“Perfect,” I replied, flushing again as Elliot trailed those rough fingertips down one arm.
I still had the slight sensation of goosebumps when he came back into the kitchen, hair wet and unbound, the white streak draping rakishly to one side amid the darker strands of the rest. He had on sweats and a rust-colored t-shirt that was slightly damp from his freshly-showered skin.
“I have an interview tomorrow,” I told him.
“With the Sheriff’s Office?” he asked, settling on one of the kitchen stools.
I spooned Korean-style noodles into a bowl and passed it to him, along with a fork because if he owned any chopsticks, I hadn’t been able to find them. “No. Some restaurant and bar called Annello’s”
“That old place,” Elliot snorted.
“Is it… bad?”
“Not at all,” Elliot replied, lifting a forkful to his mouth. “Shit, Seth, this is good.”
The flush returned. “Thanks.” Apparently Noah was going to be a good metric for things Elliot was going to like, at least in terms of food.
“Annello’s is an old-school supper club,” Elliot told me around his mouthful. “I think it’s older than almost anyone living in Shawano.”
“Is that… bad?”
“Nah,” Elliot said, taking another mouthful of rice and veggies. “But if you work there, you’ll meet everyone in the town over the age of fifty, and then they will ferret every secret you’ve ever had in your life out of you.”
I blinked, a little alarmed. “Um. How is that not bad?”
Elliot laughed. “I mean, it’ll speed up the process of the whole town meeting you and getting to know you and up in your business, but that’s going to happen one way or another. Shawano’s a small town.”
I grimaced. I’d somehow managed to forget about that part of living in rural, well, anywhere, apparently. Or maybe I’d just assumed that things would be different in Wisconsin than they had in Appalachian Virginia.
“You don’t want everyone to know your life story, you’re moving to the wrong town,” Elliot told me.
I forced a smile, not wanting to disparage his hometown, but also wondering if I had actually moved to the wrong place, and not just because of the small town vibes thing. Hints Elliot dropped here and there suggested that there were things he didn’t like about Shawano—the macho north-woodsman bar culture, the small town bigotry, the fact that it was tiny and there were a lot of things that he had to drive a distance to get—all the way to Green Bay or even down to Madison or Milwaukee.
But he also clearly loved this house, although the gardens could use some tending. Maybe that would be a project I could take on to make myself more useful while I was living with him. I liked plants. For one thing, plant compounds were one of the things that I was professionally interested in. For another, I thought they were pretty. I’d only been here six days, and already the abundance of light in the house had dramatically improved the health of my aloe plant. With the light and soil Elliot had, I could really have fun with it.
“Do they all know yours?” I asked him.
He blinked. “There’s not much to know,” he replied. “They all knew my parents, know what they did, know what I do, know that I’m gay and a shifter, know Val is my best friend. Know I’m close to Judy and Marsh Hart…” He trailed off, clearly feeling like he’d made his point.
“And even a shitty PI would be able to figure all that out in a city the size of Milwaukee, plus your shoe size, pants size, and how often you order pizza or Chinese food for dinner,” I retorted. “In a small town, people know that shit because they can look out the window and see half of it.”
“I’m not saying people are necessarily nosier,” he said, sounding maybe a little defensive. “But I am saying that when everybody can’t help knowing everybody else’s business, you have to assume that your biography and life are available to literally everyone.” He shrugged, skewering a piece of chickencoated in red chili sauce. “People are assholes, and they turn to bigotry and violence when there’s nothing else left to do. Sometimes even when there is.”
I couldn’t exactly argue the point with him. Small towns all around the world are insular places, caught up in their own ideas about how the world should work that may or may not reflect the ideas of wider society. Many of those ideologies swung toward the exclusionary end of the spectrum.
I also wasn’t about to tell Elliot that his small town wasn’t like that. One, he lived here—he’d grown up here. I had been here for exactly six days, and I hadn’t done much more than go to a grocery store a couple of times and a gas station once. And two, Elliot’s dad had literally been murdered by people from this small town who had targeted Indigenous shifters. People who had then tried to also kill Elliot. I could hardly argue that he needed to give people in his small town a chance.
I’d also known all that when I decided to move here. I could hardly use it as an excuse now.
That didn’t mean I had to be happy about it.
That said, I didn’t really mind meeting all of Shawano by working in Annello’s. I’m pretty good at keeping things pretty close to my chest. Very few people in Richmond knew I was gay, for example. And only Noah knew all the ugly details about our childhood, and then only because he had literally been there for most of them.
“It’s work,” is what I said to Elliot. “It’s something I can at least do until I find something I want to do more.”
“It is work,” Elliot agreed, then took another bite. “You waited tables before?”
I nodded, then took a bite of my own. “Yeah. Not my favorite, but it pays.” I shrugged. “I’ve done worse.”
