Page 33 of Leo
“So, are we not going slow?”
I nodded.“If that’s okay with you?”
He nodded again.“More than.”
The shop bell rang, and he sighed.“Back to the cupcake mines.”
Leaning back in the chair, I grinned as he hurried to the counter, leaving his cupcake next to mine.
For the record, salted watermelon should never be a cupcake flavor, no matter how cute the baker is.
CHAPTER12
AMBROSE
“So,you guys dating now or what?”
I startled, Bethany’s muffled voice the last thing I expected at four in the morning.“Why aren’t you still in bed?”I asked.“Don’t you have today off for some teacher in-service thing?”
“Yeah,” she muttered around her toothbrush as she stuck her head around the kitchen door, “but I couldn’t sleep with you banging around in the kitchen, so I figured I’d come into work with you.”
I pushed the plunger of my French press down slowly, shooting her a look.“Really?Instead of sleeping in, instead of being able to flop around all day and do nothing, you’d rather come into work with me at oh-god-thirty and do what?Spend the day taking orders?Helping me with the test batch of new macaron flavors?Cleaning?”
She held up a finger, disappearing to spit, rinse, spit, then returning slightly damp and very bleary-eyed.“No, I thought maybe make some videos for the YouTube channel.”
She sounded so hopeful, but my knee-jerk response was to tell her to go back to bed and meet me at the shop later, after we’d opened.
After we had customers coming and going and it would be impossible to do any filming without, I don’t know, permission slips or something.
Bethany must have been able to see my thoughts on my face because her expression started to fall, and her shoulders curled forward as she retreated into herself.“Fine, whatever,” she muttered.“I just thought you were, like, really into this and wanted to make it work, you know?But I get it.You’re scared.One little taste of success and you skitter off into the dark like a skittery thing.”
Something about that made me smile a little.“Seriously?You’re a walking encyclopedia of creepy crawlies and the best you can do isskittery thing?”
She lifted one of her hunched shoulders.“I panicked.Too many choices—I didn’t want to say roach because ew, gross.But I couldn’t decide on another example at the spur of the moment so…” She fussed with the end of her plait and shrugged again.“I want to help, Am.Seriously.I mean, okay, I like doing it and I kinda want my name on it, you know?But this is also because you deserve to be seen, you know?”
“Bethany,” I groaned, feeling my face heat.“Look, I know you think this would be an awesome thing to do but—”
“But nothing,” she grumbled.“I know what I’m talking about, okay?Wait!”She suddenly brightened.“Hold on!And pour me some coffee!”She turned and bolted for her room, shouting something aboutproofandnot dumb, for fuck’s sake.
“Language!”
“Coffee!”
I poured my own, with my usual too much sugar and cream, and then made her a cup of mostly milk with just enough coffee to tint it tan, and more sugar than I’d ever let her dentist know about.By the time I set both cups down on the table, Bethany was rushing back with her laptop and a file folder covered in doodles under her arm, and a bright yellow flash drive shaped like a cupcake clutched between her teeth.She set it all down, showing me the flash drive with a proud grin.“I got it at Walmart last week, to store all the info for the Nice Buns videos.”
“What—”
“Sit, sit!Here, let me show you what I’ve worked up.”She flipped open her laptop, popped in the drive, and started pulling things up.“Drink your coffee,” she muttered.“And I’ll drink my almond milk that someone thought of coffee while pouring.”
“You’re too young for straight coffee.”
“Ugh.Whatever.Okay, look.”
Bethany had created complicated, amazing spreadsheets, charts, and graphs showing potential outcomes for, as she put it, diversifying Nice Buns advertising and promotions into the digital world.“Holy shit, Bethy, this is amazing.You did this by yourself?”
“Mika helped,” she muttered, blushing.“I’m not great with pivot tables.But look, look, look!”Another file was a brief study on different small businesses—mostly bakeries and crafters—with YouTube channels, detailing how they’d built engagement with both regular customers and viewers outside of their sales areas and how that increased revenue.I couldn’t help it—I found myself fascinated and, honestly, more than a little excited.“And,” Bethany added after she closed the last file—something I could only call a business proposal for letting her be in charge of the bakery’s social media and digital promotions.“You can totally leverage an increase in audience base into sales for your cookbook.”
“Whenever I have one,” I murmured, paging back to the first file, with the growth charts and projections.“Which is a whole separate enterprise.”
