Bobby would’ve said I was an idjit, a moron, and a dumb ass. He probably would’ve said more than that, but since he was never going to hear about this, I didn’t have to worry about it—even if he would’ve been right. But come on, so what if it took me three weeks to notice Sam was in love with me? I mean, have you seen the kid in action? His moves? I’m a mountain lion, baby. I take ‘em down in sixty seconds flat. Sam’s a glacier. If you could get the girl to hold still for a few thousand years, it’s on. Trust me, every girl Sam dated made the move on him first.

All in all, I’m surprised it didn’t take me longer to notice the love spell, so Sam really could’ve kept his bitching to a minimum, I thought as I looked furiously out the bus window. A Greyhound bus. A goddamn Greyhound bus. It was pretty damn ironic that I sold my soul to bring my brother back from the dead, because when I caught up with him I was going to kill him.

Damn witches.

Damn love spells.

Damn Albuquerque.

X X X

Albuquerque was where I missed my first clue.

It was just a werewolf. How many of those had we dealt with over the years? Sure, it was harder now after Sam had had to kill Madison. Knowing they were victims as much as monsters. But what had to be done had to be done, it didn’t matter if you felt a twinge at taking out one of the Fidos. Yeah, we’d done it enough to have it down pat, but this crotch sniffer was smarter than most. He got the jump on me. Normally Sam would’ve shouted a head’s up as it was too close to me to shoot. But this time he lunged, tackled me and covered me right as the wolf hit us.

Sam had gotten a little overprotective since the deal. Right, I’m a hypocrite for just saying the word, but he had. Usually we trusted each other to know our shit, pull our weight. Not this time. He put himself between me and that werewolf like I was a frigging fairy princess with a wet manicure.

“Holy shit!” I hissed as I heard Sam grunt in pain. I got my Baretta from between us and blew a load of silver between lambent golden eyes just as the massive jaws were headed for Sam’s throat. There was blood, splintered bone and brains everywhere and the werewolf was gone, blown backward by the blast. I slithered from beneath Sam, thinking frantically, ‘Not again. Not again. Not again,’ as I ran a hand over his back. I found blood, but it wasn’t a knife wound. Not this time. God, not this time. And it wasn’t a bite, thank God. He’d been clawed and it was deep, but it wasn’t a bite and that’s what mattered.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I snapped, helping Sam up. “How about a head’s up? Or a look out, Spot’s right behind you? Where do you get off going all Bodyguard? You’re no Kevin Costner and I’m damn sure no Whitney Houston.”

I kept giving it to him all the way back to the roach motel and while I bandaged him up. He didn’t need stitches…by the skin of his teeth…and I gave him hell about that too. No matter how many times you have to do it, you never get used to the feel of a needle going through your brother’s skin. The tug of it, the clench of his jaw, the gray of his face, the roil of your own stomach. Never.

“Enough, Dean. I get it,” he said tiredly. “I should’ve let it eat you. My mistake.” He rolled over in the bed and pulled the covers up to his ears. More mopey and brooding than usual, but I chalked that up to the pain.

“You want some Tylenol or some of the stronger stuff?” I sighed then asked to his back.

“No.” Definitely mopey. I have him two Tylenol anyway, forced them into his hand, and gave him a glass of water from the bathroom. He glared at me through the long bangs, but took the pills then pulled the blanket completely over his head and that was the end of the conversation for the night.

A week went by and I don’t go sniffing for any more jobs, not until Sam’s back healed up. It was a good opportunity to hang around and check out the local nightlife. I carried on in my usual swashbuckling fashion, cutting a swath through the local wenches. I wanted to be a firefighter when I was little, but I wanted to be a pirate too. I kind of thought pirates would be into threesomes with the right wenches. And there were some fine women in Albuquerque. Every night that I came back to the room smelling of whiskey and chicks, Sam would still be up. Two am, three am…it didn’t matter. He’d silently close his laptop and immediately, wordlessly head towards bed.

“Thanks for waiting up, Dad,” I grinned the fifth time it happened and he gave me a look so wounded, so hurt that I felt the grin just fall off my face. “Sammy? What’s wrong?”

He took a breath and blew it out, earnest as he could possibly be. And with Sam that was pretty damn earnest. “You deserve better, Dean. You chase every woman in sight, but you deserve better. I know you don’t think so, but you do. You deserve someone who wants you and only you.”

It was beyond Oprah, but he was so goddamn serious I couldn’t blow it off with a joke or a roll of my eyes, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking.

“Why?” I said quietly. “So I can break her heart when my time is up? When the hell fire comes?” Besides, that’s not how we rolled. We killed things and moved on. There was no room for houses with picket fences and girlfriends straight out of Djinn dreams.

“There won’t be any damn hell fire. I told you there won’t be and there won’t.” His eyes were determined, fists clenched. “Don’t say it again. I mean it, Dean. Do not say it again, do you hear me? You might not lift a finger to save yourself, but I’m not going to let you go.”

The argument went downhill from there, but Sam was wound up about the deal and I didn’t blame him. If it had been the reverse…again…I think I would’ve lost it. Looney bin lost it. Strait jackets, the whole nine yards. So I let him rant. He needed it and he deserved it.

And there you go. Another time I didn’t notice. Maybe the picket fence dream distracted me, instead of warning me. I don’t know. But I didn’t notice.

And I kept on not noticing.

When he started opening doors for me and carrying my duffel bag I wrote it off to the shoulder I wrenched at our next job…still in Albuquerque, a goat smelling chupacabra this time. And when he started paying for all my meals I thought, hey, cool—more money for me to spend on drinks for the ladies. It was when he left the rose on my pillow one night that I started to get concerned. Two seconds later the music from the mixed tape I’d made him when under the influence of that shriveled old Santa Fe bitch’s love spell started playing in the room. Purple Rain by Prince. Purple fucking Rain.

I shoved whatever-the-hell-her-name-was I’d brought back from the bar back out the door, closed it and said, “Fuck me.” I took it back immediately. “Wait. No. Don’t fuck me. It was just an expression of…um…an expression of….” An expression of pure, piss my pants fear. “Just an expression. Okay? Nothing to do with anything. Just words. Bad words. Probably shouldn’t cuss as much anyway.”

Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed with a bottle of champagne, soft eyes, and a piece of paper. “I wrote you a poem,” he said shyly, ignoring my babbling. And just like that I was in Brokeback Mountain.

Needless to say, I packed our shit up in a hurry, shoved him into the Impala while he was still reading about the night and stars and the ripple of a bead of water down my…I stopped listening then. I drove back to Santa Fe. I forked over fifty bucks to that spiteful charm hocking witch and squirted Sam in the face with the counter spell while he was sitting on a bench outside the shop. Did I mention he was holding one of my shirts and smelling it with his eyes shut and a wistful look on his face?

I gave him an extra squirt…just in case.

Then it was over. All’s well that ends well.

Fuck me…again.

X X X

It took about twenty seconds for Sam’s hazy, dreamy expression to fade, his eyes to sharpen, and the emotional barometric pressure to drop like a rock. It was twenty more minutes before he could manage to speak to me. At least in whole sentences.

Three minutes: “You….” He gritted his teeth and shoved past me to get in the car.

Five minutes: “Purple rain.”

Ten minutes: “I…you…son of a bitch.”

Fifteen minutes: “Dead. Completely, utterly dead.”

Twenty minutes: He finished shredding my shirt with his big hands and growled, “An hour. It took me an hour to notice you were under that damn spell. It took you three weeks. Three fucking weeks.” Sam was cursing and when Sam turned the air blue, he was a little more than upset. It was like Mr. Rogers telling you to get the fuck out of his neighborhood. Serious.

“Hey, hold on.” I held up a hand. “This is not my fault.” It really was though. I was spending all my time trying to bury the fear that my bill was coming due, hell, to deny it altogether. Drinking and screwing and fighting—anything that let me just react, not think. But it wasn’t just hell fire I saw when was forced to stop for a moment and let thoughts creep into brain cells where beer should’ve been. It was Sam. I saw him dead, saw the blood, saw the life drain out of his eyes, I even felt him. After months, I still felt him. I could close my eyes and feel the cloth of his jacket, the warmth of his back as I held onto him. Held him so tight that no one could take him away. No one, not even death.

But it had.

I tried not to think and I tried not to close my eyes and to do that I acted like a complete jackass—a jackass who didn’t bother to notice his brother was under a spell. So, yeah, my fault, but damned if I was going to admit it. It wasn’t the Dean Winchester way. “You make moves as fast as a snail runs a marathon,” I accused. “How was I supposed to know?”

“I opened doors for you,” he spat.

“My arm.” I rubbed it and tried to look pained.

“I carried your shit, I paid for your food.” The hazel eyes darkened.

“And I really appreciated it.” I gave him a wide grateful grin and his hands made throttling motions in his lap.

“I left chocolates on your pillows at night before you came dragging in while I mooned over your goddamn horny ass.”

I ran a thumbnail along the steering wheel, the grin going uneasy. “I just thought the motels had gone up in quality. Turn down service and all that.”

“I wrote,” he said in a quietly ominous tone, “Dear Andi, about being in love with my oblivious brother. She wrote back telling me to get psychiatric care and a good lawyer.”

I choked back the laugh because I was sure that if I hadn’t he would’ve choked it back for me. “Um,” I coughed, “thought she was more open minded than that.”

His eyes were narrowed to slits and if Sam really wasn’t Sam, if he did have demonic powers, I was pretty sure my head would’ve exploded like an overripe tomato right about then. It didn’t. Kind of good news in a way. “And what the hell is up with you sitting around in the nude eating chili cheese fries?” His voice wasn’t quiet any longer.

I shrugged. Now that I wasn’t going to back down on. That was a God given right. “Hey, sometimes a guy needs his naked time.”

“Naked time, Dean? Naked time? What’s that even mean??”

“If you were a guy and not a pansy little girl, you’d know,” I smirked. “I noticed you spent like three hours in the bathroom that night. I thought you’d finally dowloaded some porn and chastity belt had finally given up the ghost. I was thinking you erupted like Mount Vesuvius.”

This time the hands reached my throat. “Oh,” I croaked as I realized it hadn’t been porn he’d been thinking about. “Sorry about that. You did seem a little more relaxed the next day though. You gotta give me that.”

I was wrong about Sammy and his powers. The driver’s door flew open and I was pushed out into the street with an invisible hand. As I landed hard on my ass, the door slammed shut and Sam leaned out the window, his hand on the steering wheel. “Next job’s in Lago Vista, Texas. Why don’t you take the bus and sharpen your observational skills there for the next two days?”

“Sammy, come on,” I snapped, getting up and moving towards the car. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

“Funny?” His eyebrows raised as he bared his teeth and somewhere I think Darth Vader shit his pants. “You think any of this is funny? Fine, Dean. Wait until you get to Lago Vista and the Impala’s pink. Then you’ll think funny.”

The tires squealed and my baby…my baby sped off. Something flew out behind it, bounced on the pavement then was still. I walked up to it, using every cuss word I knew under my breath and saw it was the mixed tape I’d made Sam when I’d been hit with the love spell first. It still had the pink glitter of the potion on it, which was how Sam had probably gotten infected to begin with. I backed slowly away from it like it was a nuclear bomb.

I looked up to see the Impala take a corner straight out of Starsky and Hutch. I was surprised a hubcap didn’t go flying off like in all those dorky movies.

Pink?

He really wouldn’t paint my baby pink, would he?

God, I hoped not, because I didn’t have a second soul lying around to bring him back this time.

When I got to Lago Vista, two sweaty, disgusting bus days later, it was to find out Sammy had thought twice. Either that or they were out of pink.

It was metallic purple.

The End