low key lavender

Cordelia should not have opened up her phone. A stranger's Tinder profile glowed dimly on her phone, barely visible in the bright sun at her seat inside the cafe. She sighed and closed the app, focusing instead on losing the chill the crisp autumn air had given her and the warm dirty chai latte in her hands. The barista had forgotten her order, and after waiting enough time to complete a journal entry, she had to remind her about her drink. She had then received an iced latte in twenty seconds flat and had to correct the barista, which she felt terrible doing, as it had seemed like the barista was new, but the warmth from this latte was something she had been looking forward to all week now that the weather had changed. The barista was a sweet flustered femme and had been a good sport about it, making small talk with her while she remade her order. They parted with an awkward goodbye, and Cordelia had left a five-dollar bill in her tip jar out of guilt.

Her Tinder had been depressingly dry, and she couldn't handle looking at it any longer. She had only been back in the dating game for a few short months, her long-term relationship of two years having just ended at the tail end of spring. Tinder, and love, had not been kind to her recently, and cold messaging a girl was so hard to feel comfortable doing. She hated the small talk and the give and take of trying to read a person over a few short messages. She hadn't had much practice in talking phases yet, unlike some of her friends, who had had literally too many to count. She had come out to herself and the world later in life and hadn't pursued a relationship until she was twenty, and by then she was so desperate for a romantic connection— she had held onto the first person whom she was mildly attracted to and had shown attention back to her. She had ignored the red flags in the beginning, and that had only succeeded in allowing the red flags to become the whole fabric of their relationship. Since finally getting out of that pattern, trying to spark anything up with anyone else felt uninteresting at best to her, and it felt hopelessly impossible at worst. Lately, her thoughts had been more chaotic and scattered, strung along with memories of the last two years thus making moving on all the more painful.

She held her familiar, ceramic, reusable cup in her hands, letting its warm outside heat up her cold hands. She had bought it several summers ago to impress a girl who had made environmentalism her personality. Since then, it had become an emotional support item. She put the cream cup down and fiddled with its lid, looking back to the screen of her phone, now lighting up with messages from her friends' group chat. She reluctantly picked it up and scrolled back to the beginning to catch up on whatever the hell they were typing away about.

One of her friends' roommates had sent a link to a concert from a band she had never heard of, or at least didn't remember hearing about. The tickets were fifty dollars, and her friends had decided to meet tonight and then carpool there from one of their other friends' houses. She winced at the price but followed the link to buy the ticket because she could not afford the wrath of her best friend for ditching another group outing. The link took forever to load, and she squinted at her phone in annoyance.

"Who put that frown on your face?"

She looked up, wondering what person had interrupted her fight with the cafe's free wifi. She was a bit startled at the sound of a voice that sounded like sugar melting, going from one kind of sweet to another, and a bit scratchy, but smooth like caramel. She liked the sound of that voice.

The person the voice belonged to was covered in tattoos—their tank tight against their broad chest and built shoulders, showing off two almost full sleeves. A beanie barely contained a mass of dark curls, but did coordinate in color with their pair of beige Carhartt pants that were tight around the more muscular part of their thighs and their hips. Cordelia's eyes drank in their appearance.

She realized she was staring and not responding to this stranger, who was looking at her with curiosity and a smile filled with teeth that had no right to be as white as they were. She managed to recover a bit and said, "I'm sorry?"