Page 12 of Total Dreamboat

Felix

Hope is smushed up against me. Our bodies fit so naturally it’s like we’re lovers who’ve been together for years. And this close, I notice she smells exactly like the magnolia in my parents’ garden.

It takes everything I have not to bury my face in her neck and inhale her.

I am determined: I will not let this day end without kissing her.

But for now, we lurch to a stop.

The cooking class is in a stately Colonial-style house on a wooded property.

An Antiguan couple comes out to greet us, and they introduce themselves as Sarah, our teacher, and Joseph, who distills rum on the property.

We all chat for a minute about where we’re from, and then they show us inside to a large kitchen.

Sarah explains that we’ll be making saltfish and fungie, Antigua’s national dish, as well as jerk chicken, conch salad, and tamarind balls with ripe Antigua Black pineapple for dessert.

She asks us to divide ourselves into groups of two.

Hope snatches my hand. “I claim the professional chef,” she says.

“All yours,” I say. As if there was any doubt.

Sarah asks if we have preferences about what we cook. The others shrug but I ask if we can make the saltfish and fungie. I love salted cod. We some times serve baccala fritters at the Smoke and Gun, and I’m curious about the Antiguan preparation.

Sarah leads us to a station with the ingredients. The cod has been soaked overnight to remove some of the salt, and it’s our job to boil it and make a sauce. We also need to prepare the fungie, a mixture of okra, cornmeal, and butter.

“You have to take care with it,” Sarah says. “If you don’t whisk it enough, it will clump. And no one likes clumpy fungie.”

“Sounds like that’s your job,” Hope says. “I can’t be trusted with a whisk.”

“I thought you liked to cook.”

“I do,” she says. “But I didn’t say I was good at it.”

“I’ll… whisk you off your feet.”

She groans. “You’re in charge, chef. What first?”

We set to chopping the ingredients to make the base of the sauce—onion, garlic, capsicum, celery, Scotch bonnet, tomatoes, and fresh thyme. The veg is beautiful, grown right here in Sarah’s garden.

I give Hope an onion to dice while I work on the tomatoes. When she presents it to me, I see she’s done a beautiful job.

“Wow,” I say. “Impressive knife skills for a civilian.”

“I confess I’m not that bad in the kitchen. I just don’t like to whisk. What next?”

“Want to chop the capsicum?”

“The what?”

“Oh. You speak American. The bell pepper.”

“Excuse me, your majesty,” she says in a faux-British accent that sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins .

“What an uncanny impression of me.”

She gets to work on her task and I do the Scotch bonnet and garlic. I’m warming oil to sweat the alliums when my eye starts watering from the sun cream I put on my face, which is sweating into my eyes from the heat of the kitchen. I reach up to wipe away a tear.

“Fucking fuck,” I hiss, as my eyeball screams in protest.

Hope looks at me in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

“Got chili in my bloody eye.”

I cook with Scotch bonnet all the time. I cannot believe I’ve done something so asinine. I was paying more attention to Hope than the food.

Sarah hears me hissing and rushes over.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Beginner’s mistake.”

“I actually own two restaurants,” I admit through the pain. “I’m just an idiot.”

“Should you wash it off with some water?” Hope asks, gesturing at the sink.

“Won’t help. I don’t suppose you have any milk?” I ask Sarah.

“You’re going to put milk in your eye ?” Hope asks.

“No, my hands are covered in Scotch bonnet. You’re going to put milk in my eye.”

Sarah brings us a bowl of it and a clean towel. Hope washes her hands up to the elbows as I try not to jump around in agony, and then dabs a bit of milk onto the cloth. I sit down so she can reach.

She carefully smooths the hair out of my eyes.

“I’m going to drip it in,” she says. “I don’t want to scratch your cornea.”

“Couldn’t feel worse than this.”

She squeezes milk from the cloth directly into my eye, and I blink and rotate my eyeball.

Very attractive, I’m sure.

“Does that feel any better?” she asks.

“It does. But my pride physically hurts.”

“Yes, I’m not terribly convinced of your talents in the kitchen. I blame it on the lack of culinary school.”

“You’d best hurry back to tell my sisters.”

“Never. Your secret is safe with me.” She gestures at the dining table in the center of the room. “Do you want to chill here and recover and I’ll do the rest?”

“No. I intend to redeem myself.”

I throw myself into cooking with my entire life force. I’m determined to make the best dish of Hope Lanover’s life, even half blind. I sauté aromatics with the tomatoes and celery, stir in vinegar and tomato paste, taste for seasoning, balance the salt.

It’s good. Very good. I take it off the flame and leave it to rest. I’ll finish it off with some lime when we’re ready for service.

Hope, meanwhile, chops the okra for the fungie and measures out the cornmeal.

“Your turn,” she says when she’s done. “I don’t want to ruin it. I’ll cook the fish.”

I boil the okra until it’s soft, then whisk cornmeal into the water in a thin, careful stream. I swear to holy hell if there is one clump in this goddamn dish I will wander off into the woods and never return. I stand obsessively stirring in butter and water until Sarah pronounces it perfect.

I feel like I just won a Michelin star.

Sarah goes over to Hope to help her flake the cooked fish into the sauce.

“Felix, come taste,” Hope says. “It’s ludicrously good.”

I do, and it’s almost there, but it could be better. “Needs acid,” I say. I cut open a lime and juice it with my bare hand.

“Do not touch your eye,” Hope says. “I can’t go through that again.”

We bring all the food to the table and take our places. Joseph comes around with rum punch for everyone. I politely decline.

Hope takes the rum.

“Yum,” she says, after we toast to our hosts. She holds her drink out to me. “This is amazing. Want to try it?”

“No thanks. I don’t drink,” I say.

“Ah,” she says. She doesn’t ask me why. I’m grateful for that. There’s nothing like being interrogated over declining a drink, especially in a room full of strangers.

All the food is amazing. Hope eats it with relish, asking questions and licking jerk seasoning off her fingers in a way that makes me even more obsessed with her cupid’s bow mouth.

God, I want to kiss her.

And I think she wants that too.

It’s so terrifying and exhilarating that I’m jittery.

They say in sobriety you have to relearn the pleasures you felt before you started drinking.

But I started drinking purloined vodka with the older boys at boarding school when I was thirteen, and immediately developed a taste for it.

I was never a good student, never a high achiever like my father and sisters, and the camaraderie and drunken confidence booze gave me made me feel like I finally had something to offer.

I was the popular, charming partier who could always secure forbidden substances. The one who held wild weekend-long parties at my parents’ country house when they were away. The bad boy good for a laugh and a shag.

This must be what it feels like to have a goofy, boyish crush on a girl, unmediated by being fucked up.

I rather like it.

When we move on to dessert, Hope takes a huge bite of the pineapple and rolls her eyes back into her head. “Oh my God ,” she moans. “How is this real?”

I take a bite of mine. It is the platonic ideal of pineapple. It is the pineapple you would find growing in the garden of Eden, and risk original sin just to taste.

Makes my sauce seem a bit less impressive.

Sarah and Joseph are laughing at Hope’s ecstasy.

“Antigua Black,” Joseph says. “Sweetest pineapple in the world. Want some more?”

“Yes!” she says. He cuts three more slices and she eats all of them, juice running down her fingers. I’m addicted to watching. All I want to do is take her to my kitchen and prepare her things that elicit such heady joy. I want her to react to my food that way. To be the reason she’s moaning.

I need to calm fucking down.

When we’re done with dessert, Joseph invites us to join him on the veranda for the rum tasting. Everyone stands. I feel awkward, as there is going to be little to do as a sober person amongst a group sampling high-proof liquor.

Hope grabs my hand and turns to Sarah. “Would you mind if the two of us skipped the tasting and went back to the kitchen?” she asks. “We’re dying to learn how to make that conch salad.”

It’s such a kind gesture.

I try not to show that I’m melting.

“Thanks,” I say to Hope, under my breath. “I was dreading that. But don’t feel like you need to miss out on the rum, if you want to leave me to it.”

She shrugs. “I’m good. I don’t drink much. Went a little too hard last year after a breakup and it made me… off.” She says this in a way that makes me think there is more to the story.

With drinking, there usually is.

Same with breakups.

“I went a little too hard for about two decades,” I tell her. “I’m in recovery. Two years.”

“That’s amazing!” she says. “Congratulations.”

I can tell by the warmth in her voice that she means it.