Page 43 of Sweet Rivals

I stormed across the kitchen after him. Pulling open the walk-in fridge and stepping into the dim light. The space was cold and mostly empty aside from some milk, cream, and fruit. The door shut behind me, the single, naked bulb casting deep shadows in the small space.

“What?” he asked.

I had never heard him so angry except when he was talking to his brother. Maybe he just really hated his brother. Now that we were facing each other, only a few steps away in the small confines of the walk-in, I could feel the full weight of his anger. But I was angry too.

“Of course this isn’t a friendly competition. This may be some rebellious way for you to get back at your dad for running your life, so you can cosplay at being something other than a rich and famous and wildly successful cook, but this isn’t make-believe for me. This is my life. This is everything. If this endeavor doesn’t work out for you, you get to go back to your glamorous life, no harm, no foul. If it doesn’t work for me, I am out of options. I am stuck as the Lobster girl forever.”

“That’s ridiculous. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”

“That is so easy for you to say,” I laughed. “You have money. You have endless possibilities.”

“You could have that too if you tried harder.”

“Holy shit. You really are an asshole. I thought that maybe you had just misspoke when you told Joel you were using me, but you really think that me not having my life together at twenty-four is because I’m not working hard enough?” I shouted only inches from his face. Tears burned in my eyes.

“That’s, no, that’s not what I meant. I just meant that…” he stammered.

“What did you mean, Jared?”

“I meant that you can be anything you want. Even if it doesn’t happen right now,” he said. Jared shook his head in frustration. “God, it’s not coming out right. I thought this whole thing, the bakery and competition, it could help you.”

“Help me? What the fuck are you talking about? You haven’t tried to help me once. In fact, the only person who seems to give two shits about me is your brother.”

“Goddamn it! Stay away from Joel!” he shouted, wrapping his hands around my shoulders and squeezing.

I froze, my heart thundering against my ribs a mix of anger, heartache, and something. The heat from his strong grip poured over my skin and raced through my body, temporarily muddling my thoughts. “You aren’t allowed be mad at me for talking to your brother,” I said.

He sighed and released my shoulder, taking a step back although the walk-in didn’t allow for much distance. Goosebumps prickled along my skin in part from the growing cold of the refrigerator we stood in and partly from the absence of his hands. A brief image of his hands moving over my skin flashed through my mind before I shook it away.

“Why do you care that I am mad?” he asked. Good point.

“I am just trying to win this competition. And your brother is nice to me.”

“Sounds like you are still trying to convince me,” he said, eyebrows lifted, sexy wrists folded over meaty biceps, his face still holding complex emotions that I couldn’t parse out.

I opened my mouth to respond but didn’t have anything coherent to say. Instead, I let the incoherent ramble fall from my mind. “Why are you like this? You belittle me every chance you get around my cooking. Then you tell me not to talk to your brother as if I betrayed you or something, and now you are trying to convince me that I don’t even have a right to call you out on it! It’s bullshit!”

“I'm not telling you not to call me out. I’m telling you that you don’t owe me or anyone else an explanation. You need to keep seeing my brother? Go for it! But don’t say I didn’t warn you. He is a creep. He takes what he wants and doesn’t care who he steps on to get there. If he is asking you on a date, it is because he wants something. What does he want, Jenna?”

I stepped back like he had hit me, my back hit the walk-in door, swallowing past the pain as tears burned my eyes. “So you think that's the only way that someone would want me? To get something? Poor pathetic Jenna. Who could possibly want me? I am just the loser who never left Cape Shore, who has worked at a shitty tourist trap restaurant, who can’t ever get her shit together to make her dreams come true.” Now the tears were impossible to hold back. I turned toward the door so he couldn’t see my tears.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“Sounds to me like you never say what you mean,” I said. I shook my head without turning around as I pushed on the handle to open the walk-in and leave. Only the door didn’t budge.

Chapter Thirty

Ipushed the door again, then again and again. “No!” I yelled as my heart rate ticked up. “It’s stuck!” My voice rose several octaves above my usual speaking voice.

Jared stepped up beside me, his eyes darting between me and the door, and I assumed he was trying to decide if I was being a wimp or if we were really trapped. He reached for the handle, his shoulder brushing against me before he pushed on the door. It didn’t move. Walk-ins typically always opened out, but just in case, Jared yanked the door inward. Still, it didn’t move. He glanced at me. His face was calm in stark contrast to my welling panic.

“What the fuck?” I asked. I threw my shoulder against the door as he pushed against the handle with his weight. “Are we stuck in a walk-in? A goddamn walk-in?”

“Let’s try to wedge it open,” he said, still entirely too calm for the situation.

“With what?” I asked, spinning in a circle, looking for something we could use. “It’s not like we store crowbars in the walk-in.” It was two metal shelving units on either wall. When the time came to open the bakery, we would stock it full from the vendors, buying in bulk, but until then, we didn’t want products to go to waste. The shelves had a gallon of milk, a quart of cream, two dozen eggs, strawberries, blueberries, apricots, oranges, butter and nothing else. “Should I throw the milk at it?”

“Here,” Jared said with a smile, pulling a spatula out of his apron. He wedged it between the door and the wall. “You push the handle while I slide the spatula through.”

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