He liked that she was a regular. It provided some familiarity and attachment in otherwise very transient job. Thanks to the regulars there were things baristas could look forward to or complain about. He also liked that all of them were slightly mysterious, same way as he seemed to recognise and know her, but knew nothing about her. He didn’t know her name nor who she was. All he knew were her habits, what she drank, where she sat, what she read. And it was not sticking to those habits that surprised him that morning. He wondered for who was the second latte she ordered, one more than usual beverage.
It was early, his eyes still felt sticky from sleep, limbs a bit stiff and mind hazed by recent, sudden waking up. Yann was always the first to be called in to cover someone else’s hangover day off. It was the price of living next to your work space, but there were other, nicer perks too. Like being able to wake up five minutes before you were due to be at work.
‘It wasn’t even supposed to be my shift’, he thought, staring at the first order of the day written on a small scrap of paper.
The feeling that something was wrong was magnified by the unusual order, from that girl in the corner. Why would one person order two lattes? It didn’t seem right to him and he caught himself checking if he definitely read it right on the check.
He poured the order into two glasses, arranging layers of milk and coffee in a floral pattern with a series of swift moves. His ears still rang with noisy huffing and puffing of the coffee maker and milk steamer. He liked all those noises of his workplace and as they quietened there was almost complete silence, and ringing in his ears. It was too early for lunch rush, the city has not woken up yet, and there was hardly anyone else in the cafe.
*
He walked into the back room, holding one coffee in each hand, being very concentrated on keeping both of them in balance. Even the smallest moves made his intricate floral shapes on the surface slowly lose their contours. When he looked up, there was no one in the little corner room at the back where he expected to find her.
‘She must have sneaked out for a minute’, he thought, and started looking for a good spot to put these coffees down.
As he was looking around without much success, baffled and considering just going back to the till, he felt somewhing warm and soft on his back.
When he thought about it days later, he was certain that her herbal smell sneaked trough the intense coffee aroma even before he felt her touch, but at the time all those sensations reached him all at once.
As she touched him more violently, he tried to hold on to the remains of the reality by focusing on the two cups of latte the was holding. As she teased him, he kept telling himself that he could not spill the coffee. He repeated it on and on, maybe even out loud, even as his knees were betraying him and his hands started to tremble. Even more so, when one of her hands moved down his torso and started undoing the buttons of his jeans. Her lips found a favourite spot on his neck as she licked it, kissed him and nibbled on this one spot. He had no idea what to do and had less and less motivation to defy losing himself in there and then.
She was pleasing him in a decisive, but still quite delicate way and still kept playing with his neck. He kept gasping for air, while peeking at the entrance to the little room they were in. While someone could walk in on them, he told himself that no-one had any business being there. Amidst those thoughts he felt himself approaching orgasm and she must have felt it coming too, because she bit the side of his neck so hard he muffled a scream. As he came, he shivered in the wave of pleasure and pain of being fucked and hurt in the same time. In the exact same moment of abandonment he forgot about his balancing efforts and the both cups of coffee fell out of his hands, breaking and splashing foamy latte all over him and the room.
Everything that followed was rather instinctive. He quickly pulled up his jeans, composing himself and starting to gather broken pieces of glass. His concerned manager peered in to see if everything was alright, but as she saw the mess, Viki went off to bring a mop. Yann realised that the regular girl was gone. What was more, since he didn’t even see her face when she fucked him from behind, he couldn’t be certain it was her in the first place.
On the table next to him there was a handful of coins, just about enough for a single latte. He smiled at the bad pun forming in his head. The second latte was for him and it was on him too.
o
