Page 48 of Alien Warrior Chef… With Benefits
She stills. Her fingers curl slightly around the plating tweezers, but she doesn’t turn away.
“Oh,” she breathes.
“I never... imagined this,” I continue, carefully. “Not just the kitchen. All of it. The laughing. The leaning. The ease.”
Her lips part slightly, like she might speak, but instead she steps closer, the scent of sugar and warmth and whatever perfume she favors settling into my lungs like a tranquilizer dart.
“And?” she asks.
“And I don’t want it to end,” I say, barely above a whisper.
Her eyes glisten, but not with tears. Not yet.
“Then don’t let it,” she replies.
I nod, my throat suddenly tight. “I won’t.”
We finish the practice round without another word. But everything’s changed.
We’re no longer just preparing to compete.
We’re building something else—together.
Something worth fighting for.
They’ve started callingme “The Brooding Brawler.”
It’s plastered in fluorescent font over a freeze-frame still of me frowning—no, scowling—while holding a pastry bag like it's a detonator. Holonet gossip feeds cycle it again and again:Warrior-turned-sous-chef? Mysterious Vakutan steals spotlight with smoldering stare.There’s even a meme of me glaring at a burnt soufflé, captioned‘This displeases the ancient ones.’
Ruby thinks it’s hilarious.
“You’ve got a fanbase, Rekk,” she teases, popping a purple starberry between her lips as she scrolls the stream of comments on her compad. “One of them wants to know if you’re single. Another says your scowl could curdle cream.”
“It can,” I mutter, reaching for the flame-jet to finish torching the lavender glaze atop a tray of eclairs.
She laughs. Loud and unapologetic, head thrown back like she hasn’t got a worry in the cosmos.
And that’s what scares me.
Because I do.
Worries buzz at the edges of my mind like feral wasps. I am not made for the spotlight. The warm lights of the bakery? Perhaps. The simmering trust of her gaze? Maybe. But stage lights, sponsors, smiling strangers wanting autographs and backstory and marketable charm?
No.
That’s her world. The hopeful, the sweet, the open-hearted dreamers who build empires from ganache and stubbornness. She belongs on screens and in hearts, weaving joy from cinnamon and caramel. I belong in silence. In shadow.
I try to speak—twice—but the words hang heavy in my throat like unspent bullets. Instead, I busy my hands. It’s easier to measure, to move, to mix, than it is to admit what I fear: that I am the wrong man for the right woman.
She doesn’t seem to notice the spiral tightening behind my ribs. Or maybe she does and just refuses to feed it. Her voice is light as she sets down the compad.
“I ordered us new uniforms,” she says, turning back to the cooling racks. “Something a little flashier. I figure if we’re going to end up on every gossip stream in the quadrant, we might as well look like we meant it.”
I grunt.
“Oh don’t give me that,” she says, hip-bumping me out of the way with practiced grace as she grabs the tray I just filled. “You look great in aprons. Verygruff elegance.”
“I am not elegant.”
