Love in Bloom's (32 page)

The door closed with a
thud
, and then silence settled into the room. She closed her eyes in the hope of falling back to sleep. Maybe Casey would leave while she was dozing. Maybe he’d sneak out like a coward. If he knew she was contemplating stuffing pieces of him down the compactor chute, sneaking out would be a wise move.

She heard him stir in the sleeping bag, and squeezed her eyes so she wouldn’t be tempted to open them. He shifted some more, and the sleeping bag’s zipper opened with a rasp. She breathed deeply, focused her vision on the nothingness on the inside of her eyelids and prayed for sleep to steal her away.

He touched her foot, and she nearly leaped off the cushions in surprise. “Is this the ankle with the butterfly?” he asked, sounding absurdly lucid.

Damn. He was awake. He had obviously heard Anna and Caitlin leave. He probably thought Susie had schemed with them ahead of time to remove them from the premises in the futile hope that Casey would want to do something with her that required privacy.

But his hand was warm on her ankle, massaging her instep, and instead of screaming at him that he should have kissed her last night, she said, “No, it’s the other one.”

She felt a chill as he pushed the blanket off her, and then she decided it was silly to keep her eyes closed. She opened them in time to see him bow over her legs and brush her tattoo with a kiss.

All right, so she maybe didn’t hate him.

He lifted his head and gazed at her, and what she saw in his eyes—hunger, yearning, lust, a single emotion refracted a million different ways—made her hate him even less. She pushed herself to sit as he reached for her shoulders, and then she tumbled off the couch and onto the floor, into his arms.

His mouth met hers and it was like that time in the stairwell, only much, much better because this time they were horizontal and all he had on was a pair of silk boxers and all she had on was her camisole and panties, which he promptly removed. His hands felt delightful on her skin, large and warm and possessive. She imagined his hands kneading dough, rolling it and shaping it into bagels. She imagined them twining through her hair, and in less than a minute she didn’t have to imagine that anymore because his hands were stroking her hair back from her face, caressing behind her ears, cupping her cheeks while he kissed her.

She sensed the connection between them again, just like yesterday in Flushing Meadows. Unspoken, unseen, yet as power
ful as a force of physics, magnetism or electricity or one of those things. She’d never excelled in science, but right now she was thinking chemistry. The chemistry between her and Casey was incredible.

She touched his chest, stroked his sides, eased back to look at him. He was smiling, that same wonderful smile she’d fallen in love with nearly two months ago, when he’d selected an egg bagel for her because he thought she was nubile. She felt nubile now, as if her insides were swelling and softening for him.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I’m happy. Why are
you
smiling?”

She hadn’t realized she was until he mentioned it, and then she felt the ache of her smile in her temples. “I’m just wondering whether we would be doing this if we’d only spent, like, eighteen hours together.”

“I’d give us a discount on those last two hours,” he murmured, running his hands up and down her back, tracing the roundness of her bottom and then drawing them forward, up over her ribs to explore her breasts. “I think we’re ready for this, don’t you?”

She’d been ready since that first day with the egg bagel. But no—he was right. Then it would have been sex. Now it was more. They were talking too much for it to be just sex. “Frankly,” she said, “I don’t know how you managed to resist me for so long.”

“It wasn’t easy,” he admitted, then sighed as she slid her hands down to the waist of his shorts and pushed them down his legs. “I guess I’m just tough.”

“How tough?”

“Tough enough.” He sighed again when she stroked his erection. “Almost,” he added with a laugh.

She joined his laughter. God, this was good. Better than good. They were talking, laughing, touching, kissing again, moving against each other, kissing some more, pulling back to catch their breaths and laughing again. He eased her onto her back on the sleeping bag, then reached under the coffee table
for his trousers and pulled open the Velcro flap on one of the pockets. He removed a condom.

He’d come for this. He’d been counting the hours as obsessively as she had, and he’d known today would be the day. That thought made her smile, and he smiled, too, and kissed her breasts, kissed her crotch, kissed her lips and fused himself to her.

Atop Neil’s old sleeping bag, Susie became one with Casey, and it was as natural as nature itself. She closed her eyes and thought about all kinds of things she never thought about during sex: the length of his fingers, the shimmer in his gaze, his critique of Jackie Chan’s foot movements during the second movie last night. His description of his best shot, the three-pointer that people thought was so hard but was pretty much instinctive to him. “It’s just the way I’m used to moving,” he’d told her. “I don’t even slam it. I hardly even aim. It just happens.”

That was how this was: just happening, instinctively, his aim perfect. She came, and he kept moving inside her until she came again, gasping and clinging to him and feeling his climax as keenly as her own. They sank onto the sleeping bag, holding each other tight, breathing hard.

Moments passed, and she relaxed her arms enough for him to lean back. His hair was disheveled, his face damp with sweat. Fudge, she decided. The richest, densest fudge in the world. She had been well and truly fudged, and she felt fat and sated.

“I think I’m in love,” she murmured.

He grinned. “Let me know when you’re sure.”

His body softened and he slid out of her. She wanted him inside her again, as soon as possible. “How many condoms did you bring with you?”

His grin widened. “Eight.”

“All right. I’m sure I’m in love,” she announced.

He laughed.

She joined his laughter for a moment, then grew pensive. “Why did you make us wait so long for this?” she asked.

“I didn’t make us wait,” he told her. “We were heading in this direction all along. I just thought a little foreplay would make it better.”

“Twenty hours of foreplay?”

“Exactly.”

She considered his words. Maybe sex wouldn’t have been so spectacular if they hadn’t waited, if they hadn’t explicated Jackie Chan and T.S. Eliot, if they hadn’t discussed traditional Passover dishes or shared so many lunches in the tiny second-floor lounge at the store. She couldn’t prove that the twenty hours had made all the difference, but who was she to argue with success?

“Do we have to wait twenty hours to do it again?” she asked.

His first answer was “We can’t do that. Your roommates are going to be back at noon.” His second was to place his hand between her legs and make mischief with his fingers, until she startled herself by coming again. She moaned, pleased and embarrassed.

He smiled down at her. “I think you’re amazing.”

“Let me know when you’re sure,” she said, once she got her breath back.

“Okay. I’m sure.” He kissed her, a long, wet kiss that nearly caused her to come yet again. “I’m sure.”

Through the mist her brain had dissolved into, she heard a vaguely familiar chirping sound. She didn’t have a pet bird, and the chirping sounded more technological than avian. When Casey finally slid his mouth from hers, her mind cleared enough to recognize the noise.

“My cell phone,” she muttered.

“Ignore it.”

“It’s my family.” She pushed herself up to sit, and experienced another bout of embarrassment when she noticed the damp spots on Neil’s old sleeping bag. “Only my family calls me on my cell phone.”

“All the more reason to ignore it,” he joked, but he rolled off her so she could stand.

Her legs felt rubbery as she picked her way around their underwear and the coffee table to reach her bag, which she’d left on the table near the window. She dug out her phone, flipped it open and gazed across the room at Casey. He was sitting on the sleeping bag, long and lean, reminding her of a Rodin sculpture. She wasn’t sure which one. Whichever was Rodin’s sexiest, that was the one Casey resembled.

“Hello?” She spoke into the phone.

“Susie?” Her mother. “You’ve got to come to the store.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“So, the store isn’t open Sunday?”

“I meant, it’s
Sunday
. My day off.”

“It’s everybody’s day off. As if that matters. Your sister is holding a meeting.”

“On a Sunday?”

“She just phoned me. She said we have to meet on the third floor at twelve o’clock. Her and her
meshugena
meetings! I thought, maybe we should all refuse to show up, but then I realized Jay might show up, and if I wasn’t there it would make him look good. Not like I think he’s going to show up. He’s out on the island, golfing.”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s always out on the island golfing. So he’ll miss the meeting and I’ll be there, and maybe Julia will fire him, which is what he deserves.”

“Okay. Sure. Why did you call me, Mom?”

“Because you need to come to the meeting.”

“Does Julia want me there?” She hadn’t officially become the editor-publisher of the
Bloom’s Bulletin
, which didn’t even exist yet. Susie wasn’t sure why she should attend Julia’s meeting, unless it was to lend moral support to her sister.

“Julia asked me to call you and tell you to come. But listen to me. I’m worried about your sister. I think maybe the stress is too much for her. To insist on a meeting on a Sunday—it’s crazy. She’s been working so hard, in over her head with this business, and the nonsense about the bookkeeping, the details,
missing bagels…And you’re her sister, Susie, you tell me—hasn’t she been acting particularly uptight lately? Very grouchy, very—pardon my French—bitchy. I’m afraid she’s going to snap. She wants this meeting, so she’ll have this meeting. But even if she hadn’t wanted you there, I’d want you there. Just in case.”

Susie hated to agree with her mother about anything, but the temptation was strong. Julia
had
been stressed out, grouchy, upset. Sondra probably didn’t know that the main source of her stress was her lover’s collusion with Grandma Ida. But it was not beyond reason to fear she was ready to snap.

And if she snapped, Susie definitely ought to be there to gather up the pieces and glue them back together. No one else loved Julia the way Susie did.

Her gaze returned to Casey, still seated across the small room. He watched her, obviously aware that the call wasn’t good news. But he didn’t crowd her, didn’t rush to her side and take over. He just watched, his expression concerned but trusting.

She would much rather spend the rest of the morning making love with him, over and over and over. Twenty hours of foreplay had left her so primed that merely looking at him caused her womb to tighten and her thighs to clench. But her sister needed her.

And Casey wasn’t going to disappear. She knew that in her soul. It was all part of that connection between them.

She turned back to the phone. “All right,” she promised. “I’ll be there.”

T
he intercom buzzer sounded like a bumblebee on steroids.

Julia glared at the clock built into her oven. Nine on a Sunday morning was too early for someone to be visiting. But the buzzer kept sounding. Whoever was downstairs in the building lobby really, really wanted to see her.

Tightening the sash of her bathrobe, she set the box of Cheerios on the counter and pressed the button to speak through the intercom. Before she could say a word, Joffe’s voice came through the speaker, sounding tinny and adenoidal. “Julia? I need to see you. It’s important.”

She wasn’t sure she’d ever told him her exact address. But he was a reporter. He knew how to find things out.

“Julia, are you there?”

“I’m here.” She sighed.

“I’ve got breakfast with me. From Bloom’s. I’ve got four bagels, a tub of cream cheese and a quarter pound of smoked Nova. And two large coffees. Let me come up.”

Her gaze wandered to the Cheerios. Joffe had lox. If she had eggs, she could make lox and eggs. It wouldn’t taste as good as Lyndon’s, and she hadn’t bought eggs in months, so if she had any they weren’t going to be fresh.

Still, she could warm the bagels, and he had hot coffee. She hadn’t even inserted a filter in her Mr. Coffee yet.

“Julia, are you still there?”

The food sounded so appetizing. She felt her stomach clutch, pleading with her to release the locked inner door for Joffe. She felt another clutch lower, between her legs. A response to the prospect of breakfast from Bloom’s, she assured herself. It had nothing to do with Joffe.

“If you don’t let me upstairs,” he threatened, “I’m going to hit every other button down here until some idiot releases the inner door for me.”

“All right.” She pressed the button to admit him, then leaned against the wall and groaned.

He’d said he needed to see her, it was important. Well, food was important. Maybe what he’d meant was that he had too much food to eat all by himself.

Hell. He needed to see her because he was a man with an ego and he couldn’t bear the idea that she’d shut him out of her life. She’d been ignoring his phone messages—well, no, not ignoring them; she hadn’t been able to put them out of her mind, but she hadn’t returned his calls—so he was going to force her to acknowledge his existence by appearing before her in the flesh, bearing bagels. Men couldn’t stand being ignored.

She shouldn’t have let him upstairs. He was going to barge in and see her in her ratty old bathrobe with her hair tangled after a night of tossing and turning, and he was going to view his invasion of her apartment as some sort of triumph.
Ha, you’ve acknowledged me!
he would crow.
Now, stop being such a ninny about the fact that I conned your grandmother into letting me walk out of the Bloom Building armed with financial data I’m going to use in my magazine article. Wanna mess around?

She didn’t want to mess around.

Well, yes, she did. But not with Joffe. Not while he had the power to humiliate her store and her family in New York City’s most popular magazine.

Her doorbell sounded. She tucked the cereal box back onto a cabinet shelf, raked one hand through her hair while the other drew the lapels of her bathrobe closer together and crossed to the door. Through the peephole, she saw Joffe’s face, distorted by the fish-eye lens. He held up a bag, and the upward-sloping Bloom’s logo swelled toward her.

She unlatched the chain and opened the door.

He stepped inside, and she swallowed hard. He’d brought with him not just food but warm, pulsing energy. His presence made her aware of how anemic her existence had been in the days since she’d banished him from her life. For one crazed moment, she fought the urge to fling herself into his arms and plead with him to make her feel all the things he’d made her feel before, things she’d never even sensed a glimmer of with other men.

She diverted that impulse by grabbing the bag and carrying it into the kitchen.

“Yeah, hi,” he said conversationally, remaining by the door. “Great to see you, too. You’re looking terrific. That bathrobe is
you
.”

“If I’d known you were coming, I would have gotten dressed,” she shouted out from the kitchen.

“Please don’t ever get dressed on my account.” He entered the kitchen, which seemed crowded enough with one person in it, but induced claustrophobia with more than one. Especially when the other person was Joffe. His blazer smelled of wet wool and his hair sparkled with raindrops. His gaze latched on to her, hot and inviting, and she fought another of those urges.

He’d come here in the rain. He’d gone to Bloom’s, bought food and come here, without a word of complaint about the weather, because it was important.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

She turned away. She didn’t want to feel kindly toward him,
grateful for his having gone to so much trouble on a drizzly Sunday morning. She didn’t want him to say he missed her, because that would remind her of how much she missed him. She had missed him so much, it took some effort for her to remember why she’d been furious with him.

“What are you going to put in your article?” she asked, trying but failing to keep her tone neutral as she pulled the bagels out of the bag and sliced them.

“You read the rough draft.”

“Have you changed that draft since plowing through all the intimate details of the company’s bookkeeping?”

He swore softly. She peered over her shoulder at him. “Of course I’ve changed it. What am I, a moron?”

“That would be one possibility.” She finished slicing the last bagel and arranged all the halves on a baking sheet, which she slid into the oven. “How bad is it going to be?”

“If it brings tears to your eyes, they’ll be tears of nostalgia.”

“I’m too young for nostalgia.”

“Then you probably won’t cry.”

“But you’re going to use the financial information my grandmother gave you in your story.”

“The financials weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Julia. If you hadn’t acted like such a jerk—”

“Excuse me?”

“Refusing my calls, hiding from me…I mean, come on! What would you call that?”

“I’d call it feeling betrayed because you obviously agreed with my grandmother that I was unable to handle things at the store, so she had to bring an outsider in.”

“Your grandmother
does
believe you’re able to handle things. Why else do you think she named you the president?”

“Because she’s a jerk. How should I know? She should have named my mother.”

“You’re joking, right?” He approached the counter, carefully leaving some space between them as he reached into the bag
and lifted out the coffees. He pried the lid off one cup and took a sip. “Your mother would have been a disaster as president of Bloom’s.”

Julia should have objected but she was too intrigued. “What makes you say that?”

“She lacks the commitment.”

“What? She’s worked hard at that store all these years—”

“She worked hard because she thought that made her a good wife. She did it without pay because she thought maybe your father and Ida would love her for it. Do you really think she gives a flying fuck about the store? She doesn’t even eat Bloom’s food. She buys all her food at the supermarket down the street. She told me that the first time I interviewed her.”

“Okay. My mother works at Bloom’s because she wants to be loved. I see. And when did you say you got your degree in psychology?” Indignation still didn’t come easily to Julia. What Joffe said made too much sense.

“And your uncle Jay is the court jester. The man has the smarts but he’s too lazy. He loves working at Bloom’s as long as he can put in four-hour days and doesn’t have to sweat.” Joffe took another sip of coffee and rested his hips against the counter. “I didn’t need access to the store’s files to figure all this out. I talked to people. Lots of them. It’s clear you were the best pick to replace your father. Your grandmother knows what she’s doing.”

“I’m sure that’s why she wants to match you up with my sister.” The fragrance of her coffee was so strong she felt a caffeine rush just from inhaling the scent.

“All right, look. Do you want to hear what I found? Yes, you do,” he answered himself. “Where do you keep your plates?” He flung open a cabinet door, stared in apparent dismay at the sparse contents—a tub of uncooked oatmeal, a few cans of tomato soup, a jar of cinnamon and an unopened pack of sugarless gum. He shuddered, shut the door and opened another. That cabinet was filled with enough lidded plastic containers to open a Tupperware franchise—but all of them were empty.
Her mother was always bestowing plastic containers on Julia, no doubt thinking that someday she would have leftovers. Perhaps someday she would.

She opened the cabinet with the plates and handed him two. He carried them to the table in the nook off the living room that served as her dining area. She pulled the bagels out of the oven, arranged them on a third plate and opened the waxed paper wrapping of the lox. If only Lyndon were here, along with a carton of farm-fresh eggs…But this would have to do. Compared with dry cereal—in fact, compared with just about anything except Lyndon’s cooking—this was a gourmet feast.

They settled at the table. Joffe pulled a notepad from an inner pocket of his blazer, placed it next to his plate and busied himself smearing cream cheese on a bagel half. “Okay, here’s what’s going on.” He glanced at his notes. “You’re grossing around a hundred-fifty thousand a week. That’s not bad. It could be better, but it’s not bad. Your payroll could go on a diet—not that you should fire anyone, but you’re paying way above minimum wage, even for your cashiers.”

“Most of them have been with Bloom’s for a few years,” Julia explained, forcing herself to overcome her irritation at the fact that he knew these figures.

“Okay, so they’ve been with Bloom’s for a few years. You’re paying them good wages, which makes them want to stay, which means you’ll keep giving them raises and you’ll never get out of this high-payroll situation.”

“You’re saying you think I’d be better off paying lousy wages and seeing lots of turnover?”

“No. I’m just explaining to you where your money is going. You want to pay good wages, fine. We’re just adding up the numbers.” He spread a layer of smoked salmon across the creamy surface of his bagel and took a bite. “This is great,” he commented on the food before resuming his calculations. “You’ve got some sort of creative deal going with your rent. The store is occupying prime real estate, but it pays rent to the Bloom Building, which is owned by your family. So you catch a real break there.”

“You could put it that way,” she said, forking some lox onto her own bagel. “Or you could say the Bloom Building is taking a major hit.”

“It’s all in the family. You can work it any way you want.”

She nodded, bit into her bagel and sighed. “You’re right. This
is
great.”

“‘Thank you, Ron, for bringing this feast,’” he coached her.

She hadn’t wanted to smile, but she couldn’t help herself. “Thank you, Ron.”

He smiled back. “You’re welcome. Now…” He flipped a page on his pad and skimmed what he’d scribbled there. “Your losses due to theft and spoilage are smaller than average. Spoilage is always a problem in the food business, but you aren’t doing too bad there. You could probably tweak your prices up a bit to increase your profits. Not a huge price hike, but a nickel here, a dime there. It would add up.”

“You don’t think it would alienate shoppers?”

“They’re used to rising prices. The prices on most items in your store haven’t risen since before your father died—and yet you’re giving all your personnel annual raises. It’s time to adjust the prices.”

She nodded. In all her scrutiny of the financials, the possibility of raising prices had never occurred to her. She ought to thank Joffe for suggesting that.

“So, that’s it, then? We should just raise the prices?”

“There’s one other thing,” he said, then popped the last of his bagel into his mouth and washed it down with a slug of coffee. She waited until he was done chewing. “You’re losing three hundred dollars in merchandise every week.”

The missing bagels. Everyone on the third floor acted as if she was crazy to care about those bagels, but if Joffe had noticed the problem, she wasn’t crazy. He could tell them she wasn’t. He could explain to her mother and uncle and accountant and assistant that three hundred a week in unaccounted-for bagels was worth noting.

“What do you think?” she asked cautiously. “Any ideas why
we might be losing this amount of merchandise on a weekly basis?”

He eyed her over his cardboard coffee cup. “It’s pretty much the same items vanishing every week. A lot of bagels. Some cream cheese. Coffee. And then a few variants…rugelach one week—have you ever tasted the Bloom’s rugelach, by the way? They’re incredible.”

“Yes. I’ve also tasted the stuffed cabbage,” she confessed.

“Yeah?” His eyes glowed. “What did you think?”

“Incredible.”

“Okay. So sometimes rugelach are missing. Sometimes mandelbrod.”

“Did you ever notice how mandelbrod resembles biscotti?”

“Yeah, except our grandparents called it mandelbrod and didn’t realize you could charge an arm and a leg for stale, funny-shaped cookies. Anyway—” he reached for another bagel half “—it’s as if someone was catering a brunch every week for a hundred of his nearest and dearest friends. It’s the same basic menu each week. Brunch food.”

“What do you think it going on?”

“I think someone is hosting a big weekly brunch,” Joffe said.

“Get serious.”

“I
am
serious. This is too organized to be random theft. Someone is doing something specific here.” He folded his pad shut and stuffed it back into his pocket.

“Are you going to put this in your article?”

“Put what? That someone is systematically stealing three hundred dollars’ worth of brunch from Bloom’s every week? Why would I do that? Next thing, you’d have police crawling all over the place, trying to find a culprit.”

“If someone’s hosting a weekly brunch…Uncle Jay,” she guessed, rolling her eyes. “I bet he’s doing something at his country club. He’s out there every Sunday, some ritzy place on Long Island. Maybe he’s showing off to all the rich snobs he golfs with, treating them all to some
real
food, proving to them you can run a New York deli and still be a big shot, you know?
The club probably serves cucumber sandwiches and watercress, so he brings bagels to show the boys how a genuine brunch is supposed to go. I bet that’s it.”