Chapter Ten
TEN
CHARLIE
The next afternoon, Charlie stands behind his designated workstation in the Amorina School of Chocolate.
Selina pins her chef’s hat in place. Beau uses some of the cooking utensils to bang out a beat on the worktop. Michelle bobbles about in chunky, open-toed shoes and large pieces of costume jewelry, overdressed for what is evidently going to be a messy day.
One down, at least, Charlie thinks, noticing Ansel’s empty station. Not that he has any better of a shot with Dario after all that occurred last night. He should have kept his temper in check at the table to demonstrate his maturity. But his hackles rose to an all-time high.
Dario enters the room wearing a white chef’s coat.
His name is stitched in gold script on the left breast beneath the Amorina logo.
The lapel of his coat is striped to look like the Italian flag.
His hair is tied back in a tiny bun, which draws attention to his expressive, puppy dog eyes.
They brighten when they land on Charlie in the back row. Charlie refrains from reading into it.
“Buon pomeriggio a tutti,” Dario says, sporting a showman’s smile.
“Today we begin our journey into the art of making Amorina chocolate. But first, I’d like to apologize again for the theatrics last night.
I do not normally operate that way. I think the newness of this experience has churned up some feelings I wasn’t aware were sitting under the surface. I deeply apologize for my behavior.”
A chorus of “It’s okay” rings out from the others, but Charlie holds back.
There is a personal conversation to be had that the whole room need not be privy to.
He shoves his hands in the apron pockets, still feeling like the least likely person in the room to end up marrying this man when he obviously needs it the most.
Once he wrestled himself to sleep, he suffered an awful nightmare where he stood in front of a packed church waiting for a nameless, faceless someone to march down the aisle.
Bit by bit, his tux got stripped away by an unseen force until he was naked and shivering before the congregation.
The ruinous winds stripped all the decorations, tore the church to pieces and sent the gatherers soaring.
At the end of it, he stood in a roofless, windowless church covering his unmentionables and wondering what curse he must be under to be so unmarriable.
“Ansel left the villa this morning. If any of you, at any point, become overwhelmed or uncomfortable with the parameters of this week, you need only to tell me and I shall see to it other accommodations are arranged for you, or that you are ferried safely home as promptly as you wish,” Dario says.
Charlie avoids a direct line of eye contact, shifting behind Beau. “Now let us begin.”
An incredible amount of math and science go into the production of chocolate. The numbers and calculations and history make Charlie’s head spin.
Using a large knife, Charlie chops twenty-four ounces of chocolate up into tiny bits so it will melt quicker.
Once done, he puts most of the chocolate into a big, clear bowl and sticks it into the microwave hooked up below his workstation.
The bowl swirls under the buttery yellow light at half power.
Every minute on the dot, he takes the bowl out and stirs the gooey deliciousness with an Amorina-branded spatula. The fragrance is heavenly.
“This process is called tempering and the method we’re using is called seeding,” Dario says as he walks around the room at a steady clip.
A heat spreads over Charlie’s neck as other types of seeding banner through his mind, causing the front of his shorts to strain.
Earlier, Dario demonstrated cracking open the shell of a cocoa bean.
The clean break. The pleasing crunch. Charlie wonders what else Dario could turn out with those strong fingers.
Dario continues, “For chocolate to be considered true, real chocolate, it can’t have any other fats besides cocoa butter, so we’re heating this chocolate to melt all the fatty acid crystals.
” He pushes up his sleeves and drops a thermometer into Selina’s chocolate bowl.
“We want to get this chocolate to roughly forty-seven degrees Celsius. Roughly one-sixteen Fahrenheit for you Americans.” Selina videos the whole thing and captions it: “Isn’t Dario Cotogna as hot as this chocolate? ”
Dario blushes for everyone to see. So does Charlie when Michelle catches him glancing too long at the exposed, chorded muscle of Dario’s forearms. He may still be irked about last night, but his hormones have not gotten the memo.
The beep of the microwave catches him completely off guard. Crap. When he opens the door to the microwave, he gets hit with a swirl of smoke and an overwhelming campfire smell that reminds him of youthful bonfires at backyard hangouts. He coughs as he stands.
“Oops,” Charlie says. Dario appears beside him. “I think I burned it.”
“Quite all right,” Dario says, taking the bowl from Charlie. “Happens to the best of us. We have plenty of chocolate to spare. You can start over.” Dario goes to the front of the room and returns with some pre-chopped chocolate in a new bowl. Charlie sets it in the microwave.
“Do you think we could start over, too?” Dario asks in a low voice. “I would like to apologize and explain where I was coming from.”
“I think so,” Charlie says, taken aback at first by the forwardness but still ever the believer in second chances. And thirds and fourths, honestly. He is in no position financially to back away from this potential arrangement when his family’s security is on the line.
“I’m sorry for making assumptions and hurting your feelings.
I wish I had behaved better.” Dario stares straight into Charlie’s eyes.
It’s disarming. “I’m quite a bit out of practice when it comes to meeting new people.
I let my emotions get the better of me. It is just, you see, I enjoy you, Charlie. ”
The hairs on Charlie’s arms stand up. “You enjoy me?”
Dario clears his throat as he squats down to extract the chocolate bowl.
At least one of them is paying attention to something other than their accelerating heartbeat.
“Si. Your presence, your conversation, your look. I saw the ring and this overriding jealousy ran through me.” He sweeps his eyes around the room, boosts his voice back to teaching level.
“Please go ahead and add the wafers to your bowl. These are the seeds. Mix until the wafers dissolve, and the overall temperature reaches thirty-one degrees Celsius. What this does is attract the loose crystals of fatty acid in the non-tempered chocolate to crystallize the way the tempered wafers are.”
“Can we go back to the part about you being jealous?” Charlie asks, lesson thrown to the back of his mind. “What could you possibly be jealous of me for? You have all this.”
“Not of you, exactly. I was jealous of whoever put that ring there. Whoever got to welcome you home at the end of a long day,” he explains as he stirs with his own spatula that has his name inked into the handle.
Someone should put a warning on Dario’s chef’s jacket. Caution: Contents are hot and sweet!
“There hasn’t been anyone like that in a long, long time.
Really, ever. The only people I come home to are my parents and my grandparents.
I promise you that,” Charlie says, glancing away.
Shy suddenly, and afraid he sounds pitiable.
He is a launched ping-pong ball of emotions.
“I think that’s why I got so upset that you told Paola that I wasn’t the kind of guy you marry.
I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, and I’m sorry for that, but still. Yeah.”
“That was my own insecurity talking,” Dario says, a fetching, refreshing portrait of sensibility.
“I reflected last night and realized that. My family is highly visible, and in this industry, people talk. When we spoke yesterday, I worried being with someone like me might invite gossip into your life.”
“I have learned the hard way not to care what people say. I mean, look at me. I can’t walk around like this if I can’t handle some choice words,” Charlie says, trying to sound as confident as possible.
He may project coolness with his hair and tattoos, but he can suffer extreme bouts of self-consciousness when he gets stressed or upset.
His self-expression doesn’t double as self-preservation.
He knows it makes him a brighter moving target.
Dario adds the tempered chocolate wafers to the ready bowl. Charlie stares into the surface of the dark chocolate as if it were a reflecting pond. His past ripples about in the bowl.
“Thick skin is abundantly important in my family. I take it you’re speaking about a specific experience?” Dario asks.
“Yeah. Back in high school. But I don’t want to take up your time,” Charlie says.
Except when he checks on the others, Michelle is the only one still working.
Beau has disappeared, and Selina has gone live on social media with what little service there is in the building.
She boisterously responds in Spanish to comments from her adoring fans.
Dario points his nose down at the bowl. “We’ve got at least ten minutes. Tell me about it. If you’d care to.”
Should he? Revealing too much too soon might be the wrong move. Yet the expression on Dario’s face is so expectant that Charlie can’t help but feel that Dario prizes vulnerability.
“I only ever had one serious relationship,” Charlie says, both excited and nervous to be sharing this.
“His name was Max. He was my best friend. We started fooling around my senior year of high school, and things got serious. So serious that I wanted to tell people about us. We agreed the week before graduation, we’d start by telling our friends.
Only, I came to school that Monday and all of our friends were being cagey with me.
Max didn’t even come to class. I texted him a million times to no response.
I figured he had a doctor’s appointment he didn’t tell me about.
He could be forgetful like that. At lunch, I got up the nerve to tell our friends that Max and I were dating.
That was the plan. The whole table went silent.
My heart sank. Finally, our closest friend, Freida, brought me out into the hall and told me that I couldn’t sit with them anymore because I was lying, that I ‘wasn’t the type of person Max goes for. ’”
“Oh, Charlie,” Dario says, face falling. “Mi dispiace.”
He shrugs. “I was so confused. We had an accepting friend group, for the Slate Belt crowd. I mean, I wasn’t expecting any of them to come to Lehigh Valley Pride with me and Max or anything, but still.
My parents and grandparents came around to it easily when they caught me and Max uh…
tempering by seeding in the barn earlier that year. ”
Dario snorts out a laugh that catches Selina’s attention. “Sorry. This is serious. I don’t mean to—”
“No, laughing is good. Laughing is much better than the pity face you were giving me. I promise. I prefer it. You look handsomer like this,” Charlie says, reaching out to place an assuring hand on Dario’s shoulder.
Dario reddens at the compliment before saying, “Okay. Go on.”
“I went to Max’s house after school, but his mom told me he was sick and didn’t want to see me anymore,” says Charlie, thrust back to that day, and how small he felt on their rain-soaked porch.
Like a worm displaced by the storm that still thundered in the distance.
“I could see in her eyes that he’d told her the same lie he’d told our friends.
That I was trying to ‘turn him.’ He was the one who lied and yet somehow, I was the one being branded Charlies, as if that’s even a creative insult. ”
Dario shakes his head as he finishes tempering the chocolate. “That’s a hard thing for a young person to have to go through.”
“It was. I gave up on guys in any serious way after that. Working, taking care of my grandparents, and my illustrations keep me plenty busy,” he says.
“You do more illustrations like the one you submitted for the contest?” Dario asks.
“Tons more. I post them online as tattoo inspiration, for myself and others. My dream is to one day become a tattoo apprentice at a real parlor so I can learn the trade and tattoo my art on others,” Charlie says, eager to share more now that he’s gotten the Max incident off his chest.
“I’d love to see these tattoo designs while you’re here,” Dario says. “But first, I should find Beau and we should begin molding our bonbons. Talk more later?”
“I’d like that,” Charlie says, spirit renewed.