Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [44]
Adam stared. “You’re a restaurant critic. And you don’t know how to cook?”
A flush of heat enveloped Miranda’s whole head when she realized what he’d just goaded her into admitting.
“I have an excellent palate,” she told him. “I can distinguish flavors and ingredients after a single bite. If I can pick the coffee notes out of a mouthful of dark sauce, is it really necessary that I know the perfect way to skim stock?”
Adam shook his head, evidently aghast.
“It may not be necessary to your bosses at Délicieux, but it’s sure as hell important to me. Until you have some solid grounding in the basics, you’ll keep making rookie mistakes and screwing up my kitchen.” He stood up and placed his hands flat on the desk, looming slightly.
Miranda tried not to be nervous.
Then he grinned.
“There’s only one thing for it,” Adam declared. “I’m going to teach you to cook.”
TWELVE
Jess blinked awake from a blurry dream, full of indistinct figures as hazy as a Stieglitz photograph. But Jess could produce from memory a vision of the main player in the dream, a Richard Avedon–esque image of a long, sharp face pale against a crop of black hair, the lines and angles as familiar as the face Jess saw every day in the mirror.
Frankie Boyd.
He burrowed down into the covers, not quite ready to let go of the dream. It had left him with a low-level hum of pleasurable happiness. This was getting to be a regular occurrence, waking up with afterimages of the lanky souschef burned onto his eyelids. Frankie was just so . . . wild and different and alive. Exactly the way Jess felt when he was anywhere near him.
For the last week, Jess had managed to avoid any actual conversation with the object of his obsession while silently and unobtrusively (he hoped) stalking Frankie around the restaurant. He was well aware that it was dangerous and dumb, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
Jess had discovered lots of random facts. Frankie smoked Dunhill cigarettes, a British brand reputed to use very fine tobacco and fancy silk filters. He listened exclusively to punk music and would argue long and loud with Adam over which was better, New York punk or British punk. He played bass guitar in a band at an after-hours bar. Frankie was a dog—he’d slept with nearly everyone in the kitchen and front of the house, boys and girls. And the rumor was that Frankie had his eye on someone new.
After last night, Jess had a shameful, flickering hope about who that “someone new” might be.
Jess knew Frankie had ducked outside for a cigarette when he let himself out the back door. He also knew he should stay inside, but something compelled him to follow the guy. Heart pounding, he rationalized that surely there’d be a group of cooks out back smoking, and maybe Jess could join in and bum a cigarette from someone (even though he didn’t smoke), and maybe Frankie would give him a light and touch his hand. It was ridiculously junior high. If Jess had considered it for longer than two seconds, he (probably) would’ve changed his mind.
But he didn’t give himself time to wimp out. And when he hit the back doorstep and saw that Frankie was alone in the dark—it was like his brain went offline completely. His feet carried him closer with no clear directive from his mind.
“Evening, Bit,” came Frankie’s laughing voice from out of the night.
“Hi,” Jess responded, then snapped his mouth shut. How lame could he be?
“You know,” mused Frankie, taking a pull on his cigarette. “I believe this is the first time we’ve been alone together since we met. Remember?”
Jess shivered. He did remember; sometimes he had trouble thinking about anything else. It hadn’t been anything big or momentous, or at least it shouldn’t have been. But somehow that instant when Frankie had first looked him in the eye and really seen him before smiling that naughty, hint-of-tongue smile—nothing, for Jess, had ever been bigger.
“Everything’s been so busy, getting the restaurant ready to open,” Jess said vaguely.