( she's halfway to protesting — no, seriously, i can get it — but alex beats her to it, money exchanging hands with a bored-looking barista before she can so much as stammer out a full sentence. skye tells herself she's just out of practice. there's not much reason to pull out a wallet on the bus, after all, and she'd spent too many years dependent on the hackability of contactless payment systems to ever really fall back on cash in the real world. why bother with paper money when you can force generate a loaded starbucks gift card into your app? )

Skye. ( unsaid: a relenting, if not appreciative, agreement. ) Oh, and next time? No "welcome to the neighborhood" excuses.

( if she can't pay, the least she can do is try to be useful, so skye busies herself with gathering an obscene number of napkins, plastic cutlery, and individually-portioned condiment packets — half of which she drops casually into the bag hanging off her arm. old habits die hard, and there's nothing wrong with free shelf-stable strawberry jam if people are just going to leave it laying about. )

Do you have, like, a serious table preference to go with the muffin theories? Because that one's free.

( it might be bathed in an excessive amount of sunlight, but it's also close to a power outlet, and she could probably stand to charge up her gear while she's here. )