Maybe she could tempt him to drink it this time.
“Here you go, Theo. Just for you.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled, his fingers just barely grazing hers as he took the coffee in his hand. At her touch, he nearly dropped the drink and yanked his arm away as if he’d been electrocuted.
“Oh, s-sorry,” he stammered, reaching forward again. “So sorry.”
She pushed the coffee across the counter to him and drew her hand back, stifling a look of concern and replacing it with a soft smile. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you, Audrey,” he muttered, retreating to the same corner as last time.
She postponed her break in favor of keeping an eye on him. Once again, he took a small black leather notebook out from his pocket and scribbled into it with a gold-tipped fountain pen. Once again, he pulled the brim of his baseball cap low over his face. And once again, he never removed his mask and never took a single sip of coffee.
At precisely 9:00 a.m., he gathered up his things, took his coffee cup, and left in a rush, without giving her so much as a backward glance.
Audrey checked the tip jar.
Just like last week, he’d left all of his change inside.
She started lookingfor Theo every day that summer.
The third week, he came in on Tuesday at exactly 8:17 a.m., just like the previous two weeks.
But then he also came in on Thursday.
And Friday.
Always at 8:17 a.m.
He always paid in cash.
And he always left the remainder of his broken twenty-dollar bills in their tip jar.
Theo began coming in three times a week, but little else changed. He barely spoke, struggled to order the same coffee every time, and never once removed his mask to drink it in the café. Instead, he claimed the same table for exactly forty minutes, clutched the warm cup in one hand, and wrote in his little notebook with the other, his leather satchel resting faithfully against his long legs. He always wore black, and Audrey could only ever see the upper left corner of his face.
No matter how hard she tried, no matter what she said at the register, she never got him to laugh.
It was hard not to fixate on such a goal.
He looked like he could use a laugh.
He was so sweet, Audrey ached to give him one.
He’d been coming in regularly three times a week for a month when the fall semester started at the tail end of August and time went strange. It was always like that when she shifted mindsets from just work to workandschool, but she only had to do this one more time.
The Tuesday of her second week of classes was already an odd day. Monday had been so crazy, she was almost late for her capstone course after her shift, but this morning was practically dead.
“We haven’t seen Pattycakes yet, have we?” Josh tamped freshly ground beans into the group head and clicked it into place. “Think she died?”
Audrey snorted at the nickname and shook her head. “Fat chance.”
The lack of Patricia meant one of three things: she was running late (unusual, but most likely), she’d taken a vacation (god, Audrey hoped so), or she’d finally chosen to go get her goddamnFrappuccino at an actual Starbucks for once (wholly wishful thinking, but a girl could dream). A few of the usual suspects sat with their ceramic cups over in the lounge area, typing quietly away to the inoffensive lo-fi playing over the café’s sound system, and Audrey drummed her fingers against the counter while Josh experimented with perfecting a ristretto.
“Hey, Auds.” She glanced over her shoulder as he slid a shot to her. “Taste this, will you?”
“Sure.” She sipped and thought for a moment as she rolled the coffee around on her palate. “You waited too long on that pull—it’s a touch bitter.”
“Damnit.” Josh turned back to the machine to try again, and that’s when Theo finally slid into the café, looking mostly like he normally did. But this time, his cap wasn’t pulled quite so low, and Audrey could see a bit more of his face and eye than usual as he stepped up to the counter.
