by Anne Calhoun
“Anything else?”
“The cheesiest pickup lines I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Delivered with a smile, though.”
Trish shifted her weight and watched Tim take long, loping strides toward the park’s entrance. “That guy? You’d think he’d know his way around. Or maybe he’s too arrogant to put in the effort. He looks like Thor.”
“He’s not that bulked up,” Sarah said absently. “Unlike your average action movie hero, I’m guessing he could lift his arms over his shoulders.”
Trish snapped out of her reverie. “Okay, so he’s an EMT, which means he knows cops and firefighters and other EMTs, all of whom eat lunch at light speed from fast food places and trade recommendations. Word of mouth. I’ll follow some of the official Twitter accounts.”
“And I’ll keep experimenting with the hotter sauces.”
“We’re a team,” Trish said, and stirred the simmering black beans. “Let’s hope for a mid-afternoon rush.”
***
“Just hold still, sir,” Tim said, then, more helpfully, leaned on the drunk’s shoulder to immobilize him while Casey applied a pressure pack to his forehead.
“It’s nine in the morning,” Casey groused under his breath. “Who’s drunk at nine in the morning?”
“Alcoholics,” Tim said tersely. And, occasionally, EMS personnel looking to numb themselves after a bad day. Or week. Or year. Eventually Casey would learn how EMS personnel counteracted a long night of drinking with the bags of IV fluids nicknamed banana packs that contained vitamins and minerals necessary for rehydration. As the job started to wear on him, Tim had done his share of drinking, but it didn’t work for him. The definition of crazy was doing what you’d always done and expecting different results, so he gave that up for a life lived at high velocity, moving too fast for the consequences to make an impact. Stay in the present, don’t think about the past or the future. Especially no futures. No one knew better than a paramedic how futures disappeared. Sometimes they vanished in the split second it took for a knife to find an artery, or a bullet to tunnel through a brain; sometimes they vanished into dementia or chronic disease. The common factor the job had taught him was that they all disappeared.
The thing was, at the most inconvenient times he’d started to drift into the memory of a hippy-dippy chef in her blue skirt and her shiny red clogs and her V-neck T-shirt and her apron. His type came in all shapes and sizes, blond or brunette, skinny or a healthy weight, the common factor a similar approach to life. High rate of speed. No futures.
“Sorry, sorry,” Casey yelped as the drunk flailed free. Tim leaned on both shoulders and focused on the job.
He didn’t even know her name, but he couldn’t stop thinking about that lightning-quick smile lifting the corners of her equally quick mouth. She moved at the right pace, and she just might fit right in to a currently empty spot in his life.
***
A few days later, Tim shook off the lunch crowd and walked to the park just after he got off shift. “I thought I’d see how you’re doing with your challenge.”
“Nice to see you again,” she said with a pleased smile. “How hot can you handle?”
“How hot can you make it?”
One hand on her cocked hip, she looked down at him and said, “Pretty damn hot.”
“Do your worst,” he said.
“Go on and have a seat,” she said. “It’ll take me a minute to dish this up.”
Choosing a bench at random (closer to the truck, because that’s where the sunshine was, not so he could watch her . . . but there was that advantage), he sat down and stretched his arm across the back of the bench. Sunshine warmed his face as he watched a man walk his dog and a couple stroll along the brick path, their arms linked and their heads bent close together, paying attention to nothing but each other. Lost to the world, like time slowed down just for them. He watched them and tried to remember the last time he’d gotten lost in time like that.
A spicy scent triggered saliva in his mouth. He turned to find her standing beside him, a bowl and spork in one hand, the other tucked behind her back in a vaguely waiter-ish pose.
“Your lunch, sir.”
Before accepting the bowl he pulled his wallet from his front pocket. “I’m paying for it this time,” he said.
“Seven dollars,” she said.
“A bargain,” he said, and handed her exact change.
She accepted the bills and tucked them into the front pocket of her apron. “The iced tea is on me,” she said, and produced a bottle of tea from behind her back. “You’re going to need it close at hand.”
She set it beside him on the bench and sat down before he could do more than narrow his eyes at her. Outmaneuvered and with a mouthwatering bowl of food in his hands, he conceded defeat for the moment. “Thanks. I bet you fed strays when you were a kid,” he said absently, using the spork to prod at the food in the bowl. Meat, looked like chicken, in a red sauce that smelled house-on-fire hot. Brown rice at the bottom again. No vegetables, but a loose red pepper in the sauce. This boded very, very well.
Her eyes lit up. “How much?”
“These things are useless,” he groused at the spork. “The tines jab you when you’re eating soup, and they’re too short to secure anything like a real fork would.”
“I hate them, too, but they’re biodegradable and multipurpose. Trish wants the business to have a small environmental footprint. How much?”
“How much did you feed them? Depends on the stray,” he replied, spearing a hefty chunk of meat.
“No, how much would you bet that I fed strays?”
The light dancing in her eyes was sheer delight, the grin on her mouth pure mischief. He wanted to kiss it off her, just to see it spring back. Resilient. That’s the word that came to mind. “Wait,” he said, backpedaling. “It’s a yes or no question, and you already know the answer. No bet.”
“Maybe I want you to win.”
Spork poised between bowl and mouth, he cocked an eyebrow at her. “I don’t play games with people who don’t want to win. Winning isn’t just the point of playing. It’s the only point of playing.”
“You’re not a magnanimous winner who’d do me a favor when I get off shift?”
“I take competition very seriously,” he warned. “If I win something from you, I’m going to take it.”
“You have to win first,” she said, and nodded at his lunch. “Better build up your strength.”
He’d used that line before and found himself pinning a blond music industry executive to the wall in a back room of a club after a game of pool. Same chemistry here. Hotter, even, but she wasn’t laying herself out for the kill. She wasn’t going for it, either.
She was waiting.
Okay. He could wait. He put the sporkful of meat, rice, and sauce in his mouth and chewed.
The first hint was a tingle spreading on his tongue. The second hint was fire coursing along the edges. It was spicy with a hint of sweet, thick and rich and borderline burning, but never quite crossing over into painful. The rice absorbed some of the heat. He swallowed.
“Not bad,” he said.
“Hmm,” she said, eyebrows drawing down. “Do you season your food with cock sauce?”
He choked on the next mouthful.
“Sorry. Cook’s term for the rooster on the label. Sriracha sauce.”
“Yes,” he managed.
“So it could be hotter. What about the flavor?”
“The flavor is amazing.”
She nodded. “That’s the habanero-based sauce. I figured you could handle it, but go easy. It builds.”
“I can tell,” he said after swallowing the second mouthful. Then he cracked open the bottle of iced tea waiting by his hip. The clean, sharp flavor cut some of the burn, leaving him wanting more.
Had she told him her name and he’d forgotten it? He was so used to calling people sir or ma’am when he arrived at their emergency that getting names wasn’t his strong suit. He looked around the park
as he dredged his memory for a name, any name that would sit lightly on this woman’s shoulders. Seward Park was one of the city’s oldest, staked out in the tenement days to ensure access to fresh air and greenery, and had the added benefit of being close to the station and his apartment.
No name. “Trish owns the truck?”
“She opened a couple of weeks ago,” his personal chef said.
“And you are?”
“The chef.”
“I meant, what’s your name?”
“Sarah Naylor.”
Angled toward him on the bench, she held out her hand. He jabbed the spork in the remaining meat and rice, and shook it. Soft, the skin a little dry, a firm grip. No lingering.
“Tim,” he said.
“Tim Cannon,” she said.
“You looked at my name tag,” he said.
“Just sizing up the competition. Do you always eat like you’re doing timed trials?”
Again, the question held no judgment, just simple curiosity. He made a conscious effort to slow down. “We eat between calls. I tend to rate food not by how good it is but how easy it is to handle and get down.”
“Spaghetti is out.”
He nodded, then ran his hand over his jaw. “Gets caught in the beard.”
“No soup.”
“I don’t eat soup, for the most part. It’s sloppy, it cools down fast, I can’t eat it in the bus or I’ll end up wearing it, and it’s too slow.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, smiling at him. “I love soup. Once I cooked a different soup twice a week for a year, Wednesdays and Sundays, and blogged about it. It’s still my Sunday thing, making a pot of soup, letting it simmer on the stove on a lazy afternoon, making bread at the same time, then having homemade soup, fresh bread, and a salad. Something simple for dessert. Baked apples or pears . . .” She drifted off. “Sorry. I get a little obsessive about it, and I haven’t had a good soup for a while.”
She didn’t seem obsessive. She seemed emotional, but if she wanted to duck that, he was good with it. “Come July and August, the last thing you want to eat is soup. Why the interest in it?”
“It was a challenge,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could make something most people think of as boring comfort food new and fresh.”
“You could have done it for a week, or a month.”
She shook her head. The off-kilter bun tipped even more to the left, blond highlights glinting in the afternoon sun, and she automatically reached up to secure it. “That’s not really a challenge,” she said. “A week, even a month, no big deal. A year? I have to dig deep for a year.” He couldn’t imagine the expression on his face, but whatever it was made her laugh, and this time it was full of delight at her own whimsy. “I know. Weird.”
On the scale of strange, cooking soup twice a week for a year was nowhere near the top of the odd things he’d heard that day, much less in his life, but it surprised him nonetheless. “It’s not weird. If you’re going to do something, you do it balls to the wall.”
“Exactly,” she said.
The whole thing was unusual. The heat was there, in the food, the sun, the chemistry sizzling between them. He could almost smell the sap running in the trees, taste the warming earth in the little park in an island of concrete.
“You’re a little later today,” she said.
“I’m off duty. I work seven to three. The way we caught calls today, eating wasn’t on the schedule.” No point in making it seem like he’d waited to eat from her truck.
Another woman dressed in a different but identical hipster uniform of skirt, T-shirt, and boat shoes, for variety, emerged from the food truck. She gave a friendly wave.
“I have to go,” Sarah said.
“You’re leaving?”
She stood and adjusted her apron around her waist. “Soon. We finish up mid-afternoon then drive the truck back to our commercial kitchen, clean it, do whatever prep we can for tomorrow, and we’re done.”
“What was that favor you were going to ask for, back when you thought I might be a good loser?”
She grinned. “Nothing onerous. We take credit cards with our phones, but some people still pay cash, and Trish doesn’t like to drive around with a lot of cash in the truck. We usually deposit it before we leave Manhattan. Would you walk to the bank with me?”
“Sure,” he said, surprised it was so easy.
As they walked to the truck, he tossed his empty bowl in the green trash can at the park’s entrance on East Broadway. Underneath the awning, Trish was scrubbing the grills.
“Tim’s going to walk with me to the bank,” Sarah said.
Sharp-eyed and bony, Trish looked him up and down, clearly on the lookout for a scam. Tim stood up straight, putting his FDNY EMT patches right at her eye level, and tried to look respectable. He must have passed muster, because Trish said, “Thank you.” She handed a zippered, rubberized bank pouch and a messenger bag through the window to Sarah. Sarah took off her apron, slipped the pouch into the messenger bag, and slung it across her body, enabling her to blend in to the crowd.
“It’s just a couple of blocks,” Sarah said.
“No problem,” Tim said. “It’s a nice day.”
It was a bit odd. When was the last time he went for a walk in the spring sunshine? Not last spring, that’s for sure. The seasons all blended together after a while, demarcated only by weather that made his job easier or harder.
She kept her hand firmly on the messenger bag’s strap as they walked. To match her pace he made a conscious effort to slow his stride and instead watched her look around, taking in springtime in Manhattan.
The penny dropped. Her accent wasn’t Jersey or Long Island or any of the boroughs, and she was looking around like a tourist as they waited dutifully for the light to change. “You’re not from around here,” he said.
“Nope,” she said. “West Coast, born and raised. I’d been out of the kitchen for a while, so I jumped at the chance to give the food truck a go. You?”
“This is my neighborhood. I’ve never lived anywhere else,” he said, and put his hand out to stop her from walking in front of a fast-moving taxi running the red. Her shoulder curved soft and warm into his fingers and palm. She flashed him a smile, so he left his hand on her shoulder as they crossed the street, keeping her close. Doing the dance. That’s what it was: a series of movements to gauge response. “What do you think of the city?”
She pursed her lips. “It’s got potential,” she said. “To be honest, I haven’t seen much. I’ve only been here a few weeks, and I’ve spent most of that time working eighteen hours a day to get the food truck up and running. I need to get out more.”
They reached the Citibank location. He held the door for her and stayed by her side as she filled out the deposit slip and handed over the cash with visible relief. He played with the metal chain connecting the pen to the counter while the teller ran it through the counting machine and Sarah tucked the pouch back in her bag. “Thanks again,” she said with a smile.
“No problem,” he repeated, then slid her a look from under his eyebrows as he toyed with the pen. Heat still lingered in his mouth from the habanero sauce, and the spring sun seemed to glow just under her skin. She was playful, competitive, impetuous, confident, and exactly what he needed to celebrate spring in Manhattan. “I live pretty close to here.”
“I’m glad this wasn’t out of your way,” she said. She took the pen from him and slotted it into the little stand, then stroked the top of his hand with the edge of her pinkie finger.
Message received. “Want to come over?”
“So I can see your ceiling?”
He blinked. “Uh . . .”
She laughed, loudly enough to start the tellers right down the row. “Your face,” she said. “There aren’t many lines I haven’t heard. Yes, I’d like to come over. I’d like that very much.”
Chapter Two
That was easy.
Six feet and at least three inches of tall, broo
ding blond man leaned against the counter of the Citibank and invited her over. For sex.
Sarah remembered her last long, coherent conversation with Aunt Joan, near the end of her two-year battle with ovarian cancer. It’s not long now. Promise me, promise me when I’m gone, you’ll go back to the way you were. You’ve given up so much of your life to take care of me. It’s not the kind of challenge a twenty-five-year-old woman should take on. Do something just for you.
Moving from San Francisco to New York was the first step. Opening the food truck with Trish was the second. The next thing she’d like to do, just for herself, had just invited her over for an afternoon delight.
He looked like a surfer god but without the shaggy, salt-rough hair, and, okay, he was too tall to surf more than casually. She’d dated her share of professional surfers, so she knew all about the body type. Lean, compact, skin over muscle and bone, a sense of confidence that came from challenging Mother Nature at her most powerful and winning, or at least not losing.
Tim had the same balls-to-the-wall attitude, but not over anything as frivolous as breaks. No, Tim slouched on the park bench after doing battle with death, shift after shift, and inhaled calories. Fuel. Not food, and certainly not sustenance or nourishment.
She accepted the receipt and tucked it into her bag with the deposit pouch. “Shall we?”
He held the door open for her and followed her out onto the sidewalk, then put his hand on the small of her back to guide her. He left it there, a touch she liked very, very much. It was subtle, attentive, and held the possibility of possessiveness without actually crossing that line.
They crossed Canal and turned down Orchard. Sarah looked around with interest, absorbing as much as she could. She’d grown up in San Francisco, a big city by anyone’s definition, as cosmopolitan as New York or London, but nothing had prepared her for this, the density of people and restaurants, the energy rising from beneath the streets to hover in the air like the aroma of a complex, simmering sauce. Intellectually she knew it was nothing more than the subway’s noise and tremors overlaid with the city’s rapid pace, a collective energy created and sustained by eight million residents, but deep inside she felt drawn in to the city’s tidal rhythms. Even if a Hollywood superdisaster wiped the city from the face of the Earth, the energy would remain. Millennia in the future, people would shiver and build temples on this location.