by Fifi Flowers
Thankfully our conversation changed between bites and only involved what we were eating and where we had other delightful tasty morsels. That was something I could rattle on about happily—no food phobias.
“So have you lived on the island long?”
“About five years full time… I have been coming to stay during the summers mainly since I was a little girl… with Pansie. We stayed with a relative during school break. We ran all over or I should say rode all over, on our bikes. Beach days, park days, sailing with friends and we even went down the strand to camp—marshmallow roasting and all. I have great memories I will never forget…”
“Are you still staying with a relative? The reason you wouldn’t invite me for a sleepover? Or even let me pick you up? Would your relative not approve of me?”
“You’re full of questions.” I laughed. “No my aunt is gone now. Just me living alone… with twenty cats.” Then we both laughed. “The truth is I’m a cat lady.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to cover your tracks. Your earlier fib.”
“The real story is that… it’s not much. It’s a place I would invite Mike to… but not Avery. I’m proud of my little shack but… you have millions. You don’t want to slum.”
“Wow, Marzi, I’m hurt that you think of me that way. Especially after what I told you about my mother.” He removed his sunglasses as if he wanted me to see that he was sincere.
“That’s exactly why. I didn’t want you to think I was some gold digger.” I looked down and fiddled with the fruit on top of my tart with my fork.
“First, even shacks on this island are worth a mint. Second, I don’t care whether you have money or not. It’s that for better or worse, for richer or poorer til death us do part feeling I have about you. I love you, Marzi…”
“Funny you should say all of that. I’ve recently become a wealthy woman. I accepted an offer for my place and I’m getting ready to move—boxes are everywhere.”
“Then you really need to show it to me before you abandon it.”
Trying not to cry at his word abandon, I bit my lip and nodded my head. Why not make one last memory in the tiny cottage that was once filled with laughter and lots of love. Love. Was I ready to speak up and profess my own love to him? How many times did he have to say it before I did? But my thoughts always ran back to whether he actually love-loved me and it wasn’t more like lust. I mean… the beginning of our relationship… the first day I met him I let him fuck me. We just had our first date after weeks of sharing our bodies with each other under a false pretense that he was a delivery man not some business owner that could buy and sell Cafélicious.
“What are you thinking, Marzi?” I looked up and stared into his dark eyes.
“I love you.”
“Take your sunglasses off and tell me again. I need to see those pretty blues.”
Removing my sunglasses, I stared at him. “I love you.”
“I don’t believe it. Take me home and prove it.”
And just like that, we figured out where our cars were and he pulled around to the parking lot where I had parked and followed me to the love shack… my one-time for the last time love shack. I had never brought anyone there in the years that I had lived there. It was a special place and I couldn’t imagine bringing just anyone there and he was the first grown up man that I had ever truly loved. It was true. It felt right. Maybe we started as fuck buddies, but it never seemed like nothing, it was something. It was something that turned into something more and had a future outside of my pastry kitchen. Suddenly, I couldn’t get to my cottage fast enough. I couldn’t wait to pull into my driveway, get out of Cherry and rush into his arms.
Chapter Eight…
Some things didn’t always turn out how you plan them in your head. Some things sometimes went terribly wrong. That was one of those times. What I anticipated being a new beginning, a new experience and wonderful—was just the opposite. The minute I stepped out of my car and started for Avery I saw a very confused look on his face and it wasn’t a pleasant one. Then words escaped his lips that had my whole body freezing and stiffening, and I stood in place with my mouth agape.
“Holy shit! You’re the love child I have been trying to get to sell.” The last part of his outburst was softer as if he realized what he had said too late and saw by the look on my face that he had struck a chord. A very deep cord that I had been struggling with for months since the offers started arriving on my doorstep.
“What?!” He knew me… He knew my aunt… He knew my history… He stole my house, swindling it away from me.
“I bought the main house when I heard they wanted to sell it so I made them an offer before they put it up on the market.”
“So you are the one that paid me two-point-five million dollars for my tiny house?”
“Apparently so. The property is listed under a trust. I had no way of knowing it was you, specifically, that I was contacting. Everything about the property has been very secretive.”
“Yes, and I recently learned why. The love child part… but you knew…” My voice was soft and I wasn’t sure that he could even hear me since he didn’t say a word. “What do you want with the extra land?” Not that it was even important, but I had to know whether he was keeping it for a guesthouse or demolishing it. My chest ached at the thought of that, but I had to know it was an option. My beginning gone.
“I want to scale the house down to a one-story which requires more acreage and I’d like to put in a pool since there is no beach access for blocks. Now, that I know it is you, it kind of changes things. First, I don’t want to take anything from you. Secondly, not knowing you were part of the property, I hoped that you would be sharing the new house with me. I envisioned us filling it up with little ones of our own.”
“The cottage?”
“We can keep it and use it as a pool house… guest house.” I didn’t say anything. There was so much to process. He may not have known that I was the owner but he knew of the love child… me. “Please, Marzi, look at the plans before you say no. It won’t be the old house. It will be gone and…”
I couldn’t hear anymore and stopped him. “You need to leave. I need to finish packing to move. I have ten more days and then it’s yours.”
“Marzi…” He reached out to me and I stepped back, looking down. “You don’t…”
“Please, Avery.” I bit my lip to keep my emotions in check and walked to lock up my car as he walked to his to leave. One last glance in his direction, I saw that he was sitting in his car staring at me. I quickly went to my door, unlocked it, stepped in, and collapsed to the floor, weeping like a little baby.
First thing the next morning at the café, I called the restaurant supply company and made sure that I had a new delivery man and asked that deliveries be on any other day but Tuesday. I couldn’t bear the reminder of our special mornings. Then I called the culinary school looking for another intern—just because I wasn’t going to see Avery anymore, didn’t mean that I couldn’t still take time off for me. Then I left work on time every day, speeding up my exit from the cottage, moving my clothing and what I planned to keep into Pansie’s place by the end of the weekend. Driving away from my Aunt Moreen’s beachy shack, I said an apology and hoped that she forgave me.
My new schedule with more downtime than ever gave me more time to spend with my mother. I taught her interns some intricate designs with marzipan and I learned that my parents had been divorced for fifteen years. My mother never even told my Aunt Moreen, worried that her sister would think that maybe she had made the wrong decision, giving me up to what she thought was the perfect couple. Keeping up the ruse, my parents lived together but separate until I left for college. I had never thought twice about them telling me they wanted to redo my girlie childhood bedroom, and asking me to pack everything up. When I used to visit with them they usually insisted that we meet somewhere to eat—saying I needed to try some foodie place. A couple times that I had gone to see t
hem, it was at what I thought was their new townhouse. In reality, it was my father’s new place as my mother had moved into a loft apartment above her cake shop. Looking back, I see that there were signs everywhere and I shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was to find out. Fifteen years is a long time to pretend.
And although it was a bit of a jolt in my life, my parents weren’t the biggest jaw-dropping thing to happen to me. Finding out that I was pregnant definitely took the cake over everything going on around me. I didn’t even bother with the over-the-counter kits, I just made an appointment with my doctor so I could get started on the road to having a healthy baby. I knew that I was pregnant. I had never missed a cycle in my life and I knew that it was possible from the first and only time I was unprotected. The delivery man had done an incredible job of giving me his goods. There was no logical thinking going on between us, just a spur of the moment lustful rush to fuck like rabbits. Maybe that’s not the best description as he hadn’t mounted me from the back, but lifted me with his big strong arms onto him. I don’t believe there are any animals that mate like that, but we fucked like wild animals, nonetheless. Neither of us had worried about disease or, even, the possibility of conceiving a human being.
Being with child, I had new decisions to make regarding Avery. Losing the cottage to him was the least of my problems… worries… the baby was not a problem. I knew that I had the means to raise him or her by myself but I didn’t really want to. I wanted the whole perfect family scenario that I thought my parents had raised me in, until recently. The question was how and when did I tell him? Not knowing, I kept my results to myself and thankfully I didn’t have the usual morning sickness so many women spoke about. Another plus was that none of the ingredients I worked with had smells that turned my stomach. I did have an appetite and I had an urge for naughtiness even more than my usual healthy sexual appetite.
With each lustful thought, my desire to avoid Avery was waning but being pregnant, I really needed to think things through and decide what I wanted for my future… for our future. There would have to be some communication between us as we were going to be connected for life with our own love child. Strange that I was living in what was once the guesthouse of a home he had bought—wanting me to move into the main house. Something about the whole situation I think was why I found it so difficult to just accept him and move into a place that had so many memories for so many people. Could Avery help me move past them? Could we make new happy ones there?
Chapter Nine…
I hadn’t spoken to Avery in weeks though he texted me at least once a day—I deleted his words without looking at them first—then curiosity got the better of me. They were simple, “I love you,” was mainly what they said. Along with his messages, I started receiving strange phone calls that involved him:
“Hello, I am a rep for Luciana Marchesa & Savona Messina. They would love to dress you in one of their couture gowns for Avery Dalton’s charity gala event at The US Grant. Also they have a stylist that would be perfect for you; she works exclusively with their ready-to-wear line—sundresses too.”
Stylist, couture, gala… I wondered who Avery was taking in his coordinating tux.
“How does it feel to be dating Billionaire Ches Dalton and Lola Loren’s son?”
Billionaire? I had mentioned Avery having millions, not billions. My two-point-five million dollar buy-out had probably been like pocket change to him. What else was Dalton Inc. part of, besides restaurant supplies? Avery probably didn’t even work at the warehouse. He probably had an office in a downtown high-rise. He probably owned the building. He probably owned shares or a stake in the hotel. In light of these phone attacks, it seemed there was a lot more to him and his family that I would never know about… His father, however, might be happy to know that they had mentioned his name first in their line of questioning. I had to grin over that.
“Whose dress were you wearing at the Adaza rooftop? And was the sundress at the Villa Nueva from the same designer’s line of casual wear? We recognized the shoes, but let me just confirm… heels were Jimmy Choo and those great sandals were from the new bou-chic sandal designers Fritzi Mitzi… I am correct, right?”
I wondered first, if these people ever took a breath when they attacked people with questions. And then I wondered where they were hiding to notice and how did they know about my clothing without checking labels. I couldn’t confirm their questions without checking myself. Lastly, they’d be really disappointed to know that I never bought any of the clothing or shoes and that my mother was sent fashions and gave me the ones that she thought looked too young for her. And wait until they figured out that my mother was Linny Morrow, Celebrity Cake Baker.
I stopped taking calls after the last one about my clothing. Next, they would be asking me about my lingerie, bath products, hair and make-up… And then, as if right on cue, Vivienne came barreling through the café door just as we had finished the morning rush and were about to greet the mommy-crowd after school drop-off.
“If you go to anyone else for your la la hair and makeup and use any other products than Rhett Scarlett… I. Will. Fucking. Flip. My. Lid. Oh my gawd!”
Oh my God was right. Vivienne had officially been added to my crazy circus of phone calls. “What is going on? I am being called by strangers and then you burst in the door shouting at me. You’d think I had been out with a prince or something.”
“He practically is! Do you not read the rags? The gospel truth?”
Vivienne’s perfectly made up eyes, with precise shadow and mascara, were glazed over, staring at me like I was the mental one to not be aware of what was going on in the celebrity world of gossip.
“No, sorry.” It was the simple truth.
I must have really upset her because she flew into a friendly tirade about how important it was to keep up on current events. Fashion trends, Beauty trends, Movie trends, and especially Celebrity trends. She sounded just like the people who had been contacting me and I was concerned that she was about to pass out. Moving away from her as she continued, I signaled Saylor and she quickly started making her a minty cappuccino as I grabbed for a couple of my signature orgasm cookies. All the while, Pansie sat Vivienne down at a table so she didn’t fall over from lack of blood flow. And Evie and Vixen moved about trying to take care of the other customers who were listening to our resident hairdresser and friend.
Once Vivienne had coffee and baked goods in front of her she began to calm down along with the fact that I assured her that I would never use anyone for my hair and makeup needs but her and her friend Scarlett’s products.
One person calmed, I still had to deal with my daily life of baking and walking home to my new temporary housing that looked out to the harbor. The view had me thinking of another location that showed a different direction of the same harbor with much scarier windows that I refused to be pushed up against—no matter how good the fucking may have been. Avery, of course, came to mind when I thought about the hotel room… so many things had me thinking about him. Then to be receiving phone calls about him and messages from him, there was no escape. Not that I truly wished to wipe him completely from my life, but I felt like I needed some time to think things through. Things weren’t simple between us anymore and I had to figure out how to handle moving forward as friends or possibly more. My mind was jumbled about everything that had happened; finding out about my biological mother and Avery taking my home gifted from her—even if I had agreed to that without knowledge of who was buying it from me.
If he wasn’t enough to deal with, I was paid a visit by my half-sister Sharene—Travis confirmed as my father, his children were blood-related to me. I recognized her when I walked out from the kitchen to meet her after Pansie said someone was looking for me. Promising it wasn’t Avery, I emerged. I hadn’t seen Sharene since I was around sixteen or so, maybe younger—I wasn’t sure of our age difference. Pansie and I were riding our bikes by as she was packing her things into their car to drive her to college—
she waved at us and her mother smacked her arm, turning her away from us. She was always nice to me, I remember, but whenever her mother was near things changed. Years later I knew why, I was the love child and a reminder that her husband loved another woman.
Grabbing a couple mini-cakes and two coffees, I led Sharene to a table after we doctored our javas the same way; cream and half a packet of raw sugar. To my surprise, she hugged me before we sat down and I embraced her back with two tears sliding down my cheeks. I apologized, wiping my eyes as we each took a seat, explaining that I was an emotional wreck. She smiled and dabbed at her own eyes and then went on to tell me a story I had yet to hear—I wasn’t even certain if my mother knew everything. That was a silly statement. My mother and Moreen were like Pansie and me, we all told each other everything. My guess was that she wanted me to learn things on my own from people like my sister, half wasn’t sounding friendly being in Sharene’s presence. Especially once she began to confide in me about what had happened between her parents and where my Aunt Moreen came into the mix.
“My mother started the deception, my father was a good man. Raymond, my brother, is not my father’s but he didn’t learn that until years later when Raymond was in a car accident and they were asking for blood donors. My mother confessed on the spot, but by then my sister Teresa and I were born—my father would never leave us or her completely. He did, however, rekindle a romance with your mother… sorry… your Aunt Moreen, offering her a place to live on the property. She knew what my mother had done to him; getting him to marry her claiming to be pregnant with his child. My father loved Moreen for years before my mother came along, but they had some kind of fallout and… well… he moved on.”
“You must’ve hated my aunt,” I said watching her reaction though it didn’t change to a frown. However, to be fair, she was making a yummy sound as she removed a fork from her mouth after diving into the red velvet mini-cake that she selected between the two I set down in front of us.
