Chapter Text
Katya wakes up before her alarm, just like she does every day. One moment she’s fast asleep and the next she’s wide awake, staring into the darkness and feeling like she never slept at all. She takes a few slow minutes to acclimatise to the morning, squints at the ceiling as she blinks away the swirling blue and red in the murky darkness of her bedroom. Finally she gives in, reaches over to her bedside cabinet to pick up her glasses with one hand and tap her phone screen with the other. She pushes her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, watches the world come into focus, then picks up her phone to look at the time. She still has an hour before her alarm is set to go off; not quite enough time to make the early morning yoga class she likes to go to on the days when she’s awake even earlier, but enough time to feel restless about the day stretching out ahead of her. Her phone buzzes in her palm and for a moment she thinks it’s a message before she realises it’s just her shitty charger kicking in. She glances to the top of the screen: 16%. She sighs, wiggles it in place until it seems to be working okay, then wedges her phone carefully between the small lamp and the teetering stack of books beside it on the surface of the cabinet and swings her legs out of bed.
Once she’s made it to the clear floor space at the end of her bed she stretches slowly, just like she does every day. She rolls her shoulders, stretches her hands up above her head and laces her fingers together, eyes closed and breathing slow and even before she bends at the waist, presses her palms flat against the floor and walks them inwards until she feels the stretch creep up the backs of her legs. Her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose and she scrunches it up to stop them dropping to the floor, keeps still for a few more counts in her head and then straightens up again. She stretches each leg up behind her, breathes slow and even, focuses on the little crack creeping down the wallpaper from the top corner of the room to keep her balance before she lets her foot drop back to the floor. It’s so quiet still, morning light just beginning to slip through the cracks in the curtains and she wants to enjoy the dusky darkness of the morning for a little longer so she doesn’t pull them open just yet. Instead she throws her covers back over her bed, a token attempt at making it back up after a night of what appears to have been restless sleep, judging by the covers that ended up on the floor and the sheet that’s come away from the corner of the mattress, and then takes herself through to the kitchen.
She starts the coffee maker and pours out cereal for herself, leaves it to sit as she crosses the room to the sliding screen door to the balcony, just like she does every day. It’s a tiny space, she can only open up the tacky folding chair she keeps out there once the door’s pulled open and its legs can rest on the edge of the carpeted floor just inside, but she likes getting to sit out in the frigid morning air for ten minutes in the mornings, extend her legs out and press her feet against the top of the railings, flex her toes and watch the clouds above float by once she’s lit her cigarette and inhaled. Her mornings are slow these days, peaceful. Maybe a little too quiet, sometimes, in a way that has her considering if she could fit a second chair out here, what it would be like to have a woman to wake up next to every morning. But as much as Katya likes the idea of a woman, she likes the quiet, too. She’s so used to her routine, knows that it works for her and keeps her content, even if she’s not living the most exciting life imaginable; it’s not the life she imagined back in college, when she was a bright eyed teenager ready to take the world by storm, but it’s not a bad life by any stretch of the imagination. Still, she likes imagining a woman here: a woman who’s louder than she is, who could fill the space around them with conversation and laughter. Someone who could bring her out of herself when she’s too consumed by the quiet, too wrapped up in figuring out the way the words should work in her head, stressed out by trying to get those words onto paper once they finally start making sense in her own brain. She likes her routine, the quiet helps keep her anxiety at bay, stops it from consuming her even on her worst days, but sometimes, in moments like these, sat by herself and watching the world go by around her, she thinks it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have a nice girl around to shake things up a little around here.
***
Once Katya's finished with her cigarette she folds the chair up, props it against the railings and slides the door shut behind her, eats her cereal and sips her coffee while she leans against the counter, just like she does every day. She leaves her bowl in the sink when she’s done, carries her coffee through to the bathroom and leaves the mug on the side of the tub while she turns the shower on, lets the water heat up as she strips off her t-shirt and underwear, sets her glasses down beside the sink next to her toothbrush. She closes her eyes once the water’s running over her, lets the heat sink through her skin for a long moment before reaching over for her coffee, takes a sip before rubbing shampoo through tangled curls. She finishes the rest of the mug while she has conditioner in her hair, lets it sit on the nearest corner of the tub to rinse out, brushes her teeth under the steady trickle of the water above her while the water running through her hair turns clear. It’s good timing; the temperature of the water’s getting steadily colder by the time she shuts it off.
Katya pulls out clothes for the day with her towel wrapped around her, corner tucked under one armpit to keep it secure, just like she does every day. There isn’t a lot of variation in her outfits, today’s is a patterned peasant dress that Violet will no doubt take pleasure in calling ugly when she gets to the store but Katya likes it, the plaid sections and the handy pocket in the front. She’ll put her docs on before she leaves, they’re an old pair of Alaska’s that she left behind years ago for Katya to keep, they’re too big for Katya but if she wears an extra pair of thick socks then they’re as comfy as if they were a perfect fit. She towel dries her hair once she’s dressed and tosses the towel over the heater against the wall, it’s not turned on but it’ll let it air dry a little by the time she gets home later. Her glasses go back on once she’s put on a token swipe of mascara in front of the bathroom mirror, and then she’s done with almost an hour left before she has to leave.
Her notebook’s waiting for her on the couch and she curls herself up against the arm, just like she does every day. It falls open as soon as she picks it up, shows the same pages with scratched out words and phrases, the same ones that she’s looked at every morning for weeks now. She digs between the couch cushion and the arm and pulls out a pen, holds it between two fingers and taps its end against her teeth as she stares at the page. Her glasses slip down a little and she pushes them up with a fingertip, and then she’s still for a moment, considering. She always hopes for the same feeling every single time she looks down at the paper, that the words will come flooding through her brain, maybe even so fast that she can’t get them all down in time, will end up with ink covered hands and cramp in her hand from trying to keep up. It’s been so long since since she’s felt more than the smallest flicker of inspiration; she can barely remember what it feels like to actually write something. She can try, sometimes, to make herself put pen to paper even when her mind’s blank, but she knows deep down that she’s never written anything of worth when she’s tried to force it. So she sits and watches the paper in front of her, hopes desperately that something will suddenly hit her and the word will finally appear in her brain.
But the words don’t come, and so she closes her notebook, bites back a noise of frustration as she tosses it back onto the couch just like she does every day. She sighs, pushes her damp hair back behind her ears and resigns herself to another morning without anything new, another morning of giving up and going to the store early. It’s not a bad thing to get there before her shift starts, not really; Ginger will be opening up by now so she can get some time to check in on her sections, make sure they’re organised and she didn’t miss anything that might have been put back in the wrong place yesterday. She tucks her pen behind her ear and stands up, grabs her backpack from its spot beside the coffee table and hitches it straps up onto her shoulders. Once she’s picked up her phone from her bedroom – it’s up to 40% now, thank god – she steps into her docs and pulls the laces tight, ties them and tucks them into the side against her socks. Then she takes her lanyard from its spot dangling off of the door handle, loops it around her neck and pauses to unsnag one of the pins from the buttons on her dress, makes sure the clasp at the back isn’t about to rip out a chunk of her hair when she moves, and opens the door.
Katya locks her apartment up behind her and drops her keys into the pocket on her dress – handy, she should wear this one more often – and then grabs the handlebars of her bike where it’s waiting for her in the hallway, pushes it towards the stairs and then lifts it by its frame when she reaches the top of the stairs, turns sidewise to carry it down to the door to the building just like she does every day. She sets it back down once she gets out onto the sidewalk and then starts the short journey to the store, ten minutes of cycling that’s never too bad at this time in the morning while traffic is quiet. Sometimes she puts an earbud in for the journey but not today, she can hear the birds chirping around her since there aren’t a whole lot of cars on the road yet. It’s nice, peaceful. Quiet.
***
She stops outside the store just as Ginger’s opening up, and once Katya’s locked her bike up against the lamp post just outside she goes to meet her by the door, smokes a cigarette in comfortable silence with Ginger just like she does every day. They don’t try to talk; Ginger’s not a morning person, and Katya’s content to smoke her cigarette in the relative quiet of the street. Things are starting to pick up a little, there are more people walking by on the sidewalk, cars parking up on the roadside, businesses opening up along the street. There’s still a little while until they’ll open the store up to the public, and even then no one tends to come into the main section of the store until closer to lunchtime, diverting off from the entrance towards the café for their morning fix. It’ll just be the two of them until around midday, and then Violet or Max will come in to join them for the afternoon when things will start to pick up. There’s always a steady routine in the store; a few students will drift through in the morning, normally looking to pick up some ridiculously overpriced Classic from their syllabus. Then there’s the rush that comes around lunchtime, people coming in to find last minute presents or pick up a new read for their commute home, and then things stay a little busier than the morning until after normal working hours are over. The evenings are a little more unpredictable; Tuesdays are always busier, when the new releases come in, and Wednesday can be swarmed when they have a signing going on (she loves the cheerful YA authors that come in, the enthusiastic crowds of teenagers and college kids they draw in; she can’t stand the pretentious, middle aged men with their self-indulgent purple prose, begs Ginger to give her Wednesdays off on the weeks she knows they’ll be there). The weekends are always busy but she normally only works Sundays, so it breaks it up a little. She’s got her routine, and it works for her. Lets her maintain her quiet, peaceful life, and that’s good for her for now. Things are pretty slow, but they’re calm, and that’s okay.
Once they get inside, Ginger goes to the register to set everything up for the day ahead and Katya makes a beeline for her sections, just like she does every day. Everything looks okay over in the social sciences corner, she tidies up a few books that were left lying around in pyschology and her little parapsychology section is untouched; true crime nearby seems to be in order. She does a quick sweep of the shelves, casts critical eye over everything, makes sure that all of the spines are facing outwards and everything’s still in alphabetical order –- pauses to swap The Man In the White City with Blood Will Out, Larson comes after Kirn -- then circles back on herself to duck through the little alcove towards the back of the store. She claimed this little area as her own years back, when she’d just about been working there long enough to negotiate with the manager, she’d promised to take on new age and spirituality when Tammie left and even handle the dreaded tiny RPG section when Dax isn’t working, the one she tries to pretend doesn’t exist next to her carefully curated selection of comics and graphic novels. It was worth it, though; no one ever comes back here, but she’s got everything laid out exactly as she wants it. She snuck the ugly chair from the front of the store into the corner one morning while Ginger wasn’t paying attention, ostensibly to give customers a place to sit whenever they venture back here but in reality to give herself a nice little spot to escape to when she wants to get away from the world, even just for a few minutes. She looks around; everything’s exactly as she left it yesterday; yesterday, it was exactly how she’d left it the day before.
“Did you see if Pearl’s here yet?” she asks Ginger when she walks back out to the main floor, breaks the silence for the first time that morning. Ginger looks up from her phone where she’s leaning against the back of the counter, gestures vaguely in the direction of the café.
Ginger’s worked here about as long Katya has, maybe just a little longer. She’s the first person to tell anyone that it’s just temporary, just what she’s doing to pay the bills until she finds something better or hits her Big Break, but Katya knows that she doesn’t mind working at the store. She’s been the manager for a few years now, though she hardly acts like it – with Katya, anyway. She likes to wield her managerial power over Violet or Max when they’re getting on her nerves but she never tries it on Katya; they’re both fully aware that Katya knows far more about the store than Ginger. But she has no ambition to manage things, to have to deal with the regional management and corporate training that would probably suck her soul dry within weeks. Ginger doesn’t have any ambition here, either, but somehow she’s ended up managing the whole place and it makes the two of them laugh sometimes over their last cigarette before the end of the day, that they used to huddle outside together when they first started working at the store when they’d get overwhelmed by customers, back when they didn’t know anything about anything, and they’d promise each other that they wouldn’t stay more than a year. That was back when Katya was still in undergrad, when working at the store was just a part time gig to pay her rent and not somewhere she imagined she’d still be after all this time. She doesn’t let herself think a lot about what her nineteen year old self would have to say about her still working here; but then again she doesn’t let herself think a lot about her nineteen year old self in general.
“She got here just after I did,” Ginger says. Katya smirks, shakes her head – of course she did. Pearl’s shift started almost an hour ago, but Katya’s never known her to get anywhere on time.
“Do you want anything?” she asks, Ginger shakes her head and Katya walks through the quiet store to get to the café. It’s small but busy, typical for a Monday morning, but Katya doesn’t mind the time standing in line. There’s not a lot for her to do in the store just yet, and Pearl will make her an extra strong coffee if she waits it out. She can see her lounging behind the counter, her expression as bored as usual even in the face of the stressed out people half-shouting their orders at her.
“Pearl, you’re supposed to be training,” says a voice from close by, Katya looks over to see Shea kneeling down not far away from her, re-stocking the shelves of coffee beans and takeaway cups they keep right by the line. She’s looking at Pearl with a raised eyebrow; Pearl pulls a face that makes Katya drop her head to laugh quietly to herself.
“Training? During the morning rush?” she says, ignoring the customer in front of her trying to thrust a bill towards her, waiting for her to give them the drink she’s still holding in her hand.
“Where did you leave her?” Shea asks, goes over to the counter to take the customer’s money and rescue their drink from Pearl’s grip, hands it over to them. “Did you abandon her in the back?”
“Dude, I was trying to save her from the mayhem,” Pearl says, rests her elbows on the counter.
“It wouldn’t be mayhem if you actually paid attention,” Shea says, sighs when Pearl just shrugs. She catches sight of Katya in the line and they share a smile. Pearl is terrible at her job, but she has a goofy charm that somehow keeps her on Shea’s good side even when she’s totally annoyed by her.
“Fine, whatever. I’ll go get her,” Pearl says when she turns her gaze back to Shea, who’s no doubt fixing her with a stern look.
“Are you really letting Pearl train someone?” Katya asks Shea, she’s a little closer to her in the line now and Shea has an insane ability to juggle taking orders, making drinks and handling payments while also holding down a conversation. Katya’s constantly in awe of her.
“Well. I’m probably going to have train Pearl in how to train someone, but yeah, in theory she’s supposed to be training the new girl,” she says, Katya laughs and shakes her head. Pearl’s been working here almost as long as Katya has, but she seems perpetually ignorant about how everything in the café works.
Katya scrolls through her phone while she waits in line, checks in on her carefully pared down facebook dashboard, reads a few news articles to pass the time, just like she does every day. The line moves pretty steadily while Shea’s in charge, but when Pearl comes back out from the back Shea steps away again, goes to check the supply levels in all of the machines. Katya locks her phone and tucks it away in her dress pocket – so handy – and looks up again. Blinks. Forces herself to breathe.
The most beautiful girl in the world is standing beside Pearl. Katya can’t really comprehend how gorgeous she is, her long blonde curls, freckled face, big, bright eyes and a little smile on her face as she watches Pearl half-heartedly point out everything to her behind the counter. She’s all soft curves and tanned skin, Katya can see that her nails are painted a pretty pink colour that matches her lips, a few delicate bracelets on her wrist shimmer gold in the fluorescent lighting of the café. She doesn’t look at Katya as Pearl sets her up in front of the register, shows her how to put through the next customer’s order.
“Now you write down what the drink is on the cup,” Pearl says, gesturing to the stack of takeaway cups by her side.
“Oh, right. I just tick the boxes?” she says, and god, even her voice is beautiful. There’s a little twang to it, something mid-western, Katya wants to sit beside her and listen to her talk all day already.
“Ignore the boxes. I just write it out on the cup,” Pearl tells her, holds up one she’s just started filling with ice.
“What does that even say?” the girl asks, abandons her spot behind the register and goes over to Pearl, tries to decipher her untidy scrawl on the cup. Katya can feel her glasses slipping down her nose, her mouth is slightly open as she watches her, taking in the way she moves, the way her curls bounce prettily over her shoulders with each steps she takes towards Pearl.
“Iced latte, vanilla, soy,” Pearl says, pointing at each scrawled word in turn to decipher them for her.
“That wasn’t my order—” a woman by the counter starts to say but Pearl shushes her, puts a hand up to halt her.
“Okay, I can’t see any of those words on there,” the girl says, Pearl opens her mouth to explain but gets cut off when Shea sighs, heavy, turns from her spot behind them.
“New rule: don’t listen to Pearl. Here, I’ll show you,” she says, moving to stand beside her at the register. Pearl looks unbothered, going back to making her drink.
Katya can’t stop watching her. She’s so cute, the way her nose scrunches up as she tries to find the right buttons to press for an order, her serious little nod when Shea’s explaining something to her. The person in line in front of Katya orders the most ridiculous concoction Katya’s ever heard and she watches her eyes bug out, fumbling to find all the right boxes to check on the cup in her hands. Pearl barely reads it when she hands it to her, Katya suspects she’s probably winging it as she adds in different things.
When it’s her turn to order, Katya feels vaguely nervous. She has to open her mouth and speak to the goddess in front of her, try to form actual words and not make a total fool of herself; it doesn’t feel very likely, right now. She steps closer to the counter, and for the first time their eyes meet. She looks up at Katya, then back down at the register, Katya can see how long her lashes are, then back up again quickly, holds her gaze and a little smile spreads across her face, the corners of her lips turned up. Katya smiles back, glances down; there’s a name label stuck onto her black barista shirt, right next to where the buttons are straining a little across her chest. Her handwriting is neat, the letters big and round, i’s dotted with cute little hearts: Trixie.
“Hi! What can I get you?” she chirps, her enthusiasm has to be forced after the rush of customers she’s had to deal with already in her very first shift, but it doesn’t sound it, at all. She’s already got a cup in hand, pen held ready.
“Just a black coffee, please,” Katya says. Trixie raises one perfectly arched brow at her.
“Black coffee? That’s it? Nothing more complicated?” she says, sounds skeptical. Katya’s cheeks are warm as she nods in response. Trixie’s smile spreads into a beaming grin and she leans across the counter towards her.
“I think I’m in love with you,” she says, her eyes are twinkling and her tone is perfect deadpan serious. Katya’s mouth goes sandpaper dry, she can’t swallow, can’t think, can’t do anything but stare at her.
Maybe today isn’t just like every other day, after all.