Chapter 2 Type No. 45
Ask who opened the place, and every bastard’s got a different story.
Andrew never gave a shit either way.
Back then, upstairs was all typesetting, protest zines, dirty little erotica stories, and banned poetry. The shit that got you kicked outta church and invited into someone else’s bed.
They printed the stuff big houses were too scared to touch—the truth. Hell, one of the first baristas got arrested for printin’ an anti-censorship piece with no author name on it, just pressed at forty-five.
They say her ghost still hangs out in the basement.
You catch a whiff of smoke sometimes. Burned ink, too.
By the ‘60s, the basement went rogue. Bootleg vinyl press, cutting records under floorboards, ones with no labels and too much soul.
The name stamped itself into history after 1967.
Type No. 45.
Some say it’s for the year it opened, right when the war ended, grief got loud, and art poured through the cracks.
Others say it’s for the 45 rpm singles still spinnin’ somewhere in the walls.
Or the 45th rejection letter a writer taped to the brick in the basement.
Or because it’s storefront 45, pressed into the side of a block New York forgot to destroy.
Through the years, Type No. 45 became one of those joints where people came to spill their guts over blues and poetry like it broke their hearts.
They sipped the espresso bitter while their cigarettes burned weary.
And if you hung around late enough, you’d hear the clacking of keystrokes from the backroom.
Some said it was an old busted pipe. The OGs said it was the typewriter, still writin’, still confessin’, still bleedin’ into the floorboards.
These days, the door still sticks unless you lean into it just right. The bathroom mirror’s still cracked at the corner, covered in Sharpie notes, break-up lines, lyrics the world’ll never hear. “I fucked someone I loved against this wall” carved faint in the grout.
The long-ass table hasn’t moved, initials cut deep into the wood, coffee rings, and claw marks from deadlines that almost killed somebody. And that old record player never fuckin’ stopped, still goin’, still playin'.
To this day, the books ain’t sorted by title or author.
They’re sorted by feeling.
And the vinyl wall up front's all wax and no sleeves, with handwritten notes in red ink. The locals swear whatever you leave here ends up in the hands that need it most.
But what gets Andrew most is the way people don't leave the same way they came, believing the place sees the holes and fills 'em up.
Late at night, he used to sit at the table in the corner by the window, watching strangers pick records the way old lovers reached for each other—slow, unsure, full of nostalgia.
And after eight-thirty, when the streets got quiet, you could hear the moment before the music starts. When the needle hits wax and the crackle comes first, that’s where Andrew Harding lives.
But back then, he could only drop by once a week early, before work. He used to picture himself playing in the basement of Type, no crowd or spotlight, only him and his guitar.
Plenty of names passed through, even Corey fuckin’ Taylor.
There’s this old rumor about him sneakin’ in one night, setting up downstairs, an acoustic set in the listening room, where there’s no mic or stage, just concrete floors, brick walls, sweat, and a silence that sits next to you when something real’s about to happen.
There's no footage or grainy photo, no proof this went down...
…Except for a sound wave tattooed on his daughter’s back.
Which brings us to Allison Jane Taylor.
Yeah.
Fuck.
She’s not the kind of girl you meet.
She’s the kind of girl you crash into.
They call her impossible; they say it with awe, with fear, with their hand adjusting their cock. She didn't need to look at you, speak, or fuck you, just wanting her was punishment enough.
She never orders her coffee with eye contact, only takes it black, no sugar, no smile, never blinks when it burns.
She walks into every room like it once lied to her.
And she still shows up—unimpressed, unmoved, unbothered.
And fuck, does she wear it well. Though, her face is too delicate to warn you, carved straight out of storms, if you ask him.
She’s Cuban nights, Italian fierce; makes you beg in Spanish, then curse in Italian.
Half her body's all legs, skin kissed by Havana heat. And that fuckin’ red, whipped mouth? A whole damn genre. All pout and punishment. Hair down to her ribs, dark as vinyl, always everywhere. And collarbones sharp enough to cut through every pick-up line ever rehearsed.
She has this deadly bronze stare, two brass knuckles for eyes.
She only dropped into Type after seven, always at night,
grabbing her coffee, wandering, never in a rush. She’d end up in the back, the record player moaning into her blood, then leave like she was never there. And every time she left, her hands were stained with dust and smelled of old paper.
She said she hated it, but kept coming back.
She never talked to anyone.
She never bought a damn thing either. Not even one of those cheap-ass bookmarks by the register no one actually uses.
She’d never say it, not out loud—would never admit it if you asked—but he figured some part of her kept showing up ‘cause this was the only spot in the city that still felt like her dad.
Or hell, maybe it was something else...
Allison didn’t believe in fate, but maybe she kept showing up anyway… just in case Andrew did.
He used to think about it all the time. How many near misses they had in this place.
How many nights she slipped out the back while he came through the front.
How many records they listened to on different days, same poems, same books, flipped through the same vinyl crate, in the same damn room, but never the same time. It messes with him.
Sometimes, he swears Type knew before they did, the store watching it all go down. As if it saw her fingers on a spine he’d shelved earlier that day and went—you idiots. You’re this close.
Because the second their eyes met, it was fuckin' over.
The real him finally woke up—the guy he’d been ignoring for years—and tapped him on the shoulder like—yo, you seein’ this? It’s her.
Yeah, fuckin’ eye contact was all it took for Andrew's whole world to collapse. Everything outside of them hit pause, but the two of 'em kept spinnin’.
It wasn’t lust, or the fact she scared the hell outta him. It felt older, as if he’d already lost her in another life, and the universe wasn’t about to let him keep her this time around. That’s what it felt like, seeing her, like he was already terrified of losing her.
She was the one defining moment he didn’t see coming but was always headed for—two lives, one second, then nothin’ was ever the same.
Andrew refuses to call it a collision.
They didn’t bounce off each other.
That night they hit and held on. To leave each other would’ve meant rippin' themselves in half.
He’d come to realize that the odds of them finding each other were trash, but somehow, they beat them anyway.
Two broken clocks striking the same second.
They could’ve missed. They almost did.
But the world bent just enough to make them happen.
And it all started that night at Type No. 45.