This is an AU series. I decided to try out NaNoWriMo, and the only reasonable way for me was with unrelated AU stories. So please forgive me on technical errors; I've never written so much so quickly before.
Yuuri bobbed his head up and down in time with the music coming out of his headphones while walking through the parking lot of the local supermarket. He pushed ten metal shopping carts in front of him towards the electronic doors, checking for cars and customers along the way. The left door stuck on its track for a moment before following the right door's lead, and Yuuri sharply turned the line of carts so that they would head into the correct lane of the cart corral.
A wave of heat hit him as he passed through the doors, a sharp contrast to the pleasantly cool outdoors. Since the corral was full enough to last another hour or so, he headed to the inside of the store. In most cases Yuuri would have preferred to stay outside. His khaki pants and black polo shirt (the store's uniform, as far as that went) were more than enough to protect him from the "cold" that his manager, a tall and emotional man named Gunter, so desperately despised.
As he expected, while he was stuffing his headphones into his pocket and walking into the checkout area, his manager came running at him and hugged him more tightly than Yuuri thought necessary. He didn't really think any hugging was necessary, but that was just how Gunter showed he cared. But right as the man took a deep breath to start commenting on how pink his ears were, the PA system system beeped and got their attention.
"Guest service manager to register three, please. Guest service manager to register three." As Gunter's grip loosened so he could go, Yuuri spaced out a little bit. That voice was his favorite part of the job. Well, the owner of the voice was, despite how nice the voice itself was. But he was at work now, so he shouldn't just concentrate on how deep and smooth Con- his coworker's voice was. He looked around to see what he should do next, and saw that register three needed a bagger. Coincidence, divine providence. Same thing.
Yuuri sized up his target while he slid into position. The customer was a middle aged woman with a cart about a quarter full of groceries and two small children behind her. Seventy percent chance she didn't care what bags he used, twenty on paper, and ten on plastic. And of course, she would make a comment about not smashing... the eggs? The bread? The potato chips? Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the paper bags up on top were empty. At least that didn't take much time to fix. Now that he had the basics down, he was ready to initiate contact.
"Would you like paper or plastic today, ma'am?" Standing upright: check. Bright smile and cheery voice: check. Direct eye contact: check.
"It doesn't matter, just don't smash my bread. Thanks." Yuuri started scooping up the little that was coming down the conveyor belt. He noticed that a lot of bags were already piled up on the counter thanks to the dutiful cashier.
He'd been at the lane for over thirty seconds now, so it was about time to acknowledge him too. The bagger-cashier exchange during busy hours was pretty standard, and today was no exception.
"Hey Conrad." he offered.
"Hey Yuuri." came back. There was the voice again. Yuuri felt a small shiver run up his spine. He could avoid eye contact for a while, but he couldn't just close his ears. He handed the bag containing the bread directly to the woman and bid her farewell with half a mind. The other half was still spinning, repeating the "hey Yuuri" over and over and over. Hopefully he'd learn to concentrate soon, or this job wouldn't last too long.
A month later it was Thanksgiving. Being the busiest day of the year for a grocery store (according to his friend Murata anyway), the majority of the part time staff of the store would be working to man all the registers from early morning until late afternoon. Much to Yuuri's delight, Conrad was one of the many selected to work. It was the first time they'd been scheduled together in that long month, not that Yuuri was counting. He supposed it was natural when his parents didn't want him working school nights and Conrad worked, well, pretty much just weekday nights. Not that Yuuri was checking the master schedule to see when Conrad worked. And he wasn't in denial at all.
He got to the store ten minutes before his shift started and realized he had nothing to do. All of the members of the deli department were eating lunch up in the break room, and while they seemed nice a lot of the time, they'd called him "fresh meat" a few too many times for him to be entirely comfortable around them. So instead he found himself loitering near the front desk, waiting for it to be close enough to two o'clock him for to clock in.
Yuuri quickly swiped his card when he saw Conrad walking towards the clock despite it being seven minutes too early. There were two empty lanes, but all of the lanes with cashiers also had baggers already. He knew it wouldn't be a long term solution, but he walked over to one of the slower baggers and started helping him out. He thought he was safe, but then the day's manager (a perpetually disgruntled looking older man named Adalbert) barked at him.
"Mike! Yuuri! I don't need two of you on one lane. One of you go over to Conrad." Mike whined quietly about how he got to Laura first, so Yuuri had to go deal with the fast checker. Fearing his manager's over-muscled forearms more than dealing with looking at Conrad, Yuuri made his way over to the lonely cashier.
Stupid Conrad clocking in early too, he thought. There weren't any customers yet, so he opened his mouth for the formulaic greeting. He spoke out at the same time as Conrad, though, so he missed getting to hear the voice talking to him. Oh well. At least it'll be so busy today that I won't have to worry about making small talk with him.
Just then, a customer walked up. It was a man in his late twenties talking animatedly on a cell phone, pushing one cart that was overflowing with groceries and pulling another cart behind him. He looked at Yuuri and preemptively made his bagging request. "Smash the bread, whatever, I don't care. Just go fast."
Yuuri hadn't encountered someone like that before, so he looked up at Conrad questioningly. That was a mistake though. He'd been carefully restricting his Conrad intake to peripheral vision and the samples of his voice that came while he conversed with the patrons. The full on frontal assault of Conrad images- his mile wide smile, his slightly disheveled hair, his crisp collar on his white dress shirt, the hint of muscles revealed on his forearms below where his cuffs were rolled up- almost made him forget what he was supposed to be doing.
He continued staring at Conrad, hoping for some guidance, but what he heard didn't help.
"I heard you can take it fast...?"
I'd take it so fast... wait. Wait. Oh, the customer asked us to go fast. I think. "It's not like there's much choice when Yozak's the cashier." Yuuri finally got out. He swore the redhead had a vendetta against him or something. Maybe Yozak was mean to all the new guys, but every time Yuuri bagged for him, he had to stay at full alert. Otherwise, the food coming down the conveyor belt would inevitably push something off the edge of the counter or into the bread. Even a cashier on his first day would know to put down the eggs after the cases of soda cans and not before.
"Good man," Conrad let out with a trace of a smirk.
Yuuri didn't know if Conrad meant him or Yozak, but his pondering was cut off when Conrad started to move. He was fast. Yuuri thought Yozak was fast, but this just made Yozak look lazy. The cashier's arms were moving independently yet in synch. The right searched through the items within reach on the belt for the next item to scan, and the left rotated the food to the correct angle to read the bar code and then placed it on the belt. Half of the items that went through the process actually flew through the air from one hand to the other, but they all ended up properly on the second belt going to Yuuri. After a couple seconds, Yuuri realized that Conrad was as precise and considerate to his bagger as he was fast. He was particularly searching out items that he knew should go together in the bags, and the way the items ended up on the second belt was always the easiest way for Yuuri to pick them up.
Yuuri felt like he was drowning with how far the food had backed up, but he was impressed with Conrad's sense of teamwork. Any time the man couldn't scan anything else due to the backup, he stepped over and helped Yuuri fill a couple of bags. And sometimes he seemed to reach extra far to grab for some produce; he would turn and flash Yuuri a smile while waiting for the scale to measure the produce's weight. It was exhausting trying to keep up, but he thought more about Conrad than about the paper burn his forearms were developing from all the paper bags. Conrad was a beautiful cashier.