They stood at the corner. The light changed. Traffic moved. Drew looked at her. The distance between them had changed. It was warmer. Inhabited. A space two people were choosing to stand in rather than a gap one of them had created and the other couldn't cross.
"Goodnight, Chef," he said.
"Goodnight, Drew."
She walked to her car. She didn't look back. She didn't need to. She could feel him watching her.
Madeleine got in the car. She sat with her hands on the wheel and her heart doing something ridiculous. Undignified. And entirely beyond her control.
Delicata,she thought.He has a favorite squash.
She drove back to Paige's with the windows cracked, the cold air on her face and the butterflies still going. And she didn't try to stop them.
CHAPTER 17
MADELEINE
Drew had made pasta.
This was ambitious. Madeleine knew it was ambitious because she could see the evidence of ambition all over the kitchen: flour on the counter, flour on the floor, flour on Drew's forearms, in his hair and on the front of the T-shirt he was wearing, which was — she noticed with a pang that caught her off guard — the Cape May shirt again, faded and stretched at the collar. The one she'd bought him from a surf shop on the boardwalk because he'd spilled coffee on his button-down and needed something to wear. She'd grabbed the first thing on the rack. That was years ago. He still wore it. She didn't know what to do with that.
"I made pasta," he said, when she walked in.
"I can see that."
"From scratch."
"I can see that too." She looked at the counter. A hand-crank pasta machine — new, still shiny, clearly purchased for this occasion — was clamped to the edge of the island. Beside it, several sheets of dough in varying thicknesses, some translucent, some thick enough to sole a shoe. A pot of waterwas boiling on the stove. The sauce smelled promising: garlic, tomatoes, something herby.
"How many attempts?" she asked.
"The pasta or the sauce?"
"Both."
"The sauce is on its second iteration. The first one burned because I forgot I was reducing it while I was fighting with the pasta machine." He held up his hand. There was a red mark across his palm where he'd apparently caught it on the crank. "The pasta is on its — I've lost count. The first batch came out like cardboard. The second batch was so thin it disintegrated in the water. This batch might be okay. I'm not sure. I don't actually know what good fresh pasta is supposed to look like before you cook it."
"It's supposed to look like that," she said, pointing at the one sheet on the counter that was even and smooth. "Not like that." She pointed at the rest.
"Right. I was afraid of that."
She took off her coat. She hung it on the chair: the same chair, every time, and she'd started noticing that Drew never moved it, never hung his own coat there, left it open for her as though keeping the space available was a practice he'd committed to without being asked. She set her bag on the counter and looked at the pasta machine, the flour, the mess and the man standing in the middle of it all.
"You need to knead it longer," she said. "The gluten hasn't developed. That's why it's tearing."
"I kneaded it for ten minutes."
"It needs fifteen. At least." She picked up one of the failed sheets and pressed it between her fingers. "See how it breaks? There's no elasticity. You've got to work it until it feels like — here." She pulled a piece of the better dough toward her and pressed it. "Feel that."
He reached over and pressed the dough with his index finger, the way you'd poke something you weren't sure was alive. "It's ... springy?"
"It's springy. That's what you're going for. Smooth and springy. If it feels like Play-Doh, you're not there yet."
"Everything I've made tonight has felt like Play-Doh."
"That's because you're impatient. Pasta doesn't care about your timeline."
He looked at her. A smile started at the corner of his mouth, the crooked one she used to see when she said something that caught him off guard, the one that made his brown eyes go warm and slightly helpless. "Are you going to help me or are you going to stand there critiquing my gluten development?"
