“I mean, consider it this way,” Bea says encouragingly. “This happened in the safety of your home, with someone who’s practically family, who would never do anything untoward. Christopher just tucked you in and left, and that was that.”
I hate it, the intimacy of that image—Christopher seeing my things strewn about the room, laying me in my bed. God knows what I looked like, what I said to him, my limbs and lips loosened with sleep and whiskey. How humiliating.
Trying to cover my discomfort, I throw back my coffee in hot, painful gulps. “Yes, thankfully that happened with someone who has no interest in taking advantage of me, not that I needed you to remind me.”
Bea rolls her eyes. “I meant he believes in consent and consciousness.”
“Yeah.” I set my mug on the counter with a thunk. “Well, I’m gonna puke if we talk any more about Christopher carrying me around, seeing me at my worst. Let’s move on.”
“Fine.” Bea lifts her hands wearily. “We gotta get ready for work anyway.”
My legs buckle. I slump against the counter. “Oh God.”
She pats my back. “It’s just a morning handling sales, taking a couple photos, then you can crawl home and back into bed.”
“Why?” I moan against the counter. “Why did I say yes to this?”
“Because you’re broker than broke and secretly you love the Edgy Envelope, maybe even more than me.”
“It’s Toni and his baked goods. And Sula plying me with samples; you know I’m a sucker for samples. And working with you.” I nudge her shoulder. “That doesn’t totally suck.”
“Life at the Edgy Envelope is pretty spectacular, especially with Toni’s cookies.”
Pushing off the counter, I groan and stomp past her toward the sobering hot shower calling my name. “There better be a platter of Toni’s cookies the size of Texas waiting for me when we get there.”
* * *
—
There is not, in fact, a platter of cookies the size of Texas waiting for me at the shop. But, like a hangover-cure miracle, sitting on the glass-top desk, beside sparkling delicate gold chains, colorful bricks of artisanal chocolates, and a precarious tower of hand-poured, zodiac-themed candles, is a massive pastry box tied with twine, nanette’s stamped on the lid.
Beside it sits a bouquet so grand and elegant it looks like a Dutch still life painting, a masterpiece of color palette, texture, and composition.
My stomach plummets when I see the name on the card and tug it from its perch, wedged inside the breathtaking flowers.
Katerina
“Look at this!” Toni says, easing open the box. The aroma of savory herbs in a rich buttery quiche, maple glaze, and pumpkin spice wafts into the air.
Bea swats away his hand. “Back off!”
“What? I just checked what was inside.”
She jabs her finger toward the card bearing my name. “It’s for her.”
“How was I supposed to know that? The name’s on the card in the flowers, not written on the box!”
“Shhh. My head,” Bea whines. “Your voice hurts.”
“Excuse me for having a voice box. And by the way, your voice hurts, too. You’re not the only one who hit the booze a little hard last night—”
“Then stop yelling!” Bea yells.
“Sweet Jesus!” I stare at them, wide-eyed with exasperation. “Would you two just shove some pastries in your mouths and hush? You’re like an old married couple with low blood sugar.”
Grumbling, they open the box and poke around in it. I shove a hand in the box, too, and pull out the first thing I find, a tiny glazed doughnut hole that smells like cardamom and vanilla.
“Toni.” I flick the card toward the bouquet. “Who delivered this and the pastries?”
Toni turns my way, tugging back his dark hair into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck, presumably to avoid getting it in the massive cinnamon bun he’s about to chow down on. “Some delivery person on a bike showed up right as I did to open.” He shrugs. “No one I knew or recognized.”
I stare at the card, the deep, slanted handwriting that’s shaky and jagged around the edges, and slide my thumb along the letters. I wonder if it was written by someone at the flower shop where this bouquet came from, if the person who sent it wrote it themselves.
I wonder what made their hand shake as they wrote. I hope it wasn’t pain.
With some kind of gut sense there’s more to the card, I flip it over and stare at the words, written in that same unsteady, craggy writing.
Better hate than never, for never too late.
“Ooh!” Toni gasps around a bite of cinnamon roll. “Poetry?”
“I don’t know.” I stare at the words, trying to make sense of them.
Bea frowns and peers closer. She’s got a fleck of quiche on her cheek that she brushes off. “Why does that look familiar?”
“Good morning, sunshines!” Sula hollers, slamming the back door of the shop and making all three of us wince. Bea and I clutch our heads. Toni whimpers. “Long day ahead,” she barks, walking her bike toward the back of the store. “Eat up those pastries, pop some painkillers, and let’s get to work!”
“Speaking of the pastries,” I call, “did you send these?”
“No!” Sula calls back. “But I’m glad someone did, because you three look like corpses and corpses aren’t much use for restock day.”
Another whimper leaks out of Toni. “I’m gonna die.”
“I’m dead already,” Bea whispers.
“Wait.” Toni points at me. “No more sling? You can help with restock!”
I grimace exaggeratedly and rub my shoulder. “Don’t think so. It’s still healing.”
Setting down the card, I help myself to a wide wedge of quiche that’s speared by a tiny flag with lettuce printed on it, signaling it’s vegetarian. Plucking out the flag, I take a hearty bite and sigh with pleasure. That creamy tang of goat cheese. Bright, crunchy asparagus. It’s a favorite flavor combination.
Bea shoves the last bite of quiche in her mouth and goes for another slice.
“Hey,” I say around my mouthful. “These are for me!”
“I need another piece so I can get my veggies in,” she says primly, helping herself to another wedge. Hers looks like broccoli cheddar. “Jamie will be so proud.”
Toni rolls his eyes. “You could subsist on lollipops for the rest of your life and that health nut wouldn’t crack one bit.”
Bea smiles to herself. “Yeah, I know.”
My sister has a number of textural aversions when it comes to food, and vegetables have proven to be a tough frontier. I can admit I found it a little surprising that my vegetable-loathing, sugar-loving, erotic-artist, tattooed sister ended up with a nutrition-conscious, straightlaced, marathon-running, polite and proper pediatrician, but I’ve been pretty delighted to see all the ways Jamie seems completely taken by the things about Bea that are different from him.
In fact, maybe I’m just a tiny bit jealous.
Just a tiny bit. And only on the very brief, rare occasions since I’ve been home, when I allowed myself to think about the fact that I’ve never met someone who saw the hard-to-like parts of me and liked me anyway. The only people who’ve liked me are the people like me.
I used to think it was closed-mindedness, people’s aversion to my inconvenient fuck-the-system views, that it was on others that I didn’t click with those who were different from me, who disagreed with me.
But lately I’ve been wondering how much I had to do with that, too. If I’ve held at a distance people I perceive as being at odds with me not so much because I disagreed with their views, but because I was protecting myself from their rejection for those differences, because it felt safer to write someone off rather than risk being written off first.
It’s a bleak path to go down, and I’m saved from wandering it any further when the bell jingles on the overhead door as it opens, bringing in our first customers of the day.
“Not it,” Toni mumbles, grabbing his cinnamon roll and hightailing it toward the back.
Bea sighs and drops her quiche.
“I got it,” I tell her.
Her head snaps up. “What?”