A word of warning at the start, this story is all build up for the first half. I think the second half more than makes up for it (much more!) but if you've clicked on this one looking for a quick fix then I'd suggest looking for something shorter, maybe save this one for when you've got the time to enjoy. I'd like to think it's worth it.
"Two more flat whites to have here, table 5."
"Got it," replied Katie, mentally adding the new order to the three others that she was already preparing.
The mid-morning rush was something that she'd come to dread, a hectic hour of mums who'd dropped their kids off at their summer holiday clubs and seemingly had nothing better to do than drink coffee with their friends and, more often than not, complain.
Caught up in making her orders, she was only vaguely aware of raised voices at the till until Tom, the owner of the coffee shop, called out, "Katie... the cappuccino for table 3 needed to be oat milk, not almond milk."
Katie looked up in surprise. "Oat milk? You said almond."
Tom looked at her for a moment, then replied, "Just... do it. Ok? You've got to get these things right." She saw him roll his eyes with an apologetic smile to the woman at the counter, and her smile back at him in return.
Prick, she thought to herself, but only to herself. She was doing this as a summer job while at home after her second year at uni, whereas this was Tom's full time job all year round. Katie knew that she had to hold her tongue, she needed the money to go travelling for the last month of the holidays.
Tom rode all the staff pretty hard, which Katie understood to an extent. It was his business, and he prided himself on his independent coffee shop being better than the chain coffee shops dotted all around the high street. And as someone in his late twenties he was in the sweet spot for a coffee shop owner in their affluent, leafy commuter belt town, a great looking, super cool character for the mums to flirt with but with more gravitas than the students who typically worked for him.
His cool image was helped a great deal by his hobby, playing guitar and lead singer in a moderately successful band, and the look he cultivated with a variety of tattoos and piercings to go with his dark, short cut hair and blue eyes, the retro, vintage sports car that he drove, and the trips he went on in his time off which usually involved music festivals in exotic locations. Tom was not shy about publicising all of that and the local private school mums who formed his main clientele lapped it up.
But still, he could be a prick sometimes, like now when he'd definitely told her it was almond milk. Shaking her head, she saw her co-worker Mark walking over with a sympathetic smile on his face.
Mark was another student, aged twenty like Katie, working at Tom's coffee shop for a summer job. He'd been on the receiving end from Tom already a couple of times that morning, and as he lined up next to Katie to help get her on top of the orders he whispered, "I heard him say almond too..."
Katie just smiled at him, but in that moment really appreciated the solidarity. Mark was pretty much the opposite character to Tom, a good guy, friendly and approachable, and someone that Katie had known loosely when she had been at school, someone she'd never been in a class with but was a friend of friends. He was good looking too, but unlike Tom, he didn't know it. Mark almost came across as innocent.
"Thanks for the help," she whispered back, as the two of them worked to clear the backlog and survive the yummy mummy rush.
A few hours later, Katie finally got a chance to take her lunch break, heading outside to the park nearby to catch the summer sunshine.
She spent most of the time messaging her old friends from her school days, arranging various meet ups as most of them were also home from uni for the summer. It made her smile to think about how they'd all changed after two years of university, she had the friend who had got in with the stoner crew, the friend who'd turned into a huge clubber, the friend who'd discovered she was actually a wannabe elite sportswoman, and so on. All of them previously (relatively) strait laced private school girls. It was a cliché that everyone discovered themselves at uni, but that didn't mean it wasn't true.
What didn't change though was their friendship, and when they met up again in the holidays they all immediately reverted back to how they'd been several years before. It made coming home for the holidays really feel like coming home, not just returning to the place where you lived.
Katie wasn't even supposed to be around that summer, but circumstances had conspired against her. Right up until early June she'd been planning to visit South America with her boyfriend of six months, but their relationship had spectacularly combusted when he'd left her in the lurch at the end of a night out to party with his friends one too many times so instead she found herself back at home, saving to go away still later in the summer with a couple of her uni friends.
To be fair, there were worse things in the world than ending up at her parents' house for the summer. For one thing her parents were away on holiday at their place in France for the next month while her older brother and sister both worked and lived in London, so she had the house to herself.
And the house wasn't bad either, a large, detached property with a few acres of garden and a swimming pool, thanks to both of her parents being 'something in the City', now semi-retired. It was an epic place to hang out with her friends, and she'd had some great parties in the past which she figured either her parents hadn't known about or, if they did, were pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The one downside was location, being in one of the more upmarket roads on the edge of town meant it wasn't really walkable, so Katie needed to catch the bus that ran once an hour in each direction to get to and from work as the cost of driving and parking would have spent most of her money as she earned it. And, hand in hand with that, it could feel quite isolated at home on her own, the next door neighbours being a little distance away simply due to the size of the gardens and the privacy from the large hedges and trees surrounding each house.
But, all in all, the location was very much a first world problem, and when she socialised in the evenings there was always a friend offering to drive and drop her home so it all worked out fine.
A message pinged up on the group chat with her local friends suggesting they all meet in the pub at 8pm that night. Excellent, thought Katie, that's my evening sorted.
Getting back to the coffee shop, Katie took a few minutes in the small staff area to get herself ready, changing back into the uniform of navy blue t-shirt and impossibly trendy and unnecessary brown apron, and tying back her shoulder length dark blonde hair.
She paused for a moment, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror. Katie was an attractive woman, her face combining just the right mix of traits inherited from her Dutch dad and Spanish mum including dark brown eyes, with a dusting of freckles when she caught the sun as she had recently. She was taller than average, though not too tall, with a swimmer's physique, a little broader across the shoulders, slim elsewhere but with the right curves in all the right places.
While she knew that she was attractive, and had certainly never had any problem getting attention from men, she wasn't remotely arrogant with it, a consequence of her upbringing which taught her to always see the best in everyone and to instinctively be friendly to people. This meant that she was generally quite popular, with a lot of people that she knew beyond her immediate groups of close friends.
Tom though... he tried even her patience. She'd made a conscious effort when she started working for him to be friendly but it was like there was a wall that he put up around his inner self that she couldn't get through, the need for him to project his cool persona making it difficult to form any real bond.
The frustrating thing was that there was something about him, his charisma, which made her still want to try. Probably, she reflected, the same thing that kept all the local mums coming back again and again for coffee and, if rumour among the staff was anything to go by, not infrequently coming back for something else as well. Gossip was that he was responsible for at least three divorces, but Katie wasn't sure how much to believe that.
