Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
“Whoops,” I said, spying the glass cup with a top and straw sitting next to the spider plant I’d potted the afternoon before. The coffee was watery from the melted ice cubes.
The craving was instantaneous after a night of broken sleep. I snatched the cup up and walked back out of the greenhouse.
I entered the back door of the shop, going into the postage stamp-sized kitchen that served as the employee break room. Even though the only other employee I had was a nineteen-year-old named Traeger who, to his parents, was taking his second gap year after high school while he “narrowed down what he wanted to do with his life.” Everyone but his parents seemed to know and embrace his dreams of opening his own pottery studio one day.
Nearly all of the planters I now sold in the studio were his creations. Hell, I’d even let him use an old shed on the property as his studio, paying a heart-stopping amount of money to an electrician to put a 240v line out there to accommodate the medium-sized kiln he’d purchased with the money from his first few paychecks from working for me.
We had a deal in which he gave me a break on the cost of the pots in exchange for the electricity he used. Though with the way he was currently scaling up—opening several online storefronts and setting up a booth at every farmer’s market he could—I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before he outgrew this setup and would need to move on to his own actual studio.
I hated the idea of having to find a replacement. It wasn’t that the job was all that difficult or that I was hard to get along with; I just really loved the easy-going dynamic I had with Traeger. He was light, breezy, fun, and always up for a random singalong to some silly pop song or musical soundtrack between customers.
Plus, he made the best iced coffee in the world. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to replicate it. I tried to convince him that a pottery studio slash coffee shop wasn’t that crazy an idea. Preferably opened up right next to my plant store.
I made my way to the espresso machine, narrowing my eyes at it and its refusal to give me the same quality coffee Traeg got out of it, and filled the portafilter.
“Stop,” a voice called, making my lips automatically curl up, “right there,” he finished as I turned to look at him.
Traeger was a—let’s call it—“eccentric” dresser. He wore a white camp shirt with a pattern featuring little black cats rearing up to swat at the crescent moon. He paired that with a pair of rainbow board shorts because, as he put it, he was ‘never more than five minutes away from heading to the beach.’
That was evidenced by his golden skin that set off his bright blue eyes and sandy blond hair all the more.
Traeger might not be what someone would call ‘classically handsome,’ but he was still undeniably attractive with his wide forehead, generous mouth that was always prone to smiling, and a lightly cleft chin.
“You know better than to try to romance that machine,” he told me as he reached to remove the crossbody bag (that was really just a fanny pack worn across the chest for some reason). “You know it only has love for me.”
I threw up my hands and backed away from the machine as he moved forward with a wave of cologne. Okay. That was possibly the only thing I didn’t absolutely adore about my coworker. His cologne had that too-clean scent to it, where I preferred earthy, natural, spicy scents. Since it had been his signature scent since his fifteenth birthday when his mom first took him to a store and bought him his first (very expensive) bottle, there was no way I could ask him not to wear it.
Traeg made a clucking sound as he removed the portafilter. I had no idea what I could have messed up by putting grounds into a little circle, but I somehow managed to do it. He dumped them out, scooped them in again, tamping them down, then repeating the process.
Meanwhile, I washed out the glasses from the day before, added ice, and handed them over to the coffee master.
“Make anything fun last night?” I asked, knowing that after I’d locked up, he’d gone off to his shed.
“Made you a few six-inch pots,” he said, knowing they were the most frequently sold ones. “And did a lot of coffee mugs. I posted a video that went a little viral, so now I have orders coming out my ears.”
“That’s a good problem to have.”
“It is. But it’s cutting into my socializing time.”
“You’re young. You have plenty of time to socialize. And you can have a lot more fun socializing if you have some money in your pocket.”