Chapter 5
APRIL
If any other customers were at the coffee shop, I would have kicked this man out.
Not because I wasn’t enjoying our little back and forth. Because I was a married woman, and I couldn’t risk anyone seeing me having a flirtatious conversation with a man who wasn’t my husband.
As luck would have it, I was the only one there. I was the owner, you see.
My husband, David, helped me achieve my goal by giving me the money to start my own coffee shop: April’s Coffee Shop.
Well, at least it had been my stated goal. When David and I first started dating, he had so much ambition and goals he wanted to accomplish. I felt left out, so I told him my goal had been to always own a coffee shop.
Yes, I was lying early on to my future husband. Don’t worry, it gets way worse.
I admit, April’s Coffee Shop was a pretty generic name, but I’d always wanted to see my name on a marquee. Sure, I’d always wanted it to be a movie marquee, but a sign would have to work.
On the first day we opened, I clicked on the light that lit up the neon sign saying April’s Coffee Shop, and it was one of the proudest days of my life. Maybe subconsciously, I really had wanted to own a coffee shop.
That was six months ago, and we’ve been slow to hit our stride. It turns out that Los Angeles has a lot of coffee shops, and it’s not the easiest business to thrive in. Who knew?
Not that I’ve given up hope. We were going to turn the corner any day now.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. It had been a rocky start, causing some friction between David and me. Well, that’s not really true. It was already there. It’s exacerbated the friction in our marriage.
Since we don’t get that busy early in the morning, I’m the one who opens the shop and works as the lone barista for the first few hours. We open at five a.m. and are generally pretty quiet until around eight, and that’s when I schedule a second employee.
As I looked at the man across from me, I wondered if he knew all of this. His smug smile told me that he might. I set the coffee and bear claw in front of him. It was pretty apparent that wasn’t the reason he was here.
“Is this your thing?” I asked. “Walking into coffee shops at five a.m. and asking out married women?”
“No. I usually wait till five-thirty.”
I almost laughed—it was funny, after all—but I was able to stop myself.
“You do realize that if someone walks into the coffee shop right now, I’m going to ignore you.”
“I doubt anyone else is coming in. Why do you think I picked five a.m., April?”
“How do you know my name?” I asked as my hands went clammy.
“I know a lot about you.”
“You’ve officially made this weird. Do I need to call the cops?”
He raised his hands in capitulation. “Not unless you want to borrow their handcuffs.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. Or was all that Hall Pass talk just that? Talk.”
He’d been too specific. That wasn’t just some random line. He’d heard what I’d said to Margie.
How could he have been privy to that conversation? “How the hell do you know about that?”
“As I said, I know a lot about you.”
“You know all this stuff about me, and I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Eddie.”
“Well, listen, Eddie, I don’t know what you thought you heard, but I’m not looking for a Hall Pass. I’m happily married.”
“Damn. Those handcuffs would have been put to good use.”
I shook my head. “You’re a piece of work.”
“I know.” He smiled.
As I debated about how to respond, I looked past Eddie—I knew his name now—and saw someone approaching the coffee shop. Eddie noticed my reaction and briefly glanced over his shoulder.
The woman was still several feet from entering the store, so he was able to get one last thing in.
“I’ll be back next Tuesday at five a.m.,” he said. “If you’re here alone, I’ll know you’re interested. If it’s another employee, I’ll take the hint, and you’ll never see me again.”
Eddie grabbed his coffee and bear claw and headed toward the exit, smiling at the forty-ish woman who walked in.
She approached the register. “Now that was a handsome man,” she said.
“He isn’t really my type.”
“Honey, he’s every woman’s type.”