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“Lake?” he said.
“Hmm?”
“I asked why you’re so hungry.” He got a wineglass from a cupboard. “You’re not a starving artist anymore, I wouldn’t think.”
“No, but I do have to watch my figure.”
He laughed, then looked over his shoulder at me. “That was a joke . . . wasn’t it?”
“I’m on TV, Manning. I don’t starve myself or anything, I just can’t pig out whenever I want.”
He turned to face me. “How would you feel if I said that?” he asked. “That I didn’t eat whenever I was hungry?”
Manning knew right where my mind would go with that question. He loved to eat. I loved to watch him eat. The times we’d been unable to communicate with words, it was one of the only ways I could satisfy him. Feed him. Fill him. Love him. I looked at my hands. “I didn’t say that. Believe me, I’m better about my diet than other actresses I know—I eat three meals a day.”
He looked as though he wanted to say more, but he just picked up the plate of meat. “You want to make a salad while I fire up the grill?”
“Coming right up,” I said, grateful for the chance to help. I chose ingredients from the refrigerator. Manning had thought of everything; it was like shopping in a mini supermarket. I took my time making a salad that wasn’t too dry, something flavorful he’d like that would complement the steak. I sipped what turned out to be very good wine and poked around the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets. Left to his own devices, what kind of things did Manning buy for himself? His dishes were white, but like his silverware, some mismatched pieces had snuck in and he had an odd number of drinking glasses. That didn’t surprise me too much. I had a hard time picturing him shopping around Target or Bed Bath and Beyond. Everything had its place. He only had what he needed; nothing had been crammed in. In one corner stood a beautiful, shoulder-high, standalone cabinet, but even that sat empty.
In the last drawer I opened, I found an Us Weekly with my picture on it. It opened directly to a page about my love life, as if Manning had read it more than once. He probably had—if our roles were reversed, those pages would be crinkled with dried tears.
I took the salad bowl and a Heineken out to the grill. He’d dragged the half-finished picnic table over, so I set everything down next to some dishes and silverware and handed him the beer. He popped the top on the corner of the barbeque.
“Can I help with anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sit and drink your wine. It’ll help me relax. But careful for splinters,” he added quickly, avoiding my eyes. “Haven’t sealed that table yet and you’ve got on that . . . skirt.”
Suppressing a smile at his sudden bashfulness, I sat facing the wrong way on the bench so I could watch him cook. “This Cab is really good,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Don’t you celebrities get the best of the best, though?”
Knowing Manning had picked this out just for me made it the best. “I saw the Us Weekly in your kitchen,” I said.
“Someone gave it to me.” He shrugged, a beer in one hand, tongs in the other. “Not my favorite thing in the world, reading all that stuff about you, but I can’t seem to trash it. Were those your, ah, dogs?”
“My dogs? No. I wish.” I swirled my wine. “They were from the shelter.”
“Mutts,” he muttered.
I realized maybe he wasn’t asking about the dogs but the “pack,” as the press had idiotically labeled my suitors since I was often photographed around the shelter. “I can’t have pets. Some days I’m out of the house twelve hours, and I also have to be able to travel on short notice.”
“Sounds tiring,” he said.
“It is. L.A. exhausts me.”
“More than New York?”
“New York was tiring in a different way. Here in Los Angeles, I have to be ‘on’ all the time. I have to act. It’s so shiny and perfect, not at all like New York.”
“Not everywhere in L.A.’s like that,” he said. “Just what you’ve grown accustomed to. You showed me your New York, maybe sometime I’ll show you my L.A.”
I hadn’t forgotten that Manning had grown up in Pasadena. Sometimes at night, I’d try to convince myself he’d moved back there, close to me, except that he’d told me before he’d never go back. “But you hate it there.”
He flipped the steaks. “There are a lot of different parts to the city. I don’t hate all of it. But the truth is, I’d like to take you to Pasadena. Show you where I grew up . . . where Maddy and I grew up.”
I stared at his back, unsure how to respond. Returning to his childhood home wasn’t something I’d ever pictured him doing, let alone with me. “When’s the last time you were there?”
