Hideaway may lack cell signal or boundaries, but damn if it doesn’t have heart.
Heart…
For some reason, my eyes trail down Main Street, stopping on a chalkboard sign stationed outside a sky-blue door.
Skippy whines.
“She wouldn’t want to see me.” Great, now I’m talking to a dog.
He huffs.
I look at my watch. “She’s probably busy.”
As if annoyed I’m making him move from his cozy snow drift bed, he gets up, nose pointed in Making Whoopie’s direction like the hunting dog he isn’t.
“Skippy.” Now I’mpleadingwith a dog. “I fell into her crotch while holding a hairless pussy.”
My crudeness falls on deaf ears as Skippy starts swaggering down Main Street.
And like the vet said I should—just to be safe—I follow.
Audrey
I’m high.I can’t tell if it’s from my seemingly overnight success thanks to two celebrity social media endorsements, an above-average sugar intake, or the sleep deprivation caused by said overnight success and sugar intake.
Making Whoopie gained a few thousand new followersafter the tree-lighting heard 'round Hideaway—and apparently, the country.
I’ve spent the last three days—including my one sacred day off, usually reserved for sleep—fulfilling an avalanche of large-order requests, dealing with pre-Christmas pie panic, and managing counter lines that could rival Disneyland on opening day.
A toddler in a puffy snowsuit screeches as he smashes his hands against the bakery display glass, leaving behind a constellation of sugar-frosted fingerprints. I slide a napkin across the counter with a tight smile at his mom, who’s too focused on getting a TikTok of the cookie selection to notice that her child is trying to eat through the glass.
“Three Jingle My Berries and two Santa’s Cream-Filled Secrets,” I repeat back to the older man in the shearling-lined coat who ordered with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. He gives me a thumbs-up and adds a sixth whoopie to the order for his wife, “the one with eggnog cream and the dirty name.”
I box them up, slap a label on top, and pivot just in time to catch a gingerbread pie as it slides toward the edge of the cooling rack like it’s attempting a baked goods escape.
I know how it feels.
Not that I’m not grateful to Felix and Amanda. I am. Exceedingly so.
Especially when I saw that my mother had liked that one post of Felix Jones biting into a whoopie pie.
I mean, does it also mean she probably saw the video of me being sacked like a quarterback by a man holding a naked cat and frosted redemption? Probably.
But I’m going to ignore that.
Just like I’m ignoring the customers waxing poetic about Hideaway’s newest golden boy—the lawyer with a heart of gold who rescued our precious town dog from paw-tricide.
A woman in a glittering “Eat, Sleigh, Love” sweatshirt leans across the counter and whispers, “Isn’t it so sweet what that man did for Skippy this morning? Honestly, I didn’t even think those lawyer types had hearts.”
I hum noncommittally and use tongs to thrust a Sleigh Me Softly into her bag. Not passive-aggressive. Just… precision serving.
Never mind that I’m the one who got body-slammed into a thirty-foot pine tree. The one with a baseball-sized bruise on her ass cheek. The one squashed under a dog, a cat, and a lawyer in a pear tree.
But sure. Let’s canonize Jack Lourd for being a decent human to a dog with a town trust fund.
I slide another gingerbread whoopie pie into a compostable box and hand it across the counter to a woman wearing a fur beret. It’s gorgeous, and I want to ask where she got it, but I’m too tired to do more than—Smile. Nod. Repeat.
My eyes flick to the stack of mail Lumi, the postmistress, hand-delivered through the crowd earlier in exchange for a Maple Me Moan. The corner of one envelope is slightly greasy from its proximity to the spiced-rum buttercream.
