Chapter Text
The person who designed these grocery store shelves clearly did not account for the average height of an adult. Maeve is not short. She’s not tall— she’s perfectly average— but merely not being short isn’t helpful when the top shelf is still out of reach. She pushes up onto her toes and stretches to try to reach the box of sugar (and who puts sugar on the top shelf?) and barely manages to brush the box with her fingertips.
There’s a soft, deep chuckle behind her and she feels her cheeks heat as she realizes someone is laughing at her. She sinks back to her heels and turns.
He’s tall.
His glasses don’t do much to hide his striking hazel-green eyes.
“Would you like some assistance?” His voice is soft and emotionless, though there’s the faintest glimmer of amusement in his eyes. He looks serious in his white shirt and tie, all crisp professionalism. The only thing that looks soft about this man is the dark hair that falls over his forehead.
He doesn’t wait for an answer and reaches past her to grab the box of sugar.
He’s close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating off him for just a second, and if she hadn’t already been blushing, she would be blushing now.
“Thank you,” she stutters slightly when he steps back and holds out the box. She takes it, and their fingers brush against each other briefly.
“Of course,” he says, and before she can think about what she could possibly say or do next, he’s walking away.
—-
It’s three weeks to the hour when she sees him again.
Maeve has gone over the encounter countless times in her head, alternating between embarrassment and fascination. She knows there is a good chance the man had not even thought twice about her. He had probably simply needed the sugar, she was in the way, and he never thought about it again.
She, however, has thought about him plenty. Every time she’s used sugar for weeks, that brush of fingertips has flitted through her thoughts. The first time she’d made a cup of coffee at the book store after the incident with the stranger, she’d blushed as she picked up the sugar to pour some into her cup. Tara, with her uncanny ability to sense such things, had immediately started badgering Maeve about why she was blushing.
So far, she hasn’t cracked. Tara’s current theory is that Maeve is hiding a relationship.
If only that were true, she thinks, forlornly grabbing a pint of ice cream to put in her sparsely filled grocery cart. With no family left, no relationship to speak of, and her friendships mostly consisting of employees, Maeve was, in every sense, alone.
She turns away from her cart on a whim to cross the aisle to grab a frozen chocolate cake, because it’s been that kind of week and she just needs something to lift her spirits, and she stumbles into a large body.
“Oh, shit—“ she starts to fall backward and the man grabs her arm and holds her steady. “I’m so sorry!” she says, and she’s glad she got it out before she looks up and meets his eyes because she is immediately struck speechless.
It’s him.
There must be some kind of god, somewhere, who orchestrated this. There is no other reason for her to have so thoroughly humiliated herself twice in front of this particular man.
He smells good.
Her brain catalogues this at the same time he asks, “Are you alright?” and it’s not fair that he sounds perfectly unaffected and steady.
“I— yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I am so sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
His lips quirk up ever so slightly. “It’s fine. Sweets can be distracting.” He lets go of her arm and takes a step back.
She’s still trying to figure out if she should respond when he reaches into a freezer and grabs a pint of ice cream, which he places in the half full basket on his arm, and then he’s gone.
She forgets about the chocolate cake entirely.
—-
Maeve may as well not even go to the gym, she thinks, carrying the third of twenty heavy boxes of books through the back room to unload onto a cart. She slices through the tape and starts taking the books out and stacking them, cursing herself for not scheduling help on a delivery day.
She could wait to move the new stock to the floor, but It’s the busy season for textbooks. If she doesn’t move them now, there’s a chance someone will come in and not find what they need, and that could mean lost sales.
Nobody, in this economy, can afford lost sales.
With online ordering, the only way her shop stays competitive is by keeping physical copies in stock— and by being just outside the Linkon University campus. She’s in a great location, with the university mere blocks away, the beaches half a mile in the other direction, and the hospital about half a mile further inland.
She goes to fetch another box, this one feeling somehow even heavier than the last, and brings it back to the cart to unload. It’s a biology text, and she finds herself grateful she never had to lug one of these back and forth from class.
When she’s got the cart mostly full, she checks the time and curses, wheeling it out onto the floor before hurrying to the door to unlock it and to flip the sign from Closed to Open. With that done, she makes sure the register is up and running, then goes to retrieve the cart so that she can begin shelving books.
She’s finished shelving the books on the cart and helped three customers when Adam, one of her newer employees, gets there.
“Hey, boss, how’s it going?”
“It’s been slow so far. I’ve mostly been stocking shelves. Would you mind moving some of the new boxes onto the cart? I’ll start shelving them after I get some lunch.”
“Sure thing!” Adam salutes her with two fingers, which makes her smile.
It’s a rule of most every customer service job that when you make the mistake of saying it’s ‘slow’, you will immediately be swamped. Maeve realizes her mistake when the fifteenth student walks through the doors with a printed list and confused wandering, and she’s well past her lunch break. She can’t bear to leave Adam alone to deal with this, so she puts on a smile and helps the next bewildered customer locate the history books.
She has just finished saying, “If you need help with anything else, just ask!” when someone clears their throat behind her.
“Excuse me, could you help me find the medical section?”
Her breath catches ever so slightly when she turns to find him standing there. “Oh! Hi. Um. Of course, just follow me.” He turns sideways to give her room to pass him, and she nervously tucks her hair behind one ear as she does. “You have great timing, because we just restocked these this morning.”
“How fortunate for me,” he says, and she just hums her agreement before turning into the row of shelves near the back of the store.
“Here you go,” she says, and he nods slightly, his eyes already roaming over the titles near the top. She clears her throat, inexplicably nervous. There’s something about him that unbalances her. “Quid pro quo, I’d offer to get something down for you,” she gestures toward the top shelf, which he can easily reach, “but alas, there you stand.”
His lips quirk into something resembling a real smile and he laughs softly. She feels warm, from somewhere in her chest all the way down to her fingertips. She pushes her hair behind her ear again.
“I think I can manage, but I appreciate the thought.“
Maeve laughs off how silly she feels for even bringing it up and starts to turn away.
“Maybe we could meet up for coffee? I usually go to the shop down the street.”
Surprised, relieved, and a little flustered, she flashes him a brilliant smile. “I would love that. What time?”