Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

Ellie

To avoid a repeat of yesterday, this morning I did my yoga on the square of carpet in the office, only knocking into the futon frame two or three times.

Kieran's face when he'd caught me had been priceless. Though a small, unhelpful voice said that there had been something else in his expression besides surprise, something that looked a lot like hunger. I'd seen it when he'd fed me, too.

When I came back from my shower, his bedroom door was open, and the siren scent of frying bacon filled the air.

I wandered into the kitchen and leaned on the counter next to him. "What are you making?"

"Breakfast," he said, eyes locked on the pan.

I nudged him lightly so he'd look at me. "Specifics would be nice," I said encouragingly.

"Nothing special. Just hash with some bacon, potatoes, and greens." He pushed cubes of potato into the oil, and a crisp, earthy smell rose up from the pan. They spat and sizzled as he hit them with salt and pepper. "Watch out for the oil."

"Cuts make me faint, not burns. Hang on, I'll grab my phone."

"It's not much."

"Let me be the judge of that. Recipes can come from super- random places."

I typed notes and snapped some photos as he worked. The camera really loved him, all his angles and shadows. He was wearing tan cargo shorts and another old T-shirt, dark brown with "Franz Ferdinand" written across it backward. He'd clearly put in time at the gym since he'd bought the shirt, and his biceps flexed as he shook the pan to flip the potatoes. And no, my fingers were not wondering what those muscles would feel like.

When he pivoted away from the stove, the scar on his knee stretched.

"Is that from Coconut Pete's?" I asked, pointing.

He looked down. "Yup." He sighed. "I was lazy and wore shorts one day, and then I got splashed with boiling oil."

The pain and shock he must have felt shot through me. "Jesus!"

A smile tightened his mouth. "That's what I said, but a lot fucking louder. The pain was bad, but to be honest, the shame was worse. When my mom got to the hospital, she was so freaked out. She kept asking me how I could do that to myself. Even when the nurse said it was an accident, Mom kept muttering to herself."

Guilt knotted my stomach. That was an awful thing his mother had done, but how much time had I spent thinking that Kieran was deliberately trying to frustrate me? That if he just did what I thought he should, everything would be fine? Maybe I'd been unfair. Maybe I was the one who needed to dig deeper.

"I love fried potatoes," I tried.

He stared at me. "Really?"

He was right to sound confused at that non sequitur. "Yeah. Always have. The reason no one's put me in charge of America's nuclear secrets is that I'd give them all away for a basket of french fries."

He looked skeptical. "You even feel that way about In-N-Out's?"

"Sure. Mediocre fries are still pretty good. But they're a distant second to the burgers, of course."

He folded his arms, which did delightful things to his shoulders. "What are the best fries you've ever had?"

I rubbed my neck. "Kind of a show-off answer."

"Still curious."

"I was in Lyon, studying abroad. There was this bistro near the university that did a ridiculously cheap prix fixe. The frites were always fresh, and they came with this garlicky herb mayonnaise that was just outrageous."

"Parlez vous fran?ais?"

I blinked at him. "Of course," I answered in surprised French. "I studied both French and English at Berkeley. How do you speak it?"

"I work at expensive restaurant in France in two…," he answered in heavily accented French, then snorted. "Shit. I don't know big numbers," he said in English. "Or past tense. But I staged at a place called Néroli right before I became sous at Qui."

My jaw fell open. "You mean the three-star place near Cannes? Working there would be the experience of a lifetime."

He stopped. "That's one way to say it. The chef de cuisine made a drill sergeant look relaxed. But I learned a fuck ton, and I picked up a little French, even though the guys made so much fun of me every time I spoke."

"But you tried," I said earnestly. "You deserve some credit for that. Someone else might have run screaming out of that kitchen after ten minutes."

He flipped the hash with a flick of his wrist. "I guess. I'm definitely better at cooking than I am at languages, that's for sure. Anyway, this is done. I'll just fry some eggs. Sunny-side up cool with you?"

He was weirdly shy about compliments, but his blushing face and tense shoulders told me that disagreeing with him wouldn't get me anywhere right now. Maybe I was feeling a little shy, too. "Yeah, cool. I'll set the table."

Once my plate landed on the table, I couldn't help eating the hash like I was starving. He'd added a little sauteed garlic and parsley at the end, and the fragrance against the crispy potatoes made me hum with happiness.

I was about to pick up my plate and his to wash them when he said, "I could make amazing fries if you wanted."

I shook my head. "They wouldn't work for the book. People think deep-frying at home is incredibly messy, and the low-fat and low-carb lobbies finished the job."

He laced his fingers behind his head. "That's a shame. But I didn't mean for the book."

I stared at him. "You'd make fries just for me?"

His cheeks went a little pink. "You'd have to come to the restaurant. We had an intern who'd worked at a really fancy gastropub outside London, and she taught me how to make the best chips in the world."

"That's sweet of you." His blush got a little deeper, which wasn't adorable at all. "But wouldn't Steve and Mrs. Hutton throw a fit if you used their precious kitchen to make french fries?"

"You think they're a lot more uptight than they are."

"Are you telling me Mrs. Hutton wears Hawaiian shirts and listens to the Grateful Dead?"

He snorted. "OK, fine. Not Mrs. Hutton. But Steve saved my ass when he could have shown me the door."

This talented, energetic chef had been on the edge of being fired? "What do you mean?"

A beat. He squinted at his plate. "Never mind. I think I'll try different seasoning for the potatoes next time. A little paprika, maybe."

Fine. I'd said I could wait.

I thought he'd go mess around on his phone like he usually did when we had downtime, but instead he leaned on the counter next to me while I washed the dishes. But this time he wasn't goading me and I wasn't being a killjoy. "How did you start cooking anyway?" he asked. "Based on your relationship with knives, I'm guessing you didn't go to culinary school."

"No, I taught myself," I said. "Mom picked up extra shifts at the hospital after…"

"After what?"

"After we moved to San Diego." That was easier than saying, After my parents' farce of a marriage finally went down in flames and I learned they'd never really wanted me .

"So she showed me how to do really basic meals for Hank," I said. "Boxed mac and cheese, ramen, frozen dinners. After a few months, I went to the library after school and asked if they had books about learning to cook. God bless that librarian, Mrs. Ferraro. She didn't think I was a precocious little dweeb. She ordered some kids' cookbooks for me, and put Post-its on the pages to mark things I should try first, and she wrote down some of her recipes for me before we moved again. I still make her Sunday gravy, and I can't improve her lasagna."

He tilted his head. "So the Ellie Wasserman Cookbook Library came later?"

I smiled. "Oh, yeah. But not by much. When I got my first paycheck from tutoring in high school, I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a brand-new cookbook."

He paused, then nodded. "So you did kind of go to school," he said thoughtfully. "You learned from all those writers how to do it."

I looked closely, but I didn't see any mockery on his face. He was genuinely hearing me, just as I was.

"Yeah," I said, feeling warm for a second as respect flowed down a new channel between us. "So I know how you got started cooking, but why did you keep going? You don't get to work at a Michelin-starred place just by falling into it."

He ran his hand through his hair. "It's hard to explain. Have you ever found something and it just made sense to you? Felt right?"

Hank's smile when I'd fed him brownies. Max's first kiss that had tasted like Guinness. It had been forever since I felt that way. "Yeah. When did that happen for you?"

"Two weeks into my job at the Pacific, we got these beautiful Page mandarins, and Ximena talked about how much possibility they had in them. You could make a vinaigrette with the juice, or marmalade with the peel, or preserve them in salt, or add sugar, eggs, and butter and turn them into custard for a tart. That's when I realized there wasn't only one right way to treat an ingredient; there were many. I'd spent my entire life never getting anything right, and now I could just follow my senses, my gut instincts, and make something delicious that people liked."

I'd listened to him tell stories about his cooking history, but now he sounded different. Less glib, more earnest. "That's why you like citrus so much," I realized aloud. "Not just because of how it wakes up food."

He grimaced. "Yeah. I said that too many times."

I put the last dish in the rack, turned off the tap, and grabbed a towel to dry my hands. "But where did the gut instincts come from? You don't just learn to cook from nothing."

He looked hard at the floor, and I let him formulate his thoughts. "Repetition, I guess," he said after a minute. "Especially with physical stuff like knife skills. But just cooking the same dish over and over would be boring as shit, and disrespectful to the ingredients. It's better to learn by starting in the same place, but then thinking about what produce looks good to you that day, what you're craving."

The candle that had lit in the back of my brain yesterday suddenly became a flaming torch. "You talk a lot about doing what you feel like when you pick ingredients and when you cook," I started.

Confusion furrowed his forehead. "Yeah?"

"Well, what if we made the book about that? Cooking based on feeling?"

"But you said we needed recipes."

"No, humor me a second. What do you like to eat when it's scorching hot outside?"

He looked up at the ceiling. "All the salad." When I circled my hands, he said, "If it's summer I want to eat watermelon. Peaches. Tomatoes, once they're in season. Lots of mint and parsley and cilantro."

"What about when you've had a really long day?"

A chuckle. "Pizza. Always pizza. I'm on a first-name basis with my local delivery person."

I scribbled that down on my notepad. "Cheese and carbs?"

"Cheese and carbs forever."

"And when you need a pick-me-up?"

He tapped on his scarred lip. "Something spicy. Like eggs with a lot of tomato and chili. Shakshuka, huevos rancheros, things like that."

"Yes." I ripped out a page, and on the blank sheet I drew vertical lines, then scored another line across the top. In each box I wrote single words: Comfort, Refresh, Awaken . I thought for a second, then added Treat and Seduce .

He blinked as I scrawled. "What's going on?" he asked. "You look even more serious than usual."

"A lot of people wake up in the morning with no clue what they're going to make for dinner," I said, filing the dishes he'd mentioned into the columns. "And most cookbooks rely on you knowing that you want Mexican food, or chicken, or pasta. But what if your starting point was just how you felt, or how you wanted to feel?"

He glanced at the paper. "So if you wanted to be refreshed, or comforted, or… Jesus, seduced?"

I raised my eyebrows. "You've never cooked for someone you wanted to get into bed?"

"No," he said briefly, his skin turning pink.

That was interesting. He didn't seem like he'd never had a girlfriend. He was too objectively pretty for that. "Well, if you ever did, you could turn to that section and pick a recipe."

He thought for a second, then said, "So it'd be a seasonal book, but, like, personal seasons."

I smiled at that little bit of poetry. "That's a perfect way to say it."

His face lit up for a second, then dimmed. "That's a cool idea."

Why did he sound wary? "So," I continued tentatively, "we'd just have to come up with a few other feelings, and then fifteen recipes for each of them."

"That's a lot of recipes," he said faintly, but I just kept scribbling.

"I'm sorry, this must be really boring, watching me write." I turned the page toward him. "Do you want to add anything?"

He pulled on his fingers. "Can't we just keep talking about it?"

"But it's not real unless you write it down."

"I'm sure it's fine. You're so smart it can't be wrong." His hands pressed into the table, and he looked like he was about to haul ass out the door. I remembered the afternoon I cut myself, how when I was vulnerable, he stepped up.

"Please," I begged quietly.

He froze.

"I need you, Kieran. I can't write the book by myself." I pushed the page toward him. "Just take a look. Maybe something will come to you."

He took a long deep breath and sat back down. "OK." He took my pen and started dragging it along the line, speaking each word silently.

And a formless something that had nagged at me whenever I'd watched him fidget and dart around over the past four days solidified.

One of the first people I'd tutored in high school had dyslexia. She'd mouthed as she read words. She couldn't spell for love or money, took extra time on essays and tests. And whenever I could, I'd take her out for walking conversations around the track instead of sitting together at a desk, because otherwise she'd get so distracted she could barely hear me.

Thirty seconds later, he finished reading the page that I would have grasped in five. He looked worn out. "OK. That looks fine to me. Anything else?"

"Kieran? Are you dyslexic?" I asked as gently as I could.

His fingers clamped on the table. "Yes," he answered tightly. "Why?"

I resisted the urge to bang my head on the table. I'd been wasting so much time being annoyed at him, when I should have been giving myself a talking-to. "Because we're supposed to be writing a book, and if you're dyslexic, I've been going about this all wrong."

"No, you're writing the book. I'm here to look pretty."

He was doing an excellent impression of my cat when he knew that he was going to the vet, hunkered down and ready to bolt.

"Hey," I said softly.

"What?" he snapped.

"What do you have to lose? I'm on your team, Kieran. Please."