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Liam Dunbar never claimed to be a genius. A crafty lacrosse play writer, perhaps, or an occasionally strategic Mario Kart player when the situation calls for it. Definitely a bullheaded member of Mrs. Finch’s class when he chooses to raise his hand over and over with dogged determination, ignoring her grimace of anticipation, just so he can earn back those pesky participation points. And, from time to time, he can pride himself over being a shockingly reliable trivia night partner, so long as that trivia night consists of all things historical and unsettling from 1400 BC to the 1860s.
Still, as he sits shivering in his seat on a Friday night across from his (now formerly) best friend Hewitt and his weird pale date, Liam starts to take stock of his life and can admit to himself that perhaps this was one of his more vainglorious and harebrained attempts at a genius plan.
“C’mon, it’ll only be for an hour or two,” Mason had wheedled at him, slapping his neon orange Cheeto-dusted palms together in prayerful supplication. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”
Liam had snatched the Cheetos bag from Mason with a scowl of disbelief. “If it’s gonna be so fun just like you claim, then why are you practically on your knees begging me to save your ass?”
Mason had jutted out his bottom lip and pulled that squinty-eyed, guilt-tripping look that definitely did not work on Liam. Not since day one. “The food will be really good. Isn’t that fun enough for you?”
“The food better be free if I’m gonna be third-wheeling and y’all aren’t even gonna be in love by the end of the night,” Liam had grumbled. He had made a grand show of plunging his fingers into the crinkling bag and rooting around the bottom for that treasure of broken off pieces of Cheetos, and pretending to throw them all back into his mouth just to see Mason’s thin-lipped look of betrayal. When Liam had had enough of toying with him, he’d finally cracked a wry grin and held the bag back out to his best friend, who snatched it from his grasp with a faux wounded look then proceeded to devour the rest of the dregs inside.
“We are in love,” Mason had insisted. “At least…over text, I think. There could be some real potential. But! Just in case there’s not! Y’know. In case he turns out to be a big loser who, like, drives with both hands flat on the bottom of the steering wheel or thinks that Breaking Bad is the peak of international cinema or whatever.”
“Breaking Bad is excellent and superior to all other shows,” Liam had quibbled, just to annoy him.
Mason had rolled him a look. “A gravely mistaken opinion for which I am using up all my saintly grace and patience to overlook. And—my point exactly.”
Liam’s mouth had dropped open in a pretense of offense, hand to his chest from the scandalous accusation, as Mason snickered softly and gestured at the entirety of Liam’s…unkempt and frankly straight white boy-looking getup.
“Look, how weird could he be? I saw the guy’s picture. I bet he, like, moons over rare species of butterflies on YouTube in his spare time,” Liam had pointed out.
“Yeah, but what if he’s nice?”
Liam had blinked. “I’m not following.”
A clap to his shoulder alerted him to the fact that this example of idiocy, too, was cause for another overflow of Mason Hewitt’s boundless patience and grace. “Look, Liam, what if he’s not just weird, but also too nice about it? Then there’s no way I can just fake an emergency and be all like ‘Oh my G-d, my mom is having a heart attack, the hospital just texted me, I have to go’! That would be a dick move!”
“The hospital would never text you about your mom having a heart attack.”
“Precisely! I’m a shit liar!” Mason had shoved his finger in Liam’s chest and poked him over and over in the sternum. “And you’d be a shit friend for not helping me out.”
“This is blackmail,” Liam had complained.
“Nope. This is payback.” Poke, poke, poke.
Liam had grabbed Mason’s index finger between his own as if it were a particularly rowdy baby weasel. “Actually, this is gay on gay violence.”
“I’ll stop the violence if you agree to help me out. Gay bro to gay bro.”
“...Goes the dialogue in the opening scene in every gay porno ever.”
“So? Will you?”
“You’re buying my entree and you’re getting me dessert.”
“If I give you the signal that he’s being weird and we need to book it out of there, there won’t be time for dessert.”
“Ha! Tough luck. I’m making you drive to Sonic to get me a slushie anyway.”
Mason had taken a moment to meet Liam’s gaze dramatically, pause, and shake his head. “I pity the person who ever decides to fall in love with you and gets their ass taken out to Sonic on a date.”
—
Which leads them precisely to here and now: in the most inconveniently placed booth ever at the rear of Restaurante de los Artistas (or so the flickering neon sign outside claims—not like the place is well lit enough to reveal any actual artwork mounted on the sticky stucco walls).
To his credit, Liam does take his responsibility as flight attendant rather seriously, and so he had asked the server at the front to please give them a booth as near to the entrance as possible. The server—looking bored, sassy, and jacked to all hell and back—had flicked his gaze up to meet Liam’s wide-eyed and earnest look with insouciance and said, “We’re all filled up at the front. Follow me back, please.”
And he had turned and proceeded to pass by exactly seven perfectly good and empty tables at the front end of the place to lead Liam and Mason to the innermost corner in the back.
“Well, fuck,” Mason mutters as they slide around on the sticky vinyl seats that somehow form both a circle and half of a figure eight simultaneously.
“At least it’s near the bathroom if you need to puke?” Liam offers with a faint grimace of commiseration.
“This is too far from the entrance,” Mason goes on moaning. “I’m a shit liar with my face and an even shittier liar with my body language. Corey’ll know while he’s watching us walk all the way down the aisle that we just ditched him for being weird.”
“And nice,” Liam corrects him most helpfully. “You forgot the more important part of our pact. Ditch him if he’s weird and too nice.”
“G-d, I should just go back to dating dicks,” Mason groans into his hands.
Liam can’t help himself. Really, he can’t. “As opposed to, what…just sucking them?”
The server chooses that exact moment to pop up at Liam’s elbow with a pen and perfectly untouched writing pad that he no doubt has zero intention of filling in with their orders.
“What can I get you to drink?”
“Water,” Mason groans, still unrecovered from the throes of his anxiety and his best friend’s subpar innuendos.
“Make mine iced,” Liam says, elbows on the table, peering over his folded hands to peep at the server’s notebook. Sure enough, the tip of his pen seems to be moving and nothing seems to be coming out.
“Sure. Extra cubes. So you got something to suck on,” the server drones on in the same uninterested voice he’s had all evening.
Liam’s mouth pinches. Is this guy implying—?
He shakes his head to himself and points instead at the notebook. “Are you actually going to write down our orders, or…?”
“Once you come up with something complicated enough to challenge my intelligence, then yeah,” says the guy.
Liam squints at his name tag. It’s upside down and spotted with grease. Hello, I’m THEO!
“Sorry, sorry, I’m so late, I’m sorry!” another voice trails toward them, huffing and puffing, and lo and behold it’s Corey Bryant in all his awkward and definitely-too-weird-and-nice-for-this-date-to-go-well glory.
“Take a look at the menus and holler at me when you’re done,” Theo the server sighs, rapping the table with his rather unwelcome knuckles as he leaves.
“Hey—I should really report you,” Liam throws over his shoulder at Theo’s retreating figure, completely without enough volume or conviction.
Meanwhile, at his side, Mason is going through his characteristic cycle of flustered to fakely confident to amazed to anxious and right back to flustered. “Oh my gosh, hi, no, not at all, we haven’t been waiting at all. Long. I mean—not long at all. This is Mason and I’m Liam.”
Liam glances over to look squarely at the new guy. Corey’s mouth is pursed in confusion.
“Dude,” says Liam.
“Right! I meant, I’m Mason and this is Liam,” Mason corrects himself, laughing with a little too much ebullience to pull off his attempt at casualness.
Liam mashes his foot on top of Mason’s under the table.
“Dude,” Mason coughs and hisses into his napkin, “my shoes are Giusti Leombruni.”
“Stop acting like a moroni,” Liam hisses right back, and then turns around to face Corey again with a winning smile.
—
And so it goes. They stumble through appetizers—Corey had insisted the nachos with double queso were his treat, since it was “such a cool thing” to meet Mason’s best friend too—and Liam has to suffer through jaw-numbingly awkward attempts at flirtation and conversation over what they have in common. To be fair, their common ground does seem to cover quite a bit, from taste in movies to musical favorites to weirdly specific opinions on forgotten sports figures, but Liam could honestly report that there’s as much chemistry behind the stilted exchanges and nervous laughter as there would be in his latest lab report for school. Which is to say, none.
It’s approximately around the time that Corey draws a deep breath and starts delving into the history of the variation in his grandmother’s side of the family name, that Mason gives another tittering fake laugh and proceeds to fucking stab Liam in the thigh with a plastic fork.
“Owww, actually,” Liam yelps under his breath.
“What?” says Corey, all blushing and stupidly adorable and stupid.
“What?” says Mason, just stupid.
That was Mason’s signal, Liam guesses. Time to put on a show. His best friend owes him two slushies now and a bag of super greasy fries for adding injury to this part of their dastardly escape plan.
And so Liam does what he does best—which doesn’t strictly involve the use of his brain cells—and he scoops up his sweating glass and dumps the entirety of its contents, ice cubes and all, over his own head.
“Oh, no,” Liam warbles in Mason’s general direction, spitting out freezing water from between his lips. “Looks like you’re gonna have to drive me home to prevent hypothermia.”
He is greeted by dead silence.
When he tentatively blinks open first one eye and then the other, Liam finds that Mason is gaping at him in raw shock. So, too, is Corey.
About point-five seconds before the two nitwits burst out laughing and just about collapse into each other from the force of their honking.
“Holy shit,” Corey gasps. “Holy shit, holy shit—”
Mason is shrieking incoherently somewhere beside him.
“I mean, was the date really that bad?” Corey demands between gasps.
“I don’t know, maybe, but it sure as hell turned ten times better,” Mason wheezes. He can barely get another word out between his gasps for air.
And so Liam has to sit there, drenched and shivering and looking so not cool and suave anymore with his hair product dribbling down his nose along with the chilly water to form the perfect imitation of a piss stain in the crotch of his pants, while his definitely former best friend and his date laugh their asses off at his expense.
As if the universe didn’t think he has suffered the appropriate amount of humiliation, Theo the ripped server decides that now is the perfect time to show up for the punchline.
“Oh. Well. Would you like a to-go bag for that, sir?”
Liam splutters and turns his head to glare as menacingly as he can through his stringy, soaking bangs at Theo. The asshole is pinning him with a straight face and gesturing with the capped end of his pen at the pile of ice cubes swimming on the vinyl seat between Liam’s thighs.
Another stream of water dribbles from Liam’s bottom lip and down his chin as he stumbles jerkily to his feet and demands, “Where’s the bathroom?”
—
See, the reason why Liam can never claim to be a genius is because he expected that to work. Also, incidentally, he forgot to bring a spare change of clothes for this entire stunt.
Theo gives him about two and a half minutes of blessed privacy, scrubbing away the shreds of his ruined dignity in front of the urinals, before blowing through the bathroom door all cocksure and smirking. When Liam meets his gaze in the mirror, scowling, the corner of Theo’s lips only twitches upward higher.
“Next time you decide to turn my restaurant into the Titanic, make sure you bring a big enough tip to make the cleanup worth it,” Theo snarks at him.
Liam growls. “Can you just fuck off already?”
Theo’s tortuously hot grin widens. “On the contrary. I’m off the clock now, so I’m driving you home.”
Liam’s brain does a record scratch. “Excuse me, what?”
Theo rips off his apron—biceps and deltoids and overall overabundance of muscles rippling everywhere—and tosses a balled-up mass of cotton at Liam’s chest. It lands squarely in his face and Liam has to paw at himself to catch a grip of the clothes being shoved at him.
Theo jerks his head over his shoulder in the vague direction of the dining room. “Looks like your boy is doing just fine without your help. You did the right thing, actually. Helping them break…you know… the ice.”
A strangled sound escapes Liam’s mouth. “Oh, fuck you,” he chokes out, even as he sorts through what appears to be a spare collared uniform shirt and pair of khakis issued by the restaurant.
Theo hums, eyebrows coasting toward his hairline. Without the obstruction of his silly orange apron, Liam is now afforded a limitless view of the valley between Theo’s pecs underneath his shirt as he crosses his arms over his chest and bounces on his feet once.
“Hey,” Theo murmurs, voice going gravelly and sultry, “I wouldn’t be opposed if that’s where you wanted the night to go.”
Liam pauses mid-stretch through the neckline of the borrowed shirt and kind of wants to smack his forehead against the nearest tiled surface. Jesus Christ.
“You know what?” he sighs, reemerging out the other end of the shirt and struggling to get the twisted cotton down over his bare abs. “You know what—fine. Might as well. If it’ll get that stupid mouth of yours to shut up.”
When he dares to make eye contact again with Theo, the taller boy is definitely in the middle of checking him out, if the flash of his gaze and the molasses-like sensation of his attention on Liam’s happy trail is anything to go by.
“My mouth has been called many things,” says Theo, shrugging, “but definitely not stupid.”
Liam chooses to fling his mass of soaking wet clothes at Theo’s chest as payback. “You talk a big game for someone who hasn’t shown what that mouth can do.” He pauses for dramatic effect, glowering. “Stupid.”
“Oh. Ouch,” Theo intones, unfazed. And just for that, Liam has to cease struggling with his shirt and throw down Theo’s apron onto the tiled floor and plant his palm squarely in the middle of Theo’s chest so he can slam him against the door and crush their mouths together.
Theo tastes hot. Wet. Teasing. And, shockingly, a little bit sweet. Liam pulls back just a second and then surges forward again to shove his tongue between Theo’s lips and ascertain what that taste was. And, yep, it’s definitely some kind of artificial citrus candy and it’s so infuriatingly attractive combined with the way that Theo is laughing under his mouth that Liam just has to shove him back harder against the door and show him who’s boss.
“You’re so easy,” Theo pants, laughing again, between their smacking lips and their hungry kisses when they part for air.
Liam shoves his thigh between Theo’s legs, making them fall open and the other boy’s mouth to drop, and he snarks back, “And you’re hard.”
Theo lets out a sound that definitely lets Liam know he can’t decide between moaning wantonly or doubling over in laughter. So sue Liam for getting a hard-on for people who are downright assholes and making out with them in questionably clean bathrooms that reek of overused oil and weeks-old nacho sauce from the jar. He’s always found the pigtail-pulling strategy of flirtation to be the quickest way to his…er…dick.
“You’re thinking too much,” Theo breathes out, hot and misty, over Liam’s mouth. He reaches up to slip the pad of his thumb over the flesh of Liam’s bottom lip. “I need to fix that. Say goodbye to your friends so we can get out of here.”
“I got a better idea,” says Liam. He kisses Theo again, bruising, with tongue and teeth. “Show me to your back door.”
“Damn. Give me your name first before you expect me to put out.”
“Liam,” the other boy says impatiently. “And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“Or was it?”
“Shut up.” Another smacking sound as Liam grabs Theo’s cheeks between his hands and melds their mouths together. “Shut up. Shut up. Just get me out of here.”
“Okay, but you’re buying me food afterward.”
“Whatever,” Liam says, urging them both out the bathroom door as Theo’s hands flail fruitlessly for the handle. “I know a place. There’s a Sonic on the corner of Grape Road and Third.”
Theo’s body stills under his, taut and unmoving. And then Theo laughs in his face. Full-on laughs.
“You’re lucky you’re kind of hot, Liam.”