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He remembers sitting in an inn with Sam and Dad like this. Except said inn was probably older than the United States, and it was winter in Vermont, and instead of wine and music and light conversation, it was cheap beer and the blueish glare of the TV and dead silence.
Okay, so it was nothing like this, really. But he can’t help but reminisce as he watches the siblings and their mother talk seamlessly, as if it’s somehow possible to come up with topics of conversation not related to their mutual job of stabbing things without struggling.
All right. Maybe that is possible, but not for the Winchesters.
Dean’s halfway through his second glass of wine—yeah, okay, it’s not half bad—when he feels the couch dip beneath him as Max lowers himself into the free space. Max doesn’t look over at him, but his knee keeps bumping Dean’s as he continues talking to his mother and sister. How old is this kid again?
Eventually, the two women get up and start moving towards the doorway. Dean, who’d been wrapped up in the steady hum of conversation and the unexpected fact that Max has been migrating towards him for the past ten minutes or so, snaps out of his reverie.
“Mom thinks she can help me with the rattling noise in the Jeep,” Alicia says by way of explanation. Her eyes light up as she teases him. “Because you were so useless at fixing it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Max waves the insult off. Then, with a wolfish grin in Dean’s direction: “I’ll just keep Dean here company.”
By the time Alicia and Tasha have left, there’s a hand on his knee. Dean raises his eyebrows.
“I thought you had a date tonight.”
Max shrugs. “I’m flexible.”
Oh God. Not that Dean hasn’t used bad pick-up lines in his time, but that was pretty damn awful. Max must be able to read it in his face, because he retracts his hand.
“I’m sorry. I thought maybe—”
This is the point where Dean would usually laugh and agree that Max isn’t exactly his type, but something stops him. For once in his life, he’s alone with a guy who has had the same experience that he’s had.
“No. I mean—that’s not the—”
Max cuts him off. “I get it. Don’t meet a lot of hunters who have that, though.”
For the life of him, Dean can’t figure out what he’s talking about. “What?”
“Boyfriend. Girlfriend. Non gender conforming significant other. Whatever.”
Once again, Dean almost corrects him, but the words gather behind his teeth and refuse to come out in the right order, so he says nothing at all. Instead, he finishes off his glass of wine in a swig, like it’s a shot.
“What are they like?”
Dean clears his throat. “Uh—he’s a real angel.”
Wow. And he’d thought I’m flexible had been bad.
Max smiles. For someone who’d been trying to pick Dean up five minutes ago, he seems pretty genuinely happy for his fictitious love life.
“How long?”
The real explanation of how he met Cas would probably be a doozy, so Dean sticks to a timeline instead of telling Max about sparks flying in a barn like the worst cinematographic joke of all time.
“We’ve known each other for almost nine years now. We danced around it for a long time, but a couple of weeks ago, I gave him…well, I gave him a mixtape, and he—” Tried to give it back “—realized what I was getting at.”
Max laughs so hard that Dean’s surprised the last of his wine hasn’t shot out of his nose. “A mixtape? Dude, you’re a dinosaur.”
Dean stares at him. “I’m thirty-eight, thank you very much.”
Of course, in Max’s eyes, he’s pretty much proving his point.
"What's it like? Being with a hunter, I mean. Don't get me wrong, Alicia's great, but sometimes—sometimes I wonder.”
Dean remembers Sam posing this same question as they laid opposite each other in the Impala one night in the summer. They'd met Eileen less than a month later. Funny how the world works.
"It's rough. Twice the probability of being killed, and when he won't answer his phone--"
He cuts himself off. It's way too easy to lie. Not that Dean finds lying difficult. But talking about Cas like this shouldn't feel so right. Whether it's witchy sensitivities or just being unusually fine-tuned to emotions for a hunter, Max infers what he's not saying.
"You don't know where he is."
Dean keeps his lips pressed tightly together as he nods. As much as he's unexpectedly enjoying this little diversion, it's still a diversion. He wants to get back to searching for Cas.
“No.”
“I can help with that. Do you have something of his?”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls Cas’s phone out. It’s embarrassing how many times he’s scrolled through it these last few days. Cas doesn’t have a lot on it. He has a couple memes that Claire sent him saved to his camera roll along with some pictures he’s taken himself. Only one shows his face—he’d had the camera facing the wrong way. Dean’s stared at that way longer than he’d care to admit.
Max lets out a low whistle. “When you said he wasn’t answering his phone, you weren’t kidding.”
He crooks his fingers a few times until Dean places the phone in his palm. Max’s eyes drift shut as he begins…doing whatever it is that witches do. Dean has always let Sam take the reins on magic stuff. Sometimes he wonders if his brother isn’t like Tasha and Max—a natural witch.
“That’s weird,” he says after a moment, a trio of creases deepening in his forehead. “I usually can get it right away.”
Dean sighs. He doesn’t know what he expected. “Right. Thanks anyway.”
Max opens his eyes and hands the phone back. “Hey. If he cares about you half as much as I can tell you care about him, he’ll be back.”
Dean tries and fails not to read into that. Is he really that obvious?
“Besides,” Max continues, giving him a quick once over. “He’d be stupid not to tap that while he’s got the chance.”
Dean’s suddenly very reminded of why they started this conversation in the first place. “I thought I was a dinosaur.”
Max grins. “Never said you weren’t hot. You know. For a fossil.”
When Tasha and Alicia walk back in, they’re both laughing, and Dean’s chest feels a little lighter.