12. Pascal

I was beginningto realize that Bud wasn't just sexy, he was sweet and hilarious too. As I swept the floors and tidied the kitchen—ready to open the doors to the patisserie that next day—I couldn't stop thinking about him and his bumbling, foolish, heart-warming attempt to speak French.

I longed to touch him.

I yearned to kiss him.

I hoped I would dream about him all night long.

Unfortunately, he was not the man who visited me in my sleep that night.

Instead, I was haunted by my Uncle Alphonse.

I was ten years old again, sweating as I kneaded ball after ball of dough in the kitchen of my uncle's farmhouse. The windows were open to let the drone of summer insects and what little breeze there was into the house. Across the other side of the wooden table at which I worked, my uncle moved swiftly from stove to oven, simmering and pouring and stirring and mixing. Occasionally he would glance up at my hard work and scowl.

"Look at what you're doing, you clumsy fool. That needs to be thinner. Fold it more carefully, treat the layers like delicate flowers. Don't break them, don't bend them. They must be just perfect, otherwise I'll never manage to recreate that damn recipe."

"Yes, Uncle Alphonse."

"And don't call me that! How many times have I told you not to call me that! In this kitchen you call me Chef, understood?"

"Yes, Chef."

This was how I spent my summers…

Trying so hard to impress my uncle, working my fingers to the bone to be like him, worshiping him from across the kitchen even as he called me a ‘clumsy fool' and a ‘careless wretch' and a ‘lazy little urchin who would never amount to anything'.

We spent Mondays and Tuesdays in the country, making batch after batch of pastry perfection. From Wednesdays to Saturdays, we returned to the city, and I would watch from a corner of his world-famous patisserie as his loyal patrons would fawn over his work, showering him in praise and admiration as he lapped up the attention.

Customers called him a genius.

A culinary titan.

A God of gourmet pastries.

What they didn't see was the part of him that was missing; the part that Monsieur Flannery had already taken from him.

And with it went any love he ever had for anyone else, including me.

"Knead that dough harder. It needs more butter, you little runt. If that pastry isn't wafer thin, I'll beat your ass with a rolling pin till you're blacker than a berry, do you hear me you pathetic little kitchen boy?"

When I woke that night, the sheets were drenched with sweat and my chest pounded until I realized with some relief—

"It's okay. I'm in Mulligan's Mill. I'm safe now."