It wasn’t exactly a far stretch to assume Basil either worked there or was related to the woman who had introduced herself as Ama. She spoke to them and understood without an issue, but she wore hearing aids and her accent gave her away as deaf. In a town this small, he let himself assume. It also didn’t hurt that she looked like Basil in the way that siblings often resembled each other. The same nose, same dark curls, though hers fell long down her back. Mostly though, it was her eyes, intense and piercing like she could see everything.
He had that same feeling when the lights had gone up and he could see Basil for the first time. Right before he walked out. In fact, it had taken nearly every ounce of his self-control not to ask her if she knew the guy. The last thing Derek wanted to do was stalk somestranger who hadn’t offered to keep in touch. He may have been somewhat infatuated, but he wasn’t a creep.
“Dude,” a voice to his right said, and Derek’s head whipped over to see James smirking at him, toying with his septum piercing with the tip of his finger. “You’ve been wiping that same spot for like ten minutes. Did someone fuck your actual brains out last night?”
Derek felt the back of his neck flush. “No. Not that I’d tell you if I did get lucky. I’m just tired. Rough night last night.”
James’ face fell a little and he leaned forward in his chair. “Want to talk about it?”
The truth was, no, he didn’t. He was sick to death of having to explain every low mood—even when there was a reason for it. He did appreciate that these guys were his family and would do anything for him, but he also wanted to be treated like a person and not some fragile mess prone to falling apart any time one little thing went wrong.
He’d had PTSD for most of his formative years, and well into adulthood. He’d survived being homeless, and every single day since then. He could survive a little panic attack and the emotional hang-over that came with it the next day.
“I’m good,” he finally said, moving on to wrap his table with the big roll of cling wrap he’d stolen from Mat’s station. “Are you on tonight?”
“I’m doing the shading on my mermaid at nine tonight, and Mat’s going to finish carving my left leg up during his downtime,” he said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs in front of him. Carving him up was essentially Mat’s pet-project. James was a double-amputee, both legs just below the knee, and more often than not he wore prosthetics that were just a titanium rod which ended with his shoe, but Mat had gotten a wild-hair to do some steampunk design in James’ cover which was made out of some type of flesh-colored foam Mat found intensely satisfying to carve up. His left leg was nearly done, and the design on the right was already being sketched out to match.
“Are you going to help out with walk-ins?” Derek asked as he started fishing through his bottles, mentally chiding himself for how damn disorganized his drawer was.
James snorted. “Dude, it’s a Wednesday. We’ll get maybe—maybe—some stoned sorority chicks who looked us up on yelp and decided to drive out. I’m not dealing with that nonsense. If I have to tattoo one more infinity symbol on the side of someone’s finger…”
Derek grinned, shaking his head even as he all-but buried his face in his ink drawer. “Come on man, it doesn’t hurt to take one or two. Coffee cash, you know?”
“I want steak and lobster dinner cash, asshole. Infinity symbols don’t pay my rent.”
Which, true. They didn’t. They were the sixty buck shop minimum walk-ins, but then again, no one in the shop made less than one-fifty an hour for their standard work apart from the two apprenticing, so it’s not like any of them had room to complain. Derek hadn’t stressed about bill paying in years, even when shit like government shutdowns threatened to choke all their business to death. But he also understood how annoying it was to have to swirl a lemniscate on a nineteen-year-old who was terrified of needles and trying to find some deeper meaning in a symbol that didn’t have any significance outside of coding these days.
Derek did his best not to judge people’s decisions though. That wasn’t his job, even if he did occasionally pull a face when some obnoxious, popped-collar asshole strolled in and asked for a camel on his big toe. His job was to just provide the ink to the best of his abilities—which was worth his one-seventy an hour—and to pocket his cash and move on with his life. He liked his regulars, and he liked his family there, and there wasn’t too much to complain about.
“Yo,” came a voice from the front. Mat and Sage walked in holding a couple of pizza boxes and Derek wanted to groan because Sage always got fucking anchovies which would make everything smell like fish ass for half the night. “Do you want to eat before your client gets in?” Sage asked Derek.
“Nah.” Derek glanced at the clock and saw his client would be walking in within the next ten minutes. “I don’t want to get all nasty before I get working. Besides your nasty fish juice probably leaked on everything.”
“Ha,” Sage said, leaning down to grin in his face, “joke’s on you, I got artichoke hearts and feta this time.”
Not that it sounded any better, but at least it might smell less. “I’m still good. I’ll probably order Thai or something later. Last night kind of killed all sense of appetite.” That was nothing new, and no one really reacted apart from a couple of careful looks which he purposefully ignored.
“Okay, well I’m going to eat and get a few of my drawings done for next week. Let me know if anyone comes in.” Sage gave his brother a long look before taking the pizzas back into their make-shift break room.
Derek sagged back in his chair and rubbed both hands over his face. When he looked up again, James and Mat were giving him a tentative stare. “Can you please not?”
“You know we just worry,” Mat replied quietly.
Derek waved him off. “I know, but that’s not necessary. It’s…it’s not even the stupid panic attack, okay? I got over that sometime around midnight.”
James frowned. “So what has your panties all twisted?” He grunted when Mat dragged his leg over a little harder than normal—punishment for the panties comment which Derek appreciated. They didn’t do gender-role shaming there. Ever.
“I met a guy,” he finally said, knowing that the moment Sam got back, he’d blab anyway so he might as well head it off. “He was stuck in the little ATM kiosk thing with me and helped me through it. And I’m a fucking moron and I can’t stop thinking about him.”
The two idiots across from him lit up like a house on fire, and before he could head them off, Mat looked like he was ready to start planning a wedding. “Are you going to see him again? What was hisname? Did you have some gross-ass romantic kiss in the rain after you were rescued?”
Derek fought off the urge to rip open his package of needles and stab Mat in the neck with the tight-liner he was about to prep. “First of all, fuck you, this isn’t a Disney rom-com. Second of all, we didn’t exchange numbers or anything. He just helped me out and then we moved on with our lives.”
“Well,” James said with a small grin, “one of you did.”
Mat smacked him at the same time as Derek flipped him off and said, “It was a rough night and I’m not used to strangers being nice for no reason, okay? I’ll get over it.”
The pair of them looked like they didn’t want him to get over it, and frankly if he thought he had a chance with Basil, he wouldn’t want to get over it either. But it was what it was. He set the needle package down just as his phone buzzed, and he saw it was an email from his online shop alerting him that a sale had been officially processed.
