Chapter 13: Brunch Interrogation
The kitchen was its own ecosystem. It hummed with old, righteous appliance noise and the hiss of too-old coffee reheating in the microwave. Mateo filled space. He was wedged between the fridge and the counter, a human mass in a stained tank top, turning pancakes on the skillet with an intense focus that belonged more to blacksmithing than breakfast. The golden lamé curtains didn’t sway so much as bleed sticky morning light onto the carnage of last night’s snacks: crushed chip bags, an open jar of achara with a fork stuck in it, lipstick stains on the rims of San Miguel bottles.
We’d dressed. Sort of. I was in a worn-out kimono over my boxers, the silk clinging to the last of the bedroom’s sweat. Omar wore one of my T-shirts, a vintage Eraserheads concert tee that swallowed his frame, the fabric draping over his plump torso like a soft blue tent. He’d pulled on his own shorts. It was a compromise. Armor for the outside world.
Chloe was already at the small, Formica table, a queen holding court amidst the debris. She’d applied a slash of crimson lipstick since the bedroom intrusion. She looked at Omar like he was a fascinating, slightly perplexing exhibit.
“Pancake delivery for the newly deflowered,” Mateo boomed, slapping a stack onto a chipped plate and sliding it down the counter towards Omar. It landed with a greasy thud. “Fuel up. You look like you got hit by a bus. A fabulous, sequined bus.”
Omar stared at the pancakes. They were thick, golden, slightly lopshed from Mateo’s aggressive flipping. He blinked, slow. The weed had smoothed his sharp edges into a gentle haze, but the social programming was evidently still booting up. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank him, it’s a trap,” I said, pouring myself the dregs of the coffee. It was bitter and burnt. Perfect. “Now he owns you. He’ll ask you to fix his bike next week.”
Mateo just grinned, wiping his hands on a dish towel that had probably never been clean. He poured orange juice into four mismatched glasses, then produced a bottle of cheap champagne from the fridge door with a magician’s flourish. He started making mimosas, the overflow fizzing onto the sticky countertop.
Chloe stabbed her fork into the air, pointing it at Omar. It had a syrupy drip on the tines.“Okay. Initial interrogation complete. Now for the deep dive.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping into a stage whisper that carried to the street. “So.The operational details. How does a sheltered Saudi engineering student,” she twirled the fork, “virgin, presumably, though the file was oddly silent on that specific benchmark, wind up getting absolutely railed by LA’s filthiest, most problematic drag queen?”
The question landed in the room like a thrown brick.
Omar froze, a forkful of pancake halfway to his mouth. Syrup dripped onto the Eraserheads logo on his chest. A deep, violent crimson bloomed from his neck, flooding up past his ears, staining his cheeks. He looked like he’d been slapped. His eyes, wide and panicked, darted from Chloe’s amused face to Mateo’s expectant one, then finally to me. It was a silent scream.
A thrill, hot and sharp, shot through me. Not at his discomfort, but at the sight of him in it. Surviving it. This was the baptism. The familial hazing. You didn’t get the affection without first enduring the blunt-force trauma of their curiosity.
I stayed leaned against the counter, sipping my terrible coffee, a small smirk playing on my lips. I gave him a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. Answer the question.He swallowed. The pancake bite went down like a stone. He set his fork down with a precise click. He looked at his plate, at the concentric circles of syrup. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, measured, a stark contrast to the blush betraying him. He was using that engineering brain, treating the salacious question like a complex technical query.
“The transition states were… non-linear,” he began, his accent clipping the words. “It was not a direct path. There were intermediary phases. Observation. Data collection.”
Mateo barked a laugh, sloshing champagne as he filled another glass. “He talks like a fucking manual! I love it!”
Omar ignored him, his focus internal. “Initial contact was in the library. The probability of a meaningful interaction there was statistically low. He introduced a… high-amplitude variable.” He chanced a glance at me. “I lacked a framework to process it.”
Chloe’s eyes gleamed. She was getting exactly what she wanted, just not in the form she expected. “So he confused you. And you liked it.”
Omar nodded once. A scientist conceding a point. “Confusion was a novel state. It indicated a system—my system—was encountering inputs outside its operating parameters. That suggested a possible… upgrade.”
I nearly choked on my coffee. An upgrade.
“And the, uh, railing portion?” Chloe pressed, grinning. “How’d that get integrated into the new firmware?”
Omar picked up his fork again, tracing patterns in the syrup. His flush was receding, replaced by that intense, technical focus. The joint had given him a kind of fearless detachment. “It was a necessary stress test. To determine system stability under extreme… loads. To see if the new parameters would hold, or if the core architecture would fail.”
The room fell silent for a second, save for the sputter of the old overhead light. Mateo had stopped pouring, his mouth slightly open. Chloe looked genuinely, deeply impressed.
Then she threw her head back and laughed, a raw, unfiltered sound. “Oh my god. David, you didn’t fuck him. You performed a goddamn beta test on a person.”
Mateo slid the freshly made mimosa across the table to Omar. It sloshed over the rim, forming a small, fizzy puddle. “Kid, you’re a philosopher. Here. You earned this.”
Omar looked at the mimosa. Then he picked it up. He didn’t sip it. He took a long, determined gulp, emptying half the glass. He set it down with a thump, a line of foam on his upper lip. He wiped it with the back of my t-shirt. A defiant gesture.
His eyes found mine across the room. They weren’t scared anymore. They were bright. Challenged.Alive.
“It held,” he said, the words clear in the humid kitchen air. He wasn’t just talking to them. “The architecture held.”
Something cracked open in my chest. It was pride, but fiercer. It was possession, but softer. He was taking my world and interpreting it through his own flawless, bizarre logic. He was making it make sense to him. And in doing so, he was claiming it.
“Of course it held, gago,” I said, pushing off the counter. My voice was rough. “I don’t build on faulty foundations.” I walked over, my bare feet sticking to the linoleum. I stopped behind his chair, letting my hands rest on his shoulders. I could feel the warmth of him through the thin cotton, the solidity. I leaned down, my lips close to his ear. “But we’re still running diagnostics. Extensive ones.”
He shuddered under my touch, a full-body ripple that had nothing to do with fear.
Chloe watched the exchange, her expression shifting from amused to something more contemplative. She swirled her own mimosa. “So what’s the endgame, Omar? You get your degree, build solar panels for the Crown, and keep David as your dirty little American secret? A fascinating hobby?”
The air thickened again. It was the real question, the one under all the crude banter.
Omar went still beneath my hands. The technical shield wavered. He looked at the Philippine flag napkin draped over the faucet, at the neon Jollibee sign taped crookedly to the cabinet. He looked at the chaos that was my life, preserved in sticky amber in this kitchen.
“The initial project parameters have been revised,” he said, finally. His voice was quieter. “The project scope has expanded. Significantly.”
“Into what?” Mateo asked, his own playful tone gone, replaced by a rare seriousness.
Omar didn’t answer immediately. He reached up and covered one of my hands on his shoulder with his own. His fingers were sticky from syrup. His grip was tight.
“I don’t have the full schematic yet,” he admitted. He turned his head, looking up at me. The morning light caught the gold in his brown eyes. “The variables are… dynamic. But the core objective is stable.”
“Which is?” Chloe pressed.
He held my gaze. “Maximize adjacency. Optimize for mutual stability. Ensure the system… doesn’t revert to its previous, inferior version.”
The translation hung in the air between us, clear as glass: I’m not going back. I’m not letting go.
The microwave beeped, a shrill, stupid sound that broke the spell. Mateo jumped, then chuckled, the tension evaporating. “Well, fuck. That’s the most romantic engineering report I’ve ever heard.” He raised his own glass. “To not reverting!”
We all drank. The cheap champagne was acidic and too sweet, but it felt like a sacrament.
The rest of the meal dissolved into easier territory. Mateo told a long, convoluted story about a flooded apartment and a mistaken drainage pipe. Chloe argued with him about the details, her voice rising in theatrical outrage. Omar ate his pancakes, listening, a small, steady smile occasionally breaking through. He was observing the ecosystem, learning its rhythms.
When he finished, he stood up, taking his plate and glass to the sink. He didn’t ask where things went. He just started rinsing.Methodical. Quiet.
I watched him. My t-shirt on his back, his shoulders moving as he scrubbed syrup off the fork. A Saudi orphan in a Filipino drag queen’s kitchen in Los Angeles, washing dishes after surviving an inquisition. The image wasn’t just surreal; it was solid. It felt like a fact.
Chloe sidled up next to me, her voice low. “He’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“A victim.A project. A fling.” She nodded toward Omar, who was now carefully drying the plate with a threadbare towel. “He’s not any of that. He’s a fucking co-conspirator. He just uses different tools.”
She was right. He wasn’t clay for me to shape. He was a fellow architect, reading from a different blueprint, but building towards the same impossible, beautiful structure.
Omar finished, hanging the towel neatly on the oven handle. He turned, his expression calm, settled. The panic from the bedroom, the flush from Chloe’s question, it was all metabolized now. Processed and filed.
“I should return to campus,” he said. “I have a study group at two. Thermodynamics.”
The normalcy of it was jarring.Beautiful.
“I’ll walk you out,” I said.
We left them in the kitchen, Chloe already needling Mateo about the pile of pans in the sink. The hallway was dim and cool, a respite from the kitchen’s glorious assault.
At the front door, he stopped. He wasn’t wearing shoes, just his socks on the scuffed hardwood. He looked down at them, then up at me.
“They are…” he searched.
“A lot,” I finished.
“Yes. But their data is consistent. Their affection has a high… friction coefficient. But it is not malicious.”
I grinned. “You’re figuring us out.”
He stepped closer. The air between us tightened. He smelled of my soap, syrup, and a faint, lingering trace of weed. “The stress test was successful. The system is robust.” He paused, his eyes serious. “I would like to schedule further testing. Under more controlled conditions.”
My breath hitched. “Oh yeah? What kind of conditions?”
He reached out, his fingers hooking lightly into the belt of my kimono. His touch was confident. A new kind of confidence. Not the bravado of last night, but the surety of ownership. “Your next performance. At the club. I want to observe the other variable. The Daphne variable.”
A cold, unexpected spike shot through me. It wasn’t fear, exactly.It was vulnerability. He’d seen me naked in every other way. But Daphne was a different kind of naked.
“You want to see the show?”
“I want to see the full system operational cycle.” His thumb stroked the silk of my robe. “I require a complete data set.”
I looked at him, this serious, brilliant, surprising boy who called my drag a ‘variable’ and my affection a ‘system upgrade.’ He was mapping me. And instead of feeling exposed, I felt seen. In a language I hadn’t known I needed to be heard in.
“It’s a rough crowd on Saturdays,” I warned.
“I am learning to appreciate roughness,” he said, a flash of something dark and knowing in his eyes. It was a callback. A promise.
“Okay,” I said, the word leaving me on an exhale. “Okay. Saturday. I’ll put you on the list.”
He nodded, satisfied. A decision logged. Then he leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t the soft seal from the bedroom. It was deep, deliberate, a preview of the kind of focus he brought to everything he deemed important. When he pulled away, my lips felt branded.
“I will text you my study group’s conclusions,” he said, as if discussing a logistics meeting. He opened the door. The bland, sunny LA afternoon yawned behind him, a flat, normal world.
He stepped out into it, pausing on the stoop. He looked back, not at the apartment, but at me. “Do not revert either,” he said softly. Then he turned and walked down the path, my blue t-shirt disappearing around the corner, a piece of my chaos moving steadily into the ordered grid of his other life.
I closed the door. The silence of the apartment felt different. It was no longer just my chaos. It was ours. A lab. A testing ground. A home with revised parameters.
From the kitchen, I heard Chloe’s voice, clear as a bell. “He’s a keeper, David. Don’t fuck it up.”
I smiled at the closed door. The thrill was still there, buzzing under my skin. Not just from the kiss. From the challenge. From the sheer, terrifying novelty of being someone’s ongoing, vital experiment.