"Decaf Hot Mocha, Italian Style"
A dhmis Padlock coffee shop AU
Summary: Paige (the Notepad), day manager at Grimme Dark Coffee, has called the shop staff in for a meeting that is interrupted when night manager Tony (the Clock) arrives. Paige and Tony discover that they had some wrong ideas about each other.
Based on the humanized designs by Aishaneko and on the Padlock fandom on tumblr.
ooo
June 19, afternoon. The morning rush was long over. It was an ideal time to have a staff meeting, which Paige thought was long overdue. She picked up a pencil and smiled at the baristas sitting around the table. It was important for a person in authority to look friendly to her underlings, she reminded herself, so she made her smile beam.
Paige could never see how there was always something off about her cheerful face and manner. The overly dark makeup she wore - heavy mascara and eye shadow, plum lipstick - made her pale face paper white. She was too old for the candy pastel colors in which she dyed her curly hair. She tended to dress almost lolita, too. Today she was wearing a close-fitting, long-sleeved black top under a white dress with layered skirts and puffed sleeves. Her necklace was a long gold chain with a pendant magnifying glass, like something a librarian might have. The overall impression she gave others resulted in a judgment of "creepy." Crowe, the short Filipina girl who was a little bit Goth, once likened the day manager to Professor Umbrage from the Harry Potter movies.
Manny leaned on the table and surveyed the coffee house interior, from the black checkerboard floor to the brick-a-brack on bookshelves that was meant to give Grimme Dark a storytime ambiance, something to tie into the Brothers Grimme reference in the store name. Behind the glass pastry case (meant to look like Snow White's coffin) and the big espresso machine on the counter, a steel refrigerator hulked. A Pelouse scale for weighing coffee by the pound had been shoved up on top, along with an iron that the fussy night manager brought in so that the aprons could look "crisp." The calendar had also been manager Tony's contribution.
His look was jaundiced with boredom. He jolted upright when Paige started talking.
"Business needs to pick up here, or there isn't going to be enough work for three people on the schedule," Paige announced. "We need ideas." She rapped her black-painted fingernails on the table top. "What is your favorite idea? Heri?" She eyed the young woman who was slouching in her chair. The big redhead shrugged.
Crowe started to open her mouth to speak, but Paige cut her off by standing up and pacing across to the counter. "My favorite idea is thinking creatively! See?" She picked up an orange from the fruit bowl. Offering fruit in addition to scones and muffins had been her menu addition. "Take a look at this orange," she said didactically. "What do you see?"
"A boring orange," Crowe said. She rolled her eyes at Manny.
Paige continued as if she hadn't heard. "I see a smiling face. The face of a happy, healthy customer smiling at me, because we creatively offer healthy alternatives! Like soy milk, chai tea, and sandwiches," she said, indicating the saran wrapped sandwiches that had been in the refrigerated case for two days already. "They make a great a brown bag lunch. You need to suggest that to every customer that comes in."
She stalked back to the group at the table, waggling her pencil like a dagger. "You have to express yourself to customers. People like to feel like we are a community. Wear fun T-shirts and share your interests to the customers." She waved her hand at her particolored head. "I use my hair to express myself. Customers think it's fun and creative!"
"I don't see what you mean," said Crowe.
"I want to do an art show," Paige announced. "When I worked my first barista job, the place I worked for had new art on the walls every month from local artists and live music on weekend nights. "
"That sounds really boring," Heri commented.
"As I was saying," Paige talked over Heri loudly, "I use my hair to express myself. We're all creative, right team? You can think creatively!" She toyed with her necklace.
Crowe slumped with her chin in her hands. This shift was already too long, she thought, and for her it had just started. Heri and Manny, at least, would get to go home after the meeting. "Uh, I still don't get it."
Paige waved her hands at the nearly bare walls. "We can be the artists! Let's each contribute something to the art show!"
Manny, Crowe, and Heri exchanged blank looks with each other. "I have a different idea about bringing in customers," Crowe started, trying to change the subject. When Paige latched on to an obsession, everyone suffered.
Pointing the magnifying glass pendant out the window, Paige continued, "Everyone sees shapes in the clouds, right?"
The three baristas leaned to look at the cloud spotted sky outside. "Hat!" said Heri.
"Cat," said Manny.
"...man with a baseball bat," Crowe rhymed.
"Ladder... dog..."
"Frog," rhymed Crowe again.
"Look, guys," said Paige. "Here's another good tip. Listen to your mind, and your heart. It's like listening to the rain. I know we can do this as long as we do it my way."
Crowe muttered, "Listen to the voices in your brain." Manny snickered. Heri bit her lip and looked at anyone but Paige.
Paige said, "We're going to start right now." She walked into the office and came out with a box of craft supplies: poster board, glitter, dried twigs, sequins, glue, and paint. " She pulled out the twigs and leaf shaped sequins and started arranging them. "Here's the color wheel for color theory," she said, taking out a hand-colored circle with wedges of black, nude, blue, yellow, and red, "in the company's theme colors."
Crowe tried to derail Paige's plans. She really wasn't into doing crafts. "Hey, Paige. What if we bring in more customers by going green? Like, we can get compostable cups and stuff. And locally sourced dairy? A lot of customers ask about that."
Paige gritted her teeth. "Green is not a CREATIVE COLOR," she pronounced. She shoved markers into Crowe's hands. "Now start expressing yourself!"
"Oh, I'll express myself," Crowe muttered under her breath.
Heri grabbed poster board and started applying glitter. Paige went around the counter to help a customer that had walked in.
Twenty minutes of agonized crafting and half a dozen customers later, Paige called a stop to the craft activities. She looked over what the trio had made. Manny danced over to a blank wall to hang his clown picture.
Paige intercepted him. "Woah, there friend. I think you need to slow down." She took the painting out of his hands, put it on the floor leaning against the wall, and hid it behind a black poster board.
Heri had molded a lump of polymer clay into something that looked like an anatomical heart, then covered it with glitter. Crowe had filled sheet after sheet with the word "death" and skull images in black paint.
"Okaaaay then," Paige said with a smile rigidly plastered on her face. "Let's agree never to be creative again."
Her fake smile faltered. She knew that the other employees were making fun of her idea, and that hurt. "Well, um -" she started.
The bells on the door handle jingled as the shop door opened. Paige looked up, ready to busy herself with a new customer. Her fake smile dropped off completely when she saw that it was Tony, the night manager. He wouldn't smile back, anyway.
Heri swept her glitter mess into the trash. "Come on, guys," she said to the baristas. "Stop mucking around. There's only five minutes until our show, Manny."
"That's not enough time to get to movie theater," Crowe commented, looking at the clock. "Even just across the street. You guys better hurry."
Tony hung his scarf and coat on the coat rack by the door, next to the prop top hat and cane. He swept in to the shop with an attitude of ownership. "All done with your little meeting, Paige?" he asked.
"Yes. We were just cleaning up," Paige replied tightly.
Tony lifted his head, turning it right and left as if listening. "You don't have any music on," he chided.
Paige sighed. "The customers were coming in. The playlist finished. We didn't have time to change it."
"There's always time for a song." Tony looked her over with an expression of disapproval before going over to the music speakers. Without asking, he changed her mp3 player out for his, selected music, and adjusted the volume. Classical violin sounded out through the speakers. "There. A little class," he commented.
Crowe, while Tony's back was turned, made a pantomime of pleading to Manny to mercy kill her. When Tony turned back around, she was putting on her apron to start working.
"Who's this guy?" Heri asked Manny while Paige finished cleaning up the table. Paige knocked over a bottle of tempera and black paint flowed everywhere. Heri reached over to Manny and picked at gold spangle that was sticking to his face. "You have some glitter on your eyelid."
"And I look fabulous," Manny hammed. "You can always tell a gay man by how he looks, right?" He winked at Crowe behind the bar. She made a face at her best friend.
Tony was saying something about times gone by and no one was listening to him. Something about Victorians, birthdays, and going to remote camping locations to fish. Hidden by the coffee grinder, Crowe silently mouthed at Manny, make it stop!
"Paige!" Tony scolded suddenly. "You're dripping black everywhere!"
Paige raised up one of Crowe's paintings. It said, "Die."
"Meh," Tony responded. He went into the tiny office and sat down at the computer.
"Our show." Heri urged Manny out the door.
It took a while for Paige to finish cleaning up the craft disaster. She had to scrub and scrub her hands in the sink. The water turned a murky purplish-brown, like an ugly bruise, and still her hands were stained dark. She felt lucky that none had gotten on her dress. She loved it because of the double skirt and all the fun appliqué. It was dumb to wear it around coffee, but since she never went out anywhere but work, it was that or wear it to go grocery shopping.
Tony thought that they should have uniforms. He was very precise about everything. Anyone late was written up. Other than making the schedule and doing the bank deposits, though, Paige didn't know what he did all shift. She did all the stock ordering. She worked behind the bar when needed. She was the one trying to drum up business, while Tony, for all she knew, played video games on the office computer after she left for the day.
No new customers came in while she was cleaning up. Crowe, bored, had wandered out to the tables and was making a house of cards on one.
"You know," Paige offered, "why don't you take the night off? It's really slow, and I can stay for you."
Crowe brightened. "Are you sure?" She was already untying her apron.
"Why not," Paige answered with another plastic smile. It had been a long day for her already, but she didn't have anything - or anyone - waiting at home.
Crowe did dance of happiness. She tossed her apron behind the counter, grabbed her handbag, and was out the door before Paige could change her mind about staying.
Paige took out the step ladder and started hanging the pictures that she had brought herself. Her pictures were still life studies in pencil. Instead of the usual subjects of flower bouquets or fruit, she had tried to bring meaning to everyday objects: a plate of bacon and eggs, an open book, a syringe that she had for refilling her fountain pen with bottled ink. She interspersed the pictures with photos taken of things from the coffee shop. They already had a group photo of the baristas hanging on the wall. She added a photograph of a sunset, then the photos of a ham and cheese sandwich with lettuce and an iced Italian soda, bubbly and pink.
She stepped down and sat in the large green armchair to get a customer's eye view of the room. Tony took that moment to pop out of the office.
"If you have time to lean, you have time to clean, Paige," he trotted out. "Where's Carrie?"
"That was Crowe, and I sent her home," she answered. "It's Heri, not Carrie."
"I don't know why we have so many women working here," Tony said.
"News alert: over half the people in the world are women. Just because we are under-represented in fiction, it doesn't mean there are more men."
"That boy hardly counts as a man, either."
"Oh, really?" Paige bristled. She was not about to let a homophobic comment pass by unchecked. She started to stand up.
Tony put up his hands. "Not because he's gay," Tony explained in a hurry. "I just meant his age. Sincerely!" He fussed around the counter, picking an apple out of the fruit bowl. "Calm your rage. Your misunderstood meaning isn't something I'd say, trust me." The apple looked withered. It was starting to brown. Tony tossed it into the used coffee grounds bin.
"Are you rhyming on purpose?" Paige asked.
Tony reviewed what he had just said. After a minute, he laughed. "I write rhymed poetry," he confessed. "Villanelles, sonnets. I suppose my brain was still in that mode."
"What's a villanelle?" Paige asked, reluctantly curious.
"It's a poem form where the lines in the first stanza - the first verse - are repeated in the rest of the poem." Since Paige stared at him with a look as blank as a sheet of paper, he said, "I can give you an example. How about this one by Sylvia Plath?" Standing in front of her chair, he struck a pose and delivered the poem poorly, with almost no inflection.
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
"That's called 'Mad Girl's Love Song.' It's odd but magnificent. What?" He was puzzled by the look Paige was giving him.
"You read that like a shopping list. Where is your passion?" She reseated herself on the arm of the chair. "What was that line?" Paige closed her eyes to remember. "'I dreamed you bewitched me to bed,'" she recited, "And sung me moon-struck, and kissed me insane."
"I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed, And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane," Tony corrected.
They stared at each other, realizing simultaneously what they had just said to each other. Tony sat down on the seat of the armchair. He pulled up his pant legs as he sat, the way Paige had only seen men do in old movies. There was something very old fashioned about Tony, she thought. Maybe it was because his family, she guessed by his swarthy skin color, was from a more formal country, like how she imagined India. She couldn't actually guess at his ancestry. He didn't have any kind of accent except that plummy way he spoke that made him sound so pedantic.
"Have you ever had your heart ripped out?" he asked all of a sudden.
"What?"
"Your heart. Pulled out of your chest. Or with a saber through it like-" he made a gesture as if stabbing her with a sword.
"No!" Paige answered in surprise. What had gotten into him? He had always been weird, but usually in an irritating way. She had wanted to wring his neck a few times. They didn't see each other often because of their opposite work schedules. She had written him a lot of Post-it notes about how the shop had been left at closing. He never wrote anything back, not even when she was nice.
"That's what passion is," Tony continued. "Your heart, ripped right out of your chest."
"Ugh. Sometimes, I just want to kill you," Paige said in exasperation. She got up and went behind the bar to make a fresh carafe of drip coffee.
Tony got up and leaned over the counter from the customer side. "Me?" he asked.
"Yes!"
"Why?"
"Because I would be expressing myself," Paige joked half-seriously. She measured coffee beans into the grinder and put a coffee filter under to catch the ground coffee as it poured out. "Why don't you ever answer my notes?" she asked when the grinder noise stopped. "As far as I can tell, you toss them out without even reading them."
Before Tony could answer, the jangling bells on the door announced the arrival of a customer. He straightened from the counter and moved off to the office again.
Paige gave the customer her best smile. She took the order for a decaf mocha, rang up the customer's charge, and started steaming milk. Tony came back out of the office and came around the bar. Paige turned on the espresso grinder.
Tony said something that was unintelligible over the noise. "I can't hear you, my head's in the steam," Paige told him as she tested the milk temperature with her hands on the pitcher's sides. He said something again, louder but still unintelligible. Tony was probably chiding her for not using a thermometer. She gave the customer another smile and ignored Tony. When she turned off the steam wand and stopped the grinder, he was just looking at her with his hands on his hips and a cranky expression on his face.
She tamped the espresso grounds and started the decaf shots. It took artistry to make a good espresso drink, not as much artistry as drawing and painting, but still some artistry. She stirred the espresso into the chocolate in the cup by swirling the cup in circles until they melted together. Then she poured in the hot milk, holding back the thickest part of the foam by the angle of the pitcher. She finished it off with a wrist flourish that turned the mixed mocha chocolate and milk into the image of a white heart on a pale brown background. "Here you go. No whip cream, as requested." She handed the mocha to the customer, who took a sip, made a sound of approval, put a lid on the drink and left the shop.
"So what were you saying?" she turned and asked Tony.
He handed her an air mail envelope.
She opened it up. Inside was a folded page of foolscap, which she unfolded.
"That's only a draft," Tony said. "I tried to answer your notes. I tried, but I always ran out of time to say what I wanted to tell you."
Paige read the poem that Tony had written, to her, about her. She read it twice. Her hands shook a little by the time she made it to the end the second time.
"It's nowhere near as good as 'Mad Girl's Love Song,'" he said. "Do you like it, Paige?"
She bobbed her head in a vigorous yes. Her pastel curls bounced around her pale face. No one had ever written her a poem before. No one had ever written her a poem to say, I love you before.
"Tony, what's your favorite idea?" Paige asked, trying not to sniffle. Her mascara would run if she cried.
"My favorite idea?" Tony took one of Paige's hand off the paper so that he could entwine his fingers with hers. "My favorite idea is spending time with you." He pulled her out from behind the counter, only freeing her when she stood on the checkerboard tiles. With a dash to the door, he grabbed the cane and put the top hat on his head. While Paige stood still, staring at his antics, he changed the music on the music player.
"Will you dance with me, Paige?" He bowed to her first, then extended his hand in invitation.
Tentatively, Paige took it. She was quickly pulled into an embrace. One of Tony's hands pressed against the small of her back. The other took her hand in his. He began to lead her in time with the electroswing beat.
It was faster than the swing step that she had learned for her cousin's wedding. She loved it. She felt beautiful, she was laughing, and the song was over too fast.
The next song was a slow dance. Tony gazed into her eyes as he rocked her gently side to side.
When the bells on the door jingled again, Paige and Tony were caught in the middle of their first kiss.
ooo