It was always slow during those long night shifts.
People who lined into the local grocery store during the day usually had relatively calm, content faces. They would smile back at the cashiers and would pleasantly echo their "Have a great day!" But the few who wandered in anytime past nine seemed to have let the night sky imprint its blackness in half-circles beneath their eyes dulled by fatigue. Their lips were usually kept in tighter, pursed lines, and they usually rushed to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible.
These zombies and their irritated need to escape through the sliding glass door within at least half an hour after their arrival called for general grumpiness when dealing with cashiers. The grocery store was a local one, a little market cornered right in the heart of Chicago, equipped with a deli, bakery, and pharmacy. The nightwalkers were usually ones who worked late shifts and stopped by at the market on their way home to grab essential items, of course with a bustling aura of haste and aggravation.
Eden had to deal with one of those customers that late Wednesday night. She had been working the register since 4 that evening, but by around 7 the nine-to-fivers stopped lining in and allowed a very slow rest of the night. The only problem was that by 9:30, the late shifters came in, slowly but surely. And the blonde girl was lucky enough to have been working the particular register that a particular woman chose to be checked out at with a particularly thorny attitude.
"The coupon says right there that I can get a dollar off this item!" the woman exclaimed, the fabric of her long-sleeved shirt with light and dark yellow stripes sticking too tight on her stomach. Her platinum, over-bleached hair was in a frizzy low ponytail, and her blue eyes seemed sunken into her plump face.
"Ma'am," the young cash register said for about the fifth time, "The coupon says there at the bottom that you can only get a dollar off the family sized box." Eden pointed hesitantly to the colorful box of excessively sugary cereal sitting on the conveyer belt next to the shelf of gum and candy bars beside her. "That's just the regular size." She had dealt with these kinds of customers many times before, but each time she always felt her cheeks blush and her heart rate quicken with anxiety.
The woman sighed exasperatedly, as she had each time the girl had explained her wrongness to her. She let her hand that held the coupon drop down to her side, her shoulders slumping over even farther. "I want to speak to your manager, please."
Eden, unlike most customers would think, actually felt relieved whenever the usual Karen would demand for the manager. She would gladly let someone else deal with the situation than her, plus she was getting so anxious that her fingertips trembled against the keys of the cash register.
Turning slightly, Eden heard the material of her green, mesh uniform vest swoosh as she twisted her upper body to glance at her manager's door where the tall guy stood talking to one of the elderly employees, Martha, whom everyone loved because she brought homemade cookies to the break room every Monday. "Sean!" Eden weakly called.
The tall man with coffee skin turned towards her upon hearing his name called. His eyes shifted to the agitated woman and back to the girl employee whose light green eyes begged for help beneath her dark green uniform cap that had the words Freshly Foods across the front in white and held up her long, dusty blonde hair in a wavy ponytail.
Eden nearly cried from relief when Sean said a quick goodbye to Martha and began walking over towards the girl. His pale yellow shirt had slight stains at the pit, and his red tie had a few stray strings poking from it. Sean was an amazing manager, though, and to Eden he was like a superhero.
The shorter girl stepped away from the register as Sean stepped up to it, looking the customer directly in the eyes and speaking in a more clear tone, "Is there something I can help you with today, ma'am?"
"Yes, sir," the woman immediately said and began rattling off the same thing she had persisted to Eden's ears several times.
Of course, Sean told her the same answer. Taking the coupon from her, he lifted it to his squinted eyes to read the fine print, and he quickly handed it back to her. "Sorry, ma'am, but this coupon is solely for the family sized box of Fruit Loops.
The woman looked between him and the coupon reluctantly, but her eyes stilled in defeat. "Oh, alright." She shoved the coupon in her purse and got out her wallet to pay for the items. Sean stayed there as Eden printed out the woman's receipt just to make sure the wary customer wouldn't try anything else. The woman took her receipt and bagged items and left, her tie-dye tennis shoes stomping furiously on the tile floor as the front doors automatically opened for her.
"The night crowd is something," Sean laughed, rubbing his black hair that was buzzed close to his scalp. He turned to Eden who stared dully at the cash register, her eyes slightly puffy and the corner of her lips etching downwards.
He could tell the kid was tired, as any 19-year old juggling college and a full-time job would be. Eden had been working for him since she could legally work, and everyone who worked at the corner market was like family.
"How 'bout you clock out early," he suggested, watching the girl with concerned, fatherly eyes. "I think we can manage the place for the rest of the night."
Sean's deep, hushing voice caught Eden from that disoriented space where one is wholly concentrated on fighting off sleep. She turned to him, seeing the way his dark lips were drew into a caring half-smile that creased into his thin beard. She nodded gratefully, too tired to really articulate herself. She reached for the tip of her green company cap, ready to pull it off along with her vest so she could go back to her apartment and jump into bed, but Sean interrupted her before he could.
"Wait, wait, looks like you've got one more customer before you go. Let me know if you need anything." He patted the girl's shoulder firmly and walked away before she could see what customer he was talking about.
Still holding the brim of her hat in preparation to take it off, she turned and looked through her raised arm to see another customer strolling up to her register. This particular customer made her heart quicken even faster, in a different way than the Karen with the greasy forehead and frizzy ponytail.
This customer made her heart feel as if it were pounding at the bottom of her throat, demanding to slip up her esophagus and come tumbling out of her mouth and onto the register before her. She swallowed it down as the customer neared.
She was shockingly tall, somewhere near five feet and ten inches according to Eden's quick and baffled approximation. Dark chocolate locks rested straight and sleek above her chest, her hair thick and shiny. Even darker eyes met Eden's earthy green ones, and even though they held no significant emotion one way or another, they struck the girl with such an immensity that she expected her own knees to buckle and falter right then and there. Those eyes so dark that there was no contrast between iris and pupil were almond-shaped and sharp at either outer end, a set of lush and dark lashes encompassing them. A set of brunette eyebrows launched gloriously from inner to outer, their arches subtle but sharp. Her face looked strong but feminine, a rounded forehead leading to sharp cheekbones that ran parallel to an even sharper, sculpted jawline that came down to a gently pointed chin.
Her skin was tan, and her clothes were elegant. She wore skinny black slacks with a silky black shirt tucked into it, a thin belt buckled at her hips. A matte black blazer rested over her shoulders, accentuating her overall sleek look. A large hand with distinct veins running trails at the top of it set down a bottle of Don Julio 1942 and a couple of ripe limes onto the black, dusty conveyer belt.
Eden had been too absorbed with the dashing woman to have noticed that she was now standing right before her, dark eyes piercing into hers with an expectant look. The girl blinked as her self-awareness returned to her, and she felt a hot wave of blush invade her cheeks as she quickly scanned the few items that the woman was getting. She avoided the woman's eyes entirely as she silently typed in the code for limes and scanned the most expensive tequila in the whole store, feeling like the air around her was suddenly too thick and foggy to breathe.
She chanced a look up at the woman once she was finished scanning and found, to her great embarrassment, that the woman was staring at her with an amused smirk, hands kept behind her back as the chest of her black blouse that left a dangerous amount of buttons unbuttoned at the top fell open a bit.
Eden swallowed her anxious heart down again as she looked back at the total price on the computer screen, rehearsing it in her head for a millisecond before robotically reciting it to the woman. The brunette's smirk widened as she pulled out a thin black wallet from her pocket and flipped it open, pulling out a black Mastercard and handing it to the girl who took it very delicately, both to avoid touching the woman's smooth fingertips and because the card was obviously a luxury credit card that someone like her would probably never touch again in her life.
She swiped the card and printed the receipt while altogether avoiding the woman's incessant stare before handing it back to her, along with her bag of tequila and limes.
"Thank you," the stranger spoke, her voice thick and raspy, a mixture of huskiness and smoothness that seemed to clog the girl's airflow even further. She took the items from the girl's hands, and Eden felt shameful to feel a sense of disappointment that the woman had not touched her fingertips with hers while retrieving the items.
"Have a good n-night," the blonde told her as the brunette began walking away, eyes still lingering on hers. Those plump pink lips stretched into a half-smirk and half-smile, and Eden mentally cursed herself for stuttering like such an idiot. Her eyes never left the woman, even as she turned and exited the doors of the store which was the luckiest establishment on earth to have such a beauty walking its scuffed floors with her shiny black heels. Eden kept her eyes on her until she could no longer see her through the glass doors that slid closed again, and it was only then that she could resume normal breathing that sane people do.
☾
She was filled with too heavy of exhaustion to care about drying her hair that night after she hopped out of the shower. She could not spare enough energy for that task, so she slid into her small bed with wet hair, not caring if her pillow was left soggy by morning. While she waited for her body to finally collapse from fatigue, she mustered enough energy to reach for her phone from her nightstand. She meant to do her nightly social media scroll, but when her lethargic thumb opened the Instagram app, the very first post on her feed did anything but relax her.
It was Ruth, her ex, in a picture with her new fiancée. They were leaning together, donning the brightest of smiles. In the background was a large, spacious room with white walls and a window with a perfect view of Chicago's skyline, and the caption read "Move in day!"
Eden could feel her chest burn. She exited the app, turned her phone off, set it on the nightstand, and rolled over away from it. She gripped her cold pillow as her knees curled up into fetal position, as they did every night but especially on nights where her mind was muddled. Ruth never failed to muddle her mind.
She tried her best to fall asleep immediately, but the picture seemed to be burned into the flesh of her brain. She saw Ruth, her caramel hair and deep blue eyes, and that new girl of hers. It seemed that seeing that apartment behind them hurt her even worse. She could never afford an apartment like that, and one of the reasons Ruth could was because she was older than Eden by 9 years—one of the reasons she was getting that apartment with her new fiancée instead of Eden.
Eden squeezed her eyes shut so hard to the point that they began to ache and water. She buried her face deeper into her pillow, curling up even harder into a ball. She felt that resounding ache of loneliness strike her deep within, like a grandfather clock pounding its bells at midnight. It was that midnight pain, that midnight ache that haunted her. Every ounce of silence throughout her tiny apartment only reminded her even more of how horribly alone she was.
Her tears warmed her tired eyes and helped drift her to sleep.