See if I Care!

Nice to See You

A/N: Friday again, so here is chapter 2! Thank you TheCookieMonster for the editing!

Chapter 2: Nice to See You

Lance buckled down with the day's workload. Mark's work was creative and ever changing, while his was routine and often repetitive, but he liked it that way. He didn't want his work to follow him home, like Mark's did. The numbers stayed here, at least most of the time. No one who met him outside of work ever guessed what he did for a living. Number crunching just didn't seem to fit him. He should be an IT consultant of some kind, or maybe even a club owner, not something as dull as an accountant... but he was. He had been surprised himself when he discovered that he was good at math, even liked it, at school. He wasn't that used to being good at anything in the academic world, but this he had grabbed on to. He knew that there was always work in this sector, and why make life more difficult for yourself than it had to be? Dreaming about becoming famous or working with what you loved was just idiotic... 99.9 percent of the time it didn't pan out. In Lance's world there was no such thing as 'the best job in the world'; he knew that almost everyone was bored at work sometimes, even most of the time, no matter what kind of job they had. Very few happily ran to their job in the mornings. But he'd rather have an occupation than to be unemployed. He didn't want to end up like most of his family or worse, earn a lot of money illegally like some of them did. He was lucky though; his closest relatives had always been able to keep their noses just above the water when it came to keeping it on the straight and narrow, if only just... a bit of gambling didn't count, did it? Oh, and some drugs... but only possession. He hoped.

"Hey, have you seen the new HR assistant?" a friend who was walking by Lance's cubicle asked with a wolf whistle a little while later.

"No, but I sure as hell will now!" Lance grinned.

"Nu-huh, I saw her first!" the other man leered back.

"Wanna race, Perez? You know what happened last time!"

"Revenge Berg! Revenge!"

"Pft, you couldn't pick up a hooker," Lance snickered.

"And you should only be picking up twelve year olds with that boy band look of yours. Grow a beard... or can't you?"

"Not all of us have to comb our whole bodies. Ever get mixed up with bigfoot?"

"Ever get mixed up with Justin Bieber?"

"Hey, man, take that back!" Lance gasped, clutching his heart.

"Yeah, sorry," Perez responded. "That was way too low."

"It really was. My day is ruined. Now go, so I can hug my binders and cry on these invoices, okay?"

"Sure, see you around the water cooler. And keep away from the chick. Give someone else a chance, huh?"

"Fine, you'll get a head start then," Lance chuckled and waved him off.

Once the man was out of sight the smile on Lance's face died away. The conversation with Jake that morning had come to mind again. He had tried to pretend it was a joke, but the fact was that more money wouldn't be a bad thing right now, not for himself but for his damn flake of a sister. He loved her, he really did, but he had been forced to harden his heart and not feel responsible for her terrible decisions. And there had been many. He had taken her in several times, driven her to rehab and hospitals. Yelled, talked, pleaded. Nothing had helped. She seemed to be completely determined to do the exact opposite of what anyone told her. He had hoped that she would calm down once Tony was born, and for a short while it seemed to have worked, but then she went off the deep end again. He didn't know what to do, didn't know what the right thing was for her or the kid. He had heard enough horrible stories about foster homes to hesitate about calling the social services, but... if she insisted on having one more child...? He sighed and tried to focus on the numbers on the papers and screen. He felt like he needed to talk to someone, but, for once, Mark wasn't the one. Not when it came to these things.