Page 1 of Love Bites

COMING AWAKE INthe middle of the night sucked.

Seriously. It just blew a hearty one. One eye then the other creaked open. I stared at the ceiling, willing myself to go back to sleep but my brain was already at warp eight and set on a direct course to intercept the Borg. Damn Borg. Stay out of our quadrant!

Creeping into my mind at—I glanced to the side but saw only a cat butt. So I pushed up to one elbow to gaze over Daisy Duke—the calico queen with brown fur on her backside and halfway down her back legs that looked like short shorts, ergo Daisy Duke whereas her brothers, Bo and Luke, who were not calico. Mostly only female cats were usually calico so Bo and Luke were plain old tuxedo cats all from the same litter because genetics were wild. They were down by my feet keeping my toes—

“Okay, stop, drop, and roll.” Shit. No, that was for when your clothes were on fire. And Conor said I never paid attention to his fire safety spiels. I felt the flood of information rushing into my head like an open tap. My pulse was spiking. Forcing my eyes closed, I took three cleansing breaths. In through the nose out through pursed lips. I found my mantra and began thinking it with each breath. Om Mani Padme Hum. I loved this mantra. It was a six -syllable Sanskrit mantra associated with the Buddhaof Compassion, or so said the online meditation app I had recently signed up for. I’d never really meditated before but of late the pressure of watching my sales grow smaller and smaller every month had started pushing me towards little anxiety episodes. Just tiny things, not what I would call an “attack” or anything. Only moments of fluttery heartbeats and raspy lung function that would result in me feeling a little woozy and—

“Damn it, Haider, focus on the mantra. Go away intrusive thoughts! Begone worrisome words! Fare-thee-well fretful feelings!”

The cats all made that sleepy little mewl at me. A polite feline way of telling the human to lie still and shut his claptrap. Claptrap. That’s a funny word. Claptrap. Claptrap. It was a word my grandmother would use. I bet that was where I heard it. Grandma, or Mamie as she preferred to be called, had probably said it at work. She was known for being quite feisty with some of the suppliers, which was why I usually handled all the ordering for the shop. No one wanted to tangle with a tiny seventy-year-old French chocolatier. Oh damn. I did need to see about ordering more of the fun factory tour tickets for the upcoming Founders Day event. Maybe this year I would give away two tours instead of one. Anything to drum up some interest in the shop. Sometimes the people who did the tour bought things on the way out. Sales were needed badly or else my little dream was going to go poof, and not in the cute Parisian way Mamie said poof but in the catastrophic way. A bad poof. A horrid poof. A poof that was more like a fiery explosion of all my hopes and dreams and—

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I slapped the bedding with both hands. The moon peeked through the slats of the miniblinds as I lay there panting. I reached out to find the lamp on the nightstand. The room flooded with soft white light. All three cats lifted their heads then leveled death glares at me. “Sorry, it’s one of my badnights.” I wiggled free of the weighted blankets pinning my legs to the bed then sat on the edge of the mattress, my toes resting on the cool tongue-and-groove flooring of my apartment. It was a small space above Harmony Chocolates. I’d given up the little cottage by Harmony Lake a few months ago to save on rent. Thankfully, this space was nice. Lots of windows to let in the sun, great ambiance and an open floor plan. My bed and dresser sat behind a stunning wooden screen Ryan had made for my twenty-fifth birthday. The folding screen served well as a tasteful wall to separate the living room/kitchen/bath from where I slept.

Daisy, the biggest beggar of the bunch, padded over to me. Her black, orange, and white head bonked my elbow. Automatically my hand went down her back for comfort.

“Okay, so we’re up. It’s three-fifteen. What say we have some cat treats? Well, not me, obviously. I’ll find something that isn’t chocolate to nibble on, and then we can come back to bed.”

I rose, slid my feet into my little pink fuzzy slippers, pulled my robe over my bare backside, and made my way to the kitchen area. The cats all followed, sitting at my feet as I shook out three treats for each cat. Bo gobbled his, Luke pushed his aside—he didn’t like the seafood flavor this morning—and Daisy ate her delicately then fell on Luke’s like a starved jackal. A fight broke out. Much hissing and swatting and poofy tails. “Hey, no, no Luke. That is not how we treat our little sister. You didn’t want them.”

Luke shot me a dark look then went back to bed, tail in the air. Bo stalked off to sit in the window and stare down on Caldwell Crossing. Not that he was going to see much in the middle of the night. Our little town wasn’t exactly a roaring mecca of nighttime frivolity.

I plugged in my tea kettle and shuffled to the bathroom, my favorite spring robe slipping from my bare shoulder. Aftertaking a piss I washed up, taking a moment to frown at the thirty-year-old business failure staring back at me. My eyes were red from lack of sleep, my curls dull and lank, and my usual sunny smile nonexistent. Worry. It rode a dude hard.

Moving to the kitchen, I made some tea. A light little berry blend Mamie enjoyed when we took our lunch breaks—Mamie, me, and Crocus. I then grabbed a tin of tiny butter cookies from Mamie’s home kitchen and plunked my ass into a chair at my desk. I tucked my feet under my butt, pink fuzzy slippers tickling my nude backside. It was nice. I’d not had anything tickle my ass in many a month. The gay men in this town were limited, and most were my closest friends. I wondered what the threesome were up to right now. Maybe I could call someone and tell them all about my concerns.

No, that was dumb. Ryan, Conor, and Sam were all sleeping like little lambs. Ryan was probably dreaming of what he could create from a slab of white ash, Conor was probs lost in a dream where he rescued someone from a fire and got a kiss on the cheek from said rescuee, and Sam was likely lost in a nighttime meander through the woods to whisper to all the maple trees on his farm. ‘Give me all your sap you sexy sugar maple you. Yeah, that’s it baby, give meallthat sticky sweetness!’ then some sort of crazy-ass human-slash-Ent knothole love fest would take place. Although, Ents aren’t technically trees, they’re sentient beings that resemble trees and serve as protectors of the wood so it would be a human-slash-bark-skinned-being-hookup, which seemed a little less weird than sticking your dick into some random knot hole. I mean a squirrel could be nesting in that hole and bite your cockhead then where would you be? At the ER getting rabies shots with a bandage on the tip of your dick, that’s where you’d be.

I blinked out of that weirdness. “Okay, Haider, you need to either speak to a therapist or get laid.” Since there were nomental health providers in our small town or available gay men, I was zero for two. Daisy leapt from the floor to my lap. I buried my nose in her soft fur and breathed in the subtle smell of fabric softener.

“How do you always know what I need?” I asked in a soft whisper as her purrs eased the tension that had knotted that spot between my shoulders.

I never did get back to sleep but I did order tickets for tours, set up a sale page on my website, and designed a new chocolate truffle centerpiece for Conor’s birthday in a week. Sleep was overrated. Who needed rest? Pfft. Not this guy.

“HEY BOSS.”

I jerked awake, eyes flying open, to find Crocus and the other three employees staring at me. My manager, a hulking man with a bald head sporting a crocus tat growing up the back of his neck onto his shiny pate pointed at my face.

“You fell asleep wrapping the maple creams,” Crocus, aka Leonard Pillen racing pigeon enthusiast said, as if I didn’t know I had done just that. I totally didn’t know. “You want to get some coffee or something maybe?”

“Coffee, yeah, coffee sounds good. Keep up the good work gang,” I told the foursome of ex-offenders who worked for me. They were all good men, hard-working, and incredibly thankful for the job. Crocus had been with me the longest. He was the very first hire from the Stonebridge Foundations Compassion Project for Ex-offenders to be placed with me. And here he had stayed. He now rented a nice little house in Stonebridge, raised pigeons, and dated a pretty lady named Dora who owned a bike rental business over by the Parker Trail. Did we have some issues reintegrating at times? Sure. But overall, the experiencehad been a good one for me and for the guys trying to get their lives back on track. A few folks in Caldwell Crossing werenothappy but they could go take a flying leap. A few people—probably the same few people—weren’t happy with an energetic gay twink openly bouncing around town. I had two words for the haters.

Tough. Titties.

“I’ll get on the phone and see if we can get someone to run out and check the dark chocolate enrobing unit,” Crocus said as I rose from my seat, tiny little silver wrappers fluttering to the floor. The guys—Tim, Mike, and Dupont—all wearing white aprons, poofy hair nets, and disposable latex gloves, looked at me with concern. Crocus had no hair but he still wore the netting, citing if his men had to wear them then so should he.

“Great, thanks. Tim, you can have my seat.” I plucked a silver foil wrapper from my cheek, blushing hotly, then exited the production area, passing the conveyer sitting silently at the moment. Shades ofI Love Lucyflickered inside my groggy head. The room was small, but then again the shop itself was not large. I’d dreamed of buying the old record store beside me for years to open up the production room, as well as the gift shop, but the cost of prime real estate on Main Street kept me in perpetual dream mode. Also, I couldn’t handle another loan. I was barely paying my workers and the suppliers.

Mamie was in the front of the shop, chatting away with a customer who was perusing the mint chocolate fudge. Petite, silver curls, and perfect skin, she gave me a look over the top of her little square glasses, her bright blue eyes—so much like my mother’s —ran over me from head to toe. She pointed to the office. I nodded, slipped around the display cases, and ducked into the rectangular space where I had stuffed a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet. The color scheme from the front—ivory and sky blue—continued into the office with white wainscotingmeeting blue-painted walls. The shop was so small. The displays filled with sweet treats were packed in tightly, making passing through them almost impossible. There was always candy on the floor that someone’s sleeve or purse knocked off the display. We needed room. But room would cost money…

The coffee pot sat atop the filing cabinet covered with Tigger stickers. I poured myself a cup and took a seat at my desk. Mamie had brought in the mail so I rifled through it, sorting the junk from the bills. When I came to the thick ivory vellum envelope with the famous goldBfor Brauning Chocolates I scowled. Did these people never give up? I’d trashed a dozen emails from them after reading the first. As if I was going to sell out the shop that Mamie had opened back when the Beatles were releasing theWhite Album. Please, mega-corporate chocolate conglomerate. Fuck right off with that. I’d sleep on the conveyer belt before that happened.

So when their emails went unanswered—I guess a line of shit emojis as a reply was probably considered rather rude by the German employees in acquisitions at Brauning who handled emails, sorry poor working peeps—they began sending letters. Fancy ones in thick envelopes. I’d tossed each one into the trash can beside my desk. Which, with a snarl, was where this last one went.

I wished I had the money they’d spent on sending me propositions to sell. I could have paid to get the enrobing machine fixed. Well, maybe not, but the sharks sent a lot of letters. Dozens. All reminding me I was failing to keep Mamie’s dream alive. I was a loser in loveandbusiness. With god as my witness if I had to sell out to survive it would not be to this Phillip Brauning, VP and Head of Acquisitions. That old German dude could sit on top of the Alps and blow his big cough drop horn. Were the Alps in Germany? I Googled. Yay me, they were! Oh crap, the cough drops were Swiss though. Well, hecould sit atop the Alps and do something German. Drink beer. Eat sauerkraut. Pull on those fancy shorts that German dudes wear to dance German dances.

God, I wassoAmerican. I really needed to learn more about other countries. Maybe when I lost the shop I would have lots of time to educate myself about Germany as I would be unemployed and living with my grandmother. Or worse, moving to Florida to live with my parents. I shuddered. Nope. Nope. No alligators for me.

My head met my desk as a whimper escaped me.

---