In the Coffee Shop When David was indoors, winter was something he found perfectly agreeable. He didn’t have much of a view where he was living, but snow improved what he did have significantly and he liked to sit and watch it float past his window even when he couldn’t be bothered to get up to put a pretentious record on to accompany the show. When David was outdoors, though, winter was just cold. Drawing his coat closer around him, he walked quickly toward the coffee shop, his mind on the weather and irritation with his primary boss until something struck his shoulder.
“Sorry – “
“Sorry – “ echoed David, then thought he recognized the voice of the person he had not noticed in a timely fashion. He looked up. “ – And not just because you have good taste in books,” he added. She frowned, looking confused, and David realized he probably sounded strange. “Sorry – again. You work at the bookshop down the street, right? I, uh, hang out there a lot and I look at the employee recommendations corner sometimes.”
“Oh!” His unfortunate acquaintance lightened up, apparently concluding he probably was not a deranged stalker. “Yeah. Oh, yeah! I know you, too. You’re Eclectic Guy.”
“Uh – that’s a new one,” said David, amused and a little startled that the staff at the bookstore evidently knew him, too, if not by name. He really did spend too much time in there, he thought. “I’ve been called worse, though – I think. Here – “
He opened the door for her and hoped she didn’t take offense. His mother had always said that it was a poor kind of man who didn’t open doors for women, but he had been away from home long enough to know that not everyone shared his mother’s opinion on such things. He really did not want to offend the staff at the bookshop, who were awfully good about not kicking him out when he sat and read for a long time without buying anything during the sometimes longish spells when he had to be particularly stingy.
“Thanks,” said Bookshop Girl – Sage was the name he’d noticed on her name tag before, his means of connecting the name on some of the slips of paper in the Employee Recommendations corner to a face. A rather pretty, to his way of thinking, face, actually; he had noticed that before, but even had he been much good with women, he couldn’t help but think it was rude (and possibly illegal) to try chatting someone up at work and he pretty consistently did not wish to be evicted from the bookshop and even more consistently did not wish to be arrested. He’d been arrested once, had not found it a particularly pleasant experience, and highly doubted that he’d be able to get out of it unscathed if it ever happened again. His father’s connections had proven useful the first time, but even if his father would stick his neck out for David today (a…question, that; he suspected his father had been inappropriately proud of him when he’d broken all of Mandy Garrett’s car windows, but he doubted that was enough to outweigh the sin of running away from home shortly after said acts of vandalism), there was the issue of how much good he could do at this point. Even given his father’s allegedly rather…colorful…young adulthood (David had, during his stint in Industry after Sonora, heard about eighteen months in jail, a Camaro, and at least three illegitimate children, though unfortunately not the identities of his possible siblings; all things considered, he didn’t know how anyone back home ever married with confidence), David doubted J.D. Wilkes had any friends left alive outside of Warren and Industry, much less alive in Washington State….
“You’re welcome,” he said, returning to the present.
“I didn’t offend you with the ‘Eclectic Guy’ thing, did I?” she asked. “It’s a good thing. It’s always fun checking you out – er, at the shop, when you buy things, I mean – because you get so many different kinds of things.” She fiddled with a piece of her hair. “Actually, I kind of got my last book recommendation from you, too,” she admitted. “I wasn’t sure about trying that new Greyston novel, but….” She shrugged.
“It was good,” said David. “Glad I could be of service.” He thought back over their brief conversation and occasional pleasantries at the bookshop. “Maybe I could buy your coffee and we could talk about that thing at the end of chapter twenty-three?”
Sage smiled and he decided he must have read the situation right. “Make it a chai latte and I’m on board,” she said. “Those things, they’re the best substitute for milkshakes when it’s too cold for milkshakes.”
David laughed. “When you put it like that, I kind of want to try one myself,” he said.
The beverage was, indeed, much more like drinking some kind of milkshake which had somehow become hot without melting into really sweet milk than it was like drinking a beverage. David wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. He was a lot more confident, though, about how well he enjoyed the conversation about books and, eventually, perks and drawbacks of their respective jobs, of living in the city, of living in this state since she wasn’t from Washington, either, and so on. As they parted ways so he could get to his second job, he had just made up his mind to ask her to dinner the next time he bought some books when she called after him.
“You said ‘Eclectic Guy’ isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever been called,” she said. “What’s the thing you’ve been called the most often?”
That was, he had to admit, a fair question. He had spent a few years fairly sure everyone he saw knew his name, but he was lucky enough now to have employment which didn’t require him to wear a name tag, so there was no realistic way for her to know his name without him thinking to mention it. “Ah – David,” he said, and Sage grinned.
“Good to know,” she said. “So, I guess I’ll see you around Thursday afternoon, Ah-David?”
David nodded solemnly. Thursdays and Sundays were the days he was most often found in the bookshop anyway, but he definitely wasn’t going to miss his Thursday trip now. “You can bet on it, Sage Sales Associate,” he said, quoting her name tag back at her, and walked down the street to the sound of laughter.