It was only 10am and she was already exhausted. She’d been stuck with an incredibly rude soccer mom for the previous two hours and was counting down the minutes until her lunch break. And it didn’t help that last night had been Trip’s birthday so she had been out until 3am with him and Lance.
Apart from a few customers, the store was pretty much empty, so she vacated to behind the main desk, hoping that Koenig would be around somewhere to help if someone needed any. Skye reached into her bag and took out her travel coffee cup, Coulson’s "Skye, stop drinking your damn coffee next to the products" echoed in her head -she shrugged before slouching down into the spinny chair. She took her phone out and scrolled through the photos she had drunkenly taken last night. Blurry group selfie, blurry group selfie, Lance sitting on the side of the pavement waiting for the taxi, blurry group selfie, shirtless Trip, blurry group selfie, video of her and Lance doing a round of shots, shirtless Lance. Fantastic.
A couple came in. The woman in front -girl, Skye thought she must have only looked 25. She was holding a laptop case close to her chest as if she would drop it, she was smiling and talking to the boy behind her. She was very cute. The boy looked of a similar age, he was not so enthusiastic -looking almost as tired as Skye herself was.
The woman walked up to the main desk and put the laptop case down in front of her, the man stood beside her and rubbed his eyes. She had a silver ring on her finger, the boy had the same.
"Hi," the woman said, beaming. English. "I was wondering if you could help me with this -I can’t seem to get this to boot up, and Fitz-" she paused quickly, and looked at the boy to her right.
"-Is an engineer." Fitz said, turning to the girl. Scottish. "And fully capable of installing a new hard drive. In fact, I could have done it this morning and we would have never had to go out into the freezing cold when we’re supposed to be on holiday, Jemma.”
"You’re Scottish, Fitz. I think if you can handle Scottish winters, you can handle Autumn in New York. Besides, I told you to put another jumper on -but you didn’t listen. And I’d hardly call study leave a holiday.” The girl sighed. “However," she said, looking away from Fitz and back to Skye, with a large smile stretched across her face again, "I don’t want to risk it because this was a lot money and we can’t afford to get a new one right now because we just moved in to a new apartment, but I need something to write papers on-“
"Speaking of the new apartment," Fitz butted in, "The boiler isn’t working."
She rolled her eyes and sighed, going on to say that “this is just ridiculous -we only moved in two days ago”.
Fitz shrugged and muttered “what’s ridiculous is that we got married two days ago and we’re standing in an apple store so that someone can install a hard drive, when we could be doing other things.”
Jemma raised her eyebrows, Fitz did the same and opened his mouth as if to say something. The pair stared at each other for what felt like ten hours, before they both laughed and moved closer together. Jemma clearly reached over and put her hand in the back pocket of Fitz’ jeans and giggled when he turned round and whispered something in her ear. When they looked back to Skye there was a moment of awkwardness.
She loved them both to pieces already.
"Is there any chance you could look at it quickly?" Jemma asked.
"Sure." Skye said, putting down her coffee cup and walking round to the other side of the table. "I’m Skye."
"Like the island?" Fitz asked, "My Grandad lived there."
"If you just follow me over here, I should be able to help you with this hard drive." She took them over to a table where Jemma took the laptop out of the bag, prompting about 30 sheets of paper to fly out. Fitz quickly knelt down, gathering them up while Jemma apologised.
"Oh don’t apologise," Skye shook her head, Jemma reached down for the few that had scattered under the table. "Are they important?"
"Just notes on multisite protein modification and intramolecular signalling!" Jemma shook her head smiling, and sighed, taking the small pile of papers from Fitz and putting them back in the bag, "Just basic stuff really -not that important."
The girl was a genius.
"So are you at college?" Skye asked, not looking up from the monitor. Jemma explained that she was studying biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and Fitz had just gone into studying advanced propulsion systems on a PhD programme, which was apparently just advanced rocket science. Jemma already had her first PhD and was working towards her second. They were both geniuses.
"Rocket science?" Skye asked, turning to Fitz. "So are you going to go into space or something?"
"Eh," Fitz wrinkled up his nose, "I don’t know if I could do that -it looks too dangerous up there. I’ll just stick to my tsiolkovsky rocket equations."
"Well I have absolutely no idea what they are at all, but I hope that works out for you." Skye said, pressing the power button to see if she’d managed to fix it. The lock screen photo was a picture of both of them, maybe a few years old. They were standing at the top of a mountain with rucksacks twice the size of them strapped to their backs. When Skye looked up, they were talking to each other about what they were getting for dinner that night and what time Doctor Who was on.
"So are you in University?" Jemma asked, raised eyebrows. Skye laughed.
"No -no." She shook her head, "I just work here. I’m good with computers."
Feeling like she must have been sounding really plain and boring, she added in some extra Skye trivia:
"But I do other things, I help out at kids homes a lot. Oh and my friend -Lance, just opened up a restaurant because he graduated from cooking class or whatever, so I’m learning to cook which is… cool. You should check it out, it’s nice."
Jemma politely went into a lengthy discussion about how great voluntary work is, and that she thought it was great that Skye helped with kids. Fitz nodded and said enthusiastically that he would happily go to her friend’s “food place” any time.
The computer was working perfectly fine now, but if she stopped talking to them, Koenig would get her to do a stock count or something. And besides, they were interesting. Probably more interesting than any other customers she would get today.
"So you got married two days ago? When you were on study leave? That’s cool." Skye began to internally punish herself the moment the words "that’s cool" came out of her mouth. “I mean, I think that’s great, you both seem very happy together.”
"That’s exactly what I thought." Fitz said, before glimpsing down at Jemma who started blushing slightly.
"Was it in the city?" Skye asked, pretending to type. "It’s a great time of year for it."
"Yeah, not far from here actually." Jemma nodded, turning around and looking out of the door, the wind had just blown a huge pile of orange and red leaves into the air, "And it didn’t rain."
"Are you going anywhere?" Skye asked, glancing over to Koenig who had just taken a huge bite into a doughnut.
"Jemma has exams soon," Fitz said shaking his head, "And we just moved in to our new apartment so we have lots of work to do-" he wrinkled up his nose again. He was also ery cute, for a boy. Not as cute as his wife. "To be honest, it’s a bit of a state. I’ve had to fix the cooker and the plumbing-"
"-and the boiler stopped working this morning!" Jemma added, widening her eyes and shaking her head. "It’s certainly a change from dorms. We’ll fix it up though, right Fitz?"
"The paintwork shouldn’t take too long -it’s not very big." Fitz shrugged, "We need to do something about that painting in the kitchen, it looks like-"
"-Miss McKendry from year twelve!" Jemma said, finishing his sentence. They both began laughing hysterically. Skye almost felt like she wasn’t there, that the two of them were having their own private conversation. It was nice to see two people so happy with one another, reassuring. "And the rug at the door has to go.”
"Looks like something’s died on it." Fitz sighed, rolling his eyes. And sighing, looking down at his feet, and then back to Jemma. "Well, you’re there so that’s all that really matters."
Jemma went pink again and leaned on his shoulder. Skye hid behind the monitor quickly because their happiness was contagious and she didn’t want to look weird in front of new potential friends.
"Ok, well I think that’s it sorted." Skye said, shutting the computer down again. "But I’ll give you my number in case it happens again."
She quickly scribbled her own mobile number onto a post-it and stuck it on the back of the laptop.
"Or.. if you ever wanted to go out for a drink or anything -you know-" She added quickly, trailing off. Worried they didn’t hear her.
"We’d love that." They both said at the same time. Fitz picked the laptop up and put it back carefully on top on Jemma’s notes on multicell protein signals or whatever.
"It was really nice meeting you both-" Skye said genuinely. Jemma said she would call her and Fitz nodded. They both left hand-in-hand, talking excitedly to one another. Skye smiled as she watched them turn the corner and disappear.