Page 46 of A Barista's Guide to Love & Larceny
“My carpentry, I mean. I’ve made all kinds of stuff ever since I was old enough for my parents to let me near the tools.”
“You can’t use magic to do the carving?”
“I can,” he said. He peeled away from the curb, guiding the car down the road. “And I do, for certain things. But I feel closer to the material when I’m working with it—I meanreallyworking with it, using my hands and that kind of thing.”
“That’s really cool,” Dani said. “I wish I had something like that.”
There was real surprise in Kass’s voice when he responded. “But you do.” She stared at him blankly. “You’re a barista,” he said. “You literally do the same thing with coffee.”
Dani scoffed. “That’s not the same at all.”
“Why not?” Kass said, confusion marking his forehead with a crease. “It’s a craft. You’re making things. You like doing it, don’t you?”
“Well… yeah. I guess so. I just never thought about it that way.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Kass said. “You never think about yourself that way.” This declaration sent a tie-dye of purple and blue into her brain. She looked at him sharply—not with anger, but with a fine point at the end of her curiosity. “I mean, not that I know you that well yet. It just seems like you tend to give yourself the short end of the stick.”
“No,” Dani said, “I just have one stick with two short ends.”
Kass laughed so loudly that it made her self-conscious; she had never thought of herself as a particularly funny person. But then again, she had never thought of her baristaness as a craft, either. It was weird to be caught in the aperture of someone else’s keen-lensed telescope, and to see herself as they saw her, as clearly as the moon with all its craters and its shadows.
Dani cleared her throat, of a mind to move the magnifying glass away from herself, at least for a minute. “Before I forget,” she said, “I just found out I have to be somewhere around ten tonight. For a class. I hate it but I kind of have to go.” She caught the flicker of disappointment in Kass’s face before he banished it like an easilybroken spell. “Does that mess up our plans?” she added, nibbling on her lower lip.
“Not at all,” he said, and turned a comforting smile on her. Heat gathered behind her breastbone. “We have plenty of time.”
They didn’t drive in the general direction of his neighborhood, like she’d expected, or to the section of town where the clubs and bars were, but instead headed west, away from the cluster of skyscrapers, past Quarter Cast and into an area she wasn’t familiar with.
“I guess I should have asked ahead of time,” Kass said as he made a right onto a street that had a very distinctive look, with clay buildings and brightly colored roofs, “but do you like Greek food?”
“Love all food,” Dani said, forehead pressed to the window. “Where are we?”
“This is Little Mediterranea,” Kass said. “My family’s old stomping ground.”
“I didn’t even know this existed.”
“Most Leap students don’t,” he said. “But when you’ve lived here your whole life, you know secrets.”
He parallel parked effortlessly in front of a white-and-blue restaurant whose lights shone through the rain. Dani watched the silhouettes in the windows, people laughing and talking and sharing food, as Kass came around to her side of the car with his magical umbrella. She took his offered hand, and their palms sparked with connection as he helped her out of the car and toward the building.
“This is my favorite restaurant in the whole world,” he told her, hand lingering in hers a beat longer than necessary before he reached for the door handle. “It’s not super fancy or anything, but trust me, it’s legit.”
She didn’t say it, but Dani was glad he hadn’t brought her to some kind of gimmicky restaurant in an effort to impress her. She likedthe homey interior of the place, which smelled like olives and feta, and she liked the cushiony booth the host sat them in. She liked the stuffed grape leaves Kass ordered as an appetizer, and she liked the story he told her while they ate them, about how his mom used to make them at home.
“This is where she and my dad met, actually,” he said. “She was a server and he was having a business meeting. It was love at first sight, to hear him tell it.”
“Is that how she told it?”
“Absolutely not. She thought he was kind of an asshole, but a cute asshole—her words, not mine.”
“Then how’d they end up together?”
“Same way I got you to go out with me, I guess,” Kass said. “A little persistence and a lot of luck. I just hope your first thought wasn’t that I seemed like an asshole.”
A self-conscious apricot brushed itself across the canvas of Dani’s mind. “Well,” she said, smiling, as she popped half a dolma into her mouth. “I kind of did. But only because you were violating the health code at the time.”
Kass shook his head. “Me and my lawlessness.”
“Pretty cool that you can shapeshift, by the way,” she said. “Is that an acquired skill, or something you’ve always been able to do?”
