Page 7 of Signed, I'm Yours!
I’m watching the door and everyone who enters like a hawk, drumming my long manicured nails on the coffee table.
There’s a girl with pink hair—jealous!—in denim overalls who stares at her phone the whole time before she picks up a frappuccino and goes back out into the jungle of the New York streets.
A guy in a business suit would fit the criteria if he didn’t sit in one of the six-people sitting areas, occupying it all by himself and talking loudly on the phone about his wife and lover.
Or the older white gentleman in his late forties who looks like he’s escaped from Woodstock and stolen Bob Marley’s dreads in the process.
So many people. So many potential suspects, yet it’s none of them. No. They’re normal people, living their normal lives, making their normal way through their normal world.
I check my watch. This person’s late. Figures. Maybe this is a trap. Maybe they’re watching me, assessing me.
Maybe they’re about to throw a hood over my head, shove me into a black van, and take me out of this world like they did with my family.
“Another coffee?” the girl who works here asks me as she picks up my empty glass, and I nod.
Maybe it’s her. Maybe this whole Espresso Blues establishment is under their control and everyone is playing their role until it’s time to “take me out.”
“Here you go,” she says after a couple of minutes, setting a new iced espresso on my table.
The scent of the fresh ground coffee infiltrates my nostrils, and I shrug as I take my first sip.
Oh well. If I’m already trapped, I might as well enjoy it.
The girl points her card machine at me, and I swipe my card.
“Oh no. It looks like the card was declined. Do you want to try?—”
I set the glass back down and take the card machine from her.
“Probably just a glitch,” I say and sign the blank screen again before I show it to her.
She takes it, looks at the blank screen, and thanks me before walking away.
Works every time.
When it comes to small purchases, I could literally sign for it in the air and it would be accepted.
I sit there sipping my coffee, wondering how long I should give these people before they reveal themselves, when someone, aguy with short black hair, a five o’clock shadow, and acne across his cheeks in a T-shirt and distressed jeans, approaches me, and I raise an eyebrow.
“What?” I ask him.
Only two types of people fit this guy’s simple profile. A guy who needs to charge his laptop and you’re sitting in the only available outlet. Or the overconfident guy who wants to ask for your number in between shitting himself.
“Are you Jay, by any chance?”
I’m already opening my mouth to tell him to fuck off, but I somehow manage to snap it shut and smile.
“You must be with SPAM,” I say.
He extends his hand and pulls up the chair across from me.
“John McTarget, a pleasure to meet you. I believe you contacted us.”
I narrow my eyes and try to reassess him with this newfound information. He certainly doesn’t look like a secret agent type of guy. He doesn’t have the muscle or the jaw for it, which only makes me wonder what kind of mess I have landed my ass in by putting myself on their radar.
Because, let me tell you, when I found out from one of the private detectives I’ve hired to help me find my family that there’s a mysterious government body that monitors and manages people with superpowers, the first thing that came to mind wasMen-in-Black.
I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought.
