“Adina always pulls the floral note, too,” Pete says, shaking his head. “My palate isn’t that good—to me, it just tastes like incredible orange juice.”
Ben ignores this implied compliment to his palate as so much nonsense; however incompetent he may be, Pete is still a professional, and Ben’s …well, whatever Ben is. But he feels the faint flush creeping up his neck anyway, betraying his pleasure even as he tells himself it’s nothing at all.
He sips the orange juice instead, trying to enjoy every nuance of the flavor, and something about the sugar and the brightness must enliven a few of his critical thinking brain cells from the stupor in which they’ve spent most of the morning. Rather belatedly, it occurs to him to ask, “Uh, what are you doing, exactly?”
Pete grins at him as he pulls out an enormous hunk of what looks like—oh, God, is thatpastrami? Homemade pastrami? With a thick smokey bark on the outside and beautiful marbling on the inside? Even cold, Ben cansmellit, and he’s suddenly ravenous, hungry like he hasn’t eaten in a hundred years.
“I’m proving to you that I can cook,” Pete says, settling the pastrami on a cutting board and pulling a wide-bladed butcher’s knife from the block. “What’s your bodega order, by the way?”
“Bacon, egg, and cheese, American, ketchup if it’s the right brand and hot sauce otherwise, hard roll,” Ben rattles off immediately, as if he’s at the bodega counter with a line of impatient New Yorkers behind him.
“Ah, good,” Pete says, peeling the onion and setting it down on another cutting board next to a small container of mushrooms and two red peppers. “You’ll like this, then, I think.”
“I’ll—wait, are you making something forme?”Ben demands, abruptly horrified. “That’s—oh my God, you don’t have to do that! I don’t—you don’t have to—I mean, who says I’m even hungry?”
“Hmm. Hold this?” Pete says, plucking a piece of paper out of an open metal inbox screwed onto the side of his station. He offers it out to Ben; it looks to be a recipe for an enormous quantity of shakshuka.
Mystified, Ben takes it. And then, a second later, the flush that was starting to fade back down his neck flares all the way up to his cheeks when Pete gives the trembling paper a significant look.
“Thatsays you’re hungry,” Pete says, plucking the paper back out of Ben’s hands. “At least, in my significant experience of working with people who’ll cook for everyone but themselves. Come on—it won’t kill you to have a breakfast sandwich. Anyway, I made this pastrami myself, and it took me three days, and ifsomeonedoesn’t eat the rest of it, it’ll be depressing.”
“Oh, I…” Ben says, badly wrong-footed. Pete must have—he must have noticed the paper shaking in Ben’s hand back in theoffice. And instead of saying anything about it, he…led Ben down here and startedcooking for him, and only bothered calling Ben out on it when Ben more or less forced his hand. That’s—it’s—atypical, that’s what it is. Ben can’t find a place to slot it in against the rest of his mental landscape.
Well. There’s one place he could put it, actually. Oddly, horribly, it’s somehow one of the hottest things that’s ever happened to Ben, for reasons he can’t entirely explain even to himself. Surely, some of it is just a function of the sheer, unbelievable hotness of Pete, which burns so intensely that Ben keeps finding himself having a hard time looking directly at him, as if those stupid cheekbones are the surface of the sun. But for someonethat hotto be paying so muchattentionto Ben as to notice a little thing like a trembling paper in his hand—for someone that hot to follow up on that observation by addressing and solving the source of the problem—it isn’t fair play, that’s all. It suggests Pete as someone who might pay Ben the same curious, investigative attention in bed, take the time to think about what he’d like, what he’d find hot, what’d feel good. This is not a quality Ben has found in previous men this attractive, who have mostly paid him absolutely no attention at all.
He’s not entirely mannerless, though, so instead of standing there openly staring at Pete like a fool, Ben thanks him, or tries to. What actually comes out of his mouth is, “I mean—thank you, I guess. Assuming you don’t, like, cut your finger off in theprocess or anything. I have an intense allergy, you understand. To fingers. The hospital would need to be involved.”
“Well, that does sound very serious, but I think we’re probably good,” Pete says, a chuckle running through his voice. Then, his smile going smaller and a little sheepish, he knocks lightly against the wooden butcher block and adds, “But maybe don’t turn your phone camera on, yeah? In case. Wouldn’t want you to go into anaphylactic shock or anything.”
“Very considerate,” Ben says faintly, at a bit of a loss, and takes a sip of orange juice to buy himself a moment to think of something else to say.
Nothing comes, but it seems nothing needs to; even as Ben’s swallowing, Pete resumes humming. The tune is vaguely familiar to Ben, but he can’t quite place it; it’s cheerful, though, and in spite of not being particularly loud, it has the odd effect of lulling Ben into an easy silence. Somehow it suggests that there is no need to fill the space between them with words.
Instead, he watches with curiosity, and then surprise, and then steadily increasing astonishment, as Pete cooks. Without a camera on him, Pete is not just a competent cook; Pete is maybe themostcompetent cook Ben hasever seen. He grew up watching a long series of line cooks fall in, and often dramatically back out, of Trattoria Luciana over the years; some of his earliest memories are of standing at one of the prep stations, so young that his eyes barely crested the top of the cutting board, watching Luis or Samara or Wendy or Hiram or whoever was on the bottom of Daniel’s list that week, cutting huge piles of onions and peppers and tomatoes into a fine dice.
Pete is faster than Luis or Samara or Wendy or Hiram, faster even than Ben’s own mother, a terrifying woman who stubbornly wields a four-inch paring knife she’s sharpened down to nearly nothing as though it’s both a chef’s knife and an extension of her hand. He slices a potato into neat, perfectchunks so quickly and so precisely that for a second Ben thinks that maybe he accidentally fell asleep, took one of those micro-naps Salvador Dalí was famous for, and missed part of the process. But then he watches Pete do itagainwith six more potatoes, easy as anything, and dump them all into the stock pot he placed on the stove earlier. He takes the pot to the sink, still whistling, and as he fills it, waves hello at someone who steps into the kitchen from the entrance on the other side of the room. The mysterious visitor drops a pile of bags on one of the far stations, disappearing again after a returning wave.
When Pete returns to the counter and sets the pot to boil, Ben wants to ask him exactly how much he’s expected toeathere, but he’s distracted again watching Pete chop peppers and onions and mushrooms and pile them up on the cutting board, then slice some of the pastrami into paper-thin strips and set it aside, before he chunks up the rest so quickly Ben barely sees the knife move. Pete’s starting the onions, mushrooms, and peppers in a huge, well-oiled cast-iron on a back burner—he’s seasoning them with salt and pepper—he’s cracking four eggs into a bowl and whisking them, and seasoning those, too—he’s turning the heat on under a stainless-steel skillet—he’s cutting off four slices of the loaf of bread, which smells like sourdough, and absently offering Ben the heel. Ben takes it, and has a bite; it’s good, hearty, a whole grain of some sort clearly running through it. The water hasn’t even come to aboilyet; Pete hasn’t stopped humming.
It’s this, more than anything, that ends up breaking Ben’s silence. “Is that…oh my God, man, is that ‘Mah Nà Mah Nà’? From theMuppets?”
Pete shrugs as he stirs the sizzling skillet, nodding at the potato water as though in approval when it starts to bubble and throwing in some salt with his non-stirring hand. “Hey, don’tknock the Muppets. Maybe the Swedish Chef is my personal hero. You don’t know.”
Ben snorts out half a laugh without entirely meaning to; he and Renata had grown up watching reruns of the originalMuppet Show, andFraggle Rock, and whatever else they could find, but it’s been a long time since Ben thought about it. “My sincerest apologies to Jim Henson; I would never knock the Muppets.” Then he watches in growing hunger as, into the now-hot stainless-steel skillet, Pete lays down several of the thin slices of pastrami. Ribboned with bright white fat, each slice immediately begins to sizzle and shrivel, and the smell they release makes Ben salivate in anticipation.
Luckily, it’s quick after that. The pastrami doesn’t take long at all to sear up into crisp little sheets of meat, and Pete piles them onto a small metal sheet tray and sets them aside. Into the same pan, he introduces the slices of bread, letting them toast up in the rendered pastrami fat. When they’re golden on the bottom with specks of black pastrami spice, Pete evacuates the slices from the skillet, tosses in a little pat of butter, dumps in the eggs he seasoned and whisked earlier, and cooks them up into a soft, fluffy scramble in a minute flat. Finally, he spreads some sort of red paste from a jar—not a branded jar, clearly a homemade condiment of some kind—onto the top slices of bread, settles a handful of pre-washed arugula on the bottoms, and piles on pastrami and egg until he has two beautiful sandwiches. He puts each one onto another tiny sheet tray and places one in front of Ben with a small, slightly nervous smile.
“The moment of truth,” Pete says, and his tone makes Ben a little unsure whether or not he’s joking. Which—well, surely that’s insane. After the skills Pete showed him, he couldn’t possibly care aboutBen’sopinion of his work.
It is at this moment that Ben’s stomach releases a grumble so audible that Ben imaginesRickcan hear it, back in his office.Pete’s smile spreads into something smugger. “Go on; eat it. The anticipation is killing me.”
“Are you planning to stare at me the whole time?” Ben demands, a little horrified.
Pete holds up his hands and looks politely away, and thank God; the minute his eyeline is elsewhere, Ben snatches up the sandwich and takes an enormous bite.
The groan that he releases is loud, involuntary, and incredibly embarrassing. Still: “Holy crap, are youkiddingme?” Ben demands, staring at the sandwich. “Whyis that sogood? It’s just—eggs and pastrami and—what is this condiment?”
“Oh, it’s, uh, sauce,” Pete says, and shrugs. “Every week I throw some stuff together…into a sauce. Sometimes it’s an herb sauce; this week it’s roasted bell peppers and Calabrian chiles and some other stuff. Malt vinegar, maybe? Anyway, I thought it would go nice here.”
