Read Online Life From Scratch by Melissa Ford - Free Book Online Page A

tonight? To a dinner party?”
    “I’m sorry—I just thought you would be with him. I thought you were . . . I don’t know . . . a random man. I’m Rachel.”
    “And I am Gael Paez,” he tells me, as if I should have heard his name before. What I hear is Gayle Perez, and the only person I can think about is Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle.
    Except that he doesn’t look anything like a middle-aged woman. He is, by far, one of the most attractive men I have ever met face-to-face (except for Adam, but I shove that image immediately out of mind.) He is about six feet tall with broad shoulders. A quick, lopsided smile, a small scar above his left eyebrow that screams “fútbol accident,” and deep brown eyes that match his equally dark brown hair. The accent also helps. I step aside and give him space to enter the apartment.
    “I work with Ethan,” Gael tells me. “On the coffee book. I lent him some of my equipment.”
    “Cameras?” I ask, nervously playing with the dish towel hanging off the kitchen drawer.
    “Cameras, tripods, lens,” Gael ticks off on each finger. “I am a photographer.”
    “For books?” I ask.
    “For weddings.”
    Of course it would be for weddings.
    I pick up a corkscrew and open the bottle of wine. It is white and room temperature and Gael looks at me strangely as I stand there with the cork in hand. “I didn’t mean for us to drink it now,” he admits. “It’s a gift? It’s what you bring to a dinner party, no?”
    “It is; thank you. I just . . . I meant to open this bottle of red. I’ll just put this aside for a moment, and I’ll drink it later.”
    “By yourself?” Gael asks, and I see him glance at my left hand and my bad-ass middle-finger cuff ring.
    I imagine myself, hand around the neck of the wine bottle, drinking straight from the bottle and drooling in front of the television after everyone goes home. Yes , I want to answer truthfully, but instead I say, “We can have it with dessert.”
    Gael slides himself onto one of the high stools in the kitchen while I switch out his wine bottle for the bottle of red I left on the counter. I glance over at the clock; Ethan, Arianna, and the other mystery guest are now nineteen minutes late.
    “What do you do, Rachel?”
    I like the way my name sounds coming out of his mouth. Towards the end of my marriage, I was always annoyed when I heard Adam say my name, because he often threw it into the sentence as if it were a curse word. What do you expect me to do, Rachel? was a well-worn phrase that I heard every time we argued, precisely after I had complained about something. That always made me clam up for the next several hours. Adam spat my name, but Gael lets it rolls of his tongue as if he’s uneager to let it leave his mouth.
    The taste of the name Rachel .
    I pour him a glass of the red wine and pass it to him. “I’m sort of between things right now.” I’ve obviously practiced since my date with Rob Zuckerman. “I’m a graphic artist, but I’m taking a small sabbatical from work. Learning how to cook. Writing a bit.”
    “What sorts of things do you write?” He gives me a smile that says he would gladly drag this portion of the evening out indefinitely, making me volunteer every small scrap of information before he turns over whatever he has brewing behind those eyes.
    My God, those chocolate-brown eyes.
    And that lopsided smile.
    I am saved from embarrassing myself by staring for too long by the buzzer jolting me to my senses. I ring the person into the building and stand awkwardly beside the front door. “It’s probably Ethan. Or Arianna.”
    A few moments later, there’s a knock on the door, and I can hear a cacophony of voices on the other side. Arianna has arrived with Ethan and another man in tow. She rolls her eyes at me as if to say that it was painful enough to spend time in the elevator with the stranger much less now sit across from him at a dinner table. She disappears into my bedroom area