56. Kiara
fifty-six
Kiara
I take a deep breath to steady my hand. Natalie and I have been paired to create molecular gastronomy eclairs today. The empty eclairs (really just pate a choux) are cooling. That was the easy part. The yuzu custard is made. Now we’re tackling creating liquid pearls for the garnish, and that’s where the rubber meets the road. Neither of us have ever done this, so the pressure is high to succeed. These elaborate ways of surprising the palate are what the institute prides itself on, and students who can’t master these techniques won’t be selected by the prime employers.
Right now, I’m the dropper and Natalie is the monitor. Using a culinary syringe, I drop the mixture of orange blossom-flavored water and sodium alginate into a bath of calcium chloride, making sure they’re all the same size. Tomorrow, we’ll use a tool called caviar maker to make it easier, but they like to torture us a little here and make us do everything by hand first before moving onto time-saving techniques.
Meanwhile, Natalie keeps track of the time and pulls out the pearls as they are ready.
I’m on a roll, bead after bead pearling perfectly into the liquid below. At this cadence, we’ll be done before most, if not all, the other teams.
That’s another staple of this place: competition. It’s ruthless. Our grades are partially based on velocity, along with taste and presentation.
The phone trills on the wall, making me jump. I refocus on my task.
“Smeess! Un visiteur.” Today’s instructor hangs up the phone, visibly irritated by the interruption.
Bead, bead, bead, bead. I really got that rhythm going now. “You wanna go?” Natalie asks.
I shake my head. “It’s probably a trick to make us place last,” I say. “Wouldn’t put it past Draco and Malfoy,” I add, referring to two guys who think they’ll get to the top by playing tricks on others.
Natalie giggles, then frowns as she looks down at the syringe. “Oh, merde, what’s going on?”
My beads are pitiful droplets, and the liquid starts backing into the syringe. I press harder. “It’s clogged. Fuck,” I mutter. I had a nice cadence going, but now we’re losing precious minutes. She helps me load another syringe. “You’re keeping an eye on the time, yeah?” I ask her, worried the other beads will stay too long in the bath.
“Oui oui,” she says.
After another fifteen minutes, my shoulders are stiff. “Why don’t you take over,” I say. “I feel I might cramp.”
“I think we have enough,” she says. “Let me start on the filling.” She loads the nitrous oxide siphon with sous-vide yuzu cream, and we work together to perfect our eclairs, garnishing them with the translucent beads and an edible gold leaf each.
“I think you were right,” Natalie says when all our eclairs are filled and decorated. “It’s too pale.”
I nervously eye the other teams. They’re almost done too, but we have a chance of nailing this. “Do you trust me with the fiddleheads?” I ask her. I’ve been telling her about this delicacy we commonly eat in Vermont in the spring. She’s never had it, but the school ordered some—anything remotely exotic, they have on hand.
Natalie smiles. “A little homesick?” she teases.
I start a simple syrup in a pan, then grab a handful of the green twirls. Minutes later, the subtle fragrance hits me, making my heart beat faster. I drain the caramelized fiddleheads. “That’s gorgeous!” Natalie exclaims. “Like little trees or something.” We take our culinary tweezers and complete the decor of our eclairs, the gold, pale orange, and deep green looking like Vermont at the beginning of fall. “Next time let’s do pine-flavored pearls and—”
“—and maple cream, I know.” Natalie laughs.
“I better go check on this fake visitor,” I say once we’re entirely done. “It’ll give me a reason to ream into these two idiots.” I check in with the instructor on my way out to make sure he’s okay with me leaving.
I’m a little pissed at the interruption, which only adds to my low-key annoyance at the assignment. Every day now, I think about how Chris approaches his baking, and food in general, and I miss it. I also think about how Annabel worked in all these fancy places then came back to her roots, growing herbs and fruits and berries in her garden, using eggs from her hens, and talking about having a cow or two for her own cream and butter. Her creations have a soul, and there’s a reason. They’re as close as possible to the earth.
Nothing she uses has an unpronounceable name or sounds like a chemical.
What she makes comes from love. It’s unpretentious, like a home-cooked meal—the best there can be.
Still, the competitive part of me wants to know what today’s instructor has to say about our eclairs. So I charge down the elevator, through the side hallway, and to the grand entrance, hoping I can clear the misunderstanding, then rush back upstairs.
The sight I’m faced with hits me like a tidal wave, my suppressed want hitting me full force. I lose my breath, my eyes blur, and the undertow of need sucks me in, pulls me across the long hallway, my feet flying, my legs propelling me, the wave of my emotion lifting me up, up, up—into Colton’s arms.
He lifts me effortlessly, twirls me around to cushion the force of my jump, his arms clasping around me while my ankles lock behind his back. “Sweets,” he whispers in my neck.
I inhale his scent—leather jacket, coconut shampoo, and something uniquely him—then dart my tongue to taste his skin, right under his ear.
He growls and moves to capture my mouth in his. Our tongues twirl softly at first, a timid re-acquainting I hate. Since when are we shy with each other? Tears spring to my eyes. This has been too long. Never, never again do I want to be away from Colton.
I run my fingers up his nape, knocking off the hat he’s wearing, and tug at his hair. His cheeks have a slight hollow that didn’t use to be there. His fingers dig deeper in my upper thighs, our teeth clash, and our kiss deepens to a level of erotic. We breathe through it, never breaking it, and all the while Colton is slowly twirling me in the middle of the grand foyer, under a crystal chandelier.
Finally we break the connection, staying an inch apart, drinking each other in. Colton’s eyes are shiny, his smile the biggest I’ve ever seen. “Hey there,” he says.
“Hi.”
A slow clapping erupts, bouncing off the empty walls. Antoine, the receptionist, is standing, watching us, a smirk on his face. “Ah, chapeau,” he says. “Bien.”
“What’d he say?” Colton murmurs. “He likes my hat?”
I lick his lobe, and this gets me a deeper squeeze of my thighs. “I don’t think that’s what it means, no.”
“Maybe it means ‘Get a room’.”
“Yeah, I think something along those lines.”
“Good, cause guess what?”
I squeeze my legs tighter around his midsection. “Good boy.”
He drops me with a slap on the butt and picks up a backpack. The thing seems to weigh a lot and is oddly shaped. “What’s going on here?” I say, picking up the cowboy hat on the floor and sticking it on my head—I’ll get to the bottom of that later.
He rubs a thumb on his eyebrow and a shy smile illuminates his face. “Ah, sweets, you’re gonna love that. Hear me out.”
I hear him out, and my heart cracks open, my stomach flip-flops, and my mouth gapes.
Meanwhile, my brain is racing to figure a way out of this.