Re: Garage: Elijah/Aubrey
Somewhere around the time that Aubrey’s elbow made contact with the countertop and he felt the sodden cold of the air brushing against the exposed skin of his hands, he registered that he was actually feeling it. The cold. He was cold, as in legitimate goosebumps popping up under the layers of wool and button-down. An instinct to frown flickered beneath the veneer, but didn’t yet reveal itself in his expression. Aubrey didn’t get cold these days, not while driving on the highway with the windows down and not when he undressed out in the woods to shift amongst snowdrifts that came up to his shins. But in the dank interior of the garage, he was just this side of uncomfortable in a way that he hadn’t been before crossing the threshold.
Somewhere around the time that the guy behind the counter started to riffle through his rolodex of apoplectic facial expressions, it clicked. Aubrey had been waiting on the wolf’s assessment, which generally came pretty quick via the sensory overload superhighway. But the wolf was quiet. And the wolf was never quiet.
(For example, he would usually have had some choice non-verbal rejoinders about Aubrey’s own propensity for all things loquacious. Instead, all he was getting was that sense of restless pacing, but this time it was more like footfalls heard from behind several feet of concrete. As a test, Aubrey mentally compared it to when the animals at the zoo were locked up in the indoor portion of their enclosures and waited — still, nothing. Maybe the softest hint of a muzzled snarl.)
But the pearly-white smile stayed fixed in place, crooking up a little higher in one corner so that it slid a little closer to this side of a smirk. A corner of the phone (expensive, no case) came up to tap against the middle of Aubrey’s bottom lip as his gaze narrowed in thoughtful scrutiny, before he used the device to gesture in the guy’s direction.
“Can’t get anything by you, can I? You got me. I’m a total junkie for the smell of antifreeze and the adrenaline rush that comes with the risk of getting grease on my Tom Ford cashmere.” He set the phone down on the counter and spun it so that the screen faced the guy right-side up, still displaying the specs of the tires he needed. His fingers came to rest beside it against cool linoleum in a relaxed tent, nary a betrayal of his growing unease at the realization that he couldn’t smell much about the man over the linger of rubber and old oil that he’d have expected to pick out even as a human.
“But hey, while I’m here getting my fix, why don’t you let me know if you’ve got what I need in stock and figure out how much you want to overcharge me with the requisite clueless-layman’s tax? Sound good to you?”