12

                                    

                                          
"Okay, so now we're going to mix it."
I invited Tony into the bakery after hours so I could teach him a couple of things. When I was first getting into baking Tony would often watch me bake, but he always swore he was horrible at it. Eventually I had convinced him to give baking a try and make me a pie for my birthday, and lets just say its a good thing he has a job he's good at because baker could never be in his job title. The pie he had made was both too sweet and sour at once which I hadn't thought possible at the time.
Which brings us to now. I decided to try and make something simple with him. The most classic feel-good food ever, chocolate chip cookies.
"I feel like my dough isn't good." he says to me as he scoops it out of the bowl and onto the counter before I can tell him not to. His cookie dough falls out, hardly any of it sticking together.
"You're supposed to mix it in the bowl." I say to him, trying not to laugh.
He shakes his head at me. "No, you knead it on the counter."
This time I do laugh which earns me a playful glare from Tony. "Tone, that's for bread. And even so, you kind of need to actually combine your ingredients before taking it out the bowl." I say as I look at his dough on the table. He added the wet ingredients to the dry and dropped everything out onto the table which is one of the weirdest techniques I've seen in my life but I'm sure we can recover.
"Oh." he says, his cheeks flushing lightly. "Its partially mixed though?"
I manage to hold my laugh in but I can't shake the grin from my face. "It's not like we're using step-by-step instructions from my own personal cookbook or anything."
"I think your recipe is the problem." he says smugly as he mixes all his ingredients together on the countertop.
"Yeah, I'm the problem." I reply sarcastically. "You sure you don't want to put everything back in the bowl?"
He shakes his head. "I'm already at this point, might as well continue."
"I'm going to put my cookies in now so we can eat them while yours bake." I say, then under my breath add "And so I can help you out of this mess."
"Hey, I heard that! Lets see you play guitar and we'll see how smug you are after."
"Probably not too smug, but I also wouldn't put the guitar on the ground then strum it like you just did with the dough." I tease.
"Ha ha." he says. "I forgot how funny you are."
"No you didn't."
"You're right, I didn't." He looks at me with a weird expression on his face, one that I can't read. 
I put my cookies into the oven and hang back as Tony kneads his cookie dough. By this point he's mixed all the ingredients together and it's actually looking decent. I think this may be his best culinary experience yet.

Twenty minutes later Tony and I are silently munching my fresh cookies beside one another. We waited all of five seconds before devouring our first cookies together, both of us silently enjoying it together.
I missed these moments with Tony. Even after everything my soul feels so comfortable with him. I know I could do anything and Tony wouldn't ever dare judge me. I could eat all these cookies right now and he was encourage it. I could go completely silent for the next week and he would just want to make sure I was okay, and once he knew I was he would just be there silently alongside me the whole time. His entire soul knows mine.
"Isn't this the best thing you ever tasted?" I ask him once I start on my second cookie.
"The cake you made for my birthday was pretty good." Tony says.