Izzyyjackson
Moving to Richmond was never part of Clementine's plan. One minute she's finishing another school year in Georgia, the next she's stuck spending the summer in a city she doesn't know because Lee got offered a better job. New apartment. New café job. New people she has zero interest in getting attached to.
Working at Page & Bean is supposed to be temporary - just a way to earn money before school starts.
Then there's the guy across the street.
Louis works at a retro diner and record shop with a mouth that never stops moving, a habit of staring through café windows like he's in some bad romance movie, and an annoying tendency to show up every single day for coffee he clearly doesn't even like. Clementine's pretty sure he's flirting with her. She's also pretty sure she should ignore him.
But somewhere between late shifts, shared playlists, and humid Richmond nights, Louis starts feeling less like a distraction and more like something dangerous:
Someone she could actually miss.
And Clementine's learned the hard way that nothing good stays forever.
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Louis has lived in Richmond his whole life, which means he knows two things for certain:
Summer shifts at the Vinyl Diner are painfully boring.
The new girl working across the street is the most interesting thing that's happened to him in months.
Clementine doesn't smile much. She barely talks to him at first. She looks at him like she's trying to decide whether he's stupid or just annoying.
Honestly? Fair.
Still, Louis keeps finding excuses to cross the street:
coffee breaks he doesn't need, fake errands, dumb jokes just to hear her laugh one more time. Before long, she becomes part of his routine - the first person he looks for every morning and the last thing he thinks about after closing.
The problem is, Louis knows how summer stories end.
School starts.
People leave.
Feelings get messy.
And for the first time in a long time, he wants something badly enough to be scared of losing it.