"…what is this?" Erik growled at the cup of what smelled like the most delicious coffee in the world his assistant had just brought him. It was not his usual cup. In fact, Erik had never seen the cup before. This was not his cup and since he hadn’t had coffee before on this morning, that somehow seemed important.
His assistant smiled one of his overly dazzling smiles at him. Erik might have shielded his eyes from it if only he had been awake enough for that. “Your cup of coffee,” Charles announced.
"That’s not my cup," Erik observed. He would remember a cup that announced happily that it was better off gay than grumpy. “My cup does not have a godforesaken pun on it.”
"But you think it’s better to be gay," his assistant asked with a cheeky wriggle of his eyebrows. "Than to be grumpy all the time?"
"Only if being gay means being gay for you too," Erik grumbled.
It took his still half asleep brain a couple of seconds and a lot of help from his vision which had registered the shocked, gaping expression on his assistant’s face, to realize that he had said this out loud. Fuckfuckfuck, why, he didn’t mean it like this, sure Charles hadn’t meant it like this, he didn’t even know it he even liked men, Erik thought, already panicky.
"Er, I," he tried to save the situation.
Charles frowned at him. Very insistently, he pushed the cup into Erik’s hands. “Drink,” he ordered. “Clearly, you’re not in your right mind before you had your first cup of coffee in the morning.”
"Wait!" Erik called after Charles who was all but fleeing the office. "I… Well, Charles, I’ve… If you do like men, that is, would you?…" Erik scrambled for the right words. "Could I invite you for dinner sometime?"
Charles rolled his eyes. “And here I thought you would never ask. You’re free Thursday, so I’ll order a table at that Thai place you like. Would eight be alright with you?”
"What…? I mean, of course, eight’s perfect."
"Good. Well then, Mr Lehnsherr," Charles almost purred.
"Yes?"
"Get the fuck to work so we won’t have to work overtime on Thursday."
