“No, not for two years,” he says. “Switched to gum to wean myself off the Marlboros and got hopelessly addicted.”
“What does it taste like?” I ask.
“Spearmint and mild euphoria.”
“Maybe I’ll borrow a piece if I need a kick.”
“You can keep it. My treat.”
The tour guide calls us and our six fellow participants to gather around, and reminds us to make sure we have our IDs and cruise wristbands. We follow her out the door and down a flight of stairs to the gangway, where a tender awaits to take us to shore.
The sea is choppy—the boat lurches up and down so forcefully it makes my ass hurt, and we all get sprayed by water. A woman runs to one of the windows and gags. Which is when I realize I forgot to pack the seasickness patch my doctor recommended.
Oh well. I’ve never gotten motion sickness before, and I feel fine.
A large, open-air Jeep meets us at the port to take us to the class. We pile in, three to a bench, and it’s extremely tight.
So tight that my entire right side is molded onto Felix’s left one.
His body is lean and hard, whereas mine is ample and soft, and we melt together.
The ride is bumpy and involves tight turns over terrifyingly vertiginous cliffside roads.
I wish it would go on forever.
Felix
Hope is smushed up against me. Our bodies fit so naturally it’s like we’re lovers who’ve been together for years. And this close, I notice she smells exactly like the magnolia in my parents’ garden.
It takes everything I have not to bury my face in her neck and inhale her.
I am determined: I will not let this day end without kissing her.
But for now, we lurch to a stop.
The cooking class is in a stately Colonial-style house on a wooded property. An Antiguan couple comes out to greet us, and they introduce themselves as Sarah, our teacher, and Joseph, who distills rum on the property. We all chat for a minute about where we’re from, and then they show us inside to a large kitchen. Sarah explains that we’ll be making saltfish and fungie, Antigua’s national dish, as well as jerk chicken, conch salad, and tamarind balls with ripe Antigua Black pineapple for dessert.
She asks us to divide ourselves into groups of two.
Hope snatches my hand. “I claim the professional chef,” she says.
“All yours,” I say. As if there was any doubt.
Sarah asks if we have preferences about what we cook. The others shrug but I ask if we can make the saltfish and fungie. I love salted cod. We sometimes serve baccala fritters at the Smoke and Gun, and I’m curious about the Antiguan preparation.
Sarah leads us to a station with the ingredients. The cod has been soaked overnight to remove some of the salt, and it’s our job to boil it and make a sauce. We also need to prepare the fungie, a mixture of okra, cornmeal, and butter.
“You have to take care with it,” Sarah says. “If you don’t whisk it enough, it will clump. And no one likes clumpy fungie.”
“Sounds like that’s your job,” Hope says. “I can’t be trusted with a whisk.”
“I thought you liked to cook.”
“I do,” she says. “But I didn’t say I was good at it.”
“I’ll… whisk you off your feet.”
She groans. “You’re in charge, chef. What first?”
