Chapter 24
I give myself a week filled with lots of dog walking before I make up my mind about what happened at the pub. Something changed, and Mike and I had a moment. It could have been a trick of the long, hot cosplay night, but I don’t think so.
When I wake up Saturday morning, I am sure of two things.
The first: I want a cookie. As delicious as the bakery two blocks up is, I know for a fact there are better cookies to be had in this little corner of La Jolla.
The second: I want to see Mike. I don’t regret not kissing him.
I don’t regret flirting with him. I certainly don’t regret the cosplay.
In fact, I plan to text Adam later today to see if I can pick up another shift.
But, my gosh, do I miss the sight of Mike Benedick.
Mike’s Dutch door is open—well, the top half, anyway. So I unlock the bottom half and let myself in. He’s on the floor with a nail gun, playing with the baseboards.
“I want a cookie.”
“Of course you do.” He punches another couple of nails in.
I hop onto his pretty new quartz countertop. “The ones you had in the cookie jar. Tell me where they’re from.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, you owe me for last Saturday. And I’ve decided I want cookies as payback.”
He rises and pushes a series of buttons on his new range. They beep haughtily before a fan kicks on. “And no doubt a meal to go with them.” He pads over to the pantry and pulls out flour, sugar, and glass jars of spices.
“No,” I say indignantly. “Cookies are my meal.”
Mike shakes his head at me, but there’s a playful smile on his lips. He hauls open the refrigerator door and momentarily disappears behind it. “Cookies do not a meal make.” He emerges with butter, eggs, and a jar of molasses.
“They do if you eat enough of them.”
His eyes narrow. “What did they do to you in law school? Lock you in a room with only Oreos for days at a time?”
“And sugar packets.” I gaze unapologetically at the sliver of skin just above his waistband as he reaches for something in the cupboard above the fridge. “Old habits die hard.”
“Which is why you can’t stop arguing or thinking like a lawyer.” He opens the tin he’s retrieved and counts out twelve pieces of what look like some sort of gumdrop candy. “Hand me the chef’s knife.”
“I can’t. I’m too hungry. I need cookies.” And I don’t have it in me to suffer through any more failed home-baking attempts. Adam has scarred me for life. “Look, if the bakery is closed on weekends or something, that’s fine. Just tell me. I’ll drag you there during opening hours.”
He sifts sugar and flour into a bowl. “You don’t know which is the chef’s knife, do you?”
“I know…” Or I would if I could Google it in the next ten seconds. “But I’m not a big fan of chopped nuts in my baked goods.”
“Not nuts. Candied ginger.”
Intriguing. I slide off the counter and find the biggest knife I can and hand it to Mike. He puts it back and pulls out a smaller knife with a square-looking blade.
“Ginger cookies?”
“So your lips can taste like ginger.”
I think that means I got under Mike’s skin last week. Most excellent. “You bake them?”
“I do.”
“And you baked the snickerdoodles the other week?”
“At Monique and Stacey’s place, yes.”
Shut up! “So you, like…can actually bake. You’re not like Adam, who thinks he can bake but is actually a disaster?”
“Adam has a lot going on—”
“Make chocolate chip cookies!”
“No.” He zaps the butter in the microwave for a few seconds before dumping it into a mixing bowl.
“But those are my favorite,” I whine.
“No, they’re not. You only think they are because you are at heart a creature of habit that craves the monotony of a routine.”
“Which is one hundred percent why I’ve quit my job and embraced the hustler lifestyle and all the uncertainty that comes with it.”
“You are living off your savings while you rotate between your library books and my Netflix subscription.” He chops the candied ginger into fine little pieces and moves on to beating the butter and sugar fluffy with a hand mixer.
“Hey, I have two dozen regular clients on FroggoDoggo, and I have plans to pick up the occasional shift at Adam’s escape room.”
He turns off the mixer long enough to dip a spoon into the bowl. “Where you hope to run into me in character.”
“Is that what you tell yourself to keep going?”
He cracks an egg over the sink and bounces the yolk from one shell to the other before adding just the yolk to the mixing bowl. “What is it with women and villains? If it wasn’t so flattering getting asked out after every shift, it’d be exhausting.” He unscrews the jar of molasses.
“Aren’t you going to measure that?” It smells way too strong for cookies.
He grins as he pours a generous amount into the batter without measuring. “You’re a woman. Maybe you can explain it to me?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Explain what exactly? Why you should carefully measure ingredients that smell like toxic waste while baking?”
He laughs as he adds the bowl of flour and spices to the batter. “No. The villain kink.”
I snort. “I don’t know why some women are into villains.”
“Sure you do.” The batter thickens as Mike stirs it by hand. “Do me a favor and scrape all that ginger into the bowl.”
I make a face. “It’s sticky.”
“You’ll survive.”
I wrinkle my nose.
“I’ll lick your fingers clean.” Delivered with such a brazenly casual tone.
I try to will my face not to turn red.
“Or,” he says, “there is the kitchen sink. I got it hooked up last night.”
“Moving up in the world.” I dump the very fragrant and sticky ginger into his bowl before running my hands pointedly under the faucet.
“Guess I won’t be licking you anytime soon.”
Heat all over my face.
“See? You like villains.”
“What?” I pull open the fridge, hoping the cool air will do something about the blush on my cheeks.
“You like the characters who say and do things they shouldn’t.”
I pull out his bottle of cranberry juice and help myself to a couple of blackberries. “That’s not the definition of a villain.”
“Then what is?”
“You’re not a bad guy, Mike.” But he is able to play them so, so well. Slip them on like they are a tailor-made suit. Why is that?
I pop the berries into my mouth and hold the bottle out for him to open. He sighs but twists off the cap before setting it on the counter.
I reach for a glass in his cupboard, but he takes my hand and pulls me gently away from the sink. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“Villains are ruthless, selfish—”
His eyes narrow before a grin spreads across his face. “You missed some ginger here by your ring.” He brushes my fingers against his lips, pausing at the offending knuckle, which he licks, sucks, and…kisses. “You should take it off next time you’re baking.”
“Right,” I say, not proud of how breathless I sound.
“It’s pretty.” He backs away and runs a single hand through his hair. “A souvenir from a buddy in law school?”
Would he be jealous if I said yes? “A present from my grandma when I started high school, actually. She said we never celebrate the starts of things, but beginnings are just as important as endings.” I twist the morganite ring around so the stone faces my palm.
“I used to wear it on my right hand, but then I grew a couple of inches and ring sizes after high school, and I haven’t bothered to get it resized. So I wear it on my left.”
“Like a wedding ring.”
I pour myself a glass of cranberry juice. “Keeps the villains at bay.”
“Piques their interest,” he grumbles, dropping a small ball of cookie dough into a bowl of sugar. “You gonna help?”
I groan. “If I must.”
“Roll them in the sugar, then put them on the sheet.”
I know better than to complain about getting sticky hands. “Where did you learn to bake?”
“Your granny gave you fine jewelry. Mine taught me how to bake and read.”
That’s adorable. “Really? Dick and Jane at the seashore?”
Mike laughs. “I mean read literature. I was in sixth grade, and I had just landed the first F of my academic career. I used to walk here after school every day. I came through that door, tore my English essay in half, stuffed it into the trash, and stormed off.”
“Without even stopping for a piece of licorice?” I take a sip of my juice.
“No, I made sure to grab one of those.” Mike scoops out more perfectly sized balls of dough. “Grandma found me. She had the two halves of my essay in one hand and her collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories in the other.”
I wish I could jump inside Mike’s mind and see what the smile on his face is all about.
“She wanted to know what happened. I told her I was bored. I couldn’t pay attention.
All the words just ran together. English was my last class of the day, and I often dozed off.
She handed me her pen. ‘You take this,’ she said.
‘Anytime you read something that is interesting, underline it. Star it. Make a note.’ I told her that none of it was interesting.
‘Then will you underline the parts that I think are interesting?’ she asked. I said I would.
“We sat together at her kitchen table and ripped Poe’s story into pieces and built it back together.
All with her red pen. The first time we went through it, we looked at foreshadowing and story structure.
Second time, we analyzed character development.
Motivations. Then themes. Then language.
We talked about why, out of all the words in the English language, Poe used the ones he did.
And that would have been fine, but then Grandma asked me what I felt and thought about the story.
She wanted to know how I connected with it.
How the dialogue felt in my ears, on my lips.
That, she said, was the most important part.
All the tricks of the trade didn’t matter one bit, unless there was an emotional connection in me, the audience. ”
I don’t know what to say. I wish I could have met this extraordinary woman. I’m glad she taught Mike how to read literature and how to connect with stories. I like knowing she has a seat saved at every one of his shows.
“Come on, I know you are dying to say something snide and cutting.”
No. Never. “What were her favorite types of cookies? You said she taught you how to bake. She must have had a favorite.”
“Ginger were her favorite.”
“What are yours?”
“I like burnt chocolate chip.”
“Okay, maybe you are a villain.” Who would destroy a perfectly good chocolate chip cookie by burning it?
Mike pops the cookie sheets into the oven. “You want to run lines with me while these bake?”
Completely, but I’m going to play it cool. I take a slow sip of my juice, like I’m not sure. Like I need to be persuaded.
“I have a monologue I’m working on. Man and Superman.”
I choke on my juice. “George Bernard Shaw?”
“Act 3, scene 2.”
“Let me guess. You’re the dead old woman.”
“I’m Don Juan.” He tosses me a book. “You can be The Devil.”