Work Text:
Working in a bakery; sounds nice, right?
Aaron Warner Anderson could agree. Especially when he didn't have to work in the actual food department and instead spent the time out in the store.
Arranging display shelves and cases: He liked that. Color-coordinated, alphabetically, sizes. Name it, he'd make it work.
Planning and composing pictures for their Instagram: It took him a while to get into, seeing he had always been a fan of the more traditional media, but now his pictures were collecting the most likes out of all the employees.
Answering the business phone: After that one time he had to decipher how many cupcakes the lady on the other end needed for her son's wedding he operated it like a born natural. Though he preferred when they sent emails.
Getting a discount on everything that hadn't been sold at the end of the week: Not that big of a perk, actually, considering his Father owned and ran the place. He tried and perfected a lot of the recipes in their kitchen at home.
His least favorite part though?
“Aaron, customer.”
He had heard the bells at the door jingle. He had just pretended he didn’t hear it. Sound hardly got in or out of the bakery with the egg beater running anyway.
His dad knows him (and the local) too well to allow him to hide in the back picking captions and waiting for cake orders on the phone, though.
“Aaron, if you don’t get your butt out there I'll come back there with my spatula, and I won't wipe off the frosting.”
Oh, the spatula. A dreaded item in the Anderson household; back when he was still around six years old. But his Dad usually didn't choose to remember that his son is close to twenty.
"I'm coming!", he called, shutting his laptop as he stoof up.
He walked through the bakery, passing through a mist of lemon and blueberry fragrance. There were four cakes in decreasing sizes on the work table, his father standing above them with a bag of white decorating frosting. It was another multilayered wedding cake. Nothing unusual.
"Uniform!", his father barked behind him just as he was about to push open the door.
It takes next to no effort to freeze his expression so that he doesn’t roll his eyes. His father is not one to appreciate an attitude. He grabbed his store-apron hanging on a nock right by the door, tied it around his waist, neat, secure ribbon in the back. Then he entered the store.
He spotted her at once.
Heavy, over-the-shoulder satchel; definitely a college student. Short stature. Long, very long, brown hair. Green (Or blue?) eyes scanning the contents of the display shelf closest to the door.
It was stocked with their wedding-themed cookies and treats. Not that she seemed to be looking at them that closely because she was attempting to multitask writing on her phone. Hopefully, she’d use that phone to take pictures for her Instagram, showing the world how wonderfully photogenic their cupcakes were. His dad would like that very much.
She looked up as he came through the door, a little startled.
“Welcome to Cake Capitol. Are you here for a delivery?”, he greeted, the sentenced cemented into his brain that at this point he could say it in his sleep.
The girl shook her head. Smile timid. “No, my friend is showing up soon, so I’m just looking at these cute cakes until he gets here.”
Warner nodded, already disinterested. “Alright, I’m right here if you need anything.”
He started keeping himself busy by cleaning the counter with wipes and all-around spray. It was actually clean. It had been clean since he got here this morning. He was just supposed to stay out there and keep watch so she didn't try sneaking cake pops.
It wouldn't be a huge hit to their economy. - Actually, it would barely register at their one dollar seventy-five cents price tag. But rather he catches them than have his father running after the thief down the street. That was just flat-out embarrassing.
She did not keep her promise about looking at cookies until her friend arrives. No, she turned out to be one of those customers. A small-talker.
“You have a lot of french looking stuff here", she said gesturing for the macaroons; they sold them in put-it-together-yourself boxes, tied with bows. (Another thing Warner enjoyed doing.)
“Yes. Our baker spent a year in France to become a pastry chef, and he learnt about the craft properly . So our cakes, unlike most cake shops in this city, don’t taste like cardboard.”
She laughed a little. “Yeah, that’s what my parents always say about American cakes...”
This piqued his interest. “As opposed to what?”, he asked.
“New Zealand.”
“Really? I was going to guess Canada.”
“Canada? What gives?”
“You have a French air about you.”
She brought up a hand to mimick the Thinking emoji that his brother enjoyed using so much. “I did pick French in Foreign languages...”
It took a second for him to remember what she was talking about.
“Right. Public school lets you pick one language...”
She scoffed. “As opposed to what?”, she said, mimicking what he had said earlier.
The hand that was wiping the counter stopped as he passed to think. “French, Arabic, Russian… Schools should utilize language learning more. I knew all of them before I finished high school.”
“You studied three languages?”, she asked. Amazed.
“Well, actually I know seven languages. But, yes, I did at one point study three languages simultaneously.”
“S-seven?”
He shrugged. “I was homeschooled by tutors.”
She looked him up and down then, as if seeing him in a new light. She looked bewildered.
“I’m sorry, but what are you doing in a cake shop...?”
“Bakery”, he corrected. “I run the cashier. Box deliveries. Sometimes I help design the decorations. The closest I get to the unfinished goods is sprinkling.”
"That's not really answering the question", she mused, crossing her arms.
He shrugged again. “It’s wedding season, combined with graduation; it leads to a lot of people wanting cake. The ship is practically one man down, and it's times like these I come in.”
"So, this a side-gig?"
He nodded. "I'd rather be home finishing my Fitzgerald."
Just as he said that her eyes widened. Suddenly, she looked elated.
"Which one?", she asked, bating her breath as the question left her lips.
"This Side Of Paradise", he replied, the cleaning towel long forgotten by now.
"I'm reading that one right now! It's my final paper." She dug through her book satchel before she had even finished the sentence. She pulled out a dog eared, bookmarked from front to back pocketbook.
"Actually I have two of them. This new one that I can take notes and highlight in without feeling like I'm going to hell, and then this one that's my dad's old copy. Everyone raves about The Great Gatsby, but no one wants to remember that This Side Of Paradise is what made Fitzgerald famous.”
He found himself nodding.
“I agree. Most ‘book lovers’ I talk to just want to check off the Nobel prize list of authors and don’t even consider going back to the roots to see where they came from, or even went afterward.”
“Yes!”
She leaned over the counter on her elbows, getting surprisingly (alarmingly) close.
“I’m so glad Kenji’s boyfriend is someone I can talk to! Most people he goes out with are so stuck up, it’s insane. But we actually seem to click!"
He laughed a little. Polite service-smile slipping back on his face, but he couldn't hide his confusion.
“Er, whose boyfriend?”
She blinked; her turn to become confused. "Kenji…?”
And then the bells in the door chimed.
“Hi Juliette, sorry I’m late!”
Juliette. That was her name.
The guy who came in stops when he sees Warner. Then looked around wildly for a second, searching.
“Hey, where’s Nazeera? Is she in the back? Who're you?"
“Nazeera isn’t here today, she's taking her flight exam. I’m Warner”, Warner told him, gesturing for the ridiculous name tag with golden letters his dad made everyone wear.
“Aw man...”, Kenji groaned. He brought a hand through his hair. “Sorry Juliette, I guess we’ll have to come back another day.”
“Or, you know, schedule a date with her when she isn’t working”, Warner suggested.
“Wait”, Juliette interrupted, who had gone strangely pale. Her eyes started darting between them. “Who’s Nazeera?”
Kenji turned to her, hand on his side. He was a tall Asian American boy. Not the type he expected Juliette to hang out with. He seemed so uncoordinated.
“She’s the cashier I told you about. Jeez J, do you ever listen?” Kenji turned to Warner then, jerking a thumb at Juliette. “I’m telling you, she reads too much--”
“I’m an English Literature Major!”, Juliette snapped. From the cheer frustration in her voice Warner could easily discern that she had had this exact argument before.
“But Kenji”, she hissed, grabbing the guy’s collar and pulling him down to her height (An impressive feat considering how much taller he was than her). “You didn’t tell me the cashier was a girl.”
“J, you know bi means I can date both guys and girls, right?”
“You told me you were going to introduce me to your cashier Tinder project, not your female cashier Tinder project…! I swear to Go-!”
That’s when the doors to the bakery pushed open, revealing his father. His eyes landed on the two customers.
“Are you here for a wedding cake?”
Juliette quickly let go of Kenji’s collar and in sync they sputtered: “N-no!”
His father nodded. “Good. You look too young anyway.”
“If we had said yes, would we get cake samples?”, Kenji perked up.
He would, Warner thought.
“No, no cake samples", Juliette intervened. "We’ll take three pain au chocolates to-go.”
His father packed their order, and Warner punched in the numbers into the cashier. She paid cash. He watched them leave, heard the bell chime as they walked through the door. Felt something tug inside him.
The bells chimed.
“Could we get coffee sometime?”
They turn around, a little startled that he followed them outside. It’s Kenji that speaks first.
“Sorry dude, she doesn’t drink coffee-”
Juliette elbowed Kenji in the stomach.
“I don’t drink coffee but I’d love to have cocoa or matcha or something”, she said, talking fast and a little too loud, probably to cover Kenji’s groans; who was trying to recover from the sudden abdominal pain she had caused him.
“Me neither. But I know a place. Sugar Sanctuary 241, they make a wonderful cocoa. But don’t tell my dad, they’re technically our competitors.”
She blinked. Words and images clicking together in her mind. “Wait, your Dad is the owner?”, she said, momentarily glancing up at the sign, Cake Capitol; spelled out in curly black letters.
Seeing that there was no point in denying it he nodded. “Yes.”
“That explains the face...”, she said under her breath, and he barely caught it.
“Pardon?”
She blushed again. Waving a hand to try and chase her own words out of the air. “N-nothing! But yeah, let’s meet up! We can finish our discussion about Fitzgerald. And maybe talk about Hemingway, or someone else.”
He smiled. Nodded. “Yeah, I would love that.”
She stared at his dimples for what feels like too long, but he didn't mind.
They swapped numbers, and when he returned inside he was smiling.
He walked into the kitchen, and one step inside something smacked him on the side of his leg. He yelped already jumping away.
“What are you doing?! Hey, stop!”, he demanded.
Paris Anderson waved the spatula in his face. “You don’t get paid to flirt with customers.”
“You don’t pay me at all…!”, he snapped back.
When he sat down in the office again, the smile had snuck onto his lips again.
Perhaps he better go stay with his mother until the date. He doubted his dad in combination with his brother would give him a moment’s peace tonight when he got home.