It’s amazing what you can do to a roast bird with nothing but your bare hands and a total lack of decorum.
When he’s rendered the roast sliced with a borderline Germanic precision, he hands me a plate laden with a hearty serving of beef, mashed potatoes, baby carrots, and broccoli.
Broccoli.
Fucking broccoli.
I break into a sweat. It’s not that I don’t like broccoli. It’s that I can’t stand it. Seriously, I hate it. Now, here I am, faced with a great big mound of it on my plate, sitting beside the man who cooked it. A man who happens to be someone I feel compelled to impress. To make matters worse, there are only two of us at the table, so there’s no amount of hiding it under scraps of meat to make it look less conspicuous. I cast a hopeful eye to the squat gray little dog that’s wandered in from the backyard.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“Oh, that’s Sadie. She’s only eight, but she likes to pretend she’s deaf. A few years back, she’d have met you at the door and would have been running in small circles at the excitement of having a guest.”
Sadie drops onto her side on the living room rug and eyes me suspiciously. I’m not fluent in Doglish because I didn’t have a pet growing up, but from where I’m sitting, Sadie looks decidedly on the fence about whether having a guest agrees with her at this point in her life.
“How do you know she’s only pretending to be deaf?”
He turns his face away from Sadie and whispers so quietly that he’s all but mouthing the words, “How ‘bout some prosciutto?”
Sadie’s ears prick up before she’s on her feet one instant and trotting expectantly to the fridge the next. Stuart follows her and drops a sliver of prosciutto into her bowl.
When he returns to the table, I say, “Does she only like meat, or does she like…other things as well?”
“Strictly dog food for her. I was only making a point. I shouldn’t have given her the cured meat.” He lowers his voice considerably and talks out of the side of his mouth. “The vet says she has to watch her weight, or she’ll start having problems with her hips.”
Shit.
No luck there.
I push a piece of broccoli around my plate with my fork, stabbing it tentatively and trying my best to keep from grimacing in revulsion. Stuart has all but finished his meal. I’ve barely started because of the broccoli contamination and stress. I lift a piece toward my mouth, but the second it gets too close, I set it down again.
It’s not just the taste or the texture. It’s the smell too.
“Don’t you like broccoli?” There’s no weight in his question, but my belly clenches at the thought of upsetting him. “You can leave it if you don’t like it.”
I’m so relieved that it takes me several minutes to place the low twist of irritation I feel at his words. There’s something about the way he said it that grates me. Something that makes me feel like he thinks I need his permission to leave it. I’m a grown-ass man. I can leave my fucking veggies if I want to. I shovel the rest of my meal down, relieved and miffed about the broccoli situation in equal measure.
As I chew, I study his face.
His features are symmetrical, and there’s something a little unapproachable about them. His default expression is that of someone preparing to deliver a scolding. I’ve had enough people attempting to reprimand me to make it very easy for me to recognize that look, believe me. There are two parallel lines between his eyebrows and his lips fit together snugly, giving the vague impression that though he’s not flat-out annoyed right now, he could work his way up to it quickly. His skin is tanned and a thick V of blond hair peeks from his well-cut shirt. A shirt that fits intimidatingly well, with a hint of a pucker where it pulls tight across the broadest part of his chest.
I feel a strong sense of disbelief that he and my dad were friends as boys as I watch him. There’s nothing remotely boyish about him. It seems almost entirely implausible that Stuart was ever a boy. It seems way more likely that he dropped out of his mother fully clad in a pair of beige slacks and a button-down shirt, complete with hard scruff graying at the sides of his neck and a slight scowl on his face.
I blink hard to get myself to focus and rejoin the conversation. Stuart is saying something about how people generally don’t eat nearly enough leafy greens. I assume it’s a thinly veiled attack in retaliation for the fact I rejected his broccoli.
“I like kale,” I say with a slight hitch. “And spinach. I eat a lot of those in smoothies and things like that.”
He nods sagely, but I can’t tell if I’ve managed to impress him.
I wish to God I didn’t care, but I do.
He offers me something sweet when we’ve finished our meals, but I make such a hash out of my answer that he takes it to mean I don’t want dessert.
He clears up dinner, and I find myself standing to his right this time, though still well out of his way. Still awkward as fuck. Once the dishwasher is loaded and running, he pours what’s left in the wine bottle into an ice tray. I try not to look at him as if he’s lost his mind, but I don’t think I’m very successful because he finds it necessary to explain, “I freeze leftover wine and use it for cooking.”
Leftover wine?
What the hell is leftover wine? What kind of maniac doesn’t finish the bottle?
