by TJ Klune
Gus did not laugh or squeak.
“So, Gus,” Casey said, “Tell me more about yourself.”
“Why?” Gus asked, already suspicious. He thought it possible that Casey was a spy sent by a bigger video rental corporation, but then reminded himself that they were all pretty much out of business. Gus then decided he probably worked for some shady land developer and was trying to get an in with Gus to convince him to sell his properties so they could be torn down and made into a parking garage for people with BMWs and no souls.
“Because that’s what new friends do,” Casey said. “They learn about each other so they can grow as people both together and apart.”
“I like that,” Gus said. “Let’s grow apart.”
Casey laughed. “You’re funny. Ooh, organic yogurt. Gus, you said they didn’t have organic anything.” He stopped in front of the cooler and started plucking flavors at random.
“I didn’t know they did,” Gus said. “People here don’t buy that crap.”
“Sure,” Casey said. “Crap. It’s from the earth. It’s why it’s organic. You know, modern processing puts in so many chemicals into the products we use. I don’t want that shit in my body. It’s why I like weed, man. It grows. If it grows, the body knows.”
“Oh look,” Gus said. “I think I hear slow jazz being played outside. You should go listen.”
Casey stopped, cocking his head. “I don’t hear any—” He grinned as his eyes widened. “I see what you did there. Man, you’re good.”
“It’s not that hard to pull one over on someone when they’re stoned,” Gus said.
“Nah, man. I’m not stoned today. Woke up with the muse caressing my face and whispering in my ear. I put it to good use. Plus it’s Sunday, ya know? God and Jesus and shit.”
“Yes,” Gus said. “I’m sure God and Jesus are happy you didn’t smoke weed on this the most holy of days.” Then, before he could stop himself, “Muse?”
Casey glanced at him, teeth flashing. “Yeah.”
And said nothing more.
Now, Gus should have let it end there. He should have. He normally would have. There was no reason for this conversation to continue. He came to get his TV dinners, his two-ply toilet paper, and maybe, if he was feeling really frisky, a package of beef jerky he could have as a dessert after dinner. And his string cheese. He needed it now like air.
However, the inspirational calendar had forced Gus to say hello the day prior, and a million things were happening, and Gus couldn’t stop his mouth from opening and saying, “You paint or something?” It came out aloof and sounding bored, but it was still a follow-up question.
Gustavo Tiberius rarely asked follow-up questions.
And never to hipsters. It was one of the unspoken rules.
“I’m a writer,” Casey said easily.
Gus stopped. “What.”
Casey stopped too, leaning his elbows down on the handle of the cart. “I write.”
That… that did not compute. “You what.”
Casey shrugged. “I write. Words. I am a wordsmith. Wordslinger. I have ideas that fill up pages and create worlds that blossom young minds into—”
Gus suddenly understood. It made much more sense. He felt sort of relieved that the world had a working order to it. “Oh,” he said. “So, like, you write poetry about misogyny and racism in corporate America and perform it live in smoky coffee bars while snapping but achingly wishing you were writing Pablo Neruda romance instead. Got it.”
Casey threw back his head and laughed. Gus did not track the long lines of his neck, did not feel his heart thump a bit strangely when the Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and most certainly did not feel the urge to stare in awe.
Gus was not prepared to not feel anything like that at all.
“Oh, Gus,” Casey said, wiping his eyes. “You are a delight. I am delighted by you.”
Gus grimaced. “That should not be a word used to describe me.”
“Ah,” Casey said. “But I’m a writer. Words are what I do. And no, I’m not some bohemian rhapsody that you have going on in your head. Pablo Neruda, though. I like that shit.”
Gus scowled. “Then what do you write?”
“Why, Gus,” Casey said, leaning a bit closer. “Are you trying to learn about me? So we can grow together?”
And yes, that is exactly what Gus was doing, but he wasn’t doing it of his own volition. He didn’t even know why he was asking. He was certain then that the supernatural existed, because the only way this conversation could have occurred was if Gus had been placed under some kind of spell. He glared at Casey and hissed, “Witch!” Because really! “Come along, Harry S. Truman,” he said. “We have shopping to finish.”
But of course, Harry S. Truman decided he would rather be a jerk and lay flat on his stomach, not wanting to walk. Gus was not above dragging him through the store, but he did not want to be seen as an irresponsible ferret owner in front of a hipster poet, lest he be the subject of Casey’s next poetry slam:
I’ve SEEN
(*dramatic pause*)
Men of my generation
Pretending love and making war
(*pause for raucous applause*)
All the WHILE
Sweet sweet mustard gas child
Dragging ferrets through the store
So he stood there.
And so did Casey.
Harry S. Truman did not stand. He lay flopped on the floor as if all his bones had mysteriously disappeared.
Gus started to sweat.
Casey grinned.
Gus said, “I don’t read books, I read encyclopedias,” and desperately wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “There’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people do that.”
Casey said, “Cool, man. Knowledge is power. Hey, question. How do you get all those movies to your store? They probably don’t have distribution centers for that stuff anymore.”
Gus said, “I go to the mall in Glide and buy them and then put them out to rent.”
Casey said, “That’s great. Epic. Right? Okay. That’s so weird. You do that? Wow. I don’t—”
Gus said, “Once a month. I go on a buying spree,” and then felt ridiculous for saying buying spree, what the hell. “I mean, I just. What were we—”
Casey said, “Oh crap. You’re blushing. Why are you blushing? That’s so unfair. I can’t even—”
Gus said, “I’m not. I’m feeling overheated. The air conditioning must be broken. I’m not blushing and everything is fine. I don’t blush.”
Casey said, “I write books. Novels. Like, full-on books about stuff. And things. Crazy things.”
Gus said. “Oh. I only read encyclopedias, so.”
Casey said, “Yeah. Yeah. Sure. That’s cool, man. Gotta do what you do. Do you like curry?”
Gus said, “No. It’s awful. I hate the way it tastes. Did you really move here?”
Casey said, “No curry, got it. That’s okay. Yeah. Live with Lottie for a while. Clearing my head. Finding my mojo. It’s working. I think it’s working. Being here is working.”
And not once did they break eye contact.
Eventually, Gus left, dragging Harry S. Truman behind him.
If he spent the rest of the day in a dumbfounded fog, well.
No one was there to see it.
Chapter 7
“TODAY IS going to be an okay day,” Gus told the ceiling the next morning, because it had to be. It had to be okay, because if it wasn’t, Gus didn’t know what he would do. He might literally go out of his fucking mind. He thought how only a week ago everything had been fine. He didn’t even know what it was now. It made him anxious. Gus hated feeling anxious. He also hated warm ketchup, loud people, sunburns, parallel parking, jams and jellies, Instagram, Sarah McLachlan’s SPCA commercials, rubber glue, Michael Bay’s DVD commentaries, Michael Bay’s films, Michael Bay, and that weird feeling that tattooed, bearded hipsters caused in the pit of his stomach that felt like he had tripped down a fl
ight of stairs into a frozen lake that got lit on fire.
He did his exercises. He told himself that he threw in an extra fifty push-ups because it helped him to clear his head. It had absolutely nothing to do with anyone who worked at Lottie’s Lattes and how they might enjoy Gus if his arms looked a bit stronger because that was just ridiculous.
He was sweating by the time he stood. Because everything was fine and it was going to be an okay day, he grumbled when he tore off yesterday’s inspirational message to see today’s. It was what he normally did, and even if he was anxious, he was going to keep up appearances. He was going to handle this the same way he handled everything else: with a scowl and a glower and eventually, it would go away and he would be just fine. He was not a fucking ray of sunshine and he liked it that way.
He looked down to read the inspirational message for his Monday morning.
Let today be the day when you release your inner sunshine for all the world to see.
“Oh come on!” Gus shouted. “Why are you mocking me?”
The inspirational calendar just sat there.
Gus stomped out of his room.
And he most certainly did not spend an extra three minutes in front of the mirror that morning making sure his hair looked okay because that would be just fucking stupid.
GUS STOOD outside his house, Harry S. Truman stowed away in his carrier, glaring at the door to Lottie’s Lattes across the street. Between the extra workout he did, the angry shower he took, and the time he did not spend in front of the mirror, he was running a bit behind today. Glowering at a coffee shop was not helping the situation.
“Just do it,” he said aloud. “Just walk across the street. Get your coffee. Go to work. It’s fine. It’s okay.”
He told himself his hands were slightly sweaty because it was awfully humid this morning.
He told himself his heart was thumping erratically in his chest because his family had history of arrhythmia, and he should see a cardiologist in the near future.
“It’s just coffee,” he said. “You do this every day. Except for Sundays. Because Sundays are when you go to the grocery store and get stalked by hipsters who write books with protagonists that are probably Holden Caulfield rip-offs that are trying to be existentially deep but are in actuality vapid twentysomethings who don’t contribute anything of value to the literary world.”
He felt a bit better after that.
He stood tall, squaring his shoulders.
His head was held high.
He marched across the street.
He entered Lottie’s Lattes because he was Gustavo Tiberius and he had a goddamn video rental store to open and he needed his coffee.
The bell rang overhead.
He opened his mouth to order (nay, demand) his black coffee and no, he did not want a muffin, thank you very much, he just wanted his coffee, and he would be on his way, that was fine and he.
Just.
Stopped.
Because life… life was completely unfair.
Casey was standing off to the left, at the front window of the shop, wiping against the glass with a paper towel, a bottle of Windex at his feet. His hair was pulled back again, artfully messy, but it was what he was wearing that caused Gus’s throat to constrict involuntarily. Deep red skinny jeans that clung to his hips. A thin white tank top, leaving his arms exposed. And he was stretching up, standing on the tips of his toes to wipe down the top of the glass, and there was more skin, a thin strip of tanned skin above the waist of his jeans. There was hair on his navel, trailing down, growing darker as it disappeared into his pants.
And Gus.
Well.
Gus just stood there.
Staring.
Because for some reason, he couldn’t not.
Casey finally looked over at him, a slightly glazed smile on his face. He said, “Hey, Gus. Glad you finally stopped glaring at the store and came in.”
Gus did what he did best when called out on the truthfulness of his actions.
He sputtered.
“What? I never—it wasn’t like that and—I just was standing there to—don’t even try to—I don’t glare I—”
When Gus got a good sputter going on, when he was really embarrassed, it could last upward of a minute.
This was a good sputter.
A very good sputter.
Casey, for what it was worth, just smiled at him and waited, eyes half-lidded and slightly bloodshot because it was wake and bake and he helped. He leaned against the freshly cleaned window, arms crossed over his chest, and Gus did everything he could to avoid looking at the chest hair that peeked out over the tank top because he was not emotionally equipped to deal with it at the present time.
Eventually, Gus stopped sputtering.
It just sort of… trailed off.
“Hey, man,” Casey said when he fell silent. “Ain’t no skin off my back. Do you not like the architecture or something?”
Gus didn’t really know what to do with that. “The architecture?” He sounded slightly aghast.
“The shape,” Casey said, fluttering a single hand around to indicate the shop. “The design. I thought you were glaring at the building because you didn’t like the way it looked. I don’t blame you. It’s so… square. Like. Square.”
“It’s a building,” Gus said, wondering how he had so quickly lost control of this conversation when all he wanted was coffee. “It’s supposed to be square.”
“Nah,” Casey said. “Not all buildings are square. There are the pyramids and that opera house in Australia and the Eiffel Tower and those houses in hills they have in New Zealand that you can go into on Hobbit tours. Those are circles. Or spheres.” He paused, face scrunching briefly. “Or domes.”
“What is even happening right now?” Gus asked.
“I don’t know,” Casey said, fingers scratching at his beard unfairly. “I was just happy to see you stopped being mad about the building and came over.”
“I wasn’t mad about—wait. Were you watching me?”
Casey shrugged. “S’washing windows, man, and there you were. Gustavo Tiberius, ready to go to battle against the building. You had your grr face going.”
“My what now?” Gus asked, sure his eyebrows were almost at his hairline.
“Your grr face,” Casey said. “You know. Grr.” He bared his teeth in what Gus assumed was supposed to be an approximation of his scowl.
And Gus was offended.
“I don’t have a grr face,” Gus retorted. “I don’t have any kind of face.” He tried not to think how petulant that sounded, but it wasn’t his fault. Casey was wearing a tank top.
“You have a nice face,” Casey said.
“What?” Gus squeaked.
Now, Gus wasn’t normally an anxious person, not really. He had a perfectly ordered world where everything had its place and everything was part of his routine. He did not deviate from said routine because that way lay madness.
The last few days, though, had been a strange sort of amalgam of events that did not occur to one such as him. He was flip phones and encyclopedias before bedtime. Beef jerky as a special dessert and having every day be an okay day.
It was all Casey’s fault. All of it.
Which explained why, when Lottie spoke from behind them, Gus let out a strangled sort of scream.
“Wow,” Lottie said, almost causing Gus to drop Harry S. Truman with how much he jumped. She affected a horrible French accent and said rather breathily, “La passion est incroyable.”
He had finished screaming by the time her terrible French ended, so he was able to catch the gist of it and he immediately made plans to find out if hexes were real so he could put one on Lottie Richards. But since one did not inform a party as to an impending hex, he instead chose to scowl at everyone standing in the shop, a look that was immediately ignored.
“Did I scare you?” she asked mildly and Gus decided it would be a bad hex.
“No!” Gus said. “Not at all. Not e
ven a little bit. I was just testing the acoustics in here. They were terrible.”
“Uh-huh,” Lottie said. “So, what did you learn today?”
“Learn?” Casey asked, and Gus did not shiver slightly when the stoned hipster brushed by him, bare arm touching Gus even though there was plenty of room to avoid such an action.
“The We Three Queens bought Gus an inspirational message calendar for Christmas,” Lottie explained. Like a jerk. “They thought he could use some uplifting sentiments on a daily basis. To make sure he reads them, we have to ask him every day what the messages are.”
“Huh,” Casey said. “Makes sense.”
“How does that make sense?” Gus asked incredulously.
Casey looked confused. “It’s a calendar with quotes. It’s not that hard. Do you need help with it?”
“Oh my god,” Gus said. “No, I don’t need help reading a calendar.”
“Oh,” Casey said, sounding strangely disappointed. “Well, what did it say?”
He didn’t really understand the question, because Casey’s tank top had billowed out slightly under the arms and Gus saw a nipple and everything misfired in his head all at once.
“Uhhh,” Gus said rather poetically.
“Gus?” Lottie asked.
“Uhhh,” Gus said, sounding less poetic.
“He was glaring at the building earlier,” Casey said to Lottie. “I don’t think he likes the shape of it. He has a thing against squares. I don’t even know.”
And that snapped him out of his nipple-induced haze. “I have to release my inner sunshine all over the world!” Gus cried. And holy shit, the acoustics.
Lottie and Casey stared at him.
“Was today’s message,” Gus said, thinking now would be a perfect time to see if he could be a long-distance runner.
Casey’s lips twitched. “Um. You have to what?” Those eye crinkles were back.
“Release his inner sunshine,” Lottie said, obviously struggling not to laugh. “All over the world.”
“Wow, man,” Casey said. “That’s truly inspirational.”
Gus eyed him warily.