Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Cass wakes up before dawn to the chirp of a ringtone he doesn't recognize, which fits the pattern, because he's naked in a bedroom he doesn't recognize either. Must have been some night.

He rolls over and finds the second half of the bed warm and rumpled, and things start to come into focus a little. It's not before dawn, but the bedroom has heavy drapes that block out all but a pool of soft gray light on the soft white carpet. It's the only light he has to see by, except for the light coming from under the bathroom door – definitely a bathroom, because he can hear the shower running – and the screen of his hostess' phone, which is flashing DAD at a pulse that makes Cass' head ache, so he reaches across and flips it upside down on the nightstand before collapsing to his back.

It's just barely possible that he's getting a little old for this kind of thing, but in his defense, it's not a regular occurrence these days. Cass can't even remember the last time he was blackout drunk. Of course, he can't remember a lot of things at the moment. He's lucky he remembers his own name.

Now that he's more or less awake and more or less able to see the room as his eyes adjust, he thinks maybe hostess wasn't the right word. The painfully tasteful décor reads to him as masculine, all neutral shades of brown and cream, straight lines and minimal personal detail. Was he at The Blue Room last night? God, it's all a blur, and just so embarrassing. This kind of thing makes a cute story to tell in your twenties, maybe – your early twenties – but--

He didn't even notice the shower turning off, so both his eyes and his brain need a moment to adjust when the door opens, spilling light into the room. When things start to settle into place and Cass gets a look at his (definitely masculine) host, the embarrassment subsides a little. Maybe Cass isn't as young as he used to be, but he must be pulling off dashing or some such shit, because fuck if he didn't go home with a goddamn supermodel last night.

Now it's really a damn shame he can't remember a minute of it.

The guy is-- look, Cass considers himself mostly straight, straight with an occasional blind alley to keep life interesting, but he couldn't deny if he wanted to that this guy is a full-tilt, traffic-stopping stunner. He's wearing a towel around narrow hips, and his torso and chest look to Cass' eye like they've been sculpted by a trainer who gets paid by the ab; the professional in Cass is bitching silently about six-pack showboaters who compromise their clients' core strength in pursuit of aesthetics, but hey, everyone has their niche, and right now Cass is feeling very indulgent toward a little showboating. “Morning, gorgeous,” Cass says, and it's early enough that he doesn't have to kick any extra huskiness into his voice to get his point across.

“Oh,” he says, “hey – good morning. Hope I didn't wake you up.” He flashes a ridiculous, sweet smile that meshes well with the whole vibe he's got going on, with the freckles and the long lashes and the absurd hotness, like he's definitely the kid in the porno who'd have a lot of I've never done anything like this before dialogue, even though you've seen him in eight other movies getting gang-banged by firemen and possibly their Dalmatian.

“I could be talked into forgiving you,” Cass purrs.

And damn, he guesses he must be dashing as fuck , because Gorgeous is right there on the bed in a hot second, his hand sliding over Cass' chest, his lips and tongue nudging against Cass' mouth. Cass hums his pleasure, but he takes his time before he lets Gorgeous coax his mouth open, because boys this pretty never have to work for anything, and it's good for the soul. Cass strokes up his muscular arm (should've gone into personal training, he really blew it with this oh, I wanna heal people bullshit), and the towel is coming untucked, so fuck that thing, too; Cass jerks it loose and pushes it off the side of the bed so he can get his other hand on the back of a thigh and slipping upward.

“We should, uh – probably talk about last night, right?” Gorgeous says.

“Yeah?” Cass says vaguely. By the time his brain catches up and realizes that the right answer was no, let's absolutely not, the damage is done. Gorgeous settles back on his heels, and he's still mostly hard, but he definitely looks like he plans to put his shoulder to the wheel and have this talk, so the best thing to do is probably to get out ahead of the whole thing. Cass pushes himself up against the painfully tasteful wooden headboard and says, “Listen, honey, this is a little embarrassing for me, but the truth is I don't party quite that hard most of the time, and – I'm afraid I need to ask you to tell me your name again.”

Several quick emotions pass over his face. “It's – it's Dean,” he says. “Wait, do you – do you not even remember-- ?”

Cass is tempted to feel sorry for him, but he reminds himself that if not being the highlight of Cass' entire sexual history is the worst indignity Dean's ever had to put up with, then he definitely needs this character-building experience. He touches Dean's cheekbone lightly and says, “Dean. Great. I'm Cass.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, faintly dry. “You told me last night. Well, this is – this is what I thought we should– Look, man, I'm really sorry, this was – or it wasn't – it really wasn't cool. I mean, I don't usually-- well, I don't ever-- I really was going to put you in a cab, but-- I don't know, I don't want to make excuses.”

“Is this a consent thing?” Cass says, and when Dean looks even more guilty, he waves it off. “Don't even worry about it, honey. I know me, and there's no doubt in my mind it was completely my idea. Right?”

“Well, not – not completely,” Dean says. “But you were....”

Yeah, Cass just bets he was. “Hey,” he says kindly. “Not traumatized. Just sorry I don't remember more.” He pets Dean's face again, because he still looks sad and guilty and just so stupidly pettable. “I bet you were one for the record books.”

He flushes a little darker in the dim light, probably not sure if he should feel flattered or objectified. Cass kind of hopes he ends up going for both. “I wasn't – really anything,” Dean says. “I mean, we didn't....”

There's a twist. “We didn't-- Really, at all?”

“Well. Um. At the bar, we, uh – we made out, and you, uh – we went into the bathroom and you....”

Cass nods, trying not to preen visibly. He doubts there was a single person at The Blue Room – man, woman, or nervous virgin twink with a fake ID – who wouldn't have blown Dean in the bathroom, but look who actually did it. Dashing as fuck. “I can imagine,” he says.

“I knew you'd had a few drinks,” Dean says, “but so had everyone, that late at night. You seemed okay. I invited you home with me, and you started – um, acting a little weird in the car, kind of zoning a little, and then it just got worse from there. I could barely keep you on your feet in the elevator. I should've put you in a cab, but you were – um. You were still pretty into it, apparently. I tried to get you some coffee and put you on the couch, but you were – fairly insistent that you wanted to be in bed, so. Like I said, no excuses, it wasn't cool. But you were, um. I mean, you are – really attractive, and.... Anyway, we just, we fooled around for a while, and then you – fell asleep. So. It probably wasn't actually a night that was going to break any records for you. If that makes you feel any better about missing it.”

It sounds a lot less dashing once the details are filled in, and Cass groans a little and rubs his eyes. “No, I owe you an apology. I swear, I'm not usually such a sloppy mess. I guess my tolerance isn't what it used to be. That's what happens when you get older.”

“Oh, I hear ya!” Dean says, which only makes Cass want to strangle him. “Man, I remember some of the parties my fraternity used to throw, and then I'd just go to class the next day like it was nothing. There's no way I could get away with that now.”

“You're fucking kidding me,” Cass says. “You can't even be thirty yet.”

“Twenty-nine,” he admits. “But you – you can't be all that much older-- “

Cass laughs. “Oh, honey. Give me a call in your forties and we'll talk.”

“You're forty?” Dean says, and Cass could genuinely go either way on laughing versus strangling. “I mean-- no, that's-- you should feel good, I would never have– you don't look forty at all.”

“That's what clean living will do for you,” Cass says wryly. “By the way, your father wants you to call him.”

Dean blinks. “How do you--?”

“Because I'm fucking psychic,” Cass snaps, before rolling his arm out to point vaguely in the direction of the nightstand. “Your phone rang while you were in the shower, I saw the caller ID; it's not an unsolved mystery.”

Dean reaches for his phone, then hesitates, then picks it up. “Sorry, I should really-- “ he says, as if Cass has any right to complain. “It's an hour earlier there, and I don't know why he'd call so early on a Saturday if....” Cass nods and stretches back out on the bed, ready to get laid or get out, whichever way this ends up going.

“Hi, Dad,” Dean says. He seems to decide that it's too risque to call home naked, so he fishes his towel off the floor and drapes it tidily over his lap like he's in the sauna. It's cute. The guy's cute, you can't take that away from him. “No, I haven't, not since – Thursday? Yeah, Thursday night. Why?” He listens with a little frown, and Cass is mildly curious, not that any of it is any of his business. “Well, that's not weird, they do that all the time. So that's – what, twelve hours? Dad, twelve hours is nothing. She's probably at her idiot boyfriend's house. Okay, then she's somewhere else, I don't really understand-- “ He chuckles a little bleakly and rubs his eyebrow as he listens. “Well, I mean, it's her car, what's she supposed to be driving? Dad, she's fine, the car's fine, everyone's fine. I think you should just go back to bed. Of course I will. I know. It's okay, I was up, I was just in the shower. Yeah, love you, too.” He groans as he tosses the phone back on his nightstand.

“So, not a family emergency,” Cass says.

“No. My sister and my mom had a fight last night, which is, like, the opposite of an emergency, or even a surprise. Then she didn't come home and she isn't answering her phone, so everyone's freaking out.”

Cass frowns a little. “Your sister ran away from home? You don't think that's possibly-- “

“My sister is twenty-three years old,” Dean says. “You don't run away from home when you're twenty-three, you just – exist out in the world.”

Valid point. Cass shakes himself for automatically siding with Anxious Overprotective Dad when he's supposed to be in Hot Piece of Ass mode. He lets his fingers crawl across the bedspread and hook the corner of the towel, sliding it off Dean's lap with his best innocent eyes. Dean smirks at him, then rolls over above him, and this is more like it.

He's breathing a little heavier than he'd like just from Dean lowering down against him, their chests brushing, the muscles in Dean's arms flexing, and okay, fine, Cass takes it all back, he loves this guy's douchebag personal trainer. He gets a little confused and tries to wrap his legs around Dean, forgetting about the blanket between them, and he leans up to meet Dean's mouth as it comes down, and yeah. Yeah, this is good; Cass can't remember why he suddenly decided to go shopping for dick last night, but he's a fucking genius, because this is so good, and it's been so long, and he needs it. Dean is broad and fucking strong and Cass can smell something inherently male on his skin, even under the chemical smells of his shampoo and bodywash, and the thing about good-looking men is that they think they deserve you, and that's a shitty way to be a human being but in bed all bets are off. Dean kisses like he deserves whatever he wants, and it flips switch after switch all the way through Cass, lighting up a pyrotechnic chain straight down to his cock. Dean might be a shitty human being on his own time, but this morning, Cass is one hundred percent going to fuck him, and he's not going to regret it for a second.

“You made a lot of pretty ambitious promises last night,” Dean murmurs against his mouth. “Now, I work in marketing, and I know that nothing ever really lives up to the hype, but I figure if you're half as good as you seem to think you are....”

“Oh, honey, is that a challenge?” he asks with a chuckle. “Are we doing some alpha male thing here, is that the game? That's adorable. You're adorable.” He pushes two fingers just into the cleft of Dean's ass, then strokes back up to his sacrum and says, “I'm not going to work extra hard to prove myself to you, sorry. It's seven in the morning, I'm pretty comfortable like this, and I'm at least three-quarters as good as I think I am, so I think maybe you're the one who needs to work for it a little.” Dean looks startled, at least until Cass smiles at him and he goes a little dazed around the eyes. “You don't hear that a lot, do you?” Cass says sympathetically, before leaning up to nip lightly at Dean's bottom lip. “It's good for the soul.”

Dean kisses him again, and Cass' cock twitches, which hopefully the blanket disguises a bit. He'll do his part, sure, make Dean feel all sexy and whatnot, but he'll do it in his own time and he doesn't need his dick jumping the gun. “Wondered if you'd be as confident when you were sober,” Dean says.

“And am I?”

“I'm pretty sure more,” Dean says, sounding puzzled. “But I give you this, you've already been an interesting experience. I think this is the first time anyone's ever gotten me naked and then showed any concern for the state of my soul.”

“I like to provide a holistic experience,” Cass says. “Mind-body-spirit and all that.”

“So I'm gonna see God?”

“Well, I don't want to overhype myself,” he says dryly, “but I would say there's a chance of some higher planes being accessed. We'll see.”

“Talk is cheap,” Dean growls. It's a marvelous growl. Cass approves. “Put on a damn condom.”

The condoms and lube are right where Cass figures they would be; of course they are, Dean doesn't seem like a wildly unpredictable guy. Cass is a pretty good judge of character, and he thinks he's got a bead on this kid – nice guy, bright enough, latent douchebag tendencies a side effect of wanting very badly to impress and be accepted. Fraternity, personal trainer, marketing – all excruciatingly conventional life choices. A little shy and stammery about getting head in a gay bar, but clearly not new to the whole scene, so experienced enough in a domesticated sort of way. Affectionate nuclear family somewhere in the Mountain time zone – Wyoming? The more cowboy parts of Colorado? Cass can't totally place his accent. Buys his design aesthetics off the rack, either because he's scared to make a mistake or because he just doesn't care what things look like. It all screams that Dean is a little conservative, a little conformist, but basically decent. A long way from Cass' type, but nothing to be ashamed of. And maybe Cass can broaden Dean's horizons just a little bit. Do the world a good deed.

Cass has made some well and truly fucked-up decisions in the past, trying to do a good deed. This one seems nice and low-stakes.

Twenty minutes later, with a condom on and three fingers buried inside undoubtedly the hottest guy Cass has ever had the privilege of seeing on his elbows and knees, he's thinking nice is probably underselling it a little. Jesus, no wonder guys like Dean are usually so insufferable; Cass is a well-balanced and almost completely functional grown-ass person who carries life insurance and meditates, and he thinks he would commit war crimes right now to get his dick into Dean. Imagine going through life being a person who has that effect on others. If Cass had power like that back in his misspent youth, he would've been a full-blown narcissist at best, so if Dean's worst crime is overpaying for his six-pack, he should probably be canonized.

“God, come on,” Dean growls. Oh, that growl. Cass wants it as his ringtone. “You made me wait eight hours for this, you can hurry the fuck up.”

“You seem a little pent-up,” Cass says. “You should get laid more often.”

“I'm trying,” Dean says.

“Am I winning the alpha thing?” Cass asks as he lines himself up. “I feel like I am, but I don't do this a lot, so I could be fuzzy on the rules.”

“You know that's not even a real thing,” Dean says. “That's just how wolves are in captivity, in real life they're much more--” A hard shiver runs through him, his spine undulating beautifully as he tries to adjust to the head of Cass' cock breaching his hole. “-- cooperative,” he finishes breathlessly.

“You're fucking adorable,” Cass says, which is exactly the type of ego-stroking he had no intention of providing, but he can't help it.

To be fair, though, Dean is giving back his share of flattery, moaning Cass' name as his fingers dig into the pillow and the back of his neck starts to smell a little like fresh sweat along with shampoo. It might be going to Cass' head just a little bit, the way Dean trembles when Cass strokes from his shoulder down to his elbow, the way all the weight and power of that designer muscle sways forward as Cass pushes deeper, just letting Cass in, letting him have control. “Don't stop,” Dean says throatily, as if that was something Cass had been considering. “Wanna come with you in me.”

Something sparks in Cass' brain, and he realizes this pretty little shit is trying to top him from the bottom right now, which is both shockingly sexy and nothing that Cass intends to put up with. He reaches around and strokes his open palm lightly up the underside of Dean's cock, nudging it up against Dean's body but doing nothing in particular to provide more than a tease. Dean moans anyway, and Cass leans up over him and licks along the curve of his scapula before he says, “You always get this hard when you've got a cock filling you up, honey, or am I as good as I think I am?”

“You're good, you're good,” Dean gasps. “Oh, God, you're whatever you want, just don't stop.”

Not a problem. Cass is still feeling sleepy and a little unfocused from the night before, so it's not optimal circumstances for throwing someone down and railing them, but actually this is working surprisingly well for both of them; something about the lazy pace Cass is setting seems to make Dean want to work harder for it, and the utter decadence of having Dean at his mercy and on his schedule is one hell of a high. Cass keeps things slow and steady, enjoying the sweat-slick glide of Dean's thighs against his, Dean's hips under his hands, and the way Dean rocks and arches, trying to follow Cass' lead and trying to urge him on at the same time is – yeah. Maybe one for the record books.

“Please,” Dean finally says, and Cass has to call on reserves of discipline he'd forgotten he possessed to keep from reacting too much to that. “Please – touch me, I wanna come, let me....”

“Put out your hand,” Cass says, and Dean pries his fingers loose and lets his hand fall on the mattress. Cass squeezes some lube into his hollowed palm and says, “What did I say about working for it? It's my day off; make yourself come.” He can't tell if the whine Dean makes is pleasure or protest, but it doesn't really matter, because he starts to jack himself right away, and the way he tilts and the way his muscles work puts a new pressure around Cass' cock that he thinks is going to make him access the higher planes in a minute.

He only wishes he could see Dean come all over his belly and the sheets, but he can hear it and he can feel Dean thrash and bear down around him, and that's nothing to sneeze at. He wraps his arm around Dean's ribs and leans up a little, angling his cock down so that the head pushes forward against Dean from the inside. Dean makes a choking sound that Cass knows comes from a sensation that can't fully resolve itself into pleasure or discomfort, and Cass shushes him and lips along the muscles of his back, letting himself push in tight and sharp for just the few more thrusts that it takes before the pressure right on the tip of his cock triggers an orgasm that vibrates outward to suck all the tension out of his body at once. He almost falls over on his side, but he drags Dean with him, so hopefully it seems intentional.

“Holy shit,” Dean says breathlessly. “That....”

“Mmhm,” Cass says, reaching up to run his fingers along Dean's lips. Dean kisses them lightly, and Cass runs his thumb down Dean's jaw and says, “See, aren't you glad you didn't call me that cab?” Dean snorts a sleepy laugh.

He turns his head to give Cass a wounded look when Cass starts to disentangle. “Don't pout at me,” Cass says. “Condoms work the same way no matter how cute you think you are.”

“How cute I think I am?” Dean repeats with a little smile. “I think I'm fucking adorable; tell me I'm wrong.” Cass flicks his ear lightly on the way out of bed.

The painfully tasteful bathroom is still humid from Dean's shower; he doesn't have a tub, but it's a sizable shower encased in frosted glass, and there's a frosted skylight overhead. Cass looks up at it thoughtfully, and then at the second door. Jack and Jill bathroom? Or one-bath apartment, with access from the bedroom and the living room? But if it's an apartment, it's on the top floor, and the tile in the bathroom is showroom-new, and twenty-nine seems young to Cass, but it's old enough to be doing pretty well in the right industry. Cass shakes his head a little as he starts to wash up; when did he turn into someone who picks up corporate yuppie frat bros with a couple of drinks in him? This is a side of himself he would rather not have known existed.

Amelia would never let him live this down, he thinks. Not that Amelia has had anything to say about his life in a long time, but the comfortable pain of her memory is oddly soothing, like picking at a scab. Cass supposes that's how injuries fail to heal, but – what's healthy, anyway? Does anyone ever really get to that mythic land?

Dean comes in behind him, his reflection distorted by the condensation dripping down the mirror, and he puts his hand on Cass' waist before licking up the side of his neck. It's a little – overly familiar, but Cass is feeling generous, so he doesn't say anything against it. He sidles out of Dean's way so that Dean can use the second washcloth on the rack to clean the come off his abs and the lube off his inner thighs. “How far are we from The Blue Room?” Cass asks. “I walked there.”

“Not too far, but not really walking distance,” Dean says. “I'll take you home.”

“You really don't have to,” Cass says. His voice is flatter than it should be, and he scowls at himself. Dean hasn't done anything to deserve taking the brunt of his moodiness, other than be a capitalist, which Cass hears a lot of people are doing these days.

Dean looks over at him warily. “I'd like to,” he says quietly. “I'd like to take you to breakfast, actually.” Cass snorts before he can stop himself, but Dean keeps a calm, professional sort of smile on his face and says with the smooth friendliness that Cass is sure they teach in business school, “Hey, I know you weren't out looking for a dating thing last night. I don't want to force anything that's not there or that's not gonna work for you. It can really just be breakfast, if that's what you want. Everyone's gotta eat, right?”

“Don't try to sell me,” Cass says. “I can't stand that shit.”

“It's not a line,” Dean says. “I think you're funny. I think you're interesting. I could read the paper over breakfast, but I'd rather talk to you. I won't even give you my number unless you ask for it.”

“I won't,” Cass says shortly.

Dean smiles. “If you don't, you don't. You still gotta eat breakfast.”

It's a bad idea. He's really not looking for someone to date, and certainly not someone like Dean, who's wrong for him in a dozen different ways that Cass has figured out before even learning his last name. And who has exactly the kind of smile that makes otherwise well-balanced and mildly-to-moderately functional people forget to be smart.

“Give me a minute to think about it,” Cass says. “At least let me put some clothes on.”

“I'd offer to let you borrow something clean,” Dean says cheerfully, “but I wouldn't want you to think I was trying to trick you into seeing me again.”

“Just as well,” Cass says. “Don't think I'm above stealing your clothes, if I really don't want to see you again.”

“If?” Dean repeats, and Cass shoots him a look before going back into the bedroom to scavenge around for his clothes.

He slides back into his underwear and jeans, then inspects his linen shirt. They managed to get Cass out of it last night with only one button lost, and it's not obvious when he puts it back on, so he decides that wearing it as-is is less embarrassing than relenting and asking for a shirt from Dean. His phone and his Visa are still in the back pocket of his jeans, and he hasn't missed any messages since he turned the ringer off, whenever that was.

Dean is also in the process of getting dressed, threading a belt through the loops of his khakis (of course he wears khakis and a belt on Saturdays; how can someone who's such a good lay be so boring when he's vertical?), when Cass makes his decision. “Fine, I'm hungry,” he says, and pretends he doesn't see Dean's grin. “Let me just call my neighbor first and make sure she can go over to my place to feed and water my kitten.”

“You have a kitten?” Dean says. He sounds surprised. Cass doesn't know why – does he not come off as nurturing and all that shit? Because he is.

“Well, I still call her that,” Cass says with a half-shrug as he starts texting. “She's actually fifteen.”

“Is that old for a cat? I've never had one.”

“Getting up there. I should get another couple-three years out of her, at least.” Still out, he sends. Check up on everything for me?

Almost immediately, Jody texts back, On it right now. Relax, enjoy yourself! He sends her an eyelash-batting emoji and puts his phone away.

When he looks back up, Dean has slid into a gray Stanford Baseball t-shirt with red sleeves, and the cut between the red and gray draws Cass' eye straight to the breadth of his chest and shoulders and the thickness of his arms, and God Cass is going to hate himself if he asks for this phone number, but he truly believes that some things are worth a little bit of self-loathing, and a second shot at fucking Dean might be one of those things.

Maybe. He hasn't made up his mind yet.

“Let's hit it,” Dean says with an infuriatingly easy smile.

Cass feels vindicated when he gets to see the main room of Dean's apartment (sober) for the first time. It's big and tidy and boring, and the huge bank of windows to his right prove that he was also right about it being a downtown penthouse, which is the most colossal waste of money Cass can imagine. You could foot a kid's tuition to college for a whole semester on what Dean probably pays in one month on this place – not Stanford, of course, but Kent State for sure. The only part of it that actually looks lived-in is the corner tucked behind the kitchen counter, where a messy desk blocks off a Bowflex machine, and none of that is newsworthy to Cass, because he already figured this guy spends too much time working and working out to be genuinely interesting.

There's no earthly reason Cass should call him. They can't possibly have anything to talk about, and now that he's already had the experience, even the hookups are bound to get repetitive pretty quickly. Repetitive at best. Emotionally messy at worst, although... repetitive seems more likely. He's certainly not going to fall for this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Young Republican, and however smoothly and earnestly Dean flirts, he can't imagine that he's going to get that attached to Cass, either. They'll just get bored, and they're both nice enough people, so they'll feel awkward calling it off, and it'll drag on in limbo way too long and--

A loud buzzer jolts Cass out of his head, and he stares around looking for a smoke detector or something before he processes Dean leaning into the call button of the speaker by the door. “Mr. Smith?” a disembodied voice says, sounding unbearably chipper for this hour on a Saturday.

Smith. Of course it is.

“Hey, morning, Garth,” Dean says.

“Morning, Mr. Smith! I got a, uh, Joanna Smith here.” Dean's face goes blank for a second, his mouth open while he gathers his thoughts. “Do you want me to...?”

“Yeah, yes. Yeah, send her up, Garth, thanks.” Dean turns toward Cass and says flatly, like he still hasn't quite digested it, “My sister.”

“Found her,” Cass says casually. Well, this will probably scuttle the post-coital breakfast, and that's really just as well. Cass has a life to get back to, and clearly so does Dean.

When he's pictured Dean's sister, he's mostly seen a female version of Dean: tall and sandy-haired and freckled, athletic and expressive, with a big smile and that particular brand of corn-fed Midwestern attractiveness that's surprisingly effective in spite of being about as intriguing as a glass of milk. The real Joanna Smith is a tiny little thing, and she's doing her best to radiate efficiency and grouchiness with the handicaps of a bright blonde ponytail, apple cheeks, and a decidedly snub nose. She's wearing leggings under a denim miniskirt and a shapeless Army jacket over a Green Day concert t-shirt, and Cass wouldn't have pegged them for related, not even in the slightest, until she puts her arms around Dean's ribs and he folds her up in his arms with an unmistakably familial protectiveness. “Did Mom and Dad tell you?” she asks.

“Dad told me you took off last night and weren't answering your phone. You're really freaking him out. Did you drive all night?”

“I didn't know where else to go,” she says. “I can't stay with them.”

Dean puts her away from him gently and says, “Good. I've been saying you should move out for years. Do you have any savings at all, or did you blow everything on those stupid road trips?”

“They're not stupid road trips, Dean! I'm seeing the country, I'm experiencing life. You know that when you die, you don't get any points for how expensive your suits are, right?”

“Right, you get points for how many states you've seen the biggest ball of twine in,” he says.

“No, she's right,” Cass says, and they both look at him like he just teleported into the room. “They've done studies on it. People who prioritize experiences over possessions live longer and have greater life satisfaction.”

“Thank you, wise stranger,” she says.

“Oh,” Dean says. “Right, this – this is my sister Jo. Jo, this is – my friend Cass.”

“Joanna,” she corrects firmly, and Dean rolls his eyes. “Your friend Cass, huh?”

“Good friend. Old friend,” Cass says seriously as he shakes her hand. “Heard a lot about you, actually.”

Dean gives up glaring daggers over her shoulder, probably realizing that implicit threats only egg Cass on. “Come on,” he sighs. “We were just heading out to breakfast, and you look like you desperately need a Bloody Mary.”

“I'm pregnant,” she blurts out.

Dean looks so deeply shocked it almost makes Cass laugh against his will – as if surprise pregnancies are a completely alien concept to him, instead of practically a rite of passage in your twenties. Maybe he doesn't have many heterosexual friends. Then he scowls, and – huh. He can actually pull off threatening. “I'm gonna kill that idiot,” he says in his sex growl.

“He's not an idiot, and it's not his fault,” Joanna snaps. “But also – we broke up.”

“Because of--”

“No! Well – yes, but no. He doesn't know yet, I haven't told him.” She sees Dean start to speak, and she says, “Because I don't want to marry him! I – love Ash, I'll always love him, but he'll think this means we should get married, and – he's the sweetest person in the world, but he's not cut out for that, he's not husband-and-father guy. And....”

“Okay, look,” Cass says when he can't take this any more. “You don't actually have to stand here and justify all of your life decisions in the next thirty seconds. Here, sit down.” He pulls out a chair for her at Dean's table, and she shoots him a grateful look as she sinks down. “Dean, get her some water, at least.” While Dean's doing that, Cass sits down next to Joanna and puts his hand over her wrist, speaking softly enough that it's obvious he means it for her only. “I know this is intense,” he says. “And it's easy to be scared and angry when you feel like things are happening to you and you're not the one in the driver's seat. But you're going to be okay. I'm all for travel, but this is what a life experience really is. This is the kind of experience that makes up a life. Someday you're going to look back on this and realize that it's never the things you plan that teach you who your authentic self is. It's the things that just happen – the wrong turns and the accidents and the mysteries.”

She nods at him, eyes wide. Dean gives him a strange, warm look as he sets the glass of water down by Joanna's arm. “I feel like such a baby,” she says. “This isn't – the worst thing in the world. Mom's pissed because it means I almost definitely won't be going back to school-- No, Mom's pissed because Mom's always pissed. But I have a good job, and my folks and Ash will help out, and – I know I'm luckier than a whole lot of people.”

“You're not a baby,” Cass says firmly, “and you definitely don't have to compete against every other pregnant person in the world to earn your right to have feelings. Were kids ever a part of what you saw for yourself, before this?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean – yeah, sure? In five or ten years. But not with Ash. We've been on and off since high school, and he's – he's this huge part of my life, and I do love him, but....”

“But also you kind of don't?” Cass says gently. She looks immediately guilty, and he squeezes her wrist. “Honey, it's okay. There's nothing wrong with being young and exploring the world with someone you trust and feel secure with. Maybe he'll be hurt when you have this conversation with him, maybe he feels the same way deep down; you can't know, and it's not your job to work out his stuff about his first love, only your own stuff. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to try for the big love before you give up and marry the you-do-but-you-don't guy. Big, power-ballad, stars-in-your-eyes romantic love – it's not the only thing in the world, but it's – singular. If that's an experience you want, don't let anyone tell you that but he treats me so well or we have so much history together is almost the same thing. Nothing else is the same thing, and if you want it, you deserve it, even if you broke some dude you went to high school with's heart when you were twenty-three, even if you have ten kids to take care of. You are too young not to give yourself a chance to want the things you actually want. Even if you never get them, lying to yourself about what you want is the stupidest, pettiest, most pointless way you could let yourself down, and I promise, you'll always live to regret taking that route.”

“Um, who are you?” she asks.

He smiles at her. “A guy who's taken enough weird wrong turns for nine lives. Now, you've got a lot of things to work out in your head, and you're not going to do a good job of that when you're feeling cornered and exhausted. So right now you should go wash your face, finish that water, and come to breakfast with us. Don't demand everything from yourself right this very second. Do the first thing first.”

“I think the first thing is sleep, actually,” she says. “I haven't really laid down and gone to sleep since I found out, and I think it's making me a little insane.” She stands up from the table and says, “You and Dean go ahead and go, and I'll crash for a while,” already aiming herself at the bedroom door.

Dean makes a weird, low whine of panic and says, “Wait, wait, wait. I – I need to change the sheets for you first.”

“I don't care about that,” she scoffs.

“No, you, uh. You do,” Dean grates out, dark flushes slashed across his cheeks.

Joanna looks at him, then looks down at Cass, who shrugs. “Gross, Dean,” she says, and Cass can so vividly imagine her as the whiny kid sister she probably still is in Dean's head that it's adorable. That word again; that keeps coming up since he met Dean.

“Hey, if you'd given me any notice at all, I would've had the place ready, but you didn't, and it's not.”

“My battery's dead,” she mumbles apologetically. “Never mind, I'll sleep on your weird couch.”

Dean sighs. “I'll get you some pillows and blankets. And I'm calling Mom and Dad and telling them you're alive – no, don't argue with me, I won't say anything else, but I am doing that. And I'm driving your car to breakfast.”

“What?” she squawks. “The hell you are.”

“It was my car first,” he says. “Give me the damn keys.”

“That is a lie,” she says, but she hands over her key ring. “Don't you fuck her up, she's not used to city traffic.”

Cass pitches in by stripping the bed while Dean makes up a nest in the living room for his sister. “It was really nice to meet you, Cass,” she says when they're on their way out. “If it takes you a little while to figure out you're too good for my brother, hopefully we can hang out more.”

“Well, you never know,” he says. “But take good care of yourself, okay?”

Dean doesn't say anything directly to him until they're in the elevator and the doors are closed. “Hey,” he says softly, “so – thanks. You're – you're really good at all that. I wouldn't have guessed.”

Cass raises an eyebrow at him. “What, that I'm only an insensitive dick by choice? Yeah, I got layers.”

Dean chuckles a little. “I didn't think you were an insensitive dick. But – yeah, I guess I wasn't expecting you to be so – philosophical.”

“Part of the job,” he says.

“Yeah? What do you do?”

He hesitates a moment, and then smacks himself around for it. Sure, Dean probably won't really get or appreciate what Cass does for a living, but why should he care about that? It's not like they're actually friends. “I'm kind of a therapist,” he says. “I do bodywork and energy healing – mostly myofascial release, but also craniosacral, polarity therapy, dynamic spinal therapy, a lot of ayurvedic influence.”

“Oh,” Dean says, with a very familiar look on his face – the look of someone trying to decide if all those words are real things, or some kind of crystal-waving hippie snake-oil. “So you're not like a therapist-therapist.”

“I'm not a shrink, if that's what you mean,” he says, trying to convey with his tone that he's not that interested in getting to the part of the conversation where he's supposed to justify the last ten years of his life to a near-stranger. “I also teach yoga,” he adds. “In case you want to tell your friends you banged a yoga instructor; people seem to find that impressive.”

“Yeah, I might do that,” Dean says lazily. “I'm the VP of Sales and Marketing at Sandover. I bet that impresses someone somewhere.”

“I have no doubt,” Cass says, tossing him a half-smile. “Unfortunately, not the kind of people I generally hang out with.”

“I play guitar?” he offers.

“Better. Are you any good?”

Dean smiles over at him. “As far as your friends know, I am.”

They take the elevator down to the visitor level of the parking garage, and Dean has an unmistakable spring in his step as he jumps out of the elevator and straight for a vintage black muscle car with South Dakota plates. “Well, hello, you,” he says, stroking its hood with one hand and jingling the keys cheerily in the other. “Is she treating you bad? I bet she is, isn't she? It's okay, baby, I got you.”

“Are you going to introduce us?” Cass says.

Dean chuckles a little self-consciously as he unlocks the door. “Sorry. I'm not usually weird about inanimate objects, but – this car's kinda special.”

“I gathered,” Cass says, but there's nothing to apologize for. He likes watching Dean adjust the seat back for his longer legs, and the rear-view mirror, and then just run his hand over the wheel and the dash, checking over everything from the cracks in the vinyl to the iPhone jack with a practiced eye. “So this used to be your car?”

“Well...sort of,” he says. “My dad bought it when he was dating my mom, so it's always been kind of a family thing. Dad took great care of it, and I learned how to drive in it, but some things went wrong, and his business was really building up at that point, so he didn't have a ton of time to spend restoring it. The deal was that he'd give it to me if I fixed it up, but...I never really got around to it, what with school and debate team and wrestling team and all that. Then when I did have time, it had kind of – turned into a power struggle, I guess. About whether I was going to do this for a living or go to college. Anyway, end of the day, I love this car, but I never loved working on cars the way Jo does. So she got the job with my dad, and she fixed up the Impala, and he gave it to her instead of me, and everyone's happier like that. I wouldn't even try to drive something like this every day, can you imagine trying to park this battleship downtown? And forget about the fuel efficiency. But damn, she's a sweet ol' thing.”

“It's funny you think of it as a she,” Cass says.

“Is it? I thought that was pretty normal. Cars, ships, planes, all that – aren't they usually shes?”

“I guess, but this is a particularly phallic car. Long and hard and sleek.”

“Don't listen to him, baby,” Dean tells the car. “I know a lady when I see one.”

Dean's a careful driver, or at least he's careful in this car. As soon as they're out in the daylight, Cass recognizes Dean's building; it has a beautiful old art deco facade with a clock face in its center, but the whole thing was gutted and renovated three or four years ago, turned into a mixed-use cluster of pricey condos on top of a gym and some hipster restaurants and short-term rental office spaces. It sits across the street from an ancient dry cleaner's and the old fire station that's now a charter school, so the neighborhood still shows a few signs of authentic life, but the gentrification is strong here. Cass tries not to get too tense about that kind of thing, because there's no fighting the inevitable, and anyway gentrification is exactly what allows him to pay the bills teaching yoga and balancing people's chakras, so who is he to complain. Eventually it'll spread like a cancer the four or five miles to Cass' end of downtown and he'll be forced into, he doesn't know, probably those ugly corporate apartments out toward the airport, but life's full of disappointments.

They go to DeVille's, which likes to think of itself as a neighborhood diner, which it could probably qualify as, if all the prices were slashed by a third. It's decorated in someone rich's idea of an homage to shabby blue-highway mom-and-pop Americana, and he almost wishes they had brought Joanna along; he has a suspicion that she would understand why the whole thing makes him want to roll his eyes.

It's funny, now that he thinks about it, that Dean doesn't seem to. He can't possibly be as silver-spoon as he seems, not if he's the son of an auto mechanic from South Dakota who almost didn't get permission to choose Stanford over the family business. So, sure, it makes sense now that he's got a little of that new-money conspicuous consumption thing, with his penthouse and his espresso machine and overpaying for casual breakfasts when there's an IHOP two blocks down – but at the same time, he doesn't seem defensive about his roots, or like he's trying to make an impression. Everything about Dean comes across so casual, so artless and easygoing. He hasn't even made an effort to shed his little cowboy drawl.

Of course, what might not be an asset in a finance job is maybe a different story when you're an Ohio salesman, even after you make corner-office level. Cass recognizes Sandover's name from plenty of signs hung on chain fences blocking off those ubiquitous downtown renovations over the years – so real estate or construction, something where coming off more like a hometown boy in his Sunday-go-to-meeting best might pay more dividends than acting like he thinks Cleveland is Manhattan.

Maybe Dean's not artless or easygoing at all. Maybe he's just one hell of a salesman.

Well, now, that is a little intriguing.

Dean is predictably sweet and casually flirtatious with their waitress, but then he tosses out a little bit of a curve-ball with his order. “A cup of oatmeal,” he tells her seriously, “walnuts, no cream, no brown sugar, no raisins. Two egg whites with spinach, but not the stewed spinach, just have them wilt a little bit of the fresh and lay it on top of the eggs, not mixed in. Olive oil, no butter, no margarine. And black coffee with soy on the side. Thanks.”

“White, wheat, or English muffin?” she asks, and Cass has to physically put his hand up over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the look on Dean's face, but he manages to refuse all bread-related products politely.

When it's Cass' turn, he says, “I'll have the chilaquiles and a Bloody Mary.” She stands there with her pen hovering over her paper until he says, “No, that was it. I'm done. Thank you.” When she leaves the table, he looks at Dean and says, “Seriously, Meg Ryan?” Dean raises an eyebrow at him, and Cass says, “Oh, that's right. You're twelve.”

“No, I got the reference,” Dean says. “My mom loves that movie.”

“Oh, yeah, it's a classic,” Cass says, casually flipping Dean off. Dean grins at him, and damn. Damn, he sure hopes whatever this guy is selling, he can afford it.

They spend breakfast chatting about Lake Michigan, where the Smiths used to rent a fishing cabin not too far from where Cass grew up, and about Mexico, where they've both traveled a couple of times. He learns that Dean's favorite tv show is Mad Men, except for how it's actually Dr. Sexy, and he refuses to be charmed by being let in on the secret, which is the oldest trick in the book; he admits that his favorite is Dr. Who, except for how it's actually Glee, and he refuses to think about the fact that it's not a trick, it's just that something about Dean's face is difficult to lie to. Nothing is particularly revealing, nothing gets inordinately personal, but Cass still feels like Dean is using the sustained contact with his pretty green eyes to gouge tiny, almost invisible chinks out of Cass' skin, looking for a soft spot. Looking for a way in.

Cass should shut it down, but he doesn't. The truth is he doesn't really want to, which – pisses him off a little, but he's got no one to be pissed at but himself.

“Thanks for the ride,” he says when Dean drops him off in front of his brownstone, throwing Dean a smile that hopefully will leave him wondering if that was polite or dirty. Dean winks at him like there's no question in his mind, and he drives off once Cass has punched the code into the box attached to the iron gate around his building.

Nobody ever mentions getting Dean's number again, and if Dean suspects that while he was in the bathroom, Cass saved his own number into Dean's phone, nobody mentions that, either.

Cass lives on the top floor, too, but there's only three of them in his ancient building, and a fifty-year-old elevator that Cass only takes when he has furniture to move, because it's ten times faster to use the stairs. He lets himself into his apartment, pitches his keys across the hall into a basket on the dining room table, and shouts out over the sound of anime turned up to an antisocial volume on the tv, “Hey, kitten.”

“Ohhh, look who still lives here,” Claire says. She turns the volume down slightly, which is the closest Cass ever gets anymore to an invitation, so he takes advantage of the opportunity, leaning over the back of the couch where she's wrapped up in a hoodie and two blankets and tapping away on her phone. She glances up at him and says, “But if I want to stay out all night, it's 'breaking curfew,'” with exaggerated one-handed air quotes.

“Congratulations,” he says, “you have successfully defined 'a curfew.'”

“Hey, I saw you get out of that cool car,” she says. “What was that, a Thunderbird?”

“I don't think so,” he says. “Some kind of Chevy, I can't remember. You liked it, huh?”

She shrugs. “I could allow you to sleep with a badass chick who drives a classic car, sure.”

“I appreciate that,” he says. “And a badass chick does own the car, but I'm sorry to inform you that I'm not sleeping with her. Her brother's real cute, though.”

Claire makes a gagging noise and says scornfully, “Are you really back to boys? Why?”

“There will be no bi erasure under my roof, young lady,” he says with a little yank to her ponytail. “Who raised you to be so problematic? Hey, so who are you texting – is that Lola?”

“Her name is Colette,” Claire says with the long-suffering patience that only a teenager can deploy to such devastating effect.

“I like Lola, it's cute,” he says. “I'm going to keep calling her Lola.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “And I'm going to keep not inviting any of my friends over here.”

“Then I've done my job. Hey, are you sure you're okay staying here by yourself when I'm out? It's totally fine if you want to keep staying with Jody and Alex; for some reason they seem to enjoy you.”

“It's fine,” she huffs. “I said a million times that it's fine. I know how to call them if I change my mind, or how to, like, walk across the hall. Jody even came over this morning to make sure I was eating breakfast.”

“What did you have?”

“Toaster waffles and chocolate syrup.”

“And Jody let that slide?”

“What do you expect from free babysitting?” Claire points out, not unreasonably. “She made sure I wasn't slamming PixieStix and malt liquor and then she left.”

“Have you done your homework?”

“No, because it's Saturday morning. Have you done your homework?”

Cass snorts a little, because come on, it's Saturday morning. He straightens up and gestures at the tv as he circles around the couch. “I see even one tentacle, I swear I'll have you in therapy for so long your grandchildren will come out of the womb with PhDs.”

“Ha,” she says. “Like that's why I'm gonna need therapy.”

“Love you, kitten,” he sing-songs at her.

“Love you, Daddy,” she sings back.

That's about as much family time as Cass has the energy for this morning, so he heads into his own bathroom to take a shower and almost fall asleep under the spray. The back of his mind buzzes pleasantly over the concept of Dean Smith soaking wet and on his knees, but the rest of him is far too drained to pay any attention. He doesn't even get redressed when he comes out, just slings on a towel and crawls into bed for a power-nap.

The light outside his blinds has gone distinctly afternoon-ish when he wakes up to banging on his door and his daughter shouting, “Andrea's mom is picking me up and taking me to the bus, okay?”

“Uh – yeah,” he says.

It must not be too convincing, because she's silent for a second and then says very judgmentally, “You remember I have an away game tonight, right?”

“Yes,” he lies shamelessly. “Yes – good, yeah. House rules?”

The roll of her eyes is loud enough to clatter against the door as she chants, “Be kind, be smart, have fun, and two out of three isn't bad.” He mouths the last part along with her, smiling drowsily at the ceiling. If he can manage to get them through high school without fucking her up, he swears this kid is gonna save the world.

“Go get 'em,” he shouts, “and call me if you need--”

The slam of the front door cuts him off, and he sighs and reaches for his phone to check messages. There's a rambling, three-part text from Lisa Braeden that boils down to, her kid had a minor playground accident that shook them both up, and she wants Cass to take over her five o'clock class. Since he guesses he's not doing anything but rattling around by himself this evening anyway, he agrees – and anyway, he'd have felt like a shit saying no to a fellow single parent in distress, even if it doesn't seem like major distress. Lisa is a sweet girl, but maybe wound a little tight, in Cass' opinion.

There's another text from an unknown number that just says, Found you ;) Cass smiles in spite of himself and saves the number, but he doesn't reply.

So that's the rest of his evening, he guesses. Cass takes clients most weekends, but he carves out one per month to hang out at home with Claire, and occasionally to go on something he charitably terms a date, even though nothing in Cass' life has really risen to the level of what he would call dating since – arguably ever. He toys with the idea of taking advantage of this unexpected gap in his Saturday schedule by going out for another drink, but the thought doesn't really appeal, so after he finishes up Lisa's class at the health club he's been trying to ease his way out of for months (he's losing his patience with – everyone, really, but especially these chipper young women who survive on avocados and credit card debt and think Cass' mission in life is to bolster their confidence about their asses), he takes himself and his Kindle out for Thai food at the place that has outdoor seating and tiny cats in the window of the apartment building across the street. He doesn't know why it fascinates him to watch cats napping three to a sill, but he finds it so soothing.

There's a small amount of excitement when a short, jittery guy with strawberry blond hair and a beard takes a header on the sidewalk outside the Thai restaurant and loses control of the six shoeboxes and twelve white sneakers he's carrying. Cass comes around to help him up, especially because he's afraid the guy is going to dive into traffic trying to retrieve his shoes. “Thank you,” he says when they've cooperated to get everything back in a box, if not the correct box, and gotten him back on his feet. He adjusts his glasses and looks Cass over, but not in a cruise-y sort of way. He looks oddly older than his years, like one of the old dziadzias Cass grew up around who were always pinching his cheek and speaking Polish at him. “You're very kind,” he says approvingly, and it still makes him sound like a grandpa, but an English-speaking one for sure.

“Good karma,” Cass says. “How fast do you go through these shoes, anyway?”

“Oh, I'm a collector,” he says. “You know, it's fascinating how the smallest differences can just make things so – different. They're like people, in a way.”

Cass can't help but smile at his earnestness, but he also can't help saying, “They're really not, friend. They come off an assembly line in China. People are the opposite of that.”

“Hm,” he says. “Maybe. Tell me, do you like it here?”

The question brings Cass up a little abruptly. “In – Cleveland?” he says.

The guy gestures in a vague circle all around them and says, “Just, around here. Do you like it, are you settling in? Are you happy here?”

Settling in? “I've lived in this neighborhood for seven years,” Cass says. “Over on Brookings, just down from the park.” He has no idea why he's providing that much information, but he feels vaguely offended to be talked to like – some kind of transplant. “I mean, I grew up in the Detroit area,” he says, which again, seems like too much information to give a stranger, but it comes out of his mouth anyway. “But I've been in Cleveland for – forever.”

It's odd that he can't remember exactly how long. Since before Claire, he knows that, but the years blur together if he goes far enough back in his mind. God knows he worked hard enough to keep himself nicely blurred, back then. It's probably a miracle he remembers anything at all.

“Hm,” the guy says again. “But you're happy.”

Cass can't tell if he's asking or stating. He sounds like he's...hoping. “Sure, yeah,” Cass says. “As happy as anyone, I guess.”

He is happy, most of the time. He likes his job. He loves his kid. It's a good neighborhood, diverse and walkable and artsy without being pretentious. He's in good health, his age wearing on him in terms of his cynicism and his alcohol tolerance, but not yet in terms of his back or joints or ability to get laid when he wants to. He's managed to pull a kind of curtain in between himself and his past – not a closed door, not a reinvention of himself, but a comfortable distance that allows him to say I went through some hard things when I was younger instead of, sorry, if you take me you get my PTSD and my drug problem and the blood on my hands and the dead love of my life, wait, where are you going?

It's as much, Cass thinks, as most people can say. He's not happy every minute of every day, but he leads a happy life.

The stranger winks at him and trots off with his shoeboxes blocking his view of the sidewalk, leaving Cass feeling oddly unsettled and not that hungry. He gets the rest of his pad see ew boxed to go.

He is happy, isn't he? He's kind, he's smart, and he has fun on a reasonably regular basis, so what else is there? Yeah, the world at large is basically a shit show – as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen – but Cass didn't make it that way, and a whole lot of years of coping mechanisms all up and down the scale of healthiness have finally made him able to accept that it's not his job to fix it, either.

Maybe he's lonely sometimes. Not all that often, because he's a naturally independent person, and until recently he spent a lot of time with Claire, which is probably co-dependent, but fuck it, they're lucky to have each other and they both know it. Still, she's turning into a pretty normal teenager, which means he tends to get bumped down her priority list a lot, and even though he's deeply grateful that she's come out of everything as well as she has, he knows it means this phase of Claire having things to do and Cass missing her like hell is just beginning.

He reminds himself about impermanence and change and non-attachment, and it helps a little. Claire was never his property; he was only her caretaker for a while. No one is anyone's property, and if you go through life looking for that, everything is going to fall short, you're always going to be lonely, because you're not at peace with being alone.

Cass is at peace with being alone, but it's not a static state. There are lonely days, in among the peaceful ones. Every day ends up a little bit different from the one before, and thank God for that. The world is a shit show, but a world where every day was identical to every other day – Cass is pretty sure that's actually Hell.

On his way home, he passes Mystic Hand, and the sign is still lit up in the window, a single glowing bulb behind the yellow plastic palm with its lines diagrammed and labeled with astrological symbols. He hesitates a minute on the sidewalk, because he's feeling a little moody, a little raw, and in this state he usually tries to take better care of himself, to attend to his emotional state and not let it pull on his strings from behind the curtain. But there's a song stuck in his head and a ghost waiting for him at home, and the world has felt just slightly off since he met a sneaker collector who asked him if he was happy here, and the weird part is that Cass could go on for hours about are you happy? but he's not sure he knows where here is. The porch seating at Thai Gazebo? This neighborhood, this city, this planet?

Are you settling in? He doesn't even know where to start with that question. So yeah, maybe this is exactly the night for it.

Sra. Candela lets him into the back room ahead of the three weary-looking women waiting in the parlor, and she kisses him on both cheeks while she takes his money, cooing over him in what he thinks is nonsense Spanish, or else his Spanish isn't what it used to be. “ Te ves tan triste, lindo ,” she says, slipping the baggie into his pocket for him. “ ¿Porque ?”

“ ¿Sí ? ” he says. “Debe ser mi vida amorosa. ¿Puedes arreglarlo para mí? ”

She chuckles darkly and says, “Debería arreglarlo para las mujeres cuyos corazones rompen, creo. ”

“Nunca, no me ,” he promises seriously.

They exchange a little idle conversation about Sra. Candela's headaches and sciatica, about Cass' persistent failures in tamale-making, about all the girls who surely cry themselves to sleep because he's still single, about the stupid lawyer who won't even return her nephew's phone calls even though the court date is almost here. When it's been just long enough that they don't look too shady, Cass starts his goodbyes, and she surprises him by grabbing his hand and forcing it flat to examine. He knows this is her line of work – her other line of work – but she's never insisted on it with him before now.

She touches his palm and says, “Un alma tan vieja. ¿De dónde salió tu luz, ángel? ”

“ No sé , ” he murmurs, at a loss. “ ¿Me veo oscuro? ”

“Te ves perdido ,” she says sadly, and folds his hand in on itself with a gentle pat that rattles her bracelets. “Deberías llamar a tu amiga ,” she advises. “Ella tambien te extraña .” Cass starts to protest, and then he realizes that the best thing is just to go, so he kisses her forehead and does that.

When he gets home, Cass is reluctant to turn on too many lights. He's haunted tonight, and he's learned that if you make a little room for them now and then, the ghosts will mostly take it and be satisfied. He uses the light of his phone to dig through his disorganized stack of CDs until he finds Wave and puts it on the stereo, then lets the first song play through while he kicks off his shoes under his bed and drags out the lockbox where he keeps his rolling papers, along with his gun and his wedding ring and the key to his safe-deposit box and a thousand dollars in emergency cash. Other than him, only Jody has the combination, but he thinks Claire should have it soon; she's not a little kid anymore, and even if he's honored the promise he made to Amelia not to teach Claire how to shoot, there are situations when she might need quick access to the key or, more likely, the cash. It's something to think about.

He rolls two joints, then returns the papers and the rest of the weed to the safe and goes back to the living room to sprawl out on the floor under the speakers. “Dancing Barefoot” has just started, and he puts it on repeat, then lights up and lies back. He keeps his eye on the red spark of its tip in the darkness as he breathes out slowly, and an old memory floats up to him out of nowhere, of his father smoking a cigarette in Cass' bedroom while making up bedtime stories of The Witch With One Red Eye that Cass found terrifying and delightful.

“ Here I go and I don't know why, ” he sings along softly, so softly, almost afraid to disrupt the ghost-rich silence of his apartment. “ I fell so ceaselessly – Could it be he's taking over me? ”

She loved this song, and he loved her. They danced to it together, made love to it together, shot up to it together. He wipes a tear out of his eye, unsure if it's from sadness or just the beauty of the music; the beauty and the grief and the joy always come together when she's near him, and she's near tonight. He always hears this music in his head when she comes near.

He doesn't romanticize any of it – not Amelia, not their marriage, not their failings, not love in general. They were young and self-righteous, they damaged each other and far more than just each other. They believed in so much, and then they believed in nothing, and in the end he knew where she was headed and he let her go, because he'd already forgiven her, erased all her debts, absolved her of everything in his power. For a while he went to a support group, because it seemed the thing to do, and they told him it was normal to feel angry, to feel betrayed, but he never did. She made promises and broke them, yes, but he stood by for years and watched her suffer and did nothing to help, so which of them betrayed the other? They were a love story, but they were no romance.

He misses her constantly. She wrecked him, she broke him, she remade him. There is no part of Cass' life that doesn't at least play a descant over the music of Amelia, and if he could still call her, even knowing everything he knows now, he would do it.

She has the slow sensation that he is levitating with she – Here I go and I don't know why –

Oh God I fell for you – Oh God I fell for you –

He's drifting on the smoke and the hypnotic pulse of the song's back half as it slips over the falls for the tenth or hundredth time, and his phone beeps. He picks it up and sees a text from Claire: 3-2 VICTORY!!! He smiles at it. Good for her. Fierce little thing, bullheaded like her mother and an idealist like her father – like he was at her age, anyway. They named her for Lake Saint Clair, where he and Amelia met and fell in love waiting tables one summer at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, and he loves the perverse way their child turned out, the way their whole family turned out, passionate and rebellious and combative and scarred, from such placid and wholesome beginnings. The goddamned Yacht Club.

Oh God I fell for you – Oh God I fell for you –

He thinks of Joanna Smith, who isn't so much older than Claire, who isn't so much younger than Amelia was when a pregnancy test sent her world into a sudden tailspin, too. Their world. He wonders how Joanna is doing – if she's called her mother, if she's called her ex-boyfriend, if she's going to name her child for the place she was when she thought for a minute she'd fallen in love.

He thinks of Dean Smith, and he lets his eyes slip closed, remembering the weight and the heat of him as he crawled naked over Cass' body, kissing hungrily. Dean is the kind of person, Cass thinks, that is supposed to make you happy – handsome and charming, successful and smart, loyal to his family, respectful to his one-night stands. Any normal person would feel like they'd hit the lottery, but of course Cass doesn't really get normal, doesn't know what to do with it, can't imagine what it would feel like or why the fuck you'd even want it. There's no going back to Grosse Pointe now; he's a long, long way past that.

Yes, okay. He'd like to see Dean again – naked for sure, and maybe even fully clothed and making an ass of himself to a waitress somewhere hopelessly bourgeois. It's not because Dean's the polar opposite of Amelia, and it's not really in spite of that, either. He guesses he'd just...like to be happy, and Dean smiles like he knows the secret to that. Even though Cass knows, he knows it's just because Dean has wrapped himself tightly in the protections that his safe background and talents and good looks have afforded him, he can't help being seduced by the possibility that Dean knows secrets. That he knows something he could teach Cass about...settling in.

Heading for a spin – some strange music draws me in –

Cass holds his hand up above him and wonders what Sra. Candela saw – something about losing his light? And an old soul? Well, he's heard that old soul line before, plenty of times, but the other bit rattled him, he admits. People tell him he lights up a room when he smiles, that he has a clear, bright aura, that he's a ray of sunshine. Even when he's churning with rage and fear and bitterness, people tell him that kind of thing, and he just smiles and thanks them, he never argues.

No one's ever told him his light is gone, before. No one's ever told him he looks lost, no matter how deeply, terrifyingly lost he's been. It's strange. He wonders if he should go back and ask her more.

He doesn't light the second joint at all, just lies there basking in the expansive, blurry sort of alertness he gets when he's high, the world around him full of mystery and allure and diffuse eroticism. He runs his hand down his stomach, hyper-aware of the beating of his heart and the way his mouth wants the weight of Dean's tongue in it.

Cass is pragmatic about physical needs, and he's been careful to keep himself sane and mostly sated, in the seven years since his marriage ended, with strategically chosen and executed hookups every two or three months – no one allowed close enough to start expecting the privileges of a girlfriend, or even of a friend with benefits. Cass has friends, but he prefers to sleep with acquaintances. Less destabilizing for Claire, he used to tell himself, until he was finally ready to admit that he just likes the stability of solitude himself. It's the only pleasure he gained from the incalculable loss of Amelia, and he's protective of it.

Or he always has been, at least. Suddenly the routines that have kept his body complacent for years are so inadequate that there's some kind of revolt in progress, and he never even saw it coming. There's no strategy to this, just an abrupt, riotous shout of fuck solitude coming from every inch of his skin, and he wants Dean over him and inside him and under his tongue and in his fucking veins.

He refuses to let this own him, though. Maybe he'll call Dean – probably he'll call Dean – but he intends to do it from a position of strength, of non-attachment, not from the depths of a craving he hasn't felt for a stranger in his whole life. Cass stretches his arms up over his head, dragging his knuckles across the carpet, hyper-extending his spine and then letting himself melt back to the floor. His shirt is rucked up over his stomach and he stares at his erection, debating whether or not to at least unzip his pants and take the pressure off of it. He lets his eyes drift closed and holds in place, pouring all his floating concentration into the fantasy of Dean, naked and fucking gorgeous, unbuttoning and unzipping Cass' pants for him – pressing one palm down against his groin to hold him still, stroking hot and firm up his cock with the other hand.

He lets out a slow, unsteady groan and catches himself just as he's letting his hand move, reroutes it to rake through his hair as his hips circle restlessly against nothing at all.

Oh God I fell for you – Oh God I fell for you –

He fumbles for his phone, distantly aware that it makes not the slightest fucking sense to decide that jerking off is giving Dean too much power, but calling him sounds like the perfect compromise. This doesn't even qualify as stoned logic. Cass has never been high enough in his life to pass this off as logic, and that's saying something.

“Hey – Cass?” Dean says when he answers, and he sounds both hopeful and wary. Cass holds the phone near his ear but not against it, still lost in the music, still – lost. He closes his eyes and has the random, stoned thought, Everyone is a ghost except us, and like most random, stoned thoughts, it feels intensely, profoundly true. “Is that-- Cass, are you on?”

“Yeah,” he croaks. “'S me. Sorry – to bother you. I'm...high, and horny, and making some pretty dubious choices.”

“We seem to be setting a pattern,” Dean says. “Am I going to have to introduce myself again tomorrow?”

Cass lets out a soft laugh. “No,” he says. “I know who you are.”

He can hear shuffling sounds, then what sounds like a door closing, and Dean says quietly, “I'm glad you called.”

“I can't stay,” Cass says. “I mean – I'm not – We don't make any sense when I'm sober. So you see the problem. Or – maybe you think I'm never sober, but actually I am most of the time.”

“That's good to know,” Dean chuckles. “Do we make sense when you're not sober?”

“Not really,” he admits. “But I don't care as much.”

“Do you want....” There's a pause, and in the silence Cass could swear he hears Dean's tongue sliding across his lip. His back arches again, and he almost misses it entirely when Dean says even more quietly, “Do you want me to come over there?”

Yes, his body groans, but he can't – he doesn't – not at the apartment. He can even remember why, just barely. “No, you can't,” he says. “Don't do that.”

Dean hesitates and then says, “You're not married, are you?” He's trying to make a light joke out of it, but the question is not rhetorical.

“Not currently, no,” Cass says. He drags his fingers over the strip of bare skin across his stomach, and it's the most intense thing he can remember feeling; even though his memory only extends to the beginning of this conversation, that's intense. His breath catches sharply.

It must make a sound of some kind, because Dean says, “God, are you--? Fuck. Cass, why'd you call me?”

“Wanted you,” he says. “Want you.”

“I – Cass, I – my sister's in the other room, I told her I had to take this because it was my boss calling.”

“After ten on a Saturday night?”

“He actually does do that,” Dean says. “He's not great with boundaries. But I can't-- God, I want to, but I can't.”

“Dime que no eres un fantasma ,” Cass pleads, sliding his thumb inside his waistband, the cool hardness of his nail pressing against heated skin. “Dime que eres real. ”

There's a little thud, like Dean is backing into the door, or letting himself fall against it. “Okay, that wasn't even English. If you OD, I'm going to feel so guilty about how hot this is getting me.”

Cass chuckles. “Won't happen. Just – oh. Just come here, lie down on top of me like you did before, I loved how you held me down like that. I don't need you to do anything, just let me put my legs around you. God, you turn me on.”

“Jesus, Cass,” he says, thin and breathless, and then he coughs a little and pulls himself together, says in a lower, more confident voice, “Okay, yeah. I can do that; I got you. What else do you need?”

“Just kiss me,” Cass says.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and under his warm, smoky voice, Cass can hear the distinctive sound of his fist moving over his cock. He smiles to himself, because it feels like a victory to drive Dean here when Cass himself has been able to resist. It's not a competition, of course, but Cass is still winning. “Oh, man, you – you kissed me at the bar, and I thought you were so cute before that, but then you kissed me, and – and I thought, God, I'd walk through fire for this, I didn't know kissing could feel like that. It was better than half the actual sex I've ever had.”

“Mmm,” Cass says. “Chemistry. Shhh – you can kiss me, you can kiss me now, anywhere you want. Did you miss me, Dean? I'm here now, I'm settled right here. I'm all yours.”

Oh God I fell for you – Oh God I fell for you –

He listens to Dean biting back every answer to that, coherent and incoherent, and he lets the world rotate around him and the universe expand, and he doesn't know why he struggled against this at all. Dean is so easy to be with, so innocent and undamaged and – and good, heroic, righteous – so strong, holding onto all the blessings that life should have found a way to strip from him....

Dean is so unlike the first time Cass fell in love, when it all descended into blood and delusion and despair, and Cass never stopped loving him – her – his soulmate, the love of his life – but he's been happier now that he's alone.

Until he met Dean, anyway.

“You don't know where I come from,” he murmurs to Dean. “You've never seen the things I've seen – the things I've done.”

“Don't care,” Dean says without hesitation. “You were – you were so nice to Jo, I can tell you're – you're a good person, you're kind. Whatever you've seen or done, it made you kind. That's rare.”

Kind and smart and happy – at least two out of three. That's his goal, and he gets there almost every day. His eyes are closed and his body is gone, the apartment is gone, Cleveland is gone, he exists everywhere and nowhere – he hasn't lost his light, it's just spread out across the curved surface of this world, where fantasies play out prismatically in front of their eyes. “I want you to fuck me,” he says. “It's been so long, and I miss you so much. Dean, are you happy here? Is this where we're happy?”

“Ah – Cass,” he says, soft and broken and choked in a way that no one, no one else ever hears him, Cass knows. “Miss you, too. Want to see you again....”

“You will,” Cass promises. “I'll find you.”

Maybe he makes other promises, fond or dirty or both, but he loses the thread of things at that point, disappears into the cracks and shadows between worlds to kiss his ghosts. He doesn't remember how he gets off the phone, or even off the floor, but he's standing on his apartment's narrow balcony now, face raised toward the starlight, the music still playing behind him – the same song over and over and over again.

He has a dream. He only holds onto a little bit of it.

Rocky ground, and a sloped and broken old road. The Jeep is parked across it, bristling with men and rifle muzzles, and Cass has the familiar weight of an M16 strapped across his back. It's getting dark quickly, the headlights of the Jeep cutting through the twilight fog.

“Because I don't trust any of this,” Dean says. “First we were going to pick up a few riders, but they can't come--”

“That's not suspicious,” he protests. “It's a contaminated well, we see them all the time – it's typhoid fever, I'd bet my life on it. Of course they're not walking two miles up the pass.”

“--so now we're supposed to split up? Fuck, no. I said we'd hold the pass, I didn't say half of us would hold the pass while the other half waltz blind into a trap.”

“Listen to yourself!” he yells. He thinks they can hear him back at the Jeep, is pretty sure he can see heads turning their way as the camp's gossip machine grinds back into gear. “What's wrong with you? These are civilians, they're mostly children. I'll go myself, I might not even have to evacuate them if I can--”

“You can't,” Dean says flatly, and Cass hates the surge of fury and self-loathing that comes from knowing Dean is probably right. “You don't have the juice for that, not anymore.”

“Croats don't set traps,” Cass says.

“Yeah, well, people do. You want to go in there with weapons and pharma, like that shit's not worth ten times more than money now? And once they have our guns and they've cut our force in half, then they take the Jeep. This ain't rocket science; it's what I would do, if I was hard up enough for gear that works. You hear one sob story about sick kids and you just buy it, you don't even think. Well, I gave them a chance to ante up with some proof and they didn't, so we're going home.”

He looks back at the red sun, and he knows that if he has any chance of getting around Dean's paranoia, it's disappearing with the daylight. “Don't split the force,” he says quietly, because he has to try, doesn't he? Who is he, if he won't even try now? “Just send me. One gun, one box of amoxicillin. Worst case scenario, if that's all you lose--”

“One gun, one box of amoxicillin, and you? Not acceptable. Not happening.”

Cass knows he's lost, but he can't help smiling. His brain has been on fire ever since the marks on his back stopped oozing blood and bile, ever since the pain meds.... He smiles a lot. He can't stop, except when Dean kisses his mouth into futile prayer and makes his eyes ooze blood and tears. “If that's all you lose,” he says again, “then what have you really lost? And maybe you keep your soul another day.”

Dean's hand, stiff and scarred under the thumb from old fang marks but still strong, winds in the collar of Cass' shirt, jerking him closer to the scent of dirt and gasoline and sweat and the disgusting maple-flavored meal shakes that Dean's been downing quietly for weeks, handing off his own rations of canned chicken and canned peaches and Velveeta to Risa and Luna and the other women. Cass will never be able to reconcile Dean's cruelty and his kindness; Dean doesn't match any of the clear, bright lines that Cass was always taught existed between sin and righteousness. “Last night was good,” Dean says next to his ear in a blunt, ragged voice like fingernails tearing through skin, a voice that makes Cass shiver as hard as a caress, “but it doesn't change anything. You undermine me again in front of my people, I'll shoot you in the fucking foot and make you crawl back to camp.”

Cass presses his eyes closed and weighs his chances of getting punched in the nose if he tries to lick Dean's jaw right now. High. “I never thought it did change anything,” he says. “I'm asking you as the one friend you have left.”

“I don't have friends,” Dean says, releasing him. “I can't have friends, and this is why.”

It hurts more than he would've expected, given how accustomed he's gotten to Dean's bouts of temper. “Then what am I?” he asks.

Dean shrugs, but he doesn't really answer the question until later that night, when he's got Cass naked in his lap in the backseat of the Jeep, his fingers dragging over Cass' lower back and losing purchase against the sweat, his tongue flicking under Cass' jawline, his cock pushing deeper with every deliberate roll of his hips. Cass can see the red glow of the campfire out the back windshield; this should keep the gossip going for quite some time, but he's past caring now. “Mine,” Dean growls. “You're mine.”

And Cass smiles, curling one hand around the back of Dean's neck and grabbing the torn vinyl on the roof of the Jeep with his other hand, sinking his nails deep and holding on, but what he thinks and doesn't say is, The fuck I am.

He wakes up unsettled, the same way he was unsettled by Sneaker Guy the night before – like something that doesn't belong in his quiet world has broken into it by force. It feels like coming home and finding his door jimmied open and the lock broken, but nothing missing and nothing moved. He can't say he's been harmed, exactly, but that almost makes it worse – a violation that defies his brain's attempt to understand it.

He sits up in bed and scrubs his eyes. A sex dream he can deal with, even one that's almost ruined by the undercurrents of aggression and resentment. It was just – so strange. He almost recognized himself – himself as he was long ago, at least – but the man in the faded military coat with the scars on his hand was both so like and so completely unlike Dean that Cass has no idea how to process the whole thing. It's already beginning to fade from his mind – were they arguing about medicine? Relief supplies?

Maybe he doesn't want to remember. It all touches a little too close to...things that aren't home. Things he had to leave behind in order to make a home.

Speaking of. He has a kitten to feed.

He cracks her door and makes sure she's in bed, which she is. He changes out Patti Smith for Janelle Monae on the stereo and starts scrambling eggs for breakfast burritos; one or the other of those things is bound to lure her out.

It doesn't take too long; Claire's always been an earlier riser than him under normal circumstances. She shuffles out in her panda slippers like she's still a little kid, and his heart hurts when he looks at her, because someone is going to let her down sometime soon, someone is going to break her heart, and it won't be the first time and it won't be the last. And there's nothing he can do, because those are the experiences that make up a life, and part of him wants her to have all of it while another part wants to wall her up in a room full of stuffed animals and cartoons and waffles and never let the world touch her at all.

He brings her a room-temperature LaCroix, because there's something wrong with this kid, and that's what she likes. “Good game, huh?” he says, and she nods, still half asleep. “I'm proud of you,” he says, laying his palm briefly on top of her head. “Just...all the way around.”

She smiles at him, small but real. “Were you okay last night?” she asks, and he panics briefly, because he can't remember when she got home, or what she might have seen. “You just – you fell asleep on the couch, and you had Mom's song on repeat,” she says. “I thought.... I don't know.”

“Well. Yeah,” he says. “You know. You think about her sometimes, and – I do, too. It is what it is, right? I'm okay now, and that's what matters. You wanna go to a movie this afternoon?”

So that's what they do, and on the way they get food truck paletas in the park and trade on Claire's cuteness to get permission to play with other people's dogs, and it's a good day.

It's a good weekend off, basically. Weird, but – good.

He doesn't contact Dean or hear from him again until Tuesday, when he's stuck in a long grocery line after work and gets a pair of texts.

Hey! the first one reads. Jo thinks I'm boring, so now I have to take her out for a drink tomorrow (Wed).

The second says, She'd like to hang out with you, and so would I, if you're free. 7 @ Blue Room, hope to see you!

Cass smiles at his phone until the harried mother behind him maybe-accidentally hits his ankles with her cart to prompt him to move forward into the available space. He doesn't respond, but not because he has any doubt about going – just because he suspects Dean doesn't have any doubt about it, either.

He mentions very casually to Claire that he's probably going to meet up with some people Wednesday night for after-dinner drinks, and she not-casually-enough suggests that she could probably study late at her friend Colette's house if he would like her to be supervised. “Fine,” he says, “but this isn't a slumber party, for either of us. Your weekday curfew stands.”

A good parent would probably take this natural opening to have The Colette Conversation, but he punts on it yet again. He doesn't know how to approach it, since he isn't even settled in his mind yet about how much it's actually his business at all; Claire's a little young to be having sex, if she is having sex, but if she is having sex with another fifteen-year-old girl, that's kind of – ideal, comparatively. He wants to be there for her, but he also wants her to figure out what it feels like to be in charge of her own life, in small doses, and he knows he can't just sit this whole situation out forever, but – right now, he's doing exactly that.

And anyway, God forbid she asks him for any romantic advice. He doesn't think, “Never text and hope desperately that they do” is going to be across-the-board useful, even if it's paying out for Cass recently. He already gave her everything he's got with the House Rules; it's the sum total of what he knows about life by now, and beyond that, they're both on their own.

He doesn't remember ever going to The Blue Room on a weekday night before, and it's surprisingly nice, dimly lit and unhurried, mellow lounge electronica playing over the speakers. He sees Dean and Joanna right away, in a booth with a bowl of peanuts between them; they are, respectively, drinking something that looks from a distance like a dirty martini and something fizzy, and they're absolutely murdering the peanuts as they talk intently. Joanna is wearing jeans and a tank top, but Dean seems to have come from work; his jacket is crumpled on the bench next to him, but he's still wearing his tie and suspenders, his sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up, and Half-Undone Business Bro is Cass' new favorite look in the entire world. He knows if he goes over there, he's going to stare at Dean's forearms and trip over his words and do everything wrong that he's barely been managing not to do wrong since they met. He needs a better strategy.

So instead of joining them immediately, Cass goes over to the bar and takes a seat. He orders an amaretto sour and spends a few minutes pulling himself together by flirting with the tiny, androgynous bartender with the pixie cut and the surprisingly great biceps on their small frame. He's not timing it or anything like that, but it doesn't seem like very long at all before a careful, heavy hand lands on the back of his shoulder and Dean's voice says, “Hey, you. Glad you made it.”

Cass swivels around, his knees bumping against Dean's thighs until Dean moves back just slightly, and Cass wants to say hello, but instead he just smiles. He forgot how – how warm Dean looks, all those shades of sand and sun-baked gold and hazel, and the bright attention in his eyes, and his sweet, lickable smile. “Yeah,” Cass finally says, and Dean's mouth quirks a little like he's used to making people speechless. But Cass isn't just people, so he makes himself clear his throat and say, “Glad you called. How's your house-guest situation going?”

“I put her in a hotel on Monday,” he says. “My apartment is just not built for couch crashers.”

Cass nods to show active listening, because he is listening, even if he's also running one of Dean's suspenders between his fingers. Dean doesn't look like he minds it at all, and when Cass widens his legs to make enough room, Dean steps closer to him and waits. Cass gives him a short nod, and gets Dean leaning down to kiss him in return.

It's brief and gentle, but Cass still can't say that he wouldn't walk through fire for a few more like it. He'd definitely want to keep that option open, at least.

So this, Cass thinks, is a date by almost anyone's definition. Yes, “hang out with my sister and me” was just the right level of ambiguous to provide them both cover if they needed it, but there's been hey, you and a hello kiss and Dean cracks out his wallet to pay for Cass' drink, and dating isn't really something Cass does, but he's seen it on television and it looks just like this.

Joanna brings her drink and Dean's over to the bar and sits on the stool beside Cass. “Hi,” he says. “I'm really glad to see you.” He is; even though he can't stop tugging on Dean's suspender, he's thought a lot about Joanna recently, and he's not sorry she's here at all. “How are you?”

“I'm good,” she says, sounding a little surprised by it herself. “I went to my first gyno appointment today. Everything seems good.”

“You have a doctor here?”

She and Dean exchange looks briefly, and she says, “Yeah, I'm – staying in Cleveland. I mean, I have to go back to Sioux Falls soon, to get my stuff and to – talk things over with everyone, but then, I'm coming back here.”

“I'm surprised,” Cass admits. “You said that one of the things that made you feel less anxious was that you had a reliable job and family close by to help out. I guess I didn't think you'd-- Unless you're not having the baby.” That should've occurred to him sooner, but she did say the appointment went well, which implies--

“No, I am,” Joanna says. “It was – up in the air until Sunday, I guess, but Dean and I talked a long time, and...yeah, I definitely am. I know I'm doing this the hardest possible way, but--”

“But that's not really out of character for her,” Dean interrupts, smiling at the half-hearted kick she directs at his shin.

Cass holds out his glass for a toast. “Congratulations,” he says, “you'll be having a Clevelander. Hey, if you're interested in working with a doula, I can make some recommendations.”

“I don't know what that is,” she says cheerfully, “but I will take all the help I can get.”

So, very surreally given their surroundings, they talk about mother-centered childbirth, and even the bartender gets into the conversation, as it turns out their wife gave birth less than two years ago. Dean looks a little bemused by the whole thing, but he seems entirely content occupying the space he's in, and Cass drapes one arm over Dean's shoulder and lets his knees rest comfortably against Dean's hips as the conversation meanders around allopathic health care in general, and then how far out of downtown Joanna will have to widen her apartment search to find an affordable place where the parking isn't crap. It's – good. Everyone seems relaxed, no one seems excluded, and it's definitely not a traditional date, but Cass has never been put off by nontraditional before.

The nighttime crowd starts showing up by nine, and the music changes over to more predictable dance-floor fare. Predictable isn't inherently bad, and Cass likes the half of it that he recognizes, and about half of the half he doesn't. He finds himself singing along under his breath when a remix of “Heads Will Roll” comes on, and Dean says, “Seriously?”

“What?” Cass says. “It's a good song. Wanna dance?”

Joanna barks with laughter. “That'll be the day. My brother doesn't dance.”

Challenge accepted, Cass thinks, but he won't press the issue on their very first date. “You want to dance with me?” he asks Joanna instead.

She sighs a little and says, “That sounds fun, but I'd probably catch hell for taking you away when Dean is obviously trying to establish residency in your lap. What are you trying to do, Dean, register to vote?”

“Shut up,” he says, unruffled. “You guys can dance if you want. I have about ten million messages I should respond to if I don't want Charlie's head to explode.”

“Really?” Cass says, reaching behind Dean to slide his phone out of his back pocket. The screen says thirty-one rather than ten million, but that still seems like a lot, and it vibrates again in his hand while he's snooping. “Who's Charlie ?”

Dean gives him a slight smirk like he knows how much Cass actually does want to know the answer to that, but Dean is too polite to call him out on it. “My PA,” he says, holding out his hand for his phone. Cass gives it up reluctantly, because he's just located the photo folder and that has real potential. Next time.

They do go out on the dance floor, and it's fun, Joanna's not half bad. She'd be attractive if she didn't remind him so much of his daughter, and if he weren't semi-obsessed with her brother, but she does and he is. Cass doesn't go out of his way to look for Dean, but he catches a couple of glimpses – one time Dean is working assiduously on his phone, and the second time he's leaning with his elbow on the bar, watching them. Cass gives him a wink and lets himself get pulled deeper into the crowd.

He's not worn out, but he's reaching what feels like a natural stopping point when Dean does come to join them; he doesn't dance, exactly, but he catches Cass' hips from behind and pulls him up against his chest. Cass relaxes against him and tries not to shiver when Dean puts his hands on Cass' elbows and then takes his time sliding them down until their fingers are tangled together. Dean leans down to say against his ear, “Let me take you to dinner on Friday.”

That does make him shiver a little, but he shakes his head. “I have plans.”

“Date?”

“Tickets,” he says shortly, then shamelessly uses his every advantage to change the subject by turning around in Dean's arms and kissing him. Dean's hand fists the back of his shirt, but he doesn't react much otherwise, just letting Cass take what he wants.

“You're a hard guy to pin down,” Dean says when he pulls away.

“Oh, well, if you'd led with that offer...” he says, and Dean laughs softly. “I'm sorry, I just – I really am busy on Friday.” He knows he should suggest a different day, but this is starting to get incredibly real, and Cass is all too aware that this is when, if he wants to keep doing this, he really needs to disclose what kind of plans he has, what kind of responsibilities he has... what getting involved in Cass' life actually means. And that's only the beginning of a conversation that gets very long, very fast, and probably sends Dean running very far away.

It is what it is. But he doesn't want it to happen tonight.

They both get another drink and sit down at a new table, and Joanna joins them only a minute later, looking uncertain. “If you want me to, I can get an Uber back to the hotel,” she says to Dean

“No, stay,” Dean says, to Cass' relief. “It's good to see you having fun.”

“Last hurrah, I guess,” she sighs, sliding into Cass' half of the booth.

Cass puts his hand on the back of her neck and says, “We are really letting you down, aren't we? Here you are, a beautiful, vibrant, newly-single woman in the final days of your wild and unencumbered youth, and we take you to a gay bar.”

“We're not trying to get her laid, Cass,” Dean says gruffly.

Challenge accepted, he thinks, and it must show in his grin, because Dean pales slightly. “Come on, Dean, be a bro,” Cass says slyly. “This is Joanna's last opportunity to make a truly appalling mistake with relatively little in the way of consequences; you can't stand by and let her waste it. All we need is one heterosexually inclined man who cleans up okay and is willing to let a beautiful woman get away with murder. You have to know someone who fits the description.”

“I don't—” Dean starts, but then he cuts himself off abruptly, startled and intrigued by whatever idea is surfacing in his head. “Hm,” he says, pulling his phone out and scrolling.

“You are magic, ” Joanna says, holding up her hand for Cass to high-five.

“Don't get excited yet,” Dean says. “You haven't seen this guy's haircut. Then again, look who you let impregnate you. Maybe you two are perfect for each other.”

Of course Cass has to see how this plays out, so he ends up staying a little later than he planned, at least long enough to meet Dean's co-worker. Sam turns out to be tall and gawky – definitely not unattractive, but awkward in that tech-sector sort of way, like he's perpetually just now realized that people don't make good programming sense and has no idea how to handle this knowledge. He looks a little terrified of Joanna, but he's obviously at ease around Dean, and then once Cass asks him a couple of questions about the beer he chose, he's latched onto the topic eagerly. It turns out that craft beer is a passion he and Joanna share, at which point Cass excuses himself and hooks Dean by the suspender, pulling him along.

Dean gives the two of them their privacy with a slight, ungracious scowl, but Cass tries the kissing remedy again, and it truly is a miracle drug. This time Dean does more than just allow it, cupping Cass' face in his hands and leaning him back against one of the columns that set the seating area off from the dance floor. Cass tucks his fingers into the back of Dean's waistband and lets his tongue slide against Dean's, and it's strange to think that he was here just five days ago, trying to fuck a stranger. “I don't really take people home on weeknights,” Dean says, sounding apologetic. “I just get up so early, and I have – kind of a routine that really helps me focus my day, so....”

“No, I – that's okay, me, too, I have class in the morning,” Cass says.

“What kind of class?” Dean asks, and it's a weird little jolt of reality when Cass is reminded

that, right, they barely know each other.

“I'm getting my Master's in physical therapy,” he says.

Dean kisses him again and says, “That's awesome. I think you're....”

“Awesome?” Cass suggests dryly.

“That,” Dean says. “And also a little complicated.”

Cass thinks almost anyone probably comes off complicated by comparison to Dean, but he doesn't say that. He just says, “Would you like me better if I were boring?”

“Boring's not the opposite of complicated,” Dean says, which is actually interesting, because – isn't it? He'd follow up with that, except that Dean is saying, “Go out with me for real. I really want you to. An honest-to-God date.”

“I'd invite you to come with me on Friday,” Cass says, “but then you really would be bored.”

“What is it, like – ballet? Opera? It's not opera, is it? I really like you, so please tell me I'm not going to be sitting through operas for you.”

“It's not opera,” Cass promises. “It's – volleyball. High school girls' volleyball. JV squad.”

The blank look on Dean's face is kind of priceless, but then he blinks a couple of times and says, “Is that your sport? Girls' volleyball?”

“At the moment,” Cass says. “Is it making you rethink the virtues of opera?”

“Not even a little bit,” Dean says. “Okay, so – what's our colors?” Now it's Cass who isn't sure what just happened, and that must be on his face just as vividly, because Dean smiles a little and explains, “I don't want to show up accidentally dressed like I'm cheering for the wrong side. Our team, what colors?”

“Purple and white,” Cass says.

“Awesome,” Dean says. “I look good in purple. I'll pick you up at...?”

“Five-thirty?” Cass says faintly. “Is that too early? The game's at six, but you probably work--”

“It'll be fine,” Dean says. “Five-thirty.”

Cass kisses him with all the things he isn't ready to say – you look good in anything and I don't think you're a truly appalling mistake but I also might not care if you are and I really hope you're still up for this when you actually know me.

He knows he's in serious trouble when – well, he's known for a while, but he's been able to lie to himself until he sits down with his coffee in the student union between classes and finds himself Googling Dean instead of studying.

You can't Google someone named Smith, which makes the whole thing beyond stupid, but here he is doing it anyway. It's been so long since he's had a crush on someone that he forgot about how it's functionally identical to a mild head injury. The first page of results is all about a famous basketball coach and the stadium named after him, so he tries again with both + Sandover and + Stanford, but as soon as it works and he's seeing the right Dean Smith in his alumni newsletter and his goddamned LinkedIn profile, he feels like a stalker and shuts the whole thing down.

Dean is who he says he is, not that Cass ever doubted him, and a basic Google search isn't going to turn up any red flags on a guy who Cass is still convinced is almost pathologically reputable. If he writes erotic Atlas Shrugged fanfiction he probably does it under a pseudonym, and if he can never return to Indiana because he and his band banged too many underage groupies in Gary, Sandover probably cares about that as least as much as Cass does. Cass isn't going to find anything incriminating.

He's not even looking for anything incriminating, honestly. He's just...curious. And that seems like a bad reason to go down this road, too, because it would actually be a lot more fun to learn who Dean is by – talking to Dean. Which he can do tomorrow, on their date, like a normal human being.

Colette isn't returning Claire's texts in a timely manner on Thursday night, so Cass gets to be a damn superhero by recruiting her to help make strawberry-cream cheese empañadas. It's win-win, in that nobody plays a whole lot of Sara Bareilles in their room and cries, and everybody gets to eat empañadas. He wishes every parenting decision were this simple.

“What do you think about me bringing a date to your game tomorrow?” he asks while they share the one empañada they have room for after all the filling they ate straight from the bowl.

She looks at him suspiciously and says, “Is it the Chevy?”

“The Chevy's name is Dean,” he says. He can't blame her for being suspicious; this is new territory for both of them, and Claire is at least as defensive of their hard-won stability as Cass is.

She shrugs, which is usually Claire's way of saying she isn't fussed about something either way, but then she says, “Are you sleeping with him?”

“Are you sleeping with Colette?” he snaps, and Claire looks so shocked that it's almost funny. He doesn't laugh, though, and he does mean it when he says, “Sorry, that's – I didn't mean it to come out like that. You don't have to tell me, but – you could, if you wanted to talk.” Claire nods, focused intently on the marks she's making with her fork in the pastry dough. “You don't have to tell me anything,” he says again, softer, and only feeling a little bit defeated. “I'm going to make an appointment for you with a gynecologist, though, and I want you to promise me you'll answer whatever she asks you, and tell her the truth. Okay? This is your business, it's – your decision, but I really want you to tell me you'll take good care of yourself, okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”

He's not sure if he's supposed to answer her question or not – probably not, but he's always hated having to pretend that somehow he knows everything, that the reason she should talk to him is so he can pass judgment on whether or not she's growing up correctly, and not just because in the real world, everyone needs someone to talk to. So he says, “I slept with him last weekend, but...I really shouldn't have. I was pretty drunk, and I just... I was lucky. He's a nice guy, but he might not have been.” She's at least looking at him now, with big, stunned eyes. Cass shrugs a little and says, “Nobody's smart all the time. You won't – you won't always like your own decisions, or be proud of them, in your life, but – that's okay. You already know how strong you are. You'll learn from things, or you'll just deal with them, and you can..... You can talk to me even if you think you've been stupid or made the wrong call or whatever. Believe me, I'll get it.”

He can tell by her face that she's thinking it all over seriously, even when she gives him a slow half-smile and says, “Well, as long as you were kind and had fun, I guess.”

“See how easy the rules are?” he says. “Even I can manage to follow them.”

It must be a pretty successful conversation, because she leaves her door open a little when she gets in bed, which means she'll allow him to come in and kiss her goodnight. He tries to be grateful for that, and not maudlin about how rarely it happens now.

He has the two ass-in-the-morning classes on Friday at the health club (he swears he's going to ditch those last four classes he does there, but then he's been swearing that for at least six months), and he puts a few empañadas in a gallon bag and takes them to Lisa for her and her kid; she's not the only person there that he's friendly with, but he's pretty sure she's the only person there besides him who isn't orthorexic and won't take a sugar-cheese-bread gift as some kind of covert death threat.

She takes it – pretty damn well, actually, or at least he guesses that's how he ends up making out with her in the Membership office. Damned if he knows, except that he gives her the empañadas and asks how her son is doing, and next thing he knows he's sitting on the desk with her kneeling across his lap, and she's shedding clothes as fast as Lycra will allow itself to be shed, and her mouth tastes good and her nipple tastes better, and they've done this before once, almost two years ago and then never mentioned it again, so as far as he's concerned it counts as completely out of the blue.

“Hang on, hang on,” he hears himself saying through kisses, his hand shoving her yoga pants down but still hovering a couple of highly critical inches away from the heat he can feel making his palm sweat in sympathy. He shudders a little, then slides both hands carefully to her hips and pushes her back to look at him. “I....”

He doesn't really know what to say, but she's not stupid and it only takes her a second to fall all the way back to reality. “Oh – oh, God,” she says, putting her hand up over her eyes like she's hoping object permanence isn't really a thing. “Oh – I'm sorry, I'm such an idiot-- “

“No, no, hey,” he says, trying to figure out where to stroke her in a soothing, unsuggestive way. He settles for squeezing her upper arms gently. “You're not an idiot at all. You just didn't know I – I'm kind of seeing someone.”

“Really?” she says, a little challengingly, and he realizes that she's probably two or three items of clothing too naked for him to play this card and come off like a good guy.

“No,” he says, like a fucking moron. “I mean – yes. I – don't honestly know, but we have a date tonight, and.... I just really want to see where it goes. I want to give it a fair try, and I feel like – this is not that.”

She seems to consider being pissed for a minute, then sighs and smiles and kisses his cheek, because Cass has always kind of had this superpower where women can't stay mad at him. He tries not to abuse it, he swears he does. “I still feel like an idiot,” she says, reaching for her sports bra, which is hanging off the corner of the desk.

“You really shouldn't,” he says. “I think you're just – lonely. Trust me, I've done much stupider things for that reason. Do you – want to have lunch?” She stares at him blankly, and he shrugs a little and says, “If you want to talk to someone....”

They end up having lunch, and it's actually really nice. She is wound pretty tight, but now that Cass is middle-aged and responsible himself, that's not the turn-off it once was. If nothing else, he likes knowing he can make her laugh; he's pretty sure she needs that a lot more than she needs some jerk who'll fingerbang her in someone else's office.

Cass doesn't know when all the pretty girls in the world started seeming to him like they're in desperate need of volunteer dads, but he guesses this is his lot in life now. He and Lisa spend most of lunch commiserating about life as an independent contractor with shit health insurance, and he's one glass of Chardonnay away from offering to book a gynecologist's appointment for her. Maybe he can get a bulk discount.

Friday is a booked-solid afternoon for him with his private clients, so he springs for an Uber to be sure he gets home in time to shower and change for Claire's game. He feels obligated to wear the Cleveland Science & Math t-shirt that he over-payed for at a fundraiser, but to keep from making himself black out from boredom, he wears it with the jeans he almost never wears out of the house anymore, because they're older than Claire and worn so soft and faded that they drip suggestively over his ass and thighs. He knows the aggressively casual look is not going to coordinate well with Dean, who will almost certainly be coming straight from the office, but fuck it, it's their second date, and the theme he's working with is don't you wish it was our third?

Cass has never had a third date in his life. He never saw the appeal, and now all of a sudden he deeply, genuinely does.

Jesus, Amelia would laugh her ass off at him. For once, it's just a thought, and it doesn't make him feel any particular way.

He runs into Jody and Alex as all three of them are headed into the stairway. “Hey, stranger,” Jody says. “You need a ride to the game?”

“No, I – kind of have one, thanks,” he says, leaving it awkwardly at that. Jody Mills is the closest thing Cass has to family, and it feels strange, after everything he owes her, to keep secrets. Dean's not a secret, exactly, he's just – something Cass isn't sure how to explain yet. But he has about half an hour, he realizes, to figure it out, because he can't not introduce them at the game. “I'll tell you more as soon as I have a chance,” he promises.

“About your boyfriend?” Alex says with perfect innocence. Cass trusts it about as much as he trusts innocence in general, but – he did tell Claire, and without specific instructions and explicit threats, that means he basically told Claire's best friend.

“It's just a date,” Cass mutters.

Jody loops her arm through his and says, “You're right. You will be telling me more, very, very soon.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he says. Cass doesn't take orders from too many people, but he'd dive off a cliff if Jody told him to. They met at the very lowest point in Cass' whole life, and she hadn't had the slightest reason to trust or believe in him, but she did exactly that. He knows good and well that without Jody's help navigating the unbelievably labrynthine corridors of family court and the foster-care system, he would never have managed to get Claire back – and while he knows that Jody mostly did it for Claire, because she's the city's most kick-ass foster mom and is always looking out for the girls who stay with her, he also knows she saw something in Cass, beyond the failed marriage and failed drug tests and failed life in general, that even he wasn't sure he saw at that point. Nothing will ever be enough to pay her back for giving him her friendship so long before he had the strength to earn it.

Dean pulls up by his front gate on the dot of five-thirty, driving a Prius; Cass admires the pragmatic and/or socially responsible choice of cars, though he thinks it'll be hard to break it to Claire that the Chevy doesn't get to stay. Kids can get so attached.

“Hi,” Dean says, letting his eyes drop to Cass' mouth and smiling a little, a combination that makes for a surprisingly effective substitute for a kiss. True to his word, he's wearing a royal purple shirt with white collar and cuffs and a white tie, and true to his word, he looks fucking fantastic in it.

Cass goes ahead and punches the school into Dean's GPS without asking permission, and Dean looks unsurprised, like he's starting to figure out that Cass isn't really big on permission in general and he's maybe okay with it. “How was your day at work?” Cass asks, and then, God help him, Dean actually tells him.

None of it makes any sense, and he stops listening pretty early on. Cass doesn't know shit about contracts and projections, and there is no part of him that has any desire to learn. He doesn't care if he ends up marrying this dude: hard pass. But he does pay enough attention to pick out names, because he might meet some of these people someday. There's a lot of Charlie, which creates some pronoun confusion before he finally twigs that Charlie is a she, and a lot of Crowley, who he gathers is the boss-of-poor-boundaries Dean mentioned once before. Both names carry a certain weight when Dean says them, like they're relevant to Dean and not just to today's sequence of events, so Cass files them away for future nosiness.

“I'm boring you, aren't I?” Dean finally says.

“Yes,” Cass says, “but I did ask. Do you – like your job?”

Dean thinks about it for a second and then says, “Yeah, I do. I know it's not like – trial law or firefighting or something, it's not exactly action-packed. But there's more to it than you'd think. And I get to meet a lot of different people, and I like that. I'm good at it, and I like that, too.”

“Fair enough,” Cass says.

Admittedly, a JV volleyball game is an extraordinarily weird place to bring a date, but to Dean's credit, he acts the whole time like it's really not. While Cass picks up his tickets from the cafeteria table set up outside the gym, Dean reads labels on the trophy case trophies and says the kind of genial hello to people who pass by him that implies a genuine love of his fellow human beings, or a guy who works in sales. Dean debates the merits of different seating areas as they climb the bleacher steps as if he really wants a good view of the game, and by the time they've been in their seats for ten minutes, the game is about to start and Dean Smith knows more of Cass' daughter's classmates' parents than Cass does. He claps and cheers when the girls come out on the court like he gives a shit, and Cass feels a very tiny bit guilty for really not giving a shit at all about Sandover Bridge and Iron.

It's probably all fake, but Dean fakes it really well.

He leans closer to Cass while the girls take their positions and says with soft, warm humor, “Do we have a favorite?” Cass is almost confused, until he realizes that the giant NOVAK on the back of Claire's jersey isn't a giveaway, because Dean doesn't know his last name.

“Number 12,” he murmurs, a little spun by the thought. Dean's taken him to bed, taken him to breakfast, driven him home, had phone sex with him, invited him out, bought him drinks, invited him out again, and is sitting here doing an absolutely masterful job of acting excited to be invited to the kind of event that actual parents have to force themselves to attend – and he couldn't even Google Cass if he wanted to. Who does that? Who does all that for someone who's completely allergic to answering the most basic personal questions, let alone capable of letting an amazing guy get close?

Who does all that and doesn't even ask for a full name? Other than a guy who can clearly see how screwed up Cass is, and who's working his ass off to prove he's interested without going too far and spooking Cass.

Cass holds his hand for a while during the game. It honestly seems like the least he can do.

It's a hard-fought game, but the Lady Falcons win it 1-0. Colette scores the winning serve, and the whole team collapses in on her like a school of hugging piranhas, but he notices that Claire gets in there first and hangs on the longest. The kid's got it bad, Cass knows, and he hates to be a cynic but he really is, and he's dreading the first adolescent broken heart he has to deal with. What do you say to that, anyway? Yeah, I know it sucks, honey, but just remember, we all die alone in the end?

Claire's changing her shoes on the bench by the time they make it down to the gym floor through the milling parents and darting teenagers. “Good game, kitten,” he says, high-fiving her.

She accepts the high-five but sticks her tongue out like she's spitting out something bitter and says, “Yeah, if I hadn't fouled out on the halftime buzzer.”

“Hey, you won. Sometimes good enough is good enough,” he says, which is probably terrible advice, but the nice thing about being Cass is that nothing he does for the rest of his life is likely to be his low-water mark as a parent. “Claire, this is Dean. Dean – uh, Claire.”

“Hi, Claire,” Dean says, putting out his hand. “Hey, I know it sucks not to get the point, but you got a lot of power behind that serve.”

She looks down at his hand, or maybe at his gold watch, and there's a very slight narrowing of her eyes that Cass just knows means she's going to say or do something he'll probably never live down, so he says loudly and brightly, “Hey, is that Lola? I should go say hi--”

“Hi, Dean!” Claire says, grabbing his hand like she's falling out of a helicopter. “It's really nice to meet you. Daddy, can I--”

She's knocked sideways by an attack hug from Alex and thoroughly distracted before she can ask for anything; Cass can barely understand the strange, high-pitched sounds the two of them are making, but he assumes it's communication of some kind. Jody's there, too, and she just waits patiently until Cass gets a grip on himself and says, “Oh – hey, Dean, this is Jody Mills. She and Alex live across the hall from us, and they are both amazing angels who are definitely slumming it by being associated with the Novak family. Jody, this is Dean Smith, he's....” Same? Yeah, no, that's not gonna work. “Taking me to dinner, I think,” he says instead.

“Good to meet you, Dean,” Jody says, fixing her intimidatingly frank eyes on him as she shakes his hand firmly. “Don't take this one too seriously, he thinks he's funny.”

“He is funny,” Dean says with a shrug of one shoulder. “I mean, I'm not totally sure he's not a serial killer, but I'm sure he's funny.”

“Is anyone ever totally sure someone isn't a serial killer?” Cass says. “You hear that every time they catch a serial killer: oh, none of us had any idea. ”

“Take a compliment, sweetie,” Jody says, kissing his cheek.

“Jody, can I go with Claire for pizza?” Alex says. She and Claire look so tightly laced around each other's shoulders that Cass isn't sure it's optional at this point, but he guesses it's nice of her to ask.

“Sure, if it's okay with Claire's coach,” Jody says. “Call me if you need a ride, either of you.”

They dash off together toward the locker rooms, leaving Cass to say dryly into thin air, “Yes, I also hope that you have a great night, thank you so much.”

“And you,” Jody says sternly, poking him right in the joint of his shoulder, “call me very soon. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I'm sure she doesn't mean you,” Cass says after she walks away.

“Hey, I have nothing to hide,” Dean says. “I'm one hundred percent not a serial killer.”

“Always reassuring to hear,” Cass says. “So, uh, that was – obviously mine. My kid.”

Dean nods. “I thought of a lot of reasons you might have invited me to this,” he says, “and has a daughter on the volleyball team was by far the least creepy, so. Feelin' pretty good here.”

He can't resist leaning in and putting a little kiss high on Dean's cheekbone. “You're funny, too,” he says. He doesn't do it to make Dean flush a little pink under his freckles, but that's a nice bonus.

“So, do you, uh – you share custody with her mother?”

Cass isn't sure how to answer that without answering eighty-five other questions that he should probably have an answer ready for but doesn't. “We tried that for a little while, after the divorce,” he finally says. “But now it's just Claire and me.”

All true, as far as it goes, and orders of magnitude more charming than hey, fun fact, did you know that when two wildly unstable heroin addicts try to sue each other for custody, the State of Ohio has some pretty strong feelings about that?

“Now I need to ask you something very serious,” Cass says, very seriously. Dean frowns a little and gives him a supportive it's okay, go on nod. “Where is it that you're taking me for dinner? Because if I have to listen to you describe to some poor girl who makes two dollars an hour exactly how you want your plate of wicker steamed, I'm going to start rethinking you. And I'm going to be honest with you, I did not put on these jeans hoping to think tonight.”

A few different emotions flicker across Dean's face while his mouth twitches, but he finally settles on, “Well, I was going to ask how you felt about Japanese food, but now I'm a lot more interested in finding out what you were hoping for when you put on those jeans.”

“I love Japanese food,” Cass says.

Dean takes him somewhere that's – naturally – a little overpriced and seems to have an entirely Korean waitstaff, but he promises the Yelp reviews are sound, and actually it's pretty good. Cass orders ramen with braised pork belly and a plate of gyoza. Dean orders miso soup, a seaweed salad, and two spring rolls. “I am genuinely going to kill you,” Cass says, pushing the gyoza toward him. “Eat a dumpling, you neurotic fuck.”

“I'm not neurotic!” Dean protests. “I just bloat really easily, and I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm trying to get laid tonight.”

“Well, pro tip,” Cass says, and gestures up and down Dean's whole general area with his chopsticks, “this is not sexy.”

“I would've thought you'd appreciate the value of clean eating,” Dean says. “You're in the health-care field.”

“Well, now that the court has established my credentials as an expert witness, I'm going to tell you that this? Is not all that healthy. Your body needs fat and protein. Okay, I'm going to give you an option. This is how I used to convince my child to try new food, understand; this is where we're at now. You can eat this dumpling, which I will literally hand-feed to you off of my own chopsticks, and it will be adorable and romantic, or you can split that green tea cheesecake with me. See, it's your choice.”

“I can't eat dairy,” Dean says faintly, even though Cass has not missed the light that kindled in his eyes at the sound of the word cheesecake.

Cass knows he's about to cross the line that separates cutely harrying Dean and just being a dick, but – honestly this shit pisses him off so much. “No, you don't eat dairy,” he snaps. Yeah, that was the line; saw it as he crossed. “You can eat whatever you want, because you're a rich guy living in the middle of the richest country on the planet, you have the option of eating a damn panda bear, if you wanted it bad enough. You choose to struggle through life malnourished, for reasons of your own, and that's fine, choose whatever you want, but own it.” Dean blinks at him, obviously at a total loss, which – yeah, what the fuck did Cass expect him to say to that? He sighs and rubs his eyebrow. “Sorry. I'm sorry, that was – really shitty. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Dean says faintly. “Just... if you can eat whatever you want and look like you do, that's great. You're lucky. I really can't. And I know you probably think it's shallow to care--”

“No, I don't,” Cass sighs. “Food is like sex, you know? We all could be completely rational about handling our needs, but we're not, none of us are. There are always emotions tied up in it. That's not shallow, it's human. So for me, it's-- I did relief work for three years in Central America when I was younger, and I can't think about hunger without remembering – handing out emergency-rehydration popsicles in the worst slums in San Salvador, to kids who would throw up if you tried to give them solid food, because they'd been hungry so long. So that's my thing. And it doesn't make it the right thing, it's just where I am.”

“I'm sorry,” Dean says softly.

“No, that's – I don't want you to be sorry, I'm not trying to guilt-trip you. I'm saying, that's my story, that's what's playing in my head. It's not more real than your story.”

“I don't really have a story,” Dean says.

“Yeah, you do. That's what I'm saying: everyone does.” Cass leans back and lets his eyes sweep over Dean, lets his memory wander a little bit. Something interesting usually pops out for him, when he lets himself be interested in something.... “You wrestled in high school, right?” Dean nods. “God, that's such a tough age. Everyone's so self-conscious, and you're stuck with your classmates for an amount of time that's totally outside your control. And wrestlers have to think about weight classes all the time. Your coach had you do weigh-ins, right? In front of the rest of the team? I'd think that could make anyone hypersensitive to how they're being perceived – constantly being told your body wasn't where it was supposed to be, and on top of that, feeling like the second you screw up, everyone knows it. Even if you rationally know that after high school, people stop being stuck together and mostly stop giving a shit what everyone else is doing, I'd think it would be hard to let that go.”

“How do you do that?” Dean says.

Cass smiles at him and says, “Hey, I went to a fancy private college, too. I'm smart.”

Dean smiles back, and Cass can let himself relax a little now, pretty sure he's salvaged the mood. “Yeah, where?”

“Loyola.”

Very casually, Dean reaches across the table with his chopsticks and lifts one of Cass' gyoza. Very casually, Cass doesn't gloat, or draw attention to it at all. “Okay, so let me try this game. You went to Loyola, and then you went and did some kind of humanitarian aid thing in Latin America, so – Catholic? Like, really Catholic, not just sort of in a vague, cultural way.”

“Very good,” Cass says. “I was at the time, yeah. See, you're smart, too, that's good. Gives you something to fall back on when your looks start to fade.”

“See, that was two separate compliments,” Dean says, “and yet also incredibly condescending at the same time, so now I don't know whether I'm supposed to thank you or--”

“Try harder to impress me?” Cass says with a smirk. “Hm. Interesting.”

Dean shakes his head with a soft chuckle and says, “I really got in over my head when I let you pick me up, didn't I?”

“Don't worry, gorgeous,” Cass says. “I promise I won't let you drown.”

There was plenty of street parking outside the restaurant, but Dean doesn't seem to trust street parking, so Dean's Prius is a few blocks away in a parking deck. Cass doesn't mind; it's a beautiful night, and he's liking this thing where he holds Dean's hand for no reason. They're waiting for the light to change on Linden Avenue, and Cass gestures off to the right and says, “Five or six blocks that way is the place where my psychic works.”

“Your psychic?” Dean repeats. “Yours personally?”

“Well, not just mine. Although she does usually let me jump the line if I stop by without an appointment. I think she thinks I'm cute.”

“There's a surprise,” Dean chuckles. “So you go there and, what, have your cards read? Crystal ball?”

“She reads palms, mostly,” Cass says. “I mean, she says she does, but she seems to see something new every time I go, so either I have very shifty palms, or--”

“Or she's a con artist?” Dean suggests. Cass gives him a look of fake shock, and Dean snorts and pulls him out into the crosswalk as the light changes. He throws a little smile back at Cass and says, “Did you ask her about me?”

“I did, actually,” Cass lies. “She said your money might be cursed, but she could break it if you bring her five thousand dollars in cash, two magnets, a case of Himalayan sea salt, and a black chicken.”

“ Two magnets,” Dean says. “That sounds serious, and not at all like a scam.”

“Here,” Cass says, putting his free hand on Dean's wrist and tugging him under the streetlight outside the parking deck. “Let me see your hand, I'll tell you your future.”

Dean gives it over easily, letting Cass spread it out flat between both of his. “I better be careful,” Dean murmurs. “Soon I won't have any secrets left, will I?”

“That's the idea,” Cass says.

There are faint white scars on Dean's hand, around the base of his thumb, and Cass runs a fingertip over them. “Dog,” Dean says softly. “Big ol' mastiff – our neighbor down the road used to breed 'em, and sometimes they'd get out. I was thirteen.”

“Are you afraid of dogs now?” Cass asks, and Dean gives a short nod. Cass traces his fingers over the curve of Dean's life line and says, “Well, good news: you're alive.”

“That is good news,” Dean says huskily. “Does it say anything about meeting a tall, dark stranger?”

“Oh, yeah, over here,” Cass says casually, tapping under Dean's pinky. “Days and days ago. Old news.”

“Old news,” Dean repeats. “Okay, how about my future, then? How about tonight?”

Cass looks up at him, suddenly feeling flushed and a little unsteady – half-drunk without the benefit of a single drink. “I don't know,” he admits. “It's – getting pretty late, and it's only the second date. Maybe your stranger is too respectable for that.”

“I'm almost positive he's not,” Dean says. “But I actually am a gentleman, so if he wants me to drive him home--”

“I just – because Claire – I don't want her to have to spend too many nights home by herself.”

“Yeah, of course,” Dean says. “Cass, if you've been – if you haven't wanted to tell me about Claire because you thought I'd be – competitive, or possessive of your time or something, I want you to know, that's not me. She's your daughter. I want you to put her first; I wouldn't honestly think you were a man worth having at all, if you didn't put her first.”

He folds Dean's fingers over into a loose fist and kisses each finger, right under the bottom of the nail. “Am I worth having?” he murmurs.

Dean looks at him, shining gold in the yellow pool of the streetlight, and Cass doesn't know if anyone has ever looked at him like that before, so – gently. “I know you are,” he says. “You try to come off really tough, and I figure it's because – I guess you had a hard divorce, probably; you got hurt. You say what you're thinking, even if it's a little – abrasive, and you make everything a joke, and you're not easy to get to know, I have a million questions about you that I know you'd up and disappear if I started peppering you with. But you need to know that if those are things you're trying to see if you can scare me off, you're really not as smart as you think you are. Cause all those things just make me want you more.”

The thing is, Cass knows all that, he really does. And the part that freaks him out about Dean is that someday Cass won't be a mystery anymore, he'll just be a bundle of wrong turns and bad decisions

and old pain that Dean won't have the cure for, and – it just feels a whole lot better to be Dean's dark stranger, the one he can't stop chasing, than Cass knows it will feel to be the real, fucked-up person that Dean actually catches.

But he doesn't know how to say any of that, and he knows Dean would deny it anyway – would really believe none of it's true. So instead, he leans in and kisses Dean's mouth very lightly and then says, “You really are gorgeous, Dean. And you're a lot of fun to be with, and you're sweet--”

“Don't,” Dean says roughly. “Whatever you're getting ready to say – don't, because it's stupid and I don't think you mean it anyway.”

Cass closes his eyes and leans in, putting his arms around Dean's ribs and his chin on Dean's shoulder. He can feel the weight of Dean's gold watch rucking up his t-shirt as Dean strokes his back. “You should take me home,” he says.

“Okay,” Dean says softly. “Yeah. Whatever you want, okay?”

Whatever the fuck that is.

All at once, something kind of snaps loose, and he doesn't care that they're still standing on a downtown street corner on a Friday night, that it's only their second date, that everything about this is the wrong place and wrong time. He steps back and holds out his hand toward Dean, who instinctively catches it just the way Cass took his hand earlier, spreading it open, holding it steady. Cass touches his own wrist, and Dean leans down a little, squinting in the uneven light until he can see the silvery bands of scarring across Cass' wrist. He looks up at Cass' face uncertainly.

“They're not what you think they are,” Cass says quietly, and he can't quite help adding wryly, “You open a vein down the wrist, not across. They're not even cuts, they're – ligature marks. I'm not-- I don't know if I could tell you everything if I tried. I know I don't really want to. But you have to understand, they thought all the Catholic charities were aiding and harboring the guerrillas – and we mostly were. We'd get permission to bring food and medicine, and we'd – we'd transport messages, too, and guns if we could. Everybody knew it. Sometimes being an American protected you, but more often it didn't. We were incredibly lucky. The National Guard took us hostage. These are where I was tied with electrical cords for three days. All of us survived it, and that makes us damned lucky, whatever else you can say. You can't know– I could never explain what it does to you, to your mind, to touch that kind of violence even once, let alone over and over again. I would never want you to know. But I can tell you that – that if I have to work harder than most people do, to be happy, to be kind, to – believe in anything at all – then it's not because I'm trying to scare you away or because I like being alone. I can't tell you all the things I saw, because I like you. And I can't tell you all the things I've done – the person it turned me into – because I want you to like me. But I need you to trust me, Dean. If I push you away, it's not just some game I'm playing. It's because I don't want blood all over this place where I finally have a chance to maybe be happy. Do you understand?”

Dean nods. Of course he can't, not completely, but Cass believes that he's trying. That maybe he understands enough. Or maybe that's just what Cass wants to believe. Dean covers the scars with his palm, pressing Cass' wrist between his warm hands. “I'm going to take you home,” he says seriously. “And I want you to call me. Tomorrow, or on Monday, or next week or next month or – whenever you're ready, whenever you want. I don't know what to say to you. But I do like you, and I'm – I'm glad that you don't want to be alone, because that's not what I want for you, either. I just...want you to call me, whether you call because you need something or because you just want to see me again.”

“Okay,” Cass says. “Thank you.”

They don't really talk on the drive back to Cass', but then, it's not that far, so it's not too awkward. Before he gets out of the car, Cass puts his fingers against Dean's jaw and kisses his lips, but they're both pretty worn out. It's a comfort-seeking touch, not an expression of grand passion, and Cass guesses he does feel comforted by it. He knows tonight didn't go the way Dean wanted it to, but Dean did kiss back, which has to mean something. Something good, Cass thinks.

Cass doesn't call.

Neither does Dean, but of course, he all but promised he wouldn't, so that's – not surprising, even if Cass still feels a thin filament of disappointment every time he glances at his phone. So basically, it's over now if Cass wants it to be.

He doesn't really want it to be, but he still doesn't call.

A week goes by, and by the end of it he's thinking about Dean just slightly less than constantly, the world's saddest achievement. He helps Jody carry her groceries up the stairs and then unpack them, and when she asks him if he has another date tonight, he stares at her kitchen counter and says, “Not – tonight, no. I don't really know if that's something I'm gonna.... I mean, it was honestly nothing serious.”

“Cass,” she says, weary and exasperated, “do you think I'm stupid? You've had a whole lot of nothing-serious since I met you. And how many of them have you introduced to Claire?”

None. For this precise reason, in fact. “That wasn't a good call,” he admits. “It was too soon.”

She looks at him more sympathetically now, and he can probably just let her believe that Dean got spooked if he wants to. “Don't let it get you down, kiddo,” Jody says. “I know it's hard out there, but I still think trying is better than not trying. I think you're brave for trying.”

He nods, feeling obscenely guilty. He's not the one who's been trying all this time, is he? All he's been doing is digging his heels in and expecting the worst, while Dean worked like hell to drag him into accepting one second of happiness, so where the hell does Cass get off pretending that he's brave?

He sits up in bed with his phone for a long time that night. Christ, he thought men were supposed to be easier; out of all the people he's fucked in the past seven years, how is it that the one he picked up drunk in the bathroom of a gay bar is the one who refuses to just – stay where Cass puts him? If Dean were just down to get together and mess around every so often, he'd be the perfect guy.

Cass doesn't know who he's trying to convince. Nobody around here is buying it, anyway.

He extends his availability on Saturday and goes from three clients to six, which is physically and energetically exhausting. His treatment room backs up onto the private yoga studio where he teaches the classes he doesn't hate, so when he locks up there, he lets himself into the empty studio and puts himself through a handful of lazy dolphins and bows and bridges to pry his shoulders open, then takes advantage of the spacious silence to sit with himself for a while.

Jody and Alex took Claire somewhere with them while he was at work, and when he finally checks his messages, Claire's decided to spend the night over there. That's a good thing; he's been afraid for a while that Claire and Alex would grow apart in high school, and Alex is studious and responsible and blah blah blah, a general good influence. He's happy that so far his fears have been unfounded, because unless pop culture has lied to him, every jock needs her best nerd.

Still, that leaves him sitting home alone on a Saturday night, and while he feels better about his life than he did yesterday, he knows there's precisely no chance that he won't end up brooding about a guy he actually could have, which is an infinite recursive loop of depressing.

So, fuck it, he decides to put on his indecent jeans and go back to The Blue Room and take a second run at this picking-up-someone-uncomplicated thing. Hell, he could hardly fuck up that simple objective more than he did last time. And maybe there are healthier ways to manage his emotions, but he's a heroin addict; there are also worse. This, Cass thinks, is what you call the Middle Way.

The jeans do their job, as measured by the number of hands that land on his ass while he's dancing, but deep down he knows his inner pep-talk about drowning out maudlin thoughts of Dean with a new hookup was mostly bullshit. He's always been a lot more bark than bite when it comes to anonymous sex; Dean was an anomaly in more ways than one. Dancing is more reliable. Dancing and flirting is a guaranteed good time, which is more than you can say for sex with strangers.

Dancing and flirting and an undetermined number of tequila shots is...a volatile combination. Cass isn't saying he regrets the tequila shots, per se, but it's hard to deny that they do change the equation.

He finds himself somewhere close to midnight sitting on a table making out with a very tall drag queen, and he thinks, yes, exactly, this is just the right kind of palate-cleansing, life-affirming mistake. Good for me.

But then it turns on a dime, as tequila will sometimes do, and he doesn't know where he lost his drag queen, but he is standing in a stairwell pulling up a number on his phone that he plans to regret in the morning, typing out come find me....

He closes his eyes and waits. Not for long.

I'm gonna need a hint, the reply says, and Cass smiles. He can hear it so clearly in Dean's easy drawl. How is Dean's voice so familiar to him, when they've spoken so few times in the sixteen days since they met?

Dance dance dance dance til you're dead, Cass responds.

If I come, Dean texts back, are you gonna make me dance?

Now how is Cass supposed to let an easy one down the middle of the plate go by like that? He's only human. If you dance with me, I'll make you come, he sends, and then he puts his phone immediately away, pretending his heart isn't banging against his ribs, pretending he just doesn't really care that much what happens next.

He hears the blip that means Dean has sent him an answer, but he doesn't look at it. He just goes back to the dance floor, because it's out of his hands now, whatever happens happens. Non-attachment and all that highly spiritual shit.

It almost works. The music has hit a dark, slinky groove, the bass vibrating underneath his feet like he's about to fall through it, and he likes the smell of all this sweat, the casual touch of a stranger's shoulder or ass brushing against him, everyone a little drunk, a little clumsy, a little lost – everyone alone, the way everyone lives and dies alone, but all together. He does forget, for a little while – maybe not for long, but long enough to pick him up and drop him back down a little sharper, a little clearer than before.

He's caught off guard when someone catches him by the elbow and reels him in – it's such a possessive gesture for the ever-shifting constellation of bodies this crowd has mostly been so far – but then he's pulled up tight against Dean's chest, and it starts to make sense. Dean is wearing a plain black t-shirt that's just barely not painted on him, and Cass can't help stroking his bicep. The bar is too loud to have much in the way of conversation, and honestly Dean doesn't look in the mood for it; he looks intense, not quite angry but not exactly happy, either.

It's too loud to say anything. Cass doesn't know what to say anyway. He shifts his hand up to Dean's shoulder, then lets the other one curl around the back of Dean's neck, ready for a kiss, dying for Dean's kiss. Dean sets his hands low on Cass' hips and steps forward. Cass stumbles back briefly, and then Dean steps again, and he gets it. They're dancing.

There's nothing to it, really. Dean's just guiding him in an easy box step, tuning in to the slower backbeat, the skeletal rhythm under the flashy noise of the production. He uses his thighs and his hips to nudge Cass back and sideways until Cass pulls himself together enough to follow along, and then he just uses his hips to smooth out the predictable, foursquare pattern, adding a little glide and curve to the mix. “You're a good dancer,” Cass says, feeling almost accusatory about it. Dean shrugs slightly.

People start shouting off to the side, and at first Cass thinks it's a bar fight; The Blue Room doesn't seem like that kind of bar, but Cass guesses people are people in every kind of bar. Then he sees that someone's down on the ground, and his mind flashes seizure, and adrenaline and training shock him instantly sober. He tears out of Dean's arms and bolts into the thick of the chaos, shouting at these idiots to clear the space.

This is more than manageable; grand mals look a whole lot worse than they are, though they're sure as hell not comfortable. He sizes the situation up quickly and decides he can do this without injury, so he gets an arm under the guy and another arm over his hip to balance him, and he heaves him over on his side so he won't choke. “You're all right, buddy,” he says, too low to make it over the music, which hasn't stopped. Doesn't matter. All Cass' focus is on holding the energy, holding the space. Things tend to reset themselves if you just give them the space, he's learned. Bodies want what they know; they want to be okay again. They just need to know it's allowed. He supports the guy's head with his hand, trying to protect it from an unpleasant meeting with the floor, and he can feel the heaviness in his fingers that means he's contacting the site of a struggle.

He has a – dream. He sees a library – wooden floors – no, a house full of bookshelves. Some of them have tipped over. Boots stomp heedlessly through them, kicking and tearing them, and no one cares.

Cass is on his knees over a gray-haired man. He's wearing a mala around his wrist, and his hands are soaked in blood. Everyone is shouting except the old man. Nothing but blood comes from his mouth, but his eyes still dart from side to side, betraying his panic. He knows he's about to die.

“You're all right, it's going to be all right,” Cass lies desperately. A bolt of pain shakes the dying man; he seizes, and Cass' hands slip. He can't hold the wreck of this body together any longer, but he can't let go.

He can hear Dean's voice, outside the walls. “Cass!” he's shouting – and “Bobby!” – and “motherfuck!”

“Hold the door!” Cass shouts. “Lock it, don't let him in!”

“We can't--” someone tries to tell him, and Cass' hands are shaking, black blood and maybe worse oozing up through his fingers as he fails to hold the pressure, as every one of Bobby's final breaths only splits his body open further.

He could stop this – he could have stopped this – he can't now, because he's nothing now, but once, but once –

But not now. Shame and fury and sadness draw a red veil over his mind, and he roars, “Keep that fucking door shut, if anyone lets him through that door, I will kill you myself!”

The sound of Dean's fists pounding the door becomes the sound of Dean's shoulder thrown against it, his whole body. He'll break it down soon, but not soon enough. He'll see Bobby's dead body, but he won't stand helplessly and watch him die.

Bobby's eyes are still moving , and Cass wants to laugh. Wants to shake him by the collar and say, What are you waiting for, you stubborn fuck? Just pass out, just let go, just be done. Please.

“Please,” he says. Bobby looks him in the eyes, and Cass watches him die in the grip of one final wave of pain.

Cass stays on his knees, too weak to stand, too sick and ashamed. Around him, people yell and step on books, and he wants to say no, don't, please be careful, those were Bobby's. He says nothing.

Dean's hand grabs him under the arm and hauls him up. “You okay?” he says.

It's not what Cass expects him to say. He doesn't know how to answer. Nothing is okay. “Dean – I'm sorry,” he says, because he couldn't stop it, couldn't do any good, couldn't even ease Bobby's pain.

He puts his arms around Dean, even though he's not supposed to, even though they've talked about this, and why it's not – why they aren't – He knows better, but he can't help it. There's so fucking much he just can't do.

“Okay,” Dean says gruffly. He wraps his arms around Cass, too, even though he's not supposed to, even though they've talked about this. “Hey. Hey. I know, Cass. I know.”

Cass just makes a long, low keen of despair and clings tighter, leaving hand prints that drip blood all down the back of Dean's coat.

A grand mal seizure passes quickly.

Cass blinks, disoriented in the darkness of the bar. None of it is the same, except that he's kneeling, and Dean is saying his name.

Other people are speaking to him, too, thanking him, offering him a hand up, but Dean crowds them away. The man's friends help him to his feet, retrieve his glasses from the floor, talk to Cass in words he can't hear, turn their friend to shepherd him toward the exit.

He glances over his shoulder and smiles at Cass – a warm and knowing smile over a strawberry blond beard, and Cass' mind stutters out and idles helplessly. What the hell just happened?

Dean puts a hand on his back and one under his elbow and helps him to his feet. “You okay, Cass?” he asks.

“I – I know him,” Cass says. “Last week, I-- He tripped, and I helped him-- He dropped his shoeboxes.... I helped him....”

It's the same man, right? It has to be, he'd swear it's the same man. But then, he would swear that Dean is the same man who held Cass in his arms in a house full of books and blood, grieving with him over the death of a man Cass has never met in a place he's never been. And that can't be true, can it? So maybe the other man – men – maybe they're not both real – or they're one and not two, or two and not one, or they don't exist at all. None of that sounds possible, or even sane, but Cass isn't sure that's the standard now.

“Huh, weird,” Dean says, but not as if he finds it anything more than a passing coincidence. “Guess you're his guardian angel.”

Cass shudders, suddenly feeling like someone is trying to fix a broken world by smashing the remaining pieces together haphazardly, trying to make things fit when they just don't.

Something is desperately wrong, and he doesn't know how to tell anyone without explaining that he's hallucinating these bizarre scenes of blood and sickness and sex and Dean, always Dean there with him. He would sound crazy if he tried, and even if someone believed him, what would they do? Return the defective universe for a better one? He doubts anyone kept the receipt.

“Come on,” Dean says, rubbing Cass' shoulder. “I want you to sit down and drink some water.”

Cass sits at a table near the bar and drinks a tiny bottle of seltzer while Dean keeps a steadying arm around his shoulders. “I'm really okay,” Cass says. “I got – dizzy, I don't know why.”

“It could be shock,” Dean says.

“It's not shock. Honestly, Dean, I'm an EMT – or, I was an EMT. A seizure's not a big deal to me. I was just – I had a head rush or something, and then when I saw the guy's face and realized I met him last week, that.... I don't know, it seemed really surreal. We had such a weird conversation then, too.... It's really-- I'm fine. I am.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Well, I don't know if I am, honestly. I'm kinda ready to get out of here.”

Cass smiles wanly at him. “You just got here.”

Dean smiles fleetingly, just to acknowledge that, and stands up, offering Cass his hand. “Let me take you home.”

“Okay,” Cass says, putting his hand in Dean's and standing with him. “Wait, whose home?”

Dean drops his eyes to the floor, looking shy and – beautiful. God, why is he so beautiful? “I was thinking mine,” he says. “I'll make you some coffee, and then – I'll take you home after that, or you can – stay if you want.” Cass just nods.

Scrupulously sincere as always, Dean starts messing with his espresso machine the minute they get back to his condo, because of course for Dean come up to my place, I'll make coffee is not a figure of speech. Cass doesn't really need it, is sure he's as sober as he's ever been in his life, but he thinks Dean might need some little sense that he's providing for Cass, or taking care of him, or God help them both, healing him.

None of that is what Cass wants, and that should mean that Dean isn't what he wants, isn't right for him, isn't what he's looking for in a – partner or whatever you want to call it. Fine, Cass is lonely as hell, but that doesn't mean that any good-looking person in the world who's willing to have him is compatible with him, with his life as it is now or with the few hopes for the future Cass has allowed himself to hang onto.

He paces restlessly around Dean's condo, trying to keep his feet under him while he's hanging twenty floors above street level, while all the stars and all the city lights burst through the wall of windows at him, doing their best to dazzle. Cass is un-dazzleable. He knows this about himself. He's been high up before and he's been all the way down, and he knows that nothing stays, everything is impermanent. He no longer believes in the God of his childhood – infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth – and he no longer believes that it's a failure of his faith. It just happened. Life happened.

If you could live long enough, you'd see everything happen, sooner or later.

“Do you like Americano or-- Cass?”

Cass knows he must look like a crazy person, his forehead and one hand pressed against Dean's windows, leaving streaks – hand prints –

that drip blood all down the back of Dean's coat....

“Hey,” Dean says softly, pulling him away from the skyline. Cass goes willingly into his arms, and Dean flips the switch on his gas fireplace before wrapping Cass up against him. “You sure you're okay, sweetheart?” Cass nods and puts his arm around Dean's shoulders, lets Dean take hold of his hand and guide him slowly into motion. “Sorry our dance got cut short,” he says. “It was nice.”

“I thought you didn't dance,” Cass says. He was obviously wrong. They're dancing right now, gliding in perfect time through the silence.

“I actually do a few things I don't tell my little sister about,” Dean chuckles. “You don't have the market cornered on mystery. You're pretty much looking at everything I know about dancing, but if you're any good at music, you almost can't help figuring out the basics. Staying on the beat and all.”

“Right,” Cass says. “You're a guitar prodigy; all my friends think so.”

Dean chuckles and brushes a kiss onto the corner of Cass' eye that almost makes Cass lose the imaginary beat. “Wanted to be a rock star when I was younger – you know, me and fifty million other teenagers.”

“What happened? Sold all your dreams for six figures and a stock option?”

“Just figured out I ain't no Clapton. You always wanted to be a yoga teacher, or a – whatever the hell else you are?”

“No,” Cass says, not sure whether to laugh or cry. “No. Priest.”

“Ah,” Dean says. “And I can probably guess what happened there, huh?”

“Yeah,” Cass says. “Same thing that usually happens. Grew up. Fell in love.” Left home on a mission. Lost his faith. Fought in a guerrilla war against his own country. Self-medicated. Lost his soulmate. Rebuilt his life from the ground up.

Tale as old as time.

“I could put on some music,” Dean suggests.

Instinctively, Cass clutches his fingers in the back of Dean's t-shirt. “Stay,” he says roughly, then drags his fingers up the back of Dean's neck to bend his forehead down against Cass'.

“Okay,” Dean says. He hasn't missed a step yet; Cass has totally lost track of where the beat should be, but all he has to do is follow Dean's lead, and the silence can't touch him. “Want me to sing?” he suggests, and Cass nods. “Feel her breath on my face,” Dean sings by his ear, so low and husky that it's almost a whisper, “her body close to me – Can't look in her eyes, she's outta my league.”

“Dirty Dancing?” Cass scoffs affectionately. “My mom loves that movie.” It's a total lie – he doesn't even think she was still alive when that movie came out – but Dean deserves it anyway.

“Hush,” Dean says mildly. “It's a good movie. Just a fool to believe I have anything she needs – She's like the wind.”

“Swayze was your first crush, right?” Cass guesses.

Dean huffs a little and says, “I swear this is some kind of compulsion for you.”

“Tell me I'm wrong.”

“You're wrong,” he says. “It was Fred from Scooby-Doo.”

“Doesn't count.”

“Says you; I was very serious about it. Fred was total husband material. But yeah, probably Swayze after that. Point Break is the greatest love story of our time.”

“Yeah,” Cass says thoughtfully, and Dean pulls back enough to give him a raised eyebrow. “I mean, no, it's obviously not,” Cass says, “but yeah, I can see why you'd think so. Has that always been your fantasy, honey? Looking for your hippie outlaw so he can seduce you to the dark side, spring you from a lifetime of following every rule, of always having to be one of the good guys? Can't be bad yourself, can't threaten that 401k and that next promotion, but you can always try just one little taste, then look back someday from your comfortable retirement and say you had a love story once.”

Dean stops dancing and pushes him away. He looks – not quite angry, but frustrated. “Stop it,” he says. “Why do you-- You don't think I know what you're doing? I'm not stupid, and I don't– I don't want to fight with you.”

“I never called you stupid,” Cass says.

“No, but you treat me like I am – like I'm just going to roll over and believe this act you put on, this Zen, free-spirit thing, like I can't tell that you're the one who always has to be the alpha male. You like – exposing people, you like proving that you know things they didn't tell you, that if you want to know something intimate about them you can just take it, you don't have to ask, or God fucking forbid, wait until they offer. That's for other people, right? Because the rest of us are just ants running around on the ground pretending our little lives matter – but you, you're the Last Honest Man, and basic social rules don't apply to you. How am I doing, Cass? Am I scoring any points? Because God knows I tried just being honest with you, just asking for what I wanted, and I don't know what it got me. You act like you might care about me, but then you make fun of my job, you criticize what I eat, you won't even return my calls when you're sober. So I don't want to play this game, I really don't like playing games, but I don't know if there's – any other way in, with you.”

Cass sinks his nails into his palms, trying not to hear his own voice in the back of his head shouting, Lock the door, don't let him in.... “I'm not the Last Honest Man,” he says. “I – used to think I could be, or that I – wanted to be, but I gave that up a long time ago, because I realized that too much truth-- It doesn't set you free. It kills you. A bullet in your mouth, a needle in your arm, it doesn't matter, it kills you if you can't make yourself look away. And I don't want to die. So I live in the illusion as much as anyone now. If I – made you feel like I was judging you, I'm sorry. I'm no better than anyone else, and I'm sure as fuck not more honest.”

“I know my world isn't real,” Dean says, and everything seems to flip upside down. Cass' stomach rolls and his vision warps, and he feels himself wobbling on the edge of one of those chasms between moments, where the ghosts call to him from far below. He reaches out blindly for support and grips the narrow metal mantlepiece of the fireplace, which is hot enough to hurt a little, but not to leave a mark. “I know we're all just naked apes,” Dean says, “and nothing really matters except sex and survival – that nothing really exists except – having food and babies and running from predators, and that eventually we all die and everyone forgets we were ever here. I know what you think of me, but I am a grown man, and I do get that. I don't believe in God and I don't think the universe cares if I'm rich or happy or handsome, but you know what, fuck, I like being rich and happy and handsome, I want that. I'm not looking to save the world. I'm sorry if you think that makes me selfish or shallow, I – try to be a decent person, an honest person, but if none of this matters and everything I see is an illusion, I just.... I want it anyway.”

Cass looks around him, feeling like an alien, feeling like there's something impossible about this tasteful, orderly place that hovers twenty stories up among the stars. He's so high up, a lightless and wingless thing suspended in the sky, and he doesn't think he's allowed to be here. He thinks the fall is going to kill him, and he doesn't want to die.

“I want it, too,” he says, and he reaches for Dean, who reaches back for him. “Dime que eres real,” Cass says desperately, brokenly, between kisses. “Tell me you're real.”

“I'm here, I'm here,” Dean promises him, holding him crushingly tight. “I got you, Cass.”

Dean somehow drags them both to the couch and sits down, which is perfect; Cass' knees sink into the leather as he straddles Dean's lap, and he loves being up higher, being the one to bring his mouth down while Dean yearns up into the kiss (okay, maybe Dean has him pegged with that alpha thing, maybe that was a little bit of projection on Cass' part). He loves all of it, though – the bright citrus taste on Dean's tongue, the hard shape of Dean's jaw between his hands, Dean's hands cupping his ass and holding him securely in place. “I'm sorry,” Cass breathes, kissing his mouth, kissing the freckles strung along his smooth cheek. “I know, I know you tried so hard to be nice to me, and I made it so hard--”

“It doesn't matter,” Dean says. “Easy is boring. I hate that anything bad ever happened to you, but I don't hate your scars. They're yours; they're beautiful.” Cass kisses him and kisses him and can't stop, can maybe never stop, will maybe never want to.

Not that he's disappointed when they fall off the couch, when Dean is on top of him with one hand dug deep into Cass' hair and the other pushing up his ribs and sending wave after wave of sensation through Cass in time with the waves of Dean's body rocking against him. He wraps one leg around Dean's hips, urging him on, and calls soft, wordless encouragement into Dean's mouth, scratching over Dean's shirt, trying to make every filthy promise he can think up at once with his body.

Dean pushes up on one hand, and Cass feels paralyzed, pinned to the carpet by the sight of Dean's flushed and swollen lips. “Tell me what you want,” Dean demands. “A straight answer, goddammit. I want to hear you say it.”

“You,” Cass says, and then he has to take another breath, because he only has the lung capacity to get through this syllable by syllable, apparently. “Get – get a condom. I want – you. In me, Dean.”

It sucks to feel Dean push away from him, but the sound of Dean's frustrated groan makes up for it a little bit. “You're so lucky I'm a gentleman,” Dean says, reaching down to grip Cass' wrist and help him to his feet.

“No, I didn't want to move,” Cass whines. “Was that not clear?”

“Yeah, well, I've tried having sex on this floor before,” Dean says. “Someone always winds up hitting the coffee table. Anyway, I like the way you look in my bed.” And Dean may not have much of a natural sense for interior decorating, but Cass couldn't care less anymore, not when he makes that sound so damn sexy.

“Was this our third date?” Cass can't help asking as Dean pulls him toward the bedroom. “Because this part's good, but a lot of the rest of it kind of sucked.”

“I know, because I let you be in charge of it,” Dean says. “That's not happening again for a while.”

And Dean's such a damn gentleman, he doesn't only help Cass get both their shirts off, he pulls the sheets back on the neatly made bed and draws the pillow down for him. Cass gives him a wry little smile and lies down, teasing himself just a little with light touches across his collarbone while Dean gets out condoms and lube. They work as a team to get Cass out of his jeans and underwear, and Dean looks him up and down so affectionately that Cass almost can't deal with it, so he lets his eyes fall half-shut and starts stroking his own cock, trying to move the needle a little more toward porn and away from – whatever else Dean is thinking.

Cass isn't necessarily opposed to whatever-else. He just needs a little more time and a lot more blood flowing to his brain before he'll be able to process it.

Dean licks his fingertips efficiently, almost casually, and the effect is fucking devastating; Cass is making the most pathetic sounds even before Dean starts to rub circles around the head of his cock. “Is this good?” Dean says, which might make him sound like a sensitive, caring lover, but the glint in his eye definitely says, payback is a bitch.

“I hate you,” Cass says.

“Gee, Cass, that's uncalled-for,” Dean says. “Maybe you should get laid more often.”

“Maybe I should,” Cass says. “Know anyone who's into that kind of thing?”

Dean chuckles a little, then leans down and presses a kiss low on Cass' groin that sparks what feels like a direct physical pressure on Cass' thighs, pushing them apart. Dean follows along lower to kiss the freshly exposed skin of his inner thigh, and Cass decides if there were ever a time to practice non-attachment and just let whatever happens happen, this is it. He tips his head back and breathes as deeply as he can; he can't help stroking through Dean's hair, but he doesn't try to gain control of his head, or of anything else. Giving up control isn't Cass' instinctive response to – anything, but he suspects something nice will happen to him if he gives it a try.

About a million nice things happen. Dean, it turns out, can do the most amazing things with his mouth – sharp little tugging kisses that feel almost like bites, lazy slides of the tip of his tongue, hot drags of his open mouth that make Cass arch up into them like he's magnetized – and he's not shy about trying all of them out on every bit of Cass he can reach. The things he can do with his hands are somehow less flashy, but it doesn't take Cass long to start appreciating the nuances, and it doesn't take him long after that to start calling Dean's name like it's the only word he still knows.

It takes forever to get Dean naked except for the condom, but by that point Cass doesn't care; he expects to spend the rest of his life in this bed letting Dean do whatever he wants, and he has no regrets. It does seem like it would be nice to make good use of all those hip-opening stretches, though, so he pulls his leg up, tucking Dean's solid shoulder in the crook of his knee, and Dean shudders and pauses with his fingers inside Cass, looking a little overwhelmed. “Don't stop,” Cass murmurs. “Dean – honey, c'mon. Don't leave me like this.”

“Wait,” Dean says tightly. He bows his head a little so Cass can't see his expression, but Cass can definitely see the labored way his back is moving as his ribs expand and contract, like no matter how deeply he breathes, he can't pull himself under control. “Just – gimme a second.”

“No,” Cass frets, stirring restlessly underneath Dean, tightening his leg around him a little. “Dean. Please, I want it. You're so good at this, you've got me so....” He doesn't know the word. He doesn't know a lot of words he used to know.

“I – can't,” Dean says. “You're – still really tight, you're--”

“No, I'm not,” Cass says. “I'm very flexible. Yoga.”

Dean lets out a rough snort of laughter and says, “One of us is really wrong about what yoga is.”

Cass laughs back giddily, because Dean is funny, and he thinks Cass is funny, and they make each other so happy. They don't make any sense at all, and Cass doesn't care. He just wants to stay like this forever, naked and sweaty and sex-stoned and laughing with this gorgeous boy who chases Cass like Cass is someone you'd want to catch.

He is still pretty tight when he finally manages to drag Dean inside of him; it hurts, and his fingers bite hard into Dean's shoulder while Dean rubs circles with his fingertips over Cass' scalp and murmurs soft, blurry apologies. “Don't,” Cass says, feeling blurry, too. “Don't be sorry. I want this, I came all this way, and I found you...” He doesn't know exactly what he's saying, but it must be the right thing, because Dean groans and moves inside him, and Cass feels himself melting, spinning, glowing bright enough to light the world.

Dean carries him all the way up, and they float without falling, and they both break, but they don't die. Cass suspects they can't die, not anymore. That's impossible, of course, but why? If nothing is real except the two of them, why can't the rules be whatever they say?

He lets Dean play the gentleman and clean him up after, and then he lies snugly in Dean's arms, pressing sleepy kisses against Dean's throat and under his jaw. “What's your favorite love story?” Dean asks.

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Cass says, too spacey to think up a lie.

“Yeah,” Dean says, “I can see why it would be.”

“Why?” Cass says.

“Because it's depressing as shit?”

Cass hums a little, slipping his arm over Dean. “No, it's not. It's about perseverance. Bravery. Defying fate.”

“Making the same mistakes over and over again,” Dean says.

“Hope,” Cass says.

Cass wakes up naked and alone in Dean's bed, again, but other than that, everything is different. He rolls over and breathes Dean's smell from his pillow, and he remembers everything, and he smiles.

The bedroom door is open, and he can hear the distinctive sleepy cadence of NPR, and a non-specific thumping and shuffling as Dean moves around, presumably in his kitchen. A pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt are folded up at the foot of the bed. The t-shirt is branded with the logos of a billion corporate sponsors for some kind of breast cancer charity bike race; Cass is surprised at first that Sandover isn't one of them, but he looks closer at the names and realizes the shirt is from a California event, not Cleveland. He deems it boring, but fit to wear around Dean's apartment, at least. He wonders if it was the first thing Dean pulled out of a drawer for him, or if he chose it specifically – still feeling a little defensive about the possibility that Cass thinks he's shallow and lacks a social conscience, maybe?

Cass shakes himself off, irritated. This really is a compulsion for him, isn't it? It doesn't matter, the stupid shirt doesn't matter. He knows what he needs to know about Dean, which is that Dean wanted him to come here and wanted him to stay.

He pads out of the bedroom and gets a cup of coffee and a quick kiss from Dean, who's fully dressed down to his sneakers and socks, his hair just slightly damp. Cass sits at the breakfast bar and waits for the interview segment to be over – someone's promoting their new book about the Cuban Missile Crisis – but Dean is also waiting for the break, and before Cass can get out so much as a good morning, Dean has fired up a terrifyingly industrial-looking blender, turning twelve square feet of produce into sixteen ounces of maroon ooze in mere moments. “Okay, your face is very expressive,” Dean says, “so I think we can just pretend like we've already had this conversation, can't we?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Cass says innocently. “It looks – delicious?”

“As a matter of fact, it is,” Dean says. “I put black pepper and turmeric in it for an extra kick. And it has the equivalent of six servings of fruit and vegetables.”

“Mmhm,” Cass says. “Also, you know what else has the equivalent of six servings of fruit and vegetables?”

“So help me, if you say six servings of fruit and vegetables....”

Cass smiles at him and says, “You know me so well.”

Dean gives him another little kiss, leaning across the bar, and says, “Quit being such a dick and drink some beets.” Cass decides that neither of those things will actually kill him and does what he's told.

It's okay. The juice, that is – it's still too early to decide how he feels about being less of a dick.

“How are you feeling?” Dean asks, and the real sympathy in his voice is confusing for a second. How should he be feeling? Dean starts to blush and look awkward, and he says, “I just didn't know if you were – uh – still kind of overloaded from last night, or...um....”

“Sore?” Cass guesses, and even though Dean doesn't confirm it, his face does. “Aw, honey. You want to hear about how big and strong you are, how you fucked me so good on your big cock that I'm still feeling it?”

Dean rolls his eyes, still blushing. “No. I was literally just checking up on your well-being, because for some inexplicable reason, I kind of like you.”

“I'm good,” Cass says, and then he makes his voice a little huskier and says, “And, yes. So are you.” Dean just shakes his head and tops off Cass' coffee.

“I really hate to rush you out,” Dean says, “but Jo's coming back into town, and I promised I'd help her unload all her stuff into her new place and take her to lunch. I would invite you, but I'm sure we'll mostly talk about how it went with our folks, and I don't want to put her on the spot, in case she gets emotional or something.”

“I understand,” Cass says. “She already found a place?”

“Well – seems like for now, anyway,” Dean says. “She's renting the spare room in Sam's condo.”

Guess that's what Cass gets for a week of radio silence; he's obviously fallen really far behind on the gossip. “So they're going to be – roommates?”

Dean shrugs, his face very carefully arranged to say, I can only tell you what I've been told. “Apparently she got real attached to his dumb dog.”

“Well, good for the three of them,” Cass says mildly. “Four of them? Anyway, tell her I said hello.”

Dean sits on the bar stool next to him and puts his hand on Cass' thigh to spin him sideways so they're facing each other. Even having Dean's knees pressed to his knees makes Cass feel weirdly cozy, and he wants to crawl back over Dean, wants to feel his heat and hear his heart and God, he's got it so bad. “Cass....” Dean says, and his tone puts Cass' back up almost right away; it just sounds like bad news somehow. “I know that you don't – rush into things, and I know your plate is pretty full the way things are now. But I don't– after last night, I don't think I'm the only one who feels like this could – this could be something. Like we have a connection. And I've really been trying to let you set the pace, but the thing is, it's kind of not working for me. I'm not saying you have to make a commitment right this very second, but--”

“But you kind of are?” Cass says. He isn't sure what this feeling in his stomach is, if he's scared or excited or guilty in advance for the inevitable way he's going to fail to be the normal, loving boyfriend that Dean so obviously wants and needs in his life.

“A little one,” Dean says. “I've hung out with you four times, and all four times, I was this total ball of anxiety, because I knew that if I blew my chance to make myself seem interesting to you, I'd never see you again. And I kinda can't keep doing that, because – Cass, I'm pretty boring. I have my job and my routines and a few friends, and – that's it, really, I don't have experiences or travel the world or do adventurous things, and you're probably right, I'm probably living out some kind of fantasy through you, because you're so interesting, you've done so many things, and I want to know about all of them. I don't have much to say that's going to impress you, but I love listening to you, I love that you see the world so differently from me. But I'm going to have a damn heart attack if I keep trying to go out with you like you're the Dread Pirate Roberts, and every date ends with, Goodnight, Dean, good work, sleep well, I'll most likely dump you in the morning.”

Cass smiles at him. “How'd you figure out I love that movie?”

“Everyone loves that movie. If I'm not what you're looking for, then – I'll be sad, but I'll understand why. But I think you do want to keep seeing me. And if that's true, then – then I want you to say that. Not just that you'll try going out with me one more time, but that you want to keep seeing me, that you're okay with being – the guy I'm seeing. I get that it's probably out of your comfort zone, that you'd probably be happier playing things by ear, but....”

“But you're out of your comfort zone, too,” Cass says, leaning close enough to put his hand on Dean's cheek. “I know. And you're right, you shouldn't have to be the only one. That's not fair to you.”

Dean's eyes close briefly, relieved to be making himself understood. He opens them again and meets Cass' eyes frankly. “I don't need you to promise me your whole life here and now just because we had the best sex of my life last night. Just – give us a little time to see how we adjust to each other, see if this is working out. My company has an annual banquet in May – it's black tie, it's excruciatingly boring, and it's less than two months from now. I want you to be my plus-one. I want you to just agree that, barring emergencies or the end of the world or something, you expect you'll still be dating me in a few weeks. Can you give me that, Cass?”

It's probably something he should think about. It's definitely something he's never done before. He doesn't know how he feels about the idea that Dean Smith is all at once about to become the person he's devoted more of himself to than anyone in the world except his wife and daughter. That feels huge, but if he's honest with himself, almost everything that's happened since he met Dean feels larger-than-life. “Annual banquet at Sandover Bridge and Iron, huh?” he says, because he's a dick, and he can't just say any of that other stuff. “And you claim you don't have any exotic adventures to share.”

“Not gonna lie,” Dean says, “some years there are casualties.”

“Oh, good,” Cass says. “I only like putting on a tux for espionage-related purposes. Yeah. Go ahead and put me down for it.”

Dean leans in and kisses him, brief but firm. “I wish I could spend all day here with you.”

“Next time,” Cass says softly, and he loves the way it makes Dean's breath catch for just a second. “I'll call you this week.”

“Will you?” Dean asks, low and sweetly vulnerable.

“Yes,” Cass promises, and it's not his whole life here and now, but it's still a big deal.

He takes the bus home, although it seems to tax Dean's every gentlemanly instinct to allow it, even when Cass points out that it lets him stop at the grocery store on the way without taking up Dean's time, and then points out that he's a grown fucking man who's been getting around this city for years without owning a car. Dean still insists on walking him to the elevator – to the elevator, like Cass is somehow going to run into trouble on the way. “You're ridiculous,” Cass tells him, between kisses. “You want to ride with me down to the lobby, or do I have to push the button all on my own?”

“This relationship's off to a great start,” Dean says.

“Aren't you going to feel stupid if you're the one who can't get through two months of this and calls it off?”

“And prove you right?” Dean says, pushing him away with one last playful kiss to the side of his mouth. “Forget it.”

He doesn't think to look at his phone until he's on the bus, and the only text message is the one from Dean that he didn't look at last night – the emoji of the blushing face with big, round eyes. Cass smiles at it for blocks.

By the time he gets home, Claire's already made herself nachos for lunch, which is fine; he bought ingredients to make turkey chili, but it'll turn out better anyway if he can let it simmer all afternoon. She's doing her homework at the table with headphones on, and she looks him over skeptically when he comes in but doesn't comment, so he just gives her a nod and starts separating the groceries into things to put away and things he needs for the chili.

He probably has the option of not telling her anything – just letting it unfold organically, letting her notice the parts that affect her and ignore whatever doesn't. But that's never really been their relationship, or at least not the better parts of their relationship. There was a lot of lying and hiding and trying to pretty things up for Claire's sake when she was small, but none of it really worked, except to convince her that what her parents told her bore no relationship to reality. Maybe he lets the pendulum swing too far the other way now, at least from time to time, but he thinks it's helped. She trusts him, he never assumes that trust can't be taken away in a heartbeat, and it works for them.

So when he calls her over to taste-test the chili (she wants a lot more oregano), he tries not to make it sound too huge or heavy, just says like it's the interesting news of the day, “So, Dean and I are dating now. Dating seriously. Or – semi-seriously, I guess, at first, with the potential for serious. That means – you know, that you'll be meeting him again. He'll probably come over here sometimes.”

She doesn't really say anything to that, but then Cass didn't really frame it like he was asking for her opinion. He guesses that's because he's actually not asking for her opinion. Down the road, if Claire and Dean get to know each other and they genuinely can't get along, that's a problem, but he's not going to go into this assuming that's likely. She'll get to like Dean, or else she'll ignore him, she's pretty good at that, but either way they'll all get used to the new normal. Cass is – almost totally confident about that.

So he doesn't push the issue, and she doesn't bring it up until pretty late that evening, when they're sharing the couch, eating chili and watching Starship Troopers, and then suddenly out of nowhere she says, “Do you still love Mom?”

Maybe he should've been expecting this, but he wasn't. He was expecting her to feel weird about having to make room for a stranger in her life, and probably to be less than thrilled about losing some of Cass' attention or focus or something, but – not this. “I.... Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I mean – I don't think that's something that really goes away. Not when you really love someone, and when you go through so much with them for such a long time. I'll always love your Mom, but – Claire, you know, she – she didn't even want to be married to me anymore before she died. So it's kind of – not relevant to anything anymore.”

“I know how screwed up she was,” Claire says quietly, stirring her chili. “I remember. But you – you were, too, and you got better.”

“Claire,” he says helplessly. “Claire, honey, you can't think about.... I know it's easy to go over it in your head, and to think – maybe if this, or if that, or maybe it could've gone differently. Believe me, kitten, I know. And you know, maybe it's even true. Maybe she would've gotten herself straightened out, and maybe if that happened, she would've wanted – us all to be together again. I don't know, and you don't know, and we can't ever know. But even if we knew for sure, why would it . matter? It doesn't bring her back.”

“I know,” Claire mutters. “Does he know about her, though? Did you tell him?”

“Not a lot,” Cass admits. “We still have a few getting-to-know-you stages left to go through before we get to – all that. But if you're worried that I'm going to somehow try and hide your mother, or be ashamed of her or something, don't be. Even if I could remotely get away with that, she deserves more from me. And – honestly, so does Dean. I was with your mom for fourteen years. Nobody can really know me or be part of my life without knowing who she was, the good parts and the bad parts.”

That's good enough for Claire, or at least she seems calm about everything when he kisses her and sends her off to bed a little later. Cass is pretty sure the whole thing took five years off his life, but Claire seems okay.

He lies in bed for a while, restlessly trying to decide between reading or meditating or catching up on his news feed. None of it sounds good. He thinks he already might miss Dean a little, and then it hits him like an anvil that – he's actually just allowed to call Dean for no particular reason. Just because he'd like someone to talk to. That's how relationships work, right?

His heart is racing as he pulls up Dean's number, which is crazy, he's – definitely allowed to do this, it's not creepy or stalking or overly needy, it's – good, isn't it? It's something he's almost positive will make Dean happy, so he's not sure why he's being so....

“Hey, you,” Dean says when he answers, and Cass relaxes a little, because he does sound warm and happy – which he admittedly sounds when he talks to almost anyone, but it works on Cass anyway.

He lies down and tucks himself more comfortably in, turning off the lamp so that he's only in the glow of his screen and the dim city lights filtering through his curtains. “Hello,” he says. “Just – wondering how it went with Jo.”

And Dean takes it from there, telling gently mocking stories of Sam's awkwardness, funny stories about Sam's dog's aggrieved jealousy, private and tender stories about his parents, who live in that odd intersection between their old-fashioned Midwestern inability to discuss emotions and their fierce love of their kids. It's not boring at all, and it's – given so freely, given to Cass like he's completely welcome to know all these things and nothing could be more natural. He doesn't know whether to feel lucky that Dean is like this, or worried that he'll never be able to return this generosity, no matter how worthy of it Dean is, how – valuable he already is to Cass.

“Are you okay?” Dean asks him eventually.

“Me? Yeah, I'm fine,” Cass says. “I'm awake.”

“I know, you just – talk more, usually. Just thought I should check.”

“Sorry,” he says.

He probably has the option of not saying anything else, but... Dean deserves more.

“I talked to Claire about you today,” he says. “She's never met anyone I've – gone out with before this, so I didn't know what to expect at all. It was pretty nerve-wracking.”

“And?” Dean prompts after a minute.

Cass strokes his fingers lightly over his ribs – over the t-shirt he stole from Dean this morning – and he decides he won't return it. He wonders if Dean will discover it in Cass' dresser someday soon, and if he'll steal it back, or if it belongs to Cass now. “I don't think she's got a problem with you,” he says. “But it did bring up some stuff for her. Some feelings about – how this makes her mother seem even further away, if that makes sense.”

“Of course it does,” Dean says. “Does she not have any relationship at all with her mom anymore?”

“Her mom is....” He closes his eyes and says something he almost never says out loud, that he always fears he'll betray himself by saying, because he's not really at peace with it and doesn't know if he ever can be. “Amelia died five years ago.”

“Oh. God,” Dean says. “God, that's – so much for a kid to go through.”

“Yeah,” Cass says. “Well, Claire's a warrior. She's okay, she's – really bizarrely normal, actually. She's good.”

Dean's voice drops a little as he says, “When I was, uh– My senior year of high school, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I ended up putting off college for a year, to help my dad get her through chemo and take care of Jo.”

“That's a big responsibility for a teenager,” Cass says.

“I don't think I felt responsible for it, exactly. I mean, not like I had to do it or something. I wanted to be with my family. Anyway, it was – fine, she's fine now. I know it's not the same thing at all, but.... My mom is so strong, she was always the center of the family. And then to shift all of a sudden into thinking of her as someone I had to protect, someone who needed us to take care of her-- I don't know. You always know your parents are human, but then one day you know it, and things change. I guess I can still be a little – overprotective of her. Jo thinks I can, anyway. That I go too far out of my way to avoid upsetting Mom, or – disagreeing with her, or anything. But I was like that before, too, so maybe that's not why. I just...don't like it when she's upset with me. Jo loves it when Mom's upset with her, so I think we're just kinda speaking different languages there.”

Cass can't help smiling. “How exactly are you going to upset your mother? Is there some way in which you are somehow not the perfect son?”

“Well, I haven't been real successful at bringing a nice girl home,” Dean says dryly. “And grandkids may turn out to be a little complicated.”

“Ouch,” Cass says. “She doesn't know...?”

“Well, she's not stupid,” Dean sighs. “Maybe she does know. But it's not something we've ever talked about. So – you know, even if it was tough, I think it's awesome that you talk to Claire about your life, that you have that kind of relationship with her. My parents.... I love them to death. I'd do anything for them. But they're not always easy to talk to.”

“That's their loss,” Cass says. “You're – a very cool person to know.”

Dean is silent for a beat, and he sounds even more sincere than he always sounds when he says, “Thanks, Cass.”

The next morning, Cass wakes up and he's a person who has a boyfriend. It's – weird, but not too weird. He's still himself, still facing basically the same day he'd be facing if he'd never met Dean. He can't even spell out what's weird or different, but he can feel the extra weight he's carrying now, the complications and potential complications. It's like the opposite of a phantom limb: instead of feeling something he's lost, he's feeling all the extra attachments that no one else can see.

It's not uncomfortable, except in its unfamiliarity.

He doesn't talk to Dean on Monday, and then on Tuesday Dean and Sam both show up at one of his evening classes at the studio, which he definitely did not see coming in the slightest. “I'm just trying to make some positive changes in my life,” Sam tells him very earnestly. “There are so many things I want to do, and it's so easy to fall into a comfortable job and get lazy and just let life happen to you, you know? I want to find my focus and be in better shape – more mentally fit, spiritually, not just – I mean, all of it. It really feels like the right time.”

Dean says, “I am literally just here to look at your ass.”

“Oh, yeah, I get that all the time,” Cass says breezily. “Does this go both ways? Can I show up at your office and check you out now?”

Sam throws his head back and lets out a startling caw of laughter. “I would give everything I own just to see Crowley's face if you did that,” he says.

“Well, that's no way to start meeting those long-term goals of yours,” Dean says a little too snappishly, not quite meeting anyone's eyes.

“Oh, okay, let's put a pin in this,” Cass says. “One of you is going to be answering a lot of questions soon, because there's clearly a story here. But in the meantime, I actually get paid to do work, so we're going to be starting class soon. Shoo, go away.”

They put their mats in the back of the room and spend about half the class horsing around and occasionally trying to knock each other over, which is probably an insurance risk for the studio or something, but Cass can't bring himself to say anything because they're so damn cute. Sam seems to take to it like a duck to water, though, and he buys a twenty-class pass from the front desk.

Dean does not take to it, and he whines about his hamstrings until Cass takes a hot shower with him and massages his legs and gives him a blowjob, which is so much more work than Cass is prepared to go to on a regular basis that he's actually relieved by how much Dean has decided he hates yoga.

He barely makes it home before Claire, who barely makes it home before her curfew, and he briefly wonders which of them is going to have to nurse the other through a stupid adolescent broken heart first. Then he shuts that thought down, because the part where he and Dean are happy is a legitimate life experience, too, and he wants to enjoy it for a while. Whatever happens after this – happens, but he doesn't have to let it have so much power over him. Being fully present in the moment isn't Cass' strong suit, but he understands the value of cultivating that skill.

It gets easier over time.

Dean likes routines, and he incorporates Cass into his calendar with Friday night dates and Sunday afternoon non-double-dates over beer and pool with Jo and Sam (because Jo and Sam are in theory not dating, even though the Angel Gabriel could descend from on high and proclaim that to be God's honest truth and Cass still wouldn't believe it). Jo resents not being able to drink beer but makes up for it by destroying them all at pool (Dean can occasionally beat her, which seems to thoroughly outrage her; Dean just chalks his cue and says mildly, “Hey, I'm Ellen Smith's kid, too”). He sends Cass funny and random little texts throughout the day, which Cass never responds to, and Cass manages to talk him into phone sex on at least a few weeknights. After they discover that they both have a little bit of a fetish for the idea of Dean bent over his desk in his suit, it stops requiring any talking-into.

Cass waits a few weeks before he invites Dean over to his place for dinner on Friday. “It's a trap, isn't it?” Dean says. “You're going to strand me in hostile foreign territory and then make me eat lasagna or burritos or cherry pie or something.”

“No,” Cass says, “but I'm intrigued by your list of nightmare food scenarios that sound exactly like what a person who's terrified of white flour might miss eating the most.”

“I'll just do a juice fast the week before,” Dean says. “It'll be fine.”

“I'm starting to think you say things like that specifically to piss me off.”

“What kind of person would do that to someone they love? I'd have to be a total dick,” Dean says, far too innocently.

It takes Cass several hours to realize that while he was admiring the sneaky way Dean called him a total dick, he completely overlooked that whole love thing. It just sounded so natural when Dean said it, he didn't give it a thought. He thinks it's weird that – it doesn't feel weirder to him.

Because he's not a total dick, Cass does spend a few days browsing the kind of holier-than-thou websites he hates, looking for Dean-friendly recipes. He finally settles on cracked pepper shrimp with a salad and gazpacho. “It's too early for gazpacho,” Claire tells him the night before when he takes her shopping with him. “These tomatoes all suck. Anyway, I thought you didn't buy out-of-season produce from Argentina.”

“Yeah, but my gazpacho is delicious,” Cass says.

Claire holds a tomato up to the fluorescent light and squints at it with one eye. “Not with these it won't be.”

“It's fine, his standards are very low.”

“Great, you're really talking this guy up,” she says. “This dinner just sounds like more and more fun.”

“You'll have fun,” he says, grabbing the tomato from her hand and dropping it in his bag with the others. “You vill haf fun, or you vill face ze consequences.” She rolls her eyes and smiles reluctantly, which is good, because Cass needs her not morose and sarcastic tomorrow. Plan B was getting her liquored up in advance, and that's not best parenting practices, so if stupid dad jokes are still working to get a smile out of her for now, he's happy.

He was sort of hoping that Dean's natural ease with people would provide the social glue for the evening, but when Cass opens the door, he thinks Dean looks about as nervous as Cass feels. “Please relax,” Cass says, loosening Dean's tie a bit. “You have a sister, you know teenage girls can smell fear.”

“Has you should relax ever worked to relax anyone in the history of time?” Dean says, then puts a paper bag in his hands. “I didn't know what to bring.”

It's a four-pack of upscale artisinal sodas, blood orange. Cass looks at it for a second before it fully sinks in on him that of course Dean normally brings a bottle of wine to a dinner party, because it is the Way of His People, but that he wanted to be sure he brought something tonight that everyone could share, and the fact that Dean thought about that, the idea that he went to a store and walked the aisles trying to decide what would appeal to a kid but also not seem tacky and cheap as a gift – the care Dean takes when he cares about something – it really gets to Cass somehow, and he feels honestly a little bit verklempt. He puts an arm around Dean's neck and kisses him softly, and it's not easy to stop. “Uh,” Dean says. “Not that I don't-- but can I come in?”

“Right, yes,” Cass says, getting out of the doorway. “So – this is where I live.” He gestures expansively around, and because the hall and dining area and kitchen and living room are all mostly open space, just cut up by counters and low walls, that's most of the tour right there. “My room,” he says, pointing at the door on the far side of the living room, “and Claire's,” he says, banging sharply on her door right behind him. (“Okay, I'm coming!” she yells, but the door doesn't open.) “Here, it's pretty warm out tonight,” he says. “I'll open the balcony doors.”

“I think it's nice,” Dean says. “It looks... I don't know, normal. In a good way.”

“Much to my dismay, I've gotten awfully normal in my old age,” Cass admits.

“In a good way,” Dean says, and Cass more or less agrees.

Dinner is a little awkward, because of course the harder Dean tries to be charming, the more charming he is, and the more Claire feels obligated to compensate by aggressively not trying at all, and by the time he serves the shrimp, Cass is really wishing he'd gone with Plan B, at least for himself. But then after trying a hundred and five different conversational gambits that don't go anywhere, Dean says something about Project Runway, and Claire sets her fork down, stares intently into his eyes and says, “America's Next Top Model is better.” Dean's eyes widen like she slapped him with a glove, and suddenly they're engaged in the kind of intensely passionate debate over pure, meaningless trivia that Cass stopped going to PTA meetings to escape, but this time he couldn't be more grateful for it.

“Don't look at me,” he says when they both appeal to him for validation. “I'm a Drag Race guy.”

After that things are a little smoother, and Claire doesn't even get defensive when Cass brags about her last game and how she's the one who made dessert, because she used to bug him constantly for chocolate avocado mousse until he told her she should learn to make it herself, and now hers is far better than his ever was. When Cass finally releases her into the wild – or at least into her room where she can re-insert the brain jack that keeps her connected to her friends – he gives her a hug and thanks her. “He's super boring,” Claire says under her breath.

“I know,” Cass says. “I like him, though.”

Claire shrugs and says, “I guess he's nice,” and Cass is going to take that as an unequivocal, blowout win.

He brings the rest of the mousse and a bottle of wine over to Dean on the couch, and he hand-feeds the former to Dean while they watch The Daily Show. “You could take this off,” Cass says, pushing at Dean's jacket. “Make yourself a little comfortable.”

Dean smiles at him and lets his jacket be taken away and his tie untied. He leans back against the arm of the couch while Cass unfastens a button on his shirt and kisses his exposed throat. “I am comfortable,” Dean murmurs, stroking through Cass' hair. “I like it here. I really like watching you with Claire. You're such a good dad.”

“I know, hot, right?” he says, half-seriously.

“So hot,” Dean says, entirely so. “But not just that. I don't know, it's just – reassuring to see that you – what's a nice way of saying have human emotions?”

“It's the part where you sound surprised that's not so nice,” Cass says dryly. “No, look, I know what you mean. I can come off a little – what's the word.”

“Chilly? Detached? Heartless?”

“Guarded,” Cass says with a little glare. “But – I mean, you do know that I'm – not, right? Or – I mean, I am guarded, but not – the other stuff.”

Dean kisses his forehead. “I know,” he says. “But when you're around Claire, you don't come off like that at all. That's why it's nice to watch. Like a little preview of what you might be like if I ever get you fully thawed out.”

“You know, I think you're more of a dick than people give you credit for, too,” Cass says, and Dean's chuckle rumbles through him where their chests are pressed together. He kisses Dean's neck a little more and then says, “It's called non-attachment.”

“Hm?” Dean says.

“I try to – to not get caught up in emotional stuff. Because I can get caught up in it. When I was – when I was more open, I let everything hurt me, all the terrible things that happen in the world. I felt everything so intensely, and I didn't really know how to shut it down. I lashed out sometimes; I hurt people – some people who deserved it and some people who didn't. And then when I couldn't keep fighting, I – had to shut it off somehow. Heroin worked great, but it turned out to kind of interfere with the parenting gig. So I went to therapy, and then the meditation and yoga stuff, and I don't feel as out of control as I did. Maybe it's age, too, I don't know. But I guess I don't – really trust my emotions. They led me down a lot of shitty, harmful roads. Questioning everything, trying to keep things in perspective, trying to just focus on what I can affect – all that gave me my life back. And now I'm – normal, and my kid is doing really well, and business is pretty steady, and I'm just not inclined to take stupid risks anymore for – idealistic reasons. Or for – love or whatever.”

Dean is stroking over his back, long and heavy and rhythmic. “Sweetheart,” he says, “I promise you that I am not the guy who's going to talk you into taking stupid risks. If you haven't been able to trust your heart in the past, I get that. But you can trust me. I won't ask you to do anything crazy, okay?” He kisses Cass' hair and says, “Let me take care of you. I'm really good at it.”

Cass closes his eyes and puts his head down on Dean's chest. “How are you single?” he says.

“I'm pretty bad at relationships,” Dean says, which sounds hilarious to Cass. “No, really,” Dean says in response to the involuntary noise Cass makes. “I always put work first, and I'm not spontaneous, and I don't like people's pets, any of them, and I'm pretty vanilla in bed, and I'm not out of the closet all the time, and I really want marriage and kids, which you can imagine is not the first thing guys in their twenties want to hear. It just – ends up sounding like a lot of effort to most people, and not really what they imagined it would be like to be with a rich, good-looking guy. I'm just...better on paper, I guess.”

“I think you're a disaster on paper,” Cass says. “Genuinely, if someone tried to set me up with you on a blind date, I would consider gnawing my own leg off first.”

“Thanks,” Dean says, bemused. “What does it mean that I actually understand what you're trying to say here?”

“That we have a connection,” Cass says. “So who did it work with? You must have been in love at least once.”

Dean's quiet for a minute, and then he says, “Once. He was – my first.”

“Of course he was,” Cass says fondly. “Hundred percent chance you fell in love with the first guy you nailed.”

Dean pokes him pretty hard just under the ribs. “It wasn't like that,” he says. “It wasn't – just some kid thing. He was a friend. He was– I trusted him like family. He was a little older than me--”

The father-instincts activate instantaneously, and Cass props himself up on his elbow to say suspiciously, “How much older?”

Dean pushes him back down with a short laugh. “A little older. Jeez, relax. We started hanging out when I was sixteen and he was twenty, and I was stupid in love with him and stupid obvious about it, but he tried so hard to ignore it, thinking maybe I'd grow out of it or find someone more my own age or whatever. He might as well have been the only person who existed, as far as I was concerned. I was finally desperate enough to just kiss him. It was my first real kiss. It was the Fourth of July, before my senior year, in the bed of his truck.”

“Sounds romantic,” Cass says, smiling a little into Dean's chest.

“It was. He was. He was good to me. He always was.”

“So you were together for – what, two years? One year of high school and then the year you stayed afterwards? Or did you try to do long-distance for a while, too?”

“Yeah, we were together for – six years, I guess. We talked a lot about it when I left, and we decided it would put too much strain on us if we tried to be completely exclusive, so – we agreed that we could both mess around with other people. And we both did, but we talked all the time, he was still my best friend. The plan was always that after I graduated, he'd move with me to wherever I got a job, but... you know, four years is.... People change. And we still loved each other, but we'd gotten used to having lives that didn't really include each other as much, and...maybe we could've gotten past that, maybe if we'd taken the jump and moved in together, it would've made us closer than ever. But he spent six years waiting for me to tell the people who mattered the most in my life who he really was to me, and – he got sick of it. Eventually anyone would get sick of hearing why it wasn't the right time. And he just stopped believing me when I told him it would ever be different. I hate that I hurt him, because he would never have hurt me. I know that. It just seemed, at the time, like...that's how it had to be. So that's how it was. And now I'm still the good kid in the family, the one who never caused any trouble, and I haven't talked to Benny for years. And...that's how it is.”

Cass winds the narrower half of Dean's tie between his fingers and kisses the hollow of his throat again. “Don't be too hard on yourself, honey. You were young, and these are big decisions to be faced with all by yourself.”

“I want you to know,” Dean says so softly that Cass strains to hear it under the low noise of street traffic three floors down, “that it wouldn't be the same now. I should've come out to my parents already, I know, but – there just didn't seem to be a reason to stir things up. But if I had a reason, I wouldn't-- I wouldn't put someone I cared about through that now.”

“I believe you,” Cass says. “I...trust you. I really do.”

He's only known Dean for about six weeks, but Cass trusts him completely. He hasn't felt this way, caught up in destiny and confident of the future, since he was a half-grown kid with a summer job folding napkins into boat shapes on Lake Saint Clair.

He pushes himself up to kiss Dean, who tastes like red wine and chocolate and a little like black pepper, and Dean's strong hands come up his arms to hold him. Cass keeps kissing him, pulling his shirt loose from his waistband, and it feels so damn good, so right, to touch Dean's skin, to feel him

tremble when Cass' tongue brushes against his.

Cass has no idea how long they stay like that, clothes half-off and hands roaming, stirring restlessly against each other and exploring each other's mouths, but it's long enough that Cass feels the heady spin of oxygen deprivation and he tastes sweat beading at Dean's hairline when he nuzzles up the side of Dean's face. “Honey – I'm sorry,” he murmurs. “I – I think I need you to go. I'm so sorry, I--”

“No,” Dean says hoarsely. “No, of course. Whatever you need.”

“I just – I'm not ready. Here. It's not you, it's-- Here.” In his home, in his – safe place, where there's never been blood or the kind of love that you bleed for. He can't risk bringing that here.

Dean nods like he understands, which Cass doubts, because Cass barely understands, but Dean Smith is nothing if not a gentleman. “I'll see you at the Viceroy on Sunday, though, right?”

“Of course,” Cass says.

They kiss goodnight again at the door. “I'm glad you came,” Cass tells him.

“I'm glad you invited me,” Dean says. He drags his thumb over the line of Cass' jaw and says, “You growing this out?” Cass shrugs a little, because he hasn't thought much about it, he's just felt a little too lazy to shave for a couple of days. “You should,” Dean says.

“You don't think it would make me look disreputable?”

Dean smiles. “I didn't say that. Maybe I just think disreputable looks good on you.”

Cass nips his earlobe and murmurs, “Would it make me look like a guy who might go down on you in the bathroom of the Viceroy on a Sunday afternoon?”

“Jesus,” Dean breathes. He laughs a little and says, “Sweetheart, you always look to me like a guy who might do just about anything.”

“That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me,” Cass says. It's probably not, but who can keep track? Dean says so many nice things.

He's pretty stirred up after Dean leaves, so he sits in the living room for a long time, playing “Dancing Barefoot” and letting the temperate spring air cool his heated skin as it blows in over the balcony. He still feels every crack and every ache and every place where his heart has crumbled in on itself like ancient ruins. He still feels the wreckage of Amelia smoldering inside him, all of Amelia, the blood and the sin and the pain and the love.

But when have his feelings ever led him anywhere but crashing to earth? When he takes the high view, when he gets up above the smog of his own stories and his attachments and his cravings and his fears, he can see that he's somewhere now that he's never been before, somewhere safer than before, where he doesn't have to burn to feel something anymore. The way he loves Claire and Dean – God, he does, he still can't understand why, but he does love Dean – doesn't hurt.

He doesn't know if that makes it more or less real, or just different, but he knows he doesn't want to let it go.

Oh God I fell for you – Oh God I fell for you –

He doesn't realize how close the Sandover banquet is getting until one whole Sunday gets taken up by Sam and Dean arguing about tuxedos.

“And it shouldn't even be a question for you,” Dean says. “You're a mutant. No rental place in the world is going to have something that fits you right.”

“He's not a mutant,” Jo says. “At least he's not bowlegged.”

“Maybe not off the rack,” Sam says, “but there are places on the internet. You send them your exact measurements and-- “

“No, no way,” Dean says. “No tux will ever fit anyone if it hasn't been altered. There is no such thing as ready-to-wear when it comes to any half-decent suit, I'm sorry, it's just not a thing.”

Sam throws up his hands and says, “Look, I'm sorry, I just can't justify spending five hundred bucks on something I might never wear again, just to go to one stupid dinner with a bunch of management douchebags – not you, Dean, you know what I mean.”

“You wear the same one every year,” Dean says. “It's an investment. And I know your friends are mostly hopeless dorks, but one of them might manage to get married someday. You'll use it more than you think.”

“I don't even know if I'll be working at Sandover next year,” Sam says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “You say that every year. Look, you got a promotion this year. You are a management douchebag. I'm sorry, Sam, but you gotta dress the part.”

“Remember, I have it worse,” Jo says. “I have to buy an evening maternity gown, and I'm actively praying that I won't ever need to wear it a second time.”

“Are you coming to the banquet?” Cass asks mildly, mostly to see both Jo and Sam look awkwardly trapped in headlights. They're so easy to mess with.

“Well, I – needed a plus-one,” Sam says.

“Sure,” Cass says. “And you have a beautiful roommate who makes everything more fun. You'd be crazy not to invite her. Makes perfect sense. Of course, she is starting to look fairly pregnant, so you'll probably spend a lot of time explaining to people that she's not your partner and this isn't your baby, but I'm sure you'll get that all cleared up and it'll be completely normal and not an uncomfortable subject for gossip at every level of your company forever.”

“I don't like you anymore,” Jo says. “Dean, get rid of him.”

“Nope,” Dean says.

So that conversation not only reminds Cass how rapidly the banquet is approaching, but puts to rest any questions he might have had about what he's going to be able to get away with wearing. He gets online and finds a cheap tuxedo from one of those sites clumsily translated by Google from Chinese to English where you can get clothes direct from the sweatshops at lower prices than a wheel of farmer's market cheese, and even if the alterations cost twice that, it's still not going to break him. It's nice to be at a point in his life where he can pay all his bills and occasionally do something stupid like buy a tux he'll probably only need for one dinner, because all his friends are hippies who have beach weddings.

Of course, it might turn out to be more than one annual banquet, and if there's one person in Cass' social circle who will almost definitely not attend their second wedding barefoot on a beach, it's absolutely him. So maybe it is an investment.

He smiles to himself a little as he enters his credit card information. He's probably getting more than a little ahead of himself, but it does make him feel better.

“Jesus,” Dean says when he sees him. “Cass, you look – awesome.”

“See, again, it's really the surprise in your voice that undercuts the pleasure I should be feeling right now,” Cass says. “You also look fucking fantastic, but see how I said that really calmly, like I kind of expected you to all along?”

Claire makes them pose for pictures, and when Cass complains, she says sweetly, “I'll quit if you promise not to take any pictures when I go to prom.”

“You see that my hands are tied, right?” he says to Dean.

“I do see that,” Dean says seriously.

He's not surprised that Dean looks like a fucking movie star in black tie, but he is surprised when they get down to the street and Dean holds the door of the Impala for him. “How'd you get this away from Jo?” Cass asks.

“I won a bet,” he says smugly. “You can thank Sam.”

“I want to believe that you and your sister weren't betting on her sex life,” Cass says, “because that actually makes me feel really sorry for Sam.”

Dean scoffs. “Please, do not feel sorry for Sam. I wasn't the one betting against him; I always knew that big doof was the stealth kind of sexy.”

“So Jo was betting against him?” Cass says. “Yeah, that makes me feel better.”

“And she still lost,” Dean says. “So don't worry about Sam, he's doing just fine.”

“Are you nervous?” Dean asks him after he scans his badge and is allowed to drive into the Sandover parking garage.

“I have absolutely no reason to be,” Cass says. “I'm not the one who knows or cares about any of these people.”

“Wow, suddenly I'm nervous,” Dean says. “I mean – you are going to be...?”

“My usual charming self?” Cass says. “Of course. Oh, don't look so anxious. I vaguely remember how to behave in polite company. I won't embarrass you.”

“I know you won't,” Dean says, almost convincingly.

It's a perfectly lovely event, Cass thinks, for those who enjoy this sort of thing – if, in fact, anyone really does enjoy this sort of thing. The tables are arranged by department, which Cass thinks must be depressing if you do work here and have to see these same people every day anyway, and also means that Sam and Jo are somewhere else entirely with the other computer people. But it's good for Cass, because he doesn't care to meet anyone except the people Dean already talks about.

That includes Charlie, who is younger and smaller than Cass had pictured her, and so clearly a brassy redheaded variation on Jo that Cass is tempted to call it nepotism. But she's obviously whip-smart and the dorky kind of funny, and Cass has figured out by now that she's great at her job, so it doesn't really matter if Dean hired a substitute kid sister for his PA, as long as it all worked out. She's here with a tall brunette named Dorothy who doesn't say much and looks terribly bored; Cass gives the two of them another month at best.

It also includes the legendary Fergus Crowley, who is also much shorter than Cass pictured, and he's a little miffed that no one told him about the British accent. Dean and Sam both have a tendency to talk around the subject of Crowley more than directly about him, with just a tinge of superstition, like the guy is fucking Voldemort, which has made it hard for Cass to piece everything together. He knows that Crowley is the Executive Vice President of Dean's department, which makes him Dean's immediate supervisor, and that Dean regards him with some confusing combination of admiration and dread. He knows Crowley has championed Dean's career, and that Dean views him as a kind of mentor, but he also knows that Dean doesn't fully trust him.

He doesn't know, but very much suspects, based on certain veiled and intentionally vague conversations between Dean and Sam, that there is, or was, or might someday be, a not-entirely-professional element to their relationship, which makes Crowley about the most fascinating person in the universe to Cass. He intends to crack this mystery tonight or die trying.

“I've heard so much about you,” Cass says when they shake hands. “You're definitely the person I was most looking forward to meeting tonight.”

“Well, how flattering,” Crowley says, his eyes sliding to Dean, and yeah, Cass is already starting to get it, because there was nothing overtly wrong with that sentence, and yet it somehow managed to sound nakedly intimidating. “And of course I've been just as curious to meet the man who's had our Dean walking on air for months.”

Our Dean meaning my Dean – okay, got it. Straightforward enough. Almost disappointingly predictable, honestly.

How long has your boss been in love with you? he texts Dean while they're waiting for their salad courses to be cleared away. Dean checks his phone a minute later and replies with, I will do anything to get you to drop this.

Anything sounds good. Cass smiles over at him sweetly. Anything also sounds just a tad desperate, as though Dean is truly afraid that Cass might somehow crash his career over the salmon, or as though there's more left to discover.

Cass can behave when properly bribed, so he has a perfectly nice dinner conversation with Fergus Crowley, who is sly and bitchy in the most fun way possible; if it turns out that he has been sexually harassing Dean, Cass is going to feel a little guilty for liking him so much. Cass doubts he has, though, at least in any traditional sense. He'd put down good money that says that when people do what Crowley wants them to do, they almost always believe it was their idea.

No wonder he keeps poor Dean so confused. Cass really does wonder how long Crowley has been working his angles with Dean, and how close he was getting to success before Cass came along. He bets Crowley could answer both those questions for him to the day.

He likes Crowley just fine, but it doesn't stop him from cajoling Dean into eating two bites of raspberry cheesecake off the tip of his fork, mostly to piss Crowley off. Cass has become a lot more attuned to his own controlling and competitive tendencies recently, and he's working on them, but he thinks this counts as using them for good.

When the tables disperse for the greener pastures of mingling and an open bar, Cass puts his arm through Dean's and says, “Show me your office.”

Dean frowns a little and says, “I'm not sure we're supposed to....”

“Not supposed to? You don't think you're allowed in your own office on a Saturday? You're a Vice President, Dean, do you really think anyone's going to stop you?”

“Not really,” he admits.

“Then let's go. I want to see it, and you said you'd do anything.”

Dean raises his eyebrows at him. “That is – not how I expected you to cash that in.”

“It's like you don't know me at all,” Cass says.

It's not a huge office, but it's nice; the furniture is dark and glossy and decent quality, and the view is great. It's the same sort of impersonal as Dean's apartment – a little messy and obviously lived-in, but devoid of anything very distinctive. There's an aloe plant. There's one photo on his desk, of a teenaged Jo hugging him in his graduation cap and gown. That's about it. Even the screensaver on his computer is just one of those automatically generated ones with the floaty ribbons.

“Well, there you go,” Dean says. “Now you've seen it. Pretty thrilling, huh?”

“Has potential,” Cass says. He tugs Dean toward the desk and says, “Sit down.”

“I feel like you're up to something,” Dean says, but he sits down in his desk chair and lets Cass perch on the edge of his desk. “You do know I'm not actually going to let you bend me over my desk, right? Cause, man, that's the kind of fantasy that really needs to stay a fantasy forever.”

“I know, my vanilla darling,” Cass says. “But you know who doesn't need to know why we vanished from the party and went up alone to your office? Crowley.”

Dean groans and rubs his face with both hands. “I knew the two of you were going to get into a thing.”

“Why would I do that?” Cass says. “I'm winning the thing we're already in. Starting a new thing could only be to my disadvantage.”

“Please don't make this into a big deal,” Dean says. “Maybe he kind of likes me, but I swear, nothing's ever happened with him.”

“Oh, I didn't really think it had, but it's interesting that you say it like that. Can I take a shot?” Dean sighs and gives him the be my guest gesture. “Hm, let's see,” Cass says as he uses his toe to push off his opposite shoe. He rests his foot in Dean's lap, his heel against Dean's crotch, and Dean gives him his best attempt at a warning look, but he doesn't make Cass stop. “He helped you get the job. He takes you along to upper-management things, quasi-social things, because he wants you to learn, and also because he tells you, all secretive-like, that you make it less boring for him. It's flattering. He lets you in on a lot of little secrets, mostly other people's secrets. He tries to get you to be a little shadier than you naturally are, business-wise, but you've seen his generous side, too, so you like to think he has a heart of gold. He's done you at least one big favor – I don't know what, though, you want to tell me?”

“Stayed with him for a couple of months while my building was being renovated,” Dean says with a deep sigh of resignation.

Cass nods. “He flirts a lot, but not just with you, so no worries, that's just what Crowley's like. He probably doesn't mean any of it. He makes jokes about being lonely, but you worry that he really is, and you hate that, because sure he's not an easy guy to get along with, but you know he can be a good friend if he wants to. You think he's a catch, actually – he'd probably cheat on anyone sooner or later, but he's smart and funny and charming and he has that dead sexy accent. If the circumstances were different....”

“But they're not,” Dean says firmly. “I would never get involved with a co-worker, let alone my boss. That's career suicide.”

“Oh, honey. He's grooming you. And I don't mean for upper management.”

Dean shrugs. “It's kind of working out for me, though, isn't it? I would never actually sleep my way into a promotion, but – hey, the first thing they teach you in business school is that it's all about good relationships. It's not better for me if you piss him off.”

That's a refreshingly selfish and cynical take, especially by Dean's standards. Cass gives him a little rub of his heel in reward. “Piss him off? We had a nice dinner. My existence pisses him off, but there's not much I can do about that.”

Dean grabs Cass' foot, but once again he doesn't go so far as to remove it. “You're trying to make him jealous right now.”

“Honey, I don't have to try, he is jealous already. Maybe I'm trying to fire his imagination a little bit. Look, if he thinks we're fucking up here, one of two things is going to happen. He'll write you off as no longer available and move onto championing the career of some new pretty boy, which will be mildly inconvenient for you, but you've already had this position for a while, your superiors all know you and like your work, it's not really going to do you any harm. Or he'll decide that somebody like him does not get thrown over for a nobody like me, and he'll step up his game a little. You could cash in big from this if you play your cards right.”

“Why am I always attracted to the sharks?” Dean sighs.

“Because we're majestic creatures,” Cass says, grabbing the arm of Dean's chair and wheeling him closer. “Now, all we have to do is make you look just a little rumpled up.” He drags his fingers up the back of Dean's neck and into his hair; it's hard to make someone with such short hair look bed-headed, but Cass knows that someone who's looking for it will see the difference. He leans down and kisses Dean, sucking and biting more color into his lips, and Dean puts his hand on Cass' thigh and kneads there a bit, which is very encouraging.

“Cass, we do have to get back,” Dean says after a minute or two.

“Soon,” Cass says. “Just let me--”

“God,” Dean says, “I'm so terrified of the end of that sentence, because I know you're going to make it sound like a really great idea. Remember how it's my job to keep you from doing risky things no matter how awesome they feel? This is me trying to do that.”

He does vaguely remember that, but fuck it. Dean's risk assessment is for shit anyway. This is fine. “You look so good, though,” he says, dragging his hand down Dean's chest. “And being with you isn't risky. You're my boyfriend; this is fully socially appropriate.”

“Yeah, not in my office it's-- I am, huh?” Cass shrugs. “Oh my God,” Dean says. “I am so slow sometimes. You're jealous.”

“I have no reason to be,” Cass says, maybe a little too sharply. “I can have you any time I want.”

“Yeah, you seem pretty motivated to prove that right now,” Dean says with a chuckle. “Who are you trying to prove it to, Cass?”

There's only one guaranteed way to wipe that smug look off Dean's face, so Cass rolls Dean's chair back a little and goes down to his knees. “It sounds like that because it is a really great idea,” he says, and Dean makes a halfhearted attempt to push his hands away when Cass starts on the fly of his tuxedo pants, but it's obviously just for show. Cass catches his hand and slides one finger into his mouth, and Dean cups his hand around Cass' jaw, stroking him gently from the inside.

There's nothing in the room but an old mattress and a trunk and a duffle bag. There are sheets tacked up over the windows instead of curtains, but there's still enough light for Cass to find every mole and every scar down Dean's back. He touches every one of them before he pours out a thin line of powder, beginning at the swell of Dean's ass and following alongside his spine.

“You know you're supposed to do this with strippers, right?” Dean says, turning his head slightly so his cheek rests on his folded arms.

“I'd put your ass up against any stripper alive,” Cass says. “Assuming there are any strippers still alive.”

“I bet there are,” Dean says. “Those girls are tough. I don't know why I'm letting you do this, this is a dumb idea.”

Cass slides a thumb over Dean's ass and laughs. “Um, because you don't give a shit what happens to me?”

“I don't, huh?” Dean says. “I think you're thinking of you, there, pal.”

“Maybe,” Cass admits. “Still, you should feel special. Do you know how hard it is to get this stuff? I could've invited anyone to this party, but I chose you.”

“Oh, yeah, you're real choosy,” Dean says. “I'm capable of human speech and I said the word yes, so I passed all your qualifications with flying colors.”

Cass licks the cleft of Dean's ass and holds his hips still while he shudders, so he doesn't dislodge any of the cocaine. “Well, consent is important to me,” he says. “Obviously. But don't be so hard on yourself, honey, you know you're still special to me. You were my first, after all. Where would I be without you?”

“Heaven?” Dean suggests.

“Oh, right. Anyway, hold still.”

He leans down and breathes and breathes, sucks in the coke and the smell of Dean's skin and the memory of flight and the lights get brighter and brighter and he laughs and feels the lash of electricity sprayed from broken cords splatter across his back and coil around his wrists and burn and he bites the moles on Dean's shoulder and fucks into his soulmate until they both scream.

Cass scrambles back on his hands and smacks into the desk, flings his arm out to keep Dean away from him until he can at least catch his breath, until he can--

But it's hopeless. All the lights are too fierce in his eyes, and Dean's voice is both too far away to hear and too harsh in his ears. His brain is burning, and the whole world seems stripped bare and just too much. He curls over his knees and clenches his fingers in the sleeves of his jacket, feeling nauseous from the vibrations of his heart.

He hasn't done coke since El Salvador, but he recognizes the feeling. He never liked it.

“Cass!” Dean is still saying, desperate and shaky, awkwardly crouched beside him and trying to get an arm all the way around the defensive knot Cass is trying to make of himself. “Cass – baby, please talk to me, what do you want me to do? Should I call an ambulance?”

“No!” Cass almost shouts. No, no doctors. No blood tests. He can't be – he can't be high right now from a – vision or a dissociative episode or whatever the fuck these things are, it's not physically possible – but he still won't risk it. He has too much to lose now. “No, I – I'm okay.”

“You're not okay! What the fuck, Cass? I'm not just someone you can-- I need to know what's happening to you.”

Join the club. “It's – just my head,” he says. “I've started having these migraines.”

“Started when?”

Started when I met you. “A while ago. I'm – okay. I mean, not okay, but it's better. It's only happened a couple of times, and they hit really hard and – they hurt, and I can get a little disoriented, but they don't last too long. Just. Just get me out of here, okay? I'm sorry, I know you're supposed to be at your thing--”

“The hell with my thing,” Dean says. “I'm not worried about them, I'm worried about you.”

“Don't worry,” Cass says. “Just take me home.”

It's easier said than done, and that's Cass' fault. He gets on his feet with Dean's help, and he can basically walk under his own power, but he's still sensitive to light and so shaky that everything takes forever. Dean stays with him, though, every step of the way, and when they make it to the elevator he holds Cass tight and lets him press his eyes against the lapel of Dean's jacket. “It's okay,” Dean whispers, and kisses his hair. “I got you.”

The parking garage is much better, cool and dark, and Cass slides gratefully into the backseat of the Impala where he can lie down and rest while Dean texts Jo and Charlie, letting them both know that he took Cass home with a migraine. It sounds so ordinary when he says it like that.

He's well enough to feel like an idiot by the time they get back to Dean's building, but he's a little exhausted, and now he does have a real headache. Dean gets him out of his jacket and shoes and tie and puts him under the blankets in bed, then gets a cool, wet washcloth and folds it up over Cass' eyes. It does feel nice. So does Dean's hand softly stroking his hair back. “What else do you need?” Dean murmurs. “You want water? Should I turn the lamp off?”

“I'm good,” Cass says. “I mean, I'm – the worst prom date ever, but other than that....”

Dean chuckles. “Getting lucky after prom is a total cliché anyway. We're better than that.”

“Just lie down with me,” Cass says, and Dean kicks off his shoes and does that. When he puts an arm over Cass' chest, Cass can feel that somewhere in the proceedings – probably in the bathroom when he was running the water – Dean took off his cufflinks and rolled his shirtsleeves up, so Cass lets his fingers stroke up and down Dean's forearm. “Thank you,” he says. He means it for so many things.

“These seem really serious,” Dean says, and when Cass shakes his head and tries to answer, Dean presses a finger against his mouth. “I want you to see a specialist – a neurologist, I guess – and also get a CAT scan. And I – I want you to let me pay for it, which I know is not going to be what you want, and we can talk about you paying me back later if you really have to, but I want to go ahead and do this.”

“I think you're overreacting,” Cass says. He doesn't really; he's just as freaked out as Dean is, but he's not sure if he can go into a doctor's office and describe what's happening to him.

“I really don't care,” Dean says. “I'd rather overreact than let something go that needs to be caught right away. You can be the cool, rational one if you want. That's never going to be me, not where my family is concerned.” Dean hesitates, a little like he might apologize, then he seems to change his mind and says defensively, “I know you're not, but you might be someday. I'm allowed to want you to be, at least.”

As far as Cass knows, he's allowed. Nobody's going to stop him, anyway. “This is normally where you scare away all the other guys, right?” Cass says.

Dean strokes his hair lightly. “Believe me, I never get half this far with other guys. If I'm overreacting, then let me overreact,” he says, and his voice catches a little bit as he hooks his fingers between the buttons of Cass' shirt. “Do this just to make me feel better if you have to, because I'm neurotic and anxiety-prone, and I will not be okay until we get a handle on this.” Cass smiles a little and starts to reassure him, but Dean cuts him off dead by saying, “I'm not going to lose you to a fucking brain tumor, not when we just found each other. I can't.”

Cass brushes the cloth off his eyes and blinks up at Dean's beautiful face. “Hey,” he says, putting his hand behind Dean's skull and drawing him down so they touch at the nose and forehead. “You won't. You won't, you're stuck with me.”

He turns over in Dean's arms and lets Dean spoon him in the dark room while he dozes, and when he wakes up Dean is deeply asleep and whuffling lightly in Cass' ear. Cass smiles and picks up Dean's hand, running his thumbs over it, spreading it out to look at his life-line in the pool of lamplight.

There's something wrong.

Cass goes rigid and pushes up on his elbow, waking Dean with a little jolt. “Dean,” he says, turning Dean's hand over and then over again, pulling it further into the bright center of the light. “Dean, where are the – what happened to your scars?”

“Scars?” he mumbles.

“Here,” Cass says, pressing his fingers into the ball of Dean's thumb. “They were right here, the – the teeth marks. You were thirteen, your neighbor's mastiff bit you, you have scars right here. You did.....”

“I didn't,” Dean says, sounding helpless. “I – that never happened. You're thinking of someone else.”

“No, I'm not!” Cass yells, struggling to sit up. “Dean, how can you not remember? We were walking to the car from dinner – it was our second date. We stood under the lamp and I read your palm, you showed me-- you told me about the dog--”

“Cass,” Dean says, and now he sounds legitimately scared. Cass can't blame him. “I remember some of that, but there was no dog, I was never bitten, I don't know what you're talking about. Look – look, I have this scar, remember?” He drags his sleeve a little higher and turns his arm over, and there's something on the inside of his forearm, that...

That Cass knows he's never seen before. He feels nauseous.

It's silvery-pink and almost elegant, like a hook or a kind of L-shape, and two small slashes beside it. Cass touches it; it's slightly raised and denser in texture than the rest of Dean's skin. There is no possible way that Cass could've just overlooked it for the past two months. “This is my only scar,” Dean says. “And it's obviously not a bite. It's an electrical burn – an accident in my dad's auto shop, remember? I told you about this.”

“No, you didn't,” Cass says. “I've never--”

Seen this before? Well, he can't fucking say that, can he? Dean already thinks his brain is dissolving.

Cass is starting to wonder if he's right.

“I'm sorry,” Cass says weakly. “Sorry, I – think I must've had a weird dream. I woke up and I...wasn't thinking straight, I guess.”

Dean pulls him back down into his arms. “Sweetheart, you're tired,” he says, and then he nuzzles Cass' jaw and sighs softly and asks with quiet, drowsy earnestness, “You're happy here, right, Cass? Here with me?”

“Yes,” Cass whispers.

“Okay. Good,” Dean says. “Then everything's fine. Just...close your pretty blue eyes and rest.”

Cass closes his eyes and thinks, Dime que eres real, but this time he doesn't ask it.

This time he's not so sure he wants to know.