11. Ezra
FEbrUARY
“Hello?”
“Hey, honey,” I said, unable to hide the smile in my tone.
Barely two weeks after her dinner party dilemma, we were on the phone again—though this time, I was the one who needed help.
“Hey,” she said softly. “Uh…what’s up?”
“I need your help.”
She chuckled. “Are you experiencing déjà vu, or is it just me?”
“Trust me, the irony of this moment isn’t lost on me.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“Valentine’s Day is on Wednesday.”
“I’m aware.”
“And instead of doing boxes and paper valentines, Hansen’s preschool teacher got a stick up her ass, and each of her students has to bring a treat to pass around. It has to be gluten, dairy, and nut free, and…”
“And sweet treats are not your forte,” she said with a giggle. “So you’ve come to the master. ”
“Yes,” I breathed. “Please, O Wise One, teach me your ways.”
“Gluten, dairy, and nut free, you said?” she asked, and I could hear what sounded like the rustle of pages in the background.
“Yes. Basically all the fun shit.”
“Desserts can be fun without all the stuff that could potentially make someone sick, Ezra,” she scolded.
“Shit, I know, you’re right,” I said, scrubbing a hand over my face. “It’s just…this is two days away. Hansen didn’t give me a lot of time to plan, and of course my dad was totally useless.”
Then again, we’d been so busy working on home renovations that, for all I knew, Hansen could’ve told me ages ago, and I’d simply forgotten.
“How’s Hansen?” she asked. “And your dad?”
“They’re good…” I said slowly. “Hansen is finally enjoying his new school. It seemed like once he came back from Christmas break, he started to really settle in. He’s had a few friends over, and I even had a group of boys here for a pizza making party one night.”
“Pizza sounds delicious,” she said absently, the rustle of paper still evident in the background.
Instantly, I was transported back to that day a month and a half ago, making pizza for her while she made those danishes that burned because we’d been too lost in each other to care. I doubted the dessert could’ve competed with her taste anyway. The tang of her arousal bursting like fireworks on my tongue with each new swipe through her pussy. How easily she’d fallen apart for me—how quickly she’d given me everything I asked for.
Fuck, I’d gotten myself off to memories of her sounds more times than I could count .
I wanted her again, badly, but I couldn’t let myself go there, not when there was so much at stake for me. Not when the livelihood of my son rode on me keeping my dick to myself.
And, of course, there was the Shannon of it all—the relationship that wrecked me so thoroughly that, in the end, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to come back from it.
“What’re you flipping through?” I asked in an attempt to distract myself from the situation in my pants.
“My recipe book. Well, not mine exactly. It was my grandma’s, but as the only baker in the family, it’s mine now.”
“Is that where you got your danish recipe from?” I asked, once again bridging the present to the past.
“It is,” she said slowly, as though timid about broaching this subject. Surprising, given she was the one who’d brought it up in our previous phone conversation.
“Is that when you got serious about baking?” I asked. “When you discovered that recipe book?”
“Oh, no,” Brie said with a laugh. “I’ve been obsessed with baking for as long as I can remember. I used to have an Easy-Bake Oven I’d routinely use to make the family grossly raw little treats. As I got older, with Mom and Dad’s supervision, I started experimenting in an actual kitchen. It was…” She trailed off, clearly searching for the right words. “It was quite the learning curve at first, but we figured it out, especially with Roscoe’s help.”
“Plus, they reaped the benefits.”
She chuckled again. “I’m not sure any of us would’ve said that in those early days, but they certainly do now. But no, I actually didn’t get Granny’s cookbook until I graduated high school. Tanya, who owns Granny Smith’s Tavern, found it when she was cleaning out the attic one day and gave it to me as a graduation present. It’s…my prized possession.”
A moment after her words, my phone let out the distinct trill of an incoming FaceTime call, and I quickly, greedily accepted.
Brie was…resplendent. Neither my memory nor the grainy phone screen did her justice. Her hair was braided, the end tossed over her shoulder in the way I was coming to recognize as her signature style. I couldn’t begrudge her, knowing it was more functional than anything, but I secretly wished I could see it loose and wavy down her back.
At her side, she held the recipe book, which was leather-bound and stamped with a massive S in the center. At the edges, I could see numerous tabs of various colors. The edges were worn, the clasp cracked with age. Clearly, it had been well loved.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
“I didn’t really know her,” she admitted. “She passed when I was a baby, but my dad has shared numerous stories about her with us over the years. Back in the seventies, she decided she was tired of being a housewife—my dad and his siblings, who are now flung across the world, were grown past the stage of needing constant supervision—and asked my grandfather if she could help out at the winery. He knew they’d likely kill each other if they worked together, so he sent her into town with a blank check and told her to buy whatever she wanted to entertain herself.”
“That seems…dangerous,” I said with a chuckle.
“Oh, it was. Granny Smith ended up buying an entire block’s worth of empty storefronts. Apple Blossom Bay had been experiencing a decrease in population at that point, and a lot of those businesses had shuttered as the owners left. So, Granny purchased the buildings on Main Street, opened the Tavern, and leased the other storefronts for pennies to anyone willing to put down roots in town.”
I pulled up a mental image of Main Street, orienting myself around Granny Smith’s Tavern and trying to imagine a day when the lively area was basically a ghost town.
“So your family used to own the Tavern, Penny’s gift shop, that ATV rental place by the bay, the candle shop, and Brubaker’s place?”
“Yep,” she said, popping the p . “My dad obviously sold all of it, including the Tavern to Tanya Geralt back in the nineties, before any of us girls were born. Thanks to a lot of sweat equity from him and my mom, the winery was booming, and he just didn’t have any interest in being a landlord or running a restaurant outside of the one at the winery.”
“That’s…crazy. Knowing the history, it must be painful to see the Brubaker place go down the way it did.”
When I moved to Apple Blossom Bay the previous spring, the Brubaker Cafe had been thriving. But after the unexpected death of Char, the matriarch of the Brubaker clan, her sons had taken over the business…and quickly ran it into the ground. After violating numerous health and building codes, they were eventually forced to close their doors last fall.
“Yeah,” Brie said slowly. “Dad definitely wasn’t happy, but…it won’t be empty for long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dad and I sort of bought the building…”
“ What ?” I asked, incredulous. “Why are you telling me this now? What are you going to do with the space?”
A thousand more questions whirled through my brain, but one thought stuck out more than the rest, flashing neon—did this mean she was coming back?
“I’m opening a bakery,” she said simply.
Fucking hell. She was coming back. My skin hummed in anticipation of getting to see her again, and more regularly at that. Maybe…
No .
I firmly shut that thought down, boxed it, locked it up, wrapped it in chains, and tossed it into the proverbial Mariana Trench in my mind. We’d agreed to be nothing more than friends for a reason, and I wasn’t going to let my imagination wander with delusions of grandeur where she was concerned.
“When?”
“I’m moving home as soon as my apprenticeship is up. Dad has actually been hard at work on it while I’m in Chicago, so it’ll be ready for me to decorate and open once I move home.”
“Which will be when?”
“My apprenticeship finishes up at the end of June, so I’m hoping to be open by the middle of July.”
I whistled low, impressed and surprised. “I had no idea you wanted to open a bakery.”
She grinned. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Then, she resumed flipping through the recipe book but said, “Now, enough about me. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“You know, normal stuff. Trying to keep my energetic son alive. Oh, and my dad and I have been renovating the house. We ripped out the kitchen yesterday, so tomorrow, we’ ll get started on rebuilding now that supplies have started to arrive.”
“Wait,” she continued, seeming to snap out of whatever task she’d been lost in. “You ripped out your kitchen?”
“Yeah, I just said that…”
“Then where exactly are you planning on baking this treat?”
“The winery,” I said with a shrug. “Your dad has been cool about letting me use it when I need to.”
“So that’s how you’ve been spending your time off,” she said, almost to herself, but I perked up.
“You’ve been thinking about me?”
“Every day,” she admitted, though she seemed reluctant to do so.
“Well, that makes two of us.”
The line was silent for several heartbeats, any words quashed under the weight of all the things we couldn’t say. Then, Brie clapped her hands.
“Okay,” she said. “Back to the real reason you called. You’re going to make spiced apple cupcakes. Now, get a pen and paper. You need to go shopping, and here’s what you need to buy…”
I grinned as she parroted my instructions from our last phone call back to me and did as she asked.
Two days later, my phone rang as I was in the middle of tearing out the old sheet linoleum lining the floor of my kitchen. Grateful for the break, I pulled it from my pocket, my mood picking up further when I saw it was Brie.
“Hey, honey. ”
“What are these?”
I grinned. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
With an exasperated sigh, she said, “I had a massive arrangement of flowers delivered to the bakery today while Bryce and I were working. The note said, ‘for my honey Bee.’ Know anything about that?”
“I would’ve had them delivered to your apartment, but I don’t know your address. I had to make do with the information I did have.”
“You’re insane.”
“You love it. Plus, I had to thank you for coming to my rescue with that cupcake recipe.”
“The kids loved them, I’m assuming?”
I chuckled. Loved them was an understatement. They ate and left no crumbs…literally. I’d already been asked by several parents if I could share the recipe. Apparently, Hansen’s classmates had gone home and sang my praises, demanding they learn how to make Brie’s cupcakes.
“I actually wanted to ask you if it was okay to pass the recipe along. I’ve had basically all the parents begging for it.”
“And I bet you just love all that attention,” she said, and I could hear the grin in her tone.
“Well, it’s not like I deserve it. That’s all you, honey.”
“You have my blessing to share the recipe with all those moms thirsting after your… cupcakes .”
I snorted at her suggestive inflection. “Someone sounds jealous.”
Brie scoffed. “I’m not jealous. We’re friends, right?”
“Are we? ”
She didn’t respond right away, but when she did, it was to say, “I love the flowers, Ez. Thank you. But…this doesn’t feel very friendly.”
I shrugged, though she couldn’t see me. In truth, nothing I felt for her was friendly, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make her feel special. “Friends give friends flowers.”
“Not the kind of friends we are.”
“And exactly what kind of friends are we, Ms. Delatou?”
Across the room, my dad perked up. I hadn’t mentioned Brie or our brief dalliance to him before, and I knew I was in trouble if the storm brewing on his face was any indication.
I turned my back on him, not wanting him to draw a cloud over my good mood from hearing Brie’s voice.
Her voice was low, barely above a whisper, when she said, “We’re the kind of friends who maybe want to be more but recognize it’s not a good idea.”
Hope bloomed like a flower in my chest, but I quickly closed an imaginary fist around it, quelling the sensation before it could invade my entire being.
“And that’s why I sent you the flowers.”
Brie sighed. “Maybe it’s best if we don’t talk anymore.”
“No!” I said quickly. “That’s the last thing I want.”
“Then how are we supposed to play this?”
“We keep doing what we’re doing,” I said. “If this is the only way I get you, I’m not giving it up.”
“This would be so much easier if we’d just never met…or never gave into temptation.”
“You’re not wrong, but I don’t regret what happened.” Then, something occurred to me. “Wait, do you regret it? ”
Brie snorted. “Please. I’m the one who got an orgasm out of the deal, plus the best pizza I’ve ever had. I definitely don’t regret it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Aside from all that, I mean.”
“No, Ezra,” she said softly. “I could never regret you.”