What was supposed to be a weekend full of work, turned into almost two weeks of absolute hell. And your lack of sleep didn't really help.
The weekend was full of booking after booking of appointments with potential clients, that Mattie set up for you, a few gigs - a wedding, three sessions of senior pictures, a family shoot with triplets, and a dog that wouldn't stop with it's incessant barking - and a whole lot of paperwork and running around. That alone was exhausting in and of itself. But to top it all off, your brother called you Sunday night and told you about his drug problem and made you promise not to tell your mother or Mattie and that he was dealing with it. "Dealing with it" turned into you getting a call from one of his Zeta brothers - you think his name was Kirk - at four in the morning, saying Will was in trouble and that you needed to get there as soon as possible.
You took the subway, a night bus, ran a block, and almost died at least twice, to get to his fraternity.
He owed a lot of money to some people you didn't want to find yourself owing money to. He nearly overdosed to get out of it. You ended up holing him up in your shared apartment until you could gather up the money yourself. You had to use some out of your savings because any more than a couple thousand from your joint account with your mother and she would ask questions. You put Ell on keep-Will-in-his-room duty. Ell slept in your room across the hall. You "slept" on the couch, keeping watch in case Will tried to leave. He only tried once when the withdrawal got so bad that he could barely think straight. You ended up having to handcuff him to his bed to keep him safe.
It was a long week. Especially with having to succumb to drinking cheap home brew.
You needed your Americano (and if Laura happened to be the one handing it to you, then that'd just be the icing on the very delicious cake).
The next time you saw Laura was a week and a half later and you didn't realize how much you missed her smile until it was the first thing you saw that morning. You walked through the doors of the coffee shop, hair probably a mess, sunglasses strewn over your tired eyes, yesterday's clothes still on your back. You regretted not showering the second Laura's eyes found you in the early morning crowd.
Her face immediately lit up, but after noticing your disheveled state, her look turned into one of concern. The halfhearted smile you barely managed to muster up probably didn't help either.
When you finally reached the front of the line, you ordered your usual, but what you got instead was a double shot of whiskey on the rocks and a cookie that practically melted when you put it in your mouth. Laura's only comment was, "you look like shit, this is on the house."
You couldn't argue with her.
You wanted to stay and talk, maybe explain why you were MIA for the better part of two weeks, but you hadn't gotten much work done and Mattie was starting to get on your case about it. So, in a quick, last minute exchange, when Laura finally did give you your Americano, you took out a pen from your bag, slung across your back, grabbed her wrist, and wrote out your cell phone number on her arm, as legible as you could manage, with trembling fingers. And with a tired, "thanks for the drink, cutie," you grabbed your coffee from the counter and left.
Around noon, while you were location scouting for a shoot you had next week, your phone vibrated in your back pocket with a text alert from an unknown number.
[(###) ###-#### (12:02)]: You never told me your name.