Chapter Seven #2
“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. ”
Miles rubbed his neck and tried not to look sheepish. “I’m not very good at this part, I should probably default to your expertise.”
It was worth admitting that he wasn’t very good at something to see Evan’s face light up. “Of course,” he chirped happily. “If you’re sure you trust me not to pick something hideous.”
“You picked me, didn’t you?”
Evan’s smile evolved into a self-satisfied smirk. “That’s right, I did. Besides, in case you were worried, I have fantastic taste.”
“What else do you have for me?” Miles asked.
“Do you watch Dream Team?” Evan shot the question over as he typed furiously away at his laptop.
Miles knew enough to see he wasn’t working on another email.
It was hard to bite back the sudden demand that Evan tell him what he was writing—it wasn’t easy to trust Evan when he’d said all that to Reed—but Miles knew he needed to.
“Dream Team? The cooking show with that baker from LA and Landon Patton? The one where they spent three quarters of the time flirting and not actually cooking?”
“That’s the one.” Evan didn’t look up. “They’re gearing up for rehearsals in the next week, because the next season of their show starts filming.”
“And?”
Evan looked up, and he didn’t look thrilled. “And that means our kitchen time goes way down, because they’re stars and we’re the low men on the totem pole.”
“What?” Miles demanded. How was he supposed to create recipes and test them and make sure he was able to actually teach people if he didn’t have access to the kitchen?
“Believe me, I know. How are you supposed to create recipes if you can’t get in the kitchen?”
Miles stared. “That was fucking eerie. How did you know I was thinking that?”
Evan shrugged. “You’re predictable. Chef, kitchen time—more important than anything else. It’s not hard to connect the dots.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” Miles asked, trying to keep his voice level. Evan might be responsible for some things he didn’t like, but he wasn’t responsible for this. This was, apparently, out of his control. “I’m assuming, since you’re you, you have some sort of plan to deal with this.”
“Yes,” Evan said. “Of course I do. Even though I just found out about this.”
“Just now?”
Evan shot him a challenging look over his laptop screen. “Literally thirty seconds ago.”
“Oh, so that was an email you were typing so angrily,” Miles said.
“No. Well. Yes. Sort of. I was sending a message to Reed. Getting permission for us to work from home. Or rather, permission for us to work from your home. You’ve got a good kitchen.
Not fantastic, but it should be good enough for our purposes.
” Evan skewered Miles with another incredibly direct look.
“After all, you made that Twinkie at home, didn’t you? ”
“It was a Ding Dong,” Miles corrected.
“Whatever.” Evan threw up his hands in frustration. “This is my solution. I wish I had something else, but it’s what we’ve got.”
“Would begging help?” Miles asked. “I can be pretty persuasive.”
Evan’s incredulous glance didn’t instantly puncture his ego. Nope. Not at all.
“Okay,” he admitted, “usually I can be pretty persuasive. Better?”
Evan gave a sharp nod. He was still typing like each key he hit was a punch in the face of the people who had demoted their kitchen time to zip, nada, nil.
“No,” Evan finally said, with a sigh, fingers finally drifting off the keyboard, “it wouldn’t help. Dream Team trumps all.”
It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard of Dream Team—Miles didn’t live under a rock. But he hadn’t really paid attention to how popular it was. Or cared, until he was suddenly faced with losing the kitchen time he needed.
“We can work around this, right?” Miles asked, and he didn’t even try to hide the desperate edge to his voice.
The part of him that was still terrified and needed any reassurance he could get.
He’d never imagined asking for it from Evan, of all people, but maybe that had been his problem when they’d first met.
“Of course we can. Working from your place, and we’ll still get some time in here but it’ll be shorter and it’ll be either early or late.”
The one thing Miles felt confident about was that Evan was definitely as committed as he was to making this show a success. Of course how they got to that success was still up for debate, but he could never doubt Evan’s commitment.
The timer on his phone dinged again, and Miles went to the fridge to pull out the dough. It felt right to be working on something right now, as they tried to muddle through this new hurdle. Whenever he’d struggled with anything cropping up in his life, he’d always gone to the kitchen.
In the kitchen, if you put flour with leavening, you got dough, and if you baked the dough, you got bread and pastries and rolls. There was a logically reassuring certainty about baking—like Miles was asserting control when he didn’t have any.
“How many more rinse and repeats do we have left?” Evan asked, not even looking up from his laptop.
“One more, and then they bake,” Miles said.
“I find it difficult to believe that anything is worth all this,” he said primly.
“Wait and see,” Miles insisted.
“You keep saying that.” Evan rolled his eyes. Miles couldn’t even see his whole face, but he’d begun to discover just what Evan’s voice sounded like when his face did that cute little scrunchy thing that always accompanied an eye roll.
Miles shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help imagining feeding Evan little bites of hot, flaky, buttery pastry dotted with the rich, dark chocolate and him moaning with pleasure as the flavors hit his tongue.
He couldn’t help it because he was just a man and Evan was wearing him down with each cute scrunchy face and every snarky retort.
Miles was befuddled because those weren’t supposed to be things that attracted him.
They weren’t supposed to be things that attracted anyone.
But somehow those things—and a growing list of others—had caught him and now he wasn’t just flirting because he was trying to out-James Bond James Bond.
He was flirting because he couldn’t do anything else.
And that was a problem, mostly because Miles had been incredibly dumb and had kissed him like he was trying to eat him alive and then had sent an email that would have turned off the most understanding and forgiving of people.
Evan was definitely not that understanding or forgiving.
“Miles, Miles, Miles.” Evan’s voice hit him suddenly and Miles realized that while he’d been daydreaming, trying to figure out how to get Evan to eat from his fingers and like it and also forget all about that very unforgettable email, he’d been trying to get his attention.
“Sorry,” he said.
Evan threw his hands up in frustration. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
“No?” Miles put on his most charming sheepish expression and hoped that would melt the exasperation on Evan’s face. It didn’t. Not even a dent.
“I said, tomorrow we should get what you need at your apartment to make it baking-friendly.”
“Right, yes, we can do that.” Miles realized after he’d said it that we had to be a misnomer. Because Evan had no clue what he needed at his apartment to make it “baking-friendly,” whatever that meant.
“You’ll put the list together?”
Miles saw an opening and even though this attraction confused the hell out of him, it didn’t confuse him enough to not take advantage of it.
“You said, we,” he said, with a faux leer that Xander had once said made him look like a creeper.
But that was Xander, and Miles took everything he said with a massive grain of salt.
The look in Evan’s eyes when he glanced up was dismissive. “Like I would know what you need to bake stuff,” he said. “You make the list, and we’ll go get the stuff tomorrow. You—list; me—corporate credit card.”
“Let me guess, you’re also in charge of the budget.”