Chapter Thirteen
Wyatt had forgotten all about insisting that Kai would be in a t-shirt next week until he’d actually shown up in one. A black one that had clearly been a size too small when he bought it and had shrunk in the wash since. Wyatt could see where the dip of Kai’s navel was by the way the fabric clung to him.
Not that Wyatt was thinking about how soft Kai’s t-shirt looked.
Not that his fingers itched to touch the fabric, splayed over the center of Kai’s chest, feeling his heartbeat speed up with anticipation.
He definitely didn’t want to kiss Kai again. That had just been the heat of the moment.
Right?
Definitely. It was just that as predicted, Kai looked amazing in a plain black tee tucked into the waistband of his jeans and nothing else.
Wyatt knew Kai was hot. That absolutely didn’t mean he wanted to do anything other than work with him. Hell, a few weeks ago, he hadn’t even wanted to work with him.
He’d gotten used to it, and aside from the two awkward kisses they’d shared, he was enjoying it now.
Except for the part where Kai was suddenly being incredibly distracting, even without trying. Wyatt kept looking over at him, watching him work with his knife at terrifying speeds and still not ever cut himself.
It was nearly impossible, looking at his hands, not to imagine them trailing patterns over Wyatt’s skin, tickling and teasing, curling around his cock…
Why could he smell burning?
“Dammit,” Wyatt said as he looked down at the churro batter he’d been halfway through cooking, the bottom of the pan scorched because he’d been listening to Kai explain about toasting cardamom pods before using them to bring out the oils.
Okay, so that wasn’t the reason. He had been listening to Kai, but mostly he’d been watching his lips. And thinking about his hands.
It was mostly the hands, although now that Kai’s lips had come to his attention…
Crap. How was he supposed to focus when Kai was right there?
“Everything okay over there?” Kai asked, not looking away from his work for a second.
Maybe he knew how distracting he was being. Maybe he was doing it on purpose.
Although some part of Wyatt doubted it. He was serious when it came to his job, and he wasn’t intentionally making Wyatt’s harder than it needed to be.
He was, unfortunately, making other things harder than they needed to be. But still probably not intentionally.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said defeatedly. “Just taught everyone an important lesson about paying attention to what you’re doing, because you can burn this mixture and then there’s really no option other than starting again.”
Thankfully, he had time. He’d been planning to finish up early today and demonstrate a little sugar work, since Kai had inspired him to show off, but he could scrap that to give himself the extra time he needed and turn the extra ingredients into a caramel sauce to go along with the dark chocolate one he’d been planning to make.
For Kai, obviously. Because he felt like he owed Kai an apology for running away from him, twice.
It wasn’t that Wyatt wasn’t interested, or that Kai wasn’t his type. It was that screwing him was a terrible idea and he didn’t want to make a mess of their working relationship for the sake of an orgasm or two.
That particular resolve was starting to crumble, but he figured that he’d blown his chance by now. Kai wouldn’t want to give him another one.
“Distracted?” Kai asked innocently.
Dammit.
He knew what he was doing.
Or at least, he was sure Wyatt would play along, which amounted to the same thing.
“Maybe a little,” Wyatt admitted, because at this point, he knew his best option was to let the audience believe he was screwing Kai. They wanted to believe that, after all.
“You’re the one who demanded the t-shirt,” Kai said.
“The audience demanded the t-shirt,” Wyatt responded, measuring out flour and sugar again.
A ripple of agreement ran through the studio audience, all of whom seemed happy with Kai’s decision to dress down for the day.
“How could I forget.” Kai smirked, clearly not about to let Wyatt get away with that. “And you promised to undress me for them. Which was very noble of you.”
The thing was, Wyatt deserved this. He’d kissed Kai last week, even if Kai had done it first. It’d been a moment of weakness, but it had come after he’d let him down gently, and it wasn’t a fair thing to do to the guy.
A little on-air torture wasn’t the worst punishment he could imagine for doing that to him.
“I’m self-sacrificing like that,” Wyatt said, bringing his second batch of churro dough together with a spatula.
He hadn’t lost too much time, after all.
This time, he kept his eyes on his work, ignoring Kai’s commentary about what he was making. It smelled amazing, the scent of cumin hanging heavy in the air, and Wyatt’s mouth was watering already.
He’d stopped eating lunch on filming days just so he could really appreciate Kai’s cooking. It was always incredible, and he didn’t see any point in hiding that.
The dough came together this time without incident, and Wyatt focused on getting it into a piping bag and piping strips into the hot oil he had on the stove.
“You can test your oil with a little chunk of bread,” he explained. “You want it to be golden-brown within about ten seconds. That’s how you know your oil’s hot enough. Or, you can use a thermometer.”
“Or you can have done this enough times to be able to wave your hand over the pan and tell by the way the oil shimmers in it?” Kai suggested.
Wyatt was glad they were apparently speaking again. “Well, yeah, that’s always an option,” he said. “I’m not gonna stop anyone frying stuff until they can tell how hot oil is by looking at it.”
Kai chuckled in response, which felt good. Maybe he was starting to forgive Wyatt.
Once his churros were cooked and draining, Wyatt got out the dark chocolate he’d had ordered in specially. This was the good stuff, because ever since he’d learned that Kai was into chocolate, it’d seemed like a good way to impress him.
At first, Wyatt had wanted to impress him to prove that he wasn’t actually an idiot, that he knew what he was doing, and that he had every right to share kitchen space with Kai.
Now, he was glad he’d had that impulse, because this was the best apology he could think of.
“What are you unwrapping?” Kai asked as soon as Wyatt opened the paper.
“Chocolate,” Wyatt responded, smiling to himself. Kai had already smelled it, and he was clearly interested.
“Good chocolate,” Kai said. “Very good chocolate.”
“Yeah, well, when the only thing in your chocolate sauce is chocolate and cream, it pays to use something you’d eat. Also, I figure chocolate’s meant to be a treat, right? So why would you eat the crappy stuff? Save those calories for something worth putting in your mouth.”
He wished, immediately, that he hadn’t said anything about putting things in mouths, but it was too late now.
He could feel Kai smirking at him without even having to look.
Rather than bother to measure anything out, Wyatt broke up the entire bar of chocolate before realizing that would leave him with enough sauce to drown someone in.
Well, at least they wouldn’t run out. And at least this time, it wasn’t going to screw up the entire recipe.
“The amount of cream you add to this depends on you,” he explained. “You really can’t screw it up, but remember it’ll thicken as it cools if you’re planning on serving it cold.”
“It’s common courtesy to warm it up first,” Kai added. “Or so I’m told.”
The image that flashed through Wyatt’s mind had nothing to do with cooking, and everything to do with a naked, eager Kai under him, insisting that he warmed the lube up first. It wasn’t quite the first time Wyatt had imagined something like that.
Which was probably what Kai intended. So he wasn’t done torturing Wyatt after all.
Thankfully, though, it really didn’t matter that he’d just poured the whole bottle of cream into the chocolate. He’d needed all of it to make the sauce thin enough for dipping.
“So I’m gonna microwave this for about thirty seconds and then stir it until the residual heat melts the chocolate,” he explained. “If you’re doing this at home and it’s not quite melting after you stir it for a while, it’s okay to microwave it again, but maybe in ten-second bursts.”
He was amazed by how coherent all that had sounded, and without a single innuendo for Kai to pick up on.
Kai’s silence in response almost felt like sulking.
Wyatt didn’t realize his real mistake until it came time for them to taste each other’s dishes.
Kai had presented him with gorgeous fragrant rice topped with tender, perfectly-grilled chicken that tasted of lime and chili, and it was amazing, but it wasn’t quite good enough to distract him from the way Kai was eating his churros.
He dipped them in the chocolate sauce, then held them above his mouth to let it drip onto his tongue, licking the excess off the end before shoving the whole thing in his mouth, closing his eyes, and making a satisfied sigh.
And crap like that was why Wyatt had kissed him, because Kai was effortlessly hot, and everything he did looked so elegant and sensual, and…
Wyatt wanted to fuck him. Either so he could experience more of it, or to reduce him to a sobbing mess and pound the elegance right out of him. He hadn’t quite decided yet.
The way Kai was eating was going straight to Wyatt’s mental catalogue of things to jerk off to later, which probably wasn’t a good thing.
“These are good,” Kai said, as though he hadn’t just been moaning eagerly over them.
“Uh,” Wyatt said, wetting his lips. “Glad you’re enjoying them?”
He wasn’t sure why that had come out as a question. Maybe because he wasn’t sure he was glad Kai was enjoying them, because he needed to move away from this counter eventually and he wasn’t sure his apron would hide his reaction when he did.
He cleared his throat, focusing on the task at hand and praying silently that he wasn’t about to get caught with a hard-on in front of the entire studio audience.
“So, uh, that’s it for this week,” he began, rattling off the end-of-show details as always, a job he’d started doing automatically and that Kai had never hinted he wanted instead.
Once he was done, Donna gave him a huge thumbs-up from the audience, and that just made everything worse.
Kai was still happily eating churros, though less dramatically now.
Hopefully, he was done getting his own back, and Wyatt wouldn’t have to handle this for three more episodes.