I hear her out in the kitchen, voice sharp, jerky. “Ok, ok, shut up!”
The metallic clang of the oven door. A blast of hot air hits me even back here. Then, blessed silence.
I am in trouble.
I, Leo Ashford, who has faced hostile boards, calmly navigated the implosion of a four-hundred-million-dollar crypto fund, smiled politely while men in suits tried to eat me alive, am absolutely, unequivocally terrified of the five-foot-four woman pulling bread from the oven.
I take a deep, shaky breath, straighten my sweat-damp T-shirt as if that will magically reassemble my dignity, and step out of the tiny room.
Tess stands at the cooling racks, her back to me.
Her movements are stiff, angry. She’s using oven mitts to slam the hot, dark-crusted hearth loaves onto wire racks with significantly more force than necessary.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Each loaf lands like an accusation.
The bakery, which had been thrumming with adrenaline and the suffocating intimacy of the locker room, is now filled with a new kind of silence, heavy, agonizing, loud as a siren in my skull.
It is the loudest silence I have ever experienced.
“Those… uh… those look great,” I offer.
My voice comes out ridiculously high, like I’m fourteen and my crush just caught me existing.
Tess doesn’t turn.
“They’re fine.”
“Smell great, too.”
“They’re bread, Leo,” she says, voice flat. “They smell like bread.”
Ok. So that’s how this is going to be.
I have shattered the truce. The fragile thing that had been growing between us, the respect, the humor, the Snorlax, has just been kissed to death in a utility closet.
Rule number one: don’t be a disaster.
And I have, once again, proven myself to be a walking, talking, sexual-harassment-liability billionaire with the emotional regulation of a Labrador retriever.
“Right,” I say, throat full of ash. “I’ll clean up.”
I don’t wait for her to tell me. I grab the bucket and fill it. The slosh of the water echoes in the quiet like we’re in a cathedral. I mop. I scrub the steel tables until they smell like bleach, lemon, and failure. I break down cardboard boxes from the day’s deliveries, folding them into neat stacks as if organization could make my life less messy.
We work around each other for a solid, silent hour.
It’s a new kind of dance. Where before we flowed, master and apprentice, brutal and efficient, now we’re two magnets repelling each other in jerky, awkward movements. I step left to scrub a table; she steps right to bag the day-olds. I move to the dish pit; she retreats to her tiny office. We are hyper-aware of every inch of space between us, every accidental brush that doesn’t happen.
I’m dying.
The silence is worse than her yelling. At least yelling tells me where I stand.
I’m finishing the floor when the warm, buttery air finally gives way to bleach and lemon. Tess is at her laptop, but she isn’t typing. I can see her through the doorway of the prep room. She’s just staring, rubbing the spot between her eyebrows. Her spreadsheet headache is in full force.
She slams the laptop shut with a weary, explosive sigh. The sound cracks the silence like a gunshot.
She stands, stretches, and her back pops audibly. She looks exhausted. Beaten. Like she’s carrying the entire bakery in her spine.
