A/N- I spent most of today in a room by myself entering stock-horse-challenge scores into a computer and listening to my iPod. Lady Antebellum came on, and this happened.

Do you remember when,

We woke under a blanket,

All tangled up in skin.

Not knowin' in that moment,

We'd never speak again.

- We Owned The Night, Lady Antebellum

When he was 23, Dean had a bad day at work. A seriously bad day. He'd woken up severely hung-over from a friend's party the night before, and because he'd already used up all his sick days he came to work with a headache to rival the one that he'd had when a mate had dropped a full drum of oil on his head (and quite frankly, he'd been lucky to survive that) when he was 17, and a temper to match. He'd argued with a cranky client, ended up giving them the finger and saying something very insulting about said customer's sister, mother, and grandmother, and then gotten fired. He'd packed up his grubby little desk, tried to take a sticky-tape holder that apparently he wasn't entitled to, and a… scuffle… had ensued in which he got a staple through his finger and a bleeding nose. So he'd left, without the sticky-tape, and driven home, swearing all the way at everything that irritated him, from the bitch-ass driver who'd cut him off at an orange light to the bird that alighted briefly on his hood to the DJ's shitty-ass choice of music.

Then he'd gone to the bar and gotten absolutely piss-blind-drunk.

He'd woken up the next morning with another killer-whale headache and a man in his bed.

He'd made a yelping sound, tried to move, and nearly fell out of bed because his legs were tangled like tree roots with the other man's. After the initial surprise had passed, he'd waited for something else to set in. Disgust, maybe. He wasn't homophobic, per se, but he'd had it pretty firmly ingrained in him from a young age that being anything less than perfectly straight was not a thing to be proud of.

But it never came.

And as he lay there, naked as the day he was born and tangled up under a sheet with another, also naked, man, something of the previous night had come back to him. Only flashes, shades of emotion and impressions and senses and while it certainly wasn't the most gentle night of loving he'd ever experienced, there was something about it that had felt… Dean couldn't quite put his finger on it, but whatever it was, it panicked him.

That was also when he realised that he wasn't in his own bed. He wasn't sure why it had taken him so long- these sheets were much nicer than his at home- but it calmed him down a little bit because at least he could run from someone else's place. To run from your own place was somewhat more difficult, and then coming back again evoked… memories, things that had to be cleared up and dealt with when he'd much rather just leave them behind.

So he got up, and left the dark-haired stranger asleep, picking up his clothes from the floor (all over the floor. And the top of the cupboard and the chest-of-draws/desk thing too) and yanking them on as he made his way to the door.

He was 28 now, married to a red-haired and wicked-smiled girl called Jill, with a much better job than he'd had back then and generally a much better life.

He was happy. Really, he was.

But sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, flashes of blue eyes and dark tousled hair swirling through his mind in a whirl of heat and skin, slightly-slightly-awkward limbs and tight wiry muscles.

Sometimes he thought a lot about that nameless stranger with the wry smile and soulful blue eyes.

Sometimes he thought a lot about him, and he wondered if maybe, just maybe, he thought of Dean sometimes too.