That's When We Uncover [Jensen Ackles + Misha Collins | Cockles | mxm]

Chapter Thirty-Five

The room soon fills with sleepy actors, trickling in with coffees and five-o'clock shadows, looking harried and sleep-deprived. I guess it pays to be a heavy drinker sometimes, because I'm not feeling the effects of our night out in the slightest. 

Playful animosity and lighthearted banter soon saturate the atmosphere as they settle down around me at the oak table. Jared fixes me a staple platter of eggs, bacon, and orange juice.

Presently, he's filling Richard and Rob in on how the cast of Supernatural are all a bunch of freeloaders who raid all of his good beer and let themselves into his trailer whenever they please.

"What can I say, we're a tight-knit community," Mark defends, dark eyes twinkling with mischief.

As the conversation progresses, howling laughter erupts in the room, hearty claps on backs and lips stretched around food in jovial smiles.

Despite the ambience of camaraderie, the gulf between Misha and I yawns bigger and bigger. Even though he's sitting beside me, he feels more distant than ever. It's a distance that stretches and stretches with each passing day that he refuses to acknowledge us.

I slug back the rest of my juice, simultaneously forcing down a muted wave of anguish.

How long can we keep this up? How long can we keep going through the motions, evading the delicate truth of our situation? It's only been a month apart from him, and I feel as though we're different people already, ghosts of the him and I that I used to know.

A blanket of panic smothers me, suffocating.

Ten, twenty years from now, we definitely won't be the same people. The show will end; our paths might not intersect like they do now. We'll be old, with flecks of grey in our beards, grandfathers maybe.

And the space between us will always be too full of all the time we let slide by, all the words we didn't say, all the passion and fire in our chests that we doused with societal expectations and family pressures and the stress of our work. How we fasted for so long, curbed our desire for each other. How we each forgot the topography of the other's body, once bared openly with earnest passion and loving solemnity. As though not talking about it, skirting around the truth in a perpetual game of lava, could ever make those feelings, those desires, go away.

When our joints are aching and our hard, lean bodies are softened with age and our stamina is, for once in our lives, lacking - is that when we'll finally realize what we missed? Is that when we'll break down in anguish over years lost and words unspoken - when it's too damn late?

I have to know. I don't want to be treading water forever, waiting and wondering what if and had I and if only. I have to know if Misha's walking away entirely of his own accord, or if there's anything I can do, anything at all, to change his mind.

Complacency nearly ruined my chances with him once before; I won't lose him again for lack of-

"Hey, Jensen, you gonna eat that bacon," Mark queries lightly.

I blink, running my tongue over my bottom lip and swallowing.

Feeling as though I've snapped out of a nightmare, I glance around me and then down at my limbs, as if checking for decrepitude. Relief washes over me. I've still got time.

Then my gaze rises to Misha, this man I've shared so much of myself with and who's shared so much of himself with me, and something snaps inside me.

A sudden tightening in my chest cavity bids me to grab onto him, pulling him onto my lap. Unease cinching my insides tight, I squeeze my eyes shut and stormily exhale the breath I've been harbouring, softly panting my insecurities and inhibitions against the sandpaper roughness of his stubbled cheek. It's not too late.