Skipping a Beat

Technically it was my day off that day. And in theory, I should have been home, maybe watching some awful reality television or looking after my mother because she has spent most of the morning and afternoon throwing up in the bathroom. Maybe I could have been out with friends if I was someone else, someone with an exciting life who did exciting things. That could have been me, if I wanted it to be, there were people I could call up, who would go somewhere exciting with me. Instead just as the sun started to kiss the tops of the skyscrapers I shoved my feet in my beat-up shoes and shuffled out of the apartment, leaving behind my heaving mother who would no doubt be unavailable to walk the streets tonight.

Sundays as a rule, were much less busy at Luna’s, the nightshift was slow and gentle compared to the usual slightly excited air in there. The people that came in were quiet and shy, taking to the back corners. The music was softer from most nights, because if played too loud it seemed to offend the air that surrounded itself around Sunday. Because it was slow on this day, Claire had given me the day off from both of my shifts, but she knew that I usually showed up anyway, sliding an apron over my clothing against her orders and ignoring her pleas for me to go out and get a life already.

That night was no different, because the lights were soft and the room was almost empty and the people that came in dragged their feet and took their time. There was never any rushing around on Sundays, no raised voices of tense atmosphere. Sunday was a fresh start, another week for them to conquer, and the air was hopeful and fresh. Sunday was the start of something new, full of possibilities boiling over the edges, spilling out so that the stupid hopeful part of you was full of the longing for another week. It was the chance to start everything fresh, fix old wrongs, discover new things, and conquer old fears. Maybe you would fall in love this week, maybe you would meet that person who took your breath away and ran away with it, maybe that job would open up just for you, or a father would come home finally after years of being away.

None of those things were likely to happen, of course. But you cannot stop the human mind from dreaming. You cannot stop your heart from beating wildly in your chest when you see that one guy on the Subway again, you cannot stop your imagination from running wild with possibilities about what could be in your life if only something would happen already. That’s another thing you come to realize about New York as you live here. As much as this city was built out of coffee, it was also built out of dreams and dreamers. People who came here searching for that one thing that would push them over the edge, make them stand out in a city of a million dreamers, set them apart from the crowd that they were so determined to break away from.

Claire was behind the counter, wiping clean the countertop of the many crumbs that accumulated there over the course of a day. She looked up when the bell above the door sounded, her face finding mine instantly as if she had been expecting it to be me and her face settled in that familiar mask of disapproval, but today her eyes were dancing and her eyebrows were quirked and there was something else mixed into that mask, I recognized it as curiosity.

“You were probably sitting here all day praying that I’d come in so you could grill me about Reese,” I told her before she even had a chance to open her mouth and my own lips settled into the tiny grin I couldn’t help wearing around Claire.

“I was not,” she huffed, crossing her arms deftly across her chest but a smirk slithered up onto her lips and she leaned over the counter like she was about to practically crawl over it.

“Well then good, I’m proud of you,” I said as I slipped past her, to the back where an apron was waiting for me. Just as I slipped it over my clothes and turned, there was Claire in the door blocking my pathway with wide bright eyes.

“So what happened?” she blurted, her eyebrows rising higher on her forehead and for a moment she looked like some sort of cartoon which made my grin spread even wider.

“I thought you weren’t going to ask,” I said pretending to look disapproving and casual flipping the coffee machine on.

“I never said that, I just said I wasn’t waiting around all day for it,” she said, her tone becoming slightly tinged with frustration.

“So then the last two hours?” I asked, my smirk raising even more, my teeth flashing for a moment even.

“You’re avoiding the question,” Claire pointed out, her eyes narrowing the slightest bit like she was trying to read my mind from across the room.

“I’m not avoiding the question, you’re the one who distracted me with your lies,” I said, now just doing it to be cruel and drag out the suspense even further so that I could rub it in her face later when it turned out there was really nothing to tell. At least, what I thought was nothing, for all I know in Claire’s mind he could have almost proposed to me last night.

“You know if you don’t tell me I’m just going to assume the worst,” Claire said, her own smile finally growing and she leaned against the doorframe as if trying to get comfortable.

“What would the worst be?” I said, challenging her, my attention distracted for a moment when the coffee machine beeped shrilly and I reached over to flick it off again.

“Did you guys have sex or something?” She asked, suddenly standing up straight, hands dropping to her sides, eyes going wide all over again as if it was the first time she had ever heard the term.

I was bewildered for a moment, trying to figure out who on earth she came to that conclusion before I realized it was hopeless to try and figure out another’s mind. That’s one of the greatest mysteries of human existence in my opinion, the way others think, the trails their minds follow to get to a certain destination. Like if you’re a type of person who immediately flips to the end of the book to see the ending, or if you put it off for as long as possible, wanting to savor in the beauty of the story.

“Yes Claire, we totally had sex. It was hot and dirty and he didn’t wear a condom,” I deadpanned, my face going void of emotion even though a blush was fighting to color my cheeks. I had never had sex before; Claire knew that and often teased me for it. It was strange now, two days in a row, talking about sex so flippantly, as if it was something I did every day, maybe even twice a day. It made me feel dirty and I hadn’t even done anything.

“Did you really though?” Claire asked, stepping closer, leaning against a cool metal countertop that we often used for baking and I knew when she stood up again her forearms would be coated in a fine layer of flour that somebody always forgot to clean off the damn table.

I blanched for a second, trying to figure out if she really thought Reese and I had sex. Did I look any different, did I walk like a woman who had sex?

“Fuck no we didn’t have sex. We didn’t even kiss Claire,” I said, putting on my best disgusted face, leaning away, scrunching up my nose, crossing my arms across my chest.

She let out a deep breath like relief and the excitement in her eyes fell, “Not even a kiss?”

“Nope,” I said, popping the ‘p’ and finally taking the opportunity to rush past her where she was still slightly disappointed and dazed for the counter, where there would be other people around so that she couldn’t ask me about Reese or sex for at least a few hours.

Claire shuffled out behind me a few moments later, thankfully quiet and she had a pot of coffee in her arms and slid it into the warmer we kept out so that we could make less pots and waste less coffee. “I can’t believe he didn’t even kiss you. I thought for sure you guys were gonna’ jump each other’s bones,” She whispered in my ear and my face shot to a tomato red as I batted her arm with my hand.

“Claire!” I hissed sharply, “That’s disgusting, I don’t even like the guy like that,” I said, which was at least half true as far as I was concerned and I pivoted back to the cash register as an elderly man made his way up and ordered his coffee and pastry. I offered the food to him with a smile, quickly adding up his change, wishing him a good night as I did to all the others. I tried in that moment to remember his face quickly, without looking at him, but all I got was the general outline, just another stranger passing by the counter who wanted refuge from the city on a Sunday night. I would probably never see the man again, is the thought that occurred to me at that moment. I wondered if when he was younger his employers would bug him about his sex life, if he ever wanted to jump someone’s bones. If he ever met someone who he wasn’t supposed to love because it was wrong, but they had a smile so great and a laugh so magical that he found himself getting lost in their vortex against their will. I wondered if his dad left him with a guitar, if he told him that he loved him but that he loved himself more. I wondered if anyone ever hurt him like that, and if it affected who he married. And if so, was he safe about it? Did he marry someone he was sure wouldn’t leave him, someone who loved him far more than he loved them? Did he ever get that rush of butterflies to his stomach when someone walked in the room, did he regret marrying the safe choice instead of the dangerous one? The one who had secrets and a past and strange friends and went to strange places and liked to hang out in the night, and who was probably a little lazy and more than a little infuriating sometimes. I wondered if he ever fell in love with someone more than he loved himself, if he would have left his daughter with a guitar and never looked back. I wondered if the city lulled him into thinking things that were not true, and if it tricked him out of the perfect life he had probably so carefully assembled.

“Laura!” Claire’s voice was loud compared to the hushed silence in Luna’s and some of the customer’s cast annoyed eyes up at the counter where Claire was leaning into my ear and I was staring off into space, where the man had been standing not so long ago.

“What?” I said back, lowering my voice to a whisper, trying to hide my embarrassment by busying myself with the mugs that never seemed to be all cleaned.

“I asked what you and Reese did last night, and you never answered me,” she said, annoyance lacing her tone but I could tell it was good-natured.

“Nothing really,” I shrugged, because for some reason it wouldn’t have been easy to explain Camelot and The Night Owl to her in that instant, with others around, when it was so quiet. And I most certainly couldn’t have explained Jamie or Kelly to her in that room. I myself had trouble still understanding it and I had been there for all of it. On top of that, the entire night almost felt like a secret that you don’t tell anyone except your diary. Telling Claire wouldn’t be the same as writing it in a diary, it would be weird to have someone else who knew about the night we had, whether anything or nothing had happened. Maybe Reese was just like that, everything you did with him felt so special that you had to keep it to yourself, locked up. As if someone else knowing it would ruin the magical quality that time with Reese held over everything.

“Nothing?” She repeated, her tone disbelieving.

“He took me out to this bar to eat,” I lied, but not really, because those two things did happen, just not at the same time, and it certainly wasn’t as normal as it sounded. “And then we went home, he didn’t even walk me home,” I said, and this, was the truth, even though maybe he would have offered to walk me home if I had given him the chance.

“That’s it?” Claire said, her tone faltering, as if this made her sad for some reason, I glanced over at her, but her face was steely and slightly angry, her hand scrubbing a cup furiously.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, shrugging, glancing towards the door where Reese was supposed to walk in any second. The city outside the door was all dark, the lights coming from the florescent neon signs that lit the streets and city, the soft glows of yellow from apartments too high up to reach with your hands. Reese, unlike me, had to work every night of the week, even Sundays. Some of it was because he was still new and thereby still someone Claire could push around, and secondly was because of the people who came every night to see him play here, not failing to show up for a single concert and it was magical that he could have this effect on people. I wondered, briefly, if I would bother showing up for all of his shows, if I was that devoted to the sounds his guitar made that I would be at every single one, maybe in the front row, listening to the simple cords he played.

I couldn’t wonder for long though, because in the next moment the bells chimed again and I plastered on the fake smile I used with customers and glanced up at the swinging entry way before I realized that it was not a customer, but Reese standing there, strolling in late, dragging his feet and looking beautiful. My smile fell off my face just as he glanced in my direction and another one took its place, this one was a gentle grin, a real one that settled on my lips so that the corners were turned up the slightest bit.

Then behind Reese was another girl, and this was not one I recognized from Camelot the other night, her dark chocolate hair was cut short around her face and her clothes clung to her slender body, she was short, but her shoes were killer heels and gave her a boost of height she desperately needed. Her face glanced over at mine for the smallest of seconds before flickering away, and in that moment her face looked familiar although it was impossible to place her.

Claire was suddenly at my side though the second she spotted the girl, who was walking just a few inches behind Reese’s elbow, her hands grazing against his leg every time she took a step. There was something prickling through me slightly as I saw this, but I brushed it away, it was only the smallest of sparks really, just at the small of my back, a kind of angry crackle that wanted to escape into my body before I stopped it with rational thinking.

Reese took the stage without stopping for a moment, considering he was already late as it was. He smiled out at the smaller crowd, pulling his guitar out of its casing, handling it softly and tenderly, he leaned into the microphone and introduced himself as he did every night and there was a sparse amount of cheers at his introduction before they quickly died down and he started up into his first song.

Just as he did the girl who came with him settled into a seat in the front of the shop and she glanced over her shoulder again, her eyes immediately finding me, looking unsure and more than a little pleased with herself, but not in a cruel way, in a disbelieving way.

“Who is that?” Claire hissed in my ear, leaning in close to me, her hand still wiping away at the same mug she had been holding for the past five minutes.

I shrugged and glanced away from the girl who had quickly turned back to look at Reese, “I have no idea,” I said truthfully, even though I was sure I had seen her somewhere before this.

“I bet she’s a whore,” Claire said quickly, bitingly, her tone harsher than even mine was.

“Chill Claire,” I said, lightly placing a hand on her shoulder, “I told you nothing happened with Reese and I. Why do I care if he’s here with a girl?” I said, looking her squarely in the eye as Reese’s song grew in volume slightly and people relaxed back into their chairs. I spared another glance over my shoulder at the girl he had brought, who was now slouching in her chair, her mouth agape and her eyes star-struck and I remembered when Kelly had quickly asked me if I had ever heard Reese play before, and her expression when I told her I had.

“You should care because you’re obviously in love with him,” she told me, scowling in the direction of the poor girl.

“If I don’t care, you shouldn’t care,” I said, my tone firm like I was talking to someone younger than me, and most certainly not my boss.

“Well I’m telling you that you should care,” she said, moving away, finally setting the cup down and moving onto the next one, still scouring it with an aggressive hand.

“I don’t,” I said, and I told myself that this was true. As far as I knew, Reese was out with a different girl every night, doing all those exciting things with her, asking her questions like he asked me. Maybe they would let him walk them home and have sex, maybe they put out more than I did, and maybe he was bored with me already. I thought of his face in The Night Owl, leaning towards me, his feet colliding with mine, ordering that stupid beer and not even getting carded.

And then I placed the girl, the waitress from that night at the restaurant. The perky one who flounced all over the place and didn’t second guess Reese’s request for the beers. I tried to imagine her flouncing out of the restaurant after I left, maybe Reese had forgotten something in there and maybe he hadn’t. But I imagined her approaching him with a hesitant smile and him blinding her with one of his own. She would probably giggle a lot, which I know would annoy Reese, but maybe she offered him a place to stay for the night, a warm bed, a warm girl, maybe he wanted to give in. Maybe he was upset that I hadn’t offered him anything like that, not even a kiss. Maybe he had a few more beers and wad tipsy and horny. I thought of them together, in her apartment, which was probably nice, and her parents weren’t home because they were gone for the weekend. And maybe he would kiss her first, in the elevator.

The anger, the same prickly one I had been feeling earlier flared up again, this time the intensity stronger and harder to contain, it threatened to spill over and haze my vision, to make it hard to think about anything other than Reese and that girl. It might make me think stupid things, like how I wish it was me instead of her, that I had been brave and asked him to take me home. It would make me do stupid things like glare daggers at the girl like Claire had been doing, or make me want to flirt with Reese right in front of her. I was not good with boys in general, much less a romantic sort of relationship, the kind where I wanted to drag him into my childish bedroom and not have him laugh. The kind where he might even think I was sexy and beautiful and he would brush my hair back and tell me so.

“I can’t believe he would have the nerve to do that to you,” Claire grumbled next to me, still rambling about Reese and the girl, but now channeling her anger at Reese instead.

“Give it a rest Claire, I said I didn’t care and you shouldn’t either. Just drop it,” I snapped at her, my voice low but my tone harsh enough to stop her angry words and cast eyes at me. I quickly snapped my head away from her, grabbing my own mug and scrubbing away at it in fast angry circles. There was no way I was going to admit to any anger about Reese in this girl, even though that same anger was now threatening to take over my body, bordering on the edge of my heart, making the organ beat faster in my chest.

Claire grumbled something in my direction and then swiftly disappeared in a huff to the kitchen, leaving me alone with my mug and the crowd and Reese and his girl. He was on his second song now, the notes slower and more distinct eliciting a collective sigh from the crowd almost as he started to play, his head bent in concentration, his arms steadying his precious instrument.

Eventually like all good things, the song ended, and he looked up at the crowd with a stunning smile, his eyes glinting in the spotlight and shifted the guitar slightly in his arms, “How are you beautiful people doing tonight?” He asked the crowd and a few people called out to him and he chuckled back.

He moved into the next song, a familiar one that was faster than some of the others and he hummed along with this one, his voice deep low and sultry. I noticed it was the same tone he used when he stood close to me, the voice that made me think of his bedroom again, and me in it instead of the Night Owl girl and I felt myself getting worked up and dropped the thought, trying my best to focus on finally getting all of the damn mugs cleaned before the evening crowd finished theirs and returned them to us and we would have a new batch of mugs to worry about. It seemed trivial, this work, the fact that I worried over cleaning mugs when other people my age worried about where to get drugs and who they were going to fuck and how they were going to pay for college. I worried about coffee and a stupid guitar boy with a stupid girl who had bedroom eyes and a killer smile and it all felt so trivial and stupid to me.
But maybe that was life, maybe life was just meant to be stupid. Maybe I was meant to worry about stupid things such as Reese Munn, who was most certainly not something I could be wasting my time thinking about. Even though I know I did, and probably would, for as long as I knew him. He was a person you couldn’t help but think about, no matter how pointless it was.

So even though I shouldn’t, I thought about him the rest of the set and cleaned all of two mugs before he set down his guitar ten minutes after close and people began their slow shuffle towards the door. It occurred to me that after he played, all the people in the room began to act like Reese, slow, lazy, and coy.

Reese clambered down off the stage, and in an instant the girl was beside him, right behind his elbow, a smile stretched across her face as her fingertips grazed his leg and my fingers clenched again on the mug in my hand without my permission and I exhaled sharply and forced them to relax and they did so much that the mug fell from my fingers, colliding on the floor and breaking sharply. Every person left in the room whipped their eyes in my direction to see me, standing there with a red face with her hands empty and broken ceramic at her feet. I cursed under my breath and quickly swooped down and began to pick up the shattered pieces of the mug, tossing them deftly into the garbage tucked away under the counter that was filled with coffee orders we got wrong.

“You okay?” Reese said, his head above the counter, leaning over at me and his eyes squinted shut in confusion.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said quickly, standing back up and brushing my hands off on my apron, “I’m just tired is all, kind of spacing out,” I said, which was half-true but still my face turned pink as if I was telling a lie.

“Need any help?” He asked, concern in his eyes along with fair amount of confusion.

“No it’s fine,” I said, shaking my head sharply and reaching for the broom a few feet away.

“Are you sure, you seemed a little off tonight,” he said and for a minute all I could think about was how happy I was that he actually noticed me tonight, way in the back, with his girl sitting right there in the front row.

“Like I said I’m tired,” I lied, because I felt more awake than I had in weeks, my entire body thrummed with leftover joy that I tried my best to squash into nonexistence.

“Okay,” he said slowly, his tone unsure and his eyebrows still furrowed together in his forehead. “Then would you mind doing me a huge favor?” He asked, leaning on the counter with his elbows.

I hesitated, glancing at him standing there, his eyes hopeful and glinting, the girl behind him at his elbow hadn’t spoken a word the entire time but she kept shooting me feverish glances, as if she was worried about something.

“Depends,” I said.

He smiled slightly at that and shook out his head so his hair fell back into his eyes, “I brought Paige here tonight and I thought it would be really rude if I made her wait outside for us to clean up, but if she was in here she would be in the way and I’m walking her home, so I was wondering if you would be the wonderful person I know you are and do my chores for me tonight so I can walk her home?” He asked, and my stomach fell to my feet and my heart crashed into a wall, “I’ll really owe you for this Laura.”

“It’s technically my day off,” I said, to him, blurted actually, before I could think of anything else to say and he sighed and leaned even closer to me and Paige’s eyes behind him narrowed the slightest bit.

“I know, I know,” He ran a hand through his dark locks, “Just please Laura, it would help so much.”

I looked at his eyes again, their color so bright and piercing against his tan skin that it made me want to look into them forever and I realized that maybe I was staring too long so I quickly looked away and glanced over his shoulder at the dark windows, “You know you’re the only one who can lift the damn chairs,” I said, my tone verging on bitter.

He was silent for a minute, mulling over what to say next and Paige tugged on his sleeve and he whipped around to look at her and she whispered something in his ear that I couldn’t catch and them silently slid a few feet away with a slow grin on her full lips and Reese turned around and this time he held much more urgency, “Please, please Laura, I mean you know what it’s like when someone wants to take you home, just do this one thing for me,” his tone was low and his eyes were bright and I thought I was going to just throw up right then and there if I hadn’t been at least a little flattered because he thought people frequently wanted to take me home.

I looked at him carefully and his face was so hopeful and Paige was so sly in the background that I nodded quickly once and turned my eyes into glares at him, “You totally owe me Reese, this isn’t cool of you.”

“I knew you’d understand,” He beamed and again I felt that same strange mix of devastation and flattery.

“I hope you know getting laid is a shitty excuse to skip out on work,” I hissed at him as he started to turn away and he glanced back at me with amusement in his eyes.

“Sweetie, if you were me you’d know that it’s not that shitty. Sex is the best thing that was ever invented,” He said with a smirk and started to move away and I felt so angry as he slipped a hand around her waist that I thought I was going to burst.

“No one invented sex Reese, don’t be a moron,” I called after him and then his laughter erupted into the shop and he flipped me off behind my back as he and Paige shuffled out of the store, leaving me by myself in the front room. It was silent for a few minutes, and then suddenly there was Claire breaking the deafening silence, poking her head out of the kitchen and casting her eyes down at the broken mug at my feet.

“What happened here?” she asked, the concern in her voice was half from being my boss and half from being my friend.

“It slipped,” I said, bending down again to pick up the remaining shards and sweep away the leftovers. Claire was there too though, and she was bending down next to me, an arm wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me close as if she was my mother.

“Where’s Reese?” She asked, looking around at the empty room.

“He asked me to cover for him so he could leave and go screw his new girl-toy,” I said, my tone biting and angry and I sounded pathetic, even to myself.

Claire was silent for a minute and then suddenly her arms were around me and she was holding me close and rocking back and forth slightly, “I’m sorry baby,” she said into my hair and I tried to push away but she wouldn’t let me.

“I’m fine Claire,” I lied, but thankfully my breath did not catch or sound teary like how I felt.
“You’re such a bad lair,” she said, and then pulled away to look at my face that was probably red from embarrassment, “But honey, let me tell you that boys are always going to be like this, even when you have kids with them,” she said, her tone getting slightly bitter and I thought about Luna’s father, who was still somewhere down south and wanted nothing to do with his daughter.

“He wasn’t even being a jerk on purpose,” I said, shrugging, trying to distance myself from the conversation and Reese.

“It still hurts just as much, doesn’t it?” Claire asked with the wisdom of a woman who has seen it almost all with men and she sympathetically clucked her tongue next to me as she plucked the leftover shards of mug from my hands and tossed them into the garbage.

I didn’t answer her though, because I moved away from the counter and out into the room, silently wiping down tables, grunting as I tried to lift the chairs up onto them and eventually giving up and leaving the chairs as they were. When I turned off the light and stalked out the door you could still see their shadows, he forgotten chairs, left alone in the moonlight as their lover walked silently away from them and into the night.