Unlike many sad-sack self-loathing coffeeshop patrons, Ika Nui could not tell himself that the cute barista didn't know he existed. She almost certainly did. She recognized him, and so she knew very well that he came into her cafe every morning without fail and ordered whatever seasonal beverage had the most sugar in it. It was barely even coffee.
They did not talk, which was Ika's fault, because he was not talkative. He spent his mornings irritable, felt slightly better after the cute barista told him to have a nice day, and then it was all downhill from there. Still, it would have been nice to be able to tell himself that she did not know he existed, because then he could pretend that things would be different if she did.
He did not know exactly how many Maori with Ta Moko were in the United States – let alone in Atlanta, Georgia – but he was without question the only one who patronized the Galactic Grind. She would have had to be blind not to notice and remember the only guy in her shop that was two meters tall with black ink all over his face.
On this particular morning, Ika did not actually have work. He wore a suit, anyway, because he didn't want it to be obvious that he was going out for coffee and then just going home. He would much rather leave his barista with the impression that he worked seven days a week with no casual Fridays.
She wasn't always there. Maybe she just assumed their days off coincided. It wasn't weird. He definitely wasn't being weird.
He was being weird.
Her nametag said Nova, and there was no polite way to ask if that was her real name. It might have been. She looked like the sort of person whose parents would have named her Nova, blue-haired and freckled with ears full of metal. Nova was probably a name that made a lot more friends than Ika Nui.
He loitered at a distance from the door to finish his cigarette, put it out against the bottom of his shoe and threw it out in an alley trash can. He could see through the window the distinctive blue that meant Nova was working, and he tried to ignore that it pleased him to see it. By the time he made it to the counter to order, there was already a mug waiting for him.
This was unusual for a number of reasons. One of them was that he always brought his own cup, because... pollution. The environment. Et cetera, et cetera. But this was not one of their cardboard to-go cups, was instead a china mug that seemed like it was intended for employees.
The other unusual thing was that he did not have a 'usual' for her to have made him. He hesitated.
"I'm trying something new," she said, leaning against the counter across from him. He did not let his eyes go lower than the choker she was wearing, a brass pendant in the shape of an octopus in front of her throat. "I thought you could be my guinea pig." Her voice sounded like a dark shade of blue, like late twilight on a clear day.
He looked down at the cup, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. It looked suspiciously like coffee, as opposed to a hot milkshake that had once seen a coffee bean. "What's in it?"
"It's a secret," she said, pressing a finger to her lips. He wondered how she kept her metallic blue lipstick from coming off. "You're just going to have to trust me."
His eyes flicked between her impish smile and the cup in front of them. There were no other customers waiting, and so he supposed it couldn't hurt. Probably. Setting his travel mug down, he picked up the cup with both hands and brought it tentatively to his mouth. He sipped. His eyebrows shot up.
"This is good," he said, before realizing it was probably offensive to sound surprised. "What is it?"
"Lavender mocha," she said, taking his travel mug. "You just drank flowers," she added, fluttering her eyelashes.
He looked at the mug in his hands thoughtfully. "So if I had an allergy–"
"What!" The pitch of her voice went high, bright and sort of yellow. Her eyes went as big as saucers, pale blue things almost colorless. "Do you–?"
"No," he said, "I was just curious."
"Oh my god." She put her hand over her heart, closed her eyes and bent at the waist to rest her forehead on the counter. "Oh my god. You scared me!"
"Sorry," he said, trying not to smile and taking another sip of the drink.
"I would have died!"
"Technically speaking, I would have died."
"Oh my god," she said, standing back up and pressing her palms to her cheeks. "Don't say that! That's horrible, oh my god. I would never be able to flirt with anyone ever again."
He choked on his mocha, glasses slipping lower. "Nn – what?"
She blushed and looked rueful. "Obviously it didn't work, since you just accused me of attempted murder." She was shading into a royal purple.
"At worst I accused you of criminal negligence."
"That's not better!" she said, crossing her arms over her chest and half-turning her back towards him.
"Someone on trial for attempted murder would disagree."
"If I'd known I was going to be put on trial I wouldn't have even offered it to you!"
"I think that's how most people feel about whatever they're put on trial for."
"Do you do this to every girl who tries to buy you coffee," she asked, "or am I just really unlucky?"
He looked down at his cup. "As of right now," he said, "you are the only woman to have ever attempted it. If that's. What this is."
"It was what I was trying to do," she said, putting her hands on her hips. Even in her work apron, she was very... hourglass-shaped. While Ika was more yardstick-shaped. They were two entirely different units of measurement. He tried not to stare.
"You're hitting on me?"
"Oh my god, I get it, it was a bad idea," she said, tucking some hair behind her ear and turning pink as she stood at the cash register. "Just tell me what you actually want so I can get your drink and hide my shame." Her voice was consistently purple, now, and he missed the blue.
The cute barista had been trying to flirt with him, and he had accused her of criminal negligence. After she made him a special drink. What the fuck was this morning.
"Lunch," he said, setting down the lavender mocha.
"What?"
"What I actually want. Is. To take you out to lunch. Sometime. If. If you want." He adjusted his glasses nervously.
She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously, but she was fighting a smile. "Really? You're not going to put me on trial again?"
He hesitated. "I cannot guarantee that," he admitted, and she laughed. "I'll try."
"Hmm." She rang him up for a vanilla bean chai latte with almond milk and extra whip without asking first. "I'm free between eleven and one today," she suggested.
"I can do that. Do. Be. Here. At eleven. If you want me to pick you up. To go... out."
She grinned as she walked backward with his cup. "That is usually what a date entails, yes," she said, the color of the evening sky.
Was that a yes? He thought that was a yes. He dug out his wallet as he watched her make his drink, dropped five dollars in the tip jar as much out of habit as anything.
"On the house," she said as she handed him his mug. "See you here at eleven."
☙❧
Whatever else he might have said about Kheira, she was a very good gardener. The garden was probably the best part of his house. The house itself was 'cozy', which meant that everything was too small and it looked like it was designed by and for small children in the 1950s and had seen no maintenance since.
It was not a nice house. But it was a lovely garden.
"What's a good flower?" he asked, circling around to the koi pond immediately rather than bothering to go into the house first.
"Depends on what you want it for," she said, currently elbow-deep in something vile that she was using on the roses. "Ask out the blue-hair chick?" Kheira's voice was a consistent dark green, and when it wasn't it meant something had gone horribly wrong somewhere.
"Yes. Sort of. Kind of. She might have asked me out first. I'm not sure."
Kheira cackled more than laughed. "Get her a venus fly-trap or something, she'd probably be into that."
"That doesn't sound very romantic."
"You want me to snip off some of these roses?" she asked.
"You know how I feel about dead plants." He considered cut bouquets to be just about the opposite of romance, pretty but useless and doomed to wither and die. They were a chore, not a gift.
She stood up and immediately tried to rub fertilizer on his suit, and he recoiled, taking long steps backwards that her shorter ones could not match. She laughed as she wiped them off on her jeans, instead. "So you want to bring her flowers, you want them to be alive, and you don't want them to be a chore. You know you can just buy silk flowers, right?"
"That's not the same."
She grabbed a terracotta pot from a pile of them near the shed, and knelt down in a different flowerbed. In no time at all, she was handing him something small and blue. "African violet."
"Shouldn't it be purple?"
"It can be blue," she said with a shrug. "You wanna bring her a potted plant on your first date or whatever, that's probably the least shitty one."
"Least shitty is not really a ringing endorsement."
"How's about fuck you for an endorsement? You taking your little pot of shit-dirt to a fancy restaurant or what?"
He hesitated. "It's just a casual lunch," he said.
"Oooh, you should take her to the place," she said, "she looks like a hipster, she'd be totally into that shit."
"She's not a – she might be a hipster. I don't know. Maybe she's already been there. I didn't ask where she wanted to go, fuck."
"You didn't invite her out for coffee, did you?" Kheira asked with a cheshire grin.
"I'm not that stupid," Ika said, brushing a thumb over one of the violet's petals.
"Are you suuuure?" she asked, leaning forward with her hands on her hips. "Because right now it looks like you're gonna wear a fancy suit to take a hipster chick to an empanada truck, and you're bringing her a potted plant you dug outta your garden."
"That's. When you put it like that, it sounds. Bad. I should–"
"Nah, stick with it," she said, hitching her thumbs in her pockets. "If she doesn't like it she won't like you, no point dragging it out. Besides, maybe she's got a fetish for dudes in suits. Probably makes the job easier." Kheira waggled her eyebrows.
"I don't think she has a fetish," he said, and he could feel his face turning hot.
"You're kind of thinking about it now, though, right?"
"Shut up."
☙❧
He was in the parking lot by 10:30. Compulsive earliness was a problem he had. He dealt with it by sitting on the hood of his car and chain-smoking.
She probably didn't mind that he smoked. Surely she'd noticed by now that he reeked constantly of cigarettes. He was almost certainly going to get lung cancer in a decade or two, in a few years his teeth would be yellowed and rotting out of his head. She must have been willing to tolerate that, if she'd said yes to going anywhere with him.
He shot upright when he saw her stepping outside the coffee shop, dropping his cigarette immediately and crushing it under his heel.
"You're early," she said with a smile, sky blue, and he hoped she didn't know he'd already been here for twenty minutes. "Did you come here straight from work?"
"Not... exactly."
Her eyes fell on the violet as she shrugged her messenger bag higher on her shoulder. She paused. "Is that... for me?"
He looked at the little pot in his hand. "It was. Blue. And it's supposed to be. Easy. Low maintenance. Not that you're, uh. I didn't want it to be. A chore."
Gently, she took it from him, lacing her fingers with his in the process. He jammed his hands awkwardly back into his pockets. "It's beautiful," she said, turning it in her hands. "This is so sweet." She looked up at him and smiled, and his heart caught in his throat. "I know exactly where I'll put it."
"Good," he said. "Good. I'm... I'm glad you like it. I'm really glad."
"So where are we going for lunch?" she asked, still holding onto the violet.
"I was thinking we could. If you don't mind. Empanadas? There's a food truck. Or we can go somewhere else. I don't mind."
"Empanadas sound good," she said, and she looked so pleased to see him he thought he might burst.
Metaphorically.
He opened the passenger door to let her in, slid into the car beside her. He had to hurry to turn off the radio after the car started, because it was entirely too early in their acquaintance to confront his love of bluegrass murder ballads.
"'Sexual Slavery in the Twenty-First Century'," Nova said, and he realized with some horror that she was reading the title of a book he had left on the floor of the car.
"That's not – that isn't – that's for work," he said, but he was pretty sure that did not improve matters. "Not that kind of – I'm a lawyer. It's. About. Legal stuff."
"So I don't have to worry about you making me your sex slave?" she teased.
"No! God, no, never, I would never. Not that. I would tell you? I guess. Um."
"I don't think you're a rapist," she reassured him with a smile, setting the book back down.
"Statistically speaking there's no real way to tell until–"
"Ika." He stopped talking, because that was the first time she'd said his name outside the context of giving him his drink order. It sounded indigo. "Are you trying to explain the reasons why you might be a rapist?"
"... not... no. I was. Speaking objectively." He was pretty sure he was warning her of his potential to be a rapist. Fuck.
"I don't think rapists try to be objective about their potential to be rapists," she pointed out, and he couldn't look away from the road to confirm, but he thought she probably had that impish smile again.
"I'm flattered that you trust me not to rape you," he said. "Or make you my sex slave." He turned into the old strip mall parking lot where the food truck made its stop during lunch hour, near an ongoing construction site.
"Unless I ask nicely," she said in indigo again, and he processed her words on a delay as he parked.
"Wait, what?" She giggled and hopped out of the car without answering. "Wait," he said, and his seatbelt took ten times as long as usual because he was distracted and flustered. "What?" he said again when he was out of the car, but she had already flounced away to order.
☙❧
"These are really good," Nova said, sitting on a bench with him with a paper plate in her lap.
"I'm not sure the health department has ever even seen this thing," he said, "so I apologize in advance if you get food poisoning."
Nova began to laugh hard enough that she had to cover her mouth, and he didn't know what to make of her amusement. "You're really not making this easy," she said in purple, "between telling me you could be a rapist and that you're going to make me sick."
He blushed, fidgeting with his glasses. "I was. Trying to avoid general misconceptions. And I didn't want you to be unprepared. Although I've never gotten sick here before. I like people to have all the facts."
"So give me some facts about you," she said, nudging him with her shoulder. "Aside from the fact that you're a lawyer who likes pumpkin spice machiattos and not raping people."
"It's true," he said, "I don't like raping people." He took a sip from his bottle of root beer. "I, uh. That. Might cover it. I'm not very. Complicated. Or interesting."
"I'm interested," she said. "What's your favorite color?"
"Purple," he said. "Technically lavender, but that might seem... convenient."
She grinned. "Mine's yellow," she said, which surprised him. "I just look better in blue." She winked, and he could feel himself turning red. He was not equipped to handle cute girls winking at him. "What's your sign?"
"I have no idea," he said. "I don't believe in that kind of thing."
"Hm. When's your birthday?"
"December sixth."
Nova pulled out her phone, and he didn't know why he felt relieved that she didn't know these things off the top of her head. "You're a Sagittarius!" she said. "You are a... fiery centaur archer."
"I have no idea what that means."
Nova scrolled through something on her phone. "Apparently it means you are jovial, good-humored, and optimistic."
"I have found a flaw in this system."
"You also value freedom, honesty, and intellect, but can sometimes be tactless," she added, not to be discouraged.
"I'm not sure we needed an app for this."
"Ooh! This says it will tell us how compatible we'll be based on our star signs." He wanted to object, but she was clearly enjoying herself, a very excited maroon. "What do you think it'll say? Do you think we're meant for each other?"
"I find the idea of destiny philosophically and ethically objectionable," he said, which was not remotely romantic.
"Even soulmates?"
"I don't believe in souls," he said before he could stop himself, "and find the idea of one true love to be both depressing and limiting."
She didn't seem to actually be listening to him, and he did not blame her. He wouldn't listen to himself if he didn't have to. The fact that anyone ever listened to him was a travesty. "Okay, so," she said, looking very serious as she entered information into her phone, "if we enter Libra and Sagittarius we get... oh, good. You'll be happy to know that the stars think we'll do fine."
"I'm glad the stars approve," he said dryly.
"We'll get along well because we're both so adventurous and fun–"
"What."
"–but according to this, I need to watch out, because I need a reliable partner and you're too independent."
"I can see how that would be a problem," he said, and she grinned.
"I also need to make sure not to let you pressure me," she said, reading off her screen in sapphire, "because I'm very sensitive, while you're into kinky stuff."
"You're just making that up," he accused, trying to see her screen. She held it out for him, and it did indeed say that Sagittarius liked kinky sex. "This is why I don't believe in astrology," he grumbled.
"You mean you're not into kinky sex?" she asked, and she pouted dramatically as she said it. He couldn't tell if she was actually disappointed, or just pretending to be as a joke.
"I. That. Is a very subjective word. Open to interpretation." His face was on fire. Nova laughed.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she took his hand and squeezed. "I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable."
"It's fine," he said. "I just. Can't tell if you're trying to make me think about kinky sex with you. Or if I'm just a pervert." Tactless honesty was, indeed, his default mode of communication. It was why he did not often communicate with people he wanted to like him. He was slightly better at tact when he was working, but not by much.
"You're not just a pervert," she murmured in indigo, and her cheeks turned a faint pink that made him want to kiss her. "Why do you think it's depressing?" she asked, and it took a moment to realize she meant soulmates.
He turned his hand around beneath hers so that their palms were facing each other, and their fingers laced together in a way that felt perfect. "It... invalidates relationships," he said. "If everyone has one true love, then every other love is. Fake. That doesn't seem fair. Just because I don't love someone anymore doesn't mean I never did. It invalidates every emotional connection that didn't last until you died. So. I don't like it."
She squeezed his hand and leaned on his shoulder. "That's sort of romantic," she said.
"Don't tell anyone," he said. "They'll take away my license to practice law."
☙❧
"Thank you for lunch," she said when he dropped her back off at work. "And for the violet."
"Thank you for joining me," he said, "and liking the violet."
They stared at each other.
"Are you forgetting something?" she prompted.
"Am I?" he asked, furrowing his eyebrows. With a huff of annoyance, Nova gave up on hinting and took him by the tie to pull him downward. "Mmph!"
He had forgotten something. Specifically, he had forgotten to kiss his date. He had forgotten than sometimes people liked being kissed as much as he liked kissing them, and he had forgotten just how very much he liked kissing people. He didn't mean to back her into the front window of the cafe, it was just a thing that happened as a side effect. All he'd wanted was to kiss her, to cup her face in his hands and draw her tongue into his mouth and press his body to hers as best he could when she was holding a potted plant. She was soft and warm and moaned in pastel purple that he could almost taste, and she smelled like coffee grounds and marzipan.
When he finally managed to pull his mouth away from hers, they stared at each other again. "Sorry about your lipstick," he said.
"Ditto," she said, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and it came away blue.
"Sorry," he said again.
"I'm not complaining," she purred. She fixed his tie one-handed, and he tried to get his glasses to stop being slightly crooked. "See you tomorrow morning," she said, giving him a peck on the cheek, and it wasn't a question.
Of course, it wouldn't have to be. He came in every morning. He wouldn't even know what to do with himself if he didn't have that to look forward to. Except now he also had special drinks and soft hands and messy kisses to look forward to.
He had a feeling he was going to start being late for work very regularly soon.
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