1. Lori #2
He hears it. The corner of his mouth tips up. Not a grin, exactly. It is something a little more dangerous. The back of my neck goes warm in a way it has not been warm in three months.
Not now, I tell myself when I feel my body leaning toward him. Not when you have nothing left to give a man like that.
I remember how Ryan screwed me over and how it went at the Sheriff’s earlier today. My walls come up, fast. There is about five feet between his stool and the edge of my booth, and I am aware of every inch of it.
I put three sugars and a splash of cream into my coffee, pretending I didn’t just laugh at his terrible joke.
"How do you take it?" He signals at my mug. "Three sugars?"
"Watching how I drink my coffee," I add some cream to my mug. "That's your move?"
"Observing." Easy. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"And a splash of cream," he adds, almost to himself.
Something loosens at the base of my neck.
The part of me that has not been seen since Ryan leans toward him an inch on its own.
The rest of me holds where it is, the part that remembers I have $41 left in my account and rent due next week and exactly zero business leaning toward a stranger noticing my coffee preferences.
"Is that supposed to impress me?"
He considers me over the rim of his cup, unhurried in a way that is its own argument.
"Maybe. Did it work?"
Lord. It did, but he is not going to hear it from me.
This feels alarmingly easy. Easier than talking to anybody has been in months. Easier than anybody is with me in longer than I will say out loud. Somewhere in the last sixty seconds he talks to me into a corner of my own booth.
I’m suddenly aware of my bun pulling at my scalp.
It has been doing that since hour four, but I’d been ignoring it.
I reach up without thinking and tug the pins out one at a time.
My hair comes loose all the way down my back.
Dark chestnut, it falls halfway between my shoulder blades, the ends gone a little dry from another year of cheap shampoo.
I gather it back to twist it up again, a little loose this time.
I look up halfway through gathering it and find that he has stopped what he was doing and is now looking at me.
"What?" Defensive. Hands still in my hair.
"Leave it down a second." Not pushy. A request.
I stop. I am not entirely sure why I stop. My hands are still in my hair, the back of my neck is still warm, and my breath goes short.
"You're —" He weighs whether to say the rest. He says it. "Yeah. You should wear it down."
My face goes warm. The heat does not stop at my face.
I would like, very much, to be a person who can take a compliment from a handsome stranger at a counter without my capillaries going haywire inside me. I am not that person. He sees the color come up in my throat. He does not lord it over me. The corner of his mouth tips up again.
"May I?" He has his phone in his hand, holding it loose at the counter.
"You want a picture. Of me. Looking like roadkill after a double shift?"
"You look like a woman who forgot how good-looking she is. I'd like the evidence."
Heck, I will never see him again. He finishes his coffee and gets back in whatever truck he comes in and goes home to whatever life he comes from. The picture sits on his phone for a week and disappears into whatever folder pictures go to when a man stops thinking about them.
I have nothing left to lose, my bank account as proof.
I huff a laugh, mostly at myself. I do not pose or fix my hair, just put my hands down back on the table.
I do not pretend to be a woman who has not been on her feet for four hours straight.
I look at him with my hair down and the worst version of myself sitting in a back booth after a long day, the day that started long before my shift, and I let him take one picture.
He snaps a picture and looks at it. He goes quiet in a way that is its own compliment.
"Yeah." Mostly to the phone. "That's the one."
I want, very badly and embarrassingly, to lean over the counter and see what he sees. But I do not.
As he puts his phone back on the counter, it lights up. PUMPKIN, with a tiny heart. Someone's calling him, but I can't make out the name on the screen from where I sit. Not that I want to know, I tell myself.
He answers, eyes on the screen first. Then he looks up. Half a second. An apology in the look. Sorry, I have to take this.
Something cold drops through my chest that has no business being there. I have no position here. We are two strangers at a diner counter who exchanged a minute of banter and a photograph, and I am not entitled to whatever feeling this is, just because he’s answering his phone.
But my ribs are honest about it.
His voice goes different. The flirt is sanded off and something else is laid down where it used to be.
"Hey, Pumpkin."
I hear a laugh at the other end of the line, small and certain.
"No, baby. I know. Daddy's coming home. I'll tuck you in. I promise. Love you, too."
He hangs up. He sits a beat with the phone in his hand. Then he turns back to me and does something I do not expect, which is volunteer information.
"Six," he says.
"Six?"
"My kid. She's six. Her name’s Cadie." He sets the phone down. "Just so you know. I don't run the play where a woman finds that out three weeks deep."
He says it plainly. No edges.
He huffs a small laugh through his nose.
Drains the rest of the coffee in two pulls, throat working with the swallow, and reaches into his back pocket for a wallet.
Beat-up brown leather. A corner resealed with some tape, the gloss long gone.
He slides a bill onto the counter under his palm. Twice what the coffee cost.
He stands. The hat comes off the counter and goes back on in one easy motion. He turns to leave.
He stops with his hand on the door.
"Huh." He turns back. Eyes amused, just enough. "Just realized I never got your name."
I tip my chin at him, dry as I can manage with my hair still down and a stranger's compliment still warming the back of my neck.
"In your dreams, cowboy."
A grin starts to form on his face, real and slow, like a man finding it funnier than he wants to let on.
"Well." He pulls the door open. "In your dreams tonight, you can call me Carson."
The door is closing on its slow spring when he says the last thing. "Goodbye, Dream Girl."
The bell finishes its small bright sound. As he walks past the diner’s windows on the sidewalk, he stops and turns to see me through the glass.
My hand rises up toward the glass before I can think about it, half-waving. I put it back as soon as I realize what I am doing.
He does not smile, does not wave, just looks the way a man looks at something he has decided about. And he is gone.
I sit there with my hair down my back, a mug in my hand, a man's name in my mouth — Carson — and the flutter under my ribs lasts exactly as long as it takes for the rest of the day to come back.
The precinct. The man I think I could trust. The seven years of savings are gone with him. The $41 left. Rent due next week.
I let the flutter go.
There’s a notification on my phone. I pick it up because my hands need something to do.
The notification is for an auto-renewal charge, for a meditation app I downloaded last year and forgot to cancel.
Mindful Healing. Annual Membership Renewed. $14.99.
Then I check my balance. The number on the screen is not $41 anymore. My new balance is $26.01.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
I would call the app and ask for $15 if I could, except I have spent twenty-five years not asking. I’m not breaking the streak.
I put my forehead down on the table next to the phone. The thunk is loud enough that Jason looks up from the register.
"For fuck's sake." I groan into the table.
Jason does not say anything. He pours another coffee into a to-go cup, three sugars, a splash of cream, and sets it at my elbow without comment. Then he goes back to his receipts.
The dark out the window sets in for the night.
Somewhere in town, a man named Carson drives home to a six-year-old he answers the phone for. I sit in a back booth of a diner with $26 in my account, and I cannot stop thinking about the way he looked at me. I feel like shit, but I look pretty to him.
This small consolation lasts until I stand up.
So, I bask in it for a little bit, and do not stand up just yet.