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I follow Rex into the kitchen. He’s wearing another dark blue and gray plaid flannel shirt that doesn’t have even a centimeter of space to spare. You have to be born with the capacity for a body like Rex’s. No amount of protein or time at the gym would ever make it happen for me. I wonder what it would be like to be that big. I’m not small or anything, but it doesn’t feel like that long ago that I was a skinny kid getting kicked around at school. Rex’s size makes him seem… I dunno, impervious. Like I could throw myself against him with everything I am and he wouldn’t budge an inch.
“Can I help?” I ask as Rex pulls things out of the refrigerator and lays them out on the counter.
Rex gives me a singularly sweet smile and it transforms his whole face. There are faint lines around his whiskey-colored eyes when he smiles, the straight line of his brow softens, and he has dimples.
“I thought you didn’t cook?”
“Well, not really, no. But I could help cut stuff or whatever.”
“You only have macaroni and cheese,” Rex says.
“Were you looking through my kitchen?” I say.
“I was looking for a glass for water,” he says. “All you have to eat is macaroni and cheese and frozen burritos.”
“Looking for a glass in my freezer, were you?” I mumble.
“Looking for ice,” he says levelly, but I don’t quite believe him.
“I have soup.”
“Soup is flavored water, not food. No, just hang out,” he says. I slide onto a stool on the other side of the counter. He chops, slices, salts, and does a whole bunch of other things I couldn’t do if my life depended on it.
“You don’t use recipes?” I ask.
“Nah. More fun to just figure it out as I go along.”
“How’d you learn to cook?”
“My mom worked nights,” Rex says as he slices carrots into tiny uniform matchsticks. “She was an actress—well, she wanted to be. She wanted to be Marilyn Monroe.” I smile at him. “She was in a bunch of plays when we lived in Houston and Tulsa—that’s when I was little—so I just fended for myself. Didn’t really care if I ate peanut butter and jelly every night. Then, later, when we went to LA she was working as a cocktail waitress, so she was never home in the evenings. We didn’t have the money for getting takeout every night and I was sick of peanut butter, so I decided I’d learn. Mostly I just experimented until I got it right. Since I had to eat anything I messed up it was a pretty good incentive to learn quick. I didn’t really like it, though.
“Then, later, when I was living alone, I started watching the Food Network. That’s when I fell in love with cooking, I think. I could just watch someone do something and then I could do the same thing. It was like going to cooking school for free.”
Note to self: Rex talks more when he’s doing something with his hands.
“I’ve never really watched it,” I say. “My brothers would’ve thrown a fit.”
Sam watches nothing but sports, Brian watches sports and those shows where frat boys dare each other to eat bugs and crawl through sewers, and Colin watches horror movies or war movies where people get blown to pieces. He would take one look at the Food Network and start ranting about pretentious faggots and how only girls watch cooking shows.
“I like it,” Rex says quietly, and there’s something about the moments when he pulls into himself that make me want to protect him.
“Well,” I say, “maybe we could watch some.”
Rex smiles that sweet smile again. God, that one crooked tooth catches on his lip just a little. It kills me.
“So your mom wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, huh? How’d that work out for her?”
Rex looks back to his vegetables, chopping for a minute in silence.
“She was in some movies. Small-time stuff. You know: screaming girl number three, secretary—that kind of thing. In LA, she was always dating someone who could get her a part because she was pretty, just never a big part. She was actually really good, though. We would watch all the old movies—those were the ones she really liked: Old Hollywood glamour—and she’d do the parts. She wanted to be Marilyn, but she was actually better at the dramatic parts. The really high drama death scenes and all—Helen Hayes at the end of A Farewell to Arms, you know?”
I don’t, though I read the book.
“Anyway, she loved being in front of the camera, but she was never going to have the kind of career she wanted. Old Hollywood had been dead for more than twenty years. No one was looking for that kind of thing anymore.”
“That’s sad,” I say. “So, what did she do?”
