basically, i wish that you loved me;

[wingborne]

Tuesdays, soaked in caramel, belonged to the boy in blue.

(They used to belong to clattered yellow dishes and scattered sugar, brewed beans and lazy curls of steam, but one Tuesday, Dave Strider stays an extra shift. There’s a moment—where the tinkle of the entrance bell scrapes inside his mind, and he grits his teeth against another red-faced customer, but something inside him drops when a boy in blue stands silhouetted in the doorway and it all goes downhill from there.)


It is a truth universally acknowledged to a small coffee cafe that Dave Strider only worked afternoon shifts. His second job, at a club slick with oil puddles and jungle juice, needed him at nights. Like Excalibur in the stone, the clipboard of haphazard schedules attached to the back of a peeling green door only moved for earthquakes and kings.

So Rose Lalonde arches her eyebrow when he asks to switch shifts for Tuesday nights.

“If you need the hours, then Thursdays would work better for me.”

“I can only do Tuesdays.”

“Really?” She smiles tartly, classic yellow pencil pressed against her lips, and he clamps down his jaw before his secret leaks out. Her violet eyes drill into his brain, but another customer spills his drink down the polite marble table and Rose steps away with a look, which speaks about insistent whispers over boiling coffee. He’d tell Lalonde about his dreams of promiscuous puppets, plush rumps shining in the air, phallic noses wobbling in front of his eyes, but the boy in blue was his secret.


The first night, he breathes through his nose as he takes the boy’s order. His heart rams hard in his chest, strangling him kindly, as he watches the boy gnaw on his lower lip over the crumpled plastic menu. Behind his shades, he can watch every movement without shame, follow the lines of the thick wrists to tapered slender fingers, the sleep-disheveled dark hair, the way the boy’s lip is ragged and sweltered in red from years of buckteeth chewing, and he stuffs his hands into the pocket of his apron to stop trembling.

“I don’t really know what’s good,” the boy says, running his finger down the list.

“Nothing’s really good,” he blurts out without thinking, because he’s an idiot who wants desperately to say anything to the boy sitting on those cherry red seats. The boy blinks with his long dark lashes, and Dave tries to recover with his nails digging crests into his palm, tries to summon up a dry laugh or an explanation, but then the boy breaks out into a million dollar smile with his shining teeth.

“Wow, you make this store sound super attractive,” he says, laughing, “But I guess I will have a cappuccino. That’s the cool thing to drink, right?”

“Yeah.” He swallows dryly with relief. “Sure.”

He rocks back on his heels as he takes away the menu, mentally pirouetting off the theoretical handle for such a dumbshit answer. He sees the boy already pulling out a book. Their eyes meet, for a moment. (Though when Dave Strider runs through this scene for the tenth time through his mind, lying safely at his apartment with his face buried in a pillow, he thinks it isn’t possible, nobody could see through his shades, but he thinks, somehow, the boy in blue could see right through him.)

But the boy only grins at him, like seeing Dave was the best thing in the world, and he turns back to his thick book.

Dave ends up accidentally making him a mocha frappe instead, but the boy doesn’t notice, and he sits quietly in the corner booth seat. The sound of percolating coffee hums from the marble counter, and Dave sits behind the register with his legs drawn up like a child. The streetlights quietly enflame like stars, reflecting light from the boy’s hair. Dave plays a game. He stares down at the register for several loud heart beats, before he darts his eyes, like small fish in a pond, towards the boy in blue, drinking up the sight thirstily before he punishes himself by staring back down at the counter.

The boy eventually peers up with blurry eyes, like a rabbit catching onto a smell, when he’s finished with his drink. A visceral stab of disappointment rams through his ribs as he delivers the bill and watches the boy obediently pay. He tries desperately of a smooth way to ask him to stay, but the blood rushes to his ears, and he sloppily begins collecting the bright yellow plastic mug, his own stoic expression disappointed with him on the sunshine surface.

“It was nice,” the boy says, “I’ll come again.”

Just like that, all the lights in the shop twinkled brighter. After the boy leaves, Dave clamps on his thick cushioned headphones as he mops up the café, and whistles quietly within the yellow walls.



The next Tuesday morning, he wipes clean all the glitter from last night’s club and runs his fingers through his hair, preening in front of a cracked mirror. He tries on three outfits before settling on a faded shirt screaming semi-casual and tight jeans screaming douchebag, and he slumps around the coffee shop nervously. He mutters to himself by the coffee machine, and gives half-hearted shrugs to his co-workers dressed in green aprons, which apparently stirs fluttery eyes and heart-felt smiles towards him.

“Careful, Strider,” Rose says, “People might actually consider you somewhat cool if you keep this up.”

They called him the coolkid behind his back. Rose Lalonde, the girl with the violet eyes, almost smirked when she heard the nickname. He never cared, as long as nobody asked him to switch shifts. Breaking his own no shift-shifting pact caught Rose’s attention, like a mouse wandered into her lurking cage. He could feel Rose’s curiosity with every curling smile she delivered to him, but he kept his lips sealed for the short, precious moments of his secret.

Like clockwork, business tampers off to pathetic drivels and the boy arrives in the doorway to the nearly-empty shop. Dave pretends not to notice, keeping his head down low as he brushes away imaginary crumbs from the second table. The mirror hanging over the table allows him to sneak grazing glances towards the boy, who wore a darker blue today. But he was unmistakable, with half-gnawed lips and bright shining eyes.

“Ready to order?” Dave finally asks, heart hammering thick against his ears.

“Yeah, thanks. Can I have a cappuccino and a sandwich?”

“Sure,” he says, making a note for another mocha frappe, “What kind of sandwich?”

“Oh.” The boy’s lashes flutter, and he turns his baby blue eyes towards him. “A triangular one?”

He can’t help it. A short laugh shoots out of his mouth, but he bites down on his tongue, raw and hard. He expects the boy to stir with anger, but the boy only gazes up at him with a wrinkled nose of quiet amusement, like he didn’t understand the joke, but he was happy to see someone laugh.

“I meant what you wanted in the sandwich,” he mumbles, hoarse and drawn.

“I dunno. Just whatever you think is best!” The boy grins at him with all his teeth flashing, and passes back the menu. There’s a moment where his fingers touch, without lingering, brushing against Dave’s open palm, and the warmth still pulsates beneath his skin when he shuffles behind the counter. Surrounded by white bread and crisp lettuce, tomatoes spilling merrily off the sides, he teaches himself how to breathe again. He hears, behind him, the soft flipping of pages of the familiar book, and he smells the warmth of coffee surrounding him like a soft coat.

He silently thanks the deities when he wipes down the counters, water chilling his bitten-down nails. In the reflection, he can see the boy in blue chew on the corner of his lips and tap his pencil against his forehead, and the thick black frames that make his eyes seem all the bigger. The night does not stretch, but it does not hurry; he listens to the clock in his ears as he watches the boy behind his dark sunglasses.

The deities favorably grant him unspoken wishes, because the boy pays by credit card.

“Thanks for the coffee, Dave,” the boy says, standing up and adjusting the heavy straps of his backpack. A beat of confusion, and another beat, before Dave belatedly remembers the name tag hanging obnoxiously from the front of his green apron.

“You’re welcome…” Dave pauses, head bent over to the scrawled out signature. His slightly sarcastic tone dribbles off, but he barely has time to resent himself for his smart mouth before a strong hand, slightly calloused, brushes against his.

“John,” the boy in blue says, and his fingers are elegantly long as he curls them up beneath his palm. The side of his hand touches Dave’s pale hand as he raps a knuckle on each letter of the signature.

“J-o-h-n E-g-b-e-r-t. John Egbert,” he explains.

“You’re welcome, Egbert,” Dave says, and the boy breaks out into a grin. He slips out the café quietly, a soft jingling of bells singing his absence, but Dave’s heart beats too fast and his blood flushes hot against his face, and he’s grateful nobody is there to see him.

(And he strokes his thumb awkwardly against the signature on the flimsy receipt before adamantly shoving it away, proving an empty point to a silent shop.)



Rose takes too long in re-discovering her purse at the end of her Tuesday shift, but he knows her intentions.

“You were correct, Strider,” she says, playful, “Perhaps I am, indeed, as flighty as you purpose. Where could I have possibly left my purse?”

“Lalonde—”

“Truly, we are in dire straits. This is the winter of my discontent.”

“Lalonde, shut the hell up, Jesus Christ, you’re splooging more than a gushing wiener in a soaking wet bun, just dripping that shit off your meaty ends, it’s fourth of July and you’re the sour hot dog, it’s you.”

“Tossing me an easy cigar,” she says, elbows askew dangerously close to the row of chipper-colored coffee mugs, bright and plastic. The girl with violet eyes was lovely and beautiful, a skinny frame built with fine muscle, who always had a gentle quip in the oversized purple purse of hers. If it was anyone else, he might have firmly turned away, but Rose Lalonde was the girl with violet eyes and nobody turned her away.

He jerks abruptly when the boy enters, and he can hear Rose’s slight hitch in her voice, the moment of realization. Even in the reflection of the glass coffee pot, filled halfway with a dark mix, he can see the blotchy red spread on his face, his heart rising unsteadily. He busies his hands over clearing the granules of sugar, finely dusting his fingerprints, and Rose gently bumps her shoulder against his bony one.

“I think I’ve found my purse,” she says, and he hears her briskly stepping away to hang her apron upon the sacrifice of green.

“Hold up,” he mumbles, and usually nobody can hear him by the coffee machine. But Rose turns on her black heels and watches him pensively, hands drowning in her violet scarf.

“Talk to him, Strider,” she says, and she walks away with her scarf in a flurry. He waits on another customer before he arrives at John’s table (because it’s John’s, now; it may have been a stone finely chiseled or a designer’s hard work, but when John sits at the table with his ankles crossed and his elbows leaning forward, it belongs to John.)

“Sup,” he mutters, pencil ready over his small notepad.

“Hi, Dave,” John says, and his book is already spread open. “I will have the same thing, thanks!”

“Sure.” He hesitates, and scribbles down the order with his scratching pencil, because he doesn’t want to leave. But he has nothing else to say, so he swallows his desert throat and turns back to his castle built from thick foam and mint tea.

“Oh, wait, maybe I should get some ice cream, too,” John says, teeth at work again on his defenseless lips. “It’s like a celebration, right?”

“Your birthday or something?” Dave turns back to him, hands resting in his pocket, and ignoring the entering customer with the rattling jingle of the bells.

“Nah, nuttin’ like that. I just hit… Shoot, you’ll think it’s totally stupid.” John fiddles with his phone, fingers dancing over the sides. “Don’t laugh!”

“Can’t make that promise.”

“Jeez, Louise, you are a pain in the butt. Okay, I got almost a million hits on my video site and it’s so awesome. It is so, so awesome.” John rocks back and forth, briefly showing him the familiar logo on the screen. Dave bends his head to take a look, memorizing the screen name into his heart with a noncommittal sound of amusement.

“Looks pretty nerdy,” he says, muscles wired to fire off half-scuffled apologies for his words. But John understands, with his dancing fingers and scraped-up phone, and John laughs with his elbows leaning onto his table and his book decorated with tiny scraps of notes, and he tells Dave to get outta town and Dave gets out of the way and his hands are cold from scooping out the melting ice cream, sticking to the metal of the scooper, but John laughs again and it’s a ridiculously attractive sound and Dave sits behind the counter and watches him from behind his shades.


Dave Strider is a lost man.

He draws open his laptop on his bed, held up by cement blocks and plush rumps (presents from his brother that he stuffs under the bed, enough to make a slight bulge on the left side of the mattress) and types in ghostyTrickster on the site. A few videos pop up, and he clicks one at random because it’s late and he’s tired, and his shift starts in a few hours, even though the morning sun creeps up through the window.

The video buffers, and suddenly there’s John, and Dave’s breath catches in his throat, because he soaks in the movie posters of Nick Cage’s face and John beams up at him, through a webcam miles away, with a comfortable long shirt with sleeves brushing over his fingers as he talks.

“Okay, so this is going to be my movie review about Face/Off, which is like the best movie ever. Oh, shit, I wasn’t supposed to say that so early… Well, you have to watch more to find out why it’s the best!” John leans forward on his elbows, and Dave scrambles to pause the video. His fingers scrape against his laptop and he throws himself off the bed, digging through his shitty crap to find his good headphones, because his face is flushed and there’s no way he won’t be listening to John Egbert’s nerdy-ass rendition of Face/Off with high quality audio orgasms.

He plugs it in, and lying against the hard concrete block and between his towers of video games and CDs, he presses play again. John’s voice is low and pitches abruptly,