Work Text:
i. Espresso (2 shots)
Jemma’s twenty-two, it’s her first week in grad school, and the boy she’s just met is trembling in front of her, stiff tongue chasing words that he cannot form. He wrings his hands, bounces on his heels, wipes away a traitorous sweat. It takes him three attempts to ask her out for coffee.
She’s a heart and an ocean away from the world she left behind, just a too-young girl with too-large hope, and here, halfway across the world, is someone whose accent feels like an almost-home. Of course in the end, she says yes.
Friday night she takes the subway downtown, to a café that plays old vinyl records on a phonograph and smells indistinctly of old books and lavender. It’s the kind of place indie films glorify, but it has the power to bring all your senses to life, and you can’t help but fall a little in love. Temporarily, with the stranger sitting in the corner, perhaps, but mostly with the sudden and acute awareness of being alive.
Fitz is waiting for her at their table by the window, standing there and holding out a single rose with shaky hands. He’s so nervous that she decides to just give him a hug instead. His heart thunders against her ribcage.
When the waitress comes to take her order, she also asks Fitz if he needs anything else. He motions to his latte, “can I please have some s-”
The word hangs unfinished when, by chance, he looks at Jemma. She smiles politely, and his gaze drops.
“S –” he stammers, wiping his hands on his jeans. “S-salt?”
The waitress is taken aback, but she obliges nonetheless. Fitz turns to her, his ears a shade too red. She quirks an eyebrow, “Salt? With coffee?”
He swallows, embarrassed. In the hazy yellow light of the incandescent bulb overhead, he is so achingly young. Something in her chest stirs, and she reaches across their table for his restless hands. Slowly, he looks up.
“Just a pinch of it, though,” he begins at last. “It makes me think of the sea.”
“What about the sea?”
“Just,” his hands finally still beneath her own, “how it is so vast, and how things like coffee and morning commute and desk jobs and lost afternoons seem so small in comparison. And how it is such an irony for the universe to put all these things on the same plane of existence.”
She blinks. He’s got those soft contours, those bright blue eyes that are still untainted, and okay, he’s much too shy and a bit pretentious, but in this café with its fairy lights and Louis Armstrong records, everything feels just sort of right.
So she decides to open up. She trades her little life snippets for his, her childhood on endless stretches of land for his days growing up in the city. She knows he’s most vivacious when he talks about his research, and she knows he’s a hopeful kind of sad when he talks about home. By the time the café closes, he’s no longer that jittery boy at the start of the evening.
He offers to walk her home, and now they’re standing on her doorsteps. The streetlight is bright but the city is gentler in its sleep, and she wants so badly to kiss him right then, right there, in the innocence of a weekend’s half-dream.
ii. Steamed milk (6 ounces)
Jemma’s twenty-four, still adjusting to the brief out-of-body experience she has every time she’s called “doctor,” and Fitz is preparing to defend his dissertation tomorrow.
“Dr. Fitzy!” It’s somewhere around midnight when she calls out while nudging the door open to their apartment, two cups of coffee in her hands.
“Don’t jinx it, Jemma,” he chides, but he’s grinning that foolish grin she loves. “I’m not a doctor. Yet.”
She just rolls her eyes and places the latte by his laptop.
“With a pinch of salt?” he asks.
“Of course, how can I forget?”
“And does that barista Lance still go, ‘sweetheart, did you kiss your boyfriend’s taste buds senseless again?’” His English accent sounds like a constipated Daniel Craig, and she can’t help but laugh as he tugs her down onto his lap.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she groans. “But I didn’t tip him, so that’s quite alright. Besides, I know this is your favorite drink.”
His face softens. “It is. Thank you, Jemma.”
She thinks she sees an infinitesimal wince as he downs his latte.
Or maybe they just need to crumble onto bed and rest their tired eyes, is all.
iii. Milk foam
Jemma’s twenty-seven, at an age where you feel like you should have your life figured out already (and maybe you do), but you still feel lost, suspended, neither young nor old. And you want to run.
Work during the week, obligatory socialization during the weekend. It’s a groove that’s been worn in the surface of her being, this routine she’s established. And though she likes her job in the lab and she loves her friends, she can’t help but feel like that old Louis Armstrong record, spinning on a turntable, spewing the same lines over and over until even the meaningful becomes meaningless.
She tells Fitz this one Sunday morning over breakfast, and he just silently pushes the salt shaker towards her. “For your coffee,” he says. “Remember that while coffee and stuffy offices exist, the sea exists too.”
She does now. So she chooses to do the one thing she’s always wanted: she runs. And she brings him with her.
They take five weeks off work without pay, catch a plane to Heathrow the next morning, and – after visiting their respective family – drive the length of Great Britain for their road trip.
The next two weeks are spent backpacking in Western Europe, sweating through sketchy motels and narrow streets with nothing but Lonely Planet knockoffs to help them. They get kicked out of a terrace café in Paris for loudly arguing about the physics of that dream sequence in Inception, and once again in Barcelona for accidentally making a hand gesture that definitely doesn’t mean “okay” in Spain. In the end, they are content just to drink canned coffee in the park and watch the world flow by.
They’re on a train from Prague to Munich, and the sun is setting. He’s half asleep in the window seat, backpack shoved between his feet on the floor, his hair in disarray in the best possible way. The feeble dusk kisses him on his stubble, and she thinks she might just have gone insane for feeling jealous of the sunlight on his cheeks.
“You know, it’s inappropriate to stare at people while they sleep,” he mumbles with his eyes still closed, though a smile is tugging at his lips. “In any culture, really.”
She scrunches up her nose. “I’m sure no culture would deny me the simple pleasure of looking at you.”
Instead of answering, he just laughs and kisses her forehead.
In Southeast Asia, they go skydiving (which she hates), then scuba-diving (which they both loathe with their every fiber), before agreeing to just rent out an ocean-front bungalow in Bali to avoid going into water altogether. Every morning he wakes her up, and they sip coffee with the sand between their toes and stuck in their crisp laughter. Coffee and the sea. The mundane and the infinite. A coexistence that is both an irony and a miracle. It just makes sense.
So when it happens, it catches even her by surprise.
They’re forty thousand feet above Manila, on a flight back to the US, and he’s just doing something so normal, like reclining the seat or flipping through airline magazines, humming his favorite song with a wispy smile like he knows the world’s best secret. That’s when she just blurts out, “Marry me, Fitz.”
That’s it. There’s no grandiose proposal, no declaration of love. No feeling like stars going supernova or nebulas collapsing. When it happens, like it did in that café all those years back, it just feels right.
iv. Salt (just a pinch)
Jemma’s eighty-one, and she’s sitting in a stiff plastic chair holding Fitz’s hand while he lies on the hospital bed.
“If you must know,” he murmurs, and he has one of those smiles again, the one that contains the world’s best secret. “I never did like taste of coffee with salt.”
She sits up, cocks her head to the side.
“I meant to ask for sugar, that night in the café, but you were so beautiful that I stuttered and said ‘salt’ instead. And I made up the story about the sea and started to drink that god-awful beverage, at the time just to not disappoint you.
“But Jemma, believe me when I say that in more than fifty years of our marriage, that was the only lie I ever told you. Because I looked at you then, under that incandescent light, pouring your heart out and listening and caring, and I knew I would never again need a space probe to witness the staggering beauty of the universe. You make the sea more infinite and the coffee less mundane, and you are worth every cup of coffee with salt I’ve ever had the privilege of drinking.”
He passes away a few days later, but even after he’s gone, there are always two cups of coffee with salt being brewed each morning. Until there aren’t. And all the salt in their blood becomes at one with the sea.