Page 76 of Turnabout Is Fair Cosplay
“I know…” Or I would if I could Google it in the next ten seconds. “But I’m not a big fan of chopped nuts in my baked goods.”
“Not nuts. Candied ginger.”
Intriguing. I slide off the counter and find the biggest knife I can and hand it to Mike. He puts it back and pulls out a smaller knife with a square-looking blade.
“Ginger cookies?”
“So your lips can taste like ginger.”
I think that means I got under Mike’s skin last week. Most excellent. “You bake them?”
“I do.”
“And you baked the snickerdoodles the other week?”
“At Monique and Stacey’s place, yes.”
Shut up! “So you, like…can actually bake. You’re not like Adam, who thinks he can bake but is actually a disaster?”
“Adam has a lot going on—”
“Make chocolate chip cookies!”
“No.” He zaps the butter in the microwave for a few seconds before dumping it into a mixing bowl.
“But those are my favorite,” I whine.
“No, they’re not. You only think they are because you are at heart a creature of habit that craves the monotony of a routine.”
“Which is one hundred percent why I’ve quit my job and embraced the hustler lifestyle and all the uncertainty that comes with it.”
“You are living off your savings while you rotate between your library books and my Netflix subscription.” He chops thecandied ginger into fine little pieces and moves on to beating the butter and sugar fluffy with a hand mixer.
“Hey, I have two dozen regular clients on FroggoDoggo, and I have plans to pick up the occasional shift at Adam’s escape room.”
He turns off the mixer long enough to dip a spoon into the bowl. “Where you hope to run into me in character.”
“Is that what you tell yourself to keep going?”
He cracks an egg over the sink and bounces the yolk from one shell to the other before adding just the yolk to the mixing bowl. “What is it with women and villains? If it wasn’t so flattering getting asked out after every shift, it’d be exhausting.” He unscrews the jar of molasses.
“Aren’t you going to measure that?” It smells way too strong for cookies.
He grins as he pours a generous amount into the batter without measuring. “You’re a woman. Maybe you can explain it to me?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Explain what exactly? Why you should carefully measure ingredients that smell like toxic waste while baking?”
He laughs as he adds the bowl of flour and spices to the batter. “No. The villain kink.”
I snort. “I don’t know why some women are into villains.”
“Sure you do.” The batter thickens as Mike stirs it by hand. “Do me a favor and scrape all that ginger into the bowl.”
I make a face. “It’s sticky.”
“You’ll survive.”
I wrinkle my nose.
