Page 15 of A Barista's Guide to Love & Larceny
“I’ll write your teacher a note,” Silva said easily. “It’ll be an excused absence, no mark on your record. Meet me here at two thirty. I’ll give you some questions to ask on the tour and arrange for a car to pick you up.”
“Great.” Dani got to her feet. Silva stood with her, looking oddly proud, though Dani couldn’t tell which of them she was proud of.
“I’m really glad we were able to connect, Miss Lionet. I think this is going to be a very fruitful excursion. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Dani said. “See you.”
She left Silva’s office in a daze, clutching the first check in her fist and the promise of a second in her heart.
Five
Dani’s day ended as it did most nights, with her behind the bar at Quarter Cast. Though her conversation with Silva had left her concerned about what OneiroLabs was up to, her anxiety over the professor reporting her to the administration or otherwise blackmailing her had all but dissipated. And she was able to distract herself from that other, nagging worry—the one shaped like a specific boy—with the nine o’clock rush and a relaxed banter with her coworkers. Once the other baristas left, though, and business died down, it was hard to keep her brain from circling back to Kass.
He’s not coming. He’s not coming, Dani told herself as she ran the dishwasher. McKenna had been wrong. Kass had bailed, and he’d never make the ghost of Quarter Cast howl again, which meant that Dani needed to keep herself occupied. In between customers, she took apart the espresso machine and deep-cleaned every hidden nook and cranny of the beast.
After about an hour and a half, though, she ran out of tedious tasks to do, so she got out the reading for her world lit class and was about to start annotating when the door-ghost gave his mournful cry. Dani looked up, hope betraying her, but instead of Kass, she saw Oliver, and frowned—not because she was disappointed to see them, but because it was unusual for them to come in so many nights in a row. She smoothed her mouth into a smile as they trudged to the register.
“Back so soon?” she said.
“Yeah,” they said, returning her smile wearily. “It’s just one ofthose weeks. Can I have the same thing you made me Sunday night? I couldn’t remember what it was yesterday, but it was absolutely heavenly, and did the trick, too. Only, can I have more of it this time?”
“The highest compliment a barista can get,” Dani said. “Coming right up.”
She made the drink quickly and waved away their money when she brought it back to the register. “On the house tonight.”
“That’s really sweet of you, thanks,” they said, throwing a couple of bills into the tip jar.
“No problem,” Dani said. She paused, debating, then added, “Um, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you okay?”
Oliver took a long sip of their latte. “Not really,” they said, a faint sky blue swirling in Dani’s mind. She got the sense that they were the kind of person who tended to put on a brave face for the rest of the world. “How could you tell?”
“You said it was one of those weeks,” she said. “Is school kicking your butt right now?”
“I mean, always,” Oliver said with a small laugh. “I probably shouldn’t have taken plant pathology in my first semester. I got overexcited when I was signing up for classes.”
Dani remembered the thrill of browsing the Leap’s expansive class catalog and grinned. “I feel that. So plant pathology is what’s making you want to stay up all night?”
“Not really, no,” they said. “It sounds weird, but trust me—you’d feel the same way if you’d been trapped in your own dreams for the last week.”
The mental sky blue darkened into sapphire, and Dani felt something click into place, a sudden suspicion forming.
“Hold on,” she said slowly. “This doesn’t have anything to do with OneiroLabs, does it?”
“Wait, how did you know I did their sleep study?” A horrified look crossed Oliver’s face, and a marmalade orange flared in Dani’smind. “Did I really just say that? I wasn’t supposed to say anything, I signed an NDA—shit!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Dani said hastily. “I won’t tell anyone. I already knew about the clinical trials—it isn’t your fault that I put two and two together.”
“Thank you,” Oliver said with palpable relief. “But howdidyou know? You didn’t do one of the trials, did you?”
“No, but I saw a flyer for it in the library. Actually—” She realized she was wearing the same pants from Sunday, which meant she could reach into her pocket and pull out the tab she’d torn off.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Oliver said. “I signed up for the study because—well, OneiroLabs is part of why I wanted to come to the Leap in the first place. They hire a lot of arcanobotany students from here, and they’re doing some innovative things with plants that I’d love to be a part of. I thought doing the study would be a good way to meet some people there, but I only made it through one night of it. I guess there was something wrong with me because they told me not to bother coming back, but it—” They cut themself off.
Normally, Dani wouldn’t have pressed them, but these were special circumstances.
“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want to,” she said, “but you said something about being trapped in your own dreams?”
Oliver hesitated, clearly considering what to say next. When they finally spoke, no colors accompanied their words. “Yes. The trials were to test their new product, some kind of potion for lucid dreaming, which sounded really interesting when they were explaining it to us. The effects were only supposed to last one night, but let’s just say it worked too well, because I’m still—”
