Chapter Text
Seriously, Daniel was on the verge of setting up an account on one of those foot websites. He wasn't kidding. He needed to make some fucking money or Julie was going to throw him out on his ass. This whole freelance journalism thing just wasn't cutting it. Where were all the stories? Where was the excitement? He couldn't do another piece about Shaggy's Pop-Up Doggy Spa or Caroline's Flower Shop closing after thirty years of business. He was losing his mind. Suburbia simply wasn't for him. But he couldn't afford rent in the city and he'd had too much pride to move back in with his parents.
$200. If he could just get his hands on $200, he'd have Julie off his back and maybe even a little left over for an 1/8th.
"Please, Daniel. I've asked you to stop pulling stools up to the counter. This is the landing area for drinks."
Daniel sat his bag on the surface and swiveled his head around. "Oh yeah? The landing area for all the drinks being ordered..."
"It's 11am on a Tuesday. The rush is over, but it's the principle."
"Look, if someone spills their breve latte on my keyboard, you won't be held liable. I promise." He unzipped the brown leather bag and slid his laptop out, setting it up in front of him and pulling the charge from the bag after, holding the plug-end up. "Besides... all the other outlets are being camped at and I know you have a strip of them on the other side of the counter."
Rashid ran a damp rag over the area in front of him, rolling his eyes. "Daniel..."
"Rashid..."
"Fine. But you need to order something."
"Can I open a tab?"
Rashid glared at him.
"Fine, fine. Oh, fuck! I think your espresso machine's about to blow!" He pointed past Rashid's shoulder and, to his surprise, Rashid turned to look. With lightning speed, Daniel reached his hand into the tip jar by the register and fished out a dollar bill. When Rashid turned back his way, he held it out, folded between two fingers. "All I got on me..."
Another glare and Rashid snatched the dollar back from him, replacing it in the jar. "Cute. Fine." He grabbed a small coffee cup, filled it with whatever he had brewed on the warmer, and fitted it with a lid before pushing it Daniel's way. "On the house. Again."
"Thanks, Rashid. You're a real prince of arabica, you know that?"
"I'm from Bangladesh, not the Middle East. That's racist."
"East is East." Daniel sipped his free coffee and set to typing as Rashid begrudgingly plugged him in.
"Again, that's South Asia, not East. And you aren't even listening, so what does it matter."
Daniel nodded as his fingers flew, eyes intent on his screen. The door chimed behind him.
"Welcome in!" Rashid called, his voice and countenance a lot less cheery than it otherwise would have been had Daniel not come in to wreck the final hour of his shift.
A group of what were definitely teenagers skipping class came to the counter and rattled off their intricate and complicated orders one by one. Daniel glanced up, smirking a little as Rashid tried to keep up. He was cute when he was overworked and frustrated, but Daniel had a deadline. He took another sip from his coffee and refocused on his work. He got a good paragraph in while Rashid rapidly filled the teens' orders in succession, calling their names as he deposited them on the counter, dangerously and purposely close to Daniel's makeshift office. Thankfully, the drinks were picked up just as soon as they were made and Daniel only needed to shield his laptop briefly.
"You look hot," Daniel muttered when Rashid came close again to wipe up.
"We can't all sit on our asses for work."
"I meant sweat looks good on you. And I work. I work plenty."
"I've seen your work. Don't remind me."
Daniel bit his lips between his teeth. He had nothing clever for that. It was about a month ago that Rashid had walked into the restroom coming off his shift to find Daniel at the service of an attractive older man who'd bought him an espresso a mere twenty minutes before. Daniel thought he'd locked the door. He really had. He was grateful when a cacophony of giggling and "oh my gods" rose above the quiet, inoffensive cafe jazz playing over the speakers and pulled focus from the subject of Daniel's 'side hustle.' (Really, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't like he was registered on any websites or anything. It wasn't for money. Just... drugs. And a shot of espresso that one time. But the guy had been persuasive.)
"What's that they're carrying on about?" Daniel asked, looking in the direction of the five teens gathered around the bulletin board that was never used for much more than missing pet posters and bands in need of drummers and/or bassists. Daniel'd given up checking it.
"Oh, some guy came in early this morning and pinned something up there. I haven't had the time to check it out, but the guy was... weird."
"Oh yeah? Weird how?"
"Well, he didn't order anything, but he did come up to the counter to ask if he could put up his flyer first. Very polite, but... I don't know. Off."
"Love 'weird.' Love 'off.' Too many cookie cutter suburbanoids around here. That's why I like you so much, Rashid."
Rashid grimaced. "Anyway. He looked rich. Smelled rich, too."
As if losing interest completely all at once, Daniel slumped in his stool. "Ugh. Of course. Nevermind, then."
"Oh, but he was about my complexion, too. Probably wouldn't have remembered much about him if it weren't for that. We had a little moment of recognition, I think. He smiled at me, anyway. But I don't know. Maybe he's not from around here. Maybe he has no idea..."
"How tragically WASPy it is around here?" Daniel snorted. "I'm sure he noticed."
"Doesn't your father own a dealership?" Rashid narrowed his eyes Daniel's way.
"Hey, I'm transcultural, buddy. Besides... I might be white, but I'm Jewish white. It's... different..."
"You can't do that!" Rashid suddenly shouted as one of the kids tore the flyer down from the cork-board, presumably to take it. He came out from around the counter and confronted the group, taking the now-crumpled piece of paper from them and shooing them from the cafe. He came back to his post, Daniel's eyes following him around as he placed the flyer on the counter beside him, attempting to smooth it out with his forearms.
"Hang on, hold still..." Daniel bent to read it. "Oh... no way. What?" He snatched it from the counter and squinted. "Rashid..."
"Yeah?"
"Get a load of this." Daniel spread it back over the counter and leaned in a little as Rashid bent over it, shamelessly inhaling his end-of-shift musk.
"Holy shit," Rashid muttered. "No way this is for real."
"I mean, you think it might be a bit?"
"Or some kind of performance art," Rashid suggested.
"Performance art around here?" Daniel scoffed. "Not likely."
"That's a considerable amount of money. How personal do you think these 'increasingly personal' questions get?"
"Who cares! Five grand? To eat spicy food and tell some stranger about the first time you noticed your mom had a bush while you were in the shower together?"
Rashid glanced up at him. "What?"
"Nothing. Nevermind." Daniel folded the flyer into a neat rectangle and shoved it into his pocket wholesale. "There's no good spicy food around here. Fucking mayo-ville."
Daniel wasn't going to call the number. He wasn't. It was a keepsake, really. The guy probably hadn't even been serious when he'd put it up. And if he had been, then he was a total psychopath and Daniel was doing some hapless 20-30 year old broke boy a favor by taking it down.
But five grand was a lot of money and Daniel wasn't set to collect on his trust for another four years. And if it weren't for his dad being a complete asshole he wouldn't be staying on the couch of his ex girlfriend in the first place.
The microwave beeped and Daniel tossed the flyer back onto the coffee table where it promptly soaked into his spilled bong water he was totally about to wipe up. He collected his pizza rolls, stabbed them each with a hair pin Julie'd left out on the counter after returning from work the previous evening to let the steam out, and returned to the couch. Five grand could change a lot for him. At the very least, it would be enough for a down payment on a place and a couple of month's rent. It'd get him out of Julie's hair and out from under her thumb. All her rules were getting to be a bit stifling. Of course, Daniel was very grateful to have been given a dry place to sleep, but if he had to hear one more of her vagina monologues about putting the seat back down, he was going to combust.
He'd just smoked the last of his weed, too. And some of Julie's. Things became a lot less tolerable around here when he couldn't get at least a little loaded.
The pizza rolls were still lava-hot, and as he bounced the first one around his mouth on his tongue like a hacky-sack to keep it from scalding the inside of his mouth, he texted Richie, his dealer.
Hey, what do I have in credit, my man?
The response was pretty immediate.
You? Nothin lol
Before Daniel could even type his response, another text came through.
In fact I think you owe me something like 30
Fuck. That was right. Richie'd spotted him a week ago. Daniel put his phone back down and turned back to his pizza rolls. Richie was a prick. In the next few months, weed was going to be legal across Maryland, anyway, and then Daniel wouldn't have to keep up a rapport with such lowlifes. God, he missed California. If his trust fund hadn't been on the line, he would've stayed behind, but his stupid father had no idea how the real world worked. Daniel's journalism career was as good as dead in the water around here. Thank god for TikTok and Twitter. He'd have absolutely no sources if it weren't for them.
Five grand could get him on a bus back to Cali. Not to stay, of course. His parents would shit a brick if he pulled a stunt like that. But just to visit. Maybe to see Alice. Maybe to get a decent burrito, see a few shows and write up a couple of reviews. Get printed again and get some goddamned recognition. Five grand could do a lot.
"Like cover the cost of your casket when they inevitably find you carved up in a ditch," he said to himself around molten tomato sauce and cheese.
What if the guy really was a psycho? A rich psycho who smelled good and wanted to run experiments on him to test if the new strand of pepper he'd engineered was lethal? Daniel wasn't above guinea pigging, but that was for the advancement of medical science, not some madcap pepper evangelist.
He'd sleep on it. He popped the last few rolls into his mouth and set his plate on the floor before spreading out on the couch. He set an alarm to wake him before Julie got home so he'd have the time to clean up and hide the evidence that he'd been in her room and pinched some of her bud. Maybe if he hadn't been so distracted, if his mind hadn't been so fixated on this strange gig that seemed a little too good to be true, he'd have noticed he'd set his alarm for 4:15am instead of 4:15pm.
By the time Julie shook him awake, all his belongings had been tossed carelessly onto the wet front lawn, his key to the house confiscated, and his bong shattered in the driveway. Harsh. He didn't even have the gas to get him across town to his folks' house.
"Are you gonna call the cops on me for sleeping in my car?"
"Not if you pull out of my driveway," Julie said, arms crossed and serious.
"Of course, of course," Daniel grumbled to himself, shoving the last armful of his damp and muddy clothes into the back of his 2007 Yaris hatchback and slamming the door. "Only if I pull out. Where have I heard that one before?"
It wasn't going to be the first time Daniel spent the night in his car. Not even the first time he'd been kicked to the curb by Julie. She'd let him back in in a night or two. It'd get cold or rain and she'd feel bad for him, invite him back in, tell him she's sorry, feed him a real meal made on the stove top instead of the microwave, and maybe even fuck him. They wouldn't get back together, though. No way. Daniel simply could not be tied down like that again.
But for now, this was fine. For now, he could recline his seat back, sleep under the light of the moon and wake up with the sun tomorrow. He'd walk over to Bean Awhile and bug Rashid for a cup of coffee. He'd bounce the idea off of him again and see what kind of difference a day made. It wasn't that wild an idea, was it?
Rashid said the guy was polite.