Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

She noticed the small things first. That was always how it went with Zara — not the grand gestures, which she distrusted on principle, but the quiet accumulation of evidence. Kai had been leaving evidence for months.

He remembered she took her tea without sugar. He saved the window seat for her in their shared office, always, without making it a thing. When she’d had her terrible week in March — the contract collapse, the family news, the rain that simply hadn’t stopped — he’d appeared at her flat with soup. Not flowers. Soup. Like he’d actually thought about what she needed.

She wasn’t supposed to be noticing any of this.

“You’re doing it again,” her friend Bex said.

“Doing what?”

“Watching him from across the room and then pretending you weren’t.”

“I was looking at the window.”

“He’s in front of the window, Zara.”

This was the problem with Bex. She was very accurate.

Kai was, by any objective measure, a wonderful person. He was patient and quietly funny and took his work seriously without being precious about it. He had a genuinely terrible fashion sense that she’d stopped noticing because she was too busy noticing everything else.

He was also, technically, unavailable — his last relationship had ended in January and she knew from mutual friends that he was taking it slowly. She respected that. She was a respectful person.

She was also a liar.

“Zara.” He appeared at her elbow, coffee in hand, the particular warmth of someone close. “Are you okay? You’ve been staring at your screen for ten minutes.”

“Thinking.”

“Good thoughts?”

She looked up. He was watching her with that attentive expression that she kept trying to read as professional and kept failing at.

“Complicated thoughts,” she said.

“Tell me over lunch?”

“You don’t want to hear my complicated thoughts, Kai.”

He sat on the edge of her desk — a small intimacy he’d claimed so gradually she hadn’t noticed until it was normal. “I want to hear all your thoughts. I’ve been trying to tell you that for months.”

The office hummed around them. Someone laughed on the other side of the room. A printer jammed.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” she asked.

“You weren’t ready.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

“How did you know?” she finally asked.

“Because I was waiting,” he said simply. “And I’m good at waiting.”

She thought about the soup. The window seat. Seven months of small, precise kindnesses.

“I think I’m ready,” she said.

He smiled — the real one, the one she’d never seen at full strength turned toward her before, and it was a lot. It was genuinely a lot.

“Lunch?” he said.

“Lunch,” she agreed.

They went to the Italian place on the corner and talked for two hours and missed the afternoon meeting and nobody mentioned it. She told him about her family. He told her about the relationship in January — not all of it, just enough. She told him about March.

“I know about March,” he said.

“The soup.”

“The soup.”

She looked at him across the table. “You’ve been very patient.”

“You’re worth the patience.”

She reached across and took his hand and felt the rightness of it settle through her like a key turning in a lock she’d forgotten she had.

“Don’t make it weird,” she said.

“I would never,” he said, and turned her hand over and held it like he intended to keep it.

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So you made it to the end… which probably means you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little romance with their coffee. If you’re in the mood for more stories about messy feelings, stubborn attraction, and women who absolutely refuse to settle for boring love, you can find all my books here.

Fair warning though. One story tends to lead to another. I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly.