Chapter 12 #2
And when Seth finally left, the front door shutting behind him, he couldn’t stop smiling.
The next night, Ren waited for Seth outside his food truck.
“What are you up to tonight?” Gabe had asked as they’d finished cleaning up. “Isn’t it trivia night?”
“It is,” Ren had acknowledged. He’d brought Gabriel before, but while he was painfully dramatic, he didn’t have the cutthroat instinct that Ren liked to have in a partner on trivia night.
After all, he always played to win.
Seth was going to be a different story, though. He was smart and quick and Ren could already sense how he might know things that would fill in Ren’s knowledge gaps.
And he’d never give any breaks. After all, he’d never given Ren any.
Sure, they were doing this “casual” thing, but deep down, Ren knew they weren’t fooling anyone.
Especially his cousin.
“You’re taking Seth, aren’t you?” Gabe asked.
Ren had nodded, hoping that he wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. But Gabe hadn’t. He’d merely smiled and said that he hoped they had a good time.
Didn’t even waggle his eyebrows suggestively, like he usually did when he thought that Ren might be having sex.
It was hardly the first indication that this casual thing was getting more serious, but it wasn’t lost on Ren either.
He didn’t know yet what he was going to do about it.
After all, at least half of the reasons why things weren’t casual were his doing.
He’d been the one to suggest Seth sleep over.
Just because he’d wanted to. The only disappointment had been that the really hot goodbye kiss they’d shared hadn’t developed into anything more.
And then last night, he’d been busy, the truck staying open late for a big band that Tony booked, and all he’d had time to do was exchange a handful of texts.
But tonight, he was going to take Seth to trivia night, and then after . . . well, win or lose, Ren always liked to hook up after trivia night. Something about the adrenaline that pumped through him with the competition made him reckless and horny.
Something about Seth satisfying all that tonight made him even more aroused, just by thinking about it.
“Hey.”
Ren glanced up and Seth was approaching. He wore a dark green button-up shirt and jeans, and looked so fucking edible that for the first time in a very long time, Ren was tempted to say, fuck it to trivia night, and just head to his place or Seth’s.
But it had been a very long time since he’d skipped trivia.
He wasn’t ready to do it—not for Seth and Seth alone—yet.
Mostly because he was a little bit terrified of what that might mean.
“Hey yourself,” Ren said, and this time it felt not only easy but necessary, to fold himself into his arms, tilting his face up for a kiss.
It was not casual at all.
But it felt imperative, and Ren had never been very good at resisting something he wanted—and he really, really wanted Seth.
“You ready to kick some ass?” Ren asked as he pulled away a fraction.
A hello kiss was one thing; he was beginning to learn just how easy it was to slide into something a lot more passionate, at least with Seth.
And he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to start making out in the middle of Food Truck Warriors.
“Always ready,” Seth said easily, slinging an arm around Ren’s shoulders as they headed towards the sidewalk. “I have a car, waiting, if you’re good with that.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Ren said, surprising at how pleased he felt at the gesture.
This is not a date. This is just . . . a casual hangout.
But Ren was not stupid, and he also didn’t like lying to himself.
Okay, this is . . . casual dating. How’s that? Does that make you want to run for the hills?
It did not.
It made him want to burrow even more tightly into Seth’s shoulder, as they slid into the back seat of the Prius that Seth had reserved for them.
The drive to the bar that hosted trivia night wasn’t long. They arrived, Seth finalizing the transaction in his phone as they walked up to the bar entrance.
“You really meant it,” Seth said after he finished and glanced up.
Ren pulled the door open. It was always busy on trivia nights, but that’s why he liked to get there early. Still, there were only two seats at the bar left, and he grabbed one, Seth taking the other.
“What did I really mean?” Ren wanted to know.
“That you said you liked to find secret spots that you could lose yourself in,” Seth said, gesturing around him.
Ren was confused for a split second, and then remembered.
Oh yeah, he’d put that in his Flaunt profile, as a thoughtless last-minute addition.
Something he wouldn’t have normally said about himself, because that was the kind of thing hookups didn’t need to know.
But he’d done it anyway, because the rest of the list had seemed so . . . banal.
And Seth had remembered it.
“This is totally that kind of place,” Seth said.
Ren looked around at the bar, seeing it from Seth’s perspective.
From the outside, it didn’t look like much at all—a dim, dark, dingy building, with none of the charm that Jackson and Shaw had infused into the very bricks of the Funky Cup. But inside, it oozed it.
The lights were dim and tinged reddish and orange and yellow.
Curtains were flowered and fringed, a shawl draped over a lamp in the corner, taking away from the direct light.
The walls were papered with years upon years of old music posters, some of the edges peeling and shredding.
The bar top was clean but the patina of the wood was dark from use, book-ended with fancy brass fittings, looking like it belonged more in a Victorian horror novel than a bar in downtown Los Angeles.
It was a unique and original kind of place, the kind that Ren had known he’d enjoy from the moment he’d stumbled in years ago, when he’d first come to LA.
He’d always enjoyed trivia, the random and strange collection of factoids unimportant to everyone else, but he’d honed his love of it here. He’d tried other trivia nights, at plenty of other bars, but none of them had ever felt right the way this one did.
“I like the way they run the trivia contest here,” Ren said.
It was not all he could have said, but there were some things that apparently he wasn’t as comfortable sharing. Gabe probably knew, because he’d come with him a handful of times, but he’d never brought an actual date here.
Not even a guy he’d really wanted to sleep with.
Occasionally he’d met someone here that he’d ended up fucking, but the fact that he’d brought Seth felt both like absolutely the right thing to do, and also terrifying as hell.
“Oh?” Seth’s eyes twinkled and it was like he knew that wasn’t all that Ren liked, though he hadn’t said anything else.
It should have been annoying, but Ren wasn’t annoyed at all.
“Hey, Ren,” Jason the bartender said, sauntering over. “What can I get you two?”
“My usual,” Ren said. One of the many reasons he liked coming here was that Jason made an old-fashioned just the way he liked it.
“I’ll have the same,” Seth said.
“You said yesterday you were busy tracking down that copycat guy, yeah?” Ren asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”
“Jonas Nichols Anderson,” Seth said, popping a handful of roasted nuts from the wooden bowl on the bar into his mouth.
“A lawyer, as he told you. Made a fortune in litigation, isn’t exactly retired now, but he’s certainly at a loose end, has been for some time, as he isn’t actively listed on any cases I can find.
He’s basically a figurehead at his firm now. ”
“So he’s bored,” Ren guessed.
Seth nodded. “He’s owned the property he’s converting into the food truck lot for awhile now. From what I can see, he bought it up because he knew this area of downtown was beginning to gentrify, and he wanted in on the ground floor.”
“He was planning on sitting on it, and then selling it for a ridiculous price to some developer,” Ren observed.
“Yep,” Seth said. “His social media isn’t as locked down as I’d have recommended if he was a client, so I could glean some from that. He appears to have dated a series of younger guys. Lots of actor hopefuls, a few ‘singers.’ The latest was a model, but they broke up last year, it seems like.”
“Not very surprising, considering this is LA,” Ren inserted wryly. He scrunched his nose. “He wouldn’t be bad looking, if he wasn’t so . . . I don’t know . . . curated.”
“Like he’s a museum piece, or a billboard,” Seth said flatly.
“Anyway, he’s at a loose end, and like you said, bored.
I have no record of him coming to Food Truck Warriors for the first time, but I’d guess it was sometime last summer, because a month later was when he started traveling around.
Lots of big cities. Some smaller ones.” Seth nodded to Jason, who was setting their drinks down.
“One thing they all had in common though—they all had a major food truck presence. There’s even some tagged posts and some pics he took that he posted on Instagram. He was definitely getting ideas.”
“All the way back then?” Ren didn’t want to sound disappointed but he was.
“You said it yourself; he’s like Tony. He sees something, he wants something, he makes it happen. No matter the obstacle.”
“Like copying someone else’s idea? Like poaching a guy’s friends away from him?” Ren could hear how bitter he sounded. He hadn’t even thought he liked Tony all that much, until someone set out to become a better version of him.
Now he was just outraged and pissed off on Tony’s behalf.
“He seems to think the two can co-exist peacefully,” Seth said, and Ren would have to be a lot less observant to miss the careful way he said that.
“You talked to him,” Ren stated. He sipped his drink.