‘So …’ Lara said.
Thankfully, I’d had enough time to think of an excuse. ‘He wanted me to bake something for his cousin’s birthday on Sunday, but I couldn’t.’ I said I’d had enough time to think of an excuse, not that it was a good one.
‘Oh. Right.’
Lara didn’t ask me anything else, but I could tell she knew. And because she was queer herself, she knew it wasn’t for me to say anything. If Brad wanted anyone to know, he would tell them.
So did that mean he wanted Lara to know?
‘So using the Babish framing won’t work,’ Gabe said. He was sitting in the booth next to me while Ava sat across from us – visibly bored and annoyed that Kevin hadn’t shown up for her to flirt with. Gabe moved our drinks out of the way to make space to put down the papers he’d brought with him.
Ava smirked at me from across the table. As usual, I knew that look. It said,It’s kind of adorable how much work he’s done-slash-how excited he is.
Gabe pointed at the printout of one of the videos from the Binging with Babish YouTube series. It was just a picture of Andrew Rea’s hands holding a sandwich cross section in front of his torso.
He continued. ‘Because it’s your application, you know? We have to see your face.’
‘Right.’
‘Show off the moneymaker,’ Ava said.
Gabe pointed at her. ‘Which brings me to my next point.’ He reached over and took my hand. Ava’s eyebrows shot up. ‘The moneymaker is these. We need to see it’syoumaking this stuff, but we also need to see close-ups and your techniques. So …’
He moved all the papers aside and grabbed his backpack from under the table. Again, Ava gave me a look. Only this time it said,This is all far too much. I felt bad; she had to be so bored by this. I decided to make it up to her by playing some co-op game together later. No matter how horrible I might be at it.
Gabe withdrew a spiral-bound sketchbook and flipped it open. The page was broken into framed quadrants, and each frame had what looked like a poorly drawn cartoon chef in it.
‘Ignore my bad drawing skills. I promise I’m a pro behind the camera.’ He nudged me with his elbow, and my cheeks flushed.
He drew these? And they were me? Each of the frames had some kind of stage direction, or I guess it would be a camera direction. And some of them had arrows pointing toward or away from the camera.
Gabe explained the setup for the video: me, in the guesthouse kitchen. He’d do something called a Steadicam shot – whatever that meant – for the moments I’d be talking to the camera, and he’d move in to focus on my hands while I explained what I was doing. Then for the steps where I’d be doing more mundane things, he’d edit the shots all together into something he called an ‘Edgar Wright Crash Zoom Montage’, and every time I completed a step in the recipe, we’d do a ‘match cut’?
It was overwhelming, but the more Gabe talked about it, the more exciting everything got. He put so much passion into something he didn’t even need to put it into. This was just a video to supplement my application, and he was talking about choreographing transitions and editing tricks.
Was he doing this because he loved making movies? Or was he doing this because he … liked me? Maybe it was both, but let’s be real here, he even watched Claire Saffitz’s croquembouche video to get an idea of what my recipe would involve, so it had to be because he liked me. Right?
By the time our mountain of fries came out, my stomach was at a full rolling boil. I couldn’t even eat yet.
Ava excused herself to the bathroom to wash her hands.
‘What do you think?’ he asked when he was finished.
‘I think it’s …’ I didn’t have words.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I got a little intense, huh?’
I grabbed his forearm. ‘No! I mean, yes, but also no. Intense in a good way. Like it’sreallyexciting. Do you do this for every project?’
‘Of course.’
Well, shit.I had thought I was special.
‘We have to go in prepared,’ he said. ‘Otherwise time is wasted and you don’t get the shots you want or your talent gets tired.’ His knee nudged mine under the table. ‘I’m going to do my best to keep you alert and on the whole time.’
I laughed.Oh yeah, no problem there.
‘Babe?’
