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“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray “Care for a nightcap, Cas?” “How many caps to the night have you had so far?” the angel asks, settling down in a chair opposite Dean. He gets his response in three fingers. Starting with the middle one. “Guess I’ve got some catching up to do,” he smirks, as Dean passes him a generous portion of whiskey. “Hey now, don’t drink me dry,” Dean snorts. “Took a liquor store to take you out before and I’m not sure the bunker’s got the goods to even get you buzzed. Not asking you to be a cheap date or anything, but have some sympathy.” Cas smiles as he settles more solidly into the worn leather chair. He takes a sip from the glass tumbler, hoping that the slight flush to his cheeks can be attributed to the warm burn of the whiskey. “How’s Sam doing?” he asks, knowing the thought of Dean and date is a dangerous one. A warm chuckle rumbles from Dean’s stomach past his lips. “You mean Mr. Rogers? I’m happy to report he is sleeping like a baby.” It was always a joke with Dean. But he couldn’t hide his real meaning no matter how many layers of sarcasm and name-calling he coated it in. Cas could tell - could see it - in his relaxed posture, in his ungritted teeth, in the way his shoulders didn’t seem to have an unbearable weight upon them. There was nothing Dean wanted more in the world than for Sam to be okay. Even just one night of unencumbered rest was enough to put Dean at ease. “I’m happy to hear that. After Charming Acres, he certainly deserves it.” The mention of the case has Dean clinking two more ice cubes and pouring two more fingers of whiskey into his glass. “You know you’ve got to tell me everything, right?” Suddenly the study seems stifling. Without thinking, Castiel starts to loosen his tie, taking a long swig. To catch up , he assures himself. “I mean, this is prime blackmailing material for the next time Sammy tries to shame me about binging on trashy TV or almost registering for a hot dog eating contest. Spill.” Right. Everything means everything from the case, Cas thinks, saying a silent prayer to the holy trinity of Jim Beam, Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels that he hadn’t yet said anything. And so Cas talks, and Dean listens, asks questions, asks follow up questions and, at one point, starts taking notes. When he’s got what he refers to as a “goldmine of good-natured brotherly harassment material,” they start to talk more generally about the case. About the Stepford town and psychics, about the fifties aesthetic and fucked up families. Until they’ve run out of pretty much everything to talk about but the letters. The steamy letters, as Cas had called them. “So how uh --” Dean clears his throat. “How steamy we talking here? Tea kettle to Old Faithful?” Castiel quirks his head towards Dean, understanding the references but struggling with the scale Dean has established. “I wouldn’t be a good judge - I have --- limited knowledge --- of this particular … genre of writing.” “I take it Metatron wasn’t a big Diana Gabaldon or Virginia Henley fan?” Dean asks, indicting himself in the process. “He did some speed-reading of some Danielle Steel novels but that’s about it.” Castiel pauses, not sure how to proceed further. Thankfully, Dean interjects, seemingly unwilling to get off of the detour the conversation had taken. “So, you can’t judge em by their literary merits --- so what made them … stand out?” Cas looks for a distraction, his empty glass a traitor to his cause. He scans his memory for a way out, landing on the pizzaman and the babysitter. On the countless times his inquiries about sexuality had rendered Dean at a loss for words and scrambling to find something else to do or talk about. To be frank and explicit was his only way out of this mess, he decided. “Well, like I said -- and I might be way off base here, being a novice and all -- but Sunny, she has a way with words. Her own and others. There was something captivating, enticing about her descriptions.” Dean fidgets in his chair, suddenly finding his boots to be fascinating. “What kinds of of descriptions, Cas?” “A lot of it was -- hypothetical. Talking about her longing, her craving. About knowing what was forbidden and still wanting it so much it engulfed her.” Dean didn’t say stop, and so Cas kept going. “She took a line from Neruda - ‘I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,’ - and just ran with it. She wanted to do with him what the ocean does with the sand - what the wind does to the willows - their bodies all the elements they’d need in one another.” Dean forwent the pretense and took a drink straight from the bottle like he was dying of thirst. “So ---- pretty poetry?” he manages to squeak out without making eye contact with the angel. “That and then some,” Cas replies quickly. “A good writer never just talks in abstractions - analogies and metaphors can never really get at the thing itself. And so she catalogued every part of him, each aspect she had memorized - the specific shade of his eyes - the strength of his hands - the curve of his legs. And she improvised the rest, down to a rather detailed imagination of the shape and heft of his ----” “Goodnight Cas!” Dean shouts as he stumbles towards his bedroom. He shouldn’t have let it get this far. He had practically goaded Cas into telling him, and he’d basically done the indoor version of running away screaming into the night when Cas had started to go beyond the PG-13 material. Dean wasn’t a prude - his internet history proved as much - and yet, he couldn’t handle Castiel, angel of the Lord, describing in detail the shape and heft of --- It was basically blasphemy. Yeah, that’s why it bothered him. It wasn’t Cas’ little preface about longing and want, about how it consumed. Because that wasn’t Cas’ preface - it was Sunny’s. And it was wrong to think otherwise. It was hard to think straight. Especially when all of his blood seemed to be going in a very different direction. “Damn it, Cas…” Dean grumbles as he made a beeline towards the emergency mickey he had in his bedside table. Except what he had intended to mumble under his breath came out decidedly louder. Loud enough for the angel pacing in the hallway to hear. Dean freezes. He hears a light tap on the door. Dean remains frozen. “Dean?” His name was a question falling from the angel’s lips. With a deep breath in and out, he heads back towards his bedroom door, opening it ajar. “Can we talk?” the angel asks. Dean opens the door enough to give his answer. Before he returned to his Very Important Mission of liberating Mr. Jameson from his bedside. Dean sits on the edge of his bed, staring at the bottle in his hands, bracing himself for round two. He’d need a lot more courage than this measly bottle could provide. “I’m sorry,” Cas offers. “I never meant - I never mean to - I’m sorry what I said made you uncomfortable.” Dean huffs out a breath, not at the angel, but at himself. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, Cas. Wasn’t your fault I lost my nerve back there.” Castiel takes one step forward, then freezes, not wanting to to encroach on Dean’s personal space within Dean’s … personal space. The single step provides Dean with enough fortitude to venture looking into the angel’s eyes. Their blues are a blend of confusion, kindness and care Dean has never seen anywhere else. “You’d think, ten years in --- I’d get use to it.” Castiel takes another step forward, resting a hand lightly on Dean’s shoulder. Hands that had rescued him from hell - literally and figuratively - over and over. “Used to what?” Castiel whispers, as if he is terrified of the answer. How could he possibly explain it? How Dean prided himself on keeping his cool no matter the circumstances and yet - with Cas - it seemed like that was a physical impossibility? Were there even words in any language that could get at what the pit of his stomach felt like right now? How it had felt nearly every day since that September some ten years ago? Could science or medicine adequately describe what would happen to Dean every time Cas would walk in a room? Could a psychiatrist or psychic make sense of the daydreams Dean would find himself getting lost in? Could any of the world’s greatest wordsmiths venture to express what Cas did to him? Meant to him? The shape and the heft of --- Dean’s feelings? “Dean?” In his reverie Dean had lost track of the space between him and his angel, now seated next to Dean, his leg pressed against Dean’s knee. God, it felt incredible to be this close to him. “Dean -- used to what?” Castiel asked again, his voice trembling as if Dean’s answer could break him. “To the temptation,” Dean breathes out. As the words leave, Dean swears he’s had an out of body experience. There’s no way they’ve left his mouth - that admission was saved for some kind of super-apocalypse that is waiting for the two of them down the road. It was too big a risk for a night as ordinary as this - words reserved for a deathbed, not this bed. Not his bed. And yet, here they were, sitting at the edge of Dean’s bed, their bodies pressed into one another in a way that could be explained away should anyone see. That’s how it’d always been - just enough plausible deniability to keep it safe. Except Cas inched closer. Except Cas moved his hand from Dean’s shoulder down to the hunter’s own hand, resting it carefully, delicately atop it. “Tempted how?” Cas asks, as his fingers traced tentative paths across Dean’s knuckles. Dean didn’t move. Neither did Cas. Words could do wonders - Sunny’s words captured as much.But what words would do now? What words could speak to the magnitude of this moment, to the thousands of moments that had gotten them there? To Dean’s bed, sitting silently next to one another, letting their bodies melt together? What words were worthy of the next moment? Where the space would narrow or widen, whether ten years would continue or come to fruition? Words failed Dean at times like these. And so, he braces himself the best he can, and chooses action.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The whole thing felt like it was happening in slow motion. Dean slowly turned his head.Cas slowly met his gaze.Neither broke the connection.Dean slowly moved his hand to rest on Castiel’s cheek.Cas slowly closed his eyes.Dean slowly moved forward until their foreheads met.Until they could feel the warmth of each other’s skin.Until they could hear each other gasp.Dean smelled of whiskey and soap. Dean wonders what Castiel tasted like. He gets a hundred answers to that question when his lips meet Castiel’s. First it was just the soft press of skin against skin, slight and tentative. Cas lets out a shaky breath when they break. “Okay?” Dean asks while his thumb tenderly outlines Castiel’s ear. Castiel crashes his reply into Dean, their lips now meeting sloppy, hungry. Castiel tastes earthy like peat and sweet like honey. Dean’s tongue swirls within the caverns of Castiel’s mouth like an intrepid explorer. They break apart again, long enough only to frantically shed layers of clothing. Each a skin they no longer needed. The wood of Dean’s floor soon adorned in canvas and cotton and silk. “You have no idea how long I have wanted to do that,” Dean mutters, running his fingers down the buttons of Cas’s button down. Castiel smiles, pulling the hunter fully into his embrace. “I think I can imagine.” Dean peppers his face and neck with kisses, as his fingers work each button open. “I think I’d like to hear about what you’d imagined,” he declares into Cas’ collarbone. The angel lets out a soft moan when Dean presses his weight into him. Very little needs to be imagined anymore, for Castiel can feel the heat and hardness pressed firmly into his leg. “What would you have written in those letters?” It comes out less like an innocent inquiry than a ravenous demand as the hunter ruts himself against Castiel’s firm thighs, throwing the dress shirt to the wayside. It had been a long time since Castiel had wanted to follow orders obediently. But Dean had always had a persuasive tongue. And right now, that tongue was writing entire treatises down Castiel’s chest and abdomen. “I’d write about the countless times I’d find myself utterly lost to the multitudes of things that enrapture me about you,” Castiel huffs as he pulls Dean’s shirt off. “How your smile warms me. How your laugh makes me tingle. How your body makes me ache. The nights I’d imagine the shape and the heft of your body - of your cock pressed against mine.” Dean’s breath hitches at the thought. “How I’d spent my nights wondering what it would be like to count your freckles instead of sheep,” he rumbles as Dean’s hands make quick work of his slacks. “How I have watched life evolve from single cells to the highly complex, watched the Earth grow and decay, how epochs have come and gone. How those millions of years don’t match up to a single day with you. How the entirety of space cannot compare to the confines of this bedroom. How that entirety of my existence could not have prepared me for what waited for me in the future - for you.” Castiel’s fingers thread through Dean’s hair as the hunter’s teeth drag across his thighs. “My letters tell you that being with you feels like an unearned privilege - but also, a curse. Because you are the man against which all others will inevitably be compared in my mind --- and you are not one who can ever be topped,” Castiel manages to mutter out, his fingers clenched in the sheets as Dean licks a stripe up the length of his cock. The hunter looks up, his eyes blown black, a grin finding itself painted across his perfect face. “You so sure about that?” he asks. Dean presses a hand firmly on Castiel’s chest, pushing him down onto the mattress. “Because I can think,” he groans as his tongue circles around the head of Cas’ throbbing cock. “Of someone…” he says before taking Cas’ length into his mouth. “Who could top me…” he whimpers before kissing his way up to Cas. The angel wraps his arms firmly around Dean, running his fingers down his spine. “That could be arranged.” Fact doesn’t always live up to fiction. In the steamiest of fiction, that first surrender lasts for hours - dusk blends into dawn without anyone being the wiser. But sometimes, what happens in minutes matters more, is better. The choreography might get muddled and someone might miss their cue, but what matters is there. Two heartbeats in sync.Bedsheets engulfed in fingers.The weight and intoxication of a name being said over and over again, sending someone tumbling over the edge.Dean had heard his name fall from the angel’s lips time and time again, but this time, it was different. This time, everything about Dean is worthy, because it’s what makes Cas dance with oblivion. It’s some hours later before either recalls a vocabulary beyond the other’s name and some few choice adjectives. Hours after they’ve painted each other’s bodies and Dean’s sheets. And that’s the scariest time of all for two people attuned to chaos. Because the aftermath? The aftermath is where you had to make a plan for what’s next. Dean had made Cas talk, give speeches and soliloquies, but that was in the throes of … something. But now? Now he needed to know that, despite what had just happened, he still had his best friend. “You good?” he whispers into the nape of Castiel’s neck. The angel takes in a deep breath. “Better than good. Better than happy. Whole,” he mutters before taking Dean’s hand to his mouth and kissing his fingers. Dean had never heard more beautiful words spoken.