But this wasn’t about bread. The real truth was that she couldn’t do another day of this. Another day of Callie in her kitchen. Another day of remembering things she had forcibly unremembered for more than a decade.
Neil tried again. ‘Mae, if I don’t get this filming completed, the whole segment falls apart. Please. Help me out.’
‘No,’ Mae said, steady and final. ‘I want to be paid for today. And that’s the end of it.’
‘You looked good, if that’s the trouble. I mean, you and Callie, together? It was really nice stuff.’
Mae wasn’t going down this road. ‘I don’t—’
‘You hadchemistry. It was telly gold.’
The silly bastard didn’t know he’d pissed her off even more.
‘This isn’t about how I looked,’ she told him, anger increasing. She was ready to physically eject him from the premises.
‘Okay, why don’t you sleep on it? Well, don't sleep on it. Rest on it. For an hour. Half an hour. I could ring you in twenty—’
OK, there it was. Limit reached. She started pushing him out the door. He let himself be pushed. ‘No problem, got things to do anyway. We’ll talk later—’
Mae slammed the door. She almost hit him in the nose. He laughed ingratiatingly from the other side of the glass. ‘That was a close one,’ he called through.
Mae turned away. She heard his footsteps piss off at long last.
The moment he was gone, Mae’s shoulders slumped like someone had cut a string. This wasn’t about schedules. This wasn’t about lost business, or inconvenience, or the fact that a TV crew kept putting their elbows on her surfaces.
This was about someone yanking open a door she’d spent years nailing shut. About how she’d seen Callie laugh one good, real Callie laugh and felt eighteen again.
No. Mae couldn’t do another day of that.
She turned off the lights, one by one, until the bakery was dim and hers again. ‘Tomorrow,’ she muttered, locking the door. ‘Not a chance.’
Back Then
For a second, Mae honestly thought she’d imagined it. There was no way that Callie Price’s mouth had just been on hers.
‘Did you just—’
‘Yes,’ Callie whispered.
Mae stared at Callie’s face, at her lips, still close enough that if Mae leaned forward the tiniest bit, they’d touch again. She could still feel the imprint of that soft press.
‘You can’t…’ She swallowed. ‘Callie, you can’t do that.’
A flicker of hurt crossed Callie’s face. She ducked her head. ‘If you don’t want me to, I won’t. I promise. I just… I had to know if—’
‘If what?’ Mae snapped, sharper than she meant. She was going to be sick. Or cry. Or pass out. Possibly all three. ‘You can’t just… kiss me out of boredom.’
Callie looked her right in the eye. ‘That’snotwhat I did.’
Mae should have seen the sincerity in it. But the trouble was, she was freaking out. It made seeing what was in front of her face difficult. Impossible, actually.
‘I’ve watched you with people for years, remember? I know what you’re like when you’re working out whether you fancy someone. You get a bit intense for a bit, and then you move on. That’s fine. That’s you. But I’m not—’
She broke off, realising that breathing was not coming naturally. ‘I’m not something you can just try on to see how it fits.’
Silence settled between them. The bakery hummed softly around them, fridges ticking. Callie’s gaze didn’t leave her.
‘You think I’m that shallow?’ Callie asked. You couldn’t miss the hurt in her.
