Chapter 50 Closed for What?
Closed for What?
Tessa
I wasn't the only one staring. A dozen tourists were bunched around the coffee shop door, reading the same sign I was reading.
CLOSED UNTIL NOON.
Barista Drama.
No Further Questions.
It was scribbled in thick red ink on plain white paper, with the first line scrawled in all caps like someone had been mad and in a hurry. The ink was smudged, the paper was crinkled, and one corner of the sheet was missing, like a rat had taken a chomp.
But it was the actual message – not the ragged state of the sign – that made me blurt out, "Drama? Seriously?"
The woman in front – a brunette in her mid-forties – turned to me and said, "I bet it's a love triangle. That happens, you know."
I was still trying to come up with a response – not that I had any idea what to say – when the guy next to her said, "It can't be a love triangle. The way I hear it, the shop has only two workers."
A squat guy in a Detroit Lions jersey chimed in, "It could be drama over tips. One time in Ferndale, I saw two baristas going ham over the jar."
I didn't even know what going ham meant, but I listened with morbid fascination as he added, "And then, the jar went flying, sending money everywhere. It was a fuckin' free-for-all."
A woman near the back gasped. "Language!"
He shrugged. "Sorry. But it was." He grinned. "Scored me a fiver though."
A youngish woman in an oversized hoodie turned to glare. "So you stole the tip? What the hell is wrong with you?"
"It wasn't just one tip," he said. "It was five. Weren't you listening?"
She was still glaring. "Yeah, but you said a fiver, not five singles."
"Sure. For five people that were all together. So five tips, see?"
She threw up her hands. "I don't care if it was for a full hockey team. It was still wrong."
With zero shame, the guy shot back, "Oh, yeah? Well you wouldn't be saying that if you saw how crappy the service was."
The guy next to him said, "If you think that's bad, the way I hear it, this place serves food off the floor."
The woman in the hoodie turned to face him, her expression curdling like she'd just sniffed a dumpster. "And you're still gonna eat here?"
"Forget eating," he told her. "I just want a coffee."
By now, I was kind of scared to admit I worked here at all. Silently, I edged away from the crowd and pulled out my cellphone to check the time. I frowned at the screen. It wasn't even ten o'clock.
This gave me two extra hours to do heaven-knows-what.
Return home?
Or maybe I should slip in through the back door and open the shop anyway. I did have a key, mostly because I usually arrived long before my so-called boss.
I was still waffling when, from somewhere behind me, a new voice joined the chorus. This one was masculine and warmly familiar, saying, "I'm just here for the barista."
My skin flushed, my stomach fluttered, and my pulse kicked as I whirled to look. And there he was. Ryder Freaking Vaughn.
Except this time, he was just Ryder, the guy who'd kissed me senseless on Maisie's front porch.
He was grinning.
And just like that, I was grinning back.