i’m publishing a new book! here’s the first chapter!
Dough is a contemporary M/F small town romance that’ll be available for purchase on December 23rd; HOWEVER! you can, if you like, preorder it right now, as preordering is a way of helping out independent creators like myself who don’t have a marketing department at our disposal. i’d be really, really grateful if you did.
here is the link!
and here, as promised, is the first chapter:
Chapter 1
Lucy Laufenberg’s Christmas display was, once again, the talk of the town.
Last year, she’d constructed an entire cookie forest, with wafer trees and coconut snow, through which a herd of gingerbread reindeer cavorted – one with a fat juicy cherry on its snout – their respective positions and size carefully calculated to create the illusion of depth. An architecturally-accurate cabin of pocky and marzipan had nestled in the background, a snickerdoodle pathway leading up to its front door, beside which stood a beaming fondant Mrs Claus.
Adorable, her customers had said.
Genius, the mayor had said when he’d come round for a photo op.
A waste of God-given talent, Pastor Carl of the local megachurch had said in reaction to the banner she’d put up over the display reading ‘Happy Holidays!’, and she was proudest of that.
This year, just to really fuck with Pastor Carl and his Facebook Flat Earth freakshow, the theme was cosmology. The Earth, a marzipan geoid, orbited a sun made from yellow cake, both elevated by thin, transparent plastic rods to seemingly hover against a black liquorice backdrop. The stars were one hundred and seventeen vanilla cookies, nestled amongst nebulas crafted from purple-pink candyfloss and dark chocolate pizzelle singularities.
To render her creation adequately festive, she’d added a bright red fondant sleigh being pulled by a fondant rocket ship, racing a pair of gumdrop meteors.
“Heck, kiddo,” said her Dad when she texted him a picture. “Guess that engineering degree wasn’t a total waste after all!”
The inevitable self-loathing spiral that line would have usually initiated was, thankfully, quickly cancelled out by the already-existing spiral of anxiety she’d been caught in all morning.
The magazine people were coming round at noon.
There would be photographs taken.
In between shovelling batches in and out of the oven, she’d dusted and polished every last inch of the shop. While one hand was giving a customer change and handing over a dozen hot croissants in a brown bag, the other was applying Tarte Maneater Voluptuous Mascara. When Antoinette arrived, dapper as ever in her waistcoat and tweed hat, Lucy left her in charge while she ducked into the kitchen to finish bullying her dense brown locks into an Amy Winehouse-style beehive decorated with delicate snowflake hairpins.
“Very nice,” said Antoinette, her white sleeves already rolled up and busy placing shortbread triangles into a pale peach box emblazoned with their looping logo: The Sugar Palace.
Lucy glanced at one of the six full-length mirrors that lined the shop’s walls to make it look bigger than it was, studying her gold nails, sparkling heels, and very favourite cute, deep green babydoll dress with frills and big, functionless wooden buttons running down the front, currently obscured by her apron. “Not too much?”
Her best friend and staunchest ally was firm: “No such thing as too much. You’re a goddess.”
“Aw.”
“Feel good? Feel powerful?”
“Yeah. Totally. Totally powerful.”
“Good. Now, there’s your coffee. Have a sip, then process what I’m about to tell you with patience and decorum.”
One month older than her, Antoinette Reynolds was the only childhood accomplice who’d stuck with Lucy all these years and Lucy was still ashamed that it had taken her so long to recognise that she had anorexia – long enough that her by-then business partner, ever proud and fiercely independent, had been well into her first battle with recovery when the truth had come out. The last half decade had brought marked improvement for them both, health-wise, though Lucy was still compelled by habit to check with a glance how brittle Antoinette’s nails were looking as she gently placed the mug in Lucy’s hands.
Lucy shut her eyes. Took a sip. Set the mug back down. “I’m prepared.”
“He’s back.”
“Back?” she hissed, spinning towards the shop’s front window. “No! No, no, no! He’s visiting his grandma in Atlanta! He’s not due back until tomorrow!”
Though her cookie cosmos partially obscured her view, through the candyfloss clouds and gleaming glass she could just about make out a thirty-year-old pickup with duct tape where its back window should have been and thick mud coating its tires. “Dammit. This is not okay, Ant. I went out of my way to ask his brother when he’d be back. The magazine people can’t see him. Absolutely not.”
Antoinette sighed, absently brushing a strand of her artfully messy bob out of her eyes. “Lucy, I get it. I do. This sucks. It’s a blow. But let’s be rational here, right, and let’s not make any hasty… Lucy?”
Lucy was already out the door.
He’s not getting away with this, dammit. He’s not.
0
Her holiday displays were only one of many ways Lucy worked her ass off turning her little shop into the cutest thing this side of town.
The front of the building was painted duck-egg blue with creamy yellow stripes. Dense flowering bushes grew in wooden tubs on either side of the main window, dribbling purple petals everywhere. A small cobblestone path meandered down to the road, flanked by a dozen lawn flamingos wearing bonnets and berets. Off to the side stood a perfectly-pruned lemon tree from which hung a charming handmade birdfeeder.
To be clear: Lucy hadn’t been trying to make the colourless, featureless block across the road crummy by comparison. If anything, she’d been trying to draw attention away from its dowdiness.
Alas, the result was the same. As The Sugar Palace had blossomed, Murkins’ Laundromat had become ever greyer and meaner-looking.
(As had its owner, Antoinette was fond of saying.)
But you couldn’t get to Strut Murkins without first wading through an army of half-feral relatives.
A grubby adolescent nephew, Kyle or something, sat warming his ass on the pavement next to the truck like he was guarding it – like there was a single human on Planet Earth who might want to steal it – and smoking a cigarette Lucy tore right out of his mouth as she passed.
He leapt up with a strangled ‘The fuck? Bitch!’ that elicited an amused chortle from the tall man with the world’s most God-forsaken mullet striding out the front door carrying a bulging garbage bag; Bronco, Strut’s younger brother by a decade, twenty-something and looking, as per usual, like he’d spent the morning traipsing around the woods.
(Maybe he had. Rumour had it he was a poacher.)
Getting in Bronco’s face, Lucy snarled, “You let the kid smoke? He’s a child, for God’s sake.”
She punctuated her sentence by throwing the cigarette on the ground and stomping on it, her sparkling heels failing to deliver the decisive ‘thud’ she’d have preferred.
“Hell with you, lady!” Kyle screeched.
Bronco shrugged, which was his default response to everything. “Eh. He’s a li’l shit.”
Then something else, low and incomprehensible as he glanced away. Like her, the Murkins clan wasn’t from round these parts. Some trailer park in Alabama – that was the rumour. Their accents supported it. Lucy got the distinct impression that those accents thickened, quite deliberately, when they were talking to people they didn’t like.
“You said your brother wouldn’t be back until Wednesday,” she insisted.
Another shrug. “Strut does what he likes.”
Bronco resumed walking, flicking his fuming nephew’s ear as he went by. Gritting her teeth, Lucy stepped inside the laundromat and was instantly assaulted by the only thing worse than holiday carols; holiday bro country.
‘That Christmas tree ain’t the only thing getting lit this year!’ sang FGL, making her wish she’d brought a baseball bat.
The twins were perched like exotic birds atop a tumble dryer, all gangly limbs and bangles, Priss painting her nails black while Barb groped her own left breast.
“Would you cut that out? Customers gonna think you’re a perv,” sneered Priss, tossing back her long bottle-blonde hair.
Barb, drabber and with a buzz cut, snapped, “The internet said this is how you do it! Catch ‘em early and the doctors can zap ‘em with a laser. Catch ‘em late and they gotta hack your tits clean off. I’m being fucking responsible, you whore. And you should be, too! You wanna work in Hollywood one day, yeah? How’re you gonna do that if they’ve hacked off your tits? Not like you’ve got anything else going for you.”
“Where’s Strut?” Lucy interrupted, before they could descend into one of their habitual screaming matches.
Seemingly at the sound of her voice, the baby, playing in a plastic laundry basket placed below the twins’ dangling feet, started to cry. Dee, real name Dorothy-Amber-Leslie Murkins, was the only member of the family with big, beautiful green eyes, doe-like and dewy. Everyone else’s were blue and squinty. Lucy endured ten seconds of silent, identical squints before giving up and stalking over to the back room.
“He’s busy!” Barb called.
“So am I,” muttered Lucy, pushing the door open and finding Strut Murkins standing there with his dick out, pissing into an empty Coke bottle.
Stream unfaltering, he growled, “Y’all mind?”
He was a broad man with close-cropped dirty blond hair whose body language had two settings – looming and skulking – and was, Lucy guessed, somewhere between forty and forty-five, with deep frown lines and thin lips prone to curling.
“Told you he was busy!” Barb chimed as Priss cackled. Evil little rats.
They all expected her to clutch her pearls and flee. Damned if she’d give them the satisfaction.
“A word, Mr Murkins,” she said icily, glaring at the bottle, because what was the alternative? Pretend it wasn’t there? “Please.”
At last, the stream trailed off.
Strut gave his dick a brisk shake before tucking it back into his pants and screwing the cap back on the bottle. “No time to chatter today, girlie. Some of us work for a living.”
He put the bottle down on the floor, just close enough to Lucy’s feet that its contents would splatter all over her shoes if it toppled.
Her eyelid twitched. Behind her, Dee was still wailing, atonal and shrill. “You have a bathroom.”
“Toilet’s fucked. Plumber won’t be here ‘til late afternoon. Nothing be done about it,” he informed her airily, then added, with a nasty grin, “unless a fine, charitable person like yourself feels inclined to let us use the one in your shop?”
Inspecting her nails, she said, “Mm. I’m afraid that won’t be possible today. Photographers from Transcendentally Domestic will be coming by. The shop needs to be pristine. The whole street, ideally. That’s why I’d appreciate it if you’d move your truck to somewhere a touch more discrete.”
She’d deliberately adopted her snootiest voice, knowing that it was the fastest way to piss Strut off and that pissing him off was the fastest way to getting what you wanted out of him. He’d explode, call you names, make threats, and then Bronco or the twins would reluctantly intervene and tell him to chill out and cooperate before someone called the damn police.
The police, she’d noticed, were the only people, the only entity that not a single member of the family cared to fuck with. Antoinette’s leading theory was that Strut used the laundromat to smuggle cocaine in and out of town.
True to form, storm clouds were already gathering on Strut’s face.
“Hell’s wrong with my truck?” he growled. “That’s my legal goddamn property. Can park it wherever the fuck I like, thank you oh so very much.”
“Well, no. You can park it where the law says you can park it. Now, at the moment, where it’s parked wouldn’t be a problem – if it weren’t for the picture, Mr Murkins. I believe we’ve already had a conversation about the picture.”
Dee unleashed a particularly piercing cry and Strut cursed and stuck his head out the door to yell, “Brats! Y’all deaf? Feed the fuckin’ baby!”
“Already did!” Barb hollered back.
“Then check her fuckin’ diaper!”
He turned back to Lucy with folded arms and a sneer. “Picture on the truck’s a damn masterpiece. Took Bronco three days to spray paint that shit on.”
“No, it didn’t. It’s an anime mermaid with comically huge breasts. It looks like it took half an hour and as I have told you before, it’s not in keeping with the neighbourhood’s tone. I run a bakery renowned for its cookies and sweets, Strut. I have little, impressionable children coming in every hour of the day. What will their parents think, seeing that… that monstrosity?”
“Eh. Frankly, you got off lightly,” he drawled with a shrug. “Bronco’s a furry. He wanted to make her a sexy fox ‘til I put my foot down.”
“Regardless. Please move the truck. At least until the magazine folks have come and gone. Then you can move it back, with my blessing.”
She graced him with a tight smile.
Scratching his stubble and pursing his lips, he said, “They’re gonna – what? Do an article ‘bout that weirdass school science project you got in your window? Why? Who gives a shit?”
Prick.
“Transcendentally Domestic is currently putting together a series on small female-owned businesses and the challenges of managing a start-up in this economic climate. It’s actually very interesting.”
Bronco burst into the room, almost knocking over the piss bottle and brandishing a phone. “Strut! Call for you. Think it’s Sergio.”
Taking it, Strut gave her a final glance, grunted, “Answer’s no,” and stalked out.
“Your lesbian friend’s looking for you,” Bronco told her, oblivious to her clenched fists and gritted teeth. “Says the magazine woman’s here.”
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