by Jade Bitters
“My lady, I swear, by the moon above, the moon that paints the ivy silver –” started Romeo.
“Don’t swear by the moon, the moon doesn’t stay the same, and every day it changes. I don’t want you to change, Romeo,” said Juliet.
“Then what do you want me to swear on?” he asked.
“Don’t. Just don’t swear. But, if you have to? Swear on yourself, your wonderful self, the god I worship as a false idol, and I’ll believe your promises,” said Juliet.
“If my heart’s truly in love –” started Romeo.
Juliet cut him off. Again. “Don’t. Just...don’t swear. You make me so happy, but I can’t be happy with a promise from you, not tonight. So much has happened, and we need to sleep on this. I don’t want a love like lightning: flashing and fading before you can Snapchat it. Honey...good night. Our love, so young, may age well like wine by the time we next see each other. I hope you feel as good as I do, though,” said Juliet.
“Are you going to leave me this way? Wanting and needing you?” asked Romeo.
“What else can I do for you?” asked Juliet.
“All I need is to hear you promise yourself to me,” said Romeo.
“I gave my heart to you before you asked for it...but I wish I hadn’t, so I could give it to you again,” said Juliet.
“You’d take your heart back? Why?” asked Romeo.
“Only to love you more and give it once again...but that means I want to do what I’ve already done. My love for you is as limitless as the storage in the cloud, my passion as full, and the more I love you, the more limitless and fuller it becomes,” said Juliet. “Both loves have limits: the limit of x approaching zero of one divided by x squared. Infinite.” Juliet heard someone at the door and knew who it was from the sound of the jewelry jingling: it was Amy, of course it was Amy. Damn. “There’s someone at my door. Honey, goodbye – just a minute, Amy! Sweet, sweet Pyrymyn boy, stay true to me. Stay here, just a moment, and I’ll be back.”
Romeo leaned back against the wall, out of sight lest Amy look and see him. What a night. What a girl! It’s dark out...just like it is in all my dreams, but this one is too sweet to possibly come true.
“Three words, Romeo, and then I really do have to go: if you want me...of you really want me, and to run off with me, away from this cursed valley, contact me. Tomorrow. Do it anonymously, physically: keep it offline. Our companies have eyes everywhere. I’ll send a courier to you tomorrow, and you can reply telling me when and where we’ll leave. I’ll take everything I need and go with you, my love, anywhere we want,” she said.
“Juliet!” called Amy.
“I’ll be right there!” said Juliet, turning to face the HR lady, before turning back to her beloved. “But...if you’re not serious about me, please –”
“Juliet!” called Amy again.
“Alright, I’m coming, just wait,” said Juliet before turning back to Romeo. Again. “Please, stop trying to love me, and leave me alone. Tomorrow, I’ll send the courier.”
“That’s all I want –” started Romeo.
“Please, just go! Now!” said Juliet, closing the window and nodding her head away towards a one-way exit.
Romeo started to walk towards the exit. Leaving her...it’s a thousand time worse than being next to her, because I go towards her as excited as I am after work on Friday, but as I leave, it’s as bad as going back on Monday. He stopped, though, when he heard a wolf whistle. He turned: had he been caught by some Thisbia employee with a Pyrymyn grudge?
“Psst! Romeo! Psst!” hissed Juliet. “Oh, I wish I could send out wireless signals, to ping my device. I’m stuck here tonight, so I have to keep it down...or else I’d pull out a megaphone, repeat Romeo’s name until the batteries ran out, repeating, ‘My Romeo’!”
“My heart calls out my name,” said Romeo, turning back to face the window from the shadows. “The sound of names back and forth in the darkness...there’s nothing sweeter, the sweetest sound a girl can make.”
“Romeo!” hissed Juliet again.
“Yes, my lady server?” he asked with a grin he knew she couldn’t see.
“What time, tomorrow, should I have the courier sent?” she asked.
“Nine works,” said Romeo.
“Great, perfect. Waiting from now until tomorrow seems like twenty days. I forgot why I called you back,” said Juliet, her mind suddenly a blank.
“I can wait,” said Romeo. “Let me wait for you to remember.”
“I’ll never remember,” said Juliet. “You’ll be waiting forever...because the only thing I remember is how much I love being around you.”
“I won’t move from this spot, not if your memory cycles a thousand times over,” promised Romeo. “I’ll forget all coordinates other than the ones I am locked on here, for you.”
“It’s nearly dawn,” said Juliet. “I want you to go...but I only want you, as clingy as that sounds, to be close to me, like a tethered device, requiring your hotspot to function.”
“I’d be your bird,” said Romeo. “I wish I was, at least.”
“I wish you were too, honey,” said Juliet. “But...I’d smother you to death with cuddles. Goodnight...what’s it they say? Parting is such sweet sorrow? I’d say goodnight to you until the night became the day.”
“Sweet dreams,” said Romeo. “I wish I was your Wi-Fi, your files, so I could be what you were with all night...but now, I’ll go see my friend. I think he has some advice for me...and he’ll congratulate me on finally getting the girl.”
Chapter Eight: Act Two, Scene Three
Lawrence entered the coffee shop and closed the door behind him, keeping the closed sign flipped so that nobody would enter as he pocketed his cufflinks. Of course, some asshole would knock and he’d pretend not to hear them. These tech kids were always pressuring him to open early, and the hours before the shop actually opened were the only private moments he was afforded. Hello, Monday, he thought to himself, looking out the window at the people walking to get South of Market in black fleece jackets.
Turn down for what? For work, apparently: Monday mornings were the worst, because the techies were not only irate, but hungover, and of course, he’d get some asshole asking him to make a green tea soy latte, no foam, when that wasn’t the kind of coffee shop Lawrence ran. You could get big boy drinks, or you could get the fuck out.
Ugh, the Friday staff forgot to clean out the espresso machine, he thought to himself. These machines: we live in a world of machines here...even me. The machines are born here and they come here to die, from the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the engineers provide their projects with update after update. Everything the techies create is so fucking special, and each is somehow different, but everything from applets to gadgets holds so much power. There is nothing in the Bay that is so evil that it doesn’t somehow contribute to the industry...and there is nothing that can’t be fucked up if it’s used and abused. The good turns bad under the worst circumstances, and sometimes, the worst become the best, if they just fix their behavior.
He heard a jingle and turned to the door: it was just Romeo. He’d met Romeo at the beginning of the summer and the kid was nice enough: a bit too concerned with finding a girlfriend and true love, but harmless, even if he should be focusing on the internship that was paying him more than Lawrence earned in all his summers combined as a student barista. “In this machine,” said Lawrence, beckoning Romeo over, “There’s both grinds and coffee...if you smell it, you feel good, but if you taste it, you’ll get sick. There are opposites in everything...in men, as well as in machines – good, and evil, and when evil takes over, things crash. Things get destroyed.”
“Good morning to you too, Lawrence,” said Romeo, too used to Lawrence’s introspections to know to listen more closely, leaning over Lawrence’s shoulder and resisting the urge to parrot off what the documentation for the Espresso Master 9001 said to do, because Lawrence knew how to use machines better than anyone else he knew, even the master
engineers at Pyrymyn. To someone technically minded like Romeo, seeing Lawrence use machines in ways that weren’t recommended by the manufacturer to create beautiful, delicious drinks was like watching an artist paint with metal and ground beans.
After spending all day in a glass and concrete pyramid and all weekend in the lights of the glitzy glamour that made up the fair city, it was refreshing to spend time in what seemed like a small slice of something real, something that didn’t fit in SoMa, a place that seemed genuine and real, rather than a place that was arranged and created to give off an impression rather than to serve as a place of self-expression. The walls of the coffee shop were not made of exposed brick, or of repurposed barn wood, but they were covered with murals by local artists, and on top of those murals, there were framed works, mostly paintings and photographs from local artists with local subject matter. The music playing over the speakers was light and soft, but it was by artists who played at local open mics, not just college rock and folk pop.
Lawrence had managed to curate not only good content, but local content, and he didn’t charge artists a feature fee, unlike a gallery or a venue would: he supported the local artists because they were part of what gave San Francisco and the Bay Area its unique flavor. The yuppies had moved into the city, taking the more affordable housing because it was chic, not because they needed lower rents, and if he could support those in his community that needed to figure out a way to survive in the concrete jungle, he was going to do more than willingly. He’d only moved away once, for college, but he’d come back to the place he belonged.
“A good morning to you to,” said Lawrence sarcastically. “I’m surprised to see you up this early. Are you okay? You’d only be here this early if you weren’t...and you know townies like me always worry, and worried people can’t sleep, but interns shouldn’t worry. You don’t get paid enough to: you get paid too much to. You should sleep in, get lots of sleep...so the fact you’re here so early means there’s something on your mind. Or...there’s another explanation: you, Romeo, pulled an all-nighter.”
“You’re right,” said Romeo, who surprisingly didn’t feel very tired after spending the night at the Thisbia party, below Juliet’s window, and staying up all night, staring at the ceiling and thinking about her. He tried to figure out what song was playing in the background: he was sure Lawrence had told him before, but the breathy female vocals all blended together and couldn’t compare to Juliet’s crystal clear voice, which he longed for the same way he longed for her touch, how he longed for the night that had passed too quickly but would last in his memory forever. “But I don’t need sleep, I feel great.”
“Hopefully Caliban won’t ride your ass if you’ve been up to trouble,” said Lawrence. He might be a townie, but he knew more about the intricacies of the industry than most of the people in it, because he actually cared to listen when people talked to him the way they’d talk to a mixologist: Lawrence put the “bar” in “barista”, and techies loved to open up about their stupid secrets to anyone who would listen and who seemed harmless, read: too “stupid” to work in tech and thus assumed to know nothing about the industry that you couldn’t avoid seeing ads for wherever you walked or whatever you clicked. “Were you with Roxanne?”
“With Roxanne, Lawrence?” asked Romeo, thinking about Roxanne for the first time in hours. “No...I don’t think about her anymore, or about how I felt about her.”
“Well, that’s good, kid,” said Lawrence, still confused, and no longer just by the espresso machine that was misbehaving. The Friday staff had really dropped the ball on this. “But that doesn’t answer my question: where were you?” Romeo was usually with those two tech scumbags, Ben and Mark, but they were nowhere to be found today, yet here Romeo was. It was nice to be with him, one on one, but Romeo wasn’t over sharing as usual, and it was better for Lawrence to have to tell Romeo, “TMI”, than to have to pry for information about things Romeo clearly didn’t want to tell.
“Fine, fine, I’ll tell you,” said Romeo, leaning back against the sturdy wooden counters. “I crashed the Thisbia party...and I fell in love with someone else, but this someone loves me back. That’s why I’m here: I need your advice. As usual. I don’t come here asking for anything unethical, because what I’m asking for will help her out too.”
“In English, please,” said Lawrence. “Use your words, and you’ll get your answer.” He closed up the espresso machine and made a test cup while Romeo gathered his words. Lawrence sipped: perfection, pure black perfection, and he turned to face Romeo, who was looking up at the ceiling, which was covered in a mural by a group of local artists who specialized in that sort of thing, a mural dubbed the “Sixteen Chapel” after the fact that sixteen artists had contributed work. There was a skylight in the room and light was already streaming in, through the fog that glowed a heavenly white above Romeo, whose head was always in the cloud to begin with.
“I love...a girl who works at Thisbia. I love her, and she loves me too, and we’re perfect for each other...except we need to get out of San Francisco,” said Romeo, the weight of the words slowing them in his throat and on his tongue and past his lips. “I’ll tell you the rest later, all the details, from how we met to how we fell in love and came up with this idea, but right now, please: I just need you to help me out.”
“Holy fuck,” said Lawrence with a whistle. “You’re really over Roxanne, after your crush for months? Then I guess techies love with eyes, not brains, and certainly not hearts. Fucking A, how much did you come in here, whining about Roxanne? How many cups of coffee did you drink as you complained about the fact she’d never noticed you? The summer’s not even over, and I still remember every word you said about that girl. You have that same look in your eyes that you had about Roxanne. If you were ever in love, and the love was tours, you and your love were pledged to Roxanne. And now...you’ve just, stopped loving her? Then repeat after me: you can’t expect women to operate any differently, when men’s affections are lost as they power cycle.”
“You whined just as much about my crush on Roxanne,” said Romeo, confused. Wasn’t this what Lawrence wanted? For him to get over Roxanne? For him to find someone else? Didn’t Lawrence want him to be happy?
“I told you not to obsess like a fucking creeper, not for your feelings, intern,” said Lawrence, his tone warning Romeo not to push the issue...
...a warning Romeo’s tone ignored. “And you told me to get over it.” Romeo resisted slamming down on the counter: he’d only remembered acting violently once in recent memory, slamming one of the wood doors at the apartment shut, hard, and how he could hear it splinter before he even saw the damage. He had never resorted to using his brute strength after that, not even when kissing Juliet, even though all he wanted to do was hold her as close as he possibly could and claim him with his body, to make her his and only his by pressing into her as if they were two halves of a whole rejoining.
“I didn’t tell you to get another obsession! To replace her!” said Lawrence, resisting the urge to raise his voice. He had to remain patient: Romeo was book smart, and that’s why he was a Pyrymyn employee, but at the end of the day, Romeo was still just twenty-one, still just a boy, and still figuring out the world the same way someone from across the Bay, at a state university working at a fast food joint, was trying to figure their life out too. Shit wasn’t magically made easier just because Romeo had a position at a prestigious company, but Lawrence didn’t know that it had made Romeo’s life harder, yet.
“Look, Lawrence, don’t. The girl I love now...at least she loves me back. Roxanne never did,” said Romeo, sighing and pushing his black hair out of his eyes as he looked at Lawrence, looking for any sign of sympathy in his closest friend outside of the company, which was too small and insular, like the tech industry, to offer any chance of counsel. He had to have someone, anyone, who understood what he was going through, but Ben and Mark seemed more in love with each other than they ever had been with anyone else, and they hadn’
t been any help the night before.
They just didn’t get it: what he had with Juliet? It was special. It wasn’t a joke. It was real, and they still thought he was obsessed with someone who he hadn’t thought about after meeting Juliet, until others brought her up, and having Roxanne’s face in his head for even a second pissed him off, because that space in his head and in his heart was dedicated space, not shared, and meant for only one girl: Juliet, sweet Juliet, sweet, perfect Juliet who was smart and beautiful but most importantly, the only girl he’d ever felt a connection with.
“Oh, Roxanne probably knew that you were thought you were in love with her, but you didn’t know what love was. But, come on, Romeo, come on,” said Lawrence, motioning towards the table where his phone was charging in the back of the café. “I’ll help you blow this popsicle stand. Resigning might be what it takes for Pyrymyn and Thisbia to realize that this feud should really be a union.”
“Good,” said Romeo. “Let’s hurry.”
“Take your time, and don’t make stupid mistakes,” said Lawrence, looking to the door. A long line was forming outside the coffee shop door, and it wasn’t even fifteen minutes until opening time. Of course, there’d be people trying to cut in line later. Typical. “Those who try to upload too fast get booted from the server.” Lawrence had no idea how right he was.
Chapter Nine: Act Two, Scene Four
Ben and Mark were in the Pyrymyn employee lounge on an executive floor, nursing two things: plain black coffee and hangovers. “Where the Hell is Romeo?” said Mark. “He must’ve come back to the apartment.” The lounge had a hired pianist who was playing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”, some music major from some school Ben and Mark didn’t care about. Liberal arts were a joke, fine arts doubly so, and performing arts absolutely cringe worthy: who would go to school to become a servant? Not Ben and Mark, who had been smart and like their fathers, both earned their MBAs...even though they’d messed up and received a women’s studies and philosophy degree respectively first, but a letter from their daddies dearest had fixed that once they tired of trying to get professorships.