Cream of the Crop Read online

  I waited in line. I looked over his wares. I was convinced we’d be horizontal before noon. I tasted a few of the samples he’d thoughtfully provided for his customers. I tasted sweet grassy clover in the buttery Camembert, deliciously twisted dark in the Stilton, and was bowled over by his strong cheddar, finally selecting a lovely Brie. I was convinced we’d be vertical before midnight.

  I watched and listened as he interacted with his customers, picking up little hints here and there about the man. He was commanding, forceful, short on words but long on brooding, and the furthest thing from a natural-born salesman. His products must be good enough to stand alone, because clearly this guy wasn’t winning anyone over with his conversational skills. Would I go in strong, and knock him down a few pegs? Or soft and demure, thinking he liked a soft, sweet girl who turned into a crazy one in bed?

  Didn’t matter. Because the closer I got to him, the strangest thing happened. My skin flushed, my knees wobbled, and my heartbeat got all fluttery. It was my turn in line next—what would I say? I tried to will my racing heart to calm down, to tell the butterflies inside me to shut it, it was time to snag this guy. But when his eyes fell on me, those beautiful blue piercing eyes, and they traveled the length of my body and back up again, the eyebrow with the scar rising in (Appreciation? Admiration? ­Carnal frustration?) question, he merely said one word.

  “Brie?”

  “Oh. Yes,” I whispered, not trusting my voice to go any louder. He nodded, wrapped up a package, and handed it to me. For one instant, one glorious fireworks-filled instant, his finger brushed mine.

  I mentally placed an order for wedding invitations.

  “You pay the cashier down there,” he said, jerking his chin toward the cashier.

  As he looked past me to the next customer, I suddenly remembered I had legs. And boobs. And a lovely round bottom. I remembered how to regain control and get us back on the horizontal schedule. But he afforded me only one more glance, and while it was clearly at my legs, he was done with me.

  I shook my head to clear it, somehow made my way to the cashier, and paid for my Brie.

  I mean. This guy.

  I stole one more look over my shoulder, and saw his gray-blue eyes flash once more toward me, feeling it all over my body.

  But I was left holding his Brie, and nothing else.

  Back at home I started plotting for next Saturday. And the Saturday after that. And . . . you guessed it. Because week after week, cheese after cheese, I’d lose all my nerve and all my strut the second those eyes looked at me, looked through me.

  “Brie?” he’d ask, and I’d answer, “Oh yes.” He’d wrap it up, I’d walk away on shaky legs, and our time together was over, but for the exquisitely lustful fantasies that ran through my head every day as I counted down how many more days I had to go before seeing him again.

  This was beyond a crush. This was beyond a quick naked tussle behind the dairy truck. This was maddening.

  And I’d see him tomorrow morning!

  I fell onto the couch, squealing, kicking my legs into the air like a cricket.

  Chapter 2

  Saturday mornings were set in stone. I always got up early, went to Bar Method class (half ballet, half yoga, all hard-core), picked up my dry cleaning and a smoothie, then went home to shower. And dress. And strut. And Brie. But somewhere between the shower and the Brie, there was Roxie.

  “Girl. How’re the sticks?” I asked, sinking down onto the couch with my berry-banana concoction.

  “How’re the sirens?” she shot back, her answer every week. My best friend for years, we’d fallen into the habit of chatting more often now that she was back on the correct coast and only a ninety-minute train ride away up in the Hudson Valley. We’d always stayed close, but something about living closer to each other had kicked our friendship up a notch, and now I looked forward to our weekly Saturday-morning chats. I spent a similar hour each Sunday morning on the phone with our other best friend, Clara, whenever she was in the same time zone. A branding specialist for luxury hotels, she was frequently out of the country on business.

  “How come you haven’t shipped me one of your coconut cakes yet? My doorstep is suspiciously devoid of Zombie Cakes care packages . . . who should I talk to about that?” I teased, slipping out of my sneakers and examining my pedicure. I might need to pop over this afternoon for a shine-up.

  “You can talk to the lady in accounts receivable, which is me. As soon as you buy a cake, you’ll get a cake, it’s that simple,” she said with a laugh. “I’m starting a business here; I can’t be giving away the profits.”

  “Can I get it at cost?”

  “Sure. It costs fifty-five dollars, plus shipping.”

  I rolled my eyes. Roxie had recently started a food truck in her hometown of Bailey Falls, using her grandfather’s old Airstream trailer. She was already making a name for herself in the Hudson Valley and had even brought the whole show into the city on a few occasions. It took time to start a business, naturally, but she was doing it in exactly the right way. She’d started small, and with a little guidance from me in terms of marketing, she was kicking some ass. Her cakes were wonderfully rich and nostalgically old-fashioned, a great combination. “How was your week?” she asked, snapping me back from my thoughts.

  “It was good; brought in a new client, assisted on a few other campaigns, nothing too exciting. How about you?”

  “It’s crazy here right now with the harvest; Leo is going nuts. You’ll be proud of me, though; I learned how to make a plaster-of-paris town hall.”

  “For Polly’s class?” I grinned, thinking about how upside down Roxie’s life had become within one summer. She’d come home to help her mother out with the family diner, and ended up falling in love with a local farmer who had a seven-year-old daughter. She was head-over-heels in love with her new life.

  “Yeah, they’re making a mock-up of Bailey Falls, and we were in charge of the executive branch.”

  “Sounds exciting,” I said drily.

  “I’m glad she didn’t get assigned the water tower; that would have been difficult.”

  And just like that, the life around you begins to change. We were growing up.

  “Leo ruined the first town hall. It was all finished and ready to go to school the next morning, when he got all twisted up in my panties, tripped us both, and fell, sending me ass first into the cupola. We had to stay up all night making a new one.”

  And just like that, you realize nothing ever really changes.

  “Enough with the Mayberry. You planning any trips into the city anytime soon?” I asked, dangling the city carrot every week.

  “Nothing on the books right now. You planning on coming up here for a visit anytime soon?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “You’re adorable,” I said, chuckling, finishing my smoothie and rising off the couch to throw it away in the kitchen. “There’s a big foodie festival here the first week of November; you should try and get your cakes into it; lots of gourmet eyeballs there.”

  “Send me the details and I’ll see what I can do. Speaking of food, are you gonna talk to Oscar this week?”

  “Shush.”

  “Explain this to me again, please,” she said, her voice incredulous. “I’ve seen you get a guy to literally eat out of the palm of your hand, and you can’t talk to Oscar the Grouch?”

  “He wasn’t eating out of the palm of my hand.”

  “He ate olives off your fingertips, and he kneeled down to do it. In a bar, for God’s sake.”

  I giggled. He did. Yuri. He’d said he was a Russian mafia guy, but he wasn’t so tough. I stuck my tongue in his ear, whispered what he could do to me if he played his cards right, and . . . wow. He really was eating out of the palm of my hand.

  “I don’t understand why this guy makes you so googly! I mean, he’s obviously got that b
rooding bad-boy sex god thing going on, and—”

  “You can stop there; that’s enough to make me go googly,” I interrupted, my eyes crossing.

  “You know, if you came up here for a visit, I could easily arrange a meetup . . .” Her voice trailed off, plotting.

  “No! I can’t, no!”

  “Why in the world not?”

  It was a good question. Why wasn’t I jumping all over this?

  “If I come there and I see him, and we talk, about cheese or whatever else might come up, then it’s like . . . I don’t know. Something changes.”

  “Yeah. We get this shit moving past the scrambled-brain phase,” she replied.

  “Exactly! What if, once we start talking, he no longer scrambles my brain? What if, once I get to know him, there’s no grrr behind the golden? What if”—and I had to sit down to even say this out loud—“what if he’s got a teeny weenie?”

  I could hear her intake of breath.

  “Well then, Clara would take the train down and we would get. You. Through!” It almost sounded like she’d choked.

  “Are you laughing at me?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

  “No. Not at all,” she insisted, and coughed strangely.

  “You are totally laughing at me, asshole!” I exclaimed.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually serious! A teeny weenie? I’m pretty sure Oscar is packing a giant milk can . . .”

  “Oooh, you think?” I asked, relaxing back onto the couch and curling up like a cat, my teeny-weenie terror momentarily subsiding.

  “You’re certifiable,” she said, undoubtedly shaking her head. “Seriously, though, you should think about coming up here and taking this thing to the next level.”

  “I like this level. I know this level,” I said, chewing on my ponytail.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense! You should own this guy, destroy this guy—and you can’t even talk to him? Make this make sense to me.”

  I thought for a minute. She asked me this almost every weekend, and every weekend I said I don’t know. I didn’t know, and that was the truth.

  “I wish I knew, Roxie. Somehow, everything I know about guys goes out the window when I see him. There’s just something about him.”

  “Well, what are you wearing this week?” she asked, the browbeating done and the girl-talk planning now beginning.

  Once off the phone, I wandered around in my apartment, restless. I folded some laundry, I spot-cleaned a few shoes, but mostly I paced. I’d circled the kitchen a few times, finally landing next to a cupboard that was almost hidden behind the trash can.

  Inside that cupboard was my secret little world, one that I rarely shared with anyone. This city girl . . . loved the country.

  Scratch that. Loved the idea of the country.

  I’d been collecting pictures out of magazines for years, always depicting small-town Americana at its best. Town squares complete with duck ponds and hitching posts. Hayrides, wash hanging on the line, kitchen gardens, and homemade cobbler.

  I had this idea that one day, far off into the future, I might leave it all behind and live in the country. Wild and free, wearing comfortable overalls and broken-in old work boots, picking blueberries by the side of a dirt road with a country dog by my side. I even knew the song that would be playing on this little blueberry adventure, “Dust Down a Country Road,” by John Hiatt.

  I really did have a soundtrack for everything.

  Even more specifically, I secretly dreamed about one day giving up my advertising career to chuck it all and start making cheese for a living. It’s true. I knew nothing at all about the actual process, but in my head it was very romantic and sweet, just me and my cows and rows of tidy little cheese rounds.

  I’d devoted an entire cupboard to this very 3-D version of a vision board, one that I’d visit when particularly daydreamy or when the city had been especially tough.

  Ten minutes spent gazing into my cupboard was worth an hour of therapy, even if officially I’d never acknowledge my love of never-actually-visited-but-often-imagined all things country.

  I looked at the clock, my heart jumping a bit when I saw it was almost time to go see my dairy god.

  Strutting, strutting. Just strutting along, not a care in the world. Here I go. In fact:

  Here I go again, on my own . . .

  As Whitesnake’s classic song played in my head, I could see myself doing front walkovers across a car, or riding through a tunnel halfway hanging out of the passenger-side window while Oscar drove, reaching over with his long, tanned fingers to caress the inside of my black thigh-highs.

  I Tawny Kitaen’ed myself through the farmers’ market, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, just doing my normal Saturday shopping.

  Oh look, farm-fresh eggs. I’ll take a dozen. Speckled brown? Fabulous. Into the linen bag they go; it’ll be my contribution to the family brunch tomorrow.

  Mmm, my favorite flower stall. Look, beautiful deep-red dahlias. I’ll take a few bundles for some color in my living room.

  Just shopping, not noticing at all that there’s a stall now just twenty feet away that contains the most beautiful thing ever created on this earth.

  There he was.

  Come on, strut it out, girl.

  No use. Those gray-blue eyes laser locked on me across the pavement, and the entire world stopped. Usually I didn’t see him until I made it up to the counter. He said his line, I said my line, and that was it for the rest of the week. Sometimes, if I was lucky, the wind would blow a few wisps of that thick, wavy hair around his face. And then angels would sing . . .

  But today, something was different. He spotted me way before it was time, and he held my gaze. His eyes were piercing, cutting through the crisp autumn-morning air.

  And as the wind blew, I realized there was no tie in his hair today. The chestnut was mixed with mahogany and copper and all the other sexy brown crayons. It was thick and a little curly, and cropped just above his shoulders. As I watched he ran his hand through the length, pushing it up and away from his face.

  Today was different, I could feel it. I forced my feet to move toward him, using muscle memory to make things that should bounce, bounce. He noticed. He dropped his gaze from my face and it rolled down my body, his stare heavy enough that I could feel it.

  There was no one else in line—another first. I walked right up to him, slowing my pace at the end to make sure that when I revisited this later in my dreams (day, sleeping, and wet varieties) I could truly savor it.

  Now, standing in front of him, glorious in his simple godlike jeans and T-shirt, I took a moment to breathe. This time, I got a hit of him. Peppery, clean, with a hint of sweet butter. It made sense: the man owned a dairy.

  I would kill someone with my bare hands to see him hold his churn.

  The mere thought of this nearly knocked me off my feet, but as it was, I was already feeling the telltale signs of going googly, as Roxie called it. Thank goodness, he knew the drill.

  “Brie?” he asked.

  “Oh. Yes,” I answered. He wrapped it up, handed it to me, and this time, instead of what simply could be called an accidental brush of a finger, he held onto it for exactly two seconds longer than he needed to. And in those two seconds, he reached out with his thumb and stroked the inside of my palm. For two seconds, he thumb-stroked me.

  I held my breath for an eternal two seconds, thumb-stroked so good that I saw stars. And when we finally let go, I knew I’d never be the same.

  If he could make me that stupid with his thumb, what would happen if he—

  My body was threatening to blow out every circuit, so I stepped away as he looked over my shoulder to the line that had formed. I walked up to the cashier, handed her the package, and fumbled in my linen bag for my—

  Where’s my money? I peered into the bag, seeing th
e eggs and the flowers, but no small coin purse holding my cash for the day. I looked behind me, looked on the ground, and for pockets that I didn’t have.

  “Shit,” I breathed, wondering where it had gone. “I’m so sorry, I think I lost my money,” I told the cashier, confused and still rattled by the thumb porn.

  “Sorry, cash only,” she said, taking my cheese and setting it back onto the display. “Next!”

  “It’s on me,” a deep voice interrupted, and I looked up to see Oscar handing me back the cheese.

  “On you?” I repeated, and for the first time, he grinned.

  “Mm-hmm.” He raised that scarred eyebrow in a knowing way. “On. Me.”

  Yeah, today was different.

  If Saturday morning had a ritualized feel to it, then Sunday was etched into stone tablets and mounted on the wall.

  You will have brunch with thy mother and father. So it is written. So it is done.

  Brunch with my family meant a lazy morning reading different sections of the Times, consuming platters of food from Zabar’s, and recapping the week’s events over incredible coffee. An unstated rule was that, barring anyone being out of town, Sunday mornings were nonnegotiable. Even hangovers were not an excuse for no-showing. You got your ass out of bed, and nursed it with one of my mother’s patented Bloody Marys, supplemented by extra onion on your bagel and schmear with belly lox.

  Once when I was home on summer break from college, I developed a terrible case of mono and could barely walk. My father carried me downstairs on Sunday mornings and my mother would push on my jaw to make sure I ate my chicken soup.

  If you were breathing, you were brunching, my mother would say. And for the most part, with the exception of Great Aunt Helen’s untimely demise in our front room one Sunday, the rule was rock solid.

  The other rule, equally unstated, was that you don’t bring someone home with you on Sunday morning unless there’s a sparkling ring in your very near future. My brother, Todd, once brought over a Dakota or a Cheyenne or some such, who giggled and pranced and preened, and kept referring to my brother as Tad. He never made that mistake again. Sundays were for family.