“You’d best hurry back to tell my sisters.”
“Never. Your secret is safe with me.” She gestures at the dining table in the center of the room. “Do you want to chill here and recover and I’ll do the rest?”
“No. I intend to redeem myself.”
I throw myself into cooking with my entire life force. I’m determined to make the best dish of Hope Lanover’s life, even half blind. I sauté aromatics with the tomatoes and celery, stir in vinegar and tomato paste, taste for seasoning, balance the salt.
It’s good. Very good. I take it off the flame and leave it to rest. I’ll finish it off with some lime when we’re ready for service.
Hope, meanwhile, chops the okra for the fungie and measures out the cornmeal.
“Your turn,” she says when she’s done. “I don’t want to ruin it. I’ll cook the fish.”
I boil the okra until it’s soft, then whisk cornmeal into the water in a thin, careful stream. I swear to holy hell if there is one clump in this goddamn dish I will wander off into the woods and never return. I stand obsessively stirring in butter and water until Sarah pronounces it perfect.
I feel like I just won a Michelin star.
Sarah goes over to Hope to help her flake the cooked fish into the sauce.
“Felix, come taste,” Hope says. “It’s ludicrously good.”
I do, and it’s almost there, but it could be better. “Needs acid,” I say. I cut open a lime and juice it with my bare hand.
“Donottouch your eye,” Hope says. “I can’t go through that again.”
We bring all the food to the table and take our places. Joseph comes around with rum punch for everyone. I politely decline.
Hope takes the rum.
“Yum,” she says, after we toast to our hosts. She holds her drink out to me. “This is amazing. Want to try it?”
“No thanks. I don’t drink,” I say.
“Ah,” she says. She doesn’t ask me why. I’m grateful for that. There’s nothing like being interrogated over declining a drink, especially in a room full of strangers.
All the food is amazing. Hope eats it with relish, asking questions and licking jerk seasoning off her fingers in a way that makes me even more obsessed with her cupid’s bow mouth.
God, I want to kiss her.
And I think she wants that too.
It’s so terrifying and exhilarating that I’m jittery.
They say in sobriety you have to relearn the pleasures you felt before you started drinking. But I started drinking purloined vodka with the older boys at boarding school when I was thirteen, and immediately developed a taste for it. I was never a good student, never a high achiever like my father and sisters, and the camaraderie and drunken confidence booze gave me made me feel like I finally had something to offer.
I was the popular, charming partier who could always secure forbidden substances. The one who held wild weekend-long parties at my parents’ country house when they were away. The bad boy good for a laugh and a shag.
This must be what it feels like to have a goofy, boyish crush on a girl, unmediated by being fucked up.
I rather like it.
When we move on to dessert, Hope takes a huge bite of the pineapple and rolls her eyes back into her head. “Oh myGod,” she moans. “How is this real?”
I take a bite of mine. It is the platonic ideal of pineapple. It is the pineapple you would find growing in the garden of Eden, and risk original sin just to taste.
Makes my sauce seem a bit less impressive.
Sarah and Joseph are laughing at Hope’s ecstasy.
