Page 87 of Lavish

“Okay…” I picked up one with the titleSimple, Sexy, Soulful Suppersin gold lettering. The edges of the page were still crisp.

I didn’t want a recipe with a million steps. I definitely wasn’t using a bunch of pots and pans and bowls. I didn’t want to experiment either.

What was easy?

Pasta.

It couldn’t be that hard, right? Boil water. Stir. Maybe throw something green on top. I could do this. The staff at my parents’ mansion made it for me all the time.

I found a spaghetti recipe, but we were missing half the ingredients. I grabbed the only pasta I could find—some expensive linguine Miles got at that farmers’ market.

“First step, boil water,” I muttered.

I set a pot on the stove like I was preparing for battle.

“Done. Easy.” I turned to my little enemy, who was staring at me with those big green eyes. “Watch, you can’t have none when I’m done.”

Again, why are you talking to a cat? You can’t be this damn lonely.

Well. I guess I was. I couldn’t go to my sisters or Noelle about Jenese. I couldn’t confess to Mama or Daddy—that would be pointless. I definitely wasn’t confessing to Erik.

“What’s the best way to chop garlic?” I muttered. “Up and down? Or sideways?”

The recipe needed tomato sauce and garlic. We didn’t have sauce but I had tomato juice, ketchup, and a real tomato.

I picked up the heavy knife. My grip was all wrong, I could tell. But I was tired and hungry and wired on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and Jenese’s name was echoing in the back of my skull like a song I couldn’t turn off.

The blade hit the cutting board with a loudthunk.

I forced myself to keep cutting, each slice a small victory against the overwhelming task. I aggressively chopped the garlic.

When I was done, I looked down at the massacre. The garlic was mangled—some pieces slivered too thin, others still nearly whole.

“Goddamn it.”

Doughboy meowed once, like he was trying to tell me to just give up.

Nope. Time to move on to the sauce.

When was the last time I’d cooked? Probably with Miles. Why had I had so many of my firsts with him? Miles always loved being in the kitchen, even if he couldn’t cook well back then. Now I knew he was a pro. I’d always been perfectly content to just watch and taste his questionable creations after.

Don’t go there.

A violent sizzling sound, like bacon in a pan, and the gurgling of boiling water drew my attention to the stove where the pot had bubbled over.

I grabbed the linguine and snapped it in half—poorly. Some slid into the pot. Some scattered across the counter. One piece hit me in the neck.

“Not ideal,” I mumbled. “But we move on.”

I reached for the saucepan, dumped in my tomato-ketchup-garlic improvisation, and stirred it with a wooden spoon, the scent of garlic filling the kitchen as I pretended to know what I was doing.

After a few minutes, it smelled…weird.

I turned up the heat to hurry it along.

Big mistake.

I really didn’t know what happened next. The concoction began popping. A rogue droplet landed on my wrist. I yelped and jumped back, knocking into the pasta pot. With a loud splash, water sloshed onto the stove, sending a plume of steam into the air. The handle tipped. I grabbed it—too late.