by Lex Chase
“Her,” the old man said with venom.
“Hey, now,” Patrick warned him. “All customers are afforded equal opportunities here.”
“But she’s going to buy the desk,” he said.
Patrick and Benji shared a glance. Patrick nodded to him, trying to puzzle out if Benji knew where the exchange was going.
Benji gave a mute nod in response, and Patrick’s nonexistent heart swelled. Lassie can be taught!
“And what else?” Patrick asked, prying for more information from the old man.
The old man shivered. “They’re going to do crude things on it. It’ll break and she’ll sever an artery in her thigh.”
“So you’re just trying to help,” Patrick explained as he watched him for understanding.
“Yes. Help. Help that girl do something with her life instead of going down the road of depravity,” the old man grumbled.
Patrick gave an overdramatic shrug. “Eh. To each their own.”
Benji knitted his brows, and Patrick officially determined that was his most charming trait. “We were born with free will,” Benji said. “We can make our own decisions.”
Patrick internally cringed but forced his grimace into a fake, bright CASA employee smile and aimed it at the old man. “Please excuse him. He’s shadowing me.”
The old man nodded. “Of course.”
Benji’s adorable knitted brows were back, now joined by a pout. Patrick licked his lips. That was a mighty fine distracting pout.
Patrick slipped from the PIOMBA desk. “Let me take care of this.” He smirked and then whispered to Benji, “Watch this.”
He headed to the yellow intercom phone on a nearby column. He gestured to the handset like Vanna White ready to turn letters.
“It’s a phone?” Benji asked in a half question. “You really did do drugs, didn’t you?”
Patrick slipped the handset off the cradle and then hit the broadcast switch.
“Attention, CASA shoppers. All linens, towels, and washcloths are two for one for the next hour,” he said into the phone and then glanced at the two women. “Perfect for cleaning those fingerprints on the PIOMBA desktop you’re so obsessed about.”
Both women jolted, eyes wide, seeking the source. Patrick watched Benji, who looked like he was choking on a meatball.
Patrick growled in a throaty purr into the phone, “That means you lovely ladies fondling the PIOMBA.”
Both women blushed hotly and then quickly scuttled off farther into the store.
The old man gave Patrick and Benji a broad grin. “Thank you, young man. Those girls needed to learn.”
Patrick reached out and shook his hand. The old man’s sickly energy put a heaviness on his shoulders. Patrick pulled away before his own energy completely left him.
“You need to see Karin in Kitchens. She’s also Guest Relations. She’ll make sure you’re well taken care of,” he said confidently, trying to shake off the aura drain.
“Thank you, son—” Before the old man could finish, he vanished into long trails of colored smoke. He wasted no time heading out the doors. They chirped with a happy tune, and Benji whistled.
“That was amazing,” Benji whispered in awe. “You really help people.”
Satisfied, Patrick passed the phone from hand to hand as if playing with a ball and then clicked it back into place. “Part of the job, cupcake. It never ends.”
“How did you do that?” Benji asked in an awestruck whisper.
Around them customers chittered their excitement about the linen sale. Patrick stepped through them, and they slipped past like water around a stone in a brook. Benji narrowed his eyes as he scrutinized Patrick.
“Voice transference,” Patrick said and expected that to explain everything. “Sending your voice from our world into theirs.”
“But why wouldn’t you use it to say something meaningful? Like ‘I love you.’ Or ‘I forgive you.’” Benji’s innocent word choice stung like whiskey on a fresh root canal.
Patrick took a breath, working out the tension in his shoulders. Instead, he plastered a grin on his face. His trademark. Impervious. A force to be reckoned with.
“Because where’s the fun in that?” Patrick asked. He nodded conspiratorially. “Do you wanna learn how to do it?”
Benji nodded once and held up his fist. Patrick responded with a fist bump of agreement.
Customers swarmed the kitchenware showroom, dumping silverware by the armful into their carts. Patrick had taken his vantage point away from the fray by kicking back on an endcap stack of FIDUCIA power strip boxes. Benji stood by, and Patrick caught his expression. Benji was trying not to laugh, aiming for sympathetic instead.
Patrick sighed and crossed his legs as he leaned back onto the boxes as if they were a well-loved recliner. “One day I’ll know what guilt feels like,” he said sleepily as customers dug through the silverware, filling their carts to the brim. “Today is not that day.”
“Announcing a fifteen-minute giveaway on silverware?” Benji asked. “That’s a bit much.”
“You know you like it.” Patrick winked at him, and Benji burst into giggles.
Patrick snorted and then broke into cackles. “Dude, that giggle is ridiculous.”
Benji wheezed and tried to compose himself. “You think?”
“It’s cute,” Patrick said, putting his hands behind his head. “Like lying in a valley of marshmallows while fat baby unicorns frolic.” Benji laughed harder, and Patrick swatted him in the arm. “C’mon. We gotta get a move on before Karin catches us. We have more havoc to cause.”
“More havoc?” Benji wiped tears from his eyes.
“We’re going after the big guns,” Patrick said, pausing for dramatic effect. “Agnes.”
“Agnes will kill us!”
Patrick shrugged. “Good thing we’re already dead.”
“This is so not going to work,” Benji murmured.
Patrick licked his bottom lip. The taste of impending victory was as sweet as the tiramisu in the café.
“Trust me. It works every time,” he said.
“How many times have you done it?” Benji asked.
“Just once.” Patrick rubbed his hands together. His stomach rumbled eagerly for Agnes’s reaction.
“How did it go last time?”
Patrick blinked and sat back on his ankles. “Last time?” He glanced at Benji, confused. “This is the first time. Hence my answer of once.”
Benji pressed his lips together and furrowed his brows. “Do you ever get any less confusing?”
“Annnd… there,” Patrick said as he pushed the final red plastic ball under the corner of his MILAN bed. “That’s the last of them.”
He flopped onto the mattress and sighed dramatically at a job well done. He laced his hands behind his head and settled in. “You have no idea how long I’ve had this in the works.”
Benji smiled down at him. “Hiding every ball in the ball pit like Easter eggs is a bit cruel, don’t you think? The kids will have nothing to play in.”
“Kids?” Patrick arched a brow.
“I suppose it’s cool of you to stage an Easter egg hunt instead.”
Patrick laughed and reached out to clap his hands. He wheezed and then broke into cackles.
Benji shook his head. “What’s so funny?”
“It’s not for the kids.” Patrick wiped a humored tear. “It’s for Agnes. Now we wait.”
Benji blinked and pursed his lips in the most adorably kissable fashion.
Flinching at the thought, Patrick sat up just as Benji took a seat next to him. He froze, and Benji didn’t notice as he looked out over the showroom rather than at him. Patrick swallowed and rested his elbows on his knees.
“So, you live here?” Benji said, his tone whimsical.
Patrick chuckled. “Living is subjective. But if we want to be normal about it, sure.”
“I’m starting to see the charm.” Benji’s smile was infectious. Genuine. No hidden agenda.
/>
Patrick flexed his fingers, cracking the knuckles on each hand. He remained silent. Agnes was late. Surely she’d catch on in less than a second. The quiet bonding time with Benji was something he hadn’t planned on. His mouth went dry and the hair on the back of his neck prickled.
Benji continued the conversation. “It’s like that dream you have as a kid about being left behind in a shopping mall. Which area would you go for first?”
Patrick clenched his fists. Benji had asked him a question. He mustered a contented smile, “Always the café.”
“You seem to like it there.” Benji turned back to him. Patrick had never noticed the faint freckles on his nose before. Not that he was paying attention. Nope.
Patrick leaned away, lacing his fingers together. “I go for the ambiance. I live vicariously through the customers who order tiramisu.”
“Tiramisu?” Benji asked. “I’d think you’d be a meatballs guy.”
“The meatballs are such a pedestrian choice.” Patrick popped his neck. Where was Agnes? Or Karin? He went along with it anyway. “The sweet cream and the espresso. Damn, I miss espresso.”
“Espresso?” Benji leaned back on the bed.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about espresso.” Patrick looked back at him over his shoulder. “What do you miss?”
Benji lay on the mattress and sighed dreamily.
Patrick’s blood pressure rose. There Benji was, on his bed, lying there like he belonged. Patrick discreetly clenched his teeth and curled his toes in his Nikes.
“I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to miss anything,” Benji said as he flopped his arms back over his head.
Even in the most innocent of gestures, Benji proved how infinitely tempting he was. Patrick turned away, pressing his hands to his face and catching a breath. Bringing Benji to his bed had been a bad idea. And he hadn’t even brought him to his bed in the biblical sense.
Either Agnes needed to bust them soon or Patrick would have to admit his prank had failed and she had won.
He would never admit defeat to Agnes.
Never.
“Sure you have,” Patrick said, keeping the mood light. “I’m sure you miss a lot of things.”
“Coffee,” Benji said. “God, I miss coffee, too.”
Patrick smirked. “I can teach you how to experience coffee again.”
“Really?” Benji brightened, his eyes alight in wonder.
“It’s a mind game,” Patrick said and pointed to his temple. “All of your experiences are up here. If you concentrate hard enough, not only can you smell it, you can taste it. Not only that, you can change it into tasting like anything else.”
“Water to wine,” Benji said.
“Water to wine to coffee to margaritas.” Patrick nodded. “But butter. Dammit. I can never get the taste of butter quite right. Either comes out like tasteless lard or rock salt.”
Benji narrowed his eyes into merry crescents. “How did you get so good at harnessing the energy here?”
“Well, it’s all particle physics. Once you realize you’re just one particle in the scheme of things, you know where to push one and grab another and make it into something else. It’s science.”
“Says the ghost,” Benji said. He crossed his legs and bounced an ankle like a teenager contemplating the supermodel poster on his ceiling.
“We’re not ghosts,” Patrick said. “We’re just in an altered state of existence. It’s like radio frequencies.” He held up his hand as if turning a dial. “Between us and the customers, we’re on two planes, like two different stations on a radio. And if you turn the dial, there’s another plane, and then another, and another, and so on.”
“And what about outside CASA?” Benji asked. “The customers go somewhere, right?”
Patrick rubbed his chin and nibbled on his bottom lip. “And that’s the mystery of the day.”
“I assume they go home?” Benji didn’t seem sure of his question.
“But where’s home? What is home? And why can’t we go there?” Patrick challenged him, more at ease in his intellectual element instead of trying to fight every ounce of attraction. If he could see Benji as a colleague, it would take the edge off.
“Home is how you feel,” Benji said and pointed to the overhanging sign. “Happy inside,” he read from the CASA advertisement.
Patrick smirked. “Funny.”
When Benji didn’t move from his place on the bed, Patrick lay down next to him. He sighed a long breath, and their eyes met. There was an unexpected glimmer of mischief in Benji’s.
“I thought you’d never lie down.”
Patrick kept his expression even as he held his breath.
“Gotcha,” Benji purred and pointed overhead.
Rolling to his back, Patrick gasped to find Agnes looming, glaring down upon him over the tip of her nose. And above her head, every last ball from the ball pit hovered in a red plastic cloud.
“Patrick.” It was Agnes’s only warning.
With a snap of her fingers, the balls dispersed into a shower of red plastic hail over them.
Patrick shielded Benji on instinct, rolling over him. Benji cackled as the balls harmlessly bounced over both of them. His infectious laughter caught on, and Patrick found himself lost in the moment. When the final ball bounced off the back of Patrick’s head, they remained in the silence, buried in balls and close enough to breathe each other’s nonexistent breath.
Agnes was gone, and Patrick let the tension in his shoulders go as he lay atop Benji. The energy seeped off Benji into Patrick, and Benji uttered a soft moan from the aura transfer between them. Patrick gasped as he watched Benji’s pupils dilate and his mouth drop open in a fresh-fucked expression. Benji slid his fingers over Patrick’s forearms, and the hard, pleasant shock to his system made him jerk away.
The balls scattered across the floor as Patrick shot to his feet. “Well, I guess we need to clean this up somehow,” he said, followed by clearing his throat. He swallowed and cleared it again.
“Yeah,” Benji said as he pushed his way from the pile. “I’d have to say in my history of dates, this is certainly the most memorable.”
The words hit Patrick in the back of the head like the DEL TORO bookcase that had killed him.
“W-what?”
Chapter Seven: SICUREZZA
The sharp-salty tang of tears that tickled Benji’s nose wasn’t exactly out of place in CASA. He’d learned that sometimes even the toughest men cry, and it seemed like those times were especially likely to occur the longer they were inside CASA, following around harried partners with overfilled carts. He wasn’t going to generalize. While most of them seemed to be straight, he’d seen more than a few bears reduced to manfully sobbing in Housewares.
Hell, he’d practically reduced Patrick to tears when he’d joked about them being on a date during Patrick’s prank. Had that been last week? Last month? Benji wasn’t sure. He was hopeless at keeping track of the date without his iPhone, and the days here blended together anyway. The point was, he’d thought Patrick would laugh at the self-deprecating joke, but instead he’d looked at Benji in horror and actually stuttered.
That had been the last indication he’d gotten that Patrick might be into him before he’d walled himself off, becoming even more aloof than usual. Not that Benji was a good judge of what Patrick’s usual was, but Karin had been very helpful in that regard. And according to her, Patrick was acting squirrelly.
It was terrible, but Benji was a little relieved to smell the tears. The only time he’d really seen Patrick lately was on their pranking missions and times like these.
Because these tears were special. This wasn’t the lone tear of a man (or woman, let’s be honest, there were plenty of them too) pushed past the brink of boredom and frustration. It wasn’t the happy tears of a giggling coed who’d found just the right fuchsia faux-fur rug for the dorm room, OMG! The tears he could taste on his tongue were those of a frightened child, and they drew him i
n like a beacon.
Karin had told him she’d never seen anything like it. No one who’d come before him had ever been able to interact with the living the way Benji could—not through the usual means Patrick employed when he was trying to influence someone, but actual interaction.
And Patrick was equally entranced by it. He said it was because he was studying the phenomenon for science, but Benji was pretty sure he just actually wanted to be there to help. Who could resist a lost kid?
So far it had only worked with kids under six, which was perfect because kids under six and Benji were like peas in a pod.
Sure enough, Patrick materialized a second later.
“What is it, Lassie? Did Timmy fall down the well again?” Patrick asked when Benji lifted his head and took a deep breath.
Upstairs. Close enough to the café that the scent of meatballs and marinara made it hard to pinpoint, but that hardly mattered. That in and of itself was enough of a clue to tell Benji exactly where the kid was. He’d stopped doubting his instincts after the second lost child.
“It wasn’t funny the first time you said it, and it hasn’t been funny the last ten, either,” Benji muttered, barely able to hide his grin. He liked that Patrick cared enough to make the joke, stale and ridiculous as it was.
He didn’t need to look over at Patrick to know he was scowling at their location. They were perched on top of the display dressers bolted to the wall on the bottom floor, which was the perfect place for watching customers as they came and went since it gave a good view of both the escalator and the doors. Patrick had told him his fascination with the void was morbid, but Benji couldn’t help it. He could sit and watch people pass through it all day and never get bored. Every single time the door opened, his stomach swooped with the same sick thrill. It was a lot like that moment just before a roller-coaster car reached the top of the drop. But instead of the ominous clicking of the car being pulled up the tracks, the soundtrack to his own personal spine-tingling instant was the slap of feet against the concrete.
