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The heady smell of gasoline reminds Cassie of Dean, of a sunny afternoon when he was pumping gas and she distracted him with her lips and her tongue and he muttered, Fuck against her mouth when the gas came spilling out over his hands.
And she had laughed even though he looked pissed.
She laughed again later when she straddled him in the backseat of the Impala and told him he smelled even as she was slipping her hand down his pants.
She’s on a deadline tonight. There’s a story to file about a mysterious death two counties over. There were puncture wounds on the victim’s neck. She wants to call him, to bring him here under the guise of business and then fuck him in her bed upstairs between her new sheets, the ones with the tiny yellow flowers that looked too delicate once she brought them home.
But she’s not twenty and he’s busy saving the world. Or so he said last time he called, his voice low and worried, “Just checking in.”
And she’s got other things to do tonight besides Dean Winchester.
He’d come if she called though, this is its own comfort.
But she never calls, not unless she has to. Maybe that’s why he always shows up so fast, standing on her doorstep with a duffel bag (the same one, always the same one) in hand and an uneasy grin on his face.
Because something must be wrong or weird for her to call, she’s trained him to think that over the years.
He calls just because.
Sometimes at the wrong times when she’s in a meeting or on a date with a perfectly respectable man who wears ties and drinks wine and who’s probably never had sex in a bathroom stall while a cover band plays “Born to Run” too loud and in the wrong key outside the door.
She pretends to be exasperated or mad, but he calls and he says---
I died.
Something’s wrong with Sammy.
Do you remember that gas station out by your old apartment building, the one where I bought the twinkies and we---
I remember Dean, she cuts him off.
(She was wearing a yellow dress. He told her he killed monsters. She said he was a liar.)
He calls a lot these days. Talks more than he used to, somehow manages to say even less. She gets this churning in the pit of her stomach like something’s coming. Something big and apocalyptic, but she doesn’t ask, doesn’t really want to know.
Instead she jokes, “You’d tell me if the world was ending, right? Because if it is I’m not wasting my time writing five hundred words about the water crisis.”
She won’t call him tonight.
But tomorrow she’ll stop to buy a cup of coffee and to fill up her tank and she’ll get distracted and let the gas overflow, accidently, on purpose, it’s all the same. She’ll go into work stinking of gasoline and sweat, her heart beating a little too fast, his name on the tip of her tongue.
Then she’ll pick up the phone and call the sheriff two counties over instead and ask if he’s found the killer yet. Later she’ll get in her car and hum along to rock and roll songs as she drives off into the night to find a monster, all the while wondering if he’s somewhere out there doing the same thing.
(“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“Don’t be.”
“It was just too big, you know?”
He laughs, “Tell me about it.”)
She thinks it’s funny how she’s getting too poetic, too soft even as she’s started carrying a rifle in her trunk.
Later when she’s sitting on the corner of her tub bandaging a wound on her side, another monster dead and gone, he’ll call out of the blue for no reason at all and she’ll smile.
Hey Dean, do you remember that time---
He does. He always does.