Another Love
A Valentine's Day Café Entry for Singles
You know, it really sucks that winter is about the same in Georgia as it is up here in Rhode Island.
Sure, it’s not as cold, which is a great plus. But what it is is humid. Stupid humid. Forget your coat, you’d be better off wearing a refrigerator. It could be 45 degrees down there and 80% humid, and the result is that it feels like 18. 18! That’s about the same as it gets up here! And you don’t even get any snow to show for it! Forget “about the same”, Georgia’s worse!
Sorry, you’ve caught me rambling. My name’s Teela.
I’m supposed to be writing for the Red and Black.
Something about Valentine’s Day at home for the editors, just a nice gesture to the people who make our little campus newspaper a thing. Go Dawgs. Woulda been even nicer if we hadn’t been assigned topics.
We’re on a bit of a tight deadline, as you can imagine. Me? Oh, fuck me, I’m doomscrolling at a tiny little table at a tiny little place called MainStreet Coffee. It’s in East Greenwich. Look it up. It’s next to Town Hall. It’s pretty cute, they’ve got this Italian cottagecore thing going on. Great coffees. And if my parents are at all reliable, there’s supposed to be even better espresso martinis starting at 5.
It’s 2:47 PM right now. I’ve been here since noon.
The article I’m supposed to be writing is titled - I shit you not - “Valentine’s Day: Why Single Students Aren’t Missing Out”. My editor, Jess, pitched it to me last week with this sick gleeful energy like she was doing me a favor. “You’re single, right? Perfect! You can write from experience!”
Gee, thanks, Jess. Really feeling the love.
I’ve got maybe two paragraphs written, and they’re both lies. The kind of upbeat, empowering bullshit that would make a Hallmark card look cynical by comparison. Being single on Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean being alone. It’s an opportunity for self-care! Treat yourself to your favorite meal! Spend time with the people who really matter!
Yeah, the people who really matter are all in Athens right now, presumably doing Valentine’s things with Valentine’s people.
My best friend, Sheila, hasn’t responded to any of my texts. Some friend.
Meanwhile, I’m up here in Rhode Island because my mom guilt-tripped me into “spending more time at home”.
Which apparently means sitting alone in a coffee shop avoiding her texts.
I should be working.
I put down my phone and started watching the door.
It’s this thing I do when I’m procrastinating. People-watching, but I make up a narrative as I go along. I first got into it in Gatlinburg after watching a Jim Gaffigan comedy special. Everyone who walks in gets a story. The woman in the peacoat with a wedding ring tan line? Newly divorced, treating herself to an overpriced latte as an exercise of her beautiful free will. Or maybe cheating. The chubby high school aged kid with the backwards baseball cap? Definitely supposed to be in class right now. The elderly man who orders black coffee and sits by the window? Waiting for someone who died thirty years ago and hasn’t let himself let go yet.
I know. I’m delightful company.
The barista with the nose ring refilled my coffee about twenty minutes ago without me asking. Nice girl.
“Still writing?” she’d asked, nodding at my laptop.
“Still… procrastinating,” I’d said.
She laughed like I was being funny instead of pathetic. “Refills are free if you’re staying awhile. Valentine’s crowd doesn’t show up till five.”
Wonderful. A countdown.
I should’ve said thank you. I think I just nodded.
Then the bell rang again. The door opened.
Two guys, late twenties maybe, they walked in. They had this kind of easy familiarity between them that makes you wonder if they’ve known each other since kindergarten or if they’re just that comfortable together. One was taller, with dark hair, wearing a Carhartt jacket that’s 100% seen better days. He held the door open for the other, who was already mid-sentence about something, his hands gesturing like he was conducting an invisible orchestra.
They’re both pretty cute, I guess.
They didn’t look around for a table. They just knew. That booth by the bay window, the one with the good light and the slightly wobbly table that no one else wants. They slid into it perfectly. Like I’m watching a living John Hughes movie.
I told myself I wasn’t going to eavesdrop.
I’m a liar.
The shorter one, with his glasses and flannel shirt and the kind of face that probably gets carded at bars even though he’s clearly pushing thirty, he pulled out his phone and started scrolling. “Okay, so if we leave Saturday morning, we can hit the Berkshires by lunch, then push north through the Greens -”
“Are we stopping at Foxwoods?” the tall one interrupted, shrugging out of his jacket.
“Do you want to stop at Foxwoods?”
“I mean, it’s on the way.”
“It’s absolutely not on the way.”
“It’s near the way.”
“It’s an hour detour.”
“An hour we could spend winning money.”
“An hour we could spend losing money, you mean.”
I went back to my screen. Typed a sentence in. Deleted it. Looked back at the beginning.
Being single on Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean being alone.
God, I’m gonna throw up.
“There’s a diner in Conway,” Flannel guy said, zooming in on his phone. “Four-point-eight stars.”
Carhartt guy leaned over to look at the screen.
“I don’t see any pictures. This better not be another fucking Swiss Burger King.”
I blinked.
Swiss Burger King.
I don’t even want to know. Actually, I do, but I’m not going to Google it in public. The way they laugh. Oh, I’ve heard that laugh before, it’s the kind that comes after someone mentions The Thing You Did That One Time.
I glanced at them again. The way Carhartt’s hand landed on Flannel’s shoulder when he laughed. The way Flannel leaned into it.
Oh.
OH.
Good for them, I guess.
I want to know the etymology of the naming. I mean, I guess everyone’s got their preferences.
I guess it makes sense, anyway. Valentine’s day. Two guys at a coffee shop in the middle of the afternoon, planning a road trip, laughing at inside jokes that sound vaguely pornographic. Of course they’re together.
Of course they are.
And of course they look happy about it.
I went back to my article. I stared at the cursor blinking on the empty page.
Being single on Valentine’s day doesn’t mean-
“Nope,” I muttered, and closed the laptop.
I wanted to leave. So bad.
But I couldn’t stop listening.
Not in a creepy way. Or - okay, maybe in a little bit of a creepy way, but in my defense, they weren’t exactly whispering. And I was right there, at the table next to them. What was I supposed to do, plug my ears?
Flannel Guy was scrolling through what looked like a Google Maps route, narrating potential stops. “We could do breakfast in Brattleboro, then cut over to - wait, didn’t we try that place last time?”
“The one with the weird bacon?”
“No, that was Burlington. I’m talking about the place with the… the the the the the, the pancakes! The ones that tasted like cardboard.”
“Oh, that place.” Carhartt shook his head. “Yeah, let’s skip it.”
“Agreed.”
“Can I get you guys anything?” The barista appeared at their table, notepad in hand, that same easy smile she’d given me earlier.
Customer service.
I tell you, MainStreet does it right.
“Uh, yeah -” Flannel looked up. “Can I get a cortado? And-” He glanced at Carhartt. “You want your usual?”
“My usual’s boring. I’ll try something new.”
“Alright.”
“I’ll get an Americano. Thanks.”
The barista scribbled it down and left. Flannel went back to his phone. Carhartt stretched, arms over his head, then settled back into his booth with this satisfied sigh like he’d just gotten home after a long drive.
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” he said.
Flannel didn’t look up from his phone, but he smiled. “Where else would I be?”
And that…
That wrecked me.
Where else would I be?
Thanks for calling me single in the worst fuckin’ way.
I thought about my friends back in Athens. The ones who’d made Valentine’s plans weeks ago, who’d sent apologetic texts when I mentioned coming home. Aw, sorry babe, we’re doing a couples thing, but we’ll miss you!
They’re probably not even thinking about me at all right now because they’re busy being with people, the way people are supposed to be on February the 14th.
And here were these two guys, spending their Valentine’s Day planning a road trip to nowhere in particular, and they looked more content than anyone I’d seen in weeks.
I hated it.
No, I didn’t hate it. I hated that I wasn’t in it. That I didn’t have a person who’d say Where else would I be like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The barista brought their drinks. Flannel immediately stole a sip of Carhartt’s Americano, made a face, and slid it back across the table.
“That doesn’t look good,” Carhartt said, not even annoyed.
“Just making sure it’s not poisoned, milord.”
“Pfffft! Twenty-three years I’ve known you, and you’ve never gotten used to not having milk in your coffee.”
Flannel smiled.
Twenty-three years.
Jesus.
I did the math. If they’d known each other for twenty-three years, that meant they were probably in… what, elementary school, Kindergarten, when they first met? And here they were, still doing this thing together, still planning stupid road trips to nowhere and stealing sips of each other’s coffee.
I looked down at my closed laptop and phone.
Fuck it, it’s too painful. I may as well open it back up and pretend to write again.
The Google Doc opened back up.
Being single on Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean being alone.
Except it kind of does, doesn’t it?
Because I wasn’t alone in the technical sense. I was surrounded by people. My parents were ten minutes away. I could text any number of acquaintances and probably get a response. But I was alone in the only way that mattered.
The way where nobody in the world was looking at me right now and thinking where else would I be?
And these two guys, this adorable couple, had exactly that.
Then Flannel’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, frowned, and typed something back.
“Your mom again?” Carhartt asked.
“Yeah. She’s asking if I’m ‘doing anything special’ today.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“That I’m having coffee with my best friend and planning a road trip. She sent back a sad-face emoji.”
Carhartt snorted. “Of course she did.”
Flannel continued. “Oh, she’s just sent, ‘When are you going to get a girlfriend?’”
“Really?”
“She means well,” he said, typing something back.
“She thinks you’re lonely.”
“I’m here with you. Does that sound lonely?”
“You know what I mean.”
Flannel put his phone face-down on the table. “Yeah. I know.”
They sat in silence for a moment. A long, devastating silence.
Wait, so they’re not even together? Are they even fucking? What the hell is a Swiss Burger King then?
“So what do you think?” Flannel asked, turning his phone around to show Carhartt the route. “Three days, four if we take it slow?”
Carhartt squinted at the screen. “You’re really gonna make me sleep in the car again?”
“I’m not making you do anything. I’m just suggesting that motels are a capitalist scam and that we have a perfectly good-”
“Your Subaru is not ‘perfectly good’ for sleeping.”
“It has seats.”
“It has seats that don’t recline all the way.”
“Details.”
They were bickering now. They’d gone off to talk about music and podcasts and whether or not it was legal to sleep in a Subaru in a Walmart parking lot, and I realized:
Fuck.
They chose this? Over literally anything else?
I can’t do this anymore.
I closed my laptop.
I looked down at my hands.
And I tried very, very hard not to cry in a public coffee shop.
I was still sitting there, trying to will my tear ducts into submission, when I sneezed.
Not a cute sneeze by any means. A loud one. The kind that makes people three tables over look up from their phones.
“Bless you,” both of them said in unison, barely glancing my way before going back to their conversation.
“Thanks,” I managed, my voice coming out smaller and squeakier than I intended.
They didn’t respond. Didn’t even register me, really. Just went back to arguing about whether New Hampshire had better hiking than Vermont.
I should’ve felt invisible.
But I felt awful.
Because I’d been sitting here for the better part of an hour, constructing entire narratives about their lives, deciding they were a couple, then realizing they weren’t, analyzing their every word like I had any right to their story, and they didn’t even know I existed.
I was a ghost. A creepy, eavesdropping ghost who couldn’t even finish an article about why being single was totally fine, thank you very much.
I checked my phone one last time.
4:53 PM.
I managed, as discreetly as I could, to wipe away any latent tears I couldn’t force back in. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t come back.
The shift happened pretty quickly.
One minute, MainStreet Coffee was all muted conversations and the hiss of the espresso machine. The next, the door was opening every thirty seconds, to let in couples in dressy coats, groups of friends in too much perfume, someone’s boyfriend holding a bouquet of roses like a shield.
The lighting became warm and dim. Someone turned on smooth jazz. I looked over at whatever the hell the barista was doing. She’d swapped her apron for a black button-down. Suddenly, she stopped making lattes altogether and started making espresso martinis, just like my parents said they would.
I watched where Flannel and Carhartt were, and realized they’d already left.
I’d missed watching them leave.
And I realized I was the only person in the room sitting alone.
Everyone else had someone. A hand to hold. A drink to share. A reason to be here that wasn’t “avoiding my parents’ house and failing to write 800 words about self-care.”
The urge to stay had left me.
The urge to cry had not.
If two best friends talking about a road trip broke me, I couldn’t imagine dealing with a room full of actual couples.
I packed up my laptop, shoved my notebook into my bag, and went out the door.
The cold hit me the second I stepped outside.
It was a stupid, wet Rhode Island cold that laughs at your coat and seeps straight into your bones.
Fuck it.
Rhode Island may just take the cake for the worst cold weather.
I pulled my phone out and opened my messages. Not like there’s anything else I’m wont to do.
I scrolled past my mom’s texts, past the Red & Black group chat, and landed on my best friend’s name.
Sheila.
She’s probably having the time of her life down in Athens.
With her boyfriend.
With her two cats.
“Oh, shit, nevermind”, I whimpered out loud to myself as I sniffled and shed a tear, her apartment doesn’t allow cats, they had to stay with her parents. Nevermind.
I looked to my left and right for any eyes looking upon my misery. None to take note of.
Phew.
I typed: Miss you.
Then I deleted it.
I typed: Hope you’re having a good night.
Deleted that, too.
Finally, I just sent: Love you.
Yeah, she’d know what I meant.
I walked back towards my car, hands shoved deep in my pockets, and tried not to think about Swiss Burger Kings or road trips or twenty-three years of knowing exactly where you’d rather be.
But I failed.
The lump in my throat only worsened.
And I reminded myself they didn’t have partners, either.
Gay or not, at least Flannel’s mom thinks he’s lonely.
I tell you, if nothing else, I’m one for schadenfreude.
Nah, maybe that’s a lie, too.
Maybe I’ll make it up to myself and go out with Sheila the night I come back. Doesn’t have to be romantic.
I pulled out into the street.
Gave the sky my delightful middle finger as I turned up my heating to the max.
Yeah.
I won’t feel so alone when I get back to Sheila.
When I get back to the Red and Black.
When I get back home.
Copyright Notice
© E. A. Morales. All rights reserved.
I came to this piece through email.
I don’t really see the feed — I mostly read newsletters and search directly.
Just wanted to note that.
Great job using voice to put so much interiority and drama into a coffee shop eavesdropping. The shift change provides natural progression to the narrative. Enjoyed the mood swings.