103.)

Blossom's eyes fluttered open, slow and soft and groggy, and her brain tried to put the pieces together.

"Hey..." Blossom muttered, inching out from under Amy. "Cupcake, you okay?"

I was not okay. I didn't try to keep Blossom from waking up. I didn't try to sneak off downstairs. To be honest, I didn't even try to stop crying.

And boy, was I crying. I was actually crying. And the more Blossom woke up, the more I cried. By the time she was sitting up and pulling me into her arms, I was bawling like an actual child. Low-volume wailing, sniffling and choking on my own breath, the whole thing. It was wholly unattractive.

Blossom had gotten herself into a half-seated position, with her legs tucked underneath her butt, and she was gently playing with Amy's hair while she did her best to calm her with coos and soft sounds.

"It's gonna be alright, cupcake, baby girl, it's okay, shh, shh, I promise. What's happening? Bad thoughts? Blossom's here, sweet girl~"

There was no stopping me. I was a runaway train and there weren't any tracks. I was a full-sized locomotive crashing through the walls of a three-story shopping mall like everything around me was glass and paper. Blossom's words dissolved in my ears, like a barrier was in place to keep them out.

But she held me all the same. She played with my hair. When I pulled at my fingers, she held them too.

It must have been another hour before I melted into a puddle of self-loathing and disgust. Tears kept coming, but I didn't have the energy to make them into a big deal anymore.

"Thank you for staying with me, Amy."

Blossom wasn't sure if the praise and gratitude would be received with the same level of earnestness that had been intended, but she wasn't entirely sure how to handle this kind of situation. Crying girls in Blossom’s life came in two flavors: crying over love, and crying over being drunk. This didn't really fit into either camp, so she was just doing her best.

"What was all that about?" Blossom asked, when she thought she could get a word out of Amy. She was exhausted and had to keep rubbing her eyes. Blossom wasn't an elegant waker-upper.

"I dunno..." It was a lie. Or, maybe a half-lie. I knew what made me anxious, but I didn't know why it mattered so much. My thoughts were just moving so fast, and... I shook my head.

"I'd like to... to get up now," I muttered. Laying in bed would make it worse, so much worse. I had to stay busy until my sleepiness was a bigger bully than my brain. I wanted to bake.

"Let's go for a walk, okay? Let's get changed, put something warm on, and go for a walk down the beach."

It was cold, yes. But that was the point, kind of - the shock of the cold could be good for Amy. Or maybe it wouldn't be. But anything was probably better than letting her slip into her self-reflective compulsions.

I shook my head and sat up. My body felt like cement, all my joints grinding on one another. My head felt like cotton candy, spinning around and around and around, getting knotted on itself.

"Walking doesn't help," I muttered. "I need something to do with my hands. Not all night. You can stop me later, just... for a little bit. A tiny bit..."

"Wanna play pat-a-cake? That'll keep your hands busy?"

And cake even sounded baking related!

I sighed. She wasn't getting it. I'd tried other stuff. Sure, games like patty cake might work for a while, but nobody wants to play patty-cake for two hours. And the noise in my head was becoming more than I could tolerate. I pulled at my fingers again and shut my eyes tight to keep them from spilling more tears. It wasn't working.

"Alright," Blossom conceded. "Let's go bake. Together. You can teach me as we go. I've always wanted to learn."

It was a concession that Blossom didn't want to make, but it was looking like the only out. She hoped that her framing was enough to make a difference, because she knew full well that Amy would refuse her out of hand with the notion of 'well I don't wanna inconvenience you' or something equally banal.

"Kay..." I wasn't sure about this. I didn't bake with other people, and relying on someone else to do the work for me seemed... frankly, anathema. The whole point was to keep my hands busy, so why would I need Blossom?

I climbed out of bed and very quickly remembered how I was dressed. That I was wet. The incongruence wasn't as damaging as the thickness between my thighs. Walking felt... difficult. It annoyed me faster than I could get to the bedroom door. Blossom handed me my glasses and I pulled at my fingers in front of me.

"I have to change..." Please don't hate me. Please.

"Okay. Do you want me to change too, would that be more comfortable for you? Should I preheat the oven or something while you change?"

Blossom was trying to be accommodating. It wasn’t her default, but she was sure she was capable of it.

"No, uh... whatever. You can do whatever..." I took a few steps backward out of the room and turned into the bathroom. I closed the door behind me and locked it.

Stripping out of the diaper and onesie was easy. Unfortunately, I didn't bring a spare change of clothes. My head was already spinning, filled with thoughts of Blossom and I baking together, of that shitty cliché movie stuff where people put cake frosting on each others' noses or something. If I hadn't already cried for an entire hour, I probably wouldn't have been able to leave that bathroom.

I wrapped a towel around myself and went back to the room. Already, things were feeling automatic. I put on panties and pajamas. My usual pants, my usual t-shirt. My body moved without me having to think about it. Down the stairs. Into the kitchen. Blossom was there...

"I think... we'll make... éclairs..." I was trying to think of two-step foods: something for her to do, something for me to do. I wanted to keep us from getting in each other's way. Or rather, I wanted to keep her out of mine.

"Oh those ones with the chocolate on top and the creamy stuff inside? That sounds like fun to make. I'm your assistant, so you teach me what to do and I'll do my best not to make more work for you."

The thing about that was… Blossom’s presence would mean more work for Amanda. But not in a bad way, hopefully. More like in a… help-burn-out-her-anxieties-quicker kind of way. And besides, who didn't want a tall, tanned, and stacked-like-a-Jenga-tower girl in a onesie and diaper to help out in the kitchen?

I preheated the oven to 400, then I started to gather ingredients from the cabinets. Blossom's beach house was well and truly stocked; I didn't need substitutes or anything.

"You're going to boil milk and vanilla extract" - working with vanilla beans was going to be too annoying to teach right now, and it didn't make much difference - "and use a different bowl to mix flour, sugar, and salt."

Blossom was nodding along with me, but I couldn't tell if she was actually getting any of this down. Whatever. She could ask if she had questions.

"Then pour the milk into the mix, but... slowly. And keep whisking while you're..." I sighed. This was annoying. "Just use the stand mixer you have. And get me when you're done."

"Uh, wait..." Blossom prompted, just when Amy turned away. She turned back around. "How much flour and milk and stuff?"

"Oh... right." I pulled out my phone and went to the Notes file. Èclairs. I sent the numbers in a text to Blossom's phone. It only had the measurements on it; no instructions. I'd forget the exact numbers a lot, but I never forgot the steps; do something enough times and you know the routine by heart.

Blossom went to boil milk and I fell into the rote motions of making the pastry. Water, sugar, butter, salt, bring to a boil. Add flour. Another few minutes on the stove. After that, I had to wait until the dough cooled off, so I switched to making the chocolate icing on the top.

Blossom, it should be noted, was an engineer. And that meant that she was exceptionally good at following complex formulae and directions. And while this whole baking thing was new to her, once she saw measurements she felt a lot less uncertain about the whole thing. So while the milk slowly came up to heat, she began to measure out the dry ingredients.

"You realize some of these ingredients are in grams and some are in cups? That enrages my engineer brain~"

I didn't respond. Eventually, Blossom had to get my attention and it felt like being slapped across the face. I stared blankly at her as she pointed to the pot on the stove. Oh, right...

I taught her the rest of the steps to make the filling, then went back to what I was doing. People had a lot of different ways they made the shell of an éclair, but the easiest was turning the temperature down after 10 minutes. There were some more complicated ways to do it that I liked, but I wasn't in an experimental mood. I just wanted to be distracted. I set the egg timer. In the meantime, I started on the second batch.

At first, Blossom did the piping and I did the dipping. That was a disaster, so we switched. Two of the éclairs were dunked entirely in chocolate sauce. I didn't really care; the end product wasn't as important as the process.

I was on my fifth batch when Blossom stepped in. We had been baking for three hours. If it were summer, the sky would have been the inky blue of the coming day.

When someone had a problem with addiction, compulsion, or malformed coping practices, it was kind of like having a friend who sleepwalked; it was always hard to know where and when to toe the line. For Blossom, she waited for three hours before she finally put her hands each on Amy's and gave her the warmest smile she could.

"Can you close your eyes for me for a few seconds, cupcake? Just for a second? We're going to do a little counting game together, and then we can figure out what's next from there, okay?"

Blossom had done her best to keep her onesie clean, but she had failed. She had spots of flour, pastry cream, and chocolate staining the garment.

"Um..." Blossom interrupted me at a particularly convenient time. Maybe she had been watching, noticing moments. I had finished piping new pastries, but the oven needed another four minutes.

"Eyes closed," she repeated.

So I obliged.

"There's two of us. One. Two. There's one beach house. One. How many lights are there in the beach house? Can you count them without opening your eyes?"

Lights...

The kitchen had a big overhead one. The living room had two standing lamps. Technically the downstairs bathroom had four. The bedroom... I wasn't sure about that one. At least two, one for the bedroom and one for the bath. Upstairs, my room had an overhead light and a bedside lamp. There was another bedroom up there, so I assumed the same. And the upstairs bathroom was... two?

"Fifteen?" I guessed.

"Oooh, that's such good counting. Okay, how many doors? Can you count how many doors? Without opening your eyes?"

This was something Blossom used to use when she was like ten years old to get her brain to stop being noisy.

"I dunno..."

"Try?" Blossom encouraged.

I sighed and kept my eyes closed. My brain was wondering about the egg timer. Doors...

Front door, sliding door. The only ways in and out of the house. Three bathroom doors, three bedroom doors. Three closet doors. An upstairs cupboard in the hall. A downstairs coat closet. That was it.

"Thirteen." I was sure of this one.

"Great! That's how many I counted too. Now I'm going to put some of my fingers in the palms of your hands, can you count those for me?"

She'd do two on the left hand and three on the right.

"Five?"

But then the egg timer went off. I opened my eyes and hurried over to the oven. Sure enough, the éclairs were done. I grabbed a potholder and pulled the tray out and set it on the stovetop. I went to put the last tray into the oven, but Blossom was in the way. I stopped in front of her.

"C'mon," she said. "It's late."

"But it's a waste not to cook them," I argued.

"They take forty minutes. That's forty more minutes before we can sleep. Aren't you tired?"

Honestly? I was. Blossom's number games had pulled me out of my automatic processes a little bit, and I wasn't even thinking about starting another batch. It was just... these ones were ready to go! I puffed out my cheeks with a bit of annoyance.

"Come on baby girl, it's okay to have a little bit of waste tonight. I promise. It's okay."

There was a sincerity there. A warmth to Blossom’s smile, a love to her tone, an actual wish and desire to do right by Amy. Of all the stars that made Blossom the universe that she was; it was this star that burned the brightest.

I exhaled and slumped my shoulders. I was pretty tired... and all my anxiety from before was baked into fifty or so éclairs. I looked at the messy kitchen with displeasure.

"Let me fill the ones that just came out of the oven. You do the dipping. Then we'll go to bed."

Blossom looked like she wasn't sure about that, but it might have been the best offer she would get. So she agreed. "Deal."

I kept my word. Blossom turned off the stove, and - after finishing the final tray of éclairs - we left the kitchen a mess. The dough was left out, and it would have to be thrown away in the morning. The éclairs were put in some large plastic containers and put in the fridge; they would make a good breakfast. With a flick of the lightswitch, the kitchen was thrown into darkness and Blossom led the way up the stairs. I followed her, and every step felt like another weight added to my shoulders. By the time I reached the top, I felt like I'd fall over and pass out right there in the hallway.

"I'm a mess," I whined as Blossom ushered me into bed. My clothes were dusted in flour.

"We'll do laundry in the morning. I have to wash my onesie anyway."

"Spot clean the chocolate first," I warned her. "And I have a Tide pen in my backpack. Put that on before bed."

"You got it, cupcake."

Blossom did exactly that. She went into the bathroom, stripped out of the onesie, and spot cleaned the chocolate spots. Following that, she came back into the bedroom to fetch the Tide pen - wearing only her diaper - before she went back to the light of the bathroom to use it.

When Blossom came into the room topless, I didn't have my glasses on. I could see the shape of her, the color differences. I could see that she had nothing but a thick white diaper between her legs. I could see the curves of her chest, but I couldn't really make anything out of it. It was like finding really old porn on the computer, the kind your parents wouldn't even get mad about.

When I blinked, she was gone. When I opened my eyes again, it was morning.