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The first time it happens, there’s a torrential downpour, drowning everything in water and raining even more. For his part, Cale is happy that he’s indoors, sitting on a stool behind the counter of his café while scrolling through his phone.
The small bell above the door jingles. Before he can even think to look up there’s a tall man dressed fully in ratty black clothes that must have been a costume.
“…welcome,” Cale says, eyeing the growing puddle in the middle of his floor. But he’s a professional, so he climbs up, looking expectantly at the man without further judgment.
“What’ll you be having?”
Perhaps the guy is just seeking shelter. It really is raining dogs and cats outside, so if he is he wouldn’t be surprised.
He’s content to wait, to see what the man wants so he can make a plan for how to best service him. If all else fails, he’ll get himself another five star on his yelp review. Boost up his ratings which are, admittedly, already stellar.
The man, contrary to expectations, just stares at him like a man dying. He looks like he’s seen salvation, the light at the end of the tunnel. All that jazz.
He’s pretty intense, staring at Cale, who is a stranger, with all the force of a thousand suns. He isn’t certain what reaction the man is expecting, but when Cale merely stares back evenly, calm and collected, it must be insufficient because he fades into himself.
His expression is interesting. If someone were to describe a puppy, loving and loyal, who’s been dunked in a tub of water before being abandoned by the only people he’s ever known, to blindly stumble his own way through the wild, with its foreign dangers and stranger scents, all alone and unprepared, Cale thinks it might have come close.
The man is a little more brittle than that though, more fragile and hopeless as the light fades from his eyes like the LED lamps at the start of a movie.
It’s what makes him study him more closely, notes the stains on his cloak and the haggard lines on his face, that, for once, leads him to doubt his initial impression. Perhaps it isn’t a costume after all.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Cale begins, meeting the unreadable gaze of the customer with a confidence he doesn’t doubt, “but whatever it is, if it’s not here, I will get it. If you don’t want anything, at least take a seat and I’ll bring you a towel. Stay ---“ he asks, because people respond better to requests than the barrage of questions forming in the back of his mind, “--- just until the rain stops.”
“I ---“ when the man finally speaks, his lips parting around a parched throat, he looks unsure. Unnerved, like he isn’t convinced of his welcome. He doesn’t shift, his hand opening and closing within the darkness of his gloves, like he’s accustomed to holding something, and he, for a second, meets Cale’s eyes, the intensity of his earlier stare blooming within them.
He looks away in the breadth of a moment, letting his dark eyes fall to the surface of the countertop. “I don’t have money… nothing to pay with.”
“It’s fine,” Cale responds. His mind, by habit, locks away the hint of shame he can hear coating the man’s voice. To hit someone when they were this downtrodden --- it would taste too much like abuse.
Cale, for all his faults, doesn’t go around abusing people. He scams a few rodents out of their money, reports idiots who truly should know better at their ages, and offers a place of resting to children or the odd, lost soul.
It appears this man might fall into the last category, walked through hell and barely crawled out alive, and Cale doesn’t want to break his pattern now.
Despite the trouble he can nearly taste wafting off of the man, Cale rounds the counter to lead him to a seat. The café he owns, Adventure and Joy, is a cosy, stout thing he’d purchased off of a drug lord. The criminal had been using it as a spare warehouse before he’d been caught, through Cale’s anonymous report, and converting it into a homey pit-stop welcome to everyone had been Cale and Raon’s fuck you to him, after they’d gotten the boy checked out at the hospital and completed all the forms legalizing his adoption to Cale, of course.
He could have sold it --- the makeover had drawn a lot of attention by the appropriate buyers and the land value sky-rocketed after the main culprit responsible for shitting on it had been put behind bars, but the soft and warm atmosphere had given Cale pause. It’s what he’d expected from a home, many years ago, before the concept of family had solidified as an illusion, before he came to have Raon and the two kittens in the house to confirm it as real.
The café became Cale’s home away from home, a representation of things he holds dear and wishes that others can come to realize are true. It is why he accepts the impoverished, the beaten-down trash who only have life’s unfair roulette of circumstances to blame for their misfortunes. He gives them a night of pure shelter, no expectations attached, before offering them jobs or to connect them to others who have more. He’s been backstabbed, exacted revenge, and trolled on the parties responsible to hammer in the point that he isn’t to be trifled with, but he hasn’t changed that.
This man tonight, soaked to the bone and reeking of confusion tied up in a bow of sour filth and the stench of grief, is only one in a line of many. Cale doubts he’ll be the last, either.
He leads the brunet to the window seat. It’s far enough from the kitchens not to be loud if Cale has to bake, but close enough that he can drink in its warmth. The chair is padded, an armchair for all intents and purposes, with plush finishing and a seat you can sink into, and the window offers a view of the outdoors. So he doesn’t get claustrophobic.
“I’ll get you something to warm up. And the towel,” he says, guiding the man into the chair in the impression of pouring him in. He stands up, wiping the dampness of the rain onto the black trousers that he has on, sparing a look out through the window where it is dark, and the rain hasn’t let up yet. “Are you allergic to anything?”
“Just dust mites,” is the faint answer as Cale leaves him to do what he’s told him he’d do.
He puts on the water first. He had a kettle beginning in the late afternoon, hot and boiling, however the temperature of it has cooled due to the long hour. He empties the pot, calmly and in measured movements refills it with a flick of the faucet, before setting it back in its cradle and turning on the switch.
He ducks into the kitchen: he keeps his dry towels beside the pantry, and the spare stock he keeps beside him up front has gone empty. He will need multiple towels, fluffy and thick, to rid the man at the window of most of his chill, anyway.
He returns from the kitchen to place the stack of towels on the table beside the man. He blinks, peeling his gaze from the rain and towards Cale like he’s seeing someone else.
He stills when Cale lifts an arm, watches with quiet eyes that seem to hope for relief that Cale will do his best to give him. In that quest, Cale plucks the topmost towel from the pile and unfolds it to drop it on the man’s head, scrubbing roughly.
“You don’t want to catch a cold from the weather,” he says, leaving that towel to wrap another one around his shoulders. “Trust me.”
“I do,” are the words coming lowly from beneath the roof of the towel. The man’s voice sounds dry, yet oddly like he’s already been crying.
Cale stands there, offering the proximity of his presence as the rain drums the glass from outside. He lifts his hand again, hovers it over the man’s form where his towel-hidden gaze won’t be able to see, before he allows it to drop, distracted by the scream of his boiling kettle.
“Dry off,” Cale says evenly. “If you want a change of clothes, tell me. We don’t have employee uniforms, but I always keep a spare change for instances just like this.”
The man nods mutely, giving off the impression that he’s tracking Cale’s retreat as he makes his way back around the counter. He heats up one of his most popular sandwiches, drips down a fresh cup of coffee, before he places both in a tray, lifting it easily into his smooth hands.
“Eat,” he tells the man simply, placing the tray beside the remaining towels in their stack on the table.
“You too?” the man replies, reaching up a shockingly scarred hand --- his original gloves nowhere to be seen --- as he pulls the towel off of his head and looks up.
Cale meets the gaze of a man who’d initially appeared as if he were dying, who now looks moderately calmer but still worse for wear. He hums, mouthing an order for him to wait before fixing himself a fancier plate.
He’s the owner, and he can afford his own cakes and strawberries.
The man, when he sits down beside him neatly without the hesitation of somebody who is scared or reluctant, seeing Cale’s heftier plate, breathes out a facsimile of a laugh.
His lips are upturned, his fingers wavering over the edge of the table as if he is hesitating, and to start them off, Cale picks up his turkey club sandwich, biting into it with the crunch of fresh lettuce.
The man, with whatever impression he has received from that action, follows suit, lifting his tomato mozzarella up to his lips and taking a slow, measured bite.
He chews, speeds up a bit afterwards as chunks of his sandwhich go missing, and the two men, each looking not at each other but the pattering rain outside, not sharing a word but instead the weight of an unfamiliar presence, pass the rest of the hour away in a comfortable peace.
Cale offers a different slice of cake to the man after that hour. Choi Han, as the man will introduce himself as before the rain has stopped falling, does him the courtesy of accepting.