Page 5 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

She cranes her neck a little trying not to look obvious, and failing. "He looks like a hitman in a movie."

"He's a regular," I say, which I realize is maybe slightly optimistic given that he's been here exactly once before, but it feels right and I'm going with it.

She gives me the look. The one that means she has opinions she's saving for later. Then the couple at the corner table finally gather their coats, and Eduard walks to the table without being told. He sits down, positioning himself exactly as he did yesterday, chair angled slightly toward the window, shoulders back.

Cookie makes her move within three minutes. She's our boldest one, a round little tortoiseshell with absolutely no sense of personal space. She lands on the chair beside him and starts kneading the armrest like she's billing him for it.

I wait for him to shift her off.

He doesn't.

He looks at her for a second and then looks back out the window. Cookie does a full rotation, decides the armrest is acceptable, and puts her chin down.

Old Bill, who has a permanent reservation on the table by the pastry display and has been coming in every morning for two years, catches my eye over his newspaper and raises his eyebrows with great significance.

I shrug. He shakes his head like I've disappointed him by not having a better explanation, then waves me over.

"He's lonely," Bill tells me, while I'm putting his Danish down. "The scary ones always are."

"He's not scary," I say automatically, which earns me another look, this one from Delilah who is wiping down the next table and clearly listening.

"Cookie doesn't sit with scary people," I add, which I think is a solid point.

"Cookie sits with anyone who doesn't actively remove her," Delilah says. "She sat on the vacuum cleaner for twenty minutes last Thursday."

I concede this is true, but I still think my point stands.

By lunchtime, it's not just Cookie. Socks has taken to appearing from wherever he spends his mornings and positioning himself on the windowsill directly in front of the corner table, from which position he hangs his tail down at intervals as though testing to see if Eduard is still there. Rhodes, who has strong opinions about strangers and usually voices them, walked up, sniffed Eduard's shoe, and walked away satisfied, which in our café's social hierarchy basically counts as a formal endorsement.

Lucifer, of course, has been the constant. He's there as soon as Eduard sits down, arranging himself across theneighboring chair like he's saving it before migrating to the table itself, tucked against Eduard's forearm, a position Eduard accommodates without comment by shifting his coffee slightly to the left. He doesn't pet Lucifer. He doesn't encourage him. He just stops preventing him, which I'm starting to understand is basically the same thing with this particular man.

The truth is I've started noticing things I have no business noticing. I try to stop myself, but they creep in while my hands are busy and sometimes the thought is fully formed before I realize I’m thinking of him again.

The way he wraps both hands around the cup before he drinks, like he's warming them even though it isn't cold enough to need it. The way he reads his phone with the same focused expression he gives to the window, total attention, nothing wasted. The way he always puts the cup down in exactly the same spot, same angle, and I know this because there's a faint ring on the table now, a ghost of it, and he hits it every single time.

He doesn't talk much. He answers questions. He says thank you, never thanks, always the full words, which I've decided counts as a crack in the concrete because I've heard actual rocks be less deliberate about it. He tipped when he left yesterday. Not on the app the way most people do now, but in cash, folded neatly and left under the empty cup where I find it when I’m clearing the table.

I don't mention the tip. He doesn't mention the tip. This feels like the correct arrangement.

By the time we’re closing and Eduard has left, Delilah has assembled enough evidence to convene a tribunal.

"He watches the door every time it opens," she says, loading the dishwasher. "Not like he's nervous. Like he's counting."

"Some people are just observant." I’m boxing up the leftover pastries and making notes on what needs baking for tomorrow.

She closes the dishwasher with more force than necessary. "I'm just saying. There's observant, and there's something else."

"Maybe he likes the café," I say. "People have reasons for liking places."

"Sammie. He looks like someone who has his dry cleaning picked up by a guy named Viktor."

This is probably fair. I just don't think it's the whole picture.

The entire week goes by like this.

He comes in on day six a little earlier than usual, and I have the coffee ready. He clocks it the second he reaches the counter, and he looks at me for a moment. There’s a shift in his expression that would be surprise on anybody else.

"The machine was already on," I tell him.