by A. M. Arthur
Vivid blue eyes latched on and drank him in, taking just a split second longer to check Alessandro out than any perfectly straight man would have. “My sister owns the place,” he said in a slightly mocking tone. “She won’t mind.” As if to prove his point, Shannon’s supposed brother reached back and turned the door’s lock. “Who are you?”
Alessandro squared his shoulders, not at all intimidated by the slightly shorter, much skinnier man in front of him. “Alessandro Silva. Shannon just hired me.”
“Damn, that was fast. We only hung the sign three hours ago.”
“Right place, right time, I guess.”
“I guess. I’m—”
“Jaime, hey,” Shannon said. She came down the center aisle, wiping her hands on a towel. “You’re cutting it close, kid. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jaime replied. “I had to get some books from the library and lost track of time. You know I never miss a chance to scrounge for leftovers and harass you while you try to close up.”
“Go harass Rusty instead. Fill the dishwasher.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jaime tossed his bag onto a chair and strolled to the back of the shop.
Alessandro caught himself watching Jaime go, so he turned his attention back to Shannon. “Your brother?”
“Half brother, yeah,” she replied. “Pain in my ass, but I can’t seem to find any traveling sideshows that will buy him off me.”
He snorted laughter. The comment was sarcastic, but he didn’t miss the underlying affection in her words. “Have you considered selling him to science?”
She grinned. “Oh, I like you, Alè. I like you.”
They spent the next hour going over how the shop ran and the kinds of food they served. They were first and foremost a bakery, specializing in thirteen varieties of muffins every day, and they changed based on the time of year. Baker’s Dozen also served a variety of other baked goods. Everything was made from scratch in the morning—Shannon came in at three—and once it sold out, it was out. She also put food specials up, five dishes that Rusty could crank out quickly, and she prided herself on serving a great cup of coffee.
They discussed pay and tips, as well as his general responsibilities, while they cleaned and set up for the next day. He got a tour of the kitchen and the small back room that doubled as a break room and office space and the closet-sized bathroom. Once they sat down and started on his official paperwork, their conversation shifted from professional to a little more personal.
“So did you just move to Perch Creek?” Shannon asked.
“I grew up here, but I moved away for a few years.” His nerves jumped a bit. “I came back to help out at home.”
“Best reason to come back to a place is family.”
“Agreed.”
As he filled in his emergency-contact information, Shannon read over his shoulder. “Eunice Deforio? Hey, are you one of her kids?”
He looked up from the form, ready to defend Eunice and himself, but Shannon didn’t have “that look” on her face. That look of disappointment and suspicion he often saw from people who immediately distrusted folks who’d grown up in the foster-care system, as though the system bred criminals. She looked curious, even a little pleased.
“Yeah, I am. Eunice has been really good to me.”
“I heard about her husband passing away. I’m real sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Sullivan Deforio had been an excellent foster father and role model, and the polite platitude was a cruel reminder of the man’s recent passing.
“Eunice must be glad to have you.”
He nodded. “She’s a mighty strong lady, but she was married to Sully for forty years. It’s like losing a leg, you know? I’m doing what I can.”
“How will your work schedule here affect her?”
“I think it will work out good, actually. Eunice is home in the morning to get the kids on the bus, and I’ll be free to take them every day after school.”
“Excellent.”
They went through a few more legal documents. Shannon handed him a stapled printout of recipes. “Helps to know what you’re serving,” she said. “We don’t have gluten-free or vegan, but I do occasionally manage a low-fat muffin.”
“Thanks.”
“You got any other questions for me?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Excellent. Then I’ll see you tomorrow at five.”
“At five.”
He didn’t see Jaime again on his way out, which was mildly disappointing. But he had a funny feeling he’d see Shannon’s brother on a pretty regular basis from now on—and the idea made him smile.
Chapter Two
“He’s cute, isn’t he?”
Shannon’s voice startled Jaime into dropping the box of paper napkins he’d just dug out of the storage closet. The box thudded to the floor without breaking and spilling its contents—a stroke of luck for which he was extremely grateful. He’d been fumbling things in the kitchen for the last thirty minutes until Rusty had gotten annoyed and told him to go do something else.
And why was he such a fumbling, bumbling mess? Dark brown eyes that had looked right at him today and actually seemed to see him. Jaime was so used to not being seen or noticed that the attention had him all out of sorts.
“Who’s cute?” he asked as he bent to pick up the box.
Shannon leaned against the wall, arms crossed over her chest, and smirked. “Rusty, obviously.”
“Rusty isn’t my type.”
“No shit, Bug. But Alè is.”
Alessandro Silva was most definitely his type. Tall, toned, handsome—he looked like he’d be at home on a South American beach surrounded by beautiful models and fruity drinks. The problem was Jaime didn’t have the most finely honed gaydar on the planet, and he couldn’t quite figure out if Alessandro was straight or not. He was also pretty sure he knew Alessandro from somewhere.
He decided to ignore his sister’s comment. “At least you filled the position fast. You looked like your head was going to explode this morning.”
“Yeah, stroke of luck he walked in when he did. He picked up on everything in, like, five minutes flat. I had to hire him.”
“That’s good.”
The woman who’d previously worked with Shannon for the last four years, Alicia Pfeffer, had called this morning at six-oh-five to tell Shannon she was leaving town with her boyfriend of six weeks to live on an atoll in the South Pacific. Shannon had wished her luck over the phone—and wished her dysentery after she hung up—then opened the bakery on her own. When Jaime stopped by around eight and saw her quietly melting down, he’d written the help-needed sign and taped it in the window. He’d also offered to stay, but she practically shoved him out the door. No matter what else happened, she flatly refused to let him work more than his once-a-week Saturday shift.
Two years after his surgery and she still treated him like glass.
“That’s good?” Shannon parroted. “That’s it?”
“I’m sorry. Yay!” He bounced and clapped for ten seconds, then stopped. “Better?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re a brat.”
“Yes, I know. An apt observation from the woman who raised me from a pup.”
“And yet somehow you’re not completely housebroken.”
“That was my fault,” Rusty said as he walked past them, his delivery perfectly deadpan.
Jaime looked at Shannon, and they both cracked up.
“Seriously, though,” Jaime said a few minutes later as Shannon was turning off the lights. “I swear I know Alessandro from somewhere.”
“Well, he’s one of the Deforio foster kids all grown up,” she replied.
He searched his fuzzy, vague memories of school until a brown-eyed, bronze-skinned boy’s face rose from the haze. “I think I went to school with him.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Pretty sure. It must have been eighth or ninth grade, though.” He’d spent most of tenth grade in and
out of the hospital and then received the rest of his education via tutors because he was too sick to leave the house.
“See? You two have something in common.”
“Great. So?”
“You really are denser than Grammy’s pound cake, Bug. Alè was checking you out earlier.”
His heart beat just a bit faster. “He was?”
“Yes, and you were so busy trying to not check him out that you totally missed it.”
He bit the inside of his cheek as old, familiar feelings of panic rose inside of him. And not because they were standing there discussing men—he’d come out to Shannon years ago to a quick “no kidding” response that immediately made it a nonissue between them. They were getting dangerously close to addressing Jaime’s nonexistent sex life and the fact that he was almost twenty-three years old and had never actually kissed another man, let alone had sex with one. Granted, he could claim extenuating circumstances from his illness and the physical toll it had taken on his body, but he’d been well for two years, and the excuses were getting lame, even to him.
He didn’t want to admit to Shannon that he was, quite frankly, terrified.
“Can you let it go, please?” he asked. “The last thing you need, anyway, is the potential disaster that would be me dating one of your employees.”
The teasing bled out of Shannon’s face, shifting her expression into one full of rare seriousness. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
“Maybe not, but you don’t deserve to lose someone who could be a huge asset to the shop.”
They’d argued about his reluctance to go out and gain a social life pretty consistently for the last year and a half or so, and it always ended with him digging his heels in. Shannon gave up the battle. They finished closing down, then locked up. He’d left his bicycle chained to a nearby bench, and he turned in the opposite direction of Shannon’s car to claim it.
“Heading home?” she asked.
“I’m going to the park to read for a while.”
“It might rain.”
“Then I’ll read under the pavilion.”
“Okay, later.”
He unchained his bike, which was his source of pride and joy. The bicycle had been a gift to him from their mother when he turned twelve—the last gift she gave him before she died. When Jaime was diagnosed with the same heart disease that had killed her, he’d had to put the bike into storage for nearly five years. Walking down the driveway to the car had left him breathless and sweating; riding a bike was impossible. For a while, he’d never expected to use it again. He’d fully expected to die, just like their mom.
And then two years ago, a car accident fifty miles away provided him with the heart he needed in order to live.
He adjusted the strap of his bag, snapped on his bike helmet and pedaled off toward the park to read the books he’d collected from the library. And to not think about Alessandro’s eyes.
* * *
The bus let him off two blocks from home, and Alessandro walked the rest of the way with a slight bounce in his step. Eunice’s car was parked in the narrow driveway of the two-story house he’d lived in for almost six years—the best years of his life. The house was old and the roof needed new shingles, but the Deforios had made it a warm, welcoming place for the children they fostered.
He glanced at the neglected flower beds on either side of the front porch. It was already September, too late into the year for any real gardening, but he made a mental note to at least weed the thing. Maybe plant some bulbs for next spring. Yard work had been Sully’s specialty, and he’d spent hours outside with Alessandro, teaching him to plant and water and tend to various kinds of flowers. There was always a vegetable garden in the backyard, every year except this year. Sully had been run-down for several months before his heart attack, so the garden ever got turned or planted.
Next year. He would plant one next year.
He pulled the screen door, unsurprised to find the front door wide open. Despite the slightly shady tone the neighborhood had taken in the last few years, Eunice didn’t fear or snub her neighbors. She only ever locked the doors at night.
The sound of a whirring hand mixer drew him down the hall to the kitchen. Eunice stood over a bowl of batter, moving the mixer around in a familiar dance as she beat something into shape. Her style hadn’t changed from the day he met her, right in this very kitchen—loud, baggy dresses that hid her figure, gray hair pulled back into a braid that hung down past her waist, black-framed glasses perched on the tip of her nose.
She noticed his arrival and winked. A few seconds later, she turned off the mixer and stood it on its side so the batter could run off the beaters into the bowl. “Alè, my boy, how’d the job hunt go?”
“Faster than I expected. I got a job.”
“Good for you!” She pumped one fist into the air, which caught the edge of her sleeve on the mixer. She didn’t seem to notice the smear of batter that transferred. “Where?”
He described his morning in great detail while she measured the batter into two greased cake pans. She put those into the oven, then set the timer. Everything was in the sink to be washed by the time he finished.
“Shannon’s good people,” Eunice said. “And her muffins are excellent, too. I think you’ll like it there, but are you sure about those hours?”
“Perfectly sure. And I think the schedule will be good for the kids. I’ll be home when they get off the bus, so I can help them with homework and get dinner started.”
Her face crumpled with an odd combination of relief and sadness. “You’re giving up so much, Alè.”
“I’m not giving up anything. You and Sully gave me everything I have and made me who I am. I told you when I left home that I’d do anything you needed, anytime, and that includes giving Tony and Molly the same chance I had.”
“What did I do to deserve you, honey?”
“You raised me right. Mom.”
She pulled him into a fierce hug. It probably smeared batter on his back, but he didn’t care. She and Sully had loved and accepted him through bouts of anger, depression, self-mutilation and one arrest for possessing a deadly weapon, all before the age of fifteen. But they finally reached him through unconditional love, even if he had continued to occasionally push their buttons. He’d never fully lost the fear of being rejected and abandoned, and he’d done some pretty petty things to make them push him away—including making sure Sully found his sixteen-year-old self in the backseat of Sully’s car sucking another boy’s dick. Not even that had turned them against him.
He knew now that nothing ever would. The Deforios hadn’t given him biological life, but they were truly his parents, and they’d loved him unconditionally. Even when he didn’t deserve it.
“You’re going to make an old lady cry,” Eunice said as she pried them apart.
“Sorry.”
“You start your new job tomorrow?”
“Yeah, early, too.”
“Well, you enjoy the rest of your day, honey. I don’t go back to work until Monday, so you’ve got the rest of the week to yourself.” After Sully died, she’d taken bereavement time from her receptionist job at a local carpet-cleaning agency, but the time only lasted so long. She had to keep living her life—not an easy thing to ask of a woman who’d lost her husband of four decades. And that was another reason Alessandro had come back. She had dozens of foster kids out in the world living their lives, thanks to her and Sully, but no blood family to take care of her in her golden years. And she still had two foster children in her care who needed love and guidance.
“Maybe I’ll use the time to work on the yard a little,” he said, mostly to test the waters.
Eunice smiled sadly. “That would be nice, but you should have some fun. Go out and meet people your age. I’m sure some of the kids you went to school with are still around.”
He snorted. “Most of those kids hated me because I was such a jerk. I doubt they’ll welcome me.”
“Y
ou never know unless you try. Speaking of, didn’t you go to school with Shannon’s brother, Jaime?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
Jaime hadn’t seemed terribly familiar, either from face or name. The only Jaime in his grade had been a girl with red hair.
“Oh no, you probably wouldn’t remember him,” Eunice said with a snap of her fingers. “He got sick and had to be homeschooled. That’s right.”
“Sick?”
“Heart disease, same kind that killed their mother, the poor things.”
Alessandro stared, surprised. Jaime had heart disease? He hadn’t looked sick today, far from it. “How sick is he?”
“Oh, he’s perfectly healthy now, they say. Lucky lad got a new heart more than two years ago, and he hasn’t had a bad spell since. Shannon’s still a bit protective, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.”
He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the concept of walking around with someone else’s heart beating in his chest. Jaime had had a heart transplant, and it had saved his life, just like in a cheesy Lifetime movie. All he could manage to say was, “Wow.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in you knowing. It’s not a state secret or anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Get on, now, and let me do my dishes. Dinner’s at six.”
“Okay, thanks.”
He headed upstairs to his room, the same he’d shared with another boy once upon a time. The bunk bed had been moved into the room Tony lived in, and Alessandro had a single bed nestled in among other mismatched pieces of furniture. The upstairs had four bedrooms, and with only two current foster kids under Eunice’s care—and likely the final two, given her advancing age and newly widowed status—Tony and Molly each had their own room.
When Alessandro moved here last week, he’d sublet his old apartment fully furnished, so he’d only had to bring along his clothes and a few personal items like photo albums and his laptop computer. Leaving his job in the mail room of a law firm in the city had been easy. The grunt work never suited him. He’d taken the job so he could get out of Perch Creek. He wanted to be his own boss one day, maybe own some kind of business, but with no college degree and no money, all he really had was the dream of it. Waiting tables might not be a huge step up from the mail room, but he was working for a family-owned business in order to support his own family. Shannon was where he wanted to be one day, so maybe he could learn from her. He had no regrets.