Title: Cupcakes

Pairing: Spain x Fem!Romano

Rating: T for Roma's mouth

I'm a young man, just out of college, Antonio Carriedo said to himself as he watched a tomcat wind itself around his poor unsuspecting female cat. He watched as the stupid male cat then immediately walked off, hissing loudly. He sighed. I'm a young man, just out of college, and all I've been doing with my life for the last four weeks is watching my cat be half-molested by a cat who has no idea what he wants.

Antonio watched as his cat- his Isabella -walked off after some male cat he didn't even know. He rolled his eyes, then got to his feet and walked from the sitting room of the house he was currently living in. He would follow his cat until he reached wherever the owner of the other cat lived, and then he would tell him or her to get their filthy cat away from his Isabella!

Filled with purpose for the first time since the end of college, he walked outside and tried as sneakily as he could to follow the two cats. Isabella kept glancing back at him and smirking though, so he knew he wasn't being as sneaky as he wanted. Oh well. As long as he found out where that weird boy was taking her, he was fine.

The tomcat led Isabella down alleys, up drainpipes, and over hedges. Antonio did his best to follow them both from the sidewalk, jogging slightly to keep them in sight. Stupid cats.

The cats led him quite a ways across the quaint seaside town that he lived in. He lost sight of them for a couple moments, but by running he was able to catch sight of them disappearing into a house through a small cat flap set into the door. He rolled his eyes at Isabella's antics and walked up to the house, knocking sharply on the door.

"Coming!" a woman yelled from inside. "Just wait one damn second!"

Something about the voice seemed incredibly familiar, though he couldn't quite pinpoint why.

Footsteps sounded from inside the house and suddenly the door was yanked open. A familiar woman was standing in the doorjamb. She had curly dark brown hair held back by a red headband, green-brown eyes that were widened in surprise, and a face he knew better than he knew his own.

"Holy... fucking... shit." she said. "Antonio? The fuck are you doing here?"

"Lovina? Lovina Vargas?"

Lovina crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe. "How did you get here? Don't tell me you actually came looking for me, did you? After all these years you decided you wanted me back?"

"No!" Antonio said, scowling slightly. "I didn't come looking for you, my cat walked in here a couple minutes ago and I want her back!"

Lovina sneered at him. "Figures. After dating me for four years in high school you come for your cat."

"Well... well, yeah. I love my cat."

Lovina slammed the door in his face, then proceeded to lock what seemed like four hundred locks.

"Awww, c'mon! Loviiiiii! I just want my cat back, then I'll leave you alone!"

"Fuck off!" she yelled from inside. "If your cat and my cat want to have cute little babies then they can!"

He knocked fruitlessly on the door again. "I don't want Isabella to have babies! I don't have enough room for a bunch of kittens!"

"Then they can live at my house!"

"Loviiiiii!" Antonio sighed, then turned around and leaned against the door. Maybe there was some way that he could bribe her... Hmm... Well, she liked cupcakes, didn't she? Of course! He could go buy her some cupcakes from that bakery/coffee shop she liked! They had the best cupcakes, all homemade and fancy-looking- not to mention delicious -and he remembered that she had been particularly fond of the caramel cappuccino that they made. That's what he would do! A half-dozen assorted cupcakes and a caramel cappuccino should be enough to get his cat back!

Pleased with himself, Antonio stepped away from the door and walked down the path leading from Lovina's house to the sidewalk. Luckily the bakery wasn't too far away; he would know, he had walked there enough when he and Lovina had dated, and even sometimes during college- and not because he wanted to accidentally run into Lovina! ...Well, okay, a little bit because of that, but also their cupcakes really were divine.

He made it to the bakery in around seven minutes and ordered six cupcakes and two coffees. He then proceeded to wait for another minute or so as they made his coffees and got him his cupcakes. He paid, grabbed the bag that they put everything in, then walked back to Lovina's house in another seven minutes.

He once more knocked on the door. "Lovina? Lovi? Um, I came back to bribe you with cupcakes an coffee."

Silence.

"Your favoriiiiiiite! I've got two red velvet with cream cheese frosting and two vanilla with buttercream frosting and those double chocolate death thingies that you like so much. Oh, and caramel frappuccinos as well! So let me iiiiiiiin."

There came a shuffling from behind the door and then a letter slot in the middle of the door opened up. Antonio bent down and looked through it, bright green eyes meeting Lovina's browner ones.

"Show me," she said shortly. Antonio lifted up the bag to show her the name embossed on the side, then pulled out the container of cupcakes and opened it so that she could see.

"Fine, come in." The letter slot closed with a sharp snap! as Lovina began undoing all the locks on the door. Antonio rolled his eyes at this. Lovina was so paranoid. Back when they were dating in high school he had thought it was cute.

The door opened and there stood Lovina. He hadn't gotten a good look at her last time, but he could now see that she didn't look any different than she had in high school. She was still curvy and shortish and perpetually scowling, although at the moment it was the type of scowl that meant she was grateful for the cupcakes but didn't want him to know it. She was so easy to read if you knew how, and Antonio had spent four years learning to read between the lines she drew with her speech and body language.

She stepped back out of the doorway and he took a slow step inside. He couldn't help but wonder if she would grab the cupcakes and lock him back outside, but to his surprise she let him in without trouble. Maybe she had grown nicer as she had grown older.

"Come on, we can have a hostage exchange in the kitchen." She closed the door and then moved easily in front of him, allowing him to hide the smile growing on his face. She was still so cute when she tried to act all tough and stuff. Of course, that didn't mean that she wasn't tough, it was just that sometimes she tried to act like a big, gruff, burly guy with a beard instead of a small woman of twenty-three.

She led him into the kitchen, which was smallish and pretty, somehow. It had four walls, two of which were dove gray and the other two a sort of creamy yellow. Sun filtered in through the lacy curtains of a small window and a short hallway led down a step to a backdoor, which was painted a cracked and peeling white. There was a breakfast island in the middle of the room surrounded by a couple of tall stools. A vase of slightly wilted pink roses adorned its center, and to the right of the vase was where he set down his ransom.

She headed immediately to one of the white-painted cupboards lining the walls to get plates for the cupcakes (he still remembered how strict she had been about cleanliness), so he took that time to look at the paintings on the back wall, facing away from the direction he had come.

There were four of them, all smallish. One was of a very decorated vase holding a bunch of red poppies. The vase and the background were both grayish- though different shades and the vase also had a golden trim -which made the poppies seem an especially fiery shade of scarlet.

There was another painting of a mirror. It was so realistic that he almost expected to see his own reflection in it, which kind of creeped him out and made him feel a bit like a vampire.

The next painting was of a faucet dripping into a porcelain bowl already filled halfway with water. There were ripples going all through the water in the bowl, and one droplet of water had been depicted falling through the air.

The last painting was of the night sky. It was painted mostly in navy and indigo, which made the bright cream of the moon and the dark gray of the clouds stand out all the more. Toward the bottom of the painting there was a strip of deep green that he took to be trees.

"Wow, these are beautiful," he said as Lovina began setting the plates on the island. "Did you paint them?"

She blushed and ducked her head so that her hair would hide her face. "Yeah. But they're not that good."

"Are you kidding?" he asked, turning around to face her. "They're gorgeous. I bet you could sell them for, like, a bajillion dollars!"

"A bajillion, huh?" she asked, smirking. He could tell that she was pleased though, from the way she didn't meet his eyes.

They both sat down at the island and he proceeded to remove the cupcakes and coffees from their bag.

"That coffee had better be warm, or no cat!"

"Shh, it's alright, I had them put in those thingies that keep them warm."

"Oh, okay then." He handed her her coffee and she took it with a small sigh, wrapping her hands around the outside to warm them, not that it was particularly cold that day.

"What kind of cupcake do you want?" he asked as he opened the cupcake container.

"Um... the red velvet."

"Good choice," Antonio said. Slowly, carefully, he reached out and grabbed one of the two red velvet cupcakes, making sure not to mess up the frosting (a skill he had perfected back when he and Lovina had been dating). He set it in the middle of Lovina's small plate, then reached out and grabbed a buttercream cupcake for himself. They both began unwrapping their cupcakes in silence. Neither of them spoke until both cupcakes were relieved of their wrappers, a habit they both still had, apparently, from their dating days.

"So," Lovina said after taking a bite of her cupcake, "your cat likes my cat, apparently."

"Your cat's the one that's been lurking around my house all the time!" Antonio said accusingly.

"Yours is the one who let him," Lovina pointed out with an affronted look. She grabbed her coffee once more and took a sip. Antonio followed suit, feeling several degrees calmer as soon as the warm liquid touched his tongue. There was something magical about caramel cappuccinos. Or maybe the something magical was drinking caramel cappuccinos and eating cupcakes with Lovina once more.

Because, despite his best efforts to forget her in the arms of many other college girls, he was still in love with her. And not a small, burning passion that could be easily hidden; no, he loved her with a fiery heat that distracted him from normal life. He wanted her. Want- a completely different feeling than just regular want. Want. With all of the fiber of his being.

"Let's not fight. Let's just eat these cupcakes and when we're both done I'll leave with my cat and we'll never see each other again, okay?" It hurt to say the words, but he knew he had to. Lovina didn't love him anymore; that much was clear, had been clear since they broke up just before graduation. And, just like the Fairy Godmother had said in Shrek, if you really love someone, you let them go. You let them grow. He had been Lovina's first everything: First kiss, first boyfriend, first crush. He wanted to let her grow away from him and find the one man she would really love... Even if she was the woman he really loved.

"Fine," she said, sounding subdued. "We won't fight, and after this, we... won't see each other ever again." She didn't meet his eyes as she picked up her cupcake and took another bite.

Antonio nodded, and the two of them sat in silence. By the time Antonio had finished his cupcake he was feeling a roiling sickness in his stomach, and it had nothing to do with the tooth-coating sweetness of the cupcake's frosting. He would never see Lovina again after today. He wondered if he could honestly live with that.

"How was your cupcake?" Lovina asked tonelessly.

"As good as always!" Antonio forced himself to smile.

Though he wasn't hungry at all, Antonio forced himself to pick up another cupcake and set it on his plate. Lovina soon followed suit, though she seemed, for some reason, just as reluctant as he himself was.

"Just two more cupcakes each and we won't ever have to see each other again," he joked half-heartedly.

"Yeah," she said thickly.

Silence. A silence so thick that Antonio couldn't bring himself to force another bite of cupcake, and apparently neither could Lovina.

"You know what, I'm sorry but I can't do this!" she said suddenly. She stood up and walked around the table and yanked him off of his school. For a moment he thought that she was going to kick him out, but all thoughts of that fled his mind as she pressed her lips to his. They were as soft as he remembered, and she pressed them to his just as shyly as he remembered, and she wrapped her fingers in his hair just as he remembered.

He pulled away somehow, though she kept clutching him back. "Wait, I thought you hated me."

She rolled her eyes, then pulled him in for another kiss. "Why would I ever hate you, fuckass."

He shrugged. "I don't know. I thought that you did- I thought that's why we broke up in the first place-"

"No... I don't even remember why we broke up, but I do know that it was pretty much the stupidest thing I've ever done." She was blushing again. It was as cute as he remembered it to be, as cute as it had always been, and he leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.

"Well, I still love you," he told her in a whisper. She rolled her eyes, then shyly met his.

"Yeah, I love me too."

He laughed. "Good."

"Yeah."

She kissed him again. "Too bad you have to leave once the cupcakes are gone," she murmured against his mouth, her eyes closed.

"We don't have to eat them," he whispered back.

And they never did.

A/N WELL, SEEING AS THIS IS 2532 WORDS I THINK THIS IS THE LONGEST ONESHOT. ONCE AGAIN I SHOW FAVORITISM TO SPAMANO. THAT IS WHAT I DO, APPARENTLY.

This was requested, once again, by VivaAmerica.