Romance

by Scribes Stories · 5 min read · 1 view

# The Recipe Box Wren had opened her bakery three doors down from Marco's, which she had known when she signed the lease and had chosen anyway, partly out of spite and partly because the rent was genuinely the best on the block. For two years they had run a quiet, entirely unnecessary rivalry, competing for the same morning crowd with the same fierce, ridiculous pride, each of them privately certain their cinnamon rolls were superior and neither willing to admit they had, in fact, tasted the other's more than once, late at night, alone, when nobody was watching. It was the town's annual harvest festival bake off that finally forced them into the same room, both of them entering, both of them expecting to win, neither of them expecting to be assigned as partners for the festival's new "collaborative category," a rule change the organizing committee had apparently decided on purely, Wren suspected, for entertainment purposes. "Absolutely not," Marco said the moment he saw the pairing sheet. "I agree completely," Wren said. "But the prize money funds the community center roof, so I suppose we're doing this." They met in her kitchen after closing, tension crackling in the flour dusted air between them, two people who had spent two years perfecting the art of pretending the other didn't exist while secretly memorizing the exact hours their competitor's shop was busiest. "Your croissants are overproofed," Marco said, by way of greeting, examining her prep station with the offended expression of a man walking into enemy territory. "Your croissants taste like you're afraid of butter," Wren shot back. "Which, given that you're a baker, is a genuinely concerning trait." They argued for twenty minutes about lamination technique before either of them noticed they had, without quite deciding to, started actually working together, her hands smoothing dough while his adjusted her oven temperature with the easy confidence of someone who'd clearly spent more time thinking about her equipment than he'd ever admit. "How do you know my oven runs hot?" she asked, suspicious. "I don't," he said, too quickly, color rising slightly in his face. "Lucky guess." "You've been in my shop." "Once. To scope the competition." "Marco. It's been open two years." "I go through phases," he said, refusing to meet her eyes, and Wren found herself smiling despite every instinct telling her not to. They worked past midnight, trading recipes neither of them had ever shared with anyone, his grandmother's technique for a chocolate ganache that made Wren actually gasp out loud, her secret ratio for brioche dough that made Marco go uncharacteristically quiet for a full minute before admitting, grudgingly, that it might be better than his own. "I hate that you're good at this," he said, watching her fold dough with an ease that came from years of practice. "I hate that you noticed," she said, and the air between them shifted slightly, competition softening into something neither of them had a category for yet. By the third night of practice bakes, they had stopped arguing about lamination and started arguing about music instead, him insisting on old jazz records while they worked, her sneaking in pop songs when he stepped out for supplies, both of them pretending not to notice they were staying later than the recipe actually required. "Why did you really open three doors down from me," he finally asked, halfway through their fourth night together, flour on his hands and something unguarded in his voice for the first time since they'd met. Wren considered lying, considered the easy joke about rent prices, and found she didn't want to. "Because I saw your window display the week before I signed the lease," she admitted. "The little sugar sculptures. I thought, if there's competition that good three doors down, I'd better be good enough to earn my place next to it." Marco stared at her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes. "I thought you hated me." "I thought I did too," she said. "Turns out I just really, really wanted you to notice me." "I noticed," he said quietly. "I've noticed for two years. I just decided being your rival was safer than admitting I actually just wanted an excuse to keep watching your shop." The bake off, when it finally came, was almost an afterthought by then, though they won anyway, their combined creation, a croissant laminated with her brioche technique and filled with his grandmother's ganache, taking first prize by unanimous decision. But neither of them cared much about the ribbon by that point, standing together in the festival tent afterward, flour still faintly dusting both their aprons. "So," Marco said, "now that the community center has its roof, I suppose we go back to being rivals." "I suppose," Wren agreed, not moving an inch closer to leaving. "Terrible business decision, sharing a recipe box with the competition." "Terrible," he agreed, and kissed her anyway, right there in the festival tent, to the mild scandal of several elderly festival judges and the enormous, unspoken relief of two years' worth of carefully guarded feelings finally, finally allowed to rise. Wren closed her bakery for a full week after that, an unprecedented event in the town's memory, and reopened with a small hand lettered sign in the window that read, simply, Now Serving Marco's Ganache, Because Apparently We're Doing This Together Now. His shop, three doors down, put up a matching sign the same afternoon. Neither of them ever did agree on whose croissants were technically superior. They found, in the end, they didn't much mind sharing the recipe box instead.