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They’re halfway through the third game of Scrabble before Sam rage-quits and goes to bed—at least, that’s the way Dean sees it, given the kid’s always been a poor loser and Cas is like the whiz of all whizzes at word games.
“No, seriously, I’m tired, Dean,” Sam insists with droopy eyes as he gets up from the table. “I’m not being a pissbaby about Scrabble.”
“You’re just mad you didn’t team up with heaven’s walking dictionary,” Dean says with a grin in Cas’ direction, which causes Charlie to laugh and protest, “Hey, I’m fucking superb at Scrabble.”
“And for the record,” Sam says, throwing the words flatly over his shoulder as he leaves the kitchen, “‘funnest’ isn’t a real world.”
“Killjoy,” Dean mutters, and starts to sweep the letter tiles off the board.
Charlie, sitting on her knees, taps pink nails against the table-top, her eyes flickering back and forth between Dean and Cas before she says, in a very neutral tone of voice, “You know, I think I’ll go to bed too. I’m totally wiped.”
“Okay,” Dean says in surprise as Charlie stands up from the table and stretches pale arms above her head, near-theatrically. “G'night, I guess. You know where the spare room is.”
“Yup,” Charlie says, ruffling Cas’ hair once before she heads for the hallway, leaving Dean and Cas to gaze at each other over a table of hollow beer-bottles and an empty Scrabble board.
“Guess it’s just us then,” Dean says.
Cas nods with a small curve of his mouth and drops his eyes. Dean picks at the dewey label of his beer bottle with a thumbnail until it peels, suddenly lost for what to say. He’s got a library’s worth of stacked words building in his chest, of things he could easily say to Cas now that he’s got him alone, but he can’t find the right ones, or the ones that would make a difference.
“I’m.” He slides his hand across the table, toward Cas’ wrist, the kitchen’s fluorescent light glancing off the reflective face of his wristwatch. His hand stalls and retreats. His knuckles drum on the table twice. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Yes,” Cas agrees softly, looking up at Dean through his eyelashes, and it’s weird seeing Cas without the trenchcoat, almost like seeing him in formal pajamas or something.
Dean nods once and looks down at the table-top, feeling the tips of his ears flare up. “Are you going to….uh, y'know, stay?”
Cas tilts his chin in consideration, eyes narrowed. “I think I’ll stay,” he says, seeming to pick his way through words like you would through a bramble-patch. “If….that’s allowed.”
“Yeah,” Dean says too quickly, then clears his throat and says, much more coolly, “I mean, yeah, it’s fine. Guess you don’t need to sleep now that you’re all juiced up again, huh?”
“I don’t have to sleep,” Cas says thoughtfully. “But I can still…” He trails off, casting his eyes down again quickly and fixating with sharp precision on a grain pattern in the table-wood.
Dean waits with his breath held for Cas to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t.
“I can stay out on the couch,” Cas offers instead, almost awkwardly.
“Okay,” Dean says, nodding. “Okay. Yeah. You could do that.”
Cas stares at him a moment more before he stands up slowly, stiffly from the table. “So.”
“So,” Dean agrees, mustering up a genuine-feeling smile that somehow still manages to make his chest ache. He feels like that a lot these days, like someone’s filled him up with glass shards that are close to bleeding out.
Cas almost rams a hip into the table but stumbles back last minute—he’d been staring at Dean, and Dean ducks his head to hide a quick, soft grin.
“I’ll just…go,” Cas says quietly, heading toward the kitchen exit, and maybe it’s the alcohol, or something braver and stupider that gets redder the closer he gets to going overboard, but Dean says, almost involuntarily, “Wait.”
Cas hesitates, one foot out the door, one foot still in the kitchen. Almost poetic, Dean thinks.
“Wait,” Dean hears himself say again, and Cas’ brow puckers quizzically and all Dean can think to himself is that his rope’s too short to let Cas sleep on the couch. There’s only so much sand in his hourglass, and it’s too much to handle breathing by himself, to sleep in a bed unaccompanied with cold sheets on either side of him.
Dean clears his throat again and wets his lips, refocusing keenly on the beer bottle. He peels the curling label all the way off. “You should stay in a bed.”
Cas frowns, completely missing the point. “I just said I don’t need to sleep.”
“Not to sleep,” Dean says, scratching at the back of his neck and getting more flustered by the second. Leave it to damn Cas to completely miss innuendo when it actually matters.
“What would I do in a bed,” Cas says, with patient exasperation, “if it weren’t to sleep, Dean?”
And hey, there are a few answers to that that Dean could snakily rattle off—he could pass this whole thing off as a giant joke, and say, Hey, never mind, see you in the morning, man. I’ll make breakfast.
But he doesn’t. He can hear the rush of the pulse pounding in his ears, his numbered pulse with his finite heart.
“Just.” Dean’s breath decompresses out of him in one giant rush, leaving him deflated, and he rubs the heel of his palm against his eyes. “Just forget it, man.”
Cas has gone soft standing in the doorway, staring at Dean with open concern, maybe a shadow of hope, like he’s finally catching on but too afraid to voice it out loud. “Dean?”
“It’s fine. I’ll see you in the morning, Cas.”
Dean doesn’t look up, but he hears the quiet drift of Cas’ footsteps returning to the table, then silence. Dean peeks up, and Cas is gazing at him, his mouth relaxed into a soft line, his eyes just as gentle.
“Is it….nightmares?” Cas asks. “I can stay with you, if it’s nightmares. My grace can keep them at bay.”
“Yeah,” Dean says quickly, relieved. “It’s the nightmares. I feel bad asking, man, but if you could….you know, stand guard while….”
“Of course, Dean,” Cas says, so sincerely, so firmly that Dean’s heart skips a ridiculous beat.
“Cool,” Dean says, standing from the table with a loud, cringeworthy scrape of the chair legs against the tile floor. “We can just.”
Cas waits again, following Dean’s lead, and Dean looks at him helplessly, completely flummoxed.
“Your room?” Cas suggests, and Dean nods.
“Yeah,” Dean says, then much more lamely, “I’m beat.”
Cas leaves his coat draped over the back of the kitchen chair and follows Dean down the hallway, shutting Dean’s door behind them when they get into the room.
“I can just sit in the chair,” Cas says diplomatically as he sheds his suit-jacket, flipping his striped tie askew. “I know it makes you uncomfortable when—”
“Can we,” Dean says, just blurts out the prelude to a question before the thought’s even formed, and the words are left dangling in this horrible, expectant silence. Dean taps his fingers against his jean leg, and he closes his eyes. “Can we. Just not do this for one night.”
“Do what?” Cas says, looking completely lost.
“This thing where…where we pretend we don’t want to be with each other,” Dean says, his eyes focused on an ugly stain in the carpet, unable to meet Cas’ stare. “I mean, hell, I know I’m like, the poster-boy for keeping up an act, but I just…for one night, can we just…..”
Dean doesn’t know what he’s asking for and he has no fucking clue how to ask it. He can taste salt in the back of his throat, like an impending dry-sob, and he feels like he wants to melt into the floor and he almost opens his mouth to take it back, to shout “psych!” or something like it’d all been an awful joke with no punchline, but Cas just toes off his shoes and pads over to Dean in his socked feet and plants a hand on either shoulder.
“Dean,” he says. Dean chances a glance up and Cas’ eyes are this sea-blue in the lamplight, warm and soft and an answer to a question Dean’s not sure he knows how to ask. Cas’ thumbs begin to move in these rolling circles on his shoulders, and Dean lets out this hitched, shuddering sigh and drops his head.
“Please don’t make me say it,” Dean says to the floor. “Don’t make me ask.”
Cas just leans forward, so close that Dean can taste whatever the smell it is that Cas carries around in his clothes, like clean laundry or cheap soap or something. Cas just presses a gentle kiss to his temple, nothing more, but the pressure that’s been building up in Dean’s chest cracks completely through like a china vase.
He drops his forehead on Cas’ shoulder and Cas lets him, his hand moving up to cup the back of Dean’s neck, his fingers carding through the soft, short hairs there, sending goosebumps rippling up Dean’s back, and Dean's….well, trying not to lose it like a fucking child here with Cas basically cradling him like something out of the terrible romance movies Sam secretly loves.
“Bed,” Cas says, a soft but stern command, and his hand drops to intertwine with Dean’s fingers.
“Yeah,” Dean says in this cracked, casual voice, and gives a swift nod. “Okay.”
They settle onto the bed and Cas reaches across Dean to flick out the light, and Dean’s heart is still crashing loudly against his chest, so loudly he knows Cas can hear it with his new super-senses.
“But I’m big spoon,” Dean jokes in an attempt at levity, which is completely ruined when Cas chuckles and says, “Not a chance.” He takes Dean’s shoulders and gently rolls him over before pulling him against his chest, manhandling him as easily as one would a little kid.
“Dude,” Dean complains, swatting at Cas’ hand. “You’re a short-ass. I’m total big spoon material.”
“I don’t know where this conception of me being short comes from,” Cas says into the back of his neck, and the warmth of his breath tickles. “I’m the size of an adequate, average human man.”
Dean curls back further into Cas and Cas drapes an arm over his chest.
“You’re still a nerd,” Dean says a moment later, almost mutinously.
He can practically hear Cas smile. He’s 90% sure he dreams or hallucinates it when Cas says, a few moments later, quietly like he’s underwater, “Love you too.”
Dean thinks he drifts off then, practically cocooned by Cas’ heat-radiator-werewolf body heat, but he jolts awake at some point some odd hours later when Cas shifts against him.
“Don’t,” he says in a groggy, sleep-induced panic, and Cas goes very still at the realization that Dean’s awake. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Cas asks softly.
“Don’t leave,” Dean whispers, his head dropping back to the pillow in defeat.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cas says, tracing a fingerpad over the shell of Dean’s ear. “Go to sleep, Dean. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Promise,” Dean slurs out.
“Promise.”
Dean’s breath gusts out of him in a large sigh, and he dreams in blues and grays, not a trace of red.