by MJ Post
“Dinner tomorrow night. Elk ragu.” Kacie was too tired to respond. He reached for her hand. She really liked this man and really felt she shouldn’t. She wasn’t sure what to do, so let him have her hand. He held her hand in both his. “Okay?”
Kacie felt herself yawning. “Yeah, I said I would. See you. Good night.”
“I’m not even tired,” Toby said. “Wish we could go for a walk.”
“You’re crazy,” Kacie said.
“Why?”
“If tomorrow’s like this, we’ll need the sleep desperately.”
He lurched toward her as if to reach for her again. She yawned again, covered her face with her hand to discourage him. Had a brief flash of imagining that when she climbed into her bed, he could climb in right behind her and hold her close. Hated herself for thinking it. “Look, see you in the morning, all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good night.”
After splashing her face and switching to her pajamas, she climbed into the cold, hard bed, reached to the table for a phone that wasn’t there, pulled the blankets up over her face, and tried not to think about the handsome jerk.
MADAME QUEEN’S CHEF SHOWDOWN
DAY ONE
Winner: Vegas
Maryann: one strike
Buster: one strike
Other chefs: no strikes
Chapter Sixteen
“Take the Blond”
Toby awakened wrapped in the covers and realized someone was sitting on the side of the bed. A gentle hand stroked his brow. The covers were lifted partly, and she slid into the bed beside him.
“You ready for me, big boy?” Kacie asked.
He pulled off his boxer shorts. “I was born ready for you,” he answered. He turned around to face her and felt the warmth of her breasts against his naked chest, stroked her feather-soft feet with his feet. He said, “Oh my God. Baby, I could swim in you.”
Her lips on his neck like a whisper.
“Ooh. You really are a big boy,” she said huskily as she pulled his erection into her.
But face to face on their sides? Wait, with their height difference, that wasn’t possible, was it?
He heard his heartbeat drumming faster and faster.
Now he was alone in the bed, awakened from a dream.
“Oh, god damn,” he said to himself. A trace of sheet was tickling his neck, not the lips of the girl he wanted. He was as hard as a stick of firewood but Kacie’s softness was not there. She had never been there. He had only dreamed of her. He hadn’t won her love. His bed was cold and empty. It had been since Amanda, but he hadn’t cared before; work had been everything. Now, after so few days it was crazy, he knew work was no longer enough.
∞∞∞
The vividness of the dream left Toby slightly unwilling to see the real woman. He might be awkward with her. He had never had such an intense feeling in a dream before. In the semidarkness he could see that Louie was out of bed, probably gone to start breakfast, and the other two men were asleep still. He went to the door and found plastic packages containing their cleaned uniforms and aprons, sorted his out and put the others on the small cocktail table where they were easy to see. He jumped into the shower, shaved and dressed and began to blow-dry his hair. He wondered if his hair would look better on TV tied back or hanging loose under the blue and red “Oxford’s Crawdad King” baseball cap he wore when cooking. Or, no, was it TV he was worried about, or what Kacie Lee might like? Light had always said the ladies liked hair down, so he’d go with that to start, and tie it back before cooking.
The shower and blow-dry cleared the residual dream from Toby’s mind. As he stood woolgathering and staring at the mirror, Buster came in, wearing only shorts, and began noisily peeing. “Oh, man,” he said. “That gumbo turned my piss as yellow as a giraffe.”
“T.M.I,” Toby answered.
Buster said, “Dude, you’re buff. You work out?”
“Swimming team in high school. You?”
Buster slapped his prodigious belly. “Eating team. Shows, right? Me and Louie. I lift weights, though.” He dropped his shorts and climbed into the shower as Toby finished dressing. “Hey, Eloise is fucking hot, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I think she likes you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You guys hung out some, right?”
“We talked some shop talk is all.”
“You know I let her win, right?” Buster mercifully pulled the curtain closed, then leaned around one end and winked.
“Yeah, sure you did.”
“Okay. Okay. She beat me fair and square.”
Toby thought he knew where it was going. “I’m not in the market for Eloise, Buster. Do your thing at your pace.”
Buster switched on the shower full force. “You think Maryann is a cougar?”
Toby left him to wonder.
∞∞∞
Louie’s breakfast of trapizzini — Roman dough pockets with several delicious fillings — was heavy and satisfying. Eloise grabbed Toby on his way to the kitchen for more coffee and sat him down at the dining table.
“You sleep all right?” Her tone was even, as if beginning a business meeting with small talk.
“Like a dead thing,” Toby lied. “You?”
“Hm. I must have written two cookbooks in my head between eleven and one. I’m tired, but I feel so creative when I’m under pressure. You’re good under pressure, right? Have to be for this show.”
“I don’t feel pressure, usually. I’m a Mississippi boy. We take things pretty easy.” He cracked a grin of the kind he’d used on TV reporters asking silly questions.
“Yeah, yeah. I believe that. Listen, how do you think everybody did yesterday?”
“I think we’re all pretty damn good,” Toby said. “I did good. You did good. You beat Buster, and he’s pretty tough competition.”
Toby didn’t think Eloise would go for Chef Wayne, but he put some praise out there. The attention of the sexy blond was amusing, but he figured she wasn’t there for friendship so much as to pick his brain.
“Alia, do you think she…”
“I’ll cut you off there,” he said. “Everyone’s good, period.”
Eloise looked deep into his eyes as if suddenly seeing him as a person not a chef. She touched his forearm with her fingertips. “Okay. I respect that. We had different kinds of mentors. Tell me something else instead. What do you like to eat that you don’t make yourself?”
Toby sensed that she would offer to make it for him if she could. It was another strategy for softening him up so she could get him to spill his private thoughts. “Well,” he said, “as of yesterday, Korean food.”
He slipped his arm free and headed to the common room. And he thought: what if Eloise genuinely liked him? She was a few years older, but not enough older for that to matter. She was stunningly beautiful and damn smart. Was he being foolish not to pursue her? Or should he play a double game, and try to use her the way he thought she was using him?
No, fuck it. Tobias Brutus wasn’t like that. It was what Kacie was accusing him of doing. Maybe it would have been smart for him to interact that way, but he’d always been a straight shooter in relationships, tried to be different from his parents and the university politics about which they ceaselessly blathered. Would using Eloise, going against his sense of his own nature, really be a road to victory? Would he want to win that way?
He sat on the sofa next to Vince and nodded hello. Kacie was with Maryann and Alia on the other sofa.
Eloise settled down next to him.
“I meant to ask—” and she touched his arm again. “That gorgeous girl who was with you on day one, who was that?”
“That’s my twin, Lillian.”
“What does she do?”
“Marketing. She just got her master’s.”
“Can I meet her?”
“Why?”
“Just curious. I’m a people person. And I must con
fess, I have a brother your age who would love to meet a Southern belle.”
“Well, we’ll see.” Aware Kacie might be watching, Toby considered how to escape from the pushy Californian. “I’m sure Lillian will come see me when they let her.”
“You two are close.”
“She’s my best friend.”
“That’s sweet.” Eloise brushed her fingers on his arm. Her eyes were bright. Was it flirting or just a California mannerism?
He saw Shelley entering, headed for the dining room. The director’s arrival supplied him with an exit strategy. “Got to ask Shelley something,” he told Eloise, and freed himself. He seemed still to feel her fingers on his arm, brushed down his hairs to get rid of that prickly sensation.
He intercepted the Aussie as she was taking her breakfast plate. “Hey, Shelley?”
“You’re sprightly for 7 a.m. What’s up, Chef Brutus?”
“We’re really locked down in the dorms. Is there a way we can get out and get some exercise?”
“Oh, soon you’ll be getting too tired for that. Cool your jets, okay?”
Shelley got her espresso and went to the table. Toby looked back at the common room. Eloise was talking to Vegas, but she was leaning back, her knees together and legs crossed at the ankles. Different body language: she had been leaning toward him with her legs parted. Toby realized that Eloise represented a real opportunity for him. If he tried, he might be able to sleep with her, or who knew what else? That perfect valley-girl face, the bright eyes, full lips, great body, were all things he had longed for back in his high school days. Logically there was no reason he shouldn’t pursue her and fulfill the fantasy of his teen years. It would be like banging a movie star, wouldn’t it?
But he didn’t like Eloise. Good looks aside, her personality was okay, but there was no spark. She talked and talked and talked about herself and her thoughts and then she asked him questions about himself that felt like businesslike probing.
It was different when he looked at Kacie Lee.
When he looked at Kacie Lee, Toby imagined them curled up together on a dark sofa of a shared home, sweaty and tired, not even yet changed out of the outfits of their respective restaurants, holding glasses of wine and laughing and feeling each other’s bodies shake with mirth.
Quickly he fell into the dining room chair near the steps. That mental image of himself and Kacie was making him hard, and he didn’t want anyone to notice. He scratched his cheek with one hand and put the other casually across his lap to cover the bulge. Damn it — he knew, just knew, she was the kind of girl he could laugh with.
∞∞∞
Day two’s dish challenge was their first individual competition. The assigned dish was aspic: they were to embed an ingredient in congealed meat stock. It was familiar to Americans because it had been a problem for the home cook in the movie Julie and Julia. Julia Child had helped to popularize it in the United States, but it had been around since the Middle Ages and was a French specialty. Toby had made aspic plenty of times, but not recently. If he didn’t get the temperatures just right, it would soften too soon and leave the plate too messy.
Three cameramen trailed the competitors through the cavernous pantry. In an interview by the shelves, Toby said, “I’m planning to make a chaud-froid aspic with some kind of poultry.”
“What’s that?” Shelley asked.
“Poultry is a bird.”
“No! Explain chaud-froid. Get into detail, start from the beginning!”
“Okay, no problem. I’m making aspic from a poultry stock, and I’ve chosen a chaud-froid recipe, which means cold and hot together. You get the stock hot, and you add cream to cool it, and the aspic comes out looking like a creamy soup. You put your poultry in cold. Usually chicken, but I’ll see what else is here.”
“That sounds difficult,” Shelley prompted.
“It can be difficult, but I think it’s important to take on the difficult dishes. This is for TV after all. I’d like to show the viewers what a great aspic dish can be like.”
He was surprised to find capon in the meat storage, and nearly selected it, but its slower cooking time would be an obstacle, and in the end, he went for a Cornish hen.
In the agonizing hours of cooking and interviewing that followed, Toby was glad neither Kacie nor Eloise had a cooking station next to his. He was able to focus well enough to nail the aspic, which had a luscious creamy appearance on the platter wrapped around the golden Cornish hen.
Louie won the challenge with a duet of fish and tomato aspics. Toby cursed himself; tomato aspic was a Mississippi specialty, and he might have made a better one than Louie had he chosen to try. But he had thought it too simple or predictable for Madame Queen.
As his prize, Louie was given a fully loaded iPod and a set of Beats headphones. With everyone else starved for media other than the common-room TV, this was a major advantage. He could listen to music to chill out, clear his head, control his moods; time using his iPod could be traded to other chefs for various favors.
Buster’s aspic set perfectly around his pork cheek meatballs, but the dish tasted too garlicky for Madame Queen, and he lost.
The other loser was Kacie. Although she had a good background in French techniques, her aspic had an unappetizing slick atop it, a purely visual error since the flavors were fine, but enough to send her to the cook-off round.
Buster was off to a bad start if he lost this cook-off. That suited Toby, and he was rooting for Kacie to beat the loudmouth and leave him with two strikes. However, he didn’t want her to get a strike. One-third of the way to her elimination was one-third of the way to breaking his heart.
He intercepted her at lunch. “Okay for the cook-off?”
Kacie adjusted her pink visor to catch some sweat. “Sure. I got it.”
He tried Eloise’s gesture of familiarity, a light touch on her forearm. “I figure we’ll all end up on the bottom at least once. Gets variety on the show, right? But you get more TV time that episode.”
“I’d rather win every time, if that’s okay with you.”
“It is okay with me. I’m rooting for you.”
“And if we’re against each other? What about then?”
“Then I’m rooting for us.”
She took off her visor, shook her hair out. It was electric for Toby, the glossy black hair dancing on her rounded shoulders and kissing the spot where the apron lay across her tanned, heat-reddened neck. The unconsciousness of the gesture, which she had no idea would affect him as her admirer, almost pulled him out of the conversation as he imagined again the two of them laughing together, his arm across that shoulder. The room was getting noisier as several of the crew arrived, so he laid his hand there and leaned in to talk closer to her ear. “You’re great, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. I’m just tired. Smells good.” She looked past him at the kitchen, where Vegas was loading up two dishes with pork and vegetable enchiladas respectively. “I’ll go freshen up.”
“Should I make you a plate?”
“Sure, okay. Got to go. Your buddy’s on her way.”
Kacie retreated to the dorms as Eloise approached with two coffee cups. She handed him one. “We kind of get the night off, right?”
“Kind of.” Toby considered what to say as small talk. Small talk was hard. He was only comfortable talking about cooking. “You make aspic often?”
“I think it’s kind of gross, actually. Maybe because I loved gelatin desserts when I was a chubby kid. Savory gelatin, just yuk.”
“No way you were chubby.”
“No, really. I still can’t get rid of my little muffin top. I miss my treadmill right about now.”
There was no way Eloise had a muffin top. Light had explained it to him back in high school: good-looking girls (or women) often spoke with false humility, which emphasized how gorgeous they were and thus tricked men into noting aloud how wrong the self-criticism was. Being a good-looking woman herself, Lillian used that tactic on men from time to ti
me. Toby, though, wasn’t falling for Eloise’s version of it. He followed Eloise to the dining room, took two plates, served one of each enchilada per plate, and sat. To his annoyance, Eloise took the extra plate without asking.
“No, that’s…“ he began.
She dug in with knife and fork. “What?”
“N.P.” He got up again and took an empty plate.
“You’re hungry,” Vegas noted.
“This plate’s for…“ As he explained, Vince took the last pork enchilada.
“I’ll whip up some more,” Vegas promised. “I think Lou Morton’s coming down later, and a couple other people didn’t eat yet.”
Toby sat down with a plate containing one veggie enchilada, saving the fuller plate for Kacie.
“You’re pretty hungry.” Eloise echoed.
“No, this plate is for someone else.”
“Oh, yeah. The Korean girl. Nice of you to look out for her. You’re a real gentleman. Here, try this.” She forked a bite of pork enchilada toward his mouth.
The heavenly aroma overcame his resistance to letting her serve him, and he took the morsel.
“Oh, man,” Toby said as he let the juices linger. “Mm-mm, that’s first rate.”
Of course, that was the moment Kacie returned. “Hey.” She cuffed his shoulder. “Don’t mean to break up the party, but is that my plate?” She pointed at his half-eaten veggie enchilada.
‘No, here you go.” Toby lifted the full plate. “Keep your strength up to beat Buster.”
“One’s enough. Maybe you two should share the other, right?”
“I’m good,” said Eloise.
“Yeah,” Toby drawled. “Apparently she thinks she has a muffin top.” He aimed the plate at Kacie’s hand. “All for you.”
Kacie grinned darkly and waved away the plate. “You guys enjoy.”
Toby followed her to the common room. “Damn it. I was just waiting for you.”
“Which is why I found you chewing a bite off of blondie’s plate. No thanks.”
“I just took one bite. Come on, let’s eat.”
“No thanks.” She looked at him with narrowed eyes, then her lip curled and relaxed, and she gave him a tiny smile. “Look, thanks anyway. I don’t want to be bitchy, but I just have to think about how to beat Buster.”