Jared couldn't drink all four espressos. He looked into the cup. Guessed that he had drunk perhaps half. Decided he was too nervous. Looked both way on the street to make sure nobody was watching him. And dumped it out.
He was already a nervous guy. Had he drunk the rest of the
espresso
, he'd be toast. A jittery monkey unable to think about one thing for more than five seconds. Back in college it might've been fun to feel so far from normalcy that he might've done it. These days he was fine with normal.
Walking down the main strip,
Baker Ave.
he wondered why so many books featured characters who walked around.
walking
seemed like a mainstay of the literary world. Nobody wanted to read about a character who wasn't walking. When the character was in a car they could never run into a person they knew. You were moving too fast. Too fast for anything to happen at a person to person level. That's why characters in cars got lost in their thoughts. And the music. But if you had a character they might run into a girl selling flowers. Like Jared had just now.