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8
Hey, Sam!” I called. “Would you come taste this?”
I hovered over the rust-colored mixture bubbling merrily in my saucepan, waiting for just the right moment of consistency to remove it from the heat. I whisked the pan from the stove and stirred it carefully before noting the time and cooking temperature in my little recipe notebook.
On the other side of the house, I heard the whining peal of an electric drill. But this time, instead of attempting to drive me insane, Sam was putting up a heavy-duty curtain rod for sunproof shades.
In the last week or so, we’d developed a routine at the Lassiter house. I would visit Jolene, nap, or experiment with new recipes during the day. Then I’d make dinner and warm up some blood just in time for Sam to rise. We’d eat together, hold completely ridiculous conversations about ’80s music, our favorite tacky monster movies, and whether reality television would be the social factor that finally triggered the apocalypse.
Sam would work through the samples I’d prepared that day, and—depending on whether or not I’d made him violently ill—we’d spend the rest of the night making small changes in the recipes.
While we talked about movies, music, food, sports, and any number of pop-culture phenomena, we rarely ventured into territory as personal as his revelations about his marriage to Lindy. It seemed to have made him uncomfortable, being that open, and he’d retreated to safer topics. That was fine, as long as we kept talking. Now that we were on the same team, I was seeing a whole new side to Sam—funny, laid-back, sensible, easy with a smile, and quick to admit when his cooking advice went horribly awry. I didn’t feel I had to play down my accomplishments, as I had to with so many men I’d dated before. I didn’t have to pretend to be a delicate little flower who rarely ate more than a salad with dressing on the side. Because Sam knew I was neither delicate nor flowerlike. And he’d seen me eat an entire quart of Three Little Pigs hash-brown casserole in one sitting. I could be myself with Sam, the unglossed, cooking-in-a-wife-beater-and-yoga-pants, “real” version of me that Phillip hadn’t met until we’d been dating for six months. We’d barely lasted seven.
I would miss our evenings together when I moved into the apartment over my as-yet-unnamed eatery. Maybe we’d arrange some sort of vampire-food-for-maintenance-work barter system after I opened, just so we could keep in touch.
I spent several afternoons helping Chef Gamling with the church dinners. On the rare evening I didn’t spend with Chef or Sam, I was with Jolene and her friends. Jolene was very quickly becoming my first meaningful friendship outside of the kitchen. She was funny, warm, smart in a no-nonsense, “don’t try to screw with me just because I’m gorgeous” way that sort of made me want to have her babies. Not that I would, because (a) science wasn’t quite there yet, and (b) she seemed pretty attached to Zeb, for whom I also had very fond feelings.
I’d found a circle of friends here. And I was really enjoying my time with them. Jolene had talked her uncles into letting me shadow them in their kitchen at the Three Little Pigs. Jane had invited me to one of her infamous girls’ movie nights, which guaranteed that I would never look at Jane Austen adaptations ever again.
Sam’s voice behind me drew me out of my musings. “You hollered?”
“Did you like Italian food when you were human? Because this has chicken stock and Marsala wine. The cooking process should have left a result that won’t make you sick.”
“Should?” he said, eyeing the shot glass suspiciously.
Without responding to his concerns, I added, “Just try it.” I pushed the shot glass toward his lips.
“But you said you weren’t sure about it,” he protested.
I took the shot glass out of his hand and pressed it to his lips.
“That’s not bad,” he said.
“No nausea?”
“Can I have another?”
“Try this one,” I said. “It’s like barbecue sauce. Honey, liquid smoke, pork stock, and other by-products you may not want to know about.”
“There’s pig’s blood in here?” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“How is it different from drinking human blood?” I asked. “Besides, if you ate bacon in life, it’s a little hypocritical to turn your nose up at pig’s blood now.”
“Oh,” he said, sighing, after knocking back the shot. “Now I just really miss ribs.”
“My blender cannot handle rib bones,” I told him.
“This,” he informed me, lifting the barbecue sauce, “is awesome. If you could bottle this, you would kick the crap out of Paul Newman and his salad dressings.”
“Paul Newman’s dead,” I reminded him, narrowing my eyes. “Unless there’s something you and the vampire community have to explain to me.”
“That’s not nice,” he said. “You could be the first celebrity chef for vampires, like Rachael Ray or, if Mr. Gamling keeps giving you those dumplin’s, that Paula Deen chick.”
“Thank you for reminding me why being nice to you is never a good idea, you ass.”
He leaned in close, his brown eyes twinkling. “Oh, come on, Tess, I’m sorry. You can be as nice to me and my ass as you want.”
“I’m not touching that one.”
