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When Adam Parrish told someone he baked for a living, after their initial response—you don’t look like a baker—they usually asked one of two questions: his favorite thing to bake, or the weirdest thing someone had asked him to bake.
Adam’s favorite thing to bake depended on his mood and how much time he could spare, and even if it didn’t, most people would stare at him blankly if he told them what he really liked to stick in an oven: Kouign-amann and bienenstich. So, when asked about his favorite bake, he always answered chocolate chip cookies: simple, unpretentious, classic. This response drew a fair amount of disbelief—why would a professionally trained baker like making, of all things, chocolate chip cookies?—but then Adam gave the inquirer one and after their first bite, they asked no further questions.
His answer to the second question—the weirdest request he’d ever received—changed frequently. When he first opened Fox Way Bake Shop with his best friend and business partner Blue Sargent, they didn’t have the discretion to turn away orders, let alone more profitable custom ones. In the bakery’s first few years, Adam made his fair share of phallic cakes for bachelorette parties and M&M-filled cakes for gender reveals. He lost count of how many customers came in with pictures of bakes they found in Instagram or Pinterest that they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—make themselves, leaving Fox Way to make it for them. Leaving Adam to make it for them. This gave him a slew of options when it came to weird requests, but additions to his cache of strange bakes slowed as the bakery grew. If a customer didn’t want to pay a fair price, if the bakery’s books were already full, or if that lady just had bad vibes—Blue’s favorite reason—they had the luxury of turning away business.
That meant it had been a while since Adam had a notable weird request, something that put a furrow between his fair eyebrows and made him fear for the future of humanity, but that dearth ended when Blue fielded a call from Ronan Lynch.
She dealt with customers, and Adam dealt with baking, and they were both in the middle of their respective roles when the call came in. From where he stood sprinkling fleur de sel over a batch of salted caramel tarts, the mechanical hum of mixers, dough rollers, and two commercial ovens covered most of Blue’s half of the call, which she’d fielded from their small office tucked into one corner of the kitchen. Occasionally, a yeah or the inflection of an unintelligible question made it to Adam’s ears, and from what he could make out, it seemed like a typical call where Blue got all the information she needed to fill out the electronic quoting form Adam created for pricing custom orders. Or it seemed like a typical call up until the point when Blue poked her head out of the office to ask Adam, “What size cake fits ten words?”
“Depends on the words,” he replied and dropped one last pinch of salt flakes onto a tart before dusting his hand off on the plain black apron tied around his waist and heading across the kitchen toward Blue.
“Dick, comma,” Blue said as she pushed herself off the doorframe so her chair rolled back to the desk. Reading from her laptop screen, she continued, “Sorry my raven shat on your bed. Love, comma, Ronan.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dick, comma—”
“I got it the first time,” Adam laughed. “This—Ronan wants that on a cake?”
“Yeah. I think it’s a nice gesture if this guy’s raven used Dick’s bed as a bathroom.”
"I'd want new bedding, not a cake."
"The cake might be more expensive."
Adam shrugged a shoulder—the full cakes they sold got expensive depending on the customer's request, so Ronan's apology could add up if he wanted a bunch of bells and whistles, unusual flavors with special ingredients. Even if he didn't, it'd probably end up costing him more than Adam had spent on his own blankets and sheets.
"Does he want script or print?" he asked Blue.
She held up a finger for him to wait and jabbed the hold button on the phone, lifting the receiver to her ear before asking, "Hey, Ronan? Print or script for your message?" She nodded as Ronan replied, then put him back on hold. "He said—I quote—make it fancy."
“Then script,” Adam replied, visualizing the space someone would need to write Ronan’s apology in cursive on top of a cake. “Ten-inch round. Or a quarter sheet.”
“Thanks, man.” Blue sent a cheery grin in Adam’s direction before choosing his responses in drop down menus on their pricing form.
“No problem,” he said, lingering in the office doorway as Blue clicked and tapped what she needed to make a quote.
Though he could decorate with the best of them, Adam usually left message-topped cakes to his more artistic-minded baker, Noah, who took customer ideas and ran with them to immaculate success. But Ronan’s cake—It’d probably be an easy bake, and it’d make Adam at least smile a little when it came up on his schedule. That didn’t happen often enough when he spent most of his day making sure the kitchen operated as smoothly as it could. He always found baking fun, but he missed the days when he did it for fun, and icing Ronan’s message on a cake would bring at least a few minutes of that kind of levity back.
“Give it to me,” Adam told Blue, rapping his knuckle on the doorframe, “when you put it on the calendar.”
“You got it.” Blue shot him another grin and gave him a thumbs up before she reached for the phone again. Adam took that as his cue to get back to work and get his salted caramel tarts in the display case, and he left Blue to deal with Ronan and his apology for his corvid’s bad behavior.
The rest of the day grew busy enough Adam forgot about the apology cake, and by the time he finished his own work, helped a few other bakers with theirs, and made a list of everything the evening staff needed to do to prep for the next morning, Adam felt Blue’s stare burning into the back of his skull. While she rolled into the bakery somewhere between nine and ten each day, Adam let himself through the shop’s back door before four o’clock and usually didn’t leave until Blue’s glare nearly set his hair on fire. That afternoon, her good intention ushered him out of the bakery before she even had to open her mouth, and though it was easier said than done, Adam tried to forget about Fox Way until he walked back into it the next morning before the sun came up.
That was when the kitchen tablet spit out his schedule and reminded him of Ronan Lynch’s apology cake, the most basic custom cake anyone had ever ordered: vanilla cake with white vanilla frosting and black icing for the lettering on the top. He hadn’t even requested any piping around the edges.
“New sheets would still be cheaper,” Adam said to himself and the empty kitchen as he started up the ovens and got started on his day. A basic ten-inch round cake would set Ronan Lynch back sixty bucks, but it’d end up being the easiest thing Adam baked all day.
Between rotating batches in the ovens, loading up the front of the shop, and delegating to the morning crew when they arrived at half past four, Adam mixed batter, filled baking pans, and got Ronan’s cake in the oven. The two layers cooled while he accepted deliveries, and he made icing during the brief lull right before the bakery opened. By the end of the morning rush, the cake had been frosted and Adam had piped a simple shell border because he couldn’t stand how basic the all-white cake looked, and right as Blue walked in, he cut the end off a piping bag to get started on Ronan’s apology.
“You know I don’t like being watched,” Adam told her as she pulled a stool up beside him. She perched on it before she even went to the office to put her bags down, instead throwing them on the empty stainless steel counter in front of her.
“Liar,” Blue replied, hugging her tote bag and backpack to her and hunching over them. “You like showing off, and me being here isn’t going to make you all shaky. I’m not leaving.” She curled her lip at Adam when he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not everyday I get to watch you write an apology for a raven shitting on a bed on a cake.”
“I won’t fight you,” Adam replied, but he turned his side-eyed look into a direct, long-suffering one before he set his shoulders, took a deep breath, and bent over the cake. With a pen and pencil, his handwriting could barely qualify as chicken scratch, but Adam had worked long and hard on perfecting the penmanship he used on cakes. As he wrote out Ronan’s apology, he made sure every flourish and curve fell into submission under the fine tip of his piping bag, and icing flowed freely out of the bag until the last small upward swoop at the end of Ronan.
Standing back, Adam looked at the cake, and despite the message’s slight crudeness, his work still pleased him.
“Would have turned out better without an audience,” he joked as he put the piping bag down, and he rubbed his bicep after Blue punched him in the arm, because even in jest, Blue Sargent didn’t pull her punches.
“See that?” she pointed at who the cake had been addressed to. “That’s what you are. Box it up, dick,” Blue told him, hopping off her stool and scooping up her bags. “I’ll let Mr. Lynch know it’s ready.”
Adam didn’t consider Blue his boss any more than she considered him her boss, but he followed her instruction to box the cake up before he brought it out to the front of the bakery and slid it into the fridge behind the counter to await pickup. Who picked it up piqued his interest, enough he told Cialina, the cashier, to flag him down when Ronan Lynch arrived, and, back in the kitchen, Adam kept an ear out for the bells on Fox Way’s front door. He didn’t need to though; Adam stood behind the counter stacking snickerdoodle cookies in the glass-fronted display case when a guy who looked exactly like someone who would own a raven—and let it use his friend’s bed as a toilet—walked through the bakery’s door.
Which meant Ronan Lynch kind of looked like an asshole.
A savagely handsome asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.
In case Adam had it wrong—and he didn’t think he did—he greeted the new customer before Cialina could. “Hey,” he said as he put the last snickerdoodle on his carefully constructed cookie tower and lowered a glass dome on top of it—for presentation, as Blue said. “Can I get you something, or do you need a minute?”
The question sounded wrong coming out of Adam’s mouth, but it didn’t make it seem like he completely lacked the customer service skills needed to work the front of the bakery. He could do the functions of the cashier position just fine, but he preferred not to. Most of the time in this situation, he would have snuck back into the kitchen, but something about the way this guy clashed with the cozy, homey, worn decor of the bakery made Adam want to see this interaction through.
“What?” the guy asked, like Adam’s question had pulled him out of his own head. “Oh. No. I’m—” He really looked at Adam then and paused for a long moment before he continued, “I’m picking up. An order. A cake.”
“Name?” Adam asked, already moving toward the fridge.
“Lynch,” the guy—definitely Ronan—answered. The way he said it sounded like he always replied with his last name when someone asked his name, like he was a Lynch, and not a Ronan, though he did clarify and confirm for Adam. “Ronan Lynch.”
Before the last of his second Lynch was past Ronans’s lips, Adam had the cake box in hand and had turned back toward the counter as Ronan finished his approach. He stopped on the other side of the counter, all the black he wore—black jeans, black t-shirt, black leather jacket—stark next to the white granite countertop separating him from Adam, who had to try very hard to stop himself from sweeping his eyes up and down Ronan from dark buzz cut to lean waist.
Setting the cake box down on the counter, Adam eased it open before turning it to face Ronan. Like not checking Ronan out moments before, Adam had to try very hard to not smirk as he showed the cake to Ronan for final inspection. “Did I get your message right?”
Ronan’s pale blue eyes snapped to Adam’s for a split second before he leaned closer to the counter, shoving his hands into his leather jacket that fit him far better than any oven mitt had ever fit Adam’s hands. The jacket hugged Ronan’s broad shoulders and tapered in slightly at the waist, and combined with his buzz cut and everything else he wore, it gave Adam the distinct impression Ronan Lynch had some venom in him.
Which served to not just pique Adam’s interest, but sent it spiking through the roof.
He looked at Ronan as Ronan looked down at the cake, and the corner of Ronan’s lips twitched upward, so quickly Adam would have missed it if he hadn’t been studying Ronan’s face. For a reaction, not because Adam appreciated Ronan’s knife-edge cheekbones or thick eyebrows, the left one sliced through with a thin scar.
Ronan nodded and replied smoothly, “That’s it.”
“Great.” Adam closed the box and peeled one of the bakery’s stickers from a roll hanging on the wall, smoothing it over the top and down the side of the box to seal it. Sliding the cake down the counter, he stepped behind the register, and as he punched Ronan’s order in, he asked Ronan, “Do you really have a raven?”
“Yeah,” Ronan replied, cocky yet casual. “Did you really bake that cake?”
“And decorated it, yeah,” Adam told him. “It’s not everyday I get to write vulgar apologies on cakes.”
“It’s not everyday my bird shits on my best friend’s bed.”
“Kind of an expensive apology.” Adam swung the cash register’s screen toward Ronan, the $66.21 bold and black on the display.
“Worth it.” Ronan flashed Adam a grin that went straight to Adam’s gut as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket.
“I’m sure it accurately expresses your remorse.”
“It’s cheaper than buying him new sheets.” Ronan swiped his credit card and Adam wondered what type of friends Ronan had who slept on sheets that cost more than a custom cake. Then again, Ronan had just spent almost seventy dollars on that cake without batting an eye.
After Ronan used his finger to sign his name—which, Adam noted, looked more like a mountain range than any version of Ronan Lynch—Adam printed a receipt and pushed it and the cake toward Ronan. “If you ever need to make a crude apology, let us know.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” Ronan said, and when he picked up the cake, he lingered for just a moment too long before he added, “You’ll be the first guy I call.”
Adam watched Ronan’s back as he left, seeing for the first time the wicked hooks of a black tattoo that crept up the back of his neck above his collar. It added to the slightly sinister air surrounding him as he walked past overstuffed leather armchairs and shabby chic coffee tables made from old window shutters. When he pulled open the door, the bells above it chimed as he left Fox Way, and not only Ronan Lynch but his car enraptured Adam, because Ronan stalked across the sidewalk to where a charcoal gray vintage BMW waited for him—double-parked in front of the shop. He looked like he was coming home as he slid behind the steering wheel and sank into the driver’s seat, and while he had no reason to remain behind the counter, Adam kept watching as Ronan peeled away down the street.
Because he prickled around most customers, Adam tended to stay in his domain—the kitchen. But if Ronan Lynch turned into a repeat customer, he’d become the only customer Adam would be glad to serve.
After that first apology cake, Easter approached and made it easy for Ronan Lynch to slip from Adam’s mind for a while. Second to the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Easter helped keep the bakery busy and keep their bank accounts sufficiently full, leaving Adam with finite time to think about Ronan Lynch and his raven. They couldn’t have been further from his mind when they came up again, when Blue thrust a Post-It note in his face until he took it from her and then asked him, “Would a quarter sheet fit this?”
Deklo, the note read in Blue’s loopy, bubbly cursive, Your kitchen looked better on fire. I’m not sorry.
Adam didn't need to see the end of the message to know Ronan Lynch had called for another cake. Dragging his hand over his mouth to scrape away the smile tugging at the corners of his lips, Adam nodded as he handed the sticky note back to Blue. "A quarter sheet would look better, but I could fit it on a ten-inch."
"Does all caps make a difference?"
At that, Adam couldn’t stop himself from laughing once. “All caps?”
“That’s what he said.”
Shaking his head, Adam didn’t stop himself from sighing as he told her, “Quarter sheet.” And though he sighed, in his chest, Adam’s heart felt a little like a souffle rising over the rim of a ramekin.
“Thanks, man.” Blue clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll schedule it for you.”
Two days later, Ronan’s cake showed up on Adam’s list of orders. Thankfully, he hadn’t opted for vanilla on vanilla again. Mindless bakes like that didn’t do much for Adam. Not that Ronan’s second cake would be an oddly original bake—just chocolate cake, chocolate ganache filling, and chocolate frosting—but Adam had to at least partially pay attention while he made it. Between rabbit-shaped cinnamon twists and cream cheese-filled carrot muffins, he baked two layers of chocolate cake and spread chocolate ganache between them after they cooled. Then Adam smothered everything with chocolate frosting and piped a bead border around the edges; the fat dollops of frosting seemed to fit Ronan’s message better than a frilly shell or rosette border would.
Finally, Adam allowed himself a little creativity. Rather than plain white icing for the lettering, he whipped up a batch of white chocolate icing instead and added whitener to take away any hint of yellow. Then Adam cut the tip of the piping bag a little higher than usual, so when Adam got down to writing, the all uppercase message came out nicely and angrily bold.
“Don’t egg him on,” Blue laughed when Adam called her over to look at the cake before he boxed it up.
“Egging him on is good for business,” Adam replied. “The next time he—I don’t know, runs over someone’s mailbox, who do you think he’s going to call?”
“Jeeze. He’s already let his raven crap on someone’s bed, and now he’s set someone’s kitchen on fire. I really wouldn’t put running over a mailbox past him.”
“And I’ll make a cake for him when he does.”
At that point, Adam would honestly make Ronan Lynch whatever cake he needed, no matter the occasion.
He boxed the cake up and brought it out front, and as he slid the box into the fridge, he told Cialina to grab him when Ronan came, so, naturally, Ronan arrived when Adam had just dumped a batch of bread dough onto the giant wooden butcher block in the middle of the kitchen. His white t-shirt bore the brunt of the flour mushroom cloud that blossomed when he scraped the dough from its stainless steel bowl onto the flour-dusted tabletop, but the front of his apron looked gray, not black, when he walked into the front of the shop to help Ronan.
“Shit, you weren’t lying,” Ronan said, looking Adam up and down as he put Ronan’s boxed cake on the counter. Adam spent a lot of time covered in flour, but that day was infinitely worse than normal. He looked messy and slovenly compared to Ronan, again in dark jeans, again in a dark tee, and again in his black leather jacket. “You really baked that cake.”
“And this one,” Adam replied. “You didn’t believe me?”
"Yeah. I mean—no. You just—" Ronan waved his hand at Adam and his flour-coated apron, a wristband sliding free from the sleeve of his leather jacket until he shoved it back into place.
"Don't look like a baker," Adam finished for him. Admittedly, Adam didn’t look like a baker. Most days, he ran multiple miles after Blue forced him out of the bakery, an effort to exhaust himself physically because his mind kept him up for hours, and he did his fair share of the heavy lifting at Fox Way. Wiry and lean since birth, no amount of consuming his own baked goods changed that, and, in his opinion, his face would never get him chosen for any televised baking competition, not with his gaunt cheeks and his fair eyebrows that might as well have been invisible. So, no, Adam Parrish did not look like a baker.
And apparently Ronan agreed. He shook his head and said, "No baker I've ever met."
"Do you meet a lot of bakers?" Adam asked as he opened the box and spun it toward Ronan to show him the cake inside.
"Not enough apparently," Ronan muttered before laughing loud, sharp, and deep when he looked at the cake. "Oh, that's perfect, man. He's going to hate that. Not even going to eat it and it'll have him shoving Tums down his throat for days."
"You got a cake," Adam said, "for someone who's not going to eat it."
"Nope. He can't stand chocolate."
Adam tried to keep his curiosity off his face, but he cocked his head as he looked at Ronan. What kind of life did this guy lead if he had a raven and made a mockery of setting someone’s kitchen on fire? Had he set this Deklo’s kitchen on fire? How? Adam wanted to ask so many questions, but he didn’t even know where to begin, so he simply closed the box, sealed it with a sticker, and moved toward the register to ring Ronan up. As he punched the order in, he said, “I hope he doesn’t enjoy it, then.”
He hoped someone would though. A two-layer quarter sheet could serve thirty people, and Adam hated to see a cake—and his effort—go to waste.
“Thanks. Like I said, he’ll hate it.” Ronan shot Adam another grin, and something in this one hit Adam a little lower than his gut.
After Ronan paid—more than the cake he’d gotten for Dick—Adam again slid the cake and receipt toward him, and, finally, he couldn’t keep his curiosity to himself. “Did you really set a kitchen on fire?”
Picking up the cake, Ronan replied, “Yep.”
The single word held a lot more pride than it should have.
“And did it really look better in flames?” In Adam’s experience with kitchen fires, this definitely hadn’t been the case.
“Yep,” Ronan repeated, impossibly more proud than before, and he smirked at Adam again, a little wicked, a little dark, and a lot hot. Lifting his box in a toast, Ronan said, “Thanks, man.”
Adam nodded. “Glad to help.” He crossed his arms over his chest as Ronan headed toward the door, and Adam called after him, “Let us know the next time you almost commit arson.”
Ronan paused as he shouldered Fox Way’s door open, and he looked back at Adam and met his gaze as he replied, “Yeah. I’ll keep you guys in mind.”
Then he left and climbed into the same shark-nosed BMW—parked legally—and as Adam watched Ronan drive away, Blue stepped out of the kitchen and stopped beside Adam.
“Did I hear him say he really set a kitchen on fire?” she asked.
With a lot less bravado, Adam gave her the same response Ronan had given him. “Yep.”
Another few weeks passed before Ronan called again, but this time, he didn’t slip Adam’s mind at all. Every morning when he checked any custom bakes he had lined up, Adam looked for Ronan’s name, and every time Blue came to him with questions about a customer request, he hoped it’d be some wild new apology from Ronan—his raven ate a pet hamster, or he mildly poisoned someone’s coffee, or he borrowed someone’s car and wrecked it.
When Ronan finally called again, though, what he wanted on his new cake was surprisingly heartfelt compared to prior messages.
“Matthew, comma,” Blue read from her computer while Adam hovered over her shoulder. “Sorry I ruined your childhood and told you Toad isn’t a mushroom, period. Love, comma, Ronan.”
“Who is Toad?” Adam asked.
“From Mario? Really?” Blue looked over her shoulder at him, and Adam raised his hands in the universal gesture for don’t blame me for not being raised by video games. After rolling her eyes, Blue asked, “Quarter sheet again?”
Adam leaned closer, bending over Blue’s shoulder as he read Ronan’s message a second time, and then a third before he said, “Yeah. Quarter sheet again.”
When the cake showed up on Adam’s schedule, he shouldn’t have been surprised at its simplicity: confetti cake with buttercream frosting. Part of him felt grateful though—Blue had posted a lemon and raspberry cake with Italian meringue icing on their Instagram and they’d gotten slammed with orders for it. Frankly, Adam had gotten sick of baking them—he never wanted to make Italian meringue again, and he loved making Italian meringue—and he welcomed the reprieve of baking what was more or less a standard birthday cake.
The reprieve was so welcome that, once he’d finished baking and icing the cake, Adam went above and beyond. He colored some leftover frosting red and piped clusters of mushrooms with tiny white polka dotted caps in the corners of the cake. If Ronan didn’t like them, Adam could scrape them off and trash the mushrooms, but though he didn’t fully acknowledge it, Adam kind of hoped Ronan liked them.
Thankfully, he did.
“Nice touch,” he said when Adam showed Ronan the cake. “Very—mushroomy.”
“And the Toad guy—isn’t a mushroom?” Adam asked. He’d looked up photos after Blue expressed he needed a better knowledge of classic video games, and, in Adam’s opinion, Toad looked like a garden variety red cap mushroom.
“Oh. No, he is,” Ronan replied. “But my little brother and I were playing Mario Kart and he was kicking my ass, so I told him Toad—he always picks fucking Toad—wasn’t a mushroom. That his little mushroom head was just a hat thing. It kind of killed his dreams.”
Adam hadn’t expected such a wholesome response, not after the raven, and not after the fire. But instead of saying how he thought it was nice Ronan played video games with his younger brother, Adam asked, “Did you win?”
“Yeah.” Ronan grinned. “I did.”
“Good.” Adam smiled back, moving to the register after closing and sealing the cake box. “Will your brother—Matthew, actually eat this one?”
“He eats everything, so yeah. He ate the last one, too.”
“That’s really a rave review about my baking.”
“Oh. No. Your stuff’s good,” Ronan said quickly, and when Adam glanced up from ringing up the cake, he found Ronan with his head ducked as he scraped his hand over the back of his buzz cut. And when Adam looked closer, he noticed a pink flush spreading over Ronan’s pale face and neck.
“Thanks,” Adam replied, his own cheeks and ears warming with the knowledge Ronan liked his cakes. Flipping the register screen toward Ronan, Adam said, “I’m glad we’ve been able to help with your apologies.”
“And non-apologies,” Ronan pointed out as he swiped his credit card and signed the screen with his finger.
“And non-apologies,” Adam echoed with a quiet laugh. He pushed cake and receipt in Ronan’s direction, and when Ronan looked up from putting his wallet back in his pocket, all evidence of any blush had left his face, making Adam think his eyes had fooled him before. He told Ronan, “Next time you ruin someone’s childhood, let us know.”
“You’ll be the first person I call,” Ronan replied, and he turned to leave the bakery, but not before meeting Adam’s eyes so quickly Adam thought he was seeing things again.
He wished he’d known then it would be the last he’d see of Ronan Lynch for a while, because Adam would have relished the moment more, like the way he savored the first bite of creme brûlée after cracking through the caramelized sugar on top. He would have watched Ronan drive away until his charcoal BMW left the view of Fox Way’s front windows. Maybe Adam would have slipped a business card into the cake box so Ronan had his email address, or he could have written his phone number on Ronan’s receipt. But Adam didn’t know then that the last few weeks of spring would pass without another call—another cake order—from Ronan, and Adam would have been a liar if he said that didn’t disappoint him. Over the course of three cakes, Adam had come to appreciate Ronan’s apologies—and non-apologies. It was an idea no other customer had had before, and Ronan had leaned into with—in Adam’s opinion—hilarious effect.
Day after day, when he checked on orders first thing in the morning, Adam rolled his lips together to keep from frowning when he saw Ronan’s name absent from the day’s schedule. Most days, Adam’s disappointment didn’t last. He had a bakery to run, new recipes to teach his staff, orders to place with vendors, mixers to repair. Summer hadn’t hit yet, but he still had a fall menu to plan and test bake. All together, Adam had enough on his hands to keep Ronan Lynch’s lack of orders from registering as too fatal a blow, except for those few private moments every morning.
Still, every time Blue came to him to determine the feasibility of a customer’s request, Adam got his hopes up, his heart rising in his chest like perfectly proofed dough before deflating once he found out the order wasn’t for Ronan, all the air punched out of him only to rise again the next time it happened. He almost sent thanks skyward one afternoon when Blue shoved a Post-It in Noah’s face instead of Adam’s while Adam—an hour and a half deep into making a test batch of pumpkin cruffins—rolled laminated dough through the dough roller for what felt like the hundredth time. Nothing seemed weird about Blue asking Noah his opinion; she did that sometimes while Adam manhandled thirty-pound bags of flour to put them away or took stock of fruit in the walk-in fridge. Noah might not have been the best baker on the planet, but he routinely frightened Adam with his inventive ways of decorating that defied standard baking conventions and, sometimes, gravity. Adam trusted his opinion and—mostly—his sense to tell Blue yes or no.
What did seem weird was Blue arriving two hours earlier than normal the next day, and what seemed weirder still was her and Noah acting conspiratorial across the kitchen while Noah mixed batter, taking care to shield what sat on the stainless countertop in front of him from Adam’s view. The last time the two of them had schemed together, Adam walked into the bakery at four in the morning to a surprise birthday party everyone else had spent all night preparing, and operating with barely-awake staff had been put at the top of the list of things he didn’t want to repeat. Standing at the butcher block, weighing out dough for rolls, Adam called across the kitchen, “Whatever you two are up to needs management approval.”
Blue whipped around to look at him from where she stood beside Noah, and she rolled her eyes before she called back, “FYI, I’m management. Unless you’ve miraculously decided you want to deal with customer service, too.”
Their arrangement as business partners kept Adam from performing customer service as much as operationally possible, and he had no inclination to start dealing with that side of the bakery. Blue knew this. Blue had always known this. And her tightly twisted lips told Adam he did not stand on the winning side of this conversation. “Alright,” he conceded, so quickly if it were anyone but Blue he would have been embarrassed. “I’ll defer to your judgment.”
“I thought so.” Blue grinned before ducking back into her conversation with Noah. She’d moved just enough Adam could see a half-frosted cake on the counter in front of them, and their whispering resumed as Noah slathered another layer of white frosting over the cake’s round sides, taking care to carefully square the top edge of the cake despite whatever Blue jabbered in his ear.
Though he’d given Blue and Noah leeway to continue, Adam kept an eye on them as he finished weighing and started shaping rolls, but he allowed them their privacy. Together, Blue and Noah created minor chaos, but they hadn’t burned the building down.
Yet.
So Adam finished his batches of rolls and put them on a proofing rack before getting to work refilling ingredients that had slowly emptied over the course of the morning. It kept him busy when all he wanted to do was figure out what Blue and Noah were up to. He decanted flour out of bags and into large tupperware bins. He moved eggs from the walk-in fridge to the ones under the counter. In the middle of Adam restocking butter, Blue and Noah finished their not-so-clandestine cake and Blue swept it into a box so Adam couldn’t catch a look at what Noah had written on the top before she carried the cake out of the kitchen.
Then, while Adam inventoried cardboard cake rounds and cupcake liners to prepare an order from their paper goods vendor, Cialina poked her head into the kitchen and said, “Adam? You’ve got a delivery?” She always had a cadence and inflection that made her sound unsure, but the way she told Adam he had a delivery sounded more unsure than normal.
Her behavior, combined with the fact the clock on the wall read 12:40 and he’d received all the bakery’s deliveries before dawn, raised the fine fair hairs on the back of Adam’s neck. This delivery seemed too—coincidental, and it made Adam sure that whatever awaited him our in the front of the bakery had everything to do with Blue and Noah—both conveniently absent, Adam noted—and whatever they’d been unsubtly conspiring about.
Hooking his pen around the spiral of the notebook he’d been using for inventory, Adam asked Cialina, “What kind of delivery?”
Cialina, usually also loquacious, just shrugged and looked as if she were trying very hard to not blurt out the truth before she disappeared from the kitchen doorway. Adam sighed and looked skyward as he tossed his notebook on a countertop. He could walk out the bakery’s back door, walk around to the front, and re-enter through the front door, giving himself the upper hand, and the idea tempted him. Not that it’d make whatever waited for him the second he stepped out of the kitchen any better. It’d really only delay the inevitable, though Adam didn’t hold himself above being a little petty.
He decided to put pettiness aside though, and he pushed a hand through his hair to smooth it back from where it’d fallen across his forehead before he headed out of the kitchen. For all he knew, it could be FedEx or UPS with documents from their accountant or lawyer. Or, worse, the IRS.
But what waited for Adam out front had nothing to do with Fox Way Bake Shop. Well, it had a little to do with Fox Way Bake Shop, because Ronan Lynch held one of the bakery’s boxes as he stood on the other side of the shop’s counter.
When Adam stepped out of the kitchen, Cialina retreated into it, leaving Adam alone with Ronan. A quick glance at the front door revealed the chalkboard OPEN sign that should have faced the street had been flipped around, confirming that whatever Adam just walked into had at least partly been orchestrated by Blue.
He didn’t know what he’d stepped into, but Adam’s heart dripped out of his chest and into his stomach, moving slower than the last few drops of honey seeping down the sides of a jar.
Sidling behind the counter, he looked at Ronan for a long moment—and Ronan looked back at him—before Adam finally asked, “Anything I can help you with?”
“I don’t know,” Ronan replied, taking a step closer to the counter. In the warmer weather, he only wore a t-shirt, the short sleeves revealing a tattooed sleeve of scales on his left arm, every tiny scale filled in with gradients of green. As he stood, his shoulders curled slightly inward for a beat before he pressed them back to their full broadness, then Ronan rolled the tip of his tongue out over his bottom lip before he said, “Probably could have helped myself a while ago by getting your name, but—” He jerked his chin and shrugged his shoulder, dismissing his past error like he was tossing it onto a decently-sized pile of regrets.
“It’s Adam,” Adam told him, the drip of his heart starting to pool in his stomach.
“Yeah. I know that now.” Ronan rolled his eyes. “Didn’t know that when I called though, but whatever. Doesn’t matter. Teal or Ocean or whatever her name is helped with that.”
“Blue,” Adam laughed dryly. “She’ll probably wish she hadn’t helped you now. Considering you think her name’s Teal.” But knowing Ronan had called the bakery, talked to Blue, gotten Adam’s name… Even with the warmth spreading through it, Adam’s stomach started to riot, and it didn’t get any better when Ronan took another step toward the counter, leaving only three feet of granite between them.
“She’ll get over it,” Ronan said. “Or not. She should, with how much I’ve shelled out on cakes.”
“We do like repeat customers,” Adam told him, resting his hands on the edge of the counter and leaning against them. What he’d said had been the truth. They did like repeat customers. But Adam like Ronan Lynch a lot more than most. Nodding toward the cake box, Adam asked, “What’s that, four apologies?”
“Four, yeah.” Ronan finally put the box down, the lid opening facing in his direction. “But not four apologies. At least this one isn’t, I guess. Kind of. Maybe. It’s more like—sorry for not having anything to be sorry about, so I didn’t need any cakes.”
“Don’t worry about it.” It’d been more than a month without Ronan doing something so egregious it needed an eighty-dollar apology, so while Adam had been Ronan Lynchless in that time, as a whole, the world was probably better off. But it did leave Adam wondering what—if it wasn’t an apology—Noah had written on the cake concealed in the box sitting between them. “But if you’re not saying sorry for—dying someone’s dog green, what’s this cake for?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” A smirk flashed across Ronan’s thin lips, making one sharp cheekbone impossibly sharper. So sharp Adam wouldn’t feel it if he fell on it and cut himself.
He kind of wanted to fall on it and cut himself.
With careful precision, Ronan ran his thumbnail across the sticker sealing the cake box, slicing it cleanly in half before he tucked his fingers under the edge of the lid. But before he opened the box, Ronan looked up at Adam, one thick, dark eyebrow raised in such a suggestive way that Adam felt like he stood not at the bakery’s counter, but at the open mouth of a commercial oven. Ronan asked, “You had nothing to do with baking this one, right?”
“Nothing,” Adam confirmed. “So I can’t vouch for quality.”
“You really have faith in your employees.”
“I hired them. I know their strengths and weaknesses.”
Dropping his head back for a moment, Ronan laughed, a loud, gravelly bark of ha before he looked at Adam again. “Shit, you seem like a real great boss.”
Shrugging, Adam smiled a little. “I have my own strengths and weaknesses.”
“Way to be humble.”
“That,” Adam said, “isn’t one of my strengths.”
Ronan laughed again and his pale eyes glinted like light sparkling off sanding sugar. “Good to know,” he said. Then he nodded once, took a deep breath through flared nostrils, and as he let it out through the cage of his straight, white teeth, he pried the box open and spun it around so Adam could see inside.
At first, Adam didn’t look down at the cake. He wanted to—but no matter the message written on the cake, Adam liked looking at Ronan more. Particularly with the way he couldn’t seem to keep still as he waited for Adam to look at his message. Based on the past few minutes, Adam had a general idea of what lay in store for him when he did look down at the cake, but Ronan had kept him waiting for over a month. Adam could make him wait another few seconds. He liked the view too much to look away from it just yet.
Finally, Adam did tear his eyes away from Ronan to look down at the cake—strawberry shortcake, one of Adam's favorites—and the message Noah had written on top.
Adam,
You. Me. Some place other than this bakery?
Love,
Ronan
The warmth pooling in his stomach started overflowing into his legs as Adam took a step back from the counter and moved one hand to his hip and dragged the other over his mouth. It was an effort to look pensive, but really, he was trying to cover up what was probably a very idiotic smile that made him look like he was a few donuts short of a dozen. He took a few moments to stop his heart from surging back into his chest and staging an uprising, then he dropped his hand to his hip and looked up from the cake to look at Ronan before he said, “I have to be home by eight.”
“Or what? You turn into pumpkin bread?” Ronan asked, and Adam looked at him flatly, cocking his head with as much of an unimpressed look as he could muster when his body wanted to violently throw itself across the bakery counter and onto Ronan. Ronan held his hands up, palms facing Adam, as he grinned. “Hey, man. You’re a baker. You walked right into that one.”
“Yeah,” Adam admitted as he stopped fighting his smile. “I guess I did. A little.”
“So you have to be home by eight,” Ronan said. “Why? You run some illicit cottage industry baking ring out of your home kitchen? Have to keep all the grannies and their family recipes in line?”
“Nothing that thrilling, sorry,” Adam laughed. “I get up at three thirty so I can get here by four.”
“Jesus shit, really?” Ronan asked, eyebrows furrowing so quickly it looked like they collapsed. He held his arm up and shoved a few leather wristbands out of the way to look at his watch. “It’s one. Why are you still here?”
“I’m emotionally and financially invested in this place.”
Ronan narrowed his eyes at Adam for a moment before he started nodding slowly. “Alright. No late nights. Got it.” He put his hands on the counter and mirrored how Adam had stood a few minutes before, leaning on his hands as he leaned across the counter. “But it’s afternoon now.”
“I can’t just leave,” Adam replied, letting out a single, sharp laugh.
“Yes, you can,” came a chorus from the kitchen doorway, and when Adam looked over his shoulder, Blue and Noah fell over one another to scramble back into the kitchen.
“I don’t know.” Ronan waved a hand at the kitchen. “Seems like they’re okay with it.”
Adam looked at Ronan, who looked like he’d give Adam a heart attack someday with his cocky smirk and broad shoulders, his buzz cut and all his tattoos. With running the bakery, and with his odd hours, Adam had few opportunities to meet people. The world didn’t teem with people who went to bed before the sun set in the spring and summer. Now someone who seemed willing to accommodate his weird waking hours had walked right into Fox Way, and he would have to be an oblivious idiot to say no. To turn down someone like Ronan Lynch, who’d just spend a boatload of money on a cake to ask him out—if Blue had made him pay.
Reaching behind himself, Adam unknotted the ties of his apron. He held a finger up to Ronan, asking him to wait a moment, then he went and threw his apron at Blue and Noah, still hovering just inside the kitchen door. Checking he had his phone, keys, and wallet, and after brushing away a streak of flour on his thigh, Adam walked around the other side of the counter to join Ronan, and he asked him, “Alright. Where are we going?”