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“I think he wants to fuck me, Fish.” Ajax leans in closer to squint at the photo on his phone screen. It’s an awful one; a bare-chested mirror selfie taken by someone who clearly barely knows how to operate their phone—let alone has any appreciation of the aesthetics required to pull off having a bare-chested mirror selfie as the sole photo on their dating app profile—but even in the dim greenish single-lightbulbed murder-bathroom lighting Ajax can make out big muscles, chest hair, a thick neck. The guy’s so tall that his head clears the dark doorway behind him by a solid couple of inches. What little of his head Ajax can make out, anyway. Behind the—er. Mask. “Not kill me. That’s, like, the whole point of this app, isn’t it?”
He angles his screen towards Fischl, who leans in to look too, but not before rolling her eyes up at him. Her motion jostles loose the earbud he’s been precariously sharing with her for the past forty-five minutes of their commute. Freed now, it dangles between them, swinging lightly as the train stutters and grinds to yet another halt. Shame. He was kind of getting into her weird Dracula podcast.
“I think if there’s even a question of him maybe killing you then you’re better off just giving up and moving on,” she says, adjusting her grip on the straining strap of her shoulder bag. She taps a long glossy-black fingernail against the dark shadowy void of the mask where the guy’s face should be. “And he’s definitely gonna kill you.”
Ajax sighs. He’s had this app installed for a week now and this is the only match he’s gotten so far. He doesn’t dare say that out loud.
[Are you sure you want to unmatch Capitano_Twink_Strangler_666? This action can’t be undone.]
The rest of their commute into Mondstadt’s city center passes in a testosterone blur: guys flexing at the gym, flexing at the beach, flexing in their bathroom mirror. Guys’ somber-faced corporate headshots, stiff-smiling wedding party photography, action-blurred vacation shots; alone sometimes, other times with their arms slung around a bunch of same-faced other guys’ shoulders. Dull, dull, dull. Left swipe, left swipe, left swipe. Guys showing off their shiny cars, their hard dicks, their freshly caught fish. (Ajax swipes right on a few of those.) It’s all kind of—well, dull. One might wonder why Ajax even decided to bother with this stupid dating app nonsense in the first place.
Because it’s a competition, Kaeya smirkingly pointed out to him in the breakroom a couple of days ago. Everything’s a competition with you. What, is emailing your monthly performance reports to every other sales rep in a twenty-mile radius suddenly not getting you off anymore? Now you need to know how many of them’ll fuck you, too?
Would you? Ajax had asked him. Objectively, just, like, let’s say purely from appearances only, if you saw my profile would you swipe—
I saw your profile two days ago. Kaeya slipped his phone back into his shirt pocket. I swiped left.
Wh—how—I haven’t even seen your—
Kaeya’d tapped his shirt pocket once. Winked. One-mile radius.
So, whatever. This is stupid, actually, Ajax doesn’t care about any of this, actually. He’s going to delete the stupid app right now and then Kaeya can go right back to shoving his Mondstadt’s Most Fuckable Douche Award right up his—admittedly fuckable—ass, which, maybe he should spend less time focusing on shoving everything in a one-mile radius up there and more on the looming threat of Ajax obliterating Kaeya’s sales record for the fifth month running, not like Ajax is petty enough to be counting or anything, ha ha ha—
Ajax’s finger freezes.
[Bennett, <0.1 miles away]
I like adventuring and dogs! Let’s go hiking!
“What’s wrong?” Fischl pockets her own phone as the train wheezes into their station. Ajax, who suddenly can’t seem to move any part of his body, groans out a long, wordless, bewildered sound that he can only describe as hurgghhh? “Are you sick or something?”
She manhandles him onto the platform, where Ajax stands stock-still with his briefcase wedged between his thighs so he can cradle his phone in both hands. Bennett smiles up at him, thumbs-up fist thrust towards the camera, perched on some crumbling temple ledge in Liyue with the sun radiant behind his blonde head. There are four more pictures behind this one. Ajax can’t remember how to operate his thumb in order to view them.
“Oh, Bennett made a profile?” Fischl peers down into Ajax’s hands. She taps, and another Bennett appears, this one flat on his back in the grass beneath a big shaggy sheepdog enthusiastically licking his face, laughing so hard his eyes are scrunched shut. “Jeez, I’ve been telling him to for ages.”
“He likes adventuring,” Ajax tells her. His voice sounds strange to his own ears, faint, faraway. “And dogs.”
“Uh-huh.” Fischl flicks her hair out of her eyes and then rolls them at him again for good measure. “Well?”
“Well what.”
“Well,” Fischl huffs. “Swipe right.”
—
He can’t. He doesn’t know why he can’t, but he can’t. He can’t swipe left, either, because then he’ll never know what Bennett swiped on him, but then again, what if Ajax swipes right only to find out that Bennett Kaeya-ed him and rejected him already? Or, worse—better?—worse?!—what if they do match, and then how will Ajax ever be able to look his longtime office crush in the eye again with the newfound knowledge that the attraction is mutual? And then what? Does Ajax ask him out on a date, or is this purely a don’t-mind-me-just-silently-acknowledging-I’m-down-to-fuck-if-you-are type of situation? Despite himself, there’s an interested twitch in Ajax’s pants at the prospect. At both prospects. Dating apps are a curse. Ajax is cursed, his dick, cursed. He’s swiping left.
But—he can’t. So he doesn’t. Ajax stares down at his still-unlocked phone screen on his way into the building. Bennett’s photo is still there, still smiling, blissfully unaware of the filthy, depraved horrors Ajax’s dick-cursed mind has subjected it to in the past thirty minutes. If Fischl says goodbye to him, Ajax doesn’t hear it.
He’s so preoccupied with the whole business—that is, clicking back and forth through Bennett’s photos for the hundredth, hundred-and-first, and hundred-and-second time—that Ajax almost walks face-first into the closing elevator doors. The only reason that he doesn’t is Venti, who gracefully slips in front of him to stick a tiny leather-loafered foot into the narrowing gap between the doors to force them to shudder open again.
“Close one,” Venti giggles, and then steps aside to let Ajax step in beside him. “Good morning.”
What’s so good about it, Ajax would mope if Venti were anyone other than the CEO. Instead, Ajax straightens out his already-straight shirt collar with the hand not currently occupied cradling his cellphone against his chest like a newborn, then tries to rearrange his face into an expression less openly miserable. “Morning.”
Venti’s finger pauses over the twentieth-floor button, lit softly yellow. He glances over, concern creasing the corners of his big round doe eyes. Ajax wonders what his dating app profile looks like. “Yikes. Everything okay?” Venti steps closer to peer over at Ajax’s phone. “Is it Zhongli? Anything I need to know about? I have a call scheduled with him in a bit, so if you—”
“Oh, uh, what, no, it’s not, I,” Ajax stammers out, reeling backwards away from Venti until his shoulders thump against the elevator’s back wall.
It happens that fast.
One minute, his phone’s safe, screen pressed flat against his shirt; the next, it’s slipping straight through his grip, palm gone clammy with how long he’s been clutching it like that. Ajax scrambles to catch it, and all it takes is one sweaty finger skidding against the unlocked screen—
Ajax swipes left.
—
It’s fine, he tells himself once he’s seated in his cubicle, bent over the top of his desk with his fists twisted into his hair. It’s fine, because outside of the veritable fruit salad of coworkers he’s surrounded with at present, there statistically can’t be that many other gay men within a mile radius, right, so if he swipes fast enough he’ll go through all of them and Bennett’s profile will definitely come back around again, which would be—like, whatever. It’s not like Ajax particularly cares either way, or anything. Because it’s fine.
He turns on his computer, fills both his screens with a scattered array of randomly-opened documents so prying eyes—namely Kaeya’s, whose visible eye Ajax can feel boring icy spears into the back of his neck from his own cubicle across the aisle—will think he’s busy, and sets to work swiping.
And swiping, and swiping, and swiping. He’s going so fast he can barely even see the poor rejected souls’ pictures as they blur right on by. Swipe, not Bennett, swipe, not Bennett, swipe, swipe, swipe—
[Sales Team Chat: 2 new]
Kaeya A. [9:04 AM]: Can you close the Dawn Winery presentation so I can edit it? Why do you even have that open…?
Kaeya A. [9:04 AM]: Stealing my clients now?
Not—swipe—Bennett—fuck. Ajax rips his finger away from the screen like it’s burned him. Was that Bennett? He was going too fast to be sure. He thinks it was; short guy, vaguely Liyuean backdrop—
[Oops! You missed a match. Upgrade your subscription to Gold Level to see who likes you! Only $19.99. Missed match expires in 59 seconds.]
You [9:05 AM]: yea gimme a min tho im busy
Kaeya A. [9:05 AM]: Busy with what? Your mouse hasn’t moved once.
You [9:05 AM]: STOP SPYING ON ME PERVERT
As the uncaring app’s timer ticks steadily down, Ajax upends the entire contents of his briefcase onto his desk to locate his wallet. Goodbye, twenty bucks, he mourns as the app chews up his credit card information. He’ll have to beg Fischl for scraps out of her lunchbox today.
[Thanks for subscribing! Here’s the one that almost got away:
Xiao, <0.1 miles away]
Liyue born and raised. On military leave. Don’t make fun of my height.
—
“So then I deleted my entire account,” Ajax tells Fischl proudly as he follows her to the kitchenette to steal the first cup out of her fresh pot of coffee.
“Good,” she says, eyeing him over the rim of an enormous mug with a picture of Edgar Allen Poe on it. “It was making you weird. Weirder.”
“No, no.” He turns his phone around to show her. “I made a new one already.”
“‘Dog lover,’” Fischl reads off the screen, voice flat. “‘Take me on an adventure.’”
“It’s bait.” Ajax smiles down at her with all of his teeth, filled with manic, electric excitement. He’s a fucking genius. “Bennett bait.”
“You sound like that serial killer you matched with.”
Ajax opens his mouth to bite back at her, but before he can, he’s met with her hand in his face. Fischl’s looking somewhere over Ajax’s shoulder towards the kitchen doorway, and the smile on her face at the sight of the mystery newcomer is bright, genuine, far more pleasant than anything Ajax ever gets out of her. Bitch. “Right on cue,” she says sunnily. “Good morning, Bennett!”
Ajax, midway through blowing the steam off the surface of his coffee, inhales sharply. He’s almost thankful for the rush of molten heat scorching off half his tastebuds, because at least then he can’t open his mouth and say anything stupid. Or anything at all.
“Morning, Fish,” Bennett chirps. “Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me on the bus home last night, it was so unlucky…”
His voice fades. Bennett’s standing in the kitchen doorway, narrow hip cocked against the handle of his mail cart. Ajax can’t decide which of them is more disheveled; the wobbling piles of the morning’s mail are stacked so high there’s no way Bennett could possibly see over the top of them while he’s steering it around the office. One rumpled white tail of Bennett’s shirt pokes out from the bottom of his sweater. He grins at Fischl’s answering groan, pushes the cracked and taped disaster of his glasses up into his hair to rest at the top of his head, and then immediately pulls them back down onto his nose again, as if he’s just remembered that he actually needs them to see. Ajax takes in all of this information as one would a knife straight through the center of their heart. As in, it hurts. To look at him.
“Hi,” Ajax manages to reply, about five minutes late and loudly spoken over whatever Fischl was in the middle of saying.
Bennett blinks at him once, twice, as if he’s just realized Ajax has been standing here this whole time. “Oh! Mister Tartaglia, hi! I actually had something I wanted to ask you about, but, um.” His eyes flicker over to Fischl, then back to Ajax, who’s standing there frozen like a deer in headlights, coffee cup still hovering halfway to his mouth. “It’s a little embarrassing.”
For the hundred thousandth time this morning, Ajax’s mind returns to the app burning a hole through his pocket. It hasn’t vibrated with a new match notification, but maybe that’s why Bennett’s embarrassed—maybe he saw Ajax’s profile and arrived at the same swiping crossroads Ajax found himself at earlier in the train. Maybe Bennett’s going to ask if they can skip the whole awkward app-matching thing and just grab a cup of coffee together at lunch. Maybe then Bennett’ll confess that he’s actually had a crush on Ajax since he started working here six months ago, which coincidentally is exactly the same amount of time Ajax has had a crush on him—
“Do you know where Mister Venti’s office is?” Bennett asks him.
“Bennett,” Fischl gasps, theatrically stricken. “He’s the CEO! What have you been doing with his mail for the past half a year if you don’t even know where his office is?!”
“Miss Katheryne usually delivers it herself,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “So it doesn’t get, um. Lost. But she’s out sick today, so…” He gestures to the heaped-high mail cart behind him.
“It’s the one with the glass door,” Ajax tells him. “Big gold plaque on it. Right near where Kaeya and I sit.” After a moment, he adds, “I can, er, show you where it is. If you want.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay, you must be super busy. I don’t wanna be a bother! Thanks, Mister Tartaglia! Be right back,” Bennett rushes out, and then scoops up an enormous pile of mail in both arms—seemingly at random; Ajax is sure that at least half of it isn’t Venti’s—and dashes off.
“Oof,” Fischl says, sipping at the rim of her overfilled mug. “Your ears are all red.”
“Fuck you.” Then, before Fischl can walk off— “Hey.”
“What?”
There, forgotten atop a precarious pile of boxes teetering at the edge of the mail cart, is Bennett’s cellphone. It’s even more thrashed than his glasses: the screen’s shattered to such a degree that Ajax wonders if it’s even functional. It looks like he dropped it off a cliff. Actually, thinking back to Bennett’s profile on the dating app, that’s probably exactly what happened to it.
“Give me his passcode,” Ajax mutters. “Hurry.”
Fischl turns, slowly, to stare at Ajax. Then she slams her mug down on the counter with a decisive crack.
“Are you actually insane?” A pointy fingernail jabs Ajax’s chest. “Why would I know that? And even if I did, why would I give it to—”—her lip curls—“you?”
“I’m not going to do anything weird with it! I just need to open his app. To make sure we match this time.” Ajax sandwiches her hand between both of his own, pleading. “Please, Fish. I need this.”
“Just talk to him! You saw. He’s so nice.”
“I can’t! You saw. Please.”
“No way.” Fischl sighs, shakes her head disapprovingly in a way so awfully reminiscent of Ajax’s stern eighty-five-year-old Snezhnayan grandmother that it makes him shiver and drop her hand. “Just delete the app, Ajax.”
—
An hour later, Bennett’s head appears around the corner of Ajax’s cubicle. Ajax, who’d spent the bulk of that hour speed-clicking through emails while slumped so far down in his chair that he’s practically horizontal, jackknifes upright so fast that his spine twinges.
“Um, hi again, Mister Tartaglia.” Bennett smiles at him tentatively—the wattage is noticeably dimmer than the radiant eye-searing sunbeam of a grin he’d treated Fischl to in the kitchen, but still, the warmth of it gets something all gummed up in Ajax’s chest anyway. His heart stutters strangely; Ajax hopes he looks convincingly nonchalant as he rubs his knuckles over the spotless front of his shirt to try to alleviate it.
He wishes their paths crossed more often than the two stupid minutes it takes Bennett to deliver his mail every morning. Wishes they had more to talk about. Anything to talk about. This is why the rest of us have lives outside of our jobs, Ajax, sneers a snide little voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Kaeya. Bennett doesn’t care about your sales numbers or your Prada boots. What else do you have going for you? Certainly not your personality.
“Hi. Hey. Hi, um, Bennett,” Ajax stammers out. “Find Venti’s office all right?”
“Yeah! Thank you! Now I just need to find the rest of his mail.” Bennett laughs, shrugs. His glasses have slipped down to the edge of his freckled nose again, hopelessly crooked. Ajax’s fingers tighten into his shirtfront. It would be so easy to just—reach over and set them straight—“I’ve got yours here, though!”
Bennett holds out a bundle of envelopes; Ajax takes them. Their fingers don’t touch, but it’s so close that the nearness jolts through Ajax like they had, like static electricity, buzzy, lingering.
It takes almost another hour before Ajax realizes that none of the envelopes are addressed to him.
—
[It’s a match! You and Dottore_Gut_Rearranger have liked each other. Now send him a message!]
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: You up?
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: Blood type?
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: Do you have both of your kidneys?
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: Latex allergy?
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: Emergency medical contact? Do they live far away? How long would it take them to get to you if you called?
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:07 AM]: No reason just making conversation lol
Dottore_Gut_Rearranger [2:45 AM]: You there?
[Are you sure you want to unmatch Dottore_Gut_Rearranger? This action can’t be undone.]
—
That night, Ajax falls asleep with his phone next to his head. Whatever demonic little swiping succubus lives within the app must take this as express permission to infiltrate his dreams, because he wakes two full hours before his alarm goes off, sweating, grinding his teeth, the lingering ghostly ping! of a match notification from Zhongli wavering in front of his eyes. Is this app the reason you haven’t answered my emails, Mister Tartaglia? You’re letting millions of mora slip through your fingers over a mailroom intern with a cute ass?
Dream-Zhongli has a point. Ajax does, in fact, have an actual paying job that he’s currently neglecting in favor of pursuing said mailroom intern with cute ass, and what does he even have to show for that? A pair of horrible bruised-looking shadows under his eyes and a carpal tunnel flare-up from swiping too much? Well, no longer. This is unbecoming of someone with as much to lose as Ajax does right now. The ink won’t be dry on Zhongli’s contract for another two weeks. Then Ajax can turn to other matters. Matters of the heart, and dick. And ass.
On the train he texts all of this to Fischl, who thumbs-down reacts each of his eight separate messages, and then replies i’m not reading all that. happy for you! or sorry that happened.
Ajax opens his email app with some trepidation as he enters the building and heads for the elevators. At least the real Zhongli hasn’t left anything in his inbox quite as scathing as his dream counterpart did. He’s always been surprisingly personable for an executive so filthy rich, but then again, he works in hospitality. This deal’ll keep every single bar at every single one of Zhongli’s fancy five-star Liyuean hotels stocked exclusively with Venti’s liquor, and—at the expense of Ajax’s sanity, already-pitiable social life, and probably the overall length of his lifespan—Ajax is the one who made it happen.
“I’m good at my job and I’m not going to die alone,” he repeats to himself like a mantra as he waits for the elevator. Thankfully, nobody’s around to hear him say it: this early in the morning, the endless, blinding-bright white marble lobby is almost entirely deserted, and the elevator doors part in front of Ajax to reveal an empty cabin, and thank god for that. He steps in.
“Wait! Hold the elevator!”
Ajax’s heart drops into his stomach like a hot stone. There, far across the lobby, is Bennett, sprinting towards the elevator bank full-tilt, the rickety wheels of the mail cart clattering loudly against the tile.
Before he can stop to think about it, Ajax jabs the “close” button. The doors slowly start to draw themselves shut.
“Ah, please! Hold it! Sorry! Please! Sorry!”
Ajax mashes his thumb into the “close” button until the tip of it goes bloodless white. Then again, and again. Click. Click. Clickclickclickclickclickclick—
Bennett’s close enough now that Ajax can see the worried furrow of his eyebrows, the dejected expression already beginning to bloom across his face, flushed pink with effort. His untied shoelaces fly out behind him like streamers. He looks—
“Cute,” Ajax mutters into his free hand, which he’s holding against his face in a desperate effort to try to contain the rapid-onset blush creeping up from his neck. “Fuck, fuck, oh fuck—”
He pushes the “open” button. The doors come to a juddering pause, grinding their jaws, almost like they’re confused, like they’re asking Ajax if he’s sure. Yeah, he’s fucking sure. He pushes it again, and then slaps his hand over the entire console for good measure. The buttons for several floors light up at random. Maybe the whole thing’ll short out and send Ajax plummeting to his death. He can only hope.
“Oh, my gosh, Mister Tartaglia, you’re a lifesaver, thank you so much,” Bennett says breathlessly once he’s clattered and clanged his way inside. With the mail cart occupying half the cabin, Ajax and Bennett are crowded together maybe a little closer than Ajax had anticipated. Not like either of them can do anything about it now; the doors slide shut before Ajax in one quick, smooth motion.
“You’re early today!” Bennett smiles up at him, rosy-cheeked, bangs a ruffled mess against his forehead. Under his sweater vest, his chest heaves as he finally catches his breath. Bennett looks—exerted. Ajax swallows noisily. Yeah. Exerted.
The elevator’s not moving.
“Ah, yeah.” Ajax glances up at the screen above the floor buttons, gone concerningly blank. “We have a big client coming in all the way from Liyue soon, so. Lots to be done.” Even in his mouth the words feel stiff, stilted. Why. Why? Why.
“Zhongli, right? Whoa.” Bennett’s eyes are burning two green holes into the side of Ajax’s face. “It’s so cool that he’s your client. Kaeya told me all about him!” His voice drops conspiratorially; Ajax’s head whips around. “I think he sounded a little jealous, honestly.”
“Did he now,” Ajax says, and really, he’s trying so, so hard to play it as cool as Bennett evidently thinks he is, can hear the strain of it even to his own ears, but there’s something about the open ease of Bennett’s smile, his sunny laugh, that tugs an answering one up and out of Ajax entirely against his will. He clenches his teeth a little tighter—maybe to swallow down the nerves, or maybe to keep himself from taking a monstrous bite out of the insufferably adorable corner of a shirt collar poking out of the top of Bennett’s vest, Ajax isn’t sure which—and smiles back.
The elevator’s still not moving. Bennett’s eyes narrow behind his glasses, squinting at something that’s appeared on the display. Ajax follows suit. Failure: direction error. Excessive inputs. Restarting system.
“Fuck,” Ajax hisses at the same time Bennett says, “Darn.”
“Um, Mister Tartaglia,” he adds after a long minute of silence stretches between them. “Are you…stopping at all these floors?”
He’s looking at the floor buttons now, lit in a senseless scattered array like a constellation. Ajax hopes he doesn’t flinch too obviously, but then again, there’s nowhere to hide in here. Even the ceiling’s a mirror.
“Hmm, no. That’s odd. Must really be broken,” he hums. Beneath their feet, the elevator grinds and whirs and goes nowhere.
“Darn,” Bennett says again. He touches a thick envelope atop the mail cart, plastered all over with loud red stickers. All caps. Extremely urgent. Highly time-sensitive. “I was supposed to deliver this by eight. Hopefully it wasn’t too, um. Important.”
“It probably wasn’t,” Ajax agrees.
The cabin lapses into silence again, so thick Ajax can feel it against his tongue, pressing down, awkward weight. He watches Bennett’s hands flutter over the stacks of mail like nervous birds, alighting only for a moment here to flatten out the creased edge of an envelope, there to paste a peeling stamp back into place with his thumbnail.
He doesn’t say anything, either. Something inside Ajax withers. He looks down at the dark, sleeping screen of his phone, another mirror, and then away again.
“Do you think…” Bennett starts to say, and then trails off. He’s glancing shyly at Ajax out of the corner of his eye, which Ajax only notices because he’s—well. He’s staring. (In his defense, there isn’t much else to look at in here.) Bennett’s sporting a new bandage this morning, a colorful curve over his round cheek, and there’s no way that the single piece of tape valiantly attempting to hold the bridge of his glasses together is going to make it through the day.
“...we should maybe call someone?” Bennett’s saying when Ajax tunes back in. “For help?” Before Ajax can answer, Bennett fishes his phone out of the back pocket of his hopelessly ill-fitting pants, and swipes, and—
0000.
Is his passcode.
Ajax feels his spine go rigid with another surge of manic, electric glee. His thumbs twitch into motion over the screen of his phone with the near-irresistible urge to text Fischl and rub it in her face. Ha! Like I ever even needed your help, you spiteful little witch.
But Bennett doesn’t make any further move to call anyone, and for some reason, Ajax doesn’t feel particularly inclined to, either. Their phones hang in midair between them, awake and waiting, and they’re looking at each other, and all of a sudden the quiet air between them doesn’t seem quite so heavy. Ajax has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that; what’s supposed to happen next. He could maybe just—speak into it. Speak to Bennett. Could maybe just—ask him—
Beneath their feet, the elevator gives a massive, violent lurch. Bennett stumbles, thrown off balance, and catches himself with a palm flat against the wall. And then, just like that, they’re ascending.
“Nice! Lucky!” Bennett laughs as he rights himself.
On the screen, the floor numbers tick steadily up. Ajax still can’t think of a single thing to say. It feels like his brain’s still stuck somewhere five floors down, like the upward force knocked loose every word he was gathering himself to speak aloud. He works his jaw uselessly, like a fish. English and Snezhnayan have both vacated the premises. He can’t even remember his own name. Adam?
At the fourth floor, the doors open. Neither Bennett nor Ajax move. The doors slide shut again.
“So weird about these buttons,” Bennett comments.
Seventh floor. Open. Close. Eleventh. Open. Close. Bennett fiddles with his glasses, takes them off, polishes the lenses uselessly against the front of his sweater vest. For some reason, this is so difficult to watch that Ajax has to avert his eyes again, to the floor this time, the shiny-pristine tops of his shoes. Another mirror. Heat creeps up the back of his already-sweaty shirt, traps itself between the woolen collar of his suit jacket and the nape of his neck.
“Got lots of mail to deliver today?” is what he finally comes up with. Pathetic. That was pathetic. There's one word Ajax remembers. Fucking idiot. There's two more.
“Yeah! Lots! Miss Katheryne’s still out sick, so.” Bennett scuffs his shoe against the wheel of the cart. It’s still untied. Ajax can’t lift his head. The urge to kneel down and tie it for him is so overwhelming it’s almost sickening, a miserable, insistent pang that rattles around in Ajax’s empty stomach like a rung bell. He really needs to start eating breakfast. “But, um, I don’t mind! It’s been great, actually! Lots of people to meet. And everyone here’s so friendly! Especially Kaeya. He even said he’d be my mentor if I wanted to try a sales internship next summer.”
“Did he now,” Ajax says for the second time. “That’s awful nice of him.”
“Super nice!”
“You know I’m the—” For a moment, Ajax really almost thinks better of it. He goes so far as to close his mouth and swallow the words, and even clears his throat, but then Bennett’s looking up at him with his eyes a brilliant green fractal behind the spiderwebbed lens of his glasses, and Ajax needs nothing more in life than to impress him. To—finally have something to talk about with him. The only thing he can talk about. His job.
He opens his mouth again. “You should ask me if you have any questions. Not him. Because I’m the best. My numbers,” Ajax corrects himself quickly. Both are true; one sounds better. “Are the best. Better than Kaeya’s.”
“Oh! Cool! Yeah, sure, I definitely will!” Bennett grins, nods so vigorously that his glasses nearly go flying off. “Thanks, Mister Tartaglia.”
Fourteenth floor. Open. Close. They’re getting closer.
“You can…” Ajax gulps down a breath with some difficulty. God, is it hot in here? Did they use up all the oxygen while they were stuck? If Ajax hadn’t spent so long this morning getting the half Windsor to sit just-so, he’d yank his tie loose and fling the whole thing down the elevator shaft. “You can just call me Ajax.”
Bennett, unfazed by the increasingly apparent dark cloud of Ajax’s emotional turmoil sucking up what little’s left of the cabin’s air supply, does a little salute with his fingers that Ajax knows will haunt his every waking moment for the next month. At least. “Gotcha! Will do, Mi—Ajax!”
It sounds very nice in his mouth. That thought haunts Ajax all the way down the hallway after he scrambles out of the elevator at the twentieth floor, so loud and enormous in his head that he can’t even remember if he said goodbye to Bennett.
Kaeya’s waiting for him outside his cubicle, arms crossed over the front of his dark blue suit. For once, his shirt’s buttoned almost all the way up. Must be a special occasion. “Tardy, Tartaglia? Tsk.”
“Traffic.” Ajax collapses into his desk chair, tips his head back until it’s lolling. Five minutes past nine is hardly tardy—especially when their boss regularly stumbles in at one in the afternoon after a lengthy liquid lunch—but for once Ajax just can’t find it in him to pick the fight Kaeya’s so obviously angling for.
“What are you doing?” Kaeya peers down at him, upside-down, eyebrow raised. “Get up. I’m on. Dawn Winery’s in the conference room already. Are you running my PowerPoint or not?”
“Fuck.” Ajax had completely forgotten. He grinds the heels of his palms into his tired eyes until stars burst in the dark behind his lids. His shirt’s a sweaty mess, gone cold and clammy in the places where it’s clinging to his back under his suit jacket. “Yeah. Okay. Let me borrow a shirt.”
“What for?”
“Just,” Ajax groans, drags his hands down over his face. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why you need a new shirt?”
“You know what? Run your own fucking PowerPoint.”
Kaeya laughs, light and airy like a bell. Ajax wants so badly to reach up and strangle the smug sound out of him with his own tie. If only Dawn Winery wasn’t Venti’s favorite cash cow. “Touchy! Fine, fine. But you’d better bring it back dry cleaned. It’s Fontainian silk.”
That night, Ajax crumples the shirt into a ball and cranks the dial on his dryer as high and hot as it’ll go. It almost makes him feel better.
—
On Friday, Ajax is halfway through his lunch (two Red Bulls and a granola bar) when Fischl abruptly grabs the cord dangling between them up into her fist and yanks the headphones out of both of their ears. The low drone of her Dracula podcast stops short; the buzzy hivelike noise and chatter of the cafeteria rush in to replace it.
“Are you okay? Like, I’m really asking.” Fischl glares up at Ajax through the curtain of her bangs. For someone seemingly concerned with his well-being, she doesn’t sound especially sympathetic. “I know Zhongli’s keeping you busy, but if you work yourself to death before he signs the contract Venti’ll freak out.” She stabs her fork into a romaine leaf. “I’ll kill you all over again if you fuck up our Christmas bonuses.”
Ajax wishes it was a Zhongli problem. He could fix a Zhongli problem. The actual problem is that there are a lot more dating apps out there on the market than Ajax had thought, and so he’d spent most nights after work this week carefully crafting Bennett-bait profiles on as many as he could find. For all he knows, maybe Bennett’d given up on the one Ajax had been using and switched to something more niche. Dating app for people with dogs? Great, Ajax suddenly has three. Dating app for outdoor enthusiasts? Sign him up, he’s been looking for an excuse to flex his ice-fishing photos from last winter’s visit to Morepesok anyway. Christian Mingle? Sure, why the fuck not, Fischl had mentioned once that Bennett has a friend who’s a deaconess so maybe he’s religious, Ajax can get down with that, though he hopes Bennett won’t want to wait until marriage to—
“O-kay,” Fischl says slowly, watching Ajax swipe listlessly back and forth through the clogged, colorful pages of scammy-looking apps littering his phone screen. “I’m just going to tell him you’re into him. Why are you making this into a whole big thing?” Which is a little rich coming from her, Ajax wants to say, reigning Prinzessin der Verurteilung of making things into whole big things, but whatever. “It literally doesn’t have to be.”
“I don’t want you to tell him,” Ajax says, setting down his phone in favor of cracking the tab on his second Red Bull. “I want it to be natural. I don’t want him to like me just because you like me.”
“I don’t like you.” Her eyes flicker to Ajax’s unattended screen, to the mildly hysterical, entirely made-up dog-dating-app profile he’d written at two in the morning. Dog dad to three but I want a big family ;)! “Mm. Natural. Right.”
Ajax pitches forward to thump his forehead against his folded arms. “I should’ve just said something in the elevator. It even got stuck, Fish. That was my chance! Real rom-com-style shit.”
A moment later, he feels Fischl’s long nails scratch soothingly over his scalp. “Poor Ajaxusha.” She sounds like his grandmother again; more mocking than sincerely sympathetic, but right now Ajax’ll take whatever little coddling he can get. “Lucky for you, you’re about to get another one.”
“Wh—”
“Hey, guys! Do you mind if I, um, sit with you?”
Fischl’s fingers tighten into a handful of Ajax’s hair. He doesn’t so much lift his head from his arms as Fischl does it for him. Forcefully. Bennett’s fidgeting at the edge of their table, holding a brown bagged lunch in one hand and something Ajax can’t identify clutched in the other.
“Of course you can, Bennett,” she says brightly. “Oh, no. Are those your glasses?”
Bennett pulls out a chair, sits. He opens his hand, and what falls to the tabletop were almost certainly glasses at one point, but now are little more than a pile of snapped plastic, useless tape, and cracked glass. “Yeah. Broke ‘em again. I was hoping maybe you could tape them for me like you did last time, but I lost my phone this morning so I couldn’t text you and ask.”
Fischl sighs, but sweeps the sad pile towards herself across the table and sets to work reassembling them. “Did you find your phone?”
Bennett rakes a hand through his hair, chastened. “Not yet.”
Despite himself, Ajax feels the slightest glimmer of hope ignite somewhere within the anxious black sludge that’s recently taken up permanent residence in his stomach. So Bennett hasn’t completely dissolved into the dating-app abyss, never to be seen again; he’s just temporarily misplaced his phone. Ajax sinks his teeth into the gluey, flavorless sponge of his granola bar, chews, watching Bennett across the table as he uses a bandaged finger to peel back the tinfoil on his enormous sandwich. It looks—Ajax’s stomach snarls again as the congealed lump of granola hits the empty bottom of it—really delicious. Bennett digs in with gusto, taking such an enthusiastic bite that half the ingredients come spilling out the other end.
In another universe, they could be on a date right now: Ajax looking adoringly on as Bennett giggled and blushed at him from across the booth in some fancy restaurant downtown. Gold candlelight, white tablecloth. Maybe their knees would touch beneath it, accidentally. They’d share a laugh about it, a little shy, Ajax thinks, the last of their nerves dissolving. Maybe Bennett would playfully nudge at the hem of Ajax’s pant leg with the tip of his shoe, and then maybe Ajax’d reach across the table to—the fantasy momentarily dissolves as he hears Fischl’s sharp, clipped voice next to his ear, backed by the resounding din of the cafeteria—reach across the table to take Bennett’s waiting hand—
“You know, Ben,” Fischl says loudly. The candlelit restaurant falls to pieces around Ajax’s head. He’s been furiously chewing the same mouthful of granola for so long now that it’s taken on the approximate texture and flavor of wet corrugated cardboard. “The office is throwing a big party next week because of Ajax. His biggest client’s finally signing his contract.”
“Nice!” Bennett talks with his mouth half-full, swallows thickly before continuing. “Congratulations, Mister Tartaglia. You really weren’t kidding about being the best, huh! That’s so great!”
“Yeah. Haha. Um, and, Ajax,” Ajax reminds him weakly. He can feel Fischl’s piercing, judgmental stare like a knife at his temple. “Just Ajax.”
“Oops.” The pink tip of Bennett’s tongue flashes between his teeth. “Right, sorry! Ajax.”
“You should come,” Fischl continues, gracefully ignoring the strange, awkward current that ripples outward from the air between the two of them. Ajax really, really, really doesn’t deserve her. She adopts her haughty, regal marketing-department pitch-voice. “Venti’s parties aren’t to be missed, you know. He’ll be pulling out all the stops to impress Zhongli.”
Bennett tears off a more manageable bite of his sandwich as he considers, screwing up his face like Fischl’s asked him to solve a particularly difficult math equation. “Only if you’re sure it’s okay,” he hedges. “I mean, I’m only an intern, so…” He doesn’t finish his thought.
“Ask the man of the hour.”
Ajax’s back straightens; he can’t help but bloom a little under the glow of the words, even as dry and unenthusiastic as they sound coming from Fischl. “Yeah, come,” he says, shrugs a shoulder, the picture of nonchalance. Or, well, he hopes so, anyway. He’s got to keep it cool, because Kaeya’s definitely not going to let him borrow another replacement shirt anytime soon. “Should be a good time.”
Bennett smiles. There’s a smear of mustard at the corner of his mouth. In another universe, Ajax, doting boyfriend, would lick his thumb, lean over, wipe it off. In this one, Ajax crumples his granola bar wrapper into his wanting fist so tightly that his fingernails bite into his palm.
“I’ll be there,” Bennett says. “But…do you think…um, Fish, is it fancy? Do I have to wear a tie and stuff?”
“Yes,” Ajax croaks, just as Fischl laughs and says, “No.”
This time, she turns sideways in her seat to look at Ajax fully. I perceive you, pervert, says her freezing, disgusted gaze. Then please, let me have this, says Ajax’s in return.
“I’ll borrow one from my dads,” Bennett says slowly.
“Great,” Fischl says through her clenched, smiling teeth. “It’ll be great.”
“Great,” Ajax echoes needlessly.
It really, really is.
—
The first time Ajax had ever spoken to Bennett was in the office lobby’s coffee shop. It was the second day of Bennett’s internship, Ajax learned later, and he’d been balancing a cardboard cupholder of coffee orders in each of his hands. He’d only made it two steps away from the counter before dropping them both all over the floor.
Ajax remembers this vividly; not only because his brand-new Prada boots took the brunt of a large white chocolate mocha with extra whip, but also because of—well. The Bennett of it all. He’d looked up at Ajax from where he was kneeling on the floor, coffee soaking into the knees of his pants, eyes wide and frantic, mouth spilling over with apologies, and had tried to use, of all things, his own cardigan to mop up the cream splattering the toes of Ajax’s boots.
I’m so, so sorry, really, I’ll buy you new ones, I haven’t gotten a paycheck yet but, um, I can maybe give you my phone number so, um, when I do you can—
Ajax had stopped him, horrified both at Bennett’s wobbling voice and at the hot, unfamiliar flush he could feel rising to his cheeks at the sight of him. Sweet freckled face behind a cracked pair of glasses. A bare centimeter of his summer-suntanned stomach, visible where he’d yanked his shirt and cardigan away from his body.
It’s fine, Ajax faintly remembers saying. Don’t, d-don’t, it’s, uh, it’s fine, man, you don’t have to, and then he’d just—walked away. Dazed, half out of his mind, like Bennett had turned around and hit him upside the head with a blunt object instead of dropping half a coffee on his shoes.
That day, Ajax had walked away. Nameless, phone-number-less, and like a total fucking asshole.
“Are you going to order something?” From behind the counter, Diluc regards Ajax with the sort of lip-curling disgust one might typically reserve for a particularly large cockroach.
Ajax hadn’t actually seen Bennett again after that for a while. The encounter had been so brief and startlingly out-of-the-ordinary that Ajax would’ve almost believed he’d imagined the whole thing, if not for the excessively irritating way the sugary residue on his bootsoles stuck to the floor tiles for the rest of the week.
It was Fischl who’d reintroduced them one day at lunch, dragging a dazzled, mildly rumpled, eager-eyed Bennett behind her. I saved him from the IT department’s lunch table, she’d announced proudly, tousling his bedhead like he was a rescue dog she’d pulled from a river. Scaramouche was about to bore him to death. Ajax, this is Bennett.
Bennett, either out of mortification or drawing upon some sort of bottomless well of angelic grace within him, politely introduced himself as Bennett, intern! I’m down in the basement, in the mailroom! Nice to meetcha! and did not mention the Coffee Incident at all.
“The usual? Black?” Diluc, who in the past week Ajax has left-swiped on every single dating app he currently has installed on his phone—not interested, thanks—prompts after another while of silence. He drums his fingers impatiently against the side of the register. “There’s a line.”
Bennett’s phone is on the countertop behind him, perched atop a stack of battered secondhand textbooks that are almost certainly also his. Fundamentals of Business. Corporate Sales Tactics for Dummies. It looks like he’d forgotten almost all of his belongings here, like he’d simply stood up mid-study session—or, more likely, leapt up, realizing he was running late—and never looked back. Ajax stares at the dark, fractured screen of Bennett’s phone. It’s so close.
Diluc coughs loudly.
“Oh, you found Bennett’s phone!” Ajax gives Diluc his toothiest, winningest smile, turning on the salesman charm. “He’ll be so relieved. I, uh, I can give it back to him. Right now, actually! I’m on my way back upstairs, so if you’ll just pass that over here I’ll—”
“Nah.” Diluc raises one thick caterpillar of an eyebrow. “I’m sure he’ll be back. Thanks, though.”
“But I—”
Diluc, evidently finished with their conversation, tilts his head sideways to look past Ajax’s shoulder. “Next.”
Ajax feels his smile pinch itself into a pursed-lip grimace. He grits his teeth, but steps aside. Almost as soon as he does, the next customer steps up to the counter, shouldering him out of the way. Whatever they’ve ordered sends Diluc shuffling off to the espresso machine at the far end of the bar, but he makes sure to turn around and look back at Ajax once more as he goes, the wordless warning quite clear in his customer-service-deadened red stare: don’t try anything stupid.
But Bennett’s phone is so, so close. And unattended, for the moment, anyway, and if Ajax just leans over the counter a little farther, his arm’s probably just about long enough to reach.
Suddenly, Bennett’s phone screen wakes. Ajax squints to make out the words on the notification pop-up, but he doesn’t have to look much farther than the first few, all too familiar now. The dating app. Someone liked you! Open this to meet your match!
Something snaps. Ajax feels it detach in his skull, some straining last shred of decency popping out of place like an overstretched rubber band, and before he knows it he’s lunging for the phone, bending in half at the waist over the coffee shop counter, legs kicking up behind him—
“The hell are you doing?”
Diluc steps in front of Ajax, looming. Damn, he’s big. Okay, maybe Ajax is a little interested.
“I,” Ajax starts, and then has no idea what to say next. Don’t mind me, just climbing over your counter to steal the intern’s cellphone to make sure we match on this dating app because every time I try to speak to him in real life I end up deepthroating my own foot. No. Fuck no.
“I changed my mind on that coffee,” Ajax says instead. “Didn’t want to bother you, so, I. Uh.” Oh, good god. “You know.”
Diluc stares at him for a long moment, then casts his eyes up to the underside of his ugly black visor, as though he’s barely suppressing the urge to roll them.
In the end, Ajax does get his coffee. It tastes like shit, like punishment, burnt and bitter and hard to swallow, and so Ajax makes himself drink the whole thing.
—
You [3:45 PM]: can u tell me that i’m a pathetic worthless kissless stupid loser who deserves to die alone and unloved without making any truly significant contributions to society except for being an overachieving cog ceaselessly grinding his life away in the unfeeling corporate machine
DaddyDom_Arlecchino is typing…
DaddyDom_Arlecchino is typing…
DaddyDom_Arlecchino is typing…
DaddyDom_Arlecchino is typing…
DaddyDom_Arlecchino [3:50 PM]: www.betterhelp.com
[You have been blocked and can no longer send messages to this person.]
—
This is not sustainable, Ajax decides a few days later. He’s got to get himself sorted out—and fast, because keeping this up much longer’s going to drive him insane. Maybe it already has; he’s been on the phone with Zhongli for twenty minutes now and the whole time he’s been typing Mrs. Bennett Tartaglia over and over in a blank Word document like he’s possessed. All work and no play makes Ajax a dull boy—
“Mr. Tartaglia?” comes Zhongli’s silk-smooth voice through the receiver. “Did I lose you?” Fuck.
“Fu—um. Yep, hi, sorry.” Fuck! “Still here.”
“Excellent. Anyway, where was I…”
After Zhongli’s talked himself out—which takes another good half hour—Ajax hangs up and puts his head down on his desk. It’s already well past six, the office dim-lit and empty in every direction around his cubicle, but Ajax figures that if he stretches this already-endless day into an all-nighter he can get through almost all of the random preparatory bullshit tasks Zhongli asked him to handle on the call. I didn’t think people actually worked themselves to death until I met you, Fischl’d said to him once, but it’s not like Ajax has many other options at present. What’s he gonna do, ask someone to pick up his slack right at the home stretch? Ask Kaeya? He’d rather just die, thanks. He’s made it this far alone. Only a little ways to go.
Ajax clicks Print, then peels himself out of his desk chair to stand. He stretches long and slow, arms to the ceiling, his spine creaking and complaining like he’s been hunched over his keyboard for ten years instead of ten consecutive hours. He doesn’t have to look in a mirror to know he looks like shit right now; he can feel it, hair a mess from running his hands through it all day, shirtsleeves shoved sloppily up to his elbows, hopelessly wrinkled. Whatever. Not like anyone’s still in the building at this hour to judge him, except maybe the janitor.
The light in the copy room’s on, spilling a wedge of white into the long darkness of the hallway. Strange, Ajax thinks, and even stranger when the light’s interrupted by the silhouette of someone moving around inside. As he rounds the corner, he checks his watch: the hour’s much later than he’d thought. Even the janitor’s usually long gone by now, so it’s probably a shitfaced Venti camping out after he lost his house keys at the bar again—
“Oh, shit,” Bennett blurts out. He startles, eyes going so wide his pale lashes nearly touch his eyebrows, and the thick sheaf of papers he’s clutching to his chest slip straight through his fingers, scattering across the floor. “You scared me!”
Ajax freezes in the doorway, glancing nonplussed from the face of his watch to the face of—Bennett’s—face—Bennett’s standing in front of him. It’s nearly ten at night.
“Bennett?” Ajax blinks, once, twice, hard, but Bennett’s still there when he opens his eyes again. This isn’t some kind of Red Bull-and-sleeplessness-induced hallucination. “Wh…what are you doing here? It’s late.”
Bennett kneels to pick up the papers at his feet. Automatically, Ajax follows suit. “Yeah, haha, guess it kinda is,” Bennett says, a little sheepish. “Um, I had this assignment for my business class that’s due tomorrow morning, but my dorm’s printer broke a while ago, so…”
He trails off. Ajax looks down at the heap of papers in his hands, gathered into a sloppy pile. It’s all out of order so he can’t make any sense of it, but it looks long and technical, littered with footnotes. Damn, is this how they teach business in college? Ajax is suddenly grateful he never went.
Bennett reaches over to take the papers. The soft back of his hand grazes Ajax’s thumb. As soon as he hands them over, Ajax finds himself casting around on the floor for another handful of papers to gather up, just so Bennett’ll have to do it again.
“So…you’re stealing our office supplies?” Ajax teases.
He half-expects Bennett to startle again at the accusation, to fall all over himself apologizing like he had the day of the Coffee Incident. But Bennett just grins at him, suddenly sly, and then Ajax is the one startled, his own smile sliding off his face so quickly that Ajax barely manages to hang onto it before it crashes to the floor.
“Don’t tell on me,” Bennett says, giggling as he lifts a finger to his lips. “What are you doing here so late, anyway?”
Fuck. Right. The presentation. Ajax springs up from where he’s kneeling, his loudly protesting knees probably giving away exactly how much of his day has been spent crunched over his keyboard. “Finishing things up for Zhongli,” he says as he punches the Start button on the printer. “He’ll be arriving first thing tomorrow morning, so, um, I want everything to be…” It hits Ajax with a sudden clarity how crazed he must look right now, his wrinkled shirt, his disastrous hair. Oh, god. His eyebags. “Perfect.”
“Oh,” Bennett says, and then nothing else. Ajax is sure he’s holding something back, but whatever it is, he’s too polite to say it. The printer spits out another thick stack of Ajax’s slides, whirrs a bit, then hacks up five more copies, rapid-fire. Ajax sighs and grabs a stapler. Now that the end of his day’s finally in sight, the exhaustion’s creeping up: his eyelids suddenly weigh a thousand pounds each, and the first staple he aims at the corner of the document misses the mark entirely.
He’s so tired that the pain only comes a moment later.
“Shit,” he hisses. The staple dangles halfway out of the pad of his index finger. Ajax plucks it out, and a red bead of blood springs up right behind it.
“What happened?” Bennett appears at his shoulder. “Ooh, ouch! Hang on a second.”
How fucking embarrassing. “Stupid stapler’s broken,” Ajax mutters as he waits, dully-throbbing finger held aloft, for Bennett to finish digging through his pockets for—whatever he’s looking for.
“A-ha!” A bandage. Ajax’s heart wallops against the inside of his ribcage with such force that he’s pretty sure it sends another rush of blood welling up at his fingertip. “I always carry lots of extras! Here, hold still for a sec.”
“I can do it myse—” Ajax starts, but then Bennett’s small fingers are closing around Ajax’s wrist to pull his hand closer. Bennett’s thumb presses into the center of Ajax’s palm, holding him still. Ajax’s mouth clicks shut so fast that his teeth rattle.
Bennett lines up the bandage—one of the brightly-colored ones he’s frequently sporting in a few places himself—and Ajax almost laughs at the intense concentration that falls shadowlike over his face as he presses the sticky edges down, like he’s disarming a nuclear bomb.
“Are you still coming to the party tomorrow?” Bennett asks, apropos of nothing. He’s still looking down at Ajax’s empty palm, so Ajax has to answer to the glasses perched on the cowlicked top of his head.
It takes him a moment. “Sure I am.” He swallows. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Bennett lifts his head, but he doesn’t drop Ajax’s hand, not all the way. Ajax has to withdraw it himself, an agonizingly slow slip through Bennett’s light loosened grasp, and he hates every minute of it.
“Good,” Bennett says, and smiles.
—
Good. It’s nearly two in the morning by the time Ajax makes it home and into bed, where now he’s staring at the ceiling, entirely awake. The word pings around the walls of his quiet, dark bedroom like a fly. Good, Bennett’d said. Why’d he have to go and say that?
Maybe he was asking on Fischl’s behalf, Ajax thinks as he rolls over onto his stomach and fishes out his phone from underneath his pillow. For all her posturing otherwise, she tends to cling to Ajax like a barnacle at work events. Maybe she’d asked Bennett to make sure Ajax wouldn’t skip out and ditch her. Good. Good. Good. Okay. Sure. That’s probably it.
Bleary-eyed, Ajax opens the app. Nothing like a little mindless swiping to put him into the coma he so desperately needs before tomorrow.
[Bennett, <0.1 miles away]
I like adventuring and dogs! Let’s go hiking!
Ajax blinks the near-sleep from his eyes. Scrubs his hand over his face, too, for good measure, but the image on the screen doesn’t go anywhere, so he’s not dreaming. Bennett grins back at him from his ledge in Liyue, right where Ajax’d left him two weeks ago.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Ajax says out loud into his empty bedroom.
He clicks Super Like. Nothing happens, no match, but Ajax falls asleep smiling anyway.
—
He wakes smiling, too, and with an odd, giddy, buoyant feeling in his chest that persists all the way to the office. Ajax watches his reflection in the dark screen of his phone on the table before him. He’s so close, now. All Bennett has to do is retrieve his phone from Diluc, and open the app, and Ajax’ll be right there at the top of the pile. They’re practically engaged.
“Expecting a call?” Across the table, Zhongli’s looking at him curiously, his heavy gold pen poised above the last page of the contract.
“Oh, uh, no.” Ajax swipes his phone off the table and shoves it into the pocket of his blazer. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
With a flourish, Zhongli signs. It’s kind of—anticlimactic.
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Tartaglia,” Zhongli says as he caps his pen. “Thank you for all of your hard work. I look forward to continuing it together.”
—
“And that’s all he fucking said to me,” Ajax snarls, teeth bared around the rim of his second—third?—drink. Whichever it is, it’s already just about empty. “Months of my life gone, and for what? And then after that he just stood up and waltzed right back onto his private fucking jet to Liyue even though I told him that we were throwing him a—”
“Take a breath.” Fischl nudges the empty cup out of Ajax’s hand to replace it with a full one. “Take a drink. It’s over now.”
Ajax does both. It kind of helps. Around him, the party’s in full swing, the normally-lifeless labyrinth of their pen of cubicles made a bit more festive with haphazardly-strung ropes of fairy lights someone’d dug up out of the Christmas storage bins, and with the low red light of sunset through the windows stretching in long lines across the floor. The room’s stuffed full, spilling over with voices, laughter, music, and, of course, the best thing about working for a liquor company: liquor.
Venti’s flitting around holding court like a king, his beret bobbing in and out of sight as he refills a drink here and there, and deposits air kisses upon the cheeks of a few of Zhongli’s stone-faced loyal retinue (who had almost all stayed behind for the party, in spite of their no-show boss). Ajax suspects Venti was somehow plastered long before the party even started; the first thing he’d done when Ajax’d stepped off the elevator was fling his arms around Ajax’s neck and kiss him square on the mouth. My star salesman!
It’s all pretty tame now, but Ajax has been to enough of these to know that it won’t last. Already Kaeya’s herding a whole crowd of people—including Diluc from the coffee shop downstairs, still wearing that horrible apron, whispers a scandalized Fischl—into the conference room for a game of flip cup. The two married HR guys from the Sumeru office vanished only moments after they arrived, probably to fuck in a supply closet. Actually, Ajax isn’t sure they have enough supply closets in the entire building for the amount of gay sex that’s probably going to happen here tonight. Best to steer clear of Venti’s office later, just to be safe.
“Oh, he came,” Fischl exclaims, elbowing him.
Ajax blinks out of his reverie. “Kaveh? Yeah, I bet he did.”
“What?” Fischl looks at him strangely. “No. Bennett.”
Sure enough, there’s Bennett, lingering near the entryway with his hands wedged into his pockets. Even from across the room, Ajax can tell he lost the battle with the knot on his obviously-borrowed tie, but he combed his hair and fixed his glasses, at least. He looks—good. He looks good. He looks—good—
“He looks,” Ajax forces out after a long, desperate, burning gulp of his drink. “Lost.”
“Give him five minutes and he’ll be best friends with every person here,” Fischl says. “I’m gonna go say hi. Are you coming?”
“In a second,” Ajax tells her.
It takes him almost two hours.
Which Ajax spends circling the party in a slow, meandering spiral like some sort of starving predatory animal. He mingles, small-talks, fills his cup. Gets bored. Drains it. Bored again. Fills it again. Every so often, helpless to Bennett’s gravity, Ajax’s eyes drift back to wherever he’s wandered off to in the room. Fischl was right; he’s a hit, already surrounded by a small crowd of people basking in the warmth of his wide, sweet, slightly-drunk grin. Ajax takes another jealous, miserable swig of his drink.
He doesn’t know what, exactly, finally propels him over to where Bennett’s hovering close to the dwindling snack table. Maybe it’s Kaeya, who emerges from the conference room sporting a few more buttons of his shirt undone than when he’d entered it, scanning the room in the sharp, calculated way he does when he’s about to put Ajax’s social skills to shame. Maybe it’s Fischl, who seems to Ajax oddly invested in keeping Bennett’s red plastic cup constantly full to the point of near-overflowing. Maybe it’s the firewater churning around in Ajax’s stomach, heating him from the inside out, liquid courage. Or maybe, probably, it’s just Ajax: he just wants, so badly, to be near.
“Where have you been,” Fischl says when Ajax approaches, but there’s something to her expression that makes him feel like maybe she knows exactly where. “Anyway, not important! Now open wide. Both of you!”
Bennett’s eyes flicker over to meet Ajax’s for the barest second, and then he opens his mouth obediently. Ajax follows suit.
Fischl pours a shot straight from the bottle into each of their mouths, one after the other, quick succession. So quick, in fact, that Ajax doesn’t have enough time to think about whether or not that counts as an indirect kiss before the firewater starts burning.
Next to him, Bennett sputters, arms flailing as he tries to force it down. While he’s preoccupied, Fischl presses the bottle into Ajax’s splayed, helpless hands.
“If you don’t do something right now,” she says, voice dropping so low only Ajax can hear it, “then you might as well just use the rest of this to kill yourself.”
—
And then they’re alone.
The absolute state of the knot in Bennett’s tie is more obvious up close. The whole thing’s lying crooked, his shirt collar poking out oddly on one side where he was probably yanking at it earlier, uncomfortable. It’s also very obvious up close that Bennett is very drunk, which is why Ajax is focusing so hard on the tie. It wouldn’t be weird if he reached over and fixed it. Right? Just the collar. Please, god.
“Oh, huh,” Bennett says after a moment. His head whips around, searching the crowd around them. “Weird. Did you see where Fischl went?”
“Nope,” Ajax lies, and then takes another pull of firewater straight from the bottle. The burn’s nearly to the tips of his fingers, now, numbing them where they’re whiteknuckling the neck of the bottle. Liquid courage, he tells himself again.
Bennett turns around to stand on his tiptoes and search the crowd for Fischl’s blonde pigtailed head. Shamelessly, Ajax seizes the opportunity to reacquaint himself with Bennett’s ass. Yep, still worth all of this heartache. This is probably not what Fischl had meant by do something, but hey. He’s working up to it, okay?
Bennett’s phone blinks awake from inside his back pocket, casting a rectangle of bluish light onto the fabric. Ajax can’t get the bottle to his mouth fast enough to outrun his first thought, which is of the app, but the firewater burns it away almost as quickly as it comes. The second, thought, too. And the third. The bottle feels suddenly significantly lighter in Ajax’s hand than it did ten minutes ago.
When he lowers it from his mouth, Bennett’s staring. The flush of alcohol is bright over the bandaged bridge of his nose, in his eyes, too, glassy with uncontained awe.
“Whoa!” Bennett exclaims. “That was cool. Firewater’s strong!” His fingers stretch towards Ajax’s, making to take the bottle. “Can I try another shot?”
“Nope.” Ajax smirks, holds the bottle up higher, out of Bennett’s reach. He’s feeling it, now. The courage. Bennett’s fingers graze the edge of Ajax’s sleeve, tugging at it. “Sheesh, Ben. You’re wasted.”
Bennett’s mouth screws up, expression indignant. “I’m not!”
An hour later, they’re still talking. Ajax hadn’t even noticed it pass.
He startles out of their conversation—Bennett’s telling him about the time he hiked down half of Dragonspine with a broken ankle—like he’s surfacing from a deep dream. The office comes back into focus around them: the drooping strings of lights, the picked-clean snack table. The room’s emptied out quickly, with only a small herd of the hardest partiers left behind, gathering up their coats for a trek to the bar around the corner. Someone unplugs their phone from the speakers and the playlist cuts off abruptly, throwing the room into sleepy, murmuring quiet.
When Ajax looks back, Bennett’s smiling at him.
“Wanna go for a walk?”
—
Neither of them know where to go, so they make their slow way to Ajax’s train station. As they walk, Bennett fishes a hoodie out of his overstuffed backpack and pulls it on over his work clothes. They must look an odd pair like this, Ajax thinks, him in his long black coat and briefcase, Bennett loping along beside him with his hands in his hoodie pockets, looking like Ajax had just picked him up from the skate park.
The thin orange rays of the sodium lights above the train station waver into view at the end of the block. It’s nearly empty at this hour. A sudden bolt of anxiety lances through Ajax along with the realization that he’s going to have to say—well, something. Soon.
When the walk into the pool of light next to the station entrance, Bennett beats him to it. “Hey, Ajax?”
Ajax turns. And then he’s falling.
Or—he’s not falling. He’s being pulled roughly forward, arms pinwheeling useless at his sides, his tie coming up taut around his throat. Bennett’s yanking him closer by the tie, and Bennett’s other arm is coming up to hook around the back of Ajax’s neck, and then they’re kissing.
Bennett kisses him exactly the way Ajax’d thought—hoped—prayed he would: hungry, eager. His lips are so soft against Ajax’s, gentle but not hesitant, like he’d been waiting to do this for a while. The thought makes Ajax dizzy. The barest scrape of Bennett’s teeth against Ajax’s bottom lip as he pulls away makes him dizzier. The only thing keeping him upright is Bennett’s still-firm grasp on the end of his tie, like he’s holding a leash.
They stare at each other in the dim light. Bennett’s breathing hard, a warm, beery wash across Ajax’s burning face. Suddenly, Bennett’s expression crumples all at once into an anxious grimace like he’s about to cry.
“Wait, was that okay?” He scans Ajax’s face worriedly; Ajax has no idea what sort of expression he’s wearing. The buzzy feeling radiating out from his mouth is making everything on his face feel numb. “I just…um, I know you like me, so I thought maybe…”
“I—who,” Ajax starts, but even as he’s saying it, he’s leaning in again. He kisses Bennett clumsily, near-missing his mouth entirely, but Bennett lets him try again. And again. “Who told you that I—”—Bennett’s lips part against Ajax’s, just a little, and every other thought slips away from him—“—that I liked you—”
Bennett pulls away again, cuts him a look, like don’t be stupid.
“You could’ve done something about it,” Ajax mutters at the asphalt between them. They’re standing so close that Bennett’s sneakers are scuffing the tips of Ajax’s boots. The image lurches unpleasantly. Oh, god, he’s drunk. He’s pouting. “If you knew.”
Bennett just laughs. “I’m doing something now!”
“That’s not…I mean, I wanted you to…” Suddenly this is all sounding very stupid in Ajax’s head. “On the…”
“You wanted me to…” Bennett prompts. He pushes at Ajax’s cheek until their gazes meet again. The palm of his hand is blazing hot against Ajax’s skin. Everything about him’s so warm. “What are you talking about?”
“Like me,” Ajax mumbles against the pad of Bennett’s thumb. “On the—on Tinder.”
Bennett’s thumb twitches against Ajax’s mouth as he laughs again, short and surprised, like the sound had leapt out of him without his permission. “What?!”
It’s almost a relief that Ajax is too drunk to recall almost any part of his fumbling explanation. It happens like he’s outside his own body. He hears himself say swipe and twenty bucks and dog dating app. He hears himself say wanted to talk to you.
“Ajax! Jeez!” Bennett’s grinning ear-to-ear like Ajax had just delivered a stunningly poetic love confession instead of a drunken vomit pile of feelings. “I never check this thing. I always forget. You said you—um, what was it called? You super liked me?”
Another bolt of shame through Ajax’s gut. He nods miserably.
Bennett digs around in his pocket. Sure enough, when he opens the app, his inbox is clogged with so many likes that the thing’s given up counting entirely. When Bennett taps on the red bubble proudly proclaiming 100+, there’s Ajax, right at the top of the pile.
Bennett taps the pink heart next to Ajax’s profile picture. Ajax feels it in his chest first, in his own, actual beating heart, and then in his pocket, the answering vibration.
“I like you,” Bennett says. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Ajax pauses. “Really?” Again. “Okay.”
—
[It’s a match! You and Bennett have liked each other. Now send him a message!]
You [11:11 PM]: Really?
Bennett [11:11 PM]: Really.