Fifteen. Sweet Temptation
Fifteen
SWEET TEMPTATION
The afternoon of the Santa parade, Corey and I met at the inn for the competition’s trial baking session—nothing we made would be judged—and I mostly sputtered around uselessly while Corey asked for assistance measuring spices or cracking eggs.
But not one of the cookies we toyed with met his standards.
He was almost gloomy by the end of the session, and making it worse was the fact that—at their station—Grant and Fiona appeared locked in as they executed a graceful culinary dance of trading ingredients, taking turns stirring, and standing shoulder to shoulder to lay balls of dough on cookie sheets.
“I’m sure something will come to us for the qualifying round,” Corey said, but I could see disappointment in his eyes.
I was glum when I went home for dinner, worried Corey was regretting having me for a
partner, but right after I’d helped put away the dishes, he sent me a nice
text. I know it’s a little late, but
what do you think of stopping by my place to tinker with ideas? Maybe if we meet
in a relaxing environment, we could talk through some cookies
without feeling so tense about it.
Also, this is me saying sorry if I’ve been tense. ;)
I replied that it sounded great. We’d eaten early since my parents were both tired after waking up at dawn for the parade, so the evening contained no plans. Plus, I thought it might be nice to meet Corey away from the inn. And Grant and Fiona.
I’m charmed by the version of Corey that admits to being worked up about this competition. The Corey I knew in high school was always easygoing. Or at least that was the impression I had of him.
Maybe it was snobbery on my part because I was his tutor and assumed that anyone who needed help writing an essay just wasn’t trying hard enough.
I’m not proud of this realization as I knock on his door.
The front window’s curtains are pulled back far enough for me to see a glimpse of a tall and beautiful Christmas tree covered with ornaments.
Warmth radiates from the house, a two-story redbrick bungalow with twin bushes wrapped in colorful lights on either side of its entry.
The door swings open and there’s Corey. More of him than I’ve seen in my whole time in Sweetville.
He’s wearing a burgundy T-shirt that highlights the emerald flecks in his lighter green eyes.
It also puts his biceps—ones derived from multiple hard days’ work, and not endless gym sessions—and strong chest on full display.
He smiles at me, stepping back from the door to reveal his kids waiting on the staircase to see who’s there.
The family’s dog—Sugar, a golden Lab; Corey mentioned her—leans against Bryce’s leg and lolls her tongue out happily at me.
I’ve prepared for this. I pull from my purse some nice colored pencils and a pad of thick drawing paper I picked up at the fancy toy store on the way over. “I would have brought you cookies, but nothing I could bring would compare to your dad’s baking,” I say.
“We do love Oreos,” Bryce says, giving Corey a sheepish look as he leaps off the step to the floor.
Corey clutches his heart in faux shock. “Traitor! How could you?” he jokes, and tickles his son, who shrieks as his daughter, Lindy, jumps up and down, laughing. Then Corey gestures at the gifts as I hand them over. “What do you say?”
“Thank you, Jill,” they recite in unison. They each hug me and take the pencils and paper to the dining room table. Now Sugar ambles down the stairs and puts a paw up to my knee. “I have something for you, too,” I say. I offer Corey a rawhide treat wrapped with a bow. “This is for Sugar.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says. Sugar barks. “But she appreciates it.” He removes the bow and gives Sugar her treat. She traipses off, claws clicking against the floorboards, as Corey urges me inside.
“So, I hope you’re okay with tasting everything,” he says. In front of his Christmas tree, on a low coffee table, is an array of eight different cookies. “These are some of the ones we hashed out at the inn.”
“You did all this just since we left the inn?” It’s truly a spectacle, seeing all the cookies assembled on plates like this.
There’s chocolate shortbread with peppermint icing, a star-shaped cookie sandwich filled with a red fruit filling and coated in powdered sugar, and another chocolate cookie that resemble a log with frosting at each end and a coating of nuts and sprinkles on top of that.
Before I can inventory the rest of the cookies, my eyes fall on the shelves along the far wall of the room.
Books. Dozens and dozens of them. I cross the room to survey the titles.
There are a few cookbooks, but most of the titles are classics, contemporary fiction, and children’s books.
I almost mention to Corey that I’ve never seen a Heartfelt movie where the characters read anything more complicated than a small-town newspaper, but I shut my mouth and turn back to Corey.
“Wow, this is a pretty impressive library.”
Corey makes his way toward me and the shelves. “I’m sure you’ve read more,” he says. He puts his hand against the side of one bookcase and shrugs, a little sheepishly. “But, yeah, I think your tutoring stuck with me.”
A blush blooms across my chest. I feel it creep up my neck. “Come on—I didn’t do that much.”
“But you read a lot. And you made me want to be more than a high school jock,” he says.
His eyes fall on a family photo. It’s different than the one hanging at the bakery.
That one was posed and more professional.
The one on the bookcase is from a past Christmas, with the family sprawled out in front of the tree.
“Christina was a reader, too. She devoured mysteries. She loved to solve them before the end. It drove me nuts sometimes. We even argued about whether authors wanted people to try to figure out the endings.”
He touches the spines of a few Agatha Christie novels, which I assume belonged to her.
“And now…” I know what he’s thinking. That he’d give anything to have that argument with Christina again.
Or have her back and not have it this time.
Just enjoy being driven nuts by the person he loved most. Grant and I argued about issues bigger than the right way to read a book, but there’ve been points over the last few years when I craved his company so much I would have been happy to be fighting with him again.
Or happy to call a truce on fights altogether.
“It must be hard. To hold it together for the kids,” I say.
Corey nods. “Yes and no. We all had each other to grieve with. And helping them stay afloat is the one thing that keeps me feeling like I have a point in life.” He clears his throat and shakes his head as if to discard the thoughts he’s having.
He turns to me and points back toward the table.
He clearly doesn’t want to expand on his grief right now. “Okay, you have some cookies to try.”
An hour later, I’m stuffed and Corey has a notebook filled with our thoughts on the cookies. The kids, done with their drawing, are sitting at our feet, eating mac and cheese and watching Miracle on 34th Street .
“I liked the chocolate shortbread with the cloves,” I say to him. He glances up from his notes and seems to mentally cycle through the various batches of cookies to reconsider that variety.
He lifts up the plate with a few of the shortbreads left and ponders it for a moment. “I really think they’re too similar to the ones we do at SweetHart’s. I don’t use the peppermint icing, but the cookie itself is almost identical.”
“Okay, well, what about the chocolate logs? Those are so decadent. And we could do some that have a green frosting like tree branches, so the Christmas sprinkles really pop.”
Corey huffs out a sigh. “They’re just a little average, don’t you think?”
“I ate seven of them, which is almost above average for me.”
“Sorry—I’m kind of a pain, aren’t I?” Corey futzes with the remaining cookies, rearranging them on their plates.
“No, you just have high standards for yourself.”
“Are you like this with writing?” He tilts his face toward me and his eyes are filled with genuine curiosity.
I think of my call with Lacey. How she wanted me to change How Pretty?
How still resistant I feel to going to the Heartfelt meeting she said she’d set for me, if I ever make it out of here.
“I am. I want to have my name on something that feels like only I could write it and that makes me proud to have my name on it,” I say.
“Sometimes I get frustrated trying to find a story that no one else has told, until I realize the beauty of adding new elements to something familiar. Like, taking a predictable plot and twisting it a bit, to make it more interesting. Maybe even a little messy…”
Messy.
In a flash of insight or maybe a sugar-fueled delusion, I blurt out, “Messy Santa!”
The kids spin around. “Santa?”
Corey is staring at me, but now he’s bewildered. “What?”
“The messy Santa. You’re a perfectionist, but what if the cookies we made were perfectly imperfect, the way little hands might make them?
A Santa cookie that’s a bit off-kilter but still delicious.
And part of the mess could be the secret ingredients.
We could blend two of your spices—you’d need to help with that; I have no aptitude for knowing what will taste good together—and that’s part of the mess. ”
“So, the cookies would look a little offbeat? On purpose?”
“Yes, and not all uniform. But still recognizably Christmasy. Kind of an ode to a season that can be chaotic.” Would talking about chaos in a place as serene as Sweetville make any kind of sense whatsoever?