Inventory was winding down right around the time the store opened for the morning. Gavin gave cheerful greetings to the cashiers coming on duty. Most of his co-workers were middle-aged women, but Gavin had a knack for getting along with almost everybody. The assistant store manager, Dan, didn’t like him much, and Gavin chalked that up to the man’s lack of confidence in his own sexuality. Or maybe Dan simply needed to get laid.
Theresa waved Gavin off to lunch around eleven, and he was glad to go. He needed food and caffeine if he was going to make it the rest of the day. He’d been up late the night before scrubbing down the kitchen in what was probably an overreaction to the faint, unwelcome scent of raw onions. Despite Mama’s heritage and their combined love of Mexican food, they both detested raw onions in any form, and they very rarely cooked with them. The distaste came from Gavin’s asshole sperm donor—Kai would walk around the house chomping on raw onions the way normal folks ate apples, and the odor used to drive Gavin crazy.
The scent of onions in the kitchen had been incredibly faint, but Mama insisted she hadn’t used any. He didn’t find any in the garbage or elsewhere, and even though the smell had faded by the time his search was complete, he wiped down every surface with Lysol just to be sure. The activity hadn’t benefited his going into work at four a.m., but he felt better about the kitchen.
He texted Jace to say he’d be early for their lunch date, and Jace texted back almost instantly that he was on his way. They were meeting around the corner at Mineo’s, a Jewish deli that also specialized in personal-sized pizzas with crazy topping combinations. The place was a favorite hangout for the younger crowd, so Gavin had been surprised and delighted that Jace chose it. Most of their time spent together was private and unadvertised.
Lunch in a public place was a good start in the “let’s be open about this” direction.
Jace had been a finicky eater lately, so Gavin didn’t even try to guess what he’d order. He bought a large Coke and grabbed a booth near the back. Surrounded by the pleasant aromas of pepperoni and relish, he played Minesweeper on his phone until the back of his neck prickled. Gavin looked up. Jace was crossing the restaurant’s black-and-white linoleum floor, coming right toward him.
No…limping right toward him, and favoring his left leg.
Gavin frowned. “You hurt yourself?” he asked as Jace slid into the booth across from him.
“So to speak,” Jace replied. “I bruised it when I was running this morning.”
He flinched. “Ouch. Did you trip?”
“Not exactly. I ran into a car.”
“You did what?”
Jace heaved a sigh. “How about I explain over food? You’re on a time crunch.”
Gavin agreed then insisted Jace stay put while he placed their order—plain veggie wrap with no dressing for Jace and an Italian sub with the works for Gavin. He came back a few minutes later with the food and tore into his sub while Jace elaborated on his car incident. Gavin had a difficult time imagining Jace being so careless. The two times they’d gone running together, Jace had made Gavin slow down and pay better attention to his surroundings.
“You’re lucky you weren’t going faster, or he’d have hit you full-on,” Gavin said. As the words fell from his lips, the mental image of Jace being run down by a car made his half-full stomach clench with worry. He could have been seriously hurt.
“I know, believe me.” Jace sipped his bottled water and picked at the edges of his uneaten wrap. “I guess I…zoned out.”
“Well, don’t do that again. Seriously.” Gavin surprised himself with the anger in his voice. He liked Jace—maybe too much, given the undefined nature of their relationship—and he didn’t want to see him hurt ever, especially in a preventable accident.
“I won’t.” Jace’s hand jerked, as if he wanted to reach across the table and reassure Gavin with a touch. Until he remembered they were in public.
Gavin stopped tapping his foot on the floor, uncertain when he’d started or how long he’d been doing it. He finished his sub while Jace nattered on about getting a ride home, icing his knee, and then made a left field conversation turn into last night’s dinner with the family. Gavin hadn’t begrudged Jace’s family time, but it sounded like Jace did.
“Mom wanted to do something nice, and I acted like a brat,” Jace said. “I still haven’t apologized.”
“We all do bratty things sometimes. I was an absolute terror when I was—” He almost said, “when I was your age,” but Gavin knew that would sound strange. They only had four years between them, after all. “When I was in high school.”