eleven

A friend had once told Jack that you didn’t have to do laundry until you ran out of underwear. She felt the same way about grocery shopping and milk. With all the desire for bottles of Cheerwine, cartons of Mayfield’s mint chocolate chip ice cream, and Moon Pies pouring off of people as they walked the aisles, she put it off as long as possible.

Though it was almost eight in the morning, the sky was still dark. It wasn’t raining, but the air was thick with moisture. It tasted bitter, like burned chocolate. Standing on the sidewalk, Jack rubbed her hands up and down her arms to obliterate the goose bumps and hoped Mr. Quito would unlock the door early.

The lights flickered on aisle by aisle. She watched Mr. Quito carry the cash drawer up front, where he counted it twice before setting it in the register. He waved to her as he disappeared around a display of paper towels. She waited.

Someone shouted her name. It was a brash, wicked sound.

Tabitha stalked down the sidewalk. Her ponytail swung violently back and forth. She stopped inches away from Jack, her face contorted and red. “Where do you get off tellin’ my husband I’m cheatin’ on him?”

Jack took a step back. She pressed against the glass window, trapped. “It was a misunderstanding, Tabitha.”

“Like I’d believe that. I know you did it on purpose. Just because you can’t keep a man doesn’t give you the right to go out and drive other women’s husbands away,” she snarled.

“That’s not what I was trying to do. We were just talking and I mentioned I’d seen you in the shop. When you said you were celebrating an anniversary, I assumed you meant yours. I honestly didn’t mean to imply anything to Jerry. I’ll be happy to talk to him and—”

“Do you really think I want you talkin’ to him again? Tellin’ him more lies?” Tabitha’s head whipped to the side and she glared at the empty street.

The low murmur of voices and scratching of sneakers on concrete grew louder. A couple seconds later, a group of ten or so women in the local fitness group power walked around the corner.

“Do you go around talkin’ about all of your customers this way? If so, I think the rest of ’em have a right to know.” Tabitha’s voice echoed off the buildings across the street.

The women skirted them, but every pair of eyes was locked on Jack as they overheard Tabitha’s threat. A few craned their necks to keep watching even after they’d marched past.

Mr. Quito stuck his round face out of the front door. He narrowed his eyes at them. “Is everything okay, Jaclyn?”

“It’s fine, Mr. Quito.” Jack said. Her voice shook with anger, but she smiled at him.

“No, it’s not,” Tabitha added. “She’s a home-wrecking bitch who doesn’t know when to keep her damn mouth shut. And now everyone’s gonna know.”

“I think you should go on home, Tabitha,” Mr. Quito said. “You too, Jack.”

Jack straightened. Her blood was pumping hot and fast. “Sorry,” she said and brushed past them.

Shaken, she pulled out her phone and hit the speed dial for Graham. She listened to the shrill rings, counting each one until voice mail picked up. “Hey, it’s me,” she said. She stopped on the corner and looked back to make sure Tabitha hadn’t followed her. “I forgot you’re out biking. So, never mind. I’ll see you later.”

Figuring Hutton was with Graham, she dropped her phone back in her purse and exhaled a long, frustrated breath.

There was no point in going home. Jack’s bad mood would just fester without some sort of distraction. Better to channel that energy into something productive. She left her car parked near the grocery store and walked the three blocks to work.

The lights in Harper’s apartment caught her eye as she turned onto Pearl Street. She could hear the low beat of music that pumped out of the open window. The violent, heartbroken voice of the singer tugged at her heart.

Harper moved into view, paint streaked on her forehead and shirt. She had one paintbrush clamped in her teeth, another in her hand. She looked up, caught sight of Jack, and disappeared.

The music shut off first, then the lights. Jack stared at the lifeless apartment. The disappointment burned in her chest. She fished her keys out of her purse, but before she reached the door, Harper pushed it open.

“You look ready to kill someone,” Harper said.

“Tabitha,” Jack seethed.

“Can I help?”

“Don’t you want to know what she did before agreeing to commit a felony with me?”

“Nope.”

Jack dropped her purse on the counter and sat next to it. “Thanks, Harp.”

“So, what did she do? It must’ve been bad for you to be this riled up.”

“She’s cheating on her husband and she got caught because she came in here flouncing around like a lovesick teenager and told me she was getting cupcakes for her anniversary. And when I saw Jerry last week, I stupidly asked how it was.”

“Well, yeah. You’re nice like that. Me, I wouldn’t have thought twice to ask. Hell, I wouldn’t even have remembered. But, lemme guess, she blames you that he found out?”

“She just came up to me outside Quito’s and started yelling at me and made sure everyone around heard that I’d wrecked her marriage.”

“Bitch,” Harper said.

“Bitch,” Jack agreed.

When the air filled with strawberries, Jack smiled.

Harper winked at her and grabbed two cupcakes from the case. She handed one to Jack. “You’re not worried about what Tabitha says, are you? ’Cause no one’s gonna listen to her. This town loves you, Jack.”

She stared at the strawberry icing. It was piled high in even thick, swirls of pink. Peeling the wrapper off, she bit in. It was sweet and crisp. After a moment she said, “I know it shouldn’t matter, but the way she was spinning it, like I was gossiping about customers behind their backs, they might listen to that.”

“If they do, we’ll set them straight.” She said it so matter-of-factly that Jack couldn’t argue. “Okay, I hate to run if you’re still mad, but I want to get back to up there before I lose the light.”

“What light?” Jack asked.

“Exactly. It makes for one hell of a painting. I’ll show you when it’s done.” She took the cupcake with her and headed back upstairs.

Harper cranked on the music a moment later. It rattled the ceiling for a few seconds before she turned it down. Jack popped the last bite of cupcake into her mouth, licked the remaining crumbs and icing from her fingers then went to the kitchen to rinse her hands.

She stopped in front of the bulletin board that now held a dozen sketches of ideas Harper wanted to turn into cupcake art. She untacked the Twilight drawing. The lines were rough, almost sloppy. But she’d seen how Harper had translated that into something precise and beautiful.

As a planner though, Jack couldn’t leave the details up in the air. They needed a system to calculate the number of cupcakes a design would take instead of relying on Harper’s instincts.

She taped the sketch to the front window. The drawing wasn’t quite to scale but it would do. She wasn’t looking for precision. She just needed to know that they could, in fact, do it. Grabbing a pencil, she layered a sheet of graph paper on top of it and began to draw circles in each box. There was enough light from the spotlights underneath the awning to make her impromptu lightbox work.

She started in the center of the design and worked her way toward the right edge. She lost count after the first hundred. Her fingers and palm burned from the strain. She eased her grip and flexed her hand. The skin was red and throbbed as she clenched and curled. She kept her other hand splayed across the paper, plastering it to window so it couldn’t budge.

It took the better part of an hour to complete. She counted it three times before she was certain she hadn’t overlooked any circles.

“Eight hundred forty-two,” Jack said when Graham came in later that morning.

“Dalmatians?” Graham asked.

“The number of cupcakes it’ll take to really make Harper’s Twilight masterpiece.”

“How’d you come up with that?”

She slapped the graph paper on the table. “Plotted out every damn last one of ’em. And I’m gonna have to do it again, mind you, to make it life-sized. But I think it’s doable.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to make the design fit a set number?”

“Yeah. You know me, I like to do things the hard way,” she said. She picked at the edge of the table. “I think I can make a template on the computer to do the work for me, I just needed to sketch it all out to see what I’d be working with.”

Graham slipped the paper from between her fingers when she tried to take it back. “Not so fast, Grabby.” He studied it for a moment, his eyebrows pulling together in a V as if trying to see the finished cupcakes.

“It’s just a bunch of circles. Nothing exciting.”

“Just give me a minute. You know it takes me a little longer to catch up to what you’re thinking. So, how exactly will it work? On the computer I mean.”

“Well, we would place the cupcake template, similar to that,” Jack said, pointing to the graph paper, “on the actual design at full scale. Then when we print it out, we’ll have a precise layout that shows how the individual cupcakes need to be iced and how they need to be arranged as a whole. The template would be scalable so that we can take one design and alter the number of cupcakes it’ll take, depending on the client’s needs.”

“I’m not sure we have enough room to try this. Scratch that, I know we don’t. Unless we plan on using the floor.”

Sitting on the counter while he started pulling out trays of cupcakes to frost, she said, “Yeah, I thought about that—”

“Of course you did. If I could bake as fast as you think, I’d be home by nine every morning.”

“You don’t come in ’til ten,” Jack said.

“Precisely. But back to your solution.”

“I think we’re gonna have to do it in chunks. And once each section is complete then we’ll put them on trays or in boxes in the correct arrangement and stick them in the cooler. The first time we’re going to see the whole thing together is when we’re setting up at the event.”

“Are we willing to risk that?” Graham asked.

“I don’t know yet. But it’s really the only way to go if we want to do this.”

“Agreed. How long ’till you have that template in the computer? If we can get it set up this week, then we can try a small-scale test to make sure it’ll work like you want.”

“Oh, it’ll work. Even if I have to draw the damn template by hand,” she said.

“It’s gonna be a massive undertaking, Jack. Just because you’re stubborn it doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself to make it work.”

“No one remembers the ones that come easy.”

***

Graham should’ve known something was up when he walked into the kitchen to find Jack waiting on him with a cup of coffee. Her hair was down for a change and fell past her shoulders. Something about the light made her eyes look flecked with gold. He took the cup, gulped down half of it, and handed it back.

“So, I made some calls this morning and convinced Grace and Nick to come in later this week to talk about a slight tweak to their wedding cupcakes,” Jack said.

“What would that be?” he asked.

“Well, two things actually. First, I want to offer them the gardenia cups—”

“I haven’t tested the recipe yet, Jack.”

“I know, but I just have this feeling about it. I think Grace will adore them. I know whatever you make will be fantastic. And second,” she continued before Graham could interrupt again, “I want to make them a garden collage since they’re getting married in Fletcher Gardens. I’ve already got Harper working on a sketch.”

He should have seen this coming.

After her excitement last night, he knew she wouldn’t wait long to test the template. He ran his hands through his hair. “And you couldn’t have checked with me before you called her?”

“You would’ve said no.”

“You’re killing me here, Jaclyn. Now get out of my kitchen so I can make your damn cupcakes.” He nudged her when she didn’t move.

Pulling boxes and canisters from the metal shelf, he piled them on the table and set to work. He added ingredients for the traditional white chocolate batter and adjusted the mixer speed without thinking. Balancing the honey and gardenia would be the tricky part.

After he put the cupcakes in the oven, he started on the icing. Graham split a base of vanilla icing into four bowls. He varied the amounts of honey and flavored sugar in each sample. There was something familiar about the flowery scent. He inhaled, closing his eyes to better concentrate. The answer hovered at the edges of his mind, keeping just out of reach.

Jack’s sultry laugh pulled him back to reality.

“You okay up there?” he called.

She leaned around the doorjamb, smiling. “Never better,” she said. She watched him for a moment as if expecting some sort of reaction.

He remembered how she’d reacted in Market when he’d first smelled the sugar, and wondered what she sensed from it. “Wanna try the icing?”

“I’ll wait ’till the cups are ready. Get the full effect.”

“What effect would that be?”

Harper murmured something he couldn’t quite make out. But Graham thought she’d said, “Don’t you wish you knew.”

“I’ll let you know when they’re ready.”

Graham tested each of the icing batches. Then he covered the bowls in plastic wrap and waited for the cupcakes to finish baking.

An hour later, they’d narrowed down the choice to two. Graham and Harper voted for the more subtle flavor, while Jack went for the full-bodied one. Graham caught Harper roll her eyes at her sister and figured he must be missing some inside joke. Instead of asking about it, he said, “You’re not gonna give in on this, are you?”

“I just think we need some more opinions. And I’ve got someone we can call,” Jack said. She pulled the phone number for the guy who had wanted to ask her out the week before from the bulletin board.

At least it’s not programmed in her phone. Graham listened as she dialed, laughed at something the guy said, and invited him in for a “onetime offer.”

He imagined the ideas racing through the kid’s head. And then squeezed his eyes shut and mentally recited the ingredients in his most difficult recipe to block the images, which sprang to very vivid life, of Jack falling for this guy.

He started another recipe when Pete showed up not ten minutes later and reached across the counter to touch Jack’s hand. Graham stood so close to her that they were almost touching. She straightened, but didn’t move away.

“What is it?” Pete asked.

“Something you’ve been wanting for a while,” Jack said. She handed him one of the cupcakes.

“You didn’t.” His grin could’ve broken his face in half.

Graham wanted to punch him.

“No. Graham did. And they’re even better than I thought they’d be.”

“What did I do?” Graham asked.

Pete winked at Jack. “Made me a cupcake that tastes like Jaclyn smells.”

Graham clenched his jaw. “Did I?” He glanced at Jack but she stared at the counter.

Harper had assured him Jack wasn’t interested in Pete. He’d talked himself into believing it. And now here he was, making special-order cupcakes just so that Jack could fulfill some twisted fantasy. He would’ve gone into the back, but Jack shifted so their bodies connected at various points—heels, hips, shoulders.

Graham watched her as Pete took a bite. Breathing normal and mouth set in a half smile, she seemed unaffected.

Either Pete didn’t want her as much as he let on, or Jack was immune.

“Try the other one,” Graham said, nudging the plate closer to Pete. “It’s a little stronger.”

Pete shoved it in his mouth before Graham had finished the sentence.

Jack’s body softened against Graham. “So, what’s the verdict?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I kinda thought I was just here to see how you reacted to them. Not really to tell you which one I liked better.”

“Sorry,” she said. She picked apart another cupcake and put the hunks on the plate. “Do you mind trying them both again?”

Graham had followed the same line of thinking as Pete. He remembered that Jack had mentioned wanting to try an experiment when they bought the sugar, and he wondered if she was learning to control her ability.

Pete ate them both and said, “I like the first one better, I guess. It’s not as overpowering.”

“Damn,” she said.

“Not the result you were looking for?” Graham asked.

“I got what I needed.” Jack scooted a few inches away from him.

His skin was hot where they’d been touching. He jammed his hands in his pockets to keep from pulling her back to him.

She leaned on the counter and continued, “I appreciate the help, Pete. Next cup’s on me.”

“Anytime,” he said.

Pete lingered for a few minutes chatting but Graham tuned him out. He watched Jack, trying to work out what she’d learned from the experiment. Her smile was friendly, her voice calm. There was no trace of the excitement he’d seen when she’d first tasted the icing.

He waited for Pete to leave before he did a test of his own. Taking the last bite of cupcake, he dunked it in the more potent icing so it dripped off in a gush, and popped it in his mouth. The flavor exploded on his tongue like a hot June night.

Jack was close enough that he could smell the flowers on her. He wondered how he hadn’t put it together before. It made his head light. He met her startled eyes and contemplated what she would do if he kissed her.

Everything he felt for her, everything he kept buried down below even the memories of the father he’d almost forgotten, came roaring to the surface: the way her hips swayed in the low-cut dress when they’d danced at Hutton’s wedding. The way her lips curved into a wicked grin when she could smell the cupcake flavor before he’d finished mentally adding ingredients to a new recipe. The way her perfume lingered in the kitchen whenever she left her sweater on the hook by the door.

The force of it made his lungs burn. With his eyes locked on hers, he took a step toward her.

She dug her fingers into the edge of the counter. “Stop, Graham, please. You know that’s not fair.”

He let the thought linger another few seconds before he stepped back and forced his mind clear. “You’re the one who wanted to experiment with the kid. Not my fault you didn’t think of the consequences,” he said.

“That’s all I think about,” she said, her voice a husky whisper.

Graham didn’t know what to make of that. But he was certain he’d crossed a line. He’d always been so careful with what he wanted around her, and in less than a minute he might have ruined everything. He said her name, no louder than a breath. He reached out to her, but she shook him off.

***

She’d been avoiding Graham for the better part of a week. The kitchen was permanently overheated and smelled like gardenias no matter what flavor he baked. No amount of air conditioning or open doors seemed to relieve the thick, stifled scent. Jack stayed up front, where the air was at least breathable.

Harper walked through the door, fanning herself with a clipboard. “I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but you better figure it out soon. If I have to smell those damn flowers one more day, I’m gonna throw up.”

“You can smell it?” Jack asked.

“I think the whole damn town can smell it.” She looked over her shoulder before continuing in a lowered voice, “Talk to him, Jack. Go on this delivery with him and don’t come back until you’ve worked it out.”

“I’m not sure either of us is ready to be alone with the other one yet.”

“Are you ever going to tell me what happened?” Harper asked.

Before Jack could respond, Graham stuck his head through the door. A wave of heat pulsed off of him. She met his eyes for a second—just long enough to see a hint of longing before the wariness took over again.

“Harp, you ready?” he asked.

“Jack?” she asked.

“Just go. Please,” Jack said. She could practically see the tension pour from Graham’s body when Harper turned to follow him.

She let out a frustrated breath when they’d left the shop. An hour or so alone was just what she needed to get her emotions back in check. She looked up when the door opened, thinking for a moment that they’d come back to insist she go instead of Harper.

She told her stupid heart to settle down.

“Hey, y’all,” she said as Grace and Nick walked in.

Grace set her purse on a table and walked to the counter where Jack stood. “Oh, it smells wonderful in here. I can’t tell you how excited I am to see what you’ve come up with.”

Telling herself to snap out of it, she tried to muster up some enthusiasm. “I’m excited about it, too. Lemme grab your info and some samples and I’ll be right out. Help yourself to a bottle of water if you want.”

Jack pulled their clipboard from the wall and put two gardenia cupcakes on a plate. “I was thinking about what we could do to really make your wedding cake stand out,” she said when she walked out front again. “And I had this idea. It may be a little over the top, but I wanted to run it by you anyway. Just in case.”

“We’re definitely up for something a little out there,” Grace said.

“Great. So, I had my sister sketch something up.” Jack pulled the drawing from the clipboard. Harper had added color to it since the morning before. Smiling, she passed the paper to Grace. “Since you’re getting married in Fletcher Gardens, we came up with this collage of flowers. The colors and types of flowers can be customized to mimic how the garden will look in June.”

“It’s perfect. I mean, I liked the simplicity of the different colors in the first option you gave us, but this just blows that out of the water.” Grace’s hands shook the paper as she held it out for Nick to see.

“I thought you’d like it. And these, too.” Jack handed them each a full-sized gardenia cupcake. “They’re not on the menu yet. Might not ever be. But if you like them, we’ll make them for you.”

Grace’s moan of pleasure was all Jack needed. For the first time in days, she enjoyed the gardenia scent and the cool rush that came with it. Her skin tingled as the air conditioner blew from the vent above her. She couldn’t hold in the laugh.

“Did I do that out loud?” Grace asked.

“Can we get a couple of these to go?” Nick asked and winked at his fiancée.

“Sure,” Jack said. “I’ll give you the lot of them if you want.”

“You can do this flavor and the whole collage in the minis still, right? It’s not gonna be a huge wedding, as you know, so we don’t need a ton of cupcakes. But I really, really want this.” She swiped her finger in the icing and licked it off.

“I wouldn’t have shown them to you if we couldn’t do it the way you want.”

“You rock, Jack.” Grace glanced toward the back as if to make sure they were alone. “I know we never really got to know each other very well, which is my fault actually. I didn’t like y’all hanging out much ’cause I thought you were going to steal him away. Well, I guess it wouldn’t have been stealing so much as him wanting you bad enough to leave me for you. But what I’m trying to say is, you seem really cool and I’m sorry I never gave you a chance.”

Jack stared at her, replaying the words to make sure she’d heard right. The idea that Graham would’ve left Grace for her was laughable. “No worries,” she said for lack of anything better. “There’s no rule that says you have to be friends with your boyfriend’s friends.”

“True. But when that boyfriend is someone like Graham, or Nick”—she paused to kiss her fiancé’s cheek—“you can’t ignore the people he cares about if you hope to keep him around for the long haul.”