As they walked side-by-side down the street, Sol meditated on what, precisely, the hell she thought she was doing. Dr. Banner was a brilliant scientist, one whose work she had admired for years . But when she had suggested the coffee shop, she had mainly been preoccupied with his crooked, disarmingly shy smile and the way his eyes lingered on her own.

They talked easily as they walked.

Sol glanced sidelong at Bruce.

"So, dare I ask what Tony told you about me?" she asked, half facetiously, half with genuine curiosity. Bruce considered his answer for a moment.

"He said you had a really nice accent."

"Well, that's true, I suppose; it is quite magnificent. Anything else?"

"You have a proclivity for Latin aphorisms and that you'd drive me crazy in less than a week."

"Blandae mendacia linguae. I only use Latin around him because he never had the patience to learn it."

"I beat him to the end of a physics problem once. He's still sore about it."

"Well, you know, that level of megalomania requires a lot of maintenance. He must be exhaus-" Sol stopped walking abruptly, glanced around, and rolled her eyes. "Come on, we've overshot. You'd think that with all the hype, either Oxford or MIT would have taught me to walk and talk at the same time." Bruce followed her back past several shops until they reached a shadowy door, retreating with a surly unobtrusiveness into the shadows of the stone building. Sol jerked the door open and stood aside for him to pass. The dimly lit interior comprised a firmly closed wooden door painted a faded and flaking red, and a steep, narrow wooden set of stairs.

"It's just up those stairs. Two flights."

What an oddity. He thought, as he trudged up the staircase with Sol ascending impatiently behind him, taking two steps at a time and waiting in between for him to move out of her way. Who would hide a coffee shop?

He passed the first landing, and saw through a glass door what looked like the contents of several large antique shops compressed into one small, dark room. When he reached the second, he found himself faced with another door painted the same shade as the one on the ground floor, but painted with a new, glossy coat of red. Inscribed on a burnished bronze plaque at eye-level were the words: The Stowaway.

"Well go on then," Sol said behind him. "I'm uncaffeinated over here." Bruce stepped inside and found himself caught quite off guard by the interior. In contrast to the rest of the dingy building, this room was filled with light and warm smells of coffee beans and pastries. The soft hum of gentle conversation and laughter enveloped them as Sol led him to a table by the window, and from a turntable in the corner there emanated smoky strains of Nina Simone's voice. And yet, it was a quality apart from the cafe clichés that drew Bruce in; a kind of conspiratorial air. One felt initiated in a cozy secret, as though The Stowaway were their very own secret clubhouse.

"What'll you have?" Bruce returned his eyes to Sol's, and found, strangely, that she looked different. Not in any concrete way, but in these surroundings she herself seemed more familiar, like flesh and blood instead of the whirling dervish of swift little movements and apt phrases that she had been a few minutes ago. Yes, she had been just as pretty last night as she was right at that moment, but now the pink flush in her cheeks, the rarified freckles on her pert nose, the quirk of her straight brow had become personal.

"Uh… some sort of tea…" He fumbled to think of type other than tea.

"Not to worry, Mort will choose something for you," she said, gesturing to the enormous, grotesquely ugly man behind the counter; he looked like a Da Vinci sketch, with a stormy brow, a drastic hook to his nose, and a protruding jaw. When he saw Sol, he broke abruptly into a sunny smile, revealing a mouth of shapeless, overlapping teeth. "He has a sense for these things." So saying, she crossed the room in five large strides and immersed herself in conversation with the behemoth Mort, leaving Bruce to resume his examination of the breezy room and their fellow patrons.

Next to the gramophone, four college students had drawn a pair of tables together and chattered animatedly over the screens of their laptops. Every so often, the boy and the girl sitting diagonal from each other would bump feet under the table and smile surreptitiously at one another. Their friends didn't seem to notice.

At the corner table, sitting with his back against a wall, a lean, scruffy middle-aged man scribbled furiously in a black leather book, muttering under his breath.

In the center of the table, sipping their steaming drinks sedately, an elegant elderly couple, both dressed entirely in black, sat in complete silence and stared over each other's left shoulders. Bruce watched them for a while, but neither stirred from their impeccable posture.

"Eerie, isn't it?" Sol had returned, setting two mugs down on the table and sliding into the seat across from him. "I've spoken to them; they make perfectly delightful conversation, but the second it ends they go right back to staring." She grinned at him. "Now, since you obviously can't brief me on confidential material here, I suppose the exposition is up to me. What do you want to know?"

"Oh, I…" It was hard to tell, he reflected, which questions he could ask. He had grown up in the years before the Google and social networking sites, and he still found himself unwilling to use the internet to gather information about people. Given Tony's lifelong love affair with the press, Bruce was sure that a few words typed into the search engine could have clarified a few points on the tech wizard's relationship with Delilah Solomon, but instead he found himself struggling to construct a tactfully-phrased way to extract the answer from her. Sol took a long gulp from her mug, watching him intently.

"We were engaged," she said finally, just as he tried to center his thoughts with a sip of tea. He barely had time to register the warm, deliciously spicy taste before spitting it out in shock. Sol smiled sardonically.

"What?" he sputtered.

"You wanted to ask how Tony and I knew each other, I assume? Well, the short version is that I left New York on the evening before our wedding." She spoke evenly, as though imparting a recipe.

"What's the long version?" he asked, recovering his composure.

"You might need more tea."

Author's note: Now, when I came back to this story it was covered in a delicate layer of lovely, springy green moss and a few skeletons were reclining against it with friendly grins on their faces. I've tried to dust it off slightly with what I freely admit is a purely nebulous, transitional chapter, with hopes that now summer's come I might muster the resolve to eventually move the story along in an actual direction.

Thanks to Starcrier, Collykins, and Rainbor for your kind reviews; you have stroked the narcissism that motivates my writing.