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“You have nice lips.”
Dean blinked himself out of the reverie he’d sunk into and inhaled sharply to dispel the cobwebs. It wasn’t entirely successful; it was difficult to bring Cas into focus, though to be honest it was hardly fair to expect Dean to bring anything into focus when it was sitting all the way on the other side of the table. “What?”
“Your lips. They’re a good shape.” Cas reached up and tapped his own as if to remind Dean what lips were.
“If you say so.” It was impossible to resist the sudden urge to lick his lips and make sure they were still there; they felt slightly numb. His gaze wandered about the table before settling on the empty glass bottle. “Was this full when we started?”
“No.” Cas considered the last swallow of amber liquid in the bottom of his glass seriously.
“Good.”
“That bottle was full when we started.” Cas pointed, then adjusted the vector of his indication towards the empty bottle by the kitchen sink instead of the refrigerator. “This one was only mostly full.”
Dean thought about that for a moment. “Fuck.” That would certainly explain the way his eyes weren’t tracking when he turned his head. “When did we start?”
Cas shrugged. Dean decided that was a fair answer.
He pushed himself back from the table. “I need to pee,” he announced. Cas nodded solemnly, as though Dean’s remark had been far more serious, and looked back down at his glass before tossing the last splash of whiskey back.
The hallway was longer than Dean recalled it being, and darker; he stubbed his toe on the baseboard as he turned the corner back into the kitchen, still fumbling with his goddamn belt buckle which was refusing to behave. He paused for a moment. Something wasn’t right.
“Cas?” he asked, as it dawned on him that Cas was no longer seated at the kitchen table.
Sound from the other room filtered through his consciousness, and though it was dark through that doorway, Dean limped his way across the kitchen to look through.
The room was dark only in relation to the bright kitchen; the blue-white light of the television scattered across the walls and Cas’s face and white tee shirt, playing some late-night infomercial featuring people too stupid to live. Cas looked up, bleary grin on his face, and gestured towards the screen.
“This stuff is hilarious.”
Dean grunted his agreement as he threw a leg over the arm of the couch. Such dexterity was just slightly beyond him, however, and he had to throw out an arm to catch himself before he toppled over. Cas’s hand appeared out of nowhere to stabilize him as he propped himself into something approaching a sitting position, and he patted it gratefully. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
They stared at the screen for a few minutes, transfixed by the appalling lack of ability of the denizens of the infomercial world.
“If you can’t hammer a nail into a wall,” Dean said suddenly, “I don’t think we can be friends.”
“I’ve never hammered a nail into a wall,” Cas pointed out.
“Present company expected. Excepted,” Dean corrected himself.
“Your freckles are darker in the dark.”
“Yeah, I - what?”
“I was just noticing,” Cas said, squinting and leaning over to more closely examine Dean’s cheeks.
Dean blinked, trying to bring Cas’s suddenly very close face into focus. His eyes flicked from the wrinkles at the edge of Cas’s eyes to the edges of his cheekbones, groggy brain unable to fathom them into one coherent picture. They stopped at the curve of Cas’s lips, slightly parted in concentration, so dry that Dean licked his own lips in empathy.
“Dean.”
Dean tore his eyes from Cas’s mouth with difficulty, a warm flush rising up his neck that always seemed to accompany that first tiny stirring in his groin, and looked into Cas’s eyes.
The expression he found there was unmistakable, even to his alcohol-soaked mind: longing, hesitance, and the same visceral need that was currently slowly unfurling like smoke within his own middle, filtering through him and hazing his thoughts more effectively than any drink.
This was not the first time. It wasn’t even the second time. This was where he coughed, or Cas took a step back, and they broke the eye contact and bid one another good night and Dean locked his door and tried not to think of deep blue eyes and stubbled, angled chin as he got himself off with barely a touch - and aggressively tried to not think about how in the room at the end of the hall, Cas was probably doing the same thing.
Cas breathed in slightly and Dean prepared himself for the detachment.
“Dean, I…”
Dean had a very short instant in which to wonder why Cas’s eyes were closing, why he was suddenly so much closer, and then rough lips were pressed up against his, a hand pressed against the back of his head and curling in his hair in a way that sent shivers across his shoulders in a thrumming counterpoint to the stab of heated lust that ignited violently and expanded outward, making his very fingertips tingle. He made a belated, surprised sound against Cas’s mouth, and as his lips parted he felt Cas’s do the same. Still numb with disbelief, his tongue darted out of its own accord to lap against Cas’s, and the sensation forced another muffled sound from him as his cock stirred against the cotton of his boxers.
The sensation of falling startled him enough to jolt his eyes open, only to realize he wasn’t falling at all - he’d simply leaned back in response to Cas’s gentle pressure on his shoulders. He twisted, bringing his legs up to rest on the couch with Cas above him, the other man’s weight against pressing him against the couch cushions. He could feel Cas’s erection pressing into the crease between his thigh and crotch and, without thought, his hips bucked up against it, earning him a faint keening noise.
Brain making a valiant effort to process the events at hand, Dean took a deep breath, trying to force an instant or two of sobriety to the forefront. “This is a bad idea,” he managed to say in a breathy tone that suggested quite the opposite.
“Terrible,” Cas murmured in agreement against Dean’s neck, and his teeth scraping against the sensitive skin there made Dean lose track of any further protests he’d intended to make. Stopping was a concept that briefly flashed across his mind and was dismissed without question; the overpowering need that suffused him made the very act of stopping a lofty ideal further away than the moon.
Cas’s hips rolled forward and they both sighed appreciatively. Friction. Friction was good. Cas did it again, harder, and a new, less-pleasant sensation made itself known, making Dean frown just slightly. Friction was good; friction against zippers was not. Hands going to fumble with the button of his jeans, he heard Cas’s breath hitch and looked up into Cas’s face, a poignant combination of lust and uncertainty. As though to reassure himself, Cas leaned down and pressed his mouth to Dean’s again, hard enough to scrape the corners of Dean’s mouth with his stubble, as he held himself up with one elbow while the other hand went to his own zipper.
Thus freed from the restrictive denim confines, Dean stifled a moan as he thrust his hips upward and met with Cas’s, the sensation of their bodies rubbing together intensified by the absence of the thick fabric, the cotton of their boxers the only separation. Dean didn’t even notice the room swimming around him, wavering and indistinct; the dispersed focus of inebriation was collected to a fine point that centered solely on the weight of Cas atop him and the frantic, desperate coiled heat that was collecting at the base of his spine, spurred on with every twitch of Cas against him. Their kiss had dissolved into nothing more than hungry snatching of lips, punctuated by ragged breaths, their eyes locked on one another as if afraid it would all disappear.
With a shudder, Cas threw his head back, thrust once more against Dean, and froze, a wordless, broken moan escaping from his slackened jaw as his eyelids fluttered closed. The perfect image combined with the way Dean could feel Cas’s cock pulsing against his thigh brought Dean to the brink in a heady rush; desperately he plunged his hand between them and grasped at his cock.
Cas had not even finished his own orgasm before Dean’s ripped from him with an accompanying guttural moan, hot and thick as it shot between their bellies and soaked into their shirts. Trembling, Cas lowered himself down next to Dean, making a space for himself between the back of the couch and Dean, one arm protectively curled around Dean to prevent him from falling off the couch. Still hypersensitive with the aftershocks, Dean took a deep breath and withdrew his hand to clasp Cas’s tightly.
The pinpoint focus he’d developed dispersed, leaving him with the slightly nauseous, sluggish fatigue that overlapped with the warm contentment of afterglow, and the only thing Dean had time to ponder before falling into a thick, dark sleep was how he could feel Cas’s racing heart against his back.
The television was off.
That was the first thing that Dean noticed when he opened his eyes. Not the two glasses of water on the coffee table, or the four capsules of Tylenol next to them, though that was the next thing that he noticed after paying due attention to the splitting headache and general unease of his good friend the hangover.
He was fairly certain they’d left the television on.
They. Dean’s eyes widened as memory filtered into his sleep-heavy thoughts and he recalled that this was not a typical night of passing out on the couch. With trepidation, he twisted - and yes. There was Cas, burrowed up against the back of the couch, face buried in the cushion, jeans bunched up around his knees just as Dean’s were.
Icy panic seized at Dean’s lungs. Fuck. They had, hadn’t they? They had, and Dean couldn’t deny it anymore - even the memory of Cas arched back with his eyes shut was enough to make the normal physiological reaction of waking up into something that would need attending to.
“Fuck.” Dean eased himself into a sitting position and tossed back two of the Tylenol with the entire glass of water, before the presence of the water and the Tylenol combined with the state of the television made his heart jump.
“Oh. Oh no.” Closing his eyes in mortification, Dean considered the state of his shirt as he pulled up his jeans - well, it had dried, which was something, and he couldn’t really see the stain unless he knew where to look. Good enough to get back to his room, at least, and if he was sneaky about it -
But of course, that never worked.
“Morning!” Sam called from the kitchen as Dean tried to steal quietly by. Dean grimaced, then turned.
“Morning,” he replied with drastically false nonchalance.
“Headache?” Sam asked in a tone absolutely dripping with empathy.
“A bit. Yeah.” Dean reached up to scratch the back of his head. Maybe Sam hadn’t seen… But no. There had been two glasses of water.
Sure enough, Sam shot Dean a knowing look and gestured at him with the spatula. “You get one freebie. Next time I’m using the garden hose.”
He turned and resumed poking at whatever was in the frying pan. Dean stood, jaw dropped, for several moments before he found his voice.
“That’s it?” he managed incredulously.
“Dude,” Sam said, looking over his shoulder, “You two have been eye-fucking for goddamn years. I don’t want to say ‘it’s about time,’ but…” He shrugged and turned back to the stove.
Collecting the last few shreds of his dignity, Dean padded down the hall to his room, The shirt came off and was tossed into the hamper, and he was pulling a new one over his head when a tentative knock sounded at his door.
There was only one person it could be. Dean didn’t even have to pull the shirt down. “Cas.”
Cas did not look amused. “Why do we do this?”
Dean swallowed, taken aback. Whatever reaction he’d been expecting, he hadn’t been expecting this. “I…don’t know?” he ventured.
Cas raised one hand to his head and massaged his temples as he lowered himself to Dean’s bed. “I feel like an entire watermelon has been forced into my skull. We should really know better than to try and outdrink each other.”
Licking his lips, Dean tentatively sat down next to Cas. “I don’t think that was the intention when we opened the bottle. It’s hard to tell - it’s all a bit hazy.”
“Hazy. Yes.” Cas dropped his eyes to study his hands. “You could call it that.”
“It won’t happen again.” Dean was surprised at the force with which he said the words. “Bad judgment call.”
Cas looked up, face its customary stoic blankness - except for his eyes. Dean nearly drew in a sharp breath at the spark of hurt that danced behind them. “Of course. We - of course.” He sat, shoulders stiff, for the space of several breaths before abruptly standing. “I should go, um. Change.”
Dean watched the handful of steps Cas took towards the door with something approaching agony, but it wasn’t until Cas’s hand faltered on the doorknob and his neck twitched, as though he were about to look back and then thought better of it, that something within Dean’s chest burst.
He covered the space between himself and the door in two strides, catching Cas by the shoulder and spinning him around, pinning him against the door with his body and catching at his lips with a desperation that he tried to pour into the kiss - that and the fear of what was happening, of letting go of a comfortable lie, of being stripped bare of everything he’d tried to pretend he was. He tried to instill the uncertainty of where this was going to go, the terror that it might end, the sharp pang at what could be the end of a friendship. All the things that he had never been able to put into words that had been standing between them, he tried to say with his lips pressed so hard against Cas’s that he could begin to taste the metallic tang of scraped flesh.
Cas seemed frozen, responding almost woodenly, until, miraculously, he seemed to understand. He relaxed by small measures, responding passively as though listening to everything Dean was trying to say, allowing Dean to push him against the door until Dean pulled away, breathless.
They stared for some time at one another, Cas’s face completely unreadable, and Dean nearly stepped back before Cas shoved at his chest. Hard.
“What -” he began, but Cas did it again, and the backs of his knees caught at the end of his bed and he nearly fell backwards. The next shove did exactly that, and it wasn’t until then that Dean began to understand.
And as Cas straddled him, leaning down and kissing him soundly, that Dean began to listen to the wordless message that Cas was telling him: This is you, and this is us, and we are never lying to ourselves or each other about it again.
Even though the headache pounded relentlessly at his skull, Cas reiterated it countless times, and Dean listened in the manner the situation demanded.