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A SWEET TOOTH
Gage
On Friday afternoon, there’s barely a second to ask if everything’s okay when Elodie and Amanda arrive at my place. My grandma offered to make chocolate chip cookies with them, then take them to the movies later since we’ll be busy at Special Edition all night.
Eliza’s waiting at the door, both for Amanda and to give Elodie the gift. The second Amanda’s inside, pressing a contraband bar of chocolate into Eliza’s pocket—which I’m pretty sure they’re going to use in Grandma’s cookies, along with the secret ingredient of coconut—Eliza hands Elodie a gift bag. “Good luck tonight. This is for you.”
Elodie peeks inside, then smiles and sniffs. “Grapefruit soap. I love it. And way better than a chocolate soap someone once gave me.”
Eliza’s nose crinkles. “Eww. Chocolate is for eating, not cleaning.”
“Exactly. But grapefruit? That’s for eating and cleaning,” Elodie adds, and she sounds like Mary Poppins, magical and bright, and I shouldn’t love that. Really, I shouldn’t. She’s not a delightful, fictional nanny. She’s a very real woman with very real needs—one who I am really in business with now.
And I can’t get in the way of her paying her bills and loans and putting Amanda through school.
Before we take off, Elodie tugs my grandma aside at the door. “Amanda’s a vegetarian. She doesn’t eat any meat at all. But she’s obsessed with cheese.”
“Well, so am I,” Grams says. “We’ll get along fine.”
We leave my house, heading for her car where she sets the soap bar in the back seat. As she drives, she’s peppy along the way, chatting about a slight increase in traffic at Elodie’s Chocolates today with some of the social buzz about the pop-up. She mentions that the woman who owns the perfume shop next door said her business has gone up too, and isn’t that great?
But Elodie’s almost too animated. Too Mary Poppins.
When there’s a break in her chatter, I say, “Hey.”
“Yes?”
“Are we good?”
She laughs, answering rhetorically with, “Why would we not be good? Now, I’ve got the playlists ready, and I need to do some chocolate prep, and I wrote out a list of?—”
“Elodie, are you pissed at me?”
She slows at a light on Van Ness, tossing me a blank glance. “No. I don’t even know why you think I would be.”
“Because—”
But I stop myself. I don’t want to be presumptuous. I don’t want to be that guy who acts like he expects a woman to be out of her mind when he says we can’t do this. When we both said we can’t do this.
“Because that’s great,” I backtrack, then talk business the rest of the way.
Several hours later, I’m amped up from the nonstop lines, the chatter, and the vibe of a packed house. A tiny house, sure. But a packed one nonetheless, with crowds spilling into the courtyard, including Loretta who brought a pack of women friends who all left big tips.
It’s just after nine, and I’m mixing a Blushing Mimosa—orange juice, pineapple juice, grenadine, and champagne—and Elodie is plating some of the chocolate-covered cherries along with the raspberry chocolates.
“We’re almost out of the popping raspberries,” she whispers out of the side of her mouth, concern in her tone. “I don’t want to have to close early. We said we’d be open till ten.”
“Good problem to have,” I say as I fill a flute with the juice mixture, then top it with champagne.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she whispers, her brow knitting.
“But the lines, Elodie. Look at the lines,” I whisper, nodding toward the crowd snaking outside the shop. “And they’re all posting. They are doing the work for us.”
“And if we run out, they’ll post that we ran out,” she counters, and there’s real worry in her voice.
I should reassure her. I’m supposed to be her fiancé. “I’ve got extra champagne in the supply closet. We’ll just serve drinks then.” There. That ought to do the trick.
“You have extra?”
