Age Gap Academy (Forbidden Fantasies #9)

1. Avery

1

AVERY

I can’t take another minute of this. My head is throbbing in sync with my heartbeat, my hands are cramping from gripping the piping bags, and the constant focus on these tiny rosettes is making my eye start to twitch. If that were all, I could power through the rest of the day, but Henri is in one of his moods.

The staccato bursts of his shouting are unpredictable and echo through the kitchen like gunfire. Even being in the back corner does nothing to muffle the sound. All week, he’s been like this, stomping around the kitchen, slamming pots and pans, and screaming at everything that moves.

It’s not even like we’re overbooked. It’s our normal workload. Something must be going on at home… again.

I want to crawl into the supply cabinet for the rest of my shift and hide.

Damn it.

My hands shake so badly that the rosette I’m trying to make looks more like a meatball than a flower. I sigh and turn around to rummage in the drawer for a palette knife to remove the meatball.

I really should have remembered to set that out with the rest of my supplies.

A large hand grabs my wrist, yanking it out of the drawer and spinning me around. I feel myself cowering under Henri’s glare.

Did he fly across the room or something?

I hate how weak and small I feel.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He seethes.

I flinch as flecks of his spit hit my face.

“I just needed a palette knife.”

“Why wasn’t it already out? Why weren’t you prepared?” he demands. “Any chef with basic fucking training would know to have all their supplies out and ready.”

He practically throws my arm down to release me. I fight the urge to rub the sore spot on my wrist. I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s hurt me.

“And what’s this?” Henri says, pointing at my rosette meatball. “Is this what you learned off the internet, hmm? Is this a flower or a pile of dog shit? Do you think the Embroidery Guild paid us to cater their meeting so we could serve them shit on a petit four?”

“It was just one mistake,” I say, blinking back tears, “but look at all the others. They’re perfect.”

“Even pigs can be taught to master a trick or two. Why don’t you go back to your sty, Little Piglet, and open this job up for a real chef?”

He swipes the rosette off the cake with his bare finger and flicks it at me. It splats harmlessly against my apron, but for how much it hurts, it might as well have been a brick. The tears are flowing so freely now that I can barely see.

“Why didn’t you use the palette knife, Chef?” I whine. “Now I have to throw the entire cake out.”

“And how is that my problem?”

Henri pivots towards the rest of the kitchen like an actor on a stage.

“People, this is what happens when we hire someone off the internet with no experience to speak of,” he says, gesturing grandly.

I crumple to the ground, clutching my knees to my chest as I sob.

“Blow it out your ass, Henri. The petit fours look amazing.”

I jerk my head up in surprise-Mia wasn’t supposed to be in for another hour, at least.

Did she get called in early or something?

It doesn’t matter, really. I’m just glad she’s here. She’s the only one who ever stands up to Henri. There’s not a day that passes where I don’t wish I could be more like her.

I bet she wouldn’t have taken any shit from Kyle, either.

No.

Thinking about him is only going to make things worse. You need to stay in the present.

I fix my eyes on Mia’s electric blue sneakers and try to make the shaking stop.

“Congratulations, Henri, you make a five foot nothing, less than half your weight woman young enough to be your daughter cry.”

He starts to open his mouth, but she cuts him off with a glare.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself, so that doesn’t mean anything to you, but you wasted a perfectly good cake by putting your dirty fingers all over it. That’s money you’re throwing in the trash. And for what? So you could feel like a big man? Move!”

She shoves past him and then holds out her hand.

I grab onto her with the same intensity that a drowning man grabs a tow rope and pull myself to my feet. A newborn giraffe would be steadier on their feet than I am right now, so I focus all of my attention on not falling over.

“Go home, Honey,” Mia says gently. “You don’t deserve to deal with this. I’ll cover pastry today, although I won’t be able to do the rosettes half as elegantly as you do them.”

“But I need?—”

“I’ll see to it that you get paid for your full shift today. Consider it hazard pay.”

She nods encouragingly at me and squeezes my hand.

“Go on home and give my godson an extra kiss for me,” she insists.

“Now wait just a minute!” Henri exclaims, puffing out his chest.

I don’t wait around to hear the end of the fight, but I can hear their raised voices echoing through the venue until I get out to the parking lot.

The drive to my parents' house takes forever and no time at all.

I stare hopelessly at myself in the rearview mirror. My cheeks are paler than paper. Instead of the sleek, platinum bun I’d put in place this morning, there’s a pile of brittle straw at the crown of my head. I can barely see my eyes for how puffy they are, but they’re such a light shade of blue that I wonder if I cried the color out of my irises.

I can’t let Leo see me like this, but I don’t have a choice. I don’t have any makeup in the car or in my purse to hide the physical effects of my bad day from him.

Maybe I should have taken out loans and gone to school after graduation. Kyle would have been upset, but at least I would have been able to give Leo a better life. He’s right. I am pathetic.

If I had just stood up to him and gone to college, he might have respected me more and maybe we’d still…

Enough, I scold myself. You’re going to plaster on your brightest smile and you’re going to march your butt in there and put on the best show of your life for that little boy. Do you understand me?

I allow myself one last pathetic sigh before I square my shoulders and march into my parents’ home.

“Ma! Ma! Ma!” Leo squeals, running to me.

“Baby!”

I scoop him into my arms and pepper his dirt-streaked face with kisses.

“Look at you! You’re more dirt than boy. What did Oma do with you today?”

“Gift,” he says, shaking his fist at me.

“For me?”

“Yes.”

I hold out my hand expecting a pebble or a piece of mulch, but instead, a half-dead worm drops into my palm. I swallow hard to force the bile back down to my stomach where it belongs and fight the urge to throw the thing across the room.

“Thank you,” I say with forced gratitude. “That was so… thoughtful of you.”

“Thot. Full,” he repeats.

“That’s right. Thoughtful. It means you took lots and lots of time to think about the gift. You’re such a sweet boy.”

He nods sagely then tugs at my shirt.

“What is it?” I ask

“I want down.”

“Ma, put me down, please,” I gently correct.

“Down peas.”

“Close enough.”

I smile and set him back on the floor, and he races back to the train set in the middle of the room.

Before I even ask, Mom is at my elbow with a wet wipe and a paper towel to help me dispose of my “present” without Leo seeing me throw it away. Even though I feel like I need a full decontamination shower from touching the awful thing, the last thing I want to do is hurt his feelings.

His latest obsessions are worms and rocks, so in his two-year-old brain, everyone else must love them too.

I live in fear of the day he falls in love with snakes.

“Thanks, Mom.”

I give her a grateful peck on the cheek after she disposes of the worm.

“You’re here early. Rough day?”

“It was alright,” I say, shrugging.

“So we’re lying to our mothers now, are we?” she scolds. “I’m going to try again. How was work, Avery?”

If I ever become even half as perceptive as she is, I’ll consider myself a very lucky woman.

I flop down on the couch and drag the box of tissues on the coffee table closer to me—just in case—before I start narrating my week from hell. I recount every tantrum, every slammed pot, every abuse of power, and every foul name he’s called everyone this week.

“I wish I had the nerve to stand up to him, but I just freeze,” I say, embarrassed, “and Mia is usually busy with inventory and coordinating with scheduling and everything else involved with running the back of the house, so she’s not there a lot and she’s the only one who ever stands up to him.”

I shrug dejectedly.

“I guess that’s because she’s the kitchen manager. If Henri pisses…” I say, darting a guilty glance over at Leo, “her off, she’ll just stop ordering his spices or whatever.”

“Has she brought her concerns to the owner?”

“She has, but every time he comes in, Henri is a saint so he doesn’t believe her. We have cameras in the kitchen for falls and stuff, but there’s no audio so it’s a he said, she said thing. Or he said, he said, depending on who it is.”

“But he threw icing at you!”

“Yeah, standing in front of me, completely blocking what he was doing from the camera. All they’d see if they looked at it was him standing close to me and talking.”

“Honey, I know Mia’s your best friend and it was so wonderful of her to get you this job, but maybe it’s time to move on, find a healthier work environment,” she says, sighing.

I gesture helplessly at her and then start anxiously rubbing the scar above my ear.

“Where, Mom?” I ask, exasperated. “Who is going to hire a 21-year-old nobody with no formal pastry training? The best I could get anywhere else is a dishwasher, or if I’m lucky, a kitchen porter. That would be almost a fifty percent pay cut.

“And it’s not like I can go back to school full-time. Even if I could afford it or get a scholarship, I would have bills to pay that wouldn’t be covered by that. Sure, I could do part-time, but what about Leo? I’d never see him between work and night or weekend classes. I know you’d help, so don’t give me that look, but he’s my son and I want to be present for him like you were for me when I was that little.”

“You could move back in here and sell your condo,” she suggests. “We have plenty of room, and that would give you the funding you need for school.”

“I can’t.” I repress a shudder. “This is the first place he’d look for me, and you know that. He has no idea where I live now, and I want to keep it that way. So unless you can find me a part-time, accelerated program that’ll give me a full ride and won’t take up every evening of my life, I’m stuck where I am until he’s old enough for kindergarten.”

Mom squeezes my hand sympathetically. The small comfort soothes me, and a little of the tension in my shoulders melts away. I even manage a small smile.

“It’s funny you should say that. Gale was in my chair the other day getting her roots touched up, and she was telling me that she sent her son to this place called Age Gap Academy to learn… what do you kids call it now? Adulting. That’s it. He’s learning how to ‘do adulting’ there. In my day, it was basic Home Ec, but,” she says, sighing, “at least he’s learning it somewhere.”

I cock my head, confused.

“But I already know how to sew a button and do basic budgeting. What good will that be to me?”

“I was getting there, Sassy Pants,” she says, making a face at me. “They offer everything from basic life skills to specialized job training. I even checked it out the other day, but I’d forgotten to tell you about it with how busy things were. They have pastry chef certification, business, organic gardening, marketing, you name it. They’re an experimental university that adopted a mentorship program instead of large classes, and the people who get certificates from there… Well, from the way Gale was going on about it, the possibilities are endless for alumni.”

“But isn’t Gale like a millionaire or something because her husband steals money for a living? How am I supposed to afford something like that?”

“He’s an investment banker and you know that, Avery Jean.”

“Same thing,” I scoff.

“Anyway,” she says with a glare, “they offer scholarships to promising students, two full rides and four partial scholarships. Here, take a look.”

I take her phone and scroll through their webpage. They’re highly accredited, they work around their students’ existing schedules, and their alumni page… Damn, Gale wasn’t exaggerating. It’s like the Hollywood Walk of Fame but for academia. If I could manage to get in, I’d be set for life.

If I’m good enough to get in.

“It certainly seems ideal, but why would they ever want someone like me?” I ask dejectedly.

Her face lights up as she clasps my hands in hers. I can feel the warm hope radiating off her like sunshine.

“Honey, you’re exceptional. You’ve got that online following, and you’re pure, natural talent. I just know you could get a full ride if you put together a portfolio and applied. I’m so sure of it, I’ll eat my blow dryer if you don’t get it.”

Mom’s confidence in me makes me feel like I could do anything in the world.

I wonder how much more I would be able to do with my life if I could feel like this all the time.

Maybe someday, I’ll get to know what that’s like.

“So, are you going to do it?” she asks hopefully.

“I’ll think about it.”