Perfect Date

It took five minutes for Lottie's world to crumble around her. Five minutes and a phone call. Five minutes, a phone call, and an unexpected break-up. Five minutes, a phone call, an unexpected break-up, and unbreakable plans with her parents. Her parents who were due to join her in five minutes.

The day started so well. Lottie very rarely had everything in control, she was often lost, but she had been in complete control that morning. She had the perfect outfit, the perfect girlfriend, and the perfect plans to finally show her parents that she had her life together. Five minutes and a phone call later Lottie's outfit was ruined, she no longer had a girlfriend, and she had no way of escaping her parent's judgement.

Phone calls, they are a dangerous beast. They're either terribly important or incredibly mundane. The less phone calls people make, the more likely they are to change your life. Every phone call you answer is a gamble, it will make or break your day, your week, your life. Phone calls can cause so much pain, Lottie knew this, everyone knew this, but phone calls were such an everyday occurrence that people often forgot to be terrified of them.

Lottie had a stark reminder of why phone calls should be feared that morning. The horror of being dumped over the phone by the girlfriend she had been gloating about to her parents for months was enough to shock Lottie into freezing mid step. Unfortunately she just happened to be walking through the door of her favourite cafe at the time.

Stopping in the middle of a doorway, especially a doorway that leads to a busy cafe, is a bad idea for a lot of reasons. The main reason being that someone exiting the store balancing four takeaway coffees on their laptop bag might not expect you to stop quite so abruptly. As a result, that person might lose control of their four coffees causing them to spill dramatically all over someone's perfect outfit.

Lottie wasn't often very dramatic, in fact she prided herself on being generally chill, but that morning had been too much and she had lost all ability to maintain any semblance of calm.

Later Lottie will admit she wasn't exactly thinking straight as she marched aggressively into the familiar cafe with a one track mind. She was covered in coffee and she was in shock. She really probably should have gone home. Instead she looked around the cafe determined to find a solution to all her problems, a way to maintain the perfect control she had felt as she left the house that morning. But she wasn't in control and she wasn't thinking clearly so when her regular barista, the one with the stripe of purple in her hair, slipped out from behind the counter and offered her a towel to wipe her coffee drenched shirt Lottie latched onto an absurd idea.

"Pretend to be my girlfriend," demanded Lottie, wild eyes fixed on the barista.

"What? No," said the barista backing away from Lottie slowly as though she was trying to escape an attacking predator.

There was a part of Lottie that knew she was being ridiculous. That knew she knew nothing more of the girl in front of her than the polite, albeit slightly flirtatious, conversation they shared as she ordered her latte every morning. She also knew no one outside of a movie would agree to be someone's fake girlfriend because it was arguably insane. But she was desperate, and desperation makes people do things that would have shocked them on ordinary days.

Lottie looked at the barista and pleaded. Pleaded like she never thought she was capable. Pleaded in a way that would have been too embarrassing less than ten minutes before, "please, my parents are coming and they're expecting a girlfriend and she's not coming and please all I need is five minutes I'll think of an excuse to get them out of here I don't have time to ask anyone else, please."

Something about what she said or the way she said it must have been enough because the barista with the purple stripe in her hair sort of slumped in defeat before turning to her colleague to say she was going on her break. "You have fifteen minutes," she said to Lottie pulling her apron off and tossing it back behind the counter.