A/N: For a prompt requesting a CVS AU :)
There was no way in hell he needed more cat food. Special Kitty? Pounce wouldn't touch the stuff. In fact, Pounce wouldn't touch anything that wasn't pre-chewed by majestic griffons and fed to him on a platter made of the bones of his enemies and/or put in the microwave. Uppity little shit.
And yet, somehow Anders was drowning in the stuff. Crinkly green bags had completely overtaken the trunk of his car, threatening to explode with every bump in the road into a shower of faintly-stale fish-flavored confetti. He was singlehandedly keeping the animal shelter in food designed for cats between 5 and 7 pounds. Really, this whole thing was getting out of control.
And yet, without fail - Wednesday night, 9 PM. He'd dealt with the last customer at the drive-thru, turned off the pharmacy lights, locked up all the good stuff, and spent at least two minutes staring at himself under the gross yellow lighting in the staff bathroom, debating whether or not he should try to fix his ponytail. Too obvious? Could he afford to be too obvious? Hell, there was about six days worth of scruff on his face - could he afford not to be?
He did end up fixing it in the end, like every time (but only kind of. As a compromise. Sort of), before clocking out and circumnavigating the store like he was searching for El Dorado in all the jungles of Peru and had never been inside an actual CVS in his life, only to stumble upon the hidden treasure of the pet aisle like he had found the Holy Grail.
Aha! Behold, the glories of the same cat food that he'd purchased every Wednesday night for all of the Wednesday nights that Hawke had worked the register.
Look, the thing about Hawke was –
The thing about Hawke is that Hawke wasn't his name at all, not exactly, even if that's what was on his nametag. It was Garrett. Hot, sexy Garrett who looked like he just slouched/bench-pressed his way out of the latest issue of Happy Trails Weekly (note: not a magazine about pets and/or hiking). It was distinctly possible that the circumference of his biceps was larger than that of Anders' entire head. Anders had no real way of quantifying this of course, but every time Hawke picked something up to scan his arms flexed, and the pecs under his slightly-too-small-in-the-chest-and-shoulders t-shirt moved in a way that made Anders' tongue get stuck somewhere between his teeth.
He had the body of a Marvel superhero and the hair of an art-school dropout and really Anders was just ruined. He even caught Cullen, the store manager, buffing the calculator in his pocket protector within eyeshot of the front counter every once in a while and as far as he knew Cullen was completely straight. The biceps – they were just that good. Coupled with the barest glimpse of the tail end of a red tattoo peeking out beneath a shirtsleeve-
The man wore shirts like he didn't even know what they mean. Anders could barely even bring himself to talk to the guy, just plopped his completely superfluous bag of cat food down on the counter, fumbled for his employee discount card, and tried not to turn seventeen different shades of red when Hawke asked, tongue in cheek and grin across his face, "Did you find everything you were looking for?"