Two days later ...

Olivia Blink was not a morning person.

She rubbed her eyes, and groggily looked around her bedroom. "I didn't even do anything interesting yesterday. Why do I feel hung over?" She slowly stood up, stepped into her slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom for her predictable and completely uninteresting morning routine. Pee, wash her hands and face, maybe a brief skin lotion treatment with her favorite lavender and vanilla lotion, and wander back to the kitchen to make coffee.

"So this is twenty-six. Second day, and I'm already convinced it's not going to be as good as twenty-five." She loaded her simple coffee machine with enough grounds to make one travel thermos's worth of coffee, filled the water tank, and clicked the start button. "And twenty-five wasn't anything particularly thrilling. So."

She poured a cup of cat food into a small bowl on the floor, and then sat down at the small table that could have been a dining nook, but instead was loaded with old mail, a shirt from who knows how long ago, a stray grocery bag, and for reasons Olivia couldn't remember (and didn't feel any urge to remember), a yo-yo.

"I will say, however," she announced to no one, "that taking a day completely for myself -- that was a fine birthday gift."

She sighed, and suddenly her mind was full of thoughts of her boyfriend Brian. Brian did not, as it turned out, come over to Olivia's house. He called her mid-afternoon to say that work was piling up and he had a big deadline, and even though it was her birthday, he hoped she'd understand and see him the next day. Or the day after that.

"Would it have been nice to see Brian yesterday? Of course it would have been. Would it have been nice to have sex on my birthday? Of course it would have been. Am I a completely devastated shell of a human because those things didn't happen?" She didn't answer the last question. Her cat finally caught the scent of his new food and appeared around the corner through a doorway. "Hello, cat."

Olivia Blink filled her travel thermos with coffee, poured in a spot of milk and one spoonful of Splenda. She secured the lid, left her house, got into her rickety old Honda Civic, and headed off to work.

It was Tuesday, and she always worked the second shift on Tuesdays. The café opened at 6am, which never going to be a good time for Olivia. However, the 10am shift was more her style, and she had settled into that routine a while back. "I know it's sort of like cheating, but when I work the 10-to-6 shift, I don't have to open and I don't have to close, and that just feels almost unfair. To everyone else." She wondered who was going to be in. Probably Traci, her boss. Maybe Jamie or Stef, both of whom were fun to hang out with. Maybe Evan. Maybe Tyler.

"Tyler," she mumbled.

She hadn't thought about him again since her late night fantasy two nights prior. Maybe it was because she hadn't seen Brian. Maybe it was because the last time she thought about sex, she thought about Tyler. But for some reason, she felt a slightly nervous flutter in her heart as she spoke his name and pictured his face.

"Why am I thinking about Tyler?" she asked aloud as she pulled her car into the staff portion of the parking lot behind The Sleepy Owl. She was a few minutes early, so she sat in her car for a bit, drinking coffee, and scrolling on her phone. Even as she scrolled, she paid almost no attention to the screen -- her mind was on Tyler. She pictured that dimple again. "Okay, whatever, Liv. Tyler's adorable, but you barely know him, and more to the point, he's not actually your boyfriend. So maybe text your real boyfriend, and get your mind out of the gutter, right?" She tapped on her phone, and wrote a quite message to Brian.

hope to see you later, maybe dinner tonight? i get done at 6

"He owes me," she said. "And he knows it." She giggled to herself thinking of how she might tease Brian later about missing her birthday. She got out of the car and made her way to the entrance of The Sleepy Owl.