Page 8 of A Quiet Man

"I'm sure." Cody touched Tomas's elbow. "But I'd like to get to knowyou— as a friend. You could tell me what's what here. I'll treat you to a meal, and you can dish up the dirt. What do you say?" His smile wasn't pleading, but it was soft and hopeful, and he knew how to use his eyes.

I bet nobody ever said no to that look when he was a kid. Even as an adult, it was entirely too appealing.

"Think about it?" Cody ducked his head, his smile showing a soft little dimple. His watchful eyes had turned guileless and sweet.

"Sure," said Tomas. "I'd like that." He crossed his arms over his chest, then realized he was mirroring and shifted his posture a little, uncomfortable with getting in tune with the fox. Would Riley develop a jealous streak as bad as Justin's if Tomas did make friends with another shifter?

The fox reached up and touched his own hair, smoothing it distractedly, his smile tentative. "Do you know a good restaurant to go to? I don't know the area yet."

Tomas thought for a moment, but he didn't have to think hard to know what he was hungry for. "There's a great taco truck near the Walmart. I could meet you there after work." It was halfway across town, not close enough to go to for lunch on work days. But he got really hungry for their tacos. They were the perfect mix of down-home authentic flavor and decadent fast food.

Tomas always felt slightly silly and out of place ordering in quiet, Midwest-accented English. Sometimes the guys working the truck looked at him like he should be speaking Spanish, like he was a sellout for not doing so. But the truth was, Tomas couldn't speak Spanish very well. His parents and grandparents had gone out of their way to make sure he didn't learn much at home, so he'd only had high school Spanish and some exposure to a few cousins who spoke fluently but whom he hadn't seen much of.

Spanish was his second language, and he wasn't confident in it at all. It was a source of frustration to him as a policeman, because he was "obviously" supposed to be good in situations where speaking another language would've been useful. And that was the one area where his family had really failed him, educationally speaking. They'd wanted him to blend in, to "sound white."

But Tomas was never going to be white, so why had they stolen the language from him which he could have learned so easily when he was young? His grandparents would speak Spanish to one another but would stop as soon as he or his brother walked into the room and switch to tortured English. His parents hadn't been any better about that. They'd wanted him to have every advantage, which somehow translated to not being bilingual.

That was a difficult thing, but it wasn't new, and it wasn't going to change anytime soon. The tacos were worth the minor inconvenience of language embarrassment. They were almost as good as his grandmother's.

#

Cody savored his tacoswith what Tomas now recognized as the ravenous delight of a hungry shifter.

"These really are good. You were right," he said rather indistinctly. Being a bit of a messy eater definitely took away some of his sleek perfection. Outdoors, the evening light hit his pale brown hair and brought out more russet tones. Foxes and red hair didn't have to go together, of course, but there was something rather satisfying about fox shifters with red hair. It made them look properly foxy, deeply pleasing to some internal aesthetic Tomas didn't know the origin of and would never admit to.

Cody flashed him a dimpled smile. "What are you looking at?"

Your hair looks reddish in this light. Tomas shrugged. Reddish, radish, the bite of radish in his taco... His thoughts rolled on. He looked away, studying the evening light's effect on pavement and scraggly trees. Walmart's blue and white glare in the near distance would light up even the night sky. This liminal space, this in-between time, felt oddly electric: standing not far from the taco truck, eating in silence as the light changed and the cold night began to settle in in earnest. The sounds and smells of the taco truck as the men inside rushed to feed a line of quiet, hungry people, exhausted and waiting after their jobs had ended. The immediacy and life of that scene contrasted with the long, cold expanse of sky if he turned the other way, the feeling of winter, of long nights and short days, of things forgotten and lost, never to be remembered again.

He shivered into his long coat. It had been a gift, from Riley, of course, a long, classy, old-fashioned style of wool pea coat. He liked it a great deal because it was warm. Riley had chosen it for him because he wanted his partner to look a little bit more presentable. "You always dress like a slob" had been his blunt critique — and Riley usually wasn't even remotely blunt.

Truthfully, Tomas rarely made any effort to dress well. He couldn't bring himself to care about looking good. Hell, maybe if he looked poorly dressed enough, people would stop noticing him and thinking he was sexually attractive.

"I'm going back for more," said Cody. He touched Tomas's arm lightly, as if he was grounding himself, or perhaps Tomas. "Don't drift away," he said softly.

"I wouldn't leave without telling you," Tomas said, deliberately choosing the most mundane meaning possible from those words. Cody was close to him, close enough for Tomas to feel his breath, close enough to kiss him on the cheek if he chose. Then he was gone, moving fluidly, joining the line.

Tomas let his thoughts drift. Was this a date, even though they'd both agreed it wasn't? Sometimes he didn't know when things were shifting under his feet like unsteady sand washed out by the tide. When he finally caught up, it left him devastated and lost and sometimes entirely washed out to sea.

He'd had more female friends when he was younger. A quiet, studious boy, he'd found it easier to make friends among the less rowdy girls who wouldn't tease him for not wanting to get muddy and chase a ball. He loved baseball, but just as a spectator. He'd never been much for playing sports. He'd much rather read — nearly anything. Tomas used to sneakily read ahead in his textbooks with the guilty feeling of forbidden knowledge. But they'd never reached the end of any of his textbooks by the end of the school year, anyway, so why shouldn't he?

When they all got a little older, several of his female friends had ended up with crushes on him. Intense feelings. He'd broken hearts without meaning to, a terrifying experience for a sensitive young man who wanted to focus on his studies and his books and his friends, and the seagulls down at the docks. He hadn't wanted things to change under his feet, that awful, relentless shifting of priorities and bodies and people into rigid hierarchies of attractiveness and availability. He couldn't see people that way without practice, and even then, it felt academic. It was a new way of navigating the world, but not one he had much use for.

He didn't have a lot of female friends after that awful year, but he'd never made up for that by finding more male friends, either. Could that be about to change? A real new friend here at the precinct? He was pretty good at handling himself at the precinct, walking the lines he needed to walk, using his internal alerts to avoid dangers and traps, avoiding making enemies where possible, and protecting himself and his partner. But he couldn't be said to have any real friends here aside from Riley. Now this fox, new and needing connection, needing people on his side — maybe he'd be a friend for real.

Tomas wondered, and realized he didn't trust himself to know. It was a shame, because he trusted himself to understand most things, the nuances of people. But not when those people wanted sex from him. He'd been wrong too many times — or was it just the scars of that awful year when he'd alienated and broken the heart of one girl after another because he couldn't put together the clues until it was too late, and then couldn't return the feelings?

Cody seemed like a sensible sort, like he could handle himself. He didn't seem like the sort of grown man who was likely to pine away from unrequited feelings — or have them in the first place. There was probably no danger there.

Cody returned and pushed a taco towards Tomas, his eyes bright with greedy hunger as he ate one himself. Tomas waved him off. "No thanks, I'm full." Cody snorted inelegantly but didn't argue. He was too busy eating.

Tomas remembered the homework promise. He didn't like letting the kids down. They'd been let down too much in life already. "I have to help someone with homework, so I can't hang out all night," he said.

Cody raised a brow and studied his features, amusement and something else, something gentle, playing on his face. "Oh? Did you think that's what I wanted from you, to hang out all night?"

"To be honest, I'm not sure what you want." Tomas smiled to make the words less confrontational. He hoped.

"I'm just trying to figure you out. You're an interesting man, Tomas. I haven't met many people like you." Cody studied Tomas with engaged eyes. "I get such interesting vibes off you. I'm like a cat who can't stay away. As they say, curiosity and the fox. Or don't they say that here?"