Twelve Arya
twelve
Arya
It wasn’t often that Arya had Sundays off, but when he did, he and his friends made a point of having brunch together.
They took turns picking out new restaurants around town to try.
This time, Noah had found a brand-new spot owned by a local sheep farmer.
It was a coffee shop and bakery during the week, but on the weekends they had a small brunch menu—and everything was made with sheep’s milk or cheese.
“Okay, this is actually really good,” David said, digging into his omelet.
Arya shared a quick look with Farzan and Ramin.
The three of them had all grown up eating sheep’s milk feta with Persian bread, so it was a familiar (and delicious) cheese to them, but somehow David, for all his worldliness—he was a master somm, after all—had been worried the cheese would be too tangy.
Arya, on the other hand, already knew his French toast would be amazing. It was drizzled in sheep’s milk caramel, covered in cinnamon and sugar, with a big dollop of sheep’s milk butter melting into the fresh berries and sliced bananas piled so high they were tumbling off the sides.
Noah beamed. “You guys like it?”
“You picked a good spot,” Ramin assured him, leaning in for a quick peck.
Noah turned and gave Ramin a longer kiss. He’d gotten more and more comfortable with PDA, showing the whole world how much he loved Ramin, and it was so sweet it made Arya’s teeth hurt.
If he didn’t love Ramin and Noah so much, he would’ve told them to get a room.
Instead, he cleared his throat and raised his mimosa. “Cheers, queers!”
“Cheers, queers!” his friends replied, bugging out their eyes to make intense eye contact with each other before clinking their glasses and sipping.
Arya dug into his French toast. It was sweet, a bit savory, with a slight tang. The toast had the perfect amount of custard soaked into it: not too soggy, not too dry.
“Fuck me,” he muttered. “This is amazing.”
They ate in silence for a few moments, everyone sighing in contentment.
Was there anything better in life than brunch with your friends?
Except Arya’s friends were assholes sometimes, because Farzan cleared his throat and asked, “So what was going on with you and the new guy at kickball?”
Arya inhaled a puff of cinnamon off his dish and started hacking and coughing.
Of course his friends had noticed. Why the fuck had he decided to be friends with such perceptive people? He could’ve been friends with oblivious straight bros instead. Thinking of straight people made Arya think of the hanky bros, which made him grin, and now Farzan thought he’d caught him.
But Arya schooled his face and grabbed his water to wash down the cinnamon.
David cocked his head. “You mean Ben?”
“Yeah. He seemed nice,” Noah said, breaking off a piece of his breakfast sandwich and trading it for part of Ramin’s perfectly browned grilled cheese.
“He just moved here from California,” David said. “He plays for the Kansas City Philharmonic. And his parents own a winery out in Napa. Phoenix Mountain.”
“Did we visit that one?” Farzan asked.
“Not yet. I went a couple years ago, though.”
Thank god his friends were distracted talking about wine now. Arya tucked back into his French toast, hoping they’d forget all about interrogating him. After all, he and Ben were just friends. And work proximity associates, as long as they were planning the Philharmonic Ball.
Arya had just stuffed a forkful of bananas into his mouth when Farzan looked at him. “So?”
“So what?” Arya asked around his fruit.
“So, what’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing,” Arya said, way too fast, reaching for his mimosa.
Ramin gave him one of those closed-mouth Midwestern smiles. “If you say so. I mean, he just moved here. It’s not like you two could’ve hooked up or anything, right?”
Arya spat out his mimosa and started coughing again.
Damn Ramin. He was the nicest person Arya knew, but he could always tell when Arya was bullshitting. He’d been like that since they were teenagers, when Arya was first dealing with his ADHD diagnosis, and Ramin could tell when Arya was lying about studying or doing his homework.
Ramin had never gotten mad; he just sat with Arya and helped him study. Worked out little strategies. Kept him focused.
Now Arya was seriously considering whether to risk jumping out a window and running down Oak Street to get out of this conversation.
Finally he sighed.
“It was at his winery. That event in California, back before Nowruz.”
His friends all looked at him.
Then Farzan snorted.
And then they all started laughing. At first Arya glowered. He could feel the top of his head going red. But it wasn’t mean laughter, and his friends had heard worse from him, honestly, so Arya uncrossed his arms, and let his chest unlock, and started laughing at himself, too.
“Why does this always happen to you?” Ramin wiped at his eye and sighed. “Remember the accountants?”
Arya groaned. When he and Farzan and Ramin had been interviewing accountants for Shiraz Bistro, it turned out Arya had slept with no less than three of them.
Out of five they interviewed.
(They did end up going with one of the ones Arya had slept with, but it had been more than a decade ago, and the guy was now in a happy throuple and lived out in Staley Farms with his two partners, three horses, and five cats.)
“Just lucky, I guess.” He fortified himself with more mimosa and then told them the whole thing. Helping Ben avoid his ex, handjobs in the grapevines, running into each other again at the Philharmonic, the Hanky Bros, agreeing to be friends.
“Wait. He seriously had an orange handkerchief?” Ramin asked, tomato soup dripping untouched from his spoon back into the bowl.
“I don’t get it,” Noah said.
So then they took turns explaining the hanky code to Noah, who was bisexual but had never had much access to queer culture and history until he started dating Ramin. Which was good, because it got the pressure off Arya.
At least until Farzan turned back to him and muttered, “Just friends, huh?”
“He’s a client,” Arya reminded him.
Farzan shrugged. “He doesn’t sign the checks, does he?”
“I’m serious. We’re just friends. You know me. I don’t date. I’m too busy slutting it up.”
Farzan didn’t look convinced.
Arya was going to argue more, but Noah started giggling. Noah had a deep voice, but his giggle was high pitched and wild, like a five-year-old’s, and that got the whole group laughing again, and for now, at least, they were too distracted to interrogate Arya any more.
Arya stared at the report, blinking, trying to make sense of things.
A million-dollar shortfall.
That’s how fucked MME’s budget was this quarter. A million fucking dollars.
When Arya had showed up at the office Tuesday, it was to a terse email from Mitchell. The time stamp showed two in the fucking morning.
Obscura has pulled out of their contract.
Obscura. Another financial services company. Yeah, Arya felt some kind of way dealing with so many financial services companies, but there was no ethical consumption under capitalism et cetera et cetera, and they’d been one of MME’s biggest clients for over a decade.
There were years when Obscura literally kept the lights on at MME, which was ironic given their name.
The money MME made on Obscura gigs helped subsidize a lot of their charity work, too.
Arya had helped plan more than a few fundraisers for queer youth shelters across the entire Midwest, funded purely off the leftovers from the enormous checks Obscura used to send after every event MME produced.
But now they were gone. And it was Mitchell’s fault.
At least he was taking responsibility for once.
When Arya had rushed into Mitchell’s office to ask what the fuck happened, Mitchell had draped himself over the bright blue chaise in the corner like a fainting Victorian.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mitchell said with a sigh. “I fucked up.”
Forgetting to sign a contract with a hotel, the hotel that was supposed to be the venue for the event, wasn’t just a fuckup, it was a fucktastrophe. A fucklamity. A fuckaclysm.
Now two thousand finance bros were going to show up to a five-star hotel in Denver and find out they didn’t have rooms. Or a grand ballroom for their big annual awards show. Or meeting rooms for breakouts.
Or booze.
That last one might’ve been the worst, because Arya had seen how much liquor the finance bros could put away.
He took a deep breath. He was pissed, yes. Distraught, absolutely. But that wouldn’t help right now. They needed solutions.
“It can’t happen again, Mitchell,” Arya said. “We need—”
“You think I don’t know that?” Mitchell snapped, sitting up like a shot. But then his voice softened and he collapsed back onto the chaise. “It won’t. I’m taking care of it.”
“You are?” A tiny bit of hope flared in Arya’s chest. He’d been suggesting (subtly, and occasionally not-so-subtly) that Mitchell could use some therapy.
After all, Arya had seen a therapist off and on for the last several years, mostly for help managing his ADHD.
He was in a good place now, so he only had quarterly check-ins, but if he needed it, he’d go more frequently again.
“What’s the plan?” Arya asked. “I can cover for you if you need time off.”
“Time off? No. I hired a new assistant. He’ll be helping pick up the slack here.”
“A new—” Arya bit his tongue.
Fuck a duck. Mitchell hadn’t signed up for therapy; he’d just hired another twink with a good wardrobe, a pert ass, and no experience. Like usual.
That kind of shit was fine when they were making enough in profit to justify new hires. Mitchell was a firm believer that having a hot young man around inspired confidence from their clients. Pretty privilege and all that.
But it didn’t fly now.
“Mitchell, we just lost four million dollars in revenue for the rest of the year. We can’t afford to hire anyone. Shit, we might have to let half the company go.”
Just saying it made Arya’s stomach sour.
God, how many of their employees—their friends—would get fucked over by this?
But without that Obscura money, how were they supposed to keep the lights on?
“It’ll be fine,” Mitchell insisted. “We’ve lost clients before. I’ve gotten MME through four recessions, remember? And we’re not even in one right now. We can find new clients.”
Arya did remember, even though he’d only been around for two of said recessions, and during the first one he’d just been a lighting technician working part-time, with no clue why he seemed to have a different boss every month.
(It was years later when he realized they’d been laid off, one after the other, as the company contracted and contracted and contracted to survive.)
Arya didn’t want to go back to that.
“Mitchell. We need a new client. A big one. Or we’re going to have to let people go. You know that.”
Mitchell sighed, but finally looked at Arya, clear-eyed. Either he hadn’t started yet today, or the news from Obscura had sobered him up better than Arya had ever managed.
“I know. So we’d both better get to work.”