Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
Ellie
I was about to write us off when he said the magic words. "I'm scared. I'm so fucking scared of this, and I'm going to mess everything up, and I can't."
The force of his emotion hit me like a sucker punch, and it took me a moment to finally say, "Scared of what? I think you're immensely capable. You just have a different brain."
He shook his head hard. "No. I figured out a way to do only the things I'm good at. I have a job which is a lot of little tasks strung together, and where I don't have to write or read." He sighed. "I know I'm not a walking disaster anymore. I've been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. I'm on meds. I got sober. I have a toolkit for adult life. But a whole book is big. Too big."
I felt like I'd dug through a layer of Kieran's thought process and now my shovel had hit rock. "What makes you think you couldn't be any good at this, even if you try?"
"Because I really sucked at it in the past. I almost flunked out of high school, Ellie. Actually flunked out of community college." He rubbed his face. "My parents couldn't deal with a kid who was anything other than an overachiever, and they'd get so angry with me." A bitter chuckle. "It didn't help that I was a little shit."
I swallowed down the surge of anger at his parents' selfishness and asked, "Are they still in your life?"
He stared at the table. "We're not officially estranged or anything. But I know they're bad for me, and I keep my distance. Brian, my brother, he sometimes tells me what they're doing." He rubbed his forehead. "This whole thing, it gives me flashbacks to being in school, before I was diagnosed."
I couldn't tell him that everything was fine, that he had nothing to worry about. It would infuriate me, if someone negated my feelings that way. "I hear you. That must be hard, and I'm sorry."
He rolled his eyes at me. "What do you know about it being hard? I don't think anything is hard for you."
I repressed a laugh. If only. "This is big for me, too. I haven't worked with anyone as famous as you. If this goes wrong, it's a huge hit to my career. And I've messed up a few times in the past, when I was first working on cookbooks. I wrote a pasta recipe which told the cook to add a tablespoon of salt to the sauce instead of a teaspoon. That book got ten one-star Amazon reviews because of my mistake."
A headshake. "That's not the same," he said quietly. "Tell me something you're really afraid of, Ellie."
I couldn't ignore the pleading note in his voice. I needed to meet his fear with mine, and for a second my mind let loose the anxieties that clawed at me: Diane and Ben turning their backs on me. Tad shaking his head sorrowfully as he said there wasn't any more work for me. Anything at all happening to Hank.
But I couldn't bear to tell him anything in present tense. I had to keep it together. "I was so afraid when my husband died," I finally said. "He'd been so strong, so vital, and he was gone, just like that."
Kieran paused, then asked quietly, "What happened?"
I sighed. "He had a congenital heart defect. One night he went to bed and just didn't wake up."
His mouth opened and shut. "Were you there?" he finally asked. "Did you find him?"
A hard squeeze on my heart. I got out, "No. He was in Paris, for a conference. He was supposed to come home, and I got a call from the police at two in the morning instead."
"That's really shitty. I'm so sorry," he said.
When other people heard about Max for the first time, their sorry s were laced with incredulousness, like they couldn't believe my bad luck. But Kieran seemed to believe it, and feel my pain as his own. "Thanks," I said, the courtesy not feeling empty for once. I could feel the tears in a hard, hot ball in my throat, and I shoved past them to say, "I felt like I'd been dumped onto a deserted beach. There was the ocean on one side and a dark forest on the other. No map to guide me, no radio for rescue. It was just me, alone, and I had to choose between drowning and walking into the unknown."
He shook his head. "You wouldn't have drowned."
I raised my eyebrows. "No?"
"You would have found a way to make some kind of machete and hacked your way through that forest no matter what. You're tough." He smiled a little. "It's what makes you such a pain in my ass."
I snorted at his crassness, and I felt another emotion sneaking in alongside my respect for his drive and his talent. Liking. I liked this man.
But we still had work to do. "Now, can we move forward? I need you to have faith that the two of us together can make this happen," I said firmly.
He grinned at me. "You and me against the world?" he asked.
I met his silver-green gaze, and I felt a tiny, delicate conspiracy forming between us. "You and me against this deadline," I said, trying to make my voice all business.
I HADN ' T REALIZED how tiring fighting with Kieran had been until we stopped. The rest of that day had gone by in a blur of brainstorming, and for the next four days, instead of waking up every morning thinking, Oh God, what now?, I'd think , Let's go! We still had skirmishes: I'd had to threaten to solder measuring spoons to his hand before he finally took me seriously about checking quantities. In return, I didn't interrupt him every ten seconds. It worked better to turn on the recorder and sit and listen as he cooked, only stopping him when I absolutely had to.
I'd heard the word "flow" before in terms of creation, but when Kieran was in it with cooking, it was like watching a musician composing at a piano, picking out a single riff, then expanding and expanding until it became a song. I'd always sneered at anyone who talked about cooking as an art. Art was something to be admired at a distance, not something for comfort and warmth.
But his art was effervescent and colorful and even a little goofy. One day we'd had leftover black olives and pearls of mozzarella from an eggplant pasta recipe we were trying for the "Comfort" section, and he made kitschy little penguins on toothpicks with carrots for their noses and feet.
I'd tried to keep my face straight. "Big kid's birthday energy."
"Yeah," he said cheerfully. "They are the cutest things you've ever seen."
One night, I stayed up listening to his chatter on headphones and transcribing. I started scribbling out more recipe ideas, annotating them, then crumpling them up and starting over again. It was a fine balance, trying to capture his humor and excitement while making sure the reader would know what to do.
Suddenly, there was a tap on the office door.
When I opened it, Kieran stood there scratching his head. In the soft light, his hair looked like rose gold. "Wow." He yawned. "You literally don't sleep."
I blinked at the computer's clock, its black numbers showing 6:00 AM . It'd been years since I'd pulled an all-nighter. "Guess I was too excited."
He smiled. "Don't do a me, here. You're supposed to be the sensible one."
I snorted as I stretched my shoulders. "That is the whole point, me doing a you."
The smile widened into an evil grin. "Get some rest, Ellie. I'll blast ‘Take Me Out' at nine thirty if you need an alarm."
On our last day, we'd finished sketching a seafood stew laced with cream and a little saffron for the "Treat" section, and I was working away at the yellow stains on Tad's nicest pot when Kieran said, "I'm going to go for a run before it gets dark."
Exactly the opportunity I'd been waiting for. "Cool. I'll have something to show you when you get back."
He stopped, sneakers in hand. "You can't show it to me now?"
"Nope, it's a surprise. Merry very early Christmas."
He bounced on the balls of his feet. "Have I told you about the time I was six and I went into our living room at three in the morning and opened every single Christmas present? Including the ones that weren't mine?"
I cracked up. "Why do I find that extremely believable?" And really freaking adorable, but he didn't need to know that. "Go, run, now."
He grumbled good-naturedly as he closed the door behind him.
An hour later, I spread out the torn yellow sheets across the kitchen table. A cookbook production editor would have had a heart attack at my haphazard efforts, but I had the gist on paper. I'd drawn boxes with crude circles in them for photos and copied in outlines of the recipes we'd thought of in the past few days, with abbreviated lists of ingredients and one-line instructions that I thought captured his voice. Light and easygoing, but grounded in his culinary smarts.
The front door opened and closed, and a waft of clean man sweat pulled me into the present. "What's that?" he asked over my shoulder.
"Your book." I tapped my pen across each page, ignoring his rough breathing that did not make me think sexy thoughts. "I wanted you to see how much progress we've made."
For a solid minute, he was totally silent. He picked up each page and studied it, and now I was the one fiddling with my pen.
"We're making a cookbook?" he finally asked.
"We're making a cookbook."
His fingers tugged at his hair as he laughed in disbelief. "This must be some kind of fluke. I got a C minus in senior-year English, and I only got that because my mom pushed me through every essay. So the fact that I'm really going to have a book with my name on it blows my mind."
I smiled. "You did good, Kieran. I think we're going to make something great."
He tapped one of the introductory pages. "Can we change one thing, though? Can we not mention anything about pirates or leprechauns?"
I cocked my head at him. "Why? That's how people know you."
He groaned. "I get that, but it makes me feel ridiculous. I like to have fun in the kitchen, that's important to me, but I'm not goofing off. I feel like a dick saying this, but I am a serious chef."
I nodded. "Of course you are."
He blinked at me. "Of course?"
"No one gets to where you are flying by the seat of their pants. You're a lot of things, but you're not a cartoon character. I'll take the name out."
He closed his eyes, and was that relief all over his face? "Thank you," he said.
Kieran
She looked at me with her blue eyes, warm and sharp at the same time, and I felt good enough.
I wanted to bottle that feeling. And then I wanted to wrap it in bubble wrap, put it in a safe deposit box in the world's most secure bank, and visit it whenever I wanted, take it out and hold it up to the light.
She gathered the yellow papers up. "Kieran? You good?"
"Yeah," I said, my voice high from all the feelings pressing on my throat. I coughed to release some tension, then asked, "So what happens now?" I almost didn't want to go back to my cruddy studio, and protein bars, and being alone.
"Well, we could find a kitchen to rent so we can test together on your days off. There's a space in West Berkeley, and another in the Dogpatch, not far from you." She bit her lip, then said, "Or you could also come work at my house. I've had two people cooking there before. It's a tight fit but it's manageable. You'd just need to bring your knife roll. It might be good for you to replicate the experience of a home cook, anyway."
"That sounds nice," I said in a very Ellie-ish polite understatement. I'd gotten a little taste of what she was like when she let her guard down, and I wanted more of that warmth, that easy quiet. I wanted Ellie playing with her massive cat, Ellie stirring something in the big cast-iron pot on her stove, Ellie chewing her lip as she studied one of the bajillion cookbooks on her shelves. Ellie at home, relaxed and comfortable.
"Cool. So we're all set?" she asked.
I blinked my cozy dream away. "Yeah." When she smiled at me, it was like she'd taken the jumble of puzzle pieces inside me and laid them out in a clear picture. Everything was rearranged now.