Coffee and Cafés - Book Two of the Café Latte Trilogy

Mocha Macchiato

After this, there are only three chapters and an epilogue remaining! But of course, then will begin Ed and Harper's story, so it's not totally over.

Love, Cam

♡

Mocha Macchiato

I wanted time to slow down. After the party, it seemed like the time blew past me so quickly I barely had time to focus. Cinzia joined our team at the Hope Foundation, wanting somewhere more stable than her current job and having a lot of transferrable skills to help us out while Angelo was gone. Our workload increased; even with Cinzia, Angelo's workload had been immense and splitting it between us was still a substantial amount of work.

I barely saw Angelo. All I wanted was to see him, to spend as much time as possible with him before he left, but he had a thousand things to organise. I missed him. Even when I saw him at work, it sucked, because we had too much to do. All we really could do was exchange longing, wistful glances at each other like we were trapped in a terrible film montage.

It felt like the days were slipping through my fingers, and I couldn't control it. That made me sadder than anything; I couldn't control it. I wanted to just pause everything for a few moments, so I could get some proper time with him, not just a quick hug and a good morning kiss before the work piled in. Whenever we tried to sit down, to spend some proper time together, someone would interrupt us. Something would come up.

"Morning," I sighed, as I entered the office one day.

Angelo was sat near the door, still wearing his coat. He stood up. "Let's go."

"Let's go where?" I asked.

"To mine, to yours, to the movies, I don't care," he said firmly. "We are taking the day off."

I sighed. "I can't, I've got two meetings-"

"Misa's taking care of them," he said, turning me around and pushing me back through the door. "I've had her reschedule everything. They've taken care of it. Let's go."

I felt my shoulders release some tension. "We've really got a whole day?"

"A whole day," he promised, kissing the back of my head. "We can do anything you like. What do you want to do?"

I thought about it, and then said, "Coffee, aquarium, then your place so I can thoroughly fuck you and then eat takeaway."

I heard a low chuckle as we stepped into the lift, and he wrapped his arms around me. "I think I can manage that."

I sighed happily, leaning back in his arms. I tried to ignore the feeling growing in my stomach, the one that nagged at me and told me I wanted to throw a tantrum until he agreed to stay in the country. I didn't want to be that person, the person that stopped their partner achieving their goals just because it would be a little bit difficult for a while.

"Moving kind of sucks," he told me.

"You moving kind of sucks for me, too," I replied.

We didn't say anything else about it, because we knew it would be too difficult to get into it again. We'd been around in circles on the subject; we knew how much it was going to suck, but how well we were going to try and handle it. I didn't want to talk about the damn short-term future right now. I just wanted to be with him, in the moment.

Was it too much to ask?

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