"So," she begins, but Damon's right hand lands on her, placed on top of her thigh and her eyes fall on it and then raise to his face.
He turns towards her slowly, with a conspiratorial look. He puts the index finger of his free hand against his own lips, "Shhh, we're not safe yet, she could come back."
"She won't," Bonnie reassures him, rolling her eyes at his silliness, "She's busy with school."
"You trust people too easily," he complains, "Only because she's your friend and you've known her all her life you think she'll spare you if the place cards are not in the right shade of gold?" he shakes his head gravely, "Tzz, tzz, so naïve, Bon."
All the while his fingers are still gently gripping hers. Bonnie only realizes it because of the warmth of his skin, still so alien to her now that he's human. She tries to pull it back without calling his attention to her movement, unassumingly straightening the hem of her t-shirt.
"Place cards?" she asks back, with a concerned look on her face. "I don't think she mentioned place cards…"
"She's forgotten, and now she's going to come back… I told you!"
"She won't. I'll send her a message and tell her we'll take care of the place holders, too."
"Or," he piques, chin high as he illustrates his plan, "I could find us new identities and we can disappear from the face of the Earth."
"Great," she nods, humoring him, "There's just the detail about you getting married in less than a month."
"Yes, yes," he shushes her with a waving hand, "Sometimes life requires sacrifices, Elena knows. Ours will be a love that endures distance and time. She'll live in the sweet memory of my pelvic movements and one day she'll have a son she'll call Damon." he says, eyeing the board Caroline left in the middle of his living room.
"Can't you be a bit less graphic?" she snorts, grimacing.
"I was talking about my dancing," he objects, grimacing.
"Of course you were." Her tone falls flat as she turns her face away. She can't even bother to try and pretend she believes him. Since the moment she's back it's been a constant reminder of the man he is, of the way he knows her, of the way he cares. It's bothersome in a way his worse attitudes never were.
"You're cranky, your Judginess." He traps a strand of hair between two fingers and pulls it gently, "You must be hungry, I'm making breakfast," he decides, standing up from the sofa.
"We're supposed to go cake-tasting. I don't think having breakfast is a good idea," she calls as he's about to push the door that leads to the kitchen, "You can actually get fat now." He stops in his step, turning around, one hand still flat against the varnished wood while he raises the other to point an accusatory finger towards her, "Take that back."
Damon's offended tone and the look of outrage on his face force her to fight the smile that threatens to appear. He's such an ass, always getting in the way of the thing she wants to do—leave him behind, be angry at him for more than five minutes.
Bonnie just stands from the sofa, giving him a triumphant smile and he tightens his jaw, following her out the front door.
#
The weather is still quite mild, but Bonnie rolls down the car window to inhale some fresh air and clear her mind from both the residues of her jet leg and the commotion of the morning. Caroline left them a list of possible choices for catering and pastry shops, but they are nowhere near Mystic Falls and they had to drive for half an hour before they arrive to their first option. Bonnie lowers the volume of the car radio to call in advance and make appointments, so that they won't have to wait too long.
It's a little shop squeezed between a hash house and a cubicle used as flower shop, the pastry shop is called Bakery Les Fils de l'Artisan. Damon walks right behind Bonnie and once she stands in front of the door he reaches his arm out, pushing it open, chest pressed to her back, so that they almost step inside together. The place smells like warm rum and looks quite simple, everything is colored in white and pastels, and there is a gigantic bee drawing on the wall. They wait in line as someone places an order for the following weekend and when their turn comes Bonnie offers a polite smile as the waitress looks at her from behind the display widow.
"Yes, what can I do for you?" the girl asks, hair pulled back in a simple braid for hygienic reasons.
"I called before…"
"Oh, yes!" the girl slaps her hands together, looking at them with a pleased expression, "You're the couple that needs a wedding cake—"
"Actually—" Bonnie tries to cut in but the waitress seems too enthusiast about taking about weddings to hear about her objections.
"You're lucky. We have a few appointments today for cake-tasting so we have a few ready for you to try, while for all the others we have a catalogue for you to look through," she explains walking to her left towards a cabinet. The girl opens one shutter and pulls out one plate and two forks. "I'm sure you'll find something of your liking…" she continues, gesturing towards a little round table in a corner of the shop "…please, sit."
A man comes out of the pastry lab with a tray of éclair, puts it gently on top of the window display and goes back inside without looking at them.
The girl cheerfully places the empty plate and a ring binder in front of them, sitting one opposite the other, and disappears in the back of the show.
"Are you going to tell her I'm not the one getting married?" Bonnie whispers, embarrassed.
"What difference does it make?" he shrugs distractedly, browsing through the pages. The pictures of the cakes are placed into sheet protectors and there's a sticker on the corner of each one, with the number of the cake. "If she likes to think that, let her."
She doesn't feel comfortable not correcting the misunderstanding, but actually, Damon is right. She sighs and leans over to steal a look at the pictures. Damon presses his fingertips on the plastic and turns the catalogue in her direction so that she can better look at the cakes.
"Wow," she says pulling back, "that's…" words escape her as she stares at the metallic cake, with a stylized and glamorous art-deco look, with seven levels, the first of which is covered in edible fuchsia glitter.
"A punch in the eye? The Kardashian's idea of elegant? The last thing you see before your retina commits suicide?" he supplies, crossing his arms over the surface of the table.
"Well…there's fuchsia in it," she tries.
"And a few metals of unknown origins," he adds.
The girl comes back with a silver trail and four slices of different cakes, "I see you're already going through our catalog," she says with a smile. "That's our Hollywood Spark," she explains, looking at the picture of the first cake. "It's highly requested by all the couples that pick an old-Hollywood theme for their ceremony, but the order must be placed with three weeks of notice, at least. When is your wedding?"
"Soon," Damon answers quickly, "We'll have to do without the Hollywoodian feeling," he adds faking disappointment.
"I'm sorry, maybe I can try and put in a good word…"
"Oh, no, I'm sure we'll find something else just as pretty," Bonnie says, raising her hands. Okay, it's not her wedding, but she can't – in good conscience – pick something this flashy and sleep at night.
"Okay then, take your time" the girl replies, politely, leaving them to their tasting.
Damon cuts the point of the first slice with the fork and brings it to his mouth while Bonnie turns the page to find something classier. In the second picture there's a cake completely white, the only spot of color is a yellow flower on one side and a black ribbon around the base, all the rest consists of three levels of sugar ruffles. It's simple enough but she's not convinced.
"What do you think about this?" she asks Damon while she's still looking at the picture.
"Try this," he says, instead, bringing the fork to her mouth to make her taste the cake he tried himself. The fork brushes against her lower lip and she automatically opens her mouth, tasting the sponge cake and the lemon curd filling.
"Not bad, but I wouldn't pick this one."
"Me neither," he decides, before stealing a look at the picture she was talking about one moment before.
"That's too…plain?"
"I think the same," she replies, turning the page. Damon digs into another cake, while her own fork lays clean and untouched next to her.
The next picture shows the Country-Chic Happy Ending, a cake in two layers, the base is covered in large ruffles, looking a lot like a tulle skirt for little girls dreaming of becoming a ballerina, so she turns the page before Damon can see it and crack a joke about it. God forbid they choose it for the wedding, his comments would make Caroline's hair go white.
Again Damon feeds her a taste of cake, made with white chocolate icing and filling, and the addition of fresh raspberries. She savors it slowly, looking up at Damon to know what he thinks about it.
She studies him for a moment, before asking, "Too sweet?"
"Definitely," his taste buds are on a high since he was downgraded to the human state. When he was a vampire food never tasted this strong, they never had such complex flavors, and though he liked to cook he could never fully savor the fruit of his effort, unless his meal was alive. Now things have changed, and it's his sense of smell that has gone down the drain.
The fragrant, sugary air he's cocooned into makes it a good thing at the moment.
Bonnie is still turning the pages. Next comes a Naked cake – Damon remembers reading about the on the front page of one of those glossy magazines Caroline left in his house – a deconstructed cake with filling on full display.
"It's the latest trend in wedding cakes," he explains, gaining a perplexed look from Bonnie.
"You even know latest trends in wedding cakes now," she comments, ignoring a sinking feeling in her chest, "You're really committed." It's probably her stomach protesting because she's trying to fill it way too late. It's almost eleven in the morning and all she had was coffee.
"I saw the word naked on the cover of a magazine and it piqued my interest," he explains, "It's safe to assume that the interest died very quickly." Before feeding another piece of cake, "But this…" he says as she opens her mouth, pink tongue appearing behind her pearly white teeth, "This can keep me interested."
Bonnie savors it slowly before telling him that "it's delicious".
"I knew you'd like it," he says, sounding particularly satisfied.
"But it's black chocolate and orange. It clashes with the color palette," she piques.
"You live to crush my dreams, Bon."
"And I'm so proud of it I'm considering buying a bumper sticker," she informs him, going back to turning the pages of the catalogue.
"Oh, this is beautiful," she cries out ecstatically, looking at a painted cake, with Monet-inspired design.
"Yeah, but you can't have it," he says, "The palette is way too important."
"Shut up," she replies turning her attention to yet another cake. She stares at artsy, marbleized, stained-glass effect way.
"Maybe with the right colors—" she begins.
"It could appear in the next adaptation of Beauty and the Beast," he cuts in, gaining a dirty look.
"You say that like it's supposed to be a bad thing." She frowns looking down and turning the next page. Damon just stares at her with a grin. She might die once a year and take down the most nightmarish baddies, but don't touch her classics or she's going to sulk very hard at you.
The last cake he makes her taste is a hazelnut-almond one, filled with dark chocolate ganache, mocha buttercream and raspberry preserves. The very moment her lips close around it he informs her that "you're not going to like it".
"Why did you make me try it, then?" she asks, once she's swallowed.
He just shrugs his reply. "I'm really into feeding you things, I guess," without much thought. "Eating alone when your food doesn't kick and scream feels quite lonesome."
He enjoys making their meals. He likes having her back and sharing this kind of daily thing with her, though his loneliness never made him take into consideration the idea of filling her empty chair with anyone else. Caroline is his friend but still not his first pick for a quiet meal together, even if she wasn't on a liquid diet. Matt eats at the office, and he's still having trouble not picking on him for his humanity, though he's on the same boat, now. Alaric has such poor taste that he can't tell an asparagus from a zucchini, so eating with him is hardly an enjoyable experience. And yeah, dining with Elena is nice, with the right setting and some ambiance, and you know you're going to burn all the calories by the end of the night, but he doesn't want to think, now, about how it will feel translating that in a daily occurrence. Maybe because she eats like a bird and he feels frustrated with that, maybe because she's all compliments and it stops feeling good after the first couple of hundreds of times, or maybe just because they'll have a lifetime of eating together so it's stupid to fill their quota starting now. All in all, he's been waiting for Bonnie to come back to not be alone anymore at the kitchen table.
"Did you like it?" he asks as Bonnie steals a glance towards the waitress, to make sure she didn't hear him.
"Not really," she mutters, and he grins at that.
The familiarity they use in doing these kinds of things, predicting each other's reaction, reading each other's thoughts on their faces, doing small things for each other, it's something he can slip easily into, like wearing his favorite jacket. The love he's always known it's something you rip into and tear off, with teeth and blood, until it leaves you spent; while this, this is good.
Bonnie writes down the cakes they like the most – just two of them – and a few fillings that could work, trying to imitate Caroline's meticulous organization scheme. Or maybe just to put her mind into something safe, something manageable, something that will occupy her time and her consideration of not blurring the confines around her.
They leave Les Fils de l'Artisan and it takes them other forty-five minutes to arrive at their next stop, The Cookie Encounter, large and pristine and run by a young couple. There are tables in one corner, and on the chairs sit pillows in the shape of colored macaroons. There is a plastic flow falling from one corner of the tables or the other, looking like dripping chocolate. Those are the only spots of color in an otherwise entirely white ambiance.
There are two couples already sitting at two different tables, tasting cakes and scrolling through a pre-printed sheet, checking-off text boxes and writing down colors. Since they don't see anyone else around Damon and Bonnie just go and sit at a free table and half a minute later a young woman dressed in a flowery blouse comes to greet them with an apricot smile.
"Hi, you must be the couple that called this morning," she says, without waiting for a reply, giving them the pre-printed sheet and a red pen, "We expected you sooner."
"Yes, we did, but actually—" Bonnie wants to explain the situation, because it's getting awkward by the moment. She's surrounded by couples everywhere and it's embarrassing. She feels like a fraud, sitting next to her best friend, accidentally playing the part of his lover in the mind of everyone that sees them, but Damon interrupts her carelessly. "Where it says allergies, are we supposed to know that about every guest?" he asks, looking up from the sheet paper. Damon is not interested in giving explanations. He doesn't pay much attention to the platitudes, has no interest in them. "Can't you just give us an epinephrine syringe as a free gift when we buy the cake?"
Looking at him immersed in all that white, the blue of his eyes is so vivid Bonnie almost forgets where she is.
The woman chuckles and turns to Bonnie with a more genuine smile then the one she offered before, "Your fiancé is very funny," she says, "I'll be back in a moment with our cakes," she adds, rushing away to the back of the shop.
"This is something you were supposed to do with Elena," she says, her slumped posture giving away her aggravated mood.
"Yeah, but she's busy," he replies, sounding distracted as he watches the exhibit cakes.
"But she's the bride," she insists, feeling frustrated with all the misunderstandings piling up. "She should want to do this." Before Kai put her down for a nap Elena's world revolved around Damon, and before that it revolved around Stefan, and now that she's about to get married and have the family she's always dreamed of while they were growing up, she bails on the preparations and leaves her to handle it. She can't handle it. She doesn't want to. She doesn't even know where to start.
"I am only asking you to eat cake with me. You'd think I've asked for your firstborn!" he protests through his teeth. Bonnie turns her eyes on him, feeling the slight of guilt. There is a palpable frustration in him, a sense of anger that feels so raw only when he's vulnerable.
"That's not what I'm saying," she replies, calmer.
"No, you're saying that the thought of someone imagining you in love with me is unbearable for you," he says starkly, trying not to look at the happy couples around them.
It is. It actually is unbearable. The white ambiance takes on a glowy blue shade. Bonnie lifts her eyes from the table top to meet Enzo's.
"This is what my worst nightmares were made of," he jokes, looking around.
"I love you," she says, half amused by his words, half saddened by the situation they are all in. She'd like to say more, but those words are all that come to mind. It's all she wants to tell him. It's what to tell herself. That they are still here, alone in their little world the way it was before Damon came back.
There's a soft smile playing on his lips, his eyes are sweetened by endearment. "I think we both know that I love you more," Enzo replies, leaning with his elbow on the table to wink at her. "Everything's okay," he reassures her, "Eat some cake for me, gorgeous."
She doesn't want to think about what Enzo's words meant while everything turns white once again. It didn't mean anything. He's always been like that—I love you more, I want you more—because he needed her to know that she was important for him. It doesn't mean any more than that, and if someone mistakes her role in Damon's life, it's no big deal because she knows better.
The waitress comes back with a tray filled with tiny plates and a little degustation of their selection. The lively icings seem to clash with the mood at the table but she doesn't notice it.
"I think you might enjoy thes—"
"Actually," Damon interrupts her, "We need to clarify something," he starts. "See, we are not—"
Bonnie reaches out under the table, squeezing his knee with one hand to stop him, "We are not sure those cakes fit our color palette," she says, preventing him from telling the woman the truth about them, "Our wedding planner was thinking about gold and fuchsia."
"Oh, that's fine," the waitress reassures her. "Whatever you like, we can change the colors the way it will fit your wedding the best"
"That would be perfect," Bonnie replies, sounding very relived hearing the good news.
"You can compile the sheet paper I gave you and keep it for yourself until you're ready to place your order, but don't forget to check the availability. Once you're sure, you can come here and give it back to me. We only accept checks and credit card."
Once they are alone Bonnie takes her hand away from his leg. Damon feels the loss and it's almost unsettling.
"What will she think now?" he asks somberly, before trying to crack a smile. "If she noticed your arm moving she's probably guessing you wanted to give me a hand job under the table."
Bonnie rolls her eyes and sticks the fork hard into a piece of cake in front of her.
"Ouch," he grimaces at the sight, amused by her violent reaction. Bonnie loosens up her hold on the fork and scoops up a piece of sponge cake, reaching out to bring it to his lips. He looks her in the eyes, brushes his lips together before half grinning at her peace offering. Bonnie's wrist moves back and forth in front of his mouth in a silent request to accept her gesture and he happily opens his mouth and lets her do all the work.
Damon chews slowly and looks at her as she tastes the cakes herself using the same fork., the way he did in the other pastry shop. He crosses his arms on his chest ostentatiously and she doesn't protest as she keeps feeding him the different kind of cakes.
On the sheet there are listed all the ingredients of the different cakes so that they can make a more informed choice. Every dessert must be requested with a different notice and there are different limits for the possible layers and colors.
"The illustrated cake is cute," she says, staring at it, "You can have them write your vows on it," she suggests, turning towards him.
"I guess it's a possibility," he answers, "Once I write them... Though, I don't know if it would get Caroline's approval."
"Mmm, probably not," she considers, "Or… you could go for the rosette cake," she tries again, "That's quite the classic." The design adds a unique, luxurious dimension without skimping on the elegance factor.
Damon uses the pen to scroll the lines to the times and colors available for the rosette cake but as he does so, Bonnie's eyes fall on one of the text boxes. "Oh, they make personalized sugar figurines to put on top of the cake!" she says, slapping his shoulder enthusiastically.
He turns his head amused, "Yeah, okay, okay, I seem to understand we absolutely want them," he says, checking the box.
More possibilities for the design of the nuptial cake seem to be buttercream, geometric, monogramed and ombrè. Plus, there is the chance to have a trio, quartet or quintet cake, which could give a full display of the color palette.
When they leave the place it's little later than two in the afternoon and the only place left to visit is the catering that will serve the rest of the food. Bonnie is already full with all the sweets so when they arrive to their destination, Damon suggests leaving the car in the parking lot and taking a walk around.
His leather jacket is on the back seat of his Camaro and he grabs it before getting out of the car.
The weather is getting grey and gloomy. There's a light wind and it's a bit chilly. He's wearing a short sleeved t-shirt but he's not used acknowledging some basic variations in his body like any other human would. He never had a problem with cold before, unless he hadn't fed in awhile, so he just hands it to Bonnie when he catches her brushing her hands together trying to ignite some warmth.
They walk in comfortable silence for awhile until he breaks it. "I know you imagined doing this with someone else," Damon says, fists sunk into his pockets.
"What?" she asks, blinking at him and slowing her pace.
"Cake-tasting, and all that stuff that comes along when you decide to tie the knot," he explains, "I know you thought you'd do them with Enzo, one day, and it's hard for you now, but I'm glad I can do this with you, so…thank you."
His sudden moments of vulnerability always seem to sneak up on her and leave her stranded, at the mercy of his blue eyes. The jacket fits her loosely and he pulls at the neck of it to better cover her when the wind seems to pick up.
She doesn't know how to respond to that, except with "I'm glad, too," because in a complicated, self-destructive way, she truly is. Because she's dead set on sparing the feelings of someone that died and did find it in him to let her go, though she won't do it and yet not Damon's. Because he's her best friend and the fact that she could not imagine him involving her in his life the way he did before was what sent her packing in the first place. Next to him she was part of something, their little team, their own council, and then Elena came back and she didn't want to be around when the moment he'd cut her off would come.
She's not sure that it's not something she'll have to face once he's married and he must manage his limited, human time, but right now, she can only feel the warmth of his leather jacket enveloping her. It smells like him.
"Wanna walk some more?" he asks her with a light smile on his soft, pink lips.
Yeah, probably once he's a married man he won't have as many chances to be with her the way he did before, to do the things they did before, but they'll still be friends, he'll still nag at her every time she listens to The Bodyguard Soundtrack and it's not like spending time with him organizing a wedding can hurt anyone, can it?
Bonnie only smiles back and nods her answer.