by Ruthie Knox
This isn’t me, a voice whispered in her head.
But of course it was.
These were the choices she got to make—not how Dan proposed or what kind of life they’d live together, but who she wanted to be. What clothes she wore. Whether or not to be the kind of woman who put on cowboy boots and felt sexy as she strode down the uneven sidewalks of New York.
Whether to tease Ben, to climb on top of his lap and kiss him, to sleep in his bed.
Whether to go after what she wanted, sex or authenticity or truth—even if it turned out to be both disgusting and amazing, scary and essential.
These were her decisions and nobody else’s.
Her heart beat hard, her chest aching with a tender elation.
“We better …”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We better.”
She thought he’d push her off him and stand up, but he put his hands over her back pockets and his face against her neck, and he breathed there for a few seconds while she ached in the most marvelous, vital, wonderful way.
Ben exhaled—a painful sound. “I’m not going to be able to walk for an hour.” His teasing tone gave her permission to smile.
“If we weren’t, you know, in some random backyard …”
He put his hands at her hips and lifted her to her feet. “Yes?”
But she’d lost her nerve. She didn’t know where to look.
Ben stood, his body so perfectly aligned with hers that nothing separated them but a few inches of air charged with a magnetic pull. “Yes, May?”
She took a deep breath. “I’d try to … I could maybe take care of that for you.”
Perhaps there was an award for world’s least effective dirty talk. She could nominate herself.
The only thing worse than her incompetence was Ben’s complete lack of reaction. All he did was arch an eyebrow and say, “Oh?”
Which was cruel, really, because he had to see how terrible she was at this. She needed an out, and he was torturing her.
“I mean … You know what I mean. With my. With my hand. Or …”
The eyebrow rose another millimeter. “Or?”
Why had she said or? What had possessed her?
“Or, May?”
“Ormymouth.” She said the words so quickly, they ran together, but he must have understood, because now he closed his eyes. He also clutched at her hips with both hands, pulled her right against his body, and put his head into her neck again.
“Pretend I didn’t say that,” she suggested.
He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“Sorry. I need more practice.”
“With what?”
“The dirty talk. I’m not very good at it.”
Ben laughed, dark and rich. “If you were any better at it, I’d probably come in my jeans.”
“You think?”
“I know. Now quit practicing. I have to think about something other than your mouth on my dick.” He pushed himself back a few feet and released her.
“Sorry.”
Ben shook his head, smiling as he turned away. “Quit apologizing, too. There are few things I’d rather do on a sunny day than get blue balls making out with a gorgeous woman.”
“It beats getting stung to death by bees, right?”
“Haven’t tried that yet. But from where I’m standing, it beats pretty much everything except those last few things you said. And straight-up sex, which we’re not talking about, because I really do need to be able to walk.”
May sat on the step again, centering herself in the sunny patch and bracing her hands behind her. She felt like she could soak in all the light and keep it. Store it in her heart, in her blood, for a future when she might need it.
Ben picked a tool up off the table, bent over the second bee box, and began prying at the lid. “Quit distracting me over there, Goldilocks. The bees don’t like it when I’m agitated.”
“I’m not agitating you.”
“You damn well are.”
She stuck out her tongue. “Deal with it.”
He muttered something about red sweaters and nipples and sunlight, and she smiled and tipped back her head.
Ben did his bee thing for a while. He kept up a steady patter as he worked, telling her all about bee spacing and showing her how to check for mites. She kind of zoned out and just watched his arms move around. He’d taken off his hoodie. His arms were well worth watching.
He whistled to himself as he tucked various tools away, and she smiled.
He did this because it made him happy. Because it took away the dark cast to his thoughts, the bubbling anger that sometimes boiled over and scalded the people around him, and reminded him of the man he really was. A good man.
Happy Ben.
She sat in her patch of sunlight and watched him. Happy May.
CHAPTER TWENTY
He took her to Bed-Stuy, where they ran into a fair on Fulton Street. When she found some earrings she liked, he bought them for her because he could tell she would never have let herself claim them otherwise.
They strolled through the fair, eating cheese pies and talking about nothing, and then turned and meandered a while, looking at real estate. Ben idly made note of the shift from street to street—the mix of commercial and residential, the traffic levels, the passersby.
When they passed a restaurant on one corner, an Asian fusion place that was doing good business, Ben glanced at the menu. Halfway down the next block, they went by an organic burger joint, and a few minutes later he realized May had asked him a question and he’d completely missed it, too busy running calculations in his head. Ballpark rent and staffing costs on one side of the scale, number of tables times average price of a meal and other expenses balanced against it …
The math was grim, but that was the restaurant business in New York for you. An uphill battle to find a good spot, hit on the right menu, and stay open long enough to attract a following. He’d gotten lucky with Sardo. Hell, maybe it hadn’t even been luck. Maybe it had been Sandy. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off a second time.
He spotted an empty space that he liked the look of. Big for the area, with a woodpaneled ceiling that jutted out toward the sidewalk and sheltered five picnic-style outdoor tables. Tile on the porch floor, glass doors that could be left open in nice weather or closed up on a cold day, high ceilings.
Spanish theme, his brain said. Paint the walls orange and pink and red, hire Alec to do the pastry, and you could sell gazpacho and sangria, shrimp and paella. Classy.
He felt moisture against the pad of his index finger and looked down to discover that he’d picked the skin next to his thumb until it bled.
Nervous habit. His doctor had cataloged half a dozen of them. You need to find another line of work, she’d told him.
Instead, he’d found another doctor.
But he had to admit, he didn’t feel ready for another restaurant. Less than a week at Figs, and he’d been getting the headaches again, the ringing in his ears. Connor had taken one look at him and insisted they grab a beer and spend some time relaxing. You look like shit, man.
He’d felt like shit. Just being in the kitchen this morning, with the dinner service still hours away and no pressure whatsoever …
Fucked. He was fucked.
So you take yourself apart, and you put yourself back together again. It’s a mechanical process. One step at a time, like Tiger Fucking Woods.
But he was such a long way from clicking into place. Miles from being ready to have another restaurant. Leagues. Furlongs.
Light years from deserving someone like May.
“Ooh, look, a leasing office!” she said. “Let’s see what it would cost you to get an apartment around here.” She dragged him toward the window and started reading him snippets from every listing that caught her eye. “What’s a railroad apartment?”
“All the rooms are lined up like in a railroad car, with a hallway connecting them.”
“Huh. Well, it’s twen
ty-five hundred a month. Probably too much?”
“Probably.”
“So what’s your budget?”
“I’m not sure.”
She turned to him again, a frown between her eyebrows. “You’re going to have to figure this stuff out, right? Like, really soon?”
Yeah, he was. But he didn’t feel like telling her the rent wasn’t really the issue.
The issue was that he had no idea when he’d be able to reclaim the life he’d lost. He knew who he’d been and who he wanted to be, but when he looked at what he had to do to get there, there was this … gap. How was he supposed to pick a neighborhood or an apartment when he didn’t know what he’d be doing with himself in six months?
At least he didn’t need to worry about rent. He could live a long time on Sandy’s money. All he’d had to give her was his restaurant, his cookbook, and his balls on a platter.
“Seventeen hundred a month,” he said, plucking the number out of thin air. “But no railroad apartments. They make me claustrophobic.” He reached over her shoulder and tapped on the glass above a photograph of a building much like the three-story walk-ups they’d just passed. “How much is that place?”
“Twenty-two.”
He whistled. “Maybe a little more than I need.” He stepped away from the window. “Come on. Let’s keep walking.”
She followed him down the block, back toward the train station, but he didn’t like the expression on her face, and he liked it even less when she said, “Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah.”
“This might be a nosy question.”
She paused.
He heard himself say, “Then maybe you shouldn’t ask it.”
Great. Be a dick, Ben. Treat her like you treat everybody else, and see what happens.
May sighed.
They walked another block before his conscience lost the battle with his self-protective instincts and he said, “Just ask me.”
She didn’t, though. Not until he touched her arm and found a way to make himself be gentle. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, very quietly, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t.”
“Don’t be that way. Ask.”
But there was nothing about him inviting her interrogation, and he knew it. He might as well be covered in spikes. Which made it even less fair that when she backpedaled some more, it dialed up his irritation another notch.
“Because I’m leaving in a couple of days, and it doesn’t matter, really,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”
“May.”
“Ben.”
They stared at each other. He memorized the planes of her cheekbones. The short, gold-brown lashes framing her eyes, and the slight point at the tips of her ears.
She hated this, and he hated it, and he didn’t know what to do about that. Find a way out of the conversation. Avoid getting any closer to intimacy with this woman. That was the smart approach, the kind approach. That was the approach that was in line with his whole asinine theory that all he wanted from May was to help her, and thereby to help himself.
Make a joke. Brush this off.
But he didn’t feel funny. He felt as though everything he didn’t want her to know was balled up inside his chest, glowing hot and red, and he was wrapped around it, growling at her at the same time that he wanted to beg her to come closer and rescue him.
God. Even his fucking metaphors were overwrought.
“Out with it,” he demanded.
She touched the dangling silver strands of her new earring. “I just wondered, I guess … if you really want to be a chef.”
“I can’t spend the rest of my life tending bees and shoveling shit on a rooftop.”
“Can’t you?”
“Not and stay in Manhattan. Not if I have any pride, May.”
She nodded. Her lips tightened.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No, but you want to.”
Her lips moved, but a car passed, and whatever she said, he missed it. “Speak up.”
“I just said, you don’t seem very happy. In the kitchen. I mean, you’re fine in your kitchen at home, but when we were at Figs you seemed … tense. And I thought maybe, you know … maybe you’re not on the right path? Isn’t it stressful, being a chef?”
He laughed. A hollow, evil sound.
“But then, maybe the gardening and the honey isn’t very …”
“Lucrative?”
She nodded.
“No.” No, it wasn’t. But that didn’t matter, because Sandy had bought him off, and he’d taken her money.
Equitable distribution. That’s what his lawyer had said. When you got divorced in New York, you took half of the assets. But the restaurant wasn’t an asset—not really. If they’d shut the place down and sold everything off, they wouldn’t have had enough left to pay back the investment group, which was essentially just Sandy’s family money in four or five different guises anyway. Her personal wealth was locked up in financial instruments that kept it from being marital property. They had next to no savings, and Ben’s share of the restaurant was worthless.
His investment of sweat and blood and the accumulated experience of more than a decade in kitchens all over the world was worth precisely nothing.
But the agreement came in the mail anyway, the contract from her lawyers fat with clauses that all boiled down to one injunction: keep your mouth closed and stay out of my way.
That was the deal. No interviews about Sandy, now or in the future. She was going places, and he was a stain in her past that she wanted to seal and paint over.
Shut up and take the money, Sandy said, in her indirect, genteel way.
And he’d taken it.
His lawyer had increased the price of Ben’s compliance until it got ridiculous, but Ben had been the only one who seemed to understand how ridiculous it was.
He’d wanted to claim something from Sandy that would hurt her, but he’d found after he got his hands on the money that it made him angrier. It left him alone with his own disgraceful behavior and no one to judge what a hash he’d made of his career and his marriage but himself.
Ben could see no way to tell May any of that, and no reason to tell her even if he had the words to make it sound okay.
She was watching him, waiting for him to say something, and what he wanted to say was that she didn’t mean anything to him. That none of this meant anything—not her, not all the methods he found to occupy his time, not the fact that he had to find somewhere to live when he no longer had any sense of purpose or use.
He said nothing, but his eyes had to be burning holes in her face. It couldn’t be comfortable. She would turn away and let him off the hook. Any second.
She lifted her chin. The frown lines in her forehead deepened, and her dairymaid’s eyes narrowed, wheat-stubble lashes drawing closer together. “Do you need to get another job as a chef?”
“No. But I want to.”
“Maybe you could look for something less stressful? Like at a hotel? Or an Italian restaurant. Just to ease your way back in?”
She smiled, tentative and sweet.
He walked away from her.
A hotel kitchen. A fucking hotel kitchen. She had no idea what she was talking about.
He heard her boots on the sidewalk behind him, but he ignored them, determined to get hold of himself before he said another word.
It wasn’t her fault he was so angry. It was visceral, physical. It lived inside him, and he didn’t know where to put it anymore. In the first months after the divorce, he’d welcomed it, but now it made him feel shaky and sick. He’d purge himself of it if he could—but there was no way. He was stuck with it.
Ben reached the subway entrance at the corner and then realized he couldn’t descend. He wouldn’t get on a train and leave her. He couldn’t talk to her. He had no good options.
When he heard her coming up behind him, he whirled around and said, “Back off
.”
She did that thing with her eyes and her mouth. That whip crack. “You said I could ask. I’m asking.”
“Hotel kitchens are for hacks.”
“And you’re not a hack.”
“No, I’m not a fucking hack. I’m good. I’m great.”
“Great at what?” she asked.
“I’m a great chef.”
She looked right in his eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re a beekeeper.”
“Seriously, back the fuck off, May.”
“Why, because I’m telling you something you don’t want to hear?”
Yes. Yes. “I didn’t ask you to psychoanalyze me.”
“I’m not. All I’m doing is telling you what you told me. You’re a beekeeper and a gardener, not a chef. You say you want to be a chef, but from what I’ve seen, you hate it. You like to cook, but not the chef part. That’s all I’m saying. And I keep waiting to hear you say I’m wrong—that you don’t hate it. But you’re not saying that. You’re just snapping at me for no reason.”
“I can’t do it right now, okay? I’ve got no real job, nowhere to live, at least a year before I can open another place, and no idea if I’ll actually be able to hack it when the time comes. You might want to rethink what you’re doing spending all this time with me, because I’m really not your type, honey.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean?”
“It means I’m a loser, and your last boyfriend was an NFL quarterback. It seems safe to assume you go for guys who are ambitious, loaded, and boring.”
“Really?” She stepped closer until they were nose to nose, and her flashing eyes pinned him down. “What’s your type?”
You. When you’re like this, you.
He didn’t like the thought. Didn’t want to be having the conversation. He didn’t want to think about the fact that she was right. He only had one plan—had only ever had one plan—and he couldn’t even talk about it without feeling his control slipping away.
He was trapped.
And he didn’t know how to get out of it, so he said the ugliest thing he could think of. “I’ll take just about any stray who comes along. Hadn’t you figured that out?”