55 Why Don't You?

Talking about the length of relationships before getting married really caught Justin off guard. Emily had never talked about anything like that with him in person before. Already knowing what kind of person her dad was, he couldn't blame her for her views on men but it still made him sad. Would he ever get the chance to prove that they weren't all like that? That he wasn't like that?

She said all those nice things about him but he knew she only did it because she was worried about insulting him. Even so, his heart fluttered a bit to hear the love of his life refer to him as the 'best guy ever.' He wasn't though.

Emily thought she had known him for two years and still didn't know much about him. Justin had known her for eight and knew almost everything about her. The deception weighed on his heart.

Part of him wanted to come clean. The other part wanted everything to blow over without him having to say a word.

"We need to make two kinds of frosting," Emily announced. "The stiff kind for the outer lines and the runny kind to flood the inside of the shapes with."

Justin blinked at her stupidly. It was as if she was speaking another language.

She noticed how lost he was and laughed. "It's okay, you can just hand me things when I ask for them and watch the master at work."

He nodded. He could do that.

Emily expertly whipped up the two different types of frosting and separated them into a bunch of little bowls before adding food coloring and scraping the frosting into plastic bags. He was dumbfounded. What sorcery was this? She pulled out a soft serve shaped cookie and outlined portions of the cookie with different colors of stiff frosting, repeating the process on all of the ice cream cookies.

"The stiff frosting needs to dry before we can use the runny frosting so it's best to do all of those parts first," she explained before switching her efforts over to outlining the llama cookies.

Justin was amazed by how perfectly connected her lines were. "How many hundreds of hours did you have to practice to get your frosting lines so straight?"

"It was more like dozens," Emily said, still squeezing out frosting. "Let's just say there were some very ugly cookies in my house before I got it down."

He was still impressed. That level of motor control would be unattainable even if he spent his entire life practicing. He couldn't even catch a ball.

"These ones look pretty cool so far."

She grinned. "Wait til you see the finished product. I could totally sell these."

"Why don't you?"

She stopped frosting and looked at him. "What?"

"It could be a side business to help pay for textbooks and stuff," Justin suggested. She enjoyed doing it anyway so wouldn't it be a good thing to make money off of what she liked? "All you'd really need is a website and I could help you set that up."

Emily continued to gape at him before setting down the frosting bag and leaning against the counter. "Actually, I've heard of people doing that before with these kinds of cookies. It never even occurred to me to try it myself."

"It's something to consider at least. Maybe you could try starting it over the next break. Unless you're going home again?"

She shook her head. "My mom could barely afford to fly me home for Christmas this year. I won't be visiting my family again until the summer."

"I don't have anything going on then either. I could start building the website while you make the fanciest cookies you can to take pictures of to use for advertising."

"I would have to do one of every kind of cookie cutter I've got…I have no idea how long that would take…" Justin could see the wheels in her head turning. She was actually considering it. "I'd have to at least triple my cookie recipe…I don't think I have a big enough mixing bowl! Or enough little bowls for all the colors I'd have to make! And I'd have to buy a ton more food coloring…I can't afford this."

Emily's face sunk and Justin's heart sunk with it. It always boiled down to money, didn't it? He wanted to offer to pay for all the supplies but how could he do that in a way that didn't seem weird or condescending?

"It was my idea; I could buy the stuff to get you started."

She shot him down immediately. "No, I couldn't possibly take advantage of you like that. You're a poor college student too."

He nearly laughed at how far from the truth she was. Hmm…he had an idea how to make her less uncomfortable. "I got a Jungle.com gift card for Christmas that I have no idea what to do with. I could get all the stuff there for free."

He could see her wavering. She bit her lip, hesitant. "Are you sure? I'd hate to inconvenience you. You could use it for textbooks or something next semester."

"All of my textbooks are only sold in the bookstore. It's really not a big deal. All I ask is that you give me some of the cookies as compensation."

Homemade cookies from the girl he loved…Justin couldn't think of anything better. He would have helped her regardless but he wanted her to feel like it was a fair trade. Emily was all about fairness.

"For the help you're giving me, you can have all of them!" she said happily before returning to filling in cookies.

It took a lot longer than Justin would have expected but once the cookies were done they stepped back and admired her work as they took pictures of them. Emily insisted on taking a picture of Justin holding up the octopus cookie, which he said looked the coolest earlier. She then caught him off guard by wrapping an arm around his shoulder and saying "say cheese!" right after he took a bite.

He looked pretty dumb in the selfie she took because he was eating but she looked extra cute, having closed her eyes and given the cheesiest grin possible while using her fingers to make it look like Justin had bunny ears. It was a ridiculous picture but he loved it because it was the first picture ever taken of the two of them.

"You need to send that to me," he said as casually as he could.

"Sure thing!"

His phone dinged and he could feel his heart pounding as he saved the picture to his phone. He changed his wallpaper from a picture of Cookie that had been there forever to the selfie and held the phone to his heart when Emily wasn't looking.