Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (16 page)

“Does that mean you’re making me breakfast again?” she asked instead.

“It could mean that.”

“If you make me breakfast, I’ll stay.”

“And the kiss?”

He didn’t change his tone or move closer. When he reached for a T-shirt, his elbow brushed her arm, and her chest broke out in goose bumps.

From his
elbow
.

“Another rain check, I think.”

They folded laundry together. He got the basket and set it onto the counter, and they piled the warm clothes inside. When they’d finished, she turned to get her purse and found him where she hadn’t expected to, and they moved into each other—a slow-motion collision that wasn’t
precisely an accident.

At least, not on her part.

Her hands lifted to investigate the rigid sculpture of his biceps just beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt. His palms spanned her waist. Then her hips. When he pulled her toward him, his thigh came between her legs, and the heat spread with a slow pulse, up and out, across her stomach and her thighs. Into her breasts, her neck. Her face.

The detergent smell of the laundry room, the tumbling clothes, her new panties drying over the edge of his green plastic laundry basket—none of this had been part of her fantasies. She’d never intended to run from Dan and end up with this divorced farming beekeeper ex-chef, with his surly attitude and his crooked smile. His secrets.

She had never imagined the feel of Ben hard against her hip, his quiet breath on her face.

She couldn’t have, even if she’d known to want to.

“I’m cool with a rain check,” he said. “But tomorrow, your vacation starts.”

“You’re going to make me fall for New York.”

“That’s the plan.”

He didn’t move his hands. He didn’t have to—she was melting just from their weight and heat at her hips. Her fingertips took tiny excursions on his arms. Up and down. Over the swell of his bicep, along the groove between bicep and tricep.

“And we’ll find you an apartment, somehow,” she said.

“And visit some bees.”

“What if they don’t like me?”

“They’re going to love you,” he said. “How could they not? You’re exactly the right height.”

She smiled, and he ducked his head and laid it against her neck. His strong arms gathered her close and wrapped around her, possessive and comforting.

She stroked her fingers along his hairline and up and down his neck, letting herself touch him. She wanted to know all the shapes of him, all the secrets he was made of.

But one at a time. Shape by shape. Secret by secret.

“When the laundry’s done, can we watch a movie?” she asked.

“I do fantastic popcorn.”

He kissed the patch of her skin that was closest to his mouth, and she closed her eyes
again and let him hold her.

In the morning, he offered her a tour of the garden at Figs.

It was a short tour. The restaurant’s rooftop was small, and its garden consisted of a series of low raised beds, each sporting tidy rows of green at various heights. Ben told her the restaurant was coming to the end of its first growing season.

He talked about both the garden and the restaurant as though they belonged to him, but when she asked him if they did, he said no. She hoped he’d volunteer more information about how he knew Cecily and Sam and how deeply he was involved with Figs, but he didn’t.

Still, he seemed cheerful as he harvested a few dozen tomatoes, some squash, and fresh herbs. He told her the names of things with a certain measure of pride, teasing her when he asked her to pick some basil and she revealed that she didn’t know which part to pick—the leaves alone, or the whole stalk? She’d never had a garden.

After that, he maintained a running monologue as he gathered the day’s bounty, and May trailed along behind him, pleasantly surprised by how much she liked being up here. She remembered snatches of a song about city rooftops—how peaceful they were—but this wasn’t that sort of rooftop. They were only one story high. She heard every car go by and caught bits of conversations from the sidewalk.

But even so, she liked looking down on the Village. She liked the way her boots squished into the humus when she took a step into the bed to pull a weed at Ben’s direction. The coolness of her forearm after the carrot tops deposited their morning’s collection of dew on her skin.

She liked Ben’s dimple-crevasses and the easy way he moved up here.

After he’d finished, she followed him down to the empty kitchen.

“Do they serve breakfast?” she asked.

Ben smiled. “If they did breakfast, it would be a madhouse in here right now, and Cecily would kick us out so fast it’d make your head spin.”

“Just dinner?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at the clock. “The prep crew will get here soon, and the pastry chef. But this early in the morning is about the only time it’s quiet in here.”

Ben turned on the taps and dumped his harvest on the metal countertop next to the sink.
While he sorted through the pile, snapping the tops off carrots then throwing what remained—as well as some tiny potatoes—under the water, May tried to imagine the kitchen with fifteen people bustling around it. Every galvanized surface covered with food, the burners all lit, the pasta cooker bubbling, the dishwasher letting off clouds of steam. She’d worked as a waitress once, so she had a sense of what it would feel like in here during the service.

Crazy.

“So can you cook?” Ben scrubbed a small blue potato with a brush and then added it to the collection of clean produce on the countertop beside the sink.

“A little.”

“You like potatoes and omelets?”

“Sure.”

“Good. You do the omelets, I’ll do the potatoes.”

“I thought you were making breakfast.”

“You need to earn your keep.”

“Since when?”

His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know how to make an omelet?”

“Sure I do.” But despite her love of cooking shows, she didn’t know if her technique would pass muster with a real chef.

Ben diced the potatoes and began sautéing them, adding seasonings and what seemed like an obscene amount of butter while he cooked some vegetables for omelet filling on another burner.

On her first try, May got shells in the eggs, forgot the salt, and failed to get the pan hot enough. When she tried a bite from the edge, the eggs tasted rubbery and bland.

“How’s that coming?” Ben asked.

She carried the empty bowl, the whisk, and the container of eggs over to the countertop on his side of the stove. “You’re making them.”

“You sure?”

“I can’t take the heat, Master Chef.”

“Crack the eggs for me, at least.”

She picked four out and cracked the first one on the lip of the bowl.

“I like mine best without the crunchy shell bits in there,” he said.

“Shut up.”

He stirred the potatoes. She glanced over at him. “And quit smirking.”

“All right, princess.”

Two men came in and began setting up their workstations on a long galvanized steel table nearby. One brought a big tray of what looked like miniature chickens out of the refrigerator, and the other retrieved a vast quantity of onions and began chopping them at a speed that astonished her. Ben greeted them by name—Luis, Pedro—but they kept their heads down, their eyes on the flashing knives in their hands as they said hello. Deferential? Or else they just didn’t want to cut off their own fingers.

May kept her back to them and focused on Ben’s graceful economy as he moved from one pan to the other, stirring and seasoning and flipping eggs in a symphony of hotness.

How had she ever thought he was nothing more than a dishwasher who liked to cook, especially after watching him make French toast yesterday morning? He moved with fluid grace, as though cooking was a language he’d learned to speak at birth.

He loved it. Obvious as a neon sign.

At their station nearby, one prep cook chopped carrots into precise cubes while the other separated chickens into pieces. A freckle-faced redhead pushed backward through the kitchen doors on crutches—an awkward job that left her little room to maneuver in the kitchen, which wasn’t a large space. Ben finished sliding the second omelet onto a plate and said, “That’s Sam. Keep an eye on the potatoes, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

He crossed to her, and they fell into a conversation that seemed to consist mostly of shorthand. May caught the gist of it—something to do with produce quality from a supplier, the prices of various cuts of meat, a shortage of hotel pans. Ben made a disdainful remark about someone he referred to as “your sauce guy.” Sam asked questions about people May hadn’t met, and Ben answered them, his tone of voice growing gradually darker and growlier.

Five minutes turned into ten. She stirred the potatoes until they started to look rubbery, then took them off the heat. The omelets cooled and took on a glazed appearance.

She caught enough of what Ben was saying to understand that he had been covering for Sam for a few days while her injury kept her from the kitchen and someone named Perry was out of town for a funeral.

She also caught enough to understand that the conversation was putting him in a foul
mood.

Or maybe it was the people. As Ben and Sam talked, nine o’clock came and went, and the kitchen filled with a steady stream of strangers in white coats. They pushed through the door, greeting the two chefs by name.

Ben began leaning toward Sam when he spoke, the angle of his body too aggressive, the V between his eyebrows as deep as she’d seen it. So different from the way he’d been on the roof—the way he’d been all morning so far, open and teasing. Fun.

This had happened on Friday, too, when Cecily asked him into the kitchen to fix the dishwasher. But then May hadn’t known what to make of the mood he returned in.

She didn’t know now, either, except that there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between Ben and Sam, who wasn’t the least bit fazed by his mood. She nodded brusquely now and then, asked questions in an undertone that May couldn’t overhear, and eventually squeezed his shoulder, said something that looked appreciative, and angled her head toward May. A moment later, Ben rejoined her.

“You didn’t eat?” He glowered at the plated food.

“I was waiting for you.”

He poked at an omelet with one finger, then tipped both plates into a nearby trash can. “It’s no good now. We’ll just stop at a bakery.”

May peered over the lip of the can. All that warm, delicious potential—gone. The eggs and potatoes had become a jumbled pile of fat-glazed refuse.

Ben turned away from her to retrieve his hoodie, and she fantasized about placing both palms flat across his shoulder blades and giving him a shove, because he’d ruined everything. Again.

But when life gave her lemons, she knew what she was supposed to do. She picked up her purse.

Maybe whatever had come over him would fade as they got farther away from this place.

The morning could still be salvaged, even if breakfast couldn’t.

“The Brooklyn Bridge?”

“Yep,” Ben affirmed.

She couldn’t believe how long it had taken her to figure it out. It wasn’t as though the bridge had been hiding.

But in her defense, they’d had to wend their way through a construction zone, and it wasn’t until they started heading up—and then up, then more up—that it became obvious their trajectory would send them out over the water.

“Don’t you have anything more obscure to show me?” she asked. “Everybody says to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“It’s a great bridge. Plus, it goes to Brooklyn, which is where we’re headed.”

“What are we doing in Brooklyn?”

“Bees. And we can look for apartments, too.”

She perked up, pleased by the idea of helping Ben find somewhere new to live. She’d loved that part of college—finding an off-campus house or apartment for the school year, moving in, fixing it up on a budget. “Do you have listings we’re going to look at?”

Maybe he would let her see them. She could be in charge of the notepad when they walked through. She would make pro/con lists with him, and—

“No, I thought I’d walk around a few neighborhoods.”

Dang it, there went another fantasy.

“When is Alec coming back, again?”

“Friday or Saturday. I have to check.”

“Cutting it close, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about his move. But if he had to be out in less than a week and he was still “looking at neighborhoods,” something smelled fishy.

Ah, well. None of her business.

As she’d hoped, his miasma of grouchiness had dissipated on the way here. They’d stopped at an amazing patisserie for coffee and pastries. She’d eaten one more chocolate croissant than she reasonably should have. But she loved them, and it wasn’t as though she could
get chocolate croissants this good in Manitowoc.

It felt perfect now to stretch her legs, to breathe deeply and move at a brisk pace. As they made their way up the inclined walkway, he seemed lighter. Cheerful, for him.

The bridge was all cables and air, the pedestrian walkway in a separate area from the car traffic but crowded with tourists and punctuated by the occasional surprise of a cyclist bombing downhill from the Brooklyn side.

The morning was crisp, the sky bluer than blue, the river shining with reflected light.

“What is that, the Hudson?”

“East River. The Hudson’s on the other side.”

“Oh.”

“Separating Manhattan from New Jersey?”

May rolled her eyes and tried to project
Sure, I knew that
.

“Kids today,” Ben said. “Did you learn no geography in school?”

“My teachers back home sadly neglected the unit on mapping Manhattan. And I bet yours did, too.”

He smiled. “Yeah, I can’t really remember, honestly.”

“Did you go to cooking school?”

A slightly risky question, as it might fall into the none-of-your-business category or, worse, plunge Ben back into gloom. But her curiosity demanded to be fed more scraps of Ben’s life story.

“No, I went to UW–Madison. You know Connor, the guy who was slagging off my darts game at Pulvermacher’s?”