Chapter 5 #3
A tendon tightened in his throat when he said it — the only crack in his composure, as if the admission had cost him.
Three words that shouldn’t have been devastating, but they were, because they were the opposite of everything I’d experienced before.
Every man who’d half-heard me and filled in the blanks with what he wanted.
Every date where I’d shared a piece of myself and watched it skip off the surface of a man’s attention like a stone across water.
I was listening. As if it were obvious. As if it were the minimum.
As if it were the only thing that had ever mattered.
And here was Rhys — the man who acted like being here was a burden he was grudgingly enduring — standing in front of me with a pie he’d made from a memory I’d shared in passing.
I took a bite.
Cinnamon hit first, sharp and warm. Then apples, soft, yielding.
And underneath — the taste of my grandmother’s kitchen.
Being small and loved and completely safe in a world that hadn’t yet taught me that wanting too much was a character flaw.
For one long, terrifying moment, I had nothing clever to say.
No sardonic commentary, no mental list of reasons this didn’t mean what it obviously meant.
Just the taste. Just the memory. Just the quiet, undeniable proof that this man had been paying attention when I thought no one was.
My throat closed. My eyes burned. I blinked rapidly — you are not going to become a viral meme of a woman sobbing into baked goods on national television, Sloane, you are not — but it was a losing battle.
Because it was proof that Rhys, for all his sharp edges and maintained distance, had heard a throwaway sentence and held onto it like it mattered. Like I mattered.
“The crust is burnt on the edges,” he said, and there was nothing apologetic in his tone — just quiet satisfaction.
“Deliberately. You said your grandmother always burnt hers because she got distracted telling stories. You said the burnt parts were your favorite because they tasted like being loved.”
I had said that. In a rambling tangent about comfort food, I’d said exactly that, and he hadn’t just remembered the words. He’d understood them. He’d turned a confession about imperfection into intention.
Across the room, Derek was watching us with his perfect smile frozen in place — but the calculation behind it was visible now — a mask slipped half an inch.
Julian was flipping through his notes, searching for the moment he’d missed the point.
And Mason had stopped eating his pizza mid-bite, eyes moving between us with the slow, dawning expression of a man witnessing a love story click into place.
He caught me looking and mouthed holy shit with such genuine delight that I laughed.
None of them mattered. Only cinnamon on my tongue and Rhys watching me like my reaction to this pie was the most important data point he’d ever collected.
“Thank you,” I said, and the word felt too small. “This is… no one’s ever…”
“I told you.” His voice was quiet, pitched for me alone, cutting through the noise of crew and contestants and rolling cameras. “I listen. I’ve been listening since the first night.”
God help me.
Later that night, I stood in my room and tried to make it make sense. Julian’s lobster: impressive. Derek’s bourguignon: strategically calculated. Mason’s pizza: an honest admission of defeat.
Rhys had made me my Nana’s pie.
Julian wanted the crown — winning was what his entire optimized life had prepared him for. Derek wanted the prize — not me exactly, but whatever having me would prove about his own value. Mason wanted to be liked, to matter, to be more than comic relief in another man’s story.
Rhys didn’t want any of those things.
As I replayed the moment — his eyes tracking the movement of my fork to my lips, dark and satisfied and utterly focused — I understood with a jolt of pure terror that he didn’t want the game. He wanted me.
And standing in my room at midnight with cinnamon still on my tongue and the ghost of his almost-smile burned into my eyelids, I was starting to want him back.
Not the crown or the show or the narrative forty million people were waiting for — just him.
The man who remembered burnt crusts. The man who hadn’t touched me once in three weeks — who’d handed my water bottle to Mason instead of bringing it himself, who kept two feet of distance on a wrought-iron bench in the dark, whose restraint cut deeper than every calculated gesture from every man who thought he knew what I needed.
The man who listened like it cost him, and did it anyway.
I brushed my teeth. Washed my face. Went through the whole routine — cleanser, toner, the vitamin C serum Tessa had bought me that I pretended was unnecessary and used every night — someone who was going to sleep at a reasonable hour and wake up without having replayed a single moment of the afternoon.
Someone whose entire understanding of what men were capable of hadn’t just been rewritten by a pie.
The cinnamon was still there. Under the toothpaste, under the cold water, under the toner that promised to remove everything. Steady and stubborn, like the man himself.
I turned off the light.
The cinnamon stayed.