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Cassie raps the top of Theo’s cubicle with her knuckles as she zips by, freshly refilled mug of coffee in hand for the fourth time that day.
“Raeken, play time’s over. You got a customer.”
Theo scowls as he reflexively closes out the tab he was browsing on his computer. Then when he realizes that he just complied with Cassie’s implicit command out of instinct, his scowl deepens further.
“What do you mean, I got a customer? I don’t have any more appointments for the rest of the day.”
“Uh, yeah you do.”
“No, I don’t. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one around here disciplined enough”—Cassie coughs into her fist, anal enough, which Theo ignores because he’s learning to take the high road these days—“to actually use my Google Calendar.”
“Vic had to step out. Son has the flu or whatever, had to run him over to the doctor’s, blah blah blah. So his appointment became your appointment.”
“And his problem became my problem,” Theo sighs, bracing his hands on his thighs as he straightens up to leave the blissful comfort of his ergonomic office chair.
“His commission becomes your commission.” Cassie has taken the time to pause with her pointy chin hooked over the corner of the cubicle, lips spread in a crooked Cheshire grin. “C’mon, you know Vic. Chances are that his fake sick-kid emergency will turn into a fake four-day emergency weekend, which means he has no more claim to whatever the hell you end up doing with his customer.”
“Oh, don’t tamp down the innuendos on my account,” says Theo.
Cassie winks at him. “He’s cute.”
“Who, Vic? I’m well aware,” Theo says with the driest of ironies.
Cassie rolls her eyes. “Just go meet the customer. You’ll be thanking me that I sent him your way instead of to Benny.”
Theo is sorely tempted to take a jab at Cassie’s over-caffeinated habits in retaliation for her constant meddling in his nonexistent gay love life, but decides it isn’t worth the effort and simply strolls to the front of the car dealership to meet the guy who is supposedly waiting to be shown a ride.
“Welcome to Toni’s Used Auto. How can I—”
The kid in a garish reindeer sweater standing in the middle of the lobby turns fully toward him, and Theo jerks to a halt. His eyebrows lift in disbelief, his mouth screws up in distaste, and then—his face falls flat and expressionless.
“No.”
To his credit, Liam looks just as gobsmacked as Theo feels right now. He splutters in offense. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean no. Not happening. Skedaddle. Scram. Get out.”
“I know what ‘skedaddle’ means.” Liam crosses his arms over his chest. (Theo decidedly does not have coherent thoughts on the quality of that chest.) “What are you doing here? Where’s Victor? Actually, no—more to the point, where have you been?”
“Vic’s gone for the day. His kid is vomiting, probably,” says Theo, and blithely ignores all the other questions thrown his way.
Liam muscles his way into Theo’s space (really, Theo doubts that there’s any other way to describe it) and shoves lightly at his shoulder with a tented hand. “Answer my other questions. Where’ve you been? After the hospital, I was looking for you for days.”
“Clearly, I’ve been working on being an upstanding citizen.” Theo gestures with both arms at the car dealership around them with the snarkiest, most asshole kind of smirk he can muster. “Last I checked, reforming me from my checkered past was on your bucket list. So I just decided to jump a few steps ahead of you.”
“You’re an asshole,” Liam declares, shoving him a second time.
“Well, sorry my timeline didn’t quite work out with yours. Did I waste all the Rehabilitating Chimeras of Death for Dummies worksheets you got printed out?”
In answer, Liam shoves him again.
From the corner of his eye, Theo catches sight of Cassie watching the exchange with a twinkle of journalistic intrigue in her eye over the top of her mug. He makes a mental note to come up with more creative threats of bodily harm to her person next time they chat.
—
Five minutes later, Liam has apparently decided to make peace with Theo’s avoidance of the topic of his whereabouts post-war, and instead is wreaking mild havoc in the break room playing with the coffee machine’s settings.
“Are you actually in here to buy a car or not?” Theo says with a world-weary sigh, watching Liam’s antics from the doorway of the break room with his own arms crossed over his chest this time.
“Oh, I am,” Liam says brightly without turning around. The ancient coffeemaker gurgles a concerning and foreign series of noises under his ministrations. “I’m just dragging out your torture a bit longer so you have a taste of your own medicine.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, how does it feel not knowing what’s up with your friend?” Liam moves on to grabbing his styrofoam cup and stirring in a heathen amount of sugar and creamer with vicious strokes.
“I wouldn’t know,” Theo deadpans to his back, “seeing as I haven’t got any friends.”
That statement gets Liam to whip around, eyebrows drawn over the flashing crystalline light of his eyes. Theo smothers a sound of triumph at getting a rise out of Liam. So predictable, as always.
“No friends? Then what the hell do you consider me?”
Theo tips his head to the side and flits his eyes toward the ceiling as though seeking inspiration from above. “A friendly warden. A puppy who got off his leash. A delusional do-gooder with an obsession with me.” He shrugs. “I could keep going, if you like. I got a whole list of descriptors for you.”
“For someone who supposedly doesn’t think about me a lot, you sure have a lot of names for me.” Liam raises a single brow and takes a prim sip of his coffee. Except that a second later, he yelps at the scalding temperature, ruining his cool façade entirely.
Theo scratches at his brow, glancing down and away. Quietly, he says, “I never said I didn’t think about you a lot.” He pauses. “Or at all.”
Liam’s eyes do something complicated then with the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window to his side. He opens his mouth, but before he can go on, they’re both interrupted by a harried-looking woman in her forties knocking sharply on the glass wall of the break room.
“Hello? Do either of you work here? Can you help me? The young woman at the front desk said to come back here for a salesman and she was quite rude about it, actually—”
Theo has to conceal a smirk. He has a little more than an inkling why Cassie would be loath to send back a customer to him right now.
As it happens, both Liam and Theo point at each other with a finger. “He works here,” they say simultaneously.
“Wonderful,” says the woman in that specially ironic tone of voice reserved by approaching-middle-aged women for unpleasant retail situations.
As she swivels on her heel and heads out toward the cubicles, Theo attempts to wrestle the styrofoam cup from Liam just to be petty. “Can’t drink that. Coffee’s only for customers and employees.”
Liam bats his lashes at him. “Oh, but I thought you said I worked here.”
“Yeah, as a full-time pain in the ass,” Theo hisses at him as they both follow the imperious lady.
Liam wrests the cup back from him and grins through his teeth. “You wish.”
The fact that the blood races to Theo’s cheeks in record time at the innuendo is a fact that Theo will desperately take to his grave.
—
Liam is having the time of his life watching Theo in his element. Truly.
Right before his eyes, as he slides down to take his seat opposite the woman at his cubicle, Theo transforms into an entirely new personality. His posture straightens, losing the ball of tension that had been zipping between his shoulders the instant he’d seen Liam. Theo runs his hand once through his hair and instantly he looks like a perfume ad model, effortless and smirking just on the edge between confident and conspiratorial. He pulls out a bunch of sorry-looking brochures from his desk drawer that look like they were Xeroxed one too many times from a copy of a copy, but serves them out in a fanning display for his customer to review and nods patiently and shoots her charming smiles at all her repetitive questions. “Yes, ma’am, only 1.9% APR for qualified loan applicants. That’s our holiday special,” he says through his teeth and an employee-of-the-month-worthy smile.
Theo leaves with the woman and comes back about fifteen minutes later with a shark-like grin of triumph as he takes the test drive keys back from her, and then arrogantly slides over to Cassie’s reception desk and leans over from the front to borrow her phone and page Benny the sales manager to come down and finalize the contract.
All the while, Liam watches him through slitted eyes as he twiddles his thumbs and thumps his heels on Theo’s desk. He’s already exhausted himself going through the spare Sudoku puzzles in a tear-off pad next to Theo’s lamp (because Theo is apparently a mind-sharpening psychopath like that) and flipping through brochures of Christmas car deals that he more than likely won’t avail of. And so as Theo approaches him, giving a backward wave and the most fake-ass laugh in the history of hypocritical laughs to his customer, Liam has no qualms in giving him shit for everything he’s witnessed.
Liam starts by slow-clapping Theo’s victory.
Theo grabs Liam’s ankles and sweeps them off his desk, scowling.
Liam cackles, unperturbed. “Bravo on tricking that poor lady into buying that dying piece of hunk.”
“Jealous of my salesman skills, are we, Dunbar?”
“Nope.” Liam pops his p, pursing his lips as he does it, and slouches back further into his chair just to annoy Theo more. “Y’know, coyote is the wrong were-creature for you. You should have been the chameleon. I swear I saw you take on three different split personalities just now to interact with that lady, your receptionist and the manager.”
“Are you done critiquing my style and”—Theo glances askance at the used-up Sudoku pad—“defacing all of my puzzles?”
“No,” says Liam cheerily. “I thought you said this was you on your journey to being an upstanding citizen.”
Theo rolls his eyes. “I said ‘upstanding.’ I never said ‘moral’.”
“Right,” Liam scoffs. “How could I ever forget there was a distinction between the two for you.”
“Jesus.” Theo blows out a breath between his teeth. “Are you done now? Are you actually gonna buy a car or not, shithead?”
“Wow,” Liam says, deadpan. “Way to romance a guy into buying another metal deathtrap.”
“I don’t need to romance you,” Theo quips. “You’re the desperate one.” He beckons impatiently with his head toward the side door. “C’mon, let’s go take a test drive in one of my ‘metal deathtraps’ so you can pick one faster.”
—
“When I said ‘pick a metal deathtrap,’ I didn’t mean be an actual hazard to other motorists on the highway!”
Theo is white-knuckling the grab handle above the passenger door as Liam screeches through a left turn yield intersection where he decidedly did not yield.
“It was too late to brake.” Liam is entirely too calm about this.
“It was so not too late to brake. I’d rather have whiplash than end up with my torso severed from my legs!”
Liam flaps a dismissive hand in his direction and hangs another hairpin turn. “You came back from hell. You’ll be fine.”
“Once, Liam. Once,” Theo reminds him hysterically. “Fuck, are you even insured?”
Liam presses his lips into a line, like doesn’t know whether to laugh, grimace, or blow a raspberry—or possibly all three.
“Jesus fuck, Dunbar.”
This time, Liam does mash his foot down on the brake as they grind to a halt two inches past a stop sign at a four-way. Liam has the gall to shoot Theo an accusatory look at the sounds the car makes along the way.
“‘So not too late to brake,’” Liam mimics him in a falsetto. “This car doesn’t even have brakes that function.”
Theo releases his death grip on the grab handle in favor of dragging both hands down his face and pulling the skin of his eyelids and lips down in a dramatic display of horror.
“You’re so dramatic.” Liam nudges him across the console with an elbow, then goes on in a falsely cheery pitch, “Listen, be glad I’m not even gonna sue you for putting this thing on the lot.”
“This thing,” Theo snaps with a glower, “is a 2006 Pontiac G8 with fully loaded features.”
Liam scrunches up his face at him in an infuriatingly patronizing expression. “Fully loaded? Is it really fully loaded, though, if the brakes don’t load?”
“The brakes don’t load—” Theo splutters in indignation.
The blare of two, then four and then five horns in impatient cacophony behind and beside them jolts them both from their glaring contest.
Theo gives in to his juvenile instincts and slaps his hands back over his eyes. He moans, “You’re killing me. You’ve finally found the balls and you’re doing it. You’re actually killing me, out in broad daylight, outside the smelly Taco Bell.”
“Relax. I’m just testing this thing.”
“Testing it for what?”
“Listen, I’m the alpha-in-standing or whatever-the-fuck-all it is Mase and Cor call me these days. We live in Beacon Hills. I don’t just need a metal deathtrap. I need a metal deathtrap that is cheap and will sustain car chases from, y’know, the new mythical creature of the month when the Nemeton wants to throw a tantrum again.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Theo once again opines to the ceiling.
“Good news is,” Liam chirps as he finally rolls them back into the parking lot of the dealership with an entirely too smug scent rolling off him, “I got to test it out with you, too. You’re, like, practically immortal. So nothing bad would have happened.”
Theo tries his very best not to look or sound as green as he feels about now. “Set one foot out of that door and something bad will happen, I promise you."
Liam just grins at him like a triumphant puppy. "There you go, that sounds more like you. You missed me."
"Nope." Theo’s glower deepens.
"Just admit it. You missed missed me."
"I missed punching you in the face."
The look Liam serves him is beyond unimpressed. It’s weirdly kind of hot, actually. "Wow, real original, Theo."
"Would you prefer to be punched in the nuts?"
"I'd prefer to be punched in the lips," Liam says flatly. Insolently.
Theo stares at him, slack-jawed, and then—he surges forward across the console and does exactly that.
Liam smothers the tiniest of flinches as Theo crowds his space. He never should have feared, though. His hands are out not to smack him in the nose, but rather to grab him by the sides of his face and desperately thumb over the hills of his cheekbones as their mouths crash together in one heated, astonished breath.
They both release a low, embarrassing moan as the kiss deepens, so really, neither of them can hold this moment over the head of the other. Still, as Liam quickly gets with the program and wraps his hand around Theo’s elbow to draw him closer, Theo evidently is still a competitive asshole at heart and one-ups him by slipping his hands from Liam’s jawline to the back of his nape to press them together further. Liam’s mouth drops open to grant Theo access, and Theo swiftly licks inside, tasting him, breathing him in like he’ll die if he lets go now.
When they finally break apart—more like Theo shoves him away, as if he’s just realized what the hell he’s done—Liam stares up at him, dazed and bitten-lipped and generally way too self-congratulatory to be warranted by the situation.
“Merry Christmas to me,” Liam whispers.
Theo is brought forcibly back to the moment. “I’m Jewish.”
“Then Happy Hanukkah, whatever. Stop being a sourpuss. Sourpuss,” says Liam. “We just kissed.”
“I’m aware. I was there.”
Liam smacks him on the shoulder.
“Ow!” Theo whines. “What the hell was that for?”
“That was for being a smartass. And more importantly, for ghosting me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I was ghosting the world in general.”
“Well, I’m gonna need you to stop ghosting me or anyone else, like, stat.”
“I’m a freak of nature that literally crawled out of hell, Liam, what else do you expect from—”
Liam yanks Theo forward again and silences him with another crushing kiss. Theo loses himself to the sensation of those warm, firm lips against his, shutting his eyes and drinking in every bit of Liam as their tongues intertwine.
Liam is the one to pull back this time. Their lashes flutter as they look up at one another.
“Don’t do that again,” Liam murmurs.
“I won’t,” Theo says.
“I’m serious. I’m buying you an Android phone from Boost Mobile for Christmas if I have to.”
“Still Jewish over here.”
“For Hanukkah. Now shut up and kiss me again.”
“Anything to get you to stop talking.”