𝒾 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊.

The air was colder. Dean didn’t mind. He liked the feeling of the wind biting at his skin, like a starved animal gnawing on a bone. It was no less than he deserved. He wasn’t exactly the poster boy for good decisions, but he really fucked up this time. There was a feeling in his gut, like he’d swallowed lead, and he felt lightheaded; nauseous. It wasn’t like he hadn’t screwed up before, but this time was just… different. 

Cas was God-knows-where and Dean missed him, Goddammit. He missed him and he was stupid because he couldn’t ever ask for what he wanted knowing that if he did he would never stop. He hadn’t expected to get as drunk as he had, just like he hadn’t expected the blue-eyed stranger with dark brown hair to eye him up. 

Dean was pretty good at keeping his attraction to men on the down low. Or at least, he thought he was. But when that man had approached him, Dean’s aching heart had reached for him and that was it. He was stupid for feeling guilty about hooking up with some random guy in some random bar off some random highway, but he did. 

It wasn’t like he and Cas were together, in fact Cas probably wouldn't even bat an eye at Dean’s actions. But it still felt like cheating. Dean hadn’t been with a guy since Sam was at Stanford, way before he even knew Cas. He’d had his fair share of hookups with women, hell he’d fucking lived with Lisa, but this time, because it was a guy, it was different. It was like he fucked up something he didn’t even know he was waiting to have. He wasn’t saving himself for Cas or anything, obviously that bridge was well and crossed, but since meeting Cas he hadn’t wanted to be with another guy. Now that he had it felt like he was getting over Cas. 

He didn’t want to get over Cas.

He didn’t want to go back to letting some schmuck in a bar bat their eyes at him and have him on his knees in the bathroom ten minutes later. That wasn’t the kind of guy he was. Not anymore, anyway. And that wasn’t what tonight was either, but he could see himself falling back into the pit, if only to keep himself from climbing out, because it was safer that way.

What he felt for Cas, he’d never felt for anyone before. It scared him as much as it excited him. For so long he’d thought he was broken, that he was never going to be able to love someone, but then Cas walked into his life in a shower of sparks and now… well, now he was in fucking love. And he fucked it up by being a desperate drunk looking for any kind of contact with another nameless drunk in another nameless bar. Whoopdee fucking do. 

So yeah, he deserved the fucking cold. He deserved to have forgotten his jacket on the backseat of his chair in that stupid bar. He deserved for Cas to personally smite him for breaking whatever the fuck they had in the first place. Because after what he did, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to look at Cas again without shame boiling in his blood. 

Cas wouldn’t know. There was no way he could. He didn’t do that mind meld thing unless Dean let him. But the guilt would probably eat at him, and he’d be able to endure it for a while, possibly years, but eventually he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. 

He felt dirty, like he’d just gone ten rounds in some trucker's backseat instead of the comfort of a random guy’s apartment. Maybe that was it. The fact that he’d let the guy bring him to his apartment, let him take him apart slowly, like they were actually… something. And he’d been eager to do it, so eager he forgot his fucking jacket. It didn’t feel like a hookup with a stranger, it felt familiar. Dean had killed lots of things, been face to face with Gods and demons and the full wrath of Heaven, but none of that had him trembling in fear like this. 

Dean would never see the guy again, but he was certain he would never forget him either. The blue-eyed man who had looked at him kindly, who had loved him tenderly, who wasn’t Cas, would plague him for the rest of his pitiful life. And there it was, under the fear was revelation. He’d wanted the first person to look at him like he was worth something, to touch him without recoiling like they’d been burned, to see him not as something to be fixed but as something to be cradled gently, knowing that his box was just marked ‘fragile, handle with care’’, to be Cas. 

The man in that bar had shown him more tenderness than Dean had ever thought he’d deserved, and certainly more than he’d ever gotten from a one night stand. That was what was eating at him. He’d allowed someone else to start to stitch him back together, to close the gaping holes in his ravaged mind, to make him feel like more than just a warm body that was the latest in a long line. 

It was supposed to be Cas, only Cas. He wasn’t supposed to let anyone else in. He’d failed. And letting the bitter December air claw away parts of his barely protected core was the least he could do to atone for giving away the one thing he wasn’t supposed to let anyone but Cas have.

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