Work Text:
"Shit, that stings."
It's been a long week for him.
Sinclair arches his back to stretch like a cat. His spine pops. The thread knotted around his finger is deep, cherry red, almost like fresh blood; so visceral that Sinclair can taste it in his mouth, but perhaps that is just him, now. It's soft to the touch too.
He barely feels it now when he closes his hand around it as it whips past him and nearly into his eyes.
It's awfully inconvenient to deal with when you're trying to take a shower.
He works the shampoo out of his long hair with one hand. The other trails the string absently, following its slack curve down his chest, past his hip, out through the tile wall and presumably down three floors and across the street and god knows where else. He stopped trying to trace it at seventeen. It goes where it goes. The universe, apparently, has opinions.
He has opinions about the universe's opinions.
He rinses off, rolls his shoulder where yesterday's deadlifts have lodged a complaint, and steps out.
Demian is in the hallway, scarf on, keys in hand, wearing the expression of a man who knows something.
"Where are you off to?" Sinclair says.
“Somewhere. Heading to that cafe again?” Demian asks, flashing that vague, crooked smile he gets when he’s clearly thinking something he won’t say outright.
“Yeah. Need to finish that paper before it eats me alive.” Demian’s smile deepens, almost sly.
“Good luck with the strings today. They can be real chatty when you least expect it.” He doesn’t wait for a reply, just slips out with a lazy wave.
“Excuse me?”
But Demian's already gone, door clicking shut behind him, and Sinclair is left standing in the hallway in a towel with water dripping off his nose and shoulder length hair.
Fine.
The cafe is called something in Italian that Sinclair has never bothered to translate. It has exposed brick, antique clocks, and a quality of light that makes everyone look like they're in a film about being young and slightly sad. Sinclair likes it. He has his corner table. He has his order. He has, by now, a nodding acquaintance with the afternoon barista and a mutual understanding that he will not be spoken to until the coffee arrives.
He drops into his seat, pulls out his laptop, opens three tabs, and starts actually reading his notes.
The string runs across the table with a thug.
This is new.
He looks up.
Behind the bar, tying her hair back, without any particular care about how it looks—and somehow, because of this, looks extraordinary—is a woman he has never seen before. Tall. Quiet. She's got ink up her forearm and she moves through the space behind the counter as if she commands it, which apparently she does now, because the usuals behind the counter cannot be seen.
The string runs directly to her pinky and ties there, neat and total.
Sinclair closes his laptop.
He stares.
She does not look up.
He has been coming to this café for eight months. He has sat at this table, studied for his exams, eaten an embarrassing quantity of their croissants, watched the seasons make their slow argument outside that window, and never once—not once—has the string so much as twitched in this direction.
He thinks about Demian's smile.
He is going to kill Demian.
He goes to finally order his coffee.
"Same as before?" she asks. She must have glanced at what he had handed, where his usual is presumably logged with his name on the loyalty card. She hasn't checked, though. Her eyes haven't moved from his face.
"Please," he says. Then, because he is young and has, at various points in his life, been called charming, though he remains personally skeptical: "I don't think I've seen you here before."
"No," she agrees.
"Are you new, or—"
"Yes."
She turns to make the coffee.
He leans on the counter. The string loops between them, cherry red, decorative, maddening. She moves through it like it isn't there, because for her, it isn't. His hand tightens around it reflexively, an old habit. The pull of it sits low in his chest, familiar and unwelcome and—
Well.
Slightly welcome.
"I'm Sinclair," he offers, to her back.
"Ryoshu," she says, without turning around.
He tries the name in his mouth, silently. It fits like it was always meant to be there, which is the most profoundly annoying thing that has happened to him this week, and this week, he pulled a muscle and nearly failed a quiz.
She sets the coffee down in front of him. Their fingers don't touch. The string, between their pinkies, goes taut.
"Y.S.L." she says.
"I—" He stops. Recalibrates. "Interesting acronym. You Stare a Lot?”
Something shifts in her expression. Not a smile, exactly. The suggestion of one, held in reserve. "Mm."
He picks up the coffee. Holds her gaze for a beat. "I'll be at the corner table if you get bored."
"I won't."
"Then I'll be there anyway."
He goes back to his table, heart beating a little fast. He opens his laptop. He reads approximately zero words of his notes for the next forty minutes, because she is incandescently, inconveniently, unfairly compelling, and the string between them sits in his peripheral vision like a lit fuse.
He is not going to tell her about the string. That is not a conversation he is prepared to have. ‘Hello, the universe has apparently made an inevitable decision regarding the way we should spend the rest of our lives, I've known for the past ten minutes but please continue making my coffee for the foreseeable future.’ Absolutely not.
He will simply be here. Every day.
At some point she comes to clear the table beside him and doesn't look at him, he says, without entirely meaning to, "Do you like working here?"
"It's fine." She stacks the cups. "You study here every day?"
"When necessary."
"What are you studying?"
"Literature. Minor in..." He pauses. "It's a very practical degree."
"Hoh. Sounds useless," she says, and there it is again—that held-back thing, the almost-smile—and something in his chest does something he'd rather it didn't.
"Profoundly," he agrees. "I'm very good at it though."
She looks at him, then. The string between them goes incandescent for a moment, red as a stoplight, red as a warning, red as something that isn't a warning at all actually—
"Hm," she says, and takes the cups back to the bar.
He stays until close.
He doesn't mean to. It just happens, the way certain things happen, like how the string happened at fifteen and never went away—quietly, with no explanation, integrating itself into his life until suddenly it was just the usual for him.
He's packing up his bag when she comes to wipe down the table next to his, even if it didn't need a wipe down. It's just the two of them now. The lights have gone gold and low.
"You're still here," she says.
"I was on a roll," he says. He was not on a roll. He wrote four sentences and drank three coffees and thought about the particular way she ties back her hair.
She glances at his screen. The four sentences. She says nothing, which is somehow worse than anything she could have said.
"I'll go," he says.
"You were going to anyway."
"Right." He zips his bag. Stands. The string pulls, gentle and insistent, toward her. He ignores it the way he always does, which is to say: imperfectly. "Same time tomorrow?"
She's already wiping the next table, raising a brow. "I work here…?"
He laughs, a short, genuine one, caught off guard by it. "Right. Okay. Fair."
He hoists his bag onto his shoulder. The string trails behind him as he heads toward the counter—because if he is leaving, he is getting one more coffee for the road, and that is a completely normal thing to want and has nothing to do with the pull sitting low behind his sternum.
She's already moving back behind the bar when he gets there, reading him before he opens his mouth.
"One more?"
"For the road," he says.
She doesn't comment. Just starts the machine. He leans on the counter again, watching her work, and the thought arrives fully-formed before he can stop it: she is going to be very annoying to be in love with.
He clears his throat. "So you're new and you already have the closing shift?"
"I asked for it."
"You like closing?"
"I like quiet."
He opens his mouth.
"You," she says, without looking at him, "are loud."
"I haven't said anything for the past thirty seconds."
"You're loud," she repeats, in a tone that forecloses debate.
He grins. He can't help it. "Ryoshu."
"Sinclair."
"You remembered."
"You said it six times."
He did not say it six times. He said it maybe three. He watches her pour the shot, efficient and unbothered, and he makes the executive decision, because he is twenty-five and occasionally an idiot, to say: "You know—" He lifts the hand with the string on it, waggles his pinky once, meaningfully, "—I think this is fate."
She looks at the hand. Then at him. "Your pinky?"
"Symbolically."
Ryoshu says nothing. She writes something on the cup. Slides it across. Her face is perfectly neutral.
He picks it up. Meets her eyes. Does, god help him, a small wink.
She raises a brow, unimpressed, and turns back to wipe down the machine.
Sinclair walks out whistling, cup warm in his hand, feeling unreasonably good about all of this. The night air is cool. The string tugs pleasantly. He takes a long sip and it's excellent, she makes it exactly right, which is not helping anything—
He looks at the cup.
Nice try. N.T.E. Come back tomorrow though.
Sinclair stops walking.
He reads it again.
Then he laughs, loud enough that a passing stranger glances over, tipping his head back in the empty street, because of course. Of course she did. The string between them hums, red and warm, and somewhere behind him the café light clicks off.
He's going to marry that woman.
She's going to make him work for every inch of it.
He starts whistling again, louder this time, and goes home