“You have mad parking skills, Truitt.”
“It was tight, but I managed to get it in. By the good grace of God, you’ll find out more where that’s concerned soon enough.” I winked.
“Always the dirty mind,” she chuckled. “And for the record, I certainly hope you’re right.” Bianca finally noticed that we’d parked in front of a bakery. “Is this where we have cake?”
“Yes. But not just one cake. We’re gonna taste many different kinds.”
“You set up a wedding cake tasting?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Don’t you have to commit to ordering one in order to do that?”
“Probably. So, I’ll order one and have them deliver it to my father.”
“That’ll be real good for his heart,” she said sarcastically.
“Okay, how about this? I’ll put down a deposit, and we’ll order it to be made a year from now. If all goes well, we come back down and pick up our cake.”
She reached for my hand. “That sounds like a plan.”
Ganache Patisserie smelled like an explosion of sugar with a hint of amaretto. Multi-tiered cakes of various pastel colors were displayed in glass cases.
A woman greeted us and took Bianca and me into a back room. She poured us some tea and laid out several slices of cake on the table.
“You can sample them in any order. There’s a pad of paper and a pen you can use to rate each flavor. They’re all labeled. Hopefully, you can come to a unanimous decision in the end.”
“Do couples actually bicker about which flavor to choose?” Bianca asked.
“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised how much bargaining goes into this. You have the option to choose different flavors for each layer, though. There are typically three. So, you can always compromise.”
Bianca and I began sampling. We were having a blast feeding each other, and it brought back memories of my first date with her as Jay at the Ethiopian place. I’d dip my finger in the frosting then rub it on her nose. I think we made the woman uncomfortable. I could only imagine how awkward she would have felt if she also knew the truth about what was really going on with us. She finally got up to give us a bit of privacy.
When Bianca licked some frosting off her lips, my dick twitched.
“My mother used to bake cakes for friends’ birthdays in her spare time,” she said. “I used to enjoy helping her. Of course, the best part was licking the spoon.”
“I bet you’re fantastic at licking the spoon. Was it a wooden spoon, by any chance?”
“As a matter of fact, it was. Big piece of wood.”
I grabbed the spoon I’d used to stir my tea. “Show me how you licked it.”
The woman returned. “How do you like the carrot cake?”
Bianca looked at me. “It’s very…moist.”
“I bet it is,” I muttered.
“Are you getting any closer to narrowing it down?” the woman asked.
“Well, it’s…quite hard,” I said.
Bianca grabbed my knee under the table. When the woman walked away again, we both broke out into laughter before vowing to try to take the process a bit more seriously.
About fifteen minutes later, the woman returned. “How are we doing?”
Bianca smiled. “We’ve decided on the vanilla cake with buttercream frosting for the bottom layer. For the middle layer, we’re going to go with the lemon…also with the buttercream. And for the top, we’d like the vanilla with strawberry preserve…buttercream all the way.”
Kissing Bianca’s ear, I said, “I know you love the cream.”
The lady cleared her throat. “Let me go grab the book. We’ll choose a design and put the order in for you.”
When she returned with a catalog of cake designs, Bianca pointed to a particular one. “Aw…look…balls. Just like our first meeting.” She turned to the woman. “What about the one with the balls?”
“You like this design? This is one we do where we actually decorate around the cake with cake pops. We strategically stick the pops in various parts of the cake. And the best part is…everything is edible.”
I grinned. “All I heard was strategically sticking shit in various parts and edible…I’m good.”
“You two are quite the pair, definitely made for each other,” the woman said.
Squeezing Bianca’s thigh, I grinned proudly. “Why, thank you.”
She took out her pen. “Okay…so when is the wedding date?”
There was dead silence for several seconds until I answered, “It’s one year from today, actually.”
“Oh, how perfect. We’ll just need fifty-percent down now, and then the balance will just need to be remitted on delivery.”
After I handed over my credit card, we were left alone for a bit, and I noticed that Bianca suddenly looked somber.
“What’s wrong?”
“It feels real. I wish it was.”
Fuck. This was backfiring.
“Maybe I took this too far.”
“No. No, I just got a little emotional when she wrote down the date.”
Before we could say anything further, the woman returned with my card and a receipt. “All set, Mr. Truitt. You can call us anytime with the venue location so that we can arrange for a delivery time on the morning of.”
Bianca remained quiet as we walked out of the shop. I couldn’t take it anymore. I pulled her into a tight embrace on the sidewalk and whispered in her ear, “We have to stay optimistic.”
“It’s hard not to want to prepare myself for disappointment. It just seems too good to be true that we could dodge this bullet.”
“I have to believe. It’s all that’s getting me through today. I have to believe that this time next year….I’m gonna have my cake and eat you, too.” I laughed, because the funny thing was, I hadn’t even meant for it to come out that way. Eat you, too. It just did. Must have been subliminal.
She smacked my arm playfully. “I’m glad you’re still finding humor in all of this.”
“Gotta laugh so I don’t cry, beautiful.”
I meant that.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on the private stretch of beach off the guesthouse.
As the sun set, it felt like the curtain was slowly closing on our time together. Bianca was still wearing her white dress, which was now covered in dirt, water, and sand. I wanted to burn the image into memory.
“I don’t want to sleep tonight,” she said. “I feel like I just want to stay up all night.”
“Who needs sleep?” I grabbed her hand. “May I have this dance?”
No music was required as we slowly swayed to the sounds of the beach. We rocked back and forth until the sun completely went down then stayed up and talked, vowing not to fall into slumber.
Sleep eventually won out, though, as we later crashed in each other’s arms on the sand.
The sound of the seagulls woke us up the next morning. Looking like we’d washed ashore, we’d slept in surprisingly late; we must have both been exhausted from forcing ourselves to stay up.
As we sat up on the sand, I wrapped my arms around her body from behind.
“So, you never finished your sentence,” I said.