Work Text:
“He’ll have a cappuccino,” Iris chuckles on Barry’s behalf when all he can do is keep his mouth closed so he doesn’t outright gape. “Also, meet my brother: Barry, this is Len, our new barista – Len, this is Barry, and he usually talks.”
“Nice to meet you, Barry,” the god in the ‘Jitters’ T-shirt smirks and turns away to fill their orders. Barry thinks he’s gonna melt. Or die, because he’s pretty sure now that there must be such a thing as terminal embarrassment.
Iris’ elbow jabs into his ribs and her grin bodes ill for Barry’s future. He knows that grin. It is the same one Iris had when she forced him to ask Ally Jeffries out and Barry ended up with icy, orange sludge dripping all the way to his underpants. He would like to believe that Iris’ judgment of people who are potential dates for him has improved, but he really doesn’t want to test how it would feel if the hot new guy dumped scalding coffee over his crotch.
“You like him!” she hisses in his ear, and Barry would roll his eyes if he still wasn’t mortified. It’s probably obvious to everyone in this room that he’s just acquired a massive crush. Most likely that includes Len, and the guy’s gonna have a hearty laugh about the dork who stared at him like he fell from the stars.
“Please don’t,” he manages to mutter back at Iris furiously as Len turns back with their drinks. He glances at his cup because there’s no risk the cappuccino is going to laugh at him for liking it… and blinks.
“Woah,” he mumbles as he stares at the shapes in the foam. It’s split evenly into darker and whiter halves, with a perfectly symmetrical leaf pattern dividing the two. Barry’s more than a little impressed.
“Like it?” Len’s voice sounds a little amused and maybe Barry’s being a dork, but he can appreciate people’s talents and hard work and he’s not about to hold back praise.
“Yeah! It’s perfect, I lo-“ and then he makes the mistake of looking up and freezes completely as he stares into Len’s gorgeous face. Nope. He can’t do this.
“Thanks,” he mumbles as he stares back at his cup and takes it, slinking off into a corner he thinks is the least visible from the counter. He’s never gonna be able to come back here.
………
He does come back. That’s the problem with having a horrible crush on the coworker of one’s sister – there’s no avoiding the place, and since Iris outright refused to text Barry whether Len’s working on any given day or not, all Barry’s got left is hope.
Of course, no such luck. Len’s right there and he spots Barry immediately as he enters. Barry doesn’t turn back and flee just because it would be rude and cowardly (and Iris would give him shit for years).
“Hey,” he tells the spotless counter, unable to look up. There are only two settings in his brain: retain the ability to produce words OR gawk at the guy who looks like he stepped out of a GQ cover (and Barry’s wet dreams). And he opts for speaking, since that can actually, y’know. Allow him to order. In a coffee shop. Not just reinforce this guy’s belief that Barry’s a creep.
“Cappuccino, right?” Hotness Itself asks, in an amused voice that should grate on Barry’s nerves with the sheer smugness, but instead sounds like wedding bells in his head.
He nods. He figures that’s an improvement – body language is a valid mode of communication. Probably.
And if he takes the two minutes that Len’s turned away to unapologetically worship the incredible, shapely backside stuffed into tight blue jeans and framed by the black apron like a masterpiece it is… well. Len can’t see. Hopefully. He’s careful to avert his eyes back to the counter when Len turns, anyway.
The cup that slides into his line of vision makes him blink. There’s a kitten – an actual three-dimensional kitten with ears and a cute face and tiny little paws sticking up from the foam.
“Oh my god,” he mumbles. “That’s incredible.”
“Yeah, well,” Iris’ voice carries from behind the counter and Barry looks up, because he can look at her as long as he pretends his eyes aren’t being drawn to where Len’s standing with his muscles and arms and lips and eyes. “He wasted like… two dozen perfectly good cappuccinos just so he could master this when he heard you were coming. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”
And then she slaps his ass.
Barry’s mortified, even though it’s good to see that her life mission is apparently to embarrass everyone, not just him. He forgets not to stare at Len, and the guy looks so spectacularly like a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching truck that Barry can’t help but wonder how that look can be hot on anyone. But apparently, it can.
He thinks he sees a blush staining Len’s incredible face but he doesn’t have it in him to wait and see, so he mumbles something like ‘thanks’ and grabs his drink, stalking back to his far, far corner while he waits for Iris’ shift to end.
………..
The art gets better every time Barry happens to go to Jitters and Len’s there. He still can’t look at the guy, but he always takes tons of pictures of every single cappuccino, because come on… there’s memes and more cute kittens (one time there’s actually a cup full of those and how adorable is that). One time, there’s Iron Man, outlined so precisely it looks like it was drawn with a ruler or something. Barry makes a high-pitched fanboyish noise in the back of his throat that makes him want to die, but he still spams his Instagram account with photos of that perfection.
He always looks wistfully at other people asking for cappuccinos when Len’s working: it’s half because he’s jealous and half because he honestly wants to see every single cup that ever leaves the man’s hands, because this is art.
(He also wants to do a lot of other things with Len’s hands but he doesn’t let himself get sidetracked in a place where he could be arrested for public indecency if he maintained that train of thought for too long.)
After a month, Iris sits down at his table after her shift with a huff.
“Barry, this is getting ridiculous. Please just ask him out. Please. This moping is affecting the work morale and it’s getting out of hand.”
“What?” Barry blinks, then frowns at his cup. His cappuccino Death Star is gone and he misses it like a limb already – good think he has forty-seven pictures of it to cry about later. “I sit in the back. Nobody can even see me. How am I affecting your morale?!”
“Not your moping. His,” Iris sighs, and that makes Barry sit up straighter. What…?
“What?”
“God, Barr… we really have to get you a good mirror. So you can see that you’re totally cute.”
Barry blushes, but doesn’t let his hopes rise just yet.
“I doubt guys like him go for ‘cute’.”
“Oh yeah? Do you think guys like him spend countless hours practicing drawing geeky stuff into coffee just to impress someone they don’t like?”
“He doesn’t do it for me,” Barry mumbles mournfully. Iris whips out her phone.
“Since I’m awesome, I knew you were gonna say that. So. I took a photo of every single cappuccino Len’s made during our last two shifts together. Here.”
She pushes her phone into his hands and Barry stares.
At a row upon row of completely ordinary cups of cappuccino. There’s an occasional leafy flourish or a basic stenciled shape, but… there’s no Iron Man. No kittens. No Star Wars. Nothing.
Barry’s heart leaps into his throat.
“Did you really think he does that kind of thing for everyone? It takes time, Barry, we’d go out of business if it took him twenty minutes to make everyone’s drinks.”
Huh. Barry never really noticed that it took so long… probably because he’s been busy staring at Len’s ass. Time well spent, and all that.
He hands the phone back to Iris, and he tries to think about all the reasons why this is a bad idea. He tries to think about Ally Jeffries in ninth grade, but he doesn’t think a guy who can make kitties out of milk foam would be capable of something as despicable as dumping a slushie down someone’s shirt, so he’s probably safe on that front.
If things don’t work out, he can always freeze outside of Jitters while he waits for Iris.
“I’m… uh. Gonna try.”
“Don’t try, just ask him out,” Iris rolls her eyes. “He’s just a guy, Barry. Also he’s a bit of a nerd.”
Barry doesn’t think he’s ever seen a nerd who had arms like that (Tony Stark doesn’t count because he’s fictional), but he doesn’t argue with Iris. He gets up and shuffles over to the counter: it’s a couple of minutes before closing time, so the place is abandoned, apart from the incredibly hot barista currently doing the cleaning.
Barry coughs. It comes out as a wheeze. He tries again.
Len turns, and yup, Barry’s brain attempts to freeze out the speech centers again. Barry struggles against the urge to run.
“Yeah?” Len asks and whips the white dishtowel over his shoulder as he moves towards Barry with a tiny smile. God he’s amazing.
“I,” Barry says, and that’s a good start, but it doesn’t really get him anywhere.
Len sighs, and Barry’s stomach drops because even if Len by some incredible accident thought he was cute, he must think that Barry’s a total moron now, and he’ll never get to find out because he just blew his chances and-
“Look,” Len speaks. Barry imagines about twenty different lines that all boil down to ‘you’re not totally hideous, but you’re also a bit creepy with all the staring, so please get your sister off my back’. “I have a feeling you don’t like me much. But Iris said something, and… if you don’t want to, feel free to say so. Or shake your head. Just… here goes. Would you like to go out sometime?”
Barry’s pretty sure his jaw just hit the floor. He furiously presses all the imaginary buttons in his brain to get it to function and let him talk, but it takes a while for him to get back online from the shock.
Meanwhile, Len’s frowning and his body language’s closing up as he crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just-“
“Fuck yes. Anytime. Now. For real.”
Of course he couldn’t be smooth about it. Even if there were really multiple dimensions in the universe, there’s probably none in which Barry Allen doesn’t put his foot in his mouth at every opportunity. He cringes at his response, but then Len’s face transforms into this huge, dorky, adorable smile and Barry knows that if he faints right now, the emergency people will find no heartbeat because his heart’s just left his chest and jumped all the way over the counter to this huge incredibly hot puppy. And Barry’s brain must be seriously scrambled if he’s thinking ‘hot’ and ‘puppy’ in one phrase, but he’s beyond caring.
The GQ barista just asked him for a date. And he didn’t immediately say it’s a joke.
“Now’s good,” Len smiles even wider.
Barry’s not sure how the date’s gonna go because he still can’t get out a meaningful sentence around Len, but Iris gives him thumbs-up when the guy turns around to finish the clean-up. Then she silently walks out, waving at him and mouthing ‘go for it’.
Turns out that furiously making out for an hour in a deserted coffee-shop totally counts as a first date.