by Jae
“If someone needs to preface a sentence like that, they usually are about to do just that,” Anja muttered.
Susanne gritted her teeth so tightly that her jaw started to ache. “Listen,” she repeated, pronouncing the two syllables carefully in an attempt not to shout. “Loving stationery is nice. But it’s a hobby. And this,” she pounded the desk, “is a business. It can’t survive on love alone.”
Anja stared at her and opened her mouth as if to argue back but then closed it and lowered her gaze to her notebook.
Damn. She had been a bitch, hadn’t she? Yeah well, so what if you were? Knocking some heads was the only way to wake up people who didn’t want to see reality. As much as she had enjoyed spending the day with Anja on Saturday, she wasn’t here to make friends. But the internal monologue that usually guided her well didn’t feel right this time, so she added more softly, “Not if we don’t find a way to share that love with potential customers—and have them back up that love with their wallets.”
Anja slumped against the back of her chair. The fight went out of her eyes, and that was worse than when she’d practically accused Susanne of being a bitch.
Susanne fought the urge to take her hand. “Don’t worry.” She allowed herself a quick pat to Anja’s shoulder. “All the social media stuff only takes up a lot of time in the beginning. Once we have everything set up and you get the hang of things, it should only take you about an hour a day. We’ll prepare plenty of blog posts and a few newsletters ahead of time so we can send them out once the website goes live. Those are the two most important things.”
Anja nodded, but the overwhelmed expression on her face didn’t fade. She picked up her fountain pen and clutched it as if it were a lifeline keeping her afloat.
Genius. You shouldn’t have mentioned the blog and the newsletter. For Anja, they were probably just two more things that she didn’t know how to handle yet. This was getting them nowhere. Susanne closed the laptop, pulled the fountain pen from Anja’s grasp, and screwed on the cap. She slid the laptop, Anja’s pen, and her notebook into her laptop bag. “Come on. I think we need a change of scenery.”
“Working on the sales floor isn’t going to help us focus,” Anja said. “We’ll have to take a break each time a customer comes in.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re going somewhere else.”
Uncle Norbert looked up when they left the back rooms. “Are you calling it a day?”
“No, we’ll be back in an hour.” Susanne dragged Anja out the door, not giving her time to stop and commiserate with Uncle Norbert about the new direction she was steering the store in. She crossed to the other side of the street and carefully stepped over the Bächle with an extra long stride.
Anja laughed. “Still afraid you’ll end up married to a local?”
“No. Afraid I’ll end up with wet feet again.” For once, Susanne didn’t mind being laughed at since it seemed to shake Anja from the mood she’d been in. Hopefully, where she was about to take her would help even more. After all, Anja had said that food was her favorite coping strategy when she was stressed.
When Susanne stopped in front of the café down the street and held open the door for her, Anja paused next to her instead of entering.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Don’t thank me yet. We’re going to continue working in there.”
Anja’s eyes twinkled. “Well, we’re women so we can multitask. We’ll be able to work and eat cake at the same time, right?”
“Right.” With just a few centimeters of space between them, Susanne couldn’t help taking in every detail of Anja’s face—her slightly upturned nose, the curve of her lips, the dimple in her chin.
“What?” Anja asked.
“Uh, you’ve got a bit of ink there.” Susanne gestured.
“Where?” Anja ran her hand over her face as if she could find the ink stain that way.
“There.” Susanne reached out but stopped herself before she could touch her. Instead, she tapped her own chin.
Anja pulled a little bottle of hand sanitizer from the messenger bag she’d grabbed on the way out and scrubbed at her chin with a tissue. “Gone?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for telling me. I know you said we need to do more promotion, but wearing our inks on my face doesn’t seem like the right way to show them off.”
Susanne chuckled, glad to see that Anja hadn’t lost her sense of humor. She followed her into the café, past a glass counter with half a dozen different cakes and pies, to a small, square table at the back of the room.
Two glass doors to either side of their table led to a patio overlooking the Gewerbekanal—a canal that was a much bigger version of the Bächle. It gave this part of the city a bit of a Venetian flair, and Susanne could imagine how nice it would be to sit outside, right over the water, in the summer.
But, of course, she would no longer be here in summer, and that was a good thing, right? For a moment, she wasn’t so sure.
“If you’d rather go somewhere else…” Anja said, as if sensing her conflicting feelings.
Susanne forced a smile. “No, this is fine.” She took a seat at the small table and reached for the menu to discourage further questions.
Anja followed suit.
They ordered, and within a few minutes, the waitress brought their hot beverages—black coffee for Susanne and a chococcino for Anja—and two pieces of cake to the table.
Susanne’s eyes widened as the waitress slid the plate with the Black Forest cake in front of her. “Oh my God. That thing is huge.”
“Mm-hmm.” Anja was already digging into her cheesecake, making little sounds that were a bit too erotic for Susanne’s comfort.
“No Black Forest cake for you?” Susanne asked to distract herself.
Anja shook her head, looked left and right, and leaned across the table as if about to reveal a national secret. “Don’t tell anyone, or I’ll be sent into exile, but I don’t like Black Forest cake.”
Susanne clutched her chest in a dramatic gesture. “That’s like being from Berlin and not liking Currywurst!”
“What can I say? It’s too rich for me. I’m a woman of simple taste.”
“No glitter, hmm?”
“Not in my cake.”
Susanne slid a forkful of Black Forest cake into her mouth. The combination of whipped cream, dark chocolate, and liqueur-soaked cherries exploded on her taste buds. It was delicious but maybe not the best choice for a cake to be eaten during work hours. “Oh wow. I think they used about a liter of cherry liqueur. You might have to carry me back.”
They finished their cake, then pushed their cups to the side so Susanne could place the laptop on the table.
Instantly, the glow that had settled on Anja’s face while she had devoured her cheesecake faded. “You mentioned that a blog and a newsletter would be the most important things. But honestly, if I get things like that in my in-box, I just delete them. All this promo stuff just feels like…like being on a date with a really sleazy person.”
The comparison made Susanne smile. “Then we’ll have to make sure we’re not that sleazy date.”
“How?” Anja gathered some cheesecake crumbs on her fingertip and then licked them off.
The sight of it derailed Susanne’s answer for a moment. She took a long sip of coffee to clear her head. “How do you make sure the person you’re going out with wants a second date?”
Anja gave a wry smile. “I think that analogy is not going to help us. I haven’t dated much in the past few years.”
Susanne wanted to ask why. Was it because relationships were like glitter for Anja—nice to have but not really necessary? That was kind of how Susanne viewed relationships. Work had always been her number one priority. Was it the same for Anja? She shouldn’t ask; she really shouldn’t.
“We should use your dating life as an example,” Anja said.
“God, no. It’s about as disastrous as Paper Love’s finances, so that’s
not going to help us either.” Susanne decided to change the subject. “How about this? Imagine Uncle Norbert gives you a raise.”
“He can’t. He can barely afford to—”
“Just imagine it. Imagine you have a couple hundred euros to blow on pens and stationery stuff each month. What would be the first thing you’d buy?”
Anja stared off into space with a dreamy look. “Hmm, tough choice. Maybe a Pilot Capless, a Lamy 2000, or a Platinum 3776 Century.”
“How would you decide on one?”
“I would go into a store with a decent selection of fountain pens and try out each one. See which one fits me best.”
Okay, that wasn’t helping. “But let’s say there’s no store in Freiburg that carries all these pens.”
“There isn’t,” Anja said. “Some will probably have the Lamy, but not the others.”
“So how do you decide, then?”
“Read some reviews and look at writing samples online, maybe see if there’s a video comparing them on YouTube.”
Susanne pointed her finger at her in a you’ve-got-it gesture. “So that’s the kind of thing we need to put on our blog. Give potential customers what they are looking for, let your passion for geeky stuff shine through…and then discreetly point them to our webstore.”
Anja brightened. “No sleazy sales copy?”
“No. You can put up lists of your favorite inks, review notebooks, and do Q&As for people just getting into fountain pens.”
Anja gave her a teasing grin. “You mean things like how to avoid having a piston-filling pen seep ink all over your fingers?”
Susanne returned the grin and looked down at her hands, but of course the ink stains were long gone. “Yeah, stuff like that.”
“I can do that.” Anja clapped her hands, then paused. “But probably not all during normal opening hours.”
“Can’t Felix help out more?” Susanne asked. “I know he’s only a part-timer, but I’ve barely seen him at the store since I got here.”
“He’s preparing for his exit exams, so since the beginning of the year he’s only been working a few hours a month, mostly on Saturdays. Once he’s done in March, he’ll probably move away. Hiring someone else is probably out too, huh?”
“Oh yeah. At least for the moment.”
“That’s why Nobby needs me in the store during business hours.”
Susanne rubbed her chin. That was a problem. She wanted to have at least a dozen blog articles ready to be posted by the time the website would go live next month. While she could edit them to make sure they had good search-engine-optimized keywords, she couldn’t write them. She needed Anja for that. “What about…?” She hesitated. “After hours? Or maybe an hour or two on the weekend? I know it’s a lot to ask, and you’re under no obligation to—”
“I’ll do whatever I can to save Paper Love. If that means giving up a few hours in the evening or on the weekend, then so be it,” Anja said without a hint of hesitation. “We can start right now.”
Wow. The passionate fire burning in Anja’s brown eyes made Susanne speechless for a moment. “Right now won’t be possible.”
“Oh.” Anja glanced away. “Of course not. It was stupid of me to assume you don’t have any plans either.”
Susanne shook her head. “I don’t. Have plans, I mean. But I need to walk off some of that cake before we get started on the first blog post.”
The smile returned to Anja’s face. “We could take a walk around Fischerau,” she swept her hand toward the area along the broad canal, “stop by the store and tell Nobby not to wait for us, and then come back here.”
Susanne emptied her cup. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Let me guess,” Miri said when Anja called her on Thursday during her lunch break. “You’re not going to be home in time to join me and Gino for a walk tonight either.”
Anja paused next to the do not feed sign someone had put up in front of the stone crocodile that lifted its head out of the rushing water of the broad canal. She felt a bit like a beast too. “Yeah. I’m sorry, Miri.”
Miriam sighed.
When silence stretched between them, Anja tried to cheer her friend up with a joke. “Aren’t you glad we decided to be friends instead of girlfriends? I’d make a horrible partner at the moment.”
“Well, if you put as much energy and passion into lovemaking as you put into these overtime projects you’ve been doing…”
“No offense, but ew.”
When Miri laughed, Anja smiled but then sobered. “I really am sorry. It’s not that spending time with you is no longer important to me. We’re just under a lot of pressure to get everything up and running by the first of March, when we’re hoping to have the webstore go live. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”
“Oh yeah, you will—and a lot sooner than March. All you’ve been doing lately is working, and that can’t be healthy. I’ll be dragging you up to the Schlossberg this weekend, and lunch afterward will be on you.”
Anja knew resistance was futile, so she didn’t even try. “All right. I guess Susanne and I could both use a break. I think she has plans this weekend, so we won’t be working anyway.”
“How’s that going? Working with Paper Love’s resident hottie, I mean.”
“I thought I was the store’s resident hottie.”
“Compared to that tall sip of water? I love you to death, and you’re really cute, but she’s…” Miri made a sizzling sound.
Anja couldn’t deny it. In fact, she had thought the same more than once this week, whenever she had looked up from the laptop to read Susanne a passage she had just written.
“So?” Miri prompted. “Is she a total slave driver or what?”
Two weeks ago, Anja would have assumed the same. “No, she’s not. She’s actually kind of fun to work with.” She leaned against the railing and watched a duck settle down on top of the stone crocodile and start cleaning its feathers. “Most of the time, it doesn’t even feel like work. We brainstorm ideas, then I write the posts while she takes the photos and proofreads.”
“And you think that’s not work? Are you at least taking breaks to eat?”
“Oh yes, don’t worry. Susanne picked up Indian food twice this week.”
“You’re having Indian food without me?” Miri sounded as indignant as if she’d just found out her girlfriend was cheating on her. “Oh, you’re so going to pay for lunch on Saturday! And I might just have the venison ragout instead of the Flammkuchen.”
Anja laughed, knowing it was an idle threat. Miri never ate anything but Flammkuchen whenever they hiked up the Schlossberg, the hill rising to the east of the Old Town. “I need to get back. Thanks for understanding.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Anja pressed the end-call icon and slid the phone back into her coat pocket. “See?” she said to the crocodile. “That’s why I’m glad I’m not in a relationship. I doubt a girlfriend or boyfriend would have been so understanding.”
Of course, the crocodile didn’t answer, but the duck sitting on its head quacked once.
A second duck swam closer and climbed up onto the crocodile’s head too.
As Anja watched them huddle close, she admitted to herself that not being in a relationship wasn’t as great as she pretended most of the time.
On Friday evening, an hour before closing time, Anja felt as if she finally had a good enough grasp on at least one of the social media channels the store now had.
The same couldn’t be said of Nobby. His forehead wrinkled as he watched her scroll through the photos Susanne had posted so far, making him look like a pug—a pug whose favorite toy had been taken away. “Are the Instantgram and all those other things really necessary?”
“It’s Instagram, Nobby.” Anja gave him a sympathetic smile. “And yes, they’re necessary. Once you get used to them, it’s not so bad. You’ll see.”
It was the truth, even though she still occasionally struggled. Susanne was a patie
nt teacher, never making Anja feel like a fool for asking questions or for taking a while to understand the many things she now had to learn.
“You just tap here and here, select a photo, write a description, click here and here…and voila, you posted a fun stationery picture.” She demonstrated her newly acquired skills by posting the photo of the pastel-colored highlighters she’d taken earlier.
Susanne, who had just stepped out of the back room, peered over her shoulder. Since Anja was sitting on a stool, she had to bend down to see the phone, and a few strands of her hair tickled Anja’s neck. “Um, not to take away from your great explanation or all the things you learned, but you forgot to add hashtags.”
“Oh shit.” Anja slapped her head. And here she had been so proud of her Instagram skills. “God, can’t we just go back to printing flyers?”
Nobby nodded eagerly.
Susanne gave them both a stern but not completely unsympathetic look. “You know we can’t. It’s not so bad. You can just edit the post and add the hashtags.” She reached around her and tapped the screen of Anja’s phone.
Her arm brushed Anja’s shoulder in the process, making her tingle all over.
“You tap here, press edit, and type in whatever hashtags you want.” Susanne did it. “See?”
Anja could only hope that she would remember all of the steps. Susanne’s closeness as they both gazed at the small screen was seriously distracting.
When the bell above the door announced the arrival of a customer, Anja hopped up from her stool behind the counter, glad to escape Susanne’s proximity and the social media stuff that, at times, still threatened to put her brain on overload.
A woman in her late thirties entered the store and unbuttoned her long leather coat while she looked around, revealing jeans and a formfitting sweater.
“Good evening.” Anja walked over and gave her a welcoming smile. “Can I help you?”
The woman’s gaze took her in from head to toe. “Oh yes, you certainly can.” Her tone and the smile she directed at Anja appeared almost a little flirty. “I’m looking for an old woman who’s supposed to work here.”