hands off of each other for longer than the attention span of a fruit fly. I was pretty convinced that they’d had sex on almost every surface in the apartment, which grossed me out so much that I tried not to think about it for too long. I also tried to touch as little as possible in the communal areas of the apartment. I spent most of the time in my room, which wouldn’t have been too bad if it weren’t for the fact that there were never any moments of quiet. Kate and Nick were loud at all hours of the day and night, playing video games, blasting music to dance with, or making moaning sounds that were way too loud not to have been faked.
My new barista job was not going any better. That was another adjustment that I was trying and failing to make. My trainer at the coffee shop had gotten fed up with me by the second day and handed me over to Kate, who graciously offered to take on my training, even though she wasn’t getting paid for the overtime. I was embarrassed about not being able to remember even the simplest of things on the job because my mind was elsewhere ninety percent of the time. And I was also angry.
I was angry at Tim for not having come to chase me down and beg for forgiveness when he got back in town—something I knew wouldn’t happen, but I fantasized about regardless—and I was angry at myself. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have broken up with him over text. What kind of self-respecting adult does shit like that? Okay, so he wasn’t forthcoming about talking to me, and he shouldn’t have brushed me off after the incident with the photo. Tim should have made time to talk to me about it before he left on his trip to Spokane. But was it all really that devastating to warrant a breakup? Maybe I had been too quick to rush to judgment, and maybe there really wasn’t anything that he had done wrong, aside from being a typical guy and trying to avoid a confrontation with his girlfriend, which he thought might just resolve on its own.
The more I thought about it, the more I leaned into a downward spiral of guilt, and the more that I second-guessed myself about having broken off our relationship. I quite possibly had just ruined the best thing in my life.
“Is this going to take much longer?” an impatient customer with a very angular nose said as she stared over the top of the espresso bar at me.
I realized that I had been in the process of making her latte when I had zoned out and started thinking about Tim again.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m almost finished with it.”
I grabbed a cup and poured the milk inside, then stuck it underneath the frothing wand and looked around me as if I had just awoken from a dream. Much to my dismay, there was a huge line of backed-up drink tickets that I had neglected to keep up with. The crowd of people who were standing there and waiting for their coffee was starting to create a stir of aggravation and impatience.
“Hey,” Kate said over the little headsets that we were required to wear to talk with each other on. “Are you doing okay over there?”
Kate was standing at the drive-through window, and she had her own customers and her own drinks to make. I didn’t want to admit to her that I was indeed not doing okay over here. Fortunately, I didn’t need to say anything because as soon as Kate got a break from the window, she walked over to check on me and found me buried under a line of drink orders that I was hopelessly behind on.
“Oh wow…” she quietly said as she assessed the damage.
The customers were becoming so irritated that they looked as if they were about to riot right here in the café. Most of the people were downtown Seattle business folks who had tight schedules and only enough time to grab a quick coffee from a competent barista, who was not me.
“I’m going to get fired,” I said flatly to her. There wasn’t any point in my getting upset about it. It was what it was.
“No, you’re not,” she smiled.
I could tell she was just trying to reassure me because even she looked a bit panicked behind her sweet smile.
“Go stand