Chapter Text
The lunch rush was never a large part of Helen Truax’s day. She’d take the stairs down two floors from her yoga studio and stand in the long, winding line that typically trailed all the way out the door from the family-owned cafe. She’d order the same thing most of the time, a chai tea latte— hot in the winter and iced in the warmer seasons— and then retreat back up to her studio to set up for the next class. It was monotonous, sure, but she thrived in it.
Helen loved simplicity more than most would expect from a twenty-three year old, especially her. Honestly, she shocked herself with how much she sought out the incomplex. Her fiancé was enough excitement between the both of them, and honestly, she let him have his glory days without too much fight. He was three months away from becoming co-CEO of Insuricare, and the perks that would come alongside that promotion would support them through the nose.
Sometimes she wondered how much different she would be if she were extraordinary in some way that she was proud of. She spent so much of her life trying to prove herself to her father that her mother’s preachings of taking care of her wellbeing first went mostly out of the window. She knew that she wasn’t special— and maybe that was what made it so easy for her to believe her dad when he stressed the importance of finding a successful man to latch onto. Fear of inadequacy and failure were both a hell of a drug, this much she knew.
But she had Bob, Bob who was charming and protective of her, who was a popular jock in college, and who was on his way to running with the big dogs.
This was what she should have wanted, according to her father. Sometimes, though, Helen wished she had listened to her mom instead.
Helen was ten years old when her mother gave her the talk. It wasn’t about sex, no, just about men in general. She dressed the conversation up as some large reveal, a secret only allotted to the very special.
She looked Helen in the eyes with her own deep brown ones, wrinkled at the corners, and said in her familiar southern drawl, “Baby girl, there’s gonna be a lotta men after you when you’re not too much older. They’re gonna want to take what’s here,” she reached forward and cupped both of her youth fully round cheeks, “and break it down until it is nothin’ but bones that they can dress up and own for themselves.”
She said this all with confidence that scared Helen, but she listened with rapt attention because this was her mother, and her mother was never wrong.
“Don’t you let them. The only thing I want for you as my child is your freedom, sweetheart.”
Those words still haunted Helen every time she looked into Bob’s cool blue eyes. She felt free, but she had a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t what Veronica Truax had meant all those years ago. Helen had gotten engaged to her father— in the sense that Bob was also a working man dedicated to the greatness that came with success, who would do whatever it took to seize the top and set himself apart from mediocrity— and her mother looked at her when she found out with eyes that buried her disappointment so deep it radiated from the core of her.
But John Truax would have never allowed Veronica to ruin the evening spent around glasses of expensive wine for the ladies and scotch for the gentlemen, and so Helen’s mother kept her mouth shut.
That was around the time that Helen finally understood. She had seen it all before, but only then did it call itself by its name.
Her stomach was queasy for the rest of the night.
Five months into the engagement, Helen got promoted herself to the head yoga instructor in the facility. She was proud of that achievement, even when Bob had shamelessly expressed that it didn’t matter because she wouldn’t be there for long anyway. Her call for celebration was met with the placating congratulations given to a child who has done something cute rather than anything of substance, and she saw her mother behind her eyelids every time she closed them.
The lunch rush was still a monotonous part of every day, but she started noticing someone there that she normally didn’t see. This woman was drawn tall and pulled taut when she ordered her drink, and Helen watched her sit down at a large table that had just cleared of its occupants and dump bags full of stuff across the surface. Finally, she sat down, popped the cap off of her coffee, dumped half of whatever dark liquid was in her silver flask into the recyclable cup, and drained half of the mixture.
She was far less tense after that.
She paid no mind to the patrons of the cafe who shot her strange, semi-disapproving glances at the amount of space taken up, nor the absurd number of schematics and tools occupying their places in a sort of organized chaos around her. Helen stuck around a bit longer that first day to rubber neck, as one does, and found herself intrigued by the short haired stranger who mixed alcohol in her coffee, and used wearable magnifying glasses to work on something so minuscule no one could dream to figure out what it was.
She thought about that stranger even after she was wrapping up her last class of the day, and then again as she was laying down to sleep in an empty queen sized bed. Bob was working late again, and while Helen was sure he would be alright eating leftovers once more, something that nagged deep in the pit of her stomach told her she was letting him down— not carrying her weight.
She laid in bed and thought of her mother and father’s relationship when she was growing up in Georgia. Many times she had looked back on her childhood with fond memories, but more and more recently she was looking past that warm and inviting curtain of happy recollections, and instead looking at what she had thought to be what she wanted for herself in a marriage when she grew up.
She had the gut feeling that she had missed quite a bit of her parents’ relationship growing up, and that knowledge made itself a home sour and thick at the back of her throat. She fell asleep with prickling behind her closed eyes, and tried to convince herself that, if she stopped thinking about it, eventually those feelings of doubt would pass.
Helen was wrong.
She had predicted that the strange woman sitting in the family owned coffee shop was a one time rarity, a fluke of timing that would never allow for them to cross paths again.
She was wrong, and she was so grateful for that fact.
She saw this strange woman again every day that she went down for her lunch break for two weeks, and in that time, she had also made herself start to take notice of just who else she had been in same space as every day. She imagined that it was unfortunate to coexist with so many people and never stop to even take note of their faces, so she made it a habit to people watch— though most of her watching was taken up by the tinkering woman at the giant wooden table.
There was a businessman with deep brown skin and graying dreadlocks that hung in a low ponytail to the center of his back who stood poised near the exit as he slowly sipped at his drink before dropping it into the nearby recycling bin and straightening his suit jacket before leaving the shop. He came in every day at 12:15PM on the dot, shortly after Helen would find herself entering.
There was a teenage girl who frequented the cafe in solitude, seemingly young enough to attend the large high school down the street that likely had off-campus lunch options. Helen found herself checking back to look at her every once in a while, her cool and put-together demeanor reminding her of the girls she envied herself in high school.
Pressure from her father to perform above her own capacity at the time had made her far too ridden with anxiety to make proper, long lasting friendships— let alone have the self-assured aloofness of being comfortable with herself in public or private places alike. Eventually, looking at the girl made her a bit too somber for her tastes, and she stopped watching all together.
“Hey, are you gonna order, or what?”
Helen glanced up immediately from where she had partially zoned out around the general area of the line. She was close enough to make people wonder if she was in it, but far enough away that she could just as likely not be.
That’s not what startled her though, it was the stranger— more specifically, it was the pretty, short-haired one who unabashedly tinkered in the cafe and who Helen couldn’t keep herself from thinking about no matter how weird she found it.
She had the subtle scent of expensive perfume, and her deep blue eyes were strikingly different from Bob’s. These had metal in them, a slightly off-putting hardness like they hadn’t shown warmth or the fleshy underbelly of softness in quite some time. The look alarmed her, and while her gaze continued to take in the other woman’s bags beneath her eyes and the absurdly nice tweed coat around her shoulders, she backed away immediately.
“No, I’m not in line. Sorry.”
“Mm,” the stranger hummed as she made her way around Helen’s frozen body to stand behind the patron ordering currently. Helen had to stop herself from turning around and staring— or worse, ask for her name— so she did the only thing she could think of in the moment. Not having ordered a single thing for lunch, she turned on her heel and exited the cafe into the tiled common space and went straight for the escalator that would take her one floor up to her studio.
Her cheeks shouldn’t have been flushed— it wasn’t as if she had sprinted up any steps— but they were, and Helen was ill-prepared to deduce a good reason other than the fact that she was simply embarrassed. That had to be it, she was embarrassed over a simple social faux-pas, one so simple it could hardly be called that without being overbearingly dramatic, but she called it such anyway.
Every time since then, Helen made weird eye contact with this woman across the cafe every time she was waiting in line. She hadn’t meant to keep looking over in her direction. It was moreso that she wanted to check and see if this strange woman was looking back at her, and thus creating the illusion that Helen was the one with the staring problem.
If she was being honest with herself, though, she was the one with the issue.
Thankfully, being honest with herself was something that Helen had yet to learn how to be— and thus, she reasoned that she was the one being looked at.
Nearly a week following their incident near the register, Helen decided to take matters into her own hands. She had spent too long dancing around the proper etiquette and rules for social interaction that told her the last thing she wanted to do was make this woman uncomfortable— but she felt now that she had a right to know what was just so damn fascinating about her person to garner so much attention.
Drawing herself up tall, she walked over to the large wooden table— long since collectively decided by the patrons that it belonged to this woman exclusively— and stopped with her arms crossed tightly across her torso. As if that would protect her from what she was about to do next.
“Excuse me, do you have a problem?” Helen asked.
Blue eyes slowly dragged themselves up from behind the magnifying glasses worn around her head, making her gaze look like pinpricks when she looked up to Helen. She reached up to pull them off of her face, revealing her tired visage and an eyebrow raised in both utter disbelief and confusion.
“Excuse me?” She asked, setting the wearable tool down to the surface of the table, and with it all of her other tools that Helen couldn’t have named had her life depended on it.
Deflating alarmingly fast, Helen decided to get it off of her chest before she lost her nerve entirely, “I noticed that you keep staring at me every time I come in here, and I wanted to know if there was a problem.”
Her voice was soft, too soft for the words that were said with it, and she cursed herself for wilting so easily beneath this stranger’s perplexed and annoyed gaze.
“If you’re referring to all the times I was looking past you at that cheesecake in the display box that I’ve been craving for the past two weeks— don’t worry. No one’s looking at you, Red.”
Helen felt her face suffuse with heat at the idea that she might be wrong, and she pursed her lips against whatever choice words she had been planning and thinking of in the brief moments she had been talking herself into confronting the woman in the first place.
“Oh, um… I’m so sorry to have assumed—“
“Don’t worry about it,” the woman murmured, already reaching back for her glasses and fitting them over her head once more. Helen lingered at her side for a moment longer than what was necessary, wanting to apologize again or explain herself in a way that would make this complete stranger think of her as less of an asshole.
She figured she had already pushed her luck for the day, and instead took her chai tea latte and went back upstairs to her yoga studio.
Bob got his promotion within the month instead of three, and looked at Helen as if she were missing one too many screws when she mentioned wanting to keep her job.
“I just don’t understand why you would keep working there when I’m finally going to be making enough to support the both of us,” he sighed, sitting down beside her on the couch and looking at her with cool blue eyes that were starting to make her chest hurt.
“Because, Bob, I like working— I like my job ! I don’t wanna sit around at home all day and be a housewife like my mother.”
That was the first time she had ever admitted it out loud, and also the first time that Bob had flinched back from her as if she had insulted him.
“What do you think I worked my ass off for, honey? Do you think I kissed asses at Insuricare and busted my balls every morning from nine to five so that my wife could work ? I did this for you, Helen! For us ! I want to be a good husband, isn’t that what you want?”
God, and when Bob said it like that, Helen had half a mind to think that her mother had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He just wanted to take care of her, was that a bad thing?
A nagging voice in the back of her head asked her what happened when it was time to settle the debt she owed him for doing as such, and the possibilities made her queasy.
If she stopped to think about it, it was exactly how her mother got roped into being the kept-thing, seen and not heard, there to decorate, and fuck, and bear a child, and raise her the way her father said he wanted her raised.
“Bob, I want to be happy,” she murmured much quieter than before.
“Do I not make you happy, Hel?” His hand was warm on her knee, and she remembered a time when that used to make her stomach flip with butterflies.
Naturally, perhaps guiltily, Helen reassured him, "Of course you do."
But she also realized, maybe for the first time, that her answer was a lie.