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Dean turned the knob to his door with a great sigh of relief. His feet felt as though they were about to fall from his body, and his lips might as well have paid their rent for the month and left him forever. His hair was damp with drops of the drizzling rain outside, but he was finally, finally home. Taking an eight hour shift that started at nine p.m. and ended at five in the morning was the worst idea he’s ever had. Especially since he worked at a fair.
Standing in a kissing booth and kissing people for eight hours didn’t seem like such a bad idea at first. He was young and single and bisexual, and most people at an all-night-long fair were just like him. The line for the kissing booth was just a filtered version of the crowd that only involved single, desperate people – just like him. So for one night, he agreed to take on the job of making out with dozens of strangers and forgetting completely about student loans and rent and home and Cas. Kissing strangers turned out to be a magnificent cure for being unable to stop thinking about your crush.
That worked for about an hour. After that, it started being tedious. And kind of gross.
Either way, taking off his shoes and rinsing his mouth about twenty times felt like heaven. He tiptoed around the sharp edges of furniture and squinted in the dark, not wanting to wake his flatmate, as he went to grab a sandwich from the fridge and sat down on the couch to massage his feet.
Really, it wasn’t weird that he didn’t turn on any lights when he came back from work late at nights and didn’t want to wake Cas up. Or that he laughed at all of Cas’ jokes even though everyone else thought they weren’t funny. No one ever seemed to look at him weird when he ordered an extra coffee for Cas in the morning, but in his head, nothing screamed super duper in fucking gay love than spelling out Cas’ name for the Starbucks barista.
Not that he was lying to himself. He’s had a huge crush on that little nerdy dude since about the third day of them moving in together. He just hoped, quite desperately, that it wasn’t showing too much. And that his abs were showing. And that he didn’t look like an asshole walking around the house with no shirt all the time. Cas hated when he said that sort of thing, but he didn’t have much to show for his wits.
Not that Cas would care. Cas didn’t want anything to do with him, he was positive. Cas probably told him he was smart just so he wouldn’t feel bad about himself – because Cas was… something else. How could anyone not feel bad about themselves when Cas was around, was a mystery to him.
Having finished his sandwich and his half hearted massage, he brushed his teeth and headed towards his room. He would fall asleep, not thinking about Cas, Cas’ smile when he saw Dean at the fair tonight, or Cas’ eyes when the light hit them in the morning when he studied for his online classes by their dining table.
He entered his room and closed the door quietly, turning on the glossy blue desk lamp on his nightstand, to find someone sleeping in his bed.
His first instinct was to hit the pile of blanket and human and shuffle backwards with his arms raised protectively in front of him, but as he examined it, he discovered an arm dangling from the bed and ending in a curled up palm that rested against the floor.
He recognized the arm.
“Cas?” He asked, his voice louder than intended. But the pile did not stir. He got closer and poked it, hard enough to make Cas sway and roll over, exposing a perfect sleeping angel face, a bare chest and no awareness to Dean whatsoever.
Dean looked around him, disoriented – had he stepped into the wrong room by accident? But it was his blue lamp on the nightstand, it was his puppy-print socks on the floor and these were his philosophy textbooks thrown everywhere around. Cas was lying in his bed, sleeping undisturbed and at least half naked. He was speechless. It occurred to him he should slap himself to make sure this wasn’t a dream. A weird daydream gone all-kinds-of-right that got itself a nice seat in his subconscious.
“Cas?” He said again, lost as to what he should do next. He didn’t know what the etiquettes of a “my crush fell asleep in my bed” situation were. Does he leave him there and sleep on the couch? Does he wake him up? Does he… squeeze in?
It was almost six in the morning, and he was too tired to think clearly. He kneeled down before the bed and shook Cas.
“Hey. Wake up, nerd. C’mon. What’s gotten into you?” His words came out too soft, the position somehow familiar. He was reliving a scene out of his dreams.
He wanted to slap himself on the forehead. He was such a fucking sappy weirdo.
He cleared his throat. “Cas. Hey. Why the fuck are you in my bed?” He couldn’t make his voice sound harsher. He deemed it exhaustion and gave up on trying to sound like a dude.
Cas stirred in the bed and opened his eyes to a slit. He grumbled something that might have been Dean.
“Why are you in my room?” Dean repeated. Cas raised a sluggish hand to cover his eyes from the dim light and grumbled, “what time is it? I fell asleep.” He closed his eyes and scratched at his face. “I waited for you, but you wer’nt here…” His hand slipped and fell straight onto his face. Dean’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Are you… drunk?” He asked, slowly and in utter confusion, because Cas didn’t get drunk. Cas drank, but he didn’t get drunk. This was the first time in four years Dean has seen him in a state fuzzier than slightly sleepy.
“I waited for you,” Cas repeated, waving his hand around vaguely.
“At the fair?” If he was still so very drunk, it must mean he’s gone to bed fairly recently. He coughed, and his breath smelled of liquor. “Cas, it’s six in the damned morning. Could you move to your bed so I can get some sleep?” Dean pled.
“Oh,” Cas said, taking in a breath. He rolled over, practically yeeting himself at the wall, and grabbed Dean’s wrist.
“We can fit together.”
Dean stared at him disbelievingly. If this didn’t feel like a freaky dream designed to torture him before…
“There’s no room,” he blurted out, finding this as the only argument in his head he could muster as to why he couldn’t join into bed with another man he’s never even kissed.
“There is if you squeeze in,” Cas said, tugging at his wrist. God, this was something special. He wondered who was laughing harder right now in their fortified temples – God, or the devil.
“Cas, I’m not getting into bed with you,” he said through clenched teeth. Cas’ clouded eyes cleared for a moment, though his pulling at Dean’s wrist remained insistent.
“I’got s’mthing to tell you,” he said. Dean let out a slow, heavy breath.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, buddy.” No matter what that was, it couldn’t do any of them good coming out of a drunk man’s mouth at six in the morning.
“S’mthing I’ve been meaning to… why didn’t I tell you, Dean?” His lids fell shut and opened back again.
“Tell me what?” Dean said, his throat dry as hay straws. This was bad. This was really bad.
“I just couldn’t tell you because you were so beautiful and smart and perfect that I… that I…”
Dean tried to swallow, but his whole mouth was dry.
“So perfect that I…” Cas looked at him, his eyes lucid as sapphires. “…That I lost my words.”
“Cas, you’re drunk talkin’,” Dean choked out.
“Nah,” Cas blurted in response. “Listen,” he said. He let go of Dean’s hand and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him closer. “I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“The words that I lost. I need to tell you them.” His grip was tighter on Dean’s shoulder than Dean imagined a drunken, half asleep guy could manage. “The fair.”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to stand in line.”
“Yeah?”
“But I di’nt have a dollar.”
This was too much. It was just more than Dean could handle. He put a hand to his mouth, but it didn’t help much. What started as a snort became a full-on rumbling laughter, while Cas watched and squinted, still gripping his shoulder.
“You didn’t have a dollar,” Dean repeated, and his own words elicited another wave of laughter. His eyes teared up. This was hysterical. All of this – Cas getting drunk, Cas thinking he was perfect, Cas wanting to stand in line for the kissing booth – while Dean is on the other end of it – it was all absurd. But the dollar thing was just hysterical. And maybe it had to do with his lost hours of sleep, but he couldn’t stop laughing.
Cas nodded in confusion. “Yeah,” he mumbled.
“Cas, you don’t need a dollar to kiss me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. You really don’t.”
Cas stared at him for a moment, then dropped his head on the pillow. “Y’don’t make any sense today.”
Dean wiped the edges of his eyes of tears and gently removed Cas’ hand from his shoulder, resting it on the bed. He’d made up his mind to sleep on the couch, or in Cas’ bed, or any place that didn’t mean being squeezed against Cas’ warm body for hours – but when he tried to move, he found that his limbs didn’t cooperate. He was so tired he reckoned he could fall asleep right there, sat against the side of his bed. And the more he thought about it, the more logical the idea seemed.
“Hey, Cas?” He said, resting his head on the edge of the pillow. He could already feel his brain getting fuzzy with webs of sleep.
“Mhm?”
Dean forced his eyes to open, to look at him. He seemed even more on his way into sleep than Dean was.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Mhm.”
Dean hesitated. “Have you wanted to kiss me just tonight?” He said, quietly. Cas answered after a moment or two.
“Yeah, just tonight.”
Dean’s chest felt like he was being suffocated, but he was almost too tired to care. He closed his eyes and started drifting into sleep. Beside him, he heard Cas mumbling numbers. Counting.
“Tonight,” he repeated, “for the last… six hundred nights?”
The best Dean could manage was an alleviated huff. “God. I love you,” he mumbled, and felt a jolt going through him as he realized what he was saying, but Cas didn’t seem to mind him.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. As Dean fell asleep, he felt Cas’ fingers reach out and rest on his shoulder, just under his neck.
He had no idea what he would say to Cas in the morning, or whether Cas would remember any of this, but he was confident more than ever that they would figure something out.
Together.