"Oh, you're on shift again?" A squeak-like voice emerged from behind the ‘staff only’ door a few feet away from where Becca stood, hands wrapped around a porcelain mug and a jug of warmed milk. Becca nodded and hummed absentmindedly in response, eyes glued to the drink in her hands, too focused on the small flower design she had now created in the froth. Only when it was done did she look up to be greeted with a smile from a younger girl – Chloe, who stood at the end of the counter struggling to tie the straps of her apron behind her back. “I thought you had today off?” Becca sighed and shook her head in response, wiping her hands on her own apron and moving to help Chloe tie hers.

“David asked me to come in, some bullshit excuse about lunchtime rush,” Becca murmured and rolled her eyes at the irony of the coffee shop’s current lack of customers, but still overly aware of the few around them and trying to keep her voice low.

“Dick.” They shared a laugh at her short reply, before the pair of them moved apart behind the counter. Becca back to finishing the drink she was making and Chloe reading the shift-notes left behind the till.

 Chloe is a few years younger than Becca, and they are opposites in every way – Chloe’s hair was a bright and buttery blonde, which sat in a blunt and layer-less cut and ended right at her shoulders. Her eyes were bright and piercing, lined with full lashes and her face decorated with light freckles across her cheeks and over the bridge of her perfectly pointed nose. She had light features, which accented her pale skin with a youthful beauty. Becca on the other hand, had dark hair, a deep chestnut colour which fell to the middle of her back in shaggy and uneven waves. Her eyes were a hazy green, and the details of her face were mismatched and uneven. She had wide eyes and an upturned nose which adorned a permanent dent from her years of wearing glasses through her teens.

"Vanilla latte for Mark," Becca called after a few minutes, setting the cup down on the counter along with a small sugar spoon. Mark, an older man with greying hair and scruffy-looking beard, nodded and kicked off of the wall where he stood; his eyes buried in his phone, like it always was. He took his coffee and like clockwork b-lined for the small table in the far corner of the shop, tucked behind a booth – where he would sit for the next 20 minutes to kill time before his shift. Becca knew this, because every day he did the same, just like all the other regulars she served in a day. Regardless of how well she knew these people and their coffee orders, Becca felt invisible behind the counter, like a ghost serving ghosts of their own ambitions, trapped in the purgatory of a 9-to-5 they never wanted. She was used to it by now though, expectant of standoffish behaviour and small grunts of gratitude from customers in need of their daily coffee fix.