Crusading Brethren- Chapter 2- There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch by debutante9 ()

title: Crusading Brethren
pairing: J/E
description: A romantic workplace comedy ficlet
author's note: Another update, can you believe it?

Ennis had looked on the same four shelves three times and still didn’t see the sandwich from Subway that he had picked up that morning.

“Who ate my lunch?” he asked the water cooler.

Glug, glug.

He was about to give up, but he stood paralyzed in front of the open refrigerator. He didn’t feel like going out into the dynamic, sunlit world that went on without him while he was boxed into a portable holding cell. He hardly ever left the building for lunch because it was always too hard to come back.

Ennis heard voices approaching from the hallway. He could tell that one of them was Dolly, a tall redhead that he had considering dating for about 10 minutes until he remembered that girlfriends usually interfered with gaming and his sanity in general. Then there was the fact that women didn’t really do anything for him, but no dating meant endless questions at Thanksgiving and an empty space on his desk where a cute picture might otherwise be. He was fine with his photo-free desk on most days, but there were times when he thought it would be nice to get candy and sex on Valentine’s Day instead of falling asleep on top of a bag of Tostitos.

“Hey, Ennis,” Dolly said. “Did you meet Jack already?”

Jack waved at him from behind Dolly. He had on the same outfit as the other day with a different plaid shirt. And he was smiling. What the hell was there to smile about? Didn’t anyone tell him that this was work, and that happiness ended in the employee parking lot where you left your soul inside the car with the broken umbrella and the ice scraper?

“Hi, Ennis. I was looking for you to see if you wanted to go to lunch. Tuesday has double coupons at the Mexican place and you get a free dessert.”

“Ennis doesn’t go to lunch,” Dolly replied, putting her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “He prefers to sit at his desk and scowl over a cold sandwich.”

“Well, looks like I won’t even be doing that today because somebody stole my lunch,” Ennis barked, slamming the refrigerator door shut.

“What did it look like?” Jack asked.

“It was a Subway sandwich, still in the wrapper and plastic and all,” Ennis sighed.

“Oh, well if it was a 12 inch ham and cheese on Italian with lettuce and tomatoes a dash of hots and one line of mayo, then Yoko ate it.”

“What?!” Ennis exclaimed, whirling around. “How do you know?”

“Because she was eating it while she was reading the Strategic Plan out loud to me. I could have just read it myself but maybe she used to be a kindergarten teacher?”

Dolly and Ennis looked at each other.

“Mystery solved, I guess. Could always head for the vending machine.” Ennis started digging in his wallet for loose bills.

Jack folded his arms. “Why don’t you just tell her she ate your sandwich? She owes you an apology, at least.”

“Pfft,” Ennis snorted. “Not worth it, I try to spend as little time around her as I can, plus she’ll probably deny it and make it look like my fault that my lunch disappeared.”

“I vote for saying something, because that shit was lame,” Dolly said, pointing at Ennis. “Just because she signs your check doesn’t mean she gets to eat your food. Hey Jack, if you’re gonna be around tonight, I’ll get the rest of that stuff out of the storage space, ok?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll be home. I have a certification exam coming up that I need to study for.”

“See ya later, Ennis, good luck with the whole missing lunch thing.”

Jack watched Dolly leave. “Man, she is gorgeous. I heard she used to be stripper,” Jack whispered.

“Have you even been here long enough to be gossiping? How do you know her anyway?”

Jack filled a white paper cone with water. “I’m buying her condo. She scored some big job in New York, that’s how I got this position. I didn’t think anything was going to pan out here after 3 months, but then, bam! Yoko called me and life is good.”

Ennis rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna go get some more change out of my desk.”

“If you want, I’ll ask her about it, I don’t care,” Jack said, heading for the door of the galley.

“Ok, no, stop. I’ll…fine, I’ll talk to her, just be quiet or something.”

Jack gave him the thumbs up and Ennis walked into the hallway towards Yoko’s office. It wasn’t that he was afraid of her; he just didn’t like speaking to her at all. Everything out her mouth was a policy, a line item, or a bullet point from a PowerPoint presentation that he had pretended to listen to while reading a comic book on the inside of his Right Type portfolio. He felt like she was trying to get him to join a cult except he that already spent 40 hours a week there. Did the guy who swept the church have to take communion, too?

As Ennis passed by his coworkers’ desks, he took pride in the fact that no one bothered to speak to him. At 24, he was the youngest in the company and therefore unworthy of attention because he hadn’t wed, spawned, or made it out of the ghetto of cubes and into the suburbs of windowless offices.

Yoko was sitting in front of the remains of his sandwich, pouring her diet Pepsi into a glass. She didn’t drink out of cans and she had her own personal dishes that she kept in her office.

“I’m at lunch,” she said, looking up briefly.

“I see,” Ennis remarked. “Thing is, that’s uh…my sandwich.”

Yoko stared into the green and white paper. “You didn’t label it or anything.”

Ennis took a deep breath. “True, but it was wrapped and still in the bag, and you know that you didn’t buy it, so how could it be yours?”

“There was a Director’s meeting yesterday that I missed because I went to get my eyebrows done, so I thought it was leftover from that because they get Subway trays most of the time. But listen, my bad Ennis, I’ll pay you back.”

“No,” Ennis said, “you don’t have to…”

Yoko wiped off her hands and took her huge, red leather purse down from the back of the door. She took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Here, I shouldn’t have eaten it. Why don’t you go out with Jack? That boy needs a friend. I mean, he knows his stuff but I’m surprised that fool finds his way to work every day because he acts like he used to ride the special bus to school, you know what I mean?”

Ennis looked down at the twenty and slid it from Yoko’s hand. “Yeah, guess the young computer guys need to stick together.” Ennis had no idea what he was saying but he needed to make some words come out, even if he had no power over which words they turned out to be.

“Tell me about it! Did you know Jack is only 22? Graduated from college early, go figure. Anyway, close the door behind you because I need to call Human Resources about the temp I fired last week. I want to make sure she doesn’t get paid since I heard she spent most of her time asleep in the file room. Did that nappy-headed ho think I wasn’t going to find out about it?”

Indeed, Ennis had witnessed the nappy-headed ho napping between file cabinets. But he sympathized with her. Hell, he was more likely to put a blanket over her than turn her in.

Ennis found Jack’s cube outside of Dolly’s office. He had been at Right Type for 2 years and the only thing on Ennis’s wall was a map of the building and instructions on how to evacuate in the case of a national disaster. Jack’s cube walls were covered with comic art, a Lord of the Rings calendar, and pictures of dark haired, blue-eyed people.

Jack rolled toward Ennis in his chair. “How did it go?”

Ennis held up the twenty-dollar bill. “Get your coupons, looks like we’re going to lunch.”

********

Ennis had tried to guess which car was Jack’s the week before, and he had narrowed it down to the green Volkswagen beetle or the red Mini Cooper. When Jack unlocked the door of a blue Toyota Prius, Ennis wasn’t surprised. His guesses were close enough; small, cute and likely to be turned into an accordion if it ever collided with a real car.

Jack’s knowledge of the area was impressive; Ennis didn’t know one corporate parkway from another and the street names all started with the same four letters.

“Thought you were going to turn on Crondall Lane,” Ennis muttered as he unbuckled his seat belt.

“You could do that, but it’s quicker to make the left on Cronridge Drive and go around the fountain,” Jack replied.

“The Dynasty of Mexico?” Ennis asked suspiciously, eyeing the sign in front of them.

“Yeah,” Jack said excitedly, “it’s Chinese-Mexican fusion. But don’t worry; they don’t mix all the food together like Kung Pao tacos or anything like that. It’s a huge buffet and you can choose Asian or Mexican.”

“I just wanted Subway,” Ennis sighed.

“Oh…we could have gone to Subway.” Jack stopped walking.

Ennis could see that Jack was waiting for him to say what he wanted to do. He reached into his pocket and felt for the money that Yoko had given him. Jack was a nice person, and that made Ennis feel immediately uncomfortable. There was no evidence of ulterior motives or split personality disorder. He was just the new guy at work trying to make friends with him.

“No, it’s fine, we’re here,” Ennis shrugged.

The inside of the restaurant sounded like a noisy cafeteria and Ennis tried not to let that rattle him.

They dropped their jackets off in a booth and headed for the buffet. Jack handed Ennis a plate and let him get in line first. Ennis didn’t know how much more of this courtesy he could take.

The first section of trays looked like food you would serve at a birthday party for 6 year olds and Ennis suspected he would find something he liked there.

“Smiley face French fries?” Ennis said, poking into the greasy bin with a pair of long, metal tongs.

“Guess they’re out of the frowny face ones today,” Jack quipped.

Ennis cocked his head at Jack who was smiling and piling food on to his plate.

That smile again.

Ennis felt his stomach and groin make some sort of agreement as his scrambled thoughts became less and less appropriate for a lunch buffet setting.

He couldn’t think of a worse time for his homosexual tendencies to start flaring up again.

They were balancing two plates each and there could easily have been a third between all of the choices. Ennis wasn’t sure if any of his food even matched but he was going to try and make a meal out of it once they sat down.

Ennis watched Jack build a masterful fajita and tried to think of something to say.

“So where are you from? Were you born around here in the D.C.-Virginia area?” Jack asked.

Why didn’t he think of that as a conversation topic?

Ennis cut his chicken breast in half. “I was born in Kenya.”

Jack put his fajita down and stared. “Kenya? Like as in Africa?”

Ennis nodded.

“Jeez, that’s so interesting. Why are you African?”

“I’m not…African, I mean…I guess if you look at it that way…”

“Tell me about it, how many years were you there? Do you speak any of their languages?” Jack had stopped eating completely so his hands were free to gesture wildly across the table.

“Let’s see,” Ennis began rubbing his chin. “I was born there because my parents were Pentecostal missionaries, uh…I lived all over that country until I was around 11, and well, we spent more time learning about speaking in tongues than learning any of their words, but I picked up a few, here and there.”

“So your parents still live over there?” Jack asked between sips of his soda.

“No, uh, they…got killed in Rwanda.”

“Holy shit, are you serious?” Jack slammed his cup down on the table. “You’re so fascinating, and now it all makes sense. That’s why you’re so good at Crusading Brethren! All those codes and math and stuff, it probably comes easy to you because you had to figure things out as a kid.”

“I’m not all that fascinating, trust me,” Ennis said, scraping the breading off of his chicken.

“What about the whole religious part, like, are you into all of that now?”

Ennis didn’t really mind Jack’s questions because they weren’t about work or politics. He hated work, and politics had killed his parents, so he hated that, too.

“Not really, it just wasn’t for me. It was like, all the stuff we were doing was so big, how could I be a part of it? I got baptized in a white gown in a river, and it seemed like I should be as important as that ceremony, but I didn’t feel up to it, you know?”

“River baptism, civil war, speaking in tongues? You should write about all of this, Ennis. Very sexy.”

“Sexy?” Ennis smirked.

“I didn’t mean sexy like that,” Jack stammered, “I meant like sexy as in interesting and people would read it, a synonym for compelling, a…”

“I get it,” Ennis nodded. “So, how about you? Yoko said you finished college early or something like that.”

“It’s funny because I thought about going to like a Bible college or something because it was cheap but then I found out most of them aren’t accredited as real schools by any of the regional authorities.”

“So where did you end up going?”

“MIT.”

Ennis dropped his fork and started to laugh, his chest painfully tight as he struggled to breathe.

“What’s so funny?” Jack frowned.

“What is wrong with you? Do you really not know what you sound like? You start off by thinking about going to some church basement academy and then end up at MIT?! That’s like, where astronauts go to school, Jack. You’re hilarious.”

“So, you’re fascinating, and I’m hilarious. Aren’t you glad you took me up on my lunch offer?” Jack folded his coupon into a paper airplane.

“Hmpf,” Ennis said, smiling into his plate.

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