Chapter Text
A travel-flat of four labeled coffees with the change tucked where creamer would normally go popped out the service window. An unmarked white sedan that screamed ‘works for the city’ pulled around the corner, heading down the street in the opposite direction to that which their truck was parked with a sinister sort of intent.
“Thanks for the business! See you next time!” Clint called out the window, shutting it before he could get a reply. The sedan nipped into a tight parking space and the driver leapt out. The little flashing lights on the top of the truck started going, and Clint slammed home the last few items in their locking compartments, securing the truck for transit. With a roar the engine revved up, swerved into traffic narrowly missing a collision with a panel truck, jumped the curb of a construction site and zoomed down a narrow one-way street. The Coffee Bandits had struck again.
“That was close, Tash,” Clint called to the front, strapping himself to a narrow seat that doubled as a spent grounds container.
Natasha made a rude noise, accelerating around a bicyclist and dodging someone trying to park. “He wasn’t even close enough to smell our exhaust.”
“I don’t know. If we get caught I don’t think we’ll get off with a fine.”
“How long have we been doing this? If they haven’t caught us now they’re not going to. The city has bigger fish to fry than a rogue coffee truck.” Natasha broke off from their conversation to curse inventively at a double-long bus. Clint glanced behind them, anxiously looking for a white sedan with city plates.
They had been at it for eight months, through the smothering heat of summer and the deep snows of winter. It was their first spring, each day dawning with more promise and beauty than the last, and Clint was excited to roll out their mixed hot/cold menu for the thirsting crowds. They had been so busy (and so successful) that the little matter of a food truck permit and food safety inspections had never been given their proper weight. They hadn’t been in operation three months, zipping around the city and dispensing caffeine to the ravening masses, when an unassuming man in a suit had sidled up to them in the financial district asking about their letter grade.
Clint had gotten out of the truck to talk with the stuffed suit while Natasha surreptitiously closed up shop. In a coordinated move which couldn’t have been better if they’d practiced, Natasha backed down Stone Street three blocks going the wrong direction at almost forty and zipped out of sight while Clint had made a break for it through a fake Irish pub and into the mid-day crowds of tourists around Wall Street. Since then they had been wanted by the city food inspectors - caffeinated fugitives from the law.
--
Clint didn’t let the last bit of tension leave him until they were safely in their home bay in the bottom floor of a warehouse. The rest of the floor was taken up by machinery, manufacturing lines which ran at odd hours, and a small collection of very expensive cars lovingly stacked and covered. Natasha told him that there was a helicopter deeper in the bowels of the building that she was relatively certain was functional. Their tiny bay space was part of the reason they never even considered getting a food services permit. It looked more like a mechanic’s shop than a place people would expect to eat food from.
Clint and Natasha moved through their cleanup routine; emptying spent grounds, disinfecting the sink and counters, replenishing cups and lids, and freezing leftover coffee into coffee ice cubes. Natasha pulled out a sack of beans and put them in the roaster for the next week Clint cleaned out their faithful Clover coffee maker and the espresso machine before dumping the spent milk. It was comfortable. They moved through their tiny space with the efficiency of long association.
“I was thinking of elephant ears for tomorrow,” Natasha told him. “There’s a cloud brewing in Alphabet City and they always sell well there.”
Clint hooked his chin over her shoulder so as to read the tablet she was contemplating. A map of Manhattan was displayed with a weather-map overlaid on it.
Tony had developed an algorithm that aggregated data from social media sites along with weather patterns, transit schedules, school schedules, traffic, and historical patterns to predict locations of great coffee need. They got alerts during particularly acute ‘flash floods’ of need, but otherwise simply picked areas where it looked like sales would be good. In return for this software (and second-to-none equipment maintenance and upgrades), they were beholden to Stark’s coffee call. If he sent out an SOS they would be at his doorstep with a carafe within twenty minutes.
“I like elephant ears,” Clint said finally. He didn’t like working Alphabet City very much. There was a high concentration of boutique coffee shops already that catered to the clientele the Coffee Bandit truck drew in and as much as they had an outlaw reputation to uphold, Clint didn’t think threatening local business was the way to go. Stark’s algorithm took that into account, though, and it had only rarely led them wrong.
“You like anything with enough sugar sprinkled on it,” Natasha admonished.
“And butter. It’s gotta have butter.”
Natasha chuckled, knocking temples with him in a fond gesture and moved to hang the tablet on its hook. She pulled twenty pounds of butter out of their chest freezer and started to work on the puff pastry for the elephant ears. Clint was just contemplating making up a fresh batch of hazelnut syrup for the debut spring menu while he had access to their bay kitchen, when an alert came in from Tony. The address was thirty blocks downtown from their location. Clint and Natasha’s eyes met. “I can’t leave the dough,” Natasha told him with the seriousness of someone saying they couldn’t leave their patient to bleed out on the operating table.
“I’ll finish it. You get the bike and I’ll load you up.” Clint put on a carafe to brew and set up a few espresso shots to amp it up to Tony’s preferred octane. Natasha came back, changed into the sleek biking outfit that had been her signature as one of the most notorious bike messengers between Midtown and the Financial District: black ballistic nylon catsuit with a reflective red hourglass on the back, half-gloves and feather-light black shoes. The bike was a thing of beauty, outfitted with puncture-proof tires, an ingenious suspension system and a titanium frame which kept the whole thing at least a pound under the lightest bike on the market. She clipped her helmet on. Clint slotted the carafe into the specially designed coffee holster over the rear tire, along with a stack of mugs.
“Don’t forget to—”
“I know how to make puff pastry. We’ve been over this. Go.”
Natasha’s bike darted off into traffic like a deadly minnow in an automobile stream. Whenever Clint found himself doubting Natasha’s strength he would remind himself of first learning to make pastry with her. Clint had been sore the next day and the day after from beating frozen blocks of butter into submission whereas Natasha had simply rolled her shoulders and gotten down to work without a comment. He was sweating in spite of the chill that seeped from the walls of their building by the time the dough was ready for its first rest. Carefully remembering his lessons, he folded it with the rolling pin, wrapped it once in parchment, and lay it back in the freezer.
He dropped onto the bench seat out of an old Cadillac that they used as a couch in the bay with a sigh. He wasn’t going to nap, just rest for a bit.
Clint woke at Natasha’s gentle kick. If she had meant to do any more than wake him he’d probably be nursing a broken rib.
“Fuck. The dough,” Clint winced.
“I caught it for the second fold. Keep your panties on, sleepyhead.” Natasha smiled down at him fondly. “Stark wants a midnight pastry run and you just nominated yourself for the honor.” Clint groaned. It was Friday night which meant Tony would be working his lots hard. Nobody knew all the properties Stark owned in Manhattan but Clint was willing to bet they made up a simply staggering value when aggregated. Natasha was working on a property map based on all the locations they had delivered to, but it was far from complete.
The properties he owned were all slivers of alleyways and places undesirable for development for various reasons. Tony had converted them into high-tech parking lots with cars stacked five and six high on rigs that looked like they should have been in a Transformers movie. They called him the Parking Czar of Midtown and his parking contraptions were simultaneously admired and feared. The bane of zoning inspectors, he was equally considered a reasonably-priced parking savior and a mounting public menace.
Clint kinda liked the guy. He was a tech genius and rented them the completely unsuitable bay for their business. He had actually approached Clint with the truck idea after the Barton Brothers storefront was closed down due to the elder Barton’s embezzlement and a money-laundering scandal. Clint had barely escaped the backlash with his Clover machine and his thumbs. Natasha had found him hiding out in an alley from some of the mafia-like investors he hadn’t even known Barney had brought into their business venture.
She had said, “Come with me if you want to live,” and Clint had trusted her. They hid the Clover on a fire escape and she extracted him from the neighborhood by having him balance on her rear wheel riders as she wove through rush hour gridlock.
“Hey, I appreciate the save and all, but where are we going?” Clint asked when they’d made it five blocks without a noticeable tail.
“We’re almost there,” she replied. They stopped in front of a cluttered shop selling cell phone chargers and various small electronics. She glared at him until he hopped off her back wheel and dismounted herself. She walked in as though she owned the place, hanging her bike on a bike rack by the counter and walking into the back room. Clint followed; it wasn’t as though his day could get any weirder after his brother getting arrested, being chased by mafiosos and getting picked up by a mysterious bike messenger.
A service elevator that looked like it came from the 1920’s, aside from a thumbprint access panel, was in the rear. She held the door open for him.
“I never got your name.”
She smiled at him as though he was simply adorable, and Clint reconsidered the life choices that had led him to the juncture in which he currently found himself.
The elevator went down, down, down.
The basement of the building stretched between both the cell phone shop and whatever business was adjacent to it. The back curved up in a ramp leading to the street though the area they found themselves in was level and clean, if filled with junk. Hydraulics and gears took up one side while the other was largely electronics in various states of repair.
“You got him!” a man crowed from deep within a pile of hydraulics. A head popped out of the pile wearing a welding mask. The faceplate popped up to reveal bright eyes, a wild goatee and a slash of white smiling teeth.
“I did,” the woman acknowledged.
The man levered himself out the machinery. He was streaked black with engine grease and brown with smears of hydraulic fluid. He wiped his hands down with a rag and approached Clint like he was a piece of livestock he was considering buying.
“Who the hell are you guys? Not that I don’t appreciate the rescue, but I got a coffee maker that needs saving too.”
“The Clover? One of my people is retrieving it as we speak.”
“Your people—”
“Don’t worry about it. And as to your question, I’m Tony Stark.” Tony stuck out his hand, nails still rimmed in black grease. Clint hesitated only a moment before shaking. He wasn’t in the food business any longer; no need to worry about appearances.
He looked at the mysterious bike messenger. She stood in an ‘at ease’ position, legs a shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind her back. “Natasha Romanoff,” she supplied with a nod.
“Yes, your payment.” Tony dropped Clint’s hand and moved across the workshop. “The chains are at the front desk.” Natasha nodded again and faded into the clutter of the room.
“So I appreciate—”
“The guy that rescues his custom coffee maker over the cash box when the shit hits the fan,” Tony interrupted him, “is the guy I want making me coffee.”
“I’m a free agent,” Clint hedged.
“Without a place to agent. Which is why I asked you here. I have a business proposal of sorts for which I think you are uniquely suited.”
Clint hitched his hip against a workbench, crossing his arms. “I’m listening.”
“A food service truck has just come into my possession, for which I have no use. Given some retrofitting I think it would serve your purposes as a mobile base of operations.” Tony slid some photos of a truck proclaiming itself the “Falafel King” with a trio of dancing anthropomorphised falafel gracing the side. “I’ll give it to you, and space to perform the retrofit, and I have a bay I can rent you when you’re off the ground, so to speak.”
“Give me,” Clint muttered to himself. “In exchange for what?”
“Two years of free coffee, provided you don’t go under. Monday, Wednesday and Friday deliveries, Sunday morning carafes, and emergency caffination calls not to exceed twice per week. And I’m talking carafes with all the frills - this isn’t a one-cup-and-you’re-done deal. Snacks too if you decide to carry those,” he added with a greedy grin.
Clint did the math in his head. That would balance out to the market price on the truck without interest, provided the engine and transmission were in good repair. “I’d need to check out the truck.”
“Sure thing. I got it with my mechanics right now; I’ll let Barnes know you’ll be by. You’re interested?”
Clint gave Tony a grudging nod. “I’ll need to think about it.”
Tony slapped his hands together in a pleased gesture. “Excellent! Miss Romanoff will get you where you need to go.”
--
“I’m not hauling your heavy ass around on my wheels; we’re walking,” Natasha informed him. She had changed into sneakers and barely spared him a glance before walking out the front of the electronics and miscellanea shop. Clint jogged to catch up to her.
“So what’s your deal with all of this?” Clint asked her.
Natasha shrugged one shoulder. “Strictly a business transaction.”
“What kind of business?” he asked. She threw him a venomous look to which he held up his hands defensively, “Hey, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, like, rescuing baristos from alleyways doesn’t seem like full time employment, even in the city that never sleeps.”
She looked him up and down as though trying to decide whether he had been casting aspersions against her character. “I’m a gopher. I get things. Sometimes people. I make sure they get where they’re going.”
“Like a bodyguard?” Natasha didn’t look more than 130, and though she was probably hiding muscle under her uniform it wasn’t the build that one expected on a personal protection detail.
“More like a courier.”
“Freelance?” Clint asked. Natasha nodded once, sharply. “You like the freedom?” He got a one-shouldered shrug in reply. “To be honest I’m kind of nervous about the whole idea. I was always in with my brother...” Clint trailed off. He’d been screwed over by his brother. His brother had been in for himself and Clint had been there helping him to screw Clint over because he hadn’t been smart enough to think about what he was doing. Now he was on the street; no way he could go back to the back room of Barton Brothers for his stuff. Those weird mafia guys would be hanging around, no questions. He’d have to find someone to crash with for the night. Someone who wouldn’t sell him to mobsters.
Clint had ground to a halt, groaning in hopelessness. Natasha gave him a guarded but sympathetic look. “We’re almost there.”
The sign on Barnes Automotive was off-kilter and had the look of a ransom note, ‘Barnes’ and ‘Automotive’ being in two different fonts and colors. A tall blond man was loitering outside in a white t-shirt and pressed khakis which made it clear that he wasn’t an employee of the garage. He nodded guardedly at them as they approached. Natasha quirked an eyebrow at him and he turned his head towards the dim interior. “Hey Buck, you got customers,” he shouted.
“Hang on!” came from deep within the shop.
The blond shrugged, pushing off the building’s wall and sauntered to the small shack on the parking lot next door.
Another man swaggered out of the shop wiping his hand on a greasy rag tucked in the belt of his jumpsuit. He had dark hair and sharp eyes, and was missing his left arm. He tilted his head at Clint. Clint looked him up and down, raising an eyebrow. That earned him a sardonic smile. “You Barton?” he asked. Clint nodded once, decisive. “Bucky Barnes. I got your girl in the back.” They shook hands. Clint was getting some sort of weird vibe off of Natasha over the guy but he didn’t spare the attention to figure out what was going on between the two.
Bucky led them deep into the dimness of the shop. It looked like a converted fire station, and cars were stacked on hydraulics nearly to the tall ceiling in various states of repair. The truck was in the very back by a rear set of doors. “How’s she look?”
Bucky gave a one-shouldered shrug that was eerily similar to Natasha’s. “Decent shape. I replaced the spark plugs and I’m going to have to drop the engine and change the timing belt. I’ll get the fan and water pump at the same time once they come in; probably tomorrow. Tranny looks good, brake pads are almost new. I haven’t got a chance to look at the genny yet but,” he shrugged expressively, “given the rest I’m not twisting my panties.”
“Can I look her over?”
“Knock yourself out. I’ll be up front working on the Crown Vic.”
“Hey, wait. How long before she’s ready for me?”
“Stark said give you guys a rush job. Day after tomorrow good enough for you?”
“Wow, yeah. That should do great.” Bucky nodded as though that settled things. Natasha watched his butt as he swaggered towards the land-boat with a ratchet set. Clint gave her a knowing smirk when she turned back towards the truck.
“Shut up,” she ordered.
Clint felt like he was involved in an archeological dig as he went through the truck. It hadn’t been cleaned out in the least. Maps and papers had been shuffled around to give access to the steering column in the front. The back had a deep fryer that hadn’t been emptied of oil, and the food prep stations still had lettuce and tomatoes in them, leading Clint to wonder exactly how Tony had ‘acquired’ the truck. “Is Stark on the level?” he asked Natasha who had followed him into the cramped kitchen area.
“Sometimes it seems like he isn’t,” she admitted. “Tony does business with everyone and he’s ruthless about exercising his rights in contract deals, but I don’t think he’s on the wrong side of things. Even if some days it seems like he’s his own personal mafia.”
“You known him long?” Clint pulled the electrical panel off and began poking at the circuits. Everything smelled strongly of fried garbanzo beans and tzatziki.
“Long enough.”
“You trust him?”
“I don’t trust anybody.”
Clint frowned at that, looking up at her from under the tiny sink. He believed that she believed it.
“I take contracts with him more than most,” she admitted. “He pays up on his debts and he’s generous to his friends.”
“Are you one of his friends?”
She snorted and an almost bitter smile curled one side of her perfect mouth.
--
Tony insisted he crash on a couch in the back of his electronics shop for the night. Natasha picked him up the next morning with a bagel for his breakfast. He wasn’t sure what she was doing acting as his escort; she almost certainly could be making money in her chosen profession.
“Where to?” she asked when he finished his bagel.
“Bowery. I have to price some equipment.”
“Stark is paying for the overhaul,” she told him.
“That’s... freakishly generous.”
“He likes projects. He’ll probably insist on some custom work on the interior too.”
Clint and Natasha had taken measurements of the interior of the truck with a borrowed measuring tape and Clint had spent the evening doodling mockups of the interior setup. Compared with trying to put out full meals and baked goods, his needs were relatively modest: cooler and freezer, hookups for his Clover and an espresso machine, warming carafes, two sinks would be a plus, maybe a blender...
The trick of working in any small space was economy. No square inch of space should be unused, and no square foot of counter space should go unoccupied. The first Barton Brothers storefront had occupied a space not substantively larger than the truck and they had managed quite well.
“You’re going to need capital if you’re going to make this work,” Natasha said, staring down a row of blenders as though they might come to life and attack.
“Yeah,” Clint agreed.
“Where are you going to get it from?”
“I’ve been really trying to not think about that.” His reply had an edge to it.
She wandered the cramped industrial appliance store silently for a few minutes. “What if I put up the capital?”
“Uh...” Clint said, frozen staring at the bottom of a Vitamix blender.
Silence stretched between them. “Never mind,” she said, turning her back to him.
“No, what did you have in mind?”
She looked back at him, and her eyes asked if he really wanted to hear what she had to say. He nodded encouragingly. “A business proposition.”
She had a not-insubstantial chunk of money saved up which could see the truck through startup and the first few months until they got a handle on their revenue stream. She was, apparently, willing to let him use that chunk of money to do just that, and help with operations, for an equal stake in the business.
“That’s a lot to... We’ve known each other a day and a half.”
“More like 28 hours,” she corrected.
“Not selling this.”
“I may find Stark more annoying than tourists in rush hour sometimes, but he doesn’t make bad investments. And I don’t like fools.” She paused. “I like you.”
Clint’s mouth went dry. “I’m gay,” he said, almost immediately kicking himself for the blunt reply.
Natasha punched him in the shoulder and snorted a laugh. “Maybe I do like fools sometimes.”
--
Clint snuck back to Barnes’ shop the next day to deal with the leftover and soon-to-be-rotting food in the soon-to-be-his truck. It looked as though the former occupants had simply been scared out of the vehicle which had then been brought to Barnes’ garage. While dumping the last load of food garbage he’d pulled from the bowels of the beast, Clint caught Bucky rummaging through his work bench for something.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
Bucky had a socket wrench held between his teeth but he somehow conveyed with his eyebrows that Clint should continue.
“Do you know where Stark got the truck?”
Bucky opened his jaws, dropping the wrench on his bench top. He pinned the tool against his hip and manipulated whatever he’d found so it caught the magnet in the wrench and held. “I got a strict ‘don’t give a fuck’ policy.”
“So... stolen? What? I just need to get an idea what I’m getting into. I’ve already been chased from my home by pseudo-Russian mobsters once this week and I just... I need to know if I should start stashing clean pairs of underwear and wads of twenties in safety deposit boxes around the city.”
That surprised a bark of laughter from Bucky. “Running with this crowd that ain’t a bad idea.” Bucky stared at the truck for a moment as though asking her what she thought about their conversation. “Stark does business with everybody - and I mean everybody - so sometimes he gets into scrapes. He’s not a bad guy though, I don’t think. He just does some bad shit without thinking about it sometimes.”
“You are literally not making a single bit of sense right now.”
“The truck was to pay off a debt, I think. Like, they had nothing else to pay with so he gets this damned truck. He tried to sell it to me, would you believe?” Bucky shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Plates are clean and by the time I get done with her she’ll be running like she just rolled off the plus-sized factory floor.”
--
Clint returned that evening to the electronics shop and an unimpressed Natasha. “You look like hell,” she told him.
“Gee, thanks. You look like something a dog threw up too. Is it opposites day and nobody told me?” Clint asked, batting his eyelashes. He’d been sleeping on the couch in the back of a shady storefront for two days. He’d slept rougher, but he had reasons to look like hell.
“Have you been bathing?”
“I bathe. I have bathed.” He had bathed in the shop shower, aka a hose suspended from a hook, using engineer’s soap which behaved as though it was equal parts gravel and lye.
“You’re coming home with me.”
“What?”
“You smell, you look like you’ve gone on a bender, and nobody in their right mind would buy food from you. If I’m going to be giving someone my hard-earned savings to blow on some Java venture I’m going to make sure my partner has a decent place to sleep. You’re coming home with me. I borrowed you a bike.”
--
“Are you two shacking up?” Tony asked when they rolled into his basement workshop the next morning. Clint smelled girly and was wearing a clean shirt and even though his ass hurt in ways he didn’t want to think about from the bike seat he felt amazing.
“No,” they replied in unison, Clint offended, Natasha with a flatly threatening note.
Tony held up his hands, “Okay, just asking. I have to protect my investments and history says that couples in food trucks don’t work.”
“You said it was urgent,” Natasha growled.
“Right. Barnes dropped off the truck.”
“Does it worry you how a man with one arm operated a manual transmission?” Clint asked no-one in particular.
“I made him a thing,” Tony replied. “Speaking of,” he turned, arms outstretched towards a truck that... looked an awful lot like the Falafel King, but the exterior was sporting an understated coffee bean motif.
“That’s not our truck.”
“Au contraire,” Tony contended. “I made you a thing.” He pulled out a tablet and typed in some commands. The truck’s exterior blinked the black of an unpowered computer screen before another, different coffee motif appeared.
Natasha moved closer to the truck, peering at the surface suspiciously. “I developed some stuff that goes on like wallpaper but works like an LCD. I figured you guys would be a good all-weather road test for the stuff. I loaded some themes but you can modify it pretty easily; add in a menu board, customize it to whatever name you guys choose. It also has a stealth mode but I’m going to warn you right now - it’s not even through beta testing and it might go terribly wrong.”
“Duly noted,” Clint said.
“There’s also something else that’s in beta testing.” Tony handed him the pad. “Now, I’m warning you, this is my baby.” Tony almost sounded nervous.
“What is?” Natasha asked glaring at him curiously.
“JARVIS, are there any predicted hotspots in the next twelve hours?” Tony asked loudly.
The pad made a soft electronic sound. “Indeed, Sir. Class four hotspot predicted in six point two hours in Chelsea Park region. Class three hotspot predicted at approximately Park and 30th Street in ten point seven hours.”
“Thank you JARVIS,” Tony replied, as though his tablet was a person.
“What is this?”
“This, is your ticket to success,” Tony said snippily.
“This sounds like Honey I Shrunk The Butler,” Clint replied.
“JARVIS can’t help it; he’s just programmed that way.”
“By who?” Clint pushed.
“Will you quit calling it Jarvis?” Natasha demanded.
“That’s his name: Java Algorithm Referencing & Variable Integration Spatially.”
“That is... absolutely contrived,” Natasha said.
“JARVIS takes all the relevant info and spits out where you guys could make the most money.”
“And you’re giving this to us why?” Clint asked.
“Field testing,” Tony sniffed.
--
Clint wasn’t a master welder or anything but he’d done his share of handyman work through the years. Between that and Stark’s ample and well-supplied workshop, the retrofit went quickly. The espresso machine and the Clover (rescued from the fire escape and burbling happily in Tony’s break room until installation) were installed across from one another. The freezer was tricky but Bucky and Tony both gave a hand and got the thing properly wired, drained, and vented. After that it was all downhill.
Natasha was biking a lot to make rent and given that Clint had basically moved in with her and was freeloading on rent he couldn’t begrudge her not helping with the truck. She dropped by the shop to get him on her way home, and found Clint with a half-drunk bottle of beer, sprawled on the truck’s hood. For every sip he took he poured some down the hood or windshield.
“What are you doing, Clint?”
“Christening her. You want a beer?” He angled his beer bottle towards her invitingly.
“Only if by ‘beer’ you mean ‘vodka’.” Clint shook his head ‘no’. “Are you sure that’s fine for the LCD coating?”
Clint shrugged negligently. “Tony said he wanted all-weather testing. Beer is weather.”
Natasha shook her head. “So what are we christening her?”
“Faizeh,” Clint replied decisively. “I knew a bellydancer named Faizeh. Well... she called herself Faizeh. I figured since she used to be the Falafel King...” He trailed off, train of logic still unclear.
“It’s a pretty name,” Natasha offered when it became clear Clint wasn’t going to elaborate.
“I was thinking we should do some training before getting out in the world. Have you ever worked a coffee shop?” he asked. Somehow in their association and business partnership which had lasted all of a week and a half he hadn’t managed to ask her.
She frowned. “You make coffee, you give people coffee.”
Clint inhaled, preparing to laugh, but her confused, serious look stopped him. “You... wait, what?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said helpfully. “I like the smell though.”
Clint dropped his face in his hands. This was going to take some work.
--