Chapter Text
“Cas, babe, can you check and see if we have enough beer for everyone?” said Charlie as she flew round the living room setting to rights the usual confusion of laptops and sound gear with which the floor was littered. Napoleon, Cas remarked to himself as he observed her fluttering about, would not have approved of her: distinct lack of discipline about this bird, he’d have said and sent her off to be court-martialled. “Think I gotta do a supply run before the guys get here. We’re out of basically anything edible – and I bet, anything drinkable isn’t faring any better.”
“‘Guys,’ you say?” said he, absentmindedly, as he obeyed Charlie’s directive. “What guys? And why would they be getting here?”
“It’s Friday Night Gang Hang, dude,” came Charlie’s reply. “Did you forget?”
“No. No, it’s not that – think I just lost track of –”
– time, he finished internally, a sense of horror dawning on him.
Good God. How could he have forgotten? More importantly, how had it already been a week since – since that thing happened about which he was definitely not thinking? Refused to think about a certain someone with whom that thing he was definitely not think about had happened?
This particular social intermingling must be discouraged. Actively discouraged, or his life was kaput.
“Um – do – do we need to have a Gang Hang tonight?” he proposed diffidently. With Charlie, one always struck the submissive note at the outset; did wonders for achieving one’s goal. “I mean, we just had one last week, and the week before that as well, and the week before that, and it kind of feels like its snowballing, you know – and – and I’m afraid, if we’re not careful with the amount of time we spend with each other, we might get sick of it. I – I kind of already am. Sick of it.”
“What are you even talking about?” came Charlie’s somewhat harried answer. “With how busy everyone is these days, we barely talk to each other, let alone see anyone in person. I’m starving for human interaction and affection, babe.”
“I can give you human interaction and affection.”
“The freezer gives warmer hugs than you.”
“I can do it,” Cas insisted. “I’ve been learning how to bypass my default robot setting. How to be a kinder, more giving person.”
“Online?”
Cas narrowed his eyes at her, although she was too occupied with tidying up the room to quail beneath the heat of his glare.
“I just think hosting Gang Hang tonight is a bad idea. That’s all. No ulterior motives whatsoever.”
“Right. You’re sick of Gang Hangs. Of course.”
“Don’t you use that tone on me, Charlene Bradbury.”
Levelling a wicked smirk at him, Charlie straightened up and dusted off her jeans and t-shirt, the front of which declared, ‘if you can suck it, you can fuck it’. She walked up to Cas, took his hands in hers, and said, so earnestly it gave him backlash, “Of course you’re sick of social gatherings – look at you! My wilting flower. My fragmented floppy-disc. My Sodom and Gomorrah about to be dusted off the planet. You’re spewing sickness all over the room. It’s obviously got nothing to do with the fact that you had a pretty drunk – not to mention, pretty public – make out sesh with one Dean Winchester last Saturday at The Roadhouse, freaked the F out, and have been holing yourself up in your room for the better part of, hmm, six days or so. Am I right, or am I so right I’m basically the lovechild of a Republican and a prostitute?”
“Th- that’s not- you’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. In fact, you could not be less right than if you were literally waving your Antifa flag along with your ‘my vagina, my rights’ t-shirt.”
“Nice try, babe,” said Charlie, the heartless harlot, squeezing his fingers with all the love and sympathy she’d entertain for a sworn enemy. “Gang Hang’s happening. Tonight. Dean’s gunna be here. Tonight. You’re just gunna have to put on your big boy panties and deal with it like a big boy with panties. Tonight.”
“Charlie,” he tried again, letting the desperation and panic he was feeling to seep into his voice. “Please. I can’t.”
“Babe, it’s just Dean. Ignore how good he is at hitting a sphere with a cylinder, and he’s essentially an oversized golden retriever with daddy issues – threat level: non-existent.”
“Easy for you to say. You didn’t kiss him and upset the natural order.”
“So you made out with him – what’s the big deal? I mean, you were blitzed out of your wits. You’d have made out with a manatee if it had happened to cross your path that night, and I can assure you, there were worse options than Dean to stumble into. This self-flagellation is unnecessary. Makes you sound like a drama queen, and not the good kind.”
“I don’t think I was black-out drunk,” he mumbled – honestly, because he more or less remembered the lead-up to that catastrophe in eye-watering, headache-induing, ultra-HD detail. “Would make this so much easier if I had been.”
“Maybe you weren’t,” said Charlie. “But Dean was.”
“Oh. So, he – he doesn’t remember anything about that night? About the kiss?”
“Can’t say for sure,” said she, truthfully enough since both of them had spent most of last week indoors, getting in each other’s way and stepping on each other’s toes – literally, so that a dull, dusky and doleful evening was brightened by a toe-stepping war – with varying results.
There was a voice inside him, however, not unlike the one by which Eve had been lured into sin, that was hissing to him to point a finger at Charlie and holler, “Liar, liar, pants on fire”.
“Haven’t had the chance to talk to him about it yet,” she continued, blithely unaware of the serpent in her garden. “Busy and all that. See, this is what I mean. We’re so wrapped up in our own stuff, we’ve stopped shoving our noses into other people’s business. It’s wrong, Cas. It’s downright unethical. We must be butting into someone else’s life, or we won’t be able to live our own. That’s why Gang Hangs must not be postponed under any circumstances. Barring literal deaths.”
Rattled because he knew the course these things had the habit of adopting in books and movies – unending discomfort and embarrassment for all parties involved – Cas wrung his hands. “If Dean doesn’t remember anything, wouldn’t it be better if we just, like, leave it alone?” he pleaded. “I am absolutely one hundred percent thinking about him here: his psychological well-being, and not how it might make my life easier. I’m like a selfless Buddha, thinking only of lesser creatures.”
“Munchkin, even if he doesn’t remember, I’m sure someone has shown him the video of the kiss by now.”
“Video? What video?” Cas exclaimed in unholy dread. “There’s a video?”
“Of course, there’s a video, babe,” said Charlie in her most ‘are you from another planet, dude?’ voice, fishing for her phone in the black hole of her equipment. “You made out with a soon-to-be pro MLB player, and you did it in the most public way imaginable. You can’t be surprised you were livestreamed to hell and back. Trended number one on Campus socials all of Sunday – #wtf, #getit, #sluttingitup, #mlbstyle – and have been in the top ten for the rest of the week.” She shook her head at him, like he was a dog she found too cute for words. “You wouldn’t be this clueless about what goes on in your life if you just got Twitter. Or Insta. I wouldn’t recommend WhatsApp, though – been trying to get out of this group for, like, years. No die.”
“This just keeps getting worse and worse,” said Cas, sitting down and rubbing his temples against the throbbing pain.
“The video’s sweet,” said Charlie, handing him her phone and dropping on the couch by his side, her manner motherly. “And Dean’s a chill dude. Usually. He won’t make a fuss. I hope. Hasn’t even tweeted anything since, if it makes you feel any better. It likely won’t.”
“Quiet, simmering rage is the worst kind there is. You don’t know when it might explode. Or on whom.”
“Or. He knows saying anything pro or against the video might make not just his life, but yours, a lot more difficult, so he figures keeping quiet is the best way to deal with it.”
“Right. My comfort is his priority. That makes total sense.”
“Dude, you’re his friend too. He cares about you. He always brings those tea-cakes with him that literally everyone but you hates. And,” she added, slapping the back of her hand against his upper arm, “in case your diva panic made you forget, making out for that long – I’m talking eons here, darling – requires two people. Two very willing people, drunk or what-have-you. But enough of that. I know you won’t trust anything I say until you see the proof with your own eyes. Find the video yet? I’m sure your attitude will do a total one-eighty once you see how… hmm, what’s the word? – how romantic everything is.”
“Stop scaring me.”
Cas found the judas video without much hassle, not on Charlie’s Twitter, but on the university’s official page where it was pinned – like a personal fuck you to himself, he was certain – as the top post, with loves and comments and re-Tweets numbering in the hundred thousand.
It was safe to assume everyone from the menial staff to the POTUS to their grandmas had seen it.
Heart pounding, he clicked play, fearing how much more damnable it might have appeared from the outside.
And lo! there Dean was, obviously drunk out of his mind, flailing around in a manner which, if one was being very generous, could be called dancing. It was testament to how utterly sloshed he was. There was also singing of some sort going on, his gravelly voice unmistakable, and thrilling, even if the lyrics were unintelligible in the din of the bar on a college weekend. He was dressed in a threadbare denim and a black Zeppelin t-shirt, which was sweated all the way through in the video, so the dancing must have going on for a while. Curiously enough, however, he had a tie tied like a bandana around his forehead; anyone who knew Dean knew of his horror of ties. He also held in each of his hands a beer, one he was occasionally seen taking a swig out of, the other he seemed to be using as a makeshift microphone.
Even drunk, though, and making a fool of himself for everyone to see – always a sport for a good laugh, was Dean – he was still the handsomest man Cas had ever laid eyes on.
“Good God!” he blurted unwittingly. Then, recovering himself, continued, “Who’s recording him? And follow up, but not really germinal to my concerns, are they still alive?”
“You’re an animal,” sang Dean, suddenly loud and distinctly audible, “baby, it’s in your nature.”
“It’s Benny,” said Charlie, sidling closer to Cas. “That beautiful, opportunistic son of a Bayou whore sensed Heaven was about to press the shower button and started live-streaming the second Dean took the stage. Metaphorically speaking. Would you look at him!” she cooed as Dean struck a pose with the empty beer bottle: if he’d been on a stage, this would be the moment where fireworks started exploding behind him to highlight his impressive figure. “Aww! Doesn’t your heart just melt at this adorable little buffoon? He must be protected at all costs. So precious!”
Precious was correct, Cas mused in the dark, hidden corners of his brain: and sexy. There was something about Dean letting loose like that, sweaty and uninhibited, that was –
Not the point he’d been about to contend.
“This isn’t going to jeopardize his chances of playing Pro?” he asked Charlie, very politely, for there was no need to show excessive concern; she might get the wrong idea. “I thought there was a library’s worth of social dos and don’ts they had to commit to, in order to be allowed to play – with ‘no drunken shenanigans’ written at the top in bold ink and italicised.”
“This isn’t, like, drunk and disorderly, babe,” said Charlie, who’d wound and rewound Dean’s rockstar pose for the tenth time. In a calmer frame of mind – and alone – he’d have appreciated it with wild abandon. “He’s not shooting drugs or starting a brawl or messing around like that. This just a dude in college having a blast after a gruelling week of academia and sports. You can’t hold it against him. Sometimes a dude’s just gotta let his inner man-child out, you know? It’s what allows them to live; and it’s literally what college is about.” She glanced up at Cas, surveyed his pursed lips and went on: “For some people.”
“His choice of song leaves a lot to be desired.”
“It’s not the song’s lyrics that matter,” sniffed Charlie: “but how one sings ’em.”
“Such a short-sighted thing to say to a Literature major.”
Dean continued singing off-key in that divine voice of his and monkeying around in that parody of a dance, surrounded by raucous laughter and cheering: there was such unalloyed joy on his face, so carefree and light he looked, loved and admired by everyone, least of all him, that Cas had to take a moment to close his eyes and rinse the smile threatening to break out on his face.
And then he himself appeared in the video, entering with a tumbler of craft beer that was The Roadhouse’s specialty, his wide, blinking blue eyes glued to the floor as he navigated the crowd in a manner as comical as it was noticeably useless. His face was furrowed, and he was biting his lower lip, divided between walking steady and keeping his tumbler from disbursing; but had he the combined focus of a horde of Roman generals, he couldn’t have stopped himself from bumping into every little thing and every little person in the bar that night.
“Dude, you are so drunk,” said Charlie, snickering, “you’re actually rivalling Dean in the adorable buffoon department.”
“I’m not that drunk,” he retorted even as he watched himself make earnest apologies to everyone. “And I’m no more a buffoon, adorable or otherwise, than a buffoon is me. So, too, with Dean –”
“Shh! It’s about to happen. The magic moment.”
It happened in slow motion, all bass-heavy sound and colourful fury receding into silence most portentously – because whoever had posted the video, had the twisted inspiration to edited it also: as he passed Dean by – a stumble-apology slash drink-spilling in slow-motion was a funnier spectacle, if Charlie’s hiccupped braying was any indication – Dean’s singing trailed off and he just stared.
And stared.
Cas himself couldn’t have explained what Dean saw in that tilting drunk version of himself that arrested him so, but whatever he saw, maddened him like wine.
It was romantic, certainly: could not have been more so if Shakespeare himself had set the scene. A blind misanthrope, one would think, could have mistaken that expression on Dean’s face, which resembled that of someone clubbed over the head with the choicest of hammers, as having been lifted straight off the map of a chump of the Romeo order.
The video reverted to its natural speed, sound rushing back in: Dean’s dumbfounded expression started registering at its normal pace, and Cas – still blissfully ignorant of Dean’s ordeal as he toddled along making apologies – started toddling to his destination at a little quicker.
“Eh? Eh?” said Charlie, beaming broadly as she nudged him in the side. “What’d I say? Ro-man-tic. He looks like he just spotted an angel!”
And Cas, for all that his soul felt harrowed at such a blasphemous description, couldn’t agree more.
Dean soon came back to his senses, such senses as were still functional, what with all the alcohol in the beer and the air, and he gulped like one doomed. He gulped again, a heavy lump which it looked painful to swallow; then, very methodically setting the beer bottles on the table, he sprang into action and jumped after Cas, catching his hands by the wrist and tugging.
Cas, naturally, jerked. The tumbler spilled. From out of frame arose groans and cheers, followed by flabbergasted meeps of shock, because the force of the tug had caused a singularly graceless Cas to crash into a similarly tipsy Dean; and events, and awkward limbs, so arranged themselves – as an increasingly red-faced Cas saw it happen – that Cas found himself cozied up with Dean, his arms trapped between their bodies, gazing up into his green eyes with a sort of perplexed fascination.
“My God, it’s like watching porn,” observed a delicate Charlie. “For women, I mean. Not the ones for dudes where it’s just raw fucking and not tender lovemaking. This has the possibility of making a good load of panties very, very wet if only someone with true balls uploaded it to a porn-site.”
It was – not pornographic, good God, no, Cas thought with a blush; but it was definitely intimate in a way that left one feeling guilty for witnessing.
Cas in the video moved his hands slowly away from Dean’s chest, and would have moved himself entirely had not Dean’s tight grip on his wrists halted him.
“Dance with me, Cas,” Dean said – whispered soulfully, would have been nearer the mark.
“No, thank you,” murmured Cas, equally soulful and short of breath, blinking at him.
Cas silently patted himself on the back for having had enough wit about himself not to go dancing in public, no matter the inducement. And closeness with Dean was an inducement more powerful than anything he could conceivably imagine.
“I don’t – dance,” Cas in the video said, unable to raise his voice to a more audible pitch. “I don’t know how.”
He punctuated this assertion with a couple of hiccoughs.
“’S simple,” said Dean, drawing him closer again, his eyes a hypnotic mesmerism of colour. Cas was tempted to make a clever metaphor about snakes and charmers, but gave it up as too belaboured, and somewhat oblique to the current situation. “You just gotta keep your hands here –” he pulled Cas’s hands up against his own shoulders and clasped round his neck. “And I keep my hand here,” he said as he wove his hands around Cas’s waist.
With a gentle tug, he and Dean were flush from shoulder to knee.
Rarely, if ever, had Cas felt his ears burn with such ferocity – but rarely, if ever, had he felt more like a heroine whose secret correspondence had been exposed to the public eye.
He was trying, and failing, to will away the blush he could feel flooding his cheeks when things got juicier.
“Wise men say,” Dean started to sing, and even to sway a little in the semblance of a dance, dragging Cas this way and that along with him, and it was so different from the monkeyish gaffing and prancing of earlier, that Cas’s heart leapt into his throat. Romeo, claiming Juliet was as his sun within hours of meeting her for the first time, could not have been more sincere. “Only fools rush in…”
Dean sang the entire song, not a lyric amiss and not a tone discordant. And as he sang, he looked down at Cas like a man madly in love, as Cas peered up at him, also tellingly lovestruck.
Now Cas had no secrets with himself. Dean was – to quote Campus Weekly, that bastion of scholastic erudition and excellence – ‘quite a dish’. This lofty valuation usually underscored a snapshot of Dean mid-swing on the diamond, or Dean mid-smile during an interview, or Dean mid-going about his day. Dean would be ‘quite a dish’ were he dumpster-diving, or pitching an old lady down the stairs. That he was attracted to him was a fact Cas had long accepted in the privacy of his mind; and this attraction had only deepened further, the more he came to know and understand Dean as a person through the years.
And if fantasy – and Charlie, clearly, whose lovelorn croons at the video might have felled the sappiest of schmucks – could be indulged for a moment, drunk Dean felt the same.
And then it happened: the fateful kiss.
As the song came to a close, Dean leaned in and pressed his lips against Cas’s.
It began as just a peck, a sweet endpoint to the experience that was Dean’s singing – the natural outcome, one would innocently think, of something so steeped in cheesy sentimentality. Then Dean drew back a little, blinked stupidly, then kissed him again. He rubbed his nose against Cas’s, and they both let out a shudder of an exhale, and their foreheads pressed as they breathed each other in – and then they were kissing like they wanted to consume each other. One of Dean’s hands rose from Cas’s waist, moved up his back and fisted round the thicket of Cas’s thick black hair, the other hand kept his firm hold over his waist, pulling closer than was physically permissible or socially acceptable.
One could even hear the gasps and moans they out, and spy lewd slivers of tongues as they met and tangled.
If he had been blushful before, it was nothing compared to the insidious fire with which Cas now felt his cheeks burn. It was a wonder Charlie, goggle-eyed and breathless with her eyes glued to the video, hadn’t already been burnt to a nice crisp by the heat of his embarrassment.
The kiss went on for a long, long, long time. There were entire minutes to the show: toe-curling intervals in which entire galaxies might have birthed and perished. People screamed out cheers of delight and encouragement, intermingled with shouts of scandal. Lights flashed as even more of the audience started recording or snapping pictures –
A true smorgasbord of activities which one saw at the end of a tacky rom-com.
When it ended at last, Dean looked wrecked – and Cas – he noticed with a pang – looked shaken. He watched himself as he disengaged from Dean, stood motionless for a minute, breathing quick breaths as the truth of what had occurred – the weight of what he had done – was gradually borne in upon him. Then he about-turned and ran.
The camera followed Dean as he ran after him, pushing anyone he bumped into roughly aside, yelling out his name.
The video ended.
There was silence in the room – the sort that might have reigned in the theatre when Caesar found himself with all those daggers in his tyrannical back.
“Um,” Charlie ventured. Her voice was the voice of a sheep wanting to be welcomed back into the fold after a long wilful absence. “Do you need a minute?”
“This is all your fault!”
His tone had been calculated to cause her to reel where she stood – and reel, even sitting, she most definitely did.
“Eh – what? How is you having the social grace of a hedgehog and the emotional capacity of a cooked shrimp my fault?”
“You dragged me to the bar,” said Cas, gesticulating schoolmarm-like for emphasis. “Again and again, I told you: Charlie dear, I have nice night in planned. A little bit of Wodehouse to curl up against the window with, a nice mug of hot chocolate to soothe a parched throat, and a few strains of Beethoven in the background to enrich the silence you’d bless me with after your departure. Repeatedly, did I tell you: I have no desire to spend my night endeavouring to avoid sweaty, smelly and gropy of the student body while endeavouring to avoid getting sweaty, smelly and gropy myself. But did you hear me? No. Did you lend me even half an ear? No, again. And look what happened! Cast your eyes over the wreckage of my life, Charlene, and rejoice!”
“I didn’t drag you anywhere. I distinctly remember giving you a choice whether to come or not. Not my fault you have the spine of a jellyfish.”
“I distinctly remember you threatening to pour coffee over my carefully curated selection of Wodehouse’s greatest works, you black-hearted blackmailer. Sophie had an easier choice by comparison.”
“That’s an offensive thing to say.”
“Don’t act like you’ve read the book or seen the movie,” Cas bit out. He didn’t gnash his teeth, but it was close thing. “You’ve only seen that one scene, you pretend-lover of classics. You have no idea what it’s about.”
“Cas, sweetheart, you’re in reactive mode,” said Charlie, laying a comforting hand on Cas’s heaving shoulders. “Let the shadow of the video pass over you. Let the memory of your shame dull in its lustre. Do not give in to the voice that’s telling you shave your best friend’s head in her sleep, okay? Be strong. Endure! And you’ll find you’re a changed man, a better man.”
“You have ruined me.”
“It was just a kiss, babe!”
“With Dean. And it’s not just a kiss, Charlie. It’s what the French call kiss. Th-there was tongue! And to make matters worse, it’s on the university’s official Twitter page! And really, do they not have anything better to waste their resources on? Prying into the love life of its students and brandishing it like a circus attraction seems hardly appropriate. I’m sure there are laws against this kind of thing. It’s there, weeks later, for all to see and be entertained by. I may as well go around wearing a big, fat red A on my chest.”
“You’re mixing ethical crimes of the seventeenth century, my darling pet. The A represents adultery, which isn’t what you did. Neither you nor Dean is in relationship with anybody else – none that I’m aware of, right? – so it was more like, uh, public indecency. Or public exposure. Public display of carnal lust. Yes! Ooh, that fits to a T. Public display of carnal lust was what you guys –”
“Stop talking!”
“Look at it this way: there’s a war going on right now –”
“And my problems are essentially fluff when set beside such grand global tragedies?”
“No. If you’d let me finish,” said Charlie. “There’s a war going on right now, so let’s focus on that.”
Cas flicked her on the nose.
“Shifting focus is the only way you’re gonna survive tonight, sweetie,” said Charlie, rubbing her nose with the tip of her middle finger. “Because he’s going to be here tonight. There’s just no getting around it. Better brace yourself.”
“Tell the guys the Blu-ray player broke.”
“Something electronic, broken and unrepaired my presence? You may as well sound the bulge for the end of the world.”
“Um, we lost the movies?”
“Lose Deluxe Extended Edition Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King? Mislay Pan’s Labyrinth, of the Criterion Collection? I’d have sooner lost a heart, ’cause I simply couldn’t continue to exist in that world.”
“You were in an accident. Yes! That might work. I’m a genius! Nobody would want to come here when you are in the hospital getting your cracked ribs checked out.”
“If I’m going down,” said Charlie in tones that promised swift and fitting retribution, “I’m taking you down with me, babe. We’ll see how well you can dodge Dean when you’re strapped to a stretcher and he’s giving you his puppy-dog eyes. It’s been known to bring giants to heel – remember the incident with the principal? – and you’re but a puny mortal. You’ll be putty as soon as he looks at you.”
“Stop shooting down all my ideas, Wicked Witch of the West! You must help me somehow.”
“Help you with what?”
“Help me avoid Dean at the damn Gang Hang.”
“All through it? ’Cause I got, like, five awesome movies scheduled back-to-back.”
Cas squinted at her. “Did we always do five-movie marathons?” he asked sceptically. The alarm bells that had been ringing in his head started ringing louder. “Is this a sleepover in disguise? Or is this another one of your underhanded schemes to get people to talk to each other? Joanna was not amused when you locked us together in the pantry of her mom’s bar. Neither was I.”
“I thought it helped you bury the hatchet! You said you guys talked it out, that you’d seen the error of your ways. That you couldn’t be more grateful you had such a kind and caring friend in me.”
“We lied. Not only did we not bury the hatchet, we added several other, bigger, and more cumbersome hatchets into the mix – one, incidentally, with your name on it. We lied to get you off our backs. You could say, at least in that moment, Joanna and I were like two bodies sharing a soul. We were united in cussing out your guts.”
“I can’t believe you lied to me. Whoa, is this what betrayal feels like?”
“I can’t believe you thought locking Joanna and I together was gonna do anything by way of repairing what I’m not even exactly sure is broken between us. We’re not a pair of snotty kindergarteners you can force to be friends by making them say sorry and shake hands. Adults like us need a tenderer hand.”
“Would be so awesome if I could, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Charlie.”
“Dude, how long do you think you can avoid Dean anyways? Say I help you tonight. Screen you from his disrobing gaze; shield you from his spitting snake; secure and preserve your status as the residential virgin numero uno. What about tomorrow? Or the day after? Or, quite literally, any of the many days that still stand between now and the time we graduate in, what, five months? Five months. Can you possibly avoid Dean for that long?”
“It won’t be that long – I’ve faith Dean will see the light of reason, and forgive and forget our silly little mishap way earlier.”
“Is this the same Dean we’re talking about? Dude is like a dog with a bone when he wants something. Remember Kevin? Poor Kevin,” said she, sighing.
Kevin, it might serve to know, was a sensitive subject amongst all who knew him, the last unwitting victim of Dean’s pie fixation. Cas had not been present for this segment of their colourful lives, having only heard of him through chilling anecdotes which usually featured Dean, his fanatical love for certain things, like pie, or his car, and a kind, well-meaning moron who never realised the danger he was in before the blow struck.
“He thought he could get away with swiping that little crumb of pie left on Dean’s plate. Never saw the investigative madness coming. RIP Kev. You were the best of us.”
Cas found himself bristling on Dean’s behalf. “I think he deserves more credit than you’re giving him.”
“Kev transferred colleges, sweetling. Imagine the trauma he must have endured.”
‘Kev’ could go suck on a sour fruit of the citrus family. “I meant Dean.”
“Babe, the only reason he didn’t storm the beaches right after you guys kissed was because he thought he should give you time to cool down and process everything. Marshall your thoughts and feelings, as it were. And know this, Juliet mine: you are the only one he’d try to be this conscientious for. Like, he actually, legitimately gives a beetle’s ass about your happiness and everything. He never extended any of his girlfriends any such courtesy, you lucky, lucky dog.”
“Hmm. Don’t I feel special. Be still, my lucky, lucky heart.”
“He gave you six days, babe: six long days, to think it over. Now the time to ponder is gone. That’s why he’s coming to the Gang Hang. Tonight, sweetheart,” said Charlie, patting his head like she was priming a pig for slaughter, “he’s gonna either rake you over the coals for your flakiness – or rail you against the kitchen table. For obvious, X-rated reasons that we won’t ever discuss, ever.”
“That’s – quite the assumption from a dirty filthy prude.”
“Occam’s razor, babe,” said Charlie. Her tone was fond and whimsical; Cas debated the merits of kicking her in the ribs and then calling the cops on himself. Plan B, he decided. “We have ice in the freezer for any black eyes you might sustain, so that’s one of the outcomes covered. Let’s stock up on some condoms and lube as well. Hmm? I think I’m out.”