que_carajo (que_carajo) wrote in summerview, @ 2019-01-20 16:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | lucas king, miguel de la guardia, ongoing, player: anya, player: mena |
Least of All Possible Mistakes
Who: Mickey & Luke, mentions of Peisinoê (whose fault all of this is)
What: A free (?) bathbomb
When: Sunday morning
Where: La Luna Verde
Rating: Rated E for Embarrassing
Status: Ongoing
He'd barely slept the night before from idiotic nerves, like a kid on the night of Christmas Eve. He tossed and turned for hours before finally rolling out of bed at four in the morning and creeping downstairs on silent sock feet to deep cleanse the shit out of the shop. He felt manic as he re-organized jar placements, re-stacked sachets, polished label plates with a desperate combination of foggy breath and his sleeve cuff, and spent the better part of an hour adjusting the bathbomb display until he wanted to scream with frustration at his own stupidity.
Around seven his grandmother came down the stairs, took one look at Miguel, smudged with dirt and sitting in the middle of the floor, staring off into middle distance with a shell-shocked expression, and promptly slapped him upside the head and banished him upstairs to shower before he scared the morning pedestrians. After a shower, a cup of cafecito, and a short break on the sofa with a chilled towel over his eyes for the swelling (not that he cried in the shower or anything), he felt calm enough to approach this situation a bit more rationally.
This was stupid. This was dumb. This was just...meeting a guy. A potential friend. Whatever expectations he'd built up in his head he'd done all on his own, so this whole episode was one hundred percent on him. So...cool. It was done with. Over. He could approach the rest of the day with that mantra in his head, and brazen his way through the rest of it, no big deal.
For a moment, Mickey actually thought he was going to manage this entire morning without any sort of adolescent romantic meltdown when he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, saw the state of his hair, and promptly freaked the fuck out. About everything.
How was he even supposed to tag this guy out? Luke hadn't given him a selfie to use for identification (or...you know...a phone contact image, and he definitely hadn't stared with middle school-era disappointment at the gray avatar in its place, sighing over the missed opportunity) and he hadn't felt confident enough to press Peisinoê for more details, but--surely she wouldn't pass his number along to a weird Brony neckbeard, not even on her most menstrual of days.
The thought brought him up short. Could mermaids even have…
"Nope," he said aloud, and fumbled a beanie over the catastrophe of his hair with one hand while he pulled her number up on his phone with the other. "Nope."
He nervously finger-combed his fringe into some semblance of order where it peeked out from the beneath the beanie's hem, chanting a quiet "come on come on answer your phone amor" through the dialing tones. He went through a rapid mental rolodex inventory about why this was all, in retrospect, a terrible fucking idea and destined for disaster and had every argument formatted like a thesis. It all immediately vacated his head at Nene's sleepy "hello?"
"Holy shit Nene, I can't do this," he blurted, ducking as low as he could behind the counter, one eye trained on the door. "He's going to think I'm obnoxious and hate me and I'll have to move again out of socially obligated mortification so that I don't have to mercy-kill myself and die and I don't even know what he looks like, what have you done why are you doing this to me I thought you loved me--"
The chimes hung above the door tinkled as it opened, almost hesitantly, and Miguel froze.
"Oh fuck," he whispered.
He hung up as he scrambled upright and shoved the phone into his back pocket. He had about ten seconds to will the flush he could feel building in his cheeks to fuck off, and encouraged it to do so by rubbing his magically chilled palms against his skin. It could totally not be Luke, he argued with himself. But it also could. But they hadn't set an official time or anything. And this wasn't like...a date or anything, so chill out, de la Guardia.
...but it could also totally be Luke.
"Wow," he murmured at his reflection in the counter top as he (fucking finally) managed to pull together a quick facade of calm, "you are so fucking pathetic right now."