Her Cherry Read online

  Her Cherry

  Penelope Bloom

  Contents

  1. Hailey

  2. William

  3. Hailey

  4. William

  5. Hailey

  6. William

  7. Hailey

  8. William

  9. Hailey

  10. William

  11. Hailey

  12. William

  13. Hailey

  14. William

  15. Hailey

  16. Epilogue

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  1

  Hailey

  My grandma had always said baking was the cure for sadness. Grammy was adorable, and she could make cookies to knock the stockings off a fireplace, but she was dead wrong. I had been pulling fresh cherry pies, pastries, croissants, bagels, and any other confectionary treats you could imagine out of the oven in my bakery for over two years now. And by my estimation, the only thing baking cured was slim waistlines and commitments to diets.

  I wasn’t sad anyway. I'd just turned twenty-five, and I realized I couldn't wait for life to come get me. Call me slow on the uptake, but I'd thought if I kept my nose down, worked hard, and acted like a good girl, everything else would follow. Instead, I just wore myself a comfortable groove in the routine of my day while time passed faster and faster. If I wasn't careful, I'd be an eighty-year-old virgin who made a cupcake that could induce spontaneous orgasms. Great baking skills, sad life. That wasn't exactly my dream. Deep down, I knew if I kept avoiding chances like I avoid flossing—except the day before I went to the dentist—I'd end up as the crusty, old, virginal baker.

  Baking was easy. It made sense. Add this much, take out that much, bake at this temperature, let rest for so long. It was a science, and if you kept track of what you did, you knew what to expect. I liked that about baking. It was my safe place, and if my sister and Ryan, my only employee, weren't constantly prodding me about my lack of social life, I'd probably already have retreated so deep into the baking that I'd be lost. My plans for the weekend included scouting the local farmer's markets for fresh ingredients from my favorite locals, testing new recipes, and trying to perfect existing ones. Baking was my life. I wouldn't be surprised if cherry filling ran through my veins. At the very least, I wore flour more often than makeup. There was baking, and there was my life. It was easy to think that someday the two would collide, that all my dreams of expanding the shop and perfecting my recipes would somehow lead me to the excitement I felt was missing. Other days, I felt like I was in a pastry-encrusted cage: tasty, but a cage is a cage.

  Yes, I loved what I did, but no, Grammy, it wasn't the cure-all.

  All I had to do was look at the battered old college textbook under the leg of my oven. I’d bought the oven heavily used, and one leg was about a college textbook too short. Marine Biology and Scarce Ecosystem Dynamics. It sounded like someone had plugged a few science words into a blender and figured college kids would feel smart for carrying it around. Then they slapped a three hundred dollar price tag on it for good measure. When the school library had offered to buy it back for ten dollars, I told them they could go screw themselves and their ten dollars.

  Well, technically, I thought they could go screw themselves. I might’ve actually smiled politely, said “no thank you,” and then listened to some Matt Costa on the way home to calm down. I worked in customer service all my life, and I knew how unfair it was to give the person behind the desk attitude for something they couldn’t control.

  So I’d put the book to work over the last six or seven years. If they weren’t going to give me three hundred dollars back, I’d find three-hundred-dollars-worth of ways to use it. First, it served as a doorstop in my college dorm while I finished out the sociology degree that was gathering dust in a filing cabinet somewhere. It’d been bumped into, tripped over, and downright degraded—I called it fat once when I stubbed my toe on it, which admittedly had been crossing the line, but I wasn’t about to apologize to a book. It also moonlighted as a spider smasher, when it wasn’t holding doors. I used it as a pillow when my cat decided to throw up on mine. I’d even doodled inside most of the margins. And now? Now, it was a cornerstone to my oven. In essence, it was a cornerstone to my business.

  That was a bit of a stretch, sure. But the truth and dough were more alike than people realized. Give them a tug in the right place, a snip here, and maybe a little kneading, and viola. You had yourself a very easy to swallow pill. Or muffin.

  All in all, I'd say I was at least up to twenty dollars in value after all these years. Only two-hundred and eighty to go. There was, of course, one other reason I kept that stupid book when I sold all the other overpriced textbooks for pennies. I'd doodled his name in that book with a little heart around it for the first time. It was the one I was holding when we talked the first time after class, clutched to my chest, right over my rapidly beating heart. Nathan. The boy of my dreams who turned into the creepy stalker from hell. I could thank him for my virginity, at least in part. I wasn't sure if there was such a thing as post-traumatic creeper disorder, but if there was, Nathan had infected me with it. I'd become a master of pushing any and everybody with a penis away after him. Keeping the book was my figurative way of hanging a warning sign in the middle of my life: "Beware the penis, for danger this way lies."

  I set down the last cherry pie on the flour-coated steel table by the oven. They looked perfect. And they should. When it came to baking, I didn’t play around. I had a notebook full of recipes and the alterations I’d tried along the way to finding the perfect balance of flavors and textures. Pages and pages of the difference between one cup of sugar, a slightly overfilled cup, underfilled, or added half at a time, and so on. If baking was science, I was the mad scientist. The cupcake wizard. If people are going to come to my shop to indulge, they could bet their buns they were going to enjoy every bite.

  Baking didn’t cure me of the empty feeling that had nestled itself deep in my heart, but it did give me purpose. I knew I was good at it, and I wanted to eventually expand my shop. Step one was figuring out a way to pay my own bills, but hey, if world domination was easy, everyone would do it.

  My little sister, Candace, popped in on her way to work. She was an editor at Business Insights, and she always stopped by to pick up a bagel on her way to work. Her short blonde hair bobbed with every step as she came half-skipping up to the front counter. She slid her sunglasses up into her hair and wiggled her eyebrows around.

  I dusted the flower from my hands, then gave the book a little kick for good measure. I wished I could kick him instead, but the book would have to do. Too bad it didn’t work like a voodoo doll.

  “How is my favorite virgin doing this morning?” she asked cheerily.

  “You know I could spit in your bagel, right?” I mentally braced myself. Candace had the virgin talk with me about once a month, probably on days I was looking particularly haggard.

  “Oooh, the saliva of a virgin. I hear that has magical powers. Please, I’ll take some of that with my cream cheese.”

  "You're disgusting. And the only power in my saliva would be an anti-aphrodisiac if my history is any indication."

  “Hm. That’ll be a hard pass.”

  “You know, if you could stop calling me a virgin at the top of your lungs so often, everyone in my life wouldn’t have to know.”

  “Everyone in your life. Okay. So Ryan and grammy?”

  "Asshole," I muttered. I turned and started punching my fists into balls of dough. It wasn't exactly the technique I'd discovered for getting a perfect consistency, but it was a great st
ress reliever.

  “Well, I guess there’s also—”

  “We’re not talking about him, remember?” I asked.

  “It’s not healthy to bottle things up, Hailey. Haven’t you ever seen Me, Myself, and Irene? Jim Carrey thought it was a good idea to bottle everything up in that movie, and what happened to him?”

  I shrugged. “It went bad?”

  “You’re damn right it did. He developed a split personality, a crazy one. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up sharing custody of your body with some crazy chick named Hanketta who starts fights with six-year-old kids in diners. Is that what you want?”

  “Rhetorical question?”

  She leaned on the counter and looked at me like I was a wounded, sad animal. “I just want you to be happy.”

  “Well, what I want is my sister to worry less about my non-existent sex life and more about something that matters."

  “Oh, right. Sex doesn’t matter. Let me just go tell all of human history we’ve been doing it wrong. Stop the presses. Put the dicks away. Shatter all the dildo molds. Close up the legs, we’re done here! Sex was overrated the whole time!”

  “Dildo molds? Really?”

  She shrugged. “How do you think they make them?”

  I glared. “I’d rather not think about it. I’m just trying to say I’m not in some big hurry to hump the first thing that moves.”

  “Maybe you should be. Think about it. You’re twenty-five freaking years old. That’s twenty-five years to build it up to be some huge, life-shattering moment. You’re setting your standards too high, girl. Just shake the stick out of your ass and let loose.”

  “Shake the stick out of my ass and let loose... Words of wisdom from Candace. Maybe I’ll have them put that on your tombstone?”

  "Who says I'm dying first? I'm going to have them put, ‘here lies the world's oldest, saddest virgin. Maybe if she'd let a guy get six inches deep, she wouldn't have gone six feet under.'"

  I snatched a bagel out of the display case and roughly slathered on cream cheese. It was more than she liked, and I didn’t care. I crumpled some wax paper around it and handed it to her. “If you’re done, here’s your bagel. Ryan’s due to show up in a few minutes, and thanks to you, he’s almost more annoying than you about trying to hook me up with somebody, so why don’t you put it on pause and let him take over.”

  She took the bagel. "The only reason I told him was so that he would be the one to pop that cobweb-covered cherry of yours. How was I supposed to know he'd dive headfirst into the friend zone and turn into Mr. Matchmaker?"

  I winced. “Your talent for disturbing images is too much sometimes.”

  “You’re the sweetest. Hey, what’s this?” she asked, picking up the envelope I’d torn open and set on the counter earlier.

  I snatched it from her. “It’s nothing. Just some junk mail.”

  “Ah yeah, the old classic junk mail that says eviction notice to grab your attention. Those always get me too. Okay, girl, stay virginal.” She blew me a kiss and walked off, bagel in hand.

  I looked down at the letter after she left. It was a notice that I had one week to pay rent on my apartment or I’d be evicted. I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to swing that one, considering I had about two weeks to pay rent on the bakery before I’d have missed my third payment this year. I sighed. I always found a way to keep floating, and that was all I needed to do. Just a few more weeks, a few more customers, and eventually the bakery would pull through for me.

  I gave the dough mixer a good shake until it started grunting and churning like it was supposed to. Most of the equipment in my bakery had seen better days, but it was mine. There was a deep satisfaction in knowing I’d worked for every last thing in here. The shop was my baby, and the cherry pies were… My baby’s babies? I guess it got weird if I tried to think about it too hard. I loved the bakery, even when the rest of my world felt like it might fall apart, I could always count on the shop. My little sanctuary, even if it did sometimes feel like a cage.

  Ryan showed up right on time, as always. He was fresh out of college, incredibly handsome, maybe even gorgeous, but for some reason, he'd felt like a little brother from the moment I met him. He must have felt it too because we'd slipped into a long-lost-siblings kind of dynamic as soon as he started working for me. He was always trying to help me fix my life, and I was always trying to keep him out of trouble, which he was exceptionally good at finding.

  He had a shaved head, a few tattoos but nothing too crazy, and a muscular build with the defined forearms of a man who has stretched plenty of dough in his time. His eyes were a warm brown. “Hot date tonight?” he asked.

  “You know, Candace just got done trying to give me a pep talk. Maybe we could skip the virgin talk today?” I started gently removing the pies from their trays.

  He sidled up to me and leaned on the counter, punching my arm gently and giving me a look that was, as usual, so sympathetic I couldn't help find it endearing. I may have been sick of Ryan's constant attempts to shove me into the dating world, but I always knew it came from a genuine place, so I couldn't fault him for it. "Here's what you do. Pick a guy today. Any guy." He smiled broadly as an idea seemed to pop into his head. "The first guy who buys a cherry pie. You pick him. Just be bold. Be yourself. Say something flirty. You don't have to ask for a date or whatever. Just, you know, compliment the guy, and we'll build from there."

  I sighed. “Even if I was considering this, what if the first guy to buy a cherry pie has a pedo mustache and booger stains on his sleeve?”

  “Okay. The first guy who buys a cherry pie that doesn’t set off your creep-alarm. How about that? Also, who the fuck has booger stains on their sleeves? What kind of people are you hanging out with?”

  “Funny,” I said, trying to dismiss the idea before he thought I’d actually agree to it. He and Candace both seemed to think sex would solve all my problems. I wasn’t so sure, even though I wouldn’t mind shedding the irony of being the girl who gave cherry pies to people all day but had never let anyone have her cherry.

  “Not funny,” said Ryan. “It’s a bet. I’m serious, Hailey.”

  “A bet?”

  “Yeah. You know all that vacation time I’ve been saving up?”

  “Yes…” I said slowly, dreading where this was going.

  “You follow through, or I’ll use it all during the Sheffield Fair week.”

  Panic spiked in my chest. My bakery was on the outskirts of downtown New York City, but one of the best opportunities for bakeries to get noticed was the Sheffield Fair’s cookie contest. The Food Network even showed up and filmed some of the top winners. It was going to be a ton of work, and Ryan knew I had no one else to help me get all the materials and food prepped.

  “You wouldn’t,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I guess you just have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky, virgin? Huh, do ya?”

  “Asshole,” I groaned.

  He looked way too pleased with himself, but he had me cornered, and he knew it. “So it’s a bet?”

  “You know I can’t say no now. But no changing the rules. I just have to say something flirtatious. One thing. That’s it.”

  “That’s all I ask. For now.”

  And that was that. It wasn't dramatically different than the way most mornings went between Ryan and I, except for the ridiculous bet, of course. That was a new level of high-pressure sales from my normally mild friend, but after a few minutes, I’d already forgotten about it.

  We prepped the display case, baked the bread, which lost their freshness much faster than the pastries, and we made a round of bagels last. The bagels were the big sellers in the morning, and a lot of customers would grab a loaf of bread for later or a pie for after dinner when they came in to grab their bagel.

  Jane was our first customer, which was true almost every morning. I could've sworn she had a designer pantsuit for every day of the year because I didn't think I'd ever seen her we
ar the same outfit twice. She was in her forties and was everything I could hope to be someday. Powerful. Commanding. Confident. Fashionable. Somehow I doubted she kept an old college textbook around as a punching bag to channel her frustration over a stalker ex-boyfriend, either.

  I looked down at my flour-covered apron and the boring jeans I wore beneath it. My top was just a simple pink collared shirt with my bakery’s name and logo on the chest: “The Bubbly Baker.” The logo was a chubby little man with a baker’s hat blowing a big bubblegum bubble. It probably would’ve been more realistic to call my shop, “The Baker who has trouble making eye contact when she speaks to you,” or maybe “Hailey’s Untouched Cherry,” but somehow I doubted those would be as marketable.

  She thanked me and made the same joke she always did. “Gotta run if I’m going to beat traffic,” she’d laugh. “Not literally, of course.”

  I never knew if the idea of her literally running was supposed to be the funny part, or if her literally beating up people in traffic was the joke. Either way, I smiled and waved as she left, just like I always did.

  The next few hours went by in a rush of regulars, new faces, and people somewhere in between. I handled most of the restocking, while Ryan did the face-to-face work. I liked people, but I had a tendency of accidentally scaring them away. I used to be the queen of “too much, too soon” when it came to making friends before Nathan, so I’d gradually shifted to “not any, not ever,” which had very successfully led me to my mostly lonely existence.

  The little bell over the door dinged, and I turned around to greet the customer with at least a quick nod and smile, but I stopped when I saw him. He was tall and broad with dark, messy hair worn in the kind of careless way only the cream of the crop type guys could pull off. His hair was a little floppy and had no clear style, but the lack of style managed to make its own very sexy proclamation. “I don’t need a stupid comb or hair product, because look at the face and body I’m sitting on,” it seemed to say. And from where I was standing, I couldn’t disagree. Not that I’d get into an argument with someone’s hair—not out loud, at least.