Fifteen. Sweet Temptation #2
I can see the gears turning in Corey’s head as he contemplates my idea.
He’s so quiet that my stomach twists, because I’m worrying that he’ll think my idea is awful.
Or, worse, that I’ve now shown I don’t care about the contest the way he does, and that I am so not the kind of person he wants in his life.
I put several more inches between us on the couch as I scooch closer to the end. But then a smile spreads slowly across Corey’s face until he’s beaming at me. “That’s perfect!”
At the inn the next day, we work with renewed purpose. I don’t know what I’m doing, but Corey’s eager to teach me.
“I need a little more cinnamon,” Corey says. He stirs a heaping tea spoon more of the spice into the dough and tries it, nodding his satisfaction. He uses a fresh spoon to get another small scoop and passes it to me. “Try.”
I taste it. It’s mind-blowingly good, thanks to Corey’s fusion of cinnamon, anise, and another of Corey’s secret ingredients, a hard-to-find vanilla extract that elevates the usual Christmas cookie flavors. “Why is this so good?”
“Chemistry,” Corey says, watching me enjoy the flavors. “Certain things just go well together.”
There’s a heavy pause after he says this, like we both realize he could be talking about me and him, and not just cinnamon, anise, and vanilla. He breaks it.
“Can you handle blending the icing for the next batch?”
“Can I handle it?” I say with swagger as I take the powdered sugar he’s measured and add a bit of milk to it, like Corey’s shown me. When I put the blender into the mixture, I turn it too high too fast, and puffs of powdered sugar billow up around me.
Corey doubles over laughing. “Hey,” I say. “I’m getting better!”
“You’re a natural,” he says with a wry smile as powdered sugar rises in clouds around us.
We’re in our own little world, and we are, in a word, insufferable. But being with Corey is so easy. He’s this interesting and kind person who’s gone through a major loss, but something about him is so open.
“You have something right there,” he says, returning me to the moment. He reaches a hand out and, with his index finger, lightly brushes the tip of my nose. “Flour.”
But he doesn’t move his hand away all that quickly. His finger lingers on the end of my nose, and he looks at my face for an extended beat. It’s warm in here because of all the stoves, but I get a few degrees hotter as a flush rises across my chest.
Corey drops his hand.
“So, finishing touches,” he says. “His hat needs a little ball of fluff.”
“Marshmallow,” I suggest. He takes one from the prep bowl and is about to put it smack-dab on the end of Santa’s cap.
“No, no, no,” I say. I put my hand over his and move the marshmallow so it’s just slightly askew. Santa’s eyes are a little crooked, his beard a bit fluffier on one side than the other, and one of his boots is doused with green sprinkles. In other words, he looks perfectly messy.
“Good idea,” Corey says, and he adds a marshmallow to the next cookie. “Shall we try them?”
We each pick up a Santa. I say, “On the count of three.”
“One…” Corey says.
“Two…” I add. I can’t help it—out of the corner of my eye, I see Grant at his station, looking our way instead of at Fiona, who has a length of dough stretched between her palms. His expression is hard to read.
He could be lost in thought, but the uncharitable part of me hopes he’s overcome with jealousy.
Before we say “three,” we each take a bite. And wow. The messy Santas aren’t just messy. They’re special.
My eyes go wide and connect with Corey’s. The shared revelation that we’ve made something really, truly good sends a spark between us.
“I don’t know if we need to try anything else after this,” he says. “I think we got it. They’re perfect.”
“Not too perfect, though, right?” I say.
Corey drops his cookie to the plate and pulls me into a hug, his strong arms circling my body and squeezing me tight. “They’re as amazing as the woman who thought of them,” he says.
As we’re cleaning up our station, Corey gets a phone call from the bakery.
“Okay, Sara. Sara, I don’t want you to worry.
” He pauses. “It’s one batch of cookies.
Javi will help you with the batter. I’ll talk you through what to say to the customer.
” He glances up at me. “Hold on,” he says to Sara.
Then, gesturing to the mess we made, he says, “I’ll get this.
You go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.
” He goes back to his call. “That old oven can be touchy, so here’s what you do… ”
I feel a little guilty leaving him with all the tidying but I do have to pee, so I mouth, You sure? and he nods and winks. Adorable.
After I use the restroom in the lobby, I’m so cheered by our baking success that I practically skip down the steps of the inn. On the last stair, the handle of my tote bag gets caught on the end of the railing, and before I can stop myself, I’m flying toward the sidewalk.
Until…
“Jill!” Grant vaults toward me and catches me in the crook of his arm like I’m an unwieldy football.
“Oh! Um! You didn’t have to do that,” I say. Grant tips me upward, like he doesn’t want to put his actual hands on me, and I stutter-step backward onto the freshly shoveled sidewalk.
“Being the inn where a lady busted her head open on the sidewalk isn’t exactly a big draw,” he says.
“It depends on the demographic you’re going for. In LA, you can make a killing selling tours of murder hotels.”
“That’s LA.” Grant says LA like the letters taste bad. “And somehow, ‘Woman Killed by the Strap of Her’”—he reads the script on the side of my bag—“‘ Santa’s Favorite Elf Canvas Bag’ isn’t as marketable as murder.”
“Well, clearly I’m not in the hospitality business, thinking any gruesome death should bring the tourists a-gawking.”
“Can we not talk about gruesome deaths? Especially yours.”
Am I slightly heartened by the fact that Grant doesn’t want to think about my gory demise? A little.
“Okay, so tell me about your restaurant. And New York. What’s that like?” I try to sound casual, easy, even though making the question emerge from my mouth feels like I’m trying to hurl a heavy weight across a canyon. Do I really want to hear that life without me is great for Grant?
Grant leans away, one eyebrow cocked. “I told you. Fiona lives there, too, but there’s nothing between us.”
“This isn’t about Fiona. I know she thinks I’m a plebe,” I retort.
“She doesn’t—”
“It’s fine. The air up where she breathes is different than it is down here,” I say. “But I’m asking about you. Just you.”
“It’s not my restaurant, first of all,” he corrects me.
“Well, you’re the sous, and that’s a big deal.”
“Yeah, it’s just hard to influence the menu as much as I want, but I’m learning a lot.”
“You sound a little… flat.”
“It’s like, I get going for a Michelin star—I do.
That’s huge, but that’s an accolade from the outside.
I think my dream has always been to craft really excellent food that takes you just outside your comfort zone but still feels familiar.
I want to make the person who’s coming in for their anniversary happy, not some faceless food judge who’s over everything. ”
“Maybe it’s good to find out what you don’t want in a restaurant,” I offer. His words, I think, sound a little like what I told Corey about writing screenplays that pay homage to but also twist the standard tropes.
“True. And New York is exactly where I need to be to see what’s out there.”
Before I can let the words sting me into a defensive response—why is New York the only place that’s exactly where he needs to be?—he’s hopped up on the brick wall that runs along the steps and is looking at me curiously.
“What’s it like for you in LA?”
Leaving several feet of space between us, I hop up next to him. He was honest, so I feel like I should be at least partially honest.
“It’s a place where you need to be able to stretch a sincere compliment out long enough that it can last you for years,” I tell him.
“That good, huh?”
“I mean, I have an agent, and my work’s out there.
There’s a kind of interesting gig I’m considering,” I lie.
But Lacey more or less said if I don’t make it to the Heartfelt meeting, I won’t have a shred of a career left.
That’s interesting, right? As will be whatever degrading job I find to replace Li’l Ballerz.
“What about that script you were working on? When we were together. The one with the woman whose reflection had a more interesting love life than she did. That was hilarious.”
I nod. “ Mirrors . I darkened it up. It won a prize at a Las Vegas film festival.”
“See? I told you to do something with that one.”
“It’s a lot different than when you first read it.”
I remember the first time he read Mirrors .
When we were together, Grant and I had no Garfield-like feelings toward Mondays.
They were our day. The one day of the week when our schedules completely aligned, and the day of the week when we got to be fully in our bubble, with no outside interference.
My library gig involved working Saturdays to take photos and document weekend events for the website, so my weekend consisted of Sundays and Mondays.
Grant had Mondays off because the restaurant was closed.
Mondays came to mean lazing in Grant’s giant bed, watching the dust motes whirl in the soft rays of light that slipped through his windows.
Mondays were a tangle of our bare limbs.
They were big breakfasts and me in one of Grant’s work button-downs, something I’d previously thought was a phenomenon that only happened in the movies.
Mondays were records crackling on Grant’s turntable—things we’d discover and buy at thrift stores: jazz, some random vintage cocktail party music—and finding ways back into bed with each other.
Grant had come home just after midnight and fallen into bed with me.
I’d been working on Mirrors at his place while I waited for him to get done at the restaurant.
That Monday began with the kind of slow, dreamy morning sex where every touch feels concentrated and extra-potent, as if sleep has helped you grow supplementary nerve endings.
We lay together in a warm, syrupy haze, Grant’s arm slung over my waist.
“I hate to interrupt us, but I have to pee,” I said, sliding out from under the covers and throwing one of Grant’s shirts on as I made my way to the bathroom.
I took my time, combing through my hair and brushing my teeth. When I emerged, I found Grant leaning against the pillows with my computer open on his lap.
“I hope it’s okay I’m reading this,” Grant says. “You bumped it awake and I couldn’t resist peeking.”
He read a little more and my heart caught.
“This is amazing. It’s so funny and smart.
And romantic.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
Before I made it a horror movie, Mirrors was a rom-com in which the heroine eventually learns to take cues from the version of herself living life on the other side of the mirror.
I grabbed the laptop from him. “It’s not done yet.” I sat on the edge of the bed and saved the pages once more before shutting the screen.
“Sorry. I just wanted to see.” Grant shifted closer to me, and I shifted ever so slightly away. “You should do something with this. Enter a contest or something. Or send it to an agent?”
“Yeah, maybe. When it’s done.”
“I’m sorry. I should have asked,” Grant said. He thought I was mad at him for reading it, but it wasn’t that. I actually loved that he thought it was good. “I guess you haven’t mentioned your writing lately, and I got curious.”
I hadn’t mentioned my writing much—he was right.
When it was just us as us, our relationship felt safe.
But I knew he wanted to move on from the underling job he had at the restaurant, and I had faith he was good enough to do that.
So every time he complimented my work or encouraged me, the troubling thought crossed my mind that he was only propping me up because he knew that once he went on to bigger and better things, I’d need something of my own.
“Well, you haven’t mentioned every detail of your work life, either,” I said. I knew I sounded snotty, but I couldn’t help it.
“I’m happy to talk about the restaurant, but I don’t want to bore you with stories about how we didn’t get the heirloom tomato delivery,” Grant said. “And I want you to succeed.”
What I thought he left unsaid was that, realistically, our careers might take us in different directions. And did that matter to him, or just to me? Talking about it would have made me feel desperate and needy. So the best thing to do, I always thought, was to enjoy our bubble while it lasted.
Until it burst.
“Enough about work,” he said. “Let’s make the most of our day off.” He wrapped his arms around me from behind and pulled me back into the bed. “It’s just us. We can do anything we want.”
For now , I’d thought.
Now, the Sweetville now, Grant says, “I’d love to read the new version if you’d ever want me to.”
He’s just being nice , I think. But I know I’m not imagining that he’s inched slightly closer to me on the wall. I’m about to tell him that maybe I’ll email him the script, but before I have a chance to answer, Fiona and Corey emerge onto the steps.
Fiona strides over to Grant and—with a tight smile to me—says, very much to Grant, “Did you still want to go pick up those library books for your dad?” Oh, so she’s met Grant’s dad.
Grant nods. “Yeah, we’d better. He gets pretty crabby when he can’t get his hands on the new Michael Connelly.” With a slight wave, he says to Corey and me, “See you later.”
I look at Corey and say—a little louder than I need to—“Did everything work out with Sara?” See? I think, hoping Grant hears us. Corey and I are more than just baking partners, too .
“All good,” he says. “How about a hot cocoa?”
“You read my mind,” I lie, grateful that he can’t.