SUGAR

It wasn't that he couldn't compete with all of the things that Feiyi's vast knowledge of pastries projected on a day to day basis. And when Quinn had confided in her that he wanted to learn how to decorate cookies, nicely, she had been nothing less than absolutely thrilled to take him to the kitchen and put him to work.

What she didn't expect was for Riley Bexton to have been expecting her.

She had made cookies the night before, since it was easier to let them firm up before decorating, and she was too busy explaining how to mix the icing together to notice that a key ingredient was missing from her piping bag as she slowly showed him how to pipe a line of icing around the edge of the cookie and then follow through with it by flooding the inside edges. Shaking the first cookie, a frog, she let it settle before watching him as he made his. Her technique was so much easier than whatever he had done in the past, he had realized, and together, they managed to get through four dozen cookies which they planned to take back to their respective houses to share.

"Maybe it wouldn't hurt to taste test?" he teased quietly, since really, all he wanted was a cookie.

"Oh! That's a great idea," she enthused. He could practically see the scribbled hearts flashing above her head as she said it. Everything about Feiyi was pink and bubbly and sweet.

The moment the cookie pressed down into his mouth, he felt himself gag.

Feiyi had a similar reaction, though her expression quickly turned to puzzlement. "Quinn, you poured the sugar, didn't you?"

He was eager to assist her by showing what he'd done and how much he'd used. And it wasn't until she stuck her fingers in the bag to test the sugar that she realized they'd been duped.