Chapter 4
4
Seth Mays
Do you like kimchee?
Elliot Crane
Do I like what?
Korean fermented cabbage.
No idea. I like sauerkraut. Is it like that?
Not exactly. I’m making Korean for dinner.
Okay. Why?
Why not?
I wasn’t a chef or anything, but I could buy gochujang and sweet chili sauce and kimchee and sesame seeds, and I could cook rice, sauté veggies and chicken, and crack an egg over all of it. It wasn’t exactly authentic, but it was tasty and vaguely Korean-themed. Noah had always seemed to like it, anyway. Of course, Noah was basically a garbage disposal, so his approval wasn’t the best metric of quality food. He had said he liked my version of Korean, anyway, and he usually didn’t comment on most of my cooking unless I specifically asked. Since I wanted to impress—or at the very least not disappoint—Elliot, I was going to go with something that Noah had freely expressed his liking for.
I didn’t have a lot of money, but I felt incredibly guilty about the fact that I’d been essentially exploiting Elliot’s generosity—and not even in exchange for sex—that I was going to at least buy some groceries and cook the man dinner.
Also, I had an interview lined up, which had put me in an optimistic—especially about my bank account—mood. Not that I was super thrilled about the job itself, but money was money, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been a waiter in my life. Assuming they hired me, of course.
It wasn’t the job I wanted, but I hadn’t heard back from the Shawano County Sheriff’s Crime Scene Investigation office. Hart had said they were desperately short-handed a few months back, but short-handed didn’t mean they had the budget to hire more people. Or maybe they’d hired people. Or maybe they’d looked me up and found out I was now a shifter, and they didn’t want fur and fangs on the job. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Nor the last, most likely.
I sighed, then picked up a different jar of kimchee that was a little cheaper, even though it wasn’t quite as good as the one I’d been holding.
Don’t count your chickens and all that.
Speaking of chickens… I grabbed a package of legs. They were cheaper than breasts or thighs.
And frozen edamame was cheaper than fresh.
And so on.
At least rice was cheap.
I was feeling a good deal more depressed by the time I and my way-too-expensive-for-the-number-in-my-bank-account groceries got back to the house. Elliot’s house. It wouldn’t be any good for me to start thinking of it as one we shared because, well, even though I was kinda living here, it wasn’t my house, and I really shouldn’t be staying here much longer.
I’d also been doing some very cursory apartment hunting, but the aforementioned small size of my finances meant that I couldn’t actually afford to put down a deposit and first month’s rent—to say nothing about last month’s rent—because I couldn’t even afford one month, much less three. And rental companies tend to frown on renting to people who don’t actually have jobs.
So that was kinda on hold until I had a job—not just an interview—and managed to save enough to do big boy things like get my own place.
Which I hadn’t had for the last four years between living with Devin and crashing with Noah. And now Elliot.
I was a serial moocher. And I hated that. I felt like the deadbeat boyfriend that everybody always complained about and warned you against dating. And yeah, I should be careful about dating a serial moocher, because I had literally no capacity to support someone who was as much of a pathetic mess as I was. But it didn’t feel good to be that guy, either.
I didn’t think I was lazy or overly needy, but if you looked at my track record, it certainly looked that way. So that was also causing some minor existential crises, because I thought of myself as a hard worker, but my lack of independence and constant reliance on other people to support me seemed to suggest otherwise. So if I was lazy or made really bad choices, if I was a mess because there was something wrong with me… How did I fix that?
I was busy sautéing the vegetables and chicken when Elliot came inside—he’d been working out in the garage, the door up so that air could get in. He’d explained that he did a lot of the smaller projects in the basement shop, but larger things—like the banquet table he was working on for one of the event rooms at the Menominee Resort and Casino—couldn’t fit up the stairs and so had to be made out in the garage.
He was sweaty and covered in sawdust and sexy as hell.
“So how come you don’t just make everything in the garage?” I asked him.
“No climate control,” he replied, raising his eyebrows as though to ask me if the massive sweat stains on his t-shirt hadn’t made my question vaguely ridiculous. “It’s hot as fuck in the summer and colder than Val’s balls in winter.”
I snorted with a grimace at that particular image. “I, ah, wouldn’t know anything about the temperature of Hart’s balls,” I replied, my neck heating. I focused my attention back on the chicken and vegetables.
Elliot sniffed appreciatively. “Smells good. Let me get cleaned up, then dinner?”
“Perfect,” I replied, flushing again as Elliot trailed those rough fingertips down one arm.
I still had the slight sensation of goosebumps when he came back into the kitchen, hair wet and unbound, the white streak draping rakishly to one side amid the darker strands of the rest. He had on sweats and a rust-colored t-shirt that was slightly damp from his freshly-showered skin.
“I have an interview tomorrow,” I told him.
“With the Sheriff’s Office?” he asked, settling on one of the kitchen stools.
I spooned Korean-style noodles into a bowl and passed it to him, along with a fork because if he owned any chopsticks, I hadn’t been able to find them. “No. Some restaurant and bar called Annello’s”
“That old place,” Elliot snorted.
“Is it… bad?”
“Not at all,” Elliot replied, lifting a forkful to his mouth. “Shit, Seth, this is good.”
The flush returned. “Thanks.” Apparently Noah was going to be a good metric for things Elliot was going to like, at least in terms of food.
“Annello’s is an old-school supper club,” Elliot told me around his mouthful. “I think it’s older than almost anyone living in Shawano.”
“Is that… bad?”
“Nah,” Elliot said, taking another mouthful of rice and veggies. “But if you work there, you’ll meet everyone in the town over the age of fifty, and then they will ferret every secret you’ve ever had in your life out of you.”
I blinked, a little alarmed. “Um. How is that not bad?”
Elliot laughed. “I mean, it’ll speed up the process of the whole town meeting you and getting to know you and up in your business, but that’s going to happen one way or another. Shawano’s a small town.”
I grimaced. I’d somehow managed to forget about that part of living in rural, well, anywhere, apparently. Or maybe I’d just assumed that things would be different in Wisconsin than they had in Appalachian Virginia.
“You don’t want everyone to know your life story, you’re moving to the wrong town,” Elliot told me.
I forced a smile, not wanting to disparage his hometown, but also wondering if I had actually moved to the wrong place, and not just because of the small town vibes thing. Hints Elliot dropped here and there suggested that there were things he didn’t like about Shawano—the macho north-woodsman bar culture, the small town bigotry, the fact that it was tiny and there were a lot of things that he had to drive a distance to get—all the way to Green Bay or even down to Madison or Milwaukee.
But he also clearly loved this house, although the gardens could use some tending. Maybe that would be a project I could take on to make myself more useful while I was living with him. I liked plants. For one thing, plant compounds were one of the things that I was professionally interested in. For another, I thought they were pretty. I’d only been here six days, and already the abundance of light in the house had dramatically improved the health of my aloe plant. With the light and soil Elliot had, I could really have fun with it.
“Do they all know yours?” I asked him.
He blinked. “There’s not much to know,” he replied. “They all knew my parents, know what they did, know what I do, know that I’m gay and a shifter, know Val is my best friend. Know I’m close to Judy and Marsh Hart…” He trailed off, clearly feeling like he’d made his point.
“And even a shitty PI would be able to figure all that out in a city the size of Milwaukee, plus your shoe size, pants size, and how often you order pizza or Chinese food for dinner,” I retorted. “In a small town, people know that shit because they can look out the window and see half of it.”
“I’m not saying people are necessarily nosier,” he said, sounding maybe a little defensive. “But I am saying that when everybody can’t help knowing everybody else’s business, you have to assume that your biography and life are available to literally everyone.” He shrugged, skewering a piece of chicken coated in red chili sauce. “People are assholes, and they turn to bigotry and violence when there’s nothing else left to do. Sometimes even when there is.”
I couldn’t exactly argue the point with him. Small towns all around the world are insular places, caught up in their own ideas about how the world should work that may or may not reflect the ideas of wider society. Many of those ideologies swung toward the exclusionary end of the spectrum.
I also wasn’t about to tell Elliot that his small town wasn’t like that. One, he lived here—he’d grown up here. I had been here for exactly six days, and I hadn’t done much more than go to a grocery store a couple of times and a gas station once. And two, Elliot’s dad had literally been murdered by people from this small town who had targeted Indigenous shifters. People who had then tried to also kill Elliot. I could hardly argue that he needed to give people in his small town a chance.
I’d also known all that when I decided to move here. I could hardly use it as an excuse now.
That didn’t mean I had to be happy about it.
That said, I didn’t really mind meeting all of Shawano by working in Annello’s. I’m pretty good at keeping things pretty close to my chest. Very few people in Richmond knew I was gay, for example. And only Noah knew all the ugly details about our childhood, and then only because he had literally been there for most of them.
“It’s work,” is what I said to Elliot. “It’s something I can at least do until I find something I want to do more.”
“It is work,” Elliot agreed, then took another bite. “You waited tables before?”
I nodded, then took a bite of my own. “Yeah. Not my favorite, but it pays.” I shrugged. “I’ve done worse.”
“Like what?” Elliot asked.
“Mopped floors and cleaned bathrooms for a gas station before I was old enough to sell the beer or cigarettes. Washed dishes for the cafeteria in my dorm.”
“That all you did before starting work on crime scenes?” The question was causal, just making conversation.
“God, no,” I told him. “I bagged groceries, stocked shelves in a couple different places, did some office janitorial work, was a bouncer for a couple different bars, and pulled more than a few night shifts at gas stations after I was old enough to sell beer and cigarettes.”
Elliot’s eyebrows had gone up. “That’s quite a few things before working crime scenes,” he remarked.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “To be fair, I did some of them at the same time as other things.” Making enough to put food on the table and cover expenses sometimes required more than one job. “What about you?” I asked, both to deflect interest away from my somewhat storied job history and to find out more about Elliot. Also because it’s polite to ask people about themselves, although I felt like Elliot rarely wanted to talk about himself.
He settled a little in his chair. “I worked for Marsh Hart for a little while,” he said. “And for a framing company. But it’s all been carpentry-adjacent.”
“Even in school?”
He shrugged. “Pop hired me when I was in high school, and then I kept working for him in the summers. I had a scholarship that covered part of my tuition, so I didn’t actually need to work during the academic year.”
I had a momentary flash of jealousy that I hadn’t had a more normal childhood and youth. Not that I begrudged them to Elliot, but it was a reminder that my life wasn’t normal and never had been. I’m sure Elliot had dealt with more than his fair share of shit over the years, given that he was a gay Indigenous shifter. But Noah and I had been home-schooled in the ass-end of nowhere by ultra-conservative evangelical parents. We’d left home at fifteen, finished high school in the Richmond public school system. We’d both worked the whole time—shit jobs that would hire teenagers and gave us a little bit of money to spend or save, depending on the week and what we needed. We’d worked through our college degrees, as well.
And I, at least, was still struggling.
Elliot clearly wasn’t. He might not have been rich—I didn’t think he was—but he also clearly wasn’t worried about the cost of feeding a second shifter, while I was worried about budgeting to feed just myself. It would easily take me months of working at a restaurant, or a grocery store, or a gas station for me to be able to afford an apartment, much less rent and food.
After dinner, I sat down with my laptop and applied for literally everything I could find in Shawano, Bonduel, Slab City, Cecil, Lunds, Thornton, Adam’s Beach, Embarrass, and Clintonville. I even checked Green Bay, Pulaski, Seymour, and Antigo.
Bars, restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, county sheriffs’ departments, city police. Even a veterinary clinic that needed a receptionist and a couple of retail stores that were hiring full- instead of part-time.
It was late by the time I finished, and Elliot had gone to bed, telling me not to stay up too late.
I did anyway, and by the time I dragged myself off to bed, my knee had stiffened, so I limped the whole way there, grimacing as I rubbed at the joint. It was an unwelcome reminder that anything that would require me to be on my feet all day was going to be brutal.
I felt like I didn’t have a lot of choices. I was going to have to take whoever took me.