Sammie
The coffee machine hasn’t been on for long when he arrives.
After he left yesterday, I had to spend real time reconciling the fact that his visit to my little cat cafe was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing for him.
I’d spent the evening ignoring every single thought that popped into my head about him.
What he does for a living, what his last name is, whether he is already married with kids and a big house on the hill.
He's wearing another suit. Dark charcoal over a white shirt, no tie, top button undone, which somehow makes him look more intimidating than if he'd been fully buttoned up with a tie.
He does the same thing he did yesterday: takes three steps inside, stops, and reads the room.
Every table, every person, every corner.
He spots the corner table. It's occupied. A couple sharing a muffin, fingers almost touching across the surface. I watch mild irritation flicker across his face. His eyes move to the next best option, a window seat two tables down.
My hands are already on autopilot making his coffee, same as yesterday’s.
I turn just as he arrives at the counter, sliding the mug across towards him. "Your table will be free in about five minutes," I whisper to him.
He looks at me. Those gray eyes are something else, I'll tell you that for free. The kind of eyes that feel like they're reading the footnotes of whatever you just said.
"I can wait," he says, hovering his phone over the card machine.
He stands near the counter while I go back behind it, and I don't offer him the stool because I have a feeling he's not a stool-sitting kind of person. He just stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking like a very expensive statue, while Delilah materializes at my elbow.
"That's him from yesterday," she says, very quietly, directly into my ear.
I don’t reply.
She cranes her neck a little trying not to look obvious, and failing. "He looks like a hitman in a movie."
"He's a regular," I say, which I realize is maybe slightly optimistic given that he's been here exactly once before, but it feels right and I'm going with it.
She gives me the look. The one that means she has opinions she's saving for later.
Then the couple at the corner table finally gather their coats, and Eduard walks to the table without being told.
He sits down, positioning himself exactly as he did yesterday, chair angled slightly toward the window, shoulders back.
Cookie makes her move within three minutes. She's our boldest one, a round little tortoiseshell with absolutely no sense of personal space. She lands on the chair beside him and starts kneading the armrest like she's billing him for it.
I wait for him to shift her off.
He doesn't.
He looks at her for a second and then looks back out the window. Cookie does a full rotation, decides the armrest is acceptable, and puts her chin down.
Old Bill, who has a permanent reservation on the table by the pastry display and has been coming in every morning for two years, catches my eye over his newspaper and raises his eyebrows with great significance.
I shrug. He shakes his head like I've disappointed him by not having a better explanation, then waves me over.
"He's lonely," Bill tells me, while I'm putting his Danish down. "The scary ones always are."
"He's not scary," I say automatically, which earns me another look, this one from Delilah who is wiping down the next table and clearly listening.
"Cookie doesn't sit with scary people," I add, which I think is a solid point.
"Cookie sits with anyone who doesn't actively remove her," Delilah says. "She sat on the vacuum cleaner for twenty minutes last Thursday."
I concede this is true, but I still think my point stands.
By lunchtime, it's not just Cookie. Socks has taken to appearing from wherever he spends his mornings and positioning himself on the windowsill directly in front of the corner table, from which position he hangs his tail down at intervals as though testing to see if Eduard is still there.
Rhodes, who has strong opinions about strangers and usually voices them, walked up, sniffed Eduard's shoe, and walked away satisfied, which in our café's social hierarchy basically counts as a formal endorsement.
Lucifer, of course, has been the constant.
He's there as soon as Eduard sits down, arranging himself across the neighboring chair like he's saving it before migrating to the table itself, tucked against Eduard's forearm, a position Eduard accommodates without comment by shifting his coffee slightly to the left.
He doesn't pet Lucifer. He doesn't encourage him.
He just stops preventing him, which I'm starting to understand is basically the same thing with this particular man.
The truth is I've started noticing things I have no business noticing. I try to stop myself, but they creep in while my hands are busy and sometimes the thought is fully formed before I realize I’m thinking of him again.
The way he wraps both hands around the cup before he drinks, like he's warming them even though it isn't cold enough to need it.
The way he reads his phone with the same focused expression he gives to the window, total attention, nothing wasted.
The way he always puts the cup down in exactly the same spot, same angle, and I know this because there's a faint ring on the table now, a ghost of it, and he hits it every single time.
He doesn't talk much. He answers questions.
He says thank you, never thanks, always the full words, which I've decided counts as a crack in the concrete because I've heard actual rocks be less deliberate about it. He tipped when he left yesterday. Not on the app the way most people do now, but in cash, folded neatly and left under the empty cup where I find it when I’m clearing the table.
I don't mention the tip. He doesn't mention the tip. This feels like the correct arrangement.
By the time we’re closing and Eduard has left, Delilah has assembled enough evidence to convene a tribunal.
"He watches the door every time it opens," she says, loading the dishwasher. "Not like he's nervous. Like he's counting."
"Some people are just observant." I’m boxing up the leftover pastries and making notes on what needs baking for tomorrow.
She closes the dishwasher with more force than necessary. "I'm just saying. There's observant, and there's something else."
"Maybe he likes the café," I say. "People have reasons for liking places."
"Sammie. He looks like someone who has his dry cleaning picked up by a guy named Viktor."
This is probably fair. I just don't think it's the whole picture.
The entire week goes by like this.
He comes in on day six a little earlier than usual, and I have the coffee ready. He clocks it the second he reaches the counter, and he looks at me for a moment. There’s a shift in his expression that would be surprise on anybody else.
"The machine was already on," I tell him.
He takes the cup and pays, looks at me for another second in that footnote-reading way, and then he goes to his table, where Lucifer is already waiting like a sentry.
The day passes the same as they all have, Old Bill and his theories becoming wilder and wilder.
Delilah entirely wrapped up in the conspiracy theories.
I’ve already warned them both, but flash them another glance when I catch them at it again just after the lunch rush. Bill takes this as his sign to leave.
I go about my business, cleaning up the table near the bookshelf where a small group of women just celebrated a birthday, filling my tray with almost-empty mugs of now-cold tea and coffee.
The routine is always the same. I start at the tables furthest away and make my way around, gathering used mugs and plates and wiping down the tables.
I see Lemur. I step over Lemur. What I don’t account for is that Lemur is approximately six seconds from deciding the middle of the floor is no longer interesting, and he executes a sudden diagonal movement directly into my path.
My foot catches his tail, not enough to hurt him, he is already gone, vanished, truly unbothered by the chaos he has single-handedly created.
Only I lose my balance, and the tray pitches hard to the left.
I overcorrect and it makes everything worse, because all four mugs with cold leftover drinks go directly onto Eduard.
Tea, two lattes, and what remains of a hot chocolate, distributed across his chest, his lap, and one immaculate sleeve.
He spins, standing from his chair, startling a sleeping Lucifer in the process.
"Oh my God," I say. "Oh, no. Okay. Don't move."
He stands in his ruined suit with the expression of a man who is doing extremely controlled breathing and choosing not to comment on anything.
I grab napkins. A lot of napkins. I start at his shoulder, which seems safest, and work my way down, pressing and dabbing like a maniac.
I'm talking the whole time because I always talk when I'm panicking, and I'm saying something about Lemur and dry cleaning, and I will absolutely pay for whatever this costs.
My hand moves down, and down, and then I stop.
I look at what my hand is doing.
My hand is very helpfully dabbing a napkin directly at Eduard's crotch with complete and total commitment to the job.
I realize what I’m doing, and there is a moment of profound silence. Until I squeak, at least.
He takes each of my wrists in his hands, pulling mine away from him, because apparently that wasn’t my first instinct. I felt what I felt and froze, hands in situ, both paused mid dab and now resting on his crotch.
Heat races up my spine. My face is now a temperature that could rival the sun.
I look up from my crouched position in front of him. He is looking down at me with those gray eyes, and the expression on his face is completely unreadable except for one thing: his jaw is working slightly, the way it would if he were trying very carefully not to laugh.
"I’m sorry," I whisper.
"It's fine," he says, and his voice comes out about half a register lower than usual.
I stand up straight, still holding the napkins, wishing the ground would just open right up and gobble me down.
Someone clears their throat behind me, and I turn to find Bill helpfully holding up the broken pieces from the mugs that fell and Delilah laughing with abandon behind the counter.
I nod at Bill, take the broken ceramic from him, and make my way into the kitchen where I can die quietly from the embarrassment.