The Aftermath

by Matayo, Amy

  “I’m not even halfway through, and it’s already ten p.m. There’s no way I’m going to finish on time.” Mr. Joyner and the others left an hour ago, after the baking was finished, and I’m staring at the tops of over three hundred un-iced vanilla cupcakes. Chad stayed behind for moral support—as he explained it—seeing as he can’t help with the decorating. He tried one and failed dismally, so he’s been standing nearby and watching me ever since.

  “You are going to finish on time,” he says, “and I’m going to stand here and keep pouring coffee down your throat all night if that’s what I have to do to help.”

  I tingle in places I probably shouldn’t feel things, but the picture in my mind is highly inappropriate and more than a little hot. I turn away and reach for a new bowl of frosting so he can’t see me blush. My face grows hotter before cooling down a bit, and this takes much longer than it should.

  “Okay then, get the coffee.” He stands up and pours some while I take the opportunity to watch through lidded lashes. I can’t help it. I could count on two hands, and probably both feet, how many times I’ve been kissed in my life, though I’d rather not cheapen things by assigning it a number. Also, the number is embarrassingly low.

  I barely even remember what really kissing someone feels like, let alone if I could still even do it. The one time he tried to kiss me, I broke away fast. But kissing is like riding a bike, right? A skill you never quite lose? Surely I could jump back on and get to pedaling if the moment presented itself again, so to speak.

  My face goes up in flames again. I’m pathetically embarrassed by my own thoughts, and that says a lot about me, doesn’t it? Girl hardly kisses. Girl doesn’t date. Girl can’t even have an intimate thought about an attractive man inside her own head without wanting to bury herself in quicksand and let it suck her under.

  “Do you want it or not?”

  “Um…what?”

  Chad startles me with his words and—wait, what is he talking about? Surely I didn’t say something out loud again. Surely he can’t read my mind. Why is he grinning at me? Oh God, please kill me now.

  “What?” I say again, a little more confident this time. Or desperate. That’s probably a better word.

  “The coffee. Do you want it, or would you rather I keep standing here and holding it in front of your mouth a while longer?”

  “Oh, coffee. Yes, I want it.” I clutch my chest in relief, realizing too late that I’m still holding a knife covered in frosting. I look down and yep, it’s all over the front of my shirt. I watch as a large glob right above my left boob breaks away and slides to my waist, making this horrendous look complete. Vague memories of wanting to make a memorable impression when I got dressed earlier this morning flash through my mind like a dismal credit score update.

  Sorry Miss Floss, you qualify for nothing.

  Something tells me Chad will remember this. Right after he mentally stamps “rejected” across my forehead.

  “So you’re really serious about baking, aren’t you? You’re taking that whole Wear Your Art thing to a whole new level.”

  I groan, bringing a hand to my face. The hand still holding the knife. I am ninety-nine percent certain I just jabbed more icing into my hair. That number jumps to one hundred when Chad laughs. I raise my head to look at him helplessly. He’s too busy cackling to notice.

  “Shut up, Chad.” I reach for a towel and try to remove some from my hairline, but it feels like I’m only making it worse. I make a very unflattering sound when I touch a bit of frosting stuck to my eyebrow. Normally I’m more than capable of baking without covering myself in extra ingredients. Since the storm, I can’t seem to keep the clumsiness to a minimum. Must be stress.

  “Here, let me have that,” Chad says, sliding the towel out of my hand. He uses it to dab at my forehead and hairline, but when he grimaces, it’s clear it isn’t working well. “Man, you’ve made a mess. It’s worse than I thought.”

  I can’t stop the bubble of laughter that works its way up my throat. He glances at me and smiles, and then something shifts. We’re close. Too close. I’m holding my breath. He still has the towel pressed to my face, but it slides slowly down to my cheek, like a caress. My lips part and the first thing I notice when I remember to breathe is his heady scent of mint and sandalwood. He masks the scent of sugar to the point I no longer notice it. I notice nothing except how close I am to Chad and how sexy his blue eyes are. Like diving head-first into the ocean, to the deepest part where the blue meets black and creates some exotic new color you never knew existed before.

  That is the exact color of his eyes. I haven’t thought of anything to describe his lips, even though my eyes keep drifting to them and I should have the color memorized by now. Red? Coral? I lean a little closer to get a good look and feel my eyes begin to close, which makes examining his lips a little difficult. Maybe I could taste them instead.

  “Well…” Chad clears his throat, and my eyes fly open. Pink. His lips are pink. Or maybe that’s the color of my face. “I guess you’re capable of cleaning your own face.” He lays the towel on my shoulder and gives it a pat like I’m a naughty cat who needs soothing, and my face heats a few more degrees. I’m fairly certain my face will stay this way forever.

  “Y…yes,” I stammer, pulling the towel into my hands. “I can definitely clean my own face. Been bathing myself for years now without any help from anyone.” My attempt at lightening the mood comes out as awkward and bumbling. “Thanks for the towel. It was very helpful.” I take a step back, silently commanding myself to stop talking. “Let me just look at the damage in the mirror real quick.”

  I take a few steps away, fleeing the room slowly and calmly though my insides are raging. Right before I turn the corner, I risk a glance over my shoulder. What I see makes me stop and smile to myself.

  Chad wipes both hands down his face, closing his eyes and raking his jaw like he’s in pain.

  Pain. Embarrassment. Two very different emotions tied so closely together.

  It’s nice to know—even if for a moment—that I’m not the only one who’s feeling things.

  “What do you think?” Chad says when I come out of the bathroom. It was bad, the way I looked. Not only had I iced half of my own head, but frosting was caked in both eyebrows, and there was a dot of yellow icing on an eyelash. How did I not see that? Where did the yellow even come from?

  He’s holding up a cupcake, clearly proud of whatever he’s made. And let me be clear: it isn’t clear.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Barney the purple dinosaur.” He says this like it’s just so obvious. It isn’t.

  I’m weirdly sentimental and perplexed at the same time.

  “Oh, I see it now. Sort of. But…for a wedding?”

  His face falls, and I realize he’s momentarily forgotten the mission. “Oh yeah, a wedding. I guess they won’t want this one.”

  “Probably not, but I’ll eat it. That’s saying a lot because I never eat my own work. Feels a bit like cannibalism.”

  “I would eat this stuff all the time if I worked in a bakery. And that’s hardly cannibalistic.”

  I reach for an unfrosted cupcake and raise an eyebrow. “Oh, you think so? Make four hundred of these things every day and then tell me if you still feel that way.”

  He shrugs. “I see your point.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  We’re silent for a long moment, me dabbing on frosting at super-sonic speed while Chad sits across from me and observes. My mouth opens and closes a few times, on the verge of asking what he’s thinking, but I don’t. I’m afraid to. I don’t know him well enough, and the questions going through my mind might dangle on the brink of inappropriate. He might not be the kind who likes to open his soul and spill his secrets, though Lord knows I want to know them. One-on-one is my favorite form of communication. Put me in a group, and I just get silly, but put me with a single individual, and I’ll go deep.

  I’m second-guessing that sentiment when
Chad hits me with this:

  “Where does the accent come from? It isn’t quite Southern, but not quite northern either.”

  My bag of frosting goes a bit limp. Deep is one thing; sad depressing stories of a tragic childhood are quite the other. I’ve managed to keep most of them to myself, and I’ve liked it that way all this time. Which makes things especially weird when I feel an urge to share the story with Chad. Still, I’m not a jump in with both feet kind of girl. I like to ease my way forward, test the water with a toe, judge the temperature, and run like hell if it’s anything less than perfect. Too hot, too cold, too noisy, and I’m out of there.

  “You noticed that?”

  “It was the first thing I noticed, right after the hair.”

  I pick up the knife and point it at him. “Careful, I know how to ruin a perfectly nice style in only a few seconds.” He laughs, just like I’d hoped. I’ve grown to love the sound of it in such a short time.

  I need a minute to collect my thoughts, both my thoughts about Chad and about my parents. There are so many things I could say, yet not even one of them seems like the right place to start. They’re all so personal, so bleak, so far removed from what feels like an appropriate conversation to have while decorating cupcakes. It strikes me then. Everything about what we’re doing is entirely inappropriate considering the aftermath of what’s happening around us. The mere idea of painting roses at a time like this is preposterous. Maybe there’s no such thing as appropriate and inappropriate. Maybe there’s only here and now because tomorrow may never come and the moments that matter might be gone in the time it takes us to assess their worthiness.

  Worth is relative. I learned that at an early age, long before other kids knew how to tie their shoes. What might seem insignificant to most people grew in importance to me. When you’re pulling on the string of your mother’s red sweater one minute and lying under a bent and broken automobile with concrete and bricks piled around you the next, all you want to see is that simple red string. When you find out you’ll never see it again…well that’s the point when all the strings in your own life break. Even the ones holding all your sanity and self-worth together.

  I take a deep breath and launch into the story.

  “I lived in Boston until I was seven. It’s where I was raised until my grandparents brought me here. My father grew up in Missouri—in Joplin. My grandparents moved to Springfield after Joplin was hit with a horrible tornado, if that isn’t perfect irony.” Chad mutters My God under his breath, and I glance up at him before curving the edge of a tiny yellow petal. He’s right; how many things is one person supposed to take? And he doesn’t even know the whole of it yet. “Both my parents died in a car accident. I was the only survivor. I can still remember the ditch, the rain, standing out there alone, my mother’s red sweater…”

  “Riley,” is all he says, and I shrug. There aren’t any platitudes or sentiments that can make the scenario sound better.

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “My mother was pregnant at the time. A boy. They told me the morning of the day it happened. One minute I had two parents who loved me and a brother on the way that I was fully intending to share my love of reading with, and the next minute I was moving to a state I’d never heard of or visited. For my first seven years with my grandmother, life was rough. For the next ten, it was better at times, but occasionally it was even worse. Especially for her. I didn’t have the best attitude, and I did everything I could to make her prove how much she cared, in the form of pushing her away. In the middle of it all, my grandfather wound up leaving. He didn’t want to raise another child, particularly not a young girl he’d only met once, not when they were so close to retirement.”

  “That might be the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard. No offense.”

  “No, you’re right. But because of me, my grandma lost her son and her husband in a two-year span.”

  “That wasn’t because of you. That was because of science and the fact that sometimes nature can be ruthless. Case in point.” He gestures to the room as proof. “And that was because of a self-centered man who couldn’t see past his own desires to pay attention to what really mattered. It was not, however, because of you. You are not responsible for the way other people treat you, and you certainly weren’t responsible for your grandfather being a spineless coward. Again, no offense.”

  “None taken.” I whisper the words around a closed throat; the lump is that big.

  “Good. Two men might have left you Riley, but only one chose to. Don’t let one bad apple ruin the whole orchard. Good men do still exist.”

  I blink at him, wondering if he’s talking about himself or just making a broad statement. Either way, I suspect he might be right. Thinking something is right and believing it is not the same thing, however. Will I ever learn to trust anyone?

  I spend a few silent moments reflecting on his words, on the very real fact that he touched something deep inside me that needed to hear them. For the last twenty years, I’ve blamed myself. My parents died in front of me. My grandmother lost her comfortable life trying to raise me. And now Paul is missing because he worked for me. Even this storm and the havoc it’s caused has felt like my fault, because I’m programmed to go there in my mind. Trouble seems to follow me. Men leave. That much is clear and has been my entire life. But maybe those things are a coincidence rather than a direct cause. Maybe things just happen, not because of the person, but because life is ruthless, just like Chad said.

  Will I ever stop blaming myself?

  I set down a finished cupcake and reach for a new one. “I’ll think about what you said. Just to warn you, it might be kind of hard to change a way of thinking that’s been with me my whole life.”

  Surprising me, he laughs. “No kidding. One of these days I should take my own advice.” He pushes the head half of his Barney cupcake toward me without elaborating. I don’t ask for an explanation. Maybe one day he’ll tell me. “Here you go. Eat up, because we have about a million hours to go. Want coffee?”

  “I do. Exactly a million or a little less?”

  “More, actually. Like, a million point two. You getting tired?”

  “Yes. And bored.”

  “I will try very hard not to be insulted by that comment.”

  I laugh at his overdone dejectedness. “I’m not bored with you, just with standing here. We still have…three hundred of these to go. Maybe more.”

  “We have two hundred and ninety-four to go, so that’s some good news, at least.”

  “You counted?”

  “Yep. I’m bored too. Hang on a second.” I eye him as he leaves the room, curious as to what he’s up to. Roses. That’s what the bride wants on her cupcakes. Multi-colored roses in yellow, white, pink, and red—no other variation. Normally I love the flower. I’m currently one hundred six roses in and have already made the decision that if I had been the Beast, I might have let that blasted rose die and willingly lived out the rest of my life as a deformed, temperamental monster if it meant I would never have to look upon one again.

  Chad walks back in with his cell phone and two bar stools, plunking one down behind me and giving it a little push so that I have no choice but to bend my knees and sit. I giggle, then slide onto it without missing a dang rose petal.

  “Okay, I get the hint. I’m sitting, sir.”

  “Good. One problem solved. Now, what music do you like to listen to? I have playlists.”

  “Hmmm…a Chad Gamble playlist should be an interesting thing to behold.”

  He looks up from his phone, a dare in his eyes. “Are you implying I might not have the best taste in music?”

  It’s exactly what I’m implying. Something tells me classical music is the dominating selection in his library. But of course, I play dumb.

  “Of course not. I’m sure what you have is riveting. Just don’t play country music. Anything but that.”

  He laughs, and for some reason it seems conspiratorial like I’m missing an ins
ide joke. “You don’t like country?” he asks.

  “Nope. Hate it with every fiber of my being.”

  He studies me; that smile staying put. “Not even, say…Tim McGraw? Or Teddy Hayes?”

  I roll my eyes. “I’ve never liked Tim McGraw, and what is it with that other guy? He’s on every magazine cover this week, and he’s not even that cute.”

  His mouth hangs open, but the grin is still there. “You don’t think he’s cute?”

  I snort. “No. Why, do you?”

  Chad laughs so hard I think he might hyperventilate, and I just watch him. I have no idea what’s so funny. Maybe he has a thing for the guy and can’t believe I don’t share it? I set down a newly designed white rose and reach for another cupcake, waiting for him to respond.

  “No, I really don’t. It’s just that most people do.” He settles a bit and shakes his head. “You’re alright, Riley. Much cooler than I first gave you credit for.”

  I give him a look. “Again, your compliments could use work. But thanks. I think?”

  “Trust me. It’s a genuine compliment. Take it that way.”

  “Okay, I will. Now, why don’t you show me what you’ve got?”

  “What?” he says like I’ve caught him off guard. It’s cute, watching him stumble a bit, trying to grasp for my meaning. Maybe he’s the one who should be on magazine covers, I think, then feel myself blush.

  “Your playlist. I’d like to hear what Chad Gamble thinks qualifies as good music. If it doesn’t include country, you’re off to a good start.”

  Understanding dawns, and he nods. “Oh, right. Well, I happen to be a bit of a Teddy Hayes fan, but I think I can manage to find a list that doesn’t include his songs.”

  “Thank God.”

  He laughs again, then starts the first song. I have no idea what in the world is so funny, but he’s a Def Leppard fan, so I don’t ask.

  I just listen and paint another rose, feeling more awake than I’ve felt in a while.

  CHAPTER 12

  Chad