by Lisa Dale
“Jonathan knows.”
“He does? Did you tell him?”
“No.” She reached for her nightshirt, pulled it on. “I just don’t understand why we can’t tell. Are you … are you ashamed of me?”
“No,” he said.
“This isn’t serious to you?”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” The look in his eyes was fierce, and she wanted to believe him.
“Then what is it?”
He stood up, crossed the room. She felt the space between them widen like rising waters. He grabbed his jeans from where they were crumpled in a ball, and he tugged them over his hips. When he sat down on the bed, she joined him, and the mattress sagged.
“I don’t know how to explain,” he whispered.
“Try.”
He looked away. “I like keeping you to myself. I like this being … secret. Just you and me.”
“Really?” Thea sniffed. “Because I thought maybe it was that you just like people thinking you’re still single, so that way you can keep on flirting with whoever you want to flirt with and keep getting all the attention you need.”
His lips pressed together. “I do like attention, I guess.”
“And girls do like to give it to you.”
“Can I help it if I’m magnetic?”
She shook her head, but inwardly, she was laughing.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked. “You want to tell everyone? Let everyone in? Be … what we are in front of everyone?”
“What are you so afraid of?”
“What if we break up?” he asked.
She pulled away, looked at him with new comprehension. She thought, So that’s what this is about. He was afraid they wouldn’t make it. And that having the entire school in on the heartbreak would make a bad situation unbearable. He didn’t do well with public failure—the thing that drove him to be exceptionally brave on the soccer field was, ironically enough, a deep and secret fear. Thea wanted to reassure him.
“There’s nothing in the world that would make me want to break up with you. Ever,” she said.
“Really?”
“There’s a lot of things you have to worry about,” she said. “Losing me isn’t one of them.”
He looked into her eyes, kissed her hard. She felt the press of a kiss that branded them both, one to the other, a promise so ongoing and endless that it could never be completed or entirely kept. When he pulled away, the look in his eyes was desperate.
“We’ll tell everyone tomorrow. It will be all over the school in seconds.” He kissed her again, softly. “I don’t know if I can wait until graduation.”
She didn’t speak. She ran her hand along the ridge of his jeans. Me neither, is what she didn’t say.
In the pre-morning dark, Thea fumbled with her key chain at the door of the coffee shop, but her fingers felt clumsy and numb, and she couldn’t seem to find the right key. She was glad when she saw Jules appear in the alleyway, his ripped jeans slung low on his hips and a yellow plaid shirt untucked and hanging from narrow shoulders.
“Thea? What are you doing here? You’re not opening today,” he said. He stood beside her, his pale face still puffy from sleep, and he noticed that she was juggling her keys to find the right one. “Here, let me do that.”
“Thanks.”
He opened the door, and she followed him inside, glad to be out of the dewy chill of morning. She turned on the lights and headed behind the counter to put her purse away and get her apron.
“Coffee?” Jules asked.
“Shot in the dark.”
“Wow. Espresso and coffee together?” He laughed and set the espresso machine to backflush in order to clean it out. “Rough night?”
“Does it count as night if you never go to sleep?”
“I’ve often wondered the same thing myself,” he said.
For the next twenty minutes, they worked in silence, booting up the register, brewing coffee, and getting ready for the morning rush. The fresh pastries were delivered, and Thea began setting them out for display in the glass-front fridge. When their coffee was finally ready, they stopped a moment to drink. Through the pressure between her temples, she could feel Jules looking at her, puzzling her out.
“Do you feel okay?” he asked.
“I just have a bit of a headache.”
“Oh my God, Thea … Are you hungover?”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye; a shooting pain made its way from one eye to the other. “Fine. Yes. Maybe a little. Okay?”
He laughed and held up his hand for a high five. She gave it begrudgingly. “That’s awesome. Good for you, getting out there. What’d you do?”
She took a tentative sip of her coffee. The java and espresso combo was bitter and thick—exactly what she needed. She wished she could get it pumped directly into her veins. “I went out with Dani. Then we stayed up for a while talking. At some point, it made no sense to go to sleep.”
He leaned hard on one hip, indignant. “You shouldn’t be here. Go sleep in. I’m on the schedule for this morning.”
“I don’t mind working,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
She shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Did you get crazy? Are you overthinking?”
“Probably,” she said.
She breathed in the fragrant steam from her coffee. Last night—or perhaps it was early this morning—she’d kissed a man who wasn’t her husband. She supposed she’d needed to do it, and looking back, she realized that she’d had high hopes for the kiss. She’d wanted to know she was still sexy and appealing, and that she could still feel that spark of electricity and promise of new romance. And yet, what she’d learned from the experiment was slightly disappointing. Her future of kissing men was a future filled with common kisses—not unpleasant—but not the kind that made her wild for more.
The truth was, she’d only been in love once in her life. One great, juvenile, operatic, and misplaced passion. The shape of that first falling in love had been coming back to haunt her in recent weeks, and yet it was nothing but a cruel, empty shell of what it had once been. No amount of kissing strangers could bring those feelings back.
Jules leaned on the counter, his arms crossed. “Well, I’m proud of you. You needed to go out. And you’re supposed to try new things.”
“Even if it gets me in trouble?”
“Especially if it does,” he said.
She smiled and felt some of the pressure of her hangover abate. She’d behaved badly. She knew that. She was not some twenty-something who should be dancing on tables and making out with strange men. If she made a self-discovery, it was not that she’d discovered who she was—but rather, who she wasn’t. Still—it was a start.
“If you’re going to be staying out all night, then we’ve got to get something straight,” Jules said sternly.
“What?”
“You’re the boss. And when you stay out all night, you’re not allowed to come in at six a.m. the next day.”
“But—”
“Nope.” With one tug, he pulled the string of her apron. She grabbed for it when it fell. “If you don’t go home and go to bed right now, you’re going to have to find yourself another token male barista. Seriously, Thea. This is me putting my foot down.”
“You’re not a token—”
“Out. Now.”
Thea barely had time to get her purse before Jules shooed her out of the coffee shop. Outside, the sun was rising, and the mist was fading from between the narrow buildings of the pier. She took a breath, and the cool, clean air filled her lungs and cleared her head. She felt different, a little bit more certain—though she wasn’t precisely sure what she felt certain about. The mire of tiredness gave way to bright waves of energy and triumph. Newport was waking up. Dawn was becoming day. All the hours were before her and full of possibility. She thought, I couldn’t possibly go to bed.
And yet, when she got home, her pillo
ws beckoned. And she fell into a slumber that was dreamless, restorative, and deep.
From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
The Newport Examiner
In the early days of coffee cultivation, many Arab countries prohibited the export of even the smallest number of green coffee seeds. However, enterprising explorers found ways to spread coffee across the globe, and their stories have taken on a larger-than-life mythology.
Coffee is said to have made its way to India courtesy of a seventeenth-century Sufi named Baba Budan, who taped a few green coffee seeds to his belly to smuggle them out of Yemen.
Gabriel-Mathieu de Clieu, an eighteenth-century Frenchman, claimed in his memoirs to have brought a single, fragile coffee tree to Martinique, but in order to get it across the ocean, he had to protect the plant during violent storms, pirate attacks, sabotage from envious fellow sailors—and when the ship’s water rations wore down to nothing, de Clieu is said to have risked his life by sharing his last cup of water with the tree to keep it alive.
My favorite bit of coffee mythology comes from Brazil. When a Brazilian lieutenant seduced the wife of a prominent French official, the woman gave her lover a parting gift that changed history. Tucked inside of an innocuous bundle of flowers was a cutting of a coffee tree—a small green shoot that gave rise to a coffee empire.
ELEVEN
A hundred times—a thousand maybe—Thea had told her daughter, It’s going to be okay. When Irina had been learning to ride her bike and she’d scraped her knee so that there was hardly any unscratched skin to speak of, Thea had told her, It’s going to be okay. When Irina was six and she’d come tearfully into Thea’s bedroom to confess that she’d broken the living room lamp, Thea made room for her under the covers and said It’s going to be okay. And last week, when Irina had purposely snapped her toothbrush in two because Thea wouldn’t drive her over to Providence at almost nine o’clock on a weekday night to see her father, Thea summoned all her patience and assured her daughter, It’s going to be okay.
Irina needed to know they would get through this. All of them. And yet to assure another person It’s okay was also to acknowledge that something was wrong.
“I don’t know what to do,” she told Dani over the telephone. “Tell me what to do. How do I handle this?”
“Hey.” Dani’s voice was soft. “You’re freaking out.”
Thea forced a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just worried about her.”
“I know you are. But honey? You’ve got to believe me on this one. I’ve been there, done that.”
“Believe what?”
“One way or another,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Garret didn’t have enough information to do any kind of formal comparison to determine if other men were more talented in bed than he was, but the anecdotal evidence—offered in breathless and bewildered gratitude moments after orgasm—all pointed to his being more dexterous than the average guy.
In college, he’d thrown himself into discovering ways to please women with the same passion that he’d once brought to the soccer fields. He’d pored over the hints and tips in dirty magazines that his friends passed furtively from one dorm room to another. He soaked up lessons like a sponge: “What Women Want,” “Five Secret Fantasies of Real Women,” “How to Kiss a Woman (but Not on the Mouth).”
But eventually, snippets in men’s magazines began to seem predictable and inadequate. Of course he knew about the G-spot. Of course he could pay attention to the back of a woman’s knee. And so he sought education elsewhere. It didn’t take him long to give up on watching porn for pointers; silly scenes of nurses and delivery men were choreographed for the visuals, not necessarily for the pleasure of the parties involved. When skin flicks failed, he turned to books, their covers plastered with pictures of half-naked couples, the gentle contours of candlelight and shadow obscuring strategic body parts. Unlike movies, the books made a promise that he wanted so badly to believe: all he had to do was follow the instructions to a T.
In crowded common rooms of the boys’ dorm, where his friends played Ping-Pong and dropped coins in the vending machine, he made no secret of his studies. And the guys mocked him ruthlessly—not because they weren’t impressed but because Garret was the only one of them who never got laid. He read, studied, and learned—he even counseled others on what he knew when they needed advice—but he didn’t put theory to practice. Not until years down the line.
Now—an adult out on a promising date—he stood in the quiet marble lobby of his building with Gemma, a gorgeous blond he’d met on Jamie’s yacht. They’d returned from a nice dinner together at a gourmet steak house in Providence, and she was looking at him expectantly, waiting for an invitation to join him in the elevator.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said. Her lips were red and shiny, set in her tanned face. Her hair, touched with perfect highlights, smelled of flowers. “Are you up for dessert?”
He looked into her eyes—past her dark makeup to the shock of blue that may or may not have been contacts. His entire life, he’d prided himself on making his dates happy. And this woman—he could make her very happy.
But when he tried to imagine walking her through the rooms of his condo, where Jonathan was probably reading a science fiction novel on the couch, and Irina was sleeping soundly in the room they were all coming to think of as hers, he simply didn’t like the idea of bringing her inside.
Oddly enough, he’d found himself enjoying the company of his brother and his niece more than he ever could have anticipated. Sure there were inconveniences—Jonathan left the toothpaste cap open and tended to be a bit of a slob, and Irina had the television in a stranglehold of endless cartoons. But generally, he enjoyed the friendly, quiet hours they spent together, and he knew it would upset the balance if he were to bring this woman home.
“You have no idea,” he said in his deepest, sexiest voice, “how much I want to take you upstairs right now.”
Her smile flickered.
“But the trouble is my niece is with me for the weekend. And she’s too young to explain why her uncle has house guests.”
“You’re so thoughtful.” She ran her fingers along his tie. “But we’ll be quick. In and out before you know it.”
“I see you’re going to make this difficult for me.”
She sidled closer, twining her arms around his neck. “I’ll sneak out before morning.”
And I bet it’s not the first time, he thought. For a moment he had the odd sense that he was on the wrong side of a seduction, and he didn’t like it. He wondered if the women he’d seduced over the course of his life had also felt like this—the slight discomfort that was not dangerous and exciting, but more of a pain in the ass.
“Rain check?” he asked.
She dropped her arms from his shoulders. “This might be a one-time offer.”
He nodded, relieved. He held the glass door of the building for her as she walked outside, her green dress making a perfect hourglass of her curves, and he shook his head at himself.
The doorman appeared by his side, watching his date walk away. “Rough night?”
“No,” Garret said. “Not at all.”
Thea didn’t realize that she was staring off into space until Irina looked up from her summer reading and stuck out her tongue.
“Sorry!” Thea said, and they both laughed.
At a table in the corner of the coffee shop, Irina looked like a miniature version of the writers and college students who regularly brought their work into the coffee shop. With a mug at her side and her foot tucked under one knee, she took on their posture—their veiled gaze and air of studious boredom—perfectly. Some days, she was ten going on thirty. Other days, she was still a baby in Thea’s mind.
Thea looked up when she heard the brass bell over the door ring, and she saw Jonathan walking into the Dancing Goat right on time. He was still dressed for work: gray pleated slacks, an oxford shirt with a tired collar, and a ligh
t purple vest. His briefcase hung from his fist.
“Dad!” Irina scooted off her chair. She threw her arms around her father’s waist, her face pressed into his belly. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting the love of my life,” he said, and he kissed her forehead.
Thea came around the counter to say hello. It felt ridiculous not to greet him with her usual kiss on the cheek—such a platonic gesture, even when they were married—and so she leaned toward him and gave him a quick peck. Irina’s eyes lit up with an optimism that made Thea’s heart break.
“What are you having?” Thea asked. “Iced tea?”
Jonathan glanced at the chalkboard above the counter, deciding what to drink. “No iced tea. I’m feeling adventurous. Give me … let’s see … a vanilla huggle.”
Irina’s face lit up, her head snapping toward Thea. “I told you men would like it. Didn’t I say?”
“Yes, you were right,” she said happily, and she headed behind the counter to make Jonathan’s latte. Her daughter had not only been correct that the lobstermen felt no discomfort about the vanilla huggle, but the men in particular ordered it twice as often as the women. They also ordered it twice as often as when it was simply called a vanilla-cinnamon latte. Thea was convinced of her daughter’s genius for marketing. Irina had a future in the Dancing Goat—if she wanted it someday.
Thea made their drinks, left instructions for Claudine to give a shout if she needed help, then she, Jonathan, and Irina headed back into her office for privacy. Thea pulled the chair around from behind her father’s desk, Irina sat on a stool shaped like a red dog, and Jonathan got comfortable on the small love seat that had been pushed against the wall for the last ten years.
For a while, they talked easily—like they used to. Thea felt as if her life had gone back to normal. Irina seemed to have made it her goal for the evening to make her father laugh, and Jonathan was a willing audience. They were very different—father and daughter. Irina didn’t let Jonathan coddle and spoil her half as much as he would have liked. But Thea could tell that one day, they would be more than just relatives: they would be friends.