Chapter Text
It was freezing in the car. The East coast wind was slipping through the cracks of the window, turning Castiel's fingers red. He could see his breath with each exhale. The guy on channel six had said it would be thirty-two degrees today, with a weatherman smile and a stay warm out there, Maryland. It was twenty degrees. Yet Castiel couldn't bring himself to either turn on the heat or get out of the car.
The first option was not an option anyway. Castiel drove a 1976 Volvo station wagon. It had pros, sure, like the color (robin's egg blue), the price ($2,050 and a referral to an auto shop). But of course there were cons, like the way you had to jiggle the passenger's handle to open the door, or the fact that the heater just gave out on him the same week the heater in his apartment had.
The second option was just unappealing. If Castiel were to get out of the Volvo, he would have to approach the office building. He would have to go inside and make pleasantries and smile and the thought of it made him appreciate the chill of the car.
He was rubbing his hands together, trying to make up his mind when a black Mercedes Benz pulled into the lot. It swerved into the spot marked C.E.O. in white paint. The driver's door opened and Castiel nearly ducked. It was a childish thing to do; it's not like she knew this crapper was his car anyway.
The woman who stepped out of the Mercedes-Benz was, in a word, high-powered. She had red hair pulled high and wore a well-tailored coat. It was seven-thirty in the morning and she already had a Bluetooth in her ear. Castiel watched her talk into it as she disappeared into the building. She would hate him if he didn't show up.
Castiel got out of his car and approached the building, striding through the small empty lot. The building itself was tall and made of gray stone. The windows were outlined in black, the glass shaded blue. There were tall white letters above the doors that read Made in Heaven . The door looked like it should come equipped with a smiling doorman in a pressed gray suit. It didn't. The door — glass paneled and frosted — opened under his hand and Cas stepped inside, shaking the cold out of his hair.
It looked the exact same as when he came in for the interview. Art deco blue tile on the floor, pale blue wallpaper with quiet floral designs curling over and over, lights with rosy bulbs. Plants everywhere, glass everywhere, gold touches and leather chairs, and somewhere a vanilla air freshener spritzing away. A receptionist sat behind the desk but it wasn't the same girl who had been there the week before. The girl last week — Ruby — had dark hair and sharp edges. She'd had a disaffected tone when she sent him back for the interview. On his way out, she had glowered at him over her french fries.
The new girl, she had dark hair too and a leather jacket but her face was soft and pleasant. There was a dimple in her cheek as she smiled at him over a magazine.
"Clarence," She said.
That stopped Castiel in his tracks. He glanced around, just to make sure no one else had come in behind him. Nope. His eyebrows drew together.
"Excuse me?"
The receptionist leaned on her desk, elbows first.
"You're the new hire? One of the cupids.” She raised an eyebrow, smirked.
"I'm a..." He paused. It sounded so stupid. "Matchmaker, not a 'cupid.'"
"That's what I meant, dummy." The girl leveled her gaze at him with a challenging look in her eyes. "I'm Meg."
"Castiel," He replied, reaching to shake her hand.
Meg ignored it and pointed down the hall beside her desk. "Naomi wants to see you before you start making those love connections."
"Matches."
"Whatever, Clarence."
She went back to reading her magazine, not even glancing to see if Cas had started moving yet. He hadn't. He stood next to the desk, breathing in the vanilla and pretending that he was somewhere else. A bakery. A cafe. A bookshop aisle just after a stranger with lovely cologne had brushed by. Anywhere that wasn't this building. Any time when he wasn't about to start working under Naomi, officially. It was a moment he wanted to live in forever.
Meg glanced at him and cocked a brow. This got him moving down the hall to Naomi's office. The door was ajar. He could hear her talking at a quick clip as he opened it.
"—can refer you to wedding planners but I will not be picking out floral arrangements or cakes any time soon," Naomi said. She stood at her desk, fingertips pressed against the paper-strewn surface. She looked up at him and smiled.
"Anna, I will have to call you back. My son is here."
Castiel took up a position behind one of the leather chairs in front of her desk. He dug his nails into the fabric. Waited to speak until spoken to. Naomi pressed a button on her Bluetooth and then it was just the two of them in a glass room, just as uncomfortable as the interview.
"Thank you for joining me, Castiel," Naomi said, smiling. It was a business smile, the one that told clients that they could trust her. That stopped working on him in high school. Castiel gave a small nod. A pause. She tapped the surface of her desk with a manicured nail and moved around to the front. She leaned against the edge, didn't sit. Ann Taylor skirts were too expensive to wrinkle doing something as ordinary as sitting.
There was another pause, longer, as she crossed her arms and studied Castiel's face. He forced himself to meet her gaze.
"I know this is strange. But I really think you will thrive here, Castiel." Naomi tilted her head. He supposed it was meant to look sympathetic, unstudied. It looked calculating. "Don't you?"
He felt like grinding his teeth. Castiel nodded.
"Good. Then we're in agreement." Naomi pushed herself away from the desk and went back into business woman mode. She shuffled through papers while she spoke. "Your office is marked with your name, just down the hall. I'm sure you saw it as you were coming in."
He hadn’t.
"As the newest member of the team, you will be handling walk-ins for the first few months to help acclimate you to the clientele and handling the matchmaking situations. Your first scheduled client should be in tomorrow, though you will have to ask Meg for the details on that. The paperwork is on your desk as well as a gift from me." Naomi looked up at him and smiled. "Get to work."
Castiel was at the door in two strides, ready to sprint out of the office and into the cold.
"Oh, and Cassie?"
He turned. The nickname nearly made him roll his eyes but he forced himself to look at her like an adult would.
"Don't let me down," Naomi said, lightheartedly. Her lipsticked lips curled up at the edges. Her eyes were hard.
It wasn’t Castiel’s fault that the door slammed shut behind him.
The first thing Castiel noticed about his office was the flowers. They were everywhere. On the cabinet behind his desk, lilies swaying in their vases. Bundles of hydrangeas on the windowsill. The black orchid on his desk arced perfectly over, like it was bowing to him. The scent, all of it twisting together would have been lovely if he wanted to be here. It was like a garden, set up on the various mahogany surfaces. It was exactly what someone would expect when walking into a place with Heaven written on the door. Castiel was sure a client would come in, see the flowers and the leather chair and the deep teal walls and feel at ease. Like they were sitting in their grandfather’s study. Maybe that was the look Naomi was going for. Probably.
Castiel shut the door behind him, quieter this time, and moved towards his new desk. Before, he had heard people joke about their work desks feeling more like a ball and chain. It was that cocktail hour conversation that people always chuckled over before downing their margaritas and licking the salt off their lips. It was just one of those things you said because, who likes to work anyway? But as Castiel touched the petal of the orchid, ran his hand across the polished wood of the desktop, he realized that the people who cracked those jokes never fully smiled when they said it.
As promised, there was a small stack of paperwork on his desk along with a small box. It was white, wrapped in a black ribbon. A small present Naomi had called it. Castiel pulled the ribbon off, dropped it on the floor. He opened the box. It was filled with blue fabric, with a gleaming bit of silver in the center. Pulling it from the box, it became clear under the warm light of his office that it was a tie. She had given him a tie. Already he could feel it choking, pressing in on his trachea and stopping his breath in its tracks.
He ran his finger over the metal of the silver tie pin and brought it up to his face for closer inspection. Etched into its surface: NOVAK. Castiel sank into his desk chair, the seat swiveling gently with the motion. She had gotten him a collar. A leash. His chest felt tight and the tie was wrapped around his knuckles as he tried to breathe.
It was a test. Another one of Naomi’s little games. When he was a child, she had done things like this. She would present him and his siblings with “options”. Choose the wrong one and you’d suffer the consequences. He was allowed to skip family dinner to go out with friends but only if he could handle not eating dinner for the rest of the week. Not wearing this tie, making him Naomi’s monkey in a suit, it was not an option. The consequences always hurt too much. It was simple , Castiel thought. Freedom is a length of rope. She wants me to hang myself with it.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, staring at the tie and only seeing a noose.