Taste on my Tongue

by Beth Bolden

  “Who’ll start the bidding at $500?” Alexis asks gleefully, clearly enjoying the way each chef is squirming far too much.

  The bidding quickly goes wild, with almost every team participating at first. But after the bidding hits $2,000, the only pairs left battling it out are Jeff Austin and Paul Flannery.

  Landon feels a moment of fear; Quentin had said that Paul had been one of his professors in culinary school. Surely he would know better than just about anyone how vital salt and pepper are. If he’s still bidding, maybe it’s impossible to cook without them.

  But a single glance to his right, taking in Quentin’s calm expression, reassures Landon.

  Jeff Austin and his partner Jessa win the salt and pepper auction at the rather outrageous price of $4,500.

  Alexis looks down the line of pairs, and Landon practically feels skewered by her pointed look. He and Quentin were the only ones to not bid on the salt and pepper auction at all. He’s not sure if that was smart or stupid; really, only time will tell.

  “One member of your team will get sixty seconds to shop,” Alexis says, “for this week’s theme. Bar food.”

  They’ve already agreed that it will be far better for Quentin to do the shopping, and when Alexis counts off the time, Landon frantically cranes his head, trying to find Quentin in the glassed-in pantry, fighting for ingredients to cook their first dish.

  Sixty seconds pass so quickly that it feels like Landon hasn’t breathed the whole time. He must not be the only one, because Quentin is panting rather heavily when he makes it back to their station with a full basket of ingredients. He shoots Landon a look after Alexis announces their thirty-minute cooking time starts now.

  “Fucking hell,” Quentin murmurs under his breath. “I thought Rory was going to fight me in the meat locker.”

  Landon shrugs as Quentin pokes through their basket. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  Quentin frowns. “I think so. I wanted to keep it simple, since you’re doing the prep. And use ingredients that have a lot of natural flavor, since we can’t use salt or pepper.”

  “That’s gonna be tough,” Landon says, “I only eat deep fried food in bars. Isn’t fried food normally salty?”

  Quentin shoots him another, even darker look. “We’re not deep frying anything. Bar food doesn’t have to be heavy and flavorless. Even without salt.”

  “Right,” Landon says brightly, “what are we making then?”

  “A burger. Stuffed with brie, with a mushroom ragout on a brioche bun.”

  Landon is impressed before he realizes that he’s going to be the one prepping all those ingredients. The panic must show on his face, because Quentin takes a break from unpacking their basket and lays a reassuring hand on his forearm.

  “It’s a fairly easy dish to make. Plus, I’ll be next to you the whole time, talking you through it.”

  Landon takes a deep, unsteady breath and focuses. “Okay. What do I need to do first?”

  Quentin leads him through cutting the brie into chunks, then forming the ground beef around the cheese. The ground beef feels gross, and Landon can’t bear to look down at his hands. Out his periphery he can see the cameras looming down on them as he makes one disgusted face after another, giggling through the slime sliding between his fingers and the responding fondness in Quentin’s eyes as he leans down to get closer to Landon.

  Landon hopes the cameras catch how sweet Quentin’s smile is as he runs to the sinks to wash his hands the literal second the last burger patty is finished.

  When Landon returns to their station, Quentin’s waiting there with an expectant expression. “Ready to chop?” he asks with a sly twist to his lips.

  Landon makes a face. “I hate chopping.”

  “Chop, chop, baby,” Quentin teases. And Landon is pretty sure at least one of the cameras has been focused almost exclusively on them since the thirty-minute countdown started. He knows they’re cute, knows they’re flirting with each other, almost unconsciously at this point, and realizes they are making really excellent television.

  So it’s not like he plays up the flirting for extra effect, but well, if he bats his eyelashes a moment longer while he wipes and carefully chops the mushrooms and washes the arugula, then nobody can really blame him. The public isn’t actually voting for them, but Landon knows how this all really works. If they become crowd favorites, the producers will make sure they stick around.

  Quentin cottons on as he moves to set the burgers carefully onto the stovetop grill. “What are you doing?” he asks quietly, leaning in and letting the sizzling of the cooking meat prevent the cameras from picking up on his words.

  Landon leans in further. If the cameras catch any of this, it’ll just look like two boys who seem very much into each other—which is technically true. “What I can to make sure we win,” he says and rises up on his tiptoes and presses a quick, fleeting kiss to Quentin’s cheek.

  His shocked expression melts into pure pleasure. “Darling,” he purrs, “I’ve gotta grab the bacon.”

  Quentin had said he doesn’t typically put bacon on this particular burger, but with the lack of salt on the meat itself, he’d said that he thought the bacon might help offset the lack of salt. Landon doesn’t know anything about cooking, but he loves bacon so he definitely approves.

  Leaning against the counter, Landon cocks his hip and tries to emphasize the curves he loathed for so many years but has learned to appreciate. He hopes Quentin can appreciate them too. “We should put bacon on everything,” he says, “just for me.”

  Quentin’s smile is like the sun. “On everything?”

  Landon can see the camera panning in on them from the corner of his eye. He reaches up and tucks a curl behind Quentin’s ear. His hair is so soft, Landon never wants to stop putting his fingers in it. But he has to forcibly restrain himself this time around. It’s not the time or the place—yet. Besides, he does want Quentin quite a bit, cameras notwithstanding, and the last thing he wants is to give Quentin the wrong idea. They’ll have to figure out where and how to draw the line.

  Landon carefully butters the brioche buns and Quentin toasts them impeccably, leaving their moist, buttery insides the perfect color Landon wants his skin to be when he’s spent a week out on the beach tanning.

  While Quentin is manning the mushrooms and the burgers, Landon has quite a bit more time to observe the other teams. Everyone appears fairly absorbed in cooking their own food, though there do seem to be some team breakdowns already—a few of the celebrities and chefs don’t actually appear to be speaking to one another—and Landon is again profoundly glad that he has Quentin on his side.

  Landon also observes that most of the other teams are making a lot more than just a burger. Most of them have sides, or salads, or other items. When he mentions this particular point to Quentin, suggesting maybe they should have some kind of additional item other than their burger, Quentin just shakes his head.

  “This is plenty,” Quentin says, pointing to their burgers. “Plus, typical sides are fries or onion rings or other things that will be really hard to season well without salt or pepper. Anyone that’s using potatoes is crazy.”

  Landon decided the first day they met that he was going to trust Quentin, so he just nods and goes back to watching Quentin carefully construct their burger.

  They have a solid five minutes to make sure it’s flawless and Quentin does, even walking around the plate and nudging the burger a bit to make sure it’s structurally sound.

  “It’s not going to fall apart,” Landon says, even though he isn’t the expert here. He’s more praying it won’t, and it helps to say it out loud.

  “The mushrooms are a bit wetter than I normally make them,” Quentin says, as he fusses with it. “I put in a lot more beef stock to try to compensate for not using salt.”

  The mushrooms had tasted delicious when Quentin had given Landon a taste, extending a spoon shyly towards Landon’s mouth.

  Mushrooms aren’t the sexiest food
in the world to eat, but Landon had done the best job he could, wrapping his lips around the spoon and sucking the morsels off like they were the best thing he’d ever eaten. And it wasn’t even that far from the truth.

  Quentin had watched with dark, intense eyes as Landon had finally relinquished the cleaned spoon.

  “You’re evil,” he’d whispered into Landon’s ear when he’d leaned down to minutely adjust one of the bun tops on the burgers.

  “You love it,” Landon had whispered right back.

  He’d felt so on top of the world right then, watching the tendon in Quentin’s neck flex and his long, deep breaths. Landon had been nearly a hundred percent sure that Quentin was only seconds away from literally dragging Landon away to some dark corner and kissing the hell out of him. It’s a little bit of payback for the other night, when Quentin left Landon wanting so much more.

  It’s selfish but Landon almost hopes the cameras didn’t catch that rather sexually charged exchange because it feels like more than just a play for the audiences’ affection. It feels like so much more. He wants it to be so much more.

  But this will all end if they can’t make it past the first judging session.

  Landon’s heart is in his throat as the time ticks to a close and they set their plates on the judging table. The judges file in.

  Quentin tenses and Landon hears him squeak under his breath when Zach Emory comes into view. And yeah, he’s really cute. Almost certainly straight, but still quite cute. If Landon was going to watch a cooking show, he’d totally watch Zach Emory’s.

  As they get set up for judging, Landon looks down the line at the different plates of food. There’s two fish and chips entries. He sees a few sandwiches, with beautifully burnished crusts, an artistically arranged plate of hot dogs and what looks a bit like coleslaw, and another burger. It’s just about everything he loves about bar food, and suddenly he’s hungry.

  The judges work their way down the line of plates, offering even more casual criticism than Landon was honestly expecting and miserly dishing out tiny tidbits of praise.

  Blair Paulson’s fish is pronounced a little soggy, and the batter flavorless. The fries also don’t have enough flavor, despite being apparently soaked in garlic and parmesan. Quentin looks downright shocked at this development, like he couldn’t even conceive of a world where Blair Paulson might make food that doesn’t taste like heaven. Of course, it doesn’t help that she attempted a dish that even Landon knows needs salt to make truly sing.

  “And this,” Simone says with a disgusted curl of her lip, pointing to Reed Ryan’s coleslaw next to an admittedly sad-looking pair of sausages nestled in buns. “This is literally the most pathetic attempt at flavor I’ve tasted all day. And that’s saying something.”

  Landon cringes, maybe even more than Reed is wincing right now. Reed has kind brown eyes and the kind of body that would probably reject salt even if it was an option. Landon wants to give Reed a hug, and say that everything will be okay because nobody deserves to be publicly humiliated.

  Jasper McDonnell reaches their burger and hums almost appreciatively. Okay, so maybe Landon is just hoping that was an appreciative hum. It might have been a completely neutral hum. He hears Quentin take a rather unsteady breath and Landon realizes he’s basically bracing himself for the worst—which is so ridiculous because Quentin should have as much faith in himself as Landon has in him.

  “A brie stuffed burger topped with a mushroom ragout, sir,” Quentin says very politely. He’s such a nice guy; he’s definitely the nicest man that Landon has ever tried to date. Not that they’ve ever actually tried to date. Unfortunately, none of what they’ve done so far could even remotely be called dating.

  Maybe if Quentin had kissed him after they met for drinks, that could have been considered half a date.

  Focus, Landon yells at himself. He can’t lose himself in an internal debate about whether he should properly ask Quentin out to dinner when Simone Lalit and Jasper McDonnell and Zach Emory are about to shred their burger with their Michelin star fingers.

  “Plate looks a bit empty without a side,” Jasper observes and Landon hates that he’d made the very same observation. He’s jinxed them.

  “If the flavor holds up, I’d much rather have one really excellent item than two mediocre ones,” Zach inserts with a crinkled smile. Landon knew he thought he was cute for a reason. “Let’s give this a try.”

  Landon’s heart is in his throat as Simone, Jasper, and Zach all pick up the burger. Zach’s falls apart a tiny bit, and he can practically feel Quentin chanting in his head, praying that it will continue to stay together. One by one, they put down the burger and Landon can hear the beat of his heart in the interminable silence.

  “The flavor is definitely there,” Zach says with a reassuring smile. Landon lets out a bit of the breath he was holding.

  “Not sure I would have picked brie as the cheese,” Jasper observes, but it’s a lot more thoughtful than snide. As if he’s truly trying to decide if brie was the right route to take.

  “Maybe a sharp cheddar might have worked better here,” Simone says. “A really sharp white cheddar. Would have bumped up the flavor profile a bit. But it’s definitely quite tasty. I love the mushrooms and the arugula. Dressing it with lemon cut through the fat of the meat and the bacon really well.”

  Landon wants to faint with relief. He also wants to fling his arms around Quentin and kiss him all over. In fact, he smugly decides that he is most certainly going to do the latter during their very next break. He can’t wait any longer. He doesn’t want to wait any longer. He also should ask Quentin to dinner. A dinner date. He’s got to make sure this thing is at least in process before he explodes of sexual frustration.

  “I do wish there’d been a side,” Jasper adds. “The presentation feels a bit simple. A bit empty.”

  “And mine didn’t stay together very well,” Zach says with a tiny apologetic shrug. He’s nicer than either Jasper or Simone, but he does still mention it.

  It wouldn’t do for the judges to give them a perfect critique with no flaws, but Landon is still over the moon. Based on some of the other comments that were given, there is almost no way he and Quentin will be eliminated today. He can breathe again.

  Except Landon does get a bit jealous when it’s Rory and Kimber’s turn. All three judges rave over his burger too. Apparently he used some exotic mix in the patty, adding flavor without adding salt.

  The worst critique of the hour definitely goes to Ezra and Vanessa, who get an askance look at their rather sad-looking pair of Scotch eggs sitting on a plate, with only a sprig of dill as a garnish. Quentin had said that Ezra has a rather good reputation as a mixologist in town, and he’s done a lot more work recently with beverages than food. But, Quentin had also warned, flavor is flavor.

  The problem with Ezra’s flavor is that it’s just not enough to even begin to compensate for a lack of salt and pepper. And Simone bluntly asks him if he bothered to season the eggs at all. Ezra just smirks, and Landon decides he doesn’t even feel that sorry for him.

  Jeff Austin—the only chef who could cook with salt and pepper—goes the utterly safe route and has prepared the second fish and chips dish. The judges give a neutral if not overly enthusiastic evaluation. Which is funny, because Jeff and Jessa spent $4,500 on salt. Whatever they prepared should be transcendent.

  Oliver prepares what is apparently a very tasty steak sandwich. His bread is glorious, a perfectly burnished golden brown and the judges only ding him for a slight lack of salt. The fact that he’d managed to get even some seasoning into the pile of meat on the sandwich is an achievement though. Landon is dying to discuss this with Quentin, but he has to stand quietly and not give a running commentary on the judges’ commentary, which is a lot harder than he ever anticipated.

  Finally, the judges move on to the last dish, a shepherd’s pie prepared by Paul Flannery and Carson Brooks. The judges like the flavor, but . . .

  “The vegetables a
re really unevenly cut,” Jasper says and the annoyance in his tone is ripe. “Meaning some of them aren’t cooked all the way through and others are just mush.”

  That is totally on Carson, who did all the prep, per the challenge. Landon has never been more grateful at how patient and certain Quentin was that Landon be up to speed in the kitchen before the show even started. He never wants to be the reason they’re judged harshly, though he supposes in the end, it’s probably inevitable. He isn’t a professional chef. But still, it must suck to be Carson, and Landon feels a pang of sympathy for him as his face falls during Jasper’s comments.

  Alexis steps up then, and she looks like she’s enjoying herself just a hair too much. It would bother Landon more, but after listening to all the judges’ comments, he still feels certain that he and Quentin are safe.

  “The judges will need some time to deliberate on their decision,” Alexis announces, and everyone files backstage, looking appropriately nervous—even Rory and Kimber. Landon can barely refrain from rolling his eyes. If anyone scored a home run, it was Rory.

  Landon just hopes that however long it takes the judges to come to their decision, it’s enough time for him to give Quentin a proper kiss.

  He shouldn’t have even wondered. The moment the door to their green room closes behind them, Landon opens his mouth to give all the opinions he’s barely been able to hold back during the judging, but Quentin pounces too quick and he’s throwing his arms around Landon, hugging him tightly.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he chants into Landon’s ear, the words innocent, but the delivery husky and far too dirty for Landon to handle. He groans a little and wiggles closer.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he mumbles into Quentin’s curls. “Literally almost nothing.”

  “You were perfect. And perfectly adorable,” Quentin explains softly, pulling back a little. Quentin’s lovely eyes are shining so close, and Landon actually thinks to himself that he can’t wait any longer to kiss him when Quentin leans in and brushes his mouth over Landon’s.