Ten Cups of Coffee (A Love Story) (Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield)
Title: Ten Cups of Coffee (A Love Story)
Fandom: TSN RPS (Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield)
10,000 words | G
Andrew Garfield: "There was a very American, romanticized idea that I had in my head about what it would be like to work in a coffee shop. I thought of coffee shops as the kind of place where you met really smart, interesting, quirky [people] with thick, black-rimmed glasses." from here
A Starbucks AU, as requested by my dearest liketheroad for her help_nz donation. ♥
SPECIAL ENORMOUS THANKS to strikesoftly for the pictures!
Standard disclaimer applies: It's not meant to be about or imply anything about these actual people, just fictionalized versions of their public personas, ie, if they get to make a movie about Zuckerberg, I get to write this fic. But please don't share this fic with anyone portrayed in it.
Cup 1
There was no line in Starbucks and Jesse was a little bit desperate.
Writing at home was absolutely impossible; not only was Joe always there, watching Toddlers and Tiaras at particularly high volume, but Jesse's room was too small for a desk where he could spread his research out. Jesse had spent the last month trying every local coffee shop in reasonable bicycling distance from his apartment, but they were all too crowded, too dark, or too filled with extremely loud and discordant music. He believed in supporting local businesses, especially in New York city, but this Starbucks was quiet, mostly empty, and there was a giant table to work at in the back.
He dumped his bag on the table first, because he was more afraid of losing a place to work than of having anyone steal his copy of The Construction of Social Reality in Minority Discourse: The Polish Experience. If they wanted it, they were welcome to it, seriously. He was about ninety percent sure he wasn't going to finish his dissertation on time anyway.
All he wanted in the world was a quiet, empty place to spread out his books and his laptop, and a cup of coffee big enough to swim in. Jesse fumbled for his wallet and tried to remember what the cup sizes were called at Starbucks.
"Good morning, what can I get you?"
Jesse wasn't expecting a British accent, and when he looked up he realized he hadn't been expecting a distractingly cute barista with a blinding smile and extremely swoopy hair, either. "Soy latte," said Jesse. "A… What's the big size called?"
"Venti," said the barista cheerfully. "It means twenty in Italian, or so I'm told, except the cold version is actually bigger than twenty ounces. It's got an extra shot of caffeine as well."
Jesse looked at him a little blankly. "Why do people buy cold coffee? It'll get cold anyway."
"Fair enough," said the barista. He rang Jesse up. "Name?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Your name. We put it on the cups." He looked up expectantly.
Jesse was relatively sure he wasn't going to confuse Jesse with anyone else because there was no one else there, but he gave his name anyway. He felt sort of like he should ask the barista's name in return, but then that seemed slightly weird.
"Excellent," said the barista. He swiped Jesse's card and handed it back to him with a beaming smile. Then he walked over to the hissing coffee machines to make Jesse's coffee.
Jesse dropped a dollar in the tip jar and then went back to open Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Polish Migration, and Immigration and Asylum: between 1900 to the Present near his laptop on the table.
"Jesse!"
He turned around to see who was calling him and explain that he couldn't possibly socialize with only six weeks left to get the last two chapters of his dissertation written. Then he realized it was the barista with his drink.
"Thanks," said Jesse, and the barista beamed at him some more. He had a really nice smile, part of Jesse's brain noted, but it was mostly drowned out by the part that was screaming about all the notes his advisor had sent him on the draft of his last chapter.
Jesse sat down and opened his laptop. He had two emails from his advisor demanding to know if he had a date for his defense yet, one from Joe asking him to bring home gummy worms, and one from Justin announcing a party at his club on Friday night that Jesse would definitely not be attending. All three emails got, "No, sorry," as a response.
He opened the first book and tried to figure out where he'd left off taking notes. Then he opened up his chapter and looked despairingly at how little of it was written so far. Jesse typed a sentence, frowned at it, deleted it, retyped it, frowned some more, deleted an entire paragraph, and seriously considered running away to join the circus.
At least there was coffee. Jesse took a long drink and tried to remember to breathe.
Something on the cup caught his eye. Jesse moved his thumb and saw that next to his name, scribbled in black marker, the barista had… Well. He'd drawn a heart. That couldn't be standard operating procedure, could it? Jesse looked up, but the barista was chatting with a coworker and cleaning the counters.
Maybe Jesse had just looked really stressed out. Or maybe that barista was just insanely friendly. Maybe it was because Jesse had tipped a dollar and no one else was there. He wasn't looking at Jesse or anything. Jesse shrugged it off.
Jesse had a much more important half-finished chapter to deal with. He took a deep breath and started typing again.
--
Cup 2
"Soy latte," said Jesse. "Grande, I guess, because I'm going to get, like, four of them." Another day, another desperate trip to avoid Joe's weird obsession with TLC and get some work done.
"I wouldn't want you to have a heart attack," the barista agreed solemnly. He was all kinds of adorable, which Jesse wanted to appreciate, but he couldn't find the energy. Seventy-two pages to write by the end of March. He'd started dreaming about red strike-through words and comment bubbles that said, "Where is your research?"
The girl working the coffee machine called, "What's the drink?"
"Grande soy latte, for Jesse," said the barista, smiling.
"You remembered," said Jesse. "That's… Wow. I can't even remember my own name, some days."
"Well, you've got a lot to think about," he said, nodding toward the pile of books Jesse had on the table.
"We're busy, too, Andrew," said the other barista, and Jesse determinedly filed that away. It would be rude to forget his name when he'd remembered Jesse's, and apparently Jesse was going to be here five hours a day every day for the rest of the month. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew.
"Right, sorry," Andrew said, ringing Jesse up. Jesse put a dollar in the tip jar again and shuffled out of the way of the next person in line. His phone beeped sadly, reminding him that he still hadn't managed to get in touch with Professor Wahl to find out if the 21st was going to work for him. Otherwise Jesse was going to need a new date that worked for all five members of his committee. But it had to be before the end of April or he wasn't going to graduate.
Jesse took a deep breath and sent Professor Wahl the same email he'd sent three times already; an almost psychotically cheerful inquiry about his week, followed by shameless groveling and begging for him to get back with date approval already.
"Looks serious," said Andrew, leaning on the counter. "Hope your coffee helps." He pushed a paper cup at Jesse and for just a second Jesse considered replying, "Thank you, I love you," because anyone who brought him coffee and didn't want to talk about the tremendous clusterfuck that was his dissertation was Jesse's new favorite person.
"Thanks," Jesse said instead. Don't scare the person who gives you caffeine, he told himself sternly. "It can't hurt, at least."
Andrew laughed and went back to the register.
Jesse's phone beeped. "Automatic Out Of Office Message: Professor Wahl is currently out of his office and will be away until next Friday. For emergencies only, please contact Professor Randolph at 832 Whittier hall."
For a second Jesse just stared at his phone. "No," he said. "No, no, no - God damn it!"
People were staring. Jesse didn't care. Plenty of crazy people stormed around New York shouting to themselves. He figured most of them were grad students being screwed over by their departments.
He sat down and looked despairing at his laptop. Even if he finished his dissertation he still needed Professor Wahl to approve a date. Otherwise he had just done four years of work for literally absolutely nothing. Running away to join the circus was not at all an absurd way to deal with this problem.
Jesse sent his advisor an email that he knew would be ignored. Then he sent Professor Randolph an email begging for a way to get in touch with Professor Wahl. Jesse forced himself to just sit there and bang out some words of the last chapter, even though he was completely sure they made no sense. It wasn't until he got up to throw his cup away that he noticed Andrew had drawn on his cup again.
--
Cup 3
There was a girl with a bag full of books giving Jesse dark looks and obviously wishing he'd stop using the entirety of the table at the back. Jesse stared her down until she huffed a little and left.
Jesse went back to burying himself in Historiography of Polish Emigration in North America and Schisms in the Polish National Catholic Church. He managed to write two sentences before the words he was trying to type began descending into nonsense again.
At some point Jesse was sure he'd liked the idea of writing a dissertation and getting a PhD. His father was pretty thrilled about it, certainly. Jesse couldn't pinpoint the exact day he'd realized the whole thing was a giant disaster; his creeping sense of dread had started when his advisor had abruptly quit his job to move to a different university, barely a month after Jesse had started the program. His new advisor was perfectly nice but so disorganized that whenever he stopped by his office Jesse ended up answering the phone and helping confused undergrads. Jesse was basically entirely on his own as far as working out what needed to get done and recruiting committee members. When he got an email from his advisor it usually said something like, "Why haven't you applied for this yet?" with an attachment for a fellowship or a post-doc that was due in a week. Also, his advisor was pretty great at sending back Jesse's chapters absolutely decimated by notes and questions pointing out problems. Jesse dreaded his email.
He went to take a drink of coffee and realized he'd already finished it. Jesse scowled at his cup for a minute, trying to will it to have more coffee in it. "Seriously?" he muttered. "Already? Come on!"
"Hey," said Andrew, wiping down the counter. "Do you need a refill?"
Jesse bit his lip, embarrassed to be caught talking to his coffee. "Apparently I do," he said. "But um. I don't remember drinking it. That's probably a bad sign, right?"
Andrew laughed. "Maybe gremlins drank your coffee, have you considered that?"
"Do you think they'd be willing to write my dissertation, too?"
Andrew pretended to consider. "Probably not. Don't know that I've ever heard gremlins are particularly highly educated. They might hide your books from you instead."
"Oh, so that's where my books have been going? I guess I need to pick up some more gremlin repellant."
Andrew laughed and for a second it made Jesse feel like things were going to be okay. There was something intensely positive about Andrew, and yeah, he was probably being paid to be as charming and friendly as possible with customers but that didn't mean Jesse couldn't appreciate it.
"I can't help with that but I can bring you some more coffee so you don't have to try and rearrange all those piles," said Andrew. He grabbed Jesse's Starbucks card -- which he'd talked Jesse into buying in the first place -- and went back behind the counter.
"If you find me buried under textbooks please tell my mom I loved her," said Jesse.
"You could build a fort," said Andrew. "It would be impenetrable."
The sound of soy being steamed made it impossible for Jesse to say anything to that, and all he could think of was something super nerdy about how impenetrable the text was. He didn't want to say anything that would make Andrew stop talking to him or think Jesse was especially weird. There were virtually no people that Jesse wanted to talk to during a typical day; Joe was planning some kind of epic European backpacking tour and Jesse really didn't need to hear any more about Prague. Brenda was adorable but she was always trying to take Jesse shopping. Justin was in school during the day but he spent all night working at a club meeting insanely famous people and making connections. When Jesse wasn't sleeping it was because he had pages to bang out. When Justin didn't sleep it was because he had models to bang.
Andrew was charming, cute, and he gave Jesse coffee. Jesse wished he had the energy to be funny or clever or attempt to be charming back at Andrew. He thought for a minute, trying to figure out what he could possibly joke about at Starbucks that a Starbucks employee wouldn't have heard four hundred times before. Then his phone beeped and he got distracted.
It was the head of the department's secretary. "We can hold your defense on May tenth or May sixteenth," she said. "Those are the only days we have available for you."
Jesse took a deep breath and massaged the bridge of his nose with one hand. "If I don't do this before the end of April I won't graduate in May. What happened to April twenty-first?"
"We're holding that date for Rebecca."
"But Rebecca only has four committee members and I have all five. Shouldn't that mean I get precedence?"
"Professor Wahl hasn't confirmed yet, so no."
Jesse didn't shout, Why are you making it so hard for me to graduate? Or Why is everyone in your department so determined to make my life impossible? Or What if Rebecca dies under mysterious circumstances, then can I have the twenty-first? "Listen," he said. "Okay, seriously, I have to graduate. I can't spend another full semester doing this, I have to be done. I have to graduate."
"Are you even sure you'll be finished with those last two chapters? Doctor Brewer seems skeptical."
It was possible to be so angry that you forgot to breathe. Jesse felt his vision starting to go grey around the edges. "No, listen," he repeated. "You have to - It's the twenty-first. That's when it's happening. I don't care what you have to do or who has to be moved around, but I am going to have my defense on the twenty-first even if I have to do it in an empty room!"
"Don't shout at me, Jesse. It's not my fault Professor Wahl is out of town."
"I'm sorry," Jesse said. He wasn't actually very good at being angry at people. "This is important, okay? Really, really important. I'm going to be done, I'm going to defend, and I'm going to graduate this year."
"I'll see what I can do," she said and hung up.
It would have been really satisfying to throw his phone across the room or knock some books on the floor or bang his fists against the desk and scream. Before Jesse could decide which one he wanted to do first Andrew walked over holding a cup.
"You look like you need this," he said sympathetically. "I made it half-caf, though. I'm a little afraid you're going to actually have a heart attack." He handed Jesse a coffee. "I put some caramel in because you look like you could use it."
There were a lot of things Jesse wanted to say - thank you, and you're awesome, and are you this great to everyone or am I special? - but he was still having trouble breathing through his rage, and anyway his thoughts were too disordered to sort through before Andrew walked away.
Andrew had drawn a heart in the foam with caramel. That probably meant Andrew thought he was a basket case. But Jesse was willing to take pity if it came in the form of coffee served by an attractive barista. "Thank you," Jesse said finally. Andrew shrugged and waved a little bit, in a no-big-deal kind of way. Maybe when Jesse left in the afternoon other, more beleaguered and desperate graduate students came in. Maybe Andrew was secretly some kind of coffee-fairy-godmother in disguise. Either way Jesse was definitely going to keep coming back to this Starbucks.
--
Cup 4
"Is today any better?" Andrew asked, leaning over the counter. Jesse hadn't slept in a few days, at least not well, and his mind was full of unconjugated Polish and Russian verbs. What that meant, practically speaking, was that there was nothing to overrule his brain when it started noticing that Andrew had pushed his long black sleeves up over his forearms and that his arms were tanned and muscular. His hands were nice, too. Jesse realized he was staring at Andrew's arms and jerked his eyes back up to Andrew's face.
"What?" Jesse asked.
Andrew grinned a little goofily. "I said I hope today is better."
"Oh," said Jesse, feeling oddly embarrassed. Had Andrew noticed him staring? "Not really. I have a Russian language professor who's kicking my ass."
"Sounds terrible," said Andrew. He was drumming his fingers on the counter and distracting Jesse completely. "Clearly this calls for coffee. Soy latte?"
"Yes," said Jesse. He wondered if Andrew memorized everyone's drinks and hoped he didn't.
"You're very predictable," said Andrew. "Is that the only thing you drink?"
"Yeah," said Jesse, and then, "No. I mean, yes, mostly, except in the fall, when I have a pumpkin spice soy latte. But you don't have those in April."
"No," agreed Andrew, "we ran out of the syrup in January. I'll look around, though. Sometimes we have more in a cupboard somewhere. In the meantime I'll get you a soy latte for your Russian studies."
"Bless you," said Jesse fervently.
Andrew laughed. "Starbucks is the patron saint of graduate students."
"I'm Jewish," Jesse confessed. "Can I still light a votive in your honor?"
"I'm half-Jewish as well, so we'll just say you did," Andrew grinned.
Was it possible Andrew was just great at customer service? Jesse wondered. He paid and waited by the napkins. Andrew smiled at the next person in line. That was a bad sign. He knew her drink, too, and greeted her by name as Amanda. Jesse frowned.
"I've got it," said Andrew, pushing aside his coworker on the coffee machine. She rolled her eyes at him and moved over to the register. "So," said Andrew, steaming milk, "why have all your books got Polish titles if you're studying Russian?"
"I already speak Polish," said Jesse. "I needed Russian for some secondary translations. I mean, I passed my comps and everything, but just barely, and my professor still isn't happy and - Um, this is a really boring conversation, I'm sorry."
"Nah," said Andrew cheerfully. Jesse was starting to suspect he did everything cheerfully. "It's good I know you're doing something with all those stacks of books and not, you know, plotting. No offense, but you do have the slightly crazed look of someone who might be plotting things."
Oh, great. Andrew was cute and nice and funny. If he drew hearts on Jesse's cup again Jesse was definitely going to say something. Jesse came up blank on what he was going to say, exactly, but he'd worry about that later, if there were hearts.
"I'm definitely plotting," Jesse said, "but mostly it's how I'm going to kill my advisor and hide his body. The other professor who I need to get in touch with is gone on vacation for two weeks… And I'm being boring and whiny again, I'm sorry." This was definitely not how he was supposed to flirt with people. It was possible, Jesse allowed, he was terrible at flirting.
"It's fine," said Andrew, handing him a cup. "I'm pretty awful when I'm auditioning for things. No one wants to be around me when I don't get a callback. It's misery."
Jesse was willing to bet Andrew whined really adorably. He bit his lip and looked at the cup. There were definitely hearts around his name. But Andrew had looked over and recognized someone in line at the counter and was shouting gleefully at her, and Jesse had five more pages to write before he was allowed to do anything else like check his email or turn his phone on and… It would wait. "Thanks," he said instead, and slunk off to his table with his brain full of stuff he should have said.
Next time, Jesse promised himself, and the idea made his throat a little tight, but then he got swallowed up again by Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Polish Migration, and forgot all about it for a few hours.
--
Cup 5
"Tell me again about the cute barista," Brenda ordered.
"Shhh," said Jesse, even though they still across the street from Starbucks. "We're not talking about this in public."
"He draws hearts on your cup," Brenda cooed. "This is the best thing I've ever heard. Is this why you've been avoiding me for weeks? Were you busy flirting?"
Jesse hitched his bag up on his shoulder. A bicyclist nearly ran both of them down as they ran across the street in the middle of the intersection. "I haven't talked to you because I have a dissertation to write. I haven't talked to anyone."
"Justin thinks you're dead," Brenda said. "He said if he doesn’t hear from you by the end of the month he's going to start giving your stuff away to charity."
"Justin can suck it," said Jesse. "Just because he goes to parties for a living doesn't mean the rest of us do."
"He works at a club," said Brenda. "You're his only non-party-boy friend. He needs you to show up to things wearing glasses and ill-fitting jeans and carrying around a copy of Anna Karenina in the original Russian. It makes him look like he's got culture."
Jesse was still not entirely sure how he and Justin had become friends, nor why they were still friends when Jesse had done his best over the last two years of grad school to cut off all human contact with people who weren't actively involved in his dissertation. "I guess I should be grateful," he allowed. "It's nice of you guys to try and keep in touch with me when I'm so hard to get a hold of."
"It is nice of us," said Brenda. "Now show me this hot Starbucks guy and all the hearts he draws on your cups."
"He might not this time," said Jesse, "and also please don't say that so loudly."
Brenda sighed really dramatically. "You need a boyfriend to help you blow off all this stress," she said, and then started giggling. "I can't believe I just said blow!"
Jesse held the door of Starbucks for her, hitching his bag up again. He hoped Andrew wasn't working so he wouldn't have to talk to him in front of Brenda. Plus, thinking about what to say to Andrew had definitely cut into his panic-about-your-dissertation time. Andrew was distracting even when he wasn't around.
"So?" hissed Brenda, at what she probably thought was a quiet volume.
Andrew was behind the counter talking to the only customer in line; a pixie-looking blonde girl who was giggling at him. "Um," said Jesse. "Yeah. That's um. That's him. I'm going to go sit down, please stop staring like that."
"I'm not staring," Brenda said. "Ohh, he's cute. I like his hair. I like his shoulders!" Jesse dragged her over to what he thought of as "his" table. "Why aren't we getting coffee?"
"He's obviously busy talking to someone else," said Jesse, trying to stare hard at his bag so it wouldn't look like he was stalking Andrew, which he definitely wasn't doing. He just liked working at this table. There was an outlet for his laptop and everything.
The pretty blonde girl at the counter laughed delightedly and Andrew blushed. Jesse wasn't great at flirting but he was pretty sure he recognized it when he saw it.
"Who's that?" Brenda asked, frowning.
"I don't know," said Jesse. "We've only had like, two conversations. I didn't get as far as asking him the names of everyone he knows. Maybe he's just the nicest person in the world and I was reading in to it."
"No, no, no," said Brenda. "Tell me again about your deal with yourself?"
Jesse couldn't remember why he'd told Brenda about this in the first place, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't have if he'd slept in the last month. "I was going to check and see if he… Um, if he drew on the cup he was giving me again. Then I'd… Y'know. Say something."
"Like what?" Brenda asked eagerly.
Jesse sank down on the banquette a little bit. "Like… Um. Like, 'Hi, why do you keep drawing hearts on my cups?'"
Brenda squealed and clapped her hands with delight. Andrew definitely looked over at them, and so did his pretty blonde friend, and then she said something and he shook his head, blushing again.
"Shh," Jesse said. He was going to have find somewhere else to do his writing if she didn't stop that. Andrew moved over to make the blonde girl some coffee, which was nice because the coffee machine blocked his view and he couldn't look over and see Jesse dying of mortification.
"This is very high school and also very sweet. I can't remember the last time you went on a date. You aren't going to wear that, are you? No offense," said Brenda, making a face.
Jesse looked down at his t-shirt and cargo pants. "What?" he asked. "This is… These are the only clothes I own."
"I know," said Brenda sympathetically. "That must be really hard. Oh!" She lowered her voice and leaned in like they were exchanging secrets. "So you think maybe he's just nice and draws on everyone's cups? What if there are hearts on her cup?"
"I'll kill myself and find somewhere else to write," said Jesse.
Brenda hugged him, half-strangling him in the process. "You are my saddest friend. Luckily, you're adorable. Before you go on your date can I buy you cuter sneakers? Those are terrible!"
"These are my sneakers from high school," Jesse objected.
"Exactly," said Brenda.
"What?" Jesse asked.
The blonde girl sing-songed, "Thank you, Andrew," and batted her eyes at him. He laughed and looked down and handed her a cup and Jesse didn't have to squint to see that there was a giant heart at the top.
Brenda narrowed her eyes. "Carey," she read. "Who is Carey?"
There was really nowhere lower for Jesse to sink in his seat. "Either she's a girl he specially draws hearts for," he mumbled, "or he just draws hearts for everyone. I'll just wait for him to go on a break before I get some coffee." He tried not to sound especially miserable, although he felt a lot like Andrew had just kicked him in the teeth. So much for the only thing helping him struggle through his dissertation.
"It's a good thing you didn't say anything," said Brenda sympathetically. "He's so cute. I would totally have asked him out, too."
"You ask everyone out," Jesse said. "You asked me out."
"Well you're adorable!" chirped Brenda. "Of course I asked you out. Do you want me to go over there and ask him if she's his girlfriend? I could pretend it's me who's interested."
"No," said Jesse flatly. Another barista came out and Andrew took off his apron, walking around the counter. He glanced over at Jesse and Jesse did his best to be looking at Brenda. Andrew walked out with Carey. "I'm just going to - I have to write, I have a million pages to write before the end of the month. Go away, I'll talk to you in April."
"After your comps you said you'd talk to me again and you never did! I'm going to call Joe and make him actually drag you out of the apartment for my birthday. I don't feel very loved, Jesse," she complained.
Jesse started fishing books and his laptop out of his bag. He wanted to go get a coffee before Andrew came back in and he looked like a dork. "When I finish my dissertation-" he started.
"Then you're going to be freaking out about getting a teaching job," Brenda said. "Promise you'll let me throw you a party after you defend. Justin and I could-"
"Oh god, no," said Jesse. "I don't like parties anyway, and you two would-"
"We would what?" Brenda asked. "Be too awesome for you to handle?
Jesse groaned. "Yes."
"Well I'm going to do it anyway," said Brenda. "Okay, I have to go to class. Better luck next time, sweetie." She kissed his cheek and Jesse made a big deal out of pretending to grimace and not enjoy it. Better her than Justin, he figured. He got up to get a coffee before Andrew came back because he didn't want to have another accidentally flirty conversation.
--
Cup 6
There was a line out the door of Starbucks which was okay; it meant Andrew would be too busy to chat with Jesse, so Jesse didn't have to be disappointed listening to Andrew flirt with other people. He was fifteen pages behind where he needed to be, anyway. At this point revisions were going to have to happen while he was sleeping, except he never had time to sleep anymore.
Andrew looked up and waved when the girl at the register said, "Grande soy latte for Jesse." Jesse started to wave back, decided that was dorky, and stopped with one hand awkwardly in the air. That wasn't how he wanted to look in front of Andrew, so he stuck his hand back in his pockets and slumped.
Jesse tried to wait for his drink unobtrusively, but Andrew saw him through the crowd of people standing around the counter and smiled. "Fancy seeing you here," he said. "How many days left?"
Another woman tried to elbow her way in front of Jesse. "Excuse me, where is my triple-tall no-foam fat free latte?"
"Coming up," said Andrew cheerfully. "I've got a surprise for you," he added, nodding at Jesse.
"Ten days until the final draft is due," said Jesse. His tone couldn't possibly reflect how bleak he was feeling, but Andrew winced sympathetically. "What surprise?" Jesse added, a little suspiciously. In general he didn't like surprises; it was always Justin dragging him unexpectedly to a club, or Brenda buying him jeans that didn't fit and had sparkles on them. Sometimes it was one of his committee members leaving the country.
Anyway it probably wasn't going to be the surprise Jesse wished it was - if only Andrew didn't also draw hearts for cute girls who came through the line - but he let himself get just a little bit excited anyway.
"It's a surprise," Andrew scolded him. "You can't know about it yet!" He handed the huffy woman her complicated drink, and then another man his drink, and then a couple of teenagers their iced drinks. Jesse had no idea how he was making so many different things so quickly. Jesse tried to check and see if there were hearts - there were certainly suspicious squiggles on some of them, although Andrew looked too busy to really decorate. "Here you go, enjoy," said Andrew, and winked.
That was not entirely normal, but he'd giggled and blushed at Carey, so it was probably just Andrew being Andrew. Jesse took his cup and was disheartened to find that while there were a couple of hearts it was mostly just his name and, "Look what I found for you." Jesse frowned and sat down.
Justin had sent him an email about Brenda's birthday party tomorrow night, and Jesse had told him no three times already because he was definitely not leaving his apartment except to write and revise. Justin was hard to discourage, though. "YOU NEED A BREAK, IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!!!!!!" read his email. Jesse sent back, "No," and hoped that would be enough.
His first sip of coffee was so startling that Jesse almost spit it back out. It was wrong, it wasn’t the soy latte he'd ordered. He stared in betrayal at his cup and then looked up at Andrew to see if it was possible he'd made a mistake with the drinks and there was some other Jesse he had a surprise for.
Andrew smiled brightly at him. "I looked all over for that!" he called, and went back to making other people's drinks.
Jesse gave his coffee a second, cautious sip. It tasted familiar, he decided, and looked at the cup again. There were a lot of letters on it, but the PSL jogged something in his memory and he realized what it tasted like. Andrew had tracked down an off-season drink for him and made him a pumpkin spice latte. That was why it had tasted so weird. Now that Jesse knew what to expect it was delicious.
"Oh," said Jesse, mostly to himself. That was a really nice surprise. Andrew was genuinely the nicest person in the world. Not quite the romantic declaration Jesse had secretly been hoping for, but hey, nice. "Thank you!" he shouted. Everyone at the counter turned around to stare and Jesse started to sink into his seat a little bit, but Andrew grinned and waved and that was worth the funny looks.
--
Cup 7
Jesse couldn't keep his eyes open. The screen on his laptop was blurry and kept going out of focus when he tried to read what he'd already written. Something about Polish immigration, he hoped, but he honestly wasn't sure anymore. It might have been about anything. His eyes were gritty and his head was pounding. Justin Timberlake was the actual devil.
Andrew had whistled sympathetically when Jesse walked in, which was nice but not very helpful. Jesse wanted a coffee big enough to lie down and roll around in. He'd gotten the biggest one they had with extra shots and it still hadn't come close to waking him up out of this fog. He should never have gone out the night before, even if it was Brenda's birthday. Even if Joe had gotten Armie to threaten to actually carry him out over his shoulder. Even if Brenda had pretended to cry until Jesse let her pick out a shirt and straighten his hair, and even if Justin had sworn he could go home before eleven, and even if Joe had been buying sympathy your-dissertation-still-isn't-done shots.
Jesse put his head down on the table and tried to make the room stop spinning. He wasn't even hung over, that was the really pathetic part; he was just so exhausted he couldn't get his balance back. There was no way five pages of introduction were going to magically appear by Friday, and if they didn't there was no way he was going to be done revising by Tuesday.
It was mildly busy again, which was nice because it meant Jesse was free to wallow in his own misery and not worry he was distracting Andrew, or being watched by Andrew, or whatever. He was working up the energy to get a second coffee, in case it was more potent than the first. He just felt miserable and achey all over and he wasn't getting anything done but he couldn't possibly justify going home to lie down and nap.
Someone tapped his shoulder and Jesse looked up, blinking blearily. He had a smudge on his glasses from where they'd been squashed against his face. The dark-haired barista who was cleaning the counters handed him a cup of coffee. "Andrew said you look like you need this," she said sympathetically, and wiped his table off before going back to cleaning spills off the counter.
Jesse blinked at the coffee and then looked up at Andrew, who wasn't looking at him. There weren't even pity hearts on his cup today, just a message from Andrew about how wrecked his hair looked and a bunch of sad faces. That was how Jesse felt, too; like a string of sad faces.
Still, Andrew was obviously a great person for bringing him coffee at a time like this. "Thank you," said Jesse, waving his cup around dangerously. He probably needed to pay for the coffee. Right now he just didn't want to move. His laptop beeped accusingly at him because the battery was dying. "Me, too," he told it, wishing he could plug himself in. At least he had coffee.
"You can do it!" Andrew yelled. His coworkers laughed at him, but Jesse perked up a little bit. He wasn't actually sure he could do it, but it was nice that Andrew thought so. He held up his cup again, sort of a dorky thanks-for-that and Andrew waved back, laughing. Then his coworkers started making fun of him and he blushed and went back to making coffee. Jesse didn't want to get him in trouble or whatever, he just appreciated the support.
Jesse took a long drink of coffee and told himself it was only five pages to the end. Well, the end of the introduction. And then just revision after that. It was doable. It had to be.
--
Cup 8
"You look different," said Andrew.
Jesse smiled. "You know what today is?" he asked. Andrew shook his head. "Today is the last possible day I can work on my dissertation. After tonight it's either done or it's not. That's it. Deadline, emphasis on dead."
"Almost finished is a good look on you," said Andrew. There was a bursting feeling in Jesse's chest; if he got done, if he successfully defended his dissertation, if he graduated and found a job, maybe that would be enough of a boost for him to work up to asking Andrew out and not caring when Andrew said no, his type was cute pixie blondes. "Soy latte, yeah?"
"Please," said Jesse.
Andrew rang him up and held his hand out for Jesse's card. "Wait," said Andrew, pretending to pout a little bit, "if you finish your dissertation will you still come in for coffee?"
Jesse hadn't really thought about that. "I… Um, yeah, I probably will," he said. "I mean, it's quiet here compared to everywhere else in New York, and I'll always need a place I can write. Unless I get offered a teaching position somewhere else, but I mean, who's getting teaching jobs these days?"
Andrew pointed at him. "Don't make a joke about taking my job."
Jesse laughed. "I was thinking about it. Why, are you guys hiring?"
"Not people with PhDs, no," said Andrew. "It's not that hard out there yet, is it?"
"What am I going to do with a degree in immigrant anthropology and Polish history?" Jesse asked. "I could be the smartest person in the world and I'd still be unemployed."
"You could be," Andrew agreed, looking down at his register. "Here, I'll… I'll make your coffee. You have to promise you'll keep coming in, though. I get bored." He glanced up at Jesse and bit his lip, and then looked back down again.
"I will," said Jesse. He couldn't decide if this was flirting or not. Did Andrew just flirt with everyone indiscriminately?
"Nearly finished looks good on you," Andrew almost-mumbled.
That was flirting, right? Jesse really should have been able to work it out by his late twenties. He smiled hesitantly at Andrew and Andrew beamed back, but when Jesse got his cup there was nothing written on it, not even his name at the top. Jesse deflated again a little bit.
Justin had emailed him pictures from Brenda's birthday. Jesse looked mildly wasted and also it was always surprising to him how short he looked next to Armie. His face was red and Brenda was hanging off his shoulder, giggling. "Please don't tag this on Facebook," Jesse sent back.
"Too late!" Justin replied. "Is your diss done yet? Can you be fun again?"
"NO," Jesse wrote. "And also no. Aren't you ALWAYS SAYING I'm not fun anyway?"
"I dream big," Justin answered.
Jesse opened his laptop, feeling a little hopeful because it was all almost over. He was also mildly panicked and his heart was starting to pound, but that might have been because he was drinking coffee.
He allowed himself a moment of genuine disappointment that Andrew hadn't drawn hearts or a stupid message on his cup. When he glanced up Andrew was watching him expectantly, so Jesse faked an awkward little smile and Andrew grinned brilliant back. He was making coffee and the steaming milk was so loud it was impossible to hear anything, but Andrew gestured with his free hand in a very confusing attempt at charades. Jesse frowned. Andrew waved his hand around more. Jesse pretended he knew what that meant and nodded politely before he went back to his dissertation.
Jesse typed a couple of paragraphs to flesh out his introduction and then revised the last chapter for a while. Justin sent him another email - "Post diss party, right??? You have a couple of weeks before your defense and I don't want you to freak out. Brenda and I have PLANS."
"I have stuff to do," Jesse typed back. He was aware Justin would never buy that as an excuse in a million years, but it was worth a try.
Jesse revised another page and frowned at his cup. So Andrew hadn't drawn anything. Jesse knew Andrew flirted with girls in line; this lack of flirting shouldn't have bothered him so much. There were scribbles at the bottom, actually, and there was his name, so at least that was something. But Andrew wasn't busy so it still stung a little bit. Jesse started to type again and then with the suddenly clarity being almost done with his dissertation forever brought, realized something.
Those weren't random scribbles on his cup. Words were crossed out so that the hot beverage warning seemed to be about Jesse instead. Jesse stared at it, then looked up at Andrew, baffled.
That had to be flirting.
Didn't it?
Andrew saw him, smiled a little hesitantly, and ducked behind the coffe machine.
Jesse's heart was racing and it definitely wasn't the caffeine. Okay, he told himself. He hadn't drawn hearts. You might still be reading into this. He might be kidding around. He typed an email to Justin - "Help!!! I can't tell if the barista is flirting with me!"
Justin replied almost immediately: "Is he cute?"
"Yes," Jesse sent. "He said I'm hot. I mean, wrote I'm hot. Does that mean something? Also he draws hearts on my cups but also everyone else's cups. HELP. "
There was no immediate answer. Jesse tried and failed to proof read his conclusion.
"Okay, play it cool for now," Justin emailed at last. "JTimb is on the case. I'll go down with you and see. I am an expert flirt-vestigator."
"You'll make it worse!!!!" Jesse sent back despairingly, but Justin didn't answer. Of course he didn't. He was impossible to talk out of anything. Jesse shouldn't have asked him for help, but… Well, Justin did flirt a lot. He'd at least be able to say definitively one way or the other.
Andrew took his apron off to go out on break. Jesse sank a little bit in his chair. He wanted to blurt, "Hey, did you mean it?" but couldn't bring himself quite to doing it without - oh god, so horrible - moral support from Justin.
"Has my life really come to this?" Jesse groaned. A warning popped up on his screen - FOUR HOURS TO DEADLINE!!!! Jesse pushed his freak out about Andrew aside and started up the final read-through of his draft.
--
Cup 9
It wasn't the day after Jesse turned in his dissertation because he slept for forty-eight hours straight, only waking up to pee, turn off his phone when it rang, and yell at Joe for over-enthusiastically shouting at So You Think You Can Dance. But Saturday, when he'd started to decompress but still had twelve days before his defense - a tiny window of sanity - Jesse called Justin and asked if maybe, possibly, he was still up for a trip to Starbucks.
"Am I ever!" Justin crowed, and met Jesse there twenty minutes later. Jesse had agonized over whether he should dress up or not. If he showed up looking fancy after weeks of looking like he'd been dragged behind a bus it might be embarrassing, especially if Andrew wasn't actually flirting. A clean t-shirt couldn't hurt, though.
"Well?" said Justin. "Fill me in so I can sleuth."
Jesse was almost sure you couldn't use that word like that but he wasn't a PhD yet, so whatever. "His name is Andrew, he always writes my name on the cup with hearts or - or um, messages about my hair, I don't know - and one time that I was hot, but… I don't know, he also draws hearts on lots of other people's cups, unless it's super busy. So maybe it's not just me, he might be bored or really nice, and I don't know -"
"Got it," Justin said. "It's not busy now, so let's see if he takes the bait."
"The-"
"I'm the bait," Justin clarified, waggling his eyebrows magnificently.
"Oh - Oh dear," said Jesse.
Justin strolled up to the counter and ordered an insanely complicated drink, all while doing what Jesse recognized as flirting since he'd seen it at the club a couple of times. It looked awfully silly to Jesse but it seemed to work; Justin rarely went home alone.
Jesse walked up after him, trying to find a facial expression that said I'm so sorry about my friend. "Hi," said Andrew, lighting up. Jesse didn't think he was imagining it. "I thought now you'd finished you might not come back."
"Oh. No. I'm here," Jesse said. "I definitely still need coffee, don't worry."
"Good," Andrew smiled. "Good. Excellent. I'm glad. Um." He handed Jesse his coffee; Jesse's name was inside a heart.
Jesse tried not to look like he was freaking out over it as he walked over to Justin. "I know you don't have a ton of experience at this," Justin said, "so allow me to tell you as an expert on the subject: that was definitely flirting."
"Oh," said Jesse. He blushed, which was so stupid; he'd brought Justin along deliberately. "You um. You think so? Because he's like that with everyone, so it's, um. I might just be-"
Justin thrust his cup at Jesse's face. "Do you see any hearts on here? I don't. There are exactly zero hearts on my cup. No messages, no 'hey you're so hot,' despite the fact that I clearly am."
"But - but -" Jesse started, blushing furiously.
"In fact," said Justin said, grabbing Jesse by the shoulders, "I think you should go complain for me. Ask him where my hearts are."
Jesse hadn't had time to plan what the hell he was going to say if he ever decided to actually talk to Andrew about the hearts and cups and possible flirting. "Wait - I - no -" he stuttered, but Justin had already shoved him hard enough to send him stumbling back over to the register.
Andrew looked up expectantly, biting his lip.
All the words Jesse had ever thought about saying to him flew out of his head. Justin, behind him, clear his throat loudly. "I'd uh. I'd like to complain to the management," Jesse mumbled.
"Oh no," said Andrew, looking a little concerned. "Really?"
"Yes, uh, I… My friend Justin, he… Um, there are no hearts on his cup."
Andrew raised his eyebrows. Jesse almost fled, but Justin was standing behind him, not even pretending not to eavesdrop. "Huh," said Andrew finally. "Aren't there?"
"No," said Jesse. His hands were shaking so he held the cup a little more tightly. He glanced back over his shoulder at Justin, who waved encouragingly. "Uh, his cup just says Justin, and mine has… I told him that mine usually have hearts and messages and… He's a little disappointed, so, um, I should probably talk to your manager or something."
Andrew nodded seriously. "Actually, I'm shift supervisor, but I can give myself a stern talking to later, if you'd like."
"I just… Um, I kind of thought… You don't write things on everyone's cups?"
Andrew made a hilarious little, "Oh!" face. "No," he said, as if he were just working something out. "I don't. Do you think I should?"
"Um," said Jesse. The cup was starting to crumple a little under his fingers and his cheeks were turning red. "I, uh. Um. This entire time I've been sitting over there writing my dissertation and uh, I've been operating under the assumption that you um… That you were just being really friendly to everyone in here, and I…" He trailed off.
Andrew started smiling. "I started to wonder if you were ignoring me or annoyed by it or what, but you kept coming in. I guess I'm very hard to discourage."
"Thank god," Jesse blurted. Andrew laughed. "No, I mean, I never… I just didn't think… Um. I'm usually not completely brain dead, I swear."
"I know, I've seen the stack of giant books you lug in here every morning." Andrew was barely suppressing a grin, biting his lip and looking ridiculous and Jesse wasn't sure what to say next. You look hot, too, or maybe, I guess asking you out for coffee would be weird.
Andrew's phone rang in his pocket. "One second," he said, diving for it. "I'm expecting a call, I have to - Hello?" The other girl working behind the counter shouted, "Is it them?" and Andrew waved her off. "Yes? I - Oh god, really? Really? Yes! Thank you, of course, thank you for calling, oh my god, I'll be there." He flipped his phone shut and turned around. "Oh my god, I got the part!"
The other barista shrieked and threw herself at him in a hug that was so fierce he picked her up off the floor. Andrew whooped and spun her around. "It's a proper part in Shakespeare, and it's - oh my god, actual Shakespearean actors, and a proper director, and I've got a leading role off Broadway!" Andrew put his coworker down, glowing with joy.
"I'm sorry, I have to go call my mum, I have to-" he said, looking at Jesse and then the other barista.
"Take your lunch," said his coworker. Andrew threw off his apron, grinned at Jesse, and ducked out the back.
"Um, congratulations," Jesse said quietly, to no one in particular.
Justin came up and put his hand on Jesse's shoulder. "For future reference," he said, "what you were supposed to say there was, 'Hey, that's awesome. Can I take you out to celebrate?'"
Jesse hated it when Justin was obviously right about things. "Oh. That makes sense."
The other barista interrupted, "It's about freaking time. Andrew's been whining about you forever. His next shift is Monday afternoon. That would be a really good time to stop by."
Jesse turned a little red again. Apparently the entire world had known Andrew was flirting with him, and he'd missed it. "I'll be here," he said.
--
Cup 10
It should have been a lot less nerve-wracking to go in and see Andrew now that Jesse was sure he was flirting and wanted Jesse to notice. Instead it was much, much scarier, and Jesse paced outside Starbucks for a little while before he worked up the nerve to push the door open and go in.
Andrew looked up at the door and smiled. Jesse bit his lip and made himself walk forward. He had been up all night running through all the things he could say - and all the things Justin and Joe had suggested, most of which were obscene.
To his horror what he heard himself say instead of anything rehearsed or flirty was, "It threw me off that you drew hearts on Carey's cup." Andrew blinked. "I mean," Jesse explained, because now he sounded like a crazy stalker, "I was… Um, I was looking at the cups you wrote for other people and you drew hearts on this really cute girl's cup and it was… I figured…"
Andrew laughed and rubbed the back of his neck, looking down. "She's my roommate, actually. She'd been, uh. She'd been teasing me about how much I talked about… Well, that I kept drawing hearts and you hadn't noticed and she thought it was really funny and wanted hearts of her own." His cheeks had turned pink. "I'm so disastrously bad at this."
"Not as bad as I am," Jesse insisted. "You wrote I was hot on a cup and I still wasn't entirely sure what you meant."
"I meant you were hot," said Andrew. "Was that not clear?"
Jesse made a helpless, confused face. "I mean, it just seemed so unlikely."
Andrew laughed at him. Jesse shrugged, because he couldn't blush any harder and he didn't know what to say. He bit his lip and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet instead.
"Would you like a coffee?" asked Andrew.
Jesse nodded. "Oh, and congratulations on your role. That's awesome."
Andrew bounced a little. "I'm really excited," he said. "It's going to be amazing. I'm going to be a real working actor in a real production off-Broadway."
"Oh no," said Jesse, putting something together. "Are you going to quit working here?"
Andrew smiled at him as if he'd said something really nice. "Not yet. Eventually, I hope. But you're going to graduate too, aren't you?"
"Yeah," said Jesse. "Eventually, I hope."
Andrew put a cup of coffee on the counter between them and pushed it toward Jesse. "So," he said.
"If there are no hearts on there I'm going to be really disappointed," Jesse said, trying to sound like he was joking and failing because his voice shook.
"Um," said Andrew, bouncing a little bit more.
Jesse turned the cup around. Andrew had written his name across the top with a heart, and more importantly, he'd written his phone number at the bottom.
"I'm sure you're really busy," Andrew began, "with your dissertation defense and all."
"And you're going to have rehearsals and stuff," said Jesse. There was a buzzing noise in his ears and his fingers felt a little numb.
"But uh…" said Andrew, "I thought it would be. Um. In case you-"
"Do you have a break coming up anytime soon?" Jesse asked suddenly. Andrew looked over his shoulder at his coworkers, who had stopped working entirely to watch the two of them.
"I'm taking fifteen," Andrew said. They laughed at him. Andrew took off his apron and threw it at them as he walked around to the other side of the counter.
Andrew stopped a little more than a handspan away from Jesse, looking excited and shy and anxious all at once. Jesse thought about explaining that the coffee cups were the only things that had kept him sane while he was writing his dissertation, or that Andrew was the cutest person who'd ever tried to flirt with him, or that Jesse just didn't get told he was hot often enough to know how to respond correctly. Instead he grabbed Andrew's hand and pulled him closer. Andrew laughed a little nervously and squeezed Jesse's hand in return.
"Thank you for writing hearts on my cup," said Jesse, and pushed up on his toes so he could brush his mouth quickly against Andrew's. Andrew followed him back down, stepping forward properly into his space and ducking his head so he could kiss Jesse. Someone in the store cheered. Jesse started to pull away, embarrassed, but Andrew put his hand on Jesse's jaw and tipped his face up a little and Jesse didn't want to move away from that. He closed his eyes and let Andrew kiss his way gently into Jesse's mouth. Andrew tasted like coffee and he kissed as cheerfully as he took drink orders and Jesse felt dizzy all over. Maybe from not having had coffee yet, or maybe from a lack of oxygen, or maybe it was just Andrew.
"Could I come see your play?" asked Jesse a little hesitantly, when he was finally forced to pull away so he could breathe.
"If I can take you out to celebrate your dissertation," said Andrew.
"That would be great." Jesse bit the inside of his cheek because he didn't want to smile too much. "I mean, if I defend it successfully. Oh god, what if-"
"I'll take you out anyway," said Andrew. "Even if I resign to be on Broadway and you end up working here with your PhD."
"I guess I better not lose the cup with your number, then," said Jesse.
Andrew smiled giddily. "I'd find you somehow, don't worry. Um, so I've got thirteen minutes left on this break, do you want to - Could we step outside, maybe? There are lots of better places to be than here, where I work."
"I'm pretty fond of this Starbucks, actually," said Jesse, tamping down on all the ridiculous, bubbly feelings welling up inside his chest. Andrew squeezed his hand again and pulled him outside and Jesse thought that actually it was okay if they found lots of other places to be together.
Fandom: TSN RPS (Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield)
10,000 words | G
Andrew Garfield: "There was a very American, romanticized idea that I had in my head about what it would be like to work in a coffee shop. I thought of coffee shops as the kind of place where you met really smart, interesting, quirky [people] with thick, black-rimmed glasses." from here
A Starbucks AU, as requested by my dearest liketheroad for her help_nz donation. ♥
SPECIAL ENORMOUS THANKS to strikesoftly for the pictures!
Standard disclaimer applies: It's not meant to be about or imply anything about these actual people, just fictionalized versions of their public personas, ie, if they get to make a movie about Zuckerberg, I get to write this fic. But please don't share this fic with anyone portrayed in it.
Cup 1
There was no line in Starbucks and Jesse was a little bit desperate.
Writing at home was absolutely impossible; not only was Joe always there, watching Toddlers and Tiaras at particularly high volume, but Jesse's room was too small for a desk where he could spread his research out. Jesse had spent the last month trying every local coffee shop in reasonable bicycling distance from his apartment, but they were all too crowded, too dark, or too filled with extremely loud and discordant music. He believed in supporting local businesses, especially in New York city, but this Starbucks was quiet, mostly empty, and there was a giant table to work at in the back.
He dumped his bag on the table first, because he was more afraid of losing a place to work than of having anyone steal his copy of The Construction of Social Reality in Minority Discourse: The Polish Experience. If they wanted it, they were welcome to it, seriously. He was about ninety percent sure he wasn't going to finish his dissertation on time anyway.
All he wanted in the world was a quiet, empty place to spread out his books and his laptop, and a cup of coffee big enough to swim in. Jesse fumbled for his wallet and tried to remember what the cup sizes were called at Starbucks.
"Good morning, what can I get you?"
Jesse wasn't expecting a British accent, and when he looked up he realized he hadn't been expecting a distractingly cute barista with a blinding smile and extremely swoopy hair, either. "Soy latte," said Jesse. "A… What's the big size called?"
"Venti," said the barista cheerfully. "It means twenty in Italian, or so I'm told, except the cold version is actually bigger than twenty ounces. It's got an extra shot of caffeine as well."
Jesse looked at him a little blankly. "Why do people buy cold coffee? It'll get cold anyway."
"Fair enough," said the barista. He rang Jesse up. "Name?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Your name. We put it on the cups." He looked up expectantly.
Jesse was relatively sure he wasn't going to confuse Jesse with anyone else because there was no one else there, but he gave his name anyway. He felt sort of like he should ask the barista's name in return, but then that seemed slightly weird.
"Excellent," said the barista. He swiped Jesse's card and handed it back to him with a beaming smile. Then he walked over to the hissing coffee machines to make Jesse's coffee.
Jesse dropped a dollar in the tip jar and then went back to open Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Polish Migration, and Immigration and Asylum: between 1900 to the Present near his laptop on the table.
"Jesse!"
He turned around to see who was calling him and explain that he couldn't possibly socialize with only six weeks left to get the last two chapters of his dissertation written. Then he realized it was the barista with his drink.
"Thanks," said Jesse, and the barista beamed at him some more. He had a really nice smile, part of Jesse's brain noted, but it was mostly drowned out by the part that was screaming about all the notes his advisor had sent him on the draft of his last chapter.
Jesse sat down and opened his laptop. He had two emails from his advisor demanding to know if he had a date for his defense yet, one from Joe asking him to bring home gummy worms, and one from Justin announcing a party at his club on Friday night that Jesse would definitely not be attending. All three emails got, "No, sorry," as a response.
He opened the first book and tried to figure out where he'd left off taking notes. Then he opened up his chapter and looked despairingly at how little of it was written so far. Jesse typed a sentence, frowned at it, deleted it, retyped it, frowned some more, deleted an entire paragraph, and seriously considered running away to join the circus.
At least there was coffee. Jesse took a long drink and tried to remember to breathe.
Something on the cup caught his eye. Jesse moved his thumb and saw that next to his name, scribbled in black marker, the barista had… Well. He'd drawn a heart. That couldn't be standard operating procedure, could it? Jesse looked up, but the barista was chatting with a coworker and cleaning the counters.
Maybe Jesse had just looked really stressed out. Or maybe that barista was just insanely friendly. Maybe it was because Jesse had tipped a dollar and no one else was there. He wasn't looking at Jesse or anything. Jesse shrugged it off.
Jesse had a much more important half-finished chapter to deal with. He took a deep breath and started typing again.
--
Cup 2
"Soy latte," said Jesse. "Grande, I guess, because I'm going to get, like, four of them." Another day, another desperate trip to avoid Joe's weird obsession with TLC and get some work done.
"I wouldn't want you to have a heart attack," the barista agreed solemnly. He was all kinds of adorable, which Jesse wanted to appreciate, but he couldn't find the energy. Seventy-two pages to write by the end of March. He'd started dreaming about red strike-through words and comment bubbles that said, "Where is your research?"
The girl working the coffee machine called, "What's the drink?"
"Grande soy latte, for Jesse," said the barista, smiling.
"You remembered," said Jesse. "That's… Wow. I can't even remember my own name, some days."
"Well, you've got a lot to think about," he said, nodding toward the pile of books Jesse had on the table.
"We're busy, too, Andrew," said the other barista, and Jesse determinedly filed that away. It would be rude to forget his name when he'd remembered Jesse's, and apparently Jesse was going to be here five hours a day every day for the rest of the month. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew.
"Right, sorry," Andrew said, ringing Jesse up. Jesse put a dollar in the tip jar again and shuffled out of the way of the next person in line. His phone beeped sadly, reminding him that he still hadn't managed to get in touch with Professor Wahl to find out if the 21st was going to work for him. Otherwise Jesse was going to need a new date that worked for all five members of his committee. But it had to be before the end of April or he wasn't going to graduate.
Jesse took a deep breath and sent Professor Wahl the same email he'd sent three times already; an almost psychotically cheerful inquiry about his week, followed by shameless groveling and begging for him to get back with date approval already.
"Looks serious," said Andrew, leaning on the counter. "Hope your coffee helps." He pushed a paper cup at Jesse and for just a second Jesse considered replying, "Thank you, I love you," because anyone who brought him coffee and didn't want to talk about the tremendous clusterfuck that was his dissertation was Jesse's new favorite person.
"Thanks," Jesse said instead. Don't scare the person who gives you caffeine, he told himself sternly. "It can't hurt, at least."
Andrew laughed and went back to the register.
Jesse's phone beeped. "Automatic Out Of Office Message: Professor Wahl is currently out of his office and will be away until next Friday. For emergencies only, please contact Professor Randolph at 832 Whittier hall."
For a second Jesse just stared at his phone. "No," he said. "No, no, no - God damn it!"
People were staring. Jesse didn't care. Plenty of crazy people stormed around New York shouting to themselves. He figured most of them were grad students being screwed over by their departments.
He sat down and looked despairing at his laptop. Even if he finished his dissertation he still needed Professor Wahl to approve a date. Otherwise he had just done four years of work for literally absolutely nothing. Running away to join the circus was not at all an absurd way to deal with this problem.
Jesse sent his advisor an email that he knew would be ignored. Then he sent Professor Randolph an email begging for a way to get in touch with Professor Wahl. Jesse forced himself to just sit there and bang out some words of the last chapter, even though he was completely sure they made no sense. It wasn't until he got up to throw his cup away that he noticed Andrew had drawn on his cup again.
--
Cup 3
There was a girl with a bag full of books giving Jesse dark looks and obviously wishing he'd stop using the entirety of the table at the back. Jesse stared her down until she huffed a little and left.
Jesse went back to burying himself in Historiography of Polish Emigration in North America and Schisms in the Polish National Catholic Church. He managed to write two sentences before the words he was trying to type began descending into nonsense again.
At some point Jesse was sure he'd liked the idea of writing a dissertation and getting a PhD. His father was pretty thrilled about it, certainly. Jesse couldn't pinpoint the exact day he'd realized the whole thing was a giant disaster; his creeping sense of dread had started when his advisor had abruptly quit his job to move to a different university, barely a month after Jesse had started the program. His new advisor was perfectly nice but so disorganized that whenever he stopped by his office Jesse ended up answering the phone and helping confused undergrads. Jesse was basically entirely on his own as far as working out what needed to get done and recruiting committee members. When he got an email from his advisor it usually said something like, "Why haven't you applied for this yet?" with an attachment for a fellowship or a post-doc that was due in a week. Also, his advisor was pretty great at sending back Jesse's chapters absolutely decimated by notes and questions pointing out problems. Jesse dreaded his email.
He went to take a drink of coffee and realized he'd already finished it. Jesse scowled at his cup for a minute, trying to will it to have more coffee in it. "Seriously?" he muttered. "Already? Come on!"
"Hey," said Andrew, wiping down the counter. "Do you need a refill?"
Jesse bit his lip, embarrassed to be caught talking to his coffee. "Apparently I do," he said. "But um. I don't remember drinking it. That's probably a bad sign, right?"
Andrew laughed. "Maybe gremlins drank your coffee, have you considered that?"
"Do you think they'd be willing to write my dissertation, too?"
Andrew pretended to consider. "Probably not. Don't know that I've ever heard gremlins are particularly highly educated. They might hide your books from you instead."
"Oh, so that's where my books have been going? I guess I need to pick up some more gremlin repellant."
Andrew laughed and for a second it made Jesse feel like things were going to be okay. There was something intensely positive about Andrew, and yeah, he was probably being paid to be as charming and friendly as possible with customers but that didn't mean Jesse couldn't appreciate it.
"I can't help with that but I can bring you some more coffee so you don't have to try and rearrange all those piles," said Andrew. He grabbed Jesse's Starbucks card -- which he'd talked Jesse into buying in the first place -- and went back behind the counter.
"If you find me buried under textbooks please tell my mom I loved her," said Jesse.
"You could build a fort," said Andrew. "It would be impenetrable."
The sound of soy being steamed made it impossible for Jesse to say anything to that, and all he could think of was something super nerdy about how impenetrable the text was. He didn't want to say anything that would make Andrew stop talking to him or think Jesse was especially weird. There were virtually no people that Jesse wanted to talk to during a typical day; Joe was planning some kind of epic European backpacking tour and Jesse really didn't need to hear any more about Prague. Brenda was adorable but she was always trying to take Jesse shopping. Justin was in school during the day but he spent all night working at a club meeting insanely famous people and making connections. When Jesse wasn't sleeping it was because he had pages to bang out. When Justin didn't sleep it was because he had models to bang.
Andrew was charming, cute, and he gave Jesse coffee. Jesse wished he had the energy to be funny or clever or attempt to be charming back at Andrew. He thought for a minute, trying to figure out what he could possibly joke about at Starbucks that a Starbucks employee wouldn't have heard four hundred times before. Then his phone beeped and he got distracted.
It was the head of the department's secretary. "We can hold your defense on May tenth or May sixteenth," she said. "Those are the only days we have available for you."
Jesse took a deep breath and massaged the bridge of his nose with one hand. "If I don't do this before the end of April I won't graduate in May. What happened to April twenty-first?"
"We're holding that date for Rebecca."
"But Rebecca only has four committee members and I have all five. Shouldn't that mean I get precedence?"
"Professor Wahl hasn't confirmed yet, so no."
Jesse didn't shout, Why are you making it so hard for me to graduate? Or Why is everyone in your department so determined to make my life impossible? Or What if Rebecca dies under mysterious circumstances, then can I have the twenty-first? "Listen," he said. "Okay, seriously, I have to graduate. I can't spend another full semester doing this, I have to be done. I have to graduate."
"Are you even sure you'll be finished with those last two chapters? Doctor Brewer seems skeptical."
It was possible to be so angry that you forgot to breathe. Jesse felt his vision starting to go grey around the edges. "No, listen," he repeated. "You have to - It's the twenty-first. That's when it's happening. I don't care what you have to do or who has to be moved around, but I am going to have my defense on the twenty-first even if I have to do it in an empty room!"
"Don't shout at me, Jesse. It's not my fault Professor Wahl is out of town."
"I'm sorry," Jesse said. He wasn't actually very good at being angry at people. "This is important, okay? Really, really important. I'm going to be done, I'm going to defend, and I'm going to graduate this year."
"I'll see what I can do," she said and hung up.
It would have been really satisfying to throw his phone across the room or knock some books on the floor or bang his fists against the desk and scream. Before Jesse could decide which one he wanted to do first Andrew walked over holding a cup.
"You look like you need this," he said sympathetically. "I made it half-caf, though. I'm a little afraid you're going to actually have a heart attack." He handed Jesse a coffee. "I put some caramel in because you look like you could use it."
There were a lot of things Jesse wanted to say - thank you, and you're awesome, and are you this great to everyone or am I special? - but he was still having trouble breathing through his rage, and anyway his thoughts were too disordered to sort through before Andrew walked away.
Andrew had drawn a heart in the foam with caramel. That probably meant Andrew thought he was a basket case. But Jesse was willing to take pity if it came in the form of coffee served by an attractive barista. "Thank you," Jesse said finally. Andrew shrugged and waved a little bit, in a no-big-deal kind of way. Maybe when Jesse left in the afternoon other, more beleaguered and desperate graduate students came in. Maybe Andrew was secretly some kind of coffee-fairy-godmother in disguise. Either way Jesse was definitely going to keep coming back to this Starbucks.
--
Cup 4
"Is today any better?" Andrew asked, leaning over the counter. Jesse hadn't slept in a few days, at least not well, and his mind was full of unconjugated Polish and Russian verbs. What that meant, practically speaking, was that there was nothing to overrule his brain when it started noticing that Andrew had pushed his long black sleeves up over his forearms and that his arms were tanned and muscular. His hands were nice, too. Jesse realized he was staring at Andrew's arms and jerked his eyes back up to Andrew's face.
"What?" Jesse asked.
Andrew grinned a little goofily. "I said I hope today is better."
"Oh," said Jesse, feeling oddly embarrassed. Had Andrew noticed him staring? "Not really. I have a Russian language professor who's kicking my ass."
"Sounds terrible," said Andrew. He was drumming his fingers on the counter and distracting Jesse completely. "Clearly this calls for coffee. Soy latte?"
"Yes," said Jesse. He wondered if Andrew memorized everyone's drinks and hoped he didn't.
"You're very predictable," said Andrew. "Is that the only thing you drink?"
"Yeah," said Jesse, and then, "No. I mean, yes, mostly, except in the fall, when I have a pumpkin spice soy latte. But you don't have those in April."
"No," agreed Andrew, "we ran out of the syrup in January. I'll look around, though. Sometimes we have more in a cupboard somewhere. In the meantime I'll get you a soy latte for your Russian studies."
"Bless you," said Jesse fervently.
Andrew laughed. "Starbucks is the patron saint of graduate students."
"I'm Jewish," Jesse confessed. "Can I still light a votive in your honor?"
"I'm half-Jewish as well, so we'll just say you did," Andrew grinned.
Was it possible Andrew was just great at customer service? Jesse wondered. He paid and waited by the napkins. Andrew smiled at the next person in line. That was a bad sign. He knew her drink, too, and greeted her by name as Amanda. Jesse frowned.
"I've got it," said Andrew, pushing aside his coworker on the coffee machine. She rolled her eyes at him and moved over to the register. "So," said Andrew, steaming milk, "why have all your books got Polish titles if you're studying Russian?"
"I already speak Polish," said Jesse. "I needed Russian for some secondary translations. I mean, I passed my comps and everything, but just barely, and my professor still isn't happy and - Um, this is a really boring conversation, I'm sorry."
"Nah," said Andrew cheerfully. Jesse was starting to suspect he did everything cheerfully. "It's good I know you're doing something with all those stacks of books and not, you know, plotting. No offense, but you do have the slightly crazed look of someone who might be plotting things."
Oh, great. Andrew was cute and nice and funny. If he drew hearts on Jesse's cup again Jesse was definitely going to say something. Jesse came up blank on what he was going to say, exactly, but he'd worry about that later, if there were hearts.
"I'm definitely plotting," Jesse said, "but mostly it's how I'm going to kill my advisor and hide his body. The other professor who I need to get in touch with is gone on vacation for two weeks… And I'm being boring and whiny again, I'm sorry." This was definitely not how he was supposed to flirt with people. It was possible, Jesse allowed, he was terrible at flirting.
"It's fine," said Andrew, handing him a cup. "I'm pretty awful when I'm auditioning for things. No one wants to be around me when I don't get a callback. It's misery."
Jesse was willing to bet Andrew whined really adorably. He bit his lip and looked at the cup. There were definitely hearts around his name. But Andrew had looked over and recognized someone in line at the counter and was shouting gleefully at her, and Jesse had five more pages to write before he was allowed to do anything else like check his email or turn his phone on and… It would wait. "Thanks," he said instead, and slunk off to his table with his brain full of stuff he should have said.
Next time, Jesse promised himself, and the idea made his throat a little tight, but then he got swallowed up again by Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Polish Migration, and forgot all about it for a few hours.
--
Cup 5
"Tell me again about the cute barista," Brenda ordered.
"Shhh," said Jesse, even though they still across the street from Starbucks. "We're not talking about this in public."
"He draws hearts on your cup," Brenda cooed. "This is the best thing I've ever heard. Is this why you've been avoiding me for weeks? Were you busy flirting?"
Jesse hitched his bag up on his shoulder. A bicyclist nearly ran both of them down as they ran across the street in the middle of the intersection. "I haven't talked to you because I have a dissertation to write. I haven't talked to anyone."
"Justin thinks you're dead," Brenda said. "He said if he doesn’t hear from you by the end of the month he's going to start giving your stuff away to charity."
"Justin can suck it," said Jesse. "Just because he goes to parties for a living doesn't mean the rest of us do."
"He works at a club," said Brenda. "You're his only non-party-boy friend. He needs you to show up to things wearing glasses and ill-fitting jeans and carrying around a copy of Anna Karenina in the original Russian. It makes him look like he's got culture."
Jesse was still not entirely sure how he and Justin had become friends, nor why they were still friends when Jesse had done his best over the last two years of grad school to cut off all human contact with people who weren't actively involved in his dissertation. "I guess I should be grateful," he allowed. "It's nice of you guys to try and keep in touch with me when I'm so hard to get a hold of."
"It is nice of us," said Brenda. "Now show me this hot Starbucks guy and all the hearts he draws on your cups."
"He might not this time," said Jesse, "and also please don't say that so loudly."
Brenda sighed really dramatically. "You need a boyfriend to help you blow off all this stress," she said, and then started giggling. "I can't believe I just said blow!"
Jesse held the door of Starbucks for her, hitching his bag up again. He hoped Andrew wasn't working so he wouldn't have to talk to him in front of Brenda. Plus, thinking about what to say to Andrew had definitely cut into his panic-about-your-dissertation time. Andrew was distracting even when he wasn't around.
"So?" hissed Brenda, at what she probably thought was a quiet volume.
Andrew was behind the counter talking to the only customer in line; a pixie-looking blonde girl who was giggling at him. "Um," said Jesse. "Yeah. That's um. That's him. I'm going to go sit down, please stop staring like that."
"I'm not staring," Brenda said. "Ohh, he's cute. I like his hair. I like his shoulders!" Jesse dragged her over to what he thought of as "his" table. "Why aren't we getting coffee?"
"He's obviously busy talking to someone else," said Jesse, trying to stare hard at his bag so it wouldn't look like he was stalking Andrew, which he definitely wasn't doing. He just liked working at this table. There was an outlet for his laptop and everything.
The pretty blonde girl at the counter laughed delightedly and Andrew blushed. Jesse wasn't great at flirting but he was pretty sure he recognized it when he saw it.
"Who's that?" Brenda asked, frowning.
"I don't know," said Jesse. "We've only had like, two conversations. I didn't get as far as asking him the names of everyone he knows. Maybe he's just the nicest person in the world and I was reading in to it."
"No, no, no," said Brenda. "Tell me again about your deal with yourself?"
Jesse couldn't remember why he'd told Brenda about this in the first place, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't have if he'd slept in the last month. "I was going to check and see if he… Um, if he drew on the cup he was giving me again. Then I'd… Y'know. Say something."
"Like what?" Brenda asked eagerly.
Jesse sank down on the banquette a little bit. "Like… Um. Like, 'Hi, why do you keep drawing hearts on my cups?'"
Brenda squealed and clapped her hands with delight. Andrew definitely looked over at them, and so did his pretty blonde friend, and then she said something and he shook his head, blushing again.
"Shh," Jesse said. He was going to have find somewhere else to do his writing if she didn't stop that. Andrew moved over to make the blonde girl some coffee, which was nice because the coffee machine blocked his view and he couldn't look over and see Jesse dying of mortification.
"This is very high school and also very sweet. I can't remember the last time you went on a date. You aren't going to wear that, are you? No offense," said Brenda, making a face.
Jesse looked down at his t-shirt and cargo pants. "What?" he asked. "This is… These are the only clothes I own."
"I know," said Brenda sympathetically. "That must be really hard. Oh!" She lowered her voice and leaned in like they were exchanging secrets. "So you think maybe he's just nice and draws on everyone's cups? What if there are hearts on her cup?"
"I'll kill myself and find somewhere else to write," said Jesse.
Brenda hugged him, half-strangling him in the process. "You are my saddest friend. Luckily, you're adorable. Before you go on your date can I buy you cuter sneakers? Those are terrible!"
"These are my sneakers from high school," Jesse objected.
"Exactly," said Brenda.
"What?" Jesse asked.
The blonde girl sing-songed, "Thank you, Andrew," and batted her eyes at him. He laughed and looked down and handed her a cup and Jesse didn't have to squint to see that there was a giant heart at the top.
Brenda narrowed her eyes. "Carey," she read. "Who is Carey?"
There was really nowhere lower for Jesse to sink in his seat. "Either she's a girl he specially draws hearts for," he mumbled, "or he just draws hearts for everyone. I'll just wait for him to go on a break before I get some coffee." He tried not to sound especially miserable, although he felt a lot like Andrew had just kicked him in the teeth. So much for the only thing helping him struggle through his dissertation.
"It's a good thing you didn't say anything," said Brenda sympathetically. "He's so cute. I would totally have asked him out, too."
"You ask everyone out," Jesse said. "You asked me out."
"Well you're adorable!" chirped Brenda. "Of course I asked you out. Do you want me to go over there and ask him if she's his girlfriend? I could pretend it's me who's interested."
"No," said Jesse flatly. Another barista came out and Andrew took off his apron, walking around the counter. He glanced over at Jesse and Jesse did his best to be looking at Brenda. Andrew walked out with Carey. "I'm just going to - I have to write, I have a million pages to write before the end of the month. Go away, I'll talk to you in April."
"After your comps you said you'd talk to me again and you never did! I'm going to call Joe and make him actually drag you out of the apartment for my birthday. I don't feel very loved, Jesse," she complained.
Jesse started fishing books and his laptop out of his bag. He wanted to go get a coffee before Andrew came back in and he looked like a dork. "When I finish my dissertation-" he started.
"Then you're going to be freaking out about getting a teaching job," Brenda said. "Promise you'll let me throw you a party after you defend. Justin and I could-"
"Oh god, no," said Jesse. "I don't like parties anyway, and you two would-"
"We would what?" Brenda asked. "Be too awesome for you to handle?
Jesse groaned. "Yes."
"Well I'm going to do it anyway," said Brenda. "Okay, I have to go to class. Better luck next time, sweetie." She kissed his cheek and Jesse made a big deal out of pretending to grimace and not enjoy it. Better her than Justin, he figured. He got up to get a coffee before Andrew came back because he didn't want to have another accidentally flirty conversation.
--
Cup 6
There was a line out the door of Starbucks which was okay; it meant Andrew would be too busy to chat with Jesse, so Jesse didn't have to be disappointed listening to Andrew flirt with other people. He was fifteen pages behind where he needed to be, anyway. At this point revisions were going to have to happen while he was sleeping, except he never had time to sleep anymore.
Andrew looked up and waved when the girl at the register said, "Grande soy latte for Jesse." Jesse started to wave back, decided that was dorky, and stopped with one hand awkwardly in the air. That wasn't how he wanted to look in front of Andrew, so he stuck his hand back in his pockets and slumped.
Jesse tried to wait for his drink unobtrusively, but Andrew saw him through the crowd of people standing around the counter and smiled. "Fancy seeing you here," he said. "How many days left?"
Another woman tried to elbow her way in front of Jesse. "Excuse me, where is my triple-tall no-foam fat free latte?"
"Coming up," said Andrew cheerfully. "I've got a surprise for you," he added, nodding at Jesse.
"Ten days until the final draft is due," said Jesse. His tone couldn't possibly reflect how bleak he was feeling, but Andrew winced sympathetically. "What surprise?" Jesse added, a little suspiciously. In general he didn't like surprises; it was always Justin dragging him unexpectedly to a club, or Brenda buying him jeans that didn't fit and had sparkles on them. Sometimes it was one of his committee members leaving the country.
Anyway it probably wasn't going to be the surprise Jesse wished it was - if only Andrew didn't also draw hearts for cute girls who came through the line - but he let himself get just a little bit excited anyway.
"It's a surprise," Andrew scolded him. "You can't know about it yet!" He handed the huffy woman her complicated drink, and then another man his drink, and then a couple of teenagers their iced drinks. Jesse had no idea how he was making so many different things so quickly. Jesse tried to check and see if there were hearts - there were certainly suspicious squiggles on some of them, although Andrew looked too busy to really decorate. "Here you go, enjoy," said Andrew, and winked.
That was not entirely normal, but he'd giggled and blushed at Carey, so it was probably just Andrew being Andrew. Jesse took his cup and was disheartened to find that while there were a couple of hearts it was mostly just his name and, "Look what I found for you." Jesse frowned and sat down.
Justin had sent him an email about Brenda's birthday party tomorrow night, and Jesse had told him no three times already because he was definitely not leaving his apartment except to write and revise. Justin was hard to discourage, though. "YOU NEED A BREAK, IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!!!!!!" read his email. Jesse sent back, "No," and hoped that would be enough.
His first sip of coffee was so startling that Jesse almost spit it back out. It was wrong, it wasn’t the soy latte he'd ordered. He stared in betrayal at his cup and then looked up at Andrew to see if it was possible he'd made a mistake with the drinks and there was some other Jesse he had a surprise for.
Andrew smiled brightly at him. "I looked all over for that!" he called, and went back to making other people's drinks.
Jesse gave his coffee a second, cautious sip. It tasted familiar, he decided, and looked at the cup again. There were a lot of letters on it, but the PSL jogged something in his memory and he realized what it tasted like. Andrew had tracked down an off-season drink for him and made him a pumpkin spice latte. That was why it had tasted so weird. Now that Jesse knew what to expect it was delicious.
"Oh," said Jesse, mostly to himself. That was a really nice surprise. Andrew was genuinely the nicest person in the world. Not quite the romantic declaration Jesse had secretly been hoping for, but hey, nice. "Thank you!" he shouted. Everyone at the counter turned around to stare and Jesse started to sink into his seat a little bit, but Andrew grinned and waved and that was worth the funny looks.
--
Cup 7
Jesse couldn't keep his eyes open. The screen on his laptop was blurry and kept going out of focus when he tried to read what he'd already written. Something about Polish immigration, he hoped, but he honestly wasn't sure anymore. It might have been about anything. His eyes were gritty and his head was pounding. Justin Timberlake was the actual devil.
Andrew had whistled sympathetically when Jesse walked in, which was nice but not very helpful. Jesse wanted a coffee big enough to lie down and roll around in. He'd gotten the biggest one they had with extra shots and it still hadn't come close to waking him up out of this fog. He should never have gone out the night before, even if it was Brenda's birthday. Even if Joe had gotten Armie to threaten to actually carry him out over his shoulder. Even if Brenda had pretended to cry until Jesse let her pick out a shirt and straighten his hair, and even if Justin had sworn he could go home before eleven, and even if Joe had been buying sympathy your-dissertation-still-isn't-done shots.
Jesse put his head down on the table and tried to make the room stop spinning. He wasn't even hung over, that was the really pathetic part; he was just so exhausted he couldn't get his balance back. There was no way five pages of introduction were going to magically appear by Friday, and if they didn't there was no way he was going to be done revising by Tuesday.
It was mildly busy again, which was nice because it meant Jesse was free to wallow in his own misery and not worry he was distracting Andrew, or being watched by Andrew, or whatever. He was working up the energy to get a second coffee, in case it was more potent than the first. He just felt miserable and achey all over and he wasn't getting anything done but he couldn't possibly justify going home to lie down and nap.
Someone tapped his shoulder and Jesse looked up, blinking blearily. He had a smudge on his glasses from where they'd been squashed against his face. The dark-haired barista who was cleaning the counters handed him a cup of coffee. "Andrew said you look like you need this," she said sympathetically, and wiped his table off before going back to cleaning spills off the counter.
Jesse blinked at the coffee and then looked up at Andrew, who wasn't looking at him. There weren't even pity hearts on his cup today, just a message from Andrew about how wrecked his hair looked and a bunch of sad faces. That was how Jesse felt, too; like a string of sad faces.
Still, Andrew was obviously a great person for bringing him coffee at a time like this. "Thank you," said Jesse, waving his cup around dangerously. He probably needed to pay for the coffee. Right now he just didn't want to move. His laptop beeped accusingly at him because the battery was dying. "Me, too," he told it, wishing he could plug himself in. At least he had coffee.
"You can do it!" Andrew yelled. His coworkers laughed at him, but Jesse perked up a little bit. He wasn't actually sure he could do it, but it was nice that Andrew thought so. He held up his cup again, sort of a dorky thanks-for-that and Andrew waved back, laughing. Then his coworkers started making fun of him and he blushed and went back to making coffee. Jesse didn't want to get him in trouble or whatever, he just appreciated the support.
Jesse took a long drink of coffee and told himself it was only five pages to the end. Well, the end of the introduction. And then just revision after that. It was doable. It had to be.
--
Cup 8
"You look different," said Andrew.
Jesse smiled. "You know what today is?" he asked. Andrew shook his head. "Today is the last possible day I can work on my dissertation. After tonight it's either done or it's not. That's it. Deadline, emphasis on dead."
"Almost finished is a good look on you," said Andrew. There was a bursting feeling in Jesse's chest; if he got done, if he successfully defended his dissertation, if he graduated and found a job, maybe that would be enough of a boost for him to work up to asking Andrew out and not caring when Andrew said no, his type was cute pixie blondes. "Soy latte, yeah?"
"Please," said Jesse.
Andrew rang him up and held his hand out for Jesse's card. "Wait," said Andrew, pretending to pout a little bit, "if you finish your dissertation will you still come in for coffee?"
Jesse hadn't really thought about that. "I… Um, yeah, I probably will," he said. "I mean, it's quiet here compared to everywhere else in New York, and I'll always need a place I can write. Unless I get offered a teaching position somewhere else, but I mean, who's getting teaching jobs these days?"
Andrew pointed at him. "Don't make a joke about taking my job."
Jesse laughed. "I was thinking about it. Why, are you guys hiring?"
"Not people with PhDs, no," said Andrew. "It's not that hard out there yet, is it?"
"What am I going to do with a degree in immigrant anthropology and Polish history?" Jesse asked. "I could be the smartest person in the world and I'd still be unemployed."
"You could be," Andrew agreed, looking down at his register. "Here, I'll… I'll make your coffee. You have to promise you'll keep coming in, though. I get bored." He glanced up at Jesse and bit his lip, and then looked back down again.
"I will," said Jesse. He couldn't decide if this was flirting or not. Did Andrew just flirt with everyone indiscriminately?
"Nearly finished looks good on you," Andrew almost-mumbled.
That was flirting, right? Jesse really should have been able to work it out by his late twenties. He smiled hesitantly at Andrew and Andrew beamed back, but when Jesse got his cup there was nothing written on it, not even his name at the top. Jesse deflated again a little bit.
Justin had emailed him pictures from Brenda's birthday. Jesse looked mildly wasted and also it was always surprising to him how short he looked next to Armie. His face was red and Brenda was hanging off his shoulder, giggling. "Please don't tag this on Facebook," Jesse sent back.
"Too late!" Justin replied. "Is your diss done yet? Can you be fun again?"
"NO," Jesse wrote. "And also no. Aren't you ALWAYS SAYING I'm not fun anyway?"
"I dream big," Justin answered.
Jesse opened his laptop, feeling a little hopeful because it was all almost over. He was also mildly panicked and his heart was starting to pound, but that might have been because he was drinking coffee.
He allowed himself a moment of genuine disappointment that Andrew hadn't drawn hearts or a stupid message on his cup. When he glanced up Andrew was watching him expectantly, so Jesse faked an awkward little smile and Andrew grinned brilliant back. He was making coffee and the steaming milk was so loud it was impossible to hear anything, but Andrew gestured with his free hand in a very confusing attempt at charades. Jesse frowned. Andrew waved his hand around more. Jesse pretended he knew what that meant and nodded politely before he went back to his dissertation.
Jesse typed a couple of paragraphs to flesh out his introduction and then revised the last chapter for a while. Justin sent him another email - "Post diss party, right??? You have a couple of weeks before your defense and I don't want you to freak out. Brenda and I have PLANS."
"I have stuff to do," Jesse typed back. He was aware Justin would never buy that as an excuse in a million years, but it was worth a try.
Jesse revised another page and frowned at his cup. So Andrew hadn't drawn anything. Jesse knew Andrew flirted with girls in line; this lack of flirting shouldn't have bothered him so much. There were scribbles at the bottom, actually, and there was his name, so at least that was something. But Andrew wasn't busy so it still stung a little bit. Jesse started to type again and then with the suddenly clarity being almost done with his dissertation forever brought, realized something.
Those weren't random scribbles on his cup. Words were crossed out so that the hot beverage warning seemed to be about Jesse instead. Jesse stared at it, then looked up at Andrew, baffled.
That had to be flirting.
Didn't it?
Andrew saw him, smiled a little hesitantly, and ducked behind the coffe machine.
Jesse's heart was racing and it definitely wasn't the caffeine. Okay, he told himself. He hadn't drawn hearts. You might still be reading into this. He might be kidding around. He typed an email to Justin - "Help!!! I can't tell if the barista is flirting with me!"
Justin replied almost immediately: "Is he cute?"
"Yes," Jesse sent. "He said I'm hot. I mean, wrote I'm hot. Does that mean something? Also he draws hearts on my cups but also everyone else's cups. HELP. "
There was no immediate answer. Jesse tried and failed to proof read his conclusion.
"Okay, play it cool for now," Justin emailed at last. "JTimb is on the case. I'll go down with you and see. I am an expert flirt-vestigator."
"You'll make it worse!!!!" Jesse sent back despairingly, but Justin didn't answer. Of course he didn't. He was impossible to talk out of anything. Jesse shouldn't have asked him for help, but… Well, Justin did flirt a lot. He'd at least be able to say definitively one way or the other.
Andrew took his apron off to go out on break. Jesse sank a little bit in his chair. He wanted to blurt, "Hey, did you mean it?" but couldn't bring himself quite to doing it without - oh god, so horrible - moral support from Justin.
"Has my life really come to this?" Jesse groaned. A warning popped up on his screen - FOUR HOURS TO DEADLINE!!!! Jesse pushed his freak out about Andrew aside and started up the final read-through of his draft.
--
Cup 9
It wasn't the day after Jesse turned in his dissertation because he slept for forty-eight hours straight, only waking up to pee, turn off his phone when it rang, and yell at Joe for over-enthusiastically shouting at So You Think You Can Dance. But Saturday, when he'd started to decompress but still had twelve days before his defense - a tiny window of sanity - Jesse called Justin and asked if maybe, possibly, he was still up for a trip to Starbucks.
"Am I ever!" Justin crowed, and met Jesse there twenty minutes later. Jesse had agonized over whether he should dress up or not. If he showed up looking fancy after weeks of looking like he'd been dragged behind a bus it might be embarrassing, especially if Andrew wasn't actually flirting. A clean t-shirt couldn't hurt, though.
"Well?" said Justin. "Fill me in so I can sleuth."
Jesse was almost sure you couldn't use that word like that but he wasn't a PhD yet, so whatever. "His name is Andrew, he always writes my name on the cup with hearts or - or um, messages about my hair, I don't know - and one time that I was hot, but… I don't know, he also draws hearts on lots of other people's cups, unless it's super busy. So maybe it's not just me, he might be bored or really nice, and I don't know -"
"Got it," Justin said. "It's not busy now, so let's see if he takes the bait."
"The-"
"I'm the bait," Justin clarified, waggling his eyebrows magnificently.
"Oh - Oh dear," said Jesse.
Justin strolled up to the counter and ordered an insanely complicated drink, all while doing what Jesse recognized as flirting since he'd seen it at the club a couple of times. It looked awfully silly to Jesse but it seemed to work; Justin rarely went home alone.
Jesse walked up after him, trying to find a facial expression that said I'm so sorry about my friend. "Hi," said Andrew, lighting up. Jesse didn't think he was imagining it. "I thought now you'd finished you might not come back."
"Oh. No. I'm here," Jesse said. "I definitely still need coffee, don't worry."
"Good," Andrew smiled. "Good. Excellent. I'm glad. Um." He handed Jesse his coffee; Jesse's name was inside a heart.
Jesse tried not to look like he was freaking out over it as he walked over to Justin. "I know you don't have a ton of experience at this," Justin said, "so allow me to tell you as an expert on the subject: that was definitely flirting."
"Oh," said Jesse. He blushed, which was so stupid; he'd brought Justin along deliberately. "You um. You think so? Because he's like that with everyone, so it's, um. I might just be-"
Justin thrust his cup at Jesse's face. "Do you see any hearts on here? I don't. There are exactly zero hearts on my cup. No messages, no 'hey you're so hot,' despite the fact that I clearly am."
"But - but -" Jesse started, blushing furiously.
"In fact," said Justin said, grabbing Jesse by the shoulders, "I think you should go complain for me. Ask him where my hearts are."
Jesse hadn't had time to plan what the hell he was going to say if he ever decided to actually talk to Andrew about the hearts and cups and possible flirting. "Wait - I - no -" he stuttered, but Justin had already shoved him hard enough to send him stumbling back over to the register.
Andrew looked up expectantly, biting his lip.
All the words Jesse had ever thought about saying to him flew out of his head. Justin, behind him, clear his throat loudly. "I'd uh. I'd like to complain to the management," Jesse mumbled.
"Oh no," said Andrew, looking a little concerned. "Really?"
"Yes, uh, I… My friend Justin, he… Um, there are no hearts on his cup."
Andrew raised his eyebrows. Jesse almost fled, but Justin was standing behind him, not even pretending not to eavesdrop. "Huh," said Andrew finally. "Aren't there?"
"No," said Jesse. His hands were shaking so he held the cup a little more tightly. He glanced back over his shoulder at Justin, who waved encouragingly. "Uh, his cup just says Justin, and mine has… I told him that mine usually have hearts and messages and… He's a little disappointed, so, um, I should probably talk to your manager or something."
Andrew nodded seriously. "Actually, I'm shift supervisor, but I can give myself a stern talking to later, if you'd like."
"I just… Um, I kind of thought… You don't write things on everyone's cups?"
Andrew made a hilarious little, "Oh!" face. "No," he said, as if he were just working something out. "I don't. Do you think I should?"
"Um," said Jesse. The cup was starting to crumple a little under his fingers and his cheeks were turning red. "I, uh. Um. This entire time I've been sitting over there writing my dissertation and uh, I've been operating under the assumption that you um… That you were just being really friendly to everyone in here, and I…" He trailed off.
Andrew started smiling. "I started to wonder if you were ignoring me or annoyed by it or what, but you kept coming in. I guess I'm very hard to discourage."
"Thank god," Jesse blurted. Andrew laughed. "No, I mean, I never… I just didn't think… Um. I'm usually not completely brain dead, I swear."
"I know, I've seen the stack of giant books you lug in here every morning." Andrew was barely suppressing a grin, biting his lip and looking ridiculous and Jesse wasn't sure what to say next. You look hot, too, or maybe, I guess asking you out for coffee would be weird.
Andrew's phone rang in his pocket. "One second," he said, diving for it. "I'm expecting a call, I have to - Hello?" The other girl working behind the counter shouted, "Is it them?" and Andrew waved her off. "Yes? I - Oh god, really? Really? Yes! Thank you, of course, thank you for calling, oh my god, I'll be there." He flipped his phone shut and turned around. "Oh my god, I got the part!"
The other barista shrieked and threw herself at him in a hug that was so fierce he picked her up off the floor. Andrew whooped and spun her around. "It's a proper part in Shakespeare, and it's - oh my god, actual Shakespearean actors, and a proper director, and I've got a leading role off Broadway!" Andrew put his coworker down, glowing with joy.
"I'm sorry, I have to go call my mum, I have to-" he said, looking at Jesse and then the other barista.
"Take your lunch," said his coworker. Andrew threw off his apron, grinned at Jesse, and ducked out the back.
"Um, congratulations," Jesse said quietly, to no one in particular.
Justin came up and put his hand on Jesse's shoulder. "For future reference," he said, "what you were supposed to say there was, 'Hey, that's awesome. Can I take you out to celebrate?'"
Jesse hated it when Justin was obviously right about things. "Oh. That makes sense."
The other barista interrupted, "It's about freaking time. Andrew's been whining about you forever. His next shift is Monday afternoon. That would be a really good time to stop by."
Jesse turned a little red again. Apparently the entire world had known Andrew was flirting with him, and he'd missed it. "I'll be here," he said.
--
Cup 10
It should have been a lot less nerve-wracking to go in and see Andrew now that Jesse was sure he was flirting and wanted Jesse to notice. Instead it was much, much scarier, and Jesse paced outside Starbucks for a little while before he worked up the nerve to push the door open and go in.
Andrew looked up at the door and smiled. Jesse bit his lip and made himself walk forward. He had been up all night running through all the things he could say - and all the things Justin and Joe had suggested, most of which were obscene.
To his horror what he heard himself say instead of anything rehearsed or flirty was, "It threw me off that you drew hearts on Carey's cup." Andrew blinked. "I mean," Jesse explained, because now he sounded like a crazy stalker, "I was… Um, I was looking at the cups you wrote for other people and you drew hearts on this really cute girl's cup and it was… I figured…"
Andrew laughed and rubbed the back of his neck, looking down. "She's my roommate, actually. She'd been, uh. She'd been teasing me about how much I talked about… Well, that I kept drawing hearts and you hadn't noticed and she thought it was really funny and wanted hearts of her own." His cheeks had turned pink. "I'm so disastrously bad at this."
"Not as bad as I am," Jesse insisted. "You wrote I was hot on a cup and I still wasn't entirely sure what you meant."
"I meant you were hot," said Andrew. "Was that not clear?"
Jesse made a helpless, confused face. "I mean, it just seemed so unlikely."
Andrew laughed at him. Jesse shrugged, because he couldn't blush any harder and he didn't know what to say. He bit his lip and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet instead.
"Would you like a coffee?" asked Andrew.
Jesse nodded. "Oh, and congratulations on your role. That's awesome."
Andrew bounced a little. "I'm really excited," he said. "It's going to be amazing. I'm going to be a real working actor in a real production off-Broadway."
"Oh no," said Jesse, putting something together. "Are you going to quit working here?"
Andrew smiled at him as if he'd said something really nice. "Not yet. Eventually, I hope. But you're going to graduate too, aren't you?"
"Yeah," said Jesse. "Eventually, I hope."
Andrew put a cup of coffee on the counter between them and pushed it toward Jesse. "So," he said.
"If there are no hearts on there I'm going to be really disappointed," Jesse said, trying to sound like he was joking and failing because his voice shook.
"Um," said Andrew, bouncing a little bit more.
Jesse turned the cup around. Andrew had written his name across the top with a heart, and more importantly, he'd written his phone number at the bottom.
"I'm sure you're really busy," Andrew began, "with your dissertation defense and all."
"And you're going to have rehearsals and stuff," said Jesse. There was a buzzing noise in his ears and his fingers felt a little numb.
"But uh…" said Andrew, "I thought it would be. Um. In case you-"
"Do you have a break coming up anytime soon?" Jesse asked suddenly. Andrew looked over his shoulder at his coworkers, who had stopped working entirely to watch the two of them.
"I'm taking fifteen," Andrew said. They laughed at him. Andrew took off his apron and threw it at them as he walked around to the other side of the counter.
Andrew stopped a little more than a handspan away from Jesse, looking excited and shy and anxious all at once. Jesse thought about explaining that the coffee cups were the only things that had kept him sane while he was writing his dissertation, or that Andrew was the cutest person who'd ever tried to flirt with him, or that Jesse just didn't get told he was hot often enough to know how to respond correctly. Instead he grabbed Andrew's hand and pulled him closer. Andrew laughed a little nervously and squeezed Jesse's hand in return.
"Thank you for writing hearts on my cup," said Jesse, and pushed up on his toes so he could brush his mouth quickly against Andrew's. Andrew followed him back down, stepping forward properly into his space and ducking his head so he could kiss Jesse. Someone in the store cheered. Jesse started to pull away, embarrassed, but Andrew put his hand on Jesse's jaw and tipped his face up a little and Jesse didn't want to move away from that. He closed his eyes and let Andrew kiss his way gently into Jesse's mouth. Andrew tasted like coffee and he kissed as cheerfully as he took drink orders and Jesse felt dizzy all over. Maybe from not having had coffee yet, or maybe from a lack of oxygen, or maybe it was just Andrew.
"Could I come see your play?" asked Jesse a little hesitantly, when he was finally forced to pull away so he could breathe.
"If I can take you out to celebrate your dissertation," said Andrew.
"That would be great." Jesse bit the inside of his cheek because he didn't want to smile too much. "I mean, if I defend it successfully. Oh god, what if-"
"I'll take you out anyway," said Andrew. "Even if I resign to be on Broadway and you end up working here with your PhD."
"I guess I better not lose the cup with your number, then," said Jesse.
Andrew smiled giddily. "I'd find you somehow, don't worry. Um, so I've got thirteen minutes left on this break, do you want to - Could we step outside, maybe? There are lots of better places to be than here, where I work."
"I'm pretty fond of this Starbucks, actually," said Jesse, tamping down on all the ridiculous, bubbly feelings welling up inside his chest. Andrew squeezed his hand again and pulled him outside and Jesse thought that actually it was okay if they found lots of other places to be together.