5. Fabián #2
All slow, making sure his black shorts ride up, and I crush a paper cup in my fist.
My tía looks at the cup, then at me. “?Todo bien?”
“Fine,” I seethe.
Elías, still bent over, says, “He’s okay, senora.”
I want to throw him into the ice chest, and then again, I want to wrap my hand around the back of his neck and drag him behind the trailers.
I want him quiet and louder at the same time.
The line stays steady, which is probably the only reason I don’t commit a felony. Customers come and go, and people recognize us from the videos. Someone asks if we’re “the raspado guys from TikTok,” and Elías immediately says yes while I say no.
The group of patrons around us laughs.
One girl points between us. “So are you two like… a thing?”
I open my mouth, but Elías beats me to it. “We’re just coworkers.”
I glare at him, and he smiles at the customer.
She looks disappointed. “That’s it?”
“Unfortunately,” Elías says.
I grab a lid and slap it onto a cup harder than necessary.
Elías leans close under the noise and says, “Careful, Salcedo. People will think I hurt your feelings.”
“I don’t have feelings,” I say as my jaw tightens.
He hums, and I hate him.
I want him.
Fuck, I want the flirtatious son of a bitch so bad.
By nine-thirty, the rush breaks, and the night settles into that late-market rhythm where everyone is sticky, tired, and sun-worn.
Music still thumps, but it’s softer—more old school than the upbeat Bad Bunny.
Kids droop against their parents, and some vendors start quietly packing the extra supplies they know they won’t use.
Elías wipes down the syrup bottles with a rag during the downtime between customers; his tongue ring clicks against his teeth.
Click. Click. Click.
I hear it over everything. “You need to stop that,” I say.
He glances over. “Stop what?”
“That.”
He clicks it again.
My hand tightens on the cash box, and his eyes brighten. “Does it bother you?”
“Yes,” I mumble.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because it’s annoying.”
“Mm.” He wipes a red streak from a bottle. “I don’t think that’s why.”
“Elías—”
He looks at me through his glasses. The lights catch in the lenses, then his mouth curves just enough to be dangerous.
“What?” he asks.
I can still hear his text.
Then finish it.
My body remembers before my brain can stop it.
My tía walks past us carrying a stack of empty cups. “Fabián, take the trash to the dumpster before the bags leak.”
Perfect.
A task. Trash is good. Trash is safe. Trash does not have glasses or a tongue ring.
I grab the two tied bags from under the back table. “Fine.”
Elías immediately reaches for a third bag. “I’ll help.”
“No.”
“You need help,” he says, looking over the four bags. “You can’t take all four at once.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“You got two hands. There are four bags.” He chuckles. “I know it’s been awhile since school, but that math still ain’t mathing.”
“I can count.” I suck in a breath.
“Proud of you, Papi.”
His mother says, “Elías, take two of the bags.”
He smiles at me like he won something, and I walk away before I say anything in front of his mother and my tía that will get me exorcised.
The dumpsters sit behind the row of food trailers near the back fence, where the market noise dulls into bass, generators, and muffled voices.
The air smells like oil, sugar, and warm rotting trash.
Romantic as hell. A security light buzzes above us as the trailers cast long shadows across the cracked pavement.
I drop the bags into the open dumpster, and Elías tosses his in after mine. The lid slams, and then there’s silence.
Not real silence because the market still lives on the other side of the trailers. Music. People. Laughter.
But here, behind the trailers, everything feels cut off.
Smaller.
Hotter.
Elías turns to me, and I already know what’s about to happen. I feel it before he opens his mouth, and that stupid wire between us goes tight. He pushes his glasses up with one finger. “You’ve been kinda quiet tonight.”
I snort. “I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been staring.”
I step closer. “You’ve been trying to get stared at.”
He laughs once, low. “Maybe.”
That word again, and my patience snaps its teeth together.
“Maybe,” I repeat.
His smile grows. “You got a problem with maybe?”
“I got a problem with you running your mouth and then hiding behind it.”
His eyebrows lift. “Hiding?”
“Yeah.”
He steps closer so there’s barely a foot between us and has to tip his head back a little to look at me, which should make me feel bigger. Steadier and in control.
It doesn’t, because Elías looks up at me like he already knows where my hands are going to end up.
“You think I’m hiding?” he asks.
“I think you fucking talk too much for your own good.”
“That’s not anything new.” He smirks. “Ma says I came out of the womb a chatterbox.”
I keep going. “I think you like pushing me.”
“I think you like being pushed.”
My chest rises against the crop top, and his eyes drop to the movement. He doesn’t even pretend. I grab his wrist, not hard enough to hurt him. But hard enough to stop the slow drag of his attention from making me lose my mind.
His pulse jumps under my fingers.
It’s not just me.
He looks at my hand around his wrist, then at me.
“You always grab men who annoy you?” he asks.
“Only one who’s asking for it.”
His mouth opens, and I know he has a comeback. I see it sitting on his tongue, so I wait. Then he swallows it.
Good.
Fucking great—now I’m going to die.
His voice drops. “You gonna do something, or is this some machismo bullshit?”
The words hit exactly where he aimed them.
Machismo bullshit.
That’s what this is, two grown men standing behind trailers, chests up, jaws tight, acting like the first one to move loses. Like wanting the other makes one of us weaker. I move before I can talk myself out of it, shoving him back against the side of the trailer.
The metal rattles behind him, and Elías sucks in a breath, eyes going wide for one perfect second before the smile comes back. “There he is,” he says.
I flatten my palm on the trailer beside his head. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Act like you didn’t want this to happen.”
His chin lifts. “I never said I didn’t.”
“No. You just act cute and mouthy until someone else has to make the move.”
His eyes flash. “Cute?”
“Yeah, you heard me.”
“I’m not cute.” He smiles, top teeth digging into his perfect lower lip.
I lean closer. “You’re right—”
His breath catches, and I bring my mouth near his ear and say, “You’re a pain in my ass.”
He laughs, but it shakes, and I feel it more than hear it. “You always this romantic?”
“I’m not trying to be romantic.”
We stare at each other, and his chest moves fast. So does mine. The air between our mouths feels alive as I pull back, and we’re only a breath away from touching. I could still stop. That thought appears, weak and tired, holding a little white flag.
Fuck it.
My hand leaves his wrist and catches his jaw. Elías goes very still, and my thumb presses near the corner of his mouth, right where I wiped syrup last week.
His lips part, and my entire body turns into a lit match.
“Last chance,” I growl.
His eyes search mine, and for the first time all night, the joke leaves his face. Just enough to show me the heat underneath. The nerves too. The same jumpy, sharp, hungry thing that has been crawling under my skin all week.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says, his voice low. “I’m not running.”
That does it.
I kiss him.
It’s not careful and most definitely not soft. It is two days of back-and-forth texts firing like gunshots, two weekends of staring like starvation has set in, and years of stupid beef collapsing into one catastrophic moment behind a row of trailers while the market keeps glowing on without us.
Elías makes a sound into my mouth, small, shocked, and completely wrecked. Then his hands slam into my chest—not to push me away, but to grab fistfuls of my crop top and haul me closer until there’s no space left between us, only heat and friction and the hard lines of his body against mine.
My hips hit his, and we both feel it—that jolt of contact that goes through fabric and straight into the spine.
He opens for me like he’s been waiting, mouth hot and sweet from syrup, but underneath there’s something sharper, something that tastes like want and recklessness and mine.
The little ball of steel brushes my tongue, sliding cool and slick for one impossible second before everything goes volcanic, before my brain whites out completely.
No thoughts or lingering questions.
No worries about being straight, bisexual, or gay.
No labels.
Just Elías against me, his fingers twisted in my shirt tight enough to tear, his mouth fighting mine like kissing is another argument he refuses to lose, and God—God—he kisses like he hates me too, like he’s been dreaming about this specifically, about my mouth and his and the way our teeth clash when I shove him harder into the trailer.
The metal rattles behind him, and he groans into my mouth, the sound vibrating against my tongue, and I feel it everywhere. In my scalp, in my stomach, my dick straining against my zipper like it’s trying to reach him through the fabric.
“Fuck,” I mutter against his swollen mouth, and my voice sounds wrecked.
His fingers grip the collar of my shirt, pulling me toward him just to feel me react. “You came already?”
I bite his bottom lip—hard—and he jerks against me, his hips bucking forward involuntarily, and I feel him too now. Feel how hard he is and how desperate, and it makes me dizzy.
“Cabrón.”
He smirks at my lips. “You started it.”
“You practically begged for it,” I chuckle.
“I did not—”
I kiss him again before he can finish the lie, and this one is worse. Better? Messier for sure.
His glasses press crooked between us, bumping my forehead, and I pull back just enough to yank them off his face because I need to see him, need to see what I’m doing to him without anything in the way.