#congrats on your perfect a+ wide-eyed wonder view of the world maybe you could make your own post about it

[hotdrinks]

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[levyfiles]

Omg drabbles! :D word: coffee. genre: fluff. tits out for coffee shop AUs lol. Congrats on the followers!

I gotta tell ya. I fought so hard with this one for what felt like ages, but I had the plot in mind and it didn’t want to let go so that is why A) the wait was ridiculously long and B) you’re about to get 2.5k of a ‘drabble’ lol. I honestly hope it’s all the fluff you wanted because you deserve it. Thank you for the prompt.

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Read it on AO3

Word: Coffee

Genre: Fluff

Word Count: 2628

It was never a thing until their newest trainee asks him politely if he and Shane are dating. Ryan doesn’t mean to snap at the new guy, but it’s just that he doesn’t understand.

“We’re not dating. We’re friends– hardly more than that. He’s just a coworker.”

It feels stupid to explain. Having Shane as a coworker wasn’t easy until it just sort of was. Ryan had hopped in on this job, promised enough time to his video production class and enough pay to help him survive. Shane was the experienced ‘lifer’ as he called himself and he trained Ryan directly and Ryan had always been a quick learner.

Ryan picked up every bad habit Shane could deliver in the course of two weeks and once their manager TJ knew he couldn’t train any of it out of Ryan once it got in, he never scheduled them apart.

“Team Espresso or Mocha Men?” Shane asked him once; this was just after Ryan had broken his first coffee cup trying to get it to sail across the top of the counter the way Shane did. Now they were in it together; Shane had laughed so hard at the sight of the shattered cup, helped Ryan clean it up, stood beside Ryan while TJ chewed him out.

“Anyone who calls me ‘mocha man’ gets his shit kicked,” Ryan had sworn, half jokingly, embarrassed and wondering why the tallest coffee barista in the world was smiling at him like a loon.

Shane got this look on his face. “I like the violence in that. Keep trying to throw coffee across the room, little buddy.”

It gets easy because their bad habits have a rhythm. You’re not supposed to run the espresso dispenser while you’re heating milk but when two orders come at once out of a long line of groggy, grumpy people, Shane will lean right over Ryan and get a firm grip on the espresso handle while Ryan’s got the milk foaming for a macchiato and an espresso cup poised for Shane in his other hand.

“How about ‘Bean bros,” Ryan says one day, tossing him a fresh bag of cream with one arm. Shane barely catches it and TJ over by the register is wide-eyed like he’s gonna snap.

Shane beams at him. Ryan knows being a barista isn’t supposed to be this exciting.

Sometimes Shane taps a set of fingers against his hip to get him to move; there’s no time for words when you’re clocking eight orders every five minutes between 7 and 10 A.M even if the touch lingers and Ryan feels the touch burn until the end of his shift.

“So you and Shane aren’t dating?” the trainee asks again.

“Fuck off. We’re just scheduled together a lot!” he hisses because Shane is just around the corner arranging the basket of muffins and He Will Hear.

Sometimes maybe Ryan notices Shane’s apron is sliding off. Shane’s hips don’t hold up when the knot’s not tight enough and he’s sloppy with his knots when they first clock in at 5 A.M. Ryan doesn’t mind doing it. It’s more efficient to get the best service time if Shane’s apron isn’t falling around his knees.

“It’s Friday, baby!” Shane exclaims when Ryan finishes knotting Shane’s apron for him. That earns him a high-five. Ryan laughs because Fridays are the heaviest rush.

But it’s just… fun.

It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t get it. Shane has to lean over close during the morning rushes; it’s easier to churn out five orders between the two of them, so they’re ready for the next order before it leaves the customer’s mouth. TJ hates watching them work but their service time sliced in half ever since they got their routine down. And Ryan knows what it means to get a routine when you’ve been serving overpriced coffee to a perfect rush of over five hundred commuters every morning for just over two years. So when Ryan bends low, uses the espresso machine, he has no complaint about Shane crowding him.

“Are you asking me out?”

Ryan hears Shane’s voice during his break. He’s in the back eating his second danish, checking his twitter and for a wild moment he thinks the words are for him, but he looks up and peers around a set of boxes. Shane’s on his way back to the front and the trainee (what was his name again?) ogles up at Shane with this wilting stupid smile. “Yeah, I kinda am.”

Ryan puts his phone down, watches and waits.

“Like…a date?” Shane says, goofy smile quirked and soft. Ryan wants to say something. Don’t look at people like that; you’ll give them the wrong idea.

The trainee beams back. “Yeah, figured you might like to see a movie? With me?”

Ryan doesn’t get that. You don’t just start working somewhere and start asking people out willy-nilly. He’d worked with Shane for more than two years– practically going onto three years now and they’d never… Ryan had never…

They weren’t even really friends, were they?

The trainee shrugs, lilting and a little too louche for Ryan’s liking. “Well?”

Shane takes a carefully casual step against the swinging door to the front, like he’s being called away. “I’m really flattered, buddy. That’s so nice, but I got my hands full these days. You’re super cool but maybeanothertimesorreee…”

Shane is gone and the trainee looks as puzzled as Ryan feels. And Ryan does feel puzzled, and, yeah, a little gratified.

Honestly, thought, you can’t just start working somewhere and just ask people out. It’s probably why Shane said no just then. If that was the reason Shane rejected him. Was Shane even attracted to other guys?

Of course the trainee chooses then to round into Ryan’s corner, stopping short at the sight of him. He looks a little put out and Ryan almost feels sorry for him–almost, until the trainee opens his mouth.

“Figures. Why would he want someone else when all he talks about is you.”

Ryan doesn’t finish his second danish. He doesn’t eat for the rest of the day.

It’s a mistake to ask TJ about it. TJ is a manager but absolutely not into the whole interpersonal coworker drama thing. He just wants to the cafe to look good, sell great coffee and pastries, and for the workers to show up and no one to be trained by either Shane or Ryan.

“Has Shane ever said anything about me…?”

TJ doesn’t look up from the deposit slips and money he’s counting. “What, like, in general ‘cause…”

Ryan steps in the office door and shuts it behind him. “I mean, you’ve known him longer than I have. Has he had a girlfriend or….uh, a boyfriend–anyone recently?”

TJ’s brow curves down, lower than it usually does and he aims a quick look at Ryan. “I don’t know, really. He’s worked for me for years and—look, honestly, what does it matter if he’s leaving to start his own cafe next month anyway.”

The news hits him harder than he would ever have expected. When you start a job just to make ends meet you never think about the people that are gonna be there. You wonder if they’re nice; if they’re gonna be annoying or rude. You wonder if you can work with them, but it never really hits Ryan until this solid shaking moment that you could just, really like your coworkers and probably want to break something because they could up and leave so easily..

And just never say a word to you about it.

He meant to come in on monday and act normal. It would have been easier to do that; if Shane didn’t think to tell him he was leaving, then why would Ryan need to confront him about it. They never hung out outside work, never really talked about the future. It was just on-the-clock rhythms and routines, expecting the best from the other person because that’s teamwork and…

Ryan knows acting normal isn’t an option when Shane slides behind the counter where Ryan is restocking the cups and nudges him with an elbow and a wink. His dumb way of saying hi.

Ryan drops the stack of cups he’s holding. They skitter across the floor. It’s only the two of them there. No TJ to yell at him, no trainee to make even a casual glance of Shane’s hand over his while they’re picking up the cups feel so intimate.

“You Ok?”

It’s a broad set of words to come out under the percolator bubbling and the hum of an empty cafe. Usually the cash register drawers growl when they close and click and people talk over each other, but the water boils and the freezers thrum and Ryan stares at the metal sink, sliding the last of its last deep soil brown dregs down the drain from yesterday. “It’s not important anymore. I don’t care…”

“Ryan…”

He’s standing close like the morning rush is in and the smell of him, soaked and heady feels more naked now than it ever did. Ryan is reeling.

“You’re leaving. We have one schedule cycle left and you’re starting your own cafe? And you didn’t even tell me.”

He finally tilts his head back, takes in Shane, arm over the counter shielding Ryan from view behind the espresso machine. He could easily be his normal statue self leaning down over the machine, waiting for the next order but Ryan is there, brimming with the growing ice in his lungs, a sheer feeling of bitterness and hurt.

“Should I have…told you?”

It guts him. “What…?”

Shane’s features are tight. He’s knotted his apron really loose today and the whole thing hangs off him like a lank drape of cloth. “I heard what you said to Mark about us. We’re only scheduled together a lot…right?.” His eyebrows quirk in his usual funny way and Ryan has to straighten up, walk away like he’s restocking the lids now.

Who’s Mark? The trainee? Ryan feels brittle inside. “If you wanna leave, go on and leave. I’m not trying to stop you.”

Shane doesn’t follow him to the lids, doesn’t help him carry any over. He simply stands there and Ryan refuses to look at him.

“I never thought you would,” says Shane.

Ryan calls in sick for the next three shifts, tells TJ he ate some bad fish. TJ sounds more concerned over the phone until Ryan reassures him that it’s not anything he ate at the cafe. The trainee can work for Ryan’s missed shifts; it doesn’t matter. No, Ryan doesn’t care that the trainee isn’t even a trainee anymore.

When he comes back, Shane isn’t there. The schedule has his name crossed out; he left earlier than planned to get ready for his grand opening and Ryan wants to quit right then and there but he’s got bills to pay. Their service time sucks that morning but the trainee-Mark–is doing his best and Ryan has no place to complain.

TJ does. He say it right to Ryan’s face at the end of the day, but he smiles ruefully through it, knows how he sounds. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself, ignore me,” he says, which is possibly the kindest thing he’s said to Ryan since he started working here.

Ryan shrugs.

“It’s easy to feel bad when you lose a good worker,” TJ murmurs, looking back down to the register float and receipts spread over the counter. “But then I think about how many coffee cups the two of you broke doing that thing I told you so many times not to do and I don’t feel half as bad.”

Ryan wonders when coffee became such an important staple to him that he’s still here, chatting with his manager when he’s already off the clock. “I’m gonna go, Teej,” he mumbles.

“Hey, Ryan, listen…”

Ryan is already almost out the door, could have decided he didn’t hear him, but he twists around anyway. “Hm?”

“I’m sorry I made it difficult for you two to date.”

Ryan doesn’t care about the job anymore. He’s about to actually turn over the first tray of cups he can get his hands on. “What?”

TJ must see the look on his face because he raises his hands in an affable surrender. “No, look, I mean Shane running his own cafe is going to cut down your time together, I know, but I had to do it.”

“Do…what?” His own breath feels volcanic. He wishes he’d not been so dumb about this, wishes he had Shane’s phone number or something.

“I had to make Shane promise me he wouldn’t take you with him. I pretty much begged. He wasn’t having it; he wanted you with him but I just couldn’t lose both of you at the same time.”

Ryan stuffs his apron in his locker. He doesn’t know what he’s angry at more; he doesn’t even know if he’s all that angry. Hurt. Yeah definitely. So many moments of quiet with Shane, lunch breaks; Shane’s smile and jokes and the way he just kind of insinuated himself into Ryan’s space, made it normal and Ryan thinks with so much inner cringe of the many times he’d leaned back for steady space, knowing Shane would be around him, passing him things, laughing when they were faster than ever.

God.

The card catches his eye when he’s just about to close his locker door. The hinges scrape back and Ryan snatches it up from under the folds of his apron sets. It’s a business card, raised font, a cute little cartoonish coffee pot with eyes.

Bean Bros Cafe, it says. The address in chocolate brown typeface under the curly silly script. Shane Madej. Owner/Manager.

Ryan isn’t sure what time the grand opening is, but he skips work again, pulls up at the crack of dawn just to be the first to step up to the glass doors etched with the same cartoonish logo in fresh paint. For all that Ryan had felt he didn’t know the guy. The cafe just screams ‘Shane’ in bold colours and climates. The cups look simple, and old fashioned, just like the music streaming from … a gramophone. There’s a huge stack of vinyls right next to it. A simple light bulb hangs above it all, giving almost the most light in the entire cafe.

And Ryan knows what albums are gonna be there before he approaches. Like he has a special own sort of mental stack of Shane facts in his head on their own special shelf and right as he takes in the sight of the warm wood floors and Shane is in all of it.

Shane is also in the doorway to the back room, staring at Ryan like he’s a ghost. Ryan takes a deep breath.

“For the record, I liked you for the longest time and you should have said something too. How was I supposed to know, you jerk?”

Shane’s shoulders sink, a relief in it. His apron is tied crisply and he looks like how coffee in the morning feels. His smile is slow, hesitant, but Ryan is already smiling back; his chest feeling empty and almost hungry in a way.

It’s what spurs him to cross the room, cross the threshold of the counter and grab the waistband of Shane’s apron, and pull him in.

“So, you wanna get coffee sometime?” Shane murmurs against his lips, huffing out laughter that vibes like cinnamon and their own warm quiet mornings alone in the old cafe..

It’s just as well, Ryan thinks. It’s never a good idea to date a coworker.