Chapter 6
Are you sure I can’t help you out around here for a little bit?” I ask my mom’s retreating frame.
“No, con. I’m fine. I don’t need any help,” she replies, voice stern. She disappears, entering the front of the convenience store again.
I exhale through my nose, trying to temper my reaction to the answer I’ve heard my entire life.
“I don’t need help” was probably in my mother’s top ten phrases.
And it was worse seeing her sweaty brow with hair plastered to her forehead as she ran from the front of the convenience store to the back with a notepad in her hand, scribbling numbers for restocks and math for the shocking amount of cash-paying customers.
She flies through the swinging back door again, eyes darting around at the boxes of extra stock sitting on the floor.
“I applied to a coffee shop, but I just figured that you would finally accept help here since Lottie is… ya know.” My eyes fall from hers, unable to finish the sentence.
She exhales and removes the glasses from her face. “Lottie and I don’t want you to be burdened by her sickness, honey. You heard her. She wants you to enjoy your life. Don’t worry about the convenience stores. We’ll figure it out.”
I nod despite my disagreement. Does she think she’s been successful at hiding her stress?
She’s in over her head going from running a cash register to overseeing seven stores at once.
But I drop it. There’s no use. The world could be collapsing and she’d swear she was fine until the rubble trapped her under it.
She rummages around her desk and then scurries back to the front, so I return to the laptop bouncing on my knees. I’m sitting on an upside-down red crate. My spot since before I could remember.
The back of this store is as familiar to me as my childhood bedroom, late nights spent waiting for my mom to finish her shift, just enjoying the company of being near her, even if we didn’t say a word. We might not have discussed our emotions, but we loved each other. That much was known.
I switch agitatedly between job listings for consultants—absolutely nothing open for the job I had already secured at Ernst & Young.
When I gave them the news that I’d be moving home for the summer, they agreed to defer my offer to September, but it feels like a precarious bet, hoping they don’t give away my position to a willing, fresh-faced graduate in the meantime.
Biting my nails, I open my email, not sure what I’m hoping to find.
But, sure enough, illuminated at the top of my inbox is a subject that reads Seabrook Coffee House—Job Application.
I lurch off the crate like a firecracker has gone off beneath me, fumbling to keep hold of my laptop as I reorient myself.
I click it open, and my eyes race to scan it, but there are only two lines of text. Zero greeting. It simply says:
Your application to work at Seabrook Coffee House has been approved. Please arrive promptly at 7:50 a.m. this Friday to begin training.
-Declan
House Manager
I got the job!
Wait. So Declan hired me… I think a second later, with a mixture of relief and surprise.
If he’s the manager, doesn’t he have the final say? Couldn’t he have easily sent a cold email expressing his refusal, left off his moniker, and wiped his hands clean of me like he seemed like he wanted to? What was his angle in hiring me, knowing he’d be forced to be near me?
Does he…
No. I force myself to stop before finishing the thought.
I picture his cold, unwavering expression boring into me across the coffee shop’s table as he asked me to tell him a little bit about myself. The way his face twitched a nearly imperceptible amount when I described myself as loyal. Maybe I read into it. Or maybe I still knew his tells.
Does he want closure too? Is this an excuse to be near me?
And there it is. The thought I can’t help myself from wondering, no matter how naive it makes me feel. It was this exact type of thinking that got me into this mess in the first place.
“Okay,” my mom interrupts my flurry of thoughts, walking into the back room. “Work is done for the day! Let’s go home to Lottie,” she says with a smile.
I slam my laptop closed in haste and try to reorient my face to a neutral expression.
“Sounds good!” I force out.
On Friday morning, I steel myself and walk through the red French doors, waiting for someone to notice my arrival and intercept me.
Peppy Teenager is nowhere to be found. Neither is Declan.
I pretend to look busy at the lid and straw station before the front door is kicked open.
Four cardboard boxes are stacked on each other, carried inside by carpenter-style pants and work boots.
The legs and cardboard boxes come to a stop in front of me.
My breath catches in my throat as the boxes are set at my feet, a disheveled-looking Declan appearing from behind them.
“Oh, hi, Blair,” he breathes, seeming to recalibrate at the sight of me. He drags his eyes from my shoes up to my face with a pained expression.
At least he’s upgraded from “Ms. Lang” to “Blair” again.
“Oh! Glasses?” I say, shocking myself with the comment.
Declan looks down at me, chest heaving slightly beneath his shirt as he recovers from the exertion. “What?”
His hair is damp at the ends, gathered over his forehead, grazing the tops of his glasses. I haven’t seen him wear them since middle school.
“Oh. Sorry, it’s just that… you’re wearing glasses,” I state like an idiot, standing with my finger pointed at them.
His eyes flick away for a moment, probably searching for an escape route. He presses his lips together before looking at me again. “I’m… sorry?”
“No. Sorry—I’m sorry. Never mind. I don’t know why I—” Someone please hit me over the head with an espresso machine.
“Um,” I try to recover. “I’m here for training?”
“Oh, yes. Harper will be training you,” he says, leaving the boxes and striding behind the counter.
“Harper!” he yells toward the back of the coffee shop. “One moment, let me find her.”
I nod and gesture with my hands that he is free to go searching.
My gaze travels upward, snagging on a birdhouse hanging from the ceiling that was not here the last time I was.
This one looks like a hand-carved, miniature version of the fairytale cottages downtown: a sloping roof, curved door, and circular window.
There’s the faint sound of twinkling, and as I squint, I notice the silver metal wheels attached to the side are spinning.
I’ve never seen decor like it in a coffee shop.
I’ve never seen anything like it. I mentally pocket the image to analyze later.
Declan comes shuffling back, looking perturbed.
“So,” he starts, looking anywhere but me. “Harper just got a call that her cat has been throwing up since she left for work this morning. She’s rushing home to take him to the hospital right now.”
“Oh no, okay, uhh,” I stammer. “Should I just come back tomorrow or?”
“No,” he interrupts. “No. That won’t be necessary. I’ll just train you.” Declan presses his lips together again.
“Okay, sounds good.” I nod.
It doesn’t look like he wants to train me, I think to myself. In fact, he’s avoiding eye contact with me like I’m the source of a disgusting sewage problem. Too disgusting to face head-on or you might just get a whiff.
Finally, at my silence, he looks at me.
I look at him.
“Do we start out here or…”
“Yeah. But not looking like that.” His eyes dart around my face, skimming over my body and up again so quickly I almost chalk it up to my imagination. And then he spins on his heel and walks to the back room. Is my outfit inappropriate for training?
My mouth is agape as I try to reconcile what just happened. But after a second, Declan explodes from the back again, brushing through the double doors with an apron in his hand, a stern look coating his face. I would pay someone money to paint the expression I must be wearing right now.
“Put this on.” He sticks his arm out to me, a white apron fisted in his tanned hand. My gaze momentarily snags on the new veins and muscles in his forearm before I snatch the apron from his grasp. Four years has done great things for this man’s forearms.
“Oh. Thank you,” I mumble.
As I fit my head through the top and start tying a knot behind my back, I look up to find Declan studying me like I’m a puzzle he needs to solve.
Making eye contact is an improvement, at least, but I hate the way I physically feel the difference in how he looks at me now.
What was once intimate is now replaced by something cold, hard, with the tiniest hint of inquisitiveness.
Like he doesn’t understand me anymore, but he wants to. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
“Come over here.” He spins around, gesturing with his arm to follow. “We’ll start on the basics.”
Something about this feels like a skit. I’m the one who taught him how to drink coffee in the first place.
I messed with every coffee gadget great-aunt Lottie would order to the house.
I taught myself how to make Frappuccinos, which graduated to cappuccinos, and then became an obsession with experimenting with weird flavors in my lattes.
“First, make sure this device is placed here to measure how many grams of beans fall into the grinder,” he says, talking to the bean grinder instead of me.
“When it hits eighteen, stop it. Tamp it down, ninety-degree angle with your elbow, then fit it into the espresso machine.” He flicks on the machine and we stand rigid beside each other, staring, just waiting for the water to trickle through the puck of coffee grounds.
I bravely flick my eyes toward him to find that he’s concentrating on the coffee machine like it’s about to give birth to his first child. My lips press into a thin line before looking back at what I realized was my dream espresso machine growing up.
It has wooden handles and a moss green coating.
I know exactly how much it costs from years of tracking the prices across multiple websites on Black Friday sales.
This one is professional grade though, quadruple the size of one made for home use, parading four different spigots.
There’s a silver wheel from what looks like the inside of a deconstructed watch on the side of the machine, exactly like the one on the birdhouses hanging above our heads. Very interesting.
The espresso drips out in a luxurious bronze stream, filling the shot glass beneath it. When the scale hits 36g he swings the lever shut to stop the flow of water.
“For a latte you’ll add about this much milk.” He holds it up to my eye level to see, which is quite below him.
I scoff before remembering myself. We did this exact same dance as kids, except I was the one saying those words to him.
He pauses, a momentary hitch in the brusque presentation he’s been performing like he’s remembering it too. To recover, he gets busy adding ice, a lid, and a straw. I’m about to grab the ocean-wave-themed plastic cup from him to take a sip when he says:
“Ahh!” He holds up a finger to pause me, still avoiding eye contact.
He grabs a syrup labeled Marshmallow Madness and pours a more-than-healthy amount before putting the lid back on and stirring. You’re not supposed to add the syrup after the ice, I think before realizing what I’m looking at.
This was my favorite latte to make every day my senior year of high school. I read about a girl in a cozy, fall-themed book who loved marshmallow-flavored lattes. Almost zero coffee shops carried it, especially in our small town, so I had to order a special syrup online to make my own.
My hand trembles as I take the latte from him, giving away any semblance of cool I had a moment ago. Suddenly, his light green eyes are poised on mine as he waits for my reaction, looking eager for the first time. I take a sip, eyes unmoving from his. It tastes exactly like I used to make them.
Exactly.
Are my pupils dilating? Are his?
The latte falls from my lips but our eyes remain locked.
And as if to taunt me, last night flashes through my mind. I fought the urge to do something I hadn’t reduced myself to in years. But I lost the battle, opening Instagram and typing Declan’s username into the search bar. It was the exact same as it had been for the past two and a half years.
One photo, the only one on his entire feed, posted my sophomore year at Pepperdine.
It was burned into my brain at this point.
It was a perfectly framed, picturesque shot, clearly taken at a wedding based on the opulent display of flowers and the form-fitting suit molding his body.
Where is this? Paris? Italy? I had wondered countless times.
Declan’s arm was fastened around a beautiful lanky blonde wearing a silky red dress.
Her head is tilted into the crook of his shoulder, smile beaming from ear to ear like she might just explode from happiness.
His face is poised in his typically confident smile, standing tall.
It was radiant without looking effortful, and it pissed me off every time.
I’d try to click on her profile, but there was no tag.
He had moved on with this girl. I tortured myself with the thought, rewinding and replaying it the second it ended.
She was stunning. Exactly who you’d picture standing next to a man like him.
I’d wept pathetically over the photo, deleting my search history over and over again, just to repeat my actions the next day. Like a dog returning to its own vomit.
Did you ever check up on me? I wonder as I stare at him from behind the marshmallow latte.
You know that look movie characters get on their face when they realize it’s the beginning of the end? That they’re the idiot hurtling toward some inevitable conclusion?
“How is it?” he asks, eyes bright with expectation.
“Yeah,” I nod. “Good. Really good.”
That was me. Hurtling toward an immovable end. I was going to get answers from him this summer. Perhaps by osmosis alone. And I was already bracing for impact.