Merlin rubbed his ear with his wrist and smiled down at the newest customer.
"Good afternoon, sir," he said. "Anything I can get for you?"
"One eight-inch standard topping devil's chocolate message cake." The customer didn't look up from his phone.
Merlin smiled a bit more fiercely, as though he could command his customer's full attention through the force of excellent customer service. "Always a hit," he complimented, passing over the notepad. "If you'll go ahead and write down your message, your cake will be ready in three hours."
"One hour."
"Pardon?" Merlin's smile faltered.
"I'll pick it up in one hour."
"I'm sorry, sir," Merlin said crisply. "Your cake will not be ready in an hour. It will take three hours to bake, cool, decorate, and package your cake."
The customer didn't reply for a moment. After a minute of tapping keys, he slid his phone into his breast pocket and leaned over the counter.
"I will be back in one hour, and at that time I will be picking up my cake." He pulled the notepad out from Merlin's limp fingers and scrawled out his message.
"If you're back in an hour, your cake will not be ready," Merlin beamed. He could feel his smile growing increasingly lackluster.
"Now you hand me a receipt." The customer slapped the notepad back on the counter.
Merlin printed off a receipt and passed it over.
"What name should I put on the order, sir?"
He looked down at the notepad—the customer's writing was legible enough—and when he looked back up, the customer had vanished.
He spent a panicked half hour baking the cake and setting up icing-cut to scale- on a parchment paper tray in the freezer. He gave the cake a few minutes to breathe before sliding it into the fridge to speed-cool.
It wouldn't be his best cake, but it would be pretty close to on-time.
He peeled the sheet of frozen icing onto the frozen cake, dabbed the sides so that everything was covered, and added edging swirls. Merlin twisted the white icing tube and began writing, in curling, elegant letters, the message.
Always more fish in the sea, bitch.
He had been trying to decode the message for the past hour, and the only conclusion he could come to was that his customer was ordering an angry break-up cake. It seemed like something one would read on the internet, not a message that would pop up among the typical Happy Birthday's, Happy Anniversary's, Congratulations', and Go Team messages.
Merlin was pretty sure it was against store policy to write swears on message cakes, but the bakery section was advertised as having a cake for every occasion, not every occasion except bitter break-ups. He decided a compromise: "Always more fish in the sea" followed by a hand-drawn, two-tone picture of a big-chested dog with long eyelashes in sailor's hat. He sprinkled some salt on top of the cake, which wasn't standard, but fit thematically and made Merlin feel better about the rush job. He boxed the cake and set the label over the picture of the dog. Its wagging tail looked a bit like a "b", and he wasn't interested on being around when the customer realized that Merlin had deviated from the order.
He looked up at the clock and congratulated himself for getting the job done in eighty minutes. He peered out at the rest of the store, half expecting the customer to be grunting on the other side of the counter, but there was no one on the other side of the cake display.
The customer didn't return for another half hour at least, but nonetheless Merlin procured a smile to go with the box—not that the customer paid him any notice—and bid him a good day.