Chapter One
Miles
“You’re going to have to stop drinking coffee,” advises my doctor. He hands me a barely legible script for some meds to get rid of the hives. I know the drill. This is the third time in as many months that I’ve gone through this.
“I’ve had coffee for years and never had hives. Are you sure this is the problem?”
“According to your log, you get the symptoms after visiting The Daily Drip. You order a single coffee black. The caffeine builds in your system and by the third week, it tips over into the unsafe region triggering your allergic reaction. The positive is that this isn’t a serious condition and it’s easily treatable. The negative is that you should stop drinking caffeine.”
“I hate tea. That’s like flavored piss,” I grouch. I’m not stopping my daily trips to the coffee shop, but I’ll have to figure out something else to order.
“Not having drunk piss, I wouldn’t know.” He gets to his feet. “Racquetball this weekend?”
“After I stop at The Daily Drip.” I shove the script into my pocket and grab my coat.
“I’m going to have to check out the coffee joint myself since you think so highly of it.”
Alarmed, I turn away from the door to confront my doc. “I’m thinking of buying the building and demolishing it,” I lie. I can’t have others start trekking to my place—at least not until I have my objective secured. “My visits there are part of a feasibility study to see if the foot and street traffic can sustain my new business plans.”
The doc frowns. “You’re doing hands-on feasibility studies now? I thought you’d moved past that and are rubber-stamping things from your office in the sky.”
I had moved past it. Brooks Management Group went through a rocky period about four years ago. It was utter chaos in the office with no clear management because we were doubling our size about every three months. I had quality people quit because we were a mess, but the ship righted, we had a billion dollar IPO, and now I sit, as the doc says, in an office in the sky twiddling my thumbs.
I am not used to being bored. Trying to get my business off the ground with nothing more than a prayer and a few hundred dollars required years of hustle and working eighteen hours a day. Sitting in my office on the forty-fifth floor of my midtown high-rise, watching my new bonsai sprout leaves and reviewing contracts for new businesses left me bored. Mom said it was time to start a family. My sister kept signing me up for dating apps. My friends roped me into a half dozen double dates before I told everyone that I was going to enter the priesthood.
I wasn’t even joking. I’d looked into it. Maybe devotion to something other than the dollar would change my slump.
In the end, I didn’t need a dating app, the lists of eligible women, or the church. I found the cure at The Daily Drip.
The Daily Drip is a coffee shop and not the citified kind. It has plants hanging from the ceiling. Each table is different and so are the chairs. The menu is written on a white board with hand lettering, usually with a lot of hearts and flowers adorning each item. The wooden countertop is filled with homemade pastries under glass domes. However, as charming as the place is, the thing that keeps me going back is Eden. She’s not the owner of The Daily Drip, according to the corporation papers I pulled. Her dad owns it, but I’ve never seen him in the shop. The only male that I’ve seen working there is a stock boy who I think is her brother. It could be a cousin. I haven’t been able to ferret that detail out yet. Sure, I could hire a private investigator who would report back with everything from how much debt Eden has to where she likes to spend her off hours, but where would be the fun for me in that? I like going to The Daily Drip every day and observing her. I like gathering each piece of evidence and compiling my own picture. I like sitting under the ferns, drinking the coffee I must be allergic to, watching Eden competently move around the small coffee bar mixing drinks, taking money, talking to customers. I basically just like Eden, though. She could be doing anything, and I would want to watch.
Some guys stream Netflix. My favorite drama unfolds at The Daily Drip. There are first dates, breakups, business deals, backstabbing, and bonding. Overseeing it all is Eden, a raven-haired goddess with a predilection for candy apple red lipstick and glittery barrettes. I’ve ordered a half dozen of the hair things off the internet thinking how pretty they would look against the veil of black silk that hangs around her face. Currently, they’re sitting in the top drawer of my bedroom dresser along with the perfume I think she’d like, a stack of tissue-wrapped lingerie that I would like to see her wear, and a sixty-thousand-dollar oval diamond ring. That should probably be in a safe, but it needs to be in a handy place for when I ask Eden to marry me, which will be any day now. I just have to think of a good opening.