Midnight Kitchen Hungers

I stopped feeling anything during sex around thirty-one, which is the kind of thing you only admit to yourself at four in the morning in a parked cruiser with the radio muttering at you. It wasn't dramatic. Nobody hurt me, nothing went wrong. I'd just finish, or not finish, and lie there doing math about my shift rotation while some perfectly nice man from a perfectly nice app talked about his fantasy football league. I remember thinking once, very clearly, that I could get up and leave and feel exactly the same as if I stayed, and I got up and left, and I was right.

After that I stopped bothering. It's not that I swore off sex, it's that I quietly stopped wanting it, the way you stop wanting a food you ate too much of in college. My hand and I had an arrangement. It was honest, it was fast, and afterward I could sleep. Three years of that. My sister Rosa asked me at Thanksgiving if I was seeing anyone, and I said no, and she made a face, and I ate another roll and let it go. Thirty-four years old, patrol officer, ten years on the job, and my most reliable intimate relationship was a battery-operated thing in my nightstand drawer that I had to dust.

Anyway. That's the woman I was when I walked into The Oak & Thyme at eleven on a Tuesday night, still smelling faintly of the rain I'd been standing in for three hours over a fender bender that nobody got hurt in.

* * *

The Oak & Thyme is a farm-to-table place two blocks off the water, the kind of bistro where the menus have the farmer's actual name on them. I like it because they keep the coffee going late and they don't mind a cop in boots sitting at the bar looking tired. That Tuesday the dining room was mostly empty, last tables paying up, and I got my cup from the bartender and took my usual stool.

That's when I looked through the kitchen pass and saw a man breaking down a duck with a boning knife, and the way he held his shoulders while he did it was so familiar that I nearly burned my mouth on the coffee.

"Don?" I said, too loud, because three diners turned around.

He looked up. He had more gray at the temples than the last time I'd seen him, which, fine, so did I. "No way," he said, and set the knife down, which I appreciated, because a man walking toward you holding a boning knife sends a different message. "Leela Chavez. In my dining room."

"Your dining room?"

"I'm head chef. Three years now." He wiped his hands on his apron and leaned on the pass. "You look good. Tired, but good."

"Ten-hour shift. You look good too." He did, was the thing. Same crooked nose from when somebody hit him with a sheet pan in stock-making class. "Last I heard you were in the city."

"Was. Came back when Anton offered me the kitchen." He glanced at the dining room, at the last couple paying. "Hang around till we close? I'll make you actual food. That coffee's been on the burner since eight, I don't know why we even pretend."

I hung around. Obviously I hung around.

* * *

By midnight the place was shut, lights off except one pendant over the prep table, and Don put a plate in front of me that was some kind of roasted squash situation with brown butter and fried sage, and I ate the whole thing standing up like an animal.

"Okay," I said, when I came up for air. "That's better than anything I've cooked in ten years."

"You haven't cooked in ten years. You told me that at graduation, when you were trading your knife kit in for a baton."

"I traded the knife kit for a baton at graduation, but I kept a small tool roll that holds screwdrivers now."

He laughed, and it was the same laugh, and something in my chest that had been sitting flat for three years shifted about a quarter inch. We caught up. His marriage had ended four years back, amicably-ish, no kids. I told him about the job, the parts that make good stories anyway. He poured us each a small glass of wine from a bottle he said was going to get tossed anyway, opened three days, still fine.

"I miss it, you know," he said, after a while, turning his glass around on the steel counter.

"Missing what?"

"The ease. That semester we were together. It was so easy. We'd close down the practice kitchen at eleven, eat whatever was going to get thrown out, and it was all easy. No plans, no weight on it." He looked up at me, and here's where I should say I felt something, and I did, but it was small, like a pilot light trying. "I miss easy."

"I remember easy," I said. "I also remember you crying over a broken hollandaise."

"Once. One time."

"The whole class heard about it."

"Okay, well." He was grinning. Then he wasn't quite grinning, he was doing the thing where a person decides whether to say the next sentence. "Look, this is going to come out wrong, so let me just get it out. Would you be interested in picking that up again? Just that part. No dinners with my mother, no meeting anybody, no expectations. Just, on slow nights, if we both want it. No strings. I'm asking plain, and if the answer's no, we drink this bad wine and stay friends and nothing's weird."

I made myself think about it for a full five seconds instead of saying yes immediately, because I've been a cop for ten years and I know what immediate yes looks like on other people. The strange thing was that under the tired and the flatness, there was a yes, an actual warm one, the first one I'd felt in a while.

"That's very no-strings of you," I said. "You rehearse that?"

"Whole drive home last week when I saw your cruiser parked on Marsh Street and chickened out of coming out front."

"You saw me and chickened out? I got coffee there twice a week."

"I know. I made your americano and gave it to Nadia to serve because I couldn't." He held up his glass. "So. Yes or no?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, with the no strings. And one more string, which is we say things out loud. If something's not fine, we say so. Deal?"

"Deal," he said. "Come here, then."

He waited until I came around the counter, he didn't reach for me first, and I appreciated that more than I could explain, so I didn't explain it, I just put my hand on the back of his neck and kissed him. He tasted like wine and he kissed the same, unhurried, one hand coming up slow to my jaw like he was asking permission with it.

"Okay?" he murmured.

"Okay," I said. "Keep going."

* * *

The prep table was cold under my back and I liked that, the contrast, his hands warm on me, the pendant light hanging low so everything else in the kitchen was dark, the walk-in humming its one long note. He unbuttoned my uniform shirt one button at a time, asking with his eyebrows at each one, and I nodded, and when he got my bra off he bent and took a nipple in his mouth, slow, and my whole body went, oh, there you are, like greeting an old dog that had wandered off three years ago and come back fatter and happier.

"This light's unflattering," I said, laughing a little, because the dim yellow made his face strange, all shadow and cheekbone, like a stranger wearing my ex-boyfriend's expression.

"You look great in it," he said, into my collarbone. "You want this? Still yes?"

"Still yes. Condom's in my jacket, right pocket, I keep one because I'm a pessimist."

"Optimist," he said, going to get it. "A pessimist wouldn't bother."

He rolled it on and I watched him do it, and then he eased into me slow, both of us making faces at each other like the awkward kids we'd been at twenty-two, except we weren't, I was thirty-four and he was thirty-five and my body remembered all of it anyway. He went slow at first, one hand flat on the butcher block beside my head, the butcher block with its old stains that I was trying not to think about, and I wrapped a leg around him and pulled him deeper and he made a low sound.

"Good?" he asked.

"Good. Don't stop!"

I didn't float off like I usually did. I stayed in it, the whole time, his breath on my neck and the hum of the walk-in and the light making his face into something half-familiar, and when I came it actually arrived instead of being something I performed, and he came after, gripping the edge of the table like it might slide.

We lay there a minute, which was silly, it's a prep table, but we did.

"Easy," he said finally.

"Easy," I agreed. And it was, right up until I looked past his shoulder at the dark doorway of the walk-in cooler and felt, for no reason I could name, that something in this kitchen wanted me to stay.

I told myself it was the light, or the wine, or three hours of rain and a fender bender earlier in my shift, and mostly I believed it, which is the trick with telling yourself things, you only have to mostly believe them. Don drove me to my cruiser at one in the morning and I sat in the driver's seat for a while with the engine off, doing the math on what I'd just done and finding, to my surprise, that the answer was good, actually good, not performed good.

* * *

The next slow night was Friday, three days later, and I came by at eleven again, this time in plain clothes because it felt weird walking into a restaurant I was about to be naked in wearing a uniform with a badge on it. Don had a whole thing ready, lamb shoulder he'd been braising since four, and he fed me standing up at the prep table the way you'd feed a horse you liked, and it was so good I made an embarrassing noise and he pretended not to hear it, which is real friendship.

"You're staying late a lot," I said, mouth full. "Every night I've come by, you're here alone past close. Where's your kitchen crew?"

"Sent home. We're slow. We've been slow." He said it easy but not casually, if that makes sense, easy voice, careful eyes. "Anton's talking about selling."

"Selling the Oak & Thyme?"

"The whole thing. He's sixty-eight, his hips are shot, and the bistro hasn't turned a profit in two years. He hired me three years ago to turn it around and I haven't turned it around."