Levi spent the next few days alternating between abject despair, embarrassment, and mortification at his own actions. It was bad enough that he'd abandoned Sally to Erwin's mercy and she had probably breathed her last in the passenger seat of Erwin's car. Granted, the leather seats had been very clean the last time Levi had seen them, and Sally had survived the ride into work on the filthy subway, but it didn't make him feel any better about leaving her behind. He felt like Kate Winslet in Titanic (which he'd seen a total of 34 times) or like Mel Gibson in Casanova (which he'd seen only 10 times, owing to the fact that he found Leonardo DiCaprio much more fanciable). He woke up every morning and stared very hard at the empty corner of his kitchen pantry that Sally had previously occupied, her charger dangling from the wall, empty and abandoned. He'd dragged his old mop out of retirement (her name was Gretchen) and had swabbed his entire apartment, furiously staring at the floor and trying not to pout.
Even Chris Evans' latest photoshoot had done nothing to cheer him up. He flicked through the pictures on his laptop listlessly, but not even the actor's lovely face could distract him from his misery. It didn't help that he'd grown a beard that made him look quite like a lumberjack, which Levi was not a big fan of, and he'd been forced to scroll back to a few other photoshoots where he appeared sans facial hair. More irritating was the fact that Erwin's face kept popping up in his mind when he went back to the earlier photoshoots, because Levi had decided it was time to be well and truly honest with himself and acknowledge the fact that clearly tall, well-built, blonde men were not all too uncommon, and it had been just a matter of probability that he'd run into a Chris Evans lookalike sooner or later.
And if Levi was being very, very frank, he did find the professor attractive, in his own pocket-protector, Norse-mythology kind of way. He'd even gone so far as to scrawl on the back of his Chris Evans' wallet-sized photograph a little scribble of Erwin's name.
He found himself craning his neck over the counter, standing up on his tiptoes every time the entrance bells jangled, simultaneously hoping it was him and fervently praying that it wasn't him. The week wore on without a single sighting of Erwin, and Levi slowly but surely began to go mad, wondering if the professor was avoiding him on purpose.
He holed up in a corner of the stockroom during his breaks, clutching the canister of chai spice to his chest and rocking back and forth, staring at the coffee filters and extra porcelain cups and running through his head all of the other ways in which his relationship, his very, hideously platonic relationship, with Erwin could have gone. And then this led to him thinking about that one time he hadn't helped that old lady across the street, and the time when his mother had berated him about not going to church more often, and then that other time in school when he'd punched that one guy, and basically went on a mental guilt trip of everything he'd done wrong in his life, as we are all prone to doing at some point in our lives.
He was just getting to his early childhood and regretting that he hadn't drunk more milk as a kid when Zöe stuck her head in, frowned at him, and told him to get out of the cupboard and go and get some fresh air, and oh, he had someone asking for him, that very cute man that had been coming in lately.
Levi almost left fingernail scratches on the wood floor as she dragged him out.
It was almost six in the evening, and the setting sun sent flares across Levi's vision, blinding him and making him squint, haloing the figure towering over him on the other side of the counter in an almost godly aura. If Levi had been religious, he would have been awestruck. However, he was not, and stood there cupping his hands over his eyes and waiting for his vision to return to him.
As it turned out, the vision that greeted him was a far better sight than he'd expected.
The first thing he saw was Sally, looking alive and well and rejuvenated, her Swiffer pad freshly changed and sparklingly white. Her battery indicator was green, and Levi almost cried tears of joy. He reached out to grab for her, but a broad hand grabbed him by the wrist and stayed his hand, and he was left gaping up at none other but Erwin.
"I will be holding Sally hostage," he announced, and Levi readied himself to sink teeth into the man's hand. The nerve of him! - "Until you agree to accompany me to dinner and a film tonight, after your shift."
Levi got ready, tensing the muscles in his legs and wondering if it would be particularly hard to vault heroically over the counter and rescue Sally from Erwin's clutches and run off dramatically into the sunset, but Zöe clearly has other plans for him, and pushes him forward while simultaneously divesting him of his black apron and telling Erwin that it was such a coincidence that Levi's shift happened to end right that minute.
Levi squirmed all the way to Erwin's car, and would have grabbed Sally and made a mad dash for it once they were out of the coffeeshop, but Sally really did have quite a fragile constitution and was not exactly cut out for a life on the run. And besides, it looked as though Erwin had taken decent care of her in the past few days, which raised him a few notches in Levi's opinion.
Currently, Levi's rating of Erwin was hovering somewhere in the 50% range. Which was much farther up the scale than many other beings. Zöe was currently in the negative, right there below zero with Levi's toaster. It had run rampant in the past few days, clearly determined to take advantage of Levi's upset moods, and had set everything in its immediate vicinity to scorching hot. Levi found this out while ripping a paper towel off the roll.
Levi plopped himself into the passenger seat of Erwin's Toyota, and a quick glance to his left showed that Erwin looked almost as nervous as Levi presently felt. Being that he'd already clicked the door locks shut and had driven off into traffic, Levi grabbed Sally's handle for reassurance and tried to calm the rapid thudding of his heart.
It was a "Date," with a capital D, which could also be used to describe a "Disaster," or alternatively, a "Delightful Time," depending on how one looked at it. The movie had been good, not something Levi would have picked out for himself to watch (he was not really a big fan of Chris Pratt), but he'd rather enjoyed Erwin laughing at the film beside him. He had a deep, rolling laugh that Levi thought sounded suitable for a potential leader of the free world (or, what Captain America would have sounded like had he been told a particularly good joke.)
However, dinner was more than a bit awkward. Levi spent most of the time absentmindedly wondering what people talked about on these sorts of things. So far, their conversation had consisted mostly of rapid-fire question and answers, such as "How old are you?" "Have you been out of the country in the past 7 years?" and "What is your blood type?"
The last one, Levi felt, was an incredibly relevant question. Erwin had rolled his eyes and told him through a mouthful of chicken that he was B+. Which, coincidentally, matched Levi's, and Levi felt slightly reassured in that, if something horrendous were to happen, he'd be able to have the opportunity to save/be saved by a Chris Evans lookalike.
He'd pulled out his wallet to pay his half of the bill and had been in the process of sliding his credit card and driver's license out of their slots, when Erwin frantically waved his hand away and told him that it wasn't a problem, knocking Chris Evans' wallet-sized photo fluttering to the ground. Levi was torn momentarily between making a dive for the photograph and forcing a method of payment onto the check, but Erwin reminded him that he'd dropped something, and the thought of Chris Evans' face getting all dirty from carpet that looked like it hadn't been vacuumed in three years set Levi's heart to racing more than it already currently was.
Once he reemerged from under the tablecloth, the waiter was already walking away with the check, and Erwin was smiling that infuriating smile of his at him. Levi glared at him, but the man seemed incapable of being intimidated.
Erwin watched as Levi carefully slotted Chris Evans' photo back into his wallet behind his driver's licence, arched an eyebrow at him.
"A friend of yours?" he asked nonchalantly, having not gotten quite a straight look at the photograph.
"Er," Levi hemmed and hawed, wondering how to answer the question. "Something like that," he agreed, and Erwin's eyebrows furrowed just the slightest. Levi wondered what he'd said wrong.
Erwin sighed heavily as he set in his car to Park in front of Levi's apartment building.
"Perhaps it's my fault, being that I practically forced you into tonight," he admitted. "But I wouldn't had I known you were already...seeing someone else."
Levi, who'd been gazing out the window and thinking that perhaps tonight hadn't been quite so bad, gawked at him. "I am?" he asked, completely dumbfounded by this news.
"Well, the person in your wallet, I'm assuming," Erwin said, slumping over the steering wheel, and Levi felt so bad about it that he even went so far as to tug his wallet out of his pocket and wrest his driver's licence from the plastic slot. He held the picture up for Erwin's inspection.
Erwin looked up halfheartedly, glanced back down at the wheel before suddenly turning back to Levi and clicking on the overhead light. "That's me!" he exclaimed, grabbing the wallet out of Levi's hand and squinting down at the photograph. "Why do you have a picture of me in your wallet?" he asked, looking back at Levi, who was only getting more and more confused by the second.
"That's not a picture of you!" he protested, but Erwin was already sliding the photograph out of the slit and squinting at it in the car's half-light.
"This is definitely me," he said after a few moments. "It even has my name written on the back!"
Levi flushed scarlet, and thought for a half second that he was very likely to pass out from the sudden rush. He would have come up with a retort, but Erwin was already pulling him towards him by the lapels of his jacket, and he opened his mouth to protest, stop, you'll rip it, I'll have you know this is Dior, but his words were lost as Erwin pressed a kiss to his slack mouth.
"You like me," he said, pulling away and shooting Levi a triumphant grin that Levi could see even in the darkness, "you liiiiiiike me."
"I definitely don't!" Levi protested, his hand scrabbling around the backseat for Sally. "Don't be an idiot, I don't like you, I don't like you..."
He chanted this without stopping, even as Erwin hopped out, dragged him out of his side of the car, Sally clutched in his limp hands, marched him past the highly-amused receptionist, pressed him into the lift. He kept on repeating himself and his denials, hoping that even as he pressed the button for his floor and limply lifted keys to unlock his flat, that it would come true.
"I don't like you," he said again, more forcefully, as Erwin pinned him against the inside of his apartment's door, one broad hand wrapping around Levi's wrists and pinning them to the mahogany above his head.
"I don't like you," he mumbled into a moan, his voice breaking as Erwin nibbled kisses into his neck, leaving a little string of strawberry bruises that Levi couldn't bring himself to care about at the present moment.
"I don't like you," he protested, even as Erwin's other hand pushed his jacket off his shoulders and slipped under his shirt, fingers creeping across his skin.
"I don't -" he began, losing his breath halfway through the sentence as Erwin's hand, burning, slid the button of his jeans out of its confines, carefully undid the zip, curled around Levi with a tenderness that had Levi gritting his teeth and throwing his head back into the cradle of Erwin's other hand. He opened his eyes, surprised by the lack of sudden pain, found himself staring up into his eyes.
"I thought you might do that," Erwin explained, smiling, and Levi opened his mouth again -
"I know, you don't like me," Erwin said, with a grin, and kissed Levi again.
Levi woke up the next morning, aching and irritatingly sticky, to bangs and half-hushed curses emanating from his kitchen. He winced as he sat up, looked down at himself, groaned and flopped back down into the sheets at the vast quantity of strawberry kiss marks littered all over his body. The toaster was certainly a master of self-defence and aggression, he rationalised to himself, so the would-be thief would probably have their hands full.
"God," Erwin muttered as he burst into the bedroom, carrying a tray of what actually looked like pretty decent toast and other assorted breakfast items. "Has anyone told you your toaster is demonic?"
Levi rolled onto his side, looked up at Erwin, and stretched out a hand to accept a cup of coffee.
"And for a self proclaimed professional latte artist slash demigod such as yourself," Erwin continued, the mattress dipping as he climbed onto it, "you ought to be ashamed, only having instant coffee mix in your pantry." Levi would have told him that there would absolutely be no eating in bed, but he'd gone to the trouble of making breakfast (his hands sported several burns that were already starting to blister), and the events of the past few hours already broke several of Levi's rules in regards to himself, his conduct, and his cleanliness. The insides of his thighs were sticky and crusty, and he'd definitely have to wash these sheets today, even though it was a Saturday and Saturdays were not laundry days.
"Yes, well," Levi said, sipping at his cup of instant coffee and frowning at its bitterness, "one has to have a bit of humility, it would be far too much to put myself with the gods."
Erwin looked at him incredulously before laughing a bit and offering Levi a piece of perfectly golden toast.
Through crunches of buttery perfection, Levi studied Erwin out of the corner of his eye, and determined that perhaps rules were worth breaking every once in a while.