Chapter Seven
W hen 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 idea 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.