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Consider the hairpin turn. It is waiting for you like a red door or the
broken leg of a dog. The sun is shining, O how the sun shines down!
Your speedometer and your handgrips and the feel of the road below
you, how it knows you, the black ribbon spread out on the greens be-
tween these lines that suddenly don’t reach to the horizon. It is waiting,
like a broken door, like the red dog that chases its tail and eats your rose-
bushes and then must be forgiven. Who do you love? Who do you
love? You were driving toward something and then, well, then you
found yourself driving the other way. The dog is asleep. The road is be-
hind you. O how the sun shines down.
*********************
It started in a bar.
It always started in a bar. Everything worth doing, that was. Or as Dean would say, everyone.
In the dim red glow of a blinking neon sign, Sam watched his brother drink the bar rats under the table. He wondered vaguely when Dean had become this. If Dean was supposed to be leading by example, Sam wasn’t sure how things were going to end up. He didn’t know then how important of a question that was.
Dean, for his part, had always taken the responsibility upon himself as the older brother to show little Sammy the ropes. Get money for him to spend on his books and magic tricks, give him the occasional punch on the shoulder like big brothers are supposed to. But he never fancied himself a good example. I may be dumb, but I’m not delusional, Dean would say. Some others might say it wasn’t his place to decide that. But it didn’t matter. Not to Dean, who was young and the type of person who will always win when it all comes down to fisticuffs. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t always all come down to fisticuffs.
Not even when it does.
That night, Sam and Dean were at a trashy bar across the street from their trashier motel. It was dark and they were both alone. Dean was drinking whiskey like he was drowning in river water and Sam was just behind the hairpin turn so-to-speak, his eyes on the glow of his brother’s skin up ahead in the distance.
The life really starts to wear on you after a while. Any life does, probably, but this one especially.
Dean was chatting up a blonde at the bar while Sam hung back at a corner booth, watching. The girl’s hair was long and dirty blond and fell into lazy waves across her shoulders and down her slender back and Sam couldn’t help but follow her with his eyes. He’d clocked her as soon as he sat down, if he was being honest. And he was a little too drunk not to be honest. It wasn’t because she was pretty, though she was. It was her eyes. They were brown. Every time Sam caught sight of her face he expected them to be blue but they weren’t. She was wrong. She didn’t really look that much like Jess at all but Sam couldn’t seem to keep his eyes away. Halfway through their third round of drinks Dean had got fed up with Sam’s absent staring and asked if he was going to hit that. Sam shot him a look and shook his head, so Dean downed a shot and went to claim her for himself.
So Sam sat and watched. He knew Dean knew he would and so he did. Sam had always watched Dean. It was how it was and how it always would be, no matter how tired Sam got of looking at the back of Dean’s head. He knew that, as he knew now that Dean was showing him how world-wise he had become in their time apart.
As Sam watched he thought about how beautiful they were together. Dean’s face was coyly hidden by her hair as he whispered into her ear. When she ducked her face in gentle laughter he followed her down, the perfect curve of his neck accentuated by the dim and smoky light that seemed to follow him in turn. Sam stared. At Dean’s hand, riding softly up the skin of her arm; his eyes, stealing light from the room and reflecting it back; his mouth, turning up in the corners like there was no tomorrow. Sam knew that Dean was the type of boy you could love with all your heart. Sam turned away. He frowned at the bartender as he ordered more. He tapped his fingers gently on the bar. He began to expect that he would have to sleep in the car.
So he was surprised when he turned back to his table some few moments later with fresh booze in hand to find Dean sprawled cockily across the seat there alone. The girl had gone, left Dean with her number and his lust. It was fine, he said. She wasn’t the type for drunken hook-ups it seemed, which meant not his type. And it was fine, except that when Dean smiled Sam could see the fire of dissatisfaction hiding behind his eyes, throwing his freckles into sharp relief and glinting off his perfect teeth like blinding sunlight.
Dean was the type that needed release after a tough hunt. Needed something in his hands, or underneath them. So it was no surprise when he got into a fight hustling pool some hour later. The man was large, but no match for the man Dean had become. They had to leave quick after that. Dean’s energy was high and reckless but not so much that he ran out breathless with laughter like when he was younger. Instead he walked out head high and world-weary, hands claret-slick, blood dripping black like oil in the dirt.
Dean didn’t stop until he made it to their room, though the night air punched through his stomach and the blood dried cold on his skin. Sam scurried to follow, closing the motel door softly behind him like Dean was an animal to be appeased. And he was.
Dean rounded on Sam anyway, asking why didn’t you have my backs and where were yous like he was still talking about some paltry barfight. But this wasn’t that. No, this was a long time coming. Maybe since Stanford, maybe since he was four years old and his childhood got lost in a fire.
Dean seethed in the moonlight streaming through the window. The light filtered from behind the red brocade of the motel curtain, catching scarlet on his eyes, his teeth, his blood-smeared hands, the bones of his cheeks, like sandpaper, the light, or a blessing, or a bruise. Like fire. Always fire, flickering in time with the harsh in-out of the breath in Dean’s chest.
Sam stared at his brother from the shadow of the door. He watched the red light hemorrhaging from everywhere at once, from Dean, in Dean, all Dean, Dean, Dean and Sam was still completely in the dark and the light spilling out was Dean.
Sam stood in the door in the dark, swallowing in the silence like it was splitting him in two, and like he didn’t even care, wanting nothing but to put his brother back together. In his drunken haze it was the light he clung to. Sam was darkness, Sam was black thread knit together with blood and his blood needed him. Dean needed him. Sam would unravel himself if it meant he had the string to stitch him up, he knew. And so he crossed the room and knelt before his brother on the bed of their seedy motel room and touched Dean’s bloodied cheek with all the grace he could find. He knelt next to his brother, telling him he was home. Right next to him. So close. But they weren’t. They were two wrenches spinning in the ordinary air.
And then Sam kissed him.
And Dean kissed back.
They were both drunk, and trembling, and still Sam was certain they had never experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person.
Dean became a devouring mouth, swallowing everything Sam would give him. And then the darkness didn’t matter because Sam could see Dean. Could see him all around. Could see that he wanted to take Sam apart, and slowly, deft fingers searching every shank and lock for weaknesses, dragging out the moans like secrets from his skin.
And how could he refuse? Sam wanted to relinquish all his secrets, wanted Dean to cut him open and peel him back and crawl inside. Sam wanted to tell Dean everything, so he kissed him harder.
He made himself into the shape of everything Dean needed. And then he made Dean, too. Stitched him into something else, something reborn, wild-eyed, free.
Dean’s hands rode softly up the skin of Sam’s hips, Dean’s eyes turned from mirrors to a room, Dean’s mouth began to carve out a place. Sam rose to meet him at every thrust. Their movements lived somewhere between memory and fantasy. In the dark they could barely tell whose hands were whose. In the dark neither could tell if the hand on him was the Hand of Judgment or the Hand of Mercy. There were suddenly too many hands for it to matter very much. Hands of fire, hands of air, hands of water, hands of dirt, it didn’t matter.
This was how it was and how it would be.
The dark motel became a tabernacle for whatever it was. Because this is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them. They raced to the answer; neck and neck and cheek to cheek.
And chest to chest, they drew the covers around them like an act of faith against the night.
Sam took the light inside him like a blessing, like a knee in the chest, and held on. After, they clung to each other like they hadn’t since they were kids—when Sam refused to sleep alone for weeks after Dean told him the truth about the monsters under the bed.
After, sleep refused them both. They lay awake for hours, Dean’s face in the crook of Sam’s neck and his fingers in his hair.
********************
When was the last time you
found yourself looking out of this window. Hey! This is a beautiful
window! This is a beautiful view! Those trees lined up like that, and the
way the stars are spinning over them like that, spinning in the air like
that, like wrenches.
********************
Sam stared at the ceiling, not wanting to let go and thinking I’ve swallowed a bad thing and now it’s got its hands inside me. This is the essence of love and failure. He saw it but he was happy anyway, and that was okay. If it was a love story after all, it would be a lasting love.
*********************
Suppose for a moment we are crowded around a pier, waiting for something
to ripple the water. We believe in you. There is no danger.
It is not getting dark, we want to say.It is not getting dark.
*********************
But Dean was just another story altogether. Dean stared at Sam. Dean was drunk and Dean was dying and Dean was thinking I just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where I could love him. He knew he had not found that place yet. He had not made that place yet. But he thought to himself I am here. You are here. You’re still right here.
**********************
The bartender smiles, running a rag across the burnished wood
of the bar. The drink in front of you has already been paid for. Drink it,
the bartender says. It’s yours, you deserve it. It’s already been paid for.
Somebody’s paid for it already. There’s no mistake, he says. It’s your drink,
the one you asked for, just the way you like it. How can you refuse.
**********************
When sleep finally let them in, they dreamed of nothing but each other.
Sam dreamed of Dean calling out to him, saying hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don’t make a noise, don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will come back from the dead for you. He said Sam, this could be a city. This could be a graveyard, Sam. Leave the lights on for me.
Dean dreamed of a car and a beautiful boy. And Sam wouldn’t tell him that he loved him, but he loved him. And Dean felt like he’d done something terrible like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled himself a grave in the dirt, and he was tired. And he was in a car with his beautiful boy, and he was trying not to tell him that he loved him, and he was trying to choke down the feeling, and he was trembling, but Sam reached over and he touched him, like a prayer for which no words exist, and he felt his heart taking root in his body, like he’d discovered something he didn’t even have a name for.
**********************
Consider the hairpin turn.