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Carlos didn’t mean for the first words out of his mouth to be, "This isn’t a date."
Then Cecil actually showed up at the coffee shop, and... well. As soon as he stepped through the door, he looked around the shop and then lit up when he spotted Carlos, calling out his name so that everyone in the place gave a knowing look at his table. The lilac purple dress shirt and and the black bow-tie with red polka-dots were, admittedly, a good look for him, but they stood out like a sore thumb from the way he'd been dressed every other time Carlos had seen him. And then, when Cecil had picked up his coffee and joined him at his table, Carlos realized he’d actually brought a bouquet, and even if it was mostly large, lovely Dionaea muscipula and Drosera, with one branch of vivid red Orchidaceae, it was... a little too much, and Carlos stepped hard on the twinge of guilt he felt when Cecil’s face fell. It wasn’t a date.
"Oh," said Cecil. His voice was no less expressive in person, and Carlos kind of felt like a tool seeing his honest disappointment, but it was still true. (He ignored the part of his mind that observed that Cecil always accepted his refusals, and was always disappointed, but he never stopped trying, or seemed like he'd lost hope that Carlos would change his mind someday, and also the part that didn't really want to see that hope fade.)
If he was being honest with himself, he’d have to admit that, separated from the issue of his obvious and public infatuation, he did find Cecil attractive. The man’s voice sent sparks down his spine, if he just listened to the sound and forgot about the words. (Sometimes even when he did pay attention to the words.) His looks weren’t striking -- if he'd seen a photo, before they’d met, he wouldn’t have taken much notice -- but in person he was lively and charismatic... or at least, charmingly awkward. Or maybe awkwardly charming.
He just didn't know how to deal with the obvious -- and public -- infatuation. It was embarrassing, and impossible to ignore. Even if it hadn’t all been broadcast on the radio for the whole town to hear -- everyone he met knew who he was and that Cecil never shut up about him, it had been a running joke among his co-workers before they'd been in town a week -- he still had no idea what to do about the... the exaggerated, effusive praise, or... or any of it. He wasn’t good with people. He especially wasn’t good with people he was attracted to, or people who were attracted to him, or... talking to people about things that weren’t related to his work or his hobbies (there was a lot of overlap). He’d managed to date a few times, it hadn’t been all bad, but it was rarely comfortable, and Cecil was the farthest thing from comfortable.
"Is this about the clocks, then?" Cecil asked, still sounding a little disheartened.
"Yes!" Carlos yanked his thoughts back on topic with some relief, straightening up in his chair. "I need you to get me a meeting with the mayor, or the sheriff, if you can. I heard you play my voicemails, on the radio," which was also embarrassing, "but I still can’t get anyone from the mayor’s office or the secret police to talk to me, and when I decided to put my alarm clock back together, because it was still better than nothing, it opened an eye and stared at me, Cecil. An eye."
"Neat!" said Cecil, and then he looked pained for a moment.
Carlos was about to open his mouth and... probably snap at Cecil, tell him that it wasn’t neat, it was bizarre and terrifying, but he didn’t get the chance, because Cecil added, a bit awkwardly, "My mother always said the ones with eyes in them are lucky," and Carlos opened his mouth all right, but nothing came out of it.
They stared at each other for a few moments before Cecil spoke again. "Um, Carlos," and whatever this was had him hunching his shoulders in further awkwardness, "I didn’t know how to broach the subject before, but... Carlos, I know that you are a man of science, and I know that you are very smart, and you know all kinds of things that I can’t even imagine, although I would love to hear about them, and... because I know all those things, I can’t understand why you don’t know how watches and clocks work," he finished, looking somewhere between exasperated and dismayed.
Carlos shut his mouth. Then he opened it again.
"They've always worked that way. That's why we bring them to the Night Vale Municipal Animal Hospital and Chronometer Repair Shop when they stop working," Cecil added brightly.
"But they-- gears," Carlos said plaintively, "and batteries," and quartz crystals, and Cecil was giving him a fond look that suggested that he was making no sense at all.
"They do get tired sometimes," Cecil was saying, "so if they won't stay in sync with other clocks then you might want to bring them in for a check-up-- oh! And I do hope you haven’t left them exposed to the air for too long, they could catch cold," and Carlos resigned himself to taking several clocks to the vet, including his apparently lucky alarm clock, which he had dropped with a shout when it opened its eye, and never put back together.
"They weren’t out of sync with each other," he said, "just everything else."
"Oh, that’s right!" Cecil looked... sheepish. "I was so distracted by your calling me, oh happy day, that I forgot about the reminder you asked me to pass on to the town! Well, I mean, I told them about your call, and they heard your voicemails, but I completely forgot to check the Relative Time schedule so I could remind everyone about the upcoming switch! ...come to think of it," Cecil mused, tapping his index finger against his chin, "I think we’re due for a few weeks of being synchronous with Coordinated Universal Time before we speed up. I’ll be sure to look it up and give a more detailed reminder on the next show, though, don’t you worry!"
"Of... of course," Carlos said. Of course everyone in Night Vale already knew that time didn’t work the same way there as it did everywhere else. Of course they had a schedule for it. He could just hear Cecil’s announcement, that lovely rich voice exclaiming over how thoughtful it was of perfect, beautiful Carlos to want to remind them of the upcoming time change, as if it were as mundane to them as Daylight Savings Time, and to them it probably was. That thought made him bury his face in the palm of one hand, stifling what he was sure would have been a slightly hysterical laugh.
"Carlos?" Cecil asked hesitantly, "Are you all right?"
Carlos lifted his head to see that Cecil was leaning across the little table, looking very sincerely concerned, and... awfully close, since Carlos had kind of pitched forward when he put his head in his hand. He straightened up in his chair. "Um, yeah, I’m-- I’m fine, Cecil." Although he wasn’t entirely convinced that was true, he managed what he thought was a polite, concern-diffusing smile, and Cecil leaned back to a less disconcerting distance.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Carlos remembered his coffee and took a sip. It had gotten sort of cold. He pushed his chair back a little. "I should probably--"
"So, how is--"
"Oh, sorry. Um, you go ahead."
"Oh, no, you go ahead!"
"I should probably be getting back to my lab," Carlos said. He wasn't really in that much of a hurry to get back, but they’d finished talking about what he wanted to talk about, and, well, Cecil was already like this with no encouragement whatsoever.
"Oh," Cecil said, looking down at the table a little dejectedly -- then he brightened, raising his eyes to Carlos’s again. "Maybe we could do this again sometime?"
He was not tempted to agree. Carlos told himself this firmly. He didn’t have any idea what to say to Cecil if they weren’t discussing phenomena that defied the laws of nature or physics or common sense (sometimes all three), and anyway, eventually, especially if Carlos kept turning him down, Cecil would figure out that he hadn’t hung the moon, and stop telling the entire town every time they exchanged a few words.
(He was tempted to point out that ‘this’ was supposed to have been a purely professional meeting in the first place, but he refrained.)
"I’ll have to check my schedule," he said, and he wasn't sure which answer it was that he was chickening out of giving. Cecil deflated a little anyway.
"Well, call me anytime!" His cheer sounded a little forced.
"I will," Carlos said, and that was true, if not for the kind of reasons Cecil was hoping for.
It made him smile anyway, a tenuous thing that mostly disappeared when Cecil opened his mouth again., pushing the vase across the table. "Uh, you can have the-- I mean, I know you said this isn’t a date, but I got them for you."
Carlos looked at the bouquet with dismay for a moment, and then squelched his embarrassment. It wasn’t going to-- well, actually, the Dionaea muscipula probably would bite, but they were still harmless. "The variety of Drosera is impressive," he acknowledged, grabbing the vase with one hand and his coffee cup with the other. There was no way his co-workers wouldn’t make fun of him for it, but... they were harmless too, or at least their teasing was. Also, he was pretty sure Shaquan would geek out even harder than he would about the Drosera -- there were at least eight different species in the bouquet, all particularly large specimens.
Cecil brightened. "Those are the sundews? Sadie, the florist, said rafflesia would be more romantic, but I thought you might like those!"
"They’re very... scientifically interesting," Carlos said, "if not strictly appropriate." Because this wasn’t a date. And Carlos probably wouldn’t need to remember not to listen to any recommendations from Sadie, the florist, since he couldn’t imagine ever needing to send flowers to anyone in Night Vale, but he made a mental note all the same. "I really should get going," he added, standing.
"All right," Cecil said; he stayed seated with his 'for here' latte in the wide ceramic mug, propping his head on one hand and watching Carlos with a wistful expression as he got his things together to leave.
It occurred to him as he reached the door that he had no idea what time it was.