But First, Coffee

by Sarah Darlington

  I inhaled deeply, savoring this moment, my first cigarette in roughly two years and a month, while also savoring the needy, jealous look in Doug’s eyes. I wasn’t sure which was better—the harsh, smoky hit at the back of my throat, or the look I had never seen in Doug’s eyes before.

  “Don’t be a child,” he snapped at me, which was a stupid thing to say considering he wasn’t that much older than me. “When you go into Lana’s office tomorrow, I expect you to be on your best behavior. Do you realize how many people I had to pay to make this happen? You might be charming and charismatic, but you’re not that charming and charismatic. Lana didn’t come up with this cockeyed idea to hire you all on her own. It took me months to make this happen. Remember that. And wear a damn suit tomorrow. You could pass for homeless in those clothes.”

  He grabbed the cigarette from my mouth and flicked it onto the sidewalk at my feet, before he turned and walked away without another word.

  I inhaled sharply, my fists balling at my sides. I would have loved nothing more than to have chased after that man and beat him—and his designer suit—into a bloody mess.

  It was what I hated about people like Doug Maddox. People who are born into money and grow up only ever knowing money, it gives them a sense of entitlement, makes them think because they have money that they somehow have the right to treat the rest of the world like shit.

  You aren’t him, I silently told myself. Not anymore.

  I inhaled and exhaled, collecting my breath and my thoughts. The lit cigarette was still lying there on the pavement, intact and calling my name. I knew I should have left it be, left a piece of my past there on the cement, but I figured what could one more inhale really hurt? I’d already fucked my record anyway.

  Since I knew I’d be starting all over at day one again, I bent down to my knees and grabbed it. I brought it to my lips, not bothering to stand back up. I savored what would be my last ever—hopefully, my last ever—cigarette in my life. Until a pair of beautiful legs broke the moment and my concentration.

  Damn, those are nice.

  Toned and smooth, curvy in just the right places, standing beside me in a pair of white fuck me heals. The testosterone in my body instantly spiked. In general, I never really considered myself a ‘legs man,’ but hell if all of that didn’t change in one single glance. I wanted those legs wrapped around my waist. I wanted to know how they felt as I ran my hands up them, past the edges of that skirt, breaking all the rules I had set in place to protect myself a long time ago.

  I squinted up into the cloudy sky, desperately needing to see who these perfect, pristine legs belonged to.

  Fucking Lana Bitterman. The legs belonged to Lana Bitterman.

  Out of her office.

  On the street.

  With a breath, semi-frustrated with myself now, I stood.

  CHAPTER 3

  LANA

  Nancy normally fetched my lunch, but today I needed the fresh air and a chance to clear my head. For the first time in a while, I rode the elevators downstairs and left on my own. There was a sandwich shop not far down the street—not the best place ever, but convenient enough. The glass doors slid open, and I stepped outside into the warm summer air.

  I loved Portland, Oregon. I hadn’t grown up here. I’d grown up in Washington, in a small town called Oak Harbor, where I’d opened the very first Java Beans store—a.k.a a shed. A shed where I sold coffee out of the back at my dad’s lumberyard. When I had enough money saved and my business started to grow, the next step was to move here. Even if I didn’t look the ‘Portland part,’ I somehow felt connected with the people, connected with the city, grateful that both had decided to take a chance on me, and I enjoyed the small moments I got to walk and enjoy the fresh air.

  But not two feet around the corner of the building, I noticed Joe Coffee for the second time today. He was crouched over, one knee on the ground, smoking a cigarette off the sidewalk as if it were the cure for cancer.

  I paused for a moment, taking this chance to study him.

  He was a beautiful human being. Sure, a little rough around the edges. But underneath the scruffy beard, the unkemptness of his dark curly hair, behind those second-hand clothes and tattoos running all over his arms, his handsomeness radiated in an obvious way that infuriated me. I spent countless hours a week on my appearance. Blow drying and meticulous straightening my hair every morning. Visiting the salon every six weeks to keep up the color of my hair. Countless hours spent watching YouTube makeup tutorials over the years. Thousands of dollars of my hard-earned money spent on my wardrobe. And I still felt inadequate when I looked in the mirror.

  For as hard as I tried, it seemed he was trying equally hard in the opposite direction.

  This man was a big fat question mark.

  I mean, who shows up for an interview with the CEO of a company wearing a tank top? Wearing shorts? In fucking flip-flops? The tattoos on his arms were beautiful, expensive. An education from MIT and Harvard—those things were also expensive. Which led me to believe that he came from money. A contradiction to his appearance and to his minimum wage paying job as a barista. A contradiction to the way he currently crouched on the pavement, smoking a cigarette off the ground.

  But perhaps the weirdest part of this entire situation was me and the fact that I’d hired this man to work for me based on nothing at all. That wasn’t like me. He’d shown up for his interview dressed inappropriately, with a bit of an attitude, and yet all I could see were his pretty blue eyes.

  So, I’d hired him.

  I hired him because he had pretty blue eyes.

  Well the hell had I been thinking?

  I stepped across the pavement over to him, stood next to him, about to tell him what a mistake I’d made, when he looked up from the ground and straight into my eyes. His stare wasn’t friendly or even pleasant, if anything, he looked annoyed. Grunting, he flicked the cigarette that had previously been pressed to his lips aside. Then he stood.

  “Lana,” he said. And just like that, my insides turned to mush.

  I was a grown ass woman. Beautiful men did not make my knees weak. They did not set my skin on fire. Or make the spot between my legs thump. They did not distract me. But this man, in all his messy glory, seemed to be the one exception to the rule. I just stood there staring at him like a lost little puppy until he spoke again.

  “Did you need something?” he asked, swiping his hand across his forehead, brushing his unkempt hair out of his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  I cleared my throat, snapping back to reality. “Fine.” Fire him, dammit. Right now, fire him. Do it, Lana, before it’s too late. Fire him! “I was just about to go get some lunch,” I explained, rather calmly. “Would you like to join me?”

  What. The. Fuck. Lana.

  His eyes narrowed. A few long moments followed my question, enough time that I started to sweat out in the damp Oregon air. “Sure,” he finally answered. “I could do that.”

  “There’s a place down the street. Richard’s. It’s a sandwich shop. It’s where I usually go.”

  He made a face. “I know it. It’s a knockoff of Rico’s.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d never heard of Rico’s.

  “Rico’s,” he repeated. “The famous place on 8th.”

  I still didn’t know what he meant.

  “You’re kidding me,” he continued. And for the first time since I’d met him, his expression softened. He’d been so tense in my office, so tense a moment ago, and suddenly, he wasn’t. This discrepancy startled me. So far, I’d gotten the impression that he hated me—either that or he was terrified of me, like so many others—but his face as he spoke about some random restaurant named Rico’s had changed. He appeared more like the man I’d first seen—the man outside my office who’d joked about the woman in her white pantsuit with coffee stains all over her.

  “I’ll only eat with you if we go to Rico’s,” he decided.
“Richard’s is complete crap. Can you handle walking two more blocks?” He glanced pointedly down at my feet and my heels.

  I lived in heels. Two blocks did not frighten my feet. What frightened me was the extra time. Because going the extra distance would take up more of my valuable time, time away from the millions of other things on today’s to-do list. But then again, time spent with Joe, if I actually planned to keep with my original decision to hire him, wouldn’t be wasted.

  I could pick his brain. I could figure him out.

  “A piece of advice . . .” I told him. “Don’t ever ask a woman if she can handle her shoes.”

  His eyes narrowed as if he had a snappy comeback ready and waiting on the tip of his tongue. But whatever he was thinking, he didn’t say. He nodded, setting off walking, leading the way.

  As we walked, neither of us spoke. I found myself wishing I could read his mind, or at least wishing I would have dug deeper when I’d originally investigated him. I hadn’t lied, researching him had been like falling down a black, mysterious rabbit hole. His education at MIT and Harvard were impressive. Top of his class at both. Loved and known by everyone I contacted. His professor from MIT that I’d telephoned had spoken so highly of him, raving about his attitude, his innate intelligence, and his overall presence, praising him like the son he never had but always wanted. I’d hung up the phone with the professor feeling breathless. Breathless and desperately needing to meet Joe myself.

  After that, as much as I’d wanted to research him further, I decided against it. It felt too intrusive, too personal. I recalled the way learning more about Joe Coffee had sent my body into some weird frenzy. And dammit if I didn’t feel that feeling all over again. Sharp little tingles prickled across my arms as I merely walked beside him. I focused my attention on the cars, the buildings, the cloudy sky, and on the other people we passed as we walked. It didn’t matter. My attention attuned to Joe.

  I noticed the way his curly hair bounced as he stepped beside me. The way he continuously ran his hand over his beard as if he wasn’t used to it. The way he hadn’t glanced at me once. The way he held the door open for me when we—all too soon—reached Rico’s. The way he stood behind me in line of business-dressed people all impatiently waiting on the infamous Rico’s sandwich.

  “You should order a number one,” his smooth voice said from a couple of feet behind me.

  If it were anyone else, I would have told them to shove their number one up their ass. I had eyes. I could see the menu board. I could decide for myself what to order. But I said none of those mean comments that burned on my tongue. I only nodded. And when it came my turn to order, speaking to Rico himself behind the counter, I ordered a number one. Joe ordered next, shocking the shit out of me when he, in fact, didn’t order a number one.

  “I’ll have a number two,” he told Rico. “Hold the tomato.”

  I glared at him over my shoulder, connecting with those blue eyes of his for the first time since outside my office building. What the heck was this man’s deal? Then, as if he hadn’t insulted me enough today, when we approached the cashier, he made no attempt to pay.

  Okay, so this technically was a work lunch, I think. Since I’d invited him and since I was the boss, I should pay. Yes, I understood these social norms. But, shouldn’t he have at least reached for his wallet and pretended to try to pay?

  Yes. That would have been polite.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  Whatever.

  We sat down at a table across from one another. I sipped my iced tea, unwrapped my sandwich, and watched as he unwrapped his. No more words were exchanged. Then, just as I was about to pick up one half of my number one, Joe reached across the table and swapped one half of his sandwich with one half of mine. Before I could even stop him, the swap had been made. I now had half of each kind of sandwich sitting in front of me.

  I stared hard at Joe. Did he have any manners?

  “You really have to try both to give Rico’s a fair shot.” He shrugged, his eyes on mine, waiting on me to try both half sandwiches.

  With a sigh, I appeased him. I brought number one to my lips. And dammit if it didn’t taste like heaven on Earth. A small moan escaped my lips as I bit down, savoring the sandwich slowly. Number two was different but equally amazing.

  With a hint of a smile, when I was nearly finished eating, he picked up one half of his lunch and bit into the sandwich.

  A few minutes later, we were finished with our lunch, tossing our trash in the bin and walking back outside into the hot air. For the most part it had been a pleasant lunch until—shit!—it occurred to me that I had yet to ask him a single, relevant question. We started walking back in the direction of my office building, and my brain couldn’t even come up with some decent small talk or anything to fill the silence that now followed us.

  What the hell had been the point of this lunch if I wasn’t going to make use of my time alone with him?

  As we turned a corner, my eyes awkwardly connected with his for a mere fraction of a moment, I knew the answer to my question. And it pulsed through me like a blast of muggy swamp air.

  I liked Joe—or something about him.

  I liked him and that was the reason I’d asked him to lunch. Not to pick his brain. Not to decide if he was a suitable employee. I’d merely, selfishly wanted a few precious moments alone with him. Obviously, this ‘newfound, out-of-left-field, you’re-an-adult-for-fuck’s-sake-so-start-acting-like-one’ crush was one-sided, only in my head, and completely unprofessional. He was too young. He was too messy. He was soon to be an employee. One I desperately needed to shoulder some of my growing workload. Plus, besides all of that, I gave up on the possibility of love and romance years ago. My last encounter with a man had been a blind date, set up by my mother, where I drank too much wine and ended up crying on my date’s shoulder by the end of the night. Needless to say, I never heard from that guy again. Until I saw him, awkwardly enough, at my parents’ Christmas Eve party last year. He avoided me like I had a highly contagious flesh-eating virus while I ended the night trying not to get too drunk off the eggnog in my parents’ basement.

  The eggnog won that battle.

  I knew what I was. I knew what I wasn’t.

  If I wanted to fantasize about Joe Coffee on my own time, fine. But not on work time. Today was the one and only time this little lunch thing—whatever it had been, most likely nothing at all—would ever happen.

  As we approached my office building, stopping in front of the glass double doors that led inside, I tried my best to be professional and not show on the outside everything I felt on the inside. I thrust out a hand for him to shake. It seemed like the business thing to do. He took my offered hand—his strong, warm, really nice, hand around my hand. I swallowed hard, trying not to feel anything, although I felt everything from one single handshake.

  Fuck me, I was in trouble.

  “Nice meeting you, Joe. Thanks for showing me Rico’s.” My voice cracked a little as I spoke.

  We dropped hands and he shrugged. “No problem.”

  “Next time Nancy gets my lunch, I’ll instruct her to walk a little farther and go there. It was nice—I mean, good. Well, then, see you tomorrow for your first day.”

  Saying nothing further, not giving him a chance to respond to my ‘this-was-only-a-one-time-thing’ comment, I turned and entered the building.

  I rounded the corner.

  The moment I was out of Joe’s sight, I sucked in a deep breath and leaned my back against the marble wall inside of the building. I let the chilly feel of the stone set into my body as I took a moment to collect my thoughts and feelings. The elderly door man, a man who’d been here at this building for as long as my company had been here, whose name I didn’t know, stared at me. He had to be thinking I was a nutcase. So with one more deep breath, giving him a small smile, I stepped away from the wall and onto the elevator.

  CHAPTER 4

  LANA

  I didn’t sleep. In
stead of crashing in my ‘hide-a-bed,’ the nickname I used for my under the desk bed, I’d gone home to my apartment. I’d had a feeling I’d have some trouble sleeping, thus the reason I’d gone home, but being in my king-sized bed hadn’t been the cure for the anticipation of today—Joe’s first day.

  Instead, I showed up at the office the next morning, exhausted, confused, but determined to be the best, most professional version of myself. Typically, I was the first person to arrive in the morning, but it had taken me longer than normal to get ready, and as I walked through the office halls, I spotted a few people who had beat me in today. They each said a polite ‘good morning’ as I passed, all of which I returned, until I reached the outside of my office and Nancy’s desk.

  Even Nancy was already here.

  That was when I knew I was late.

  “Good Morning, Lana.” Nancy smiled politely up at me from her desk. “Joe Coffee is already here. He’s waiting inside your office.” She raised her eyebrows, wiggling them a little. “Would you like me to get you your coffee now? Or anything else?”

  “Coffee, yes.” She knew how I liked it, I didn’t have to explain.

  “Okay. I’ll be right in with it. And here’s the research you wanted on that other coffee bean farm in Costa Rica.” She stood from her desk, raising her eyebrows at me as if she was trying to send me some hidden message, but I couldn’t read her mind. We weren’t that close that I knew what sort of message her eyebrows meant. I grabbed the pile of papers off her desk. For a small second, I tried to decipher what her hidden message might possibly mean, but quickly gave up, pushing open the doors to my office. I was ready to face Joe, ready to put yesterday miles behind me, ready to ignore anything my body felt for him, and simply work with him as if he were any other person on this planet.