by Lucia Jordan
My new barista job was not going any better. That was another adjustment that I was trying and failing to make. My trainer at the coffee shop had gotten fed up with me by the second day and handed me over to Kate, who graciously offered to take on my training, even though she wasn’t getting paid for the overtime. I was embarrassed about not being able to remember even the simplest of things on the job because my mind was elsewhere ninety percent of the time. And I was also angry.
I was angry at Tim for not having come to chase me down and beg for forgiveness when he got back in town—something I knew wouldn’t happen, but I fantasized about regardless—and I was angry at myself. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have broken up with him over text. What kind of self-respecting adult does shit like that? Okay, so he wasn’t forthcoming about talking to me, and he shouldn’t have brushed me off after the incident with the photo. Tim should have made time to talk to me about it before he left on his trip to Spokane. But was it all really that devastating to warrant a breakup? Maybe I had been too quick to rush to judgment, and maybe there really wasn’t anything that he had done wrong, aside from being a typical guy and trying to avoid a confrontation with his girlfriend, which he thought might just resolve on its own.
The more I thought about it, the more I leaned into a downward spiral of guilt, and the more that I second-guessed myself about having broken off our relationship. I quite possibly had just ruined the best thing in my life.
“Is this going to take much longer?” an impatient customer with a very angular nose said as she stared over the top of the espresso bar at me.
I realized that I had been in the process of making her latte when I had zoned out and started thinking about Tim again.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m almost finished with it.”
I grabbed a cup and poured the milk inside, then stuck it underneath the frothing wand and looked around me as if I had just awoken from a dream. Much to my dismay, there was a huge line of backed-up drink tickets that I had neglected to keep up with. The crowd of people who were standing there and waiting for their coffee was starting to create a stir of aggravation and impatience.
“Hey,” Kate said over the little headsets that we were required to wear to talk with each other on. “Are you doing okay over there?”
Kate was standing at the drive-through window, and she had her own customers and her own drinks to make. I didn’t want to admit to her that I was indeed not doing okay over here. Fortunately, I didn’t need to say anything because as soon as Kate got a break from the window, she walked over to check on me and found me buried under a line of drink orders that I was hopelessly behind on.
“Oh wow…” she quietly said as she assessed the damage.
The customers were becoming so irritated that they looked as if they were about to riot right here in the café. Most of the people were downtown Seattle business folks who had tight schedules and only enough time to grab a quick coffee from a competent barista, who was not me.
“I’m going to get fired,” I said flatly to her. There wasn’t any point in my getting upset about it. It was what it was.
“No, you’re not,” she smiled.
I could tell she was just trying to reassure me because even she looked a bit panicked behind her sweet smile.
“Go stand at the window,” she said. “Just say hello to the people as they pull up and take their payment. I’ll do the rest.”
“But Kate—”
She shooed me over to the window before I wasted any more time on protesting. There was no way that she was going to be able to keep up with both the espresso bar and the drive-through drink orders at the same time.
I did as she said. I greeted and talked with the people who pulled up at the window and processed their payments, which I managed not to screw up. Anytime there was a break in the drive-through, I looked over at Kate and saw her busting out four to five drink orders at once. My head was spinning as I watched her work. How could a girl who was so flighty be so damn efficient?
She apologized to the customers who were ornery and comped their drinks so that they left happy and didn’t complain to management. She dwindled down the crowd of waiting customers until she was left with the current drink order and the last customer. She even somehow managed to squeeze in one of her specialty lattes for a woman who came in regularly and fed her dog the whipped cream off the top of her mochas.
At thirty minutes before closing time, the store manager came in to assess the evening and ask us how everything went. He looked around the café and saw the few customers who were still hanging out to be content and sipping their drinks while working on laptops and engaging in pleasant conversations. The espresso bar had been wiped down clean—even though I had made a disastrous mess spilling drinks all over it before Kate took it over—and everything looked as though it had been running smoothly all night.
“How was the shift?” our manager asked Kate.
“Great!” she said enthusiastically.
I had known Kate for a long time, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her so tired as she was right now. She sure did a great job of hiding it, though.
“No problems at all,” she said. “Smooth sailing. Brooke is a natural! Even some of the picky regular customers took an immediate liking to her.”
“Is that so?” he asked with a healthy dose of skepticism as he looked directly at me.
Kate gave me a look from behind him that indicated she would kill me later tonight back at the apartment if I didn’t smile and confirm her story after she had busted her ass to save my job for me.
“Absolutely! I answered as I smiled at our manager with feigned confidence. “Piece of cake.”
He stared at me for a second, and I thought for sure that he was going to start quizzing me on how many espresso shots went into a drink or the temperature to steam the milk. But instead, he just nodded and turned to walk into the back office to work on the product order.
I could see Kate sigh with visible relief.
“Hey, baby,” Nick said as he walked up to the counter to pick her up since our shift was almost over. He usually came in at the end of the night to get a late-night coffee, so there wasn’t really any sense in all of us bringing cars to the tiny parking lot. I was the weird one who liked to walk home. It helped me clear my head.
Kate leaned across the counter to kiss him, and when the store manager came back out to look for a pen, he scolded her for fraternizing with the customers. Kate just rolled her eyes at him. If only he knew what a great employee she was, he wouldn’t criticize her for anything at all. She did the job of two, if not three, people tonight.
“You look beat,” Nick said to her. “Rough night?”
Kate looked at me and laughed. “Not as rough as it could have been,” she said as she came to put her arm around my shoulder and pull me out from around the espresso bar with her.
We took our aprons off as we walked and hung them up on the hooks for the night. Kate shouted a goodbye to the manager, and we all left the café together.
“You sure you don’t want a ride home?” Kate asked as we got to Nick’s car.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure. It’s a short walk, and I could use some time in the cool air to think.”
“Okay,” she said as she shrugged. “See you back at the apartment then.”
I wasn’t lying when I said that I needed the time on the walk home to think; I did. But I also had another reason for wanting to walk—the route on the way back to the apartment passed by my old office building at Cubed.
Ever since I had started questioning whether or not I had been right to break up with Tim, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and worrying that I’d been too hasty. Now, I was getting obsessed with trying to either confirm or retract my decision. I didn’t actually have anything planned per se; I wasn’t going to go walking into his office or anything. I just thought that I would walk by the building to see if I got any kind of feeling about things. Maybe his office
light would still be on, and he would be the only one in the building. Maybe then I would feel like I should go in and talk to him. Or maybe he would be by his car getting ready to leave, and he would see me walk by and call out for me to stop to talk to him. Maybe he was just waiting for the opportunity to patch things up between us. There was, of course, also the possibility that he hated me now. I tried not to dwell on that one.
The nearer that I got to the Cubed complex, the more I convinced myself that I should just go in and talk to Tim about everything. By the time I had almost reached the front entrance, I was certain that I would head straight on up to his office if his car were still parked in the lot. But then, just as I noticed that Tim’s car was indeed still there in the lot, I saw him leaving the building with some woman. I stopped walking and stood next to the corner of the next-door building so that he wouldn’t spot me there. Not only was it a woman, but it was the woman, the woman who had been in the limo with him and the subject of the picture that had caused all the trouble to begin with.
I turned down the other street and hurried away before he could see me there.
4
Chapter Three (Tim)
“You look like shit,” Max said as I walked into the office in the morning.
At least I could always count on Max, to be honest.
“Rough night?” he asked.
“Not unless you count having to deal with Chelsea,” I answered. “I just don’t understand why that woman is so hell-bent on trying to snake her way into my life.”
“What did she do this time?”
“Nothing remarkable, she just showed up here at the office last night to try to get me to take her out for drinks. I ended up having to walk her out and hail her a cab just so I could get her to leave. I wasn’t even finished with my work, so I came back inside after I got rid of her.”
“Man, that girl really wants a piece of you,” Max said as he shook his head.
“Yeah, but why? I mean, I don’t get it. There are plenty of other wealthy, attractive men in Seattle. Why does she keep coming after me?” I asked.
Max laughed. “Don’t be so full of yourself. You’re not that attractive.”
I slapped him on the shoulder, and then we got started on work. I loved hanging out with Max, and I always considered it an honor when he worked on a project with me. He was an incredibly talented designer, and he would come up with some of the most innovative ideas I had ever seen. I always fancied myself as being pretty inventive, but Max’s ideas put my creativity to shame. If I could choose one head to crawl inside and look around in for a while, it would be his.
He had designed and installed the curved skylight in the bedroom of my modular home in the mountains and inlaid them with a magnifying element that made it look as though you were literally lying among the stars at nighttime. At the time, there was no such technology to make the glass do that, so Max camped out in the woods in his van for several days, and when he returned, he had invented it. The guy was a complete genius in the body of a drifter.
He also was a good friend, the type of friend who never sold you out, but also called you out on your bullshit if necessary. When I had told him of Brooke breaking up with me, he was sympathetic as any good friend would be, but he also let me have it for my obstinance in bringing the whole issue on myself.
We both stood around the oversized drafting table in my studio and started sketching some plans for the Spokane project. The new project was a huge contract for the company, and if it went off successfully without a hitch, it would bring a substantial amount of good press to Cubed. The project entailed the designing and building of a new, hip collection of container homes that would be used to start a tiny home community in Spokane. Until now, it was nearly impossible to get the right zoning permits to build tiny homes in Spokane. This project was the first to acquire the permissions to do anything of this nature and would open up the possibility of other tiny home communities that were self-sufficient and economical worldwide.
I’d had lots of important contracts and projects before, but this one was by far one of the most exciting and high-stakes. It had to be executed perfectly, which was why I tried so hard to keep my mind on the task at hand and not on Brooke. My attempt immediately failed when Max brought up her name as he started laying out a build model onto the paper with a thick, dark piece of charcoal.
“I think you should reach out to Brooke,” he said without looking up from the design concept that he was drawing out. “She really seemed to care about you, man. She was really good for you, I think.”
“Yeah, I know she was. I cared about her, too. But I don’t think there’s a way for me to appeal to her now. I’ve let too much time pass.”
Max looked up from the paper just long enough to roll his eyes at me dramatically.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “It was my fault. Regardless, what’s done is done.”
“Not necessarily.”
Max loved to do that. He loved to play devil’s advocate and try to goad me into things. I could never seem to resist taking the bait.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s only done between you two because you never really talked to her about it. She thinks that you cheated on her with Chelsea.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Chelsea isn’t even my type, even if I hadn’t already been dating Brooke. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for that picture.”
“That may be true, but you never told her that, so she doesn’t know. To Brooke, it looks like you were allowing a pretty woman to rub her hands on your pants. Besides, even if you hadn’t intended for things to get out of your control, you were still inebriated, and you didn’t remove yourself from the fiasco. How could you expect Brooke to think anything else?”
Max always seemed to be right about matters of the heart. Sometimes it drove me absolutely crazy, but he was right. Maybe I should go try to talk to her. Hell, I probably should have already gone to try to talk to her as soon as I had gotten back into town, but instead, I chickened out again.
“You might be right,” I admitted to him as I watched him work his magic with a nub of charcoal and turn a blank page into an entire scaled blueprint. “I practically ignored her before I left on my trip to Spokane. I was so busy preparing for the trip that I—”
“Compartmentalized?” Max asked as he finished my sentence. “Dude, you really need to stop doing that when it comes to human beings. Compartmentalization only works with container homes, not people.”
Ugh, could he stop being right all of the time? It made me wonder why I was the billionaire, and he was the vagrant wanderer. Perhaps I was living my life all wrong and that Max really had it all figured out.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Brooke.”
“About time,” Max sighed.
5
*** (Tim Continued)
When I left work that day, I headed straight to Brooke’s apartment. Since she had blocked my number, there wasn’t any way for me to get a call or message to her. I had even tried through social media, but she had apparently very efficiently blocked that as well. So I knew that the only option I had left was to show up on her front door and stand there until she agreed to talk with me. But when I got to her apartment, it was vacant, and the landlord said that Brooke hadn’t left a forwarding address. Great, now what was I supposed to do?
“Hey,” I said into my phone as Max picked up my call.
“Don’t tell me I forgot something,” Max said. “I am not coming back into the office tonight. I don’t work that way. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said. “I can’t find Brooke.”
“What do you mean you can’t find her? Is she lost?”
“Her apartment is vacant, she’s blocking all my messages, and the only place of employment that I knew of where to find her, was my own company when she worked for me. How the hell am I supposed to find her now?” I asked in frustrati
on.
“Well, start by calming down. You don’t want to find her while you’re all agitated anyway, or else you’ll say something stupid that you won’t be able to take back,” Max said. He was seriously good at talking me down off a ledge.
I was surprised that he didn’t have a girlfriend. I bet women would love him if he ever came out of the wilderness for more than a day or two at a time.
“What about her friends and family? Know any of them that you can call?” he asked.
“I didn’t really know anything about her family.”
“Dude, how long were you dating her for? You guys were together for a least a few months, and you’re telling me you know nothing about her family? That’s kind of messed up.”
Criticism was not what I needed right now. What I needed was a way to find Brooke.
“Wait a minute,” I said as I remembered something, “She did have a friend who worked at one of the coffee shops downtown. I think her name was Kate.”
“Do you know which coffee shop it is?” Max asked. “There are tons.”
I thought for a few minutes as I tried to remember it from the couple of times that Brooke and I went there for lattes and her friend poured our coffee. I pictured it in my head, and when I did, Kate’s apron came into view in my mind. Not only did it have Kate’s name on it, but it also had the name of the coffee shop, CUPS.
“Just remembered which one it is,” I said hastily on the phone as I went back to my car.
“All right, man,” Max said. “Good luck!”
There was no parking once I get to the coffee shop. Downtown was a beast when it came to parking spots. After a few times of circling the block, a spot opened up, and I pulled in. The walls of the coffee shop are glass, so I could see who was sitting in the café and who was standing in line. At first, I didn’t see anyone that I recognize, but then I saw Brooke’s friend, Kate, sitting down at one of the tables. I couldn’t mistake her short, punky haircut. There was a guy sitting next to her who had his hands all over her, and she seemed to be enjoying it, so I assumed that was Kate’s boyfriend. Across from them, with her back turned to face the window, was Brooke.
