My Coffee Shop Romance

I'm sitting at one of those little plastic two-top tables in the bookstore. Cafe latte in a paper cup. Sugar cookie the same size as the paper plate it's sitting on. I've just hung my jacket off the back of the chair when some guy swoops in to pick up my sugar cookie and put down a slice of chocolate cake in its place.

“What the...”

He sits down across from me. The sugar cookie's right in front of him. Lucky guy. “Upgrade,” he says. “On the house.”

“Who says it's an upgrade?” I try to grab my cookie back, but he never let go of the paper plate, so he easily hoists it over his shoulder one-handed like a waiter balancing a tray. I don't want him to drop my cookie, so now I'm forced to stop grabbing at him.

“What's the matter with you?” I ask.

“Told you. Upgrade.”

I look at him for real this time. Guy thinks he's pretty cute. And he's not wrong. The carrot-colored fade puts the spotlight on his freckles. Green eyes to go with.

“Oh, for...” I bite back the swear. Should have recognized him before. Every Friday, I come in and order one sugar cookie and one latte. Every Friday, he's the guy who serves them up. “Your manager put you up to this? Because I'm not mad if she did, but this is not okay.” The cake came with a fork. I pick up said fork and point at the cake in case he's in any doubt about what's not okay.

“C'mon,” he says. “You're like, the saddest story in this cafe. Every week, the same thing. You come in, buy one sugar cookie. That's it. You eat it. You leave.” He gives me one of those freckled-face cute-boy grins. “Gotta be a severe tragedy behind something like that.”

All right, so his manager's not involved. No way she wants staff flirting up the regulars like this. “I'm taking my cookie back now,” I say.

“No, you're not.” He flips the cookie right off the plate and onto the floor. “You deserve chocolate.”

My jaw drops. “I could get you fired.”

“Too late.” The boyish grin gets, if anything, even more boyish. I'm well aware I should kick him in the knee or climb up on my chair to bay at the moon or, something, anything, but... well... freckles. “Eat your cake,” he says while his knee kind of joggles to knock my knee. Not a difficult trick to pull off under these two-tops, but it's still moderately sexy. “I'll buy you another cookie if you tell me the sad story behind it."

“The story behind why I eat a cookie every week? That's what you're asking me?”

Nodding, he leans forward. His knee is still making enthusiastic contact with my knee. I keep noticing dimples.

“Iron willpower," he says. "I got to hand it to you. You've never treated yourself even once. Always the sugar cookies. And just one.”

I realize he thinks I eat a single sad, lonely sugar cookie to save money. A slice of chocolate cake is two dollars more.

“It's not like that." What's a good BS story to charm a charmer? “My dad's a wolf shifter, and I've got some of those canine genes. Know what that means?”

Grinning, he shakes his head. “Nope, sorry. What's it mean?"

“Canines can't eat chocolate. It makes their hearts race. You can look it up."

He doesn't need to. He's heard this fun fact before. "Oh, yeah. Sure. But you're no dog."

"Wolf, not dog."

“Gotta love a girl with a sense of humor.” He goes to buy me another cookie. The woman working the counter isn't the manager, but she tells him something anyway, and he gets it boxed to go.

“Don't tell me,” I say when he comes swaggering back. “You're not supposed to hang around after you've been fired.”

He shrugs. Twinkles his dimples a little.

“Fine,” I say. “I guess we can go to my place.”

***

Like half the other guys I meet that year, his name is Austin. We fit all right for a few weeks, but he keeps not finding a new job, and then he starts hinting around that he wants to move in, and I know it's time to end it.

One morning, I get up, and there's an entire cake sitting on the kitchen counter. A chocolate cake. Haven't we talked about this? Seriously, dude, I don't want large-scale carbs hanging around the house. Once a week is plenty enough.

“What's that?” I ask.

“Friday,” he says. “Treat day.”

“A whole cake is too much of a good thing.”

“Can't have too much of a good thing.”

Maybe if you're him, you can't. I put my face in my hands, but only for a minute. Then I look up to stare hard into those pretty green eyes. “The bakery in the grocery store sells cake by the slice. But you have to buy a whole box of cookies.”

“Which means what?” The way his smile flicks off tells me he already knows.

“Means I have a carb addiction. If I bought the whole box of cookies, I wouldn't eat one cookie and put the rest away until next week. I'd eat the whole box and get sick. So I go to the cafe instead. Once a week. One cookie. If I was into chocolate cake, I would've just bought the slice at the store, and we would've never met.”

The green-eyed stare is pretty hot now. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Thought you might want the true story.”

“Why would you think that?” He sticks a knife into the cake to cut out the first slice. “I'll eat some too. Don't worry. I won't let you eat the whole thing.”

"Sure you won't." I sling my handbag over my arm. “That cake better not be here when I get back. As long as it's sitting there, that's all I can think about."

"I was trying to do something nice." He closes the white bakery box all huffy. I'm already out the door, but he's right behind me.

We go out once or twice more, but that's the real moment we break up.

***

Photo Credits

The feature photo is a collage created by the author for purposes of illustrating this fictional short story. Dogs should never be fed chocolate. Dog image by Juris Freidenfelds from Pexels. Cake image by Elli from Pexels.