Smart Girl (15 page)

“And now you’re trying to shoulder responsibility when you are in no way to blame.” I sigh. “Your being virtuous is not helping me feel any better.”

“Well.” She fluffs her bouncy blonde hair. “I can see that you’re determined to castigate yourself regardless of what I say. Can we go get a latte at least? I’m going to need caffeine if I’m going to be forced to watch you wallow.”

“Yes.” I nod. “And I’ll buy you a baked good too. It’s the least I can do.”

Her eyes light up. “How about a Milky Way cheesecake brownie with
fleur de sel
?”

I can see the plan already forming in her head. It’s a ridiculous idea, given the amount of work I still need to catch up on, but I play along.

“But Landon,” I say with the affected innocence of a silent-movie ingénue, “there’s only one place in all of Los Angeles that makes that dessert, and it’s all the way in the Valley.”

“Oh come on.” She bounces up from her chair. “You know we do our best work when surrounded by food, and the Flour Shop totally has Wi-Fi.”

Just the idea of playing hooky and stealing espresso all day already makes me feel better. I smile in agreement. “I’ll text Max and tell her to reserve our table.”

We take seats at our usual table in the corner. All around us Max’s bakery is alive with happy activity. A few customers are finishing up treats or working on laptops just like Max wanted it when we designed this space. The only thing she’d asked me at the time was that I find some way to preserve some of the raw and broken elements. Since I knew that the request had everything to do with her emotional journey at the time—that she was trying to find the beauty in the broken parts of her—I spent weeks and weeks making sure I paid homage to that. The floor, for instance, is the exact same stained concrete it was when she got the place. I had it polished and buffed until it shined. The seating area is a mix of large and small tables that Taylor made just for her. Each table is whitewashed reclaimed wood—again, an opportunity to give something new life. The white marble countertop is the anchor of the entire space, and it’s topped on one side by a glass display case housing baked goods that I know from personal experience are good enough to make you cry. We found a way to marry a little rough industrial with a sort of French country kitchen, and the results turned out beautifully. The serving pieces themselves, from the vintage cake stands to the mismatched teacups, are all from a flea market. Everything in here got a second chance when the bakery opened, especially its owner.

“You look like hell,” Max says.

She sets a lavender-and-honey latte down onto the table in front of me, served in one of the giant flea market coffee mugs she knows I love so much. She also slides a platter filled with glazed doughnuts towards us. They are covered in a brown-butter glaze, and I know from experience that they will be warm from the fryer. She knows from experience that Landon and I always want treats whether or not we order them.

I run a hand down one side of my mane to try to smooth it out, but there’s no hiding the wildness in it today, in spite of the general calm I usually feel when I come here. The conversation with Liam, the mistakes I made with the client, the discussion with Landon—that drama is playing out in every single hair follicle to make it twice as big as it should be.

“It’s not a great hair day,” I grumble.

Max settles herself gracefully into the seat next to Landon. She’s wearing one of the cool hipster aprons we sourced for the staff here, and her pixie cut is being held in check by the vintage scarf she wrapped around her forehead. She looks beautiful but suspicious, which for Max translates into concern. Naked concern shows too much vulnerability for her to display openly, so when she’s worried about someone, she channels it into anger instead. I can guess why she’s immediately hostile too.

“I hadn’t even gotten around to checking out your hair. I’m more concerned about the dark circles under your eyes. What’s going on?”

She actually gets super pissed off if she thinks one of us isn’t taking proper care of ourselves, since health is such a driving force in her own life.

“Oh Lordy, too many things to count.” Landon’s accent gets more pronounced the harder she’s trying to sell you on something. “Work’s been crazy busy. And Thanksgiving took it out of her—isn’t that right, Miko?”

I nod like a dutiful ventriloquist dummy. If she wants to try to save me from probing questions, I’m not about to stop her. I take a sip of my latte and focus on the joy of that rather than the awkwardness of this conversation. This caffeine tastes like I’m getting a hug from an angel while standing in a sunny field of lavender. They should totally put that description on the menu.

“And then there’s, um . . .” Landon is still stumbling along under Max’s knowing glare. “Um, that new POV book.”

“POV?” Max asks.

That was the opening Landon needed. “Oh, it stands for point of view—”

“I know what it stands for, Landon. I’m not an imbecile.” She stops to smile at the mother who’s just walked into the bakery with a toddler in one hand and an empty stroller in the other. “Hi, guys! Back for more cookies?” Max asks this question with the joy of a first-year kindergarten teacher.

My eyes fly to Landon, and we stare at each other in shock. The little girl wiggles loose from her mother’s grasp and runs headlong to our table.

“Miss Max,” she greets enthusiastically. Her lisp turns the
s
’s into
th
’s, which is the flipping cutest thing I’ve ever heard. “I got new braids today.” She leans her little head closer to Max for inspection, making her tiny waterfall of braids swing against each other. “Do you like my beads? Some of them are stars.”

“So pretty,” Max tells her with equal enthusiasm. “Can I touch them?”

“Of course, silly,” the toddler says, shaking her head and making the colorful beads dance.

“Ooh, the stars are my favorite shape so far. Much better than the butterflies from last time.” Max plays with the ends of the braids reverently. “So which colors did you choose today, Claire?”

As she starts to recite her colors, the little girl’s mother wheels the stroller up to our table. Max smiles and waves her away. “Mike will help you get your order together, Sasha. She’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely,” Max tells her over the sound of Claire reciting
red
for the fourth time.

Max introduces us to the little girl, but that seems to make her shy, and she turns back to regale our friend with stories of something that happened at preschool yesterday. Landon and I watch in stunned silence while Max carries on an animated conversation with the toddler until her mother comes back. She wishes them well and then turns back to us without having missed a single beat.

“I know what
POV
means, Landon. I’m just not sure what that has to do with Miko looking like she’s in the third stage of mono.”

“There are stages of mono?” I wonder aloud.

Landon can only stare at Max; every emotion she’s feeling runs across her face in quick succession. She jumps a little when my foot connects with her shin under the table, and she has to clear her throat twice before she can resume speaking. There is absolutely no way we can comment on what just happened. Later, when it’s just the two of us, we will laugh and scream and rejoice over how far our friend has come. But doing that now will only embarrass Max and make her self-conscious.

Right now we have to act like nothing important happened. Like we didn’t just see something incredible. And it is incredible. A year ago she wouldn’t even have been able to look at a small child, let alone interact with one. For the first year I knew her, I just assumed it was because she didn’t like children. It was only after learning the gut-wrenching story of how she lost her own baby that I realized how painful it was for her to see other parents with theirs.

I marvel again at the effect that Taylor has had on her life; it’s been amazing to watch. They might have started out a little rocky and unsure, but they are nearly inseparable now, and not inseparable in that creepy way that some couples are. They hang out all the time because they are genuinely best friends. Because they were friends first, she was able to learn to trust him in a way she hadn’t with any other man. And eventually she trusted him enough that she could recognize the love that had been there all along. It’s as if by allowing him to love her, she was able to love herself. And by loving herself, she’s been able to grow into the best version of herself she’s ever been.

I look down into my half-empty cup and slowly let the air out of my lungs. That’s what a relationship is supposed to do. That’s what the
right
relationship is supposed to do. The right relationship certainly doesn’t leave dark circles under your eyes.

I bat that unwanted thought away and focus instead on what Landon’s saying.

“—is when an author rewrites a popular book from the male POV. It really upsets Miko.” She takes a demure sip of her latte. “Gets right up under her craw.”

Max leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “Seriously, how can you even keep track of the amount of things that upset Miko?”

Landon casually rests her chin in her hand. Each nail is perfectly painted in ballerina-pink polish. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I’ve gotten so good at keeping track of all the things that upset you, that keeping up with Miko’s emotional dependence on literary fiction is just par for the course.”

Max snorts inelegantly and Landon skillfully changes the subject. Before long we’re talking about the bakery, getting brunch this weekend, and a dozen other innocuous things that keep me from thinking about all the stuff I don’t want to focus on.

Since I sent the last text in our phone conversation, I make the decision not to reach out to Liam while he’s in New York. I figure if he wants to talk to me, he knows how to get ahold of me.

I don’t hear from him all week.

Part of me wonders if he’s trying to prove something or send me a message. Part of me wonders if this is yet another move in some relationship game I haven’t figured out how to play. Part of me (an admittedly pathetic part of me, in the very back of my mind) wonders if he’s in Manhattan running his way through a bevy of women. All of me misses him, which super pisses me off.

I make the decision at least eight times a day to call things off.

But then I talk myself around again. He did tell me he’d text me when he got back into town, so really, what do I have to be upset about? Also, maybe this is totally normal behavior. Maybe I’m being too needy. I always thought when you found someone, it would be so easy to figure out. I guess I just never anticipated having to figure it all out on my own.

Several times I consider asking Landon what she would do in my situation, but after my screwup earlier in the week, I don’t think she’s the biggest proponent of me and Liam. Without a better option I head in search of my original sidekick on this project.

I find Casidee in the small closet-sized room we commandeered from Tosh to use as a craft space. She’s sitting at the large work table that takes up half the room, and she’s surrounded by at least a dozen different vintage floral fabrics. I’d seen the idea for fabric-covered boxes ages ago and was excited to find a client who finally wanted them as favors for her bridal shower. That’s how it works in event planning: you design a hundred events in your head, and eventually you find a client willing to pay to make your dreams a reality. Casidee is busy gluing the fabric around craft boxes. The box of Hello Kitty Band-Aids beside her means she’s probably already hurt herself at least once. Crafting in large quantities is always hazardous. When I was an intern, I was always accidentally hurting myself, though my bandages were Ninja Turtles, which are way cooler.

“Cardstock?” I nod towards her bandaged finger.

She’s in the middle of attaching a pale-pink toile fabric to the box in her hands, so she nods without stopping. “I was cutting the gift tags, and somehow my knuckle got in the way.”

“Bummer.”

She nods again, making no further attempt at conversation. She’s been acting awkward around me for weeks.