Chapter Text
Agatha’s⋅ Jimmy W. ⋅ ★★ / 5
Decided to try this out before work. It always looked really sketchy, probably not up to code. Never understood how it got built in such a nice neighborhood, but then, I’ve seen the Westview public transit system so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Interior was very dusty and smelled like incense. Power’s spotty. I don’t think they’ve changed the decorations since Halloween because there were skulls everywhere? Someone paid more attention to the design of those skulls than the entire rest of the shop—they looked freaky real.
There were maybe three people working there, including the boss (Agatha, presumably), who kept yelling at everyone. I’m a respectful guy so I wasn’t going to say anything, but this lady was LOUD. And concerning? One barista pulled a dagger out of the register and she just like, started flirting with her? It feels like it crosses so many professional boundaries but they looked pretty into it. So I don’t know.
I’m also gonna guess that the boss has a son because the alternative is that this place is breaking several child labor laws.
The service was pretty fast but since the boss just shoved the coffee cup in my hand when I made a noise, I get the sense that they kind of just give you whatever. Don’t go here if you’ve got allergies. Or care in any way what kind of drink you get, I guess.
2/5 because (somehow?!) the coffee tasted great.
Alice stepped into the slightly nauseating mix of incense and pumpkin spice latte and felt a weight lift off her shoulders.
She’d spent half the day dodging groupies and reporters, and the other half on a call with the executor. It shouldn’t have been that hard to explain that she didn’t want any of Lorna’s stuff—if Alice could have done it, she’d have given the lot of it to the fans and gotten both of those problems off her back—but here she was: overwhelmed, undercaffeinated, and trying desperately to figure out where to put a piano in her crappy one-bedroom apartment. Who scheduled movers before the person had even agreed to take the damn thing?
Alice probably needed Advil more than coffee at this point—and sleep more than Advil. But Agatha’s had always made her feel better.
It was chaotic. It was falling apart. It didn’t care whose daughter Alice was, or whether her mother had somehow escaped the hotel fire, gotten plastic surgery, and set up shop in the Bahamas. And the coffee was good, even at 8:00 at night.
“I’m gonna kill her,” someone said as Alice approached the cash register.
Please do, a small part of Alice’s brain groaned. Then she clocked the person standing there: not Lilia (like usual) or Agatha (on bad days) or Rio (on worse days). Not even Teen, who Agatha had forbidden from revealing his real name (“for tax purposes,” she claimed), but who always seemed extraordinarily bright and happy for a place like Agatha’s.
“Sorry?” Alice said, a little dumbly.
This woman didn’t seem like she belonged at Agatha’s, either; she was tall and slim and put-together. Her dark skin glowed as though she stood under modelling lights, not the one bulb from the 1900s that went out constantly. She wore a light pink dress which Alice felt a sudden, inexplicable urge to protect from the coffee grounds that flew everywhere whenever Rio was in charge of the grinder.
She was, unfortunately, very, very beautiful—and frowning at Alice. Which figured.
“Welcome to Agatha’s,” the woman sighed, looking as though it physically pained her. “How can I help you today?”
Alice stared. In all fairness, it was less because of how pretty the woman was— very pretty, her brain reminded her when the woman tapped the counter impatiently—and more that Alice couldn’t remember the last time someone at Agatha’s had attempted proper customer service. “Um,” she said.
“We have specials today,” said the woman. “Blueberry-lemon custard latte, pumpkin mocha, caramel apple twist with light foam...”
I didn’t know you guys had specials, Alice thought. Or a menu. Or remembered it, if you did. But she’d already thoroughly embarrassed herself at this point, so she bit that back and said, “I don’t know. Uh, what would you recommend?”
The woman blinked as though the question surprised her, and Alice breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Even this woman had a limit to her terrifying composure. “Me?” she said.
“Yeah—you’re the expert, right?”
The woman looked at her, then back at the haphazard, gravity-defying stack of foam dispensers and coffee grinders, and smiled. “And what about me screams ‘expert on mediocre, hole-in-the-wall coffee’?”
Alice groaned internally. But the part of her that sat like hot coals on her shoulders—the part that had lost her several jobs and girlfriends already, the part that had people spitting bad luck, Gulliver in her face, the part that hadn’t made it in time—knew there was no other way this could have gone. Better this way, probably. Alice could nip the crush in the bud before it had the chance to do something awful to her heart. “Wow, okay. Sorry if I offended you.”
The woman leaned over the counter, her smile growing thinner and sharper. She looked like she wanted to eat Alice, but not in a good way. “No, I really want to know.”
Alice shifted on her feet. “You seemed...smart, that’s all. You seemed like you’d definitely know more than me about this.” Feeling a sudden, absurd urge to defend the coffee shop that had hidden her for years in its rickety embrace, Alice added, “And the coffee here is great.”
The woman’s menacing grin faltered, and she stopped leaning over the counter. The bulb flickered above her head and illuminated an expression Alice couldn’t read, as though the woman herself had not yet decided what to feel. “Huh,” she said.
Alice waited, unsure.
The woman opened her mouth, about to say something —but then Agatha swept past, hitting her in the back with the hem of her coat. “Well, this seems fun. But stop flirting with the sullen one and get on with it, Jen. I don’t pay you to strike out with the customers.”
The woman—Jen’s—face immediately twisted with such murderous annoyance that Alice had to stifle a laugh. She pushed herself off the counter and spun to shout after Agatha: “I was not striking out! Just because Rio won’t make out with you in the storage closet—”
But Agatha had already disappeared. In a literal puff of smoke, as one of the heaters in her wake began to malfunction.
Jen growled after Agatha, stomping her foot. This time, Alice couldn’t contain the laugh and had to quickly disguise it as a cough. From the glare Jen shot her, she didn’t buy it.
“Uh—” Alice said, gesturing to the smoking heater, “should you...fix that?”
“Agatha doesn’t pay me to fix the machinery,” Jen said primly.
Alice snorted. “Yeah, I’m surprised she pays you at all. Kinda seemed like the flaky type.”
“Oh, she is. But she knows if she shorts me, I’ll cut out her throat.”
Alice nodded sagely; that seemed like a drastic but understandable reaction to have toward Agatha Harkness. Alice hadn’t been to a coffee shop in years before Agatha’s, and she remembered walking in for the first time, expecting to be mobbed by fans or paparazzi. Instead, she’d almost gotten impaled by one of Rio’s daggers. Rio, of course, had been aiming for Agatha, who had casually stepped to the side and let the lethal, flying projectile sail toward her customers.
It had been the most relaxed Alice had felt in ages. But then, Alice had always been a little broken.
“So...coffee?” Alice said awkwardly, and Jen’s mouth turned up in wry amusement.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. Consider it my apology for...whatever that was.”
“Hey, I’ve seen worse.” Alice held up her hands, her own mouth forming a helpless grin.
Jen, already wiping her hands off and turning toward the back, paused. She looked over her shoulder at Alice, and a gleam of... something sparked in her eyes. It was the same gleam her mother had gotten when “inspiration” hit. It was the same gleam Agatha had when she was about to say something extremely stupid. It was a gleam that, on every conceivable level, should not have been as attractive on Jen as it was.
“Hey...” Jen said carefully, “so I wouldn’t have struck out, right?”
Alice gulped. The answer came unbidden, as though Jen had drawn it out of the bottom of her stomach with a string: “No.” And then: “But that’s not what you wanted to ask.”
Jen’s amused grin curled up even further, into cat-like satisfaction. “Your place. I get off in an hour.”
Alice tried not to think about how long it had been since she’d done this: met a girl after her shift, gone home with her, had nice no-strings-attached sex. It had probably been during her late teens, stuck bouncing between anonymous hotel rooms and desperately wanting to rebel against her mother. It hadn’t really worked. When she’d moved to Westview after the fire, she had made a point not to bring anyone back to her apartment at all; it always got weird.
And anyway, these days, she wasn’t exactly a catch. She went to work, trudged home, and fell asleep the instant her head hit the pillow.
Not that Alice was going to tell Jen that, obviously. Jen had come out exactly when she said—to Agatha’s clear and audible frustration—and smiled meaningfully at her; Alice had felt her traitorous heart flip in her chest. She’d always been a goner for the dangerous types.
“You showed,” Jen said, with a coy toss of her head.
“So did you,” Alice shrugged. She also was not going to tell Jen that she’d just stuck around for the whole hour and killed the time by trying to talk herself out of an anxiety spiral. It might have been a long time since her last hookup, but even she wasn’t that inconsiderate.
They flirted all the way to Alice’s apartment. Or, at least, Jen flirted and Alice tried not to combust. She felt a little like the world’s most bumbling fool, but Jen seemed not to mind, grinned wickedly whenever her sly touches made Alice’s steps stutter.
“You need to let me get to the apartment,” Alice mumbled at one point, her face red-hot.
Jen arched an eyebrow. “And you’re going to have to keep up.”
Alice tripped over her own feet, and Jen guffawed.
They did make it to the apartment eventually, without Alice taking a swan dive into the sidewalk. Alice considered that a win in and of itself; a cord had wound itself tight and hot inside her, trembling like an overtuned string whenever she looked over at Jen’s tipped smile, her slender fingers, the sheen of her eyes in the moonlight. When they got to the door, Alice’s hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t fit the key into the lock.
“Oh my god, give that to me,” Jen said, the coyness pulling back into real annoyance for a moment. She wrested the keys from Alice’s hands and opened the door.
Alice carefully did not think about her body’s response to that.
“I don’t usually, um, bring people back here,” she said instead—only for the words to die on her tongue as she recognized the tarp-covered...thing in the center of her living room.
In the dim light, it looked like a monster under a shroud. Or maybe, the resentful part of Alice’s mind bit out, that’s what it always has been.
Jen turned to her, deeply unamused. “Okay, I came with you on the assumption that you weren’t an axe murderer.”
“It’s a piano,” Alice sighed. “I told them I needed some time to figure out where to put it, but...”
Jen glanced from the piano to Alice and back again, clearly debating whether or not to believe Alice, then whether or not the sex would be worth the awkwardness. Her gaze fell, too, on the beer bottle Alice had left on the coffee table, the beat-up sofa she’d dragged in from the curb and fixed up, her even more beat-up security guard uniform.
Jen’s lips pursed. “Are you a cop? Because I’m definitely not doing this with a cop.”
“Uh, no,” said Alice. “Hot Topic security guard.”
“Oh.” A pause stretched between them, stolid, as though Jen had unexpectedly found herself in the middle of small talk and didn’t know what to make of it. “Are you into music, like, as a hobby...?”
“No,” Alice said. The words lodged themselves in her throat and she needed to force them out. “It was—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jen looked at her, and Alice felt the cord in her stomach start to unwind. The pleasant heat had already begun to go, dissipating like cold, damp steam.
It didn’t feel bad, exactly, just...resigned. Bad luck, Gulliver.
“You can go, if you want,” Alice said. “I won’t be offended.”
Jen seemed to consider it for a moment; then her expression firmed, and she shook her head. “It’s fine. Just know that I’m not helping you move that thing. This is just sex.”
Surprise flickered to life in Alice’s gut, tiny and warm, and she shot Jen a half-smile, crinkling her nose. “Yeah, no. I won’t make you do that. I would burn that thing if I could.”
Jen nodded as if they’d cleared up a business agreement. Then she tilted her head toward the bedroom, clearly impatient: “Now can we get on with it?”
Alice smiled, charmed despite herself, and went.
It was nearly midnight when they finished, Jen coming with a last boneless gasp under Alice’s mouth and rolling away. “Okay! Alright, enough!”
Alice smirked a little, watching Jen through half-lidded eyes. “So did I keep up?”
Jen let out a burst of breathless laughter. “Yeah, yeah.” She stayed sprawled on the sheets for three more lungfuls of air, then decided she’d recovered enough to swing out of bed and start looking for her clothes. Alice didn’t know whether to be offended or impressed.
She landed on impressed; certainly she’d had no complaints for the last few hours. Jen gave as good as she got, and Alice had the marks to prove it: bruises flowering the inside of her thighs, scratches along her spine, the delicious strain in her muscles that would likely be less delicious in the morning. She wasn’t twenty-two anymore, after all.
“You weren’t bad,” Jen threw over her shoulder as she tugged on her underwear.
Alice snorted into the pillow. “Thanks, I guess.”
“I’m saying I liked it.”
“I know what you meant. But you sound a lot like Agatha.”
Jen squawked in indignation, halting the whirlwind of redressing to fix Alice with a betrayed stare. “I’m choosing to ignore that because the sex was good. But if you ever say that again, I will ban you from the coffee shop and never speak to you.”
It wasn’t an empty threat, and in the languid dark Alice didn’t feel like pushing it. Instead, she let Jen hunt down both of her shoes (somehow on separate sides of the room) and her bra (fully intact, to Alice’s credit) and watched her remake herself. Only when Jen was done did she look a half-step out of place, unsure what Alice needed before she could leave.
Alice rolled her eyes, feeling an unexpected glimmer of fondness—quieter than admiration, stranger than lust. It was only sex. But then again, when was the last time Alice had wanted even that? She didn’t take random strangers home. She had seen—something in Jen.
But that wasn’t in the deal, and Alice knew that. “I told you you could go if you wanted, and I meant it.”
“That was before we fucked,” Jen pointed out.
“How about this,” Alice said patiently. “You go home, I go to sleep. I come back to the coffee shop tomorrow, like I always do. And we don’t make it weird, because you make the best coffee I’ve ever had.”
“Of course I do,” Jen said with a regal turn of the chin. But she sounded warmly pleased, and Alice caught the edge of her smile as she slipped out of the bedroom.
Alice listened for the door, then lay back; she felt a smile on her lips, too. It had just been sex, and she would have to get up in a moment and lock everything; and outside, a dog started barking incessantly; and in the morning, she would have to deal with the soreness and the soulless job and the stupid piano taking up more space in her life and living room than it ever should have—but tonight. Tonight had been something good, and she hadn’t ruined it.
Even if it never happened again, she could hold onto that.