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He waited outside the diner until she finished her shift. He leaned against his car, a vintage, black Chevy Impala (he loved that damn car). It was such a cliché for her to admit it, but in the glow of the mid-afternoon sun, amber and luminous, he was the closest picture to perfection she ever laid her eyes upon.
“You know, stalking someone is not the way to get on a girl’s good side.”
“Now is it really stalking if this is the only place I know you’d be?”
She approached him, a sly grin upon her lips. He was tall—though he insisted his younger and unseen brother was taller than him. His eyes stared down at her, olive green and surrounded by thick eyelashes. She wanted to smooth down his hair, give it a brush or a comb because the slight spike made him look just a touch like a stereotypical frat boy instead of the town-hopping drifter (possibly grifter?) he portrayed himself to be. She shrugged at him playfully. “Only if you knew I’d get out at this time. Which you did. So I can only come to the logical explanation that you’re stalking me.”
“I’m really not,” he denied, “but if it makes you uncomfortable, then I apologize.” He stood straight up and held his hands behind his back—a soldier’s stance. She suppressed the giddiness stirring inside her stomach, itching its way into becoming an audible giggle. “Does it make you uncomfortable?”
Maybe it should, but it didn’t. “Not really,” she remarked, another shrug on her shoulders.
He slouched against the Impala's side and exhaled a sigh of relief, too heavy to be genuine. “Well that’s good. I can go eat that slice of pie without the fear I accidentally stalked someone on my conscious.”
He tried too hard to act nonchalant. She liked it.
“The special of the day is the bleu cheese burger, served with your choice of fries or a side salad, a drink, and a slice of boysenberry pie,” she articulated in her best waitress voice, her chin held out high. “All for the low-low price of nine-ninety-five, plus tax and tip.”
He chuckled softly. “You should act like that when you’re actually working. The tips would get exponentially better.”
“I’m like that in the first two hours, but when I’m on my feet for eight hours serving ungrateful assholes who complain because I forgot that they wanted no ice in their drinks, it kind of gets moot.”
“Speaking from experience?” he guessed.
“Too much experience.”
He laughed again, and she laughed with him. Not because she was funny, or it was funny that he found her funny. It felt right to laugh alongside him, to share a moment quite like this. A tender, kind moment to a bland and somewhat stressful day.
When the laughter declined into silence, they held their gazes. Blue and green, Emma and Dean. Her smile fell, but not from sadness or shock. His face softened, but a faint smile still adorned his lips. She shuddered at the sudden touch of his hand against her cheek. Broad and square, calloused and dry, his palm and his fingers emanated a warmth she never experienced before. Automatically, she reached to rest her own hand, small, delicate, and smooth in comparison to his, against his wrist. Deep within her core, an indescribable surge flowered. The fervor extended to all her limbs, molten and pleasurable. No one ever indulged her in such intimacies. She wished it would stay within her forever, even after he were to remove his hand and step away from her.
“I could kiss you,” he susurrated, his voice low, as if he were confessing a profound secret.
They stood suspended in their stares, unwilling to break the tension between them. Her heart tumbled into her gut as her head swam with delight and confusion. Not the declaration she wanted to hear, but one she anticipated after days of the lighthearted, flirtatious back-and-forth repartee they exchanged over different variations of cheeseburgers and too many slices of pie. His words were close enough to what she craved he would say, and substituted what he actually meant.
He was a charmer. She knew that.
“Then go ahead.”
From the tough-guy exterior he gave himself—the leather jacket and the car and the smart mouth—she thought the kiss would’ve been rough, demanding, and ravenous. But he was gentle and careful, almost romantic and sweet.
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She said that their seventh night together, and she meant it. In his motel room, cookie-cutter dingy, she reached an arm over his body. Even if he was larger than her in height and mass, she sensed he would want to feel the safety and security no amount of sheets or blankets could provide. He never elaborated too much on it, but several post-coital discussions led her to believe he held onto a vulnerability and drear he never exposed to anyone. Anyone but her.
A few nights prior, when she couldn’t sleep and he took a shower, she saw the photograph hanging out of his wallet on his bedside table. A family photo—a father, a mother, a little boy, a baby. The woman looked startlingly like him. He caught her staring at it, and at first, she feared he would scream and her and tell her to get out because she snooped through his personal belongings. And at first, he glared at her with daggers, and a quiver in his voice. “Why are you looking at that?” But after her heartfelt apology, he sat next to her, and took the photograph from her. He smiled at it, but not a smile of happiness—one of melancholy. He softly explained how he watched his mother die, and the image of fire and the smell of scorched flesh still haunted him in his sleep—if he slept, because he claimed he only needed four hours.
In the nights following, he admitted to an unconventional life growing up, moving from state to state, hardly in one town for more than a month. He never said the words, but she recognized how much he loved his younger brother. “Sammy never knew our mother. I guess I was the closest thing he had to one.” She wanted to relate, but she couldn’t—not entirely. She never knew her parents, and she never had anyone come close as a substitute. He at least had his father, and his brother. She had no one.
Except him, at this moment.
He shifted onto his opposite side so he could face her, their noses barely touching, their exhales grazing their skin. He smelled of sweat mixed with car grease and cooked beef, but his lips tasted like raspberries (maybe from the raspberry-rhubarb slice of pie he scarfed down hours ago). She wondered what he thought she smelled like, or what her flavor her lips were. Blue and green, Emma and Dean.
“No, I guess you’re not,” he rasped after minutes passed by, when she nearly forgot to what he was responding.
She counted the freckles on his face before she drifted into a pleasant, calming sleep.
She cursed him when he ran off, with nothing left behind except a piece of paper with a telephone number scribbled on it. “If you ever see anything out of the ordinary—and I mean out of the ordinary, then please call me,” he said when he pressed the motel room stationary into her hand.
“Fuck you,” she spat at him. “You have some audacity for thinking I’d ever call you after this.”
“I can’t explain it, I’ve already said too much,” he said, but she swiftly punched his jaw and turned on her heel. She remained calm until she turned the corner, when the tears tumbled down her cheeks and onto the pavement. She kneeled to the ground and held her knees to her chest, and tore up the sheet of paper with his chicken scratch. Her knuckles still throbbed from the impact against his jaw.
She cursed him when the police arrested her days later for being an accomplice to a crime, and she sat in juvie for months. She cursed him every day as the baby inside of her grew and grew until it couldn’t be contained anymore. She cursed him while in labor, and for months afterwards. Green. Dean. She didn’t believe any of the stories he told her, not anymore. She couldn’t tell which ones were real, or fake, or if his last name was even “Winchester.”
Most of all, she cursed herself for falling in too deep with someone she knew was a charmer.
Over the years, she stopped thinking of him, and the pain he caused her. In a way, she thanked him. If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t be the person she was today.
She stopped cursing him until her twenty-eighth birthday, when a boy knocked on her door.
She especially cursed him when the boy asked about who his father was.
Manhattan. Blue and green, Emma and Dean. Eleven or twelve years.
A part of her wanted to pummel his face again, and another wanted to kiss it. Things were different, for the both of them. Not as simple. Older, not necessarily wiser. Even with the crinkles on the outer corners of his eyes, he aged rather well—she chastised herself for admitting it.
She knew right then and there that she had loved him, and she never stopped. And she knew it was the same for him.
Explanations from both of them, opening each other to concepts and ideas neither of them ever fathomed. All of it new terrain for both of them, exploring together, with a son and a family.
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered one afternoon when the craziness halted. It would start up again, and soon, because nothing ever went smoothly in either of their lives. He held her tightly in his arms, and for once, that security and safety she once provided for him now enveloped her. They could never be normal, but they never had been. If anything, their “normal” involved curses, monsters, demons, sorceresses, magic, angels, fairies, bloodshed, and tears. Except for once, they could face them together.
In the afternoon sunlight of Maine, it was just blue and green, Emma and Dean.