jensen gasps and his hips tremor with one last pulse of almost painful arousal.
“Yeah,” Chris says. He sucks a finger into his mouth and groans as his hips shove hard against Jensen’s hip, once, twice and then freezing stock still as he comes, fully clothed, against Jensen’s leg.
Chris collapses against him, knocking the breath out of Jensen as he presses against the ache of bruises across his chest. Chris’ breath is hot in the crook of Jensen’s neck.
* * *
They make it to Miami a few hours later, clean only for a gas station restroom and wet paper towels. Jensen checks into a hotel and Chris makes his delivery.
Jensen isn’t sure that Chris will come back, and the relief that floods through him when he sees the truck, minus its trailer of goods, pull into the motel lot is almost embarrassing.
Chris stops calling him a kid and starts moaning his name; Jensen thinks it’s pretty good trade off. They fuck in a mess of humidity, come and sweat. And then they do it again.
And again.
Chris orders them pizza and they eat it, greasy and with their hands, tangled in the scratchy sheets of the motel bed. Jensen gets drunk on a six-pack of beer and Chris laughs at him when he can’t stop hiccuping. Jensen tries to shut him up but Chris just laughs louder and pushes him away, tells him there’s no way he’s getting anywhere near his dick when he’s liable to hiccup and bite the thing off.
Jensen tells him about his life back home. His mom and her auxiliaries and his dad and his golf buddies. Chris rolls his eyes a lot and grumbles about money being wasted on the rich. In turn Chris tells Jensen about growing up in Oklahoma, the farm that his pappy had to sell after his momma spent a little too much on online gambling. How he went to community college and got a degree in farm management and wants to own his own place.
Chris teaches him how to give a good blow job and Jensen practices with enthusiasm. Jensen has sex with a man for the very first time, his fingers scrabbling in the slip of sweat against Chris’ lower back. He comes embarrassingly fast and Chris doesn’t care at all, simply grabs Jensen’s hand and wraps his fingers around his cock, using him to masturbate himself over the edge.
They fall asleep to late night talk show hosts being smarmy on the television.
Three days later, Chris tells him that he still has to go back. Jensen nods and swallows against the lump in his throat. The sex is softer then, a careful tangle of thighs and muscle. Jensen knows it’s goodbye, even though he doesn’t understand it.
He left home to find something, and he found Chris. It makes no sense that he can’t keep him, and it isn’t fair. He wishes he were still a kid so that he could stomp his foot and cry.
But he isn’t, and so he doesn’t. Has a shower instead of watching as Chris drives away. Another haul, another shipment. Heading north.
* * *
Three months later
Jensen gets a job at a local construction company and lives his life. He discovers he doesn’t like a lot of things he thought he might. Freedom isn’t quite as freeing as he’d imagined.
Life, it turns out, is harder than he thought. The meagre bunch of acquaintances he makes are hard-working and definitely not rich. He doesn’t envy their lives, even as he respects their determination to survive.
While part of him wants to prove his parents wrong, he wants to go back to school. Maybe get an MBA, though he isn’t a hundred percent sure. As it happens, he doesn’t actually need to deal in absolutes. His parents had never given the impression there was anything else.
He phones his mom and his dad every few weeks. They still don’t understand but they don’t turn him away, don’t hang up the phone in his ear. He loves them despite their faults, which surprises him even though it shouldn’t.
When he calls to tell them he’s coming back, going to college after all, he tries not to let their elated joy poison his decision. Because it is - his.
He packs up his belongings in his ratty backpack and sets it by the door of the motel.
And he waits.
A week and a half later he wakes up and looks out into the parking lot. His heart jack-knifes in his chest and he pulls on his jeans and his abandoned shirt off the floor. He stuffs his dirty clothes into his bag and is out the door.
The truck is the only one in the lot of the motel that doesn’t have devil's horns or flames painted on it.
Heart thundering in his chest he approaches from the side, hauls himself up on the step and pulls open the door.
“Hey! What the fu-” Chris stares at him, mouth open in mid-sentence. Jensen grins and hoists himself into the passenger seat.
“Jensen,” Chris says, sounding stunned. Sounding something not dissimilar to pleased.
Jensen smirks, because maybe he can keep some of what he found, if he works at it.
He raises an eyebrow, quirks his mouth into a grin. “Going north?”
* * *
End.