Time Shift

Chapter 3

Derek sat on a plastic chair at Cert's Corner. He got comfortable with the chair with Emilia standing on her tiptoes, looking at the kitchen just next to them. She kept sniffing the aroma of different kinds of food.

"Oh my God! It's like an orgasm! But with food!" She whispered at Derek's ears when she slid into her seat and then leaning towards him. She then sat back and sighed loudly and with pleasure, stunned by the smell of cooked food, especially the ones that they ordered.

The interior of Cert's Corner was simple. Round plastic tables and plastic chairs were set up arbitrarily and obviously hurriedly. Some of the sets of tables and chairs were made out of wood. Derek saw a set with a wooden table and a plastic chair and another plastic table and a wooden chair. It was truly random, but he didn't mind. The food they cook here was extraordinarily appetising. It wasn't like he had OCD to rearrange the sets of tables and chairs to match their materials anyway. The floor was tiled with cheap dark grey slate and the walls were painted in white. Small parts of them were unintentionally scraped off to reveal the grey cement underneath.

There were a few people who sat on their chairs, some eating hamburgers and a few eating chicken chops and quite a few waiting for their food to arrive, including Derek and Emilia. He turned to look at Emilia, who remained perfectly still, but with a tilted head and a tongue sticking out. She was smiling from the scent of the food.

"Em, you don't need to exaggerate," Derek advised as he leant towards the kitchen to take a whiff of the food.

"Holy Christ!" he whispered in his breath. His eyes widened as he slumped back in his seat. "I stand corrected."

For almost three years, they had been eating at Cert's Corner and they hadn't seen any developments to the furniture, exterior and interior. But it was truly his first time when he sniffed those foodstuffs.

"What was I doing while I was eating? Holding my breath?" He muttered but out of earshot of anyone in the restaurant.

"You could be, I don't know," Emilia replied.

"Wait, you didn't listen to what I said."

"Uh, yes," she smirked. "Then why would I be replying to you?"

"Alright, what was I saying?" Derek challenged.

"What was I doing.." She trailed off as she forgot the other part of the sentence. "I knew I heard what you said. I have ears, Derek."

"Then are you implying that the customers here have no ears whatsoever?" He quipped.

Emilia's embarrassment would have been made if not for the food arriving at their tables. Cert was the one who served them.

"What have you two been up to lately?" Cert asked, smiling. "I haven't seen you in a while now."

He was around his forties, clad in a normal short-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of blue trousers. The red apron he wore blocked what the T-shirt wrote. He sported a beard and a black bandana was wrapped around his forehead to keep hair from falling, though Derek doubted that would work, since he had a beard.

"We've been collecting time spheres, if you wanted to know. Challenging work," Derek said while folding his arms behind his head and leaning back. The chicken chop Derek ordered was fresh from the kitchen, hot and filled with black pepper sauce. A pair of spoon and fork was wrapped around by two pieces of tissue.

"Derek," Cert said, with anxiety. "It's not too late to quit it. One day, you'll get caught."

"She," Derek said as he pointed towards Emilia, who was gorging on the sandwich. Derek withdrew his finger from her and continued. "She's one hell of a protector."