"Hey, uh, so how hot is the Aztec hot chocolate?"
Lucy blinks. It's New York, 7 in the morning, and somebody is asking her a question. What is this.
"Do you mean temperature-wise?" she asks. The customer has spiky hair. It is pink. Her mind cannot form long sentences. Somehow, she is still shocked by his hair color.
"Oh, yeah. And spice-wise?"
His voice is hot. He is hot. He is asking about the hotness of his drink.
Lucy almost giggles, but then she snaps herself out of her morning daze. "Oh. You mean honestly?"
The customer grins – it's a cute grin, slightly crooked and wide like the sun. It pulls up higher at the left corner to expose what look like fangs (sharpened? Well… she shouldn't judge other people's life choices…). "Yeah, I guess so."
"It's, well… slightly warmer than lukewarm, barely spiced. I'm sorry."
"Uh, can I get that at like a boiling temperature? With hot sauce, possibly?"
Not for the first time, Lucy is taken aback by this abomination of a human being. She does not understand him.
"I… uh, I don't know if we have hot sauce," she says, her smile tightening in confusion. "I'm sure we can heat up your drink, though."
"Hold on a second," responds the customer, digging through a shoulder bag that hangs by his waist. He throws a few crumpled papers on her counter as he rummages through his textbooks. Lucy kind of wants to wrinkle her nose, but she gets too distracted by the absolutely appalling doodles of pegasi (?) on his Environmental Studies homework.
"Ah, sorry," says the customer. "I thought I brought hot sauce with me, to put on my snack. Looks like I forgot." He laughs, a little sheepishly, and that laugh alone makes the corners of her mouth quirk up into a genuine smile.
His laugh is so honest, and just one of those laughs, y'know? She feels like it deserves a real smile back.
"Well, maybe next time," she says. And then her heart slams in her chest 'cause that's like Coffee Shop 101 – you don't just pressure your customers into coming back.
But the customer smiles so big she feels like it shouldn't fit on his face and flashes her a thumbs-up. "Yeah! Next time, for sure. I'm all fired up!"
Her heart goes back to beating normally. She can breathe again. She didn't screw things up. Calming down, she flashes him a thumbs-up in return. (But, "all fired up?" That was a weird thing to say…) "Alright, next time, we'll put it in for you," she chirps back. "One Aztec hot chocolate? Will that be all?"
And then he pays and lingers for a moment while Mira makes his drink, and then… he's gone. A little too soon. His upbeat personality is so rare in the big city's early morning, and Lucy just wants his presence back.
The shop returns to a quiet lull. Lucy relaxes and mentally prepares herself for the next rush hour – lunchtime.
(She thinks about the weird customer once or twice, but that's just because it's so strange to see an honestly happy human being out there.)
