The Roast Mistake

So here's what my Tuesdays looked like for the past five years. Lock the roastery at 11:00, walk past The Foxhole without going in, get home, eat cereal standing over the sink, sleep, repeat. I'm Evelyn July, thirty-four years old, single, and I roast coffee for a living in a college town called Ashwood. And I was bored out of my skull.

That night I locked the door at 11:02 and stood there on the sidewalk with my keys in my hand and thought, what am I even doing? The street was quiet. The Foxhole had its neon fox flickering in the window like always. Sticky floors, cheap good beer, grad students crying into their pints. I'd never once gone in.

"Hey! Roaster girl!"

I turned around and there was this guy leaning in the bar door, grinning at me like we already knew each other. Tall, dark hair, forearms out of his rolled up sleeves. Bartender build, if that's a thing.

"Do I know you?" I called back.

"Sort of! Magnus. You know Daisy? She used to work the counter at your place?"

Daisy, yeah. She'd left the café a year back and I hadn't thought about her in months. "Daisy's friend. Okay, yeah, hi," I said, walking over. "She talks about you. Says you pour a decent whiskey."

"Daisy lies about everything but that part's true," he said, and held the door open. "Come on. You just closed. You look like you need one."

Did I look like that? I guess I did. "One," I said. "Then I'm going home to my cereal."

"Cereal at midnight? God, Evelyn, we need to talk about your life."

"It's a great life," I said, and honestly I half believed it.

He bought me a rye whiskey and himself a beer and we took the corner booth because it was that dead in there. He was funny in a fast way, the kind of guy who's already three jokes ahead. I found out he's thirty-five, that he knows my old roommate's crowd from college days, that he's been at The Foxhole four years and before that he did a stint in Denver he doesn't like to talk about.

"Why not Denver?" I asked.

"Bad year. Bad girlfriend. Bad bowling league." He shrugged. "Anyway. You. Daisy says you never come in here. Five years across the street and you've never once walked through that door?"

"Never," I said. "I'm a creature of habit. It's my whole brand."

"That's the saddest brand I've ever heard."

"I know, right?" And I laughed, a real laugh, the kind I hadn't done in a while. Because that was the entire issue, wasn't it. Same walk home, same cereal, same Tuesday. I turned thirty-four in March and I could've told you exactly what my thirty-fifth birthday would look like too. Roast, lock up, sleep. I wanted to feel young again, spontaneous, like the version of me at twenty-nine who once ran off with a grad student for three weeks and didn't apologize to anybody about it.

"Okay," Magnus said, and drained his beer. "Here's the deal. I get off at midnight. My place is three blocks that way. Housemate's hanging out with her boyfriend tonight, we'd all just be shooting the breeze, low key. You in?"

Now, I want to be plain that he asked and I said yes. He didn't drag me, didn't do anything but grin and wait. And I sat there with my empty glass and thought, this is either a huge mistake or the most interesting thing I've done in a year.

"I'm in," I said. "But if this is some weird cult recruitment thing I'm leaving."

"Swear on the fox. It's neon and everything."

At midnight he clocked out, came around the bar in a flannel jacket, and we walked. The town was dead quiet, that college town summer hush where even the frat houses are asleep. His hand found the small of my back somewhere around the second block and stayed there, warm and easy, and I did not move away from it. He smelled like bar soap and beer taps, the way a bartender probably can't help smelling. He caught me looking at him and raised an eyebrow.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing. Just deciding if this is a mistake."

"And?"

"Jury's out."

His place was a third floor walkup above a nail salon, two blocks off the main drag. Old building, radiator heat you know is murder in January. He took the steps two at a time and I followed, my heart doing a little more work than three flights should ask of it.

"Okay so, heads up," he said at the top, fishing for his keys. "Marla and Edwin are in the living room. They're cool, I promise. Marla's my housemate. Edwin's her guy. They're, uh. They're postgrad people, so fair warning, they might be arguing about something dumb."

"Grad school people arguing about something dumb. I run a café across from a college, I speak fluent dumb argument."

He opened the door and I heard the TV and low voices before we even got our shoes off. And let me tell you, I was picturing some frumpy couple on a couch with a Netflix queue. That is not what I walked into.

The living room had the couch pushed aside and a mattress on the floor in the middle of it, with a sheet on it and everything, like somebody had planned this. Candles. Actual lit candles on the bookshelf, which in a rental apartment with a radiator is a bold move. And standing there in the middle of the room was a woman, thirty-something, dark curly hair, glasses, wearing a slip of a black dress, and a lanky guy perched on the arm of the couch grinning like he'd won something.

"Oh," the woman said, and then, "Ohhh," like a lightbulb going off over her head. "Magnus. You didn't say she was cute."

"You didn't ask," Magnus said, and shut the door behind us.

The guy on the couch arm stood up. "Wait, wait. Hold on. Is this her? Is this the third person?"

And I stood there with my jacket half off my shoulder, doing the math in about four seconds flat. Third person. The mattress. The candles. Marla and Edwin, whoever they were, had arranged a guest for tonight. And Magnus, friend of a friend, funny fast-talking Magnus, had apparently invited me to a party I wasn't supposed to be at. Or. Maybe. Had he? The grin on his face said he might have known exactly what he was doing.

"I think there's been a mix-up," I said. And here's the part I still can't fully explain, even to myself. I did not turn around and walk out the door. Because the woman in the black dress was looking at me like I was dessert, and the guy was looking at me like I'd brought them a winning lottery ticket, and some old part of me, the twenty-nine-year-old part, the grad student fling part, woke up and stretched.

Or maybe I just stood there. Honestly I don't remember the exact second I decided. But I remember Marla crossing the room, hand out, smiling.

"I'm Marla," she said. "This is Edwin. And you are obviously not the person we were expecting, but honey, I'm not complaining."

"Evelyn," I said, and shook her hand. Her grip was warm and she didn't let go right away. "So. What exactly were you expecting?"

Edwin laughed, a nervous little laugh. "Okay so this is awkward. We were supposed to meet a friend of a friend at nine. She never showed. We kind of figured the whole night was off."

"And then you walked in with Magnus," Marla said, "and Edwin thought the plan was back on, and honestly? Look at you. I'm not mad about the substitution."

I looked at Magnus. "Did you know?"

"Swear on the fox, no," he said, hands up. "I really did think we were hanging out. But now that we're here..." He let it hang there, that grin back.

The three of them all looked at me. And I want to tell you I weighed it out like a sensible adult, pros and cons, safety first. What I actually did was think about Tuesday. Cereal over the sink. Lock the roastery, same walk home, again and again until I'm sixty-four.

"So what happens now?" I asked. "I mean, if the night's not off?"

Marla bit her lip, eyes on me the whole time. "That depends entirely on you, Evelyn. We're easygoing people. Edwin and I have done this before, Magnus knows the rules, nothing happens unless you say so. You could sit down, have a drink, watch us be idiots. Or you could..."

"Or she could stay," Edwin said, "and we could all have a very memorable Tuesday."

"God," I said, and laughed, because my heart was pounding and my face was hot and five years of Tuesdays were sitting on my chest like a cat. "Okay. One question first. Is there more whiskey?"

Marla got me the whiskey. Edwin turned the TV off, which I took as a sign, and we all ended up sitting in a loose circle on the mattress because there was literally no other furniture close enough to bother with. I sat cross-legged with my glass and tried to act as though I regularly ended up on mattresses in strangers' living rooms. I did not succeed.

"So Evelyn," Marla said, tucking her legs under her, "coffee roaster. That's a real job? You actually roast the beans?"

"I actually roast the beans. Five years. Every Tuesday I lock the roastery at eleven and walk home past that terrible bar."

"The Foxhole is not terrible," Magnus said from the floor, where he'd flopped with his beer.

"The Foxhole has a floor that sticks to your shoes."

"That's character."

"That's old beer."

Edwin laughed so hard he had to put his glass down. See, this was the thing. I liked them. All three of them, already, ten minutes in. That was the part that made the decision feel less crazy and more like something a person might actually do.

We drank and talked and it got easy fast. Marla told me she'd done her PhD in anthropology and now worked in campus housing admin, which she described as "applied anthropology, applied to broken radiators." Edwin was a linguistics postdoc who kept trying to explain something about tone languages and kept getting derailed by Marla correcting his examples. Magnus mostly listened and stole pretzels from a bag Edwin had produced from somewhere.

And the whole time, underneath the talk, there was this current. Marla sat close. Closer than she needed to. Her knee against mine, then not, then against mine again like she was checking whether I'd move away. I didn't move away. Every time our knees touched, something in my chest went oh!

At some point Magnus got up to put music on and Marla turned to me.

"Can I ask you something kind of forward?"

"You can ask. I reserve the right to lie."

"Are you staying? Because I keep catching myself hoping, and it's distracting from Edwin's tone language thing."

"Hey," Edwin said.

"You can be distracting later, babe."

I looked at her. Glasses, curly hair, that black dress, and this open look on her face like she'd already decided and was just waiting on paperwork. My whiskey was doing the warm thing in my stomach where it