#(...well.)

Big hands. Thick arms. Silver on his temples and a widow's peak that his much younger brother makes fun of. When he gets on the floor to work on a bot and his shirt rides up, I can see a fraction of a tattoo on his back, some big sweeping blackwork thing. If he's laying on his back, it's worse – the crease of his belly, the sensitive strip just above his belt, the way I want to sink my teeth into him until I taste blood...

I had almost quit vaping. I was down to 0mg, I was finding ways to keep my hands and mouth occupied on breaks, I had almost kicked the stupid habit for good, but whenever my mouth floods with saliva and I forget to blink because he's laying on the floor beneath me with his arms elbow-deep in a chassis or those big hands are wrapped around a neck... Vaping seems like the wiser choice and I keep ducking outside to breathe and the vape just finds its way into my hand by rote.

I don't love my job. When I dreamed of building robots as a kid, I dreamed of articulated prosthetics that helped people walk, remote devices that kept real human people out of dangerous environments, massive industrial constructs that did things no human could ever dream of – but a delivery robot that sings Happy Birthday when you take your food out of the drawer was... fine. It was a resume-builder. It was a stopgap while I stabilized, a launching pad to go somewhere else once the opportunity presented itself. But because it was a stepping stone, because my stupid boss knew way too many people in the industry, I didn't really want to get fired for trying to throat the CEO's brother while on the clock.

He knows, too. I've been caught staring too many times, fumbled stupid simple shit because I'm distracted. He hasn't told me to fuck off, he hasn't brought it up to anyone that I know of, and he hasn't stopped showing up on days when I'm in the shop alone. I don't know if that's because avoiding the boys on the team is more valuable than avoiding the weird little fruitcake, though. Maybe a quiet little shit who can't stop staring at your crotch or your chest or your hands is easier to ignore than a gaggle of kids who speak in Tiktok brainrot. When he gets tired of the boys, he leaves for the day. When he catches me staring, he just... stares back for a moment, those pretty, dark eyes unreadable.

The way he looks at me changed after I made an off-the-cuff joke about being a masochist – I don't even remember what I said, what had prompted it, and the rest of the boys had missed it. I don't know if it's disgust, honestly, and I've made a stupid game out of referencing some kink or another as subtly as I can whenever the gaggle of boys create an opening, to see if he catches it, to see if he recoils. It's directly counter to job safety, but it's harder to stop stupid little quips from coming out of my mouth than it is to stop my hands from shoving down his pants. I have a bad habit of making eye contact with him every time, too, so it isn't very subtle.

So he doesn't think I'm the greatest, probably. We don't talk much, when we work alone. So I try not to stare, I fail, he catches me, I bury my nose in a bot. Days where we work on our own thing go fine, but days when we have to work together on a bot to push it back to the field... He smokes, too, so at least he can't give me shit for ducking outside to get away. He does it, too.

So when his brother – our CEO, I should be mindful that he's my boss and not just a hot man's brother – tells us we have to fabricate six new bots for a new contract, and one of the idiot boys quit, and another broke his wrist at a party, I can almost hear my vape groan. He comes in more often, at first just to work on fabrication, actual fabrication of the parts we use to build the bots. When he descends onto the assembly part of the process, though...

We're three days deep, just the two of us trying to crank out as much work as we can over the weekend, and I'm ducking outside after watching him tear a group of wires out of a bot's neck. It's the first time he gets pissy with me about it, because it's damn near the end of the day and I've been salivating about watching the muscles in his forearms flex and he's already frustrated with how this build is going – hence, tearing apart a bot with his bare hands. I ignore him, and the wind outside bites at me as I walk to the little busted box I've designated a smoking area. It's an old, beat to shit telephone booth with the telephone part torn out, but I'm the only one who works in the shop that knows what the fuck a telephone booth was.

Or. I was the only one. It feels so fucking weird to not be the oldest person there.

It startles the shit out of me when he stands beside me, which is pathetic. The area around the shop is all gravel, and between that and the frost it's not hard to hear someone moving around. He has his jacket on, that stupid fucking leather jacket that I hate that I like because it's a goddamn cliche, and a cigarette hanging from his lips.

I exhale, watching my cloud drift. "I'm not trying to ignore you, I'm–"

"It's fine. Build's going like shit and I was about to leave, anyway. Hypocritical to get mad at you."

Uh... Sure. Yeah. It's the frustration, not... anything else.

I hit my vape again. It's almost like a breathing exercise, if you think about it. Right?

"Always hated the sound those things make," he mutters, his lighter rasping as he flicks it to life.

I pause and study the little blue device in my hand. I'd never thought about it, but the sound was kind of irritating.

"They smell fucking terrible. You know that, right?"

I give him a baffled look. "This smells terrible? What?" I didn't disagree, actually. I usually went flavorless, especially now that I wasn't even getting nicotine out of the arrangement, but I'd run out and the shitty berry vanilla whatever the fuck was all I had left until payday.

If I could've just fucking quit...

"They do. At least tobacco has character."

"Sure, character." Like I wouldn't rip out my piercings to press my nose into his neck and breathe him in. "At least this doesn't make you taste like shit."

The regret hits, the hot wash of mortification at not being able to control my mouth better. I feel his eyes on me like a punch to the gut, that unreadable look as he considers me.

"Kids are real bold these days," he says finally, and it feels like a slap. I'd be fine with him slapping me, actually, that sounds hotter than being called a kid.

"Kid?" I ask, and I know that he's not in the mood for attitude. The spark in his eye is a sharp reminder of that. I don't care, or maybe I want to push him and get slapped for real, and cock my head. "I'm not a kid. I'm older than–"

"The other boys in the shop? Sure, you were born first. If you can't manage one of these, though?" He plucks his cigarette from his mouth and flicks the ash from the cherry. "Then I'm gonna call you 'kid'."

Indignation tidily collects every brain cell I have, and I scoff. I hold out my hand, palm up, and crook my fingers. "Hand one over."

"Excuse me?"

I'd never actually smoked a cigarette, so this was a massive load of shit, and I would eat shit if he called my bluff. "I can prove it," I lie, "or you can call me whatever you want and I'll just call you an old cunt."

The regret doesn't wait until after the fact to hit me. My pride is writhing, but I'm already screaming at myself internally about risking my job. He doesn't laugh, either. His nostrils flare, his free hand balls into a fist, and my libido joins the party, trilling low in my gut about how badly it looks like he wants to hit me. Call the already angry man a cunt again, it whispers. See what happens.

I don't, and he doesn't hit me. Instead, he turns his cigarette in his fingers, filter firmly between his thumb and forefinger, and very slowly, very intentionally presses the cherry into the palm of my outstretched hand. It sizzles and hisses angrily and I let out a pathetic yelp as I snatch my hand back, the cigarette butt dropping to the ground.