Shut Up (Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is) | CHAPTER FOUR
From: winchesterd@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 08:53 PM
To: swinchester@law.standford.edu
Subject: Re: SPAM: Re: Re: Still alive?
Okay, I know I said I'd call, and I swear I will- I'm just really busy right now with work and other things. We've got a few big project deadlines coming, and I just started helping one of my coworkers fix up his place. The guy has this gorgeous house, maybe a hundred years old and out by the coast, and it hasn't been worked on since the fifties or something. Crying shame. Dad would have loved to get his hands on it.
Speaking of busy, how's school? Your fall semester is starting soon, isn't it? Let me know how that’s going.
-DW
Castiel is a mystery.
He’s a mystery, wrapped in an accounting-controller-financer whatever, wrapped in a fuck-ugly trenchcoat candy coating, and somehow still so irresistible that Dean spends maybe a day or two a week in his own apartment, mostly after late client meetings and not at all if he can help it. It always feels like a punishment now, going home alone.
Castiel seems to exist independently of any family or real friends, Anna notwithstanding. His main hobbies appear to be watching the ocean, reading brick-thick novels in foreign languages and bringing work home to squint at on his bulky Gateway monitor, which must be closing in on a decade old.
Oh, and sex. Dean can personally testify that when Castiel isn’t working, there’s a fifty percent chance or greater that he’s wrapped around Dean, on their bed or across the couch or outside under the trees, tugging Dean down with him into the grass after he shows him the ruined gazebo that clings to the top of the rocky slope. When Dean darts furtive glances at their distant neighbors and says, “What, here?” Castiel snugs his calves behind Dean’s knees and growls, “Yes, now.”
He’ll disappear while Dean’s prying up rotten boards and pounding in new ones, and Dean will spot him hours later a hundred feet down the beach, crouched on the jagged rocks that frame their sandy cove. He brings Dean shells, sand-dollars, and on one memorable occasion a hermit crab barely bigger than his thumbnail. The crab gets a name-- Herman-- before he’s released to make his crabby way through life. The cat, which sleeps on their bed almost every night, remains nameless.
Objectively, Castiel should be boring. His job is boring (though he insists it’s vital to the company’s continued existence), his clothes are awful and boring, his routines (save the sex) are incredibly boring.
But Cas is probably the most interesting person Dean’s ever met, and in his childhood Dean covered more ground than a travelling circus. The way Castiel sees things, the paradoxical combination of frightening insight and complete obliviousness that characterizes his view of people, his stubbornness, intelligence, the unselfconscious way he carries himself through life- it’s amazing, and baffling. Dean sometimes feels like even after all these weeks he barely has a grip on who exactly Castiel Milton is, this weird little dude who lives an enormous turn-of-the-century beach house that has to be worth millions and hasn’t replaced a single cedar shake, hasn’t painted, hasn’t even dusted from the depth of the cobwebs layered over the foyer’s chandelier.
"What do you mean, you've never been in the basement?" Dean says through a mouthful of Cheerios one morning.
Castiel, who Dean has quickly learned is never at his most amicable or mentally nimble before coffee, glares lethargically at him over the lip of his mug. "It's a cellar. They kept root vegetables in it."
"Still." Dean chews, swallows. "You've been in this place, what five years? And you've never been in the cellar?"
"The doors are chained shut," Castiel mumbles, slumping further in his seat.
“And you don’t have the key?”
Castiel glowers at him. "I have it. Somewhere."
'Somewhere' turns out to be in the ungodly mess that is Castiel's kitchen drawers, and Dean has to comb through every last extraneous letter opener and piece of scrap metal to find it.
“I’m making you a key rack,” Dean threatens.
“Oh?” Castiel says, looking more interested. “Can it be wrought iron?”
It’s cooler today, wind a little brisker, and the waves are energetic where they crash against the beach below. The stray cat is waiting for them on the east loggia, basking in the intermittent sunlight that makes it through the trees. She rolls onto her fat belly to watch them walk past, then casually saunters after them as they make their way across the overgrown grass and viburnum bushes just starting to pink around the edges.
“Key me,” Dean says, braced over the rusty chain and lock, and Castiel drops it into his waiting hand.
There’s a lot of jamming and swearing as the key incrementally turns, and then Dean has to yank at both ends of the chain to pry the lock open, but then it’s off and he can throw open the double doors to rickety stairs and a deep, waiting darkness.
“... flashlights,” Dean decides, and they troop back to the kitchen, leaving the cat to sniff interestedly at the top step.
The root cellar has dun-colored brick walls and rows of empty, dusty shelves. And mice. Dean sees them darting along the walls and very shortly after sees the cat in hot pursuit, eyes glinting eerily as she runs through the beam of Dean’s flashlight.
“I told you,” Castiel says. “There’s nothing in here.”
“Well, it never hurts to check,” Dean says. “And if we cleaned it out, we could…”
He pauses, and holds his flashlight up to illuminate the far wall.
“Is that a door?”
“Where?” Castiel asks.
“Right there,” Dean points, and walks towards it. “Behind that- yeah, that’s a door alright.”
The door opens onto flight of steep, narrow stairs with another door at the top, sunlight peeking out around the frame. The cat precedes them up the treads and sits there until Dean can open it-
-onto a virtual sea of mover’s boxes.
“Ah,” Castiel says, peering over Dean's shoulder. “We’re in the garage.”
“The garage?” Dean sputters, shoving the door further open against the tide of cardboard. “How have you not unpacked all this crap?”
“They aren’t mine,” Castiel says, helping him. “Everything I own is either in the bedroom or kitchen. The majority of the furniture and home accents were my great-aunt’s, who also kept my great-great-grandmother’s things after her death and was an avid collector various things. I would say she contributed the bulk of these.”
“Cas,” Dean grunts, wedging the door open wide enough that they both can squeeze through, “are you telling me that all the freaking boxes I’ve been shoving around, tripping over and stubbing my toes on aren’t even yours?”
“I was always too busy to look through them,” Castiel says apologetically, holding the door for the cat.
“That’s our first step, then,” Dean says, dusting his hands off.
“First step?”
“Before we can tackle anything else in this house, we’ve got to clean it out. If, uh,” Dean says sheepishly, “that’s okay with you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Castiel says, sounding surprised. “The volume has been overwhelming at times. Will two of us be able to do it?”
“About that,” Dean says. “I think I’ve got a plan.”
“So, Charlie,” he says the next morning, leaning a hip on her desk. “What are you doing this weekend?”
“The same thing we do every weekend, Pinky,” she says, eyes glued to the 3-D model she’s crafting on a computer screen the size of some tables. “Why? Whatcha got in mind?”
“Well, you know. Cas and I were going to have some people over,” Dean says offhandedly, flicking an invisible piece of lint off his tie. “Grill out on the deck we just finished. You interested?”
“Holy cow, am I,” she says, spinning around to face him. “Wait. Wait, you’ve got the look.”
“The look?” he says, feigning confusion. “What look?”
“The look,” she says with narrow eyes. “The ‘heh-heh’ look. The look that says ‘suckaaa, I got you and you don’t even know it’. That look. What are you planning?”
“Well,” Dean prevaricates, “there might be some recreational sorting involved. You’ll love it, I promise.”
“Sorting?” she asks incredulously.
“Boxes, Charlie,” he says, leaning in. “Boxes as far as the eye can see. No one’s looked in them for at least a decade, maybe more. Crazy collector just up and left them. Turn of the century antiques, probably.”
“Oh my God,” she says, but her tone is completely different now, as he’d known it would be. “Let me tell my troupe!”
“Your... troop?”
“The community theater is always looking for old clothes and things,” she says, “and we can rent a van to take things for charity, and to the dump if they’re super gross, and maybe I’ll finally find my mom that Fiestaware glaze pattern she’s missing! This is going to be the best party ever!”
Dean leaves her office with a vague sense that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, but that’s certainly nothing new with Charlie.
Then she shows up at the house on Saturday with easily fifty kids under fifteen and their hapless-looking parents, and Dean feels like he should have known this was coming.
“Whoa,” he says, looking out at the crowd. “Hey, this is kinda--”
“Don’t worry, we brought enough food for everyone,” Charlie says breezily, and blows right past him into the house, trailed by her youthful minions.
Castiel takes the invasion of his home by a mob of theater kids with unexpected grace, sitting in a stained damask chair in the middle of the foyer and looking only a little unnerved as they run back and forth across the breadth of the house, shrieking and laughing like a bunch of damn monkeys.
“Sorry,” Charlie says as she hurries past, wincing as something crashes to the floor in a distant room. “I don’t think all that soda at lunch was a good idea.”
“Yes, well,” Castiel says bracingly, just as the cat streaks in, pursued by a gaggle of tween girls. “Oh, don’t--”
Dean scoops her off the floor and she runs by and deposits her in Castiel’s lap, making him the immediate target of the cooing group.
“She’s so pretty!” one of them gasps. “Can we pet her, Mr. Milton?”
“Oh, um, if she lets you,” Castiel says, hemmed in and slightly panicked-looking.
“You know, she might need some alone time since things are so noisy down here,” Dean says. “Why don’t you go see if the older girls need help in the west wing.”
They trail away with a chorus of awwwws, casting longing glances back at the cat clinging with all its might to Castiel’s shirtfront.
“You can go upstairs,” Dean says when they're gone. “Charlie and I are getting pretty good at knowing what you want to keep, and if we have any questions we’ll ask. Promise.”
The look of unspeakable gratefulness Castiel gives him before getting up makes Dean feel like a terrible person. But, looking around at the emptied room and the piles and piles of things marked for donations out in the paved courtyard, he also feels like they’re moving in the right direction, and a sense of deep satisfaction accompanies the thought.
Cleared of extraneous junk, the house is cavernous, huge and bare and echoing. He and Cas are going to change that.
“A house is like a person,” Dean says, warm and drowsy in their giant bed, Cas lying on his side next to him. “It’s got bones, muscle and skin, and veins and eyes. The guy who's coming by this week, the home inspector? He's like a doctor who goes through and makes sure the foundation is solid, the electric work is safe, and the pipes aren’t rusted through. We'll fix those things, and we'll replace the doors and windows that need it. Then we can knock out walls, paint, put in shelves. Move furniture around. Whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want,” Castiel muses, drawing a ticklish line along the dip of Dean’s waist, up the rise of his hip. “What if I wanted- pink polka dots over everything? Zebra stripes?”
“I would consider it my civic duty to try to talk you out of it,” Dean says, which earns him a smile. “But if that was what you really wanted… yeah.”
Castiel’s hand finds his in the sheets and the man’s eyes drop to their fingers, lashes lowered and his thumb stroking across Dean’s palm. It takes a moment for Dean, who’s still floating in that particular languid exhaustion that comes from really good sex, to realize that it’s his left hand. Castiel’s left hand as well.
The rings are something they don’t talk about, though they both wear them. Dean holds his breath and waits for Castiel to say something, glad of the darkness that hides his face.
He's still waiting when he falls asleep, lulled by the movement of Castiel's thumb on his skin and the quiet sound of his breath in his ear.
The third Sunday of every month is Ben's Baseball Day, and Dean can’t miss that- especially not when the Yankees are in town. He casually mentions over next Saturday’s tetrazzini that he has plans for the next day and won’t be around. Castiel grunts to show he’s listening and then goes back to shoveling the casserole into his mouth like he’s never tasted anything better. Sam used to complain endlessly about Dean’s cooking, about the amount of butter and red meat and transfats and ten thousand other things, so the starved way Castiel always goes after his food is always an ego boost.
Dean slips out of the house at ten and speeds across the empty freeways, making excellent time out to the suburbs of Dorchester. He’s even a little early, pulling up in front of Lisa’s cute little townhouse at a quarter after eleven. Ben must have been waiting for him, because Dean’s hardly put the car in park before the kid is out the door like a shot, his mother walking out a little slower with folded arms and a long-suffering expression.
“Dean!”
“Hey, kiddo,” he says warmly, grabbing him in a one-armed hug and Ben flings open the door and throws himself across the bucket seat. “Okay, okay, sit yourself down. The sooner you strap in, the sooner we can go, right?”
“Call me if you’ll be home later than six,” Lisa says, coming up to lean on the Impala’s frame.
“Yes, ma’am.” Dean salutes her, Ben copies him, and she rolls her eyes at the both of them and makes shooing motions with her hands.
“Get, then, you’ll be late.”
“Bye, Mom!” Ben waves at her for a perfunctory second before he settles down and starts talking a mile a minute about the World Series and averages and reciting statistics that would make a casual fan’s ears bleed.
The seats today are pretty decent by their standards, high in one of the last rows of the first deck. Dick Berardino is supposed to be autographing in the Alley later, but Ben’s already got a ball from him, Dean thinks. They settle in with hot dogs and warm cola and sit through twenty interminable minutes of a pregame ceremony to honor a closer who’s retiring before the game starts.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s been a shitty year to be a Yankees fan. The first inning starts out promising with a run for the Yankees, but at the bottom of the first the Red Sox get in three and from there, it’s a fucking rout. He and Ben get one pretty solid appearance on the jumbotron in the third before Dean’s just too depressed to look up anymore, but the commentary from the observation booth and Ben’s nonstop trashtalk mean he doesn’t miss a single excruciating instant.
Buchholz pitches six innings of two-hit ball and the Red Sox coast to an easy 9-2 win, their third in a row and their seventh over the Yankees in eleven days. The Yankees don’t even get in that second run until the top of the ninth, and leave the diamond looking like a bunch of beaten dogs. Despondency leaves Dean slumped over with his head in his hands as Ben jumps and hollers and stomps with the rest of the stadium, jabbing his giant foam finger in the air and getting mustard all over his shirt from the forgotten footlong in his other hand.
“Jeez, kid, you’re a mess,” Dean says as they join the crush of people squeezing out towards the parking lot.
“We won! Souvenir stand!” Ben crows, dodging ahead through the crowd, because this is baseball and there are traditions to be upheld. Dean joins a hellaciously long line and grudgingly forks over the money for piece of crap Sox-embroidered hat made in China, which Ben jams sideways on his head with a cocky grin, and another mug for Lisa’s collection. He hesitates, then throws in a Sox keychain in case Cas is any kind of baseball fan.
They go out for milkshakes and burgers afterwards, and Ben describes with great disgust Lisa’s new boyfriend, a dentist from Georgia who “Doesn’t even have any hair, Dean. Like, he’s completely bald. And he calls me sonny, that’s so weird--”
When Dean relates this to Lisa that night she laughs, reaching out to pat Ben’s back where he’s slumped fast asleep over Dean’s shoulder, one arm around Dean’s neck. Poor kid had crashed so hard on the drive back that he hadn’t even stirred when Dean lifted him out of the front seat and carried him inside.
“Why don’t you go tuck him in,” she says quietly. “I’ll make us some drinks.”
Dean gets Ben squared away upstairs and comes down to two steaming mugs at the kitchen table, Lisa already sitting and sipping from the one Dean had gotten at Fenway. He slides into a seat across from her and grabs the other one.
“Hot chocolate?” he says after a taste, licking foam from his lip. “It’s September, Lis.”
“It’s never too early for peppermint hot cocoa,” she says primly. “Besides, I just found a huge container of it hiding in the back of the pantry. Can’t let it go stale.”
They make small talk for a while, questions about how the gang at Talbot is doing and if Lisa ever got rid of her unexpected bumpercrop of summer squash.
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” she says, shuddering. “I’m lucky Mark let me dump so many of them on him. Too nice to say no.”
“Mark?” Dean says casually. “Is that this dentist guy?”
The arch look Lisa aims his way shows he isn’t fooling anyone. “How about your little Las Vegas hook-up, hmm? How’s he doing?”
It’s too late to hide the ring. Dean’s not sure he could get it off even if he wanted to, with all the calluses he’s been building up working on the house. “Uh, good. He’s good.”
“Oh, he must be,” she says, tone nothing short of salacious.
“Lisa,” Dean says, pained, and she laughs at him, setting her cocoa aside and leaning back to look at him with a smile and sad eyes.
“We’re okay, aren’t we?” she asks. “You and I.”
Seeing her will always be a little bittersweet, he thinks. They’d started dating after Dean moved to Massachusetts, about three years with each other when all was said and done. There’d been such a strong sense of fate and meant-to-be with her, because he’d known her in New York before meeting her again in Boston and Ben could have been his, even though she says he’s not.
“Yeah,” Dean says, smiling back. “We’re okay.”
“So, then,” she says, leaning in, “You can ask me about Mark, and I can tease you about this Milton guy. Is it true there were coconut bras involved?”
“I was completely wasted,” Dean says defensively, and Lisa cackles.
“Well, I’m happy for you,” she says when she finally gets control of herself. “You’ll have to bring him around some time. I know Ben will want to meet him.”
Dean hadn’t thought of that, though strangely the idea doesn’t sound as far-fetched as it once might have. “We’ll do another baseball day before the end of the season. You should come, too.”
“He’d love that,” she says, getting up to wash their mugs out. “I'd love to.”
When Dean gets back to the house, he finds Castiel sitting on the edge of the still-unvarnished deck, feet swinging in the empty space where the stairs will be as he looks out towards the first glimmer of stars over the ocean. Dean grabs a beer and a ginger ale from the fridge and moseys out across the raw wood, handing him the drink and sitting next to him with a knee pulled up to his chest.
“Nice night.”
“Mmhm,” Castiel says, hooking an ankle under his.
They sit in companionable silence while sky darkens overhead, cerulean to indigo to coaldust.
“Oh, hey,” Dean says, shifting to dig in his pocket. “I got you something from the ballpark.”
He holds out the keychain and Castiel glances down at it, gives Dean a disdainful look. “I actually prefer the Yankees.”
“Dude,” Dean says, eyes widening. “Dude. Get over here and kiss me.”
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