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"Guess what?"
He doesn't get time to guess. Because one moment he's standing there, gauging the liquor shelf behind the bar and trying to decide if it’s a Whiskey night or a Martini night while the Post is still empty. And the next, there's a pair of arms clamping down around him, trapping him, holding him in a tight grip. Which leaves him acutely aware of the position of every single weapon on his body and how long exactly it would take him to reach for each one and shoot or stab or strangle his assailant respectively.
He's also acutely aware of the smell of Candy's perfume. (the one that Blaine refers to as 'horny flower shop' in the privacy of his mind. He'd also called it that out loud one time and Candy had stepped on his foot with her heel. 'On accident'. With the way things are on this unbearable planet, it probably has a name like 'Dark Silk Seduction' or something) Dark Silk Flowershop is paired with some curves he intimately knows not to be Candy's.
"I'm guessing you're on no-boundaries-brain."
Don E cackles at that - too loud and too close to his ear and the tips of his fingers are digging into Blaine's chest and he can feel him laugh - because everything is either brilliantly hilarious and exciting in his weird little world or brain-deadeningly dull. There is little middle ground. Don E is warm, too. His arms around Blaine. Unnaturally warm - which is to say, perfectly naturally warm. Humanly warm. Alively warm.
"Brain's fine, man."
Apparently, they had at some point crossed some sort of event horizon where this kind of thing had started to appear acceptable in Don-E-World (actually, there seem to be very few taboos over there). Maybe Blaine should have put his foot down earlier. Put a stop to all the shoulder-clasping and back-patting that must have led them here.
"You sure?"
"Guess."
It's not hard to guess. So he bites the bullet and feeds Don E's excitement. See if he can snuff it sooner rather than later.
"You're warm."
Don E drum-rolls his hands against his sides in excitement. “Now you got it!”
It’s the undead equivalent of when you were thirteen and it was freezing outside and you ran inside the warm classroom just to sneak up on some poor kid and push your shivering, red fingers into their neck. Just to show them how cold you were. Except now it’s always cold. They are always cold.
“It's hard to miss.” Like being hugged by a toaster oven. Hard to believe that he’s ever been that warm himself. That any of them had been. Even Don's breath is warm against Blaine’s neck. “Why d’you smell like Candy?”
“She’s got a heated blanket and we-”
“Those things that keep setting old ladies on fire?”
“Those were the 80s, Blaine. Now, they got this safety mechanism. And it’s really toasty.”
“You're like...reheated meat or something.”
“It just feels nice. It goes all the way down to your bones…”
“...like roadkill baking in the sun. You're a possum.”
To make all things worse, Don E puts his chin on his shoulder. Blaine can feel his jawbone move when he talks. “You’re just jealous.”
Jealous of-
“Jealous of what?”
“Y’know, I think of getting one myself. They don’t tell you how much you’re gonna miss that: Being warm.” Don E has the nerve to sigh wistfully. It’s a bad look on him, pretending like he’s got the necessary depth for wistfulness, Blaine thinks.
“So!” The weight of Don E’s head disappears from his shoulder - but he slaps his shoulder one last time. For good measure. And further substantiating the link between unchecked casual touch and this excitable little ambush.
Actually, Blaine could see his face, he notices. In the mirror behind the bar. Slightly distorted through a bottle of London Dry. And he's perfectly beatific again, too. “What d’you think?”
“I’m thinking we should get you a giant microwave. Give you a spin and see what happens.”
Judging by Don E’s laugh, Blaine has just accomplished the height of comedy. As he laughs, even his breath feels warm against Blaine’s neck.
He really doesn’t want to know how long Candy and him had spent rolling around under that blanket. It’s not natural, to be that warm. Not as a zombie. But apparently, for some people, it’s somewhere up there with utopium and LSD levels of novelty and excitement.
“You’re makin’ drinks?”
“I was making a drink.”
His arms fall away from Blaine’s side. The last thing Blaine can feel is Don E's shrug before he takes a step away. “Right on. I think I’m getting a beer.”
His ridiculous, passive warmth is already seeping out of Blaine. Because now he feels cold. Especially with Don E opening the fridge under the bar, rolling bottles this way and that. (And it’s not like Blaine doesn’t know it is cold at the Post. Ever so often, human patrons walk up to him, high and mighty or reluctant and apologetic, asking him to dial up the thermostat. And every time he tells them to bring a jacket next time. Because heating costs money and most of his customers are just as warm or cold as any room they walk into. So if they don't like it, they can go to Le Dome because there's a queue of actual zombies waiting outside who bring better business.
But now, with Don E having finally dislodged himself from around Blaine, he cannot help but notice the chill himself. So he crosses his arms in front of his chest. Which doesn’t do much good because his own arms are as cold as the rest of him, but something about the weight and the pressure equals an illusion of warmth. And of something else.
They’re like reptiles now. The inside same as the outside.
He still keeps his arms in front of his chest and he’s still looking at the shelf, still deciding what to drink. There is a hiss behind him - followed by the clatter of a bottle cap skittering across the counter.
“You want one, or...?" His jacket smells like Candy, too, now. And standing here, behind the bar, sharing a beer. It would just make that so much worse. "...Blaine?"
So, it’s a Martini night. For him.