Baked Under His Gaze

I'd never been nervous about a tart before, but there I was at half past nine on a Saturday morning, standing outside Wertz Waves with a lemon tart balanced on both hands and my stomach doing gymnastics, and I told myself it was just a bake-off, just a bit of fun, except it wasn't, because I'd spent three days perfecting that tart and I wanted to beat my neighbor more than I wanted to breathe.

Let me back up a step for anyone just tuning in. My name is Randi, I'm thirty-four, I'm a soil scientist, which means I spend most of my week knee-deep in mud testing drainage for the council, and two years ago I moved into the flat next to Silas Wertz, who owns the surf shop on the corner and bakes better than any man has a right to. In two years we've exchanged maybe four hundred waves over the fence, a dozen hello's, and one conversation about a bin collection that got moved to a Tuesday. That's it. That was the entire relationship, and then last month somebody taped a flyer to the shop door announcing a bake-off, judges included, and something in me decided this was my moment.

So I pushed the door open with my hip and the bell jangled and the smell hit me, surf wax and coffee and something buttery underneath, and I navigated past the racks of boards toward the back room where somebody had set up two long tables and a folding chair with a clipboard on it.

Silas was already there, and I mean already there, like he'd been there since dawn, arranging his own entries on the far table with the kind of care most men reserve for engine parts. He's thirty-seven, tall, forearms like rope, hair that's been salted by the sea and never once cut by a professional, and when he turned around and saw me holding that tart out in front of me like an offering to a small angry god, his whole face changed.

"There she is," he said, and he wiped his hands on his apron and came around the table. "I was starting to think you'd chickened out."

"I don't chicken out over baked goods," I said, which was a lie, because I'd rehearsed chickening out twice in the car. "Where do you want this?"

"Center of the judging table, love. Front and center. Give the others something to cry about."

I set the tart down and he leaned over it and looked at it, really looked at it, and then he looked at me, and I don't know how to explain the difference except that one look went into the tart and the other went straight through my chest and out the other side. He did that a lot, I'd noticed, over the fence, over the bins, that steady unblinking watching like I was weather he was trying to read, and I'd always told myself it meant nothing. Standing three feet from him with lemon curd on my fingers, I couldn't tell myself that anymore.

"Good crimping," he said, nodding at the tart. "Did you chill the dough twice?"

"Twice and then a third time because I got paranoid," I admitted. "Don't tell the judge."

"Your secrets are safe." He smiled, and something lurked beneath the smile, some current I could feel on my skin like the air before a storm rolls in off the water, and I busied myself straightening my tart even though it didn't need straightening.

The back room was exactly what you'd expect from a surf shop annex, cluttered with spare boards leaning in racks along one wall and tins of wax stacked on a shelf, and up on that shelf there was an old chessboard with a game frozen mid-match and one bishop missing, which struck me as the most Silas thing I'd ever seen. He caught me looking at it.

"Never finished that game," he said. "My opponent moved to Bristol and took the bishop out of spite."

"Who plays chess in a surf shop?"

"Men with too much time between swells." He shrugged, and then the bell out front jangled again and the temperature in the room changed, and I felt it before I even turned around.

She came in like she was arriving at her own film premiere, this tall woman in a camel coat with a pastry box held up in one hand like a trophy she'd already won, and I knew, I just knew, before anybody said a name. Silas's whole posture shifted, loose and easy in a way it hadn't been with me, and he called out, "Katarina. Well, well. Somebody told the whole town, then."

"Somebody always does," she said, sweeping in past me close enough that her coat brushed my elbow, and she looked me up and down with a smile that had teeth in it. "And who's this?"

"Randi, my neighbor. Randi, Katarina. She bakes professionally, so watch yourself."

"Pastry chef," Katarina said, setting her box down on the table like she was laying down a royal decree. "Though I'm between kitchens at the moment, so consider this a vacation." She peeled off her coat and I caught the sharp little glance she threw at Silas while she did it, checking whether he was looking, and he was, of course he was, and something hot and ugly turned over in my stomach that I had absolutely no business feeling.

Because I have thought about this a lot since. I had no claim on the man. Two years of waves over a fence does not give you standing. But watching her plant herself next to him and laugh at something he said, some old joke I clearly wasn't in on, watching him laugh back with his head tipped, I felt like I'd brought a tart to a knife fight, and worse, I felt something else underneath the jealousy, because Silas's eyes kept drifting back across the room to me while she talked, again and again, and every time they landed on me that same current ran through the air.

"So," Katarina said, turning back to me with her box already open, revealing what I will grudgingly admit was a perfect apple galette, the kind of thing you see in magazine spreads. "Neighbor, is it? And you bake?"

"A bit," I said. "Hobby. Mostly I play with dirt for a living."

"Soil science," Silas said from behind her, and his voice carried something when he said it, like the word pleased him. "She tests drainage for the council. Clever hands, soil scientists."

"I'll bet," Katarina said, and the look she gave him over her shoulder could have curdled the cream in my tart from across the table.

Magnus arrived then, the judge, a big weathered man in his forties with a beard going grey and a limp he wore like a medal, retired competitive surfer, local legend, the whole package, and he clapped Silas on the shoulder and bellowed something about how he hoped somebody had finally brought something worth waking up for. People trickled in behind him, a handful of locals with cakes and boxes, and the back room filled up with chatter and the smell of sugar, and I stood at my little corner of the table pretending to arrange my tart while actually keeping one eye on Silas and one on Katarina like a cat watching two birds at once.

And all the while he kept watching me back, patient and unhurried, like he had all morning and knew something I didn't.

Magnus got everybody's attention by rapping a knuckle on the table like he was knocking the dents out of a surfboard, and he laid out the rules the way a man lays out rules who has never once been argued with successfully. Each baker presents one item, no names on anything, no decoration that identifies you, nothing but the food itself talking. The tarts and galettes and loaves would go up on the long table at the front with plain paper tags and numbers, and Magnus would taste them blind and rank them, and the winner would get the absurd little trophy, a resin wave on a wooden base, plus bragging rights for the year, which in a town like this was worth more than the trophy by a mile. "And no sneaking your number to me," he said, pointing a thick finger around the room. "I know every trick. I've been bribed with better than you lot can bake." Everybody laughed at that, and I laughed too, but halfway through the speech I felt Silas drift over to my corner of the table, casual as anything, pretending to study my lemon tart, and he leaned in close enough that I could smell the sea still clinging to his jumper and said, low, just for me, "I'll be watching you the whole time, you know. Every move you make with that tart." I nearly dropped the serving knife. "That's not intimidating at all," I whispered back, and he grinned, slow, like he'd been handed exactly the reaction he wanted. "Good," he said. "You're nervous. I like you nervous." And then he strolled off across the room like someone who hadn't just said something that rewired my whole morning, and I stood there gripping that knife and trying to work out whether I was furious or flustered, and coming up honestly with both.

The judging setup took a while, because Magnus ran it like a proper event, and the numbers got assigned by lot, and my tart went up as number six and Katarina's galette as number two, which she announced to the room herself even though the whole point of the exercise was anonymity, and Magnus gave her a look that said he'd remember it. That left us with the better part of an hour to kill while he set up his little tasting station with a glass of water and a notebook, and people drifted out front to buy coffee and gossip, and that was when I found myself back at the shelf with the chessboard, because I couldn't help it.

The game was frozen mid-match, kings castled, a couple of pawns advanced, and the bishop's square just sat there empty on the dark diagonal, a gap in the teeth. There was something about it that bugged me, the same itch I get when a core sample comes up wrong, and I was leaning in with my arms crossed trying to read the position when Silas appeared at my shoulder, quiet as a cat, and said, "It's in play." I jumped. "What?"

"The bishop. It's in play. It's not gone." He winked at me, actually winked, a thirty-seven-year-old man in a room full of wax tins, and tapped the empty square once with a finger. "Bristol took it out of spite, but I keep the square. You don't resign over a piece like that. You adapt your whole game around the gap."

"That's either very wise or very daft," I said, and he laughed, a proper laugh from the belly this time, not the polite one he'd handed Katarina, and I noticed the difference, and I filed it away where I keep things I don't want to examine too closely. "Most of my best decisions are both," he said, and then Magnus bellowed something about ten minutes, and we drifted back to the table, and I spent those ten minutes not thinking about a missing bishop and failing completely.

Because the break had this quality. Katarina spent it working, and I mean working, and I watched her do it with a professional's grudging respect and a jealous woman's worsening mood. She stationed herself next to Silas at the counter out front and asked him about ovens, of all things, laying her hand on his forearm while she did it, laughing at everything he said, flipping that chestnut hair back like she was in an advert, and telling anybody in earshot about the three-star kitchen in Padstow that had tried to poach her twice. And Silas, to his credit, was polite and nothing more, answering her questions and topping up her coffee and keeping a full arm's length of counter between them, but he didn't move away, and that was the part that got under my skin, because he'd moved toward me all morning, every chance he got, and now he just stood there being available, and every