Castiel would never wish to disappoint her, but so far this experiment was only uncomfortable and a bit damp. He was all too aware of how close she was and didn’t understand how this was supposed to be anything but disconcerting. According to Anna, this was affectionate and comforting. She’d been careful to avoid calling it the other things it was: sensual, carnal, and lustful. Yet it was there between them in the way her fingers curled into the forearms of the flesh he wore.
Castiel parted from her, not jerking away or shoving. He merely took hold of her shoulders and moved her from against his mouth to over a foot away again, where she’d started.
“That was very nice,” he recited with barely any inflection to his voice.
“You didn’t feel a thing, did you?” Anna accused softly.
“It was wet,” he countered with a tilt of his head.
“Well, it’s something,” Anna muttered, more to herself than to him. “I should’ve expected this.” She moved further away, and though Castiel wasn’t very learned in the ways of body language, he could tell that he’d done something wrong.
“We could keep trying,” he offered.
“There wouldn’t be a point,” Anna said, her voice strained with the effort it took to keep her disappointment properly buried. “I’m sorry I brought it up, really. I don’t think you’re ready to understand the ways of the flesh, Cas.”
“Does one have to fall to feel it the way it is meant to be felt?” he ventured carefully, thoughtful as always.
“That may be,” Anna replied, but it was plain that she didn’t care about the reasons. She only cared that it hadn’t worked, and Castiel felt a weight fall on him when he considered that he’d let her down.
“I am… sorry.” The words were almost a question, awkward with a tinge of inappropriateness to them. But if there were words for such a situation, Castiel didn’t know them.
“Me too,” Anna sighed with a smile as strained as her voice.
Castiel searched her eyes for a moment as something welled up in him, some new realization. He wanted to compare it to revelation, that feeling of receiving orders and having a direction being given to him, but this felt more internalized. This was not delivered from some outside source. This was only him. Him and a memory.
“Dean could do that for you,” Castiel grunted and could hear something new in his tone that hadn’t been there before. “He kissed you and felt everything he was supposed to feel.”
Anna, who had averted her gaze, snapped it back in Castiel’s direction now with a hint of confusion. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was jealous. Perhaps that was too simple a label to put on something as complicated as this, but there was something dangerously bordering on a sin there, lurking around the corners of his words like a shadow.
She was near to answering him, moments away from finding the right words that would soothe and calm him. She wanted him to be real, but it shocked her to find that the notion of an envious Castiel was frightening. Perhaps not to her, but to others certainly. She wasn’t given a chance to smooth the jagged edges, steer him onto a more even path. She was besieged.
This kiss was like fire, full of movement and fervor, and while she wasn’t sure he felt anything more now than he had moments ago, he was having no trouble in making her feel. Her body was not strictly angelic, and that was another way in which she would likely never find anyone else who understood her uniqueness, but she wasn’t numb. Their locked mouths was a bold reminder of just how much sensation she could sustain, how much it lit her up inside.
The room had been turned white from a harsh glow, and neither of them noticed until they were parted a second time. It seemed that Anna’s wings had slipped free when she wasn’t looking, and Castiel felt another of those odd surges (pride this time, but he was still too naïve to pair words with emotions with any success).
“Was that better?” Castiel asked, and Anna could see a splash of color on his cheek, proving in some, small way that he perceived more from his vessel than he let on.
Anna was mere seconds away from saying “yea, verily,” but she figured Castiel wouldn’t understand that sort of humor. “Yes, I’d say so.”
“We should continue to practice this,” Castiel said evenly. “I feel I am improving.”
Anna snorted, then before he could become defensive, she pressed her hand tenderly against his cheek. “You are at that.”
The End
