4. Tempering #3
"This feels like a game, Dillion." Her voice was controlled but not completely, a hairline in good porcelain.
"I thought I was coming out here to spend time with a man who was interested in me.
But I'm putting it together now. There's some girl. People mentioned her, as if she’s weather that already ruined somebody's wedding, and I decided she wasn't an issue. You know why? Because you never brought her up, she’s never came around. Because you took me on your solo week, the week everybody on this island treats like it’s a standing appointment, the week I'm told nobody's ever been invited to.
Everything came out in my favor. And still, something in this house keeps telling me that even not speaking, even gone, this person is—"
"You're not competing against anyone," I said with every bit of patience I had left.
"Then why does it feel like I'm losing?"
I scrubbed a hand down my face and behind my neck, trying to center myself.
"You won't give me the title of being your girlfriend." She continued pushing, “You barely touch me the way I've asked you to. You didn't really kiss me until this morning. I'm losing to somebody who isn't even here."
I pushed back from the table and picked up both our plates without a word, because I needed something to do that wasn't this conversation, and the kitchen was the one place I had always known what to do next.
Sixteen years old in juvie, I knew what to do next in a kitchen.
My grandmother in the ground, I knew what to do next in a kitchen.
A critic at table six, a freezer down in July, a man bleeding in my parking lot, there has never been a moment in my life so far gone that a kitchen didn't have a next task in it — scrape, rinse, rack.
That's the truth about men like me that women mistake for coldness: we're not leaving the room, we're going to the one place we can still be of use without making things worse.
I needed a minute to breathe. That fight didn't belong to us, not yet. It was borrowed off some year down the road where we'd already sanded each other down to the grain, and I'd reached ahead and pulled it into a Tuesday that hadn't earned it.
But that wasn't the whole of it. Underneath was the part I didn't want to look at straight: I needed to believe I could be what she wanted.
Madeline was good for me. She wanted me, had no problem saying it or showing it. She was willing to fight for this before we'd even made things official. That's the kind of woman I wanted.
So I decided that I'd go back in there, sit down, apologize like a man, feed her right, take her upstairs and kiss her slow, the way she'd been asking without asking.
I'd give her back to back orgasms, more than she came for.
I'd hold her after, till she went heavy and her breath went even and her hand quit gripping.
I'd be good to her. Be honest about everything that wasn't Aurelia. And that was most of it. Damn near all of it.
I'd start my shift later on Sundays so I could sit in a pew with my hand on her knee and my head bowed for Sunday Service. I'd build a life on a woman who never once made me wonder where I stood. Men have built on less. Built on a whole lot less and slept fine.
Something in me would have to die for it. I knew that but, I'd erode gradually. It couldn't hurt more than Valentines Day. Nothing would.
Besides, a Dubois becoming a Duckworth? My father would finally get the thing he'd been chasing since before I was born – proof that the name meant something now instead of just money trying to buy its way into a room. They’d be Sunday dinners where he'd sit up straighter than usual, where Madeline's mother would compliment the wine, where my father would tell the story of Capa Dillion's start like it was always destined for this, for us, for a name marrying into old Roena County instead of just serving it dinner.
Her parents would probably buy us some house neither one of us could really afford, the type of gift that gets dressed up as a wedding present so nobody has to say out loud what it actually is.
I'd let them, because that's the currency people like that trade in, and because saying no to it would cost more than the house itself. Or she’d redecorate the whole penthouse within a year, probably, tear out everything I'd picked without asking, and I'd let her, because that's what a man does when a woman's building a life instead of just visiting one.
I could do that.
Please, Dillion. I wanna go with you. Don’t leave me.
I shook that voice out my head and turned to the freezer.
The ice cream had been churning since that afternoon.
Brown butter base, a ribbon of salted caramel folded in by hand, taking longer than it needs to because I make it the way my grandmother made it, slowly, with full attention, refusing to let the process be less than what it's supposed to be.
That woman never once in her life rushed a custard, not for company, not for church, not for anybody.
I have met heads of state with less command of a room than she had of a kitchen with a wooden spoon in it.
I pulled the ice cream out and let it sit on the counter a minute, the way you let anything that's been held at one temperature adjust before you ask something of it.
I plated two bowls. The ice cream released clean from the scoop, caramel showing through in amber lines where the spoon cut it.
Then the peaches from this afternoon, caramelized dark and glossy out of the cast iron, the bourbon still in them somewhere under the sweetness.
Stone fruit at the exact top of its life.
I'd stood at that stove today and caught them at the door, one day before they crossed over, and it had felt like the only thing all week I'd timed exactly right.
I picked up both bowls and walked back to the table, and I set hers down first. The way I always plate. The person you're feeding before yourself, always, first thing my grandfather ever taught me in a kitchen and the last thing I'd unlearn if I live to be a hundred.
"Sit down and have dessert with me, Madeline."
I pulled out my own chair and sat down like the matter was settled.
She looked at the bowl, then at me. I looked back at my bowl and then I heard her sit and pull herself in.
She picked up her spoon like a woman deciding to eat, not a woman being fed.
I let her have that too. Pulled my own bowl in and didn't say another word about the fight, because the fight was over the second she sat down, and a man smart enough to know that doesn't go looking to relitigate a win.
The first bite did what it was supposed to do.
I watched her eyes close, just a second, the briefest surrender, the brown butter and the caramelized peach and the bourbon underneath all of it finding her at the same time.
A chef learns to live off that half second. It's the only review that never lies.
She opened her eyes, and I could see it. The whole indictment was still sitting in her, waiting to find out whether I was going to do anything with it or just feed her dessert and call it a night.
She pointed her spoon at me.
"You can't shut me up with dessert and dick, Dillion."
"Watch me." I teased with a smirk, feeling a little relief that she was making a joke.
"Arrogant asshole."
"I'll be that." I took another slow bite. "Been called worse."
"You better back it up, is all I'm saying…
making me wait all week. Upsetting me at dinner.
You've opened a tab, Dillion, and it's accruing interest by the hour.
I'd start thinking about how you intend to make good on it, because I don't extend credit indefinitely, and I've never once in my life settled for less than what I was owed. "
"I'll clear the whole balance, Miss Dubois. Attitude included." My hand found her knee under the table, squeezed. "Don't you worry about the service over here.”
I winked at her. I don't fold. I fold things.
"My goodness.” She chuckled. “Not that little awkward boy in a ballroom anymore, huh?"
"Never belonged in those rooms."
"Now you own the room, and they come to you, begging for a reservation the way I've spent all week begging for your heart."
"You don't have to beg me for anything, Madeline.
I've been giving you everything I have to give right now.
I need you to taste what's actually on the plate instead of trying to guess what's still in the pan.
We're still building the foundation, and foundations don't hold if you rush the pour.
Focus on what I'm putting into this. Not what you think is missing from something that hasn't even come off the heat yet. "
"First I'm a braise, now this." She deadpanned it, took another bite. "Cool it on the culinary metaphors."
Something about that ran cold through me. I looked at her a second longer than the joke deserved, long enough that I watched her notice she'd stepped somewhere she didn't mean to.
"This is the language I speak." I said, plain, no smile behind it.
"I didn't mean anything by it." She said it soft, and I could tell she meant it, that there wasn't a drop of malice anywhere in her. Didn't change anything.
"It's fine." I picked my spoon back up, and it was the first bona fide lie I'd told her all week that I actually meant to keep.
When I looked back up she was watching me the way you watch something you're afraid you've hurt without meaning to.
"I'm not trying to fight with you, Dillion." Her voice had lost the edge it had been carrying since she'd said Aurelia's name out loud. "I just want to know what this is. What we are."
She turned her spoon over in her bowl without eating, watching the caramel fold under and disappear.
"I've wanted you a long time. Long before this week. And now you're finally right here, and I still feel like I'm trying to hold water in my hands."
Tell her.