Between Work and You

December 5th. The email arrived on a Wednesday morning, at 7:03 AM.

Jax was still stuck in that strange in-between state, half asleep, when the vibration of his phone on the nightstand pulled him back into reality. He reached for it automatically, glanced at the screen with one eye barely open, and read the subject line.

Subject: Proposal — Director of Applied Research / Response expected before January 11th

He stayed still for thirty seconds.

Then he got up, walked into the kitchen, heated water, prepared a coffee he never drank, and reread the email while leaning against the counter.The proposal came from the Institute  and not just any proposal.

Director of Applied Research.

The position he had technically been aiming for over the past three years. The one his current supervisor had been mentioning for the last eighteen months as a future possibility.

And suddenly, it wasn’t a possibility anymore.

It was a formal offer, with a deadline, a list of expected commitments, and one sentence that made the conditions perfectly clear:

“This position requires increased availability, particularly during the first six months of transition, with an estimated workload of sixty-five to seventy hours per week.”

(Sixty-five hours.)

He placed his phone face down on the counter.

(You wanted this. This is exactly what you wanted.)

Yes. He did want this. Jax picked up the phone and called his supervisor.

“Congratulations, Solace. You truly deserve this position.”

“How long do I have to confirm?”

“Officially before the 11th. But between us… if you wait more than two days, it might not look great. They have other candidates waiting.”

Jax stared at his now cold coffee.

“Understood.”

He confirmed the next morning.

What followed felt like someone opening one box, then another, then another endlessly. Files arrived in waves. Meetings stacked themselves one after another in his calendar like dominoes, every meeting somehow creating three more. His phone practically never turned off anymore, even after ten at night.

The first week, he didn’t come to the coffee shop’s . (It’s normal. I managing a transition.)

The second week neither. (It’s temporary.)

By the third week, he was sitting in a meeting room at 7:40 PM with five coworkers all staring at the same projection on a white wall, when he realized he hadn’t eaten since morning.

(It’s temporary…)

Meanwhile, the coffee shop’s kept existing.

Every morning at exactly seven, Yuna opened it. She handled the Tuesday orders, accepted new bean deliveries every Thursday, reorganized the menu depending on stock arrivals. The regular customers were still there; the woman with two dogs who always tied them outside and ordered a sugarless flat white, the three high school boys who systematically bought overly sweet caramel drinks and stayed until closing time, the old man who still read a physical newspaper every morning as if the internet had never been invented.

And then there was the corner stool.

Yuna didn’t officially reserve it anymore. She no longer placed the small Reserved sign on the counter in front of it. But generally, whenever she saw someone about to sit there, she somehow always found a way to gently guide them toward another seat.

“It’s practical for unpacking deliveries. That’s why,” She would say with a smile that was maybe a little too professional.

She didn’t think about it that much. It was Chloé who asked first.

They were closing together one evening near the end of December. Chloé was drying cups while Yuna swept the floor, her phone connected to the coffee shop’s speaker as a TWICE song played softly in the background.

“How long has it been since Jax came by?” Chloé asked, glancing at her.

Yuna kept sweeping.

“Don’t know.”

“Yuna.”

“About three weeks, maybe. He started his new position.” She pushed a pile of dust toward the baseboard. “It makes sense he’s busy.”

“Hm.” Chloé carefully placed a cup onto the shelf. “Did you text him?”

“Why would I text him?” Yuna stared out the coffee shop’s window at people walking by outside.

“To check on him? Congratulate him?”

“He’s fine. He got promoted.”

Chloé sighed and put down both the cup and the towel in her hands.

“Yuna. Did you send a message to your friend who disappeared for three weeks?”

Silence.

“No. Because if I text him… then that means I miss him.” She lowered her eyes slightly. “And I don’t want to bother him.”

Chloé looked at her with the specific kind of patience people have when they understand exactly what’s happening and decide not to turn it into a dramatic situation.

“Okay,” she simply said.

Then she went back to drying cups.

Meanwhile, Jax was in his apartment past eleven at night, surrounded by three monitors and a stack of printed documents whose folded corners formed an organization system only he understood.

His phone rested beside the keyboard. He hadn’t looked at it since morning.

After a very short pause spent staring at the ceiling, he returned to work. One hour passed. Then two. At some point, he opened a new tab automatically he wasn’t even sure how his fingers had done it.

The coffee shop’s Instagram account.

There had been two new posts since the last time he checked.

The first one:

A repost from a customer who had photographed the special collaboration menu, the drink names they had created together back in November.

“Soy Nebula.” / “Caramel Orbit.” / “Cold Eclipse.”

Jax had grimaced at those names at the time. Yuna had laughed and pointed out that he had actually suggested them first, so he had no right to complain.She wasn’t wrong.

The repost caption read:

“I miss this menu so much, it was so good! When is it coming back?”And the coffee shop’s had replied with a clock emoji.

The second post:

One of the framed collaboration photographs. A long-exposure shot of the Milky Way taken from a mountain ridge at high altitude, dark rocks in the foreground beneath that cold white light spreading across the sky. He had given the photo away without thinking much about it. Yuna had printed it in large format and framed it in a simple black frame.

He hadn’t expected it to look that good.

The caption read:

“We keep the stars warm for you.”

There, inside the picture, were his own stars hanging on the wall of a coffee shop’s he hadn’t visited in three weeks. As if the place continued to exist even when he wasn’t there.

As if something of him had stayed behind without asking permission.

(You’re looking at coffee shop’s pictures at midnight instead of finishing your report, Jax.)

Of course, he kept working. He finished the report. He even finished it two hours early. And he didn’t really question why he suddenly wanted to work faster.

The next day, he reorganized his schedule for the following two weeks. It wasn’t the first time he had done that, moving things around, searching for small openings in between obligations.

But usually he searched for time to catch up on delayed work.

This time, he was searching for something else, without fully admitting it to himself. Jax closed his agenda.

(This is just efficient time management. Structured breaks are important.)

He adjusted his glasses, still convinced he was right.

And then, on a Thursday morning near the end of December, he finally appeared at the coffee shop’s again.