Page 31 of The Likelihood Of You

Holy Mother of God.

That movement should be illegal, at least for him to do anyway. My body was nowhere near mended enough for me to be feeling how I felt watching him lick the almondy mixture from his finger, like a match had been struck deep within me, and every swipe from his tongue was a log being added to the fire. I hadn’t felt so turned on by something so mundane in… well… forever.

Never had someone critiqued my baking and then proceeded to make me want to jump on them so quickly before.

It shocked me, more than his corrections, that I could feel these things so soon after what happened. It surprised me even more how I was basking in it. But before I lose face, I circle back to hiswrongopinions on my frangipane.

“It is not.” I insisted.

“It so is.” Another swipe from his tongue. “Needs more almonds too.”

I let out the mother of all scoffs. “Are you insane? I followed the recipe exactly- the recipe I’ve had memorised since I was seven. It’s perfect. And… can we just address how you even know what frangipane is?”

His eyes go from playful to downright frightened, like I’d caught him out on something he shouldn’t have let slip. “Oh… uh. Just familiar with the recipe, I guess.” He claims, swiping his tongue over his fingers one last time to rid them of my ‘too wet’ mixture.

My hand glides up to my hip. “Thought you hadn’t heard of this-” I waved my other hand around the mess in front of us. “-before.”

“I haven’t.”

“But you know what a frangipane is?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I just do.” He takes a step back as a chuckle erupts from his throat. I look him up and down, my eyes judgier than they’ve ever been, realising how close our bodies had gotten during that standoff.

“I don’t buy it. I only found out what the actual name for this was two years ago, and I’ve been baking since I could walk.” He looked defeated, but still smug. “So what gives, Emerson?”

He sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, before an irritated chuckle sneaks past them. “You’re annoying.” And just like that, he releases a sigh, grabs a tea towel to clean his hands and perches himself on one of the spinny bar stools beneath the island.

“You know ‘Pins’?” He asked.

“The Rolling Pin?” He nods. “Where we met?” Another nod.

“Yeah… well, my Moms own that bakery.”What?“There are at least two locations in every state along the East Coast, but it all started from the tiny bakery cart they had in our town in Boston.”

My breath catches in my throat. “Are you serious? Is that why you…?”

“Why I know your frangipane is too wet and not almondy enough? Yes. That’s how I know.”

I tighten my lips to keep the smile I want to show off hidden, but I can feel my smile lines are already creasing. “You know how to bake?” I ask, joining him on the bar stool next to his.

“More than I’d like to, but yes, being raised by bakers has its perks. Learning how to bake was one of them. Although I could have done without being around pastries and cakes my whole life, my freshman year pictures will tell you that I ate one too many slices of pie when I worked there over the summer.” He did that thing again where he scrunched his nose and dropped his head when he laughed, hiding the smile I wanted to see.

“Is that why you were there that morning?” I questioned him eagerly, forgetting about my frangipane that was now deflated, but it was already too wet and not almondy, so who cares?

“I’m there most mornings. Old habits die hard. I’m scared if I don’t have at least one slice of that pie a week, then I’ll just crash and burn out.” We both laughed in sync, and for the first time in a long time, I realised that I was talking to a boy about baking who actually gave a crap.

His helping me and knowing how to crack eggs with one hand already made me feel a certain way about him, knowing that he was brought up around it? It made me dangerously hopeful.

It made me look at him a whole lot differently than I had this morning. This morning, he was just a celebrity who’d offered me a job, whom I had a tiny, innocent crush on. Now, he was a guy who was baking with me and somehow made me forget how wrong it was to imagine us doing this after tonight.

That crush had probably just toed over the borderline between innocent and curious, which scared me, and my heart.

As our smiles remained fixed, and all of the revelations from the last minute and a half were settling between us, only then did both our noses pick up on the burning smell that had invaded the space between us, then turning our attentions towards the oven… that was seeping with thick, dark smoke.

“Hey… did you set a timer for those pastry cases by any chance?” Jacob asked, but the ear-splitting alarm from the smoke detector above us answered him before I could.

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