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“I went to the restaurant opening.” Lawrence twisted the cap back onto his water. “I took Shariah.”
“Yeah? You guys gonna do something like that again?”
“We are. I’m taking her to my favorite Italian place this Friday.”
“Good for you guys, I’m glad you finally asked her out,” Jasper said. Lawrence had been nursing a crush on her from the first day he walked into the shop.
Lawrence settled back into position and laid his arm on the armrest. He watched Jasper resume the line work, giving him several minutes of peace that Jasper could already feel slipping away. “Just spit it out, Lawrence.”
“I saw you and Konrad. He’s crazy about you. You do know that, right? Looks at you like you hung the damn stars.”
Warmth spread across Jasper’s face, and he was glad his head was already ducked down to focus on what he was doing, hiding the very clear reaction he had to those words. “He’s sweet.”
“Wanna know how you look at him?”
“No, I do not.”
The conversation stayed with Jasper for the next several hours, even though Lawrence didn’t attempt to bring it back up during his appointment. He’s crazy about you.
Jasper had never had anyone look at him the way Konrad did. Like they were seeing him down to his core, like his shadows didn’t scare them. He hated how easy it was to imagine accepting that affection, letting himself believe it was something he could have, that Konrad was something he could keep. Allowing himself to feel that way would mean he was well and truly defenseless.
When he was done with work for the day, he pretended he wasn’t looking forward to anything in particular about his night. He showered and changed and made food that wasn’t Konrad’s cooking, but it was good enough. He finished the book he was reading and started another. When his phone rang, he made himself wait a few seconds before picking it up so it wasn’t obvious that he’d been waiting.
“Hi,” he said, not meaning for it to come out a little soft, like it did.
“Hello, darling.”
Jasper’s stomach flipped. Were they back to pet names? There was a long pause, and he wondered if Konrad hadn’t even meant to let that slip out, which somehow made it land that much harder on Jasper’s chest. “The restaurant looked busy when I got off work. That’s good.”
“Jasper.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t believe so much damage has been done to our rapport that we must resort to small talk. You don’t need to say anything that does not come to you naturally, even if that means you say nothing at all.”
Jasper huffed a dry laugh. “That would make me a pretty terrible phone companion.”
“I enjoy sharing space with you. We may drape words in that space, or leave it empty, save for the two of us. It matters not to me.”
Jasper ran a hand down his face. Sometimes Konrad said things and Jasper’s heart responded in a language he didn’t understand. “I just started reading a book.”
“Will you read to me?”
It would probably insult Konrad’s love of the arts that Jasper had never read Les Miserables, but in Jasper’s defense, it was a long goddamn book. He opened it on his lap and took a sip of the whiskey he’d poured himself an hour ago and forgotten on the side table.
He hadn’t gotten very far before Konrad called, so he decided to start at the beginning. “‘So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny…’”
Once he started, it was easy to continue. He wasn’t used to talking for long periods of time, so he had to take frequent breaks, during which Konrad waited in patient silence for him to continue, making just enough ambient background noise for Jasper to assume it was for his benefit—so he knew Konrad was still there.
Jasper took the book to bed when his eyes started to grow heavy, read until he kept losing his place, and finally relented to the pressure of sleep. “I gotta go to bed.”
“Could we perhaps pick up where we left off tomorrow?”
“Yeah. We can do that.” Jasper switched off the lamp on the nightstand. “Good night.”
“Sweet dreams,” Konrad said.
He hung up and wished Konrad was there. He missed sleeping beside him. Jasper wondered how one weekend in a too loud, too bright city had eroded years of armor he’d built around himself. He stared into the shadows, but his imagination summoned no monsters from them.
