Chapter 5
Tristan
The rest of my shift drags. Okay, not entirely true. The rest of my shift after Cute Latte Guy leaves drags.
Before he left, I may or may not have occupied myself by sneaking peeks at him between the not so sneaky glances he tried to steal in my direction from over the edge of the laptop he’d pulled from his messenger bag.
It was all purely for the sake of entertainment, of course. Nothing more than that.
Unlike a lot of the other places I’ve worked, Upshot isn’t a revolving door of busy customers wanting to just grab a drink and get on to whatever they have next in their day.
I’ve gotta say, I was totally loving the fact that, far from a line out the door making me work my ass off every second, the vibe here is so low key and slow that I actually have time to think between orders.
Or, I was loving it until Cute Latte Guy came shambling up to the counter and threw everything off with whatever it is that makes him so damn tempting. Now, I wish like hell that there were customers lined up around the fucking block.
Reagan, the girl who’s been training me today, is no help whatsoever. When it comes to keeping me distracted from my pesky thoughts about a certain customer with a hella cute blush and mussed up hair the color of sunshine, I mean.
Don’t get me wrong though. Reagan’s a total sweetheart and was great about talking me through the shop routines without hovering when the two of us got started.
Apart from being way less busy, this place really isn’t all that different from the other coffee shops I’ve worked in, so there wasn’t much for her to show me.
“You mind if I read between orders?” she’d asked me an hour or so after she’d run out of items on her training spiel list. “This book I just started is soo freaking amazing, and I just never get a chance to read once I’m home.”
When I’d told her to go for it, she’d squealed and ducked right around the corner to where she’d stashed her bag, to grab a bedazzled Kindle. After that, except for when a customer needed something, she had her eyes glued to that thing right up until closing.
I can’t deny that I kinda wish she hadn’t.
The need for distraction from my weirdly one-track thoughts about that warm, fuzzy sorta feeling I definitely shouldn’t have gotten when Cute Latte Guy fixed those soft grey-blues on me aside, I honestly just would have liked to get to know Reagan a bit.
She seems super cool; quirky and funny and just like the kind of person I’d have totally hung out with… before.
Not that I’m holding her focus on her book against her. I wouldn’t with anyone, especially given that I’m totally the same when I get going on a painting, like I just want to block out the rest of the world and paint. On top of that, it kinda sounds like Reagan deserves it a little extra.
Okay, not just kind of.
One of the first things she’d told me was that she’s got a four-year-old kid, and that her boyfriend is super busy, so he isn’t around much. Not gonna lie—hearing that shit had seriously put up my hackles, especially considering that the next thing she told me is that she’s five months pregnant.
The picture I’d been building in my head of her boyfriend was all kinds of nasty until Reagan had gone on to tell me that the reason he’s so busy is that he’s just started his clinicals for nursing school and he’s still working full time as a medical assistant until he graduates.
Then she had to go and get all hearty-eyed and pull out her phone to show me half a dozen pics of her hella sweet little family, boyfriend included.
So yeah, that just left me feeling like a total douche for making assumptions.
Reagan was on lunch while the whole Cute Latte Guy saga unfolded. Thank fuck for that, since that means she didn’t see me fumble his drink. Not that I think she’d give me shit for it or anything. She totally doesn’t seem the type, but still, first impressions on the first day and all that.
He’d still been at his table when she’d gotten back, sipping his drink with those full, rosy-pink lips of his.
It wasn’t long after that he’d packed up his laptop, that I’m not sure he’d really even used, and sloped out of the shop, leaving me wondering just how bad, on a scale from no biggie to totally fucked, it is that I’m kinda hoping he’s a regular here.
Obviously, I could have asked Reagan, but she’d had her nose buried in her book by then, and I hadn’t wanted to interrupt.
My not asking definitely didn’t have anything at all to do with the fact that doing it would have meant admitting just how much the answer to that ‘how bad’ question would have been leaning toward the ‘totally fucked’ end of the scale.
Nope. Not one bit.
So yeah, I’m not kidding when I say it’s a relief when seven thirty finally rolls around. Reagan and I’d already shut mostly everything down and done nearly all the cleanup before the last customer straggled out of the shop.
The walk back to my new apartment clears my head a bit.
Definitely, the legitimately freezing air has something to do with that, but so does the fact that I’m able to turn most of my thoughts to mentally calculating whether I’ll have enough money to buy some warmer clothes when I get my first paycheck, or if I’ll have to wait for the next.
One of the reasons I chose the apartment I did is the low rent and the fact that the girl who’s subletting it only asked for first month plus security.
Still, between paying that and getting myself all the way to Seattle, I don’t have much left over.
Why Seattle? Because it’s far the fuck away from Tucson.
And because Seattle was the place I wanted to see most when I was a kid.
The night my mom and I left Reno, there’d been this rack of travel brochures for all the different places the bus company went.
While my mom riffled through the random shit she’d thrown in bags for us, trying to find the cash she’d shoved down at the bottom of one of them, I’d wandered over to look at the shiny photos.
Trying to imagine what it might feel like to be in those colorful places they showed felt a hell of a lot better than being stuck where I was at that moment.
Mom must have found her money while I was staring at those pictures, because suddenly she was shouting in this whispery hiss for me to get the fuck back over to her.
In the last year, the happy, smiling woman I’d always known had turned hard and sharp, and I’d quickly learned not to piss her off more than I could help.
So I did exactly what she said and got the fuck back over there.
But not before snatching my favorite of those brochures, the one with this picture of a sunset lit city looking out across shining water to a snowy mountain stretching up into a glowing sky.
I must’ve thought those brochures were books or something.
Something you had to pay for, which the new version of Mom sure as fuck wasn’t going to do, no matter how much I wanted one, ‘cause I shoved the thing up the back of my shirt and partway down the back of my pants to hide it until she’d passed out on the bus.
We weren’t going to wherever that picture was. I knew that. Mom had already told me we were going to Dallas, where, she said, Fucking Bruce couldn’t find us. In Dallas, everything would be better, she’d said.
Fucking Bruce was the man we’d lived with for the last year, since I’d started kindergarten.
Glad as I was that he and his late-night knock down drag outs with Mom wouldn’t be joining us there, something already told me Dallas wasn’t going to be any better than Reno had been.
Well damn. Maybe dwelling on Cute Latte Guy and his shy smile and adorable awkwardness would have been better after all.
Supposedly, based on some articles I looked up online, I’m not supposed to try to keep all that shit buried. Apparently letting it out so I can, as they say, confront it is healthy. Well, look at me being healthy. But that was totally enough confronting for one night, thank you very much.
By the time I’m up the rickety, sketchy AF fire escape-style stairs that lead to my apartment, I’m as jittery and wound up as if I’d personally matched every last customer I served today, espresso shot for espresso shot.
Whether it was that charming little trip down the broken-glass-and-garbage-strewn streets of memory lane, or whether it has something to do with a certain pair of blue-grey eyes and an unstyled mop of blonde hair, not to mention the highly questionable things their owner made me feel today, I’m not exactly sure.
What I do know is that, either way, I sure don’t have any interest in considering the question or its possible answers. Neither one is particularly good.
The apartment is a drafty old place in the upstairs of a drafty old house.
I have three windows and I swear not one of them closes properly.
Considering the fact that I don’t have money to throw away on luxuries like running the heat all day while I’m out, it’s fucking cold when I step inside. Like no-warmer-than-outside cold.
Cranking the dial on the radiator that looks more like it belongs in a museum than in someone’s actual living room-slash-bedroom-slash-kitchen, I peel off the coffee-stained shirt I’d hidden under my sweatshirt so I can set it soaking in the kitchen sink with some dish soap and vinegar to lift the stains.
This treatment, plus one good wash, and it’ll be good as new.
That done, after jumping in a quick shower and pulling on a pair of sweats and a fresh sweatshirt, ‘cause damn I hate the cold, I wander over to my paints and easel.
I’m tempted to start on a new painting, but a nagging voice in my head tells me that I’m not so sure I’d be very pleased by what would end up on the canvas tonight.
Already, my mind is conjuring up bold black lines tracing a tall, thick figure, sweeping in splotches of mismatched color for the clothes, a vivid, blushy-pink for the skin, golden sunshine blonde—
Nope. Not painting tonight.
Instead, I wander over to my keyboard. Music is safe. It can take whatever shape it wants, and, no matter what I’m thinking about as I let it out, there won’t be any evidence left over to fuck with my head later.