Four Of A Kind

The next two hours passed in a blur of espresso shots and themed drinks and the persistent feeling that someone was watching me from every direction at once. Because someone was. Four someones, actually, plus Iris, plus Sarah, plus Felix, plus approximately two hundred festival attendees who had apparently decided that the vampire butler was the main attraction rather than the drinks he served.

A sophomore girl asked me to sign her cup. I wrote "stay hydrated" and she almost fainted.

By four o’clock the crowd had shifted to mostly upperclassmen and a handful of parents who seemed genuinely confused about why their children were paying seven dollars for drinks served by teenagers in Halloween costumes. Patterson had disappeared into the back to count revenue with the manic energy of a man who could taste victory, and Felix had abandoned his Dracula accent entirely in favor of just being Felix, which honestly worked better for tips.

I was wiping down the steam wand when Harlow materialized at my elbow.

"Isaiah." She had her phone in both hands, screen angled toward her chest so I couldn’t see it. Her twin tails were slightly lopsided from five hours of bouncing between tables, and her maid headband had migrated to a forty-five degree angle that made her look like a satellite dish receiving transmissions from space. "Can I show you something?"

"If it’s another photo of Gerald wearing a tiny cape, I’ve seen it."

"It’s not Gerald." She paused. "Gerald looks very distinguished in his cape and I won’t have you disrespecting him. But no. This is different."

She turned her phone around.

The screen showed an Instagram post from an account I didn’t recognize, but the photo was unmistakable. Me, standing behind the espresso machine in my vampire butler costume, cape draped across my shoulders, one hand on the portafilter and the other reaching for a cup. The lighting caught the red lining of my tailcoat and the sharp line of my jaw at an angle that made me look like I belonged in a cologne advertisement rather than a high school gymnasium.

The caption read: "whoever this vampire butler is at hartwell’s fall festival, i am looking respectfully (and also disrespectfully)"

It had four thousand likes. Posted forty-seven minutes ago.

"Harlow."

"I didn’t post it!" She held up her hands in immediate defense. "Someone from 3-B took it through the gym doors. But look at the comments."

I scrolled. The comments section was a warzone of thirst and speculation.

"is this the mystery boyfriend from the boba shop pics????"

"he looks like he stepped out of a manhwa i stg"

"those HANDS on the espresso machine someone hold me"

"wait isn’t this the guy who was at the lumiere launch with vivienne valentine"

"HIS NAME IS ISAIAH ANGELO i have calculus with him he’s a scholarship student and YES he’s single (i think)"

I stopped scrolling and handed the phone back to Harlow. My stomach had turned itself into a knot that no amount of latte art could untangle.

"That’s going to be a problem."

"It’s already a problem." Harlow bit her lower lip, which still had traces of the strawberry gloss she had applied six times throughout the day. "Vivienne saw it twenty minutes ago and hasn’t spoken since. She’s standing by the door looking at her tablet but the screen hasn’t changed in twelve minutes, which means she’s either strategizing or dissociating. Both are scary."

"Where’s Cassidy?"

"Tennis courts. She went to hit things after the Rebecca incident."

"Sabrina?"

"Still doing readings. She told a girl from 3-C that her boyfriend was going to break up with her before winter break and the girl started crying and bought three Vampire’s Kisses. Sabrina’s revenue per customer is actually the highest of anyone on the floor."

I untied my apron and set it on the counter. "Cover the machine for ten minutes."

"I don’t know how to make espresso."

"Then pour drip coffee into fancy cups and charge full price. Nobody will notice the difference after four o’clock."

"That’s dishonest."

"That’s hospitality."

Harlow considered this for approximately one second before her eyes lit up. "Can I do the latte art?"

"Harlow, you can barely draw a straight line with a ruler."

"I can draw bats! Tiny bats! In the foam!"

"Fine. Tiny bats. Go."

She squeezed my arm once, quick and warm, her fingers finding the exact spot between my wrist and elbow where she always grabbed, and disappeared behind the counter with the enthusiasm of a girl who had been waiting five hours for permission to operate heavy machinery.

I found Vivienne exactly where Harlow described. She stood at the entrance with her tablet pressed against her stomach like a shield, her burgundy skirt catching the purple uplighting in a way that turned her into something between a Renaissance painting and a nightmare. Her posture was so rigid that if someone pushed her, she would have toppled over in one solid piece without bending.

"Hey."

"The post has six thousand likes now." She didn’t look up. "Seven media outlets have reposted it. Two of them are publications that covered the Lumiere launch. Someone in the comments identified you by name and linked the previous photographs from the boba shop."

"I saw."

"My mother follows three of these accounts." Vivienne’s voice was flat, emptied of everything except information. The way she sounded during board meetings, not during conversations. "She will see this by tonight. Possibly she’s already seen it."

"Vivienne."

"This complicates the schedule. If she contacts me before Monday I’ll need to prepare a statement, and if the tabloids start calling the PR team we’ll need a coordinated response rather than individual—"

"Vivienne." I stepped in front of her and she finally looked up. Her purple eyes were doing that thing where they tried to be cold and controlled but the edges kept flickering with something that wasn’t cold at all. The Lovers card Sabrina had tucked into her pocket came to mind, and I pushed the image away because tarot symbolism was not a useful framework for real-time crisis management.

"What?" she said.

"You’re spiral planning."

"I’m being proactive."

"You’re standing in a doorway catastrophizing about a photo someone took of me making coffee."

Her mouth opened. Closed. Her fingers pressed harder against the tablet. A muscle in her jaw twitched once, twice, and then something behind her eyes collapsed inward like a building losing its foundation in slow motion.

"It’s a very attractive photo," she said quietly. "You look like you belong somewhere expensive. And now everyone can see what I see when I look at you, and I’m not ready for everyone to see it because I barely understand it myself."

The gymnasium hummed around us. Felix’s laugh carried over from the dessert station where he was teaching Iris how to arrange cookies into a pentagram shape. Patterson’s voice boomed from behind the curtain where he was apparently on the phone with someone about trophy engraving, which felt premature given that results hadn’t been announced yet. Fog rolled across the floor in thin white ribbons that caught on our shoes and dissolved.

I reached out and straightened her tablet in her arms. My fingers brushed hers for half a second, which was long enough for her breath to catch and short enough that anyone watching would have seen nothing except a butler adjusting paperwork.

"Your mother is going to see a photo of me making coffee," I said. "Not a photo of me kissing her daughter in a museum bathroom. There’s a difference."

"The difference is a matter of time."

"Then we use the time."

Vivienne studied my face with the intensity she normally reserved for quarterly earnings reports. Whatever she found there must have been sufficient because her shoulders dropped two inches and she exhaled through her nose in a controlled release that still managed to convey seventeen different emotions simultaneously, most of them contradictory.

"Fine." She turned her tablet around and showed me the screen. She had been working on a contingency document titled SOCIAL MEDIA EXPOSURE PROTOCOL (v.3). "I’ve drafted three response scenarios. Scenario A assumes minimal viral spread and no direct media contact. Scenario B accounts for moderate exposure with potential press inquiries. Scenario C involves—"

"Vivienne."

"What."

"Your eye is twitching."

Her hand flew to her face. "It is not."

"Left side. Been going for about thirty seconds."

She pressed two fingers against her left temple and held them there, breathing slowly. The twitching stopped. She lowered her hand, smoothed her skirt, adjusted her corset with a tug that did something extremely distracting to her neckline, and met my eyes with the look of a general who had been briefly shelled but refused to retreat.

"I’m fine."

"You’re always fine."

"And you’re always annoying." She turned on her heel and walked back toward the cafe floor, her stockings making a soft whisper against each other with every step. "I’ll handle the media. You handle the coffee. And Isaiah?"

"Yeah?"

She paused, half-turned, the purple uplighting catching one side of her face and the candelabra glow catching the other, splitting her between shadow and warmth in a way that made my chest do something involuntary and unhelpful.

"Stop being photogenic. It’s causing operational problems."