Chapter 18: The Evening Banter
The neon Klee sign buzzed a soft, persistent elegy against the deepening Prussian blue of the Berlin sky. Inside, the café had shed its bustling afternoon skin, settling into the hushed, intimate tone of late evening. The air hung rich with the day’s accumulated fragrance: espresso’s bitter tang layered over the sweet ghosts of baked marzipan and the faint, clean scent of wiped pine tables.
Yvonne leaned against the counter, watching the last customer of the day pack his belongings with frantic precision. He was a pale, hollow-eyed guy in his mid-twenties, his fingers stained with highlighter ink, surrounded by a fortress of textbooks and scribbled-on printouts. He’d been nursing a single black coffee for three hours, his foot jiggling relentlessly under the table, a metronome of anxiety.
“Thanks,” he muttered, not looking up as he shoved a laptop into a frayed backpack.
“Good luck with your thesis,” Yvonne said, her voice warm in the quiet room.
He glanced at her then, his eyes wide with a kind of stunned desperation she recognized. It was the look of someone who’d been staring at words until they’d lost all meaning. “It’s due Friday,” he blurted out, as if confessing a crime. “The structure is… it’s a fractal of nonsense.”
“I’m sure it’s better than you think,” she offered, the platitude feeling feeble but necessary.
He gave a sharp, joyless laugh, shouldered his bag, and stumbled out into the night.The door sighed shut behind him, sealing the café in a sudden, profound quiet. The only sounds were the low hum of the glass-fronted fridge and the distant, watery rush of traffic from Oranienstraße.
Joost emerged from the back, a bag of garbage held at arm’s length. “Thesis guy finally cracked,” he announced, pushing the door open with his hip to heave the bag into the bins outside. A cool stream of night air washed in, carrying the scent of damp pavement and distant kebabs.“He just left,” Yvonne said. “The wilderness of academic despair awaits him.”
“Better out there than in here.” Joost locked the door and flipped the sign to Geschlossen.The act had a finality to it. The public world was shut out. This was their domain now, a familiar stage after the audience had departed.They fell into the closing routine, a comfortable, wordless dance. Yvonne started on the espresso machine, dismantling the portafilters, her strong hands moving with unconscious expertise against the steel.The used coffee grounds fell into the bin with a soft, damp thud. Joost attacked the tables, wiping away invisible crumbs, aligning chairs with a geometric precision that always amused her.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of the day’s echoes and Yvonne’s own noisy thoughts. Victoria’s laugh from that afternoon replayed in her mind, a bright, clear sound that had somehow altered the acoustics of the room. The memory of Salim’s patient, wounded voice on the phone two weeks ago followed right behind it, a somber bass note. Her hands stilled on the steam wand.
“Joost?”
“Yeah?” He was crouched, wiping the legs of a chair.“Can I… ask you something? Something ridiculous?”
He froze, then slowly straightened up. He tossed his cloth onto the table and shuffled over, leaning his lanky frame against the counter opposite her. His expression was carefully neutral, but his eyes were alight with undiluted curiosity. “Is it about the British kiss?”
“It’s about the… the everything,” Yvonne sighed, wiping her hands on her apron. She avoided his gaze, focusing instead on a small scratch in the counter’s varnish. “It’s just… it’s only been two weeks.Since Salim.”
Joost nodded, waiting.
“And I know what everyone thinks.That you need a mourning period. That jumping into something new is… disrespectful.Or a rebound. A stupid, cliché rebound.” The words tumbled out, rehearsed and yet raw.
“Do you feel like it’s disrespectful?” Joost asked, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
Yvonne thought of Salim’s gentle, abstracted love, which had felt like being wrapped in a soft, grey blanket—comforting, but slowly suffocating. “No.Not disrespectful to him, really.Maybe to myself. Like I’m… cheapening what we had by moving on so fast. Or like I’m not giving myself time to figure out what I actually want.”
“What do you want?” he pressed.
“That’s the problem!” she exclaimed, her voice lifting in the empty café. She pulled off her glasses, rubbing the bridge of her nose.“I don’t know. With Victoria… it’s like she arrived in a thunderclap.All this energy, this certainty.She sees things. She saw me, in a way Salim never bothered to. It’s… electrifying.” She put her glasses back on, looking at Joost directly now.“But is that real? Or am I just so relieved to be out of the fog with Salim that any bolt of lightning would seem magical? Is she a person, or is she just… a metaphor for my own liberation?”
Joost chewed his lip, thinking. He hoisted himself up to sit on the counter, his long legs dangling.“Okay.Let’s break this down. You think she might be a fantasy.”
“She feels like one,” Yvonne admitted. “The sharp suits, the London job, the way she talks—it’s all so other. So unlike my world of dirt and coffee grounds and predictable routines.It’s dazzling.But fantasies are dangerous. They’re not built for Monday mornings.”
“True,” Joost conceded. “But here’s a thing.You fix her bike.”
Yvonne blinked. “What?”
“In her fantasy world of high-powered meetings and spreadsheets, does a woman with grease on her fingers who can rebuild a derailleur with a pocket toolkit fit?Probably not.That’s not a fantasy. That’s… a mechanic.” He grinned. “A really hot, surprisingly competent mechanic.”
Yvonne felt a smile tug at her own lips.“Stop.”
“I’m serious! You said she looked at you like you’d performed a miracle.That’s not someone seeing a fantasy. That’s someone seeing something real and solid and genuinely surprising. You are surprising, Yvonne. You just forget because you live inside yourself all day.”
The observation landed softly, truer than she expected.She leaned back against the sink, crossing her arms. The warm, yeasty scent of the day’s last bread rolls lingered in the air.Joost swung his legs. “And another thing.You keep talking about her energy, her world. But what does she do in your world?She sits at the counter.She drinks black coffee. She listens to you talk about oven thermostats and grumpy old men who complain about the soul of coffee. She doesn’t look bored. She looks… fascinated.”
“Maybe she’s just polite.”
“Nobody’s that polite,” Joost snorted.“Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s exhausting.”
Yvonne laughed, the sound bouncing off the tiled walls. She looked around her café—the mismatched chairs, the shelves of well-loved mugs, the healthy spider plant trailing from a high beam.This was her reality.Solid, earthy, unglamorous. “So you think it’s real? My… interest?”
“I think,” Joost said, adopting a sage tone that was undercut by his youthful face, “that you’re overthinking because you’re scared. Scared of getting hurt, scared of being seen as flighty, scared that maybe you don’t know yourself as well as you thought. Which is, like, fair.But also boring.”
“Boring?”
“Yeah.The alternative is way more interesting. The alternative is that you met someone who makes you hum Bach and forget to charge for oat milk. Who you kissed by a lake after fixing her bike.That’s a good story. Don’t psychoanalyze it into dust.”
He hopped down from the counter and picked up his cloth again, giving the already-clean surface a final swipe. “My official, well-versed-in-relationship-drama advice is this: stop worrying about the timeline.Two weeks, two months, who cares? If it feels right in your bones—and not just because it’s exciting, but because it feels like recognition—then it’s probably right. And as for the fantasy thing…” He paused, leaning on the mop handle.“Just remember, Yvonne. You’re probably as much of a fantasy for her, too.”
The statement hung in the warm, coffee-scented air.It was a simple idea, yet it flipped her entire anxiety on its head. She had been so preoccupied with Victoria’s dazzling otherness, with the fear that she was chasing an illusion, that it had never occurred to her that the dynamic might be reciprocal. What was Yvonne’s life to Victoria?An anchored, fragrant, tactile reality.A sanctuary of growing things and made things. A person who could solve practical problems with calm hands, whose life was built not on abstract projections but on daily, loving labor.
To the woman in the tight shoes, thinking of EBITDA, perhaps Yvonne was the fantasy.
The weight in her chest, a cold lump of doubt, began to soften, to warm. It didn’t dissolve, but it became something manageable, something that could coexist with this new, tentative hope.
“You’re smarter than you look,” she said to Joost, her voice thick with an emotion she couldn’t name.
“I know,” he said, with utter seriousness.Then he ruined it with a goofy grin. “So, are you going to see her again?”
Yvonne looked out the window. The neon sign painted a pinkish glow on the dark street.Two weeks.It was no time at all.It was an eternity. She thought of Victoria’s text: plotting ways to get stranded with you again.
“I think she might be plotting something,” Yvonne said, a slow, real smile spreading across her face.
“Good,” Joost declared, as if the matter was settled. “Now, can we finish up? I have a date with a cute gamer girl.”
“Do you now?” Yvonne asked, not looking up from the sink where she was rinsing the portafilter baskets. Her tone was deliberately light, a mirror of his earlier probing.“A gamer girl.Tell me more. Is this the one from the Discord server you’re always whispering to on your breaks?”
Joost froze, the mop handle slipping slightly in his grip. A faint, high pink bloomed across his pale cheekbones.“What?No.I mean, maybe.It’s not a big deal. We’re just playing a co-op campaign.”
“A co-op campaign,” Yvonne repeated, turning off the water and drying her hands slowly on a linen towel. She leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms.Her expression was one of mild, scholarly interest.“Fascinating. And is this a digital-only campaign, or does it have… real-world objectives?”
“Real-world—what are you, my mum?” he spluttered, his defensiveness instant and comically sharp. His ears were now fully crimson.“It’s just a thing. We’re meeting for boba.That’s it. No grand strategy.”
Yvonne let the silence stretch, maintaining her gentle, inquiring gaze. She watched the confusion in his eyes churn, saw the moment his own words echoed back to him. Her posture, her tone—it was a perfect, gentle parody of his earlier interrogation about Victoria.His mouth opened, then closed.
A slow, sheepish grin replaced his flustered scowl.“Oh.Right. Okay, I get it.” He shook his head, a chuckle bubbling up from his chest.“Touché. Full points for thematic callback.”
She laughed then, a warm, rich sound that filled the quiet café. “Just taking a professional interest in employee morale, Joost. I hear boba dates are a key metric.”
“Har har.” He propped the mop in the corner, his earlier faux-sagely demeanor fully dissolved into amused surrender.“Alright, I’m clocking out. My co-op partner awaits. And no, you don’t get a full briefing until I’ve run a proper reconnaissance mission.”
“Understood.Casualties are to be reported tomorrow,” she said, waving him off.
He grabbed his threadback backpack from under the counter, slinging it over one narrow shoulder. At the door, he turned, the neon glow painting his face in pink and shadow. “For what it’s worth, Boss?Go water your plants. Think about the spreadsheet woman imagining you with dirt under your nails. It’s a good thought.”
Then he was gone, the door clicking softly shut behind him.Yvonne stood in the sudden, complete silence. She listened to the fading crunch of his bicycle tires on the gravel alley, a sound that receded into the Berlin night’s low hum. The café felt larger, a vessel of her own making, and she moved through the final tasks with a quiet contentment: wiping the last counter, checking the locks on the bakery case, turning off the main lights until only the soft glow from the kitchen illuminated the empty tables.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment, each creak a familiar note in a private song. The evening air in her living room was still and cool, carrying the green, quiet breath of her many plants. She went to the sink, filling a small copper watering can with a pleasing, solid weight.
Her fingertips brushed velvety begonia leaves, traced the waxy perfection of a hoya heart. She poured water at the base of a spindly rosemary plant, the earth-dark scent rising instantly. This was her liturgy.Simple, necessary, silent. Her strong, capable hands, which could calibrate an espresso machine and rebuild a bicycle derailleur, now performed this most fundamental tending.
As she worked, Joost’s words spun in her mind, weaving with the scent of damp soil. You’re probably as much of a fantasy for her, too.The idea was no longer an abstract concept. It settled into her, warm and strange.What did Victoria see when she closed her eyes? Not a spreadsheet, perhaps, but this: a woman in a sage-green room, her ginger dreadlocks a loose cascade, her glasses smudged, her hands patient and sure among the leaves. A person whose life was built from tangible, growing things.A sanctuary of quiet skill.
To be someone’s fantasy wasn’t about being perfect or untouchable. It was about being a specific, needed contrast.A living alternative. Yvonne felt the truth of it in her bones, a quiet thrill that had nothing to do with dazzling lights and everything to do with being seen—truly seen—in her own grounded world.
She finished with the last plant, a sprawling pothos tumbling from a macramé hanger. She placed the watering can in the sink and wiped her hands on her trousers. Out the narrow window, the Berlin rooftops were silhouetted against a deep indigo sky, dotted with the scattered, bronze stars of apartment windows.
She was no one’s rebound.She was a possibility.A plot of fertile ground in someone else’s imagined future. The thought didn’t feel like pressure; it felt like a seed, small and hard and full of latent life, resting in the palm of her hand. She turned off the kitchen light, letting the darkness and the quiet company of her plants absorb the echo of the idea, leaving only a soft, satisfying warmth in its wake.