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He heard himself say, “Then maybe you shouldn’t ask it.”
Great. Be a dick, Ben. Treat her like you treat everybody else, and see what happens.
May sighed.
They walked another block before his conscience lost the battle with his self-protective instincts and he said, “Just ask me.”
She didn’t, though. Not until he touched her arm and found a way to make himself be gentle. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, very quietly, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t.”
“Don’t be that way. Ask.”
But there was nothing about him inviting her interrogation, and he knew it. He might as well be covered in spikes. Which made it even less fair that when she backpedaled some more, it dialed up his irritation another notch.
“Because I’m leaving in a couple of days, and it doesn’t matter, really,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”
“May.”
“Ben.”
They stared at each other. He memorized the planes of her cheekbones. The short, gold-brown lashes framing her eyes, and the slight point at the tips of her ears.
She hated this, and he hated it, and he didn’t know what to do about that. Find a way out of the conversation. Avoid getting any closer to intimacy with this woman. That was the smart approach, the kind approach. That was the approach that was in line with his whole asinine theory that all he wanted from May was to help her, and thereby to help himself.
Make a joke. Brush this off.
But he didn’t feel funny. He felt as though everything he didn’t want her to know was balled up inside his chest, glowing hot and red, and he was wrapped around it, growling at her at the same time that he wanted to beg her to come closer and rescue him.
God. Even his fucking metaphors were overwrought.
“Out with it,” he demanded.
She touched the dangling silver strands of her new earring. “I just wondered, I guess … if you really want to be a chef.”
“I can’t spend the rest of my life tending bees and shoveling shit on a rooftop.”
“Can’t you?”
“Not and stay in Manhattan. Not if I have any pride, May.”
She nodded. Her lips tightened.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No, but you want to.”
Her lips moved, but a car passed, and whatever she said, he missed it. “Speak up.”
“I just said, you don’t seem very happy. In the kitchen. I mean, you’re fine in your kitchen at home, but when we were at Figs you seemed … tense. And I thought maybe, you know … maybe you’re not on the right path? Isn’t it stressful, being a chef?”
He laughed. A hollow, evil sound.
“But then, maybe the gardening and the honey isn’t very …”
“Lucrative?”
She nodded.
