I Hate, I Bake, and I Don’t Date! by Alina Jacobs

29

Tess

“You know you’re going to have to go see him.”

“You could just ask him at work tomorrow.” I groaned.

“I’m not talking to Beck,” Maeve said, horrified. “He might fire me. Then where will we be? We’ll be homeless.”

“We really shouldn’t be living here anyway,” I admitted, poking my pencil at the spongy wall.

“You need your phone.”

“To be fair, it’s Beck’s phone.”

“But it’s your SIM card, and you’re still paying the bill,” Maeve reminded me.

“Shit. My bills! My student loan payments! You can’t even work for the temp office without a phone.” I sat down heavily on the rickety couch that was in front of the bunk beds. It cracked, and the corner sagged.

“Maybe we should try harder to find another living situation. We could sign up for a house-sitting website and be paid to live in a swanky penthouse.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing.”

“Of course it’s a thing.”

“I think it turns into a sex thing.”

“No, that’s those deals on Craigslist where a guy is like, ‘come move in and be a maid for room and board,’ and you get there, and he’s like, ‘here’s your room, don’t mind the sex dungeon décor.’”

I went back to baking my pie. I hadn’t been able to properly enjoy my dessert after the tapas fiasco.

Also, screw Beck. I furiously worked the pie dough, which wasn’t good because the pie dough liked to be cold, and I was making it as hot as my ex-boss.

“No, he is not hot.”

“Are you talking to your baked goods again?” Maeve teased.

“They like being talked to.”

Maeve jumped up and stole some of the pie dough, dipped it in sugar, and ate it. “So good!”

Rain splattered against the tiny single window of our apartment.

“Is it supposed to rain all week?” I asked Maeve. “We may need a new apartment sooner than we think.”

She swiped on her tablet. “If you can find a better job that pays three times as much and I find a better job that pays four times as much, we could move into a two bedroom with a view of a brick wall as opposed to a view of a cinder block wall.”

I adjusted my robe. I had changed into my self-care clothes, which were a ratty pair of Tweety Bird pajama pants and an I Lurve Cupcakes T-shirt. No bra. Because I had just been fired, and you didn’t have to wear a bra if you were fired.

“I love how we have such lofty goals,” I said sarcastically.

“It’s good to dream,” Maeve said.

The floor above us started vibrating, then crappy hip-hop music blared through the floor. We looked up warily at the ceiling.

I grabbed my broom.

“Don’t,” Maeve warned. “You’ll bring the whole place down.”

“Stop blaring your music!” I yelled. “People are trying to bake here.”

I opened my window and beat the broom up against the wall.

“Wow, you really are mad!”

“I was in the middle of shopping when Beck fired me, and I’ll never hold those vintage Polly Pockets,” I complained, banging the broom against the wall above the window.

Thunder cracked, and lightning flashed. In the dark alley below, I saw a car waiting.

I was suddenly apprehensive and slammed the window.

“Don’t think you made much of an impact,” Maeve said, throwing me a towel for my hair. Then she frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“I think…” I pointed.

Maeve looked out the window, peering into the dark. “Is that a car?”

“You see it too.” I sat on our sagging couch. “I was hoping it was a wine- and rich-Spanish-food-fueled hallucination.”

“You don’t think it’s Kaden, do you?” Maeve asked in concern. “Do you think he’ll come up here?”

“Oh my god. He probably saw me stick my head out of the window,” I said in horror.

“I thought you always said he wasn’t dangerous.”

“He hasn’t shown up at my job or my home before now!”

“Maybe it was just a delivery driver,” Maeve said uncertainly.

“They ride bikes,” I hissed.

The front door to the building slammed. A man’s voice echoed up the stairway.

“Oh my god, he’s in the building.”

“We don’t know it’s him,” Maeve said, grabbing me.

“What if it is?”

“Turn off the lights. Pretend we’re not here.”

A man’s heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.

I grabbed my cast-iron skillet greased with butter for the apple pie I was baking and hefted it.

“Oh my god!”

“Shhh!”

I snuck up to the door, adrenaline pumping. I refused to cower before Kaden. I didn’t have money to hire a lawyer to file a restraining order against him. Not to mention that if I was going to get a high-paying job and move into a two bedroom—which was probably a stretch, but Maeve and I could at least find a studio that wasn’t in the process of converting itself to toxic sludge—I definitely wasn’t going to have the living experience ruined by Kaden popping up randomly to ruin my day.

Nope. It was The Art of War out here. We had to deal with Kaden decisively.

The footsteps came closer.

I motioned Maeve to open the door. She shook her head.

Do it!I mouthed, raising the cast-iron skillet in two hands. I had found it at a thrift shop. It was thirteen inches. (Ha! Who needed a man when you had a cast-iron skillet!) Though the rest of me was soft and doughy from stress eating, my forearms were pretty powerful from stress dough kneading and baking.

The footsteps stopped in front of the door.

Maeve closed her eyes, grabbed the door handle, and swung it open.

I screamed, “Towanda!” at the top of my lungs and sprinted out of the apartment door, swinging the cast-iron skillet.

And almost bashed Beck in the head.

He cursed and ducked. The force of the motion carried the skillet and embedded it into the wall opposite the apartment.

Beck skittered away from me, flecks of plaster and wood chips narrowly missing his suit.

They showered all over me, of course, because such was my life.

Beck opened his mouth then shut it.

Maeve screamed from the other side of the door. “I’m calling the police!” She ran out, brandishing an eggbeater. “Oh. Oh! Hi, Mr. Svensson.”

She stuck the eggbeater behind her back and shuffled backward into the apartment.

Beck turned to me. “Is that how you answer the door?”

“It’s my door that I pay for, and I’ll answer it how I want,” I said, putting my fists on my hips.

Beck looked at me, shaking his head. His eyes flicked down then immediately back up. “You’re not… wearing.” He couldn’t get the words out. He looked up at the ceiling.

“A bra,” I said, crossing my arms, refusing to let him make me feel self-conscious. “You can say the word bra. You’re not going to spontaneously combust in a shower of pink lace.”

“Why aren’t you wearing one?” he choked out.

“Girls have boobs, dammit, and I have been told that they are very nice ones on occasion,” I said tartly. “And sometimes things need to breathe.”

“But you’re standing out in the hallway,” he said, horrified.

“You can’t tell me that you don’t walk around letting your balls air out on occasion,” I said, pointing to his crotch.

“Don’t point at me.”

“I’m not your assistant. You’re at my house, and if I want to point at your crotch, I will. If you don’t like it, you can leave, especially since you weren’t even invited over here anyway,” I said, raising my voice.

“Message received.” Beck glowered at me. “Though you could have just yelled through the door when you saw it was me instead of jumping out here like a lunatic.”

“The peephole was painted over by the maintenance people, and I can’t see out,” I admitted.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. “Here,” he said, stretching out his hand. “Or are you going to bite me? Should I slide it over on the floor?”

“No, I think the floor is leaking some sort of toxic chemical.” I took it from him, turned the phone over in my hand, and pried the SIM card holder out of the phone.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s your phone.”

“No, it’s yours,” he insisted.

“You bought it for me for my job.”

“Funny,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I might have acted a bit hastily in firing you. Ethel showed up. She almost had a heart attack at the girls’ hair.”

I grimaced, vaguely remembering the drunk text messages.

“But it would be even worse if she learned you were out of the picture,” Beck continued, taking a cautious step toward me. “Tess, I really need you.”

A part of me, the part that hadn’t completely given up hope and still loved romance novels, wanted him to tell me how much he missed me and wanted me in his life and wanted me to be his one and only true love. You know, a full-on Cinderella moment.

“Tess,” he said, reaching for me.

Was this it?

You don’t even like him, I reminded myself. In fact, you hate him.

“I’ll raise your pay.”

Well, if that’s as good as I get, that’s as good as I get.“Double or nothing.” I crossed my arms.

“You drive a hard bargain.”

I held out my hand to shake. “I’m only coming back for the girls,” I warned, “not you.”

He took my hand then frowned. “Why is it sticky?”

“I’m making apple pie,” I explained, wiping my hand on my nightgown, much to Beck’s chagrin. I turned around and grabbed the handle of the cast-iron skillet and pulled. Nothing happened.

“I have the car waiting,” Beck continued. “I believe the majority of your things are still at the condo.”

I tugged on the skillet. It budged slightly. “Guess I’m stronger than I look.”

“I have to pick the girls up from the bento box class soon,” he prompted as I pulled at the skillet.

“So…”

“So let’s go.”

“I told you,” I said, bracing a leg against the wall and putting my full weight on the handle. “I have to bake a pie.”

The skillet jerked out of the wall, and I went flying backward. I careened into Beck, bouncing against his hard chest. His arms wrapped around me briefly, and I resisted the urge to lean into him.

You don’t like him, remember! He yelled at you and fired you three times.

But he had brought me my phone back.

You have such low standards.

“One other thing I forgot to mention that should make you happy,” Beck murmured as he released me, slowly, unless it was my imagination, which it very well may have been. “I told the girls they looked great with their haircuts, and if they liked their hair, I liked it.”

“What?” I glared up at him. “No, they can’t just chop off their hair like that.”

Beck’s nostrils flared. “You just yelled at me for not being supportive of their choices!”

“Treating them like individuals who are capable of making decisions about their own bodies is not the same as being supportive of terrible choices,” I countered. “They can’t go out in public like that. They look like their hair got hacked with a butcher knife. No, they need it styled, and they’re about to learn the hard way that short hair is deceptively high-maintenance. If they want short hair, they’re going to do it right.”