How to Lose a Regular

How to Lose a Regular

A Short Story

The man walks in at 7:42 a.m. every single day, and every single day I consider poisoning him.

Not lethally. I’m not a monster. Just something mild. Laxative in the oat milk, maybe. A dusting of cayenne where the cinnamon should be. Something to communicate, in a language more honest than customer service, that I — Zoe Papadaki, twenty-six, barista at Grounds Control on Melrose, owner of a film degree that has earned me exactly zero dollars and a very thorough understanding of Italian neorealism — find him absolutely unbearable.

His name is Eliott. I know this because he tells me every morning. Not casually, not in the friendly way normal humans offer their name at a coffee shop. He tells me correctively, because for the first three weeks I wrote “Eliot” on his cup, and apparently the missing T is a war crime.

“Two T’s,” he said, the first time. Smiling. Like it was charming.

“Two T’s,” he said, the second time. Less smiling.

“It’s — there are two T’s. In Eliott. It’s a very common spelling. It’s the standard spelling. One L, two T’s. Elliott with two L’s is also acceptable. But one T is — that’s not a name. That’s a typo.”

That was the third time. I had written “Eliot” on purpose. I wrote it on purpose every time after that, too, and each day I watched him notice, and each day his left eye twitched just slightly, and it was the best part of my morning.

Here is what I know about Eliott (two T’s, God forbid):

He orders an oat milk cortado. Not a latte, not a flat white, a cortado, and he will explain the difference if you don’t ask, and also if you do ask, and also if you are visibly helping another customer and not speaking to him at all. A cortado is “equal parts espresso and steamed milk, traditionally served in a small glass, originated in Spain’s Basque country, and no, a flat white is not the same thing, a flat white is a — it’s a whole different ratio, it’s — you know what, it’s fine.”

It’s never fine.

He wears the same rotation of four oxford shirts in white, light blue, pale pink, and a grey that I think he considers “adventurous.” He carries a leather satchel that has a patina, which I know because he once used the word “patina” to describe it to another customer unprompted. He reads on a Kindle, which he holds like a Bible — two hands, reverent posture — and he reads exclusively nonfiction, because one time I asked what he was reading and he said, “It’s a book about the history of timekeeping,” and when I said “oh, like clocks?” he looked at me the way museum docents look at children who touch the paintings.

“Horology,” he said. “But yes. Clocks.”

He tips exactly twenty percent. Not nineteen. Not twenty-one. Twenty percent, calculated to the cent, which I know because I once watched him do the math on his phone for a $4.75 cortado. The tip was ninety-five cents. He placed it in the jar with the precision of a man defusing a bomb.

He is, in summary, the most irritating person I have ever met.

He also has these brown eyes that look like someone poured honey into coffee and backlit it with late afternoon sun, but that’s not relevant. That’s just an observation. I notice things. I have a film degree. We’re trained to observe.

The war started on a Tuesday.

Not the name thing — that was just reconnaissance. The war started when Eliott (it physically pains me to use two T’s, but accuracy matters in wartime) told me I was pronouncing “cortado” wrong.

“It’s cor-TAH-do,” he said. “The emphasis is on the second syllable.”

“I know how to pronounce cortado.”

“You said cor-TAY-do.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. It’s — it’s not a big deal, I just think if you’re going to serve a drink, you should probably be able to—”

“Your cortado is ready, Eliot.”

One T. Maximum disrespect.

He picked up the cup. Looked at the name. Looked at me. And for the first time, he didn’t correct me. He just nodded, very slowly, like a general acknowledging a worthy opponent.

“Thank you, Zoey,” he said.

My name is Zoe. No Y. It’s Greek. He knew this because it was on my name tag, which says ZOE, in capitals, with no Y, and he had added a letter to my name the way I had subtracted one from his, and the symmetry of the insult was so elegant that I almost respected him.

Almost.

I retaliated the next morning.

He ordered his cortado. I made it with whole milk instead of oat. When he tasted it and frowned, I said, “Oh no, was that wrong? I could have sworn you said whole milk.”

“I have never once ordered whole milk.”

“Are you sure? I feel like yesterday—”

“I have been coming here for four months. I have ordered an oat milk cortado every single day. I have never ordered whole milk. I am lactose intolerant.”

He said lactose intolerant with the gravity of a man revealing a terminal diagnosis. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

“I’ll remake it,” I said. “On the house.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem, Eliot.”

His eye twitched.

The next day, he brought his own oat milk.

He placed a small carton of Oatly on the counter — the barista edition, the expensive one — and slid it toward me like a chess piece.

“Just in case,” he said.

“We have oat milk.”

“Clearly.”

I made his cortado with our oat milk, not his. He tasted it, paused, and said, “This is actually good.”

“It’s always good.”

“It’s often good. Today it’s actually good.”

I wanted to throw the portafilter at him. Instead I said, “I’ll let the beans know you approve.”

He laughed. Short, surprised, like a dog hearing a sound it doesn’t recognize. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. It did something to his face — broke the composure, let something looser and younger through. For about half a second he looked like a person instead of a walking TED Talk.

He caught me staring. I looked away. Aggressively. With great purpose and intent.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, we’re open.”

He laughed again. Picked up his Oatly, put it back in his satchel — his patinaed satchel — and left.

I stood there for a moment, holding a rag, not wiping anything.

“You’re blushing,” said my coworker Priya, who had materialized behind me like a retail ghost.

“It’s the steam.”

“We haven’t steamed anything in four minutes.”

“Then it’s a delayed reaction.”

“To what?”

“To you being annoying. Go restock the cups.”

The escalation continued.

Day one of the war: I misspelled his name. He added a letter to mine.

Day two: I switched his milk. He brought his own.

Day three: He left a Yelp review. Five stars, but the text said: “Great coffee. The barista with the Greek name could benefit from a brief tutorial on Spanish pronunciation. Cor-TAH-do. The emphasis is on the second syllable.”

I found it at 11 p.m. while lying in bed eating crackers and hate-scrolling our reviews. I sat up so fast a cracker flew off my chest.

“He didn’t.”

He did.

Day four: I responded to the review from the business account. “Thank you for the feedback, Eliot (one T). We appreciate your patronage and your passion for Iberian phonetics. As a Greek-American, I can assure you my Mediterranean pronunciation is impeccable. See you tomorrow. — Z (no Y)”

Day five: He walked in, set his phone on the counter with the review pulled up, and said, “Impeccable is a strong word.”

“I’m a strong person.”

“Also, my name has two—”

“Your cortado will be ready in a moment, Eliot.”

Here is the thing about Eliott that I didn’t expect to learn, and didn’t want to learn, and which is inconvenient to know:

He’s kind.

Not to me. To me he is a pedantic, over-enunciating, oxford-shirt-wearing menace. But to everyone else in the shop — to Priya, to old Mr. Kowalski who comes in at 8:15 for a drip coffee and always fumbles with the card reader, to the mother with the twin toddlers who once spilled an entire mocha on the floor — he is patient and generous and quietly, annoyingly decent.

I watched him help Mr. Kowalski with the card reader three times in one week. Not impatiently. Not in a “let me do it for you” way. He just stood next to him and talked about the weather while Mr. Kowalski’s shaking fingers found the right button, as though time was not a thing that concerned him, as though the only place he needed to be was right here, next to this old man, talking about rain.

I watched him pick up the twins’ sippy cups when they threw them on the floor. Twice. Without being asked. Without performing it. He just picked them up and handed them back and went back to his Kindle and his book about horology.

And the worst part — the truly unforgivable part — is that he never mentioned any of it. He didn’t do it to be seen. He did it because his default setting, underneath the cortado lectures and the name corrections and the Yelp reviews, is to be good.

I hate this. I hate knowing this. Because it would be much easier to wage a coffee war against a man I could fully dislike, and Eliott — with his stupid honey eyes and his stupid kindness and his stupid two T’s — is making that increasingly difficult.

Day nine of the war. I drew a picture on his cup.

Not latte art. Sharpie art. A small, terrible stick figure with a speech bubble that said “Actually, it’s pronounced cor-TAH-do.”

He looked at it. Looked at me. Pressed his lips together in the way people do when they are physically restraining a smile.

“The proportions are wrong,” he said.

“It’s a stick figure.”

“My head isn’t that big.”

“Debatable.”

He sat at his usual table — the one by the window, where the light hits the Kindle screen at the exact right angle, because of course he’s optimized his coffee shop seating for screen glare — and I saw him take a picture of the cup before he drank from it.

I drew something the next day too. A tiny clock, because of the horology thing. Then a Spanish flag with a cortado glass next to it. Then a miniature T, just one, with a circle around it and a line through it — the international symbol for No T.

He kept every cup. I know this because on day fourteen, he came in with a tote bag — not the satchel, a separate tote — and inside were all the cups, nested together, the drawings facing out.

“I’m building an archive,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of evidence. For when I escalate this to corporate.”

“We don’t have a corporate. We’re independently owned.”

“Then I’ll escalate it to your mother.”

“My mother would side with me. She’s Greek. We hold grudges professionally.”

He laughed. The real laugh, the short surprised one, and this time I didn’t look away. This time I let myself notice the way it changed his face, the way the composure cracked like ice in warm water, and the way he noticed me noticing, and the way neither of us said anything about it.

“Same time tomorrow?” he said.

“Unfortunately,” I said.

But I was smiling when I said it. And I didn’t stop smiling for the rest of my shift, and Priya didn’t say a word about it, which was her loudest possible commentary.

Day eighteen, he didn’t show up.

7:42 came and went. Then 7:50. Then 8:00. Mr. Kowalski came in at 8:15 and struggled with the card reader and nobody stood next to him talking about weather.

I checked the door eleven times.

“He’s probably just sick,” Priya said.

“Who?”

“The man you’re staring at the door for.”

“I’m not staring. I’m monitoring the entrance.”

“For what?”

“For... fire hazard reasons.”

“You are catastrophically bad at this.”

He didn’t come the next day either. Or the day after. Three days of no Eliott, three days of no cortado, three days of a 7:42 that came and went without anyone mispronouncing my name or explaining the Basque origins of espresso beverages.

I made a cortado on the third day. An oat milk cortado in a proper cortado glass. I set it on the counter, on the spot where he usually stands, and I didn’t serve it to anyone.

“Is that for him?” Priya asked.

“It’s quality control.”

“You’re quality-controlling a drink nobody ordered.”

“Priya.”

“Zoe.”

“Please restock the cups.”

He came back on day four. A Thursday. 7:38 — four minutes early, which felt like a statement, though I couldn’t parse what it was stating.

He looked the same. White oxford, satchel, Kindle. But there was something off — a tiredness around the eyes, a looseness in the way he stood, like someone had slightly turned down his internal voltage.

“Cortado?” I said.

“Please.”

No correction. No lecture. No “oat milk, obviously, as we’ve established over the course of approximately ninety-seven previous transactions.” Just please.

I made it carefully. More carefully than usual. I steamed the oat milk the way he’d once described — not too frothy, silky, a thin microfoam — and I pulled the shot a beat longer because he’d once mentioned, in passing, in the middle of a monologue I’d pretended not to listen to, that he preferred a slightly longer extraction.

I wrote “Eliott” on the cup. Two T’s.

He picked it up. Looked at the name. Looked at me.

“Two T’s,” he said quietly.

“Don’t get used to it.”

Something shifted in his face. Not the composure-crack, not the surprise laugh. Something slower. Warmer. Like a room that had been dark for a long time and someone had just opened the curtain an inch.

“I was in Chicago,” he said. “My dad had surgery. He’s — he’s fine. He’s okay. I just didn’t—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“I know. But I wanted you to know I didn’t just—”

“Eliott.”

He stopped.

“I’m glad your dad’s okay,” I said.

He nodded. Picked up his cortado. Sat at his table by the window. Opened his Kindle. And everything was normal again, except that nothing was normal again, because I had spelled his name right and he had told me something real and the distance between the counter and his table felt like a measurement I suddenly cared about.

The cup drawings changed after that.

Not the frequency — I still drew every day. But the content shifted. Less mockery. More... I don’t know what to call it. A conversation in Sharpie.

I drew a tiny airplane landing. He looked at it and smiled.

The next day, I drew a clock — but this time with a heart where the 12 should be. I panicked about it for the entire time it took him to walk from the door to the counter, which was approximately seven seconds and approximately seven years.

He looked at it for a long time.

“Is this commentary on horology?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely. It’s a statement about the commodification of time.”

“It has a heart on it.”

“That’s the commodification part.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Most art doesn’t.”

He took the cup. He sat down. He did not take a picture of it, which worried me. Then he pulled a pen from his satchel and wrote something on a napkin and left it on the table when he went.

I waited until he was gone, obviously. I waited a full four minutes, walking past the table twice on unrelated missions — once to wipe a table that didn’t need wiping and once to adjust a chair that didn’t need adjusting — before I picked up the napkin.

It said: The heart should be where the 7:42 is. That’s the time that matters.

I folded the napkin. Put it in my apron pocket. Priya was watching me from behind the espresso machine with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for this moment for weeks.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face is saying everything.”

“My face is right.”

Day twenty-six. I wrote my phone number on his cup.

Not smoothly. Not the way it happens in movies, where the barista writes her number with a wink and a hair flip and the guy grins like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I wrote it in tiny, cramped digits between the “E” and the “t” of his name, like I was trying to hide it, which I was, because the possibility of him not calling was so much worse than the safety of never asking.

He picked up the cup. He didn’t look at it — he was reading something on his phone, one of those moments where life doesn’t cooperate with your dramatic gesture — and he walked to his table and sat down and drank his cortado and read his Kindle and I died fourteen small deaths over the course of forty-five minutes.

He got up to leave. He dropped the cup in the trash.

My stomach hit the floor.

He walked to the door. Pushed it open. And then stopped. Turned around. Walked back to the trash can. Pulled the cup out.

He looked at it. At the tiny numbers between the letters.

He looked at me.

I was holding the portafilter with both hands like a weapon.

“Is this,” he said slowly, “a phone number, or is this another bit?”

“It’s a phone number.”

“Your phone number?”

“No, it’s the customer service line for Oatly.”

His mouth twitched.

“I’m going to call it,” he said.

“It’s probably busy. They get a lot of complaints.”

“I’ll wait.”

He put the cup in his satchel. Not the tote — the good one. The patina one. And he walked out, and I stood behind the counter with my heart doing something that I can only describe as what a cortado would feel like if a cortado had feelings: hot, concentrated, and slightly more intense than I’d planned.

He called at 7:42 p.m.

Of course he did.

“Is this the Oatly complaint line?” he said.

“Speaking.”

“I’d like to file a complaint.”

“Go ahead.”

“My barista has been deliberately misspelling my name for thirty-one days, sabotaging my milk preference, publicly mocking my pronunciation on Yelp, and drawing increasingly confusing illustrations on my cups, one of which featured a heart in place of the number twelve on a clock face.”

“That sounds serious.”

“It is. I think she might like me.”

“That’s a bold conclusion.”

“I’m a bold person.”

“You read books about clocks.”

“Horology is a deeply bold field.”

I laughed. A real, full, startled laugh that came from somewhere below my ribs, and I heard him go quiet on the other end of the line — not the awkward quiet of a pause, but the warm quiet of someone listening to something they want to remember.

“Can I take you to dinner?” he said.

“You’re asking me on a date?”

“I’m asking if I can sit across from you without a counter between us.”

“What if you don’t like me without the counter?”

“Zoe.” He said it right. No Y. Perfect pronunciation. “I have been finding excuses to stand at that counter for four months. I once explained the history of Basque espresso culture to a woman who visibly wanted to throw a coffee grinder at my head, because it meant she’d keep talking to me. I brought my own oat milk. I wrote a Yelp review. I have never written a Yelp review in my life. I don’t even have a Yelp account. I made one. For you.”

“That’s either very romantic or very unhinged.”

“It can be both.”

“Dinner sounds good.”

“Tomorrow?”

“7:42?”

He laughed. The real one. The one I now knew I’d been making cortados for.

Our first date was at a Greek restaurant, because he’d remembered I was Greek, because of course he had, because this is a man who memorizes pronunciation guides and spelling conventions and the optimal Kindle-glare angle at a coffee shop window.

He ordered in terrible Greek. I’m talking catastrophic — he’d clearly memorized some phrases from YouTube, and what came out of his mouth was something between a toast and an apology. The waiter looked at me with the patient suffering of a man who has seen many well-meaning non-Greeks attempt his language.

“He’ll have the lamb,” I said in Greek.

“What did you tell him?” Eliott asked.

“I ordered for you.”

“How do you know what I want?”

“I’ve been watching you choose between the same four shirts for four months. You’re not exactly unpredictable.”

“There are five shirts. There’s a navy.”

“I’ve never seen a navy.”

“The navy is for special occasions.”

“Is this a special occasion?”

He looked at me across the table. No counter between us. No Kindle. No cup to hide behind. Just him, in his white oxford — not the navy, the standard white, which I found either disappointing or endearing — with his honey-in-coffee eyes and his two T’s and his hands resting on the table like he wasn’t sure what to do with them now that they weren’t holding a cortado.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”

I learned things at dinner.

His full name is Eliott Park. He’s twenty-eight. He’s a structural engineer, which explains the precision and the mild obsessive-compulsive energy around things like name spelling and milk ratios — his brain is wired to notice when things aren’t where they should be.

His dad’s surgery was a knee replacement. Routine, but Eliott flew to Chicago and stayed for three days because his mother asked him to and he is, as I already knew and resented knowing, fundamentally incapable of saying no to people who need him.

He started coming to Grounds Control because it was near his office. He kept coming because of me.

“Because of the coffee,” I corrected.

“The coffee is fine. You’re interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

“You misspelled my name on the first day and instead of fixing it, you committed to the bit for a month. That’s not carelessness. That’s dedication. I respect dedication.”

“You respect a woman who can’t spell your name?”

“I respect a woman who won’t.”

I took a sip of wine to avoid responding, because the thing I wanted to say was too honest for a first date and too fast for a person who had spent thirty-one days pretending she didn’t care whether he walked through the door at 7:42.

But here it is. The thing I thought, sitting across from him in a Greek restaurant with bad lighting and good lamb while he tried to pronounce “efcharistó” and got it wrong in every direction:

Oh. There you are.

Not like finding something new. Like recognizing something that was already there, that had been there since the first time he said “two T’s” and I decided to keep using one, since the first time he laughed that surprised-dog laugh, since the first time I noticed his eyes and told myself it wasn’t relevant.

It was always relevant.

He walked me to my car. It was 10:30 and the street was quiet and the air smelled like jasmine because this is Los Angeles and even the air is trying too hard.

“I had a really good time,” he said.

“I know. Your posture relaxed approximately forty percent after the second glass of wine.”

“You’re observing my posture?”

“I have a film degree. We’re trained to observe.”

“What else have you observed?”

I looked at him. Streetlight on one side of his face. Shadow on the other. The leather satchel over one shoulder, because he’d brought it on a date like a man who is never fully off-duty.

“You hold your Kindle with two hands,” I said. “You calculate tips to the cent. You stood next to Mr. Kowalski for five minutes every morning to help him with the card reader and you never once looked impatient. You kept every cup I drew on. You have a shirt you save for special occasions and you didn’t wear it tonight, which means either this isn’t special or you’re saving it for something even more special, and I haven’t decided which one is more annoying.”

He stared at me.

“The navy is for the second date,” he said.

“Bold of you to assume there’s a second date.”

“I brought my own oat milk to a coffee shop, Zoe. I am the definition of bold.”

I kissed him. Or he kissed me. It happened at the same time, like a drink that’s equal parts espresso and steamed milk, balanced and warm and exactly the right ratio, and I thought: so this is what a cortado feels like.

He came in at 7:42 the next morning. White oxford. Satchel. Kindle.

But he was smiling before he reached the counter. A different smile from the one I’d catalogued over four months — not the polite-customer smile, not the surprised-laugh smile, not the composure-crack smile. A new one. Private. Like a door that only opens from one side.

“Cortado?” I said.

“Please.”

I made it. Oat milk. Proper microfoam. Slightly longer extraction. I wrote “Eliott” on the cup. Two T’s. And underneath, in tiny letters:

Same time tomorrow?

He read it. Looked at me. Put the cup in the patina satchel without drinking from it.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I’ll be here.”

And he sat at his table by the window. And I stood behind the counter. And Priya said nothing, which was everything. And outside, the morning was doing what mornings in Los Angeles do — arriving golden and exaggerated and full of the kind of light that makes ordinary things look like they matter.

They do matter.

They all do.

Even the T’s.

End.