"Hello, welcome to the Fortree Cafe. We serve the best coffee in Hoenn! What can I get for you today, sir?"
The barista is small, with bark-brown hair that's longer in the front than the back and a high, bright, customer-service voice. Everything about her screams positivity, from her bright red outfit to the smile plastered on her face. She looks at me, expecting either a short, to the point order or a meandering uhh…I don't know…
What she gets, after asking twice more, is a stuttered, "Oh, sorry, um. Excuse- uh…"
I've been to this cafe before. I try to come almost every morning I'm in town, usually on business for my father and Devon Corps. But I've never seen this barista before. I would remember if I had.
Her smile falters the smallest bit, sunlight glinting off her golden nametag that says May in fancy golden script. "Sir?" she asks, and tilts her head at me.
She's all sharp angles, I realize. Her nose is pointy and her eyes are pointy, her cheekbones sharp, shoulders small. If her shirt were any tighter I could probably count her ribs. She's tiny, birdlike, but not any species I've ever seen.
"What I mean," I say, clearing my throat once, then twice before continuing, "is that I would like a...an…"
People behind me are starting to mutter. The barista's getting agitated, I can tell. She heaves a little sigh, blowing a lock of hair out of her face, but ultimately remains cheerful. Or maybe that's just the customer service in her expressing itself, I don't know and I don't care.
I can't take my eyes off of her.
Three minutes later, I've managed to stutter out a response and she's laughing, handing me my coffee-mocha-latte-thing (what did I even order?). The line at the Fortree Cafe starts moving once more. The coffee-wait, tea?
Did I get tea?
Amazing. Just great.
I don't even like tea.
He's cute, she thinks.
Sure, there are a lot of cute guys that stroll in and out of the Cafe, ordering coffee and leaving. Sometimes they stutter and stop, like Steven (he told her the last time he came in), but more often than not they're overconfident and step beyond their bounds.
Sometimes, it's all she can do to still her shaking hands and avoid 'accidentally' spilling hot coffee down the front of some Ace's shirt, but she manages. She is in customer service after all; she must maintain a smile, an unbreakable aura of charm.
But this one.
He's never taken her niceness for flirting, and she's never seen someone get so red so fast over a compliment on a suit. He's funny, too. Shy, but funny.
He comes in every day for her entire work week (six days-Marrissa ditched again) and gets the same thing every day: a hard caramel latte, three shot, twenty ounce. The tea from when they met, he explains, was a terrible, terrible mistake. He hates tea, but needed to get an answer out before there was a riot in the line behind him.
He learned to come at less busy times.
She learns things about him, too. She learns that he's come on business. Devon Corps, to be exact. Big business might not be her thing, per say, but she'll make an exception this one time. As long as he cuts casual as good as he does a three-thousand-poké suit. She learns that he loves the color purple, and yes, his hair is that white on it's own, and that he has a dry sense of humor. And oh, yes. She almost forgot.
His name is Steven Stone. Son of President Stone, leader of Devon Corps.
He's worth millions, and he's sitting here ordering coffee in a crappy cafe in a crappy town from her, a seventeen-year-old that dropped out of school far too early and doesn't write home anywhere near as much as she should, and he's funny, and smiles when she laughs, and she'll be damned if he doesn't have the kindest lavender-grey eyes she's ever seen.
He is entirely, irrevocably out of her league, a fact that doesn't stop her from putting her number on his cup the day before her day off.
He takes his latte with a smile, a nod, and a "thank you, May," before sitting down to read his ledgers and drink. He doesn't even notice her number until he finishes and stands, giving her a smile before tilting his white paper cup.
"Let's see what my cup says today. You know, I've never been to another cafe with stickers on their cups. And these are cute, too. Make my day."
Her heart is hammering in her chest, beating out a rhythm of one-two-crap-one-two-fuck-one-two and she can't breathe. Time slows to a stop when he sees the black lettering.
She busies herself with cleaning the espresso machine. Anything to not see his face right now.
"May?"
"Yes? Oh-I'm, I'm so sorry, it's okay if you don't-shit, uh," she stutters, re-wiping the machine harder.
"May."
"Steven, I-"
"May," he laughs, and she freezes. "I just wanted to ask if you had a pen. Paper, too, would be nice."
She stares at him for a beat too long, and starts about his request ever so slowly. A pen with a giant plastic flower taped to it, and the back of a receipt are the first things she grabs.
She hands him her washcloth instead.
He looks at the rag in his hand, and the pen in hers, and laughs.
"Please," he says between bouts of laughter, "tell me you're not serious."
Arceus help me, she thinks, and all but throws the pen and receipt at him. He scrambles to catch them, then walks back to his table, bends down, and scribbles something on the receipt. "Good day, May," he says with a nod and a mischievous smile shot in her direction before leaving, ledgers tucked under one arm, empty coffee cup in the other hand.
He left the receipt on the table.
Fifteen minutes later, when she finally gets the nerve to look at it, creeps over to Steven's writing.
Tonight? it reads in messy scrawl. Somehow, she thought he'd have nicer handwriting. 7? Call me.
And then his number.
His. Number.
The actual phone number of Steven-fucking-Stone, is sitting on a slightly crumpled receipt in a crappy coffee shop in a nowhere town, given to her, a seventeen year old highschool dropout that would work way past seven tonight at her second job, if she wasn't suddenly planning on calling in sick for once in her life.
Maybe getting this job wasn't such a bad thing after all.