Dinner for One (22 page)

He thinks about it for the rest of his shift and his way home and all the way to his door where a new container rests. Seeing the red and white Tupperware is a weight lifted from his shoulders, an easing in his riotous, confused thoughts. He opens it before he even gets inside this time. He’s waited long enough. The box contains aligot: mashed potatoes with cheese and garlic melted into them. It smells wonderful, even cooled as it is.

Chloe is beyond outraged when he heats it up and eats it at the table, not sharing any with her. “It’s not good for you,” he tells her, and her nose goes up in the air as she stalks off.

It practically melts in his mouth, and he cleans the container out in no time.

If Bastien is smiling as he writes the next note, well there’s no one there to see it.

Too much garlic.

THE FIRE
alarm goes off in his building at three in the morning, and James is forced to go stand on the street with the rest of his neighbors as they wait for the fire truck to arrive and clear the building. Nothing’s smoking, so James is pretty sure this is another case of someone accidently lighting toast on fire or something. Although why they’re making toast at three in the morning he doesn’t know.

Everyone is uniformly grumpy at having been woken from their sleep by a loud, piercing alarm. James is not an exception. Thankfully this shared grumpiness keeps anyone from trying to talk to him. He looks up recipes on his phone while he’s waiting, swiping through ones he has saved as possibilities. He might as well be productive if he has to be up at this ungodly hour.

The fire truck pulls up, bright glaring lights flashing and sirens blaring. He wonders if his ears are bleeding at this point. His headache is certainly ticking away. As they stomp into the building, he moves his thumb back and forth between the tiny icons of a cassoulet recipe and a recipe for
garbure
. He’s tempted to go with the latter because it looks simple. At the same time, he thinks it’s time to make Bastien something more complicated, and he does have all the ingredients.

He opens the recipe.

It’s definitely complicated, and it’s going to take a long time. He won’t be able to redo it if he fucks it up.

Challenge accepted.

They get cleared to return to their apartments half an hour later (someone’s cat knocked a candle over and set a place mat on fire—he can’t make this shit up). Predictably, after standing outside for an hour at three in the morning in October in New York City, he’s not feeling so tired anymore. His headache is still going strong.

He turns on all the lights, hooks his phone up to his Bluetooth speakers, and listens to Walk the Moon’s radio station on Spotify while he prepares the kitchen. He shakes his hips while he dumps the beans into water to soak, and he sings along loudly while he chops the garlic, onions, and carrots. And then he realizes the beans have to soak overnight and he doesn’t have all the ingredients needed to continue. He really needs to start preparing better.

He puts everything away, calculates at exactly what time he can start cooking in the morning, and proceeds to dance around his living room obnoxiously till he’s tired enough to pass out on his couch.

He wakes in the morning when he rolls right off the couch and lands on the rug. The rug is soft; his landing is not. He groans. Why didn’t he go to his bed? He has to use the table to pull himself to a stand, and it takes not one but three cups of coffee to make his eyes open more than a slit.

He’s exhausted, okay, and he still needs to run to the store to get a few things.

He still feels like a sleepwalking zombie by the time he gets back from shopping. It’s probably not the best state to be in to try to cook what is undoubtedly the most complicated thing he’s ever made. There’s a couple points—when he’s trying to bundle together the herbs, of all things, and when he’s trying to sear the duck legs—that make him want to give up. Little things that have somehow become hard amongst all the other little things that have to be done.

He’s never making this meal again. Ever.

By the time it’s finished cooking, the day has gone by, and it’s round about the time he’d be heading to Bastien’s to drop it off. He wants nothing more than to drop the cassoulet on the doorstep and wash his hands of it. He doesn’t even taste test it. There’s no time to fix it if it’s awful, and he doesn’t have a backup for it. He should have made a backup while it was cooking. Why didn’t he do that?

He sighs and rubs at his forehead.

He’s delivering it and then coming home and sleeping. In his bed.

The note from Bastien, three simple words that shouldn’t mean much at all, makes everything feel worth it when he picks it up. He’s doing all of this for a reason, and it appears to be working. The key is to not lose sight of that.

BASTIEN DOESN’T
work, and it leaves him feeling off-kilter. He’s tempted to go in just so he can come back and have this night be exactly like the ones before it. He realizes that’s ridiculous, though, and settles for reading with Chloe. Well, trying to read. He’s distracted, wondering if James has come by yet, if he’ll knock. Will he hear James?

He’s read the same line at least fifteen times, and if you asked him, he wouldn’t be able to tell you what it said.

Chloe butts at his hand with her head, demanding he pet her, and he can’t hear much over the motor sounds of her purring. He occupies himself with that for a while, till his petting becomes too absentminded for her tastes and she leaves him. Cats are fickle creatures, but he loves her.

Fleur jokes that he’d be the old cat man if he could. He doesn’t see what the problem with that would be.

Thinking of Fleur gives him an idea. He calls her, asks if she wants to go out shopping or to see a movie.

“This is Bastien? Right?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I’m just checking. You sound chipper.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Of course not. I’ll be over in twenty. We can go car shopping!” She hangs up before he can try and say he’s suddenly found other plans. Son of a bitch. He hates car salesmen. They talk down to people, and they’re so pushy.

He’s tempted to put on sweats and a ragged hoodie so they think he’s too poor to buy a car and will leave him alone, but he knows Fleur will just make him change. Jeans and a Star Wars hoodie are a much better choice. He’s tugging the hoodie over his head when she walks in (without even knocking because she’s rude). He needs to take her key away.

“Chop, chop,” she says. “You can tell me about the bubbly mood on the way.”

He follows her out to her rental car, a blue 2014 Mini Cooper that’s completely impractical for her. She insists she’s always wanted one, and since this is only temporary, why not enjoy it? He thinks Chandler will have a conniption if she actually brings one home for good.

For the first time since it’s started, he talks about what James is doing and how he feels. How he’s not so mad anymore, and he’s charmed. He tells her about James’s siblings coming into the restaurant and the lying being their idea. “Am I just making excuses?” he asks her when he’s done spilling it all out.

“Only you can answer that,” she says, like she’s some kind of guru or something. He scowls at her, and she beams back. “Oh look, we’re here.”

They spend
four hours
there, and Fleur doesn’t leave the lot with a car. “I’ll think about it and let you know tomorrow,” she tells the sales guy with the fake-ass smile and slicked-back hair.

“I’m not coming back with you tomorrow,” he says when they’re in the car. “It’s not happening.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not coming back either.”

He doesn’t demand to know what the point of that whole thing was, then. He’s better off not knowing.

Saying good-bye to his sister is a relief. He wants to go stuff his face in one of his pillows and breathe in something that doesn’t smell like new car. He’s so appalled by his experience he completely forgets about the food that will be waiting for him. His stomach swoops with excitement when he sees the Tupperware.

He peeks inside. This time it’s cassoulet, and Bastien can’t help but feel that James is getting more ambitious. Cassoulet is essentially a meat stew, filled with beans, duck, and lots of pork. It’s incredibly difficult and painstaking to make.

He heats it up and eagerly takes a bite. He has a feeling this dish is going to tell him a lot. His eyes flutter shut as his lips close around his fork.

That’s… surprising.

The note he leaves is a little different from the ones before it.

Good to know you do know how to cook meat.

IN AN
effort to keep things varied, James wants to pick a lighter meal for the day. It doesn’t necessarily have to be simple, but he’s thinking along the lines of something that can be eaten anytime. Bastien clearly likes to bake. Perhaps it’s time he shows his own hand at it. His first idea is to attempt to make the religieuses that started this whole mess of feelings. If that goes well, maybe he’ll add something to the side, or he could put a different spin on it? He browses Google. He could use chocolate ganache as the icing? That could be promising.

His first couple attempts look like science projects gone wrong. The pastries have to be baked first, which isn’t an issue. He manages to get the choux pastry into pleasing circles, and they fluff up just like they should. When he leaves them out to cool, putting the cream he’s prepared inside them, they deflate like a basketball being run over. He puts the cream in anyway, hoping that’ll puff them back up. The cream starts to spill from cracks that appear throughout the pastry.

He wonders if there’s a different way to go about this.

He moves the rejects to the side, breaking off cream-drowned pieces while he tries to figure out what he did wrong. It may look awful, but it tastes good. He’s got something right at least.

The second attempt goes better than the first, and his pastries come out of the oven looking like they should. He leaves them to cool, checking on the cream filling he’s stuck in the fridge. Getting it into the pastry bag again isn’t going to be a picnic. While he waits, he makes the chocolate ganache icing, having forgotten about it in his desire to perfect the choux pastry itself.

It all smells delicious, and his stomach rumbles. He might lick the bowl when he’s done. That’s how good it looks. Then again it’s hard to go wrong with decadent chocolate.

He sets that to the side when he’s done and returns to the pastry bag, carefully filling each choux pastry with the cream filling. He only messes up two of them. He adds those to his rejection pile for him to eat later. It would be wasteful to toss them.

The recipe says to dip the filled pastries into the icing, but he’s got an idea that he thinks will work nicer. He puts the smaller choux pastry on top of its larger counterpart and proceeds to drizzle the chocolate ganache over them till the entire thing is coated. He slices strawberries once he’s repeated the process on all of them and arranges the slices in a little crown on top of the pastries.

There’s a chance he’s biased, but he thinks they look pretty damn good.

Moving them to the cake platter is less than fun, and he gets chocolate ganache
everywhere
. He even manages to drop one. He’s very close to banging his head on his chocolate-smudged counter. There’s still a respectable number of pastries left, probably more than Bastien will want to eat, but it’s the principle of the matter. He can’t even eat the dropped one. It’s on the floor, and he has standards. That’s a lot of yumminess gone to waste.

Once he’s wrangled them all onto the cake stand, he puts it in the fridge to cool while he considers the quickest way to clean the unholy mess he’s made. There’s flour on his floor and butter leaking down his cabinet from where it’s dripping down the side of a bowl and rolling off. Cream has ended up on the door of his microwave somehow, and there’s chocolate on the counters, the floor, and on his clothes.

He has no clue how he managed to make it look like the pastries exploded in his kitchen. It practically takes as long to clean up as it did to make.

Getting the pastries to Bastien’s is a whole other level of nerve-racking. He has to walk
very
carefully. It’s a challenge just keeping people from bumping into him. He’s paranoid that the tiny pastries on top are falling off without his knowledge. Is he going to be leaving Bastien a bunch of toppled-over and broken religieuses?

He takes a deep breath. He needs to calm down.

With the utmost care, he sets it beside his Tupperware container on the doormat and breathes a sigh of relief. He reads the note left for him, delight surging through him at what is, for all intents and purposes, a compliment and not so much a critique.

There’s a bounce in his steps as he walks home. He’s going to put it down to not carrying that cake stand if anyone asks.

JEAN’S STARING
has reached an all-time high. Bastien’s seen him fumble two peppers and almost chop off his thumb while slicing a carrot. He sighs and tilts his head toward their office. He’d put it off till their break, but the risk of Jean permanently maiming himself by that time seems high.

Bastien waits till the door is shut—he doesn’t need his nosy workers trying to listen in—to ask Jean what’s on his mind.

He stuffs his hands in his pockets and shakes his head. “You seem happier,” he says. “I’m glad.” Jean leaves the “I’m surprised” unsaid. He bites his bottom lip. “I’m not saying you need to update me on what’s going on, but it’s been a week of these sappy-ass smiles and this sudden good mood… and I’m your best friend, no? So you could update me. Share the good news. If you wanted.” He shrugs. “It’s up to you.”

He’s tempted to laugh, but he knows Jean is sincere. He sits down on his desk, lets his heels bump against the thick wood. Jean takes a seat beside him, the two of them ignoring that they have two perfectly comfortable chairs right there. “I don’t know how happy you’re going to be with it,” he admits.