Love in the Time of Cynicism

by Jani Berghuis

  Tracy smashed her lips even farther together before telling me, “What you did directly violated staff policies and cost the business money.”

  “It was three dollars and thirty sense-”

  “Still!” Her voice rises about an octave. “You need to pay for the drink and swear not to let him affect you like that again. And if he loiters around here, I expect you to ask him to leave like any sane person would, or we’ll have to let you go.”

  “But-”

  Like she’s my mother, Tracy cuts me off with a fat finger against my lip. “Not buts! You’re a good, hard worker, Del. You’ve worked here nearly as long as I have and I don’t want that to change. But you have to take is seriously. Wearing the apron is a gift. Respect it.”

  It takes all my willpower not to roll my eyes. “Yes ma’am.”

  “Good. Get to work.” She scans Rhett from across the room once again. “And if he doesn’t order anything in the next ten minutes, ask him to leave. I’ll be watching.”

  As I take my usual position behind the counter and begin to wipe it down, Rhett plants himself in front of me and doles out a usual grin. He looks so comfortable there propped up on elbows I’m surprised he doesn’t go the whole way with it and sit on the counter. “I hope you enjoyed your brief trip on the bike.”

  “Immensely,” I answer quietly, nervous at the thought of Tracy watching me. Rhett’s my ride back to Trent’s truck and I need him to stick around my entire shift or I’ll have to walk back to his house, which is a potentially mortifying situation to think about.

  “Hopefully there will be many more occasions in which it would be appropriate for you to hold me so tight.” Coming from him, I’m not quite sure whether or not we’re flirting. He could be completely serious or not. It’s hard to tell when he’s not looking directly at me, but at Tracy. A strange, uncomfortable silence settles in between us while we aren’t paying attention. His tan fingers drum quietly against the countertop but otherwise it’s completely silent. It’s weird and new and altogether something I want to avoid in the future, this not-talking thing.

  Since, in my experience, Rhett is a full-of-life talker and not one for sitting and contemplating while I have lived for years perfecting the art of silent warfare, he breaks it first. “Was your manager giving you crap about the free drink? I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I wanted to make sure you know I normally don’t take favors.”

  “Then why did you?”

  He shrugs like his answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “I didn’t want you to leave.”

  This makes me hide a smile behind my lips and stop staring at him for a moment. “She’s just…irked, that’s all. She doesn’t like it when the people she sees as abnormal hang around here. Personally, I could not even fathom giving a shit.”

  “You wouldn’t even consider giving a shit? That’s some pretty strong commitment right there,” he tells me sarcastically. Then, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a couple of folded ones and a five, shoves them across the counter at me. “For the last drink and the one I’ll have today.”

  “Rhett, it’s not a big deal. I can pay for the drinks,” I reply, trying to shove the cash back at him.

  “I refuse to be in the debt of someone as attractive as you,” he says seriously. I raise my eyebrows and laugh. “This is not a matter to be made fun of, Cordelia Kane. You could hold a power over me I would never be able to repay and I’d probably end up selling my soul to you to pay for those coffees.”

  “How about-” I separate four of the ones “-I pay for the last one and you pay for this one, then we move on with our lives. There are more important things to talk about than coffee.”

  “Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “Like what? And by the way, I’ll have a coffee. Black.”

  “You take your coffee black but you tolerated having a caramel macchiato the other day. Why?”

  “Anything for the beautiful girl.”

  I bite my lip as if I’m suddenly a real proper teenage girl looking into the eyes of a real handsome teenage boy. I almost laugh at the thought while I pour out coffee from one of the pots already prepared; Tracy must’ve done me a solid she normally wouldn’t have because every kind of coffee (half caf, regular, and decaf) are already brewing behind the counter. “Well, Doctor Sullivan, the anthropology teacher, he, ah, gives me special assignments instead of the work they do in class, and he wants me to work with someone on this one. Specifically someone who-”

  “Is thrillingly attractive and talented in many areas including writing and wooing, in equal parts?”

  “Precisely.” I smile at him briefly and continue, “The only specification he gave me was that the writing had to be ‘stylized reality,’ which is basically what most of the writing in anthro is, anyway, but he didn’t say what he wanted us to write on or anything like that. If you’ll help me, that is.”

  He beams, and I’m struck once again by how he’s the first person I’ve seen do this. “I would love to help you with your dumb writing project, Cordelia Kane.”

  I grin, feeling his happiness breaking through my usual veil of contempt for the world. “It’s not stupid. Very serious and of the utmost import.”

  He guffaws whole-heartedly now. “Import? What are you, a seventeenth century knight?”

  I turn mock-serious immediately. “Yes. Are you willing to be the damsel in distress?”

  “The role I was born to play, surely,” he responds, equally humorless. Then, his bright smile returns and Rhett asks, “What were you thinking? For this whole project deal, I mean.”

  “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “No better time than the present.”

  As I’m about to speak, a group of youths come in. I sigh heavily. “Can I just, like, call you to talk about it later or something? We could meet up some place.”

  Loaded with flirtation, he answers, “How will you contact me without my phone number?”

  I give the customers an utterly fake warm smile and push over a napkin and the pen behind my ear to Rhett. “Give it to me when I’m done with these guys.”

  He nods, gives me a wink, and settles in at a chair in the corner. He then proceeds to drink his coffee and to pull out his small notebook, scribbling down his phone number first and then moving into to writing what I assume is poetry.

  Then the group approaches me. They’re courteous and friendly and talk and laugh with one another, completely comfortable. I’m making white mochas (chocolate, steam milk, pour espresso, pour syrup, mix in milk, top off with whipped cream) and chocolate frappuccino (basically blending chocolate, milk, ice, and vanilla) as well as some fru-fru crap we recently started carrying. No drink made primarily with fruit and corn syrup should be sold in a coffeehouse. It’s disgraceful.

  They move past me, still chattering pleasantly, and settle in the big circle of chairs at the center of Ebony’s main room. There’s a loft upstairs that looks down on us, though it’s really only used as overflow seating for the shows we have on the weekend, when the place actually becomes cool to work at. Whoever has the first morning shift gets to rearrange the chairs however they want, and I’ve never had the honor. It seems like a massive waste of time and an excessive use of energy to me, but I enjoy seeing everyone else expend the effort.

  While I’m cleaning off the counter (I’ve never managed to make a drink without spilling some amount of liquid) and blenders, I quietly watch Rhett. He’s paying me no attention now that he’s in the writing mood, so I only feel a little creepy looking at him. I wonder, for the first time, what he’s writing about, if it’s for the poetry reading next week or about me. The thought captivates me, the ache to know what he really thinks of me; it must be serious, considering he’s letting me hear a personal poem in order to go on a date with me. Nobody’s ever done something like this for me.

  Imagining Rhett getting up in front of a crowd and reading some gushy poem for me, even if it was the worst poem ever written, makes my heart skip
a beat. I let the scene play out in my head like some sort of dream.

  He takes the stage. Taps the mic. He introduces himself nervously and reads the title. Then, the words start. They bump each other on the way out from his unprepared lips but gain confidence and rhythm as he continues, those impossible words bathing me as our eyes meet. At this point, it doesn’t even matter what he’s saying because I’m so caught up in how he looks at me from the stage, like I’m the only one he cares about in the room and like it doesn’t matter that he’s in front of crowd. These words are wholly mine as much as they are his.

  And when Rhett finishes and the audience erupts, despite the rules, into applause and whooping cheers, he ignores them and comes over to me. For the first time, he kisses me and it’s the most flawless kiss I’ve ever experienced. Fireworks, strings in the background, the whole deal.

  Oh god. I’m in deep, I realize as a sudden nervousness riddles by bones. Even though this whole thing is a misplaced fantasy and exceedingly unlikely to actually happen, I can’t help but wonder. Will he be a good kisser? Duh, my head answers. Will I be a good kisser? Doubtful.

  And then I’m thinking about my kissing experience which has, up to this point, been very limited.

  The last (and first, sadly enough) guy I dated, I was fourteen. Eric Gainsborough. He was seventeen, much to the dismay of my mom. She tolerated him, though, because she was good friends with his parents. We’d never been in the same school or even known each other except in the vaguest sense until my freshman year and suddenly, with the frankly disgusting amount of advanced classes I was taking because I still cared about my future, he was always there. Didn’t even realize I wasn’t a Senior until I told him.

  I don’t remember exactly how it happened. One day we were a couple and it was everything I was supposed to want, according to my mother and step sisters. He was perfect. Respectful. Always arrived on time. The kind of guy Michael called ‘son’ and mom baked for, once she grew past the age difference and saw his perfect grades and perfect face and perfect rich family. We dated for practically a whole year before he kissed me. It took him a while to get up the guts, I think. When Eric kissed me, there were no sparks. No fireworks. No string quartet. Unlike the rest of the relationship, it was so weird and awkward and uncomfortable for me. Everything went downhill from there and I can’t help but shudder at the memory of the horror of my second kiss.

  Two kisses. One nice and one awful.

  That’s what I’ve got under my belt, which means one thing.

  I need to figure out how much experience Rhett’s had, both from selfish desire and from the blatant curiosity constantly in me when I talk to him.

  Chapter Six – Miraculous Days

  When Rhett takes me back to his house a few hours later, Tannis is already outside waiting not for her brother, but for me. We dismount from the beast and Rhett give Tannis a meaningful look that urges her not to rush me until he’s done talking with me.

  “Sorry you had to sit through my entire shift,” I say while searching for something better.

  “It’s hard to think decisions through when a dashing lad is calling, isn’t it?” He smiles, hands shoves in his pockets as if he’s itching to reach out and touch me. After my brief and strange poetry fantasy, I feel the same way. “Honestly, though, it wasn’t bad. I never get time to myself around here, what with all the, ah-” he shoots a glance at his younger sister, who’s tapping her foot anxiously “-distractions. It was nice to have time to myself, you know?”

  “Not really,” I answer honestly. “My house is, as a rule, dead silent whenever I’m home. Being here is amazing, weirdly enough. There’s lots of, I don’t know, life here, I guess.”

  He shrugs. “Fair enough. We could trade off every once in a while.”

  We both choose to ignore the fact that there’s no way he’s welcome at my house or ever will be.

  Rhett takes his hand out of his pocket and takes my fingers in his. The golden sun is setting behind him and it punctuates the moment between us as the napkin with his phone number passes from his hand to mine. The mere touch of it is enough to make me feel connected to Rhett in a way I haven’t been with anybody.

  Tannis interrupts our prolonged eye contact with a groan. “Done being a sap yet, big brother?”

  “Never,” he responds cheerfully, then leans in and whispers in my ear. “Good luck, Cordelia Kane, with Tannis. You’ll call me tonight?”

  I nod, grimacing as the thirteen year old charges me and her brother retreats into the house.

  “What’s up, kid? Bra advice? Makeup tips?”

  Tannis sighs heavily and shakes her head. “Boys.”

  “A complex topic indeed.”

  “Right?” Her eyebrows knit together in frustration. “But I figured since, you know, you’ve obviously got some boy experience now that you’ve reeled in my brother-”

  “No comment.”

  “And he’s practically putty in your hands, you could give me some advice.” The sun dips below the horizon and the sky grows darker by the moment. I need to get home ASAP. “There’s this guy in my math class and he keeps, like, asking me for help and stuff? And yesterday he poked me to ask for a pencil. Twice. But I could totally see that there was a pencil case in his backpack. Does he like me?”

  I put on an old-wise-sage face, lips pursed, eyes shut as if I’m thinking hard about this absolutely puzzling conundrum. Then my eyes pop open in a gesture of grand epiphany and see Tannis watching me expectantly. “You should…wait for it…ask him!”

  She protests vehemently, “It’s not that easy!”

  Calmly, I reply, “Isn’t it though?”

  She nods, clearly taking this to heart, and smiles. “I will!”

  “Make sure you update me next time we see each other on the status of your mission.”

  “Will do,” she tells me seriously. She salutes, then heads back inside.

  And I drive back to my too-quiet house.

  Amanda, as anticipated, is waiting for me when I arrive. She’d nearly slipped my mind through the day’s usual and unusual antics, and now it’s come back to haunt me. The decision to sneak out with Trent’s truck before dawn could be seen in many ways and she will surely relate any thoughts to our ‘parents’ after wringing my neck (possibly literally) for more a more detailed report.

  I’m already late by at least an hour (a bunch of needy customers came in right before my shift was up and then there was the whole Tannis thing), although it doesn’t seem like mom or Michael is home judging by the quiet and the dark.

  Normally, even though they like to keep a very, very quiet home, my ‘parents’ are always making some amount of noise. Whether it’s the incessant flipping through of Michael’s piles upon piles of paperwork or mom’s humming in the shower and babbling about baby talk with her friends, there’s always some background noise. Now, though, as the door slams loudly behind me and I kick off my squeaking shoes in the foyer, the only sound is from my step sister’s judgmental gaze. In my admittedly short experience on this planet of ours, never have I encountered such a loud sound as that of Amanda’s stare. God, it’s deafening.

  “You’re late.” Her voice isn’t quite harsh enough to be an accusation. In fact, it almost sounds sad.

  I decide on a tactic to combat this strange reaction. I was expecting blunt and unbridled scorn, if not full out shouting and barbarous laughter. Sarcasm, being my general first choice, becomes the easiest option available to me. “Thanks for letting me know. What an astute observation.”

  “Can we not do this, Del?” Amanda flips her long blonde hair over a shoulder for the sheer emphasis of it. “We need to talk.”

  “What about?” I ask as if I don’t know. “We aren’t exactly notorious around here for our good ole fashioned sister-to-sister talks.”

  She rolls her eyes, which are smudged with makeup she doesn’t need to impress boys she doesn’t like in a school she hates going to, and tells me, “You went out with your broth
er’s truck to see that guy from mom’s announcement party, right?”

  Something weird – confidence? Stupidity? Hard to tell – comes over me and I tell her completely truthfully, “Yeah, I did. He invited me over for an apology breakfast and we spent the day together.”

  “I figured.” At this point, she plants herself on the steps and puts her head in her hands.

  Okay, I’m a bit concerned now. I’m in a position I’ve never been in before where Amanda is showing me some vulnerability. It’s strange and weird and my previous relational training (which mostly consisted of hanging around in corners and suffering through silences) hasn’t prepared me for this. Awkwardly, I position myself next to her and my rarely seen or expressed compassionate side comes out for the first time in a while for someone living in my house.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I try, “I mean, not to brag or anything, but I did coach a thirteen year old through a boy crisis less than an hour ago.”

  She unloads on me without hesitation and it’s very strange. “When I saw you leave this morning, I was so ready to tell dad and mom on you when I got home from school. Then, during third period, I was still thinking about it and I started talking to Dylan about it-” her longest-lasting boyfriend of a whopping year and a half “-and he asked me why it was bugging me so much and I realized it. I’m jealous of you, Del.” The words slip out. She’s as shocked an embarrassed as I am until she explains. “You’ve only known this guy for, like, a week and you’re already willing to wake up ungodly early and steal your brother’s truck and sneak around against mom’s orders for him. That says something about both of you, I think, and I want to have a relationship like that. With passion where everything’s spontaneous and free and amazing.” Her face burrows even farther into her hands. “I told Dylan I had to call it off.”