Chapter Text
For such a staid man, there were far too many rumors swirling around Dorian. A sentence that practically summed up the problem—after all, he’d only introduced himself with his first name at the beginning of his first shift. When Emily, one of the weekend managers, had gone to check the personnel roster, it was exactly the same way.
She’d followed up with the owners about it. They’d shrugged, and told her to leave it alone for the time being. It’d only become a concern when it’d been time to send him his first paycheck and there wasn’t an address—he’d updated his file with a grumble—but nobody could quite find what he’d updated it to, or what it had been previously.
The man valued his privacy.
So, of course, most of his coworkers valued getting to speculate about him.
Kyle dropped a glass the first time Dorian showed up to work.
He hadn’t been told to expect a new member of staff—the man was unfairly tall, somewhere in his mid to late 30s, with a broad set of shoulders, and a set of inscrutable yet well-done door-motif tattoos that crawled up his arms and underneath his crisp white shirt.
And Kyle was just a man. (Who was incidentally, as of about two weeks ago, trying to come to terms with his own delayed realization of his crippling bisexuality.) Kyle was learning new things about himself every day, and this day it seemed like there was a lot to be learning.
It wasn’t one of the more expensive glasses, thankfully, and he didn’t drop it into the ice-bin. He’d broken a glass into the ice-bin once when he was still in training, and the memory of just how pissed everyone had been haunted him. There’d been a number of times where he jerked awake, turned and saw the clock flashing 3am, and had been unable to fall back asleep from the sheer shame and humiliation coursing through his body.
The sound of the glass ricocheting off the cabinet baseboards had stirred him from blinking incredulously at the man who’d just walked in. Behind him Ryan swore and went to grab the broom from the back, muttering about fucking up so close to opening hours.
“Alright there?”
Oh fuck the new guy had an accent too.
“Um. Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Um. General rule is not to move if something breaks around your feet so that you don’t accidentally grind the glass into the floor, so. I’m fine though!”
“Good. Glad to know this establishment is safety-conscious.”
“Yeah,” Kyle squeaked. “We’re pretty safety-conscious here, I guess. I’m Kyle, by the way—you’re new right? I don’t feel like we’ve met before…”
The guy nodded. “Right, I ought to introduce myself. The name’s Dorian. I’ve just been brought on as a new doorman.”
“Hi, yeah, I’m Kyle.” It was embarrassing the moment he said it.
“You mentioned.”
Kyle wasn’t expecting his first conversation with the hot new doorman to be…the only way to describe it might be ‘nuclear levels of catastrophic.’
“So—you’re British?” he asked, attempting to find a cool way to lean against the counter while not moving his feet. Turned out that there was no good way to do that.
“Yes.”
Behind him, Ryan returned from the back with Misty, who knelt to hold the dustpan as Ryan swept up the broken glass around Kyle’s feet. Kyle definitely owed Ryan one for letting him talk to the new guy like this rather than helping clean up—but if he was honest, Misty probably offered to come herself so she could make fun of him later, when he drove her home.
“So. Um. How?”
“Did you just ask me how I’m British?”
“No?”
Dorian scoffed, and Kyle winced. There wasn’t really any recovery from a fumble that bad, and he knew it. If he was lucky the guy would keep talking to him, but there weren’t any guarantees that Dorian wouldn’t immediately turn around and go back to the front of house early.
Dorian cleared his throat. “Well. I’ve been here for the majority of my life. It’s been so long, I can’t quite remember anything else. But yes, I’m British.”
Okay, so he hadn’t totally botched this. Time to lock in.
“You kept the accent though?” Kyle asked, caught between attempting to lock in and being unsure where to go with the conversation from here. It felt like everything Dorian said was so final, somehow, like the echoing crash of the crypt doors sealing you inside with the zombies. Or something like that.
“Yes.”
“Uh.” Kyle cleared his throat, and glanced back at Misty, who tapped her finger against her watch exaggeratedly. “It was nice to meet you, Dorian—I’m sure we’ll talk more later.”
“Cheers.”
Dorian’s expression remained difficult to decipher as he left, and Kyle turned toward his fellow bartenders. Ryan attempted to give him a reassuring smile, but Misty’s grimace lets him know exactly how well they thought the conversation went.
Kyle whispered furiously to her as they finished prepping for the night— “If you think you can do better, you can be the one to talk to him!”
And to Misty’s credit, she did try, about three hours later.
“So, your name’s Dorian?” Misty started her attempt, slipping into the employee break room (a glorified closet that had cubicles for people’s personal items and space for a coffee machine) where Dorian was taking his mandatory mid-shift break. Something which seemed to make him uncomfortable, given how he kept glancing toward his post by the front door.
“Yes. That’s me.”
“I’m Misty, it’s nice to meet you—though I’ve got to say, seems like a little bit of nominative determin— ” she slowed and stopped as Dorian stared flatly at her, a new set to his brow unsettling her. She coughed, rallied, and tried again. “Well. Do you think your name led you to your current career path?”
“No. My name comes from the Grecian column, as I am strong and sparse in decoration.” His patter on the line was smooth, like he’d said it, or something like it, before. This was not helpful to Misty whose brain had just skipped and scratched like an old DVD attempting to process his words. “I take pride in my name, but it’s unrelated to what I a—do. For a living.”
What?
“Oh. Were your parents architects, then?” It’s the only thing she can think of—and genuinely so much about Dorian would make sense if his parents told him that kind of thing when he was a child. Like, there had to be some sort of unusual childhood going on here.
“Sure. Something like that.”
A moment of relative silence, despite the unbearably loud music from the dance floor.
“Cool. Um—I should go.”
The hinges on the door as she left the employee break area sounded like they were laughing at her.
Kyle, Ryan, and Misty gathered together around the end of the bar as Percy gathered the last of the dishes to take back to the kitchen and wash. Due to being relatively new, Dorian’s shift ended well before everyone went home for the night. Morning. Whatever, it was still dark enough that it counted as night, whatever the clock said.
Regardless, Dorian’s shift had ended about halfway through the night, and the man had already left by the time closing rolled around, which gave the three bartenders on staff that night the perfect chance to discuss the new hire.
“I can’t believe he’s real.” Misty muttered into the palms of her hands.
“Dorian?” Kyle asked.
She raised a scathing eyebrow and he winced. “Obviously? Who else would I be talking about?”
“So what do we even know about him?” Ryan asked, propped on the countertop by his elbow. “Seems like it’s not much, but humor me.”
Kyle ticked the items off on his fingers. “Name’s Dorian, he’s British—or was at some point? It was honestly unclear. He’s got the accent though. Um.”
Misty took over. “He was named after a fucking architectural feature, and that’s it. That’s all we know. Fuck’s sake, we don’t even know how old he is, or if he’s single, so maybe try and keep yourself from going totally head over heels for him, Kyle.”
Kyle blushed. “Was I that obvious?”
Ryan shrugged. “I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know that it matters, because I doubt the man noticed.”
“Yeah, you were.” Misty added. “I have no idea how Dorian didn’t notice. Not that I blame you though, the guy is pretty damn hot.”
“So that’s what we know about him,” Ryan summed up. “His name is Dorian, he’s a Brit, he was named after the Grecian column, and he’s hot. Great job, everyone.”
Misty rolled her eyes. “You’ll be the one to try tomorrow, if you think you can do better.”
“I plan on it.”