Harry Kao served a steady trickle of customers afflicted with technical issues related to their various devices. He didn’t smile at all, which was unnerving, but as a result he sped customers through at a higher rate than his better-mannered colleagues, which meant his ratings stayed higher than theirs, which is why he had made manager before his peers. He took his break at noon, and walked to the coffee shop a few blocks away. He ordered a scone and a cappuccino from the dark-ponytailed barista with the attractive gymnast’s body. She was unfriendly, and was the kind of unfriendly barista everyone knows even though no one knows her name: she was the one with tattoos and a fishnet leotard worn underneath form-fitting ripped clothing who never smiled. Harry Kao enjoyed ordering from the unfriendly barista at this particular coffee shop. Deviantly unsmiling people can detect one another across crowded rooms the way vampires can, and it had only taken two visits before the barista cracked and smiled at Harry, wanting to test the depths of his unfriendliness and to measure it against her own, and soon she had made it her own personal mission to smile at him, engage him, flirt with him, pause meaningfully when she took his credit card, coyly pout when he didn’t tip.
Harry sat down and waited. She brought him his cappuccino personally. She had an ornate dragon visible on her back, as her leotard was cut very low between her shoulderblades (and Harry could see right through it besides) and vines that climbed her legs beneath the fishnets, and she smiled at Harry as she set down his drink and gave him a good view of her when she did so, pausing for one genuflected moment to adjust the cappuccino so that the heart etched in foam on the surface was facing him exactly before swinging away and flouncing back to the register, but Harry just pressed his lips together and promptly raised the cup to his nose to smell it, as if checking for hemlock, and smelling none got right down to drinking it, which was what he had come there to do.