Read Online Oh! You Pretty Things by Shanna Mahin - Free Book Online Page B

to do scut work.
    Cooking is pretty much the only thing that’s ever come easily to me. All the feelings I stumble over putting into words—
I’m sorry, I suck, I love you
—are far easier for me to express through food. Cooking for Tyler would be an ideal situation, except the menu never changes. I’m just saying the same thing over and over like a parrot.
    I’ve made ravioli from scratch four times in six days, transforming flats of fresh artichokes from their raw, spiky state into a smooth puree. Each artichoke has to be steamed and scraped to collect the meat; each sprig of thyme is fresh-plucked from the garden and hand-stripped. It takes a metric fuck ton of artichokes to make a single cup of puree.
    When that’s done, I make the pasta dough and let it rest before rolling it into thin, translucent sheets on the Atlas roller. Some days this works better than others. I often have to scrap a batch and start again because I’ve misjudged the ratio of wheat flour to semolina. There are machines that can do this in a fraction of the time, but I make it by hand because Tyler said the pasta from the machine tasted funny.
    It’s endless. The only thing I’m trying to say with my food at this point is
You’re bugging the shit out of me.

    I’m elbow-deep in the ravioli process—steamed hair, flour-encrusted shirt and all—when I meet the boys from Fleurs et Diables. Fleurs et Diables is the company that takes care of the blooming plants on Tyler’s deck. The whole operation is two guys in tight white T-shirts emblazoned with stylized devils lounging on a carpet of rose petals. They pull up in their branded white Range Rover once a week, snip a few things, then ceremoniously sprinkle “Peruvian blue magic”
here and there. It’s allegedly some kind of powdered rain-forest spore they smuggle in from the Amazon, but I’d bet all the money in my bank account—granted, that’s about $47—that it’s Miracle-Gro in a burlap satchel they bought at Anthropologie. Still, Tyler’s convinced it’s the magic that makes his tea roses bloom year-round.
    The whole process takes twenty minutes, start to finish.
    Monthly charge: $1,500.
    I must say, though, the deck looks fantastic. It’s a weeping profusion of white roses cascading from hand-painted Italian urns. There are rosemary bushes neatly trimmed into topiary balls and rectangular planters lined with green moss that’s been hand-cut into checkerboard two-toned patterns. There are dwarf kumquat trees with waxy, white blossoms and bright-orange fruit, and an arbor of rare, white bougainvillea shading a fifteenth-century Italian church-altar table, surrounded by eight folding wooden chairs with leather hassocks.

    I made the mistake of calling them gardeners.
    The little buff one said, “We’re botanical stylists,” with an Arctic chill in his voice.
    I swallowed a snicker. “Right. Got it. I’m Jess.”
    When the regular-size buff one introduced himself, I wasn’t sure if he said Kirk or Kurt, so I said, “How do you spell that?”
    He arched a perfect eyebrow. “It’s Kirk with two
k
s. But only the second one is capitalized.”
    â€œSo unique,” I say sweetly. You’re a freak, kirK, but you really fill out that T-shirt. Also, I need to know who does your brows, because they’re spectacular. The flower boys, by the way, are completely straight. In any other city, if I described a buff man with perfect eyebrows driving a white Range Rover and holding a plant mister, that might involve different connotations.
    Welcome to Hollywood.

    At least the week ends in triumph. On Friday, I skip Starbucks. Instead, I slip into the kitchen twenty minutes early. Zelda sniffs for a biscuit as I rummage through the refrigerator, pulling an unopened bag of bourbon micro-lot espresso roast from the freezer, and a glass bottle of Broguiere’s