Page 36 of Bare
At midnight, Rory walked him to the door. They stood in the hallway. The usual moment arrived, the moment where one of them would reach.
Neither reached.
Rory kissed him at the door. Brief. The press of his mouth, the ring clicking against Neil's lower lip. A full stop, not a prelude.
‘See you, Neil.’
‘See you.’
He drove home. The Van Gogh quote in his head. The shape of the evening around him.
The pattern held through November. Fridays. Freddie at Gemma's. Neil at Rory's. The evenings had acquired their own rhythm, sometimes sex, sometimes not. The not-sex evenings grew longer, deeper.
‘I’m making risotto,’ Rory announced.
‘You can’t cook.’
‘I’ve watched a video. The Italian woman said it was simple.’ He produced a bag of rice, mushrooms, an onion, and a block of parmesan with the confidence of a man about to perform surgery he’d learned from YouTube. ‘You do the vegetables. You’re good with detail work.’
Neil diced them with the same precision he applied to lesson plans, every cube uniform, every cut careful. Rory watched him do it.
‘You dice an onion like you alphabetise your bookshelf.’
‘I do alphabetise my bookshelf.’
‘It’s terrifying and attractive in equal measure.’
The rice went in. Rory stirred it with a wooden spoon, phone propped against the backsplash, the Italian woman’s voice coming through the speaker in bursts.
‘She says you have to keep stirring. Constantly. The starch releases.’
‘Are you stirring?’
‘I’m stirring.’
‘You stopped stirring to check your phone.’
‘I stopped stirring for two seconds to verify the ratio.’
Neil leaned over. The rice was already sticking. ‘You need more stock.’
‘I haven’t added the stock yet.’
‘Then it’s burning.’
‘It’s toasting. Toasting is different from burning. The video said...’
‘The video didn’t account for you leaving the spoon in the pan for forty-five seconds while reading about starch.’
Rory scraped the bottom of the pan. A thin brown layer came up. He held it on the spoon and studied it with the focused attention he gave his canvases.
‘That’s not burnt. That’s fond.’
‘You learned the word fond from a cooking video twenty minutes ago and you’re using it against me.’
‘I’m using it accurately. Fond is the caramelised residue that forms...’
‘I know what fond is. Give me the spoon.’
