THE FAJITAS WERE, SURPRISINGLY, excellent.
“I’m not sure if I should be happy you’re surprised or a bit offended,” he muttered, pouring himself another glass of bourbon (which he had also used to season the strips of steak when he cooked them).
We sat at my aunt’s yellow table in the kitchen and ate some of the best fajitas I’d ever had in my life. The beef was tender—it must have been flank or skirt, so juicy it melted in my mouth, with a back-end bite of that smoky bourbon flavor. The seasoning was sweet yet spicy, just enough chili powder to offset the cayenne pepper. The bell peppers and onions were crisp, and they kept sizzling when he brought the pan over and set it in the middle of the table, along with warm tortillas, sour cream, guacamole, and hot sauce.
He told me he’d learned how to make them from his roommate at that fancy culinary school of his and that it was a special family recipe, so even if I loved it, he was sworn to secrecy.
“Someday I’ll convince him to open a restaurant—a food truck, at least,” he added defiantly, picking at the leftover bell peppers on his plate, “and he’s going to thank me.”
“Or else!” I joked. I took one last bite of fajita before I realized that I was stuffed and couldn’t eat another bit, and I pushed my plate away with a groan. “Okay, I’ve decided—if you keep cooking like that, you can stay however long you want.”
He tore off a bit of tortilla, picked up a piece of bell pepper and steak with it, and ate it. “That’s a dangerous declaration, Lemon.”
“Dangerous or genius? I’ve always wanted a live-in chef—like movie stars have. What’s it like to just . . . have meals prepared for you. Hungry?” And I signaled to our imaginary server. “Please, I’d love some escargot by the waterfall on the pool deck out back.”
He snorted a laugh. “You joke, but I know someone who does that in LA,” he said. “She hates it, but the pay’s good so she stays. I couldn’t. They always want the same thing—low carb, low calorie, keto, cleanse, vegetarian, whatever—too soulless for me. Not adventurous enough.”
“So obviously you want to go work at a restaurant where you have to cook the same thing every day?”
He rolled his eyes. “ ‘The same thing every day,’ ” he echoed with air quotes, and scooted his chair closer, his eyes bright with passion. The gray was swirling, like the eye of a hurricane, so easy to get lost in, I almost felt like I could. “Lemon, firstly, the menu is seasonal, and secondly, practice makes perfect. How else do you learn how to make the perfect meal?”
That made me curious. What kind of food could make him this passionate? I wondered, leaning against the table, “What makes it perfect?”
“Imagine,” he began, his voice sweet and soft like butterscotch, “I’m eight and I travel to New York City with my mom, sister, and grandpa for the first time. While Mom took my sister around to some of her old haunts, I went with my grandpa to a small restaurant in SoHo. He was so excited. He’d worked in a denim factory his whole life, but he always wanted to be a chef. He read food magazines religiously, cooked for friends, family—birthdays, block parties, anniversaries, Fridays, any occasion that’d let him. And as long as I can remember, he’d always wanted to go to this one restaurant. I didn’t know it then that it was world-class, with Michelin stars hung on the wall. I just knew that my grandpa loved the chef de cuisine there—Albert Gauthier—a genius of culinary sciences. I didn’t care, I was eight and getting fed, but my grandpa was so happy. He got some sort of steak tartare”—and his mouth twitched then into a tender and reminiscent smile that reached up into his eyes and made them almost glow, how happy he was—“and I got the pommes frites, and my whole life changed.”
“Pommes . . . ?”
“French fries, Lemon. They were French fries.”
I stared at him. “Your life changed because of some French fries?”
He barked a laugh, bright and golden, and said to my utter surprise, “The things you least expect usually do.”
My heart clenched for a moment, because that was something my aunt would say, too. That kind of terrible Hallmark-card platitude.
“And anyway,” he went on, sitting back in his chair, “my grandpa never had the chance to open a restaurant, but he loved cooking, and he passed that love down to me.” His voice stayed light, but he didn’t look at me as he said, “He was diagnosed with dementia last year. It’s weird watching this man I’ve always looked up to—this unstoppable force of a guy—slowly get smaller and smaller. Not physically, but just . . . yeah.”
I thought about the last few months with my aunt. How, in hindsight, she got smaller and smaller, too, like the world was suddenly too big. I swallowed the knot rising in my throat, and curled my fingers into fists under the table, resisting the urge to hug him, although it looked a little like he needed it. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” he asked, surprised, and suddenly schooled his emotions into a pleasant smile. “No, no, it’s fine. You asked what makes a meal perfect. It’s this. Food”—he motioned to our almost empty plates—“is a work of art. That’s what a perfect meal is—something that you don’t just eat, but something you enjoy. With friends, and family—maybe even with strangers. It’s an experience. You taste it, you savor it, you feel the story told through the intricate flavors that play out across your tongue . . . it’s magical. Romantic.”
“Romantic, really?”
“Absolutely,” he replied, almost reverently. “You know what I’m talking about—a rich cheesecake you dream about hours after. Soft candlelight, a plate of cheese, and good wine. The headiness of a brazen stew. The pillowy promises in a golden loaf of brioche.” The passion in his voice was infectious, and I bit back a smile as he painted a picture for me with his words, his hands waving in the air, getting carried away. His joy made my heart ache a little in a way I hadn’t ever felt. Not the sad sort of ache—but a longing for something I’d never experienced before. “A lemon pie that makes your teeth curl in delight. Or a piece of chocolate at the end of the night, soft and simple.” Then he pushed himself up from the table, went to grab something from a shelf in the refrigerator, and tossed it to me.
I caught it. A foil-wrapped chocolate.
“Romance, Lemon,” he said. “You know?”
I twirled the chocolate around in my fingers. No, I thought, looking at this strange russet-headed man in a shirt with a stretched-out neck hole and frayed jeans, a tattoo of sprigs of cilantro and other herbs across his arm, but I might like to.
And that was a dangerous thought.
I’d had memorable meals before, but I couldn’t describe any of them as romantic—at least not in the way that he did: sprinting through airports with fast food in one hand and a ticket stub in the other, late-night rainy dinners huddled under awnings because the restaurant was too full, pretzels from streetside vendors, croissants from no-name bakeries, that lunch yesterday at the Olive Branch, washing it down with too-dry wine.
“I guess I just never had a perfect meal, then,” I said finally, putting the chocolate down on the edge of the table. “I’ve just always felt so out of my element every time I go to one of those fancy places you’re probably talking about. I’m constantly afraid of choosing the wrong spoon or ordering the wrong dish or—something. Pair the wrong wine with the wrong cut of steak.”
He shook his head. “I’m not talking about that. A restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy, with artfully plated smears of coulis and beurre blanc—”
“What’s that?”
“Exactly. It’s not important. You can get delicious meals from a mom-and-pop joint just as easily as you can get one from a Michelin-starred restaurant.”
“And one requires less Spanx. Or—hear me out—I can just stay home and eat a PB&J.”
“You could, though what if it turns out to be your last meal?”
I blinked. “Wow, that went dark fast.”
“Would you still stay home and eat a PB&J if you knew?”
I frowned, and thought about it for a moment. Then I nodded. “I think so. My aunt used to make me PB&J sandwiches whenever I came to visit her because she’s a terrible cook. She’d always pack more peanut butter onto the sandwich than jelly, so it’d always get stuck right on the roof of my mouth—”
He sat up straight. “That’s it! The perfect meal.”
“I wouldn’t call it perfect, but—”
“You just said you’d eat it as your last meal, right?”
He had a point.
“Oh,” I gasped, finally understanding what he meant. “It’s less about the food, then, and more about—”
“The memory,” we finished together. His grin slid into a smile, crooked and endearing, and it made his eyes glimmer.
I felt a blush creeping up my neck to my face again.
“That’s what I want to make,” he said, resting his elbows on the edge of the table. The sleeves of his T-shirt hugged his biceps tightly. Not that I was looking. I definitely wasn’t. “The perfect meal.”
It might have been the good food, or the three glasses of wine, but I began to think that maybe he could. Who knows—maybe he already had in my time. I tried to picture him in a chef’s uniform, a white coat stretched across his shoulders, covering up the tattoos sporadically placed across his arms like afterthoughts, and I couldn’t get the image in focus. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy to play by normal rules. He seemed like an exception.
He unwrapped his chocolate and popped it into his mouth, and rolled it into his cheek to melt on its own. “And how about you?”
My shoulders squared at the sudden question. “What about me?”
“Why’d you want to be a book publicist?”
“I just . . . did, I guess.”
He arched a single thick eyebrow. It was a rather infuriating eyebrow, actually. Most of the time, guys would just nod when they heard what I did for a living and move on to . . . literally anything else. “How’d you start?” he asked. “You majored in art history, right? So it wasn’t something you always wanted to do?”
“No . . .” I admitted, and averted my eyes and concentrated on a piece of chipped paint on the yellow table, scratching at it to uncover the sandalwood underneath. “I don’t know. I guess . . . the summer after college, my aunt and I backpacked across Europe.” This year, actually. The summer he was here in this apartment. I didn’t know why I was telling him all of this. I thought I had decided earlier that I wouldn’t. “I’d been thinking about what I wanted to do my last year of college, and I didn’t really want to be a curator, but . . . I loved books. Mostly travel guides. My aunt and I always bought one wherever we went. Just like there’s secrets in memoirs and confessions in novels, there’s a steadfast certainty to a good travel guide, you know?”
“I feel a similar way about a good cookbook,” he replied, nodding. “There’s nothing like it.”
“There’s really not,” I agreed, thinking back on when I actually decided to be a publicist. “Strauss and Adder publish some of the best travel guides in the industry, so I applied and it turns out I’m really good at being a publicist,” I said simply. “So, I schedule interviews and podcasts, I get authors from one city to another, I pitch them to TV shows and radio shows and book clubs. I think up new ways to convince you to read a classic for the twentieth time even though you know it like the back of your hand, and I like it. I mean, I have to like it,” I added with a self-conscious laugh. “You don’t get paid that well in publishing.”
“You don’t in restaurants, either,” he added, watching me with the kind of rapt attention that made me feel like what I did was actually interesting. He studied me with those mesmerizing gray eyes, and I began to think about how I’d paint them. Maybe in layers, navy mixed with a lovely shade of shale. “So, in a way,” he said thoughtfully, his eyebrows furrowing, “you create a travel guide of your own. For your authors.”
“I . . . never thought of it that way,” I admitted.
He cocked his head. “Because you haven’t seen yourself the way other people do.”
Other people? Or you? I wanted to ask, because it was bold of him to think he knew me from a few hours of conversation and plucking a pigeon from my hair. “I think that’s very nice of you to say,” I told him, “but it’s not that deep. I’m just very good at facilitating the sale of books. I’m good at spreadsheets. I’m good at timetables. I’m good at badgering people long enough and hard enough to get that sought-after interview . . .”
“And what do you do for fun?”
I gave a laugh. “You are going to think I’m the most boring person in the world.”
“Absolutely not! I’ve never met a book publicist before. Or anyone named Clementine,” he went on, and put his chin on his hand and leaned toward me, grinning. “So we’re already off to a great start.”
I hesitated, twirling my chocolate around on the table. “I . . . like to sit in front of van Gogh’s paintings at the Met.”
That did, in fact, surprise him. “Just sit?”
“Yep. That’s it. Just sit and look at them. There’s something peaceful about it—a quiet gallery room, people moving in and out like a tide. I actually make it a yearly thing for my birthday. Every August second, I go to the Met and sit on a bench and just . . .” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I told you, it’s silly.”
“Every birthday,” he muttered, marveling. “Since when?”
“Since college, actually. I studied him and other Postimpressionist painters extensively, but he always stuck out to me. He was—is”—I quickly corrected, trying not to wince—“my aunt’s favorite, too. The Met has one of his sunflowers, one of his self-portraits, and a few others.” I thought about it. “I’ve gone for about ten years now. I’m nothing if not a child of consistency and routine.”
He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “You’re the kind of person who sticks to the directions on the back of a brownie box, aren’t you?”
“Those instructions are put there for a reason,” I replied practically. “Baking’s a precise art.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you ever color outside the lines, Lemon?”
No, I thought, though that wasn’t exactly true. I used to, just not anymore. “I warned you,” I said, downing the rest of my wine, and gathering our plates to take to the sink, “I’m boring.”
“You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means,” he said in a very cheesy Inigo Montoya impression, and it was my turn to roll my eyes. The wine had made me warm inside, and relaxed for the first time all week.
“Okay, then come up with another word that means dull and uninteresting, tiresome—”
“Do you hear that?” he interrupted.
I put my plate on top of his and paused, cocking my head to listen. The ghost of a melody drifted through the vents from upstairs. Miss Norris playing her violin. I hadn’t heard it in . . . years. The strings sounded sweeter than I remembered.
He tilted his head to listen.
It took only a few bars to recognize the melody, and my heart clenched.
“Oh, I know this song!” he said enthusiastically, snapping his fingers. “It’s The Way of the Heart or The Matters of the Heart or—no, wait, The Heart Mattered, I think? My mom loves that old musical.” He hummed a few notes with the violin, and he wasn’t that off-key. “Who’s playing it?”
“That would be Miss Norris,” I supplied, pointing toward the ceiling. Of all the songs to play, it had to be that one? “She performed in Broadway pits for years before she retired.”
“It’s lovely. Whenever my mom played this song, she’d put me on her toes and dance me around the kitchen. She’s not a big musical person, but she likes that one.”
I could imagine a tiny Iwan dancing around a kitchen on his mother’s toes.
I said, my eyes trained on the ceiling, “My aunt starred in that musical, you know.”
“Really? So she’s famous?”
“No, it was the only Broadway show she ever did. Everyone said it was because she was too full of herself to follow Bette Midler or Bernadette Peters. Such a promising young talent, after years of being an understudy, just suddenly abandoning her art? They didn’t understand her,” I added, a little softer, a little gentler, because my aunt was a lot of things—loving and adventurous, but also messy and human. Something I never really recognized until the very end.
The soft and warm notes from the violin upstairs sank through the ceiling, a love song. I’d seen grainy videos on YouTube of my aunt in the show. She was brilliant, and infectious, in her glittery robes and extravagant jewels, belting refrains with her entire soul. It was the only time I’d ever seen her really—impossibly—happy.
“The truth is,” I went on, and I wasn’t sure if it was the wine that made me want to talk about her, or the way Iwan listened—closely and preciously, as if my aunt had mattered to more than just me, “she was always afraid that whatever came after The Heart Mattered wouldn’t be as good. So she did something new instead. I envy that. My entire life I wanted to be like her, but I’m not. I hate new things. I like repetition.”
“Why?”
I turned my gaze back to him, studying this stranger I shouldn’t have let stay in my aunt’s apartment, and all of his questions. “New things are scary.”
“They don’t have to be.”
“How are they not?”
“Because some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.”
“Then how do you know they’re your favorite?”
In reply, he stood from the table and offered me his hand.
I stared at it.
“It’s not a trap, Lemon,” he said softly, his Southern lilt a rumble.
I looked at his outstretched hand, and then at him, and the realization dawned on me. I shook my head. “Oh, no. I know what you’re doing. I don’t dance.”
He began to sway back and forth to the violin and hum the chorus. For a moment the heart mattered, for a moment time stood still. My aunt had sang it sometimes as she folded her laundry or curled her hair, and the memory was so raw it stung.
“When was the last time you did something for the first time?” he asked, as if daring me. And if there was one thing I was more than a practical pessimist, it was someone who never backed away from a challenge.
I resisted. “I assure you I’ve danced before.”
“But not with me.”
No.
And—despite his insistence—this was frightening, but not because it was new or spontaneous. It was frightening because I wanted to, and the Wests never did spontaneous things. That was my aunt. And yet . . . here I was, reaching up to take his hand.
It was because of the wine. It had to be.
A smile curled across his lips as he laced his fingers through mine and pulled me to my feet. His grip was strong, his fingertips calloused, as he spun me in the kitchen. I stumbled a little—dancing wasn’t my strongest suit—but he didn’t seem to mind. We found a rhythm, one of his hands holding mine, the other coming to rest at my lower back. His soft touch made me gasp involuntarily.
He quickly took his hand away. “Sorry, is that too low?”
Yes. And this is too much. I don’t dance in kitchens with strangers, I wanted to say, all of the excuses building in my throat, but at the same time I just wanted to be closer, too. He was so warm, and his touch so light and tender, that it made me want him to hold on tighter, steady and sure like he held his knives.
This wasn’t like me. And yet . . .
I returned his hand to my lower back, to his surprise, and trained my gaze on his chin instead of his eyes, trying to keep the flush out of my cheeks. But that only meant I could still see the crooked grin that spread across his lips, and as he pulled me closer to him, our bodies pressed together, my skin felt electric. He was solid and warm, and the music was yearning, and my heart hammered brightly in my chest.
We swayed in my aunt’s cluttered teal kitchen to a song about heartache and happy endings, and it was so tempting to just let myself unravel. For the first time in what felt like forever.
“See?” he whispered, his mouth against my ear. “Something new isn’t always so bad.”
The last violin note sang through the vents, and the moment ended. I came back to myself with sudden, crashing certainty. No matter how I thought about it, this couldn’t—wouldn’t—end well.
I let go of him and stepped back, wiping my hands on my jeans. I felt my stomach twisting itself into knots. The warm feeling in my middle turned icy. “I”—I swallowed the lump in my throat—“I think you got the wrong idea.”
