Cops Prefer Croissants, 3/3
Title: Cops Prefer Croissants
Author: tripatch
Rating: PG
Pairing: Monroe/Nick
Summary: Bakery!AU. Monroe runs a bakery, Nick is clueless.
Notes: IMPORTANT: I'm ret-conning my own fic, because apparently it has a plot now. Who knew? Anyway, for the purposes of this chapter, assume that Monroe doesn't know Nick is a cop.
Chapter One: Bakers Prefer Biscotti
Chapter Two: Employees Prefer Eclairs
“What’s wrong?” Juliette said immediately, entering the shop to the merry little tinkle of the bell that Monroe seriously considered ripping out of its socket and stomping on every time the door opened. He didn’t know who had installed the stupid thing in the first place. Probably Wu, if only for the ironic value of a surly baker’s shop having a cheerful bell. Stupid little hipster.
“How do you know something’s wrong?” Monroe snarled, handing a frightened patron their wrapped lemon tart. The patron fled. Curiously, the bistro tables with tile mosaic tops and plush chairs were all empty today, save for one oblivious student with headphones jammed firmly in his ears.
Juliette looked at him before doing a meaningful sweep of the empty café with her eyes. Monroe sighed. “That’s it?”
“Well, that and you’re wearing the ‘I stole this apron!’ apron. You hate that one. Plus, I saw the debris in the kitchen. Did your date not go well?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, my date did not go well, because it wasn’t really a date. It was a set-up by a nefarious employee who needs to recalibrate her gaydar.”
“He isn’t gay?” Juliette sounded surprised.
“No, he is,” Monroe said brightly. “He’s also very much taken. That’s spelled F-U-C-K-O-F-”
Juliette held up her hand for him to stop. “Seriously? I honestly thought-oh, sweetie,” she cooed, and Monroe braced himself for a hug. It came as expected, complete with the little petting motions women made when other women were upset. It felt kind of nice, actually, though he’d never admit it. “I’ll make you some of your favorite tea and a bagel with cream cheese, okay?”
Sometimes Monroe wondered why he kept Juliette around, but it was at times like these that he remembered: she was awesome. Even if she did make a mistake and try to set him up with a guy who was cute, funny, and so very not available. She spent the rest of the day coddling him, shooing him into his kitchen haven and dealing with customers herself, handling all of them with that same scary efficiency that made him nervous, because she could clearly run the entire shop by herself if she wanted. It was kind of nice to be pampered, sometimes. A cup of warm tea and a poppy-seed bagel slathered in herbed cream cheese worked twenty times better at calming him down than any of those meditation techniques his pilates teacher encouraged them to practice.
He could feel the disappointment and stress easing out of him with every tray of cookies he put in the oven, each delicate icing flower he piped onto the petit fours, and the fact that though he never caught sight of Juliette once, his mug of tea remained mysteriously filled the entire day.
When six o’clock hit and the doors closed, he almost felt relaxed again. Juliette wandered in, a sympathetic look on her face. “Now are you ready to tell me about what happened?”
“Can we skip the gorey details?” Monroe pleaded with her. Unfortunately, his unmovable object proved to be incredibly mobile when faced with Juliette’s irresistible force. It was a losing battle, but one he always fought anyway, because it was the principle of the thing. If he let the employees think they’d won, he’d never win their (occasional) respect again.
“Spill,” Juliette demanded, dragging over a stool and watching him work. He sighed, brushing off the flour from the counter and wiping it down with a clean wet rag.
“Fine. It was going great, we were laughing, he smoldered at me-”
“Smoldered?” Juliette’s eyebrows were as high as her voice.
“Smoldered.”
“Are you sure it was a smolder?”
“It was definitely a smolder,” Monroe confirmed. “I was just about to ask him out when he mentioned his partner.”
Juliette winced. “Ouch. What a jackass, leading you on like that!” Monroe, being somewhat fond of his head where it was, as opposed to somewhere else not attached to his neck, wisely did not point out that it was more Juliette’s fault for trying to set him up with a man who was taken. “I am so sorry, honey, I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”
Great, now he felt like an ass.
He waved off her apology. “It’s fine. You lose some, you lose some.”
“I think the phrase is, ‘You win some, you lose some,’” Juliet said with a sad smile.
“Not in my experience,” Monroe muttered as he viciously wrung out his cleaning rag over the sink.
Monroe was possessive of his kitchen. Somewhat territorial, in fact. Even Juliette and Wu, who were the closest things he had to friends, weren’t allowed to touch anything more complicated than oven mitts when they were in the backroom. If he could claim to have a sanctum of any sort, it was his kitchen, the small, cozy mess that felt like home and smelled like cookies. For the next week, he retreated back there and licked his wounds, feeling a little silly because seriously, he had known the guy for an hour, and unlike some Disney princesses he could name, he did not fall in love in an hour.
Annoyed with himself and his newfound teenage girl impulses, he donned his camouflage apron, which was the manliest apron he owned, and was tackling the newest batch of peppermint biscotti that he was mere moments from getting right when he heard it: Nick’s voice, talking in quiet tones on the other side of the door.
Daring a peek outside, he saw Juliette giving Nick one of her frostiest glares. He looked mostly confused.
“Sorry, no coffee today.”
“Uh, how can a coffeehouse not have coffee?” Nick asked, not unreasonably, Monroe thought.
“We just are. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do, so move along?”
She was positively icy toward him, and although Monroe wanted to be the better man and would completely tell her not to actively drive away anyone who may or may not have led Monroe on, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of vindictive pleasure at the way she was handling things. That was loyalty, right there.
“Good girl,” he whispered, disappearing back into the kitchen.
He heard them continuing their conversation and was just checking the biscotti when he heard Juliette let out a squawk. 3…2…1… She banged through the door, righteous anger all over her face. Without missing a step, she walked over and slapped him upside the head.
“Ow!” Monroe yelled. “What the hell was that for?”
Wu poked his head in to see what all the commotion was about.
“You idiot!” she hissed. “He’s a cop!”
“What? Okay? So?”
He could feel her resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “So? So he’s single, you moron! His partner was his cop partner! And you ran him out of here like a-Argh! I spent all day coddling you, you gigantic moron!”
Somewhere along the way, Juliette’s handslap and mad rantings and the words ‘single’ pinged in Monroe’s brain, and his jaw dropped. “Wait, wait, he’s-and I-so he’s probably-“
“Really confused about why the guy he was obviously hitting on chased him out suddenly? Thinks you’re homophobic or something? Yeah, all of that.”
It all sank in and sat there, like a brick of bread that refused to rise deep in his stomach. He sagged down onto a chair and buried his face in his apron, moaning a little. “Fuck.”
There was a brief silence, then Juliette sighed and sat down next to him, patting his back. He could hear Wu snickering. “Okay, here’s what you do. You go, you apologize, you tell him that you’re an idiot, and you ask him out.”
“Also, bring him something sweet,” Wu chimed in. They both looked at him and he shrugged. “It’d work with me. Fastest way to a man’s heart and all that.”
“Okay, that’s actually not a bad plan,” Monroe said, thinking about it. He stood, plaid shirt covered with flour and smelling faintly of peppermint extract, camo apron firmly tied around his waist, and hair destroyed by his hands carding through it. “Shoo. I have baking to do!”
Through a little “creative computering”, as Wu called it, and what the rest of the world probably referred to when they said “hacking”, and Juliette’s own esoteric skills, they managed to dig up Nick’s address. Juliette was fussing over Monroe’s clothes, surreptitiously trying to replace the sweater-vest with a plain jacket, while Monroe panicked.
“Is this okay? I mean, it’s a little creepy. And cops are paranoid. He’ll probably shoot me as soon as he sees me.”
“He won’t shoot you,” Juliette scolded him. She gave the brown sweater-vest, one of his favorites, a considering glance. “Actually, if you wear that, he might.”
“Just go,” Wu said, shoving him out the door. “It’ll be fine, we promise.”
“That’s… actually supportive.” Monroe paused. “I didn’t know you could do supportive.”
“Of course I can. Also, dibs on the cake when this doesn’t work.”
Monroe gathered all the dignity he could while wearing a tie from 1986, driving a Volkswagen Beetle, and talking into a Bluetooth to his two employees, who apparently were romantic saps somewhere beneath their evil and snarky exteriors. “I’m driving up the street. I just stopped at a stop sign. I’m-“
“Okay, really, we don’t need to hear every detail,” Juliette’s voice interrupted him. “Just find the guy and let us know how it goes, okay?”
There was a click, and he found himself utterly alone standing in front of a well-kept, moderate house in an older neighborhood. It was landscaped fetchingly, with little rose-bushes along the sides and the lawn was neatly manicured. He raised his hand to knock when the door swung open, revealing Nick wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt, hair mussed as if he had fallen asleep on the couch while watching television. He perked up when he saw Monroe, then wrinkled his brow.
“Monroe?” he asked, glancing around outside, as if he expected someone else to be standing there.
“Here,” Monroe said, shoving a wrapped loaf of bread into Nick’s hands. “I brought you Icelandic Christmas cake.”
“It’s not Christmas,” said Nick bemusedly.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not Iceland, either. Can I come in?”
“Um, sure,” Nick held the door open for him, leading him into the entryway. The house had wood-flooring, plush leather couches, and the minimal decorating style that screamed bachelor. None of the knick-knacks accumulated from two people living together cluttered up the place, no pictures of a happy couple smiling at the camera with happy expressions. He felt something inside him ease. “Do you want a beer?”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Nick passed him a bottle and arched his eyebrow. “So what brings you over this late at night?”
“Is it late? Fuck, this is why I need a clock in my kitchen,” Monroe cursed, realizing what time it was. “I’m sorry, I’ll just-”
“No, really, it’s fine,” Nick said with a smile. “Seriously, I was just watching a game. What’s up?”
Monroe fidgeted with the hem of his jacket. “Listen, the other night, at the baking lesson, um, were you-were you flirting with me?”
Nick’s beer paused halfway to his mouth. He carefully lowered it, rolling it between his palms and carefully not looking at Monroe. “That… kind of depends.” He laughed self-consciously, looking up at Monroe through his lashes. “Would you mind if I were?”
Monroe gaped at him. “Seriously?” he managed. He flailed incoherently at Nick for a moment. “Look at you! It’s pretty much like some cheesy fairy tale where the handsome prince walks into the surly baker’s shop and the baker falls madly in love with him!”
Nick looked amused. “Madly in love?”
“In like,” Monroe said immediately. “I meant madly in like.”
“Right.”
“So, uh, the reason I came over was because I wanted to ask if you wanted to, um-“
“Get some coffee?” Nick asked with a grin, and Monroe nearly hit himself in the head.
“Low blow. Look, I’m not good at this stuff, obviously, but I brought you food and that’s practically a courting ritual to my people.”
“Your people?”
“Bakers.”
“Ah. I take it this is your way of asking me out on a date?”
Monroe nodded impatiently. “Yes, that’s what all this is leading up to. So?”
Nick gave him a sly grin and slid off the counter. He wandered into the pantry and began pulling out baking goods, organizing them all on the small island in the center of the kitchen. Monroe watched him with fascination and growing anticipation. “Tell you what: you show me how to do the weird criss-cross thing with the raspberry tarts and I’ll teach you how to make red velvet cupcakes.” He raised an eyebrow. "Deal?"
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Monroe said with a grin.
Author: tripatch
Rating: PG
Pairing: Monroe/Nick
Summary: Bakery!AU. Monroe runs a bakery, Nick is clueless.
Notes: IMPORTANT: I'm ret-conning my own fic, because apparently it has a plot now. Who knew? Anyway, for the purposes of this chapter, assume that Monroe doesn't know Nick is a cop.
Chapter One: Bakers Prefer Biscotti
Chapter Two: Employees Prefer Eclairs
“What’s wrong?” Juliette said immediately, entering the shop to the merry little tinkle of the bell that Monroe seriously considered ripping out of its socket and stomping on every time the door opened. He didn’t know who had installed the stupid thing in the first place. Probably Wu, if only for the ironic value of a surly baker’s shop having a cheerful bell. Stupid little hipster.
“How do you know something’s wrong?” Monroe snarled, handing a frightened patron their wrapped lemon tart. The patron fled. Curiously, the bistro tables with tile mosaic tops and plush chairs were all empty today, save for one oblivious student with headphones jammed firmly in his ears.
Juliette looked at him before doing a meaningful sweep of the empty café with her eyes. Monroe sighed. “That’s it?”
“Well, that and you’re wearing the ‘I stole this apron!’ apron. You hate that one. Plus, I saw the debris in the kitchen. Did your date not go well?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, my date did not go well, because it wasn’t really a date. It was a set-up by a nefarious employee who needs to recalibrate her gaydar.”
“He isn’t gay?” Juliette sounded surprised.
“No, he is,” Monroe said brightly. “He’s also very much taken. That’s spelled F-U-C-K-O-F-”
Juliette held up her hand for him to stop. “Seriously? I honestly thought-oh, sweetie,” she cooed, and Monroe braced himself for a hug. It came as expected, complete with the little petting motions women made when other women were upset. It felt kind of nice, actually, though he’d never admit it. “I’ll make you some of your favorite tea and a bagel with cream cheese, okay?”
Sometimes Monroe wondered why he kept Juliette around, but it was at times like these that he remembered: she was awesome. Even if she did make a mistake and try to set him up with a guy who was cute, funny, and so very not available. She spent the rest of the day coddling him, shooing him into his kitchen haven and dealing with customers herself, handling all of them with that same scary efficiency that made him nervous, because she could clearly run the entire shop by herself if she wanted. It was kind of nice to be pampered, sometimes. A cup of warm tea and a poppy-seed bagel slathered in herbed cream cheese worked twenty times better at calming him down than any of those meditation techniques his pilates teacher encouraged them to practice.
He could feel the disappointment and stress easing out of him with every tray of cookies he put in the oven, each delicate icing flower he piped onto the petit fours, and the fact that though he never caught sight of Juliette once, his mug of tea remained mysteriously filled the entire day.
When six o’clock hit and the doors closed, he almost felt relaxed again. Juliette wandered in, a sympathetic look on her face. “Now are you ready to tell me about what happened?”
“Can we skip the gorey details?” Monroe pleaded with her. Unfortunately, his unmovable object proved to be incredibly mobile when faced with Juliette’s irresistible force. It was a losing battle, but one he always fought anyway, because it was the principle of the thing. If he let the employees think they’d won, he’d never win their (occasional) respect again.
“Spill,” Juliette demanded, dragging over a stool and watching him work. He sighed, brushing off the flour from the counter and wiping it down with a clean wet rag.
“Fine. It was going great, we were laughing, he smoldered at me-”
“Smoldered?” Juliette’s eyebrows were as high as her voice.
“Smoldered.”
“Are you sure it was a smolder?”
“It was definitely a smolder,” Monroe confirmed. “I was just about to ask him out when he mentioned his partner.”
Juliette winced. “Ouch. What a jackass, leading you on like that!” Monroe, being somewhat fond of his head where it was, as opposed to somewhere else not attached to his neck, wisely did not point out that it was more Juliette’s fault for trying to set him up with a man who was taken. “I am so sorry, honey, I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”
Great, now he felt like an ass.
He waved off her apology. “It’s fine. You lose some, you lose some.”
“I think the phrase is, ‘You win some, you lose some,’” Juliet said with a sad smile.
“Not in my experience,” Monroe muttered as he viciously wrung out his cleaning rag over the sink.
Monroe was possessive of his kitchen. Somewhat territorial, in fact. Even Juliette and Wu, who were the closest things he had to friends, weren’t allowed to touch anything more complicated than oven mitts when they were in the backroom. If he could claim to have a sanctum of any sort, it was his kitchen, the small, cozy mess that felt like home and smelled like cookies. For the next week, he retreated back there and licked his wounds, feeling a little silly because seriously, he had known the guy for an hour, and unlike some Disney princesses he could name, he did not fall in love in an hour.
Annoyed with himself and his newfound teenage girl impulses, he donned his camouflage apron, which was the manliest apron he owned, and was tackling the newest batch of peppermint biscotti that he was mere moments from getting right when he heard it: Nick’s voice, talking in quiet tones on the other side of the door.
Daring a peek outside, he saw Juliette giving Nick one of her frostiest glares. He looked mostly confused.
“Sorry, no coffee today.”
“Uh, how can a coffeehouse not have coffee?” Nick asked, not unreasonably, Monroe thought.
“We just are. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do, so move along?”
She was positively icy toward him, and although Monroe wanted to be the better man and would completely tell her not to actively drive away anyone who may or may not have led Monroe on, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of vindictive pleasure at the way she was handling things. That was loyalty, right there.
“Good girl,” he whispered, disappearing back into the kitchen.
He heard them continuing their conversation and was just checking the biscotti when he heard Juliette let out a squawk. 3…2…1… She banged through the door, righteous anger all over her face. Without missing a step, she walked over and slapped him upside the head.
“Ow!” Monroe yelled. “What the hell was that for?”
Wu poked his head in to see what all the commotion was about.
“You idiot!” she hissed. “He’s a cop!”
“What? Okay? So?”
He could feel her resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “So? So he’s single, you moron! His partner was his cop partner! And you ran him out of here like a-Argh! I spent all day coddling you, you gigantic moron!”
Somewhere along the way, Juliette’s handslap and mad rantings and the words ‘single’ pinged in Monroe’s brain, and his jaw dropped. “Wait, wait, he’s-and I-so he’s probably-“
“Really confused about why the guy he was obviously hitting on chased him out suddenly? Thinks you’re homophobic or something? Yeah, all of that.”
It all sank in and sat there, like a brick of bread that refused to rise deep in his stomach. He sagged down onto a chair and buried his face in his apron, moaning a little. “Fuck.”
There was a brief silence, then Juliette sighed and sat down next to him, patting his back. He could hear Wu snickering. “Okay, here’s what you do. You go, you apologize, you tell him that you’re an idiot, and you ask him out.”
“Also, bring him something sweet,” Wu chimed in. They both looked at him and he shrugged. “It’d work with me. Fastest way to a man’s heart and all that.”
“Okay, that’s actually not a bad plan,” Monroe said, thinking about it. He stood, plaid shirt covered with flour and smelling faintly of peppermint extract, camo apron firmly tied around his waist, and hair destroyed by his hands carding through it. “Shoo. I have baking to do!”
Through a little “creative computering”, as Wu called it, and what the rest of the world probably referred to when they said “hacking”, and Juliette’s own esoteric skills, they managed to dig up Nick’s address. Juliette was fussing over Monroe’s clothes, surreptitiously trying to replace the sweater-vest with a plain jacket, while Monroe panicked.
“Is this okay? I mean, it’s a little creepy. And cops are paranoid. He’ll probably shoot me as soon as he sees me.”
“He won’t shoot you,” Juliette scolded him. She gave the brown sweater-vest, one of his favorites, a considering glance. “Actually, if you wear that, he might.”
“Just go,” Wu said, shoving him out the door. “It’ll be fine, we promise.”
“That’s… actually supportive.” Monroe paused. “I didn’t know you could do supportive.”
“Of course I can. Also, dibs on the cake when this doesn’t work.”
Monroe gathered all the dignity he could while wearing a tie from 1986, driving a Volkswagen Beetle, and talking into a Bluetooth to his two employees, who apparently were romantic saps somewhere beneath their evil and snarky exteriors. “I’m driving up the street. I just stopped at a stop sign. I’m-“
“Okay, really, we don’t need to hear every detail,” Juliette’s voice interrupted him. “Just find the guy and let us know how it goes, okay?”
There was a click, and he found himself utterly alone standing in front of a well-kept, moderate house in an older neighborhood. It was landscaped fetchingly, with little rose-bushes along the sides and the lawn was neatly manicured. He raised his hand to knock when the door swung open, revealing Nick wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt, hair mussed as if he had fallen asleep on the couch while watching television. He perked up when he saw Monroe, then wrinkled his brow.
“Monroe?” he asked, glancing around outside, as if he expected someone else to be standing there.
“Here,” Monroe said, shoving a wrapped loaf of bread into Nick’s hands. “I brought you Icelandic Christmas cake.”
“It’s not Christmas,” said Nick bemusedly.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not Iceland, either. Can I come in?”
“Um, sure,” Nick held the door open for him, leading him into the entryway. The house had wood-flooring, plush leather couches, and the minimal decorating style that screamed bachelor. None of the knick-knacks accumulated from two people living together cluttered up the place, no pictures of a happy couple smiling at the camera with happy expressions. He felt something inside him ease. “Do you want a beer?”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Nick passed him a bottle and arched his eyebrow. “So what brings you over this late at night?”
“Is it late? Fuck, this is why I need a clock in my kitchen,” Monroe cursed, realizing what time it was. “I’m sorry, I’ll just-”
“No, really, it’s fine,” Nick said with a smile. “Seriously, I was just watching a game. What’s up?”
Monroe fidgeted with the hem of his jacket. “Listen, the other night, at the baking lesson, um, were you-were you flirting with me?”
Nick’s beer paused halfway to his mouth. He carefully lowered it, rolling it between his palms and carefully not looking at Monroe. “That… kind of depends.” He laughed self-consciously, looking up at Monroe through his lashes. “Would you mind if I were?”
Monroe gaped at him. “Seriously?” he managed. He flailed incoherently at Nick for a moment. “Look at you! It’s pretty much like some cheesy fairy tale where the handsome prince walks into the surly baker’s shop and the baker falls madly in love with him!”
Nick looked amused. “Madly in love?”
“In like,” Monroe said immediately. “I meant madly in like.”
“Right.”
“So, uh, the reason I came over was because I wanted to ask if you wanted to, um-“
“Get some coffee?” Nick asked with a grin, and Monroe nearly hit himself in the head.
“Low blow. Look, I’m not good at this stuff, obviously, but I brought you food and that’s practically a courting ritual to my people.”
“Your people?”
“Bakers.”
“Ah. I take it this is your way of asking me out on a date?”
Monroe nodded impatiently. “Yes, that’s what all this is leading up to. So?”
Nick gave him a sly grin and slid off the counter. He wandered into the pantry and began pulling out baking goods, organizing them all on the small island in the center of the kitchen. Monroe watched him with fascination and growing anticipation. “Tell you what: you show me how to do the weird criss-cross thing with the raspberry tarts and I’ll teach you how to make red velvet cupcakes.” He raised an eyebrow. "Deal?"
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Monroe said with a grin.