Reluctantly, she draws the knife a couple more times across the onion, then pouts again.
“I don’t know…” she says, musing with all the deepness of thought a philosopher might use. “I kinda like it better when it’s all uneven. It looks less like a robot cut it.”
I open my mouth, milliseconds away from delivering an expletive-ridden rant about the value of precision, about the need for perfection—the kind of rant that earned me a primetime slot on premium cable TV and millions of views online. Chloe’s been a little too professional and mature, and I’m this close to forgetting she’s just a nine year old kid and not a convict who’s used to taking orders.
But then I remember Willow, the soft way she managed to bring Chloe to her way of thinking, how she would use humor and gentleness to teach Chloe about the ingredients we browsed at the market, and instead I suppress the hotness of my blood.
I take a clove of garlic and put it in front of her.
“Chop that just like I told you, as best as you can, and then we can leave.”
Chloe stiffens and looks at the garlic with the determination of purpose.
“Do you want it crushed or sliced?” she says, and I can’t resist smiling. Maybe some of my lecturing stuck.
“What if I said I wanted it as strong as possible, without any bite or tartness?”
Chloe nods.
“Crushed,” she says, already squeezing it under the flat side of the blade.
Maybe the soft way does work sometimes.
Once our time is up and I’ve dropped Chloe back off with her supervisor, I start making a few moves around town, chasing down a few distributors, going to a meeting with my accountant that lasts way beyond the point at which it can be called torture, and then a sit-down with the new Vegas spot’s interior designer to talk color schemes and textures for the fiftieth time.
Unfortunately, none of these activities are as compelling as Chloe’s ideas about loving shellfish because she gets to keep the shells, so my mind ends up slipping back to Willow. Maybe I was a little harsh on her during that hurried conversation at Knife, but I had to put my foot down and reaffirm the boss-employee relationship again, rather than the girl-on-top one we’d established the night before. Not just for her sake, but for mine.
I could run wild with a girl like her. Spend an entire week in bed together and still feel like we’re just getting our appetites wet. Her body like a map that I’ve only just set foot on, that still has so many places to explore, so many secrets to unfold. If she wasn’t one of my chefs I’d already be planning the how, where, and when—but since she is, I still have to ask myself ‘if.’ It’s clearly not a smart move. But then again, I’m not known for my smarts. I’m known for getting exactly what I want, and doing things my way.
Memories of her in that tight dress stick themselves into my mind throughout the day with the incessant force of a catchy song, so that even as I’m listening to my accountant reel off numbers, I close my eyes and try to relive the taste of her lips.
By the time I’m done for the day my suit feels like a straitjacket, muscles tensing and skin hot with the aggression of a caged bull. I make the car roar like a beast through the cool evening, yanking it through the winding roads that lead up to my place in the Hollywood hills. I bring the car to a slide-stop at the front door, too impatient to even park it properly, and step through the long building of glass and white walls as if there’s something waiting for me. Tearing off clothes the way I’d like to do to hers, until I’m down to my boxer briefs, picking out a bottle of Pinot Blanc and opening it roughly. Wine in one hand, phone in the other, I go out to the deck and sit back on a lounger, letting the breeze off the swimming pool take the heat off my body. Slow sips from the bottle as I contemplate the L.A. skyline between my feet.
I’m barely below the neck on the bottle before I start thinking about Willow again, looking over to where Knife might be in the skyline and imagining what she’s doing right now. Working a knife with focused delicacy, sipping soup through those lips, dancing between the other chefs on those long legs, skin alive with the warmth of the grills, eyes narrowed with the determination of purpose.
I’m prickling with lust before I even realize it, even the cooling air not enough to release the pent-up tension that all these thoughts of Willow are stirring in me.
There are a million reasons why this is not a good idea for either of us. I need to nip this in the bud. I pick up my phone and flick through the messages and work notifications to get to the contacts list I keep for times like this, sucking down wine as I scroll through the names and photos.
Models with bodies that don’t need Photoshop, actresses who talk dirty enough for an X rating. Leggy brunettes and manic redheads, nymphomaniacs with every kink in the book and shy types who let it all go at once. A list of perfect women who’d be here in a heartbeat, the push of a button.
But none of them is Willow, and tonight I’d rather have nothing than settle for something less.
I drop the phone to the side and replace it with the bottle, other hand already palming the hard cock in my briefs. This time the wine doesn’t taste like wine, it tastes like her lips again, like that delicate, sensitive tongue against mine. A taste worth any price you’d put on it, worth searching half the world for.
I open my eyes to the shimmering sky blue of the pool, impossible not to imagine her being here, her long frame under that surface, flickering in the gentle lap of the water, gliding through it with the smoothness of that golden skin and the easy elegance of her movements. Difficult not to imagine those naked breasts as she emerges from the water, droplets catching the light as they trace that perfect shape, wet hair slicked back, that long neck.