Chapter Text
“Hey! How’s business?” Amy calls, waving and walking up to Jake’s side. It’s nice. being familiar enough to greet him.
“It’s going alright? All the pretty trees already got sold out and people have to settle for the not-so-pretty ones now.” He shrugs. “Their mistake. You off to the library or something?” His gaze flicks over her backpack.
“Nope, heading to class. Asian American art history, but it doesn’t start for a while.” Amy smiles, knowing she has time to spare and someone to spend it on.
“Hey, that’s cool! Is that for-” his voice drops. He gulps, eyes darting to the side. “To your left, indecisive lady who refuses to leave. She’s been here for an hour. I’ll legit pay you part of my commission if you pretend to be a customer and say you want that blue spruce.”
“Which one’s the spruce?! None of them are blue,” hisses Amy.
Jake smiles. “Tall one on the left, leaning like fifteen degrees, looks sort of sad and brown?”
“Gotcha. So, more of a brown spruce?” She puts on a plastic smile and walks toward the lady, blonde and probably in her forties. Jake watches Amy sidle up and cross her arms, invading the other customer’s space. They start talking and nodding, pointing and laughing at the upper branches of one of the trees. Twenty minutes later, blonde lady’s put down an offer on a northwestern fir with a bird’s nest tangled in its leaves.
“You are an actual miracle worker.”
“Thank you for recognizing my true potential, hardly anyone else does,” Amy brags. “See you at lunch later this week?”
“You got it. My treat, it’s the least I can do,” Jake says, and he admires her as she walks away.
Medici’s bakery does not serve lunch.
Medici’s decorates their cinnamon rolls with powdered sugar so fine, it looks like snow falling on a desert. Medici’s has actual polished silverware and cloth napkins for your lap. Medici’s food is so heavenly, one could hardly deign to describe with earthly words like lunch or breakfast or sir, I’m sorry to say we’re closing, you and your date need to stop staring lovingly into each other’s eyes. Amy’s getting nostalgic just thinking of the meal she had there.
It might’ve been the best meal of her life. One of those ‘before I die, I want lobster confit’ meals.
“And then what happened?” Amy asks, leaning forward. She tries to keep from staring at Jake’s tie (he wore a freaking tie to a New York café pretending to be an Italian bistro, as if he couldn’t get any cuter) and ends up fixed on his nice hair and his hands and his crooked, too-innocent-for-this-world smile.
Alright, maybe she’s exaggerating a little bit. First dates tend to be colored pink by the honeymoon effect 一 good first dates do, anyhow.
Medici’s cinnamon rolls, incidentally, have regular sugar on them, just like the ones from Cinnabon do. They’re not glazed over with fairy dust that looks like snow from the ski trails in Sun Valley, as one very enthusiastic food critic has claimed (they gave Boyle a lifetime member platinum card for that review.)
But, well, when you’re with someone who makes all the difficult things seem easier, it’s pretty easy to glamorize. Sugar crystals become diamonds in the rough.
“So I’m still trying to impress this guy at an afterparty for this awards show. He’s Bruce Willis’ second cousin’s wedding photographer’s best friend-”
“Naturally, a big deal in the Die Hard fandom,” Amy says in between bites of pasta.
“Yes! You get it.” Jake takes a sip from his water glass; he’d wanted orange soda but that seemed a tad embarrassing. Some tidbits you ought to save for the fifth date. “It’s pretty dark outside, and we’re drinking. Think, like, fancy lights scattered all around, women walking around with those clutch purses that must be easy to lose, caviar and other modern appetizers whose names I can’t pronounce. So I walk up.”
“Doing alright so far,” Amy teases.
“I shake the guy’s hand and introduce myself, and I sorta cringe on the inside ‘cause I’m talking too fast. I brush it off. I’m still determined to walk away with a great line.”
“What’d you do then?”
“So I shoot him a cool ‘welcome to the party, pal’, and I turn around. My friend Stevie’s still making jokes but I could use a breather, right? I do the only natural thing, I step aside. I’m gonna be back in a minute! Aaaaand, well, I’m not looking where I’m going until I walk straight into the swimming pool and drop like a stone. Cannonball, basically.”
Amy laughs so suddenly, she snorts. “Sorry. Sorry! Poor you. I really am sorry. I’m not laughing at you, really, it’s more like laughing with you-”
“Nah, you can make fun, everybody else does.”
“But I don’t want to be like everybody else,” Amy says then, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She lets her hand, twirling spaghetti around her fork, fall.
“Oh. Oh, um, thank you?”
Amy’s stomach tightens, and she wonders if she made the wrong move.
“Sorry! That was weird. I like you, I’m just not that good with people,” he fumbles, hands gripping at his cloth napkin beneath the table. It feels nice to have something to fidget with while he balances the truth like a Jenga tower.
She smiles. “I mean, the swimming pool story already proved that.”
“Did I mention my rented suit shrunk because of the water?”
She laughs with him (instead of at him) some more.
“The thing was two hundred bucks! I lost my deposit!”
But Jake thanks her with a kiss on the sidewalk when he walks her home, and another one when they’re pressed against the door to her apartment. He lays a final kiss on her cheek when he leaves.
Wow.
Cute christmas tree guy is smooth when he wants to be.
The next month, he brings flowers to her classroom at NYU, and Amy’s students all give Jake a not-so-subtle nod of approval.
“Hi, Jake,” she murmurs, class having just let out. The students stream out the door. “Lunch again?”
“You know it.”
While they’re walking to Medici’s, Amy gets lost in a tangent about how impractical it is that millionaires can own fossils and keep them away from public museums who clearly need them for Important Scientific Research™, but she’s so endearingly angry that he can’t interrupt her. Her voice is bright (can a voice be bright? it’s just a sound!) and she laughs at his awful anecdotes about working in retail. They take the same table as the one they had on their first date, and spend the afternoon curious over each other.
Amy’s flowers dry up, but she says the conversation’s worth it.
Medici’s ends up catering their wedding. They serve lobster confit.