Roman turned to his friend and said with a savage ferocity, “If you make fun of him for this, I will squeeze your testicles until they pop.”
Jay raised a hand. “Chill, Debo. I can be cool.” Jay then asked about the rookie center that had been recently drafted to the Saints’ lineup, and they drifted into talking shop, pointedly ignoring Ezra’s prolonged absence.
Ezra joined them eventually, but he was very careful to keep his gaze focused away from Roman’s bare chest. His purposeful avoidance only drew attention to the fact that Ezra found him attractive, arousing even. With any other man, Roman would have already mapped out his next play, but with Ezra, he needed a little more time to read the field.
6
Distractions
Roman was so curious. He asked questionsallthe time. Ezra was trying to clean the grout in between the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush and Roman kept disturbing him.
Ezra, how old are you?
Ezra, when’s your birthday?
He needed to focus on his work, and he couldn’t do that if Roman kept distracting him. But answering his questions only caused Roman to ask more. With some prompting, Ezra explained that he’d taken a break between high school and college and pursued his personal interests of biology, botany, and mathematics before settling on computer science. Then, Roman wanted to know why he hadn’t gone directly into university.
“I needed more time to bake,” Ezra said and gave a pointed look at the task he was trying to accomplish. Roman left him alone after that.
Later that day while they were eating dinner together, Roman asked if he’d ever been to one of his restaurants. Ezra knew their names because he’d thought the information might be useful to his housekeeping duties and as with anything having to do with Roman Reynolds, he paid attention.
“I’ve been to N’awlins to buy beignets for Mr. Reid.”
“Any others?”
“No, but I haven’t been to a lot of restaurants because I don’t like them.”
Roman lookedsupremelyupset by that. With most people it was hard to tell what they were feeling, but Roman’s face was easy to read. When he was sad, his eyes got very droopy like a sad hound, and little frowny marks appeared like a pair of parenthesis bracketing his full mouth. His lower lip was more pronounced too, like the delicate pout of an orchid’s labellum. Ezra supposed it was because food was Roman’s passion while cleaning and coding were Ezra’s passions. Well, he didn’t expect Roman to get excited about Seventh Generation’s Plant-Based All-Purpose Cleaner, did he?
“What don’t you like about them?” Roman asked.
“They’re loud and smelly and there are strangers everywhere, some of them wearing perfume or cologne. People walk by very fast, rushing this way and that. They never have the foods I like, and if I have to go to the bathroom, I have to use a toilet that everyone else uses too. Or a urinal, which is…” Ezra shivered, remembering the one time a man was peeing next to him and had terrible aim so that some of his urine splashed onto Ezra. “I’ve had bad experiences with urinals.”
“What happened?” Roman said with a growl.
“Let’s just say I find them to be quite unsanitary.”
Roman’s face shifted from “supremely upset” to “thinking of a solution.”
“What if the menu was more to your taste?”
Ezra considered it. Sometimes the children’s menus had good options. The cost was usually cheaper and the portions were smaller, all of which he liked, except sometimes there was a rule that you had to be twelve and under. How was that fair?
“Maybe then I would try it,” he conceded, mainly because it seemed to make Roman happy. He didn’t like it when Roman was upset, especially if he thought he might have caused it. “But I do like it when you cook for me.”
Roman was an excellent cook and he paid close attention to Ezra’s exacting instructions. Lately though, he’d been asking him totrythings. Some of them were terrible, like Dijon mustard (spicy barf). But some of them were not too bad. He even discovered another cheese that he liked, called Manchego.
“Thanks, Ezra. I like cooking for you too.”
A couple of days later Ezra got to see Roman’s very happy face when he presented him with the log-in credentials to a database of all the restaurant menus in New Orleans—605 that he was able to find. For the menus he hadn’t already photographed, he found them online, converted them into PDF’s, and indexed them according to all the ways Roman might want to search for them. It had taken him several hours to complete the project, but the coding for it was really quite simple. Roman was impressed, nonetheless. Non-computer people often thought what computer people did was magic, but it was really more like learning a foreign language with some logic puzzles thrown in.
“Ezra, this is incredible.”
Ezra almost said, “I know,” but his mother had told him that it made him sound vain, so instead he said, “I’m glad you think so.”
“I can’t believe you did all of this for me.”
“Well, it didn’t make sense for you to always have to rifle through paper copies when I could easily digitize them for you. And this way you can update them as well.” Food was Roman’s passion, and if Ezra could make his life a little easier, why wouldn’t he?
