by Talya Andor
"Becky," Soren said, leaning against the stainless steel counter. "You know something's up, don't you?"
"Honestly?" Becky braced her hands against the cash register. "This is the first I've heard of it, so it's pretty useless to ask me questions. You know I don't really get involved in store politics. Me, I just like to do my job and go home. I've got enough to worry about in my life."
"That's the way I thought it was for me too," Soren muttered, but he turned his back to check on the levels of espresso as he said it. There was no point in getting Becky upset.
The expression on Aaron's face as he'd strode back behind the counter had been confident and self-assured. What had Aaron said or done to cause an inquiry like the one that Danice and Michelle had called Soren back for the other day? Whatever it was, Soren had the feeling it involved Lucas as much as him…he'd always thought he was beneath Aaron's notice, before. Now that he was dating Lucas…
Now that he was dating Lucas…
Wait, did Aaron know he was with Lucas now?
Aaron made a reappearance not long after Teri had gone back for her break.
For a long, tense moment Soren tried not to look, but couldn't help himself. When he did, Aaron paused, smirked at him, and left the flap of the service island swinging behind him. He whistled along to the jaunty jazz tune playing over the store speakers, and in the next instant he was at the front door and gone.
Soren tried to piece together the fragments of what he knew, or suspected. It wasn't any good. He'd have to puzzle it over with Lucas, who as a shift supervisor surely knew the motives and machinations of Aaron better than he'd ever care to.
The next surprise appearance was Ray, a tall handsome black man who'd been a shift supervisor at the store for longer than Soren had been working there. Soren was a little shocked to see him. Ray was irreproachable if anyone was. Soren didn't often have an opportunity to work with Ray, because they were usually scheduled differently, but he knew from the times they had worked together that he was briskly efficient, a competent leader on the floor, and soft-spoken.
This morning his dark brows were slanted down in an angry expression and his full mouth was taut.
Soren glanced over at Becky, who arched her brows and said nothing.
With Teri's return, Becky retreated to the back to do a load of dishes and tidy up some odds and ends of store maintenance between busy streaks. Soren lingered behind the bar, and after a moment he began to clean out the brown-rimmed shot glasses with hot water, not avoiding Teri's eyes so much as keeping his hands occupied.
He didn't want to think. Moreover, he was now too worked up to return to the pleasant daydreams that had gripped him before.
It wasn't long before Ray returned to the front, looking angrier than he had before. If they'd asked questions anything like the ones put to Soren on Wednesday, he felt a pang of sympathy for Ray.
"Ray?" Soren asked softly as Ray paused on the black mats that lined the service island, looking more stunned now than angry.
"Look," Ray said roughly, "I ain't saying anything, but someone's going down. And if management in their infinite wisdom decides it has to be me…well, I've always liked working with you kids."
Teri laughed. "Don't be so melodramatic, Ray," she said in her laid-back way, leaning against the back counter and crossing her arms.
"Ha, I wish…" Ray sobered and gave Soren an intent look. "Good luck, kid."
Then he was gone.
Soren stood behind the bar with a renewed sick burn of anxiety crawling up his belly. Now that…that had been a warning, and he was scared.
What was he supposed to do about it if his conscience was clean?
For one maddening moment, he thought of Lucas and the prospect that Lucas might not be so clean, then shook his head, gripping one of the espresso bar's porta-filters so tightly his knuckles were white. He knew Lucas. He wouldn't risk his job for something stupid.
Aaron was the one who spent more time in the back than he ought. Aaron, whom they'd thought had been reading up on his American classics all this time.
"Hey." Teri's soft voice reached him, and Soren looked up. "You okay?"
Soren pulled together something resembling a smile. "Busy morning."
"Ain't that the truth," Teri said with a smile. Whatever went on behind the scenes, she was either oblivious to it, or incurious.
Before, it had reassured Soren that he wasn't the only person to be questioned. Now, it scared him a little that he seemed to be the only non-supervisor who had been called back.
Danice appeared at the back door with a full bin of clean dishes.
"Hey, where's Becky?" Teri asked, pushing away from the low counter, her arms still folded. "And what're you doing here this morning?"
Danice's eyes flicked to her. "Don't worry about it, Teri," she said, beginning to stock the dishes away with an understated rattle and clink.
"Ray looked—" Teri stopped when Danice turned to face her, giving her a formidable look of her own. "Uh, upset."
"It's a little something that Michelle and I are looking into. I suggest you tend to your register and don't pay it another moment's notice."
Teri gulped and stepped up to her register, although the only customers in the store were a couple of men sipping coffee and sifting through the leaves of a newspaper. "Right, sorry."
Danice's expression softened, but she turned back to her dishes without another word.
If it was that bad, Soren thought, watching her from the corner of his eye, then why hadn't they suspended someone yet? Then it dawned on him that they really didn't have the staff to do that until they knew who the culprit was, especially if it involved a shift supervisor.
Soren took Danice's advice and turned his attention on cleaning the espresso bar, as little as it needed that so early in the morning.
Once Danice was done unloading the dishes, she disappeared into the back again without a word.
When Becky returned, she wore an inscrutable expression, invading Soren's space at the bar and tagging him on the shoulder. "Go ahead and take your lunch break," she told him, wearing a bland smile that increased his sense of foreboding.
"Becky…"
"I can't talk about it, Soren, you know that. But if you haven't done anything, then you don't have anything to worry about."
Soren gave her a nod that must have been as unconvincing to her as it was to him, and retreated to the back. He had to go to punch out on the time clock, otherwise he would've been perfectly happy to avoid Michelle and Danice all morning.
Danice poked her head through the partially-open door to the back. "Soren, can you come back here for a moment?"
Soren dragged his feet, making it to the furthest reaches of the store with a kind of panic simmering in his belly. If Ray, one of the nicest, most honest guys Soren knew, could come out of the back looking so angry, what kind of questions were they asking now?
As it had been the time before, an open chair awaited Soren across from Michelle. Danice was already seated beside it. Again, Michelle had a clipboard in her hands and her eyebrows were furrowed together. She looked like a tired, angry mother.
She looked up and her expression cleared for a moment. "Sit down, please, Soren," she said quietly.
Soren pulled his apron off, sliding onto the indicated seat with all the ginger attitude of someone handling explosives. "Am I…" His voice cracked, and he cursed mentally. "Am I being disciplined?"
Michelle looked at him steadily. "I'm pursuing a couple of lines of investigation. No one is being disciplined at this point."
"All right," Soren said uneasily, feeling as if he still weren't off the hook. He knew that his cash-handling habits weren't as steady as some. In the days when he used to count out his till in the store at Eugene, he'd always been baffled when his till had come up inexplicably short by dollars, a handful of change, nothing simple and explainable like a round twenty that could have been slipped into the wrong drawer.
"Has anyone i
n the store given you the combination to the safe?" Michelle said, her clipboard poised on her lap.
"For maybe completely innocent reasons," Danice said. "For convenience, to have you go open the safe while they're busy doing something else, for example."
Soren stared. "No," he said, gathering indignation around him like a cloud. "No, and I wouldn't have let them tell me if they'd wanted to." Was that what was going on?
Becky was right: he'd done nothing, and he had nothing to worry about.
"All right." Michelle nodded and made a notation on her clipboard. When she looked up again, her eyes were piercing. "Is it true that you're now dating Lucas Daye?"
"L-Lucas?" So much for being discreet. "Yes," he managed, and swallowed.
Danice shifted beside him and re-crossed her legs.
Michelle made a note of that too. "How long?"
That made Soren angry. He straightened on his chair. "A few months," he said, meeting her eyes with composure. Would his word even matter, anymore? It seemed someone had done a good job of setting him, or Lucas, up for a fall.
Now he had a better idea of what was going on, and he didn't like it one bit.
"All right." Michelle her clipboard aside with a heavy sigh. "All right. Look, Soren…this is a confidential subject, understood? We need to figure out what's going on before we act in haste."
"I understand," Soren said, resisting the urge to fidget.
Michelle looked up at him, her dark eyes shadowed and adamant. "Not anyone, Soren."
"I got it," Soren said, fighting a clench of anger again, knowing exactly what she meant by that. They didn't want him tattling to his boyfriend.
Becky had been wrong. It might not matter a damn if he was innocent.
*~*~*
Lucas had installed himself on the most comfortable couch in the rec room of his empty apartment and he'd been staring at his laptop's screensaver for nearly an hour. The relentless focus that had buoyed him up last night through three assignments was gone, and he found himself reliving the events of the night before, and thinking of Soren, and something churned in his gut.
Can you be serious about anyone?
Truth was, he didn't know.
Love whom you willed. Lucas had learned that much and almost too late. That was one thing.
Believing in commitment, any kind of lasting commitment, was harder.
Lucas shifted restlessly on the sofa, giving his assignments up for lost and shutting his laptop. Normally he would be reveling in having a morning to himself, empty apartment, no commitments until eleven-thirty. Now when he woke up, the bed was empty, not roomy.
He was tangled up inside. What Kerri had said…it was true. Of the two people he'd ever loved, or thought he had, in the end something always changed.
How was he supposed to know what was right this time around?
Could he be serious? He didn't know.
He'd never had a great example as far as commitment went. When he was very young, his father had divorced his mother. Ever since, he'd seen evidence all around him that love changed, faded, and wasn't necessarily for keeps. He'd seen it in the relationships around him, and in his own.
Lucas had been in love exactly twice.
His first girlfriend, Shari, had been his first love in that part of his life he now thought of as 'young and stupider.' He had dated her, begun having sex with her, and couldn't quite pinpoint during the post-mortem exactly when he had begun calling it love. Near the end of the relationship she'd revealed she had picked him out because he was the best-looking guy in their class and everyone knew it. In the end, Lucas had blamed the break-up on the fact that his father had uprooted him from Illinois and moved the Dayes to Oregon, but Lucas knew now that the truth had been more complex. Years later he still couldn't sort through the cross-hatched impressions his relationship with Shari had left on him.
And Stephen had been a shock to his system and, for a while, a welcome one. They had begun having sex before ever calling it a relationship, and Lucas had finally settled on something he could call himself. Bisexual.
Lucas sat up and contemplated food. There was only so long he could go on thinking about the past and how it all tied in with the present. Still, it was early and there wasn't much in the cupboard. He decided he'd be better off grabbing something at the Cove on campus before class and scarfing it on the way to the building.
All he knew right now was that he wanted to be with Soren. Was it enough? Would it change? He shook his head. That didn't matter right now.
He was serious about Soren. That was the one thing he knew to be true. As for how far it went…who said that had to be decided now?
And if Kerri didn't like it, that was her problem. She had been a rebound relationship in a series of bad choices dating from the day of Stephen's departure. He enjoyed women's bodies, but right now the only set of pants he was interested in getting into were Soren's.
A lazy smile took hold of Lucas's mouth as he contemplated that eventuality. Anal sex was the one thing he hadn't pushed for, though he wanted it and he knew it had crossed Soren's mind too. He wanted Soren to become comfortable with his own body and Lucas's, first. That was an area where he was progressing quite well for someone who'd been virginal until a short time ago, but Lucas supposed that some things were instinctive.
It helped, Lucas knew, that Soren could extrapolate what might please Lucas from intimate knowledge of his own pleasure. In touching him that way, Soren's touch was confident and coaxing.
Knowing Soren beforehand, then meeting him in that blind date scenario, might have been the one thing he'd done right—though it had seemed all wrong at the time.
Soren was the first person he'd actually known for any length of time before he began dating him. Even if it wasn't a conventional sense of knowing, they'd grown close enough to consider one another friends before ever meeting in person.
Lucas's frown disappeared as he set out to get himself ready to hit campus. "I'll give it a chance," he said aloud, voice low though he knew he was the only person in the apartment. He refused to say forever, but 'as long as I can…' That was something he could handle.
Lucas realized, rehashing his own arguments and internal discord, that those were the kinds of thoughts he would not usually divulge to anyone. No one, perhaps, but Dawntreader…the online friend who'd become close enough to him that Lucas wanted, at length, to become even closer.
He'd gotten to know many people online, but Dawntreader had been the one he felt he could talk about anything, more or less, and not be misunderstood.
"Don't forget," Lucas's investments professor said over the rising din of students packing away their class materials. "That assignment's due on Monday and I expect to see good work."
A groan went up from the class, and their professor gave them an ironic smile before lifting his hand in a motion of dismissal. "Get out of here, kids, and enjoy your weekend."
Lucas scanned over the class as he rose from his seat, checking for any acquaintances he could drag off to have lunch with him. He had a break in between classes and he wanted his dose of Soren as antidote for the previous night but had no means of getting a fix, and he was mortally certain that if he went home before his last class he'd never come back to campus.
He shouldered his bag and left the building, groping around for his cell phone to check for messages. As he flicked his phone on, scanning for anything from Soren, he recalled with disappointment that Soren would still be at work. There was a message waiting for him, though, and Lucas looked at the number and was terribly tempted to shut his phone off for a long moment. Instead he stuffed his phone in his pocket like tempting fate, daring them to call him again.
Irene had called, and now he wasn't sure what shape his afternoon would take. It was rare to get a call from his stepmother on any given day. From the moment Jonathan Daye had married blonde, ice-cold Irene, Lucas and his step-mother had been on civil terms but nothing more.
After a moment's debate, L
ucas squared his shoulders and sought out a quiet nook on campus. He checked his cell phone's reception and decided better sooner than later, because he had plans with Soren later. "Curse the luck," he muttered, when he got four bars. So with more curiosity than trepidation, he dialed Irene back.
Given the hour, she was likely in the kitchen with a drink, immersed in dinner preparation while Jonathan Daye was still at the office. Lucas weighed the phone in his hand as it rang, then held it to his ear when the click let him know the line had picked up. The timing of this call was suspicious.
"Hello?" It was Irene's aloof voice.
"It's Lucas."
"Ah, good. How are you?"
"I'm all right. What's going on?" Unlike with his father, he wasn't quite up to the point of being curt enough to demand why she'd called.
"Nothing in particular," she said, and he could hear the steady chop-chop from her side of the phone that meant she was in the middle of dinner preparations. "We're going to be in Portland this next weekend."
"We?"
Pause. "Didn't your father tell you?" Lucas could picture the disdainfully surprised look on her elegant features. "Your father is coming for business, and I'll be picking up a few cases of wine at a few Willamette Valley wineries."
"No…yes…" Lucas swept his hair out of his face with his free hand. "He mentioned he would be in, but…"
"We'll both be in." Irene sniffed. "Well, it's like your father not to get down to details. And you don't make it any easier on him, you know."
"Whatever," Lucas said with a shrug.
"I was calling to tell you to place reservations for us, for next Friday and again on Saturday night."
Lucas shouldered his bag. This wasn't going to be any big deal, after all, and he was hungry. "Not a problem. You trust me to pick the places?"
"I trust you to display good taste." He heard the crystalline sibilance of a wine glass leaving the counter.
Lucas's mouth worked. "Right. I'm sure Wildwood will do for Friday, then. The Heathman on Saturday."
"You know your father's preferences." Lucas could all but see her shrug.
Preferences. Right. Almost, he thought he could say something. It was so soon. But then… Can you be serious about anyone?