The wine tasted bad.
Steele, no actual conneisseur of wine but a believer in all things Expensive and Tasteful, was only drinking it because there was something subtly impressive about a well dressed man, sitting in a leather backed arm hair, holding a glass of Chardonnay in one tanned hand. It didn’t matter that said well dressed man probably shouldn’t be buying suits that were more than his entire month’s rent, or that the wine tasted like sour vinegar, what mattered was the appearance of it all. The full package, the real deal, the Grand Poobah of it all.
It was what being a lawyer was all about. For the most part.
The other part was going in on it all together - taking the world by storm with his partner in crime and actual partner. It was a shame they were both so good looking, it really wasn’t fair to the rest of the world that two such men were at the forefront of excellence in it. With Rob at his side, Steele was entirely certain they could conquer it all - and better yet, he’d be able to stop drinking this terrible wine.
And also maybe pay off the suit. Or at least one of them.
It would be better, however, if Rob would actually have answered his damn ******** phone.
It had been growing steadily harder and harder to reach Rob, which made little sense in Steele’s mind, considering that he saw him practically every day in the office. It should not have cost such a monumental effort to get a text or a phone call back from his best friend when they were outside of the office, especially considering just how little this should have surprised Rob. Steele was both a notoriously frequent texter, Snapchatter, Vine-er, Tumblr-er, Tweeter, and every other possible social media guru in the world. It was not unusual at all for Rob to receive a torrent of texts, all with a single link to a picture of a kitten or a pokemon he’d caught in Pokemon Go that day, generally followed by a cascade of overenthusiastic exclamation marks.
Except that the last time that Rob had texted him back was…
Steele couldn’t actually remember. What he could remember was inviting Rob to the bar a few nights prior and, in a moment of strange serendipity, managing to get ahold of him long enough to drag him out, where they’d both had a perfectly pleasant time getting unbelievably shitfaced.
Except that had been - Steele ran through the dates in his mind, because at the very least, with all of his shortcomings, he was talented in remembering numbers and times of things - close to ten days ago now. And then there had been the almost two weeks that Rob had taken off a few months ago now, and the various unread text messages and the missed phone calls and the fact that in spite of this, Rob still came to work and did his job as perfectly fine as if everything was perfectly fine.
Maybe he was overthinking this. Maybe everything was actually perfectly fine and it was he, Steele, who was losing his mind. Better that than his hair, but still; he had a life to live and crimes to perpetuate and money to hoard, he would very much prefer to keep his thoughts where they were meant to be - nestled firmly inside of his head.
The bar this time was a classy place, all mahogany wood and sleek metal fixtures and modern furniture. Steele had picked it precisely because of its generally upper class clientele, and in spite of the fact that his glass of wine was approximately three times the price of his Pokemon Sun game, it was a particularly lovely place where it would be easy to pick the minds (and the metaphorical pockets) of potential clients.
That is, if Rob would answer his ******** phone.
Steele gave the phone in question a dirty look and sipped his wine. He’d hoped it would have gotten better with age. Or time. Or a lighter.
It had not.
The phone was left on the counter beside him, an annoyed expression flashing across Steele’s face as he tried very hard - and very unsuccessfully - not to think about it. He would have just up and left, but there was always a chance Rob would come swaggering through the door at any moment, and then everything would be just fine. It was fine. It would be fine.
It did not feel fine in the slightest. In fact, he was starting to feel antsy in a way he hadn’t felt since childhood, off kilter in a way he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager trying to sneak into the Haunted House down the street from his own because the other boys had told him he wasn’t brave enough to even make it past the front door. They’d bet twenty bucks he couldn’t have done it.
Well, as Steele had said in later years, children were little shits.
The crumpled twenty dollar bill was the first thing he’d hung in his office, and it was still there, although the tempation to break the glass and use the twenty to get a few cups of coffee was sorely and pathetically tempting. Steele wasn’t quite so far gone that he would have resorted to that, at least, especially because the twenty was a reminder that just because some little s**t had told him he couldn’t do something, that was exactly what he had set out to do.
The more you tell me I can’t, the harder I’m going to try, he had said, once upon a time.
(It was a good phrase. Steele sort of wanted to submit it anonymously to one of those quote sites where people wrote things like ”And she danced on waves of peanut butter,” then italicized it and added a couple quotation marks and suddenly it became a Meaningful Phrase passed on down through the ages.)
The bartender was giving him a look, a look that indicated that Steele had started to overstay his welcome. In dive places and other lowerclass, scummy slums he could have stayed longer, but there was something about the high class nature of it all that made it important not to appear as a lush or possibly as someone who just really, really liked drinking.
Steele took another sip of his wine and ignored the bartender. Then he ignored the waitress who passed by, the man who slid onto the stool beside him and tried to hit on him, and the plate of appetizers that almost got dropped down his pants as the waiter carrying the tray stumbled over the leg of his stool. He tried to ignore the busty blond giving him eyes a short ways away, then couldn’t ignore the fluttering invitation back to her place, then had to work extra hard to ignore all of these things when the woman’s husband came back to the bathroom.
He texted Rob three more times. Then he slipped off the stool, left a meager tip on the bar, and went back home to his empty condo.
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