by Noir, Roxie
“— Help the girls with their hair and makeup schedule,” Emma finishes, still talking to her maid of honor.
“Hi there!” Violet says, walking toward us. “Welcome to Bramblebush. Congratulations!”
She’s all smiles and professionalism, warm and no-nonsense.
Until she glances over. Then she feels like a firestorm as she takes in the scene and last of all, me. There’s a look. I forget to breathe for a second as I run through it all again: lips tongue teeth hands wall. Tell me to stop. No.
I don’t laugh at my victory. I don’t even grin. I just smile at her, polite and professional as you please, and I resist loudly telling her about the recent appetizer change on the menu. It’s immature and petty, but damn, it feels good.
Besides, dear God Violet is pretty when she’s mad. She’s pretty all the time, but anger sparks something in her eyes that makes her light up like a human flame, burning and flickering from the inside, dangerous and alluring all at once.
This feels dangerous in a way it never has before. Her anger’s always been dangerous, of course, but now there’s something about it that shakes me to the core.
Violet makes me unsteady. She makes it feel like the ground under my feet is treacherous, like I’m exploring new and uncharted territory.
I don’t hate the feeling.
But I can’t stop. If she’s the flame, I’m the moth, and despite myself, I want to see her light up again and again.
“Thanks, Eli, I’ve got it from here,” she says, giving me one last burning glance before turning to the assembled bridal party. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person. Shall we finalize everything for tomorrow?”
* * *
Once the bride and groom retire with Violet and Kevin to the other side of the lounge to talk logistics, I’m left with the bridesmaids.
Things go dramatically downhill.
Six of the seven bridesmaids are sipping on drinks, standing around, casually chatting. They seem like they’re having a lovely time getting ready for their friend’s wedding.
The maid of honor — Susan — has had another gin and tonic, and she’s sitting on a stool, half an arancini between her fingers, leaning on the bar, telling me about her life.
I have work to do. I’d love to get out of here, but I’m new at this whole create a good guest experience thing. Does ditching a drunk girl create a poor guest experience? Will it cost me twenty grand?
Hell if I know.
“So anyway,” she says, the eyelashes dipping and bobbing dramatically. “I’m a free woman now, just in time for my little sister’s wedding. Cheers!”
She holds up her glass, then takes a long pull from it.
“I think I should go to Paris,” she says. “That’s exciting, right? Paris?”
She takes another sip.
“Or Bangkok. Or Abu Dhabi. Or Moscow. Those all sound like places someone exciting and adventurous would go, right?”
“I hear Moscow is nice in the summer,” I say, staying as neutral as possible. “I wouldn’t go in the winter.”
Susan laughs. She laughs way too hard.
“You’re funny,” she says, putting a hand on mine.
Shit.
“Or maybe I should go to Sicily and get some more of these tasty balls,” she says, finally picking up the last one and holding it in front of her face like she’s divining her future in it. “I’ll just get as many tasty balls as I can handle, I bet that’s fun and exciting.”
Then she pushes the whole thing into her mouth, chews, swallows. When she finishes she licks the crumbs from her top lip, making eye contact with me the whole time.
I have a vague sense of foreboding.
Maybe she’ll just leave, I think.
“Got anything else for me?” she asks, reaching for her glass and missing. Her hand bangs against the bar, and she sighs and frowns at it like it’s a misbehaving pet.
“That’s all I made tonight,” I say, clearing away the platter.
This is your chance. Deposit her with the other girls and get out of here.
“Boo,” she says. “Does that mean — um, so, you know, are you off now? Like, are you doing anything?”
She tries to lean her chin on her hand, but misses and goes off-balance, nearly careening off her bar stool.
Shit. This girl is about five minutes from full-blown drunk disaster, something that would almost certainly create a poor guest experience for everyone else in this room.
Trust me, I bartended near the oil fields in North Dakota for a while. I know from drunk disasters, though those disasters were usually much burlier than Susan. Compared to them, she’ll be a walk in the park.
“Sorry,” she breathes, her hand in mine as she finds the floor with one foot, then the other. “Sometimes your hand’s not where it’s supposed to be, you know?”
She tries to shake her hair over her shoulder again, but it sends her off-balance, stumbling into me. I steady her with a hand on her back, her hand still gripping mine for stability.
“Thanks,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment, fully leaning on me. “You know, you didn’t answer me.”
“Let me help you to your room,” I say, still holding her up.
This girl needs to be in bed before she can cause any damage, preferably with a trash can next to her and a glass of water on her night stand. If I had Gatorade and Advil, I’d leave that too. How’s that for guest experience?
“You’re coming to my room?” she says, her words getting blurry, still leaning against me.
I don’t answer her, just walk her through the lounge and to the elevators opposite the door. I feel bad for her. She seems like a nice girl who’s having a rough time right now, and to top it all off, has to stand up at her little sister’s wedding, probably while half her family wonders why it’s not her up there.
“You’re nice,” Susan says, leaning her head against my shoulder, sliding an arm around my waist. “So nice.”
She sways again, and I prop her up with an arm around her shoulder. She’s too warm, and I’m trying to hold her up while I touch her as little as possible. I’ve always felt bad for girls when they drink, just because it seems like they go from “slightly tipsy” to “puking in the gutter” so fast.
The elevator dings. The doors slide open. I carefully guide Susan across the threshold, because in her current state, even that seems like it could present a problem.
Just as I face forward and hit the button for the third floor, the door to the lounge opens, right across from us.
Violet steps out, alone. She stops. She looks at me. Susan hugs me tighter, her arms around my waist. She buries her face in my shoulder, my arm around her so she doesn’t fall over.
Violet’s eyes lock onto mine as the elevator doors slide shut. It feels like it takes a year for them to close and the whole time, she doesn’t look away. Her expression’s unreadable, but I still feel it deep inside myself, twisting me in a place I didn’t know I had.
Then the doors close and I stare at myself in the dull reflection, Susan snuggled against me, head now against my chest, my arm still around her shoulders so she doesn’t fall over.
“This is nice,” she murmurs.
I don’t answer her.
Chapter Twelve
Violet
I stand stock-still in the doorway as the elevator closes, my brain unwilling to process what I just saw.
Eli. And the maid of honor who’s been sloppily hitting on him for the past fifteen minutes, in the elevator, their arms around each other, her head against his chest.
Going upstairs. Where there are beds. Six days after he kissed the hell out of me, he’s going upstairs with this girl who’s clearly handsy as fuck and who’s also pretty cute.
If I were a dude, I wouldn’t turn her down. My heart feels like a fist.
“You forget something?” Kevin asks, shaking me out of my reverie.
“Nope!” I say, sounding way too perky. “Just standing here. You read
y?”
Kevin gives me a weird look, but doesn’t say anything as we head back to the office barn, talking over the final few preparations for tomorrow.
When the linens get here, we need to make sure they match.
Eli is banging the maid of honor.
The bride brought last-minute chair-hanging nameplates for the entire wedding party, so someone should make sure that those go in the right place.
Does he do this all the time? Does Eli have a new girl every week and I didn’t know? Am I already old news and he’s on to the next thing?
We’ll need to do a dry run of the butterfly release before the ceremony, and Eli is banging the maid of honor. Oh my God, why is he doing this and why do I care? Stop caring. Now.
We reach my office. Kevin hands over the iPad and says goodnight. I act normal and also say goodnight, then gather my things, and prepare to head out.
And I keep thinking about Eli. In the elevator. About the look me gave me, the smug way his eyes lit up when the maid of honor snuggled harder against him, his arm around her shoulders. I’m pretty sure she was grabbing his butt.
You are being ridiculous, I tell myself.
You saw two people in an elevator, one drunk and one not. You have no idea what happened afterward.
Except they looked so cozy together, and she was definitely into him, and they were touching and he gave me that look as the doors closed, the one that was smoldering and high and mighty and smug and hot.
The same look he gave me Saturday night right before —
“Stop it,” I say out loud, in my empty office, like a lunatic.
Then I clear my throat, hope no one heard me, grab my stuff, and leave my office.
As I’m walking down the hall, something else occurs to me.
Sleeping with a guest is unprofessional as hell.
I don’t know if it’s specifically in the employee handbook. I read it cover-to-cover when I started this job, of course, but I didn’t memorize it and it’s been a few years. But there’s no way that’s proper, condoned behavior.
It’s possible that I could get Eli fired. It’s probable that I could get him in hot water with Montgomery.
It’s almost certain that I could knock him out of the running for that twenty thousand dollars.
I stop again, right in front of the door to the employee parking lot, and I back up a few steps until I can look down the hall, toward Montgomery’s big corner office.
The door’s open. The lights are on. If I listen really closely, I think I can just make out the sounds of typing.
And I can’t get the elevator scene out of my head: the way they were intertwined, all over each other, her hands everywhere. Most of all I can’t get the look on his face out of my head, like he’s mocking me, challenging me.
I’m not jealous. I’m not. Kissing him last weekend was a dumb mistake and I don’t want to do it again, no matter how good it felt, because Eli and I don’t get along and there’s no point to making out with someone you don’t even get along with.
Therefore, I can’t be jealous. Logic dictates it.
I’m still standing there. I’m still staring at Montgomery’s open door, thinking about how much harder I could probably make Eli’s life if I just walked down there and told him.
But you didn’t actually see anything, a voice whispers in the back of my mind.
You saw Eli and a drunk girl. That’s all. Everything else is pure conjecture.
God, sometimes I hate it when I’m right.
I stop looking at Montgomery’s office and go home.
* * *
I stare upon the monstrosity, uncomprehending.
It’s so tall I can’t even see the top, tiers and tiers of cake reaching heavenward, festooned with endless swirls and whirls. Flowers drip from every layer, each one more dramatic than the last.
“How much of it is cake?” I finally ask, gobsmacked.
Janice, Bramblebush’s pastry chef, leans in, squinting. We’re standing right outside the wedding barn, where the dinner has finished and now everyone is dancing. This small, green courtyard is lit only by dozens of string of fairy lights looped overhead and around a row of potted trees in a complicated, swirling pattern. It’s romantic, but also hard to see.
Janice points at a layer, still squinting.
“I’m pretty sure that from here down,” she says, “is the stand, and everything on top of that is cake. I think.”
I continue to stare. My job is mostly logistics, but every so often, I’m presented with some very interesting problems that require creative solutions.
Right now seems to be one of those times. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting it — after the butterfly release and the choreographed bridesmaids’ dance went off without a hitch, I thought I was in the clear.
I was not. I was unaware that there existed a wedding cake too tall to fit through a barn door, but you learn something new every day, I guess.
“If we split it in two and only leave on the top layer of the base, can we put it back together inside?” I ask, looking from the cake to the door and back. “People might see us, but…”
I shrug, the universal shrug of I think this is our only option.
“As long as we’re careful, I think so,” Janice says, still moving around the cake. Here and there she takes the stand in her hands and wobbles it very, very carefully, checking its structural integrity. “The only other option is to serve the cake out here, and…”
She gestures around the small outdoor barn entrance area, clearly indicating four hundred people won’t fit out here.
“We’ll use the cake dolly,” she goes on. “Brandon and Zane can handle it, don’t worry.”
I just nod, still looking up at the biggest, most elaborate wedding cake I’ve ever seen. Apparently it’s the groom’s grandmother’s gift to the couple, and she really went all-out.
Naturally, I got the cake dimensions from the bakery last week. I always get the dimensions from the bakery, but she ordered from a bakery I’ve never worked with before, one all the way up in Richmond.
When they sent the dimensions, they sent it for the cake only. They failed to mention that it was attached to an elaborate custom cake stand as well.
By itself, the cake would fit through a ten-foot-high barn door.
With the stand included, it does not.
It’s really a hell of a cake.
“It’ll be no problem,” Janice reassures me, since I must look worried. “You won’t even be able to tell that —”
“HEY! STOP IT!” a kid shouts, right behind the row of potted trees. Janice and I both turn, but we can’t see anything through the perfectly cylindrical evergreens.
“NO, YOU STOP!”
“FARTKNOCKER!”
There’s a quick scuffling noise, and we both frown.
‘“I’M TELLING MOM!”
“Liam, you’re such a baby —”
“Take it BACK!”
There’s a shout, then a grunt.
“Ow!” the other kid yells. “You little —”
A tree shakes slightly.
“TAKE IT BACK!”
There’s another loud oof. A grunt.
Then the tree falls.
It seems like it falls in slow motion, the top wiggling before picking up speed and rushing earthward, revealing the surprised faces of two boys who can’t be more than nine.
I lunge for it. Janice lunges for it, but there’s no way to match the speed of disaster.
The tree falls on the cake, the branches and needles sinking into lush white buttercream, slicing through the beautifully-wrought flowers, gouging through frosting, pushing the tiers askew, cleaving them in twain.
Then it comes to rest. On the cake. The nine-year-olds are long gone.
I can’t do anything but stand there, mouth wide open, staring in horror. This feels like some sort of anxiety dream, and I swear to God I’m expecting my teeth to start spontaneously falling out any moment now.
; They don’t. If they did, I’d be relieved.
“Oh God,” Janice finally says, her voice strangled. “Oh God. Oh my God.”
Then the cake starts slipping, the tiers sliding sideways under the weight of the tree. I finally jolt out of my horrified reverie and lurch forward, panic singing through my veins.
“Get the tree!” I shout to Janice, running to the side of the cake just as a layer starts sliding off the one beneath it.
I put my hands out. I don’t have a plan. I’m not at all sure that this will work, I just know it’s my only option right now and this cake cannot hit the ground.
Instead, it falls straight into me.
Softly. Slowly. Gently, almost.
My outstretched hands are no match for the thick, soft buttercream. My fingers squish as they finally reach the cake, and the whole thing slumps against me like a sleepy toddler after a long day at Disney World.
“Help,” I squeak out.
Janice grunts, launching the tree back upright, the needles and branches along one side are covered in off-white frosting. Then she turns and looks at me.
“Oh, fuck,” she says, her eyes wide as saucers. Both her hands go to her temples, in the universal gesture of oh fuck.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Don’t move, Violet, I don’t — fuck!”
Janice is freaking out as she looks at me, at the cake, at the tree, then frantically around as if someone’s going to run in and save her.
I gather my wits to the best of my ability, which is not great right now.
“Janice,” I say. “There’s a radio on my belt,” I say, sounding far calmer than I feel. “Call Lydia and ask her to get Eli out here.”
I don’t know why I told her to get Eli. He’s probably busy right now, and he’s not even a pastry chef, but that’s what came out when I needed someone to come save the day.
Janice grabs the radio. The cake slumps a little further, and I try not to wonder what it’s like to drown in cake.
“Hello?” she says, mashing the buttons. “We have a cake emergency at the barn. I repeat, WE HAVE A CAKE EMERGENCY.”