The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (35 page)

Luc’s departure so close to Valentine’s Day left his
second
insanely busy, shutting off almost all possibility for continued conversation, as they got closer and closer to the end of Sarah’s internship.

Patrick was in his element, taking over those kitchens. But that was what he had done for years and years now, hadn’t he? Run those kitchens and let Luc front his dream. That was what a
second
did.

He had to make hearts. He groaned and fed a sample of every one to Sarah.

He sent her home ahead of him when he wasn’t going to be able to stop until three in the morning, and when she protested, he said, with typical outrageous nerve: “Last time I checked, I was still your boss, Sarabelle. Shut up and go home.” And as she left, scowling, after changing into her street clothes, he would be lounging right outside the locker room, like a teenage boy hanging out in front of school to try to catch a girl, asking wistfully, just so she could hear: “Mind if I show up later?”

And she never did mind. She liked it when he slipped in late, threw his arm over her, and fell instantly asleep, dead with exhaustion.
He’s home safe
, her whole body would think, and she would finally fall asleep properly, too.

Rarely, they managed to talk a little, a soft exchange of words on the ride or walk back to Patrick’s apartment when he could leave with her, or falling asleep after he slipped into her bed at three a.m., or in those two minutes before they had to force themselves out of bed in the morning. Talked about the treatment for a bad burn Sarah got just above her left wrist, for example, and which made Patrick grimace every time he looked at it.

“You never cry, do you?” he asked softly, in bed that night, after she had showered with the wounded arm sticking out, away from the hot water, and he had washed her hair.

“How could I?” she said. “My mother – in comparison everything is so–” She broke off and just shook her head.

He nodded, rubbing his thumb over her right wrist, over and over as sleep crept upon her, to help focus her brain on the pleasurable sensations running along the nerves in that arm, rather than on the nerves in her left arm that were signaling hurt. “Bernard used to try to teach us to bear burn pain by forcing our hands down on hot pans,” he murmured.

Sarah jerked, shock driving away all fatigue as her hands went to cover his. She pressed them over his palms, stretching her fingers as far as they could go, this strange desperation filling her at her inability to stretch them far enough. His hands were too big. The hurt inflicted was too long ago.

His breath stopped. He stared down at their hands, pressed palm to palm, and then at her. His fingers flexed, folding her smaller hands inside his, and he held them very tightly. Neither of them said anything for a moment, as if everything about them had condensed into their hands – this battle for hers to protect his, and his to protect hers. With themselves.

But Patrick’s hands were bigger and stronger. He could force hers to hide inside his protection. He could even lift them, so protected, and kiss the edge of her palm that peeked through.

So she bent, too, their cheeks brushing, as she pressed her lips to his knuckles and just held them there.
I’m so sorry. Oh, that bastard, I’ll fucking kill him the next time he steps into the kitchens.

“Not hot enough to cause real damage,” Patrick whispered. “You remember, Sarah. How your hands can actually stand more heat than your brain wants to risk, how you had to learn to override that instinct to jerk away. The pans weren’t even as hot as the sugar we work with, Sarah, and we handle that, right? That’s all he was trying to teach us. The…brusque way.”

He finally let her wriggle her hands free, and she took one of his in both of hers, petting it. He gazed down at her hands on his with the oddest, most wondering expression on his face.

“Luc was used to that kind of thing – fostered at ten from the streets, he just accepted it – but I was fifteen. I hit him. That’s when Luc intervened and took me on. Gave me my own place. Gave me something to aspire to. Took a lot of shit from me, I guess, but whenever I gave him shit, he wouldn’t do anything – not try to punish me or anything. He would just
look
at me, that way he does, you know:
If you think that’s the best you can do, then that’s obviously your decision
.
I’m going to go ahead and do better, myself.
”

Yes, that was Chef Leroi in a nutshell. “And Luc’s way of doing things worked?” The name “Luc” still sounded strange in her mouth, absurdly presumptuous.

“The first year, I fell into bed so exhausted every night from trying to impress him as an apprentice, I didn’t do much. Kind of like you,” he said ruefully. “And then when I was sixteen and had gotten used to the work enough to have too much energy left over, I had a lot of sex.” He was laughing at himself, but it clearly wasn’t a bad memory. “The only guy my age with my own space. Girls thought I was
hot.
”

Sarah sighed. She had been a complete geek at sixteen, and she had been in college before she had her first attempt at sex, which had worked out kind of as badly as she had been afraid it would. And she was pretty sure having his own space wasn’t the only reason girls had thought he was hot.

“But after a while, I settled down, yes. Yes, it worked,” he said. “Well – I mean, here I am today. Do you think it worked?”

“Patrick.” She stroked back his hair, not even able to think what to say to that until finally, simply: “Yes.”

Another time, she found herself telling him about the first cake she ever made, for Danji. About the way her sister’s face lit, the way her mother almost cried.

He sat bolt upright in his bed. “Are you kidding me?” He pressed his hands to either side of her face to peer at her in the tour-boat-sparkled darkness. “All this time I thought you were going after your dream. That pastry school was all for you.”

“It is,” she said, puzzled, peering at him as little gleams from the tour boat spotlights ran over him. “When I can get it right, it makes me feel like a fairy godmother. Making everyone’s dreams come true.”

His eyebrows slanted together. “Did you even hear what you just said?”

She blinked up at him. “No.” And she didn’t want to, either. It was two in the morning. Long past the hour of self-analysis. “You didn’t see how terrified my mother was when I told her I was leaving engineering, or the way my stepfather tried to get over his disappointment. It was a very selfish thing for me to do, to come here. But I still did it. I still chose me over them.”

He just stared at her for a long moment and then slowly shook his head. “Isn’t it funny,” he said, almost talking to himself, “how we can spend our whole lives as ourselves and never have a clue who the hell that is?”

What did that even mean? She frowned at him warily, oddly unsettled, not at all sure she wanted to have her image of herself restructured by him at that hour of the night. But he just shook his head again, his expression turning inward, and slid back down beside her, throwing an arm over her waist again and letting the lights from the tour boats glimmer them to sleep.

It was as if little by little, in those walks, in those quiet moments, shields opened. The mix of fatigue and adrenaline, the beauty of the Paris night that made every dream seem possible, the cold that pushed them together, sometimes under an umbrella as winter rains tried to wash all the city’s dreams away under their chill. They failed, those stubborn, frustrated rains. All they did was make another human body seem enticingly warm.

And in the crescendo of work leading up to Valentine’s Day, Sarah slowly began to realize how much she had learned the past year. Was reaching Luc and Patrick’s level of greatness going to take her – well, as long as it had them? Was it
normal
that she struggle so much at first, exactly as Patrick had always told her it was? Was she actually making progress?

When Patrick kicked her out after the lunch service the day before Valentine’s Day – which was, granted, the time she was officially supposed to get off, but it made her want to
smack
him – she wandered along the Champs-Elysées, surprised to find she had energy left: a good ten hours of energy simmering in her bones, not knowing what to do with itself, instead of that exhaustion from the beginning of her internship.

She stopped before a store, gazing at the most gorgeous, sparkly stiletto heels. She had handled everything today, hadn’t she? And it had been a crazy day, every man who had enough money but not enough forethought to reserve a year in advance trying to fit his Valentine’s lunch in a day early. She had made some mistakes, but – so had everyone else made some mistakes, actually. And righted them and kept on, in their usual blur of speed. And she had almost matched that blur of speed. She had felt that intense magic, as if she, too, was a pixie on speed, scattering miracles with every twirl of her wand.

Maybe Patrick was
right.
Maybe she really did need to stay on in Paris a year or two, start to get really good, before she had the hubris to open her own place. Maybe, right now, she needed to stick with the hubris of thinking she could work for – let’s say, Philippe Lyonnais.

She smiled, and on the other side of the shop window, a woman walked close to eye those sparkly shoes, and Sarah stiffened. Hurrying inside the store, she went straight to the clerk. “Those shoes in the window. Can you get me a size 37?”

“Those have been popular,” the young man said. “Let me see if we still have anything left.” As he headed into the back, Sarah leaned against the counter, thinking how
nineteen
he seemed. She had gotten used to being around young men in the kitchens who seemed nineteen the way a soldier seems nineteen:
I may be young but I know exactly what I can do.
“Last pair,” the clerk said, coming back.

As she took them out of the box, she realized that they were not just sparkly white but actually iridescent, little lavender flecks of light shimmering off them as they shifted.
Oh.
Her thumb tried to catch those elusive shimmers of color, but of course they danced away. “Those shoes in the window,” she heard the women she had seen earlier saying. “A size 37?”

Her hands tightened on her pair, and she slipped them on. Well, squooshed them on. She might have underestimated her size here. Ow, that heel was high. But she angled her foot to savor the enticing contrast of that delicate impossibility with her practical jeans. They were so
pretty.
And she was fairly certain that cramp in her toes meant they didn’t really fit. “Do you” – she slid a cautious glance at the other woman, just in case the shopper might leap at the opportunity and snatch the shoes off her feet – “have a size 38?”

“Those are really the last pair,” the clerk said. “But if you don’t want them–”

Sarah took a few steps, pretending to test the comfort of the shoes, but actually just because that other shopper had an avaricious look in her eye and she wanted some distance. Hmm. Not so comfortable to walk in, but – she caught sight of her feet in one of the angled mirrors.
So pretty.
A magic midnight, caught for her feet. “I’ll take them,” she said quickly, angling her shoulder to the other woman as she paid, keeping a firm hand pressed on the shoebox until it was safely in its bag.

There went half her month’s stipend. And, of course, they didn’t exactly go with her midnight-blue dress. Or her jeans or chef’s gear, either.

She walked slowly back up the avenue toward the hotel to a shop window she never really lingered in front of on the way to work – really, she didn’t – and stood gazing at the dress in the window. It wasn’t her style at all, really.

But it kind of was. Just enough that sometimes, since the display had gone up, she stopped a second and looked at it. This soft white knit, not a harsh white, just this gentle tone, made of angora and cashmere. A sheath dress, with long sleeves for the winter weather, and the most strokable-looking fine fluff to its knit, from the angora. Shimmering in the fluff, here and there, were little iridescent flecks, cool tones of lavender and light, like the moon glimmering off a night filled with snow. She squinted at the tag, and winced, her eyes squeezing shut. Two whole months’ stipend. A silly waste of her savings.

Even on her engineer’s salary it would have been a waste. Who spent that much on a dress? Well, presumably the people who could spend that much on a
meal
, like they did at the Leucé tables, but Sarah wasn’t in their number.

But it was Valentine’s Day tomorrow. She knew they would be too busy on the actual day, but she could guarantee that Patrick would come up with something romantic to celebrate, just as soon as things calmed down. He’d probably do something twice as romantic just to make up for the delay, and it boggled a girl’s mind to try to imagine what Patrick would come up with for
twice
as romantic as the night of the Opéra Garnier. It boggled a girl’s heart.

It made it all soft and speckled with iridescent light – and a bit of a financial idiot.

But the dress felt so soft against her skin when she tried it on.

It was mildly annoying to realize those two T-shirts he had bought her would probably have covered half the cost. If they were going to be living on one salary, she was going to have to have a talk with that man about showing some financial sense. But, well – before she had that talk. Before she was obliged to make her own financial decisions based on what was good for both of them, rather than her own temptation to splurge, she – splurged. Then stood there gazing at all the thousand-dollar wallets proposed as Valentine’s gifts for men, feeling guilty at having splurged on herself and not him. What would Patrick like for Valentine’s Day?

You
.

Any way you’re packaged.

She stopped at the door out of the store, flushing a little, but smiling as she did. And then she went back inside and bought the delicate, lacy, shimmery pale garter belt that went so well with the rest.

Not that she was his
toy
or his
present
or anything, but – she kind of liked imagining the expression on his face when he saw it.