Sweet
Copyright © 2016 Alysia Constantine
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-61-0 (trade)
ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-62-7 (ebook)
Published by Interlude Press, New York
http://interludepress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Book design and Cover illustrations by CB Messer
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my love, B—, who is the brightest and most beautiful person I know.
Contents
One
This is not a story
with a beautiful first line or the perfect symmetry of a beginning and ending wrapped tightly together like a present from the Fates. This is not a story about love at first sight; there will be no perfect first kiss, no white horse and sunset, no prince, no glass shoe. In fact, in this story, nothing very important happens—it is a very unimportant story about two very unimportant people who find one another. Yes, there will be some kisses in this story, and also cupcakes and lost keys and other secretly beautiful small things, but nothing that changes the world or shifts the ground under anyone’s feet.
Except for this moment, on a winding side street in the West Village of New York City, on a slippery and too-chilly spring morning soundtracked by the wet whoosh and spray of taxis hissing over damp pavement, when the woman with the red umbrella comes rushing out of a nail salon in a flap of still-sodden overcoat, with her cell phone and umbrella stem clamped precariously between cheek and shoulder
and her eyes trained on her wet painted nails, and bangs directly into Teddy Flores.
Teddy, too, had been a dark flurry of wet trench coat and wool gabardine and barely balanced coffee, with his newspaper clutched over his head in a vain attempt to prevent his hair from re-coiling into ringlets around his face in the spring rain. He was late. He was always late, because the hurry and the thinking forward—
get there get there get there
—stopped him from thinking too much about how miserable it was to actually
be
there,
in that world of gray wool and blue carpet and steel and linoleum and fluorescence and sticky notes and very sharp pencils and meetings in which too many men cleared too many throats and shuffled too many folders and nobody said anything that anyone—least of all Teddy—cared the least bit about.
If you knew Teddy Flores in high school—a bright boy with a bright smile, flickering eyes and doglike devotion to joy, who had so many friends and so much waterfall energy, who saw his future opening before him like a stage curtain pulling back, saw his future like that spot of light into which he was always about to step, a boy sparkling and muscle-ready and about to burst open—if you knew that boy in high school, you would ask him how it was that he ended up this way, gray and hushed and soft as wet flannel. But most people are too bored or too polite to ask such questions of a man like him: one CPA among a team of CPAs
, in a big department of an overgrown company occupying a single floor of a plate glass building on a crowded block in a city so large and harried and full of everything under the sun that nothing—certainly not he—was remarkable enough for it to stop its bluster for even one quiet second.
It’s not that nobody cared about him, for Teddy still had loving parents, good friends, familiar and welcoming faces at his regular haunts (coffee, laundry, Chinese takeout). It’s simply that everyone, including Teddy, was in such a rush, with so many errands to run and so many important things to think about. And his story wasn’t much to tell. It was a slow slipping down into mediocrity
, as if Teddy were being very gently crushed under a quietly building avalanche of nods and agreements and the gradual understanding, finally, after many discussions, of the difference between what was
fun
and what was
practical
and what it meant to
grow up and take care of yourself.
But all of this is an untold story and will stay that way; and that is for the best, because it will soon change, and because it will interest neither you, nor I, nor Teddy himself, whose only thought in this moment was that he must
get there get there get there
until the crash with the wet-nailed woman knocked that out of him, knocked him flat back onto the watery concrete. He fell with a small, surprised “ooof!” and almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of the sound he made, like the butt of a slapstick stunt in a Stooges movie. His coffee splashed up and was gone; the paper cup skittered into the gutter and rolled under a parked car; his shirtfront became a clinging Rorschach blot he could only read as
ruin
and
wreck of a morning.
“Damn! I am so sorry!” the woman said as her umbrella flipped past them both and went skipping down the sidewalk, cheerfully leaving her behind to soak in the rain. She extended her hand, and when Teddy, still spinning and stunned, didn’t take it, she grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. She dusted his shoulders and then laughed at herself, pushing back the wet hair that flopped in her eyes. “Well, that’s useless! I’m so, so sorry. Are you okay?”
Teddy nodded. The cold and wet had soaked through the seat of his trousers, soaked through his underwear, was soaking into the muscles of his thighs in a way that made his whole body ache.
“
God
, look at you! I really messed you up! You’re wearing your coffee, too!” She smiled at him, a very white smile, a very straight smile, and Teddy tried to grin back, but her hands were clutching his shoulders and the rain was starting to slide down the collar of his shirt like little slivers of ice.
“It’s really fine,” he said, forcing a stiff smile. “Are you okay?”
“I’m an idiot,” the woman said, pushing her hair back again and letting her hand drop to his bicep. “And I’m buying you a new coffee.”
Teddy opened his mouth to protest, but the woman tightened her grip on his arm and pulled him into the doorway of a little shop. Gold letters above her head on the glass of the door, in a very simple font, read, without elaboration: BUTTERMILK. She turned toward him, raised her eyebrows and threw herself back against the door so it shuddered open and the little bells that hung above the door shimmered a silvery tingle down his spine. She nodded once and yanked Teddy into the warm, sugary air of the bakery.
“Sit,” she told him and shoved him onto a stool. “How do you take it?”
“What?” Teddy said.
“Hey, Irene,” said the bored girl behind the counter. “Back already?” She was dreadlocked and pierced in a number of places, with black tattoos curling over every exposed inch of her skin.
“I,” Irene said, making a grand gesture toward Teddy, “just accidentally slammed into this gentleman here and ruined his morning and I am buying him a new coffee. And I’m late, so I’m running.” She slapped a wad of cash onto the counter. “Whatever he wants. The rest for you, sweetie, for the tip cup.” She turned to Teddy and squeezed his arm again. “Tell ‘Trice your coffee order. She looks like she might bite, but she never has, not once. Here’s my card, so that you can call me and we can have a drink sometime, and someday we’ll tell all our friends about our perfectly adorable romcom first encounter, when we met cute and then I bought you a coffee and you couldn’t stop thinking about me and asked me out and then the rest is history, but I’ve got to be rude and run
right now because I am extremely late
!
” She shouted the last words over her shoulder as she whipped out the door with a shiver of bells and cold air.
“So, that was Hurricane Irene,” the girl said, smiling at Teddy. “I think she likes you, because she never, ever tips. She was trying to impress you. You’ll have pretty babies with pretty eyes.”
“I don’t…” Teddy started to say, but the girl raised her hand, laughing at him.
“I totally know. I live in Chelsea. I work in a pastry shop. My boss coordinates his socks and his pocket squares, and my best friend breeds teacup Dobermans. But Irene usually can’t tell the difference between a man and a fire hydrant, let alone pick up on the subtleties of homosexual semaphore.
She
has no idea. Nor does she probably care,” she added with a smirk, flipping a large paper cup in the air and catching it with a flourish. “How do you take it?”
“What?” Teddy asked again.
“Your coffee,” the girl said, enunciating slowly. “What are you drinking?”
Teddy felt dumb and cold and still as a stone. Why couldn’t he catch up? Everything seemed to be moving so fast around him, everyone seemed to be talking at high speed, but the warm air smelled like cinnamon and had wound itself around his neck and cheeks like a scarf, and he simply wanted to sit and breathe it in.
“Black, please, just plain coffee.”
He was slowly thawing. The stools and the counters were of old softened wood, dry and warm; jewel-toned fruits and mounds of frothy pastel sugar glinted from the display cases in the dim light—the entire shop front, he noticed now, was lit mostly by daylight from the large plate glass window, aided by a few old lamps with heavy velvet shades that drooped with ornate tasseled trim.
Strings of colored glass beads criss-crossed overhead, glittering and shaking slightly with faint vibration. Some of the wooden stools were loosely topped with well-worn velvet cushions, and the walls were hung with gauzy fabrics in rich, delicious colors: fuchsia, pumpkin, vermillion. No fluorescents anywhere. It was cozy, even romantic, and he wanted to linger, snug in the glittering semi-dark, all day.
“Black, please,” he said again, more sure of himself.
“You got it, sailor,” the girl said, flipping the cup again. She turned her back and filled the cup, then slid it toward him across the counter, along with a stack of napkins. “Here, dry off.”
“Thank you,” he said, but she was already gone; the door at the back of the room was still swinging in her wake.
Teddy sat on a stool and placed the coffee carefully on the table in front of him. He began to pat himself with the napkins, first drying
his face and neck and then attempting to clean the brown blotch on his shirt.
“You’re just rubbing it in.
” The girl had returned and was leaning against the counter and staring at him with widened brown eyes. “Just let it be. It’s already gone. That shirt is a done deal, my friend.” She whistled and swept her hand through the air like a plane taking a nosedive.
Teddy grimaced at her and continued to blot. It was a good shirt. Was.
“Here,” she said, “a consolation prize.” In front of her on the counter was a petite, perfectly pale yellow cupcake topped with a swoop of the lightest-looking white frosting. A little bramble of shredded basil and a thin twist of sugared lemon rind curled across the top. She pushed the little cake toward him with her finger.
“No,” Teddy said. “Thanks. But it’s too early for that much—”
“It is never too early for something this good. This is sunshine and fluffy clouds and bunnies and happiness for your mouth,” the girl said seriously. “Well, maybe not the bunnies, because, well, gross. But, you know…”
Teddy looked dubious, but he did stop blotting.
“Meyer lemon and olive oil cupcake. Whipped cream and ricotta frosting. A little basil in there.
Didn’t even put them in the case yet. Totally fresh. My boss might be uptight and totally crazy and use enough hairspray to punch a Cleveland-sized hole in the ozone, but he is a genius with food. You will never taste anything more beautiful. On the house. Seriously. Eeeeeeaaaaaaat,” she wheedled, poking the cupcake forward.
Teddy had to laugh, because a girl by whom, under other circumstances, he might have been quite frightened was trying to force upon him the most dainty-looking cupcake he’d ever seen.
“Okay,” he said and took the cupcake. The girl clapped her hands and bounced on her toes. She watched as he carefully peeled the paper from the cake and opened his mouth. “Just for you,” he said and winked (when did he ever wink?) before taking a gentle bite.
You may have experienced a moment like this, sometime in your life, when you were filled with light and magic and you knew—completely and without question, all-of-a-sudden and with your whole body—when you knew
something
you could not quite put in
to words. A moment when you felt the sure click of a key turned in a lock, after which the whole mechanism of your life slid into place, and the door, the one your back had once pressed against, sprang open, and you felt the wild, pitching expanse of possibilities suddenly rolling out in front of you. A moment when, in the back of your throat, a small voice that might have been your own whispered desperately,
turn around turn around!
It was simply a cupcake. A cupcake, Teddy reasoned, cannot change your life. Not even a cupcake as gloriously, floatingly light and exquisite as this one. It must be the warming up, the coffee and the sugar, and the being-out-of-the-rain and the halting of the rush
, and the jarring of the fall he’d taken and the sneak of a head cold coming on, but he felt it: a burning like a little flame as the bite went down. It settled like a sun in his belly and embered there and spread heat in waves that rippled through his bones and muscles and through his skin in curling-out rays, and he thought, for a moment, that he must be glowing with it. All the strings of bells and beads, all the lamp tassels and the passementeries looped over the doorknobs, everything seemed to rock and twinkle with a whispering rustle and a soft, musical jingle. It was as if the whole little bakery was laughing with him.
“Mmmmmmhh,” he groaned and rolled his eyes closed because he knew the girl was watching, and something inside him said
show her how glowing and good it is
and, without thinking, he did. He fanned his hand near his mouth and tipped his head back, a decent kind of ecstasy, for her benefit alone.
“I know!” she shouted, and slapped the counter with the flat of her hand, clearly pleased. “Like sunshine, right?”
