3. Fabián #2
Cárdenas Raspados. Their business page comes up lightning fast. A bright logo with posts of the menu. POV videos of syrup pouring over shaved ice and a reel of Elías making raspados with fast hands and that mouth running nonstop. I should stop there.
I don’t stop there.
There is a tagged post, then another, with a personal account attached to it.
@lalo.con.limón
Public. Of course this annoying motherfucker has a public account.
Elías Cárdenas lives out loud online like the world deserves access to his nonsense. His profile picture is him in those black glasses, head tilted, tongue out just enough to show the silver ball, middle finger lifted near his cheek. Silver chain. Crooked grin.
Bio: East Bay. Raspados. Problemático pero bonito. Don’t ask me for less chamoy.
I stare at it.
Problemático pero bonito.
He literally wrote that about himself.
Cocky asshole.
My thumb scrolls to his first pinned post, and it’s him at the raspado trailer, holding two cups, grinning.
The second is a mirror selfie in a bathroom, wearing a white tank, a silver chain, shorts low on his hips, and glasses pushed up into his hair.
Next is him at a family barbecue, mouth open mid-laugh, holding a beer, someone’s arm around his shoulders, and the last is a close-up of his hand holding a peeled mango on a stick, with chamoy dripping down his fingers.
This is stupid.
This is extremely stupid.
It’s just Instagram.
People post pictures.
People have bodies.
Men. Have. Bodies.
I have one; I see mine every day. I wash it and put clothes on it.
I have piercings in places that make airport security pat-downs more personal than I’d like.
None of that means anything. Elías’s fifth post is from last summer.
He is in one of his many cousins’ backyard pools.
Shirtless in short black swim trunks, with his hair all messy.
Tongue caught between his teeth while he laughs at something off-camera.
My brain stops.
Silence.
A bad kind of silence. It’s like all the workers in my head dropped their tools and walked off the job.
His chest is leaner than mine but defined.
Brown skin, water on his shoulders, a little trail of hair below his navel, not as dark as mine but there.
His shorts cling to one thigh. His hand is lifted, fingers curled around a plastic cup.
He looks happy.
Open.
Mouthy even in a still picture and hot.
The word lands in my head before I can dodge it.
Hot.
Elías Cárdenas is hot.
Not annoyingly or objectively attractive. Not “I can see why other people would.”
Fucking Hot. To me. A man who’s spent thirteen years treating that part of himself like a check engine light he could ignore if the car still ran.
I lock the phone and chuck it onto the workbench. Then I stand there staring at it like it might attack.
“Get your shit together,” I whisper.
The Altima waits in bay two, and when I get back to it, I work for approximately eleven minutes.
Eleven whole minutes.
Thank God this is a family business because my ass would have been fired a long time ago if it wasn’t.
Then I’m back at the workbench with my phone in my hand like a weak man and an even worse liar.
I open his Instagram again, and my eyeballs are graced with shirtless Elías, who smiles up at me from the screen.
My chest feels tight and my stomach feels worse. I scroll because apparently I am committed to making myself suffer.
Maybe eternal damnation too. YO-fucking-LO
There are more pictures. Elías in a soccer jersey at a game. Elías wearing gray sweatpants and a black hoodie, glasses on, sticking his tongue out at the camera like a menace.
One that makes my mouth water: Elías bare-chested in tiny denim shorts at Pride, one arm around Anita, both of them laughing, his silver earrings catching the sun.
Then Elías, holding his baby niece Fatima, face soft in a way I had never seen in person.
That one stops me.
He’s smiling down at her, not performing, not smirking, not trying to win the room over with his ridiculous humor. Just soft. His glasses are crooked because the baby has one tiny hand grabbing the frame.
It hits somewhere under my ribs, and it’s tender.
I close Instagram—immediately.
Nope. I can handle horny. Horny is physical and can be dealt with. Horny doesn’t ask questions about why my chest feels weird because Elías looks sweet holding a baby.
I am not doing tender.
Tender is where people get stupid.
Tender is how you end up helping an ex move apartments on your only day off after she cheated on you. Tender is how you remember coffee orders and how someone gets under your skin so deep you start changing plans around them.
Absolutely not.
My phone buzzes again.
Junior
Bro, another video, and these comments are worse.
?Qué chingados es yaoi?
u alive?
Then another video, and this one is from a different angle.
Posted by someone else. It has over 200k views already.
It catches the moment Saturday night when Elías and I are alone behind the booth, close enough that our shoulders almost touch.
It catches him saying something to me and me leaning in.
It catches the look on his face when I tell him to watch his mouth. The audio is replaced with some ridiculous romantic song. The text reads: “I need these two fictional men to be real.”
Fictional? We are real.
Unfortunately.
Junior was right… These comments are worse.
This tension has tension.
Someone tell Crop Top Papi I support his journey.
Glasses is trying to get folded behind that booth, and I respect that.
Not me invested in raspado yaoi at my grown age.
Papi said, ‘Watch your mouth,’ and I got pregnant.
I hate myself when I go back to Elías’s profile and tell myself I’m doing it because I need to understand the problem. I can’t fix a problem I don’t understand.
This is diagnostics.
Research.
Like checking a fault code.
The fault code is you wanna put your hands on him, then bend him over the folding table and take his sassy little ass to pound town.
I rub both palms over my face, and my nipple piercings drag against the inside of my shirt.
Today’s crop top is faded gray, cut from an old shop shirt, the hem sitting just above my navel.
Grease mark on one side. My black Dickies are unbuttoned at the top because the shop is too hot, and the button digs in every time I adjust on the creeper.
I think of Elías looking at me and the way he stares at my stomach. The way his eyes get all caught up on the patch of hair under my navel. The way his voice changed when he called my crop top slutty. My dick gets hard so fast it feels offensive, and I grip the edge of the workbench for support.
Nah… not here.
Not at work.
Not because of him.
The shop is quiet except for the old fan rattling overhead, a car passing loudly outside, and my tío talking to someone in the front office. The bay doors are half-open. Sunlight cuts across the concrete in bright rectangles. The Altima sits there, hood up, judging me.
I adjust myself and immediately regret touching anything because as soon as I make contact, a hot pulse goes through me. My body doesn’t give a fuck that this is a place of business.
My body doesn’t give two shits that my tío’s twenty feet away arguing with a parts supplier or the fact that I’ve spent thirteen years being, at the very least, deeply confident in what usually gets me hard.
But apparently my body has received new management because Elías is now definitely a part of that list.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
This is not sustainable. I can’t spend the whole day walking around the shop with a hard-on because Elías Cárdenas owns swim trunks and a fucking tongue ring.
One that my dick’s decided it needs a test run of.
I need to handle it.
Quickly—like an adult. A stupid one, but still. I look toward the front office. My tío’s voice carries faintly on the phone with a parts supplier, which means I have at least ten minutes of him saying, “No, the other one,” in increasingly disappointed Spanish.
I grab my phone and walk to the back restroom and lock the door.
Then lock it again, because I have severe trust issues.
The restroom’s small and clean enough, with a cracked mirror, a sink, a toilet, and a paper towel dispenser that sounds like a raccoon being murdered every time someone uses it.
There’s a tiny window near the ceiling letting in a thin strip of daylight.
This is so not romantic.
Good. Romance isn’t the point.
The point is relief and getting Elías out of my system.
I lean back against the sink and open his Instagram again. My thumb already knows where to go. The shirtless picture and I zoom in.
“Fuck my life,” I mutter.
He looks good. Too good.
Water on his skin, his smile wide, there are even a few drops of water on his glasses. His silver chain sparkles against his chest, his stomach tight above that perfect V, his shorts clinging in all the right places.
Fuck me… He looks like summer turned into a person and decided to run its mouth. My dick throbs behind my zipper, and I look over my shoulder at myself in the mirror.
This is insane—and maybe a health code violation… at the very least.
I’m sweaty, with grease on my jaw. Crop top sticking to my chest. A grown man about to jerk off in his family’s shop bathroom because his enemy has a public Instagram and four-inch inseam shorts on.
“I’m not doing this,” I tell my reflection.
My reflection doesn’t believe me.
Neither do I.
I unzip and slide my hand inside my boxer briefs, and the first touch pulls a rough breath out of me. It’s way too sensitive.
Too wound up.
I’m gonna blow my load like a two-pump chump in the back of his primo’s lowrider. I close my eyes, but that makes it worse because now I see him without the screen.
Elías licking syrup off his thumb and looking up at me through his glasses.
Elías saying, “Maybe you’re too scared.”
My hand tightens and a shudder rolls through me.