Unresponsive - Joey Quintero, Nico Pontevecchio

Joey flips up the schedule on her clipboard to check the work orders for this building. There’s usually some special requests attached to the cleaning schedules, and tonight is no different. A drink spill in the IT room that left the floor sticky.
“I’ve got the mop duty. You want to deal with the bugs in the light fixtures in the Associate Director’s office?”
“I told him that would go away if he stopped keeping bananas in a bowl on his desk,” Nico mutters. “But yeah.” 
Joey wheels the mop pail down to the janitor closet, adds some tile cleaner solution, and then fills it up partway with the hose attached to the floor-inset sink’s faucet. They’ve been working in this office about a week, and Joey’s already memorized the layout. IT is down the main hall, the third corridor on the left, two doors down. 
She wheels the mop pail down the hall, unlocks the door with the master key on her lanyard, and pushes the bucket and mop inside.
This room is always eerie. There’s 24/7 surveillance monitors up and running, casting a blueish light on everything, the servers hum and occasionally beep threateningly, and the air is always too-warm and stuffy.
She dips her mop into the pail, squeezes out most of the water, and heads for the visibly icky spot on the tiles near workstation 4. 
“Thank goodness. I almost tripped on that when I came in.”
The voice startles her, as does the dark figure in the chair that spins around from station 2. She stops cold. 
“I swear, Connor is the clumsiest person I know. I keep telling everyone he’s going to fry the servers if they let him keep bringing liquids in here, but apparently he needs his Gatorade or his electrolytes and blood sugar go all out of whack. But no, I can’t have coffee in here. Not even if I get caffeine headaches after a couple hours.”
Joey has no idea how to answer that. She just dips her mop into the pail, rinsing off the orange goo, and repeats the wring and scrub. 
“That’s what I like about coming in to work on the servers at night. I can bring my coffee in here and no one can say jack about it.” She hears more than sees him pick up a Thermos and shake it back and forth with a sloshing sound. 
She thinks of the blood in her lunch bag in the van. 
“Oh, come on. It gets lonely on the night shift. You gotta feel the same way.”
Actually, I like the peace and quiet.
“At least they sent in someone cute this time. Last cleaning guy was some skinhead I thought might cave my nose in if I looked at him wrong.” He looks up at her, the blue monitor lights washing his skin out and making him look a bit like a corpse. “Probably some gangbanger on a work release.” 
Don’t do it. No lo hagas. 
He blinks behind his glasses and then frowns. “Oh, wait, I didn’t realize you were Mexican. Probably shouldn’t have said that about gangs, huh. They’re always tearing up your guys’ neighborhoods.” He shrugs. “At least you’ve got a real job and you’re not one of their girls or getting pimped on a street corner, right?”
She can feel the white hot rage bubbling up inside her. Something volcanic. If she loses control, she will kill him.
She sets the mop back in the pail with shaky hands and reaches for her clipboard to cross off ‘IT room drink spill’ from her checklist.
“Hey, like, I wasn’t insulting you. I think it’s great you’re breaking out of that whole cycle. More people should be like you. Maybe if they got jobs they wouldn’t have time to run around shooting up the place and getting high.”
She glances at the photo of her family taped to the clipboard, below the stack of the night’s work orders. You want to see them again. You have to show some restraint. You can’t let anyone think you’re dangerous. If her eval this week goes well, that yellow line on her chart could move to the beginning of next week rather than the middle of it.
But if she shows ‘aggressive tendencies’, it will move down another week and a half. 
“What’s the matter? You don’t speak English? No parley?” He’s butchering it. “Wait a second, is that French? They always sound the same.”
She’s pretty sure, given what she knows about Nico, he’d consider her actions at least partially justified if she slammed this guy right through his own server tower.
She wouldn’t. She’d self-report if she had to, but if she can’t get a grip, can’t lock down this thing simmering in her, fighting to get out, she wouldn’t want herself around anyone she cares about that she can hurt.
The only thing she wants more than seeing her family again is to keep them safe.
And she has a horrible feeling that if she lets this thing free, she might like what it turns her into. 
“Oh come on. Wait. No hobble English? Hey, look at someone when they talk to you!”
A hand on her shoulder spins her around, and Joey clenches her fingers white-knuckled around her mop handle. 
No lo hagas. No…
“Hey, you gotta problem in here?”
Nico. 
“Does your partner here not speak English?”
“Non sono cazzi tuoi.”
“What, you either? How do you people get jobs if you can’t even speak the language?”
A hand slams down on the man’s shoulder with double the force he used on Joey. “I’ve got a better question. How do you still have yours if this is how you talk to people?” Nico’s voice is sharp, snarly. Powerful in a way this IT guy wishes he was, but will never be. 
“I was just being friendly, man!”
Nico’s hand moves up to the man’s shoulder to the junction of his neck. “If you talk to my employee at all, even one word, you will never be able to speak again. Is that clear?”
She never thought she would consider Nico scary. But like this, those cold, dead, steely eyes staring down the other man, he certainly is. 
“You’re bluffing.” But his voice is shaking. 
“We’re a cleaning crew. We could kill you, dispose of your body, clean up the crime scene, and you’d just disappear off the face of the earth.”
His tone is completely level, not an ounce of hesitation or doubt that it’s true. This sounds like a threat Nico’s given before.
“What about the cameras?” The guy says with a triumphant note in his voice, looking past Nico’s shoulder to the array of visuals on a monitor. 
“You’re IT. You shut them off to work on the system and never turned them back on. As a matter of fact, no one is sure why you shut them off and just vanished.”
“Okay, alright, ch-chill, dude. I wasn’t actually gonna do anything to her, I swear.”
“And now I know you won’t. If you’re smart enough to bring up the cameras, that means you should be smart enough to leave.” Nico moves his hand back down the man’s shoulder, then brushes at it as if there was some dust there. “Pack up for the night. Sign out. Go home sick.”
The guy rushes out so fast, he leaves his coffee thermos on the desk.
Nico picks it up, glances at Joey, and then tosses it directly into the trash cart he left near the door, sinking it into the bag in a perfect arc. 
She’s not sure if she wants to laugh at his petty display of anger or collapse into a puddle on the floor just like Connor’s Gatorade.
“If anything like this happens again, you make whatever excuse you have to and come find me.” Nico shakes his head. “People get it all wrong when I say the night shift is better for my people because buildings are empty. It’s less about the vampires hurting humans as it is about how humans still treat us. I didn’t know he was here. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”
Joey relaxes her hands around the mop handle. “You can’t be with me every second. I’ve dealt with people like him all my life. He won’t be the last.”
Clearly, that wasn’t the right thing to say, because Nico’s eyes go steely all over again. “For the record, the next person who talks to you like that? You can throat-punch them. It won’t affect your performance evaluations.”
Joey chuckles weakly. “I don’t think I want to let that side of me out at all. It’s not who I was before. It’s not who I want to be now.”
“Well, then, anyone who doesn’t respect you answers to me, because after what you just said? I can’t say as I’ve ever respected anybody more than you just gave me a reason to.”