Page 56 of Deep Feelings & Shallow Graves
I throw the tray out the window.
“Maybe something more classic?” he suggests. “You make good cookies. Like, make Cookie cry with your cookies.”
I turn to the oven where batch #6 is rising like a yeast-fueled panic attack. I’ve baked so many test rounds I’ve lost track of which ones I hate the least. I am surrounded by a cookie battlefield. Chocolate chips, lemon zest, and chaos.
“I have no clear winner,” I admit. “I’ve birthed forty-seven different cookies and none of them are better than that smug bitch’s glitter bullshit.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Blake says, cheerfully licking icing off his wrist like it’s a kink and not a casualty. “You’re perfect. You can’t lose to someone named Cookie.”
I lean against the counter, breathing in sugar and spirals. The scent of baking anxiety. “You are dangerously supportive for someone I told not to make me come this morning.”
He grins. “I follow instructions. Mostly.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t sign up,” I say, staring at the form like it laughed at my trauma.
“Listen,” Blake says, wiping cookie batter off his wrist with the confidence of a man who has definitely licked something inappropriate in public. “She can’t keep her mouth shut. So I’ll just feel around while I’m fixing shit at her bakery. The oven fangoes out more than she does, and we’ll know exactly what kind of cupcake or tart she’s summoning from hell this year.”
“And if it’s great?” I ask.
“Then we regroup and sabotage. Or bribe the judges. I’m flexible.”
“She has this whole town in her little apron pocket,” I say. “You find out what she’s making. And I’ll…”
He leans in, serious now, feeding me a still-warm chocolate chip cranberry cookie like he’s proposing marriage or a sex cult. “Are you okay?”
“It’s fine,” I say around the cookie. “I’m just balancing murder, sugar, and three men who all have thighs like Greek statues. Totally manageable.”
He frowns, clearly unsure if that’s a metaphor or a confession.
“Find out who’s judging,” he says, recovering fast. “I know everyone in this town, and so does Edgar. Carson might only know how many speeding tickets they’ve racked up, but me and Edgar? Between us, we know food and fixing shit.”
I nod, adrenaline and baked goods running hot in my veins. The kitchen looks like a war crime, flour on the walls, icing in my hair, fondant dicks haunting the cooling rack like edible regrets, but I feel good. Dangerous. Hydrated. Focused.
Blake packs up three dozen cookies, a dozen bars, and six cupcakes “for science,” kisses my cheek like a golden retriever with boundary issues, and disappears with a salute.
I stare at the entry form. Download it. Then call Carson.
He picks up on the first ring. “Jennifer.”
“Can you find out what Cookie is entering in the bake-off? And who’s judging?” I ask.
“On it, sweetheart,” he says, and hangs up like we’re planning brunch, not blackmail.
The moment Blake leaves, I march upstairs and open my closet like it’s going to offer me answers instead of existential dread and a waft of cedar-scented trauma.
The dress I bought for Edgar’s date, silky, black, mid-thigh with lace like grief had a lingerie phase, suddenly feels too widow-core. Not that he’d mind, probably. Man cremated his high school guidance counselor and still remembered her favorite scone.
I hold it up. “Do I want to look fuckable or like I can help him dispose of a senator’s body?”
The mirror offers no help. Just stares back like, bitch, I don’t know your life.
I try on something red, sexy, simple, deadly, but it makes me look like I’m about to fuck my way through the G8 Summit, and while that’s a goal, it’s maybe not the energy for date three.
I text Blake:
Me: thoughts on lace?
Blake: You always look great. Wear the hoodie I left! :)
