“She’s pretty.”

Dean Winchester’s voice is softer than you expect. He looks up at you from where he’s crouched on the cracked sidewalk, Kansas sun turning his hair to gold. He’s got one hand braced on his knee, the other scratching behind the kitten’s tiny ears. She pushes into his touch, eyes half-shut, tail flicking.

You’d seen Dean around before — always on the edges of your neighborhood, leaning against lampposts or kicking pebbles down the road like he had nowhere else to be. He didn’t live around here, not exactly — everyone said he was always drifting between motels and friends’ couches since his dad was hardly ever home.

He’d been kicked out of your high school long before you ever set foot there — everyone knew why. Fist fights behind the gym. Smart remarks to teachers. Cigarette smoke in the boys’ bathroom. If there was a rule to break, Dean Winchester had broken it, grinning while he did. He was two years older, the kind of rumor parents warned their kids about but teenagers whispered about in the dark: Dean Winchester did this, Dean Winchester did that.

But now, on your street, he doesn’t look like trouble. Not really. He’s in ripped jeans and an old flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, grease smudged faintly on his forearm. He looks soft when he smiles at the kitten, pretty even, and the way his green eyes flick up to yours — curious, amused, warm — makes something flutter low in your stomach.

“I’ve seen her around a few times. She yours?” he asks, voice warm and teasing. The kitten flops over dramatically onto her side, purring like an engine, and Dean laughs — a bright, surprised sound that doesn’t match the rumors at all.

For a second, you forget every story you ever heard. He’s just a boy crouched in the summer heat, trying to make a stray cat love him. And the way he’s looking at you — like he wants you to laugh too — makes you wonder if maybe all the stories were only half the truth.