The Coffee Shop (Wellenore)

eleven

H.G. was back on Monday, working behind the register when Lenore floated out of the storage room mid morning. Lenore had spent the entire night taking the random crush quizzes she found in her magazines and trying to convince herself that everything was wrong and that she couldn't possibly have a crush on H.G. If she had been alive she was certain that she wouldn't have gotten any sleep but she was not alive and did not need sleep which meant that long debates with herself over if it was just a coincidence that she could relate to many of the things Annabel had said was just an activity to fill her night.

She was a ghost who died on her wedding day when she was getting married to the guy who was supposed to be the love of her life. She was supposed to spend the rest of eternity mourning the wedding and grieving her separation from her fiance. That was what ghost brides did in every sort of media that she had ever heard of. She wasn't supposed to move on and fall in love with a man who was still alive and wasn't who she had been in love with before her death. She blamed herself and her decisions to forget about her past and death circumstances so that she didn't have to deal with the pain of it all forever, clearly that had been the wrong decision. She was failing her duties as a dead bride.

When her eyes landed on the back of H.G.'s black vest, Lenore immediately froze. Her first reaction was filled with excitement that he was finally back even though he had only been out of town for a weekend. Her second reaction was to move quickly into the nearest wall and out of sight. She had never been one to get flustered around crushes, in fact many times she had marched up to boys to tell them her feelings or ask them out. She didn't know why with H.G. she suddenly felt like she couldn't possibly allow herself to be seen by him. She told herself it was because she was embarrassed by the thought that she had allowed herself to question if she had a crush on him, because she did not have a crush on him.

She travelled through the walls, something she was good at doing, she knew exactly how to position herself to not be seen and also how to position herself so that she could see out of the wall but no one could see or would notice her. She found herself a spot near the oddly placed corner in the middle of the shop where a woman who had to be in her early thirties sat with a stack of books and papers sitting on the table beside her half finished coffee. On the floor beside the tall stool was her black purse where more papers stuck out of the unorganized bag which had been left open.

Lenore, for likely the first time since she had been summoned as a ghost, did not want to bring attention to herself. Lenore, who had always loved having people's attention on her and had many times gone out of her way to make sure the attention was on her, Lenore who had thought that becoming a ghost would be cool because she could haunt people and still gain people's attention, suddenly just wanted to hide in a wall and not be seen. It was unusual for her and she didn't know how she was meant to behave while trying to not be seen. Usually she would mess with the person sitting nearest to her, sticking her head out of the wall to read over their shoulder and go through their bag and make loud comments about the contents but in those moments as she rested in the wall, close enough to its exterior that she could see around the coffee shop, she did not do anything to interact with the woman. Instead, her eyes found themselves wandering straight towards H.G. who had begun to help a customer who had approached the counter.

He looked tired and Lenore was surprised that Annabel had allowed him to take a morning shift when he had stated that he would be returning to the town very late the night before. It did not surprise her that H.G. had shown up for a morning shift after likely being up half the night driving back from the city. H.G. was a people pleaser in many ways and had already felt bad enough about having had to ask for the weekend off so that he could leave town for his inventors conference.

Beneath his tired eyes was a large smile that likely remained from his exciting weekend. Lenore wanted to hear all about it. She wanted to hear his excited rambles filled with words she didn't quite understand and to hear about exactly what an inventor's conference entailed. No matter how much she wanted to float over to the counter and demand he tell her his real name and what sort of nerdy things he had done in the city, Lenore didn't move from her hiding spot in the wall because her panic over the idea of possibly having developed any sort of crush of him was too strong in her chest.