Chapter 1 #2
I pour hot water into my cup, watching the steam rise like it might offer an answer.
Roma hums, thoughtful. “Well, whatever it is,” she says, pulling the conversation back from the therapy-adjacent place it landed.
“We need to find a way to make it sound real again. Go on a date, flirt, fuck, kiss someone you shouldn’t.
Just, give yourself permission to feel something as Louisa Evans, not just whoever you voice that week, they will thank you for it. ”
“I’ll be done recording tomorrow, I have the dungeon scene tonight.
” She knows I do. That’s why she called me now, because later I’ll be in the hot and heavy pages of the enemies becoming lovers.
We exchange a few more words, and I know throughout all of this her intention is in both helping me be successful and perfect a craft I genuinely love, and also, for me to let someone beyond the first pages of my book.
I just stand here, tea steeping in hand. Thinking about what she said, and exactly what I’m going to do about it. Because reactivating a dating app sounds like my worst nightmare.
Chandler is already behind the counter, her hair catches the light from the front windows that makes it feel like it’s always golden hour and the rest of the day is just waiting for her to arrive. “Bad call?” Chandler asks, already halfway through making something intricate out of cappuccino foam.
“Not really,” I say. “She wants me to ‘dial up the passion.’”
Chandler brightens immediately. “Oh my god, I love that for you. I love that for me.” She is the ultimate hype girl.
Has been since college, and is by far one of the most convincing people I’ve ever met in my entire life.
It's more than charisma, there’s just vibrance that bounces off her in a way that has every single patron tipping 35% when she swings the tablet around for them to pay for their coffee.
“I think everyone should have more passion in their life,” she says, spooning a little of the coffee foam into a peak.
“What are we making today?” I ask, as I lean over to see what has her so delicately shaping foam with a chopstick and a spoon.
“Working on kittens.” Her tongue curls around her top lip in a way it only does when she’s thinking, or trying to be very delicate with whatever she’s crafting.
And I see it, the small nose from a droplet of coffee on the white milk foam.
(She is an artist.) Though her art is mixed media, and while technically yes, I do believe foam counts as mixed media, she is more known for her large-scale portraits out of whatever the hell she can get her hands on.
It’s part of why she likes working here, the trash collection, because I don’t think it was her BFA that prepared her for cappuccino cats.
I do a totally casual (completely not suspicious) scan of the shop the way I always do, the way any normal person does when they walk into a coffee shop when Toby appears from the back, carrying a stack of mugs. “He's not here yet,” he says as he pushes his glasses up on his nose.
Toby is getting his PhD in statistics, which means he approaches the human condition as a data set and is focused more on probability than tact.
He once told me (with complete sincerity and zero awareness of what he was saying) that based on the frequency with which I change my nail color versus previous months, he had calculated a sixty-three percent chance I was going through something.
(He was right.) He is also, inexplicably, one of my favorite people I’ve ever met.
I think it’s because he is the only person I know who is incapable of saying something he doesn’t mean.
There is no performance in him, no social lubrication or polite fiction.
It's exhausting and it's the most honest thing I've ever encountered, and sometimes when the world feels like it's made entirely of people performing versions of themselves (hi, it’s me) for each other's benefit, Toby is a relief.
“I wasn’t looking for him,” I say. (I was looking.)
“You were. You checked the corner table before you looked at either of us when you walked in,” he says. He’s hyper vigilant like that. He keeps track of everything. “But you’ve got four minutes before he walks in that door.”
The corner table currently sits empty but won't be for long. It has been occupied, Monday through Thursday, by the same person since the week I moved in down the street. It’s always at the same time, always with the same order, always with posture that’s decided the world (and everyone who inhabits it, particularly me) is disappointing.
He orders, sets up, works for half an hour, shuts the laptop, and leaves, all before 9 a.m..
We call him Angry Neighbor?. (Not to his face, usually.) It started after he walked in the first time, about a week after our first (disastrous) encounter and greeted me in the most un-neighborly way possible.
With a scowl. I tried to settle up our ‘incident’ with a free coffee but he just looked insulted.
Chandler wanted to call him ‘Hot Neighbor,’ and while she isn’t wrong, I refused to concede.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if he even recognized me, or that just was his face.
(Turned out to be both.) I reintroduced myself, and he just said ‘I know.’ And the name Angry Neighbor? stuck. Immediately.
He is, technically, my neighbor, the 7A to my 7B with a shared wall and shared contempt that has been brewing steadily since that first chance meeting. Once we were both on our balconies at the same time, and when I waved, he just turned and walked inside.
I know the four minutes have passed when the door chimes, and the atmosphere shifts.
I’m not being dramatic, I’m sure you’re thinking it’s hyperbolic that the air is thicker now, or the notion that all heads turn.
But it’s just kind of a natural adjustment.
The space needing to accommodate a new presence, a tall, brooding, unreasonably attractive, Large.
Americano. Extra-Hot. kind of presence that didn’t occupy space (or thought) a moment ago.
On move-in day, he was striking. (I also technically struck him with lukewarm medicinal tea.) But even amidst the dread of his anger, and my desperate attempt at an apology, I was taken by the look of him.
Who wouldn't be? I’ve read and voiced enough romance novels to know he looked like he could have walked right out of one. He just had none of the charm.
And here he is walking right into my morning, like usual.
Always exhibiting the same ultra-controlled energy.
He scans the shop, as if he’s not going to choose the seat that always seems to be available for him.
I sometimes wonder if Chandler shoos people away just to keep it open so she can get a good look at him, which he makes easy for her when he crosses the room to me (okay, not to me) to place the order I’ve already punched in.
Large. Americano. Extra-hot.