Here’s another silver lining: this insane influx of customers has stripped me of most of my inhibitions. Why not tell the hottest man I’ve ever seen to take me on a date? If he’s on one of those shows, the jig will be up when they have to shoot in the new location.

I don’t really believe the theory about the prank show. I’m starting to, slightly, but it’s the heat. And the line that’s still out the door. It has nothing to do with reality.

Dash smiles, a half-smile that nearly does me in right there in terms of propriety. “About what?”

He’s so close to me that it would take practically no effort to reach out and tug his shirt over his head. With our backs turned away from the customers it’s almost like we’re in a private room. 

“Hello?” The man at the counter calls, knocking his knuckles on the laminate. “Coffee?”

“It’ll be one moment, sir,” Dash says over his shoulder, and then he’s back. “You said about that.”

I snap back into this bizarre and strangely sexy reality. “Right. About that—we’re probably going to run out of espresso.”

“Didn’t that happen yesterday?”

“Unless another delivery comes before close, it’ll happen again,” I intone. “Also, the lids.”

“What about them?”

“We’re going to run out of lids for small cups.”

His eyebrows fly up to his hairline. “How do you not have enough lids?”

“I don’t handle the ordering.”

“But you handle telling people you’re out of lids, right?”

“People are sometimes too busy to place the right kind of order. They are in Florida right now. We are in New York.”

“We are in the strangest coffee shop I’ve ever—”

“Hello?” says the man again. 

“We’ll come back to this later,” says Dash. “Ready?”

“Break,” I say, then laugh out loud. We’ll be returning to the issue of supplies sooner, but he’ll see. He’ll see.

* * *

We move into a kind of slow-motion dance behind the counter. Dash plays the part of the stoic dancer who stands in one spot, and I play the part of the coffee fairy, flitting to and fro behind the counter, grinding beans, making lattes and cappuccinos, pouring iced brew. We run out of that once every fifteen minutes. By three o’clock, we’re out of ice.

Normally I fight off the frustration one wave at a time.

“Why is it like this?” Dash says, leaning close while the grinder is running, covering his words. 

“Like what?” I shrug. “This is normal.”

“Stop.”

“Because Lisa set up the deliveries five years ago and hasn’t updated them.”

“You could update them.”

“I can’t. These are all people who will bother her, and she doesn’t need that.” Dash’s eyes flick around the shop. “I can manage.”

“Not if people keep coming in like this.” I catch a flicker of something in his expression that I can’t quite put my finger on.

“Looks like they’re going to.” They’ve been coming and coming all morning. Is something going on in Lakewood this weekend? If it’s this huge, how could I not know about it? I guess there are more people wearing vests with tons of pockets, but maybe that’s the style now. I don’t know.

It’s hard to care too much when I keep having to squeeze by Dash’s muscular body every time I go to grind more beans. The brewers are working overtime, putting batch after batch into the carafes, but the people keep coming.

I start to get bold. One trip across the store, I brush against him. It’s a pain to suck it in and hold my breasts away from his body every second of the day, so I let them touch. A little. Nothing else. Nothing more. 

He doesn’t seem to notice.

The next time I go over to the industrial grinders, I linger another moment. The cameras will love this. I could be in better form—the sweat soaking in at my hairline surely isn’t the stuff of dreams—but Dash is dogged at the register, taking orders one after the next.

I stop at three fifteen to give him a crash course in running credit cards. Those get swiped through a separate slot above the keyboard, but otherwise, it’s a simple process. Do I lean a little too close? Yes. Does he pull away? No. No, he does not.

“And then you hit the big green button,” I say.

Under his breath, he murmurs something that ends with your button.

I lean closer, pretending to peer at the cash register. “What did you say?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “I said, you are driving me slowly insane, Ellery.”

“What’d I do?”

“Look,” he says, running a finger over the register’s keys. “I will take you to dinner. You have my word. I never promise something I’m not going to follow through on.”

A pleasant heat rises in my gut. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be flirting with Dash, who has appeared in town with no prior history. He could be anyone. He could be after anything. Worse yet, I owe him one. People have been streaming in and out of Medium Roast all day, and not one of them offered to help. He’s gone above and beyond. He’s even wiped down the counters and, somehow, swept away some of the dirty dishes between others. “That’s good to hear,” I say, then pat him on the shoulder and stand up. I’ve got to get back to my post.

He takes the next order and follows me. The air crackles between us. I know that if we were alone, he wouldn’t keep six inches around us, but there are people on every inch of the floor space. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

“I know,” I say over the whine of the steam wand. “I asked you.”

“And you are driving me crazy,” he says, his voice even lower. “If you brush against me one more time, I’ll be forced to take drastic measures.”

I want to know how drastic those measures would be. Dash reaches around, his arm hidden behind my body, and puts one hand on my waist, right above my hip. “Drastic measures,” he repeats.

I behave myself until the store closes.

It’s a near thing.