Chapter 1
ONE
Annie
One Year Later
Flirting with a porn star is definitely against the rules.
Different sets of rules. Sister Annie’s rules. Hawk Publishing House’s client relationship rules. Moral, ethical, spiritual, religious rules.
But because I can’t help myself, I type: Wow. How’s your dick?
This is also a question of genuine concern, however, and it follows right on the heels of watching this deliciously naked man groan, “Fuck,” on my screen while clutching said appendage. “You would think I’d learn after the first few times. I should start wearing protection,” he had said.
I chuckled and pulled out my phone to email him immediately, something I’ve been doing with regularity for the past several months.
As I wait for his reply, his sexy scholar voice continues over my laptop speakers.
“But anyway, the reason I keep burning my dick is that oil splatters when moisture comes into contact with it when it’s hot.
The water pretty much immediately vaporizes into steam, which expands quickly, which pushes the oil out of the pan.
” He lifts up on his tiptoes to stick his impressive length under a stream of presumably cold water running from the sink.
“And onto my dick,” he finishes in a deep baritone.
Goddamn.
His turning towards the sink allows me the perfect opportunity to objectify the hell out of him. Sorry, he’s a client. I meant admire. Admire the hell out of him. Out of his ass, that is. Although ‘ass’ has never seemed like the proper terminology.
Badonk, perhaps?
Because the creator of NakedReactions is big. Beefy. Bulky? No, that’s not right either.
Thicc. With two c’s.
He’s big all over, but not in a meathead, gym rat way. Obviously strong, but most of his muscle is covered with a thick, nay thicc, layer of padding. More bear over lion. More dad-bod than pro-athlete.
I wipe at the drool collecting at the side of my mouth.
He’s hot as hell, and we don’t even need to see his face to make that determination.
His camera is always angled in such a way that his head is cut off.
For privacy reasons, he told me. But he could still have the face of a melted candle and still be considered hot, because his body, combined with the deep intentionality of his voice and his clear intellect, is a solid recipe for success, as evidenced by his hundreds of thousands of followers on his subscription-based platform.
We love a smart beefcake of a man who cooks. In the nude. While explaining, in thorough detail, the science behind his cooking processes. Hundreds of thousands of people will even pay ten dollars a month to watch him do so.
Hawk Publishing House will pay him a hefty seven-figures to make a cookbook out of his videos. And they will pay me, a desperate-for-cash failed poet under their employ, a (barely livable) wage to ghostwrite it.
My phone dings.
From: chef@
To: ali@
He’s out of commission for a while. I’m going to the doctor in a bit. I feel really sorry for him.
I smile, and amidst the sizzling noise of potato sticks frying in hot oil and the creator’s languid, professorial voice saying something about pectin and starch granules and enzymes and pectin methyl-something, my fingers start flying and I’m hitting send.
From: ali@
To: chef@
Seems like a standard occupational hazard for you. But who could ever feel sorry for what you’re packing?
An imaginary nun reprimands me from my shoulder. Annie, Sister Annie snaps.
Fuck you, Sister Annie, this doesn’t count! Flirting with a porn star—sorry, adult content creator (his preferred terminology)—may toe the line, but it certainly doesn’t cross it. It might bend it, though, but at least I’m not getting bent over. By anyone other than myself.
Sex with myself doesn’t count, I proclaim to Sister Annie from Rock Bottom, also known as my parents’ basement. And I’m totally sober. And you’re gone in a month, anyway.
I jam my fingers into my eyelids.
Sister Annie. This sanctimonious bitch. Guardian nun of my now-two-year-long self-imposed vow of abstinence: no sex, no drugs, no alcohol.
A hard reset after a decade of reckless abandon, of nights blurred by strobe lights and fake friendships and sloppy fights, of rooftop misadventures and waking up in strangers’ beds with nothing but a headache.
She got the job two years ago, when my twin sister May kicked me out of our shared apartment and forced me to move back home.
Here. Where I’ve stayed safely. Bored, but safe.
Until last year.
After I rose like a drunken phoenix (an insane yet sexy one—the two truest things that dumb fuck Nico has probably ever said about me) from the literal flames of May’s engagement party, I made a promise.
No more problems. No more chaos or relapses or ruining more things for May.
I gave Sister Annie one more year. Her last day is on the day of May’s wedding.
If it’s something outside of my bed or this house, then it’s off the table. Sister Annie has one job: to make sure that this time, I don’t screw everything up.
From: chef@
To: ali@
You’re making me blush, Ali
However, flirting with an adult content creator is a bit of harmless fun, especially under the shroud of secrecy we’re operating under.
Immediately after my boss Patricia gave me this project, as soon as I contacted him, right off the bat, he demanded to communicate via email only.
No real names. No texts or phone calls, no video chat.
I could watch his videos to get his “general vibe,” but that’s all.
To him, I’m Ali, which is just my email address—short for Anne Li—so I’ve never bothered correcting him. Ali, the ghostwriter from who-knows-where. He didn’t give me a name, so I call him by his email, too.
But it’s tough to get a handle on someone’s voice while they parade naked through a kitchen.
Aside from the faceless hunk of meat, something about it seems impersonal.
His voice is sexy but seems unnatural and practiced.
Fake. I get that it’s for privacy’s sake, but…
if I wanted to do a good job on this cookbook, I needed his real voice.
So, in old Annie form, I started flirting him out of his shell.
So, fuck you, Sister Annie—it’s for work.
My phone rings, indicating a group video chat.
“Hey, everyone,” I answer with a smile.
“That’s one way to get his dick wet,” Fernanda shouts, her eyes magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses, not one strand of hair out of place from her hairspray helmet.
“Jesus,” Izzy says, “I’m walking down Broadway right now, Fernanda. You can’t yell that shit.”
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who blasts their music in public,” Betty snarks. All I see is the underside of her wrinkled chin on my screen.
“A cry for help,” Fernanda shouts once more, “some real main character behavior!”
“I forgot my headphones at home,” Izzy mutters, topknot bobbing at the top of her screen.
“Your parents not give you enough attention growing up—”
“Did we want to discuss this episode or use this as a forum to air our grievances regarding sidewalk etiquette?” I chime in, heart filled with warmth for my best friend Izzy Flores and my two newest and realest friends.
After a few months of Sister Annie, I got bored in the basement.
I figured the Brooklyn Public Library branch in my neighborhood was about as G-rated and safe as it got, so I started volunteering for a family literacy program, helping kids fall in love with books.
I love kids anyway—they’re chaotic little goblins like me.
And Fernanda and Betty. I watched the two of them perform Grumpy Monkey for a group of five-year-olds, both of them wearing clothes that were blazingly loud and/or blindingly sparkly, trading off animal voices like a well-rehearsed comedy duo. I loved them immediately.
Still, I hung back. Sister Annie had me convinced that getting too close would somehow ruin their lives.
But Fernanda and Betty vehemently disagreed.
They barged their way into friendship like they’d done it before—maybe they saw something in me and decided I could use a little love.
Maybe they just didn’t scare easily. Whatever it was, they found me in a quiet place and gave me something louder: community.
And not of the five a.m. afterparty in Bushwick sort.
Izzy loved them instantly, too. Which mattered—because after over a decade of being the “honorary triplet” to me and May, her stamp of approval wasn’t optional.
“Izzy’s the one watching pornography in public right now.” Fernanda says the word “pornography” as loudly as possible.
“Jesus, can everyone please lay off? I have a privacy screen on my phone for work.”
“This episode’s pretty good,” Betty interrupts casually, as if we are watching a normal sitcom with a laugh track and not a group of women ages thirty to seventy-five watching a naked giant explaining the science behind cooking the perfect French fry.
“I feel sorry for his dick,” Izzy mutters.
“I could never feel sorry for what he’s packing. Seems like a standard occupational hazard for him, anyway,” adds Fernanda.
“That’s what I said!” I yell.
Fernanda and Betty do not like to cook. Fernanda and Betty are, however, thirsty for all the men who cook on various cooking shows.
After listening to their particularly long, pining soliloquy of “that mean daddy, Gordon Ramsay,” I mentioned NakedReactions to them, and within the hour, they had each subscribed to his channel.
We try to have a cute little watch party for all of his episodes.
“Aww,” Fernanda coos eventually. “Look at him. He’s all red in the places the oil splashed on him. It got on his weird tattoo.”
I turn back to my phone.
From: ali@
To: chef@
Sorry, did I say dick? That was supposed to say duck. How’s your duck?
Chef has one distinguishing feature that could potentially help identify his body in case of kidnapping or murder by a super fan (not me, of course…
I probably couldn’t lift his arm, much less his entire corpse).
It’s an interesting tattoo on his left pec—a pink hallucinatory duck head with a surprised look on its face.
The duck’s bill is open in an ‘o’ shape.
It dons a tiny chef hat and inexplicably has eyebrows, both of which are raised high.
Right now, the duck is also kind of splotchy and red.
From: chef@
To: ali@
Overcooked
I smile, and then my fingers go flying.
From: ali@
To: chef@
Might need a taste test to confirm
I tune back into our group chat, where they’re currently debating how much this naked chef can deadlift “with an ass like that.”
“Me on one side of the bar and Fernanda on the other,” Betty is saying.
“I think he could manage me in the middle, too,” Izzy adds on, “because that is one strong-looking ass.”
“You could bounce a damn coin off it.”
“—whole piggy bank.”
“Chip a tooth, probably.”
The thirsty commentary eventually ends, and after everyone hangs up, I pull up my email again.
From: ali@
To: chef@
Don’t answer that. I’ve surpassed my flirting quota for the day. But here’s today’s Two Truths and a Lie.
1. I’m deathly afraid of flying.
2. I haven’t drunk alcohol, done drugs, or had sex in almost a year.
3. I love my job.
At the beginning of our working relationship, I’d just been watching his videos and typing up standard recipes with some basic descriptions.
He didn’t like it. He wanted it to feel like more of a meaningful, personal story, he’d said, not so much just a collection of recipes.
May and I used to play Two Truths and a Lie as kids to practice our twin telepathy, so I started playing it with Chef after flirting him out of his shell so we could get to know one another better, so I could get a better sense of his voice.
For some reason, we just started putting the lies at the end.
They’ve gotten pretty personal, and now, even worse than flirting with an adult content creator over email?
I may or may not have a crush on one.
I’ve gotten bits and pieces of his voice, his attitude, his humor, and what I’ve found underneath it all is warmth and kindness. Empathy.
I like him.
I finish taking notes on what Chef’s saying about the French fries, but it’s not at all what I want to write about. I’m dying to write poems about the man himself.
His thick hands twist and pluck, pinch and scoop, a rhythm of motion in the cramped space of his tiny kitchen.
Massive thighs shift, moving him up and down the narrow aisle.
The kitchen is sleek—modern and polished, the kind you find in any city apartment where square footage is sacrificed for skyline views.
I don’t recognize any of the buildings out the window.
He could be anywhere. Chicago, maybe. Boston, Miami. Even Tokyo.
But here, in this sliver of space, his presence is overwhelming.
a quiet choreography—
each step
a negotiation,
a conversation
between body and space.
a warm cloud
pressing against the walls,
his body
swallowing half of it whole,
his energy
saturates the rest.
He’s finished cooking. He lifts a fry to try one, and I hear an audible crunch.
Damn. My salivating continues. He finally plates his French fries and shows them to the camera.
They look incredible. His dick peeks out from under the plate, and honestly, like everything he cooks…
there’s just something about his dick that makes me want to put it in my mouth.
I shut my laptop and bang my head on the headboard behind me. I should not be watching this man’s por—adult content in my parents’ basement. I should not be flirting with the adult content creator. Even if it is for work. Because it’s for work.
But I hope his dick is okay.