Alysse: Maybe he got to you because you just didn’t expect it. See what happens tomorrow, you know?
Good advice, Staci thought.
Staci: I’m so unsure and that’s not like me.
Alysse: Stop it. You’re the most powerful, kick-ass girl I know. You need to get him out of your head and you into his head.
Staci smiled to herself. It was a little late at night for Alysse’s crazy outlook on life but she knew her friend’s logic was sound.
Staci: Thanks. Heard from Jay?
Alysse: Not since yesterday but he said I wouldn’t. I hate that he might be in danger.
Staci: He’s coming back to you. And you both know it.
Alysse: Yeah. You okay now?
Staci: Yes. Thanks. Enjoy your brownies.
Alysse: I’m thinking of eating them all. :)
Staci: I suspected as much. Night.
Staci put her phone down and rolled over. The coolness of the air-conditioning circulated through the room making her feel as if she were on vacation. She and her grandmother didn’t have air conditioning in their old fashioned ranch house. It had been built in the 50s and her grandmother had come to itas a young bride. The kitchen was the only thing that had been updated religiously by the women in her family.
Her grandpa had been killed in Vietnam, her father...well, she’d never known him.
The Rowland women had a weird legacy of being left behind by their men. She scrubbed her hand over her eyes and rolled over again.
“Hey, what are you the princess and the pea,” Vivian grumbled from her bed.
“Sorry,” Staci muttered. She’d never had to share a room with anyone. And she’d liked it that way.
The only way she’d have a room to herself was to out-cook everyone else. She forced her mind to cooking and the dishes she’d eaten tonight. Food had been her ticket out before and it would be again. WP24 was heavily Asian influenced and the tastes were familiar to her having grown up here on the West Coast. It was silly but she dreamed of food and cooking the way some women dreamed of shoes and purses.
What, she wondered, did Remy dream about? Was he like her and couldn’t sleep when something new had been introduced to his palate? And why did it matter? She rolled over and heard Vivian sigh.
“Put your headphones in,” Staci whispered. “I’m a very restless sleeper.”
The other woman grumbled as she took her iPhone headphones and put them in her ears. Staci grabbed her food diary as she thought of the night wind and the moonlight and the hot way that Remy had held her, touched her. She channeled that passion into food.
She heard the sea and tasted in her mind a new dish with seafood and spices but not from Mexico as she usually went to, but from China instead. There had been a wealth of new spices and tastes that had been brought to her tonight and now they were alive in her mind.
She wrote down ingredients, sketched in variations and maybes and then in her mind started to cook. She drifted to sleep with the pen in her hand and the notebook open on her lap. In her mind she was in the kitchen preparing her fresh ingredients. She smelled sesame oil heating up in a wok and glanced over to see Remy standing there waiting.
He’d chopped the garlic. “Let’s cook together. I can help make this dish stronger.”
She nodded and started telling him what to put in and he did exactly what she told him to do. They moved together in the kitchen, which, she noticed from the picture of her, her mom and her grandmother next to the stove, was her kitchen. He was talking and smiling in a way he hadn’t when they’d cooked earlier and she started to resist the dream. This wasn’t real.
She shoved him out of her kitchen and out of her mind waking up to find her flashlight and notebook on her lap. She didn’t want or need Remy Stephens cooking with her. In real life or in her dreams, she needed instead to find her strength on her own. It was something she knew very well that she could do.
She closed the notebook and rolled over on her side to watch the shadows on the wall. She drifted in and out of sleep but it wasn’t restful and in the morning when everyone started waking she was still tired.
She got dressed and hung out with the other women. Drinking coffee and talking about what they thought the challenge was going to be that day. She almost fooled herself into believing that she could handle Remy and that last night had meant nothing to her. However, when they piled into the cars to go to the studio, she ended up sitting right next to him and she knew she’d been lying to herself.
He smelled good. She hated that. She didn’t want him tobe one of those men who made her want to lean closer and breath more deeply.
“We have to talk about last night,” he said quietly under his breath.
