Chapter 15 Then
I’m sitting at Alex’s kitchen table, sipping a very good, very strong cup of coffee as Friday morning sun spills in, warm and buttery, through the windows.
Alex sips his coffee, then sets it down, turning back to the stove, where he’s making the breakfast he invited me over for. He’s moving around… stiffly.
“Something hurting?” I ask.
“Better question would be, is anything not hurting.”
“What happened?”
He seems to hesitate, then says, “A cascade of events.”
“Beginning with?” I watch him wince as he shifts his weight, tensing his shoulders, his lower back arching in.
“Ah. Well.” He leans over the pot on the stove and winces again. “Your floor.”
My mind flashes back to the other night, the two of us lying on the floor, Alex’s arm still curled around me.
My eyelids growing heavy, telling Alex, we should go to bed, immediately realizing how that sounded, about to clarify what I meant, then being answered with a snore, his heavy arm curling tighter around my shoulders.
Then early the next morning, when I woke up the moment the sun hit my eyes, like I always do.
For a few minutes, I watched him sleep, cataloged his features.
The tips of his dark, thick lashes burnished bronze by the morning light.
His bittersweet-cocoa bed-head hair, indecisive curl-waves stuck out in every direction.
The stubble darkening his jaw right up to his cheekbones.
How beautiful I thought he looked. And thought about kissing him again.
Heat rolls through me.
I clear my throat. “Next time,” I tell Alex, “you should definitely try the dog bed.”
A soft laugh rumbles out of him. “My back still would’ve been fucked up. I went too hard on the rowing machine, trying to work out the knot. Then I overdid it on the stationary bike.”
“I’m sensing a theme,” I tell him.
He sips his coffee. “Yes. I can get a little… overzealous with things, including, but not limited to, workout machinery, but it’s that or smoke to deal with stress, and we have an agreement, don’t we?”
“Haven’t even looked at a gas station hot dog stand in weeks.”
He grins. “Look at us, staying strong.”
“Does anything help?” I ask. “With the pain.”
“Nah, I just have to wait it out. Stay active and do my stretches. Sleep on my absurdly posh ergonomic mattress and take ibuprofen and look forward to waking up not feeling like I’m eighty.”
“How old are you, actually?”
“Fifty,” he throws over his shoulder.
I nearly spit out my coffee. “You are not.”
He has his back to me, mostly. I can see only a sliver of his profile, but it’s enough that I catch the corner of his grin, the deep dimple it sets in his cheek. “The men in my family age really well—what can I say?”
“Alex.”
“Thirty-five,” he says. “Thirty-six in November.”
“Uh-huh. A Sagittarius.”
He glances over his shoulder. “How’d do you figure that? Aren’t most November birthdays Scorpios?”
“Yes, but you are one hundred percent a fire sign.”
He laughs, then gingerly glances at me over his shoulder. “You?”
“Textbook Libra.”
“Noted,” he says, “but I meant your age.”
“Oh. Thirty-three. Thirty-four in October.”
He grins. “Spring chicken.”
“Tell that to my ovaries. Because they’re telling me, I’m a ticking clock.”
“Nah,” he says gently. “You’ve got time, Ted. You’ll get your babies.”
My heart pinches. “You really think so?”
“Know so.” He turns off the burner, then carefully scoops out four poached eggs. “Until then, I’ve got a feisty four-year-old you can have whenever you want.”
I laugh. “Mia is a blast.”
“She’s a goddamn handful,” he says affectionately. “Also a fire sign.”
“Aries.” I’m confident of this.
He smiles. “Textbook Aries.”
As I see him start to plate the food, I jump up, rummaging around his kitchen for silverware, napkins, place mats.
When I take my first bite, a whimper sneaks out of me, then a deeply appreciative, “Holy shit.”
Alex’s mouth tugs up at the corner. “I hope that’s a good ‘holy shit.’ ”
“It’s a euphoric ‘holy shit.’ ” I dive into another bite, sweeping a piece of crisp toast through sun-gold yolk and glossy burnt-umber sauce. “What is it?” I ask.
“Oeufs pochés en meurette,” he says, “á la Chef Diane.”
“Chef Diane?”
“My mentor,” he says. “She hated how the original recipe made the eggs turn purple; it calls for poaching the eggs in burgundy wine. So instead, she taught me to poach the eggs in water, then make a sauce with the wine, said it made everything about the dish better. And she was right—it’s better like this, in every way. ”
“Well, I have nothing to compare it to, since this is my first time having… what was it again?”
Alex smiles. “Oeufs pochés en meurette.”
Desire hums in my veins. I did forget what it was called, but I asked him to repeat the dish’s name mostly because Alex speaking French is hot as hell.
“Yes,” I manage hoarsely. “That. It’s phenomenal. So please thank Chef Diane for me.”
“I would,” he says, “but she’s dead.”
I nearly choke on my food. “Oh my god, Alex, I’m so sorry.”
A chuckle tumbles out of him. He sighs as he cuts into his food.
“No need. Sorry I said it that way, but I had to. That was her condition, when she told me she was sick, that whenever I talked about her, I had to tell people she was six feet under the way she would have—bone dry, all in for the shock value. Except Diane wouldn’t have broken as fast as I did.
She would have given you this flat stare for five seconds that felt like five minutes. Then she would have laughed.”
I smile. The way he talks about Diane reminds me of the way I talked about my namesake, Grandma Thea. Respect, deep gratitude, even deeper admiration. “She sounds like she was special.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “She was.”
“That’s who your first cookbook is dedicated to, isn’t it?”
Alex peers up at me. And now I realize I’m busted.
I caved this past week and scoured The Bookshop for Alex’s cookbooks, learning he’s published two—first, Come Viene, Viene, the one Lauren gave me, which came out four years ago, and second, A Tavola, Non S’invecchia, which came out last year.
I bought the second cookbook and, on my lunch break, flipped through both of them—more beautiful, mouthwatering photos (of food and Alex); more scribbled-in-the-margins notes.
He tips his head and says, “So you do know who I am.”
“I do,” I tell him. “You’re my first celebrity best friend.”
He groans, letting his head fall back. “I didn’t say it like that.”
I drop my voice and do my best Alex Bruscato: “So you do know who I am.”
Alex belly laughs. “Okay, I said it like that.”
“I’m teasing,” I tell him. “One hundred percent teasing. I knew what you meant. And I actually didn’t know who you were, when we met.”
“Okay, that’s what I thought,” he says.
“Why?”
Alex is suddenly deeply interested in his food. I lean in, enjoying this. The fun of talking, teasing, this innate comfort I feel around him to be playful. “Why, Alex?”
“People just…” He takes a bite, chews, swallows, then looks at me like he’s hoping I’ll have forgotten where we were in the conversation. I smile, eyebrows lifted, so it’s clear I haven’t. “They act a certain way, when they know. They’re different.”
I set my chin on my hands, laced together. “So you really are a celebrity.”
“Eat your damn breakfast,” he grumbles.
I laugh. “No, I’m serious. I’ve read six celebrity autobiographies, and they all said that—there’s this feeling you get when people know. They change around you.”
Alex shrugs. “I’m not a celebrity. I’m just… recognized in the foodie space. And when that damn cookbook took off—”
“Oh, the hardship! A bestseller!”
He stabs a piece of bacon from my plate and pops it in his mouth.
I gasp. “How could you?”
“Smart-ass tax,” he explains.
I try to stab a piece of bacon from his plate, but his fork parries mine, pinning it to his plate. I drag away my empty fork, moping.
“Three sisters, Ted. I have a lot of practice defending my food.”
“Three?” I sigh. “I always wanted sisters.”
“No, you didn’t.”
I laugh. “I did! All I had was a brother eight years older than me who found me deeply exasperating. Probably because I was.”
“You? Exasperating?” He shakes his head. “Nah.”
“So rude!”
Alex grins, then takes another bite of his food. “So, just one brother for you?”
“Yep. Just three sisters for you?”
“Three is plenty. What about the rest of your family?”
I shift in my seat, poking at my food. “My parents are retired, moved to Columbus.”
“To Columbus?” he asks.
“Yep.”
“Who retires to Ohio?”
“Apparently, their post-retirement dream life was one surrounded by fields of corn. And both their families are there.”
Alex is quiet, watching me, like he’s waiting for me to say more about them. I don’t.
“Getting the sense things aren’t… great with your parents?” he finally hedges.
I shrug, trying to ignore the dull, familiar ache in my chest. “They’re not great. But they aren’t terrible, either. That’s sort of it in a nutshell. We’re just… not very close.”
Alex nods. “Parent shit is hard.”
I peer up, surprised by that. Alex so far has given me tight-knit, we-love-the-heck-out-of-each-other, big-happy-family vibes. Going by his knowing tone, maybe I was wrong. “Yeah, it is. Nothing about my upbringing was bad. It just… wasn’t…”
“Good, either,” he says.
I nod. “My parents were tired. I was an oopsie. My mom was my age when she had me, my dad was… well, your age. They thought they were done having babies, after my brother. Dad was in car sales, and the commission life is stressful. He was either gone all weekend and I missed him, or he was home on weeknights and grumpy, and then I wondered who I’d been missing in the first place.
Mom was a dedicated public-school teacher, and her students and her teaching were what she poured herself into.
By the time she’d come home to me on weeknights or handle me on her own all weekend while dad had his big sales days, she didn’t have much left. Neither of them did.