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Sometimes he regretted being friends with her. It made his whole ordeal that much harder.
Y/N had hunted with the brothers for a little over a year now after they had picked her up on a vampire hunt. She fit easily into their life and within a week the brothers were wondering how they had survived without her. She had grown especially close to Sam, leading to many jabs about their relationship from Dean, all of which Y/N laughed off and returned just as good as she got.
The three of them were close, and Sam was hopelessly stuck in the friendzone.
Even he had to admit he wasn’t doing anything to change that. Despite Dean’s near-constant urging for him to confess, he maintained the opinion that she wouldn’t feel the same way and that she saw him only as a brother. And he tried, he really did, to act as if brotherly affection was all he felt for her.
But she did not make it easy.
Sharing beds was nothing new to them. They frequented crappy motels, so the number of times they checked in to the phrase: “One room only” was relatively frequent. And invariably she chose to share with him, because: “We’re good friends” or “Sam sleeps with a shirt on”.
He was brushing his teeth, pacing around the motel room as Dean talked to Bobby over the phone. Y/N emerged from the bathroom in her pajamas: some faded t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that she must have stolen from one or the other of them, as they hung low around her hips and pooled at her ankles. Twisting her hair into a ponytail, she walked over to the bed that they were sharing and flopped face-first onto the covers.
“Gah, so tired.” She mumbled into the bedspread.
Sam spat out his toothpaste and changed into his pajamas. Crossing to the bed, he rolled her over to one side, ignoring her half-hearted swatting and protests.
“You take up too much room.” He jokingly complained, poking her side.
“Says the 6’4 guy who barely even fits on the bed.” She shot back.
The banter continued until Dean told them to shut up and go to sleep, slipping under the covers himself and passing out almost instantly. Y/N snorted and got under the blankets, rolling onto her side, her back to him.
He lay there for two hours questioning why he did these things to himself. Considering the possibility that it might be better if she slept with Dean from now on, because the way her shirt rode up, exposing her lower back, was really detrimental to his restraint. Then again, her making a habit of sharing a bed with Dean probably wasn’t a good thing for his relationship with his brother.
He rolled over to face away from her, hoping that if he removed her from his line of sight he wouldn’t keep thinking about how easy it would be to kiss her, or how his fingers ached to brush away the feathery strands of hair that were falling in her face, or how that tantalizing strip of her back was only sixteen inches away from him. Only seven more hours ‘till he could get up. He could do this. Just forget that she’s there, he told himself.
And then she rolled. Y/N was a notoriously restless sleeper, as he knew from prior experience. To her credit, he had to admit that she rarely kicked, but she certainly tossed around a lot. The blankets were already tangled around her legs where she had twisted them. She was now facing him, her mouth curved into a tiny smile and her eyes shut. Her hair was falling over her eyes just like it always did. The faint light from the window cast the shadows of her lashes down her cheeks. Her arms came up to clasp the pillow her head was on, hugging it tightly.
He didn’t even have time to feel jealous of the pillow before his brain seized on the patch of skin that had been exposed when she reached up. Starting just inside her hipbone, a tattooed feather curled around her hip, ending on her lower back. He wasn’t sure how he had missed it up to this point, it wasn’t particularly inconspicuous and she’d been with him and his brother for a little over a year now. But there it was.
His face flushed red and he struggled to rip his eyes away from her. He lay flat on his back and trained his eyes on the ceiling, blowing air out of his nose. So much for sleeping. She was gonna have to share with Dean from now on, as much as it might bother him, since missing consecutive nights of sleep because he wanted to run his fingers over her tattoo so badly that it was actually making his fingers twitch was not a good idea.
“Shit.” He muttered.
Bad idea. His hushed expletive apparently reached her and she mumbled in her sleep, shifting further until she was pressed against his side. Her arms wrapped around one of his and her cheek came to rest against his shoulder. His arm suddenly became the most sensitive part of his body; he could feel her eyelashes fluttering lightly against his skin and her warm breath heating the muscle as she swallowed and squeezed his arm a little.
His other arm came up and he covered his face with his palm, feeling the heat from his blush on his hand. He struggled to keep his breathing normal, because his brother was in the bed next to him, and he was 100% sure that if he started hyperventilating he would never hear the end of it from Dean, and this was really not how he had hoped this night would go.
The only coherent thought that his frayed neurons managed to produce was: At least now I don’t have to be jealous of a pillow.
He slowly blew air out through his mouth, the muscles in his arm tense and corded. Inhaling shallowly through his nose, he tried to avoid the scent of citrus and gun smoke that was emanating from her hair and making it that much harder for him to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and to hell with the consequences.
Her head shifted slightly, causing her lips to just barely brush over his heated skin and he jumped, actually jolted, in the bed as a result. He could feel his restraint running through his fingers like grains of sand and briefly considered waking her up and leaving to sleep on the couch, but the stronger part of his mind whispered that, really, that would be rude and that would hurt her feelings and it wasn’t hurting anyone for him to just lie here and pretend that she wasn’t asleep.
And of course that sent his brain spiraling off into a nosedive of feverishly constructed and hastily dismissed fantasies and this was really not how he had hoped this night would go.
And of course she woke up. Of fucking course. As if his night wasn’t tough enough.
She swallowed and her eyes fluttered open. She glanced around blearily, grimacing faintly from her recent sleep. It was a only few moments before she realized she was hugging his arm, but those moments seemed like plenty of time for him to send up a desperate prayer to any deity in their vicinity that she would spontaneously decide to go back to sleep. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t.
She blinked slowly and then squinted up at him.
“You’re warm.” She mumbled, and lay her head back down on his shoulder, nestling closer, her arms sliding around his arm to embrace it further. Her eyes slid shut again and he didn’t dare breathe for fear of breaking whatever fragile miracle had just occurred.
"And you smell nice..." Her voice trailed off as she fell back to sleep.
He lay frozen there for a minute, wondering if his luck could possibly be this good. In an effort to decide on a course of action, he cast his eyes downward and took in her barely open mouth, the gentle rise and fall of her chest that perfectly corresponded to the puffs of air he felt in his skin, her fingers curled around his arm.
His brain somehow managed to run through every possible scenario of how what he was considering could go wrong, and still come up with the conclusion: go for it.
He gingerly shifted onto his side, supporting his weight on his elbow so as to not move the bed at all. Cursing the squeaky mattresses that all motels seemed to have, he tentatively placed his free hand on her hip, over the tattoo. He slowly moved the arm that was in her grasp into a more comfortable position. She moved in her sleep to accommodate the change of position, but did not wake.
He relaxed when he was sure that he wasn’t going to wake up again, allowing his muscles to un-tense. Her head was resting against his chest, and he enjoyed the gentle weight pressing there. His hand traced lightly over her waist and he smiled in the darkness, grinning at the sheets where she had been lying. He could deal with Dean’s shit in the morning.
This was not how he had hoped the night would go, but really, he could deal with a little sacrifice now and then.