Page 50 of Blush Crush

Whether it’s frustration from the insomnia or I’m truly losing it, I give up on sleep and get dressed.

There’s only one place I can go to escape this torture.

CHAPTER 15

Ariana

WHAT DEMON POSSESSED ME?

I’m not a professional baker.

I can see why people might assume that—especially since one of my brothers is a classically trained chef—but I’m fully self-taught.

Back in high school I worked at the coffee shop part-time, when it was still called Jitters and Miss Lydia owned the place. She’s the one who taught me everything I know about coffee. How to source beans, what certifications mean, different brewing methods, roasting practices—things most people don’t even realize go into a single cup.

At the time, she outsourced the bakery items from a shop in Badger Canyon and split the profits with them.

I never intended to make coffee my full-time career. Truthfully, I had no idea what I wanted to do.

My parents encouraged me to take a gap year after high school to figure things out. It was harder than I expected—Layla had moved away for school, and it was the first time we’d ever really been apart—but that year ended up changing everything for me.

I went from working part-time to full-time.

The first six months were great. I still hadn’t figured out my long-term plans, but it felt good to have a routine, to carve out something that was just mine.

Then, unexpectedly, Miss Lydia had a massive stroke.

Her daughter had never worked for the business, so most of the responsibility suddenly fell to me. At first I thought I would drown trying to keep everything running overnight, but the opposite happened. I found that I loved it even more.

Not having Miss Lydia around was incredibly sad, though. I was determined to keep things running smoothly so that when she came back, the shop would be exactly how she left it.

Except she never did come back.

She recovered from the stroke, but her mobility never fully returned. Eventually she offered to sell me the shop. At nineteen, I was just optimistic and naïve enough to go to my parents and ask if they’d help me buy it.

I know how lucky that makes me. Not everyone has parents they can turn to like that, and I’ve never taken for granted the fact that mine believed in me enough to take the risk.

That’s how I ended up becoming a business owner before I was legally able to drink.

I was completely in over my head, but I refused to fail. I learned everything I could about running a business—taking online classes, enrolling in business courses, leaning on my dad’s expertise to better understand the financial side of things.

And little by little, I started changing things.

To keep costs down, I phased out the outsourced baked goods and started experimenting with recipes of my own. Customers were surprisingly into it, and before long every pastry in the case was made in-house.

It doubled my workload, but for the first time in my life I felt like I was doing exactly what I was meant to do. I didn’t have to stress about finding a career path anymore.

I’d already found it.

Miss Lydia passed away about a year after her stroke. But before that, she used to stop in whenever she could. She’d sit at the counter with a cup of coffee and watch the shop buzzing around her, always telling me how proud she was.

After she was gone, I decided it was time to make the place more me. I rebranded the shop to Novel, changed the décor, and combined my two biggest passions—coffee and books.

Every day I’m grateful this place somehow landed in my lap. And when it feels like nothing else in my life is under control, I come here and my nerves settle.

This place is my center.

But as much as I’m trying to get lost in baking, my mind keeps going back to everything that happened today. It gets especially worse when I move on to laminating the croissant dough.