#disgustin

I open the door and he smiles at me, stepping inside and holding up the plastic bag. “I got drink.” He announces. “Can I leave this somewhere?” 

“Oh, yeah, just, here, I’ll take it.” I bring it over to the table and unload a six pack of beer and a bottle of wine. 

“I don’t know anything about wine.” He explains. “But that one had a cool label.”

“I also don’t know anything about wine, I just know when it tastes nice and when it doesn’t, and honestly, it doesn’t especially make a difference to me one way or the other.” I want to screw open the lid and start chugging it right now, but restrain myself for risk of appearing wild-beast-like in nature. 

The tension is so thick between us that it feels like a sentient being in the room, but I have no idea how to navigate a situation like this. What are we supposed to do? Do we have small talk? Dean sinks his hands into the pockets of his cargo trousers and looks around the room curiously. “So this is the forbidden apartment.” He says. “It’s nice to finally be here.” 

I laugh nervously. “Yeah, this is it. You can make yourself at home.”

He points at the beers. “Can I have one of those?”

“Oh, yeah of course, here.” I scramble to free them from their plastic coating. “You can sit over there on the couch, I’ll bring it.” I give up trying to rip it from the top and end up stabbing a hole through it with my thumbnail and yanking the can through it. “Do you want a glass?”

“No, the can is fine.” He settles onto the couch and starts touching things all around him, picking up the TV remote, shifting the cushions around, thumbing through one of Claire’s business textbooks that she left lying on the coffee table. Meanwhile I take a glass out of the cupboard and pour myself some wine and try not to think about how strange it is that he’s here, in my space, touching my things, taking up room on the little blue sofa that Claire and I have shared secrets and talked late into the night on. I have shared almost everything with her there, but it’s ironic that now the biggest secret I’ve ever kept from her is sitting right on it. I feel unsettled by the magnitude of my own lies, the personification of them with his hands blatantly all over her things, and I feel compelled to protect them from him.

I walk over towards him and place my glass of wine onto the coffee table. “Thanks.” He says as I hand him the can with one hand and slide Claire’s textbook off his lap with the other so I can move it out of reach. Then I settle next to him, carefully arranging myself so there’s enough distance so that I won’t accidentally touch him and set off a chain of events. My breath has already quickened, my chest rising and falling, and Dean knows. He always knows. In fact I know his favourite thing about me is how I react to him, how easy it is for him to set my blood rushing through my veins. He gives me one of those long, intense looks that makes my stomach flutter and I make a swipe for my wine. 

“Shall I put something on the TV?” I start scrambling for the remote and flick it on, and there’s some season one re-run of Smallville playing. “Oh, Smallville, have you ever seen this?”

“I haven’t.”

“I loved this when I was in secondary school, it’s kind of like a reimagining of the superman story, see there, that guy with the dark hair, that’s Clark Kent, he’s a teenager in high school who’s just discovering his powers.” I’m very aware of the heat radiating off Dean’s body, and the weight of his eyes on the side of my face, but I keep rambling anyway. “And her, that dark haired girl, that’s the love interest. Lana Lang. He hasn’t met Lois Lane yet, she comes into it a bit later, but right now it’s all about Lana. They haven’t got together yet, they just clearly fancy each other.”

“Right.”

“So in season one, right, there’s something freaky happening at their school, these kids keep going wild and exhibiting strange powers that they’re using for evil, I think this is the episode with the girl who eats everything.” He puts his can onto the coffee table and starts shifting impatiently beside me. “There’s another episode with a guy who kind of, like, turns into this bug-human hybrid and he, um, like, they find him crawling on the ceiling of his room that he’s turned into this disgusting chrysalis…”

He gently takes the remote out of my hand and switches off the TV. “Evie, I don’t want to watch Smallville with you.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” His eyes move to my mouth and he watches it intently as I speak. I can’t seem to stop. “That’s okay.” I say. “We can just talk if you want.” He shifts in closer to me and takes the wine glass from me so he can put it next to his can on the table. The warmth and the scent of him makes me feel overwhelmed, like he’s too much all at once, and then he moves his mouth slowly towards mine so that we’re almost touching. “I don’t want to talk to you either.” He says. 

“No?” 

“No.”

He brings his hands to my face, that first contact of his skin sending a jolt through me, and dips his fingers into my hair and when he finally kisses me it’s so gentle, so startlingly different to all the other times when he’s crushed his mouth against mine in fervent desperation that I’m almost thrown by it. His fingers come to brush my throat where my pulse thrills and then his mouth follows and he dips his tongue into the hollow between my collarbones. For some reason just that simple act overstimulates me so much that I could rocket off the couch. 

“You alright?” He asks me. 

“I’m nervous.”

“All I’m doing is kissing you.” 

“I know.” 

“You’re fine.” The final lingering rays of sunset hit his face in such a way that his eyes are the colour of flames, such intense, warm browns and golds flickering in his gaze as it travels over my face and my neck, raking down the centre of my body to the line of exposed skin above the waistband of my jeans. He touches me there and starts tracing mystical shapes on the skin beneath my t-shirt. “I didn’t come here to hurt you” He murmurs. “I’m only here because you asked me to be.”

“Yeah, I know.” I whisper. “I just don’t know why I’m so jittery.”

“Maybe you’d feel better if you were lying down.” He says with a presumptuous quirk of his brow and moves a casual hand to brush my hair over my shoulder. “Do you want to show me your room?”

I exhale a laugh at his forwardness. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Come on.” He gets up and takes me with him. “Upstairs is it?”

I nod.