Sweet Girl (3 page)

“OK, Miss Mackenzie”—my mother smiled down at me while tying her apron around her waist—“what’s the first thing we have to do before we start a new recipe?”

I was overeager to answer, and I nearly tripped over the untied lace of my Keds as I ran across the kitchen to her.

“Oh, I know, Mama!” I crowed as I hurried to climb up onto the chair she had set at the counter for me. “We preheat the oven!”

When her face fell a little, I knew I’d said something wrong. She leaned down to tie my shoe before she responded.

“That’s almost right, sweetheart, but that’s the
second
thing we do. Can you remember the first? It’s very important.”

My six-year-old brain scrambled for the right answer, and then my shoulders slumped when I realized what it was.

“First”—I recited the line she’d told me a kajillion times already—“we have to check my levels to make sure it’s OK if I have some sugar before we bake.”

“Exactly!” She beamed her approval. “Now then
. . .
” Her voice trailed off as she held my index finger in her hand and used a tiny machine to get a sample. I used to hate this part, but I’d been doing it for so long now that I could mostly ignore it when it pinched me.

While we waited for the readout, I washed my hands (that’s step three for a good baker, Mama says) and came back over to the counter.

“You’re all set, Kenzie!” She smiled and put the monitor back into the cabinet. “Now, what should we bake today?”

My mind spun with the images of all the yummy things we’d made last time she’d had a day off like this. Mama and I loved to bake, and because it was so close to Christmastime, we got to make even more things than usual. Then we bundled them up in pretty paper and handed them out to the neighbors in our apartment building.

“Um
. . .
” I trailed off, trying to come up with a fun idea for us. “Maybe—what about peanut butter cookies? The kind Malin likes.”

“Mmm, that’s a good idea,” Mama said, running her fingers back through my hair. “Then she can have a cookie when she wakes up from her nap. OK, so peanut butter cookies.”

She walked across our small kitchen and began pulling ingredients from the shelves. She got out our big blue mixing bowl and my favorite spatula. Next came the flour and the sugar and a jar of peanut butter. We liked chunky, not smooth.

“What can we do to give these cookies a Kenzie-spin?” she asked. “What should we add to make them more special?”

I wasn’t surprised when she asked. Mama usually asked me for ideas to experiment with a recipe. I didn’t always have a good answer, and she helped me a lot, but sometimes I came up with really fun creations. Like that time I asked her if we could put cookie dough into our brownie dough, and the dessert we made was
so
good. We called them brookies because they were brownies plus cookies. I wanted to come up with something just as good for our recipe today.

“Um
. . .
what about if we add gummy bears?” I asked hopefully.

Mama made a grossed-out face, and I laughed.

“Kenzie, remember how we do this? Try to think of something you’ve had that you already know tastes good with your main ingredient. This time we’re using peanut butter, so maybe we could do jelly or—”

“Chocolate!” I yelled, so excited at having come up with the idea.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Malin is still asleep, remember?” She spoke quietly, and I tried to lower my voice too.

“But chocolate works, right? Like a peanut butter cup?” I danced in place.

Mama reached into the pantry, pulled out the chocolate chips, and placed them on the counter with everything else.

“Chocolate is a great idea, smart girl.” She smiled at me.

What seemed like a billion years later, the first batch of cookies had cooled down enough that Mama let me have one. It was so yummy that I felt like peanut butter and chocolate were having a party in my mouth. I told Mama that and she laughed.

“Mama,” I said as I licked the last of the chocolate off my fingertips, “I can’t wait until I’m all growed up.”

“
Grown
up,” she told me while trying a bite of her own cookie. “And why is that?”

“Because when I’m grown up,” I told her happily, “I can marry David H. from my class. Not David C.; he’s the one who pinched me on our science-day field trip. But David H. is my friend, and he said he would marry me if I gave him my red slap band. So then I can be married and have babies, and they’ll have a mama
and
a daddy just like Marissa’s family. Then I can bake every single day because that’s my job, and me and David H. can eat all the cookies we want because when you’re growed up you get to be in charge of yourself. Right, Mama?”

When I looked up at her, she had a funny expression on her face. I didn’t know what I’d said that was wrong, but I could tell something was. She seemed sad. She had to swallow a few times before she could answer me, even though she didn’t have anything in her mouth.

“You know what I always loved most about baking?” she asked me.

I wasn’t sure what this had to do with David H., but I was happy she didn’t have that look on her face anymore. I shrugged my shoulders so she would continue.

“I always love how happy it makes other people to try a special treat. It makes me feel good inside when I know that they’re enjoying something I made just for them.”

“Me too!” I said happily. “That’s why it’s gonna be my job someday.” I thought for a second and then asked, “I can do that, right? There are people whose job it is to bake things.”

Mama reached out to run her fingers through my hair. “You,” she said with a smile, “can do anything you set your mind to.” She made a silly face that made me laugh. “Just don’t mix gummy bears and peanut butter.”

Chapter Three

I make a hurried grab for the caramel while still holding the mixing bowl, and chocolate batter splats across the kitchen floor. I curse, happy I’m home alone because Landon would definitely screech in reaction to my using those two words together in the same sentence.

“Girl, you have the mouth of a sailor!” my roommate calls from the entryway.

So I’m not home alone, after all.

I can hear her shuffling and struggling with the door, her bags, and whatever else. I look around, realizing I need to clean up ASAP. I’ve thoroughly trashed the kitchen trying out this recipe, and I’m supposed to help her come up with drinks to make that espresso tequila palatable tonight. As if that’s possible.

She’s mumbling to herself as I pull on my mitts and slide the pan halfway out of the oven.

“Are you wearing clothes?” she calls out accusingly.

I drizzle another layer of caramel over the nearly finished brownies and sprinkle them with a layer of this round’s add-on.

“Of course I’m wearing clothes. Since when do I run around here nude?” I call back. I bend over to slide the pan into the oven as I hear her walk down the hallway to the kitchen.

“It’s not nudity I’m worried about, but your typical shocking lack of”—I’m still adjusting the brownie pan with my oven mitt when she walks into the kitchen and gasps—“pants.”

At that same moment, I hear a decidedly masculine choking sound. I glance behind me and see Landon’s whole face turn every shade of red available in the spectrum. Her friend Taylor stands next to her, eyes wide in shock before they dart away from the sight of me bent over the oven door wearing a partially buttoned flannel and a miniscule pair of boxers I got in the preteen boy’s section. Yes, I
am
dressed, dressed enough to hang out with Landon and Miko, but the threadbare shorts barely cover up anything.

Good effing grief! Who brings a man over without even a text message of warning?

I stand up to glare properly at them both, and when I put my hands on my hips, I realize that I still have a lobster-claw oven mitt on each hand. The fact that I look ridiculous isn’t helping my annoyance level.

“Hey, Princess,” I hiss, and she has the sense to look contrite. “I thought we talked about bringing douche bags back to the apartment.”

Taylor looks back at me, and I meet his challenging stare with one of my own. He’s taller than I am (which is saying something), with dark-brown hair and eyes. Landon and Miko think he looks like a built version of Adam Levine. They offer this up like it’s some kind of compliment, but I think Maroon 5 are my mom’s favorite band . . . which pretty much sums up their level of cool.

Taylor leans up against the wall with his arms crossed like he’s settling in to watch a show. I’m momentarily distracted by the tattoos that cover both of his arms in a kaleidoscope of color. When I follow the line up towards the sleeve of his white T-shirt, his bicep flexes. My gaze snaps up to the humor dancing in his eyes. He thinks I was checking him out. I glare at them both.

“Max, don’t be rude. You know Taylor isn’t, well, that. He’s helping Miko and me with the layout for the party, and since we’re sampling cocktails anyway, I thought it’d be easier to do it all at once.”

“I wasn’t aware I make you so uncomfortable, Jennings,” Taylor says with mock sincerity. “I’d be happy to come back another time.”

I start to point an angry finger in his direction, but then I realize my hand is still covered by a giant fabric claw and slam it back down to my side.

“In order for you to make me uncomfortable, I’d first have to give a damn, Bennett.” I purposefully use his first name since only his friends call him by his last. We’re definitely not friends. In fact, I assume the only reason Landon and Miko like him is because they all worked events together. Based on the dark circles under Landon’s eyes during the latter part of her time at SSE, I’m guessing working events together is sort of like being in the same platoon. I don’t care if they think he’s great, or that he’s some kind of wunderkind in event production and uses that knowledge to help them out. He might play Boy Scout with them all he wants, but he’s gone out of his way to antagonize me since the moment we met.

He responds with an amused grin, which I ignore by turning back around to clean up the rest of my mess. Landon walks through the kitchen with her bags and, in her typical style of avoiding conflict, refuses to acknowledge our bickering.

“I’m going to change out of these work clothes. Y’all try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”

I start to pile dirty dishes into the sink and pick my way through the destroyed kitchen. Chocolate- and flour-covered bowls and spatulas are everywhere. Broken potato chips are strewn about as if I threw them into the air like confetti. I am not a tidy cook, and it takes several minutes of scrubbing before I can even see the countertop again. Taylor doesn’t speak or move, but I can feel him watching me. I’m positive that if I turned around now I’d see him grinning like a jackass.

When the last dirty spatula sails into the sink with the other dishes, I turn to grab my brownies from the oven. Mindful of my audience, I don’t bend down this time as I use my lobster claw to pull them out. As soon as they are visible, Taylor gasps, and I turn my head to face him.

“Dear Lord, are those potato chips?” He pushes himself off the wall and comes to stare into the pan as if I’m holding plutonium. I look along with him, surprised that my desire to push him out of my personal space is warring with the excitement I hear in his voice.

“It’s”—I clear my throat—“it’s a mixture of potato chips and pretzels. It’s a play off of salty and sweet. I’m hoping they still have a crunch, but it’s a new recipe idea, so I can’t be sure.”

I have no idea why I just explained all of that to him, and I utterly loathe that I’ve now initiated a conversation. I put the pan on the stove, grab the edges of the parchment paper, pull it out along with the brownies, and set them on a wire rack to cool.

“Can I try one of those?” he asks.

I can actually hear the chocolate-lust in his voice.

“No!” I snap.

“Why?”

“Because they’re mine.”

“What are you, five?” he accuses.

I realize that on some level I am acting like a five-year-old. I made the brownies for other people to eat; it’s not as if I can enjoy them myself. But this guy hasn’t done anything but antagonize me since the moment we met, and if he tried the recipe and offered any criticism, I’d have to bash his head in with the brownie tray. Then blood would get all over the already-messy kitchen.

I’m saved from further conversation when the doorbell rings and he turns towards it.

“It’s my door to answer!” I bark.

Taylor just shrugs as if he’s totally unaffected by my attitude and leans back against the countertop. I walk off to the entryway and throw the door back without even checking to see who it is first.

Miko is on the other side of it, looking gorgeous but also sort of as if she just left an outdoor music festival.

Honestly, when did macramé become a thing again?

“Did you just come back from Burning Man?” I ask as she walks past me into the apartment.

She turns towards me with a somber expression.

“It’s too much, right? I knew it was, but I couldn’t help myself.” She lets out a long sigh, as if she’s about to admit something truly upsetting. “Dude, I think I’m finally too old for Urban Outfitters. It used to be just a little edgy, but now everything there is like half-shirts and acid washed and I’m just always going to be too—”

“Asian?” I tease as I follow her back to the kitchen.

She throws me an annoyed look over her shoulder.

“No, short. I was going to say I’ll always be too short to pull it off.”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” I can’t help but smirk at her.

Miko doesn’t break stride as she pulls her giant shoulder bag off of her arm and lets it fall to the floor with a thud.

“Ooh, you’re extra grouchy today. Why is that?”

No sooner is the question out of her mouth than she rounds the corner into the kitchen and sees Taylor hovering over the brownies.

“Ahh.” She smiles at me as if she’s got me all figured out.

“I am not extra anything, I—”

Taylor turns towards us, already chewing. He’s holding a brownie the size of his hand and wearing an unrepentant expression.

“I can’t be held responsible,” he tells me before I can even open my mouth to yell. “It’s all my favorite food baked together in one pan,” he says almost desperately. “It’s like kryptonite.”

Miko rushes forward to inspect the cooling rack.

“How are they?” she asks, already cutting herself a square.

It actually takes me a second to find the words, because I’m so shocked by their total lack of manners.

Who eats someone else’s baked goods without being invited to do so?

I open my mouth to rip into them just as Taylor actually sighs into his next bite. “They’re incredible. Possibly the greatest thing to ever happen to my mouth.”

My lips snap closed.

How do you scold someone who just gave you a compliment like that? I want to, based on principle, but I can’t do it. Because truthfully, if potato chips and chocolate are his kryptonite, then people liking my recipes is mine. Taylor’s smile kicks up to one side as he chews, and a single perfect dimple appears. He looks from Miko to me.

“Well, there was that model last summer—”

“Big-Lips Chloe?” Miko asks between bites.

“The very same.” He answers her but looks at me. “So this was, I guess, the second greatest thing to ever happen to my mouth. But that’s still a wild endorsement for your skills in the kitchen, Sebastian.” He looks pointedly at the lone lobster mitt I still have on my hand.

“Sebastian was a crab, not a lobster,” Miko says, hopping up on the counter behind her.

“You’re right.” He smiles at her indulgently. “My knowledge of crustaceans as immortalized in the annals of cinematic history is surprisingly sparse.”

I clench my fist inside the ridiculous oven mitt, but I refuse to give him the satisfaction of my taking it off. Since when did guys with perfectly sculpted arms and massive tattoos start using words like “annals”?

Since when did I start noticing his sculpted anything?

“What’s surprisingly sparse?” Landon asks as she walks back into the kitchen, wearing her workout clothes.

She makes a beeline for the brownie pan and cuts herself a sliver.

“The number of quality historical novels involving a Viking love story?” Miko answers helpfully.

Landon throws the little weirdo a bemused expression.

“That only really makes sense to you. You get that, right?” she says, cutting a slightly bigger sliver this time.

“Doesn’t make it any less true,” Miko answers wistfully from her perch. “Now then, someone promised me booze, and if I don’t have a cocktail in my hand soon, I’m going to eat whatever’s left of this pan of stoner-delight. Landon, stop cutting one miniscule bite at a time and just take a whole piece.” Landon stops midslice to argue, but Miko ignores her and looks at me. “And Max, go put on some flipping pants, because Taylor can practice nonchalance for only so long, and I’m not sure he can help us with our timeline if he’s surreptitiously staring at your Iron Man chonies all night.”

I open my mouth to answer her, but between the
Little Mermaid
reference, Landon slowly hacking away at my brownies, the Vikings, and Miko’s bossiness, I’ve lost some of the steam behind the tirade I was about to go on.

I turn and head out of the kitchen, going the long way, all the way around the breakfast bar, to avoid walking past Taylor. If that jackass is inclined to check out my shorts, I’m not going to give him a clear line of sight.

“And this one is?” Landon takes a sniff of the cocktail in her hand.

The other six options I created are lined up on the coffee table between me, her, and Miko. Taylor took off right after they finished working out the timeline for the party this weekend. I stayed in the kitchen mixing the drinks, but I heard him claim he had other work to finish up that evening. Since it was after eight o’clock, I couldn’t help but wonder if his “work” had an IQ that was at least as big as her bra size.

“That one”—I point at the lowball glass in Landon’s hand—“is an espresso margarita made with a citrus-infused simple syrup and a cinnamon-sugar rim.”

“Well, that sounds like—” Miko starts in cheerfully.

“The best I could come up with given the required ingredient.” I roll my eyes. “I told you both already, espresso-flavored tequila is an abomination.”

I take a sip from my own cocktail, which remains espresso and tequila free. Landon does a weird little dance as she sips on the cocktail in her hand and then grins as she sets it to the side.

“Well, abomination or not, Riverton Tequila is our biggest client and is currently making it possible for me to pay rent on time,” she says while making a note in the giant event binder she carries around for each party.

“And how bad can it be?” Miko asks, pulling the tequila bottle over and pouring some into a shot glass to taste. “Tequila is good. Espresso is good.” She gives it an exploratory sniff. “It smells interesting.”