Lindsay shrugged. “What can I say? I’m very charming.”
“Are you gonna hit that?” asked Evan.
“What? No. First of all, if I take the job, he’d be my boss. Second of all, I’m trying to get back together with Brad.”
“And how’s that going?”
Lindsay took a fortifying sip of her martini. “Not the best.”
“What’s going on?” asked Paige.
“He’s being sincere now. He tried to win me over and I wasn’t hearing it because I was so tied up in my own nonsense, but once I realized that I still have feelings for him and that, actually, I do trust him, too much time had passed, and he stopped believing I’d come around and decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. So now we’re at some kind of truce, but also an impasse. I can’t just tell him I trust him because he won’t believe me, so I have to find a way to show him.”
Evan and Paige both nodded slowly. “You don’t trust anyone,” Paige said. “Except us, I mean.”
“Brad said the same thing. It’s…hard.”
“Trust is hard,” said Paige. “But love is amazing. I think if you and Brad can find a way to love and trust each other, you’ll be very happy together.”
“I think so, too,” Lindsay said quietly.
“When Lauren told me she’d hired him, I was really expecting this monster to come work at the café. But he’s actually pretty great. He’s creative, he’s got a good sense of humor, and he’s good with the customers.”
“That’s because the customers are all trying to get in his pants,” said Evan.
“Well, hopefully soon, I’ll be the only one who gets in his pants,” said Lindsay.
“I’ll drink to that.” Evan raised his glass. “Although, I swear to god, if you get married and leave me as the only single one, you’re dead to me.”
“Aw.” Lindsay clinked her glass against Evan’s. “I love you too, Ev. And your Mr. Right is out there somewhere.”
“Wish he’d show up sooner.”
***
Brad’s two assistant pastry chefs, Stephanie and Dan, were both fairly recent culinary school grads, but they were also both very good. Dan viewed baking as a science and got nervous when asked to improvise, but if Brad gave him a recipe, he followed it precisely. Stephanie was more laid-back and creative, but she also mostly stuck to the menus Brad had made.
The goal was for one of them to be in the kitchen at the cat café each day, sometimes both, with Brad only working on high-traffic weekdays. Brad was looking to get his schedule down to four days a week, because he could feel himself burning out after the zany hours of his first couple of months at this job. Lauren was being very accommodating, basically letting him set his own hours and run the kitchen however he saw fit as long as they had enough pastries to feed the masses.
All three of them were in the kitchen one morning, though, while Brad did some frosting-decoration training.
Dan prized taste over decoration, so he seemed pretty skeptical of making cupcakes look like cats. He gamely held up a piping bag, though, and moved as Brad directed. Once he’d drawn a passable orange cat in frosting, Stephanie took a turn and nailed it.
“Not every pastry chef is good at this kind of thing,” said Brad. “Most days, Dan, you can stick to danishes and muffins. And the cat treats, obviously. But when I designed the menu, I was thinking about how the main theme of this place is cuteness. People come to hang out with the cats, so we should have some cat-themed pastries.”
Dan nodded. “I totally understand. I’ll practice and get better.”
Brad nodded and then moved to take a tray of tuna cat cookies out of the oven. The cat treats themselves were small rectangles, sometimes a little irregularly cut, because Brad’s technique was to make the dough, roll it out to quarter-inch thickness, and then use a spiral cutter to slice it up into treats. They were small enough he could bake a few dozen treats on one tray. Brad had coached Dan and Stephanie through making this particular batch, and as soon as they were cool, he planned to have everyone taste test them so they’d know when they got things right. These tuna treats were actually a little gross—they were the same texture as a ginger snap but tasted like fish—but Brad had studied feline nutrition to make sure he only used safe ingredients, and the café cats gobbled them up.
When Dan and Stephanie had finished frosting a dozen cupcakes, Brad put them all on a tray and carried them out to the counter.
Monique looked grateful. “There’s a little girl in the cat room who wasverydisappointed we didn’t have any cupcakes today. I told her our baker was making some more right now.”
“Sorry about that. We did cake-decorator training today, so these took longer than usual.” Brad walked around the counter and slid the tray into the empty spot in the display case. “You want me to go tell her there are cupcakes now?”
“Sure. Black girl with braided hair in a pink dress.”
“Gotcha.”
