Page 10 of Heartbreak & Cupcakes
After she took one bite, she asked if I could make a dozen for her granddaughter’s birthday. I told her that of course I would. I was happy for the distraction. And baking had always been my particular form of therapy.
I showed up at her door the next day with two dozen cupcakes and handed them to her. She would only accept them if I would accept twenty dollars. I tried to refuse, but she insisted I take it and “know my worth.” She explained that she’d run a small business out of her apartment for years called Babushka’s Baked Goodies and she thought that I could successfully do the same.
At the time, I was in between jobs as a nanny. My last family had just moved overseas, and the agency I worked for hadn’t placed me with another yet. I figured, what did I have to lose? My options were trying my hand at doing something I loved or going back to bartending while picking up odd jobs like dog walking or tourist photographer.
It wasn’t a difficult decision.
Yana was my first customer. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. She told me that anything was possible with hard work, dedication, and sacrifice.
My problem was, I’d been pouring all of my hard work, dedication, and sacrifice into dead-end relationships because all I’d ever wanted was to have a family. My dream, ever since I could remember having dreams, was to have a white picket fence, complete with a husband who adored me, kids running around laughing and making messes, and so many animals people would wonder if we were running a zoo.
I could have a baby on my own. I knew that. I’d grown up with a single father. My mother died tragically from complications while she was giving birth to me, so I’d never known her. After she passed away, my father had never dated anyone. So, it had just been the two of us when I was growing up.
Whenever I asked him about his love life—or lack thereof—when I was younger, he said he didn’t have time or space in his life because he was busy raising me. Maybe there was some truth to his explanation, but I’d just celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday, so that excuse hadn’t been valid for nearly twenty years. And he was still single. Now, in his seventies, I didn’t think that status was going to change. And that made me a little sad.
If anyone in this world deserved to be happy, it was my dad. He was honest, hardworking, funny, and smart. He also happened to have an imposing six-foot-five, athletic frame and movie star good looks. He’d been likened to the Brawny Man, Tom Selleck, and Don Draper. Not Jon Hamm the actor that played Don Draper, but the fictional character himself.
He was also a police officer, which served as catnip to the fairer sex. He’d worked his way up from a beat cop and was now deputy chief. It was basically a desk job, but I still worried about him. I’d been begging him, for years, to retire, but he always responded the same way. “And do what? I don’t golf.”
Growing upallof my friends, my friends’ moms, teachers, babysitters…basically every female I knew under fifty, or over fifty for that matter, had a crush on him. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if my dad was picking me up, or was my dad going to be somewhere, I wouldn’t be living in a five hundred square foot apartment. I’d be rich.
But he never gave any woman a second look. He seemed oblivious to the attention. It seemed he was the eternal bachelor.
I wondered if I would have the same fate. Forever single.
Maybe I would be…but I didn’t have any control over that. I had control over my business. And I’d poured all of my hard work, dedication, and sacrifice into it. Sweet Temptations would still be considered a newlywed if I was married to it. Which I practically was. Especially since I’d decided to give up on the four-letter L-word that had proved to be so elusive in my life.
I’d thought I’d been in love a dozen times in my thirty-five years. But after my last car wreck of a relationship with Sam, I realized that the only thing I’d ever really been in love with was love itself. I loved everything about love. The falling in it, the being in it. It didn’t really have a lot to do with the person I was in it with, I could make anything work, and had.
My eternal optimism, nurturing nature, refusal to give up, innate fixer tendencies, and can-do attitude had helped me build my business from a small online side project that I ran all by my lonesome out of my studio apartment, to having a brick-and-mortar boutique bakery in the city and the neighborhood of my dreams with one—and soon two—employees.
Those were also the traits that enabled me to stay with men that were not good for me. Red flags were just flags when you looked at them through rose-colored glasses. That was my problem. I was a rose-colored glasses girl. But no more.
From now on, I was concentrating on me, myself, and I. No more rehabilitating mama’s boys, ignoring cheaters’ behaviors, believing liars, excusing thieves, and supporting unemployed losers.
I’d love to blame my pathetic romantic past on the men in my life, the Dirty Dozen, but after a fearless inventory, there was one common denominator in all of those relationships. Me. So, I’d been wearing a metaphorical chastity belt for the past two years.
My vow of celibacy had been going surprisingly well until the day of the Grand Opening of Sweet Temptations whenhewalked in.
I’ll never forget that moment. It was straight out of a movie. (Yes, I’m fully aware that even in my description of the event my neurosis is shining brighter than Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I romanticize everything. But hey, they say acceptance is the first step.)
The bell dinged and when I looked up, I saw the image result of the Google search Tall, Dark, and Handsome, walk into my shop. He wore a thousand-dollar tailored suit that screamed white-collar but his large, work-roughened, scarred hands had blue-collar written all over them. His dark, thick hair appeared to be perfectly groomed, not a strand out of place, but was also somehow tousled like he’d just gotten out of bed after rolling around in the sheets. His frame was muscular, and his broad shoulders looked like they could hold the weight of the world. His face was a whisper away from being too pretty but possessed an undeniable manly quality highlighted by the sexy stubble covering a strong jaw. His inky, long lashes framed eyes as blue as the bay on a sunny day and perfectly contrasted his olive complexion.
The moment our gazes met, all of the oxygen evaporated from the room, time stood still, the earth stopped rotating. It was as if only the two of us existed. And although I would bet my life that I’d never met or seen this Roman gladiator in Italian loafers before, I knew him, and he knew me.
I’d never felt so connected to a complete stranger—or someone I knew in the biblical sense, for that matter—before in my life.
When the bell dinged again and another customer entered the bakery, the man took a step to the side breaking our eye contact. It was then that I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding.
When it was his turn to be served, I had to remind myself to breathe, so I didn’t pass out. My hands shook and my heart raced like the time in high school when I accidentally doubled the dose of my diet pills and thought I was having a heart attack.
I wasn’t sure what I expected our first interaction to entail. I mean I was hoping he’d declare his undying love for me on the spot, but realistically I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Sort of. As it turned out, the first time we spoke was the same as the nearly one hundred times we’d had since then.
He steps up to the counter.
I say, “Hi.”
He says, “I’ll take a dozen donuts and one Sadie’s Special.”
