Cora hated morning shifts. It wasn’t that she didn’t like waking up early in the morning, she did that naturally anyways, but dealing with a bunch of crabby, zombified people who were barely human before the first drop of caffeine passed their lips was not something that she ever found enjoyable. She understood that most people weren’t like her, she popped out of her bed at 5:30 every single morning and was cheery as could be, but there was no reason to act horrible to every single person that crossed your path just because you made bad choices the night before. Morning shifts were, regrettably, unavoidable when you worked in a cafe, and while she did like the morning crew—and the freedom that she got being done with work that early—she often wondered if the customers she dealt with regularly were worth it.

As she walked into the cafe, Cora noted the girl standing at the register. From what she could tell, she was new, which both excited and terrified her. It wasn’t that she thought that the other girl wouldn’t be qualified, but morning shifts were almost always busy at the cafe, which meant that right now wasn’t exactly an optimal time for her to learn. Maybe that was why she nodded with a smile as her manager asked her to focus on making drinks and hop in only when the new hire needed her. Surprisingly enough, she didn’t really need a whole lot of help, just the occasional gentle nudge and reminder of where certain buttons were and how to ring up certain drinks. All in all, she was doing really well, but she was on the slower side, which meant that when the manager stepped towards Cora and asked her to take over on the register to cut down the line that was growing, she did so happily, and made sure to give each and every customer the sugary sweet smile that came as naturally to her as breathing.

And then, he stepped up to the front of the line.

Cora remembered him well. The dark brown hair, the apathetic look in his eye that he had masked so many times. If she thought about it, she could still feel his fingers pressed against her skin and the way that his lips molded to hers. The memory alone was enough to press her lips into a hard line, and a muscle in her jaw that most people didn’t even know she had twitched. He had broken up with her almost half a year ago now, and there was still a part of her that was raw over it. After all, they had dated for about a year, and she had fallen hopelessly for him. What a mistake that had been.

He started rattling off his drink order, and Cora didn’t move a muscle. Instead, she stared him down, rage evident in those green eyes that so rarely turned unkind. The curse left his lips, and she fired back immediately, her irritation sharpening sarcastic wit that she didn’t even know she had. “Sorry, we don’t serve that here, but if we did you’d be the first in line to get a taste.” Glancing behind him, seeing the few other customers within earshot, Cora’s ears reddened slightly. She knew that she shouldn’t mouth off to any customer, but Lennox? He was a special situation, and right about now she wasn’t thinking about “should” or “should not”. She was too busy seeing red.

“Lennox.” The sugary sweet smile reappeared on her lips, standing stark and mismatched against the hard look in her eyes. A million other bitchy comments sprung to her lips. Did he just forget that she worked here? He probably did, he had made it painfully clear to her just how little she meant to him the day that he shattered her heart. Squaring her shoulders, she looked down at the touch screen panel before her, trying to ignore the fact that her heart was pounding both with adrenaline and with the desire to throw that large black coffee with a double shot of what the fuck ever directly in his face. “What can I get for you?”

Cora was something of a romantic. No matter how much she tried to keep it under wraps, she was definitely the kind of girl who had cried at The Notebook, and who was looking for that great love in the world who would sweep her off her feet in the best of ways. She was also a dreamer, the kind who let her imagination run wild with the “could be” and the “someday”, but most of the people in her life knew that about her before she had ever told them. She had been both of those things when she was dating Lennox, and her imagination had certainly run wild while they were together, thinking about the things they could do, the places that they could go once she was done with school. She had thought that their relationship was going to last, that their love was one for the ages, that he would stay with her regardless of what they faced. So long as they were together, nothing else could tear them down. Maybe that had been what drove him away in the end, maybe her love for him had been too intense, too wild, and he hadn’t known how to handle it. Maybe it was on her.

Or maybe she had just been wrong about what kind of a person he was from the moment that she had met him.

“I never said it was, but since you obviously aren’t observant enough to know this, there was someone else at this register until about a minute ago. New hire. I’d say thank you for your patience, but obviously you don’t have much of it.” He continued, and her lips parted, the briefest expression of hurt flashing through her eyes. She was smart, she knew that she was… wasn’t she? Or was he right? No, no, Ms. Morgan had told her she was intelligent, and she wouldn’t just tell her that if it wasn’t true. Right? Her face flushed, both with embarrassment and anger. Why was she even giving him the time of day? Who cares what he thought about her intelligence?

Cora cared. Despite everything that had happened, there was still a sliver of her that felt something for him. They had dated for so long, she had shared so much of her life with him, how could anybody expect that to just disappear? Cora bit down on the inside of her cheek and looked down at the screen again, wanting to tell him to fuck off. How dare he come here of all places? She was on the clock, she was physically forced to stand there and deal with her ex-boyfriend, the boy that she had convinced herself that she loved, while he gave her a hard time. How was that fair? Her loathing for him deepened, but it still wasn’t enough to shatter whatever caring she still felt for him. God damn it. Not for the first time, she chewed herself out for still feeling a damn thing for him. She felt everything deeply, but this? This was just unfair.

He rattled off his coffee order, and Cora punched it in, fighting the urge to roll her eyes at the rest of his statement. “I really don’t. Our nights never lasted all that long.” She shot him a sweet smile. “That’ll be 4.82 please.” She reached out, pulling the twenty out of his grasp and popping open the register. She tried to keep her mind from wandering as she quickly made the exact change, hands moving quickly and without any of the shake that she felt like they were going to have. Seeing him again had rattled her, and she absolutely hated it, she hated whatever power he still had over her. She needed to move on, she knew that she needed to move on, but that was something that she would have to deal with later on. His thick Scottish accent filled her ears, and she tried not to hate herself for wanting to hear it again. Accents had always done something for her, just like hearing a guy speak a different language, and that was something that she knew he knew about her. “When you’re involved, I don’t.” She handed him back his change, shooting him that sweet smile, the hatred still in her eyes.

She turned from him, hating that stupid nickname that still made her feel weak in the knees, and the accent that still sent a shiver down her spine. Luckily, she had managed to quell both reactions enough that she was sure he didn’t see them, but even him being here, at her job had rattled her. With practiced hands, she made his coffee order, trying to ignore the feeling of his eyes on her. She hated this. She hated him. With the drink completed, she slid it across the counter. “Are you staying?” She hoped he wasn’t, she didn’t want to deal with him staring at her for the next two hours before she got off work and could retreat to the relative safety that Phalanx provided.

The problem with Lennox was that he had been everything that Cora had dreamed of when she thought of someone she would fall in love with. He was charming, he was charismatic, he was sweet and he treated her like she mattered to him. With all the time that they had spent together, times when he had gotten her to open up past the shell that she kept around herself to keep people from knowing too much about her, it was no surprise to her that she had fallen head over heels, hopelessly in love with him. The surprising part had come after, when he had broken up with her, leaving her shattered and drowning in her own tears. It was true what they said, that when you were wearing rose colored glasses, red flags just looked like flags, and she had experienced that firsthand. The only thing that she was thankful for now was that she knew what kind of person she was dealing with, and while that didn’t make it any easier to come face to face with him—at work of all places—it made it a little easier to distance herself from the feelings that she had felt for him.

“I can think of a number of reasons why you will never be picked for sainthood.” She arched her eyebrow. “Let’s just say the words ‘heroically virtuous’ don’t exactly spring to mind when I think of you.” Shit. She had just admitted that she still thought of him. She hated that he could do this, that he could say a few words and she would suddenly feel two inches tall. More than that, she hated that she had given him that power over her, the power to ruin her day and make her feel like she wanted to cry with nothing more than a few words. This was the reason that she didn’t open up to anybody. This was why she kept herself closed off, because she couldn’t handle the feeling of being raked over the coals the way that he currently was. “Mmm. More like the worst decision of my life.” Considering some of her decisions, that was saying a lot. Reaching down, she ripped the receipt out of the machine a little more harshly than she normally would have, and handed it to him with that same, syrupy sweet smile that was dripping with barely veiled hatred, no matter how much he seemed to not let it bother him. Of course, it was much more likely that he just… didn’t care.

Cora’s cheeks heated up as the change clinked against the glass tip jar, hoping desperately that neither her coworkers nor the customers in line behind him could hear what he was saying. She was equal parts furious and embarrassed that complete and total strangers would know about how vocal she was in bed. After all, it was none of their business, and as she was learning, it was not something that Lennox should have been the one to inspire in her. She had so many regrets in her life, so many things that she should have done that she either didn’t or couldn’t, for whatever reason, but the one that she held above everything else, at least at the moment, was that she had sacrificed her virginity for someone who was so reprehensible that even being in the same room as him right now was making her feel slightly nauseous. Or maybe that was the thundering beat of her heart as adrenaline pumped through her system. “Are you done?” Her real frustration slipped into her voice as she blinked, trying to keep the tears prickling at her eyes to show at all. She just wanted him to leave, and take his fucking coffee with him.

Or she could do something to make him leave.

His words had left a bad taste in her mouth, and she was sure that it showed through loud and clear. All she wanted was to go home and remove herself from this entire situation, but she was stuck here for the rest of her shift, unless her manager let her leave. Knowing Allison, she had no doubt in her mind that she would let her leave once the morning rush was done, she just had to make it to that point. Whether or not she would be able to was another matter.

“You know how I like it.” She did. In fact, this wasn’t the first time he had said something like this to her, but this time they didn’t make her feel sexy, confident, and wanted. This time, it was like the words were covering her skin in a film that left her feeling dirty and frustrated. The other girl, Lindsey, came back and took over, so Cora could return to focusing on making drinks, which ended up providing Lennox a nearly unobstructed view of her body. Despite her best efforts, she kept catching glances of him out of the corner of her eye, and no matter what she was doing, she could feel his eyes on her. However, she certainly didn’t bend over in front of him, preferring to bend at the knees and keep her back stick-straight, not wanting to give him a reason to think that she still felt anything other than contempt and massive annoyance for him.

However, after a few minutes, the usual crush of people emptied out, leaving the cafe with the last few stragglers from the morning rush, including Lennox. Which meant that she couldn’t ignore his existence. Glancing up, she saw him sitting there, and the irritation lit in her all over again. She clenched her jaw, her gaze sliding to his cup, and specifically, to the shadow that his cup created. She wanted him gone… and she could, theoretically, make him leave. Cora could feel the unease rising in her stomach, and instead of shoving it down, she latched onto it, that feeling surging through her like a dark wave, until she could feel herself latching onto that already existing shadow. With a surge of irritation, she felt for the shadow that she knew would be resting under the edge of his cup, and pushed up with it. She watched as, for a moment, the cup only raised slightly, defying gravity just for a moment as she pushed harder, before falling against the table, the lid popping off and hot coffee spilling on the table spreading towards him, faster than she was hoping he could move. A wave of emptiness washed over her, a desolate feeling that she couldn’t shake, and Cora knew that she made a mistake and had pushed it too far, but potentially getting Lennox to leave her alone, just for a few more hours, might have been worth it.