Lola
The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I…I couldn’t feel my arms.
“Kal? Kal!”
I wiggled my restricted limbs and hissed at Kal beside me. I had wondered once or twice what it would be like to wake up in Kal’s embrace, all tentacles and strong arms. Now I had my answer. Tight and nearly suffocating. But nice, if you can handle the shock of it.
“Wha–? Oh, sorry!” The tentacles loosened their hold on me first, unwrapping from the tops of my thighs and my shoulders. But Kal’s arms squeezed me tighter before letting go, pulling me so my body splayed over his.
I had so much to do, and between my tight timeline and long to-do list, I was on the verge of freaking out. But I was also tempted to stay where I was, lying in bed with my—well.
I didn’t quite know what to call Kal. All I knew was that he felt like mine.
Then I rolled over, tweaking my wrist in the process, and remembered that real life was happening outside of our quiet bubble. I didn’t just have a lot to do—I was injured and falling behind and oh god. I was on the verge of freaking out.
So, that was that. As much as I wanted to stay snuggled up in bed, I had a restaurant to save.
I groaned and shimmied out of bed and got to work.
First, I posted a message to Southern Charm’s social media accounts letting customers know we would be closed until Friday.
I teased a new menu and mentioned that we were contestants in the Greatest Restaurants of the Great Smoky Mountains Contest. Much to my surprise, it took no time for likes and comments to start streaming in.
I shoved my fingers through my messy hair. Where was this support before? I wanted to know. But instead of getting frustrated, I decided to take it as a sign that I was doing the right thing. I mean, people seemed excited about Southern Charm again! Who was I to complain?
Next, I sent a group message to my brain trust—my family, Nat, Al, and Darlene.
Dad had made me promise I wouldn’t be too proud to ask for help.
I needed that reminder—and I needed to pay attention to my own words to Kal last night.
Everyone deserved love, and sometimes that love comes in the form of showing up.
I knew these people would show up when I needed them the most, because I would do the same for them.
Because I loved them, and they loved me.
And I was right. The texts came streaming in.
Nat would help me freshen up the flowers outside the restaurant. And because she was freakishly good at everything she did, she would also touch up the hand-painted sign that hung by the door.
Darlene and her two refrigerator-sized sons would help rearrange the dining room.
I had some ideas for a new layout. I was inspired after the day Kal and I spent freshening the space up, but had immediately put those ideas on the back burner.
With renewed fervor, I sketched the new layout on a sheet of paper last night.
That morning, I would give those plans to Darlene so she could direct her boys as they made the sketch real.
Al agreed to design a new menu for me. She’d dabbled in graphic design for a couple of semesters in community college before switching to a hospitality program, and I knew anything she whipped up would be miles better than what I could create.
Mom and Dad would be my hype men, talking up the new and improved Southern Charm.
Dad, because he knew everyone in town (and most of the folks in the next town over), and Mom because she was the loudest person in Eastern Tennessee.
And while I often wished for her to keep her mouth shut, I was suddenly very excited to weaponize my mom’s gift of the gab.
With all of that figured out, I dragged Kal out of my bed.
When I went back into my room, I found him curled up like a cat in the middle of the bed, and I almost felt bad waking him up.
But I needed him, both for emotional support and, well.
Hand support. Someone had to do the cooking for my test recipes, after all.
And while Kal was a bit of a disaster in the kitchen at first, I’d found that he was a pretty quick learner.
His biggest barrier was that he got in his own head.
I could practically see the gears whirring when he made a mistake, like he was on the verge of scolding himself.
But really, cooking wasn’t easy, especially for someone entirely new to it.
And when I encouraged him the right way and saw how something clicked—those moments felt incredible.
His brilliant smile, the light returning to his eyes. It was all worth it.
Over the next few days, Kal and I fell into an easy rhythm. I riffled through Grandma Gladys’s recipe book, along with the other recipe cards Dad shared with me, to get ideas. Then I would point Kal around the kitchen to gather the right ingredients and cookware.
My wrist was getting better, but I didn’t want to test the limits of my sprain and slow the healing process, so mostly I kept my wrist on ice and ordered Kal around. In the restaurant, Kal wore his human suit, of course.
I was warier than ever of Kal being discovered—I think because I was increasingly worried about what it would mean if Kal had to disappear.
The concern hovered at the back of my mind, but I willed it away when it got too close to consciousness.
I had him now, didn’t I? And there was enough on my mind to worry about.
Kal in his human suit was awkward, like a foal learning how to move its body. Yet he gained impressive proficiency in the kitchen over the few days—enough that if he walked in now looking for a line cook job, I’d hire him in a second.
After several hours, when we were both tired and needed a change of scenery, Kal and I would walk back to my apartment.
He would shed the human suit that I’d grown to love and hate in equal measure (I loved that it brought him to me, let him exist among humans without putting him in danger, but hated that it wasn’t him), and we’d keep working.
We alternated between following my grandma’s recipes and making adjustments I recommended to update the flavors and cooking techniques.
I wrote out the new instructions as we went, adding my own notes next to Grandma’s.
In some cases, I added entirely new recipes, ones that I’d been mulling over for a long time.
I marveled at my chicken scratch next to hers—fresh ink beside faded.
Over those long days, I watched as Kal grew, bit by bit, from a novice cook into a capable one. Together, we took classic recipes that I loved, that I’d enjoyed since childhood, and breathed new life into them.
And at night, we’d fall into bed, still smelling of sugar and flour and grease—the smells now embedded in our pores—and fall asleep beneath the projection of my galaxy lamp.
We would start the night flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling, and end up a tangle of limbs and tentacles and Kal’s green hair mixed with my pink, a colorful galaxy of its own.
I was playing with fire, and I knew it. There was no reason for Kal to sleep in my bed rather than the couch, other than my insistence. Because it felt good, and he felt good, and I wanted to feel good for a while.
I think I hoped that my feelings toward Kal were just a by-product of proximity and being forced to accept help for the first time in a long time.
Like some sort of switch had been triggered in my brain that made Kal seem especially attractive in that particular moment, and that once the moment ended, I would regain my senses.
Because that would have been a convenient, non-complicated version of events that meant I was safe, and Kal was just a friend, and it didn’t matter that he was a literal alien from another planet.
I couldn’t even think about what that meant for the future, so I didn’t. Instead, I let myself grow more and more comfortable with Kal in my life, and ignored the consequences.
* * *
There’s an intimacy to cooking with someone that doesn’t get talked about enough.
It’s a dance as much as a partnership, and Kal and I were both still learning the steps. A brush of our arms here, a bump of the hips there.
Here, taste this, and a spoon pushed gently to the other’s parted lips.
Which meant that by Thursday, I was more enamored with Kal than ever.
And it was good. Okay, it was perfect. Or as near to perfect as it could be, considering I was stressed out of my mind, living with an extraterrestrial who felt more like my boyfriend, and reopening my family’s restaurant with a new menu so I could try to win ten thousand dollars to save said restaurant.
So, yeah.
I’d gotten a reminder text that morning from Eileen Watley, the inimitable senior coordinator for Greatest Restaurants of the Great Smoky Mountains Contest.
Good morning! Our judges will be rolling into Roswell Falls tomorrow afternoon at 5 P.M. sharp!
They will visit participating restaurants and fill out their scorecards on site.
Their reviews and scores will be compiled and posted on Appalachian Living’s website this weekend. Good luck and bon appetit!
So that was it. I had Thursday to prepare, and Friday to cook my ass off. My wrist didn’t hurt anymore—maybe a twinge of pain here or there, but in good enough shape for a full day of cooking—and I knew the recipes by heart.
I had really outdone myself, thanks to Kal’s help in the kitchen and the willing mouths of my most trusted taste testers.
The new menu was a blend of everything I loved about Grandma Gladys’s menu, and everything I loved about cooking.
Classics with a twist that made them feel new without being unfamiliar.
Cinnamon molasses cornbread. Hot honey chicken and waffles.
Catfish and grits. Fresh local vegetables, roasted and seasoned.
Chicken and dumplings loaded with herbs.
Buttermilk biscuits with spiced apple butter.
I’d developed an entire menu that I was proud of.
No, scratch that.
Kal and I developed a menu I was proud of. Because without him there to support me, to cook for me and cheer me on, I didn’t know if I could have done it.
But I was ready. If I failed, I failed—but at least I would fail knowing I did it my way.
I thought of a song my grandma loved, a Frank Sinatra track by the very same name. I’ve had a few regrets up until this point in my journey home. This wouldn’t be one of them.
I did a final walk-through of the restaurant, sent the menu to Al, who would get it printed out and dropped off bright and early the next day, and messaged Eileen Watley, senior coordinator for the Greatest Restaurants of the Great Smoky Mountains Contest, to triple confirm that Southern Charm was ready to host its judges.
And that was that. There was nothing more I could do; I’d done everything on my list except win the contest.
The only problem was Kal.
It would have been so much easier to pretend I didn’t see the change in Kal, or sense the mood shift between us. And during the busiest week of my entire life, I almost would have preferred being left in the dark.
But when you’ve felt the warmth of the sun on your skin for so long, and then it’s taken away, you notice. You can’t help but notice.
I couldn’t deny that Kal’s sudden aloofness affected my mood.
Anytime I’d tried to talk to him about it, it seemed like he would retreat even further. I didn’t want to push him away, but evidently he didn’t need any help. Maybe he was just tired like me, and his version of tired was grumpy rather than loopy, which was how my exhaustion tended to manifest.
What could I do, though? I decided to take a warm shower to try to calm my nervous system, which was displaying an incredible amount of nervousness for just one person.
I left Kal in my living room, flipping through the books on my bookshelf with the enthusiasm of a cat experiencing catnip for the first time.
He still had so much to learn about humans and life on Earth, and I found that I was increasingly guilty of imagining a future where I was there to discover those things with him.
When I emerged from the shower, I found Kal sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding something in his hands. He must not have heard me walk into the room, because he jumped when I said, “What’s that?”
I saw the exact moment Kal decided to lie. That’s the thing about good, honest people. They spend so much time being good and honest that you know right away when they’re acting out of character.
Kal’s hands twitched, itching to hide what was in them.
“Nothing,” he said, surreptitiously tossing the thing into his pack, the one he’d kept with him since the day we met. But his jade eyes said otherwise. It wasn’t nothing. It was very distinctly something.
I stood there, short-circuiting.
Confront Kal or let it go? Try to break down the walls I felt him building between us, or ignore it?
Or did it matter at all what I did, because while we were clearly a thing, we also didn’t have a label on that thing—just an undisclosed expiration date.
Before I could decide, Kal jumped up from the floor and pushed past me, the strap of his pack held tightly in his fist. The palm of his hand skimming across my stomach left goosebumps over my arms, and it was enough to distract me.
I could have chased after him, demanded an explanation. I could have shown him it wasn’t that easy to lose me because I cared about him deeply, even if he didn’t believe he deserved it.
I would like to say I didn’t know what stopped me from doing just that, but I did know. It was pure, unbridled fear. Like most people, I would do anything to avoid the sting of rejection in favor of what’s easy.
Then my phone started buzzing, cheerful as a busy bee, and I was properly distracted by a deluge of texts.
It seemed like everyone in my life had a renewed excitement for Southern Charm ever since I’d announced the grand reopening a few days ago. I was fielding texts, calls, and social media posts all week. I’d even gotten a request for an interview in the Roswell Falls Gazette.
Not a particularly remarkable publicity boost, but who was I to turn it down? After years of being in decline, I could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. A new Southern Charm, a new me.
Instead of trying to decide what to do about Kal, I sat on the couch scrolling mindlessly through phone notifications. What could I reasonably do the evening before one of the biggest days of my life?
And then, ridiculously, I wondered: What would a pithy motivational poster say about this?
Even alien men need space.
I snorted at the thought. But…well. Maybe there was some truth to it. People needed space; I could give Kal space, too.
Besides, I’d been chock full of nerves for days. Maybe I was just projecting my own stress onto Kal and making things seem worse than they actually were.
I twined my fingers through my damp hair, twisting it into a lazy braid, and willed myself not to think about it.
That night, Kal slept on the couch.