Chapter 7
seven
. . .
No Eye Contact Coffee
HALSTON
There are two kinds of secrets. The first kind has weight. Heavy, ugly, soul-rotting weight. The kind that you feel in every room. The kind that Grant kept. The kind that rewrites the past and makes every single normal memory look suspicious under fluorescent lighting.
The second kind has glitter.
Still dangerous, obviously. Still possibly capable of ruining your life before breakfast. But shiny and stupid.
The kind that makes you pace around your bakery at six in the morning with your hair smelling like a stranger’s skin and your thighs reminding you that you had, in fact, participated in casual, consensual, mind-blowing sex with a stranger for the first time ever.
The man from Oliver’s bar is the second kind. I think.
As amazing as it was, part of me is too ashamed to admit it.
Hooking up with a stranger on my floor mattress like I’m a frat brother is not something I think I want to say out loud.
I stand behind the counter in Bitter Bloom, staring down at the note the man had left like it may grow legs and start chasing me.
You need a better lock.
Enjoy your day, stranger.
That’s it.
No name, no number, no “Good morning! Last night was incredible!” No smooth line that will immediately make me regret every second I was nude in front of nameless eyes. No “Thanks for the sex Sorry about your emotional devastation! Here’s my LinkedIn.”
Just practical criticism and coffee.
The man is apparently the human equivalent of a fire extinguisher with excellent hands.
I pick up the note.
Set it down.
And pick it back up again.
Set it back down.
“Absolutely not,” I whisper.
The ovens are heating up and the espresso maker hisses softly as it comes alive.
Outside, the morning light slides over the sidewalk, pale and gold, catching the blue trim around Bitter Bloom’s front windows.
The tables still have chairs stacked on top of them, and the pastry cases are all bare, waiting for evidence that I am a functioning adult and not a woman who just had life-altering sex with a stranger before making muffins for the local church.
My body feels warm in places I do not want to discuss with myself.
Not pain, exactly. Definitely not the endometriosis pain I’m so used to. The hollow, cruel ache that turns my organs into an active hostage situation and leaves me bargaining with God, my heating pad, and whatever scientist invented extra-strength ibuprofen.
Instead, it feels like the dull ache of longing. A memory. One you know you’re never going to experience again. His hand on my waist and his mouth against my throat.
The man’s tattoos under my fingertips and the way his muscles flexed as I traced them.
The pierc—
“Oh my god.” I drop the note like I just got burned.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
MARLEY
Be there in a few.
I stare at the screen.
Marley King.
My best friend. My human emergency siren. My fellow chaos demon. The woman who pulled me into her arms in my car less than a week ago and told me making an apology croissant for a cheating man did not make me stupid.
Marley, who has gossip. And needs caffeine.
Marley, who will absolutely know the second she looks at my face.
I type back: Sounds good.
My fingers shake. Just a little.
But don’t make it weird.
Her reply comes instantly.
What? Why are YOU making it weird? What’s going on?
I’m normal.
Halston.
Bring yourself caffeine. I have coffee but I am spiritually unavailable.
Oh my god. WHAT HAPPENED.
Nothing.
I’m leaving now. Also my brother finally got to Baltimore this morning and is being annoying about breakfast plans, so I told him to meet me at your place.
I freeze.
Her brother.
Right.
Marley’s mysterious, rigid, trained at a German baking school, apparently emotionally constipated older brother is in Baltimore, today of all days.
Today.
Apparently now.
Apparently, he’s coming here. To my bakery.
I stare at the message, panic building in my chest.
But it doesn’t bubble over.
It’s a small ripple of dread. Some curiosity. A vague concern about meeting my best friend’s protective older brother while I look like I spent the night losing a fight with a very large man’s mouth.
Marley’s brother exists in my mind as a category rather than a person.
Warren.
The name floats through years of stories like folklore.
Warren raised her more than her father did.
Warren made lists. Warren sent money while she was in college and he was overseas in Germany, where he lived and went to school to be a master baker.
Marley had said on several occasions that Warren could be blunt enough to bruise but would fly across the ocean if she needed him.
He’s always been important to Marley, and therefore important to me, but still an abstract shape.
In high school, he made himself scarce, and Oliver and I were never allowed to go to Marley’s house.
When she was at our place, Warren would stay in the car to pick her up.
Nine months into her fifteenth year on this earth, Warren took her to get her learner’s permit.
He had been teaching her to drive for years in a Safeway parking lot.
During the summer, they used the school’s empty lot.
The second she turned sixteen and a half, he took her to get her provisional license and bought her a car.
She had wanted to start contributing to the household bills, and he wouldn’t have to pick her up from soccer every night.
Among the three of us, she was the first one with a car, but it was for good reason.
It was a Subaru with a large enough back seat that Oliver and I used to hide under blankets as she drove us home from the Columbia mall.
She’d call out when a cop was driving by and we’d go still under the blanket, the thick pink bag containing our Wockenfuss candy crinkling as we shushed each other like the officer could hear us.
Oliver turned eighteen first, and he graduated to the passenger seat. She turned eighteen second, and I graduated to the backseat.
It made the hours driving back from the beach a little less tedious.
Marley lost her phone for a week one time after her brother found out. He was a rule follower and was terrified that he’d fuck Marley up more than they were already predestined to be by their upbringing. He thought for sure that she’d get pulled over and her driving privileges taken away.
She was fine.
But in my head, Warren is a brother-shaped warning label.
Define “finally got to Baltimore.”
I have no idea what to expect or if I should have coffee ready and available and a chipper smile on my face.
He texted “arrived” at 5:58 like a serial killer.
That does sound like him.
You barely know him.
I’ve met him spiritually.
No you haven’t. He’s way worse in person.
Comforting.
He’s meeting me at Bitter Bloom in a bit. Don’t be weird about the fact that I have a brother.
I’ve always been weird about the fact that she has a brother who’s never wanted to meet her friends.
I am literally never weird.
You once named a latte “My Chemical Slow Burn.”
It sold out.
Exactly my point.
I lock my phone and look at the note again. Then at the coffee he brought me. And then at the back door, where I entered this morning with a clear mind and a guilty conscience.
God, my mattress probably looks like a crime scene staged by lust and poor judgment.
I have about twenty minutes before Marley arrives with caffeine and her brother.
Twenty minutes is long enough to do many things. I could change my sheets, brush my hair, hide the note, even make muffins.
I could call my therapist.
Instead, I stand completely still and whisper, “His dick was pierced.”
I start laughing, but it’s not normal laughter. It’s panic laughter. A bright, breathless thing that has my hand over my mouth and makes a sound that bounces off the tile. I bend at the waist.
It’s the kind of laugh you let out when you’re searching for two girls kissing on your family laptop, but your dad walks in and the second you click on one of the other seventeen tabs you have open, the porno music starts playing and your heart drops into your ass as you stare at your dad silently with wide Bambi eyes as you watch him decide whether he wants to acknowledge it or not but instead, he just walks out of the room and—
Breathe.
I count to five. Name five things around me.
What am I supposed to do with that information? Carry it alone? A dick-piercing-sized secret in my pocket for the rest of my life? Pass it on like an heirloom? A cursed family jewel?
No.
Absolutely not.
Some things are just too large for one woman to carry.
Then I remember Marley is bringing her brother.
I glance at the front door.
“Okay,” I tell myself. “We will not be discussing genital jewelry in front of a man who probably alphabetizes his spice cabinet.”
I wash my hands and pull muffin batter from the cooler, set out mixing bowls, grab more gold sprinkles from the back, and attempt to become the version of Halston Smith who owns a business and doesn’t spiral over one-night stands before seven in the morning.
That version of me lasts for exactly four minutes.
Then I see the coffee again.
Black. Strong. Too bitter for me.
I sigh and pour in my vanilla syrup, oat milk, and what some may consider a disrespectful amount of cinnamon before leaning against the counter and taking a sip.
Much better.
The bell over the front door jingles at six twenty-three, and I jump so hard that coffee sloshes into my hand.
Marley trudges in alone wearing black leggings, an oversized sweatshirt, sunglasses pushed onto the top of her head, and the expression of a woman who smells blood in the water.
She locks the door behind her.
She doesn’t say good morning or ask if I’m okay.
She takes one single look at my face and freezes.
“Oh my god.”
I turn toward the muffins. “Good morning to you too.”
“You had sex.”
I drop the spatula. It hits the ground with a wet slap.
“Marley.”
“You had sex.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She crosses her arms, staring at the spatula.
I stare at the spatula.