The Icing on the Cake by Elodia Strain Page A

asked, raising an eyebrow slightly.
    “Yeah.” I took a spoon off the table and filled it with a large amount of the cake’s sugary icing. I placed the spoon in my mouth and let the icing melt on my tongue. “Definitely the best part,” I said, my tongue sticky and satisfied.
    Isaac leaned back in his chair and wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin. “Maybe I should have asked them to forget the cake and just bring out some icing.” He smiled into the napkin.
    I twisted my lips embarrassedly. “Very funny.”
    Isaac and I continued to talk and joke with each other as I finished my slice of cake and then enjoyed a few bites of Isaac’s. Okay, nearly half of Isaac’s.
    Then the water I had sipped during dinner suddenly caught up with me. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” I asked Isaac. “I need to make a trip to the ladies’.”
    “Of course.”
    I took one last bite of Isaac’s cake before walking to the restroom.
    While in the ladies’ room, I checked my teeth for anything unsightly that may have crept between them during dinner. After my teeth-check, I began practicing smiles in the mirror, trying to decide which one to flash at Isaac when I walked back out to the table. Not because I liked him and was practically bursting with flirtatious energy that I absolutely had to get out. Of course not. Just because it was the last time we would go out and I might as well make it pleasant for him.
    I was practicing a smile I thought was the perfect mix between flirty and mysterious when a thirty-ish woman entered the bathroom. She saw me smiling at myself in the mirror and looked at me like I was a nut.
    “Just practicing,” I said sheepishly.
    I quickly exited the ladies’ room and headed back to the table, flashing my flirty-yet-mysterious smile at Isaac. I was pleased to see that Isaac was smiling too. But it only took a second for me to realize that he wasn’t smiling at me. No, he was smiling at a woman who was sitting in my seat. A gorgeous woman with lovely green eyes and shiny auburn hair.
    He was smiling at Rona Bircheck.
    The smile fell from my face, and I moved my feet quickly toward the table. “Rona what are you doing here?” I asked when I reached the table. I glanced at Rona’s left hand and noticed that the huge diamond ring she had flashed at me just hours earlier was no longer on her finger.
    “I was just finishing dinner with a friend when I saw you two come in. I came over to meet your handsome date.” Rona smiled nauseatingly at Isaac. Engaged or not, she was the same Rona.
    “This is Isaac,” I said, plastering a friendly expression onto my face.
    I waited for Rona to give me back my seat. But she didn’t. So, since it was a two-person table, I had to grab a chair from a nearby table and squeeze in next to Rona. It was ridiculous.
    “Yes, he already told me his name,” Rona said. “He also told me that you two are working together on some article. It’s nice to see that you’re writing again after what happened last time.”
    I bit my tongue. And not figuratively either. I literally bit down on my tongue. Pretty hard, too. It was the only way I could stop myself from saying something less-than-nice to Rona. I mean, she knew what had happened with my last writing assignment because Carrie had told her, and it was just like her to bring it up in front of Isaac.
    “My photographer has been letting me down lately,” Rona said, talking to Isaac more than to me. “So, I’ve asked Isaac to bring a portfolio down to my office. I bet he could help me sell houses.”
    “I’m sure he could,” I said.
    “Here is my card, Isaac.” Rona handed Isaac an ecru business card. “Call me and we’ll get something arranged.” She put extra emphasis on “call me.”
    “Sounds good,” Isaac responded politely.
    With her trademark poise, Rona stood up from the table and swayed off without another word to me.
    “This is great,” Isaac said after a moment. “I could really use some more