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"Textures?" Cas echoed with a suggestive grin, but he didn't take it farther than that - for now. The look on his face was enough to hint at what was running through his mind.

And for once in his life, he agreed with Lucas. "Yea, that whole... risking your life for total strangers thing? You wouldn't be putting your family through hell worrying about you if it wasn't for something important."

Rylan shrugged. "That's just. What I do for lack of a better idea," he said. Having a college degree didn't help a heck of a lot when you didn't know what you wanted to do with it. "I could never sit behind a desk, I guess. Cas, you were MARSOC, for crying out loud. Doing your duty to your country. I'm just doing it on a smaller scale."

Cas rolled his eyes. "Too good for this world, he is," he muttered, not for the first time marveling at how undeniably good this man could be. That wasn't him. Cas had never considered himself to be good. More self-serving than anything else. "Let's just pretend he can take a compliment."

He relented and, at Cas' gesture, finally held up his beer so the others could clink their drinks against it. "I... alright, alright," he said. "She was a much better dancer than me, even with a prosthetic leg."

Then the food finally came to relieve him of feeling mildly embarrassed.

"Good call, brother," Cas said, letting out a low whistle as the smell of wonderful food wafted up from the table. The kitchen had already helpfully divvied up the lobster roll and tuna burger into four portions, and the waitress set down four small plates to help with the sharing.

"Ladies first?" Rylan said, motioning to Jo. "Anyway, work aside, Lucas has been looking into getting a dog. Cas, you like dogs."

Unsubtle change in topic.

Cas went with it. "Better than people, anyway," he said in agreement. "Not as much as horses. In general."

"Tastes as good as it smells?" Rylan said, himself reaching for part of the lobster roll as Cas took a bite of Jo's and promptly pretended to relieve her of the sandwich.

The firefighter took a bite out of his portion and shrugged. "What? I'm not saying go buy dogs together, I'm just saying everyone likes dogs," he said.

For his part, Cas managed to look intrigued, rather than relieved that he wouldn't have to go dog shopping with Lucas, which was about the only thing that could make spending a day playing with dogs seem a little less exciting. He wasn't really in the market for a dog, anyway. It seemed like potentially more of a responsibility than he felt ready to take on.

"Oh," Cas said, finally returning Jo's lobster roll and going for the tuna burger. "Yea, we used to have these big mastiff-like sheepdogs on the ranch I grew up on. We were a little south of wolf country, but sometimes they wander farther out of their range than you'd expect. And bears. These dogs would warn them off before they got too close."

He took a bite and nodded his approval. "Good dogs. Not always friendly. Pretty sure I have a scar or two from bites." The horses never bit, though. Not the well-adjusted working ones he'd grown up around. They were quite a bit different from the high-strung show horses people tended to own out here on the East Coast.

"Well, I'll never say no to being surrounded by animals," Cas said thoughtfully, chewing on his burger. "But I wouldn't want them to be stuck in the city, you know? Without the open space. And I like the country, I'm comfortable out where there's nothing but wide open plains and no people, but... I'm also not going to spend another minute of my life working on a ranch. So I guess I'm screwed either way."

He smirked almost carelessly, and someone who didn't know his past and what he'd grown up with on that ranch would never guessed how rough that childhood had really been. And to Cas' credit, he was perfectly alright with that.

"He just likes to be difficult," Rylan intoned, giving Jo a knowing look. "But don't let him fool you, in six months he'll have brought home a zoo of broken animals that need help. You know, he had a baby fox once? For about a week. Its mom abandoned it, so he just brought it home in a box. That thing smelled so bad."

"It was helpless," Cas protested. Although even he would admit that handing it over to a wildlife sanctuary had been, ultimately, the better idea.

"And we've caught him sitting for hours by the river trying to befriend the deer. It worked too. They were like two feet away from him."

Cas chuckled. "Pretty sure I was asleep by then, but patience does win."

And then, "Sweetie, will you stop sulking? I'm not trying to start a fight here." Rylan nudged the unusually quiet Lucas. He'd seen the looks and realized it was perhaps not the most tactful way to address the issue, but he didn't want his entirely innocent change of topic to be misconstrued.

"Jo understands," Cas said, smiling at the kiss before stuffing the rest of his tuna burger into his mouth. A moment passed in which he kept busy chewing the damned thing, and then he caught Rylan's raised-brow look and shook his head.

"These guys judged the s**t out of me, even after I explained that bouncing around on ranches isn't exactly conducive to making friends!" he said with a laugh that said he'd moved on by now, but wasn't going to pass up the chance to give Rylan some s**t for it. "I didn't hang out with people my age until... hell, until college. Spent the rest of my time hanging out with animals because that sounded better than 'avoiding rough men who could beat the s**t out of me.'"

"Yea, well. You showed 'em," Rylan conceded with an incline of his head that spoke of great respect for whatever it was that Cas had done to "show them."

He turned to Lucas, and rather than let himself feel exasperated, he said, "Alright, alright, eat up. The pasta is great, make sure you try that too." Because they'd had more moments like this than he cared to recall, and he knew it was a crossroads of sorts between an awkward rest of the night and a pleasant, if somewhat more aloof one.

He took one more look at Lucas, recalled their earlier conversation about the fight, and found himself thinking, not for the first time, God damn but aren't you lucky you didn't try to attack Cas when he had a gun. He didn't like to think what might have happened, but he knew that people like Cas weren't trained by MARSOC to just win fights. They were trained to eliminate threats, which was an unsubtle way of saying that they were trained to kill. Even a werewolf was no match for a bullet at close range.

Then again, they were all in their own way lucky.

"What about you, Jo?" he said finally, turning back to the blonde. "What do you think of dogs?"

"Fidget could always use more friends," Rylan agreed with a smile. The dalmatian was in many ways the perfect mascot for the firehouse, so happy and indiscriminately friendly was he. People of all ages, shapes, and sizes seemed to delight the dog equally and he had yet to meet an animal he didn't get along with.

"Think about it, they could come on hikes and go swimming in the lakes and ride in the truck bed," Rylan said. "Get one that knows how to swim. No bulldogs." He paused, and then continued, "Or. You know. Whatever you want." He would put up with a puntable dog if Lucas so decided.

"How quaint," Cas put in, not at all sarcastically. "You guys could train for the Boston Marathon together, all that fun stuff."

It was true, animals were wonderful companions.

"That's why I keep him around," Rylan said with a grin. No small dogs. He leaned pressed a kiss to Lucas' jaw, doing what he could to cheer him up.

It was exhausting sometimes, trying to figure out how to balance his best friend with his boyfriend, but Rylan had to argue that it was worth it. Both were so important to him, perhaps second only to family and even then only by the slimmest of margins.

They'll work out their differences... he caught himself thinking, hoping.

"Fidget knows how to stop, drop, and roll," he offered helpfully. That was all the training he needed. Although admittedly, the dalmatian was naturally well-behaved.

Meanwhile, Cas had put his fork down to say, "I resent that!" Although the amused grin on his face suggested otherwise. He wasn't arguing either, not really. Jo probably had a point.