Caffeinated

Karina Webb finished the last roast at 9:40 on a Thursday night and turned off the drum. She was twenty-nine, had been roasting coffee for six years, and she knew the smell of first crack like she knew her own name. She knocked the beans into the cooling tray and listened to them tick while they cooled.

The office was empty. Or it should have been. BrewCode took up a converted warehouse in Oakland, roaster and green coffee sacks on the main floor, a few desks shoved along the far wall, and upstairs a glass conference room and a little break room with a futon nobody admitted to sleeping on.

She bagged samples, wiped down the drum, and went to lock the front door. The electronic lock blinked red at her. She pressed her code again. Red.

"Come on," she said. "Not tonight."

She tried the code three more times. Then she tried holding the door and pressing the manual bolt, and the bolt did not move. The lock had jammed in some half-locked state, the way it did sometimes, except usually it fixed itself and tonight it did not.

She pulled out her phone. No signal. Of course no signal. The warehouse had the cell reception of a bunker.

She stood there a minute, then remembered she had not actually checked the whole building. She climbed the metal stairs to the second floor, and that was when she saw the light under the break room door.

Steven was asleep on the futon.

Her husband, thirty-one, a software engineer, was lying there in a wrinkled shirt with his laptop open on his chest, his mouth slightly open, one arm hanging off the mattress. She had not seen him awake in what felt like a week, even though they shared a bed every night.

"Hey. Hey, wake up."

He startled and knocked the laptop half off. "What? What time is it?"

"It's almost ten. What are you doing here?"

He sat up and rubbed his face. "The release. The one I told you about."

"You told me you'd be home for dinner."

"It blew up. The fix ships at six in the morning, and I didn't want to wake you coming home at three, so I just stayed."

"So you came here and slept on a futon instead of texting me."

"I did text you."

She checked her phone. "There's no signal in this building, Steven. You know that. You've complained about it for two years."

"I sent it from the parking lot. It didn't go through, I guess."

"You guess."

"Well, I'm sorry." He closed the laptop. "Why are you yelling?"

"Because the front door is broken and my phone doesn't work and the security company doesn't pick up until morning. We're locked in. Both of us. All night."

He blinked at her. "The lock thing again?"

"Yes, the lock thing again. Except this time it decided to stay broken."

He got up, stretched, and followed her downstairs. He tried the code, tried the bolt, tried the code again, and then just stood there with his hand on the door like he could talk it open.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. There's a couch upstairs."

"I know where the couch is. I just watched you drool on it."

"I wasn't drooling."

"Whatever. I'll call the security company from the one spot by the window where I get half a bar."

She got half a bar. The security company's line said, in a cheerful recorded voice, that an agent would be available at six a.m. She called Steven's phone from six feet away just to hear a human sound. It rang. He answered. They looked at each other across the room and he said, "Hi," and she hung up.

"So," he said. "I'll make coffee."

"You're locked in a coffee warehouse, Steven. There's coffee everywhere."

"That's what I'm saying."

He ground beans by hand because the grinder was on a circuit she'd switched off, and he made pour-overs at the cupping table like he was back at the trade show in San Francisco where they'd met four years ago. He'd been a skinny white nerd wandering the wrong aisle. She'd been the only Black roaster at the whole show, bored behind a sample table. He had asked her what made one coffee taste like blueberries and another taste like dirt, and she had talked at him for twenty minutes, and he had asked her out before she even finished.

Now he handed her a cup and sat across from her and neither of them said anything for a while.

"You've been weird," she said finally.

"Me?"

"You. For like a year. You come home, you eat, you sit with the laptop on the couch instead of on your desk like a person with a desk, and you go to bed at ten. You kiss me like you're kissing your aunt. What is that?"

"Wow."

"I'm serious. Just answer it."

He turned his cup in his hands. "You really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Fine. I've been living in that headspace because I don't know where I stand with you anymore. You're always tired. You're always at the roaster or thinking about the roaster. I ask about your day and you give me a weather report. I try to touch you and you've usually got an armful of green bags or you're asleep by nine. So I stopped asking. Happy?"

She put the cup down harder than she meant to. "That's your answer? You stopped asking?"

"What was I supposed to do, Karina? You turned me down three weekends in a row in March. I remember the count. Do you?"

"Because I was roasting for the competition! Because you never once offered to help or asked what it was costing me, you just noticed I was tired and took it personally!"

"I took it personally because it was personal! It was me you were saying no to."

"And you never once said, hey, you seem wrecked, let me carry some of this. You just sulked in the bedroom with your code."

"Sulked." He laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. "Okay. Sure. I sulked. Meanwhile you look at me some days like I'm a roommate you got assigned."

"That is not true."

"Isn't it? When did you last look at me like you wanted something from me? Anything?"

She opened her mouth and nothing came out, because the honest answer was she could not remember, and that scared her more than the fight did.

"That's what I thought," he said quietly.

"You don't get to do that. You don't get to make it all mine. You've been a ghost, Steven. You're here and you're not here, and I got so tired of reaching for somebody who flinched that I stopped reaching. What was I supposed to think? That you still wanted me? You gave me nothing that said so."

"I was afraid," he said. "There. Is that what you wanted to hear? I was afraid you didn't want me anymore, so I figured I'd stop finding out."

The roaster ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the walls the old warehouse pipes knocked, the way they always did.

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," she said, and her voice cracked on it. "I married you."

"Yeah, well. Fear isn't smart."

"No. It isn't. I've been afraid of the same thing, if you want to know. I kept thinking, he used to look at me like that and now he doesn't, so it must be me."

He set his cup down. "It was never you. God. It was never you, Karina."

He got up and came around the cupping table, and he touched her arm, just her arm, fingers light on her sleeve, and she did not pull away. She looked at his hand and then at his face.

"Tell me to move and I'll move," he said.

"I'm not going to tell you to move."