Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
“Should we go down there?” Allie didn’t know why she was whispering.
“Are you sure it’s an intruder? Should we call the police?” Ryan was also whispering.
“Maybe we just go check? What if Ren left a tray too close to the edge of the counter or something? I hate calling the cops, and I would extra-hate it if they showed up and told us the dangerous intruder was a mug that slipped.”
“That noise was not from a mug that slipped.”
“Let’s just go see what it is. But, like, slowly. Quietly.”
“Slow I can do. Not sure about quiet. Your stairs are creaky.”
Allie nodded. “If you stay on the left side of each step, it’s a bit better.”
“Noted. So, are we doing this? Vigilante justice?” Ryan looked more concerned than she would have expected a giant man to be about a noise in a kitchen.
“Vigilante investigation, more accurately.”
“Fine, Sherlock. I’ll go first. That way, if they get me, you can escape. You have more valuable skills to offer the world.”
She paused to smile at him. “I can’t confirm that, but of the two of us, you’re more likely to scare someone into running away without a fight. So, yes, you go first.”
They left her apartment, stepping as softly as the old floors would allow, and crept slowly down the stairs, their feet as far left as possible on each step. Allie’s heart was pounding for an entirely different reason than it had been a minute ago. At the bottom of the staircase, Ryan put his hand on the knob of the door to the kitchen and turned back to her. They could both hear movement on the other side.
“Ready?” Ryan whispered. He looked as unsure as she felt. Allie drew in a deep breath and nodded.
Ryan tensed his face into a nervous squint and turned back to the door. He pushed it open and froze.
“Oh dang!” He reeled backward into the stairwell with his palm over his eyes.
“What is it?” Allie shrieked, leaping up one stair to avoid being crushed between his body and the wall of the stairwell.
“Boobs!” Ryan yelled. “My roommate’s boobs!”
Allie still wasn’t sure what was happening, but it didn’t sound unsafe. She wriggled around Ryan, who was still frozen with one hand covering his eyes.
The situation became clear when she took a tentative step forward into the kitchen and saw Anisha there, perched on the edge of the prep counter, naked from the waist up. A person, who was definitely Ren, was emerging from under her voluminous skirt. Anisha rolled her eyes and put one arm across her chest in a gesture of reluctant modesty.
“You’re being very dramatic for someone who has already seen my boobs plenty of times !” she called to Ryan, who was still in the stairway with one hand over his eyes.
“Never while you’ve been in the middle of a sex act !” Ryan shouted back. “Walking to your room from the shower is a whole different thing, Anisha ! And for the record, I have always advocated for bathrobes.”
Allie finally remembered why they were there in the first place and walked around the counter to check for what had fallen. Sure enough, a large metal dishpan lay on the floor, cutlery littered around it. Definitely the source of the crash.
Fucking Ren.
It wasn’t as though Ren had never had sex in the café before. There had been several times when Allie had heard unmistakable moans coming from the bathroom toward the end of an evening shift when they were working together. They had an unspoken understanding that she wouldn’t rat Ren out to Mindy. But hearing muffled groans from a bathroom that Ren was in charge of cleaning anyway was very different from finding a half-naked lady on their food prep surface. A slow burn of frustration was spreading through her system. And, though she tried hard to stifle the emotion, a bit of…jealousy? She had been all excited about her G-rated almost-kiss with Ryan upstairs, when all the while there was a full NC-17 scene happening just below them.
“Well, at least you didn’t break any dishes,” Allie said to Ren, who had now fully emerged from Anisha’s nether regions and was standing beside the counter, looking only mildly embarrassed by the whole situation.
“Yeah, sorry about all that. I’ll wash those again.”
“And do a vigorous wipe-down of the counter, too, please.” Allie looked at where Anisha’s butt was still perched on their food prep surface, the ruffles of her long skirt making a nest around her body.
Ren nodded.
“Look, I don’t want to be a buzzkill or anything,” Allie went on, “but for fuck’s sake, please don’t have sex in the café kitchen. You have your own kitchens. Go have sex in one of those.”
“Not ours!” Ryan had finally entered the room.
Anisha pulled her shirt back on. She was rolling her eyes when her head emerged through the neckhole.
“After this lovely interaction, I’m not particularly in the mood to have sex in anyone’s kitchen.” Anisha hopped down from the counter and, with an amount of haughtiness that Allie found impressive, picked her discarded underpants up off the floor and tucked them into her purse. “Ryan? You heading home?”
Ryan sighed. “Yeah. Let’s head out.”
Allie was stunned. How could they just carry on with their relationship as normal after a scene like this? Wasn’t Ryan mad? Wasn’t Anisha annoyed? Apparently not anymore.
How can they forgive each other so fast? And how can Ryan just…leave? Now?
Anisha stopped to give Ren a lingering kiss as they headed toward the door. “I’ll call you,” she murmured.
Ren smiled wider than they usually did. “Not if I call you first.”
Ryan made a theatrical gagging sound as they retreated from the room. Anisha swatted his arm. Allie could hear them bickering as the café door closed behind them. The café was once again dark and quiet.
She left Ren to rewash the cutlery and scrub down the counter, and went back up to her bedroom. Should she text Ryan? And say what? Hey, remember how we almost kissed? No, the moment had passed, and who knew what Ryan’s intentions had been anyway—maybe she had it all wrong. She looked at herself in the mirror and took her hair out of its messy ponytail. She looked exhausted. And kind of pathetic. Maybe she wasn’t made for romance. Music was so much easier. She hummed a Belinda Carlisle song to herself as she changed into her pajamas.
Even though it was late and she had to get up early, she listened to their recording of “Borderline” six times before she shut her laptop and turned out her light. Ryan’s harmonies were still echoing in her head as she drifted into an exhausted sleep.
—
The next morning, almost-kiss almost forgotten, Allie was once again behind the counter, taking orders from a small group of people who had no business being as rude as they were.
“We wanted two cranberry scones.” The middle-aged man with dark hair and pretentiously thick glasses frames was jabbing at the pastry case glass with his index finger. “But there’s only one in here.”
“That’s the last one.” Allie tried to smile and pretend that he wasn’t now staring at her chest. The woman he was with flipped her very shiny hair over one shoulder and huffed.
“Are you sure? Can you ask your boss?” The man dragged his eyes up to Allie’s face. She felt a stab of annoyance in her chest.
“I am sure,” she responded with a tight smile. “But the pumpkin scones are also very good.”
He sighed. “Pumpkin’s pretty basic, isn’t it, though?”
Allie decided not to address this. “Let me know when you decide.”
As the opening notes of “Let It Snow” bounced out of the speakers, Allie took a moment away from her frustrating customer interaction to smile at the ceiling and then glance outside.
They had a rule. No Christmas music until December first or until it snowed, whichever came first. Ren would have started in August otherwise. Christmas was the only time of the year when Ren had strong opinions about the music they played in the café, leaving Mindy and Allie to argue about the relative merits of Joni Mitchell for the rest of the year.
Sure enough, large white flakes were drifting past the window. The normal buzz of the full café seemed to turn up its volume as people started noticing and pointing it out to their friends. The first snow.
When Allie finally provided the unpleasant man and his companion with their scones and oat milk cortados, she stuck her head back into the kitchen.
“How did you even see that it was snowing? You don’t have any windows back here.”
“They have a sixth sense,” Mindy answered for Ren. “Out of nowhere, they went running over to open the back door, and there it was. Snow.”
Ren laughed. “Yeah, a sixth sense. Otherwise known as a weather app on my phone .”
“Well, whatever it was, I’m grateful to be notified.” Mindy took her apron off. “We ran out of whipped cream, and I need to get some more before we get the usual first-snow run on hot chocolate this afternoon. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
When Mindy left, Ren came to stand with Allie behind the counter. The café was full, but everyone was happily chatting and eating, providing a momentary breather. Allie started tidying the sandwich station. Ren immediately moved beside her to help.
“Look, I’m sorry about last night, and thanks for not telling Mindy.”
“You owe me for that one.” Allie smiled, more able to laugh about the experience after a good sleep. Remembering Ryan shouting “Boobs!” had been making her giggle to herself all morning. “But honestly, she’s never said as much, but I’d bet any amount of money she’s had sex in that kitchen over the years.”
“No doubt!” Ren laughed. “The way that guy from the hardware store stares at her when he comes in. No way there wasn’t something happening there before he married that lady with the hair.”
Allie snickered. She finished wiping crumbs and arranging the lettuce bin and turned to Ren. “Anyway, even though it was not great that you were getting it on in the kitchen, I apologize for interrupting you.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. I was to blame for the interruption, anyway. It was me who knocked the cutlery bin off the counter. That stupid bin ruined what would have otherwise been a very pleasant evening.”
Allie was torn between keeping her secret and her burning desire to talk about the situation with someone.
“You’re not the only one. I thought Ryan was about to kiss me before all that noise interrupted.”
Ren immediately stopped stacking tomatoes. “What? Really? Allie!”
Allie could feel herself blush. The regret was already seeping in. “But it wasn’t really anything, I don’t think. We’d been up late singing together, and that always makes people mushy. Plus, he broke it off with that girl, Sheila. He was probably just feeling lonely.”
Ren shook their head emphatically. “Ryan is about the least lonely person I’ve ever met. He wasn’t feeling lonely. Allie, he likes you. Why are you acting like you’re in sixth grade and a boy has never liked you before?”
Allie bristled. “Because he was the one who was very clear that he’s not interested. He accidentally held my hand once, and he could not offer up disclaimers fast enough.”
“What do you mean, ‘accidentally held your hand’? People don’t accidentally hold other people’s hands. If we lived in a world where random strangers were constantly grabbing people’s hands, I’d never leave my house.”
Allie chose to ignore that particular premise. “We’d just had a good conversation, and he was, I don’t know, feeling extra friendly or something?”
“You know another way to say feeling extra friendly ?” Ren smirked. “Feeling like he has a crush on you .”
“Nope.” Allie was now certain that bringing this up had been the wrong move. “Nothing like that. When I pulled my hand away, he fell all over himself explaining that it hadn’t been a romantic thing and we were just friends and that was all he wanted.”
“You pulled your hand away? Why?”
Allie was starting to feel queasy. “I don’t know. It felt weird. It was sudden. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“But did you like it?”
Allie flashed back to the feeling of Ryan’s warm, soft hand gripping hers. It made her mind wander to the memory of them lying side by side on her bed last night. She wondered what his hands would have felt like on her skin. What his breath would have felt like on her neck. It gave her goose bumps.
“What are you thinking about?” Ren’s voice booted the fantasy from her head immediately.
“Nothing!” Allie’s cheeks were burning. She looked around frantically for something to clean.
Ren laughed. “You were picturing him grabbing more than your hand, weren’t you?”
“I, uh, need to pee.” She was panicking. Ren was laughing harder. Their voice followed her as she speed-walked into the kitchen. “It’s okay to like a boy, Allie!”
It wasn’t okay to like this boy. She’d just managed to actually form a friendship for the first time in years. If she propositioned Ryan and he said no, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to go on being his friend. She needed Ryan and Anisha in her life. They’d only been there a short while, but it felt as if she now couldn’t manage without them.
Why did I tell Ren?
She put her head in her hands. Would Ren tell Anisha? She would have to ask them not to. And besides, none of Ren’s relationships lasted longer than a week, anyway. Even though Anisha was definitely not the type to come crying to the café after Ren broke things off, Allie doubted they’d be seeing very much of her after Ren did their usual vanishing act.
She stood up and checked her hair in the mirror, pausing to tighten her ponytail.
Everything will be fine.
She could hear the strains of “Blue Christmas” from the kitchen speakers wafting into the bathroom. Glancing in the mirror one more time, she locked eyes with herself.
Don’t fuck it all up this time.
She nodded emphatically at her reflection, turned off the lights and returned to the world.