Chance Encounters Cpt. 1

Saturday September 21, 2013

“Kicks!” The young man looked up as somebody called his name, blue-grey eyes searching them out. To no surprise it was his manager, Mark, calling to him from across the coffee shop. Kicks quickly slipped out from behind the counter and made his way carefully through the customers and furniture until he reached his boss, who was hovering by the store room door. “We got some new plates in,” Mark explained, “can you go put them behind the bar upstairs? Oh, and set some out while you’re at it, the book club rented it out for the afternoon and it’d be a nice touch.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kicks replied with a smile. “No problem.” Mark thanked him and went off to do other things, as Kicks picked up one of the heavier boxes in the store room with a grunt and leaned it against his chest for balance. Moving out he closed the room door with his foot and made his way once more through the maze, somehow making it to the stairs up to the top floor without bumping into anyone or anything. There were just a few people sitting upstairs, and one or two of them smiled at Kicks as he set the box down behind the bar. They all knew the book club was coming at two- some of them were in it- and so most of them would be making their way downstairs soon enough.

The Green Bean, this place where Kicks worked (and practically lived), was a favorite hangout for all the locals. It was a cozy coffee house with an environmental focus and a lot of personality. On the corner of a street in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, right next to the college campus, it was a two-story building filled with comfortable second-hand furniture, happy people, and of course, great coffee. Kicks loved it. He’d been working there ever since he moved to Bloomington to go to school, and by now he knew the names of just about anybody that walked through the doors. Mark had even promoted him to assistant manager, though all that really meant was that he got to help with the paperwork more. Here he knew everybody, and everybody knew him; and he liked it just that way.

HONK

TJ jolted back into full consciousness. He had, despite it being almost 2 in the afternoon, fallen asleep and drifted into the next lane. But seeing as he hadn’t slept in over 30 hours it was a miracle he hadn’t done so much earlier. He needed caffeine.

The first exit he came to was for Bloomington, Indiana. His knowledge of the city was equivalent to his knowledge of, say, wombats: not much. One of his old teammates had been recruited to play soccer there, but TJ hadn’t heard from him in years. He took the exit and pulled into the first parking lot he came across.

TJ looked at his phone. He had two new messages from his sister but he knew he didn’t have the mental capacity for her right now. “Siri,” he said to his phone, “find me the nearest five-star coffee house.”

“Here is the nearest five-star coffee house in your area. Would you like directions?” Siri asked. The place his phone had found was called the Green Bean. TJ snorted a bit at the name. It looked like one of those over-the-top green and organic places. The atmosphere wasn’t TJ’s kind of thing but he had to admit they usually had pretty good coffee.

“Yes.”

TJ had always been good with directions. He could easily memorize maps and find his way around new places. This was nice because he hated using GPS.

Map memorized, he drove off in the direction of the Green Bean.

Once all the plates were packed away and the room was ready for the arrival of the book club, Kicks made his way back down stairs and returned to his position behind the counter. “Thanks for covering for me,” he whispered to his co-worker Ansa, who smiled and nodded at him as way of reply before turning back to the customers at the counter. Though the coffee shop had a pretty steady flow of people all day, they tended to only have (and only need) two people behind the counter at any given time: one to take the orders, and the other to make the coffee/tea/what-have-you. Kicks was the latter, and if he did say so himself, nobody could make a better Spiced Mocha.

He watched the customers as they filtered through the doors, his hands on automatic as they filled the requests that Ansa slid to him on coffee sleeves. Most of them he knew, and he returned their waves and greetings with a smile, but it was always the ones he didn’t know that piqued his interest. His favorite at-work activity was people-watching the new customers, imagining where they had come from and what had brought them all to this little coffee shop. It was something to pass the time with, and it had always fascinated him the way that complete strangers could find themselves at the same place at the same time for no other reason than coincidence. Sure, it happened every day, but Kicks liked the way that it pulled people together, like the universe was always asking you, ‘But here, what about this one?’. And sometimes, in a little coffee shop like The Green Bean, strangers found their way towards becoming not strangers anymore. He liked that the best.

TJ pulled into a metered parking spot right by the Green Bean. As he got out of the car and fed the meter, he hoped like he’d never hoped before that there would be no line. He stepped through the door. There was a line.

As he waited in line, TJ kept himself awake by examining the place. It was pretty big for a coffee shop. However any illusions of spaciousness were erased by the fact that there were squishy chairs and couches everywhere. All of them mis-matched and all of them appearing to have been bought at a second-hand store. There was also a hodgepodge of lighting fixtures around the place. No industrial lights of any sort were to be found.  Despite all of this, TJ found that he actually sort of liked it. For whatever reason.

He shifted his focus to the two workers behind the counter. The first was a very Irish looking girl at the counter taking orders. She was smallish with red hair and freckles. The other was a young man who was several inches shorter than TJ who… well he looked pretty normal if you didn’t count the long blue braid falling past his shoulder on one side of his head. The rest of his hair was shorter and brown.

“Welcome to the Green Bean. What can I get for you?”

“Large, extra-hot, upside-down mocha with four shots.”

The girl, her name tag read ‘Ansa”, blinked for a second before writing it on a sleeve. “Will that be all for you today?”

TJ nodded, gave his name and paid. Ansa told him it would take a few minutes because orders were a little backed up, so he went to sit down on an unoccupied couch in the corner to wait. The couch was surprisingly comfortable and before he knew it, he had drifted off.

Kicks grinned as he picked up the coffee sleeve, Ansa’s round handwriting printed clearly across it. A large, extra-hot, upside-down mocha with four shots… well, somebody did know what they wanted, and what they wanted was life force in a coffee cup. Whipping it up in record time, and enjoying a bit of a challenge for once, Kicks slid the large coffee onto the counter and called out, “Large extra-hot upside-down mocha with four shots for TJ!” He waited a moment for somebody to come up, but through there was a bit of a stir amongst the waiting customers nobody showed up to take it. Frowning slightly, but thinking that they might have just slipped off to the bathroom or something, Kicks left it there and fulfilled a few other orders that had been queued up. Once the short line had been taken care of though, and he had called out the order again with no results, Kicks turned to Ansa.

“TJ,” he said, holding up the order in question as a visual aid. “Did you see where he went?”

Ansa thought for a moment, looking around the front of the store a bit, before shaking her head. “No, there were too many customers. He might have wandered upstairs or something though, nobody can hear the orders from up there.”

“Alright, I’ll just take it to him then,” said Kicks, jumping over the counter before snatching up the coffee cup. “What did he look like?”

“Oh tall, blond, brown eyes,” she said. Ansa was very good with names and faces, even one customer she had seen a while ago amongst a sea of others. “Pretty muscular,” she added, a slight blush flooding her cheeks. Her skin was so fair it lit up like wildfire.

Kicks’ grin only got better. “Alright, I’ll go give this coffee to your beau then!” he teased her, before heading back into the maze that was the coffee shop.

Ansa flushed even more, her cheeks beginning to match her curly hair. “He’s not my beau!” she retorted, only to have a laugh float back to her from her already-gone co-worker.

Because he really expected to find him upstairs, Kicks almost missed the guy sitting in the corner. Skidding to a halt, he looked at the man slumped over asleep on the couch. Fit the description just right, and that would explain why he hadn’t come up to get his coffee. “Uh, TJ?” Kicks asked, approaching the man cautiously and setting his coffee down on the table in front of the couch. “Hello?” He even waved his hand in front of the man’s face, but nothing got a response. “Wow, he’s really out, huh?” Kicks muttered to himself. With a smile he reached into his apron. Pulling out a flip pad and pen he wrote DO NOT DISTURB on one of the pages and, tearing it out, placed it on top of the sleeping man. A few of the customers around him giggled at this, but still the guy didn’t wake up. After that Kicks just went back to the counter, unconcerned. He was probably just another student who had stayed up too late studying, and The Green Bean didn’t have a rule against napping on the couches. TJ could sleep for as long as he wanted, and they could always warm up his coffee again later.