Warm Drinks, Cool Dispositions (Susan & Hatsuharu)

Susan's heart was about to explode inside her ribcage. She could not account for this, not in her wildest fantasies. The Faces had asked her to get coffee with him. She was excited of course, but also very frightened. There were connotations to this scenario. She would have to select her wardrobe and conversation plan very carefully to adapt to possible scenarios and maximize the odds of social success. She had fretted fitfully over the text message for hours before responding, choosing a time she deemed to be optimal. It was far enough that she would know she was off work but close enough that she could still be expected to be just arriving from work, allowing her to wear her business suit. This eliminated the stressor that was "what to wear", as she could not predict if this was a friendly meeting or a coffee date. She could not imagine that someone as famous and storied as Hatsuharu Yoshima would want to bring her to a coffee date so this was an out and an alibi. If she did not have time to change, she could be expected to still be wearing her business clothes which would remove any possibility of being misunderstood of her perceived intentions. As her contingency she still fixed her makeup in her car to ensure that she was still presentable. Regardless of what sort of meeting this would be she would still need to not look slovenly, it would be bad form either way.

She would arrive at the locale very early and spend much of that time in her car, mentally rehearsing likely topics of discussion until she was able to meet them to a degree she found to be adequate and applying her makeup. Luckily for her this was a location she was familiar with and could feel more comfortable at, mitigating social confusion and excess turmoil caused by her environment. She had had coffee meetings here quite often. 10 minutes before the scheduled time she would enter and choose a visible seating arrangement so as to mitigate awkwardness as she had done before. She sat silently in her seat for the duration, deigning not to order something beforehand in order to not complicate the interaction yet still bringing her tablet with her in order to look up certain conversational strategies and possibly get some work done. She could not appear as if she had no time to spend other than this, it would not do, it would make her appear lazy. Instead she would nervously flip through her tablet as time ticked by, dreading the incoming human interaction that would certainly catch her off guard and cause her to feast on crow.