by Kim Barnouin
“So you want me to teach you how to cook vegan.”
“Yeah. And we could catch up.”
For the first time in six months, I was talking to Ben Frasier, the guy who loved me “more than anything on this green earth” until he dumped me right before Christmas at the Santa Monica Pier because—
He’d fallen in love with someone else.
I could still hear him saying “I’m sorry, Clem,” over and over. Watching him walk away, then run, as though he was crying, which he might have been, since he was so annoyingly nice and it probably did break his heart to break mine. Not enough to stay, though.
The thing about Ben was that he wasn’t just some boyfriend. He was the guy I’d thought I’d end up with. Forever.
“Ben, I don’t know. I—”
“You’re the best cook, Clem. And you’re the only vegan chef I know. I saw the flyers, and . . . maybe I was looking for an excuse to call you, too. You know?”
Yeah, I knew.
“I was thinking that in addition to the cooking lesson, you could bring over a bunch of meals to freeze—maybe two weeks’ worth? Just dinner entrees, you know, like the risotto and the pad thai. A couple of those interesting pizzas you used to make all the time.”
I forced myself not to go there, remembering those interesting pizzas and a thousand other shared meals, eating together on his tiny deck overlooking the ocean.
I focused instead on the numbers. Two weeks’ worth of dinner? Fourteen dinners. Between the three-hour cooking lesson, fourteen entrees, and my Very Important Time, I ca-chinged in my head more than two thousand dollars.
Holy shit.
Maybe he didn’t realize how much money he was about to spend.
“The photos of the Mediterranean pizza and the falafel on your website look amazing,” he said, which meant he must have checked out the fees page. “Definitely make those. He rattled off a list of the fourteen dishes, which I copied down in the little notebook I carried everywhere. “Are you free the weekend of the 18th?”
“Let me check my calendar,” I said, counting to fifteen. “I’m sorry, but I’m double-booked—oh wait, I see here that my assistant noted a cancellation for the afternoon session on the 18th.” Elizabeth would be proud.
As he was going on about the falafel kick he was on lately, I tallied up a price of two thousand four hundred bucks.
Ben had money, but still.
And after rattling off a tony address in the Hollywood Hills (he’d clearly moved), he said good-bye and I hung up. Half of me wanted to call every person I knew, everyone who was still speaking to me, anyway, to scream from the rooftops that I’d gotten my first client. Leaving out the part that it was Ben, I called my sister, who still did her usual parade-drizzle by reminding me it was one client. A good client, but one client. And to put the two thousand in the bank and not blow it on sandals or a trip to Brazil.
“As a freelancer, Clem, you need to—” Elizabeth started, but I told her the smoke alarm was going off and I had to go, then I called Ty, who appropriately whoo-hooed, until I told him who said client was.
“Clem. That’s dangerous territory. Obviously he wants you back. Or some afternoon delight. He wants something.”
“I know. And if he wants me back, why is that so bad?”
“Because I scraped you off the floor for a month,” he reminded me. “You didn’t eat for a week. He crushed you, Clem. Don’t go back there, okay?”
But.
“Fine, whatever,” he said. “Just be careful.”
I’d try.
That night, Sara, who totally got it, told me we were going out to celebrate the gig—but we were banned from what-ifing about Ben. And so we went dancing at Olios—not a single what-if coming out of my mouth, despite the many swirling through my mind. But after one idiot told Sara she would be “so hot” if she lost some weight, we left and went home. Sara made a mental note of the asshole so that when she did get “so hot” and he asked her out, she could tell him to suck it. I sprawled out on the sofa, writing up lists of ingredients I needed to buy at the grocery store and the farmers’ market, drifting off to thoughts of artichokes, deep red tomatoes, and two thousand four hundred necessary dollars. Oh yeah, and Ben Frasier.
On the way to 5202 Violet Drive in Hollywood Hills on Saturday, I swore I saw Scarlett Johansson jogging with a German shepherd trotting beside her perfect body. I drove slowly, not only because, yeah, I was actually kind of nervous, but because I had fourteen expensive dinners packed very carefully in coolers on the backseat.
House after beautiful house reminded me so much of Ben, how we’d spend Sunday afternoons driving in the Hills and West Hollywood, gaping at the homes. I passed my favorite, the English country stone cottage with the blue door and fruit trees. Every time Ben and I would drive past it, I’d sigh, and he’d say he’d buy it for me as my cooking studio when he made his first million. We’d picked out “our house” on the next street, a gorgeous Spanish hacienda that was practically all windows, and Ben had pulled up in front of it and told me all the delicious things he’d do to me under the Jacarandas and orange trees at night in the backyard. That was more than six months ago, and I could still remember how he’d looked at me, the way he’d kissed me in the car, how we’d freaked and then laughed when a gigantic Rhodesian Ridgeback suddenly jumped at the passenger side window.
Did I want him back? On a scale of one to ten, a nine. One point taken off for the scraping Ty did have to do that first month. So, yeah, Ty was right. But maybe Ben had had to work something out of his system, and now he was ready for the real thing. Me.
Ben’s place was a stunning limestone mini castle. Clearly Ben had gotten some big-money clients himself. I parked my ten-year-old Toyota in the driveway behind a black BMW. I got out, put my chef jacket on, and loaded up the pull cart I’d borrowed from Sara, who used it for lugging props to auditions. I put my case of pans and utensils down first, then carefully arranged the flat coolers of entrees, which I’d loved every minute of preparing. I’d made the Mediterranean Pizza and Pizza Rustique, two pastas, two tofu-based dishes, including my pad thai, two amazing rices, the risotto, an Indian-style seitan-vegetable biryani that Sara and I ate half of, my kick-ass African chile, my sick falafel, and two noodle dishes, yuba and soba. I used only the best, freshest ingredients.
I sucked in a quick breath and rang the chimy doorbell.
A woman opened the door. Model gorgeous, with the kind of long, slightly wavy light brown hair shot with gold so perfectly it looked naturally sun-kissed. She was almost six feet tall and rail thin, but still managed to look lush. She wore low-slung jeans and a tiny white tank top. Bare feet, red polish, silver toe ring.
“So you’re Clementine,” she said, smiling.
And who the hell are you?
“You’re just darling,” she added, a big honking diamond twinkling on her left hand.
Darling? I forced a smile.
“Come on in. Ben’s really looking forward to seeing you.”
Okay. What the hell was going on? Was she his maid? Personal assistant?
The chick he dumped me for?
If Ben had gotten engaged—after only six months—I would have heard about it somewhere, wouldn’t I? I mean, I had told everyone I knew not to mention his name to me again because when I finally found myself able to breathe, to eat, to get up and function, one person mentioned they’d seen him walking his yellow Lab, and I went back to bed for two days. But still.
“Baby, Clementine’s here,” she called out.
Oh, hell.
I held my breath and followed her into the huge cook’s kitchen, and there he was. Ben Fucking Frasier. In jeans. Navy blue T-shirt. Chucks.
The yellow Lab, Gus, was gnawing on a bone under the round table by the window.
Fuck. Are they fucking kidding me?
“Clem, it’s so good to see you again,” Ben said, coming toward me with that gorgeous face, those dark blue eyes, those goddamned pecs. He gave
me a quick kiss on the cheek. “This is Laurel, my, um, fiancée.”
I stared at him, then at her.
I watched her eye me up and down, then slide her pale brown eyes to Ben. She smiled at him. A sweet smile, then giggled. Giggled. What the—
“Okay, sweetie, I’m going,” Laurel announced, slinging a huge red handbag over her shoulder. She walked up to him, planted a hand on either cheek, and kissed him as though they were having sex. I heard him murmur something. Saw his hand graze her perfect ass before it sashayed out the door.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
Ben leaned against the counter. “It’s everything I said on the phone. I didn’t mention I was engaged because Laurel has nothing to do with the cooking lessons. And it would have been weird to bring it up.” He ran a hand through his hair.
“So you just thought you’d hire your ex-girlfriend to teach you to cook and make you two weeks’ worth of meals—in the home you share with your fiancée. Right, Ben.”
“Look, I heard from a few mutual friends that you got fired and that you’re kind of blackballed now. At least five people called to tell me. And then I saw your flyer on a lamppost when I was walking Gus and . . . ”
“And you felt bad for me.” Jerk.
“Okay, yeah, I felt bad. I’ve been looking around for a vegan cooking class and couldn’t find anything. Then I saw the flyer. So it all just worked out.”
Because I knew him so well, I knew that he was just trying to do me a favor. Nothing malicious. Nothing salacious. He broke my heart, felt bad about it, had a moment of “oh, that’s too bad” when he heard about me getting fired, and saw his opportunity to feel better.
“So let me guess,” I said. “You told your fiancée you wanted to hire me, that you felt bad—about everything—and she said something all faux-concerned like, ‘I don’t have anything to worry about, do I?’ and you said, ‘Come on, of course not. Be here when she arrives and you’ll see I don’t feel anything for Clementine anymore.’ ”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair again.
“Something like that, maybe,” he said. “I’ll always care about you, Clem. And you are the best vegan chef I know, and I want to learn from the best.”
I looked at him and forced myself to see two thousand four hundred bucks instead of the guy I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. I needed money. And I wasn’t going to be stupid and walk out.
“I’ll help you unload,” he said, reaching for the cart, and that was that.
As we put each container away in the freezer, I went over the taped-on instructions for reheating as though he were just anyone. He was standing so close to me—not “I still want you” close, but close enough that I could smell that clean, fresh marine-based soap he used, the one I turned him on to. He was so tall, with such broad shoulders, and for a second I was back in bed with him, my eyes closed as he trailed wet kisses down my neck and—
“So what are we making?” he asked, snapping me out of my memory and back to this ridiculous kitchen.
“One of your favorites, actually—falafel, topped with cilantro, onions, tomatoes, and tahini, with garlic hummus and pita bread.”
“My mouth is watering already,” he said. “Set me to work.”
So I did. I handed him a clove of garlic. He forgot how to remove the skin from the clove, and I had to take his hand and press down, my heart shifting in my chest. There was now an actual ache there. Not like six months ago, of course, but a lingering longing. Maybe it would never go away.
“So how’s your dad?” he asked, adding the coriander to the bowl of mashed chickpeas.
That was nice of him. At least he still remembered my life, even if he was probably just making conversation. “Good and bad,” I said. “Holding on. Fighting.”
He looked at me with compassion in those dark blue eyes. “He’s a great guy.”
“Yeah, he is,” I said, remembering the first time Ben met my parents. It was their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. We stayed for the weekend, my sister good-naturedly arguing with my father over the whys of corporate greed; my younger brother, Kale (whose food-of-the-earth name suited him fine as a perpetual student working on his masters in marine biology), talking about his deep-sea expedition to study the mating habits of orcas. My dad had been bringing in a basket of carrots and was humming. The next second he was on the floor, his face ashen, the carrots rolling in every direction.
Ben had stayed with me an entire week at my parents’ farm while my father was in the hospital undergoing tests. He’d been there when I’d first heard the word cancer.
And now, he was someone else’s fiancé.
“Oh, not that much pressure forming the balls,” I said when I realized he was compressing the chickpea mixture in his palms. “Gently, like this,” I added, showing him how to use a lighter touch.
I wondered if he’d make some sort of sex joke, some reference to how I used to like the rough way he touched me in bed. If he’d grab me up against the zillion-dollar stainless steel refrigerator and go at me.
Of course, he didn’t. He just gave me that sweet smile and asked if he was doing it right now, and he was.
We fried, we plated, we ate. Ben declared the falafel the best he’d ever had. As he licked tahini sauce off his lips, he occasionally brought up something from our past as though it was just a fond memory that didn’t matter a whit anymore, because, of course, to him, it didn’t.
“Uh, Clem, did we forget to put something in the hummus? It’s kind of . . . boring,” Ben said, handing me the fork.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I could make orgasmic hummus in my sleep. Did I screw it up?
“Oh, no, her hummus isn’t great?” Laurel said, coming into the kitchen with two boutique bags in each hand. Of course, she had to come in at that exact moment. Not when Ben had been “Oh my God”ing over the tahini-drizzled falafel. “Baby, I thought you said she was an amazing cook.” She eyed the two-thousand-plus check stuck to the fridge with a little barbell magnet, narrowed her eyes at me, then dipped a spoon into the hummus. “Huh. Yeah. Bland.” She glared at me, then cut a tiny piece of falafel. “Oh my God, this is incredible.”
Saved by a teaspoon of cumin.
“I forgot to add the garlic to the hummus when she told me,” Ben said. And it was true; he wasn’t covering for me. “Don’t worry—my money was very well spent.”
As I started cleaning up, Laurel told me not to bother, that their housekeeper came every afternoon to do a basic tidy-up. She handed me my check. Instead of feeling like the teacher, the businesswoman, the brilliant chef who’d just earned two thousand four hundred dollars, I felt like a loser.
I had barely left the kitchen with my pull cart before Laurel launched herself into Ben’s arms for another sex kiss.
“Thanks again, Clem,” Ben said as he and Laurel headed out the opposite end of the kitchen through the French doors toward the grand staircase, probably to rip off each other’s clothes.
“Just close the door on your way out,” he added.
I wanted to spread that dull hummus all over their bed and let them roll around in that. But you bet your ass I closed that door—permanently—and walked out with my big fat check, all I really needed.
“That’s insane, Clem,” Sara said as she stripped down to her bra and underwear to step on the scale in our bathroom. “I ran into Dickhead Pete, but that’s nothing compared to that. Seriously, that is messed up.”
“Let’s not mention either of their names in our little sanctuary again,” I said. “They don’t exist.” I blinked my eyes like a genie. “Poof. Gone.”
She blinked and added a genie arm cross for good measure. “Now let’s hope I made even a little bit of my ass disappear, too.”
“Don’t worry about the stupid scale,” I reminded her. “Being a Skinny Bitch is about feeling good, not what some digital numbers say.” She stepped on the scale and I crossed my fingers for her. If she hadn’t lost any weight, she might
get discouraged. That date from hell usually would have sent her into a sugar binge, but she’d been working really hard on the eating plan, not a Dorito in sight. Going from eating whatever you wanted to being a Skinny Bitch wasn’t easy—I knew that firsthand. But Sara was really into it and sticking to it. I wanted the scale to show a loss to give her that extra hell, yeah.
Three and a half pounds.
“Sara! That’s awesome!”
Her face lit up and she put her tank top and yoga pants back on. “I can’t believe I’m losing weight while I’m stuffing my face. That breakfast sandwich you made me this morning? I can’t believe that’s on the plan. Scrambled ‘egg’ tofu, soy bacon, vegan cheese.”
“Breakfast of champions.”
“Fettucini alfredo last night that almost tasted like the four-thousand-fat-gram version I ate last week. And I even get my dessert. I can do this, Clem. I thought I’d have to starve to get skinny.”
“Nope. And wait till you taste the almost-cheesecake I’m making you today. One small slice a day.”
We headed into the kitchen for Sara’s lesson on how to make very low-fat, low glycemic-index sort-of cheesecake. I got out the flour and the Stevia. “Hey, maybe we should film this for my website.”
“Good idea,” she said and set up her phone to videotape it, but we moved around so much that all we got was some decent footage of a big silver mixing bowl. And the finished product, which was pronounced “fucking amazing” by Sara.
“Clem, you should be teaching everyone how to cook.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually, ever since I got back from Ben’s. Some people might just want me as a personal chef—making the meals and delivering them in reheatable cookware. But others might just want cooking lessons.”
“I totally want both.”
“I’d do it, but where? I can’t afford to rent a kitchen somewhere, and it’s not like I can teach in this tiny kitchen with the electric stove and half-dead refrigerator. I can’t stop thinking about it, though. Planning the menus for the classes, maybe taking field trips to farmers’ markets.”