Page 31 of Mixed Signals
“Fine.” He rolls his eyes and goes back to his bread. I whip my batter until my arm begins to ache. He mutters something under his breath that sounds vaguely liketouchy.
“Did you—” I hesitate, not sure I want to ask Beckett the question that’s prodding at the edges of my mind. The question that I hear the loudest whenever I’m with him and Evelyn and Stella and Luka. Every single time I watch a couple move together in perfect, easy synchronicity through the front doors of my bakery.
Beckett watches me with a level of patience I probably don’t deserve, the tray of bread clutched between his hands. “Did I, what?”
“Did you ever think you’d find someone?” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “Did you think you’d find Evelyn?”
His face eases when he hears her name, a calm settling over his shoulders.
“No,” he says. His head tilts to the side and he drags his palm against his chin. “I didn’t. I’m not exactly a social butterfly and I—I struggle with people. You know that.”
Beckett has trouble with interactions—with small spaces and loud noises. It takes him some time to warm up to people, to ease into conversation. It’s why, I suspect, he spends so much time out in the fields. In the quiet, he can pull the edges of himself back together.
“But Evelyn saw the pieces of me that no one else did and decided she wanted to keep them. I wanted to keep hers, too. I’m—” He clears his throat. “I’m grateful for that. And I, uh, I guess you’ve noticed I have some trouble when she’s gone.”
The man has been stomping around the farm like someone took his favorite toy away. Evelyn travels for her work with the U.S. Small Business Coalition, helping little places like ours all over the country get their digital legs beneath them. She’s incredible at what she does. It just leaves a grumpy-ass farmer for the rest of us whenever she goes.
I give him a droll look, arm still working at the batter. These better be the best damned donuts on the East Coast by the time I’m done.
Beckett gives me a half-smile, fingers collecting the crumbs he missed at the bottom of the tray. “You’ll find someone, Layla.”
“Everyone keeps saying that, but I’m not so sure,” I confess. “I’d like something to be mine. Someone, maybe.” Mine and mine alone. Secret smiles and easy touches and lips pressed against the back of my neck. Easy affection and comfort in the mundane. I set my mixing bowl aside and reach for a tray. “You really think someone will want my pieces?”
He shrugs. “At the very least, they’ll want this bread.”
I flick a spatula at his head.
Stella interruptsme during my third batch of donuts, swinging through the back door hard enough for it to bounce off the wall. A cascade of aprons and head scarves come tumbling down on top of her, pale pink and bright purple and a thick canvas with dancing nutcrackers on it that I’m sure was a joke but I love to wear year-round anyway. She fights her way through the fabrics.
“Big news,” she tells me with an orange scarf over the top half of her face. It’s a shame Beckett left already. He’d probably enjoy this more than my zucchini bread.
“You discovered a filing system that doesn’t involve chucking all your paperwork into the bottom drawer of your desk and hoping for the best.”
“Ha.” She bats away the orange scarf and wrestles with a pale blue one. “No. Though Luka continues to try his best.”
It’ll be the culmination of Luka’s life's work when he finally gets Stella organized. Sometimes he waits until she’s out of the house and reorganizes all her closets. The last time she went to Annapolis for a shipment, he reorganized her book collection by genre and color.
A thrill of excitement rockets through my chest. I straighten from my standard curved-over-the-table position and almost send my donut tray flying. “Did Luka propose?”
I might have misgivings about my own love life, but I am firmly invested in the happiness of my best friends. The tickle of sadness in the corners of my heart is easy enough to ignore, bursting as it is with absolute joy.
“What? No.” One pale blue eye peeks out at me through gauzy fabric. I have no idea how she’s still tangled up over there. She swats the last piece away with a relieved sigh. “We just moved in together.”
After a lengthy construction on the back of Stella’s tiny cottage so Luka has space to work and Stella has more space to hoard pine tree air fresheners and novelty tea towels and goodness knows what else.
“You’ve been in love with each other for a decade,” I reason.
She scratches behind her ear. “But only dating for a year and some change. I know I’m going to be with Luka forever. I’m not in any rush.”
Only Stella would think of a decade as a rush. I fill a piping bag with batter. “My best colors are a sienna or a dusty pink, so a fall wedding would work best for me.”
“I’ll take that into consideration. But that’s not what I have to tell you.” Stella hops up and down on her toes on the opposite side of my table. I pause with my hand curled around my bag.
“What?”
“The news!”
“Right. Please proceed.”
