Abel had come to work one day with his head pending to one side, claiming he had slept in an off position and woke up with a stiff neck. At first they all shrugged it off. Arthur told him to go see a doctor, Mathias told him to sleep it off. Gabriel watched him from across the room with squinted eyes and then went back to work.

Two days passed, three. Everyone started looking at him weird, some even ventured out to give him advice and absurdly non-practical ways to fix it. Abel was beginning to worry himself. He didn’t want to spend money on a doctor, but he was getting tired of the discomfort.

Gabriel found him in the cramped office kitchen, bent over the counter and holding a heating pad over his neck. “I can fix it for you,” he said, and Abel waited for it, “for a price.” There it was.

“I’m not paying you money.”

“I don’t want money.”

Abel turned his head and looked at Gabriel’s narrowed eyes and folded arms over his chest. “Fine.”

Gabriel made him sit down, take off his jacket. He opened his mouth to ask, but then Gabriel’s hands were on his shoulders and he was pressing down hard and painful and Abel was fighting back groans and tears because he would not give Gabriel the satisfaction. “Relax,” Gabriel whispered in his ear and it was not okay to treat co-workers like this, Abel was going to report him, he was going to-- and who the hell allowed Gabriel to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day just so his voice could sound this wrecked and hoarse and raspy. “Jesus, Abe, stop being so tense.”

Pain subsided into not-pain (it was not pleasure, Gabriel be damned) and Abel held his jacket firmly over his lap because all the tension on his shoulders and neck might be dissipating, but the tension in his groin was only increasing. “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked through gritted teeth.

He felt Gabriel’s quiet chuckles next to his ear more than he heard them. “Dinner, tonight. You’re paying.”

Abel was about to protest when Gabriel turned his neck rapidly between his hands and his bones crack loudly. He breathed. The pain was gone. He could turn his head around again.

Gabriel patted him on the head like a child and he glared at him as he made his way out of the tiny kitchen. “And don’t pick a cheap restaurant either. I want something fancy as payment.”

When Abel didn’t move, he looked back, “Are you coming?”