Come As You Are (Twisted Bard)

6. Sebastian

Sebastian

It was Monday, a day the bar was usually closed to customers. Olivia had called an all-hands meeting for eleven, and Maria had gotten the girls to come in early so they could work on some new routine. Andrew had brought in the go-go boys early as well, so the place was hopping.

I was catching up on inventory, and Toby was doing his best to distract me while I tallied the bar stock. For the most part, it wasn’t working, but that was more because I was completely distracted by my own thoughts than any superpowers of concentration I might possess.

Ever since Vee and I had danced and I’d caught sight of Olivia watching us from her office, I couldn’t get the memory of his body or her expression off my mind. His body had felt amazing against mine, his chest firm and slick under my hands, his ass fitting perfectly against me, my happy cock nesting along the seam of those damn shorts that hid nothing. And then Olivia’s molten expression, her eyes as they’d locked onto mine, had ramped up my arousal and threatened to send me toppling over the edge. I’m made of stronger stuff and knew how to control myself at work, but at home? I’d jerked off at least half a dozen times thinking about everything that had happened that night.

I was still thinking about it now, days later every time I saw Vee, every time Olivia walked through the club. Vee had been off Sunday, which had given me a bit of a reprieve, but Olivia had come down to sit at the bar again that night. She’d been a complete distraction for me, but I think I’d covered well.

So, no, while Toby was trying his hardest to interfere with my work, he was having a difficult time up against the shit that was whirling through my head. I was busy counting bottles and watching Vee practice a dance routine, and couldn’t tell if I wanted Olivia to appear or to keep her distance and enable me to focus. My head was a busy space at the moment, and Toby’s antics barely registered.

“I need to head to the storeroom,” I told him when I finished my count. We were down on some staples, and I also wanted to check on the stock. I still wasn’t sure what had happened a few weeks back, but I’d been keeping an eye on what was in the back room ever since then, surreptitiously keeping my own inventory tally on my phone. Today, I had something else I wanted to check. “When I get back, I want to try out some new drinks. How’s your liver today?”

Toby flashed me a wicked grin. “Ready and willing,” he said and snapped me a salute as I lifted the bar pass.

It had occurred to me that morning that there was more than one way to skim premium liquor besides stealing the bottles from the storeroom, and I had had an idea on how to figure out if that was the case. Under the guise of trying out some new drinks, I was going to pull a few premium bottles and sample what was in them, then compare them against what was on the shelf in the bar. If my suspicions were correct, I’d probably find that what was in the bottles wasn’t the same as the newly opened bottles from the storeroom.

The only risky factor in my plan was being caught by Mal who would tell me it was wasteful to open a new bottle when there was already a bottle at the bar. It wouldn’t be the first time Mal had disagreed with me on how to run the bar, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but something wasn’t sitting well with me at all.

The storeroom was cool and quiet even before I closed the door behind me and blocked out the chaos coming from the club. I loved this space because it was peaceful, but today it gave me a bit of breathing room and a chance to get my head on straight before my crush on Olivia got me in trouble. That I was attracted to Olivia was not news to me. I think I’d been in love with her from the moment Antonio hired me. I’d tried hard to keep my feelings under wraps because she was Antonio’s assistant manager and sister, and I would never do anything to jeopardize my job or make her feel uncomfortable around me. I think I succeeded about ninety-five percent of the time.

Or at least I had until that dance with Vee and the way Olivia had watched us.

The feel of Vee against me had been more intoxicating than One-Fifty-One rum. It had made all sorts of inappropriate thoughts run through my head, fantasies I had no idea I harbored of threesomes starring myself and Olivia and Vee.

I shook my head to clear away those thoughts and concentrated on finding the case of Belvedere that had come in last week. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, which puzzled me because I was the one who had received the order and put everything into inventory. I didn’t want to have to tear the storeroom apart, but I noticed some other cases had been shifted as well. My organizational system was shot to hell, and my blood boiled at the thought that Mal had been in here changing where things were located without telling me. It would make it trickier to find things quickly in the middle of a shift if I didn’t put things back the way I needed them to be. With a sigh I set to work, alternating between pissed off and bewildered as I moved boxes and bottles.

I’d just found the case of Belvedere when Vee burst through the storeroom door. He glanced frantically at me, then around the space, settling for a moment on the shelves behind me before stammering out some bullshit excuse about forgetting where the bathroom was and apologizing for startling me. With a last glance at the shelves, and then at me, he left.

With a shake of my head, I turned back to the case of vodka that had initiated my need to reorganize the storeroom, but something niggled at me about Vee’s entrance. Curious, I turned to look at the shelving unit behind me and realized it had been pulled away from the wall by about a foot. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was clear it had been moved. When I peered around the corner, I understood why. Someone had created a small nest behind the shelves out of blankets. Space on the lowest shelf for a backpack and some photos had been carved out by pushing the boxes of liquor forward and then using cardboard to create a false back. It would be almost impossible to see that anything was amiss unless you were specifically looking for it.

I stepped around the end of the shelves and looked at the makeshift bed. It was easy enough to figure out that Vee had been sleeping here. I would have suspected it even without the photos of him and his brothers, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been going on for too long. The space didn’t smell like he’d been here for more than a couple of days. Not that I was an expert or anything, but I’d lived in a squat with no running water for a few months. A space like this would definitely have developed an odor if Vee had been living here since he started at Illyria.

Mal would hit the roof if he found out, so I gathered up his things, put them in a box, and planned to talk to him after Olivia’s meeting. Then I finished up what I needed to do in the storeroom and got out of there.

Vee eyed me as I returned to the bar, the box with his things in my arms along with a couple of bottles. I nodded at him, then tipped the box in his direction. When his eyes grew wide, I winked at him and shook my head. Hopefully he got the message that I was covering for him and wouldn’t freak out too badly before I had a chance to speak with him.

At eleven o’clock, Olivia came down the stairs from her office accompanied by Mal. I could tell just by looking at her that what she had to say wasn’t good news, and unfortunately I was right. The club was in financial trouble.

“It’s not so dire that closing our doors is imminent,” Olivia said. “But we don’t have a lot of room for unplanned expenses. I’m hopeful that with the holidays, we’ll make up our shortfall, but I also am open to any ideas any of you might have for special events or ways to bring more customers in on our least busy days.” She glanced at Mal with narrowed eyes, a definite warning in her expression. “You’re welcome to come to me directly or to Mal who will pass on any and all ideas.”

There were murmurs among the employees. It was unsettling to hear that your employer was having financial difficulties, but I also thought there was a note of optimism as well.

“What about a pageant or dance-off?” someone asked.

All heads turned in the direction of the speaker, and I was surprised to see it had been Vee who’d spoken.

“What are you thinking?” Olivia asked.

“Like a drag queen pageant or a dance contest for go-go boys,” Vee said. “We could invite performers from all the Castro clubs. It would be kind of like a Castro’s Got Talent thing.”

“A talent show?” Mal scoffed.

“No,” Vee responded, and I thought his voice was a bit sharp. “It would just be open to people who already perform in the clubs. We could even do it as a charity event and raise donations for a local nonprofit.”

“The idea is to make money for—” Mal said, but Olivia cut him off.

“Let’s talk about it,” she said. “Vee, come up to my office after lunch.”

Vee blushed. “I don’t know how to organize something like that. It was just an idea.”

“And it’s a good one. I want to explore it some more, flesh it out a bit, then come back to everyone so we can see who wants to be involved. You won’t have to take this on, getting it organized will be my job. Okay?”

Vee nodded, and Olivia asked if anyone else had thoughts about events the club could put on, but no one else had anything near as good as Vee’s suggestion. At least as far as I was concerned.

The meeting broke up soon after, and Maria and the queens headed out for lunch as did most of the go-go boys. Vee hung back, and I knew he wanted to talk with me about the storeroom, so I nodded my head down the hallway and told Toby I’d forgotten something I needed for one of the new drinks I was envisioning. He nodded and waved me on my way, a lazy smile on his face.

We’d already sampled a couple of my new drinks, and I’d been right in my suspicions: the alcohol on the shelves had been watered down. The bottle of Belvedere I’d brought from the storeroom was, as far as I could tell, unopened and full strength, while the bottle behind the bar hadn’t had quite the same burn to it. In a mixed drink, it was almost undetectable, but if I were to pour it neat, the customer would probably notice. It likely meant someone was skimming off a couple of bottles at a time and watering down the open bottles so the loss wasn’t as obvious. It was one of the easiest dodges to pull off in bartending, but having full bottles of premium alcohol go missing would also explain why the bar seemed to be losing money on the drinks. If this was happening with all our top shelf brands, we could be losing thousands of dollars. I was going to have to keep a much closer eye on what was happening with the liquor.

Once inside the storeroom, I scanned the shelves again while I waited for Vee. In addition to finding out why the hell he was camping out at Illyria, I needed to know if he had moved the boxes around or if someone else had. If he hadn’t moved them, I needed to know who had because that was probably going to be the person skimming alcohol. That Vee had seen something while he was sleeping in the storeroom was too much to hope for, but I’d ask that anyway and cross my fingers he could tell me.

Vee arrived a few minutes after me, sliding through the door as quietly as he could. I had to give the kid credit. He walked up to me, meeting my eye, and apologized.

“I know I shouldn’t have been sleeping at the club,” he said. “It was just going to be temporary. Until I could find another place.”

He glanced down at the floor, biting his lip, and I noticed the glassy sheen to his eyes. Vee was fighting back tears, and he suddenly looked so lost and alone that I wanted to take him into my arms and soothe him.

“What happened?” I asked, keeping a tight rein on my control. Sleeping at Illyria wasn’t allowed no matter what the reason, but I knew living in San Francisco was hard.

“My roommates ditched me,” Vee said, still staring at the floor. “They took my money and anything they might sell and took off. I don’t have enough to rent a new place on my own.” At that he snorted and shook his head. “And I don’t know enough people to find a room I can afford. I thought if I could be here for a few days, I could figure something out.”

It was my turn to snort. At Vee’s pay rate, it was going take him months to come up with enough for a deposit and first month’s rent. “How long have you been in SF now?” I asked.

“About four months now.”“Long enough to know how impossible that was going to be.”

“Yeah. But I don’t have anywhere else to be,” he said, his voice so quiet it was like it had shrunk inside him.

I knew in that moment what I was going to do, but I needed to ask my questions first.

“Did you move the boxes around or did someone else do that?”

“It wasn’t me,” Vee said. “I was trying to make it look like I wasn’t here.”

I nodded because that made sense. “When you were in here at night, did you see anyone come into the storeroom?”

Vee shook his head, and frustration welled up in my heart though I knew it would have been too easy for him to have seen who our resident thief was. And, yeah, I knew I was taking a big leap of faith that Vee wasn’t lying through his teeth. I believed the kid didn’t have it in him, and he looked so miserable, I was pretty certain he wouldn’t have done anything to screw up having a roof over his head.

“There is one thing,” Vee said, his gaze flicking up at me.

“Yeah?”

“I saw Mal up in Olivia’s office the other morning.”

“That’s not—”

“It was at five thirty. No one else was here. And no one else gets here that early. Ever.” He shrugged when I didn’t say anything, then continued. “I usually wait until Olivia arrives at one, and then sneak out to get something to eat and come back when my shift starts. But I’d gotten up to pee, and Mal was in her office. I thought I was going to get caught.”

My mind was whirling, but one thing struck me as odd. “Weren’t you worried about the motion sensors?” I asked. Our alarm system was set with motion sensors for the dance floor, the stairs to Olivia’s office, and the hallway to the storeroom. Vee sculking around after the alarm had been set by Olivia or Mal at the end of an evening should have set it off.

Vee shook his head. “I overheard Festus talking to Mal about it. They’ve been out for months, and he was complaining that Mal hasn’t called the company to get the system worked on.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I growled. “And I suppose the code on the storeroom door doesn’t work either.”

The grin Vee gave me was in stark contrast to his earlier expression of fear. “It wasn’t that difficult to figure out. It’s the same code as the dressing room.”

I laughed, but it was bitter and full of disbelief. Fucking Mal. “All right,” I said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ve got an extra bedroom in my place. It’s not much, more like a glorified closet, but it’s yours if you want it.” I raised a hand as Vee opened his mouth, refusal written all over his face. “And don’t even try to tell me you can’t accept it.” I waved at the storeroom. “You absolutely cannot stay here anymore. I know about it, and I can’t let you sleep here. You don’t have anywhere else to go, you said that yourself, and I’m not about to throw you out on the street.”

While all that was true, Olivia would also kill me if she found out that Vee was on the street and I could have prevented it. That was at least part of why I was offering him a place to stay. The way she looked at him told me everything I needed to know about how she felt, so I wasn’t about to let him sleep rough. The other part, if I was being honest, was because I actually liked the kid. He was na?ve to the point of being a danger to himself, but he worked hard and was a genuinely nice person.

So, I accepted his thanks and chalked his discomfort up to not being used to people taking care of him. Given his most recent experience with his roommates, I figured I wasn’t too far off the mark.

Vee came home with me after our early shift. He wasn’t working that night, but I was, so that gave him a lot of time to settle in and get used to my place. Not that there was a lot to get used to. I lived in a fairly standard two-unit Victorian about a block away from Delores Park. Two bedrooms, one bath, and a nice deck off the kitchen since I had the upper unit. It took less than two minutes to give Vee the tour and show him where he’d be sleeping. The smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms was so narrow it only fit a twin bed, but there was a closet, a dresser, and a slim table next to the bed that doubled as a nightstand.

“It’s not much space,” I said as I pushed open the door for him and let him enter first.

With a shrug, Vee turned in a circle in the middle of the room, and then lowered his backpack to the floor. “But there aren’t any roommates to steal my stuff,” he said. “So, it’s better than what I had before.”

“Definitely. If it would make you feel better, you can install a lock. I won’t be offended if you do.”

“Nah.” Vee stopped turning and faced me. He stood with his feet apart, arms crossed over his chest, and took me in with a steady gaze. “I trust you,” he said. “The folks at Illyria have been really good to me.”

The expression that crossed his face was the same I’d seen earlier in the storeroom when he thanked me for offering up my spare room. Again, I wondered if he wasn’t used to people being nice to him or lending a helping hand.

“And just so we’re clear,” I said. “I’m not expecting anything in return except for some help with the utilities and food until you get back on your feet. Okay?”

Vee shifted on his feet and nudged his backpack with the toe of his cowboy boot, then nodded. A faint blush tinged his cheeks, but he covered it by reaching for the pack and picking it up.

I knew he didn’t have much in there, but I figured I’d give him some time, so I told him I’d be in the kitchen making coffee. “You’re welcome to join me in a cup on the deck once you’ve gotten moved in.”

The comment made Vee laugh, which I’d been hoping for. “I’ll be done before you,” he said. “Those assholes didn’t leave me with much.”

I nodded. “Maybe we can go through my closet later. I’ve got some shirts that’ll probably fit you better than they do me.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No, I don’t.” I smiled at him. “But I want to.”

Vee smiled back at me, and I lost myself for a moment in his big, blue eyes. Dressed in a dusty blue T-shirt that matched his eyes and highlighted the muscles in his chest, Vee looked…amazing. When he licked his lips, I had to look away. Ever since our dance together, I’d been hyperaware of him, and now I’d brought him into my home. Awesome. Good thinking there, Bastian!

I cleared my throat and clapped my hands together. “Right. Coffee.” And spun on my heels to retreat to the kitchen before Vee could say anything more.

In the kitchen, I braced my hands on the counter and tried to get myself under control. I did not ask this attractive young man to live in my house so I could perv on him. Finding out that he’d been sleeping in the club’s storeroom had horrified me, and not just because it was a violation of the health code, and Illyria didn’t need any more issues. No, it had horrified me because I knew how easily he could be desperate enough to do something stupid and potentially life-threatening to stay in the city. And yes, that was personal experience talking.

San Francisco could be unforgiving if you didn’t have some kind of safety net to keep you from falling to a deeper level of hell than you ever knew existed. Antonio had been my salvation, now I was paying it forward by holding out a chance for Vee to survive here without losing any of that wide-eyed innocence that made him so irresistible to Illyria’s customers.

Before I’d even set up the coffee, Vee walked through the doorway into my kitchen.

“You okay?” he asked. “I can go somewhere else if you—”

“I’m fine, and don’t even think about it. You’re staying here, and that’s the end of the conversation.” Arms still braced on the counter, I glanced over my shoulder and tried to muster a smile that would reassure him. Based on the way he took a step back from me, I didn’t think I’d succeeded, but Vee was simply turning his attention to the coffee maker.

“Coffee sounded really good,” he said.

I shook my head and straightened up. I was being an idiot. “Mugs are in the cabinet to your left, pods in the drawer beneath the machine. You’re welcome to anything that’s in here. Safeway’s walkable if you want to grab something I don’t have.”

Vee opened the cabinet and pulled out a mug. “Considering I’ve been living on twenty-five cent ramen packets and fruit from the bar for the past month, I’ll be fine.” He gestured with the mug. “Do you have a favorite?”

Shaking my head, I stepped out of his way. It was a tight fit with the two of us in the kitchen, and all my senses were on alert because of Vee’s proximity. His bare arm brushed against mine, and the brief contact left me reeling. His scent was a mixture of musk and vanilla: sweat from his earlier dance practice and the lingering trace of his aftershave. I remembered those heady scents from when we danced together, and the ghost of how his body felt pressed against mine had me getting out of there before I did something that would put the lie to my altruistic intentions.

I went to the bay window that overlooked Guerrero Street and tried to get myself under control with deep breaths. The only person who had ever affected me like this was Olivia, and I hadn’t ever expected to feel this way about someone else, especially not someone who was as masculine as Vee. I considered myself pan because I really was more concerned with the person than what they were wrapped in, but truth be told, cis guys had never done it for me the way fem twinks and nonbinary, androgenous humans had. Even though my list of hookups included many of them, that was mostly a matter of supply. Cis guys were a dime a dozen, especially at a club like Illyria which is where I found most of my partners.

“How do you take your coffee?” Vee called from the kitchen.

“Black.”

“No creamer or sugar?”

The disbelief in his voice was evident, and I wondered if I was going to find flavored creamer in my refrigerator by the time I came home.

“Here.” Vee handed me a mug of coffee so fresh the steam was still rising off it. “You know they say only psychopaths drink their coffee black. Should I be worried?”

I took it from him with a wink, and then moved to the couch to sit down. Vee remained standing at the window. This stretch of Guerrero wasn’t that interesting, but the rent had been affordable, and it was within walking distance of Delores Park, Illyria, and the center of the Castro. But Vee was staring at it as if it were paradise. He turned to look at me, and my breath caught at the sadness in those beautiful blue eyes.

“The view’s better than what I had before,” Vee said. “Not the storeroom, but the squat. I’ll probably be able to sleep better here as well.” He shook his head as he turned back to the window. “I’m really grateful to be here, Sebastian. And not just here. Everyone at Illyria has been so good to me.”

It was the second time he’d said that about the people who worked at Illyria, and in the same wistful tone.

“How’d you end up in SF?” I asked. It wasn’t like me to pry, but I was curious, and if we were going to be living together, I wanted to know more about him.

Vee moved away from the window and sat down in one of the chairs opposite me. “Not much to tell. Came out to my folks. Dad hit the roof. Mom didn’t say anything. Brothers said they knew it all along and didn’t want a…well, they didn’t want me as a brother anymore.” He shrugged. “They started hassling me over everything, and Dad gave me an ultimatum: stop being gay or leave. So, I left. About the only place I could think to go was here, and it took almost all the money I had to buy a bus ticket.”

“Sorry about your folks,” I said. “That’s shitty, but you’ll find a lot of guys who have the same story.”

“I know.” Vee sipped his coffee. “What about you?”

“San Francisco born and bred.”

“It must have been nice growing up in such a queer-friendly place.”

I laughed. “You’d think, huh? But ‘gay’ is still a taunt kids throw at each other on the playground, and it’s not in a friendly and supportive way. Although…” I smiled at the memory that had come to the forefront of my mind. “The mom of one of my middle school friends was great. She heard my friends tossing around ‘gay’ like it was the worst thing ever and told us that, given statistics, at least one of us in that group was going to be gay or bi, and that what we were doing could be making it harder for them to recognize it. Plus, it would be harder for them to come out, and if we wanted to stay friends, we should be supportive of each other. She also told us it pissed her the hell off to hear us using the word as a slur since she was queer as fuck.”

Shaking my head at the memory, I said, “I had no idea at the time she was talking about me, but when I had to write an essay in high school about what I’d like the world to be like in five years, she pulled me aside to ask if I’d been able to come out to my friends yet. She knew damn well I hadn’t, but I’d been struggling with that essay, and when she said that, I knew what I wanted to say. Got an award for that essay from some contest, actually.”

“Are you still friends with those guys?”

“Two of them. Most of us went to different high schools and lost touch, though some of us ended up at the same school. You’ll meet Liam and Josh at some point. They’re regulars at the club.” I wiggled my eyebrows at Vee. “Turns out, we were a bit ahead of the statistical average.”We both laughed, then drank our coffee in companiable silence.

Before I left for my shift at Illyria, I showed Vee how to work the TV and get on the internet, and reminded him that he was free to eat anything he wanted in the fridge. Then I was on my way, head full of Vee as I followed the familiar streets to the club.

When I got to Illyria, I discovered that Toby had stayed and finished up all the prep work for the bar. Monday nights were relatively quiet, but there would always be a crowd of people to watch the girls perform, so we still needed to be prepared.

As I stood behind the bar polishing glasses, it occurred to me that I had the time to do the inventory again. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t occur to me that something had changed from the time I left this morning after the meeting to now, but these were not ordinary times and something was definitely going on.

I’d made marks on the bottoms of all the bottles and taken screenshots of the inventory spreadsheet with how much was left in each bottle on the shelf as well as the number in the storeroom. Though I’d hoped to find everything exactly as I’d left it, almost all the top shelf bottles had been “swapped” for full bottles from the storeroom. I suspected they’d been refilled with either water or cheaper alcohol, even though a full bottle had been taken from the inventory. At least I had a better idea of how we were losing money on drinks even though the club was full most nights.

I took screenshots of the new spreadsheet tallies with the intension of talking to Olivia about my suspicions, but before I could head to her office, Maria wandered in and plunked herself down at the bar. She was dressed down for the day, which made sense. When she was the MC for the drag show, she appeared as the drag king, Dick Pics, a nod to her pre-transition self. I didn’t know much of Maria’s story, but she had an edge when she was Dick that she didn’t have at other times. Most AMAB trans folk I knew distanced themselves from that part of their identity, but Maria had turned it into comedy and taken power from the way Dick was a character she portrayed, a costume she could take off when she was done with the show.

“What’s new, hot stuff?” she asked as I passed her a bottle of water.

“Nothing much.” I picked up another highball glass and resumed polishing off any spots left from the dishwasher.

“Hm. Not what I heard.” Maria’s smile was lascivious.

“And what does that mean?” I asked even though I knew I shouldn’t engage.

Maria nodded at Toby as he returned from lunch and lifted the bar pass to join me.

“A little bird told me you left with the delectable young Vee in tow.”

I rolled my eyes and turned to Toby. “I suppose you were the little bird.”

Toby didn’t even bother to deny my comment, just gave me a crooked smile and picked up another glass.

“He needed a place to stay,” I said. “Roommates robbed him blind and took off while he was working, leaving him with no way to cover his next month’s rent. I was doing a good deed.”

“Yeah, you’re a boy scout for sure,” Maria said. “Just be careful with him, okay? The boy looks at you like you hung the moon.”

“The boy is definitely hung up,” Toby agreed.

“Or down,” Maria countered, and the two of them were off with their puns about being hung and well hung and…I mostly tuned them out until they turned their attention to me and wondered if I was hung well enough to satisfy Vee, and if Vee might be suffering from a hangover the next time they saw him.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, but their banter had reminded me of something. I leaned toward the bar and motioned them to come close. “This doesn’t go any further,” I said. “Vee could get into serious trouble if Mal found out he’d been sleeping in the storeroom for the past several days. That’s why I took him back to my place.”

They both nodded in agreement.

“Our lips are sealed,” Maria said. She started to lean back, but I motioned her to stay close.

“There’s more,” I said and dropped my voice even lower. “Vee says Mal came in early one day and was snooping around in Olivia’s office. He also says he overheard Fest talking to Mal about the security camera in the hallway to the storeroom not working. Which wouldn’t be as troubling, but someone’s been stealing bottles of our top shelf brands.”

“You know Illyria isn’t paying you to stand around like a bunch of gossiping teenagers,” Mal’s voice rang out, echoing in the empty club.

Startled, I nearly dropped the glass I’d forgotten was in my hands.

“No, it doesn’t.” Maria looked over her shoulder at Mal. “We just throw it in as a free bonus.”

Mal threw her a sour look and stomped his way up the stairs to Olivia’s office.

“He’s getting worse,” Toby said, and I nodded. I had my suspicions about who was stealing from the storeroom, but I’d need more than just conjecture to prove it.

Maria said nothing but the contemplative look on her face told me she was plotting something. Her silence was a bit unsettling.

“What are you thinking?” I asked her.

“I’m wondering how to get Olivia to see him for who he really is and expose his snooping.” She turned on her stool to face us. “What does Mal want more than anything? What does he think he’s owed?”

Toby and I glanced at each other. “To own Illyria,” we both said, and Toby added, “Or at least be Olivia’s partner.”

“Right. What if we could convince him that she’s going to do that?”

“I like where this is going,” Toby said. “How would you do it?”

Maria tapped an index finger against her lips. “If he’s snooping the way Vee says he is, then we should give him something to find. Maybe an email between Olivia and her lawyer talking about a partnership agreement with Mal.”

“And if that email outlined some task Olivia should give Mal as tests of his fitness as a partner…” Toby grinned, and I nodded.

“It shouldn’t be anything that would put the club in jeopardy, though,” I said. As much as I wanted Mal to be taken down a peg or two, I didn’t want Olivia to have to pay the price.

“Of course,” Maria said. “I’ll put some thought into what we can do and then run it by you two before I put it into action. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, and my thoughts turned to what it would be like to work at Illyria without Mal breathing down my neck all the time.