“It wasn’t a date,” Stephanie told her friend Denise on the phone as she got out of her car and headed into the Morningstar Mocha to pick up a couple bags of their specially blended herbal tea. She was a coffee fiend, no doubt, except when she was working a case that meant she had to spend more of her time sleeping than any one person should’ve been able to.
Denise handled scheduling and travel arrangements for Crew members who needed, as Stephanie had, to relocate in order to pursue cases. Stephanie had known her for years, though this was the first time she’d ever been assigned close enough to hang out with her in person. It had made the Pennsylvania winter a little more bearable for California girl Stephanie.
“He told you his girlfriend left him, then he asked you to an intimate little venue for fondue. Fondue is not work-related material, Stephanie.” Denise’s voice dipped low for a second, crackling, before getting clear again. “Sorry, I’ve got someone on the line waiting for hotel reservations in Moscow. My Russian’s pretty rusty. If I break off with you, it’s to deal with that.”
“I can let you go. I don’t have any updates or anything. I mean, yeah, he’s cute. And now he’s single. But so what? I’m out of here as soon as I bust whoever’s doing this stuff, and I’m back to Los Angeles. And he’ll be here. So.” Stephanie shrugged, though Denise couldn’t see her. “I mean, anyway, he’s a normal.”
“Hey. I’m a normie!”
“You are so not normal,” Stephanie said with a laugh. Denise had no paranormal talents, true, but she’d been working with the Crew for long enough to have seen some seriously strange stuff. That left marks.
Denise rattled off a long string of something that sounded like Russian before saying, “I have to go. Fill me in later!”
“There’s nothing to—” Too late—Denise had disconnected.
Inside the shop, Stephanie ordered two bags of the tea, then leaned on the counter to wait. She pulled out her phone. No messages, not that she was expecting any. No new email, either. She casually thumbed open a Words with Buddies game, but it wasn’t her turn to play any of the rounds.
She people-watched instead.
She’d made the Morningstar Mocha one of her favorite stops, so she already knew a few of the regulars. Carlos was still tapping away on his novel over there by the windows. Tesla worked the counter, her spiky blond hair tipped with bright purple now. Her boyfriend, Charlie, had stopped in to bring her something in a brown paper bag that made her giggle, and watching them kiss, Stephanie had to turn away because that was a story that didn’t need her to make anything up about it.
There was another face, a kid of about sixteen, sitting in the back corner with a laptop open in front of him. The back of it was adorned with stickers from indie bands Stephanie had enjoyed a few times herself, mostly courtesy of her older brother, which made it a little strange to see them as decoration for someone at least ten years younger than she was. Still, it was going to be a few more minutes before her tea was ready, so Stephanie wandered over to take a closer look.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “Bangtastic Frogmen? Really? I didn’t think anyone else had ever heard of them.”
The kid, pale, eyes faintly circled by shadows, looked up at her through the fringe of black hair. A girl, not a boy as Stephanie had first assumed from the thin frame and baggy clothes. The girl gave Stephanie a blank look.
“Huh?”
“The...sticker.” Stephanie gestured. “Bangtastic Frogmen?”
The girl tipped the laptop’s lid to look at the assortment of stickers, then closed it firmly and put her hands on top of it. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, so raw in places that Stephanie winced. “It’s... Yeah. They’re great.”
Great was not how Stephanie would’ve described the group, which had prided itself on being actually awful. Out-of-tune instruments, mumbled and incoherent lyrics. They’d made one album, so far as she knew, and while it had been played to death for a few months in her circle of middle-school friends, it had quickly been replaced by something a little more boy band. She eyed the girl.
“Front of Desperation? You listen to them, too?”
The girl began to put the laptop away, keeping her gaze from Stephanie’s. “Look, I just have the stickers, okay. I’m not a fan or anything. I just liked the way they looked.”
There was a ceramic mug on the table, one of the refillable ones. You could spend all day in the Mocha on a $2.99 cup of coffee, if you were so inclined. This girl had that sort of look. Come to think of it, there was something familiar about her, as though Stephanie had seen her before. Yet when she tried to remember if the girl was a Mocha regular, she somehow looked less familiar.
“Okay, no big.” Stephanie tried on a smile the girl didn’t return.
Behind the girl, on the wall, a large clock spun its hands. Frowning, Stephanie glanced at the menu pinned to the bulletin board next to it. For a second, literally one, the letters jumbled and merged, making it impossible to read. Automatically, Stephanie tapped her wrist three times with her forefinger, a trick she’d learned long ago to determine if she was awake or dreaming.
Awake.
But... “Hey, wait a second,” she said to the girl, who was now slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder and trying to inch past her.
“Tea’s up!” came a voice from behind the counter, and Stephanie turned. That was her order.
When she turned back, the girl had slipped out the front door and disappeared. Stephanie looked again at the clock and the menu, but both were fine. She was standing in the Morningstar Mocha for real, not in the Ephemeros, and she was drawing curious looks. She shook herself, just a little, and turned to the guy behind the counter.
“Who was that?”
He looked past her toward the door’s jingling bell overhead. “Who?”
“That girl. The one who was sitting there, in the corner.”
The guy shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a girl?”
“She must’ve been sitting here for a while. She had a refillable mug.” Stephanie pointed toward the table where the girl had been sitting but then let her hand fall to her side. “She had a Bangtastic Frogmen sticker.”
That earned her a weird look, so she took the bag of tea and peeked inside. She didn’t really like the way it tasted, but it did wonders for putting her to sleep when her body fought it. “Thanks.”
“I love the Sleepytime. Puts me right out.” The guy grinned.
Stephanie returned the smile absently, still thinking about the kid in the corner. Out on the street, heading for her car, she tried again to look and see if she could find the mysterious teen, but nope. The girl had vanished.
* * *
He had no reason to call her. They’d already had a meeting. Work related. Lunch had been a nice gesture; it didn’t mean anything.
He wasn’t ready to date. For sure. Right?
Grumbling to himself, Kent forced his way through a lackluster microwaved dinner and some bad TV, ticking off the seconds until he could make it into bed and give up to unconsciousness. If he were a drinking man, he’d have taken a few shots to help him along, but he made do with counting sheep.
He found himself unable to stop thinking of Stephanie instead.
When his phone buzzed, he snatched it up off the nightstand, thumbing the screen before he really paid attention to who was calling him. “Oh,” he said. “Carol.”
“Just calling to check in on you.”
Kent frowned. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“I wanted to tell you that I’ll be sending someone to pick up the rest of my stuff that I left in the guest room. I’ll be at my mom’s for a while.” She paused. “How are you, really?”
He closed his eyes, thinking of the brightness of Stephanie’s laughter and how nice it had been to sit with her at lunch, enjoying the moment without any resentments hovering between them. No bad memories and all the possibilities of making good ones. How long had it been since he’d felt that way?
“Carol, I’m fine.”
“If you’re sure.” She didn’t sound convinced.
That, finally, pissed him off more than her sneaking away while he was at work had. “Look, I’m sure you think that I can’t survive without you, but the truth is, I think this is going to be good for both of us. Great, in fact.”
She didn’t have much to say to that. He took little satisfaction in her silence. It felt more like a standoff than anything else, and he was pretty damned tired of that feeling.
“Good night, Carol,” Kent said finally. “I’ll make sure to have your stuff by the front door for when the guy comes for it.”
“You know, you can call me...” she began but trailed off as though waiting for him to jump in with an answer.
This time, he didn’t say good-night.
This time, Kent said, “Goodbye.”