Chapter 11 #2
Is Mebel imagining it, or is his gaze moving back and forth from her eyes to her lips? “This is your restaurant?”
“Oui. What do you think?” Alain says, turning his body slightly and letting Mebel take in the surroundings.
She gives him an appreciative nod. “Very nice. I like the style. Is classic. Without time.” Her mind goes: Are we talking about the restaurant or about the man? Blushing, Mebel shushes her traitorous thoughts.
“Ah, wait until you try the food,” Alain says.
Bruce, whose presence Mebel has blissfully forgotten for the last few minutes, pops his head over Mebel’s shoulder and says, “She won’t be trying the food. There was a mess-up with our reservation, and they haven’t got a table for us.”
Alain frowns. To his credit, he only pauses for a beat as he takes in Mebel’s unlikely dinner friends.
“Your dinner companions?” he says to her, gesturing at the motley group.
Mebel nods, and Alain says, “Give me a moment.” He walks to the hostess and speaks to her in rapid French.
Though Mebel doesn’t speak French, she has a rough idea of what he must be saying to the hostess, and the knowledge of it fills her with pleasure.
And when the hostess says, “Of course, right away, sir,” and turns to Mebel and says, “Follow me please, madame, your table is waiting,” Mebel almost squeals with excitement.
Had Mebel been in her twenties, or even her thirties, she might have turned to Bruce and made some snide remark about him telling her to wait outside earlier this evening.
But, no, Mebel is a grown woman, and she won’t stoop to such pettiness.
She suffices with giving him a smug smile before gesturing for the rest of the group to follow her.
The restaurant is much bigger than the outside led her to think and reminds her of a classic French ballroom, with its crystal chandelier and gilded paneling.
They are seated in a corner of the room next to a large picture window overlooking Saint Giles’.
As soon as Mebel sits, a server comes over and hands them each a leather-bound menu.
Mebel takes out her reading glasses and studies her menu closely for a few minutes.
When she glances up, she finds everyone else staring at her over their menus.
“Yes?” she says. “Why you are all staring? I have something on my face?”
“Mebs,” Gemma says carefully, putting her hand on Mebel’s arm. “Please tell me you did not just casually reveal that you’ve got an inside line to the Alain Moreau?”
“What is this inside line?” Mebel says.
“Like you’ve got a hookup with him,” Bella says.
Mebel looks blankly at her.
“She means that you’re tight with him,” Adam says helpfully. “You know, like the two of you are…buddies? Or maybe lovers?”
Mebel’s eyebrows disappear into her hairline.
“Lovers?” she cries. “Pah, such rubbish! No, of course not. I am married woman! Alain and I are friends.” Though as she says the word “friends,” Mebel realizes that she hasn’t ever had male friends.
Oh, she has plenty of connections who happen to be men—people she knows from the country club, her friends’ husbands, Henk’s business partners, and so on.
But none that she could call an actual friend.
In a circle as traditional as Chinese-Indo society, that would be highly inappropriate.
“Is he single?” Gemma says.
“How I know? Or care,” Mebel adds, though funnily enough, she can feel her cheeks warming up even as she says it. Stop that, you hussy, she tells herself.
“Girl,” Gemma cries. “He is hot as sin and he’s wealthy? Why wouldn’t you be interested?”
“I am married,” Mebel says simply.
Gemma rolls her eyes. “Your husband doesn’t sound like all that.”
“Rude,” Adam says.
Gemma shrugs. “I’m just saying!”
Just as well, their server comes back with a bottle of chilled Chardonnay. He pours a splash into Mebel’s glass and presents it to her.
“I think maybe has mistake. We did not order this,” Mebel says.
“Monsieur Moreau has requested the best bottle we have for your table, madame,” the server says. “Is it to your liking?”
Somewhat dazzled, Mebel raises the glass to her lips, feeling the weight of her classmates’ stares on her. The wine is refreshing and crisp, the kind of thing Henk would have easily paid upward of five hundred dollars for. “Is very good,” she manages to the server.
“Very well,” he says, and pours them all a generous portion.
“Monsieur Moreau has also requested that the chef prepare a special meal for you and your guests tonight. It will be a four-course meal, and of course, if there is anything you’d like to add from the menu, it would be our pleasure to serve. ”
“Oh!” Mebel looks down at the menu, flustered, then says, “Four course is a lot. I don’t think I can eat more than that, so I won’t order anything else.
” She hands the menu to the server, and the others follow suit.
Bruce looks like he’s torn between appreciation and having a conniption fit, and Mebel would be lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying his annoyance.
When the server leaves, Gemma leans forward and says in a low voice, “Okay, Mebs, it’s official: this Alain dude has the hots for you.”
Mebel laughs, shaking her head, but Bella leans forward and says, “Oh yeah, totally. He’s trying so hard to impress you.”
Bruce rolls his eyes. Mebel takes another sip of wine. It really is very good wine. “Is he…what you kids might call ‘flexing’?”
Gemma, Bella, and Adam burst out laughing. “Yes, Mebs,” Adam says. “He is totally flexing.”
“Showing his rizz,” Bella adds.
Mebel’s eyebrows knot together. “Why would he show me his risoles?”
“What?” Bella says. “No, Mebs, ‘rizz’ is short for charisma.”
“Ah.” Mebel takes another sip of wine to keep from having to explain that her treacherous mind had jumped to “risoles,” which is a phallic-shaped Indonesian dish, the thought of which had both excited and scandalized her for a moment.
All thoughts of risoles are wiped away from Mebel’s mind as the meal begins.
They open with a starter of truffled Comté gougères—choux pastries filled with deeply rich Comté cheese custard flavored with white truffle oil.
The cheese puffs are so delicious that Mebel’s eyes flutter closed as she bites into one.
“Are you liking the amuse-bouche?” Alain says.
Mebel’s eyes fly open and she hurriedly swallows, flustered at having been caught with what is probably an orgasmic expression on her face. Dabbing at the corners of her lips, Mebel nods. “Is delicious.”
“We bought the truffle oil from a farm in the Cotswolds, only about a one-hour drive from Oxford,” Alain says. “Have you ever been?”
Mebel, a true city dweller, never bothered to venture outside London when she did visit England. She’s heard of the Cotswolds, of course, but never even considered going there. Painfully aware of Adam, Bruce, and Bella’s eyes on her, she shakes her head.
“Oh, Mebs,” Gemma says, “you’ve never been to the Cotswolds?”
Mebel shrugs. “England has so many places to go to, I go to Cotswolds for what?”
“True,” Adam says, popping a puff into his mouth. “The Cotswolds are overrated.”
“Adam!” Gemma says with mock outrage. “They are gorgeous, Mebs. They’re like little fairy-tale villages. I live there, actually. You have to go.” She turns to Alain. “You can take her next time you go.”
“Aiya, no, he has better things to do,” Mebel mutters, shooting Alain an apologetic look while at the same time glaring at Gemma.
Alain laughs. “Better things to do than showing a beautiful woman around a beautiful town? I think not.”
The straightforwardness of Alain’s words makes Mebel almost choke on her food. She quickly takes a gulp of wine to keep herself from coughing, and when she looks up, Alain has excused himself from the table and the next course is being served.
My goodness, her mind warbles. These Western men are—are incorrigible!
Unfortunately, as her mind spits out the word incorrigible, another part of her mind whispers: Exciting!
She barely tastes the smoked mackerel dish, though judging from the reactions of her friends, it seems to be life-changingly good.
“It’s the cream of cauliflower for me,” Bella says. “It’s like they took the soul of cauliflower and concentrated it and crushed it and—god, how is cauliflower this good?”
“It’s just roasted pureed cauli,” Bruce says with a shrug. “Nothing to it. I bet I could re-create it.”
This, at least, snaps Mebel back to the present moment.
Nothing quite like a pompous comment from Bruce to snatch one’s attention.
Mebel takes a smidgen of the pureed cauliflower, and it is indeed life-changingly good, precisely because she’s never once given a second thought to cauliflower.
As far as vegetables go, it’s one of the most unassuming, neither slutty like artichokes nor fashionable like the broccolini.
But to take such a humble vegetable and turn it into what can only be described as something this sensual?
My god. Mebel’s loins are shivering with excitement, and Mebel doesn’t even know what loins are and has been unconvinced, up until now, that she is in possession of any.