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Murphy’s favorite coffee shop is a bit of a shit hole. It’s gritty, like the coffee, often dirty, and doesn’t have any of the quirkily named lattes, indie music, or overly large arm chairs that the cafes people his age seem so enamored with. He wouldn’t even have known it had a name if a new barista hadn’t said “welcome to the Dead Zone” in a tortured voice one Tuesday morning.
But he can get a large coffee for a dollar and doesn’t have to worry about any of the baristas becoming friendly with him or some shit because they all seem to hate themselves and their jobs.
Turns out what he does have to worry about is pickpockets.
It’s the Monday after the clocks go forward for daylight savings, which means there’s the doubly unfortunate circumstance of it still being dark out when he leaves his apartment and that he’s more exhausted than usual.
As if knowing he’s in a particularly bitter mood, the universe doesn’t bother to stop the girl behind him in line from bumping into him, her eyes glued to her phone. She doesn’t even apologize, looking up at him once before seemingly changing her mind about the coffee, and walking back out into the alley the hole-in-the-wall shop is tucked into. A harsh wind slams the door shut behind her, making the bell over the door let out a jarring ring. The petering of rain starts a moment later.
It’s mildly off putting, but he doesn’t have a high enough opinion of people to be very surprised, and wouldn’t have thought about it anymore if he hadn’t reached for his wallet in order to pay and found his pocket flat and empty.
“Shit,” he says, curling his fist in irritation before turning on his heel and running out in hopes of catching the thief.
The door of the shop closes behind him and he walks out into a deluge. The kind of wind and rain that turns your umbrella inside out and drenches you to the bone. He’s outside for hardly a moment before the rain has his hair matted down completely, the drops sticking to his eyelashes and blurring his vision. But despite the cold running down his neck and and seeping into his ratty sneakers he stops dead in his tracks in the alley outside.
The thief stands a few paces in front of him hunched over at the waist, the curve of her spine visible through her soaked t-shirt, framed on either side by identical raised scars as thick as his pointer finger that run straight from her shoulder blades to the small of her back.
For a moment he thinks she might be having a seizure, she’s shaking so much, but then she releases a rattling scream into the side of her closed fist and straightens herself. When she turns over her shoulder to look at him a clap of thunder rings in the sky like a punch to the back of the head.
Her long hair is plastered to her cheeks. Small, out of place tendrils curling over her forehead and sticking in the corners of her mouth, making the black tattoo on one side of her face even more complex. The hand she had screamed into is shaped oddly, two long fingers and a smaller thumb, like the foot of a bird.
There’s a twitch in her feet, a nervous edging away. He expects her to make a dash for it, which would suck because he’s a horrible runner at the best of times, not to mention when the ground is slick with water. But despite her finicking she doesn’t move.
She’s still shaking, but he recognizes it now as a shiver. The tremble of her jaw doesn’t seem to dampen her though, there’s something hot and burning behind her eyes that isn’t extinguished. In part he thinks it’s a challenge. But if there’s anything he likes in this world than mysterious, morally corrupt girls are pretty high on the list.
“I’m kinda broke, but if you give me back my wallet I’ll buy you a coffee,” he says. She doesn’t expect that, obviously, because something in that gaze cracks. Surprise is a good look on her, softens something in the set of her mouth. Suggests a smile.
“Who are you?” She asks, like she can’t place him.
“John Murphy. My license is in there if you want to check,” he says with a vague point and passive-aggression he can’t suppress.
“I believe you,” she says. “I’m Emori.” There’s a shift in her shoulders, less tension, an effort to change the narrative between them. She pulls the soaked strand of hair from her mouth. “Why are you out here?” As if to emphasize her point a rush of wind slants the sheets of rain, batting against them as if to suggest no human should be in this weather.
“I’m not afraid of some rain or petty crime,” he says with the expectation that Emori would take offence, but instead she meets his eyes with a sort of sharp understanding. As if she could know how unafraid of crime he is. “Why haven’t you ran?”
She doesn't answer the question. Instead she reaches into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out his wallet. “Okay,” she says.
“Okay?” He repeats, confused.
“Yeah,” she says, “you can buy me that coffee.” For a moment the rush of water in the gutters overhead drowns out all other sound, even the persistent beat of his heart in his chest. She hands back his wallet without further prompt then pushes past him to go back into the shop. He has no other option but to follow her.
The worker behind the counter glares at them as they drip over the floor, which Murphy thinks is a little unfair considering that they don’t wash them anyway.
“Uh, I’ll get another large coffee too,” he orders, the one he hadn’t been able to pay for still sitting on the counter.
He slaps down four quarters and a dollar bill that’s a little damp on the top edge, taking the two coffees and handing one to Emori.
“You know, I could like decaf,” she says, taking the first bold black sip without hesitation.
“You also could have not robbed me,” he says, sitting at one of the shop’s three tables to wait out the storm, popping the lid off the coffee so he can stir in half a packet of sugar and cool it to a reasonable temperature.
He does a mildly good job containing his surprise as she takes the chair opposite him. “What?” She says, studying him with dark eyes that might have a veneer of something softer collecting light in the corners. “You’re the one who asked me out to coffee.”
It’s a good thing he hadn’t been drinking because he probably would’ve scalded his throat choking on his coffee. “This isn’t a date.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I have work in ten minutes.” And it’s a ten minute walk. Not that he’s moving. Whatever, the bookshop doesn’t get much traffic and his boss probably won’t notice he’s late anyway.
“What a coincidence, me to.” Her eyes fall to his wallet which he stupidly left sitting on the table. He tries to replace it in his pocket with nonchalance, but there is very little finesse in the way he snatches it up.
“Look I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but lifting people’s wallets right before they have to pay for something can’t be the best call,” he says as a distraction.
The lids of Emori’s eyes fall slightly as she drinks her coffee. “Well, people don’t usually notice me.”
“No way,” he says, not with sharp eyes like hers.
“Or they purposefully ignore me, I guess.” That gives him pause. He can understand how people turn away from things they deem unworthy of attention, that are past the point of ‘saving’.
“Why?” A curiosity, maybe tainted, forces him to ask.
Her hands had been wrapped around the coffee, soaking up its warmth, but now she pulls the interesting one away to tuck under the table. “If I told you, you wouldn’t look at me the same.”
“Maybe. Then again I might surprise you.” He’s not exactly a basket of muffins either. Emori seems to consider this for a long time. When she answers it seems almost anticlimactic.
“I’m a harpy.”
“Huh.” Is she calling herself a nag, or is that a gang name? There’s really no way he can respond to that without sounding like a complete idiot.
Emori blinks. “Do you know any Greek mythology?”
“I read Percy Jackson.” Well, the first book. His dad encouraged him to read them when he was younger because the main characters had dyslexia, like him, but that still required reading which to him defeated the whole purpose. He kinda wished he’d finished them, seems they would have been helpful right about now.
Emori presses her eyes closed. “It’s not like that.” When she opens them they’re reflective, softly wondering. “Well. I don’t really know what it’s like. This is what I was born as. But the world and people in it decided I was stained and unwanted centuries ago. And now they hardly ever see me. I don’t see the fault in stealing something back from them.”
“Screw ‘em. That’s pretty badass,” he says, despite his remaining confusion, and Emori almost laughs. He’s never been one for easy forgiveness but he doesn’t care at all about almost losing all his cash anymore. Not after seeing Emori’s smile.
“You think theft is badass?”
“I told you I wasn’t afraid of petty crime. Ask me about that time I burned down half a pharmacy when I was seventeen.”
Emori does laugh that time. “That’s a felony, and seems a bit more thanpetty.”
She’s right of course, he’s not so far removed from those burning embers of revenge to not feel them under his feets every now and then.
“I had my reasons, but courts of law don’t care.” His jaw ticks. “I’m the bad guy.”
“Guess we have that in common,” Emori says, like she couldn’t care less. He holds out his drink for her to clink against his in cheers. His coffee is a little sweeter than he usually takes it, but he doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s the company.
At this point the storm has passed, as quickly as it sprang up, leaving only wet pavement and puddles as evidence of its onslaught.
“I have to go,” he says, because getting his job was hard with the criminal record, despite the nepotism, and he can’t risk losing it. Even if he’d like to remain here until he finished his coffee at least. “But I come here every morning around this time,” he tells her as he prepares to leave. She can make do with that information what she wants. Personally he has a preference for what she should do, but it’s not as if he’s going to tell her that. Emori offers a nod.
“It was nice meeting you, John.”
“You too.”
Murphy doesn’t look back at her as he leaves, but that doesn’t mean he stops thinking about her either.
He’s late for work, but as predicted Bellamy doesn’t seem to care, hunched over his laptop in one of the chairs that’s supposed to be reserved for customers. Murphy’s not going to call him out though, especially since he’s been reaping the benefits of Bellamy’s distraction. For the most part the fact that Bellamy’s master’s thesis has been eating his brain is great for Murphy, however it also does mean he hasn’t been great for conversation. But Murphy’s been presented with perhaps the only instance that his Classics major will ever be useful in real life and he wouldn’t want to deprive him.
“Hey, do you know anything about harpies?”
Bellamy finally looks up from his laptop. “Sure. Greek and Roman mythological creatures that appeared in Homeric poems. They’re half woman, half bird. Usually really ugly and fierce. Associated with bad weather. Why do you care?”
“Cause I met one,” he says, but with enough sarcasm that Bellamy thinks he’s fucking with him and returns to his work with an eye roll. After getting set up for the day he mans the register, searching google in his free time to confirm Bellamy’s review, and for the first time finds a Wikipedia page to be wildly inaccurate. Because Emori might be a bad omen, or represent the destructive nature of wind. But she definitely isn’t ugly, or a stain of humanity. All learning about this does is make him want to see her more.
The next morning he doesn’t even feel like he needs the boost of caffeine from his coffee; expectation has him wide awake. He does a fair amount of loitering in the shop when he arrives and Emori isn’t there, reading the board as if he’d ever differ from his regular order and stopping to retie his shoe twice. But it pays off, Emori slipping into the shop with just one customer in front of him.
“Hey,” he greets her, hands deep in his pockets, fidgeting with the crinkled receipts in their depths.
“Morning,” she says, then cuts in front of him and orders two coffees before he realizes it would have been his turn. “Now we’re even,” she says, handing him the coffee, and for a second he fears she felt obligated to pay him back, but then she smiles and clinks the lids of their drinks together and he feels more at ease.
“Thanks,” he says, “I like this kind of payback. I’m more used to the punching variety.”
Emori smiles, which was the goal. He only has fifteen minutes before he has to leave again, and he wants to use it well. The time goes by too fast though, Emori is easy to talk to, sharp and funny with an understanding ear. He wants to get her number, but forgets because he gets so caught up in a story she tells about the advantages of power outages for pickpocketing.
But she’s there again on Wednesday. They each pay for their own coffees this time, but that doesn’t stop them from talking. And it doesn’t take any convincing for her to walk with him to work, just so they don’t have to say goodbye just yet.
“It’s finally starting to feel like spring,” he notes, even though he doesn’t particularly care about good weather.
“Not good news for me,” Emori says, even as she tilts her head back when a warm breeze has her hair flaring behind her. “April showers, and all.”
“Didn’t think you had any problems with rain,” he says, thinking back to Monday.
“Storms play with my moods,” she admits, and it’s the first time she’s mentioned anything relating to the harpy thing since Monday. “They...spark something in me. Emotions that well up and make me want to act.”
“That why you screamed outside the shop?”
She nods. “I don’t know how you didn’t run seeing that.”
“It takes a lot to scare me. More than a pretty girl screaming.”
“I suppose, Mr. Ex-Con,” Emori says, the fluttering of her hair not quite able to hide her smile.
“Yeah, prison wasn’t fun,” he says. It was the boredom that got him most of the time. No objective, no purpose. The same grey walls everyday. All he could do for fun was run his mouth, and that usually just landed him in solitary, which was worse. “I think having nothing to do but be with your own thoughts is the scariest thing, sometimes.”
They both think that over for a moment in silence, the rustling of loose leaves against the sidewalk filling the pause.
“That’s been my whole life, really,” Emori says. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
He agrees, and they don’t stop. It becomes a habit, like a caffeine addiction.
Everyday the pair of them lean against one of the back tables, both of them unwilling to commit to sitting down. It would feel stupid if it didn’t allow them to be closer together. And the physical proximity promotes emotional closeness too, both of them revealing things that don’t seem possible to share in only a collection of quarter hours.
It’s a foggy morning when Emori tells him about a surgery she can’t remember.
“I think I used to have wings,” Emori finishes and he remembers the scars on her back.
“I wish I could see you fly.”
“Maybe when I’m all grown up I’ll be a pilot,” she jokes, her gaze turned to the window.
“You totally could be.” Emori doesn’t know what to say after that.
She strikes him equally speechless just the next day, after finally building up the nerve to tell the arson story. One of flaming anger at overcharging, corrupt medical institutions that take advantage of the weak and susceptible.
“That makes sense,” Emori says without judgement when he finishes. “I might’ve done the same.” A personal understanding shines in her eyes that he’s never received. She gets him. A weird calm settles for a moment, all the world holding its breath. He finds the silence a little shattering.
She walks with him to work often too, and one day with the pair of them caught in a conversation about the almost legitimate job he didn’t know she had, involving a lot of scavenging and flexible hours, if bad pay, he invites her in, squeezing out as much time with her as possible.
“I hate to say it, but I do have an eye for shiny things,” Emori says as she follows him in, her eyes investigating the small shop. The rich green arm chairs and oaky bookshelves.“For instance there’s barely any in here.”
She situates herself on a free table, flipping through some of the discounted books by checkout, reading passages from a guide to camping as if it were high literature. It’s highly entertaining, and he learns quite a lot about boating.
Bellamy comes in a little later, interrupting. “Murphy, don’t forget we have a delivery at eleven. You’ll need to do the stocking,” he says as he takes off his coat.
“Sure,” he replies, then looks to Emori whose face seems to have fallen a little bit. He’s noticed the way she’s so cagey around other people and he can’t say he likes how others force her into it. “This is Emori, I was just showing her around. That’s cool right?”
“Oh,” Bellamy says, his eyebrow furrowed. “I didn’t see you there. It’s nice to meet you.” He comes over to shake her hand and that does a lot to ease Emori. Although Bellamy spends the entire exchange looking mildly confused. “No problems as long as you get your work done,” he adds to Murphy.
“I’m probably too much of a distraction,” Emori says, hopping off the counter after Bellamy’s gone into the back room. “I’ll see you tomorrow, John,” she adds before he can protest.
“John?” Bellamy questions, sticking his head out from the back room once the bell over the door rings indicating Emori’s exit. Murphy rolls his eyes. He should have known Bellamy loves too much to not eavesdrop.
“Yeah, I like her. Don’t make it a thing,” he says, pretending to occupy himself.
“I won’t,” Bellamy says. What a liar. “You just don’t usually like people.”
“Well I like her,” he says. At this point it’s easy enough to admit, even if she isn’t technically a person. He should probably do something about it. Tell her.
Bellamy shrugs and pretends to let it go while Murphy resolves to ask her out to something more substantial than coffee.
That’s still easier said than done, even if he had done it without much forethought the first time, which Emori considered a date. So it follows that they’ve had a date every morning for the past two weeks, and asking to go out to one in the evening shouldn’t be a big deal.
He keeps putting it off though, enjoying the extended amount of time they’re spending together on Sunday, his only day off. Even if it consists of him watching Emori steal from people, customers and workers of the Dead Zone blind to her slinking movements. It’s almost graceful the way she moves about the shop, picking wallets off of people. She even replaces the them sometimes, and he bets more than a few of those people don’t even notice they’re short a twenty. It’s like watching an old lady knit, dexterous and deceptively easy. Soothing in a way too, although he might be alone in thinking that.
She comes to sit by him when she decides she’s done for the day.
“How do you do that?” He asks, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that he had been so attentive to the sway of her body, the work of her hands.
“And here I thought you were a criminal,” Emori laughs. “I could teach you, so long as you don’t be a hero.”
“A hero? And here I thought you got me,” he says, agreeing to the idea easily enough even if that’s not quite what he was referring to. He meant how all these people fail to notice her, how they don’t take one look at her and decide that she’s someone worth knowing. She had mentioned it the day they met but he finds it honestly baffling.
Him having the only pair of working eyes in the world is a pleasant change though, and he doesn’t complain as she takes his hand and drags him into the alley. Some kids drew a hopscotch in chalk just a little to the left of the door and it does a lot to liven up the little street.
“It’s honestly pretty simple,” Emori says, stepping into his space once they’re a short distance back from the shop. Her hands rest light on his stomach before wrapping around his sides to rest on his lower back. And he knows he should be paying attention for when she slips her hand in his back pocket, but his heartbeat thuds in his throat and all he can think about it kissing her.
For a moment her own gaze flicks to his mouth, her own lips parted, and he thinks this whole lesson was a pretense, but then she takes a step back from him, his watch dangling between two fingers. He expects teasing but Emori’s smile is forced rather than triumphant.
“That wasn’t really a lesson,” he says after exhaling long through his nose. He takes the cheap watch back focusing on attaching it in an effort to calm himself down.
“Okay,” Emori concedes softly. She stands next to him again, but not as close. “The trick,” she begins, reaching up to rest her hand on his shoulder, “is to touch them somewhere obvious and distracting so they don’t notice you swindling them. “ She pinches his waist in emphasis. “And of course you need a light touch.”
She doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands after that; they fall off him slowly. A breeze picks ups around them, strong enough to force Emori to take a step closer to him. He reaches out to catch her hand, even if there wasn’t a threat that she might fall.
“Do you wanna get dinner with me?” He breathes, overly aware of his grip on her, and ensuring it’s not too tight.
“Yes,” Emori says with immediate agreement, “but I hate restaurants.”
“I can cook,” he tells her. “You could come over.”
“Okay,” Emori says, then, “Now?”
He has no idea what’s in his fridge, doesn’t remember the last time he cleaned his place. For all he knows he left his dirty socks in the middle of his living room.
“If you want to, yeah.”
“I want to.”
It just happens that they hold hands as they walk back to his place, it’s natural, good. And every few seconds he finds himself looking over to the smile on Emori’s face, until he gives up on looking away. They’re taking their time, small steps, and he’s wondering when he can ask to kiss her when a fat raindrop lands on the center of his forehead. Then another, on his arm, then hundreds, drawn from the heavens like a showerhead was turned on.
“Where did that come from?” He asks, looking up as if for an explanation. He and Emori are both soaked in seconds, but despite the suddenness he can find no reason for complaint. It’s a warm rain, early for the season. The kind that makes rainbows.
“I-I think it’s me,” Emori says, and he turns to her.
“What?”
“Remember when I said the storms affect my mood?” He nods and there are drops of water beading on Emori’s face, and she’s so beautiful. “I’ve been thinking for a while that it works the other way too. And I’m so happy right now. It had to come out somehow.”
He smiles because she’s happy, because he makes her happy, and he doesn’t have to figure out how to ask to kiss her, because they meet in the middle.
She kisses like a torrent and tastes like water, but there’s so much more to her than the storm. Her skin is warm and he has no regrets about the way their wet clothes cling when he pulls her closer. His fingers trace the scars on her back and she shivers against him, his shirt twisted in one of her hands. The other traces the line of his jaw, brushing off water collected on his stubble. He laughs into her mouth at the feeling. They kiss for longer than they should in public, but it seems impossible to separate, like the wind is pushing them together. Besides there’s no one but them out in this storm, and neither of them want to move.
They do, eventually, but it rains all night.