“Grumpy?” Braydon supplies judgmentally.
A faint defensiveness rises inside Greg at the word. For some odd reason, he wants to protest it, but can’t argue with the fact that it fits Julien. At least the Julien he’s seen so far. Almost too well. “Okay, yeah. Grumpy.” Grumpy was his favorite dwarf in the Disney cartoonSnow White, so he says it with a nostalgic sense of endearment instead of Braydon’s sass.
Braydon does a dramatic shrug-and-sigh combo. “Beats me. I don’t know much about him other than that Martin and Augustine raised him because of some messy shit with his parents, he’s been working at the restaurant forever and a day, and we hooked up once over a year ago and he hasn’t brought it up since.”
Greg takes this trove of information and shakes out every small treasure. “Why haven’t you brought it up to him?”
“Because you’ve met him now and see how he is,” Braydon says with bountiful snark Greg could do without.
“Oh yeah? How is he?”
“Intense!” Braydon says. “Wasn’t that interaction back there intense? He couldn’t just take the ride. He’salwayslike that. He’s a certified sommelier, which you need a lot of discipline and patience for, but it’s a lot.”
Julien. Sommelier.Greg calls to mind Julien’s classical features. His fragile yet tough manner of speaking. The way he refused the sample cocktail but dedicated his life to wine. He’s an enigma, and Greg has always liked puzzles. Rubik’s Cubes. Sudoku. Crosswords. It’s no wonder he’s already dying to solve Julien Boire.
Braydon continues, “He basically made me jump through hoops before I was allowed in his bed. Shoes off at the door, shower in advance, no kissing, absolutely no cologne. And then, after all that, he didn’t even finish, which is...probably more than you asked to hear. Sorry. Everyone tells me I don’t have a filter. Oh, make a left here, and you can park anywhere on the street.” Braydon points up ahead. Once they’re idling, he adds, “You’re welcome to come up for a bit if you want. I’ve got some liquor and mixers. Maybe you could do one of those random ingredient challenges that you do on TikTok for me?”
Greg’s tongue goes numb, and his mouth goes dry for a minute.
He respects the level of confidence it takes to come on to a man you just met, but that’s the issue. They just met. Greg isn’t emotionally ready to divulge anything about the pills he takes or the performance issues they sometimes cause to random guys who just won’t get it.
To top it all off, he doesn’t particularly like the way Braydon spoke about Julien. To him, it sorta sounded like Julien might be some flavor of neurodiverse, and Braydon was a dick about it. Something Greg experienced firsthand with Stryker.
Though, maybe Greg was a different type of dick earlier when he tried to cajole Julien into taking his cocktail sample. In the moment, he hadn’t considered that he might’ve been putting Julien in an uncomfortable position.
This new information and matching remorse only reify his initial desire to get closer to Julien, despite his standoffishness, so he can apologize and maybe forge a connection.
“I’m pretty beat. Thanks for the offer, though,” Greg says when his senses return to normal.
Braydon nods, moderately unfazed. “Chill, chill. Well, if you ever change your mind...” he points up to a dark window on the second floor “...you know where to find me.”
“Roger that.”
Greg drives home singing along to “Beautiful” and crying along to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and parks in the middle of “Home Again.” He stays in the car until the song ends, letting the soothing notes wash over him. Allowing himself to unwind after a bustling night of making drinks, taking orders, and being “on.”
Exhaustion weaves between his bones.
The older he gets and the more he learns about his unique brand of anxiety, the more time it takes him to recharge after hours of intense interaction. Carole King proves the perfect balm after a frenzied shift. He can’t wait to take his meds and go to sleep.
Inside, he finds Rufus on the couch, lounging in sweatpants playing a video game. He speaks into a large headset. “Get out quickly! Go, go, go!”
“Coming in on your left,” Greg says about the intruder gaining on Rufus’s character on the high-definition screen, but what he thinks is a helpful hint scares his cousin instead.
Rufus jumps up and pauses his game. “Shit! You almost gave me a heart attack... Yeah, Wayne, my cousin’s home. I’ll catch up with you soon. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Bye.” He throws off the headset and brushes some Cheetos crumbs off his shirt.
“My bad,” Greg says apologetically. “I see you’re enjoying your night.”
“Yeah, special agent missions are a good way to de-stress,” Rufus says. “Why are you...wearing that?”
Greg got so comfortable in Julien’s shirt that until this moment he’d forgotten he was wearing it. Ridiculous, given how it could bust open at any moment. Straining. Pulling. He’s used to wearing spandex to the gym, though, and this shirt had some give to it, so he didn’t mind all that much.
“There was an accident involving spilled cocktails, so my coworker lent me this,” Greg explains. He thinks again about how he’d like to turn said coworker into a friend. His phone, nestled in the front pocket of his bag, has been devoid of incoming texts from the so-called friends he had back in New York. For longer, it’s been wiped clean of messages from his handful of academy buddies. And don’t even get him started on his parents who only check in on birthdays and holidays, if they remember.
He knows he could reach out first, but that would require him admitting defeat, failure. They know him, his history. Julien—with his scowl and his intensity and his cute earrings—doesn’t know him at all. From his attitude, maybe he thinks he does. But Greg is excited by the prospect of proving him wrong, of potentially forging a true connection with someone so unlike the people he ran with in his old life. Maybe even someone who shares a similar diagnosis.
So it didn’t happen tonight like he thought it might, but soon. He’ll work on it. Maybe ask him about his favorite wine regions or grapes or...
“Sorry to say, but you look kind of ridiculous,” Rufus says, bursting out laughing.
