She walks back into Cuppa Joe’s for the second time that day with a preoccupied frown on her face, tapping her letter against her fingertips. She thinks this letter will help. She hopes this letter will help. She spent most of her time at the HCC today working on it. She doesn’t like being at odds with Alex. This “talking at cross-purposes” thing, as he put it, really is a pretty severe limitation of only communicating this way, and it’s honestly almost enough to make her write him a note that says Hey, can you just meet me at a table in Cuppa Joe’s so we can talk this out? But that feels too much like giving up. So she wrote this letter instead.
“Man, you two are prolific today!”
Zoe is jolted out of her thoughts by Andi, sweeping near the front door. “Hmm?” she asks incoherently.
“You and Alex. Seriously, that’s like the fastest turnaround I’ve seen from you guys.”
“I mean,” Zoe says, a bit confused. “It’s Saturday, so it’s not that unusual for me to be able to get him a response the same day he wrote one to me.”
Andi shrugs and walks Zoe up to the counter. “I guess I just haven’t been working when it’s happened before. But I’ve actually got another letter for you that you should read first. Move, Shawn.” Shawn, more than happy to give up interacting with people, takes Andi’s broom and gives up the space at the counter.
“Alex wrote me a second letter?” Zoe asks, utterly bewildered. Andi almost looks like she’s hiding a smile.
“Yeah,” she says. “He tried to get his first one back. Didn’t want you to read it.”
“Oh.” Zoe stares down at the letter she wrote and tries to figure out how she feels about that. “Why wouldn’t he want me to read it? It’s not like he was antagonistic or anything. I mean, yes, he overreacted to some things I wrote, and I know he wrote back before he read my whole letter, but all that was mostly my fault in the first place, and he was just reacting honestly, if a bit prematurely.”
“Really?” Andi asks with a raised eyebrow. “Because he seemed pretty sure that whatever he wrote was going to piss you off so badly you’d never want to write to him again.”
“What?” The word flies out of her with no small amount of exasperation. With a heavy sigh, she rubs at her forehead, then asks, “Andi, what am I going to do with him?”
Andi blinks, a bit taken aback. Then she hands Zoe Alex’s second letter and says, “Have a seat and hold that thought, okay?” She disappears into the back, and Zoe takes the opportunity to read the first half of Alex’s new letter.
And . . . wow. He is frantically apologetic, and it just kills her. If someone read this letter, and only this letter, they’d think he must have sent the most incendiary, insulting — She sighs heavily and runs a hand through her hair, reading on with a creased forehead as she tries to figure out what to do.
This letter honest-to-God has her on the verge of tears, she’s so frustrated. Not at him, not even a little bit at him. But at the whole situation. At the people in his life who have set him up to respond this way in this circumstance. He’s begging her not to leave him in this letter, because he honestly thinks she’s about to. She hates that he’s been reduced to this on something involving her, and the worst part is, she knows she can’t address it head-on. This letter, like the last, was written in haste. She can tell. Which means that, if he’d had more time to reflect, he’d have written a more controlled letter. Which means that once he’s calmer, he’s probably going to be embarrassed as hell that he wrote and sent this. So if she calls attention to it . . .
“Sorry,” Andi says, interrupting her train of thought as she slides in across the table. “I didn’t think this was an over-the-counter kind of conversation, so I went on break. Let’s chat.” She slides a cup of coffee across the table toward Zoe. “But first, try this. I’m experimenting, and you’re my guinea pig.”
“What is it?”
“Nutella mocha. Hot chocolate with nutella and a shot of espresso.”
“I like the sound of that already.” She takes a sip and sighs in contentment. “That is amazing, Andi. I am buying one of these for Alex the next time he comes in.”
“He’s not gonna like it,” Andi warns with a grin.
“Anyone who doesn’t like Nutella anything has no soul,” Zoe responds.
“Okay, seriously, though,” Andi says, sipping her own drink. “What’s going on?” Zoe sighs.
“I don’t know how to get him to stop thinking that I’m looking for the first excuse to walk away,” she says. “I’ve tried telling him and I’ve tried showing him, but . . . This whole thing with these last few letters? We’ve got a disconnect. And I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know. You know him. What do you think?”
Andi makes a face. “I don’t know him that well,” she hedges. “I mean, we’re on speaking terms, more so now, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call us friends. We acknowledge each other, and we’re friendly, but . . . he’s a loner. I’ve seen him hang out with exactly two people in here the whole time I’ve known him. One is his friend Emma.”
The way she says Emma’s name and rolls her eyes makes Zoe reach out and grab her hand. “Oh my God, do you hate Emma, too?”
“I cannot stand her,” Andi says immediately, with great vehemence. “She is the rudest, the hands-down worst example of patron any place of business could run into.”
“Thank God, I thought it was just me. Okay. Sorry. You were saying? He hangs out with Emma and one other person? Um . . .” She searches for the name. “Brent?”
Andi smiles like she’s enjoying a secret and shakes her head. “No, it’s not Brent.” Zoe frowns.
“Then who? I don’t think I’ve heard him talk about anyone else in his letters.”
“It’s you.”
Zoe pulls back, blinking and immediately confused. “What? Me? But we don’t hang out. We’ve never even met in person.” Andi shakes her head.
“I can’t explain it,” she says. “But . . . the way you get with your best friend? When your walls are completely down, and you’re perfectly relaxed and at ease? The closest I have ever seen Alex get to that is when he is in the corner, at a table by himself, reading one of your letters.” Zoe looks down, biting her lip and trying to fight off the brilliant blush that she is sure is all over her face right now. “Anyway,” Andi continues, “I think . . . I think there’s no way to fix this, not the way you want. All you can do is keep chipping away, little by little, at the insecurity. But you can’t crumble it all at once or wave it away. You have to just wear it down, piece by piece. Prove with every letter that you’re not going anywhere. Now then. You have a letter for him?”
Zoe sighs. “I want to add a post-script, to acknowledge this letter. Gimme a sec?”
“‘Course,” Andi says at once, gathering their empty cups and taking them behind the counter.
Zoe chews her lip, thinking about what to say, then jots a quick message. She keeps it simple and light-hearted, but she still worries that she should just scrap this whole response and start again. But then she thinks of him waiting to hear from her, agonizing over whether or not she’s going to reply, and she knows she has to get something to him. She takes the letter up to the counter where Andi is waiting.
“I dunno,” she says as she holds it out. “Maybe I should write him a note and ask him to meet in person? This all might be easier to explain face to face.”
Andi says hurriedly, “Oh, that seems a bit extreme.” Zoe raises an eyebrows. Andi clears her throat. “I just mean, well, how’s he gonna react if he thinks you’re angry enough to stop writing, and then instead of writing, you say you want to talk with him in person?”
Oh. Zoe hadn’t thought of that. Thank God for Andi. “You’re right,” she says, definitively holding the letter out now. “That could be disastrous.”
“In more ways than one,” Andi stresses, though Zoe doesn’t quite understand what she’s getting at.
“Well. Thanks, Andi. I appreciate the advice. Oh! And here.” She holds out a ten dollar bill. “For Alex’s nutella mocha, next time he comes in. Keep the change.”
Andi grins. “You got it. See you in Humanities.”
“See you.”
Alex still weighing heavily on her mind, Zoe heads for home.
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