Aeon {Celestial Bodies Book One}

~ dane ~

Dane usually didn't mind working the late shift, mainly because their clientele at Ti Amor was ninety per cent retirees taking advantage of the senior's pasta discount, and they all ate at six o'clock. It meant he got paid for four hours of twiddling his thumbs, chatting shit with the line cooks, and eating the leftover breadsticks from the tables of people who thought they were too good for breadsticks. No one was too good for breadsticks. Breadsticks were too good for them.

But on rare nights when the owner came in, things were much more by the book. Read, boring. Freddie and his wife didn't like seeing staff 'sitting about' when they were paying them to work, even when there was nothing to do; a busboy couldn't bus tables that weren't filled. Maybe they were in denial about the financial pit that Ti Amor was in. Still, hopefully, it would be a couple more months before they realised his job was obsolete in a restaurant that rarely served more than fifteen tables per night. The employment market wasn't exactly booming for college dropouts with no car and visible tats (he had his dad's name on one wrist, an eye on each palm and an adorable little sea serpent he called Hester over his eyebrow – far from the obscenity you would have thought got him rejected for over fifty minimum wage jobs the year before).

So, he'd spent the entire night polishing forks that had already been polished, folding napkins that didn't need folding and generally doing everything he could to appear essential. He didn't know if he'd completely sold it, but Freddie's wife, Edith, seemed charmed by him. Maybe before her husband went bankrupt, she could divorce him and give Dane a roof to live under. He wasn't quite at rock bottom yet, but give him a couple of months, and he'd happily be a sixty-year-old lady's sugar baby if that's what it took to pay off his student loans.

Yeah, he was one of those idiots with student loans for a degree he hadn't finished. Every time he saw a black car, he worried they'd been passed on to some sharks who'd come to his home and break his legs. If he were honest with himself, he wouldn't want to bring that kind of heat to Edith's door. She was a sweet lady.

He was exhausted by the time he locked up shop, pulling up his hood with a cautious eye on the rowdy men lingering on the opposite side of the road. Ti Amor was on a relatively isolated stretch of road but close enough to the city that he often saw drunks wandering, searching aimlessly for a bar that hadn't already kicked them out. As long as they weren't pissing near the restaurant bins or messing with his bike, he couldn't care less what they did; he was well and truly off the clock.

As he strapped his backpack to his bike, he heard a scuffle and, despite his better judgement, looked over his shoulder. The drunks had migrated and were converging on the street corner where one of their own was grappling with a woman, visibly struggling against his hold. She didn't cry out as she fell, her assailant's hand gripping her hair in a closed fist, but he saw her bare knees scuff the pavement, her arm thrown up to defend herself. The part of him that still had faith in the human race quickly died as he realised the two drunks were not intervening but rather helping their friend restrain her as they jeered and whooped.

Dane's chest clenched in concern, and before he could overthink it, he abandoned his bag and bike, jogging down the sideway towards the attack. He shouted at them to back up in the gruffest voice he could muster as the men circled the flailing woman, their laughter mocking her, but if they heard, they ignored him. Cursing and fumbling for his phone, Dane crossed the street, pitching his voice down to a growl as he approached.

"Get away from her! I've called the..."

He didn't get to finish his threats about calling the police before one of the men folded in on himself and hit the floor with a groan. The laughing and jeering stopped abruptly as the man curled around his stomach and whimpered on the pavement. Dane slowed to a stop, stunned to see the woman standing in the centre of her assailants with her feet planted and her fists raised, her mouth a determined line. She swung around and struck again with a disciplined, precise blow to the nose of the one who'd had his hand in her hair, and a loud crack echoed through the night as he went down, too.