Kitchen Gods Box Set

by Beth Bolden

  Evan picked up the spatula and gently, carefully mixed the dough until it came together into a ball. He wasn’t taking any more chances for Miles to ingratiate himself. Mistakes were an opportunity for Miles, and Evan wasn’t giving him any additional openings.

  “That’s good,” Miles said. The murmured intimacy in his voice had lessened somewhat, and Evan was glad. It was exhausting to fight the attraction all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to get some stuff done without all the distraction.

  Shoving his hands back into the dough, Evan copied Miles’ demonstrated kneading techniques until Miles pronounced it ready, and got another bowl out, to set the dough into. It went into the freezer to chill.

  “What now?” Evan asked.

  “Have you ever eaten a croissant?” Miles asked.

  “Of course I have.” Evan tapped a foot impatiently. It felt like they’d wasted hours, even though it had only barely been one, if the clock on the far side of the kitchen wasn’t lying to him.

  “Then you know about the flaky layers it has. We need to create that, and to do that, we use a sheet of cold butter, folded in between layers of dough. When the croissants bake, the butter evaporates and creates pockets of air in the dough.”

  “Which makes it flaky.” This baking thing, Evan thought, was a lot more complicated than he’d realized. He re-thought what Miles had said. “A sheet of butter?”

  Miles shrugged at Evan’s astonishment and pulled over a single sheet of waxed paper, on which was spread a thick even layer of butter. “I came in early and made this, and chilled it,” he said. “It needs to be very cold, or else it’ll all just melt into the dough. It’s like pie dough.”

  When Evan continued to look at him blankly, Miles continued. “You know, like the pies you bake on Thanksgiving? You need cold fat mixed into the dough to prevent it from being tough.”

  Evan knew what Miles was getting at, and while he had no intention of sharing just how far his Thanksgivings had been from family pie-making, he couldn’t exactly pretend like he knew what Miles was talking about.

  “We always had store-bought,” Evan said, which was only partially a lie. He remembered years when he’d been fortunate and lucky to get a piece of store-bought pie. Homemade pie was a figment of his imagination, a dream that he’d never gotten to share.

  “It’s the same concept,” Miles said. “The water in the butter or the lard evaporates in the heat of the oven, leaving the dough pocketed and airy. Here,” he handed a rolling pin to Evan, “let’s roll out the butter a little while the dough finishes chilling.”

  Evan felt like he did a really good job getting the butter perfectly flat and even, as Miles grabbed the dough. Finally, his A-plus personality and perfectionist instincts were coming in handy in the kitchen.

  The dough was far trickier to roll out. Miles kept tossing flour on the marble and insisting Evan flour his hands and the pin so many times that he was sure that flour had made it past the apron to his clothes beneath. Good thing he didn’t have any other meetings scheduled for today.

  When Miles felt like he had the dough flattened enough, they worked together to carefully transport the butter from the wax paper to the dough rectangle. This time, Miles didn’t offer to lick the residual butter off his fingers, and Evan shouldn’t have been disappointed, but he was a little.

  He certainly thought about offering to return the favor as Miles lifted one of his hands to his mouth for a surreptitious lick. But that would be insane and Evan prided himself on his sanity.

  “Now, fold the sides of the dough over the butter, like a Christmas present.” Evan held his breath and waited for Miles to try the same thing he had with the Thanksgiving pies, but he didn’t. Which meant nobody else in the office had blabbed and Miles didn’t know yet. A small blessing.

  “We’re done?” Evan asked hopefully after the folding was complete.

  Miles shot him an incredulous look. “Not even close. The dough needs to be re-chilled, and then we’ll re-fold to make more layers. And then rinse and repeat.”

  Jaw dropping, Evan stared incredulously at the man next to him. “How many rinse and repeats?”

  “Four? We’ll see how it looks at four,” Miles said, piling up bowls together and walking over to the sink. “Pastry isn’t a race to see how fast you can get something on a plate.”

  “Or in my stomach,” Evan grumbled. “Am I allowed to work at non-baking tasks in between layers?”

  Miles waved a hand as he started running hot water in the dishes. “Whatever you want.”

  Checking email usually didn’t fill Evan with quite so much excitement or anticipation, but he was so ready to get back to the familiar, he nearly forgot to take off his flour-dusted apron before venturing back to his cubicle to retrieve his laptop and his notes.

  He could only imagine what the reactions would have been if he hadn’t detoured to quickly shed the ugly apron and brush off his clothes. He left the bow tie lying on the counter next to his notepad, and considered it a worthy sacrifice for a little bit of Miles’ trust.

  The problem was that Miles wasn’t just after trust. That much was becoming very obvious, and even though it was difficult to imagine a world in which Evan could resist him forever, he still had to make a decision about giving in.

  What would it mean? What would it look like? How could he make sure he maintained the upper hand while giving in?

  Since he’d turned eighteen, Evan had been professionally ambitious and personally careful. It was a combination that served him well until now, and he saw no reason to throw caution to the wind. If he was going to let Miles—and himself, if he was being very honest—have their way, he needed to at least do it on his own terms, in his own way.

  Laptop in hand, Evan swung by the restroom and when he was washing up, gave his face only the most perfunctory look over. Even with the briefest glance, his flushed cheeks and bright eyes gave away the story.

  Miles evoked all sorts of emotions in him—frustration and annoyance and impatience, but also something warmer and more indefinable. Something he’d always avoided because he wasn’t sure he could control it, and until this moment, that had felt like the scariest risk he could have taken.

  This time it felt scarier not to take it, like he didn’t know what he was missing out on if he let it pass him by.

  Chapter Seven

  When Evan left the kitchen to grab his laptop, Miles did the dishes and stared at his reflection in the window in front of the sink.

  There was no shame in needing to give yourself a pep talk every now and again, but Miles felt weird that he didn’t need any sort of pep talk at all. Didn’t people usually need to psych themselves up when required to cozy up to someone for mercenary reasons? James Bond never flinched, but James Bond was a manwhore with zero conscience.

  Miles didn’t like to think he was that sort of person, but when faced with the prospect of using Evan’s attraction to give himself the upper hand all he felt was pure, unadulterated excitement. He knew his own feelings about Evan were conflicted, but maybe the lack of shame he was feeling meant he wasn’t really conflicted at all.

  He was pretty sure that meant his heart or his mind or maybe just his dick was engaged on some level. And that made it better, didn’t it? his conscience insisted.

  It wasn’t going to be all for show, on some level it was real for Miles and that should have been all the green light he needed to close the deal. But instead of prodding him into action, the thought made him hold back when Evan returned to the kitchen with his laptop and that stupid folder bulging with notes, half of which seemed to be pages torn from the precious notebook that barely ever left his side.

  It was the same sky blue as the bow tie he’d removed earlier, and they both sat, innocent but inherently dangerous, on the kitchen counter.

  “Do you want to go over some of the stuff I have?” Evan asked, and unlike his normal, ball-busting certainty, he seemed hesitant. Like maybe he’d reconsidered just how good of an ide
a so much flirting was.

  Miles’ dick certainly thought the flirting had been fantastic, and nothing in the world had been hotter than uptight, always-confident Evan uncertainly digging his hands into a bowl of dough and looking to Miles for instructions on how to deal with it.

  He hadn’t realized that was going to be a turn-on, but Miles wasn’t stupid. It added a flair of authenticity to the charm he was trying to pour on, so he used it.

  The real question was if it only had the ring of truth or it was the truth. Miles had claimed, not even a week ago, that he could never be attracted to a man with such a stick up his ass. He was not happy to discover he might have been wrong.

  The only explanation was that Evan, like any decent mold, grew on you after awhile.

  “What do we need to go over?” Miles tried to play it casual, but he sounded equal parts apprehensive and excited.

  “Oh, tons of stuff. A whole bunch of tiny details, all pointless by themselves, but it all needs to be decided.”

  “Like?”

  Miles had spent most of his teenage and adult life playing it casual with guys he liked. He didn’t do serious relationships, or usually relationships at all. He’d never felt the need because casual came naturally to him.

  Casual was not coming easy to him now, as he sidled up to where Evan was perched on a stool, sorting through his folders. He leaned against the counter, and railed at himself for looking like some sort of practiced gigolo.

  Maybe he was James Bond, he’d just never realized it.

  Evan wrinkled his nose. “You don’t have to be so tense. I’m not telling you the decisions, we’re making them together.”

  “Right, yeah, of course.”

  Costa, he told himself firmly, you sound like a fucking moron. You can barely string together a sentence. When did he get to you like this?

  Apparently between one breath and the next, in the time it had taken for Evan to stick his fingers in the dough and then throw Miles a single beseeching look.

  Miles wasn’t James Bond, he was a romance novel heroine straight out of the bodice-ripping 1980s.

  “For example,” Evan said, pulling out a single sheet with a bunch of scribbles, “how do you feel about the title?”

  Evan had very straight posture, his spine stiff even when he was sitting on one of those uncomfortable stools. Miles had never really noticed before, or if he had, he’d marked it off as a character flaw, but now he couldn’t stop noticing. And all that ramrod posture made him want to do was tear off Evan’s shirt and see what his back looked like, pale and firm, as he bent over the kitchen counter.

  Maybe it was Miles who was the bodice ripper.

  “The title?” Miles was having difficulty giving coherent answers, and Evan was looking at him a little like he was crazy. More than usual, anyway.

  “Of your show. Pastry by Miles?”

  “I’m not changing the name.”

  “I know that,” Evan coaxed, “but what about a subtitle for this first season?”

  “What, like Pastry by Miles: Joan of Arc Julia Child Teaches You How to Bake?”

  “Not exactly,” Evan sniffed.

  “Then what?”

  “Like, Pastry by Miles: Baking 101.”

  “I sort of like that,” Miles admitted begrudgingly. There was a part of him that still recoiled in horror, of course. He wasn’t Joan of Arc Julia Child; there was a part of him who was always going to be an inherently selfish slave to his own creativity. But the idea of helping others find their potential was growing on him. He’d drink another bottle of faux Kahlua if Evan found out, though.

  “I thought you might.” Miles told himself that Evan’s smug tone of voice was not in any way attractive. He wasn’t very convincing.

  “What else?”

  “Well, I took the liberty of having the graphics department make some mockups of the new title, just to see what you thought.”

  Evan pulled some other brightly colored pages out of his folder and slid them across the workspace.

  Miles knew graphics were not his strong suit. The logo he’d pulled together last year for Pastry by Miles was barely acceptable. Which was why it was so easy to get excited about having a professional take a crack at it—or at least that was what he used to justify it to himself.

  “These are great,” he said, leaning over and carefully examining the options one at a time.

  “We can change them, or mix them, or really, anything we can think of. If you don’t like any of them, we can even start over,” Evan rambled, and Miles looked up at him, and realized, like a light turning on in a pitch-black room, that he was nervous. Uncertain. Worried that Miles wouldn’t be happy with his initiative.

  That was to be expected, because Miles hadn’t been happy with any of his initiatives until now. It was completely Miles’ fault that Evan worried about his reaction—because, and this was a bitter pill to swallow—none of Miles’ reactions had exactly been reassuring.

  Obviously, Miles had seen Evan before, but at this moment, it was like he was seeing him for the very first time, separate from his own fear-tinted glasses. It felt like he’d just been dunked in very cold water.

  “I think some of these could really work,” Miles said.

  Evan smiled, any momentary lapses in self-confidence gone. “Agreed. This one is my favorite,” he said, pulling one particular graphic, the font curling around a series of rainbow-tinted circles that evoked the famous French macarons. A series of episodes that Miles had done on macarons inspired by famous adult beverages had been very popular; probably his most popular episodes before the strawberry raspberry tarts. He still got people messaging him that they’d never thought of making a strawberry margarita macaron, or one inspired by a White Russian, but that he’d changed the way they saw pastry.

  Those comments had probably been part of the problem, Miles realized. Somehow he’d gotten insufferably smug. There was self-assurance and then there was conceited arrogance. Somehow he’d fallen on the wrong side of that line.

  He wanted to apologize—to his credit, not for the first time this week—but that apology, like all his others, still stuck in his throat.

  “Did you know that three quarters of Five Points clamored for Reed to make those macarons?” Evan asked, almost to himself, like of course Miles knew.

  “Did he?” Miles asked.

  The expression on Evan’s face grew conspiratorial, and it shouldn’t have been so cute, but it was, undeniably. He leaned closer, bending over the drawings between them. “Reed claimed he was too busy, but his boyfriend, Jordan, admitted to me that he spent three weeks trying to perfect them, and finally gave up.”

  Reed Ryan had attempted to duplicate his recipes and failed? Miles didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed. Suddenly it seemed very stupid to not provide people who wanted to duplicate his creations the recipe.

  And sure, he’d worked at Terroir, but Miles had always prided himself as being laid-back and down-to-earth, at least as far as chefs went. He certainly had never been as bad as Bastian Aquino, whose ego he’d gotten to witness with a front row seat.

  “Macarons are tricky,” Miles said, which wasn’t a lie. They were notoriously difficult to master, and even he sometimes baked batches that just didn’t turn out for reasons he could never pinpoint. “I’ll make some this weekend and bring them in.” He hesitated, because even though Evan had claimed not to like sweets, maybe he could extend a peace offering in lieu of an actual apology. “Did you want to try a particular flavor?”

  Evan shot him a triumphant look, like he’d just been waiting for Miles to ask. “The lemon drop. Of course.”

  It felt as easy as breathing to reach forward and trace the bright yellow circle on the logo. “One of my favorites.”

  Evan just sniffed. “Well, you have some taste, apparently.”

  “Does that mean I should pick that particular logo?” Miles challenged. But he couldn’t help but miss that the sniping they were doing today was far
more playful and anticipatory than the sniping of the last two weeks.

  It left Miles breathless and fairly certain that he had almost nothing in common with James Bond after all.

  “If you want to. It’s ultimately your show. But,” Evan said, with more than a little defiance in his own voice, “it’s the best choice, by far.”

  “And probably the idea that you came up with,” Miles finished smoothly.

  Evan looked surprised and annoyed—definitely not as pleased as Miles had hoped when he’d thrown that line out. “So much shock I can do my job properly,” he retorted.

  “I figured they put the best with the best.”

  Evan just rolled his eyes. “And there’s the Miles Costa I’ve grown to know.”

  “Be nice, or you won’t get any macarons. Or any pain au chocolat.”

  This time Evan seemed to completely forget that he didn’t like sweets, because he sighed with exasperation at Miles’ threat. “What?” he asked defensively. “They’re taking an eternity to make, surely I should get something out of all this time and effort.”

  The beeper on Miles’ phone went off, pinging loudly. “And that’s our cue for more time and effort. Time to re-fold the dough.”

  This time Evan didn’t make a movement to go grab the dough from the blast chiller, but Miles let him go, as he scribbled more into his notebook, seemingly absorbed in making notes on the new logo.

  It was an easy five minutes of work for Miles, who got twitchy if he couldn’t get his hands into some sort of dough every day.

  When he got back to where Evan was perched, he had opened his laptop and was typing furiously into an email window. Miles peered over his shoulder. “Anything good?” he asked.

  “Sending some final notes to the graphic designer,” Evan said. “I told her to bump the brightness of the colors up a bit, I want something bright and almost candy-colored. And to make the font a bit less fanciful. I feel like the rainbow macarons are enough on that front. She’ll probably send a few options for us to look at.”