Recipe for Romance

by Snyder, J. M.

Cam smirked. “That’s why they train the wait staff. Forget about the wine for a minute. What are you thinking about for dinner?”

  Preston looked up from the menu and met Cam’s jeweled gaze. That was all it took; in a heartbeat, he was gone again, lost in those golden eyes. It was only when Cam applied gentle pressure to his wrist that Preston could shake himself free. “I’m sorry. I just…every time I look at you, I want to stare all night.” His heart did a little nervous flip. Aw, the hell with it, he thought. Taking the plunge, he admitted, “Is it too early for me to say I think you’re the sexiest guy I’ve ever met?”

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” Cam asked, laughing. “I’m the redheaded stepchild here with Mr. All-American of the Year. I’ll be honest with you. I really thought you were married. I mean, you have a daughter, I meet you at her school during pictures—how can you not be, right?”

  “Trust me, I’m not,” Preston assured him. “Not only am I not the type, but Tess isn’t, either. She’s Abby’s mother.”

  Cam knew all about Preston and Tess’s arrangement; it was one of the first things they talked about in their lengthy phone conversations. Now he nodded and continued. “I’ll admit I flirted with you out of habit. You might be with someone but I’m not, so I can’t just turn it off. What’s the harm, you know? If you’re not gay, then you only think I’m a nice guy, that’s it. If your wife was around, I wouldn’t have been quite so brazen, maybe, because most women nowadays know when another guy is hitting on their man. Some think it’s cute, some get all righteous anti-gay about it, so you have to be a bit careful then.”

  Preston knew what he meant. “Most straight guys don’t get it.”

  “Exactly!” Cam laughed again. “Clueless to a fault. And I had you pegged that way, too. I mean, I wasn’t really blatant, but I thought I was a bit obvious. Still, you have a daughter, so when you walked away I was like well, that’s that.”

  “Then I came back,” Preston reminded him.

  “And I just about creamed my shorts when you leaned up against me like that,” Cam admitted. He leaned against Preston’s arm in a similar manner, his chest pressing against Preston’s elbow, his thigh flush against Preston’s beneath the table.

  Then he rested his chin on Preston’s shoulder and blew softly into Preston’s ear, his breath ticklish and warm. Preston felt it enter him and trickle down his spine to curl in his groin. It heated his balls and excited his cock, promising more to come.

  “So, tell me,” Cam murmured softly, “have you decided on what you want tonight yet?”

  Oh God, yes, Preston thought, but it was nowhere on the menu.

  * * * *

  Cam wanted to try the filet mignon, so Preston ordered the catfish and they asked the waiter to recommend a bottle of wine that would go with both. It was cheaper than individual glasses, and they ended up with a Rioja reserva that tasted phenomenal. “It’s a bit of an untraditional choice with fish,” the waiter admitted, “but it’s a big wine with high tannin that goes well with red meat, but pairs well with our catfish, too. It has an oaky flavor from the aging process and can be a little bit creamy for some, with berry undertones—”

  “We’ll take it,” Preston said. That was all he needed to hear.

  When the wine was served, he took one sip and sighed. “Good choice,” he told the waiter, who nodded and poured Cam’s glass. To his date, Preston said, “We can’t order more than one bottle of this or I won’t be in any shape to drive home.”

  With a laugh, Cam teased, “Then I guess I’ll have to take you back to my place to sleep it off.”

  “As much as I’d love that,” Preston admitted, “I have Abby to think of. I highly doubt Mrs. Schroedinger will want to stay overnight with her, and she won’t know how Abby likes her pancakes in the morning. My daughter can be…how do I put this nicely? Very peculiar.”

  “All kids are like that to some degree,” Cam assured him. “When I was little, I had issues with my food touching.”

  Preston frowned. “Touching what?”

  With a shrug, Cam said, “Other food. If my mashed potatoes were running into my chicken, I didn’t want to eat them. If my green beans got mixed in with my rice, I got mad. Kids can be funny when it comes to food.”

  “Abby is funnier than most.” Preston never said the words he’d overheard Tess use when telling others about their daughter’s habits, things she claimed the pediatrician had told her were common in children and weren’t anything bad. Words like autism spectrum or Asperger’s syndrome, which put labels on Abby that Preston wasn’t ready to address. She was fine, wasn’t she? She did well in school, made good grades, got along well with her classmates, and if she had a few quirks, well, who didn’t?

  Their appetizers arrived, oysters Rockefeller on the half shell and Nicoise salads. As they ate, Preston said, “So tell me more about you. I feel like I hog up all our conversations every time we’re on the phone, talking about me and Tess and Abby.”

  “Well, you did say when we met that it was quite a story,” Cam pointed out. “You weren’t kidding.”

  Preston shrugged. “Yeah, but enough about me. Tell me something I don’t know yet about you.”

  For a few moments, Cam dug around in his salad, lost in thought. Then he said, “Oh! Did I tell you I have a twin?”

  Preston almost choked on his oyster. “What? No! There’s two of you? That seems impossible to believe. I’d have thought they broke the mold when they made you.”

  With a smirk, Cam told him, “I didn’t say I had an identical twin. Remember my niece, Jocelyn? Her mother’s my twin sister, Camella. She goes by Mel.”

  “And you aren’t identical?”

  The moment the question was out of his mouth, Preston wished he could take it back. He slapped his forehead at his own stupidity. “God, forget I asked that, will you? Of course you’re not identical. Duh.”

  Cam laughed, and his hand found Preston’s wrist again, giving it a comforting squeeze. “No worries. You’d be surprised how often I’m asked that, really. But when you meet her, you’ll see we look nothing alike. She has darker hair, more brown than red, and she hates it. She’s been dyeing it auburn since high school, and won’t ever let me forget that I got the better hair out of the deal.”

  “Jocelyn’s a redhead, though,” Preston said, remembering the photographs he’d seen on Cam’s laptop at Abby’s school.

  Cam rolled his eyes. “Yes, another point of contention with Mel, especially since her husband’s Italian. So who knows where that came from?”

  “What’s Mel do?” Preston wanted to know.

  Spearing a forkful of salad, Cam nodded. “Oh, you’ll like this. She’s a baker. Not classically trained or anything—she didn’t go to culinary school like you did, just taught herself how to cook, then found she really liked baking more than anything else. She wants to open some kind of store or restaurant or something, I’m not quite sure. I should introduce you two. I think you’d really hit it off.”

  Preston wasn’t sure what had given him that idea. “I don’t bake. With cooking, you don’t have to be precise all the time, you know. You can play around with ingredients and measurements and see what works, what doesn’t. But with baking, if you don’t get the numbers right, your bread doesn’t rise, or your cookies crumble, or your biscuits turn out flat and green and hard.”

  “Green?” Cam asked, skeptical.

  “Oh yeah,” Preston said with a nod. “Once, in school, I accidentally swapped baking soda for baking powder in a biscuit recipe, and what came out of the oven after twenty minutes were green little flat things the consistency of hockey pucks. I don’t bake. I give your sister major props for being able to.”

  “I still think you should meet her sometime,” Cam suggested. “If nothing else, we should at least introduce Jocelyn and Abby. If they hit it off, maybe they can have a sleepover sometime and hey, then so can we.”

  That sounded promising. His hand slipped off Preston’s wrist and disa
ppeared beneath the table, where it found a spot to rest high up on Preston’s thigh. His touch was warm and heavy through Preston’s jeans, a welcome weight that made Preston hope for more before the night was through.

  * * * *

  Dinner was as delicious as Preston had hoped, given the prices on the menu. He sampled Cam’s filet, which melted in his mouth, and shared his catfish, which flaked apart like a dream. This was the sort of place where he wanted to work, not some dive like Roger’s River City Restaurant, but high end eateries like the Bistro didn’t exactly advertise for chefs. When Preston had come back home after college, he’d had a hard time finding any work in the culinary field despite his degree. While they ate dinner, he explained to Cam that his training and work experience in the restaurants in New York groomed him for a certain niche, but when he came back to Virginia, he had to start at square one all over again.

  “I was earning top dollar in some of the fanciest restaurants off Broadway,” he told Cam, “working alongside huge names, chefs you’d recognize from magazines and TV. Then I came down here and no one wanted to pay me what I was worth. Or they’d tell me I had to start at the bottom and work my way up, same as everyone else. Tell me how I’m supposed to go from being sous-chef at one of Gordon Ramsey’s restaurants to a chef de tournant at a little podunk dive off Broad, huh?”

  Cam grinned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I love the way the French words roll off your tongue. It sounds so sexy, even though I know it means line cook or something like that.”

  Preston had to laugh. “I studied two semesters in Paris. If it’s sexy you want, I can read you the Marquis de Sade’s writings in their original language.”

  “So that’s date number two squared away,” Cam joked. “Though you could read me Mother Goose and I wouldn’t know. Give me a smoldering look and drop your voice down low, and I won’t care what the words mean as long as you whisper them onto every inch of my skin.”

  The thought sent a delicious shiver down Preston’s spine. “Okay, yeah, that is date number two.”

  After dinner, they split a decadent cheesecake and the check. As they left the Bistro, they linked arms and strolled past the parking lot, following the cobbled street down to the James River and the paved Canal Walk that ran alongside the waterfront. Cam’s elbow was hooked tightly through Preston’s, keeping him close, and their steps meandered along, their footfalls echoing into the early evening. Around them the sounds of the city seemed distant—traffic on the bridges spanning the river passed in a rush too far away to make out any individual noises, and there were no cars or other pedestrians nearby to disturb them. Only the stars shining down kept the two men company, their light refracted in the river as if they were winking at their own reflections.

  “This is romantic,” Cam murmured, resting his head on Preston’s shoulder as they walked.

  Preston hugged Cam’s arm closer to him. “Yeah. It’s nice. This is nice.”

  Cam smiled up at him, his eyes and teeth shining softly in the darkness. “What is?”

  “Being here with you,” Preston said. “I haven’t done anything like this in such a long time. I mean, not since Abby came along. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.”

  Cam’s grin turned mischievous. “What’s that, eating someplace that doesn’t have a kid’s menu?”

  Without breaking stride, Preston bumped Cam with his hip. “No, silly. I mean…I don’t know to say it, really. Adult company? No kids around? Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter to death, but it’s nice to be with someone my own age for once. To be me for once and not Daddy first. To…I don’t know, to be a guy again, just an average dude, out on a date, hoping…”

  Cam stopped walking, forcing Preston to stop, as well. “Hoping what?”

  Preston turned to face him. “You know, that everything goes well.” It sounded lame to his own ears, so he shrugged and searched for something better to say. “That things end in such a way that we actually do get to that second date.”

  “The one where you read to me in French while we’re naked in bed?” Cam teased.

  With a laugh, Preston said, “Hold up, no one said anything about being naked. I don’t think I’ll be able to concentrate on whatever I’m reading if we do it that way.”

  Taking a step closer, Cam eased both arms around Preston’s waist and pulled him into a loose embrace. “All you have to do is read to me, not translate the book yourself. Hell, it can be a French dictionary for all I care. I want to hear you say the words out loud. Say something French.”

  “Like what?” Preston asked, amused.

  Cam shrugged, settling his body closer to Preston’s. “I don’t care. Anything. It all sounds sexy to me.”

  Suddenly every French word Preston knew flew out of his mind. Everything, all of it, gone. All four years of high school, all four years of college, the entire two semesters spent studying abroad, an entire lexicon of French cooking, English words of French origin he’d known all his life, hundreds of phrases and his mind was blank.

  “Um,” was all he could come up with. Not very sexy sounding, he knew.

  Then, out of the deep recesses of his memory, a phrase came bubbling up from an old French poetry class he took in college. Draping his arms around Cam’s neck, he ran his fingers through that thick, titian hair and looked into those amber eyes as he murmured, “Le seul vrai langage au monde est un baiser.”

  Cam seemed to melt in his arms. “What’s that mean?” he whispered.

  “The only true language in the world is a kiss,” Preston told him.

  In reply, Cam leaned down and covered Preston’s lips with his.

  Chapter 8

  It seemed like an eternity since Preston last felt another’s mouth pressed against his own, and the kiss was so unexpected, it took his breath away. For a long moment, he kept his eyes open, staring at Cam’s face inches from his own, so near that, despite the darkness of the night around them, he could see every line, every pore, every freckle perfectly in the starshine and ambient light. The pale eyelashes, the thick brows, the mottled freckles that even dotted Cam’s closed eyelids…Preston took them all in during their first tender kiss.

  Then Cam’s lips parted, easing Preston’s apart, as well, and the tip of his tongue licked into Preston’s mouth experimentally. Finally Preston remembered to breathe again, drawing in Cam’s scent as he did, a faint cologne with a beachy undertone to it that reminded him of watching ocean waves roll in on hot, summer nights. The scent was intoxicating, gripping him somewhere below the belt, squeezing his balls and holding on, forcing his hips forward into Cam’s with a gentle thrust as he pulled Cam closer, deepening their kiss.

  Tongues delved into open mouths, each tasting the other, exploring. Preston took a stumbling step back, finding himself against the canal wall; Cam followed, pinning him in place. The concrete was cool and slightly damp where it pressed against Preston, but Cam’s body alongside his kept him warm. On his lover’s lips, he could still taste the creamy cheesecake and the wine they’d shared over dinner, and beneath that, the garlic from the smashed potatoes that had been served alongside the filet mignon. Preston was glad he hadn’t gone with a more offensive dish; the catfish had been perfectly seasoned in a lemony, herb rub that hopefully wouldn’t overpower Cam’s senses or turn him away.

  He needn’t have worried. Cam’s kisses grew ardent, urgent, hungry, until they once again left Preston gasping for breath. With his hands, Cam explored Preston’s back and sides and waist, then lower, brushing over his buttocks, dipping into the pockets of his jeans, fondling his ass through the denim. His hips ground into Preston’s, eager to feel as much of their bodies touching as possible. “God,” he murmured against Preston’s mouth, “I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I saw you.”

  Preston had both hands plunged into Cam’s thick head of hair. “Good thing you didn’t,” he said, tugging on the auburn locks to pull Cam back enough to catch his breath. “Can you imagine? They
would’ve thrown us both out of the school in a heartbeat.”

  Cam laughed and Preston kissed his chin, then his lower lip, angling for that one dark freckle he’d been curious about from the beginning. He ran his tongue over it; sure enough, it was slightly raised, not a freckle at all then, but a tiny mole. Either way, still adorable.

  “That’s what I’ve wanted to do since day one,” he admitted.

  With a snicker, Cam asked, “That thing? What, is it bothering you or something?”

  “I like it,” Preston told him. “Makes you unique.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Cam’s teeth seemed to glow in the starlight. “How unique is something that covers half your body? I have dozens of them all over.”

  Preston licked the mole again, following his tongue with a quick kiss. “This one disappears into a dimple when you smile.”

  Cam winked. “I have one on my ass that does the same thing when I clench my cheeks just right.”

  Letting Cam’s hair run through his fingers, Preston smoothed down the unruly strands. “Okay, I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not, but now I’m going to have to take a look at that the first opportunity I get.”

  “I’m telling you,” Cam reasoned, “we hook up my niece with your daughter, they’re practically birds of a feather, and my sister will be babysitting before she knows it.”

  Preston gave him a sly smile. “Sounds like you’ve done this before.”

  Laughing, Cam shook his head. “No, not quite. You might find it hard to believe, but I’m like you. This is my first date in years.”

  Though he was comfortable in Cam’s embrace, the chill from the concrete wall behind him was seeping into his bones now, and Preston was beginning to feel the evening air, as well. Pulling away from the wall, he eased out from under Cam but took his date’s hand, careful not to do anything that might be misconstrued. “If we’re going to talk, can we walk back to the cars, or something? That wall’s a bit cold.”

  “Sorry!” Cam draped an arm around Preston’s shoulders, hugging him close and kissing his temple, then his cheek, then his mouth again, warming him up in the process. “The night’s still early, though. Do you really want to head back so soon?”