Skinny Bitch in Love (7 page)

“Please. Look at her,” Eva snapped, upping her chin at me. “He wants to get in Clementine’s pants, and he sees his opportunity. A few dinners, a good lay or two, and you’ll back off the sign. By then, he’ll have all his permits in order.”

“God, you’re cynical,” Sara said to Eva. “I love that.”

Eva stared at her and then belly laughed.

Normally I would open the door and await him, the way I had for Alexander, nice British vegan chef, but Zach Jeffries, of the dead animal signage, could knock.

I could hear him jogging up the five flights.

Finally, the knock. A firm rap of the knuckles.

I opened the door.

Damn. He held a motorcycle helmet, and a black leather jacket was draped over his arm. In his other hand was a bottle of wine. Red and expensive.

“So it’s just you four?” he asked. “That must mean you have room for one more student.”

I stared at him. “Lady with the clipboard?”

He smiled. “Me.”

I laughed. “You? Right.”

“I’m interested in all kinds of food, neighbor.”

“So you want to take my class.”

He put down his stuff and pulled out his wallet and a Skinny Bitch Cooking School flyer that he must have ripped off the light post on the corner. “Four hundred, right?” He
took bills from the black wallet and handed me two hundreds and four fifties. Then he walked right in and sat down at the table. “I’d introduce myself,” he added, glancing at the laptop, open to his photo in the
L.A. Times
, “but I see you’ve met me.”

Sara studied him, head to toe. “I’m Sara, teacher’s roommate, so, also a neighbor.”

“Duncan Ridley, librarian,” Duncan said and we
all
waited. But Zach’s expression didn’t budge.

Eva shook his hand. “Eva Ackerman. Single?”

“I’m not married,” Zach said, his eyes on me. “So, by the amazing smell coming from the oven and this dressed salad, I assume I’ve missed most of class.”

Sara started setting the table. “We get to eat our work. You’re just in time for the first course.”

Definition of surreal: sitting at your thrift-store kitchen table, eating student-made leafy greens with miso-ginger dressing while Zach Jeffries poured the wine he brought, listening to him talk about the thousand-acre cattle ranch his family had owned for generations in northern California, where he grew up, not too far from Bluff Valley.

“We seem to have more in common than not,” he said to me as he popped an olive into his mouth.

“Really? Because I don’t drink wine made with red dye from crushed beetles.”

Everyone pushed their glass away from them. Except Zach.

“My motto is everything in moderation,” he said, taking a sip. “Mmm, that’s good.”

Sara, Eva, and Duncan looked from Zach to me like we were at Wimbledon.

My turn. “We have northern California in common, but you’re a leather-jacket-wearing carnivore and I’m a faux-suede-wearing vegan,” I said, extending one silver sandal for emphasis—and so he could get a glimpse of my yoga-toned leg.

His eyes went up my leg, to my skirt, and finally landed on my face.

Oh shit. My toes tingled. My
toes
.

He’d taken one bite of the bruschetta and declared it “damned good” when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, then said, “On my way, Baby.”

Oh. Deflated back to earth. I glanced at Sara. She looked disappointed, too.

Of course, there was a
Baby
in his life. A supermodel, no doubt, that would blow even Laurel soon-to-be Frasier off the runway.

But who cared? Zach Jeffries grew up slaughtering animals and thought nothing of selling twenty-seven-dollar burgers and spewing fuel emissions into the atmosphere. Being attracted to him was ridiculous.

But I was.
Very
traitorously attracted.

Chapter 5

The moment I opened my eyes the next morning, Zach Jeffries was the first thing on my mind. I
was
a traitor to my own self. Last night, as I’d peeled off my cotton tank top because it was so hot and the stupid fan was useless, I lay in my bed, staring outside at the sliver of moon and the twinkling stars, imagining Zach lying right next to me. On top of me. Under me.

I did not have such thoughts about the cute vegan chef, whose name I kept forgetting.

“Earth to Clementine,” my sister was saying, a forkful of pad thai on the way to her mouth.

Once a month, Elizabeth and I took turns having a “your world/my world” lunch to keep in touch, since those two worlds didn’t often collide except for family functions. Last month was her world, which meant having an uninspired fruit
salad in her stodgy law firm’s cafeteria while listening to her and a colleague talk shop. This month was my world, so Elizabeth, in her severe suit and dull pumps, sat beside me on a bench in Palisades Park, having vegan pad thai from my favorite Asian-Fusion truck.

“God, this is good,” she said, fork in mouth.

Elizabeth might be uptight, but she appreciated good food, even if it was vegan, which she gave up a zillion years ago. When she was thirteen, Elizabeth had her first hamburger with an incredulous “I can’t believe you’ve never had a hamburger” friend at In-N-Out Burger. She came home and informed our parents she was now a carnivore. She took it for granted that they’d respect her choice to be who she was (which, of course, they did), and that was that. At the time, I was annoyingly militant about being a vegan and tried my best to make her feel as gross as I thought she was for going to the dark side. She’d ignored me and often brought home burgers and lobster rolls to eat in front of me while smacking her lips. When I went off the rails that one summer, she’d said “Ha, told you!” ten times a day. I
Ha
’d right back at her, pointing out zits on my once-clear forehead and how I’d had to drop out of training for a 10K because I was such a slug, but she’d claimed she felt perfectly fine and always had. Elizabeth
did
have amazing skin. And worked twelve-hour days and then hit the gym for an hour every other night. She got lucky, that’s all.

From the looks of us, you’d never know we were sisters, unless you noticed we had the same color green-hazel eyes. I looked like our dad, blond and tall. Elizabeth was a dead ringer
for our mother, except my sister’s chestnut-brown hair was cut in a very clean bob, whereas our mom’s hair was down to her waist and graying. And I don’t think our mother ever wore a suit. Our differences aside, Elizabeth and I had always been close, even though she was four years older and lived to be conventional. In our house, that made her a rebel.

As we’d waited in line at the truck, I hit her up for information about ordinances and regulations about huge signs on commercial buildings, and she knew all about websites to check for size regulations and other arcane details about petitions and offending neighbors and potentially hurting small businesses. Of course, the minute she heard I was talking about The Silver Steer, she said she and Doug, her fiancé, were already on a waiting list for opening night.

“You’re a million miles away, Clem,” she said, taking a sip of her iced tea. “Are you worried about your new initiatives? I can help you with a business plan. Did you—”

“Business is great, actually,” I said as a guy on a skateboard almost ran over my foot. “The cooking class is going better than I expected, and I’m sure the students will be word-of-mouth spreaders. And I got two calls this morning about the personal chef and private lessons side, so right now, it’s all good.”

“Right now,” she repeated. “You probably have, what, a thousand bucks left in the bank?”

Ha. Mucho more, actually, thanks to my ex-boyfriend and my new frugality, ever since I no longer had a steady paycheck. Between that and the money that would come in here and there from the personal chef stuff and the next
session of cooking classes, I could make a real go of being my own boss.

“Elizabeth, I’m fine. Trust me. Okay?”

She raised one eyebrow and peered at me. “Okay, fine. But if you need money, ask. Got it?”

“Got it.” We stood up, took last sips of our iced tea, and threw our boxes and bags away. “And thanks.” She might be bossy, but she rocked as a sister.

We headed over to the farmers’ market, where Elizabeth oohed and ahhed at the rosemary artisan breads while I bought ingredients for tomorrow’s personal chef clients—two college students who were thinking of going vegan and hired me to teach them how to make some easy, freezable meals, like pizzas and burritos.

With three loafs of bread sticking out of her tote bag, Elizabeth joined me at a big basket of gorgeous red bell peppers. I took six and moved on to the green and yellow.

“Bringing a date to Mom and Dad’s party this weekend?” she asked, her two-carat diamond ring glinting in the brilliant July sunshine. Elizabeth was engaged to a fellow lawyer who didn’t believe she really came from organic hippie farmers until he met our parents last summer. No matter what any of us said, his response was a half-good-natured, half-appalled, “That’s so interesting.”

Our parents were celebrating thirty years of marriage and having a huge party at the farm. A weekend among my kind and I’d be better armed against the face and charisma of Zach Jeffries.

“Nope,” I said, paper-bagging some mushrooms and moving to the garlic bushels. “Not seeing anyone.” Shit. Shouldn’t have said that. Elizabeth was constantly trying to set me up on blind dates with any lawyer at her firm who had remotely cool hair or carried a messenger bag instead of a briefcase. Once she tricked me into being anecdotal data for a case involving an employee demanding vegan options at her workplace cafeteria. The guy and I got into a huge fight, and I ended up dipping the end of his tie into his coffee. But the fix-up offers kept coming.

“Glad to hear that,” said someone with a British accent.

I turned around to find the cute vegan chef—Alexander, I now remembered, with his nice-chap smile and dimples—standing with two reusable shopping bags full of produce and wrapped goods. He looked so fresh-scrubbed, like he’d just washed his face a second ago. Two days had passed since we’d re-met in my apartment during the cooking class, and he hadn’t called. There’d been something so puppy-dog about him, I had almost expected a call that night.

He lifted the bags. “One of today’s three specials at Fresh. Cherry Barbeque Seitan Napoleon. Eight layers.”

“Barbeque week was my idea,” I said. And ha. Emil probably hated that he’d been unable to resist trying it.

“And a good one. Crazy reservations for the weekend.”

“Sounds like dinner at our house growing up,” Elizabeth said. “Not just vegan, but weird vegan.”

Alexander smiled and stuck out his hand, which Elizabeth shook. As I introduced them, I could tell Elizabeth approved.

We made the usual small talk and I could also tell that Elizabeth was aware of how Alexander was looking at me, as though he couldn’t bear to drag his eyes away from my face (which I appreciated, even if he didn’t quite inspire the same can’t-take-my-eyes-off-you lust in me), so she moved on to the gingerbread table three booths away to give him a chance to ask me out.

Except he didn’t. He told me a funny story about one of the new waiters at Fresh. Asked how the cooking class had gone. Told me I had to try the baba ghanoush from Mediterranean, a former favorite restaurant that had scorned me on my job hunt, so no. And said he liked my shirt. But he didn’t ask me out. Which, of course, made me slightly more interested in him. He wasn’t even looking for an in, like asking if I’d seen a certain movie, if I’d been to a certain restaurant.

He glanced at his watch, said he had to go, called “Nice to meet you, Elizabeth” at my sister, flashed us a wide smile, and took off.

Huh.

“He’s so cute,” Elizabeth said, biting into a gingerbread man’s head as we watched him disappear into the crowd.

“Yeah, he’s cute, but not my type.”

“Too nice?”

“Ben was nice,” I reminded her as she stopped at a table full of chocolates.

“Yeah, I guess he was.”

“Alexander’s just lacking . . . something.” Like not being Zach Jeffries. What the hell was wrong with me?

She bought a pound of almond bark. “Well, I guess you can’t help who does it for you. Though, I’ll tell you, the first time I saw Doug—even the second time? I was a little meh on him. Third date? He made my knees weak.”

Doug looked a little bit like Elmer Fudd. So maybe there was hope for Alexander.

“See, I told you that vegans don’t look like shriveled-up vampire ghosts,” said a short redhead to an even shorter blonde when she opened the door to her apartment the next morning.

My newest clients—sisters, roommates, and Santa Monica College students Morgan and Dana. Their apartment—right around the corner—was even smaller than mine.

“You’re, like, skinny, but healthy-looking,” the blonde said, eyeing me up and down. “We want to be skinny bitches,” she added, holding up one of my flyers, which Morgan, the redhead, said they’d seen on the community billboard at the hot yoga place I lived above.

“I’m not really that bitchy, though,” Morgan said.

“Being a skinny bitch is about cutting the crap out of your life,” I said, putting down my bag of ingredients on the little round kitchen table. “Eating good stuff. Speaking up. Out. Treating yourself right.”