A Car's Tires on a Road

Now I'm feeling so brand new

The next morning, waking up was a brutal torment as I felt a distant but nastily loud throbbing in my head and shrill bright rays of sunlight were obviously trying to kill me. I hadn't known I could still do hangovers. I kept my eyes shut and tried to breathe away my headache, while a number of pictures of last night paraded through my mind. I smiled. Christmas Eve. There'd been apple pie and music and that ugly crafted Christmas tree that didn't even come close to mine back in the bunker but still had something memorable and charming about it. There'd also been a lot of booze. So much eggnog and whiskey, when we'd run out of eggnog, and then beer as everybody had gotten too tipsy to even stay upright.

I smiled wider. It'd been a blast, and I was incredibly thankful for what they'd done. I rolled over, the soft sheets wrapped all around me and the warm air in the room a comfort to my every bone. I inhaled the air, still smelling like apples and cinnamon, and maybe even a little sweat, but I didn't care. Half my face hidden in my warm pillow, the pain ebbing away a little, I reached out and pulled the body next to me a bit closer that was so warm and smooth I just wanted to bury myself in it. My fingers settled on soft skin and felt a calm heartbeat underneath it that almost lulled me back into sleep. This was nice. A mellow body aligning with mine, sharing the rhythm of our heartbeats and breathing in the fresh scent of soap on the back of someone's neck, just staying in that moment for a while longer, when you're already awake but don't want to start the day just yet.

Wait.

In one fell swoop, I was upright and wide awake, my eyes as open as they could possibly be. They found a sleeping Cas there. In my bed. Sleeping. Right next to me. In my bed. And I'd just cuddled up to him like a needy little cat looking for a warm place to nap. My hand was still on his bare chest, his arm wrapped around mine as though he wanted to keep it there forever. I was in a kind of awkward position, for all sorts of reasons, but I somehow managed to use my other hand to have a curious if not terrified peek under the sheets.

We were both still wearing boxers, thank god, and for a moment I was relieved. But only until I realized that it didn't change the fact that I was in bed with a half naked Cas and couldn't remember how that'd happened and what the hell had happened after that. I vowed to never touch another drop of alcohol, even when I knew I wouldn't keep that promise.

God, I thought. What had I done? How had I done that? And how was Cas sleeping so peacefully, clinging to my arm and sweating on my palm and drooling into the pillow, while I was there having a mild nervous breakdown? He slept a lot these days, practically used every free minute to, and he always looked so young with his tousled bed hair and his relaxed face and twitching chin and the soft snoring and content sighs, while he was supposed to be that stone-old angel who'd once watched fish crawl out of water and had at some point reduced himself to watch me crawl out of bed every morning. It was weird to wake up and not have Cas' eyes on me.

I pulled my arm out of his hold, not carefully enough, though, as he sighed deeply and stretched his arms over his head, turning it into a full-body earthquake of a stretch that had me so focused on him that I had to force myself to look the other way so the whole thing wouldn't turn into an awkward boner situation.

His eyes started to crack open then, lazily taking in the scene, as though he had to remember first which millennium he was residing in.

"Dean?" he gave, his voice deep and kind of hoarse and vibrating across my skin from where my hip was still against his side. That did something to me, that low gravelly timbre of it, the depth of his voice scratching along my nerve endings and bringing them to life like my head was underwater and I breathed in air for the first time after drowning.

It was stupid. So stupid. And I couldn't help it, I couldn't fall back into this, I couldn't forget how inappropriate all this was and how Cas probably just didn't know that humans usually don't share beds in a totally platonic way. So I did what I'd been doing my whole life and pushed.