Chapter Text
He is the first thing you notice when you step foot into the laundromat.
Mostly, it’s due to the sheer size of him. He towers over the rows of washers and dryers lined up through the building, and the attendant has to crane their neck back to meet his eyes while they speak lowly with each other at the service counter. Even without the peculiar bulkiness of his clothing—as if he’s layered two or three shirts below the jacket he’s wearing and maybe a pair of jeans under his sweats—you can tell he’s made up of corded muscle.
In the gap between where one row of washers begins and another ends, you steal furtive glances at him as you mindlessly transfer your laundry from the basket you brought it in to the stainless steel machine in front of you. Decorum dictates that gawking is impolite, and you’d be mortified if you’re caught, but something about him commands your attention and makes your eyes prone to wandering.
He swivels his head side to side at the same time you sneak another look at his face, and you nearly get stuck on the bright green of his eyes. They are sharp and hypervigilant, excessively so for an almost empty laundromat at a quarter till midnight on a Friday. You think it’s a near tragedy how the black ends of his hair almost conceal them completely.
You dip your eyes back down to the laundry at your feet, but it’s an effort done in vain. You are drawn back to him by the low timbre of his voice and how it’s raised in volume now. He’s not yelling, nor is he stern, but you think he might be defeated from the way his shoulders droop and his hands are curled into fists as they rest on the counter. It’s unclear if the attendant’s face is scrunched in pity or fear.
Before you have the chance to look away, his head turns, and he locks eyes with yours without having to search for them, as if he knew exactly where they’d be. You startle in place and drop your chin, desperately hoping he takes it as a mere coincidence that your gazes met at that exact moment and not that you were intently observing him. But it’s dashed when you see him push off the counter from your peripheral and begin to meander in your general direction. The urge to duck down and hide is hard to resist, and a combination of anxious embarrassment and some kind of anticipatory excitement sends a buzz over your skin; you cannot ignore the fact that he’s alluring.
He’s coming closer and closer, and you feign trenchant focus on the task at hand until he sidles up to the washer next to yours. He leans his shoulder against it, and it becomes clear he’s after your attention when he lowers his head to try and catch your eyes while you pointedly avoid doing so. He clears his throat, and you turn to him hesitantly with a politely innocent smile on your face. Greeting him is probably the most inoffensive thing to do, and you open your mouth to do just that until—
“You like it?”
Your mind blanks, and you dart your eyes around nervously.
“Like what, exactly?” you ask tentatively.
“My face,” he says bluntly at the same time he holds up a pointed finger towards himself, “cause you keep staring at it.”
In the most inelegant way possible, you choke on your own spit and stutter out a strangled “no!” as you wave your hands about in front of you.
He just laughs in some amused way. “Something else about my appearance then? How would you describe it? Rugged? Mysterious?” And after a dramatic pause, “Handsome?”
His eyes are hooded, and the way his mouth curves into a smirk tugs at the silvery scar in one corner. It’s borderline condescending and plenty arrogant, but if you squint hard enough, you’d say it’s concealing something vulnerable.
Truthfully, you might have been staring—ogling, if honesty prevails—but he’s the one who had the audacity to call you out on it, and thus you have no choice but to save face. And rock his ego.
“Unkempt is more like it,” you snip at him, and his smug expression drops into offended disbelief so quickly that it’s comical. “Haggard and in need of a shower, if you want me to be exact.”
It's not a complete lie. A half-truth, if you will. His hair is long enough that it skims past his ears, and it's limp as if it hasn't been washed in a couple days. His clothes are wrinkled and not really stained, but the fabric of his pants are thinning at the knees and the sleeves of his jacket are starting to fray.
He recovers himself after a moment, scoffing and rolling his shoulders back in a way that tests the integrity of the seams on his clothing. You have to swallow at the sight of it.
“Ironic, given where we are,” he snaps, and he looks pointedly at the basket of laundry at your own feet and then at the oversized hoodie and stretchy pants you have on, both of which have seen better days.
The implied accusation has you bristling. “The washer in my apartment is broken, and the part to fix it won’t be here till next week. And I’ve been busy. What’s your excuse?” you fire back, planting your hands on your hips.
Unperturbed, he mutters something under his breath as he scans the perimeter of the laundromat before his gaze lands back on your chest briefly. “You a student at the university?”
The change in topic is abrupt and catches you off guard. You have to shake your head clear after glancing down and remembering your hoodie has your university’s name printed across the front.
“Oh, yeah, I am. It’s my last year,” you tell him. “Are you?”
He looks at you flatly and presses his lips into a thin line as he waves a hand down the length of his body. “What do you think?” he asks with heavy sarcasm.
“Do you want me to be honest again?”
That shuts him up, and he runs his tongue over his teeth before poking it into his cheek. He doesn’t say anything, so you turn back to the washer with a tired sigh.
He was prettier when he didn’t open his mouth, you think to yourself.
After tossing a final pair of socks into the machine, you shut the door and pull out your wallet to find the necessary change to pay for the wash. You can feel him observing you from behind your back, and his shoes squeak against the linoleum floor as he shifts his weight. The coins you put into the machine rattle and clang as they disappear into it. You face him again, but he’s pointedly not meeting your eyes. Instead, they flit nervously from the coin slot on the washer to the rest of the room and then down to his shoes as his hands absentmindedly toy with the hem of his jacket. He takes a step back towards the exit, and a lightbulb goes off in your head.
“I have extra change,” you start, but he’s already spinning on his heel and throwing the door open to skulk off into the night, not bothering to spare you a glance or farewell. You watch through the windows to see if he gets into a car or walks to the bus stop not far down the street, but instead he turns the corner around the neighboring building and disappears.
When your laundry is done and you’re driving back home, you keep a casual eye out to see if you spot him, but you can’t make out his figure in any shadowed crook or hidden cranny. You think of him as you climb up two flights of stairs with your bag of laundry over your shoulder and wonder where he might be. When you’re staring into your mirror as you brush your teeth before bed, you reconsider if there was anything you could’ve done to offer help to someone who clearly didn’t want it. As you begin to nod off under your blankets, you can admit it wasn’t the prominent muscle or his height that had kept your attention. Instead, nearly obscured by jagged black hair, it was the green of his eyes that made you guilty of watching him. Coincidentally, they are the last thing you think of before sleep takes you completely.
-----------------------
In some stroke of luck or happenstance, your one bedroom apartment is nestled in the quieter side of town only a fifteen minute walk from campus. Equidistant from the university but in another direction completely is where you’ll find your employer. In a cozy brick building on a corner sits a place that is something in between a cafe and a coffee shop, not quite one or the other but perhaps lends itself in certain ways to either. You’ve worked there the last three years of your schooling, and so it carries with it the same homely familiarity as your apartment, though you would say that’s mostly due to the fact that you never have to pay for your lunch when you’re there, even if you aren’t on the clock.
That’s precisely what you’ve done on this particular Wednesday, and the sandwich that sits in the brown paper bag hooked on your elbow is leaching steam that smells divine and nearly tempts you into eating it as you walk instead of waiting to sit down on a bench at the park halfway to campus. The only thing that stops you is the fact it’s misty outside and you don’t want your lunch to fall apart before you’ve even had a chance to enjoy it. Such are the perils of late autumn, maybe even winter now at this point, but you’d gladly take the cold and wet over the hot and humid oppressiveness of summer.
When you round a street corner and the park that is situated centrally in a sea of corporate buildings and shops with sparkling glass windows comes into view, you quicken your steps out of eagerness and jog through the crosswalk when the coast is clear. Your stomach is growling loudly and your hair is dampened more than you’d like, but something about the day has you close to giddy, even with the hours of upcoming classes you have waiting for you in the afternoon.
At this time of day, the park is mostly empty. There’s a concrete trail that runs through it, surrounded by trees and swaths of grass and flowerbeds. The leaves have lost their autumnal hues and have faded into a dullness that’s beyond the point of beauty, so they flutter to the earth and lay plastered against the ground, waiting to be crushed underfoot into pieces of oblivion. One straggler floats down across your field of vision, and as you lift your eyes to follow its descent, they catch on something just a ways from down from you.
Your feet falter on the pavement when you recognize a hulking figure occupying most of a wooden bench half hidden under a giant tree. His hands are buried in the pockets of a threadbare windbreaker, and from the curve of his shoulders as they hunch in on themselves, you can tell that he’s feeling the effects of the weather. He’s glaring at nothing in particular. He cuts his eyes at anyone who passes by, and there’s a satisfied and bitter curl to his lips when they scurry past him. When you step up to the bench, he does the same, but then he blinks twice in rapid succession as his nose scrunches in disdain.
“Just my luck,” he grumbles. “You here to insult me again?”
You snort and drop down into the scant empty space to his right, ignoring how he side-eyes you. You unwind the black scarf you had around your neck and pluck off your gloves before setting them down between you. “Only if you deserve it, though that’s probably likely.”
He grunts, but says nothing else, instead choosing to cross his arms over his chest, tuck his hands under his armpits, and focus his stare outwards over the sidewalk and to the street. He doesn’t seem keen on keeping up any sort of conversation and is more set on ignoring you. Content to let him glower and grateful for the way the tree offers shelter from the mist, you set your school bag down on the ground next to your feet and grab your takeout bag from the crook of your arm. The corners are stained dark with grease, and you can already smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, pesto, and melted cheese before even getting your sandwich out.
It seems as though you aren’t the only one who does. From your peripheral, you see him glance at the bag before darting his eyes away. Fabric rustles and crinkles, and you think he’s balled his fists into the pockets of his jacket again. After removing the sandwich from the bag, you begin unwrapping it from the parchment paper it came in, and just like before, as if he can’t control it, his eyes drift back to how it sits and steams in your hands.
It’s plainly clear to you that he’s hungry. Mightily so, if you had to take a guess. But from his brusque attitude and how you can already tell from one meeting and a half that he’s prideful to a fault, you know that he wouldn’t accept an offering to share your food, no matter how tempting it may be to him. You’d venture to say that he’s impressively sharp and keen, and you fret internally over how you can get him your sandwich without him thinking it’s done out of pity. It isn’t until you're lifting it to your mouth to take a bite that you smell the pesto and see the small pieces of pine nut blending in with the rest of the herbs that an idea springs forth.
“Damn it,” you groan, dropping the sandwich back onto the paper in your lap and making a show of wiping your hands together. His head flicks in your direction, and his eyebrows raise in question. You look at him bashfully, as if you feel bad for interrupting the silence with your outburst, and then you purse your lips in disappointment. “They put pesto on my sandwich even though I asked them not to. I’m really allergic to nuts.”
Your place of employment would do no such thing, and while you wouldn’t consider yourself a liar, at least not in any regularity, you suppose such a fib could go forgiven in circumstances like these. You just hope your little act works.
“Ah, bummer,” he mutters, and again he eyes your sandwich with a yearning he must not be aware of.
With a mournful sigh, you begin wrapping it back up. “If I didn’t have class in just a little bit, I’d go back and get a new one. But the shop’s twenty minutes away and it’s cold and I—,” you pause like something just occurred to you, then turn to him before looking back down to your sandwich and then back to him one more time. “I’d hate for it to go to waste,” you say in a tone that’s entreating. “Do you want it?”
You hold the sandwich out to him and watch as he deliberates for only a second before reaching to take it from your hands in a way that feels barely restrained. He doesn’t hesitate in lifting it to his mouth and taking such a large bite of it that you almost cringe. It’s only worsened by the fact that he doesn’t bother to wipe the pesto from the corner of his mouth before looking at you.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, and you’re just grateful he at least has the decency to swallow first. Before you have a chance to reply, he shifts the sandwich to one hand and uses the other to grab something from his pocket. “I think I have some change I can give you.”
You seriously doubt it just by the looks of him and if his behavior at the laundromat is anything to go by. “Don’t worry about it.”
He pays you no mind, and as he fiddles with his wallet—a beat up, pathetic thing—you try and shift your weight casually and just so to allow a quick peek from the corner of your eye into its contents, hoping to uncover his name and nothing more. You’d ask for it point blank if it didn’t seem like getting it out of him would be akin to pulling teeth.
You aren’t successful, and he fixes you with narrowed eyes as he snaps his wallet closed and lets it fall into his lap. “What’re you doing?”
“Just curious,” you say with a shrug, because it’s true and you see no use in lying about it when he knows what you’re up to.
He scowls. “Don’t you know what they say about curiosity? Killed the damn cat, or whatever.”
“You must not know the rest of the saying.” You tsk at him, and you don’t hide the smug grin on your lips. “‘Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.’”
His look of displeasure intensifies, and it’s very clear how absurdly he thinks of that last bit—and maybe you, by extension. “That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“A matter of opinion,” you say blithely, and he takes another large bite of your sandwich. Then another, and another, finishing it off in less time it would take you to eat even half. With a content groan, he reclines back against the bench and stretches those long legs of his as far out as they can go and then crosses them at the ankle. It occurs to you that for how simply massive he is, both in his height and the breadth of his shoulders, one meager sandwich isn’t going to do much in staving off hunger for more than just a little while. But some of the darkness from his face has bled away and his jaw isn’t set as tightly as it was when you first spotted him, and it absolutely makes your heart ache like never before.
A sudden beeping from your wrist breaks the silence and makes the both of you jolt in place, though you are more affected by it than him. With a hand slapped over your racing heart, you glance down at your watch only to have your eyes bulge when you realize that you have five minutes to make it to a class ten minutes away.
“I’m going to be late!” you gasp out. You jump up at the same time you reach down to swing your bag up over your shoulder, and you spare a look behind you to give the guy a wave goodbye. “Take care of the trash please!”
He rolls his eyes in a very unimpressed way, but you’re already hurrying off and can’t be bothered with making sure he does as you ask. In fact, it isn’t until you’re halfway to class and your fingers are already numb and the collar of your coat is damp that you realize you left behind your scarf and gloves under the takeout bag on the bench. There isn’t really anything to do about it at this point, and you can only hope that he has the sense to make use of them. If he didn’t toss them in the garbage too, that is.