Alone in a crowd...

~ Aiden entered the tiny cafe and did what he always did first. He stopped just inside the door and took a very deep breath. As always it smelled of coffee and chocolate and toasted bread and something else that always eluded him. Was it wood? A spice? Aiden never spent to long mulling over that, lest he ruin it by actually recognizing the scent.
It was a small place, tucked in between two buildings with a tiny sign out front that, though bad for hauling in more patron base, was good in the respect that the place was always quite, never crowded, and the people that were there you'd probably seen there many, many times before.
As it was such a long and narrow space the few seats near the bank of windows in the front were taken almost continually. Aiden was ok with that. He preferred to sit farther back, in one of the invitingly dim, by comparison at least, nooks or crannies. Today though he wasn't alone and not likely to want to sit in an isolated nook watching the world spin about him, while his own personal time stood still in its continuum. This time he went to one of the tables at the front, delicately sun splashed and miraculously uninhabited. He gestured Jacob to a chair.
“So what do you think? I've always liked this place. Found it by almost getting hit by a car.” Jacob glanced around and shot a charmingly casual smile at the cashier.
“Oh yeah? Nice place.”
The cashier blushed in an incredibly adolescent manner and went back to mixing the latte for the customer at the counter. She promptly messed up the order, blushed again and started over. Jacob tactfully didn't notice and scanned the large blackboard that the menu was scrawled on.
"So, what's good here?" ~
~ I made this!

Update: I am currently on page 16 of the would be manuscript. That is roughly a tenth of the size of an "average" novel. So far I think that it's going well. The pacing can be scary. The reassuring thing is that with the kind of format that I've used so far I think that I could go back and insert some additional scenes, should the central plot line end up shorter then I intended. I am constantly hit by tiny modules of panicked worry that this endeavor will not only come to nothing because of the fact that I am making a point of writing, but that I will also completely ruin the story because I rushed it. Hopefully I am wrong on both counts. I have gone back and rewritten one scene that I was not happy with. That was somewhat reassuring. Nothing is permanent.