Read Online Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor - Free Book Online

got together—there had been a moment when she thought she was going to kiss him. A short lull in the conversation, very typical and comfortable. They were sitting on adjacent too-small stools. Jeremy shifted his weight, and their thighs rubbed. Jules turned with a smile, with a ready quip, just as he turned to her. They were staring at one another. Their expressions grew serious. And there it was, a hovering instant of possibility. Both of them floating in it. She looked at his lips, so full, so nicely formed. She could have. She would have.
    But they didn’t. From the start, Jules sensed a very different and possibly better way their relationship was directed. She liked this Monkey’s Paw idea. She liked the implied day-to-day spontaneity, culinary theatre sports in a kitchen where two people could riff off one another. And she also knew that a professional relationship would scuttle romantic possibilities, no matter how their feelings were evolving. She made it a practice not to sleep with cooks in the first place, but turning up the heat with someone from your ownkitchen was a truly ridiculous idea. Cooking was a twelve-hour day, more. You couldn’t spend that kind of time together, dancing around the same prep counters, the same hot grills, literally rubbing against one another, and then go home to the same bed. Jules had tried it once—she knew. The experiment had been to good effect for exactly two nights, to bad effect for the additional two months it took to extricate herself from a life that had so physically, so intensely woven through her own.
    Her evolving sense of their relationship was also rooted in her own irritations and rewards. She told him that there had been a time when she had wanted nothing more than the kind of job she had. The Tea Grill was new; it was highly visible on critical radar. At twenty-seven, coming out of cooking school after several years on the sales side of hotel catering, Jules felt she had to jump on board something moving, happening. Something on which a reputation could be quickly built.
    “Hip at any cost,” Jules said. Coming out of school it felt like there was no time to waste.
    “And now?” Jeremy asked her.
    “Turns out I don’t want to be there.” Jules wanted independence. Jules wanted to be known for her own work. “The restaurant gets raves, fine. I’d do something smaller just to establish my own personal connection with something good. Not huge, but good and my own.”
    Jeremy watched her eyes. Green. At once open, accessible and yet bottomlessly resolved. She was right about him. His interest had begun to migrate towards the romantic, although he had taken his time deciding. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in the year since he started his most recent job. No dates even—too busy. Sex exactly twice, both with restaurant people, although not from his restaurant.
    “There are a million things I can do,” Jules was explaining. “An endless list of desserts that I can dream up and make.They all taste good. Caramelized peaches with cumin infusion, brandy-yam ice cream.”
    “And there is liberty in it,” Jeremy said, articulating what he believed to be her point.
    “Sure. But I like key lime pie.”
    Jeremy considered this confession.
    “The intent is spontaneity,” Jules went on. “But the more I think about it, the more I imagine our creations to be the product of a ‘spontaneity rule’ of some kind. Like: Classic Ingredient A plus Exotic Technique B plus Totally Unexpected Strange Ingredient C equals Wacky Dish D. Sauce with something black or dark blue and you’re good to go.”
    Jeremy was nodding.
    “Everything
works
, clearly,” she continued. “Crème de bourbon and lemon-grass tart is actually very good. But I sometimes think what I’m doing is totally … 
incoherent
. That I’d rather make key lime pie.”
    “Key lime pie,” repeated Jeremy (who didn’t particularly like key lime pie, as it happened, but who could think of nothing