6. Matty
Matty
Our workstation looked like a fucking crime scene.
The Case of the Buttercream Bloodbath.
Flour blanketed every surface, broken cookie shards littered the counter, and somehow, there was more buttercream frosting coating our shoes than the edges of our cookie box.
I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist and resisted the urge to scream. Long sleeves had been a bad idea.
“This is exactly what I was worried about,” I muttered.
Diaz shot me a pointed glare. “You’re the one who kept opening the oven door every thirty seconds, mi pana.”
“Only because you forgot to set a timer even though I reminded you. Twice.”
He rubbed the back of his eyes, leaving a mix of flour and powdered sugar on his caramel skin. “You know I’m not good with numbers.”
“Ho, ho, holy night. There’s only five minutes to go, bakers,” Penelope called out above the noise. “If you haven’t started plating your cookie boxes, now’s the time to do it.”
Diaz muttered a curse in Spanish and went back to scraping the burnt bottoms off his cookies. Meanwhile, I frantically transferred my sad molasses crinkles into our collapsing cookie box.
Granny was going to have my ass for fucking up her legacy.
The round had started out well enough. Diaz and I had agreed to divide and conquer.
He would take on the mantecaditos—Puerto Rican thumbprint cookies with guava filling—and I would handle my molasses morsels.
In between, we would collaborate on our “box” made from no-spread sugar cookies and buttercream.
For the first thirty minutes, we moved in tandem, dancing around each other while making casual conversation for the cameras.
Normally, Diaz’s nonstop charm would’ve gotten under my skin, but today, it had been a welcome distraction. Anytime I clammed up or got too overwhelmed by the cameras tracking our every move, Diaz somehow redirected the attention before I could completely lock up.
If Penelope wandered too close while I was measuring out the brown sugar for the third time, he’d flash them a toothy grin and start rambling about how I had the soul of a sixty-year-old church lady trapped inside a twenty-nine-year-old baseball player.
Rude, but effective.
The cameras loved him. And it helped that he seemed genuinely relaxed, like this was just another day for him instead of a nationally televised disaster waiting to happen.
He flirted shamelessly with the judges during walkthroughs and somehow managed to keep up the banter, even while piping his guava filling. With irritating precision, I might add.
Unfortunately, our brief stretch of competence had come to a violent end the second we’d started assembling the cookie box. As it turned out, buttercream mortar was less structurally sound than we’d hoped.
“Matty, stop fussing with it,” he said, voice tight.
“I can fix it.”
“It’s cracking.”
“I know it is,” I said through gritted teeth. “But if I can just fill the cracks with buttercream—”
“In less than two minutes?” Diaz crowded in beside me, reaching for the spare piping bag. “Here, let me help with the corners—”
Our elbows collided. Hard.
The box tilted.
And suddenly, everything slowed.
I saw the exact moment disaster struck. The wobble in the left wall, the way the buttercream seam split down the middle, Diaz’s eyes widening as the whole structure started to lean.
“No, no, no—” I chanted.
It was no use. Two walls gave way with a sickening crack, sending half the structure sliding off the counter and onto the floor in a catastrophic heap of crumbs and frosting.
The entire barn seemed to gasp.
Diaz froze. “Shit, Matty. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” I cringed when my voice cracked. “Just . . . don’t.”
I could feel the cameras circling like vultures. The weight of the judges’ concern burned a hole in the back of my head. It was too late now, and we all knew it.
“Bakers, that’s time! Please step away from your cookies.”
Well, shit.
I stepped back from our baking station, suddenly questioning how we had gotten here. This was supposed to be fun. A way to raise funds and awareness for charity, while rebuilding my relationship with Diaz.
Instead, I was standing here, staring at the wreckage dripping off my favorite pair of shoes, ten seconds away from a full-blown meltdown.
I couldn’t help that I was a perfectionist. In baseball, that kind of precision made me great.
Off the field, it had wrecked me. More than once.
The added pressure had led to sleepless nights, anxious days, and carrying a bottle of Tums with me at all times—even in my game day bag.
I had spent the better half of a decade working on it in therapy, but right now, standing in front of rolling cameras with a collapsing cookie box, all that old anxiety came roaring back.
James and Nora were called up to present first. I pretended not to notice how flawless their shortbread cottage looked.
Holy buckets, were those sugar glass windows?
A hand landed gently on the small of my back, hot and steady through my shirt. The touch was light, but it grounded me instantly.
“Breathe, tesoro,” Diaz murmured, low enough for only me to hear. “It’s going to be okay.”
Tesoro.
The word hit me like a soft punch to the sternum.
Damn, I liked it way too much.
Liked him way too much.
The endearment rolled off his tongue like it belonged only to me. It made something deep in my chest tighten and bloom at the same time, a dangerous mix of comfort and want that I had no business feeling right now.
But then, reality crashed back in.
We were mic’d up. There were cameras everywhere. Had the boom mic caught his words? Would the editors leave it in? The thought of millions of people hearing my teammate call me his treasure sent a fresh wave of panic through me.
I should’ve pulled away.
Instead, I leaned into his touch for half a second, soaking up the warmth before my brain could catch up and ruin it.
When I glanced sideways at him, our eyes met. Only for a moment, but it was enough to make my chest ache in an entirely different way.
It was easy to pretend this was something else.
That we were different people in a different life and that all of this was ours—a cozy, little inn, the smell of cinnamon and sugar in the air, the two of us bickering over burnt cookies like some painfully domestic couple on a vacation neither of us wanted to end.
I could almost see it.
But we weren’t different people.
We were professional baseball players, teammates, standing together on national television, one wrong glance away from turning our lives into tabloid fodder.
So, I stepped out from under his palm and forced myself to look back at the cookie carnage instead of the man beside me.
“Matty and Peter, you’re up next.” Penelope’s voice rang out cheerfully.
We stepped forward, carrying our sad, lopsided creation to the judges’ table like it was a live grenade.
Keira Von Hustenberg winced when we set it down in front of her. “Oh, dear.” She sighed.
Jin Kato blinked slowly, tilting his head like he was examining abstract art. “What . . . happened here?”
Diaz and I exchanged a quick, pained glance.
I cleared my throat. “We, uh, had some structural issues.”
“And there may have been a slight timing error with the ovens,” Diaz added.
“Is that your way of saying you burnt your cookies?” Keira asked.
“Not burnt,” he corrected smoothly, flashing the judges a grin. “Caramelized.”
Mandy Bickham leaned forward, poking at one of my pale molasses crinkles with a fork. “Let’s see what we’ve got then.”
The three judges each took a piece of both cookies. The barn went quiet except for the faint crunching sounds.
Jin chewed thoughtfully. “The guava thumbprints have lovely tropical notes. It’s a pity they’re too dark on the bottom.”
Mandy nodded. “The molasses crinkles are absolutely delicious, too.”
All the air whooshed out of me. “Thank you.”
“Sadly, they’re still a bit raw in the center.”
Keira set her fork down gently. “The flavors are actually quite good, gentlemen. There’s real potential here. You just need to figure out how to meld your styles instead of letting them clash.”
“Communication is key,” Mandy added.
Boy, if I had a nickel.
I could only nod, my ears still burning.
Even Diaz looked like he had been knocked off his high horse. “Yeah, we’re . . . still figuring that part out.”
Penelope stepped in with her signature bright smile. “Thank you both. You may return to your station.”
By the time filming wrapped for the day, my social battery was running on empty, my shoulders ached, and I was ninety percent sure there was still buttercream in my left shoe.
The barn emptied in slow waves around us.
Producers huddled around their monitors reviewing footage, while my fellow competitors replayed the day’s disasters at the nearby picnic tables with a round of beers and the kind of exhausted, slightly hysterical laughter that only came from trauma-bonding over public humiliation.
I wanted no part of it.
Except, maybe, the beer.
At this point, I would settle for a lukewarm shower and a cuddle with my wiener—and not necessarily in that order.
The early evening air was still sweltering, even though it was pushing eight o’clock. Sweat prickled along my spine as I stepped onto the gravel path, counting down the seconds until I was safely tucked inside my cabin with the air conditioner cranked down to sixty.
It wouldn’t be long now.
Shower. Dog. Bed.
I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and headed down the path, shoes crunching loudly with every step.
Shower. Dog. Be—
“Matty, wait up.”
Lord have mercy, not now.
I kept walking.
“Matty.”
Gravel crunched behind me as Diaz jogged to catch up, falling into step beside me. “Tesoro, I know today didn’t go the way you wanted—”
I scoffed. “That’s an understatement.”
“—but c’mon, they’re just cookies.”
I stopped abruptly, pivoting to face him. The movement was sharp enough that he nearly walked right into me. He caught himself at the last second, sneakers skidding against the gravel.
“Just cookies,” I repeated. “Just cookies?”
Diaz’s brows pinched. “Okay, maybe that came out wrong.”
“That’s all anything is to you, isn’t it?” He opened his mouth, but I kept going, the words pouring out faster now. “Just cookies. Just flirting. Just kissing. Does any of it actually matter to you?”
The words came out sharper than I intended.
Heat crawled up my neck. The frustration from the barn was still boiling under my skin, but it went a lot deeper than that.
And we both knew it.
“This isn’t just about today, is it?”
I took a step closer, lowering my voice even though nobody else was around.
“You wrote stories about me. About us. And then, you spent months texting me as if you were someone else. Flirting with me, making me feel things I had never felt for a guy before, all while knowing exactly who I was.”
My hands were shaking.
“And then you kissed me. You kissed me like you meant it, like maybe you wanted the same things I was starting to want, and I—”
My voice cracked.
I forced myself to look away before he could see too much, dragging in a sharp breath that did nothing to steady me.
“Matty—”
“Wait, please. I need to get the rest out.”
Diaz nodded. It was what came next, though, that really floored me.
He stayed quiet.
The man who filled rooms by nature and turned strangers into friends in five minutes flat was letting me have my moment and, more than that, allowing me to stumble through it at my own pace.
And lord help me, that almost undid me more than his kiss.
“I ran because I was scared,” I told him, evening out my tone.
“And hurt. And confused as all hell. And instead of giving me space or time to figure it out, you just kept being . . . you. Acting like nothing had happened. Like we could just go back to being teammates and pretend the rest doesn’t exist.”
Diaz opened his mouth, but I kept going, the words pouring out now that the dam had broken.
“And now, I’m stuck wondering if any of it was real or if maybe, I’m just another idiot who fell for the Peter Diaz charm special.”
I laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“Don’t do that.”
His voice was rough, almost angry.
“Don’t you dare stand there and call yourself an idiot for feeling what you felt. For wanting what we had. That’s not fair to you, and it sure as hell isn’t fair to me.”
He exhaled sharply, running a hand over his shaved head.
“You think I call everyone tesoro? You think I lose sleep over everyone the way I have over you these past months? Fuck, Matty. I know I fucked up, and I’m sorry about that, but you don’t get to rewrite what we had just because you’re hurting.”
His words landed hard.
I wanted to believe him. God, I really did. But the hurt was still there, raw and achy, and I didn’t know how to shove it back down.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
There was nothing left to say. The lies, the kiss, the hurt—everything I’d been carrying around with me for months was finally out in the open. Part of me felt lighter, but the rest of me was just . . . exhausted.
Bone-deep, soul-tired exhausted.
“I’m sorry, too,” I told him. “I just— Damn, I don’t know if I’ve ever been this tired.”
He nodded with understanding. “Get some rest, ‘Bama.”
I turned toward my cabin before I could change my mind.
“Matty,” he called out after me.
I looked over my shoulder.
“Just so you know, I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “When you’re ready, I’ll be right here.”
I closed my eyes for a second, letting the words settle somewhere deep in my chest, then kept walking.