Page 34 of Icing on Top

“Oh, I definitely did in the beginning,” she confessed with a reassuring smile.

There was hope for me yet.

“Jada opened up her bakery a couple years after we graduated, and it just made sense to work for her. Who wouldn’t want to spend all day with their best friend?”

I thought back to playing on the Cascades with Wesley. I missed working with my best friend and seeing him every day. He made everything more fun. Even those morning skates when Charlie had kept Sadie and I up all night.

“Sounds perfect to me,” I said.

While I worked on cleaning the last of the utensils, Zoe moved to check the cupcakes.

“Cooled off?” I asked, drying my hands with a paper towel.

She nodded with a smile. “Ready for icing.”

She headed off to get Charlie from the living room, the two of them returning within seconds. Charlie climbed back onto her stepping stool and looked over the cupcakes eagerly. I opened the silverware drawer to my left to grab a couple of knives for us to use, but Zoe stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“Absolutely not.” She looked utterly appalled as she eyed the butter knives. “You two are going to learn how to properly ice a cupcake.”

I tipped my head forward and raised my eyebrows at her. “You’re trusting me with the icing?”

“Possibly against my better judgement, but yes.”

Her lips tipped up on one side into a smirk, and my neck flushed warm.

“You have more faith in him than I do,” Charlie muttered behind us.

The chirping never ended.

Zoe made up two bags of icing that she called piping bags and then insisted that Charlie and I needed to be the ones to decorate the cupcakes so they didn’t look store-bought. She helped Charlie first, guiding her hands to squeeze gently and move in a circular motion from the outside to the middle for the perfect swirl. They repeated this for a couple cupcakes before Zoe supervised Charlie attempting one on her own. She was a bit heavy-handed, but I doubted anyone would turn down extra buttercream.

Zoe’s eyes met mine over the top of Charlie’s head, and she smiled softly before tipping her chin toward my daughter and mouthing ‘she’s amazing’.

Having Zoe in my kitchen and seeing her with Charlie was not helping these new feelings that had been bubbling up. Feelings that had spent years dormant after I lost Sadie. Whether for my own protection or simply because my heart needed time to heal after being shredded into pieces.

It also had me questioning whether my rule about no dating was worth keeping. And that scared the absolute shit out of me. I hadn’t played the dating game since I was nineteen. Dating as a thirty-one-year-old would already be vastly different from whenever I was a teenager without adding on the fact that I was a single father and a widower now. I came with unique baggage that most men Zoe dated probably didn’t carry around with them.

But I hoped that was something we would be able to figure out together. Even just the little time we’d spent working on the women’s rec league had shown that we made quite a good team. Tonight was even more evidence of that. Surely it would transfer over into more personal matters as well. Right?

Zoe stepped around Charlie to join me with a fresh piping bag in hand, and I quickly shook those thoughts away. For now, at least.

“For me?” I asked, hand placed to my chest.

She tried to roll her eyes, but her amused smile gave her away.

I took the bag from her and held it poised over the bare cupcake nearest me, trying to recall what Zoe had just told Charlie to do. In my opinion, I hadn’t used that much pressure, but the icing apparently felt different given how quickly it came rushing out, resulting in a giant glob. Definitely not a perfect swirl like Zoe’s and still worse off than Charlie’s cupcakes she’d done on her own.

Zoe giggled softly under her breath.

“Here.” She placed her hands over the top of mine—which did not help my focus at all. “Just a slight squeeze as you move in a spiral.”

She applied the smallest amount of pressure to my fingers. I followed suit, hyperaware of how tight my grip was now. The icing came out much slower this time as Zoe guided me.

“And then ease up once you reach the middle and lift.”

Was it the prettiest cupcake I’d ever seen? Not by a long shot; lopsided from my first solo attempt. It would still taste good, though. Maybe I could convince the girls to let that be a sample cupcake for us to enjoy.

Zoe used one hand to move the cupcake to the side and replace it with a new one. I didn’t complain when she led me through decorating another. Hell, she could help me with all of them if it meant that she’d stay this close. I was drowning in her sweet cinnamon and vanilla scent and happily so.