Chapter 1 - Eve
I had a craving for something salty; a craving that had persisted for a week. It had followed me to work, to meetings, and to Los Angeles to shoot a guest appearance on a cooking show—which never happened—until I finally had the time to slow down.
I stood in the salty snacks’ aisle of Target, trying to figure out what chips would curb my cravings. I didn’t have these cravings often, and I tried to stay away from all salty and sweet things. Ironic, given my occupation.
Did I want Lays or Ruffles? Sea Salt or Regular? What about Doritos? All those cheese and spices looked fantastic. Also, as a general rule, I never shopped while hungry. Studies have shown that people who shop when hungry spend more than people who had a snack before. Everything on the shelf looked appetizing, to the point where I didn’t want to pick anything and end up having buyer’s remorse. Could you have buyer’s remorse for a $3.00 bag of chips?
A woman about my age rolled her cart into the aisle and I flushed red just looking at her. She was wearing workout clothes, you know, the kind where you couldn’t tell if the person just came from the gym or was wearing them because they were cute and comfortable. Still, it got my guilty conscience talking.
I should probably join a gym. Not that I was unhealthy. Yes, I didn’t run on purpose, although I probably should prepare for the zombie apocalypse. I worked too much to do any sort of purposeful exercise; my job required me to stay on my feet all day. I was young and healthy and my internal body parts were fine.
I probably didn’t even need any salty snacks.
Ooh, Pringles. You could never go wrong with Pringles.
Satisfied, I picked up two cans, because one was never enough, and also, they were on sale and turned around.
“Humph!”
My body collided with a wall and cold, sticky liquid spread across my chest and trickled down my body. I looked down at the front of my pale blue dress, on which creamy liquid was now spreading. Great. This was exactly what I needed after the day I’d had.
The wall cursed, and I looked up, startled, finally realizing that there hadn’t been a wall there just a second ago. I clutched my cans of Pringles to my chest like a shield and looked up at the “wall” I had bumped into.
“I’m so, so, sorry. You just turned around unexpectedly, and I didn’t see you there,” it said.
It’s not it, Eve. It’s he. Right.
And he was staring down at me, waiting for me to speak up. I took another involuntary step back because of the sheer size of him. He wasn’t beefy by any means. He was tall and his shoulders were big, but they weren’t Dwayne Johnson big. I had nothing to be afraid of. My mind repeated these words like a mantra to me. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Don’t. Be. Afraid.
“You’re apologizing and it sounds like you’re blaming me for this,” I said. My voice sounded a lot steadier than I felt.
“No, no. I was just going to walk around you and then you turned, and my reflexes are slow because I haven’t slept in eighteen hours and just… I’m sorry.”
A fairly innocuous reason, still it caused my distress to rise. I stared at the man standing in front of me. He looked harmless enough, dressed in faded blue jeans, the material of which looked soft, and a white t-shirt which stretched across his shoulders. A baseball cap cast half his face in shadow and the lower half, which was all I could see, had dark scruff covering it.
Without looking into his eyes, I couldn’t tell if he felt remorse or not. Not wanting to prolong a conversation with a stranger, I shrugged off the whole incident and gave him a polite and firm smile.
Though it wasn’t that late at night, this Target was never that crowded during this time. I didn’t want to get too friendly knowing I was going to walk out of here and through a fairly empty parking lot to get to my car. As a woman, I felt it was complete BS that I didn’t even feel safe in my local Target, even if this guy looked harmless.
“It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t really because the short, cute blue dress with small sparkling flowers on it was my favorite and was now covered in coffee that was heavy on the cream. A shower was much needed, ASAP.
“Really? Are you sure?” He asked hesitantly. I noted vaguely that he had a nice voice, all warm and calm. He sounded like a man who never lost his cool, no matter the situation, and I wondered what that felt like. No one could ever accuse me of having the patience of a saint. Especially if they worked in my kitchen.
I sighed and nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. And I happen to like coffee. Usually not on my clothes, but it’s no big deal.”
He leaned towards me slightly, his head tilted like a curious bird. I took another step back and wondered why I was still standing there and not walking away.
“Okay, well…” I didn’t know what to say so I started to walk around him, pinching my dress and pulling it away from where it was sticking to my stomach. Gross.
“Wait, I know you!”
I stopped short and looked up at him again. My heart relocated to my throat, where it continued to beat a mile a minute. You never, ever, want a strange man you’ve never met to tell you that he knows you. My first instinct was to make a run for it and I would have had I not been wearing six-inch heels. I wasn’t about to go tripping and making myself an easy target in Target.
“Dude, you’re being super creepy right now,” I said. I was now clutching my Pringles cans like a weapon. I was very conscious of the security camera on the pillar and it was pointed at us directly. Hopefully, defending myself wasn’t going to be necessary, but I was prepared to do it.
“Shit, sorry! I mean, you look familiar. You’re Eve Darling, right? The baking woman?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Is this what my life had come to? Being accosted by strangers who recognized me thanks to my YouTube videos and baking show appearances?
“Yeah,” I said, drawing out the word. “Although you’d be the first to call me ‘the baking woman’. That’s not my title, you know.”
His pink lips lifted into a barely-there smile and my heart sort of gave a tha-thump. I told it to calm down. I couldn’t blame it. Under normal circumstances, I kept my heart away from men like the one standing in front of me.
The men who are your type don’t want a woman who doesn’t have time for them, my brain piped in. Building a successful business was difficult. Some things, namely my love life, were on the back burner for now.
I shook my head. Think straight, Evelyn. Worry about your life and not your heart.
“Right, I know. The Cupcake Queen.”
I felt heat rise from my neck to my cheeks. The title was ridiculous and ridiculously cheesy. It had been assigned to me months prior when a lifestyle magazine did a spread on me and my bakery, Sugar Bliss. They had called me The Cupcake Queen of San Diego. It made me feel like I had accomplished something in life. At the same time, I felt a cold dread in the pit of my stomach every time someone mentioned it, like now. Because that stupid title had ruined my life.
“You watched my tutorials?” I asked. He didn’t look the sort who did. Though I suppose everyone had hidden depths.
“No,” he said, with a slight wince. “I have a patient who’s a big fan of yours. She showed me a video of yours and I guess I just recognized you.”
I stared up at him. Either he had a good memory, or he paid more attention to this video than he was letting on. I hadn’t shot a video since I was about twenty and started taking the idea of my business seriously. I still had a social media presence, but most of my time was spent in the kitchen. And I could safely say that five years later, I didn’t look like I had at twenty. For one thing, I had embraced my blonde hair and let it grow out, instead of keeping it short and bubble gum pink—it had been a phase, though I did miss the pink sometimes. My nose piercing was gone, as were the two additional piercings on my right ear. And I liked to think that my dressing sense had improved much.
“You must have paid attention to the videos to recognize me,” I said. I wished that he would take off that hat so I could see his eyes and more of his facial expression. Why was he even wearing it? It was close to seven in the evening and we were inside. What did he have to hide?
“I’ve always been a really good student and I happen to like sweet things,” he said. Did he just glance at my lips? No, that must have been a trick of the light.
“Great, well…. Have a good night,” I said, stepping around him.
“Wait!”
He stepped in front of me suddenly and I just barely avoided another collision.
I looked up at him inquiringly. Wasn’t this a bit much?
“I ruined your dress. Let me buy you another one,” he said earnestly. I blinked at him, taken aback by his words. He wanted to buy me a dress? Most people in this situation would have apologized and walked on, lest they get stuck with exactly what he was suggesting. We’d already talked more than I ever did with people I didn’t know.
I looked up and down the aisle, wondering if there was a camera crew set-up there that I had missed somehow. I looked more carefully at the stranger, searching for a concealed camera on his person. This had to be part of some cringe-y prank show. There was no logical way to explain any of this.
“Unnecessary,” I said. It was sweet of him to offer, though. If the offer was genuine.
“Okay, then... I think I have a t-shirt or something in my car.”
“Dude, you’re being weird now. Seriously. I am fine.”
He looked down at me, slowly realizing that he was accosting a woman in a store. His cheeks colored and he rubbed the back of his neck, grimacing slightly.
“Right, I’ll let you go. I’m sorry, again.”
This time, when I turned around to walk away, he didn’t stop me. Breathing deeply in relief, I walked down the aisle. A worker was setting up a display of boxed Mac and cheese in the center walkway. As I rounded the corner, a group of teenage boys came barreling down the aisle on skateboards and right at me. For a moment, the eighty-year-old woman inside me reared her elderly head and wanted to shout at them. Instead, I jumped out of the way just in time. A sudden horn sounded somewhere to my right. It was loud and vicious, and my nerves were shot.
Which explained why I freaked out, my boxes of Pringles flying out of my hands. I let out a loud yelp and took a startled step back. My foot landed on something sticky and wet and slipped right out from under me. The next thing I knew, I was flying, or more accurately, falling. My arms flailed as I tried to grab purchase, anything to hold on to that would keep me from falling. All I caught was air.
My body collided with something hard, the loud sound of a crash filling my ears as I fell right on top of the Mac and cheese display. Oof. The perfect cherry on top of this terrible, awful, no-good day.
“I just put that together,” the bored worker intoned, looking down at me.
“I didn’t like the way you put it together the first time and thought you should re-do it,” I said thinly. Something hard and sharp was digging into my body and I felt cool air in places I shouldn’t be feeling cool air. With sudden dawning horror, I realized the skirt of my dress had flipped up when I fell, revealing my underwear to the bored teenage worker and anyone else who happened to walk by.
“Eve?”
I groaned, closing my eyes and suddenly wishing for a superpower that would make me invisible or transport me anywhere I wanted to go. Anywhere, but here. Anywhere the stranger who had spilled coffee on me couldn't see my underwear. My cotton, dancing cupcakes underwear. Something a thirteen-year-old would wear, not a twenty-six-year-old woman. The perils of never doing laundry.
The stranger was moving away from the boxes and asking the bored worker to get someone in charge. The last thing I needed was more witnesses to this most humiliating incident.
“Are you hurt anywhere?” The stranger asked.
“Does my ego count?”
He chuckled lightly. Ugh, I could just imagine him going home to a beautiful wife or girlfriend and telling her all about the crazy woman he met at the store. I struggled to sit up.
The stranger laid a staying hand on my shoulder. It was large and tanned, the heat seeping into my body and warming places that definitely should not be warm right now.
“Don’t move, I need to examine you first,” he said authoritatively.
“There’s no need for that, I’m seriously fine. And what do you mean by “examine”?”
His lips tilted up just slightly. He had a nice jaw, covered in scruff as it was. Also, a nice neck. I had never admired a man’s neck before, and this was the most ridiculous time to get into it. I was lying on top of a pile of Mac and cheese boxes, my underwear still showing. I must have been a despicable human being in my past life.
“You could have hurt yourself when you fell and not even know it.”
The next thing I knew, he was leaning over me, his hands on the base of my neck, his fingers pressing in gently, but firmly as his hands moved along my spine with purpose.
“How do I even know you’re a real medical professional?” I asked, trying to distract myself from the feel of his hands and how nice he smelled. It was a crisp, wintry scent and reminded me of the time my family went to Aspen over one Christmas break. I almost killed myself while trying to ski, but that’s irrelevant.
“I’ll send you a copy of my medical license,” he said, distractedly
“Like you can’t Photoshop those.”
“Are you always this suspicious?”
“When a stranger has his hands on me, yes. You don’t have to worry. The human body was made for this.”
He looked at me like he thought I was crazy, and maybe also a little adorable.
“It isn’t,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“The ten grueling years of med school helped.”
He finished his examination and sat back. I had to give it to him. My skirt was still flipped up and he hadn’t once looked at me anywhere below the neck.
“Do you feel any pain?” He asked.
“Does the pain of humiliation count?”
“It does not.”
“Then, no.”
“Did you hit your head when you fell?”
“No.”
He hummed quietly. “I don’t think you broke anything. You should be fine, but if you feel any pain, check-in with your GP or the nearest emergency care.”
When I agreed to do his bidding, he helped me up slowly and set me on my feet. Miraculously, my foot was just fine and I breathed a sigh of relief at that. A sprained foot would have set me back at work.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to leave now while some vestiges of my ego remain, and then I’m going to pretend none of this ever happened.”
“Good night, Your Majesty,” he said with all seriousness. I rolled my lips between my teeth to keep from smiling. We both turned away at the same time, and for a moment, something told me to turn around to ask his name. I shook my head at my wayward thoughts and walked out of the store, my cans of Pringles forgotten.
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