Rain showered vehemently outside the same tacky window later that night. I knew because I had tossed and stirred and occasionally threw the rented sheets to the hardwood floor, cursing and mumbling incantations that I had picked up from sophomore Latin before I finally gave up sleeping altogether. By then, the rain was fighting another formidable foe: hail. Insomnia combined with ice cubes large enough to sink the Titanic is twice as formidable. So I sat up most of the night, sleep deprivation getting the best of me around the time I pulled out my laptop and in bolded white analog numbers, read back to me 4:03am. I realized shortly after I finished college with a Bachelor's Degree (writing novels didn't exactly pay for the economy motels and the gas to get halfway across the country) that I was living life at an expense, and that expense was time. As long as I was breathing air and coexisting in this pool of life, time was my currency, and it wasn't cheap.

I stared aimlessly at the white document I had opened up, as if the words were going to magically write themselves onto the page. It wasn't like I had anything extravagant to write about like the theory of relativity, but it also wasn't as if I was fresh out of ideas. That's the thing: I should have all of these ornamental things to write about. I'm a young novelist; I'm supposed to be foaming out of my ears with ideas compared to those washed-up authors who will write vampire on werewolf fornication so long as it's the next bestseller. But I had nothing. I was twenty four years old and I already felt the sting of absence as effervescent as my beating heart.

The cursor pulsated a few times over the blank screen before it was hovering over a new window. It was an e-mail from Naomi, my newest publisher at Gallery Books:

Castiel,

One of my trusted colleagues, Zachariah, is interested in you after I showed him your work for the extensive period of time that you interned for The Huffington Post and NPR and he is beyond impressed. He wants to schedule a meeting to discuss the possibility of co-writing his novel, Chasing Cherubs. He thinks you would be perfect for the assignment so hopefully you're a pious kind of guy.

As far as your novel goes, I expect I full report by the 30th on the latest installation.

Naomi

Naturally, this e-mail did anything but stimulate me to write. I had to come up with a brilliant subplot in less than twenty-four hours or I could kiss my career goodbye.

A small but perceivable rapping came from the front door. At first I sat there, legs folded underneath my computer, just listening and looking for the noise. The sun wasn't even peeking through the thick masses of sinister clouds at this ungodly hour, and it seemed less plausible that someone would be standing out in the pouring rain. But then it came again, the rapping—this time louder, and a fit of pique accompanied the sound. I closed my laptop, and realizing that I was literally naked and had gone without the warmth from my laptop radiating my thighs, stumbled around in the dark for a pair of pajama pants in my backpack.

Opening the door was the easiest part—minus the icy draft that hit me not-so-kindly over my exposed chest—the hard part was raking my mind over the fact of who was standing in my doorway.

"H-hi," he said in a voice barely cutting through the sound of lightening crashing down next to him. He looked even more sheepish than earlier with his hands in a black hoodie zipped over a white jersey and his hair completely deflated from the humidity of the rain. Before he could mutter tangible words, I was leading him inside.

"Dean?" I asked, closing the door, but not before turning on the light so I could see him better. His once-scarlet cheeks were now coated in a blue frosting and his plush lips weren't as smooth anymore. He was shaking in place and I did everything in my power to find him a spare jacket of mine. Sufficing for an old hand-me-down trenchcoat, I gestured for him to sit on my bed as I helped him take off his soaking jacket and folded the fleece around him. He tried thanking me but settled with a wobbly smile.

"What are you doing here? Is something wrong?" I ran through the possible scenarios in my head. It couldn't have been the electricity, so was it the pipes? No, the water was running just fine a couple hours ago when I poured myself a glass from the tap. Deranged serial killer on the loose? Yeah, that had to have been it.

Dean shook his head, wrapping the sleeves tighter around his bare arms. "I-I wanted to s-stop by to ask you s-something," he admitted. I had this unfulfilled urge to wrap my arms around his diaphragm. It felt totally rude to have all of this unrequited warmth but then again it was also rude to lead me to believe that he was available for hookup. I should have left him soaking wet outside my door, but there was something in the back of my mind that said to take him in. I didn't know what until the next sentence spilled from his mouth: "D-do you want t-to go out with m-me?"

I couldn't exactly say that I was expecting that. "What?" I said, as if for clarification.

"Do you w-want to go out w-with me?" His eyes were shining brighter than any emerald stone I had ever come across at a jeweler.

I was about ready to pounce on this guy earlier with every whimsical response I could formulate. But now, for some reason or another, I was lost when it came to just one word. I couldn't take his excessive staring with that beautiful face of his any longer, so instead I sprung up from the bed and said dumbly, "I think I should on a shirt."

Dean's slim fingers swathed more balminess around my wrist than I had supposed, impeding my actions. "Answer the question f-first," he said.

I pulled my hand out of his grasp despite the sparks that flew up and down my arm and replied, "What about that guy Sam?"

"What about him?"

I scoffed. "What about him? If you think I'm the kind of guy that swings for being on the back-burner while you and your boyfriend get it on in front of me—"

"Whoa! Ease on the temper, beautiful. We're not together. Sam's my brother."

Had he just called me beautiful? He took out something from the front pocket of his jeans: a wallet. Though dampened from the weather, the pictures inside that he displayed before me were still perfectly intact. There were three pictures in total. The first was a beaming young boy holding a chunky baby in his frail arms. The second was a Dean a few years younger than his twenty-two, shirtless with a teenage Sam clutching to his back for dear life like a leech out of water. And the third was of him, Sam, and two people I presumed to be his parents... or were. His smile disintegrated into a fine line when he got to that one.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, reading his eyes. "And I'm sorry I was quick to assume that you guys were an item."

He folded the wallet up and shoved it back into his jeans. "It's alright, to both. Life was hard after they passed and with Sam growing up knowing that bigger brother dug guys, I felt like I had to step up my game to be a father figure. He's real protective of me, almost as much as I am of him. He's a good kid, and I'd like to think that I did that much. He's working here part-time until he can afford tuition at Stanford."

"Wow," I said, although still feeling like a complete idiot. "A part-time job, a prestigious school, and an older brother to look after him; sounds like the life of a king."

Dean scoffed. "Yeah, I guess. Meanwhile I've been running my dad's place for five years and even that's a total disaster."

"Not totally," I said, nudging his arm playfully. "The walls haven't fallen down, the shower has decent pressure…and the owner's not so bad looking."

Dean laughed. "Is this your way of saying yes to the date?"

"I would if I knew exactly where we were going on this date," I said. "Every road in Lawrence is blocked. I can't even get a decent signal to place a call."

Dean nodded, averting his fixation from me to the entertainment around him—which really only boiled down to an outside sink, a television set, and a small dining table fit for two by the windowsill. The rain outside was still coming down hard, but that didn't seem to matter. The slightly younger man slipped his hand into mine and moved to position his broad stature on top of my waist, straddling my hips with his knees.

His voice came out in a whisper next to my ear as his other hand came to rest behind my neck, causing me to shiver partly from the new contact and partly because his fingers were still somewhat frigid. "I can think of a few other alternatives, if you're interested."

Before I could even distinguish the fine line between rationality and insanity, I was kissing the handsome stranger. At first it couldn't be classified as nothing more than chaste, butterfly kissing—the kind that the Eskimo use to test the frigid waters before absorption—but then when tongue was introduced, I became a beast. My tongue swiped across his bottom lip and soon we were in a wrestle for dominance—and ultimately, warmth. His body was melting into mine like a Popsicle. I could feel the blood from my head pounding against my ears as heavily as his hard member against mine. He had to strengthen his hold on my neck, pulling my head down so he could deepen the mouthy kiss and pull me down onto the bed with him, drowning me further in his unrequited warmth.

When he caught my throat like a lion would catch its prey, I moaned in ecstasy and used another hand to slide underneath his damp white shirt to latch onto his shoulder, digging and clawing my nails into the razorblades. His shirt was discarded along with the trenchcoat before he continued planting sloppy but heated embraces down my length. His chest was like nothing I had seen before. The best way I could describe it was that it was like a man-made sculpture comprised of rocks: boulder stacked on top of boulder with horizontal clefts in-between. I arched my back high enough to grant him the access to dig his teeth into one of my hips. His actions were languid unlike his heart against my chest, thrashing and tugging at his chest, now slick with more secretion than acid water. He dug his knee into my erection, teasing and taunting the tight muscle, and soon we moved in synchrony to a tune of comprised purely of heated friction.

Flushed to my very core, my fingers found the waistband of his underwear and I slipped my hands around his ass, two tanned squared pieces sectioned off by a thin line. Both items were discarded, but not before he slipped his hand that had been holding mine to palm said erection. Let me tell you, I've had a few hand jobs in my prime, but most certainly not like the kind that Dean was giving—or was implying at giving. He ran his fingers over my strained muscle, just enough that I was on the verge of exploding, but not too much that I actually did. I caught scent of my own breath in the back of my throat when he pulled my flannels down with his bare teeth and just about choked when he began making his incision with his forefingers.

"Towel change for room twenty-tw—" Sam stopped just short of swinging the door wide open.

Luckily, Dean had pulled the covers over the necessary parts so all the younger brother had to walk in on was two scarlet-inflicted men. He covered his eyes anyway with his free hand and began pushing the door closed when Dean called, "Leave the towels, Sammy! We'll need them later."

"Right, uh—gross," was all he could muster before he dropped the towels and slammed the door shut. Dean took a moment to laugh at his brother's immaculate timing and how his face turned as red as my scrotum that he was about to completely destroy.

I lost all sensation in the lower half of my body following the events and even more so in my eyes. I've never actually had the occasion to pass all four emblematic bases in copulation, but I've heard that right after one undergoes the experience that their eyes get glazed over with stars. Like looking through a thin film of broken glass and beyond it was the cluster of the Milky Way. I can validate that conspiracy; however, I could also say that I wasn't all focused on the exertion part of the so-called "date"—that also didn't entirely mean I didn't want to go without the experience again; it was quite the triumph in my list of life accomplishments—but moreover the sentimental part of it. Dean had almost immediately taken to holding me close to his all-encompassing chest. He had also taken the same hand that had previously had that strong hold on my wrist and laced his fingers through it once more. We laid there for a good half an hour spooning, lightly touching, and sometimes just staring at each other, basking in the mere propinquity of our bodies.

Usually, I'm not this impetuous and no, it wasn't a stereotypical date—or was, depending on what one entails to be customary for a first date. It was better than that. We did more than chow down on twenty dollars' worth of tortellini and exchange small, meaningless conversation. We bared our souls to and accepted one another into our small little worlds. Even though I knew his name by a hair's breadth, I knew everything about him by the way he made love: with leisure, but with passion. I could already tell in the way that he talked about his brother, how he raised him up slowly to be the passionate man that he was today. That was the kind of man that I wanted as more than a one-night stand. It was like something straight out of a romance novel.

I pulled out my laptop later that morning while Dean was in the shower. The sound of running water, sleep deficiency, and the faint illumination of a computer screen; it all suddenly sounded eerily familiar. I began typing.

It took a hundred fifty dollars' in gas, another hundred in food, and fifty imbibing in copious amounts of alcohol, but falling in love didn't cost a single dime…

A/N: A huge thank you to all of my followers on this story. You are all beautiful people.

Thanks for reading! (x)

Chuck's Prophet