“Excuse me, Miss. I’m not going to ask if you’re okay. You’re crying. I’m just going to ask if it’s okay for me to sit here.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t raise her face from her hands.
She was about nineteen or twenty. Pale skin and long black hair, maybe a bit overweight.
“Okay,” I said cheerily after a couple of seconds. “It’s none of my business, but I’m sitting down now.”
I sat across from her at the table in a corner of the café near the windows. It was raining outside and dark, although it was mid-afternoon.
“Tell me ‘no’, or tell me ‘go’, if you want, and I’m gone. Okay?”
She still said nothing, but there was a pause in her soft sobbing, and her fingers opened a little so she could peer at me. I guessed she thought that the unprepossessing elderly Black man opposite her was at least harmless, because she didn’t say ‘no’ or ‘go’. She didn’t talk either. She cradled her half-empty (or half-full) cup of coffee and looked out at the rain, which looked as though it wasn’t going to stop any time soon.
I looked out and sipped my matcha latte.
“When the rain stops, I’m going to leave. You don’t have to say anything.”
A waiter came across with the cheese and tomato croissant I had ordered. I looked at the young woman’s cup.
“Could you bring another cup of coffee for my friend — with milk?”
“Sugar?” I asked, looking at the girl.
For the first time, she looked at me and said, “Don’t call me Sugar.”
We both laughed. It was like a break in the clouds.
“Oat milk, please,” she said to the waiter.
He smiled at us and nodded.
The girl’s eyes were still glistening and pink from the tears, but she had relaxed.
“It’s always a risk talking to strangers. You might think I’m a perv or a missionary, but I’m neither. I’m just another human being. If you want to talk, you can. I’ll listen. If you don’t, then we can just sit here like old friends. Well, I’m old anyway. We can look at the rain.”
“Let’s do that,” she said.
After a while, she looks at me.
“We’re not on our phones,” she says.
I smile as she turns back to watch the rain and the people walking past with umbrellas up or sheltering in the shop doorway across the street.
Minutes later, she is sipping her coffee. Her breathing is not as fast as it had been. It is deeper.
Half an hour later, the rain has eased.
The girl says, “I have to go.”
I look at her and smile. “It was good to meet you,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
I ask the question with a tilt of my head.
“For not being a perv or a protector. For not being on your phone. For being present.”
She hesitates for a moment and then bends to kiss my cheek.
Then she is gone.
I wait for a while, resisting the temptation to take out my phone. I sit looking out of the window. The rain has stopped now. It is brighter.