Strong Coffee

[mrshhh]

STRONG COFFEE
part 1
by mrshhh   

   I used to hear that this town only had two seasons: winter and construction.  If my morning commute was any indication, we were definitely in the dog days of constriction.  I’d been out of school only six months, at my sparkling-new job less than three, and had just settled into an efficient transportation route when the hard-hats started tearing up the street.  Learning my new graphic designer role even all these weeks later was pretty taxing, and I really counted on my morning coffee shop to a degree I was embarrassed to admit.  The problem was, any alternate route that avoided the construction lacked for decent coffee options.  I eventually found a Starbucks in Google Maps that took me a solid 10 minutes outside of my optimal route.  The logical part of my brain told me to suck it up and buy a Keurig machine, but the fancy-lad in me knew that good coffee was all that separated us from the animals.  I settled on a plan to venture to the new Starbucks on a trial basis and go from there.
   Monday morning hit and it was one of those dark, dreary ones.  I damn near chose to skip the coffee stop out of sheer laziness but forced myself to follow my nav route.
   When I arrived, the place was nothing special - one of those older locations that was like a time machine set to the 90s.  I placed my Grande Americano with the cashier and wandered to the hand-off area.  I stuck my nose into my phone while I waited for my order but slowly noticed an unusual voice calling out the drinks.  It was deep, low and powerful, noticeably so - but it wasn’t the voice of a guy.  There was a subtle and dare I say cutely-feminine quality that way layered on top, almost like it was being put on or exaggerated. 
   Then my drink was called.  I glanced up and was shocked to realize that my normally-reliable muscle radar had failed me completely.  The whole time I’d been standing there, there had been a big, beefy behemoth Barista preparing the beverages.  Everything about this person screamed “bodybuilder”, from their darkly-tanned bronze face to their thick-necked, wide-shouldered top-heavy shape. 
   “Darren?”  They prodded politely. 
   I felt like I was staring at them for an eternity.  There was so much visual information to parse, I legitimately didn’t know what I was looking at.  The barista was dressed in a fairly concealing long-sleeved blue collared shirt, but there was no disguising their full-blown muscleman silhouette.  This was clearly one mega-jacked dude, but they couldn’t have been taller than 5’2.  Even crazier, my muscle radar - highly-tuned for female bodybuilders - was now going crazy.  Something was up, something epic. 
   “Darren…?” They asked again, scanning the faces of other waiting customers for an acknowledgement.   
   I shifted my gaze to the barista’s comparatively small head lodged between wide, hulking traps.  They had a stylishly-messy crop of short, parted blonde hair.  Their face had no make-up, but despite some really harsh definition and vascularity - the kind a pro gets towards a competition - there was a pretty face smiling back.  Then their wide, blue eyes locked onto mine and I realized I was looking at a girl. 
   “Now you look like the type who’s middle name is Americano,” the barista joked.  I probably looked like I was in a trance as they handed me my drink.  “Hope to see you again.  Have a great morning!”  The barista concluded with the same combination of youthful femininity and deep, raspy, floor-rattling bass. 
   I wandered out of the cafe in a completely shell-shocked state.  By the time I got to work, I realized I hadn’t even touched my coffee.  Had I just seen what I thought I saw?  Was the barista who made my drink a cute, mega-swole hardbody? 
   Only one thing was certain: I had a new favourite Starbucks. 

[fp909]

Yes! A new story you are back! Welcome back, and looking forward to the rest

[Jeremy Lightning]

Good to see you writing again, if only this small, but very fun scene. As always, your stories will get a k+! from me!

[MegaMassiveMuscle]

Ive literally just been searching for stories from you and came across this! Love you!

[seldom]

Yay! I love it! I'm losing my mind that you wrote a thing! She is outrageously sexy, but my favorite (no "u"!) line is: "good coffee was all that separated us from the animals."

So true. *sips my morning blend*

[mrshhh]

Thanks everyone!  I know it's a slow start, and short, but I'm hoping that doing the story in small bite-sized chunks will make it easier to produce.  Probably not going to be the most epic story in the world, but I've got some "ideas"... 

[phil123]

Like to read your ideas. Please keep writing

[sevenpeight]

i feel like i need a strong coffee...

[taoschild]

Isn't coffee and muscular women 2/3rds of heaven. Throw in chocolate and this "little story" will be heaven. Great start MrShhh. Welcome back we've missed you.

[Lupus753]

Excited to see where this goes.

[mrshhh]

STRONG COFFEE
Part 2
By mrshhh

   Tuesday morning came and I’d never flown out of bed faster.  I was like Gary Oldman levitating from his coffin in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  I probably spent ten minutes brushing the same three teeth, lost in a daze trying to crystallize the brief mental images I’d captured of the musclebound barista the day before.  In my mind’s eye she was almost superhumanly-jacked - her neck, shoulders and chest containing the girthy mass of a full-blown male bodybuilder.  I chalked this up my overactive imagination, as my memory more closely resembled the kind of massive, rippling, obscenely-muscular female super heroines I used to draw in high school than a real-life girl.  I knew I needed to talk myself down and set a realistic expectation, as the last thing I wanted was to end up disappointed when I saw her again.
   On the drive over, I thought about the precious few real-life interactions I’d had with muscular women.  They’d uniformly-amounted to briefly noticing a set of toned arms or a girl’s wide shoulders as I passed them in a public place.  During the summers I worked at a local amusement park, I’d interacted with a few trophy moms who clearly worked-out to get carved deltoids and lean arms with some definition - and if I was lucky, a visible vein on their biceps - but that was the extent of my history.  In my town, women with muscles were beyond-rare and female bodybuilders might as well’ve been Unicorns.   
   When I arrived at the cafe, I paused at the entrance.  I tried to focus and be “in the moment”.  I’d never felt so excited in my life.  Entering, I scanned the store searching for the blonde-haired girl-stud.  To my disappointment, she wasn’t among the 4 or 5 disappointingly normal-looking baristas working.  I went through the motions of ordering and waiting for my coffee, hoping that she would emerge from the back room or something, but I was delivered my drink within a brief few moments by some guy who looked like Ron Weasley.   
   The rest of the day felt long.  I had trouble concentrating on my work and kept kicking myself for not asking the other staff where the blonde barista was.  Likely it was her day off I told myself, but a small panicking voice told me she’d been fired, or transferred, or that I was John Nash from A Beautiful Mind and she’d never existed in the first place. 
   Wednesday and Thursday went the same way.  I waltzed into the Starbucks full of hope and enthusiasm, and left with just a disappointingly-excellent cup of coffee.  Each time I left I felt like throwing it back at the store in disgust, but it was far too delicious and I drank them both in a stew of self-pity.
   On Friday I ended up running late and arrived at the cafe a good 20 minutes later than normal.  Apparently this made a world of difference because when I walked in, there was a line-up of customers being served by a small army of frantic baristas.  I tried to pick out the muscular shape of the blonde from the blur of whizzing green aprons.  And then I saw it: a glimpse of a wide, meaty back straining a collared shirt from behind an espresso machine.
   I excitedly placed my order and dashed over to the hand-off area.  I must’ve been staring like a madman because the blonde caught my gaze immediately.  I fumbled around and pulled out my phone and the blonde went back to her machine.  The upside of it being so busy was that the baristas had a backlog of drinks to work through.  That gave me ample time to lurk like a creeper and steal glances at the blonde.  I felt more than a little sleazy, but surely it was better to admire her immense physicality with some degree of subtly than stare like a sociopath.     
   What was abundantly-clear was that any disappointment I’d risked was for naught.  If anything, my memory of Monday morning had not adequately captured the barista’s utterly, impossibly immense presence.  She was similarly-dressed in a roomy, conservative long-sleeved shirt, but it could do nothing to hide the tremendous macho-man shape she possessed.  Even her wide collar was stuffed to bursting with a neck that looked more like a bodybuilder’s thigh.  She only got wider from there, and the shoulders of her top seemed to contain two basketballs stuffed in them.  Her chest was powerful, dense and projected outward like a shelf of pure machismo.  In fact, her whole upper body was so beefy that it made her move quite awkwardly as she prepared and passed-off orders.  It was this muscleman swagger that more than anything excited me.  This was not a fitness girl or a lightweight bodybuilder.  This was a hunk.  A hulk.  A thick, pumped-up beefcake. 
   “Earth to mister Americano man,” the barista’s deep yet lightly girly voice called. 
   I snapped from my reverie to find her staring at me now.  Despite the hustle and bustle, she held my drink in her hand and motioned to it with her eyes.  “Hot and delicious, just how you like it,”  she smiled.  But instead of returning to her work, she waited.  I nervously put my phone away and moved to the counter.  I watched as she rested the drink in front of her with a tanned, rough and unmanicured hand.  This was not the dainty hand of a twenty-something college girl.  It was the tough, calloused, powerful hand of a weightlifter.  Even more, as she held it nearby, I saw that it was muscular.  There was distinct and shocking masses of muscle straining the cuff of her sleeve and covering the back of her hand.  Even her fingers looked muscular, and to my absolute shock, I could see thick veins snaking across the thick beefy masses and between her knuckles. 
   I took my drink with a shaky hand and looked up at her.  She was still looking at me with the same warm smile.  “See you tomorrow Darren?”  She asked.  I don’t know if she was being polite or what, but I felt like she was peering straight through me to my soul.  I wasn’t the kind of guy who got nervous around girls, but in that moment I could hardly find the strength to form words. 
   “Well I’ll be here.  Take care,”  She ended mercifully and returned to her station.  I was quickly moved aside by the other customers, and I slowly walked back to the exit with my drink.  I looked back one more time to the blonde, but she was buried in her work once again.  I left a bit unfulfilled, but also buzzing with a genuine warmth and excitement.  And hey, at least I knew what I’d being doing on Saturday morning, I thought. 

[muscleboytom]

Incredible writing! Please continue...

Tommy

[southbendcarp]

 

Rafiki: "The master...has returned."

[QBikk]

It's very good, thanks for sharing!

[shamus0013]

Very, VERY cool! Can't wait to read more.