“They have wine pairings,” I told him joyfully, eager to share my excitement. “You know, if you’d prefer, you can just read the tasting notes and not actually drink.”
“Shut up.” He was grinning, though, so.
“Aren’t you two a handsome couple!” remarked the host as we walked in.
“Oh, we’re not—” he started to protest, but I cut him off at the pass.
“Thank you,” I said. “Can you even believe this is our ten year anniversary? Thank god we found a sitter, amirite? Good help these days… my mother always warned me.”
“Oh my god, shut up. We aren’t a couple. We’re just roommates.” The panicked look on his face as he explained to the host sort of annoyed me. Which was why—
“Screwmates,” I hissed at the host as he yanked me past, and into the classroom kitchen.
“Not yet!” he called over his shoulder. See, he knew he was being seduced, and handily.
“But soon!” I yelled over him. He’d had the last word too often already.
“I can’t take you anywhere,” Marc told me.
“Lucky for us, I took you here.” Boom. The kitchen smelled fantastic already. It may surprise no one to note that although I would have lied like a rug about it, I couldn’t actually identify a single bit of the smell. If pressed, I would have just said it smelled like a nice restaurant, mixed with a hint of Grandma’s kitchen.
Later, when I was waxing poetic about it, Marc told me that was bread. I was smelling fresh-baked bread. I never have quite figured out how someone as observational as myself can have such a dull palate.
“Hello, and welcome to a night of romance!” the chef proclaimed from the station at the front of the room. “Prepare to fall in love all over again… with great flavor.”
I so wished I had used that line in my comic.
The appetizer course was that most classic of lusty foods—the oyster. Brief moment of geographical knowledge—Kansas City Missouri only has one kind of native seafood, and that is the mutant kind that comes out of the river that no one eats and is probably dangerous to touch. There’s only a single Cajun restaurant in town. So even though I knew oysters were sophisticated and alluring—well, I had never actually had one.
“You’ve all seen oysters before, but a lot of you probably haven’t opened one,” chef said, and I nodded pretentiously. If I pretended I was old hat at shucking oysters, then it would only make sense for Marc to acquire the skill. Then I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labors.
Plus—there was something undeniably sexy about seeing him pry my dinner from the jaws of nature, regardless of how the actual oyster was meant to make you feel.
It was only a very shallow cut he sustained, and considering he opened six oysters, I personally felt like he was a natural.
“Now when people taste wine, they use all kinds of descriptors to tell other people what they’re experiencing. You might be surprised to learn that oysters have a taste range just as vast as our favorite grape juices.” At this, Marc and I were both nodding arrogantly. We had so many descriptors. Perhaps they were always wrong, but we had pockets full of them.
For example, only five minutes before the oyster shucking, we had both agreed we were enjoying a crisp glass of peach and honey-noted chardonnay.
It was pear and green tea.
My personal consensus was rapidly becoming that the people who wrote those notes on the bottles were just generally drunk. Or flat out making things up. Either way, I just knew we were going to kill it on the oysters.
We adorned our first varietal with drops of lemon juice and dabs of horseradish, and then sipped our little meats out of the shells. Our eyes were locked. They widened together. His watered. Mine did a bit of the same. I swallowed.
So that was an oyster.
“I got hints of ocean…” Marc said tentatively.
“Overtones of mucus,” I added. He nodded. I nodded back. It turned out oysters weren’t turning either of us on. Unspoken, our thoughts seemed to communicate. Who needed oysters when you could mind meld? I swept our remaining four bivalves (I totally stole that word from Chef) into the trash as Marc refilled our wine glasses.
Appetizer was becoming a very apt name, as my appetite had only grown after we threw our first course out.
My lips were feeling a tad bit numb, which I also chalked up to the seafood, because the rest of my body was starting to feel very sensitive. The heat of the kitchen, the scents in the air, the wine in my glass, and the proximity of Marc… well, it was all a bit dizzying.
I brushed against him more often than I needed to as we prepped our next dish. It wasn’t just because I was starving that I was jazzed for it—it was also going to be the fanciest thing that had ever gone into my mouth. There were figs. There was a kind of fresh mozzarella and cream mixture called burrata. And there were goddamn truffles. On top of pasta, which meant automatically that I was going to like it, because a bad pasta is kind of like a bad taco—a myth.
After receiving all our instructions, we started cooking. A pot of salted water waited to boil on our stove. We each had a cutting board and a sharp knife, Marc seemingly no worse for the wear after the Oyster Incident. Also, the Culinary Center kept Star Wars Band-Aids on hand, so.
I assigned myself the burrata. With every slice of my knife, cream pooled across my cutting board, and onto my fingers. I licked my first fingertip. It was salty, creamy, thick, rich. It was fucking sexy.
I ran my finger through the cream again and offered it to Marc. His tongue delicately grazed my skin, but it sent shock waves all the way down to my core. I dipped my finger again, and brought it back to his mouth. The heat of it, the anticipation of it… unf. When he licked me, I swear I felt as melty as the cheese.
“Ahem,” said the long-suffering chef. We were developing quite the pattern of PDA. I regretted nothing.
Apparently, neither did Marc, because he bumped my arm one more time before returning to fig duty. We drank our glasses of wine when the water came to a boil, so that we could have fresh ones with our pasta. I had to admit that even though the sexual tension was still as thick as the burrata waiting on my board, we’d settled into a really comfortable routine. It was nice to work so well with someone. I couldn’t think of another time in my life when that had happened to me.
Certainly never with a boyfriend. Not that—of course Marc wasn’t—nor would he be, but. Suddenly I understood why people waxed so poetic about the idea of relationships. Why girls I knew (cough, Ava) fell in love constantly. This was a nice feeling. One that I didn’t know was missing from my previous two boyfriends.
It turned out that we really were just friends who happened to do it. Except that’s what Marc and I were, too, right? Minus the doing it part. Yet. Tonight was going to be the night, I just knew it, because everything was going like a dream. Underneath my skater dress, I was wearing black lace, even.