Chapter Text
Knife Skills | Chef Showdown
“Mince the garlic.”
“Okay.”
“Then macédoine the sweet potato.”
“Do I have to say that word?”
“And finally julienne the jicama.”
“Got it.”
It is surprising to a lot of people based on his rather chaotic Internet show, but Alex was classically trained and has more restaurant experience than almost anyone else in the kitchen, so he is feeling pretty good about the fact that the next chefs’ competition is about knife skills. After they explain the rules to him, they ask him how he feels about it.
“I feel great,” he says, winking at Isabelle, who is sitting on the stool he usually occupies while she is filming. She talked him into letting her go first today while he was still in his office trying to talk the building managers into letting him set up composting stations in the test kitchen (so far, he has not had any luck). He knows she did it because she has zero confidence in her knife skills, even though as he has told her one hundred times, it truly doesn’t mean anything.
She sticks her tongue out at him, but she’s smiling.
“The real question,” Jackie says from where she is sitting next to Isabelle, flicking pieces of jicama at Alex, “is who you think is going to win.”
“Amandla,” Alex says quickly. He has said it a hundred times and he will say it again: the woman could cook any of them under the table in a heartbeat.
Jackie takes offense because she is Jackie, and she throws another piece of jicama at his head which he manages to catch and eat. “Okay.” He rolls out his shoulders and cracks his neck like he’s back playing football in high school. “What’s the time to beat so far?”
Tara, their director for today, checks her notes, flipping a page. “Mark got four minutes and forty-five seconds,” she says.
“So not Isabelle or Jackie.”
“Shut up!”
“On your mark… get set… go!”
Alex grabs the garlic, picking up the knife he is using today, which is his trusty old cleaver that got him through thousands of knife cuts in culinary school. It is huge and it looks way too big to be julienning jicama or mincing anything, but it works. They told him that he has to try to talk as he is working, which is not a problem for Alex since he can maintain a verbal stream of consciousness about literally anything.
“There are different ways to do this,” he explains, leaning down over his cutting board. He can already feel his neck starting to crick; this is a countertop for ants and normally it doesn’t bother him, but he is really feeling it now. “Most people do a rough chop, but it’s faster to put it on the flat side, cut horizontally through towards the root, make slits like you would with an onion, and you have a perfect dice. Plus it is possible to rough chop too much, which basically bruises all of the flavor right out of there.”
He can see on Isabelle’s phone timer, which she set up in front of him, that it only takes him thirty-six seconds to finish the garlic, pushing it to the side of his cutting board and out of his way.
It has been years and years since Alex has macédoined anything, but it is basically just a small dice. It is incredibly finicky and it takes a long time and it is difficult, but they never said that it has to be perfect. Alex shaves off the peel of the sweet potato, rotating his knife around all the bumps and crannies carefully, not wanting to waste anything.
“You know, Isabelle and Jackie squared off the entire thing,” Tara says casually.
“Wait, what?” Alex looks up, cutting the ends of the sweet potato off so that he can cut it into strips. “That definitely seems like cheating.”
“Hey, they never said anything about yield,” Jackie says defiantly, like she is daring Alex to challenge her more.
By the time he finishes the macédoine, scooping up the pile of diced sweet potato and dumping it into the empty bowl sitting in front of him, the timer is at two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and he will have to really hustle if he wants to beat Mark.
“Let me guess,” Alex says as he cuts the jicama in half. “You squared this off too.”
“Does it matter?” Isabelle asks. Normally she gets a little cranky when she’s not the best at something, but she has been in a better mood lately. Alex isn’t sure why. Maybe it is because the Starbursts episode is over; maybe it’s because the snow is gone and it is spring and New York is finally warming up. Whatever the reason is, Alex will take it, because she has been especially cranky ever since she found out that there was a possibility that Alex might leave this city that he loves so much.
She has been asking him about it for a couple of weeks, ever since the admittedly disastrous double date when Lauren blurted out, for some godforsaken reason, that she wanted Alex to move across the country with her.
Lauren had only sprung it on him earlier that day. He knew that she had talked to a couple of chefs that she knows on the West Coast, that they had floated the possibility of having her come work with them. Frankly, Alex can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to leave this city, not even to go somewhere where it is warm and sunny all the time. They are just sitting at Alex’s kitchen table, looking out at the rooftops around them, when she drops the bomb that Providence wants to hire her and Los Angeles has plenty of fine dining restaurants that would love to have Alex as their executive chef.
At first, he thinks she is joking. “Sure, Lau,” he says. “They would love to hire the guy who hasn’t stepped foot in a restaurant kitchen in six years.”
“I’m being serious,” she says, pouring him more coffee. He glances at his watch. It is only seven o’clock; he still has plenty of time to get to work, even if he does take the later train. But it certainly doesn’t seem like enough time to be having this conversation. “You’re more talented than most of the chefs I know. You should think about it.”
“Can we talk about this later?” He grabs a piece of toast, holding it between his teeth as he shrugs his coat on and grabs his bag. “I’m gonna be late.”
He isn’t, but he can’t think about the fact that the girl he has been dating for about half a year just brought up the idea of him moving away from his home and his job and his friends, and not just away but three thousand miles away. He means to talk to Isabelle about it, but when he gets into the office he immediately starts working on the intro for her book and he forgets about it until he goes home and Lauren brings it up again. He doesn’t feel like he needs to ask her not to say anything about it at dinner, but apparently he should have because suddenly she is saying it and Isabelle is looking across the table at him like he punched her in the face.
And then she drops the pregnancy bomb on him like it’s nothing.
If he was freaked out about her engagement changing their friendship, it was nothing compared to the white hot flash of panic that streaks through his mind at the thought of her suddenly being a mother. That would certainly change the dynamic of their friendship. And she just blurts it out like she’s not freaked out about it, like it’s something that she’s been thinking about.
The very short, very weird conversation that they have about it in the back alley behind Death & Company is the only time they speak of it, but it has been sitting heavily in Alex’s mind ever since that night. Someday, maybe soon, she is going to be a wife. Someday she might be a mom. They are concepts that Alex can’t get his head around.
Unlike Alex, Isabelle has taken the opposite approach, asking him whether he is moving to Los Angeles every single day, sometimes multiple times a day like he wouldn’t immediately tell her the second he made up his mind one way or the other. And he hasn’t, not really, although the rational part of him knows that he can’t leave this place. But sometimes when he can’t sleep, he thinks about the fact that one day soon he is going to lose his best friend, and maybe he just isn’t supposed to be here anymore.
Needless to say, he has no idea where the fuck his life is heading.
He shakes his head, finishing up with the jicama and glancing at the clock. Four minutes and twenty-one seconds. “Yes!” he says, raising his arms over his head triumphantly. “I win!”
“Well, Amandla hasn’t gone yet,” Jackie says snappishly. She must have really screwed up.
“Okay, fine. I beat Mark. That’s something.”
In the end, Amandla wins, beating Alex by a solid thirty seconds. He is fine with coming in second, Mark right behind. Liam clocks in at fourth, followed by Jackie, Leven, and Isabelle, who is dead last but seems fine with it.
“It’s not like I expected to win,” she says to Alex later. “I mean, I didn’t expect to be last, but what can you do?”
“You are taking this surprisingly well,” Alex says. He is supposed to be cleaning his office; he has been promising himself for weeks that he will do it as soon as he gets longer than five free minutes, but now that time is here and he is finding himself completely unmotivated. “I seem to remember someone who spiked a spoon into the floor when she lost to me at the snack competition a few months back.”
“That person seems very cool.”
“You could say that. You could also say that they are ultra-competitive.”
Isabelle laughs. “Well, competition breeds innovation or whatever the fuck.”
“Inspiring.” Alex finds a stack of paper buried on his desk, notes about Italy that he was going to use to try to convince Dayo that he should be allowed to go there this year for a Wild Card episode about olive oil that would conveniently fall over his birthday. He never got around to it and he’s not really sure why. He goes somewhere every year for his birthday. But this year, he barely even thought about it until it was already too late, maybe because he was just too busy and maybe because the Lauren Los Angeles thing really threw him off his game.
He shoves it in a drawer. Maybe he’ll go eventually, see how olive oil is made and then spend the rest of his trip eating his way through southern Italy. He is still bitter about the fact that Jackie and Leven got to go for the Great Mozzarella Tour of 2019, although he did get to go to Hawaii for a food tour so he can’t complain too much. If anyone should be complaining, it is Isabelle; the poor girl never gets to go anywhere, even though she is put through hell and back on her show. (After Mozzarella-gate, someone started a Send Isabelle Somewhere campaign on Twitter, complete with hashtags.)
For a little while, when the Italy idea was still fresh in his mind, he thought of asking her if she wanted to come with him.
Maybe next year, although who knows where they will be then.
Either way, he just turned thirty-one years old, which is not a milestone by any standards but is certainly old enough to make him feel like somewhere along the way he got left behind. All of his friends are in serious relationships, engaged or married or living together or procreating, and he’s just… living. It’s not like he doesn’t want what they all have; he just hasn’t found it yet.
He didn’t do much for his birthday, but that was by choice. All he wanted to do was eat good food and drink good wine with his friends, and that’s what he did. Lauren secured the fanciest private dining room at Beauty & Essex, the one with the Chihuly glass and the dim lighting and the glass topped table. Alex knows that before he started dating Lauren, this was one of Isabelle’s favorite restaurants in the city; he had heard her wax rhapsodic many times about the custom two-story chandelier and the spiral staircase and the fact that the entrance to the restaurant was tucked away in the back of a crowded pawn shop so that it felt like you were entering another world when you walked through the brightly-lit fluorescent storefront and stepped into the low light of the restaurant. She has said a hundred times if she’s said it once that if she ever opened her own restaurant, she would want it to be exactly like this one.
He also knows that since he started dating Lauren, Isabelle hasn’t mentioned Beauty & Essex once. Normally she goes at least a couple of times a month and tells Alex all about it the next day, but he can’t remember the last time that happened.
She did come for his birthday though, showed up with Jackie and Leven and Amandla, brought Alex a picture of the cutting board that she is having custom made for him at a workshop in Maine. She sits across the table from him at dinner between Mark and Dayo and they eat street corn ravioli and salted shishito peppers and drink a lot of wine, and it’s almost perfect.
It shouldn’t feel like there is something missing.
🍯💛
The next weekend he goes back to Los Angeles to meet with Fell; they want to do another collaboration, an entire knife set this time, and they invite him out to their gallery to look over some things and get a feel for what he wants to do. The timing works out nicely; Lauren has been talking about going out for a couple of days to visit Providence again and look for apartments. Alex has a feeling that it is going to be three days of her trying to convince him to move, and hopefully he will be able to dodge having to give her a concrete answer, but he is certainly willing to entertain the idea for seventy-two hours of sunshine, palm trees, and maybe some surfing if he can sneak away.
Isabelle comes over the night before he leaves to help him pack like she always does; he has never met anybody who can pack a suitcase as well as she does. She has tried to teach him how to do it a hundred times, but he just can’t. It’s not like she minds; she is the Queen of Organization. (You should see her pantry.)
She is sitting on his bed, rolling his shirts up as he hands them to her. It is late, and he has to leave his apartment at four in the morning to get to LaGuardia in time for his six o’clock flight, but he got caught at work late, so what can he do? He is spending the entire day tomorrow at the Fell gallery, and then he’ll have all of Saturday and most of Sunday to do whatever he wants, so he’ll catch up on sleep then if he absolutely has to.
“What if you don’t come back?” Isabelle asks, leaning over his suitcase and rearranging the clothes that she has already put inside, making more room.
“I’m going to come back, Iz,” he says, rolling his eyes at her as he hands her another shirt. “At the very least I’m going to have to get my laptop from work since I accidentally left it there.”
“Shut up!”
He laughs, abandoning the packing for now and sitting down against his pillows, patting the blanket next to him. Isabelle sighs, crawling up towards him and collapsing against his side. It is kind of late; that’s his bad. She shoves her face into his side, hiding a yawn. “Iz, you can go to bed.”
“No,” she says, her voice already bleary. “You need help.”
“We’re basically done,” he says. “I can probably handle packing my own underwear.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he says. Now he is the one trying to stifle a yawn. He glances over at the clock on his nightstand; it’s already midnight, but he cannot force himself to get up and keep packing. “What would I do without you?”
She doesn’t answer, and when he looks down at her, she’s already fast asleep. His last thought before he drifts off to sleep himself is that maybe he should go sleep in the guest room that Lauren spent a week cleaning out and decorating so that it’s actually suitable for guests and not just a dumping ground for all of Alex’s crap that he doesn’t want to deal with. He even went so far as to buy a second bed and haul it up to the apartment, but he is tired and it is midnight and he is comfortable, so he doesn’t. Instead he falls asleep with Isabelle curled up against him, the best sleep he’s had in a long time, at least until his alarm goes off three hours later.
Isabelle is already up; when he jerks awake he can see that his suitcase is zipped shut and standing by the door, and he can smell coffee coming from the kitchen. For not being a morning person, she sure is taking good care of him so early in the morning.
“Hey!” she says when he comes out of his room to take a shower, rubbing his eyes because apparently he forgot to take his contacts out before he passed out, judging by the stabbing pain. She is surprisingly chipper. “Good morning!”
“Okay.” He sits down at the counter, yawning so big his jaw cracks. “How many cups of coffee have you had?”
“None.”
“Plus?”
“Three. But that’s totally fair because it’s three o’clock in the morning.”
He yawns again. “Iz, you do what you gotta do. You’re the only reason I’m not going to miss my flight.”
She considers this. “You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t have packed for you.”
In hindsight, maybe he should have put a shirt on before wandering out of his room. And he probably should have texted Lauren to tell her that Isabelle was sleeping over. Regardless, it was truly unfortunate timing that Lauren walked into his apartment as he was hugging Isabelle good-bye.
“Hey,” Alex tries to say casually as she bursts through the door with her suitcase, already talking about whether they’re going to be late for their flight and if he has ordered the Uber yet. Isabelle jumps away from Alex like shrapnel, which only serves to make the whole thing look a whole lot worse. “You’re… on time.”
To be fair, if the situations were reversed, Alex might be a little annoyed. But he certainly doesn’t think that he would make passive aggressive comments all the way to the airport and the entire time they are going through security. It takes a lot of effort to fight with your boyfriend while two TSA agents and an entire line of tired, cranky, stressed people who don’t want to take off their shoes or pull their laptops out of their bag listen to you, but she manages to get it done.
“Okay, Lau, enough,” he finally says once they make it to their gate and sit down. They have at least forty-five minutes to sit and wait before their boarding time, and he cannot spend those forty-five minutes arguing. “She was just helping me pack.”
“Are you telling me that you’re thirty-one and can’t pack for yourself?”
“Do you know me? That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Finally, she lets it go, after Alex apologizes profusely and promises that it was an accident and it will never happen again. In the back of his mind, Alex wonders if Isabelle has had fights like this one with Nicky about him, but then they board the plane and he falls asleep and when he does wake up, they’re in Los Angeles and he forgets the whole thing entirely for a while.
They rent a car, and Alex drops Lauren off at the restaurant before going to the gallery all day. He goes to Church & State for lunch to visit one of his friends from culinary school, and he is sitting in the courtyard when Isabelle calls him. “Hey,” she says, and she sounds weird. He looks at his watch; it is lunch time for her, which means she probably just got back up to her office and is pretending to check her email while actually doing the Times crossword for the day. “Can you talk?”
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You sound weird.”
“I’m fine, I just… I don’t know. This morning was kind of a mess.”
“That wasn’t your fault. I should have… I don’t know. I should’ve told her you were coming over.”
“It’s not like anything happened. We’re just friends.”
“I know that,” Alex snaps, and someone at the next table glances over their shoulder at him. “I know,” he repeats, lowering his voice.
“Okay, well, you don’t have to get crabby with me about it.”
“I’m not crabby. It’s just that I spent all morning hearing about it and frankly I’m really sick of talking about it.”
All he hears on the other end of the line is silence, and he knows immediately that he fucked up. The two of them may bicker sometimes, but they never ever fight; they have always talked about everything, putting everything on the table so nothing is ever bottled up until it explodes. Alex rubs his forehead, wincing as he does so at the headache that has been building up all morning. Is it always so goddamn hot in this city?
“Iz,” he says. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t… I am annoyed, but certainly not at you. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I know,” she says. “I’ll see you when you get back, okay?”
“Iz, wait!”
Well, that sucked, Alex thinks as he puts his phone down on the table. He doesn’t even have the time to fix it right now, he realizes as he glances at his watch. He has to get back to the studio and then he has to pick Lauren up from the restaurant so that they can go look at an apartment. The traffic in downtown Los Angeles is ridiculous, he is sweating through his shirt, and frankly, all he wants to do is go home, crawl into bed, and sleep for three days.
Instead, they go to look at an apartment that Lauren hates on sight, and Alex is having a hard time keeping it together. By the time they get to the Airbnb, he realizes that if he doesn’t go for a run, his head is going to explode.
He sleeps for a solid twelve hours that night, which is good because they spend entirely too much time the next day driving around and looking at more apartments. By the time he drops Lauren off at the restaurant for dinner service, he is more than ready to go sit on the beach and not talk to anyone for a few hours. He drives the forty minutes to Santa Monica, finding an empty spot on the sand and sitting down.
All day, he has been thinking about the week that Isabelle helped him apartment hunt. He had just been offered Wild Card (and the pay raise that came with it) and decided it was probably about time to find an apartment where he could run the air conditioner and the microwave at the same time. Isabelle hadn’t even been at the magazine for a year yet, but they were already spending all of their time together, and he figured if anyone was as invested in his next living situation as him, it was Isabelle. (The elevator in his building was constantly broken, and Isabelle told him that if she had to keep walking up the stairs she was going to end up burning the entire place to the ground.)
She was actually the one who found the place he is in now. They spent weeks looking for places, and while there were a lot he liked, there weren’t any that he could actually see himself living in. “I don’t want to move again,” he complained to her one night, scrolling through rental websites as she screamed at the television. (She always screams when she watches Chopped. “You have ten seconds, Tiff! That is not enough time to make a vinaigrette!”) “I’ve moved like twelve times since I graduated high school. I would love for the next place to be the last.”
“Last last?” she asked. “Or like… last for a while until you get married and have kids and move out to the suburbs and get a dog.”
“Like I’m ever going to move,” he said, shooting her a look. “You know there’s nothing in the world that could ever make me leave the city.”
They didn’t find anything that night since Isabelle managed to turn Chopped into a drinking game (one of her many talents), but the next week she came flying into his office, practically throwing her phone at his head. “I found it!” she said, gasping out a breath like she had just run a marathon.
“Iz, you ran down one flight of stairs.”
“Shut up and tell me what you think!”
She was right; it was perfect. It had everything he was looking for: two bedrooms, high ceilings, exposed brick, wood floors, open shelving in the kitchen. It seemed crazy expensive at the time, but he had been in a rent controlled apartment for almost five years and Isabelle told him that if he didn’t apply that day, he was going to lose it. She was right (she always was, not that Alex would ever say that to her), and two weeks later, he was moving in.
He remembers that day clearly; they each brought in one box (“It’s more of a symbolic gesture,” Isabelle told him, dropping it on the ground. “Just go with it.”) before ordering pizza, sitting on the ground and eating it off paper plates. Alex remembers looking around, thinking about how the place might look after he has lived there for five years.
And now it’s been almost five years, and he’s thinking about moving.
Except, he realizes, looking out at the sun setting over the ocean, he’s not. He’s not really thinking about moving, not seriously. When he thinks about it, even casually, he gets a pit in his stomach at the thought of leaving his home, his job, his friends. At the thought of leaving Isabelle. New York might not have the warm weather or the ocean or the surfing, but it has everything else that he needs. He would be crazy to move.
And so that night he finds himself breaking up with Lauren.
If he was being honest with himself (and with her), it’s been a long time coming, as long a time as it could be considering they have only been together for a few months. She turns it into something it’s not (Isabelle’s name is mentioned far more often than he would have liked), and if he had thought it completely through, maybe he would have waited until they got back to the city, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t spend one more night in that Airbnb listening to her talk about what their lives are going to look like when they move to California.
He goes to stay in a hotel that night, calls Isabelle but realizes that by the time he does, it’s three o’clock in the morning her time, and he doesn’t answer. He spends another hour getting an earlier flight back, and by nine o’clock that morning he is on a plane heading back to New York.
He almost forgets that he called Isabelle, telling her to meet him at his place at noon. To be fair, it was four in the morning when he left her that message, and he’d had a couple of drinks from the minibar. (Okay, fine, four.) He practically has a heart attack when he unlocks the door of his apartment to find that it is already unlocked and Isabelle is standing in his kitchen surrounded by flour.
“Oh my God,” he says, dropping his suitcase to the ground with a thump. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“Excuse me, you are the one who scared the shit out of me. Not that I hate the tipsy voicemails at three in the morning, but what happened? Why are you home?” She wipes her hands on a towel and comes over to him. “Also, I made honey cake because it just seemed like it was going to be that sort of day.”
He sits down on the couch, leaving room for Isabelle to drop down next to him. It smells like honey and sugar and vanilla, and before he got here Isabelle opened one of the windows so the apartment is nice and cool, a spring breeze filtering in and ruffling the pages of the magazines on his coffee table. She sits down next to him, and all the thoughts that had been running through his mind for the last twenty-four hours, his worries about whether she is mad at him, melt away as she throws her legs over his lap.
“So how was the City of Angels?” she asks. “Fun?”
“Ah, it was fine. Whatever. You know.”
“I don’t actually,” she says. “Because I was here all weekend while you were in California with your girlfriend.” There is a slight edge to her voice, a current running underneath her words that wasn’t there just a few moments before, and suddenly Alex doesn’t know what is going on.
“Listen, Iz, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“You’re moving. Aren’t you.” She says this flatly, doesn’t ask it, just assumes, and something inside of Alex’s chest snaps.
“Isabelle,” he says, and she is going to know he is pissed because he never ever says her full name. “How many times do you have to ask me that before you believe me?”
Isabelle sits up, pulling her legs back and narrowing her eyes at him. “I don’t know, Alexander.” She puts extra emphasis on his name, and it feels weird to hear the whole thing coming out of her mouth; he can’t remember the last time she said it in a non-joking way. “Maybe I would believe you more if you hadn’t just gone to Los Angeles with your girlfriend to look at apartments.”
“I wasn’t looking at apartments! She was looking at apartments!”
“Yes, for the two of you.”
“Oh my God.” Alex stands up, rubbing his eyes. He is fucking exhausted, his contacts have fused to his corneas, he spent all weekend fighting, and all he wants to do is crawl in bed and sleep for a week. He had this vision in his head that he came up with on the plane of him coming back and telling Isabelle that he broke up with Lauren and everything going back to normal (or as normal as it can be), and that has gone entirely down the drain at this point.
Isabelle always says that they know each other so soul deep, and he agrees. He loves her more than anyone. But the downside of them knowing each other so well is she knows exactly what to say to upset him. “I don’t know how many times I can say this, Isabelle,” he says, as firmly as he can. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You didn’t even tell me about it,” she says, getting up and following him around the coffee table, and he knows that’s her problem with this whole thing, that she had to hear about it from Lauren.
“I would have.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, her voice rising, and this is it; this is what makes him the most angry, when she acts like she doesn’t care or like she’s over the conversation when she clearly isn’t. Isabelle is confrontation-averse; he has been saying it for years. She would much prefer to sit on whatever she is feeling until it explodes and she is screaming at Alex in his living room. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”
“Well, that’s tough. We’re talking about it.”
“What’s the point? You’re leaving me.”
“I’m not!” he says, and he is yelling now, can’t help himself. “I can’t fucking leave you!”
The words hang in between them, and he knows that there is no going back now.
“That’s why you’re staying?” she says, standing so still it looks like she can’t move. “Because of me?”
“Of course, Isabelle,” he snaps. “Because of you and because of our job and because of this city. There’s no way in hell I could ever leave.”
“So you’re choosing me over your relationship?”
“I’m choosing you over everything.”
“Alex, I-”
“And then you had to go and get fucking engaged.”
And there it is, the feeling that he has kept close to his chest since it happened. He never told her how it made her feel, how he has been feeling since the day she came into his office and told me that she was getting married. Maybe he didn’t even really know himself; maybe he knew and couldn’t put the words to it. What he does know is that he doesn’t want Isabelle to get married.
He does not want Isabelle to get married.
“Alex-”
“You’re my best friend,” he says, looking down at her. “I’m… I don’t, I can’t lose you. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You’re not going to!”
“Yes I am. You’re going to get married and you’re going to be the one moving to that big house in the suburbs with the kids and the dogs and the pool and the white picket fence. You’re going to be so happy and you’re going to forget about me. You’re going to forget about me entirely, and I don’t… I don’t know how to deal with that. I can’t.”
“You can’t? You can’t deal with it?” By the way she is raising her voice again, he knows that it is not a question that he should try to answer. She gets in his face, so close he can see every freckle splashed across her nose, pushing him a step backwards with the force of her words. “What is there for you to deal with, Alexander? You’re still my best friend. I still see you every day. I still tell you everything. If it wasn’t for your fucking girlfriend, I would still sleep over at your house and make you breakfast in the morning without it being weird. Nothing has changed!”
He knows that is the time to tell her about Lauren. Now is the time to tell her that as long as she has a boyfriend or a fiancé, there is always going to be something between them. There is always going to be something deep in his chest that he can’t put a name to.
So instead of talking, instead of telling her what he lies awake at night and thinks about, he kisses her.
It is the kind of kiss that has been in the making for five years, the kind that has been in the back of Alex’s mind with every conversation, every time Isabelle comes into his office to complain about Bitch Kitchen, every time she asks him to taste test something, every time she falls asleep in his bed with her head pillowed on his arm.
At first, Isabelle seems as surprised as Alex does, but she doesn’t pull away, stepping closer and sliding her arms up around his neck, pulling him down towards her. She tastes like honey and vanilla and sugar and all the good things in the world, like everything that he might have thought she tasted like if he had ever thought about it before.
(He has. He would be a liar if he said it had never crossed his mind.)
She kisses him back and he feels in that moment like the world is standing still. He forgets that she is engaged. He forgets that he just broke up with his girlfriend. He forgets that he has spent every single day of the last five years stopping himself from kissing this girl. He forgets about California and apartment hunting and everything that has snuck its way in between them because he is kissing Isabelle Fuhrman and she is kissing him back.
He holds onto her tightly, like she might disappear if he stops touching her, and he could do this every single second for the rest of his life and never get tired of it. He angles her towards the couch, and she lets him pull her down, but a second later she springs up.
“Alex, what are we doing?”
He can barely form one word, much less a sentence. “I… I don’t… I was just…”
“I gotta go.” And Isabelle is out the door before he can say anything, before he can tell her to stop or to wait or to just let him explain. She leaves him sitting there in the wake of what he has done, wondering if he has truly ruined the best thing he has ever had in his life.
🍯💛
Nakatomi Plaza Nothing is more Alex than Alex slicing garlic with an AXE
JR Isabelle might be dead last but still the winner of our hearts
Jules I like to imagine that someone in the test kitchen needed these ingredients prepped and this was their way of tricking the others into doing it