Page 83 of Darling
In the end, Christian cooks. Because one of the three meals in my repertoire doesn’t happen to be spaghetti carbonara. He tasks me with slicing the long French baguette and warming the bowls. He fries off the cubed ham, pancetta, he tells me, while the spaghetti boils in the biggest pot I own, which is not a pasta pot. He cracks two egg yolks and begins to whisk them with some black pepper before adding the cheese, explaining how so many people refuse to make it like this, the traditional way, because it uses raw eggs.
“Raw eggs?!” I stare, horrified.
“Yes. It’s how the Italians make it,” he explains. “Trust me.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, it’s the Italians. Isn’t that how you kill a person? Raw eggs. What is this, payback?”
He laughs and begins to whisk the ingredients into a lumpy yellow mulch. I can feel my appetite disappearing. “Darling, do you trust me?” he asks, eyes like dark cocoa, mouth curled up suggestively.
“I guess…”
“I’ve never poisoned a person yet with this recipe, and I’ve been making this a long, long time. It was Stella’s favourite. We ate it in Rome on our honeymoon, and I’d always make it when she was feeling poorly—it was her comfort food.” He stiffens a little, as though either shocked by his own mention of her or scared of my reaction.
I’m sort of flattered he felt comfortable enough to share it with me, and so I style it out. “And it never made hermoresick?”
“Not once,” he assures me.
“Okay, I’ll trust you then. I’m all done with the bread and bowl duties. Anything else you need me to do?”
“Just water for the table. It’s nice with a white or a red wine, but I don’t think we bought any, did we?”
“Uh, no. We didn’t. But I think Amata left a bottle of rosé here, if you want that?”
He makes a face. “I cannot stand the stuff. It’s Felix’s favourite, and even the smell turns my stomach.” The mention of his beautiful ballet dancing ex barely even grazes this time as it flies past me. Becauseno, darling. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on, is still loud and clear in my head more than twenty-four hours later. I watch him plate up in a sort of love daze, slipping again into the fantasy where we live and cook and exist together like this every night.
The pasta is incredible. It’s rich and creamy and cheesy, and after the first mouthful, the fact that I’m eating only slightly warmed eggs disappears from my mind. I feel warm and satisfied by the end of it, and it’s not hard to see why it was a comfort dish for his wife.
“So what’s your comfort food then?” I ask as I mop up the last of the cream sauce with the warm bread.
“Curry. Authentic and South Indian, preferably. The spice always helps pick me up from whatever’s getting me down. My favourite restaurant in the world is a curry place just off Brick Lane. I’ve been going there for twenty-odd years. Which is about as long as you’ve been alive.”
I ignore the remark about the age. “I’ve never had authentic South Indian curry.”
“Never?”
I shake my head. He gives me the same look he gave me the day at the ambassador’s residence, when he said he wanted to show me the world.
“Maybe when I get my passport, you can take me to your favourite curry place?”
He wipes his face with his napkin. “Oh, I completely forgot. I got word back from my contact to say they were able to have it approved internally. They’re sending it to my office. It should be there when I get back on Thursday.”
“Seriously? That’s… thank you. I really didn’t want to have to go to Ohio… I appreciate it.”
He smiles, pleased. “You’re welcome.”
“That’s impressive. What else can you do?”
“Here, not very much at all. I think arranging for a passport to be issued to an American citizen might be about the extent of it.”
“And back home? What can you do there?”
“A lot more. I managed to have a man released from prison twenty years early.”
“Hot.”
He laughs, fully, and I do too, moving to lift our empty bowls. “I’ll wash, you sit down.”
“Don’t be silly, we’ll do it together. Do you want to wash or dry?” He follows me through, and we lapse quickly into a two-man assembly line of him washing and me drying. As I’m putting the last fork into the drawer, he snakes an arm around my waist and nuzzles his mouth into my neck, pressing a kiss just below my ear.