Total pages in book: 36
Estimated words: 34995 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 175(@200wpm)___ 140(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 34995 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 175(@200wpm)___ 140(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
His voice was low and unhurried and carried an accent that I thought might be Italian, and something in my chest did a thing that I absolutely refused to name because naming it would make it real, and I've had enough experience with real things being taken away from me to know better.
Our fingers didn't touch when I handed him the menu, but I was aware—painfully, specifically aware—of exactly how close they came.
"I'll give you a minute," I said, and I walked back to the counter, and Jolie was leaning against the espresso machine with her book open but her eyes very much not on the page.
"So?" she said.
"So what?"
"So, that."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Thea." She closed the book, and I noticed she was only on page forty-seven, which was the same page she'd been on last week. "You forgot the specials."
"I did not—"
"You absolutely did. I could see it from here. You looked like someone unplugged your brain."
I busied myself with wiping down the counter, which was already clean. "He's just a customer."
"Uh-huh."
"He is."
"Sure."
"Jolie—"
"I'm just saying," she said, and her smile was the kind that made me want to throw a dish towel at her, "you should probably go take his order before you wear a hole in that counter."
I went to take his order.
He asked for coffee (black, no sugar) and said he needed another minute with the menu. I brought the coffee. I refilled the napkin dispenser at the table next to his even though it didn't need refilling. I counted the tiles on the ceiling above the corner booth (six) and wondered if this was what losing my mind felt like, and if so, whether it was covered by the café's health insurance.
When I came back, he ordered the smoked trout hash.
"Good choice," I said, because apparently I'd decided to have opinions about his breakfast.
"Is it?" He wasn't quite smiling, but something played at the corner of his mouth that might have been amusement.
"Best thing on the menu.”
I remember wishing I could just disappear then and there (I was never the type to make small talk!), but it was like nervousness had turned me into a gabbering idiot, and so I even found myself adding, quite unnecessarily—
“Gail makes it herself."
"Then I look forward to it."
“I’ll let her know.”
“Please do.”
You know how some memories will always make you want to kill yourself? Well, that’s exactly how I feel every time I remember my first day of meeting him.
Anyway...I wish I could say it ended there, but I remember how it just got worse, with how I found myself increasingly infatuated with him as I walked back to the kitchen and put in his order.
I remember doing my best not to look at the corner booth. But failing so spectacularly that it had Jolie accidentally choking on her coffee when she caught me doing so for, like, the nth time.
I mean, I know Jolie notices everything. It’s, like, a part of who she is, and it’s why she’s the only friend I’ve made in this town (Sarah doesn’t count, since she’s, like, part-guardian-angel, part-mob-boss). I’m not sure if it has to do with what she’s studying in grad school (honestly, I still have a hard time remembering what exactly it is she’s studying; I just know it’s something obscure and psychological), but Jolie has always had a way of seeing a person with, well...
Most people won’t understand this, but Jolie sees people with the eyes of Jesus. The first time we met, she didn’t even care to ask questions about what a 19-year-old Kansas girl was doing in Jackson Hole all alone, working full-time while taking online classes and with the most crippling sense of shyness.
Honestly, I’ve come a long way since then, and it’s mostly because of how patient Jolie and Sarah were in drawing me out of my shell.
But...I digress.
The thing is, as compassionately intuitive Jolie is when it comes to seeing people, I don’t think she even needed any kind of special talent that day to realize just how, well, hard I was crushing on our never-saw-him-until-now customer.
“28,” Jolie said as I refilled her coffee.
“Huh?”
“I caught you staring at him 28 times in the past hour.”
I couldn’t even make myself deny it since that would be a lie, and so I simply ended up sputtering. "W-Why are you counting?"
"Because you taught me to count things." She turned a page, even though I was reasonably sure she wasn't actually reading. "Also because it's deeply entertaining."
"I'm not—"
"Thea." She looked up, and her expression softened in that way it does when she's about to say something true that I don't want to hear. "It's okay, you know. To look at someone. To be interested. You're allowed to be a twenty-one-year-old human person with hormones and
feelings."
"I have to work," I said, and I grabbed a coffee pot that didn't need grabbing and went to refill cups that were already full, and I did not—absolutely did not—glance at the corner booth.