Dean planned to drink alone the night that he met Tom Jordan. He’d just rolled into town the previous night, he was tired and he ached everywhere. The only cure was a couple of beers enjoyed in complete solitude, a prescription that Dean was taking when someone tall sidled into the seat beside him.
He didn’t have to look up to know it was a kid trying to live up to his fake ID, probably making him about twenty-six to avoid suspicion. He deepened his voice when he didn’t need to, asking for a Heineken before leaning against the bar. His fingers trembled.
Dean swallowed down another long swig of beer and glanced at the kid. At first he questioned if he was seeing him correctly or if he’d actually gotten himself thoroughly drunk on two and a half beers. Dad didn’t raise a lightweight—at least Dean thought he hadn’t. The kid definitely wasn’t twenty-six, but that wasn’t what put Dean on edge.
“Sammy? What are you doing here?”
He was confused when he didn’t turn and greet Dean with a scowl. He was confused when he didn’t turn at all, making goo-goo eyes at the bartender like that’d get him a free drink. Sam, Not-Sam, whoever he was, propped his elbow on the bar, put his chin in his hand and stared until he was handed his beer. The bartender didn’t let him slide and waited idly until the kid slid the money across the scuffed counter.
“Thank you,” the bartender said bitterly, sending him off before Dean was able to process it.
Either Sammy had a doppelgänger or he was pretending like Dean didn’t exist. It wasn’t a great feeling that he couldn’t exactly decide which idea made the most sense.
—
Dean almost wondered if God and prayers and all of that were real when he returned to the bar the next night to drink away another wasted day hunting and spotted the same tall, mop-headed kid standing at the bar.
He leaned against the counter, flashing those same innocent eyes to try and coax a free beer out of the bartender. Sammy hadn’t been interested in drinking when Dean started pulling Dad’s six packs out of the fridge to try them, getting stuffy middle-aged winos going into the local liquor store to buy the stuff for him with only a few minor threats if they didn’t. This wasn’t Sammy, he’d decided earlier that morning that there was no way in Hell it was him, and Dean was pretty sure he was right now.
Dean sidled up to the kid, leaving one seat between them but making a point to stare directly at him. He smiled with one side of his mouth and raked his eyes up and down his body, one that he could only imagine would look deeply familiar underneath his unfamiliar clothes. Hunger and arousal swirled around in his gut to leave him with a feeling that wasn’t dissimilar to nausea.
“You know, you don’t pass for twenty-six,” Dean whispered to the kid, practically making him jump out of his skin.
His wide eyes were so much like Sam’s, but his alarm? Not so much. Dean almost felt like he was sitting across from his brother for a second before his lips finally opened.
“Yes I do! What do you know? You’re probably forty!” The kid sputtered, and Dean grinned. He wasn’t Sammy, but he liked how riled he got over one accusation.
He was disappointed he didn’t get much more before the kid got his beer and stormed off to drink in private. Didn’t he have friends? Dean almost felt sorry for him going to a bar all by himself, but then it just reminded him that he was in the exact same boat and had no right to judge.
Every now and again he’d glance around the bar and find the kid lingering around like he was waiting for someone, or waiting for someone to let him join a conversation, but those people and invitations never came. Dean watched him leave alone, hands tucked into his pockets and his mop head turned down. He wasn’t sure he’d feel that same pang in his stomach if he didn’t look so much like Sammy.
—
Dean waited two days before he went back to the bar, tried to make it look like he was too busy to make it back and not that he was lying in his motel room thinking about Sam, thinking about calling Stanford and asking for Sam Winchester since he didn’t have his number. It was a pathetic two nights, and he felt like he deserved an overpriced beer or two and a look at Not-Sam. That was, if he was even there at the bar like Dean hoped he’d be.
It looked dire at first: he waited thirty minutes, scoping out the room again and again as he drained his first beer and finding no sign of the kid. He’d been on stakeouts, he knew that sometimes patience actually was a virtue, but it always felt so impossible in the moment to just wait for something to happen. Dean couldn’t stand passively waiting by like that, especially not now.
But, somehow he did it. His third beer was slid over to him just as some tall bastard walked up to the bar, leaving no seat between them. The hairs at the back of his neck stood on end when it dawned on him just who was standing there.
“Who are you?” The kid asked as Dean looked up at him, trying to stand his ground but looking about as graceless as a baby giraffe.
“Nobody you know,” Dean said back, tipping his beer up and draining the neck.
That wasn’t a good enough answer. “If you’re another journalist trying to get me to spill, my dad is going to be up your ass with lawyers, I swear to G—”
Dean held up his hands.
“Calm down, Trust Fund. I’ve got more important business to deal with than you.”
What an absolute lie. The case was at a complete standstill and Dean couldn’t come up with any conclusions. No amount of reading through Dad’s notes could put two and two together. In all honesty, this kid was the most important business in his life right now.
He settled then, realizing with a grimace that he’d jumped to conclusions. Then, his gaze lingered on Dean, like he was really seeing him for the first time. He was glad the kid hadn’t noticed him when he was all moon-eyed the previous few nights. The kid grinned, and he leaned against the bar counter.
“I’ve never seen you in here before.” His expression faded and he jumped into defense mode. “Because I don’t look at guys, I’m not gay or anything.”
“I’m just visiting,” Dean said into the mouth of his bottle, liking how flustered the kid got. “Don’t plan on staying longer than I have to.”
The kid looked disappointed. “That sucks. Not like town’s great or anything, but there’s been barely anything to do the past few months. I’m bored out of my fucking mind and you’re the only interesting person I’ve met since the Wolf shit.”
“You don’t even know me,” he reminded the kid, who rolled his eyes in a way he could only read as flirty. Thinking about Sammy shooting him that exact look made his stomach twist up.
Dean could tell he wanted to elaborate on “the Wolf shit,” so he indulged him. He’d ordered another beer by the time he got done describing how he wanted to play dead, too.
“It’s not too much to ask to get coated in fake blood, is it?”
“Like in Evil Dead II. I thought one day my hand was gonna go psycho and I’d need to know how to cut it off just in case.”
“I knew you’d get it!” The kid nudged him, almost pushing Dean off of his seat. God, the way his eyes glimmered with excitement, he really looked like Sammy. Once again he had to remind himself that this wasn’t Sam, that he’d never known this kid before today, but his brain had been thoroughly tricked.
After only a little more conversation did the kid reach across the small gap between them to touch Dean’s thigh. Even with the alcohol in his system, it didn’t dull the nervous glint in his eyes. Baby’s first gay hook-up.
Dean’s blood was rushing in his ears as the kid’s hand crept up his thigh. His long fingers fumbled as they grazed over the front of his jeans, and when Dean looked up to really fuck with his reality, he found the kid looking at him curiously, a small smile bowing his lips. He focused on his dimpled cheeks, smiling back with one side of his mouth. The dimples were all Sam.
—
“Do you want to take me home?” He asked the next night in the bar, like he’d practiced it in the mirror before he arrived.
Dean really thought he was going to stop himself before it got too far. That was until he was taking the kid back to his motel room, something deeply irresponsible—what if the kid was a monster in disguise?—but something that Dean was actively ignoring as he jammed the kid up against the wall beside the vending machine, only a couple of doors down from his room. It was the closest they’d been to unexposed since they met in the bar, and Dean needed to exert some of his pent-up energy.
“I’m Tom,” he said in between rough kisses.
“Good for you,” Dean said back, kissing his smooth jaw. The laugh that came out of him wasn’t Sam, it was some tittering noise like a bird.
“What about you? I want a name to yell when you’ve got my ankles over my head.” He wrapped his arms around Dean, held him close as he sucked a hickey onto his neck. “Fuck, Regina’ll have to cover that up.”
Dean ignored that last comment. “If you come looking for me, if you come here tomorrow and try the front desk, I’m going to put you through hell. Okay?”
Tom nodded, definitely not taking his threat as anything but playful teasing. He certainly was infuriating like Sammy. He kissed Dean sloppily, reaching between his thighs to fondle his hardening cock. “Name, please?”
He sighed, both at Tom’s insistence and the admittedly nice way he was handling Dean’s cock. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss him.
“Dean,” he said as he led him to his room. “That’s all you’re getting.”
Tom wedged Dean against the door, his tongue finding no resistance on its way into Dean’s mouth.
“I like it. Dean,” he murmured against Dean’s lips as he kissed him. “Easy.”
—
He was almost exactly like Sam. His hair, his height, his voice was a near-perfect match. Dean thought he’d just dreamt of going to Virginia, that he was actually on the West Coast and licking the sweaty column of Sam’s neck.
While Dean was balls-deep inside the kid—and he had to remind himself he was a kid, and he’d have a moral quandary about fucking a seventeen-year-old once he came just like he had the first time—he moaned, repeating his name in a way that was almost right.
“Dean, Dean, fuck yeah, Dean!” Tom was breathless, his head was thrown back and he bit his lip when the head of Dean’s cock grazed against his prostate.
Dean had to ignore his hard, large cock bobbing against his stomach, grazing Dean’s when he drove into him. He had to ignore that he was fucking the wrong hole. But that felt easier to dismiss than the way his voice drawled with an accent Sam didn’t have, the way he drunkenly told Dean about Texas as he lugged him back to the rented room. He would have taken Sam rambling about the latest folklore he’d heard from Bobby over Tom bragging about his dad being a senator, how furious it’d make him if he learned his son was gay.
He didn’t know how Dad would feel about him having sex with men, but he knew that he’d be furious that the first guy Dean ever fucked was a teenage doppelgänger of his little brother. Dean felt spiteful as he hiked Tom’s mile long leg up until his thigh was hanging at his side, his knee meeting his chest.
“I want you to come on my chest,” he begged, biting at Dean’s earlobe and making him jerk back. When Dean was staring Tom dead in the eye, he grinned. “I want you to treat me like a whore.”
Dean hid his scoff with a quick exhale, lunging into Tom and burying his face in his neck. He kissed old and new hickies, a bite mark from last night that was starting to bruise, a damning amount of proof if someone managed to notice it. It only felt like a matter of time until someone noticed them and Dean had to leave town, leave behind the closest thing he still had to Sam. It made him sick, thinking of losing access to Tom.
“You’ve never told anyone about us, right?” Dean said against his ear, fucking hard into Tom like he was claiming him.
“Never. My reputation’s already fucked, I don’t want to fuck it even worse by—fuck , Dean!—letting everyone know I’m gay,” he breathed into Dean’s ear, kissing the side of his jaw and his neck. “I’ll tell Dad before I go to college, though. I want him to picture me getting my ass torn apart between Biology lectures.”
Dean moved back, pushing Tom hard into the bed. Fear briefly flashed in his eyes as he looked up at Dean, and suddenly it was him and Sam in a motel room again, fighting over some stupid shit he wished they’d never fought about.
“Promise me right now you won’t say anything to anybody. Promise me.”
Tom nodded, his eyes wide and his conflicted little expression looking so much like Sam’s that it made Dean sick. Guilt fell over him like a heavy curtain that he couldn’t untangle himself from.
He stayed in place for a second before loosening his grip on Tom, moving his hands back down to his hips and guiding back down onto his cock. It only took him a few minutes to fall back into the rhythm, that fear completely forgotten like it hadn’t been real at all. Dean knew fear though, even in Tom, fearless and stupid as he was, it was clear that Dean terrified him. That it was best Sam was far away from him. That he should’ve pushed Tom away, let him escape while he still could.
Dean initiated a kiss for the first time that night, said he loved him when all he could see was a perfect recreation of Sam’s mouth, pliant and accepting of everything he gave him. He felt human again for the first time since Sam left. He wasn’t going to push Tom away just yet.
—
“I beat off thinking about you this morning,” Tom yawned, stretching his arms up towards the ceiling. Not three minutes ago he was panting like he’d just ran a marathon, his face splotchy red with exertion and friction against the rough pillowcase. “Thinking about how I’d like to suck your cock next time.”
Dean turned away when he smiled—one of the only other differences between them. Tom’s smile came straight out of a boardwalk caricature drawing and he was sure he’d begin to blur that expression with Sam’s actual smile.
“We still have time.”
It felt better to keep him in this dingy room and keep him occupied with sex than let him go back out there where he might get hurt. If he did think of him as Sam, there was no question to him keeping Tom around for a while longer even if he was caught breaking curfew. His dad could just bribe his way back in, couldn’t he?
Dean could lie to himself and say that he was keeping an eye on Tom as any good samaritan would, that it was best he was sleeping with Dean instead of someone who was going to give him an STD or dump his body in the nearest river. But he knew deep down that his intentions were selfish, that all he wanted was a second chance with the closest thing he could get to Sam. If it helped Tom sleep better at night, he could think that Dean wanted him, just him, and not a stranger with his same face.
Tom settled into Dean’s arms, his face going slack as he fell asleep. Dean’s come was steadily dribbling out between his thighs, his body was littered with finger and suck bruises, and his lips and asshole were swollen from overuse. At this point, Dean was imprinted onto his body, a brand that declared Tom as all his, unfit for anybody else. He pushed his bangs out of his face, admired that there were no differences when Tom was asleep. Almost Sammy in his arms, slotted against him like he was always meant to be.
Tom was as good as he was going to get, and Dean wasn’t going to let him go.