6. All You Can Eat #3
I stood there with my heart slamming against my chest, staring at this woman across my grandmother's counter.
Four months I'd carried that look on her face from the parking lot, the one right after, when she'd stared at me like she didn't recognize what she was looking at.
Told myself she'd seen the animal in me and run from it, rejected me for it because it loved her too much.
Turns out, it was never that simple. And it was never the animal she ran from. It was the part of her that wanted to feed it.
"Then why didn't you come? I checked my phone like a teenager for weeks, Ru. Every person that walked through the restaurant, sat at the bar, every buzzer at the penthouse, I—" My jaw locked. I made it unlock. "You knew where I was. You let me have my answer."
"Because I fell deeper, Dillion!" She hit the counter with the flat of her hand and the sound cracked through the kitchen.
"That night made it worse, don't you get it?
Watching you do that, hearing everything you said in that car, seven years of it all at once, and I felt myself falling all the way in and I looked at where I was falling from. "
She was breathing hard now, eyes shining, chin refusing to drop even as her voice shook.
"I didn't even know what I liked to eat anymore that wasn't what he ordered. Six years of that man was on my skin like grease, Dillion. It’s not something you can't get off with one wash, and you, " her voice broke and she pushed through it, "you deserved a woman who came to your door whole.
Choosing you with a whole heart, not bleeding on you from the last one.
Not making you the hospital. You'd already been the hospital for years. "
The rain filled the space where my voice should have been.
"So I stayed at my mama's and I did the work.
I sat in a therapist's office every Tuesday and said your name so many times she started calling you 'the chef' like she knew you.
" A wet laugh escaped her, gone as fast as it came.
"I learned what I like. How to solve my problems without you always doing it for me.
I learned that I let that man treat me like a rental because somewhere deep I believed that was my rate.
And the whole time, every single day of it, I was healing toward you.
I just couldn't tell you, because if I heard your voice I'd have come running before I was ready, and I'd have ruined us. Again."
I couldn't move.
"So no, I didn't come the next day." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, rough, angry at her own tears.
"I came today. I got on a boat I had no business on, in a storm, sick the whole way, because I finished, Dillion.
I finished the work. And I couldn't sit in my mama's house one more night knowing your week was ending and you'd be standing on that ferry dock waiting for me and —. "
She stopped. Her whole body was shaking.
Then I watched it happen, the last piece slide into place behind her eyes, the way I've watched a hundred line cooks realize mid-service that the order they've been building is for a table that already left.
Her face didn't crumple. It did something worse. It went still.
"Except you weren't going to be on that dock." Almost gentle. "Were you?"
I didn't answer, the rain did. She let out one note of a laugh with nothing in it.
I rubbed my eyes and stepped back until the sink caught me, and I gripped the edge of it behind me with both hands, so that I wouldn't reach for her.
"This is impossible, Ru. What did you want me to do?
" It came out low and cracked and tired.
"I told you how I felt. All of it. Laid it out in that car and told you, if you don't come, I'll have my answer.
You didn't come. Not the next day, not the day after.
Then damn near a month later later you send me a text.
Not a call. Not a pull-up. A text talking about 'how's your day' like we're coworkers.
Like I didn't leave my heart sitting in your mama's driveway.
What was I supposed to do with 'how's your day,' Aurelia?
Only thing before that was congrats on the article. "
"Dillion, the world is not your kitchen.
You don't get to fire the tickets and set the times and have everybody's feelings come up when you call for them.
You gave me an ultimatum on the worst night of my life, like an hour after I watched you break a man, ten minutes after you told me seven years of truth in a moving car, and then you parked all of that in front of my mama's house and told me the clock was running.
That's not a choice, that's a deadline. And I'd just spent six years living under a man's deadlines. If I wasn't ready, I wasn't ready."
"You could've just told me that. One sentence, Ru. 'I need time.' I'd have waited."
"I know." No flinch. She took it on the chest. "I could have, and I didn't, because I couldn't hear your voice and stay gone, and I needed to stay gone to get right.
I told you that. And that's why I'm here now, okay?
That's why I'm standing in this kitchen instead of sending another stupid text or being awkward with you at an event. "
Something in my throat went tight, and I had to look away from her for a second, out toward the dark window, before I trusted myself to look back. When I did, her shoulders had come down some, the fight easing out of them, and she spoke again, softer this time.
"I was at my mama's, helping her put up peaches. And I had this thought about stone fruit, and I couldn't get rid of it."
I raised an eyebrow. "Stone fruit? You wanna talk about produce in the middle of this conversation right now?"
"Yeah." She looked up at me, and her eyes were clear in a way they hadn't been since she showed up on that porch.
"Stone fruit only comes in summer. Peaches. Plums. Cherries. Nectarines. Fruit that’s sweet, heavy and impossible to eat without juice running down your wrist, staining your fingers, ruining something you're wearing.
Demands all your whole attention or it's gone before you even decide you wanted it. "
She was speaking to me in my language. The same language Madeline had taken a small dig at earlier that night, cool it on the culinary metaphors, like it was something cute I did instead of the one true thing I actually understood about the world.
I didn't know a lot of things for certain, but I knew food.
Food was the one place things always made sense to me, cause and effect, heat and time.
"You can't order it in February and expect it to taste like anything worth having.
It has a season. The season is short and doesn't wait, Dillion.
It doesn't care if you're ready. It doesn't care if the timing's bad or the house is full or you already told yourself the tree was done. It ripens when it ripens."
My hands had gone still on the sink edge behind me as I listened.
"The best stone fruit is also the most unforgiving.
" Her voice was firmer now. "Too early and it's hard, closed off, not ready to give you anything.
Too late and it's soft in the wrong places, past its moment, still beautiful to look at but already turning into something else.
There's a window where it's exactly what it was always meant to be.
Where the sweetness finally catches up to the heat. "
"Aurelia—" I tried to interrupt.
"Let me finish." She held my eyes and I stopped. "Some things can't be rushed into ripeness. They can only be grown slow, under the right conditions, by the right kind of patience.”
My chest was getting tight.
"Stone fruit is also the messiest thing you'll ever love.
It doesn't let you keep your distance. It runs.
It stains. You can't hold it carefully and expect to taste it, you have to commit.
Have to let it ruin you a little. Have to decide that whatever it costs you to hold it is worth what it gives back. "
She leaned forward on the counter then, and her hands came across the space between us as I pushed off the sink, palms up, open, stopping just short of mine once I got closer.
"It always is," she continued. "But only if you reach in time.
Only if you stop standing in front of the tree with your hands at your sides, telling yourself it's not the right moment, you're not ready, the season's long, there's still time.
There isn't…there’s only ever this summer.
This fruit. This window of warmth before the whole thing turns, and you're left standing in the cold holding nothing but the memory of how good it almost was. "
My jaw was clenched so tight I could feel it in my temples.
"We are stone fruit, Dillion. You and me.
Seven years on the branch." A tear got loose and she didn't wipe it.
"And I can feel the light leaving. So reach for me now, while I'm standing in your kitchen.
Or tell me the season's over, and I'll get on the first boat out…
because we stain. We will mess each other up unintentionally, leak on to everything and everybody if we don't reach and clean this up. "
Tears started falling from somewhere so deep, it was shaking her whole body on the way out. I couldn’t even find my words, not a food metaphor, not nothing.
"I get why you took me to my mama's, Dillion.
" She kept going, surprising me. "I get why you didn't take me home.
I know it hurt you too." She looked down, then back up, and I could see the war behind her eyes.
"But you did it because it was right for me.
You always do the right thing for me. Even when it guts you. "
I gripped the edge of the counter to stop myself from pouring another drink. Didn't pour another. This was the burn in my chest that I needed to feel.