The words went straight down my spine.
I turned my head. “That would be safer.”
His eyes stayed on mine. “You want safer?”
I dipped a spatula into the honey butter because busy hands were safer hands. Unfortunately, my busy hand slipped against the rim. A pale gold smear landed across the back of my wrist.
Flint reached for a towel.
I lifted my wrist out of reach. “I can handle it.”
His eyebrow rose.
“I know where this goes.”
“I was getting a towel.”
“You say that like towels have never lied.”
He took my wrist anyway, slowly enough that I could pull away. I didn’t. His thumb swept over the smear, warm and rough against my skin. Then, with the steadiness of a man testing whether a coal had caught, he lifted his thumb to his mouth.
For half a second, I had no useful thoughts left.
Flint licked the honey butter off his thumb.
Joelle dropped a metal spoon into a bowl.
Ed said, “I’m charging extra.”
Caprice shouted, “Cut! Why are we cutting when we weren’t rolling? I don’t know, but cut anyway.”
I yanked my wrist back and grabbed a towel. “It was honey butter.”
Caprice marched toward us. “I know what it looked like. I have eyes.”
Flint wiped his hand on a cloth. His expression gave away nothing, which was deeply unfair because my face had probably turned fire-engine red.
Caprice pointed between us. “I don’t know why the pre-round footage keeps turning into whatever this is, and I don’t currently have emotional bandwidth to define it. I need competitors. I need food. I need one final round that doesn’t turn into a lawsuit, a wildfire, or a dairy-adjacent workplace incident.”
“That was cleanup,” Flint said.
Caprice stared at him. “Flint Sparks, you’re a terrible liar for a man with that many practical pockets.”
Ed nodded once. “She’s got you there.”
Flint looked mildly offended. “The pockets are useful.”
“Enough,” Caprice said. “Sunny, return to your prep table. Flint, go back to your side. Joelle, guard the honey butter from further workplace incidents.”
Joelle lifted the container. “With my life.”
I turned back to my work and focused hard.
I put flour into the dry bin, folded towels, sheathed knives, nested pans, chilled fruit, covered butter, and smoothed label tape with the side of my thumb.
My hands knew how to do this. They’d known since fairground mornings when I was ten and standing on a milk crate behind my parents’ concession trailer, portioning batter while my mother told customers I was our cute little helper.
The old refrain rose in my head: cute little Sunny with her cute little hands rolling dough, her cute little smile selling lemonade, and her cute little self drawing comments before skill.
