Beefcakes

by Katana Collins

  “Uh…” Liam looked to me for help, but I simply shrugged. I literally didn’t know how we knew her.

  “It’s Chloe! Chloe Dyker!”

  Liam’s face drained of color as he gulped.

  Dyker. Shit. It couldn’t be. “Chloe Dyker, as in Lainey Dyker’s sister?”

  “I go by Elaina now.” A woman stepped forward from the group. Moments before, I’d been sweating in the summer heat. But now? Her frosty look chilled me to the bone. I hadn’t seen those icy blue eyes up close in years… not since I had left Maple Grove after finding out I would not be graduating with the rest of my class.

  Liam and I slid each other a look. Mom happened to omit the fact that we were delivering cupcakes to a pair of sisters we had each gone to high school with. Granted, Liam and Chloe were never really friends. But Lainey and me? We were friends. Best friends. With benefits. No, we were more than just that. I think we may have been in love. Until I skipped out on her and moved to Boston. I didn’t go to a fancy school there, like she did. After getting my GED, I went to a much smaller art school with half the tuition of most other schools. I could have visited her if I wanted to (I did see her from afar once, when she was outside of her dorm room). But I didn’t. I never called her. Never reached out. If I’d learned anything from high school with Lainey, it was that I would merely hold her back.

  “I ordered cupcakes,” she said, arching a perfect eyebrow at me. “Not the Evans brothers strip act.” She swiped at a nonexistent hair in her face and smoothed her dark blond hair knotted in a bun at the base of her neck.

  Liam grinned at her, and I had to admit, he was charming as fuck. Way better at talking our way out of this than I would have been. Maybe he was right—I should just stand there and look pretty.

  “It’s a new service for our bachelorette parties,” he said calmly. “We’re beta testing it and you all get the official, uh, Beefcake experience… for free.”

  All the other women around us squealed, eyeing us like slabs of meat.

  “I’ve already had that experience years ago. Even free is too expensive to go down that road again.” She folded her arms and glared at me.

  I put a hand over my heart and narrowly missed getting a palmful of icing. “Ouch,” I hissed. “But for the record, you never complained in high school.”

  “I didn’t know any better in high school. Consider me older and wiser now.”

  But Lainey had always been smart. She was the girl in high school who could drink almost any of us under the table, stay up all night, then be at class first thing in the morning and ace the pop quiz while the rest of us were still trying to remember how to spell our own names.

  I didn’t recognize any of the other women around us. I could only assume they were Chloe’s friends from later in her life—college and work or beyond. But they snickered around us. Whispering and leaning into each other, they stared as Lainey and I continued our standoff.

  “If you wanted nothing to do with us, why did you order from our mother’s bakery?”

  “Because,” she snapped, stepping closer to me. “As the town manager, I wanted to order locally for Chloe’s party.” Her eyes softened… if only slightly, as she added, “And your mom is the best. I know she’s had a tough year and I wanted to support her. But I had no idea you were back in town.”

  I snorted. Bullshit. Perhaps she didn’t know I would be making this delivery, but she must have known I was back in town. My first day back, three city council members brought casseroles to me in my new cabin. Our town, Maple Grove, gossiped like you would not believe. And as the town manager, there was no way that someone on the city council didn’t mention to her that I was back. But sure, I’d let her have this round, even if we both knew it was bullshit.

  Liam cleared his throat, stepping between us.

  “Hey Elaina,” he said. “Sorry about the misunderstanding. We were planning on giving you all a hands-on tutorial on how to decorate cupcakes with these flowers.” Liam held up one of the few cupcakes that had made it intact. “Then, after, those who want to can decorate their cupcakes, um, off of Neil’s body. But we can skip that part—”

  There were whines of protest from the rest of the bachelorette party, and even Chloe stepped forward, grabbing her sister’s elbow. “Oh, c’mon! This sounds fun. And harmless. It’s not like they’re really stripping or anything.”

  Lainey’s rigid demeanor softened briefly. She always did have a soft spot for her sister. “It’s your weekend,” she said, sending Chloe a smile. “If you want to eat icing off Neil Evans’s body… I’m not going to stop you.”

  All the girls started squealing and jumping up and down—an action that was an utter mystery considering the sky-high heels they were all wearing. Except for Lainey. My gaze dipped to her ballet flats, and I couldn’t help but smile at the cute and sensible shoes on her feet.

  “Ugh,” one of Chloe’s friends said, leaning in and sniffing the cupcake. “I’ll never fit into my bridesmaid dress if we keep eating like this all weekend.”

  “That’s the best part,” I chimed in. “These cupcakes are protein cupcakes… so all in all, pretty guilt free. And the frosting is sugar free.”

  “You baked these?” Chloe asked, eyes wide. “I just figured you were delivering them for your mom.”

  “Is it so hard to believe that we can bake?” Liam asked.

  “Well… yeah, kind of!” One of the girls in the back laughed. “I can’t get my boyfriend to make me spaghetti, let alone sugar-free cupcakes!”

  Lainey folded her arms and glared at me. “Sugar-free buttercream sounds sacrilegious.”

  I dipped my finger into the icing that was smeared across the edge of my ribs and held my finger out to her, unable to help the smirk on my face. “Try it before making that statement.”

  Impossibly, her glare hardened even more. Seriously, she had perfected that icy look in the years since I had seen her. “Get your finger out of my face before I bite it off.”

  One of the other girls from the party stepped forward, wrapping her hand around my knuckles, and brought my finger close to her lips. “I’ll try it.” Her voice had a breathy lilt to it that a few years ago would have had me on my knees. But now? If I could have rolled my eyes without being rude, I would have. We were on the clock, after all. I used to fall for that doe-eyed sex-kitten thing back when I was single in LA. But I’d learned my lesson fast not to trust girls like that.

  The girl exhaled a sharp breath, glancing briefly at Lainey before wrapping her lips slowly around my finger and sucking the icing off. Her eyes snapped open wide, and she looked around to all her friends, wiping at something nonexistent on her lips. “Holy crap, he’s right. It’s even better than Magnolia’s frosting!”

  A hum of excited chatter fell over the girls as Chloe stepped forward. “Come on in. You can set up in the kitchen.” She paused as she led us into the cool home. With the windows open, the cross-breeze was refreshing against my sweat-dotted skin. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the slight scent of sea-salt clinging to that breeze. “What did you say your business was called again?”

  Liam glanced at me, grinning, and I gave him the nod. Holy shit. I think we may actually be onto something here.

  “Beefcakes,” we said in unison.

  It didn’t necessarily surprise me to find Neil Evans standing on the front stoop of my parents’ beach house, thirty miles east of our hometown of Maple Grove, New Hampshire. It did surprise me to find him standing there with no shirt and buttercream frosting spread across the dips and curves of his muscular abs. Abs that I knew so well a decade ago. Abs I’d once had my tongue all over.

  Yep, that was not something I’d anticipated finding when my father called to warn me that the Evans brothers would be delivering the dozen cupcakes I ordered from Linda Evans a few months ago. A few months before I knew Neil would be coming home and even before I knew that Linda had been diagnosed with stage II breast cancer.

  I sat in the corner of the kitchen, e
xamining the various women in the room with me. Human behavior had always baffled me. My sister and I are incredibly close regardless of how vastly different we are. I’m bookish. She’s a party girl. I love numbers and data. She loves going with her gut and being in touch with her feelings. I also know how much she loves her fiancé. She’s been madly in love with Dan from the day they met in college.

  Granted, we weren’t always so different. I’d been like her back in high school. The party girl. The one with the fake ID who always managed to get beer for the parties.

  But I grew up. With a little help from Neil leaving me. The truth was, the party girl doesn’t get the guy—not long term at least. Then again, with my track record? The bookish girl wasn’t getting the guy either.

  Not gonna lie… being happy for my baby sister getting married wasn’t so easy when my own boyfriend of nearly nine years cheated on me, then dumped me six months ago. I thought I was getting an engagement ring for Christmas. Instead I ended up moving back home with my parents—at age twenty-freaking-eight. It didn’t get much more humiliating than that.

  “So, you were seriously Mr. Universe?” one of Chloe’s friends asked.

  Neil bit his bottom lip through a grin and nodded. “Three years in a row.”

  “So, like, did you meet Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

  “He helped me train.”

  Tanja, Chloe’s best friend from undergrad, held a cupcake in her hand and swiped it down his abs. She twisted it so the buttercream coiled at the top, then darted her tongue out, licking at the sweet icing in a not so subtle suggestion. Tanja was rarely subtle. “So… could you bench press me?”

  I exhaled a little louder than I intended, and all heads whipped around, staring at me. Oops.

  Neil’s eyes found mine and his eyebrow lifted, arching so subtly that I didn’t know if he even realized he had done it. His jaw ticked. Even after all this time, his body language hadn’t changed a bit. Tight jaw. Fidgeting fingers that he clasped behind his back. He hated this. All this attention. “I could… but I won’t.”

  Tanja pouted, jutting her rose-colored bottom lip out at him. “Party pooper.”

  “Oh, I know!” Chloe clapped her hands. “Let’s see how many cupcakes we can stack on your bicep!”

  More squeals. Ugh. Why do girls squeal so much?

  I watched as they stacked the cupcakes, one by one, until half a dozen cupcakes balanced on his bicep. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to eye-roll myself into a coma soon. Or someone would mistakenly think I was having a seizure.

  “Hey, Lainey,” Neil called from the kitchen. “You sure you don’t want a cupcake?”

  It was my turn to arch an eyebrow, and Neil rolled his eyes in response, jerking his head to Liam. “Liam could show you how to pipe a flower with buttercream.”

  I gave Liam a smile. I’d never had a problem with him. Liam and Finn Evans were sweethearts who helped make this town a profitable, little tourist destination. I could even deal with his sister, Addy, whom I hadn’t gotten along with since high school. Despite our differences, she and I were cordial. Most days. Neil, on the other hand, left our town when he turned eighteen and never looked back.

  You mean he left you and never looked back.

  Yeah, okay, so I was a little bitter. One second, Neil and I were hot and heavy and he was putting the first punch in my V-card. And in the next moment, he was gone. No one knew where the hell he went until after my first year at Harvard. When I came home for the summer, Addy told me he’d been in Boston too. All freaking year. We lived in the same city and he never even reached out to me. Learning that had torn open the old wounds from when he first left. After that, I vowed to never think of him again… and then, the bastard had to move to LA where he not only entered but won Mr. Universe.

  I couldn’t avoid seeing him after that. His face was freaking everywhere. Our town celebrated him. All of a sudden, his signed headshot was hung up in every business in town. Getting my coffee? There was Neil. Having dinner at my favorite Italian eatery? There was Neil. Even my freaking laundromat had his damn picture up.

  And I had to watch while every bimbo in Los Angeles dated him. I had to see it in every tabloid. On TMZ every evening.

  It was disgusting.

  Liam tilted his head in an invitation for me to join the rest of the group. I gave him a smile and shook my head no. “I think I’m going to head down to the beach for a bit.”

  I crossed behind Neil, my eyes landing on his swollen bicep, veins covering the length of his arm down to his wrists. I hated the way my body responded. The way my mouth went dry while other, more important areas, became all too wet.

  While the girls all snapped photos of Neil, still balancing cupcakes on his bicep, Chloe’s eyes darted to me, her brows furrowed in concern. “You okay?” She mouthed. I rolled my eyes and nodded, doing my best to seem both casual and totally fine. Neither of which I felt. How could I be okay? I was watching the man I’d been madly in love with as a teenager get molested by all of my sister’s friends. Friends who were younger and sexier and knew how to own their sexuality in a way that I never had.

  No, that wasn’t true. There was a time I had owned my sexual side. With Neil. When we were young and I didn’t have a career or reputation to worry about—I’d had a wild side, too. But then I matured and realized that life couldn’t be sustained burning the candle at both ends. Even still, sometimes I missed that side of myself.

  While the nine other women at my sister’s party were currently in the house, licking frosting off of Neil’s abs and cozying up to Liam as he taught them how to decorate cupcakes, I snuck out the back door down to the beach. Hugging my arms over my chest, I inhaled the salt air deeply and listened to the crash of waves, sitting down and stretching my toes out in the sand.

  I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sunset as the time passed. The longer I stayed out here, the more likely the guys would be gone when I went back in.

  I must have been out there for thirty minutes, judging by where the sun had set. Its bright orange sherbet reflected against the deep blue of the ocean’s edge.

  Behind me, the screen door slid open, and I heard quiet footsteps against the sand. I knew it was him before I turned around. I felt it in each heavy step behind me. In the way my body responded, goosebumps rising against my skin and just the slightest beginning of moisture forming with the heat and humidity, despite the disappearing sun.

  Even though a decade had passed, my body remembered him—no matter how desperately I tried to push it from my memory.

  “Here,” Neil’s deep voice rumbled through me and I resisted the urge to shiver; to let him know that he affected me so profoundly in this way. I glanced over my shoulder to where he was holding out a cupcake. “I know you didn’t have one yet. And the only thing better than a friend… is a friend with a cupcake.”

  “Who says you’re my friend?” Looking at the cupcake in his hand, I lifted a brow. “Besides, I’m not into healthy cupcakes. If I’m going to have a cupcake, it’s going to be sugary and delicious.”

  He waved it under my nose. “This is delicious. It also happens to have twenty grams of protein and only three grams net carbs.”

  I scrunched my nose. I didn’t want to admit that the buttercream smelled divine. I didn’t want to admit that I wanted anything he was offering. I had taken his offerings once. Well, more than once. And where did it land me? Sad. Angry. Alone. Until Brad had come into the picture. Brad had been everything Neil wasn’t. He’d been soft-spoken. Studious. Content with quiet nights in, rather than parties and beer-bongs.

  Not that it mattered. He still left me for someone less “married to their job.”

  Neil rolled his eyes and dropped his arm, interrupting my thoughts. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Lainey, it’s just a cupcake. Eat the damn thing.”

  It was so not just a cupcake. And the fact that he thought that showed how little he had grown in all these years. “My name is Elaina, not Lainey. Not anymore.”

>   “You’ll always be Lainey to me.”

  I rolled my eyes back at him. It was the sort of cheesy line that I would have fallen for, hook line and sinker, ten years ago. Now, I was older and wiser.

  He held the cupcake out once more. “The Lainey I knew ten years ago would have tried anything.”

  I resisted the urge to narrow my eyes. Resisted the boiling anger building up in the bottom of my stomach, threatening to erupt like lava out of my mouth. Instead, I smiled, took the cupcake, gently peeled the foil wrapper away and pinched the base gently between my thumb and forefinger. I could feel how spongy and moist the cake was. The smell of chocolate wafted toward my nose and I had to admit that, there in that moment, I did want to take a bite. I wanted to taste the buttercream as it melted across my tongue.

  Neil waited, his hands in his pockets. He had, thankfully, put a shirt back on, and I noticed that his dark hair was wet. Chloe must have allowed him to use the shower after they finished manhandling him inside. My eyes met Neil’s over the heap of buttercream, and I licked my lips slowly, suggestively, knowing full well that I was teasing him. He was right. The Lainey he knew in high school would have devoured this cupcake. She would have joined those girls inside and licked the buttercream right off of his body, her tongue hitting every ridge of ab muscle. But that was Lainey. And I was Elaina.

  Instead of taking a bite of the cupcake, I smashed it into his freshly showered face, swiping my hand up and down his nose and forehead until crumbs and buttercream were stuck in his stubble, eyebrows, and lashes. “My. Name. Is. Elaina,” I said, emphasizing each word with a harsh staccato. “The Lainey you knew in high school learned her lesson.”

  I finished by wiping my hand off on his shirt and gave him a smack on the chest before pushing past him to march back into the beach house, where I intended to lock myself in my bedroom until the Evans brothers were gone.

  Three Days later…

  I was grumpy as fuck. You would be too if you had to get up every morning at four o’clock. No wait, scratch that. I had to be at the bakery by four. I had to wake up by three-thirty. Which was hard enough as is, but add to that, sleepless nights thinking of Lainey? It made those few precious hours of sleep even harder.