Never Been Nerdy(35)

"Don't you yell at me, Katie! Don't you fraking dare! Next time I see you, I'm gonna punch you in the boob!" She growls. I want to throttle her right now.

"You're the one who can't get your head out of your ass for five minutes and see what you're doing to yourself and the people around you. Fraking hell, what is the matter with you? Where the hell are you, you and I are going to have words, and they ain't going to be pretty, I promise you that!"

I don't know what to say. I can't call her a bitch because that's exactly what I would've said if the roles were reversed. Huh.

"I'm with Dean right now."

"Has he knocked some sense in you, yet? You better not ruin him, K, he's too good for that! I swear to Castiel, you do anything to hurt him, I'm going to …  I'm going to find another maid of honour and you'll have to live with the shame for the rest of your life!"

I feel like I've been slapped. There was just too much information to deal with.

"Maid of Honour? What? Dean? Who?"

I'm making no sense but Sera knows what I'm saying. "Yeah, you're going to be my maid of honour! You said some real shitty things but I know why you did, and even though I didn't deserve any of that, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. You were angry and riled up and terrified and humiliated and you took it out on me. Not cool, K, but that's fine. The Winchesters know I'm not going to hold it against you. That's what you do, K, even when all the cards are down, or some other Poker analogy I don't understand - you still keep fighting for who you care about. You don't just give up, and I'm not giving up on you."

My throat's on fire, and I'm struggling to breathe. There's a hole in my chest, expanding, getting wider, tearing everything open with harsh hands.

"I don't think you should give me another chance, Sera," I whisper and start walking towards Dean's bathroom. I set Potter down at my feet, who just curls up between them and starts napping again. Man, I envy him that ability.

"I'm an awful friend. You shouldn't give me another chance. You shouldn't do that." I swallow hard, and rub the tears off my cheeks. I hiccup and chew on my lip to keep quiet.

"Hang up on me now, and go celebrate with Hunter. Have some hot jungle sex and orgasm twelve times, okay? Be happy for me, Delos, just be happy."

I hang up, and grab a wad of toilet paper to soak up my tears.

The only thing is they don't stop falling.



***



"Are you okay in there?" Deans asks, after knocking on the bathroom door. Maybe he has to take a piss, and I'm hogging the bathroom.

"Yeah, I'm okay," I say, but my voice is all watery and weak and he has to know that I'm in here, bawling my eyes out, no matter how quiet I tried to be.

"C'mon, kitten, come on out. I'll make you some hot chocolate from scratch and top it with homemade whipped cream, okay?"

"You keep feeding me like this, I'm going to weigh a thousand pounds!" I whisper-yell, and blow my nose.

"Hot chocolate, kitten. Homemade. Did I stutter?"

That's probably a reference, too, but I don't know from what movie. There's no pressure though for me to understand, and because I can't see him, he doesn't give me the crazy eyes begging for me to understand the reference like Sera sometimes does. I never told her, but it always made me feel stupid, and left out.

Dean doesn't make me feel like that at all.

"I'm coming out, just gimme a sec." I get up off the toilet and Potter hops to it with me, looking at me like we're going to go on an adventure together and he's game. I look at my reflection and try to wipe off the meager makeup I put on this morning, wiping the mascara trails under my eyes, practically rubbing my skin raw ‘cause that shit is waterproof.   





 

When I'm satisfied I come out, and smell the deep cocoa smell that is homemade hot chocolate.

"You know," I sniff, "my dad used to make me hot chocolate almost every school night because I had trouble sleeping. Even when I didn't have trouble sleeping, I never told him, because I loved getting something that he made from scratch. Pretty stupid, huh?"

Dean looks back at me from stirring the pot of milky deliciousness. "Not stupid at all. It's a long con if I ever heard of one. I wouldn't mind making my little girl hot chocolate every night. With toasted marshmallows on top topped with cinnamon. Yeah, that sounds about right."

"You want kids?" The question is very … intimate. I mean, I don't even know if the Josh, Eli, Russia and Alex want kids. We've never talked about it, and knowing this about Dean seems more than a bit invasive.

"Yeah. My little brother Max is in New York, I think I told you that already." I don't tell him he didn't.

"I don't get to see him much and I miss the little asshole. I don't know, I always wanted a bunch, now whether a bunch means three or five kids, I'm not too sure."

I listen to him whisk the milk. "That's a lot to ask of somebody."

"Yeah, I know. That's why I'm single."

I snort, rubbing my eyes and cheeks again. "You're single because you want kids? Yeah, there's got to be something else wrong with you."

Dean shrugs and pours the hot chocolate into giant-sized mugs. He then gets to work on the whipped cream, even beating it by hand. I admire the bulge and contractions of his forearms and biceps. Wow.

"I'm sure there's lots of things wrong with me to at least one person on the planet. But I don't see anything wrong with me. I just haven't found the right girl, I guess."

"And who's the right girl, what's she like?" My heart's thumping hard, and all I want to yell out is: Me, me, me!

"She calls me out on my bullshit, and laughs a lot. She knows all my favourite movies and leaves me alone when the Habs are playing or if it's playoff season. She won't mind my patchy beard growth during November, and she won't mind at all that I collect comics and toys. She'll love my dogs, and won't mind getting dirty when we go for long walks. She lives in sneakers, and doesn't care what she looks like without makeup on, but to me, she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

"We can spend evenings with Netflix playing in the background and we just sit reading whatever we feel like. I don't mind cooking for her, because she loves my cooking, and doesn't care if I put butter, and use all the real ingredients. I could spend the day planning out a meal and just watch her enjoy it, listen to all the sounds she makes as she devours the food.

"We can go for long walks with the boys, and I'll be completely enchanted by the blush on her cheeks, or the way she puts her hands in the bend of my elbow. She wouldn't mind that I read too much, or spend most of my time thinking about how to design my own Death Star and if I really could be seduced by the Dark Side. Nah, she wouldn't mind that at all."

Dean's finished with the whipped cream and tops it delicately on top of our mugs. He adds a sprinkling of cocoa on top with a few shakes of a Darth-Vader-shaped sieve, and walks over to hand me my hot chocolate.

I stare down at the awesomeness that I'm about to devour and want to bite my lip. I don't want to say, that sounds nothing like me. But what's the point? Dean just blatantly told me that I'm not what he wants, and that doesn't even matter  –  I'm going to break his heart, again, and he'll never forgive me for that.

So I keep quiet, and slurp up some decadent hot chocolate, getting whipped cream on my nose and laughing because I probably look ridiculous.

"This is amazing," I smile up at him, and watch him wipe the whipped cream off his nose.

He takes another sip then concentrates hard enough to get his tongue to swipe the bottom of his nose and get the cream. I let out a giggle and slap my hand over my mouth. I don't think that sound's come out of me since the third grade.

"You have a nice laugh, why do you cover it up?" he says, grinning at me and it's like we're back in high school and that smile destroys me all over again.

"I don't like the sound of my laugh. It's too girly. Not professional at all."

"Kat, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I've seen a lot of shit movies in my time, so I know what I'm talking about. "   





 

I shake my head, slurp up some more hot chocolate. "Do you have any straws?"

Dean nods, and turns around to go into his cupboards. He fishes out a green one for him and a blue one for me, the special silly straws that were the coolest thing you'd ever seen when you were a kid.

I wanted to keep my nose from being cream-ified any longer, but Dean's gone ahead and started blowing bubbles into his hot chocolate. Giant bubbles erupt from the mug and Dean's face is a perfect mask of concentration, keeping the bubbles from exploding over the rim of the mug and spilling onto the countertop.

He's just a big kid and I don't think he'll ever grow up.

"C'mon, kitten, blow some bubbles and get your face dirty. You'll still be beautiful if you get chocolate milk on it, I promise."

How can he just say those things to me and go back to blowing bubbles like what he just said hasn't made my eyes all big and my heart trip over itself?

How does he do that  –  disarm me completely?

"You and Sera okay now?" Dean asks, and that's it. There's no probing for details just a general question if everything's okay now. And I like that a lot.

"I think so. She wants me to be her maid of honour."

"And?"

I shrug. "I'm not too sure how to feel about that. I want her to be happy, but I'm getting in the way of that. I should keep my distance. At least for now. I'm going to screw things up for her, and I don't want to do that. It's actually the reason why I'm staying far away from my mom's wedding tonight. She's getting married at city hall, but a whole bunch of her friends and family are supposed to show up later, but I don't want to go.