Chapter 12: Morning Interruption
The explosion of noise and light was an act of pure violence against the sanctuary we’d built.
Our door doesn’t have a lock. It’s an unspoken rule, a bylaw of our fucked-up little commune: privacy is a request, not a guarantee. Mateo and Chloe apparently filed the request in the trash this morning.
The door didn’t just open. It slammed against the wall with a crack that shot through my sleeping brain like a gunshot. Blinding, vulgar LA sunlight came first, shearing through the neon gloom. Then came Chloe’s theatrical whistle, two sharp, descending notes. “Oh, hello. There’s a lot more of him than I expected.”
My eyes flew open, saw the silhouette of her in the doorway, one hand on her hip. Then Mateo, a hulking shadow, bulldozed past her. “Rise and fucking shine, lovebirds! We brought sustenance!” His voice was a cheerful boom that physically hurt.
Omar jolted awake beside me. It wasn’t a gentle stirring; it was a full-body spasm, a animal reaction to being ambushed. He made a choked sound, part gasp, part yelp, and scrambled backwards against the headboard, dragging the tangled silk sheet up to his chest. His eyes were huge, flooded with pure, unprocessed terror. He wasn’t in a sequined nest in Los Angeles; he was back in a place where this kind of exposure meant obliteration.
The sheet, of course, left me mostly uncovered. I was on my stomach, one arm flung out where he had been. The cool morning air hit the bare skin of my back and ass.
I didn’t scramble. I didn’t cover up. The invasion was too complete, too audacious. A slow, molten anger began to burn through the shock, but on the surface, I forced my body into a performance of total nonchalance. I let out an exaggerated, luxurious groan, stretching my arms over my head, arching my back, making sure the movement was a display. I turned my head on the pillow and looked at Omar first.
He was a statue of panic. His knuckles were white where they clutched the sheet. He was staring at Mateo and Chloe like they were armed intruders, which, in a way, they were.
“See?” I said, my voice thick with sleep but deliberately calm. I reached out and ran a slow, possessive hand down his arm, feeling the tremor in his muscles. My touch was an anchor line. “I told you he was real. Not a chatbot. Flesh and blood and…” I glanced at the sheet tented over his lap. “…clearly, a morning person.”
My joke did nothing. He was frozen.
Mateo, blissfully oblivious to the seismic trauma he’d just caused, was already in the middle of the room, holding up a greasy paper bag in one hand and a cardboard tray with four coffees in the other. He was grinning, his bald head gleaming in the sunlight he’d unleashed. Chloe slunk in after him, her eyes doing a quick, appraising scan of the room—the discarded towels, Omar’s sweatpants in a heap by the bed, the general atmosphere of spent passion.
“You hogged the hot water all night, you selfish bitch,” Chloe said to me, flopping down into my plush velvet reading chair. She picked up a stray feather from the pillow and twirled it. “We heard things. Wall-shaking things. Conclusive things.”
I finally pushed myself up to sitting, not bothering to pull up the sheet. Let them look. My nudity was my armor now. I crossed my legs, facing them head-on. Omar remained a stricken figure beside me, a pale moon to my carnal sun.
“You brought coffee as a bribe for your felony B&E?” I asked, my tone dangerously light.
“And churros!” Mateo announced, rustling the bag. The smell of fried dough and cinnamon cut through the intimate musk of the room. It was a gross, wonderful violation. “From the truck on Sunset. The good one.”
“Omar, right?” Chloe leaned forward, elbows on her knees. Her expression was curious, not unkind, but it was a laser beam. “I’m Chloe. That’s Mateo.We live here. We’ve heard a lot about you. Mostly via frustrated text messages and one very illuminating DATA.TXT file.”
At the mention of the file, Omar flinched. His gaze flicked to me, a silent, panicked question.
“She snoops,” I said flatly, shooting Chloe a dagger look. “It’s her love language. Ignore her.”
“I do not snoop,” Chloe corrected, sipping from one of the coffees. “I conduct wellness checks. Your laptop was weeping. I provided a sympathetic ear.” She turned her attention fully back to Omar. “So.Saudi Arabia. Engineering. Orphan.Inheritance. David’s mysterious bottom. That’s the dossier. Want to fill in the rest?”
The blunt, bullet-point summary of his life, laid out in our bombed-out bedroom, was too much. Omar’s face went from pale to ashen. He looked like he might be sick. His breath came in short, sharp pulls.
I saw it. The shut-down. The fortress walls slamming shut behind his eyes. He wasn’t here anymore.
“Okay, time out,” I said, my voice losing its performative edge. I turned fully to Omar, blocking Chloe and Mateo with my body. I cupped his face, forcing his wild eyes to meet mine. “Hey. Look at me. Habibi. Breathe. These are just my idiot friends. They have no boundaries. They’re vulgarians. But they’re mine. And now, by annoying extension, they’re yours too.”
I kept my hands on his face, my thumbs stroking his cheekbones. “You’re safe. You’re in my room. No one is judging you. Well, they are, but they judge me for eating canned Spam, so their opinions are worthless.” I leaned closer, my forehead almost touching his. I dropped my voice to a low, private register. “Kapit. Hold on. For me.”
I watched the struggle in his eyes. The animal fear versus the anchor of my voice, my touch. Slowly, very slowly, the breath began to even out in his chest. The rigidity in his shoulders softened a fraction. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod against my palms.
I turned back to the room. “Give him a fucking minute. And give me that coffee before I stab you with a stiletto.”
Mateo, finally picking up on the vibe, had the decency to look slightly abashed. He shuffled forward and handed me two coffees. I passed one to Omar, wrapping his cold fingers around the warm cup. “Drink. Sugar.Caffeine. It helps.”
Chloe remained unrepentant but quiet, watching the interaction with a newfound sharpness. She was seeing the mechanics of us, the care underneath the crudeness.
Omar took a cautious sip. He didn’t look at them.
“So,” Mateo said, trying to shift the energy. He perched on the edge of my vanity stool, which groaned under his weight. He opened the churro bag and offered it first to Omar. “Engineering, huh? What kind?”
Omar stared at the greasy pastry like it was a foreign artifact. He looked at me. I gave a small, encouraging nod. It’s a safe question.
“Mechanical,” Omar said, the word quiet but clear. He took a churro, more out of automated politeness than desire. “With a focus on renewable energy systems.”
“No shit!” Mateo’s face lit up. “I’m in trades.HVAC. We’re like… cousins. Sort of. You work with airflow, I move it around. You build the future, I just make sure it’s not a sweaty one.”
A faint, fragile smile touched Omar’s lips. It was the barest flicker, but it was a return. He’d been handed a technical topic, a safe, sterile bridge back to himself. “The efficiency of photovoltaic thermal hybrid systems is heavily dependent on ambient temperature regulation,” he said, almost automatically.
Mateo blinked. “Yeah. What he said. Sounds… important.”
Chloe snorted. “God, you’re both so hot.” She took a churro for herself. “Omar, real talk. David’s a lot. How are you handling the… intensity? The drag, the kink, the general theatricality of his entire existence?”
I tensed, but Omar answered before I could intercept. He was looking at his coffee cup, but his voice was stronger. “The intensity is… the point. There is no noise. No transaction. It’s… pure signal.” He glanced at me, then away. “I find it… clarifying.”
Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. She looked at me, a new respect dawning in her eyes. “Huh.Okay. I’ll allow it.”
The room settled into a slightly less hostile atmosphere. The shock was receding, replaced by an awkward, early-morning social call. Omar took small bites of his churro, answering Mateo’s technical questions in polite, concise sentences. He was compartmentalizing, the engineer neatly boxing away the naked, terrified boy of five minutes ago.
I watched him, this man who held my heart in his steady, scarred hands. He was performing a version of himself for them, and he was doing it for me. To prove he could belong in this world, with its loud, messy people and their brutal, affectionate intrusions.
The sunlight, no longer an enemy, pooled on the silk sheets, illuminating the dust motes and the glitter from last night’s discarded clothes. Chloe and Mateo’s presence, once a violent shock, was now just a fact. The scent of churros and coffee was layering over the scent of us, not erasing it, but adding to its history.
Omar finished his churro, wiped his fingers meticulously on a napkin Mateo produced. He finally lifted his head and looked directly at Chloe.
“You read the DATA.TXT file,” he stated.
“I did,” she said, meeting his gaze without flinching.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
Omar took a deep breath. “Was he telling the truth? In it?”
Chloe’s smile was slow and genuine. She looked at me, then back at him. “David lies about what he had for lunch. He lies about stealing my eyeliner. He lies for fun and for profit.” She leaned forward again, her voice dropping conspiratorially. “But in that file? Not a single lie. It was the most boring, honest, and disgusting thing I’ve ever read. He’s utterly, pathetically sincere about you.”
I threw a wadded-up napkin at her head. “Putang ina, could you be more dramatic?”
Omar didn’t smile. He just nodded, absorbing the information like another data point. He looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw the fortress doors swing open again, just a crack. The terror was gone. In its place was a weary, dazed, but solid acceptance.
He was here. Really here. Surviving the ambush. Passing the first, brutal test of my world.
Mateo clapped his hands together, making us all jump.“Okay! Well! This has been educational. We’re gonna go… I don’t know, scrub the bathroom with a wire brush or something. Give you two privacy to… reconstruct.” He stood up, gathering the debris. “You’re cool, Omar. Don’t let this one,” he hooked a thumb at me, “break you. He tries that with everyone.”
They filed out, Chloe shooting me a wink before she closed the door. Not softly, but without a slam.
The silence they left behind was different. It was charged, but with a new understanding. The sanctuary had been breached, evaluated, and strangely, validated.
Omar set his coffee cup down on the nightstand with a precise click. He stared at the closed door for a long moment. Then he turned to me, the sheet finally slipping from his grasp, pooling around his waist. The morning light painted his plump torso in gold and shadow.
“They’re…” he searched for the word.
“A lot,” I finished.
He nodded. “But they’re yours.”
“And now they’ve met you.” I reached out, running the back of my fingers down his warm chest. “That’s it. You’re inoculated. You’re in the system.”
He caught my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. His grip was tight. “The system is loud.”
“And messy.”
“And… clarifying.” He repeated his own word, a small wonder in his voice. He pulled my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles, a soft, deliberate gesture. “I want to read the file. Now.”
The momentum shifted. The aftermath of the invasion was over. A new, quiet tension took its place—the anticipation of a different kind of exposure.
“Okay,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. “Get my laptop. It’s under the bed.”
I wriggled to the edge of the bed, the silk sticking to my thighs. The cool darkness beneath the frame swallowed my arm to the elbow. My fingers brushed against the smooth, familiar plastic shell of the laptop, but also something softer, a crumpled paper bag. I pulled both out.
The bag was from the kare-kare place from three nights ago, grease-stained and brittle. I tossed it aside. The laptop felt heavy, its secret weight a physical thing.
I handed it to him. It was warm from hibernating in the dark. My heart did a strange, sideways thump against my ribs. This was worse than him seeing me naked. This was handing him the naked, undressed wiring of my brain before I’d had my coffee.
He took it, settling the computer on his lap. The glow from the screen illuminated his face as it woke up, casting upward shadows that made him look solemn, older. He clicked through my files without hesitation. He knew where it was. He’d been paying attention that night weeks ago when I’d grumbled about backups.
He found it. DATA.TXT. A stupid, impersonal name for the most personal thing I’d ever made.
He opened it. The plain white background and the block of black text seemed absurdly clinical in our neon cave.
I didn’t watch his face. I couldn’t. I stared at the spinning wheels of the kalesa on the floor, tracing the same pointless circle over and over. The silence was a dense, cottony pressure in my ears, broken only by the soft tap of his finger on the trackpad as he scrolled.
My own words, written in a fog of San Miguel and longing, scrolled through my head. I think his mind works in geometries I can’t see. He’s so quiet, but his quiet isn’t empty. It’s a loaded kind of quiet. It has mass. It takes up space in my room even when he’s not here.
The way he says my name. Like it’s a real word. Not a stage name. Not a character. Just a name.
I want to ruin him. I want to put him back together so only my fingerprints are on the seams.Seconds stretched. A minute. The fairy lights flickered.
Finally, I heard the soft click of the laptop closing. A definitive sound.
I forced myself to look at him.
Omar was staring straight ahead, not at me, not at anything. His plump chest rose and fell in a slow, deliberate rhythm. His eyes were shiny. Not with tears, but with a fierce, focused light, like sun on dark water.
He swallowed. Then he turned his head.
His expression wasn’t soft. It wasn’t sentimental. It was awed, but in a rigorous way. Like he’d just verified a fundamental law of physics.
“That is beautiful,” he said. His voice was low, steady, reverent.
The air left my lungs in a rush. He didn’t say it was sweet, or romantic, or intense. He called it beautiful. An engineer’s assessment of a perfect structure.
He reached out and took my hand, his grip firm, anchoring. “Every datum. Every vector. It maps perfectly.”
A laugh, shaky with relief, bubbled out of me. “Shut up. It’s just a drunk text file.”
“It is not,” he stated, with absolute conviction. He leaned in then, and kissed me. It wasn’t a hungry kiss. It was a seal. A confirmation of receipt. His lips were warm and sure against mine.
When he pulled back, his eyes had changed. The awe was still there, but it was edged now with a glint of pure, knowing mischief. He glanced meaningfully toward the bedroom door, behind which the muffled sounds of Chloe and Mateo arguing over pancake batter were clearly audible.
“But,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. He squeezed my hand. “Now I need to smoke a joint. Before I go out there and get mauled by the vultures waiting by the door.”
“No, don’t go there.” I shifted off the bed, my bare feet hitting the cool, sticky floor beside the empty San Miguel bottles from what felt like a different life. “Never face the horde without proper chemical fortification.” My laughter was dry, a short bark in the heavy morning air. “Axiom one of living in this apartment.”
He watched me, the clinical look returning to his eyes. It was his observation mode. I knelt by the little wooden kalesa and retrieved the plastic bag and papers from its hiding spot. I didn’t stand up. I just pivoted on my heel and extended the kit towards him, resting my elbows on the bed’s edge.
“Your turn,” I said. “You said you wanted one. Show me what kind of fidelity a mechanical engineer brings to the sticky side of life.”
A new kind of focus settled over his face. The anxiety from the door-slamming invasion, the awe from reading my stupid file, it all banked down into a calm, technical intensity. He took the bag and the papers from my hand, his fingers brushing mine, already assessing the materials.
He sat cross-legged on the silk sheets, the laptop pushed aside. He opened the bag, inhaled the skunky scent with a slight, appreciative tilt of his head. He pinched a bud, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, testing its texture. “Humidity is acceptable. Trichome preservation is good.”
I just stared, propping my chin in my hands. This was better than any porn.
He tore a paper from the pack, laying it on the flat surface of the laptop lid. His movements were economical, deliberate. He emptied a small, perfect mound of green onto the paper. It was a precisely calculated amount, not a crumb more than necessary. He began to shred it with his fingers, the motion not rough or rushed, but a systematic fracturing.
“No grinder?” I asked, my voice low.
“Introduces a variable,” he murmured, not looking up. “Metal particulate, inconsistent grind size. Manual deconstruction allows for greater control over fiber length and density distribution.” He spread the shredded weed evenly along the paper’s gum line, creating a flawless, cylindrical green rod.
I laughed, a real one this time, deep and delighted from my gut. The sound seemed to surprise him. He glanced up, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, grinning so wide my cheeks hurt. “You’re just the most fucking you person I’ve ever met. It’s beautiful.”
He absorbed the comment, his gaze holding mine for a second. The faintest blush touched his neck. He looked back down at his work.
His long fingers, which had trembled so violently when pulling his sweatpants down last night, were now perfectly steady. He pinched the paper at its ends, initiating the roll with a subtle rocking motion. He didn’t lick it yet. He used the pads of his thumbs to tuck and tighten, creating a flawless, snug cylinder. It was a symmetrical masterpiece.
He lifted it, holding it horizontally to the dim light from the curtains. He examined the seam, the even pack. He gave a slight, satisfied nod—a scientist confirming a successful replication. Then, and only then, did he run his tongue along the gum line in one smooth, decisive stroke. He sealed it with a final, gentle roll between his fingers.
The finished joint was a work of art. Tight, straight, perfectly sealed. It looked machined.
He handed it to me, his expression expectant, like a master craftsman presenting his final piece for inspection.
I took it. It felt solid, professional. I brought it to my nose and inhaled. The fresh paper and deep green scent were perfect.
“This is the tightest joint I’ve ever seen,” I said, my voice full of genuine reverence. “It’s obscene. It’s like you gave it a boner.” I reached for the lighter on the nightstand, flicked it alive, and brought the flame to the tip. It caught evenly, burning a perfect, glowing orange ring. “No runs. No canoeing. Just pure, efficient combustion.”
His shoulders dropped a fraction, the tension leaving them. A small, real smile finally broke through his focus. “Optimized for even burn and airflow. Maximum cannabinoid delivery per unit of plant matter.”
“You’re a goddamn prodigy.” I took the first hit, holding the smooth, cool smoke in my lungs. It was a flawless pull. I exhaled, passing it to him. Our fingers touched again in the transfer, a tiny spark in the haze.
He accepted it, his eyes locked on mine. He took his own hit, his cheeks hollowing. He held it, then let the smoke drift from his lips in a thin, controlled stream that dissipated in the sunbeam cutting across the bed.
We passed it back and forth in a new, comfortable quiet. The weed was a good batch, sending a warm, softening wave through the residual stress in my neck and shoulders. I watched him relax into it, the engineer slowly dissolving into the man, his plump body softening against the pile of silk pillows.
The smoke curled around us, mingling with the dust motes in the light. The muffled sounds from the kitchen—Chloe’s laugh, the clang of a pan—no longer felt like a threat. They were just background noise, the soundtrack to this pocket of peace we’d carved.
He finished the roach, pinching the last ember out with careful fingers. He set the tiny remnant on the nightstand, aligning it precisely with the edge. Then he flopped back onto the pillows, his arms spread wide. A deep, contented sigh left him, moving his whole chest.
“Chemical fortification achieved,” he announced to the ceiling, his voice pleasantly rough.
I crawled up the bed and laid my head on his stomach, listening to the gurgle of his insides, the steady beat beneath. His hand came down, his fingers sinking into my hair, not stroking, just holding. A grounding weight.
“Ready for brunch?” I mumbled against his warm skin.
His fingers tightened slightly in my hair. He took another deep breath. “Hypothesis: They will ask invasive personal questions. They will feed me excessive carbohydrates. They will attempt to make me watch RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“All true.”
“I am prepared,” he said. And he sounded like he meant it. Not eager, but resolved. Equipped.
I smiled against his belly. The joint had been his ritual, his control panel. He’d calibrated himself for the chaos. I pushed myself up and looked at him. His eyes were half-closed, a soft, hazy contentment in them. He looked young. He looked like mine.
“Okay, engineer.” I tapped his chest. “Time for the field test.”