Macaron Menace
With a mission at hand and a plan in mind, we were like well trained military professionals. If the kids could have rolled out of the car into some kind of fighting position, they would have, but we settled for Dylan moving so quickly he nearly fell flat on his face.
Ivy hit the market for her list while I worked. At the back of my mind, I was drawing up plans; on my desk, during my break, I poured over the recipes I had been given: apple pie, key lime pie, and banana cream. Were my recipes the best the Internet had to give me? Almost definitely not. Were they serviceable? Yes, and Brittani was just going to have to deal with that.
I didn’t see Aegis until lunch, and I was so absorbed that I nearly forgot about what had happened the night before.
When he first walked in, I looked up and immediately said, “You ready for World War Pie?” And then I also remembered that he had kissed my forehead, and I felt my entire face go red. It was the kind of blush that you know is visible, because your body goes from, like, the usual ninety-eight degrees, to, like… “Hi, I’m legally dead” degrees in three seconds flat.
If Aegis saw- and he definitely saw- he didn’t say anything, instead sliding me a very large pumpkin spice latte drink with whipped cream on top. I gasped and grabbed it like a woman trapped in the desert for forty days, and he snorted.
“Should’ve given you the pumpkin pie recipe,” he said, grinning.
I felt as stupid as a teenage girl facing her crush alone and unsupervised for the first time. I almost was, except I was a twenty-nine year old woman, so it was horrific in about thirty different ways, and I actually could not think straight.
“I’ve been reading the recipes,” I babbled, pointlessly holding up my papers. “You know. Pies and stuff.”
“We have plenty of time,” Aegis reminded me. “It’s Wednesday. We’ll hit the market today and take out some of the things that’ll sit all right until Friday afternoon. The bulk of the baking will be tomorrow, and we’ll probably be able to finish things off on Friday.”
“Assuming we do everything right the first time around,” I cautioned. “Those macarons are going to be testy.”
Aegis gave me an amused grin, subtle, but unmistakable. “All the better. That means I can be around you longer.”
I choked on my coffee and nearly spat it all over the desk, and Aegis- trying very hard to hide his laughter- jumped up to pat my back, until I waved him off.
“Aegis Alexander Black,” I said, pointing at him, “you’d better not be pulling my leg, dammit!”
Aegis burst into laughter- the kind that was rare from him, where he was doubled over and laughing in a thick, deep, booming laugh that reverberated in his chest. When he had control, he looked up at me, amber eyes glittering with laughter.
“I didn’t know anyone knew my middle name,” he said.
“Oh, please, with how I mooned after you?” I retorted, wiping a bit of coffee off my shirt.
“And you think I’m pulling your leg?”
I made a face. “Need I repeat the previous comment? I was obnoxious, Aegis, like every other girl ten years ago. I’d think you’d want to get as far away from that as possible.”
He sobered up. “Do you really want to have this conversation now?”
I froze. Aegis’s expression was dark suddenly, dark and intense, and I realized what that meant. I was standing on the precipice of something terrifying, something more than just his telling me something I was terrified of and desperate to hear.
What exactly could Aegis Black feel for me? I wasn’t the person I was ten years ago. He needed more time to see that whatever picture of me he’d built in his head, I wasn’t that. I would never be that.
“No,” I whispered. I was a coward, anyway.
Aegis sighed and shook his head. That brooding energy dissipated quickly. “I didn’t think so.” He pushed up. “I waited ten years, I can wait a bit longer.”
“You did not wait ten years,” I said, but he cocked an eyebrow and shook his head.
“I can’t give out half-answers, Sylvia.”
I felt a strange, alien shiver that went up my spine when he said my name, his voice low and husky. A huge part of me suddenly reared up its head, demanding for me to go “Oh, sorry, did I say I wasn’t ready? I was just joking, now get back here and kiss me till I’m dead”, but thankfully, I didn’t actually let that happen, because that would have been worse than having my diary read in front of the entire school.
And I would know what that was like.
The rest of the work day went by a little more haphazardly, admittedly. I kept finding my gaze drifting around the office, toward the windows, and worse, over my shoulder into the garage. Aegis was in there, obviously, and he was tall, and broad-shouldered, and his laugh was so deep I could hear it from in here, and then he’d start to turn and I kept having to spin around to look back at my computer like the complete and total loser that I was.
Of course I was curious about what he had to say. Of course I wanted to know.
I also wanted to make like a cartoon ostrich and jam my head in the dirt, so I could just pretend nothing was happening around me.
Then three o’clock rolled around, and since Ivy had the booster seat in her car, I was almost relieved, because I wasn’t so sure I could hold out on the whole “I’m too scared to hear what you have to say” thing.
Willpower was never my strongest suit, or else there probably wouldn’t have even been a diary for Brittani Choi to read out of.
Feeling weirdly jittery and energetic, I dropped into the car and we sped off to pick up the kids.
I didn’t realize Ivy was watching me until she suddenly snorted with barely suppressed laughter.
“Girl, are you all right?” She asked, eyebrows raising when I jumped in my seat. “You’re more jumpy than a horse when a plastic bag rolls past.”
“I’m fine,” I said- too quickly. “Fine. Totally fine.”
At a stop sign, Ivy turned and gave me a very blunt look. “Something happened with Aegis, didn’t it?”
“Nope.”
She rolled her eyes, checked all her directions, then moved on. “I know you think you’re suddenly this impossibly different person all these years later, but you’ve got the exact same tells that you had when you were fifteen. Spill.”
“Nothing happened! It doesn’t matter. I’m not doing anything.”
“Sylvia, you realize life is going to catch up to you, whether you want it to or not, right? Like we have no control in this world. None. We just have to roll with the punches.”
“I have control over my own choices.”
Ivy made a very loud, very aggressive snort of laughter. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ivy shook her head. “Sylvia, when are you going to open up to all of us?”
I clamped my mouth down and tried to clear out my thoughts. “Open up about what?”
She shook her head again. “Nevermind. Forget I asked.”
We were saved from the tension with the appearance of the boys, eager to begin our journey into baking. Lucy was even more excited, climbing up and nearly belting herself in before I even got out of the car.
The market was a mad dash with Ivy as backup while we grabbed everything on the list, then paged through the instructions. Even then, we bought extra flour and sugar anyway because we were undoubtedly going to get things wrong.
By the time we made it to the house, Paul, Aegis, and Jade were already waiting out front.
Ivy clicked her tongue as we pulled up to the curb. “You think it’s like, a genetic requirement that werewolves are hot?”
I nearly choked on the laughter that exploded out of me. “What?!”
“Oh, please,” Dylan grumbled in the backseat. “As if you don’t agree.”
“Hey! My own kids?!”
“I mean, look at them,” Ivy continued, ignoring us. “Greek statues, all right there in your front lawn. It’s unfair for the rest of us human losers.”
“Ivy, you know you’re gorgeous, right?” I said, giving her a pitying look. “You’re like the pot calling the kettle black, only it’s like the rose calling the iris pretty.”
Thankfully, she laughed, and the tension eased up a little. “All right, that was pretty good.”
“Brittani’s Buttkicking Brigade is a go!” Jade said, jumping up and down as we approached. “Everyone got everything they need?”
“I think so,” I said, grabbing bags of groceries with Ivy. I looked up in time to catch Aegis jerking his chin in my direction, and the boys freezing before awkwardly turning around and grabbing some bags out of the trunk. I bit my lip to keep from smiling.
It took a couple trips to organize everything, but then it was suddenly real, and we were all gathered around my kitchen, looking grim.
“All right,” Aegis said. “Let’s get this over with.”
----
It was like trying to train a group of seven feral ferrets into learning to “sit” on command.
Jade and Dylan were covered in some sort of mystery white powder. By the end of the night, they had managed to complete- and fail- three batches of macarons, all of which sat in various states of burned, deflated, crumbled, or straight charcoaled.
“I don’t understaaaaaand,” Jade wailed, her hair nearly white with powder and her face in her hands. “I did everything right!”
“Well, no, we forgot to make sure we got rid of all of the air bubbles on that first one… and we definitely didn’t know what ‘stiff peaks’ were until the third batch,” Dylan said rubbing his eyes.
“Are you guys going to be able to handle this?” Paul had gotten chocolate all over his shirt, but he didn’t seem like he noticed… or cared.
“The video said this recipe was foolproof,” Jade wailed. “Why can’t I get these damned macarons down?!”
“Did you follow absolutely every step exactly?” Aegis said, leaning on the counter. He had a shockingly beautiful red velvet cake sitting in front of him, the icing so perfect it was unbelievable. “You didn’t try to make any step go ‘faster’?”
Jade and Dylan exchanged guilty looks.
“I know that look,” Lucy said from my side of the table. She had a spoon sticking out of a tiny bowl of apple pie filling that I’d let her pilfer. “Dylan likes to take shortcuts. I heard he’s always getting points taken off for not showing all his work in math.”
“I can do it faster in my head,” Dylan groaned. “They make you show the stupidest steps just so the homework takes like three hours longer than it needs to!”
“That red velvet looks amazing,” Ivy said, staring at it in undisguised desire. “You and Collin pulled that off beautifully.”
Collin was standing just behind Aegis, and the patches of skin we could see through his fur turned pink. “I didn’t do all that much.”
“Yes, you did,” Aegis said, leaning against the counter. “You were the one who did the icing, and you mixed the batter exactly right. You did a really good job.”
I saw Collin’s eyes widen, his canine ears flattening against his head. “Th-thanks.”
“And our cookies look pretty good, thank you very much,” Ivy said, pushing forward a massive bowl of admittedly delicious looking cookies, the kind that looked like it had stepped off of the cover of a cookie mix. A second plate showcased their not quite as impressive pecan pie, with some of the pecans looking slightly well past toasted… but it was done and that was all that mattered.
“Nice,” I said appreciatively, looking around the kitchen. “So we have down the… apple pie, the red velvet cake, pecan pie, the chocolate chip cookies, and… um. That’s it.”
“Oh man,” Lucy said, frowning. “I’m still not great at math, but I think we’re missing a bunch of stuff.”
“Like the macarons,” Collin said, looking pointedly at Dylan.
“We’ll get it down, dude,” Dylan said heatedly. “Not my fault you got the easy stuff.”
“Next time,” Aegis said, trying to hide his laughter, “start with something that isn’t the most complicated recipe in the list.”
“We’re dooooooomed,” Jade wailed in despair. “I’m going to go home and watch that video until I go blue in the face.”
“First,” Ivy said, holding a finger up, “we need to get everything cleaned up and stored properly, and then we can go prep for round two, because it’s… mostly pies.”
“The key lime pie should go really easy,” I said, checking my list. “That had like… four ingredients. I might be able to knock that out tonight, after the kids go to sleep.”
Aegis leaned forward. “I’ll stick around and help.”
I felt my face go absolutely scarlet, and since everyone (except Jade) was looking at me, they all undoubtedly saw it. Even Paul couldn’t have missed that.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said quickly. “It really is stupid easy. Plus, I kind of cheated and bought a few of those pre-breaded pans.”
“Still,” Aegis said, eyes glittering in amusement. “I’ll stick around and help. Rudy’s not here.”
I rolled my eyes. “You all know I was doing this alone, all by myself, for the past ten years, right? Like Rudy being a part of the process hasn’t been a thing since I-“
My voice died in my throat. The words had nearly tumbled out ahead of my brain, but my thoughts had caught up, and there was a ringing in my ears.
-hasn’t been a thing since I found my whole family dead and brutally slaughtered in the middle of the road.
The echoes of screams were bubbling up from the back of my mind, and I don’t know what I did, but someone grabbed my right arm, and someone else grabbed my left. I blinked, and the whole room had changed; Aegis was on one side bracing me, Ivy on the other, and both of them looked scared.
“Sylvia,” Aegis breathed, voice low. “What the hell just happened?”
I blinked again and looked around the room. Paul and Jade were mid-step in our direction, alarmed; both Dylan and Collin were halfway to me, and they had gone very pale. Lucy had her spoon gripped in her finges, looking so frightened she might cry…
That was all I needed to get myself together.
I realized I had sagged against the wall behind me and quickly stood up, re-composing my face and trying to shake it all off.
“I’m fine,” I said. My voice sounded stiff and far away. “Sorry. I’m fine. I’m all right.” I tried to smile at Lucy, but the look in her eyes just deepened. I screwed up my face, shook my head, patted my cheeks, and smiled again for her. “I’m fine, sweetheart. Mommy’s fine.”
“Mama,” she whispered, and big, fat teardrops appeared at the corners of her eyes. “What’s wrong, mama?”
I moved quickly to her, ignoring the extremely concerned gazes of my friends. Dylan and Collin moved with me, expressions tense.
“Mom,” Dylan said, “are you all right?”
“It’s okay.” I gave another smile- better this time. “It’s fine. I’m fine. We… we should all get ready for bed. I can keep… I can make the key lime pie afterward. For Brittani Choi.” I tried to laugh, and that was a terrible idea, so I immediately stopped that. “Sorry.”
I turned and rushed over to the stairs, Lucy in my arms and Dylan and Collin hot on my heels.