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What You Wait For
by afrai

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inspired by a picture and a song: Ed's Redeeming Qualities, I Will Wait

Renji wants you to know that he is not a stalker.

He's just ... bored. Good at his job. He's bored and good at his job and the girl who comes in every Tuesday to sit at the table by the window and fail to drink her cappuccino is a valued customer. Renji likes their valued customers. He's a caring guy.

The girl comes in after the lunch hour crowd's filtered out, when the mid-afternoon hush has settled over the cafe. She has black hair and blue eyes and down-sweeping eyebrows that lend her a perpetual air of indignant surprise. She likes yellow, though she's too pale for it, would look better in red. She doesn't fidget, though the guy she waits for is always late; she sits, instead, in a pocket of stillness with her eyes on the street.

Hell if he knows her name. Hell if he's gonna ask. It's not like he even knows her. He catalogues her the way he used to collect stamps, with half his attention, because nothing's ever been worth all his attention. She wears sandals, though the summer's shading into autumn now. Her hands are small. Her mouth is like a lock. She does not smile to herself as she waits. She doesn't read a book or stir her coffee or play invisible concertos on the table-top. She waits.

Sometimes she drinks the cappuccino she's ordered. Most of the time, it's still untouched when Renji comes around to the table again to clean up the detritus she left. Once, a crumpled receipt for a pack of HB pencils and a stapler. Another time it's a brochure for a get-away in Micronesia. She doesn't leave much behind.

He reads these cursorily and dumps them in the trash. He imagines her picking up the holiday brochure on a whim, glancing over it in the subway on the way to her rendezvous. He can see what she'd look like when she was reading -- impatient, slightly annoyed, only half her mind on the page. He can't see her on a beach somewhere, basking in the sunshine. That would be easy, and the girl's all steel purpose. He doubts she likes easy.

This is all theoretical, of course. Hypotheses cobbled together from glimpses of her from across the room. For all he knows, she's just like everybody else. She could be normal, boring, aimless like he is.

But she doesn't even smile when her wait ends. The man never comes into the cafe -- that's not even part of their deal, maybe. She just sits there, and Renji can tell when she sees him outside, because it's like a light going on. She pushes the chair back, puts the money on the table, and flies out of the cafe, her face fiercely alive.

He sees the man through the window once. Not that he's looking, but -- guy's older than either of them, long out of school, dark-haired, good-looking. There's an easy tilt to his grin Renji doesn't like. It's a story Renji could tell, if he felt like it, but he's not sure he wants to know the ending.

He keeps working at the cafe when school starts. He could get better-paid work elsewhere, but he likes the atmosphere here.

She keeps coming in on Tuesdays.

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It breaks up her routine, the one time she comes in and the table's taken up. She looks around, bewildered at this sudden turn. She takes a few steps towards another table, glances around the cafe again -- a betrayed look, like she can't believe it's done this to her -- and leaves.

Next Tuesday, Renji places a cup on the table by the window at about lunch-time to dissuade nearly all comers. Cappuccino, made the way she likes it.

"Not sure the management allows that," says Hisagi, way too amused.

"I'll pay for it," says Renji. One of the perks of working here is that they get free coffee, as much as they like, but it's a busy time of day and every table counts.

"That's gonna be disgusting after an hour."

"I'll get another one."

"Loser," coughs Hisagi. Renji throws a rag at his head, and when the girl comes in, her table's waiting for her, just as always.

Sometimes he indulges in an impromptu art performance. He draws apples, ferns, elaborate swirling designs in milk on the surface of the coffee. He's pretty sure she doesn't notice, and the coffee he brings her is always safely ordinary, the foam blank as his own expression.

He does the art for his own amusement. He can do hearts as well, but he avoids that, because maybe she does notice. You never know. Renji sticks to ferns.

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When three weeks pass without her showing, he knows it's over. He doesn't see the man waiting outside either, though he's been looking.

The expected unhappy ending. He still feels a pang when a troop of noisy teenage girls clatter in one Tuesday and descend on her table. They demand hot chocolate and giggle and screech, and he doesn't think one of them looks out of the window even once.

Tuesdays are greyer without her. He doesn't quit, because it's as good a way to spend the afternoons as any. But there's nothing to wait for anymore.

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She comes in, finally, after a couple months' absence. No time for preparation -- he gets the sight of her right in the face, as he's turning from a customer, and the twisting pain in his chest is so sudden he has to stop to catch his breath. And then he has to grin, because. He's just basically an idiot, isn't he?

"Tea, I think," she says when he asks. He brings her chai, and says, when he's setting it down,

"He married?"

He doesn't know her, no, but it feels like he does, because he could have predicted the curl of her lip, the abrupt withdrawal behind her eyes. He's ready for the whip-sharp retort -- could almost mouth the words along with her -- so it's a surprise when she deflates, and her eyes turn human. She says,

"Yes. But it wasn't like that."

Her eyes are sad. Renji remembers the list he made the fifth Tuesday she came in, when late summer sunshine had cast gold across the cafe, turning her skin sun-warmed ivory. He'd watched her eyelashes gleam in the sunlight and counted over the places she should be kissed: in the hollow between her collarbones. On the inside of her wrist. The back of her knees. The arch of her foot.

When he looks up, Hisagi's at the other side of the room, mouthing sit down and making gestures Renji really hopes the nice old lady trying to get his attention doesn't understand. Renji shrugs and says,

"This seat taken?"

She looks disdainful. "If you want to risk your job, that's not my business."

He considers being crushed. He could walk away. But Renji knows a challenge when he sees one, and for the first time in his life, there's something at stake that's worth taking up a challenge for. He pulls out a chair.

"I don't ... I can only get away once a week," she says at one point. Then, apropos of nothing, "Don't expect too much of me."

She hasn't drunk much of her tea. She's a black coffee kind of girl, Renji thinks. He'll make her try that next time.

"It's okay," he says. "I can wait."

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