by Beth Bolden
“Are you deaf and intractable?” Evan asked archly.
“No, I’m just trying not to . . . cry or something,” Miles muttered. “You realize what I create isn’t exactly the same as a bag of M&M’s or bag of Oreo cookies.”
“Of course I do.”
Miles tried to keep his temper leashed. It wasn’t easy, probably because it felt like Evan was pushing all his buttons, even the ones he liked having pushed. “Tell me what you might like if you liked sweets.”
“Apparently once when I was four I ate a whole bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups. I vomited them all up afterwards, but I did eat them.” Evan didn’t even act like this was a horrifying memory.
“Perfect,” Miles said, the finished product already emerging in his mind. His recipes usually started with the end product, and worked backward. Each step was a way to achieve what he’d already conceived in his head.
Right now, he was imagining a fluffy deeply peanut butter-y cookie, dotted with the sharp bitterness of dark chocolate chunks.
Evan whipped out a pad and started writing. “What are you doing?” Miles demanded.
“Taking notes,” Evan claimed. “This whole experiment is to figure out how you work. I already know how I work. The end goal is to try to mesh something together of the two.”
Miles raised a dubious eyebrow. “You really think we can compromise?”
“Not really,” Evan admitted. “But I’ve never given up, ever. I’m not about to start.” He hesitated. “What are you doing now?”
“Standing here?”
Evan made a grumpy sound that shouldn’t have been as cute as it was. “In your head, silly. What are you thinking?”
Miles had never talked about his process before. Everyone had a slightly different one, and nobody usually cared about the intricacies, as long as the end result was good. “I usually construct an idea of what I’m baking in my head first. Then work backwards to figure out the exact recipe steps.”
Scribbling away in his notebook, Evan nodded. “What’s the idea you’re creating today?”
“Peanut butter cookie with dark chocolate chunks,” Miles said.
“Now that wasn’t so hard,” Evan shot back with a sly, challenging look that Miles told himself he hated. He never lied to himself, but he knew he was now.
“Supplies?” Miles asked, changing the subject. He didn’t want to trade flirty quips; he wanted to prove to Evan that there was no way they could figure out how to work together.
“What, you haven’t already familiarized yourself with the kitchen layout and pantry?” Evan snarked right back. He definitely sounded bitter over Miles filming his own video.
Okay, he probably deserved that. Though baking that Ding Dong had been pretty damn satisfying—almost as satisfying as Evan’s reaction to it—it was still on the tip of his tongue to apologize. Only the thought of leaving Terroir, moving to LA, and somehow losing control of Pastry by Miles in the process, kept him silent. Ignoring why his base instinct was yelling at him to treat Evan nicer, he trailed after the other man, who pointed out the tucked-away pantry and the big commercial fridges against the far wall.
Evan returned to his pad, scribbling with his eyes down as Miles methodically went through and picked out his ingredients. Setting everything on the counter and beginning to sort through so he could get his mise en place set up, he glanced over at his partner.
He knew Evan wasn’t going to tell him and so there was no point in asking, but Miles found he couldn’t help the question. “What are you writing?”
Evan didn’t even glance up. “Terrible, dreadful things.”
Miles rolled his eyes.
“I thought you’d already deigned this experiment a failure before it even began,” Evan continued. “So why do you even care?”
“Maybe I want to know all the terrible, dreadful things.”
Evan looked up and even across the room, his dark eyes felt piercing, right through all the skin and muscle and into his chest.
“First off, you spent probably four hours making homemade Ding Dongs. I’m not sure you deserve to know.”
“Six,” Miles said, and it was technically true, but it also did what he’d intended, which was to get Evan’s attention away from that stupid notebook again.
“What?” Evan demanded. “You spent six hours on those stupid Ding Dongs?” He sounded even more affronted than he had when he’d first found out about them.
Miles shrugged. “I’m a perfectionist. I have to make a recipe more than once to get it right.”
“How many times usually?”
“Last night? Four. Today? We’ll just have to see.”
“Well, you have the kitchen for three more hours today,” Evan said unrepentantly. “So it’s however many batches of cookies you can bake in that time.”
“Only three?” Miles knew he was pouting. He was also painfully aware that they had bridged a snarky, sharped-edged back-and-forth that vaguely resembled flirting.
“It would have been four if you didn’t waste an hour this morning not coming to the kitchen when I told you to.”
Miles returned his focus to the mixing bowl in front of him. If he only had three hours, he needed to focus, and stop bantering with Evan. If that was even what they were doing. Maybe it wasn’t bantering if it was one-sided. And Miles was sure it was one-sided. Evan didn’t look like anything ever distracted him from work.
Especially someone Evan intended to control. He talked big about compromise, but Miles had a feeling that Evan had zero experience compromising. Probably as far as Evan was concerned, all compromise meant was that you’d conceded.
Miles wasn’t great at it either, but even if he had been, he couldn’t do it here. Not with Pastry by Miles. Not when he was taking such a risk in leaving the restaurant industry. If he failed here, he might not be able to get another plum job like the one he’d had at Terroir. And Miles knew he’d never get his job at Terroir back.
He wasn’t even sure he wanted it back, if it came to that, but the phantom sting of potential failure made him turn away from the temptation Evan presented, and back to his mixing bowl.
Evan was a distraction, and almost certainly the enemy. Even worse, Miles was beginning to realize he might like him more than he hated him.
* * *
Miles was fascinating to watch as he worked. Evan was trying to spend more of his time scribbling down notes and ideas versus staring at the other man like a creeper, but it was hard because he totally had a thing for competent people. Watching Miles was like competence porn; he was so instinctual and confident, it was very hard to look away once you’d started.
He'd been trying to keep his questions to a minimum in order to give genius a chance to work uninterrupted. Evan might have been worried about Miles unconsciously changing his process because he was being observed, but there was an innate certainty in every movement he made. Besides, Evan thought darkly, Miles had had zero compunction about demonstrating exactly what he thought of Evan’s involvement in this project.
Rigging up a phone in a fake ficus. Evan didn’t know what he could have said or done to make someone so desperate to prove themselves. What Miles didn’t realize was that while Evan was committed to making a successful show that appealed to a wide range of audience members, he was also committed to producing a show that Miles could be proud of.
The problem, Evan thought, his eyes returning again to a pair of graceful hands as they cracked eggs, was they were both too determined to be in charge.
It was Evan’s natural position, and while he wasn’t sure it was Miles’, Miles was clearly determined not to relinquish creative control.
Evan still believed they could find a compromise they could both be happy with; the problem lay with convincing Miles of that fact. And, considering what Miles had done when he thought he’d been backed into a corner, it was not going to be easy.
Evan didn’t need easy—he’d been living the hard way for as long as he could remember—
but easy still would have been nice. It also would have been nice if Miles had returned even an iota of the interest that Evan was trying to forget he felt. But clearly, Evan was alone there.
He usually didn’t let himself feel regret, but if he had, he might have wallowed in it a very tiny bit. He might have also wondered what could have been if they’d met in a bar, or a coffee shop or even on Grindr, and Pastry by Miles hadn’t been this big, looming, impossible thing between them.
Evan looked down and realized he’d doodled a heart in the margin of his notebook. He scribbled it out with such hard pen strokes, the paper tore. When he looked up, Miles was watching him, amusement tilting up the corner of his lips.
“You writing more terrible, dreadful things?” Miles asked.
Ha. If he only knew just how terrible they were. Evan shook his head. “Just an idea that wouldn’t work out.”
“Those are usually the best sort of ideas,” Miles observed.
This was definitely not Evan’s experience. Of course, he’d made a habit of always doing the stuff that people said was impossible. Go to school while working three jobs? Transition his part-time internship at Five Points into a full-time, paid position? Take care of himself and others when most guys his age were barely able to handle the former?
Unlike the saying, yeah, he’d definitely broken a sweat, but he’d still done it. But those were all things that he didn’t share about himself. Especially not at work. Miles would find out that he was a former intern sooner or later—hopefully later, if Evan got lucky—but the rest was going to stay firmly locked away.
“Trust me, this one isn’t,” Evan said. Because getting Miles to be able to stand him professionally seemed like a tall enough order; to convince him to like him personally wasn’t even under consideration.
Miles seemed to digest this as he poured vanilla from a bottle into the mixer. He wasn’t measuring, and Evan couldn’t help it. “You’re not measuring anything,” he asked. “How do we replicate the recipe if we don’t know the proportions?”
“This is just a test batch. I’ll adjust from here,” Miles said. “Besides, I might not be measuring everything out, but I know how much I’m adding.”
Of course he did. Evan knew odd things turned him on, but finding it hot that Miles was a human measuring cup was weird, even for him.
“Force of habit,” Miles added, with a bashful, lopsided smile that would have made Evan’s insides clench if he’d let them.
“Must come in pretty handy,” Evan said.
“Yeah, at home, for sure. But at the restaurant, we measured everything. Had to follow every recipe to the letter.”
“You didn’t like that?” Evan was surprised; Miles struck him as a chef who didn’t do wild experimentation.
“I hated it,” Miles admitted. “I get that diners look for consistency, especially at a restaurant like Terroir, but it got really old. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t take a step out of place without having a ton of bricks come down on me.”
“That’s why you took this job,” Evan said, realizing very quickly what had driven Miles to accept their offer. “You were bored.”
“No,” Miles corrected. “I was bored so I started Pastry by Miles. I was insane, that’s why I took this job.”
Evan couldn’t dignify that with a response, but when he glanced up, he saw that Miles was actually smiling still. “Seriously?” Evan demanded.
“I made you a video of me baking a Ding Dong,” Miles said, “do you really think insanity scares me off?”
“Obviously not.”
“It’s just like I said. Sometimes, the worst ideas are the best ones.” Miles folded in the dark chocolate chunks he’d just been chopping off the big block. “Dark chocolate, as dark as I’m using, is probably going to be complete shit in this recipe, but I’m trying it anyway.”
Evan’s jaw dropped a little. “You think those aren’t going to be good? Then why are you making them?” It seemed like a total waste of time and resources to bake something Miles didn’t think was going to be good. But he’d done it anyway.
Clearly, this was part of the reason why they hadn’t gotten along right away. They both had very different ideas of how to go about a project.
“Because I thought they might actually be brilliant, and I had to know. I made those strawberry raspberry tarts that everyone loved so much eight times before I was happy with them.” He gave a careless shrug.
Evan realized that Miles really did not care how long something took before he declared it finished. In a terrible premonition, he could see blown budgets, billowing grocery bills, and an intractable chef whose perfectionism somehow eclipsed Evan’s own.
It was not a pretty picture of the future. Even if Evan had been inclined to let Miles take over and control Pastry by Miles, he couldn’t let it happen because Miles wasn’t just fooling around in his own kitchen. There was a lot more on the line now, including, Evan thought with a mental shudder, his job.
“How long are they going to bake for?” Evan asked, eyeing the filling cookie sheet with trepidation. If these weren’t outstanding, they were going to have to go through this process as many times as Miles wanted until he was satisfied.
“Ten minutes, give or take,” Miles said.
Evan scribbled that number down, next to the list of ingredients Miles had used. Miles might be lackadaisical about measurements, but the point of this show was to make what he did accessible to the regular viewer. That meant recipes—proven, tested, reliable recipes—that accompanied each video.
“Did you just write that down?”
Evan glanced up at Miles’ incredulous voice. “Of course I wrote it down. You might not be measuring, but we need to provide a recipe for the cookies to everyone who watches the video.”
Miles wiped his hands deliberately on the towel he’d draped across his shoulder. Evan, in a moment of unbelievably weak hormones, thought it made him look like a romantically temperamental chef. Delete the romantic part of that, Evan thought to himself morosely, and braced himself for another round of, “I’m a big fancy chef and I know better than you do because I took a class on how to chop an onion.”
“I didn’t realize we were doing that,” Miles said.
Evan couldn’t help but explode. “Of course we’re doing that,” Evan ground out. “How do you think this site makes the money to pay you? Hits. And you get hits by directing people to the recipe and the site, where we sell ads that pay for all of this.”
Miles rolled his eyes. “I’m not an idiot.”
The problem was Evan had a temper. A temper that he’d spend a lifetime hiding and controlling and stuffing back into its little box, but a temper nonetheless. And Miles was the most tempting target for it that Evan had run across in a long time.
“Then don’t behave like one,” he snapped, all too aware that Miles’ laid-back, infuriating, patronizing personality was breaking him, a little bit at a time.
Evan did not like being broken. He’d learned to assert control over himself because he didn’t always have control over his environment, and Miles, with his annoyingly good looks and bullshit attitude, was taking him right back to a time Evan never wanted to revisit.
Miles didn’t say a word, merely turned back towards the counter and began piling dishes into the sink. Evan returned to his notebook and scribbled out the line he’d written about compromise. There was going to be no compromise. He would prove to Miles, one day at a time, that he was the one who was in charge of this show, and it was Miles’ job to develop the recipes in a reasonable timeframe, and then stand in front of the camera and charm the women of the world into attempting his recipes.
It would happen because Evan had never failed in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. If that meant he had to become an asshole to meet Miles’ asshole, and forever ditch the hope that something could have grown between them, so be it.
* * *
Miles ran some hot water over the dishes in the sink as the first bat
ch of cookies baked, and then began to re-assemble the ingredients for a new batch. He hadn’t tasted the first ones yet, because they weren’t out of the oven, but he didn’t need to. He’d never made a recipe that couldn’t be further perfected.
And Evan could just pry his head out of that exasperatingly cute ass and get with the program.
Ever since marching the two of them into the kitchen, he’d been making noise about compromise, but Miles knew one thing for sure—Evan had never compromised in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. The sour-milk look on his face after Miles had confessed to redoing the strawberry raspberry tarts told him everything he needed to know. There was no way Evan was going to let him be true either to his vision or his training. And sharing recipes! Miles didn’t feel comfortable with that at all. The point of Pastry by Miles had never been to make the food accessible to anyone. It had been to express his point of view.
Having to dumb down his processes so the common person could follow along was not something that Miles was interested in doing.
The alarm on the oven beeped, and Miles sauntered off to take a look. The cookies were baking nicely, looking fluffy and full in the middles, and just browning around the outside. He opened the door, pressed on one lightly, and decided it could use another minute. He wanted a firm, cake-y cookie on the inside, but with crisp outer edges.
Miles didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that Evan was writing this all down. He could hear his pen scratching across the pages as if he was doing it right next to his ear. He put in another thirty seconds, just to fuck with him.
He fully expected Evan to loudly and emphatically inquire what good thirty seconds of oven time would accomplish (almost nothing) but his section of the kitchen remained quiet. Miles knew it wouldn’t last.
Pulling the cookies out of the oven, he slid them across the counter, and went to grab a spatula and a cooling rack in the equipment pantry. Returning, he saw Evan had moved closer, bending over the pan, finger outstretched, as if he was going to duplicate Miles’ movement from earlier.