The Problem Client

by K P Maxwell

  “I know,” he replies, voice low. She’s immediately relieved. If he had replied any other way, she would have had to find a way to make sure he never saw Damien again. And none of them would have been happy about the situation. Probably Ty especially.

  “And soon,” she adds, because she might as well press it.

  “Alright, alright,” Ty says, sounding hassled. “I know I need to,” he adds, trailing off at the end, and she can imagine him frowning on the other end of the line.

  “I suppose I’ll cancel your existing contract then,” she says after a moment. She suspects, but she doesn’t truly know.

  Ty confirms it for her. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, the brat and I are going to try something else.”

  And Melanie might not like it, but in the end, maybe these two can make each other happy.

  “You better treat him well, Balducci,” she says. “Otherwise you have me to answer to.”

  Ty laughs, “You’re the only one in the city that scares me, Mel. I’ll be good to him.”

  Melanie nods, even though Ty can’t see it. There’s not much to say after that, and after they hang up, Melanie feels a little bit better about the situation. But not by much.

  She pulls out Damien’s folder from her desk drawer, opening it to the pages with Ty’s original contract. She’d been suspicious about it from the get-go. About the amount of money Ty had offered, after only one night with Damien.

  Wolves, she thinks, half-bitterly, shaking her head.

  The first thing Damien does when he wakes up on Friday morning is grab his phone. There’s already a text from Ty.

  Dinner tomorrow?

  Damien presses the phone to his chest in glee for a moment before gathering himself together enough to answer it. The café closes at 5 tomorrow, so he makes plans for Ty to pick him up right after and go to a sushi place downtown.

  He snorts to himself thinking that the last time he went out to eat was with Eli, and before then, he can’t even remember. Usually he eats at the café. He rarely leaves.

  He texts Eli, because he figures he should update the man. Giving him a chance ;)

  He doesn’t expect a response, given Eli’s job, but he sits in bed for a moment longer, trying to wake up and thinking of the night before. The door hadn’t appeared for Ty. It’s an interesting hint as to how they work. They have some sort of logic behind them.

  Damien finally forces himself to get out of bed. He pockets his phone after getting into his black work slacks and black button-up shirt. The standard café uniform. His closet is full of identical versions of these same clothes, provided by Melanie, as well as many other clothes provided by her. He’s sure the other hosts are the same. She provides them with any clothes they require as well, since it ties in with the other business. But Damien didn’t actually bring much down from Seattle with him when he left.

  His old roommate tried to contact him several times, but Damien never replied. He feels a twinge of guilt at that. He wonders what happened to everything up there, but none of it felt important anyways. It felt like it belonged to someone else entirely, and he doesn’t think he’d even recognize that person anymore.

  He glances around this room. All of this is provided by Melanie, he thinks. Sure, he works in the café, but now that he’s not going to be taking any clients, how much will he really have to offer her in trade? Especially now with Kaz and Jake training to take on a lot of the responsibilities that Damien used to have. He frowns to himself before he heads out into the main living area.

  He makes his way down to the café to have his morning meeting with Melanie before the café opens. He stops at the espresso bar first, to fill a cup with coffee, greeting Liam.

  Liam grins widely at him. “Good morning!” he says, sounding genuinely cheerful. Kaz is nowhere in sight yet, but the other man is probably still sleeping.

  “Good morning,” Damien replies as he pours coffee into the cup for Melanie.

  He’s not looking forward to seeing Sebastian as he heads back to the kitchen. He and Sebastian have come to some sort of truce, but he doesn’t really want to risk the man’s teasing this morning after being caught last night. It’s unavoidable though, given that he always brings Melanie a croissant, and it would be weird to stop now.

  Sebastian merely smirks at him, though, his eyes twinkling with something mischievous as Damien grabs a fresh croissant off of a tray, placing it on a plate for Melanie. Damien smiles back in reply, feeling oddly happy about the interaction. Perhaps Sebastian really is just a quiet person, and not cold or stuck-up like Damien had assumed. He feels a little bad about thinking that the entire time they’ve lived together, but it seems like there was a misunderstanding on both sides, and neither of them bothered to correct it.

  He carefully balances the coffee cup and the plate with the croissant as he leaves the kitchen, and stands on his tiptoes so his keycard will trigger Melanie’s office door lock from his pocket. He’s performed this exact series of actions hundreds of times over the past few years and hasn’t thought twice about them, but everything feels different today.

  He no longer has any clients. Perhaps more specifically, he’s going to be dating a client.

  Melanie looks up from some paperwork and pushes her current coffee cup aside to accept the new one. She immediately grabs the croissant as well.

  “So?” she asks, and Damien thinks about how Sebastian thought she’d be able to tell that Ty came over yesterday. He thinks that the look she’s giving him is particularly knowing.

  “Um,” he says, not sure how to begin.

  “Damien,” she laughs, and she gestures to the chair across from her desk that he never uses. “Sit.”

  He does. He feels weirdly nervous about the whole situation.

  “I talked with Ty this morning,” she says, and Damien instantly sighs in relief. She laughs again.

  “You two are so predictable,” she says, and Damien’s not sure what she means by that, but he’s just glad Ty already explained the situation to her.

  “We’re –” Damien starts, and then finds himself looking down at his hands. We’re dating, sounds too official, even though that’s what’s actually happening. “Ty’s taking me out tomorrow. To sushi,” he says instead. “After closing, of course.”

  Melanie nods, looking amused. “You never take any time off, Damien,” she says. “You could, if you wanted.”

  Damien shakes his head, because that’s not exactly what he wants. He has this idea forming, but he can’t voice it yet. Maybe that he might need more than a vacation from his work at the café. “He’s my final client,” he says, and realizes that it sounds out of context, but Melanie shrugs.

  “That’s fine. You’re welcome to keep using your current room, or you can move to one of the studios upstairs, if you’d like,” she says. “You are still a very important member of the café.”

  Part of him wonders if she knows what he’s thinking, but she couldn’t possibly. She’s not a mind reader.

  “Thank you,” he says, because he still needs time to think about this other thing that’s bouncing around in his brain. “I’ll stay in my current room.”

  “That sounds good.” She smiles at him. “Congratulations,” she adds softly, and it’s incredibly sincere. He can’t help but smile back.

  He stands, reaching over to grab her old coffee cup out of habit before he turns to go.

  Damien tells Kaz about the date later that evening when they are closing up the shop for evening. Damien is flipping chairs up onto the table so Kaz can mop underneath them, and Liam’s in the back, helping Jake and Sebastian clean the kitchen.

  “Nice!” Kaz says, holding the mop in one hand and offering the other for a high five, and Damien laughs. It feels like a running joke at this point, so he smacks his palm against the other man’s.

  “A date, huh?” Kaz asks after a moment. “So I guess you really aren’t going to be taking clients anymore then?”

  Damien shakes his head. “
I haven’t really needed to, for a while,” he says.

  “So the debt’s all paid off. What next?” Kaz asks, sliding the mop across the floor. Damien moves back behind the espresso bar to tidy up there.

  “I’m not sure…” Damien hedges as he wipes down the espresso machine. He’s still turning over possibilities in his mind.

  Kaz gives him a curious look, but Damien really isn’t sure.

  Once, he had a set plan for his life. He ruthlessly pursued a goal, ignoring anything extraneous that could potentially distract him from that goal. But even that. It wasn’t enough. And when he realized that, he wondered what all of it had been for in the first place.

  He was never that interested in law. It was more a means to an end. Where approval was the end. And he always had to work two times, three times, four times harder than anyone else to try to gain that approval.

  Kaz waves him off. “You’ll figure it out, man. You don’t need a specific plan.”

  Damien shrugs. He feels a little adrift without a plan. For the past few years, he’s held onto the idea of paying off all of his debts and starting fresh, and now that’s he’s getting to this point, he’s finding it difficult to let go. First it was Ty, and now it’s the café itself.

  He looks around the café, watching Kaz work for a moment. He can’t rely on this place forever, he thinks, even as much as he’d like to. He thinks maybe this thing with Ty, maybe now that it’s not relying on some artificial scenario, maybe he can try something completely different.

  “All done!” Kaz says, and puts the mop back in the bucket, starting to wheel it back to the utilities closet near the kitchen.

  “I’ll put the chairs down later, after it dries,” Damien says, as Kaz passes.

  “Thanks!” Kaz flashes him a grin. “I’ll see if blondie and the other two need any help back there.”

  Damien nods, happy to be lost in his own thoughts again as Kaz goes back with the others.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ty picks Damien up from the café about a half hour after closing. Damien has traded his black work slacks for a pair of dark-wash jeans, but left the black button-up on, and Ty watches him leave the café with appreciation.

  Now that they’ve done away with the contract, Ty is going to court the fuck out of Damien, if that’s what it takes.

  But first… he needs to deal with that small detail. The corner of his mouth turns down briefly. Damien doesn’t know that he’s a wolf shifter. It just never made sense to bring it up in the context of their previous arrangement. He doesn’t think Damien knows. Melanie hasn’t told him at least. Although Damien could have easily found out from another shifter if he brought Ty’s name up. Ty is… Well, he’s a bit of a known quantity, so to speak.

  Ty turns the radio down as Damien opens the car door, sliding into the front seat, and Ty feels something warm crawl up into a ball in his chest at the sight. This is the first time they’ve been truly alone together and outside of the café.

  “Hey,” he says, and Damien smiles back at him, those pale green eyes dancing.

  “Hey yourself,” Damien says, and slips on his seatbelt. Ty’s not much of a conversationalist, but Damien starts talking about some of the customers he’d had at the café today, and the rhythm of his voice is soothing. Always the host, his Damien.

  He’s taking Damien out for sushi at a little place downtown where he knows the owners. The traffic’s a little slow at this time of day, but most people are trying to leave downtown rather than drive into it, so it doesn’t take too long. The sushi restaurant is a smaller, unassuming place, with only a few tables along with the sushi bar area where you can watch the chef prepare the fresh fish.

  The hostess leads them to one of the small tables, and hands them menus. Damien’s eyes light up when he sees the options.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve had sushi!” he says happily. Ty knows Eli took Damien out to a seafood place. Eli said that Damien had really enjoyed himself, and Ty had to tamp down his jealousy that Eli got to experience something like that with Damien first. Eli totally made fun of him for the reaction, but Ty has to admit that if not for Eli, Damien might not be having dinner with Ty tonight at all.

  “Order whatever you want,” Ty says. “My treat.”

  Damien smiles up at him, and it sends a shock right through Ty – this simple happiness without the hosting persona. This is what he’s been looking for, he thinks, inordinately pleased. Damien unmasked.

  A waitress stops by their table with glasses of water, and Ty asks for sake as well as Damien peruses the menu.

  When the waitress comes back with his sake, Ty orders a chirashi bowl, and Damien orders two sushi rolls. Ty could probably eat a lot more food, but he’ll wait to see how Damien’s doing and order more later.

  “Do you want some?” Ty asks, holding up the sake bottle. The waitress had brought him two small cups, but Damien shakes his head.

  “Not tonight,” he says, and Ty nods, pouring himself some. His metabolism is so high that alcohol rarely affects him unless he drinks a lot all at once, so he’s not worried about driving.

  “So, I don’t know anything about you,” Damien starts, after the waitress leaves. He sounds almost hesitant. “If we’re going to do this whole…” he pauses, looking uncertain. “Whatever this is…” he trails off.

  Ty leans back in his chair. Even though they’ve known each other for months now, they really don’t know each other outside of the bedroom. He nods, “Alright, what do you want to know?”

  Damien frowns, tearing at the paper wrapper around chopsticks that are already on the table before looking up at him again. “Well, for starters, what do you do for work? How do you know Melanie? That sort of thing…”

  Trust Damien to pick the two most sensitive topics and go straight in for the kill. Ty sits up again, taking a sip of sake, partially to buy time, and then sets the little cup down.

  “I’m a… business owner,” he says, finally, delicately. “You know,” waving a hand here. “Importing, exporting, stuff like that.”

  Damien raises an eyebrow at him, obviously catching on to the undertones. “So something illegal?”

  Ty gives him an incredulous look and lowers his voice. “You do realize this whole setup we have going here is entirely illegal?”

  Damien laughs, tilting his head back in a way that makes Ty want to bite his neck. When he looks back at Ty, his eyes are sparkling. “I suppose it is, isn’t it?”

  Brat. Ty shakes his head at him. “Anyways, I work with Melanie a lot, actually. We go way back.”

  Damien frowns again. “That’s not very specific,” he says, and Ty chuckles.

  “When you’re in the sort of business I’m in,” Ty says, taking a sip of his drink in between. “You end up trading favors with a lot of people. That’s the sort of thing we do. In fact, I originally thought you were a favor.”

  Damien’s eyes narrow at this, and Ty holds up a hand.

  “You weren’t,” he emphasizes, and then he lowers his voice to something more intimate. “She was just as surprised as I was to find me there, apparently.”

  Damien looks mollified at that, and Ty wonders, not for the first time, what Damien’s story is. It seems to hang between them sometimes. The question of why someone like Damien was working this sort of job. Why do any of the hosts work for Melanie?

  The waitress returns with their food though, beautifully laid out, as always, and the question is lost as Ty digs into his chirashi bowl.

  “You can ask, you know,” Damien says a little bit later, and he stuffs an entire piece of sushi roll into his mouth in a way that really shouldn’t be as erotic as Ty finds it. He just can’t get enough of this man, he thinks, as he watches him eat.

  He shakes his head, trying to remember their previous line of discussion. “About you?” Ty says, and Damien nods. He swirls his chopsticks in some eel sauce that’s on the platter, and then licks it off of the chopsticks.

  Ty has to drag his gaz
e back to Damien’s eyes, only to find them laughing at him. Perhaps the brat knows what he’s doing after all.

  “You’re too easy, you know,” Damien says softly, and Ty nearly chokes at that.

  “Am I?” he growls, and he’d really like to show Damien just how easy he isn’t. But this really isn’t the time or place for that.

  Damien smiles at him, something bright and happy and fully open, and Ty loves it. He doesn’t want to ask about Damien’s past right now. He shrugs.

  “You can tell me if you’re comfortable with it,” he says. “But no pressure.”

  Damien nods, looking back down at the now nearly empty platter of sushi.

  “It’s not that exciting,” he says, sighing. “Just some debt. From law school. In Seattle.”

  The words are clipped in a way that makes Ty think there’s more of a story there than Damien’s telling, but he doesn’t press. “Law school?” he asks, though, because that part is surprising.

  Damien laughs. “Couldn’t you tell I’m more than just a pretty face?” he asks, practically batting his eyelashes at Ty.

  And Ty could, is the thing. Damien has always seemed to be way too smart for his own good. Even on that very first night, Ty saw it in him. Something lying in wait, just beneath the surface. But law school?

  “It’s not that, brat,” Ty says, and he shrugs. “You just don’t seem like the type that would be happy in that environment.”

  Damien looks surprised at the statement, and sets his chopsticks down. “How so?” he asks, and he doesn’t look offended yet so Ty continues.

  “I dunno. I guess we’re still getting to know each other, but it seems like that sort of thing would drag you down. You’d do better in my line of work, if I’m honest.” Ty takes a sip of sake, waiting for Damien’s reply. Damien inclines his head.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, I’ve decided,” Damien says, teasing, and Ty chuckles.

  “It is one,” he says, and he sets the sake cup down. He enjoys the taste along with his sushi even if he doesn’t get any of the other effects. Which reminds him of his promise to Melanie. If they’re going to try this for real... he has to tell Damien. He doesn’t want to fuck things up again, just because he left this part out. He frowns, and Damien notices, giving him a concerned glance.