Out of Nowhere (6 page)

“Got that mocha?” Lucas called from the cash register.

I brought it over to him and got started on the next drink. Saturday nights at Jitters were the craziest but also the most fun. The city was alive with noise and people. I liked to watch them as they gathered around our small, round tables. College kids meeting for snacks before hitting the clubs. Couples on dates, holding hands. Writers tapping away on their laptops, bottomless cup of coffee within easy reach. Once in a while kids we knew from school would come in and try to score free goodies. Like Sydney, for example, who liked to stop in for an extra-large coffee with milk and two sugars and then claim she forgot her wallet. Then the guy she was with at that particular moment—and there was always a guy—would offer to pay for the coffee and sometimes a six-pack of cookies too, for the road.

It was extra chilly outside tonight, which meant a good percentage of the people walking by found themselves drawn in by the promise of warmth and pastries. Business was steady all evening until we hit a lull around nine o’clock when it started to rain. Lucas and I leaped at the opportunity to suffuse our own blood streams with caffeine and sugar.

We were leaning on the counter, sharing a double chocolate chunk cookie and discussing the poem we had to read for English class, when the squeak of the door hinges alerted us to new customers. Having been trained by Rudy to unobtrusively wait for people to get their bearings before acknowledging them in any way, Lucas and I barely even looked up. When I finally did look up a minute later, something made me do a double-take.

Cole Boyer, the skateboard victim from the ER waiting room, was standing right in front of me. At least I
thought
it was him. His face looked different now that it was clean and not distorted with pain. His hair was different too, thick and silky-looking and neatly tied back at the base of his neck. A vast improvement over the sweaty, tangled mess I remembered. He cleaned up nice. I probably wouldn’t have even recognized him had it not been for his arm, which was encased in a white sling. Sprained, I guessed. Just like he’d predicted.

He was talking to the guy next to him and hadn’t noticed me yet. Impulsively, I said, “Hi, Cole,” and then watched his face as he struggled to place me. Two weeks had passed since our little bonding moment in the waiting room and I thought for sure he’d forgotten all about me. But then his confusion melted away and he smiled.

“It’s the granola bar girl,” he said, looking surprised but not altogether displeased to see me again. It hit me then that we never did exchange names. I only knew his because the nurse had called it out. “Never thought I’d run into you again.”

“How’s the arm?” I asked, feeling Lucas’s curious eyes on me.

“Almost better.” He pushed aside the sling to show me the mostly-healed skin underneath. “Just a sprain and a few scrapes. How’s the rash?”

“Gone.” I glanced at his friend, who was looking me over thoughtfully. “Um, what can I get for you guys?”

“My buddy Dean here wants one of those girly smoothie things.”

“Mango,” Dean said, not the least bit ashamed of his beverage preferences. He was tall and skinny with spiky hair and a nose ring. I wasn’t about to make fun of him for liking smoothies.

I glanced over my shoulder at Lucas to make sure he heard, which of course he did because he’d been eavesdropping the entire time. “And for you?” I asked Cole.

“Medium bold roast coffee,” he said. “Black.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding. “A very manly drink.”

Dean threw his head back and laughed. “She’s got you all figured out, dude,” he said, slapping Cole on the shoulder. “Who is this girl and why don’t I remember her?”

“Because you’ve never met her,” Cole told him. “We were sitting across from each other at the ER a couple of weeks ago when I was there for my arm. She shared her granola bars with me because I started feeling…” He paused to look back at me. “What was it you called it?”

“Hypoglycemic,” I said, ringing up their order. “And it was a good thing I was there or you would’ve passed out.”

He grinned at me again. “Yeah, good thing.”

I could almost sense Lucas having a conniption fit behind me. “Five ninety-eight,” I said, and Cole dug a ten out of his pocket and passed it to me. When I gave him back his change, he shoved most of it into the tip jar next to the register. “For the granola bars,” he told me. I smiled back at him, hoping I didn’t have chocolate chips caught in my teeth.

Lucas came over with the drinks, trying to appear indifferent but failing miserably. “This is my friend Lucas,” I said before he strained something.

“Hi,” Cole said, nodding at him. “This is Dean, like I already mentioned. And Dean, this is…” His eyes flicked over my chest in an attempt to locate a nametag, but we didn’t wear those here. At least I assumed that was what he was doing. There wasn’t anything else worth seeing in that area.

“I’m Riley.”

“Riley,” he repeated, trying it out. “And obviously you already know my name.”

“I heard it in the ER, when they called you.”

He picked up his coffee. “Right.”

“So…have a good night,” I said when it appeared that he was about to turn away, done with this little reunion. “Try not to fall off any skateboards,” I added, emboldened by large quantities of chocolate.

Dean laughed again, and Cole just shook his head. “No chance of that. I can’t skate with one working arm. It would throw off my whole sense of balance.”

I wanted to remind him it was his sense of balance with
two
working arms that had landed him in the ER two weeks ago, but I figured I’d already met my snark quota for the week.

“Don’t worry,” Dean said, slurping his smoothie. “We’re in town for a concert, not the skatepark. I’ll try to keep him out of the mosh pit so he doesn’t bust his other arm.”

“Like you could,” Cole said, and then he caught my eye as he moved toward the door. “See you around.”

Probably at the ER
, I thought to myself. But out loud I said, “Sure. See you.”

They left, and the coffee house grew quiet again. I could hear Rudy in the back room, humming a Beatles tune as he did paperwork or whatever else he liked to do back there. Then Lucas, who hadn’t said a word in the past five minutes, burst like an overinflated balloon.

“Who was
that
?” he demanded, hot on my heels as I wiped down the tables.

“Cole,” I said, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn coffee stain. “I met him at the ER. You heard him.”

“Yeah, I heard him
flirting
with you.”

“He was not.”

“The hell he wasn’t. And you were flirting back.”

I spun around to face at him and almost impaled myself on the broom he was holding. “Bite me, Lucas. I know flirting when I see it. Adam was an expert at it, remember?”

He leaned on the broom handle and shook his head sadly at me. “Has it been that long, Riley?”

I calmly pushed the broom out from under him. He teetered for a few seconds before correcting himself. “I’m kidding!” he said to my back as I walked away. A few minutes later he joined me behind the counter again.

“What now?” I said, still irked at him.

“I’m sorry.” He snatched a stray quarter off the counter and gave it to me as a peace offering. “I’ll shut up now.”

I tossed the quarter in the tip jar. “Thanks.”

“He is pretty hot, though.”

“Adam?”

“No,” he said. “Cole.”

I wrinkled my nose. “You think? With the hair and the stubble and all that?” I was surprised; Lucas and I usually shared the same taste in guys. We both gravitated toward the impeccably-groomed, clean-cut preppy types. “You really find that attractive?”

“Sometimes,” Lucas said, peering at me sideways. “You don’t?”

“No, and I’m shocked that you do.”

He snorted. “Right, because that sexy-bad-boy thing is
such
a turn off.”

I just shook my head. Okay, so he did have a nice smile. And he’d smelled good this time, like soap and fresh rain. But that didn’t mean I thought he was cute.

“Do you think he’s a pothead?” Lucas whispered, his eyes wide. “Maybe he was here because he buys from Rudy.”

Now I laughed. Lucas was convinced that our boss was secretly running a grow-op out of his basement and using the coffee shop to launder the money he made. The boy watched too many cop movies.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “You need to start limiting your espresso consumption.”

He swung an arm around my shoulders. “And you, Granola Bar Girl, need to tap into your rebellious side and hook up with that bad boy.”

“I don’t have a rebellious side, and that bad boy is so not my type.”

“How do you know? You’ve only dated one ‘type’ and look how that turned out.”

But there was no backing down when it came to this. I knew I was right. If Mr. Perfect Adam Nash could break my heart, imagine the damage someone like Cole Boyer could do.

* * *

Three days later he was at Jitters again, and this time I didn’t have Lucas there to protect me.

I was rinsing out milk cartons at the sink when he walked in, alone. He lifted his hand in a wave when he saw me and I noticed that his sling was gone. I was so busy noticing this, in fact, I somehow managed to soak the front of my apron.

“Hi,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Riley.”

“Hi, Cole.” Embarrassed, I grabbed a dry towel and started dabbing at my front. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going.” He drummed his fingers on the counter. “Can I get a coffee?”

“Sure.” I went to get it since Claudia, the girl I was on shift with this evening, was in the middle of replenishing the cream and sugar station. “Medium bold roast, black?”

“Good memory.”

I deposited his coffee on the counter. “My treat,” I said. “A gift for being sling-free.”

He looked down at his arm, gently rotating it. “Sling-free but not healed. I still have to exercise it and take it easy. No strenuous activity for three more weeks, at least, which pretty much rules out anything fun.”

“You’ll have to take up chess or something.”

He backed away from me, as if horrified. “Where’s the rush in
chess
?”

“I don’t know, those chess tournaments have been known to get rowdy.”

He laughed and picked up his coffee. “Thanks,” he said, raising the cup a little so I’d know what he meant. “Coffee’s really good here. You’ve converted me.”

“You’ve never been here before? I mean, before Saturday?” I’d certainly never seen him here before then.

“Nope,” he said, smiling. “But now that I’ve tasted the coffee, I plan to become a regular.”

I didn’t think he meant that in the literal sense, so I was surprised when he actually did become a regular. He showed up again on Thursday evening and asked for his usual, a medium black coffee. And this time, instead of leaving right away, he sat down at a table by the window and texted on his phone for twenty minutes. When Lucas saw him there, he mentioned to me that Cole had been in last night too, when I wasn’t here.

“He’s not coming for the coffee, honey,” he stage-whispered.

I made a face at him. “He didn’t ask about me or what nights I work, did he?”

“No,” he replied. “So we can assume he’s not some freaky obsessed stalker.”

I already figured that. I’d glanced in Cole’s direction numerous times since he’d been sitting there, and not once did he look up or try to talk to me. He didn’t seem to notice anyone else either, not even the cluster of teenage girls at the next table over who were clearly checking him out. The fact that he’d dropped by last night while I was nowhere near the premises told me he really did come for the coffee. It
was
the best java in town, after all.

By the time Saturday rolled around, I was no longer surprised to see him come in. Before he was even halfway through the door, I had his coffee poured and sitting by the register.

“You provide some of the best customer service I’ve ever experienced,” he said, handing me two dollars and dropping another two in the tip jar.

“I try,” I said with my best employee-of-the-month grin.

“It’s so outstanding, in fact, that I think you’ve earned one of those brownies over there. The big one, on the end.”

I shut the register drawer. “Yeah? Well, they are good, those brownies.”

“Are they?” He leaned a little closer to me. “Maybe during your break I’ll buy you one and you can let me try it.”

Okay, now
this
was flirting. I’d have to be dense not to see that. “My next break is in fifteen minutes,” I said.

Those minutes went by fast. Lucas kept trying to talk to me—more like interrogate me—but every time he got a free moment I made sure I was too busy for conversation. Lucas was one of my closest friends, but sometimes I wished he wasn’t so invested in my personal life. I didn’t want him making a big deal out of something that was really nothing at all. A little flirting and a brownie did not merit a private gab session by the blenders.

At noon, I took off my apron and went to the washroom while Cole bought me the brownie. Then we reconvened at the only vacant table in the room, which I hadn’t even had a chance to wipe down.

“You could feed a small country with this thing,” Cole said as he set the jumbo brownie on the table.

“I know. They’re baked here,” I said proudly. “Everything is. Someone comes in at five a.m. every morning just to bake. Oh! We forgot forks.” I jumped up and ducked around the counter to grab one for each of us.

“I’ve never eaten a brownie with a fork before,” Cole said when I was seated across from him again.

“They’re too big to pick up and bite into.” I stabbed my fork into the brownie and pulled off a huge chunk. “So what brings you into Weldon today? And don’t say the skatepark.”

He flashed a smile. “I wish. My uncle owns an auto repair shop over on Maple Drive and sometimes he lets me come over and help out. I think he felt sorry for me today because I’ve been bored out of my mind.”

“What do you usually do on Saturdays? Besides almost killing yourself on skateboards, I mean.”