Coffee.

Slow Days and Beautiful Places

It was raining. The rain was falling in sheets - too lightly to be considered heavy, but too heavily to be considered light. It was cold. But it was warm inside. The coffee shop was small, tiny, even, but it was nice enough; perfect to Evie, even with its consistent lack of customers. In Evies' mind, the fact that the coffee shop was bursting with unique character was the reason that people stayed away; some can't handle different. But in reality she knew that wasn't why because it really wasn't that different to every other café, it was just slightly more run down.

Okay, a lot more run down, but the coffee was still good, isn't that what mattered? Why should it have mattered that the sign out the front was miniscule and the presumably formally nice black and white paint was fading to more of a grey and peeling in places? So what if the actual name of the shop was rendered practically illegible by the elements? And maybe there was more than a few stains on the patchy brown carpet (Evie guessed that, back in its day, the carpet used to be a chocolate brown). And if the business had had any money, and if Evie could see the point to it, she would clean up the pen marks on the table tops and give them a new coat of paint. But the place was barely staying afloat seeing as it's only source of income was from the coffees Evie made for herself and payed for with the small cheque from her boss, so there was no chance of any renovations. The exposed brick walls with the old narrow copper pipes running back and forth across them would have been beautiful had it not been for the occasional missing brick or the few chips and cracks in the corners. The owners before them had fed electrical wires through the otherwise abandoned copper pipes and diverted a few of their paths so they ran across the wall and then up and along the roof to power the lights (which are equally exposed, bulbs). And, yeah, she knew that was stupid because of course that mattered but she just couldn't see why because she loved this coffee shop even with its many, many flaws and she thought she was lucky to be one of the few who could genuinely say that they looked forward to going to work, even if technically, there was no work.

Evie looked down at the cheap excuse for a marble table top and traced the words scribbled there in blotchy permanent marker. It looked as though the pen was running out but that was only because the person was using it to write on paper and the ink was seeping through and marking the table and they didn't realise until it was too late. And, okay, that person was Evie but it wasn't her fault. She was in a hurry-she couldn't, for the life of her, remember why-and she needed to write a shopping list and the closest pen to her at the time was the marker.

It's not like it was a problem, anyway. If they had paying patrons it might have been, but alas, they don't.

Evie began thinking about the possibility of her boss retiring-or dying, not because she was mean, just because he was that old-and the chance of the new owners restoring the café to its former glory and rehiring her as the waitress. That would be nice, she might finally get to actually do something for this beautiful place and- she whipped around when she felt a tap on her shoulder that quite possibly startled the life out of her, because since when did anyone, aside from the occasional lost tourist asking for directions, go in there?

She followed the arm, connected to the hand touching her shoulder, up and over tanned skin, littered with tattoos, and a large bicep to meet wide green eyes staring down at her expectantly and-oh shit. She knew exactly who this was.