“I wish I knew how to cook. I would make these all the time.” She dipped another onion ring into her ketchup. “When Duke comes to town, I always bribe him to do it.”
A couple of months ago, I went with Dallas to her brother’s couples cooking class. I found out then just how untalented she was in the kitchen. The steak had been so tough, I’d had to stop and get something else to eat on my way home. “Have you thought about learning to do it yourself?”
She paused, onion ring midair. Glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, she shook her head. “Hell no. That’s what chefs are for, right?”
I laughed. “You’re a trip.”
“We’ve already established that cooking is not my gift. The most I can do is cut up vegetables, because I was always early to help my mother cook for Thanksgiving. That damn Blake purposely came late so she wouldn’t have to peel the potatoes for the potato salad.” Dallas continued munching on her food and talking about random shit, like celery and green peppers. She’d gone through all the ingredients of her mother’s famous potato salad and was now telling me she’d tried to sneak pre-cooked boiled eggs into her mom’s house one year. “Mom made me go to the store and buy more. I had to peel all those mugs too. I hate that.”
“Is there anything you can cook?” I wondered aloud.
“Oh, yeah. I can bake chicken. Oh, and I can make rice—” she covered her face, “—in the rice cooker?” I didn’t realize I was smiling until she said, “Why are you smiling? ‘Cause I’m pitiful?”
Because you’re beautiful.“Not even a little bit,” I told her.
“Do you cook?” she asked, pouring more ketchup on her plate. “I mean, I’ve known you for years and—”
“We really don’t know each other,” I finished for her.
A moment passed. “Maybe we should do better?”
“I’m ready if you are.”
“Is this awkward for you?” she asked.
The question threw me off, but I quickly recovered. “How so?”
“That we’re sitting here by ourselves, learning things about each other we never bothered to learn before.”
I leaned closer and whispered, “Why is that?”
Her gaze dropped to my lips. “We had sex.”
Dallas had this uncanny ability to catch me off guard. I wasn’t expecting her to bring up Halloween, but talking about that instead of my personal shit was better any day. “We did.”
“Yeah, but before that, we didn’t really have much alone time.”
“By design?”
She eyed me skeptically. “Maybe.” She hitched a shoulder. “I don’t know. But just so we’re clear, I don’t want to talk about it now, either.”
I laughed again. “Tell me how you really feel.”
“I just did.”
“You brought it up, though.”
“Only because I wanted to say something else.”
“Something else that has nothing to do with sex?”
“Exactly.” She stretched a bit. “I’m going to be stiff. You might have to help me off this stool.”
“Still sore from that game-winning slide into home base?”
She snickered. “Very. I’m never doing that shit again. Anyway, I brought it up because we’re alone now. The last time we were alone, we got busy.”
“I recall that night a little differently.”
