Hot & Sweet

by Sean Ashcroft

  Which reminded Wyatt of something he’d been meaning to ask about. “You mentioned your grandma yesterday,” he said, pouring pancake batter into the pan. “She why you became a chef?”

  Kai chuckled, but it was the kind of sad, nostalgic chuckle Wyatt was used to hearing over the long-dead. Kai’s grandma had clearly been important to him.

  “My family is originally from Wales,” he said. “She and my grandad actually, literally came here by boat, all the way across the Atlantic. One of the things I remember mostly about her was her ability to swear creatively for two or three minutes in a row without repeating herself, in Welsh and English.” He smiled a small, fond smile tinged with the sadness of loss.

  Wyatt’s heart went out to him. He’d been right, she was important. Which made it kind of a big deal that he was sharing this.

  “When I was ten,” Kai began. “I was the youngest of four male grandchildren. She worked as a cook in a diner, but it was probably the best feature of our small town. People travelled for her food, and it wasn’t complex or trendy, but it was always good. Anyway, one day she handed me an apron and told me that I’d just have to be the girl of the family, and started teaching me how to cook.”

  Wyatt chuckled. “I can picture you in a frilly apron,” he said.

  Kai would have been an adorable ten-year-old.

  “There was only a frill on the pocket,” Kai responded. “But I didn’t mind. I loved her, and I loved the attention, and I loved it when she announced proudly that I’d done half the work for family dinners, even if I’d only scrubbed potatoes or something. She was a hard taskmaster, honestly, but she taught me everything I know and it was all out of love.”

  Wyatt’s heart swelled at hearing that. It was the kind of thing that didn’t end up on a Wikipedia page, and he felt as though Kai was telling him a secret.

  “That’s adorable,” he said, flipping the first pancake.

  “It was,” Kai agreed. “She died when I was sixteen.”

  As quickly as Wyatt’s heart had soared, it sank again. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been over a decade and I still… miss her. I dunno. I feel like she understood me like the rest of my family didn’t. All the other men in the family are either fishermen or lumberjacks. I was too soft for them.”

  Kai was anything but soft, but Wyatt understood what he meant.

  “Anyway, when she died I kind of, uh, lost my way a bit. And ended up on first-name terms with the sheriff and spent more than a few nights at the station for little things. It was a small town, so I got away with apologizing and replacing the locks I’d picked or cleaning up any messes I’d made, but…”

  “Whoa, wait, hold on. Go back to the part where you were a little tearaway.”

  Kai grinned at him. “I knew you’d like that part,” he said. “I bet you got into all kinds of trouble when you were that age.”

  “Mostly the kind that involved climbing into and out of bedroom windows.” Wyatt shrugged. “I hated to date anyone that I was allowed to be seen with.”

  “Yeah, somehow that’s not a surprise.” Kai grinned, obviously thrilled by this information.

  “What you see is what you get,” Wyatt said, sliding the first pancake onto a warm plate.

  “Anyway, around the time I found myself staring down the wrong end of a shotgun barrel for trespassing, I decided it was a good time to take a long, hard look at my life. I was seventeen and a half.”

  Wyatt swallowed. He knew there was more to this story, more pain, but it wasn’t his place to ask. Not yet, anyway.

  What Kai was sharing was an honor. Wyatt doubted many people knew any of this about him.

  “So I found a culinary school halfway across the country that would take me, and a job as a dish washer in a busy kitchen, and then… everything you read about on my Wikipedia page happened. Mostly out of luck.”

  “No,” Wyatt said. “Luck is just a function of how many rolls of the dice you take. And it sounds like you took plenty of them.”

  Kai sighed softly, but when Wyatt looked up from flipping his second pancake, he was smiling. “Do you actually have to try to be ridiculously kind, or are you just like that?”

  “Just like that, I guess,” Wyatt said, shrugging. He was glad Kai thought he was kind. As it turned out, Kai could clearly use a little kindness. “She’d be proud, you know. I bet she’s looking down on you and tuning into the show every week.”

  Kai snorted. “She hated TV. Or I think she actually just hated my grandfather wasting his life away in front of it.”

  “I still think you’d be proud. You’re sharing the love of food she taught you with the world.”

  “I’m just grateful she gave me a way to escape,” Kai said. “You know my dad blamed her when I came out? His first words were this is because of that damned frilly apron, isn’t it?”

  Wyatt winced. “Jeez. That’s really not how this works, huh?”

  “It’s really not,” Kai said. “But he wasn’t interested in understanding. I was busy telling him that I was going to France for a year at the time, though, so I didn’t care. I just walked away and I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  Wyatt nodded, wanting to encourage Kai to keep sharing if he felt the need. This felt like getting somewhere with him, like they were moving past coworkers-with-benefits and into something bigger, more real.

  As heartbreaking as it was to hear what Kai had suffered through, it was also nice to know that he was ready to talk about it with Wyatt.

  That care he’d been trying to show him had obviously paid off.

  And this explained a whole lot about the way he was as a person, too. It explained why he seemed closed-off and skittish and like you’d get burned if you got too close to him.

  But something about him had made Wyatt want to be close, and he was glad now that he’d gone along with that feeling. Even if it’d taken him a while to figure it out.

  A soft, comfortable silence fell between them as Wyatt cooked the remainder of the pancake batter, and suddenly this was a nice, normal morning-after breakfast with someone he definitely wanted to see again.

  Which was true, Wyatt supposed. He did want to see Kai again, and he wanted more breakfasts like this.

  “These pancakes are incredible,” Kai said between mouthfuls. He was already on his second one, having inhaled the first without even pausing. “I need this recipe. I’m gonna learn to do pastries.”

  “They’re just pancakes,” Wyatt said, blushing at the way Kai appreciated his cooking even when he wasn’t playing it up for the camera. “But I’ll write it down for you sometime.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “So you might have noticed that I’m on the wrong end of the counter for this episode,” Kai explained, beginning to wonder if there was something about this side of the studio that encouraged people to talk. “Which is because we’ve decided for this last episode to see how much we’ve learned from each other.”

  He looked down at the recipe he had again, chewed on his lip, and then decided he’d be fine. “So naturally Wyatt assigned me something he never would have made himself.”

  “Hey, I’ve made plenty of those, and they’re a nice thing to be able to break out for birthdays and stuff. I wouldn’t make one every week for the family. Probably.”

  “You would, though, wouldn’t you?” Kai asked.

  Wyatt glanced over at him, grinning. He was already getting to work on the Thai curry Kai had assigned to him, and part of Kai wished now that he’d picked something a little more foolproof.

  On the other hand, Wyatt had forced him to learn how to pipe a rosette, and he didn’t exactly seem to be struggling.

  Putting together the cake batter was easy enough, though it might have been easier without Wyatt saying things like whip it harder while he’d been working on the egg whites, which was apparently the big secret to the whole thing.

  Folding them into the batter had been a strange and delicate task, but by the time he had two pa
ns filled halfway and put in the oven, Kai was fairly confident that he was getting this right.

  The smell coming from Wyatt’s side of the kitchen was amazing, which implied that he was getting it right, too.

  Normally, this moment was when Wyatt would have paused to ask what Kai was doing, but Kai didn’t have time. Instead, he dumped butter and icing sugar into the stand mixer in the quantities he had on his recipe sheet, and flicked it on.

  The icing sugar puffed out of the bowl as the paddle of the mixer hit it, dusting Kai’s face. He sighed, licking his lips as Wyatt chuckled.

  He was gaining whole new levels of respect for Wyatt today. How did he do all this in a measly half-hour and explain it and keep up with what Kai was doing? Kai hadn’t given him nearly enough credit for how good he was at hosting.

  “I’m just demonstrating what would happen to someone who had no idea what they were doing,” Kai said, grabbing a paper towel to wipe his face off with.

  “Well, if you wanna prevent that in future, you wait until the butter’s about halfway whipped and then start adding your sugar a little at a time,” Wyatt explained cheerfully, without even the barest hint of judgement.

  He was too good for Kai. How the hell Kai had managed to get and keep his interest was still a mystery.

  He’d gotten through making his own curry paste and even remembered to put on a glove while he handled the chili, which was a miracle, because Kai never did that.

  His fingers were basically fireproof anyway.

  “You seem to be getting along fine,” he pointed out, since he needed to say something.

  “Learned from the master.” Wyatt turned to grin at him, and Kai’s heart actually fluttered in his chest. He’d never really taught anyone to do anything, and he’d never actually shown Wyatt how to do this.

  “I watched an old episode of your show where you made this,” Wyatt continued. “You were so young and adorable.”

  Kai didn’t even remember filming that episode, but he was flattered that Wyatt had gone back and watched it.

  “I bet you’ve seen all my shows,” he said, teasing.

  “I have, actually,” Wyatt said. “I’ve been working my way through them since we started this.”

  Kai swallowed. That was news to him, and he wasn’t sure how to handle it. He knew, logically, that people must have been watching, but he’d never really known someone who was watching before. Even if it was years later.

  “Wow. Sorry for nearly boring you to death then, I guess,” he said.

  Wyatt shook his head. “No, I learned a lot. And you were cute back then.”

  “I’m not cute now?” Kai asked, figuring that this was the last episode and if it became really obvious that he was screwing Wyatt—and more importantly, really liked him—that was fine. It’d help the final episode ratings.

  “I think you’ve levelled up to handsome,” Wyatt said, tossing his chicken in the pan.

  Kai blushed and turned his attention back to his own work, his insides fluttering at the thought that Wyatt had just called him handsome, sincerely, in front of everyone who was ever going to watch this show.

  He spent the rest of the episode preoccupied with how nice it was that Wyatt seemed to really like him. He hadn’t felt like this in a long time, and not toward someone who would have been so good for him. Who would have lifted him up instead of tearing him down, who respected his work, who…

  Who was Wyatt, really. No one Kai had ever been with before even began to compare to him. He left all of Kai’s previous boyfriends in the dust.

  Not that they were boyfriends. Were they? That seemed like the kind of thing they’d need to discuss, but this was the last episode, so maybe it was the kind of thing they could discuss after. Maybe they could be that, now.

  “I’ve always wanted to say this,” Kai began as he got the other cake out of the fridge. “Here’s one I prepared earlier.”

  This one just needed to be filled, frosted, and decorated, which was easy enough. He’d made probably a thousand rosettes now, and he was confident he could get the twelve he needed for this cake right.

  “It’s fun, right?” Wyatt said, grinning over at him.

  Kai caught himself staring a half-second too long, suddenly distracted by how much he liked it when Wyatt smiled at him.

  He mentally shook himself, focusing on the task at hand instead of how pretty Wyatt’s eyes were when he smiled.

  By the time he was done, he had what he thought was a pretty passable celebration cake. Hopefully, Wyatt would think so, too.

  “You done over there?” Wyatt asked as Kai wiped the last stray smear of buttercream off the cake stand he was presenting his work on.

  “Just,” he said, stepping away and watching Wyatt’s reaction carefully.

  Wyatt made a soft, pleased noise as he inspected the cake, turning it around slowly and checking it from every angle.

  “Check out the finish on this. Anyone’d think you were some kind of professional,” he teased. “I guess the skills transfer, huh?”

  Kai blushed. He could feel tension he’d been carrying all day melting out of him, relief washing over him in its place.

  “I’m proud of you,” Wyatt said. “And I’d definitely take you on as an apprentice if you ever decide you wanna learn baking.”

  Kai laughed, his stomach flooding with warmth at the sound of Wyatt’s voice. He really did seem proud, like Kai had pulled something truly impressive off.

  Kai looked at him, taking in the expression on his face, and felt his heart flip. Wyatt being impressed with him made laughter bubble up in his chest, a tight swell of joy that he almost felt he couldn’t contain in his body.

  Wyatt glanced at him, and the bright smile on his face faded to something softer and more sincere as their eyes met for a few heartbeats too long.

  Kai’s breath caught in his lungs, and his stomach flipped over as he realized that he was…

  Was…

  Oh no.

  Oh no.

  He was in love with Wyatt. Wyatt, who’d been kind and patient with him even when he hadn’t really deserved it, who’d given Kai the security to show him all his soft spots without worrying he was going to poke at them.

  He swallowed.

  Well, all things considered, Wyatt wasn’t the worst person to fall in love with.

  Hell, now that he’d had the thought, he even liked the idea. Wyatt had been amazing, and if there was even the slightest chance he felt the same way…

  Kai could have been happy with him. Very happy.

  Ridiculously happy, even. Wyatt was everything he hadn’t realized he wanted, all the things he should have been looking for all this time.

  And the sex was incredible, and he’d never been happier than when Wyatt held him after and murmured goodnight into his ear and made him feel safe and wanted for maybe the first time in his life.

  Damn.

  “Well, if you ever start your own bakery, I’ll consider it,” Kai said, forcing himself to look away from Wyatt, but unable to stop himself smiling.

  He was in love.

  The giddy rush of excitement at the thought of loving Wyatt felt really, really good.

  He kept smiling to himself as he went over to taste Wyatt’s dish, barely even caring whether it would be any good or not.

  Of course, because Wyatt was Wyatt, it was amazing.

  “This is unfair,” he said after his second mouthful. “You’re not allowed to be good at my job, too.”

  Wyatt chuckled. “Like I said, learned from the master.”

  Kai could hardly wait to go home with him tonight.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The pop of the cork coming out of the champagne bottle made Wyatt jump, even though he could see that Kai had it under control. Well under control, even.

  “You know what you’re doing with one of those, huh?” he asked, sorting out takeout containers on the coffee table. Kai hadn’t let the cork go flying, or had a single drop overflow.


  Champagne and takeout was definitely a chef’s celebratory meal. It saved either of them cooking.

  “If you’d had a sommelier hit you with a towel every time you screwed it up, you’d get good at it, too,” Kai smiled wryly. “Not that I’m ungrateful for being taught, just…”

  “Yeah, my uncle used to stand on my foot if I let my fingers get too close to the dough roller or tried to reach under the guard without totally unplugging it first. He was trying to stop me hurting myself, but…”

  “Well, you’ve still got all your fingers.” Kai shrugged, pouring two glasses and then sitting down beside Wyatt. “But yeah, what is it with hitting juniors in the kitchen?”

  “Stress, I think,” Wyatt said. “I dunno. I always promised myself I wouldn’t do it if I was ever running a kitchen.”

  “Of course you did,” Kai said warmly. “You’re probably the sweetest man I’ve ever known.”

  Wyatt chuckled, sipping his champagne and making a happy sound at the crisp, tart taste of it. He’d let Kai pick the bottle, since he figured he knew what he was doing, and it had paid off as far as he was concerned.

  “I never wanted to run one,” Kai said. “I just wanted to… do what I do, because I was good at it. When you’re in charge, you’re just barking orders. Which is why I like this job. Thank you for helping me keep it.”

  “Yeah, I love this job,” Wyatt agreed.

  They passed takeout containers between them, and drank their champagne, and Wyatt could feel the comfort he’d wanted with Kai filling up the room, making the whole place warm close and wonderful.

  His heart had almost leapt into his throat earlier, when they were filming, at the way Kai looked at him. He wasn’t sure he remembered ever being looked at like that before, like for just a second, he was the center of someone’s whole world.

  He’d been carrying that feeling since, turning it over where he’d tucked it away in his chest and examining it from all possible angles.

  It was starting to look like something bigger and more precious than he’d expected to have, but now that he’d gotten his first glimpse of it, he wanted it.