Sweet Girl (13 page)

“What do you want from me here? Why all the effort?” The anger in my voice grows with each sentence. “There’s not a chance in hell we’d ever go on a real date; you get that, right? I’m here because I lost a bet, not because I’m attracted to you.”

Taylor puts both his hands up in surrender, which looks ridiculous since one of them is holding a fork with a piece of carrot cake stuck to the end.

“Are you serious?” he asks.

The look I give him would have sent most men screaming in the other direction.

“OK.” He drops his hands. “I was kind of purposely a jerk to you the first couple of times we met.”

“You don’t say,” I answer sarcastically.

“I do.” He struggles to hide a smile. “I know it makes me a terrible person to admit this, but it’s just that you’re so easy to rile up. It’s actually really entertaining.”

I stare at him in surprise, but he just keeps speaking. “I don’t know why, exactly, but it is. I made the bet because I thought it would get us back on neutral ground after our chat. I knew it would piss you off even more, but I didn’t count on just how annoyed you’d be if you lost. Afterwards I felt badly about it.”

“Not enough to cancel,” I point out.

“Oh hell no. I’d already thought up the Renaissance faire, and I wasn’t letting that go.” He smiles again. “But at least enough that I tried to end it on a high note.” He looked around us meaningfully.

He shocks me again by saying, “I’d like us to be friends, Jennings.”

It is my turn to ask “What?”

“Friends. We hang out with a lot of the same people. I don’t want to bicker every time we do.”

Bicker, he said. Like we are eleven-year-olds.

“So you want to be friends?” I say it slowly, as the concept is so alien to me.

Nobody ever tries to seek out my friendship. Landon was forced into it by proximity, and Miko just came along for the ride.

“I do.” He nods.

“I don’t,” I answer too quickly.

“And why not?” He feigns insult. “I make an excellent friend. And you said it yourself, you’re not attracted to me. So there’s no excuse.”

“You annoy me,” I point out.

“I entertain you. It’s a fine distinction,” he answers happily.

“We have nothing in common,” I try again, unsure why I feel like I am grasping at straws.

He finishes chewing the bite in his mouth and his smile grows bigger.

“We have chocolate in common—that’s enough.”

Chapter Ten

“Stork!” Avis screams over the hum of the mixers Ram is running in the other room.

I look up from an invoice I am holding for insanely overpriced cheese. In the last eight days alone, Avis has run through nineteen pounds of mascarpone as she’s been working her way through a new galette recipe. I jump up from the desk and hurry to find her. In the three weeks since Joey left, I’ve actually worked with the food very little and Avis even less. Running the kitchen occupies most of my time, and the rest of the team is efficient. In my off hours I work on the different recipes Joey taught me. I’m hoping I won’t be called upon to make anything until I’ve perfected each one.

I find Avis hunched over a pile of dough like a scavenger hiding its food from others who might pick it off.

“It’s done,” she says without looking up at me.

I look at the blob of dough beneath her hands, confused.

“The, uh—”

“The galette recipe!”

One of her hands shoots out to grab a crumpled-up paper towel, which she throws in my direction. I catch it and unfurl the edges to find it covered with her chicken scratch, written in at least three different colors of ink. There is no discernable order to any of it.

“You want me to—”

She cuts me off with a look.

“What Joey did. I want it on the menu by this weekend.”

When I don’t respond, as I’m too stunned to say anything, she waves a flour-covered hand in my direction.

“Can you find me an Orangina? I’m thirsty.”

I walk back through the kitchen in a daze, and I don’t know how long I stand in front of the drink refrigerator trying to decipher her recipe before Ram walks up behind me.

“Damn,” he says, looking over my shoulder. “Is that even in English?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” I tell him honestly.

I know I shouldn’t show any weakness since I am, technically, supposed to know what I am doing, but I look over at him in something close to panic. There is no way I can figure this out. I know from countless hours with Joey that Avis refuses to be questioned. In fact, Joey wasn’t even sure Avis knew what she wrote down on her recipes, but she definitely knew if they weren’t followed. This is my first test in this new role, and I cannot fail.

Ram bumps me with his shoulder. “Why don’t you come in early tomorrow? Before first shift? You could try to figure it out before everyone gets here, and then you won’t have an audience.”

I nod stupidly and head back to bring Avis her drink. I keep glancing down at the hieroglyphs in my hand, but no matter how long I stare at them, they never make any more sense.

The next morning I come in at four, and since I fell asleep around midnight, I am kind of a wreck. I don’t know much about this recipe or how I’ll pull it off, but even if it means sacrificing sleep, I know I don’t want an audience while I try. The hour is late enough that the A crew has already arrived, so the kitchen is unlocked, but early enough that no one on B shift will get wind of what I am up to.

I find an empty workspace and spread the crumpled paper towel out gingerly. Next to the towel I place my notebook, which holds my notes from the hours I spent last night trying to decipher ingredients into some kind of discernable order. A deep hip-hop beat makes its way across the kitchen, which means that Pauly must have gotten to work first today. I learned early on about the battle of wills that is the damn radio. Everyone wants to choose the station, and the crew fight constantly for their own tastes. Classical, country, banda, rap, pop, and the occasional soccer game all battle for supremacy. The house rule is that whoever arrives first picks the day’s choice, but people are forever changing channels just to piss one another off. I put my earbuds in and turn on Hall & Oates radio on Pandora. It is going to take a miracle and a snappy eighties beat to get me through this day.

I look again at my list and start gathering items. I have at least a fairly good idea of what most of the ingredients are because a lot of it is in shorthand. The issue is that even though I can identify some things, I don’t know their order or quantities, or a good portion of the other words. They could be ingredients, or they could just as easily be doodles she added in her spare time. I stayed up most of the night trying to figure this out, and I don’t feel any closer than I did when she first handed it to me.

How the hell am I going to pull this off? Not just the recipe, but any of this at all? I have no business being here. Just because you once dream up something doesn’t give you the right to try to make it your own. Especially when other people’s careers are on the line. I’m such an idiot!

The words on the paper below me distort with my tears, and I swipe at them with an angry hand. So apparently I’m going to cry over everything now!

I reach down for the recipe, wildly debating tearing it to pieces before forcing myself to drop it. While Avis might be crazy, this is probably some totally genius recipe, and just because I am too unskilled to recreate it for her doesn’t mean someone else might not be able to. It is a hard thing to accept, because I’d so wanted to be that person for her. Her unique flavor pairings are her specialty. She thinks of combinations very few people would even try, but somehow they always work in perfect harmony in her dishes.
What would it be like to have a palate like that? Or to—

A small idea forms before I can stop it. I have her ingredients, at least, and I have her pairings. The only thing I don’t have is her measurements.
Maybe I could . . .
I know how to bake, and galettes aren’t that difficult to pull off. It is totally insane to think I could reproduce a recipe for a chef at her level, but maybe I could get close enough?

I think of Edith’s words again:
You mix it up till it’s yummy. If it don’t come off quite right, you try it another way.

That decides it for me. If I am going to lose this job, it won’t be because I offer up something inedible. I’ll attempt to recreate her recipe, and if it isn’t right, well, at least I can say I tried.

When Avis appears without warning six hours later, I have one hand propped on my hip as I stare dubiously at the berry galette with a mascarpone filling on the table in front of me. It is the fifth one I’ve baked, and I’ve struggled to get the crust just right. The filling itself is a mix of strawberry, blueberry, lemon zest, and a vanilla-bean mascarpone. Ram and Harris both tried the fourth version and declared it perfect. I baked this one just so Avis will have it fresh from the oven when she comes in. She looks at it along with me, neither of us saying a word.

Without waiting for me to say something, she cuts herself a slice. In the absence of a plate, she drops the piece of pastry into the palm of her hand. I don’t even have time to prep her before it is in her mouth.

She’ll be able to tell immediately that it isn’t her exact recipe, because even though I used her ingredients, there is no way I made it precisely as she did. In the end, I decided to make it as good as I possibly could, knowing it’d never get anywhere near her level.

She looks down at the slice in her hand and then back up at me, the confusion evident on her face. She takes another bite. When she finally opens her mouth, I am ready to hear the words. I prepared myself all morning to be fired again, and I am going to accept it this time.

“This is exactly right, Stork. Well done,” she adds, almost as an afterthought. “Now, can you get me a Perrier? I’m thirsty.”

“So you pulled it off,” Taylor says as he keeps pace beside me.

“It took me all night and five tries, but yeah, I guess I did. Nobody is more surprised than me,” I say as we round a bend in the road and jog past some old women who are meandering along the trail with their small dogs.

“And what was in it, again?” he asks, pulling the brim of his well-worn OU hat lower to escape the glare of the late-afternoon sun.

I haven’t run while carrying on a conversation since the long-distance track team in high school. But over the last couple of weeks we’ve been texting each other stupid YouTube videos and arguing over which Pandora stations are the best. It feels remarkable, but somehow Taylor has wormed his way in just like Landon and Miko. As hard as it is to believe, we are becoming friends. So when he sent a text asking me if I wanted to jog the Rose Bowl with him, I didn’t immediately hate the idea.

The Rose Bowl, like all good sporting venues, houses big football games, epic concerts, and a monthly flea market famous throughout the state. The other three hundred days of the year, it is a sort of mecca for runners who live on the Eastside of Los Angeles. At any given time of day, the loop around the outside of the bowl is covered with hundreds of joggers, sprinters, walkers, and humans involved in any kind of activity involving lower body strength and a set of wheels. One time around the outside is a three-mile trek, so it is a favorite for runners, since they can easily calculate distance based on their laps. I’d always liked the space because it is surrounded by hillsides and trees, and the affluent neighborhood makes it fairly safe to run here alone, which is not something I can say about living in Hollywood.

On the first lap around I tell Taylor how things have been going since Joey left. On the second lap I tell him about the saga with the galette. I should feel ridiculous about talking basically nonstop since I got out of my car, but I sort of feel too good to care. No one else knows nearly as much about my job at Dolci, and it is really nice to tell the stories to someone who seems excited for me. His reaction might have more to do with the food itself, since he’s asked me to describe each recipe in detail, but I’m not complaining.

“Mascarpone, strawberries, blueberries, lemon zest, and vanilla bean,” I answer him, ticking the items off on my fingers. My Wayfarers slide lower on my nose, and I push them back up again.

“That sounds incredible,” he says emphatically. “Next time feel free to use my place as a prep kitchen. Someone should be testing your attempts for you.”

“I test them, just in very small amounts. But it’s enough that I can check the flavor.”

“Well, use me for quality control, then.” He laughs. “It’s the least I can do if you’re going to taunt me with recipes.”

“You act like you never eat, when that’s all I’ve ever seen you do.”

“I love all food, of every kind. That’s why I’m always out here running it off.” He pats his entirely rock-hard stomach as if it is a beer belly. “Got to keep up my girlish figure.”

Several moms with strollers jog by going the opposite way, each one of them staring at his “girlish figure” as if it were her last meal.

“Are you going to that bar thing on Thursday?” he asks.

I pop a bubble in my gum before answering.

“Ugh, no, I hate bingo! I don’t know why Landon thinks it’s so clever just because they’re hosting it at a dive bar.”

“Come on, Jennings, don’t let me down. I was counting on you to make acerbic comments about the other patrons.” I noticed recently that his southern accent grows thicker whenever he is trying to wheedle something out of me.

“Not interested,” I answer.

I am totally immune to that accent.