Love for the Cold-Blooded (30 page)

Life got even less bad after week two, when Maldonado decided he could no longer cope with Pat’s existence and transfered to a Happy Beans halfway across town. Pat promptly recruited Cat to join the poorly paid ranks of coffee slaves. She was naturally nocturnal, and she had time to kill right now, like all of Sir Toby’s full-time minions. (Their dread master was busy securing an alternate power source, since Butterfly had managed to play the Crystal of Power right into the Corny Corps’s hands. Honestly, though, Pat couldn’t be sorry he was no longer sharing a scheme with that thing. Crystals shouldn’t be trying to take over people’s heads, no matter how eldritch. That was just creepy.)

Anyhow, with Cat around, night shift at Happy Beans was pretty awesome. Pat did have to do his share of the cleaning, but the trade-off was that he and Cat got to swap anecdotes about Serpentissima and Jaguar, discuss the latest Were Lovers book and how much the hero fell short of the standards Rock Nighthawk had set, plan out Cat’s future career as Catalina the Great, and do all manner of other cool stuff, including lots of giggling.

Around this time, winter finally stopped dicking around and committed. It got horribly cold, and Pat had plenty of occasion to be glad of his toasty, expensive new coat. He also studied hard, started an awesome new paper (on socio-spatial transformations in the historical riverside quarter) that sucked up a lot of his time and brain space, trained a lot, and competed in several swim meets, where he clocked in respectable times and even placed third, once. Life was fairly okay.

And then life got way better, because Nick started coming in for coffee.

The first time, Pat was so startled he burned himself on the coffee machine, which hadn’t happened since his second day on the job. Nick ignored his pained curses, took the coffee, and found a table in the corner to drink it, attention entirely fixated on his datapad. He didn’t look at Pat once, and when he left, he slipped out with no fanfare, just as though he’d honestly come in for the Happy Beans’ sub-par coffee.

He only drank a fancy hand-roasted special blend that Pat had never been allowed to touch. The AI brewed it directly in the lab, no doubt according to a complex and entirely symmetrical coffee algorithm.

Nick dropped by again two nights later, and then the night after that, always between 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning. The exact time he should have been ensconced in his lab, calling down to the kitchens for something to eat.

Next time he came in, Pat added a squirt of caramel syrup and plenty of foamed milk to Nick’s cup. He’d ordered the macho black version, but Pat knew what that shit tasted like, and he wasn’t a sadist — watching people suffer didn’t do anything for him.

“This isn’t right,” Nick said, when he made to pick up his cup. “I didn’t order this.”

“No, but you’ll like this much better,” Pat said firmly, and then added, “Are you stalking me?”

“Yes,” Nick said, bland as anything. Then, he calmly picked up his caramel latte and took it off to his usual corner.

“Oh,” Pat said to the counter.

When he turned aimlessly to mop at a non-existent coffee spill, Cat was watching him narrowly.

“You make bad coffee,” Nick said the next night. It wasn’t a complaint, though; it was clear he was merely stating a generally known fact in order to make conversation, the way other people would say things like “it’s freezing out there” or “the forecast says there’ll be more snow”.

Pat smiled, aiming for pleasant insincerity. “Maybe you’re just spoiled.”

He got an unimpressed eyebrow and a several-second stare. “Considering that your prices are considerably above the market average, I should be being spoiled here.”

Hard to argue with that, so Pat simply shrugged and reached to take back the cup he’d plonked down on the counter. “Fine, give it back, then. We’ll be sure to have some free-range kopi luwak waiting for you next time you come in.”

In a move so fast and smooth Pat could hardly follow it with his eyes, Nick swept up the cup, whisking it out of reach. “That won’t be necessary.”

Pat had no idea whether Nick had taken the joking offer of kopi luwak seriously. It was exactly the sort of thing that AHM Suze and her merry band would do, after all.

The next night, Pat brought some of the cookies Bart had pressed on him the last time Pat had dropped by the mansion’s security checkpoint after work to catch up (Bart’s wife had really liked Pat’s cake, and would like to borrow Pat’s copy of
Lord Hawk’s Elven Folly
).

When Nick came in at exactly 2 o’clock, Pat fixed him a large cup of cocoa and slid one of the cookies on the saucer. Nick left a ridiculous tip next to his empty mug that night.

“That guy’s trying to flirt with you, you know,” Cat told him.

“Really?” Pat tried not to sound too eager and/or hopeful, but he could tell he was doing a crap job. The thing was, his flirting instincts had never been worth a damn, and when he assumed things, he generally ended up with someone’s drink in his face. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to risk, with Happy Beans coffee involved. “You really think so?”

Clearly Cat was spending way too much time with his sisters, because she snorted and rolled her eyes at him in a very familiar way.

Nick came in a lot, after that. It got to the point where Pat started looking out the window as soon as 2 o’clock rolled around, eager to catch his first glimpse of his — of Nick.

Absurdly enough, he was seeing way more of Nick than he ever had before. Well, he saw him more often, anyway, though more briefly. And of course he’d seen far more of Nick in the literal sense as Padraig the companion… talked to him more, too. Now, Pat could only look forward to a few brief, meaningless words exchanged as he slid a hot beverage across the counter.

It was ridiculous how much Pat missed Nick, and he never missed him more than when he was right there, sitting in his chair with his mug, eyes glued to a datapad as though the world around him didn’t exist.

“Oh my gods, you loser,” Cat said scornfully, and then snapped a towel at his hip for no reason at all, giggling.

Nick had to miss Pat too, at least a little. Right? Why else would he be coming here every night, to a place he would never ordinarily have known existed? He was a creature of habit, but he had changed his routine — was venturing forth from his lab every night just to see Pat, force down a sub-par beverage that must be offending him down to his very soul, and exchange one or two bland words with him. If he just wanted to keep an eye on Pat to make sure he wasn’t up to any mischief, he could have installed some kind of surveillance at Happy Beans.

The hope swelled inside Pat for several nights before he let it carry him over to Nick’s table, ostensibly to check if he wanted a refill (though nobody at Happy Beans ever did).

“Hey,” he started by way of greeting.

Nick looked up from his datapad, raising both eyebrows in polite inquiry.

“There’s this party on Friday,” Pat went on before he could think better of it.

Nothing changed in Nick’s expression. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” There was always a party somewhere on Friday, so it was a safe bet. If he had to, Pat would simply lure over a bunch of neighbors and people from the swim team with the promise of free beer. Hey presto, instant party. “You wanna go?”

“I don’t like parties.” Nick’s face was entirely blank, and he was holding himself so still that Pat couldn’t tell what the answer meant. He was briefly tempted to poke the dude in the shoulder just to break through that unnatural stillness.

“I bet you’ve had a good time at parties before, though,” he soldiered on instead, stubbornly refusing to feel insecure. “Once, at the very least.”

Nick lifted one shoulder in a minimalistic hint of a shrug. “It’s hard to find a party like that.”

That was an opening, right? Whatever, Pat would take it. “Not really, bro. It depends on the company more than the party.”

A small sliver of eternity crept by as Nick watched him, all fierce dark eyes and piercing stare. He should have looked like the last person Pat would want to invite to a party; instead, he looked like the only fix for the Nick-shaped hole in Pat’s life.

Say yes,
Pat urged with his mind and his glance and every fiber of his being, all of it straining towards Nick.
Say yes, you dumb hoagie fuck.

“Not yet,” Nick said, and smiled. It was a thin, pale kind of smile that did not seem at all certain it wanted to be there, but it was a smile nevertheless, and Pat’s heart leapt at the sight, crowded with hope and joy and apprehension. “Ask me again next time.”

Next time was not the next night, or the one after that, because Nick didn’t show up on either. Nor was it the night after those. Which, Pat wasn’t overly insecure or anything, but. What if Nick had changed his mind and never wanted to see him again? What if Pat had been too quick and too eager and too pathetic — or what if he’d misunderstood and Nick had just been at Happy Beans to make sure Pat wasn’t running around being evil and seducing innocent hoagies or something? What if…

Cat was beginning to throw Pat worried glances when three o’clock rolled around with no Nick in sight. She’d stopped teasing him about his ongoing flirtation with the handsome regular by the second Nick-less night, and Pat was grateful for it, even though he took her uncharacteristic diffidence to mean he was looking pretty rough.

When Nick did finally come in on the fourth night at sixteen minutes after two, Pat was wound so tight he felt like he would shiver right out of his skin in another moment; would jump over the counter and — gods, he didn’t even know. A second nightbird drifted into the coffee shop after Nick, but Pat didn’t even glance at him (or her, whatever). He had no attention to spare.

He was going to act normal. He wasn’t going to be an idiot. Nope, normal, that was the watchword.

“Black, please,” Nick told him, exactly the same way he always did.

Pat concentrated fiercely on his hands as he fixed a latte macchiato, adding an extra helping of milk and several generous squirts of vanilla syrup to cover up the taste of the actual coffee. It was for the better, and anyway, Nick had only complained that one time. Tacit permission, as far as Pat was concerned.

He made a special effort to create a perfectly symmetrical lattice of caramel syrup on top of the milk foam. He hadn’t read the Nicholas Andersen Coffee Manual, but some things were universal.

“I’m not going to any party with you,” Nick said, coolly.

A thick, jagged squiggle ruined Pat’s careful right-angled pattern, and he set down the syrup bottle with a too-loud bang. What the fuck! It wasn’t as though he’d been expecting anything… except that he had. Of course he had. Why had Nick come back at all, if he hadn’t been going to say yes? Why had Nick practically
told
him he would say yes (just not yet), if the answer had always been going to be no?

“I hadn’t even asked yet,” he snapped, voice shaking only very slightly. “You’re not that hot. Maybe I wasn’t going to ask again. Maybe I already have a date, ever think of that?”

It was a weak effort, and Nick gave him an appropriately disgusted glare. “You were going to ask again, though.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. But I might not have. No way for you to know, is there.” Great, now he was heading straight for petulant. Petulant was not a good look on Pat. Hadn’t he been determined to weather this with — well, not exactly dignity, but at least
something
?

“You should ask me to join you in the storeroom instead,” Nick said, bland and flat as ever.

What?

Wait, hang on. He’d actually thought he’d heard Nick say — but that couldn’t be right. Could it?

Suddenly, Cat was right beside him, trying to shoulder him away from the counter and towards the storeroom. She was doing a far better job of muscling Pat around than should have been possible, considering she was a head shorter and about half his weight soaking wet. “Go do inventory, you loser.”

He looked at her helplessly until she nudged him in the hip, giving him a taste of hidden claws. From the other side of the counter, Nick was leveling a punishing ‘why are you so stupid’-type stare at him. Which, for the record, was totally unfair. Pat wasn’t the one going totally off-script here.

“Uhm,” Pat said at last, fumbling for words. “Yeah. Inventory. Let me just check on — stuff. In the storeroom. You should, you know. Come have a look, or whatever.”

Cat seemed mildly disgusted with Pat for some reason, but Nick merely gave a brisk nod of acquiescence and followed Pat to the storeroom without further comment, stepping inside after him without being asked.

As soon as the door had fallen shut, Nick turned and grabbed Pat, pushing him against the nearest set of shelves. Pat gave a low gasp as Nick leaned into him, bracing his arms against the shelf on either side of Pat’s shoulders to fence him in.

Long moments passed in silence as Nick’s eyes roamed over Pat’s face, evidently cataloging every feature. He was frowning slightly, and Pat didn’t dare to do any of the things he would have liked to do. He still didn’t know what was going on, and maybe Nick wouldn’t be okay with being kissed, or pulled in closer, or —

Nick’s brow smoothed in the same instant the steel went out of his posture; he sagged forward slowly, bowing his head until his face was buried against Pat’s throat, nose nuzzling against his jaw.

It was weird as fuck. It was damn uncomfortable, too, what with the shelves behind Pat digging painfully into his shoulders. Not to mention they were surrounded by sacks of coffee beans, plastic vats of syrup and stacked boxes of take-away cups and straws, and Pat was looking straight at the disturbing poster of dancing coffee beans on the wall behind Nick. Every one of the beans was watching him with beady red eyes and a wide, rictus-like grin filled with tiny teeth.

It was perfect. Pat never wanted to move.

“I miss you.” The words were muffled against Pat’s neck; the feeling of Nick’s breath hot against sensitive skin made him shiver. “I should put you out of my mind and move on. But I miss you.”

At this point, Pat was clutching Nick a good deal too tightly to pretend at a cool casual attitude. It had probably been too late for that anyway, all things considered. “The model clones aren’t cutting it, huh?”