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“Ciao, veloce,” he said as the door shut behind him.
From there, my next panic attack commenced.
Chapter 11
The next few days were not the same without Matteo. I spent the bulk of them holed up in my room, continuing to watch the cooking competitions on the Food streaming channel and hoping for his gentle knock at the door.
I was hopelessly heartbroken by the abrupt end to our love affair. The silver lining of meeting Matteo, though, was that our relationship had re-awakened an old passion of mine: cooking.
I had never been a master-chef-level expert in the kitchen, but in high school I had taken a culinary class and loved it. I had fond memories of creating delicious meals in our home kitchen for my dad to enjoy when he got home from work. Mom never seemed interested in trying any of my creations. She’d always said she had to watch her figure.
Dad, on the other hand, had loved everything I’d ever made him. He would compliment me on a job well done, and during that time, he and I had begun to bond more than we had in my earlier life. He was never much of a kid-person, but when it came to having conversations about what I was learning in school, he’d loved to partake. He saw a budding love for the culinary arts in me, and it was encouraging.
I stopped cooking, though, when that school year ended and summer came. That was the summer Mom had pushed me into modeling and scolded me for every incorrect food choice I’d made. Preparing meals lost the sparkle for me, and I would soon let go of the enjoyment of cooking entirely. It had become a forgotten relic of my memory, tucked away behind new memories I would have much rather forgotten instead.
Since mine and Matteo’s breakup, though, I’d been reminded of those memories with every episode of the cooking competitions I enjoyed. I had started watching them, hoping to get a glimpse of TV-Chef-Matteo, but it was to no avail. I had continued watching because of a genuine interest in the subject matter.
I was learning all kinds of kitchen tricks—how to julienne an onion in just a few flicks of the wrist, the correct temperature to drop crab legs into the pot, the boiling point of sugar…
My favorite cooking show was called Chef Charades, where a duo of chefs were forced to work together alongside each other in a kitchen. The catch was they were not allowed to speak to each other or touch anything at each other’s work stations. They could only gesture—and they were in a race against a team sharing the circumstances. I watched episode after episode, gaining a fondness for the way chefs learn to communicate with one another. The smooth, effortless way in which two people can share a kitchen and prepare a gorgeous meal without words was almost poetic to me.
It felt like a metaphor for life and love—two people coming together, each with unspoken needs and desires finding their way together to create something beautiful.
I was deep in thought about the episode I was watching when Jessie pounded on my door.
“Are you alive in there?” she yelled from the hallway.
My face flushed. It was mortifying being anywhere with her, but the safest place to have her was in the privacy of my cabin—so I opened the door and let her in.
“Seriously!” she squealed. “We are on a Caribbean cruise, and you’re going to spend the whole time in sweatpants watching cooking shows? Get a grip, Heather!”
“I’m having a really good time!” I said. “You enjoy the trip how you want, and I’ll enjoy it how I want. I’m probably going to wind up paying for everything anyway.”
Jessie groaned. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said.
“Trouble with Smithy?” I asked. “You guys fighting?”
“Nope,” she said. “No trouble. No fighting. Hard to fight with someone who refuses to even look at you and acknowledge your presence!”
She flopped on the bed, frustrated.
The last few days holed up in my cabin, I had tuned out the world. It occurred to me that I had even stopped paying attention to the other girls and the game altogether. I had just taken it for granted that Jessie and Smithy were having sex—Jessie always got her target, after all. I almost laughed, hearing the news that she hadn’t.
“You haven’t slept with him?” I asked.
She looked at me, devastated. “We haven’t even kissed,” she bellowed. “Haven’t held hands. Haven’t hugged. Nothing.”
“Have you told him you’re interested?” I asked.
“Not outright!” she said. “I’m not easy, Heather! But, yes, I’ve given him hints. I’ve flirted. It’s just like he’s not seeing me or not picking it up!”
“Maybe he has a girlfriend at home somewhere?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “I said something to him about how I was sure his girlfriend missed him. I was fishing for information. He said he didn’t have a girlfriend.”
“Okay,” I said. “What if he has a boyfriend?”
“Don’t even say that!” Jessie said. “Besides, I’m sure if he had a boyfriend he would have corrected me when I asked about the girlfriend—right? Wouldn’t he?”
