CAPPUCCINO FOR CALLIE - chapter one |
Callie Hamasaki batted at the window blind cords as she passed, having given up on finding a way to angle them that properly diffused the light in her temporary apartment. Every single window faced west, the ocean views trying to calm her like they weren’t the latest problem piling onto the stress of her life.
No matter how she framed it, she was smack in the midst of a disaster. Another epic loss, in a life fractured by epic losses, both material and social. If only she knew how to guarantee that, this time, she wouldn’t have to go through any extra levels of hardship before her triumphant success.
Been there, done that, overcome it all.
And she would overcome again. Triumphant, overarching success, that was the game plan. Just as soon as she grappled this apartment into some kind of usable order.
She paced the perimeter of the rooms she'd sublet from her college roommate, Alicia. Maybe to an outsider she’d look like a leopard cat restlessly testing the limits of a new cage, but she couldn’t settle in until she got to know the space, feeling out its dark corners and deceptive shadows. Learning the light: that essential first step to using a space as the home base for her art.
Callie always claimed she could paint anywhere, but made that claim without including her caveats about natural and artificial lights, ventilation, or storage. All the things she’d balanced so perfectly in her studio in Monterey—until it went up in literal smoke, leaving her with a coveted contract for a solo exhibition and a stack of completed canvases now curdled to burnt blackness.
The damn fire had blazed through Callie’s building right when Alicia was moving in with her partner, Mateo. When she told her friend about the dim and dismal extended-stay motel Callie’s renters insurance hooked her up with, she offered up her place in Surfside, a few hours north of Monterey. Callie knew the town from her college days, and was more than glad to return to it, leaving the smoking rubble of her old life behind.
Alicia left a decent stash of furniture in the apartment for her, which helped. Callie had salvaged barely enough from the ashy ruins to fill her little van for the drive up the California coastline. But before she hauled in the remains of her possessions, she needed to grasp what it would take to turn the place into her perfect creative haven.
So she paced.
It wasn’t what she’d have picked for herself, if she’d had the whole world and plenty of time to search. Not only did the windows face west, many were sunk under a balcony overhang. The ceiling fixture in the living room was a track light. The space-saving sink and shower in the bathroom would cramp her clean-up process. And the tiny closet made her slightly grateful that the restorers deemed most of her wardrobe too scorched to salvage.
But she hadn’t had time to be picky. Her options were the dingy motel, her childhood bedroom and whatever space she could claim in her parents’ garage for painting, or Alicia’s sublet. And at least the sublet, for all its flaws, gave her the chance to use every inch of its sub-par space to work towards the triumph she refused to put off, no matter what it took out of her.
* * *
Abraham Wells removed two water bottles from his fridge, replacing them with the two he’d just taken from the dishwasher and refilled. He stashed the cool bottles in the side pockets of his blue backpack and headed to the door.
His brother glanced up from his video game. “Where are you off to? Hiking?”
He shook his head. “Caving.”
Austin crinkled his brow. “Thought caving was the green backpack.”
“Green for hiking. Blue for caving.”
Probably he didn't sound as annoyed as he felt after correcting his brother for the six-hundredth time, since Austin just grinned and said, “And red for when you have a hot date and may not show up until morning.”
He sounded, as always, entirely too amused by his brother’s systems. Abraham told himself he didn't care if his family wanted to laugh at him for having color-coded backpacks depending on what activity he was up to. It was fine. Let them laugh. Let them giggle. Let them go to goddamn hell.
He didn’t want to change the specifics of his life. It was better for his mental load when he set aside time to organize in advance, so he didn’t have to figure shit out when he was on the way out the door. So, yeah, his backpacks were always set for him to grab and go. His car’s tank was rarely below half-full. He did his laundry when he was down to four pairs of clean boxers. He couldn’t prepare for every eventuality in life, but he could do sensible things to make everyday life smoother.
He rolled his eyes at Austin, who was already engrossed back in his game. Escaping out of the apartment, he reviewed the route he wanted to take. He hadn't been to the Addax cave system in a few months. He was thinking of following the green slope pathway he’d discussed with a caving friend recently. It meant navigating from the more northerly entrance, which wasn’t his fave. Too much brush to wriggle past. But once he made it past the portal, it would open up to a series of walkable caverns before he branched off to explore the green slopes themselves.
Set on working through the steps, Abraham nearly plowed into a veritable carnival of nonsense filling the foyer.
He'd grown up in this apartment building his parents owned. It was hardly the first time he'd encountered people moving piles of stuff into the place. But there was something unusually motley and festive and intrusive about this crowd.
It was easy to peg them as a group of friends, rather than professional movers, even without blanket wrapped furnishings or neatly taped and labeled boxes. The stuff they carried existed in some space between move-in day and housewarming party: a paint-splashed box full of incomprehensible wood pieces, tote bags of groceries, two crates full of bottles and jars. Bundles of cloth trailing from the arms of a couple of conspiratorially laughing guys.
One of the cloth bearers reached over to snag his arm as he moved past. “Hold up, you live here?”
Abraham just looked at him, which didn’t deter the guy from letting out a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.
“Hey, everybody. Hang on. This guy is gonna help us.”
Well, that was taking quite a lot for granted. But all the goddam customer service training he’d done since he and his siblings opened Pier Three Coffee kicked in. Plus, if his parents or brother heard about him being rude to visitors, they'd stack that little nugget atop the pile of evidence they’d collected that Abraham was … Well, whatever they thought about him. That he couldn't take things in stride. That it was their job to reform the world to ease his navigation through it. Some kind of judgment they would never ever speak, but which would always lurk behind their eyes.
He used the pretense of hitching up his backpack to detach himself from the guy. “What can I do?” He scanned the various loads they were carrying, searching for anything so unwieldy it was about to topple.
Cloth bundle guy seemed to guess what he was doing and shook his head. “We’ve got this stuff.”
“But no one remembers where our friend’s staying. I know it’s in this building,” said one of the crate-bearing women. Her tone was more than a touch impatient.
“I believe you,” cloth bundle guy told her, not quite sincerely. “But what apartment?”
Crate woman pushed a puff of air out of her cheeks. “She's not answering her texts.”
Abraham stepped in before they could launch further into some kind of bickering routine that would trap him in the foyer forever. “Who are you looking for?”
The other three people turned away from the crate-cloth battle and spoke at once. “Callie Hamasaki.”
It wasn't even how in sync they were that gave him pause. It was the utter reverence when they breathed her name. He didn't know how his sister's friend inspired such awe, but he was sure all that adulation wasn’t something he wanted to deal with.
* * *
She was two-thirds of the way through shoving Alicia's unwieldy bookcase from the sitting area to the bedroom when someone knocked. Callie scrubbed her dusty hands onto the butt of her shorts and fumbled at the latch of her new front door.
Since she hadn't been expecting anyone, maybe it made sense that she’d be surprised. But something hitched sideways in her when she caught sight of the grumpy, narrowed, deep brown eyes of the man at her threshold.
“Um?”
“You’ve got visitors.”
She didn’t know why he sounded so grim and disapproving.
She didn’t know who he even was.
And then her arm moved like she was sketching his form, and she noted consciously what her visual processor had already established. The Wells siblings weren’t identical, but their cheekbones, their noses, the bow of their lips were all the same. “Oh. You’re Abraham.”
The grumpy eyes got deeper and narrower. Just a fraction, but it altered his expression from general annoyance, to a specific kind of guardedness aimed squarely at her.
“Yes, I’m the brother with one hand. Austin’s the other one. You’re Callie. The foyer is full of people claiming you invited them, but didn’t tell them your apartment number. If you want to see them, go meet them or text them or something.”
With that, he turned and strode away.
Callie stood there, agape. The back of her neck burned, but she wasn’t going to fluster herself chasing after him to, what, apologize for not recognizing him at first sight? It wasn’t in anyone’s interests—and certainly not hers—to follow those strong, tanned calves down the hall. He could think insulting things about her if he wanted.
Not that she could sort out how it was insulting, if she had recognized him only because of his congenital limb difference. They really didn’t know each other, and she’d never seen him with a beard before. As often as she’d gone with Alicia to her parents’ penthouse for dinner or to use their laundry and pool during college, she’d barely encountered either of her friend’s brothers; they were pretty much off doing their own thing in those years. Especially the older one, who’d moved away from Surfside for college and grad school both.
She shut the door and shook her head. His mood didn’t need to be her problem. And apparently she had people to see.
In the bathroom, she washed up and recovered her phone from the charger. After letting the crew know where she was, she debated and rejected the idea of sending Alicia a question about how to un-piss-off her brother.
What did it matter? He could fuck off if he wanted. She had things to do, and, based on the noise in the corridor, a lot of hugs to dispense.
No matter how she framed it, she was smack in the midst of a disaster. Another epic loss, in a life fractured by epic losses, both material and social. If only she knew how to guarantee that, this time, she wouldn’t have to go through any extra levels of hardship before her triumphant success.
Been there, done that, overcome it all.
And she would overcome again. Triumphant, overarching success, that was the game plan. Just as soon as she grappled this apartment into some kind of usable order.
She paced the perimeter of the rooms she'd sublet from her college roommate, Alicia. Maybe to an outsider she’d look like a leopard cat restlessly testing the limits of a new cage, but she couldn’t settle in until she got to know the space, feeling out its dark corners and deceptive shadows. Learning the light: that essential first step to using a space as the home base for her art.
Callie always claimed she could paint anywhere, but made that claim without including her caveats about natural and artificial lights, ventilation, or storage. All the things she’d balanced so perfectly in her studio in Monterey—until it went up in literal smoke, leaving her with a coveted contract for a solo exhibition and a stack of completed canvases now curdled to burnt blackness.
The damn fire had blazed through Callie’s building right when Alicia was moving in with her partner, Mateo. When she told her friend about the dim and dismal extended-stay motel Callie’s renters insurance hooked her up with, she offered up her place in Surfside, a few hours north of Monterey. Callie knew the town from her college days, and was more than glad to return to it, leaving the smoking rubble of her old life behind.
Alicia left a decent stash of furniture in the apartment for her, which helped. Callie had salvaged barely enough from the ashy ruins to fill her little van for the drive up the California coastline. But before she hauled in the remains of her possessions, she needed to grasp what it would take to turn the place into her perfect creative haven.
So she paced.
It wasn’t what she’d have picked for herself, if she’d had the whole world and plenty of time to search. Not only did the windows face west, many were sunk under a balcony overhang. The ceiling fixture in the living room was a track light. The space-saving sink and shower in the bathroom would cramp her clean-up process. And the tiny closet made her slightly grateful that the restorers deemed most of her wardrobe too scorched to salvage.
But she hadn’t had time to be picky. Her options were the dingy motel, her childhood bedroom and whatever space she could claim in her parents’ garage for painting, or Alicia’s sublet. And at least the sublet, for all its flaws, gave her the chance to use every inch of its sub-par space to work towards the triumph she refused to put off, no matter what it took out of her.
* * *
Abraham Wells removed two water bottles from his fridge, replacing them with the two he’d just taken from the dishwasher and refilled. He stashed the cool bottles in the side pockets of his blue backpack and headed to the door.
His brother glanced up from his video game. “Where are you off to? Hiking?”
He shook his head. “Caving.”
Austin crinkled his brow. “Thought caving was the green backpack.”
“Green for hiking. Blue for caving.”
Probably he didn't sound as annoyed as he felt after correcting his brother for the six-hundredth time, since Austin just grinned and said, “And red for when you have a hot date and may not show up until morning.”
He sounded, as always, entirely too amused by his brother’s systems. Abraham told himself he didn't care if his family wanted to laugh at him for having color-coded backpacks depending on what activity he was up to. It was fine. Let them laugh. Let them giggle. Let them go to goddamn hell.
He didn’t want to change the specifics of his life. It was better for his mental load when he set aside time to organize in advance, so he didn’t have to figure shit out when he was on the way out the door. So, yeah, his backpacks were always set for him to grab and go. His car’s tank was rarely below half-full. He did his laundry when he was down to four pairs of clean boxers. He couldn’t prepare for every eventuality in life, but he could do sensible things to make everyday life smoother.
He rolled his eyes at Austin, who was already engrossed back in his game. Escaping out of the apartment, he reviewed the route he wanted to take. He hadn't been to the Addax cave system in a few months. He was thinking of following the green slope pathway he’d discussed with a caving friend recently. It meant navigating from the more northerly entrance, which wasn’t his fave. Too much brush to wriggle past. But once he made it past the portal, it would open up to a series of walkable caverns before he branched off to explore the green slopes themselves.
Set on working through the steps, Abraham nearly plowed into a veritable carnival of nonsense filling the foyer.
He'd grown up in this apartment building his parents owned. It was hardly the first time he'd encountered people moving piles of stuff into the place. But there was something unusually motley and festive and intrusive about this crowd.
It was easy to peg them as a group of friends, rather than professional movers, even without blanket wrapped furnishings or neatly taped and labeled boxes. The stuff they carried existed in some space between move-in day and housewarming party: a paint-splashed box full of incomprehensible wood pieces, tote bags of groceries, two crates full of bottles and jars. Bundles of cloth trailing from the arms of a couple of conspiratorially laughing guys.
One of the cloth bearers reached over to snag his arm as he moved past. “Hold up, you live here?”
Abraham just looked at him, which didn’t deter the guy from letting out a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.
“Hey, everybody. Hang on. This guy is gonna help us.”
Well, that was taking quite a lot for granted. But all the goddam customer service training he’d done since he and his siblings opened Pier Three Coffee kicked in. Plus, if his parents or brother heard about him being rude to visitors, they'd stack that little nugget atop the pile of evidence they’d collected that Abraham was … Well, whatever they thought about him. That he couldn't take things in stride. That it was their job to reform the world to ease his navigation through it. Some kind of judgment they would never ever speak, but which would always lurk behind their eyes.
He used the pretense of hitching up his backpack to detach himself from the guy. “What can I do?” He scanned the various loads they were carrying, searching for anything so unwieldy it was about to topple.
Cloth bundle guy seemed to guess what he was doing and shook his head. “We’ve got this stuff.”
“But no one remembers where our friend’s staying. I know it’s in this building,” said one of the crate-bearing women. Her tone was more than a touch impatient.
“I believe you,” cloth bundle guy told her, not quite sincerely. “But what apartment?”
Crate woman pushed a puff of air out of her cheeks. “She's not answering her texts.”
Abraham stepped in before they could launch further into some kind of bickering routine that would trap him in the foyer forever. “Who are you looking for?”
The other three people turned away from the crate-cloth battle and spoke at once. “Callie Hamasaki.”
It wasn't even how in sync they were that gave him pause. It was the utter reverence when they breathed her name. He didn't know how his sister's friend inspired such awe, but he was sure all that adulation wasn’t something he wanted to deal with.
* * *
She was two-thirds of the way through shoving Alicia's unwieldy bookcase from the sitting area to the bedroom when someone knocked. Callie scrubbed her dusty hands onto the butt of her shorts and fumbled at the latch of her new front door.
Since she hadn't been expecting anyone, maybe it made sense that she’d be surprised. But something hitched sideways in her when she caught sight of the grumpy, narrowed, deep brown eyes of the man at her threshold.
“Um?”
“You’ve got visitors.”
She didn’t know why he sounded so grim and disapproving.
She didn’t know who he even was.
And then her arm moved like she was sketching his form, and she noted consciously what her visual processor had already established. The Wells siblings weren’t identical, but their cheekbones, their noses, the bow of their lips were all the same. “Oh. You’re Abraham.”
The grumpy eyes got deeper and narrower. Just a fraction, but it altered his expression from general annoyance, to a specific kind of guardedness aimed squarely at her.
“Yes, I’m the brother with one hand. Austin’s the other one. You’re Callie. The foyer is full of people claiming you invited them, but didn’t tell them your apartment number. If you want to see them, go meet them or text them or something.”
With that, he turned and strode away.
Callie stood there, agape. The back of her neck burned, but she wasn’t going to fluster herself chasing after him to, what, apologize for not recognizing him at first sight? It wasn’t in anyone’s interests—and certainly not hers—to follow those strong, tanned calves down the hall. He could think insulting things about her if he wanted.
Not that she could sort out how it was insulting, if she had recognized him only because of his congenital limb difference. They really didn’t know each other, and she’d never seen him with a beard before. As often as she’d gone with Alicia to her parents’ penthouse for dinner or to use their laundry and pool during college, she’d barely encountered either of her friend’s brothers; they were pretty much off doing their own thing in those years. Especially the older one, who’d moved away from Surfside for college and grad school both.
She shut the door and shook her head. His mood didn’t need to be her problem. And apparently she had people to see.
In the bathroom, she washed up and recovered her phone from the charger. After letting the crew know where she was, she debated and rejected the idea of sending Alicia a question about how to un-piss-off her brother.
What did it matter? He could fuck off if he wanted. She had things to do, and, based on the noise in the corridor, a lot of hugs to dispense.