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The CEO smirks. “I am Everything: every trope, every sub-genre, every archetype rolled into one like a quesadilla. But you could just call me Every without an L for short, though—everyone calls me that. Or Every Darkindeep Ebonyngrey Wolfmane.”
“Huh, your surnames sound familiar, Every. Do I happen to know you from somewhere?”
“It’s the name of the town and the coffee shop, you stupid girl.”
“They named it after you?”
Every the CEO sighs. “No, my family owns this whole town, as well as most of the businesses here. Even this damp, gloomy coffee shop you’re interning for.”
“Everything? As in including the watermelon shop, the sperm bank, the trash collecting services, the funeral service company, and the sex toy shop?”
“Yep,” Every answers confidently.
“Seriously, even the sperm bank?”
“Yep, why? You’re interested?”
“My asexual aunt got, you know, her kid from there. Like, whose swimmers could they even be?”
“My papa’s, most likely. He is a major donor there. Or others. It’s confidential, but looks like I have a new half-brother.”
Then a pregnant pause ensues.
“Welp, no wonder all the locals here live in trash bags and poverty,” Lily says absently as a new batch of coffee is brewing. She slowly stirs the pot with a moldy wooden spoon because she is so poor and can’t afford a new one.
Does coffee even work that way, anyway?
Not sure.
Billows of smoke rise from the old pot, signaling that the drink is finally boiled and ready for consumption. Lily, the beautiful barista she is, heaves up the pot and sashays down the aisle, her hips swaying softly, taking it to her only customer, who is patiently waiting at a nearby table.
As she gently puts the coffee pot down, she bats her eyes, thick, dark eyelashes pressing against her blushing pink cheeks. A drop of black coffee spills out as she pours it into a clay cup, making her pout, full lips pressing softly. Lily sure has the fullest, poutiest lips in this world, and she somehow obtained them without the help of fillers or silicone implants.
Totally natural.
The customer, Every the Tall Tree, sips his drink carefully, relishing the bitter flavor of black coffee beans with no sugar as well as the rich iron taste from the rusty pot. He scowls, baring his teeth, looking every inch like the rabid dog in front of Seven-Eleven.
“This tastes like ass,” he mutters in a deep voice.
“So you like it, then?” Lily brightens up.
“It sucks,” he explains his earlier statement, which went entirely misunderstood.
“You don’t like ass?” she screeches, shocked, as if he had just confessed a horrible crime.
He stares at her, his eyes nearly breaking out of their sockets.
“What the fuck.”
CHAPTER 2: HOME SWEET HOME
The soft golden hills of the country rise and fall as Lily Lilieta Lalietta’s puny little legs continue to pedal the bike, taking the petite pixie girl ever closer to her home, where all the trouble had begun.
After her peculiar encounter with Every earlier in the morning, she had decided to leave her shift five minutes early and was screamed at by Billy Ben, the coffee shop manager, for that. He had arrived at the run-down shop right when she was about to leave, and had ordered her to make a cup of coffee for himself, which Lily spat into. She then made her way to college, slugged through the lectures, skipped lunch thanks to her racking debt and negative cash flow, then went off to deliver pizzas for Josefina’s Pizzeria. The place is owned by an old hag with an attitude worse than Billy Ben’s and a body odor that makes rat-infested dumpsters smell like fresh roses.
That ho sure is vile.
Lily had survived the horrid behavior and smell of dear old Miss Josefina while helping her in the kitchen by hoping every second that the witch would fall down the stairs and just die. Then, she delivered the sardine and pickle pizzas by bike. Like, who eats these horrid combinations of specimens anyway?
