Page 8 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“Right,” I grumble.

She wipes her hands on the towel over her shoulder and at me. Delilah has a way of looking that Jasper has clearly been teaching her. “Anything I should know about?” she asks.

“No.”

“Hm,” she says.

I pick up the top five trays and head out.

Through the window, the gallery is lit up all the way to the back, and Kimmie is crossing and recrossing the floor with something in each hand. That gray skirt swishing around her knees like my own personal torment.

Delilah gets the door for me, and cross the street.

Kimmie

The cloth on the trestle table has a crease straight down the middle of it, and I have now smoothed it flat eleven times, but it’s still there. I shouldn’t have folded it into quarters and left it in a box for two weeks like a woman who has never met an iron in her life. I know I’m overthinking it. Not one person coming through that door in four hours is going to look at a table and think, well, the crease has ruined it for me, I was going to buy the Rebecchi but the linen has let it down.

I smooth it again anyway.

Then I go around the room with my clipboard and read my own handwriting back to myself like it belongs to somebody more competent than me. Fruit out of the refrigerator by ten. Cheese boards at half past. Wine open at eleven, except the sparkling, which is mine.

“You have done everything,” I tell the room out loud. My voice makes the space feel less enormous. “The lights are right. The cards are straight. The floor is clean.”

The floor.

I go back to the clipboard so fast I nearly take the corner off the plinth with my hip, which would send Marianne’s stoneware into the wall and give me an entirely different problem to think about. Honestly, at this point, I’d consider it a kindness.

There’s a knock on the glass just after seven, the door opens, and both of them have to come through it one at a time because they don’t fit any other way.

Jasper has five trays balanced along one forearm like a man who has never dropped anything in his life. Natan has the other five held flat against his chest. He’s wearing a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and my entire face goes hot in the time it takes him to close the door with his shoulder.

Great. Wonderful. Twenty-four years old and I have the emotional regulation of a stovetop.

“Morning Kimmie,” Jasper says.

“Morning! Hi. Good morning to you both. The basket, the big basket, the shallow one in the middle of the table, that’s for those, or the boards if they don’t fit, although the boards are for the cheese, so probably the basket.” I put my hand on the table and then take it off again. “Thank you. Sincerely. You have no idea.”

“Delilah’s orders,” Jasper says.

Natan sets his trays down in one movement, no wobble, no rattle, and starts lifting the wax paper off. “There’s a lot of pastries here.”

“Well...” I trail off and ignore the way his forearms flex. “Everyone loves a sweet pastry, right?”

“Delilah is still watching us,” Jasper says.

“She counted them twice,” Natan says.

I smile, but it feels tight on my face. “Sounds like she was being thorough.”

“It was a threat,” he says, completely flat, and Jasper snorts.

I laugh too, and it comes out about a third of a note too high, and I turn away and busy myself with the basket so that neither of these men can watch my face do whatever it’s currently doing to give me away. The pastries are still warm. The smell of them fills the whole gallery in about four seconds, cinnamon and butter over the top of lemon floor cleaner and turpentine. I banish the thought of the floor out of my head as quickly as it arrives.

This is what it smells like on the morning I open, and I want to remember it. Only I know I won’t, because there is only one thing in my head today and it isn’t cinnamon.

He’s looking at me. I know he’s looking at me because I can feel it on the side of my face. I keep arranging pastries int the basket, and I say, “It’s going to be a wonderful day. The light’s perfect. Isn’t the light perfect?”

“Did you sleep?” Natan asks.