I pull the door open with a hard tug. “He’ll get over it.”
Our lobby is blissfully empty. No cameras, no crewmembers, no customers. No running backs. Our CLOSED sign is broadcasting to the outside, warning them away from the uncanny within.
In two hours it will be over. The cameras will leave, the store will open. Things will go back to normal. I’ll go in the back and bake my brains out, losing myself in the rhythm of mixing, timing, cooling, frosting. Mixing, timing, cooling, frosting. Mixing, timing, cooling, frosting.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
But I can’t do that now. Not yet. So instead, I clean. It’s the worst thing in the world, my most hated chore, even above hanging my clothes in the closet, but I have no other choice. I can’t stand here doing nothing and I definitely don’t want to go outside and talk to Mr. Mustache about how stellar Colt is. How funny. How irritably offensive but oddly sweet. How my skin is scorched like fire where his lips touched it. How badly I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss him until my lips ached.
“Shit,” I grumble, hurrying behind the counter. I nearly dive for the bottle of Windex.
By the time the film crew starts packing up an hour later, the front of the store is spotless. I’ve scrubbed every surface and washed every piece of glass from windows to display cases. Rona takes it all in carefully, her eyes reading the spotless space like I wrote my feelings and fears across every surface.
Sandra surprises me with a gentle hug on her way out the door. “Thanks for agreeing to go on film, hon. It’s a better story about the bakery with the both of you telling it.”
“I’m glad I did it,” I reply, returning the hug. And it’s not a lie. It was fun, if not a little unsettling. And hey, now I have a video souvenir of the time an NFL superstar licked my face.
Rona and I stand behind the counter waving goodbye to the crew. They shuffle out quickly, moving at a speed I haven’t seen from them all morning. When the last one lets the door bang shut behind him, Rona collapses listlessly onto the counter.
I slap her ass hard. “Stop breathing on that! I just cleaned it.”
She lifts her head to look at me, her dark hair in her eyes. “Dare I ask about that?”
“Ask away.”
“Whatchya stressed about, Lilly?”
“Global warming.”
“And the fact that Colt Avery’s blistering hotness is melting the polar ice caps?”
“Exactly. Think of the children.”
“It seems creepy to involve kids in this.” She stands up straight, replacing her face with her ass on the counter. “So why does he stress you out?”
“He asked me to dinner.”
“That bastard,” she snarls.
I grin, shaking my head. “I sound insane, I know. Most girls in this town would kill to go to dinner with him.”
“And kiss him.”
“I didn’t kiss him,” I argue sharply.
“It looked like a kiss from where I was standing.”
“It wasn’t on the mouth.”
“A guy can put his mouth on your elbow and it’s still a kiss,” she educates me. “Why’d it freak you out?”
“It was in front of a room full of people. It was in front of a camera.”
“You made out with Hank Lester for a solid five minutes in front of our entire eighth grade class. You’re not shy about a crowd. Give me the real reason.”
“It freaked me out because I liked it,” I admit, falling back against the wall. “Because I wanted to eat his face.”
“That’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Every woman in that room was thinking the same thing. Probably some of the dudes.”
“That’s the thing. It’s like it’s expected that of course I’ll like him. Of course I want to kiss him. Of course I’ll go to dinner with him.”
“And you don’t want to be a forgone conclusion.”
“I don’t want to be an idiot.” I look out the window, my eyes following the angle of the sun through the glass. It cuts the room in half, casting long shadows across the floor. “He’s not a real person. He doesn’t do ‘like’ and ‘dating’. He does supermodels.”
“There were no models here when he spent his entire morning letting you be frigid toward him.”
“I wasn’t frigid.”
“You were cold. You know you were.”
“I think that’s just me, Ro.”
She frowns. “It didn’t used to be.”
My leg starts to twitch, a nervous energy building in my toes and branching out up into my blood, flooding my body. “Yeah, well, it is now.”
“He’s gonna call you later,” she blurts out.
My leg goes still. “Why? No, not why. How, Rona? How is he going to call me if I’ve never given him my number?”
She touches her nose in reply, the international charades symbol for ‘that’s it’.
I shake my head tightly. “You’re using that wrong.”
“Not really. You know how he got your number.”
“You.”
She touches her nose again.
“Stop it.”
Rona lowers her hand, but her face is unrepentant. “You should give him a chance.”