I'll just have one, I thought. Nobody can mind if I just have one. It was a chocolate chip one, and to avoid being caught I ate the whole thing in two big bites. It was glorious – so moist and warm and perfect, oh! It was easily the best muffin I'd ever had. I licked the crumbs off my fingers and wiped them on my uniform. The perfect crime, I thought to myself.
I drummed my fingers on the counter, looking at the plate of muffins out of the corner of my eye. There were eight of them there, arranged in a sort of pattern, and with the one I had taken, you could tell there was one missing. It was so obvious. I tried to rearrange them, but couldn't get it to work. There was an odd number! Six would look a lot nicer than seven. I deliberated for a fraction of a second before taking a pineapple one next. Ah, bliss! I licked the last crumbs from my lips, and that was the problem solved. No big deal. The six muffins left formed a perfect hexagon on the plate.
Of course, a hexagon is a hard shape to make. They'd form a better, tighter circle if there were just five... and there were two blueberries, that was redundant, right? Yeah, totally redundant. And delicious.
But after that I worried that if Emily came in and noticed one blueberry, she'd wonder what happened to the other one. I had to get rid of the evidence; the tasty, tasty evidence.
Four muffins making a square looked really weird, though. Three seemed kind of weird, whereas three would be perfecty natural and casual. Exquisite.
Three, okay, that was where I would stop. I managed five minutes, in fact, and served a couple of customers, before I even thought of it. But they were just sitting there. One more couldn't hurt. Oh, wow. Double chocolate.
The two remaining muffins, one banana, one white chocolate, looked like two eyes staring at me. If I had the banana one, that was almost healthy. And with all the muffins I'd had this afternoon, I needed some fruit. It's important to have a balanced diet. Especially when it's that scrumptious.
And then there was one. Clearly, I thought, as my shift drew to a close, there would be no point in leaving one muffin. If I ate that, I could hide the plate under the counter, and nobody would be any the wiser. I had barely finished my thought before I bit into the muffin, and I think it was quite possibly the best of all.
I had just put the plate away in the space under the cupcake display counter – not before licking all the crumbs off it – when I heard the door swing. I wheeled round – Emily was there.
"Right, that's us closing up," she said. "Good job on your first shift, Conrad. Come round the day after tomorrow at six a.m., we'll try you on an early morning."
"Oh, okay," I said. "Thanks." I made for the door, back into the staff area to get my things, when Emily called after me.
"Hey," she said –
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