synopsis: in chinese culture, it’s believed that your blood type says a lot about your personality. people with type o blood are said to be warm, sincere, and kind. they handle affairs carefully and patiently. however, they’re thought to lack bravery, and can be stubborn and suspicious. And that included Xu Minghao.
O血型的人为人温和，待人诚恳， 亲切。处事谨慎，有耐心。但较胆小，顽固，易猜疑。
After the apartment he shared with his two friends Seokmin and Mingyu, Think Coffee was Minghao’s second home. This wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew him: every waking moment of his not spent studying or in lectures was spent working at Think Coffee. He needed to earn money somehow, though not for the reasons you might expect.
Rent wasn’t cheap by any means, but splitting it amongst three people made it manageable, especially considering how Minghao’s scholarship covered half of his housing costs. No, the money went to renting the bloody expensive dance studio just 3 blocks from campus, because there were no other studios close by and performing arts majors had to practise somewhere.
Since he still wanted to be able to afford food, Minghao made an agreement with these three other students from his class to rent the studio together. Originally, they only ever spoke to discuss money, and they each took a corner of the studio to practise separately. But they eventually began to work together, even choreographing routines with one another.
Dancing was one of the few things Minghao lived for, and as much as he loved working at the coffee joint, he often had to drag himself through long shifts by reminding himself of the $70/hr rental rates. He reminded himself of the thumping bass blaring from speakers Soonyoung plugged his iPod into and his shoes squeaking across polished wooden floors and full-length mirrors that sometimes fogged up after hours and hours of practice and the exhilaration of finishing a routine.
The only other thing that helped him power through the day was you.
Ever since he started working there, there hadn’t been a single morning where you didn’t come in and buy a cup of black coffee. You would sit down at one of the booths with that cup, your laptop, and your binder, typing notes. After a couple of hours, you would pack up your things and head to class, taking your drink with you. Sometimes, you would come in again after your classes ended, buy another cup of coffee, sit at your usual booth in the back corner, and do even more work.
As the days went by, Minghao committed your order to memory—not that it was very complicated to begin with—making a mental note that you’d always ask for a cardboard sleeve to take your coffee to lectures with you. And as he became so quick and confident in making your drinks, you made a constant effort to give him a goodbye nod whenever you left for your late-morning classes.
Minghao first got the job at Think Coffee last winter, when he’d see you enter the café hurriedly, eager to get out of those cold slurries of icy morning air, sighing in relief that the place was heated. He’d gotten used to being able to see you in the corner of his vision from his spot behind the counter, always working and taking tiny periodic sips of the coffee he brewed for you.
As spring arrived, the flecks of pearl snow in your hair gave way to wind-blown locks, the flush in your cheeks migrated to your nose from all that damn pollen in the air, and the thick trench coat folded over your lap changed to a flowy cardigan.
Likewise, you didn’t fail to notice the cute barista with ever-evolving hair colours and the slightest drag of eyeliner along his lower lids. You noticed the way he always double-counted your change before giving it you and how he always slipped your cup of black coffee into a cardboard sleeve without you even having to ask. You noticed how he only ever worked on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and that one black-and-white striped turtleneck he always wore underneath his uniform: the one with sleeves long enough to fall down and cover his hands.
You knew nothing about him, save for the fact that he was incredibly kind-hearted. You’d seen him comfort this girl who got stood up at the café and give her the drink she ordered for her date free of charge, all while she was a blubbering, incoherent mess.
As the spring semester drew to a close and finals were right at your doorstep, you spent a lot more time in Think Coffee studying, and a lot more money buying coffees to keep yourself awake. Minghao spent less time in the café—cutting his hours in half so he had more time for revision—pushing his shifts further into the night to free up his afternoons for library sessions with his study group.
He only saw you on Monday and Thursday nights because of this, watching you struggle to keep your head off the table as you poured over stacks and stacks of neatly filed notes and colour-coordinated revision sheets. Irrational as it was—it was his job, after all—he always felt bad when he had to send you home at 11.30pm so he could close up.
You watched him too, how he started taking just a little bit longer to take orders and make drinks, his hair now free from styling products and messily flopping into his face, eyes slightly bloodshot, and his eyeliner smudged just a tad too much. You watched how he would pull a wooden stool from under the counter and read from his little stack of flash cards when there were no customers to be served.
The image of his warm eyeswdark brown, coffee-coloured irises and inky eyeliner swiped along his bottom eyelids—looking down at you every time you fell asleep while working and he nudged you awake was one you didn’t mind seeing every Monday and Thursday night.
Similarly, the way your hair got progressively messier throughout the night from you constantly carding your fingers through it was something Minghao found endearing, for some reason. He found a lot of things about you endearing, like how you often folded up your jacket to use as a pillow when you took little naps on the table after hours and hours of studying.
The undersides of the cup sleeves on your coffee cups always had messages scrawled on them. Usually, they were just compliments like, “You look nice today” or encouragements like, “You can do this!” for the days you came in and your eye bags were just slightly bigger than usual.
Lately, Minghao had started writing invitations. Date invitations, along the lines of “Lunch sometime?” At first, he just thought you weren’t interested when you never spoke to him about them, but he doubted that. You seemed too sweet to just ignore him like that. Granted, he could’ve just asked you directly, but he didn’t have enough courage for that.
Even after these past few months, you two hadn’t had a conversation away from Think Coffee’s ordering counter before the Night of the Spring Shower, as you’d dubbed it in your memory.
There was just a week till semestral exams began, and you were seated in Think Coffee as usual, one hand scribbling annotations in the margins of your notes and the other idly picking at the cardboard sleeve of your coffee cup. Your eyelids felt heavier than ever and liquid lead had started to replace the blood in your veins. But you still had one more chapter to go for the night.
Minghao tapped you on the shoulder at 11.30pm sharp, gesturing he was about to lock up the café for the night. You nodded and began to gather your books, as he headed back to the counter to close the till.
When you were set to leave, you gave the now orange-haired man who was busy counting the money in the cash drawer a small smile before you pushed open the glass door and stepped outside.
How had you not realised it was raining? It wasn’t even your run-of-the-mill early spring drizzle either; it was a full downpour, heavy enough that the rain fell in cascading sheets rather than individual beads on strings. Even under the café’s awning, your shoes and jeans were getting wet. You had no umbrella, and you didn’t even have a coat to cover your face with, so you resorted to just waiting out the storm.
Ducking beneath the baby blue awning, as close to the café’s window as you could, you took a sip of your coffee. Spring nights could get quite drafty, especially if they were accompanied by showers like these. And this one wasn’t showing any signs of stopping.
According to your phone, only 6 minutes had passed, but it felt like eons and eons had skimmed by. Your skin was cool to the touch, even under your cardigan, but your fingers remained warm from being wrapped around your cup of coffee. You fixed your gaze on the pearls of rainwater falling to the ground just inches from your face, the repetitive clinking of them colliding with concrete strangely comforting to you for some reason.
And then a single word snapped you out of your trance.
You jolted and turned to your left to see the barista, café keys in hand, denim jacket hanging over that striped turtleneck of his and his olive green work apron nowhere to be seen. He was staring into the haze of raindrops just as you were seconds ago, but his focus settled on you soon after he saw you jump.
“Sorry,” he apologised, digging the heel of his left boot into the gravel beneath your feet. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
You shook your head a little too furiously. “No, you just… startled me, that’s all.” Now that he was standing right beside you, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans lingering on his clothes was strong enough to wake you from your daze of fatigue. “You wouldn’t happen to have an umbrella, would you?”
The tentative halts in your question made Minghao smile tiredly, and he shook his head. “ I’m guessing you don’t either.” He paused for a little too long before he spoke again, without ever directly looking at you, “You stay in the Eastern apartment complex, don’t you?”
Your confused nod was enough of an answer for him, and he turned and knelt to lift up the potted plant by the café’s front door, slipping the key under it. Turning back to you, he held a finger to his lips, before grabbing your left hand and sprinting right out into the spring shower, dragging you along with him.
In your other hand you gripped your coffee even tighter as you followed behind him, struggling to keep up with him and his ridiculously long legs. You could already feel the cold penetrating straight through you to your bones and the rainwater seeping into your shoes, but you surprisingly didn’t mind them that much.
Minghao’s free hand was held over his eyes, shielding them from the rain so he could maintain at least some visibility in the falling fog of rain, He ran the next two blocks back to the apartment complex with you in tow, not stopping or slowing down till you both reached the sheltered foyer.
And after catching your breath and exchanging awkward goodbyes, you both took separate lifts up to your apartments. Once you’d changed out of your drenched clothes, you sat at the kitchen counter and finished your coffee. It was cold from the rain, but still good. This was a habit of yours by now, picking at the edges of the now-soggy cardboard sleeve on the cup till it disintegrated into a pile of rubble.
Before that could happen, though, the sleeve fell off the cup mostly in one piece. You thought nothing of it until you noticed the writing scrawled on the inside of the sleeve in black marker.
“good luck for your exams :)”
At 12.10am in your kitchen with an empty coffee cup and a small pile of cardboard pickings beside you, you made two resolutions:
1. Buy an umbrella.
2. Find out the name of that barista.
areudirty
izzy806
kaledo-art
2087
prguitarman
vaporwave
jacobvanloon
