The Bake-Off After Hours

Tulani sat in her apartment on the Sunday evening and listened to the quiet. It had been four months since Shane moved out, and she still caught herself setting out two glasses sometimes, out of habit more than hope, and then she would wash one of them and put it back and feel a little foolish about it. She was twenty-three years old, she kept telling herself, and people her age got dumped all the time, and there was no reason her whole chest should go hollow every time she walked past the corner bar where they used to go on Thursdays.

The apartment had come with the breakup too, in a way, because Shane had found the place for her when she moved to the coast for the job at the language school, and it still felt like a room she was borrowing from a version of herself that did not exist anymore. The walls were pale and bare. Her mother kept sending her posters in the mail, rolled up in cardboard tubes, and none of them had made it onto the wall yet. That told her something, she figured, though she did not like to think too hard about what.

So when her phone buzzed that evening with a message from the office group chat, asking if anyone could come in early Monday to help set up for the bake-off, she answered before she had time to talk herself out of it. Extra shifts meant extra money, and extra money meant maybe a proper bed frame by fall, but honestly it was not about the money. It was about not sitting in the quiet apartment with two glasses on the counter. She typed yes, I can be there at seven, and then she made herself some pasta and ate it standing up at the counter like a person with no plans and no future, and she went to bed early.

The school sat up on a low hill above the harbor, an old stone building that used to be a merchant's house before somebody with money and bad taste bought it and stuck a sign out front. The administrative office was on the ground floor, and off the back of it there was a little kitchenette the staff used for birthday cakes and bad coffee, and beyond that, past a yard with a low wall, the falconry mews where the school kept its three birds for the educational program. Students loved the birds. Parents loved the birds. Dom, who ran the whole operation side of the place, loved the birds more than anybody, and he had been a falconer since he was twenty-one, which was ten years of standing around with a leather glove on his arm talking to students about kestrels.

Tulani got there at ten to seven on Monday morning and the parking lot was empty except for Dom's van, which was a rust-colored thing with a ladder rack that he never used. She let herself in through the side door and found the office cold and smelling faintly of the sea and old paper, and she stood there for a second wondering if she had got the day wrong, and then she heard a clatter from the kitchenette and went toward it.

Dom was already there, which did not surprise her, because Dom was the kind of man who was always already there. He was thirty-one, tall and narrow, with dark hair going silver early at the temples and a permanent expression of a man doing arithmetic in his head. Right now he was elbow-deep in a cardboard box, pulling out bundt pans and extension cords and what looked like an enormous laminated banner, and he looked up when she came in with an expression she had never seen on him before, which was panic.

"Tulani," he said. "Oh, thank God. Tell me you can actually stay the whole day."

"I said seven, I meant seven," she said, setting her bag down on a chair. "What's all this?"

"This," he said, holding up the banner so she could see it, "is the regional bake-off, which is happening in our kitchenette in approximately seven hours, in front of three judges, one of whom writes for a food magazine, and I have entered it, voluntarily, like a madman."

She looked at the banner. It said, in cheerful red letters, SECOND ANNUAL HARBOUR TOWN BAKE-OFF. "You're baking?" she said. "You? The man who microwaves fish in the staff room?"

"That was one time and everyone agreed to move past it," he said, pointing a spatula at her. "Yes, I'm baking. My mother's almond torte. She's coming to watch, which is the whole problem, because if I mess it up in front of her I will never hear the end of it, and she'll be here by noon, and I still haven't found half the equipment on the list."

Tulani pulled the list off the counter and read it. "You need a stand mixer," she said. "Where's the stand mixer?"

"The school has one. It's in storage, in the annex, behind about nine years of old desks. That's your first job, if you're staying."

"I'm staying," she said, and something in her chest loosened a little when she said it, having somewhere to be that was not the apartment. She put her hair up and got to work, and for the next hour the two of them hauled furniture and wiped down counters and argued about where the judges' table should go, which was the most conversation she had had in a week that was not with a cashier.

Dom talked while he worked, the way he did, half to himself. "The torte has to be made live on site, from scratch, which is fine. The problem is the demonstration. They want each entrant to do a little presentation, not just drop off a cake like it's a funeral. And I thought, well, I have the birds, I'll do a falconry demonstration, tie it into the theme, the school, tradition, all of that."

"You're going to fly a hawk at a bake-off?" Tulani said, laughing before she could stop herself.

"Not at the cakes," he said, wounded. "In the yard. Out the window there, over the wall, Sombra does a pass and comes back to the glove. It's very impressive. It was very impressive in my head, at least, and now the judges are arriving early and I need someone to hold the lure and someone to open the mews and someone to stand there looking competent, and Gabriela is off with the flu and the new kid doesn't start until Thursday."

"So you need me," she said.

"I need you desperately," he said. "You've seen me work the birds a hundred times from the office window. You just have to hold the lure out at arm's length and not flinch. That is the entire task. Can you do that?"

"I can not flinch," she said. "I'm very good at it. Years of practice."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and she noticed, in a way she had not let herself notice things in a while, that he was easier to look at when he laughed. Then he got embarrassed about something and turned to check the oven, which did not even have anything in it yet.

* * *

They went out to the mews at half past eight, because Dom wanted a rehearsal before the actual thing, and the morning was gray and clean off the water, gulls wheeling around the harbor below the hill. The mews was a long low shed with a wire run attached, and inside, on a wooden perch, sat Sombra, the Harris's hawk, dark brown with white-tipped wings, watching them come in with one yellow eye and an expression of professional contempt.

"She likes you," Dom said, pulling on his glove. "She's judging us both, but she likes you more."

"Does she bite?"

"Only if you deserve it," he said, and then he caught her look. "No, she doesn't bite. Here. Glove on, strap tight, hold your arm out flat like a table, not like a wave." He adjusted her arm with two fingers on her elbow, businesslike, and Tulani told herself very firmly that the small warm spot where he touched her was nothing, because he was her boss, and because she was a disaster, and because the last thing she needed was a crush on a man who owned a hawk.

Sombra stepped onto her glove with a weight that surprised her, and Tulani held very still and did not flinch, and the hawk looked at her, and something in her went quiet. It was the first quiet moment she'd had in four months that did not feel empty.

"See?" Dom said, quieter now. "Told you it was good."

"She's heavy," Tulani said. "I didn't think she'd be this heavy."

"About two pounds, but they carry it like it's ten. All right, I'm going to take her out to the wall and do the pass. When I whistle, you hold the lure up high, swing it once, that's it. Ready?"

"Ready," she said, and she meant it, and out over the gray morning yard the hawk went up, and for a minute Tulani forgot about the apartment and the two glasses and everything else, and just watched the bird fly.

They did the pass four more times, and by the last one Sombra came to Tulani's glove instead of Dom's, which he took personally, and then it was nine o'clock and time to start actual baking, because the bake-off ran from ten to two with the judging at two, the torte needed the whole morning, and entrants had to bake on site, which Dom said was the stupidest rule he had ever heard and also the rule he had agreed to when he signed the form. They carried the stand mixer in from the annex together, Dom walking backward through the door with his end and nearly taking out the doorframe, and Tulani set out the ingredients on the counter in rows the way the recipe card said, flour, sugar, almonds, eggs, butter, the little bottle of almond extract that his mother apparently mailed him from somewhere up north every Christmas.

Dom was eight years older than her, thirty-one to her twenty-three, but he handled that recipe card like it was a legal document, reading it twice even though she had watched him make this torte in his head about six times already that morning.

"You know it by heart," she said. "You've been muttering grams at me all week."

"Out loud is different," he said. "Under pressure, with my mother standing there at the judges' table with her arms crossed, out loud gets different." He reached into his jacket pocket for the small folding knife he used for everything, scoring the almond paste, opening tape, whatever, and it slipped, his hand slick from washing the bowls, and it came out of the pocket handle first and Tulani's hand shot out and caught it before it hit the floor, and his hand closed over hers around the handle, both of them holding the same knife, his fingers warm over her knuckles, and neither of them moved for what was probably two seconds and felt like a lot longer.

"Nice catch," he said, and his voice had gone a little lower, which she chose to pretend she had not noticed.

"Years of practice," she said. "Not flinching and catching things. It's my whole skill set."

He took the knife back slowly and she went back to the almonds and told her hands to stop being weird, and her hands ignored her.

The truth was she had been single for four months and it had been a bad four months, Shane moving out in February with his record collection and his good coat, and she was twenty-three and her entire romantic résumé was one long-term boyfriend and a lot of nothing, and here was her boss, tall and narrow with silver coming in early at his temples, looking at her over a recipe card like she had personally saved his life with a pocket knife. She was not going to do anything about it. She was going to hold the lure and not flinch and get through Monday.

"So why is your mother coming, exactly?" she asked, cracking eggs. "To watch, or to supervise?"

"Both," he said. "She entered me in this without telling me last year, that's the joke of it. I found out from the flyer. She does the almond torte every family thing since before I was born, and she's never once written the recipe down, she just, it's all in her wrists, she says, which is not helpful. So she's coming at noon to watch me try to do it from memory and she will stand there like a hawk." He stopped. "A real hawk, I mean. Not Sombra. Although Sombra also."

"You're nervous," Tulani said, delighted. "You're nervous your mommy is going to watch you bake."

"I will fire you," he said mildly, whisking.

"You can't, I'm the only one who doesn't have the flu. You're a mama's boy. A big tall falconer mama's boy."

"Ten years with the birds," he said, pointing the whisk at her. "Ten years, and you've seen the scars. And yes, fine, my mother is coming and I want her to be impressed, what of it. She's seen me drop a bird on a glove at two hundred meters and she still tells that story about the time I was nine and cried at a christening."

Tulani laughed so hard she nearly broke an egg, and after that the morning went easy, the mixer running, the oven ticking up to temperature, the smell of toasting almonds filling the little kitchenette while gray light came through the window over the sink and gulls kept up their racket from the harbor. The banner was already up in the yard, SECOND ANNUAL HARBOUR TOWN BAKE-OFF, and every so often Dom would glance out at it and go quiet in a way that made her want to poke him.

At a quarter past nine they were both leaning over the same bowl, his