Page 55 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

The line cook adjusts. The service keeps moving.

I know what it is. What I’m feeling. I’ve been dancing around the name of it for two weeks because naming it means sitting with it and sitting with it means doing something about it and we agreed not to do something about it yet.

I’ve felt it before. A long time ago, before Monica, before all of it, when I still thought love was something patient that waited for you to be ready.

It doesn’t wait.

It never did.

“Asher.” My sous chef at my elbow, needing the count for the turn. I give it to her immediately, clean, no hesitation. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Running a kitchen doesn’t stop for anything, not for heartbreak, not for Monica, not for whatever is sitting in my chest right now watching Harper Brooks laugh at someone else’s joke.

Service ends.

I go back to the pastry.

I fold it one more time and put it to rest and I already know it’s going to come out right.

Some things just do, if you’re patient enough to let them.

20

MADDOX

Here’s the thing about me and distance: I invented it.

Not literally. But practically. Emotionally. Geographically. I have maintained comfortable, functional, drama-free distance from every woman I’ve been involved with for the better part of fifteen years and I have done it with charm and good humor and absolutely zero casualties. I know how to be the best version of a man who’s not staying. I’ve refined it. I am, by any reasonable measure, extremely good at not getting attached.

So this. This thing I’m currently doing. Is embarrassing.

There was a woman named Céleste at the tasting on Tuesday. French, naturally, which felt appropriate given the setting, beautiful in that specific Bordeaux way that makes you think of old paintings and very good wine. She came in with a hospitality group and she laughed at something I said about the estate’s pressing technique and touched my arm twice and I felt nothing.

Not nothing bad. Just nothing. Like trying to tune into a frequency that wasn’t broadcasting.

I talked to her for twenty minutes anyway because I was there and she was charming and I kept thinking: this is the thing I know how to do. This is easy. This is my entire skillset distilled into a single social interaction. And the whole time some portion of my brain was elsewhere, specifically at the east side of the property where Harper was running a walk-through with Mallory, which I knew because I’d seen them heading that direction when I came down from my suite and I had not been tracking it. I’d just noticed. In passing.

Céleste gave me her card. I put it in my jacket pocket. I have not looked at it since.

Wednesday there was a woman at the bar in Vine who had strong opinions about the Pomerol selection and wanted to discuss them, which is normally the kind of conversation that holds my attention because wine is genuinely interesting and so are women who know things about it. Her name was something that started with a V. Valentina? Vivienne? Starts with V. Lovely. Absolutely lovely. We talked for thirty-five minutes and I remember approximately eight of them because the rest of the time I was thinking about the way Harper’s face goes when she’s trying not to laugh at something she thinks she shouldn’t laugh at, the way she bites the inside of her cheek and her eyes do this thing, and by the time V-name finished her very informed point about the estate’s late-harvest Merlot I had been thinking about someone else for the better part of half an hour and I felt like a complete asshole about it.

I ordered her a glass of the Merlot and excused myself with as much grace as I could manage.

Thursday I didn’t try.

Thursday I sat on my terrace with my laptop open and talked myself into believing I was working when what I was actually doing was watching the south courtyard from my vantage point one floor up in the specific desperate way of a man who would like to catch a glimpse of someone and is not going to admit that out loud even to himself.

I caught the glimpse. Harper and Raph coming back from wherever they’d been, her talking and him listening in that easy way he has, and even from a floor up I could see her face and the way she was into whatever she was saying, completely herself, no armor.

I closed the laptop.

I opened it again.

I closed it again.

This is what I’ve been reduced to.

The thing is, I understand what I’m feeling. That’s almost the most annoying part. I’m not someone who doesn’t know what’s happening inside his own head. I’ve been running from permanence long enough to recognize the moment when permanence stops looking like a trap and starts looking like the only thing worth staying for. I know what this is.

What I want is to walk across whatever room she’s in and bury my face in the curve of her neck and just breathe her in for a minute. Not even anything beyond that. Just that. The specific gravity of her, the warmth of her, the way she smells like something that makes the rest of the noise go quiet.