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”I think it’s a conspiracy.”
Scott looks up from his textbook to catch Stiles staring at the front counter from their position at the front of the coffee shop.
“What?” he asks, not really wanting to engage Stiles in a conversation about conspiracies at the moment since they really need to finish this chapter’s revision before they can move on, but Scott knows if he doesn’t give in to Stiles’ current fixation, they might never get back.
“Just look! I’m pretty certain they’re robots. I have been here all week and not a single one of them has dropped anything. And there’s probably some sort of mob connection, I swear.”
Stiles flails an arm in the direction of the counter where two blonds with curly hair are standing behind the service counter, the guy with a bright smile is taking orders and making change and the girl with a startling lack of crew neck shirts is making the orders. She glances over at their table and gives Stiles a smirk and a wink before resuming her work.
“Stiles, you’re just mad they won’t give you any more coffee,” Lydia pipes up, breaking Stiles’ focus on watching the barista’s every move to sneak a glance at her. She’s sitting at a table close by, part of the rules of studying ‘with’ her included being at separate tables and not looking too much in her direction. They mostly communicated by instant message and text. Hearing her voice nearly jumpstarted his heart, if he wasn’t already nearly tweaking on a very irresponsible amount of Adderall and espresso.
“Wh-what? No. I mean, I could get another cup. If I wanted to. It was just that enforcer, that – see, the mafia! Why wouldn’t they take my perfectly good money? He probably doesn’t even need this shop because he’s got money laundering or drugs or whatever going through the back and look, I bet if I asked angel-face-baby-smiles over there he’d give me another Red Eye.”
Lydia’s look of disgust nearly wounds his heart, but Scott’s challenging grin takes away the sting.
“Oh yeah? You think you can get some? Go for it, dude.”
Stiles squints at Scott, who is unusually confident about this. On a normal day, when Stiles hasn’t been mainlining espresso and abusing his prescription, when he doesn’t have a cumulative final in less than twenty-four hours, Stiles could talk his way around any dare. But today he just takes it as a double dog dare and stands up, his chair scraping loudly as he does so.
Just as he approaches the counter, the mafia mob boss danger danger guy comes from the back and pats the curly blonds on their shoulders, “Erica, Isaac, take your breaks.”
The man’s gruff, very dangerous voice hits Stiles somewhere below his belly button and the glare he’s fixed with should deter him from any more conversation, but it doesn’t.
“A twenty ounce red eye, please,” Stiles says, setting his cup on the counter, feeling dangerous.
“I thought I told you no more coffee products today.”
If Stiles is surprised that the man actually spoke to him, instead of peeking his head out of the office just to glare at him whenever Stiles came up to the counter, he really hoped it didn’t register on his face.
“Actually,” Stiles said, leaning his weight onto the counter because his foot wanted to tap dance it’s way out of his shoe and the only way to help that is to take the weight off of them and tap one. The tapping looks like it makes the guy’s face twitch but Stiles continues on, undeterred. “You just told me No. Just the word, nothing else, and pointed back at my seat. You had other customers in line so I didn’t make a scene but here I am. Making a scene. Because there’s no one in here but me and my friends and we’ve been really good to you this week. Wondrously good. We could find a new shop to study in.”
They really couldn’t, Stiles doesn’t know why these words are coming out of his mouth, but there’s just something about this guy (dangerous mafia mob boss with some seriously expressive eyebrows) that is turning Stiles into that contradictory, argumentative customer.
“No is sufficient. Can I get you some water or food? I’m not going to make you any more coffee today,” mafia dude gives Stiles a smirk that makes him feel like he might become the main ingredient in their next foray into meatloaf (not so great last week, but a good try). “As good as you are for business buying my four dollar drinks, I think a customer having a heart attack from a drug overdose in the middle of my floor would counteract all of that.”
If Stiles makes a frustrated noise that sounds like a dying cat that makes Scott and Lydia look up and one of the workers to peek out from the back room, half a bagel sticking out of his mouth.
“Look, I have an exam and I need to stay awake until this exam so that I can cram everything that I forgot at the beginning of the semester into this fifty-minute exam that’s cumulative! Who does that? Do you know who does that? I’m sure you do because their brand of evil and your brand of No seem to go hand in hand. Is that it, are you working together with my professor just to make my life hard?”
Stiles gives the dangerous mafia dude a glare of his own, but isn’t sure if it just looks crazy or he actually pulls it off. A laugh from the scary dude that actually lights up his face is startling to Stiles, who leans back, watching as the dude starts scooping some ice and fixing a drink.
He hands it to Stiles with a genuine (not gonna eat you right now kind) of smile, “I’m not in this to make your life hard, now go back to studying, I have to go get some real work done.”
Just like that, Stiles is dismissed. His hand took the cup automatically and he shuffles back to his seat and glances at Lydia before glaring at Scott. “You knew that was going to happen,” he accuses, but takes the sip of his drink anyway. The apple juice is tasty, but he’s not sure if he’s supposed to be insulted.
Scott just laughs and taps the side of the cup he can see, causing Stiles to twist it around. In black sharpie there’s a phone number and a message to call when he’s gotten at least two days of sleep.
Startled, Stiles glances back up at the counter, but Erica and Isaac have taken their positions back and are looking anywhere but at Stiles, laughing grins on their faces.
“A conspiracy, I told you. I’m going to be murdered so hard.”
Lydia snorts and shakes her head, “You’ll get something, all right. What do you have for twenty-eight?”