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Despite all the unexpected things that had happened in the last few months—dimensional rifts, Jack’s birth, discovering the Empty, Lucifer’s defeat and Dean’s possession by Michael and subsequent disappearance—somehow Castiel could still be taken by surprise.
He was on a supply run at a convenience store the next town over. (Sam had instructed him to switch things up every once in a while to keep the residents of Lebanon from growing suspicious of occult activities, and Castiel decided it was a good strategy.) He was waiting in line just like a human man would, basket of goods in hand, when he felt a familiar energy prickle at his senses just out of his line of sight.
When he turned around to see what it was, the basket fell to the floor with a dull clatter. He was too stunned to think about picking up the supplies, or to care that a few people were now staring at him.
“Meg,” he whispered.
At first he thought he must be seeing things. There was no way that the young, leather-clad blonde woman in the wheelchair two aisles over could possibly be the one he knew. But then he saw the whirling smoke under her skin, wafting over thorns, and she glanced his way with a smirk and a raised brow.
“Clarence,” she said, too low for the humans around to hear. “Long time, no see.”
He wanted to bolt to her, ask her where she had been, but his feet felt as though they had sunk beneath the floor and couldn’t move. It turned out that he didn’t need to worry. The demon was already rolling toward him, her dark eyes fixed on his face just the way they had been years ago in that dead woman’s living room. It was only then that he realized there were still groceries as well as other odds and ends at his feet, and he dropped to his knees in order to pick them up and put them back in the basket.
He was missing a red candle. Delicate, pale fingers bumped into his, and he looked up to see Meg bent over in her chair and handing him the candle. “Looks like you dropped this.” Her voice was every bit as sultry as he remembered, floating around him like mist, and he almost wanted to close his eyes just to savor the full experience.
Not for the first time he denied his impulses regarding her. “I…yes. Thank you.” A little too quickly he grabbed the candle from her and put it back in the basket, then stood. There were so many questions on his mind that needed answering, and his tongue was caught behind them. “Meg, where…?”
“Heads up, Cas.” She inclined her head toward the counter. “Line’s moving.”
“Oh.”
He straightened himself out to be a little more presentable to the employee behind the counter and moved with the line. And he was more than a little pleased to be peripherally aware that Meg was wheeling along beside him the whole time. And as much as he wanted to say something, anything, he was speechless.
She’d always had a habit of rendering him that way.
The first question he finally voiced as they waited was perhaps the most obvious. “What are you doing here?”
In that same amused tone she always used when she thought he didn’t understand something, she said, “I just followed the cycle of weirdness. Around here seems to be the center of it all. There’s a kind of pull. Isn’t that what you’re doing here?”
The angel shook his head. “No. Not quite.”
They were quiet again, but it wasn’t awkward. It was easy. Comfortable.
But soon it was Meg’s turn. “So what are you doing here?”
“It’s a bit of a long story,” Castiel began, but before he could elaborate it was his turn to check out. It took entirely too long for his taste, but whether that was due to his own impatience or the fact that Meg was gazing at him the entire time he couldn’t say. It didn’t matter.
For the first time in months, he felt hope again. So he focused on that as the cashier rang up the items in the basket and sent him on his way after he paid.
Meg watched him expectantly as they went out the door together, and Castiel realized that he was expected to continue.
“Sam and Dean are living around here semi-permanently,” he explained, though he felt a small pang when he reminded himself that as if right now, it was only Sam. “And there’s a boy, Jack…I’ve been caring for him. Or trying to, anyway. That’s why I’m here.”
“You call that a long story?” Meg rolled her eyes, but underneath it all Cas could see the ghost of a smile. It vanished as she started putting the pieces together. “Wait a second. Jack…I think I’ve heard of him. Isn’t he…?”
“The biological son of Lucifer, yes.”
Meg’s eyes gleamed, if only for a second.
“But he’s nothing like Lucifer, personality-wise,” Castiel went on. “He’s good, through-and-through.”
“Looks like you’ve had a lot on your plate,” Meg said. By now they had reached the car that he had used to drive here, figuring that avoiding teleportation of any distance would help keep him below Michael’s radar. “You’re gonna have to fill me in at some point.”
“I could fill you in on the way to the bunker,” Castiel blurted. “That’s where Sam is now. That is…if you want to come with me. You don’t have to. I don’t know what Sam would say, or Jack for that matter. But I…I would like for you to come with me. I missed you, Meg.”
The demon blinked, as if taken aback by such a brazen admission. But then her expression turned coy again. “And here I thought you’d never ask me to go home with you.”
The seraph blushed, but offered no rebuttal. “Well?”
Brown eyes locked on blue in a sort of staring contest until the owner of the former let out a sigh that could almost be called fond. “All right. I’ll come with you. But you’ve got to promise not to let either of those dunderhead Winchesters try to kill me. So, we taking this junker or something?” She gestured to the car before them.
“Yes, we are.” Then he narrowed his eyes at her, trying to read her as well as she could read him. “You don’t seem surprised that I’m driving now.”
If he didn’t know better he would say she was thrown for a loop. But she only scoffed and tossed her hair over one shoulder before nonchalantly rolling around to the passenger’s side. “Please. Everybody’s driving these days.”
It was dark when they pulled up to the bunker. Castiel parked outside the door instead of in the garage. “It’s heavily warded against almost everything,” he explained, just as he had recounted to her all that had happened in his life since he last saw her. “I’ll have to go in and tell Sam to disable it.”
The fact that he still thought of everything and was so insistent on including her in his endeavors made her smile to herself. Somehow even with all the time they had spent apart, he still made her feel gooey deep inside. “Okay. I’ll wait here.”
She didn’t really have too much of a choice in that area anymore.
Castiel reached out his hand but stopped just before he could touch hers. “Right. Okay. I’ll be right back.”
Could she really be blamed if, as he got out of the car, she watched him go in hopes that his trench coat would ride up?
Alone with her thoughts, she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Blackness greeted her—the same blackness she had seen when she first woke up. One question remained, and it had haunted her since she found herself on the outskirts of Kansas City.
How the hell did she get out?
Soon enough the angel who had been kind (or dumb) enough to bring her back to an actual, real-life Men of Letters bunker emerged and opened her door. “Come on. You should be able to enter now.”
While she stood on shaky legs that she couldn’t really feel, holding onto the door for support, he got into the backseat and retrieved the collapsible wheelchair. She had to hand it to him; he hadn’t asked any questions about her situation or even said so much as a word.
She wanted to believe that he remembered exactly how she felt about being pitied. It made her feel a little better about having been apart from him, and his hesitance to make a move already. Seriously, they’d been together again for an hour! If she had to wager a guess she would say that he was afraid to touch her. Which would mean she would have to do the heavy lifting again. That was fine by her. She could easily fall back into that role. In any case it would be nice to feel like she had some level of control again.
Once she was seated in the chair she rolled herself after Castiel to the door of the bunker, narrowing her eyes at the stairs before her.
“There aren’t ramps,” Castiel said apologetically, and Meg’s brows shot up. It was the first time he had actually said anything about the chair.
Then she just shrugged her shoulders. “It’s cool. I’ve got my own way around it. But you may wanna invest—just saying.”
With a concentrated thought, she vanished from the top of the steps and rematerialized at the bottom, shooting Cas a cocky smirk. Seeing that she could clearly handle it, he nodded. “That works.”
The heavy steel door creaked open, and Meg eagerly wheeled inside only to find that there were even more stairs…and that Sam was staring up at her through the bars of the railing with a hilariously bewildered expression, his mouth opening and closing a bit like a fish on land.
“Meg?” he finally said.
The demon held out her arms and grinned. “In the flesh. Go on, get an eyeful.”
“How…” Sam paused and gulped. “How is this possible? I saw…”
“You saw Crowley skewer me?” Just for the dramatic effect, she pulled the same trick she did outside, appearing right beside Sam at the…what was that, a war table? “I know. I watched you go just before he lit me up like a Christmas tree.”
“Wait, what?” Castiel had hurried down the stairs after her and now was looking from her to Sam and back again.
Meg’s mouth fell open and she didn’t bother trying to hide her derision even for the sake of a front of friendliness. “Oh, no. You have got to be kidding me. You didn’t bother to tell him?”
“Meg…” Sam looked about ready to flee. As if Meg would let him.
“He’s supposed to be your friend, jackass,” she snapped. “And you didn’t just tell him I died in order to save all your skins? It would have taken you all of a minute at most! What’s the big idea? Did you think he would just forget about me and move on? Because I’m just some demon, right? Whatever I do for you people, I don’t matter.”
Not even giving Sam a chance to respond, she wheeled away and teleported herself up some more stairs (Christ, did these Letters have a hard-on for stairs?) and into what looked like a library. She only stopped at the far end when it hit her that she had no idea where she was going, and she rolled the chair back against one of the bookcases so at least Sam couldn’t see her. That would get her point across sufficiently.
She heard Castiel tell Sam that they would talk later, and then his footsteps were making their way toward her.
Was sulking like this a little childish? Yeah. But she had been dead for four years. She was entitled.
Just like in the market, she looked up and he was crouching in front of her.
“Hey,” he said quietly.
“You didn’t even ask him,” she said as she realized it. “I was gone and you didn’t even ask where I was.”
He looked down at the floor and stood only to grab one of many chairs and sit in it beside her. He was silent for a long moment, and Meg was just getting ready to chew him out, too when he said anything.
“I was afraid. It’s no excuse, but…I was afraid. For all I knew you could have just escaped and gone somewhere to lie low, and I didn’t want to blow your cover with how dangerous the world became in the time since we last saw each other. Angels walking the earth, Abaddon, Crowley…”
The only solace Meg got out of that was knowing that Crowley was now dead himself.
“…and then I was afraid that I might have learned the truth,” Castiel went on, and at that Meg turned to face him. “I was so scared that you didn’t make it out of that alley that night, but I didn’t want to know for sure because…well, I guess because I felt so alone as it was. If I had known I would have wanted to die right then and there.” As if saying all that had lifted a weight from him, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
And then, just like the universe was determined to interrupt her at every turn, a boy walked into the room and saw them sitting there. Dirty blond hair was on top of his head, but his face and eyes were so much like Castiel’s vessel’s that Meg would have sworn they were related if Cas hadn’t told her about the kid beforehand.
“Castiel,” the boy said. He was eyeing Meg warily the whole time, though. “Who is this?”
Castiel didn’t rise to his feet like Meg half-expected, but he did look up at him. “This is Meg. She’s…she’s an old friend of mine. Meg, this is—”
“Jack,” Meg said, and she smiled at the boy in the same sweet, friendly way that had gotten her that nursing job at the Northern Indiana State Hospital. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“She’s a demon,” Jack said. He certainly did have his adopted dad’s talent of pointing out the obvious.
“Yes,” Castiel replied. “But she’s not like the rest. I can fill you in a little later, but just know that you can trust her.” Taking Meg a little by surprise, he took her hand in his and squeezed lightly.
His touch was every bit as electric as she remembered.
Meg had lost none of her skill for reading people, and Jack didn’t look sure if he could take that assessment to heart. She didn’t hold it against him, either.
Still, just a little uncomfortable with being scrutinized by a kid, she pushed off from the bookcase and looked to Cas. “If I’m gonna be staying here like we talked about, you’re gonna need to put me up somewhere. So…”
“I’ll show you to your bedroom.” Castiel let go of her hand and stood at once, and then spoke to Jack again. “We’ll talk a little more about this after Meg has had a chance to settle in. All right?”
Backing away from them to give them both more room, Jack only echoed Castiel. “All right.”
The bunker had a multitude of bedrooms once Meg got her chair down even more stairs, and Castiel told her that many of them were occupied at one point by the refugees from the apocalyptic dimension that Jack had accidentally accessed before he was born.
“A good deal of them have moved out by now, though,” he said, stopping outside of one numbered 29. “At least until we can find a way to safely return them back to their home so they can start rebuilding. They may all be occupied again soon if Sam manages to recruit the hunters that he wants for our operation.”
Meg glanced at the door, then back up at Castiel, a sly look in her eye. “And where are you gonna be staying?” She reached for his hand again, needing the contact more than she was willing to admit, and bit her lip.
“One of the rooms is a sort of designated guest room. I used to stay there whenever I visited, but Mary has been occupying it recently…” At last, he seemed to catch her drift. “Oh. I, uh…”
She chuckled at his flustered expression and shook her head. “Well, you let me know when you figure that out. ‘Kay?”
“Uh…okay.” He moved as if to walk away, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“One more thing. Why did you really bring me here? Just be honest with me.”
“I’ve been honest with you all day,” he said simply. “But…we could really use your help here. Someone who can keep an ear to the ground and make it easier to find Dean.”
“You mean apocalypse-Michael.” She pursed her lips and considered. Much as she really, really didn’t like Dean, she knew the guy meant a lot to Castiel. She’d be hurting him if she said no. And besides, maybe rescuing the douchebag would earn her some cred on the trust front and give her some much-needed allies in this brave new world.
Staying here would be safer for her with a big bad archangel roaming around anyway.
Finally, she nodded. “Okay. You’ve got me on your little team.” She smiled, and even she was aware that it was sickeningly sweet on her. She just couldn’t do anything about it. “Now go talk to the kid and convince him I’m not Cruella de Vil.”
Cas smiled, too, and for a second Meg thought the light of it would throw her to the floor. “Let me know if you need anything.” He headed off and stopped in his tracks. Before she could tease him, he was gone.
Tensions had cooled enough the next morning for Castiel to approach Sam down in the archives. He knew that the younger of the Winchester brothers would be there just has he had been since they lost Dean, looking to see if any of the past Men of Letters had been successful in researching or devising a way to track an archangel and lived to tell the tale. The likelihood was slim since the only archangel who had been on earth for great lengths of time until very recently was Gabriel, but they both had thought that it was worth a try.
Sam must have been deep in concentration for he flinched when Castiel greeted him with a customary “Good morning.”
“Oh.” He looked over his shoulder, then went back to rummaging through the box he had laid out on one of the tables against the wall. “Hey, Cas.”
Castiel might as well just be blunt about the reason he was here. “Sam, I want to talk about yesterday.”
That made Sam turn around in his seat. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“I think you know already.” Castiel pulled up a chair and sat near his friend. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened to her?”
Sam sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Look, man. I wanted to, I really did. But with everything that was going on—you disappearing on us, the trials, and then the angels…no time ever felt like the right time. And then when we tracked you down when you were human and you were calling yourself Clarence…I don’t know. Guess I thought you knew. I know that’s not an excuse, and I should have said something. But I’m really sorry, Cas.”
Even Castiel knew that the look on his face was transparently sincere. “It’s all right, Sam. I’ve already forgiven you. I just needed to know why.” Then he patted Sam’s hand and got up to fetch another box. “Let’s look together.”
Meg was pressed as close to the wall as her chair would allow, listening to Cas talking with Sam. The angel’s capacity for forgiveness would never stop blowing her mind. In her experience angels were usually the complete opposite of forgiving—ironically wrathful.
The memory made her rub her abdomen.
“Hello.” The voice was a whisper, but she still recognized it.
“Hey, Jack,” she whispered back, and then she held a finger over her lips. He appeared to understand what it meant, for he gestured for her to follow him back down the hall.
She cast a glance toward the archive room and made a mental note to give Sam a little more shit later.
As she rolled after Jack, he slowed down to allow her to catch up. She would have thought he was pandering to her, but apparently he really just wanted to talk. “Castiel says that you aren’t that bad. And he says that you’re here to help find Dean. Is that true?”
“Do you think Cas would lie to you about that?” she asked. “Guy’s practically your dad.”
“My biological father lied to me,” Jack said simply, and Meg actually felt a pang of sympathy.
“Yeah, that’ll do it,” she muttered. “But yeah, I really am here to help. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last either. Which will may or may not be the death of me. Again.”
“Will you show me how to help?” His big, blue eyes were imploring and entirely too puppy-like for her to ignore.
“Uh…” Was she really being asked to mentor a kid? She didn’t know the first thing about interacting with kids. Even if this one did look like a grown man. Then again, it might help her secure a place here, and she’d be lying even to herself if she said that it wouldn’t be kind of nice to chat with someone who was just as new to everything that was going on as she was. “Sure. Just tell me what you need and I’ll do my best. My age comes with tons of knowledge that up till now has been kind of useless. Maybe it can be useful again.” She inclined her head toward the short set of steps that led to the kitchen. “Let’s go grab some grub first, ‘kay?”
As they went off together, Meg thought that she wouldn’t be so out of place here after all.
The next few days were business as it had gone before, just with Meg added to the equation. Castiel felt a little vindicated, too, for she was proving to be just as useful as he had promised Sam that she would be. After digging through the archives she had found a spell that she could use to overhear demonic frequencies in much the same way that angel radio worked. Her clear delight over it wasn’t something that the angel would easily or willingly forget about. How could it be that a creature made for the darkness could glow with happiness like that?
Still, despite the warmth that she sparked in him he couldn’t make himself bring it up to her. After all they had only just been reunited for a few days. What if things had changed between them and he was just clueless as usual? Or what if she simply changed her mind about him? He had made so many mistakes. Would she still want him after all of that?
None of that was on his mind as they sat at the war table. This time they weren’t strategizing or regrouping after a long day of research. Instead they were all having dinner—him, Meg, Jack, and Sam. Even Mary and Bobby were there. The latter two still didn’t trust Meg fully, Castiel knew, but they were willing to tolerate her at least while Dean was gone, and for that he was grateful.
They were making idle chitchat about the happenings of the day. Of course some of this did include the research, but it also included simpler things like a new movie that Jack had watched (X-Men, he reminded them all whenever he mentioned it) and something funny that Sam saw in town. Castiel filed away the specifics but didn’t digest them, as he was too preoccupied with gazing at Meg, then looking away when she was near noticing.
Apparently it was a game that she liked, for he thought he saw her lips tug upward slightly out of the corner of his eye. The hand he soon felt on his thigh only confirmed it. And while he should have perhaps moved away, he merely placed his hand over hers to keep it there. It was bold of him, true. But she wasn’t pulling away either.
There was a lull in the conversation when abruptly Jack asked, “Meg, why are you in a wheelchair?”
It was an innocent enough question, but Castiel and Sam both flinched. Mary and Bobby shot Jack looks that Castiel had come to learn meant to retract the query. The last thing they needed was a potential internal conflict.
But nothing happened. Meg did look a little irked if the quirk of her eyebrow was anything to go by, but she just cleared her throat and set her gaze on the boy.
“A little while back, I got stabbed in the gut with an angel blade,” she said. “It sent me all the way to the Empty. Then a few months ago, somebody—” She shot a quick glance toward Castiel. “—woke up and disturbed the dragon’s slumber. Not saying it was an actual dragon, but when the thing is probably freaky enough to give Lovecraft a b—some excitement, I think it fits.”
Castiel hid a smile at her self-censorship.
“Anyway, pretty soon that woke me up, too. Kind of like I was sleeping in the floor and someone stepped on my head. I didn’t even get a chance to ask any questions. I just got spit out back here.” She shrugged. “The pig sticker left its mark on my true form, though, and now here I am.”
“Oh.” Jack was silent for a moment, but then his face lit up. “Like Professor X.”
Meg snickered, but she didn’t deny it. “Yeah. Like Professor X.”
After that dinner went on as it had the last few nights. The momentary excitement was all but forgotten. For Castiel, however, it lingered in the back of his mind even after Meg excused herself for the night.
Once she was gone, Jack had yet another arguably invasive question. “Castiel, is Meg your girlfriend?”
Sam almost choked on his water.
Mary and Bobby both exchanged uncomfortable glances, and then Mary was rushing to Sam to make sure he didn’t asphyxiate.
Castiel, for his part, could only blink and refrain from making eye contact. If he could just manage that, then he wouldn’t crack under the pressure of the question.
After all, how was he supposed to say no and not be so transparent about his regret?
“Why would you think that?” he responded at long last, his eyes still darting about the table.
Jack didn’t pick up on the blatant attempt at misdirection. “Because you care about her a lot, and she makes you smile. I’ve never seen you smile so much. I haven’t even seen you so happy at all in a really long time.” Of course, given that he was only about a year old any amount of time was going to feel like an eternity. Castiel recollected reading about that perception in one of the many parenting books he had devoured before Jack’s birth. “And you were holding her hand again under the table just now.”
Castiel supposed that it was just his luck that his whim wouldn’t go unnoticed. “Well, Jack…no. I’m sorry. She isn’t my girlfriend.”
“She should be,” Jack said as if it were the easiest thing in the world, like he could declare it and make it so.
Once that bit of awkwardness had passed the dinner party dissolved one by one. Castiel was the last to leave (and Sam the second to last, patting him on the shoulder as he retired to his room), if only because he had so much on his mind now. First there was the information that Meg had divulged, and now…this.
It was foolish. He couldn’t just go to Meg’s room and ask her if she wanted to be his girlfriend now, not when he wasn’t even sure of her true feelings and certainly not when there was so much going on.
Then again, maybe that was a reason that he should. A conversation was dredged up in his mind, rose-tinted and sentimental. If they survived this…
She hadn’t survived then. What if neither of them survived now? What if they were just wasting time they had already lost far too much of?
He should bring her something. Humans did that sometimes when they were trying to woo someone.
Was that what he wanted to do? Woo Meg?
His feet carried him to the kitchen, and he searched through the liquor. Meg preferred whiskey. She might appreciate it if he brought her some, and then they could actually sit together and talk some more. There was still so much that he wanted to know, and even more that he wanted to say.
Once he had found the whiskey he held it securely in both hands all the way down into the sleeping quarters until he reached Meg’s door. He raised one fist to knock, but then her voice came from within.
“Come on in, Clarence. I know it’s you.”
Shortly after there was the sound of something whizzing through the air and hitting the wall. Curious now, Castiel opened the door to find Meg sitting on the bed, a knife wedged in the thick wall. The wheelchair was folded up and tucked between the bed and the nightstand. She was drawing the dagger back with her mind and preparing to throw it again when she cast a glance toward him and saw the whiskey.
“Are we gonna have a party?” she asked on a low chuckle. It made the corner of his mouth twitch.
“If you want to have a party.”
“Well then…” She threw the knife one more time and patted the spot next to her. “Come on. Let’s party.”
He didn’t have to be told twice. He went over to the bed at once and sat beside her, then handed her the whiskey. “Here. You should get the first drink.”
She eyed the bottle, then him. For a second he thought he saw a hint of her old wickedness in her eye, but she took the alcohol and started working it open so he couldn’t be positive on that. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Her cunning was part of what interested him in the first place.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to impress me.” The cap twisted off with a pop and she took a long swig directly from the nozzle. He tried not to watch the movement of her throat too intently.
“I just thought it would be nice for us to talk,” he said. “Without the others around. Who knows how many more chances we’ll get for that, right?”
Her brow furrowed, and then she rolled her eyes, passing the bottle back to him. “You always were such a fatalist.”
He took the bottle without question. “Given the state of the world, I think I’m entitled.” He decided to follow her lead and drink right from the bottle, too. The burn wasn’t new to him anymore, so he didn’t grimace even a little. “Anyway, alcohol is usually a good facilitator of conversation. Or so I hear.”
“Well wherever you heard that, it wasn’t wrong.” She held out her hand. “Gimme.”
It wasn’t quite the picture of romance that Castiel had seen in movies and television. But passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth felt right enough for them, and so far it was working out okay.
“So, this finding Dean thing.” Meg smacked her lips after lowering the bottle again. Oddly mesmerizing, that. “You really think you’ll be able to get Michael out of his meatsuit once you track him down?”
“I’m not sure,” Castiel admitted. “But we owe it to Dean to try. He’s gotten me out of more stupid situations than he perhaps rightfully should have.” Though whether that was out of a true bond of friendship or just a moral obligation was still unclear to him.
“And if you do get Deano back.” She handed the whiskey over to him. “You think he’s gonna be okay with keeping me around? Not that I care what he thinks, but I like to think I know better than to cross him when he’s having a temper tantrum.”
He didn’t offer a reply at first. What would he do if they got Dean back and he was unhappy with Meg’s return and the alliance with her? What would he do if his friend tried to kick the being he had come to care so much for out of the one place her safety was all but guaranteed?
“You know, Meg…” He placed the bottle on the floor and shifted where he sat so he could look directly into her eyes. “I wouldn’t give a damn what Dean thinks, either. I would fight for your right to stay here.”
She blinked, and her lips gradually curved upward into a smile. “And they say chivalry is dead,” she purred. Her hand fell on top of his. Only when he glanced down did he notice that she was scooting closer to him.
“I didn’t think chivalry was something you were interested in,” he admitted. Clearly she had caught onto what he was trying to do, even when he hadn’t fully worked out just what that was. “That’s part of why I brought the alcohol. I know you do like that.”
“I do.” She nodded. She was incredibly close now, and he was having a hard time not staring at her lips. “And I know that you’ve been pussyfooting around this. Don’t even try to deny it. You’re a horrible liar anyway.”
He would have protested, but she would have just called him out on it. “You’re right. I am. But I don’t think that I would want to lie to you, anyway.”
While she gazed at him from under her lashes, Castiel could see her true form under her skin, too. He had never wanted to connect with that more than he did now. “You always this good at taking a girl by surprise?”
There was a double meaning there, he was sure of it. “Perhaps.”
“Did you plan on showing me or am I gonna have to guess?” She was leaning in now, and doubt suddenly struck him. What if this was the wrong time? Or what if he just ended up disappointing her?
“Meg…” He drew away, turning his head. Logically he should get up now, make up some explanation as to why he couldn’t do this right now. But he couldn’t think of anything sufficient.
She seemed to sense that. Her hand found his face and turned it around, gripping his chin gently. It startled him, the softness of her expression juxtaposed with the fire in her eyes. “Clarence. Do you remember what I said five years ago in that lady’s house? If we survive this…”
“You were going to order pizza and we were going to move furniture around,” he said. “I remember.”
“Yeah. That was dumb. We shouldn’t have waited.” Her mouth was barely an inch from his, and he couldn’t keep his eyes from fluttering shut. “So don’t keep me waiting now.”
Her kiss was surprisingly gentle, and it set his chest alight. It called to the forefront everything he felt for her, and even more so the fact that since the last time they’d done this he could now give it a name. Her shadows pushed against his celestial power and his own essence pushed back in response, but there was no sense of threat. It was only natural give-and-take like the exchange of gravity between the tides and the moon at midnight. She was everything, darkness and light, sharp edges and smooth surfaces, a mess of contradictions wrapped in a single package. He wouldn’t have had her any other way.
His arms wrapped around her, but he was still cautious. Not because of her new reality, but just because he was so used to ruining everything that he touched. He didn’t want her to be a casualty of the destruction that he couldn’t fight.
An eternity and a fleeting moment later, she pulled away, but only a tiny bit. A smile danced across her features. “Why, Clarence. It’s almost like you think you’re gonna break me.”
“I don’t want to,” he told her. “Break you, I mean.”
“We might be in a pickle then,” she quipped. Her lips trailed across his jaw until they found his ear, leaving a smoldering trail in their wake that sent a shiver up and down his spine. Her next words were a whisper breathed as her teeth caught his earlobe. “Because I definitely want you to.”
Well, he couldn’t argue with that logic, especially not when his pants were growing increasingly tight. It was now or possibly never, he reminded himself, and how was he supposed to deny her something she so clearly wanted?
“Okay.” He took another shuddering breath. There was one more thing he had to tell her first, bubbling on the tip of his tongue and if he didn’t say it now, it would burst out of its own accord. “Meg, I…”
Her mouth was on his again in another heated kiss, and that was all it took for him to fall into her.
Meg had never been one for cuddling after sex, but Castiel insisted. And when he fixed her with those big, blue eyes while she was still coming down from several highs, how was she supposed to resist?
Besides, it actually felt…nice. Being held by someone who obviously cared so much about her wasn’t something that she had ever anticipated would happen in either of her lifetimes. But here he was, doing it just because he wanted to. In his words, it was because he didn’t want to let her go yet. The old her would have mocked him for being so sentimental, but after she had bared so much to him—physically and otherwise—she couldn’t judge him for it. Not really. And she couldn’t stand so much as the thought of his face going from so ecstatic to so sad, and she knew just how sad he was capable of looking at the slightest things.
As it was, she was curled against his bare chest while he drew patterns across her back. They hadn’t bothered to pull the covers up, letting the air cool the sweat from their bodies. She didn’t want anything to obstruct her perfect view, anyway.
He was more muscular than she would have thought. Even though his trench coat was better-fitting now, she had still underestimated him in that area. As a matter of fact, everything had been better than she could have dreamed. Not due to any particular skill of his, but just because it was him. The thought frightened her a little, so she redirected her focus to the tattoo on his side. She hadn’t been able to keep herself from licking it, but she still didn’t have the story about it, either. She’d have to remedy that in the future.
“You’re quiet.” His voice was even rougher, and she knew she would remember the sound of it for the rest of forever. “What are you thinking about?”
“Hmm, wouldn’t you like to know?” She propped herself up on his chest, her eyes zeroing in on his lips as she leaned down to give them a languorous kiss. It was just as intoxicatingly, dangerously clean as it had been that first time, and she would never stop going back for more.
He kissed her back for a moment, then broke away to keep talking. “Actually yes, I would like to know.”
Her mouth flattened into a line. “You’re too curious for your own good, you know that?”
Somehow he managed to tilt his head even though it lay on the pillow, making that puppy dog face she had so feared just moments before. “I thought you liked that about me.”
“True,” she conceded. Then she sighed and rested her face on his chest again. “I was just thinking about that kinda good feeling and how it still sucks. But I think I’m learning to manage it.”
“Oh.” She could practically hear him still smiling. He had barely stopped in the last five minutes. How was his face not hurting? “You know, I think I could learn to manage your assessment of me as kind of bad, too, as long as you’re here.”
She groaned. “Come on, don’t get sappy on me.”
“Is there something else you would like for me to get on you?”
She had to raise up and stare at him again at that. Did he really just…? “You’ve gotten filthy, you know that?” Pride swelled in her bosom.
He only shrugged as well as he could.
She saw his silence as an opportunity. “So, I’ve got a question for you. Where the hell did you learn all that?”
He opened his mouth to answer, and then he closed it again, seemingly to think about it a little more. “I did have an experience, once. But most of what I know I learned from reading. Not that I was doing any specific research prior to this or that I was expecting…” He gestured to her and around them. Books had fallen off the single shelf near the bed and various wall hangings had crashed to the floor, leaving little doubt as to what had transpired here. If Meg had it her way, she would leave it like that. “But like you said, I am too curious for my own good.”
Part of her wanted to know more about this experience that he referenced, but she knew better than anyone that if he were ready to talk about it then he would have elaborated already. So she just nodded her acceptance. “’Kay. You go.”
He paused again to think, his fingers making their way into her long, blonde locks. She had been tempted to dye it once she first came back to earth, but then she decided to own it. She wasn’t going to let her time held captive by Crowley make decisions for her. “Your hair is very soft,” he murmured. His eyes met hers, and that was what kept her from lying in answer to his real question. “Why didn’t you tell me about what happened when you came back?”
She knew he was talking about the chair, and now it was her turn to shrug. Secretly she was relieved that he didn’t ask her about her lack of surprise regarding his knowledge of driving again. How was she supposed to explain that she had tracked and followed him to that store without damaging her reputation? “You never asked. I was pretty relieved about that, too, not gonna lie. I was pretty sick of strangers looking at me like…” She shook her head. “Like they pitied me. They didn’t even know who I was, but oh, I was on wheels and wasn’t that sad? I was glad not to get that from you.”
“Yes, well. I do know you and I know that what other people see as limitations, you see as opportunity.” His smile had softened. “I like that about you.”
Oh, here he went with the gooeyness again. “You like everything about me, sugar.” Her hand drifted down his body, tracing the line of his hipbone and wandering inward.
“This is true.” He gasped then, and Meg grinned. Something about that almost human reaction made her think that she liked everything about him, too. He was fallen, flawed, some would say broken. She wouldn’t have wanted him any other way, not anymore. He understood her too well.
“I have one more question for you…” Reveling in just how easily his body responded to her, she shifted atop him and flashed him a grin. “Am I your girlfriend, Clarence?”
He froze and narrowed his eyes at her. “You heard?”
“Oh, yeah. Every word.” She nipped at his lips, and he arched to try and reach her. “So?”
All at once, he threw his weight and pinned her underneath him. She knew her astonishment was written all over her face, but she didn’t care.
“I think that’s something we should decide together,” he murmured. With that his mouth found hers again, and she melted into him.
Oh, yeah. She could get used to this.