“Macchiato, huh?” he said with a lopsided grin. “You’re right.” He shook his head slowly, looked at the barista. “A latte and a macchiato, please.” The barista just jutted his chin up in acknowledgment and got to work on the giant, shiny espresso machine. “I do like to taste life exactly as it is,” he said, gesturing to Josie to take a table. There weren’t many, most of the spots taken by people using the coffee shop as a pseudo-office, but there were two, and he grabbed the most private.
She sat down, grateful to give her shaking legs a rest. Talking about herself, talking about anyone, in such true terms wasn’t something she was used to. But she’d done it, she’d actually told him something deep about her soul and about how she saw him, and he was still here. But holy shit, now she had to continue talking and so did he.
This wasn’t like in the movies, or in a book, where the scene ends on this dramatic, intense moment and then switches over to three days later, with the main female character engaging in chatty banter with her best friend, confessing what had happened. Josie couldn’t skip to a charming reflection that perfectly encapsulated all of the heroine’s foibles and her journey toward accepting that love conquers all.
Oh, no.
Instead, she found herself fumbling to know what to do with her hands, her hips, her knees and feet, and the millions of brain cells flying fast and furious inside her skull, trying to compose a sense of self by making it up as she went along, second by second in Alex’s presence. She still had to sit here, and talk to him, and get to know him, and do what next? Pretend she hadn’t said such revealing, visceral observations about him?
He leaned forward on the tabletop and invaded her space as much as she could handle. Deep breaths helped center her as she willed herself not to pull back. It would have been too easy to lean casually into the chair’s back and pretend that it was her sarcastic facade that made her so casual, so blasé. She had that, she possessed it—or rather, it possessed her. It was the comfortable and the known, but…at some point in the past two days, the comfortable and the known had become claustrophobic and stifling.
Alex was a breath of fresh air, and the Josie that she was just starting to get a peek of when she was around him needed more oxygen—not more containment.
If he could have hit a pause button, as if life were a DVR, he would have, just to freeze in time what Josie was saying to him, so that he could process it instead of react to it. He tried, with marginal success, to keep a straight face as she talked about him, but he felt as if he had cracked his own chest open and revealed the flesh of his beating heart to her in stark relief.
It was a small thing. It was no big revelation, that macchiatos were, in fact, his favorite coffee drink. And she was right, the Starbucks version was crap. The fact that she understood why was what made his pulse race, made his back straighten—and other body parts, too. He was hard at the thought that she could know him so well with so little time together.
Years ago his mother had told him that he would know, just know when he found the right person. He had thought that she was being sappy, overly romantic, and idealistic, which was her tendency at times when it came to love. As Josie sat across from him and they waited for the call that their drinks were ready, he filled in the space between them with as much knowing as he could muster. As much as he would have enjoyed a pause button, just being real would have to be enough. He reached over and clasped her hand in his, the shock of the connection of their skin making his heart simultaneously race just a little more, and calm down on a deeper level.
She didn’t pull away. In fact, she intertwined her fingers in his, a confirmation of what he had suspected was there, making each step toward connection with Josie seem more preordained. When he reached out she responded, so why was he so unsure? He wished again that he could halt time and buy himself some reflective processing. “Dr. Calm, Cool, and Collected,” as one med school colleague had called him, didn’t get flustered like this. The fact that she could trigger this kind of response in him meant something.
She relaxed at his touch, and just as he was about to open his mouth and ask her how she knew what she knew about him, the barista called out, “Alex!” He jumped, their hands separated, and he motioned to her to wait, he would get the coffee. He came back to the table, careful to set everything down with unshaking hands. It wasn’t that he was worried that he would spill, but rather that time seemed to move in nanoseconds, while his brain raced at the speed of love.
They each took a sip of their coffee, then he asked, openly, with that unshaken sense that whatever he said had to be enough, “This is unnerving you, isn’t it?”
“Me?” She waved her hand dismissively and took another big sip of her coffee, her face bisected by the rim of the white coffee cup, like some sort of demented librarian looking over the edge of a book.
“Why did you come with me?” he asked, hoping that the question sounded like the warm inquiry that it was, and not an accusation or some sort of creepy, low self-esteem narcissism.
“Because I always go out for coffee with guys who’ve been traumatized by looking at Dylan’s ass**le.”
Ah, he thought, smiling, and laughing at the joke, doing the conventional thing that was expected of him. She was that threatened. Good. That meant she felt it, too.
Her face got serious and she set the coffee cup down. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, giving him a look at her cle**age as her shirt fell a bit. His fingers itched to reach out and peel the shirt all the way off, gain access to the flesh that had been so tantalizingly close in the on-call room. Pursuing a presumption of those activities too soon would make him look like what he did not want her to think he was. “Skirt-chasing”—Ed’s term—wasn’t his goal here. Not with Josie. And yet…oh, how he wanted to get na**d with her again, let her explore all the ways they could read each other’s skin, the way that she was reading him now with observations and words.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “How often do we get weather like this in May in New England?”
She stood, the question not really a question. She seemed to want to walk and he was up for it.
“Hey, you never know, it could snow tomorrow.”
“It could,” she said, and two people sitting at tables nearby nodded in agreement, ruefully smiling and rolling their eyes.
It wouldn’t snow today, though; she was right, it was a good day for a stroll. He had finished his coffee already, the shot with a little milk foam on top about the size of a kid’s Dixie cup, so he pitched it as they walked outside, and then took her hand in his. The gesture, so fluid, felt right. She looked up at him, and for the first time since he’d seen her today, gave him a dazzling, open look of joy. This was a face he could fall into every morning, waking up next to it. This was a smile he could spend the last six decades of his life trying to make spread across her face. This was a hand he could hold, warm and soft in his, and this was a woman he could know from every perspective, and still find more to know.