“My dear, I am not everyone,” their instructor said. He clapped his hands, and everyone stood to attention. “Please, pick a station.”
Mal and Jo wandered to an unclaimed station in the back. Jo draped an apron over her head, then bent to snap off her heels and slip her feet into Mal’s sneakers. The instructor introduced himself as Emiliano (Even his name is hot, Mal thought bitterly), then announced that they would be making cacio e pepe. “So simple, even my worst cooks have managed,” Emiliano said, winking at Jo.
Thankfully, even if Jo was a terrible cook, she couldn’t resist a challenge. She borrowed a hair tie from a woman at the station behind them and secured her hair into a ponytail, rolled up her sleeves so they wouldn’t dip into the flour. Despite her initial reticence, she seemed genuinely engrossed.
She had not, however, been joking about her lack of skill.
“Oops,” Jo said. Her attempt to crack an egg open at the edge of the counter had resulted in her smashing it instead, and a sticky glob of yolk dripped onto the floor. She crouched to clean it. “It looked cooler when you did it.”
They came to a tacit understanding after that. Jo read out the steps from the recipe card, measured the ingredients, and handled the unskilled labor, such as grating cheese, and Mal did the mixing, the kneading, and eventually the rolling when Jo’s attempt to help led to a glob of dough getting stuck in the pasta maker.
“I don’t understand how you’re alive,” Mal said, stunned, when Jo asked Emiliano exactly how much salt she was expected to add to the boiling water.
“I’m too pretty to cook,” she said with a sideways smile. She turned the dial on the timer. “Besides, I can tell you set me up. You clearly know what you’re doing.”
Okay, so he’d been caught.
“My dad and I used to make pasta once a week when I was a kid,” he confessed. “I was a picky eater. Would only eat vegetables if they were drenched in alfredo sauce. I can still make a pretty respectable tortellini.”
“Okay, sure, that’s cute. But you still attempted to deceive me,” Jo said. Then she reached into her front apron pocket and produced her phone. “As your punishment, I’m going to need you to take a picture.”
“Already got me doing Instagram boyfriend duties,” he muttered.
Jo smiled beatifically at him, holding up a ladle that she hadn’t used once. The clear incongruence between her clothing and their setting was silly but charming, like she’d stepped off a movie set and onto a cooking show.
“Is that what you want?” she said the second he’d returned her phone. “To be my boyfriend?”
Mal choked on a laugh. He’d expected to have this conversation at some point, maybe on date three, or at the very least after they’d covered such bases as where they were from or what they liked to do with their free time. Just not now, and certainly not with two minutes left on their boiling pasta.
“You... That is a question,” he sputtered.
“Does it have an answer?” Jo asked.
Behind her impish expression, Mal could sense something else. Her stance had shifted, legs set wide, arms tense, her smile all teeth. This question, he sensed, had a wrong answer.
Thankfully, Emiliano swept by their station, slapping a meaty hand onto the counter.
“Josephine! You have left all the work to your partner. I’m ashamed! I thought you would at least try for me!”
“Emiliano, I wanted us to have something edible for dinner at the end of this—”
Mal took advantage of the time Jo was using to defend herself to drain the pasta—setting aside some of the water for the next step, of course—and think. Someone else might let a topic like this go, but Jo was like a bull, and she’d already seen red. If he’d learned anything from his last interaction with her, it was that he’d do best by being honest, not by trying to tell her what he thought she wanted to hear.
Emiliano hovered by their station, forcing Jo to crack the black peppercorns, then sauté them in a second pot. He swept away to check on other guests for only a few minutes before he was back, snatching the tongs out of Jo’s hands to demonstrate how to coat the noodles with cheese without breaking them.
By the time they’d transported their finished dishes out of the kitchen and to the attached dining room, Jo’s pout was in prime form.
“I was just bullied, wasn’t I?” She dropped into the chair facing his and crossed her legs, smiling at a waitress as she poured them both glasses of wine. “I was bullied for thirty whole minutes, and you did nothing.”
“You’re so overdramatic,” Mal said. Despite Jo’s best attempts at sabotage, the pasta was delicious. “You did well at the end. It’s not rocket science. Ormedicine.”
“Does it bother you that I don’t cook?” Jo asked suddenly. “Because I don’t really clean either. I hire someone to do that for me.”
“That sounds nice,” Mal said dryly. “And no? Why would it?”
“You don’t expect it of the women you date?” Jo said. She’d lined under her eyes, and it made her stare even more predatory, like a cat waiting to pounce.
“I expect the women I date to be adults who know how to take care of themselves,” Mal said carefully. “However they make it happen.”
