Chapter 2 The Flour On His Hands

• By Monday morning, four hundred and twelve people had seen the screenshot.
• I know the number because I counted the likes myself, at 2 a.m., in the dark, like picking at a scab I'd promised myself I'd leave alone. Making the dessert and eating the evidence. Efficient. Someone had captioned it with a crying-laughing emoji and the words "campus icon behavior," and forty-one people had commented under it, and I made the catastrophic mistake of reading every single one before I made myself put the phone face-down on my dresser.
• Priya found me like that when she got back from her early class sitting on the floor with my back against my bed, phone dark, staring at nothing.
• "Okay, who do I need to fight," she said, which is Priya's version of are you okay, and I loved her for it even as I shook my head.
• "Nobody. It's fine."
• "You've got your 'it's fine' voice on, which is how I know it's not fine." She dropped her bag and sat cross-legged in front of me, uninvited, the way she'd done since freshman year when we got assigned as roommates and she decided within forty-eight hours that I was hers to look after whether I wanted looking after or not. "Show me."
• I showed her. I watched her face do the thing where her jaw goes tight and her eyes go flat, the specific fury of someone who loves you reading something designed to make you feel small.
• "Vienna Cole," Priya said, "is going to choke on a crouton one day, and I am going to watch, and I am not going to do the Heimlich."
• "That's dark."
• "I contain multitudes." She handed my phone back to me screen-down, like she didn't trust it to be near my face anymore. "Also— and I need you to not make a face when I say this Rhett Calloway liked your comment defending yourself under that post."
• I did make a face. "He did not."
• "Junie. I watched him do it. Live. In real time. I refreshed to make sure I wasn't hallucinating."
• I thought about the text still sitting in my phone, deal. tuesday?, and the fact that it was Monday, which meant tomorrow was Tuesday, which meant in roughly thirty hours I was supposed to stand in a kitchen with the best-looking guy on campus and teach him how not to overwork pie dough, and the whole idea felt so far outside the realm of things that happened to girls like me that some stubborn, self-protective part of my brain had spent the whole weekend deciding it probably wasn't going to happen. That he'd cancel. That Monday would bring some excuse, some fade-out, the quiet unraveling I'd learned to expect from anything good.
• He didn't cancel.
• rhett: still on for tomorrow? i already bought an apron. it has a lobster on it. i need you to know that going in.
• I laughed out loud in my empty dorm room, an actual laugh, the first one since Thursday, and Priya looked up from her laptop with an expression like she'd just watched a solar eclipse.
• Tuesday came anyway, the way Tuesdays do whether you're ready or not.
• The kitchenette smelled like it always did browned butter ghosted into the walls, a little bit of vanilla, the particular metal smell of a proofing oven that's been running too long. I got there first, because I always get there first, because arriving early means I get to choose which corner to shrink myself into before anyone else picks the good spots.
• Rhett showed up eleven minutes late wearing the lobster apron over a hoodie, looking so genuinely pleased with the apron that I forgot, for a second, to be braced for whatever this actually was.
• "I wasn't kidding," he said, gesturing down at himself. "I found it at a thrift store this weekend and knew it was the one."
• "It's a deeply unserious apron."
• "I am a deeply unserious man in a kitchen. That's why I need you." He looked around at the flour, the rolling pins, the little dish of chilled butter cubes I'd set out. "Okay, teach me. What are we making?"
• "Galette," I said. "It's forgiving. Hard to mess up too badly, which given the lobster situation feels important."
• We made pie dough with our hands, which meant flour on his knuckles within about ninety seconds, and I showed him how to feel for the pea-sized butter chunks that mean you've stopped too soon versus kept going too long, and he asked actual questions, real ones, not performing interest but genuinely curious in a way that surprised me every time, because I kept waiting for the moment his attention would slide off toward his phone or toward the door or toward literally anything else in the world that wasn't me explaining gluten development to a boy in a lobster apron.
• That moment never came.
• "Can I ask you something," he said, somewhere around the point where we'd gotten the dough wrapped and into the fridge to rest, and his voice had dropped out of the joking register into something quieter.
• "Depends what it is."
• "Thursday. That thing with Vienna." He wasn't looking at me when he said it, focused instead on wiping flour off the counter, which I understood immediately as its own kind of kindness giving me somewhere to look that wasn't his face. "Does that happen a lot?"
• I could have lied. I've gotten good at lying about it, actually, a whole practiced repertoire of 'oh, that's just how she is' and 'it's not a big deal' that I deploy so smoothly most people never push past it.
• "Since freshman year," I said instead, and I don't know what made me say the true thing instead of the easy one. Maybe the lobster. Maybe the four hundred and twelve likes still sitting in my head like a stone I couldn't put down. "She dated Grayson before I did, actually. I think that's part of it. And then I dated him, and then I didn't anymore, and somewhere in there I became the joke that makes her feel better about — I don't actually know what. I've stopped trying to figure out the math."
• Rhett was quiet for a second. Then he said, "For what it's worth, I've known Vienna since freshman orientation. She's..." He stopped himself, chose his next words carefully. "She's insecure in a way that makes her cruel to anyone she thinks she can get away with being cruel to. That's not an excuse. I just — I wanted you to know I see it. What she does. I'm not blind to it."
• Something in my chest went tight and warm at the same time, an uncomfortable, unfamiliar combination, like stepping into sun after too long in the cold.
• "Grayson didn't say anything," I said, before I could stop myself. "Thursday. He just stood there."
• "Yeah." Rhett's jaw did something — tightened, released. "I know. I was standing behind him in the doorway. I saw the whole thing."
• I hadn't known that. I'd clocked Rhett in the doorway, but I hadn't clocked how long he'd been there, hadn't realized he'd watched the whole slow unfolding of it, every single beat, the heat crawling up my neck and the wax paper squares and the number twelve.
• "Why didn't you say anything?" I asked. "In the moment."
• "Because Marlowe already had it handled, and I didn't want to make it a bigger scene than it already was for you. I figured you had enough eyes on you without me adding a whole thing." He glanced up then, finally met my eyes. "But I've been thinking about it since Thursday. About how nobody in that room said a single real thing to her. So I'm saying it now, I guess. Late. But I'm saying it."
• I didn't know what to do with that. Twenty years of bracing for cruelty had left me with almost no functional muscle for receiving the opposite, and I think he could see that on my face, because he softened, backed off the intensity of it, nodded toward the fridge.
• "Dough's probably close to ready," he said, giving me the exit. "Show me how not to ruin this."
• We rolled it out together — badly, on his end, beautifully uneven edges that he insisted were "rustic" and folded it around sliced peaches I'd brought from the dining hall, and by the time it came out of the oven, golden and cracked and imperfect in exactly the right way, something had shifted between us that I didn't have a name for yet.
• He ate a slice standing at the counter, still warm, and made that same unguarded sound from Thursday, and said, "I want to do this every week."
• "The galette specifically, or the whole—" I gestured vaguely between us. "This."
• "Both," he said, no hesitation at all, like it wasn't even a question worth pausing over. "Both, obviously."
• I walked back to my dorm that night lighter than I had in months, replaying the whole evening on a loop, and I almost — almost — made it back to my room before my phone buzzed with a text from a number I didn't recognize.
• private number: does rhett know what you actually look like without the flattering kitchen lighting? asking for a friend.
• My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
• Because whoever sent it knew where I'd been tonight. Knew who I'd been with. Which meant someone had been watching us the entire time, close enough to see everything — and I had absolutely no idea who it was, or what they were planning to do with what they'd seen.