Schedule Constraints

Schedule Constraints

POV: Rhys

"You're checking your phone every six minutes, Bash."

I didn't look up from my laptop, but I counted the taps of his thumb against the screen. He was sitting at the island, his breakfast untouched, acting like a man waiting for a wire to be cut.

"I'm not checking anything."

"You've turned it over four times in the last ten minutes." I finally looked up, watching him set the phone face-down again like that solved something. "Someone's expecting a text."

"It's nobody."

"You've said that about him twice now. At some point, it stops sounding like nothing and starts sounding like a name you're avoiding."

He didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer. I let it go for the moment, turned back to my laptop, and watched him out of the corner of my eye instead — the way he kept glancing at the counter like the phone might do something on its own if he looked away too long.

He'd been lighter this week, in a way that had nothing to do with anything I'd given him. Humming under his breath while he made coffee. Smiling at his phone before catching himself and wiping the expression clean, like he thought I wouldn't notice the effort it took to erase it.

I finished my coffee and called Miller first. He'd owed me since that mess two winters back — the kind of favor neither of us talked about outright, but the kind that meant he picked up on the second ring when my name showed on his screen.

"Following up on the double," I said. "Julian still on for it tonight?"

A pause longer than I liked. "He is. But Rhys — I already bent the schedule for you once. Guy's starting to ask questions about why he keeps pulling back-to-backs. Nobody else is getting stuck with."

"Let him ask. You don't owe him an answer."

"I don't love doing this twice in one week." Miller's voice had an edge to it. I hadn't heard from him before, something closer to reluctance than the easy compliance I'd gotten the first time. "This isn't a bottomless well, man. I've got a business to run. If corporate catches wind of favouritism on the schedule, that's my job, not yours."

"It won't come back on you. I'll make sure of it." I kept my voice level, reasonable, the tone of someone asking for one more small thing rather than someone leaning on a debt for the second time in a week. "Just the one more push. Closing tonight, opening tomorrow."

He exhaled, long and put-upon. "Fine. Last one for a while, though. I mean it."

I didn't argue the point. There'd be time to argue it later if it came to that. I hung up and made one more call after — to a diner regular I knew casually, someone who worked scheduling software for a living and occasionally answered technical questions over a beer without asking why I wanted to know. Nothing that implicated anyone. Just enough to understand how locked a shift assignment actually was once it went in, and how much friction it would take to move it again without drawing attention.

Julian's shifts had already been changed twice this week, and it hadn't cost me anything to make that happen. Miller's patience had a bottom. I filed that away, unbothered but noted, the way I filed away every constraint I ever ran into. It simply meant the next move needed to be cleaner than the last one.

Bash was still watching me when I turned around, something wary flickering behind his eyes, though he covered it fast, dropping his gaze to his coffee like the surface of it had suddenly become interesting.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

"Work stuff." I crossed the kitchen and set my mug in the sink, close enough now that he had to tilt his head back slightly to keep looking at me. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that. It's starting to sound like something you're trying to convince yourself of." I reached out and straightened his collar, an unnecessary correction, just an excuse to close the last few inches between us. He went still under my hand the way he always did. Some old animal instinct deciding stillness was safer than pulling away. "You keep looking for something outside this house, Bash. What exactly are you missing here?"

"That's not—" He stopped, swallowed, and started again. "That's not what this is."

"Then what is it."

"I don't know. Maybe I just want to know what it's like. Ordinary stuff. Dinner with someone who isn't—" He stopped himself before he finished the sentence, but I heard the shape of the word he hadn't said anyway.

"Isn't me," I finished for him evenly. "You can say it."

He didn't. I hadn't expected him to. I braced one hand flat on the counter beside him, boxing him in without ever technically touching him, close enough that he had nowhere left to look except at me.

"People let you down. I don't." I said it plainly, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. "I've never once needed you to chase me down after I disappeared on you. I've never made you wonder where you stood."

"That's not the same as—"

"Isn't it?" I tilted his chin up with two fingers, just enough to hold his eyes on mine. "Tell me one thing outside this house that's ever been as reliable as I have. One thing that's never once let you fall."

He didn't have an answer. I hadn't expected one. I stepped back before he could recover enough to manufacture some defense, satisfied that the point had landed the way it needed to, and went back to my laptop like the conversation had been nothing more than idle morning talk.

I thought that settled the matter for the week. I finished my coffee, answered a handful of emails, listened to him move around the kitchen behind me, quieter now, subdued in the particular way he got when he was chewing on something he didn't want to say out loud.

I was wrong about it being settled within the hour.

His phone buzzed against the laminate, and this time, I didn't pretend not to notice. I leaned over the counter, my chest nearly touching his shoulder as the screen lit up with Julian's name once more.

Julian: Shift manager threw another double at me for tonight. Doesn't matter. Sunday afternoon, three o'clock at the park. No diner, no work excuses. I'll see you there.

Beside me, Bash stopped breathing entirely. I felt it happen, the sudden stillness of him, the way hope moved through a body like electricity even when the person carrying it didn't want it seen. I kept my hand flat on the counter next to his, my voice barely a whisper against his ear.

"He's persistent," I said, my voice completely flat. "I'll give him that."