ONE
“What about this?” Mila Castro picked up a clear glass pot or pitcher of some sort that looked like it belonged in a museum and turned to present it to Shani.
“Ooh, is that a Pyrex stove-top coffee pot?” Shani snatched it from her hands and turned it over. “Yes! This is from like the Fifties!” She held it up to the sun as if it were the Holy Grail itself. “Perfect!”
Mila laughed and shook her head. Her best friend loved yard sales, thrift shops, flea markets, antique shops, anywhere you could buy other people’s discarded crap. They spent a lot of weekends crawling through garages and yards and parking lots looking for rare finds and white elephants.
It was a testament to their deep friendship, because Mila had worked her ass off from the moment she’d aged out of foster care to be able to afford new things. She’d lived with hand-me-downs and ‘freecycles’ all through her childhood and for years after, and there was nothing about ‘vintage’ that appealed to her.
Shani had grown up poor, too, dressed, shod, bedded, and sheltered in her older siblings’ hand-me-downs and her parents’ bargain shopping. But she’d turned that experience into an avocation.
Maybe it was the difference between growing up in a big family and growing up the way Mila had. To her, hand-me-downs and yard-sale buys were charity and failure. To Shani, who’d spent her childhood scouring sales with her family, they were the rewards of great adventures.
Mila had been to hundreds of sales with Shani and had long ago stopped buying anything for herself, but she’d toted and lifted and packed hundreds of her friend’s new-to-her treasures.
“Can you tell who’s working here?” Shani asked, looking around the parking lot as she gingerly placed her holy coffee grail in the cardboard box in which she’d been collecting her treasures.
They’d been carpooling to Capital City Fight Center to work out when Shani had seen the sign for the St. Benedict Shelter’s rummage sale and had hung a right so hard her Wrangler had tipped onto two tires. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the lot bustled with people surrounding about a dozen long, flimsy folding tables and several rows of clothing racks.
Mila tried to see cash changing hands, to tell who was giving and who was receiving, but people kept blocking her view. “The assholes running this place should be wearing name tags or aprons or something so we can tell.”
“We are wearing name tags and matching t-shirts,” a male voice said behind her. “And I don’t think any of us is an asshole. Well, maybe one guy, but he can’t help it.”
Whipping around, Mila found herself face to face with a tall, dark-haired, bearded guy in a navy blue t-shirt with the St. Benedict logo across the chest. A small black pin clipped to the shirt said Hector.
Actually, Mila wasn’t quite five-one, so they were more face to chest, and virtually every adult on the planet seemed tall to her, so maybe he was only average. He was definitely shorter than Thor, Jake, or Niko, some of her fellow Cap City fighters, but those guys were enormous.
But he was definitely dark-haired and bearded, and she definitely felt like an asshole now for calling him and his coworkers assholes.
“Sorry. But those name tags are hard to see.”
He smirked and took a couple steps past her to set on the table a wooden crate full of dishes packed with what looked like straw.
Shani dived at that crate like it was the last package of toilet paper in the apocalypse.
“This is Corelle! The Indian Summer pattern! My mom is gonna faint.”
Hector laughed. “I don’t want to cause anybody any health trouble, now.”
Sparing a moment to give him a brilliant smile, Shani went back to ransacking the crate. “This is a great sale. Where’d you get so much awesome stuff?”
“Donations. We’ve got arrangements with a few consignment places around town, too.” He turned to Mila. “You’re empty-handed. You don’t want to help out the shelter? It’s a great cause.”
Impervious to his little guilt jaunt, Mila shrugged. “I’m just the help. Shani’s the one who likes paying for other peoples’ trash.”
“Trash? That’s harsh.” He set a hand on his chest like she’d wounded him, but he smiled to show he was teasing. Nice smile. Good teeth. After a childhood of indifferent and erratic foster care, Mila had gone through a fuck ton of dental work to have a nice smile.
His hand was inked—a black and grey skull—and there were symbols on the backs of his fingers, too. Strange black marks that almost looked like letters. Mila felt a faint ping, like she should be able to read them, but they were really just squiggles.
Noticing that, she also noticed that he was fairly heavily inked in general—hands, arms, a little ink showing on his neck, rising from his t-shirt. A t-shirt he filled out pretty nicely. Mila spent her life around fighters, a whole lot of extremely fit men wearing not very many clothes, so she wasn’t necessarily impressed by big muscles. This Hector person was not extremely fit, but he took care of himself. There was a bit of pectoral contour under his t-shirt, and enough swell of biceps to pull his sleeves taut.
Mila had far too much going on in her life, and had had far too much going on in her past, to be interested in romance and relationships. Honestly, she didn’t like many guys even as friends, and she knew better than to trust any of them to get too close.
However, she liked a good lay, and for that she had to let a guy get a little bit close every now and then.
Often, she’d wished she were like Shani, who was bi and tended to prefer women. Mila had tried to be into women, but it turned out it wasn’t a choice one could make. Despite plenty of evidence of its dangers, she liked dick. Her finely tuned antennae were telling her this guy might be interesting in that regard.
“I calls ‘em likes I sees ‘em,” she answered him with a smirk, dipping a toe into the waters of flirtation.
His posture and affect changed slightly, picking up what she was putting down. His good smile grew wide, and he leaned in. “Well, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, they say.”
“Have we ever pinpointed the location of this ‘they’ who says so much? You know, for a drone strike?”
He laughed. It was a very nice laugh, low and a little raspy. A laugh that suggested there were things he knew but wouldn’t share. A seductive laugh.
The more she let herself see of him, the more interesting he got. He wasn’t exactly handsome in a fashion-model, movie-star way, but he was good looking. His face was kind of rugged, with a few scars she recognized as the remnants of fighting, and he had a little age on him, some grey speckles in his beard, some lines around his eyes, enough so she thought he was maybe ten years older than her twenty-nine. Right at the outside edge of acceptable. She was extremely and emphatically not into older guys. One grabby foster dad had ripped any Daddy complex inclination right out of her.
This guy was Latino, too—he had the look, and the name, so she felt pretty secure in that assumption. She herself had the name, and maybe the look, but she’d had to do one of those DNA tests to learn that her heritage was a hodgepodge of Latin American, and some other tiny percentages. According to the analysis of the results she’d gotten back, Cuba was the likeliest source of her largest percentage.