Beautiful Mistakes

"Are you ordering?" Leigh snapped. "This area is for paying customers only."

Shannon let no annoyance show on her face as she said, "Sure, I'll take a cup of coffee. Two cream, one sugar," she said quietly to Aaron.

Aaron finally glanced up, sighing, and he glanced at Leigh, but then he just turned around himself, grabbing the coffee pot and turning back to the redhead, turning her coffee cup over and filling it up.

"Cream and sugar's right there, you can help yourself," he stated.

"So, you're working here now? I thought you liked your other job," Shannon said conversationally.

"I don't work here, I own here," he stated evenly, less emotion in his tone than when he spoke to Julie.

Leigh must have finally remembered there were still a few people left, because it seemed that she had to use a lot of will-power to pry herself away from the redhead to go check on her customers.

"Wow, that's great," the girl responded.

Intrigued, Julie ran over and grabbed the pan of creamers, then she began refilling the creamers at the tables right by the counter so she could still listen.

"You never stopped in to see me when I worked at Subway, either," she said to him. "I had hoped you would."

"Did you really expect me to?" he asked flatly.

"No," she said quietly, her voice remorseful. "But I was hoping that you would find it in your heart to maybe forgive me someday."

He scoffed then, a harsh sound, and said, "Heart? That's funny."

"Oh, don't play tough with me, Aaron. I know you too well for that."

"Knew me too well," he corrected. "You don't know me at all anymore, Shannon, and I'm planning on keeping it that way."

"I know that I hurt you—”

"It doesn't matter what happened in the past, okay? It just doesn't. Drink your coffee, leave Leigh alone, and Julie will cash you out when you're finished. Have a nice life," he said, and with that, he disappeared into the back.

The girl named Shannon sat there on her stool stirring her coffee forever, and Julie began to wonder if she would ever leave.

Forty minutes passed and the girl sat there stubbornly, but Aaron didn't come out and Leigh never approached her again. It was as if she existed to no one in the café—except for Julie, who got stuck awkwardly coming over to ask if she needed anything else.

The girl merely smiled tightly, shaking her head and responding, "No, thanks. I'm just going to wait for Aaron."

But Aaron never came. In fact, when Julie had no one else to wait on she went looking for him, and she searched every nook and cranny of the café, but Aaron was nowhere to be found.

He had left.

He had actually left.

Julie was in awe that there was, in fact, someone in the world that Aaron seemed to hate more than Julie herself—this Shannon Hamilton person.

Obviously she was an ex, but as she tried to picture stone-cold Aaron with the fiery redhead on the stool, it just didn't seem right.

Of course, Julie didn't know the story.

Julie wanted to know the story—really bad.

The last man left the dining room so that all that remained was the redhead, and Julie took the opportunity to run back to where Leigh was hiding to try to pry some gossip from her.

"Who is she? Do you know Aaron is gone? Like, he actually left."

Leigh nodded, but without her usual smile on her face she looked strange. "I told him just to go ahead and leave, I'll close up."