Free The Starving Years by Jordan Castillo Price

dream.”
    Tim wished she was home, too. Especially now that he had a flash drive that was practically screaming to be looked at.
    Marianne pushed back from the computer and rubbed her eyes. “Do you have anything to drink—water, even? I feel all shaky and nauseated.”  
    “Oh. Uh, right.” He maneuvered around Randy, slipped behind the kitchen island and took stock of his supplies. Most of his stored manna was in the upper cabinets, where the mice were less likely to get to his stockpile. Marianne wouldn’t be able to reach it, Randy didn’t seem to have any interest in rifling through Tim’s things beyond the medicine cabinet, and Javier wouldn’t be surprised to know Tim had stocked up for emergencies.
    Though right now, in the face of an actual riot, he felt anything but ready.
    What if it had been a bomb? A chemical attack? Water was a really great idea—and coffee, even better. Tim felt shaky and nauseated himself, and making coffee would give him something useful to do with his hands. He opened a lower cabinet. Two mugs. One tumbler. He used to have two tumblers, but his ex had shattered one on the floor to make a point when they broke up. Jackass.
    He dragged out his coffee press and cleared a space for it on the countertop. Caffeine was probably the last thing they needed now, but it was something to do that wouldn’t incriminate him as the Voice of Reason.
    “Is that real coffee?” Marianne asked.
    “It is.”
    “Wow. How long have you been brewing your own?”
    “A few years now. It’s a lot fresher than the stuff you get at a restaurant.”
    “In Colombia,” Javier told her, “near the plantations, the coffee is so fresh you can smell them roasting the beans. It’s so rich you feel like you can drink the air.”
    “Are you Colombian?”
    Tim paused with a carafe full of water hovering over the stovetop to hear the answer. Javier needed to think about the question, he noticed. Or at least think about how he cared to answer it.
    “I’ve done some traveling.”
    “Is it all retro in South America,” Randy asked from under the veg-o-mix, “with cows and chickens roaming around and coconuts falling from the trees?”
    “Not like you see in old movies. No.”
    “But it’s the rise of leisure time,” Randy said sarcastically. “The biggest thing since the Industrial Revolution. Aren’t all the natives dancing around and being all cultural and stuff because they’re not stuck scratching out a living from the land?”
    “Not anywhere I’ve been.”
    Where exactly had he been? He’d never mentioned his travels while they were in the chatroom, and it would have been interesting stuff. Tim had never visited anywhere but the biggest tourist traps: Disneyworld, Vegas, Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls. His parents weren’t particularly creative.
    Javier caught Tim watching him and quickly looked away.
    Tim wanted to be annoyed with Javier, but kept forgetting because he was so damn interesting—and really, wasn’t that what had first drawn Tim to him to begin with? If only he’d mentioned the thing about his eye….
    Javier looked up again, saw Tim was still considering him, and turned away to browse a stack of books beside the door.
    If only.
    Marianne joined Tim behind the counter, drawing his attention from Javier. “Do you do a lot of cooking, too? Your kitchen seems so small—smaller than mine, even.”
    “No, no cooking. Just coffee. It…helps me stay awake when I’m working on projects.”
    Javier sat in the computer chair and began typing. The incriminating chat was gone, and the history was clear. He’d have no way of knowing Tim had revisited their last online rendezvous to blow off some steam. Still, the thought of someone else working on his computer made Tim feel edgy. He reminded himself, as he showed Marianne how to measure the ground coffee into the press, that just last night he’d been dying to have Javier in that very spot—sitting in his chair, touching his