This is How We Change the World Ch. 04

20 Feb 2023

A blonde in an immaculate suit walked through the front door just after one in the morning, while Lyric was cleaning behind the counter. Lyric smiled, and said, "Hello! Welcome to Downtown Grind. What can I get for you?"

The woman peered at her, then at her nametag, and then back at her. "Is Madalyn here tonight?" she said, turning her head very slightly.

"Yeah," Lyric said, blinking. "Uh. Hang on."

They weren't supposed to give out information on shifts and personnel to the clients, but this woman didn't look like a stalker. She didn't remember Maddy mentioning any overly affectionate customers or crazy exes, or... oh.

Lyric took a quick look at the woman. Perfect makeup, perfect hairdo, perfectly manicured nails. She looked like something out of a magazine, slightly unnatural. For a second Lyric considered lying, saying that no, nobody by that name worked here... but that would be stupid, because obviously the woman knew that wasn't so. She was probably taking too long already. Better just roll with it.

She poked her head in the back, but Gertrude wasn't talking which meant that Gertrude was alone. She held up a finger, signaling to the woman to wait just a minute, and went down the hall to where the doors to the north section of the store were closed.

"Hey," Lyric said, poking her head in. Maddy stirred from one of the chairs in the dark, waving slightly to get her attention. "Someone is here for you?"

"Someone," Maddy asked, "or someones?"

Lyric paused, shrugged, and added, "I think just the one? Blonde hair?"

Maddy got up slowly, flexed her fingers, tucked her hair behind her ears, straightened out her apron, and rubbed at her eyes in the time it took her to walk to the door where Lyric was waiting. This, to Lyric, was a tell, and she was slightly better prepared for it when Maddy rounded the corner ahead of her and said, "Ames! Hey!"

Maddy was hugging the blonde, and then quickly moving on to a man behind her that must have come in after. He looked like he was cut out of the same magazine, though his dark, curly hair was slightly ruffled and it made him look a little more human. Lyric started to head toward the counter, to distance herself, but before she got more than two steps Maddy turned around and extended an arm in her direction. "Guys, this is Lyric? The one I've been telling you about?"

Lyric froze, then turned and smiled mechanically. She's been telling them about me? What do these people know about me?

Amy was still holding Maddy's hand, drawing her back into another hug, and so it was the man who approached her first. Lyric held out her hand, for shaking, but he took it, turned it slightly, and kissed the back of her hand with a rogue-ish wink. "Enchante, Mademoiselle," he said, with a moderately thick French accent.

"Lyric, this is François, and this is Amy." There was a kind of halting pronunciation to Maddy's introduction, like she was repeating this is happening in her head between every word. Her eyes darted between her spouses and Lyric, but her smile looked genuine.

Amy approached her more formally, one hand held out in a way that Lyric could only describe as crisp. Lyric shook her hand, and had that internal twinge that happens whenever two people go to shake hands but one of them has a very different idea about grip strength. Amy's grip was firm, business-like, and Lyric couldn't quite get her hand to adjust before it was over and she felt like an idiot.

"Thank you for taking such good care of our Madalyn," François said, pronouncing it like Mada-line. "Really, the last two months have been a rollercoaster."

"Has it been two months?" Lyric asked, through clenched teeth. "Since you've seen her?"

"Yes!" he said, bending backwards slightly and expanding his arms. "Mon Dieu, we have been living on takeout for two months!"

"Tone it down, Monsieur. You were born in New Jersey," Maddy said, fixing him with a stare.

To this, both Amy and François rolled their eyes, but there were different tones to it. François seemed miffed to be called out, and Amy's, a few seconds later, seemed more annoyed that calling him out had worked. Lyric read all of this in their body language, but mostly what she got from them was that they immediately turned toward each other. Forming a triangle with the set of their shoulders.

Lyric felt outside of it, and despite Maddy giving her a warm smile and planting herself inclusively, to keep Lyric in that space in front of her, Lyric got the message loud and clear.

"Let's sit down," Maddy said, turning and gesturing. "Now that you're here."

Amy turned and looked around. The woman had the most immaculate eyebrows Lyric had ever seen. "I suppose," she said.

"I should stay at the counter," Lyric said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. "Eric was talking about that secret shopper audit like it might happen overnight at some point."

Maddy gave her a long look, then nodded. "Right. Okay."

She could not have been more pleased to not be sitting at that table, not least because her position allowed her to watch. Amy and Frank were tag-teaming their storytelling, filling Maddy in on this and that. Some of it sounded like it was related to their apartment, and the non-stop circus that was the ongoing repairs, but most of it was about their jobs. They had jobs in a career sense that Lyric thought she might never have, not because she couldn't learn to do things but because she was pretty sure places like those would physically, literally, slam doors in her face.

After a minute or two, Lyric could see Maddy falling into the pattern of it. The ebb and flow of their conversation. Rhythm. At the same time, though, Maddy was apart from it. She wondered how much Maddy realized the way the other two dominated the conversation while simultaneously leaning on her to fill in gaps. To have responses they agreed with. She justified them without them giving her the same in return.

Lyric didn't really listen. She let the words pass in one ear and out the other. She paid more attention to their body language. The way they encouraged Maddy to focus on them, by turns. She didn't need the words to see the imbalance.

It was easier for Lyric to look at these things in others. She didn't see how much more furiously she was wiping mugs that were already perfectly clean. She didn't understand how jealous she was, or how much it was potentially plain in her expression, until François stood up and turned away from the table. Lyric schooled herself to a professional smile, ready to take his order, but he breezed past her toward the bathrooms in the back.

That was when Lyric knew. The tension in her jaw. The way she was sucking on the roof of her mouth. She tried to stretch, rolling her shoulders and pacing, but the damage had been done. She was all bound up. She paced a few times, and was spared the indignity of solving all her own problems when a customer came in and ordered a double espresso latte.

When she turned around to present the drink, as expertly crafted as she could manage (though still a fair bit shy of Maddy's mastery), she saw that François had emerged from the bathroom and was next in line.

"You know what?" he said, looking up at the menu. "Madalyn was always going on about the white chocolate raspberry thing, but I don't see that."

Lyric gulped. "It's not on the menu, but... I can make it." This was half true. She knew what it was, a specialty drink Maddy had tried to get the management to put on the menu years ago, before Lyric's time, but that had proven somewhat costly as well as tricky to get right. It involved a significant number of syrups in small, precise amounts. Lyric had never made one successfully. Worse, making one was more like baking than cooking. You couldn't just muddle your way through and fix it at the end with a bit of salt. You either made it right and it turned out right, or you didn't and it turned out bad.

As she turned around, grabbing all of the syrup pumps she knew she was going to be using and setting them out in order of amount to be used, it occurred to her that if Maddy had told them anything about this drink it was that it was a) good (which it was) and b) complicated (which it was). Which of those had been the real reason he ordered it?

The secret ingredient that made the whole thing work was that one of the espresso machines, the old one, had some kind of problem where a section on the top, near the back, got way too hot. Maddy had discovered that if a small amount of simple syrup was placed on top of that, in a glass cup, for the length of time it took the machine to make the espresso and foam, the syrup would burn a little and get a caramel flavor that blew away the caramel flavored syrup they had. If you placed the cup wrong, it didn't get hot enough. If you put too much syrup in the cup, it didn't get hot enough. Too little and it would burn too quickly.

It was half art and half science. As far as she knew, Maddy was the only barista who could make it right every time. For the rest of them, it was a fifty-fifty shot at best. She got the main ingredients assembled and went down the line, adding the four flavor shots one right after another, and froze. She'd forgotten something.

She took a spoon, dipped it into the drink to draw a small amount of the drink out, and dropped that into another cup. After giving it a few seconds to cool, she took a sip and immediately knew where she'd gone wrong. She went into the back and dug around for the box of biscotti straws Eric kept for himself, in secret, that everyone knew about.

"Here you go," she said, when she emerged a minute later, and presented it to him. He smiled at her as he took the drink, and something in the way his eyes lingered on her as he turned said that it hadn't been the flavor or the complexity he'd been interested in when he ordered the drink. He'd either done it to make her sweat or to watch her backside from behind. From what Maddy had told her about François it was probably the latter.

There was a rational part of her brain that was protesting, very loudly, that she didn't actually know any of that, that it was all complete conjecture, and that she was, admittedly, extremely jealous. For all she knew, he just might really like white chocolate and raspberry.

She didn't like seeing them together. She didn't like seeing Maddy smile when they made a joke. It stung. She didn't like either of them, Amy or François, on an instinctive level, and was very probably jumping at any opportunity to assign malice to their actions. It felt bad. She couldn't have said why she didn't like them. They were beautiful, and graceful, and had a certain aura of interest around them. Something that made them glimmer like they were central characters in a film, but to Lyric they felt ominous, like they were... vampires, or something. She internally rolled her eyes at herself for thinking that, telling herself it was childish, but then she looked again at how they flourished in Maddy's attention, and she wondered.

Lyric went into the back in a little bit of a daze. She didn't think of herself as very traditional when it came to relationships. She was a sex worker, for fuck's sake. Why was she so bent out of shape about those two? She'd known, on some level, that she was, at best, sharing Maddy's full affection.

"You look pale," Gertrude said, looking up from where she was sitting.

Lyric nodded weakly, and drifted onto one of the other stools.

Gertrude produced a flask from her apron, handed it over, and stood up. "Don't let the muffins burn."

Not wanting to appear ungrateful, Lyric untwisted the cap and took a swig where Gertrude could see, and the big woman laughed heartily as she went out into the front.

The whole thing left a bad taste in her mouth.

***

Half an hour later, when Lyric peeked through the door, Amy and Frank were just leaving. Maddy had walked them halfway across the floor, and Frank was already holding the door open. Amy kissed Maddy on the cheek, and when she spotted Lyric she gave a small smile before turning and leaving.

For the moment, the place was empty. Lyric came to her place behind the counter a little sheepishly. Maddy turned to face her and Gertrude, who was leaning on the back with her arms folded and smirking.

"Now, Ma-da-lyn," Gertrude said in an accent that mocked Frank's. "Why are you out here kissing our customer, mm?"

Maddy rolled her eyes, but blushed slightly. "They're my partners. Amy and François."

"Partners?" Gertrude tilted her head, looking from Maddy to Lyric. "I thought you two were... partners."

"We are," Maddy said curtly just when Lyric had opened her mouth to say "we're not." She closed her mouth again, tucked her chin in and eyed her toes. She didn't know how good an idea it was to let it known at work that they had... that they were... she didn't even know what they were.

"So Lyric, are you partners with Amy and François too?" Gertrude asked.

Lyric jerked her head back up. "No!"

"So it's... what?" Gertrude and Maddy shared a look that Lyric couldn't interpret. "How many people can one woman love?"

Maddy shrugged. Gertrude laughed and spread her arms. "Whatever! You kids these days. I tell you, I thought I had it bad with Klaus, but at least there was only one of him."

The door opened, and they all turned to look. The customer looked almost frightened with so much attention, and Maddy quickly straightened the chairs around tables to make it look like she was busy. Gertrude went back to the kitchen without another word, and Lyric painted on her customer-serving smile. "Welcome to Downtown Grind! What can I get you?"

***

21 Feb 2023

The rest of the shift was very quiet. The walk home was very quiet. They got ready for bed in mostly silence. Lyric wasn't sure if she preferred this to talking about it, but then she didn't know what she wanted to say, and so she was quiet.

Images of Amy and Frank kept flashing through her mind. She wanted to think like they were clearly a pair, that Maddy was just some kind of a third wheel and didn't realize it, but deep down she knew this wasn't true. There was clearly some kind of dynamic to their throuple, even though she couldn't begin to imagine what it included.

She didn't know why she was so rattled. She had known Maddy was with them. She had known Maddy would move back home when the renovations were ready. She had known all this. But she hadn't thought about it, because she didn't want it to be so. She had been pretending.

Lyric had a long and complicated relationship with pretending. Pretending it didn't matter. Pretending she didn't care. Pretending all was okay. Sometimes, on her darker days, pretending that she was fooling anyone.

"I'm sorry they barged in there like that," Maddy said when they were settling into bed. "I've told them I don't want them to come to my work."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just don't... I don't go to their workplaces either. Except sometimes for some parties or something. It's just not..."

Lyric turned her back at Maddy, piling the pillow under her head and pulling the covers around her. She could almost feel Maddy's eyes on her back.

She wanted to ask when Maddy was moving back home. She wanted to say she didn't want her to. She wanted to have some kind of a claim on Maddy. She wanted to have all the claim on Maddy. She didn't want to share. It stabbed her heart to think how classy, and stylish, and adult, and in all kinds put together Amy and Frank were, when she was just a mess. She could clearly see how she was nothing compared to those two, nothing at all.

"Are you okay?" Maddy asked, quietly.

"I'm fine," Lyric said with clenched teeth. "Just tired."

Maddy sighed. Lyric felt her turning, how the mattress shifted, and then she settled. Lyric listened to her breathing for a long time and was almost sure she wasn't sleeping either.

***

The next morning was one of the worst mornings Lyric had experienced in a long time, even though technically it was mid afternoon when they awoke. Maddy could be blunt when she wanted to, but she was also somewhat non-confrontational. They both were. They woke up, and traded time in the bathroom without saying anything. From a distance, it might have even looked like they had settled into a comfortable routine.

Lyric had one thing going for her in this regard; she could make a bad situation worse.

"I don't think I like them."

Maddy paused while pouring a bit of cream into her coffee, and stared wide eyed through the wall.

"I mean, you hadn't seen them in months, and they just show up at your work? Unannounced? Yesterday was already kind of a lot without them popping in out of nowhere."

"I don't like it when they do that," Maddy said, quietly.

"It was rude, right?"

"I don't show up at their offices and pull them out of meetings or... whatever."

"And I don't like the way they looked at me."

This, Maddy did not respond to. She just looked down at her coffee.

"The head-to-toe oh. I get that often enough from strangers."

"Well they were strangers," Maddy said, tilting her head back and forth.

"Yeah, well, I'm kind of going back and forth about whether or not I think it was okay that you didn't tell them."

"Wait, tell them what?"

Lyric just glared at her and barrelled forward. "I mean, on the one hand, it's not like its any of their fucking business if I'm trans--"

"Oh," Maddy said, and though her expression seemed to brighten with her comprehension, it darkened again after a moment.

"But I don't like the way they looked at me, and then looked at you like so this is what you've been doing?"

"That's not what they said," Maddy said, a bit more defensively.

"It's exactly what they were saying," Lyric snapped. "I can't tell which of us they were more insulting toward."

"You just don't know them," Maddy said, turning to face the counter and setting down her mug. "I'm sorry if they--"

"If?" Lyric said. "If?"

"I don't understand why you're being like this," Maddy said, finally cutting her eyes to the side. It was the closest she'd come to looking at Lyric all morning.

"So, what, that whole thing was okay with you?"

"Of course it wasn't okay, but--"

"I'm sorry to say this, but I don't know how to handle you defending them."

"Of course I'm gonna defend them," Maddy said, now turning fully and making direct eye contact. "I love them, both. I'd stand up for you too if you--"

"If I what? What can I even do to them? I'm poor and I'm trans."

Maddy just blinked at her, lips forming wordless shapes. "That's..."

"I mean, what do you think are the chances that any trans person has ever stepped foot in your apartment building that wasn't getting paid by the hour, to get someone off."

"Now hang on," Maddy yelled, angrily.

"I don't need your charity," Lyric shouted, even louder. "I was doing just fine on my own. Maybe you should just go back to them. I'm sure it'll be a lot less awkward for you."

There was no way to follow that up, so Lyric was already moving. The only place she could think to retreat to was the bathroom, so that was where she found herself a few seconds later. Sitting on the toilet with her hands fisted in her hair, trying desperately not to cry loud enough to be heard.

She kept expecting to hear the door slam. Feet pounding as Maddy stomped around angrily. Grumbling under her breath, but loud enough to be heard. That's what her parents often did. She didn't like comparing Maddy to her parents. It felt really unfair, but she was upset, and it was hard to make being fair a priority.