#osceban

The guy smiles and fills his entire face with it. It scrunches up his eyes. “Hi there!” 

Oscar thinks this guy has got to clear seven feet, sizing him up as he looms over him. He looks like Gumby- tall and lanky and vaguely squishy. 

“Hello,” Oscar offers, clipped and polite, hoping to end this as quickly as possible.

Impossibly, the guy’s smile gets wider. 

“I just got done with the longest day of work, sorry if I look tired.” The guy didn’t look at all tired. He looked like a ray of sunshine on Valium. “What are you reading?”

Oscar furrows his brow. The nerve of some people to walk up to strangers and strike up a conversation. It’s like he needs to hang a sign around his neck saying please do not approach! Skittish! 

Still, his mother raised him to be at least a little cordial to strangers. “Uh, just ah. Scrolling. Passing the time,” he mumbles, waving his phone for emphasis.

The guy nods. “Oh. Have you been here long?”

Why does that matter? He’s been here for an appropriate amount of time. Yes, it’s been a minute since he finished his coffee, but that doesn’t mean he has to leave. There’s no time limit on hanging out at the cafe alone. Who does this guy think he is? 

Oscar manages a grumbled “Uhhh…”  before he’s interrupted.

“I’ll buy the coffee,” the guy says, still smiling. “It’s just fair. How do you take it? I usually drink it black. Cliche, I know, being French, I like my coffee dark, but it’s just what I like. I try not to be embarrassed about the things I like.” 

Oscar blinks, his brain still trying to catch up. A stranger’s never offered him coffee before, but he supposes he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Hey, free stuff is free stuff.

“Uh. Just a latte, I guess,” he says, and the guy’s eyes light up.

“Great! Wait here and I will get it,” and he bounds off to the counter to order.

Left alone again, Oscar tries to dissect what just happened. He’s never been to this cafe before, maybe it’s common for people to walk up to strangers and offer to buy them a drink. Or maybe it’s a French thing. Oscar doubts it, though. Ever since his disastrous internship at Alpine Motors, he’s always been a little distrustful of the French.

He looks over at the guy. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet while he’s talking to the barista. His energy is infectious; Oscar catches his knees bouncing in his seat.

Soon enough, he comes bounding back over to Oscar, placing the latte in front of him and taking the seat on the other side of the table. Oh. This apparently was not just a small act of kindness; the guy really does want to talk. Oscar takes a long sip of his coffee to prepare himself.

The guy smooths out his shirt, fixing his posture before looking back to Oscar. “How has your day been? Before this, of course.”

What the hell, might as well be honest. The guy’s kind of weird, but he did buy him a coffee. And he’s been dying to complain to someone about work and Lando still hasn’t texted him back. There are worse ways to kill time. 

“Um. Well. It’s my day off, so it’s been good. Work’s been a bit shit, nice to be away from it for a day.”

The guy nods, sipping his coffee, “I can relate to that. I love what I do, but sometimes the noise around it all gets to be a lot.” 

“Yeah.” Oscar says, “I’m not into all the bureaucracy, but I like digging into the technical stuff. Like, just leave me alone and let me work my shit, you know?”

He’s had a lot of trouble lately with other departments interfering with his work. Every little thing he does needs to go through seventeen different approvals and focus tests and revisions. It’s exhausting. Lando doesn’t like talking about boring work stuff outside of working hours, so it is nice to get an opportunity to vent about it a bit with someone who actually seems like they want to listen. 

And French Coffee Guy is looking at him like he’s the most interesting man in the universe. It’s actually kind of intimidating, a guy looking at him like that, especially when he’s not really saying something that important. 

And now Coffee Guy is nodding at him enthusiastically, like he couldn’t agree more that Oscar’s work was shit. “What do you do, again?”

Again? Oscar never said in the first place. He assumes it's just another weird French thing and lets it slide.

“I’m uh. In engineering.”

The guy slams his cup on the table. It sloshes a bit onto the tabletop. “No!” he exclaims, “I am also! I work at Alpine Motors in their product development department!”

“Alpine?” Oscar can’t believe it. “I interned there after uni! That place is shit!”

“It is!” he says, still smiling, “I am not happy there!”

He tries to suss out if he’d seen this guy before. He really only worked in the dregs of the company, doing the most menial shit for eight hours a day. He didn’t get to meet very many people, just his manager and some of the other interns. And he thinks he’d remember someone like this guy. He’s not easy to miss, all six feet of him with his long arms and big smile and boundless energy.

“Well. Why don’t you quit?” Oscar asks. He’s wanted to ask this to every employee of that shitty, shitty company. He’s glad he has the opportunity. 

The guy sighs, “Eh. I am looking, but it’s hard to find a job doing exactly what you love to do. I just try to remind myself that I’m lucky enough to be doing this job at all.” He takes another sip of his coffee before his eyes widen. “Wait! We need to back up. You worked at Alpine? That’s such a coincidence! That must be why-”

But he’s interrupted by a waitress delivering some kind of artisan muffin to their table. “Ah! I thought we could share!” he says, taking a piece and pushing the plate over to Oscar. Oscar takes a piece because he doesn’t really know what else to do. It’s pretty good. Maybe a little sweet.

In between bites of muffin, the guy speaks again. “What else do you like to do? Besides your job?”

Oscar is not resigned to the fact that he’s stuck here having a full conversation over coffee with a guy who hasn’t even asked his name. He checks his phone- still nothing from Lando. Well. He supposes there are worse ways to kill a little more time. 

“Um. I like sports. I follow cricket pretty closely,” he says, popping another piece of muffin in his mouth. It’s good, not too sweet. This guy has good taste. 

The guy nods along. “Ah. That makes sense- it’s big here, no? It’s mostly football that’s big in France. What team do you follow?”

“I keep tabs on the Aussie national team-”

The guy leans forward in his chair, “Australia? That’s interesting, why?”

Oscar tries to suss out the joke he’s been left out of. “Uh. Because that is where I’m from?”

The guy’s eyebrows knit together. “It is? I could have sworn you were from here…” his voice pitters off, lost in thought. 

Ah man, has his accent worn off that much? Are people really thinking he’s a local? This can not stand. He can’t have people thinking he’s a Londoner. He’s going to need to visit home more; he always feels more Aussie when he gets back from a long trip. Maybe he just needs some TimTams.

“What do you like to do?” Oscar hears himself asking. Because he guesses he’s becoming an active part of this conversation now.

The guy’s entire face brightens up. “I love comics! Especially Marvel. Especially Spider-Man. I’ve liked them since I was young. I’ve seen all the movies and I even have some really old prints of first-run comics, like from the sixties!”

He’s talking with his hands now, making sweeping gestures. He almost knocks over his coffee mug. And hell, Oscar’s feeling a little endeared. He likes listening to people be passionate about things, even if it’s something that he has no interest in. It’s why he listens to Lando ramble on for hours about the newest Call of Duty: Whatever game.

“That’s actually pretty cool,” Oscar tells him, leaning back in his chair.

“Yeah! Most people think it’s lame, but I don’t know- it’s like escapism for me,” he says, ducking his head. 

Oscar takes a sip of his coffee. “I don’t think it’s lame,“ he says honestly. Dorky does not equal lame. 

The guy gives him a small smile. It doesn’t make his eyes wrinkle, but it’s still sweet. It looks almost hesitant. “Maybe… I can show you some, sometime.”

“I- yeah,” Oscar says. And he’s surprised to find that he actually means it. 

They talk more about their hobbies, their interests and their backstories. Oscar learns that this guy moved from France to London with little more than the clothes on his back, walked into every car manufacturer headquarters in the city and dropped off his paper resume in person. He learned that he’s in a bowling league that he organized with some of the retired folks in his building. He learned that he’s started wearing his glasses more often because he thinks his new frames make him look like Clark Kent. 

He still never caught his name, and at this point, he feels like it’s too late to ask. 

Soon enough, the guy checks his watch and his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Has it been that long we’ve been talking? I have to be off, but I’ve really liked finally meeting you.”

Oscar smiles around the very last sip of his coffee. “Yeah. I’ve liked meeting you, too.” 

The guy is already standing, pulling out his phone. “I would love to do this again, Oliver.”

Wait. 

What?

“Oliver?” Oscar asks. 

The guy blanches, “Oh- do you not prefer that? What did Pierre say- Ollie? Is that what you usually go by?”

Oscar lets out an awkward laugh. “Uh, no. I don’t go by any of that because I’m not Oliver, mate.”

“What?” Coffee Guy’s eyes are wide and searching. 

Oscar blinks. It seems like they’ve both been left out of something, here. “Who’s Oliver?”

The guy scoffs, pointing accusingly. “What do you mean you’re not Oliver? You’re wearing a white hat!”

Oscar pulls off his hat, turning it around in his hands. “Why does that make me Oliver?”

“Because…” The guy trails off, picking up again. “Because there was no one else in here with a white hat!”

Ah. The pieces are all coming together at once. The guy bought him coffee. Sat down at his table. They shared a muffin for shit’s sake. Oscar’s an idiot. 

“Were you supposed to be on a blind date?” Oscar asks. The guy’s face confirms it for him. It’s a shade of red Oscar’s never seen on a human before.

The guy laughs a little hysterically. “You let me sit down and talk with you unprompted and did not stop me?”

“You never said you were meeting a date, mate!” Oscar counters.

Coffee Guy’s quiet for a while. “I… am embarrassed.” 

He stutters out an apology and turns to leave. Oscar’s never seen a guy that tall look so small. He leaps from his chair and bounds after him.

“Wait!” Oscar says. The guy turns around, startled. “I mean. Is your offer off the table, then? To see the comics?”

He looks back up at him. “You still want to?”

Oscar shrugs. “Unless you’d rather show Oliver, but…” 

He laughs. A real laugh, high and cute. “My name’s Esteban. I realize I did not introduce myself. I am not so good at blind dates.”