Chapter 2: The Regular
She came back on Thursday.
Hajin was mid-pour when the door opened—a Guatemalan Huehuetenango for the architecture students, who had finally graduated from cold brew after weeks of gentle persuasion and one impassioned monologue about extraction temperature that Jiwoo still hadn’t forgiven him for. The gooseneck kettle was tracing its third spiral when he heard the magnetic catch click, felt the October air push through the doorframe, and looked up.
Sooyeon.
She was dry this time. Her hair was down—straight, dark, brushing her shoulders—and she was wearing a different coat, this one a muted charcoal that made her look like she’d stepped out of a magazine editorial about autumn in cities. She stood in the doorway for a moment, scanning the room with that same quick, evaluating gaze, and when her eyes found the bar—the seat closest to the door, the same one she’d sat in two days ago—something in her posture relaxed. Just slightly. The way a held breath releases.
“Americano?” Hajin asked, keeping his face straight.
She gave him a look. It was, he decided, one of the more eloquent looks he’d ever received—simultaneously acknowledging the joke, refusing to be amused by it, and warning him not to push his luck.
“Whatever you’re making,” she said, sitting down and placing her bag on the counter with the careful precision of someone who treated every surface as potentially hostile. “But not the fruity one. Something… normal.”
“Define normal.”
“Coffee that tastes like coffee.”
“All coffee tastes like coffee. That’s what makes it coffee.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did know what she meant. She wanted something that wouldn’t surprise her—something warm and round and familiar, without the bright acidity of the Kenyan that had clearly unsettled her worldview. He reached for the Brazilian Santos he’d roasted two days ago—chocolate, nut, low acidity, the coffee equivalent of a cashmere blanket.
“Brazilian Santos,” he said, weighing out the beans. “Chocolate and hazelnut. No surprises. Well, one small surprise, but you’ll like it.”
“What’s the surprise?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
She almost smiled again. He was beginning to catalog these almost-smiles—the way a birdwatcher might catalog sightings. This one was the corner-of-mouth variety, quick and controlled, as if her face was a building with strict security and the smile had snuck past the guards.
He made the pour-over with the same focused ritual—weigh, grind, bloom, pour—and she watched with the same quiet attention she’d shown on Tuesday. This time, though, she asked a question.
“Why do you wait after the first pour?”
Hajin blinked. In three years, he could count on one hand the number of customers who had asked about the bloom. Most people didn’t notice. Most people were on their phones.
“It’s called the bloom,” he said. “When hot water first hits fresh coffee grounds, it releases carbon dioxide—that’s the gas that builds up during roasting. You see the grounds swell?” He pointed to the V60, where the coffee bed was rising like a small, dark soufflé. “That tells me the coffee is fresh. The fresher the roast, the more it blooms. I wait thirty seconds to let all the gas escape, because CO2 makes coffee taste sour and harsh. Once it’s gone, the water can extract the good stuff—the sugars, the oils, the flavor.”
Sooyeon leaned forward slightly, watching the grounds settle. “So the waiting is the important part.”
“The waiting is always the important part. In coffee. In most things.”
She looked at him then—not at the coffee, at him—and for a moment the careful composure slipped. Just for a second. What was underneath it, he couldn’t quite read. Something tired. Something hungry for a kind of attention that had nothing to do with being watched.
Then the composure was back, smooth as a door closing.
“The surprise?” she asked when he set the cup in front of her.
“Take a sip.”
She did. Her eyebrows drew together—not in displeasure but in concentration, the way someone’s face tightens when they’re trying to identify a song playing in another room.
“There’s something sweet. Not sugar sweet. Almost like…”
“Brown butter.”
“Brown butter. In coffee.”
“Not added. It’s the natural flavor of this particular lot, from a farm in Cerrado. High altitude, slow cherry maturation, full natural process—the beans dry inside the fruit, and the sugars caramelize during roasting. The result is that butterscotch finish.” He was aware he was doing it again—the lecture, the explanation that Jiwoo called his “coffee TED talk”—but Sooyeon was listening. Actually listening, not politely waiting for him to stop. “Most people miss it because they add milk or sugar. Black, at this temperature, it’s unmistakable.”
“It’s unmistakable,” she agreed. She took another sip. Set the cup down with both hands, as if it was something worth holding carefully. “You really love this, don’t you?”
The question caught him off guard. Not because it was unexpected—people said that to him all the time, usually with a tone that meant you’re a bit odd—but because of the way she said it. Without judgment. Without the faint condescension that came from people who couldn’t understand caring deeply about something as ordinary as coffee. She said it the way you’d say you can see the stars from here—with quiet recognition.
“Yeah,” he said. “I really do.”
“Must be nice. To love something that much.”
Before he could respond, Jiwoo burst through the back door carrying a box of takeout cups and radiating the specific energy of someone who had just won an argument with a supplier.
“Got them to drop the price by twelve percent,” she announced, dropping the box on the prep counter. “Twelve! I told him we’d switch to a competitor and he folded like a—” She spotted Sooyeon. Her eyes lit up. “Oh! You came back!”
“I came back,” Sooyeon confirmed, with the air of someone who had been caught doing something she hadn’t intended to be public.
“Hajin’s been cleaning that one seat at the bar every twenty minutes since Tuesday,” Jiwoo said, sliding behind the counter. “I’ve never seen him clean anything voluntarily. You’ve had a profound effect on this establishment.”
“Jiwoo.”
“I’m stating facts.”
“You’re stating embarrassing fiction.”
“The bar stool doesn’t lie, Hajin.” Jiwoo turned to Sooyeon with a conspiratorial grin. “What did he make you? Let me guess—he did the whole bloom explanation? The thirty-second wait? The ‘extraction is a conversation between water and coffee’ speech?”
Sooyeon looked between them—Hajin with his slightly reddened ears, Jiwoo with her gleeful grin—and something happened that Hajin hadn’t seen before. She laughed. Not the controlled almost-smile or the exhale through the nose. An actual laugh, short and surprised, like a bird startled into flight.
“He did the bloom explanation,” Sooyeon said.
“Of course he did.” Jiwoo sighed with theatrical affection. “Well, welcome to Bloom. I’m Jiwoo, the person who actually keeps this place running while Hajin communes with coffee beans.”
“I also commune with coffee beans,” Hajin said. “But I also roast them, brew them, and serve them, which is technically the entire job description.”
“And I do the books, the marketing, the ordering, the supplier negotiations, the health inspections, and the emotional labor of being your business partner. We’re very evenly matched.” Jiwoo extended her hand to Sooyeon. “Seriously though, nice to properly meet you. Anyone who makes Hajin clean voluntarily is welcome here anytime.”
Sooyeon shook her hand. Her grip was brief but firm—the handshake of someone who had been trained in handshakes. “Sooyeon. And I should pay this time. I don’t like—”
“—owing people. She told me,” Hajin said.
“6,500 won,” Jiwoo said immediately, before Hajin could offer another free cup. She caught his look and returned it with one that clearly said we have rent to pay, you idealistic disaster.
Sooyeon paid with a card—a black card, the kind that didn’t have a credit limit printed on it because it didn’t need one. Jiwoo processed it without comment, but her eyes flicked to Hajin with a look that contained an entire essay.
After Sooyeon left—an hour later, one cup, no phone the entire time—Jiwoo cornered him by the roaster.
“That card,” she said.
“What about it?”
“That was a Hyundai Black. You know who has Hyundai Black cards?”
“People with good credit?”
“People with insane credit. Or insane money. Annual fee alone is three million won. That’s five months of our current net profit, Hajin.”
“So she has money. A lot of people have money.”
“A lot of people have money. Not a lot of people have that card and sit alone in a second-floor specialty cafe in Yeonnam-dong for an hour watching a barista make pour-overs. That’s a person who is either very bored or very lost.”
“Or maybe she just likes good coffee.”
“She liked you. There’s a difference.” Jiwoo held up her hand before he could protest. “I’m not being romantic. I’m being observational. She watched you the entire time. Not the coffee—you. Your hands, your face, the way you talk about beans like they’re sentient beings with feelings. She’s interested in something, and it’s not the Kenyan AA.”
Hajin opened the roaster’s chaff collector and began cleaning it with more force than necessary. “You’re reading too much into a customer who came in twice.”
“I’m reading exactly the right amount into a customer who came in twice, paid with a card that costs more than our monthly rent, and didn’t touch her phone for sixty straight minutes. In 2026 Seoul, that’s basically a marriage proposal.”
“You need a hobby.”
“You are my hobby. You and this cafe and your complete inability to recognize when a beautiful woman is interested in you.”
Hajin didn’t respond to that. He focused on the chaff collector, the methodical scraping of dried coffee skin from the metal cylinder, and tried not to think about the way Sooyeon had said must be nice, to love something that much—with that particular mix of admiration and sadness, as if she was describing a country she’d heard of but never visited.
She came back on Friday. And Saturday. And Monday.
By the second week, Hajin had learned certain things about her—not through direct questions, which she deflected with the practiced ease of a diplomat, but through observation, the way you learn about someone by watching them exist in a space.
She was left-handed. She always sat at the bar, always the same seat, the one closest to the door. She carried a leather bag—Bottega Veneta, Jiwoo informed him, roughly two million won—but she never opened it during her visits. No laptop, no book, no notebook. Just the coffee, the window, and occasionally him.
She kept her phone face-down on the counter. It buzzed frequently—sometimes three or four times during a single visit—and she never looked at it. Not once. Whatever was calling, she had decided it could wait, or that waiting was the whole point.
She was precise about small things and careless about big ones. She noticed when Hajin changed the flowers on the counter—a single stem in a narrow ceramic vase that Mrs. Kim from the flower shop replenished weekly—and commented on it. “Eucalyptus today?” But she never noticed the weather, never brought an umbrella, seemed perpetually unprepared for the fact that October in Seoul meant rain.
She asked questions. That was the thing that surprised him most. Not personal questions—she was armored against those in both directions—but coffee questions. How do you know when the roast is right? Why does water temperature matter? What’s the difference between a V60 and a Chemex? Each question was delivered with the focused intensity of someone taking mental notes, and Hajin, who could talk about coffee the way some people talked about religion, found himself explaining things he’d never had to articulate before.
“The V60 has a single large drain hole,” he told her on Monday, holding up the ceramic cone. “The Chemex uses a thicker filter and a narrower neck. The V60 gives you a cleaner cup—more clarity, more brightness. The Chemex gives you more body, more texture. It’s the difference between a photograph and a painting. Same subject, different medium.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Depends on the bean. Light roasts, V60. Dark roasts—which I don’t really do, but hypothetically—Chemex.”
“You don’t do dark roasts?”
“Dark roasting is what you do when you want to hide what the coffee actually tastes like. It’s like overcooking a steak—you end up tasting the char, not the meat. I roast light to medium because I want you to taste the origin. Where it grew, how it was processed, what the soil was like. Every cup should taste like a place.”
Sooyeon cupped her hands around her mug—the Colombian today, her second favorite after the Brazilian—and looked at it as if she could see the origin in the dark surface. “A place,” she repeated. “So this one tastes like… Colombia?”
“This one tastes like a specific hillside in Huila, at 1,800 meters altitude, where the coffee cherries ripen slowly because the nights are cold and the days are warm. The slow ripening concentrates the sugars. That’s why it’s sweet without being sweet, if that makes sense.”
“It makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Things that grow slowly tend to have more depth.” She said it quietly, looking at her cup rather than at him. “People, too.”
Hajin felt that gear-click again. The one he’d felt on Tuesday, when she’d told him her name. Something shifting into place, a mechanism he didn’t fully understand engaging.
“Hajin.” Jiwoo’s voice, sharp and low, from behind the espresso machine. She was giving him a look—the specific look that meant we have other customers or you’re doing the thing again or both.
He glanced around. Mrs. Kim was waiting at the register with her flat white money in hand and an expression of patient amusement. The architecture students were making pointed eye contact with their empty cold brew glasses. He hadn’t noticed any of them.
“Sorry,” he told Sooyeon. “Duty calls.”
“Of course.” She straightened in her seat, the composure resettling like a coat being buttoned. “I should go anyway.”
She paid—the black card again, 6,500 won that was nothing to her and everything to Bloom—and left with a small nod that was almost a bow, a formality that seemed automatic, ingrained, the posture of someone raised in rooms where politeness was currency.
At the door, she paused. “Tomorrow,” she said, not quite a question, not quite a statement. Something in between—a word placed on the counter like a tentative order.
“Same seat?”
“Same seat.”
She left. Mrs. Kim came to the counter, took her flat white, and gave Hajin a look that grandmothers have been giving young men since the invention of romance.
“She’s pretty,” Mrs. Kim said.
“She likes pour-overs.”
“She likes you, dear.”
“Mrs. Kim—”
“I’ve been married forty-two years. I know what it looks like when someone finds their person in an unexpected place.” She took her flat white to her usual table, opened her novel—page 347 now, she was making progress—and said nothing more.
Hajin busied himself with Mrs. Kim’s payment and the architecture students’ refills and the hundred small tasks that made up an afternoon at Bloom. But his eyes kept drifting to the bar seat. The one closest to the door. The one where a faint impression of warmth still lingered, invisible but present, like the ghost of a coffee note you couldn’t quite name.
That night, after closing, Hajin sat alone at the counter and cupped a sample of tomorrow’s roast—an Ethiopian Sidamo he was considering. He slurped it from the spoon, let it coat his palate, searched for the flavor notes. Jasmine. Stone fruit. A whisper of bergamot.
She’d like this one, he thought, and then immediately tried to un-think it, because cupping coffee for a customer who’d been coming for less than two weeks was not a professional decision. It was not something a rational business owner did. It was not—
He reached for his notebook and wrote: Ethiopian Sidamo. Jasmine/peach/bergamot. Light roast. Try 94 degrees, coarser grind. For Tuesday.
He didn’t write for Sooyeon. He didn’t need to. They were the only two people in the room, even though she wasn’t there.
He locked up Bloom at 10:47 PM, walked down the narrow stairs to street level, and turned right toward the subway. The October air was cool on his face, carrying the mixed scent of rain-wet asphalt and the fried chicken place on the corner. Yeonnam-dong at night was quieter than people expected—the bars were on the other side of the park, and this block was all small shops and cafes and the nail salon that was dark now, its K-pop silenced until tomorrow.
His phone buzzed. A text from Jiwoo:
I ran the numbers. We need 12 more customers per day to cover the rent increase. Or one very rich one who tips well. Just saying.
He typed back: Goodnight, Jiwoo.
That’s not a plan, Hajin.
Goodnight is always a plan. It means tomorrow exists.
You’re impossible.
Artistically impossible.
He put his phone away and walked to the station. The Ethiopian Sidamo was still on his tongue—jasmine and peach, fading to bergamot—and for the first time in months, the walk home didn’t feel like the end of a day. It felt like the pause between movements. The bloom before the pour.
He was thinking about coffee. He told himself he was thinking about coffee.
He was lying again.