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Dragan doesn’t particularly want to be here, but he’s already gotten throat gonorrhea (and probably about twelve other diseases in the past three months alone if he’s being honest) from working on Vorx’s plaguehouse of a crew, and the clinic is offering not only treatment but two hundred thrones if he makes out with an uninfected stranger, so here he is. His ass is turning numb from the shitty plastic it’s been resting on for the past forty minutes, and he’s holding back the urge to pace around their clinic. He can’t help it. Dragan thinks better on his feet, kills time better on his feet, and hates waiting for no reason.
Philameon texts him Vorx says he’ll approve sick leave if you want it, which Dragan promptly ignores. Of course he will. Dragan doesn’t like his boss that much these days, but he’ll admit the old man’s not a bad boss, just a poor leader. Too slow to upgrade equipment, to at least switch to a system that isn’t a century old. He’ll probably approve sick leave regardless of what Dragan wants, just to prove his point about slowing down or something.
“Dragan-” the nurse squints, the way almost everyone does when they try to pronounce his last name, so he cuts her off with a quick grunt and stands. “Lovely. Right this way, please.”
She reminds him of the rules he’d agreed to, the three-minute timer that would be running, and does a quick check of his vitals before telling him the other participant should be in within two to five minutes.
Some people would say this is a sad way for a man of forty to spend a holiday centered on chocolate, love, and affection. Those people are not aware of how most of Vorx’s crew celebrates ‘romance’. He’s fairly sure all of them will be in and out of medical points like this one over the next week as Philemon and Slert’s disgusting ‘treats’ will have people shitting pink or their intestines twirling into heart shapes again. Meanwhile, Dragan will have money and the chance to do several runs with only the crew he’s won over, the smart ones who won’t take any company-brewed concoctions at the mixer Vorx throws in an attempt to give them some normalcy.
The door opening draws him out of his thoughts. Same nurse as before, followed by a man deftly maneuvering his crutches so his entrance looks almost like a dance. He drops himself onto the examination table with trained ease. Dragan watches his forearms flex in the process.
“Avinash,” the stranger says, with an awkward smile that just barely exposes his chipped teeth. “And you’re the one whose tongue will be down my throat for several minutes?” He offers a half-gloved hand attached to an arm covered in bracelets.
Avinash’s hand is clammy when Dragan shakes it, but his grip is solid. His nails look either infected or painted to match the look of disease, and Dragan knows enough freaks to call it even odds.
“Dragan. Yeah. What brought you in?”
“I’m getting a flu shot and figured I might get paid for being here.” Dragan can respect that. He’s no stranger to diseases and infections, but the flu’s a bitch to fight and it leaves their roster short every season. It had taken him ten years to convince Vorx that the flu shot, if not as relevant to their day-to-day hazards as tetanus shots, would be worth getting.
“Now that you’ve gotten to know each other,” the nurse’s voice is full of the same clipped impatience Dragan normally feels, “we’ll get started. I’ll be behind the curtain to allow for some privacy. Full disclosure, I will hear everything but only really monitor silhouettes for mouth-to-mouth contact. I won’t be able to see full details. When you’re done, you’ll both be tested, treated, and released with cash in hand. Alright?”
“Aye.”
“ ‘Course.”
“Excellent.” ‘Denise’, at least according to her nametag, turns away and marches to behind a curtain that she draws shut. “You can start whenever you’re ready.” If they ignore her blue flats poking out from behind the curtain, the illusion works. He refocuses on Avinash, who is slightly taller than him while sitting on the examination table. Dragan would bet his left sock the man would only come up to his ears standing.
“Full disclosure," Avinash says, “I don’t exactly make out much.”
“And you think I do?” Dragan isn’t one to pay a lot of attention to expectation, but he’s forty and has been working for Vorx’s waste disposal services since he was seventeen, so whatever interest he could have had was firmly squashed by a complete lack of viable candidates.
Avinash shrugs. “You’re not unattractive. And the harsh attitude can signal a secretly sensitive side underneath.” He sounds so sincere it takes a second for the sarcasm to register.
Dragan snorts at that, his usual default of mild irritation at the state of the world replaced by that mental image. “By that logic you’d have folks falling all over you.”
Avinash laughs, the sound short and barking. “After they’ve tripped over my crutches or the wheelchair, you mean.”
“Aye.”
A pointed cough from behind the curtain brings them out of the banter. Dragan turns and is about to ask ‘Ready?’, but the question dies at how Avinash is already leaning in, and their lips meet just as Dragan realizes this.
The first thing he notes is that Avinash’s mouth tastes strongly like citrus, like he’d been eating oranges before coming to the clinic. The second is that the chips and gaps of his teeth make for an interesting surface to explore, just as much as the slight bumps on his inner lip do.
The third thing is that Avinash is just as active a participant as Dragan, and his own tongue is sweeping across Dragan’s mouth. He can feel an oddly ridged scar on it, the kind that suggests he could have had his tongue slit. It feels nice.
Dragan’s hand finds itself in Avinash’s curls. They’re softer than his own hair, curling around his fingers and making him feel drawn in. Avinash’s hand, in turn, goes to Dragan’s neck, and the small circles it starts making have Dragan sorely tempted to let the weight off of his knees and lean forward, even if it has both of them falling over onto the table.
Avinash’s tongue is thorough in exploration. It brushes against the open cold sore on the left side of Dragan’s mouth, sparking a pleasant sensation that sends most of the nerves on that side of his face into action. He’s pretty sure he can taste the filling in Avinash’s molar, a soft sound coming from one or both of them in the process.
They don’t so much separate as leave room for a breath or two of air to join the interaction.
“You taste good,” comes out of his mouth before he can stop it. He feels overwarm in a way that shouldn’t be possible without a full hazmat suit and several hours of active movement.
“Thanks. You too,” comes back. Dragan’s view is limited, but he can see Avinash flushing hard, the bright red of his cheeks making the pockmarked skin look even more textured. Dragan wants to touch, throwing that impulse into the next kiss because the timer is still running and he’s pretty sure Avinash wouldn’t appreciate a stranger’s thumb sweeping over his cheek and to his eye socket when they’re supposed to be focusing on the transmission of disease.
The second round is slower, both of them revisiting the spots they’d already swept over once. On a whim, Dragan tilts his mouth a bit, licking Avinash’s lip and tasting some kind of berry chapstick in response. He wonders distantly what he tastes like. ‘Good’ by Avinash’s standards apparently, enough so that Avinash is either trying to lean further into Dragan or else pull him onto the examination table as well. He can’t follow all the way, but he does his best, ignoring how a small part of him almost wishes Avinash’s mouth would travel to other places, or maybe leave a few marks on Dragan’s throat or at that spot on his hip that he usually rests his hand on so he won’t forget the feeling of Avinash’s mouth anytime soon-
The timer beeps loudly from behind the curtain, and as reluctant as Dragan is to break the kiss, he’s not interested in making this more awkward than he has to.
It takes him until Denise has walked to stand next to them to realize his hand is still in Avinash’s hair, and he pulls back quickly.
“Three minutes,” Denise confirms. “You’ll go to the back for gonorrhea testing and treatment, and they’ll give you the money. Nod or say ‘yes’ to confirm you understand.”
Dragan nods, but Avinash’s eyebrows jump up as he looks at Denise.
“Gonnorhea? I was told you were treating early-stage syphilis.”
Denise looks unhappy. Dragan sympathizes. Syphilis is one of the few things he hadn’t had the displeasure of dealing with yet after decades of work in Vorx’s crew.
“Well,” Denise says, attempting to reassert control of the situation, “If you were here to get infected by syphilis,” she trails off at Avinash’s sheepish look.
“Here to infect, actually.” He rubs at the back of his neck. It’s almost endearing, if Dragan ignores that he now has yet another std to take care of, and this is one of the ones that even Solace’s crew worry about enough to have a warning poster of.
“I also have oral herpes and seasonal flare-ups,” Dragan volunteers, because at this point honesty seems the best path to avoid Denise’s building anger, and open sores increase transmission risks like nothing else. If he isn’t infected then he’ll buy a damn lottery ticket. Avinash smiles at him.
“Likewise, although mine appears to be inactive at the moment.” It’s harder to even be irritated at being infected when he smiles like that.
Denise sighs.
“The syphilis is more important to treat, but you two will need to come back for the gonorrhea as well. I’ll make sure you both get paid since this was Eli’s mixup and not your own.” Ah. Dragan is familiar with that type of problem as well. Thankfully, Eli’s mixup hasn’t resulted in him slogging through a sewer for no reason, unlike the charlie foxtrot before they’d learned Slert had gone legally blind and didn’t bother to tell anyone.
“Tell them to check if they have anyone with ‘Anish’ or ‘Anoushka’, surnames Patil or Patel in their lists,” Avinash tells her. “I’m mixed up with those names most often.”
Denise nods. “I’ll see if I can’t get them to compensate you both for both trials, but no promises. Go outside, wait together, someone will give you paperwork for the pharmacy in the next ten minutes.”
Dragan holds the door so Avinash doesn’t need to worry about trying to keep it open and maneuver his crutches at the same time, and they make their way to the waiting room, sitting by unspoken agreement away from the others. Avinash leans his crutches against the wall and slumps ever so slightly onto Dragan’s shoulder. His curls spill over like a short wave of brown.
“How much were they offering for syphilis?”
“Two-sixty. Gonnorhea?”
“Just two hundred.”
Avinash laughs. “Pity. You should’ve taken the syphilis one. Ended up with it either way.”
Dragan is content to sit here for a few minutes if it means potentially being paid double, but his body has other ideas, and his hand starts tapping at the armrest like he’s back on the job, trying not to yell over comms at the crane operator.
Avinash’s bracelets clack when they tap against the armrest.
“If you want,” he offers, and Dragan does want. The beads are comfortable for him to roll his fingers against.
“How’d you get syphilis then?”
Avinash lets out one of those laughs that’s more air than sound. “Biohazard work. Believe it or not, some of the nastier things in this district make syphilis look like a candy bar harm-wise. I only got it two days back, so I wasn’t too worried once we got it contained again.” Dragan’s fingers roll over a new bracelet, made of old metal in twisted shapes. “And your gonorrhea?"
“Waste disposal work. Everyone gets something sooner or later. At least Vorx offers the day off for this kind of thing.”
“Vorx?” Avinash looks up, at the perfect angle for Dragan to think his eyes are the same dark brown as good chocolate. “I know that guy.”
“Oh?”
“We worked together a few times.” Avinash drops his head down on Dragans’ shoulder again. “Probably passed each other by, you wouldn’t recognize me under the suit unless you know I’m the one with the blue ringstains all over.”
He probably had seen him, although Dragan’s usual job involves retrieval and not handover, so it’s not surprising they probably haven't properly met on the job.
Dragan lets his right hand fidget with Avinash’s bracelets and uses his left to text Philameon 2 sick days, got syph from receptionist mixup.
There are worse ways a man of forty years could be spending Valentine’s day than with an attractive stranger as they wait for a sum of two to four hundred and sixty-odd thrones apiece.