Chapter Seven
SEVEN
Blake tilted the sauté pan, watching oil run across it in a shimmering sheet.
Hot enough. He slid the diced onions into the pan and the rich scent and loud sizzle momentarily muted his racing thoughts.
Cooking soothed him. When his mind got out of control, like it had been ever since playing with Rose the other day, he could make a meal from scratch and let the mental chatter fade away.
Kink had always been another focusing influence.
When playing with someone, he could lose himself in their needs and reactions, and the rest of the world disappeared.
Playing with Rose on Wednesday had evoked that experience once more, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.
It had been two nights since their play session and she still loomed foremost in his thoughts.
Everything in him wanted to reach out immediately afterward.
He wanted to play again, ask her personal questions, set up a date, meet in person …
all ridiculous, a reflection of his loneliness and not their (nonexistent) relationship.
He’d checked in with her yesterday to see how she was doing, exchanged a few friendly texts.
Then he’d told her he wanted to play again soon (the truth) and then said he had to run (a lie).
He had to set these boundaries or he’d get too attached.
Blake looked up from the stove as the apartment door opened, accompanied by the ding of a text message.
Maggie entered, arms full of two bags of groceries that she could barely see over.
Another text message ding, then another.
“My god, Cora!” She set the bags of groceries on the counter before he could move to help her. “My sister will not stop messaging me.”
Blake smiled down at the onions. He was starting to get a sense of Maggie’s relationship with her younger sister, where Maggie pretended to be long-suffering despite her unwavering devotion. “What’s she want?”
“We’re trying to plan timing for the food truck festival tomorrow.”
Blake kept stirring the onions as he glanced over at Maggie. “There’s a food truck festival tomorrow?”
“Yeah, out on the Greenway.” She pulled her phone out of her back pocket.
When she spoke, it had that slow, absent-minded quality of someone trying to talk while they were reading something else.
“Been meaning to go … looks fun … expensive, but a good time.” She typed out a message to her sister, frowning, a line appearing between her eyebrows.
It vanished as she sent her message and looked up.
“Smells great in here. What are you making?”
“Risotto.” Blake stirred the onions again, letting them cook down. The rest of his ingredients sat staged in a neat line while the chicken broth reached a simmer on the back burner.
“I didn’t know you could cook.” Maggie wandered into the kitchen to peer over his shoulder into the pan, getting up on tiptoes to make up the inch difference in their heights.
Her breath whispered past his cheek, the unexpected intimacy making him pause his stirring. “Just looks like onions right now.”
“It is just onions right now.” He gestured to the pot in the back. “And chicken stock. You have to keep the stock hot so you don’t bring down the temperature of the rice.” The stock was steaming but not simmering. Perfect. “And yes, I can cook, but I don’t like cooking in the heat of summer.”
“That explains why I thought you lived on takeout.” Maggie returned to the groceries, stepping out of Blake’s personal space, and the tightness in his chest eased.
Her direct proximity made him tense, not like anxiety, but like …
tense in a different way. Maybe they were still getting used to each other.
“In the summer, I do live on takeout.” The onions had cooked down enough and he added the minced garlic. The smell wafted up, strong and gorgeous, and he inhaled deeply. “I budget for it. But now the weather’s getting cooler and I start cooking again.”
Maggie started putting groceries away. “Like a seasonal flower that only starts blooming in the fall.”
“Chrysanthemums,” Blake said absent-mindedly. “Or goldenrod. Some types of sunflowers, too.”
“Right.”
He didn’t have to look at her to know that she was laughing at him, which made him smile. “Do you want some of this? It serves four.”
“Really? Thanks.” Maggie held up a bottle of wine. “I picked up this rosé if you want to split it. My contribution to dinner.”
“That sounds great.” Blake added the dry arborio rice to the pan, stirring it around with the wooden spoon.
The grains gleamed in the butter and olive oil, toasting in the heat.
He kept stirring. In the first stages of risotto, you had to keep things moving, never letting anything settle too long or it would burn.
Once the rice was cooking, then it became all about waiting.
A mixture of action and patience, alternating between the two; the secret to a perfect risotto.
If you moved too slow when you were supposed to move fast, or you rushed ahead when you were supposed to wait, everything would turn out badly.
He wished life and relationships came with timing instructions as clear as those for risotto.
When the rice was toasted, he poured in the white wine, a sweeter wine than he would usually use but it was what was in the fridge. The large saucepan sizzled and steamed, filling the kitchen with a garlic-onion-wine aroma.
“Smells like a restaurant.” Maggie put the last of her groceries in the fridge behind him, then poured herself a glass of water.
She stood at the edge of his peripheral vision, tipping her head back to swallow, her throat working …
and Blake needed to focus elsewhere. No, this was not acceptable.
She’d come to mind the other night, too, when he was punch-drunk on orgasm endorphins after playing with Rose, and the two women had blended in his mind in the hazy moments before sleep.
He’d spent the last couple of days rationalizing it away as a product of hormones and exhaustion.
He didn’t have that excuse now. She was his roommate, for god’s sake, and she’d never approve of his private life.
He searched for a topic of conversation that wasn’t the smooth line of her throat and the way it twitched when she swallowed. “Do you … like to cook?”
She leaned sideways against the fridge. “No way. I can cook, I mean, I’ve lived on my own for nearly ten years now, and I started cooking for Cora and me when we were teenagers, but I don’t like it.
It’s a better alternative to spending a fortune on eating out.
” She paused, taking another sip. “I will never turn down food that somebody else is cooking.”
Her phone dinged.
“Or food trucks,” Blake said as Maggie typed something else into the phone.
“Or food trucks.” She looked up from the screen. “Cora keeps being vague about the timing because she, quote, ‘might have something going on in the morning,’ but doesn’t know when it will end.”
“Well, they’re not breakfast trucks, right?”
She brushed a wavy lock of brown hair behind her ear. “Breakfast food trucks aren’t a thing.”
“They are in New York. Metal-sided carts all over the financial district. They pop up every morning and disappear every night. They sell bagel sandwiches and … pastries … and coffee …” He was rambling, still trying not to think of the soft curve of Maggie’s neck.
“Since when did you become an expert on New York food trucks?”
Blake stirred the risotto again. “I spent a few weeks going back and forth there one summer.”
“Chasing a girl?”
He looked up from the sauté pan. Maggie wore a knowing expression, one eyebrow arched, lips curled just shy of a smirk.
He gave another half shrug. “Maybe.” His last girlfriend, Sharon, had been considering moving there, and she did a summer internship to see how she liked it.
He’d felt her slipping away and had almost grabbed hold out of reflex.
But letting go had turned out to be best for both of them.
If Maggie sensed that there was more to his story, she didn’t press, and the smirk eased out of the frame of her lips. “I, uh,” she began, looking around. “I told Cora I’d be there at one, and she could text me.”
“Seems reasonable. That’s a good time. Lunch, or snacks, or whatever.
” He wasn’t even sure what he was saying.
The rice had absorbed the wine and he stirred it around to the rough sounds of the grains scraping against the bottom of the pan.
Then he carefully scooped a ladleful of the hot stock over them.
The steam curled up, along with an aroma of deliciousness, and he let his eyes fall closed.
“What happens now?” Maggie’s voice, much closer than she had been, made him jump. She stood at his elbow, peering into the pan again.
“Now it has to absorb the stock.” He swallowed and smoothed out the rice into a thin layer. “You can only add the stock a small amount at a time. It’ll eventually take the whole four cups, but you can’t add it all at once or it will never absorb.”
“There’s a Zen koan in there somewhere.” Maggie nudged him with her elbow. “Is that why people say risotto is hard? You have to get all the timing right?”
“Yeah. You can’t rush it, and there are a lot of ways for it to go wrong.
But it’s not particularly difficult.” He turned aside from the sizzling pan to the block of parmesan cheese, focusing on the task to avoid accidentally grating his knuckles.
The action was meditative. Maggie moved away; probably for the best.
“Anything that’s getting this much cheese makes me happy,” she said from behind him.
“This is one of the first things I learned to cook.” He spoke loud enough to be heard over the cheese rasping across the grater. “I thought, if I can figure this out, everything else will be easy.”