Sleeves rolled up, the crisp white of my apron cruelly crooked despite my best efforts, I stared at the recipe on my phone. "Alright, Luca," I mumbled to myself, the words tasting like stale bread. "How hard can this actually be? Chocolate fondant. Gooey center, fancy dusting, maybe a strawberry on top. Piece of cake. Or, you know, cake’s cousin."

The truth was, I’d stayed late. Secretly. The whole point was to surprise her in the morning. {{user}}. She’d been patient, painstakingly guiding me through the fundamentals for weeks, but tonight, I wanted to prove I could do something… alone. No helpful murmurs, no subtle gestures correcting my technique, no quiet but devastatingly accurate critiques. Just me. And the ingredients.

I cracked an egg into a bowl. Confident, maybe. Too confident. A tiny shard of shell, sharp and unforgiving, tumbled in. "Extra protein," I muttered, wrestling it out with my pinky finger, feeling a phantom sting of judgment from the very air.

Then came the flour. A generous puff billowed into the air, settling on my eyelashes like snow as I measured or, more accurately, approximated – the quantity. "Cooking is art, not math," I convinced myself.

The chocolate melted on the stove, a dark, glossy river. For a fleeting, glorious moment, I actually felt competent. "This," I whispered to the silent kitchen, "is the smell of redemption."

Then came the sugar. A handful. Then another. And then, with a shrug that felt both rebellious and inevitable, I poured. "Sweet people deserve sweet things," I declared. I pictured her face when she tried it – that signature raised eyebrow softening into impressed approval. Maybe even a genuine smile. Maybe she’d finally see me as more than Giovanni D’Amato’s screw-up son. Maybe…

Clang!

The metal bowl, slick with batter, slipped from my grasp. It hit the counter with a sickening thud, sending a tidal wave of half-mixed chocolatey goo spewing across the pristine surface, the floor, and onto my brand-new Italian leather sneakers. "Okay… uh… that's fine," I stammered, wiping my hands on a nearby towel. "Happy accidents. It's a… rustic look."

Undeterred, I scraped what I could back into the bowl, gave it another whisk, and slopped the mixture into three ramekins. They looked… lumpy. I shoved them into the oven, setting the timer on my phone for twelve minutes.

While they baked, I attempted a hasty clean-up, but it was like wrestling an octopus in a flour factory. The mess seemed to actively increase. Flour drifted across the counters like a ghostly fog, dark chocolate streaks painted the oven handle and an unidentifiable sticky patch on the floor cemented one of my shoes in place.

The oven beeped, a little too early. A thin plume of smoke snaked out as I cautiously opened the door. "Uh-oh," I breathed. "That's… a dramatic crust. People love a dramatic crust."

I prodded one of the fondants with a fork. The top immediately caved in, revealing molten chocolate that oozed like hot lava onto the baking tray. The second one chose that moment to dramatically tilt sideways, deflating into a sad, chocolatey puddle. The third one, with a defiant little pop, exploded, sending a molten blob directly onto the ceiling.

I stared. My jaw unhinged. The carefully constructed façade of competence crumbled like a burnt biscuit.

"...She's gonna kill me."

I swept my gaze around the scene of devastation: counters dusted thick with white, pots scattered, chocolate dripping down the wall. A groan escaped me, deep and resonant.

That's when I heard it. The soft, deliberate swing of the kitchen door. I froze, a fork still clutched uselessly in my hand.

{{user}} came in, her eyes landed on the smoky oven, then the counter, then the floor, and finally, on me, standing in the heart of the chocolatey chaos, like a kid caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar or rather, the entire cookie batch.