“You’re staring.”
She tripped over a particularly thick pocket of air. Ben caught her by the upper arm and shook his head, amused at her.
“Come on, May. ’Fess up. Did I say something weird? Do I have egg on my chin?”
“You shaved,” she said. And then, when he cocked an eyebrow, “I like it.”
That made the dimple-creases cut deep into his cheeks. Even more devastating without the beard. “I thought you might.”
“You did it for me?”
A shrug. “It was time.”
But as he looked away, his eyes were wrinkling at the corners, and his mouth stayed amused for a long moment of walking.
He’d done it for her, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about how his face would feel under her fingers. His raspy-smooth cheek against her
s, or on her breasts. Between her thighs.
“You’re blushing,” he said when he looked back.
“It’s windy.”
May turned around to walk backward so she could look down on Manhattan from up high.
“You’re gonna trip.”
“No, I’m not.” But she turned and walked normally.
They reached the middle of the bridge, where the pedestrian path widened out into a platform. Tourists pulled one another into knots, smiling for the cameras.
Ben cut through the crowd. She hung on to his arm, amused at herself for feeling so smug. She loved her boots and her jeans and the cranberry-red pullover sweater she wore with a black camisole. She loved being on Ben’s arm, feeling like she could pass as local when she was the furthest thing from it.
False pride, but it still felt good.
After they’d moved through the bulk of the crowd, the traffic thinned, and they began heading downhill. The change in elevation registered as a tightening in her hamstrings and glutes. “So is Europe where you became a chef?”
“Sort of. After my buddy and I knocked around for a while, he had to come back, and I moved in with this girl in Sardinia. She lived with her grandmother, and the grandmother made everything by hand. Cooked like the old days, you know?”
“I thought those people were only in movies.”
“Nope. My girlfriend would be working, and I would sit in the kitchen with the grandma—her name was Bibiana—and she would cook and insult me in Sardo.” A huff of laughter. “She wasn’t so thrilled about having her granddaughter’s deadbeat boyfriend hanging around her kitchen.”
“And she taught you to cook?”
“Eventually. At first I just watched her. I could barely speak Italian, and she mostly spoke Sardo, so there was a pretty big language gap. But I figured out the food words. I got a dictionary and would sit there looking stuff up while she cooked, trying sentences. I liked how she never seemed to be in a hurry. She never looked at a recipe, never doubted herself. Everything seemed really clear to Bibiana—there was Sardinian food, prepared correctly, and then there was crap.”
“Was her food that good?”
“Her food was fucking amazing. But it wasn’t the food that got me first. It was more … I’m not sure. There was this completeness to the way she cooked. The food, the view from the house and the kitchen, the way her hands moved. This wooden thing she had to roll the pasta, like a big skinny rolling pin without handles. It all made sense to me. It felt right. Watching her, and eating that food.”
“So what did she teach you to make?”
“Oh, everything, eventually. This thing called a panada, which is like a pasta pie stuffed with eels and—Don’t make that face. You would die if I fed it to you, it’s so good.”
May imagined Ben feeding her an eel pie that was so good she wanted to die. Oddly, it wasn’t difficult.
“At first, though, she wouldn’t trust me to do anything. Not even make the pasta. I had to watch. Then I progressed to cleaning vegetables. It took for-fucking-ever to get her to let me do the pasta.”