Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
HENRY
If Rozen weren’t still gripping my wrist, I would’ve thought his too-casual, fishing expedition comment about a local twenty-four hour diner was another gambit to get one over on me. But he hadn’t let go of me since he pulled me off the dance floor, even though it meant I couldn’t put on my hoodie, and there was something… softish in his eyes. For all of his squawking about hookups and the right Henry, he hadn’t actually done a single thing to secure a hookup since I’d walked up to him. He’d danced with other men, but hadn’t given any of them any signals he was into them. He’d talked to other people, but I hadn’t heard him flirt at all.
He’d been ignoring everyone else since the second he challenged me to dance. He hadn’t even made fun of my Grindr profile. And he’d… gotten hard when we danced. While I didn’t go to clubs, I’d always loved to dance, even if it was only in my living room. I was a big fan of videos of men dancing while they did sexy everyday things like make pancakes or change their oil, thirst traps designed to make me wish they were at my house. So yeah, I had some moves too, not that I’d gone all out because I was in public and not at my house. That could’ve been the only reason he got hard, meaning it was meaningless… except for the aforementioned fact that he’d been ignoring everyone else.
Maybe I was setting myself up for failure again with him, since I still didn’t know why he was the way he was with me. But our back-and-forth tonight after I’d told him I was gay had felt like… flirting and showing each other who we really were, without all the attitude and history we had at work. “Antagonism” and not antagonism. We’d both gotten so hard dancing, and I was way too old to spring random boners that didn’t mean anything. So I didn’t want to go home yet.
“I could eat,” I said with a very believable amount of carelessness in my voice.
It was weirdly quiet and comfortable as we left the club, walked to my car while I pulled on my hoodie and he tugged his shirt out of his back pocket and put it on, and drove to the diner, less than a mile away next to the gym I worked out at. We got seated at a booth far away from the bleary-eyed college age kids and I immediately ordered a pot of coffee for Rozen. He scrutinized the large menu like he was studying for a final exam, but I could still tell he was sobering up because he wasn’t chattering away now the way he had when I first got to the club.
“What can I get you boys?” our server asked when she came back with the coffee.
“I’ll have the Midnight Dessert with scrambled eggs, sausage, and extra whip cream, please,” Rozen said with relish, beaming brightly up at the server like she was an angel.
“Can I please have the Snack Sampler?” I asked when she looked at me next.
“Sure thing, boys,” she said, taking the menus from us, “that’ll be up real soon.”
Rozen slumped over the table, chin propped up on one hand, and gave me a lopsided smile while he sort of squinted one eye. I couldn’t tell if he was like a nocturnal animal trying to get used to daylight or if he was trying to size me up for some reason. But whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but think he looked sleepy and gorgeous, not nearly as snarky or intimidating as he was at the office. I tried not to think about how the table looked like the one I had in my dining area, so I now had a realistic idea of what he’d look like sleepy and gorgeous at my place.
“So why don’t you already have a forever man?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“If you just warmed that lordly tone up a degree or two, it could be a compliment,” I teased him lightly, and he stuck up his middle finger while he drank some of his coffee. The part of me that had really wanted to befriend him combined forces with the part of me that had been enjoying the last couple hours despite my best intentions, compelling me to offer up, “On holidays and birthdays, I get glum and say it’s because cool men don’t want a homebody nerd.”
Rozen chuckled, a mellow, sleepy noise of amusement. “Who gives a shit about cool men?”
I ran my eyes over him. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re cool, Rozen.”
He looked down at himself, face screwing up in confusion, and then looked up at me with that familiar glare, only this time it still had that softish undertone. “Take that back, Saunders, take that back right now. I only despise two qualities in any man: Coolness and abs.”
The passionate hatred of abs, of all the bad qualities, made me burst into laughter.
“You clearly recognize my flawless fashion sense and my not at all creepy charms and are mislabeling them coolness,” he went on doggedly, waving his hands around in a cross between voguing and an infomercial assistant waving majestically at the product being sold. A smile crept onto my lips as he made his argument with maybe half the strength of his usual sober arguments. “But cool people are hogging all the credit while they’re totally super boring! Only other cool people want to hang out with them or fuck them more than once, if you’re into that sort of thing. They’re all flash and no substance. All smoke and no fire. All talk and no action.”
“Just like you tonight!” I joked.
Gasping in renewed outrage, his eyes lit up. “I’m offended, sir,” he told me. “If I were a drill sergeant, I’d make you drop and give me fifty or something truly torturous like that.”
“I like pushups,” I said with a shrug.
“You would,” he griped, giving me an exasperated look while he drank more coffee.
I patted my stomach and said, “Shouldn’t surprise you. Someone looking for their forever man is dedicated and puts in all the effort as a sign of respect. Planks and dead bugs all day.”
“Your stupid abs are a sign of respect?” he echoed so caustically that it deserved a medal. Then his nose wrinkled up adorably and he exclaimed, “Wait, what the fuck is a dead bug ?”
While I started explaining the core workout to him, holding in my amusement at his utter disdain for exercise, the server came by with our food on two turkey platter sized plates. Sighing like he was in heaven, he shoved the eggs and sausage aside until they clung to the rim of the plate, so he had the space to smother his pancakes in butter, syrup, fruit compote, and extra whip cream.
“Jesus Christ,” he moaned in ecstasy, making my body twitch and my cock plump up again while he was deepthroating his forkful of food, “if you have to be dedicated to something, dedicate yourself to pancakes and having fun with the people you love, Saunders.”
How could he say something so profound while he was eating so… lewdly ?
The college kids across the diner had fallen silent, their mouths hanging open as they gawked at Rozen going to town on his Midnight Dessert like he was filming adult content.
I was gawking at him too. I’d definitely noticed his enthusiasm before at work, but it annoyed me there because it was a sign he was dedicated to our job too. If he was so happy with his job, and so was I, then we should’ve been best coworker-friends, not in opposite corners. But… his enthusiasm about client satisfaction had never given me an erection, so…
Maybe I needed to try to get to the root of his problem with me again.
Because I could use that lewd enthusiasm going to town… on my ass.
Fuck, I’m delirious. I need to drink more coffee , I told myself.
“So how did you wind up so horny for the right Henry?” I blurted out with as much sass as I could manage at two-thirty in the morning, before I could blurt out something totally inappropriate and delirium-induced like Do you moan like that when you’re eating ass?
Rozen screwed up his face and groaned, “That… may have been the drinks.”
“No kidding.”
He shot me a look, and it was almost back to normal, sharp and clear as he usually was at work, so I knew all the coffee and food was sobering him up faster than all that dancing.
“It’s hazy now,” he conceded while still sounding perfectly proud of it, “but my friends and I were having a great time, then they found their fun for the night and took off, with my permission as the ringleader of course.” His smile was softer around the edges than usual, not its usual sharp-edged one, but more of an indulgent curve. “Buckle is the only queer club in town and I’ve never struck out there, and there was definitely Cupid’s sex magic and my birthday magic after midnight, so I don’t know why I called the other Henry… I’m sure it’s Deston’s fault somehow,” he added hastily, his snow-white skin flushing a pale pink over his cheekbones and making me think there was a lie in there somewhere.
“You’re lucky you called me and not some stranger,” I said more sharply than I meant to.
He clasped his hands under his chin and batted his eyelashes. “Aw, you were worried about me.” Now I was the one whose face went hot as he carried on dramatically, his eyes twinkling, “You came to rescue me. All that stuff about wanting to get blackmail material on me was just an excuse, a side quest to your main objective of protecting me from myself and strangers!”
Abandoning my half-eaten sampler plate, I leveled him with a look. “What do you know about side quests?” Then I brushed that question aside in favor of something I was even more curious about, which would also get us off this topic, and asked, “Did you say it’s your birthday?”
“Why don’t you know that?” With a superior, smug look, he added, “I know yours.”
I didn’t believe that at all. “You do not.”
“Please,” he scoffed, crossing his arms, the twinkle in his eyes getting diamond-hard and gleeful, “it’s November 6. No wonder you’re losing our war; you’re not even trying, Saunders.”
“That’s because I don’t want a war!” I exclaimed, tunneling my hands through my hair.
“You shouldn’t have started it then,” he exclaimed back, throwing a syrup-soaked banana chunk toward me that landed with a splat on the last bite of my buckwheat biscuit. “If you hadn’t stolen my favorite client as soon as you could, we could have a totally different relationship!”
I shook my head in disbelief and confusion, the heat in my face exploding throughout my whole body as everything coalesced and I burst out, “What the fuck are you talking about, Rozen? What client? What kind of different relationship?”