It wasn’t that Sato disliked Starbucks exactly. She liked the coffee. She likes the company’s success story. She liked whatever they pumped into those zesty pretzels. She liked they way people tramped in and out like busy schools of minnows—or cruising dessert carts. Really, Sato almost didn’t mind Starbucks at all…
Except that they all smelled the same. The same dream had been ground up, boiled, and processed into every link of the chain—and that rubbed Sato’s fur the wrong way. She liked the taste of originality, even when it was salted with faults and gaffes. She liked surprises.
Usually, she amended, walking in and spying her appointed rendezvous. There was no mistaking him. The divine aura was almost laughably incongruous among the colorful tea bins and Yanni soundtrack. She arched a sculpted brow in greeting and held up a manicured finger: wait.
If they were going to do this—and there was no avoiding the disaster now—she wasn’t going into the mishap uncaffeinated.
“Mocha Valencia,” she told the barista, or whatever they were calling them now. “Medium.”
“You mean grand—”
“I mean,” Sato said with that particular steely edge to her smile. “Medium in terms of your menu which would be sixteen ounces. Grazie.”
The girl looked at the smile, the dress and heels, the razor nails, and didn’t argue. Sato collected her drink without bloodshed. Mischa would’ve been proud.
Showtime., Sato thought, sitting down across from the face she’d spent nearly a decade avoiding.
“You know,” she said as if they were miles away from the present and halfway through a different conversion altogether, “I planned to see you eventually. Not while you were still alive, of course. But at your funeral, oh, it was going to be noteworthy. Murasaki would send all the usual flowers and sentiments, along with an exquisite arrangement in blue and white Yuan Dynasty vase. A beautiful piece, you’d have loved it—which is part of what I planned to say in the eulogy.” She sighed and ripped open a sugar packet. “I’ve been writing it since 1958. It was going to be perfect.”
The Baku’s dark, dark eyes focused on the god. “Yet here we are. Hilarious, non?”