Roast & Reveal

Okay, so let me tell you about the spider. No, wait, first you need to know who I am, because otherwise this whole thing reads like a lunatic's diary.

My name is Liza Rollins, I'm forty-three years old, and I clean the Copper Bean Roastery down by the water. Sweeping floors, scrubbing the tasting counter, hosing coffee grounds off the patio. Glamorous stuff. The pay is small but the view is enormous, and in a little coastal town like ours that's basically a fair trade.

Now the spider.

Kent Dyer is forty-five, drives the tow truck for the garage next door, and comes into the roastery every morning like he owns the place. He doesn't. Zeke owns the place. Zeke is thirty-eight, married, and too nice for his own good, which is why he lets Kent loiter.

Anyway. This morning, Wednesday, I opened the storeroom door and a spider the size of a small dog dropped down on a thread right in front of my face. I screamed. I mean SCREAMED. Dropped my mop, knocked over a bucket, the works. And then the spider bounced gently against my nose and I saw the fishing line going up over the door, and I saw Kent leaning in the doorway with his coffee, wheezing with laughter.

"It's rubber!" he finally managed. "Oh god, Liza, your FACE!"

I stood there with my hand on my chest, heart doing about two hundred beats a minute, and I made myself a promise right then and there. Kent's birthday was that night. Zeke had been planning a surprise party for him at the roastery for two weeks. Fairy lights, patio, the whole deal.

"Kent," I said, picking up my mop with all the dignity I had left, which was none, "you are going to regret this."

"Oh, I already regret it, I can't breathe," he said.

"You have no idea," I told him, and I swear he winked at me on his way out. That wink was his funeral, he just didn't know it yet.

Now, some background on me and Kent, because you're going to wonder. We've been circling each other for a couple of years. Flirty arguments, coffee slid across the counter, the usual slow dance of two single adults with too much pride. The last serious thing I did with a man was a barista named Paulo when I was twenty-two, and that was a summer and then a goodbye, so my dance card has been mostly empty. Kent's has too, as far as I know. He dated some festival organizer when he was twenty-three and has been single ever since, which the town gossips find suspicious. I find it useful.

The point is, I know Kent. And Kent gets flustered by exactly one thing, and it's not spiders.

So here was my plan, and I admit it was petty and a little public, but he started it. Zeke hired me to do a final cleanup before the party, which meant I'd be at the roastery hours before anyone arrived. That was the job, paid and finished by five, and everything after it was strictly between me and Kent. Which meant opportunity.

Which brings us to the dress.

I own a red wrap dress that I bought for my cousin's wedding and have worn exactly once since. It's low-cut and it wraps loosely, and if you don't tie the inner strap, well. Things can become visible. That's all I'm going to say about the dress for now, except that I packed it in a tote bag along with a shawl, and I changed in the back storeroom at five in the afternoon while the roasters ticked and cooled.

The storeroom smelled like burlap and green coffee, which is honestly one of my favorite smells in the world, and I stood there in my bra and panties doing the math on my own sanity. Was I really going to do this at a party full of coworkers? At a party for the man I was punishing?

Yes. Obviously yes. He dropped a spider on my face.

I put on the red dress and I did not tie the inner strap. I left my bra folded on a sack of Ethiopian beans as a little flag of surrender, except it was a flag of war, really. I pulled the shawl over my shoulders, checked myself in the storeroom mirror, which is cracked down the middle and makes everyone look like two people, and decided both of me looked fantastic.

By seven the patio was glowing. Zeke had strung fairy lights everywhere, and Ingrid, who is forty-one and my best friend and the fastest barista on the coast, was behind the counter pulling shots for a crowd. Ingrid knows me better than anyone. When I told her my plan, quietly, while she steamed milk, she laughed so hard she had to turn the steam wand off.

"You're going to flash him? At his own party?" she whispered.

"Not flash exactly. More of a... hint," I said.

"A hint of what?"

"A hint of consequences."

She wiped her eyes. "Liza, I love you. I want a front-row seat. Also, what happens when he likes it?"

I hadn't gotten that far, honestly. I told her I'd worry about that later, and she gave me the look she gives customers who order decaf, but she promised to keep Zeke busy at the far end of the patio when the moment came. That's friendship.

Kent arrived at seven thirty, right on time, and got properly ambushed by thirty people yelling surprise. He jumped, genuinely jumped, which I enjoyed immensely given the morning. He wore a blue shirt and looked annoyingly good, and he made the rounds shaking hands and laughing while Zeke pushed a beer into his hand.

I stationed myself across the room. The roastery's main floor is big, all the roasting equipment pushed to one wall for the night, and from my spot by the tasting counter I had a clean sightline to Kent and he had one to me, if he bothered to look. Men always bother to look eventually. It's physics.

Zeke climbed onto a crate around eight and clinked his glass with a spoon. "Everybody! Speech! Kent, you old sea barnacle, forty-five years." Everyone cheered. Kent raised his beer and made some joke about barnacles that nobody heard, and the room settled into that warm sloppy party hum where everyone's holding a drink and talking too loud.

Perfect conditions.

Zeke launched into a story about the time Kent towed his own truck by accident, and the crowd roared, and in that exact pocket of noise I caught Kent's eye across the room. He raised his glass at me. Cheeky. Friendly. Recovered from nothing because he thought he'd won the morning.

I smiled back. Then, very slowly, while holding his eyes, I let my shawl slide off my left shoulder.

The dress, untied as it was, followed the shawl halfway down my arm. There was nothing under it. The fairy lights caught my bare shoulder, my bare side, the whole scandalous outline of a woman with no bra on at a birthday party, and I watched Kent's face go from smug to confused to absolutely, gloriously stunned.

He choked on his beer.

"Kent?" Zeke said. "You okay, man?"

"Fine." Kent croaked. "Great speech. Great speech, Zeke."

I slid the shawl back up, slow as honey, and took a delicate sip of my wine. Across the room, Kent set his beer down, then picked it up, then put it down again like he'd forgotten how objects worked.

Ingrid appeared at my elbow with a tray she wasn't carrying for anyone. "He's the color of the roaster," she whispered, delighted. "What now?"

"Oh," I said, "now we see what he does."

Kent lasted about four minutes before he came looking for me. I counted, because Ingrid was timing me from the counter with her phone held low like she was checking soccer scores. Four minutes for a man who has known me for years and has never once looked at me the way he was now looking at me. Not bad. Honestly, better than I expected.

I had drifted out to the patio by then, where the fairy lights were doing their best work over the water. The sea was doing that thing it does at night, all black and whispery, and the party noise stayed behind me at a comfortable hum. I found a spot at the rail with a view of exactly nothing important, and I sipped my wine the way I imagine women in movies sip wine, slow, thoughtful, the glass held just so. I was not thinking about anything. I was performing not thinking about anything, which is a different thing entirely, and Kent Dyer walked right into it.

"Liza," he said, coming up beside me at the rail. "You're being weird tonight."

"Weird? Me?" I swirled the glass. "I'm at a party, Kent. I'm drinking wine. I'm looking at the ocean. What could be more normal than me?"

"You know what you did in there."

"I made a toast with my eyes? How rude of me."

He laughed, and it came out crooked. That crooked laugh did something I hadn't planned for, but more on that later, maybe, if I ever admit to it. "The shoulder thing," he said. "The shoulder thing was a thing."

"What shoulder thing?" I took another sip. Long one. Over the rim of the glass I watched him watch me. "You've been at the punch, haven't you."

"There's no punch. It's beer and Ingrid's espresso martinis."