they met in a coffee shop

short story

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Tracy Beattie.

It was like any other meeting. It could’ve been any other day. Nothing particular compelled either of them there that morning. It was just out of routine, habit, pattern that they were both there. Really, the surprise was actually that they hadn’t met before. That they claimed to have been getting coffee at the same time every day but had never noticed one another. Never caught each other’s eye. Never even spoke.

It wasn’t even romantic. He was running late and worrying about work before all of a sudden the cup in his hand was empty and there was a girl with a coat covered in coffee standing in front of him. Thoughts of work disappeared immediately. Not because she was beautiful or anything, of course not. He was just mortified to have done such a thing and was determined to do whatever he could to fix his mistake and make the smile on her face come back.

Well, he did happen to think that she was rather beautiful. But isn’t everyone, when you really look at them? When your gaze is drawn from the hot liquid dripping off the deep brown buttons of her coat and you look up to see that her eyes are exactly the same colour?

But we digress. Rather like they did, leaving behind whatever they were supposed to be doing with their day and instead deciding to introduce a completely new person to their life. They both found the other much more interesting than anyone they might’ve encountered if they’d left the store on time. That’s what they did every other day anyway, and nothing like this had ever happened before.

Eventually she got sick of waiting for him to ask and straight up gave him her number. Being too forward had caused her last relationship to rot until she’d had the courage to admit to herself that he’d been a dead carcass for a while and was not going to come alive again while she was around. But she was still forward, because she’s not going to change for anyone else, and he likes it.

He likes that she’s not hiding. That she feels comfortable saying hey, I like you, let’s do this, you and me. He lost his last love to someone else, someone who supposedly loved her better than he did. He cried for a long time about it too, and went through a lot of ice-cream. His friends tried to convince him to date again, to find someone else to cry about but he’d always refused. He didn’t want to go to a club or speed dating or on a blind date just to try and pick himself up. He could do that by getting off the floor and making his bed properly for once.

Because this had nothing to do with the situation. It wasn’t the magic of the coffee shop or the chance drink spilling or that they were both in the same headspace or the fact that the table they were sitting at by the window caught the best light across their faces. It was all about the two of them. It was the words they were saying, the stories they told, the expressions they made and the experiences they’d had. It was how she would always look away when talking about the things that mattered to her and how he got nervous when he realised that she smelt exactly like fresh flowers and the bottle of vanilla essence tucked away in his kitchen pantry.

That is the point of this meeting, after all. It is just another instance of how connections spring out of people, not places or happenings or things. It is the people who make the love and the love that makes the people in return.

They left the coffee shop, side by side, off to face the great wide world now with a smile on both their faces. Up in the sky, fate chuckles to coincidence and says confidently, “See? They know what they are doing without us. We may as well let them take control.”

Coincidence agrees. They have had this conversation many times before. They have not been working in a long, long while.