Cinnamon Muffins Chapter 23: A Karen a Day Keeps the Self-Respect Away
Spoiler: if u have had a worse first day at work than this (I have) i wanna hear about it XD
I hope everyone is having a great day! I just used some airline miles to book a trip to see my mom for mothers day. She’s been having a rough go of it for the past 6 months/2 years and all she wanted for mothers day was to see me qwq. Friendly reminder that I can afford to take her out to a fancy restaurant if enough people press this fun button:
I love my mom so much. She has grown to be my absolute role model, and she deserves a break.
But anyway today’s chapter is fun :) enjoy it!
Towards the end of the shift, when the customers are less numerous and less demanding, Wes lets Taylor try to make a coffee. A simple one, just a mocha latte. Wes's hands guide Taylor's over the syrup pumps and the espresso machine and the fridge handle to get the almond milk and the steamer to heat it up. He leaves Taylor to cap the cup and put it on the counter while he takes an order at the register. Taylor thinks he did alright, but the second the order hits the pickup counter, he hears "This isn't my coffee" from a 56-year-old woman with a baseball cap reading "Road Trip Fam!" and a toddler on a leash attached to her belt loop.
"Mocha latte, right?" Taylor checks.
The woman rolls her eyes, sucks her teeth, and yanks on the toddler-leash when the kid starts poking at the coffee grinds on display below the register. "Iced," she hisses. "Iced mocha latte."
"Oh, uh, I can add some ice?"
"No, that won't work. It's not the same. You already steamed the milk."
"What—" Taylor feels his face heating up, embarrassment breeding shame and shame inciting rage. He tries to calm it down because this is Wes's shop and he can't be fighting random women because he fucked up their order (even if she definitely did not say "iced" anywhere in her order). He chokes out, "What would you like me to do about it, ma'am?"
"I want a new coffee, obviously!" she snaps, "And I'd say I want a refund, but I don't think your ancient cash registers even know how to tender returns on a debit card. Lord above, this is why all these mom and pop stores are closing down!” She yanks her leash-child closer when the kid starts tinkering with the display near the window. “I don't know why I let my husband talk me into coming here. Willy!"
A man with a matching baseball cap sidles up next to his wife. "This punk giving you trouble?" he asks, leveling Taylor with a suspicious glare.
But by now, Wes has finished the order at the register and he materializes next to Taylor. Taylor hadn't heard him coming and that's his first indication that the blood rushing in his ears is loud. "Everything alright, ma'am?" he asks politely. Below the counter, his hand taps against Taylor's.
The man mutters, "Great, another punk."
"Yes, I'd like to speak to the manager," the woman says, yanking her leash-toddler back from the display again. "Or at least someone over the age of thirty?"
"I'm the manager of this establishment," Wes answers saccharinely, "I can assist you with whatever trouble you're having."
"Your employee messed up my order. I want a new one."
"We can do that for you, ma'am. What was your order?"
The woman rolls her eyes again, exasperated at having to repeat herself a second time. "Iced. Mocha. Latte."
"Absolutely, I'll have that right out for you, ma'am."
"Thank you," she snaps, shooting Taylor a livid look, before dragging her toddler and husband to a cafe table to wait.
"Can you man the counter while I deal with this?" Wes asks. His shoulders are a little stooped and his eyes look tired. Taylor grumbles an affirmative and steps to the register, taking the next order from a girl who looks too young to even be drinking coffee.
A few minutes later, when Wes is done making the drink, Taylor watches listlessly as he walks it out to the woman and accepts her diatribe with more composure than Taylor could have ever managed. When he returns and there's no orders for a minute, he gives Taylor a sympathetic half-smile and a shrug. "K-Karens," he says, "we get at least one every day."
Towards five pm, the place empties out. Nobody wants coffee for dinner, apparently. They're stacking chairs, sweeping the floor, turning off and cleaning the machines, and that's when they see them.
Alex Morenson, with road rash and bruising obscuring half his face. Mathew Megans with a nasty bruise just below his adam's apple. Jasper Liu with a heavy limp. They're staring in the front windows. Wes is still in the stockroom filling up some new bags off coffee grounds to replace the ones they sold today in the display below the register so that he can show Taylor how to clean it and turn it off in a minute. Alex, Jasper, and Nathan see Taylor, and their resolve fractures, but it doesn't crumble. After an intimidated moment, they resume their boldfaced, mocking stare. Alex smirks.
Taylor drops the chair in his hands onto the table and goes for the front door of the shop. The bell twinkles as he slams it open and the sound punctuates Mathew's feet hitting the pavement as he makes a break for it. Jasper seems torn between following Nathan and standing his ground. When Alex takes a step toward Taylor, Jasper decides to stay and pivots back toward them.
"Where's your boyfriend?" Alex sneers, as if that was a good way to get Taylor's goat or something. As if Taylor is upset at the implication of dating Wes and not, ya know, the fact that these three assholes tried to kill Wes and Collin yesterday.
"Who cares," Taylor answers. "Get the fuck out of here." He wants them to leave. Part of him wants them to leave. Part of him wants them to walk away, kicking their heels up, no fight in their shoulders the way it is now. The other part of him is itching for a fight, begging someone to set his bones right again, dying to feel his own blood trickle from his nose and his knuckles swell with exertion. He's letting Alex make the choice for him. Down the street, on the other side of the ABC Supply Warehouse, Mathew's face peeks out, assessing the situation.
"We're not doing anything wrong," Jasper says. His eyes dart between Taylor and the shop. Taylor doesn't take the bait to look, because when he's distracted is when Alex will strike.
"Get out of here," Taylor repeats.
"Or what?" Alex is begging for it; feet set wide, shoulders square, hands flexing in and out of fists. He's smiling around the road rash.
The door bell twinkles again. Alex visibly falters, toes pointing sideways to flee instead of forward to fight. Of course, it's Wes's voice that says, "Get off my family's property or I will act in self-defense."
"What're you gonna do?" Alex sneers, as if Wes doesn't have several inches and more than twenty pounds on him. As if he thinks being gay somehow makes Wes less dangerous.
Taylor hasn't turned to see Wes's expression, but it sounds pretty close to barred teeth and murder when he says, "I'm gonna beat the shit out of you if you don't get out of here."
Something in that makes Alex and Mathew wiggle uncomfortably in their shoes, and they scoff and wander off, meeting up with Nathan at the other side of the warehouse and grumbling on home.
When they're far gone and not coming back, Taylor finally turns to see what in Wes made them change their mind today, he gets his answer in the hardened shine of Wes's obsidian-set eyes and the knife that they keep underneath the display of baked goods to cut slices out of the bread loaves. Taylor can also see the tremor working its way through Wes's shoulders, his wrists, his spine. He nudges Wes back inside the shop and locks the door behind him.
What Taylor wants to say is that what Wes just did was stupid, and he could have taken both those guys, and Wes is still hurt, and knives usually escalate fights rather than calm them down, but he turns around and sees Wes, one fist gripping that bread knife and his whole body shaking. Wes doesn't need to be reminded about how poorly that could have gone. He knows. "Hey, Wes, it's alright," Taylor tries, "it's fine. We're both safe. They left—" Wes isn't listening, fingernails starting to scrape through skin to draw blood. "Wes, your hand—” Wes’s thumb has carelessly pressed into the blade of the bread knife, and the cut is dripping onto the floor.
"Who gives a fuck!" Wes snaps. His head spins to glare at Taylor and there's the bee-sting of an emotion beyond anger, beyond fear, beyond exasperation in Wes's eyes. "Have you even once considered that the feeling you have when you see me h-h-hurt is the exact same feeling I have when you're h-h-h-hurt? Why is it so h-hard for you to understand that I care about you!?"
Taylor stares. His brain feels fuzzy and full of buzzing, angry bees. He can barely understand the words Wes is saying, with the knife waving around in his other hand and blood dripping to the floor. Slowly, feeling nauseous panic creep up his throat, Taylor reaches for the knife. Wes lets it go easily once Taylor has a grip on the handle, and Taylor wants to sob with a kind of relief he doesn't understand while he sets it in between the upturned chairs balanced on the table behind him.
Free of the burden of the knife, Wes's hands go twitchy and then his whole body shudders and then his hands grab at his hair and he screams, "Do you not understand that it hurts me to see you hurting!? My worst nightmare is you being in pain, Taylor! And here you are! Picking fights with the express purpose of getting hurt!"
"I did it to get them to back off—"
"Bullshit!" Wes shouts. The fuzzy feeling in Taylor's head magnifies until his whole body feels ensconced in an angry beehive. Wes is still shouting, but Taylor can't understand the words anymore. Just angry bees and the pervasive fear of the guys who tried to hurt him and the woman who shouted at him earlier and the bruises under Wes's work shirt and the knife on the table and how loud everything is. Angry bees and fear.
It's a surprise when Wes's hand touches Taylor's cheek, because Taylor hadn't seen Wes move towards him. Panic laces his veins, constricting them until Taylor is sure there's not a drop of blood in his body. Wes's other hand moves to settle between Taylor's shoulder blades and by then they've moved to the storeroom, and Taylor is sitting on the same bags of coffee beans that Wes sat on yesterday.
"Taylor, you're panicking," Wes says. But Taylor isn't. His chest is rising and falling in even breaths, his expression is as impassive as ever, there's barely any tears dripping from his chin. Taylor isn't panicking. This isn't what panic looks like.
But Wes still wraps Taylor up in his arms, holding him so tight he can feel the nerves he'd thought bloodless and inactive light up in recognition of the warm, soft pressure of Wes's body around his. Still wipes the tears from Taylor's face before tucking his head into Wes's shoulder. Still whispers, so much more audible than his shouting, that Taylor is okay, and that Wes is going to take care of him, and that they're both safe.
Time passes, but there's no way to tell how long. The first thing Taylor can feel is Wes buzzing with tremors around him, and he tries to push away— Wes is probably nervous, Taylor needs to help him, he needs to reassure him, Wes is shaking, Taylor needs to do something about it— but Wes's arms hold him tighter. "It's alright," Wes says, "take a minute. We're okay. You take a minute." Taylor doesn't feel himself cry harder, but he feels the shoulder of Wes's t-shirt when it's damp against his cheek. He can hear Wes shushing him, stammering, reassuring him. Only when his vision begins to zoom into focus- when he can read the clock on the wall as a quarter to seven, when he can see the shipping labels still stapled to the pallet leaning against the wall across the room, when the grinder machine becomes a squat cylinder instead of a shapeless color-smudge, does Taylor realize he hadn't been able to see any of those things before.
"Wes?" he whispers. He has to crane his head and look up to see Wes's face. Taylor is sitting in Wes's lap, with Wes's arms wrapped around him, holding fistfuls of Wes's shirt. He releases the shirt and stretches his fingers; they're sore from gripping so tight for so long.
"I'm sorry, Taylor," Wes whispers.
"For what? You didn't do anything."
"I yelled, and I had that knife in my hand. I shouldn't've—" Wes stops in time to spasm out a nervous tic in his neck. He needs to take his meds, Taylor realizes. He didn’t have a chance to take them this morning. "I'm sorry, Taylor."
"I'm fine," Taylor says, but even his pride can't convince them both that Taylor isn't sitting, curled in on himself like a child, in Wes's lap with tears still staining Wes's shirt.
"You had a panic attack," Wes says, "That's not fine." Taylor can hear the edges of stammers at the onset of every syllable, can hear how carefully Wes is reining them in.
"That wasn't a panic attack." Taylor tries to explain that panic attacks look like what happens to Wes, with the screaming and the hyperventilating and the crying, not what happened to Taylor. "That was... I dunno. It just happens sometimes when I get freaked out. But it's not a panic attack."
Wes searches Taylor's eyes for a moment. It feels like eternity to Taylor, who can feel that gaze looking right through his eye sockets and into his skull, scrying for truth that Taylor is desperately trying to obscure. "Alright," Wes says, "it's okay. We can bicker about it when you're feeling better."
"I feel fine."
Wes says, "You don't have to be fine, Taylor."
"But I am," Taylor insists, even though he can feel tears choking out his voice.
"Okay," Wes whispers. His arms readjust around Taylor, and his fingers find the back of his neck and rub circles around the vertebrae there.
Taylor is asleep in minutes.
>:D take THAT ao3 authors who write everyone’s panic attacks as looking exactly the same (/lh).
anyway next chapter is the one you’ve all been waiting for hehehehehe see u there.
if ur reading this comment somn about papayas im running an experiment
as always, scream at me in the comments!! nothing brings me more joy!!!
I love this story!
Ps. Papayas.