The noise of the world fades to radio static, faint in the distance. I hear Jack say something about coffee for the group and giving us a minute.
But, I can’t focus. Everything is riveted to Cas, magnetized to his presence.
A long, sweet breath pulls into my lungs as I work through the vertigo of having my world right itself again.
Cas is the North Star, and the pull to navigate by his light gathers all the scattered parts of me back. The shapes of who I am always seem to lay at my feet, but in his presence they right themselves like puzzle pieces waiting to fit together.
A slow smile spreads across his face and he leans in, stepping closer and closer, until he has me in a hug.
“Fuck, I missed you, Bee.” The words seem to slide out on his breath and onto my skin. A vapor that flows into my pores, even my skin wanting Cas back inside me again in some way. To hold every bit of him I can.
My heart kicks up, as if his words have made it into my bloodstream. The lurch of my heart is painful as it tries to climb out of my chest.
I let the feeling of him in my arms wash over me. The specific weight of him. His lean, rangy body is strong, and he smells the same — lavender and bergamot lay faint on his skin and in his hair.
He smells the same, feels the same. But that can’t be right.
This is an older, different guy than the Caswell Vaughn I carry around in my heart. It shouldn’t be the same at all. Suddenly, all that clarity I walked in here with dissolves like dust in the wind.
When I think of Cas, I think of those things that send the swoony swirls straight to my gut — the way his eyes look in the morning light, the turn of his hands when he talks, the way he tilts his head when he is listening to a song he really likes, or the movements of his fingers against the strings of an instrument.
Now, he’s standing before me and I don’t have to remember the rest: the sharp jaw framed with blond hair, the blue eyes and upturned nose.
Cas easily makes the lists for sexiest and most beautiful celebrities. The comparisons the magazines usually make to Cas are either calling him James Dean or an archangel. That’s never changed over the years. Somehow, as wrapped up in him as I have been, I forgot all that.
My body hasn’t forgotten, though. He’s the moon and I am the ocean, pulled to him like the tide by some kind of old magic that never will let go.
I have been in love with Cas for so long, I forgot how attractive he is. It lands now, straight into my chest like a kick-drum beat from nowhere.
The gas builds up on that broken burner, the pilot turned on too long trying to light. Thirteen years too long. The click is almost muted, the barest spark needed before my whole body ignites in what should be an audiblewhooshof flame.
Fuck. I’m so fucking fucked. This was a terrible idea.
During Jack’s wedding, my brother mouthed to his new husband “we are inevitable.” And I think that is true. Jack and Perrin would have found each other in any dimension. Any planet. Any universe.
That’s not me and Cas. I think I could have been happy enough without him if we never met, except once I knew Cas was out there, no one else could satisfy me. Nothing else could. There was a hole in me he uncovered, and only he could fill it once it became exposed.
I don’t know if there is a dimension or universe where we end up together. I just know it’s not this one. And as much as I know that, my brain isn’t using logic here. Instead, it wants to cling to the slight tremors in his body and breath.
This. Cas in my arms. His breath on my skin, is all so very right.
The way it always has been.
For me, Cas will always be the right word in the lyrics, the one that makes the whole song come alive.
Cas pulls back from the hug, his eyes searching for something in my own.
“Tell me we can talk somewhere after this, just us, Baylor.”
I nod.
Cas’s hands rest on my shoulders, and his thumb strokes across my collarbone in a slide of skin I feel to my toes. He stares at it a long minute, eyes locked on his skin touching mine again. I know he can feel my heart spasming in my chest.
I can’t make words.
Nix saves the day when everyone comes into the room moments later, throwing herself in my arms and I can’t help but laugh despite. . .despite Cas. Here again. Real and in the flesh.
“Long time, stranger,” she says as I sit her down on her feet.
