Only a couple of months

 

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” the woman says and Dean squares his shoulders, furrowing his brow. He hates being talked about like he’s not there – makes him feel like the child he never really ever was – and his jaw clenches when John steps forward and says something quietly to her. She laughs and nods, looking past him at Dean as she motions towards the house. “C’mon. I’ll show you your room.”

 

It’s not too bad, compared to some places they’ve stayed, and Dean thinks the dilapidated look of the outside of the farmhouse belies the care that’s obviously been taken with the inside. He hears the Impala spin out in the gravel and she raises an eyebrow when he sighs. “I guess this isn’t how you hoped to spend your summer?”

 

Dean shrugs. “Better than some other alternatives.”

 

She grins and opens the last door in the hallway that leads straight through the house. “I’ll have dinner ready at five… if you wanna take some time to settle in.”

 

“Sure,” Dean says with a smile, trying hard not to act like an insolent child. “Thanks.” He doesn’t know what he expected when his Dad told him where he was spending the summer and why, can’t reconcile widow with the red-haired woman walking down the hallway. He’d expected black dresses and a sad, sour face – but she’s wearing overalls and a t-shirt, has her hair pulled back in a faded blue bandana and Dean thinks she looks more like some college girl than a woman whose husband went feral werewolf one day and started killing people.

 

 

It’s not until he’s wandering through the living room, looking at all the family photos that Dean remembers six months ago and the trip that John had taken to Oklahoma, where he and Sam had been deposited Caleb’s for two weeks because Dad wanted to hunt a werewolf alone. Werewolves are fast and messy, boys, he’d said before he left, but that didn’t make the bile of rejection easier to swallow. It irked Dean to no end that he was being left behind more often than not; one day, he'd make his dad realize he wasn't a child anymore, that this life had become his.

 

He picks up a picture and looks at it: it’s her and her husband, happy and laughing in a wedding dress and tuxedo, looking as if they had no cares in the world. Dean wonders if she knew what he’d become – what had actually killed him – or if John had just spun her some lie like he sometimes did for widows and children that couldn’t handle the truth.

 

“I hope you like meatloaf,” she says from the doorway and he spins around, placing the picture back in its spot above the fireplace.

 

“Lady, I like anything if it’s homemade,” he says, cocky grin back in place as he shoves his hands in his pockets.

 

She frowns, but it’s only a second before the worry is gone from her features and she’s smiling at him again. “You can call me Sophie – ‘lady’ makes me feel like I’m middle-aged and graying already.”

 

Dean nods, feeling a blush creep up his throat. “Sorry, I just- wasn’t sure...”

 

+++

 

Dinner is filled with silence and good food. Sophie spends most of her time watching Dean eat – which completely unnerves him - and by the time he’s through his second helping of green beans and mashed potatoes he’s begun to think her eyes have bored a permanent hole into his head.

 

He catches her eyes and he’s not sure what he expected, but there’s a look of surprise on her face. “What?” It’s mumbled with half a mouth of potatoes and she shakes her head and laughs, pulling apart a biscuit and reaching for the butter.

 

“Nothing, I’ve just…” she laughs again and finally looks away, faintly embarrassed. “I guess I haven’t seen anybody that hungry in a while.”

 

“Well, you’re a damn good cook, la-” Dean stops, swallowing the food in his mouth before he continues. “Sophie. Where’d you learn to cook like this anyway?”

 

“My grandma and grandpa owned a diner in town when I was growing up and I really took to it,” she chews thoughtfully, taking a sip of iced tea before she finishes the thought. “Instead of college, I went to school in Nashville to become a chef.”

 

Dean sighs approvingly, nodding towards the apple pie sitting on the counter. “Well, if this ain’t what you do for a livin’, maybe you should consider it.”

 

Sophie smiles weakly. “Maybe I will, someday.”

 

+++

 

It’s not easy work – up and out of bed two hours before the sun rises so he can help her with the pre-dawn chores. For the first couple of nights, he barely makes it through dinner without falling asleep.

 

Like everything else, though, he gets used to it. He starts to sleep through the night once the sounds of the old house are like a gentle melody and the barn owl doesn’t wake him up with every hoot and flutter echoing across the yard. He learns how to chip paint off old wood, sand it down and re-paint it so it looks new. After a couple of weeks, he starts to like the routine; breakfast in the kitchen at dawn, lunch under the old oak out front when the sun is high in the sky, and dinner on the table just as the crickets start to sing. He doesn’t see Sophie much but he knows she spends most of her days going through some boxes that her aunt and uncle left in the basement. Dean’s glad that it’s not something else she needs help with. 

 

He’s not sure he could handle going through boxes of someone else’s memories when all of his fit into a shoebox and the duffel bag he’s got stuffed under the bed in his room.

 

Dean finds an old pickup in a shed out on the back forty that Sophie says he can keep if he can get it running. After that, Dean’s evenings for the next week are spent beneath the dingy, rusted confines of the truck’s hood. He starts to miss dinner, though, and feels bad when she has to heat everything up for him the hard way – no microwave – so he says that maybe, if she wants, he could just make a sandwich to take down with him.

 

She won’t hear of it, though, and the next night she shows up at the shed with a picnic basket in hand. “You’re doin’ me a favor, you know?” She smiles softly and sets the basket onto a dusty workbench after she’s wiped it clean with a dish towel she’d brought from the house. Sophie sighs, then pulls out containers of chicken and coleslaw and sets them onto the makeshift table. “I couldn’t put this place back together on my own, and your dad just happened to come around at the right time.”

 

 

Dean takes a fork from her and opens the lid on the coleslaw. “Yeah, sometimes his job makes it hard for us kids to be around. We dropped my brother off in Minnesota...”

 

He wonders if she’d read his mind, or maybe just the tone of his voice when she replies, “But you’re not a kid anymore, are you? Eighteen is old enough to make your own decisions.”

 

He huffs. “Yeah, but I got obligations. I work for him, too. He needs me around. And Sammy,” Dean shrugs. “Sammy likes the break from all the travelin’. Means he gets to be normal for a little while.”

 

Sophie smiles and spins the lid on the Thermos she’s brought along, opening it and pouring black coffee into the cup before handing it to him. “Well, if your dad needs you, I guess it’s good you’ve got something worth doing..”

 

+++

 

One day each week she goes into town; it’s usually Friday because the refrigerator needs re-stocking and she has to get the mail from the post office. She says he has free reign, can take as long a shower as he likes – which he often does – and he spends the rest of the time doing his laundry and wandering through the house, trying to get used to actually living somewhere for a change. 

 

It feels strange that his boots have their own place by the back door and there’s a seat at the kitchen table that she never sits in because that’s where he always sits. Half of the bathroom cupboard is his; its sparsely covered shelves in sharp contrast next to the crammed busyness of her side. He sits on the edge of the tub, thinking about it a bit longer than he should, pretending that he doesn’t open the bottles of lotion and shampoo crowded into the cupboard just to smell them so he knows which ones she wears on what day.

 

He thinks maybe he shouldn’t think about things like that, shouldn’t care that she’s got pretty brown eyes and freckles that make her look twenty-five instead of the thirty-one she says she is. Then again, Dean’s eighteen years old and everything bothers him in embarrassing ways. He tries not to think about her smile, the way she laughs – pretends he doesn’t stay up a little later than she thinks just so he can watch her walk through the house, checking the locks on the doors and windows. She looks so young in her cotton nightgown and bare feet, curly hair falling over her shoulders, that he often goes to bed thinking that maybe liking her a little isn’t so wrong after all.   

 

When she comes home, he helps her put the groceries away, and he thinks about how they move together in the small kitchen, each one knowing when to sidestep to just miss bumping into the other. He thinks it’s like a hunt, like how he and Sammy were brought up to work together like they were one man because it made them less vulnerable. He thinks it’s natural the way she seems to always be right behind him when he’s sliced his hand with chicken-wire or hit his head too hard coming down out of the loft in the barn. 

 

He thinks it’s not enough when his fingers brush hers when he pulls a wet dish from her hand to dry it, thinks it’s just the way things go when her breath hitches and she moves away when his hip nudges against hers a little too long at the sink.

 

After all, she really is thirty-one and he’s just a kid, and maybe it’s not as right as it should be.

 

+++

 

It storms something fierce one day in July and Dean spends half the day making sure the animals don’t get loose while Sophie boards up the windows. Three tornados have been spotted since daybreak so when she runs into the barn, terror written on her face, he doesn’t ask questions but quickly finishes tying off one of the horses before following her out into grey. She stands there, staring into the distance at the funnel cloud twisting its way across the flat land and Dean winces at the sting of the sideways rain, grabbing her arm and pulling her faster towards the storm cellar.

 

 

He nearly slides down the slick, wooden steps once he’s secured the door, and he fumbles in the dark once his feet hit the solid concrete floor. The storm had knocked out the power before dawn and he reaches into his pocket for the matches he’d stowed away earlier in the day. He barely strikes one just as he hears a loud thud and Sophie cursing under her breath.

 

“There candles or somethin’ down here?” he asks when the light casts a circle into the room.She nods, pointing at two lanterns on the shelf. Dean blows out the match before it burns to his fingers, pulling open the glass and striking another. Once it’s lit, he sets it on a table against the wall and tosses the matches beside it. 

 

Sophie sits down on one of the chairs, her breath shuddering out when the wind rattles the door at the top of the stairs. “Well, that was close,” she says softly and Dean shakes his head, raking water from his short hair with a couple quick brushes of his hand.

 

“You ain’t kiddin’,” he turns around, brow creasing when he sees a trail of red slipping down her leg. She tries to hide it, pulling the hem of her dress lower over her knee, but he grunts, kneeling in front of her. “What’s that?”

 

She rolls her eyes at him. “It’s nothing. The lightning spooked one of the cats and she jumped into my lap, is all.”

 

“Yeah, well, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig – let me see.” Dean’s fingers cover hers, pulling until she’s released the material hiding the wound and he pushes it gingerly over her knee until he can see the angry claw marks on the inside of her thigh. He sighs, rocking back on his heels. “Shit, Sophie, those are gonna need stitches,” his brow furrows and he stands up, rifling through the cabinets for the bottled water. He finds it, and whiskey which he thinks will go a lot further for his purposes.

 

She laughs weakly, balling her fists in her lap. “Yeah, the little bitch hung on tight, that’s for sure.”

 

Dean laughs as he opens the bottle and moves back to the table, raising an eyebrow at her. “Never liked cats,” he says, stripping off his t-shirt and ripping a wide strip from the bottom. He misses the way she sucks in a breath and looks away, doesn’t notice the color on her cheeks until she reaches for the bottle in his hand. He shakes his head, squeezing her fingers before pushing her hand away. “You just hang on, this is gonna sting like hell.”

 

He’s surprised when she doesn’t yelp, doesn’t cry, just lets the tears well in her eyes as the alcohol sluices over her skin and when he’s done he lets her have the bottle. He laughs as she takes a long drink and swallows, watching as he folds the t-shirt material carefully in his hand. “Hold this tight on your leg to stop the bleeding... it doesn’t look too bad, but it’ll need sewing up.”

 

“Thanks,” she murmurs, closing her eyes and Dean can tell the whiskey’s kicked in when he sees her face flush and goosebumps raise over the skin of her throat – not that he should be looking, he thinks, tearing his eyes away from the tight, wet cling of her dress.

 

Dean thinks this is going to be a very long afternoon.

 

+++