Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jensen was fairly certain he was going to keel over dead. It wasn’t the heavy class load. He’d done far worse getting his physical therapy degree. It certainly wasn’t his job unless he thought that the constant exposure to clothes washing detergents and fabric softeners was getting to his brain.

No, he was pretty sure it was his diet. Ramen noodles and whatever cheap stuff was in the discount bin at the grocery store was bad enough, but he’d had to switch to cheap coffee, and the burn from its acid was going to go through the lining of his stomach. That and it was going to cause his taste buds to shrivel up and die.

He wasn’t that old, but he felt it. There were days when he wondered what the hell he was doing, and then he’d drag his ass to class and be assaulted by the sight of a giant angel bouncing around and grinning like a lunatic.

Jared, Jared, Jared. Jensen wasn’t sure what to make of the seraph. Half of him felt overwhelming affection for the guy every time that he laid eyes on him. The other half was just overwhelmed in general. Most days he was confused about the whole thing, and it didn’t help that the instant that Jared was within speaking range he just kind of sucked Jensen into orbit around him.

Jensen’s classes had started to blend together. He wasn’t even sure if he was really learning anything from them anymore because he spent so much time paying attention to Jared that he kind of blotted out the outside world. Half the time he couldn’t remember if he was supposed to be dabbing paint on the guy’s pinions or rubbing that perpetual knot out from between his wing gap.

He was more aware of what was going on with Jared than he was of anybody else. He knew the way that Jared’s mouth tilted when he was angry, sad or contemplative. He knew the instant that Jared’s feathers started growing back in, and he felt the wholly unfounded stab of jealousy when those same feathers fell out to be replaced with newer, more colorful plumage.

Mating feathers, Jensen’s brain unhelpfully identified them the very first time that his eyes landed on one. Another student probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Jensen had spent his life being obsessed with the winged creatures. He knew that they’d start molting their regular feathers to brighter ones when they were trying to attract a mate. It was, as far as the historians could get out of the tight lipped seraphs, one of the reasons that wing painting had developed, vain seraphs trying to duplicate the wonder of their mating feathers.

The illogical jealousy was made worse by Jared’s thoughtfulness. At first, he had kept trying to get Jensen to go out for coffee or something after class. Each time that Jensen told him, “No,” the guy’s face seemed to get one more worried wrinkle to it. He’d seemed upset by Jensen’s constant refusals, but Jensen’s pride hadn’t allowed him to admit that he didn’t have the money to go out. He felt like a jerk because Jared was making this great effort to be his friend, but he couldn’t afford to pay for a two dollar cup of coffee let alone the burgers and fries Jared would sometimes tempt him with.

It was after one of those turned down offers that Jensen had walked halfway to the exit door before realizing that he’d forgotten to double check that he’d gotten the lids back on his paints. He couldn’t afford to replace them if they dried out, and he wasn’t a good enough painter to make up for a color missing from his palette.

When he had walked back into the building, he’d caught Jared pulling at his feathers fretfully. They were healthy and strong quills. Jensen himself had run his fingers over them that very morning, and he knew that there was no way that their condition had deteriorated enough in the intervening hours to merit their removal.

“Hey, stop that,” Jensen had said as he strode over to grab hold of Jared’s hand.

“Jensen,” Jared had whispered in response as his face blushed, and his eyes clouded with shame.

“What’s got you so stressed? You were fine earlier. My magic fingers losing their touch?” Jensen had joked as he removed Jared’s hand and gently pushed the still attached feathers back into place.

“No, I… It’s nothing,” Jared had said.

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Jensen had countered. “Unless you’re talking about the fact that ‘nothing’ is going to be exactly what’s left of your wings if you keep this up. What gives? They were starting to look better.”

“I…” Jared had looked away, but Jensen hadn’t let that deter him. He’d gently reached up to turn Jared’s face back to his own.

“What?” He’s prompted.

“What’s wrong with me? I don’t understand.” Jared had whispered.

Jensen’s eyebrows had headed towards his hairline. “Nothing is wrong with you.”

“But, I… I thought you liked me, but I have to be wrong because, well I know you’re not bigoted. So it’s got to be me, right?”

And then Jensen had understood at least part of Jared’s problem. It hadn’t been worth his pride to cause Jared the stress, and the not so simple admission of being broke had eased the seraph’s worries and turned them into a disturbing need to coddle Jensen instead.

Jared started bringing him fresh ground coffee and found all sorts of excuses to share his lunch because he was, “Too full, man.” It was a lie because Jensen was fairly certain that Jared could eat an entire pot roast complete with vegetables without blinking an eye, but he found himself accepting the food more often than not because Jared was so careful to spare his pride with the way that he gave, and Jensen hadn’t liked the ramen diet the first time around.

When Jensen made one throwaway comment about wanting to know more about seraph culture instead of just learning about their physical attributes, Jared started bringing him books. Informational ones and fiction that was popular with Jared’s seraph acquaintances started to clutter Jensen’s tiny living space. Jared seemed to mull each selection over carefully before giving them to Jensen like he wanted to make certain that Jensen would appreciate just how much Jared wanted to help him with his goal of knowledge.

There were times when Jensen just wanted to give Jared a hug and tell him that he didn’t need to worry so much. He was really helping Jensen out, and there wasn’t any need to be worrying about the quality of his gifts. It wasn’t like he thought Jensen couldn’t be appreciative of how generous Jared was being to him when he didn’t need to be if he brought Jensen a used book instead of a new one or simply loaned him a book instead of outright giving it.

Jared was really a nice guy though, and Jensen got along well with him. He didn’t want to hurt Jared’s feeling or make him feel uncomfortable about all the gifts and how they could be interpreted the wrong way. Jensen knew that Jared wasn’t trying to buy his trust or companionship with expensive coffees and tasty meals, and whatever anybody else thought was their own business.

The fact that Jared’s feathers had started to grow back in was a great thing, and Jensen wasn’t about to add stress back to Jared’s life by trying to alter his giving nature into something more socially acceptable by his classmates. They were to the point where Jensen would honestly call Jared his friend. Over the course of the weeks they’d spent together, Jensen had mostly given up on the idea that Jared was the academy’s special Ackles hunting mole.

Even though the faculty still took down the occasional suspicious note, Jensen had never seen Jared do anything but stare sincerely at him.

And yeah, those fond looks of friendship might have crossed a few wires in Jensen’s brain. He liked Jared. He liked him in unprofessional ways, and no matter how hard he tried to make himself listen, his heart still did a stupid little stuttered beat each time that Jared smiled at him. He still blushed and looked down whenever Jared brought him a new trinket or tidbit because he knew that his eyes would give away what he was feeling if he didn’t.

Most embarrassingly, he could still get caught gawking at Jared’s physique at the beginning of preening class when he didn’t have enough sleep or caffeine in his system to enable the neurons in his brain that controlled subtlety. It was almost like his body was trying to tune into Jared’s on some weird level, like they were magnets attracting each other. It was preposterous, of course, nothing but starry-eyed bullshit that all of the romance books that Jared had bought him had put into Jensen’s lonely head and fueled his under used libido.

So when Jared’s mating plumage started coming in, it was easy for Jensen to start worrying and tell himself that it was nothing but platonic concern. If a simple perceived rejection of friendship had disturbed Jared so much that he’d started to pull at his feathers, Jensen couldn’t imagine what a romantic rejection would do.

He only hoped that the pretty little thing that had caught Jared’s attention was as gentle and nice as the lumbering giant. Given that most of the books that Jared had given him lately had been popular romance novels about star crossed human-seraph pairings, Jensen had the ominous feeling that Jared had fallen in love with a human girl.

It wasn’t that Jensen frowned on that sort of thing. He’d marched in support rallies for those couples; it would make him a hypocrite to frown on that sort of relationship. But that didn’t mean that whatever girl had caught Jared’s eye returned his affections or returned them for the right reasons.

There were plenty of humans that would be more than willing to give a tumble to a seraph for the uniqueness of it. Jensen didn’t want Jared to get attached to somebody who was really only out for the thrill of getting it on with one of the winged ones.

Any sentiment of, “Why not me?” was quickly subdued on Jensen’s part. He wanted no part of pushing his own feelings on Jared. It was bad enough that they would sneak up on Jensen and catch him unaware. It would be so much worse if the emotions managed to get out and announce themselves to Jared. A little crush was one thing. Exposing that crush would be quite another, especially not when Jared had been his only real support for the past couple of months.

Sure Chris still called, and Jensen’s parents talked to him regularly. But Chris always had that worried tone that told Jensen that he was crazy for dumping his internship, and Jensen was still lying to his parents. They didn’t know that they needed to be supportive, and they certainly didn’t know that he was back to scraping by. Not that he’d been doing great shakes on an intern’s salary, but it had been enough that they’d given up on worrying about his financial health.

“You’re thinking so hard that I’m worried for my feathers,” Jared said as he waved a shiny looking thermos in front of Jensen’s face. “You don’t think that they could spontaneously combust, do you?”

Jensen rolled his eyes and snatched the thermos away. “From my stare? Do I look like Superman to you?”

Jared grinned and started pulling his shirt off. “No, more like Lois Lane.”

Jensen snorted and sucked down a gulp of coffee. It swirled around on his tongue as he watched Jared’s fingers reach nimbly behind his back to unbutton the rows of small buttons on either side of the bottom of his shirt that held the center panel to the right and left sides. The button ups always looked nicer than the regular tees in Jensen’s opinion. The casual shirts didn’t always return to the right shape if a seraph’s wings stretched the wrong way when getting dressed.

Not to mention that Jared looked good in a collared shirt. Blue plaid, plaid white oxford, pink paisley: it didn’t matter. The fact that Jared tended to favor T-backed muscle shirts underneath had nothing to do with Jensen’s appreciation.

Of course, it didn’t detract from said appreciation either. He wasn’t going to mention any of that to Jared though. He didn’t need to make him uncomfortable.

So instead of making murmurs of lust and attraction, Jensen went with a comfortable, buddy like jibe of, “There a reason that you’re stripping down for preening, or are you just trying to impress the ladies?”

Jared turned to grin at him. “You say that like showing off isn’t a good excuse.”

Jensen shook his head and took another swig of coffee before regretfully screwing the lid back on and getting up off his chair to stretch out before the latest class came into session.

“You’re a terrible flirt,” Jensen told him.

“Terrible as in I’m bad at it, or terrible as in incorrigible?” Jared asked as he clambered onto the preening stool.

“And now you’re fishing for compliments,” Jensen said with an exaggerated shake of his head.

“I’m a good fisherman.” Jared shot back as he flared his wings out for effect. The snapping sound they made attracted the attention of some of the other class participants, and Jensen tried not to begrudge them their lingering glances at Jared’s wings.

The stormy sea colored feathers were deepening and mottling out into patterns all their own, no pretty painting required. Some of the deeper blues were starting to get iridescent shines to them that made them almost look purple and the greens were bleeding into the lighter blues with shocking vibrancy. The greys and browns cut through the riot of color to keep it from looking gaudy or tacky, and Jensen had to admit that nature could really kick most artists in the ass without really trying.

Of course, his own nature was being a selfish bastard that didn’t like the stares of the other people in the room. He was quite content to look at Jared’s plumage and admire its beauty without sharing it with another living soul. He didn’t need his competition finally catching a hint and taking Jared up on his mating offer.

“So you going to give me an honest answer? Or are you really just trying to show off here?” Jensen snapped despite his best efforts to be calm.

Jared didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he chose to ignore Jensen’s less than friendly tone. “The feathers at my wing base feel funny. They’re sensitive, and I can’t reach them well.”

Jensen swallowed and tried to grab a veil of calm around him. Seraph sexuality wasn’t necessarily a well discussed or shared topic with the human world, but he knew that the farther on in a mating ritual that one of them got, the more sensitive their wings became. If they were far enough along in their endeavors, they’d sprout tiny feathers along the joining points of their wings that served no purpose except to tickle and torture the hell out of them.

The feather basically started making them incessantly horny whenever they took flight. It was Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that the species literally couldn’t think straight until they made an attempt at continuing the family line. Sometimes Jensen thought that it was the punishment that the seraph got in turn of having the ability to fly. Other times he just figured that Mother Nature was a pretty kinky lady.

Summoning all of his professional demeanor about him, Jensen slid his fingers along Jared’s skin and very gently lifted the outer layer of feathers from the scapular region of his wings. The down that was there was healthy and soft, but sure enough, there were tiny little feathers starting to sprout in a wrong direction. They weren’t misshapen or aberrant ones that would interfere with Jared’s flight or hurt him. They grew naturally in with the regular lying feathers in a fascinating interwoven pattern, and if it were anybody but Jared, Jensen would be making all the mental notes that he could. Aside from a seraph’s mate, it was rare that anybody was able to physically lay eyes on the feathers.

He doubted that he’d ever have the opportunity to see their growth first hand again, but the excitement of that died to the fact that very soon he probably wasn’t going to be seeing Jared again. Once the seraph mated, his mate would take care of most of his needs for him. Jensen didn’t doubt that they’d still be friends, but it wouldn’t be the same. He highly doubted that Jared would even finish out the semester. Jared would be too busy honeymooning with his new mate.

Unable to help himself, Jensen ran a fingertip along one of the soft feathers as he tried to corral his unwanted envy. Jared shivered under his touch even though the feather hadn’t matured to its full length and purpose yet.

“You’re getting your, uh…”Jensen trailed off uncertain of how to actually get the words past his lips.

“Breeding feathers?” Jared finished for him.

“Yeah,” Jensen agreed even though it felt like he had something stuck in his throat.

“I thought I might be,” Jared said quietly.

“You want me to pull them out?” Jensen blurted out suddenly. Maybe Jared didn’t want them. Maybe it was just a stupid biological impulse like the plucking had been, and Jared wasn’t ready to settle down.

Jared barked out a laugh. “Dude, I’m not a masochist.”

Jensen was grateful that Jared couldn’t see his face then. He didn’t need Jared seeing the stupid hope that had been there nor the guilt that followed when he realized just what sort of pain he’d suggested putting his friend through.

“Just let me get some numbing gel then. It’ll maybe take the edge off until you can get her to your, your nest or apartment or wherever it is that you stay.” Jensen mumbled as he turned around to find the small vial of ointment that he so far had never needed. It was only used when prepping for a removal where the calamus had broken off from the rest of the feather and was still embedded in the skin.

“Thanks man,” Jared mumbled as he flared his wings out a bit more. As Jensen fumbled for the ointment, he could see the way that Jared kept twitching his wings ever so slightly and the way that his hips were held rigidly still.

Jensen didn’t know what lucky bitch had snared Jared’s affections, but he was pretty sure that he hated her already.

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Jared was certain that he was going to lose his mind. He’d planned to go slowly with Jensen. The human was older and less prone to jumping into romance headfirst, and Jared could respect that. For Jensen, he figured he could do a whole lot that wasn’t in his normal exuberant nature.

The gifts and tokens of affection had been difficult for him. It was in both his and his people’s nature to be generous with courting gifts, but Jensen’s pride was strong. He had to make things acceptable to the older human’s world view or else Jensen would see it as charity.

His nature dictated that he should shower Jensen with affection and gifts, but his chosen mate was reticent at the best of times. Jared hadn’t missed the moments of awkwardness and uncertainty that would often follow one of his attempts to give Jensen a token of his affection.

The food and coffee was a double edged sword. On the one hand, Jensen was guaranteed to take them because of his own limited options. On the other, they were necessities and could easily insult Jensen’s pride.

The books had been a gift from the heavens. Jensen had shown a true appreciation for all of the books that Jared brought him, and in turn, Jared had used to opportunity to woo his beloved with other people’s words. He could take his future mate’s passion for learning, and gift him with the information he so craved. It had been a struggle to keep from giving Jensen carloads of books.

Still, Jared had managed to restrain himself for the most part. Going slow seemed to be the key, and Jared desperately wanted inside of Jensen’s gates.

His body, on the other hand, just desperately wanted inside of Jensen.

It wasn’t that Jensen hadn’t been attracted to Jared’s mating plumage. Jared had noticed the appreciative glances that Jensen gave it when he thought Jared couldn’t see. Reflective shadows and windows were Jared’s friends. Without them, he would be half convinced that Jensen was completely unaffected by his body’s courtship displays.

His soon to be lover was good at playing things close to the vest. Jared couldn’t exactly blame him. The more that he learned about Jensen’s many rejections from the academy and the ways that his friends and family tried to get him to give up on his dreams, the more that Jared understood why Jensen didn’t display the normal levels of enthusiasm that the other students did.

In a way it made Jared love him a tiny bit more. What Jensen lacked in energetic excitement, he made up for in determination and dedication. He had faced reality and done well for himself in the human world, but he’d turned around and grabbed at his chance when it was offered. He knew himself in ways that the other potentials couldn’t because they hadn’t live those years of their lives yet.

Jared wanted to take things slowly for Jensen’s sake. He wanted to be able to give Jensen that gift of patience and love.

His biology wasn’t onboard with that plan. Gaining his mating plumage was fine. It was a statement of intent, but there wasn’t any urgency to it. Only the most self-effacing of seraph would ever bemoan having to display their mating plumage for an extended period of time.

Breeding feathers though – those were a different matter. They didn’t exist on any avian that Jared had ever read about, and as far as anybody could discern, they were there simply to encourage a seraph to get laid.

They tickled and teased. There was no relief against them because most seraph were not nimble enough to rub soothingly at them because of the awkward positions that they grew at. The only option was to have another person help out, and that person would ideally be a seraph’s mate.

Every morning since Jensen had first spied them, he had rubbed numbing gel on them. It felt both good and wrong at the same time, but the chemical at least helped Jared make it through to the end of the day without dragging Jensen off to the janitor’s closet to have his wicked way with the human.

Jared tried to step up his game a bit. He started asking Jensen about decoration preferences hoping to get some clue as to how to appropriately line their nest, but it seemed like the more he asked, the more withdrawn Jensen became. It was highly unsatisfactory to him. His instinct said to build and establish, but Jensen wouldn’t give him any guidance on it.

Even his tokens of affection and gentle touches were received with hesitancy. Jensen had taken to glaring at random people that would stop by to greet either of them. He was decidedly unfriendly toward some of the women.

It wasn’t like Jensen to be that way, and Jared worried about him. When he tried to broach the subject with Jensen, the human almost completely shut down before declaring everything fine in a fit of denial.

Jared was at his wit’s end. His body was becoming more and more demanding with every minute spent in Jensen’s presence while Jensen himself became more reticent. It was like some unsolvable puzzle, and Jared wanted to scream with the unfairness of it.

Talking to Sam was his second to last hope. His last one was asking his mother for guidance, but he preferred to stay away from that option as long as possible. He didn’t need his mom becoming all motherly and asking for embarrassing details or questioning Jensen’s suitability or offering embarrassing sex advice.

Sam shot him a knowing grin when he shuffled into her office. “Things not going well with Jensen?”

“No,” Jared said bluntly as he flopped into the chair across from her.

“Your wings look like they disagree.”

“My wings are mindless horndogs. Ignore them,” Jared ordered with a wave of his hand.

Sam laughed and shook her head. “I’m sure it’s not that bad. Jensen seems to be rather smitten with you.”

“Jensen likes me,” Jared corrected.

“And?”

“‘And’ what? Jensen thinks I’m his friend, and my body doesn’t understand the concept of slow,” Jared groused.

“I’m fairly certain it understands the concept quite well given the mind that is attached to it,” Sam told him.

Feeling insulted, Jared frowned at her for a moment before asking, “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you aren’t going to be the only one to feel possessive or jealous in your relationship. Sometimes people, humans especially, try to hide their feelings because they don’t want to be hurt. Does Jensen even know that you think of him as something other than a friend?”

“Of course he does! I bring him all sorts of gifts, and I always make sure to hug him or pat him on the back.” Jared scoffed at the ridiculousness of her words.

“And he hasn’t seen you greet other people that way?”

“It’s different!” Jared insisted.

“I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying that maybe Jensen doesn’t know that it’s different.”

“Okay, but he hasn’t made any moves or anything. Shouldn’t he be doing that if he’s interested in me?” Jared couldn’t look Sam in the face as he asked the question. He worried at his thumbnail instead. He didn’t know what he’d do if Jensen wasn’t interested, and Jared turned out to be one of those rare seraph’s whose mating instinct was completely haywire.

“Would that make sense with what you know of Jensen?” Sam asked gently.

Jared shrugged like he didn’t have an answer, but the truth of the matter was that Jensen wouldn’t actively pursue a seraph. His consistent rejections from the academy had taught him to keep those sorts of feelings towards Jared’s species internalized. He wasn’t going to ever be the aggressor in a non-traditional relationship.

If Jared had his way, Jensen wasn’t ever going to be the aggressor in any relationship because he intended to mate with the human. From there on out it would simply be a matter of patching up misunderstandings and fights. Pursuit wouldn’t be necessary.

“So you’re going to go out there and let him in on the big, bad secret before your wings decide that they’re going to start rustling out odes to him, right?” Sam asked.

Jared glared at her. “That’s an urban legend, and you know it.”

“Maybe, but if I were you, I wouldn’t chance it.”

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Jensen was trying to control his breathing. When Jared oh so nonchalantly mentioned that he’d like to talk to Jensen after the end of class that day, Jensen had immediately started to panic. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew what Jared wanted to talk about. Everybody everywhere probably knew what Jared wanted to talk about.

It wasn’t a secret that most seraph with mates have their grooming done by their families. It was convenient for one thing. For another: Jensen wasn’t stupid. Animals the world over used mutual grooming as a way of bonding. Just because the textbooks didn’t specifically mention that it was the same for seraphs that didn’t make it not true.

Maybe the young kids in the preening class hadn’t noticed that most of their live subjects brought their spouses with them, but Jensen sure did. He’d been around long enough to notice the occasional suspicious glint or possessive touch when one of the student’s hands got too familiar with a wing or muscle group.

And really, Jensen couldn’t expect Jared’s new lover to be any less jealous. He certainly wouldn’t be up for letting some random stranger feel up his lover every weekday morning, and if Jared had any taste in women, he wouldn’t be picking somebody who would be okay with that either.

All of which meant that Jensen was about to get dumped. It was silly to think of it that way because they weren’t really anything but friends, and he should be happy that Jared had found somebody that made him happy all the way to the tips of his wings.

“Hey,” Jared said as he walked up to Jensen, effectively interrupting Jensen’s pre-pity party.

“Hey,” Jensen greeted in return. The school’s brick wall was rough through the thin fabric of his tee, but he leaned against it anyway. He needed something to ground him so that he didn’t show too much disappointment when Jared gave him his walking papers.

“So, look, I need to talk to you about something,” Jared started off hesitantly, “I’m sort of… I want… Thing is… Oh, fuck it!” Jared finished with a growl as he stepped into Jensen’s personal space.

For a split second, Jensen was worried that Jared was going to hit him. Then Jared ducked down, faster than any human of the same build could have, and kissed him. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t demanding either. It was oddly perfect in its pressure, and some distant part of Jensen’s brain that wasn’t busy whirling in confusion wondered if seraph’s heightened senses enabled them to be better kissers with less practice.

When Jared backed off from the kiss, Jensen stared at him stupidly before saying, “What the FUCK was that?”

“A kiss?”

“I know that,” Jensen snarled, “but you can’t just go kissing me like that. If you wanted experience or something you could’ve just hung out with some of those hormonal girls in class. I don’t think your girlfriend is going to like me being around if she knows you practiced your macking skills on me.”

“What?” Jared asked.

Taking yet another calming breath, he was becoming an expert at those, Jensen said, “Your mate, Jared. You know, the girl that you’re sprouting all the pretty plumage for?”

“I… my mate isn’t a girl,” Jared said slowly.

“Great, then he or it or whatever,” Jensen begrudgingly corrected himself. “The point is that your mate isn’t going to like you playing kissy face with me.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Jared, trust me and my four years of extra life experience. You do not want to attempt a plural relationship. They’re pains in the ass. My buddy Phil had this arrangement with his…”

“Did you like kissing me?” Jared interrupted.

“That’s not really the point, man.”

“Well then you won’t have a problem answering the pointless question.”

Jensen choked a little in frustration and waved his hand dismissively before saying, “It was good, okay? Now back to what I was trying to tell you. You don’t want to…”

Jared kissed him again. This time he pressed in a little harder with his lips and pushed his body against Jensen’s. The amount of heat coming off his form made the Texas sun warmed brick against Jensen’s back feel cool. It shouldn’t have been a shock. Jensen knew that seraph’s body temperatures ran hotter than a human’s, but somehow it was startling in the contrast.

With a sharp intake of breath, Jared backed away from their second kiss. Their lips parted company with an audible pop, and Jensen automatically licked his lips to swipe away any embarrassing wetness that lingered on them.

“Was the second one better?” Jared asked softly.

“I…” Jensen trailed off as his mind started catching on to what was probably happening, “Seriously?”

Jared grinned at him and bounced on his feet, nervously nodding his head up and down like it was a basketball.

“I don’t know what to say.” Jensen admitted.

“Will you mock me forever if I quote a chick flick and tell you to, ‘Say yes’?”

“Probably,” Jensen told him as he stepped forward to place a hesitant hand against Jared’s chest. He could feel Jared’s heat hammering away inside, and that was more soothing and comforting than he expected. If Jared was nervous and uncertain then there was no reason that Jensen couldn’t be the same.

And if Jared could overcome his fears to make a move, then there was no excuse for Jensen to hide behind his own. Sure Jared was having some additional physiological impulses, but Jensen had four more years on him, and he’d already gambled his secure future to come to the academy in the first place. What was another roll of the dice going to cost him?

“Yes,” Jensen said simply.

Jared’s face broke out into a sunny grin. With a whoop of delight, he descended on Jensen, glomming on to him with grabby hands and mile long arms. He peppered Jensen’s face with kisses and then proceeded to snuffle against his neck.

Laughing, Jensen pushed him away, “Jared, not on campus. You have to know that Chad has gotten access to the security cameras.”

“No. No, you’re right.” Jared answered quickly even as his hands reached for Jensen again.

“Jay!” Jensen said reproachfully as he slapped at the advancing hands.

“I know, I know… just. I could fly us to my place, yeah? It’s loads faster than walking.”

“Your place? As in to… you know?” Jensen asked.

“Too soon? It’s too soon, isn’t it? I’m all,” Jared paused to wave his hands spastically, “and you’re not, and I’m moving too fast.”

“Well your mouth certainly is,” Jensen told him as he grabbed hold of Jared’s forearm.

“I’m sorry. Can I get a do over? Am I too old for that?”

“Definitely too old for do overs,” Jensen agreed solemnly.

He let Jared look stricken for a moment before adding, “But you don’t actually need one, so you don’t have to worry.”

Jared sucked in a breath and held it for a longtime before exhaling noisily. “Really?”

“Really,” Jensen told him as he slid his hand around Jared’s back to bury his fingers into one of his wings.

Jared let loose a groan, and his eyes literally rolled back in his head. “Jensen, man, you trying to kill me?”

“Just making sure we’re both on the same page,” Jensen teased.

“Gonna take you back to my nest and fuck you,” Jared growled.

Jensen felt his heart beat a little faster at Jared’s words, but he pushed the feeling down to his stomach so that it could play with the butterflies taking up residence there. He was not going to let it move upwards to do something stupid like make him grin like a loon. Of course, Jensen had never had that great of control over his body, so he ended up blushing like a fool anyway, but it didn’t seem to bother Jared all that much.

Without really giving Jensen that much time to adjust to the idea, Jared pulled him into his arms and just took off from a perfect standstill. The part of Jensen’s brain that wasn’t jabbering at the sudden change in altitude was busy marveling at how Jared’s wings could angle out from his body enough to cause lift off from such an awkward position and then turn back to glide on regular air currents.

The rest of Jensen’s brain was jabbering in fear because he was suddenly up in the air with nothing but Jared’s arms to keep him there.

Panicking, Jensen grabbed at Jared. He wrapped his arms around the seraph’s neck and wound his legs around Jared’s long torso. His book bag swung downwards, pulling at his shoulder as gravity tried to yank his textbooks to the quickly disappearing ground and wind started moving it, twisting it to and fro.

“You might want to look at a backpack instead of a shoulder bag. Less wind resistance,” Jared shouted into Jensen’s ear, competing against the noise of the wind and the sound of his own beating wings.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jensen mumbled into Jared’s neck.

It couldn’t be comfortable for the larger man to have Jensen clinging to him in such a manner, but Jensen couldn’t bring himself to care. Jared hadn’t exactly given Jensen a lot of time to adjust to the idea of flying through the city without any safety precautions. Jensen had never experienced a fear of heights before, but those moments of elevation had always been accompanied by safety railings or nice airplane cabins.

In one gut churning movement, Jared’s wings snapped backwards and instead of gliding forwards, they jerked back and started to fall. Jensen’s life flashed before his eyes seconds before he realized that they weren’t actually falling anymore and were standing on an apartment’s balcony.

Well, Jared was standing. Jensen was still clinging to him like a monkey.

“You want to let go now?” Jared’s voice purred amusedly in Jensen’s ear.

Jensen nodded, not caring that the rims of his glasses were digging into the soft flesh of Jared’s cheek. With a laugh, Jared’s hands slid down from their embrace around Jensen’s torso to cup gently at his bottom. “Or I could just walk you to the bedroom,” he suggested with a gentle squeeze of his hands.

Jensen scrambled out of Jared’s hold and promptly fell on his backside before stumbling up onto his feet. The reflection from Jared’s patio windows let Jensen know that his glasses were askew and his hair was a mess – half slicked down and half standing up. His face was flushed, and he in general already looked like Jared’s had his wicked way with him.

So he slapped Jared like an insulted, virginal maiden from those horrible romance novels that the women in his life always seemed to be reading. Or, come to think of it, Jared kept giving to him.

“What was that for?” Jared whined.

“For scaring me! And then copping a feel after!” Jensen shouted.

Jared looked confused. “Scaring you?” he repeated slowly.

“Yes, scaring as in, you know heights and falling and, and…” Jensen trailed off with a limp wave of his hand as one of Jared’s neighbors walked out onto his own balcony to get a good view of the commotion.

The man was balding and slightly potbellied, but instead of asking questions, he just glared at Jared. He didn’t even spare Jensen so much as a second glance.

With a grunt of disgust, Jensen grabbed hold of Jared’s arm and dragged him towards the glass doors of his own apartment. “Come on, I don’t like audiences,” Jensen muttered.

Jared cast his gaze over his shoulder and made a face before turning his attention to the locked doors and fishing the key out of his pocket to open them. “Mr. Nelson doesn’t like his peace and quiet getting interrupted, or maybe that’s just because he just doesn’t like me. Thinks it’s bunk that I got an upper floor with a balcony because of what I am, you know?”

“I can guess,” Jensen told him as Jared gestured him inside.

The apartment was barely decorated. The only outstanding thing that Jensen could pick out was the nearly overflowing fruit basket and the giant pile of cardboard boxes that seemed to be building a fort made entirely out of different snack brands.

“So I know your kind have faster metabolisms than us humans do, but is that normal?” Jensen asked while he tried to not make it look like his eyes were going to bug out of his head. He also prayed that his stomach didn’t start growling because he needed to stay mad at Jared for a little while longer and after that there was a distinct promise of sex. Eating was a low priority that the moment.

Jensen hadn’t had physical company in ages. He’d very much like to get to the sex part, and empty stomachs making funny noises were never conducive to sexy times.

“Uh, sort of?” Jared replied with a tiny smile. “See, I wasn’t sure what you liked aside from coffee, and my metabolism is kind of hyper right now, so I just bought one of everything that looked remotely tasty.”

Jensen frowned. “What do my food preferences have to do with your grocery shopping habits?”

Jared’s face looked insulted, and his feathers puffed out in a dizzying display of plumage. “My momma taught me how to go about nesting properly!”

“Ooookay,” Jensen drawled out slowly.

Jared’s feathers seemed to wilt down into themselves. “Guess you couldn’t tell that from the way the living room looked, huh?”

“Uh,” Jensen said because he was having a little bit of trouble keeping up with Jared’s sudden mood shifts and impulsive behaviors and grunting in a noncommittal way sounded like a great plan for giving himself time to think.

“I tried, I really did. You just didn’t want to talk to me about it, and I couldn’t just… what if you hated a color or something or you had an allergy you didn’t tell me about? I… I didn’t even know what size condoms to get because sometimes when we choose a guy he doesn’t want to bottom. And the lube! I… shit. Maybe you could tell me now, and I could go hide the others?” Jared’s voice lilted a little too high at the end of his question, and his face looked like he was about to burst into tears.

“I think,” Jensen said as calmly as he could, “that you need to sit down and breathe a little bit before your hormones turn you into a puddle of angst and feathers.”

“Yeah?” Jared’s hopeful tone was almost heartbreaking in its intensity.

“Yeah,” Jensen confirmed. “You might also want to tell me what’s going on in that head of yours because you’re getting a little spastic.”

Jared looked abashed for a moment and fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “It’s sort of a hormonal thing. Humans, you go through puberty and that’s kind of it, you know? You grow up, and you get a handle on things, and when you fall in love or whatever, you get all giddy, but there isn’t really that big of a change to your system.”

“And your body isn’t like that,” Jensen filled in. It wasn’t a question. He’d done enough studying to know that one of the reasons that a seraph’s feathers changed colors when attempting to mate was because their chemical balance in their bodies started to shift. Doctors had likened it to the changes that humans could experience when their chemical makeup was messed with by a pregnancy or medical procedure -things like hair color changing or straight hair becoming naturally curly.

“Yeah,” Jared confirmed, “so I’m going through second puberty over here, and it’s kind of embarrassing.”

Jensen wanted to get back to the place where he was angry at Jared for the sudden take off and flight, but it seemed almost cruel to yell at the guy for some instinct that he really didn’t have a choice over. It was a bit worrisome that Jared’s hormones were affecting him so severely. If Jared was unable to control himself because of his hormones, how could he possibly be sure that it was Jensen he wanted? Maybe he was just…

“Stop it,” Jared ordered as he grabbed Jensen’s hands in his own. “I can practically see you thinking in there, and it’s just not true. Whatever it is that’s got that look in your eyes, it isn’t true.”

Jensen’s answering smile was admittedly shaky, but it was there nonetheless. “You sure about that?” he couldn’t keep himself from asking.

“You’ve driven me crazy since the moment I first saw you. And trust me, that means something to my people. We don’t feel that way about those who we aren’t meant to be with. I’ve been looking for you forever,” Jared told him as one of his hands released its grip on Jensen’s hands and reached up to stroke gently over his cheekbone.

“That’s really sweet,” Jensen told him, and he meant it. But that didn’t mean that he was about to turn into a mushy romance novel heroine. “Don’t think you’re getting off the hook for that flying stunt with that though.”

Jared didn’t look the slightest bit chastised by Jensen’s words. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take a bribe to forget about it?”

“A bribe?” Jensen echoed.

“Yeah, see, I figure that bribes are more reliable than relationship promises. I ask you to forgive me. You give me that dubious look that says you’ll be bringing this up forever. I offer you a blowjob in order to get you to accept my forgiveness request as a counteroffer.”

“Your bribe sounds an awful lot like something I’m going to get anyway, so maybe you ought to just stick with promises and repentance roses like a normal boyfriend,” Jensen told him.

Jared frowned. “I thought that men weren’t supposed to be able to turn down blowjobs.”

“Who said anything about turning one down?” Jensen asked with a purposeful leer. “I just said that I was going to get one anyway. You might want to think about taking a business class. Your negotiating skills need some work.”

“Are you insulting me?”

“I’m making helpful suggestions to improve your future.” To Jensen’s surprise, Jared started beaming at his words.

“You’re so perfect,” Jared told him earnestly as he leaned in to steal a kiss.

At first, Jensen both wanted and planned to go back to Jared’s declaration of his perfection to get some details on it, but Jared didn’t end the kiss, and the longer it went on, the less that Jensen cared about getting those details. Or, to be precise, he still wanted to know, but his little head was making it known that information was not a priority.

Jared’s body was like a furnace against his own, but Jensen tugged him closer anyway. The more that they touched, the more that Jensen’s body went from shying away from the unnatural heat to craving it. He had touched Jared more times than he could count, had been touching him since the very first day they met, but everything seemed so much more intense when Jared’s tongue was in his mouth.

Jensen didn’t remember sex being like that the last time he’d had it, but then again, he’d never felt such possessiveness towards his partner before. It was like his inner caveman had woken up and started pounding his chest.

His hands slipped around Jared’s back to bury themselves in his wings without Jensen’s express permission. It was like they just instinctively wanted to go there. Normally Jensen would be all about the back of the neck or the shoulders or even a nice ass grab, but he had never been with a seraph before, and he maybe he had been lying to himself about not having a little bit of a thing for the wings.

Jared didn’t seem to mind Jensen’s wandering hands. He moaned as he pulled his lips away from Jensen’s mouth. They were puffy and red. Jensen could only imagine what his own mouth looked like.

“Bedroom,” Jared rasped out, his eyes rolling back into his head as Jensen’s fingers toyed with the tiny breeding feathers that had caused him so much angst when they had first appeared.

“Lead the way,” Jensen encouraged even as he moved a hand to stroke at that sensitive spot on Jared’s back that never failed to make him squirm. Only this time instead of flushing and shifting uncomfortably, Jared just rolled his hips forward and rutted against Jensen’s stomach for a bit before pulling out of Jensen’s arms entirely.

“We need to get to bed before I end up trying to mate with you on the floor,” Jared said as he began moving towards the bedroom. His gait was off from its usual swagger, but Jensen could give him a break. He could see the bulge at the front of Jared’s pants; there was no way that it was comfortable.

Jared yanked his shirt off as he went and already had his belt and fly undone by the time they were in the bedroom.

It was done almost exclusively in blues and there was a Dallas Cowboys bedspread on the king sized bed that took up most of the room.

Jensen arched an eyebrow at the monochrome theme.

“You were very unhelpful. I only knew you liked football,” Jared defended himself as he fumbled with his boots. He didn’t sit down on the bed to take them off like a normal person would. Instead his wings unfurled slightly for balance as he bent over to tug at his footwear with both hands.

Jensen might’ve been tempted to call it another unfair perk of having wings except for the fact that Jared looked ridiculous doing it. Not that Jensen was laughing at him. Stupid pose or no, Jared was very attractive when he was half dressed.

With a burst of speed, Jensen dragged his shirt off over his head. His glasses snagged on the material as he pulled it on, but he settled them back on his nose without any problems and stumbled over to the bed to start taking his own shoes off.

By the time that he’d kicked his way out of his pants and underwear, Jared was already naked. Naked and staring at Jensen like he was some sort of porn star. It was a ridiculous notion, because he wasn’t wearing anything except for his glasses. That wasn’t a flattering look on anybody.

Jared on the other hand was a marble sculpture come to life. Jensen had known what Jared’s torso looked like. He’d seen it often enough in class, but that was an academic setting. Jared’s bedroom was a completely different story.

Then, of course, there was Jared’s lower half. Logically, Jensen had known that Jared was toned all over. He’d had his hands on a good portion of Jared’s body. But actually seeing it was something else.

Jensen’s eyes didn’t want to focus on the cut of Jared’s hips or his strong yet slender looking legs though. His eyes strayed invariably towards Jared’s sex. It looked human for the most part. Strong and thick, its proportions and shaping were the same as a human male’s. It was even starting to drip little beads of precome from its slit like a human’s would.

It was no doubt warmer than Jensen’s own would be. If Jared’s body temperature was naturally higher than Jensen’s it would naturally follow that his cock would have that same increased heat. The thought made Jensen’s own cock throb with want. The idea of Jared tucking up inside of him teased at the edges of his mind and tormented him with its very real possibility.

Where Jared’s sex differed was in the presentation. Instead of having dark, wiry curls of hair to match the strands on his head, Jared’s crotch was covered in thin, soft feathers that variegated in color the same as his wings did. Jensen knew form his readings that the pubic area feathers would be flexible, their shafts bending and soft, yet still feathering out like some hybrid of down and hair.

If Jared weren’t erect, most of his cock would be back inside his body, sheathed away more securely and with more protection than what a human’s foreskin gave. It was prehistoric safety for a seraph’s reproductive organs. Cold winter winds could easily freeze a seraph’s bits off if they were to fly through them, and having a down covered sheath helped to keep their cocks intact.

“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” Jared whispered.

“Get your ass over here,” Jensen ordered in return, patting the bedspread invitingly and doing his best to act sexy and not embarrassed at having zoned out on Jared’s junk.

Jared wasted no time in scrambling onto the bed and pinning Jensen to it. He kissed Jensen again and plucked his glasses off his face, placing them on the nearby lampstand and pressing another kiss to Jensen’s nose where the bridge had created a tiny red line from resting on the same spot all day.

Jensen could feel Jared’s dick rubbing against him as Jared moved to slot them together, their legs intertwining with each other’s. His pubic feathers tickled at Jensen’s skin, teasing him right before the area was rubbed over with the hot length of Jared’s dick as the seraph rutted against Jensen’s hip.

“I want to mate with you,” Jared whispered against Jensen’s mouth. “I want to be inside you. Please say ‘yes.’”

Jensen’s own cock gave a twitch at the words, and his body tightened with want as the idea filtered through his brain. For a terrifying second, it was like his entire being was screaming out that coveted ‘yes.’ He arched up against Jared, pushing his own sex against Jared’s thigh and moaned out his consent as he tried to ride the wave of want inside of himself.

Jared flipped him over, and Jensen rubbed against the covers while Jared fumbled with the bedside drawer to grab the necessary items.

“You’re so beautiful,” Jared commented as he ran his hands over Jensen’s back and trailed his fingers down into his crevice, “like the early morning sun peeking out from between the clouds.”

Jensen looked back over his shoulder at Jared. “You trying to woo me?”

To his surprise, Jared laughed at his words. His whole upper body shook, broad shoulders jerked and feathers trembled. His dimples cut deep into his face as his smiled.

“What?” Jensen snapped.

“It’s about time you noticed,” Jared told him as he swatted at the rear he’d just been fondling.

“Hey!”

“Fair game,” Jared pointed out, “you were slapping my ass the day I met you.”

“You weren’t naked, and you weren’t about to sleep with me,” Jensen argued.

“Oh, now I beg to differ. I would’ve slept with you in a heartbeat if you’d asked.”

“You hussy!” Jensen accused lightheartedly.

Jared just grinned back and him and took the cap off the lube. “It’s the truth. I wanted to be with you from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

Jensen could see the sincerity in Jared’s eyes, and his automatic smart remark died on his lips. Instead he said, “That’s really sweet, Jay.”

Jared smiled back at him and nervously fiddled with the lube bottle sending a glob of liquid onto the bedspread. “Fuck,” he swore as the comforter turned a slightly darker color as the liquid seeped in.

“Wet spots are supposed to be created after the fact,” Jensen told him unhelpfully.

“Shut up and be glad it didn’t land on you,” Jared mumbled as he squirted the lube onto his fingers this time and gently pressed them against Jensen’s opening.

It was a little cold at first, but warmed up quickly enough as Jared gently massaged the area. Jensen gasped at the sensation, and any verbal response he was planning on making got overwritten by his moaning as he pushed back against Jared’s fingers and then forward against the bed.

“So gorgeous,” Jared murmured as he slipped his first finger inside.

When the first one was met with little resistance, Jared worked it around to spread the slick before sliding a second finger in with a comment of, “So perfect.”

“Jared,” Jensen moaned as the fingers twisted inside of him. His body felt like it was itching for Jared’s touch, like if he didn’t have Jared’s weight back on him soon, it would revolt.

“Shhh, just a little bit more,” Jared soothed as he worked his third finger in.

Jensen should have at least felt a burn at the stretch if not a little pain. He hadn’t had a sexual partner in a long time, and hadn’t exactly been doing much to himself other than cleaning the pipes in the shower since he’d started up at the academy.

But his body seemed to have missed the memo that he was supposed to be tight and in need of a good stretching because Jared’s large fingers slid in and out of him without causing any discomfort.

Then Jared tugged his fingers free and Jensen heard him rip the condom package open. Jensen pushed himself to his hands and knees to get into a better position, and he was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath from Jared.

“I love you so much,” Jared said right before he lined his cock up and pushed inside.

Jensen couldn’t have responded even if he had known what he wanted to say. His cock was stiff between his legs, poking up against his belly, and the feeling of Jared sliding inside of him just drove him crazy with want.

“Harder,” Jensen ordered.

“Not even all the way in yet,” Jared grunted back in response.

“I don’t care,” Jensen whined, “I just need it h…”

Jared cut off Jensen’s rant with a rough slam in. It should’ve hurt. Some part of Jensen’s mind was frantically trying to tell him that, but the rest of him was only focused on how good it felt to have Jared fully inside of him. Jared’s cock was even warmer than the rest of him, just like Jensen had suspected it would be. Instead of just its hard length, Jensen could feel the heat it was giving off as well and the sensation was better than he’d imagined it would be.

Jensen moaned a little as his ass clutched at the cock inside of it, “Fuck, yeah.”

Jared growled at the words and snapped his hips back and forward again in response. His cock dragged inside of Jensen, rubbing at all the right spots, and Jensen keened at the sensation. Jared’s pubic feathers tickled against Jensen’s ass when Jared was all of the way in. It was a maddening tease of softness.

“More,” Jensen gasped as he tried to grind backwards against Jared’s warm body.

Obligingly, Jared began to set up a rhythm with his thrusts. They were short and strong, but that suited Jensen just fine. He didn’t want Jared’s cock to pull out too much from his body. He wanted it inside where it belonged. He wanted it fucking him and rubbing in all the right places.

Shifting his weight to one side, Jensen reached a hand down to start stroking at his cock. The action made Jared moan.

“Yeah, touch yourself for me. You have such wonderful hands, my beautiful mate. Talented and strong, perfect for me, perfect for our nest,” Jared groaned as his thrusts picked up to an even faster tempo.

Jensen didn’t have to do much. He rubbed his thumb around the head of his dick to smear around the liquid dripping out of it and gave it a couple of pulls before he started shooting all over the covers.

“Yes,” Jared hissed as Jensen’s muscles contracted with his orgasm. Jared made it a couple more thrusts before he too was coming, his wings flaring out and snapping shut with an audible crack of air in the small room.

Even though Jared was wearing a condom, Jensen could feel the rush of hot semen flood the latex covering before Jared pulled out and stumbled off the bed to take care of it.

Like a gentleman, he came back with a wash cloth and towel. He cleaned Jensen’s body with the rag and tossed the towel down over the legitimate wet spot that they’d made before climbing back on the bed and tucking Jensen up next to him. He didn’t grab the covers, only draped one of his wings over them both.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared was woken from his most delightful post coital nap by the sounds of Jensen fumbling around in their bedroom. Opening his eyes, he could see that the room was darker than it had been when they’d drifted off to sleep, a sign that they’d been out long enough for the sun to significantly shift its position in the sky.

“What’re you doing?” Jared asked.

“Looking for my other sock,” Jensen answered.

“Why?” Jared queried as he tried to shake off the grogginess that he always got whenever he took a nap.

“Because wearing shoes without socks on is a sin, Jared.”

“Why are you putting your shoes on?”

“Because I have to go to work,” Jensen told him as he sat down on the edge of the bed and started putting his now found socks on.

“Call in,” Jared said as he sat up and placed a gentle kiss against Jensen’s jaw, “I owe you a blow job.”

Jensen pushed him away with a laugh. “Later, okay? I’ve got to work, or I’ll end up moving back in with my parents.”

“What?” Jared was sure if he felt more hurt or surprise. Didn’t Jensen think that Jared would take care of his mate?

“Student loans are a bitch,” was all that Jensen offered up as an explanation.

Jared frowned. This was not how their first night of mating was supposed to go. Ideally there would be a couple more rounds of sex interspersed with sweet nothings while they broke the nest in. But Jensen was at a different point in his life and very human, so Jared could adapt.

“Can you give me a little bit to get my stuff together?” Jared asked as he forced himself off the bed. Jensen’s place wouldn’t be as nice as their nest, and Jared suspected it was dreadfully close to ground level, but it would have to do.

“That’s okay, man. You don’t need to come with. I’m sure you’ve got stuff to work on here. Besides, I already called a cab,” Jensen dismissed with a wave of his hand and a gentle smile.

“What? But… I… What about money?” Jared asked dumbly.

“I saved a little with all the food and coffee you’ve been bringing me. I’m good. Just catch a little more shut eye, okay? Wouldn’t want you flying into the side of a building because of me,” Jensen answered him as he patted Jared’s arm in what Jared presumed was supposed to be a comforting gesture.

“But…” Jared trailed off. What exactly could he say without sounding pathetic?

“Hey,” Jensen said, his voice taking on a soothing tone, “I had a great time, really. And I’d stay if I could, but it’s my job.”

Everything inside of Jared protested the words mightily. They were supposed to be mating and bonding, growing closer together, merging their souls to create an unbreakable chain, not kissing each other goodbye like they were some casual hookup. He didn’t bother trying to hide his pout and scowl. Maybe it wasn’t fair to Jensen, but Jared couldn’t fight his instincts hard enough to completely hide his upset from his mate. If he couldn’t spare Jensen the pain, he might as well not even try.

“Jared, come on,” Jensen said as he brushed a strand of hair out of Jared’s face, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Yeah?”

Down on the street, Jared could hear a strange car pulling up to the curb. It could’ve been anybody, but the timing for Jensen’s cab was too coincidental for him to think it was anything but the requested driver showing up to escort Jensen to that place that was no longer his home.

“You’d better get going. Your cab is here,” Jared told Jensen. His voice was strained and clipped as he forced the words out of his mouth, but he managed a tiny smile because he didn’t want Jensen feeling bad. He was unhappy enough for the both of them, no sense in his human having to go through the sadness. It wasn’t, after all, in Jensen’s DNA to feel their separation like Jared did.

“How can you tell?” Jensen asked. Jared could see the desire to fix what was wrong in his eyes, but he could also see that Jensen knew that he couldn’t fix it. Only staying, nesting with Jared would chase away the upset, and Jared wasn’t stupid enough to think that Jensen would make that decision. His mate wasn’t the romantic and impulsive young human that he’d once been. Life had molded him differently, so in absence of being able to repair the situation, he was going to avoid it.

It was an effort to let Jensen get by with the subject change, but Jared tried. Still, “I have super good birdy hearing, remember?” might not have been the nicest of responses to give.

Jensen looked stricken at his words. Jared did feel a flash of guilt over them, but he didn’t take them back. Just because he understood where his mate was coming from, that didn’t change the fact that Jensen had still made those choices.

Jensen had still chosen to put his job above their mating, and he hadn’t bothered to wake Jared to bring him safely back. Instead he had called a human cab company and rebuffed Jared’s efforts to join him in his pathetic hovel of an apartment so that they could continue being together even if it was in undesirable circumstances.

“Jay…”

“Just go,” Jared interrupted as he rolled over on his side presenting Jensen with a view of his back, a view of his mating feathers that were there specifically and only for the human that was about to walk out the door.

A loud and rather disgusted sigh came out of Jensen’s mouth before a taut, “Fine,” was uttered in the still dark room. Jared heard Jensen retrieve his shoes from the floor before he walked out of the bedroom. There was an odd shuffling noise when Jensen reached the front door that Jared assumed was the sound of Jensen hastily shoving his feet into his footwear before he went out into the hallway to take the elevator down to the street.

The instant that the apartment door clicked shut, Jared swung himself out of bed and slid into his boxers. The balcony window opened to him easily, and he watched as Jensen got into the back of his cab. It felt like a lonely thing to do, watching his mate leave without going with him, but Jared wasn’t interested in going somewhere he wasn’t invited.

“You should leave him be,” Mr. Nelson said, his gruff voice carrying clear and loud across the gap of their balconies.

Jared snorted and ignored his neighbor, instead choosing to watch the taillights of Jensen’s cab until the car turned a corner and obscured itself from Jared’s sight.

“It’s not natural,” Mr. Nelson continued, “you need to keep to your own kind. Leave those silly fans of your people alone. It’s the novelty of it, is all. Best you save yourself the hurt of finding that out and best he get his head back in reality.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Jared informed him. Normally he wouldn’t engage in any altercation that he could avoid. The press on seraphs was generally favorable, even a little awed, but that didn’t mean that a human couldn’t twist things around to raise Cain if said human had the right agenda going.

Seraphs were biologically stronger and faster before any side powers developed from their matings. There’d been more than one human who would take a swing at one of the winged ones and then cry foul and assault if the seraph fought back.

“No, you didn’t. But I’m not the kind of person who sits around waiting to be asked the answer, especially when you’ve got two fools who don’t even know to ask the question. You’re in there seducing that poor boy, taking advantage of his hero worship. And I worry about my own kind, just as you should be worrying about yours.”

“Look, Mr. Nelson, this isn’t really any of your business,” Jared snapped.

“It is my business! It’s all our businesses. You’re out there leading some twisted up pretty boy into depravity when you should both be sticking to your own kinds. Lions don’t mate with Tigers, boy. Just because it’s possible, that doesn’t mean it happens, not until some freak scientist gets it into his head to mess with nature,” Mr. Nelson argued back.

Jared ground his teeth together and tried not to glare at his neighbor. Glaring tended to make him focus harder, and he was in no mood to see the man’s hateful face any more clearly than he already could. The dark shadows that hid the man’s round face were fitting. They almost made him faceless even if he wasn’t voiceless. It made him less human and easier to deal with.

“Don’t you dare compare me to an animal,” Jared ordered, “I am a sentient being, and so is Jensen. We both make decisions and have reason. Who are you to judge me or him?”

“I’m an honest man, and you’re not. You think that I don’t know what some of your winged brethren get up to? I’ve lived near that damned academy too long to not notice how many of your little canary friends make off with those impressionable human students. It’s like some sick sex club that’s pretending to be a place of education.”

Jared swallowed. The feeling of relief flitted through his mind at the thought that Mr. Nelson couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness. While his words were twisted and cruel, there was enough perceived truth in them that the accusation hit home. That they were beloved mates and not sex objects wouldn’t matter to the likes of the angry human. He was the reason that they kept hidden.

Prejudice could easily give sway to violence, and seraphs were just as vulnerable to a bullet as any human. Worse, their human mates were excellent targets just for being what bigots called weak to their mate’s allure. It was one of the reasons that the seraphs kept so much of their knowledge hidden from the general public. Instinct to protect and preserve ran universally through their blood. They did not share the pure human trait of being unable to keep a secret, not when it kept both them and their mates safe.

Jared had no doubt that human sociologists and psychologists alike would be fascinated by his people’s universal ability to agree and hide things from humans, but showing weakness when there were men around like Mr. Nelson was a poor idea.

Maybe the man would change his opinion if he knew the truth about how the seraph had always been meant to breed with the humans. If he knew that their bloodlines would attack inward without the constant infusion of human DNA into their generations, he might not call Jared’s love for Jensen unnatural and depraved.

Human blood was needed in a mate or else the mate would never be able to properly groom a seraph’s wings, not only was their touch instinctively better, but their skin reacted with the oils and glands in a seraph’s wings to create the ideal covering and smoothing agent for feathers.

The fact of the matter was that for all that Jared might have a physical superiority on his mate, he wouldn’t be able to survive long with Jensen’s touch. Humans held the power over ‘his kind,’ and it would only take a couple of generations of not breeding with humans for the seraph to start dying of sicknesses similar to heavy human inbreeding.

Still, Jared didn’t need to tell Mr. Nelson anything other than the truth, so he opened his mouth and said, “You’re a bigoted man, and you’re absolutely full of shit,” right before he stalked back into his apartment and slammed the door shut.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Jensen dragged himself to class the next morning, he was surprised to see Jared already perched on his preening stool. Gone was the normal vibrancy and eagerness that Jared normally displayed in the morning. Jensen couldn’t say that he had expected everything to be sunshine and roses after how they had parted the night before, but Jared’s mood was a bit of an overreaction for a stupid little fight.

“Hey,” Jensen greeted as he got close. There was a thermos sitting on the floor, and a large part of him was relieved when he saw it. If Jared was still brining him coffee, then he couldn’t be too pissed at him.

Jared didn’t give him a greeting in return beyond a slight shuffle of his feathers.

It was an effort for Jensen not to groan at Jared’s reaction. He hated getting the silent treatment in a fight. Nothing was worse, and while he’d been known to be an asshole and employ the technique himself, Jensen had never thought that he’d have to worry about Jared not saying anything. It seemed so far out of character that if another person had suggested the idea, Jensen wouldn’t have hesitated to laugh in said person’s face.

Only now it was a reality, and Jensen was going to have to figure out why exactly Jared was so upset about Jensen having to go to his job. He could understand the general irritation well enough. Having to leave right after their first time together wasn’t the best thing that could have happened, but he’d tried to make it as easy on Jared as possible. He hadn’t been the high maintenance guy that demanded to be carried home or anything like that.

The bell rang before Jensen could figure out a way to try to start a dialogue, so he just buried his fingers in Jared’s feathers and started working. It was weird to go through the motions without Jared’s cheerful morning chatter. For the first time in forever, Jensen caught himself staring at the whiteboard positioned at the front of the room. There was a new technique listed for the day. Some sort of pinch and roll that was supposed to do something or other. He didn’t know what. He hadn’t been paying attention to the lessons since Jared had walked into class that very first time.

Part of Jensen was surprised he was still passing the class given how absorbed he’d been in Jared. He hadn’t even realized it until his mind was searching for something to focus on other that Jared’s silence. The last thing that he wanted to do was have another argument in the middle of an important class, and to be honest, he also had a cowardly part of him that didn’t want to have to address the situation at all.

There was even a loathsome part that wished that he hadn’t slept with Jared. That he’d made their hormones wait until after the semester finished. Jared was basically his case study. Jensen hadn’t really read all the fine print that came with his acceptance letter, but the academy had to have some sort of ethical behavior agreement in it, and there was a good chance that sleeping with Jared violated his contract. And if he hadn’t slept with Jared, they would never have fought like they had.

It wasn’t that he wished that he could take back their kisses or their relationship, just… If he’d been able to keep it in his pants, they wouldn’t be in the mess they currently were. Jared probably would’ve been fine with Jensen having to go back home to work. They would’ve actually gotten some meaningful talking done, and there wouldn’t have been that long post-coital nap that caused Jensen to wake up in a panic and rush to get back to his place.

Jared made a little choked sound as Jensen pulled at a quill that was too damaged to remain. Thoughtlessly, Jensen leaned forward and pressed a consoling kiss to Jared’s bare shoulder. It was too intimate of a gesture for public, and Jensen didn’t even know what possessed him to do it, but even as he tightened with embarrassment and darted his eyes around the room looking for anybody that might have seen him, Jared’s rigid body posture relaxed a tiny bit.

“Sorry,” Jensen muttered. He wasn’t quite sure what he was apologizing for, the night before, the quill or maybe even the kiss, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Jared still didn’t respond verbally, but Sam did.

“You should be,” were the words that came out of her mouth as she walked up behind Jensen.

He froze, and without his consent, memories of his first day in preening class began to roll through his mind. The whole bit about always having to prove himself loomed larger than ever in his head. Jensen hadn’t thought that he could ever feel more intimidated than he had been at the very beginning, but Sam was proving him wrong.

It was shaping up to be an awesome day. First he was in the middle of having a fight with Jared, and then he got called out by the instructor for it. With the way that his luck was going, he was going to find out that the crap coffee he’d drunk before he left for class that morning was either decaf or not even coffee at all, but some sort of coffee substitute. Then he’d get suspended from classes because he was too cranky to appropriately kiss professor ass.

“Pardon?” Jensen felt his lips say. Part of him wanted to laugh. It was so proper. It was like he had been raised by some little old, blue blood lady in New England who still wore a floral print dress and sat on white chairs on her perfectly manicured lawn while her servants refilled her iced tea glass and brought her a straw sunhat to shade herself from the reflection of the light off the lake that her estate sat on.

“You heard me,” Sam replied, though her voice didn’t hold as much censure as it did amusement. “What are the two of your doing in class when you should be curled up in a bed somewhere?”

“What?” Jensen squeaked this time, his voice going into the full grown twang that his true Texas roots gave him.

The muscles that had relaxed in Jared’s frame tensed right back up, and a fiery red blush showed up on every inch of skin that was exposed. It was a good bet that all the unexposed skin was blushing as well, but Jensen could certainly forgive him for that. He’d be having the same reaction if he wasn’t as pale as a piece of notebook paper.

“Jared’s nesting. He needs to be with his mate, preferably alone, horizontal and naked. But here the two of you are, not only in public, but already squabbling from the looks of it. You’re the most dysfunctional pair of mates that I’ve ever seen, and you haven’t even gotten a full day in yet,” Sam said, her eyes narrowing and darting back and forth between Jensen’s poorly schooled face and Jared’s hunched over shoulders.

“I…” Jensen croaked. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that.

Sam shook her head. “I think we need to teach a class to young seraphs about the importance of communication,” she said with a particularly pointed scowl at Jared’s back.

Jared didn’t respond to her any more than he had to Jensen, and Jensen felt perversely glad that he wasn’t the only one getting ignored.

“Well, if the two of you are going to be like this, the least you can do is get out of class and quit being distracting,” Sam told them with a huff.

Jensen’s eyes took a quick scan around the room, but he couldn’t find any of the other students actually paying them much attention. Sure the blonde girl next to them kept sneaking glances out of the corner of her eye, but the interest on her face was nothing more than Jensen would expect from a fellow student trying to eavesdrop in on what a teacher was scolding a classmate on.

“They don’t exactly seem to be distracted,” Jensen told Sam, some of his irritation with Jared seeping into his voice.

“It isn’t the students she’s worried about; it’s the volunteers,” Jared told him.

Jensen wanted to smack him for choosing that of all topics to break his silence over.

Sam’s mouth twitched in what Jensen had to assume was amusement at his own irritation. “The two of you are going to be like fire and ice, aren’t you?”

Jared’s feathers rustled as he pulled his wings back against his body. He turned around to face Sam, and Jensen barely resisted the urge to glare wholeheartedly at him for giving her attention while he had so pointedly ignored Jensen’s attempts at opening communication.

“I don’t think so,” Jared said, “I don’t think I’m capable of it.”

Sam looked thoughtful at Jared’s words and tilted her head to one side to observe Jensen. “Are you sure he isn’t?”

Jared’s eyes flicked over to Jensen finally, and Jensen couldn’t keep the scowl from stealing across his features. Sadness filled Jared’s gaze, and he shook his head as he turned back to Sam.

“I doubt it. Indifference is not a problem of ours,” he told her.

“Would one of you care to tell me what you’re talking about?” Jensen snapped, his confusion and irritation coming to a head.

The outburst gained the attention of quite a few of the other students. Heads turned and eyes tracked over. The volunteers openly looked over now that they had an excuse, and Jensen tried not to squirm at being the focus of so many people’s attention.

“Okay, let’s get the two of you out of here before your relationship angst causes any more disruptions,” Sam ordered and she picked up Jensen’s book bag and thermos from where he’d placed them.

She stalked from the room, pausing to look coldly at those who hadn’t returned to their preening sessions. Numbly, Jensen followed her. He was upset, to be sure, and embarrassed, but his confusion was winning out, and he really didn’t want an audience anymore.

As they walked, Sam fished a key out of her pocket and took a sharp turn down some hallways and past the janitorial closet. She unlocked a nearby door, and Jensen was surprised to see what looked like a small bedroom on the inside of it.

She tossed Jensen’s belongings on top of a small dresser almost carelessly.

“Hey!” Jensen protested as he went to look at his stuff. He didn’t have anything breakable with him, but it was the principle of the thing.

Behind him, the door clicked shut. Turning around, he saw that Sam had just left without saying a single word, leaving him alone with Jared.

“Fucking seraphs,” Jensen muttered as he moved towards the door. Jared obligingly moved out of the way. The door wasn’t locked, much to Jensen’s surprise. With the weird and unprofessional way that Sam had acted, he had half expected to get held prisoner with Jared while they worked out their issues.

Clearly he watched too much television.

“If you felt that way, then you should never have mated with me,” Jared said.

Jensen stopped in midstride, turned around and went back into the room. He slammed the door shut behind him with a loud bang.

“Don’t you start with me,” he warned. “I’m not the one who got all upset because I needed to go make ends meet. Maybe you don’t realize this because you’re younger, but bills are a bitch. I can’t just ditch work to make out with my boyfriend.”

“Don’t start with you? Maybe you shouldn’t have started it with me!” Jared yelled back. “If I wasn’t good enough for you, if I was just some experimental fling, then maybe you should’ve told me that instead of letting me think that you wanted to nest with me.”

“Why are you being so melodramatic?” Jensen asked as he threw his bag back down on the floor with even more force than Sam had used earlier. He kept his thermos in his hand and gestured with it, little drips of coffee flying out of the so called ‘no drip’ spout.

“I’m not being melodramatic!” Jared bellowed as he flopped down onto the provided bed.

“Oh? How is this not dramatic?” Jensen asked, pointing at Jared with his coffee mug.

“I’m sorry if my adverse reaction to getting rejected by my mate is such a hardship on you,” Jared sneered.

“Oh for… You’re worse than my high school girlfriend. No, wait, you’re worse than my junior high girlfriend. If I didn’t know that it is biologically impossible for you to be on the… Oh, God. Tell me this isn’t some hormonal thing.”

Jared sat up and glared at him. “I think I’m offended on behalf of all the female humans I’ve ever met for what you were about to say. And no, it isn’t some ‘hormonal thing.’ It’s a Jared thing. Specifically your leaving me in the middle of our first night of nesting and very pointedly disinviting me from coming along.”

“You were tired, and my place is a shithole,” Jensen defended himself.

“It should’ve been my choice. Hell, Jensen, you didn’t even want to make it an option.”

“I’m sorry, okay? But I can’t just stop my life because we’re together.”

“I’m not asking you to do that,” Jared rebutted.

“Yeah, Jay, you kind of are.”

“I’m… Look, Sam wasn’t wrong about what she said. I need to be with you right now, but that doesn’t mean that I want to keep you from living your life. I just need to be a part of it.”

“That reminds me,” Jensen said, the vitriol returning to fuel his anger, “what were you two talking about back there? Furthermore, why did she seem to know about us?”

Jared shifted almost uncomfortably on the bed. “Sam is my… mating councilor.”

“Your what?”

“My mating councilor,” Jared said again. “They assist the unmated through their selection process and nesting period. I talked to her about us earlier, and it isn’t exactly hard for another seraph to see the signs that I started nesting.”

“The selection process?” Jensen echoed.

“Well, I mean, sometimes it takes a while to find the right one, you know? It just took me a lot longer than normal.”

“And my preening instructor moonlights as one of these councilors?”

“Kind of?” Jared said with a shrug. His wing curled over his arm and he started playing with the ends of his feathers.

“What does ‘kind of’ mean, Jared?”

“Well,” Jared drew the word out long, and Jensen could virtually see the wheels turning in his mind.

“Don’t you dare lie to me right now,” Jensen threatened. “If you do, so help me I will be out that door and run home so fast that you’ll get wind turbulence from it.”

“At least every couple of generations we need to mate with humans,” Jared told him.

“That isn’t an answer to my question,” Jensen replied even though his mind wanted to grab hold of the new piece of information desperately.

“Let me finish then,” Jared snapped before he looked back down at his lap. “I… You know how prejudiced some people can be about it?”

“I might know something about that, yeah,” Jensen drawled sarcastically.

“Right,” Jared said tensely, “so we literally can start to die from it. It’s like some crazy form of inbreeding or something. Our doctors think it is your body chemicals, and our dominant genes don’t let human recessive ones through or something because after a while even those with human ancestry start to have weak children, and worse, we don’t produce the right chemicals to allow us to preen others.”

“Okay, but I don’t think you and I have to worry about having babies,” Jensen pointed out. He couldn’t remember any of texts mentioned anything like what Jared was saying. He hadn’t even read it on the internet, and there was some pretty fantastical stuff out there about super powered seraph.

“No. You’re right. We don’t need to worry about that, but I just wanted you to know that this is normal. It’s natural,” Jared told him earnestly.

“I’m not having a problem with that. I slept with you, remember? I’m not having a crisis about it.”

“I know, I just… In the old days, when humans didn’t know about us, we’d just be able to woo you away. There was nobody to hunt after us because they didn’t know we existed. But when we went public, some humans started condemning us and our human mates for copulating together and others started trying to sleep with us for the thrill of it.”

“Jared, I know this. I’m a seraph geek, remember?” Jensen interrupted.

Jared nodded. “I needed to mate, Jensen. It wasn’t something I could just put off or not do. We don’t work that way, and I’m worse off than a lot of my peers. My fellow seraphs were unappealing, but humans were difficult to get to know. And it was even harder to tell if they were really interested in me or just interested in a ride so to speak.”

Jensen nodded in understanding. “So you went to Sam.”

“No, not exactly. I eventually ended up with her, yeah, but until I met you, I had several councilors in different parts of the country. They looked for me.”

That sounded pretty desperate to Jensen. “You just picked random places and hired a matchmaker?”

“Umm, no?” Jared fidgeted with his wing tips again.

“Then what?”

“Getting known for that kind of matchmaking would draw some pretty heavy resistance and hate groups, we couldn’t afford that especially in the early days. So we had to cloak our intentions behind something else. Who would notice if a couple of horny college kids decided to go shack up, right?” Jared mumbled nervously.

Jensen’s eyes widened as the implications of Jared’s words started to sink in. “No, no you are not telling me what I think you’re trying to tell me.”

“Jensen…”

“No, Jared. This is my whole fucking life we’re talking about here. I sacrificed years. Hell, I sacrificed my fucking dignity for this, and you’re telling me it’s all a scam? All my hopes and dreams are pinned on some façade created so you and your feather dusting relatives can get your rocks off?”

“Just because they were founded because of need, that doesn’t invalidate what you or anybody else learns. You still…”

“Shut UP!” Jensen yelled as he threw his thermos at Jared. Its stainless steel sides reflected the overhead lights as it flew through the air. Jared dodged the projectile easily, and it landed on the bed, slowly gurgling out coffee onto the yellow bedspread.

Shakily, Jensen turned around to grab his bag off the floor. When he turned around, Jared was standing right next to him. His face was crinkled up in concern.

“Jensen,” he said softly as one of his giant hands reached out to cup the side of Jensen’s face.

Jensen swatted the hand away. “Don’t you dare touch me you freak,” he spat angrily.

“You don’t mean that,” Jared said, his own eyes filling with the tears that Jensen refused to let come to his own.

Jensen didn’t bother responding to that. “You stay away from me,” he ordered instead as he pushed past Jared and yanked the door open.

“Jensen!” Jared yelled after him as he stormed down the academy’s hallways, but Jensen didn’t turn around, and Jared didn’t follow.

It wasn’t until he made it back to his apartment that he remembered that he’d left his thermos behind. Part of his heart clenched because it had been a gift from Jared, and he’d loved it even with its leaky mouthpiece. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d given it back to Jared only to get it back the next day filled with another serving of hot brew made from freshly ground beans.

It was a stupid thing to even think about given how all of his dreams had just gotten doused with the ugly light of reality, but Jensen let himself feel the loss because he didn’t dare let himself feel anything else. He just couldn’t acknowledge the fact that he was no more than a custom fit whore. Jared’s very own call girl. The stupid thermos was just a trinket, his payment for being a good little bitch and giving his assigned seraph what he needed.

He couldn’t sleep that night, so he dragged out all of his clothes and washed any of the ones that Jared might have ever touched him in. The ones that he’d worn to Jared’s apartment were treated to a triple wash.

When the sunrise started to peak through the windows of the Laundromat, Jensen paid it no heed. He just sat and watched his laundry spin in the dryer, evaporating the remaining moisture in them like the truth had evaporated his dreams.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not getting up early felt odd to Jensen. After so many mornings where he had to force himself out of bed so that he could stumble groggily to class, his body decided to betray him by waking up and refusing to let him sleep.

He had stupidly thought that after that first night of getting no sleep, his body would give him a break. It’d just crash and burn and give him the blissful peace of not having to think, but he received no such reprieve. Instead it made his eyes snap open and his heart race with the familiar thrum of adrenalin that he always got when he realized that he’d slept in.

It always took him a few moments to calm down and remind himself that he didn’t have anywhere to be, but by then the damage was done. His body didn’t want to go back to sleep, and he was stuck with the torture of being awake until he could exhaust himself back into slumber.

For the first week or so, Jensen just wandered around town. He did a lot of window shopping and people watching, but always made certain he stayed far away from both the academy and his apartment. He didn’t want to see anybody he knew and have them ask about why he wasn’t in class.

The first couple of days of that first week, he spent figuring out how he could expose the seraphs for what they were. But as his anger cooled and settled like lead in his guts, he had to acknowledge that his word was going to be nothing against theirs.

How many humans had gone through the academies? How many of them had fallen into the snare of the true nature of the programs? There had to be thousands of human students who had never found out the true purpose of the academies. To make matters worse, Jensen had to assume that the humans who had mated with a seraph and had children with their mate had to know about the so called ‘biological needs’ of their cherubs, and they clearly weren’t out and about spreading the word.

There wasn’t a news source in the world that would take any of Jensen’s claims seriously. He himself had read similar stories on the internet and scoffed at the loonies and bigots posting such utter trash. The only people that would believe him were the separatists, and he didn’t need his reputation besmirched with any association with them.

Jensen had hatred towards the seraphs, but he wasn’t out to cause their destruction, and he couldn’t imagine that polarizing the human world against the seraph one would ever bring anything but trouble. After all, his own pain was caused by the secrets that the winged ones had kept from him and his fellow students.

If the human race began to withdraw from contact with the seraph, ignorance and prejudice would only grow. How much worse would it become if they weren’t allowed to interact at all? Would wars spring up as seraph attempted to just take what they needed and humans fought to take them down like a hyper evolved parasite? Would the choice of being separate from the winged ones eventually be taken from the humans as the seraph fought for their continued existence?

They were fantastical thoughts straight out of a dystopian, alien invasion movie, and Jensen could well appreciate the grandeur of his imagination. That he of all humans would cause such an upset that it would cause genocide and war was ridiculous. And it was that thought that made him pull enough out of his funk to focus on what was left of his life.

Once he managed to walk and think himself past thoughts of vengeance, Jensen was slapped in the face by reality. He couldn’t make himself walk back into the academy. He’d lied to his parents about what he was doing, and come the end of the semester, he was going to end up owing his student loans again.

The first solution that he thought about was calling Chris to move him back home. It was a sad and pathetic thing for a man of his age to do, but Chris owed him for a few rent checks back in the day. Jensen knew that if he begged hard enough he could get his old internship back. It’d kill his pride, but the hospital had been one of the few desperate ones around. Their reputation wasn’t the best, and their finances proved it.

It was, after all, why they hadn’t been able to afford to fix the paging system and why Erica had to run to fetch him that fateful day. Their major source of business was in physical therapy, and Jensen the intern was a cheap alternative to not-Jensen the fully trained and expensive therapist. The fact that he’d walked out on them without so much as a two weeks notice was going to require some major groveling, but he’d already lost most of his pride.

He figured that by the time that his parents realized that something was up, he’d at least have a guaranteed paycheck again, and he could figure out the rest later.

But Chris was out of town when he called. He’d finally picked up some tour dates and couldn’t make it back to help move his buddy for at least a couple of weeks.

The prospect of more time on his hands didn’t thrill Jensen, so he started to look for other job opportunities that were around his current location. While internships weren’t exactly plentiful given that most of them were picked up by graduating students, there were a few openings here and there that he could get into. The problem was that most of the openings he found only let him interview because he put down that he was a student at the academy.

It wasn’t exactly a lie, and he needed a reason for why he’d bailed out of his last internship. The hospital administrators were impressed with it, and Jensen swallowed down the bile that rose at their enthusiasm. He didn’t blame them for their excitement. Getting into one of the seraph programs was a very big deal, but their enthusiasm only reminded him of how he would have reacted once upon a time.

For years he had terrible fits of envy every time a classmate was accepted to even the smallest of one of the seraph programs. He’d been obsessed with getting the Academy of Angelic Care logo on his diploma. He’d daydreamed about being that cog in the cosmic wheel of uniting their species only to find out that he was more of a literal fucking hole.

Inventive lying became the name of the game in his interviews. He feigned pride about his academy classes, and told a detailed story about how he’d only been accepted into their summer sessions because of a cancellation and a patient’s recommendation, but how he was thrilled to just have that opportunity. He finished up with a sad face of regret about how he wasn’t going to be able to get into the fall semester. Too many confirmed applicants were just going to make it impossible even though his grades were good, but he felt that his preening and flight muscles classes were the most important ones to apply to physical therapy anyway.

It was a good act. Jensen had caught sight of himself in the reflection of a window while he interviewed, and the way that he sold it almost made him think going into acting. It was a viable enough thing to do. Going crazy and running off to California to pursue his name on the big screen would be a believable enough story.

He didn’t get any immediate offers, but there was enough interest in some of the administrator’s eyes that Jensen knew that he’d get something even though he had practically run out on his last position.

The problem was, of course, that he would actually need good grades in order to grab his job, and not showing up for classes wouldn’t get him those.

Jensen couldn’t make himself go back. His remaining self-worth wouldn’t let him, but it would let him blackmail the institution. It was unethical, and Jensen was glad that he’d already taken his ethics tests because otherwise he’d feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite taking them.

But he sent the letter directly to Ms. Supreme Ruler of the Erotic Feather Plucking Class and let her know that he expected good grades in order for his silence. He didn’t hear back from her, but he couldn’t do anything about it until the semester was over anyway, so he just hoped for the best. He didn’t pray for the best because there was a level that he just plain refused to sink to, and praying for his underhandedness to prosper just didn’t seem like a good idea.

Jensen made himself not think about Jared. If when he was awake he’d sometimes literally feel an ache deep inside himself that he just knew was related to his residual feelings towards the seraph, he’d just tamp down all the harder on them. It never made the ache go away. In fact, sometimes it even got worse if he attempted to stifle it.

It was almost as if his feelings were nothing more than petulant children who wanted to stomp their feet and get their way. Nothing would pacify them except for giving them what they wanted, and Jensen would be damned if he did that.

Jared was as good as dead to him. Sure Jensen hadn’t felt heartbreak before like he did now, but he was attributing that to the additional factors of the whole mess with the academy. He’d been blue over a lover before, and he’d live. It was just going to take a little longer this time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared frowned as another feather floated its way down onto his previously pristine living room floor. Its brightly hued family lay in a circle around Jared, their cheery colors mocking him. The molting hadn’t started right away, and Jared thanked whoever might be listening for that small favor. He wouldn’t have wanted his fellow seraph to see his utter disgrace.

His whole heart had ached to go after Jensen when he had left that small mating room, but his mind had prevailed and kept him inside. Jensen was hurt, and trying to talk to him would only exacerbate the situation. Still, Jared had sat in the room for two hours before sadly acknowledging to himself that his mate wasn’t coming back.

The coffee had leaked out and stained a good portion of the bed with its contents, leaving a cold, wet mess, so Jared had twisted the cap off and poured the rest of it out over the bedspread in an act of senseless destruction. Things like that were supposed to make a guy feel better, but all Jared felt was guilt and sadness. That was Jensen’s coffee. He’d made it just that morning the exact way that his mate liked it because as upset as he was at Jensen’s abrupt departure the night before, Jared had still wanted good things for him.

Standing there, staring at the ruined bedspread, Jared’s tears had come back in full force. He had stood there like a fool, clutching at Jensen’s coffee thermos and bawling his heart out. The word ‘freak’ kept rolling around in his mind over and over like a horrible song. It lurked in its tuneless, horrible glory, grinding away at his memory with its ugliness.

Eventually, Jared had left the room. His eyes ached and he felt terrible, but he made himself leave while the hour was still at its midpoint, and he was less likely to run into anybody in the halls. The flight home was more painful than he had thought it would be. Not even a day earlier, he had been bringing his love home to their nest for their first night of mating. Now he was alone and rejected by that same man, and though his head could somewhat comprehend it, his heart would not.

The blankets of his bed that first night had offered him the solace of Jensen’s lingering scent. Pungent and warm and loving, it had been everything that Jared had ever wanted, and he had wrapped himself up in the comforter and sheets. Swaddled up like a baby, he had fallen asleep, and in his dreams it was almost as if Jensen was with him.

The morning had not been so forgiving. Warm and aroused, he had pushed out with his hips, fully expecting to feel his mate beside him only to find nothing but his own cotton sheets. For a moment more his memory had stayed blissfully asleep before it came back to taunt him with the events of the previous day.

He had almost called Jensen that morning. He’d almost gone to see him even though Jensen was against the mere thought of Jared being near him. It was only remembering the look in Jensen’s eye when he warned Jared away that kept him from going to his mate.

As strong as Jared’s desire was to soothe and comfort Jensen, such overtures would not be appreciated. Humans needed time apart sometimes. At least that was what Jared’s human relationship books had told him, and he didn’t exactly have anybody else to ask. He had relatives and friends who were married to humans, but they had never been rejected by their spouses.

Even the stories that Jared had heard about a mates rejecting their seraph’s advances were always tales about how the humans had resisted at first. Most often their resistance was a hesitancy to sleep with another species, and they always came around in the end. Jared had never heard of a mate rejecting his seraph after their first breeding.

It was shameful, and Jared feared that Jensen would be blamed if others found out. They would insinuate that something was wrong with Jared’s mate instead of Jared. It wouldn’t bother him so much if those people were just associates or strangers, but there was the chance that friends and family might feel the same way, say the same things, and Jared wouldn’t be able to abide that.

Jared stayed in his apartment for fear of meeting up with somebody he knew and having them see that something was wrong. He was in no mood to talk about what had happened, and his cupboards were stocked full of food that he had purchased for his and Jensen’s nesting period.

The one call that he did make was to the school. Once they confirmed that Jensen hadn’t shown up for his classes, Jared had no reason to leave his nest.

At first he was just miserable, then his body decided to up the ante.

He was in the shower the first time that one of his feathers fell out. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Sometimes even the most thoroughly preened seraph would just lose a feather. Hopefully it was never a large one because losing a large feather in public was embarrassing. It was like having a sign pointed to you that announced you had poor personal hygiene.

Since Jared was a cherub, he’d gotten lectures about checking his pinions upon landing if he’d been flying through rough winds. It just wouldn’t do to have feathers pointing out the wrong way. Bad weather wasn’t an excuse to not groom after landing. Only the lazy didn’t pull their feathers in order as soon as possible.

Usually shedding a feather from a recently preened set of wings happened after flying through a strong wind or getting rained on. The forces of nature conspired to batter a guy’s feathers about, and sometimes they twisted just the right way or were just soft enough, and one would drop off.

So when Jared’s feather came off in the shower, he didn’t pay much attention to it. He’d had other, more Jensen shaped things on his mind, and it was actually more convenient that it was one of his larger feathers. If humans thought that long hair clogged their drains, Jared had always thought they should try cleaning one that was full of down feathers. The one time that his mother had made him help clean out the house’s drain pipes was a day that he’d rather forget.

When the second one came out, it was annoying, but he blamed in on the interrupted preening that he’d gotten. If Sam hadn’t butted in, then Jensen would’ve finished up on his wings and done his usual impeccable work on them. But surely his mate hadn’t made it all the way through before the older seraph had come by. After all, Jared had a very large and impressive wingspan.

Of course, thoughts of Sam made Jared scowl because if she had just kept her mouth shut and not dragged them out of class, there was every chance that he and Jensen would be engaging in makeup sex instead of spending time apart. But she hadn’t. Even though inside Jared knew that there were things that he could’ve done better, he couldn’t help but blame Sam a little for putting him in a situation where he had to reveal certain truths to Jensen so early in their partnership. If he and Jensen had been farther along in their mating, their bond would’ve been stronger. A stronger bond would’ve made it more difficult for Jensen to leave him.

A stronger bond would’ve also meant that Jared would have felt Jensen’s upset more keenly, but that was a hardship that Jared would’ve eagerly borne just for the fact of what it meant. Jensen was a unique human, special. All seraph felt that way about their mates, and Jared knew to some extent he was just a love-struck fool, but he believed that he and Jensen were something greater.

If Sam’s question had been any indication, she had suspected it was well. In theory, all seraph had the possibility of developing extra ‘powers,’ but few actually did. It was a function of their genetics and more importantly their bond with their mate. While all seraph were directionless as far as career goals went until they bonded with their mates, the right mate would not only bring direction, but would trigger the powers that were possible inside a seraph.

It wasn’t true of all mates. Whether mating with a fellow human or another seraph, there was no way to tell if the mating would cause a power to emerge until it was completed. While it confounded the scientists that they couldn’t pinpoint the biological and psychological factors, Jared had always felt a small amount of comfort in the knowledge. He’d known a few of his kinfolk who would’ve blatantly searched for the ‘right’ mate to activate them and left good, honest mates behind because of it.

Jared, though, had always been different from his peers. His mother would’ve called it more mature, but that wasn’t really it. He’d just always taken mating seriously, been wrapped up in the idea since he was a small cherub, and he’d had the nervous energy for it since he was old enough to mate. It was only cruel fate that had kept him from finding his right one for so long.

It was an even crueler fate that he had been kept from his mate now that he had found him. If the admissions board had let Jensen into the academy when he had first applied, Jared was certain that they would have been mated for years by now. Sure other seraph would probably have vied for Jensen’s attention, but Jared just knew down inside of him that they were the ones that were meant to be bonded together.

That thought held him through his second night without Jensen.

The morning brought unpleasant surprises. He felt cold when he rolled out of bed. It was unusual for him, but the drain on his system from his fight with Jensen couldn’t be expected to just not bother him. It wasn’t until he turned around to see that he’d left several feathers behind that he realized why exactly he felt chilled.

His body had decided to skip right past the unbearable itching and nagging sensation that drove him to over preen and go straight to molting. His beautiful courtship feathers lay in clumps in his sheets, and even as he collected them up, he could feel others letting loose from his wings.

He tried to calm himself. When that didn’t work, he tried to call Jensen five times, but he kept getting the human’s voicemail. For a few minutes he was tempted to leave a voicemail, but there was nothing he could say that wasn’t pathetic and needy. Jensen clearly wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, and Jared understood enough about humans that a physical appearance would probably be more meaningful than a phone call anyway.

Jared was through his balcony door halfway to its railing when one of his primary flight feathers fell to the floor. He stared at its dark blue coloring standing in relief against the light grey of the cement that made up his small landing. His mind spun for a while. It wasn’t that he couldn’t think of all the ramifications of what losing his feathers meant; it was that his mind refused to accept them.

It was instinct to fly almost everywhere. Sure Jared had his driver’s license, but he didn’t have a mate or children that required that he own a vehicle. He had friends and relatives to help him out whenever he needed to move larger objects that he couldn’t carry. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d had a strong vocation when he’d been mateless. He was as directionless as any other seraph would’ve been without his mate, and he had an almost completed general studies degree at a human university thanks to it.

Despite Jensen’s intimations to the contrary, Jared was very well aware of the need of money in order to own things. He had his own college tuition loans, and his parents were the ones who funded his apartment and even gave him the money to nest once he’d called them with the good news. It was nice that his parents had the funds to help him out, but that didn’t mean that Jared was irresponsible with their money or wanted to spend it frivolously.

As he was in possession of a healthy body, a car was one of the most obvious expenses that he could eliminate while he was searching for a mate. It wasn’t as if he was going to find a good paying job with his generic education, and he wouldn’t have been committed to it anyway. It was better to continue searching for a mate than trying to work to make enough money to afford a vehicle he didn’t need.

Even if Jared discounted the embarrassment of public molting, he needed feathers to fly. If he lost too many of them he could get stranded. Worse, if he lost the wrong ones while in flight, he could plummet to his death. He would prefer if the next time that Jensen saw him that he wasn’t laid out in his coffin awaiting burial.

Jensen. Jensen could not see him like he was. Strangers would be bad enough, but his own mate? Those mating feathers on the floor were Jensen’s. They’d grown only for him, and now they weren’t even doing Jared the favor of letting him vent his frustrations on his wings by pulling them out.

In a corner of his mind, Jared wondered if Jensen would still find the molting behavior fascinating like he had every other piece of seraph related information or if Jensen would spurn such knowledge with the same ire that he’d rebuffed Jared with. It bothered him that he didn’t know what Jensen was thinking. He didn’t know if Jensen was even thinking at all yet, or if he was still reacting to the pain that Jared’s disclosure had brought him.

Slowly, Jared dragged himself back into his apartment. Drawing the drapes behind him after he walked through the sliding glass door, he had plunged the living room into darkness, and he hadn’t seen the outside world since.

After a few days, his feathers were all over his apartment. It was disorderly and disturbing, but Jared couldn’t bring himself to collect them. He just let them stay wherever they landed unless they were in seriously inconvenient places like the coffee pot or the actual shower.

If he were human, he’d call it depression. But he wasn’t human, and he knew full well it was Jensen’s rejection that was causing his body’s physiological symptoms and lethargy. He’d never even heard of a mate so thoroughly refusing his suitor, but Jared figured that a seraph had never bungled up a mating like he had either.

The only cure for it would be to go and see Jensen. Jared was already committed; his body wasn’t going to move on until one of them was dead. It was just one of those mysterious mating things that happened. Partly blood chemistry, but mostly unexplained, the hormone levels that changed in a seraph during mating ensured their fidelity and strengthened their bond with their mates, but those levels remained strong even with prolonged distance between them. Somehow they still knew that their mate was out there, and they kept producing the same hormones without any additional contact until their mate died.

Jared needed to reconcile with Jensen. The problem was that what little Jared had to induce Jensen to speak to him again was now greatly reduced by his lack of attractive physical appearance. His wings weren’t even the pathetic fluffy down of an infant cherub. They were pale, peach skin dotted with the occasional scraggly feather. His wings looked like horrid slabs of meat without his feathers covering them. Loose skin shifted on them if he flexed, making him look more like he was in a science fiction movie than anything else. It looked like an alien creature was sprouting out of his back.

It was hideous and mortifying. Jared felt sick each time he looked. His ego and pride had never been large or overinflated even though he’d been told often enough that he was a very handsome man, but the loss of his feathers was difficult for him.

What would he woo Jensen back with when he had so few possessions, and his words were now worth less than nothing? His physical appearance had been the one thing still in his favor. Humans, despite their protests, were still more forgiving of comely people. While Jared knew that Jensen was the type of human who would strive to be above such shallowness, he had harbored some hope that his looks would open a small door to the opportunity of thawing Jensen’s heart.

 

He stewed about his situation for days before his phone rang. Sam was on the other end complaining about how ‘Your Mate’ was blackmailing the school. She wasn’t exactly happy with Jared’s suggestion that she just give Jensen what he asked for, but she caved in easily enough. They both knew that whatever she’d been told by the higher ups to demand of Jared in the situation wasn’t going to happen. Jensen wasn’t about to do a damn thing that Jared suggested he do, and Jared was probably the only seraph that would have a chance of talking to him.

Once she was on the phone, Sam was difficult to get off the line. The longer that she talked, the more that Jared got the sinking suspicion that her motivation for calling had less to do with Jensen’s rather bland demands for good grades and a solid recommendation and more to do with her interfering in Jared’s now dead love life.

Three minutes later, he was stabbing the end call button on his phone with fervor.

Jared wasn’t the type of guy that hated being right, but Sam drove him to that point. She seemed to think that just talking with Jensen was going to make everything better. Jensen was his mate, she’d reasoned, he’d thaw eventually. There wasn’t a single mate that had turned on his seraph in all of the years of the academies, and Jensen wasn’t some special exception.

And, really, did she think that Jared was stupid?

As much as he didn’t like her messing in his business, her call did make Jared aware of two things. The first was that Jensen was moving on with his life, and if Jared wanted him back, he had best initiate contact again before his mate got too good at moving on.

The second was that there was no way on Earth that Jared knew how to bridge the gap between his mate and himself. Jensen was human and thought like a human. Sam was a seraph, and even though she meant well, Jared could hear the undertones that said she thought that Jared should be able to simply woo Jensen back with their bond without any real effort.

Jared’s wings begged to differ.

Jared’s intellect and everything he’d learned about Jensen and humans begged to differ.

But just because Jared didn’t know how to get Jensen to talk to him, that didn’t mean that nobody did.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The last person that Jensen expected to show up at his abode was Chad the Admissions Jerk. Honestly, he figured that if the academy did deign to send anybody to speak with him, they might send a lawyer to deal or maybe an innocent looking underling who would be too scared to say anything if Jensen went off on him.

Not that Chad wasn’t an underling, but the innocent looking part didn’t apply. Jensen thought it was the squinty eyes. Normally he’d be all over anybody that physically stereotyped, but hey, he’d been all over the pro-seraph bandwagon too, and that hadn’t turned out so hot for him.

Still, the Laundromat wasn’t exactly hopping with business any more than it normally was during Jensen’s shift, and there was only so much angsting about his wasted past and dubious future that he could do.

Chad’s greeting of, “Hi, Fellow Blackmailer!” almost caused Jensen to toss him back out on the sidewalk. Jensen would rather navel gaze than put up with that, but part of him was curious about Chad’s presence, so he let the man come farther into the business instead of shoving him right back out.

“For a group of people trying to keep a low profile, they should learn how to teach you some tact,” Jensen told him with disdain.

“Dude, I blackmail them. Tact is so not required,” Chad said as he strolled around and checked his reflection out in the empty washers and dryers.

Jensen grunted and tried not to roll his eyes. “So I take it that they got my letter.”

“Yeah, yeah they did. I don’t think they were too happy about it, but hey, they have me working there. Giving you some fancy ass recommendation is nothing compared to that.”

“They’re going to give in then?” Jensen tried to keep the excitement out of his voice as he asked, but he failed miserably. The relief of having a clean academic record and a recommendation on top of that would be a pathetically huge weight off his shoulders. Maybe without it he could focus on the nagging burning sensation in his guts or start in on taking those steps to getting over Jared.

“I’d assume so. It isn’t like you’re asking for a helicopter and a million dollars in unmarked bills,” Chad replied with a shrug.

Jensen tried not to get upset with the guy, but really… “First of all, I’m only taking advantage of their own duplicity. I’m not robbing a bank. Second of all, what do you mean, ‘I assume’?”

“Hey, I’m not judging. Those guys have it coming to them someday, you know? I mean sure, they need their mates, will die without them, one forever, blah blah bliddy blah blah. They could be just a bit more honest is all I’m saying. If this shit was out in the open, they wouldn’t have to put up with me and my slacking ways. Of course, then I’d actually have to find a job, but I figure I could make the talk show circuits and have a ghost writer write my memoirs or something. If I invested my money right, I’d be set for life.”

“What do you mean, ‘I assume’?” Jensen reiterated with particular force on the words.

“What do you think I mean? I mean, ‘I assume.’ Just because I work for them and know their dirty secret, that doesn’t mean that they keep me in the loop. They kind of try to keep me out of their business if they can. I mean, one of these days I could blackmail for a promotion, you know?” Chad said as he shot Jensen an overconfident smirk.

“They didn’t send you?” Jensen asked.

“Uh, no. Did I say that they did?” Chad asked right back, tilting his head like he thought Jensen was the one making Chad’s reason for being at the Laundromat confusing.

Jensen frowned. “What are you doing here then?”

“I came to give you this,” Chad said as he reached into the messenger bag that he had slung over his shoulder. He pulled a stack of papers out that had a cover sheet on them marked CONFIDENTIAL in big, red letters.

“I can’t read that,” Jensen automatically said. He’d already violated enough ethical rules by blackmailing the academy. He didn’t want to add to his conscience.

“Of course you can,” Chad scoffed, “it’s your file. Or one of them anyway. It has all the notes from when you had your enrollment interview. You know, the one you failed?”

Jensen’s fingers twitched, but he kept his hands by his sides. “I can’t take that. It isn’t…”

“Don’t you want to know why they didn’t let you in all those years ago?” Chad interrupted him, waving the thick stack of white paper under Jensen’s nose.

Jensen looked down at the floor. Chad just dropped the paper farther down to block Jensen’s view of the carpet.

Angrily, Jensen snatched the papers away. When he glared at Chad, the other human was grinning.

“Happy with yourself?” Jensen asked, his voice as sarcastic and scathing as he could make it.

“Fucking thrilled, man. So you gonna look?”

“No.”

“Pansy.”

“Look…”

“Pansy assed, feather fucker.”

“Chad, you need to take this back to…”

“Pansy assed, yellow bellied, feather fucker.”

“Would you quit?! And seriously, ‘yellow bellied’? Who says that?”

“I dunno. You tell me. I’m not the Texan,” Chad said with an inappropriate grin.

“We don’t say that,” Jensen ground out.

“Dude. Westerns. You totally say that. Besides, I don’t see you objecting to the feather fucking part. Old Jay give you a little tail? Or, I guess, tail feather?”

“That’s it,” Jensen snapped, “Get out of my store.”

“This isn’t a store; it’s a place that old grannies and starving people go to wash their grundies.”

“Out!” Jensen yelled pointing towards the door.

“Public place, man.”

“This is a place of business, and you are not a customer,” Jensen snarled.

Chad shrugged, pulled off the jacket he was wearing and dropped it in the closest washer. He dug quarters out of his pocket and started the machine going.

“Guess I’m a customer now.”

“You’re washing one jacket without any detergent.”

“I’m allergic,” Chad said smugly.

“Oh, for the love of God… Take. This. Back.” Jensen ordered as he shoved the papers towards Chad.

“No can do. You read that or I wash each and every thing that I’m wearing one item at a time.”

Jensen’s eyes narrowed. “Why is this so important to you?”

Chad huffed, and his face turned slightly red. “Look, I don’t agree with what those guys do, okay? And I don’t think that they treated you fairly or whatever, but it’s tearing you up inside, and… I’m not the world’s worst guy. They’re so scared of being outed or whatever that they’re not seeing the big picture of how this could come back biting them in the ass, but neither are you.”

“Come again?” Jensen snapped, his eyes narrowing in anger.

“I get it. I do, but you’re having some sort of meltdown or something over what those guys did. So I brought you one of your application files. Take a look, see what they said,” Chad encouraged him.

“I don’t need to know what they said,” Jensen replied. “I wish that they’d never changed their minds about me in the first place, but now that I know what they are, I don’t care that I wasn’t their idea of a perfect fuck toy.”

“Dude, that’s harsh. They don’t think that.”

Jensen tried not to get more irate at the guy, the human standing in front of him, but he didn’t do a good job of that. “How can you even say that? How can you defend them when you know what they do?”

“And what do they do? Huh? Set people up on dates without their knowledge? Nobody is getting roofied or coerced into anything.”

“And you think it’s okay that they’re selling themselves as an educational place when their entire goal is to get their offspring married? You think it’s okay that they have this elaborate system designed to hide their true intentions? I didn’t sign up for eHarmony. I signed up for an educational experience and a chance to make a difference in the world. They tried to pair me off. I thought real schools stopped that crap back with the women’s rights movements,” Jensen argued.

“I get it. Your dreams are crushed. But you’re going off the deep end here. This whole blackmailing thing isn’t you! Those students at the academy? They’re going to get jobs and maybe somebody that will love them for the rest of their lives. Is that such a bad thing?”

“It’s deceitful and dishonest, and you have no idea who I am. You don’t know me,” Jensen growled.

“Of course I do, you know why? Because I read that file. I read every single one of your application files because I’m not you. I don’t have this great, caring attitude or the stand up for the right thing mentality. I don’t have a giant ruler shoved up my ass telling me what to do.”

Jensen slapped the file against Chad’s chest. The other man’s hands came up reflexively to clutch at it. “Get out before I call the cops and have you arrested.”

“For doing my laundry? For getting into an argument with a man trying to blackmail the fine establishment that I work at?”

“Are you threatening me?” Jensen’s incredulity shone through.

“I told you that I’m not you. I’m not the guy who was a perfect candidate except for how he was too much of a security concern. You were too bright man. They were worried that you were going to figure out what was going on before you mated, and then you’d be telling on them. Your scores on everything else were flawless, if it makes you feel any better,” Chad’s words softened as he spoke.

“Great,” Jensen said snidely as he tried not to feel the pang of old hurt at finally getting the answer to his rejection for all those years. “That all? Will you leave now?”

“Jacket still isn’t done washing,” Chad pointed out.

“I’ll mail it to you.”

“Okay well then how about we talk about Jared?”

“How about we don’t, and you quit talking to me about stuff that really isn’t any of your business?”

“So it really doesn’t bother you that you’re punishing him for something that isn’t his fault?” Chad asked.

“If I was going to discuss Jared with you, which I’m not, I’d tell you that he knew. He knew, and he still didn’t tell me until he really didn’t have a choice. Is that the kind of lover you’d want to end up with?”

“Dude, he’s not human. You get that, right? Maybe he could’ve told you earlier, and I really don’t doubt that there are some secrets that he should’ve let you in on. But the guy was doing what he always had been taught was the right thing to do. He loves you in a stupidly huge way. He wouldn’t do stuff to purposely hurt you.”

“He loves me in a ‘stupidly huge way’?” Jensen echoed, his emotions overriding his decision to not discuss anything with Chad. “So do stalkers, Chad. So do weirdoes and, and…”

“And do you believe, no, do you even think that Jared is one of those guys? Some asshole that is just obsessed with you because he’s got a mental imbalance? He’s your mate,” Chad stressed his last word as hard as he could.

“You’ve been around them too long if that’s your argument,” Jensen told him.

“Bullshit. You think that I don’t know how you’re feeling right now? I’ve seen a lot of mated pairs walk out those school doors, and they don’t like being away from each other. You trying to tell me that you’re not feeling anything towards him right now? You mean to tell me that there isn’t even the smallest part of you that cares about him anymore?” The challenge to dare contradict him was clear in Chad’s eyes.

Jensen never did like backing down from a challenge. “Maybe that is exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” he said even as his insides twisted that much harder at the lie. Just thinking about Jared hurt, talking about him was worse.

“Yeah? Then I think I’ll wait around for the show if it’s all the same to you,” Chad said with a level of smugness that made Jensen want to slap him.

“What show?” He bit out around the increasing pain in his chest. It felt like his own heartbreak wanted to come alive and just shove out of him, and seriously, he could do his own grieving in private. He didn’t need Chad the fucking Clerk to be there to watch it happen.

“Well, see, Jared’s outside waiting to talk to you. If you’re gonna tell him the same thing that you just told me, then I want to be around for the fireworks.”

Jensen’s mouth opened a bit in shock before he closed it tightly, compressing his lips into a thin line. There was no way that he was going to give Chad the satisfaction of gaping at him.

“You’re a terrible person, you know that?” Jensen asked as he stalked over to the large windows that faced the street. He meant his proclamation wholeheartedly. He could understand people who liked to watch this sort of thing on television, it was cathartic in a way or even just plain entertaining. But there was a difference between television and real life, and he wasn’t about to explain that fact to Chad. With Jensen’s luck, the bastard wouldn’t understand the concept anyway.

Chad, for his part, didn’t seem to care that Jensen had just insulted his character. “Whatever, dude. I’m not the one who is breaking his own mate’s heart,” were his exact words.

“He’s not my…” Jensen trailed off as his eyes finally landed on Jared. It was a little embarrassing how long it took him to identify the giant hulk of Jared’s tall form, but Jensen had never seen Jared hide his wings before.

It wasn’t that it was that unusual for a seraph to cover up his or her wings. Even though their propagation levels kept them in the minority as compared to humans, Jensen had seen quite a few of them throughout his life. Wings were just as easily injured as any other limb, and if a seraph broke a wing, they were known to cover it up and just blend in like a human that was forced to walk from place to place instead of soaring in the skies, or as the less accepting of humanity’s members said, hopping around town like pigeons and seagulls.

But Jared hadn’t once hid his wings from public viewing. Not even when he was plucking and had horrible gaps in his coverage had he taken to folding his wings tightly behind him and covering them with a giant overcoat.

That he was doing so now bothered Jensen on some level. He hated himself for the instant worry that sprang to his mind. He tried to grab on to the anger and hurt that resided there with it, but those feelings kept slipping away. They didn’t disappear. How could they? He wasn’t some robot that could just turn off his emotions, but he couldn’t pull them to the forefront either.

“Just so you know, he’s kinda pathetic right now,” Chad’s voice interrupted Jensen’s internal conflict.

The irritation that he felt towards Chad had no problem usurping Jensen’s worry, and he almost felt relieved. “Do you ever mind your own business?”

“Nope, not really. Besides, Jared was the one who came groveling to me to beg me to talk to you. Figured that he needed a human perspective on this stupid love affair you’ve got going. I think I’m the only human he knows or something. I might have an ego, but I can admit that I’m not exactly a good choice for relationship help.”

“Jared came to you?” Jensen couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. He didn’t turn to look at Chad when he spoke, just kept staring out the window at Jared.

“Yeah, well, he was desperate I guess. He gets why you’re upset, kinda. I tried to explain it to him, but eventually it was just easier to steal your damn file myself and drag him over here. He was just too miserable and hung up on the ‘mates’ thing, and I’d call him a pathetic loser, but you look just about as good as he does.”

“Thanks,” Jensen said dryly.

“Yeah, well, just being honest. Of course, if you want, you could quit staring out the window at him and go talk or something. Just a suggestion,” Chad said as he flopped down into one of the old, yellow vinyl seats that the Laundromat provided for its customers.

Jensen snorted and made himself move away from the window, and more importantly away from Chad. He wasn’t about to do anything the bastard suggested. He was only going to wait until Chad’s jacket finished drying and then calmly suggest that he leave before Jensen called the cops to have him arrested for loitering or harassment or something.

If Jared was still skulking around by that point, Jensen would have him reported as well. After that he’d be seraph free for a while. Neither humans nor seraphs wanted trouble with the law, and while he had his doubts about Chad, he knew Jared well enough to know that he’d leave without putting up a fuss.

It was a good, solid plan.

The trouble was that Jensen knew Jared. As much as he wanted to just dismiss everything that he had learned about him as deceptive, brain washing trash, Jensen couldn’t deny that there were just certain things that couldn’t be falsehoods. Maybe there were people out there, conmen and the like, who could pretend to be a totally different person twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but Jared wasn’t one of them.

And if Jared wasn’t out to deceive Jensen completely, then there were still parts of him that…

Jensen shook his head to clear it of his trail of thought. He glanced over his shoulder to see Chad blatantly staring at him. The instant that they made eye contact, Chad raised his eyebrows and gave an incredibly unsubtle glance to the window.

Unwillingly, Jensen’s gaze followed Chad’s motion, and he could see that the summer wind and grey clouds of the day had finally given in to the rain that had been threatening all afternoon. The sun hadn’t quite set yet thanks to the long days of summer, so the grey sunset outlined Jared’s pathetic figure as rain pelted against him.

The overcoat was already starting to cling to the seraph’s form, and his brown hair was matted down against his head. The street lights kicked on as both the storm and the disappearing sun deemed it dark enough, and the additional light made Jared look like a pathetic hunchback, Victor Hugo’s creature in a modern day world, but still alone.

Jensen snorted to himself at the thought and simultaneously kicked himself for being an avid reader. It had gotten him into the seraph mess to begin with and now gave him stupid, romantic notions. He should’ve spent more time indulging himself in regular, human sports. He should’ve listened to his parents about finding other hobbies when his first few applications to the academies were declined.

But he hadn’t listened, and he couldn’t change the past. He also couldn’t change the fact that he’d managed to mess enough with Jared’s mind that the guy was hanging outside a Laundromat like some sort of creeper and was apparently so distraught that he’d sought Chad’s advice on humanity.

Jensen was many things, but he had never considered himself cruel. He could be a jerk. Sometimes he could even be an asshole, but then again, he’d never met a guy who didn’t have that ability. Even though he’d never seen it, he suspected that even Jared would have that capability in the right situation.

Jared and the academy had hurt Jensen, fucking stomped all over his one castle in the air, but if what Chad said was true, Jared didn’t really understand that he’d done that. Or he understood that he had, but he didn’t understand the why or how or something like that.

The point was that after a little time away from the situation, Jensen could see that maybe Jared hadn’t quite realized how the hidden agenda of the academies would hurt Jensen. Maybe he hadn’t quite comprehended how keeping their secret, how using their secret would make Jensen feel.

If that was true, then Jensen could maybe just… help the guy out. Explain things to him so that when Jared was ready to get back on the dating horse, he’d be a little wiser in his decisions if he were to date another human instead of finding another seraph to mate with.

The thought made Jensen’s heart twinge a little, but he ignored that. He wasn’t over Jared yet. He hadn’t had time to deal with their breakup properly, but he wasn’t going to be able to work through that before talking to Jared. It was just the way that Jensen’s life had always been though, and he knew how to deal with it.

He could hide his own hurt and feelings away for a while. Maybe by talking to Jared, he’d be able to make a difference. Maybe it wasn’t going to be the difference in human-seraph relations that he had hoped to make when he’d first started in on his quest to get into the academies, but it could be a start.

Having made up his mind, Jensen took a fortifying breath and released it before heading towards the door.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared huddled into himself for warmth as the wind buffeted against him. He had thought it was cold without his feathers when he sat in his lonely nest, but he had been very mistaken. The chill of his apartment had nothing on nature and the outdoors. He was used to the wind being a friend or a challenge to his flying skills. He loved it when the warm summer rains came and he could glide through their unpredictable patterns, letting the rain pelt at his exposed skin.

His mother had been forever afraid that he would get caught out in a thunderstorm and be struck dead by lightning, but he’d always been careful to avoid those. His body knew when the storm was about to take a turn for the worse, and he knew when to go to ground.

But without his feathers, his wings felt frozen as the wind and water made his coat cling to their nakedness. He had expected them to feel like his arms or his legs, but he should have known better. They’d always been covered in feathers, and they were much more sensitive to everything without their defensive barriers. Even when unsightly patches had appeared because of his plucking, the surrounding feathers had offered protection.

Not now though. Now they felt all the more exposed and hideous even with their fabric covering. In his reflection in the Laundromat window, Jared looked almost human. If he was still in possession of his feathers, they’d be poking out underneath the hem of his covering garment, but without them there, he wasn’t immediately identifiable as a seraph. His wings didn’t even take up as much room in the coat as they normally would have. Their bulk was nonexistent without the warm layer of down and flight feathers.

His reflection had mocked him as he watched Jensen fight with Chad. His reflection was human. His reflection would know what to say to his mate to make things better. His reflection would still be desirable to his mate, not some winged freak that wasn’t able to give Jensen whatever it was that he was wanting.

Eventually Jared had made himself quit looking at his own image in the window, and he’d been grateful because while he could still hear the voices inside, he had no desire to see Jensen’s lips form the words that denied their partnership, denied their status as mates.

The words hurt Jared terribly, and he fought the urge to hunch down on himself and cry. There were still people on the street hurrying to get to shelter as the rain turned from a light sprinkle into a downpour, and he did not want to attract their attention away from their goals by doing anything unusual.

Chad and Jensen continued to bicker for a while, and Jared knew the instant that Jensen’s eyes fell upon him. He could feel his mate’s gaze rake over his body, and it left him feeling exposed and raw. It was as unnatural a feeling as being away from Jensen was, and Jared not for the first time wondered if there was something wrong with him that his relationship with his mate was so abnormal.

The uncomfortable feeling of Jensen’s gaze went away after a moment, and all that Jared had left was the cold discomfort of the increasingly colder needles of rain driving against him. The temptation of seeking shelter in one of the other nearby buildings was tempting, but Chad had been insistent on the idea of Jared staying outside the Laundromat in full view of the windows.

The human had been flabbergasted at first when Jared had shown up at the academy offices begging for his help. As Jared explained his situation, Chad had gone from looking at him like he was crazy to looking at him like he was an idiot then to looking at him like he was a sad idiot. To be fair, Jared had felt like a sad idiot, standing there with a crocheted throw over his shoulders to keep his naked wings away from prying eyes. He couldn’t exactly blame Chad for feeling the same way.

Chad had shooed him away with a set of instructions that consisted of precisely two things. The first was that Jared had to go himself a coat because the blanket looked, “Fucking ridiculous, man.” The second was that he’d call Jared the first day that it looked like a storm was going to happen, and that Jared had, “Damn well better answer,” because Chad wasn’t looking to get in the, “Dr. Phil business.”

Without any further explanation, Jared had been ushered away from Chad’s cubicle. He had thought about calling Jensen again, thought about going to see his mate himself, but he’d been too afraid to do it. Now he almost wished he had. To be rejected to his face was one thing. It was impossibly hurtful, but Jared could keep that pain to himself. But now Jared’s own plans had backfired on him. Jensen had rejected their mating to a fellow human, and it tore at Jared’s insides.

Despite wanting nothing more than to go back to his nest and curl up under the warm blankets that he had purchased for their bed, Jared stayed outside in the rain. Chad had made Jared promise to stay by the windows. No matter what he overheard, he was to stay there until either Jensen came to get him or Chad did.

Jared couldn’t imagine a situation where Jensen would come to fetch him now, not after another angry rejection, but he stood there anyway. He didn’t have much choice. Chad had driven them over to the Laundromat, and Jared wouldn’t have risked flying in the current weather even if his wings were in perfect condition. He could hire a cab, but he doubted that any of them would want his now soaking wet body in the back of their vehicles, and he didn’t want to waste the rest of his nesting money on it anyway.

If it was to help Jensen, that would be one thing. He wouldn’t have any problems asking his parents for a little more cash for that. It would be expected of him. While human parents paid for lavish weddings and graduation parties for their children, good seraph parents would aide their children in funding their nesting.

Now that Jared thought about it, the similarity to humans was sort of startling. Graduations were seen as a step towards a successful career for a human child, and marriages were seen as a bonding between two individuals who would supposedly spend the rest of their lives together. For a seraph, nesting was like a hybrid between the two. It was a fact that Jensen would have found fascinating not even a month earlier. He would’ve been excited about it and pestered Jared for all the little details and any other insightful comparisons that Jared could’ve made.

That old Jensen had loved Jared’s people. That Jensen had loved Jared, and the thought of it made Jared’s stomach twist up inside as the feeling of loss made itself known again.

The silence from inside the Laundromat unnerved Jared. He could still hear the swish of the washing machine that Chad had thrown his jacket into, but there was no other sound coming through the thick glass panes. He tugged his coat more tightly around his frame and strained his eyes to watch the gloomy sunset. On the horizon, he could make out some slight smatterings of oranges and pinks whenever the clouds broke, but mostly it was just a dismal grey that got darker as the sun disappeared from view.

Jared figured that there was some sort of poetic symbolism to it, but he didn’t exactly want to dwell on that. He’d really read too many books on romance and not enough on reality. If he’d spent just a bit more time reading about the human psyche, he might not have fucked up his mating. He might be welcome in Jensen’s arms. They might be curled together at the moment, the storm nothing but a howling soundtrack to their canoodling.

The door to the Laundromat creaked open, and Jared hunched his shoulders. He hadn’t heard any footsteps clicking on the cement sidewalk, so it had to be Chad signaling their defeat. Jared tried to take comfort in the idea that he’d at least tried, but it wasn’t truly any comfort at all.

He turned to face Chad and thank him for his help, but when he managed to turn, it was Jensen who filled his vision and said, “Hey, man. You maybe want to come in? It’s kind of icky out here.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared almost tripped over himself in his haste to get to the door. The excitement evident in his actions was typical for the seraph, but the desperation was not. He moved as if he thought any moment Jensen would revoke his invitation, and that fear made him clumsy in his movements.

Jensen couldn’t blame him for it, but he still felt a little insulted. He wasn’t the kind of person that would offer shelter to somebody and then take the offer immediately away. Well, he would, but he would only do it if the person in question was being an ass. Chad, for example, him Jensen would dump out on the street.

Both of the times that he and Jared had fought though, Jensen had done the leaving. Precedence indicated that Jensen was more prone to fleeing a fight than anything else, but he supposed that it was too fine of a point of logic to get worked up over.

Even though he’d only been out in the rain for a short period of time, Jensen’s hair was wet when he followed Jared back through the door. The shoulders of his flannel shirt were dark with dampness, and he could only imagine how soaked Jared was.

It was nasty outside. Any fool could both see and hear that, which was why Jensen could only stare as Chad started walking towards the door, his soaking wet jacket dripping on the floor.

“Well, gotta go. Have to get home before America’s Next Big Sumo comes on. There’s going to be a double elimination tonight,” Chad said in a weirdly chipper voice.

“It’s pouring out there,” Jensen pointed out.

“Yeah? And? My jacket is already soaked through. No point in waiting for it to dry only to get it wet again. You two have a good night,” Chad replied.

“Chad,” Jared said. He sounded confused, and that made Jensen feel a little better. Whatever Chad was attempting to do, Jared obviously wasn’t in on the plan.

That was a good thing, because Jensen was seriously tired of being the subject of people’s secret plans. As far as he was concerned, surprises officially sucked. Heaven help his friends if they ever again tried to throw him a surprise birthday party.

“I know, I know. But you’re going to have to get your own ride home, buddy. I can’t hang around for your little lovebird talk right now,” Chad said dismissively as he bolted out the door.

“Well, obviously he’s a liar too,” Jensen muttered as he stalked around Jared to drop the lid back on the washing machine that Chad had been using. The machine kicked back on with a rattling whir as it swished and swashed without knowing that there was nothing inside of it to clean.

“What?” Jared asked.

“He said he wanted to stay around for the fireworks,” Jensen responded with a disgusted sigh.

Jared’s face fell. “Oh, well, if it’s all the same to you… I kind of overheard most of that already, so if you’re just going to tell me what you told him, I’d like to skip that.”

Jensen rubbed his forehead and looked up at the ceiling. “No. That wasn’t what I was planning on talking to you about.”

“But you were planning on talking to me? Not just, you know, letting me in from the rain?” Jared sounded hopeful.

“Yeah, I was. Why don’t you take off your coat and sit down? I can go get the override key if you want to dry it while we talk,” Jensen suggested as he started to move towards the small alcove where all of the administrative junk was kept.

Jared tugged his coat closer to himself and looked distinctly uneasy. “I’ll just keep it on if it’s all the same to you,” Jared mumbled.

Jensen arched and eyebrow and stopped in mid stride. “Jared, you’re soaking, and you look fucking ridiculous with that on.”

Jared’s chin jutted out and an incredibly mulish expression stole over his features. “I’m good,” he said tersely.

It was ridiculous. They were so headed into another fight, and Jensen wasn’t about to get into it with the seraph over a wet coat. He wasn’t the guy’s mother.

“Fine. Get wet and catch a cold, see if I care,” he muttered as he walked back to the main washing area.

“You know that getting wet doesn’t actually give you a cold, right? Hypothermia maybe, but colds are caused by viruses and bacteria,” Jared told him.

“Yes, Jared, I know that. I have a degree in a health field, remember?” Jensen said back, not bothering to keep the bite from his voice.

Jared shrugged like he didn’t care and went to go take a seat. He perched on the edge of one of the chairs, not leaning back, and Jensen wondered if Jared had managed to injure one of his wings.

While Jared had always been fond of stools and other backless chairs as most of his people were, he’d never outright kept his wings away from the backs of seating that had that sort of support. That he was avoiding it now combined with his reluctance to take off his jacket was a sure sign that something was wrong with his wings.

The stress of the situation could have pushed him back into over plucking. It was a sadly likely scenario, and it bolstered Jensen’s resolve to communicate some wisdom to his ex.

“Look, Jared,” he started off.

Jared’s eyes focused instantly on his face, and his body went almost perfectly still. It was a little unnerving, but Jensen obviously had his attention, and that was what mattered.

“I think that maybe I should explain a couple of things to you. See what the academy does, it isn’t… it’s not good, okay?”

Jared nodded slowly in response to the question, but Jensen could practically see the wheels turning in Jared’s head trying to figure out the meaning of Jensen’s words.

“I know you think,” Jensen continued, “that they’re helping your people out. But they’re being dishonest about it. They’re selling a lie.”

“But they aren’t doing any harm,” Jared said. “Nobody is getting forced into anything, and…”

“And do you think that it is going to stay that way forever? How do you think that the general populace is going to react the day that it finds out what’s going on there? For God’s sake, Chad knows. Eventually somebody with enough clout and enough persuasion is going to get the dirt on the academies, and then what’s going to happen?” Jensen argued.

“But, I mean, it’s been this way for years, right? And those who don’t mate have a good education. Those who do still have a good education, and they’ve found their one. I don’t… that’s a good thing.” Jared replied.

Jensen took a deep breath and exhaled. “It’s not that what you’re saying is wrong, but it isn’t truthful. If I’d known what the main goal of the academies was, I would never have gone there. And you have to know that it would be the same for other humans. Otherwise why would your people be hiding it?”

Jared shrugged and bit his lip. His eyes were practically swimming in misery, and his shoulders had a decidedly dejected slump to them. “It’s just safer… What if the humans came after us? Or what if, what if our mates wouldn’t come near us because they were afraid of us trying to mate with them? You said that you wouldn’t have come if you’d known. Would you have even talked to me if you had known that I needed a mate and probably needed a human one?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t talked to women who were out husband hunting,” Jensen pointed out.

“But those are husbands. They aren’t mates. There are a lot of humans out in the world, and very few of them are fit to become our mates. The academies attract those who are capable or willing to be with us.”

“And yet it worked for all of those years where your race was hidden. You didn’t have the academies then. Hell, you didn’t even have public knowledge of your existence!”

“And what did it get us? Inbreeding and sadness and…”

“And you’re going down the same path! For God’s sake, Jared, can’t you see that your people are setting themselves up for the same type of failure?”

“No. No, I don’t see that! Why do I have to be the one to see your way when you won’t see mine? You’re human, if you never mated, you would have been fine. We’re not like that!” Jared yelled.

“I know, okay? That’s why I’m trying to tell you why this whole thing upsets me, so you don’t make that same mistake in the future. Maybe the next time you find a mate, you can know what to tell him. I’m not an idiot, Jared. I know that neither you nor I can change how things are today, but maybe you can at least spare the next guy a little turmoil.”

Jared’s face turned ashen, and Jensen felt bad about causing him that kind of distress, but before he could try to rephrase his words into something a little less painful, Jared was speaking.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Jensen’s temper surged at the question, but Jared’s mouth just babbled over Jensen’s outrage.

“Do the doctor’s know? Who have you seen? We can find a specialist or, or a different specialist if you’ve already seen the ones around here. My uncle lives out in California, and he knows a lot of alternative medicine places that might be able to help,” Jared spoke quickly as he rose from his chair and dripped his way across the floor to kneel in front of Jensen. His big hands reached out to grab hold of one of Jensen’s hands. They enveloped it in a hard grip that Jensen thought was supposed to be reassuring, but all that it conveyed was that Jared’s hands were freaking freezing.

“What are you even talking about?” Jensen said as he tried to pull his hand out from between Jared’s.

Jared’s grip tightened then pulled Jensen’s hand closer. “I know that the whole alternative medicine thing seems a little out there, but we need to try. I’m not just going to let you die, Jensen.”

“Die? I’m not dying,” Jensen’s bewilderment was clear as he spoke.

“But… you said that you wanted me to understand for when I moved on to my next mate?” Jared’s voice quirked up in a clear question.

“Exactly, you know, that special someone that’ll make you happy. The after me guy in the sense of post-Jensen not you know, post-Jensen.”

Jared looked nonplussed. “You’re my mate,” he said slowly.

“Jared…”

“How could you even think that I’d… that I could possibly… you’re my mate,” Jared said as if he couldn’t quite wrap his head around any other concept.

“Look,” Jensen started, “I know that this isn’t exactly easy.”

“Fuck easy, Jensen!” Jared exploded to his feet, his grip on Jensen’s hand forcing him to follow. “Do you think that I lied when I asked you to nest with me? Did you think that my mating feathers were for another and that I just figured I’d snare you as one last bachelor fling?”

Jensen yanked his hand out of Jared’s tight grip. He glared up at the taller man, and with Jared’s face tilted downwards, they were practically nose to nose. “You’re not making this any easy.”

“‘Easy,’” Jared’s voice was full of loathing, “What is it with you and that word? My mate is trying to, to… I don’t even know what you’re trying to do. Proposing insanity is what you’re doing. We nested! You and me, together. You don’t take that shit back!”

“I’m not trying to take it back,” Jensen said evenly, trying to calm Jared down. “I’m just pointing out that we shouldn’t go down that road any farther.”

Jared’s eye welled up with tears.

“Jared, come on,” Jensen said softly. “You knew how I felt about all of this.”

“Fuck you,” Jared cried. “Fuck you and your stupid, fickle human heart. You can just run off and, and find somebody else, but where does that leave me, huh?”

“You think that I’m having fun over here making the hard decisions? We’re not going to work out, Jared. I’m just calling it before we get too invested. My heart isn’t fucking fickle, and it’s breaking probably about as bad as yours is, but I…”

“Stop!” Jared bellowed. “Just stop, Jensen. Listen to yourself. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to us? You can’t want to hurt us like this.”

“Of course I don’t, aren’t you listening?” Jensen said, willing his own tears away from his eyes. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. This was supposed to be about helping Jared move on.

“I’ll start listening when you start making sense. You’re my mate, my one. I couldn’t move on if I wanted to, don’t you understand that?” Jared asked.

“I…”

A look of comprehension tugged across Jared’s features, and he stepped backwards. “You don’t, do you? You have no idea.”

“Know what?” Jensen said tiredly.

“Jensen, seraphs mate for life.”

“No,” the denial sprang instantly to Jensen’s lips, “you’re lying. I know that you’ve slept with other people. You were no virgin.”

“What is it with humans and sex?” Jared said exasperatedly.

“What is it with seraphs and nesting?” Jensen shot back quickly.

“Nesting is different. I’ve had other partners, true. But we only get our mating feathers for our one. We bond with them when we consummate. Didn’t you know that?”

“Obviously not,” Jensen bit out. “Just one more thing that was conveniently forgotten,” he mumbled bitterly.

Jared huffed and frowned at him. “It was heavily implied.”

“By who?”

“By everybody! By the romance books I gave you or maybe the fact that we don’t get divorced,” Jared said with an expressive wave of his hand.

“You deny it! Every one of you that has ever been asked about it has either avoided the question or denied it!” Jensen argued.

“Yeah, well, I guess it’s just us lying seraphs doing our lying thing,” Jared said snidely.

“Oh, that’s great, Jared. Be flippant about it,” Jensen snarled back.

“Then don’t you go pretending to be high and mighty about it. If you weren’t willing, we would never have bonded. And you were the one who went and tried to reject me afterwards,” Jared pointed out.

“Well if I’m your one, then maybe you could’ve been a little more honest with me. Maybe you could’ve opened your mouth and said something. You weren’t exactly being communicative about anything before you just up and kissed me,” Jensen reminded him.

“You knew that I had my mating feathers! You knew that I was nesting.”

“Which told me that you were serious, but it didn’t tell me that you were ready to get settled down and not start making babies.”

Jared seemed to shrink at Jensen’s words, and a timid, “Would you not have accepted if you’d known?” came out of his mouth.

And the truth of the matter was that Jensen couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have. He could still remember the jealousy that had roiled through his veins at the thought of Jared’s mating feathers being for another. It had almost been a living thing, eating him up from the inside out, and Jensen wondered if maybe that nesting thing didn’t have an impact on the ‘mate’ before the actual consummation.

Not that it mattered one way or the other. The deed was already done.

“Does this have anything to do with why I feel absolutely crappy?” Jensen asked as he sank back down onto the nearest chair.

Jared shrugged. “Probably,” he muttered, “but it could be me too.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?” Jensen asked.

“Not exactly? I mean, yeah. There’s the mating thing, and the Jensen thing, and then there’s the Jared and Jensen thing which kind of differs from the mating thing.”

“How?”

Jared shifted uncomfortably for a moment before meeting Jensen’s gaze. “In a normal mated couple, we bond together, right? After a long period of nesting sometime we’re so attuned to each other that we can almost feel what each other is feeling. It’s not that different from how closely bonded humans can get, but in a shorter time frame.”

“Much shorter,” Jensen interjected. “But that isn’t what you’re talking about, and you don’t seem to think that I’m just sitting over here wallowing in my own, self-inflicted heartache.”

Jared shook his head then moved to sit down in the chair next to Jensen. “Some of us, when we mate, develop certain additional abilities.”

Jensen felt like burying his face in his hands, so he did. He didn’t bother taking them away when he said, “Tell me you did not just confirm an urban legend.”

“Well, I mean, you did call me a freak,” Jared pointed out.

“Not the same. Not the same at all. So are you going to start Jean Grey’ing it and lifting crap with your mind or what?” Jensen asked.

“I don’t know yet. They take a while to come in. Lots of, uh, additional mating is required first. Something to do with endorphins and chemical reactions, but the biggest early indicator of powers is a strong emotional bond.”

“So basically, you screw me senseless and get superpowers in return,” Jensen recapped for him.

“No! Yes! I don’t, do you have to make it sound tawdry?” Jared complained.

“I’m mystically tied down to a giant angel who is going to start shooting laser beams out of his ass. There was so not a warning for that.”

“Well there aren’t warnings for a lot of things in life, and you wouldn’t have paid attention to them anyway,” Jared replied.

“I would’ve paid attention to that,” Jensen argued.

“You don’t know that. You’re pig headed and stubborn and would’ve done what you damn well pleased, just like you’re doing right now. And I still would’ve loved you for it, because I still love you even though you’re hell bent on proving that you were tricked into being with me.”

“Jared, I don’t believe in being fated and finding the ‘one’ and all of that.”

“But that’s just the thing. I’m not asking you to believe in the same things I do. I’m only asking you to believe in me,” Jared told him gently.

“That’s really all you want?” Jensen asked.

“That’s really all I want,” Jared confirmed.

Jensen blew a breath out and looked at the ceiling. It wasn’t that what Jared was asking was impossible. If what Jared said was true, it was actually more of a necessity. The problem was that Jensen had spent his whole life believing in one thing and found out that it was something completely different.

His dreams were somebody else’s afterthought, a byproduct of their main goal that they didn’t truly care about, and he had to deal with that. But even though Jared had contributed to Jensen’s distress, he wasn’t the originator of it. The question was whether or not Jensen had enough faith left in him to believe in Jared.

Sure he could stay with Jared out of obligation and convenience. He wasn’t a mean person, and forcing Jared to live in misery sounded like sort of a douche thing to do. And the matter of his own feelings and state of mind couldn’t be discounted, but was that really a reason to stay when you couldn’t find it in yourself to put any trust in your partner?

“You’re thinking pretty hard over there,” Jared teased, but his eyes held tension in them that could never be attributed to something like lightheartedness.

“Yes,” Jensen blurted out.

“‘Yes,’ you’re thinking pretty hard?”

“No,” Jensen said back, his tone clearly implying that Jared was a moron.

“Then…”

“Yes, Jared. Okay? Just yes,” Jensen said wearily as he rubbed his face with his hands.

There was a moment of silence where the only noise was the sound of rain pelting against the windows of the store before Jared said, “Just so you know, I’m over here wanting to do a happy chair dance, but you’re all mopey, and it’s dragging me down.”

A tired laugh came out of Jensen’s mouth, but he turned to look at Jared. “Sorry it’s just a lot, you know?”

Jared nodded in an overly enthusiastic way, a grin breaking out on his face the second that Jensen’s eyes were on him. It was odd to see just how quickly Jared’s mood improved. If Jensen had been on the other end of their argument, he’d still be harboring some negative emotions and feeling wiped out.

He started to wonder if that was a seraph thing or just a Jared thing before he coldly shut that impulse down. It didn’t matter what was and wasn’t nature or nurture. Jared wasn’t going to morph into a human before Jensen’s eyes, and Jensen wasn’t ready to even start thinking about seraphs in general yet, let alone in any quantitative, scientific way.

“So now that we’re all…”

“Made up? Back together again?” Jared interjected.

“Yeah. That,” Jensen agreed blandly as he tried not to goggle at Jared’s energy. “I was thinking that you might want to get out of that coat? Because seeing you in it is making me uncomfortable just out of sympathy.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared felt his good mood evaporate almost instantly, and he could see the confusion on Jensen’s face when the human realized the same thing. It wasn’t that Jared didn’t have a good poker face when he needed one; it was just that he had forgotten all about his wings for a little while.

Fighting with Jensen had been terrible and draining, but Chad had been insistent on the fact that Jared would have to fight for what he wanted as much as possible. Apparently Jensen, or maybe just human men in general, Jared still wasn’t clear on that point, was a stubborn asshole who needed sense beat into him.

Chad had said something about this wisdom coming from several human women of his acquaintance, and as he told Jared about the whole fighting plan on the way to the Laundromat, Jared hadn’t had time to actively weigh any options that didn’t involve following Chad’s somewhat confounding plan.

But it seemed to have worked out well enough. Jensen didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t pushing Jared away any longer. Inside of him in that spot where their mating had taken root, Jared could feel the hurt easing as Jensen accepted them again.

Not that he was going to make the mistake of telling his mate that until they were much, much more thoroughly nested. Jensen’s skepticism was best kept far away from their continued bonding. He’d told Jensen about nesting, and had held his tongue while Jensen doubted it. He’d learned that keeping information from Jensen was bad, but he’d also learned that too much information too soon could be just as much of a detriment.

It hadn’t been easy fighting against the instinct of defending what he knew to be true, but Chad had also told him that nobody liked to be told they were wrong all the time or having all of their perceptions challenged. To have his own mate question the facts of their mating was hard, but as Chad had pointed out, living without Jensen was going to be harder, so what would he rather do? The answer was obvious, and Jared’s efforts had paid off.

Jared could still barely believe his luck at getting Jensen to relent. Not that he wasn’t ecstatic about it because he was, but he hadn’t expected Jensen to actually give in to the point that he had. Sure it would be nice if Jensen was a little happier about it, but Jared would take what he could get. They’d barely nested at all before they’d had their first fight followed quickly by their first major fight. He couldn’t expect that Jensen was just going to bounce straight back to happy.

At least, according to Chad he couldn’t expect that. It was apparently some sort of human thing. It took them time to get over things that upset them, and Jared couldn’t go expecting Jensen to do otherwise. That sucked, but Jared had to admit that he didn’t know everything about humans any more than Jensen knew everything about seraphs.

But now Jensen was asking him to take his jacket off, and Jared knew full well that a good portion of his appeal was in his physical attractiveness. He didn’t think that Jensen was shallow. If anything, Jensen’s habit of thinking deeply and taking things too much to heart was what had caused the human to breakup with Jared in the first place.

Then again, if Jensen hadn’t taken his obsession with seraphs to the level he had, Jared might not have met his mate for years. Or worse, Jared might’ve finally met Jensen once he’d nested with another, and that would’ve been… unpalatable. Overall, Jensen’s dedication and preoccupation had turned out well for Jared.

Still the fact remained that they’d spent maybe one entire day being actual partners. They’d made out and slept together exactly once before everything went downhill, and now Jared was deformed and ugly. He didn’t want Jensen to see him like that. What if the sight of Jared’s wings reminded him that he was inviting something foreign into his bed? What if Jensen thought that Jared looked like a monster?

“I’m good,” Jared finally blurted out when it seemed like Jensen was about to lose patience and ask him about his coat again.

“You’re good?” Jensen sounded skeptical. He should. Jared felt skeptical about it. Actually, Jared felt absolutely rotten about it because the wet material was really starting to chafe against the sensitive skin that was so unnaturally naked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Jared stated again this time with an emphatic nod.

“Right,” Jensen drawled. “You want to tell me what’s wrong with your wings?”

Jared flushed and shrank away from Jensen. He felt ashamed of his wings. Now that Jensen wasn’t resisting him any longer it was almost like his wings had been faithless bastards. It was a ridiculous notion, but Jared couldn’t help it. They were ugly and creepy, and his beautiful mating feathers were long gone.

He was hideous and clumsy without them. His body was off balance without the extra weight of his feathers, and his muscles were constantly overcompensating for a ballast that was no longer there, causing him to trip and stumble when he walked.

“You’ve been plucking pretty bad?” Jensen guessed when Jared didn’t answer him.

“No,” Jared mumbled to the floor.

“Come on, let me see,” Jensen coaxed.

“No,” Jared said again as he pulled further away.

“Hey, it’s okay. I’ve been to the classes, right? I can help you out,” Jensen soothed.

“No, I… not here,” Jared mumbled. The likelihood of Jensen giving up was nonexistent, but there were security cameras in the Laundromat proper. He didn’t want his shame displayed for anybody else to see. Fighting with Jensen was one thing, but his wings in their pitiful state were not going to be witnessed by outsiders. He wanted no proof of his almost ruined nesting.

Jensen seemed to understand what he was saying as his eyes tracked over to where one of the cameras was mounted. “I’ll make you a deal. You keep an ear out for customers, and I’ll take you upstairs to my place, and you can change into some of my stuff up there.”

“You could just stay down here if you give me the key,” Jared suggested.

That earned him a reproving look from his mate. “I had gotten the impression that you didn’t exactly have a ride home tonight once Chad bailed on you.”

Jared shook his head because, well, Chad bailing hadn’t been part of the plan, and he really didn’t have a idea of how the night was supposed to go outside of Chad’s plan.

“So I’m guessing that you’re going to be staying with me tonight,” Jensen continued.

That thought perked Jared up a bit more. It wouldn’t be their nest, but staying with Jensen would probably translate into sleeping with Jensen. Sleeping with Jensen might just translate into sex with Jensen if he played his cards right, and sex would help them bond. Plus, it would feel good and…

“And if you’re staying with me, I’m going to see them anyway,” Jensen concluded.

Jared frowned. That wasn’t technically true. If he found a shirt to cover his wings, he could easily sleep with Jensen without exposing himself. But it would definitely mean that there would be no sex on the agenda. Jensen would try to touch Jared’s wings if they did that, and there was no way that he would miss the fact that there were no feathers there.

Of course he’d also be disgusted by the ugly lumps of flesh, so instigating any sort of sex was a bad idea. Jared should never have considered it in the first place.

But castigating himself about getting his hopes up about sex wasn’t going to help him out with the wing situation. Jared didn’t know how long it was going to take his body to get over the shock of nesting rejection, but even if it snapped back instantly, his feathers weren’t going to grow back in as fast as they’d fallen out.

He doubted that he could avoid Jensen for as long as it would take, so he might as well get it over with as soon as possible.

“I suppose we should go up then,” Jared mumbled as he stood up and started moving towards the back of the store.

“Jay, wrong way,” Jensen said gently as he grabbed hold of the sleeve of Jared’s coat.

Jared flushed and followed after his mate. The door that lead up to the apartment was actually hidden behind the small counter that Jensen was supposed to occupy when there was a customer in the store. It seemed to Jared like a strange place to have an upstairs entrance, but when they reached the top of the stairs, Jensen led them down a small hallway and unlocked yet another door.

The efficiency apartment inside was tiny and reeked of Downy fabric softener.

“It’s right over the main bank of dryers,” Jensen explained as Jared’s nose wrinkled at the smell.

Jared bit back the question of why exactly Jensen had ever wanted to go back to this crappy place when he could’ve been nesting with Jared. Chad had told him that it was a human independence thing. He could learn to accept it and wait it out, especially if he ever wanted to get laid again.

As Jensen began to rummage around in the small built in closet that the room boasted, Jared played with the cuffs of his coat. He bit his lip. He inhaled and exhaled and ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to draw out the time leading up to the inevitable.

“Hah! So the inseam on the pants might be a little short, but the sweatshirt is gigantic. It was mislabeled, and it’s huge on me. Comes down to my freaking knees so it ought to… Jared, seriously, you need to take that off,” Jensen scolded him as he turned around to see Jared’s still clothed form.

“I don’t want to,” Jared admitted with a voice that he would’ve sworn was too tiny to be his own. He sounded like a scared cherub, and he’d long since grown out of his childhood.

Jensen looked knowingly at him, but it wasn’t harsh. “Hey, come on, I’ve worked in a hospital. I’ve seen worse.”

It was meant to be consoling, Jared knew that, but it really didn’t make him feel any better.

Telling himself to just get over it already, Jared whipped off the coat and let it drop to the floor. It made a sick flopping noise as the wet material plopped onto the carpet, but he didn’t really pay much attention to the sound. His ears were too busy burning in shame. All of the blood rushing to them muffled the other noises in the room with the dull thud of his own heartbeat.

Jensen walked around him, and despite his blood’s best efforts, Jared could still hear Jensen’s shocked gasp when he saw the state of Jared’s wings. His mate didn’t say anything, but his fingertips grazed ever so gently against the naked skin.

“Don’t touch them!” Jared shouted as he pulled away from the touch, his gut roiling in misery.

Jensen didn’t follow, and when Jared worked up the courage to look at him, he was holding his hands up in the air placatingly like Jared was holding a gun on him. The sweatshirt that he’d been offering Jared was dangling from his hand, and his face was carefully schooled into a look of calm serenity.

Jared hated that look. It told him nothing.

“What happened?” Jensen asked softly.

“What do you think happened? You left me,” Jared told him. It should’ve sounded confrontational, something that Jared knew he should avoid doing so close to their reconciliation. But instead his voice cracked, and he just sounded hysterical.

Jensen’s calm evaporated and worry took its place. “Jared, you didn’t pluck those all out, did you?”

Jared shook his head.

“Then...”

“They just fell out, okay? You left, and I couldn’t, I didn’t have enough faith, or I was too weak, and they fell out. All my mating feathers are gone, and, and,” Jared’s breath hitched, and Jensen walked up to him and placed his free hand on Jared’s shoulder.

“Did you see a doctor?”

“What?” Jared sniffed.

“Did you see a doctor? Are you sure this is just a breakup thing?” Jensen asked him earnestly.

“I,” Jared took a breath as he focused in on Jensen’s question. He couldn’t explain to a man of science and physiology that he just knew why his body was doing what it did. Sure a lot of it was based on his experiences with plucking, but inside he knew what it was.

“I know the cause,” Jared settled on saying, his head hanging down as his humiliation grew deeper.

Jensen’s mouth turned down in a frown. It was clear that he didn’t like the answer that Jared gave. His eyes scanned back and forth over Jared’s face, and eventually he leaned up on his toes to press a gentle kiss to Jared’s forehead.

“Okay,” he said, “we’ll talk about it later. Right now we should get you into something warm.”

Jared could agree with that thought, especially as it would hide his ugly wings from sight. He shucked out of his undershirt and practically yanked the sweatshirt out of Jensen’s hands in his haste to cover himself. His pants followed at a more sedate pace, and it was almost funny how Jensen demurely averted his eyes as Jared changed his lower half.

Once done, Jared shoved his feet into the pair of slippers that Jensen offered as Jensen took his wet sneakers over to a corner to let them air dry.

Jared half expected Jensen to leave him to his own devices up in the apartment while he finished his very boring shift down in the Laundromat, so he was surprised when Jensen tugged on his sleeve.

“Come on, gotta get these in the dryer,” he said as he held up Jared’s wet clothes.

“I’m not exactly fit to be seen,” Jared said as he gestured at the too short pants and the questionable footwear.

“Nobody down there but us, and you know it. Besides, people always procrastinate on doing their laundry. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve seen them wear in here,” Jensen told him.

“I don’t know,” Jared hedged. The overcoat had been one thing, but even the generous cut of the shirt wasn’t enough to hide the bulky shape of his wings.

Jensen gave him an encouraging smile. “I’ll be lonely down there,” he cajoled.

It wasn’t a fair thing to say because Jared would never allow his mate to be lonely, and he had a niggling suspicion that Jensen knew that. He managed to glare halfheartedly at Jensen, but followed him.

After all, he didn’t care for being lonely either.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared’s reluctance to touch was an odd concept for Jensen to wrap his mind around. Even when Jared had been hiding the truth from him or being less than obvious about his intention to drag Jensen off to his nest to have his way with him, Jared had always encouraged physical closeness.

Then again, he hadn’t exactly been discouraging touch in general so much as he’d been tweaking out whenever Jensen got close to or tried to mention the state of his wings.

Once they’d gotten back downstairs, Jared had become Jensen’s shadow. He’d stayed as close as possible and every time that Jensen sat down, Jared would sit right next to him, leaning into his warmth, so it wasn’t that Jared was avoiding contact entirely. It was just that Jared’s muscles tensed any time that either of Jensen’s hands moved in his direction.

And, yeah, Jensen got why. In truth, he would have expected more adverse reactions were they in a normal situation. He’d had a few serious girlfriends before, and when he fought with them, there was never immediate forgiveness. There was always that period of leeriness that followed a reconciliation. But Jared didn’t seem to be displaying distrust in Jensen so much as he was self-conscious about his appearance.

That was also an odd concept for Jensen to grasp. Jared’s outgoing nature just didn’t jive with low confidence levels. People could learn to project confidence when they in actuality had low self-esteem, but Jensen had spent enough time around Jared to doubt that the seraph had developed that particular skill set.

Unlike Jensen and his myriad of confidence problems, Jared was fairly self-assured. There was no reason for him to have learned tips and tricks to overcome shyness or other issues.

Jared was for all intents and purposes a well adjusted college boy still out there discovering himself. Sure he was on the older side of that age group, but Jensen couldn’t point any fingers. He was the one who dropped an internship for one last stab at his dreams. Jared at least had some sort of biological excuse for his lack of direction and purpose in life.

Not that Jensen had ever lacked direction until recently, but that was an issue that he’d have to tackle at a later date. He figured that it would have to be much later because he had managed to basically get himself married to a slightly insecure college boy, and neither of them had a good paying job at the moment. Jared was going to have to go back to school come the fall. Jensen doubted that they were going to be able to be apart for long stretches of time which meant that he was going to have to find a job near Jared’s school

Another internship would be ideal, but internships didn’t pay well even if they were the best choice for his future. Jensen didn’t want to ask Jared to take out more in student loans than he absolutely had to, but they were going to need food and off campus shelter. Jensen’s loans were going to come off their grace period again, and he wasn’t going to be able to support both of them.

Worse than that, he was going to have to tell his friends and family about Jared, and that was going to be a treat and a half. He couldn’t think of a one of them that was going to treat his relationship with Jared with anything other than skepticism.

Oh, they’d be nice to Jared. It was Jensen that they’d rake over the coals. He could practically hear the accusations of him leading poor, young Jared astray. He could envision the looks of pity aimed at Jared’s back while Jensen received disapproving glares that suggested that he was fucking the innocent little angel out of his desperation to be close to the object of his lifelong obsession.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Jared’s voice cut over the sound of the television that Jensen had turned on.

They had lapsed into silence as soon as they had left Jensen’s small apartment. After a while the drone of the dryer and the splatter of rain on the windows had gotten boring to listen to, so bad television had been the option that Jensen had chosen. At the time, it had seemed safer than a discussion.

“I’m just thinking about you,” Jensen answered truthfully.

Jared’s face got an absolutely adoring look, and Jensen kicked himself for inadvertently saying something that could be construed as romantic. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to say nice things to Jared, but there was no graceful way to admit that he’d been worrying. It would be a major let down.

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” Jared whispered, his big hand slowly inching closer to Jensen’s.

“Really?” Jensen forced himself to ask evenly.

“Yeah,” Jared replied as his fingers curled around Jensen’s, forcing their palms together.

They were holding hands in a Laundromat watching bad television. The thought made Jensen feel spectacularly old. He’d seen some of the elderly couples come in at night when they found out that their washer or dryer was broken. Little, shriveled old ladies who still did their husband’s laundry would shuffle in and dutifully wash and fold flannel shirts while the husband sat around looking bored. A few of them would hold hands when the machines were busy working. When they were done, the husbands would help the old ladies carry the laundry back out to the car that the husband would invariably drive away.

It was a stereotypical sort of event to witness, and Jensen had to fight back the urge to tell the old guy to learn to wash his own damn shorts each and every time. But then he’d wonder if maybe that was just something that didn’t matter to them. If maybe they’d gotten to the point in their relationships where they didn’t try to fight the status quo anymore because it didn’t make a real difference one way or the other. He’d ponder if he had the right to judge what was important in their lives if they looked happy enough about it.

And sure, some of those old guys were probably asses to their wives. Or maybe some of those old ladies were secretly the ones who abused their husbands. Jensen couldn’t know any more than he could foresee what people were going to think about him and Jared.

Jensen’s loved ones would eventually come around. If Jensen was Jared’s ‘One,’ then Jared wasn’t going to be going anywhere. Eventually those close to him would have to accept that. But Jensen couldn’t predict what potential employers or acquaintances would think. There were anti-seraph bigots and gay bigots and people who were just plain going to dislike them just because.

There were going to be times that he and Jared would fight, and given how great their relationship had been so far, there was a chance that their fights were going to be epic in nature. Those around them were probably not going to understand why they weren’t splitting up.

Or they wouldn’t unless seraphs as a whole started coming clean about some of those facts that they kept hiding, but Jensen wasn’t holding out hope for that. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to hold out hope for that at the moment. It wouldn’t mitigate the worries that his family would have. If anything, they’d fret that he’d been brainwashed or tricked into being with Jared.

They would react in exactly the same fashion as Jensen had, and while he still believed that the academy system deserved his ire, he didn’t want that sort of negative feeling focused on Jared. Maybe some point in the future their relationship would be strong enough and established enough to weather that sort of stress and scrutiny, but Jensen wasn’t enough of a fool to think it anywhere close to that stage currently.

There were, after all, different levels of forever. If they were stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, he’d much prefer to build something more stable and endearing. Antagonism and sadness was just a bad idea in the long run.

“So what’re you thinking about me?” Jared asked.

“Wondering if you have any plans for the future. Ones that aren’t a variation of, ‘nest with Jensen,’” Jensen clarified.

Jared blushed a little, and Jensen mentally patted himself on the back for guessing what the other man had been thinking.

“I was thinking maybe, that is, you’re going to be working in a hospital, right?” Jared mumbled as he pulled his hand away and began to fiddle at the hem of the sweatshirt that Jensen had loaned him.

“Or a clinic or something similar,” Jensen added. “Why?”

“I was thinking that I could go into something that would maybe mesh with that? Like a, a counselor maybe? I’m not inclined to go into a medical field, but I was just thinking that maybe nesting isn’t always easy for everybody. Maybe more of my people have problems with their mates than they realize, or they’re like me with my plucking. And my people, they get over that pretty quickly, you know? But you, you’re not over it yet. I can see you worrying over there, and I don’t understand it,” Jared paused to tap at his head.

“I get the general concept, and I can feel how it bothers you. But I don’t know how to give you what you need,” Jared finished with a slight shrug of his shoulders.

Jensen stayed silent for a moment as he tried to absorb what Jared was saying. He wanted to balk at Jared’s easy dismissal of the state of his wings as some sort of mate related thing, but the truth was that he didn’t truly know better. Once upon a time he might have argued with Jared about it. He would’ve pointed to the lack of documentation about the phenomenon in the medical journals that he’d read about seraph physiology, but that was before he’d found out that the seraphs had had some very meticulously guarded secrets.

“So you want to go into psychology?” Jensen asked.

Jared nodded his head like he thought that Jensen was going to object to the notion.

“Are you sure that’s what you really want? Or are you just doing it because you think it’s something I’d approve of? Because I want you to do what you want to do. I don’t need you to follow a path you don’t want to just because you’re scared that I won’t approve or something,” Jensen told him.

Jared looked at him like he was a complete moron. “Jensen, I don’t even… You realize that I can’t actually separate out those impulses, right? We’re sort of rudderless until we meet our mates. Once we do, our compulsion is to take a complimentary path to theirs, so in a sense this choice can’t be anything other than influenced by who you are. But I could just as easily choose to become a teacher so that I have summers off to take care of things around the nest to ease your burden or I could choose to become a physical trainer so that we have a shared interest in sports medicine. I just think that this might be the best choice.”

“I just don’t want you making a hasty decision,” Jensen said.

“And I’m telling you that I’ve spent years of my life waiting to make a hasty decision. It’s what we do. We mate, and we settle into our path,” Jared responded.

The desire to argue that roiled around in Jensen. That just wasn’t normal. Falling in love was supposed to be a life changing experience, but it wasn’t supposed to magically endow you with a sense of purpose in that life.

Then again, his own mother would argue with Jensen’s view on love. She would tell him that if he wasn’t changed by falling in love and committing then he wasn’t with the right person. She’d tell him that he should want to change in order to make both of their lives better. What Jared was saying was extreme to Jensen’s sensibilities, but it wasn’t completely unheard of even in human circles. It was just drastic in its timing.

And if Jared wanted to pick his entire career path based on Jensen’s because it was something that seraphs were compelled to do, then Jensen could learn to shut off his cynicism for a little bit and support him. Disagreeing with Jared over his decision would theoretically be as bad as influencing it in the first place. It wasn’t a bad career path to choose, and Jensen had no real objection to it other than the seemingly arbitrary nature of it.

“Okay, so a counselor,” Jensen said forcing as much support into his words as possible, “It’s a good choice.”

“You think so? I know that we might not end up at the same hospital and all, but I could help people mend psychologically, and you could do it physically. Both of us getting people back on their feet, so to speak,” Jared gushed with enthusiasm.

The same hospital? Jensen wondered if Jared had ever been introduced to the concept of absence making the heart grow fonder. Given the state of Jared’s wings, Jensen was going to go with a ‘no’ on that one.

Then again, it wasn’t like he was going to face that hurdle right away, and there was a good chance that by the time that Jared was finished with his degree he’d have his daily Jensen quota filled and realize how awesome it was to not share lunch with his significant other every day.

Jensen summoned an encouraging smile. While he had his doubts, it was nice to see the return of Jared’s spirits. It was almost like he could feel Jared’s good mood inside of him, lifting his own dour mood.

Jared’s hand reached out to rest over Jensen’s breastbone. “You make me happy,” he said earnestly.

A shiver of something ran up Jensen’s spine. It was like an odd mixture of creepy fascination and affection. His eyes cut over to Jared’s face and the amusement there was irritating.

“What?” Jensen snapped.

“You’re adorable; you know that? You’ve got all these feelings inside of you, and the one that you choose to express most often is grumpy. You’re like a tootsie roll. All hard on the outside and soft on the inside,” Jared replied.

So great, apparently he wasn’t imagining the weird sensation in his chest that was telling him how Jared felt. Worse: Jared had the same thing and thought it was normal. Or, worse yet, Jared thought it was a good thing. Neither of them needed to feel each other’s ire when they fought. Jensen knew how hot his temper ran, and how it could eclipse other emotions in the heat of the moment.

“You worry too much,” Jared cut in.

“I have to worry. My mate is out buying stale tootsie rolls and thinking its normal,” Jensen huffed back.

Jared beamed, and Jensen’s insides felt like he had a bazillion firecrackers going off – only not as painful.

“You called me your mate,” Jared whispered as if it was a secret.

Jensen felt his mouth curl up in a tiny smile for no other reason than the way that Jared was looking at him. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared hated Jensen’s oversized sweatshirt. It was nice enough, but it barely smelled like Jensen at all. Not that he expected it to have Jensen’s scent on it. It was hardly something that he could envision Jensen wearing when it was obviously a much larger size than the man needed. In truth, Jared couldn’t really fathom why Jensen had kept the thing.

He could understand why Jensen might have ended up with it, but that was no excuse for not donating it. The shirt was practically brand new too, so it wasn’t like Jensen had held onto it for a work shirt or something.

The mystery of Jensen’s odd packrat behavior aside, the shirt just wasn’t long enough. Jared had to constantly tug the hem down in the back to cover his wings. No matter how tightly he furled them against his back, their scandalously naked tips would peak out from underneath. It was like some upside down version of a plumber’s grin, only his naked wings flashing Jensen wouldn’t be anywhere near as sexy as his ass.

The minutes until closing time seemed to drag, but Jared contented himself with being close to Jensen. They watched bad television together and occasionally grunted about the storm that was going on outside. It wasn’t scintillating, but it was good enough. He had Jensen right next to him and could just about bask in the absence of that constant, nagging pain that their separation had brought him.

If it weren’t for how naked his wings were, it would’ve been a pretty perfect evening. Even though he could still feel Jensen’s worry and doubts, he was already starting to catch bursts of affection and fondness from his mate. And he knew enough about humans to know that not all of Jensen’s worry was bad. In a way it was a good sign that Jensen cared enough about Jared’s future to fret about it.

Eventually though, the clock turned past the point of closing time, and Jensen went around closing up shop. He shut the open sign off and locked the door. He cleaned the floors and wiped down the chairs.

Jared just watched as his mate settled things down for the night. He knew that Jensen could have done most of these things earlier in the night, but he’d sat with Jared instead. Maybe it was because he had wanted to spend some quiet time alone with Jared, or maybe he left the tasks undone to buy himself some extra time before they went back up to his apartment.

Either way, Jared could understand the hesitancy. He wanted to be close to his mate, but he wasn’t exactly looking forward to sharing a bed with him. Jensen’s sleeping place was a queen size at least, but there wasn’t going to be much room for the both of them to fit, and Jared’s wings were going to be unavoidable.

Jensen felt affection towards him. Jensen, despite his hesitancy to say it, loved him.

Neither of those facts meant that Jensen wanted to sleep with him when he looked the way that he did. There was love, and there was lust, and the two didn’t always agree with each other. Unfortunately, Jared was vain enough to want to be wanted. He craved Jensen’s sexual attraction as well as his emotional.

When Jensen was finally done with his chores, they went upstairs to his apartment without saying a word. Even if it weren’t small and didn’t reek of perfumed laundry soaps, Jared would hate the little space. It wasn’t their nest. It wasn’t what he wanted to give Jensen, and it was going to irritate him to no end that Jensen didn’t understand that accepting his mate’s gifts was a good thing.

They were going to fight about it at some point. Just… sometime after Jared’s feathers grew back so that they could have make-up sex. That had to be sufficient time for Jensen to realize that they should just move in together and nest all the time, right? It was ridiculous to live apart, to not be near each other. It wasn’t like Jensen was even going to keep his current job once he got a new internship.

Jared was so busy fuming, his momma would call it pouting, that he didn’t notice that Jensen was stripping down until he was given a good look at his whitey tighties. It was a distracting view.

“What?” Jensen asked when he glanced over his shoulder and caught Jared staring.

“I thought you wore, you know, boxer briefs?” Jared croaked out as he willed his body not to start showing signs of interest.

Jensen arched an eyebrow. “I can’t switch it up now and then? Because I’ll warn you that I’ve also got classic boxers. Sometimes I even dabble in different fabric combinations and colors.”

“Oh,” Jared squeaked.

Jensen, the bastard, smirked at him and crawled into bed. It was only when his fine ass was covered by the covers that Jared was able to start breathing normally again.

He stood there for a moment, feeling about as awkward as he ever had before Jensen sighed, rolled his eyes and patted the empty section of mattress next to him. “Get your ass in bed,” he ordered.

Jared complied as quickly as he could. It was a close fit, but he managed to leave a little space between them as he snuggled down between the sheets. Jensen turned over and hit the lights off. Soon after, his breathing started to even out as he dropped off into sleep, and Jared dearly wished that he could follow, but he couldn’t.

Firstly, he was in bed with his mate. His mate who he had only slept with once and had just gotten an eyeful of was right next to him. It was very distracting.

Secondly, as hot burning as his libido was at the moment, his wings were freezing. It was easier to ignore when he was awake and moving around, but lying in the bed, he could feel the goose bumps rise on his exposed skin. Worse than that was how the rest of his body protested the loss of their warmth. He was used to being able to curl them around himself when temperatures dropped to the chilly side.

Summer was still alive and well outside of Jensen’s apartment, but his pathetic air conditioner seemed intent on proving itself despite its old age and dodgy craftsmanship. The summer blankets on Jensen’s bed weren’t nearly enough to keep Jared warm, and it was making for a rather miserable experience.

“Jared, go to sleep,” Jensen’s gruff voice interrupted Jared’s attempts at freezing to death.

“I’m cold,” Jared whined.

Jensen cracked his eyes open. Even Jared’s better than human eyesight could only make out the whites in the dimly lit room, but he was fairly certain that his mate was glaring at him.

“Then come here and quit with the North Pole act,” Jensen groused as he lifted the blanket a little.

The action looked like it was an invitation, but, “You sure?” Jared asked timidly.

Jensen’s annoyed exhale was loud, but he lifted the section of blanket even higher. “Move,” he commanded.

Jared wriggled over the extra few inches, and the additional proximity to Jensen’s body heat was nice. Not only was it cozy, but the warmth smelled of Jensen. It was nice, and Jared did his best to suppress the next round of shivers, but he was unsuccessful, and his increased proximity to his mate ensured that Jensen felt them.

“Seriously?” Jensen grumped as his eyes opened again.

Jared shrugged and tried a tiny smile even though he knew that Jensen couldn’t see it. “My wings are cold,” he admitted.

“So turn around,” Jensen told him.

“And do what?” Jared asked.

“Get spooned. It’s summer in Texas. I didn’t exactly pull my down comforter out of storage for the move,” Jensen explained.

That sounded kind of good except for the part where Jensen was going to be touching his wings. Jared didn’t care that he still had on the sweatshirt. He could feel where the ends were exposed from when the shirt rode up while he was getting into bed, and even if they weren’t exposed, Jensen was going to feel their bony, un-cushioned shape under the cotton-polyester blend fabric.

Jensen must’ve sensed his hesitation because his next words were, “Quit being vain.”

That was kind of insulting to Jared’s feelings, so he turned over in a huff. In his tired mind, he thought of it as giving Jensen the cold shoulder for being a rude, insensitive human. Then Jensen snuggled up behind him, and his warm chest pressed oh so nicely against Jared’s cold wings.

Jensen’s arm wrapped around Jared’s waist and pulled them even closer together. His breaths puffed against Jared’s neck with regularity, and Jared tried his best to stay miffed at Jensen, but he couldn’t. For the first time in days, his wings felt warm. The constant knot of tension and grief in his stomach was gone, and without his true consent, his body relaxed back against his mate’s.

The action caused Jensen to snuggle up even harder against him, before he too relaxed and started to go back to sleep. The movement made Jared instantly, blindingly hard, and he had to fight against the urge to try to hump something. He doubted his mate would want his sleep interrupted again because Jared was regressing to a teenager.

Jared focused on matching his breaths to his slumbering mate’s, and after a while, his body began to lose its tension as it remembered that it was exhausted from too many nights spent worrying and pining over Jensen. The world started to fade as sleep took him over, and between one moment and the next Jared went off to visit the land of nod.

When he next regained consciousness, it wasn’t because of the bright light of the sun starting to stream in through the windows. Jensen had rather dark drapes that blocked the cheery morning from filtering in, and there was little wonder that he was always half awake for his morning classes if this was how he kept his room.

But Jensen’s morning rituals weren’t what woke Jared any more than the sun. At least, Jared assumed that it wasn’t one of Jensen’s morning rituals, because if it was, he was going to have to hunt down the person that had been on the receiving end of Jensen’s attentions and do horrible things to said person.

Gentle kisses were being pressed against his back. The oversized sweatshirt had been pushed up over his wings, and Jensen was mouthing along the sensitive skin where they joined into his back. Tiny kitten licks interspersed with sucking little bites were driving Jared insane, but when Jensen’s mouth started peppering those pecks actually up onto his wings, Jared pulled away.

“Stop,” he said as blood began to rush to his face. The curtains might not be letting in much light, but there had to be enough for even Jensen’s poor eyesight to behold how ugly of a sight Jared’s back was at the moment.

Jensen followed Jared’s retreat and pushed up against him again. His cock was half hard where it pressed in against Jared’s ass. “You realize that the only person those wings are bother is you, right?” Jensen said as he threw a leg over Jared’s hip, ostensibly to keep him from just getting up and leaving the bed.

“I lost my mating feathers,” Jared mumbled.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Jensen responded gently.

“I… I lost your mating feathers,” Jared clarified.

“Well, I forgive you if that’s what you’re looking for, but I don’t think that it was your choice or fault, so you shouldn’t feel guilty about it either way,” Jensen reasoned with him.

“You don’t understand,” Jared protested.

“Maybe not,” Jensen conceded, “but are you really going to let that keep you from getting laid?”

“You’re sure?”

Jensen rolled his hips and pressed a kiss to the nape of Jared’s neck. “Does that feel like I’m not sure? Because I’m the one coming on to you here, so unless you think I got hooked on drugs in the middle of the night…”

Jared laughed. “Okay, so you’re sure.”

Jensen nipped the back of his neck again before trailing kisses downward to resume his prior task.

Wing grooming had forever been an intimate task between mates. Jared had been raised with the understanding that should he choose a seraph mate it would be his duty to provide this service and be serviced in return. It was an opportunity for renewal of one’s bond, and only in dire circumstances should a mated seraph allow another to touch his or her wings. Even then it was best to have one’s mate nearby or as close as possible via telephone or Skype to prevent any feelings of guilt or abandonment from growing.

He was prepared for preening and grooming to feel good and bond him with his chosen. He wasn’t prepared for Jensen’s delicate assault on his senses as he mouthed over sensitive, unfeathered skin. Disbelief warred with his libido. Jared couldn’t imagine that Jensen actually wanted the ugly, crepe like skin is his mouth, but he was doing it and seemed to disregard Jared’s concerns on the matter.

Jared couldn’t even complain about the results. He could already feel his own hardness sliding out from its protective sheath. His feather hairs had thankfully remained intact during his severe molting, apparently deciding they were more hair than feather, and they tickled at him as his borrowed sweatpants kept his cock from jutting out like it wanted to do.

“Jensen,” he gasped out as he tried to push his mate’s leg off his hip so that he could rid himself of the annoying clothing.

“Wanna get naked with me, Jay?” Jensen purred as he ground his erection against Jared.

“Yeah,” Jared moaned back, not caring that he wasn’t responding the teasing tone with a witty rejoinder of his own.

If Jensen minded, he didn’t mention it. He withdrew his leg, and Jared wasted no time rolling out of the bed to rid himself of both his shirt and pants. When he turned around to get back on the bed, Jensen was already sprawled out on top of the covers. His underwear was sitting in a tiny heap on the floor, and he was trailing teasing fingers over his erection.

Jared couldn’t speak for a moment, but the additional rush of blood southward made his groin ache with want.

He was knocked out of his stupor by a bottle of lube slapping against his chest.

“Get over here and make yourself useful,” Jensen said as he rolled over onto his front and wiggled his bottom provocatively.

Jared obeyed. Settling himself over the backs of Jensen’s thighs, he ran a gentle finger down Jensen’s crevice and was thrilled at the shiver that his mate gave. The tip of said finger caught ever so slightly against the rim of Jensen’s hole, and Jared suppressed a moan at how easily the little opening flared and relaxed for him.

He knew it was simple biochemistry of his own body oils reacting with a compatible human’s, but Jared had always been too fond of romance books for his own good. He liked to view it as his mate accepting him and eagerly encouraging his entrance.

From the sounds that Jensen was making, his fool notions weren’t that far off. Impatience seemed to run in Jensen’s blood though, so Jared didn’t waste time coating his fingers with lube and stretching his mate properly. The last thing he wanted was to get yelled at for not moving fast enough.

“Condom,” he gasped as soon as Jensen was sufficiently stretched, his own excitement making him breathless. When Jensen reached behind to hand the packet to him, Jared leaned forward to press a kiss against Jensen’s back. It was nothing more than a soft caress of lips, but he placed it exactly where Jensen’s wing gap would be were he a seraph. It was sentimental, but Jared figured he was allowed.

Hastily, he tore into the condom and rolled it on, slicking lube over in generously to lessen the chance of hurting his mate with their coupling. Now that he had Jensen back, he had no desire to harm him. He’d learned his lesson well enough about how they could injure each other, and he wanted no part of it.

Someday, hopefully someday soon, they would make love without a barrier between them. Jared would be able to get as close as physically possible to his mate without them truly becoming one.

“Jared, move,” Jensen whined.

Jared rolled his hips with a sigh. He was going to have to teach his mate about the pleasures of slow lovemaking at some point as well, but today wasn’t going to be that day either. He obliged his mate with harder, faster thrusts, and the eager response that Jensen gave was exhilarating. They were both headed towards the finish line when Jared’s push in went a little off.

Instinctively, he flared his wings out to balance himself, but they only thwapped uselessly against the backs of his arms. The combination of no feathers and abnormal weighting caused him to pitch forward and slam his whole body down onto his mate in a not so sexy way.

“Goddamn it, Jared!” Jensen yelled into the pillow his face was currently mashed in.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” Jared babbled as he pulled out and rolled to the side. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

“Your awkward clumsiness is officially no longer endearing,” Jensen told him as he gingerly rolled to his side to face Jared.

“I’m sorry,” Jared said again.

“I get that.”

“It’s just my wings. I’m all unbalanced, and I can’t do anything right anymore,” Jared told him.

Pity crawled onto Jensen’s face, and Jared had to look away.

“Hey,” the word came tenderly out of Jensen’s mouth as his hand reached up to cup Jared’s face and turn it back to him. “It’s going to be fine. They’ll grow back. Until then it’s just like having a cast, right? You’ve lost some mobility, and we’ll have to work around it.”

Jared shrugged. “I guess.”

“Look, if they don’t come back in, I’m dragging you to a clinic. So I obviously don’t think that this is your fault because I’d be yelling at you otherwise,” Jensen reasoned.

“You were just yelling at me,” Jared pointed out.

“Because I didn’t know any better, and my boyfriend just flattened me in the middle of sex,” Jensen argued.

Jared had to concede that point even though it rankled him that his mate was back to calling him his ‘boyfriend’ instead of his mate. “They’re not going to grow back in with you know. My mating feathers won’t come in again for a long while.”

Jensen smiled at him. “I know. That much you tight lipped bastards actually have shared with the rest of the world. Just don’t expect me to help you out with any wing painting. I was so failing that class.”

“Your transcript says otherwise.”

“My transcript is the result of ham-fisted bargaining,” Jensen corrected him.

“You really don’t mind that I won’t, you know…” Jared made a vague hand gesture.

“I’m really hoping that ‘you know’ does not mean that you’re going to cut me off from sex until your feathers grow back,” Jensen commented drily.

“I meant that my colors are going to be drab. They aren’t going to declare our status and what you mean to me,” Jared told him. “And I’m so not getting back up on top of you. I won’t hurt you.”

“I’m not a seraph, Jared. I don’t need you to have fancy feathers, and I’m more than good with you not drawing attention to us. Also? There are a lot of different ways to have sex. I, for instance, have a fully functioning dick of my own. There are also people in the world called cowboys, and there is that fun one where we lay on our sides and spoon fuck.”

Jared’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Dude, don’t say ‘spoon fuck’ that just makes a bad mental image. Like you want me to shove silverware up there or something.”

Jensen snorted and shoved at Jared’s shoulder. “Well get used to it because we’re doing it as soon as I go make coffee, and we both brush our teeth. I aim to have reunion sex today, and you’re not foiling my plans.”

“You’re kind of chipper for it being morning, especially with the way you were feeling last night,” Jared mentioned.

Jensen grabbed his glasses off the nightstand before rolling out of bed. He pulled his underwear back on over his still slightly hard penis before turning around to answer Jared. “You were practically helpless last night, you know? I guess I just… you never seemed fragile before, but here you were a featherless, shivering mess.”

“Thanks,” Jared said sarcastically.

Jensen blushed and shook his head. “I just meant that I was deceived about the academy, and you were part of that. But last night was my choice. I didn’t have to let you stay overnight. I could’ve called you a cab. I could’ve made you sleep on the floor, but I chose to let you stay with me. It was my choice to hold you, and if you’re my choice, then you’re my choice, right?”

“That’s really confusing, Jensen. But that’s okay, because I love you and know that you haven’t had your coffee yet.”

“Oh God, you’re an ass when you don’t get to come,” Jensen complained as he walked over to pick his sweatshirt off the back of the armchair that it had fallen on when Jared tossed it off in his haste to get naked. He pulled it on over his head and padded barefoot into his kitchen.

“I’m the ass that has real coffee back at the nest and lots of lube for frisky lovemaking involving cutlery,” Jared corrected as he followed Jensen into the kitchen.

“Not cutlery, spooning. Don’t you dare tell me that you’ve got a knife fet…” Jensen stopped his sentence as his eyes landed on Jared’s body. “You’re naked in my kitchen.”

“Your kitchen is two steps from your bathroom. You don’t get to judge,” Jared rebutted as he walked around his mate to open the refrigerator door.

“I’m going to need coffee for this,” Jensen muttered.

Jared kept his mouth shut. He had a feeling that Jensen was going to need coffee for their entire relationship.

He was kind of okay with that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Epilogue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So tell me again how you went from calling me in a panic, begging me to get you out of Dodge to begging me to come move you into your little love nest?” Chris asked as he lugged a box of Jensen’s books up the stairs.

The elevator was broken, but Jensen had the feeling that Mr. Nelson was actually playing around with the mechanics of it. Bigoted old bastard that he was, he unfortunately was a repairman with an excellent reputation. If he could fix it, he sure would know how to break it.

“For the last time, it’s just a nest, okay?” Jensen corrected his friend.

“Right. A nest. That you spend all your time fucking your angel winged boyfriend in,” Chris drawled sarcastically.

“You’re hopeless,” Jensen grunted as he pushed the front door open. It squeaked on its hinges as it moved.

“You and your boy need to start taking the stairs sometimes. Or at least oil the damn thing,” Chris told him as he shoved his way past.

“I’ll be sure to mention it to Jared,” Jensen told him.

“Mention what to Jared?” Jared asked as he magically appeared.

“Where the fuck did you come from?” Chris swore as he dropped the box he was carrying.

“School? I was just heading over there to pick up my books for the semester,” Jared explained as he plucked a rather cumbersome looking book bag up off the floor.

“Yeah but… Oh, right, the window,” Chris said as he bent over to pick up his load again.

“Patio door,” Jensen corrected him for the fiftieth time.

“Jen, if it doesn’t have stairs or a hallway attached to it? It’s a window,” Chris argued.

Jensen sent an apologetic look in Jared’s direction, trying his best to say, ‘Forgive him. He’s a redneck,’ without words.

Jared smiled at him and leaned in to plant a kiss on his cheek. Chris made choking noises in the background when Jensen turned his head and gave him a kiss back on his lips.

“I stopped by the academy today,” Jared whispered as he pulled a brochure out of his back pocket.

“Yeah?” Jensen asked, his posture tensing despite his best efforts.

“They put a new clause in. ‘All prospective students should be aware that unmated seraphs will be in attendance at the school. As such you may be approached in courtship displays and should be prepared for this eventuality. We are an equal opportunity school and encourage human-seraph interaction to its fullest extent.’” Jared quoted.

“So, ‘Warning, you might get booty called?’” Chris commented.

“He’s almost as bad as Chad,” Jared said with a roll of his eyes.

“I don’t think he has ever actually blackmailed anybody,” Jensen replied.

“Damn straight I haven’t. Ass kicking, now that I’ve done. So what’s the big deal with the whole ‘might get hit on’ clause?” Chris asked.

“It’s nothing,” Jensen told him with a shrug. He didn’t agree with their tactics, but that didn’t mean that he was going to expose Jared to the scrutiny that would come with a full reveal.

The clause was the first step towards bringing the seraphs closer to sharing themselves more fully with the human world, and it was Jared’s petition on his mate’s behalf that had even brought about that small change. It wasn’t much, but Jensen had years of his life to fight that battle.

“Right,” Chris said skeptically, giving both Jensen and Jared the hairy eyeball.

“So, who is in the mood for pizza?” Jared asked.

“Ugh, you just had to pick up a college boy, didn’t you?” Chris complained.

“Yeah, yeah I did,” Jensen agreed as he smiled fondly at Jared.

Chris made another, louder gagging noise before he stomped off to the living room to drop the moving box in its assigned delivery spot.

“Try not to burn it this time, okay?” Jensen told his mate once his friend was out of earshot.

Jared’s face flamed red. “I’m getting takeout, don’t worry. And it’s not my fault that I got the lamest power ever. Fucking controlling fire and heat is nowhere near as cool as the comic books make it look.”

“Neither is wearing spandex,” Jensen pointed out, “but at least you can light candles? Think of all the money we’ll save on matches over the years. And if we ever move somewhere cold, and you manage that trick of heating stuff without setting it on fire, we’ll save tons of money on heating bills.”

“You’re so supportive,” Jared drawled.

“I know, but it’s your own damn fault for mating with me,” Jensen retorted.

Jared grinned at him.

“Are you going to get that look on your face every time I say the M-word?” Jensen asked.

“Just be glad you didn’t say nesting, or I’d have to let Chris know what a real concert sounds like,” Jared threatened.

Jensen made his own fake gagging noise. “God, you get your feathers back, and your libido skyrockets. I feel like I’m living with a nymph not a seraph.”

“You know you love it,” Jared dismissed.

“Just for that, I’m making you come to Sunday dinner with me and sit there while I explain to my parents that I’ve moved in with my college aged boyfriend who happens to be an entirely different species from me.”

“Mate,” Jared corrected as he moved in closer.

Jensen leaned up and pressed a kiss against his jaw. “Yeah, mate.”