epic. // ashton

one ➵ chocolate

Chocolate.

It’s so sweet.  How can you not love chocolate?

Everyone needs a little chocolate.

It is the most beautiful creation on Earth.

Chocolate ice-cream, chocolate milkshakes,

dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate-

Chocolate shops.

I love sweet shops.

Damn I love sweet shops.

I love the aroma, ah the smell of a sweet shop.  There's nothing like it.

Honestly I could live in a sweet shop.

In fact when I was younger I thought about owning my own sweet shop.  I thought about making everything by hand, I thought about being surrounded by the thing I love all day long; chocolate.  I thought about naming it "Raelynn's Sweet Shoppe", you know, with two p's and an e’—because it's cool.

But of course as I got older I began to think about the downsides of owning my own sweet shop.

The monthly rent, the horrible hours, the long lengths of time I would be forced to withstand sitting down in a chair.  And worst of all, the chocolate I would be forced to stare at and not be able to touch.

Torture.  Such torture.

But of course I still venture out to sweet shops.  In fact one of my favorite things that I got to do while traveling up and down the coast of California to Washington was stop at the various sweet shops I came in eye contact with.  I mean I just couldn't find myself to drive by a single one.  They were all just too tempting.  And each one was different.  Each shop would have different sweets than the next, and I never found myself bored with candy.  I mean how could someone become bored with candy?  It's impossible.  Merely impossible.

So of course when I returned to good ole Los Angeles I couldn't help myself as I passed through the ringing front door of my childhood sweet shop—Uncle Benny’s.

Now Uncle Benny’s is a special place.

It was the place where I lost my first tooth, it was the place where I learned to tie my first shoe lace—it was the place where my father proposed to my mother.

Yes.  It is a special place indeed.

So my first instinct was to search the glass cases for new chocolate creations.  I knew at Uncle Benny’s they always had new things.  They always had new chocolate recipes, new jelly bean flavors, new ice cream flavors—new employees.

New employees.  The ones that come in and the ones that go.  The ones that come as college freshman and leave as Bachelor’s graduates.

More particularly the ones with Green Olive eyes and Chestnut hair in wavy knots.  But attractive knots—

This guy was attractive.

Now I don’t mean to come off bold but he really was.  This guys was attractive.  Hell with that—this guy was hot.  And I don’t like to use the term ‘hot’ loosely.

He even found a way to make the Uncle Benny’s employee uniform looks somewhat decent, all the way from the pale khakis to the red polo shirt.

And I guess I found him so hot that I in fact did not catch myself slowing drifting off into a daydream as I wholeheartedly stared at the guy.  But I was caught mid-drift by the guy’s change in attention.

He was now looking at me.

He was now looking at me looking at him.

And then he smiled.

“Can I help you?”  He asked, leaning his entire body against the black granite countertop.

“Um.  Yeah.”  Was all I said.

“Alrightly then,”  He spoke, whipping out a small brown bag.  “What would ya like?”

I could feel my eyes bulging in their sockets.  So to lessen the tension I felt polluting the atmosphere I gazed down at his name tag.  Ashton.  His name was Ashton.

“Chocolate.”

And then his smile made a reappearance.

“Chocolate?  What kind of chocolate?”

My mind went blank.  I searched and I search and I searched but my mind was blank.  And then without thinking I blurted out—

“Ashton.”