Chapter Text
Alex Goes Camping | Wild Card
What an absolute idiot he is.
Alex has been playing those moments right before he kissed Isabelle in his mind, over and over and over, even though he is currently sitting in the woods with only Jack, his camping gear, and a roaring campfire for comfort. The whole Alex Goes Camping thing seemed like a good idea for a video when he came up with a month ago, but then he had to drive two hours out into the middle of nowhere and act like he is happy in front of the camera, even though he’s not.
His best friend hasn’t spoken to him in a week. An entire week. It is the longest they have ever gone without speaking. He finds himself reaching for his phone every sixty seconds like she is going to suddenly call him or text him, even though she has given him no indication that she ever wants to speak to him again.
And honestly, he wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t.
“Dude,” Jack says. They are sitting around the campfire, and it is starting to get dark. Alex has already built a fire and made tons of food, fish and steaks and ribs, grilling it all over the fire as Jack films. It is way too much food for the two of them, and he spent twenty minutes packing the leftovers into the Yeti so he can bring it back home and it doesn’t go to waste. He certainly doesn’t feel like eating it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Alex says automatically. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He knows that he hasn’t been hiding it well. He has been quiet and cranky all day; Jack only had to reel him back in from a couple of tangents instead of his usual twelve. It’s no wonder Jack knows that there is something on his mind.
“Alex.”
But he can’t stop thinking about it, not even when he tries. He has run through it in his mind basically every other minute since it happened last week, and he can’t figure out what the hell he was thinking. She is engaged, for fuck’s sake. For a little while she thought she was going to have a baby, and she didn’t even seem all that freaked out about the prospect. And here comes Alex, kissing her like she is his to kiss, like he can just do whatever he wants with no consequences or implications.
Honestly. What is his problem?
He doesn’t know. He really doesn’t know. All he knows is that one second she is standing in front of him, yelling at him, and the next second he is kissing her. He can’t help himself. He doesn’t even realize until it is happening that this is what he has been waiting for his entire life, this is what he has felt like he is missing. This right here is it.
Except it isn’t because she’s engaged. She’s getting married. She promised to spend the rest of her life with someone. And that someone certainly isn’t Alex.
He did try to follow Isabelle after she fled her apartment. She ran and he was left sitting there, frozen for a moment or two, but then he jumped up, chased after her. She was already gone; Alex was pretty sure that the elevator had never come faster, and he hated it for that. He called her a few times, but she didn’t answer or respond to his texts, and he gets the idea pretty quickly. She doesn’t want to talk to him or hear from him or see him.
She didn’t come in to work at all last week, called in sick, which she hardly ever does, even when she is actually sick. On Monday when she doesn’t show up, Alex goes over to her apartment, but she isn’t there and he sure as hell isn’t going to go over to Nicky’s place to find her. He tries again on Tuesday, but she still isn’t home, and then he gives up. At least for now. On Thursday, Jackie comes storming into his office while he is making a list of what he needs to pack for the camping trip, demanding that he tell her what he knows.
“What are you talking about, Jackie?” he asks. He knows that his voice is tired, and he’s sure that he doesn’t look any better than he is feeling. But if he tells anyone what happened, what he did, well… saying it out loud doesn’t seem like a possibility at this point.
“Where is she? She’s never out for this long. She’s not answering my texts or my phone calls. You saw her last, right? She went over to your place on Sunday?”
“Yeah, but that was the last time I talked to her.”
“Well, how was she? Did she seem weird?”
He puts his pen down, looking up at her exasperatedly. “She was fine, Jackie. I don’t know.”
“Well…” Jackie looks a little suspicious, but if Isabelle isn’t talking to him, she certainly isn’t talking to anyone else either. There’s no way Jackie knows anything. “If you hear anything, you’ll let me know?” She frames it as a question, but it certainly isn’t.
“Will you track me down and kill me if I don’t?”
Jackie storms out of his office, leaving him behind to wonder if he has ruined not only his friendship with Isabelle, but also all of his other friendships too. (No one will take his side once they hear what he’s done. Hell, he wouldn’t even take his own side.) So he tries to put it out of his mind. He doesn’t have time for it anyways. He has videos to film, which is why he is out here in the woods with a tent that took him forty minutes to figure out.
The only good part about the whole camping thing is that he doesn’t get cell service out here, which would normally be annoying but is actually coming in handy since now he doesn’t have to worry about whether Isabelle is ever going to text him. (Or Lauren, for that matter. He has been avoiding her texts ever since he got back from Los Angeles, which is proving to be a chore in and of itself. She has been asking incessantly whether she can come over and get some of her stuff that she left at his apartment, which is a fair request, but he knows it is going to turn into an argument or a marathon therapy session, and he just can’t handle that. He ended up texting her at four o’clock that morning, telling her that he was going to be gone all weekend but she could stop by, grab what she needs, and leave his spare key under the mat. Hopefully that is the end of that, in all respects.)
He decides he doesn’t want to think about any of it anymore, and he certainly isn’t going to talk about it. He has managed to keep Jack off his back for the majority of the day. They leave early in the morning, the sky still dim, Jack falling asleep in the passenger seat as they drive out of the city. It takes Alex an ungodly amount of time to set up the tent, but he gets it done. He makes a cooking fire, chops wood and sets up a grate and hauls all of the food out of the car so he can get it cooked once the fire is ready.
He keeps himself busy because if he doesn’t, he has no idea where his mind might go.
But now it’s getting dark and he doesn’t have anything else to film until breakfast tomorrow and the stars are so bright and big that he can count them all individually and he feels lonelier than he has in a long time, even when he was sitting on that beach in Los Angeles thinking about his failure of a relationship, even the night he tossed and turned after Isabelle ran out of his apartment. And now, instead of staying awake and staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, he can lie awake and stare at the ceiling of a shitty tent that he only half-ass put together.
There are bugs and a stick is slowly working its way into his spinal cord and putting his pillow on top of his head is not enough to block out the hoots of owls and it’s cold, even for the middle of June. God. This sucks.
He thinks that maybe things will be a little brighter in the morning, but he practically cuts off half his finger when he is chopping wood for the fire. A little duct tape and a lot of blood later, it’s fine, but now he’s even crankier than he was when he went to bed. He makes breakfast, acting like he’s fine, just fine, for the camera, counting down the minutes until he can go home and take a shower.
He is definitely calling in sick on Monday.
🍯💛
It has been one hell of a week.
Alex kissed her. It seems even more unreal when she says it in her head, but he did. He kissed her, and it didn’t feel like something that he just did on a whim. It feels like something that he has been thinking about for a long time, something he has clearly been contemplating. She can feel it in the way he touches her, like she is going to disappear if he moves too quickly.
And then Isabelle takes off, for reasons she still can’t explain, even to herself.
When she is standing there in Alex’s apartment, listening to him talk about her relationship and what the rest of her life is going to look like, she is so mad she can barely breathe. She had been so sure that he was going to walk in and tell her that he was moving to California, that he is leaving her for good. And instead, he starts talking about Nicky and her engagement and this hypothetical house in the suburbs, and then before she even has a chance to argue, to tell him that he is wrong, he kisses her.
Isabelle knows in that moment that Nicky is a stranger to her because in all the times that they have kissed, it has never felt like this. It has never felt like what kissing Alex feels like.
Kissing Alex makes her feel like she is not, in fact, trapped in her own life, the way she has been feeling since the second Nicky got down on one knee, if not before.Kissing Alex makes her feel like there is more out there for her. Kissing Alex makes her feel like she is cherished.
And it is like she loses her head completely. She forgets that she is engaged. She forgets that Alex has a girlfriend. She forgets that he is her best friend and that this friendship means more to her than anything. But then she remembers, all of it coming at her at once to hit her like a truck.
So Isabelle does what it is that she does best: she leaves.
She practically sprints out of his apartment, down to the street to catch the train back to her side of the river. As soon as that door slams behind her, she regrets it, but there is no turning back now.
She doesn’t go to Nicky’s apartment, even though she told him this morning that she might stop over later. (That was before everything changed. She certainly isn’t the same person she was this morning.) Instead, she goes back to her place, locking the door behind her and sitting in the dark for an hour, her head in her hands, thinking of how she got here.
She doesn’t know. She couldn’t tell you. She hasn’t got a clue.
What she does know is that there is no way she can go to work tomorrow, so she doesn’t. For the first time in five years, she calls in sick when she is not actually sick, and she does it again the next day and the next and the next, until suddenly it is Friday and she hasn’t gone to work all week. She knows she’s being a coward, and she can’t help it. But she cannot face anyone until she figures out what happened and what she’s going to do about it.
Isabelle also knows without question or equivocation that she is in love with Alex. She knew it from the moment his lips touched hers, and if she is being honest with herself (which she figures it is high time for), she has known deep down for a very long time.
Now she just needs to figure out what the hell she is going to do about all of it.
After spending five days in her apartment not speaking to anyone, only going out to get groceries or sit on her balcony when she needs a little fresh air, she decides that it is time to buck up, go over to Alex’s apartment, and tell him how she feels. Maybe then she will know what to do. Maybe then she will have the courage to move forward, no matter what moving forward actually looks like.
If Isabelle is being honest with herself, she would have to say that she is terrified.
Even so, she swallows her fear, taking the train over to Brooklyn bright and early on Saturday morning. (Alright, it’s more like nine o’clock, but that’s plenty early for both her and Alex on a weekend morning.) She stops outside his door; normally, she just barges in. He never locks the damn thing and it has always felt like her apartment too, but things seem different now.
Things are different now.
So Isabelle takes a few deep breaths, counting to three before knocking tentatively on the door. It swings open almost immediately, and she opens her mouth to apologize. She has a whole speech planned out, so she doesn’t end up just blurting out that she loves him, but it gets caught in her throat when she realizes it is Lauren looking back at her.
Maybe she should have thought this through.
“Hi,” Isabelle manages to croak out. “Is, uh…” She doesn’t know what to do next. It’s not like she can have this conversation with Alex if Lauren is sitting in the next room. “Is Alex here?”
“No,” Lauren says shortly, and it looks like she has been crying. “He’s away for the weekend.”
“He’s… what?” Normally, Isabelle knows where Alex is every second of the day. She guesses that’s what she gets for not talking to him all week.
“Yeah,” Lauren says. She has a sweater in her hand, tosses it on the chair next to the door. “He’s camping with Jack.”
Godammit. Isabelle did know he was going to go do that for Wild Card; she just forgot entirely that it was scheduled for this weekend.
“Okay.” She doesn’t know what to say, tries not to look at the sunlit patch of floor where she stood just a few days ago with Alex touching her so softly it was like she was made of spun sugar, like he was afraid she was going to disappear altogether. “Could you just tell him…” Something inside her makes her cut off her sentence before she can finish it, although it’s not sure whether it’s the look on Lauren’s face, the amount of Lauren’s things she can see spread out across the apartment, or the feeling deep in her stomach that tells her this whole thing was a bad idea. “Never mind. I gotta go.”
She doesn’t cry until she’s back in her apartment, all of the fairy lights switched off and the darkness heavy around her.
🍯💛
When Alex gets back to his apartment on Sunday afternoon, he can tell immediately that Lauren is gone. Half of his closet is empty, the counter in his bathroom is clean again, and the floral smell that usually follows her everywhere is noticeably absent. He opens all the windows right away, trying to get the air moving, but it still feels like something is missing, and he knows that that something is not Lauren.
He makes honey cake, even though he is not a baker and nothing that he could make would turn out as good as Isabelle’s, but it makes him feel like she is there nonetheless with the smell of honey and vanilla filling the apartment. It surrounds him as he sits down at his desk beneath the giant industrial window, sunlight pouring in, to finish writing the introduction for her book.
He doesn’t even know if she wants it anymore, if she has asked Jackie or Leven or Amandla to do it instead. But he hasn’t heard otherwise, and her deadline is fast approaching.
So with the taste of honey in his mouth and in his head, he writes.
Alex would be the first to say that he is not much of a writer. There is a reason that he has never considered working on his own book; he is much more comfortable standing at the stove with a spoon or a whisk in his hand than he is in front of his computer, trying to put words to feelings that he has never been able to adequately describe. But for Isabelle, he would do anything, which is why he sits at his computer for three hours and produces absolutely nothing of substance.
He needs a walk.
He ends up on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking at the lights of Lower Manhattan as the sun starts to set. He can see One World Trade, thinks that if he squints really hard he might even be able to see his office, although he knows that that’s not really true. But it could be, and it brings to mind all of the times that he has sat there with Isabelle as the sun goes down, talking about food and relationships and life and all of the good things that the world has to offer them.
Without question, she is his best friend. But it doesn’t hit him until that moment, five years after they met, that she is also, without question, so much more than that.
He made it twenty-five years before he met Isabelle, but he can’t imagine how. He remembers the day he met her like it was yesterday, popping up over the cubicle wall that separated their desks and scaring the crap out of her. She was good-natured and sweet and reminded him of honey even then. She has been there for all of the big moments in his life: when he managed to muddle through his first Wild Card video without having a panic attack in front of the camera (Alex Makes Kombucha; he managed to spill all over the floor and make a giant mess of both the kitchen and himself); when he moved to this apartment that he swore up and down would be his last; when his videos started hitting one million, then five million, and then ten million views; when he was written up in the Times.
And Isabelle was right there next to him for all of it: laughing in the corner as he sheepishly mopped up kombucha; unpacking his kitchen equipment and taking extra time to put it away just the way he liked it; tweeting his videos when they went live; and, of course, even there in the Times article, her name in black and white right next to his.
And Alex will be there for her, no matter what her big moments happen to be, whether she’s getting promoted or engaged or married or pregnant, the same way she’s been there for him.
It is clear as day, all of a sudden, as he stands there looking at the map of what their lives have looked like so far.
He is in love with her.
It seems absolutely ridiculous that he didn’t know that before this moment. It is evident in the way he feels when she’s not around, like something is missing. It is evident in the brightness he feels when she is. It is evident in how uncomfortable he feels when Nicky is around and the feeling that he had deep in the back of his brain when he was with Lauren that he could never put a name to.
Alex rolls the thought around in his mind as the sky gets dark and he walks back to his apartment. He tells her everything and it would feel weird not to, but of course he has to keep this to himself. He might be single, but she certainly is not.
So instead of calling her and telling her that he can’t live without her, he sits down at his desk, opens his computer and writes about love: not how much he loves her, but how much Isabelle loves food, how she treats it with care and how that care permeates through her work, her life, everything she does.
He reads it one more time around three o’clock in the morning, knowing that he has to get up for work in just a few hours, and without overthinking it, he attaches the document to an email and hits send, finally falling into bed. He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, Isabelle the last thing on his mind before he lets go.
🍯💛
It is no surprise to Isabelle when Jackie shows up at her door at lunchtime on Monday.
She shouldn’t have called in sick again; she knows that. She wakes up early, showers and makes breakfast and straightens her hair, but as she is getting ready to walk out the door, she freezes. She can’t get the image of Lauren in Alex’s apartment out of her mind, and she isn’t sure she’s ready to face Alex yet, not until she can figure out what to say to him, until she can figure out how to tell him that she loves him. The thought crosses her mind that maybe she shouldn’t; he certainly doesn’t feel the same way, and even if he did, he is in no position to voice that to her. But she isn’t so good at keeping her thoughts inside, especially not with Alex.
She knows that if she sees him, she will end up blurting it out and ruining their friendship. So she can’t see him. Not yet. Not until she figures her own life out first.
She emails Dayo and gets right back into bed, resigning herself to another day of crappy reality television and even crappier takeout. She should have known that Jacqueline Emerson was not going to let that fly.
“Isabelle!” She could hear Jackie yelling at her front door from her bedroom, so most certainly the rest of her floor probably could too. “Let me in!”
Isabelle took her time getting out of bed, pulling on sweatpants and trudging to the door to let her in. Jackie barges past her as soon as she pulls it open, bringing in warm June air and the smell of summer. “Isabelle Grace,” she says, whirling around and glaring at her in a way that only Jackie can. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m sick,” Isabelle says, giving a pathetic little sniff for good measure. “How did you get into the building?”
“Oh, I bribed a delivery guy. That’s beside the point.” Jackie sits down on the couch, looking pointedly at Isabelle until she sits down next to her. “What’s going on with you?”
“There’s nothing going on.” Isabelle sighs heavily. She knows there is no point in trying to hide anything from Jackie; the woman was a private investigator in another life. “I’m just… I don’t know. Kind of down.”
“Why?” She sighs again. “C’mon, Isabelle,” Jackie says. “You can tell me. Whatever it is.”
So Isabelle does, makes Jackie tea and then spills the whole story from her feelings about her engagement to her pregnancy scare to the moment Alex kissed her, which is when Jackie shrieks and spills her tea all over Isabelle’s couch. Isabelle ends the entire thing by telling her that she is in love with Alex and needs to end things with Nicky, one way or the other, no matter what her future with Alex might look like.
“You’ve gotta tell him,” Jackie says, mopping up tea with a soggy tissue.
“You think?”
“He’s miserable. He barely came out of his office last week, and today he looks like he got hit by a truck.”
Isabelle leans back, closing her eyes. She doesn’t want him to be miserable, of course. But she can’t face him, not until she talks to Nicky first. And knowing what she has to do doesn’t make any of it any easier.
Jackie stays for a while, straightening up Isabelle’s apartment and forcing her to cook because she knows it will make her feel better. She makes her promise that she will be at the office tomorrow, no matter what, promising her in return that everything is going to be fine.
And then Jackie leaves and Isabelle sits down at her computer to check her email, and she sees one from Alex that came in late last night (or early this morning, very early, depending on how you look at it) that she must have missed in her Monday morning distress.
It’s a Word document attached to an email that just says: “For you, if you still want it. -A,” and she knows what it is immediately, even though there is no name. (Alex never names his documents, something that makes Isabelle crazy, especially when she is trying to clean up the desktop on his work laptop.)
She starts crying from the moment she reads the first word and she doesn’t stop for twenty minutes after she’s done. She doesn’t know if it’s the thought of what happened between them or the realization of how she actually feels or the weight of the words themselves, but the phrase soul deep has never meant so much or made so much sense. No one knows her like Alex does; that much she knows for sure.
Later, when she thinks back on this day, she will not remember leaving her apartment or hailing or a taxi or standing on the street in front of Nicky’s building. But somehow she finds herself there, ringing the buzzer like she has a million times and waiting for him to let her up like she has a million times, even thinking in the back of her mind that she is surprised that he is there and not at work, although she can guess by the tone of her voice in her phone call that he knew well enough to meet her right away.
“Hey,” he says when he opens the door. He is still half in his suit, his jacket and tie discarded over the back of a nearby chair and his top two buttons undone. The first thing he does when he gets home every day (or night, more often) is take his tie off, and he leaves them all over his apartment, like little silk surprises for Isabelle to find. “What’s wrong?”
Isabelle takes a deep breath. “Can we talk?”
She muddles through it as best as she can, telling Nicky that she loves him, she will always love him, but she’s not in love with him. In ten minutes, she ends a relationship that went on for a year and a half, putting the ring into his hand before looking at him one last time and leaving. And when she walks out onto the street, the air warm and the sounds of the city floating around her, she finally feels free.
🍯💛
Blue James I could watch this man do anything
Brittany Faze At least he saved his beer when he fell off the stump. Always gotta save the beer.
DavePun I love that he says that he has never cooked langoustine in the woods, implying that he has cooked literally everything else in the woods
Katrina “Heard some guy cut off his thumb doing this, not to jinx myself” cut to Alex contemplating his bandaged hand
Jackie Emerson “Hey Jack! Sleeping beauty! Morning babe!” How come you never greet me like this when I walk into the kitchen every morning?
SB I love how they cut it out when Jack talks so it seems like Alex is going crazy
🍯💛
Isabelle Fuhrman - Unnamed Cookbook
Introduction by Alexander Ludwig
I was so glad when Isabelle asked me to write the introduction for her book because if she didn’t, I was probably just going to do it anyways. But when I actually sat down to start writing, I realized that I couldn’t, not because I didn’t know what to say but because there are so many things that I could say about Isabelle.
We met in 2015 on the day that she started at the magazine, and from the moment that I stuck my head into her office and scared the daylights out of her, I knew that she would be my friend for the long haul. She is loyal and kind and endlessly honest (sometimes too honest, a sentiment that I have often voiced when a Wild Card episode is failing miserably and Isabelle is around to see it). Over the years, she has been my sounding board, my constant encourager, and my best friend who has more love to give than anyone else I have ever known.
Above all, Isabelle is a fantastic chef. When I think about her, I think about two things: love and food, and those two things intersect. She loves food, loves to talk about it and make it and, above all, eat it. And the love and care and respect that she has for food and for the industry and for her work shines through in everything that she does. She truly, excuse my language, gives a shit. (Sorry, Mom.)
When Isabelle told me that she was going to write a cookbook, I knew without even asking that it would be about baking and dessert and sweets. Our friend Jackie says all the time that dessert is in Isabelle’s DNA. Every time we go out to eat, she orders every dessert on the menu. She makes croquembouche for fun. Whipped cream is her favorite food. And it only makes sense that she is putting all of the knowledge and passion and love that she has into something that she can share with the rest of the world and not just those of us who are lucky to know her personally.
This book has been a labor of love; I cannot count the amount of texts and phone calls and FaceTimes that I have gotten at midnight because Isabelle needs a second opinion or a little encouragement or just someone to tell her to push through. She loves food so much that she wants everyone else to love it too. She wants you to be confident in your cooking, to learn new things, to work with ingredients you might not have used before, and to, at the end of the day, create something.
I have been so lucky to get to know Isabelle over the last six years, and I feel so lucky to be even the tiniest part of something that she cares about so much. She has so much goodness inside her that begs to be shared with the world, so I hope that as you read and use and love this book, you fall in love with food just as much as Isabelle has.