Chapter Twenty-Two
O n Thursday, Magda and Mac were both off their game.
Mac had half expected the producers to pull him aside when he arrived at King Arthur that morning and read him the riot act about fraternizing with other contestants, but if news of the kiss had spread, there was no sign of it. In fact, all of the producers seemed sort of tense and distracted—and he just hoped that had nothing to do with him or Magda.
Magda was the last one into the Proving Room, and he tried to catch her eye, but she was very focused on Leah and Eunice—and very much not looking at him. Something uneasy twisted in his stomach, but they were called into the kitchen before he could make his way across the room to talk to her.
He tried to get close to her in the cluster of bakers as they made their way to the front of the room, but when he murmured, “Mags,” she just shook her head and walked faster.
Crap. Was she mad at him? He’d thought she was with him all the way last night, that the kiss had been mutual and consensual. Could he have read that wrong?
Had he freaking assaulted her?
The Skills Challenge was French macarons. He’d practiced them because they seemed to pop up on Cake-Off nearly every season. The judges exited the kitchen, Flanders called for their ninety minutes to begin, and Mac fought to stay focused.
He heard Magda’s voice at the station two behind his, talking about beating the egg whites, and he hummed to himself to drown out the sound of her voice. Focus. He was here for a reason.
Even if sometimes he couldn’t quite figure out what that was.
At the end of the ninety minutes, he had something passably resembling macarons. He glanced back after he carried his tray up to the judging table and saw Magda frowning at her own tray. Apparently her bake hadn’t gone well, either. He tried to position himself near her as they were ushered out of the room, but she was sticking close to Leah and Eunice again.
“Magda.” He approached her when they were back in the Proving Room. “Can we talk?”
She flushed, shaking her head. “Not now,” she mumbled.
Okay, yes, they were both wired for sound, and there were cameras everywhere, but still. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. That we’re okay.”
She flicked a glance up at him as Leah and Eunice looked between them and subtly moved away to give them space.
“We’re fine. We’re good,” Magda said as soon as they had the completely inaccurate illusion of privacy. Then she met his eyes, something meaningful in her gaze. “I just want to focus on the competition. I don’t want any distractions.”
Well, that was clear enough. “Right. Message received.” But something prompted him to add, “But you’re not, uh…” How was he supposed to say this in a coded way. “I didn’t… want to make you uncomfortable…”
“You didn’t do anything,” she said firmly. “We’re fine.”
“Right.”
The conversation still felt unfinished—but of course this was the one time that the kitchen clean-up and glamour shots took no time at all, and they were suddenly being called back in for judging. There were still PAs rushing frantically to wipe down counters as they were lined up at the front of the kitchen and the judges entered.
Normally, judging took ages, but there was a strange sense of urgency today, and it almost felt like they were rushing through it.
Magda was in the middle of the pack—which was clearly a disappointment for her—while Mac was second from the bottom. Not exactly a great position moving into the next challenge. Which they were informed would be starting right away.
A ripple of surprise went through the remaining eight bakers—they never went straight into another challenge without doing a round of interviews.
“For your Elimination Challenge today, you have been tasked with constructing a cookie tower—it must be at least eighteen inches high, self-supporting…”
Mac knew he should be listening, but he barely heard the judges’ instructions—though thankfully they’d been told about today’s Elimination Challenge before they left last night. He’d been supposed to plan his cookie tower—but he’d been distracted by thoughts of Magda.
Magda.
Who didn’t want a distraction. And okay, yes, he could get that. They were in the middle of a competition, and the last thing either one of them needed was to be off their game. He’d actually had the same thought last night—that this wasn’t the best time to be starting something.
But was that just until the competition was over? Or was that a nicer way of saying this was a mistake and we should never do it again ?
Did she regret it? He was still having flashbacks—that little sound she’d made echoing in his ears.
“Your time starts… now !”
Shit. Jeffrey Flanders’s host voice rang over the room.
Okay. Cookies. He could do this in his sleep.
Mac immediately started measuring ingredients, his hands moving smoothly through the familiar recipe—until he heard Magda’s voice across the kitchen.
His body felt like it had been tuned to the sound. He could easily pick out her voice in a room full of chatter—and he found himself focusing on it. Did she sound a little wooden? Was there a waver in her voice?
“Mac! What are you making for us today?”
The judges were suddenly standing in front of him with a camera crew, all of them smiling expectantly.
“Uh…” Shit. What was he making?
The bakers had all been given the instructions last night so they could plan their towers—Mac had roughed out an idea this morning, but now as he looked around, he saw Tim to his left working from a little notebook open to a detailed diagram.
“I’m making, uh…” He looked down at his hands. “Ginger snaps. And snickerdoodles. And raspberry sandwich cookies, and lemon curd sandwich cookies, and…” Shit. He’d definitely had a fifth kind, but maybe the judges weren’t counting. “And it’s going to be on a Rice Krispies Treat structure in the shape of—” Why was his mind so blank? What was tall? “The Eiffel Tower.”
The judges all oooh ed as if he’d said something shocking.
“It’s going to be the battle of the Eiffel Towers,” Flanders said melodramatically.
“Magda is making an Eiffel Tower of French cookies, drawing on her experience living in France,” Joanie explained. “What drew you to that structure?”
Oh no. No, that was bad. Crap, he’d probably heard her voice say Eiffel Tower and his brain had latched on to it. “Sorry! Sorry, did I say Eiffel Tower? Wrong thing. Empire State Building. New York. I go there to see shows all the time. Broadway. And these, uh, these cookies are all the star of the show.”
Bullshit. It was such bullshit. But the judges were nodding along as if he’d said something meaningful.
“Just remember,” Alexander Clay cautioned ominously, “it’s all about the flavors and the bake. Don’t get too caught up in the structure and lose that.”
“Absolutely,” Mac agreed—breathing a sigh of relief when the judges and their cameras finally moved away.
Usually he loved chatting with the camera crews—he pretended he was on his own baking show and hammed it up—but today he was having a hard enough time remembering what he was supposed to be doing.
He needed to be focusing on his baking. The clock was ticking.
He reached for the salt—and his hand froze. Crap. Had he already put in the salt? He couldn’t remember. His hands had been moving on autopilot, and if he didn’t get his shit together, he was going home.
Mac slammed a lid on his thoughts about Magda. He was making an Empire State Building out of cookies, and he needed to get his act in gear.
Her Eiffel Tower was going to collapse.
Magda stood in front of the judges with her cookie Eiffel Tower on the table between them and silently willed the caramel to hold. She’d taken a chance, making her tower out of cookies as well. Around the room, towers made of Rice Krispies Treats or nougatine stood firm, while her cookies glued together with caramel were seconds away from crumbling.
They hadn’t had a chance to practice, and Magda had failed to account for the weight of the cookies that were piled on her Eiffel Tower. The first floor was slowly buckling under the weight as Alexander Clay muttered about a “lack of refinement” in her construction.
Joanie staunchly pointed out that her design goal was clearly identifiable—which could not be said of all the cookie towers in the room—and then they began sampling the cookies. Perhaps time was moving strangely again, but it felt like this part was moving faster than normal.
They tasted all her cookies in quick succession. Joanie commended her baking skill—and then she and Alexander began their usual tag-team routine. Joanie with her gently disappointed “Oh, but we were hoping for so much more from you.” And Alexander with his “delicious, but uninspired as always” condemnation.
Magda forced a smile to her face and thanked the judges for their feedback, before picking up the Eiffel Tower—which promptly collapsed under its own weight and cascaded toward the floor in a waterfall of cookies.
Everyone froze. Magda stared in horror at the mess, wondering if this was going to affect the judging. Did it have to stay upright all afternoon? Or just long enough for the judges to see it? Had she somehow jostled it or knocked it in a way that had caused this? Would this be what America watched over and over and over again on the commercials for week six? Was she going to go out as the contestant with the collapsed cookie tower? Oh God, she was going to be Collapsed Cookie Tower Lady for the rest of her life, wasn’t she?
“Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!” Jeffrey Flanders declared, in what he clearly thought was an incredibly pithy joke—which just made her want to fling the remaining lower levels of the tower at his face.
As if that was a signal everyone had been waiting for, the director bellowed for Flanders to help her get the crumbled remainder of her tower back to her station—but it was Leah and Eunice who rushed forward to help. The cameras eagerly captured the moment—and then the PAs were there to sweep an afternoon’s worth of Magda’s hard work into trash bins and clear the way for the next tower to be judged.
Naturally, she didn’t win.
She’d thought Mac might actually be in the running for the top prize—his Empire State Building was rock solid and neatly sculpted—but then the judges had sampled his ginger snaps and flinched, declaring them salty to the point of being nearly inedible.
No one looked more shocked than Eunice when she was declared the winner over Abby, while Tim looked deeply pissed to have been in the middle.
Magda held her breath as she was scolded for her flavors and her lack of attention to detail, Mac was called out for his massive error with the salt, and they were both lectured that the judges expected better of them, like they were children being taken to task.
They were saved only by the fact that Cherise’s cookie tower had never managed to get upright, and she’d only managed to get three kinds of cookie on her display. Abby’s sister had been strongly in the middle of the pack until then, but today had destroyed her.
It didn’t actually feel great to know Magda was only in the competition for another week because of someone else’s complete collapse.
She just wanted to get back to her room and lick her wounds. Today had been a marathon. It had to be after dark already, but when the director called cut, he followed it, ominously, with “Hold positions!” Which invariably meant there was more coming.
She couldn’t do another bake tonight. She just couldn’t.
Then Stephen stalked into the room. He hadn’t been on set all day, and all of the producers tensed as they watched him take a position where the judges usually stood.
“Attention!” he bellowed. “Effective immediately, production is shutting down.”