Chapter 7
I’d been pretending to work for hours. Sure, I’d tightened a few bolts, rewired smoke alarms, and helped mount shelves in the back pantry, but if anyone asked what I really accomplished today, I’d have to admit it. I spent the whole damn time orbiting Marigold.
She moved through the bakery like sunlight, warm and soft, checking in with the volunteers, thanking people with fresh-baked treats from her home kitchen and that easy smile.
Flour and paint splatters dusted her jeans, and a smear of frosting curved up one cheekbone like a kiss someone else had left behind.
And it was driving me insane.
“You’ve got it bad,” Thomas, one of my coworkers muttered to me earlier as we replaced tile near the register. I told him to shut up, but he wasn’t wrong.
I did have it bad. I’d just been holding it back for weeks.
Goldie was newer to town, and I didn’t exactly have the softest reputation. People liked to say I was too blunt, too bold, too much.
And her?
She was all sweet and light and kind.
I figured someone like me had no business wanting someone like her.
Never mind the fact that I couldn’t tell if she was even into women.
Normally I had a fantastic sense of it, but I was worried that her hippy love vibes, the ones that pulsed love and acceptance out into the world for every living creature equally, was tricking me.
But today, something changed.
She wasn’t just smiling at everyone and chatting like she normally did. She was smiling at me. Looking longer each time we caught each other’s stare across the room. Laughing a little more intimately when I made a joke.
And every time our hands brushed when we passed each other tools, or trays, it felt intentional. Everything she did today felt like a choice, and it felt deliberate.
Was I just losing my mind with need? Probably.
By late afternoon, the bakery buzz had died down. We were waiting for the paint and flooring to dry before furniture could be moved back into the main sitting space, so it was just us left.
I carried a box of old, water-ruined décor down the back hallway toward the dumpster when I finally found her again hiding in the office.
Goldie sat at her desk, flipping through receipts with one hand and eating a cookie with the other. Her hair was a wild halo, half pinned up with a paintbrush stuck through it. A string of twinkly lights blinked behind her on the bulletin board.
She looked like a chaotic, sweet treat dream.
My chaotic wet dream.
She glanced up when I walked in, “Don’t say it,” she warned, grinning at her receipts.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” I lied, setting the box down by the door. “Except that you probably shouldn’t be eating that cookie. Pretty sure it’s from the pre-flood stash.”
She took another bite and grinned around the confection, “Worth it.”
I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. The room felt too small with us both in it, or maybe I was just too full of things I’d been swallowing down all day.
Goldie glanced back down at her paperwork, “Do you need help with something, Rhea?”
“Yeah,” I said, slow and cautious, “You.”
Her head snapped up, her lips parted slightly before she closed them again. Her fingers stilled on the desk for the first time since I had walked in.
“I’m not great with…subtlety,” I admitted.
“I don’t flirt well with someone I’m not sure is as into me as I am with them.
I don’t ask questions or wonder, because I usually know.
That’s not to sound cocky or anything, but I’m a very confident woman.
” I exhaled as she stared at me, “But I need to know, Marigold. Are you into women?”
There. I said it.
She blinked at me for a second. And then again. Before finally saying, “Yes.”
One word. One syllable. And it hit like a firehose to my chest.
“I’m bi,” She added quieter. “Always have been, I think. I just don’t label myself to the world because I hate feeling like I have to fit into a box for other’s understanding.
” She gave me a tiny shrug. “You’d be surprised how many people think the little hippy girl who bakes cookies and paints pretty pictures on her walls should only want to kiss boys. ”
I stepped closer, unsure of what I was doing until I was right beside her desk. “But you like kissing girls, too?”
She stared up at me through her lashes, “Are you asking because…?”
“Because I’m interested in kissing you. Really, really interested.” I replied, steeling my spine, “And I think you are too. At least based on how we’ve interacted all day today, anyway.”
She smiled then, slow and wide, as if it had snuck up on her as she stood up. “Good,” she said. “Because I am interested.”
It didn’t take much after that.
One breath. One step. One tilt of her chin.
I kissed her.
And damn, she kissed me back.
It was quick, and softer than I meant, but no less real. Her lips tasted like vanilla and cinnamon, and maybe a little like sin in her sugary sweet way. Her hands fluttered at my waist, but didn’t push me away or pull me closer.
When we broke apart, she pressed her fingers to her lips and let out a breathless laugh.
“Well,” she whispered. “That answers that.”
I grinned. “I think I’m going to have a hard time focusing on anything but your lips when we sit down in that meeting tonight about the charity hockey tournament.”
She gave me a look. “You’re telling me,” She groaned. “I’ve got it worse.”
“Why?” I questioned, “Because Tanner will be there?”
She took a quick breath in, and I could see the conflict in her eyes, speaking volumes that her lips wouldn’t.
“It’s okay,” I smiled at her with a sarcastic nod, “I’m not going to hold your horrible taste in men against you.”
She snorted a noise that shocked us both, and she covered her face in mortification before dissolving into a fit of giggles that made me relax like we weren’t toeing a line of no return with the name of a man on both of our lips.
“Do you think I’m a terrible person,” She asked after calming down, looking at me cautiously, “For wanting my cake and to eat it too?”
I shrugged as I picked up the box of décor and turned back to her, “No, not really.” She stood at her desk; hands twined together in front of her as she waited for me to reassure her.
“Listen, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with Tanner Brooks, if you’re into the good-boy kind, which I’m not.
I’m bi too, I see the appeal there for someone like you.
He’s just not who I would pick if I were looking for a male partner. But you could pick worse.”
She held my gaze; head tilted slightly in that unnerving way she always did when it felt like she was trying to see straight through my forehead into my thoughts. What would she find in there if she could? Would she find the lie in that statement?
Finally, she took a deep breath, “Why does your calling Tanner a good boy feel incredibly—” She hesitated as she searched for the words.
“Mean? Cruel? Correct?” I babbled on with a smirk.
“Erotic?” She replied, and I nearly choked on my own tongue.
“Erotic?” I asked, “Why does me calling Tanner a good boy feel erotic to you?”
She shrugged again, eyes alight with mischief, “Maybe because that’s just who you think he is, but I know better. And the idea of you realizing he’s not a good boy at all kind of intrigues me.”
Good-heartedly, I scoffed and walked back out into the hallway as ideas I shouldn't have started rushing through my mind.
The kind of things that included Goldie and me in a bedroom, shut away from the world, doing incredibly indecent things to each other.
While Tanner Brooks watched.
“Maybe one day I’ll let you show me just who he really is,” I called out, knowing I shouldn’t plant that kind of seed in her head, when it was obvious she wanted us both.