I'll have the americano, then

December 14, 2021

Coffee wasn’t always her thing. But after 7AM conference calls, two-hour commutes, and her sister’s third baby shower, coffee is her dependable, impartial friend. It grounds her. All she has to do is let the relief slide down her throat and wrap her in giddy warmth, and she is alive again.

It’s bitter, she thinks, and frowns.

A splash of cream blossoms in her cup as she shakes a sugar packet, and she sees him.

He’s all curls and scuffed Stan Smiths, rolled-sleeve elbows, pine and patchouli. Callouses, too, because he’d play guitar. No—piano. Those are piano hands, she thinks, and swishes the coffee stick in her mug.

She glances from her laptop, but he’s absorbed in a yellow paperback that makes him chuckle every so often. That’s when she notices he has dimples, and it’s like she’s been jabbed in the gut with a spade. One gulp of comfort numbs the sting.

Maybe she would nonchalantly offer, Sedaris? Good choice. You ever read Lawson?

He would smile, make a bad pun about books, she'd laugh, and they'd start chatting. Three dates and a weekend trip later he'd bring her blueberry pancakes in bed and she'd take him kayaking at her parents’ summer cottage, until they fell asleep in the hammock together, among the scent of the hydrangeas, under the stars.

She scrunches her nose, stares into the mug. The sweetness is thick and cloying on her tongue.

No, he would awkwardly shove over a half-crumpled napkin with his number—make that social media handle—and they would waste weeks prodding each other with texts until they finally meet up to sip overpriced IPAs and shout over too-loud alt-rock, split the bill of their mediocre night, and stumble back to her place to tangle the sheets in clumsy, sweaty disappointment.

But in her periphery his eyelids flicker toward her. When she looks up, his irises are the deep chocolate of rain-soaked earth.

She is ten years old again. The patter of droplets against her scalp. The loamy mist of morning in her nostrils, knees caked in mud. Damp coffee grounds cling to her arms as she buries her hands in the earth. Twenty years on, only the smallest of the saplings will survive: scarred and crooked through wind and rain, reaching, ever so slowly, toward the light—

“Lauren?”

She blinks, turns away. Shakes his rain off her mind.

“They said they can do peonies. They’re your second choice, right? We should go, your dress fitting is in half an hour.”