11. Esperr
ESPERR
The espresso machine hisses and groans beneath my hands, hot and nearly temperamental, but I welcome the sound and the warmth.
It fills the space in my head where thoughts like to collect when I let the wall slip.
The heat fogs the front window in soft bursts when it kicks on, blurring the street beyond it until the world looks distant and harmless—it isn’t, even as it tries to convince me.
I move through the motions like I’ve practiced too many times, a muscle memory of wiping down the counters until it gleams. Aligning the cups so their handles all face the same directions, pouring milk with care that I don’t extend to myself.
Taylor is talking behind me about inventory, deliveries, and a customer who complained yesterday. I do my best to respond at the right moments without really hearing her. She watches me sometimes, like she’s trying to decide whether to ask, but I just smile at her, and she turns satisfied.
The bell over the door rings, sudden and loud, and my attention snaps toward it before I can stop myself.
Something I’ve done every single day, and my body tenses in a way my mind refuses to acknowledge, shoulders tightening and breath catching low in my chest. It’s an old reflex, one I haven’t managed to unlearn no matter how quiet my life has become; it’s drilled into my head.
And just like always, it’s not him. Just a man shrugging snow off his coat, the smell of wet wool following him inside. Relief doesn’t settle over me like it did yesterday; there’s no peace, just a pause.
By the time my break comes, the shop has filled and emptied itself more than once, and my irritation filled itself to the brim.
Cradling my ice coffee between my hands, I step outside, breathing in the fresh air. I barely get two seconds of the quiet before my phone begins to ring. For a moment, I just stare at it. The screen lit up with Oliver's name.
“Hey,” I answer, trying to keep the irritation to a bare minimum.
“Hey, you at work?” he asks.
“On a break.”
He hums softly, a sound I’m awfully familiar with. “You sound like you’re far away.”
I lean back against the brick wall and water; my breath fogs the air. “My mouth is near the speaker, so you might need to get your hearing checked.”
“Well, I see how today’s going,” he fires back with as much sass as a teenage girl.
I close my eyes, letting the cold seep through my clothes. “I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I’m just…I haven’t been sleeping.”
There’s a pause on the other line, and I don’t have to ask to know that it’s Oliver thinking what to say without pushing a button that might cause me to go off. I hate it. I hate that it seems like I can’t control my emotions.
“How bad?” he finally asks.
Opening my eyes, I focus on a thin line of ice creeping along the edge of the road. Then I look at the large blackout truck and the rock lying next to my shoe. “Bad enough that I wake up already tired.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“Eh,” I shrug, though he can’t see me.
“You want to tell me why?” he mutters into the phone.
I hesitate, not because I don’t trust him. He’s the only one in this world that I do, but with knowing what's inside my head, it weighs you down.
“I don’t know,” I finally say, sighing. “It’s just…
my brain, it won’t shut off. Every time it gets quiet, it feels like I’m forgetting something important.
Like I’m supposed to be listening for something and I just don’t know it.
” The words tumble out of me. While it’s the truth, it’s not everything.
I don’t tell him about how I can feel someone’s eyes constantly watching me or how in the back of my mind I wonder if he found me.
I don’t tell him how I’m obsessive over a stranger, someone I have no business getting involved with because it’ll do nothing but end up with him six feet in the ground.
“You always get like this when you finally slow down,” he says. “It’s just your body doesn’t know what to do with it.”
I hum, knowing that it’s not that. “Maybe,” I murmur, picking at a loose thread on my sleeve. “Or I've just been pretending I’m fine for too long.”
“That’s kind of your thing.”
I huff out a breath and roll my eyes. “Rude.”
“It’s just accurate,” he counters, trying to sound gentle.
I close my eyes again; this time the images don’t come. The feeling, the memories—they all stay locked in the place I ignore.
“I don’t like feeling this… I don’t know, I’m…” I bite my cheek, trying to gather the words that are scrambling around. “Nothing’s happening, I know that; logically I know that. But Oliver, I… this feeling—it’s driving me crazy.”
“That doesn’t make you crazy,” Oliver rushes to say. “That makes you human, and we want to keep you that way.”
I don’t respond right away, his words sitting wrong in my chest. Being human has never felt like something I do correctly.
I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but after being surrounded by death for so long, I’ve grown accustomed to the darkness.
At a certain point I had to look at those around me to see what emotion I was supposed to feel.
I was numb to being a person; I was broken in a way that no one could understand.
Or maybe they could, if I ever let them close enough to see it, but I don’t.
My emotions don’t arrive gently; they crash and they overwhelm.
They take up space until there’s no room left for anything else.
And when I feel something, it’s all of it at once—too loud, too much.
And then I don’t feel anything, just a hollow stretch of time where I know I should care but can’t make myself reach it.
No one realizes how exhausting it is, how swinging between two extremes can feel like you’re running miles.
I learned early how to watch people, memorizing their reactions. How to count seconds before responding, laughing when others did, and lowering my voice when it was quiet.
Then there are some days that I don’t trust my own reactions; I second-guess every spike of emotions, every sudden drop, wondering if it’s real or just my brain. Setting the traps for me.
I cling to people without meaning to and then pull away so fast it leaves me dizzy. I want closeness and fear in the same breath.
I know how that looks from the outside—unstable, intense, and difficult.
But inside, it feels like I’m constantly trying to hold myself together with hands that won’t stop shaking no matter what I do.
That’s the part I don’t say out loud; it’s what I swallow down when Oliver tells me I’m human, like he says it to mean something simple and safe. Like being normal hasn’t always felt like a liability.
“Listen… I’m fine; I should go,” I say instead. “Break’s almost over.”
“O—”
I end the call and shove my phone back into my pocket. My breath fogs the air in slow, uneven bursts, and I scream at myself to move, to go back inside, to be the version of me everyone expects.
You’re fine, you’re okay, you’re OKAY.
The bell over the door rings when I push inside, my shoulders tensing before I can stop it. Warmth hits me first before the smell of coffee, sugar, and pastries. It’s all normal things, safe things, but my stomach still twists like it doesn’t trust any of it.
“You okay?” Taylor asks from behind the counter, frowning as I step closer.
“Yeah,” I say too fast, and then to try and make it better, I smile, feeling the pull wrong on my face. “It’s just cold.”
She nods, already distracted, and I hate myself for the relief that it gives me. Stepping back behind the counter, I tie my apron back on with fingers that don’t quite cooperate. The knot slipped once and then twice, causing my pulse to spike.
Move, smile, breathe, pretend.
Be the version of me that’s okay and that everyone expects me to be.
And maybe, if I do it well enough, I’ll start to believe her too.
By the time the clock above the register moves to one, something in me loosens immediately. I step away from the counter, ripping my apron off and yanking my jacket out.
I’m ready to leave this place and curl up in my bed without having to pretend, ready to breathe without any noise or eyes watching me.
“See you tomorrow?” Taylor calls out from beside the espresso machine.
“Yeah,” I mutter, already halfway out from the counter and threading my arm through the sleeve.
I take a step toward the door when the bell above it rings and my chest tightens, breath catching when I pause, fingers frozen on the zipper.
My obsession stands there, just inside the door, eyes finding me immediately. The shop keeps moving around him; someone in the distance laughs, a chair scraping against the tile, but I barely hear any of it, not with him standing there.
My pulse stutters as I finish pulling my jacket on, slower, suddenly too aware of my body. Of how tired I feel inside my skin.
“Hi,” I breathe out.
“Hey,” he smiles, eyes flickering briefly behind me. “You’re off.” He doesn’t phrase it like a question.
And though he’s not asking, I still found myself saying, “Yeah, I… just clocked out.”
Something in his eye shifts; it’s small but controlled, almost like relief he doesn’t mean to show.
We’re so engrossed in staring at each other that I don’t realize we’re standing in the middle of the shop until someone brushes past me on their way to the counter—I flinch and my shoulder jerks away before I can gather myself.
And what’s worse is I hate myself for it; I hate that I can feel his attention snap to me immediately.
Thankfully, he doesn’t say anything, though I noticed he doesn’t blink, just watches.
“Did you need something?” I ask, my tone a bit sharper than I intend.
“No.”
I bite my cheek as my stomach twists and nerves buzz under my skin. His answer leaves too much space behind it, like he stopped himself mid-thought.
“Oh,” I say, completely uselessly.
He shifts his weight, boots scuffing softly against the tile, and up close, like this, he looks different.
Not softer, but more real. Damp, dark brown hair hangs into his eyes like he didn’t bother fixing it, strands clinging to his forehead.
There’s a faint shadow along his jaw, almost like he hadn’t remembered to shave.
While his eyes hold mine, hazel and steady, not searching like most.
When his gaze flicks down and then back up; it’s careful and measured. And for reasons I refuse to acknowledge or unpack right now, that makes my chest tighten.
For the first time, I’m the one who looks away, heat creeping up my neck, suddenly too aware of how close we’re standing. Of how easy it would be to misread this moment if I let myself.
“I mean,” he says, clearing his throat. “Not specifically.”
A smile spreads across my lips before I can help it, watching this six-foot-four man shift between being nervous and then confident.
“Long shift?”
I huff out a small laugh, shrugging. “You could say that.”
He nods like he understands exactly what I’m not saying without having to say the words. And thankfully he doesn’t ask for details or the need to fill the space with anything unnecessary.
“I was…just heading out.”
Jesus fuck, I want to smack myself.
I obsess over a guy that I don’t even know, and when he finally shows his face, I’m telling him I have to leave? What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
“Same,” he says, like he hadn’t just stepped through the door.
I glance down at his hands, raising a brow. “You didn’t get your coffee,” I say, tipping my chin toward his empty hand.
His mouth twitches. “Guess you’re right.”
“You always get it,” I add, quieter, saying it more to myself than to him.
“Wasn’t here for that.”
My stomach flips, and my brows pull together in confusion as the word, “oh,” slips from my mouth. I take that chance to study him; his hands are loose at his sides, and there’s no fidgeting like he usually does in the corner of the shop.
The noise of the shop presses around us, Taylor calling out an order, the door opening and closing, and a rush of cold air seeping through. But he doesn’t seem bothered by any of it, his attention staying right where it always is—on me.
“So…,” I say, shifting my weight, stuffing my hands into my jacket pocket. “You what? Came in just to… what, linger?” I ignore the heat creeping up my neck and focus on the corner of his mouth that lifts slowly, almost like he’s deciding whether to admit something that’s on the tip of his tongue.
“I guess so,” he says, shrugging.
Something in my chest tightens, but it’s not from nerves or anything; it’s this calmness that hits me, and I’m not used to it.
“That’s new,” I mutter under my breath.
“Me too,” he blurts out, and there’s something in his voice that makes me believe him.
I let out a breath, realizing I’d been holding it. “Well, if you’re not here for coffee, you picked an odd place to come to.”
He nods once. “I know.”
“You know,” I start out slowly, “you’ve been watching me for what… almost a year now?”
His jaw tightens, and while he doesn’t seem defensive, I can see the twitch in his eye as if he thought he was being slick and I hadn’t noticed.
“I think I deserve to know your name, at the very least, right?”
For a second, I wonder if I pushed too far, if I crossed a line that would make him upset. And while I know I shouldn’t care about making this stranger upset, I didn’t want to.
“Zyran.”
I nod once. “Okay, Zyran,” I repeat, wanting to feel what his name sounds like on my tongue.
And Zyran watches my mouth as I say it, his tongue darting out to lick his lip, and then something unreadable flickers across his face before he reins it back in.
“Do I deserve the right to know yours?”
I smile, hesitating a fraction before whispering, “Esperr.”
And just like he had watched me, I do the same, watching his mouth as he repeats my name quietly. My name coming out of his mouth settles something warm inside me.
I clear my throat and glance toward the door, fingers curling into a fist. “I should… I have to get going.”
He doesn’t argue, just steps to the side, letting me move towards the door. I move close enough that I’m aware of the heat coming off him, the solid presence of his chest inches from the top of my head, but I keep my eyes forward, pushing through the urge to stop and hug him.
My hand closes around the door handle, letting the cool knob ground me.
“I hope to see you tomorrow,” I say, the words slipping out as I pull the door open. For half a second I regret saying it—being too much and too honest.
But then I peer over my shoulder, seeing his lip lift up. “I think that can be arranged.”
Not trusting myself to stay any longer, I nod and step out into the cold, letting it slam shut behind me. The entire walk back to my apartment, my pulse doesn’t slow; instead, it speeds up, reminding me to take a cold shower the moment I get home.