Don't Tell Sammy

Chapter 2: Just Go With It

Dean pulled the door of his motel room open as soon as Castiel knocked.

'Cas,' he grinned in greeting, clapping the other man on the shoulder as he ushered him in and closed the door behind him. 'Good day?' he asked, gesturing for him to sit down in one of the chairs by the window in the small, slightly damp smelling room.

'It was relatively uneventful,' Castiel shrugged, not seeming like he cared very much about it at all. 'I dropped a slushy on my foot. I've had an uncomfortably wet sock for twenty minutes.'

'I got a pair you can borrow,' said Dean, while Cas sat watching him, and got up to go through a bag that was on one of two beds in the room. He tossed a rolled up pair to Cas, went to the mini fridge and pulled out two cokes. He returned to the table by the window, slid one over to Cas as he sat looking at the socks, and sat across from him. 'Go ahead, put 'em on.'

Castiel frowned, continuing to watch Dean as he kicked off his shoes. Dean sat watching him, their eye contact unbroken, unspeaking. Clearly, he was waiting for Cas to speak first.

'So you wanted to talk to me?' he asked, referring to when Dean had entered the store earlier and confused the hell out of him with his good mood and his odd request. 'Something about pretending to be ... your boyfriend?'

'Yeah, that's right,' Dean nodded.

Castiel broke the eye contact to remove his socks and he placed them on the floor by his shoes. He spoke as he dried off his foot with his one dry sock, then began putting on the borrowed socks Dean had given him.

'Is this about what you told me last week?' Castiel asked, slipping in little glances at Dean when he could throughout his sock-putting-on activity. 'Because if you, I don't know, want to tell Sam about it by having a fake relationship with someone of your own gender, I don't think that's the way to do it.'

Dean raised his eyebrows as he caught when Cas was saying and his heart rate accelerated automatically as he watched Cas pick up one of his shoes, presumably the wet one, and dry it out with one of his discarded socks, presumably the dry one.

'No – it's about the, uh ... the bi thing,' Dean assured him quickly. He still struggled to say the b-word out loud, especially in front of another person, since Cas was the only one who knew apart from a handful of long-gone guys from his past.

He remembered accidentally getting into it as he'd tended to Cas's wound and carefully, as gently as he could, wrapped his wrist in a bandage.

'So are you upset at all about it not being, y'know ... a date?' Dean had asked carefully, in a room in another motel closer to the house where they'd babysat, killed an angel, so on.

'Not ... particularly,' Castiel had responded. 'Nora is a nice woman. She's always kind to me, so when I accepted the offer of what I thought was a date I accepted to be nice and because I assumed that's what humans are supposed to do. Isn't it?'

'Well it's not what you're supposed to do,' Dean explained, tying the bandage in place with feather light touches, and placing Cas's hand down to get something that would support it more. 'There's no rules to this whole ... human thing. You do what you want to do. So if a girl asks you out and she's nice and pretty and you like her ... you either go or you don't. Do what you wanna do. For future reference.'

Dean worked on Cas's arm again, wincing internally when Cas flinched slightly. He wanted to apologize – but Cas was trying very hard not to let any pain show through his mask of a face, so he pretended he hadn't noticed and made note to be more careful.