Dean couldn't remember a time when he'd been so attracted to anyone. Sure, he had a healthy appreciation for beauty. He spent his fair share of time checking out persons of the opposite sex. Hell, he couldn't even say he'd never checked out a person of the same sex before. It had just never been like this. He could spare a glance or two, and sometimes his eyes would linger on some parts more than others, but it had never been to this extreme before.
His eyes tended to linger longer than ever before. When they did, it was always on the same person. It was always on Castiel. And it was every part of the angel, not just one particularly tempting section of skin.
It had started with his hands. Dean couldn't even say when it had begun, but he knew it had been the hands first. They were very nice hands. Not the disaster that Dean's own were. They were smooth, unblemished. No matter how horribly they had been treated in the multiple battles they had faced, they remained the hands of a man that had never seen such things.
Dean imagined that Jimmy had not seen much of their particular brand of action before Castiel had taken his body. Intellectually, he knew that those hands would never change. The angel's mojo would repair them back to their original state no matter the damage that was done to them. It still fascinated him every time he took a moment to actually look at them.
The really strange part was that they were very manly hands. They were all squared edges, with a large palm and long fingers. Dean had never once thought of himself as the kind of guy to want a man that was so masculine. Until, that is, he realized the idea of those smooth, manly hands running across his skin was totally doing it for him. He could imagine them while in the shower, and sometimes he didn't even have to imagine anything else. The thought of those hands could push him right over the edge, even if it was his own hands that were actually doing all the work.
The brief glimpses he'd gotten of the shape of the angel's rear had ratcheted his desires to a whole new level. The only times he'd seen Castiel without his trench coat had been in times of distress. Cas was suffering from amnesia or a horrible case of humanity or even death. Every time Dean had been so distracted by so many other things that he hadn't had time to appreciate his angel's ass. Nothing could stop him from remembering it later. His shower times had increased exponentially since those thoughts had started filtering into his mind.
At one point he'd convinced himself that he was romanticizing the size and shape of it in his own mind. Sure, it was probably nice, but there was no way it was as perfect as his fantasies made it seem. He'd taken it upon himself to get the angel out of his jackets so he could confirm his suspicions. Perhaps one of his worse ideas.
When he'd convinced Castiel to take them off to help him with some of the baking for the holidays, it had seemed like such a simple thing. Get a glimpse of the real thing and hopefully squash some of the (honestly ridiculous amounts of) fantasies he'd developed about it. No big deal. That is until he actually did get a good look. Yeah, Castiel's pants weren't the greatest fit on him. It didn't matter. The shape could still be seen clearly in them. And what a shape it was. Instead of killing Dean's fantasies it had fueled quite a few new ones. Dean hadn't even been able to finish making the cookies before he'd had to excuse himself to the restroom to relieve the pressure on his lower extremities. Well, one of them. Not his finest moment.
Then it started to seem like it was something new every week. The dip in the center of his clavicle. The muscle that connected his neck to his shoulder. The fullness of his lips. The blue of his eyes. The ridiculous sex hair the angel was always sporting. A new discovery for Dean's obsession.
Then came the worst part. The stuff that told him this wasn't something that he would be able to get rid of with a quick roll in the hay to satiate his curiosity. It was no longer a fascination with the angel's blue eyes. It was the color. The ring of blue toward the center that was lighter than the outside edge. The shots of what could only be described as sunlight that streaked out from the pupils.
It was no longer the fullness of his lips and what they might feel like on his own, or on his body. It was the way they curved when the angel smiled. The way they dipped, only on one side, when the angel was confused. The way the angel chewed lightly on the bottom lip when he was concentrating. Dean thought it was adorable.
Adorable was not a descriptive word you used to describe someone you wanted to molest against the nearest available surface. It had taken Dean much longer to figure the rest out than it probably should have. The descriptive words coming into his vocabulary when he thought of Castiel were no longer the terms he usually associated to attraction. What did that mean? Oh yeah, he was falling in love with a fucking angel.
Yep, that's exactly what he'd done. Not that it hadn't been bad enough before, when he'd just been thinking about his best friend while he "showered". Nope, he had to go that one step farther. When he finally realized what was actually going on in his head, it made the whole situation worse.
When Castiel was around, Dean found color creeping onto his cheeks more often than not. The angel would stand too close, like he always had, and Dean would flush from the heat he could feel coming off of him. They would stare too long at each other, as they always had, but now Dean would feel a heat creeping across his face while they did. His dreams were still haunted by those hands and that mouth, but more and more they were gripping a coffee cup and grinning at Dean over it, while Dean made them pancakes or some other ridiculous and sappy crap like that.
Worse still was the feeling of happiness and contentment that accompanied the dreams. No longer would he wake up from dreams of his angel, drenched in sweat and rushing to finish what his dreams had started. Most mornings he woke feeling abandoned by the phantom lips pressed against his that had disappeared before he could feel them return his feelings. Or feeling the disappointment that came with the wonderfully domestic breakfast scene vanishing. Or the heartbreak of realizing that although his dream self had been curled up in bed with the man he loved, his real self was lying alone in a bed that had somehow become too big and too empty.
The thing was, it didn't matter how long Dean had been lonely. It didn't matter that he'd lived his whole life without that kind of fulfillment. It didn't matter how tough he was. It didn't matter how long he'd already denied this. It was what he wanted, and apparently even Dean had a breaking point.
He was done never getting what he wanted. He had to do something about these feelings. He didn't know what he would do, but he knew the time had come to make a change. He was ready. Dean sent up a silent prayer, to an absent God, and began to formulate a plan.