"Why, good-morning, Castiel."

"Good-morning, Audrey."

The angel and the young woman sat at either end of her stretch dining table. It was the morning after.

Vaguely, he remembered. He remembered having his innocence frantically ridden out from him in the back room; clothes barely divested, only shoved aside. He remembered migrating their acts to her empty apartment, where he had mercilessly coaxed his name, deities and affirmatives out of her. She was a noisy lover. Insatiable too. Her unbridled feedback brought him a strange satisfaction.

It all became a blur the moment she finally had him. Still straddling him on the chair, her underwear had been wrenched down to hook around one ankle, skirt gathered up by his own hands. One hand was then taken in hers, directing his fingers down to work with her. She had felt so… ready. He could only watch and relish the way she took to the feeling, letting her eyes close and her head fall back, crying out desirously. He still couldn't believe he could bring such pleasure to a human.

After nipping at his bottom lip and grazing her hot mouth over his face, she had asked, in a taunting, seductive hiss that tantalized him, if he wanted to take her, but with a word that should very well disgust him replacing "take". He didn't answer with words.

Though his physical body remembered just where to touch, he still insisted on reading her mind like an instructional map, and by all appearances and sounds, it had paid off. He strove to do away with any impression of any other man who'd had her before. To almost imprint himself deep within her, make a mark of possession. Yes, angels didn't have possessions, but then, he decided, he really wasn't just any other angel. All he could think of with every rough advance was mine, mine, mine.

She was his. And he had labored to make that clear. Right there on the living room floor. Having to travel another thirty feet to her bedroom was anathema when the libido was concerned, especially after the restrictive cab ride that transported them there.

They had poured themselves through her front door. Lost themselves in one another. He would never forget the way her body curved to accommodate every deep intrusion he made. Nor would he forget the sounds she made, the sounds they made, the clawing of carpet, the thirst of her mouth, the quickened pace, the heightened sensation, more, more, oh…

For six hours, she slept, curled up against his chest, while he pretended to. Eventually, she left, and he soon followed, redressing first. That was when he found her sitting at her dining table, swirling her finger around the rim of a coffee mug. When he had been spotted, he took a seat right across from her as she greeted him. She was doing all this, naked. Almost.

"I believe I need my trench coat back," he said, eyes flicking downwards indicatively at the one she was wearing, "and my tie."

"Leaving so soon?" she asked, blinking with affected dismay. She twirled the fabric of his tie around a finger. "What's the rush?" A glint sneaked into her gaze. "We have sooo much catching up to do."

"We have done much of that already," he replied, watching intently as she released the material to let it drop back down between the swells of her breasts.

"Well I wanna do it some more."

"I need them back now, Audrey."

"Come and get it."

Slowly, he tilted his head, wordlessly accepting the challenge in her tone but with dark promises. Fifteen minutes later, he breathed a goodbye down into her ear and walked off to leave, coolly shrugging on his trench coat after zipping up his fly. Left behind was Audrey, who was panting into the table she was pressed down against.

Once he was out the door, his small, satisfied smile dissolved. He turned and stared at her door. Reached out, caressed it wistfully. His eyes closed. He remembered her skin beneath this hand. Every texture, every contour, every sensitivity. It longed to touch her again, and he furiously wondered why. Her allure should have waned by now. He had gone all the way with her – shouldn't he feel quenched in some respect? Was the utmost point of human lust not sex? Or had he just mistaken this all to merely be lust in the first place?

There was a war raging for authority within him. On one side were his pleasant memories – the heat of her skin, the crescendo of her urgent cries, the supple curve of her back – and on the other side were admonishments reprimanding him for such wild abandonment and for willingly tucking away the aforementioned memories into his heart. Not only had it been an experience he was never truly meant to know, but it had all been done under the deception he orchestrated for her. Adding further insult to the eventual injury. So that had all been a very, very unwise thing to do.

Sex under false pretenses. It was almost rape. Disgusting.

Nearby, a door opened and closed, awakening him from his introspection. He turned, finding that Audrey's neighbor, Marilyn, had emerged from her apartment room, and as she approached the elevator doors, she regarded him skeptically. The doors opened to her with a ding!, and before they shut her away from his view, he saw her size him up with a sort of withering disbelief.

"You can't be that good," she muttered bitterly, before the doors obscured her.

It was later in that day, and Jody had taken one step into the back room, darted her eyes gaugingly before she just knew. One word was uttered. "NO." Seconds later, she was hauling Audrey inside by her elbow, unconcerned to the way she was tripping over her heels. "What is the one thing I told ya not to do?"

Facetiously, she attempted a joke with a helpless smirk, "If there's only one thing, then clearly I haven't been listening."

Jody shifted the weight in her feet and crossed her arms. She was in no mood for banter. "When Nicky and I left, what did you and Castiel do?" she asked tightly.

"We kissed and made up." In the distance, Nicky's head flew up from his copy of Christianity For Dummies, and she addressed him assertively. "We did!" Pause. She did a double take. "Oh, and we totally did it in that chair you're sitting on." Horrified, Nicky clambered out of the seat so violently he nearly toppled it over.

"I am soooo glad you didn't die last night!" she cooed, missing the aghast look passed between Nicky and Jody as she ambled around dreamily, "because now," she stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck, "we get to do something we haven't done in a while." From the tricky angle, she looked at him pointedly and then pecked him on the cheek. "Girl talk! Yay!"

As she pulled away to prance to the front of him, she also missed his squirrelly squeak of, "Oh God".

"Don't you love the beginning of relationships?" she asked, starry-eyed, her tone suggesting she was not exactly asking as much as she had already expected agreement from him. She took his hands, swinging them from side to side whimsically. "Where it's just sex, sex, talking, sex —"

In her bubbly detachment, his shudder was lost on her. "Audrey, I —"

"It's insane!" Grip tightening, she reeled him forward to secure his eye. Her voice dropped to a fierce, confidential whisper. "It's almost as if he can read my mind and do everything I want him to do!"

Desperately, Nicky broke away, waving his hands in protest. "Honey, seriously, please, stop, please, no!"

As though wounded, she curled her hands back. "Whaaat?" she demanded demurely, "I always tell you about my sexcapades, and you do the same for me. It's like our unwritten law!"

The look he offered was despairingly imploring. "I just don't really wanna hear about… Castiel. Especially not in that way."

"What?" she exclaimed, disbelieving, "But you're hot for Castiel! Why won't you let me rub it in?" He shook his head firmly, like a child refusing dinner. Her eyes narrowed. "Oh, I see. You're bluffing. You just don't wanna grow green with envy. You just don't want to hear about how he looked me dead in the eye —"

"Audrey…"

"Walked right on up to me."

"Come on…"

"Forced my body against his."

"Seriously…"

"Kissed me."

"I don't need —"

"Said that he needed me."

"This is so —"

"Turned me around."

"I can't —"

"Bent me over the table."

"I really don't —"

"Ripped off my skirt."

"Please stop —"

"And with all the power in his being, he thrust —"

"AUDREY!"

She giggled. "That didn't really happen. But the deed was done." After one more second of constraint, her amusement yielded to her frustration. "Come oooon, what's wrong? You can't have a problem with Castiel; he saved your life! Is it because he left me? Because believe me," she began to smirk lewdly, "he's demonstrated his remorse more than what's necessary."

"I–I'm just uncomfortable with this, okay?" he asserted in an urgent rush, tossing his hands in compliance, "And uh, yes, yes, it is because he saved my life! I don't look at heroes that way!"

Rolling her eyes, she scoffed. "Okay, that is a load of BS. You, Nicky, a guy whose only straight thing about him is the B's he achieved in grade school, slept with the person who pushed you out of the way of that moving bus. And she was a girl!"

"In my defense," he shot back primly, "she was a very masculine woman!"

Jody, whose attention had been clouded with shock during this entire exchange, finally mumbled, "I can't believe it." They turned to her, and only under their scrutiny did she finally look up from the floor to stare wide-eyed at Audrey. "You. Deflowered. Him."

Her expression contorted bewilderedly, with a tad amusement at her choice of words. "Huh? Are you kidding me? No, I didn't – he most definitely was not a virgin! And what are your problems with Castiel all of a sudden?" she hotly directed to the both of them, "He saved your lives, didn't he?"

"Exactly," they chorused dryly.

Their droned response compelled her to eye them both with severe incomprehension. "How… how is that at all relative to the fact that we had sex? And what was that flinch?" she flared at a blanching Nicky, "You're the one that encouraged me to wring him dry!"

The whites of his eyes immediately became very, very visible. "Oh – my – GaGa, YOU DID THAT?" Pressing his hands in prayer, he directed a repentant gaze to the ceiling fan. "Oh Holy Trinity, please forgive me! Oh God, oh my God, I'm so screwed, oh God, I think I just peed a little —"

Utterly flabbergasted, her mouth opened but struggled for words. Deciding that they would be wasted anyway, she spun at her heel with a toss of her hair and flounced for the doors.

"Where are you going?" asked Jody, monitoring her movement. At the doors, Audrey stopped stiffly, before whirling around to them and drawing herself up with an air of great pride.

"I am going to go and fuck the brains out of Castiel." Goading them with a brassy little smile in response to their horrified faces, she shifted to leave but hesitated, deciding to add salt to their apparent wounds. "Oh and yes, if you're wondering, there is a very relevant reason as to why I have carpet burn on my knees."

The doors slammed as she left. Similar thoughts passed between the remaining two through a shared glance. Nicky shook his head in dismay, sighing, "Homegirl is so going to Hell."

"Don't tell her."

As Gabriel blithely inspected his cuticles, Castiel felt himself bristle with indignation. "You encouraged me to tell her," he growled, his patience exhausted.

After dusting a few coffee grains off of the counter, he waved dismissively with the same hand. "Eh, both options A and B were glamorized at equal measures. Now, I'm telling you to ix-nay on the ruth-tay since you finally copulated!" Consternation instantly displaced the look of exasperation on his brother's face, slightly tilting his head in question. Gabriel, reading this gesture well, smirked and leaned forward secretively to clarify. With a wink.

"I can smell her on you."

Castiel's gaze flitted down for a moment of bashfulness. Gabriel shook his head reverentially. "Unbelievable. You score a human girlfriend before I do." His face contorted knowingly when the angel peered up at him. "And she's a catch, your girl. Superb ass to breast ratio, an IQ of at least two digits, unlike my Brandi…" The instant he noted Castiel's dark look, he stopped trailing off and made an abrupt return to his usual effervescence. "I am so proud of you, Cas! By having your little dance in the dark, you've obliterated both your virginity and the unresolved aspect of your unresolved sexual tension! Killing two birds with one condom."

Unable to share the same enthusiasm, Castiel frowned. He knew why and he knew how he could resolve it. "I need to tell her," he said. Immediately, he acknowledged the vanity of his words. All talk and never any action. His hand kneaded his brow, hoping to stifle the inklings of a migraine. "This shouldn't be so hard," he ground out.

"That tends to happen during sex," Gabriel quipped airily. At Castiel's disinterested stare, he added, "And no, you do not need to tell her. That'll open a whole Pandora's Box of massive proportions."

A profusion of arguments came rushing to his assistance, but in its disorderly approach it became impossible for him to actualize any one of them, so the angel was left twitching his lips in an agitated manner. Needing a moment of clarity, he glanced away and turned his attentions inward. He mentally dug around to find the root of all his problems.

It was easy to pin it all on Audrey, but unless she had strings attached to him and had been controlling him the entire time (which would, ironically, make her the master of deception), he knew she wasn't to assign liability to. There had been a time when she was just another human to him, albeit a rather interesting one, but what human wasn't?

In the corner of his mind, he found the origin. Realization sparked and illuminated his judgments, as indignation and frustration snowballed into one explosive sentiment. Cold seeped into his eyes.

"You," Castiel marched right up to the counter, scowling accusingly, "fueled all of this."

A derisive snort. "What do I know? I'm an archangel and I work at Starbucks!" It seemed he had been expecting this outburst for quite some time. What that indicated made Castiel's glare seethe.

"You have been trifling with me this entire time!"

"As the Trickster, and as siblings, it's obligatory, bro!" he replied jauntily, but his tone didn't influence the angel the slightest, so he sobered. "Just listen here. Her pride is like the new One World Trade Center. Lofty, imposing, and guarded as though its welfare could be jeopardized at any moment. And if you tell her, now? Do you know what that makes you?" Pinching his nose with one hand to induce a nasally tone, he lifted his other to represent an aircraft. "This is Flight 93, United Airlines –" He glided this hand into the arm of his other, staging a crash. "–NNNNNRRRRRRRRRBSSSSSSSHHHHH!"

Castiel fixed him with a glare that could have rivaled the sun with its intensity. "I have listened to you enough," he declared caustically, "I should have never grown to trust your word."

"Oh, Cas. My poor, delightfully impressionable Cas. You chew me out now, but I know a part of you is grateful," he sneered. He challenged his harsh gaze with his own, complete with his habitual smirk. "Without me, you'd have never gotten what you wanted."

"Without you, I never would have wanted at all," he grated, "Which is the way it's supposed to be."

"You chose to come to earth, so you abide by humanity's natural tendencies, brother." His tone was almost reproving, which chagrined Castiel to be on the receiving end of. Gabriel, of all the angels, was in no position to avail that tone on him. His stern features suddenly slumped into one of farcical complaint. "Doooon't look at me like that, I'm not the bad guy! And you're in no position to throw shame on moi." Affronted, Castiel opened his mouth to argue, but he quickly threw in, "Can't you at least admit the stress of the situation is worth the pleasure? That's the beauty of being human!"

"Neither one of us is human," he stated wearily.

"Technically no," he conceded with a dip of his head, "but look at us: in human forms, on earth, mingling with humanity. The experience doesn't differ." He leveled a shrewd gaze upon him as he began to recite, "First John, 2:16; for all that is in the world – the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions – is not from the Father but is from the world."

As he paused to let that sink in, his head slanted, expression quietly eloquent. "You're failing to adjust to the reality that you have been humanized. You descended to earth, operate with humans, became socially acquainted with a member of your vessel's opposite sex, developed emotions, and continuing in that downward spiral into humanity," he listed forward, thumping a fist on the counter, "you – had – sex." Leaning back, he dusted his hands, grinning with vainglory. "Mission accomplished… me."

Castiel scowled hatefully, both at his brother and the truth of it all. Shook his head. "I am not going bother with you anymore." Finding the words and knowing he would read into them the way he intended, he stepped forward. "You. Exacerbate. Everything."

A very foreign expression of indignity grew on the archangel's face, indeed reading into Castiel's words the way he intended. This wasn't just about his situation. This was about everything, particularly his abandonment of Heaven. Gabriel blinked the injury away and drew himself up with an appearance of forced cool.

"Fine by me!" he chimed with a snide grin. He gestured the door dandyishly with a falsely nurturing look on his face. "You go now and rectify the sticky little situation you've gotten yourself into without my assistance. Should be pretty hard at this point since you're obviously in love with her!"

This hit the angel like a ton of bricks, not only because they hadn't been on the topic of her for the past five minutes, but because … well … at second glance, it wasn't a ton of bricks that had hit him; it was one gargantuan piece of the puzzle, one he had yet to consider. And with this quick but careful consideration on the spot, he discovered that it sort of… fit.

Some of his perturbed thoughts must have surfaced on his face since Gabriel then cocked his head with mock concern, ripping him back into the present.

"What's wrong, bro?" he asked, coating his voice with mock concern to match his expression, "You need help getting out too? You really are pathetic!"

Closing with a scathing smile, Gabriel raised a hand. "A plague on both your houses!" he quoted grandly, before snapping his fingers. All of a sudden, he felt himself not only being transported, but shoved into another location, and he was unable to recognize where as he suddenly fell face first into a tract of mud. Nearby, a cow mooed lethargically as the angel slowly raised his muddied face, finding himself in a sweeping stretch of wet farmland in some obscure European country. He scowled.

Assbutt.

They were in Brooklyn Bridge Park later that night, staring back at Manhattan from across the East River. Convening at night was a regularity for them, and had he put much scrutiny on the whole concept of it, he would have realized that the modern term for this was "dating".

Little had been said to each other so far. Both were too busy mentally churning their day's thoughts, with the hopes that it would eventually generate something comprehensible, to notice that the other was doing exactly the same. Unlike her, a compulsion to air these thoughts had not been gradually mounting to the surface of outward show.

"Castiel…" she murmured, the beginnings of a question in her tone. He looked at her patiently. Eying him warily, she leaned forward against the coin operated binoculars she used ten minutes ago, yet still retained a grasp of during that time. "Did I miss something between you, Jody and Nicky? Is there a detail about last night's incident that's flown over my head or … or hasn't past me at all yet?"

Inwardly, he screamed the truth. Threw some chairs. Clawed at his internal walls. Outwardly, he was one with the crickets. "Why do you ask?"

"They're uncomfortable with you and me… you know, together," she mumbled, idly thumbing the tail end of his tie. Her eyes shot up to his, finding him contemplating her words already. "And that totally throws me 'cause before the incident, they were cheering us on. And today, when I tried telling Nicky about our consummation, he blanched!"

Raising his head a little, he regarded her from above his nose, mildly amused. "Why were sharing this with him?"

"I always share with him my sexual experiences," she shrugged, "He's my confidant." Her brow lowered, "At least he was." For a minute, she dwelled on this with a sort of disenchantment, unaware that Castiel was of the same frame of mind. Suddenly she shifted to assure him the full weight of her undivided attention. "Cas, you know me well enough by now to know that I hate liars. Anything that threatens my pride. So, I am asking you now, point blank, with the most open mind, is there anything, anything at all you're not telling me?"

A sigh of long-suffering escaped him. He didn't even realize he had been holding his breath. Perhaps it was air he had been secreting along with those skeletons in his closet. It was time. She deserved to know everything. It was dishonorable to continue wearing this mask and watch her fall fool to it. He'll brave whatever strife stemmed from his revelation; she was worth the trouble.

His mouth worked mutely. A whole speech had been prepared for this, but it was so hard to externalize the words. It was like the opposite of Tourette's syndrome. At long last, he spoke.

"No."

Everything around him seemed to convey to him a collective "WHAT THE FUCK?". The crickets and the stars above were especially loud. He couldn't help it! The last minute notion of losing her was enough to wheedle him into further treachery. His affection had made him selfish. And it was no fault of his that some things were just easier said than done.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, beyond these desperate throes of rationalization, was the knowledge that he was so – damn – screwed.

The answer he provided dangled ambiguously above her and he suspected she would not take it this time. It was as though she caught glimpse of that mask he wore but as he stood firm with it, she came to lose sight of it. Finally, willing to assume she never saw it at all, a smile warmed her features. Her hand swung around his neck and gathered him down for a kiss.

"Good!" she said brightly when she pulled away. Her hand stroked his jawline fondly for a second, randomly delighting in the gentle stubble that dusted his jaw. He took that hand and held it there. Her touch always managed to soothe the tension he harbored, if only for a second. No other being was able to achieve that. There was a power in her softness and he both admired and envied it. His hold of her hand remained, as though clinging to the moment he believed he would never have again once he told her the truth.

"What am I to do with you?" he breathed, mourning her in advance. Inwardly, he answered his own question. Starting tomorrow, he was setting out to tell her.

Her lips curled as an eyebrow arched, deriving something risqué in his words. She sidled close. Purred against his lips. "Do you really want me to answer that?"

… that is, if she gave him a chance to.

To Loretta Lolita, since you've disabled the PM function and I can't respond to your reviews personally: I bet you're disappointed with this chapter, but I just don't write sex scenes, lol, at least not in graphic detail. They say if you feel uncomfortable writing it, most likely it's going to make the one who reads it uncomfortable too, so it would be best to leave them alone if you're not confident. Besides, them having sex in their current situation was never something to be celebrated, since he's adding fuel to the eventual fire. But thank you for reviewing (and everyone else too, as usual)!

Read and review :D