IT WAS AN unholy Wednesday morning at Grace's Place.

A concoction of bleach, coffee beans, and leftover cheeseburgers tickled my nose and turned the liquids in my otherwise empty stomach. The fluorescent bulb in the corner kept flickering as though indicating paranormal activity rather than faulty wiring. None of the other workers had clocked in yet, and I scrambled to make the checkered tiles spotless enough, the vinyl booths a tad less sticky, the marble countertop pristine enough. I constantly wiped relentless beads of sweat off my forehead, and, even worse, the lavender hints in my cologne had evaporated, leaving me a frazzled, collegiate mess.

Even unholier was the sight of my sister, younger than me with only a year, in nothing but a low-plunging white top and frayed shorts over FaceTime at 7:45 in the morning. We hadn't caught up on the happenings in each other's lives in a hot minute, and I had two back-to-back classes to attend once my shift was over—one of them a statistics course I dreaded with every hair on my head—so when I saw her text asking to FaceTime, I couldn't say no. No matter how badly I wanted to.

She'd watched me mop the floors and fail woefully at trying to screw the shaky fluorescent bulb tightly in, all while telling me about this event and that incident. It was all mostly okay, somewhat fun. At least right until she brought up the sour subject of Rhys Harvard, the boy whom I'd kissed several times throughout my high school career and was now pinned to the top of my chats, but still wasn't clearly defined. I secretly feared he'd never be, and that was one of the uncountable reasons why I found the mention of him so depressing.

There I was, struggling to do what I could before the place opened in fifteen minutes, and I kept falling victim to the thought of asking her if that wasn't a little too much cleavage for a Wednesday morning, just to change the topic.

"Like Aunt Kim would say—you must be very stupid," she deadpanned.

I had my phone propped up against the bare strip of wall between the espresso machine and several stacks of white Styrofoam cups, and on the other side of it, Tomi put her makeup products—which I, apparently, couldn't afford even if I sold my kidneys (her words)—back in their designated purse. "You know," I said as I grabbed the last clean rag from the old plastic bucket by my feet, "speaking to your older sister like that is considered offensive and rude in our culture."

"In many cultures, actually," she corrected, and I shook my head at her. Sometimes I really hated her guts. "But we're in the land of the free, so yes, like Aunt Kim would say."

"You're still supposed to uphold your values, but whatever. He likes me, Tomi. I know it."

"If that is true, why hasn't he asked you out yet?" She raised an inquisitive eyebrow, full Cupid's bow pressed into a challenging line. "A guy who likes you would want to have you all to himself, not kiss you under the bleachers a questionable number of times, only to miss you by an hour the day you leave for college. Then what? He texts you everyday, sends you thirst traps, and . . .?"

A tired breath fluttered past my lips as I turned away to wipe down the counter. I had no damn clue how to answer her question. It was yet another mystery in the infinitude of mysteries I'd been blessed with. "I don't know," I told her with a nonchalant shrug, sparing her a glance over my shoulder.

"Do you want me to spell it out for you, De?"

"Please don't," I muttered.

"He just wants to have fun with you. He wants to be that white dude with the Black girlfriend."

At the sound of that, I stopped what I was doing and gave her a half-hearted glare. "Don't tell me you're one of them."

"One of who?" She reached behind her camera for an elastic band, then threw her head back and gave it a little shake to align her longass knotless braids. Tomi was rarely never with braids. I had no idea how she did it.

"One of those people giving me shit for wanting to date a white boy. This isn't about race."

She impressively held her hair up in a ponytail before declaring, "I don't have a problem with white boys." Then she rolled her swivel chair to her bed so she could grab the jar of hair gel on it. It was a lot of activity that was starting to give me whiplash. When she was back in front of her phone, she added, "Rhys is just an entitled ass who wants to get in your pants."

I huffed and resumed my task, spying the time and increasing my pace. "Mitch clearly wanted the same thing, yet how many months in are the both of you?"

"Girl, stop."

"It's true, Tomi! He was practically drooling all over you. I've never seen a person stare so unashamedly at someone's ass in public before."

"I do have a great ass."

I shook my head again and sprayed some cleaning solution on the counter.

She wasn't wrong, but I'd rather put pins in my eyes than admit it to her face. It was embarrassing enough when she started using D cups and I was still stuck with a B. When our parents gave her liberties they wouldn't give me until I was at least thirty. When we went out together and people thought she was older because I couldn't possibly be older in my state. When she could impulsively buy tops that caught her eye on the internet, while I had to triple-check the size and remind myself not to trust the mockup women.

In theory, I didn't look bad. B-cup boobs, a waist that made my hips look prominent even though they never really went past thirty-six inches, and most of all, skin so clear that it had girls in high school thinking it was okay to touch my face while they asked what products I used. But when you had a sister like Ewatomi Rivers, a taller, curvier, darker version of you, it was a constant reminder that you didn't quite look like the other females in your family. My parents had told me stories about people staring at us too long when we were out together as kids. Other than the facial resemblance—something you'd only truly notice when you stood up close—and the tight curls, there were no other indicators that we were sisters.

"There's nothing wrong with Rhys," I offered, exhausted of this conversation to my bone marrow. "It's just . . . complicated."

"Mhm." Tomi had that say it till you believe it tone to her voice, and it sunk deep and fast. "There's nothing complicated about a privileged boy trying so damn hard to prove that he's not a racist."

I shut my eyes for a moment and waved my free hand in two circles in front of me, my way of telling her to drop the topic. "Why are we talking about this again?"

"You told me he called last night, and that you guys talked for over an hour," she responded, leaning towards the mirror behind her phone and brushing the hair gel through her baby hairs. "And I'm just trying to prove to you that it might not really mean anything. Maybe he was just bored, you know."

I watched her lay her edges for a beat, dumbfounded by her total disregard for my emotions. "You're so unsupportive, it's ridiculous."

"I don't like Rhys. Send me to jail."

"Remind me to never FaceTime you before eight a.m. again?" I said as I crouched to put the cleaning supplies back in the bucket.

The bell above the door jingled before she could respond, and I pushed the bucket aside with the belief that it was my coworker Ro refusing to use the employee door again.

"So, did everyone just snooze their alarm fifty times this morning like I did or what?" I started to smile at her as I rose back up to my feet, but then I realized with a violence behind my ribcage that it wasn't her. Or any other late coworker, for that matter.

For a handful of seconds, I couldn't move.

Sydney Miller took a pause at the door, most likely processing my question and wondering if it was worth answering, and it took me a breath too long to realize that my mouth was half-open. I promptly shut it, feeling that familiar brush of heat as it climbed up my chest.

His curls were damp, and the shoulders of his loose gray tee housed a few dark spots where they had dripped onto it. One of his hands remained on the not-quite-closed door, and I tried really hard not to get a seizure from the sight of it. I'd spent twenty minutes cleaning the suspicious smudges from the glass, way too much time for him to just walk in and place his ridiculously nice hand against it.

He regarded me in silence for a couple more heartbeats, and it was in that moment that I took note of the hint of surprise that had threaded through his full, dark eyebrows. I was more likely to suddenly understand advanced calculus than I was to make sense of the reason why he looked surprised to see me. It had easily been two weeks since our last encounter—a simple brush of my shoulder against his chest as I, for some reason, passed through the same doorway he was standing in at the student center without asking him to excuse me first.

Finally, he let the door close and said, "Didn't know you worked here."

We were the only ones in the place, so his deceptively smooth voice traveled across the space between us with ease. I hated the resulting commotion at the base of my stomach, so I employed my only coping strategy.

I ignored him.

"We're not open yet." My words surprisingly came out with a devil-may-care tinge I knew I'd only be proud of when I recalled this moment while my professor droned on about why it was important for us to relearn the measures of central tendency—albeit a more advanced version of it.

Sydney paused again, this time intentionally, and I was nearly forced to take my words and break them down, turn them into a joke. But if there was one thing I was terrible at, it was improvisation, so I kept my mouth shut. "Yeah, I know," he finally said.

"Great," I mumbled. Then a little louder, I informed him, "So yeah, I unfortunately can't attend to you until eight-thirty. If you walk two blocks, you should be back just in time."

"Hey," he said, voice firm and calculated as he crossed the checkered tiles—that I also just cleaned—to me in four brisk steps. He placed his hands on the countertop, and my neurons got to work, shooting these tiny electrical sparks to my brain. I wasn't sure why exactly. Was it the fact that his hands were right there, on the countertop that probably wasn't completely dry yet, or the fact that his hands were right there? Hands that had touched me once. Hands that had fluttered in a warm path across the small of my back and left me feeling concussed. Hands I'd thought about every other day since then. "My dumb roommate broke our Keurig."

I was hit with a wave of cocoa and honey, and a base note of coconut, as his shoulders went taut, and in that singular moment, I got so jealous. I probably, maybe almost certainly, smelled like sweat and bleach, and I probably looked like I smelled like sweat and bleach. I was probably saturated with it, and it probably showed. People weren't supposed to smell like me before two p.m.

"As you might've noticed, I'm the only one here," I told him in an effort to distract myself from the fact that I was overthinking again. "And you can probably smell the place." I gestured around, adding a quiet and me in my head.

"I can make coffee," he announced. "I'll make it."

"Coffee is actually bad for you, you know?"

He leaned down a couple inches to meet my height, and before I could prepare myself for it, he breathed, "De, please."

It was difficult to match this version of Sydney Miller with the one in the campus rumors. This version that was here, almost begging for coffee in a near-whisper couldn't possibly be the same one the girls in my faculty talked about with a mixture of awe and loathing. The stories just didn't add up.

"Sydney, you know Grace's Place opens at eight-thirty."

"Yeah, and you know a caffeine boost is needed to get through a Chin class, which also happens to be by eight-thirty today."

"Why are you in a class about political analysis in the first place?"

"Why are you not?"

"I'm minoring in psychology," I answered with a small tilt of my chin. There was a hint of pride in my voice.

"Well, I'm double minoring in political science and philosophy."

"How surprising."

"Don't judge me."

I was tempted to let him in on the fact that judging him was what most students were doing right now, but I held my tongue.

After a moment of silence, he sighed, and I hated that I caught the exact moment the edges of his eyes softened and exhaustion clung to his face. "Will you make it?" he asked, still gentle, still pleading.

"Depends on how much you tip me." I topped that off with a smile.

Sydney took his hands off the countertop and reached into his left pocket for his wallet. When he smoothly flipped it open, it was enough for me to feel as if I was extorting him. All for a cup of coffee that cost a dollar, with tax. In the time I'd spent arguing with him about it, I could've started the brew.

He placed a ten-dollar bill in front of me and raised an eyebrow, a silent question. A nine-dollar tip before eight-thirty. Wow, he meant business. "I can make the coffee while you just . . . " He trailed off, already coming around to the other side of the counter.

"What are you doing?" He didn't respond. "Sydney." I turned to get a good view of him as he came up next to me, and it was only then that I realized my sister was still on FaceTime.

She watched us with strange interest, her pixelated face holding onto an I'm never looking away kind of satisfaction. Tomi had never been quiet for this long when not trying to act disinterested in a cute guy.

I ignored her.

Sydney had already manned the coffee machine with a look of intense concentration on his face, and I was pretty sure at this point that by the end of today, I'd have a heart attack. He was touching everything.

"Sydney, don't touch that. Go have a seat. I'll make the coffee."

He promptly took his hands off the machine and looked up at me as I took my place by his side. "You will?"

I let out a sigh. "Yes. Just go have a seat. I can't risk someone walking in and seeing you back here."

"I'm back here," Tomi said, loud enough to draw his attention. When he noticed where she was nestled, she wiggled her fingers at him, and he looked at me again, this time as if asking for permission.

I stood there quite awkwardly for a beat too long, and I didn't like it, so I made a grand sweeping gesture towards my phone. "That's my sister. Don't say hi to her, you'll thank me."

"Hi, Sydney," she said anyway, all straight white teeth. "She's incredibly single, whatever she tells you."

I'd never gone at my phone that fast in my life. "Okay, Tomi. You know what—let me call you back in, like, ten-ish minutes. Or maybe at the end of the day. Bye."

I hung up and slipped the device into the pocket of my boyfriend jeans before she could utter a word, then turned with my hands on my hips to face Sydney, who still stood there in surprise.

"What are you still doing here?"

He blinked himself out of his daze and shook his head. "Sorry. I'll go"—he gestured vaguely behind him—"wait over there."

"Thanks. And please, take your ten dollars back. I can't exploit you like that."

"You sound like a bad politician." There was a playful smile on his lips as he said that, and I paused for a heartbeat, confused as to what it meant. When I didn't respond, his smile went down. "Okay, I'm hilarious. I'll go stand over there now."

Minutes later, while his coffee was getting ready, my phone vibrated against my thigh, and I briefly pulled it out, hoping it was a gig notification, but it was just Tomi being a nosy gremlin.

The incomplete golden retriever energy is sexy. I demand details

I shook my head and spared Sydney a covert glance. He sat in a booth in the far corner, his head placed on his crossed arms on the table, dark curls semi-limp. Before my mind could begin to come up with anything inspired by him, Ro walked in, through the front door as expected, with a blue duffel bag slung over her slender shoulder.

I took a moment to process her state—dirty blonde hair in a half-hearted braid, flushed cheeks, bleeding mascara around sunken eyes, T-shirt neckline slanted—before deciding that I could spare her the questions today. Frankly, she looked like she was hit by a bus.

She stopped in front of the door, her arms limp at her sides, and regarded me with a blank expression for a moment. Then she informed, "I have a wine hangover, and college is a bitch."

I laughed because I couldn't agree more, then slipped my phone back into my pocket. "Yeah, you should probably clean yourself up before Grace gets here." I reached for the box of wipes I carried in my tote bag for her sake as she came up to me, grumbling about something I didn't understand, and it was enough to make me forget about Sydney Miller.

first chapter teaser anyone?

this took over *a year* to come out right, so please let me know your thoughts. they're very much appreciated <3