His Naughty Lessons
Chapter 96: Caffeine Fix

Chapter 96: Caffeine Fix

** Harper **

Aftercare was wonderful, Harper concluded after her first not-at-all-serious experience of it. It wasn’t as much of a tender loving session for Eli as it was for herself, though, since the way he snuggled up to her so naturally the entire time was nothing but perfect for soothing the uncertainty lingering within her. So what if they weren’t a real couple yet? She was making a hell lot of progress, and all she needed was time.

That thought made her cheery again, even as she left Eli’s apartment with reluctance at the end of the night, and kept her cheery every time she peeked into that shopping bag she brought home with her, grinning at the blindfold and all the memories that went with it.

So it was probably little surprise that, by the time Monday rolled around and she arrived at her office to find a small shopping bag sitting on her desk, the thought of those sex shop accessories was the first one to cross her mind.

... Um, wait, but this was the office ...

"Ah, Wallace got you some coffee from that new shop down the street." Lindsey waved a good-morning from her computer when she saw Harper’s dazed stare. "He said it’s for our meeting at nine, though apparently I didn’t get the same special treatment. Did he forget that I’m officially a part of the secret cult now too?"

Oh. Just coffee. Harper let out a breath that she had no idea why she was holding. "Right, coffee is good for morning meetings ..." she mumbled absentmindedly and picked up the drink, internally ridiculing herself for thinking that the bag could contain something unspeakable. Then she registered belatedly the envious tone in Lindsey’s words. "Oh, I suppose you can take it instead if you want? I had a K-cup already before I left my apartment, and I won’t tell Wallace a thing."

Lindsey let out a puff of snort, turning back in her chair with a wiggle of eyebrows. "Nah, I’m not sure if I should. There might be some secret ingredients in there for you that I don’t want to know about ... Anyway, I gotta go get this doc scanned. See you at the meeting?" Without further elaboration, she was gone.

Hmm? Harper looked at the coffee in her hand, not sure what her coworker was getting at. Did she somehow come across as the kind of person to need double shot strength for the morning? Or too much sugar for a sweet tooth? Mystified, she shook her head and made her way to the meeting room.

The meeting wasn’t going to start for another fifteen minutes, but Harper liked being there early to settle down and prepare, maybe read through the agenda and powerpoints ahead of time. She pushed the meeting room door open, expecting to be the first arriver to find a good seat—

"Morning!" Wallace’s greeting boomed brightly from the near end of the conference table.

"Oh hey, aren’t you early." Surprised but not unpleasantly so, Harper joined him at the table and set down her laptop in the next seat. After two lunches and a few too many meetings together, she and Wallace had gotten quite familiar by now, which also explained the coffee. "Thank you for the caffeine fix, by the way. Though I hope it wasn’t a hidden message to imply that this meeting is going to be super long and boring."

Wallace laughed. "No, I just happened to remember you talking about morning coffees while I was there, so I ordered one extra. This is the place I told you about that has the amazing vacuum press with Ethiopian beans. How do you like it?"

It took Harper a moment to recall what he was referring to. During their second lunch last week, Wallace had given her a half-hour crash course on various roasts after she mentioned that her breakfast consisted mainly of coffee. He had indeed talked about a boutique coffee shop specializing in all sorts of fancy single-origins and trendy brewing methods ... But the details were a bit hazy by now, because most of the time when she heard those connoisseur terms that only a coffee expert would use, her mind would drift distractedly to the way Eli introduced her to his "pretentiousness", in very much the same style of word choices.

Those same word choices didn’t come out feeling the same to her, though. With Eli, she loved hearing everything he had to share about what she didn’t know, and it never bothered her how wide-eyed she looked while learning any of it. With Wallace, on the other hand ... She felt a bit of an embarrassing necessity to not mention the fact that her morning coffees were mere K-cups.

Staring at the steaming, fancy coffee in her hand, she snapped back to reality. "Ah, it is" — she took a sip of the hot liquid — "really good. Obviously I’m not an expert, but I like the lighter taste."

The anticipating smile on Wallace’s face spread wide. "Me too, that’s why this one is my favorite. You should really check out this shop then — maybe we can make a morning coffee run together next time? They have different roasters on feature seasonally, and trust me, you build a refined palette pretty fast that way."

... This guy really didn’t get the hint that she wasn’t the type of trendy person to care about a "refined palette" in pretentious coffee, did he? Harper opened her mouth, and was debating how much truth of her classlessness she should admit when her phone dinged in her pocket.

Good interruption of conversation. She snapped her mouth closed, reaching for her phone instead, although she knew exactly what the notification was — one that came punctually at six minutes to nine every day, the odd time she had set for her web novel Chapters to auto post so that it’d be done before her official work hour started.

Interestingly, however, it seemed to be not the only distraction to their conversation, because before she could get her phone out of her pocket, Wallace’s phone dinged as well, mere seconds after her own.

"Ah, that’s the meeting reminder." Wallace didn’t bother to check his notification. Instead, he nodded at the coffee in her hand with a grin. "Ready for the real deal now with all that energy?"

Harper smiled back just as the meeting room door opened, their fellow coworkers starting to pour in with a chorus of good-mornings. Though silently she wondered — a meeting reminder precisely six minutes before the start time? Did Wallace somehow share the same weird habit of setting alarms at such peculiar times?

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.