Continuing with Day 2 of this Elsanna Week series.

It started on a Thursday.

Speaking generally, Elsa had a dispassionate, ongoing war with Thursdays. Thursdays were when the combination of the week’s lack of sleep, her courseload, and work finally took its toll. Thursdays were when her immaculate schedule fell apart on her.

Thursdays, she needed caffeine.

This wouldn’t have been such a problem if the symptoms of exhaustion had the courtesy to appear in the morning, when she was still at home and near a coffee maker. Instead, the weekly occurrence landed punctually in the middle of the day, when she already couldn’t remember if she was running to work or school, imploring her to stop for coffee before she fell asleep in the middle of a crosswalk. Valuable time, all out the window.

Her eventual compromise of spending the time on coffee and being granted alertness was reciprocating with a complete lack of enthusiasm. Her goal remained getting in and out of the shop as fast as possible.

So out of sick cosmic joke that her inevitable presence at the shop already partook in, it of course was a Thursday when her harried routine grew an extra head. A red one, to be precise.

The scene had been a simple one: Elsa walks into a coffee shop. She stands in line and does not fall asleep. Still not falling asleep, she orders her coffee. She receives her coffee. She leaves.

Her barrista does not stop handing over her coffee to stare at her, initiating a five-second pause while the staring lengthens before she smiles and says, “Hey, I hope it gets better.”

Elsa does not spend more seconds standing in a coffee shop pondering the idiosyncrasies of participating in human interaction without being particularly awake.

Now, Elsa did.

Once a week. On Thursday.

Quickly extending to more than once a week when it kept happening.

The barrista would smile. “Hang in there.” There would be an indecipherable picture of a cat up a tree drawn on her cup.

On days when more of Elsa’s carefully laid plans were sabotaged, she would fall asleep in line and see sets of blurry freckles saying, “We’re not busy, you can sit down while you wait.” More smiling.

Braids would whip around when Elsa walked in, and bleary eye contact would be established while one of the other barristas hissed at the imminent overflow of a current customer’s drink. Elsa’s name would be written on the cup with the L looped large enough to fit a smiley face in it.

Elsa would be awake enough to read the letters on the nametag, and the freckled blur with the red hair, dubbed Anna, would not get started on her coffee. “It starts with awe for awesome, not the screaming kind. And, uh, are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

The cup would have another kitten on it, this one with a heart around it.

It would be raining, and no number of free seconds would eliminate the frizz from her hair. Smile. “Don’t worry about it, it’s on the house.”

Elsa would walk in. “Hi, Elsa! Be with you in just a sec!”

It all happened like clockwork. If it kept up, Elsa wasn’t sure that her feud with Thursdays would last. She was starting to do leg exercises behind her desk, building up the appropriate strength required to be on time despite the routine change.

There was only one problem.

Her half-sleeping self was acquiring some form of association with a pretty, sweet, and unfathomably kind girl—but the only reason Elsa knew that last part was because Anna was constantly looking at her not only as if she’d just left a funeral, but had descended upon the coffeehouse with the whole procession on top of her.

Haltingly, in one of the few free moments she had, Elsa had explained the problem to Olaf.

Olaf had thought for a bit.

“You do have very sad eyes,” he said. “Maybe she’s worried about you.”

Her response that there was nothing to worry about, that was the root of the whole disturbance (and she did not have sad eyes) had been answered with, “She might worry less if you didn’t think people being nice to you was strange.”

That part wasn’t so strange. It was glorious and wonderful, and Elsa probably lost more than Thursday’s seconds thinking about the various levels of simply how glorious and wonderful it made her feel.

It was the part where their entire relationship appeared grounded in Anna’s assumption that Elsa was a lost soul in need of tender nurturing from the random stranger she saw once a week that bothered her. It was impossibly sweet, but she was a person, not a puppy.

She didn’t seem capable of articulating that when she was mostly asleep.

That was how she ended up getting coffee when it wasn’t a Thursday. Fully dressed, in clothes that fit and were buttoned all the way up, with hair that did not look like she’d spent half an hour running, she stepped up to the counter.

Where Anna wasn’t.

Elsa ordered her coffee. Elsa received her coffee. Elsa refrained from hiding her face in burning embarrassment and left the establishment as quickly as humanly possible.

Upon which she slammed into someone trying to enter as quickly as humanly possible.

“Whoa, sorry about—Elsa?”

Overly occupied with keeping her coffee from spilling all over herself, the voice didn’t immediately register. But the cheerful tone, and the way her name was said, told Elsa what had happened before she spotted a single freckle.

Anna smiled, radiating happy surprise, but with the same confused concern that made Elsa wonder what depraved sight she presented to the world at large. “It’s not Thursday!”

Before that could be followed with some variation of, ‘Has the world gone mad and are you okay?’ Elsa expertly inserted herself into the conversation.

“I know that.”

Anna tugged some hair behind her ear and shook her head. “Right. Sorry, obviously it’s not—I meant—so you’re here! On a not Thursday! And that’s…” Her eyes did a funny motion where they repeatedly redirected themselves on parts of Elsa’s clothing before landing on her face. “Great. That’s—hi. Hi, it’s good to see you!”

Despite herself, Elsa smiled, because all told, “It’s good to see you, too.”

Anna leaned against the doorframe, not hearing or not minding the loud call of her name going on inside the shop. “What brings you here? Besides the coffee,” she added. “We do make good coffee. You’re okay, right?”

Her eyes were so wide and concerned that Elsa was tempted to take a picture to present to Olaf so that he could see what actual sad eyes looked like.

“Yes, Anna, I’m okay,” Elsa said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Oh, you’re taking some time to relax?” Anna asked brightly. “That’s good to—”

“I am not a puppy.”

Elsa had never had much appreciation for Anna’s work setting. When the silence caused by her impactful statement was interrupted by the usual bustle of the shop, she reevaluated. She was also forced to admit that her sleeping self was not the only one having significant trouble articulating the problem.

Anna looked confused. Not concerned, which was an improvement, but very confused.

“Do you… not like puppies?”

She looked a little concerned about that.

“No, that’s not—” Elsa ran her hand through her hair. “I like puppies,” she said, to be clear. “And I like you. I think you’re lovely, but I’m not…” She struggled with the thought, not helped by the distraction of Anna’s expression at what she’d already said. “I’m not incapable of caring for myself,” she settled on, firmly. “I don’t want you thinking I’m not, or, or only being so sweet and worrying over me because you think you have to.”

She closed her mouth, awaiting judgment.

A scrounging robin tweeted from the sidewalk.

Anna tilted her head by the doorjamb.

Another call of her name went ignored.

“I like you too,” she said at last. “But you look like a zombie whenever you come in.”

Elsa was unsure as to whether or not she preferred being thought of as a puppy at the present time. “I—”

“Elsa,” Anna interrupted, “a bike almost hit you when you were sleepwalking your way in here last week. I don’t know about the rest of your life, but your Thursdays belong in a circus. Someone should be worrying over you, because I don’t think you even know what that looks like.”

There should have been some way to counter that declaration.

Elsa was coming up short.

“But I never thought I had to,” Anna continued, smiling uncertainly. “I just want to. Because I like you enough that I wouldn’t mind knowing about the rest of your life.”

Elsa’s fingers folded the cardboard holder around her coffee cup, and as far as her life went, the most important thing of the moment was that there was nothing, not in any piece she could tell Anna, that could explain how someone this radiant could be a part of it. “Is… was that you asking me out?”

Anna’s eyebrows jumped and crinkled together. “It… probably should have been.” She tucked a hand around her neck and looked at Elsa guiltily. With puppy dog eyes that it was oddly comforting to know she could never match.“Can it be?”

Elsa smiled.

And they did not go out on a Thursday.