Smoked to Perfection
One cafe. One deal. Way more smoke than either of us signed up for.
I hate people who try to kill me in creative ways. Smoking right on my face in a cafe is one of them.
The cafe has big glass windows, the kind of place people photograph for Instagram. Right now the whole place is covered in smoke. It smells like burnt rubber.
“Excuse me. I am sitting with a girl here. Can’t you see?” I say to the smoker guy beside me. He is venting more smoke than my car ever did.
He doesn’t care. He keeps smoking right on my face.
“I don’t understand how these smokers can even think or plan anything,” Neha says, offering me a glass of water. She is my friend from the partner firm. We are here to finalise the agreement between our companies. “I am sure smoking clouds their thinking.”
I cough my way to the door for some fresh air. She follows, coughing too, one hand over her mouth. Outside is worse. Two more men are smoking near the entrance.
I run back inside, pinching my nose, and stand under the air conditioner. But the smoke has settled everywhere already. One look at the AC and I think it is smoking too.
“It’s not working,” the cafe owner tells me, as I stare up at the vents.
“What’s the smoke coming out of it?” My brows knit together.
“It’s the smoke fumes of the smokers in the house,” he says, and winks at me.
I swear I want to blind him right there and choke him with his own pack of cigarettes.
“I think it’s a public place. Smoking should be prohibited,” Neha says. She looks more allergic to the smoke than me. Her breathing has gone shallow. I hand her the water and she drinks it fast.
The owner looks at us like we landed from another planet. Then he laughs and points at a signboard. SMOKING KILLS, it says.
Who laughs at dying men. Rude.
“Yes, I know. That’s why I don’t smoke. You should tell these smokers too,” I say, pointing at them like he might have missed the obvious.
He scratches his head, then his cheek, and looks at me like I am the slow one. “They already know. But maybe they don’t care.”
“Then don’t let them come here,” I say, my voice rising. “Why suffocate non-smokers like us? Passive smoking is dangerous, you know.” Neha nods hard. I thump my chest like I am trying to push the smoke out.
The owner scrunches his brows, cocks one eyebrow, and says nothing.
Neha recovers first and pulls me to a corner table, tucked behind a half wall where the smoke thins out a little. I pull the chair out for her. She smiles. I smile back, but my mind is somewhere else, on the deal I need signed today if I want to keep my job.
My boss made me two promises with this deal. Close it, I get a promotion. Fail, I get fired. So this is not just a meeting. This is survival.
Neha has brought three thick files from her company. She lines them up on the table while I sit there biting my nails down to nothing.
“What would you like to eat?” she asks, noticing how my leg won’t stop bouncing.
“I’m sorry, I should have asked you first,” I say, and wave down a waiter.
“Can I see the documents? The agreement from your side?” Neha asks, pushing her hand across the table.
Her hands look soft. Some part of me wants to press my palm against hers instead of handing over paper. That would be inappropriate. Other girls in the cafe would object. Their hands are pretty too, you know.
“Let’s eat first,” I say. “I’m starving. Look, food’s here already.”
The waiter sets down a tray. On it sits our burger, Neha’s coffee, and a pack of cigarettes.
“Excuse me? Who ordered the cigarettes?” Neha’s voice jumps.
“Complimentary,” the waiter says, already turning to leave.
“Take it back. We don’t want it,” I say, standing, and toss the pack at him.
He catches it without looking, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and leans against the wall. Then he waves his colleague over and hands him one too.
Neha and I watch the smoke rise and spread across the ceiling, like fog on a hill station.
Within minutes Neha is struggling to breathe. She coughs first, then I feel my own throat tighten. We run outside again.
Once we catch our breath, her phone rings.
“Yes sir. We’ll be done signing in a few minutes,” she says to her boss, giving me a thumbs up. I return it.
“We need to move fast,” she says, hanging up. “Show me the proposal, the draft you prepared.”
I nod. “It’s in my bag. Inside the cafe.”
She looks back at the cafe. From here you can barely see through the windows. “Why did you pick this place? Didn’t you know about their smoking policy? It’s not even close to my office.” She shakes her head.
“I didn’t know,” I say, pinching my lips like I am personally wounded. “Every cafe is like this now.”
She nods, taking the point. My phone buzzes. My boss.
“Kevin. Have you finalised the deal yet?” His voice is cold as always.
“Almost, sir,” I say, wiping sweat off my forehead with my sleeve. Neha notices and hands me a napkin.
“We need to sign and go,” I say, hanging up. “My boss wants me back at the office.”
We push back through the smoky cafe to our table. When we get there, the burger and Neha’s coffee are both gone.
I flag down the waiter. “Where’s our food? Our coffee?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I thought you’d left, so we cleared the table,” he says, smiling like this explains everything.
I throw my hands up. Neha gasps.
“Just show me the documents. We’ll have coffee later,” she says.
I reach under the table for my bag. It’s not there. I check the tables around us. Nothing.
“Where’s my bag?” I say, louder than I mean to.
The waiter goes pale and starts searching without a word. Neha helps too.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” A man walks up holding my bag.
I look at the bag, then at the waiter, jaw tight. “Yes. Where did you find it?”
“Near the billing counter,” he says, pointing at the waiter. “I saw him clear your table. Figured he’d left it there by mistake, so I kept it safe.”
I take the bag. I grit my teeth at the waiter. He looks down and disappears toward the kitchen.
“Let’s finish this. We’ve already lost time,” Neha says, sitting back down. “I have to get to the office.”
I grab the glass of water in front of me and drink, my mind racing. I open the bag. Reach for the papers.
Nothing.
I search again. Still nothing.
“What’s wrong?” Neha’s brows pull together.
“My files. They’re gone. I think someone took them,” I say, breathing hard, tearing through the bag a third time.
Her eyes go wide. She stands and helps me search the already empty bag. “Are you serious? My company will fire me if this doesn’t close today.”
She calls the waiter over. “Where are the files from his bag?”
“I swear I don’t know anything. I kept the bag safe. I didn’t touch what was inside,” he says, looking like a man accused of two crimes in ten minutes.
Near the counter sits an old hourglass, the kind cafes keep around for decoration more than for actual timing. The sand is already halfway through its fall. I catch myself watching it drain, grain by grain, and for a second my hands go still on the table, even though my face keeps performing panic.
The smoker from earlier notices the commotion and strolls over. “What’s the matter?”
The waiter fills him in. He nods slowly, like he is weighing something.
“No problem,” he says. “I have a solution.”
Before either of us can ask what that means, he pulls out his pack of cigarettes and offers it to us like a peace treaty.
Neha looks at him like she might eat him alive. He shrugs, lights one for himself, and blows smoke into our tired faces.
We’re back outside within seconds, coughing our way through round three.
Once we recover, Neha exhales hard. “I need to call my boss.”
“Please don’t,” I say. “I’ll lose my job if he finds out.”
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” She starts walking toward her car.
I watch her open the door, already turning to say goodbye, when the same bystander comes jogging up. “Hey, are these your documents?”
Neha stops. I take the papers from him and check them fast. He waits for a thank you. I stare at him a beat too long instead. He shrugs it off and walks away, confused.
“Kevin? Did you find them?” Neha calls from across the road.
“Yes,” I say, still scanning the pages. “But only some of it.”
I slide the papers into my bag, sorting as I go. The agreement goes into the front pocket, where anyone can see it. The rest, the contentious provisions we’ve been fighting over for weeks, goes into the pocket buried at the bottom. My hands know exactly where each page belongs. It takes four seconds.
I walk over to her.
“The agreement’s here,” I say. “But the proposal with the extra provisions is missing. I’m sorry. I never got to include those in the draft either. You’ll just have to trust me on this.”
Neha looks at the agreement, then at me. Something in her face softens.
“You’re a nice guy, Kevin,” she says. “You’ve been so patient with me through all this smoke.” She takes the pen, signs, and slides it across.
I sign under her name. We shake hands. I watch her car pull out of the lot and disappear down the road.
My phone rings the second she’s gone.
“Sir, it’s done,” I say.
“Good,” my boss says. “You just got your promotion.”
I hang up and open the bag again. The papers are still in the bottom pocket, right where I hid them. These are the pages Neha’s company fought hardest for, the clauses that would have protected them if the deal ever went wrong. She signed the agreement without ever seeing them. My company gets everything it wanted. Her company gets nothing it asked for. And she has no idea any of this happened.
I walk back into the cafe. The smoker and the waiter are still leaning against the same wall, still smoking, like they never moved. The smoker holds out a cigarette without a word. I take it. I lean against the wall next to them and add to the haze I spent the whole afternoon pretending to hate.
I open my phone. Neha’s social media profile is right there, her bio proudly declaring how much she hates smoking, more than almost anything else in the world.
“And they say smokers can’t think or plan,” I say.
They laugh. I laugh with them. We smoke to the plan, to the win, and add our own share of fumes to a cafe that never had a chance of clearing out today.
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