No, this is not a story about how passionate The Dreaded One is about preparing good food, or a story about how passionately Grumpy loathes fern leaf latte art. It's a story (not so much of a story as a captured moment) of two of the most passionate customers we've ever had.
Sadly, they were not passionate about the food or the coffee. They were, however, very passionate about each other. Basically, they were the snoggingest couple I think I've ever seen They were at it for well over an hour. It could have been two hours, or maybe that was just because it felt like time had slowed. It was like they were 14 years old and had discovered that another person's tongue was the absolute coolest thing ever you could have in your mouth. It was blurring the lines between affection and canabalism. It was noisy, in a quietly wet and moany way.
They took short breaks from time to time to murmur and giggle quietly, then they went back at it. Their hand clasped each others head, fingers wound through hair in a way that reminded me of octopus tentacles, sucking and slurping...
For a long time, they were the only customers in the cafe, which made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I tried to be as quiet as possible as I went about doing stuff that had to be done because I didn't want to ruin the delusion they were both sharing that they were actually at home on their own. Then I thought fuck it and turned the music up to block out the wet sounds. Then, thinking about the music, I hoped like hell there was no Barry White on The Dreaded One's phone because that would definitely have pushed them over the edge.
Then I peered into the future and knew that I was going to write a blog post about it, because in all the five weeks of running the cafe I had never felt so awkward. It was pretty funny and definitely worth writing about, but I needed an image to go with it. I wanted an image of The Snoggers. But I couldn't just brazenly stand there in the open and take a shot of them because, well, that might appear a little bit pervy.
No. Much better to be secretive about it. Get the camera out, kneel down out of direct sight and aim the camera through the glass display cabinet and zoom in for a nice, intimate shot.
Whereupon The Dreaded One walked in just at the wrong moment and said, "Grumpy - what the hell are you doing?"
Okay, so that obviously didn't happen.
What did happen was this: I wrote a little sign saying Do Not Disturb. I hung it on the door, facing out, stepped outside, quietly closed the door and went for a nice little walk around the block because surely they couldn't still be at it when I got back.
Surely.