I, however, wasn’t ready to answer yet. Sure, I probably should have thought of that while he was gone, but I hadn’t. Nope, instead I had sat there and thought about what it might be like to see Axel naked. Which meant here we were, facing each other with my answer looming between the two of us.
If there was one thing my years in the food industry had taught me, it was how to politely divert a conversation.
“Umm…I’m actually really hungry, so I think it’s best if we pause on our tutoring and I eat this delicious club sandwich in front of me,” I told him, trying to give him my best confident face and attitude to hide my nerves.
He grinned back at me, letting me know he saw my play but was going to let me have it.
“I’ll let you enjoy your meal, then,” he said before walking over to a new customer who had just sat three chairs down from me.
The good news was I did spend my time while eating thinking of what to say next, just in case he tried to bring it back up again. That meant I was ready when he came back a few minutes later, asking how everything was.
“It’s good,” I told him. “I have a question for you, though. Why do you want to learn all these extra things? Just so you can understand the language better?”
He crossed his arms, standing in front of me as he took a moment to answer. “In my job, I need to be able to read into the things that people say. Sometimes people are not obvious when they need help or when they are lying to you, so I need to be able to read their faces. That is normally hard to do, but it is even harder when you don’t speak the language or know everything they are saying.”
That made sense, and I thought it was great that he was pushing himself to learn this.
“Tell me, Stella. If you were not born in Sweden, how did you learn how to cook such delicious bakery items?”
I smiled, appreciating the fact that he thought they were delicious.
“I’m adopted,” I told him. “My mother died when I was three years old, and I moved in with a foster family. My social worker never found any relatives living here, and I didn’t have a father listed on my birth certificate. I was adopted by an older couple, and they loved to cook and bake with me. It was one of the ways we bonded.”
I knew this was some deep information and probably more than he really wanted to know, but he stood there attentively as I continued on.
“When I was sixteen, I begged my parents to let me do one of those ancestry kits so I could learn more about my heritage. They were reluctant at first, but eventually let me, and I found out I was over ninety percent Swedish and Danish.”
I smiled, thinking back to how happy I was to know about that part of myself.
“My adoptive father is also Scandinavian, though he’s just Danish, and it was his grandparents who moved to this country, so he’s never been there, nor does he have any real insight into his culture, but it still gave us something to bond over.”
“That is awesome that you shared that and didn’t know it,” Axel said.
“Well. In my new quest to learn more about my ancestry, I started looking up how to bake traditional Scandinavian desserts. I became mildly obsessed with it and decided to go to culinary school. After that, I worked for another bakery in Chicago, but I had always wanted to own my own. When my dad got sick a few years ago, I decided to move back home to be closer to him and also chase my dream of opening my own bakery.”
“Damn, girl, that’s a great story,” Tammy said, making me realize she had been standing there the whole time, and I hadn’t noticed because I was so caught up in reminiscing. “And I’m really happy you decided to move back here, because I’ve had several of your desserts, and they are sinfully delicious. They also go straight to my butt, but totally worth it!”
“Thanks, Tammy.” I laughed self-consciously at what she’d said. I often felt awkward at people’s praise or compliments, especially if I didn’t know them all that well.
“Okay, but listen…hear me out,” Tammy said, holding up her hands. “I think if we put some of your desserts on our menu here, they would do really well. Have you ever thought about doing something like that? Partnering with a restaurant?”
“Umm, no, not really,” I responded.
I hadn’t actually thought of that before, but I wasn’t opposed to it. She gave me a couple of suggestions, and we tossed around a few ideas on how to make it work, with plans for me to get back to her in a few days.
As Axel handed a check to someone else at the corner of the bar, I looked down at my watch and was shocked to find I had been here for almost three hours, just talking and gabbing away with Axel and Tammy.
While I didn’t have to get up super early since Isabel took care of all the early baking, I also didn’t want to stay too late. When Axel walked back, I asked him for my check so I could head home.
“You don’t owe anything. I took care of it,” he replied, causing me to sigh.
“Axel, the whole point of me coming here was to repay you in some way for looking into Braden and helping with that whole situation,” I rebutted. “You won’t let me pay you for that, so I wanted to come here and be a paying customer while helping you with our weird English terms.”
“You are not going to pay me to keep you safe,” he replied.
“Axel, that’s literally your job. People pay you to do exactly that. Why can’t I?”
He stared at me for a few moments as though trying to choose the right words. “I will use a phrase to answer you that Ruthie often uses…Because I said so.”
