My Clocking In System

Chapter 20: Coffee With Jodie I

The café had a blue front and a steamed-up window. Busy with the after-work crowd. Two students hunched over laptops.

Two mums with a buggy parked between them.

An old boy doing the crossword with a pot of tea. The hiss and gurgle of the machine behind the counter. Someone’s order called out over it. And at a table for two in the window, in the middle of all of it, sat Jodie Carter.

Danny stood on the pavement a second longer than he needed to. The engine ticking as it cooled under him.

She had not seen him yet.

Chin on her hand. Two coffees on the table. The low afternoon light through the glass catching her, the dark blonde knot with its escaping strands, the freckles she never covered, the open collar of her shirt with a button too many undone.

Beautiful, he thought.

Not polished. Not styled like the women in his building. Hers.

She’d done her hair. He could tell. The knot wasn’t the work-knot she’d had at the till with a pencil through it.

This was a slower one, two strands left loose at the front on purpose, the kind of knot a woman did when she’d thought about it. The button too many undone was a choice too. He clocked both and felt his pulse go up a notch and tried not to read into it.

She dressed for this.

The shirt was loose. Loose enough that he could see the shape of her tits moving under the cotton when she shifted to set her cup down. The kind of beautiful that had sat in plain sight at the back of a maths class eleven years ago while a coward two rows over never said a word.

He went in.

The bell jingled over the door and the warm coffee-and-toast air closed over him. Under the coffee, as he got closer to the table, he caught the smell of her. Clean cotton and steam-iron and the soap she’d used since she was sixteen.

She turned. Her finger tapped the rim of her saucer once. The half-smile started at one corner of her mouth, the one that always came before something cutting.

"He shows." She didn’t get up. "Stop the press."

"Sorry, the..." he started, and gestured at the door behind him, the traffic, the whole excuse he’d been about to give, and realised halfway through that an excuse was the worst possible thing he could open with after eleven years. He stopped.

She let him stop. She let the stopping hang there for a half-second, watching him work it out, and then took pity.

"Sit down, Danny Flynn. You look like you’re about to leg it again."

"I’m not about to leg it."

"You sure? Because that was the face you had at seventeen, too."

She said it lightly, but it landed in him, the seventeen, and he felt something go tight at the back of his throat and tried not to show it. From the look on her face when he sat down across from her, he had not entirely succeeded.

She picked up her cup with both hands, elbows on the table, and pretended she hadn’t seen.

"Flat white. You used to drink it like it was keeping you alive. Assuming eleven years hasn’t changed your entire personality along with all this."

A wave of the hand at the coat, the boots, the whole of him.

The chair was small. The table was small. Her knee bumped his under it, and this time neither of them moved away.

Her eyes flicked to his for a half-second over the rim of her cup. A question. Then away.

He took the coffee in both hands and did not drink it because his throat had closed up. She gave him a second to get past it.

"It hasn’t," he said eventually. "The coffee thing. The rest of..."

"The rest of?"

"I don’t know yet."

"Fair."

"Thanks. For getting it. For..."

"For?"

"For being here."

"You don’t have to make a speech about it, Danny."

"No."

"Just be here."

He nodded. He picked up the cup and finally drank.

"Oh, you’re chasing me," she said into the small silence that followed, blowing across her cup, but her knee stayed pressed against his. "Make no mistake. This is you chasing. I’ve just allowed it." She tapped the saucer again. "Provisionally."

"Provisionally."

"Don’t get cocky."

She leaned forward to set her cup down and the shirt did its work and Danny lost his place for a half-second and then caught up. She knew. He could tell she knew. She did not call him on it.

"Delivery come?"

"Yeah, yesterday. All of it."

"And?"

"You were right about the navy."

"I’m always right about jumpers."

"You folded the grey one with too much care."

"That grey one cost you the price of a holiday and I wanted you to feel it." She tilted her head. "Did you wash everything?"

"Yeah."

"Cold?"

"Cold."

"Good boy."

The "good boy" came out before she’d decided to say it.

He saw her register it, mid-sip, the half-second flicker where she considered taking it back, and then she chose not to and her eyes met his over the cup with the half-smile starting at the corner.

He did not look away.

"I’d have been cross if you’d shrunk it," she said, recovering. "I’d have replaced it on staff discount. But I’d have been cross."

"Noted."

"You absolute mystery, Danny Flynn." She shook her head, going for safer ground.

"Look at you. Yesterday, you were in a binbag jacket and now you’re in your own coat like you’ve worn coats your whole life. I’m proud of myself."

"You should be."

"I am."

She drank, watching him over the rim. Then:

"I keep telling people about you."

"Do you?"

"Not the you part. Just the project. Steve at the till asks if you ever came back. I tell him to mind his own."

He laughed. The first real one of the afternoon.

She watched him do it with a satisfaction she did not bother to hide, and the laugh trailed into a silence neither of them broke for one whole beat, the kind of silence with weight on it, and she dropped her eyes first.

It was easy after that.

Underneath the easy there was a current. They both felt it and neither said it. The café filled and emptied around them.

The machine hissed and gurgled. None of it touched the small charged bubble of the table where her knee was against his and her eyes kept finding his mouth when she thought he wasn’t watching.

His kept finding the open collar of her shirt. The freckles on her collarbone. The way her tits shifted under the fabric when she leaned forward. The way her chest moved when she laughed.

The first time she leaned all the way in for a sip, the open shirt gave him an angle and he registered, with the small jolt of confirming something he had been almost-noticing for an hour, that she had nothing on under it.

No bra, he could see her boobs in whole nipples and everything.

She had no idea what she looked like from his side of the table.

Or maybe she did.

She circled the money carefully.

"That coat new?"

"You picked it."

"I picked the grey one."

"It’s a grey coat."

"It’s a different grey coat. That’s a Crombie or something near enough and you didn’t buy it from me. So."

He didn’t answer immediately. He held the cup. He was discovering that the lie he had been building all week did not survive contact with her eyes across a small table.

"I bought a few," he said finally.

"Few being how many."

"Few."

She let that sit. Watching him. The saucer-tap. Once.

"Danny."

"Yeah."

"You can pay for that coat, can you. And the rest."

"I can pay for it."

"And."

"And?"

"Don’t make me do all the work."

He laughed, short, no real humour in it, only the recognition. She was not going to ask the question for him. She was going to make him say the thing he was about to refuse to say, and then watch him refuse it, and file the refusing as data.

"What do you do now, then?"