Here for the Cake

by Jennifer Millikin

Who knew writing a story could feel this good? Like releasing a caged exotic bird, and watching it fly to freedom. All these words, inside me for days and months and years, and now here they are, on paper and tucked in my backpack. Nobody of importance will read them, but that was never the point. Their release was the point.

I want words. Moldable, buildable, powerful. Emotion evoking.

The guy is too good looking for words, even in a room full of creative writing students. Could any of us properly describe him? I cannot. There’s something about him, an essence, that holds him apart from the rest of us. Not only his talent with the written word, which he has in spades, but something else. It’s not a social glow, because he’s not particularly friendly. Strangers don’t gravitate toward him, attracted by an unnamable quality. Except for me. I’m the stranger, attracted.

Gag me. Now. With a spoon. A serrated spoon. No! A spork.

“You know what your problem is?” Paloma, my best friend and second-in-command at my digital marketing firm, stares at me from four feet away. She raises her eyebrows, one hand on her hip while her other arm extends to hold up her side of the mylar photo backdrop we’re affixing to the hotel room wall. “No,” I grunt from my side, using a disproportionate amount of strength to push a thumbtack into the wall and wincing at the dull pain it sets off. “But I bet you’re going to tell me.” She blows a strand of black hair from her face. “You’re the floor.” I frown as I suck the pad of my thumb between my teeth. “I’m the floor?” “People walk all over you.”

“Speaking of plus ones, you need a date to the wedding.” I’m shaking my head before she finishes her sentence. “Who’s going to be my date to a wedding on the other side of the country? On an island. For a week?” Paloma frowns, acknowledging the uphill battle I’m facing. “You’re screwed.”

I bought a house last year. I wear high heels every day, dammit.” Paloma snort-laughs. “High heels?” “When I was younger, I thought if you wore high heels to work it meant you were someone important.” “Strippers wear high heels to work.”

I’m the worst kind of doormat, the kind who knows what they are but doesn’t fix it.

My personal life resembles the desert in which I reside.

But then I see... her. Paisley Royce. A woman who has haunted me for years. A dream, but in the flesh. A story I relive too often. Beautiful Paisley, with her unique blue-green eyes and her rosebud mouth.

Reality was more than an ice bath, it was a caveman’s spiked club across the head.

I loved her from afar with a burning desire that consumed me. I lived for that twice a week seventy-five minute class. I went rain or shine, sickness or health. A gnarly cold didn’t keep me away,

It’s good to be literally shoved back into reality; I could stand there and stare at Paisley all night.

I’m two seconds from hanging up when Klein strides back around the bar. His green eyes zero in on me, affixing me to this moment, tethering me to the center of the emotional hurricane swirling around me. He hesitates, and then, despite me being on the phone, comes closer. My heart batters my breast bone. Why do I have to like the way he walks? Who does that?

“Paisley, baby, get off the phone. I’m done sharing you.” I swallow. Hard. Did Paisley baby get off the phone I’m done sharing you just become my favorite ten words in the English language? Yes, but I’ll never admit it out loud.

“Isn’t that what writing a book is? The world’s longest, most intricate lie?”

Like Brad Pitt in Troy but his hair is shorter and not as blond. And he writes books. And he’s bigger.

It should be illegal for a man to grip the doorframe and lean forward like that. He must know what he’s doing, the way his biceps pop and flex, the way it takes an expansive chest and expands it even more. He knows, right? He knows. He has to. And if he doesn’t, I will not be the one enlightening him.

I blow out an annoyed breath. “I guess all that angst was for nothing.” “There was angst?” I give him a flat look. There’s no way I’ll be describing the tornado that is my room after all those outfit changes. “Please do not become stuck on my usage of the word.”

This home has love and acceptance seeping from its walls, as if anybody who grew up here automatically absorbed those qualities.

“Get used to me being a gentleman, Paisley.” “Let me guess. That’s how your mother raised you to behave?” “Yes, but also because you deserve to be treated that way.”

Why, after all this time, did he retain that unimportant detail? And why, oh why, do I like that he did?

I push out the breathless feeling and tell myself this is only Klein being organized. Not kind, sweet, or thoughtful. Organized.

The dress doesn’t look good on you… YOU make the dress look good.

She is stunning, and you know what happens when you’re stunned? You cannot speak. That is precisely where I’ve found myself.

“There’s only one bed.” How in the world did I not see that coming a mile away? Of course there’s only one bed.

Something warm and heavy settles in my chest. Emotions, to be sure, but I can’t put a name to them. They are a bit dodgy, these emotions, desiring to not yet be known.

I’m already her worst kiss. Now I need to be her best.

“Good night, Wordsmith. Get your beauty sleep. Tomorrow, the real hoodwinking begins.” “Sleep tight, Ace.”

Waking up like this is a dream I didn’t dare have, but here she is, tucked into me, the lines of her body pressed to mine like she was made to be there. Like she was made for me.

She’s teasing me. I like it.

He remains silent. Internally, I rejoice at having stolen all the words from a wordsmith.

“You’re beautiful.” “It’s nothing.” “It’s something,” he whispers. “You’re something.”

“When we get back here tonight, I am going to fuck you so well, so good, I’ll have to clamp my hand over your mouth to keep everybody from hearing your screams.”

“I remember every moment of that kiss.” “Every bad second of it?” “Even the worst kiss is the best if it’s with you.”

“There is no safer place for your heart than with me.”

“You occupy every one of my thoughts, and my dreams, too.”

Ahh. Klein. My whole body smiles when I think of him, from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head.

“Are you catching feelings for me, Ace?” My heart beats double time. “Do you want me to?” He pulls back, leveling me with a tender look. “Yeah. Maybe I do.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” “Like what?” “Like you adore me.” Should I have chosen less meaningful words? Something that would’ve given Klein the chance to have a less impactful response? For several seconds he stares, eyes riveted and glimmering and thoughtful. “Tell me to stop,” he says hoarsely. “Don’t stop.”

She has so many names for me. I have a few, too. Whipped. Fallen. Fool. I am a whipped fallen fool for Paisley Royce.

“Proud of you,” he murmurs. “That’s my girl.”

Paisley was never simply there. Shane was, and still is, too shallow and self-involved to see. Paisley wasn’t a background character. She was the whole damn story. A complicated plot, interwoven with subplots. A riveting main character. Internal conflict mixed with shifting goals. Shane was never man enough to read her story. But me? I’m immersed in it. Forget slowly diving in, I’m already lost in her pages. I was hooked on page one, sentence one. Do I have a favorite book? Sure do. The tale of Paisley Royce. And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t end in a happily ever after.

“You are the cake. I’m here for you. I’m here for your hard times, and I’m here for you as you grow as a person and I don’t know about you, but all this fake dating stopped feeling fake as soon as we landed.”

My mom holds up a palm. “You don’t have to tell me. I have eyes. I can see how smitten you are with each other.” A smile tugs up one corner of my mouth. “Yeah?” She nods once, slowly. “Yes. He’s obsessed with you. In a good way.” “I’m obsessed with him, too.” “Yes, you are. It feels good, doesn’t it?”

“You’re lucky,” she says when I climb on. “He’s hot, intelligent, and cherishes you. Basically everything a woman wants.” Am I lucky? I guess I am, to a degree.

“There is some measure of luck to it all,” I agree, holding on as Wren careens around a bend. “But I deserve to be loved well, Wren. And so do you.”

Fisting the front of the shirt, I laugh and sway. “I can’t believe you remembered.” He holds my face in his palms and glides the tip of his nose over mine. “If you say it, I remember it.”

“Paisley, I’m in love with you. And it feels like a flash, and also a throb. You are a place where my heart can settle, but still be itself. Your laughter prompts my own, and I didn’t realize how important that was until I met you. To be connected, loved, cherished, to be inspired, to be grounded but not tethered, I knew none of that until you walked back into my life.” Klein grips my face the same way I have his, absorbing the moisture on my cheeks. “We had something back then, Paisley, and we have something today, and that tells me we’ll have something in twenty years. In forty. In fifty. We are evergreen.”

“You are my favorite story. The best I’ve ever heard, and the best I’ll ever tell.”