A/N: Ah! It's been some time :') this chapter is slightly special at the start. I hope you like it!

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Giselle Jaxon had the strangest dream in a long, long while. She woke to the silence of a room with the air-conditioning set to freezing digits, thinking of the colours she'd seen moments before and staring at the carpet that seemed rather plain in comparison.

Her eyes—heterochromatic now—drifted to rest upon the bottle of unopened water on her bedside table. It looked awfully blue. She kicked the covers aside, not noticing that she'd forgotten to change out of her clothes before taking a nap; or rather, falling asleep on the bed without warning.

Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she stood by the table and picked up the bottle that could have been within reach had she been lying on the bed. She unscrewed the cap. Tried to.

She didn't think of asking anyone else to help her at that point in time; merely going down the path that she'd chosen initially and sticking with it. She tried using the other hand before returning to her right and grabbing it with her left. It remained unopen.

Giselle returned the bottle to its exact position on the bedside table, staring at it before turning and heading to the bathroom instead. There was a cup—or was it a glass?—by the vanity that one would have used to hold a toothbrush or as a tumbler for containing water after brushing one's teeth. That, she took and held under the tap which she turned, filling the glass with water.

And that, she drank.

It didn't taste very bad; just a little metallic but water was water. Was it not? A little like love. Love was love and that was it.

She wiped her mouth with a face towel and headed back to bed before jumping up again and drawing towards the door that separated Xander and Chip's room from hers. It was ajar.

Giselle swung the door wide, expecting to see her brother and his husband sleeping on the bed just like she was but she did not. The bed was empty, and the sheets were left untouched. The latter part did not strike her very much as a clue to where they were or what they were doing. She simply did not know where they were.

"Xandie," she called without stepping into the room or crossing the line that marked the end of her own and the start of theirs. "Chocolate Chip?"

The room was quite obviously empty.

Remembering the smartphone that her brother had given to her a couple of years back, she headed back into her room and found her sling bag beside the bottle of water that she could not open. Inside, tucked into the tiny zipper compartment at the front of the bag, her phone would be there. Chip would pack it there himself and shown her every time he packed it.

It was not there.

Yet, it did not strike Giselle to search the other compartments of her sling bag. The phone was not there so it was not, ever, there. Unbeknownst to her, Chip had, nervous and muddled from the excitement of something new, dropped it into the wrong compartment that fateful morning as they were rushing for the bus.

Still, that was no big deal for the girl. She returned to her brother's and his husband's room, knowing that they, too, had smartphones. It did not cross her mind that their phones would not be there because they were, for all intents and purposes, absent as well. Unable to find something she was familiar with, she settled for the white, plastic, corded telephone that featured a dial pad that was a surprisingly tasteful colour of grey.

Having seen Xander used it a couple of times, Giselle was confident about the process—picking up the receiver and pressing the buttons and waiting—of making a call with such a device.

She would have done so had she not been distracted by something else. A necklace with a ring attached to it placed on the bedside table where the telephone was.

She picked it up, unable to make the connection that it was Chip's since it was not on his neck or his ring finger, like she'd always observed it to be, until the carvings of several letters, spelling out a word, caught her eye under a specific angle of the light.

He'd forgotten to bring his ring.

Thinking at once that such an important thing—obviously, it should never leave his side, should it not?—was left behind, Giselle could not help but feel worried for her brother's husband. The connection was quite effortlessly made: that he would be searching everywhere for his ring and it was up to her to bring it to him.

Slipping the necklace into the pocket of her dress and slinging her bag across her chest, Giselle grabbed her coat before yanking the door open, ticking off every step as she did so and leaving the room behind. Key card and all.

*

Music. She found her way to the elevator and pressed a button before stepping back to wait, listening to some soft music playing in the background while she did so. What was a background? Giselle was listening to the music that was coming from somewhere above, somewhere far, when she realized that the button she pressed (one had always been enough) was the wrong button. She drew forward to press the other, the one on the bottom, when the sound of the elevator arriving at her floor startled and prevented her from doing so.

The bell was sharp and shrill, warning her before the doors slid open to reveal two women, talking.

They stopped when they saw her, a momentary paused that faded as soon as they deemed her irrelevant. The girl did not look at them as she entered it regardless, immediately moving past the operating panel (where the buttons were) to the deeper corner of the elevator, leaning far back. The metal bar sticking uncomfortably into her side.

"Floor?" One of them asked. Giselle did not reply. She stared at the number that was lit. Sixty-two.

Without a response, the two women could only assume that Giselle, too, was heading for the sixty-second floor. They continued their conversation soon after.

"So, he introduced him as his husband. You heard it."

"Shouldn't you be happy about it, then?" The other woman laughed. "He doesn't know a thing about baking. You brought your assistant."

Giselle was listening to the music. It seemed a little softer than before and there was a loud buzzing of what seemed like a fly in her ears. It distracted her from the music that was nice.

"I don't understand what he's thinking. It's a competition."

"Maybe he's arrogant," shrugged her companion. "He thinks he can win without a professional opinion."

"Either way, he wouldn't know a thing about fusion baking with a background like that. Those are not the kind of ingredients you'd get from a regular supermarket from that small town he's from, so. Clearly, he's made the wrong choice."

The buzzing was very loud. The building was too tall. The elevator, too slow.

"We'll see during the first task tomorrow. You've planned it all out, I assume?"

The lady laughed. "You mean, He's planned it out for me?"

"Who?" Giselle did not mean to participate in the conversation. It felt as though, well, since the lady didn't seem to bother about filtering the content of whatever she was saying despite the presence of a stranger, she'd thought, then, perhaps she didn't mind an additional opinion.

Both turned around to blink at the girl who was staring at the buttons of the lift, not exactly meeting their gaze.

"Oh," one of them laughed. "You're too young to understand my dear."

"I've lived for eighteen years."

The taller of the two stepped into Giselle's line of sight, blocking her view of the operating panel. "Well, okay, if you insist dear, maybe you'd like to join us at church? The youth group will do you good, with an attitude like that."

Giselle was now staring at the buttons on the lady's dress.

"Does church teach you to say bad things about other human?"

Both women looked quite as though they had been punched in the gut. Their jaws dropped and eyes narrowed in on the girl in the white dress with red flowers. One stepped in front of the other, closer to Giselle.

"Excuse me, young lady, but there is not a thing you know about either of us. What makes you so sure that what we said were bad things? We were just expressing an opinion," she snapped, looking Giselle up and down.

The girl shrugged. "You don't seem very nice."

"You—"

"Leave it, Jennifer," the woman who spoke directly to Giselle right before looked furious, outraged by Giselle's apparent lack of tact. It was the other woman, however, who placed a hand on her shoulder and shook her head with a gaze that seemed to find Giselle strangely familiar.

She quite clearly remembered, however, that Xander's sister had these bandages where her eyes were. This girl, however, did not. Nevertheless, her eyes had a strange look to them—as though they were not her own—and her disposition, the way she spoke, reminded her of the rude, unrefined girl she met at the driveway towards their stretch of houses.

"Kindergarten teaches you to be nice," offered Giselle, eyes remaining fixed on the same spot of air. "You can go there."

The girl, who had a genuine will to help the two women despite her lack of social aptitude, was roughly pushed aside when the elevator sounded with a ding, indicating that they had arrived at the sixty-second floor.

Out. Out. Out. Go.

The pair did not hold the door open as they left the elevator, one of them turning once to give the girl a final glare, as childish as it seemed to sound. To Giselle however, who could hear the music again with the buzzing no longer present in her space, it did not seem very much of a difference, with or without their being there.

Then, she noticed that the music had stopped.

She looked up, remembering that she had to operate the lift by pressing buttons and making things light up for it to work. She pressed something, and the music came back on. The lift began to descend. Logically, one would have pressed the number one, thinking it to be the most reasonable option for the lobby of the hotel, where Xander and Chip might be.

Giselle, however, had pressed the button labeled 'B' for basement. It was the option that Xander would always press back when they were still living in that apartment last year, since they still had a car back then and that was where it was parked.

She hummed to herself, waiting for the lift doors to descend and open.

When it finally did, she found herself looking at two familiar people—one smaller, anxious frame with eyes that were slightly teary and one taller, blockish, wallish thing that had his arm over the other and himself looked fairly anxious, but only just slightly. An expression that Giselle was strangely familiar with.

Their eyes widened when they saw her.

"Giselle!" "Little fucking shit."

The one who'd said her name came forth to hug her at once, scrambling past the lift doors and throwing himself at her. She stumbled a little, but they were about the same height either way. The taller one entered the elevator behind his husband, rolling his eyes at the girl but mostly in relief. She was familiar with how he worked. Functioned.

"Where did you go?" The teary-eyed person held her by the shoulders and checked her for injuries. "What happened? I'm so sorry I placed your phone in the wrong compartment. I'll... I'll never do that again! I'll double check it, okay? Every time. Starting from now."

"I went to find Chocolate Chip," said the girl, voice slightly muffled from the clothes that were blocking her lips. "You left your ring on the table. I thought you wanted to find it."

"You had us worried sick," the tall man who she identified as her brother flicked her forehead. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere. I only got into here. Some other people were in here too," her nose wrinkled involuntarily. "Noisy."

Chip dried his tears with the back of his sleeve. "It's okay Giselle. Everything's fine now! Let's go back to the room? A-are you, um, hungry or anything?"

The girl shook her head, fishing in her pockets for the ring attached to a necklace chain. She handed it to her brother-in-law. "I'm maybe bored."

Chip laughed, accepting the ring and hugging her again. "Alright. Maybe—hm. There's a rooftop pool, if you'd like to swim."

"I can't swim." "She doesn't know how to swim."

The pair of siblings looked at each other.

"I want to draw."

"You have your sketchbook," Xander reasoned. "Maybe sit under one of the umbrellas and sketch while Chip and I cuddle in the pool?"

Giselle considered the idea. Chip on the other hand, was blushing and stuttering. "W-wait, I didn't say anything just yet! I don't know how to swim either, remember?"

"I could teach you," Giselle's brother was smirking as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open to reveal the basement. He closed it with the push of a button and pushed another instead. "Let's get some extra towels at the counter before going up to change."

"I didn't bring any swimwear, Xan!"

Xander appeared fairly disappointed at this.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

[Xander]

Giselle's initial disposition towards heading to the pool had been a 'no'. All it took for her to give in and fix herself permanently under an umbrella with her sketchbook and a pencil provided by the hotel, however, was a single glance at the rooftop pool.

"I'll watch over your stuff," offered my husband who attempted to propel me towards the pool with a tiny push. "You, um, go have fun."

I sighed, pulling him back into my arms. "Without you?"

Chip squirmed a little, his white shirt (that was really mine but on loan due to his lack of anything fitting for poolside attire) slipping off his shoulder and baring illegally smooth skin before I fixed it for him.

"I-I can't leave Giselle alone either," he reasoned, eyes darting around our surroundings before peering back up at me. "And, well, since you've packed something for this, you shouldn't skip it just because Giselle and I aren't doing the same thing."

"I'll keep your towels warm," he added after observing my continued reluctance, smiles and all. I was blinded for a second before giving in, watching as he settled on a lounge chair beside Giselle's, under the same umbrella. My husband waved from afar, shooing me in the direction of the pool before hugging his knees and curling up with a book. Sure enough, he kept a towel snug between his chest and thighs.

The vulnerable position he ended up in—the undersides of his thighs exposed and his calves forming an 'A', legs apart, delicious—confirmed my disapproval of shorts outside of home. Naturally, I decided that fifteen minutes was the max I could tolerate anyone else seeing him like this, which simply meant that I had to do my laps fast. Not a very big deal.

I started on a couple; one, two, not exactly noticing other hotel guests, who were either lounging on the chairs by the pool or taking a dip in the jacuzzi on the other end. I did catch occasional glimpses of feet or legs in the lap pool, but they didn't matter unless they got too close.

All that mattered was that I would, unconsciously, glance over to where Chip and Giselle were seated after every lap. Weird, really. It's not like they would disappear all of a sudden. Or maybe my eyes were that aware of my greatest fear after all.

I was watching them—not a drop of attention elsewhere and shit—when I felt a kangaroo's kick in the water, on the back of my leg. Had it not been underwater, I probably would have felt the pain a hundred times more than what I felt.

A sphere of black shot up from the surface of the water and a woman, complete with goggles and a swimming cap, began apologizing profusely.

"Shit, I'm so sorry! I swear, I didn't do that on purpose, these goggles are weird as fuck and they make me feel like a fish."

She gasped for air, waving her arms around for some reason. "Are you okay? Like—oh. Wait, you're that... dammit, I forgot your name but you're that hot guy with your husband." The woman, who looked about Chip's age, removed her goggles and cap.

"You are?" I asked, wary.

"Elena," she held out a hand. It was weird to shake someone else's hand in a pool. "Andy's daughter? One of the other pastry chefs?"

I nodded, remembering vaguely. "Jaxon. Honeycutt. Confusing, but Jaxon's fine."

"Gotcha. So, uh," she looked me up and down. "I was gonna ask if you were okay, but, well. You don't seem to need that."

I shrugged, and she laughed. "You pack a lot."

"Sure," I was about to excuse myself to do the last couple of laps in peace when she asked something that, at the very least, included my realm of interest.

"So. Where's your husband?"

I turned around, leaning against the edge of the pool and nodding towards the umbrella nearby. "White shirt. Legs apart. Very illegal."

"Who allowed him to wear shorts?" Elena gawked, clutching her chest in shock. "Those legs are delicious!"

My gaze returned to her, slightly surprised. "You get it."

"Of course I do!" She could not seem to close her mouth, eyes remaining fixed on my husband's legs. "How can't anyone?"

"Alright, stop staring," I reached over to fix her jaw that refused to close. She sighed, propping herself up on the edge of the pool.

"Well, it's a pity that they already have the winners down. Your husband suits the cover of some cute cookbook I'd definitely buy."

I frowned, shifting to face her. "What?"

"Yeah," she said, brows knitted. "You look surprised. I thought you guys knew that—it's been going around. Shortlisted bakeries knew about this year's theme quite a while back, you know. Uh, my dad's not one of them."

"How did you know about this?"

"My dad told me," Elena shrugged, turning to glance over her shoulder all of a sudden. "He's not here. I thought the cat was, you know, out of the bag. I don't think I'm supposed to tell anyone but uh, some pastry chefs have already decided on their recipes for each segment."

I took this in without a blink and left her hanging for a response, unsure if my husband had known about this already and was simply hiding it from me. I threw a glance in his direction, observing an excited wriggle of his toes and a momentary arch of his heel as he buried his face deeper into the book.

"Listen," she tapped me on the shoulder and I put some distance between us at once—uncomfortable. "How about, we trade?"

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Tell me what your husband's plans on every upcoming segment, and I'll tell you whatever I know. My dad's, ARCD's, New Town's—basically everyone," she shrugged, seemingly nonchalant. I laughed once, not buying into her offer.

"Yeah? And what's in it for you?"

I was feeling restless; muscles already starting to lose the warm-up.

"I don't know," Elena had her goggles circling in the air, dangerously close to her face. "Maybe level the playing field? It's pretty boring if things are set in stone, don't you think?"

I snorted. With the kind of trust issues I had, it would take much more to win me over. Besides, I was pretty sure that Chip had no clue what the segments were so there was no way he could have come up with a recipe in advance. Basically put, he was at a great disadvantage.

"Not really." Chip had stopped his reading for a moment to peer over at Giselle's sketches, who had noticed and was probably about to launch into a long blow-by-blow explanation of what exactly she was trying to portray. "Level playing field or not, he's... the kind of person who wins no matter what he's up against."

"Not because he's the dumb, undefeatable protagonist of some shitty novel," I added, watching as my husband looked over to where I was and raised his arm for a shy wave. "But because what winning means to him is different from what others think it is."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Chip rolled over in bed just as I emerged from shower, sitting up as soon as I reached for a face towel by the vanity. Naturally, the first thing I noticed upon looking into the mirror was the underwear that he was wearing.

"You're wearing the new pair," I observed with a raised brow, turning around to see the real thing instead of his reflection in the mirror. "Trying to seduce me?"

This took a turn for the worst, undeniably testing my limits.

"Maybe," was what he'd said in response, tottering over to bury his head in my chest. "Hehe."

What the fuck is going on.

"Uh, Angel. Is something wrong?" I held him by his shoulders at an arm's length, searching his eyes for any sign of trouble. "Do you need something to drink?" I rested the back of my palm on his forehead.

"I'm... just a little warm," my husband's voice came out muffled and he proceeded to (attempt to) wrap his arms around my back. "Mmehe. You smell really good."

Dick: excited. Mission: aborted.

I detached Chip from myself and for a moment felt as though he resembled a sleepy starfish. This was before he could notice the weird fucking tent in my pants. Unfortunately, tiny husband did not look too happy about that.

"Hug me!"

Grabbing his hands that were flailing around like a floppy starfish and gently leading him back to the bed, I noticed an open, half-eaten box of chocolates that looked suspiciously alcoholic laying right beside his bed.

"Angel," I turned his cheeks so that he was looking at me. "Where did you get these?"

"Hhmmm...? A doorbell rang and... I opened it and someone said these were from Mr. Yamazaki!" He smiled sheepishly, flopping onto the pillows before peering up at me through those ridiculous lashes of his. "They are really yummy."

I sighed, taking a glance at the box and skimming through the ingredients. Sake. Red wine. Whisky. Bourbon. "Which one of these did you eat? What shape was it?"

"Mmm," hummed my husband into the pillow, ears flushed from the alcohol. "Mffhfmhfmfm."

I turned him over, grabbing the covers that were in a mess and placing them over him. "Alright Angel, time to sleep."

"What's this?" Chip took the liberty to stare at my crotch that was basically in his face now that I was leaning over him, and since he was lying on the bed, had quite the view of it. He had the gall to poke the hard-fucking-on with his index, prodding it as though it was some sort of animal to tame. "It's... in your pants."

"Mhm," I entertained him with a nod, backing up ASAP to save my self-control from flying out of the window and into the abyss. "It's a banana. I'm just going to take it out while you fall asleep right here, okay?"

"Oh," was all my husband managed before flopping back onto the pillows. "Mmaybe you can, um, put it on the table? And I'll... hehe. Eat it tomorrow for breakfast."

I paused. Blinked. Laughed.

"Okay. If you say so."