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Things were looking up for Remus. This morning when he transferred trains at Metropolitan, he squeezed onto the first L train that came into the station. The messenger bag he’d spilled wine on the night before was still damp when he woke up, but he had salvaged his lesson plans and readings, and tucked them safely into his left arm for the journey into Manhattan. When he skipped up the steps at 6th Avenue, it was breezy, and the little droplets of sweat that had gathered on the back of his neck in the hot subway evaporated immediately. He handed a dollar to the cheerful old man at the coffee cart and set off for the liberal arts building, thinking that maybe, finally, his luck had turned around. Rejected grant applications and shitty landlords be damned, it was a warm spring Wednesday in New York and he was going to try and enjoy it.
By the time he got to the corner of 12th Street, he was convinced that someone or something was smiling down on him. There, through the picture window in the front of O Cafe, was a face that he recognized too well from the wine bar his cohort frequented. Every Thursday, right at four o'clock when Avaline opened, the anthropology PhD students would descend the crooked cement stairs to the wine bar and drink two for $10 of whatever the wine on special was. It was the last affordable place without sticky floors east of 8th Avenue, and last week Remus had plucked up the courage to exchange names with the new bartender he’d been stealing not-so-surreptitious glances at for three weeks.
“Don’t laugh,” he had said, with a sideways grin that Remus mirrored dopily. “My name is Sirius. And don’t call me Siri, please, a guy tried that on a date once and I had to walk out immediately.” He emphasized this with an eye roll and a little flip of his dark hair over his shoulder. Remus was mesmerized.
“Okay, Sirius,” he replied, stuck to the spot, before Lily rescued him from further embarrassment by appearing to order a second round.
And there Sirius was now, behind the glass of the window, his face framed in the trailing philodendron and pothos plants in the trendy little coffee shop, looking like an advertisement for something expensive and French. Remus slowed his steps and tried frantically to think of an excuse to stop altogether and drink in the sight of Sirius out of his normal context. How the hell could someone look more beautiful in the broad daylight of nine a.m. than in a candlelit bar in the West Village? Remus started imagining other ridiculous contexts in which this guy probably looked unfairly amazing. Waiting for a bus at Port Authority. Buying dish soap at a bodega. Caught in a sudden downpour in July, still an entire avenue away from his train, without an umbrella...
As though he could hear Remus mentally ogling him in a wet white t-shirt, he looked up to catch Remus staring at him straight on. Sirius lifted one eyebrow, adjusted the collars of a leather jacket that Remus liked very much, and - oh god - smiled.
Remus smiled back before he could help it. He recognizes me , he thought. This day is getting better and better . Finding himself without any free hands, he decided to raise his coffee cup, a hello, a morning iteration of the tap on the bar during a toast.
In that moment, Remus’s good day was completely, horribly, irrevocably undone.
His right hand collided with the shoulder of a young woman walking quickly up the avenue. The lid of the cup popped off and clattered on the ground; he felt hot coffee spreading down his jacket sleeve; the young woman shrieked and threw her own coffee in the air, and its contents landed spectacularly in the crook of Remus’s left arm. He looked down to find himself holding a disintegrating draft of his lesson plans, two very soggy volumes of Levi-Strauss’s Mythologiques , and an entire iced chai latte, from the smell of it. That his left arm was cold and wet and his right arm was hot and wet registered in his brain as both impossible and supremely hilarious. He heard himself laughing in a strange, mean-spirited way. The more he tried to stop, the funnier the whole thing seemed.
“What the fuck!” the woman tried to cut in. Remus doubled over, still clutching his ruined books and the almost-empty coffee cup. A bunch of ice cubes fell to the sidewalk and bounced around their feet. She startled when one landed on the vamp of her high heel, and kicked frantically, like the ice was going to bite her. He laughed harder.
“Why are you - watch where you’re going! You ruined my latte! Ugh, you touched me with your hand , get away from me!”
Remus thought to wipe the tears from his eyes, but both of his hands were already sticky with sugar and milk. The angry twenty-year-old in front of him looked as instagram-perfect as she had before she threw her Starbucks on him, but she wasn’t laughing. She kicked her foot again and limped away, as though she’d been hurt by the quarter-ounce of frozen water. He could barely catch his breath to pant out a confused and insincere “sorry” at her retreating figure.
Suddenly, Remus remembered that Sirius had been in prime viewing range for this incident, and he whipped around just in time to catch him laughing on the other side of the window. The moment didn’t seem so funny any more. Sirius’s face fell as they made eye contact, and Remus’s heart sank watching him jump up from the table and shuffle away inside.
There was a trash can close to the door of the cafe, and Remus moved over to take off his soaked denim jacket and sort himself out. Of course Sirius would want to make a quick exit; nobody likes secondhand embarrassment. Remus was already dreading seeing his stupidly beautiful face the next day at Avaline and wondered if he could get out of Arthur’s birthday happy hour.
Just as he took a deep breath and accepted that the forty-seven pages he’d printed were, in fact, ruined, and he’d have to wing his seminar at least a little bit, the door opened and Remus caught a glimpse of a black leather sleeve. The papers landed in the trash with a soft swish . Before he looked up he knew whose shoulder was in front of him. He straightened up slowly to see that Sirius’s eyebrow was raised, again, and there - there was the smile. Remus had never felt more like disappearing.
“Not your day today, huh?”
Remus blinked. “Uh. I guess not.” He knew he should say something else, but he couldn’t figure out what he could possibly say that would dig him out of the pit of humiliation he’d landed in.
“Remus, right? I’m--”
“Sirius! I mean, we met last week. Yeah.”
“That was a pretty nasty spill. I can’t believe that girl had to limp away.” He laughed. Remus melted. “I figured you could use a refill.” He held up a white paper cup.
“You. You got me another coffee?”
Sirius nodded, but moved back an inch. “Well, I hope that’s okay...”
“No, no! That’s extremely - it’s just what I needed. I was having a great morning, and then this happened, but now you’re here and everything’s good again.” He could feel his face heating up as the words came out of his mouth. “I mean - thank you for the coffee.”
The smile was back. Before Sirius could respond, a stream of undergrads pushed past them out of the coffee shop, and Remus realized that time had continued passing during the entire incident. The elevators would be packed. “I think I’m going to be late for class,” he groaned.
“Can’t have that. Take this, go to class. I’m - well.” Did he look disappointed? “I’m sure I’ll see you around?”
“No!” No? Remus, what the hell? “I mean. Yes. I’ll be around. I’d love to get the next round though, if you drink coffee in the afternoon? I promise it’ll all stay in the cup this time. I’ll be done with my office hours at 2:30. If you’re free, later, you know.”
Remus held his breath. He had tempted the universe too much. What made him think that his good luck from the morning would return after such a spectacular embarrassment? But to his shock, Sirius agreed, suggested that they meet at French Roast at three, and typed Remus’s number into his phone.
At Avaline the next day, Remus and Lily volunteer to bring the first round back to the corner table that the cohort had staked out.
“Hey, stranger,” Sirius says in greeting, ignoring Lily completely.
“Hi again.”
Lily has to clear her throat to snap them out of it. Sirius glances at her, seems to remember that he’s working, and grins again at Remus before busying himself with glasses.
“That was sickeningly cute, Remus, but if you break the bartender’s heart you know we can’t come back here anymore. Are we going to have to find a new place for happy hour?” Lily is sweet, but she can be such a mom sometimes, Remus thinks.
“Not if it goes well.”
“Well excuse me, Mr. Optimist, who are you and what have you done with Remus?”
He flicks his eyes over just in time to see Sirius pretending not to listen. “I dunno. I just had a really good day yesterday, that’s all.”