"I got you, motherfucker."

Rhythmic passes of a damp cloth on a laminate counter, steady whooshes of breath as his body leans into each motion of his arm; this is as calm as Peter Strahm ever feels. Repetitive actions keep his mind occupied enough to not wander in search of some pressing issue to fixate on. Not that there is much to endlessly turn over in his brain at the diner, but he can always find something.

A loud clang of the metal bells bouncing off the front door and the scuff of shoes against the wood floor heralds the arrival of customers. The first ones of the day. Peter doesn’t bother to look up, choosing instead to let Lindsey be the face of the establishment. He is convinced that she’s the only reason this place stays afloat. He’d have run everyone off with his demeanor ages ago if he were the sole owner. As a supervisor had once said to him, Peter would cut off his own nose to spite his face.

Barely listening to his partner’s cheery banter and the responding pleasantries of the customers—two of them, he notes, a man and a woman—he tosses the rag in the sanitation bucket before making his way to the coffee machine. It’s finished brewing the pot he’d started just five minutes ago. He dumps the used grounds and resets the machine with a new filter of freshly ground beans. When they hit a rush, coffee is the first thing to go. Early on, he and Lindsey learned that lesson the hard way. Customers get downright vicious when they can't get their caffeine fix the instant they want it.

“Pete,” Lindsey says, sliding up alongside him behind the counter.

“Mm,” he responds as he takes the offered ticket from her hand. He looks over the order. Simple. Easy. No substitutions or alterations. He can appreciate that. “Need anything before I get this made?”

“No, I’ll try to not burn the place down while you’re in the back though.”

He snorts, amused. If anyone was going to be engaging in pyromania during work hours, it would be him.

Peter retreats to the kitchen. His shoulders relax in the privacy beyond the swinging door. He is used to eyes being on him, every moment analyzed and critiqued, but solace suits him better. He doesn’t have to put on the thin veneer of normalcy that he’s capable of.

Steady hands prepare the ingredients before laying them on the grill top. Cooking is immersive work, a different kind of toil than when he was in the FBI. The constant examination for guilt, the way he would dirty his hands with the worst humanity had to offer… it took a toll on him. He lost himself in his job. Back then, most days, he felt like he should be the one handcuffed to the table while an agent berated him with rapid-fire questions. He had gathered up parts of every criminal he ever investigated. Strahm had ingested those pieces like poison until they had become a part of him, lining his internal organs and threatening to spread like a cancer.

The only thing that had kept him from going into the restroom and closing his lips around the barrel of his own handgun at work had been Lindsey. There had been a day when he was uncharacteristically tidying his papers on his desk and she looked up from where her own desk butted right against his. She had taken in the sight of his drawn, exhausted face, the bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the faint tremor in his hands. She had known. She’d stood up, nearly sending her desk chair halfway across the room on its wobbly wheels. His partner had reached over their computer monitors and grabbed onto his forearm with determined desperation. She’d said, “Fuck this, we’re done.”

They had opened the diner five months later.

Conceptualizing the place had started off as a pipe dream between two friends. Strahm had cooked for Lindsey some nights, when there was a sliver of down time. He’d been the one to teach her how to make more than oven pizzas and the occasional grilled cheese. He had also been the one who taught her how to shoot a man in the chest without flinching.

Five years, they’d worked together as agents for the FBI. Lindsey had been fresh out of the academy, and he’d already begun his downward spiral when they were assigned one another. No one else had wanted the woman rookie or the wild-eyed man they swore must be doing drugs to be acting the way he did, no matter how many piss tests came back clean. Two misfits.

Their coworkers and supervisors thought that he would make her cry, that he would destroy her confidence. Hell, they’d hoped he would go so far as to convince her that a woman didn’t belong at the boys’ table. Instead, Strahm realized that there was someone he could be bothered to live for.

He plates the two meals, reminiscing over and set aside for now. Fingers long since desensitized to the feeling of hot ceramic against them, he carries one plate in each hand to the dining area. The man and the woman are still the only customers. It’s a small town. It’s far enough from the main city that they don’t get much traffic out here this early in the morning. Usually, their clientele starts trickling in a couple hours after they open. It’s a motley assortment of people. They get folks from all walks of life seeking a seat at their secondhand tables. Money had been tight when they opened the place. Now, they keep the mismatched furniture as part of the place’s charm. He leaves the decor up to Lindsey.

As Peter makes his way to the dark haired pair seated at a table by the windows that span the front of the diner, initial thoughts that they might be a couple are blown away by the way the two of them are interacting. She’s engaging in five finger fillet with the straw for her orange juice. The hand that she’s playing the game with belongs to her resigned companion rather than herself. They must be siblings in one way or another.

“Here you go,” he sets the plates in front of them. “Anything else I can get you?”

“Yeah,” the seated man says. He’s wearing a suit. There is a flash of something at his hip. A gun and a badge. Strahm realizes that the man is a cop. Great. “Some decent coffee would be nice.” Peter’s eyebrows shoot up at the brazen rudeness. Across the table, the woman hisses, “Mark! What the fuck!” and swats at the officer.

The man isn’t deterred, just continues to stare Peter down with a dumb look in his blue eyes and a faint curl to his overly large, fish-like lips. Strahm hates him immediately. His dislike is only furthered by the realization that the seated cop’s buttons are straining across his chest. Could he not afford better fitting shirts? Or is he just too stupid to know his own size? Peter isn’t completely sure, but he’s willing to hazard the guess it might be the latter.

He grits his teeth and puts on a smile that’s more similar to a snarl than a genuine stab at pleasantry. “And what’s wrong with it?”

“It tastes like it’s been sitting out for hours,” he says, wincing only a little when the woman manages to land a solid kick against his shin. Peter wishes he could also dig the tip of his shoe into that yielding body.

Snatching the mug off the counter, he barely avoids the impulse to dump it on the cop’s lap and give him something to actually complain about. He doesn’t quite storm off to the narrow space behind the counter but it’s a close thing. He still carries his anger around his throat like a noose. Leaving the FBI hadn’t changed that.

The expression on his face is thunderous enough that Lindsey looks alarmed. Rightfully so. “What’s wrong?”

“Jackass cop. They always think they can come in here and push everyone around. That one probably jerks off onto his badge every night.” He feels a muscle jump in his jaw.

“That was… descriptive.”

“Sorry,” he mutters, ditching the mug on the counter by the machine and picking up the glass coffeepot and a fresh mug.

Peter strides back over to the occupied table. He sets down the mug with a hard thud on the tablecloth-covered wood, enough so that the table rattles with the force of it. It’s a miracle the ceramic doesn’t shatter. Neither of the two men look away from each other as he slowly pours the dark liquid. Only rising steam blocks their view, faltering and diverting as though it were afraid to be in the middle of them.

He fills the mug as high as he can get it, surface tension being the only thing keeping the coffee contained. It will be impossible to pick up without spilling. The cop is going to have to drink from it like a dog if he wants it at all.

“Thank you, Peter.” His voice is low, throaty.

Strahm startles at the use of his first name. His fingers reflexively clench into a fist. He perpetually forgets about the name tags that Lindsey insists they both wear despite her being the only one he has ever grown accustomed to calling him anything but some variation of “Agent” and “Strahm.” Of course this bloated asshole would be presumptuous enough use his name.

Choosing not to respond, he leaves the table and retreats to the sanctuary behind the counter. Any satisfaction he might have felt at watching his customer debase himself is dashed when Mark seeks out his eyes once again with his own as he lowers his face to the table and presses those absurdly full lips against the rim of the coffee mug. Peter can’t look away as he watches Mark’s throat engage in gulping swallows to drain the mug to the point where he can pick it up and drink from it like a slightly more civilized ape. He doesn’t realize he’s trembling, nearly vibrating in place, until his partner taps him on the arm and takes the glass carafe from his hand.

Lindsey attends to the pair from that point on. He lets her. They both know things might escalate, with his fuse being an oil soaked scrap of already burning twine.

The cop is perfectly nice to her, even smiling and thanking her for another coffee refill. Strahm can still feel the other man’s eyes rest on him from time to time. There’s something about the weight of his stare that makes him want to scratch at a phantom itch under his collar until blood burrows its way beneath his nails.

He finds his relief when Lindsey brings out the bill. Mark leaves his sister behind to pay after he hands her his wallet. She approaches the register with the slip of paper, looking meeker, somehow smaller, without her brother around. He barely keeps the frown off his face at her body language. There’s a nervous look in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry about my brother. I don’t know what got into him. He’s never like that.”

She sounds so sincere that he feels his frustration ease off the gas a little. It wouldn’t be right of him to be pissed at her just because she has an asshole for a sibling. “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

“Please, keep the change,” she says, handing him a wad of bills.

He pauses, fingertips already on the smaller denominations in the cash drawer. “This is too much, really.”

“Call it a…” she raises her fingers in scare quotes, “‘Markup’.”

Strahm sighs. Both siblings are intolerable.

“Alright then…?”

“Angelina. Angie.”

“Have a nice day, Angelina.” He very politely does not tell her to inform her brother to go fuck himself. Preferably with his own loaded gun. Safety off.

The young woman gives a little wave to Lindsey on her way out the door. His partner cheerfully returns it, her other arm laden down with the pair’s used plates. Peter loops around the counter to help her with bussing the table. He snatches up a clean rag on the way.

He’s not quite sure why the other man got under his skin so badly. It chafes at him. They have had more than a couple blowhard cops in the diner before, but they’ve never invoked the same visceral reaction from Strahm as Mark had. At least he can find solace in knowing that he will probably never have to see them again. They hadn’t seemed like locals, and it’s unlikely they’ll return, especially given the cop’s behavior towards him.

Hours pass, evening finally settles in after a long day. Diner traffic had ebbed and flowed along the usual patterns after the two siblings had left. Strahm and Perez had had the their typical rush around eight, followed by another burst of customers around noon, and the final crowd at six. There had been nothing else out of the ordinary to get Peter’s hackles up.

“Go on home, Linds,” he says to his partner as he flips the last chair onto one of the tables. He doesn’t want her to be stuck here all night while he meticulously combs over the diner in preparation for opening in the morning.

She stops, looks over at him with raised eyebrows. She’s got one hand on the dustpan and the other wrapped around the broom. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I could use the time to—“

“Get your homicidal urges under control?” she suggests with a grin.

He doesn’t dignify Lindsey with a response, just takes the broom from her before gently pressing his knuckles to her back to nudge her in the direction of the counter. “I’ll see you in the morning. Shoot me a message when you get home.”

“Oh, I’ll shoot you alright,” the woman mutters as she goes and gets her coat and purse.

“I wish you would. It would save me the trouble of doing it myself,” he calls after her.

The look he gets in return, all scrunched eyes and pursed lips, makes him smile. Lindsey’s “agent special”, as they jokingly call the expression they both slip into when agitated, would be enough to sour milk. He and his partner aren’t all that different. Their mannerisms have blurred together over the years. Lindsey is still his better half, though. She always will be.

“’Night, Pete.” She pauses with her hand on the front door’s handle. “You let me know too. When you get back to your place.”

“Goodnight,” he says, grudgingly tacking on “I will.” when she clears her throat in a pointed demand.

He finishes sweeping and is in the middle of mopping when his phone vibrates in the front pocket of his jeans. Without looking, he knows it’s the message from Lindsey. Still, he pulls the device out anyway and flips it open.

The text illuminated on the screen reads Im home :) Dont forget 2 eat

Satisfied that she’s safe, he doesn’t pick at the number pad and work up a reply. Peter merely closes the phone and returns it to his pocket. He’ll be messaging Lindsey about his return to his shitty rental soon enough. He’s almost done here, will be once he’s combed over every final detail down to the level the salt shakers are filled to. Strahm can’t help but treat every night at the diner like a case. All the parts have to be arranged in just the right order to construct the whole picture.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Early riser, is the first thing Strahm thinks the next morning when he hears the bells clatter against the glass of the front door. It is barely five minutes past six. Lindsey is in the back wrangling the day’s special; muffins. Much to his mixture of pride and chagrin, she’s become a substantially better baker than he. She has the patience for it.

“Welcome in,” he says, not looking up from the inventory list he’s in the middle of putting together.

He is going to have to call in an order to their supplier before noon today if they want it by Friday, which they do. Business is going to be elevated above average due to a local softball game on Saturday. One of them will be tasked with catering the event while the other stays behind to run the diner. He and Lindsey are going to have to draw straws for who gets what job. Peter is sure that she’s going to rig the game by changing the rules once the results are in so that she has be the person to go. His customer skills are better left unpracticed.

“Thanks, Peter,” comes a familiar voice.

Nearly snapping his own damn neck when he jerks his head up, he looks at the speaker. It’s Mark. He is holding the door open with a glove-clad hand for his presumed saint of a sister.

Anger sparks along his spine. He had bet wrong on never seeing the cop again, and with an aggressive motion, he snatches up only one menu. It’s only when he’s halfway to their table that he realizes he is rapidly clicking the pen he was using to write down notes for the order. He forces himself to stop.

Strahm can’t help but notice the other man is dressed the same as he was yesterday. He’s wearing the black blazer again, silk shirt is straining over his—what Peter can only call—breasts. He catches the sight of a thick suspender strap pressing into the softness of his chest, and finds that he has to look away and focus carefully on the menu he’s setting on the table in front of Angelina. He can tell that the other man is eyeing him questioningly.

“Where’s mine?” the cop asks, falling right into the trap Peter had impulsively set for him.

Turning to him with a fake as shit, winning smile, he says, “I thought your sister would be reading it to you. On account of you being a brain-damaged neanderthal.”

While Mark looks at him unblinkingly for a long moment and Angelina tries to smother her shocked laugh, Peter doesn’t let go of the smile. He rubs this thumb over the pen as he waits patiently for the cop to speak.

“Hm,” Mark finally says, considering, “Mother always did love dropping me on my head.”

Peter’s grin wavers, thinking the man might not be joking. His tone had been too serious. The amused expression falls off his face completely.

Fuck, he thinks, feeling a tinge of horror. Lindsey is going to kill him if he doesn’t kill himself first. Mark’s sister has her face buried in her hands. He’s royally cocked this up. He’s on the verge of apologizing when—

“I’m joking, Pete. I thought we were all friends here.”

Strahm relaxes, just marginally, but then Mark speaks again “Besides, I didn’t have a mother. In fact, you might be onto som—”

Peter interrupts him, turning to Angie, “What can I get you started with?”

“Orange juice, and some coffee for Oliver Twist over there.”

“Did you take him to the vet to get his taste buds looked at?” He’s still reflexively tapping his thumb against the clicker of the pen, not hard enough to trigger the mechanism.

She snaps her fingers, a smile playing at her mouth. “Damn, I forgot. I’m sure he’ll be nice this time,” she emphasizes with a pointed look at her brother.

Unable to help himself, he hazards a glance at the cop as well. Mark, upon realizing he’s being observed, darts his eyes from Peter’s right hand to his face. There’s something off about his expression, only furthered by a hard swallow. He looks almost… No. The idiot is probably just creaming himself over the thought of breakfast.

“I’ll be right out with that.”

When he pushes through the swinging door into the kitchen, he finds Lindsey pulling out another tray of muffins. She slides them onto the wheeled cooling rack and hums along to the radio blasting dad rock. His partner looks over at him with a smile. “Got a customer already?”

“Yeah,” he grumbles, snagging a glass serving decanter off a shelf, “jerkoff cop and his sister from yesterday.”

Peter can hear the frown in her voice as she speaks. “Want me to handle them?”

“No. I got it,” he calls on his way to the walk-in, decanter in hand. He fills it with orange juice from the dispenser before slipping out of the cooler and back into the main room of the kitchen to find and wrangle the lid onto the glass vessel.

Perez speaks like he hadn’t walked off, used to his comings and goings, “I’ll take the softball game then.”

“Not your call,” he says, thumbs bleaching white as he presses the sloped, metal lid down into the decanter until the rubber seal catches.

“Sure is, buddy. You’ll be using up all your goodwill today. I don’t want you terrorizing entire families this weekend. It’s bad for business.”

The retired agent lets out a ragged sigh on his way through the swinging door, finding himself unable to disagree. He knows his own limits, as much as he resents them, and so does Lindsey. Unlike her, he is willing to ignore them if it means getting the job done. It’s a miracle how she’s managed to stick around all these years. No one else has managed to tolerate his unwavering dedication. His first wife had left him for turning a blind eye to everything other than work, and the second had done the same for his devotion to Lindsey. Strahm is ever the dog with a bone, gnawing until he has reached the marrow and licked away every last trace of it.

He loves Perez like the sister he never got to have. Peter has both put his life on the line for her and taken the lives of other people for her continued survival. He has the unfortunate affliction of being willing to do anything for her, even going so far as to let her take some of the burden of this job off his shoulders. Atlas gets to have a partner.

Fetching a glass from under the counter, he tops it off with orange juice before stashing the serving jug in the mini-fridge where they keep the other cold items they need close at hand throughout the day—beverage pitchers, whipped cream, sliced lemons, the works.

Laughter travels across the diner, quick-footed and noisy. Strahm looks up at the interruption. The cop is holding the menu upside down and attempting to read the inverted text as he trails a thick finger over the print. He clearly cares about his sister. The love is written all over his stupid face, so thick that it’s enough to choke on.

Tamping down any lingering irritation as best as he can, Peter makes his way over to the siblings’ table. He is careful when he sets Angelina’s glass of orange juice down but doesn’t take the same care in the dismissive way he thunks Mark’s empty mug on the surface.

“Decided what you want yet?” he asks, pouring too much coffee into the mug in a repetition of yesterday. It laps the rim, begging to escape over the side.

At Angelina’s affirmative, Strahm sets the coffee carafe on the table and withdraws the notepad from his belt. While he jots down their order, he can’t help but be unsure if Mark is actually stupid or if he is just pretending. Either way, the man grates at him in such a way that he’d like to sink his fist into his face. It might relieve the inexplicable feeling crawling around under his skin like its trying to make a home. If he doesn’t act, it might buy real estate nestled away somewhere under his ribs.

Once he has everything marked down, he trades places with Lindsey after passing her the coffeepot and cooks the meal up in the back while she mans the front. They swap again as soon as he serves the places.

Behind the counter, he works at finishing up the restock order. Peter keeps finding his eyes wandering to the eating man rather than the task at hand. The solitude of the front only serves to allow him all the free rein he could possibly want to watch the man consume the meal Strahm had put in front of him. Each mouthful, each bob of that thick neck as he swallows, the tines of the fork disappearing between those overfilled lips; there’s something about it that he cannot look away from.

For now, he tells himself that the rapt attention is borne of disgust, that he’s watching for a complaint so he has cause to let out the aggression boiling inside of him. Later, once he has closed the diner for the night, he tries to convince himself that the tinge of satisfaction he’s feeling in this moment is because he is looking at proof of a job well done. The cop is clearly enjoying his food, and Strahm takes pride in his work.

Either way, he ignores the stirring that he feels in his jeans. He curses himself under his breath and puts all his focus into finishing the list he should have been locked into all along. He barely marks down the last item on the sheet before Lindsey pops through the swinging door, flushed from having completed her baking.

She ducks right under his arm and pulls the paper out from under his hand. Lindsey ignores his outraged noise. “Is this everything?”

“Yeah. Business has been picking up.”

“Mmm… Go water the plants for me? I’ll take over here.”

His partner makes a shooing gesture at him. She had been the one who insisted they have flowers in front of the diner and around the lot’s tree. Of course, the task of caring for them has fallen to Peter. He’d seen the state of her houseplants time and time again. Each of them inevitably finds a place at his rental home, handed over by a sheepish Lindsey. He all but has a jungle tucked away in his living room. Perez has many qualities. Unfortunately, a green thumb is not among them.

Casting a quick glance over at the table, he sees that the siblings are nearly done. They will be needing the check soon.

“Fine,” he says, giving in. It’s probably better for everyone is he’s not looking at the cop.

The bell chimes as he ducks out the front door. He checks the soil before he bothers to get the hose. In doing so, he finds out that Lindsey was right, the plants do need watered.

Peter is in the middle of watering the bed under the window when a shadow falls over the box. It consumes his, merges with it to create a twisted creature. There is something familiar in that figure, something deep in the core of his body groans in approval. Everything else fades away for a moment as he quietly observes it.

“Angie told me to apologize.”

Peter jerks, surprised by the rolling voice behind him. His finger slips off the sprayer. The water cuts off abruptly. He narrowly avoids clutching at his chest with his free hand like a stereotypical old man having a heart attack. With his heart pounding in his ears, he turns around to face Mark. Strahm doesn’t spay the cop with the hose. He wants to.

“So are you?” he asks with forced nonchalance.

Mark considers him. Those pale eyes survey the damp patches on Strahm’s jeans where the water had blown back. His stare seems to catch on the wet patch of t-shirt clinging to his stomach. “I don’t know. Is there something in it for me if I do?”

Strahm feels his neck go hot. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say the other man is flirting.

“Depends on how good the apology is.” The words are out of his mouth before his brain catches up. Damn it, Strahm, damn it, he thinks. His tendency to spout out whatever leapt to his tongue was a barely leashed thing that often broke free of its tether at the most inopportune of moments.

A smile curves the edges of Mark’s over-sized lips and the shorter man leans his bulk in just enough to make him feel cornered. Strahm has to fight not to react in any direction; either to shove him away or to pull him in. Disgust is warring with interest. He frowns. He barely knows this man. The retired agent would like to know what the fuck is wrong with him.

Sudden surprise flairs in those eyes and Mark withdraws, saying, “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

Peter is left standing alone on the pavement, hose in hand, as the other man lumbers away to the navy Crown Victoria parked at the meter. He’s wet and confused. His jeans feel as tight as the scar cutting across his cheek.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Wednesday passes without further incident. Thursday’s only outstanding feature is the arrival of the order they had placed on Tuesday. Friday night sees Strahm helping to prepare everything for Lindsey’s catering on Saturday. There is no sign of Mark during the three day span. Only his sister stops by the diner. She gives no explanation for her brother’s absence and Peter does not ask.

Over the days, Strahm and Perez get to know Angelina. They learn that she loves her brother just as much as he loves her. She reveals that she and Mark were system kids. He has taken care of her like his own family since the moment they met at the home of shared foster parents. The adults had ended up not wanting Mark and despite only intending to send him back, they’d had to send both children away. Hoffman and Acomb had been stamped with a “do-not-separate” notice when Mark had later broken the nose of one of the staff members in response to being told they were going to be split up. Another family had wanted to foster just her.

Hoffman had filed for custody of her as soon as he aged out of the system and the means to show he could provide for her. He had been the youngest cop the precinct had assigned the role of detective to. Angie wishes her brother would hover less and worry about himself more. She thinks that he is burning the candle at both ends.

Over those days, Strahm’s worldview around the man shifts. The flames of disdain that had been raging inside of him peter out and turn into a charred bed of ash. He still wants to punch the man in the face, still wants to rough him up until he’s marked with the proof of Strahm’s fists—of his mouth—but he might soothe the man’s wounds afterwards with careful passes of his tongue.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Lindsey has just barely left for the softball field with her small truck laden down with the necessary food and supplies for the catering ordeal when the bell above the door jangles. Strahm looks up from the coffee filters he’s separating to see that it’s Mark. He is the first customer of the morning.

The detective doesn’t take a seat at the table, instead, he settles himself onto a stool at the counter. Strahm can’t help but notice that the seat Mark chooses is the one beside the stool that his sister has been occupying for the past few days. It’s as though his body instinctively knows where Angie resides and always keeps that space carved out for her. Peter is sure that if something were to ever happen to her, there would be a gaping hole in the detective’s life, a place where his sister should fill.

Something gives way in his chest at the sight of him. He’d never admit it, but he’s irrationally missed him.

“Morning,” he says, putting a mug down in front of him. He leaves enough room for Mark’s sugar this time as he pours the coffee in, unprompted. He’s being uncharacteristically nice. It could be that he’s making up for the lack of his partner. His rough edges can’t be too sharp when she’s not around to patch up the cuts he might make.

Any positive feelings at the other man being back at the diner are dashed when the first words out of his mouth aren’t a good morning in return, or even a thanks, but a “You wife has been getting real close with my sister. You guys a pineapple couple or what?”

Mark’s eyes are flat, deceptively calm. Uncomfortably, Peter feels as though he’s looking into the eyes of an attacking shark. He barely keeps the coffeepot he’s holding from slipping from his grasp. He’s suddenly all too aware of the wedding band weighing down his ring finger. It had been the same one from both his previous marriages. The retired FBI agent should have known the second marriage was doomed to fall apart from the moment he decided to not pick out new wedding rings with his fiancée. It probably hadn’t helped, that unbeknownst to ex-wife number two, he had proposed to her with the engagement ring he’d gotten back after the divorce of his first wife. Both women had been right to end their marriages to him. He’d been a shitty husband. His heart hadn’t been in it. Neither woman had been what he was really looking for.

On the Lindsey’s behalf, he’s offended for Mark even thinking she would stoop so low as to be married to him. She deserves better than his negligence and repression. He knows it and she knows it. In all the years that they’ve been partners, they have never done anything more than share a few awkward hugs.

“Lindsey and I aren’t married,” he says firmly.

“Just you then?”

“I’m not married. Neither of us are married.”

“You wear a ring. Seems awful married to me.”

“It keeps some of the old ladies from trying to mount me in the stock room,” he answers, dry.

They sit on that in silence. Strahm places the carafe back on the hotplate. Something nags at him. He turns to Mark only to find that he’s still staring at him. “What the fuck is a pineapple couple?”

“Swingers, Pete. I asked if you were a swinger.”

“What? No. Mark. No. No.”

The seated man looks strangely smug. “Good. I don’t share,” he says as if it were the most casual thing in the world and flips open a menu.

For a moment, Strahm thinks his brain shuts off. He reaches blindly for a rag out of the sanitizer bucket and starts scrubbing the counter with it. Mark’s voice comes to him like Peter is under water, distorted and faint.

“Eggs and bacon for me today. Some multigrain if you’ve got it.”

Pulling his notepad from his belt, Strahm scribbles down the order. He doesn’t need to but he needs to fight for a finger hold of normality here.

“Small breakfast. Sure you don’t want to stuff your mouth with anything else?” As soon as the words hit the air, Strahm wishes he could somehow suck them back in. Why is he forever incapable of thinking before he speaks?

Hoffman shrugs. “Nah, Angie’s not here to steal half the food off my plate. Besides, what I want isn't on the menu anyway.” His eyes feel like a physical caress as they map over Peter’s body. The meaning is blatant, not remotely subtle.

Peter opens his mouth, closes it.

“I’ll be back with that,” he says. On his way to the kitchen’s swinging door, he tries to keep his pace measured as he escapes Mark’s all too interested eyes. He doesn't want the detective to see how much their interaction has rattled him.

Once in the kitchen, he realizes that he needs to get ingredients out of the walk-in and pops the latch to step inside the small space. Instead of gathering what he had come for, Peter finds himself sitting on a tomato box. He leans back, pressing the sides of his clenched hands to his brow bone. Letting out a loud sigh that’s more of a growl, the diner owner sags into the cold metal of the wall behind it. The change in temperature is enough of a difference to shock his system back into some sense of reality.

What the fuck? he thinks, irritation creeping into his thoughts like an old friend. The detective had acted like he would gladly engage him in a physical fight over coffee and now he’s making overt passes at him. It’s enough to send his head spinning. Going over their interactions, he’s drawing the conclusion that perhaps the other man had been flirting with him since the start, trying different tactics to get his attention like a snot-nosed brat pulling a girl’s hair on the playground before realizing that honey catches more flies.

Being in the cooler finally catches up with him and he wastes no time in getting to his feet. He hates tight spaces, always has. Eventually, they make him feel like the walls are closing in inch by anxiety-inducing inch. A nonsensical section of his hind brain fears he will get crushed between them, rendered into a pool of fat floating atop pulpy innards and shattered bones.

Once free of the walk-in, he fries up the bacon and the eggs. He slips some toast onto the plate before carrying it out to the front. It’s hot against his fingers, the heat soaking through his callouses.

Peter has a moment to observe Mark when he pauses in the doorway. The swinging door is propped open against his elbow. The detective is sitting quietly, sketching something out on a napkin with the pen that Strahm must have unintentionally left behind after he took down the order. Once Mark catches sight of him, he flips the napkin over. As he does, Peter gets a glimpse of the drawing. It’s depicting something mechanical, like a medieval torture device made modern. An alarm bell clangs in the back of his head.

Neither of them bring up the drawing. Mark steadily tucks into his breakfast. Peter pretends not to be watching him. He thinks part of his brain dies when Mark has to lick away a smear of ketchup off his own lip. For a moment, Peter has the thought of his own tongue doing the work for the detective instead.

The retired agent ends up nearly snarling at him when he asks for a coffee refill.

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