It was a stormy Thursday evening, slow and muggy with the kind of miserable, aching weight to it that came with a hard week at work and too much barometric pressure. Emerson ducked hurriedly into the overcrowded restaurant, his work suit soaked at the edges by the downpour despite his best efforts.

The middle-aged businessman grumbled in irritation as he half-heartedly shook out his umbrella and folded it away in his pocket, doing his best to bottle his frustration despite the less-than-ideal circumstances. He then made his way to the front of the line, eying it with dread and hoping his reservation had kept despite the rush and his tardiness.

“Hello, excuse me,” he half-called to the young woman manning the podium as soon as there was an opening between noisy customers, “Is the table reserved for Goodwin still available?”

“Goodwin? That’s you? Ah, yes, your table is still available. You got here just in time, I was was just about to give it away haha!” She joked with a strained smile, not sounding very joking about it in her exhaustion. He couldn’t blame her; with a rush like this and a free table sitting around empty and unclaimed for almost thirty minutes, he would probably be about ready to give it away, too.

“Has, uh, has anyone else come by to claim it?” He asked a little hesitantly, dreading the answer. “Hm? Oh, nope! You’re the only one. No one else has arrived for it, so far.” She answered distractedly from where she’d ducked down below her podium to gather the menus.

His fears were confirmed. The nervous lump in Emerson’s stomach sank at her reply; Clarice knew he’d reserved a table aside for them, yet she still hadn’t arrived…

“Right this way, please!” The attendant chirped with false cheer, and led him briskly to the back of the restaurant. The older man struggled to keep up with her, dodging around stray elbows and trying not to lose her in the chaotic din.

Finally, she seated him at a modest little table in a more blessedly quiet corner of the establishment, the table set for two with the pair of menus in her hands hastily thrust in his direction. He absently thanked the back of her head as she rushed back to her post and began scanning through the menu; he knew fairly well what he wanted, but it had been some time since he’d eaten here, and he wanted to check if anything interesting had been added.

That, and he wanted to distract himself from the very real possibility that he would be spending this meal alone instead of with his crush of two months.

Time passed, and eventually the dinner rush trickled to a crawl. Emerson’s texts to his would-be date went unanswered, until finally Clarice replied with a thinly veiled excuse that she was ‘too busy’ to make the date, a full two hours after they’d agreed to meet up and with him knowing full well that she had left their workplace just a few minutes before him.

Emerson huffed a disbelieving, irritated sigh at her audacity. He’d gotten soaked in the rain, sat here hungry and waiting to share a meal with her, and now she had stood him up without so much decency as a rain check? Just great. A flat out rejection would have been preferable, even a rudely-worded one.

His waiter arrived for the fourth time in the past hour to try and take his order, his acne-speckled face contorted in a poorly-contained pitying wince. With a sigh of defeat, Emerson decided to cut his losses and accept that the date he’d been looking forward to all day wasn’t going to happen, and that he may as well eat and leave.

“I’ll take a Ruby Surprise, please.” He grumbled out his random selection, no longer in the mood to waste his cash on the steak he’d been eying when his evening was already ruined. The teen nodded with an odd smile on his face, and scurried away.

Not ten minutes later, he returned with a hearty slice of red velvet cake, and cheerfully announced that as it was his birthday, the ‘meal’ would be free.

This wasn’t true, of course, but… red velvet WAS his favorite. Slowly, a warm smile blossomed across the downtrodden man’s face for the first time that day.

Who was Emerson to turn down some free cake, after all?