by Amber Lin
“Now go on,” she said. “You pack. I’ll watch Bailey.”
Relieved, I gave her a peck on the cheek, which she accepted with the forbearance of a queen. I practically skipped down the steps with Colin at my heels. We each grabbed a handful of flattened boxes from the back of his truck before going to my apartment door.
As I put the key to the lock, the door swung open an inch. The lock itself cocked, exposing the circular hole it occupied in the door. I stood there blankly until Colin shook me.
“Go upstairs,” he said. “Now.”
It registered then—my apartment had been broken into. I ran upstairs and back into Shelly’s place, where I snatched Bailey up. She was safe. She squirmed, but I held her even tighter. Shelly questioned me, and I must have said something. What if Bailey had been there?
Shelly opened the door to Colin.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“Who could have…?” Shelly trailed off. It was better unfinished.
“Pack quickly,” Colin said.
I went cautiously back downstairs, as if I were going to survey the aftermath of a hurricane. But there was no disaster, not outwardly. Nothing had been taken—not that I had anything valuable—and nothing had been destroyed. Just the lock on the door, broken by some faceless person.
A violation. I should be used to them by now.
It was probably just a prank. Or a robbery that ended in disappointment when all they found were dolls and toys.
This place was crappy, but it had been home—mine. It shouldn’t matter because we were going to a place that was so much better—Colin’s. I tried to focus my thoughts on the practical, like throwing clothes into trash bags.
Colin loaded the crib and high chair and other furniture into his truck. That meant leaving behind my bed, my dishes, my dinette. Colin said he would come back later and take whatever was left to Goodwill. We filled up his truck and my car trunk, and I realized just how few material possessions I had.
Shelly brought Bailey down when we were finished.
She paused for another hug as she handed Bailey over. I glanced at Colin. He was strapping down the stuff in his truck.
“The lock—” I started.
“Don’t think about it,” she said.
She was right of course, but… “Am I making a mistake?”
“Of course not.” Her face was perfectly smooth, gaze clear, completely giving herself away, the faker.
“You’re a horrible liar.”
She raised two perfectly groomed eyebrows. “I have a buttload of clients who say otherwise.”
“Yeah, well, I know you too well.” I lowered my voice. “I’m scared.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” she said.
We both laughed. She always knew how to cheer me up.
Because, well, the worst was pretty bad, but then we’d both been through bad. What Shelly meant was that bad things happen, but we couldn’t let them rule us. Living was a choice.
Colin slammed the tailgate shut and turned to me.
He raised his eyebrow. You still in?
Yes, I answered silently.
* * * *
Bailey dug through my box of clothes while I hung them up in the closet. The room had two closets, so this one had been empty when we got here. Still, it was already stocked with hangers, and that had to count for something.
Colin stepped in. “I’ve got the last of it downstairs.”
“Thanks.” I wiped my palms on my jeans.
Christ, how awkward. Why had no one ever given me lessons on how to handle moving in with a guy I barely knew? Suddenly that seemed like a vital life skill.
“So.” I took one of my high heels out of Bailey’s hands and replaced it with an innocuous sweater. “It’s official.”
“Yeah.” He had an almost cautious expression, as if I was freaking out.
Was I freaking out? Possibly a little. “We’re cool, right?”
Humor glinted in his eyes, turning them from glacial to just chilly. “We’re good. But listen, I’ve got to head out.”
Alarm streaked through me. “You’re leaving?”
He frowned, just a crease of his forehead, but I didn’t think it was directed at me. “It just came up.” He shook his head as if to negate the importance. “I’ll be back by dinner.”
“Right, okay.”
He gave me a speculative look. I strove for casual and failed. With a grimace I took as an attempted smile, he left the room. A few minutes later I heard his truck bump out of the driveway.
“Bye-bye,” Bailey said.
“That’s right!” I winced as my feigned cheerfulness came out louder than anticipated. “He’s gone bye-bye. But he’ll be back soon, promise!”
Back by dinner, apparently. Should I make dinner? I made dinner for Bailey and myself every day, of course, but I wouldn’t feel right serving Colin spaghetti from a can. He probably thought I could cook, seeing as I baked, but it wasn’t the same. Give me flour and sugar over turmeric any day.
I quickly finished up with the clothes; then Bailey and I forged into the kitchen. I expected a barren refrigerator, save for lumpy milk and beer. There’d be stale chips in the cupboard for sure. Instead what I found was a chef’s paradise. A fully stocked fridge with vegetables. A pantry with buckets of grains I couldn’t even name.
He did own a restaurant. I was so fucked.
But I didn’t have a choice. Most likely he did expect dinner, and besides, it seemed fair and right. Even with my income from the bakery, I couldn’t cover a fraction of the costs of this place. Of course I should contribute this way.
I rummaged through the fridge, past fancy cheeses and free-range eggs and vegetables that just reeked of organic, when I heard the crash behind me. Bailey had helped herself to the pantry, her chubby arm jammed in a box of whole wheat graham crackers. She fished out a still-wrapped plastic package and held it up triumphantly.
“Crackers,” she said with a baby chuckle.
“Glad one of us is already at home.”
She fussed at the plastic until I pulled it open for her. That pantry would need reorganization—namely, the entire bottom shelf should be empty—but that would wait for another day.
I foraged for something easy, like pasta, and came up empty until I found the lasagna slices. Sure enough, there was marinara among the sauces, ricotta among the cheeses, and grass-fed ground beef in the freezer. Hell, I’d eaten lasagna before. Mostly frozen, but it was self-explanatory, what with those layers.
I even got fancy, sautéing onions and chopping parsley, while Bailey built a sand castle on the once-gleaming kitchen floor. I did a double take. Yes, she had crumbled what was probably an entire box of graham crackers into some sort of sandlike state. She sat in the middle, gleefully trailing her grubby fingers through the layer like it was her personal zen garden.
“Oh, Bailey,” I groaned.
She sucked on her crumb-coated fingers, but I couldn’t even be upset about the mess when the state of the entire kitchen smacked me like a frying pan. It was a disaster. The counters were piled with food in varying states of cooked.
I laid the layers of lasagna and stuck it in the oven, then set about cleaning. First I put away all the produce and ingredients. Then I grabbed the pan to wash it and burned my hand in the process.
Ouch. Leave it to some fancy brand of cookware to actually have fewer features than a cheapo knockoff, like say, plastic handles for safety. Probably they were expecting rich people not to be idiots and spring for pot holders. Fair enough.
Bailey watched me curiously as I ran my hand under the cold water, and I realized I’d been making monkeylike sounds in my pain.
A smile slid across my face. “Mommy silly?”
In response she puffed up proudly and presented her hand, covered in crumbs. “Cracker!”
My shoulders slumped. “Right.”
Although I had plenty left to do cleaning my own mess, I figured I’d fix the floor
first. For all I knew, he’d take one look at the nuclear wasteland that was his kitchen and order us out into the street. Okay, probably not that drastic, but it wouldn’t be good.
He wasn’t used to living with a kid. Even if he was, graham cracker snowfall was not an everyday occurrence. So I cleaned like a woman possessed. I would not even mention that regular graham crackers did not crumble on touching them. It was probably the grains, being whole as they were, but he wouldn’t hear that from me.
Possibly I was becoming unhinged. A hysterical laugh bubbled up, but I ruthlessly forced it down. I was going to make this work. Everything was going to be fine, and if it wasn’t…well. Well.
I swept up the crumbs, though the wet ones got caught in the broom’s bristles and had to be washed out. Then I went back over the floor with paper towels, but the particles had wormed their way into the grout, as if it could camouflage itself with cement. I scrubbed until my hand was tired, but this called for stronger stuff.
I ducked my head into the cabinet under the sink, rummaging for some harsh chemical shit to wipe those suckers out.
“Uh, Allie?”
In a knee-jerk reaction, I banged my head into the wood above me. A cry escaped me as tears sprang to my eyes. A sense of utter failure assailed me, and I contemplated just how long I could keep my head buried in the cupboard before it got weird. Not very long, it turned out, because Colin dragged me off the floor and into a kitchen chair with such horribly insensitive commentary as “Jesus” and “Are you okay?”
“I made a mess,” I said flatly.
In acknowledgment he gently pressed an ice pack to my head.
I flinched, then let him hold me steady. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey.” That was all he said, his chiding tone tempered with concern.
The tears fell in streams then, making my voice all high and wavery as I tried to explain. “I’m sorry. I know you said dinner, and I tried to make it, but I just didn’t… I didn’t have time, you know? Or the ability to cook, either. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” he cut in.
“But—”
“No, listen. I didn’t mean you’d have to cook. I can cook, or we can go out. Don’t stress out.”
“I am so beyond stressed,” I said, watery.
“Let’s order a pizza.”
The consideration and utter simplicity of the gesture touched me. “Really?”
He handed the ice pack off to me and pulled out his cell phone. “Ordering now. What do you want?”
“But the organic,” I said. “And the grass feeding. I know you don’t just order pizza.”
“Pepperoni with extra chemicals? Got it,” he said to me before he turned to the phone to place a real order.
I swiped at the tears, but they didn’t want to stop. While relief flooded me, I toyed with the empty box of lasagna noodles on the kitchen table. Idly I read the fine print.
“Hell,” I said. “You’re supposed to boil these first?”
“Silly mommy,” Bailey said.
* * * *
If I thought I’d made a mess in Colin’s kitchen, it was nothing compared to the bakery.
Cabinet doors were open, pans littered the countertops, and a fine layer of flour coated the entire room. It hadn’t even been this messy that time a hailstorm had knocked in the front windows.
I stepped inside, my mouth open. No one was in the back. The restroom was dark. I peeked into the storefront. Empty.
That left Rick’s office. The door was shut, and I was almost afraid to knock. The place looked like a crime scene. First-degree baking by an idiot, maybe. I couldn’t muster up the proper seriousness when the place looked like a supersized snow globe.
A deep breath. Knowing Rick, this was going to get strange. Well, stranger than usual.
I knocked. “Rick?”
Scuffling sounds from within. Then Rick poked his head out the door. “Allie. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my shift. What happened?”
“What happened?” he repeated.
I closed my eyes tight, prayed for patience, then opened them. “Here. In the kitchen. It’s like a flour bomb went off.”
“Oh, right.” He glanced past me as if just noticing the mess.
I narrowed my eyes. “Seriously, what happened?”
“Nothing. No work today. Bakery’s closed. Go home.” And he shut the door in my face.
Oh man, I would love nothing better than to go home, to pick up Bailey from Shelly’s and maybe even convince Shelly to spend the afternoon out with us. But even as I planned my afternoon off, I stomped my foot. A cloud of flour rose up, and I sneezed. I couldn’t leave. Rick was a friend. An annoying, clearly deranged friend, but there was no way I could walk away from this. Whatever this was.
I knocked again, harder. “Rick!”
A thud and then a curse. He opened the door. “Why did you yell?”
“Let me in.”
A pause. “No.”
“Then come out here.”
“Definitely no.”
“You have exactly three seconds to open this door, or I swear to God I will…”
Before I had to make up a false threat, he opened the door. Files and papers flooded the small office. The cheap wood furniture peeked out between crumpled pages. I shouldn’t have even been surprised.
Rick turned away and squatted to rifle through a bookcase. Rather halfheartedly, considering the magnitude of disarray.
“What the hell, Rick? Now.”
He stopped and bowed his head. Then he turned and stood, with so much raw emotion on his face that my breath caught. In the year and a half that I’d worked here, I’d never figured him out, but in this moment his eyes told the whole story.
Nothing so mundane as details. The broken, raw, painful part of me recognized the same thing in him. We stood there, connected by this nothing, and everything. It was uncomfortably intimate. More intimate than sex, but I’d learned long ago that the recognition of pain was so much more potent than the sharing of pleasure.
He leaned in, his intent clear. I didn’t want to kiss him. He was a friend to me. Maybe even a surrogate father, since mine never came around. And there was Colin.
I jerked back, just slightly.
He froze, and then smiled a small, sad good-bye. It was a relief, to see he understood and accepted it, and a confirmation that we’d been real friends. A small rush of air escaped me. It was a miserable thing, not knowing a friend from an enemy.
“Allie,” he whispered. “Come with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Away. Let’s leave this place. I’ve got a little money saved up. It’ll be just us.”
Even if there wasn’t Colin or Shelly, I wouldn’t have. Probably not. But stupidly, the first thing that popped into my head was, “What about Bailey?”
“She’ll come, too, of course.”
I shook my head against the crazy. “What are you saying? We aren’t going anywhere. You have the bakery. And I have…well, I have roots here.” That was an exaggeration. I had history here, in this city, which wasn’t quite the same. And I had Shelly, who’d just as soon transplant with me.
Colin counted as roots, however young and tender they may be.
I had to see him again. Right now.
Rick was searching again, picking through the papers like they were rubble from an explosion and babbling about finding things and running out of time. I wanted to help him, but sometimes I had to learn when to walk away. When I wasn’t really wanted or needed. And Rick, for all that he cared about me in his own way and had asked me to go away with him, was in his own world. I was a prop, not a player.
I put a hand on Rick’s arm, and he stopped moving. He looked up at me, lost.
“I’m going to go now. I’ve moved in with someone.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I told him. “But…I quit.”
The
relief on his face was answered by gratitude within me. There weren’t words, so I pressed a soft kiss to his lips before leaving the bakery for the last time.
Chapter Seven
“Is living with a man all it’s cracked up to be?” Shelly asked as she examined her nails.
I studied her, unsure if she was being sarcastic or not. A mist of caution had risen between us in the few days I’d been at Colin’s. “Oh, you know. The toilet seat’s up, and there’s extra laundry. That’s about it.”
She glanced up, a small curve to her lips. “You do his laundry?”
My lips answered hers in a smile. “Yeah.”
“Isn’t it sort of…weird? I mean, underwear.” She lowered her voice—this from the girl who’d taught me everything I knew about how to give great head.
I ducked behind my pizza slice as I took a bite. It was weird. Blowing a guy was one thing, folding his underwear seemed so…personal.
Still, I’d insisted. I picked up all the housework and even got a cookbook. It was the least I could do, considering I wasn’t contributing financially.
Speaking of which. “Where’ve you been staying? I stopped by the other day.”
Shelly grabbed another slice from the box and began picking off the toppings. She always picked everything off, though she insisted on ordering supreme. It added variety, she always said. “At a friend’s place.”
“A friend?” I didn’t mean to sound so skeptical, but she and I weren’t exactly the book club type. It had just been me and her. At least since Jacob had…well, since Jacob.
“A client,” she said.
That was new. Brand, spanking, completely against the rules new. I opened my mouth—to warn her, to chastise her—but she was a big girl, and I wasn’t quite that much of a hypocrite. In fact, that meant she was now living with a guy too, although I doubted he could pay her enough to do his laundry.
“So, did you bring me something fancy?” I asked.
“Some of my best stuff,” she said. “What’s it for?”
I sighed. “Colin’s taking me to the ballet.”
“Seriously?” She whistled. “Classy.”
