An Introduction

There’s this place in Sheffield that I can’t live without, Brews Brothers. I’ve been coming here pretty much since I moved here, which was five years ago, way back when I was a freshman the first time. I actually was only a freshman once, but I took two years off, because school was cramping my style. So now that I’m back at it, I’m a junior, even though I’m 23, and at the age when everyone I know is graduating and getting real jobs and moving to exotic places like Albuquerque and Minneapolis. Someday I’ll graduate and do the same thing. My academic advisor says I have just two semesters to go after the current one, which is good news. Then I’ll be a Real Adult with a Real Degree in Communication Studies, whatever that entails.

Anyway, I’ve been coming to Brews Brothers since about the second week that I was in town. I was at the bar one night – here you only have to be 18 to go to the bars, but at the time I had my older brother’s ID – and I got hit on by this 35-year-old dude with a fake tan and a receding hairline. Try writing home about that one. Turns out the guy’s name was Wendell, and once I explained to him that I’m not gay, just (to quote Derek Zoolander) “really, really ridiculously good looking”, we had a good laugh and he told me that he and his brother, Wyatt, own the coffee shop in town, Brews Brothers. And I’ve been going there ever since. I even briefly worked there, for a period of about two days during my “time off from school” phase. But it was quickly decided that I make a much better loiterer than I do coffee shop employee, and I returned to my post at my regular table in front of the window.

It’s strange that I would choose to frequent a coffee shop, since I can’t stand the stuff. After watching my parents chug down pot after pot pretty much my entire life, the smell of black coffee actually makes me kind of sick. I’ve just never developed a taste for it, which isn’t to say that I haven’t tried. Wyatt’s always experimenting with flavors, creating new concoctions, channeling his previous alcoholic tendencies into mixtures of coffee such as “Mocha Caramel Mango Latte.” Since he knows me and I’m there pretty much all the time, when I’m not in class and not working 25 hours a week as a teller at the credit union located inside Grocery Mart, I usually get to be the guinea pig. I’ve explained to him a thousand times that I don’t like coffee, but he keeps insisting that I try his experiments. If one day he does mix up something that doesn’t make me want to hurl, I think it will be the pinnacle of his coffee making career and he will either retire from the java business or die happily in his sleep that night.

Frequenting Brews Brothers has other benefits, aside from Wyatt’s strange brews and free cookies – I’ve never paid for a cookie there, and I consume plenty of peanut butter and oatmeal raisin ones, washed down with hot cocoa in the winter and iced tea in the summer. There are many attractive females at Sheffield U, and many of these attractive female apply to be baristas at Brews Brothers, and all of the females who are actually hired to work there are attractive. This is partially due to the fact that Wyatt is kind of a pervert, and partially due to the fact that Wendell is not a fan of – as he puts it – “uggos”. Either way, I’m not complaining.

The newest barista to join the Brews Brothers staff is Heather. She’s petite with big brown eyes and longish brown hair, and she’s shy but when she smiles – wow. Her smile will just warm your heart. And her teeth are perfect. I wouldn’t say that perfect teeth are a necessity in a girl, I’m sure I could love a girl with imperfect teeth if she was the right girl, but I recognize a perfect set of pearly whites when I see them, and Heather has them.

Heather has been working at Brews Brothers for three weeks and two days. The only words I have ever said to her are “please” and “thank you” except for the time that I asked her what her name was, and said that my name was Chad, and that I really wasn’t stalking her, that I was kind of a regular at Brews Brothers, that she could ask Wyatt and Wendell to confirm this, that I’m just a student at the university doing my homework and drinking my iced tea and eating my peanut butter cookie. Since then, we make eye contact, we both smile, and I nod politely, but that’s it. And I want to talk to her, but I don’t know what to say. I think I might have been too over the top during our first conversation, rambling on and on, and now she probably thinks I’m mentally challenged or something since I haven’t really spoken to her since.

It’s not that I’m shy; at least, I don’t think I’m shy. I’m a friendly guy. I’ll talk to pretty much anyone. I like to meet people and hear what they have to say. And I’d really like to talk to Heather and hear what she has to say, I just wish she would break the ice, so I know I’m not overstepping my bounds.

The thought has also crossed my mind that maybe I’ve forgotten how to do this – you know, talk to girls. My friends tell me it’s like riding a bike, that you don’t really forget, you just have to get back on and start riding. It’s not that I haven’t dated since I’ve been at college. I have, but it’s been awhile, since the final demise of my on-again, off-again relationship with my high school girlfriend, Lindsey. She and I went to separate colleges and chose to lead separate lives, together, which didn’t work out nearly as fantastically as we had planned. We broke up at Christmas break freshman year (happy holidays), got back together five months later when we were both living at home for the summer, broke up again that October, got back together in February, and broke up for good at the end of April, right before finals, which catapulted me into my “time off from school” phase. I dated a few girls in that time, nothing serious, and then Lindsey and I got back together, briefly, last summer. Then I enrolled at school again and we broke up, again. And I haven’t dated anyone since. It’s not that I’m waiting for her or some stupid thing like that – I told her I was done with it, done with the drama, with the “she loves me, she loves me not”, with the on-again, off-again rollercoaster that had become our lives together. I just haven’t been ready.

But then I see Heather, and I think that I might be.