Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Okay, okay, okay,” Nicaise said. “What about this: mango croissant.”

From behind Laurent came two sceptical noises, one low and reserved — Jord — and the other an elaborate hmmmmm, rising and falling crazily — Lazar, certainly.

“Mango how?” Jord asked.

A brief pause as Nicaise considered this, and then: “Mango jelly,” he read out, “and lychee pulp —”

“And lychee pulp?” Lazar demanded, aghast.

“— folded into a mango-infused almond dough —”

“How do you infuse almond dough with mango?” asked Jord, quite reasonably, at the same time that Lazar was moaning, “That’s just words, you’re not even saying anything —”

“— mango-infused almond dough,” Nicaise repeated, “and that gets wrapped in the croissant dough and baked. Then you finish it off with white chocolate and freeze-dried mango and lychee. Thoughts? Laurent, thoughts? You were saying we needed more dessert items —”

“I’d rather blow up my oven,” said Laurent. When he turned around, Nicaise was staring at him with delighted wide eyes. Laurent so rarely let himself be baited — but really, mango and lychee and almond? With jelly inside? Abominable. “At least,” said Laurent, “you can comfort yourself in knowing you’ve invented the worst bastardisation of Veretian cuisine to never grace these kitchens.”

“Oh, it’s not my invention,” said Nicaise, with that particularly innocent demeanour which he saved for his most diabolical moments. “Someone posted the recipe onto YouTube.”

Laurent paused and looked at him. Nicaise’s angelic expression intensified.

“Here,” he said, like he was doing Laurent a great favour, “I’ll send it to you.”

“No, I’m good.”

“No, look at it,” Nicaise insisted; Laurent’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He held out for another moment, but they’d be here all night if he tried to resist, so he pulled his phone out and navigated to Nicaise’s most recent text, which was not a link but a screenshot —

Laurent became aware that he had gone very still. “Nicaise,” he said. “What’s this?”

“That’s the cook,” Nicaise said brightly. “His name’s Damen.”

“That is not a cook,” said Laurent. Damen beamed out at him from his phone screen, wearing — he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was wearing trousers and an apron over his bare chest. The apron didn’t even cover — was it an apron for children? Surely nobody’s chest was that large.

“Not a cook?” Nicaise echoed.

Laurent forced his brain back online. “A mango-lychee-almond croissant? Please.” And then, with a final look around: “I think we’re done for the day. Come on, out, I’ll lock up.”

Nicaise cackled all the way out the door. “Well, you heard it here first,” Laurent heard him telling his phone. If he wasn’t such a good chef, Laurent would have fired him long ago over his social media addiction. “No mango croissants in the future of Chez Hennike…”

The comment stared out at Laurent, darkly taunting.

It’s everyone’s right to be doubtful! I bet I could win him over if I got him in my kitchen though ;)

The words didn’t change no matter how long or how suspiciously he looked at them: stark black on white, with a line of blue text underneath informing him that there had been 47 replies to this comment. Laurent scrolled back up to the video, which had paused on a frame of Damianos, beaming, brandishing one of those wretched mango croissants with the pastry absolutely drowned in white chocolate drizzle and freeze-dried chunks of fruit. He was still shirtless — somehow the apron just made it worse. It could not even be called an apron; it was a handkerchief’s worth of fabric stretched over an obscenely generous chest. And why had he ended that comment with a winking face?

Laurent navigated back down to the comment and glared. It wasn’t a genuine proposition, obviously. Laurent knew better than to treat it as such. The 47 replies were undoubtedly all some brainless variation of omg that would be so funny!!! Damianos ‘call-me-Damen’ Vallis was just playing to his audience.

Laurent opened the thread anyway, scrolling through the sea of lazy abbreviations and egregious spelling errors — and then stopped, abruptly, when he saw that call-me-Damen had replied a second time, to a viewer who claimed to be laughing out loud at the idea that Laurent might actually see this and take it seriously.

Damen had written: I’m totally serious! I’d clear my schedule for him in a heartbeat :)

Laurent scoffed under his breath. He closed the app, but the words were already embedded in Laurent’s mind. Totally serious, exclamation mark. The stupid smiley face. One could almost hear the way Vallis would deliver that line on camera, with all the cheerful sincerity which had become his trademark, the smile, the dimple.

Well, totally serious or not, it had no bearing on Laurent. It was a casual, informal offer, made deep in the comments section where only the most dedicated losers in Vallis’ fanbase would see it. There was no reason for Laurent to be aware of its existence. Nobody would ever know that he had gotten home and spent the late-night hours watching — he gritted his teeth just thinking the name — Beef+Cake videos. To assess just how badly Vallis was treating the time-honoured traditions of Veretian cuisine, of course.

Naturally, it was Nicaise’s fault that this state of affairs was not permitted to continue. He came to their next shift with the comment gleefully open to his phone: “Laurent, have you seen this? Laurent, any comment? Laurent!”

“You’re not broadcasting this as well, are you?” Laurent demanded.

“Broadcasting? Okay, old man,” said Nicaise. “No, I’m not broadcasting this. Or streaming it, even. But I could!” Wiggling his eyebrows: “Professional chef makes up with upstart young recipe vlogger —”

“Why are you saying it like that,” said Laurent, at the same time Lazar said, “That sounds like the title of a porno.”

“I could broadcast that, too,” said Nicaise shamelessly. “Chef and recipe vlogger get naughty with enormous mango croissant?”

Lazar hooted with laughter. Laurent pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I am officially,” he said, “banning any further conversation about those wretched mango croissants.”

“Okay,” said Nicaise, “but just before that rule goes into effect, I should probably tell you that I gave Beefcake your email —”

“What?”

“— I mean the bakery’s email, your work email, don’t glare like that. I said I did social media for the restaurant, which is true, because you won’t hire a real social media person, and he should reach out to you! Which is also true! And if he says nice things about you it’ll be good publicity for the bakery. So think about that before you jump down my throat,” said Nicaise loftily, and sailed off with his nose in the air. He would be so, so out of a job if he wasn’t so capable in the kitchen.

It shouldn’t have changed anything, was the thing. Whether Nicaise had meddled or not — Laurent’s path forward was clear. He was perfectly capable of avoiding one man in Marlas, no matter how implausibly large his muscles were. When, during his late-morning break a few hours later, he saw a new email sitting in his work inbox, there was nothing to stop him from deleting it unread.

Of course he opened it instead. The polite thing to do would be to send a brief refusal, and think no more on the matter.

Laurent scanned the email and felt his eyes narrow. It was quick and friendly and exactly what circumstances had led him to expect: an offer to have these silly mango confections made for him so he could be the judge of how they tasted and whether the bastardisation of Veretian cuisine might be worth it. But there was a line — I’ve visited Hennike’s several times since it opened and always enjoyed it thoroughly. The thought was strangely electrifying. He knew perfectly well that it was probably flattery, empty politeness, an attempt to build a foundation of goodwill between them. It was still — he felt a hard twist in his chest when he thought about Damianos in his cafe, eating his food, maybe food that Laurent had prepared himself with his own two hands, no more than a room away. It was rare and somewhat ridiculous that he should feel like this; years of working in kitchens had removed any sentiment from the process of making and serving food. It was only really the private lunches with Auguste which evoked such a response from him anymore.

Despite all his best intentions, he was already tapping out a response: If you want to me to put one of those mango monstrosities in my mouth, I want to see you make a real croissant first. He did not let himself hesitate before sending it. The bakery could weather one recipe vlogger with a grudge, if it came to that.

He really expected that to be the end of it. But when he checked his phone again at closing — after a disastrous shift which had caused Nicaise to start watching him suspiciously and ask pointed questions about whether he felt sick — there was a response waiting.

It began: It’s a deal.

Damianos worked out of his home, a standalone house on the outer suburbs of Marlas, far enough out to have its own yard, close enough to remain well-connected to the city centre by public transport; it only took Laurent about half an hour to get to the right address, which was strangely unsettling. He’d known they were both based in Marlas, but it was something else to have real proof of that, to actually experience it.

The house was well-kept, with a red roof and cream-coloured exterior. Laurent wondered idly whether the Beef+Cake channel was doing well enough to help pay for this, or whether the Vallis family fortune was helping. Damianos had plenty of subscribers, but he hardly ever deigned to advertise on the channel, nor had he tried to leverage his success into paid events like classes. He’d mentioned a day job a few times without going into specifics, just that it was freelancing, and that he’d been able to cut down on the work he took on as the Beef+Cake channel grew increasingly successful; it had taken some digging to find out that his father had founded the foremost VFX company in New Artes, and that Damen had been part of the family business before he left Ios and went independent — but after all that, Laurent didn’t know how well the work paid.

He shook these thoughts off and rang the doorbell. From inside came the sound of footsteps, and Laurent barely had the time to notice the lightness of the tread when the door swung open, and —

Ridiculously, absurdly, Damianos even more attractive in real life. To the extent Laurent had allowed himself to consider this at all, he’d thought that surely the camera was doing him favours, the lighting, makeup, maybe even special effects. Laurent just could not catch a break. Damianos’ eyes were brighter, his hair richer, both a deep lovely brown rather than the almost-black they appeared to be on camera. His mouth was moving. His lips were very pink.

Laurent blinked. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“What?” said Damianos. He looked and sounded faintly disoriented, as though he’d just woken from a nap. He was, mercifully, fully dressed. “Oh — I said it’s nice to meet you. Um, come in. The shoe rack’s just there.”

They walked through the house silently, which was really all the better; Laurent wasn’t sure he’d be able to carry on a conversation right now. He was trying to pay attention to his surroundings, but he kept getting distracted by the way Damen’s muscles shifted as he walked.

The house was open-plan, and there had clearly been some renovation done to expand the kitchen, not just to get more counterspace and cooking supplies in but for the filming equipment which was set up to capture it all: a ring light here, one of those big light diffusion sheets there, a handful of tripods, two cameras, wires trailing all over the floor.

“Sorry about the mess,” Damianos was saying, presumably having followed Laurent’s gaze. “The behind-the-scenes is a bit chaotic. Did you want anything, tea, coffee —?”

“Just some water,” said Laurent. “Please.” Now that his attention had been drawn to it, his throat was dry.

Damianos dipped his head and swept into the kitchen, avoiding the trailing wires and cables with expert movements which suggested that this was a permanent setup rather than one continually assembled and disassembled around his video schedule. If it was bad watching his videos, it was worse, far worse, to be here in person watching his effortless command over the kitchen. Something about the way he moved, totally confident in his environment and his mastery over it, was impossible to look away from.

“So,” he said, as he was handing Laurent the glass of water. “Like I said, I’ll be filming the process — I haven’t done a basic croissant video, it seems like a bit of a tough one for people to do at home, but since I’m going to be baking them anyway, I thought I might as well. You won’t have to appear on camera, you can just sit there and watch.” He gestured at a chair which had been positioned opposite the kitchen island, slightly behind the main camera setup. “And you can let me know if I’m doing something wrong.”

“I’ll be gentle,” said Laurent. The words were not exactly friendly, but Damianos’s expression opened into amusement like a flower unfurling; and then, absurdly, as though purely to infuriate Laurent, he laughed, a lovely rich sound.

“Don’t hold back on my account.”

“And,” Laurent said on impulse, his tone very crisp and clear, “if you have a spare microphone, I’m okay to have my voice recorded. Never let it be said that I don’t stand by my opinions. You can choose not to put it in later, right?”

Damianos grinned down at him, and just like that the initial reserve between them, the slight awkwardness which was a natural part of meeting someone new, began to shift in favour of a new, different tension.

“Done,” said Damen. “I’ll send you the video before I upload it. Let me go grab my spare mic.”

“Stop fussing,” said Damen, casually, as though he was looking directly at Laurent and not facing the opposite direction, fiddling with the setup of the secondary camera. “You look fine.”

Laurent had not even really been fussing. It had been a twitch of the hand, to straighten his chef whites. “And how would you know?” he asked, his tone edging towards waspishness.

Damen rose to his full, ridiculous height and turned his equally ridiculous smile on Laurent. “I have my ways,” he said. “We have these very useful organs called eyes —” And he laughed at the disgusted noise that Laurent made. “All right, I’m going to start recording.”

“Right.” Laurent took a breath and tried to rearrange his face — tried to school his expression towards neutrality. Right now he was out of frame; they’d agreed that Damen would do the preamble and then beckon Laurent to step forward, a little official introduction. Laurent’s heart was beating very quickly. Something made him suspect that being off-camera around Damen had been the safer position by far. He would tell anyone — he had told Nicaise, multiple times, when quizzed — that he didn’t know what he’d been thinking when he accepted Damen’s challenge to appear in a future video. Just because the man’s monstrously unVeretian croissants didn’t taste terrible was no reason to indulge him like this. Laurent forced these thoughts away. “Ready.”

It was not, he had to admit, all that bad. The gimmick of the video was that Laurent was presenting one of the simpler recipes they used sometimes in the cafe, and Damen was acting as a sous; but they had talked through the recipe in advance, and Damen had absorbed enough information that he could do most of the talking and Laurent only interjected occasionally to point out some slight overlooked detail or give instructions. The rhythm of their conversation was by now easy and unforced. Laurent knew how Damen spoke, the cadence and rhythm of his speech.

He did have to keep his eyes averted, though, while Damen whisked his icing into stiff peaks. His apron today — MR GOOD LOOKIN’ IS COOKIN’. — looked even skimpier than usual, which was saying something. There were some things which mortal man could not be asked to withstand.

They finished their preparations without any major incident, and the cupcakes were placed in the oven to bake. Once that was done there was twenty minutes of baking time, and then there would be more down time as they waited for the cupcakes to cool. They both moved, without speaking, to clean the kitchen in the interim, wiping down surfaces and stacking dishes and bowls and measuring cups neatly in the dishwasher. By the time they had returned the kitchen to its former sparkling state, Laurent was positively relaxed. There was still the icing to get through, and the way Damen’s arms would look as he piped, but they were nearly at the finish line.

Having prepared himself for the icing process, Laurent got through it with, he thought, a graceful aloofness. But this meant that, by the time Damen started to speak about needing to try each others’ cupcakes, Laurent’s guard was well on its way down. More fool him! The next thing he knew, Damen had picked up one of their cupcakes and presented it to Laurent’s mouth — as though that was a normal thing to do, to hand-feed a colleague as though they were in medieval Arles. Laurent stood frozen for a second, barely comprehending what was happening to him. And then his traitorous cheeks began to flush. He became very, very aware that they were still on camera.

Carefully, he leaned forward to bite the cupcake. It was a strange, heady mixture of mortification and thrill which rose in him then — his mouth was perilously, achingly close to Damen’s hand. He wanted to set his teeth to Damen’s thumb, to worry the joint and the flesh there. It was only the back of his mind, the force of long habit, which paid any attention to the food, noting absently that it was good, that it had turned out well. Far more important: Damen’s eyes were enormous melting pools of brown, as though he had not realised what he had been doing, either. As though he was just as astonished by the moment as Laurent.

That was what jolted Laurent to his senses, seeing his emotions mirrored back to him. He withdrew slowly, willing his cheeks to stop flushing. “It’s adequate,” he said.

Gratifyingly, Damen did not appear to have any clue what he was talking about. “What?” And then: “You have a bit of —” he gestured weakly towards his own nose.

“Really?” asked Laurent. “Do you have a tissue?”

Damen nearly dropped his cupcake. “Right,” he said, fumbling for the kitchen towels on the counter. He moved his hand slightly, jerkily, as though he expected Laurent to take it from him; when Laurent didn’t move, he brought the tissue up and wiped gently at Laurent’s nose. For some reason Laurent felt on the verge of exploding with fury: how dare Damen do — what? Laurent had invited the gesture. And yet inside he was battered by the inexplicable, impotent rage, and the confusion and vague self-recrimination which accompanied it.

They were gazing at each other, neither of them moving. Then suddenly Damen laughed and ran one hand through his curling hair, in a gesture which managed to be both sheepish and charming, and said, “We are going to have to refilm that.”

Laurent took a breath and forced his mind to clear. “What for? My judgement won’t change,” he said. “It’s adequate. Or do you just want me to say it again?”

“You’re in denial,” said Damen, outrageously. “About this, and about the mango croissant —”

“Your mango croissant is a monstrosity —”

“— you just couldn’t bear to admit that you enjoyed it on the record. But I know,” said Damen, and wagged a finger under Laurent’s nose, as though he thought himself a reproving schoolmaster. Laurent resisted, with great resentment, the impulse to bite it.

“It’s a crime against nature,” Laurent said. His cheeks were burning again, his whole face was hot. “Against hundreds of years of Veretian cooking —”

“But not your tastebuds,” said Damen.

It was ridiculous that Laurent should be so flustered by this. He’d run into plenty of people who wanted to do terrible things to food — there had been plenty of them in the prestigious culinary schools of Arles, despite that environment’s reputation for hidebound snobbiness — but it had never affected him like this. Then again none of them had ever stood in front of Laurent looking like some deranged cross between a porn video and a Home & Country magazine spread.

“You are ridiculous,” he told Damen, and then, driven to the end of his self-control: “I refuse to want someone who makes those abominable confections!”

Damen blinked. An expression of pure pleasure rose into his face and rendered Laurent hopelessly weak in the knees. They stood gazing at each other for another long moment and then, silently, Damen reached forward and unclipped the small microphone from Laurent’s collar.

Damen’s hand hesitated on the mouse, the cursor on his computer screen pausing — again — in its movement. “But you look so sweet,” he said, trying again.

“I look deranged,” said Laurent. On the wide screen of Damen’s monitor, he was staring up at Damen’s face with an unholy light in his eyes. “Damen —”

“All right, all right.” Damen’s voice had a little laugh in it that made Laurent want to — bite him, or something. He did not like that they had been recorded in those first vulnerable moments, he did not like the idea that someone else might one day watch it, that brief stretch of time which had been for them and them alone. Damen, on the other hand, had tried with terrifying earnestness to convince Laurent to keep the footage: it was only for them, it would never be uploaded, it was the start of everything, wasn’t that worth keeping? And now this last effort, which could only be the sign of a pathological liar or a truly addled mind. Nobody else would call the look on Laurent’s face sweet.

But, bowing to Laurent’s wishes, he deleted that incriminating section of video, then leaned back with a little sigh. Laurent bent to kiss him and felt his mouth turn up with easy pleasure.

“Come back to bed,” said Laurent. That afternoon had been among the most difficult of his life: separating himself from Damen, insisting they finish filming before the light changed so much that everyone would notice. Even after the first round of the reward he had subsequently won by his patience, he was not in the mood to delay.

“Yes,” said Damen. But he didn’t get up right away, holding Laurent in place by the side of his neck, just gazing up at him. Then he smiled, dimple flashing in his cheek, and his fingers shifted slightly over Laurent’s skin. “You were right,” he said. “We don’t need a video.” His thumb drifted to touch Laurent’s mouth. “Just stay where I can see you.”