Mackie
…Uncle Dean liked my cookies?
Me
he nodded. A Barrett nod
Mackie
...how many
Me
four dozen. Rodriguez says maybe five to be safe
Mackie
I need Juliette. Tell Rodriguez they need to be at your apartment in 20 minutes
Me
why?
Mackie
we’ll need both ovens obviously
Mackie arrivesat my apartment at 11:20 with grocery bags over both arms. There's flour already dusted across her shirt from a batch she started at her parents’ house before realizing she didn’t have enough supplies. She takes over my kitchen the way she takes over every room she enters. She’s got bowls out and butter softening, her phone propped against the backsplash playing music. The whole apartment shifts from mine to ours in thirty seconds.
I lean against the counter and watch her work. I’ve seenMackie in a lot of contexts but I’ve never seen this—her hands moving without hesitation, scooping and leveling and adjusting. She doesn’t measure the vanilla. She eyeballs the brown sugar. She cracks an egg one-handed without looking at it. My eyes track the movement, stuck on her. I can't look away.
Rodriguez calls to confirm his oven is preheated and he’s sending Juliette to bring the next batch upstairs. We now have two cookie operations running simultaneously six floors apart in the same building at midnight. It's not a sentence I ever expected to think, yet here I am, standing in my own kitchen while my secret girlfriend runs a production line for a lie my best friend told.
Rodriguez and Juliette come down to deliver chocolate chips and don’t leave. He sits at my counter and eats cookie dough off a spoon, yelping when Mackie slaps his hand away but sneaking another spoonful when her back is turned. The four of us are packed into my kitchen and all I can do is lean against the counter and watch them, letting the noise wash over me without worrying about tomorrow.
“Stop eating the dough,” Mackie says without looking up. “If you keep eating the dough the count will be off and I will end you.”
“I’m not eating the dough,” Rodriguez says, the spoon still in his mouth.
“Rodriguez.”
“Fine.” He puts the spoon down. “But for the record, the dough is better than the cookies.”
“The dough is NOT better than the cookies. The dough is a PRECURSOR to the cookies. You don’t look at a caterpillar and say it’s better than a butterfly.”
“That analogy doesn’t work.”
“It works perfectly. Stop eating my caterpillars.”
I’m laughing and Mackie is pointing a spatula at Rodriguez and Rodriguez has his hands up in surrender and the oven timergoes off and she pulls the tray out and the cookies are golden and perfect.
“Is this my life now?” she asks. “Baking cookies at midnight for a hockey team that thinks my boyfriend is a self-taught pastry chef?”
“Apparently.”
“Your teammates are going to eat these on a plane tomorrow and say ‘wow, Almardon is such a good baker’ and nobody is going to think ‘I wonder if he’s been ghost-baking with his secret girlfriend who learned this from the very wife of the very teammate whose daughter he’s secretly dating.’” She shakes her head. “The irony has layers. Like a cake. Which you also can’t make.”
“When you say it like that?—”
