Page 40 of Under the Stars

The morning after my first date with David, I bounced out of bed and into the kitchen to cook breakfast. Just a simple frittata with some bright new cherry tomatoes from the vines on the patio, some local cheese, avocado, tangle of dressed arugula on the side.

The burr of the coffee grinder woke him up.

He shuffled into the tiny kitchen in a pair of boxer briefs. “What the fuck is this?” he asked.

I kissed him on the cheek. “I’m making breakfast, duh.”

“You cook at home ?”

“You don’t cook at home?”

He stared at me with blank eyes. “Cooking is work, babe. When you get home, you want to relax. Order in. Let someone else do the cooking .”

At the time, I thought he was kidding. I thought all chefs were like me—we cooked because cooking was what we did, because food enchanted us, because when we daydreamed, we daydreamed about the alchemy of ingredients, about the instant when melted butter turns to foam, about the caramelization of meat in a cast-iron skillet, about the ping of white wine and the earth of mushroom and the singe of pepper.

We imagined how this bread felt in your mouth, how that sauce unwrapped itself on your palate. Cooking wasn’t work; it was life.

But David was not kidding. He sat down at the kitchen table and watched me plate his breakfast; he took a bite of the frittata and told me that I should have used a smoked Gouda instead of cheddar.

He was right. David had the best palate of any chef I knew; he had a million brilliant ideas; he came up with dishes I never imagined from ingredients I hadn’t known existed.

But once he perfected a recipe, he left the cooking to the staff.

He left the eating to the customers. He didn’t relish food—he never could appreciate the sublime pleasure of a basic hamburger, perfectly cooked.

To David, cooking was nothing more than a chemistry experiment, and the kitchen was his laboratory. The diners, I guess, were his subjects.

“So it was all about control,” Sedge says, when I tell him this story. “The all-powerful creator of food.”

I look up from the ceramic bowl in which I’m beating cream with an ancient hand mixer that might possibly electrocute me. “Oh my God. That’s exactly it.”

“Like surgeons. High proportion of narcissists and sociopaths. Not you, ” he adds, grinning.

He’s at the sink, washing and stemming the strawberries.

Dessert, he told me, when I asked what he felt like eating.

Not too heavy. So we’re having strawberries and cream.

“But if you’re someone who’s into control, you’ve got to love the power dynamics of head chef. ”

I turn back to the cream, which is just beginning to thicken, along with the muscles of my upper arm. “This feels weirdly disloyal. Telling you all this.”

“Disloyal? To the guy who left you in the middle of the night without a word? Dumped all his shit on your lap and took off for God knows where, free as a bird?” Sedge sets the bowl of strawberries on the counter next to me. “I have to say, this is some good-looking fruit.”

I shake out my arm.

“Badass,” he says. “Let me finish whipping that cream. You work your magic on the berries.”

We switch positions. I drizzle a little honey over the strawberries, shred some mint from the herb pots lined up on the kitchen porch.

Sedge presents me with a bowl of beautifully whipped cream, not quite stiff.

I fold in a few drops of vanilla extract with a wooden spoon that was probably once used to spank children.

“No sweetener?” he asks.

“If you have good berries, you don’t need it.”

We sit at the kitchen table with our bowls of strawberries and cream and eat with our fingers. Quincy sprawls over our feet. “You were right about the cream,” says Sedge.

I shrug and smile at my bowl.

“I’m serious. How does this taste so incredible? It’s just, like, four ingredients. Five.”

“It’s not how many ingredients. It’s the quality. You pick them out with care. With—” I shake my head and laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking about this time I grilled lamb chops. Which even David approved of. He was like, How did you make these? And I said, With love. He looked at me like I’d just tattooed a peace sign on my forehead.”

Sedge sets down the bowl. “Can I ask you an obnoxious question?”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Did you really even love this guy? I mean, what you’re telling me, he’s not the kind of person I can see you falling for. You’re too clear-eyed. You’re too…”

“Too what?”

“I was going to say tender, but I didn’t want you to get all defensive. I mean it as a compliment.”

“Tender, huh?”

“Don’t forget, I’ve seen you ugly crying. You only hurt that bad when you love deep. When you open yourself up to someone else.”

I smile. “Just like the queen said.”

“Wait, the queen said what ?”

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

“Right-ho,” he says. “Question is, why him?”

One strawberry left. I dredge it through the remaining cream like a Zamboni. “He was charming. Maybe I left that part out. He could be so fucking charming, you can’t believe it. Like I was the only woman on the planet. And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t.”

Sedge leans back in his chair and studies me. “So how’s the divorce going?”

“Meredith’s offered me her lawyers to start the proceedings.”

“Have you taken her up on it?”

“Not yet.” I pop the strawberry in my mouth and lean down to cradle Quincy’s head in my palm.

“I guess I’m kind of holding out for—I don’t know.

A sign. A clue. A signal that it’s okay to let the axe fall.

Because right now, the whole thing, the past six months, it’s just a void.

I’m groping in the dark for something, and I don’t even know what it is.

It’s like there’s this man who was my husband, this man I thought I loved, and this totally other person who deserted me.

And I can’t put those two people together in my head.

It’s like I’m grieving for the old David, the David I thought I knew, but I can’t really grieve because he never actually existed?

Like maybe I didn’t really love him at all.

Maybe we had this physical connection that I projected into emotional connection—he’s a chef, I’m a chef, we must be soulmates.

But all the time, he was really someone else.

I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer than that. ”

“No, I get it.”

“I mean, logically, yes. I should be on the phone with Meredith’s lawyers.

I should have already started proceedings or whatever you do.

But it just doesn’t feel over enough. If that makes sense.

I want it to be over. But it’s not. My marriage, it’s like a sentence with no period at the end.

Is it finished or not? Can I stick the period by myself? Does it work that way?”

I lick the cream off my fingers, one by one.

I pretend as if this act requires all my concentration, because it’s impossible to look at Sedge’s warm eyes, Sedge’s wide shoulders underneath his T-shirt, without losing what’s left of my mind.

I think he’s watching me. Watching my fingers, as if the act requires all his concentration, too.

“Let me ask you this,” he says. “If David walked through this door right now with a good story, would you take him back?”

“Hell, no. I’d tell him to fuck off.”

“You’re sure about that? One hundred percent?”

“One thousand.”

“All right, then. All I need to know.”

I lift my head. It’s still too hard to look in his eyes, but I look anyway because this is the moment when you must do that difficult thing.

They are clear and earnest, more green than brown in the old incandescent light.

A wisp of cream decorates the corner of his mouth.

He reaches out to lay his sticky fingertips on my sticky fingertips, cradling the empty bowl.

“Look,” he says. “This is your call. If all you want right now is some hot sex to press your psychic reset button, I’m here for you. The rest can wait. I’m a patient man.”

At the words hot sex —the way he says them, low in his throat—I get this peculiar feeling in my belly, like melted chocolate.

I rise from the chair and hook one leg over his lap to straddle him.

Underneath the table, Quincy slaps his tail against the floor.

There is a ridge of ultrafine stubble along Sedge’s jaw and I drag my thumbs along each side and lower my tongue to the smudge of cream at the corner of his mouth.

The texture makes me shiver. Sedge’s hands creep under my shirt to clasp my waist.

And everything falls away—David, Foster, Steve, Meredith. What the past holds. What the future holds.

All that’s left is now.

“Press any buttons you want,” I tell him.

—

Later, as we lie slack against each other, nerves throbbing softly, Quincy chasing dream-rabbits on the corner of the bed, a thought comes to me—the first coherent idea my brain has formed since straddling this man’s lap a couple of hours ago.

Sedge Peabody is a man of his word.

I nestle my head in the hollow of his shoulder. “Meredith likes to tell me that you can either leave or get left, it’s your choice.”

He drowses his hand around the curve of my elbow. “Wow. That’s a pretty dramatic binary.”

“I used to tell her that was true for her because she manifested it. Then I married David to prove to her how different things were for me.”

“Trust issues. Got it.”

I turn my head to stare at his cheekbone. His ungainly ear. “You don’t see the red flag here? Damaged goods?”

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” He leans over to kiss my forehead. “Larkin. My dad used to throw that poem at me, when he was plastered.”

“Oh, you too, then.”

“Me too.” He smooths my hair and studies my eyes, until I am drunk with the closeness of him. Levitating into the proximity of his skin and bone and muscle. “So I guess I’d better do whatever it takes not to screw this one up.”