Cities that Never Sleep

i

🎶And she fights for her life as she goes in a store
Where the people are cleverly strange
And counting the change as she goes
Nobody knows🎶

Oren Lavie, Her Morning Elegance

//

He decided that she was worth figuring out.

He decided that she was, in fact, beautiful. In different ways which were not always apparent to the average eye, of course. Just to the ones really looking.

And he regretted that he never took a second look before.

But tonight, they started off as strangers, like everyone else. Tonight, before decisions were made, when she walked through the door she looked like a wreck. She wasn't pretty. She was quite the opposite, with stray pieces of wet hair sticking to the side of her face, her mascara slightly smudged, and her coat hanging crooked on her frame.

She was having a bad day. She looked calm, but the sort of calm that took effort, using every bit of will power not to break down and scream at the old man with his small expresso sitting at a table near her.

The girl walked up to the counter like she had every evening, hands tightened around her bag. She didn't try to smile. She just spoke in the same, careful tone as she recited her coffee order. An order Finn knew too well that he sometimes questioned why she ever took the time to tell him day after day.

Her name was Katherine, Finn learned, from hundreds of times of scrawling her name down on a cardboard cup. She liked her coffee strong, with two double-shots, no sugar, no cream. Just plain coffee.

As Finn started to type in her order, he curiously kept looking up at the girl named Katherine, although she was not paying attention. She was distracted-she always looked distracted-both nervously and constantly glancing back at the windows, as if something was bound to burst through them, or checking her phone for the time. But today, she was distracted from her own thoughts. Katherine looked lost, her eyes empty, and for a minute, acceptingly trapped in the world around her.

Of course, she had hid all of that behind a sour face and frigid eyes, as if to dare someone to question her. But to Finn, it was utterly obvious.

So using the time of her state in distraction, Finn slyly mixed up her coffee with another, an innocent look plastered on his face.

Katherine would not be getting what she had ordered tonight.