Nikki loves baking as much for its simplicity as for the challenge of it. There’s a very clear structure to what she does, a precision to which she must adhere to see the desired outcome. Cooking is chaos, or at least it has always seemed to her. “Improvisation” is just another word for not having a plan. She can’t conceive of how chefs ever plate a dish that way. Baking is a science. When you improvise science, shit explodes.
Also, sometimes when you use liquid nitrogen, shit explodes, but she maintains the rest of the staff exaggerates that incident.
In the small pastry kitchen that is her domain, Nikki is a monk perfectly duplicating manuscripts. That’s where her laser focus serves her best. She follows the recipe for her black pepper strawberry cake to the tiniest corner of the letter. She believes eating fondant is as redundant and flavorful as performing oral sex on a plastic blow-up doll. Nikki uses a piping bag filled with a frosting of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and chocolate she made herself, a spatula, and a small sculpting tool. That’s it.
The exterior of the finished product is as smooth as silk draped over steel, and the lines of her frosting designs are so flawless, they might be machine-pressed plastic.
Fucking fondant, she thinks to herself as she licks the spatula.
She’s come into Sin du Jour on an off Saturday to bake cakes for a family party. Nikki bakes in her home often for personal occasions, but for larger jobs, she doesn’t see the harm in using the company’s equipment. She’s baked birthday cakes for her seven-year-old niece and her friends, and larger cakes for the attending adults.
“Nikki? You back here?”
It’s Dorsky’s voice, no mistaking it.
Nikki freezes, accidentally squeezing a stray dollop of frosting from the piping bag onto the cake.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she seethes as quietly as possible, waving her spatula-wielding hand in frustration.
“Nikki?” he persists, and she can hear him approaching the entrance to the kitchen.
“Yes, dammit, I’m here!”
Dorsky walks into the pastry kitchen. He’s not wearing his chef whites, which makes him look somehow odd and out of place. But he’s also not wearing a jacket in January weather so he can show off his biceps, which makes him look exactly like Dorsky.
“I stopped by your place,” he says. “I figured I’d take a shot you were here doing your thing. And I had some expense reports to turn in, anyway.”
“You stopped by my place?” she asks, almost alarmed, but it’s not enough to pull her focus from removing the errant frosting and patching over the blemish on her cake.
“Yeah, I needed to talk to you. Need to talk to you, I mean.”
“About what?”
Nikki uses the sculpting tool to smooth the raised remnants of the frosting she spilled and blend it into the rest.
“There,” she whispers to herself. “Perfect.”
“About something that’s been on my mind since all of that crazy shit went down with the Enzo Consoné gig.”
Now that the cake is fixed, Nikki’s full attention is brought to bear on what he’s saying, and it’s enough to make her raise her hands in a panic.
“Tag, before you say anything else, can we both agree my engaging in happy fun time with you strictly to break you free of a succubus’s spell is a self-explanatory kind of situation that doesn’t require further discussion? Like, ever?”
Dorsky just blinks at her in silence for a moment. When it comes to anything that doesn’t relate to cooking or the business of running a kitchen, Nikki knows his wheels turn about half as fast.
“What, that?” he finally says. “No. That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh. Oh, okay, then.”
Nikki sounds surprised, and then disappointed.
“I mean, did you want to talk about it?” Dorsky asks, cautious.
“No!” she insists immediately. “No, of course not.” An impatient, vexed air overtakes her. “What do you want, Tag?”
“Right. I just . . . I feel like I owe you an apology.”
Nikki’s impatience quickly turns to sheer bewilderment. She doesn’t even know what to say to that.
Realizing she’s not going to help him along with it, Dorsky quickly continues. “The whole thing with what’s-her-fuck, Luciana, the way you all . . . you and Lena and Cindy and Jett, I mean—”
“The womenfolk of the office,” Nikki clarifies.
“Yeah. The way you had to deal with that on your own, and the way you were shut out of the kitchen—”
“Lena was shut out of the kitchen. I’ve never been very welcome there.”
Dorsky sighs. “All right, yeah, fair, so I owe you an apology for that, too. My point is, you stepped up for the line in a big way when we’d all turned on you, and you shouldn’t have had to do it yourselves. Evil fuckin’ snare-bitch or not, I feel like . . . like maybe I made it easy for her to divide and conquer us. I was pissed at Lena for taking off without so much as a voice mail, and I was pissed at you for being on her side when she came back, which is stupid, I know.”
“It is. It is very stupid.”
“I get that. And as long as I’m apologizing, I might as well go all the way back to what happened with us . . . before. I liked being with you, but I didn’t treat you so good when we weren’t alone.”
“You treated me like Danny Zuko when he first saw Sandy again in Grease.”
He furrows his brow at her. “Is that the play or, like, the movie? I’ve never seen—”
“Never mind, Tag. Why . . . What brought all this on? Seriously? This is the most un-Dorsky-like behavior I’ve ever witnessed, and that includes when you were under the total control of an evil she-demon.”
He looks genuinely frustrated, and it’s that more than anything he’s said thus far convincing Nikki he may be sincere.
“I don’t know. I don’t . . . I don’t want to be that guy who talks a bunch of shit about who they are and then fails spectacularly to live up to it. That guy raised me. Fuck him. I always tell myself, and everyone else, the line means everything to me. I’d do anything for my line. More than that, I call myself a leader of that line. I haven’t been living up to any of that lately. You and Lena have. You’ve done more than your share for this place. You deserve better. You deserve better . . . from me.”
“Wow” is all Nikki can say at first. Then: “Well. Thanks. I mean it. Thank you. That is shockingly mature of you. And I appreciate it.”
Dorsky nods, seeming at least slightly appeased.
“Can I have some of that cake?” he asks.
Nikki giggles. “Yeah. Sure. I think you’ve earned cake.”
As she sets about cutting him a healthy slice, Nikki asks, “What about Lena? Are you going to have this talk with her?”
“Yeah, I need to,” he admits. “It’s just . . . there’s going to be more to say with her. It’s more . . . complicated.”
“Like an adult relationship?”
“I’m not the dumb jock in a John Hughes movie, Nik; I know what sarcasm is.”
Nikki slides a plate in front of him with a wedge of cake and a fork on it.
“So, what are you going to say to her?”
“I don’t know,” Dorsky says, forking an inhuman-sized bite and somehow managing to fit it all inside his mouth.
He says something else, but the words get lost amid the layers of frosting and crumbs being broken down between his jaws.
“What was that?” she asks.
He swallows. “Where is she at with Ritter?”
Nikki frowns. “That’s not a question to ask me, Tag. It’s none of my business.”
“I just want to know if it’s even worth bringing up all the other stuff, or if I should just say I’m sorry like I just did and leave it at that.”
“Ask Lena, and then you’ll know.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It’s always that easy. People are just dumb.”
Dorsky cuts another forkful and relishes the bite.
“This cake is fucking awesome.”
“Of course it is,” Nikki confirms without hesitation. “I made it.”