Take a Cue - Billiards Vingettes
1- John started teaching Dean to play pool as soon as he was tall enough to reach the felt, and Sam had early memories of sitting on the edge of the table in grimy bars, watching his father guide Dean’s hands on the cue, just like he guided them on a gun doing target practice.
Once, Sam got his fingers crushed against the edge of the felt by the ball because he’d forgotten John’s admonition to be careful. Dean didn’t want to play for a while after that, until Dad snapped, “He’s gonna get hurt worse than that some day, do you want to be able to take care of him or not? Pool’s a good way to make money, in a pinch.”
After that they played again, and Dean had a hard-eyed intensity that Sam was slowly becoming familiar with as his brother grew older.
2- Sam’s earliest role in hustling pool was as the teary-eyed distraction. If Dad’s mark was making trouble about handing over the money, it was Sam’s job to come over sniffling and wide-eyed, asking if they were angry with his Daddy. Dean would stand protectively behind him, ready to drag him out of harm’s way in case it didn’t work. It always worked.
3- Later, it was Dean who taught Sam to play. Night after night, whenever there was a diner or a bar with a pool table, they’d take down the cues and rack the balls. At first Sam just practiced hitting any ball into any pocket, and then, as he gradually improved, they played every variation of billiards on the books, and a few that he was pretty sure Dean made up.
“You scratched the cue ball! You have to pick truth or dare.”
“That’s not a real rule, Dean.”
“How do you know? And don’t chalk the cue between every turn, it makes you look like an amateur.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t looking like an amateur the point?”
“Yeah but only when you want to. Pool is a dying art and w e have to be defenders of her honor. Come on, truth or dare Sammy?”
“Don’t call me Sammy. Fine, truth.”
“Were you jerking off last week, after you walked in on me and Carla Benetti?”
“Ugh, you’re such a freak, Dean!”
Dean waggled his eyebrows. “Answer the question, you can’t welch on truth or dare.”
“Time to go, boys,” their dad called, and they had to put the cues away.
Twenty miles down the highway, both curled to sleep in the back seat with streetlights flickering in magic-lantern shadows on the inside of the car, Sam leaned his head against Dean’s shoulder and whispered, “Yes.”
“Huh?” Dean said, already thick with sleep. Dean could fall asleep anywhere, at any time.
“I said yes,” Sam repeat, low enough to not be overheard by John beneath the roar of the engine and the rush of the road. “I was jerking off. After I walked in on you.”
“Oh.” Dean breathed out, a little shakily, and his hand found Sam’s skinny knee, squeezing.
The dark made Sam brave. He reached down and closed his own fingers around Dean’s, holding them in place. They fell asleep like that.
4-John watched his boys circling the pool table. Sometime in the last six months, Sam had started to grow and didn’t look like he was stopping, and it was throwing off his game. It would take practice to get accustomed to his new reach and strength, and although it would eventually be an asset, it was clearly aggravating Sam now, as Dean beat him up and down, game after game.
John was at the bar, waiting for a contact who was supposed to meet him. Despite spending most of their lives in a car or assorted motel rooms together, he didn’t often get a chance to just watch his boys together. Not without haranguing them to finish their drills, or do the dishes, or stop their damn fool arguing. Tonight he had nothing better to do, until his contact showed.
Dean was teasing his brother, ragging on him, the kind of patter he never got to use on marks, not when he needed to keep them calm. Sam was not staying calm, going red-faced and pout-lipped, bangs in his eyes. It was affecting his playing. Steady breaths, John could have told him; just like aiming a gun - shoot on the exhale. But Sam was getting to that age where you couldn’t tell him anything, lanky and stubborn.
As Sam leaned over to take a shot, Dean passed close behind him and ruffled his hair. Sam missed the shot badly, and straightened up, scowling. “Dean!” John heard, over the noise of the bar. Dean grinned, unrepentant.
Beside John, someone cleared his throat, and John turned to shake hands with the tall, grizzled ex-hunter he’d been waiting for. At some point during the conversation, he lost track of the boys and when he glanced over, they were both gone, pool game abandoned with balls scattered across the table.
Just as John’s heart jumped with adrenaline, wondering if something or someone could have snatched them right here under his nose, he spotted both of them coming back from the bathrooms. Sam was still red-faced, and Dean still looked smug. They didn’t finish the game.
5- There was a stretch of time where they were too old to be shepherded into a bar innocently by their father, and too young to convincingly pass off fake IDs. They kept their skills up at billiards tables in all-ages restaurants and permissive dives all across the country, places that would turn a blind eye to a pair of teenagers playing pool as long as they didn’t drink. It was easy to hustle in places like that. Everyone underestimated a kid.
Sometimes people looked at Dean’s mouth or Sam’s beanpole legs and thought they could hustle something else. Dean always sent them away firmly as long as Sam was in earshot. Occasionally, if money was really tight, he’d slip out after putting Sam to bed, come back near closing time, and make a little more on the side.
6- Watching Sam’s ass as he bent over a pool table was Dean’s favorite kind of public masochism. His bubble butt was the one place he’d never lost his baby-boy softness, although Dean knew from touching it a thousand times that the plump roundness was all muscle when Sam flexed.
Sam’s Levi’s strained over the generous curve and Dean knew he wasn’t the only one watching. It made him hot with jealousy and pride to have other people’s eyes hungry on Sam as they played. His arms flexed in his t-shirt as he lined up his next shot. It was a view good enough to sweeten the sting of the money marks lost.
Sam didn’t love the buzz of hustling like Dean did. During his teen years, Sam got more and more bitchy about how weird it was to count hustling pool as domestic budgeting, and he started the same tune right back up after Dean came to get him at Stanford. But he loved the game; had always loved mathematics and precision of it, the way Dean loved the art and music of the clacking balls.
It never took much to cajole him into a game or two. Sometimes Sam even won, and always the competition, the posturing, the subtle exhibitionism left them both wound up and desperate to get off.
Someday he was going to fuck Sam over a pool table. The opportunity just hadn’t presented itself yet. They sucked each other off in the car instead, taking the edge off enough to make it back to the motel.
7- Sam could beat Dean sometimes, and Dean occasionally lost to an unlucky mistake with a stranger, but the first time Sam saw Dean get his ass whupped at pool by a girl was at the Roadhouse. Dean was excellent, professional caliber, but Jo had grown up in a bar with a pool table, spent every day of her life there. And Dean had underestimated her the first time. It was stupid of him, Sam reflected, when Dean himself had so often taken advantage of his blond good looks to lower a mark’s expectations.
Jo won the second game on skill alone, Dean playing hard and focused against her. He won the third, though. She looked a little breathless, a little bright-eyed and turned on afterward. Sam could sympathize. Win or lose, playing Dean at pool was always a semi-sexual experience. That was part of what made him such a good hustler. The game was as much about domination of this cocky, beautiful, attention-seeking young man as it was about the billiards. It drew people in helplessly, like Jo. Like Sam.
8- There was something unknowable about the Winchester brothers from the moment they first set foot in the Roadhouse - a mystery that went beyond Ellen’s strong reaction. Dean was mouthy and charming, Sam withdrawn and polite, but both of them were in some undefinable way, untouchable. Like everyone else in the world was slightly unreal, and only the Winchester brothers really existed for one another. It was at the pool table that she finally figured them out.
Waking up in the middle of the night and padding down the hall to the bathroom Jo heard noises from the bar downstairs. Sometimes her mom would take weird meetings with hunters at odd hours, and Jo was always curious, so she crept to the top of the stairs where she could watch without being seen in the shadows.
It was Sam and Dean, playing pool. The hard clacking sounds she’d heard weren’t beer glasses but balls. She understood insomnia. There were nights when she couldn’t sleep that she’d spent hours at that table, trying to lose herself and her grief in the patterns of the balls on the felt.
They circled the table like a pair of graceful animals, not speaking at all, and watched each other with intense eyes. That was what caught her attention, held her in place wrapt instead of going back to her warm bed. She’d played Dean earlier that evening, beat his chauvinist ass twice, and she’d seen how he watched her as he played - first casually, then measuringly, and finally triumphantly. But he had never looked at her like he’d seen her, like she was real in his world, like he was looking at Sam now.
He watched his brother like Sam was a work of art, a piece a theatre. Appreciative, ecstatic. And Sam was looking back, almost predatory. She’d written him off as the soft, hurt college boy to Dean’s brash edges, but there was nothing soft about the way he was looking at his brother. Dean leaned over the table, deliberately slow, and Sam’s eyes were hungry.
The unnamed suspicion growing in Jo’s gut clicked into focus when Dean put a hand on Sam’s back, dragging it down to the curve of his ass. Sam didn’t flinch, as if they did this all the time, just took his shot and sank the ball. Then he stood and grinned at Dean, wolfish.
When Sam pushed Dean back against the edge of the table, pressed up between his spread thighs, Jo slipped away. She didn’t actually want to see them kiss or fuck or whatever they were about to do. God knew hunting made you crazy and destroyed innocence fast. Jo wanted to keep a tiny piece of her sanity for herself, in blissful, plausible denial about the mystery of the Winchester brothers.
HAPPY WINCESTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR! xoxo Anon
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