Page 60 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

Nat would help me freshen up the flowers outside the restaurant. And because she was freakishly good at everything she did, she would also touch up the hand-painted sign that hung by the door.

Darlene and her two refrigerator-sized sons would help rearrange the dining room. I had some ideas for a new layout. I was inspired after the day Kal and I spent freshening the space up, but had immediately put those ideas on the back burner. With renewed fervor, I sketched the new layout on a sheet of paper last night. That morning, I would give those plans to Darlene so she could direct her boys as they made the sketch real.

Al agreed to design a new menu for me. She’d dabbled in graphic design for a couple of semesters in community college before switching to a hospitality program, and I knew anything she whipped up would be miles better than what I could create.

Mom and Dad would be my hype men, talking up the new and improved Southern Charm. Dad, because he knew everyone in town (and most of the folks in the next town over), and Mom because she was the loudest person in Eastern Tennessee. And while I often wished for her to keep her mouth shut, I was suddenly very excited to weaponize my mom’s gift of the gab.

With all of that figured out, I dragged Kal out of my bed. When I went back into my room, I found him curled up like a cat in the middle of the bed, and I almost felt bad waking him up. But I needed him, both for emotional support and, well. Hand support. Someone had to do the cooking for my test recipes, after all. And while Kal was a bit of a disaster in the kitchen at first, I’d found that he was a pretty quick learner.

His biggest barrier was that he got in his own head. I could practically see the gears whirring when he made a mistake, like he was on the verge of scolding himself. But really, cooking wasn’t easy, especially for someone entirely new to it. And when I encouraged him the right way and saw how something clicked—those moments felt incredible. His brilliant smile, the light returning to his eyes. It was all worth it.

Over the next few days, Kal and I fell into an easy rhythm. I riffled through Grandma Gladys’s recipe book, along with the other recipe cards Dad shared with me, to get ideas. Then I would point Kal around the kitchen to gather the right ingredients and cookware.

My wrist was getting better, but I didn’t want to test the limits of my sprain and slow the healing process, so mostly I kept my wrist on ice and ordered Kal around. In the restaurant, Kal wore his human suit, of course.

I was warier than ever of Kal being discovered—I think because I was increasingly worried about what it would mean if Kal had to disappear. The concern hovered at the back of my mind, but I willed it away when it got too close to consciousness. I had him now, didn’t I? And there was enough on my mind to worry about.

Kal in his human suit was awkward, like a foal learning how to move its body. Yet he gained impressive proficiency in the kitchen over the few days—enough that if he walked in now looking for a line cook job, I’d hire him in a second.

After several hours, when we were both tired and needed a change of scenery, Kal and I would walk back to my apartment. He would shed the human suit that I’d grown to love and hate in equal measure (I loved that it brought him to me, let him exist among humans without putting him in danger, but hated that it wasn’t him), and we’d keep working.

We alternated between following my grandma’s recipes and making adjustments I recommended to update the flavors and cooking techniques. I wrote out the new instructions as we went, adding my own notes next to Grandma’s. In some cases, I added entirely new recipes, ones that I’d been mulling over for a long time. I marveled at my chicken scratch next to hers—fresh ink beside faded.

Over those long days, I watched as Kal grew, bit by bit, from a novice cook into a capable one. Together, we took classic recipes that I loved, that I’d enjoyed since childhood, and breathed new life into them.

And at night, we’d fall into bed, still smelling of sugar and flour and grease—the smells now embedded in our pores—and fall asleep beneath the projection of my galaxy lamp. We would start the night flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling, and end up a tangle of limbs and tentacles and Kal’s green hair mixed with my pink, a colorful galaxy of its own.

I was playing with fire, and I knew it. There was no reason for Kal to sleep in my bed rather than the couch, other than my insistence. Because it felt good, and he felt good, and I wanted to feel good for a while.

I think I hoped that my feelings toward Kal were just a by-product of proximity and being forced to accept help for the first time in a long time. Like some sort of switch had been triggered in my brain that made Kal seem especially attractive in that particular moment, and that once the moment ended, I would regain my senses. Because that would have been a convenient, non-complicated version of events that meant I was safe, and Kal was just a friend, and it didn’t matter that he was a literal alien from another planet.

I couldn’t even think about what that meant for the future, so I didn’t. Instead, I let myself grow more and more comfortable with Kal in my life, and ignored the consequences.

* * *

There’s an intimacy to cooking with someone that doesn’t get talked about enough.

It’s a dance as much as a partnership, and Kal and I were both still learning the steps. A brush of our arms here, a bump of the hips there.

Here, taste this, and a spoon pushed gently to the other’s parted lips.

Which meant that by Thursday, I was more enamored with Kal than ever.

And it was good. Okay, it was perfect. Or as near to perfect as it could be, considering I was stressed out of my mind, living with an extraterrestrial who felt more like my boyfriend, and reopening my family’s restaurant with a new menu so I could try to win ten thousand dollars to save said restaurant.

So, yeah.

I’d gotten a reminder text that morning from Eileen Watley, the inimitable senior coordinator for Greatest Restaurants of the Great Smoky Mountains Contest.

Good morning! Our judges will be rolling into Roswell Falls tomorrow afternoon at 5 P.M. sharp! They will visit participating restaurants and fill out their scorecards on site. Their reviews and scores will be compiled and posted on Appalachian Living’s website this weekend. Good luck and bon appetit!

So that was it. I had Thursday to prepare, and Friday to cook my ass off. My wrist didn’t hurt anymore—maybe a twinge of pain here or there, but in good enough shape for a full day of cooking—and I knew the recipes by heart.

I had really outdone myself, thanks to Kal’s help in the kitchen and the willing mouths of my most trusted taste testers.

The new menu was a blend of everything I loved about Grandma Gladys’s menu, and everything I loved about cooking. Classics with a twist that made them feel new without being unfamiliar. Cinnamon molasses cornbread. Hot honey chicken and waffles. Catfish and grits. Fresh local vegetables, roasted and seasoned. Chicken and dumplings loaded with herbs. Buttermilk biscuits with spiced apple butter. I’d developed an entire menu that I was proud of.

No, scratch that.