“It should have been ready. I have a meeting.”
“Of course, I completely understand.” Bunny is already moving efficiently, checking the counter, producing the flat white from where it’s been sitting. “Here you go! Ithink I must not have called your name loud enough. I’m so sorry about that. I hope your meeting goes really well.”
The woman opens her mouth to say something else. Bunny’s smile doesn’t waver. It’s not a defensive smile or a placating smile, it’s just entirely genuine, like he actually does hope her meeting goes well, like he has no idea there was anything adversarial about this interaction.
The woman closes her mouth. Takes her coffee. Leaves.
From the corner, there is a very low sound. The kind of sound that isn’t quite a word but is definitely an opinion. I glance over. Dark is watching the door the woman went through with an expression that suggests he found her wanting.
Bunny looks over at the corner. “It’s fine,” he tells Dark, pleasantly. “She was just having a bad day.”
Dark stares at him.
Bunny smiles and goes back to wiping down the counter.
I watch this exchange and feel something shifting in my chest, something that takes me a moment to identify. I’m watching Dark watch Bunny, and there is something in the way Dark is looking at him, in the moments when he thinks nobody is paying attention, in the unguarded seconds between one customer leaving and the next arriving.
It’s the look of someone encountering something they didn’t know they were missing.
The look of someone trying to work out if they’re allowed to want the thing they’re looking at.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that.
The thought arrives without warning, quiet and absolutely certain, and it sits in my chest with theparticular weight of things that are true and unwelcome. Nobody has ever looked at me the way Dark is looking at Bunny right now. Not with that quality of helpless, astonished attention. Not like I’m something they’ve walked into unexpectedly in the dark and can’t stop reaching for.
I think about what that would feel like. To be on the receiving end of that kind of attention. To have someone look at you in their unguarded moments with something that isn’t strategy or amusement or careful composure but just pure, undisguised wanting.
It would be nice. I imagine it would be remarkably, stupidly nice. The kind of nice that rearranges things.
I turn back to the machine. I clean something that doesn’t need cleaning. I have a fully functional life and I am absolutely fine, and I am not going to stand in my own coffee shop feeling sorry for myself because a shadow being I barely know is making eyes at my employee.
I’m fine.
The door opens. A group of students. Bunny goes to serve them with his usual enthusiasm and somewhere in the process manages to make one of them laugh, properly laugh, the surprised kind.
Dark watches this. Something moves across his face that he almost immediately suppresses, but not quite fast enough.
Hopeless, I think. Absolutely hopeless. And I mean that with the warmth of someone who recognises the condition.
The students leave with their takeaway cups, and a new customer comes in, a young man, harried and fraught. Heglares up at the menu as if it is displaying crimes against humanity rather than coffee options.
“I don’t understand why you don’t have oat milk,” he says, gesturing at the board with the irritation of someone who finds everything inconvenient. “Every other coffee shop has oat milk.”
“We absolutely do have oat milk!” Bunny says. “It’s not on the main board, but it’s always available, I’m so sorry for the confusion…”
“It should be on the board.”
“You’re completely right, we should make that clearer…”
“I’ve wasted five minutes trying to find it.”
From the corner comes a sound. Not a word. More of a rumble. The kind of sound that large things make when they are exercising considerable restraint.
Bunny’s head swivels to the corner. He points. “Stay,” he says, with the pleasant firmness of someone who means it.
Dark goes still.
I stare.
