Working in the service industry was not, normally, something Krishna viewed with loathing or even disdain most of the time. Sure, there were instances of patron insanity and general managerial frustrations, but problems, he figured, arose in any job. He liked talking to the customers, and the work itself was fine. Mindless, to be fair, but basically any job he could take on at this point would be mindless. He had no degree, as his parents kept reminding him. His sister, too.
(So, okay, maybe he would eventually apply himself the way everyone wanted him to, but couldn’t they just leave him alone for the time being? He was figuring things out. He was making it. He wasn’t even asking anyone for any money and was able to keep a roof over his head on his own. For the most part, anyway.)
That day was a particularly good one, though, and although the café was busy, it was the good kind of busy. The kind that had Krishna joking around with his co-workers and flirting with the guy who came in sometimes to work on his dissertation at a back table. All things considered, he should have expected that things were going on a bit too well to stay that way.
The door chimed when Yves walked in, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. The bell was there for a reason, though it was a bit unnecessary during particularly busy times. Still, the sound had Krishna looking up reflexively from where he was clearing a table, and his reaction was, it turned out, pure reflex, too.
Because he could not for the life of him remember, afterwards, the string of thoughts that had gone through his head before he turned on his heel and booked it towards the kitchen. At least, he attempted to book it to the kitchen: he wound up tripping over someone’s outstretched leg and crashing uproariously into a fully patronized table.
He sat up in a mess of spilt coffee, broken mugs, and acute mortification. Stupidly, he glanced up. Yves was definitely looking.
“I’m so sorry,” he said hastily to the bewildered looking customers whose conversation about global warming he had unceremoniously interrupted, stumbling to his feet. “Oh my god. I’m so, so sorry. Er - here, I’ll just - um. Hang on, I’ll get a rag.”
Face burning and downturned, he managed, this time, to make it to the back without knocking anything else over.
Krishna heard him before he saw him. At first, the niggle of recognition in the back of his mind didn’t jar him overly; he always recognized people here because it was his neighborhood, and because somehow or another he made himself familiar to a lot of people in this neck of the woods. He liked befriending strangers, and he did so with ease and frequency. He found it comforting to create a larger sense of home that way, to know people’s names much of the time when he passes them on the street. When he looked up and saw Sal just a few yards off, though, he felt anything but comfortable.
The way he froze must have been comical, but he didn’t have the presence of mind for objectivity. Instead, he stared wide-eyed at the eerily familiar slope of Sal’s back as he bent to kiss a child’s forehead. Sal laughed at something inaudible from the distance between them. The kid had Sal’s nose. It was weird.
Technically, he had a very clear cut course of action laid out for him: turn and walk away. The problem was that his legs didn’t seem to obey him when he tried - if he tried at all, which was a dubious assertion at best. Before he could actually get himself to do anything at all (say something? run away? let the earth swallow him up entirely?) someone said his name.
When Sal walked over, his gait was halting, like he was half trying to keep himself rooted to his original spot and half trying to pull himself closer.
“I said, what are you doing here?” he repeated when Krishna’s ears finally stopped ringing. A frown marred his face, and that expression was familiar, too.
First of all, the question was ludicrous. Krishna wanted to say something suave, or at the very least something righteously indignant, like I’m pretty sure that’s my line All he seemed capable of, however, was staring dumbly. He was pretty sure his mouth was hanging partially open. It was probably not a very good look for him.
Sal scratched awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I didn’t…” He glanced back in the direction of his kid.
“How old is she?” The words were summoned from a place Krishna hadn’t been aware, thirty seconds ago, that he possessed. He felt a stab of pleasure when Sal looked acutely embarrassed.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live right around the corner,” said Krishna. That was right. Sal had only come to his old flat a few times, and he probably hadn’t been paying attention to the neighborhood on those occasions anyway. Why was he humoring this conversation? Why hadn’t he run when he had the chance? “Do you want to come up?” He was immediately appalled with himself, which later on he would consider a small sign of progress. “Sorry.” The truth was that he wasn’t actually very sorry; he was just embarrassed by his own shamelessness. Sal’s kid was playing a few feet away, for fuck’s sake. “How old is she?” he asked again.
“Five.”
Krishna did the mental math. The knowledge it revealed to him should have made him feel even guiltier, but all he could think about was that a year and a half ago Sal had been making utterly cliché working late excuses to meet him all over town. Being this close again was setting him on edge now. He wanted to bridge the gap between them, to fist his hand at the collar of Sal’s shirt in front of everyone, in front of his five-year-old daughter, and bite down on his bottom lip.
“Her name’s Rita,” Sal offered belatedly.
So surprised by this was he that Krishna let out a bark of laughter, eyes wide. “Fuck you?” He was briefly upset that it came out like a question. As if he weren’t sure that he meant the phrase in all its connotations.
The frown that had been hovering over Sal’s face before returned with a vengeance. He stepped back once, and Krishna felt the move like a kick to the stomach. “Well - ”
“I miss you,” Krishna blurted out. “I want to - can I see you again? I just want to - ”
“Stop.” Sal was half turned away, perhaps in the guise of watching Rita. (Knowing her name didn’t make Krishna feel much worse, either, but at that point he wasn’t sure he was capable of feeling any lower.) “You have to stop calling and texting. This is over, okay?”
“I haven’t been - ”
“Jesus, Krishna, what the fuck is wrong with you? My daughter is right here. This is over.”
The accusation wasn’t very jarring because he had been, in some way, expecting it. And it was true; he couldn’t focus on the insane hypocrisy buried in the sentiment because it was so true. There must have been something severely wrong with him. Even then, he surged forward to take Sal’s hand, but Sal wrenched it away with enough force to send Krishna stumbling back a bit.
He watched as Sal bent again to gather Rita up and walk away, completing the entire series of moves without ever glancing back once. Only after their figures had disappeared down the street did he finally look down and realize, through the blurry curtain of his tears, that his grocery bag had ripped and splattered a medley of egg yolk and yogurt over the pavement.
He could feel the pounding of the bass through the floor and up his legs. It was loud enough that this was at least probably not a drug-induced hallucination, but he didn’t particularly care either way. When he elbowed his way to the bar, he was flushed, and his pupils were dilated. Not that anybody could have really noticed given the state of the lighting (or lack thereof).
“Whiskey neat,” he shouted at the bartender. He turned his head to survey the rest of the bar - the people posted up for the night there, the people trying to signal other bartenders’ attention, couples making out. Paddy. Oh.
The slice of his grin was wide when he pushed through the people in his way, single-mindedness making him careless and rude. Nobody seemed to mind when he invaded their personal space briefly along the way.
Paddy didn’t seem to notice him immediately, probably because his jostling was fairly commonplace for where they were, and so after a moment Krishna decided to step it up a bit. With the easy of familiarity, he hooked his index finger into one of Paddy’s belt loops and tugged a bit. Success.
“Hello,” he said, smile still bright.
“Where’d you come from?”
Paddy looked surprised. Krishna considered this a win. When the bartender came back over, finding him with surprising deftness through the crowd to hand him his drink, he took it without looking. “Where’d you come from?” he echoed nonsensically.
“I’m here with someone. And we've finished. You can’t just come up to me like - like.” Paddy didn’t have much luck finishing the sentence, and the hand he placed on Krishna’s shoulder, perhaps to push him away, turned into a rather steady hand on his waist. His thumb grew bold, pushing at the place Krishna’s shirt had ridden up. Technically it wasn’t such an intrepid move; the thumb had been there before quite a lot in the past. It was all familiar territory.
Krishna leaned against the bar, insouciance built into the graceful slump of his body. “That’s interesting,” he said, smirk curling at the corners of his mouth. “What’s she like, then, this one? Do you think she’s starting to suspect already?” He didn’t much care for their location when he leaned in closer. Paddy leaned back, but not with enough intent. “I wrote a song about you, you know. You should give it a listen. I even got a free jumper out of the whole thing, and all I had to do was sing my diary. Funny, huh.”
Idly, his hand traveled up the front of Paddy’s shirt. The tips of his fingers skimmed the bumps of the buttons, the seam at the middle of it. He felt a flare of triumph when he caught the visible bob of Paddy’s Adam’s apple.
Paddy reached out to grip his wrist. His fingers were too tight, but it was nice. It had always been that way between them. Krishna’s grin didn’t falter when Paddy hissed at him. “She’s here,” he said, helplessness threaded through his tone. “You can’t just come up to me and touch me like this.”
“I’m pretty sure I can, though.” The inherent archness of his words was belied by the softness of his eyes. “Want to get out of here?”
Again, Paddy swallowed. His gaze dipped down Krishna’s figure, then back up again, a seemingly unconscious move. “You really wrote a song about us?” he asked, faltering.
Krishna’s smile widened, blooming slowly until his cheeks nearly hurt. “Let’s go,” he said, and Paddy followed him out.
Because the universe worked the way it worked, Krishna shouldn’t have been surprised to glance up from the latest issue of Fantastic Man and see a familiar figure on the other side of the room. And because this was not in fact a Nora Ephron movie (when had his life ever been a Nora Ephron movie?), it wasn’t an endearing run in with an old friend who would, unbeknownst to him, turn into the love of his life. It was Wylie Lawson.
Wylie Lawson canoodling with another man, at that.
The feeling growing in the pit of his stomach was strange. It wasn’t specifically jealousy - what cause did have to be jealous, anyway - but it also wasn’t specifically shock. It was something in between that rolled into a slow kind of dread that dulled his reaction time and dragged at his muscles.
So: he didn’t duck away quickly enough to avoid being seen, but he also couldn’t bring himself to go back and clean up after the way he’d abruptly dropped the magazine into a sad little heap on the browsing table. He felt guilty, but not enough to rectify his rudeness. He was much more focused on mapping out his path from the South American-origin section of the fiction stacks to the door in a way that would be optimal for both stealth and speed.
Before he could even make it to the other side of the aisle, though, he was cut off. Of course. “Oh,” he said, doggedly pretending, despite the obviousness of the situation, that he hadn’t seen Wylie before. “Uh. Hi! Hi. Wow. Hi.” He winced at his maladroitness, but as desperately as he cast around for something to cure his broken record syndrome, his brain offered no help.
Wylie, however, only seemed warm and affectionate, even as he called Krishna out on his failed escape maneuvers. The ensuing hug was unexpected and a little unwelcome, though Krishna couldn’t find it in himself to push out of it. Mostly, he was just confused.
“What’re you doing out this way?”
A good question. “I’m, uh. I’m just visiting. I’m - you know, uh. One of my friends moved here, so.” He couldn’t seem to stop worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth. He thought about it for a moment, then admitted, “I’m here with Jay.”
“Say hello for me.” Wylie seemed unruffled as ever, calm and gentle around the expression. His partner in PDA seemed to have vanished, but Krishna didn’t think it appropriate to inquire into. “You look good,” said Wylie. His tone was infused with something Krishna couldn’t quite pinpoint, something that made him feel both flattered and wary. He demurred a thanks before Wylie continued. “Should’ve congratulated you on the Brits. I’m glad things are going well for you.”
“No - I mean. You didn’t have to.” Krishna shook his head. “I mean, thanks.” When he smiled, he was a touch less careful about it than he had been before, though he couldn’t stop his anxious, flighty eye line. “Um. Yeah, things are… Things are really good.” He drew in a breath. “I’m - Jay and I are dating.” He said this like a test; it was the first time he’d said the words out loud. “And. We’re starting tour again soon. Just a couple weeks away now. Are you - it looks like things are going well for you, too?”
“Glad to hear you’re finally dating,” Wylie said, teasing humor evident in his tone.
Krishna was only reminded by his own idiotic idiocy, and his smile faltered. Finally dating. The implications were obvious, even outside of Wylie’s reference to what had happened between the two of them specifically. As self-pitying as he tended to get, though, Krishna understood that he put himself in the situations he found himself in.
But this was different, he thought. Jay was different. Jay was real.
“Looks like we’re both on our way to being kept men, huh?” Wylie was saying. “I’ll have to check out a show whenever you’re in town. If you’re all right with that?”
“Sure,” Krishna said, dropping his hand. He had been rubbing at his eyebrow, a tic. “Yeah, that would be…” He let out a snuffly laugh. “Weird but good.” He studied Wylie’s face for a slow moment, scanning it, searching his eyes as his expression sobered. “I’m really sorry,” he said abruptly, brow furrowing slightly. “I was - a fucking idiot. And I should have been better about admitting that when I e-mailed you. I just - ” He let out a burst of air through his nose and shook his head. “Anyway. Sorry for being a crazy person. And.” He paused, glancing back in the direction the other man had been. “I hope things work out for you.”
The conversation had already gone on for much longer than Krishna had ever intended. Strictly speaking, he had been trying to avoid a conversation in the first place, though he had to admit now, caught in it, that it wasn’t as terrible as he might have thought.
He drew in a deep breath. “Um. Well. It was - good to see you.” He smiled again, the expression incrementally less tentative. “Weird but good,” he repeated, a joke at his own expense.
For a long moment, Wylie looked at him. Krishna would have squirmed had it not been for the softness in Wylie’s eyes. “Thank you,” he said at length. “I’d apologize again, but…” He put his hands on Krishna’s shoulders, movements deliberate. “I only have good thoughts when it comes to you. The rest of it… I hope you feel the same. I’ll see you at one of your shows. We’ll keep things weird.” He dropped his hands from Krishna’s shoulders, grinned, and started heading off. Before he disappeared around the corner, he stopped. “Keep Jay in line, yeah? Fucking softie if I’ve ever met one.” And then he was gone.
Krishna stared at the space Wylie had once occupied. When he finally left, too, the smile on his face was bright and unhindered.
