The Starving Years (20 page)

He dropped a hand down to the couch cushions on the floor. Nelson was gone, and though the pillow still bore the impression of his head, the cushions were cool to the touch. Across the room, Javier was curled up on his couch with his back facing the room, so his bad eye was hidden. It was as if he refused to let anyone see his vulnerability without his permission, even in his sleep.

Tim sat up and savored the sensation of muscles he usually ignored having been put to some use. He could hardly consider it soreness—especially when it made him smile, despite himself. He stood and stretched. Yeah, definitely sex. And it had definitely been way too long. And, yeah, he was smiling again. Or maybe he hadn’t actually stopped at any point since he’d opened his eyes.

Once he finished up in the bathroom—smiling the whole time about what a big deal Nelson had made over the size of his dick—he took a discreet look around the conference room, careful not to wake Javier. There was a small snack bar along one wall, with a sink, a refrigerator, and a water cooler. The fridge had been emptied, but the cupboards were awkward to reach over the countertop, so they hadn’t been ransacked. Unfortunately, it looked as if, due to their hard-to-reach position, they weren’t particularly well stocked.
 

There was instant coffee, though. Instant creamer, too. And sugar—though, unfortunately, there was a roach carcass legs-up in the sugar. Still. Unsweetened instant coffee was better than no coffee at all. He found a hotpot way in the back, pulled it down from its long span of disuse, set some water to boil, and found somewhere to plug in his netbook.

When he crawled back out from under the table, he found Nelson and Randy standing there, looking at him. A grin spread across Nelson’s face that telegraphed he’d just been checking out Tim and thinking, “been there, done that.” And hopefully, “I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

“We’re gonna go have a smoke,” Randy said.

“Out there?” Cabin fever must have been setting in already, and they’d been asleep almost the entire time they were there. Aside from…that other thing three of them had been doing.

“Want one?” Nelson asked. He held up a cigar, and somehow made it look embarrassingly phallic without even trying. He knew it, too. Tim could tell by the twinkle in his eye.

“Don’t you think that’s a little reckless?” Tim said.
 

Randy snorted. “Mister Drive-on-the-Sidewalk is calling us reckless?”
 

“I just think we should stay inside until we know what’s going on.”

Randy and Nelson exchanged a look that said they thought Tim was taking it all way too seriously, and Nelson gave the cigar he was holding a languorous sniff—pointedly phallic—and said, “But they look like they’re Cuban.”

“Of course they’re Cuban.” Javier said, awake now. He had his eye patch in place before he’d even sat completely up. His hair was tousled. It looked sexy tousled. “Alejandro wouldn’t be caught dead with a box of Nicaraguans.” Tim wished he had the guts to ask him to repeat himself. The way he said “Nicaraguans” was sexy, too.

Tim said, “Can’t you just smoke them in the bathroom, or…?”

“I will make anyone who so much as
thinks
of lighting a cigar in this trailer wish they’d never been born,” Marianne called from the other room.

Nelson raised his eyebrows expectantly and said to Tim, “Well? Are you
coming
?” Now, Nelson seemed incapable of saying anything that wasn’t a blatant flirtation…which Tim had never realized would make him feel as phenomenally awkward as it did. He couldn’t recall the last time anyone had acted flirty toward him. If anyone ever had at all. And if they had, somewhere in his vague and distant past—it was utterly forgettable compared to the look in Nelson’s eye now, the one that fairly screamed out,
I love dick.

On the table behind him, Tim’s netbook chimed an alert message; the security on it was set sky-high in case it was ever stolen. He glanced over his shoulder and okayed the DLR wireless network with a click. “No, I think I should maybe…” he felt the flash drive Javier had stolen for him, square and unyielding in his pocket. “I have some work to do.”

Randy mouthed “work?” like Tim had just spoken a foreign language.

“Stay behind the truck,” Tim suggested. “Keep out of sight.”

Javier stood and tucked his shirt in, then smoothed his hair. “I’ll keep them out of trouble,” he told Tim, and he followed Nelson and Randy outside. Once Nelson and Javier were gone, Tim felt like he could breathe again…although the moment Nelson was no longer watching him with that naughty half-smile and that
look
in his eyes, Tim began to doubt that he’d actually done the sort of thing with Nelson that would prompt that sort of look.

Concentrate
, he told himself
. On something other than the memory of stuffing your dick in his mouth…alongside Javier’s.
Tim sighed. And here he’d thought the idea of meeting Javier in person was distracting. Reality was definitely underrated. His netbook beeped loudly, and another warning flashed. UNENCRYPTED NETWORK. He hit OK.

He’d saved the initial work he’d done back on his home system on the portable drive. No need to hack past Canaan Products securities again. Tim had set up a new identity in the I.T. department as Joe Johnson, and now it was just a matter of seeing what kinds of permissions he could secure for “Joe.” Yes, Javier had told him to look in Shipping and Receiving. But while he might find evidence of large amounts of manna being moved around in that department, he wouldn’t necessarily know why. He might as well see what else he could find—and I.T. guys had access to everything.

Tim should know.

Within moments, “Joe” was approved. Tim let out a slow breath and began to feel his way around the system. Research and Development. Financials. Company email. And…there it was. Warehouse.
 

He began accessing directories, and then downloading. His computer was fast, for a netbook. So much of it was custom that the only thing original to the unit was the keyboard. But it still wasn’t as fast as the powerhouse desktop back at Tim’s apartment. The file grab would take a while.

One by one, the file names flashed on his screen as they transferred. Databases, emails, any documents he could find. Tim grabbed them all with the objective of getting in, getting out, and sorting through it all later.

Once that process was underway, Tim turned to the documents they’d already appropriated from the HR rep at the job fair. Nelson Oliver’s job application was the most recently viewed document…and there, now, was another document Tim had overlooked back at the apartment. The
analysis
of his application—right there beneath it, just waiting to be browsed.

Tim flicked the scroll bar and spotted a Javier Santos. That wasn’t Javier’s last name, but a quick search showed no other Javier on the roster. Javier’s job application would be all lies—or at least creatively re-worked versions of the truth. But still, it seemed that even the lies he’d told might give Tim some insight about what made him tick. What to open? Nelson’s analysis, or Javier’s mostly-phony application?

Tim wavered, surprised that he felt so torn about where to look first. Funny, how much his perspective had shifted over the last twelve hours or so. He hovered the pointer over Nelson’s file, then Javier’s…then Nelson’s, and back yet again.

And he hoped they would take their time smoking their cigars.

***

It was cold outside, sitting on the concrete slab that was sheltered from street view by the truck. Nelson drew his knees up to his chest, leaned his back against the side panel, and rubbed his hands together. “I don’t need a whole cigar,” he said. “I’m not much of a smoker. Just wanted to see what the whole buzz over a Cuban was all about.” He bumped Javier with his shoulder. “Wanna share?”

He’d taken care to sit on the side of Javier’s good eye. Javier glanced over him, cool as you please. Inscrutable. Nelson supposed it went with his whole calm, cool and collected persona. Still, it seemed like Señor Cool should have thawed a bit, given the fact that they knew each other a lot better now than they had the day before.

Randy pulled out a cigar trimmer—presumably from the office, unless he carried one around with him, which would be totally hilarious—and clipped off the tip. “See?” he showed the cut end to Nelson. “If it was a cheapo, it’d be rolled together from the sweepings off the cigar factory floor. You’d have tobacco crumbling out. But not this. Whole leaves. Nice and tight.”

Nelson glanced at Javier—couldn’t resist. But even the words “nice and tight” didn’t get a rise out of him. Sheesh. What did a guy need to do to make him smile? Oh well. Nelson had always dug a challenge.

Randy passed a cigar to Javier, and then the trimmer. Something in the way Javier handled it—what was it? He’d done it before, yeah…but so had Randy. There was something else to his motions, though. A sureness. Like it was no big deal to fire up an expensive Cuban.

Maybe because he was Cuban. A rich Cuban. If such a thing even existed. Nelson tended to learn his politics as he needed them, and he’d never kept company with a Cuban before, so he only knew the generalities: Bay of Pigs, dictatorship, boat people, embargo. That sort of thing.

Javier rocked the cigar over a lit match, then held it to his lips, puffed, rolled the smoke over his tongue, and blew an experimental, wobbling smoke ring that was whisked away by the wind. While Randy lit his, Javier watched the lit end burn for a moment, then handed it to Nelson and said, “Don’t inhale. It’s not a cigarette.”

Nelson took a puff. The tobacco was wet from Javier’s lips.

“That is so gay,” Randy said.

Nelson laughed the smoke out of his mouth, and handed the cigar back to Javier.
I’ll show you gay
would have been his typical response, with a nice, juicy kiss right on another guy’s mouth—it was a blast to yank straight dudes’ chains like that—but he could tell by the set of Javier’s shoulders, he’d be seriously pissed at Nelson for even trying it. Even though the whole business of cigar smoking seemed to involve more holding and staring than actually smoking (evidently you didn’t want to get the tobacco too “hot” because that ruined the flavor) and you weren’t even supposed to inhale, Nelson found it companionable enough…with Randy, at least.

How Javier managed to seem so distant—sorting that out would be quite a challenge, all right.

Luckily, Randy attempted to break the ice, so Nelson wouldn’t need to. “So you worked here before?” he said to Javier—and Nelson couldn’t have asked for a better tone in his delivery.
Don’t actually care, just random curiosity, something to talk about while we enjoy our cigars.

 
And then Javier smirked to himself before answering, “Not exactly.”

Nelson scratched his stubble to hide a smile. Javier couldn’t have piqued his curiosity better if he’d been trying.

“For this company,” Randy clarified—as if maybe Javier had been referring to the specific job site.

“It’s a family business.”

“De la Rosa? That’s your name?” Randy took a round puff of his cigar, cradled the smoke on his tongue for a moment, then blew it out—and gave Nelson a pointed look that said,
Gay
.

Nelson toyed with his hair to hide another smile. He knew the frat-boy humor should offend his delicate LGBTQ sensibilities…so of course, he found it all the funnier.

Randy talked about how he hated his job at the credit union. Nelson said his job at the video store was okay—except for the customers, who tended to be jerks. And the fact that it paid so shitty. Javier said absolutely nothing, just listened. And then the cigar burned down to the last couple of inches, he took it from Nelson and said, “That’s it. You don’t smoke it down to the butt—it’s not a cigarette.”

While Randy stared at his last couple of inches sadly, willing to risk another few puffs to extend his experience, Nelson stood up and dusted off the back of his jeans. He decided to poke around in the truck before he headed back inside, because all that stuff in the back—who could resist rifling through it, and seeing what made that Tim guy tick?

The boxes were labeled so cryptically Nelson needed to pry open the flaps of the folded-shut boxes and paw through to see what was actually in any of them. The heaviest boxes were water—but the gasoline, bleach and manna weren’t exactly lightweight, either. Clothes. Towels. Flares. Maps. Camping gear. Three different first aid kits. Since he’d seriously depleted the first kit giving Marianne her pedi, Nelson tucked another blue and white box under his arm and turned to head back inside, when he found Javier blocking the truck door. He couldn’t help it—he broke into a smile that made Javier look twice as exasperated as he already did. “What?” Nelson asked, all innocence.

“Watch yourself.”

“Why? Am I gonna do some kind of trick?”

Javier’s uncovered eye narrowed. Probably the one behind the eye patch, too. It might be damn near impossible to make him smile, but it was pretty easy to wind him up. But then he said, “With Tim,” and Nelson sobered. A bit.

“What about him?”

“Just…don’t be an ass.”

Nelson’s short-lived gravity broke, over the uber-serious tone of the warning. He laughed—he could hardly help his assish tendencies. “I’ll try my best.”

Javier didn’t move from the doorway. He had the body language of someone who was accustomed to being Obeyed. He said, “Don’t string him along if you’re going to drop him the second the roadblocks come down. He deserves better than that.”

Nelson looked Javier up and down a few times, unsure where to even begin a reply. “I thought we were all cool.” He shrugged. What did Javier expect to come from a quick-and-dirty hookup? “Aren’t we?”

Even with just the one eye, Javier gave Nelson a look that told him they weren’t.

Javier turned to go, and Nelson caught him by the shoulder. “Hey.” Javier turned back, and Nelson said, “I like Tim. He’s a good guy.”

Javier looked at him, hard. Nelson felt like he was being X-rayed. Maybe losing sight in one eye was like losing one of the full senses. It sharpened whatever remained to a preternatural point.