outpastthemoat:

It’s not love, Dean swears, it isn’t.  It’s just preference, right now, that’s all. Dean just likes him the most. Likes to be near him. Likes the smell of his shampoo, likes it when his phone rings and it’s Castiel on the line, but that’s not love, Dean would know.

Not love, not yet. It’s not love, it’s just the way things are just better when he’s near, a part of things, a part of Dean’s everyday routine. His name there, filling up every line, every page in Dean’s book of days.  Taking the remote out of Sam’s hands to change the channel or kneeling close at Dean’s side after a fight, it’s not love but it’s close, it hits home right in the center of Dean’s chest whenever he turns his head and finds Castiel smiling at him, just at him and nobody else – that’s not love, though.  Dean would know.  

If there was ever gonna be anybody for him, someone for Dean to take home and say finders keepers, he thinks it really might be Castiel –  but it’s not love, just something like it.  Something that looks like love, sometimes; something that sounds like love and tastes like love and feels just like it but it’s not love, Dean’s not stupid.  He tells himself it’s not love because he’d know.  It’s not love because Dean knows what love feels like, and this isn’t it: Love is oiled brakes and love is dinner made from scratch and love is watching someone’s back as they walk away without a single glance behind, and so this can’t be love, Dean knows it’s not because it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t leave him strung out and hung over the next morning.  

This isn’t love.

Whatever it is, it isn’t much.  Just golden light creeping across the kitchen floor in the late morning and pouring Castiel a second cup of coffee, it’s just warm hands resting on the crook of his elbow to help him stand up, it’s not like love at all.  It’s not what he remembers.  It’s not a love he knows.

But there are signs – the flowers on the kitchen table that Castiel left there for him.  Castiel’s shoes left in the doorway of the library, laces untied.  The way he nods off in the front seat of the car with his shoulder against Castiel’s sometimes, when it’s four in the morning and Cas says he’ll drive for a while. He likes that Castiel’s dark hair curls against the back of his neck, he likes to look at the bare slice of skin just under Castiel’s left ear.  That’s not love, is it?  Dean can’t tell, can’t be sure.  It’s not the final sum, the grand total of everything they are and are not to each other, it’s just part of the equation.  Dean tells himself that If this was love he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. If this was love, he’d be singing love songs at two thirty a.m. along with the radio, he’d be doing ninety down the highway just to match the pace of his heart.

But sometimes he’ll sit there watching Castiel, with his arm thrown back over the arm of the couch watching This Old House, and he allows to himself – it might be, one day, if something ever changes, if Dean ever gets the courage – it’s not love, he knows, he knows.  Just something like it.